Jocko Podcast - 382: Into The Heart of Darkness. Fighting Che Guevara's Communist Insurgents in the Congo. w/ SEAL Jim Hawes

Episode Date: April 19, 2023

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This is Jocko Podcast number 382 with Echo Charles and me Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. The Congo's recent independence from Belgium had triggered a secession crisis by one of the country's most mineral, rich, and wealthy provinces. It led to an opening for the Soviet bloc to exploit rebellions among local tribal factions. The U.S. saw the country as a strategic geopolitical necessity against communes. which meant the Congo was turning into a superpower battleground the US feared that losing influence in the Congo was the next step to losing Africa the CIA had

sent me to the Congo to conduct a clandestine operation under as deep a cover as possible while still enabling and sustaining the conduct for a successful mission The suits in Washington recognized that the communist rebels needed to be contained. The strategy was to cut off their supply lines and strangle their resource base, which would require battle-tested and seaworthy hands. And the world could not know we were responsible. We were holding back the line on insurgent violent communism. It was the boiling years of the Cold War, and Africa was becoming. a hotbed of potential dominoes that might fall the wrong way if we didn't pay attention.

And as all eyes were focused on that other communist battleground in Southeast Asia, the U.S. government wanted to keep Africa involvement as quiet as possible and ensure that no one could find our fingerprints on this up. Consequently, one of the most important elements in my Congo mission was to cover the ass of the U.S. government. They needed a guy who had the knowledge and covert experience to make this a successful play. The CIA had determined that I was that guy. And that right there is an excerpt from a book which is called Cold War Navy SEAL.

It's written by James Jim Hoss, who, as a 26-year-old seal lieutenant, ended up building and commanding small navy in the Congo a small navy that helped defeat communism in that country including the communist icon Che Guevara but it's not all he did in his career he served with the US Surface Navy was involved in the Gulf of Tonkin incident worked in Saag and Vietnam and has worked and lived around the world and it's an honor to have him with us here tonight to share his experiences and lessons learned. Jim, thanks for joining us. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here. It's always fun to talk to young seals who are interested in ancient history. Well, it's always nice to be called the

young seal when I've been retired for 10 years and I'm 51 years old, so I appreciate it. But I guess everything is perspective, right? I'd trade you. No doubt. I always look at the younger guys. I trade with them in a heartbeat. Yeah, thanks for coming down. And I guess this is a lot of stuff to cover. Let's jump into it. Let's just talk about, you know, you growing up. So you were born in Oklahoma, but you didn't grow up there, right? Oklahoma, then the Panhandled of Texas during the Second World War. My dad was a Pacific battleship sailor. So what year were you born? 39. Okay. And so do you remember, what do you remember about the Second World War, if anything? Oh, well, I remember my General MacArthur's uniform. I remember my father. I remember my father.

sending me a bracelet made out a plexiglass from a Japanese kamikaze that hit their ship. He was in damage control. I remember the first time I saw him, which was after he had been away for three years. And, of course, I didn't know what he looked like. All I knew was that there was that guy standing there in a sailor uniform, and he had to be the guy. and I set the world record in broad jump leaping into his arms. I remember that very well. And then, of course, I remember the end and all the victory.

What years did he come home? He came home in 46. And what year did he leave? 42. So you just didn't remember the beginning and then you're growing up. You're listening to the news or I guess read it newspapers or is your mom telling you what's going on? Well, yeah, whatever I knew, I knew from my mother.

Right. And, of course, you had some radio, but mostly it was from, yeah. And this was while you were in Texas. This is while we were in the Pan-Naddle of Texas. Yeah, I am really. My mother was the classic World War II, what they call them, the Riveter?

Yeah, Rosie Riveter. Yeah, except her riveter. was in a synthetic rubber plant outside of Borgher, Texas. And because it had taken all the rubber in the world. So Phillips 66 built this butodyne plant, synthetic rubber plant. And every morning we get picked up in a bus in Borgor, and I'd get dropped off at what today would you call the daycare center. And she would go make synthetic rubber.

pick me up and we'd go home. That was, it is. And my first year of grade school, you know, they weren't building classrooms, and they weren't building houses, so we didn't live great. 55 years later, I've got to say this without choking up, 55 years later, she apologized to me for the way we had to live during this time because it wasn't good. But, of course, I didn't notice it, you know, it's with my mother.

and that's what kids are. And as long as we were together, it didn't pay any attention to anything else. But it had bothered her all those ears. Sure. Amazing. Anyway. Yeah.

So how was your dad when he came home? How was his hearing? I always think about those World War II guys with the guns firing. Well, and they didn't know about hearing protection. I mean, 16-inch guns on that ship and damage control. He didn't talk about it once.

He said one time I had one of those kamikazis. He said there were 23 guys in damage control and 21 got wounded. He was one that did one of the two. He never really talked much about it. And of course, in retrospect, I didn't ask it, all the things I should have and could have asked. But, you know, I never, he was fine. He was like all those guys.

He was ready to get back at it and, you know, be with his family, support his family, whatever. And what do he end up doing? for a living when he got back. Well, he did a lot of things. He got a job in Wisconsin when he got back and so we got on a train and went to Wisconsin to join him. A little town called Beaver Dam, population 10,000. And he worked for the local lumber company and he ran the cement block plant and he was involved in home building. And he was involved in home building. And he was He was always in sales type stuff.

He had quite an outgoing personality. And yeah, so we were there for the next 10 years or so. And I went to a, there's a local private school called Wayland Academy, which is the oldest co-educational private school in the country. And I got a scholarship there, which changed my life because Beaverton wasn't exactly the launching pad for colleges and universities around the area. And my head, the headmaster was a guy named Ray Patterson, who was the guy who built the Milwaukee Bucks and the Houston Rockets.

He was a hell of a guy. He'd been an All-American basketball play at the University of Wisconsin in the early 40s. I had a huge influence on my life. He was a great man. So that was luck. And then that was all luck. And then we moved back to Texas when I was going into my senior year.

So what year is that? High school, I'd be 56. So you're just growing up in the, like, one of the most iconic periods in American history? No question about it. And did you, I mean, everything is everything. Everything was possible. Everything was possible. And, of course, that's the way my parents were.

You can do anything you want to do. Go get them, you know. Were you playing sports in high school? Oh, yeah. What'd you play? Yeah, I played football, basketball, track, and tennis. Yeah. And the music, I mean, you got Elvis.

Like, it's just an iconic time. Is that? I remember when Elvis was first on Ed Sullivan's TV show. Yeah, that was a big deal. I think that was in 56. Maybe it was spring of 57, I can't remember. But anyway, yeah. So you're, at this time, are you thinking as you're growing up,

are you thinking about joining the military? Well, everybody did. You know, everybody had a service requirement. So I just always assumed that you would do that. And I, having seen Woodmark, Richard Ugmark and the Frogman like so many of the other guys, I said, that's for me. But I always knew I had these terrible eyes. So I had to.

But I also knew some I was going to do it. I just never, there was never any doubt in my mind. But you ended up going to college right after high school. Yeah. And then what was the college experience? Again, you're like in the most prime. Oh, the worst four years of my life was college. Worst four years in my life.

I had no fun. I had no money. I had no fun. I wasn't, I didn't know what I wanted to do except get out and go to OCS. You know, it was a four years wasted time. And I should have gone into the military right out of high school and then gone back to college. I've made that recommendation to a lot of kids over the years.

When you're 18 years old, you're not ready to go to college. You want four more years of sitting in a classroom? Yeah. Yeah. So, no, that was, well, that was so good that I started. I spent my first four weeks of college at the University of Texas. I had a girlfriend in Wisconsin. I was a walk-on at Daryl Royals' first year at the University of Texas.

And, you know, he was an icon coach football. coach in Texas and I guess around the world around the country and so you know Daryl in his first year when Texas was coming off the floor wasn't interested in 155 a 155 pound quarterback who couldn't see and plus I had this girlfriend in Wisconsin so I came home from my first weekend in college my mother's all excited I'm for Scott to go to college of course in the family and I I said, well, I'm going to Wisconsin. Needless to say, it caused some hate and discontent at the table.

And my dad took my side, and I remember when he drove me to the bus station the next morning to get back to Austin, to throw my stuff in a box and get on a train. He said, I want you to know that's the first time your mother ever went to bed mad and woke up mad. So don't screw up. Well, of course, I did. But then I spent that, I spent the rest of that year at a really good place called Lawrence, now called Lawrence University. It was called Lawrence College then in Appleton, Wisconsin.

And then I was so ashamed to myself by the end of that year. I said, this is just crazy. I'm going to start all over from forget sports. I got to, you know, I got to do something right. So I went to SMU, and there was a dean there named Mack Adams. and I said, Dean, I got no money and I'm on academic probation, but I said the dean at Lawrence will give me a recommendation and help me get some jobs.

I like to go to school here. He said, fine. So he helped me get a couple of jobs, and so I finished my next, I basically did four years and three years at SMU. And you just worked hard the whole time. Yeah, I just worked hard. I had jobs and I had, yeah, I just had extra load of classes. But he became a matter of pride diminished in four years,

which is stupid because all I meant was my grades weren't very good. So you can understand when I said to my son, who's now in college son, you can come to me with any problem, any concern you got because you can't make any mistake that I didn't make. And did you, so at what point did you start applying to, did you have to apply for OCS or how that worked? Yeah, applied to OCS. I did it during my senior year.

And so I graduated, I think May or June, and I went to OCS in August. What year was this, 1963? 1961. Yeah, 1961. So I finished OCS because of Christmas, et cetera, in February of 1962. Okay. And your first job was as a surface warfare officer, right? Well, yeah, on a floating refrigerator.

It was USS Vega AF 59. It was a reefer. And I was the damage control. So it's a literal refrigeration ship that you... Yeah, I did all undersea replenishments. Replishments. Hell of a captain. Really good captain.

So that was really good. It was a good experience. I became an OD officer of the deck underway. It's not exactly like being an officer of a Deco Destroyer in formation, but it's called independent steaming. And so, yeah, so I had, I bought myself some contact lenses with my first paycheck when it was in OCS. So I had my contact lenses. And contact lenses at the time were brand new technology type thing? Well, they weren't in the forms.

They didn't have anything about anything about contact lenses in the Navy forms. You got a little section in your book about this and I think I thought was pretty good. You say here, I considered applying to become a frogman. And you said that because you saw that frogman movie. Yeah.

Did your dad tell anything about frogman? I didn't even know about it. No, no. My dad didn't tell me anything about it. You say, but my eyesight was enough to keep me out of the seals altogether, To enter the Navy and attend officer candidate school to become an unrestricted line officer, I needed a medical waiver. My eyesight was 2,200, the worst allowable under the required medical standards, if correctable to 2020 with eyeglasses.

So I purchased contact lenses with my first Navy paycheck. I was fully aware that my eyesight might prevent me from even entering the Frogman training. I went to Yokusa, Yukuska Naval Base Hospital and timed my eye exam to a crew. during the lunch period. There was a Corman striker, a medic in training on duty in the unit. I knew his minimal medical experience would yield the least resistance to my desired result. I said, Corman, I need to get back the ship. Can I read the chart to complete this exam? With contact lenses in, I read the chart and passed with excellent 2015 vision. There's nothing on any of the forms that questioned the contact lenses or anything related,

since the forms had not kept pace with the technology. My application sailed through channels, and I got immediate orders to report to underwater demolition team replacement training. Class 29 commencing January 2nd, 1963. I was in. Yeah, I was, of course, in terrible shape because I just got off the ship and went east to stop for Christmas with my folks and went east. And, you know, the moral dilemma that I had was officers carry their medical records,

and I looked in my medical jacket, and sure is hell, there was my waiver, the last page in the jacket. And so, did I tear it out or did I leave it in? Well, you know, you can't, you're on, you've got an oath. And so I thought, well, let's see if God wants me to be a frogman. So, I reported in over there, and they had a first-class diving corpsman, not a frog. First-class diving corpsman on duty, and he was receiving the medical reasons. And he went in, you used the squat jump, splice, whatever. And you handed him your medical jacket, and he starts going, leafing through it,

and he flicks the pages. and the last page with the waiver on it stuck to the previous page. So we didn't see it. So I thought, whoopee. I'm in. Of course, then I'm looking at everybody through my contact lenses. And so we started the training, and we're down to, we had gone to, we just finished Camp Pickett, which was about halfway through training. And so you're going through what they used to call UDT replacement training, which is now called Buds.

and you're going through class 29, and this is on the East Coast, because for a while they ran seal training on East Coast and West Coast. You're on the East Coast, which is in Virginia. Right. And it's January. It was the snowiest winter they had had in recorded history in Virginia. I'm going to tell you something that you'll understand this,

haven't been an instructor. The days leading up to Hell Week were pretty nice, was pretty nice weather. And the instructors kept saying, it always snows for how we go to bed on, we go to bed on Sunday evening, and the weather's not bad. It, you know, after midnight, it all,

you know, it all cuts loose. We fall out of there, stumbling all over ourselves, and we fall down in the snow. You can imagine the psychological, In fact, that had, these, wow, these instructors of, they do magic. And that was the start. That was the start of it.

And it was called Jesus. But you weren't really physically prepared because you've been on a ship. Yeah, I knew. What did you know about seal training? Nothing. The movie? I didn't know anything about it, except it was going to hurt a lot. That's all I knew.

I met some guys at the officers club in Yakuoka, who knew something about it. And they were telling me, we were having drinks, and they were telling me about it. And I thought, well, I guess Israel is going to hurt. But what do you do? You just do what you have to do. How long was it? Was it like six months long? The base of the, it was, yeah, six months long.

And was there, was there anything that really challenged? do you? Did you have a hard time? Like, were you good in the water? I was, I was good a runner. I was good on the obstacle course. I was good in the water in the pool. But when we got into the ocean with those heavy duck feet on my skinny little legs, and that was painful. I remember we're in Rosie Roads for training and we're, I don't know, I think three miles of swim or five mile swim. When you're going around the island, I got, it was a three miles swim. I got more than six feet away from my swim buddy. So the next one, which was, I guess, five miles, whatever it was, a little fuzzy in the thing, but it was a long way. They put a three-inch hawser between, tied me to my swim buddy.

So I was dragging that, we were dragging that thing through the entire swim. I'm crying like a baby in my face mask. I mean, it really hurt. But it finished. The pain will eventually stop. And, of course, when you're swimming around and the tide's going the wrong way, all you remember, and you try to get into the coral to break it up, but you don't want to get the coral and get cut to pieces. I remember stroke, stroke, and looking up there was this little house or shed or something up on point in the sill and we're as close into the corals we can get I'm stroking I'm stroking and that place is staying exactly the same place we did our we did our five and a half nautical mile swim just in Coronado just down and back and I remember you know you're like

looking at whatever some marker on the beach and it's just not moving it's just not going anywhere you're like why it's taking so long you're thinking the current you're thinking it's the wind you're thinking it's your swim buddy it's like no it's just going to be a long arduous time and by this time by this time the instructors found out that I was going to be coming back to be their boss so that that that took place because they found out about your vision oh yeah so they found out about my so we're we finished camp picket we're halfway through the training and I get called into the end we're down to the hard cores pretty much the hard cores you know. And so I get called the instructors hut and the funniest guy there was in the

SEAL team's economy escapes me now. A hell of a guy. And he says, Mr. O's how many fingers am I holding up? I thought, whoa, oh. And he said, they want to see you back there in officers country. So I go back, come to attention, face to face with the guy whose job I'm something I'm going to have. And he says, okay. oh, is what you do. So I told him the absolute truth. That's all I could do. He's shaking, I'm telling the story.

He's shaking his head. And he said, well, do you know you might be eligible for a court martial? And I said, I don't think so, sir. I didn't say anything and I didn't sign anything. And he said, well, I don't know what's going to happen, but you've got to get over and get to the ophthalmology department right now and get an exam. So I go over the ophthalmology department and the doctor says, well, I'm glad to meet you.

you're a medical phenomenon. You've gone from 2,200 to 2015 in less than a year. Bureau Medicine wants to know about you. I said, well, it's actually the way it is, Doc. And he said, well, we've got to give you, I said, I got contact lenses, and he said, well, okay. And he said, well, I don't know what I can do about that. And I said, well, Doc, you got to do something.

not good enough. You got to do something. He said, well, let me give you an exam. So he does the exam. Sure enough, I'm 2015. And he said, well, I don't know what to say. You're 2200. I said, Doc, you got to say something. You just got to say something. He said, I can say you're extremely well adapted for contact lenses. Say it. So he said it. So I go back to the training. I'm missing some evolutions. And, of course, the instructors aren't happy about that. and nobody knows what my status is, is going to be here or whatever. So I get called over to the senior medical officer in the Atlantic Fleet, and I'd seen this guy watching training.

He liked to come watch training, whatever. So I get called in to see him. I walk in, Ramrod, Strait, Tension Hoss reporting, he's directed, blah, blah, blah, he just looks at me. and he just looked at me like he was looking into my soul and finally I couldn't stand any longer and I knew this was it this is the court last resort so I just from the tip of my toes the intensity just came out and I said general I'm standing first in my class right now so don't tell me I'm not physically qualified and he he just looked he just kept looking at me and

and finally said, okay, I'll recommend a waiver. Part of I know I hadn't been done before. So I was always grateful. You got a guy like that'll take a situation on its merits rather than just go by the, that was good Navy. Yeah, anyway. So that wasn't at the end of it, though, because in those days, you know, the Navy wouldn't let the seals

do their own training. Because, you know, the seals were there, the frogs were the orphans of the Navy, unwanted orphans of the Navy. And so I get, and so it's run by the Naval Amphibia School, which is run by a captain, a force driver. So I get called over to the captain's office. And this is a regular fleet guy. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. So I get, uh, Brinson Hawes report is directed, sir, and he said, okay, what'd you do? So tell him the story. He's shaking his head. He said, well, I have, I have a recommendation here for a waiver that I can forward. approved or disapproved. How would you like to come back as an instructor? I said, Captain, I'd love to do that after I've operated a couple years.

I'd love to come back to the structure. He said, I don't think you understood me, Yinson. I got a waiver here that I can forward either approved or disapproved. How would you like to come back as an instructor? I said, I'd love it, Captain. So the ward came down. I went to jump school. You don't have to be able to see to jump, as you know.

and then went to underwater swim school, and the diving medical officer there wasn't going to allow me to complete underwater swim school because I had contact lenses. I said, Doc, I said, I'm not trying to hurt myself or anybody else. I went into a chamber, went down to 200 feet with my contact lenses in, and it doesn't matter. Well, you're going to do it. So I go to see the XO, and the XO is an ex-Frog. He said, don't worry, Jim.

by the time we'll cross the waiver at a time they act on it until you'll be finished with the training so so did you pretty much

wear contact lenses all the time all the time and they never like fell out or one did one time and no factor no factor

do you carry a spare actually it was what we were doing around the world in hell week and a in a branch just picked it right out just I'm glad they had the lens

and whether it's got my eyeball it just picked it right out but it didn't matter had another set. What's around the world? During Hell Week, we had this exercise where we took the boats, we took it through all canals, we went through all kinds of mud flats, all kinds of whatever stuff.

Around the world, he ended up, as I recall, back in the bay paddling into the whatever. But it took most of the night. Yeah. And Coronado, what they do is they launch you into the bay side of Coronado. Yeah. And you, you know, you carry the boats over there, go through the mud, then you launch, and then you paddle all the way around Coronado, all the way back out the channel, out into the ocean, and then back and you come into the beach. But it takes like, like six, seven hours.

And people are falling asleep, and it's usually pretty late. I mean, it's maybe two or three days in a half week. And it's a little bit of a, it's a little bit like you get time away from the instructors, you know? So people are like falling asleep. and but yeah it's just a long I really can't almost can't remember I mean I can only remember bits and pieces of it it's like you know your mind so far out of gear by this point you're just people are hallucinating stuff and seeing stuff and probably not the best time to lose your contact lens for oh well so so then you come back so you just graduate from training and then they said you

right back as an instructor yeah so then I have so we're down in Puerto Rico during the you know and doing these long swims and all that stuff. And the instructors find out, of course, they always find out. And Master Chief Tom Blaze, who was one of the old legends, said to me, Mr. Hawes, I'm going to make it my mission to make sure you deserve to be my boss. So I had his personal, so you asked me about, swimming. So I had his personal attention in Puerto Rico. And I'd be on those long swims. And my legs would be

like rubber and blaze would be on my ass. So I got a lot better at it, but I was never really, never really one of the top guys in the water. Were you, were those UDT guys that were putting you through training, were some of those guys, World War II guys or career guys? Yeah, yeah. We had a guy named John Parrish who drove the landing boats at Iwo Jima or no at Tarawa at Terawa we had fabulous guy just died a few years ago and Jim Cook who was a War II frog we had a fabulous guy named Chester Cleveland Cs it was actually had him later Chester Cleveland Stevens who had gone to work for the agency and he was down at a base they had in North Carolina when I was doing some training for the agency

down there and conducting some training for this with with Chester and he was one of the guys whose body they used when they put together the Navy diving tables they put him in a chamber and take him down and his and he met as the woman who was his wife for 50 years or whatever she was she was one of the nurses on the chamber and so they had take him down started to bring him up if he went he started to go if he started to bend quickly taken back down again oh hell of guy hell of a guy what was his name chester cleveland stevens the the guy that they based the navy no he was one of the i don't know i'm sure they had more than one but he was that's still crazy yeah crazy about what else they're going to do at trial and error

i mean how's you're going to do it so anyway and uh benny selinsky chief Slensky was our was our chief instructor and he was World War II guy you know hell of a guy hell of a guy and all these guys treated me when I reported into the you know after training treated me like I'd been their teammate for 20 years and the best they ever met I mean they was they were so professional this is a fabulous year and this how many classes did you watch get put through two to what'd you learn from watching classes get put through especially because it was so fresh your mind. I sure learned that you can't tell anything about anybody that you can't see inside of. It's a weird thing, isn't it? Yeah. And how to, how to, how to, try to get a little better at how to look

inside, but it's pretty hard. You got to, you got to put them under people under stress of one kind or another to find out what they're made of. It's very bizarre. I went down, right after a report, I went down to Key West to screen, to screen people that were going to apply. I came back and And I said the instructors that said, well, I met the guy who's going to be honor man in his next class. Oh, yeah, Mr. Hodge. You know, that damn guy was the first to quit. Not the second.

The first to quit. Well, you can imagine the plaque that I took from these guys on that way. What made you think he was going to be so awesome? He was just really good physically. Even after having just gone through it, I still undervalued the, the mental toughness it takes. I had a friend, he was a captain, and he was very, very careful,

and he's never recommended anybody. He would say this, he'd say, I'm never recommending anybody, and finally this candidate came along, officer, and he spoke a few different languages, and he had all these assets, and went to some Ivy League school, and this particular captain was very forward-thinking,

and like, oh, we need to start learning languages, and I think he spoke, you know, like some crazy combination of language, which is like Farsi and Chinese. I mean, some really good combination. So he finally breaks down and gets this guy, gets this guy to go to Bud's, the same thing. I didn't remember, I didn't know about any of that part.

I only knew when the guy quit. And I was in the office with this guy, get the word, are you kidding me? Are you kidding? I'm never going to, I'm never doing this again. I've never recommended anybody again. Well, in the next class, we had this officer. really good physically.

Top Ivy League University spoke fluently, Spanish and Portuguese, had everything. And the instructors were saying, oh, these guys, Mr. Smith's going to be honor man. I said, nope. I'm telling you, this guy has imposed his own limitations,

and when he hits him, he's going to quit. Oh, yeah, what about so and so? So we start Hell Week, and on the first day, I used up to him as we're running on the beach in the afternoon. And said, how you doing, Mr. Smith? Fine instructor. I said, Mr. Smith, these instructors think you're going to be on our man,

but I think you're going to quit. And never instructor. Okay, well, when you get ready, let me know. So I used off the next morning on the next afternoon, Tuesday. And it's a beautiful day. I'll say, Mr. Smith, how you doing? Well, fine instructor. I said, you know, Mr. Smith, look at all those ships.

exercising out there in the bay. I said all the smart officers are sitting in the wardroom drinking coffee. Why are you here? I'm going to be a frog. This is just Mr. Instructor. Okay, well I don't think you are when you're ready. Let me know. Wednesday. Mr. Smith, I can see your dragon. You sure you want to put up with this? I mean, you're so smart and well-educated and whatever. You sure you want to do this? Yes, instructor. I said, well, I don't think so. Mr. Smith, but when you're ready, you just hand me your helmet. Thursday afternoon.

Is this hell week? This is hell week? So we made it through four days. Okay. Yeah. Thursday afternoon. I said, well, Mr. Smith, you ready to quit? Yes, instructor.

He hands to me his helmet. Yeah. How do you know? And we had another guy. You probably heard of him named Randy Wise. He was in all, he was a, he was jump happy. He was a parachute guy. I heard of him.

Wonderful guy. Wonderful guy. And he was in the same class. So I thought, well, I'll work. I always worked on the officers. I didn't, you know, I worked hard on the officers. And so I went up to Randy on the same beach, same sort of one. How you doing, Mr. Wise?

Oh, fine instructor. He said, Mr. Wise, what makes you think you're going to complete this training? He said, you did instructor. So I left him alone. We became great friends. Now, this is one. Wait, so are we in 1963 right now? We're in 1963, yes.

So what do you know about the SEAL teams versus going to a UDT team? Well, I just see these guys in the child hall. That's all. I don't know much about them. Because after all I remember, all they did basically was take the secondary missions of the UDTs to make them the primary mission of the SEALs. And everybody was going through the same training. So there was no, you know, it was kind of like,

How do you go, how does the Navy get more appropriations? Got it. Particularly in the aftermath of the JFK thing for special warfare and so forth. And the Navy looked around. That's why Ben Milligan's book is so instructive. Yeah. It's just a great book. Great book.

Yeah. And it's also why, though, I don't believe there'll ever be a Navy, there'll never be another Admiral in charge of Socom. The regular Army's got it. Really? Oh, and Socom will be diluted. It'll be, they can't stand them. It's cultural.

they can't stand themselves. They have to, they have to be big army, big regular army. They can't help it. And to some extent, the Navy is that way, but less so, thank God. Otherwise, we wouldn't be around. We wouldn't have got to do what we did. But I, yeah, right, these, the cultures are such that they can't stand, well, look at how long the Marine Corps fought it before they finally came around because they had to. They had too much pressure on. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that'll be interesting. It seemed like they have a little bit of a rotation going on for the Socom commander. Well, I think they did. We'll see if we continue. I'm just skeptical, okay? Because I, you know, I've spent all the, I never got to really work much with SEALs. I was always kind of a, the lone ranger. And always we were, and everything was so politically sensitive, we were always talking to these guys at headquarters. And the guys at headquarters think they're at headquarters because they're smarter than they.

the guys in the field. If you were, if you were as smart as I am, you'd be here, you wouldn't be in the field. I mean, look at Vietnam with Luke Cohnene, the guy had worked with Hocci men, he wouldn't get listened to. I talked to Jack Richardson, who was chief of station at the DM coup. I knew him, I talked to him. He said, we told him, don't get rid of him now. We've got nobody to replace him. We can get rid of him anytime, but don't do it now. And of course, you know, the, the, the, the, the glorious elite determined otherwise and what do we have. Then for the next, and we were there. So would they have five new governments in the next six months,

all of which we were there, some of which during the demonstrations were targeting us in with the White Elephant in Danang. That was also another lesson that I got for agitated, for crowd, manipulation in the communist agitation propaganda department of how to control mobs. We stood up there on the third floor, it was only three floors in Bogdung after one of these changes of the government and watching the, you know, they got in the crowd of people

whipped up and they were going to come in and we had everything burned and we weren't going to fire until they started coming up, you know, from the second floor and we're looking down this mob and you see five guys. It was right out of the manual. Five guys men. manipulating this crowd. So if you know what you're doing, it's easy because my mob's got no mind. Right. Just need someone to get pushing the right direction

momentarily and they follow each other. Exactly. So you get, so how long, you do two classes, you're there as an instructor for two classes. Are they, how many classes they do in a year at that time? Like how long did that take? Two, okay, so you're there for basically a year. I wasn't there for the full second class

because they, How long was it until you got orders to UDT 21? Oh, of course, I would go to work on that immediately. So I went over, I wanted to see Ken Wolf, who was the lieutenant commander in charge of 21. I said, Mr. Wolf, you need operators, I want to operate, get me a waiver. He said, sure. So he, separate chain of command, so boom, he got me, he got me set orders. In come the orders.

phone rings. It's Captain Lee at the Naval Amphibia School. Hawes, get your ass over here right now. So I wrote it to say it's Oz reporting. He's directed, Captain. You frogs are always pulling this crap. We got a deal. You're an instructor.

I'm getting these orders canceled right now, which he picked up the phone and did. Four stripes, two and a half striped. but the waiver was on the books that was the key the waiver to be an operational fragment the waiver was on the books and that paved the way then for when tarbox called me from seal that paved the way for when tarbox called me from seal team too and said you want to go to Vietnam I can't tell you what what it is because I don't know if she asks how soon you be ready to go so yeah so you so you have this waiver in the book

books, which means despite your eyesight, you're going to be able to go and operate. You get the orders get canceled at UDT21, and you got a little section about this in the book. You say, almost a year later, I received a phone call from Tom Tarbox, Steel Team 2XO. He was calling with the kind of offer I'd been waiting for. I have two questions, he said. One, do you want to be assigned to Vietnam on a mission so secret that it comes right straight out of Secretary of Defense McNamara's office? And two, how soon can you be ready to go?

I replied, yes, sir, and 24 hours. There were very few officers available with my experience, and Tarbock's knew I was more than ready to join an operating team. When Captain Lee heard about it, he was infuriated with me all over again, thinking I had circumvented him and the agreement we had made. He summoned me to his office yet again, and after vending his fury, he picked up the phone to get my orders to Vietnam canceled. A struggle to hold in this surging joy. as I watched his demeanor turn from imperious to obedient. He finally hung up and said, congratulations, Lieutenant J. G. Haas.

Whatever it is, it's so politically sensitive, it comes straight from Secretary McNamara's office. Is there anything I can do to assist you? So I was off to Vietnam. Port-a-Seal Team 2 the next day and had a cup of coffee with Tar-Box and my life as a covert operator began. When I went to the 25th reunion,

which was not anything fancy like they do these days, sealed him too. It was in a bar in Virginia Beach. And you know the name Eagle Gallagher, Bob Gallagher, Eagle, Eagle, Eagle Gallagher walks up to me like he's about to beat my ass. And he said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm here because I belong here and speak to Tarbox. If you have you got any question, you got any doubt. Well, of course, and he swaned up in a hurry, but it was, it was, I almost had the shortest tenure in SEAL Team 2 in anybody in history. Yeah, that's a, I like, I like Captain Lee just having to go from, you know, you're not going to.

Is there anything I can do to assist you? Well, you know, but again, that's another good, that's, to me, that's another kudos for the Navy because the guy said, okay, geez, whatever, let me help. That's squared away. Yeah. Yeah. You say here, after detaching from SEAL Team 2 bound for Vietnam, I stopped by to visit my parents and brother.

By that time, I was trained and fit, Frogman headed for war in the pursuit of my dreams. As I concluded the visit with my folks, my mother put her arms around my neck and said, Jim, take good care of yourself. Please tell them not to send your body home if you get killed. I could not go through it twice. Her words were liberating to me.

I knew it was hard for her to let me go, but I also understood and always had that she wouldn't try to deter me. Maybe you had to grow up as she did in the heart of the dust bowl, and as the wife of a World War II sailor on a battleship to be able to be that strong. It was typical of her to be encouraging of whatever I wanted to do, yet saying goodbye to me twice,

once as I departed for war and then again as a casualty, wasn't something she could do. But there were no guilt trips, no whining, she didn't cry. She was completely supportive without a selfish gesture of any kind. Her only other request was, just please write. I was ordered immediately to military assistance, Command, Vietnam, Special Operations Group, Naval Advisory Detachment based in Danang, where I would

spend the next year participating in the takeover of the CIA's Operation 34A and its expansion and intensification under the Department of Defense. I wrote every week on Sunday night. That's a good sun right there. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good son right there. I guess people have it easier nowadays with email. Oh, yeah. I think email was a good thing because, you know, if you can call or nowadays guys can

FaceTime, right? Yeah. And then that's cool, but it's lost, right? It's very interesting for me to go back. We didn't have that kind of communications. You could, I would call my wife like once a week, maybe once every two weeks. In fact, we had BTF Tony who was one of my friends, and he remembered. He came into my office and he's looking over my shoulder.

I have an email from my wife. It says something like, I haven't heard from you in a month. Is everything okay? He just looked at me and said, what's wrong with you, dude? Write your wife. But I think that's cool because now you can look back and you say, you can read your old emails. You know, you can read like, I know what was happening during deployment.

I'm looking at what I'm writing my wife. I'm like, oh, I hope everything's okay. You know, and there's a lot of stuff going on at deployment, but it's interesting to be able to review that. So, you know, that's a good thing about writing letters as opposed to just a phone call. So you end up with this MACV SOG in, you know, you say under this authority and McNamara's direction,

the military would take over OPP Plan 34A where a principal strategy included the establishment of the Naval Advisory Detachment, NAD. Do you call it NAD? NAD or do you call it? NAD. Enoling. Employing small.

boats to run harassing raids against North Vietnamese installations. All 34A maritime operations were approved by President Johnson's National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy and communicated directly to NAD Danang with a copy to inform

Saigon. I mean, this is micromanagement at the highest level. Oh, you can't believe it. As we go on, you'll hear why I made the comment before about headquarters mentality. Jesus. Yeah. Macanamara was the worst. Yeah.

And Johnson, those guys were just absolutely horrible. Yeah. Targeting was done in a vault at Bakhton, Bhat dang, Bak Dang, Bak Dang. Bakong. Bakong. It means white elephant in Vietnamese. Where the intel was secured,

ops planning took place, including proficient aerial photography, interpretation by a Navy Intel lieutenant who was a central part of that mix. The SEALs took part in the planning of the operations and conducted the training of the rating teams, which were made up with South Vietnamese Navy personnel. I was assigned as training officer and assistant operations officer to help run the operation.

So you're the only reason the only way that could happen is that the Navy had no idea They were the Navy was told to send somebody with these qualifications It wasn't told about rank no talk about nothing because I got relieved by I was still a JG I got relieved by a full lieutenant and a lieutenant commander Same job So the only way only way I got that that job is a J.G is because the Navy didn't know what it was all about. And what years is? This is now where we're in 1964?

64. Spring is 64. You show up there. Actually, you say this is pretty interesting. Since there were no precedents, no manals, no procedures for what we were doing, the learning curve was dramatic and we were only limited by imagination of what we could make work. Our group was plausibly deniable, clandestine operation. They needed to stay that way.

We had to not only avoid our own media, but the end. International Control Commission, the ICC, a group of three inspectors representing Canada, Poland, and India, who were tasked with monitoring aggression in the region. An important part of my mission was to avoid the ICC because the North Vietnamese were protesting our raids and trying to bring international public attention to our actions, while Secretary of State Dean Rusk repeatedly and publicly denied our existence. So what's your opt tempo like? Like what's going on? Like what's a day look, a day in the life for Lieutenant J.G. Hoss in this 1964 in Vietnam?

I was a training officer. And assistant ops officer. So with respect to training, this detachments came out from CLTM1 to actually do the training. Irish Flynn, you know, our first admiral was the first, the first OIC of that training

attachment that I met and he was relieved by Maynard Wires you know I don't you ought to know that guy and you ought to get him on he's got an invite he's got it happened he's got history like crazy and he was a hallow an officer and so they were they were running the training of our of our individual teams and we had as I recall six six individual teams of composed of nungs not not mixed Couldn't mix them. No. Nungs and Vietnamese. And we had them isolated in camps one mile apart along China Beach.

So this is the same area that Meyer later occupied after NAD was gone, and this was all taken over by SOG, C&C. they talk about Marble Mountain. Marble Mountain was the southern end of this whole complex. That's where I learned to repel? You know, I didn't, I picked it. Where did I learn to free fall? You know, the chiefs, a couple of chiefs got me,

and got a helicopter and said, okay, here's what you do, blah, blah, blah. We got it up and that was in Vietnam? You went to Free Fall School in Vietnam, which was just a couple of chiefs thrown you out of the airport. Which is on China Beach, right? Safety third. Yeah, exactly. Anyway, so, yeah, so we had these six teams along here,

which would then go do the raids in the north. And I would, if I can remember the opt tempo correctly, because we definitely accelerated it from what it had been, probably twice a month, but not always a team, always the boats. Because we got there, the Navy had no small boats. I am not exaggerating. No small boats.

So the only three boats that we had were the Swifts. And they were brought there by the CIA because they were really good for, they were really good boat. But the CIA mostly was doing junks. They'd get fishing junks, which they felt were more, had a less chance of being observed. and so they would modify fishing junks and send their teams up before we took over. Then we had the Swifts,

but none of this could do the kind of harassment of the coastal installations, which could be done with the nasties. So to the Navy's credit, they bought the best boats in the world from the Norwegians, which were the nasty PT boats, and they were 95 feet long. They made 45 knots.

You could go all full, all reversed just like that. High performance, Napier-Deltic diesel engines that you couldn't even be in the engine room. They had such a whine, you know, whatever. They were terrific boats. And so those started going up two or three times a month.

And that was, those were the boats that were causing the, the irritations to, I don't pretend to be able to say, how valuable what we did really was. And I'm not sure anybody can. If they said they could, I'm not sure I would believe them. It's reasonable to assume that we tied up a lot of North Vietnamese assets because we were a pain in their butts.

How actually destructive we were, I'm not sure. A couple of times got really lucky and did some real good stuff. One of those was just prior to the Gulf Tonkin incident. and following up that one that was quite successful, the boats went up to do Han Matt and Han May and Han Nu, which were islands sort of in the roads leading to the Hifong Harbor. And of course, Highfong Harbor was Sacrosanct. Let me tell you how sacrosanct they were.

When I arrived into Nang, Green Lieutenant J.G and I said okay let's look at the let's read it let's look at the intel and so there was

two dredges, Porta High Fong if they're out of action the Porta High Fong silt's up in six weeks so well this is easy let's go get the let's go get the dredges oh no can't touch the dredges

never touched the dredges the entire war Why is that? I don't know. I think it's criminal, but I don't know why it is because it was our, I think it had to do with the with the headquarters genius concept that, which McNamara describes himself later on when he's trying to excuse all he did, all he did wrong, by thinking that we were going to increase our pressure. incrementally to the point where Ho Chi men would say, okay, ouch, we're done.

And so I think part of the incremental approach was to allow them to continue to have access to Haiphong Harbor, and we would impose the punishment elsewhere. Okay? That's thinking doesn't make any, that logic doesn't make sense to me, but it, I, I, I, I, can't think of anything any better. Because that's where all the Soviet stuff came in. A lot of the Chinese stuff came in. It was terrible.

You know, I, I, sorry, I wrote a book called Leadership Strategy and Tactics. And in that book, I write about something called the iterative decision-making process, meaning, hey, we take a little step in this direction, and we see what the results are. And if it seems like we get good results, we go a little bit further in that direction. And if we see more good results, we go a little bit further than that direction. If we see, oh, that didn't work the way we wanted to, we make adjustments. And it's the way I always made decisions. You know, I always, you know, I don't need to, I don't need to make a big, giant decision.

I can make a little one. And I can make a little one to make adjustments. And then, you know, as I started reading a lot about McNamara, you know, you get this idea of this incremental approach. And I started thinking myself, like, hold on. Well, if I was McNamara, maybe I would have been thinking the same thing. I'm going to make these small steps. Why was McNamara's incremental approach? Why did it turn out so bad compared to what I did my whole career,

which was this iterative approach? They're basically the same thing. And it didn't take me very long of thinking about it to realize why? Because the key component of me making a small decision is to pay attention to the feedback and make adjustments when it doesn't work. And what you can see with McNamara and Johnson is that they were getting feedback and they were just not paying attention to it. They weren't listening to it.

They were just saying, no, keep going, keep going, keep going, keep going. And they never paid attention to the feedback, and they continued to take the same approach over and over again, and it never worked. Well, I couldn't agree more. I think that's astute. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. They didn't understand will. They'd understand the will. And these guys are such compromisers.

They just didn't understand the will. Yeah. And, you know, I think we're seeing that. You know, people ask me about the war in Ukraine right now. And it's a test of wills. And that's the thing. When you go to war, the only reason you're going to war is you don't know who has the stronger will. Because if you knew, you wouldn't go.

If you look at someone and go, yep, they're going to go and they're never going to stop. Then you say, hey, this isn't a good thing to engage in. And so who's got the stronger will in Vietnam? You know, we thought after the Battle of I Drang, like, oh, we killed 150 to 1. We're going to beat them. We got air power. We're going to beat them. We didn't realize that they didn't care if they lost 150.

They didn't care if they lost 150,000. They didn't care if they lost a million. Well, that statement right there applied to Ukraine. The simple arithmetic of Vietnam when Westmoreland, every day at 4 o'clock at the infamous 4 o'clock follies would talk about body counts. And the so-called strategy, which was no strategy, but was the closest thing I guess they had to a strategy, was attrition. And nobody ever stopped to look at the simple arithmetic that the birth rate in Hanoi always exceeded the attrition rate in the south, ensuring an unlimited supply of manpower. And it's the same thing. And right now, the Ukrainians are brave as hell.

But if Putin's prepared to sacrifice all the Russians that it takes, which all indications are he will, he'll grind them down. They can't win. And he'll kill, you know, we'll fight to the last Ukrainian. Yeah. Yeah. Or, and this is what we don't know. We don't know if the Russian population says, hey, you know what, I'm not sending my kid. Or I'm not going to go.

And if that happens, things can go the other way. History doesn't support that. That is true. The Russians just cinch it up another notch and tough it out. The Russians know how to suffer. Yeah. Yeah. But you get, in the end, it's a test of wills that you don't know what the answer is.

You don't know who has the stronger will. I mean, look, the Ukrainians obviously have an incredible will. It's their homeland. It's their houses. It's their country. They're going to have an incredible will. But at the end of the day, you're going to end up with this, if you end up an attrition fight, and the Russians can keep pouring bodies at, it's terrible.

Maybe what we ought to do is take all those resources and put them into stockpiles and cashes in various places. So I'll invite the Russians in and let the Ukrainians go out and with guerrilla activities. I have been very surprised that the Ukrainians didn't go into that already. Yeah. I mean, they have well-trained snipers. They could kill 100 Russians a day just without engaging them in any attrition, ground, you know, force-on-force peer-to-peer combat. It doesn't make sense to do that. So they're going to figure, I mean, it seems like they're going to have to figure that out.

Is we can't beat them with numbers. We need to beat them with guerrilla warfare. And we'll see what they do. It would be interesting. By the way, back to the dredges and iPhone. I went back to Hanoi before Americans were allowed to go back because I was working with a guy in Hong Kong. Hell of a guy. And I was German of the, well, we built the first.

office building in Annoy after the war right next to the Metropole Hotel near the what year was that upper houses would have been geez early 90s okay makes that I have to think about that but yeah it was before Woodcock went there and did the the water no that was like 70s wouldn't I think that wasn't the 70s yeah so it would have been somewhere in the 80s I think yeah when I did that anyway so I I I took a day off. By the way, Vietnamese at this time, everything was still raw.

Vietnamese were gracious as could be because, of course, they had won. So they could afford to be. And the young ones were interested in building what they've subsequently built it. But during one of the days, I said, you got to, excuse me, I've got to get a taxi,

and I've got to go take a drive to iPhone. I've got to see those dredges. So I drove up there. there's still all kinds of bomb damage all over the place. I look over at this narrow gauge railroad. That's where all this stuff was coming down. A narrow gauge railroad. So much the stuff's coming because the roads weren't any good.

A couple of bridges were still damaged. But the nail gate railroad was just, I mean, I kept saying, how could they move all this tonnage? How could they move all this stuff south? And if you were paying any attention at all, I mean, it's like the story, I don't know, if somebody, I'd like to, if I could be here in a couple of more days, I would see Ron Bell, who's going to be here for the old frogs and things that Bill Shultz does. And because he's reputedly the first seal that went into a tunnel,

that went into a Cucci tunnel. I don't know if this is true story or not, but, and supposedly, Bell came out of that tunnel. said, if these guys prepared to live like this, we can, there are no way we're going to win. And that would have been about 66 or 67. So, where the barge is still there when you went there? Yeah, there were the two dredges? It's incredible. It was incredible.

Anyway, so we took them back to Haifa on May and anew. So they were in the sort of the road. So when we hit non-may and on Nguyen and did some damage, I think that provoked some kind of a retaliation. Now, what the retaliation was, I'm not sure whose story, I believe. But they were really, that's what led, you know, then after that came the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Yeah, you say up here, when we sent the Nastys up there knowing they'd, get the job done quickly. These islands are in the direct path of the entrances to the harbor, and hitting them could have been considered a threat to the harbor itself. We came in fast

and hit the targets hard and successfully when we finished North Vietnamese patrol craft came after us with a fury, chasing us back down toward Danang. Our boats outran them somewhere north of the 17th parallel. Those North Vietnamese boats that were chasing us that night were the ones that allegedly attacked the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. And our attacks on them most likely triggered their strategy to engage the U.S. in retaliation. What happened with us and the Turner Joy and Maddox on that night would result in the joint congressional Tonkin Gulf resolution, which authorized President Johnson to escalate U.S. military efforts in Vietnam. No, young Jim Hawes would have attributed any nefarious motives to those decisions.

An older and more cynical, Jimahas would attribute it to selfish political reasons. And I wish I knew the truth. So I'm going to read this section here. You say younger seals, which I am one, cannot appreciate the atmosphere in those days. The frogmen and early seals were barely tolerated by the traditional Navy. And 34A was the most politically sensitive operation in the country.

Ignorance and disinterest in covert operations along with security compartmentalization made it inevitable that the Navy would appoint an officer in charge with no training no experience no interest in a vessel smaller than a destroyer So you're dealing with this guy and all that you were doing there you say but dealing with that was part of what I had to go through in Vietnam in order to be prepared for the Congo There I learned the clandestine art of plausible deniability and gathered the experience that led me to build and lead a mercenary navy for the CIA. I was incredibly lucky. I was being paid to do what I would have done for free. This is just a little bit of information here. You say, while I was learning covert ops on the job in Vietnam,

the Cold War was heating up in Africa. What preceded my arrival in the Congo was an extraordinary effort that included the talents of an American operator. Jordie McKay. He did everything he was supposed to do and more as a one-man show McKay was in the Congo to work with five commando as he made up the entirety of the U.S. clandestine maritime paramilitary team. The agency had sent him there before they sent me and no contribution was more vital to mission success than McKay's. But through an event in the middle of a crucial battle, McKay made a judgment and acted on it and it was exactly the

wrong decision according to the state department because of that the operation inevitable the operation became available to me but the groundwork for our mission success lay in actions McKay took at a place called Fitsy Baraka am I saying that right Fizi Fizi Fizi so it's just like it's written Fizzy Baraka so now we're talking it's 1965 the Congo battlefield that he didn't cool to a varying degree of ferocity over the pre preceding several years the symbol Simba rebels and these are communist rebels were a rag-tag bunch of untrained renegades, more interested in pillaging and butchery than ideology or cause. But they began to receive the support of communist

advisors and troops who had been training in Eastern Europe and China and supplies of weapons and ammunition steadily increased. The U.S. worried that Soviet bloc reinforcement and training the Symbas might actually turn into a coordinated fighting force. That notion began to drive policy. you talk about McKay and by the way I always have to say this I'm reading chunks of this book I'm reading a small percentage of the book there's all kinds of details in here there's an incredible story that's flown through we're hitting the highlights of it but get the book so that you can get all these details some of the you talk about McKay McKay left the Navy in 1950 to start a salvage business in Cuba and eventually he gets pressured out of Cuba by the communist

He gets put out of business. The person that put him out of business in Cuba was there, was the minister of industry, which is a guy named Che Guevara. That's the guy who put McKay out of business when he started this, this company down in Cuba. And after he gets forced out of Cuba, he goes back to the CIA because he was in the CIA before. So McKay, and we'll get into who he links up. with a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Mad Mike Hoare. He's the commander of these five commando mercenaries and these guys kind of join up. They get some vessels. The five

commando starts, they start doing basically amphibious operations. There's this giant lake. How do you say that lake? Taganyika. Tagan yika. So tagan yika. Tanganyika. I'm going to brutalize that one. 450 miles long, 50 miles wide. Taganika. Second deepest lake in the world. And it's actually in between what two countries? It's between on the one time it's Tanzania and Burundi and then Eastern Congo.

And it divides those two countries. So they have, they're running operations to try and suppress these rebels. And you say this, during the assault, McKay, would make a significant difference in the war, albeit by making a conscious decision that would contra-navene the CIA instructions. He wasn't supposed to be in the fight. The State Department wanted no U.S. fingerprints on the operation and plausible deniability was the purpose behind using five-commando boat crews. If a mercenary were killed in the Congo, so be it. But if an American turned up shot and dead there, particularly an ex-Navy personnel, it would be much more difficult

to ignore and whitewash away. McKay was the only American officer involved in the planning, training, and preparation of this operation. And despite CIA instructions, ultimately, the only one who unexpectedly ended up engaged in combat. So they're doing this big amphibious operation. And again, get the book. There's really cool details about it. They do this amphibious operation to land troops on the beach. They get resistance when they get on the beach.

They start kind of, they can't really get off the beach for a while. And they're pinned down. And you say this, as five commando forces took casualties, they became bogged down. Around eight hour plus three, the attack started to stall. These guys are short on ammunition. And over on the left flank of the landing beach, there was this church. And in the church, there was some snipers, apparently, that were really reaping havoc on the five commando guys. And so you say this, McKay went to the captain of the Ermonds.

This was the ship that they were using a five-commando mercenary under horse command and asked him to bring the boat around and Also to get someone on the 75 millimeter recoilus perched on the stern but there was no response McKay face-to-face and under fire in the middle of a battle Stared at a frozen captain who had gone gun-shy without hesitation McKay took control of the ship himself He ordered the helmsman to steer the airmen's parallel to the beach until they were approximately a hundred and fifty meters offshore and only 250 meters from the gun nest. McKay called for a dead slow course with the engine stopped and the Ermonds began taking direct enemy fire.

McKay ran to the aft deck and got onto the giant 75 millimeter weapon. He had borsighted and tested the rifle the day before so he could fire with accuracy. He loaded the recoilus, took aim and fired the powerful weapon at the steeple where the hidden gunners continued to pin down the landing troops, his first shot was a bullseye. The heavy rounds inside of the recoilus struck the machine gun nest with a force that demolished the steeple. Two bodies were flung into the air like a pair of ragdolls as the nest was splintered and blown apart.

The gunners were silenced. Lieutenant Colonel Horr began to plan a breakout that would take troops into the interior from Fizzy to pursue the retreating Simba's. He buried his five KIAs. count was 215. So this is like before you get there. And this guy McKay, after this happens, he finds out that his father had died. His father was a cop, a New York NYPD detective.

His father had had a heart attack. He goes home. When he gets home, it sounds like they say, hey, look, you're out there doing what you weren't supposed to be doing. And they kind of don't let him come back to the Congo. The State Department wants you to do you want you to be successful in your mission, but not break any rules. The CIA wants you to be successful in your mission and not get caught breaking any rules. How did he get caught?

It's my observation. How did he get caught? Oh, uh, horror. My core was the, the most notorious mercenary of the 20th century by far. You hear about black jack, shram, and some of these other guys. They were nothing compared to horror. Or, sorry. Yeah, they were nothing compared to horror.

Among, and I don't like horror, but I think he was exactly the right guy for the job. And we worked together just fine. I didn't like him because, to me, he was too much of a prima donna. And that's one example right there. He invited two American chorus. correspondence to this. And, of course, that was a no-no, but it served him. It served him well.

And fortunately, they were old-style correspondence because they kept their word on not disclosing anything about American presence. But it was enough to get so that the State Department was able to find out. And so they just leaned on Africa Division, which would be more politically sensitive than the Special Operations Division. So it was really interesting. The African Division wanted some of them, not all of them, of course, wanted to hammer him. And the Special Operation Division wanted to award him. And Bill Hamilton, our old frog father, was very instrumental in protecting Jordy. And so he went on and spent another, you know, what, 30, 40 years.

And he didn't retire to his early 80s. So, but not in Africa. Meanwhile, as that's happening, you are, you get orders. I think you get orders so that you can, you know your next assignment is to take a platoon to Vietnam. But you're still in Vietnam at the time. Yeah, I volunteered to take the first detachment to the Delta. So that call comes in. You say, hey, look, I'll go.

And you say, hey, can you send me a replacement? because I want to get back and start training with my... Yeah, it's a whole different type operation, of course. So you say, can you send me a replacement? And Bupers, which is the Bureau of Navy personnel, this is sort of the nightmarous bureaucracy that anyone would think of, this big giant organization that doesn't think of people as people,

but as numbers and billets. So you say, can you send me a replacement? Well, they don't send you your replacement. So sorry, we can. We just can't. It's too late. I can't do it. It's too late. So you wait.

You're waiting. So I said, okay, I'll just get a half of a training session, whatever. But then your replacement finally shows up. Two replacements. Two replacements finally show up. And you, you know, you're just, hey, welcome. One is the guys I went through training with. And you say, hey, you know, welcome.

Here's what we're doing. You say something along the lines of, and you've got it in the book, but, you know, I wish you guys could have gotten here a little earlier. And the guy looks to you and goes, I haven't, I could have come any time. I've been totally free. And you got, you got so, so frustrated that you, uh, well, it was the, it was the cavalier attitude or the nonchalance or the whatever, the just, Jesus, it just hit me at exactly

the wrong, the wrong time. Just the fact that Bupers, yeah, could have sent a replacement. Here you are, getting, you're in war, you're getting ready to go. back to war. I just need a replacement and they just didn't do anything about it. Here's this guy going yeah, I could have come months ago. It doesn't matter. Yeah. And you got so pissed off that you called Bupers. Oh, I picked up the phone and got right in those days. Went Saigon switchboard, Honolulu switchboard right to Bupers. I would I said my name was haws. My file number is 653959. I'm on a voluntary extension. I want out of this Navy right now.

Want to volunteer extension? Boom. In comes to set orders. Goodbye. That was it. I mean, you went back to San Francisco. Mustered out. And then started making a slow drive across the coast.

Because this time I'd cool off and said, geez, you love what you're doing. What the hell do you do? I'm constantly telling people not to make decisions with their emotions. This is why. Because you're in the freaking teams. You have the best job in the world. You get pissed off. And so you say I'm going to get out.

You start driving across back towards the East Coast. At some point, you get a call from one of your buddies. Well, I'm already back on the East Coast. I'm back in Little Creek. So what are you doing? Are you just like going to the team? I'm reacquointing some, reacquointing with some old friends.

How long had it been since you, since you got out been when you showed back up at the teams. Oh, like you just drove across country? Yeah. Week or whatever? Yeah.

Well, probably maybe a month because I stopped and stopped to see my folks. Did you? And were you thinking Ham's going to get back in? Yeah. I thought, well, you know,

what he is, yeah, sure. I couldn't think anything I'd rather do. Yeah. And it's not not that hard. I remember I was talking to Dick Thompson, you know, a SOG guy. And, you know,

he had, he was his officer, Green Beret and SOG. And I said, was it, I said, was it hard to, you know, become an officer? And he was like, no, just signed up. And I go, was it hard to get selected for special forces? He goes, no, he just had to go.

And he goes, it hard to get his sock. He said, no. And he's like, it was Vietnam. No one wanted to be doing this stuff. There was no waiting line at the door to do any of this stuff. All I'd do is call Tarbox. And Tarbox said, we'd make it happen. So that was the plan.

That was the plan. That was the plan. And then I get the call from Phil. And what was Phil's situation? Well, Phil was a plank owner and SEAL team. one. Phil Gaddis playing. Yeah, yeah. And he, not his true name, of course. And Phil had been one of the first seals to go to Vietnam in 62 or whenever it was earlier. One of the first attachment that went, a handful of guys went over. Philip was the officer in charge. A really, really smart

guy, a really good guy, Harvard guy, Harvard graduate, great physically good guy. And his wife, was at least as smart as he was and she was actually just as an aside when they made all the when they made all the dependents leave Vietnam they forgot Barbara was in denang so Barbara kept quiet they all kept by kept quiet so Barbara stayed in denang for quite a long time until someone realized she was there by the time she left she could speak reading right vietnamese and she was a hell of an asset to have but anyway yeah so Phil a Phil a Phil had, Phil was the only other SEAL officer with Swift Boat experience. And he had been, the year that I was there, he had been, he was ship, sheep dipped in the agency.

And he was there, but he was doing other things. He wasn't much involved in our operations. And he was getting out of the Navy. He had been in RODC. And his time was up. He was getting on the Navy. he was going to go to the CIA Career Training Program. So he called me, he called me and said, Jim, he said,

they want me to go to the Congo, and I'm starting the career training program, and Barbara's about the pop. He said, I really don't want to go, but I don't want to say I don't want to go. Are you interested? And I said, you mean I'll get paid? And he said, yeah, I said, let's do it. So Bill, and Bill Hamilton was the chief. of the maritime branch, the CIA.

And Bill Hamilton, he was a frogman. Oh, what a guy. And pilot and just like an absolute stuff. Everything. He's like, he was like, this is delicate. So I've got to be careful because I'm not sure you're now strongly. I believe it myself. But in those days, officers knew they were going to make Admiral. So was the team, the teams, the teams.

That's why we survived, in my opinion. because guys like Fane and Hamilton and so forth and what's his name from Del Judas and so forth. They all did the things necessary to keep the teams alive. And it wasn't about when am I going to get my stars. Anyway, Hamilton, Naval Academy graduate, son of an admiral, naval aviator in Korea, and he says, I want to be a frog man.

So he comes and he becomes U.D. UDU2, which is underwater demolition, which was in charge of the teams, the UDT teams and the, I think, beach jumpers or something else at the time, whatever anyway. He was the senior frog. And he was, got a head at all. He was big, handsome, outgoing guy smart as hell. I mean, he's the kind of guy you needed to keep us alive, basically. which he helped do at Opnev when the seals were formed. He was in the right place at the right time. And, you know, the East Coast and West Coast have stupid arguments about who, in those days, about who was the most important. Well, they were all important, but he was really important. Okay.

So, so, yeah, so now he's head in the Maritime Branch and the CIA. The Maritime Branch of the CIA. So I get a call from Bill and says, come on up, let's talk. I said, okay. So I go up and he, of course, by that time he didn't have trouble checking me out as an individual. He just wanted to know if I knew anything about Swifts. And I didn't know why, but he asked you some questions. Obviously, you know what I was talking about about Swift.

So that was it. He said, okay, let's go. Get ready. You got to get out there right now. So he takes me to see a guy named Cheever, who was the head of Special Operations of his junior, a retired Marine Colonel, smart guy. Can you imagine? I go ahead and talk to this guy, and he's got to decide.

whether or not this kid is, should go to the middle of the Congo all by himself with all the weapons and cash that it takes to do it. And you're 26 years old? No, 25. 25. 26. Yeah, I think that's 25 or 26, whatever.

And he's got to make the decision. And you're out of the Navy, so you're civilian. Oh, yeah, I'm a civilian, yeah, right. And so I'll pass that test. And then he says, you know, you probably have some idea who you're working for. So I go down to, so they send me to orientation course down in, outside of. Marana?

Yeah, Marana, yeah. At Marana, which was also a training place for smoke jumpers. And it's also where they train their kickers for Laos. The kickers for Laos, most of them have been smoke jumpers. So I went down there and got sort of an orientation program. and then I came back and went around headquarters to get what I needed. And what a wonderful thing. It was like, boy, when you had an emergency, it was like everybody said,

hooray, we got an emergency. Everybody woke up and couldn't do enough for you. Really, it was extraordinary. So, yeah, so I went out there and said, Dick Johnson will meet you. He's going to be your boss, and you'll find out what you need to know. You say I arrived in the capital of Leopoldville on a commercial UTA flight from Paris with 2,500 in cash, stuffed in my socks and a quantity of morphine-filled syringes in my bag. I knew there would never be casualties and CIA supply and logistics made sure I had what I needed to help get the job done.

You just rolling in there. What was your cover? Well, when I got on the plane, I was Department of the Army. excuse me, Department of the Navy or something when I got off the plane I was Department of Army. I can't even remember that because nobody were asked me.

No one cared. Nobody cared, yeah, nobody cared. But I had one. It was flimsy, but I had one. Then you leave Leopoldville for Albertville. Which is now called Kalimi.

And what's Leopoldville called now? Kenchasa. That's Kinshasa, right? Kinshasa. You say this, I began to learn everything in this operation be different. My seal training and Vietnam experience included highly skilled professionals and state-of-the-art resources immediately at hand. In the military, it had also been accustomed to a formal structure of working with other troops and adhering to a coordinated strategy. And where Vietnam may have been the precedent for this new practical reality, this was a remote enterprise where I went from high tech to no tech.

There were no historical how-toes and no one with pre-eastern. experience to give me direction or assistance once in Albertville I was completely on my own no one was there to meet me no crew existed and few available boats were in need of substantial repair in this remote corner of Africa the CIA just expected me to handle things on my own and go out and get the job done that's exactly what I did well I mean Dick was Dick was terrific he is a World War two Marine would have been this is Dick Johnson and what was his position he was a head of all military, paramilitary activities in the Congo,

working for Larry Devin who was the chief of station. And he had been a chief of station himself. He was a really experienced guy and just a terrific fellow. But he basically said, look, after he decided I was, he was going to keep me, because I had to go, I'd have his stamp of approval in order to stay because he could have sent me home. after he just said look

I'll help you any way I can but it's not much I can do it's 2,000 miles across the jungle over there you just got to figure it out so one more the guy asked for gee that's tough oh please

here's your intro to five commando. You say this, I knew these guys were five commando mercenaries. Lieutenant Colonel Mad Mike Hors troops. Probably the most famous mercenary in modern history, the colorful Mad Mike had collected a hodgepodge of experienced soldiers, pretenders,

and combat castoffs the way others collected stamps. He had ability and charisma, and he never shied away from an opportunity to inflate his reputation. His exploits in Africa are, to be the inspiration for Daniel Carney's novel and film The Wild Geese, which starred Richard Burton and Roger Moore. Over the next few months, I would learn firsthand of the vicious nature of this Five-Commando Band of Cutthroats, the way they almost revered a code of duplicity instead of loyalty,

and how their ruthless tactics adhered only to a pale version of military standard. These all-white paramilitaries from former British colonies in Africa, Europe, and the UK, were definitely not your well-disciplined combat troops. They had little respect for treatment of civilians and property, particularly safes, and they would demonstrate their shady conduct many times while I worked with them. And you got a story in here about, it's kind of how you formed your quick reputation with them. They were trying to get into a safe, and they were trying to blow it open, and they didn't know what they were doing.

And you helped them blow the safe open. And then when they talked about how they were going to divide what was. was in it, you were like, hey, I'm not here for that. Did you know, what intel did you have on Five Commando when you showed up there? What you just read. That's it. These guys are just running around causing mayhem. They would sign contracts that I can't remember, six months contracts for them.

And the quality of it deteriorate over time because it was a nasty environment. And I mean, if it wasn't, you know, if it wasn't the Simba's, it was hemorrhagic dingy fever or whatever. So the quality of the people who were signing contracts deteriorate over the time. So by the end, it was real dregs. I mean, yeah, there were some real dregs. There were a few amongst all of those who were first class soldiers, but not many. And the ones that were were, when I say first class soldiers,

they had the soldier skills. but yeah because otherwise they'd be still in the British Army or whatever mentality was yeah whatever you know you now you're you're starting you have to you you got to work with them I mean that's just the way it is well the leadership lesson

imagine this they were mercenaries I mean the first thing the first thing they did when he had a new town was half of them peeled off to get the missionaries and half peeled off to get the banks okay so they were mercenaries I didn't pay them

they were five commando I wasn't I wasn't in their chain of command they didn't have to take any orders for me so I had to make sure but I'd get them to take orders for me

if there was any discipline to be done I had to say what needed to be done and it would get done but I had no no official position in any of this So I can't think I couldn't have been better prepared than for having been to seal to do it.

I really couldn't. And when I got in, where I really helped was instinct, instinct that was honed in training and in Vietnam. Because, you know, when I get, when I finished Harvard Business School, I had unlearned instinct. It took me a long time to realize what a mistake that was and to get back to trust in my instincts. It's true, pretty good. This is kind of a cool along those lines. You say the event that it contributed more to any other

toward the success of the forced Naval Congolays. Am I saying that right? Yeah. Was the recruitment? You know, I don't absolutely know, sure. That's just what I named it. Okay, cool. Sounds good.

I don't know if the grammar is perfect or not. Was the recruitment of five commandos regimental sergeant major, Samuel Jock Cassidy. He had trained every five-commando mercenary in the country and was a hardened soldier of fortune, a veteran of Congo and mercenary warfare. The key to his real value was the personnel files he held in his head. Acquiring Cassidy with his knowledge and assessment of the troops meant that I might be able to recruit the best of the mercenaries. And if I could do that, I'd assemble a Navy with the capabilities to accomplish the mission. Cassidy was older than I was.

And I knew him as a murderer and a plunderer with a hair trigger that often led to violence. He was tough, mean tough. And the word on him was that he had racked up a catalog of savage acts that had earned the fear of every mercenary working in the Congo and many other parts of Africa. Instinctively, I addressed him as if he were a UDT seal trainee. which was a direct line back to the year I'd spent as instructor. Thank you, Captain Lee. Instinct. Instinct.

You say, we're going to build a Navy, I told him, with or without you. But if you come on board together, we'll make an effective force in this war. I forced him to stand as if he were a subordinate officer, and he stared at me with a lacerating glare. I know you're a mercenary, I continued, but I will not bid against Lieutenant Colonel Hor for your services. I was in my element and felt as though I had the upper hand in this conversation because as I had a desirable card to play, so I sweeten the pot.

What I will do, I told him, is see to it that you are commissioned as lieutenant. And if you are as good as you are reputed to be, and I believe you are, I'll make you captain. Cassidy nodded in agreement. And you kept the army ranks. You go into that a little bit. Then you say weeks later, you guys had a conversation about this. Cassidy finally gave me his impression of this initial meeting. Commander, he said, I trained every mercenary in five commando and no one, including Lieutenant

Colonel Hoare ever talked to me the way you did on that first day. I didn't know whether to join you or kill you. Luckily for us both, I signed on. Once again, the old adage, better lucky than good, proved valid, whatever his reasoning. We were now working as a team. We set our sights on assembling a Congo Navy. So, thank you, Salinsky and Blaze and all those instructors. I can't tell you. It was, you know, boy, why didn't this, you know, yeah, I can't tell you. It was just turned out right. I said, I guess, again, God wanted to be a good frog man. You give background on Lieutenant Colonel Hoare. You say his transition to adventure came out of unlikely circumstances like many people who have lived a bland life. Of course, personal history

might seem obscure and nondescript right up to the point where he first gained notoriety that happened in the Congo. He was born in India, served in Lord Mountbatten's staff in World War II in the British Army in South Asia had been educated as a chartered accountant, hardly rigorous prerequisites for a mercenary commander, but through a friend,

he was introduced to one of the Congo's most powerful political figures. Moist Chambi. The governor of the breakaway Katanga province, and once he was in, he took full advantage. Some of his critics

would label Hora Puppet, which is far from accurate. Hora's ability to act his role was crucial to commanding a mercenary army, particularly because he had no formal judicial recourse structure. What he did was have good fundamental military skills, and that meant he could recognize those same skills and others and employ them accordingly. He masterfully played above the riffraff, the role of a British gentleman officer, tapped to lead mercenary troops in overcoming a communist threat. His theater of war was a small but important strategic part of the Cold War world.

Cold War world. He had an acute sense for both strategy and tactics, and I saw him juggle cold-blooded killers, African leaders, and U.S. embassy employees with a plumb while still focusing on chasing down and destroying the rebels. Yeah, I don't know. I had great respect for him.

I didn't like him, but I had a lot of respect. What was it you didn't like about him? I didn't like his ego. I don't, you know, ego guy. Egos always gets you in difficulty. Yeah. So was she were for him. And other than that, no, I think, and he very resented me because he didn't want the Navy to be separate from his command.

Oh. And I knew that Dick Johnson would back me up as long as I was doing the right things for the right reason. And I, and he wasn't going to bug Dick Johnson. Mm-hmm. And so I say, look, my primary reason to be here is interdiction. I said, you watch, we'll support you. You'll get all the support you could possibly want. But my primary mission here is interdiction, and that's, I don't need any help.

Thank you. And he had a hard time with that for a little while, but it ended up working out just fine. We would meet every day about 4 o'clock to talk about the next days or next up operations and so forth. Then we did, we supported him very well and that problem went away. You start scrounging up. But he never liked me because I'm, you know,

because his ego wouldn't allow. He must have been, what, 50 years old? I mean, if he's in World War II, he must have been 50 years old. And you're 26 year old, little punk ass frog man. Exactly. He had actually had his wife with him

for much of his. campaigning and she had a baby a long way she was and she was great looking and toughest could be he's written a couple of books that are good reads no I'll check those out you should do that so now you start scrounging up boats you got the boat called the Kivu I'm saying that right the Kivu and it was a you liked it because it was built in 1910 but you liked it because you could basically help recruit oh it was a great recruiting tool because it was a bear and we made it a barracks vessel so they could eat they could eat good

and sleep clean and did their own cooks they're like those five command of those army guys and five command of army guys well I live terrible so that sense it was a hell of recruiting tool so with with that plus cassidy's knowledge of the individuals that was another reason whore got a little resentful I took away his plus guys that must have really pissed him off and yet you didn't pay him you didn't pay Cassidy? So how was he making money? Oh, he just paid five. They were in five commandos. So they got paid their five commando money plus all the money they could they could pillage or they could plunder. But he still kept getting paid by five commando even when he worked for you

because you're all part of one big mission. They were all five commas still five commando but they were under my my jurisdiction. Who is paying five commando? Well ostensibly the Congolese government getting funneled through America and cash. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. He wouldn't do anything to buck. Dick Johnson, which means he was bucking Larry Devlin, the Chief of Station. And he and Devlin liked him. But Devlin called him a, oh, what do you call it, gentleman? It's a British, it would be a British expression. A British expression for a gentleman adventurer.

And that's not the exact term, but it's close. An adventurer. And they stayed, they were friends till, until. the devil and died. So he didn't want to rock the boat with you? No, he wouldn't rock. He knew who he was writing his paychecks. Yeah, yeah.

And those had to be some fat paychecks. I have no idea. But the U.S. government doesn't play around. Never asking. Yeah, never asking. I have no idea. Plus, you know, as I said, he pretended to be above the fray,

but Cassidy and John Peters, who, if anybody was meaner than Cassidy, it was John Peters. What did you, what did you heard about Cassidy? Like you're calling him a murder and all this stuff in the book. Like, what did you heard about him? That's what I'd heard about him.

He would just kill people. Yeah, I mean, when he got drunk. You wouldn't do it unless he was drunk. Okay. But he had a bad liver. But anyway, he, in fact, he was away on medical leave when I arrived. That's what I'd heard about him. And so I got word to him as soon as he came when I heard he was coming back to come and see me.

So before horror could get his hands on him or do anything. And by, and I'd also, some, I can't tell you now how I came to realize that the thing you wanted was to be an officer, be commissioned, be the, whatever. And he had never could do that under horror because he's too valuable whore as the regimental sergeant major. But it's interesting like you're wanting to be commissioned as an officer in five commando, a random mercenary group, right? Well, there you go, yeah. And there's no pension that comes with it or anything? That's right You say here

I'm a fast forward in a little bit Things were beginning to fall into place Our primary focus now had to be on the boats We had a few smaller boats Exaggerately termed PTs Which were operated from the Ermands The 250 ton lake vessel That we inherited from McKay

And commandeered for the Navy We called the Ermans the mothership She was the command operations vessel For the PTs and armed with captured Russian weapons, including a 12.7 millimeter Russian machine guns and a U.S. 75 millimeter recoilless rifle. The Irman's had radar on it.

You talk about that. Then you say here, Peter Jessup of the national security staff wrote a member to President Johnson stating that a more substantial pocket Coast Guard is necessary. He approved the purchase transport, and by air and armament and manning of six additional boats, two swifts and four sea crafts. So they are getting a word that you need more support over there.

Oh, yeah. That was all at the beginning. I mean, again, Hamilton and his deputy, Tom Klein's, who's a hell of a guy, and the guy who the Cubans totally trusted. I mean, we get into that story. You learn the new definition of the word trust. Anyway, so Hamilton And got these swifts And went down to Seward Seagraft in Louisiana

Where they were built and got the Cajuns to Come on board And as only Hamilton sell it You know, basically we cut the superstructure Cut the bow, cut the superstructure Cut the whole longitudinally Through everything into Globmasters Flew it into this narrow

this strip next to Kalimi, there's a nail grade railroad, put it on that, put it over to the port, brought the Kunasses out, or sorry, the Cajuns. You can call them Cunasses if you're their buddy. And brought the Cajuns out, and the Cajuns, I'm not sure where the Cajuns even knew where they were, because it was hot and humid and everybody was black. But whatever it was, they did their, they were terrific. I mean, these guys worked like hell. have a cold beer at the end

and laugh at the end of the day and up the next morning. Everyone thought it'd take a month that took them like a week or two to get the boats. Were those two boats, those were two boats were,

those were the ones that had been used in the anti-Castro maritime rates. So they take these boats. That's just, and you're going to the details in the story, but when you talk about Klein's,

you know, he said, here. Well, first of all, when you talk about Klein's and in his relationship with the Cubans, what was that relationship based on? All the anti-Castro stuff out of Miami. They had just been working together.

They trusted him. I mean, they didn't even know where they were going. And these guys, these Cubans, get basically turned over to you. Yeah. And you say here, Klein would turn the Cuban contingent over to me with a message. These men are tough respect.

tough, resourceful, and brave, and take pride in their performance, but above all else, they're loyal. Chavez is a proven leader and the men believe in him, so there will be no discipline problems. Over the years, we have developed a trusting relationship based on shared experiences, and I am assigning these bonds of trust and friendship over to you. When he endorsed the transferred expectations to me, I received a team prepared to work unconditionally under my command, no questions asked. You're all set, clients told me, now don't fuck it up. Exactly right.

So you had these Cuban Americans that this is after the Bay of Pigs, all that had happened, and they had fought Castro, they'd fought communism. They're now basically in America, mostly in Florida. They get this opportunity to go to freaking. A couple of them were Bay of Pigs and had been in prison. We were liberated with the tractors, you know. So they get put together, all right, you want to go fight the communisms? We got a spot for you.

It's in Congo, Africa. And they say, hell yeah, let's go. I mean, I can not tell you, we did not have one single discipline problem. We didn't have any other kind of. These guys were so professional. So, you know, I like it to my boat crew in training. I had such a boat crew. I just had to not fall out of the boat.

You know what's interesting. These Cubans were almost the same thing. I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday who's a, as long as I had him. A friend of mine yesterday who's a Cuban American who came over on the boats. And he said his, you know, his mom and dad, his dad wanted to come to America. His mom was like, hey, it's not that bad here. I got my family here.

We're going to stay. And finally, they started taking, they started taking the Cuban military-aged males and saying, you're going to go to Africa and fight for communism. And when the mom heard that, she said, we're out. And they came to America. So that's how much they, like, number one, they were willing to sacrifice everything to get away from communism.

And also the fact that the Cuban communists were exporting fighters to go overseas. It was a really interesting. Yeah, that I had this conversation yesterday with a guy who's like, oh, yeah, that's one of the reasons we left is my mom. mom didn't want me to get sent to Africa to fight for communism. Nope, not happening. When I started to write this book, which was, I really wrote most of it 25 years ago because I didn't want to, you know, the older, you get the smarter, tougher, faster,

stronger you were, blah, blah. And I was trying to avoid that. And I went to the Swiss embassy in Washington, which is where they were, had whatever they call it a representative thing of the Cubans. and I met a Cuban guy who was the first secretary, very bright, very articulate, whatever. And I said, look, I'm going to write this book. There's a lot of you guys in this. I said, I'd like to talk to the guy who was in charge who at this point was on the Politburo in Havana. And I said, he said, I like, you know, I want to put your side of the story in.

And he thought that was just a great idea. So he got a hold of those guys. but they wouldn't cooperate. So I said, okay, I'll with you. It was it. You talked a little bit about these guys with the, showing up with those boats. You talk about a guy named Joe Bresh, who showed up, engine men,

shows up with the Cajun builders. This is just like a crazy story. Oh, these guys were. Yeah. Bill Bain, an old frog man. Shows up. He's another one of these guys. Bill Ben could do, he was a World War II guy, another one of the World War II guys. He could do anything.

I mean, he was, you know, talk about the utility player. God, the guy was good to do anything. So, yeah, that was all part of the team that Hamilton assembled, you know, to sort of help make me look good. When interviewed for this book, Bruchard, and that's the guy who's running the Cajuns, about the job his crew did. The CIA had apparently expected the reconstruction would take them

two or three months to complete. He and his team did it in a month. He said, I'm not going to brag. He said, I'm going to brag. We were expert at this stuff. We built them from the keel up. I worked on the boats when I first went to Seward and we knew every piece of the boat.

We knew what we were fooling with. The Cajuns slipped into the country, undetected, black in, blackout in the vernacular of the CIA. And there you go. You know, Seward, of course, died, and he sold it, and his company's called Swift Ships or something right now. And I tried to get a hold of those guys,

because I thought, boy, this would, they'd love this because their sons are probably working in the shipyard. Yeah, yeah. Grandsons, whatever. No, I never got to reply. Never got to reply. They might reach out to you now. The Swifts were powered by high-performance Detroit Diesel,

GMV-1271 engines that were extremely reliable. as were the inboard outboard gasoline engines on the little PTs, but maintenance and repair requirements were inevitable. Locally, the capabilities to perform that kind of work just didn't exist. Bill Hamilton looked to the teams for support, and he knew the right person for the job. Renee Goff, known as Gooch, when Hamilton was the commander of underwater demolition Unit 2, at Naval Amphibious Base in Little Creek, Virginia, Gooch served as a frogman with a specialty as an engineman. He stayed in that post until his retirement when he left Virginia Beach and headed for an idyllic Caribbean spot in St. Thomas with his wife and four children. They had all sailed down to the Caribbean on a 57-foot retired oyster boat, a type of vessel known as a Chesapeake Bay Skipjack, which he had converted into a floating family residence.

They had endured hurricane force winds, a rejected sanctuary landing in Haiti by Papa Doc Paranoid. Papadoc's paranoid regime and the impasse of the doldrum in the Sargasso Sea before pitching up for a couple of years on an Adelic Island living aboard a sailboat fishing and enjoying being a family again Then the CIA came calling about a one-of-a-kind mission in the Congo ever the dedicated frog man Gouche said Gouche could not say no to his old commander This veteran old frog would provide age and experience because at 26 I was decidedly short on both. He was the kind of guy who could do anything, a good sailor, a brilliant engineman, and a confident and selfless friend. Gooch had the perfect demeanor for the job,

and when he arrived in the Congo, he made an immediate impact on the smooth running of our operations. That's a terrific guy. Wow. I wasn't allowed to, you know, when he died, uh, Cassie and I had to pound, had to hammer a gal that together a casket and then wrapped him in heavy sailcloth and managed to find a cool spot until I could get a plane over to get his body out to get him back to Leopold.

I was never allowed to speak to his family. The agency took care of him, of course. But I was never allowed to speak to him until about the time this thing came out. And we've become friends and so forth since. I've never forgiven myself for obeying that order. It wasn't the right thing to do.

I mean, I understand the reasoning behind it, but it wasn't the right thing to do. Anyway, it wasn't the right thing for me to do. But anyway, he was just a remarkable guy and a hell of a friend and helper and advisor. He got along with everybody. Mercenary is all liked him. Cubans adored him. Yeah, it was a great guy. And he could, again, he could fix anything.

I guess if you can take a skipjack, do it into a living quarters, you can do anything. You sure could. And keep your wife happy while you're doing it. That's double impressive. You say here, when I first learned that the Cubans would be coming to train the five commando mercenaries, I realized there might be a potential problem. The mercenaries had a range of motivations for being in the Congo.

Some were strictly there for money being paid for professional soldiering, but others were perverted, so perverted and deranged that they were just there because they wanted to kill caffers, the pejorative. South African term for blacks. Fighting in the Congo conflict enabled them to do this and get paid for it. Because some of the Cubans were dark complexioned, I needed to make sure that before they arrived, they would be allowed to have a smooth introduction into the equation. I approached Jock Cassidy.

Jock, these Cubans are professionals. They've been fighting a real adversary, not a bunch of Ganja, hyped up teenage soldiers, and they know what they're doing. After allowing Cassidy to acknowledge this, I proceeded. and some of the Cubans have dark complexions. So I'm holding you responsible. There better not be any trouble. Cassidy's reply was filled with a perfect mercenary rationale.

No problem, Commander. They ain't kaffirs. They're Cubans. And so our operation rolled on fueled by a commitment to racial harmony. That was such a funny incident. Don't worry, Commander. They ain't kaffirs, they're Cubans. Oh, Lord.

life, people. Jesus. I'm going to fast for it. Again, there's so many good, great details in this book. Get the book. You say here, I'm going to fast forward a little bit. On December 30th, Chavez, so Chavez is your lead guy of the Cubans that came, and he's basically the extraordinary leader of these Cubans. And he's outrun in operations.

On December 30th, Chavez reported coming across a boat on the lake. They maneuvered Lobo 1. These are some of the, again, I'm fast. Fast forward, but these are the vessels that they gave the vessel's name. Lobo won in a circle around the small boat to take advantage of the moon to illuminate it. The ship's log notes that it was a boat with an outboard motor, a definite sign of a rebel vessel. Chavez ordered a high firing and immediately the boat attempted to get away. Lobo won in a pursuit.

And instead of firing over their heads, the crew took aim at them for real, firing several rounds. They approached the boat slowly and found that everyone on board had jumped into the lake and was trying to swim away. Chavez ordered a slow speed chase, dodging, the rebels through the water until they tired out Lobo's lobo one's crew fired rounds into the water just to scare the swimmers as Chavez recorded they finally captured the rebels and brought them on board the Cubans were motivated by a general hatred of communism but they also perceived early on in their recruiting that something was happening in the Congo that related to their Cuban problem they would soon find out for certain rumors circulated throughout Miami that communist Cubans were fighting in the Congo but no one knew for sure if it was true or not until my Navy crew confirmed it. Here's another just, I mean, you're in all, you got leadership challenges all over the place down here. Here's fast forward a little as well.

After midnight, there was a loud banging on my hotel room door, even though half asleep, I instinctively picked up my Walther P.K from the night table and went reluctantly to the door. It's never good news at that hour. I ease the door open, A severely inebriated Jock Cassidy stood swaying in the hallway behind him. The tall, gangly durn was quaking with fear.

The color had drained from his face and he was so pale with fright that he almost seemed to glow in the dark. I shook my head at the sight of them and Cassidy immediately blurted out. Commander, this arsehole insulted me in front of the men. I thought about Cassidy's foul temper and having witnessed his vengeful brand of discipline with the, and this is another story that you tell in here about how he handled somebody that had stolen. and something. I knew he was capable of meeting out irrational punishment. Cassidy glared at Dern. I'm going to kill him, he said. His eyes flared with an alarming rage that continued to build. And then I'm going to burn down the Navy. I stepped back in my hotel room, held the door open a little

wider as Cassidy turned to enter. I motioned to Dern to stand fast. I needed to diffuse the tension and do it quickly before Dern did something really stupid. My instincts told me that I needed to maintain a casual atmosphere in this situation. Come on and I said, tell me what happened and let's talk about it. So what was Dern's role over there? Well, they, when we found out that, that Che was in the area, they decided they needed a real intel guy. So they came, they came out and made, he was chief of base, which made him my boss in effect, but he didn't get, he didn't interfere with anything I was doing. But he was there supposedly to try to collect intel. And I

Be careful about his name because he's a bit of an Israel name is a bit of a name in Washington, D.C. So It tells you more about headquarters mentality. Anyway, so So he would, I never drank with the mercenaries. I did one time.

I drank with him one time. I competitively shot with him one time. So I made him think I could hold my liquor, which I can't. And again, God wanted to make me a successful frog man, and I really hit what I was shooting at, I was pointing at those days. So I never did it again.

Never let them, I was friendly. I just kept a little distance. Kept distance. Kept distance, and I did everything to jock. Because for some reason I had jocks total, total. And the Congo definition of the word, total loyalty. But what's his name, Dern, he would go to the watering hole and drink with these guys.

Stupid. I mean, they're screwed up anyway. They got weapons on them and they got alcohol. What else the definition of trouble? I never, not one time did I ever do that? He would go do it. And I guess maybe he thought he was collecting information or something. I don't know, but he was just drinking as far as I was concerned.

So, you know, this is, he insulted Cassidy in front of the men, or Cassidy thought he insulted it in front of them in, whichever it was. So then they come back to the, come back to the Hotel de Locke, and there they are. So a shoe darn away, and Cassidy came in, he said, and he said, repeat himself, I'm going to kill, I'm going to burn down the Navy, and I said, jock, I don't give a shit if you kill him. But why would you want to burn down the Navy? We worked so hard to build.

You know, trying to do it. Anyway. So that worked, and over the course of the next three or four hours till dawn, and he sovered up a little bit. And then he, I said, look, I'll keep Dern away from the Navy. Don't worry. We just get on and do our stuff. So, okay, that was agreeable to him.

And so he staggered back to the Navy and asleep it off. and I went down to Dern's room, that dumb ass that kept drinking. Can you believe that? And I said, you know, I said, I don't know whether we can keep you alive. I said, I don't know for sure. I said, we'll try, but my advice to you is get out of here.

He said, yeah, that's good advice. So that's when I had the story. That's when I had the talk with Gooch about how we were going to have to kill Cassidy. if it came down to it, it was either Cassidy or Dern. And so that's that, that's what that story is about. You and Gouche came up with a whole plan. Yeah, whole plan. You have to kill Cassidy because you couldn't obviously let him kill this American.

Yeah, yeah. Fortunately, fortunately, Dern took off and it was all dissipated. He took your advice, thankfully. Luckily, he put his ego in check because there's people that are like, no, I'm not leaving or it's on him. That's how people end up getting killed. He had an ego, but he also had a sense of saving his own. own ass.

Fast forward a little bit here. Again, that's a, but just, you're just dealing with like mayhem. I mean, this is just mayhem. Yeah.

And you're just keeping it together. It's a 26-year-old Lieutenant G., now Admiral of the Fleet. No, no, they started calling me commander. And I thought,

okay, I'll be a good. Fair enough. Why not? That made me equal to whore, by the way, in terms of rank. So that also worked.

It was totally. accidental but did you look old for your age or not really well you there's a picture in the book you too tell me you look you look like maybe you don't look like a full commander though oh no no way fast forward a little bit here you say I was back at base monitoring the radio and I suddenly heard Ricardo Chavez's voice out attack the distinct pop pop pop pop of machine gun came crackling through the radio immediately distinguishable from the mundane static and club clutter my ear was attuned to the prospect of a firefight and the hair on my arms began to prickle as that unmistakable sound cut through the feeble reception of our rudimentary equipment the swifts were out on the lake and in some shit the only question was how deep the boat crew opened fire with the first semi automatic Soviet AK 47 weapons we'd capture captured in the previous raids that was one of our ways we hurt them using their own guns against them if the boats got really close during the melee of the firefight the AKs would come in hand Lobo 1 was armed for combat carrying 50-count machine guns mounted amid ships port starboard and aft

Plus a shoulder fired 57 millimeter recoilless rifle on the gun tub above the cabin a concussive barrage erupted as five enemy vessels returned fire Bullets screaming between boats Toledo recalled the events vividly as soon as we made contact one boat separated from the group in hindsight we realized it was obviously to distract us leaving us to contend with the other four boats that were fired Intensely the fifth boat that cut away was stationed a short distance behind the others not firing a shot just waiting as if trying to decide whether to re-engage or depart Then their decision made the fifth boat suddenly swung around and opened up again in a hail of bullets that covered their escape as it sped east across the black waters Toward the enemy refuge of Tanzania I debrief Chavez and it was clear to both of us that there was something very curious about that fifth boat the manner in which it is escaped that suggested it sheltered someone or something very important a VIP we thought otherwise the remaining enemy boats would not have put up such fierce resistance their previous behavior had

consistently been cut and run we had already discovered that Castro Cubans were fighting alongside communist rebels we had detected their radio calls because they weren't disciplined enough to protect their names or language they blatantly violated even minimal tactical cover on the radio and of course one Cuban recognizes another so who had been on that boat who had merited such fierce protection. We believed it had to be Che Guevara. It was reasonable to assume that it would have taken someone of his stature and importance of Che to motivate the four boats to remain in the fight and to sacrifice themselves in order

to give the fifth boat protection so it could open up and withdraw and escape. And then you got in here in Guevara's diary, the African dream, the diaries of the revolutionary war in the Congo, He writes about the pressure he and the rebels felt from the five commando ground troops and from the Navy's interdiction efforts By our daily patrols we had been able to nearly close down the rebel supply lines which he created which created a shortage of everything particularly food We also made sure weapons ammunition medicine could not reach their base They were systematically being deprived of everything they depended on as our Navy began to live up to its capabilities, the battle strategy was working exactly as we had planned and prepared for.

We intensified patrolling even more. And as Che's diary indicates, the intimidation factor we created kept the captains of their vessels from even attempting Translake supply missions. As supplies ran out, the attrition rate kicked up. And toward the end of the summer, the Simba's began deserting. Those desertion numbers would escalate slowly and then become a critical exodus into the fall campaign. And you just posted up with Che Guevara's diary. What is he said? Here's the African dream, the diaries of the

Revolutionary War in the Congo. And in the epilogue, he makes other references in the book. But in the epilogue, when he's discussing the mercenaries and the opposition, he says, their weapons do not currently add up. This is, he's writing to himself and to Castro. Their weapons do not currently add up to much. the most telling have been their PT boats, which have made it difficult to cross the lake. Blah, blah, blah.

There you go. It worked. By his own admission. Yeah. And you've got some good quotes in here that you pulled from there. Guvara's army suffered from a scarcity of competent leadership and lack of organization. According to his writings, his group was continually outmaneuvered by the Five Commando mercenaries that he refers to as guardsmen he says in that in that book I was informed that a large

number of guardsmen were outflanking us from the hills only one unit did honor to our army and resisted for another hour he continues from a military point of view the situation is difficult in that our troops are collections of armed men without the slightest discipline and without fighting spirit the CIA had built and fast forward a little bit the CIA had built a massive air force And the air campaign was critical to our mission success. A training program that had begun as early as 1961 at the request of the Congolese grew into a superb air force piloted solely by Cuban exiles. And you go into some of that. But that's another just awesome piece.

You know, the Cubans were willing to go out and fight wherever they could against communism. And they did. They were out there flying around strafing troops and taking out there. taking out their boats. I mean, pretty awesome effort. And you say this here. Ultimately, Che seemed to recognize the futility of his position. And this is again from his diary. Could I ask the Cubans to die in the trenches to defend this piece of nothing? He questions. He then sent another message by radio to Fidel Castro. Things are falling apart. Whole units and peasants are going over to the enemy, crew and boats in good condition urgently needed. Jay's calamity was nearly

finished in the Congo. Well, it was his own arrogance and ignorance at the outset, which led to this, because he really did, he did no assessment of the environment he was coming into and the people he thought he was going to be working with. He just thought he was going to come in and, make these people ideologically committed, and they didn't have, they didn't know communism from capitalism, from, you know, whatever, utopianism to whatever. They wanted to do what they'd always done, which rape, pillage, and blunder. And I thought that he could turn them into some kind of an ideological force was this nonsense. He was a romantic, revolutionary, and every sense of the word. He had, he loved to kill. There's ample evidence of that. And when he wanted some

practice, he'd just go into the prison in Havana. And he, it was all about his zeal for, quote, the revolution. And he couldn't build anything, which he proved when he was Minister of Industries in Cuba. He wasn't a builder. He was just a killer. Just a killer. I'm going to fast forward a little bit. November 21st, you talk about this would have been the day that Guevara and his men evacuated out of Tanzania. Jay Guevara and his ill-fated rebel band had been out of food, money, weapons supplies, and luck we ran them out of the Congo. They were sent packing by the combined efforts of the Force Naval Congolese and the mighty Makasi Air Force and the five-commando mercenary army. But even with that portion of the rebels, forces,

on the run are operations against the remaining insurgents continued. The events in Congo began to move quickly after the communist coup even forces pulled out the same week on November 25th, General Mobutu, stage of bloodless coup d'etat, which ousted President Kaza Vubu and Prime Minister Kimba. The coup also created internal Congolese constitutional problems, and even though the U.S. saw it as a way of preventing political and military disintegration. Mobutu was only 35 years old, and the Constitution required at a minimum presidential age of 40. The Constitution would have to be amended to accommodate him.

I've said that all of us in the Congo believe that Mobutu was the best option at the time. He was comparatively non-corrupt. Had demonstrated leadership skills, acknowledged his failures of his own troops as a part of an effort to upgrade its quality and performance and showed no signs of seeking revenge or retribution for anything in the past. The corruption in megalomania that would become the standard in his government was not evident at this time in his personal history Lieutenant Mike Hoare decides he's not going to extend his contract so he's done you got Mobutu taken over You say this here at this point Lobo one was the was only one nautical mile offshore Chavez and the crew then withdrew and took their swift boats another four miles out waited until dawn

through the course of the night began to rain hard there was an absolutely no visibility and there were no longer any night lights discernible at 4 a.m. they began to patrol again searching for lights as they had earlier they patrolled that area for another two hours but as the sun came up they lost any chance of spotting those lights again Chavez wrote how bright the lights on the beach were and then you say they waited still hoping to see those lights when no illumination were spotted on the shore the crew headed south back to their previous target at the end of the peninsula

So there they found clusters of lights in two groups when the crew was ordered to make a high fire. All the lights and both groups suddenly went out. Chavez ordered the crew to fire again and they found the enemy. A rapid exchange of gunfire erupted between the boats and the enemy on the shore. For nearly an hour, Chavez and his crew were embroiled in a ship to shore battle using all weapons on board until Chavez log finally records. They don't shoot anymore. Lobo won and taken out an enemy stronghold. They had been out of the lake, out on the lake for more than 24 hours.

and engaged in two serious gunfights attacked on the water and from the shore. And these are all, these are just highlights that I'm hitting, you give really good details and you got the log books from Chavez. I mean, it's pretty awesome to read this stuff. In fact, this is like one of those cool points you say. When I began the project of writing this book,

I opened the ship's log book for the first time in years. I found a note, one page of line paper torn from a loose leaf binder lying inside the front cover. The note is addressed to me. I don't remember reading it at the time, but seeing it nearly half century later written in a little bit of phonetic spanglish. I found it a gracious parting gift from the crew. Chief, it says, we give you good year, 1966. Employees of Force Navy Kivu Captain R. Chavez, 1-966.

Ricardo and his men had indeed handed me and all of us concerned a very good year. No, it's a treasure. Yeah, that's awesome to be able to find that. as this stuff is kind of winding down and we mentioned that Mike Hor's kind of done with his contract and you've got this you know you got this story in here just get the book to get this story but the and you mentioned these guys earlier you got this guy named John Peters who's one of whores you know top guys um and then you've got Cassidy uh and You say, let me make sure I get this right. Peters had been responsible for securing any of the resources five commando had taken during their raids.

Peters was an ex-NCO who was said to have a fanatical prejudice against the British officer class. He was also ruthless killer, may have been a deserter from the British Army. And then on the, so you got that guy. You got this guy, John Peters. And then you've also got another guy named Von Oppen, or sorry, Van Oppen. And Van Oppen, you say here it was a textbook, perfect as a British officer, tall and handsome, upper-crust British accent, had attended the Royal Military Academy at Sandhurst. He'd gotten court-martialed because of something had happened, like something got stolen.

And he ends up not graduating, but he ends up fighting in Korea. He ends up fighting in Egypt. then he serves in the federal army in Rhodesia. And basically you go through this whole story. It's just fascinating to read about. These guys are basically in competition for who's going to take over as leaders of the five commando. Correct.

And one of them ends up dead. Van Oppen ends up dead with a bunch of bullets in his stomach. Self-inflicted. Allegedly. A click. A click. I mean a clip, a whole clip. Self-inflicted.

like the tough guy you know it's it's wild you know because a lot of this stuff you know growing up I was always fascinated with the military you know I was fascinated with anyone you know mercenaries soldier of fortune like all this stuff was part of my childhood you know the movies and so when you like kind of know these names like I did I mean I've always known about my core you know he's this famous guy and five commando you know about these things and you know about the Rhodesians and the recruiting that happened with the Rhodians to bring British military down there and just like the Rhodesian commandos,

like all those things that all, you shed so much light on those things and it's wild for me to think about because every time I think about my core, I'm like, no, you were actually, you worked with this guy. How long were you there for a total? A little less a year.

So this is a guy you worked with like directly And all these crazy mercenary killers. When crazy mercenary killers was a thing. Because listen, there's a modern day version of a mercenary that goes out and does security and they're working for the government and they're getting hired by one of these big contractors. And look, there's been some flare-ups. There's been some things that have happened that have certainly have been investigated and some people have been punished. I don't have a lot of details about that. But basically, it's a much more common thing that, oh, this country is.

A guy retired from the Marine Corps, went to work for this company, he's going overseas as a contractor. Yeah. That's not the same thing. That's just not the same thing as what these guys were. These guys are legit mercenaries. And this is your day-to-day interactions. You built the Navy with these guys.

Oh, it's wild to read. Going back to the book here, and you mentioned this earlier, but it was a cruel element of fate that came into a world on the afternoon of November. 28 that would take a major toll on our crew about six o'clock in the evening a young Congolese corporal was driving a poorly maintained truck down this military transport road and with no warning the truck has sputtered and stopped stalling directly in front of the bar Kalamay just near the Bada Bada boot store and a few hundred meters north of the hotel Doolock that's where you can

guys lived the Bada Boots store was the only store in Albertville that had glass on the windows anecdote yeah so this truck breaks down and and it just doesn't move and so it's a Sunday evening a new moon it just occurred so at 1.35 a.m. on Monday it was pitch black African night on the deserted street with a five-ton hazard laying in weight there was no caution lights on the truck no reflectors nothing that would mark the presence of an enormous vehicle abandoned on a dark dry road in the middle of the night a pair of five commando mercenary soldiers from south africa hans von leers and cornelius johans von week had been out together that night gooch was with them the three of them had driven that road many times and knew the terrain very well von leers was behind the wheel and gooch was in the shotgun seat van weik was riding in the back in the blackness of the African night with the driver feeling sure of himself the Jeep came racing down that road at a high rate of speed

the official accident report states that the Jeep slammed full force into the back of the transport truck thrusting the truck forward and embedding its front bumper solidly into a coconut palm Man Lera's lay half inside and half outside the Jeep. He was still alive when the first witness

ran to the scene. The other South African Van Wic was also still alive and was quickly taken to the hospital for treatment. Gooch was killed instantly. I was not informed about the incident, about the accident until the next morning. When I got the news, I was immediately, I went immediately to where his body had been placed.

Cassidy came with me from the source that is now lost to memory. We found wood and materials and hammered together a coffin. With the assistance of Chavez, Pachardo, and Poppo, we wrapped in a strong, heavy canvas and transported it down to the port,

where we somehow managed to get a refrigeration unit in one of the warehouses working. We made sure that Gooch's body was held appropriately until a plane could get it to Albertville to make the transport to Leopoldville. There it could be properly prepared for the onward trip back to the USA. Gooch was certainly not the first casualty he had dealt with, but he was the one that affected me the most. Having to handle his body with respect in those extremely crude circumstances was most disheartening.

It was my challenge and my response. And we did our best in that terrible situation to get our friend and Comrade's body back safely to his family His contribution to our mission had been essential I've carried guilt around for 50 years for obeying my instructions from the agency Not to speak with his wife at the time in retrospect It was an exaggerated security concern by the agency I'm hoping that this book will adequately say what I would have said all those years ago The Goff family children remember the day well when they heard the news.

They arrived home from school and some family friends were there. A priest, Father Alphonse Olive, who was also a family friend, was there. He took the children into the bedroom and told them what happened. It was a very difficult time for the family. They were not able to get a lot of information from the agency about the circumstances of Gooch's death. youngest son Nat was the one who eventually did the research years later trying to fit all the pieces together Marcel René Gough Gouche to us was buried at an Arlington National Cemetery on December 6th 1965 he was just 41 years old his son Mickey who is known as little Gouch

remembers that many of his father's UDT and EOD mates were at Arlington that day for the funeral One of his most vivid memories is of the casket. He describes it as being made of dark tropical wood. It was a small piece of the Congo that went with Gooch, and then onto his final rest. His name is also inscribed on the memorial wall at the Navy Sealed Museum in Fort Pierce, Florida, where it belongs. And also, you mentioned this later in the book, in 2016, they added a gold star, to the CIA Memorial Wall at their headquarters in Langley, Virginia, in honor of Gooch's sacrifice.

I love a guy. When did you, you said you met, you finally met the family around the time this book came out? What they do afterwards? She worked at the CIA and, you know, whatever. They, they, I think we, if I remember correctly, we met, in 2014, we, had the 50th commemoration of the hostage rescue at Stanleyville, which was the prelude of this

book. And that was the large, I think the largest rescue of American hostages in history, at least up to that time. And Five Commando gets the credit for the rescue, but it was really Cubans led by an American guy named Rip Robertson, CIA paramilitary guy who got there first. There is a on the cover of Paris Match magazine and sometime in 65 or 66, 65, sorry, 64, damn it, come on Jim. There's a picture of the swarthy guy who she didn't know was Cuban holding this little blue-up blonde hair, blue-eyed four-year-old girl with a machine gun and in his other hand, and she and a whole bunch of the other people who were rescued, including four of the five sons of the American missionary who was murdered at KM8,

kilometer 8, outside of Stanleyville. Two of the sons were wounded, but not severely, during that rescue period, four of those five sons, and all these other people, including this little girl, and not a little girl any longer, obviously, 50 years later, all came to Miami to the commemoration, because none of them had ever met the people who rescued them. It was very moving.

You can imagine. For sure. They never met the people who'd say their lives. And these four American, or I guess they're Americans, they've been born and raised in the Congo, where their dad was died, they're still in the Congo doing the Lord's work. The amazing guys. Anyway, these people all came.

The only coverage, the only coverage, was the Miami TV station. Gee, what's the guy's name? He's been a real friend of the community. For this very moving event. I mean, you know, all these people's lives were saved, both Americans and other than. nationalities, not counting all the Congolese.

And that's one of the reasons I wanted to write this, because the Cubans have never been given any recognition for what they did. This is it. And, you know, it's just outrageous in my mind. And none of those Cuban politicians have gotten off their butts and done anything about it in Florida either, which I cannot understand. But anyway, that was a very moving event, that 50th commemoration. Wow.

All those people there to say, thanks, for coming from all around the world. And we couldn't even get anybody from Washington, D.C. Figures. Fast forward a little bit here. You know, you got more fighting with the rebels. You're beating the rebels. The Cuban sailors start kind of turning over. with the locals and with the five commando.

And just to close out this part of the book, you say here with my Cuban crew gone and missions winding down, it was finally time for me to pack up and leave Congo. I did so exactly as I had arrived quietly. I boarded the C-46 in Albertville with my three pairs of khaki pants, three safari shirts, and a pair of desert boots.

And that was that. Yeah, was that. How was, So what did you do when you got back? How was your transition back to the world? Well, you know, when you're, you know, very well, when you're working with that amount of adrenaline constantly pumping into your system, it takes a while to come down.

You know, you miss it. It's, it's, I've never done a drug in my life, but I can't imagine it can be any more addictive than that. degree of adrenaline constantly being injected into your system. So I met a lady in Leopold, she worked at the embassy there and she was in so I kind of chased her around for a little while and tried to figure out what I really what I was going to do next. They by this time they agency had decided they wanted me to go into the career training program and I

really liked what I had been done and I liked the people that I'd worked with. I mean how you know how can you be first you deal with seals and then you deal with the best guys they got in the agency I mean that's a that's a hell of a run with an incredible amount of autonomy as a 26 year old yeah you're freaking running a war in the Congo exactly well then I Oh, I remember now what I was going to do. I wanted to go to Laos. Then I'd have been the only guy in the sort of special ops community who had done Vietnam, Congo, and Laos.

Whoopee. I mean, today, what was it? Anyway, at the time, it would be fun to do. Well, I got conned by the best, who basically said, okay, you can be a knuckle-drager all your life where you can really get into the tough stuff. and he wanted me to be a strictly foreign intelligence, need to be an intelligence, be a case officer.

So I went into the career training program, got all the training, which was terrific. And then at the end of that, you basically got, I didn't want to go in the embassy. I didn't want anything to do with the embassy. And of course, that's career. path in the agency, you've got to really, got to be in the embassy because that's where most case officers are. And I said, no, that's not for me. And they said, well, might as well be a

non-official cover. And I said, you'll be all alone. And I said, sounds great. And so they fixed me up with a cover that was illegal in the country that I went to. So I had to set my own cover, which meant starting a business. And that worked out well. It provided a good cover, and the business was afforded me a way of enhancing my ability to collect the kind of intelligence they were interested at the time. This was in Southeast Asia, so Vietnam was hot. What years is this, This is 68, 67, 69. And so the country that I went to was hostile at the time. And so that was pretty exciting, doing some interesting stuff.

And then the country went our way. They just opted for the West. It was a battleground country from the Communists, or from the West. It went our way. So now I just got bored. I mean, I just got bored. It was... Was there any other countries they put on the plate for you?

Well, then there would have been. But you were bored. But I was bored. I had a personal problem I had to deal with. We required some professional help. And couldn't get it anywhere else. And I had really liked starting that business. and so I fired off an application to Harvard Business School

figuring, you know, at the time, it's not like that today, I don't think, but at the time, they were interested in screwballs who had sort of under different kind of backgrounds. And I thought, well, you know, I'm happy doing one. I got no complaints. I'm happy to know what if I can get to Harvard Business School, I'll go otherwise, I'll keep doing what I'm doing. This isn't a bad.

and I got in and so I fired off a resignation which shocked everybody because again I didn't have any complaints I've been well treated they said quote the words were shocked and dismayed and I said hey what can I say I got no complaints this has been great I'm just going to do something else so that was it that was it I went to business school and went back, went back to Asia for the next 35 years. And what were you doing? What kind of businesses were you like? Well, we were, first thing I did was I was in charge of building the first Sheraton in Asia, which was the Hong Kong Sheraton. And I met this guy in Atlanta who was the most remarkable business guy I've ever worked with.

And it was terrible to start with him because I thought this is what business was going to be like. And I never met another one like it. But in a way, he was kind of like, Johnson. You know, you see, once he made a decision on you, that was it. He just backed you to the yield. So with two weeks of real estate experience, one week in his office, and one week at the Travel Crow Company in Dallas, which was the number one real estate company in the whole country at the time, I went out, he took me out to Hong Kong, said, this is Chumhawz, he speaks for me, and he left. And it was the deepest hole in Hong Kong at the time. It was a phenomenal,

financing was not in place. It was on the tail end of the cultural revolution. So people in Hong Kongers were still looking for the exit because they didn't know What was going to happen? Whatever is 50 years later was going to might happen then. Right And so we basically said figured out So I'd had some experience at that so it was okay. I mean I didn't really didn't know much it didn't I didn't I there was talent around the new real estate. It was sort of how to get it all all put together. And my deal on that was a handshake. I worked for mighty low wages for a project. That was the biggest, most glamorous project in Hong Kong. And I was basically working for peanuts. But the deal was that he'd give me a stake on my own because he correctly said when we first got

acquainted, he said, look, I know what you're like, you're going to want to go on your own. And that's fine. Just promised me we'll do a deal together. So that was, it was a handshake. This guy was, I told you, I never mind anyone like it in the business world. Anyway, his personal life was a shambles, but his professional life was absolutely perfect. The guy was just behaved perfectly in business. And which defies the usual rule that people have about that. Anyway, so the Sheraton was, and we, in Hong Kong, the culture revolution was, was, was, ending and Hong Kong was starting to come back because it was such an incredibly

resilient and energetic place with all those Chinese entrepreneurs and so the project was going good so I called him and I said well I'm ready to I'm ready to to do my own deal there was kind of a silence and he said okay let me know what you want to do so I go back to Indonesia, dumbass that I am, because here I've done the most glamorous project in Hong Kong. So what do I do? I leave to go back to go back to Indonesia. Well, I got lucky on Indonesia because the offshore oil industry was just starting. There was no office space. And I created the first office park in Indonesia, which is as close as I can make it to perimeter office park in Atlanta, Georgia. In fact, I went into them, said, I'd like to.

do this in Indonesia can have a set of your plans. I said, well, I guess we'll never do anything in Indonesia. Yeah, here. So he gave me a set of the plans and modified them. No kid. And did this office park in Jakarta, which was a roaring success, which is exactly when I should have quit. Except at this point, I thought I was a hell of a businessman. I thought I was a hell of a businessman. Anyway, so I stayed in Indonesia for a while and did some more stuff in Indonesia. And by this time we had one daughter and another one on the way and my wife had trouble carrying. So we had to be near the right kind of medical facilities. There were none in Indonesia.

So we moved to Singapore. Stayed in Singapore for the next 10 or 12 years or whatever. and had huge successes and huge failures. I went up and down like a yo-yo. And so I've basically been connected with Asia ever since. And we started the first venture capital firm, which was based in Hong Kong, with the grand capital fund of $2 million,

mostly passing the hat to people around and about. And that brought the first McDonald's to Asia, which, of course, was a roaring success. It made us all look better than we were. And it did a number of other things. The first of K is in Asia, the first McDonald's in Asia, the first shirt in Asia. It was a great time to be there.

Great time to be there. And the thing I loved about Southeast Asia is it was kind of like going through seal training. Nobody knew who your daddy was, nobody cared. it was all on you. You've made your own reputation. That was good with me. And then, you know,

then the American lawyers and the American banks started coming in and screwing it up. But it was the best time in the history of the world to be there. And since then I've just,

since then I've just done stuff, you know, business things, entrepreneurial type things. But you spent the last few years in Africa, is that right? Yes. And what were you doing there this time? Well,

Allegedly. When I was in Burma on a two-month consulting gig that turned out to be a year, a friend of mine had taken over CEO of the biggest bank in Burma and mentored to the daughters of the owner. A really remarkable guy. He is. And he said, come on, take a look around, because they had 450 branches and scattered throughout Burma, or Myanmar as it's known today. and about half of them are out there in the boonies

where there are 31 to 33 dissident armies depending on whose drugs were moving that day. And so, and everything was cash. 95% of that economy is cash, was cash. So they had some security concerns, and my pal came, you know, my friend who had done some stuff with in China years before, said, come on out and have a look around,

will you for a couple months? I said, sure, well, that turned out to be a year. And during that year, the military did their coup. So it was becoming a little less inviting for people with our kind of a background. And about this time, about this time, I get a call from Africa. Hong Kongo says, are you interested in doing a surveillance program in the Gulf of Guinea? Because the locus of kidnapping and piracy and so forth that was shifting from Horn of Africa to the Gulf of Guinea. And I said, no, I'm not interested in a surveillance program.

I said, you can get a radar. You guys think surveillance is radars. You can get a radar manufacturer. We'll be glad to flog you some radars, half-ass train your people, and disappear. I'm not interested in that. So if you're interested in a comprehensive solution, I'd be interested. And I said, well, what's that? And I said, well, I'll write it up for you and send you a PowerPoint.

And it had to do with surveillance detection, instant, reliable, communication. reliable communications, rapid reaction force, blah, blah, blah, blah. None of which any of them had. And they said, oh, we like this. So I said, okay, I'll come, but let's get one thing straight. I'm too old to run away from the IRS. And y'all's reputation is you're doing, not mine. So anything I do, I can be able to sign with a U.S. company, the LLC, and a U.S. bank account.

Oh, yeah, don't worry, no problem, no problem. These places are as corrupt as Washington. Okay? Terrible. And so I've been the last three years working on those in several countries, and it looks like it's going to happen. I hope it's going to happen because it's a worthy way to go out. Eastern Congo is where 75% of the river minerals come.

from and it's actually slavery. I mean it is real life, so I'm not exaggerating it's slavery. It's terrible. And they're more, it's a worse hurt, it's distinguishing is hardly worth doing, but it's arguably worse than the Ukraine. And you know, periodically the western western countries sit out of a training team and blah, blah, and they go around. But you know, they're out in a terrain that's got no roads or if they do they're impassable for most of the year.

And so how do people move around? Well, they move around in the rivers. The bad guys move around in the rivers. The good guys don't. They don't have a river capability. And all the locals move around in the river. So I finally met

this minister, and I said, Minister. I said, number one, the only way you know what's going on out there is you get in a plane with your staff and you fly out there and then you've got to find them on impassable roads. And then when you find them, you've got no maneuverability and you don't have any way to find out what you did, what happened after you got there. You said you've got to have instant communications, which are available if you know how to access them. I said you got to have a riverine capability because that's how the bad guys move. So you've got to have a rapid reaction force and you've got to have the right kind of equipment and have the right kind of trading. And here's the package.

And they all say they want to do it. And a critical part of it has been figuring out to get them financed. And I think we've got that figured out. Solved. So we're getting my... mighty close, but I hate to say we're doing it because, you know, you're not doing it until you're doing it, but we're mighty close, and that's what I've been working on. It's about four countries. Still got a lot of stuff going on.

Well, the only way to go. You know, it's interesting, too, and just going back to the book here for a second, you know, the way this all turned out, government corruption, of course, allowed many The idea many of the riches of the Congo to be exported. It was a country with deep reserves of copper, cobalt, uranium, and diamonds. 1971, Mobutu renamed the country Zaire. Diamonds ended up surpassing everything as the Congo's main export, including cobalt and copper. Diamonds made up 30% of the country's total exports in 1989, but through corruption and financial mismanagement, the entire mining industry was in jeopardy, and its share of the GDP went from 11.3%.

in 1988 to 4.7% in 1994. Mobudu's ill-conceived fiscal programs drove the country from bad to worse as the years wore on, even as his personal fortune soared. Over his 32-year reign, he was estimated to be worth as much as $5 billion while almost all facets of life in Congo deteriorated. He maintained a presidential services fund that took up between 17 and 20% of the government's budget. He owned personal stock in every enterprise relating to Zaire and Congo, and it was said that no business transaction with a foreign-owned company was allowed to take place unless a kickback was paid to Mobutu. Personally, he was the largest shareholder in the bank of Kinsasha and had personal ownership, either partial or outright in agricultural businesses, mining and manufacturing in all provinces the country. But as Mobutu and his family members and hand-picked cronies grew wealthier, the country fell to near ruin.

The highway road and rail systems were in utter disrepair. The health care system wasn't funded. Human rights violations were rampant. Just a few years before Mobutu would finally leave the scene, according to the same Harvard study, the country faced a risk of virtual disintegration due to hyperinflation. The GDP plummeted, pushing the economy into substance. Agriculture by the end of 1995 income per capita was only one third its pre-independence levels Mobutu got forced out of power in 1997 he died in exile a year after that Laurent Kabila took over I was in I was in Sierra Leone in

In 1998 as the war was going off and things were getting crazy again in the Congo the echo mag was down there working But it sounds like you're back there now, at least trying to make a positive impact. Yeah, four different countries. Outstanding. What else? Is that it? Are we up to speed? Are we up to present day?

I think we're pretty close. Echo, you got any questions? This is going to seem out of nowhere, but how Singapore right now is a place to live? I was in Singapore when we're declared independence. right after that because I went down from Vietnam before you were allowed to go to Singapore from Vietnam

and it was so I've seen the whole transition the whole growth I'm remarkable remarkable what can be done when the corruption is at an absolute minimum and you got everybody focused with a strong leader

Singapore is garden spot, just a garden spot. It's now expensive. And now they're, now they have a bit of a social problem, and it's just gotten so expensive. They got to do, you got to do something to keep the spark, a spark going, which was, but yes, the, Lequan Yu was, it was a multiracial with all the,

with all of the, I mean, just the next door in Malaysia, there was always the Chinese Malay problem. I wouldn't, none of that in Singapore. The Indian community in Singapore was, was small, comparatively small, but extremely important. And Li Kuan Yu was able to take this team of Chinese, Indians, and a couple of Malays, and lead that growth. No, corruption tolerated and unleashed the entrepreneurial spirit within the rules. And it's just been extraordinary to watch. It was extraordinary. I knew those guys.

I mean, I knew so many of his old team. That's what, so I remember, I can remember when they did the classic thing, and came the garment, garment, guys, because they had to get people employed. What he did, what he did was he gave everybody a stake in success of Singapore by making sure everybody was an owner of their own residence. Now, in doing that, he had to get rid of the traditional villages, which caused, you know, a lot of people in the West. Just remember when all this was going on,

and you guys were having to read the New York Times and the Washington Post, I was out there and I was reading the Bangkok Times, post in the Singapore Straits Times and the Jarkar Post in the Malaysian Times. Whole different stuff. Okay. So he, I can remember, I can remember when at the start of it all, once a year, Lee Kwan, you would pick out an expatriate business leader and hang him. Not literally hang him, but, you know, he just would assume that he was up to something.

making an example. Okay, was that fair and good? He generally picked the right guys. I remember how significant was the first time he picked a Chinese business leader to make an example of. That was because it reflected actually what was happening in the society.

The Chinese were slowly taking over everything that had previously been colonial or whatever. Yeah, It started out with a factory, you know, just the factory, the garment workers. I remember how embarrassed they were in Singapore when they had an outbreak of Coro. And Coro was supposed to, was a group hysteria in which the men were afraid that their scrotums were ascending into their lower abdomen. And they got hysterical. This happened in factories.

And they had a name for it. I think it was Koro, if I remember correctly. And dealing with all that kind of stuff. And, I mean, they went through the whole thing, except they went through it with a guy who was adamant against corruption and was focused on success in what was good for Singapore. And the U.S. didn't make it easy for them early on in the early days because they considered him a socialist.

I mean, I'd take a look around at the guys, you know, go back to that headquarters thing. We never listened to the guys who worked with OCHYMEN during the Second World War. Never paying attention to OCHIman was a communist. OCHIman wanted to be successful. In Hong Kong, in Lombo, in Lombo, communist, communist, communist, communist, communist, commas. Lambo was looking for friends. We weren't going to be his friend because the Belgians didn't like him.

And therefore, we couldn't like him. So he goes to go to Russia. When I was doing the research for this, I was all starting. starting off with a set what I'd always thought about. I would come to the conclusion, the Mamba was a hardcore communist. He was just looking for friends and where he could get the money

to help him do what he was trying to do. Lee Kuan Yew, socialists, or he wasn't a socialist, he understood his people. He understood what it would take to grow. And he would listen. He got this Dutch economic guy, economist, and the two of them together

put the master plan for what become Singapore. And then not only that, he voluntarily stepped down. I mean, tell me how many dictators have done that anywhere, any continent. So, anyway, that starts kind of a wordy answer to your question. It's a great place. I lived there for 15 or 20 years. RETO. Yeah. Jim, any other closing thoughts? term limits I support them Meritocracy

I support it awesome well you know before closing out I just wanted to go to the book one last time you gave a speech at a reunion to honor those that had fought in the Congo the Americans the Cubans the Belgians I think this was 2014

that was the 50th commemoration And here's what you said about these men, and I'm just going to read an extra probably. You said, these men, these fine men will receive no recognition, no medals, no Rose Garden, thanks. They've always known that is the way it would be. And they have never asked for more. What they will have that no one can ever deny them is the respect, admiration, and affection of those who are there and who truly know how bravely and honorably these men performed. And of course the gratitude from those who were saved.

What these men had was each other, their mutual trust, respect, their pride in their performance, and their dedication to the eradication of communism. There were no expressions of entitlement, and there are still none. They took the conditions, circumstances, and threats that were presented and did what they were tasked with accomplishing. They were disciplined and proud participants in a historical event, saving thousands. of lives including those we are privileged to have with us here today in their desire to salute their rescuers It is no exaggeration to say that these folks would not have survived that terror without the intervention and performance of these men 50 years later there are lessons in these events relevant to today's war on terror It takes dedicated men of intelligence judgment and courage willing to go into harm's way to do the job to

to protect the lives of the innocent and to destroy those of perverted political and religious beliefs who seek to harm us. Please join me and salute these deserving men. Well, sir, we salute these heroes for sure. I'm glad we can tell their story and salute you for your service. And thank you, sir, for what you did for the teams

and what you did for our. country and for the cause of freedom in the world. Thank you. Thank you for what you do. Thank you for what you did. Thank you what you do and what you're going to continue to do. And I really appreciate this because not enough people know about these guys. Well, we're telling them now.

Amen. Thanks, sir. Thank you. And with that, Jim Hoss has left the building. Definitely an pretty awesome conversation. You go back to that 26 years old being in the Congo by yourself working with random mercenaries and foreign nationals and putting together to fight a war against insurgents. That's pretty awesome. And it's pretty awesome.

He kept referring back to the training, right? Yeah, and I think that's such a huge part and he mentioned Ben Milligan. I'll mention Ben Milligan as well in that book, in Ben Milligan's book by water beneath the walls. You know, he, he ties that route back into the U.S. Navy and the Navy in general and how when you're out on a ship by yourself in the middle of nowhere, you've got to make things happen. It's decentralized command. So this is an incredible example of decentralized command for a 26-year-old lieutenant junior. great in the U.S. Navy to roll out and run a counterinsurgency in a different country. So very cool.

Lots of things going on. Definitely appreciate it. I also obviously love hearing some of those old stories about what training was like. When he sent me some, a little bit of a bio, he said, you know, class 29E and then he had in parentheses winter. He wanted to let me know that it was a winter hell week. about the snow and everything but yeah that stuff's pretty cool is that that's a big difference though right the winter versus because you guys talk about that here or at the end of the day is it just hard hard it's hard hard let's face it it's a little bit colder yeah it's a little bit colder

you know what i'm saying yeah my i think my hell week was like a spring hell week yeah it was like a spring hell week and that's still cold right coronado oh yeah i mean it definitely was cold i mean you're You're going to be cold, but it wasn't 37 degrees, which in a winter hell week out here, it can be 37 degrees, 41 degrees. Yeah. They, and, and, and listen, there's some different suffering that happens in the summertime. Yeah. Because you're hotter. Mm-hmm.

And being hot sucks. And, and I guess in the winter, in the summertime, you're more swollen and more chafed. Oh, for a, damn. So, you know, pick your poison. Yeah. But I think you got to, if you just run the numbers. more people quit in hell week during the winter time. I think if you just run the numbers,

I can't sit here and defend it. I can't be like, well, you know, it's just as hard. No, if you run the numbers, you're going to find winter hell week, less survivors. Damn. Yeah, that's. And East Coast winter hell week, snow on the ground?

Yeah, you know some people are quitting. You know when you see that snow. Some people are quitting straight out. Yeah, he mentioned that where it's like, yeah, you fall down in the snow. Like, damn. That's just psychologically. right out the gate.

The interesting thing is they're going to get you. They're going to get you. And they're going to make you, they're going to push you to your physical limit. You're like, how many push-ups can you do right now if I dropped you down and said, I want you do as many push-ups as you can? If you give me a minute and a half to, like, stretch out. Okay, yep, you got that minute and a half to stretch out. How many are you going to get?

Solid. Probably 120, maybe. Okay, so you do 120 push-ups. And then what are you going to do when I tell you to keep going? Lay down. You know what I'm saying? Like, by the way, how long would it take you to 120 pushups? 140 seconds?

120 seconds. Okay, so two minutes. So let's say I drop you down. You do two minutes worth of push-ups. Yeah. Two minutes. We have 14 more hours to kill in this day. First phase of buds, right?

Like you could exhaust yourself in every exercise. And guess what? You're going to keep going. Yeah, that's true. So you're going to reach your physical limitation. You're going to reach your mental limitation when you freak out about stuff and stress and all this stuff. So they're going to get you.

It's going to be 37 degrees. It might be 45 degrees. It might be 52 degrees. Yeah. But they're going to get you. They're going to get a bunch of people to quit. So the cool thing is you learn that adaptability and you learn how to make things happen, which is what Jim Haas put to use in Vietnam and then over in the Congo.

The D-Roc, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. So speaking of things going on. on. We all have a lot of things going on. You should, hopefully. We're trying to have a lot of things going on. You need to fuel that. Get yourself some Jocko fuel.

I just drank two. Jock goes. What's cool is? I feel so good. And I'm going to feel good. Yeah. I'm going to feel good. There's no, not going to be a crash.

In two hours, I'm not going to be coiled up watching a Netflix series. In fact, I'm going to be trying to. in a little while. You know? So that's what we're doing. That's what we're getting after. Jockofuel.com, go check that out. We got ready, by the way, once when Jim left the building,

Jock grabbed a milk. I grabbed an RTD. Ready to drink, milk, protein, get yourself some of that. We're in a bunch of stores around the world, well, around the country right now. We're in vitamin shop. Number one brand in vitamin shop.

You wear that? Yes. I am. I saw that process go down. Good to be. Military commissers were in there. We're in Hanford. We're in dash stores. We're in Wakeford and shop for shop right. We're in H.E.B. down in Texas where it's crushing.

I was just in Texas. They have the big, they call it an end cap in the industry. And what that means is, you know how we're an aisle in the grocery store? And at the end of the aisle, there could be some product there. They have a whole end. cap that whole end is just jaco fuel stuff powder pow pow pow pow wow yeah it's good because all these things

like um you know when you can kind of compare it to others and all this stuff where because I have been guilty of this in the past distant past where man I need like an energy drink or even like one of these little ready to drink proteins or whatever and bro I just ignore the amount of sugar in there I'm just going to ignore that because man I'm on the go

you know I'm leaving or whatever kinds of excuses that are just RTEs ready to excuse. So RTEs all day. And the thing is that is factually true where I'm like, hey man, maybe I'm going into catapolic breakdown or something like this. So I do need that protein or whatever. Sure. You know, so I'll get the, you know, these other, I don't want to name me anything.

You know, throw nobody under the bus. But you do get these ready to drink protein milk. At a gas station somewhere. We'll say gas station or a 7-11, something like this. And yeah, like you see, if you dare to look at the sugar or these other things. Hey, listen, honestly, if you remotely care about your health and you look at the sugar, you're putting it back. Yeah, put it back. Look, if I'm guilty of that, I won't.

I'm not even looking. You know what I mean? And I know it's just a lie. Yeah. Once you look and you go, oh, 36 grams of sugar, serving size, one, servings per container, two. So you're about to ingest 72 grams of sugar. That doesn't make up for being catabolic. That protein is not worth it.

It's not worth what is you doing, your insulin levels. And it's true, bro. So in a situation like that, this is how it used to be for me, where, hey, man, I'll just pay that price just today. Look, I'm not doing it every day. Just today I'll pay that price. And so you pay that price. Like, of course, you pay the price for the product, you know, at the register.

But come on, that price is going with you down the street. You see what I'm saying? Brought, not anymore, man. Bro, I'll grab two of those, whatever. 60 grams of protein. I pounded yesterday. I pounded two, just back to back. Just got it done.

Yeah. Banana banana. Yep. No additional cost of your, your conscience. No. At all. It's clean. Clean fuel.

Clean fuel. Jock fuel. By the way, listen. Time war. This is something. Here's my anecdotal story. I went to the muster. At the muster, you have those downstage monitors.

They are a certain size. When I look, so you were standing on stage and you look down to see. to see what the notes are and listen I've been blessed knock on wood without my vision's always been good and like a lot of people my age my friends they have glasses like they wear eyeglasses to read or they wear eyeglasses to look far or whatever I've been very very lucky but you know sometimes you like especially if my eyes get a little tired I got read a bunch sometimes it's sort of notice or something I'm like what is this and so I was at the muster and I'm like hey did we get bigger downstage monitors and west is like no it's the same size and I said oh are using a bigger

font he's like no that's the standard and I was like oh I can see more clearly why is that there's only one variable that's changed time more and we have ocular nutrition in there so yeah that's like one small element but I'll tell you what's not even a small element I will never I will take I will take Time War for the rest of my life right now, like 100%. Just off that right there. That's just incredible. And to know that you're fueling your body and keeping it in on the path is freaking epic. So get Time War, try it out.

Let me know what you think. I think it's freaking legit. So there you go. JoccoFuel.com. Check it out. Yeah, that mix of Time War because it has a lot of stuff in there. Like even vitamins, minerals, all the, all the, in the anti-aging stuff or whatever. It's funny.

So a mix like that, right? Where it's not like, you know, when you drink a coffee, you know, it's like I know what the coffee is going to do. So it's made me feel more alert or awake, whatever, all that stuff or whatever. But a mix like that, it's funny how all the little cracks in your performance capable, like the little teeny tiny stuff, like whether it be your vision, whether it be just a little ache, whether it be like you falling asleep faster or when you wake up, like certain like just things that you just took for granted. Because they don't like go down as smoothly. I'm telling you with Time Wars is this is another thing that I am noticing is like a higher Consistent I don't want to call it energy, but there's like a higher It is an energy, but it's not like a spike of energy. It's like oh, I just feel more better more better

Yeah, yeah. Make that the thing more better. Make that the slogan. You you feel like oh like I'll be let's call it let's call it 747 in the morning sure workouts done and sometimes in the past 747's kind of a little little low

you know what I mean like kind of tired worked out went for a run feeling a little feeling a little bit of a a downturn yeah and right now I'm like feel good that's real good yeah you keep it going again

what's the what's the what's the what's the change just one change time more anyways freaking awesome check it out time more joccofield.com also origin USA dot com go this is where you can eat your jeans American made stuff this is not just jeans obviously but all American made from the cotton grown yeah in the fields to the manufacturing to the even the little buttons on there everything made in America that's whatever they try to trick you these other brands like a lot of them they'll be like, oh, yeah, I made in America. Yeah.

Sometimes they make those buttons. Yeah. How many T's are in button? Two. How many do I say? Zero. Zero. Button.

Button. No, no, no. Silent, uh, double silent two T's. Button. You know. You say button. But either way. Sometimes.

Nonetheless, we want those buttons made in America. Whole gig. And if you're down for that, that's how OriginUSA.com. Well, a lot of good stuff on there. Gies on there too. New Gie out. By the way. Yeah.

Nano wee is it pearl nano weave is a nano pearl nano pro yeah yeah see that one's legit So I took mine home yesterday yeah yeah yeah and I have my old defgy I made the little comparison Let's make it too I feel you I feel the upgrade yes good that's a good one there's a good one there Yeah, it's true also jaco stores called jaco store this where you can get your discipline equals freedom Shirts hats hoodies if you're representing on this path and we're on the path You'd be crazy not to be in this day and age with all this good guidance. There's a lot of negativity actually is a more important reason to be on what we're calling the path. Yeah.

What is known as the other day what's weird is I noticed the other day. So listen, I'm not, you know some people like, hey, you got to bring more positivity in your life like those kind of things and watch out for negativity. And give me some more of those little sayings like negative people cut them away like all those kind of things. I've heard that a lot in my life And I've always not thought much of it It didn't really mean much to me You know to me it was like oh you gotta stay positive I didn't even think that was a thing

But I don't know there's something like in the last week Where I it was like I saw a bunch of negative things All in a very short period of time I was like oh That's what people mean and you could get sucked into that negativity Yeah and it didn't really make sense to me before Because it's never really been a temptation for me to be negative for it get sucked in that negative thing. And it's also such an instinct for me to be like,

oh, cool, we got a problem, cool, we're going to go crush it. That's positive thinking. I never thought too much about that. But now I'm like, oh, I get it. So watch out for that negativity. Yep. That's what I'm saying.

So we're staying on the path, by the way. Yes, sir. And yeah, if you're representing on it, that's where you can get your stuff. Junkostore.com. It's not a placebo. Remember when you were a kid and you got new sneakers

and you ran faster? Yes, no doubt about it. This is like you get a shirt locker T-shirt, all of a sudden you're more disciplined. Yep. Well, the shirt locker shirt, that's like for us enjoying ourselves on the path, you know? So we kind of go out, we color outside the lines every once in a while with the shirt locker stuff. They're fun. New design every month.

That's the subscription one. But, you know, if you're wearing discipline equals freedom and you choose to work out with that shirt, you know, you put on that shirt. The chance of you skipping that workout go down to zero. Zero. It's not possible Not possible So there you go Subscribe to this podcast as well

Subscribe to Jocko Underground Subscribe to the YouTube channel The Origin USA YouTube channel The Jock Fuel YouTube channel Go to Flipside Canvas.com And get something for you hang on your wall Got a bunch of books Let's get this book

Cold War Navy SEAL By James M. Hoss and Mary Ann Koenig I forgot to mention Mary Ann Conig But she also helped Write the book So there you go

Cold War Navy SEAL A bunch of really interesting stuff It's so weird Again I was talking about this with Jim When we were offline Is just like I went to the

The SEAL team One Anniversary A little while back 60th year anniversary But I also went to the 30 year anniversary And so 30 years before that Was when SEAL Team 1 got made

Oh dear So this is all like I've been around. You know, you're around people that are generally, generationally all part of this group. Yeah. It's kind of wild. But a lot of those historical things, I mention that to him,

like, known about the war in the Congo. That's a thing. And now you're sitting here talking to Jim, and he's literally worked directly with lieutenant colonel, Mad Mike Horr. Like, that's crazy to think about.

Yeah. It's crazy to think about. So anyways, check out his book. Check out a bunch of books that I've written final spin leadership strategy and tactics field manual a bunch of bunch of books We have a leadership consultant seats called Eschlamfront if you want need help from a leadership perspective inside your organization go to echelonfront Dot com we also have an online training academy because leadership and life is not something that you just are able to just cruise through and know what to do you don't None of us do that's why we made this training academy online go to extreme ownership.com come and check out some of our free classes

Just you when you take a free classroom, oh, I get it. There's a weird skills. I was telling you know what I was telling the troops on? So we got a question on the academy the other day. Yeah. Guy says, hey, my boss is not being transparent, not telling us what's going on, starting to be a little bit of a problem with the team.

And I was like, yep, hey, here's what you're gonna need to do. Everyone that's on this call, it's where I'm doing a live webinar on Extreme Ownership.com. I said, everybody that's on this call, right, now if you and we all we all take ownership we all subordinate our ego we all prioritize relationships we all work to build trust and listen to each other that's what we're doing and if you're doing that you are better at relationships and leadership than 99% of the world so when you've got your boss that's not

behaving like a good leader you're the one that has to use these techniques to help them close the gaps on their leadership, which is a powerful thing, right? It's like you're trying to build a house. Like Echo's over here. I'm watching you. Or let's say Echo, you're building a house for me.

And I go in and all of a sudden I see like Echo doesn't have a square to make sure that the walls are square. And I'm like, hey, bro, no, it's all good. I got this square right here. And you're like, oh, thanks. I'm actually helping you. It's not my job. I know you're the house builder.

But what am I supposed to do? sit back and watch my house be crooked maybe you don't have but maybe you don't you're not good at plumbing and so I go hey man let me help you with that plumbing let me fill let me fill in the gaps right here oh hey your drywall's not you're not quite that good of a drywaller let me give you a hand so I'm just making these little now listen you're the leader you should be doing this yourself and I can say back oh this is all messed up but guess what I got to live in the house yeah so go to extreme ownership dot com learn these skills and then you can help your leader you can help

your peers you can help your subordinates and by the way just FYI you don't help them by saying hey echo you got a major problem with your leadership no that's not what you do because then they get defensive you use the indirect approach you work through it so that's what we're doing go to extreme ownership dot com we will help you learn to lead it'll make everything in your life better and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their their families gold star family check out mark lee's mom mama lee she's got a charity organization and if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org and also don't forget about myka think who last report was riding a mountain lion through the wilderness and he was rescuing a small

bear from a tree so that's this is you know go to heroes and horses dot org he's out there in the wilderness helping veterans find themselves And if you want to connect with us, Echo is at Echo Charles. I am at Jocco Willink. We're on the various social media platforms. But just be advised. You think those social media platforms are there for you. They're there for your benefit.

They're not. They're there for their benefit. So just be careful because they got algorithms that are going to try and hook you up. Thanks once again to Jim Hoss for coming out and sharing his experiences and lessons learned. and more important thanks to Jim for all he did to support and defend democracy around the world and a special thanks to those who served with him aligned with freedom the Cubans the Belgians the Americans

who fought and continue to fight clandestine wars to protect the cause of freedom and also thank you to our police and law enforcement firefighters paramedics EMTs dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service and all first responders, thank you for fighting to keep us safe here at home. And to everyone else out there, you're not going to get things served to you on a silver platter. You're not going to get the money that you need.

You're not going to get the support that you want. You're not going to get blessed with a perfect team of people that have the perfect set of skills. You're not going to get any of that. That's the way life is. But like Jim Hawes, you still still. have to figure it out you have to make it happen you have to create something from nothing and if you do that you too can achieve victory and you do that by getting out there every day and getting after it and until next time this is echo and jocco out