Jocko Podcast - 346: Flying and Fighting w/ Legendary WW2 Fighter Pilot & Triple Ace, "Bud" Anderson

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Flying and fighting with WW2 Fighter Pilot and Triple Ace, Bud Anderson. Author, "To Fly and Fight".Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

This is Jocko podcast number 346 with Dave Burke and me Jocker Willink. Good evening, Dave. Good evening. In an airplane, the guy was a mongoose. It's hard to believe if the only Bud Anderson you ever knew was the one on the ground. Calm, gentlemanly, a grandfather, funny, and all around nice guy. But once you get him in an airplane, he's vicious. Shot down 17.

Best fighter pilot I've ever seen. He's also the best friend I have in the world. We go back 47 years, Andy and I. Andy and I developed a rapport flying Mustangs in England, particularly after I was shot down, made my way back, and finally got the OK to finish my tour. We were both small town boys who liked hunting and fishing. We kept finding things in common

and developed a tremendous mutual response. By the time we finished up and went home, we were pretty damn close, although making friends wasn't something either of us went out of our way to do. It was risky in wartime. We lost an awful lot of guys over there. We had the same kind of eyes, 2010. We saw everything that went on in the sky before anyone else in the squadron or even the group. What made Andy unique was that he flew down. so many missions, logged so many combat hours, and never had a battle damage or a boarded mission.

An incredible record. It shows what a meticulous professional he is, especially in combat. The same attention to detail is what made him a hell of a test pilot. He had those eyes, too, and he developed the combat skills to take advantage of the opportunities his eyes brought him. But luck was also a part of it. Luck plays a big part in anything you do in combat. Some guy you don't see can always sneak up and shoot your ass off. No question.

Andy is a very, very lucky guy. Anyone who got through the war was. Generally speaking, getting killed was the least of our worries. When it happens, you don't know anything about it anyway, so what the hell? That's the attitude I think that most of us had. Duty was paramount. Damn it, it's your job. The fact that you might get killed doesn't enter your mind after the first couple times.

And so those right there are words written by Chuck Yeager, probably the most famous and legendary fighter pilot of all time. And the words are written in the forward of a book called To Fly and Fight. by Colonel Clarence Bud Anderson, who Chuck Yeager refers to as Andy. Now, Bud Anderson was a fighter pilot in World War II and in Vietnam. He was a triple ace, which means he shot down more than 15 enemy aircraft. He was a test pilot. When being a test pilot meant you were the best of the best.

He ended up serving over 30 years in uniform. and it is an honor to have him with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and lessons learned. Sir, thank you so much for joining us. It's an honor to have you here. It was my pleasure, Jekyll. That's quite the praise from General Yeager you got there. He wrote it. So I guess we can jump into this.

I know you were born January 13th, 1922. And right now the date is August 3rd, 2022, which means you got the triple digits in your age up there at 100. That's pretty impressive. What's the keys to your health? No minor vices. There you go. That'll do it.

You've got some kind of just a, get to know you a little bit. I want to read a little section from the book here. And it says, I was the third of my father's four children born January 13th, 1922 in Oakland, where my mom's parents lived. Friday the 13th, it was. If it's an unlucky day, you couldn't prove it by me. I've been pretty lucky. I never was superstitious. It says Clarence Amel, is that right? Amel Anderson, Jr. on my birth certificate. But few call me Clarence or junior, and none call me a mill. When I was young, my family nicknamed me Buddy, which in time became Bud.

The men I flew with used Andy because all Andersons are automatically Andy. I can attest to that. The first thing I remember is Lindbergh making it across the Atlantic when I was just five. I have no idea why somebody flying from one place to another should have made such a lasting impression, but it kindled an in. interest in airplanes that would last a lifetime. When I was seven, my father took me to Sacramento to a little dirt airfield with one little hanger where a fellow named Ingvald Fagerskod made or supplemented his living by taking people up for rides in a stearman biplane.

The airfield was on Auburn Boulevard near Watt Avenue. I can remember being excited and a little bit frightened the incredible intoxicating smell of the gasoline oil and airplane dope like a new car. our smell and the throaty sound of the engine. Most of all, I remember flying over our house and circling tightly, the pilot standing the plane on its side. It's a pretty awesome introduction to aviation. A biplane was the first thing you flew in, huh?

Yes. And so that's just a big, giant open cockpit. Was your dad with you, or was only a two-seater? Yeah, it was a three-seater. Okay. You know, the pilot in the back and then side by side seats. Okay. And he buzzed your house.

Yeah. So you could say your dad is partially to blame for your fascination with flying. He supported my... So what did your mom and dad do when you were growing up? Well, I grew up on a farm, and that's what we did. We farmed. And that means you were probably working more than most people work in their lives. Yeah, I had pretty heavy chores.

And then later on, as the depression hit, my mom had to go back to work. And she went and found a job in the governor's office. And she was just a typist and everything and then worked her way up to office manager. And then it was in that old days, a spoiled system. So when a new governor came in, they fired everybody. And then they kept her to, you know, tie in. Got it. And then pretty soon they dropped her salary.

everything but soon they said why don't you stay brought her salary back up and then she went through about four governors like that pretty pretty awesome yeah I mean for the depression and being in a farmer during the depression yeah how rough was that for for the family oh well at least we we didn't suffered too bad from food because we manufactured food. Right. We raised chickens and grew lots of vegetables and fruit, of course. So a lot of canning.

So as a kid, I don't remember being hungry at any time. Wow. Well, that's definitely a good family business to have during the Depression being a farmer. And so, but you still had to go to school, right? Oh, yeah. And I know you played sports in school? I was, I liked basketball, but I was kind of small, so I could only play on the sea and the meetings.

I could never go to the varsity. But it sounds like, you know, in the book you talk about, it sounds like your dad, not only encourage you with flying, but he put a lot of, He put a lot of, it seemed like he put a lot of trust in you, even as a young kid, a lot of responsibility. I know you. And, you know, I get asked a lot of questions about parenting. And at one point, you crashed your car. Oh, God.

How'd that happen? Oh, young and scared. Hit the wrong pedal? Yeah, well, yeah, well, as you came up. I can't see that here, but there's a double road at the front door. And it always went on the inner road, you know. And so I came around the corner. He's behind the wheel, and I'm over here steering, and, you know, with a foot pedal, too.

and so I come up to go down the road and oop it's blocked by a car so I said oh I got to get over here in the left and get on the bypass and a big tree was coming up and I went to the middle and pushed down on the accelerator and ducked my head under the dash I think and dad was he was trying to get me to get out of her you know but I was I don't know it's just a bad bad thing but the interesting thing is how he kind of handled that you know he kind of got you right back on the horse as they say oh yeah you know how if you go through a terrifying experience it's best to get them back on back online Now, speaking of terrifying experiences for someone that has aspirations of being a pilot, I know there was a plane crash that took place in your hometown. How did that impact you and how did that steer you away from wanting to be a pilot?

Well, I had a buddy down there in Loomis, nearby town, and he and I were just kind of nuts about anything, aviation. Is this Jack? Jack, Jack Stacker. And so this was something we had to investigate personally.

It was an old Boeing biplane, three-engine biplane. He crashed on the side of a hill not too heavy down, well, you know, the whole

fuselage was there and the other parts of it. God, and we're in the area. And so we just had to see what it was like. Yeah, and I guess in those days there's no black box. There's no real way to tell what had even gone wrong. No. But you looked at that and said,

still seems like a good job I want. Well, maybe we ought to fly fighters. So I'm gonna and by the way, I'm gonna read some chunks of the book. The book is fantastic. Just order the book right now. It's just an incredible book with so many details in it. I'm gonna fast forward a little bit. You say right after graduation I was working out in the yard when a car came chattering into the drive.

A fellow climbed out, extended his hand, showed me his teeth, and started telling me in a practice salesman's pitch about this trade school. about this trade school and down in Los Angeles or someplace. He said they could teach me all about refrigeration, a good solid career, and he pulled a bunch of brochures from his bag. I'm thinking how college would have been nice,

but I've got to do something. And then dad came around the corner. We hadn't talked much about the future. We talked more about Arthur J. Lewis the several months previous than we'd ever talked about my future. But there and then, in the yard, I learned that my dad was pretty shrewd and supportive. Go on, get out of here.

He told the salesman gruffly, my boy's going to college, and then he's going into the Army Air Corps. So he was convinced that this is what you were going to do. Yeah. And he was fully supportive. I think it was the other way around. Fast forward a little bit. You say there were three requirements for enlisting in the Army Air Corps, beyond passing the physical. You needed two years of college.

I figured to complete the course in June 1941. You had to be at least 20 years old, which I would be on January 13th, 1942, and you had to be single, which seems simple enough since I had no good prospects. This course of study would qualify me, and if it turned out I couldn't fly for some reason, then at least I could fix or build airplanes. So that's what you're thinking. You're focused on getting into the Army Air Corps. some pretty minimal requirements really to go and enlist.

I mean, not being married. Sounds like you were trying the field but hadn't turned anything out yet. So you were all right there. Well, you're physical. It's something, you know, your eyes. Did you know when they gave you the physical that your eyes were awesome? I can't remember. I think maybe we did go get an air dock to give me a flight physical.

I don't really remember. You end up taking flying lessons, so you're learning how to fly. And you say this, my instructor Dale Hunter was an old guy, 24 maybe. I don't remember that learning was terribly difficult. On the daily rating sheets, there were 36, descriptive words or phrases, some positive, some otherwise, all or none of which the instructor could check after each lesson. The four he marked after my first flight, March 4th, 1941, were cooperative, rough on controls,

careful, poor coordination. On March 27th, the day that I soloed, he put a mark by Erratic. By the end of May, after 37 hours in the cub, he would check only. eager to learn and consistent. I don't remember a lot of compliments, but I soloed after the standard eight hours of instruction, did everything pretty much by the numbers, got my license, no problem.

So there you go. You're learning how to fly pretty quick, it seems like. Yeah, I was, what I guess, 17 or 18. Yeah. It was a government program. civilian pilot training program. And with no commitment, no financial, I think it was an insurance policy for my parents,

$9.50. And it was a pretty good deal. So I gloved on to it while I was going to junior college. So what year was that that you soloed for the first time? 41. So that was 1941. Yeah, so spring. So when did Pearl Harbor happen?

So it happened December 7th. Yeah. So you were already flying, but you weren't old enough to enlist yet. Correct. We were, I went to work. My college training qualified me to be an aircraft mechanic. It was a technical school part of a two-year. part of a two-year thing.

And the Sacramento Air Depot was building up as a depot. And they were hiring anybody that said they could turn a wrench, I think. They hired our whole class. This was after Pearl Harbor. They hired your whole class? Right at graduation. Oh, at graduation. No, right at graduation six months before.

Got it. Pile Hammer. And I can remember to this day, well, every guy, World War II guy, knows where he was December 7th. And we were working 24-7. And being the kids, young guys, they put us on the graveyard shift. I'd just gotten on days. And I remember Sunday. came around later in the day and said, hey, you, you, you, go home and come back at midnight.

The Japs of just attack us at Pearl Harbor. God, I didn't even know where Pearl Harbor was, but I knew the impact of that was. Uh-oh, we're at war. and I was still 19 and so I had to wait one month. I went down on my birthday and a few days later I raised my right hand and I was on my way. You say in the book on the 13th of January my 20th birthday I went in to sign up. They had a recruiting office right there on base. They gave me a physical and I was so keyed up with anticipation that they gave me the

the Schneider test, the blood pressure and pulse check, the doctor said, I was borderline, there might be a problem. My heart was pounding away like a jackhammer. I was told to come back in a couple days, and they'd test me again. After I was accepted, I couldn't wait to tell Lloyd Geraldson,

an older guy who'd been a pilot and done some barnstorming. He worked at the depot, and we often carpooled together. I looked up to him, liked to listen to him talk about flying. I told him the moment he got in the car, and he leaned back against the passenger's door and stared at me silently. Son, he said after a while, let me tell you something.

You've just signed your own death warrant. That's a heavy statement. Yeah. Years later, we talked about it years later, and he said he doesn't remember saying that. He was just throwing it out there. It had a little impact on me, but not much. So then you start flight training. Yeah.

And was all the flight training down in San Diego? Just my primary. Okay. So you go down there and from the book it sounds like you already knew how to fly. Yeah, I got a private pilot's license. Did that make it just a lot easier than the other people were having? I don't remember having any trouble going through the military flight training schools. Just easy.

Dave, was that you too? I did not have the license going to flight school, so I had a slightly different experience. But I know the folks that had some flight experience getting a flight school, it could actually be a double-edged sword if you brought some bad habits, but most of those kids showed up, understood things that I didn't understand, so I definitely had to catch up to the ones that had experience.

Chuck. Wasn't it a big deal? Like, being a fighter pilot, I remember my dad telling me when, you know, when he was a kid that even like an airline pilot, people treated airline pilots like they were superstars, like they were rock stars. And now, obviously, like the Dave Burke here, he grew up in the top gun era

where everybody knew what a fighter pilot was. What was the kind of what was the aura around fighter pilots back then? I don't think there was too much of that. I'll tell you the truth. Probably just pilot maybe, you know. So you guys were busy creating the aura that guys like Dave Burke would get to live off of.

So you get your wings. Do you get your wings at the end of primary? No, you've got to go through three flight schools, primary, basic, and advance, about three months long. And do you know that you're going to be a fighter pilot? I mean, because you could be a transport pilot. How do they figure out who's going to get to be a fighter pilot? Especially at that time when I went in.

If you knew what you wanted to do and could convince your instructor that you'd be a good fighter pilot, your chances were pretty good of getting what you wanted. We needed, they were trying to build up from, you know, a few hundreds of pilots to 225,000 pilots and don't let safety get in the way of progress.

And I'd like to, I don't think this is in my book, but a sad statistic of World War II is we killed more of our own pilots in training than we did in combat. That's definitely a crazy statistic, especially like the new generation, like Dave, safety was number one, 100%, right? Yeah, I mean, safety is a huge thing. You did say something I wanted to ask about, though. Didn't everybody want to be a fighter pilot, or were there guys that actually wanted to fly other airplanes?

I think there was an equal number of wanted to fly multi-engine. Gotcha. And I don't know where my fighter pilot thing came from, actually. I think it was watching the Battle of Britain newsreels. You know, wow. And then I thought, you know, if I'm a fighter pilot and I'm a fighter pilot and I'm a a single place fighter, I'm responsible for keeping me alive. And I'd be the pilot, the navigator, the radio man, the gunner, the bomber,

bombardier, all of those things. And then I would not have to depend on 10 more, 10 crews of 10. And besides that, I thought the fighters were a little bit cooler. Well, I mean, you want to talk about the building the aura of pilots. I mean, the Battle of Britain. If you're watching that thing happen and you're seeing those spitfires and the spitfires going out there and doing their work, that had to at least start the momentum going for fighter pilots becoming what we now know as fighter pilots. So once you do get trained, you go, you get sent to San Francisco and you start flying a P39 for the 320.

28th fighter group. Correct. And you're flying coastal defense. Well, I think that's just because we were there and we were flying military airplanes. And we didn't have any coastal defense. And so, you know, you grabbed what you had and said, okay, you were part of it.

Yeah, it sounds like a job that, sounds like a job that kind of needs something for you to do. And they're not sure what. Although, Dave, you flew combat air patrols over L.A. after September 11th, right? Our squadron right, starting on 9-11, we had a mission starting that morning where we were flying missions up and down the coast. Yeah, so that's kind of similar, right? I imagine it came from not knowing what was going to happen next. Yeah, we didn't have a clue.

We stayed up all night one time because there was a really. report of the Japanese fleet you know coming toward the coast and it was it was ours he didn't tell anybody

oh that's not a good side you ended up losing your wingman in that time frame is that right? Oh yeah I had a wingman we were doing a you know he was brand new and so he was

just getting checked out. And I had him on my wing, and I'm flying on. Here come up a couple of Navy planes. And that wasn't uncommon. You know, we had a lot of Navy that were in the Bay Area, too. And so it wasn't unusual that we would attack each other and have a little dogfight. And the two Navy planes came by.

and came across us and started heading down towards us. And I was wagging on my wings like, hey, wait a minute, don't bother me now. But that may be waving my wings, but hey, let's have a dog fight, you know, who knows? And so I made a pretty steep turn into him. And my new wingman, just maybe his second ride and a fighter, got in here and stalled the thing. And I watched him go into the bay. Yeah. Reflecting on that in the book, you say, dying was easy.

A piece of cake. lots of people would die. And so I suppose I began putting up walls. I knew I had to concentrate on what I was doing and block out the rest. Yeager wrote about that in his book,

how he stayed away from people, didn't want to get close. I don't know that I consciously carried it to that extreme, but it came out the same. If you fly airplanes, drive race cars, do stunts for movies, or maybe walk a high wire

with the flying, Lendez, anything truly hazardous, then losing friends goes with the territory. We're talking serious stress here, and you either cope or you don't. Death is a thing that you have to get used to as cruel and hard as it sounds. From that point on, from that point on, I resolved to control my emotions no matter how hard that might be. And you got some other things that you talk about, just about being. a good fighter pilot. You, because you're mentioning that,

you've got to control your emotions. You also say a fighter pilot mentality was taking firm root now. Living close to the edge sort of went with the job. Daring, audacity, creativity, flair. These things were as much a part of being a good fighter pilot's makeup

as skill and sound judgment and were encouraged within certain parameters. Sometimes, of course, we stretch those a little. The rest of the time, more than a little. You measured a pilot by his formation flying as much as by dogfighting. Some guys would weave in and out, just couldn't hold it there. And some, the talented ones, could stick to your wing like paint.

You'd bank and go down and the good ones would stay right there. No closer, no farther away. This was wartime, however. And there was the other kind, too. We needed pilots so there was reluctance to wash people out. and even more so once they'd gotten their wings. Marginal pilots slipped through, not many, and almost no truly bad ones, at least not in fighters.

But there were pilots that made you uncomfortable wing tip to wing tip. Chuck Yeager was in the first group of pilots that joined us at Tonapaw. We had only six months more experience than the guys straight out of flying school, but that was a lot. We knew how to fly P-39s. The new guys hadn't seen one. Some found the transition tricky at first, but not Yeager. Chuck became the yardstick by which we would measure the rest as they joined us, several each month.

Yeager could fly. Right from the start, he was pretty impressive. Yeager and Chuck McKee had been flying sergeants, graduates of a program for non-commissioned officers. Then someone decided pilots had to be officers, so they made up a rank, flight officer, equivalent to a warrant officer, one grade below second lieutenant. So these guys were unusual, what we called blue bars after the color of their insignia,

the two lowest ranking pilots in the squadron. He was from West Virginia and had a terrible drawl. Over the years, I got the impression that he loved to use it, never tried to hide it, practiced it for all I knew. He had such a distinctive voice you had no trouble picking him out on the radio.

And he had those eyes, Hunter's eyes. Most of the aces could pick up far off airplanes a little quicker than the rest of the men. But as often as not, it was Yeager, spotting the enemy first and announcing it over the radio, making it sound like the grand old Opry. When it wasn't him calling them out, it was usually me.

So that's a big deal to have the eagle eyes that you guys had. Yeah, it really was. When you think about it, we didn't have any kind of a ground control, know, toward, you know, many bandits at 12 o'clock. You had to see them. It was incredibly important. Dave, you got good eyes, don't you?

I was given the gift of really good vision. But it's not as important now. No. Because you just get basically in a modern, you just got to be able to see the screens in front of your face, right? Thanks. I would not draw a comparison of what Colonel Anderson needed in terms of the vision, but having good eyesight, even today, is a huge advantage because at some point, all the computers,

all the information you were talking about even somewhere on the ground telling you where to go and where to look. Eventually, you have to see him yourself. And the sooner you see him, the better and the better your eyes are, the sooner you see him. So for me, 50 years later, listen to you describe a fighter pilot, daring, creative, stretching limits, it's the exact same way we think about it 50 years later. So your explanation is timeless for what a good fighter pilot makes. So it was really cool to read that and hear that from you. Now, you get trained up and eventually you get orders to Europe.

You get orders to Europe. And again, to fast forward a little bit through the story here, and people got to get the book to get all the details. but you guys ride over to England on the Queen Elizabeth. Right. So, but it's not exactly the luxury liner that you wanted it to be, right? They pack you in there with, what, 17,000 guys? Yeah, well, something like that.

A division, infantry division, plus the fighter group. Yeah, it's something like that. Yeah, it's a big number. the air conditioning, I assume, wasn't great on that ride over? Well, it was for our GIs. They had to ride 24 hours on the open deck. They had plenty of air conditioning. And then 24 hours in the hole.

But I was a captain. So I got a honeymoon suite on the fourth floor. Nice. with 17 other guys. And you had to be, were you thinking all about like U-boats, like getting sunk? Oh my gosh, yeah. We had not won the battle of the Atlantic yet. And we were taking pretty good losses.

Yeah. And I figured that the Queen Mary and the Queen Elizabeth had to beat primary targets, you know, that there must be a ring of them out there off of New York, which we'd have to go through. But, you know, they did that the whole war. And as far as I know, we're never damaged or anything. They were fast. They'd change course, you know, every so often.

They would take alternative routes, instead of going directly across. I remember we went down by the Azores on our trip to England. And so, yeah, thinking about U-boats was very high on my list. Yeah, that's got to be scary. And you know they didn't have enough lifeboats

for 10 or 15,000 people on that. Yeah, my God, I don't know whether they did. or not, but we had lifeboat drills all the time. Wow. You end up arriving in England, December 4th, 1943, and I'm going to get into a little section here. You say, I don't remember when or how I learned about Jack. He'd been shot down over Germany on November 13th and was listed as missing,

but I don't remember how I found out. It seems clear I had a note from my sister, but I have no memory of it. I don't recall what my emotions were, though in thinking this book through I've tried. I'm certain I wrote a letter about it to Eleanor, saying how terribly sorry I was, but I have no memory of what the letter contained exactly.

And Eleanor was Jack's wife. Like most men who've known combat, I can remember the finest deal. detail, the nuances, what airplanes look like in my gun sights, what I felt in the swirl of battle, what I said to people and what they said to me on certain days 40 odd years ago. I can remember silly things, the words to some Glenn Miller tunes, the first points I ever scored in a basketball game, these things are burned into me. I can summon them up in an instant.

But as for things in my heart on the day I found out my best friend had been shot down and possibly killed, no clue remains. All of that is blocked out. The screen is blank. Before anyone thought up computers or knew what delete buttons were, I had one and I punched it. That was how we all managed. On December 12th I wrote my parents.

I received June's letter. Although it had been bad news about Jack, it still was swell to get my first mail here. I can imagine how you can imagine how I feel about it. But as long as he is just reported missing, I won't worry about him. Much later, we would learn he'd survive the bailout from his P-38, but it died in a hospital. Jack Stacker is buried in Belgium, in one of those sprawling white-on-green military cemeteries that we Americans maintain so meticulously, the cross is all in row.

He was married two weeks before he went off to war and then never came home like 291,130 other American boys in that war. It was just his fourth mission. So this, I mean this is Jack, the boy that you grew up with, the boy that you were obsessed with airplanes with, the kid that you both wanted to go and fly. And here you are basically almost as soon as you arrive in England,

Do you find out that he's been shot down? Yeah, yes. I don't know what else I can say other than what you just read. It was a blow to me. But then we knew he was in the hospital. We learned that. And so he had to been alive. So there was some hope.

You know, drags on and on and on, and then you find out he's killed. It's maybe an easy way to break you in on it, but it's still a blow no matter how you slice it. Meanwhile, you guys get issued the first P-51s that are going to enter the war. And tell me about that P-51 the first time you got to fire that thing up. Well, I'm going to go back further than that. When we got the word, I don't think any of us had even seen a Mustang, let alone fly one. And then after we got to fly them, it was kind of a do-it-yourself checkout. We would send a guy up to the port where they were assembled.

find a crew chief to learn how to start it, and bring it back and check out the next guy. And I hear again, I'm one of these lucky guys. About this time, a group commander came by and says, hey, bud, we're going to, they call me Andy actually. you're going to go to the Royal Air Force Central Flight Instructor School, gunnery instructor. And take a P-51 and fly the course with a P-51 instead of a Spitfire, which is what the course was taught in. So that gave me 35 hours in the Mustang before combat, where other guys were lucky to get two or three flights. And I make that sound, you know, really bad, but it was so much better than the P39, and we knew it, and boy, we weren't going to bitch. but the bad thing about it was the handbooks didn't even come with the airplane and so we're

making it up and it didn't have to be that way because the pioneer Mustang group was already in the theater checked out but they just didn't have a way of passing the word to you guys Well, I don't know why, though. Dave, what do you want to know about the P-51 Mustang? I'm trying to imagine that feeling of, and I think you described it, they didn't, quote, tell you where you were going to go, but you knew where you were going. Oh, yeah. But you left your P-39's behind.

Yes. So did you know, did you have a thought that they were going to be P-51's there, or was that a surprise when you found out? Well, when I, looking back at it, But we wondered where we would go, you know, with P-39s and be in North Africa or South Pacific where they were being used. And so we heard at the same time we're going to go to England and we're getting a brand new P-51 Bravo. So that one was a surprise. but when we got there not having airplanes there waiting for us

was a little bit of a surprise and so then we learned that oh you're going to go up to the port and bring your own airplane home oh Jesus and we just we thought once we flew the airplane boy we didn't bitch about a thing

it was so much better than the P-39. You know, we didn't want to get bitch, bitch, too much said, okay, guys, you can go to Africa and fly your old P-39. We love that Mustang. It was a great airplane. And it was a perfect airplane for the European theater. It had such long-range and endurance.

highly maneuverable, and just no negative things. People said, oh, well, it was liquid cool in one bullet hole in there would ruin your whole day. Well, we didn't have many of those, believe it or not. And so even that didn't turn out to be a big negative factor. I gotta say a thing or two here that might not come out clear in my book. The arrival of the Mustang in Europe, Jimmy Doolittle, taking over the 8th Air Force, made a significant impact on the air war in Europe and the eventual downfall of Germany.

What was the correlation there? Okay, let's see. In late 43, the 8th Air Force, their B-17s, B-24s, had a bombing halt. They stopped doing what they were doing. And they were supposed to kill the Luftwaffe so we could have the invasion of Europe. And you can't go without it. You got to kill the enemy's error. And the way they were trying to do it was they thought they could do it alone.

They thought they could go without fighter escort or anybody. And they forgot to tell the Luftwaffe about it. They were having tremendous losses. So they had a bombing hall and said, okay. okay we gotta have escort. And they said, oh, by the way, the Pioneer Mustang Group is over here in Europe in the 9th Air Force, which was the tactical Air Force that was going to go with the invasion. And they put the Pioneer Mustang with assigned to it, the 9th Air Force.

It said, we understand they have pretty good range and everything. Why don't we try them? So they loaned the 354th fighter group to the 8th Air Force. And they were so wildly successful that the 8th Air Force demanded that they get P-51s. Where are the next one coming? So we go almost directly to the 8th Air Force. We were assigned to the 9th for a short time. And when we got our airplanes, well then, tactics, the 8th Air Force was in charge,

and the 8th Fighter Command told us how to escort. They said, we want to see you. We want you close. When the enemy comes in, we want us to drive it away. and just driving them away and then come back. You know, is this being videoed? Yes, it is. People will be able to watch your hands.

Fighter pals can't tell their story without using their hands. It's impossible. If I had to put my hands down here, I couldn't tell you. We would just stop recording. We'd be at the end. No, we can see you. And they can see you. And so, we actually had an altitude limit.

We could take them to 18,000 feet. If you hadn't shot him down, break it off, come back up. It wasn't the way to do it as it turned out, but we do what we're told. And further, they were, their ideas of, all they had all the strategic air command was, you know, was their basic thinking that the bombers could go in, didn't need help. They could destroy the enemy's war-making capability, and the troops could just walk in. Well, like I said, they didn't tell the Luftoff about it. They were even so upset, oh, they were bombing factories, oil, anything to do with the production of fighters,

or just fighters on the ground, you know, inventory. So the chief of staff was so upset about it. had given them several written instructions. You got to kill the Luftwaffe, and they just weren't doing it. So they fired the 8th Air Force Commander and brought in Jimmy Doolittle, who had a personal talk with the chief of staff. and he said, Jimmy, the mission is to destroy the Lufthewth.

I don't care how you do it. And so he was, well, you guys all know who he is and what things he'd done. The Doolittle Raid shortly after Pearl Harbor, you know, incredible stuff, blind flying. And so he,

He was more pragmatic and he came down to, I didn't know this, I read it in his book later. He came down to visit the Eighth Fighter Command headquarters, you know, first time. And they walked through and they had this thing over the door. The mission of the Eighth Fighter Command is to bring the bombers home safely, something like that. He said, who put that up there? And General Kepner said, I don't know. It was here when I got here.

And he said, well, tear it down. The mission of the Eighth Fighter Command is to destroy the Luftwaffe. no more 18,000 feet. Now it was pursue and destroy. That was official our orders. We're now, you fighters, you're turned loose. And you know, we had felt like we, we, my first month, I guess I was over there was under those restrictions. And we did have the feeling at you were tied, you know, you had your hands behind. We wanted to get into the fight. We just were all so eager.

It was incredible. And what that happened, he turned that energy loose. And that's actually how we defeated the Luftwaffe. We shot down their experienced test pilots one by one. And by spring, no, that's the spring of 41, 41, yeah. And the invasion was planned for 6 June. And so by the, you know, by May, the Germans could not put up a mass against us. Well, we were putting up 1,000 bombers and 8,900 fighters maybe, you know, that would

be the maximum. We'd get those kind of missions. And when we were trying to do it at the beginning, the Germans would put up a big fuss about it. I mean, hundreds of airplanes. By May, they could not do that anymore. And that allowed the invasion to start and led to the eventual downfall of Germany. And I credit General Doolittle turning the fighter pilots loose, his policies.

and they were able to the Mustang of having a significant impact on the war in Europe. When you guys took the Mustang out when you're flying it, how much intel did you have about the enemy fighters? Did you know, when you got that Mustang up going as fast as it could go, did you think to yourself or did you know, hey, the Mr. Schmidt can only go this fast? The junker can only go that fast. Did you, did you, you know, nowadays we kind of analyze, maybe even overanalyze the enemy, but we have pretty good intelligence about what their capabilities are.

When you got in that Mustang, did you pretty quickly realize you were going to have the upper hand? Pretty soon. I felt like I learned it real quick, especially of altitude. I learned later that a measure smith. it in the hands of a good pilot down low could give a Mustang a hard time. But I never experienced that. Fortunately, I guess. I'd like to say a little bit about the Pacific and the European theater.

The airplanes in the European War were all very close and performed. performance, 109, 190, not the twin-engine ones, you could just forget them. First guy there got the most. Compared to the zero? Yeah, where you had, we had, we were faster and could climb higher than they were, but don't turn with zero, you know, is what I, I never had to, but that's when I heard intelligence reports. Therefore, I'd say in Europe, the pilots made a lot of difference, whereas not so much in the Japanese theater. you had to use tactics, you know, don't dogfight.

So I think that that was a factor in the European war. Where was I? No, that's it. You were just wanting to point out the differences. And we have to bring up your bird. Your bird was named Old Crow. Right. after the whiskey

well I tell my Baptist friends it's named after the most intelligent bird flies in the sky but my drinking buddies all know it is named after that bourbon and I wouldn't call it good old anymore because it's down on the bottom of shelf

it was the cheapest stuff we could find Yeah, it's great. These pictures of your bird, you know, you can see very prominently. It's painted. Old Crow is on there. Everybody knew who you were. You know, just talking about these bomber escort missions a little bit, and you go over some of the stuff in the book, but the bomber crew tour was 25 missions. That's something that a lot of people talk about.

If you were in a bomber crew, you had to go and execute 25 missions. If you got through 25 missions, you were done. You could go home. Now, what's interesting is as you pull the thread on that number, well, they expected and anticipated that on each one of these big bombing missions, there was going to be 4% losses. So what does that mean? You take somebody with a 4% chance of getting shot down.

You multiply that times 25, and you get 100% chance of getting shot down is what they had, these bomber guys doing. And what's even scarier than that was that the actual life expectancy, the actual number that you would get shot down on was between 12 and 14 missions. So the 4% was a low number. Now, interestingly, my great uncle, who I'm named after, his name was George Gretton. My middle name is Gretton. He was a bombardier in the 306th bomb group. And he flew in a B-17, which was known.

as Tar Heel Peggy and Tar Heel Peggy was shot down on April 24th 1944 and this was right when you were flying in that area I don't know if you flew on that day but he was shot down April 24th 1944 there was 10 crew members on board as you were talking about five were killed and five were killed five were made it out parachuted down became POWs that actually includes my my great uncle, George Gretton, he was a POW and he survived prison camp and eventually came home. But that job that you guys had to go and protect these bombers that were going in, and you mentioned a little bit of the scale.

Here's the scale of some of these missions that you all were doing. There was this operation, which was called Operation Argument, which you referred to in the book as the Big Week. That started it. So the big week on one of these one one mission this is one mission happening 417 B-17s hit one set of targets 314 B-17s hit another set of targets 272 B-24s hit another set of targets so so right there you've got what's almost a thousand bombers heading in and they were escorted by

94 P38's, 668 P-47s, and 73 P-51 Mustangs. This like level and scale of combat is something we can't, my generation, Dave's generation, we can't even comprehend what it means to have a thousand aircraft. Dave, what was the most number of aircraft you had in the sky over Iraq or Afghanistan? The mission is that it was probably a big one was in the 20th, 24 airplanes. That was a mission commander for 24 airplanes, and that was a handful. So what does it look like when you're in the air with close to 1,500 or 2,000 aircraft? Well, the beast of the bombers would go in.

They'd take off real early in the morning, assemble, and then get lined up. and all start climbing at the same time. And especially in the winter, our cold temperatures up there, we'd leave intense. Oh, like trails? Contrails. And they would last, you know, they were long and last, sometimes we made our own overcast with all these things. Then the fighters joined them later, you know, we could see them. We could see them for a hundred miles, you know, to get up on top of the last

overcast and so we would head, we had a heading and he arrived up there and hopefully at the proper time. But if it wasn't, you remember on the tails of the B-17s, they put these big letters, square D, A, big, big letters. We would join, see what the letters were, and then fly up and down and find ours. It sounds hard, but it sounds hard, but actually when you're doing it every day, it wasn't so bad. You know, just kind of routine. Go up here. Okay, oops, that's not ours.

You know, go up here and there, go back. And would you be assigned to one bomber or like a group of, how many would you and your team be covering? Well, that's a good question. They flew in little three-ship Vs. And there'd be about 60 of those. 60 more, 60 more, 60 more. And we would, God, I don't know.

You cover it just as, how many different radio frequencies would you have? Four different radio frequencies. And you just flip from channel to channel? Was there a common frequency? How can you have a common frequency with a thousand or two thousand aircraft? Well, that was a, emergency channel. Got it.

Everybody and his brother was on it. That must have just been like filled with chatter the whole time. Yeah, that was really. And then you had a bomber, fighter. Then we had our own channel and we used that

sometimes to come home. We'd get a steer. We'd we'd get a practice steer, you know. What do you mean by that? What's a practice steer? Just terminology. But what does it mean?

I don't know what it means. Dave, you know what it means? I think he's talking about giving you a vector so you knew it's way to go to get back to where he needed to be. And you wouldn't want to say. You didn't, yeah. You wouldn't want to say, I really need this now. You know, it was a practice. You don't want to admit you need a heading.

So you gave me a practice steer and they go, why don't you go, 1-80? And that was them telling you how to get home without having to admit it. Oh, okay. You probably use somebody else's voice when you're asking for those practice steers, so you didn't sound like yourself. Yeah, it's just hard for us to even imagine a 2,000 aircraft in the sky. When you're flying in, what's your first indication? How do you know the enemy's coming?

Is it the first anti-aircraft that starts to come up, the ACAC? No, you got that all the time. That's just happening. Whenever they flew over a wrong place. And is that just a matter of chance, whether it hits you or not? The fighters, we didn't worry too much about the flak. That really was after the bombers. But they would shoot at us.

too. You were talking one time about looking off in the distance and it looked like little gray puffs of smoke. You'd see hundreds of airplanes and you and I guess probably Chuck Yeager more than anybody, but you could see the enemy aircraft coming. But it didn't look like airplanes at first. I think your description was almost it looked like little clouds. Yeah. Yeah, and it used to be that was a little hundred chip cloud.

No, that's another thing that, you know, that we had to get used to. In practice, we were lucky to sometimes get four ships up to practice formation. That was a big deal, a four ship. We did a lot of two for formation training. And every day in England, when we flew, we flew with 16 ship formation formation for squadron. three squadrons, lead, one over here and one over here, and two spares. They flew across the channel, turn around if they weren't needed, and fly through two or three layers of overcast, probably more likely than not.

we had never, never flew. I think I can remember flying in a group formation one time in training. Were there mishaps with fighters hitting each other and American fighters and bombers just on the way over to the target? Did that happen? Or was it pretty well coordinated guys figured it out really fast? It was pretty good considering. But my own flight, I lost a wingman, two flights here and climbing through and somehow these two guys drift together. One of the worst ones I ever saw was B-17s. You know how you can have days when you can look down and see pretty good, but you can can't see forward. Well, there was a lot of those. And we see these two columns of B-17s. We're sitting

up here, and they're going along at the same rate. So you can see it looking down? Yeah. And their same altitude, and they're going. And they got a mission recall, canceled the mission and these guys went like this oh my god you could see it coming you know nothing you can do

you know they lost about four airplanes right there that was a hell of a sight to see a bomber go down I mean to us you um the book here a little bit when you're now flying

you say we were fighter pilots flying the damnedest, fastest, most lethal airplanes anyone ever dreamed up the forward line in defense of the entire free world. We were 22 years old, give or take two years, and carrying the entire war on our shoulders and doing a pretty good job of it, too, to judge by what the newspapers told us. We were winning the fight and developing egos that would make Mussolini look humble. We weren't like other people, at least not in our own minds. We were bolder, braver, smarter, more spirited, better.

Our eyesight was keener, our reflex is quicker. We were risk takers too who worked and played hard. We were confident, self-reliant, able to stand on our own and proud of it. Most of all, we were motivated, aggressive. Only the fittest and most competitive survived the training and then the deadly winnowing out imposed by our last and best teacher the German Air Force. I was no fighter by nature, at least not with my fists. I can count the fights of my youth on one hand, but I enjoyed competing and racing cars or dueling with airplanes was a way of

compensating for my slender build and testing myself against anyone. I enjoyed combat, which is not quite the same thing as saying that I enjoyed killing. Combat was exciting, addictive, a test of our metal and manhood, a crucible in which men became a cut above the ordinary. We thought that we thought we were that and we were encouraged to think it all through our training because we couldn't have done what we did without thinking it. Why else would they have let us fly under bridges and buzz people's houses? It took a big ego to fly to Berlin with anything resembling enthusiasm. We were never afraid, most of us anyway.

I truly believe that. Scared sometimes, you'd have to be stupid, not to be, concerned, respectful. But never afraid the way a little kid is afraid of the dark, or the way you might fear some dark alley knowing something is there waiting for you. We were so young, I suppose we just didn't know any better. Combat is like a near miss in an automobile. It happens. You react instinctively to it and later on you might say,

that was close and your fingers might tremble a little. But while it's happening, you don't pause to assess it and say, my God, I'm going to die here. There simply isn't time. You just do what you have to do. I never saw a man crack, not in our group. I don't remember anyone standing down because he was what we called flak happy. There was a guy who lost a brother and wept openly every so often about it.

but he flew he did his job nobody had to be lifted out of his cockpit frozen up staring stress at least in our corner of england wasn't what hollywood might have you believe although it was there no denying it so there's the attitude you know you point something else you point something else out in here i had my left right sir this is like i have to deal with Dave all the time on this stuff. The description couldn't be better. It's written perfectly. You also mentioned in the book, and I don't think I have it marked out to read, but

you talk about how when you look at the films that they made after the war, all the pilots are 30, 30 years old or 35 years old, you know, in the famous World War II fighter pilots. And you say, hey, it was a bunch of kids that were 20, 21, 22 years old. Yeah. That's right. I'm going to go to a little combat here. Flying skill, I've always felt, meant more in Europe than it did in other theaters, where the airplanes had differing strong points.

The P-38 was successful in the Pacific, although it couldn't turn with the zero because it was much faster when diving. Its pilot could attack from above and then keep going, and the zero had no chance of catching it. Same with the P-40 earlier on. The Falk Wolves and Messerschmitts had more speed. the Pacific tactics wouldn't work on these aircraft and the P-38's was much less effective against them.

To beat them, you had to turn with them. Like I'm turning with this 109 right now, northwest of Hanover. We're flying in interlocking circles but on differing planes. Descending, we pass one another once, twice, three times, at ridiculous angles with neither of us in a position to fire. I feel like I'm gaining, but not very much and I'm excited and impatient and getting terribly frustrated that I can't get a shot. I've worked the angle down to where our paths are crossing at 40 to 60 degrees. What you want ideally is 0 to 10, with the enemy either moving almost directly away or coming

almost straight at you. Anything over 30 degrees, it's almost pointless to shoot with a fixed sight. Of course, these same numbers, this same geometry problem, are probably running through the mind of the Mishersmith pilot. I'd been considered a rather good marksman in the P39 and T6 at both our gunnery school and later at the RAFs. Now I've flown nine missions, triggered my guns only once and still have no kills, but I'm cocky enough to try something bizarre.

I decide to pull my sights through the German, keep pulling my nose up until I can't see him, then fire. hose him and hope against all odds that he flies through the stream. What the hell? Worth a try. I pull up and fire off a quick stream of Tracer as he disappears underneath me. And another for luck. I ease the stick back and he flies back into my view.

Hot damn. He's spilling coolant back into his slip stream. I got him. Got a goddamn golden BB on him. Pungered his radiator or severed a coolant. got my first kill. And while I'm whooping, like I just scored the touchdown that won the Rolls Bowl, he throws the canopy off and bails out.

His 109 goes straight in exploding. That's your first kill right there. Still putting a smile on your face. You haven't read the rest of it there. Well, yeah, after this, a guy sneaks up on you, but luckily it's another P-51, right? Yeah. Yeah, what happened afterwards, I felt, ooh, you know, oh, golly, you're a guy who's flying close formation with me right now.

He pulled right up there pretty quick after the kill. He down low, he had his mask off, and he was grinning, and he gave me something like that, you know, or I don't know. didn't and I thought wait a minute did he shoot that thing down out from under me you know and I thought I my shot had to be the luckiest shot in the world you know to be able to blindly get that lead and then see him come through so all the way home I I convinced myself I probably did not shoot that airplane down that he got it was Johnny England, England Air Force Base. That was the guy that the base was named for.

And so I get home, he's in a different squadron, and I get home, I make a claim to the intelligence officer briefing. And then I said, but just hold it, I got to go get confirmation from a A guy that obviously saw what was going on. So now I'm riding, going in the Jeep, or the officer's club. Can you tell who the other pilot is, or you just know what squadron he is? No, I knew who he was.

Oh, so you can see him. You're that close to him. You look at him. Oh, yeah. It's like, oh, it's Johnny England. Yeah, what's up? He had his mask, and I could see the name on his airplane. He already had two kills.

And so I think, how am I going to? to bring this up, you know, am I going to say, hey, you asshole. Did, oh, you could, you could bleep this out. You're good. You're good. We're amongst friends. Hey, asshole, did you shoot that thing down out from under me? Or, you know, just how am I going to put it to him? So I go in the officers club and he's over here. He sees me, and he comes running over to me.

And he says, Andy, he says, that was the best shot I've ever seen. You got that guy out there about 60 degrees angle off. I said, oh, Johnny, you know, lucky shot. And as soon as we were through, I rushed by phone and got my first kill. There you go. Did you guys put the, did you guys put the, the, the, the, swastika on. You're playing the little mini swastika for a kill? Very quickly.

Very quickly. Hell yeah. Oh, that's awesome. You got a section in here that it's about another dog fight and I believe it's probably the one you remember the best. It's called the straight up encounter.

Oh, yeah. And I've got to read this. This is just an incredible situation here. And I'm going to go to the book. I am in this steep climb pulling the stick into my navel, making it steeper, steeper. And I'm looking back down over my shoulder at this classic gray ME109 with black crosses that is pulling up too. Steeper, steeper, steeper.

The pilot trying to get his nose up just a little bit more and bring me into his sights. There's nothing distinctive about the aircraft. No fancy markings, nothing to identify. It is the plane of an ace as one of the dreaded yellow noses like you see in the movie Some of them did that I know but I never saw one and in any event all of their aces weren't flamboyant types who splash Plain on their paint on their airplanes to show who they were He was someone who's trying to kill me is all So I'm looking back almost straight down now and I can see this 20 millimeter cannon sticking through the middle of the

the fighter's propeller hub. In the theater of memory, it was enormous. An elephant gun. And that isn't far wrong. It is a gun designed to bring down a bomber, one that fires shells as long as your hand. Shells that explode and tear big holes in metal is the single most frightening thing

I have seen in my life then and now. But I'm too busy to be frightened. And I am extremely busy up here hanging by my propeller going almost straight up full emergency power which a Mustang could do for only so long before losing speed, shuddering, stalling and falling back down. And I am thinking that if the Mustang stalls before the Messerschmitt stalls, I have had it. I look back and I can see that he's shuddering on the verge of a stall. He hasn't been able to get his nose up enough,

hasn't been able to bring that big gun to bear, almost, but not quite. I'm a fallen down dead man, almost, but not quite. His nose begins dropping, just as my airplane too begins shuddering. He stalls a second or two before I stall, drops away before I do. Good old Mustang.

He is falling away now, and I flopped the nose. nose over and go after him hard. We are very high by this time, six miles and then some and falling very, very fast. The Messerschmitt had a head start plummeting out of my range, but I'm closing up quickly. Then he flattens out and comes around hard to the left and starts climbing again as if he wants to come at me head on. Suddenly we were right back where we started. A lot of this is just instinct now. Things are happening too fast to think everything out. You steer with your right hand and feet. The right hand also triggers the guns. With your left, you work the throttle and keep the

airplane in trim, which is easier to do than to describe. Any airplane with a single propeller produces torque. The more horsepower you have, the more prop will pull you off to one side. The Mustang, I flew, used a 12-cylinder Packard-Murlin engine that displaced 1,649 cubic engines. That's 10 times the size of the engine that powers an Indy car. It developed power enough that you never applied full power sitting still on the ground because it would pull the plane's tail up off the runway and the propeller would chew up the concrete. With so much power, you are continually making minor adjustments on the controls to keep the Mustang and its wing-mounted guns pointed straight. It's a little unnerving to think about how many things that you're going to

you have to deal with all at once to fly combat. So the mission Schmidt is coming around again, climbing hard to his left, and I've had about enough of this. My angle is a little bit better this time, so I roll the dice. Instead of cobbing it like before and sailing on by him, I decide to turn hard left inside him,

knowing that if I lose speed and don't make it, I probably won't get home. I pull back on the throttle, slightly put down 10 degrees of flaps and haul back on the stick just as hard as I can the nose begins coming around slowly slowly hot damn I'm going to make it I'm inside him pulling my sights up to him and the German pilot can see this this time it's the Messerschmitt that breaks away and goes zooming straight up engine at maximum power without much alternative

I come in with full power and follow him up and the gap narrows swiftly. He is hanging by his prop, not quite vertically, and I am right there behind him, and it is terribly clear, having tested this theory less than a minute ago, that he is going to stall and fall away before I do. I have him. He must know that I have him. I bring my nose up. He comes into my sights, and from less than 300 yards, I trigger a long, merciless burst from my brownings.

Every fifth bullet or so is a tracer, leaving a trail of thin smoke, marking the path of the bullet stream. The tracers race upward and find him. The bullets chew it, the wing root, the cockpit, the engine, making bright little flashes. I hose the Mr. Schmidt down the way you'd hose down a campfire, methodically, from one end to the other,

not wanting to make a mistake. The 109 shakes like a retriever coming out of the water, throwing off pieces. He slows, almost stops as if parked in the sky, his propeller just windmilling. And he begins smoking heavily. My momentum carries me to him. I throttle back to ease my plane alongside just off his right wing. Have I killed him? I do not particularly want to fight this man again.

I'm coming up even with the cockpit, cockpit, and although I figure less I know about him the better, I find myself looking in spite of myself. There's smoke in the cockpit. I can see that and nothing more. Another few feet. And then he falls away suddenly, left wing down, right wing rising up, obscuring my view. I am looking at the 109's sky blue belly, the wheel wells, twin radiators,

grease marks, streaks from the guns, the black crosses. I am close enough to make out the rivets. The Messerschmidt is right there, and then it is gone, just like that, rolling away and dropping its nose, falling almost straight down, leaking coolant and trailing flame and smoke so black and thick it has to be smoke or oil. It simply plunges, headed straight for the deck. No spin, not even a wobble, no parachute. And now I am wondering.

His ship seems a death ship. But is it? Undecided, I peel off and begin chasing him down. Did I squander a chance here? Have I let him escape? He's diving hard through, he's diving hard enough to be shedding his wings, harder than anyone designed those airplanes to dive, 500 miles an hour and more.

And if 109s will stall sooner than the Mustang is going straight up, Now I am worrying that maybe their wings stay on longer. At 25,000 feet, I begin to grow nervous. I pull back on the throttle, ease out of the dive, and watch him go down. I have no more stomach for this kind of thing. And right now, not right now, not with this guy. Enough. Let him go and to hell with him.

Straight down, he plunges from as high as 35,000 feet through this beautiful crystal clear May morning toward the green-on-green checkerboard fields leaving a wake of black smoke. From four miles straight up, I watch as the Mr. Schmidt and the shadow it makes on the ground rush toward one another. And then, finally, silently, they merge.

I think I just found a guy for my audio book. I know how you feel. that's just um yeah Dave what's your breakdown of that it's give us give us a breakdown I'm actually just I'm kind of at a loss for words and I know this sounds maybe even sounds a little arrogant I can picture what he's saying so even when he's talking about he you're right here sir even when you're when you're talking about looking down your wing line seeing his nose come up to you and you know if he's got two or three more degrees

on you, which is kind of like a matter of inches really in an airplane that he's going to get that this Messerschmitt's going to get a shot and that the sinking feeling that comes with seconds later the elation of watching him shutter and you know that he can't keep

his turn even the angles and the fall. So your ability to get another pilot to see through their eyes what you're seeing is it is It is remarkable how well it is written in a way to describe it so I can feel what you're seeing, not just see it. It is just unbelievable to listen to you describe that. And then the shadows merging with the airframe and then at your altitude, it's probably a fireball, but you don't hear anything.

And everything in between there is just, I have never seen something written well enough to see it with my own eyes as what you. you wrote in that dog fight. It's really amazing for me to hear, and I'm really grateful that you have the ability to get that on paper and capture that forever. We may blame Joe Hamlin. Joe Hamlin, yeah. Well, he didn't fly the airplane.

I know that. Well, the stories are all mine. And when it came to, well, we first had to get together. And he'd go home and run. write a couple of chapters. And then we would come back and review them. And I said, Joe, this word isn't even in my inventory. You know.

And we'd go on and on and on. I'd say, I don't even know what that means. And we had that. Then when it came to the flying, he would try it. And I said, Joe, give me a yellow pad over there. And I'd write it all out in the longhand. I said, don't change a word. But after we got together, so many times he really got into my head.

He did a marvelous job. And then even when I said, don't you. change your word. Sometimes he'd try. And I might or might not leave it because he was a, he is a good writer. Absolutely. I would have taken my book and say, I was born on January 13th, 1922, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know. But, you know, the way he mixed, mixed it through the book. Right. I think was really good.

Yeah, no, that's, so that's the, just for everyone that's listening, that's the, the, the co-author of the book that helped write the book. Joe Hamlin did a great job. When, when you're, so when you're looking over your shoulder at this Messerschmitt, and they're start, he's starting to stall. So you can see that, you can see the plane start to kind of shake. I said, I see him shutter. Right.

But I don't. think you can see it shutter shuttered shutters a feel in the airplane you know you feel but there's some visual thing that's going on that you go oh he's not going to make it much further he got sloppy you got sloppy you know that's the beginning of a stall and you can probably sense when you're about done going up too so you knew that you were close oh yeah and then we reverse and then when you're shooting that that aircraft you have to make little micro adjustments with your nose to get like you're saying you hose it down like you would a campfire so you're making little tiny adjustments to kind of sweep up and down on that aircraft with your maneuvering yeah you know maneuvering

was maneuvering is just a little bit of rudder yeah small amount you had to keep it in trim and I don't What I mean in trim, keep the ball centered. If you had a ball off, then you're, you know, you're shooting at the airplanes over here. You can't, you got a, you can't. So this makes, whereas normally you could get away with having trim be off a little bit because you're still just maintaining some kind of a bearing. But in this situation, if your trim is off a little bit, your guns pointed in the wrong direction. It might be, you know.

And you've got, you're making these constant micro adjustments. And I actually, that's a part of the book that I didn't quite go into. The level of detail that you have to do to keep that trim, but I failed to understand why that's so important in a gunfight when you have fixed sites. Because, like, if you're flying an aircraft, I mean, I've taken off in small airplanes before where there's a strong crosswind. The plane is going. If you look at the heading of the plane, it's like 10 degrees off the direction. in your heading, but you're still going in the right direction. So if you do that with your gun, that's going to be a problem.

So you've got to keep that thing perfectly trimmed all the time. Dave, you didn't have to do any of that, did you? He had a computer doing all this for him, sir. Well, we got the early computers. You had it harder than I did because in a jet, moving the throttles in a jet doesn't change your trim. Every time you move the throttle on a propeller, you change the torque. Every movement of a throttle, and I have a little bit of a throttle, and I have a little

bit of propeller time. I learned to fly on a propeller airplane. Every time you move the throttle forward or back, you have to adjust the rudder trim. So when he talks about the ball, we called it stepping on the ball, which is literally a little gauge that has a little white background and a little black floating ball that would tell you if your nose and tail are aligned. It'd be like pointing a gun with your wrist cock to one direction or another.

Every time I move the throttle on the jet, the computer said, we're okay, don't worry about it. The ball is always centered. Every time in a prop, prop, you have to either use your feet. or use the rudder trim. So when he's talking about moving the throttle, what he's not saying is that every single movement of that throttle meant moving my feet, moving it with my thumb,

moving my hand. So the intricacy to be able to track an ME109 that's probably, what, 30 feet long and 30 feet wide, the accuracy to do that is so precise to be able to do that in a dogfight like that is so hard to do. I got the colonel here, was like the humblest guy in the world saying Joe's a good writer, which I know he is,

but he didn't track that Emmy 109 with his P-51 the way that you did. So I still just, it's remarkable that you're able to capture that. And I'm trying to do justice to how difficult that is and how intricate that physical movement is in your airplane. Also the fact that you described this 101 engagement, that's something I always loved as a fighter pilot, was ultimately at the very end what it would come down to you and somebody else. But what's hard for me to really truly grasp is that there's a war going on around you. You weren't the only two airplanes in the sky at that time. So your ability to compartmentalize and focus on this one airplane as part of a much larger thing going on is, to me, equally as remarkable.

And the thing is that what we call situational awareness, you have to do that. You have to know. and I've got a real good example of when we were doing a dogfight, I saw a shadow. And when we were through, I said, hey guys, you see anything, shadow or anything? No, no, no. Okay, come on down and get lined up here. I knew it was going west, generally speaking. So I go along here pretty soon.

when we come up and I see the shadow again before I can see the airplane. And it was a bright, sunny day, and it was a green-on-green camel. And if it's been hazy, I never would have seen him. And so I come up and it's like a 11-K. All obsolete Battle of Britain bomber. And we had a gunner. We silenced the gunner and we got both engines spoken. And so I scored my, I went back over here from this side to that side.

And I'm scoring them as they shoot. so that's how you get a quarter of a kill share the whole thing and my number four guy is a new head you know new inexperienced guy and he he fired every round on one pass

and you could imagine where the bullets were going he burned the barrels out and we only had 30 seconds of of gunfire. Yeah, that's not much. I know.

And he'd come home a couple of times with no ammo. How many seconds do you fire out that Messerschmidt in the straight up encounter? Three, four, five seconds, something? Yeah, something like that. That's still a lot of rounds to receive. I don't want to be the receiving. I don't want to be the receiving of those 50 cows. You go on here

Talking about that straight up encounter You say Eddie Simpson joins up with me Both wingmen too Simpson my old wingman and friend Had gotten the one who'd climbed out This is another aircraft We bagged three or four Three of the four

We were very excited It had been a good day I had lived and my opponent had died But it was a near thing It could have been the other way around Just as easily And what probably made the difference was the airplane I flew. Made in America.

I would live to see the day when people would try and tell me that the United States can't make cars like some other folks do. What a laugh. I didn't wonder if I just made a new bride, a widow, or if he might have kids any more than I would have wondered about a snake's mate and offspring. I may have given some thought to how many of my friends he had killed, or he might have killed in the future

or how many bombers he might have shot down had he lived. But that's as far as it went. From what I could tell, he hadn't been overly concerned about me. People ask about that all the time. People usually ask it hesitantly, as tactfully as they can,

but they ask it, did I wonder and worry about the mothers and children's and wives of the men I shot down? Did I carry any guilt or regret? No. Not then and not now. World War II was a total thing, us against them, when being against them was unquestionably the right thing to be. I flew from my country and was proud I could help in any way that I could.

Besides, all of my opponents were trying to kill me. And frankly, I always was elated. They hadn't. This one had almost gotten a beat on me. He'd come as close as anyone would. When it was done, 480 hours of combat flying in P-51s and another 25 missions or so in Vietnam, almost all of those in F-105s,

I never once suffered a hit in air-to-air combat. The sum total of the damage all my aircraft absorbed amounted to one small arms round that found one of my wings during a strafing run after D-Day. It bored a hole the size of my little finger. It didn't even go all the way through, just punctured the underside skin.

Nobody noticed it until the next day. Needing a patch the size of a coin, that's exactly what my crew used, a British shilling. People on the ground often shot at me, flack batteries, machine gunners, foot soldiers with rifles and pistols. There may have been some who threw rocks, who can say. But this man on that day,

was the only opponent who was ever behind me and he couldn't quite bring me into his sights and he never did fire. To my knowledge, I never was fired upon by an airplane in combat. Skill had something to do with that, I suppose. But there was certainly something more to it than skill. Lots of hot pilots never came home.

I guess I was lucky or blessed. Yeah, that American-made P-51. was just next level in the sky, huh? When you guys were getting that thing, it must have seemed like, you know, a lot of times for me, you know, I grew up, I grew up, the P-51 was like an antique, right?

It was like an antique thing. But for you guys, this was like a piece of the newest technology imaginable. Yeah. Just an incredible bird. I mean, Dave, that's like you getting, into an F-22 or an F-35 for the first time.

It is. I can't imagine, you know, certainly the prominence of that airplane, but it had to feel good to know, and I fully appreciate, and I'm so glad you wrote about it, what it always came down to was the man in the cockpit. That's the ultimate factor, but it had to feel good to know you were getting into an airplane that was going to level the playing field

or give you an advantage over what the Germans had. so you didn't have to mitigate the deficiencies of that P39 or something else. It had to be a confidence builder to say, if you want to go fight me one-to-one, any up, down, left, right, any environment, this airplane will be just fine. So that feeling of getting into that P-51 knowing you're going to war had to be a lot better than what you might have been flying in anything else. And I felt that when I got in my first flight in an F-22. I felt like I'll fight anybody anywhere.

How did you being a Marine? How did you do that? If I can steal a line from your book, I was very lucky. A lot of timing, a lot of just good fortune, a lot of things, just aligned, right place, right time, need requirements, qualifications. And at the end, it's really hard for me to take credit for being the only Marine that's gotten to do it. But I was very lucky. You're the only Marine that got to fly the F-22? ever.

And the F-35? Those Marines that fly F-35. Yeah, I was the first Marine. Only Marine to ever fly the Raptor, first Marine to fly the F-35B as operational. How did you get in the Raptor? Short version of a long story.

The Marine Corps was going to buy F-35s. It's a whole new airplane. They didn't know how challenging it would be to go from old to new. We hadn't done it in 30 years. The Air Force had just introduced a new fighter called the F-22 to replace the F-15, and they basically sent a spy, go live with the Air Force for three years, and learn all the lessons that they've just learned from going from the F-15

to the F-22. We'll take those lessons and apply it as we replace the F-18s with the F-35. So I got lucky to be selected for an exchange with the Air Force to learn all about the F-22, all about this new generation and all about the challenges of replacing a 30, 40-year-old airplane with a brand-new airplane because the Marincor had and done. done it since the early 80s and I was the guy that got to do it and I went straight from the F-22 to the F-35. Lucky.

Yeah, you two need to play the lottery. So look, I'm not going to read the whole book. You know, you've got a bunch of other encounters in here. Dog fights, incredible detail on the combat experience. You end up with 16 kills. 16 and a quarter. 16 and quarter that's right don't let me leave off that quarter what was the quarter for was the quarter for that one that you just described yeah so there you go you got a little bit of that one too you end up with 16 uh kills you fight you fly your last mission with yager you guys are out there together okay um and again people get the book it's incredible get those details but i'm gonna go back i'm gonna skip forward a little bit here and you say I hadn't intended to get married it just kind of happened I landed in the

States on February 1st 1945 and married my pen pal the widow Eleanor Cosby stacker 22 days later it took me a few days to get from the East Coast to California and I know I asked her at least a week before we got married figure it out the courtship lasted no more than 10 days to two weeks, pretty intense. We were married three days before Chuck and Glenys. It didn't sit all that well with our folks. Our moms didn't think it would last, and you can understand why. After we've been married about 20 years with our two kids, almost grown, my mother poured

it all out to Eleanor. She told her, I thought you'd run home to mama at the first sign of trouble. I couldn't have been more wrong. You're a wonderful person. They had a good cry. At another time, Elle's own mother told her the same. Ellie had been married to Jack for two weeks and had mourned 15 months. People thought she was vulnerable.

But she knew her own heart. After 40 plus years, we're still happily married. No question, she's the best thing that ever happened to me. Over the years, we've seen lots of couples break up. Loving a fighter pilot is like loving a cop. He leaves for work in the morning and you're never entirely. entirely sure he will come home at night. Worse, there are

inescapable, agonizing periods of separation where the woman has to be both father and mother to the children, keep the house together, manage the money, and contend with the loneliness. And there never is much money. But we can look back and laugh now.

Surviving the trials is what brings people closer. I ended up with 70 years. She passed. away and that's not in the, you know, that's an updated version, isn't it? I'm not sure which version is. I know I have two versions here. Let me see the cover. The cover to this one. I think that's the original. I think this is the original one. I think

this is the updated one. Oh, okay. Yeah. I have both versions. Well, actually one of them's Dave's version that he's had for 20 years or something. What can I say about that? The storybook romance. Right. Right. No, it's And then what was like coming home? And I didn't mention this. It's in the book. You actually came home for a little bit of leave in between and you got treated like the biggest hero in the history of America. Yeah. Which is awesome. But when you're, now you come home again. For good, for good, so to speak. Well, yeah. You didn't know it would be for good.

maybe you would be going to Japan or whatever. But Germany surrendered while you were back in America. Right. And so how did that feel? Did you feel like we did it? I was pretty elated. And you mentioned this in the book, and I think it's definitely worth talking about. So the 357th, who you were part of, shot down 609 enemy aircraft.

13 died in training 57 were killed in combat and that was from 16 accidents and then the others were killed in shot and there was 71 POWs taken you had 28 original pilots in your group

nine of whom were killed seven of whom were shot down and became POWs yeah 50% You must have felt very lucky to be home. But then it's like you're looking at Japan, right? You had to be looking at Japan like everybody else. Yeah, it was always there, yeah. But you ended up going to Texas, and did you become a flight instructor?

Was that your job in Texas? Yeah, but I led a group. You know, I had a group of instructors. And I'm a group commander. and I have to ride the, I go to the instructor school, the central instructor school, then come back and they only let me do the wash rides. What's a wash ride? Tell a guy he's not going to make it.

Oh, you're washing him out. God. And then it's, next thing happens is, so you're there. working as an instructor and the next thing happens is VJ day yeah and now the war's over yeah what was it what was the state what was the mindset of America on VJ day just I don't know how to explain it but extreme joy and I don't think there's any remorse from a serviceman that served in that time about the use of the atomic bomb. And I really, Truman, he did a good job.

Yeah, yeah. No doubt about that, and especially when you hear the stories from the guys that fought in the Pacific on the ground against the Japanese. I mean, it was going to be absolutely horrendous if we had to go into mainland Japan. Yeah, and, you know, we know they were, we know they were training their kids and the women to fight with sticks and hide in caves. And we would have just wiped them out. Yeah. We would kill more Japanese than Americans.

Yeah. So now that the war is over, you're going to become a recruiter, going recruiting duty. Everybody's getting out. Yeager becomes a test pilot, and it seems like he eventually recruits, basically recruits you to become a test pilot. Well, he allowed me to, he got me an interview with a head of a flight test. You got a cool section in here during these test pilot years. Scary. Scary. I kind of wanted to bring out the fact of what it was like being a test pilot, because it was risky business back then. This section here, you say on April 24, 1953, we took off and rendezvoused with the B-29 and a couple of chase planes at 25,000 feet.

In the chase aircraft were Jake Knight and Bill Ross, the pilot scheduled to join John on the project. I moved in on the B-29, hooked onto its wingtip, and again, the dash panel light remained dark. No power. Damn. Thoroughly frustrated by now, I disconnected, moved away from the mothership, and Davis moved in and hooked up. So this was what you were trying to do, what we were trying to do as a country, was get away to make the fighters be able to support the bombers longer. And they devised some kind of system where you could actually take two fighter planes. and hook into the wings of a big giant bomber that has a bunch of fuel,

and they would kind of pull you along. Well, that was one concept that people latched onto. But the basic program was a theory by this German engineer that we brought back from World War II. to work at right field. And he theorized that you take a bomber, if you could put a wing extension out here, just a wing extension,

and you had some way of controlling it, you increase the aspect ratio, and that give you longer range. And so they wanted to, to do it in a wind tunnel, but they didn't have the priority and all that stuff. So I said, well, let's try it with airplanes. Well, that was okay, except we haven't done that before. And so that's why we developed a program with a C-47 and a little Q-14.

and with a simple locking mechanism like back into it and then the drag would hold us it was a beveled ring and then we had a beveled ball with a dotha bevel with a spike and you had to go in front of it and back in it which meant made it about two isis hard. And then it was locked when you pulled the throttle back. But then if you want to get out, just add throttle to it. So as you're trying to do this, you try bringing your plane in. You connect, but you're not getting the full connection.

And so then I'm going back to the book, Autopilot coming on, he radioed. So this is after Davis moved in and hooked up. This is a completely different project. Okay. Yeah. So what project is this one? This was using two F-84s, two airplanes, one on each wing. That was going to be the panel.

Right. And we had gone through the manual flying of it and done enough to give them confidence to go to an automatic pilot. it. And meanwhile, I'd been, I'm sorry. Meanwhile, I'd been there about five years, which was way more than normal. And I wanted to stay there and I told him, I say, hey, this project's coming up. And the only other guy that can do it is John Davis. He's been flying along. but just flying. I flew the data ship that got all the data on, you know,

angles and speeds. And John was flying another airplane manually, just a standard fighter. And so I could never get power. This was something like the fifth time. And everybody was getting nervous. You know, they wanted progress. And the contractor was a low-bitter on the autopilot,

and I'm in the Pentagon now. I got a new boss, and he's pissed off at me because I'm going away flying. They asked him to let me go. I should have told them to stick it. So they didn't. They didn't see much desire in keeping me there when I knew this was coming up. But I'm the most experienced guy to make the first few flights and then turn it over to check out some other guys.

And now you're coming up on the bad part. Yeah, so basically you had gone in. to try and see if you could get it to work. It didn't work. You didn't get the connection. You didn't get the power that you were supposed to get when you connected up to the bomber. Yeah.

And so you break off and then Davis comes in and he hooks up. And I'll go to the book now. Autopilot coming on, he radioed. And I knew he would be trying to set some kind of record for turning a switch on and off. And then his airplane, abruptly pitched up and over and smashed upside down onto the wing of the B-29.

I saw the explosive bolts of fire. If a certain angle between the wings was exceeded, they were to fire automatically blowing the connection apart, but it didn't matter. It all happened too fast. The spasm reaction of an autopilot far out of phase through the F-84 over onto the bomber, like the cover of a book slammed shut. There was no time for anything,

not even a call on the radio. The outer panel of the bomber's left wing peeled upward from the wing tip almost to the outboard engine and then the F84 fell against the main spar. The impact sheared the jets nose away cleanly just in front of the cockpit. The fighter bounced off and fell away in a glide.

I remember yelling for John to get out, but I got no response. The bomber nosed over and with the most with most of the wing gone fell into big power spiral and augured almost straight in. It wouldn't have been the simplest thing in the world to get out of pointed almost straight down and spiraling tightly and pressurized which would have made getting a door open even more difficult. Earlier flights had been flown without pressurizing the cabin, guarding against exactly this sort of incident. But everything had gone so well, flight after flight, that somewhere along the line, the B-29 crew had decided such precautions weren't necessary. In the final seconds, just before the bomber crashed into the bay, one of the crew of five struggled free. But he was too low by then, and there wasn't enough time for his parachute to come all the way open.

Moments later, the fighter burrowed into a forest, throwing up a huge fireball. Six men were dead, won a close friend, because engineers programming the autopilot had erroneously assumed the B-29's wing to be rigid, and because there wasn't an instrument to warn us how out of phase the autopilot might be, and because there were too many people involved in the project, and because everybody was probably too much in too much of a hurry and because no one had fought up computers which probably could have worked out the settings and because of Curtis LeMay had said keep working on it and of course because I hadn't said it's too damn tough at a time when saying it was almost certainly would have killed the project in war when death is all around a man can steal himself against it block out the heartbreak press on

but this wasn't war time and maybe I'd let my guard down maybe of all the things that have happened to me in my life this probably hit me the hardest I was a long time getting over it John Davis was dead and it could have been me probably should have been me

we never did learn why I couldn't draw power from the B-29s so horrible incident yeah I have to say that in all my 30 years of service

the hardest thing I had to do was drive back into the housing section and tell a widow that her husband's not coming back tonight I had to do that so many times you'd think I would have coped with it, but somehow, rather, it just was very difficult for me to do.

Well, there's a, you know, you talk about this in the book, there's at one point where someone comes, comes, there's so many accidents happening. Someone comes to do an assessment of the program. And they say there's no evidence of a safety program at Edwards, like it didn't even exist. And actually Dave and I were talking about this. You eventually got tasked with creating the safety program there. And Dave and I were talking about the term buying the farm, which everybody knows what buying the farm is. But I think we found the root of that in your book

was that you guys used to say, if you die, then your widow's going to get a $10,000 insurance policy, which is enough to buy the farm or buy whatever you want. So that's where, From what I know, that's where that term comes from. Exactly. Buying the farm.

But you get tasked with coming up with that safety program. And, you know, you're at, how long are you at that test pilot program for? Forever. It's a long time. You got a pretty good story about Yeager in here. I kind of got to read this one. Again, there's some background, and I'm skipping through the book, so buy the book to get the details. Chuck was involved in the testing, and on one of the flights in late 1963, I was practicing instruments in a T-33, just happened to be in the air, listening on the radio, when Chuck's chase plane had a problem and had to abort.

I piped up and said, hey, I'm available. All a chase pilot does is follow as far as he can and then pick the man up coming back. and stand by to help if he's needed. So you're out there just doing a normal flight. Chuck's doing some kind of a test flight and the person that's supposed to be observing him, something happens to his plane. Yeah, so you say, hey, I'm up here.

I got it. As I circled in the general area where the NF 104 would return to my altitude, I listened and watched. Chuck made a level run, then lifted the 104's nose and touched off its rocket, blasting almost straight up, leaving a trail that could easily be seen.

At 100,000 feet, I learned later, the 104's nose pitched up, which was always a danger in the Starfighter when you ran out of speed and reached a certain critical angle. A device made the stick actually shaking your hand to warn you as you approached this angle of attack, and if you didn't correct, then a stick pusher would move the nose down automatically. Instead of stalling at this angle, the 104 would pitch up, gyrate around, and fall into a spin you could recover from if you had enough altitude. Only this time the air was too thin for maneuvering, and the small thrusters didn't have enough power to force the nose down. Chuck's plane fell into what became a flat spin, belly down, like a frisbee, the kind of spin you can almost forget getting out of. He tried everything to book in the book to recover.

He even popped the landing drag chute, trying to get the nose down with no luck. I followed him down from 25,000 feet, circling his spinning aircraft. As we reached 10,000, I was yelling for him to get out. He fired the rocket-powered ejection seat, and while I was calling for the chopper to fly out and get him, I watched his parachute billow. I came over low as he landed to see if he was all right. He was lying down and as I flew by he waved. The way he was lying seemed awkward but I wrote that off to the cumbersome space suit.

I came by again and he was standing up waving. I circled until the chopper arrived and took him off to the hospital. I was stunned to learn he'd been burned. By the time I got to the hospital, his head was swollen as large as well as he was. of basketball. As he'd ejected, the seat had become fouled in his parachute lines, and the pull of his shoot popping open had slammed the seat into Chuck. The still hot rocket attached to its underside hit him smack in the face, splitting open his helmet's faceplate. The spent rocket was still spitting some flame,

and it flashed inside his split helmet fueled by Chuck's oxygen. He managed to get the faceplate open would shut off the oxygen or it might have been worse. As it was, his glove caught fire and his face was badly seared. The doctors had to peel away the skin daily for weeks. It must have hurt like hell. You can still see the scars, though you have to look closely. So that's a day in the life of the dang fighter test pilots back then. Just kind of crazy stuff you guys were doing.

Well, the Cold War was still on. But what he was doing was trying to set out a new official time-to-clim record. And it was especially modified F104 that they were going to try to use in the test pilot school. running the test pilot school at that time so he was doing some of his own flight testing but we had already flown the airplane to 120 something thousand feet and uh what's space isn't space 50,000 feet the what how how how is space? I forget what there there isn't a official yeah I think it's probably closer to 80 80

it's definitely about 50 I've been to 60 which is kind of laughable by these standards it's not space is this the scene is this the scene that they show in the book the movie the right stuff and in the book the right stuff this this scene right here are you familiar with that movie the right stuff yeah is this what they when they portray Yeager crashing yeah and he comes walking out of the fire and the guy says now what is that that's a man

I forgot that so you spend this time out there eventually you get signed to the in like 1965 you get assigned to the 18th tactical fighter wing this is in Okinawa your son meanwhile Jim goes to the Air Force Academy

yeah so I guess he was he was following his father's footsteps. How did you feel about that? I was really proud of him. I am proud of him. He is a real good guy. That's a pretty amazing story.

I took him for a ride in F105. He came to Okinawa. Okay. Wait, how old was he when he went for a ride in a 105? I forget what the academy. Oh, so he was at the academy. Yeah, he was a, cadet and then of course later on he took me on a combat mission okay well go

ahead and tell us that story I think we already did well we weren't hit we hadn't hit record yet and I was only catching pieces of it because I was getting set up so what happened how'd you end up doing a combat mission with your son in Vietnam well he when he got out of flying school he wanted to go to fighters no had B-fifis 52s, you know, all down. And so he finally decided, well, if I can't get fighters, I might as well go to Vietnam. So he went to a special operation squadron.

This was on the choose list. And flying on O2, which is a push-puller, a Cessna 3-37. standard 337 modified for special operations and then shortly after he got there I got assigned to Tocli in Thailand 105s in the Southeast Asian War and the 7th Air Force was having a all command Anders meeting in Saigon. And so he was at Benoit, so right next door.

So I called him and I said, hey, maybe we could get together, you know. And then he comes back with, hey, you want to go on a combat mission with me? I said, you've got to be kidding. You'll never get that permission to do that. And I certainly would not have permitted it in my wing. And so he says, stand by. And when he's a new guy. And he's standby.

Come back all it seemed like a minute later. He says, it's all set. He says, you come on down to Saigon. I'll pick you up the next morning. We'll go on a combat mission, land at Benoit, spend the night, and then I'll get you back to your Bay, you know, Saigon meeting. So sure enough, it happens.

But special operations, they do all kinds of stuff. And so he probably picked a minimum risk kind of a project. We went out, the O2 had a loudspeaker on it, and they'd go out over communist strongholds and publish, speak, oh stuff like. Oh, hit them with some sciops, some psychological operations.

Yeah, that's what I was trying to think of. And then we'd go back over the area and drop leaflets, which gave them safe passage. They could go and, you know, go up and surrender with it and we would take them up as a pretty, prisoner with no wooden kill him well i'm glad that that approval chain didn't go through your wife because she would not be very happy i i carry this story of i a little overkill when i do it you know oh you know i can't i don't have the words i can't describe

what it means to me to be able to fly with my son in a combat mission. I certainly wouldn't let anybody do it in my organization. And then I go on, I say, but my word, my wife had a few words to say about it. She's damn glad she didn't know about it until it was all over. Yeah, speaking of like flying, your friends and whatnot. You had a little reunion in Vietnam as well.

Here's another one. You got Chuck Yeager. Chuck said, well, we flew our last combat mission in World War II together. We might as well fly our first combat mission in Southeast Asia together. That morning we served as a crew

for one of several bombers on a close support mission, making one run after another over an endless green jungle. A forward air controller on the ground with a radio gave us targets and we dive in 30 degrees pretty steep for a plane of that size, toggle away a single bomb,

then fly back around and let go another over and over again, ever so carefully, trying to put them right where the troops wanted them. Again, we stayed the night and partied with friends. So you got to do ops with Yeager again in Vietnam. Eventually you end up with, eventually you end up with, you become the commander of the 355th tactical fighter wing

and you're flying the F-105 Thunder Chief which Dave told me is called the thud and how'd you like that bird I don't know what thud beans oh okay Dave gave me some bad intelligence you didn't call it thud no it got that name

from crashes in the development of the airplane. Got it. And after it was deployed, even the first few years. And I remember when I went to the 18th wing, they were putting in safety pack 19 and 20 and 21. God, it had a terrible reputation. but I have to say about the 105,

once we got all the bugs worked out on it, it was a very reliable airplane, and it made a good bomber. You didn't want a dog fight with it, except with another 105. They called it a FB, you know, a fighter bomber. I flew a tour. or a part of a tour in Southeast Asia with it

after we'd not quit going north we were bomb just bombing the Hohibin Trail you talk about that deployment to Vietnam and what that was like it's I mean we had pretty good air superiority compared to when you were fighting the Luftwaffe over France yeah hell that's for sure and eventually your jets get sent home

because you had a bad relationship. Something happened with the Thai government because you were in Thailand and something went wrong there. Oh, no, it wasn't, it was near the end of the war. And so they decided to send the strike thuds, you know, the ones making the bombing strikes,

send one of the groups home. And unfortunately, it was my group. I got in a Pentagon. When I left Okinawa, I thought, I'm combat ready in the airplane. Next logical place is to go to Southeast Asia. But I'm a bird colonel. And those assignments are more difficult.

Good assignments. I said, no, you're going to the Pentagon. I didn't want to do that. And I guess my grumblings got down to the colonel's assignment somewhere. So I got a call. He says, hey, we got a need for a colonel who's been a wing commander who's checked out in the equipment. And your name flashed up.

I said, yeah, that's what I wanted to do when I left Okinawa. you know and said well if you want to take it you can take it I'll take it and then he said well I got to tell you something bad about it it may close while you're there may be shut down gonna send the wild weasel airplanes home no keep them and send the strike eagles strike Not the eagles. The thuds. Strike thuds home.

So nobody knew what to do. The State Department said, oh, you cannot close that wing at this moment. And we went in there with just a handshake. We didn't, normally when you go into a foreign country, you have a status of forces agreement where they give you example cases like one of your truck drivers kills a tie and an accident. What do you do? And we didn't have any of those.

We went in. Ties wanted us in and we wanted in, so we went in. Anyway, we got all these things that Ties wanted us. They wanted everything, including the airplane. But when the time came, we start shutting down, but still with no end date. You know, when do we shut down? Right. The State Department was the problem there.

And Christ's ties were still shipping us bombs, you know, driving the truckloads of bombs. They go through the tie gate and get the comshaw, you know. And they didn't want to turn off the bombs, so they're bringing them to us. We're stacking them in the road. And, you know, the shelters were all filled. So we're stacking them in the goddamn roads in the thing. Jesus, it's just, you know, violation or regulation after regulation. And not have any luck at that.

Got a 7th Air Force, 7th Air Force assistance team came to visit us. help us shut down. And so I said, well, we only need one thing, giving a date, a shutdown operation. Well, we can't do that right now. Well, you could stop the bombs from coming in. If the four-star turns to a colonel, and he says, take care of that. And we got the bombs shut down. And I was still on date. And I learned a few things during this

period of time. I'm going home to a mandatory retirement. And let's see. They offered you a billet in Saigon and you said, nah, I'm not going to sit around here. I'm a...

Oh, after, yeah. Yeah, after they shut it down. Yeah, we're still closing the base now. Oh, I can tell you that. Okay, I'll tell this to you. You have another meeting. Well, I think it was the same meeting that I went down there to fly with Jim. And this young brigadier general there was in operations was at this dinner.

And something came up about me going to the headquarters. and he pipes up, yeah, I've got, you chose you, it'll be good for your career. So I said in the loudest voice I could gracefully do, oh, then you know I go home to mandatory retirement. Yeah, really good for my career. So you end up going, go ahead. On closing base. I said, I had seven full kernels.

I said, you close, make a plan to close your function, you know, from day one. If I tell you how many days, weeks, whatever, does it take you to shut down? And so I said, every one of you do that and then give it to me. I put them all together, added two months, and picked the date. And then I decided to put it in a telegram to all ships at sea and everybody I could think of. And state department, everybody. and title closure of closure of tockley plan something like that and I set that thing and then sat back and I had no idea what I was going to give oh Christ we got a plan it worked like it it like we're like bad

Yep. We call that leading up the chain of command. We're going to make this happen. Jesus, Christ, everybody was so happy except the State Department. But I learned a lot of things about wasting government. So we tried to get rid of everything we had. And what didn't, we couldn't. We couldn't. went into the trash and went to the ties. And so, oh, one morning they came and told me, hey, we got a dead Thai officer in such-and-such building. It was one of the buildings we were cleaning up, but we had not turned over to the ties yet.

And he was in there tearing out the electric wire. electrocuted himself they were you know selling it yeah but about but about to trash so steel lockers labor intensive to tear up it's tear down very heavy if I tore down torn them down shipped them home nobody would have said a word but it would have cost like hell. But if I put them in the dump, aha, government waste. Look at this. But what we did was the South Vietnam had a crate, they needed them badly. So I said, well, you'll send somebody over here and dismantle them and get your C-130s. I got tons of them. And so we got rid of most of them that way and some of them did make it to the dump but it was a hell

a lot cheaper than packing them up and sending them home and nobody would complain there you go you got to find those solutions yeah so you end up getting orders back to McClellan Air Force Base which is which is about 90 minutes from Auburn which is where you're from This was sort of what we call I don't know if you call it in the Navy We call it a Twilight tour This was sort of your twilight tour

You get put in charge of maintenance You still get to fly T-33 So you're happy about that But this is sort of This is where you end up your career Right And I'll go to the book here You say too soon

It was over There was talk about a big ceremony But I asked them to forget about that and just mail me my papers. There was a short, sweet ceremony in the commander's office. Ellie, her folks, and my mother were there, and that was it. 30 years and 30 days from my day of enlistment at age 50, I was a civilian again, going out in the place where it had all begun.

My mother had actually written the epitat for my career a bit earlier when I'd flown home from Talk Lee. well she said when I walk through the door are you satisfied now I said sure file it under white lies because that's you know you can never be happy never be satisfied

and that was the end of your career in the Air Force you ended up working for McDonald Douglas well a McDonald aircraft company and later McDonald Douglas got it They bought them out. You took a few years off from flying,

but then you started missing it. You started flying again. You got some great stories in heroes when you got a version of Old Crow back in one of these restored P-51s. You got to fly that. You got to fly with Yeager again in some of these air shows.

Just, again, the stories as the book closed out and how it goes and the rest of the stuff you've done. Just great, just incredible story. Incredible story. How did you feel that day when you retired? Had mixed abortions. I know. So in the SEAL teams, you know, you have, we call it a drying cage, but it's basically a big locker, probably the size of a prison cell. But you have all your gear in there, all you gear in there that you collect for the years that you're in.

And I was in for 20 years. But I remember my last day, I got my van downstairs. And for me, it's kind of similar in that 18 out of 20 years. I was stationed in Coronado in San Diego, all within 100 yards. Seal Team 1, Seal Team 3, Seal Team 7. When Seal Team 7 was in an old building right next to Seal Team 1, And then the training command, they were all 100 or 200 yards apart. That's where I spent my whole adult life.

And then one day, my last day, I retired, I went up, cleaned out my locker, my gear cage, through all that stuff in my van, and left. And that was a pretty empty feeling when I left, because it's your whole life. So I'm sure you had some of that when you got done. Oh, yeah. actually that comment was made that my mother was made when I was retired and after I was retired she said well you satisfied yet now well tell you what this is probably a pretty good place to stop the book has so much more detailed information in it you know it's just an incredible life incredible hero

and I got to read one more quote from the book you said you said all those years they'd actually paid me to fly what a deal it's just incredible Dave you got anything else

I'm sure you guys could talk for hours I'm sure you want it's this has been this has probably been one of the best three hours of honestly of my entire life getting to be here and You know, I'm lucky. I get to work with Jocko.

I'm on this podcast a bunch, and I've gotten to meet so many veterans. And then now, you know, this movie Top Gun just came out again, and it's so prominent. And people ask me all the time, you know, what was the first movie like? And I saw that and I was 13 when the first movie came out. So as you know, at that age, when you see something at that young age, you look at it and you think, man, I really want to do that. And a lot of times when people ask me, you know, why did you? become a pilot. I think about that movie a lot,

but as a little kid, you know, much before 13, 14, I was reading books. And I remember as a little kid, reading a book on, on Pappy Boyington, and reading a book on the Black Sheep Squadron.

And there's a TV show, you know. Long before Topkin, I was already, I was already enamored. I'm already enamored. And it was, it was Yeager. Anderson, Foss, and Boyington.

And what I've realized in this podcast, as I'm listening to you talk, when I was a little kid, what I wanted to be was you. I wanted to be you. And I can't express how much gratitude I feel and how much reflection I have now is a very little boy long before the movie Topkin ever came out as what I wanted to be was what you described in this book and to get to sit across from you and hear you talk about this.

is just an honor of my lifetime. And I can look back now and when people ask me why I wanted to be a fighter pilot, I can tell them that I got to meet the reason why. So thank you very much. This has been awesome. Thank you. Yeah, I don't have much to say after that, Dave. I got it.

You know, I get asked, you know, what do you tell kids today? And what I tell kids today is, you know, you really can be what you want to be. And there's a good example of it right there. If you want to be something really, really bad, you can be it. And I say to kids, live your dreams. And find something you're going to something you. like to do and if you can if your job is something you like to do you can excel in that job and live your dreams that's that's what I say these days well sir you certainly lived your dreams

without any doubt. And, you know, people can find you. You got a website. Oh, yeah. Same name as the book. It's to fly and fight.com. Is it dot com? Yeah.

It's to fly and fight. com. So anybody that's interested in hearing more about you, hearing more of your story, you can go there and check that out. I mean, it's just, it's incredible. It's an honor to be sitting here talking to you and to have Dave here. Just it's incredible to see. So thank you so much for joining us and making the effort to come out here.

And of course, more importantly, thank you for your service to our great nation. Thank you for what you did in combat to defend the world from tyranny and from darkness and to defend freedom in the world. You fought machine against. machine and you fought man against man in the ultimate test of skill and you won every time and that's pretty impressive and we salute you and we thank you for your service sir thank you very much and with that bud anderson has left the building Dave I feel like I should just turn it over to you at this time I don't know if that's a good idea man I need a little time to decompress and

kind of contemplate that. That was, I knew that was going to be a unique experience for me, but that was, I don't have a lot of frame of reference to what to compare that to. That was unreal for me, man. When he just stepped up, you were kind of rattling off some of the thoughts that you had in your head as you were thinking about this. And you're thinking, for instance, a thousand aircraft go out and whatever, six hours later, 10% of those are gone.

A hundred aircraft crews gone. This is what they did day after day after day after day. Yeah. There's like, I don't know. Is there anything equivalent for a fighter pilot to being a World War II fighter pilot? Look, the guys in Vietnam, obviously, they're extremely challenging, you know,

horrible situations to go into, you know, having guys like Charlie Plum and William Reeder on the podcast to talk about their experiences, you know, surface to air missiles, migs out there. Those encounters were relatively rare compared to you're going to bomb Germany. You are 100% going to get into it. Yeah. This is the next level. Yeah, I don't think from scale, like there's nothing.

He's talking about, was it big week? Is that what they called it? Yeah, big week. Yeah, first mission, thousand bombers, 800 fighters, and 16, 160 Germans come up to fight him, something like that. So there's 2,000 airplanes in the sky. And 250 bombers don't come home. I don't think there's anything, certainly in my aviation mind that's even close to the scale of that. It's just, it's hard, even for me, it's really hard to relate to what that might look like.

It's kind of overwhelming. The heavies. Dude. Hey, by the way, they just mentioned this. If you want to get the book to Fly and Fight, go to go to this website I already mentioned to fly and fight. And Bud is signing books. So you can get a signed book from that website. And I would recommend you do it.

I mean, this guy's 100 years old right now. Just the stuff that he's seen in his life, lucky to be here. Just awesome. So if you get the chance and the book by the way, I read through two dog fights So there's whatever 14 more and they all have their own little details They all have their own little scenarios that are happening and look the rest of the book There's all kinds of things in there that we didn't talk about so if you want to hear that story Go get that book to fly and fight.com

We may have to like once this comes out actually when you listen to this again take notes and maybe we'll do sort of a wrap-up of this. And you can kind of talk through some of the stuff and maybe even bring in some different stuff from the book if we didn't cover it. Because I mean, you're talking about them shooting down German pilots that were parachuting. And that was just there's a bunch of other things

to talk about that we didn't cover here. Yeah. So when you listen to this, take notes and maybe we'll do another sort of a recap or an after actions on this, even if it's just like, you know, an hour or four or whatever. Right on. We can go through it.

Echo Charles, you've been here the whole time, but you've been quiet. Yes. Because you didn't have a mic. Yes. So. On purpose. What, you know, let's face it. What am I going to add to?

Well, then again, I did kind of have some. There, that first dog fight, you know what? Wait, the first one? Or the one, the first one that you read? Okay. One that he said, lucky a shot in the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I was, so a lot of people say like, oh, you should read my audio book or whatever.

But that was the first time where I was like, you should read this audiobook. You meaning him or you meaning me? You. Oh, okay. And of course, the story's laid out like perfectly. Yeah.

Right. Especially at the end. I don't know why I like the end so much when he was like, oh, I don't even know if that was my shot. It might have been the other guy's shot, you know? And I don't even know how to approach this guy. And then when he found out it was his,

that was good. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you know, I didn't, I actually didn't read that part so he could kind of tell the story. And it's a weird thing to try and figure like, what do you want to read and what do you want to hear from them? And you got to, I mean, in my mind, I'm always trying to think, like, I want to give them enough that they go, oh, yeah, and they get in the zone.

And then they kind of fill in the deets, as they say. But, man, you know, it's such an honor to be able to have these guys on and hear their stories, man. It's just, it's crazy. And then, you know, you always have to think to yourself that there's almost 300,000 that didn't come home from this war. And that didn't get to tell their story and didn't get to have kids. It's, yeah, it's just so we're so lucky to be able to have this opportunity to do this. So appreciate you all listening. And if you want to support what we're doing here and you want to support yourself too, which is a bonus.

It's true. Some people might even prioritize supporting yourself over supporting what we're doing here. Either way, it's a win. Because if you support yourself, good. I want you to be stronger and smarter and faster and better. Yeah. It's one of the functions of the existence of this whole outfit, I think. Yeah.

So if you want that, you can go, if you want to support, you want to support yourself. You want to support America, by the way. You can see I kind of got a little fired up when we started talking about the P-51 Mustang. The P-51 Mustang was like the, it was a game changer. A game changer. 500 miles an hour. It's just faster and stronger and better. And it was American made.

It was American made And obviously it was American made But just thinking like every detail that The engineering, the design, the material Like all that went into that And that that wasn't even an idea On December 7th, 1941 That wasn't even an idea.

They're just like, okay cool, we have to build the better You think, well, I actually don't know the history. It wasn't an idea yet? I don't know exactly the development of it. They knew we knew we needed better airplanes But I don't think anybody certainly in 1941 could have predicted what the Mustang was going to be other than we needed something. Well, I was so fired up listening to talk about the Mustang that I started thinking about the Ford Mustang.

Like, I just need to get a Ford Mustang because I can't get a Mustang Mustang. I can't get a P-51 Mustang, but I can get a Ford Mustang. That's an American-made piece of machinery. Legit. It's legit. That's how fired up I was getting talking about this aircraft and what they did with it. So America, if you want some American. making made stuff. Well, hey, JoccoFuel, got joccofuel. Got joccofuel. Go get some stuff. Hey,

JoccoFuel, we got all new flavors. I was pounding mine today. Were you pounding yours today, Dave? How's that new orange? Did you think your orange could be better? I didn't know that it's like the P-51 Mustang of freaking drinks. It's the upgrade. It's like the new version of the Mustang is just a little bit better. It's a little bit better. And Echo Charles, how were you over there on the mango? Outstanding. Actually, I got messages saying that that's their new favorite flavor. Also you got people that the mango comes through more. So their old favorite flavor was mango and their new favorite flavor is mango? Is that what you're saying?

Their old favorite flavor apparently was not mango. I'm just guessing what the last one was. Nonetheless, yeah, they're all a lot better. They're all a lot better. They're in a different category. So joccofuel.com, get yourself some milk, get yourself some joint warfare, some krill, super krill. Origin USA's.

Look, Maiden America is a thing. And people like, you know, like Bud Anderson's, said, people like, oh, we can't make the stuff over here. I laugh at them. That's what Pete Roberts did when they said, hey, you can't make geese in America. He laughed at them. Because guess what? We can.

We have the capability. We have the technology. We have the skill set. We have the will to get it done. And look, you can go buy your, you can go buy your jeans, let's say, from a place that is literally has slaves. That's what you can do. Or you can buy it from America.

where we're on board with freedom with freedom that's what's happening and they happen to be the best genes that I own I'm speaking for myself it's the P 51 of the P 51 stole my line the next modification

the next modification or the next version of the jeans I don't even know what they might we might do but there's going to be some P 51 things coming out and look I get it P38 love it Corsair love it You probably love the Corsair a lot.

I do. I do. Because that's Marine Corps. Wait, what's your, is that your favorite Bird World War II? When I, Cappie Boyington, Black Sheep, Marine Corps, Corsairs, winning the war in the Pacific. Yes. Listen, the P-51 is the iconic World War II fighter, and everybody knows it.

That doesn't mean I don't love the Corsair. All the Marines out there know what's up. But listen, the P-51, that's the machine that won the war in Europe and everybody knows it. Bro, sometimes the P-51 flies like in the vicinity of my house because they'll do the coastal run. and I can hear them and then you look up the the silhouette look the cool thing that's cool like it would be a little bit difficult to tell a corsair from the side profile you know when it's out at a little distance you know but a P 51 you see that bottom air scoop

you're like there it is big daddy's coming home so if you want the if you want the p 51 Mustang of American made gear go to origin USA dot com get some of American-made stuff that's going to go out in the world kick ass going to be faster better stronger we got hunt gear coming you probably saw you just me wearing my hunk gear have you you seen the pictures of the camo in the in the in the environment as they say so of course they did made a big deal out of it made a thing out of it yeah you made a predator quote yeah you like that messed it up after I revisited it but it was good it passed it landed you got there all right so it looked good though for yeah it does it's awesome uh

Joccofuel.com, origin USA.com, joccostore.com. Yeah. That's what Echo made. Well, you know, it was a collaborative effort for sure. But yeah, we got some new stuff on there. What do we got? Standard issue. Discipline equals freedom.

Sure. Standard issue. There's a layer in there. There's layers in there. There's a couple layers in there. And there are optional layers. You don't even have to know the layers to appreciate the garment, as it were. So yes, get that.

We didn't, this is like the, what, second announcement on the podcast. We didn't make the official announcement yet. Oh, for the standard issue, Disponical Freedom? Yeah, we'll probably announce it like next week or whatever. But if you're hearing this, boom, get yours before everybody. You're already in there. Yeah, also, short locker, subscription, shirt every week.

There's a good one coming. Two good ones coming. Oh, yeah. You show me the draft of one of them. This is the kind of thing? People are going to want that one. I think you're right about that one. I feel that way.

Please tell me there's going to be something in the future themed on the P-51 or something for the Shurlock. Come on. The P-51. Look, like I said, the P-51 has always been up there in my head. But, I mean, let's face it. It went next level today. It went next level today. And you know what?

Reading the book, I mean, you think about that. You think about your climbing as hard as you can in the aircraft. And you've got a Messerschmitt 109. By the way, Germans world-renowned for their engineering and their efficiency with their building of their aircraft, the whole nine yards. And you're like, guess what? I'm from America. Sorry, bro.

I'm from America. I got a P-51 Mustang with what? How many, 1,100 horsepower, something crazy. And we're going to go. You're going to hang with me? Cool. See what you got. Hanging by the propeller.

He used that term a couple times. Hanging by the propeller. You can imagine that thing just trying to grab air and it's just about to run out. And that thing's, it's true. Yeah. So yeah, there it is short lucker. Don't forget that one.

Sign up for that one. Sign up for that one. JockoStore.com. Subscribe to the podcast. Subscribe to jacounderground.com. People, look, we don't control these platforms. Look, we talk about freedom a lot. There's some people that are offended by that.

They've kicked people off of platforms for what they've said. So we don't want to risk that. Everything's been cool so far. We hope it continues to be cool. But if it doesn't, we have joccoeunderground.com. $8.18 a month. If you want to help us build that, and maintain that.

Check it out. And look, if you can't afford that, it's okay. We still want you in the game, as they say. If you can't afford to $8.18 a month to support, no factor, email assistance at jaco underground.com. We got a YouTube channel. I'm the assistant director for these YouTube videos. Clearly.

That's the difference, bro. And I thank you. I thank you for that. Praise. Psychological warfare. We got flipside canvas.com. Dakota Meyer putting making cool stuff to hang on your wall books for once again to fly and fight by Colonel Clarence e bud Anderson with Joseph Hamlin as the co-author just go to to fly and fight

dot com order that book up check out some of the other books we got we got only cry for the living by Holly McKay that's jaco publishing right there she she she risked her life to read to read to write that book. So, and it gives you an insight. It's not too often you get the insight of both sides of a war, right? Not historical, like, hey, this was 100 years or 30 years ago.

This is like, oh, the war's going on right now and we're hearing both sides. So that's what Holly did. So order up that book. Final spin. I wrote a novel. Look, I've written a bunch of books too. So if you want to get some of the books that I've written,

get some of the books that I've written. Get a bout face. I didn't even write it. I wrote the foreword on it. I'll tell you what. I don't even know. Sometimes I read that book. And I just think I just, my life, every podcast should just be about another section of About Face.

There's so many things in there. It's so filled with goodness that you miss goodness. Right? It's like you walk into a buffet and maybe over in a corner there's like some, some, some little wagoo beef like niblets. Right? Hell yeah. But there's prime rib over there. There's some, you know, some bacon wrapped hot dogs.

This is like a bunch of stuff. You miss the niblets, bro. Well, I know more room on your plate kind. Either that or just overwhelmed with goodness. Just so much. Yeah, just goodness everywhere. Maybe they got some milk like in the containers. You're ready to drink. You know, we got ready to drink milk coming.

R&D, as they said. That's the word. That's the word. I was worried. Not worried. You want to control your expectations, right? You want to be like, look, it's going to be healthy. there's no sugar like it you know how can it it's gonna be it'll be good but how good dude it's

g t g as we say yes it's good to go yeah e a e a all this yeah all day it's it's delicious yeah i was comparing it i would i wanted it to taste as good as a certain um let's say known well-known brand of chocolate flavored drink we'll say we're there no we're there all right That's good. That's good. Yeah, that's interesting. It's outstanding. Imagine drinking something that is completely good for you and it tastes delicious. I mean, I guess we have that with mold. Oh, yeah. And I said this from the beginning where my kids like the, you know, how there's work, kid, milk, or whatever. They like the regular one, like the best. They think that's like a treat. And I kind of psychologically, like, train them to know that that's like the treat or whatever. But yeah. And so I know I, well, guilt free, you know. There's something that you can do that tastes so. How? has so much goodness, so much immediate gratification and no downside. Short and long-term pan. Yeah.

That's kind of a, I guess you could look at Jock Fuel from a strategic perspective and one of the consistent underlying themes of the products is short-term mega gratification, taste-wise, and long-term total goodness across the board, Health-wise. Yeah. That's a thing. It's an anomaly, for sure.

People don't know what's up with that. It's kind of hard to believe in a lot of ways. You're like, wait a second. As Dave said earlier today, what I should say is, you're welcome. Dave's like, Jocker, you just need to tell people, oh, here's my drink. You're welcome. Oh, here's Mulk. You're welcome.

He was not wrong with that. Here's Joint Warfare. Take it. You're going to be able to do things you couldn't do two weeks ago. You're welcome. Oh, but then again, I don't know. Joint Warfare is pills. I know, but you're welcome.

Yeah. For sure that. The short term, let's taste it. That's like, what do you call it? What do you call when it's like normal? You know, something that he don't love, but it's like the standards or whatever. Way to shut it down, Echo. Good work.

Thanks, man. Do you got any other cool things I'm saying that you want to kill? I'm keeping it, what do you call? Real? Like down to earth. Like for, you know. Yeah. You seem to saying.

Nice job. Appreciate it. Okay, let's just end this. Freaking Echo screwed it up. Bro, what did you be talking about? It's all true. We were just writing this. huge wave and you're like yeah but those are pills okay you know what we're gonna need to do

we're gonna make some chewable oh see right warfare now you talk that have a really good like lemon lime sort of zing to it bro tasting good okay remember back in the day old school we're more less same genera remember those vitamin C wafer a hundred percent things okay see now we're talking this is those vitamin C wafers is is how you end up with 3,500 milligrams of vitamin C in your day. Oh yeah. Colts are running away from you. And they taste it kind of like a special candy. 100%.

Oh, yeah. See? So that's like the avenue to pursue. As far as pills go. I don't mean pills. You know what? But let's face it. Let's look into it.

As Eddie Bravo would say. Look into it. Hey, we also have Eschelon Front, our leadership consultancy. We solve problems through leadership. if you need help inside your organization with anything. It's a leadership issue. So go to Ashlandfront.com for details on that. We also have some events you can come to.

Next thing we have, next big thing we have. We have other things that are sold out in the meantime. But Atlanta, October 12th through the 14th, that is the next muster. We're going to hot Lanna. Actually, in October, hopefully it won't be too hot in Hot Lana. Should be all right. But that's where we're going to be. So if you want to come check that out.

And also we have an online training academy. It's extreme ownership.com. And if, look, leadership is not something you get good at in one day. You don't go to one seminar, just like you don't go to a jih Tzu seminar and say, okay, cool, I'm ready to take on Gordon Ryan now. Yeah. Right? No, it's not going to happen. Not really.

But you can grab individual things from time to time and roll them right into your game that day. You can do that. Can do that. And that's one of the things that happened at the muster. But you better have a game and you better keep training. That's what the academy's for. Extremeownership.com. All kinds of good stuff going on on there.

On top of that, if you want to help service members, active and retired, you want to help their families, Gold Star families. Check out Mark Lee's mom, Mama Lee. I just talked to Mama Lee yesterday. Yesterday was August 2nd. Mark, her son, was killed on August 2nd in 2006. It's been 16 years since he was killed. in action and that whole time almost actually no not even almost from the word go mama lee

looked to help she helped the platoons she helped the task unit she wanted to make sure we were okay and she hasn't stopped that in any way shape or form she's doing a ton of things to help out veterans to help out gold star families america's mighty warriors dot org is her website and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to that website also heroes and horses.org Micah Fink is up there in the wilderness and he sent me a message the other day and he's got I'll get the complete message but it's basically a person that he's working with that's like a counselor a high-level counselor said that he had never seen changes as significant in human beings as he has as he had seen

The guys that went through Micah Fink's program going into the wilderness for 41 days, riding horses, eating meat, cold baths. He's got all kinds of things going on. I don't want to go too much into it. But if you want to support that, go to heroes and horses.org. And if you want to check us out on social media, we're on there. But listen, we're not in the algorithm. Well, they're going to try and put us in the algorithm, but we don't want you to get caught in the

algorithm but if you want to check out what's going on with us Dave is at David R. Burke echo is at echo Charles and I am at jocco Willink again watch your six to use the the flight term watch your six watch your back so you don't get caught in that algorithm and finally to all those uniformed personnel out there thank you for fighting for our freedom with a special salute to the airman and I don't know if this is right Dave is Is it airmen in the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines? All those, what do you call people that work in the air? Airdales?

They're still Marines, huh? They're Marines. Well, to all of you that own the skies, you all have your own aviation units inside all the service branches. And as much as I love the ground pounders and the doughboys, and you know I do, it's you all up in the sky that cover for us on the ground. So thank you for your service and sacrifice and also thank you to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service

All the first responders thank you for your service and sacrifice as well and for protecting us here On the home front and to everyone else out there there's a part in this book Where Bud is talking to his granddaughter's class and it's 40 years after the war and one of the students asks something like what is the hardest thing about being a pilot and without hesitation he replies losing friends and we get to read this book and we get to hear about the life and experiences of Bud Anderson but as I said earlier just remember that there are hundreds of thousands of of stories that we never heard lives that were cut short in the sky on the ground and at sea

brave souls who sacrificed everything for us let us never forget those heroes and let's make sure we are living lives that honor that sacrifice we owe them at least until next time this is Dave and ECHO and Jocko