School of War - Ep 212: Arnold Punaro on Fighting in Vietnam and Washington

Episode Date: July 4, 2025

Arnold Punaro, retired USMC Major General and author of If Confirmed: An Insider's View of the National Security Confirmation Process, joins the show to talk about his infantry service in Vietnam and his experiences serving in Washington DC. ▪️ Times      •      01:35 Introduction     •      05:40 5 weeks     •      10:51 Officer training       •      13:18 3/7     •      16:37 Jungle fighting           •      23:25 Wounded         •      31:32 Payback      •      36:35 Bad situation     •      40:10 Getting home      •      45:46 The Senate     •      49:28 Getting the facts     •      54:00 Service Follow along on Instagram, X @schoolofwarpod, and YouTube @SchoolofWarPodcast Find a transcript of today’s episode on our School of War Substack

Happy Independence Day, everyone. Here's an episode we recorded just before Memorial Day, and it seems just as appropriate to put it out today, a conversation with Major General Arnold Panaro, USMC, retired. We mostly talk about his incredible military career and his combat service in Vietnam, but there's a lot else, facing down protesters on the streets of Washington, D.C.,

his later service in government, and more. It's a good one. Let's get into it. It is for a war just to walk the invasion of away. December 7, 1941, a date which will live in infantry. A bloody experience of Vietnam is to end in a state. We continue to face the grave situation in grand. It will fight on the beaches. There's a fight on the landing ground.

We'll fight in the fields and in the streets. We shall never surrender. For more, follow School of War on YouTube, Instagram, substack, and Twitter. and feel free to follow me on Twitter at Aaron B. McLean. Hi, I'm Aaron McLean. Thanks for joining the School of War. I am delighted to welcome to the show today, Arnold Panaro, who served 35 years in the United States Marine Corps on active duty and in the reserves. He retired as a major general. He spent 24 years in the United States Senate, becoming staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee. He does a variety of things in

government and the private sector. Today, he's the author of several books to include most recently an insider's view of the national security confirmation process. Arnold, thank you so much for joining the show. Privileged to be with you and your listeners. So I want to start with your background and your career in uniform. What was it like growing up in Georgia? How did the Marine Corps first come on your radar? I have it in mind that your dad was a veteran of the Second World War.

Was he a Marine or in the service? No, my dad was a 1938 graduate of the Citadel. Wow. So he was in the United States Army, fought with Patton's Army in Europe, the dash across France into Germany. And all of my uncles on both my father and mother's side obviously served in World War II. My mother worked in the Army. My wife, it didn't know her at the time, but both her parents served in the U.S. Navy. So, you know, we grew up with a generation that had served in the military.

my uncle Vincent was a paratrooper in the 82nd Airborne, and he'd left all his old paratrooper stuff with us, so we played with that when we were growing up. But my dad was a small business contractor, and, you know, so what we knew about that was all the uniforms and paraphernalia that was left over, but nobody I knew directly when I was growing up and making Georgia serving the military,

although the people I went to school with, many of their dads that had served in World War II, it stayed in the National Guard. We had a big National Guard unit in my hometown of making Georgia, the 48th Mechanized Brigade, which I would come to work with very closely when I worked in the U.S. Senate. So I was once accused by a U.S. Senator known to us both, who learning of my family's Army background, asked why I had betrayed my family and the United States Army to join the Marine Corps. What led to this turn of events in your own life?

Well, so I'm a graduate, 1968 college graduate, and that was the peak year of the draft. And I was not anxious to be drafted. The lady, there was a lady that ran our local draft board, Mrs. Beasley, who was way up in years. And she basically said to me, if we don't get you in June, we'll get you in July. And my dad said, hey, son, you don't want to get drafted. You'll go in the army and have to go fight in Vietnam and war as hell. you know, and so the other services, the Navy and the Air Force were only really looking for pilots at that point. That was like a six-year obligation.

And the Marine recruiter, his name at the time was Major Jim Way. He said, well, you joined the Marines. It's only two years. Of course, what he misled me on was it was two years if you flunked out of Officer Candidate School. If you got commission like I did, it was a four years on active duty. So later in life, when I was working in the Senate and he was a colonel, you know, I said, I know all about these recruiter tricks now. But in any event, you know, I joined the Marine Corps and went through Officer Candidate

School and then the Marine Corps Basis School and ended it up in Vietnam quicker than I ever would had if I'd been drafted in the Army. Well, you know, say what you will about that recruiter, he was effective. He was right. Exactly. He was meeting his meeting as well. We not only got me, got all my buddies. And the other interesting thing was, you know, we weren't inclined to go in the military.

And he said, well, come back. You know, we met with him the day before. Come back. And I've got to give you a test and everything. you all look like good candidates. So we went out that night, and there's any good college students that were getting ready to graduate that were going to have to go into military. We had a few libations and came and took the test the next day, not in the greatest of shape.

And he told me, I remember I'll never forget this, you know, Ms. Prenaro, you've scored one of the highest scores we've ever seen on this test. And I was quite proud of myself. I learned later in life when I was in a senior enough position and had access to all my records. I actually didn't do that well on the test. But in any event, in any event, you know, I got accepted and was successful in the 10 weeks of Officer Candidate School. And then the basic school was 21 weeks. So, you know, basically I was in combat on the ground in Vietnam in 31 weeks.

And there was no infantry officer's course in those days. There was not. So basically, the whole 21 weeks you were learning how to do patrolling in a jungle. And so it was all training. And of course, you know, in the Marine Corps, infantry is the way to go. And, of course, in the peak of the Vietnam War, all they were looking for was infantry officers.

The time I was in Vietnam, you know, sadly was one of the peak years of casualties in Vietnam. And some days we were losing 100 killed in action a day. The average lifespan of a second lieutenant, the average was five weeks. I lasted five months before I got wounded. I was actually the senior in five months on the ground in the bush the whole time. I was the senior second lieutenant in my battalion, third battalion, seventh Marines. I was getting ready to be a company commander because there were no first lieutenants because I was that senior and they had, you know, so few officers that had lasted.

And obviously I did not get that opportunity. Now, when I was at the base of school, this class had to be somewhere in the vicinity of yours, if not actually your class. But I think it would have been a 68 class because I was at the basis school in 2008 and there was a reunion that year, which would have been what, I guess the, this is why it was an air contract, a ground contract. This is I guess the 40th reunion of 68 tech something. I don't remember what it was, but they said of themselves that they were either the,

either the most highly decorated TBS class and or the most senior TBS, like the most general officers came out of that. Because I remember looking around the room, and I recognized several people to include there was an actor, the guy who played Rawls on the wire. I can't remember the actor's name off the top of my head, but it was probably, you know, HBO Star at this time, had been a, you know, lieutenant in this class back in the 60s. No, we had some, in my basic school class, we had a silver medalist from the Olympics. I mean, there was all different. We did a 50th year reunion. We had 232 students in our basic class, 8-69 was our class designated Hotel 8669.

And we had a number of foreign military students, including Vietnamese Marines, one of whom was one of my roommates. And we had a number of our brothers that were, you know, killed in combat in Vietnam. We had not done anything together. And most of them had just done their four years of active duty and gotten out of the Marine Corps. A few like myself stayed in the reserves. We found, you know, we spent two years trying to locate everybody. obviously we had a sizable number that had been killed in action and we knew who all those were. And we had over a hundred of that class of 232 minus the foreign military students and minus the ones that had passed away either in combat or over the years.

You know, we had a great reunion. One of the things we did is for every single Marine in our basic class that was killed in action, we had built a plaque and had information about that Marine. we went down to the Vietnam Memorial and in front of each of their names on the wall, we had one of our basic coup class talk about what that Marine did and who he was. And we invited some of the widows,

a few that we were able to locate and were able to attend. And it was a very, and again, for the Marines. And then the government had come up with a Vietnam recognition pen. As you know, the Vietnam veteran was very frowned upon and not treated well at all to recognize their service. And so at the dinner we had that Saturday night, we had actually gone down to OCS in the basic school. We went to the evening parade on Friday night.

Obviously, we went to the Iwo Jima War Memorial, laid a wreath. We went to the Vietnam War Memorial and did that what we said about each of our fallen brothers. We had every Marine come up and talk about what they'd been doing for the last 50 years. And I thought it was a very meaningful thing for the individuals. And so, again, you know, the old saying, once a Marine, always a Marine, it's really true.

I mean, nobody that showed up had lost their love of the, of the Corps or lost, you know, Semperfidelis always faithful. Now, this is asking you to sort of think back to some details that are pretty far in the past at this point. But I remember from my own experiences in Quantico thinking that, you know, with reasonable limitations allowed for, the year-long pipeline of training for an infantry officer to go to an operational unit and then go to either Iraq and Afghanistan in my day was actually pretty good. I mean, that is to say, what was within the realm of the possible to do with lieutenants in the United States without actual exposure to combat was pretty high quality. Like, one did feel pretty tactically well-prepared to command a platoon in the kinds of conditions

realistically you were going to face. Now, of course, there's all kinds of stuff that comes with actual war that you can simulate, but the thing itself is the thing itself. Still, I have a lot of respect for the team that designed and led the training that I went through. In 1969, how much did the training prepare you for what you were actually going to face in Vietnam and how much of a gap was there? Well, the training that helped me most was land navigation, because basically when I learned very quickly, is it was pretty easy to get lost in Vietnam with the triple canopy jungle.

There was no global positioning system. There was no electronic systems. You had your lens added compass and a one to 50,000 math. And basically our company commander, one of the legendary Van Riper twins, I was Jim Van Riper. He was on his second tour in Vietnam. We moved every single day.

We never stayed in the same position, which is probably good tactically because the bad guys can find out where you are. And I never got lost. So my small platoon, I never had 50 Marines in my platoon. I was lucky to ever have 25. They were all draftees, not one volunteer. I never had a sergeant, not an E5 sergeant. The highest rank I ever had was a corporal.

And you didn't have your full complement of fire teams, things like that. And the team that your Marines had a lot of confidence in you because so many lieutenants, I guess, got lost. And the battalion had confidence in me. So when the battalion was moving, my platoon was always asked to be point. and lead and make sure and get lost. So to me, that was the training. It certainly did not, I don't think, again, today, it's so much more complicated with so much more complicated equipment.

I mean, basically all we had, we trained on the M14 rifle. We got to Vietnam and we're given an M16 rifle, so we never trained on that. Number two, the early M16 had a problem with extracting the spent round, the grit and the sand and the monsoons would get in there with jammed. So it was a huge problem. Obviously, though, it could be semi-automatic or automatic. You had your basic hand grenades.

You had your M-79 grenade launcher with a B-Hive round. You had your 60-mic-mic motors, and the lieutenant always got the two heaviest, the Willie Peter and the white phosphorus ground to carry. And you had your, you know, 250-round cans of M-60 machine gun that was very heavy. the base plate for the machine gun, the base plates for the mortars. It was pretty basic stuff. And, you know, you had a lot of training at the basic school that was school solution

that had no application in the real war whatsoever. Wow. So you're with 3-7. What was 3-7 up to in 1969? So 3-7 was headquartered about, so the seven Marine Regimental headquarters headed then by a colonel called Gildo Kopp, Spot. was headquartered at LZ Baldy, which was on the Danang Airfield Complex. 3-7 was at LZ Rider, which was down the red line, about 30 minutes by a helicopter ride,

about 20 miles south of Danang. We were in the Quasan Mountains. Our whole mission was to interdeck the Ho Chi Minh Trail. We were about in the Quasan Mountains, you know, on the Laos-Cambodian border, trying to stop the flow of Chinese bringing supplies into the, the Viet Cong in the NVA in the Kwasan Valley. And I'm a dumb second lieutenant. And I said, you know, why is it we don't stop the Chinese up there in North Vietnam when they first come out of China? Lieutenant, we don't do that. We got to stop them down here. So that was our mission

was basically, you know, patrolling. That area that we had of the 7th Marines had been headed up by the Army Ameri-Cal Division for many years. In the Ameri-Cal Division patrolled from the air. They didn't have people on the ground. So unfortunately, when the 7th Marines took over that area of operation, the enemy had dug in. I mean, at one point, we found a major hospital dug into the side of the mountains. They had fortified tunnels because the Army had, you know, done what they did in that division, which was they patrol from the air. You're not going to root out to bad guys, you know, up in a helicopter in my judgment. And so we were, you know, we were the basic, you know, grunt stuff.

And, you know, you put out a nighttime ambush every night. You basically, you got up before the sun came up because you wanted to be moving as soon as the sun came up because you didn't want the bad people to know where you are. You basically would move to your next nighttime position early in the afternoon. You'd stop because you needed to dig your fog holes and put out your lines of fire, final protective fires and everything like that. And then, you know, when it got dark, you had to send your patrol out. When you only had 25 Marines in your platoon and you don't want to send a patrol out or nighttime ambush without less than 10 Marines, you don't have a lot of Marines left back. You're supposed to have four Marines in each fire foxhole.

So three can sleep while one's up. We never had that. Big problem early on in my platoon with Marines falling on sleep during the night during their night watch. So we had to kind of correct that. But it was every day that, I mean, you know, monsoons, you know, you never got your resupply. of C rations. We never had Hot Chow on time. Very concerned about supply discipline with your ammunition. Don't use all your ammunition at a firefight. Don't shoot on automatic and get rid of all your rounds. I had, I carried 10 magazines, 17 rounds each age grenades, but that could run out pretty

quickly in a firefight. And if you weren't going to get resupplied, you're in deep trouble. So there was a lot of just, and every day, you know, what I say is that was a life of a rifleman in combat. It didn't much different today. When I looked at the patrols they did in a Iraq and Afghanistan, it was the same dirt stuff that we did in First Patoon, Lima Company, Third Battalion, South Marine, First Marine Division, Quasan Mountains in 1969. I remember, though, being grateful that I didn't have to do it in a jungle. Like, I actually had that conscious thought that I was happier to be. Yeah, well, the problem with the jungle, the triple canopy jungle is you couldn't see a darn thing.

And you had to, we had machetes, you had to chop your way through. And so if you didn't trust your compass and you didn't trust your sense of distance, you are going to be in big trouble. The other problem we had with artillery fire is that because you had so many trouble finding a key terrain feature so you could figure out where you were on your 1 to 50,000 map with your 8-digit grid coordinate, you know, the artillery, the foreign observers were always calling in fire in the wrong location. It got so bad that First Marine Division put out a requirement that before you could fire for effect with eight high explosive rounds with artillery.

You had to fire a white phosphorus air burst so you can see generally where the round was going to go. And you had to fire a white phosphorus ground burst. And by the time you did that, the bad guys saw that and they're gone. But it was people, we were just blowing each other up so much because of the poor navigation. And again, there was no electronic anything. Everything was one to 50,000 map. And the way I knew where I was supposed to go the next day is that all we had.

had was a PRC 25 radio. It was very limited in its range. The batteries were heavy. The batteries always would wear out. It had a whip antenna that didn't work in the triple canopy jungle. They would, you would operate for, as you know, from thrust points. So you would know, let's take a name. We'd say, okay, Thrustpoint Christmas, you know where that was on your 1 to 50,000 map because they would send that information to you on the classified net, which was another screwy thing because it was the same radio. but it would come in an encrypted form, and you had this disk where you had to encrypt it,

and it would take you hours and hours to figure out what the hell they told you. Okay, from Thrust Point Christmas, go up 3.5 clicks, go right, 2.3 clicks. That's how you got told where to go. Yeah. You couldn't tell anybody on the radio, go to grid coordinates such and such, because they know where that is. So it was very basic, very basic. I'm struck by what you said.

And you never had water. All you water, only water you were going to get was, at a stream or a well. I put the halogen tablets in to purify the water. It made the water taste like, you know what? So the troops wouldn't do that, and they'd get diarrhea, dysentery, things like that. And your boots were always wet. The jungle boot that we had in Vietnam, it had these two weep holes on the side,

so the water was supposed to leak out. It never did. So I made all my troops a hole in the boots so the water could leak out. If you got immersion foot, they called it cellulitis. That was a metabat because you couldn't walk. So it was very, very basic. Yeah. I'm struck by what she said about not firing on full auto.

I had this mental image of that being how the M-16 was principally employed in Vietnam, which now that I think about it, mostly comes from reading Bing West's The Village, which is about a totally different mission where the engagements were usually, I guess, a little bit shorter against irregular troops. You guys are out there for day after day facing regulars. But that's my mental image of combat in Vietnam is a lot of full-a- The reason we had to be extremely careful.

Now, certainly the point man, I allowed them to keep their weapon on automatic because if you're up point, and by the way, because in Vietnam, if the lieutenant wasn't up right behind the point man on the fire team, you're going to get lost because that person had no idea where they were going. So you had to be up front with the first fire team in the front. And your radio man, you didn't let them put the antenna out because then the enemy snipers would know where the durn lieutenant is. You're either going to be in front or behind the radio.

And of course, I remember one time one of my troops said, well, Lieutenant, why don't you wear your gold bars? I said, are you kidding me? Look at what happens when the sun hits those damn gold bar. So, but I mean, it was, and because I learned the hard way, you were not going to get your resupply. We were supposed to be resupplied every three days with food and ammunition. And it never happened because the helicopters couldn't operate in the monsoons.

They weren't enough of them. So, you know, you had to be, and if you just blew all your ammo in a firefight, and then you had another firefight coming, what the heck were you going to do? So we were extremely careful. Now, if we needed to use ammo, we did. But we, fire discipline was a very, very key subject. And of course, the M60, you know, was primarily for your final protected fires to protect your position at night. If snipers or sappers were going to come through, which we faced. And then, of course, you had your claim. that you put out on your listing post, you know, to try to catch somebody further out. Once they got close to your position, most of your gear wasn't any good anymore. We, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, we, the, we, third battalion, and I had company perimeter for them and, and, and, and, and the bad guys briefs of security, and lieutenant peck, and I think he was Gregory peck's son,

was a fire control officer, and he put the wrong coordinates in for his final, protective fires, called back to the battery and fired them, and they were firing on top of us. And he's yelling into the fire control net, check fire, check fire, meaning, as you know, quit firing. And the operator on the other end, because it was so noisy because the explosions were heading right where we were. He said, say again everything after check. And Peck yells, fire, fire, fire. So they found a whole other battery of H.E. That was not a fun night. Talk about the NBA. What was the quality of the soldier on the other side of all this?

They were tough. I mean, people, people, I hear people talking now, and I don't pretend to be an expert, people talking now, you know, everybody's talked about how large the Chinese army is and the Navy and things like that. You hear people say, well, you know, they haven't really been in a fight. You know, they're probably not that good. I said, look, I have, unfortunately, and I'm not, this is not a bragging thing whatsoever, I have personal experience going up against Chinese soldiers.

And guess what? The Marines at the Frozen Chosen, the ones that are left and still alive, they'll tell you a little something about fighting the Chinese. The NBA, the regulars, very, very tough. The Vietnam, you know, mostly counter-guerilla warfare. The Chinese were tough fighters. So you never should underestimate your enemy. And I had Korean Marines attached to my opportunity at one time in Vietnam,

you know, South Korean Marines, these people tough as nails. And, you know, read a little history about World War II and the Japanese and the Chinese. And you'll learn a lot about these people are very, very tough fighters. Tell me about the day you were wounded. So the day I was wounded, the day before, the January 4th, 1970, the day before we had come across some major weaponry, enemy weaponry, anti-acraft guns and things like that that gave our battalion our regimental command structure, hey, we must be, you know, coming across some kind of major buildup. And we'd had some couple of firefights the day before. And so the next day, the actual

CEO of the 7th Marines, Colonel Gildo Kada Spati, came out and linked up with our company commander to kind of help map out our operations. And my platoon was to basically be the lead platoon in moving in the direction of where we thought the enemy buildup was calling it, as you know, moved to contact. My good friend that now, and I didn't know him then, First Lieutenant Eric Chase, Eric Chase had been to one year of Vietnamese language training, so he was actually

commissioned before me, but didn't get to Vietnam until after I was there. He was the third platoon commander, and he got in a firefight earlier that morning and was wounded. And so Captain Van Riper put the third Patoon under my Patoon the first Patoon. And I could see where we were told to go on the 1 to 50,000 map. And I felt very strongly that having been there, you know, which was a long time, five months, this was a very dangerous path they were putting us on that was going to put us in an ambush situation because we were going to be moving up a finger, which is the low point with two high draws

or mountain ranges on either side. You never do that. At the Basin School, if you did that in platoon tactics, they probably would flunk you on that grade. And so I kind of sent word back using code language that we were being told to move into an ambush situation. And I didn't want to do it. And I got the command and the call sign of the regimental commander, hate to say it, was grim reaper. So if you're the commander, you're grim reaper six. Lima six is the company commander of, Lima Company, Lima One actual, I'm the company commander. So the word came back to me on the prick 25.

Grim Reaper says move to contact. So I knew this was not a good idea. And rather than move like we normally move in the jungle where you stay fairly close, I said, you know, I'm going to spread everybody out because I'm very worried about, you know, the fact that we might come under attack. And I didn't want us to be very close. And so I actually spread the formation out. I still moved at the front of the formation because, you know, you had to know where you're going in the point man.

And sure enough, we got right into an ambush. My corpsman was hit right away and got knocked into a stream. And I went out to give him first aid. And as it turned out, he had a sucking chest wound. And as you know, you've got to seal those out pretty quickly. you actually had in your first eight pack you were on the back of your your 782 gear you had a pad a past thing that you put where you because with a sucking chest wound you can't get the air you need in the right way if you don't seal that off so i'm bent over sealing him off and then all of a sudden i get hit in the back and in i guess in the back and knock down the stream the impact of the the the bullet that hit me was so hard my helmet was buckled. I never let my Marines wear bush covers. They wore steel helmets. It was buckle. Your flack jacket was zipped at all times. No John Wayne's in my platoon. It hit me so hard it knocked my

helmet off and it knocked my rifle out of my hand. And I remember as I'm going, you know, being knocked down into this dream, I'm thinking I'm going to pay, I'm going to do a lot of paperwork for losing that M16. That was all I thought about. I don't know why. And then, of course, I'm out the open and the sniper rounds are pinging around me. And I had actually gotten the corpsman to safety, you know, and I'm out in the open. And all of a sudden I hear this boots come thundering down in Marine Corporal Roy Hammonds of the third platoon. I didn't know him because, you know, he was in the third platoon, was coming to help me. And basically, he ended up being between me and the sniper. I had actually thought the sniper was, you know, in a different direction.

And when I got hit, I knew where they were. So I had my radio man was changing the coordinates for the, you know, we were going to fire artillery on the, on the mountaintop. And Corporal Hammonds, you know, came out to help me and landed on top of me. And I kept saying, I kept saying, we got to get out of here. We got to get out of here. And, you know, rolled him over. And he had, unfortunately, been very, very seriously wounded.

and I was able to pull him and myself out of the middle of the stream and hopefully out of the sniper fire and, you know, tried to save his life, but I couldn't. So he basically, here was a guy that I did not know. I didn't know at the time, but I learned later. He'd been in the bush over 12 months. He only had two weeks left before he was going to his back home in Texas, 21 years old, didn't know him, didn't know me, and basically sacrificed his life for mine, which, you know, not uncommon in the United States Marine Corps. And then the rest of the day, unfortunately, the firefight was so bad and the enemy concentration was so bad, we could not get our dead wounded out the normal way. We'd had a couple of medevacs come in, and one of the helicopters got shot down. The other helicopter dropped the Neil Robertson, you know, which is that jungle sling that goes through the Chippel Canopy Jungleing,

and you tie your wounded onto that and they pull them up. That wasn't working because they were taking too much incoming. I mean, we had to fight our way up to the top of a mountain, which took all day and carry out our dead and wounded. And I didn't, I wasn't about to leave. I didn't tell the company commander I'd been hit until we got our Marines to safety. And I flew out on the last helicopter with, with Corporal Hammonds and, you know, never met him. But we're bonded forever, as you would imagine. What was the nature of your wound?

So did it hit your flack and then did it penetrate? or like you're still somewhat mobile it sounds like. Yeah, it went. So I don't think I had a, I didn't have a flack jacket with the metal plates in it. I had a flack jacket that had some kind of stuff in it that if the bullet was hit it was supposed to kind of grab it. But I think it may have gone in between the bottom of the flat jacket and, and, and they, so I got, I got hit in the back. I guess I luck, well, listen, of course I was lucky. I mean, thank you, Corporal Hammonds.

and it ended up being a through-and-through gunshot wound. I didn't know it at the time because it went in my back and then went down my leg and came out my right leg, more or less. And, of course, I was losing a lot of blood, but obviously the intensity of the situation we were in was such that, I'll be honest, I don't think I really felt it that much. I was so concerned about getting our Marines to safety and getting safely out of the firefight as best we could,

given the circumstances. And obviously, to this day, two things, you know, just tremendously remember. It's on Memorial Day and all the time of the sacrifice that Corporal Hammond's made. I've taken my grandkids down to the wall and let them see his name and Etch's name and told them the story that they wouldn't be here today if it wasn't for his heroism. On the other hand, I always held Colonel Gildo Codasbati responsible, you know, for sending these Marines at the arm's way. and, you know, I probably think in my first book, I think I may have said that I actually found a way to pay him back a little bit, and I did. And I hate to say that, but I felt that strongly about it. Well, tell us about that.

I mean, we're skipping forward. Well, so it wasn't physical, but so I was, so you had a situation where Linden John, so many Marines were getting killed on their second or third Purple Heart. if your wounds were serious enough where you were hospitalized outside of Vietnam for more than 30 days, they would not let you go back into Vietnam. I ended up in Yakuoka Naval Hospital for over 60 days. They weren't going to send me back. I put in administrative forms to go back to Vietnam to be with my troops. But no dice.

Even Eric Chase was in the hospital with me, and his dad was a senior in the Marine Corps, and he tried pulling some strings. Neither one us could get back. But guess what? our overseas control date, you were supposed to go overseas for 13 months, wind up. So they sent us to Okinawa. And we were non-deployable troops, so we had these meaningless jobs on Okinawa. I was working in the G3 section of headquarters Camp Butler. One of the jobs of the, I was still a second lieutenant was when senior Marines were coming back from Vietnam, we would go meet their airplane and help them

take good care of them. Sure enough, we see on the manifest, Colonel Kadaspati is coming back from Vietnam. And another Marine that was in my basic class from Second Battalion, South Marine, Frank Newbauer, and I were kind of escort guys. So we show up, we meet the plane. Colonel Codasbati, I said, you know, Sir, Lieutenant Pernaro 3-7, Frank Newbauer, 2-7, your 7th Marines here to take good care of it. He says to me, Lieutenant, just make sure my luggage, all my luggage gets on the right plane and he had a couple of Alpacks and a big footlocker. And so I said, yes, sir, I'll take personal care of it.

I have a lot of experience doing this. So Frank Newbar took him in the old club to get some refreshments. And I basically took care of his luggage. And I got all his luggage, took all the markings off the outside, and sent every bit of it to what we call the dead luggage section at Camp Hanson on Okinawa. Camp Hansen was a big base, and Marines that were either wounded or killed, all their stuff went there and someday they would sort it out. I never saw any of my stuff that went there.

So his lug and when he comes back out, Lieutenant, did you take good care of the luggage? Absolutely, Colonel, I took the best care of your luggage that's ever been taken. Yes, sir. Damn free. Have you ever read that? I know nothing. I know nothing.

Years later, I'm the staff director of the Armed Services Committee. My company commander, Jim Brad Riper is now a colonel. And we got, we stayed in touch. And so he's visiting me in the U.S. Senate. it and we're just kind of swapping stories about people we worked at. He says, Arnold, you're never going to believe this. I said, believe what? He said, what happened to Colonel Codda's body? And I said, oh, yeah, well, tell me about it. What did happen to Coney? He said, well, as it turns out, when he was coming back from Vietnam, somehow his luggage got misplaced, and it ended up in the

dead luggage section at Camp Hanson. And when people finally got around to opening it and looking to see whose it was, he was bringing back from Vietnam all kind of contraband that was prohibited and was illegal. And he got caught doing that and he actually got court-martialed and put out of the Marine Corps. I said, oh my God, I am so sorry to hear that. And I barely can say that with a straight face. But I then I told him what I did. I said, and he, he was, I'm not going to speak for him. And I have, I think I did put that in my first book. So I'm not revealing any state secrets here. But, I mean, really, seriously, he should have known better, and he should have listened to the people on the ground that was actually in harm's way that he was putting our Marines at risk for no good reason. And so, you know, I'm not the one that brought contraband back from Vietnam, so I'm not responsible for that.

He's responsible for that. There's a scene in what in my view is a pretty good novel of the Vietnam War, Matterhorn by Karl Marlante's. Yeah, I've heard about it. Yeah. Yeah, it's good. I think it's good. And, you know, there's a lieutenant, a young lieutenant who, and for him it's his battalion commander, who is the sort of self-serving bad leader. And it gets to a point where, you know, there's been so much cost incurred as the consequence of this senior officer's instructions.

There's a scene where the protagonist of the novel, who's Marlantis is like a stand-in for Marlante's own personal experiences, is actually looking from one ridgeline to the next through the sights of his M-16 at this lieutenant colonel, sincerely considering pulling the trigger. He doesn't, of course. he's not going to murder another Marine, but he really gives it some thought. And I thought to myself reading it, like, I completely identify with this. There's someone for me who I could imagine in that situation. Of course I was never going to do it.

Did I contemplate at the time? Think, you know, ways to, you know, deal with my problems. Of course I did. And, like, I think if you haven't been in these incredibly intense environments, it's hard to imagine. We always talk about the comradeship of combat, which is real and which you've spoken to as well. But there's another side of thing sometimes as well, in particular amongst leaders. And sometime my boys, and I'm privileged that my oldest son, Joe, joined the Marines and served in the second Iraq war.

I didn't twist his army. He did it on his own. My younger son, Dan, is in the Army, Army Reserves and joined on his own. And they've asked me, well, you knew you were getting into a bad situation. Why didn't you just not do it? I said, look, you're in combat. You don't disobey orders in combat. I mean, you know, you just, I decided to try to be as careful as I could going into the situation I was ordered to go into it.

a legal order and it's not something that you're going to, you know, disobey. And again, you know, just because I was saying that it might happen, you know, a more senior person could say, well, no, he's tactically, he could be wrong about that. But it's a, you know, you face those kind of situations in combat all the time. And, you know, we, we were supposed to be operating in no fire zones and no civilians were supposed to be in the area we were operating in the Kwasan mountains, but they were everywhere. And by the way, you could get, you know, the enemy didn't, most of the time, didn't wear uniform. So you didn't know who the good people or the bad people were.

And what we call the little soda girls, you know, who if they knew where you were, you know, come drive up to your position on their bicycles, ask me like they're going to sell you cold soda pop, which would have been the great relief to the troops because you'd never had anything cold. And it would be a Chikom, a Chinese grenade, they'd throw into your position. And you had to worry about booby traps. And you were, anytime you were going through an area that looked like, like somebody had been there, you had to be extremely careful of whatever you touched or did

because it could have been booby-trapped. So, you know, the other thing, though, is somehow you'd get used to it. And you're very careful, but on the other hand, you don't live in constant fear because there's, there actually nothing you can do about it. The other thing is you had no communication with the outside world. We had no idea what day of the week it was. we had no idea what day of the month it was. There are no newspapers.

There's no radios. There's no nothing. It's just you and the elements. And, you know, in the mountains, it was cold at night. You froze because you didn't have any sleeping bags, particularly if you were wet from the monsoons. And it was blazing hot during the day. And, you know, you're trucking up and down mountains and things like that.

So, again, you know this and other people know. And, you know, and I look and see some of the what my dad went through. Look at the Marines that went to Iwo Jima, and maybe we thought we had it tough in Vietnam. We hadn't ever near as tough as some of those folks did. And, you know, in Vietnam, you're on patrol. You know you're at risk, but I mean, you're on that landing craft. You're going into the Valley, Iwo Jima. The Navy has been bombarding it for 70 days and 70 nights to try to soften it up.

They didn't soften anything up. You're going out of that landing craft. You're the fourth Marine division, you know, which I had the privilege to command later as a commanding general. 18,000 Marines, most of which were killed or wounded in that battle, you're coming off that landing craft, and you know pretty much, you're probably not going to make it, and they did it anyway. That's who we give thanks to on Memorial Day for Darnshaw. Yeah.

Well, I've given thought to it as well. I mean, I had the one combat deployment of which five and a half or so months was pretty regular exposure to combat. My dad, ironically, well, not ironically, but probably unexpectedly for someone my age, also a World War II veteran. And, you know, he, like your dad, you went to war and you got to come home when the war was over. That's correct.

That's correct. So for you was 13 months, for me it was seven months. Yeah. And there was a time at which it was going to be over, but not for those guys. Yeah. The other thing interesting, my dad was a character. I mean, most of these guys were, I mean, he, this is probably undiplomatic, but my father never thought the French were appreciative of everything we did to liberate them from the Nazis.

And so he was not a big fan of French things. And you would hear that on a pretty constant basis from him, because he just felt like they were unappreciative of the sacrifices our troops made to liberate France from the Nazis. Not everybody. Don't get me wrong, not everybody. But that was my dad's personal experience. So back you come from Vietnam, you heal up a bit while still overseas. You're back in Quantico.

And it's pretty bumpy back in the United States. It's bumpy for Vietnam vets. And then there's unrest in Washington, D.C. while you are still on active duty. Tell us about that and about the role of the Marines. Well, one thing people nowadays don't realize is, I mean, the Vietnam vet was not treated very kindly at all. And you hear stories of you get spit on in the airport. I've experienced that firsthand.

I'm a lieutenant with a short haircut, training other lieutenants to go to Vietnam now at the basic school. I got put on the staff at the basic school. of the basic school. You know, we were a bachelor, so we tried to go, you know, do a little liberty in Washington, D.C. Most of the bars we went into because we were Marines with short hair, even though we weren't uniform, you ended up getting in bar fights. So we finally found an Irish bar up on 13th Street. It's not there anymore.

Run by Butch and May. They ended up moving to New Orleans and open an Irish bar. As it turned out, it was a hangout for the Irish Republican Army, the RA. So the Marines and the RA, we got along great. So that was the part we hung out with. But what happened was you had all the protests going on, and one of the additional duties we had at Quantico was the riot troops. And, you know, the big riot were John Kerry, and again, probably not diplomatic to say this, I personally will never forgive him for what he said about Vietnam veterans before the Foreign Relations Committee that we were all baby killers. There was no baby killers in my unit.

And they were all draftees. And some of them were McNamara's 100,000 that it never should have been in the military. these troops did everything that we asked them to do and more good troops. And he threw his medals over the thing. We had actually to protect the U.S. Capitol. The Marines had positions on the steps of the Capitol. And Richard Russell, the chairman of the committee at that time, came and looked at him. So it was a huge, huge protest.

And we were actually given live ammunition. The second protest was a couple of years later. And I don't have the dates exactly the top of my head. but what we were we were given the position to keep the hippies and the dippies that's what we call them we're going to shut down all the bridges and shut down washington dc so my unit was given the mission of keeping the 14th street bridge open so obviously of course anything in the military they make you show up five hours before you need to be there so we go and embark on our our nighttime position protecting the 14th bridge in the middle of the night and the the hippies were supposed to

come shut the bridge down around dawn. Sure enough, the light, sunlight comes up. They still aren't. Then all of a sudden we see them start to come towards us, and we get in our riot formation. And in the riot formation, you know, in those days, it's much more sophisticated now. You had those plastic shields, and you had bayonets on your weapons. And you kind of get in lockstep like that, and you march one, you know, one foot at a time, and you punched your rifle like that. And so we started in cadence and making a lot of military cadence noises, we started moving in formation towards the hippies as they were coming to try to shut down to 143 bridge. And, you know, they weren't much of a organization because as we started getting closer, they sort of figured

out, I don't think we want to mess with these United States Marines. And they dispersed very, very quickly before they even got close to us. And so if you were the news media, it was a pretty big bus because they didn't get anywhere close to shutting down the 14th Street Bridge. I guess we should have been proud of our mission. But because they didn't have any good pictures, I get this signal on the radio. Lieutenant, you know, you're going to be in a pickup in a 46. They're going to come pick you up. Now, think about this.

We're over by the 14th Street Bridge. We're going to be helicoptered over to the grounds of the Washington Monument, you know, to pretend like we're going to protect the Washington Monument. What is it, like a 30-second helicopter ride? And I'm not kidding. My instructions were when you come off the helicopter, come off like you would if you were going into actual combat. So we have a ways of disembarking from the helicopter when it's on the ground

and the ramp is down in the back to 46. You know, in Vietnam, the 46th, you know, you had 50 cows on the side. And, you know, basically you didn't want to ride in a helicopter because they made a lot of noise and they got a lot of bullets. So we come, we come, you know, one at a time rushing off the back in formation. making a lot of noise and got on the CBS news that night with the Marines protected to watch the monument. There was nobody to protect it against. There wasn't any terrorist or anything going to watch the monument. So we felt pretty good about that. We not only dispersed the hippies

and the dippies at 14th Street Bridge, but we got on the news that night. So you end up in politics in the Senate. Yeah, so I basically, I did my four years. Like I said, I would. I did everything I committed to do. I wanted to go, you know, to graduate school. So I got accepted at the University of Georgia. I'd be very honest, it was the only thing I could afford. I'm a young, still a first lieutenant. In the Navy, if you were in two years, you made captain in the Marine Corps, four years on active duty, and I still was still a first lieutenant. So University of Georgia, my home state and graduate school, and of course, what am I, 26, 27, older than most of the students. Even then, there was no support for the Vietnam veterans, although I would say, I don't

think we faced a hostile environment at the University of Georgia, but there was no really organized, and we were older than most of the students. And, you know, I got my master's degree. And then I saw and I was my wife to be lived in Virginia in the Washington, D.C. area. And so I was going to come back up there. And I saw this advertisement, Senator Sam Nunn, who just been elected, was having a academic internship program for 10 weeks. And so I said, you know what? I'll apply for that. because then though if I get it, you know, I can, you know, look for a job during the 10 weeks while I'm doing this internship. I didn't even know who he was. I had no idea, knew nothing about the U.S. Senate. I lucked out and got accepted and ended up staying 24 years. So, so, you know, I'll be very honest. I was very lucky to get linked up, not just with that internship, but with a senator as conscientious and as dedicated and who had such a bright future in the U.S. Senate and did such a

a great job for our country. And of course, eventually moved over the Armed Services Committee, became the staff director, and again met, you know, and was involved in some of the most consequential legislation that Senator Nunn, Senator Warner, Barry Goldwater. On that committee at the time and in the Senate, I lucked out. I got to the Senate when the, when a lot of legendary Senator, Senator Bob Dole, Senator Danny in Norway, Melovana recipient, John Warner, John Glenn, John McCain, these just legendary figures from World War II, Korea and Vietnam, were in the U.S. Senate. It was very bipartisan then. Surinandun was a conservative Southern Democrat.

He would be considered a very conservative Republican these days. The middle of the Senate ran the Senate, so the far left and the far right didn't control the Senate. So I lucked out. I was there and we went through, you know, the change from the volunteer force where we did away with the draft in 73 and went to the volunteer force. had to spend the decade of the 70s trying to keep the military from collapsing. You still had in the military a lot of people that had been drafted that didn't want to be there. So that was a challenge. Then you had the Reagan build up.

Then you had the Cold War drawdown when Bush and you had Secretary Cheney and General Powell as a chairman of the Joint Chiefs. You had the Goldwater Nichols Reform and things of that nature. So very consequential times for national security. And Sur to Nunn ended up being, you know, extremely popular in Georgia and highly respected. and so you didn't have kind of the knockdown political fights that they get into these days. Let me ask you this question. You know, you saw things, you saw the American National Security establishment from basically both ends. That is to say, as the young platoon commander in the jungle in Vietnam,

all the way up to staff director of Senate Armed Services, which, you know, maybe not every listener knows exactly what that means, but it's an important role at the very top end of the American national security process, just call it that. It has its own very important function to play in support of the chairman. What did you learn? Did you learn anything as a young Marine that later went on to inform your work, whether it's just advising Senator none on national security more generally or in your role, specifically as staff director? Did you draw on those experiences? Can you think of times? I did. That's one of the reasons I stayed in reserves is I want to basically learn what was going on at the deck plate at the bootplate level.

What I've learned over the years, and it's still true today, is I call in the Pistol, I said there's something called the thermal layer where the real facts don't always get to the top people. And as you get more senior in the military and I was fortunate enough to become a general officer, and so I've worked at the general officer level. And, you know, in the Senate, I work with all the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the Secretaries of Defense, and even after leaving in my roles in industry and now my roles on government boards and commissions, when you get to the top, you don't often, oftentimes you're not as well informed as you think you are. And you don't know what's actually going out at, then, you know, in the Marine Corps, we have something we say, get out there

and kick the tires. And then the industry, same thing. If you don't get out on the factory floor, you're not going to know what's really happening with the programs that you're supporting it. So what I learned over the years, and I say it is still true today, you know, the people at the top are not always as the best informed as to what really is happening out in the field. And, too, when you get to those higher levels, you get very conservative in terms of your willingness to stick your neck out on a controversial decision. And so, you know, I had a saying when I was staff director and I use it in my speeches now, the Pentagon is not always right.

Just because they say that's what we need to do doesn't mean it is the right. And I can give you lots of examples when what they recommended was the wrong thing to do. Don't get me wrong. Congress and industry make a lot of mistakes too. But, you know, I think staying connected to the troops, if you're in the military and, you and particularly the non-commission officers, you're going to be a lot better leader and make much more knowledgeable decision.

Senator Nunn was really good that way. Senator Nunn always wanted to get out in the field and talk to the people at the deck page level. He talked to the senior people as well. Don't get me wrong, but he was a very, very person that was very interested in making decisions based on the actual facts. And that's why we say, like when incidents happen

and tragedies happen, you know, first reports are always wrong. You know, you know, I remember when the Marines got blown up in Beirut in the initial reports of what happened. And so you've just got to get out in the field and find out what's going on. What were those initial reports with Beirut? Pardon? With Beirut, what were those initial reports that were wrong? Well, I think, I think they talked about how what they tried to do to stop the truck or didn't stop the truck and what the security parameters were, what intelligence they had, PX Kelly, then commandant, a legendary Marine, decided that, you know, the troops had made a lot of mistakes, which was the wrong thing. It was a wrong answer when he testified, savoundly criticized. So, you know,

the committee did a, did an after action report on that. And just like we did the after action report on Desert One, when the helicopters, you know, the Carter went in their rescue. I was with Bud McParlin reviewing that for the Armed Services Committee and the initial media reports were wrong. And so, you know, I learned a hard way when there was explosion on the battleship, Iowa. The Navy position was that a troop that possibly was homosexual had intentionally, you know, caused the turret to blow up and kill a bunch of sailors. I didn't buy that for one second. And Senator Nunn and Senator Warner, who led to committee at the time, didn't either.

The Navy didn't back off their position. So we brought in the general accounting office, the government accounting office at that time, and got Sinia Labs to go out and do a technical test. And sure enough, what they found out is the powder was to the power was to be. affected. That's what caused the explosion. So I've learned over the years to basically never take, you know, the first report or the government position is the gospel position. Many times it's the right position, but you always want to double check. So the subject of your most recent book, which I want to make sure we get to here before we run out of time, is the confirmation process.

It's kind of a, it's almost a how-to for nominees. Looking at it, you'd be kind of crazy to be nominated today and not look at this book. But let me ask you this. I'll put it bluntly. Why would anyone in their right mind accept a Senate-confirmed position? I don't mean this politically. I don't just mean the Trump administration or the Biden administration. I just mean the current state of affairs where the process seems so arduous.

I mean, it really does put the service in public service. So anyone in their right mind should not want to go through the Senate confirmation process of today. with one exception, you are in a position to do so much good for your country once you get through the process successfully. And we need the very best people to serve in government today because the issues are so complex and so difficult and so challenging. And so because I've been working in this area for 50 years, ran the process on the committee for 14 years, since 1997 when I left and then Secretary of Defense Bill Cohen said, hey Arnold, would you come over and help us with our conference? information process. I've been sort of pro bono informally helping both the committee and the building. So I've worked with 12 secretaries of defense, 13 chairman of the joint chiefs. I want the very best people to be willing to come in. So I wanted to write a book showing them how they could be more

successful. I also have a chapter on how we could reform the process to make it a lot more easy and a lot more timely than it is today. But the point is of the 1,200 government-wide Senate-confirmed, presidentially appointed position. Every one of these is pretty much extremely important, whether you're in Treasury, whether you're in the Department of Homeland Security, you're in the Veterans Administration, the 65 we have in the Department of Defense. I mean, these people are responsible. The military senior leaders leading our troops in combat. We give our sons and daughters to the military with the expectation they're going to be the best trained, best led, and best equipped. We want the very best people. Same thing with the

civilians. They're making decisions about spending a trillion dollars. This year, we're going to spend a trillion dollars in the Department of Defense. We want our very best people. And so you want to, you want to give them a way to do that because the process, you know, the disclosures, living in a fishbowl, the length of time it takes through to get through the executive branch vetting, the length of time it takes to get now through the Senate, you know, is very discouraging. But however, fortunately, including in this administration, and I, I've had the privilege of working with a lot of these nominees. We are still getting the kind of people we need in government that are willing to make this kind of sacrifice.

The financial sacrifice, I remember, and I know he wouldn't mind me saying this, Don Winter, and I forget what administration it was, but Don Winter from industry was asked to be Secretary of the Navy. I'm helping him with his confirmation, and he's going to lose, no kidding, tens of millions of dollars. Now, he was blessed to be very fortunate, but because of the way his deferred compensation was set up, And I said, Don, I so admire what you're doing. Why are you willing to do this? He says, Arnold, I have been so blessed by this country. I have been so fortunate, both in my bringing up and in the industry jobs I have. I feel I want to pay it back.

And I'm willing and my family's willing to make this kind of sacrifice. So that's the kind of people that, and we're getting those kind of people today. Don't get me wrong. There's so much controversy about all these people going through the confirmation process. and media and other people act like, you know, these are not qualified people. Maybe there's some, but I can tell you, most of the ones I've been working with are extremely qualified. And if we can get them through the Senate and through the FBI and the Office of Government Ethics

are the right kind of people we need in this unbelievably challenging and difficult world. Look, the world today, and you know this, is more dangerous and unstable than the peak of the Cold War. We need people that basically can look forward and make decisions today that are going to put us in the position for, you know, our kids and our grandkids. I have 11 grandkids going on 12. I want them to basically have the same kind of opportunities I've had, but also live in a very safe and free country. And if we don't make some tough decisions, we're not going to be in that. They're not going to be in that situation. General Arnold Pannaro, author most recently of if confirmed, an insider's view of the

national security confirmation process. This has been a really interesting, engaging conversation. We have, it's funny, you know, this is a small world of the Marine Corps and the military. We have a number of things in common, actually, which the one I'll highlight right now before we close is when I was in Helmand Province, I had the honor of serving, you know, under the command ultimately of the 7th, of RCT 7. So the 7th Marine Regiment. I was 1-6, but you know, we were sort of plugged into that.

I'm happy to report our regimental commander at the time. It was a Colonel Newman. We all liked him. He was pretty well respected. Yeah, the seventh Marines, what a legendary regiment. I mean, it's such a, God bless them. I've got a lot of Seventh Marine stuff paraphranator at home, and I drag it out from time to time. I take, you know, another sort of weird unit thing, but I take sort of a quiet pride.

It's sort of silly, so I don't really talk about it that much. But for a brief period, you know, originally RCT7 plugged into the Second Marine Brigade, Expeditionary Brigade. But then the brigade left in the First Marine Division took over. So for a few months of my Marine career, I served in combat with the First Marine Division, and that really means something to me. Yeah, I mean, most people wouldn't understand why. I actually had Senator Nunn do a floor statement about the history of the First Marine Division. My son, Joe, he was in 3-4, but it was attached to the 7th Marines, First Marine Division. So in the Second War, my son Joe served as an infantry platoon commander in the 7th Marine Regiment.

And of course, Jim Mattis was the leader there. And one last story, I'm still on mobilized for active duty. General Jones is a commandant. His son, Greg, is over there. My son, Joe, is over there. So we knew every day, you know, what they were doing. And, you know, we're in a briefing in the tank. I'm representing the Marine Corps for some reason.

And they're being briefed on, you know, well, what's the Army? The first Marine Division, of course, got into Baghdad very quickly and it was ahead of everybody else. Thanks, Jim Madison, John Kelly, and a few people like that. and one of the senior generals was asking the briefer who happened to be an Army major at the time, well, what is the Army unit? And I forget which Army unit it was. You know, what are they doing? What kind of opposition? Are they facing? What kind of casualties are they taking? And the Major says, General, you know, it's been pretty easy for us because the Marines have killed everybody in sight on the way up. Arnold Panaro. It's been great. Thank you so much for making the time.

Welcome. Such a privilege. This is a nebulous media production. Find us wherever you get your podcasts.