Jocko Podcast - 77: War Stories. Mental Toughness and Clever Tactics in Vietnam and for Life. With CWO Roger Hayden

Episode Date: May 31, 2017

0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:25 - Training and Going to Vietnam 0:44:02 - Differences between Volunteers VS Draft guys.  0:45:26 - Wounded in a Fire Fight. 0:50:20 - More Deployments to Vietnam. 1:05:01 - Kilo Platoon Deployment to Vietnam. 1:22:28 - OP Tempo. 1:30:46 - Blue on Blue and Lessons. 1:38:07 - The Stay-Behind Ambush. 2:01:43 - The Fist Fight with a Big Dude. 2:04:33 - Becoming a Warrant Officer. 2:05:29 - Advice on Going into the SEAL Teams. 2:12:02 - Some details about the Boobie Traps in Vietnam. 2:17:19 - Support, Cool Onnit, JockoStore stuff, with Jocko White Tea and Psychological Warfare (on iTunes). Extreme Ownership (book), (Jocko's Kids' Book) Way of the Warrior Kid, and The Muster 003.  2:28:35 - Closing Gratitude. Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/jocko-podcast/exclusive-content

The names and the stories in this episode have been omitted to protect the privacy of the individuals involved. This is Jocko podcast number 77 with Echo Charles and me, Jocka Willink. Good evening, Echo. Good evening. And tonight we welcome back to the show, retired chief warrant officer Roger Hayden. And if you don't know who Roger Hayden is, then just stop right now and go back to episode 37 of this podcast. And you can listen to Roger came on for a short period of time. We had some time constraints on the first time that Roger came on.

But he's one of the men on which the reputation of the SEAL teams is built. Started off as a Frogman member of the underwater demolition teams and deployed to Vietnam with underwater demolition team 12. And then came back and checked into SEAL Team 1, where he deployed again two times to Vietnam. And then spent 30 years in the SEAL teams and then as a civilian has another how many years? 20 another so we're just looking at a solid 50 years of service to Naval Special Warfare in the SEAL teams so like I said Roger's been on before and I'll tell one real quick story to kind of give a little background as to Rogers attitude about things and so I was on and I talked about told this part of the story last time we were on a ship we were we were having our

our operational readiness exercise was being graded it's called an ORE and the person that's grading it is Roger Hayden so you know the the young seal platoons we're getting graded and making sure that we know what we're doing and at this point Roger is a warrant officer so he's a commissioned officer and he's out on the ship with us going you know watching how we're planning and seeing how we're preparing our gear and making sure that we're we know what we're doing like said and as a commissioned officer you're supposed to be eating in what's called the wardroom with the rest of the officers so you know the military has officers and they

have enlisted guys and the officers are sort of the managers and the enlisted guys are the workers and as an officer on a ship on a Navy ship you have something called a war room which is nice they have it's it's just a little it's not even a little level up it's pretty darn nice in the wardrobe I've eaten in both the wardroom And on the mess decks and the wardrum, you know, you have real silver. And there's actually people serving you. So the wardrum is kind of nice. Well, Roger, as a warrant officer, is, you know, permitted or authorized or supposed to eat with the rest of the officers.

You know, he's supposed to go get that good treatment. And Roger didn't want to eat with the officers. He wanted to eat with the chief. So then the middle management of the Navy is the chief, the chief petty officers. And there's chiefs, senior chiefs and master chiefs. and they're like the backbone of the Navy they have the the tactical knowledge in the seal teams and so Roger instead of wanting instead of eating with the officers he wanted to eat with the chiefs and he before he was a worn officer what were you a senior chief before you were a warrant officer master chief so he was already a master chief before he became a warrant officer and so he started eating the chiefs mess with all the chiefs well some of the the the the the the chiefs Chiefs on the ship They didn't like having an officer

You know, right? We don't want this officer in here This is our territory, right? This is our area. You can't you know, we can't why is this officer coming in here? And so my platoon chief at the time Was actually friends with with Roger, but you know, he was the guy that was getting had really building relationships with the chiefs on the ship and all that stuff and so they knew him and they and he was a senior chief and they pulled him outside They said hey, you know Hey, hey, senior chief, you know, it's kind of, we got this warrant officer, he's a seal, why is he coming in? He's not, shouldn't be coming in here. He needs to go to the, he needs to go to the, the, the wardroom with the rest of the officers.

This is the chief's mess. He doesn't belong in here. And so my chief was like listening to him. Okay. I'm not sure why you feel that way. But this goes on for a couple days. And finally, my platoon chief, and I wasn't there for this, but I got told the story. And my platoon chief was a guy from the south, and he had a great accent and talked in a very distinct manner.

And so they get into lunch. I think it was lunch. They roll into the chief's mess for lunch. And Warren Officer Hayden comes in and he's standing in there and he's getting a couple looks from people and finally my platoon chief stands up and says Can I ask everyone in here a question real quick? And they go okay, you know what what? And he says well this here is Warren officer Roger Hayden member of the underwater demolition team is member of the Sealed team. member of the SEAL team served three tours in Vietnam highly decorated including a purple

heart for being wounded and he was a master chief before he got commissioned and he wants to eat with us in the chiefs mess does anyone here have a problem with that and of course no one did nothing but crickets and so Roger Hayden eats where Roger Hayden wants to eat. So Roger, welcome to the show once again. Thanks for coming back. I know last time we were time constrained, and you said you'd come back,

so here you are. I appreciate you coming back on. That's my pleasure. Thank you. And like I said, anybody that wants to get the full background, you know, listen to that podcast number 37,

and he talks a little bit about how you grew up, but I had a question when you joined, so you came in and your dad was UDT, which is awesome, and then when you joined the Navy in 1965, did you know you were going to Vietnam? Was the war big enough yet? Because we had this guy on last time, Captain Charlie Plum,

and he went to the Naval Academy. And he said, he graduated from the Naval Academy, I think in 1965 as well. But he said he never heard, he never heard the word Vietnam one time while he was going to the Naval Academy. It wasn't until he graduated that the war escalated. And all of a sudden they realized

when he was going through flight training that, yeah, you're going to Vietnam. But when you joined in 65, did you know, I mean, were you thinking, yeah, I'm definitely going to go to war and go to Vietnam? Yeah, pretty much because I'd have been drafted in the Army, and I knew the Army was going to Vietnam. So I figured, I knew I wanted to go in the Navy and into UDT. My dad never talked about it much, but, you know, when I was younger, I watched the movies of the Marines attacking beachheads and getting mowed down. and, you know, Rangers taking heavies and stuff, and then I saw the bridge of the river quiring the guns at Navarone,

and I figured, yeah, if you're going to fight, that's the kind of outfit you want to fight. You want to sneak around a little bit more. So, yeah, I did. In fact, as soon as I got in to the Navy, I took the screening test and all that stuff. And, you know, before I even went to, you know, right after when I was at Radioman school,

I was a radio man. So, through it, that was a 22-week-long school. And that's what I did as I worked and did all that stuff and did the screening tests. And, you know, they wanted me to go to Rota or some other Navy insulation because they didn't do too bad in radio men's school. I wasn't the number one guy, but I went, no, I'm going to go to UDT. And so. And you went to what, the USS? Well, yeah, we, our class, our class wasn't starting up for about six months.

So they stuck me on the USS Paul Revere at 32nd Street Waiting for UDT training And I was a designated seaman back in the day A designated seaman was pretty good Wasn't like it is now And I figured I'd work in the radio shack or something like that Well as soon as they checked aboard they put me me Mets Cook And I was down in the scullery

And when we went down there There were two other guys that were waiting for training two That were in the scullery So we sat there and did that for six months and caught off the ship and went next door, crossed the bay there to training. Yeah, that's something in the Navy. It's if you're a new guy, everyone talks about how new guys get treated wherever you

are in the military, but in the Navy, when you go, when you show up to a ship, you doesn't matter, you have to work in the, in the scullery, which is washing dishes. What is it? A 90-day stint you got to do in there? Yeah, pretty much. Yeah, pretty much 90 days. And you only don't do that if you're an E-4 and above. Right.

And we did, I did a deployment where we had a guy that was an E-Siel, but he was an E3. And, you know, he was saying, hey, wait, how am I going to get out of this, you know, doing the scullery duty? And we're like, you're not. That's the rules. You're going to go do it. You can do it. I was a senior chief, two of us, that guy named . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

couldn't get a flight back, so they put us on an ARG to float back here to San Diego. And we kept all of our guys in the mess cooking that were seamen. That's legit. Because we just went, we got stuff to do. We're doing training, and they haven't got time to do that. So we kept them out of, of course, I was a senior chief then, and so it was so we had a little pull. Plus the cob of the boat, he really liked us a lot, and, you know, the CMC. And he was a PBR Vietnam guy.

Oh, really? Really well, yeah. Yeah, well, and actually this kid ended up making E4, luckily, before we went on deployment, so he skated out of it. But I remember. But we still did bringing in the supplies and stuff like that, you know, because it was a good workout, you know. Yeah, yeah, we did that too.

I forget what they call that, un reps or something. Yeah. We did that too. Yeah. Actually, when I, so my first deployment, I deployed to Guam, and, you know, we just did whatever he wanted. I was 21 years old. It was completely insane.

You got all this per diem money. You felt like the richest. You were, Never mind felt like if you were the richest guy you ever met I mean you never made any money when you're in 16 17 years old you getting the seal teams you're getting all this money and then they go overseas and They're giving you per diem and so you're the richest dude in the world you have very limited Responsibilities because you're a new guy in a seal platoon so what do you do just get crazy and get after it And you know you're doing whatever you want and then my next deployment was on a ship and we pull into the first port

And they say you know e form below Liberty expires at 10 o'clock and I was like oh yeah whatever you know I'm a seal and they're like no actually you'll be back on the ship at 10 o'clock and there was no way around it when there was ways around it we found ways around you know what the way around it was I'd put my PT gear in a backpack and then go off the ship to go out whatever and then hang out all night until five o'clock in the morning and I put my PT gear back on I'd run get a sweat going to walk up the brow Whatever I was coming back and say yeah I was just out for a run got my ruck on So there was ways there's ways to make it happen

So speaking of guys from from when you were going through training Was there guys when you're going through buds training was there Korean Korean vet UDT guys in there? Was it world war two was it just Vietnam guys of early Vietnam instructors? Yeah, oh they're World War II guys there was one guy named And, God damn it, great big tall guy, crew cut. And he was a World War II UDT guy. Well, let me tell you the story on that guy. So we're out of, we just get the same community, the last part of the training, you know, third phase. So we're all lined up there.

We just got off. We went out there on an LCU, you know, with all of our demo and ammo and all that of the crap. We just mustered out there. And this guy comes walking up, great big tall guy, real old. What was I, 19, 18, you know what I mean? He looked probably like you do or I do. We thought he was an old guy. This guy you've ever seen.

Yeah, but he looks at us and he starts talking, you know, and he goes, God damn it, I'm your demo instructor and keeps talking. He says, I don't brook no bullshit on the ranges, you know. We're kind of just looking at him like, what the hell? And he gets himself worked up a little bit. And he goes, matter of fact, anybody that screws up, we'd just go out behind the shitter and get it squared away, you know, and we're still looking at him.

He talks a little bit more and gets himself all excited and shit. And he goes, matter of fact, anybody wants to go behind the shitter right now, we'll go. We're just looking at him. Well, come to find out later on. He was in the 82nd Airborne

and jumped into Normandy. Oh, dear. Got captured, escaped on and on. And then he was in the Korean War too. That was one of our instructors. Almost all of them there were in the Korean War, you know, pretty much. But then we had another guy,

And on his jacket he wore, he had a UDT instructor. And the other side was God. You know, he was. He was a hook-nosed Indian Apache. And he was a badass dude, man. We had some great guys. And most of the instructors, yeah, were, and some were Vietnam guys, you know, like had this one blue-eyed guy.

He was, I can't think of his name right now either. but he was on vacation was paddling up north in the Columbia River. No, not that north, the east coast side. And he was on an excursion with some other people, and his canoe tipped over. And it was real cold and shit, and he was trying to swim a couple of them to shore and shit, and then he just went out. But this guy would run behind you. And, of course, we didn't have a lot of hair, but what we had,

I had stood up, you know, and you turn and look, and he was just staring at you had these blue eyes, you know. I'll think he was name in a minute. Real good guy, though. And there must have been, because Bud's pretty regimented now, but they must have had no, it was definitely less regimented when I went through, for sure. It must have been completely just, like, no rules when you went through. Now, we had this guy during Hill Week, he had what they called the swimmer line. And like I say, we're on the Bayside. Minds you, we were in training in January.

He started three January, something colder than God, you know. What he would do is we'd have us hook into what we call the flutterboard line. You know, like when you do recons, the guys hold on the line, you move down the line and stuff. And he'd send us all out. And hell, there's about, fuck, it's about 60 of us. Excuse my language. That's a big. That's a big flood of what.

He'd send us out, and we had to be in a straight line. If we weren't, he'd bring us all back and line us. and line us all up again. And we weren't straight. So he sent us out again, brought us all back in. And we're freezing. The guys are almost getting hypothermia because we're not, we're just in a K-Poc

and, you know, regular utilities that you wear for training, you know. So he sent us out again the third time. And like if you're on the bitter end line, you're screwed, you know. Then he brought us back in. He goes, well, goddamn, I guess it still wasn't very, you guys still weren't in a straight line.

We may, we're going to have to send you out again all the way down the line. All you heard was click, click, click, click, click, click, click. We just looked at him. Well, all right. We got other things to do. That was it. We were done, man. You had lost the whole class.

That was so cold. Yeah, people always, if you don't know California and you think California is like Baywatch, the old TV show and you think the water's all warm, it's not warm. It's not warm. in January. January 3rd, it's not going to be warm. And you were saying you guys were swimming like crazy going through that because you knew that you were going to UDT at that time.

So you're a frogman. That's what you're being trained for, not seals. So we did a lot more water work than you guys did going through buds because we didn't have the seal portion of it. We got that after we made our deployment, came back, went to seal team, then you went to a cadre. Did you get any land warfare at all in buds? Oh, yeah, a little bit.

It was more like, yeah, basic stuff. And little immediate IEDs, but immediate action drills, but not much. It was like our last stop that we had, I think I told you this, on San Camini, was we did swimmer scouts in on the other side of a rock formation. We called Birdshut Rock and got the island. They gave us all the 40-pound haversacks. And we went from there all the way 23 miles to the end of the island. Wait. You were walking?

Yeah. Okay, so you hump 23 miles after you swam over the beach. Yeah, and then came back and attacked the camp. That was our last off. Dang. That's a, that's a crappy patrol, too. Those cactus. Yeah, I know.

Yeah, that's a beautiful. I thought I was pretty smart, see, so I wore kind of a wetsuit. What do you call that, the small one, you know? Oh, like a wetsuit top. The cheater. Yeah. And because, you know, so I wouldn't freeze the death coming in. And actually, this was April, almost the end of April, and it was still cold out of San

Camini, you know, so we swam in. And I humped with that thing on all the way up there and it got sunny and warm. And I almost frigging died. By the time I got back, you could peel it off me like this, you know. Yeah. There's no good way to do it. There's like no good way to handle coming over the beach. It's not going to be convenient and you're not going to be comfortable.

That's one of the things that makes, in my opinion, one of the things that makes the, The SEAL team, the guys in the SEAL team is really good, is that we just have to deal with the water. And as soon as you're dealing with the water, like you just said, there's no easy way to do that. Like, you're going to either be freezing in the water, or you're going to be sweating on land, or you're going to be too hot. No, actually, you're not. You're going to be okay on the land. You're just screwed, is what I'm saying. And not to mention your weapons, your weapons all get, your radios all get jacked up, your weapons all get jacked up, your gear gets all jacked up, you got sand in your boots.

there's no good way to deal with it. No, there's not. And on top of that, the communications, like you're in the water. You can't talk to people. You can't, there's no radioes aren't working. It just everything sucks. And so when we were do ops dry, it just seems like it's so easy to do. And I think that's the one big thing that separates, it doesn't separate us, but it's

one of the things that makes us good is that we have to deal with the water and we deal with in our whole career. Well, bottom line is you should never bring a boat to shore. You always swim in. Yep. That's what we do. Yep. Just like swimmer scouts, the whole nine yards.

That's the bottom line. Well, as a chief, that's pretty hard on that stuff. We never brought the boats ashore. Yeah. You know, we did the same thing. When we were in the art platoon, we never brought the boats in because there's a, there's a 10, 15, maybe 20% chance that you're going to flip a boat, you're going to lose a boat, something's going to happen to a boat, and then you're screwed.

Now you've got a boat washing up against the shore, and you've got to deal with it, and it's a big, no, we always swim in. Plus, it's a big target. Yeah, for sure, for sure. Like in Desert Storm, you know, and we inserted those Quaidies. The officer, I won't mention any names, but wanted to bring both the boats in, you know, into Quaid and let the Quady guys off. And I went, no, keep at least, if you're going to do that, keep one boat back, even if you keep another boat on shore because they can give covering fire. You know what I'm saying? And then if they have to E&E and, you know, you can be seen.

You know what I mean? That's a big target. You know what I mean? You just don't do that, you know? No, that's, there's so many things you've got to figure out with the water. And when you, when you go, that's why when we were in Iraq and we rarely did boat ops, we did some in, in the river. But you're just either on foot, it's just everything is so much easier. It's, it's crazy.

It's crazy. So you get done with training. Sanco de Mayo, 1967, you get done with training, and you check into UDT12. And you didn't really know too much about the seal teams. I guess no one at that time knew much about the same things. much at all, no. And you were saying on that first podcast that we did that the platoons weren't really formed up yet.

You kind of showed up at UDT and it's kind of a loose situation, but you do do a workup. Oh, once we started working up, then it was regimented. You know, you knew what you had to do. But we had a while. They had just come back and relieved UDT11 and just deployed. And then 12 came back and you have a kind of a stand down for about a month or two. Oh, so that's what you showed up for. Yeah.

Okay. Because it's a nine-month deployment for UDTs. So you have about a six-months work-up, and then you have three months where the guys go and leave, school, stuff like that. And I came in just at that time. So it was really kind of like we'd go up and do what they call silver slippers up at Pendleton when the Marines would do amphibious landings

and we'd be the lifeguards and stuff like that, you know what I mean, until we started forming up and start working. Then it got pretty good. What did you guys do? Were they hardcore about PT back then? Oh, yeah. Would you guys do team PTs? Platoons or team?

Team. The whole team. Yep. And was it just? Every, every day. Was it the same? Was it flutter kicks, push-ups, pull-ups, dips? Yeah, just doing your basic PT.

In fact, I didn't start lifting weights until shit, I was in about 15 years, maybe 16, 17 years, because you do old course swimming, all the PT we did and everything. We were in really good shape. I mean, you know what I mean? And you didn't see a lot of the guys in the gym lifting heavy and stuff. That came on later on. Then, also, which I changed, later on when I was a chief and senior chief and stuff. And even, no, not as an LPL.

We still did platoon PT every morning. But we'd do it every other day, then let the guys go off and do their running, do their weight lifting and stuff like that. And it worked out well. You know, you can change, even though I thought PT in the morning, first thing is the best to do. Yeah. Especially when we were in Subi,

you know, about half the guys would be throwing up and stuff when we were doing PT. Yeah, I always like we used to team one, when I got to team one, there was that team PT we did every day in Team 2 is the same thing.

But, you know, I'll tell you, once the war started, there's a lot less focus on PT and it just was. Some guys were staying in shape. Well, you can't really go for long runs and shit when you're in a rock and shit, you know.

Yeah, we'd run around base and stuff like that. But did you guys have, my question is, did you take weights with you? Did you have a workout place and stuff? Yeah. We deployed. And actually, once one team shows up somewhere on deployment, they all bring a bunch of gear. Yeah. And then there's enough to do it to get it done.

And then other teams, they don't have to bring everything, but they'll bring more stuff. And eventually, you know, whatever compound you're in is pretty nice. If you go to that same compound, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. and and I always brought mats for for jih Tzu I'd make a little Jiu Jitsu area so I could Of course So I could still train and get the boys training and

You know what's funny it's like you were talking about it's weird how some of this stuff stays Because you were talking about walking around in UD t shorts and and coral boots and unfortunately UD T shorts I don't think guys wear them I don't think they even get issued him anymore But when I got the team one we absolutely got issued UD T shorts and that's what that was our our uniform and we got issued coral booties those old gray coral booties and I didn't realize you know that's what you guys wore that's that's something they've yeah probably been issued for I don't know even out in town you'd see guys with coral boots on with the Levi's and the Rolex watch and

stuff you know what I mean you can pick out a team guy in a heartbeat yeah I was I was I looked I looked up coral booties and I was just seeing if anybody makes them anymore they're hard to get they're on eBay you got to buy a pair on eBay. You got to be lucky if they have your size. I got to go through my gear and see if I still have my coral booties. But and then you did do

a legit workup though where you did all your hydro recons and all that stuff. We did river recons like up the coast by Pendleton. We drug this one rocket-looking thing in up over these fucking mountains and put it in the lake and stuff like that.

And then we swam across the well, did we swim? No, we didn't, right there at the channel when it goes out. Yeah. And you have those old gun em placements and shit. Yeah, yeah. We had to attack those and they had them set up with booby traps and stuff. So we'd go across and work her way up and shit like that.

Always stuff, yeah. Yeah. In UDT. It wasn't bad. It was good training. I mean, but it wasn't, you know, like a story I told you was, during the 67, 68 Tet, we were in Dongtam on the Ascari. And that's when I was with UDT.

and there were about 17 of us on there. We're doing that dark thing later on, getting that a little bit more, but that's when we worked with the 9th Infantry and stuff. Anyway, they had a seal platoon in Mito, which wasn't too, too far away, but it was right in the town, why these coasts would have their place in a town.

I'd never know, because any time you left or went anywhere, you know what I'm saying? You could be picked out. But anyway, so they were almost getting overran, but they were on the tallest building, and they had a 57 and called us rifle and stuff. Anyway, they sent a call out, hey, we need help.

And there were 17 of us, you know, on the Ascary, UDT guys. We wanted to go in and rescue them and save them. And our officer, just a great guy, lieutenant said, now you ain't going anywhere. We were so pissed. How would you gotten in there, helicopter? We don't know. Don't even know.

We just wanted to go and help them. Yeah. Put me in coach. Just ready to go. Yeah. You know, they're seals, but they're UDT guys too. So anyway, so we didn't do that, and I got back from deployment when the seal team went through the Cadbury. And those guys, by the way, they didn't get overrun.

No, they brought them off. They were coming up the stairways, and they were throwing grenades down at him and stuff like that. And then finally the Arvin and the U.S. came in and took Mito back over. It was during the 67-668 tab, which I drove bad. But anyway, so when I got back and I went through Cadre and stuff, I found out, you know, okay, we were. weren't ready for this. We didn't know any immediate action drills. Well, not a lot. Yeah, yeah, limited. Not, you know, pounded into our head where we'd automatically think about them. Did you do any urban environment whatsoever? That's what I was going to say. Plus, we weren't

urban and that was urban. We'd add our asses handed to them, you know. Because we didn't know, we were fighters. We'd have fought, but, you know, figure those guys in me told the VC and stuff, they had their shit together. That was their town and stuff. You know what I mean? We'd, you know, You know more about the urban stuff than I do because I never fought urban, you know. We'd hit hooches and stuff like that, but we never swept through a – we did one village one time, but it was, you know, it was good, you know what I mean. Yeah. Yeah. And so when you deploy to – with UDT, did you guys ride a ship over there?

Do you fly over there? How did you get to Vietnam? We flew over to Subic Bay. And like I said, that's where we were at. That's like you went to Guam. Well, Subicos is our place, Subic Bay. And then we'd fly over to, we had different debts that we had in Vietnam. Like in Danang, they had Camp Tenchaa.

And from Danang, you'd work up around Fubai, Wei, Quangtree, Dung Hall, the northern part of the area and stuff, you know. And then we got on the Daishenko. And I don't know if we picked the Daishenko up at Subik or not, we might have. And it was when we did all them Beatrix. And then the next debt I went. to was down in Dongtam on the... Would you go back to Subic in between at all? Oh, yeah.

Oh, really? And we'd be there for about a month or three weeks. So you basically deploy from Subic out to Vietnam, do operations for a month, and go back to Suey. Oh, three months. Oh, for three months at a time. Yeah. Oh, but it's a nine-month deployment.

Yeah. So, yeah, my three deaths were Danang, then on the Daichinko, and then down in Dongtam, when I was in UDT, and that was three months at each place. And first of all, on the last one you talked about doing 130 miles worth of beach recomb. It was about 120, I think, yeah. I'll give you the bonus 10, Roger. It was three months. I mean, you know, you were kind of talking about it like, oh, you know, we were doing this recon.

But that was, you were, you were reconning beaches in North Vietnam? No, South Vietnam. And was there any resistance? Were you guys in jeopardy of getting rolled up? Or was it more of like almost an admin thing? Or was it somewhere in between? No, we always had to either. The Marines or the Arvin, which was the South Vietnamese Army, they would screen, put screens out when we would do the beaches to cover us in case we got hit with anything.

Right. Because they were, nobody knew what was really on the beaches and stuff. But if the Marines were in the area, they'd send a patrol and they'd worked the back shore and stuff as we were doing our recon and stuff. And the one I told you we got hit was we didn't have any army or Marines. So we sent two of our guys in the back to kind of check things out as we're doing a recon. And that's when we got caught in that, almost caught in that L-shaped ambush. And what happened was as we were coming down the beach, and we had the guys out, and I was a photographer, so I was out front with another guy. And I had a pair of bathing suit, UDTs on, coral booties, and my super slate, and I was writing the backshore information down.

So everyone knows what we're talking about. When you're going to land people on beaches or if you're potentially going to land people on beaches, you have to do a reconnaissance of the beach, but not just of the beach itself, but of the water, and how deep the water is and make sure there's no obstacles in there. And so the people that did this since World War II was the underwater demolition teams. So that's what we're talking about. The way you do it is you have a literally, you have a line, a big rope. It's small.

It's more like a line than it is rope. But that stretches from the beach, from a couple guys on the beach. called the beach party all the way out to a boat, a small little rubber boat way out of two. And that was an IBS we hooked it to, and it's about 30 feet. It has knots where you know each pair is going to be holding on to. And you mark, take the sounding. Then as you went to the next sounding, which was 25 yards down the beach, and on the beach they'd be holding up these markers so that you could get yourself on them,

you'd be Dippy Dune down until you got to that point again, then you'd take your sounding again. And then you'd come back and make a hydrographic chart. So there's guys on the beach that are holding what we call range markers. And they're set, what do they say, like 10 yards apart, like one guy in the front, one guy in the back, and they're looking at a compass so that they're making sure that they're lined up, so that lines up this whole line.

So it's this kind of complicated, and it seems like an administrative thing, but you've got to do it. Otherwise, you know, you get a situation where the Marines come into land and they hit a like they did. Yeah, like they did in Tarawa and they hit a big, they hit a reef and then they drop the ramps. The guys get out and they didn't know that that reef was only 10 feet long. It's two feet deep. But now on the other side of the reef, their guys are going into 10, 12, 15 feet of water and drown.

So that's why you have to actually be fairly precise or at least as precise as you can be when you're taking these, when you're doing this hydrographic reconnaissance. So you have the backshore party, you know, the two guys there, and you have the officer and a couple other guys picking up the stakes, putting the stakes out, and that's usually a photographer's job. You're way out ahead of everybody else taking the backshore information. So when you come back and do your hydrographic chart, you know, you can lay it out exactly. Then you have to do it. I was a photographer.

I know all this shit, which I hated. Because you had to man-make, hand-draw the maps, your hand-draw. your hand drawing. And those charts that you draw, those are going to get presented to, you know, the Navy, and they're going to use those charts to conduct this landing. So like I said, they've got to be good. You've got to be good quality.

Yeah, anyway, so our two guys are walking along and we were doing their beach reconnaissance and everything. Well, they had a nail-shaped ambush on us, and they had a spire hole back here with a couple guys that once we got hit, and if anybody ran back, these guys would hold them. them down. Where are two guys hit those two guys in the spider hole and opened up on them, which made

them open up on the sooner. So we all leapfrogged back down the beach. And we had a really great guy. I mean, he took charge. Everything was perfect. We grabbed them to the line. The boat, the IBS took off. And, you know, nine and a half horsepower engine didn't go real fast, you know.

And we had a Coast Guard cutter out there. They started lobbing in. Willie Peter on them, but we didn't know it was them, and some of it landed pretty close to us, and we thought that was them trying to hit us. Anyway, we got out far enough, and our PL that we finally got to and got on, PL's, you know, the boat that we inserted off of and stuff. And they picked us up, and the guy was shooting his 50 and stuff, but what was really neat was in come these two jets.

Oh, nice. And they napalm the whole beat. That was kind of cool That's when I told you When I got back to the boat I said screw this naked warrior shit Yeah I can't

I can't even So you're in a pair of UDTs Coral booties Coral booties That's like what Like reef walkers They're like They're like Chuck Converse Chuck Taylor's

Yeah Yeah, but a little bit leaner Do you have the Split No No No They're like

They're just like They're just like They were They were They're not getting But when it like hold you down, they're not big big. No, I don't know. They were light.

They were canvas and they had a kind of a real thick rubberized bottom on it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, they were good. And then I had an M79, so I'm shooting that thing as I'm running back and stuff. Then that's the only weapon you had is an M7. Yeah, that's all I had, yeah. That and your slate to draw on. Yeah.

To collect back short information. That was kind of exciting. And was that before you, was that, was that recon before you work with the 9th Infantry? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I went from there from the Dyschenko down to Deng Tam and worked with the 9th Infantry. And the 9th Infantry, man, so this stuff, I was looking about, you know, about the 9th Infantry and what they did.

But just, first of all, the 9th Infantry is the unit that the fictional character, Forrest Gump, was supposed to be attached to, which is why in the movies working by the water and all that stuff. I imagine that's what they, that's why they picked it. the 9th Infantry in Vietnam had 10 Medal of honors awarded to soldiers and three sailors so they were working in conjunction very closely with the Brownwater Navy which again to pull a quote from the last time you you were on Roger you're like saying that job as being Brownwater Navy was just vicious job vicious job and General Westmoreland said that the ninth infantry division and the Mobile River Marine forces saved the Delta region from falling to the North Vietnamese during Tett.

That could have been. I mean, I didn't, I wasn't on land with them. Don't know everything they did. Remember, I was at second class then. And we got, we were on the, uh, the, um, Ascarian Benewawe as reconnaissance guys. What's the Ascarian Benewan? What's that? Um, uh, amphibious.

Some, some kind of an amphibious ship. Yeah. Oh, okay. Both of them were big ones and troop ships. One was a troop. I think the Ascarry was a troop ship. I'm not sure. Could have been the Benoit, too.

But they were pretty good size ships, and they were right at on the, right at Dongtam, which was the Dongtam was, had a big army base and a Navy base. And late, my third trip to Vietnam, I went back there as a seal. And it was the same place, same area. So when you, how did you guys get? get linked up with the 9th Infantry? Well, that's who we're doing the reconnaissance for to see if they could go up the canals and up the rivers, you know, see what the depth was so they could bring the brownwater

Navy up there, the troop carriers and stuff like that for the 9th infantry. And they didn't know what the depth of the, some of the places they were going to go in. So they dropped us off on these, we call them the darts. They were like a jet ski. Right. Except you didn't sit up on them, you laid down on them, used your feet to. guide them and they had a 355 degree camera

and a fathometer and they would take two of us up, drop us off and we'd come down and do the reconnaissance. I mean take soundings and take pictures of Nome's point like a pagoda or another canal coming in or something, you know, we'd come back and we'd do

a chart and we'd give it to them and that's what they used those charts to go up and do their amphibious landings. But you can only go up down those things maybe once or twice, and then you didn't do it again because they'd be waiting for you. So when we weren't doing that, which you could only do so many of them, then we started riding with the 9th Infantry as their demo guys.

And so you would, would you have already seen it because you'd do the DART mission and then you'd come back and then they'd come up with their plan and then they'd say, okay, we're going to go up that river that you just came down. And so you'd be from, would you be familiar with it now? No, they took us. We went up to four corners and other places that we'd never been. Oh, okay. That was deep enough for them to go up and stuff.

But they might have, I don't know. You know, that would have been John Odish, my OT. That would have probably been in on the planning when they were going to go in something and talk about our charts and stuff, you know. Remember, I was just a booger eater. I was just one of the guys in the darts, you know. And but then they said, okay, we're going to need you. What were the log?

I know you were saying on the last podcast that they had these log dams at the... Oh, yeah, they'd put dams across logs to stop the boats up and just different obstacles and shit or bunkers along. And we'd go in and blow up the bunkers or blow up the log dams, you know, if they had them. And that's what I said. They first put us on what they called an alpha boat, which was the lead boat. And they had one in the rear and one in the front. And what would they look like?

God, I don't have a picture over. I can show you. Yeah, I actually was checking. Anybody looks up on the 9th infantry, they'll be able to see them. But anyway, the alpha boat, we were on one of those, and that's the one I told you we got sunk on, because a B40 rocket hit us right in the exhaust, and the thing started going down, and we ran it to shore.

If it had been a little bit higher, it hit all those stacks of C4 we had. But then they started putting us in about the third or fourth both back. That's because they didn't want the big demo load in the front alpha boat. Yeah, that makes sense. Pretty much. Yeah. So your boat gets hit with a rocket,

and it starts sinking, and then the, was it like a chief run in the boat? No, it could have been. Like a chief for a first class or something? Yeah, and they ran us up. And then it started sinking down and we got off did a little perimeter. And then the zippo boat came up and just hosed everything down and we swam over the zippo boat and got off. The zippo boat so named because after the zippo lighter, because it has a flamethrower.

Yes, right. Exactly. A big giant flamethrower. I know I popped this stuff off like people know what it is. You had to have been there to see it. But, I mean, it came zipping up, and then we swam over to it, and we got on it and got out of there. And you got everyone out of there? Yeah, nobody got hurt or killed on that, just that B-40 rocket.

They started opening up, but the boats opened up, too, and they had 50s, you know, Jesus Christ, 20-mills. Did you try and salvage any of the demo, or did you leave it? Well, actually. Or did you blow it in place? We were going to come back and do that, but they decided to have the OD do it. So, EOD went back and blew the boat up and all that crap, so. Yeah. Because it was just partly out of the water and stuff, but they, you know, pissed us off.

We're underwater demolition. It was like, you know, WTF, you know, we can do that, you know. That's what we do, you know. Yeah. Well, the EOD guys, I guess they didn't have a lot to do, so they sent them down there. Yeah. I don't know if it was Army or Navy EOD, but who knows? It's always good to blow things up.

That's one of my. Oh, yeah. My first deployment to Iraq, we didn't blow very much up. And when I went to my second deployment to Iraq, I kind of had the attitude is if we had the opportunity to blow something up we were gonna blow it up it seems like the smart thing to do you never take it apart pip blowing place you blow it in place and uh that one you know on the last podcast you were talking about that one operation that you went on and you it was basically a giant ambush against the whatever seven or eight boats that you guys had that the ninth infantry had

and they must have been prepared waiting for you got for this group to show up. I mean, was the enemy that well organized at that point? I wouldn't say well organized, but when you got Psiop's guys dropping pamphlets in saying, you know, we may be doing something in this area, you know, all the good guys leave and stuff like that. You know, Psiops had a lot to play with that or choppers going around with their speakers and, you know what I mean? Yeah. So, yeah, that particular one, there was another group of boats

that went up ahead of us, dropped off their guys, the 9th Infantry, and we're coming back, and we passed them. And since we got by them, I'd say about 10 minutes, and we got opened up on them. They didn't hit the first group. They just hit our group.

And, you know, that was a bad day in Dodd City, but, you know, got hit really bad. But we managed to get to the shore and put some of the guys off and stuff. And it was, I think it was going to be a pincher movement where they came in and caught people. Okay. Because they dropped the other guys way off. And there were three UDT guys on that group.

And then there was three of us on the group that when we got hit. And your main mission was going to be demo if he did. Yeah, basically, yeah. But, yeah. Yeah. Those big, it's weird, those are like straight up amphibious operations, the Army's conducting. Yeah, think about that. And the Marines are holding the DMs.

Yeah, yeah, you were saying that the Marines were busy upholding the DMZ at that time. Yeah, that kind of blew me away. But the 9th Infantry did a good job. They were fighters, you know, and they were out of Washington, the state of Washington, you know. And they were good, good troops. Yeah. What about another difference, I mean, even with the 9th Infantry, those guys, I mean, in UDT, you guys are all volunteers. And, I mean, and you said, you.

you would have been drafted had you not joined. Did you notice any difference between drafted guys and guys that were volunteers? Didn't really work with that many Army guys in the 9th infantry. The only thing I can remember that stands out as I had a second lieutenant come up to me when I was on a riverboat, one of the river boats, and they were about ready to land him.

And he came up to me with his map and asked me where he was, you know. And that kind of, I went, hmm, and that's the second lieutenant. He's leading a platoon or squad of guys in. You know, that kind of, you know what I'm saying? I just don't know. My thought of that was, is we were trained,

and we knew what we were going to do, just like in the SEAL team. And we leaned forward, and that's what we're going to do. You just picked off the street, go through basic training, and then you, you know, next thing you know, you're up on a hill in Vietnam being overran and stuff, that's got to be pretty traumatic, you know. But then again, Americans are Americans.

We fight, you know what I mean, regardless. But I think we were more psychologically set for what we did than because of the extra training we had and stuff. Plus the guys that trained us were a lot of more Vietnam guys. And like I said, Second World War and Korean, that gives you, with the type of job they did, and that's what we do. You got wounded on that mission too, right? How bad did you get wounded?

Just some strapping on my foot and my leg, no big thing. Did it take you out of the field for any amount of time? Not at all. In fact, I got up and started shooting along with this guy, this other guy. That's one thing you could do. But we had this buddy of ours. I think I told you this, he got hit really bad with strapping on his arms and legs, and I crawls over to him after I moved my fingers and toes and everything

and realized that we all got blown down. And then went over to him, hit him with morphine, put it through his collar. Then the 30-gunner got blown off his gun. And so I got up there and started shooting a 30. You know what I mean? No big thing, but it's just what you do, you know? Yeah. Yeah, I know.

It's no big thing. Yeah, yeah. So you shoot back. What I know. He got blown on the other side of him and calls over to him. Didn't see my pin through his collar. So hits him with another shot of morphine, you know. Yeah.

And in about four or five minutes, he kind of set up like this and wanted to do something, but he was screwed. He was hurt really bad. And then me and the people got up and started shooting and stuff. and the guys that were down and everything were, after the 30 ran out of ammo, I started shooting 16s, and they would hand us up 16s to shoot and stuff,

load them for us and shit. And then, like I said, the ramp went down. We started going in towards the beach to let the guys that weren't wounded get off. And we started taking fire right through the front. So I went to one side, we went to the other side, and I was using a M79 to try to,

suppressed fire and stuff and we backed off and then we got out of there. Did you insert any of the Army guys? Yeah, about eight or nine of them, yeah. And how many guys got inserted? Was like a company? A company strength? Yeah, it was more than a company. It was eight boats.

A lot of people about, you can put about 25, 30 guys in the boats, yeah. Yeah, we were here and like I said, it was really a weird thing because, you know, we were sitting there and then everything just started fire going off. We heard number one boats hit.

We're number four boat. No, number three, number four, yeah. Number two boats hit. Number three boats hit. And I remember I just turned and looked at a girl and said, we're fucked. And we got hit. And what it did is it has a canvas cover. And they had all those wire stretchers stacked up.

And the B-40 rocket was heading right towards the, uh, uh, uh, uh, the, um, um,

um, um, conning tower you know what I mean where they're driving it and everything but it went low and hit those stretchers and they just went you know all that shit went out so did you guys get good medical training I mean obviously knew how to give morphine well UDT yeah pretty good but in SEAL team we had extensive mental medical training fact the first platoon I went over he's uh we had a first class corpsman probably the best every week he had run us through something rather with soggy head wounds or something, sucking chest wounds.

And we had the same stuff that you guys did, have the mannequins up in the woods, and you'd have to run up and treat him and what to do. And we learned to give ourselves serum albumum in case the corpsman was hit or something and you need to give yourself an IV. We did all that stuff. All of us carry that with us.

Everybody had serum albunum, which is a blood volume expander. You know what I mean, just in case you had to have it. But UDT, not so much. We knew morphine. And basics, some of the basics and, you know, pressure eyes and tourniquets and stuff like that. But not real, real good in UDT. They do a good job with that T-T-T-T-C class that they teach now.

I forget what it stands for, but it's good. Combat trauma. You guys learn that. And so they know what to do when somebody gets hit. Everybody in the platoon knows a decent amount to get the guy stabilized. So I told us in the platoon, this is the one in the 69. He says, yeah, I'm the only corpsman here. and if I get hit, somebody's got to take care of me.

Yeah, so he wanted people. That's good for him. So you get home from that deployment, and now, like you said, you knew you had enough of the naked warrior stuff, and you said, I want to get a big machine gun. But I will say that was one of the best deployments. I was on the guys and everything. The UDT12 at that time was comprised of class 40, 41, and 42, and 70. some of 43, but everybody knew everybody.

You know what I mean? It was real tight and real good. Subic Bay would put Guam to shame. Oh, I'm sure it would. Oh, my God. Yeah, like I say, after we'd been there for about three weeks, you were ready to go to another debt just to get out of there. You need to go to Vietnam to stay alive.

Yeah, pretty much. No, I never realized that you guys would go back to, you know, back to Subic Bay in the middle of deployments. That's kind of... Yeah. Well, we would for... Then you'd head off to your next debt. Like you said, we were there for nine months, and each debt was about three months.

You know what I mean, maybe a little less, but we'd have some downtime in Subic, and then we'd head over to our next debt, which is pretty nice, you know. Nine months is a long time, but still, you know. And actually, back in the day, Subic Bay was almost worse than Vietnam in some areas because it was almost like the gangsters back in Chicago. You had all these different gangs were after each other and shit. And when you was walking down next eyesight, you almost had a look around the corner to see if, you know, they were shooting at each other before you walked by and shit. It was pretty kind of like the Wild Wild West.

And you said that the whole UDT 12 at that time was made up of all guys from the same like five or six buds classes mostly? Yeah, guys that were there too from other classes. But it was a, the majority of us that were put into the platoons and stuff were from class 40, 39. maybe, yeah, 39 was ahead of us. A lot of them went to 12. They used to split them 11 and 12. You went to a UDT team. Right.

And then, yeah, there are a lot of more guys that were, you know, behind us. But remember, we only ran two classes a year in Buds. Oh, no kidding. Yeah. Two classes a year? Yeah, because 39 was graduated. And then we started 40.

Okay. And then we graduated, and that's when 41 was starting. You know what I mean? What do they run now? like five. Yeah, something like that, five, six. It was something like five when I went through. Yeah, I think so.

So you had a good experience with UDT, but you still wanted to go get out. Me and the diny. We'd put in the shit every month to go to SEAL team, and they yelled at us and said, yeah, nothing to you get back, you know. So when we got back, we were the first two out of UDT into Cadre. That's awesome. And I was, you know, Echo and I had a conversation. I was talking about how at SEAL Team won when I was in training.

silting one we called ourselves cadre and I didn't really know where that came from but I knew that that was what it was called and we were proud that we were cadre but then I was listening to the podcast that you came on and you were talking about cadre and you guys actually called it cadre training that's what SQT was yeah was quadry yeah guys that taught her were a cadre instructors and that just carried on that carried on platoon training was different you know once you got in your got out of SQT or Cadre then you went to a platoon he went through platoon training two,

and that was still ran by some of the Cadre instructors, yeah, because we had our own training cell in Team One. Team one training cell's been around that long, huh? It was, yeah. Yeah, that was the only team. That's true. And it wasn't another team.

There was UDT guys and seal guys. Yeah. That workup, or the cadre training. Now you started getting heavy with field craft, with, I mean. Oh, everything. Yeah, all every ambush. you name it.

And then we had the Alamo River we worked on. And the Alamo River is a lot like Vietnam. They actually set up a whole thing there to look like a village. They had a little wooden outposts where the whole nine yard you have to work. You'll go down and get in and work your way in and stuff. And it was just like Vietnam. It was pretty close. And once again, the people that are teaching you are seals that are in cadre now

who probably just got back from Vietnam. So they got fresh information from the, battle for fresh experience. Our platoon training, our training cell on Team 1, every time a platoon came back, they'd pull two or three of the best guys from that platoon and put them into our training cell, and that was every platoon that came back, they did that.

So you had a cross-cut of all the different areas of Vietnam and guys that had been in there that did well, and that's who, that's you during it. We had guys like just some great guys. I mean, we got good training, and, I mean, there was no bullshit, because they knew, We knew that what we learned there was going to save our asses and our buddy's butts.

So we got pounded into our heads. We did river and stream crossing a lot because you had a lot of rivers and, you know, small canals. Well, not small canals, but a pretty good size. You either walked on them and went up the other side or you went across them, you know. Like as a 60 gunner, I always carried about three UDTs with me, you know, to help me float across. But I'm just saying you had to judge the current right. So when you went out, it would bring you right in where you're supposed to be and stuff like that. You know what I mean?

Just an extensive training. The Alamo River is not real, it's not a real fast moving stream, but it has a good current in it. So you learned all that, you know what I mean? You learned what you had to have, your gear you had. Like we'd do swimming pool stuff with our 60s and shit to see where we needed to have the flotation and stuff like that. You know what I mean? It was pretty good. Actually, when I went out to Nileland, we didn't even have the camp out there.

We had in Nileland itself, the town, there was a gas station, and it had about four or five little green trailers. And that's where we stayed at. And then they used to truck us up to where the canal was to shoot and stuff. And a lot of times we'd go up there, then we'd run back and stuff. You know what I mean? And we'd go up to the Chocolate Mountains up to Beowell Well. and stuff like that for ambushes and just, you know what I mean? We had no camp.

There was no camp there. Seif and what was that siphon? I can't remember the siphon. I mean, all along that whole area, in fact, later on, we'd be going to chalk the mountains, come back some other way, and you'd still see holes where 40 Mike might had went into and stuff, you know, from back in the day. How much work were you doing at night?

Oh, that's all the only time we work pretty much. We do our meat action drills and stuff during the day and stuff, but all of our ambushes and all the other field craft that we did and everything was all at night because that's when we worked. And that was the known thing. It was like, yep, we're going to go out at night. That's what we do. Pretty much, yeah.

How much did you guys, did you guys go out? If there was a full moon, would you go out less? In Vietnam, would you go out less if there's a full moon? Because you had foliage and stuff. You couldn't see that well. It was still dark enough. Because sometimes in the desert, a full moon, it's almost like daytime. Oh, yeah, yeah.

Yeah. And what, you know, you're talking about gear a little bit and what you carried, and there's all these kind of myths about what guys were doing back in the day in, in Vietnam. One of them is blue jeans, like everyone wore blue jeans, or a lot. A lot of guys wore blue jeans, which kind of makes sense to me because they're tough, right? That was the whole reason was the mosquitoes wouldn't go through them. And if you're in mangrove and stuff, it wouldn't tear them and stuff. ripstop would tear. And if you bent down, like when you stopped and stuff, the skews

to reach you alive right through the ripstop and stuff. So we started wearing the blue jeans and you wanted to get zip-up blue jeans, not the button-up, because they also kept leeches off. If you had the button-button-up ones, you were screwed. And then sometimes we wore panty holes underneath that to keep leeches off us. But we'd take the Levi's and put them into our jungle boots and riggers tape them around so you know we did it wouldn't just be hanging down where shit could come up and stuff because there were a lot of leeches over there no big thing but i mean you just you just learned you know like i said the panty hose it's pretty funny because when we're on sea float guys would be walking around with pink and blue and yellow panty hose on and stuff and

sailors are giving us kind of some weird looks and shit you know it's kind of funny how about guys going barefoot. Well, we had a couple guys that do that and guys stepped on stuff and injured themselves and that, I didn't see that very much at all myself in my platoons. Maybe other platoons would tell you, yeah, that was a

big thing, but a lot of times we don't walk on trails. We walk outside of the trails and there's all kinds of shit in there and you don't want to just be barefoot, I guarantee you. So you get done with that workup and everything. How How about like you're a pig gunner?

I heard stories about guys taking every round out of their belt and lubing every individual round, especially stone. I heard that about stoner gunners, that they'd take every round out of their belt and lube every individual round and put it back in there. Is that not true? I've never seen that happen,

and we had four guys that carried the stoner machine gun in my last platoon, but I don't know why you'd take them out and put them back in. They jammed a lot, but that was just a stoner thing. sent our guys to Cadillac Gage, which is who made the stoner, so they could learn all the intricacies and what to do if something happened. You know what I mean? But the pig gun, the 60, you didn't have to worry about it that much. As long as you took care of that baby, it did work

for you. The only time I ever had a malfunction was operator error, you know. Uh-oh. Like having it slide down your arm. Okay. And you'd get a link stuck in there, or you're shooting it, and you have your do-rag around your neck and it gets caught and starts dragging your head down like this. Just things you learn, you know. And I don't know who told me, one of the Vietnam SEALs told me this story that, like, he had the, he was a stoner gunner.

And when he came back, he checked in his weapon and he was going and joined another platoon, so he went to get a new stoner, not a new stoner, but one of the stoner's out of the armory. And he got, went and checked the stoner out of the armory and engraved. in the buttstock of the stoner, it said, everybody must get stoned, which I always got a good kick out. That could have been, yeah. No, it was, but that 60, it was just, and you developed exactly, like my basic load was about 630, because we had a 130 round box that we had China Lake made that went right on the side of it,

and we slung it, you know, and shot it from the hip. but after shooting thousands of rounds from the hip you get really good eye to barrel coordination of exactly where that round was going to go. But even regardless, you always worked it in because it wasn't a, excuse me, a point weapon like M-14. You know, it's an area weapon,

but still you can get pretty accurate with that, son of a bitch. And you'd always walk your rounds in because rounds with you, Shainov could hit a guy just as well as getting him right square in his chest or something. And I use canteen pouches and carried five canteen canteen pouches around my waist, and I'd put 100 rounds there and leave about an inch out of that.

Got it. And then when I would fire and I knew I was getting low, I'd pop my lid open on my can I had, grab my thing of my 60 rounds, snap them in and dump them in, and close it. Or the lid, when it opened up, had ridges on the side, would slide right in, just dependent, you know. But what was good about that box is you could be blown upside down or anything and still have that 130 rounds ready to shoot, you know what I mean? That's why we liked it.

But this place, it's a Navy experimental place called China Lake, and we had them build them for us and they worked really well. Did you use a sling? Yeah. What we did is we took the big butt plate off, put an aircraft butt plate on, and if you notice in the back you have that round thing that, we'd take a, we would take a, we'd, you It hooked it through that, bringing it up and took a hanger and made it down real like this, and I put it around the front of the hanger so you could take it off when you're in a chopper,

so you can hold it down, and then you could take it off, put it on, but you got it fit just right where it was just right exactly where you wanted it to, too, and it worked great, you know. We were invented fucks, man. We figured it out, you know, like we was on this one boat one time, and we saw these 60 guys. They had 60s on the boats, you know, and they had these big, metal containers that the rounds went in.

We're looking at that. It was a flex tube that went into the 60. So a couple K-bars later, we walked off with a couple of those, and they would fit perfect in the back of a brick 77 backpack. We could put them on, held 500 rounds, and you had the flex tube that went right into your 60. You had to have a special feed tray for them. You know what I mean?

The feed tray was right on the end of the flex tube. so it's set right in there, perfect. So, and then if we're doing an off-the-chopper, charged the bunker off, you had 500 rounds right there. It was kind of neat. We're the only ones in Vietnam that had that. In fact, we came off choppers one time. We were doing parakeet ops.

I'll tell you about that later, and there was a whole bunch of army guides and stuff where we landed where the choppers were getting off beating each other on the back and a couple good firefights and shit, you know, and just all the cordalight coming up and everything. We're all bearded, and, you know, Levi's and all that shit.

And they were saying, God damn, I told you we had mercenaries over here. It wasn't mercenaries. And one guy says, no, that's heels. So you guys had, you guys were the originators of the Predator Pack. Pretty much, I think we were. They used them on the boats, but not on, not out in the field. You couldn't patrol it.

Did you have to feed it? No. It just, it fed itself. It fed itself, right out of the bottom. You didn't need to pull it or nothing? No, nothing. It just roop right through their butt. You had to be careful.

Because if you took that thing off. and laid it down and didn't put a nail through the flex part of it, all your rounds had come out. So there you have this big pile of 500 rounds that's not good, you know, especially if he's in a firefight and stuff, trying to put it back in. You know, I'm just saying, it's just funny. But it was pretty good. Me and a guy named me, two of us had those, and we fixed them up, just playing, looking at it, thinking, hmm, but you couldn't patrol at night with them on patrol because they would go clank, clank. You could hear them moving.

That was only if you were actually going off and hitting something. Like you say, there were three types of ops we'd go into if we knew we were going to take heavies. One was a downpilot, and another seal platoon in trouble, and a bright light. What was bright light? That's a prisoner war going in to hit them, get them out. But those three ops were the main three would he went into no matter what, you know. Yeah, that's awesome.

So you finish your workup, and now you're over, you go your first deployment to Vietnam. Was this Keelow platoon? Yeah, Keelotoon. Vietnam. And you're saying you were doing the first podcast, you were saying that you did dartboard operations, which was have a guy huck a dart, because you guys that didn't have good intel, you didn't have good support. We were at a place called New Namcan, and it was a Vietnamese firebase out in BF, G. you know and we're here then down here you had the river and sea flow where our other squad was

but our squad got put up here that was the one so just one squad out there by itself yeah oh dang with the vietnamese guys they had a fire base there okay and there was not good intel so you basically would throw a dart at the dart board and then do what go do an ambush there go set an ambush basically just go out and look set up ambush or something see what was out there go patrol yeah and that and you also were inserting primarily on sandpans during that deployment? Pretty much. Otherwise, about three times we walked out of the fire base and walked back in.

That's just, that doesn't give you a warm and fuzzy, you know, because change guards and stuff and you come back in, all they see is moving out there, and maybe they don't know what the bonafida is for you coming back in and shit. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah. So, yeah, we didn't do a lot up at New Namcan because of that. And we only had sandpans. We didn't have any of our boats up there. none of the mediums or lights or anything. So after we'd been up there for about a month, I think, month and a half, then they brought us maybe two months.

Then they brought us down to sea float. And then we started doing some good ops down there. The sandpans, how big is a sandpan? How many guys could you fit in it? Oh, four or five. So you take two sandpans? Because we were heavy. Yeah, we'd take two sandpans.

Have you ever gotten into a sandpan? No. They're not a real stable. boat. Vietnamese are good in them because they're small. But you get about five big Americans in there and it's a, you have to be real careful. And are you rowing it?

No. It's got a little motor on the back, yeah. The little like, we used to have VN with us. Oh, okay. That we can put it along with us. It wasn't just ourselves, no. And then, and then someone would stay with the boats. Yeah, yeah. The VN would stay with the boats or something. Or they'd leave and come back and get us, you know.

But you didn't start working a lot until you got to see. float. Yeah. And then what kind of ops are you doing on a sea float? Yeah, same thing. Ambushes and going up wherever, setting up ambushes. And that's what I told you. I think it would, you know, I get a little bit confused sometimes on PBRs and SWIFs. I'm thinking they were PBRs that were down in the sea flow with us. But they would, we'd go up on the PBR and have a Boston whaler with us. And a Boston whaler could probably hold four or five guys, you know, plus the guy on the front with a 60 and the guy driving it. Well, the way we'd worked at is we had the whole platoon there.

One platoon would be going to do something while two guys out of the other I mean one squad would go up and two guys from the other squad luckily got to pick to be the driver sitting up on a thing driving the Boston Waylor and the other guy in the

60s why everybody else was just looking over the edge like this and didn't get there again it wasn't you didn't get real excited when you were chosen to be the the coxon you know How often would you guys make enemy contact when you guys go out on ambush? Because that had to be kind of like looking for a needle in a haystack, right? Yeah, we got some contact.

That was the one down in the Square Bay I told you about when we hit the wind. I wasn't on that up when they hit that junk. And then all the other flare started popping up and they realized. And a few other times, we got in some crap. But that particular, that platoon and that deployment wasn't, we didn't do an awful lot. We went out a lot, don't get me wrong, but we didn't get a lot of firefights and stuff. It was my second platoon where we kicked ass and took names. And it sounds like, I mean, this is sort of classic, and you and I were talking about this earlier today.

If you don't have good intel, you can go out on the ambush all day long. Even down in the sea float, we didn't have that good of intel, you know. Like we didn't have a chief of a platoon, we had an OPO, and no mention of any names, but he wasn't real good. but we had this other guy that Chief Corman, I told him, not Chief, but that Corman, it was the first class, and he kind of took over everything. He had been with the Marines twice to Vietnam,

so he was a good hand, you know what I mean? Had his shit together, it was smart, and just a couple funny things happened. It was down the seaflo, I told you, where that pile of clothes moved and stuck his head up, oh, you're looking for me? We thought we'd lost him, you know. And that was like the chopper comes in and lands.

Two of them did, And one was pretty shot up, and a doorgunner had been hit. So he said, hey, anybody want to be a doorgunner? We got to go back and pick up some other guys. Well, of course, as a corpsman, yeah, I'll go. So he's in UDTs. He throws a flat jacket on the helmet and takes the doorgunner position, you know, and they take off.

And about a half hour later, the chopper comes back in and lands shot up even more. Harry gets off the boat, I mean, he gets off the boat, throws his helmet down, takes his flat jacket off. Fuck, I'll never do that again. Yeah, those, when we had this guy, Colonel Reeder on, who was a pilot in Vietnam, he flew Cobras in Vietnam in a second deployment. But those guys, those pilots in Vietnam, the helicopter pilots in Vietnam, they did not, they knew they were going to take rounds. They just went in anyways. They were badass.

That was the same as our sea wolves and the black ponies, but the sea wolves especially were just unbelievable guys, you know. just, they were just badass dudes, man. And I told you that one story, didn't I, about that one chopper? No, I don't think so. We're kind of pinned down behind this rice ditch, and we're getting some pretty heavy fire from the tree lines. So we're calling for closer support, and it's the sea wolves, you know.

So we're getting up, shooting, getting back down my 60, and we're getting kind of low on ammo, too, except the sea wolves. We always had ammo staged on the sea wolves, so they could kick it off to us when they came in. So the sea wolves were coming in. We can hear the rotor. Well, when the sea wolves weren't doing, they were the greatest,

when they weren't doing close air support that do Psiops, they had these great big speakers. So we hear this one sea wolf coming in behind us, and we're still shooting everything. All of a sudden, now to the clear blue sky, I swear to God, you hear this, we are the gods of hell fire, and we bring you fire, and the fucking walkets went over our head,

hit the tree line and they either had a 50 or a mini gun on one side of the seawolf. And that seawolf turned like that and just hosed it down. I think that one had a mini gun on it. Then right behind and came another seawolf. But when we heard that, we were like, everybody just stopped shooting and we looked back up like, what the fuck? Oh, dude. It was unreal. And they didn't really suppress the fire.

So then the black pony, they had 2.7 rockets, and black ponies came in with the five-inch zumies. And when they hit the tree line, it was blowing shit clurp over our head. And that pretty much squouched it. It was done. And we got out of there. The sea lords came in, the regular Hueys that picked us up and got us out of there. That was a good off, though. The Sea Wolves were the Navy pilots, Navy Vietnam pilots, gunships that came and supported.

And we weren't like Coler's. They were regular Huey. Yeah, they were regular. They were regular. They're set up with rocket pods. And I think like the black ponies had the 20-millimeter guns. guns in the front and then the five in Zumi's they had the just a rocket pods but they had a 50 on one side and or a minigun on the other side and the most important thing that they had from everything I've

heard and from what you're telling me right now is they had balls oh yeah oh yeah they were good they were just come in and we got drunk one night in our bar and sea wolves are on the army side that's where they had the thing so we figured hell we'll go over and visit them and have them drink with us so we jumps in our six by and headed out we were they had the army base here and the navy base here we were lived on the vietnamese side and had her own own barracks all fortified it was perfect anyway we got in our six by and was heading out went over to where the sea wolf guys were we wanted to drink with us you know we had our 60s with stuff you never knew you know so we get over there and go walking in their compound everything all right boys get up let's drink

well see we made them drink with us naked because we We were all naked, so we're all sitting there drinking beers. Nakedness, M60s, and booze. I like where this is going. So you guys had way more fun in Vietnam than we had that back. We had a good time, I'm telling you. We'd get back from a nap, do our debrief, clean our weapons, and go up and get shit face, you know. That's another thing.

Colonel Reeder said the same thing. He goes, yeah, you know, we'd go out, we'd fly, we'd get shot up, we'd have to come back and like put the birds in for repair. And then we'd get drunk. Yeah. And then we'd go. And he goes, I don't know. And he really like looked at me and he said,

I don't know how you guys did it without alcohol. Basically is what are you saying? Oh, yeah. Well, I was a, you know, went to Desert Storm. We were over there nine months and no alcohol and stuff. It was okay. But, I mean, to me, it was just like, yeah, this isn't my war, you know.

We really didn't do that much. And, you know, the guy did recons and stuff up from Michelle. and we did that one deception op and when we inserted the Kuwaitis and shit. And then that's outside of that, they never really gotten to firefights and shit, you know. Yeah. Now that that hop with the Sea Wolfs, that was, I'm assuming that was on your second deployment to Vietnam?

Yeah, that was the good thing. Because your first deployment, you know, you did what you did, but it wasn't as fruitful. No, to me, tell you the honest of God truth coming out of E.T. and the SEAL team, I was ready to hit the deck running and it just seemed like we didn't hit the deck. running over there and just didn't have the intel I don't think our as you were saying leadership was all that good and stuff I mean we had one guy the LT they

were doing some shit down in C-float but up where we were we just didn't you couldn't it just wasn't that much you could do you would go out and look try to find shit and everything but we didn't have actual intel yeah that we could react on you know which you found out later that's what you have to have Sometimes, too, I think people spread their forces too thin. Like, if you think about it, you just take a squad and put them out there in the middle of nowhere with no intel support. And then you got another squad in some other area with no intel support. You know, you might as well bring them together.

Put a couple guys together, Intel, and you start making something happen. Well, the platoon before us, that was there and stuff that, that was a platoon. Those guys got in a lot of shit, you know what I mean? That's when he got his Medal of Honor and stuff like that. And actually, my second trip over had been in that platoon. You know what I mean? And told me some stories about it. They got a lot of shit.

But we were stuck at New Namcan and just didn't. Well, shift, right, you could see the U-Men Forest, which was at the very southern part of Vietnam. And it's just triple canopy. Just, I mean, we were away from that a little bit, you know. But this old Vietnamese guy there, he had tattoos all over. And I guess he had fought with the French against the Vietnam, you know, which was the bad guys fighting the French,

same as VC. And we were, through an interpreter, we were talking to him, and I like, goddamn human force, you know, that's a, he says, yeah, a whole company of French Four Legion paratroopers jumped in there, and none of them ever came back out, and we're going, hmm. Plus, that's when I was telling you on my last podcast I did, that's where we landed and we were just starting to put our shit away, and the Sloat lands, and it's a Prooadvisor,

and a good friend of mine, real good friend of mine now. And then when that loach took off, we got the ship mortared out of it for about two hours. And that's when we told him, don't ever come here again, you know? Yeah. So now when you get back, you get back, you do another workup.

And, well, actually, you got out for a little bit. You come back in. You decide, you know, that's like when I went to college, I had to go, I had to get my, once I got my commission, I had to go to college. And people would say, oh, would you learn in college? I'd say I learned in college never ever, ever, ever, ever get out of the teams ever. Same with me.

You know, it's the same deal. So you get out for a year or something and you come back in and get in your second platoon, getting ready to go to V. Was that November platoon? Yes. Okay. He just passed. And what a great guy. Was he the platoon commander?

Yes, he was the LT. Diwi, L.T. You know, he's a great guy. Just a great guy, man. And he just passed here. about three weeks ago. We went up in Rosecrans and they buried him and stuff, but he was a great guy, man.

And that workup, that workup, did much change between your first workup at SEAL team and your second one? Actually, when I got out, came back in, I went back through Cadre. Oh, okay. Just to kind of get yourself refreshed. It had been

about a year I was out. You know what I mean? And it just, that's the way he did in Team One. If you were gone way over six months or something, you went back through Cadbury, just even the guys that came from the East Coast, you know, just so they'd know how we worked and stuff, which was good. When I was going through Cadbury, Jerry Fletch was out there with his platoon, and I got to know him, and I knew some of the other guys in the platoon, so as soon as I got out of Cadbury, they lost

a guy in their platoon, and lucky enough, I was good enough to get into it. So I didn't go through the whole workup with November platoon. I just got in it, and that's when I was telling you was down at the Ream Field. They used to have a firing range down there. And I was figuring out, man, I might shoot something else. You know, that's when I actually asked the first, that's when I picked up at 60, me and this guy, we shot at this creosol log.

Pieces flew off the creosol log, and we set it on fire. And I remember looking at me, and it was like we're in. So that was it. Yeah, the 60s are a beautiful thing. Oh, it's a great thing. So this next deployment, and you mentioned this on the first podcast when you came on about the orders that you got from, was it from Mac V-Sog? Is that who you're getting orders from? Yeah, Nav 4V.

Nav 4-V. Yeah, and we landed in Saigon and our LT, Daiwi went up to see where we're going to go, what area we're going to work in what province, you know, and he went up there and they told him, Well, you got the Vin Long Province, which is where Dongtam is and stuff. And he said his orders were to pacify it. That was it. And we brought it. He picked up a whole bunch of money so we could pay our Kekarsen Scouts and stuff like that.

And we went to Dongtam. Well, we stopped at Ben Luck first. It's about 40 miles away from Dongtam. And there was another platoon there, Gary Gallagher's platoon. And we shows up in our six buys and stuff. And we're kind of rugged looking because we'd been in Saigon for three days. and having a good time and shit and comes walking out

and he looks at us he goes, God damn, you guys look like you've been here six months already. You know, we used to little bedraggled and shit. Then we went to Dong Town, but we used to go back and forth.

It was in that platoon. They just had some great guys. Yeah. And they were like I said, they were our sister platoon, you know, so we'd go and see each other once in a while. Would the sister platoons deploy at the same time? No, they had been over there for three months.

Okay, so was it like a overlap, of three months between the platoons? Some of them, yeah. Two of them may go at the same time. But usually when you got there, there was another platoon somewhere around you, rather East Coast or West Coast. Of course, East Coast had two platoons over there. So, Vung Tao.

I'm thinking it was Vung Tao. God, I'm still trying to think of that name. It's right on a river, and that's where the East Coast platoon was. We never, Nabe. That's where it was, Nabe. And that's where the East Coast platoon was? Yeah, they had a platoon there, and they had a platoon of Mito. And that was their two platoons.

and then we took over, when they left, we took over the one at Mito, but we moved to Dongtam because we didn't want to be right in the middle of a city, you know, or a big town of our city. So we moved down to Dongtam, and then the Navy base didn't want us. The Army base didn't want us,

so they put us in the Vietnamese base that split them. There you go. Yeah, and that was good. We had our boats right there. Everything was perfect. We'd go to the Army base, the test fire weapons and shit, and they were doing that all the time anyway.

So it wasn't. It's another thing. I wondered how in Mito, how they test fired their weapons and shit. Anyway. So what was your opt-tempo like when you were on the second deployment? The second deployment was, we'd go out about every two to three days. Because you had to gather intel and stuff like that. And then we'd get a little break.

And if we were real bored, we'd do what we called parakeet ops. And there was this area. I don't know if I talked about this in the first podcast. I don't think so. It was a place called the Plain of Reeds, and it was all enemy. It was all VC. And so we'd take off four or five of us, and a Huey didn't have a sea wolf in front and back of us. And we'd just fly out there, start looking, go over small hamlets and villages, and if you see VC run around to get shot at, they'd land us.

We'd sweep through, then they'd pick us up, and we'd go look for some more, you know? That's when we were bored, you know. We called them parakeet ops. Then when we hit and started spreading around, the seawolf would go off. I mean, not sea wolf, but sea lord, which was our hughy. And then the sea wolves would start circling, looking for squatters and stuff, you know. So it was good. We might get in two or three fire fights, you know.

Yeah, I guess. Yeah. That was daytime ops, you know. Yeah, so you're just running those daytime ops. And you would just look at the map and say, hey, this is probably a good spot. Yeah, the plane of reeds, the whole place was a, uh, VC stronghold. Yeah, VC stronghold and a lot of VC out there.

So, and then that's when we took a couple of the Australians with us on that, those parakeetops and stuff, and it blew them out of the water. How'd they like it? Did they come back for more? Oh, yeah. We had two groups come down with us. And me and that went up to Newie Debt where the Australian SAS were and went out with them, and that was pretty unique, yeah.

my 60 and about 500 rounds and 120 pound pack and walked around for about eight days. I was real happy about that. Dang. Yeah, that's no joke. But it was good. They were great troops and, you know, they loved coming down working with us because we got contact. And when they, you know, up there, they look for things to see what they could find. They had two types of things.

They had a five-man fighting patrol or a ten, I mean a five-man recie or a ten-man fighting patrol. When we went out with him, it was a 10-man fighting patrol, because we were going to go into this area that the Australian armored infantry had taken over this North Indian, NVA, North Vietnamese Army base camp, and it just decimated it. Well, our job was to go see if any of the NBA had moved back into the area or not. It was good. That's, like I said, my first podcast of the best reconnaissance guys I've ever, ever worked with. And they're fighters, too. Yeah. They're good, good, good, good, good troops. Yeah.

For some reason a lot of people ask me if you've ever worked with foreign troops. Everyone kind of wants to know what we think of their countries and their troops, you know, and, you know, the Brits and the Aussies. Well, the SAS are top shelf. For sure.

They're the only ones that went out with us on patrol, and I think we're in Vietnam. We were the only ones that went out with them, you know. And it all started out with a couple of sats guys drinking in a bar with a couple of our guys and pooper pats

and telling tall tails and, you know, drinking beers and shit. Next thing, you know, we have this exchange, and it's been ongoing since, yeah. Yeah, always, when I was a team one, there was always an S-A-S guy there. Yeah, did you, when you went to, did you get to go to Australia? I never went, no. Oh, you'd love it. Yeah, I know, that's what everyone tells me. It's great.

I always got, I always got screwed out of going Australia for some reason. Yeah, I went through five times after Vietnam, and hell, there was still guys there that had been to Vietnam with fun of the SAS. You don't mean, it was good. It was great. Yeah. I always got screwed. For some reason, I'd always go, well, yeah, we're going to go to Australia and something would come up and we wouldn't get to go.

That's because your platoon officer wasn't very well liked or something. Most likely. What, when you said you were getting contact a lot, so you're doing an op every two, three days, how often are you guys getting an enemy contact? Just about every time we went out because we were going out on actionable intel. You know what I mean? And, shit, I can't think of all. all of it like that one time I was telling you.

Another time we hit these two hoochies and guys came out. It was like the old Kay Carroll except we won. And another time we was doing this recon just looking and this one guy gets up on top of this bunker because we couldn't find any entrance around it.

They may have had a tunnel coming into it somewhere and he's up there. I'm standing here and this guy who has the 60s there and we're kind of watching the area for him why he's up there looking around and tune, tune, tune, tune right by me comes this AK-47 rounds, and they miss me. I don't know how the hell they miss me.

But then jumps off the bunker down right beside me, and this is gone, yeah, the guy's over there, the guy's over there, and me here yelling, and we'll shoot the son of a bit. Finally, we saw where his rounds came in, and we started shooting. Another time we got pinned down a little bit, and we were going to go and hit this, check this hospital out and stuff,

We got hit pretty hard and we had to pull back and move out. That might have been when we got pinned down, you know. Was that when you called them the Sea Wolves? Yeah. We called them in a few times, you know. Yeah, no, it's interesting because people think that every time you go out, you're going to get enemy contact. And you could see, I mean, your first deployment, it was rare that you'd get enemy contact.

The second time, it's a lot more often. Yeah. Like my first deployment to Iraq, we got in, like, I don't know, like four or five firefights maybe. And they were all pretty, like, not really a big deal. and then when I was a troop commander in Ramadi the platoons were getting into it all the time almost every not not almost every but

a lot of the times I mean a majority of times there'd be shooting going on you know yeah I might tell you I've talked to a lot of guys that were in your platoon in Ramadi and they'd follow you to the the hell if they had it they loved you so just letting you know you had a real good impression

and you were outstanding just telling you that that's for My guy, you know, talking to the guys in the ground, drinking and stuff when your name comes up. Well, they're drunk, I guess. That's the reason. No, I'm just telling you. Just letting you know, you know. Well, those guys were, those guys did.

Those guys actually, never mind they would, they did. They did all kinds of stuff that was way above and beyond the call of duty for sure. And God bless everyone. You fought the fight. You took it to them. That's what you're supposed to do, you know. Yeah, it was an awesome deployment. awesome deployment with working with awesome guys for sure.

Yeah, hell, we went out one time and we heard there was this cachet, you know, so, but we didn't want people to know they were going out there. So we got into a refrigerator truck and hid in the back of that until they got close to where the cachet was. Then we went out and dug it up and came back, just little things, you know what I mean? That was a neat op. Yeah, that's, uh, that is good stuff. When you get back from that deployment,

and that was the last, November platoon was the last fully deployed to Vietnam. And you didn't get any, you didn't go back to Subic when you were in a single platoon, did you? No. That was like in-country the whole time. Yeah. Well, you did get two weeks, a week or two weeks, I think, of R&R. And I think I went to Hawaii and Thailand one time. Echo supports your choice of going to Hawaii.

He's from Hawaii. Yeah, Hawaii isn't bad. Nope, it's not. Kind of weird, though, going to Hawaii and everything is all quiet and peaceful and everything. And you just come out of the woods. And, you know, after you've been there for a while, you're, you kind of want to go back. You know what I mean? I don't know.

If I'd have went to Thailand, I probably would have stayed in Thailand and still been there now. No, I'd probably be dead. Yeah, there's a lot of people that go to Thailand and don't come back. No, Bangkok makes the hard man humble. I guarantee you. Did, uh, I remember last time we talked about this. blue-on-blue that you guys had. Was that in November platoon? No, that was in

Kilo. Oh, that was in Kilo. Yeah, and that was our that was our, the officer that was with us up in New Namcan. Dang. And it was like you say, it was supposed to be a hammer and an envelope up. It just went wrong. Yeah. And I'm not sure if he was stood up to shoot or if he was

trying to wave and tell him to stop shooting. Anyway, he got hit, you know, and killed him. So. And then we almost had another in November platoon and I forgot to mention this, so we're hitting this island. It's not a big island, but it had hooches all along one side. So they wanted us to go through and check out the hooches, and we had what we called white mice with us. They were Vietnamese intel guys that could look through things

and find out if there's any VC stuff, you know what I mean, sort of thing. So we lands and we're sweeping through it, and I had this one white mice with me, and I had my 60. Well, the guy that planned this up and thought it was a good idea was our debt golf guy and debt golf was your senior

CEO was that deaf golf and he was kind of in charge of all the other platoons that were spread out and so we did it and he was with us and his interpreter and we were told everybody stay on the side when we patrol because anything on the left side is a free fire zone

right so we're walking along and I'm looking at the woods and also I see this flitting through the woods. So I bring my 60 up, take it off a safe and I'm watching. Well, where the woods were, there was a space and another part of the woods where I wanted the VC who I thought it was to get out in the space. And then at hammering, you know, open up with my 60. And we were spread out a little bit because everybody was checking different things out as we're going along.

So I had it off safe. I'm just laid it up on this rice bag, you know, with rice. on it and just waiting, who comes out? But the Lieutenant Commander, the Ted Gulf guy, I was so fucking pissed. If I'd have been a new guy, I'd open up. You know what I mean? Maybe killed him and

things, so I told Jerry Fletcher my LT about it and he never went out with us again. Because that was crazy. He was on the free fire zone. You know what I mean? And like you say, what if I'd been a brand new guy or something? But I wanted to wait until he got out so I had a clear pitcher before I opened up on him.

Yeah. I mean, even your mindset wasn't even, let me firmness as a bad guy. You knew it was a bad guy. You were just waiting for him. Yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I wasn't saying that might be one of our guys. I knew it was a bad guy because we had already briefed heavily. Everybody stay on this side. Anybody over there and you see them open up on them. You know, when I was running training, man, I worked those guys. They would have blue and blues all the time in training. I mean, we would just make stuff so confusing and just put the enemy in the wrong place and get guys confused. I wanted them to have blue on blues in training so they realized how easy it is to happen so you get a guy

instead of making that decision like oh just you know what just probably get a good vantage point over here if I just walk over here and they'll know it's me you know it's like no they won't know it's you they'll kill you so yeah it's uh man you got to people don't understand how confusing it gets out there man it gets confusing it does that's that's where you're training in your like I was telling you though it saved our butt in Vietnam was our immediate action drills and have them so ingrained into us that it's dark you know exactly where the guys going to be and what you're going to do. Whether it's a peel off or whether you're going to the right or left, you know what I mean.

Getting out of the fire zone, whatever, you know what I mean. But you had to have that, man. Those immediate action drills to me are the key no matter what you're doing, whether it's urban or I think, which I can't really say. No, it's the same thing. It's the same thing in an urban environment. You've got to have immediate action. Just like, say you have a hooch there and you're going to hit the hooch, you know,

and we know there's probably bad guys in it. and we're coming in. What we do is two guys to branch out to the right or left to get anybody from behind. The rest would go in, one guy would turn around and look that way, and the guys would go in,

and that way they could shoot, you know, 180. You know what I mean? Nobody was down now. If the hooch was covered and it had foliage around it, then as we came in, one of the guys in the left

would go down, lay down, look behind. The other guy would be right here at the corner so he could see anybody coming out of window and then we'd have the other guy over here, and then we'd go in and hit it. But what I'm saying is when we did that, it was like that. I mean, that was our immediate action stuff that we did.

That's how we'd hit a hooch. And then when guys went in, they'd switch, one would swing high, one would swing low, just to check it out, then they'd go through. Then they'd say, clear, or we got someone, and then whoever was right next to the door facing out, because we had her security, and didn't know if any way,

but he was going to come behind you, As I'd bring the guy out like I had my 60, I'd stick my 60 right between his legs and you'd fall down. Then I'd put my 60 in his mouth and go, shh, he wouldn't say much, you know. And we'd take off. Yeah, that you were talking about how the SAS, one time you went out on patrol with the SAS and they went out, you were out there for like 10 days and no one said a single word. Not a word. If you did say something, you put you here right next to the guy or your mouth, right next to the air and talk.

But normally it was all hands. signals. But like what you're talking about, all the stuff that you just described, you do all that stuff without talking. Everyone just knows where to go. It's a standard operating procedure. It's the immediate action drill and everybody knows exactly what to do. And yeah, that's... Just like you get a booby trap or something, the smartest thing to do is back away and come in a different way. But if you had to keep going, you'd feel it with your hand and grab the guy next to you behind you and show him where it was. Then you'd step over it, move on a few steps, wait until he got over it by grabbing the guy behind him and you just keep

move. How often would you guys do that? Not too often. We did run into them occasionally, but we were kind of lucky. We never hit. Plus, you'd be able to pick up the signs if you did happen to go on a trail. You could see broken branches faced in a certain way or little sticks pointing in a certain way.

Or actually, we got landed one time in this rice paddy, and we looked after we got off, everybody started looking around. and all you can see was two doys signs, which meant minefield. So we didn't move. You know, we just called the choppers back in and got off and took off. So your second deployment to Vietnam,

how many casuals, how many casualties? No one got killed, right? No, we didn't get anybody hit or killed. No one got hit or killed, despite getting in all those gun fights. Don't ask me, but it's just one of those things. God's a frog, man. Yeah, we figured, you know, we're getting to the point.

That's why we had six months. deployments and not a year or you know whatever because you start feeling like you're invulnerable you know yeah but we were on the cutting edge and uh we just had the firepower we're better i mean you could have had the odd shot like that one yeah one that went right by me or something that could have hit me right in the chest no you had too much skill to get hit in the no i don't know it wasn't skill that was pure luck dude yeah i know it's like uh unfortunately in combat you can do everything right and you can still get killed and you can do all kinds of things wrong and live we did that stay behind ambush that one night i think i told you about that i don't think so okay so about our second op we had in vietnam thought hmm we're going to go and hit this one area here and if nobody's in the uh the little village or anything like that then we're going to do a stay behind ambush and so a squad of us went in and patrolled through through some uh willy peter and the hooches and she's shit like that and just kind of caused hate and discontent.

And then the sun started going down. So as soon as it started going down, we got in a nail-shaped ambush, being where rice paddies were going this way, that way, and stuff. And then we had the other choppers came in like they were going to pick us up. We had our other squat on it. They got off the chopper, ran around it, and got back in it like we were being extracted, right? So we sat there and sat there for about 45 minutes, almost an hour. And all of a sudden here these guys come walking down.

Rice-Dike with AK-47s and shit and stuff. And we opened up on them and, you know, blew them off the Ristike and shit. And then they opened up on us from the tree line, hit him a little bit. The Seawoos came in, did some damage and shit. And then the fucking chopper came in. There was only one of them, so we all couldn't get on it.

We landed with two choppers, you know. So me and another guy, Radioman, and a stoner guy myself, stayed there while that chopper went long. I wasn't too far away. Come back and picked us up, you know. My pooper was a little tight on that and stuff. How long were you sitting on the ground?

Oh, about another 20 minutes, 30 minutes before they came to got us. But nobody came in to the village after that because we had hammered them, you know, pretty bad. So that was pretty good. But that was a brilliant up. Anyway, so I'm shooting my 60. He's over here shooting his 40 mic, Mike, and there's a small stream between us. And we got back. We're drinking beers, patting poopers, you know, telling tall-tail.

and shit and says god damn didn't you see that fucking string of rounds that went right by you on the stream and I says no because I'll shoot my 60 you know it was pretty neat you know I mean yeah that's some good times over there yeah that's an amazing deployment to do all that damage yeah that was a stable hind ambush classic here I mean just the way you want to do it they knew we were there they thought we'd laugh they came in and we got the son of bitches yeah you know and then they always say, you know, did you shoot a guy yourself? Well, you know, when you open up with stoners in 60s and you see guys flying off of rice tax and shit,

you're not sure if it's your 60 that hit him or if it's a stoner or whatever, you know? So it's only one time I know I hit a guy for a fact is that off the, when we came off the choppers and did that O.K. Corel thing? Oh, yeah. Well, then me and a guy, another guy went around before the squad continued moving by,

we wanted to check out the back, you know. So he and I goes walking around And he had a car He was our corpsman And I saw him walk around the edge And fire about three times I stepped by, he missed the guy And here's this guy with an AK-47

Right about here And I stepped around with my 60 Point right at him, you know And I just flipped him Yeah, that's a bad day And then we joined up and went Kept going And then three guys popped up

Out of the Ristike And one, they started shooting at us And we were shooting back But a sea wolf was coming right over us And three rounds went right through the instrument panel on the seawolf, didn't hit anybody. They turned like this,

and the guy had a mini gun and just went, oh, and we just dropped down because there was fucking rounds going everywhere. Yeah, the amount of firefighter you guys are getting in to take no casualties. Yeah, we didn't. That's amazing.

No. That's amazing. That's incredible. And we didn't have a lot of pictures either because we didn't have a professional photographer walking around with us. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, it's, We missed, I would say in Ramadi, we missed the real, like a couple deployments later, maybe a year later when guys were going on deployments, they had pictures of everything because they had helmet camps and they had all this stuff. And we didn't. And as a matter of fact, at that time, there was like rules against taking pictures. So we don't have a bunch of pictures of Ramadi either. We never in that.

Both platoons I was in, we took one just before we deployed, you know, the whole platoon. And then hardly nothing else after that. We wouldn't let photographers close to us. We wouldn't let news people even come close. We weren't on a Vietnamese base anyway they couldn't get on it. It was perfect. And we just went out and did her thing and had a good time and didn't beat no drums about it.

You know what I mean? Yeah. It was good. There was a couple of platoons that had a photographer with him that took a lot of pictures and shit. And you've probably seen them and stuff. And we didn't. Yeah.

And there's platoons. well, for in Iraq, there was platoons that got in trouble. And that's one of the reasons why we didn't take pictures because there was platoons that had pictures that got exposed and got released and they were pictures they shouldn't have taken and they got trouble.

And, you know, not just that they got in trouble, but it was bad press, bad press for America, you know? And that's why there was rules. It was like, hey, no pictures. So we don't have a lot of pictures of when we were in mind. You can do 100 things right and you do one thing wrong and that's what's going to pop up. Yeah, and you do one thing wrong

and you take a picture of it. Yep. That's in these days, you know, that picture's going around the world in 30 seconds. Yeah. So it's, uh, the death's one thing that has definitely changed. And it, and like I said, when we were in Ramadi, we were just on the, like, I don't think people were really on social media yet. That we, you know, not everybody had a camera and not everybody, you know, had a video camera. These guys got video cameras now.

They got helmet cameras. They got all this stuff. And, you know, some of it's good. Some of it's beneficial. I mean, you're not going to get any better intel. There was a company commander from the first of the 506 who was one of the best guys I've ever worked with But he videotaped every time he went out on patrol in a Humvee or or not in a Humvee however he was going on patrol He filmed the whole thing and he was working in one specific district of Ramadi called the Moolob district

And he would come back and watch those videos and he would just and I sat there and watched him with him one time and he goes yeah You see this garbage can over here? Yeah, this this one's a good landmark because it's a different color and then up on this street corn right here This this poll is always filled with so many wires. It always scares me, you know, because there's so many wires hanging off it. And he just had the whole city memorized because he had a camera rolling in his Humvee the whole time. And so for that reason, plus when you gather Intel, you know, you're going into a building and you got pictures of everything. You got, if anyone ever goes in that building gun, here do. Here you go.

Here's what it's laid out. So there's some definite benefits to it. But yeah, there's some real drawbacks as well if, you know, for people can use that stuff for propaganda against you. or if you're videotaping things or you're recording things that are going to make, you know, the Americans look bad. And now you're saying, okay, you did this. Well, here's what was happening in the situation. Here's why this happened. And here's the context.

Well, the context isn't going to make it onto YouTube. The only thing that's going to make it on to YouTube is the thing that makes America look bad. And that's what's going to. And that's what the reporters are going to key on regardless of anything. See, we had barn dance files. Did I tell you about that? You did mention them. Yeah.

Barn dance files were this. Every time you went on an op and you came back, the guy was telling you was our intel guy, our first class. And he'd fill out these barn dance cards. Why'd they call them barn dance? Is that just a pro word for or whatever? But if they had the who wear, what and why's equipment, anything we found out there, what firefights we got into,

what the enemy were using, anything that would be good intel. And it was just a five by four by five card, but it was really good. And every platoon, like the platoon we were leaving, already had theirs. So if we were going back into a specific area that they went into, we had it organized, you know, we'd look it up, pull it up, read and see what they hit and what they got and all that stuff.

And that would be help us out when we were going on and we did our briefs and stuff, and we'd do the same thing. But every platoon would have these barn dance files of what they did and the areas they went into and stuff. and it was pretty good, you know. That's how we did it. You know, that we didn't do the cam record, like you're saying,

but anything that we saw that would be of interest of another patrol or another platoon going into that area, then we'd let them know, you know, through the Barn Dance files. Yeah. And then, like you said, when we got to Dongtam, Vinlawn Province, what the guys did have split us up into provinces or districts in that province. and then we would go out whether Kit Carson Scouts or interpreter and gather intel from the PSB guys, the chiefs,

or from the SF that were out in the field, indoor rangers that were doing firebases and stuff like that and bring that back and then we would put it up on our sit map and start working. You know, like we had this one, we knew through our province that this one VCI, which is your high-level guy, They wouldn't transmit communication-wise.

They would bring your orders in and packets. You know what I'm saying? And he would come through the province maybe once a month. So all the different information that was to be distributed. Yeah. And he would hand it to the VC what they wanted to hit and stuff. But he had all this stuff. We knew he came through there every time.

But there were three different trails that he used because we'd got an intel. We didn't know which one it was. So we went out on the one trail, did an ambush, waxing people and shit like that. So we knew the next time he came, he wasn't going to do that trail. And then we did the same thing on the other trail, right? Yeah.

So we figured he's going to come down this trail. So we set up on him. Got him. He came down that trail, and we got him, got some good intel. That's beautiful. But that was just working with actual intel, trying to figure it out and working it.

You know what I mean? Yeah. Worked out real good. Were you on that op? I always heard about this op where they wanted to get this one VCI and they ended up hitting like his family or some member of his family and when they went to the when they had the funeral they went and got the guy that they no I wasn't on that one there's a lot of things that happened and like you say when you're in your

platoon that's kind of your world and that stuff and I've heard of I don't remember hearing about that but I probably was one time and the trade wins the bar we used to drink at in Coronado or something I'm sure that was brought up. Like guys used to hit tax collectors and get their piasta from them, their money. And then they would turn that into MPC and stuff. You know, just different things. Yeah, guys were getting creative. Good hit in a tax collector because that's a good thing.

Yeah, I support the tax collector for sure. And if he had a whole bag full of money, well, oh, well, you know. Yeah. Yeah, no, that's awesome. That's, and it's all another thing that people, you know, It's all self-generated. So much of it is self-generated. Like what you're talking about is the same thing for us.

I mean, I had an Intel group, but my Intel group was seals, some Intel seals and some Intel guys, and they created all of our intel and, you know, our guys fed into it. And so we produced our own targets, kind of like what you're saying. Yeah. People have this thought that, you know, that the assault force is sitting there waiting for some command to come down and go hit this target. But the reality is we're making up the targets. We're figuring them out ourselves most of the time.

Yeah. Well, I can see the difference from my first platoon, or we didn't have anything, and my second platoon where we actually worked off of actionable intel that we got. It was like night and day. It's a whole different world. Just like we talked about before we started this, you know, you got your fine, you got your fix, and then you got your finish and exploitation. You know what I mean?

Yeah. But we're the best in the world, I think, on DA stuff to finish. But you can't do the finish if you don't. don't have the fine where you know what to go and hit. You know what I mean? And that's why a long time ago we started up that field craft and all that other stuff. But we are proof advisors. We had a training site up in Quiamaca. You know, we called to advanced training. And it was for our prud advisors because they would go over there by themselves or with one other American and have about 50 VC, whatever, that they

were in charge of. And the prunes actually were for, When the CIA could collect intel, but they didn't have a method of going out and hitting it, you know, reacting on, doing the finish part of it. So that's when they started the PruPROP program. Right. And that's it for what? Provincial. Preventional recon units is what they were called Pruths. We call them Proust. Like you say, if I throw out an acronym.

Yeah, yeah. No, I'm just making sure that everybody. Because I'm just so used, you know. Anyway, and they would poll select guys to go through this Prude training and East Coast guys, too. and then they would go over and work. And you said they'd be in charge. You said VC, but you didn't mean that, right? Ex-V-C.

X-V-C. Yeah, not the guy. The guys at Chuhoyd and stuff and decide they wanted to make money. You know what I mean? So, mercenaries is what they were. And so they had that train up. Does Chuhoy mean, does it mean turncoat? What is it?

Chewoy is a guy that, yeah, you left the V-C side or the NBA and went to the south. Do you know what Choo-Hoy? actually means? No, I don't. The actual noun of it? No. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a But it was, they'd put him in this camp. And like when we went to Dong Tam, we went to that camp with our interpreter, but we just happened to have a

special boat guy at the time. MST, we called a mobile support team, not SBU, that spoke fluent Vietnamese. So we'd bring him with us when our interpreter didn't realize this guy could speak Vietnamese too. And then we'd start interrogating guys for our district that were in, you know, for myself or

then along where the guys were. And we'd talk to them and interrogate them and stuff, and they sounded like they were good to go. Then we'd bring them in as Kerkarsen Scouts. And they would stay with us. We'd let them go and stuff. But any time we had an off, they stayed with us until the op was done and stuff.

You know what I mean? We just didn't let them go. But they turned out that they were great guys. And anyway, the Prue program was about six months long and half of was Freight. Fafa was medical because you had to have that when you're working out there. The medical, especially because you're on your own out there, you know,

and you've got to be able to take care of yourself if you get hit. And then they would come over, but these guys would also, after they got done like, if they were going to another platoon, it would be able to get that his everything he did. But we had about seven guys that, or six guys, and there was one of them that went to a special school like Camp Perry. but it wasn't Camp Harris different and it was a shorter version.

And they got that training and they're the ones that were the cadery for that set. And like my first platoon in 69, my whole platoon went through most of that before we deployed over. So you get all that stuff. We didn't get the field craft portion of it, but they had some great, really good

quick kill trails and stuff like that and map and compass and everything. You know what I mean? Yeah. And we're lucky because the platoon every once Well, if they didn't have guys going through, we'd be able to pick that up and go through it. But that was superb training.

I mean, really good, you know. Yeah, that's, yeah. All boils back to training all the time. Yeah. And that's one of the best things about the SEAL teams. But they called it two advanced training. It was SAT training. It was specifically for the prevention of recon units

that they sent the guys over to. Yeah. Yeah. So when you got back from that deployment to Vietnam, now, like I said, that was November platoon was the last full deployment to Vietnam. and now you know the war's kind of over, but you stayed in the teams.

Did you go right to buds? I mean, after that? So I get these orders to the amphibious base, and I thought, what's the shit? Because that's when the dirty 30 was happening and all that stuff. Oh, yeah. Explain the dirty 30 to people. No, dirty 30 is where after the war,

we had too many people, and they wanted to cut us down. So even though guys just got out of training stuff, they picked 30 guys to go. out to the fleet be divers, EOD and stuff like that. And after two years, they could come back or whatever. And it just sucked. It was just one of the low points, I think, of the teams. Imagine you just made it through Buds or UDT training, whatever they called it back then.

It might have been Buds. And next thing you know, you're going to dive school or somewhere. Anyway, I went over to, and I was really pissed. I went over to Buds as an instructor. and warfare. It was the third phase and all that shit. But they still had LDNN program going on then, which is where, you know, gotten his action.

Some other guys did. And I want to stay there and still do the LDNN. But I think, I don't know. I just was one who selected to go to Buds. And when I got done with Buds, I went back to Team One. How long were you a Buds instructor for? Just two years. Yeah.

And then you go back to Team One. there again for about seven years and took about three or four platoons. You know what I mean. Yeah. When you see buds now, because you still are in the community, is there any major difference that you noticed between what you went through and what you see now? A lot more land warfare now. Yeah. I think the kids get trained better. There's so much more to learn. Yeah. I don't know. Half our class, probably would have flunk just academically with what the guys got to know now, I swear to God. We were a frog band. It was, you know, Wasn't that hard, but now with all the calm and everything those guys go through.

Are they teaching that stuff in Buds? They teach calm and buds? They teach some of it, yeah, not all of it, but some of it. And a lot of IEDs when they go out to San Camino and stuff, I guess they do. Maybe they don't. Maybe that's more in SQT. But yeah, they've got to use radios and shit there in Buds. But it's just a mixture between what we did in XQT and what was the Frog Man.

But I think the Frogman part of it, the UDT part of it, is kind of really slacked off. I think they do a few cursory parallel perpendicular recons and stuff like that. But when I went through, we were in that fucking water so much. It was so cold. And everybody always said, you know. You earned your wetsuits. And it wasn't a full wetsuit. It was just the...

Well, that's for sure. That was the same with me. We had the old wetsuits with beaver tails. Even when I went through, this is 1991, right? And so it's not like you couldn't get a decent good surfing wetsuit because I surfed and I knew what a good wetsuit was. So they gave me that shitty wetsuit with the beaver tail with the big zipper, a big loose open.

It looked like a 1970s disco. There's so much water going through that thing. It was almost not worth wearing. Well, our first swim was in UDTs and no fins or nothing. You earned your fins. Oh, yeah. Wet suit depreciation. They called it wet suit appreciation.

And then fin appreciation. Also to get your fins too. You know, and then we got our fins and we still did a couple swims without the wetsuit. Then we got our wetsuit. I mean, it was like, Jesus Christ, you know. Everybody always says, yeah, you don't mind cold water, do you? And I says, I've hated cold water all my life. It's just part of her job and it's what you do.

You know what I'm saying? Yeah. You only get wet once. Yeah. Like, you know what? You just, oh, you're going to get wet. You can just get wet one time. and it doesn't matter anymore.

Yeah. But the, I mean, and there's certain things that I don't think have changed. Like, there's always been a 5.5 nautical mile swim. Yeah. Right? I don't think that's gotten any shorter. I don't think that that just is what it is. A lot of the standards have stayed the same physically.

Yeah. And it fluctuates a little bit, I think, about who's the director over buds and how many times they roll people back and everything. Back in the day, I mean, if a guy got dropped or something, he was gone. He never saw him again. He was just, he was out of there. You know, it wasn't come back later. Maybe they did after a couple of years or something. Like we had a guy in our class name,

and he had been in class 37, I think, and he had broke his hip. And then he was in my class and he made it. You know what I mean? We called him shit. Really got hypothermia bad. Good man, though. There was a guy in my class that had rolled back,

Jeff Higgs, as a matter of fact, who's a jihih Tijuana, but he had hypothermia. They dropped him for hypothermia, and he wouldn't. So they told him he's out. They're like, you're done. Hey, man, listen, you're a great guy, but you can't be in the program anymore because you just get hypothermia too easy. And he's like, no, I'm not leaving.

And they gave him his dungarees back, which is like the regular Navy thing that you wear. And he showed up with the class on Monday with his dungarees on, just PT and with the class in the compound. And they looked at him and they're like, all right, We'll give this bastard another shot at the title. Yeah, he's a hard dude and he made it through. But, you know, hypothermia is a lot like heat, heat, exhaustion when you get at the heat thing. Yeah.

That'll come back and bite you. You know, it really does. I mean, I swear to God. Hypothermia is like that, too? Yeah, if you get a real bad case of it. I knew it was like that with heat exhaustion, but I didn't know it was like that with hypothermia. I think it is. I mean, maybe I'm wrong.

Yeah. I'm just, you know, that's what I heard, so I don't know. Well, I'm lucky because I've always been pretty well marbled. in terms of insulation. These those really skinny, lean dudes. I always found out if you swim as hard as you can, you usually stay warm anyway. That's a good point.

I don't like treading water and cold water, you know, but like that swimmer line I was telling you about, that was painful. God almighty, that was cold. And I told you, when we first got to Buds, they had us go down to 401 and gave us a talk, you know, a guy left in right here, it won't be there, it's easier to pass,

a marshmallow through the keyhole of a needle and make it through and we're all going yeah whatever and so they march us all back in front of the bay you know I told you we're on the bay side and that the guy was telling you about come walking out and he kind of like yeah yeah how tough can this be

and everything and he said about face forward march and march just all of their dress blues right in the water so you got your flap sticking out like this all the white hats floating and the officer sat and kind of looked at each other and went god damn Damn, this may not be that easy, and it went downhill from there, you know?

That sucks. Get ruining your uniform. Dress blues, dude. Yeah, that sucks. That's typical. So you got done with being a Bud's instructor. You went back and you did a bunch. How many platoons did you do back to teams?

I think I did overall nine. Damn. Yeah, that's not that many, but I mean, it was good. Actually, that is a lot. For anyone that's listening to doing nine platoons is a lot, because that's nine platoons with workups. Yeah, that's like 20 years worth of work. right there.

And then, you know, I had a story about you. And you got into a fight with some guy at an island. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was like, you got into a fight with some guy at an island. Oh, no. That was this guy that was just out of prison. That's the one.

Yeah. Blue-eyed, Herrian, about 6-6, yeah. Yeah. Somehow, you know, I heard the story from my platoon chief, and he said, yeah, he said, Roger. He's the toughest bastard alive. And I said, he goes, yeah, one time we're out at Nileland. And there's some guy in a bar and he's, whatever, something happens.

And you guys throw down. And apparently you guys had like a legit, like five, maybe 10 minute fight. Oh, it was terrible, yeah. So I walks in the bar and I'm just sitting there and the song kept playing this Western. She rides a saddle and da da da, da. Finally, I asked the bartender, God damn, can you play a different song? guy turns it off and this great big guy stands up like he said he had blonde hair about six four i think let's just look you know the steel blue eyes and stuff and how come you turn that off and the

bartender pointed right to me well he said to turn it off and then the guy looks at me and i went hmm i don't want to fight you know yeah it's just you just don't get in fights them so i started walking out the door going across the other bar which is right across the street like he wouldn't have followed me so he follows me out the door. And I turned and looked at him and I said, now he's going to follow me over there. We'll probably wind up fighting. So I jumped on one foot twice and hit him as hard as I could, right in the jaw,

knocked him down, his head went like this and hit the wall, and the sunbitch stood right back up. And I went, holy shit, you know. So anyway, we did about a 10-minute fight, and he actually never hit me one time because I was just, I was in really good shape. You know, out of Nileland running and, you know what I mean? And so finally we squares off again, you know, and I look at him and he looks at me and, you know, I'm covered blood, but it's his blood dripping on me because I just kept, you know, if the guy had ever hit me, he had killed me. He was fighting for fun. I was fighting for my life. You know, that's the deal. So we squares off again. And finally I went, we can, I'm not tired yet and we can keep on fighting or we can go across the street and have a beer. And he thought about it. He says, well, let's go have a beer.

puts his arm around me, you know, you're pretty tough for a little guy. And that mom was crying. God, thank God. Now, that's probably the toughest fight I've ever been in. That guy was, Jesus. And then I found out he'd been in prison. Yeah, that's what he did is weightlifting boxing. He was in prison.

How I got out of that, I'll never know, man. That was the punchline was the dude just got out of prison. It was a weightlifter and a boxer and got boxer in prison. Yeah, that was a, that was out. Got worn out. I had a few moments of excitement in that one. And then you became a warrant officer? Yeah, I was a master chief.

I was master chief of Group 1. And that was all I was going to do after that I wasn't going to go to Warcom or anything. And that's when they came out with a warrant program. So I put in for warrant and went warrant. And then deployed the Desert Storm, came back. And then we started that special program I was in. We did that for about a year, year and a half. and the benevolence of Warcom decided we didn't need that anymore.

So they took us all and put us in to run the first SQT for group one instead of having it at the teams. And then we did that. And then I went from that to start doing OREs. That's awesome. And finished up doing OREs. You put, when I was in my second platoon, all the guys, all of our new guys went through your SQT. We've been going for like two hours right now. I want to get one more question.

Some people listen to the podcast that want to go in the SEAL teams. And, you know, any sort of thought on what they should be thinking about when they're trying to get in or trying to go. They ask me all the time. You know, I always say real simple stuff, you know, like, hey, do a bunch of pull-ups, push-ups, dips, swim, run, and don't quit. And that's how you make it into the SEAL teams. then when you get into SEAL teams, you know, work your ass off. Well, you know, you get all those kids up at the pre-training up at Great Lakes, you know, physically fit, perfect.

And it's the mental thing. It's you got to take each day at a time when you get there. And if you finish that day, be real happy. Then get the next day and keep going on. Don't look ahead of what you've got to do. But it's like when I was a second time I was a bud structure, I was a master of arms, you know, and I'd get all these guys.

in and I'd tell them if you want to do everything we want to do and have the easy life go eOD. If you think you're going to be a diver and a working diver, I said go be a diver. I told him if you want to be cold, wet, and miserable, then go in the seals. But I will say one thing, even going through buds and you can probably attest to this, that just gets you into the teams and then you deploy and that's where you pull from what you experience. and buds where you have to push yourself to the inth. You know, like there again too in 69, we were doing this, when I was with a Kilo-Latoon, we were gonna set up

the sandbush on this river. We had to go through about a click and a half of mangrove shit, and that's where it was all gray and shit from aging orange and shit. I was up to my knees in mud, up to my waist and water. And when you're holding your weapon up high enough to keep it out of the water, and you go for about a click and a half in that shit, using just compass because we didn't have GPSes and all that shit, and you kept going to your run into the stream or whatever you're going to set it up on.

You had a strain headache so bad your fucking eyes were crossed, and you're breathing the mosquitoes in your mouth, and spitting them out and shit like that. That's a... That's the 10. And you come back and drink beers and pat poopers, you know you're good to go. Or you're in Korea and Pohang, and you've got to hit this target, but you've got to go over about three mountain ridges

because you can't run the ridges in Korea. You've got to go up and down them and come out of a submarine and land on the beach. And it's cold, and you're kind of covering why one guy's trying to take off his wetsuit and he's falling down until he gets it off. Then you do it. And you get about halfway up the first, mountain ridge before you start getting warm, that's when you find out if you got it or not. The bottom line is we complete the mission, you know.

Yeah. That's what we do no matter what. But like I say, Bud's Hell Week, all that shit, just gets you your mind in the right place to know that, well, God damn, I went through Hell Week, I can do this. You know what I mean? Yeah. And other things like the five miles swim and all that stuff. And that's all.

It's just it's more, I've seen when I was an instructor, great big guys that were football players fall out and quit. And I've seen little skinny guys that you laugh at and thinking this guy's going to be a seal and he makes it through. It's all because of up here in his mind, you know. Do you agree? I mean, does that sound? Yeah, and I've always, you know, the buds is a screening process

and you don't actually learn much in buds. It just gets rid of the people that don't want to be there. And the real test comes when you, you know, when you get into combat. Because going into, you know, being called wet and men, miserable for two or three or four or five days and training and doing a bunch of push-ups doesn't compare to what you were just talking about. Or you. I think of the sand and the heat and all that shit that you went through.

I mean, I don't like the desert. I don't like code in the mountains. You can give me the jungle any time. And I'm a happy camper. Yeah, I don't like mosquitoes. So I'll take the desert of the mountains. But those are the things, you know, I always say that, or I always talk about seeing my guys lined up to go out. in Ramadi and their Humvees are lined up and like if I wasn't going on the hop

It was just like a platoon was going out and I'd stand there just I'd salute them like as they were leaving you know I'd just stay out there and salute them as they were rolling out And what it takes to be the lead turret gunner in the first Humvee is more than what it takes to get through buds like That guy who knows that there's been you know an IED on the road he's about to drive by There's been seven to ten IED a day on that road and he's the lead turret gunner and he's going to roll out again and he did it the night before and he did it the week before and he did it the night before that that's what the test is and so plus that reminds me when I was on that Boston whaler to where is he he's up at the top right what can people see him yep yeah any rockets or anything like that you know where it's going to go yeah yeah because they're going to want to stop that from shooting, you know what I mean. But just an example, I mean, like when I was in Subic, it would be,

we'd take the, in Subic it's pretty neat because the topography there was, you'd go from triple canopy jungle down to Mangrove to where the lower Mal was, which was their fuel place and stuff. Well, I'd take my guys up

to the, about four or five them, up to the hospital, which was up top. We'd go down through the triple canopy jungle. work her way all the way through, spend the night, then come in and hit the lower amount. So they had triple canopy, regular jungle, and mango swamp type of stuff.

And they were going to just to kind of let them know, you know. Yeah. This is what it was like, boys. Yeah. That's all that's, and that's what it's like. That's why we train hard and to be prepared for that stuff. So, yeah, awesome, awesome advice. Echo, speaking of advice, do you have any advice on how anyone,

and if they want to maybe support the podcast or support themselves, how they could do that. Sure, of course. Quick question. Quick question. You mentioned the booby traps. Like what kind of booby traps? What is it?

Like trip wires? Oh, God. We went before, when we deployed in, I don't know if I was, I think it was 7071, we stopped in Hawaii and went through the EOD booby trap course that they had, that they'd picked up over the years in Vietnam and set it all up. And after we went through that,

that thing, you didn't even want to go over just about because it was unbelievable. But they would do stuff like they'd like to use, you guys would call them IEDs, but there'd be like mortars up in trees and stuff and they'd use different methods. Like a guy named, they got, he got hit with a command detonated, might have been a mortar and hit him pretty bad. But sometimes they would take filament down and put, uh, uh, you know, he'd get him pretty bad. put fish hits on it so that you would grab it, you wouldn't feel it on the bottom, you know.

And it would pull, set off, whatever they had set up. If you usually saw a filament line that was just kind of sagging everything, you'd go ahead and cut that. If it was tight, you didn't fuck with it. Like you say, the smart thing to do is the back way and come in another direction. And the way the R-Point scouts did it, they were really good. They would take a thin branch or stick, you know,

real thin. Just like when you're fishing, you can feel a bite on the line. They would take that and they would hold it kind of in the center. And as we're moving slow, they'd move at any time that thing dipped, they had reached out and feel it. Like a lot of other times, if you're going down a trail, which isn't a really good idea anyway, but you'd step over a log. Sometimes they'd put pressure, detonated stuff over that log if you stepped on it. So you'd always want to go to the side, just a myriad of things. There was a... A lot of the stuff was command detonated. Like when we were on those river boats,

there was this place called Snoopy's nose, you know, and we'd have the boats going like this, and when they would turn one group of boats, another group of boats would be here. And then they would open up on this group of boats so they would shoot across, but it wasn't that far to where the other boats were, and they'd started getting hit and thinking,

God damn, we're being shot at, then you'd go back and forth. Or they would put a B-40 rock, then they'd be down here in a spider hole but they'd have like singh-o-posts little one sticking up up there and as soon as the boat got right there they would hit the command thing a rocket would go off and hit the boat everybody would open up here and these guys would be giggling taking off you know what I mean just uh just you know the uh the EOD guys that we had nowadays in the SEAL teams the guys are coming they go through work up with them they're awesome you can't you couldn't if someone normal person was watching they

wouldn't be able to tell who's EOD and who's not in at least when we're in Ramadi and that's what most of the EOD guys are like but my EOD guys talking about not wanting to go over there my EOD guys they would they would put together briefs of like the latest EADs that's been out there this is when we're in Ramadi and you know every couple every maybe like once once every two weeks they put together more of a detailed brief of like hey this is what it does this is this thing and what we would do is when someone knew like let's say someone was in from out of town or we had like a visitor that was going to go on and op with us you know would they give that extended brief to teach the guys well what it actually did was he would just horrify yeah that's what happened us when we went

through that uh yeah that was that became like the joke like i you know i'd look at the eOD like i see their slide come up and i the initial slide in the brief was i could tell it was the big brief and I'd look over it the person that was going like our guest, you know, maybe it was like a senior officer, someone was going to come, or some intel person that was going to go out and on up with us, and I'd look them at the beginning of the EOD brief. And, you know, they just have a normal look on their face.

By the end of 22 slides later, they'd look like they didn't want to go anymore. No, like the VC would take these stone things, you have water in and stuff, right? And if you're going through a village, which we didn't do, we didn't usually sweep through villages and shit, they'd fill about half it up with gasoline. And if they knew the Americans would come in,

they'd take a grenade, wrap, say, rigors tape or something that would disdegade. Drop it in there, then as the guys are going through, checking out the hooches and everything, that would go off. I mean, like if we were going to go into a hooch or something, we would tie a string to the door and then pull the door open if everybody would be down or if we saw something. And then where the steps were going into it sometimes, if we weren't hitting it quick, you know,

you checked and see what was under the, you know what I mean, see if there was anything. But it's just, they were ingenious, man. They were really good. Evil. Evil. They beat the French and shit. You know, these guys have been fighting for a couple of years, you know.

Yeah. Anyway, go ahead. I'm sorry. Yeah, no, no. That was it. It's crazy how they get smarter and then you guys get smarter with trying to figure it out.

Then they're like, okay, they're trying to figure out this. So they get smart, you know? And it becomes, yeah, the game. That's the game. the game doesn't stop. So part of the game. No. Dang.

Speaking of the game. Speaking of being in the game. Okay. Like that? I'll give that one to you. You took some alpha brain today, apparently. I did. Alpha brain.

Alpha brain from on it. I don't think there is any other kind of alpha brain, but nonetheless, I did take some, and we're going to talk about it. Not for too long. So anyway. Supplements. Supplementation. So I was thinking about this.

I was taking krill oil, actually, is when I was thinking about this. where would you be if you didn't take any krill oil or any strong bone? Where would you be? We don't know. Behind? We're not going to find out. I'll tell you'd be behind. Exactly.

Right. So it kind of makes me think like, okay, you know, anyone who's thinking about, okay, Jocko, actually, they talk about taking krill oil all the time, how much it helps. And they didn't start taking it. You're behind. So my recommendation is take the krill oil, not to mention the alpha brain, not to mention any other supplements that will help you get to. where you want to be. You talk about procrastination sometimes. Every once in a while.

And that's the biggest thing, by definition, that's going to keep you from doing it. Anyway, get on the supplements. That's the point there. And if you want 10% off the supplements that we all know are the best supplements, go to onet.com slash jaco. Boom, there it is.

Support yourself. Then you can support others. And it supports a podcast. Boom, there it is. Also, another way to support podcast is Amazon click through, which means before you do your Amazon shopping, click through the website, joccopodcast.com. A little banner there.

A good and natural way to do it is, you know, when you shop for the books, like the books that you cover. We have a whole page of all the books, all of them. Click through there, boom, it'll take you right to the books. You purchase, that's a good way to support. There it is to support your brain as well with books and educating yourself. Also, subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Stitcher, Google Play, all these other podcasting, providing platforms. If you haven't already, that's a good way to do it.

Leave a review if you're in the mood. If you're not in the mood, then don't do it. Or you can still do it if you're not in the mood, whatever you want. Also, YouTube, subscribe to that one. People have been subscribing. That's good. It's good because it helps spread the word. It seems obvious, but when you really think about it.

not as obvious as you might think. Because when you get that alert, it's not just the whole podcast, as we always kind of note. It's like little excerpts, you know, a lot of times or a little bit more artistic excerpts. You'll be more compelled to share those. And we talk about shareability. Right. When you get, when someone shares it with you, that's one thing.

And you're like, okay, I'll listen to this. It's only two, three minutes long. But on the reverse side, when you're about to share it, you, you're, you're about to share it, you'll be thinking kind in the other person's mind. They're more into listening to it because it's shorter. It's subtle, but there's a difference. So anyway, if you subscribe, boom,

it'll have that effect on you as well. I know seems magic, but it's very explainable. Anyway, point there is subscribe to YouTube. That's a good one. We'll put more videos on there as well. Also, Jocko has a store. It's called Jocko store.com. New Rashguard is out.

straight up. We did it on the Facebook Live, I put it live on there. You were there. I was there. I think it was your Facebook Live. I don't think I've ever done a Facebook Live, by the way. Anyway, back to the store, there's women's stuff on there.

There's T-shirts on there. You have a T-shirt? We gave you a T-shirt, right? Last time? I'll give you another one this time, too. They're pretty dope. There's layers. More to the shirts than meets the eye.

Warrior Kid's shirt is out. Warrior Kid shirts Shirts Adults and children Yeah Yeah Also Jaco uniform That's what I'm calling it

The Jocko uniform Oh this shirt Victory MMA and fitness shirt You know The actual original shirt 100% cotton Very soft

Like how Jocko likes it Anyway From my eye here That's what I heard Anyway A lot of cool stuff On there If you want to support

Get something There's some patches on there too Velcro patches, regulation size for the hats. Actually, we got hats coming out too, by the way. Oh. A lot of people are they out now? They're not out. They're not out.

I'm saying. So why are you even telling anyone? I'm saying because when people make these suggestions and a lot of people start making them, okay. You know, the more people that make them, the more we, we are likely to begin to think about executing.

God, you make it sound like such a process. It's a process because you can't just have like two guys saying hey we should get um you know i don't know something earrings or something and another guy's yeah that's cool no we're not doing earrings exactly right story don't ask boom so you made my point for me so hats were one of those ones where there was a lot of people saying we need hat or we should we should have hats that would be cool and people were like yeah i think that too so anyway hats are on the way some hoodies out there i already mentioned the rash guard i think i think we have a lot of good stuff on there. But only way

for you to find out is to go to jocco store dot com and find out for yourself. If you're in the mood, get something like that or get something that's on there and it will support the podcast. Also, good way to support yourself in your journey. Journey? Are we doing journey? You've been doing it just so you know. I know,

but I just, I have mixed emotions about it. Still not comfortable. Yeah, I like when other people say it, not myself. Anyway, and you're getting after it, journey, waking up early, sticking to the workout, sticking to the diet, I think that's the that's the main one you know what I'm saying maybe but don't say maybe you're at my house the other day and you were pound what were you eating chicken wings no there was something bad apple pie wait wait was it apple pie no there was something nonetheless as far as

diets go I went I went nuts on the chicken wings technically the way those were made that wasn't much of a deviation from the diet okay anyway the point there being I think I think I think about something else though Yeah exactly right And that's the point really Even Jaku gets nuts sometimes It was a Saturday so that could have been

His cheat day who knows but I'm just saying You can be on the program and the diet thing That'll sneak up on you That'll sneak up on you when you're not ready Like if you're if you have okay I gotta wake up at 430 You know when the insurgent is gonna come He's gonna come at 430 You gotta work out at 830 or 5 or whatever time

You know when the weakness might come So you can be ready for it. The diet thing you just don't know. That's what I'm saying. So, nonetheless, any moment of weakness, this is what you do. You go to iTunes or Amazon Music and get an album with tracks called Psychological Warfare. All it is is a bunch of tracks.

Jocko telling you why you should not skip workout. You should not hit the snoo. You should not eat the donuts. No donuts. Practical, logical. advice from Jocko you know why because a lot of people they look for inspirational advice this is practical

flimsy right inspirational is very flimsy because it relies on you feeling like it this has nothing to do with feeling this has to do by definition with you not feeling like it so let Jocko talk you into making the right decision boom that's all it is

100% effective I dare you to skip the workout after workout and get Whatever the track is called. There's a bunch of them on there. Because anyway again psychological warfare iTunes still number one by the way Mm-hmm that's a check holding holding strong holding strong for a good reason by the way Yeah also when you're on Amazon you can get jocco white tea which I'm drinking right now and the reason I'm drinking it is because it's delicious By the way was it tastes like victory way of the warrior kid book came out feedback's been unbelievable getting photos of kids of kids

Doing pull-ups studying doing Jiu-Jitsu basically getting after it in all realms of getting after it, which has been awesome and if you want your kid to get after it Or other kids around your kid to get after it and become stronger smarter and better than get them way the warrior kid And I just got an email yesterday from a friend of the family 69 years old Is that considered a kid? No, a little bit older than a kid. It's only than a kid, but guess what? I He said he learned a lot from Uncle Jake. I did. I just finished it.

Oh, you finished it a few days ago. I read one or two chapters. Just every night routine, boom, boom with my four-year-old. Does she understand it? She understands a percentage of it.

She's four. The good things. Does she understand the impact of things? Yeah, so this is the plan. So she's going to understand these really, really basic things. And maybe, you know,

I'm going to just read it over and over and over. So it becomes the ethos kind of thing. Yeah. And then after she gets older, she can start understanding the details, you know? And then the, The more older she gets, the more she understands.

Just gonna be her base way of thought. Her book, the ex-corated. Boom. This guy, friend of the family, 69 years old, learned from it, and then he went and bought a copy for all of his grandchildren,

each of them individually. So that's good. Discipline equals freedom, field manual, thoughts and actions. That's coming out. It's available. You can get it for pre-order right now.

Extreme ownership, of course, you can get combat leadership applied to business and to life so you can get that book. Also, if you want to get in the game, you can contact Eschelon Front, leadership and management consulting company that we have.

That contact is info at eschelonfront.com. Also, the muster is around the corner, the Austin, Texas, Muster 13 and 14 of July at the Omni Barton Creek Resort. Pragmatic leadership strategies and tactics that you can utilize day one. No reason to wait around. You'll learn them and you'll be sending emails in a break to your team getting things fixed. There's only 300 seats for this because we wanted a smaller venue and this was the better venue.

It's going to sell out. So if you want to come, get your tickets now until the muster. If you have any feedback or questions for us, you can find us actually. on the interwebs, Twitter, Instagram, and on the Facebook. And Echo is at Echo Charles,

and I am at Jocko Willink. Roger, of course, has no social media. He doesn't care. Echo, you got anything else? I thank Roger Heiden, again, for coming by. Thank you so much.

Yeah, I just want to say, though, Jocco, my son's been going to Jiu-Jit-So, at your studio for about six months now. And I'll tell you he loves it. Yeah. He went to about two and a half years of this fighting, boxing guy that was really good. But he says that Jiu Jizzo was plus the instructors you got our top shelf.

Yeah. And he really likes it. He told me to tell you. He really enjoys it. And thank you. Yeah. Of course. It's great to have our gym, Victory MMA.

It's great to have it and to have it. It's just accessible to people. There's no walls around it. It's an open door. It costs money, of course, because you've got to pay rent and all that stuff. But not that much. Not crazy. $100 a month.

You can train any time you want. Anytime. Anytime you want. Well, not 24 hours a day, but 6 in the morning until 10 o'clock at night. Compared to other places. Oh, yeah, yeah. That's like literally three times as much training. Plus, it's not just Jiu-Jitsu.

You got everything there. And he says that's what he likes about it. He's wide open and, you know, he likes it. Yeah, it's got jih Tuxing, Moitai, wrestling, MMA, CrossFit. It's got everything in there. And that's why we built it. Roger, you got anything else? No, I'm good.

I'm about burnout now. Well, hey, man, once again, thanks for coming on. It's just awesome to have you on here. And the first time that you were on, I got a million. I know you don't do social media. But I got a million people saying, please bring Roger back on, please bring Roger back on. And now that you were on today, and once again, you have a good way of telling little bits of stories that are awesome. And I want to hear like a one hour story about Sea Wolf's coming in and dropping bombs and spraying stuff down.

I'm like, how does that, what – I want to learn the tactics of what was going on. So you're probably going to have to – you're burned out for today, but you're probably going to have to get on one more time at least. And – but thanks for coming on again, sharing your story, your story. experience your wisdom with us and more important of course thanks for what you did for our country for the Navy and of course for the teams you're absolutely one of the guys that made the teams what the teams are so thank you for that Roger honor to have you on here and for the rest of the Vietnam veterans and I hear a lot from Vietnam veterans thanks to all of you for holding the line and thank you for every deployment for every operation

every mission every day spent out on patrol every night spent out in the bush every helicopter assault every river operation every combat sortie every case of jungle rot and malaria and every wound received and every brother lost Thanks to you all for what you did for us. We will never forget. So until next time, this is Echo and Jocko and Warren Officer Seal, Roger Hayden. Out.