Shawn Ryan Show - #227 Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

Episode Date: August 14, 2025

Henry L. (Dick) Thompson, Ph.D., is a retired U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and legendary MACV-SOG operator known by the codename "Dynamite." Serving as a recon team leader from 1968 to 1970, he led over 20 high-risk black operations deep into enemy territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War's secret campaigns, earning a reputation for bravery in brutal firefights and hand-to-hand combat.  After 21 years of military service, including roles in Special Forces, Airborne, and Ranger units, Thompson founded High Performing Systems, Inc. in 1984, where he serves as President and CEO, providing leadership solutions, training, and assessments for corporate, military, law enforcement, and firefighters in high-stress decision-making. A psychologist, Mensa member, and Ironman triathlete, he authored, among other books, the bestselling "SOG Codename Dynamite" series, including "A MACV-SOG 1-0's Personal Journal" (2023), sharing firsthand accounts of combat psychology and spiritual warfare.  Thompson advocates for mental resilience, veteran support, and applying combat lessons to everyday leadership. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://bruntworkwear.com – USE CODE SRS https://bubsnaturals.com – USE CODE SHAWN https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get your 25% off your family plan https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://moinkbox.com/srs https://mypatriotsupply.com/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://shopify.com/srs https://simplisafe.com/srs Henry Dick Thompson Links: Website - http://www.hpsys.com IG - https://www.instagram.com/hps_ceo X - https://x.com/HPSys SOG Codename Dynamite: A MACV-SOG 1-0's Personal Journal - https://www.amazon.com/SOG-Codename-Dynamite-MACV-SOG-Personal/dp/B0C9SB8JGP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Dynamite Dick Thompson. Welcome to the show. Thank you. Honored to be here. And I really appreciate the opportunity to sit in this tear. And in this room, particularly as you're getting ready to transition to the new one. So honored to be here. Honored to be a sod guy on your show.

honored to sit across from you and i i truly mean that um came highly recommended from our mutual friend john strike at mire and uh he's told us a lot about you and and uh you know i just this is the last interview in the studio and uh i wanted the perfect guest to to shut the lights off with and it is a real honor to be sitting here with you so thank you for making the time to here and um and and uh i'm really honored to document your story and your history and it's going to be good it's going to be a powerful interview you ready right looking forward to it me too me too so every guest starts out with an introduction here dynamite dick thompson last interview in the studio 21 year retired army lieutenant colonel green beret ranger and mac v sog operator who

ran over 20 cross-border recon direct impact missions into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Awards include four bronze star medals, two with V for Valor, two air medals for aerial combat, one with V for Valor, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Gold Star for Valor. Natural Born Tracker raised on your grandparents' farm, you could smell the NBA in the jungle. Distinguished member of the Airborne Ranger Training Brigade, served as a professor of military science at the University of Georgia, author of SOG codenamed Dynamite, a two-book series about top-secret missions that were once classified for 20 years,

a PhD in psychology, founder of high-performing systems, and author of The Stress Effect, teaching leaders how to make decisions under pressure. Among your hobbies, you are a master scuba diver. You've made over 1,200 free fall halo parachute jumps, earned a black belt in karate, and you're an Iron Man, your husband, a father, a grandfather, and most importantly, a Christian. Thank you.

I'm sure I'm missing so. But, yeah, like I said, it is an honor to be here with you. And so I just want to do a life story with you, document everything you've been through, and hopefully bring a lot of hope to, veterans that are coming home for more and that are trying to find their new way in life. So once again, it's an honor. Thank you.

And one of the things that we started doing in our company back in the 90s was we traveled all the time, always going through an airport. So I implemented a policy that said, if you see someone in uniform, Or you can tell their veteran standing in the Starbucks line, pay for their coffee, thank them for their service. And then so everybody had a special credit card from a company card, you know, to pay for that with. And then a little bit later, we bumped it up some more. And what we started doing is also giving them challenge corn.

Oh, man. So, thank you. That basically says thank you for your service. We care about you. Welcome home. And, you know, we'll give that out. I've been doing that now for a long time. It's not the big fancy one like, you know, the coin John gave you,

but it's one that we could share with a lot of veterans who had never been welcomed home. So, you know, I'm a little biased along that line because, you know, when I came home, people literally spit at me coming through the airport. And, you know, I also talked later on that my biggest challenge in the beginning coming home from Vietnam was restraint.

coming through the airport and listening to somebody yell, a baby killer, murderer, or whatever, but noticing that they were not close like you and I are now. They were back at what they considered a safe distance. And I used to think they have no clue. I can close the distance between us and less than a second. because I'm not carrying 90 pounds of gear and I could be real ugly to you when I got there

so I have to restrain myself know that I could do that but I don't have to do that and just a lot of things just based on coming from the wild west back to a country that has some laws and is civilized you know I've got to come back to this world

and one of the things that I try to work with veterans on is understanding the skill set you have and how to use it because most veterans think well you've taught me all this war stuff and tactics and I don't you know I can't use that stuff back in the civilian world yes you can you know how to plan make decisions organize I mean you have a whole skill set that can help you be successful. And you've got to apply some of the SOG techniques that we'll probably talk about in a little bit to keep moving forward.

And you can be successful. So anyway, sorry. I love that. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody starts off with a gift. Thank you. Vigilance elite gummy bears made right here in the U.S.

say it's just candy there's no marijuana in it no CBD just candy so they're legal at all 50 states John Meyer said they might be something in here he said he he noticed some kind of charge after he ate some yeah yeah I'll put it right there and and if I start to run down after a while I'll consume a couple of what thank you I really appreciate that hey my pleasure my pleasure and then one more thing before we get going so i i have a patreon account and uh that's a subscription account and we've turned that into quite a community i think we're at 85 000 patrons now and um and they're the reason that i get to be here and that i have this amazing team uh that i'm surrounded by and and so one of the things that we do is uh we offer the patron community the opportunity to

ask each and every guest a question. So this is a question from somebody you might know. John Stryker Meyer. Please explain how you carried seven claymores, Buku, Car 15 rounds, hand grenades, and M79 rounds. I believe you carried it on most missions. Oh, and I forgot your pistol. How did you carry all that?

After the first mission that I went on, where I carried the normal load out, I used up so much ammunition in the ambush that we went into, this is not going to work. So once I became the team leader, then instead of carrying five frag grenades per person, per team member, I upped it to 10. So, what that did was, and I usually went out with six or seven people. So if I had seven men on the team carrying 10 frag grenades a piece, that's 70. With 70 fragged grenades, you can do some serious damage. So I also up the Claymore to three per person. Some people, like the M79 men, usually didn't carry a claymore because he was carrying so many grenades with him. But everybody went to three.

Seven-man team, 21 claymores. Wow. And then I also started that night on the most likely avenue of approach coming into our remain overnight position. I would put out seven claymores daisy chained one click seven claymores go on 10 and a half pounds of C4

4,900 steel balls traveling at 4,000 feet a second the blast the steel balls would just shred whatever was out here and if you were far enough back or happened to be behind a tree and survived, you would say, this guy's crazy.

Nobody sets off all of their claymores at one time. So now the survivors, we can go down and get them, and they start to come. That's when they run into three more daisy chained, and that goes off. So you catch them by surprise with that. Wow. And then they start running into Claymore's on time fuses that are randomly going off as they're trying to come.

And, yeah, so in their dossier that they put together on me, it was this guy's a nut. Don't go charging after his team because he's going to run into all those claymores. And at night, you want those area-type weapons like the Claymores and those frag grenades. You could start chunking frag grenades at them. They don't know where they come from. Yeah. And they're just going off everywhere. Man.

And then I like, well, let me say, if you shoot at me, I'm going to shoot back. I really don't like people shooting at me. So I will shoot back. So I found I needed to carry more ammunition. And most guys were carrying, you know, 800 rounds or so. or maybe 700, some 600, I went to 1,000. I carried 50, 20-round magazines. 50-20-round magazines.

And in my 20-round magazines, I put 20 rounds because I used brand-new magazines every mention. I would draw new magazines, so everybody had new magazines. so they'd only been loaded for three or four days so the springs were fine they were working good so I I never in a firefight had my car 15 jam not not from the number of rounds in the magazine but you know so my people had a lot of them I didn't force them to put 20 if the 18 rule had been ingrained in them but I encouraged them to put in 20.

Because when you run up against the NVA, you've got ear setting there with a 20-round magazine for initial contact. The NVA's got a 30-round magazine. They've already got 10 more rounds than you do. You run out first, and then the firepower shifts totally over them now. So until we finally got the 30-round magazines, We were a disadvantage every time as soon as we started, so you needed to be able to load faster and, you know, shoot longer.

Man, I never thought about that 20-round magazine, the versus 30-round magazine. It's a big difference. Yeah, yeah. How long did it take them to get you guys 30-round magazines? We didn't get, you know, I got there in 68. We didn't get the 30 rounds until 69. And when we first got them, it's, they couldn't get it. many so I could go draw one 30 round magazine per car 15 oh man so we all have one you know

in our weapon to start with that was after they made a tweak I discovered early on as it did a lot of other people that if you have that 30 round magazine and your car 15 and you You jump off the skid of the helicopter. When you hit the ground, your gun got lighter all of a sudden because the magazine's laying down in the mud. Because the spring on the magazine retainer wasn't strong enough to hold that extra weight. Wow.

So the shock of hitting the ground, the magazines fall out. So we had to take the weapons back in, have the spring changed. to a stronger one so the magazine was staying near but at least you had you had a 30 round magazine to start with but you know I guess I guess my team's just had

problems discipline problems maybe it seemed that we lost our 30 round magazines almost every time we were in contact and I'd have to go back to you know S4 and draw some more 30 round magazines to replace the ones we lost. Wow.

And what, you know, but then that, somebody noticed one day, how are you guys getting so many 30-round magazines? You're only supposed to have one per gun. Your guys are all carrying more. Well, I guess they found some of the ones they lost. What kind of pistol were you carrying? I tried different ones.

I carried a 1911 45 caliber of pistol it was heavy only held seven rounds but man if you hit somebody with that it would put them down

I mean it hits hard but then I I changed to a browning high power 9mm because now I double the amount of ammunition and a number of shots in there. So I played with those a little bit,

and then I started carrying a high-standard 22-caliber, long rifle with an integrated silencer, because that thing was so quiet. A little hush puppy, huh? Yes. You know, you've got to be careful where you shoot them. You know, 22, if it hits a vest or something, it's not going to penetrate.

So I tried to go for softer spots like the temple, and I did a lot of practice and trying to get a guy, particularly a tracker. If you were tracking me, then I would tell those teams, if you guys keep going, I'm going to drop back.

Somebody's behind us, I'm going to drop back here and have a little chat. So I could go back and take out a tracker. I could take out a dog. I could do things without, you know, a big disturbance. And particularly at night, there were times when we had people walk inside our little perimeter. I mean, we're all within arms of each of each other, in a little circle. And sometimes you'd have somebody walk right through the middle of it.

So you couldn't open up with a car 15 because it just liked the whole area. But with that 22, I could tap you, particularly if I saw. set off of Claymore, made a little noise, shot you at the same time. Nobody did ever know I took you out. Wow. You had people inside the perimeter when you guys were at arm's length distance

and you're only six to nine people. How many times did that happen? Several. And we can talk maybe in a little bit about where I had a longer experience of someone inside That's pretty cool. Let's talk about it now. We were, I had 22-man team.

We had put two of our recon teams together because we were going after a group of NBA that had a group of American prisoners that they were trying to take through Malau's into North Vietnam and we were trying to stop them. And we had stopped for an R.O.N. We had 22 people. So it was a circle almost as big as this room in here. And they were ready arms links apart. I was in the center with my assistant team leader. And it was about 21.30. It was dark. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And I was really tired. And my eyes were starting to roll back in my head, I was leaning against a tree. And I heard a twig break. And I opened my eyes and I was thinking myself, that sounded like a twig break inside the perimeter.

And then I heard another one. And I realized someone was inside our perimeter and was coming directly toward me. I'm laying back. I have a car 15th laying across my lap. And I can hear this person moving. And I knew all of our people knew the rule. Once you go down, you don't get back up at night. Anybody moving is a bad guy.

And this guy's coming right toward me. And I think he's going to step on me. I slid my selector switch over the full auto. And I'm laying there and he's coming and the air is so thick. And at this point, I can mentally see a silhouette coming at me. Although I can really see the silhouette. I know where it is based on the sound. And now I'm starting to hear him breathe.

I'm starting to hear his heartbeat because he realizes he's inside the perimeter. and he's probably about to get killed. So his heart is thumping, he's coming right at me. I can't open up because I'll light the whole perimeter up and will be in trouble. So I couldn't get to my knife. So I decided just as he gets to me, I'm just going to shoot my left hand up.

I'm going to grab a hold of his chest, whatever he got there, and I'm going to pull him at the same time, raise my leg up and trip him. I'm going to pull him down to the ground. I'm going to hit him in the side of the head with the muzzle of my car 15 as I'm bringing him down. If he yells, if he fires his weapon, I'm going to pull the trigger. So he's coming. He got into position.

I grabbed him. I jammed the muzzle into the side of his head, just cut a bit. big gash in his head. I bring him down face first into the mud and he didn't say a word. It didn't make a sound. It scared him so bad he didn't even grasp when I grabbed him.

And now I started thinking, now what? I'm sitting here holding this guy face down in the mud. What am I going to do with him? And then I heard a whisper. And the whisper was Trung Wee, a lieutenant in Vietnamese. Lights, lights, what? And he said, lights, lights.

And I looked up the ridge towards the top of the mountain, and you could see lights, lanterns coming down the mountain. About 400 people, if he counted one or two people in between each, lantern, probably 400 people coming down the ridge line toward where we were. That's not good. We're on a ridge line like that. We picked it, though people couldn't get around us. They're coming straight out of us.

But then I turned and I looked down the ridge. They were that same number coming up the ridge. They were going to come right to us. We were going to be right in the middle when they got there. about, you know, estimated 800. Whoa. So then I realized the guy that I've got face down in the mud is the Vietnamese captain that we took on his mission with us.

He didn't, you know, he didn't have the experience. He didn't realize it when he got up to come tell me there were lights coming that I might shoot him or somebody might shoot him or knife him. But anyway, you know, he did call that to our attention. And so these guys are all coming at us. They're going to intersect right on us. So my RTO crawled over and said, sir, you're wanted on the radio.

And I got the radio, and this was a K-Y-38 with the K-Y-28 manual code loader in it and all that stuff. You had to have that daily code set in this coder. You had to be on the right frequency. This was the highest security radio that you could manually carry around. Anyway, so I was talking, I answered it, and it was Saigon, and they said, you are now a prairie fire emergency, meaning everything in that part of Southeast Asia now belongs to you. everything, every asset that's within range of you, every asset that still has armament left, is being diverted to you to try to get you out.

And I'm looking up and down and I can see how we are a prairie fire emergency. So I, you know, copied that. I got my assistant team leader over and said, here's what's going on. and then the RTO says sir

you got to hear this and I said WTF Shafor you know I've got 800 people coming why don't she going to tell me I picked up the radio the hands up

and there's a Vietnamese woman on the radio there's no way that she can to this radio, but she's talking to this tactical radio, secure one. And she's reading our obituary. What? She's reading our obituary that we were all killed in action that night.

She's reading name by name of everybody who's laying in that parameter. And she reads my name. She reads off Dick Thompson and keeps going. And Saigon's monitoring. And they heard her read my name off as Dick Thompson. And they said, okay, she made a mistake. She doesn't even know his name. Who is Dick Thompson?

His name's Henry. No one at that point. When that side of the world, you knew me by Dick Thompson, except for Eldon Bardswell, later Major General Bardswell. And we'd been on the same team before. But somehow, she knew my name that no one else knew. And as I'm listening to it, there's music in the background. not just music

but I realized this is the same music that as a little kid at 12 o'clock every day at my grandmother's house she would say things like Boris, Morris, quieten down I need to hear the obituaries

in the county and there's a southern kind of music that they played in the South when they would read obituaries read about somebody that had died and they're playing this in the background as they're reading our names all as being

killed in action that day on a super encrypted radio that they couldn't possibly be talking on. So it kind of got our attention. I would imagine. So I got a team leader

together and we put our plan together and we were We were armed. We had four machine, M-safety machine guns with us, you know, four grenadiers with us, we had all those claymores. We were loaded for bear.

But that kind of got all over our attention. And that started at 9 o'clock. At night, it was almost 1,700 the next day when we got out. and we just banged it out with them right and left and had one catastrophe after another but we got out and we got everybody out with us you got everybody out wow there are a lot of bad guys that were left

but holy shit what was the radio did you ever figure that out somehow they'd got a whole one they'd gotten a hold of one of those they got the radio they had to have gotten the codes

and the frequencies you know from the compound we think part of what happened was eight days before we were at the launch site getting ready to launch on this mission and a team

was overrun and you know The launch site commander came in and said, look, your mission's just changed, you're now bright light, your team's going to go in to try to recover the team that just got overrun. So they changed their mission, and we went out there and fought it out for a couple of days. And when we came back, we had to have some recovery. We had to replace some people that were when we did doing a firefight. So it was eight days before we could go back and run our original mission. So they had eight days to get more intel on us and figure out what was going on.

And we had some spies there at CCN in the camp that we didn't know about. Man. Well, I got another gift for you. And the KY-38 radio, and the K-Y-38 radio, And that's 54 pounds of radio Plus all the batteries The big batteries that it goes through Nobody wanted to carry those things

You had to have a PRC 77 To hook to There's KI and KY38 So half of it was on your front chest Half of it was on your back Oh man It was unreal I'm sorry I interrupted you go ahead

No, no, no. Well, not much has changed today. Nobody wants to carry the radio, but it's not 50 pounds. But, hey, since we're talking about everything you've carried, I got you a little present here. So I got a friend over at Sig Sauer. His name's Jason, and I told him you were coming on, and he is just fascinated with Magby's SOG guys.

so he wanted me to present this to you oh wow go ahead hold it up so that is the sigs sour p-365 macro legion and uh hold 17 rounds plus one in the pipe it has that red dot we were talking about red dots at breakfast it has the uh slide cuts in the front to help you with the muzzle flip and recoil it's made out of all metal And that is the latest and greatest everyday carry handgun from Sixth Hour. So we wanted you to have that. That is awesome. Thank you.

You're welcome. Thank you. Fortunately, I'm driving home, so I don't have to try to carry those on a plane. But, yeah, so we wanted you to have that. So when you get your new studio completed, including your firing range, hopefully I can get invited back up to see if the thing works on your range.

We'll invite you back, you and John. Maybe we'll have a little shooting competition. Oh, yeah. He'd love that. I'm sure he'd whip John's ass shooting competition. Oh, yeah. I'll tell him he better start practicing. That's great.

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There's no safe like SimplySafe. Well, I'd like to get into your story here. So we always start with where did you grow up? grew up in a little town called Walhalla, South Carolina, up in the north-western tip of South Carolina, right up above Clemson University, and spent a lot of time outside. And, you know, my mother's family had four sons. And when World War II came along, all four of them were deployed, you know, in World War II. My father was deployed along with them, so there were five men, you know, from the family there.

And they, three of the brothers, four brothers, came back, and my father came back. And then when Korea came along, you know, my father was called back in, so served in Korea. And they talked about some army stuff mostly at my prodding, saying, what does this mean? What is the Ptoon? What do you mean have a reserve? a reserve what excuse me all kinds of questions you know I was just full of questions

about army stuff and then when I was about seven years old I decided I'm going to have an army so I got with my cousin Carl and I said you're the first member

of my army and I had heard about rangers I'd heard them talk about what the rangers did. So I decided it was going to be, you know, a ranger company. So I formed the 69th Ranger Company.

And it was commanded by General Thompson, of course. And so, but we needed more than one other member. I needed command more than one person. So I started recruiting my other cousins that are about the same age. We've got, you know, all the close ones in, the ones I liked, got those guys in, brought

in one female cousin, Pat, which was actually cousin Carl's sister, we brought her in, so we had a whack in the army. Then we started letting people outside the family in, so it grew bigger. and I still got the log book for Thompson's Rangers at home, the actual logbook. Are you serious? And you can open it up and you can, it's getting pretty faded now, but you can see notes. You can see people's names. You can see the note.

You can see information about the only court marshal that we had. There was one of the members of the company that, um, they, He gave me some lip, and he ended up getting court-martialed and booted out of the Ranger group. But, you know, I still have that book. Yeah, that's cool. You know, I cut two pieces of cardboard for the covers and taped it together and put the paper inside. And it's pretty cool. But I still have it after all these years.

So, really got into rangers. And, you know, the family did a lot of hunting. My father liked to hunt. So I was brought up with weapons and shooting and hunting and tracking. And every time I, my parents both worked as I was getting over. So every opportunity I got, I was in the woods by myself. hunting, tracking, tracking deer, tracking whatever animals I could find and studying them. You know, what do they do?

How did they move? And then I got this idea, I need to be invisible. How can I be invisible? So to be invisible, it's not just that you are not visually seen. If I'm invisible, you can't hear me. you can't smell me. You know, I just don't exist. I'm just, I'm here, but I'm not here.

And how do you do that? So I'd practice slipping up on deer or rabbits or whatever I could find out there. And then my cousin Carl started coming over, and we'd take, I had the little army pup tent. We'd carry that thing a couple hundred meters up on the hill, in the woods and put it up. It would go out and, once I got a BB gun,

we'd go out and shoot some birds and, you know, little birds and build us a fire. And we would roast them and we would say, well, what else do Rangers eat? You know, let's get us some ranger food. Let's go kill us something else and let's come eat it. You know, we'd camp out there and pretend we were rangers and we'd go on missions and different things like that.

And, you know, we got older. And then when I was 13, my parents sabotaged me because I knew I was going to be a ranger. And Santa Claus came and brought me a chemistry set. You know, I used to watch shock theater at midnight on Saturday night. You know, they'd build Frankenstein and wear-wuss and change people's brains out. And I said, they can do that one? Can I do it? So I started, you know, catching rats.

I'd catch rats and bring them into my lab. And I'd knock them out. At that time, if you went into a pharmacy, we call them drugstores at that time. If you went in there, I mean, if you could get permission, from your parents to buy a syringe a real syringe which was a big deal at that time

because only drug users and medical people had access to syringes but talked to pharmacists to letting me buy one so I had a syringe and then I could shoot the rats of the birds or whatever up

knock them out and I could go in and take their brains out and see if I had I could swap them and bring them back, swap their hearts, things like that, and try to, you know, from shock theater with Frankenstein. You know, the electricity from lightning went in him. I would plug them into the outlet, tended to fry their little hearts and stuff. I never could get one to start back. I could put them in there.

I just couldn't get them to work again. The psych test must have been a lot different to get into the Bramberays back then. So I really got into chemistry, and then at some point I got into, let's build some rockets, you know, Thompson Rangers needs some rockets to launch it to the bad guys. So I studied rockets and rocket fuel and the chemistry around it. And again, back to the pharmacy, I need. I need some, I need some potassium nitrate, I need some charcoal, and I need some sulfur. What are you going to do with that? I said, oh, I'm, you know, building some bottle rockets.

Okay. I had so much of those chemicals in a foot locker in the house. If my mother had realized what that was and what it could have done to our house. But anyway, you could build rocket fuel out of that, and then discovered later you could build bombs out of that too. So I built a launch pad. I built a lab

in the barn and built an actual launch pad out behind it. I had a window so I could look out there and see it so I didn't get hit with shraping all the stuff that exploded on the launch pad. And I'd launch

them off of there. One day I built a big one. It was almost three feet high. It exploded on a launch pad, actually broke windows in my neighbor's house. So I decided I needed to go back down to smaller ones, so they didn't do so much damage as they didn't work. But, you know, so I played with explosives. I did all kind of chemistry stuff. I mean, when I was in high school, I took, you know, the advanced chemistry course. I didn't even have a book. I just basically showed up for class, took the exams, and maxed out the course because I was going down to Clemson University to the library, reading all the articles, reading chemistry books.

Wow. getting and I found it if you got the older chemistry books around the turn since around 1900 they were like recipe books they didn't just talk about theory and how you know if you mix these two components then then you get this it was a recipe this is how many grams of whatever it was that you were going to use and mix together and this is how you mix it together they don't you know to do all that stuff so I was learning that and really really into chemistry I got a scholarship to University of South Carolina on chemistry you had a pet too I'm sorry you had a pet I had several pets but I had one when I was you know really young that was a particular interest I was in third grade and my parents came, got me out of school

and took me home and said, we've got a surprise for you. What is it? Well, you have to wait until we get home. So we got home. It got out. And there was a spider monkey. So it was a monkey.

You know, he's on a little chain at a lease. So he's running around doing things. And I thought, that's cool. I snatched that little joker up. I found out about monkey teeth really quickly. I mean, he bit my finger on. So anyway, I didn't, I kind of liked him, but I was careful with him because I knew he would bite. We ended up building a small house that was outside, close to the barn, and he would sleep in that at night.

And we put a light bulb in there for heat because it was winter. time and I went out one morning and looked in the air and you know I could see his tail sticking out the little door and I grabbed his tail and I thought wow this is strange he's not moving and I pulled him out and he was literally just straight out you look like a monkey on a stick and he was frozen a monkey on a stick uh he was frozen And his little mouth was open, all the little teeth are showing. You know, I was not happy, you know. I mean, I forgave him for all the biting, but, you know, I ran back in the house, and I gave him to my mother and said, you know, he's dead.

He's dead. And she said, I don't know if he is or not. Let's try this. She wrapped him up in a little blanket and put him on top of a little oil heater that we had. So the heat was coming up to try to warm him up, thaw him out a little bit. and then she heated up some milk and took an eyedropper and squirted that warm milk down his little mouth and I mean she kept working with him and after a while

his little mouse started moving and she thawed that jugger out she thought him out and all of a sudden he came back to life I thought this is really cool if you can freeze somebody to death and then just thaw them back out I mean, how cool was that? But anyway, they had the monkey and what?

He caused so much trouble that we ended up swapping him for a dog. So he had to go away. You didn't take that and ask for volunteers from your army to freeze, did you? No. I'm not saying I didn't think about it. Maybe the guy that got court-martialed could have had a, ultimatum. I did take college students.

Oh, shit. I have to be careful how much I tell you about it, but I did take college students, and I was interested in what happens if I put you in the sleep deprivation? If I don't let you sleep for a while, what will happen.

So I got permission to do some research at the University of Georgia using college students and so I got a group of volunteers from the ROTC department.

These guys were all in the ROTC ranger company there to University of Georgia of course they can do anything and you know so they volunteered to do it so they had their full gear on we took them out in the national forest full gear um carrying a 40-pound rucksack and continuous movement was that we'd stop for a 10-minute break every once a while but continuous movement um no sleep every four hours they had to take a

a test. One of the tests they had to take was a cognitive test, you know, it's basically addition and subtraction, just a couple sheets of addition and subtraction. And then they would rate, after they finished it, I would say, well, compared to when you first started, when you were fresh, before you'd lost any sleep, compared to that, how would you think you did this time and they would say it's pretty easy I did just as well well this time just as accurate as I did on the first one I'm looking at the scores and thinking that didn't have them one of the things that that I discovered was that after 24 hours with no sleep that you lose about 25%

of your cognitive ability, particularly to be able to do things like math. The scary thing is you don't know it. You think you're still just as good as you were when you started out. And, you know, it doesn't stop at 24 hours. It keeps on going down. And you don't see things.

Things happen in front of you. You don't see it. things you see sometimes didn't happen. You know, you hallucinate. You do all kinds of things. And, you know, as a ranger instructor for a number of years, you know, with the ranger students, we didn't feed them much, we didn't let them sleep. We kept them running up and down mountains all the time.

And, you know, they would hallucinate, you know, you'd lose them. You're going through the woods. and all of a sudden you say send up to count. They start sending the count up and you realize you're missing about 10 or 12 people. You stop, you go back, you know, it's night, you go back, and here's a guy standing behind a tree, just standing there thinking that tree in front of him

is his buddy. He's supposed to be following. His buddy's not moving, so he's just standing there, and nobody behind him's moving. They're all waiting. And when I went to, my ranger buddy and I, you know we were already SF qualified and everything

so we're gonna have some fun you know so if you're walking along you had your little patrol cap on you had the little range of eyes in the back the little fluorescent tabs in the back of the hat

so the guy behind you could see you in the dark you take your hat off you kind of put it over to the side and as you're walking along You just, you just, you just start, you know, getting yourself lower and lower and you're lowering that hat around. And the guy behind you, he's following you up.

Now he's filling around trying to, where's the drop ball? Where's he going? And we found that we found if we did stuff like that. It was hilarious to us, and it kept us motivated. You know, we could do all kinds of things. And we had fun in Ranger's school. But anyway. Humor keeps it going.

Yeah. It keeps you moving on along. Especially in the darkest hour. Yeah. So, anyway, with the sleep research, that was a major study that the military used. Because one of the things, when I was put on the airline, Land Battle 2000 team to figure out how are we going to go $100 straight with the ground war when we move into 21st century, how can we go 100 hours straight, leaders be able

to lead, soldiers be able to function, aviators be able to fly, you know, without 100 hours of that sleep. So I did a lot of research around that. And then I started going to NATO nations and briefing the Army staffs. Here's what we found. Here's what you need to do to be able to function. And I remember very clearly when I briefed the commander of the U.K. forces. I gave the presentation, and this is what special ops are going to have to do. And then what the soldiers and aviators to do.

And I finished that presentation, and the general got up, and he said, Thompson, that was a good briefing. But I can tell you now, we're not doing any of that crap. These guys are just going to have to drive on. We're not doing that. Okay, it's a price to pay. And then shortly after that, Falkland Islands came along, and all of a sudden they ran into problems

because they didn't have enough pilots down there to meet the, the safety requirement, the sleep and rest requirement between missions. They tried different chemicals to help them be able to do that because when a pilot comes back from a mission, his eyes are like that. He's wired from all the stress and everything. He can't go to sleep to start with. When he finally does go to sleep, he can't wake up.

And if you give him a chemical that knocks him out right away, way, then you can't get it out of his system, you know, six hours later or four hours later when you wake him up and say, you've got to go. You've got to fly another mission. He's still trying to figure out who he is. But there are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready because when they go for, you know, when the ground war started, the ground war went 100 hours. now my brother was a patchy pile and you know he was telling me all the town about

I go fly a mission I turn around I come back I'll land while I'm rearm and refueling I'm sitting there in the cockpit eating a sandwich drinking a coffee because as soon as they they get me rearmed I'm going back out I got to go fly another mission

and so you know that stuff was going on all the time and you're just not as effective and somewhere somewhere around five hours or five days without any sleep zero sleep people start to die and the university said you know we can't keep supporting your research if you have your students dying so you got to stop keeping them up that long They didn't actually die, but, you know, they were getting close enough that they were concerned about it. Wow. So I hear people all the time.

How long were you keeping these people up? Holy shit. We ended up stopping them after, I think it was 72 hours as far as we would go. But I hear people tell me all the time, man, I can go five days without a problem. young guys to tell you that you think you are I remember

in the English school sitting in the bleachers and the instructor standing in front of us there was a creek there he's standing in front of us and he's talking and it seems like

mid sentence mid sentence he says Thompson in the creek and I think what did I do you were asleep and I think

no it wasn't asleep in the creep do push-ups until I get tired make sure your face goes under every time you know

so I went up there in a creek trying to drown myself doing push-ups and I was and my ranger buddy said yeah you were sitting here but you were asleep

you were setting up your eyes were open but you were asleep and I began to realize Yeah, you go to sleep and you don't realize it. In fact, some of the research shows that there are more people killed than traffic accidents with drivers falling asleep than theirs or drunk drivers.

Interesting. Almost everyone that drives or been driving for a while can tell you, you've had experience late at night and you're sleeping and your head's bouncing around and all of a sudden just before you hit the bridge of you fill the car run off your shoulder and you jerk it back into the road because you were asleep you didn't you didn't know it and you know if you're driving a drone you're driving whatever and you go to sleep the drone's on its own now there's no telling where you're going to put that thing and if you're you know watching a radar screen you don't see the aircraft coming you don't see the blips you're looking at it your eyes are open but you don't see it there's a whole series of things like that

that I did a lot of research on and particularly using it with special ops and still now I go out I do a lot of presentations and with different groups particularly high stress groups special ops groups on sleep deprivation

things to help you get around it to be of the function better longer and what's going to happen if you don't so that's a long answer to whatever you actually about a monkey or something with it well i want to get into that what you're doing nowadays towards the end but you went to school you dropped out of school correct yeah i was in school And at that time, every night on the 5 o'clock national news, you know, there'd always be a segment about what was happening in Vietnam. And interestingly, very different from what we have today,

you know, the reporters would be saying, man, we're crushing those guys. I mean, we're just crushing the NBA. And we're doing this and we're doing that. And I started thinking, well, I wanted to go to Vietnam, you know, so I could, you know, do my patriotic duty, like my uncles and father and everybody had done. It's going to be over. If I wait until I finish school, it's going to be over. So I decided to take a break from school, you go in a list for three years, go do my thing. come back, pick back up where I was in school, and, you know, continue on.

No, no intent, no desire to really, it'd be a career person. I wanted three years, and then I wanted to get back to chemistry and do my thing. And so I stopped. My mother was not happy. My father supported it. My mother kind of freaked out over it. I told her, I'll go back to school. She said, no, you won't.

I said, I'll go back to school. I'll get a doctor, but I need to go to do this first. And then, you know, I get to the recruiting station and went down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And, you know, they put us in the barracks, went to sleep about three o'clock in the morning. All the lights come on. and there's some guy yelling and screaming

to top of his lungs to get up and get to attention in front of your bunk and then I hear bunks being pushed over you know double bunks pushed over people falling out on the floor and this guy yelling and hollering I got my buns out and got to attention

in front of my you know bunk there and I look and I said he's my size he's got a big smoky the bear hat on he's my size and he sounds like a giant coming through here and what is that on his shoulder a ranger tab

so I thought that's it you got to do that and then he took us took us on a run and you were singing all this stuff about I want to be an airborne ranger I want to live a life of danger, all this kind of stuff. And I thought, this is cool.

If I'm going to be in three years, I might sort of, you know, this is what I want. I get a chance to, you know, be a real ranger now, not just, you know, what I used to play up. So all of a sudden, you know, I still didn't have, I still didn't intend to stay in beyond the three years, but I wanted to be a ranger while I was in and, you know, go to Vietnam as a ranger. You know, why not? What was the sentiment of Vietnam at the beginning of the war? Terrible. It was terrible.

You know, the country is divided now. We're in America. But, yeah, in America it was divided. So they had, you and I, for example, as soon as people looked at our heads, they could say, well, he doesn't have hair down to his shoulders. His hair's not parted in the middle. He's in this group over here. You and I are in this other group, and we're much more likely to be patriotic, support the war, go do it. These other guys, these long-haired hippie guys over on the other side, they're against it. They're all smoking marijuana. They're

doing whatever. And I'm kind of exaggerating. But it was divided. Those people, anti-war, you know, protest, do all this kind of stuff. So there were some people who were for it, most people were against it, and they were out protesting. And, you know, I had some good friends that had moved on the other side. They were total anti-war. But some of the stuff you were hearing was, you know, we were killing babies, we were killing old women.

We're doing all kinds of things like that, which wasn't necessarily true. But, you know, I got really excited about the Army and what we were doing and kept thinking, they're paying me to do this. Can you imagine what it would cost if you just wanted to go jump out of an airplane and have a thrill like that? They're paying me to go do that. And all these other things, and the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it, and when I finished AIT, they just said, hey, you're going to OCS.

You went to OCS right away. Yeah. So you need to go to OCS. And they talked me into it, said, you know, you can still get out to any of your three years. You'll be your two-year requirement that you'll get from OCS. will be over and you can still get out of the army. You'll still get to go to Vietnam. Then you can probably do some of these other neat things

like airborne ranger, stuff like that. So I started volunteering in OCS to go to airborne school and to go to Special Forces. So when I finished OCS, then I just went from there to airborne school. I was already at Benning. I went to airborne school. and then they sent me to Bragg

and went through the officer's cue course up there and became S-F. And then S-F, I went to Rangers and then went to the fifth group in Vietnam and did what my buddy said. Didn't really do what he said. I did the opposite. He said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for sob.

why is that and when I asked that question he said if you do you're going to die and if you don't die you're going to come home with the crap shot out of you in a nutcase that's if they find you

do not volunteer for the sod and say what do they do I said nobody knows you have to get there and volunteer and get there and then you'll find out what you're going to do but you're going to die or come back as a nutcase. I was 21 years old.

At that time in history, we thought that your prefrontal cortex up here in the front of your brain, we thought that the only thing it really did was hold up your cranium so that your front end of your head didn't kind of cave in. And we thought it was fully developed. By the time, you know, you're 20 years old, you had all your pre-phone cortex abilities. Really, you've got to be about 30 before it's fully developed. So before it's developed, you tell somebody you're going to volunteer to go anywhere, do anything, anytime, and never say a word about it for 20 years, I can do that. I mean, that's a recruiting poster to a 21-year-old. Uh-huh.

And if you look at the SOG pictures of the Americans on those teams, almost all of them are old baby-faced guys. You look at John Schrocker-Meyer. You look at his old baby face. You look at my little baby face. You look at Eldon Bardswell's little baby face. I mean, all three of us within two or three months of the same age, and we're all look like little baby faces because we'll go charge that hill we'll go to another country and do things

by the time you're 30 you're saying let the younger guys to do that I don't need to have that kind of action anymore if you stay if you're still there at 30 and you're still doing missions like that you know as you saw with some of the seal work you were doing you know it's starting to have a bad effect on you I mean there's a limit to how much stress you can take and recover from it you know easily so we don't take good care of our special operators in particular yeah we keep throwing them back out there in the middle of all of stress with no break when with no opportunity you know to to heal some and then we put we put all these restrictions out there they don't mention the word mental health don't say you're getting a little stress because we'll take you off the team

yeah the tier one guys you know like you like the sod guys i mean i had to pass you know the flight physical i mean just blow it out of the water every year Or I couldn't be on a team like that. You can't be Tier 1. You can't be Halo. You've got to have perfect ears, perfect eyes, perfect everything. Or they'll take you off the team. And what do you do?

Same thing in sock. I mean, I used to come back and take forcips and pull pieces. I've got scars all along and pull pieces of shrapnel out and not say anything about it because I didn't want to get taken off the team. You know, and civil guys do it all the time. Rangers guys still do it. You're not going to report anything. Yeah.

But you don't have to, so. So did you go right into SOG from the Greenberg? Yeah, when I got there, when I got to Vietnam, I met a buddy of mine in the bar that first evening when I got there. And he's the one that told me, whatever you do, don't volunteer for SAG. because he'd been there a month before me, so he knew all the kind of stuff, right? So the next day, went through all-in-processing at the end of the day, then I ended up Colonel Blatz's room, and he said, I'm looking through your folder here, you volunteered for the Army,

you volunteered for OCS, you volunteered for airborne, you volunteered for Ranger, You volunteered for special forces. You volunteered for Vietnam. I've got the most important job that you will ever have an opportunity to do. But you have to volunteer for it. And I said, you're trying to get me to volunteer for SAG? He said, yes.

I said, what do I do? What does SAG do? And so I can't tell you. He couldn't tell you anything? I can't tell you what they do. I just tell you you're going to have to volunteer and sign the volunteer paper to go to SOG. You're going to have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, 20-year agreement, that you won't say the word SOG, you won't say anything about what you guys did for 20 years, or you're going to receive the full punishment of the law. But if you'll do that, you can get in the sob

and you can do things that nobody else can do. So the next day, I was supposed to be at the airfield. They sent me down to the classified end of the airfield where the blackbirds, the black C-130s and C-133s were all parked. You know, nobody could go down there. I went down there, got on an aircraft to go up to a train, and there were no seats in the plane when it got there, the seat belts on the floor. The crew chief came by and he said, sit on the floor and buckle in, and they were three

or four of us. on the floor and buckle in because when we take off we're going to climb as fast as this thing or climb so that we don't get hit on the way out and then when we go to land up in the train we're going to dive toward the ground like we're crashing so we don't get hit on the way down and you guys just hold on you're going to have a great ride got there and got off the plane and they told us to where to move to and said you know there's a sog bus there that's going to pick you up and drive you on up to the name. So we went over where the bus was supposed to be,

and there's a black school bus sitting there. All the windows are shot out of it. There must have been 200 bullet holes in the bus. The seats are all ripped apart where bullets have been hitting. And there's a driver there. Went out to him and said, is this the bus to me? Dinang? He said, yeah. What happened? And he said, well, there is this one pass that we have

to go through. And the NVA liked to ambushes up there on a fairly regular basis. So, you know, kind of shoot the bus up and the people are in it. We're going to pick up a SOG team in a few minutes as soon as they get here. Then we'll leave. All you have to do is just do what they tell you. whatever they tell you to do, you do, and you'll live. If you don't, you'll probably die before you get there. And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, here's a line of about seven or eight guys headed toward the bus. I mean, they just appeared.

And I'm looking at them and said, I never seen anybody like this before. I mean, I've been special forces. I've been to Granger. I don't recognize the equipment they have. I don't recognize the uniforms they have on, and they're scary. I mean, if they had this little short, like a little short, M16, some of them have, you know, grenade launchers that have been cut down to that long.

They're camouflaged, they had on bandanas around their heads, hang grenades all over. Scary looking dudes. They got on the bus. and said, and they immediately took up defensive positions on the bus. The team just arrayed itself around the bus, and they were all at the windows ready to shoot in whichever direction the fire came from. And the guy who was the team leader, and he said, if we run into trouble, he'd get face down on the floor of the bus,

and don't move until we tell you. Copy that. We didn't get ambushed, but wow. You know, you start thinking, what did I get into? Jeez. Yeah, I was talking, I'm talking to Eldon Bar 12, you know, several years ago before he passed. And he said, oh, yeah, I still can see that bus in my mind. All shot up like that and wondered what have I gotten into.

Is that what you were wondering? Yeah. I said, hmm, this is different than what I thought. But, you know, it's going to be exhilarate. because I'll be on a team like that in a few days. I'll start becoming one of those guys. I mean, those guys made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And when they get around other people, you can see.

Everybody just kind of backs away, give them room. They don't get close to them. They don't make eye contact with them. If you look them in the eye, for the most part, you see death. I mean, they're just, they've seen things nobody else is seeing. And you can't not see it once you've seen it. So I thought, you know, that part's pretty cool. So it went on up, got to Danang, and the little guy that picked us up there said,

I'm going to take you to your quarters, where you'll stay tonight, tomorrow, you'll get your assignment, you'll get briefed. And you might want to, we have a movie theater set up coming out here. You know, we put a couple pieces of plywood together. We got a movie projector, and we show John Wayne and other kind of movies out there. I mean, we have some bleachers up. You might want to go out there and watch the movie. This is one of you the last chance you get to take a break and relax a little bit.

Been into bleachers about, it's dark. and the bleachers about 15 minutes. Marble Mountain is behind us, and all of a sudden it looked like the 4th of July. Red, tracers, green tracers, flares, stuff going everywhere. Now I'm faced down in the sand. And the guy sitting in the bleachers said, oh, I'm sorry, Sarah, I should have warned you.

This happens every night. Just watch the movies. They won't shoot down here. You know, in a few minutes, all those green tracers will be gone. because they did the team's up there on top of the mountain we'll take them out everything will be fine just enjoy the movie you know my heart's pounding holy shit so you know the next day we get a briefing and and I you know you pick a code name so I pick the dynamite code name then I went to up to Fubai where you know

John Myers already up there. I went to Foo by, we got off. It was about five or six, I was one up there, and the sergeant major came out, and he had a little list. He got us all together, and he said, all right, and he read the names off, and he said, all of you guys are going to leave tomorrow

to go back down toward the train to one-zero school to learn how to be a SOG team leader. I said, boy, you didn't read my name off. Thompson? Oh, no, you're not going down there. Your SF qualified, your Ranger qualified, I'm putting you on a team this afternoon. You don't need to go down there.

What you don't know that's going to be taught down there, the team's going to teach you over the next few days before you go on your first mission. Wow. And then he said, you know, tomorrow morning, I need you to report into the S-4, Sergeant Jones has a mission he'd like for you to help him with that I need an officer for. If you would help him for that, and then we'll link you up with your team and you can do it started. okay they put me in quarters went to s for the next morning and the sergeant said we've we've had some casualties and we have their personal effects here they've all been packed up in duffel bags and before we can

ship them back to their families their personal effects back to their families the the effect effects need to be reviewed and signed off by an officer. So I need you to just go through each of these seven duffel bags. Make sure there's nothing in there that would be classified, no pictures, no, you know, anything that could be classified. And pack them back up, signed a sheet, and we can get them out of here. first duffel bag I picked up

a friend of mine before break he went sorry okay he went about 30 days you know before me and you know just disappeared

nobody knew where he went what the assignment he got when he got there, he just went into a black hole and, you know, so he's been there 30 days and I'm inventory and his personal effects to send back to his family and Saug got real

so I did that went and linked up with a team and I went to work, started training with the team because we had a mission coming up in a few days. Trying to learn everything I could before we went out. But anyway, that was a long story of how I got to... What was on the bag?

He had some civilian clothes, letters to his parents. I mean, you know, people's personal kinds of things like that. They were letters that, you know, that had come from their families. There were letters they had written that they hadn't mailed yet. Things they had in their hooch, personal kinds of things that they would put in there. So, I mean, probably half to two-thirds of it, you know, I took out. But I had to read the letters, you know, to their families. And, you know, that was brutal.

Just brutal. You were close with him. Yeah. I would just, anyway. What was his name? Stax. Lieutenant, Stacks, Stan, Stax. And, yeah.

You know, we went through the officer S-F course up there and, you know, hung out some after that. But it was just a shock to my system, all of the first bag, you know, the duffel bag with your name stencil on the side of it, and I picked that up, and it just, holy come, now I know where he went. SOG. Like my friend had told me, you know, a couple of days before, don't volunteer for SAG. You're a dead man walking if you do.

And then, you know, here's stacks all of a sudden. I'm sorry. So, I mean, I got put right to work, which, you know, I'd rather get to work. Let's go do it. I learn fast. If you show me, I'll learn it. I wasn't expecting to get ambushed the first time out. Let's take a quick break.

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That's hard to find these days, so check them out. Visit Patriotmobil.com slash SRS or call 972 Patriot. Use promo code SRS for a free month of service when you make the switch. All right, Dick, we're back from the break, and we're getting ready to get into your first mission with SOG. But, you know, something that I found interesting that you didn't mention is SOG did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention, correct? Right. Why is that? Well, we were not supposed to be in the countries we were going into.

We didn't have permission to go into those countries. So all missions were conducted without ID cards, which you can't do and be covered with the Geneva Convention. No dog tags. Nothing, in the beginning, nothing that said U.S. on it. Now, later on, M16s and CAR-15s and those types of weapons became so ubiquitous in that area that anybody could be carrying something, a weapon that said U.S. on it. So they took the restriction of that. In the beginning, you carried a, you know, a Sten gun or Swedish K or something like that rather than American guns. So they took that off.

But because we had no identification of any type on us, and then we were considered spies if we were caught. And it was also gave the U.S. government plausible deniability that they didn't have anything to do with us. That's what prompted the different uniforms and different peer and everything. Wow. Now, you know, like I said, later, I mean, we went to the regular jungle fatigues or tiger stripes or whatever. Very interesting.

Let's get into your first mission. Okay. We had kind of started it before where they assigned me right off the bat. So even the SOG rule was even if you come in as an officer, like I, I did. When you went to a team, you could not go as the team leader. You had to go out as an assistant team leader for a certain number of missions until the team leader that was vetting you said, you know, this guy's ready to lead a team. So I went out with team R.T. Alabama, to start with, to get, to learn really what it would like and get vetted. Because it's just a river, but they were something about when you cross that river into that other country, everything was different.

I mean, you didn't make contact with 20 or 30. 30 guys and have a gun battle, you made contact with 500. You know, it's like kicking the top off of an ant hill. I mean, they would just swarm. Once they figured out where you were, they were coming from everywhere to try to get you. And the other thing, it was kind of reminds me of Jiu-Jitsu in that with Jiu-Jitsu, you and your opponent kind of lay down. in the floor and you get your best hole on each other and then they say go and you try to fight

your way out of it with us they would take us into louse or wherever set us down put the NVA all around just hundreds and hundreds of them all around us with us in the middle and then they'd say go go accomplish your mission and then see if you can get out so you started all surrounded with ever mission and and just there are just so many of them when you did and then I worked mostly up north with Laos you know North Vietnam the terrain up there is very mountainous and double triple canopy jungle thick vegetation I mean most of the time when I made contact you would you know, this close to me.

I mean, 10 meters, maybe, 15 meters. That's when we made contact. And I probably couldn't see the other 20 people who were with you because they were standing a couple meters farther back in the vegetation. I could hear the gunshots. I could see the bushes moving as, you know, the blast came and things like that. So a lot of times I was shooting just movement, shooting, it sounds. shooting at the one or two that I could see and bullets were just coming from

everywhere you were never shooting at one you not think you're shooting at one person but there's 30 or 40 shooting back at you and it was when you made contact in Vietnam which we'd go do a lot just for practice so you can have a live shoot-back target you know you run up on five ten guys and and have gunfight but when 5 or 10 turns into 100 and 200 and they're more coming it becomes difficult so the the hardest or the easiest thing is to get inserted and sometimes that's a real problem but still getting inserted seems to be the easiest part accomplishing the mission becomes really difficult.

Getting out becomes almost impossible. And, you know, it's like that almost every mission. And you get in, trying to accomplish through a mission with everything going on, but then how do you get out? I mean, it can go on for hours and hours and hours trying to get out because you can't get the fire suppressed enough to get a helicopter in. And I mentioned Prairie Fire, Fire, Emergency. earlier

if we were about to be overrun if I call on the radio and declare prairie fire emergency everything within range that has ordinance is getting diverted to me to try to help get me out so all of a sudden

I mean there are times when I'd have 14 gunships in orbit waiting their turn to come in you know five or six self-bore phantom in orbit ready to come in some, you know, other types of aircraft, all in orbit, just waiting their turn to come in and expend their ordinance on the bad guy so I could try to get out. So, anyway.

What was it like when you, I mean, you show up as an officer to the most elite unit at the time? and they want you to lead one and how are you received by those guys um young guy 21 years old only been to the schools you know qualified SF qualified Ranger but you know even in today that doesn't mean much when you show up to the team I can't imagine what the receptions like for a for a junior officer to show up at a team like that of those type of men to be let. John Meyer might have told you what the perception was. He did.

He told me one time that he said, you were one of the few officers that actually wanted to go out and was not afraid to go out and could perform when you were out there. And he said, you know, that made you. different than most of the officers. And most officers, they went out a few times and they didn't go back out again. You know, they found another job. But, you know, enlisted, NCOs did that too.

And telling you, when you go over there and experience what it's like, you have to think long and hard before you say, I'm ready to go back. because it was just so different when you went out there and you know I was I thought I was given a fair chance um sergeant gentry deck um he didn't seem to have any qualms he just you know we'll see what you can do it's my team and you know I'll tell you what I want you to do and you do it

you know i was okay with that and you know the guys in um when you when you went into the lounge the club um you know you could sit with more senior guys there people with more experience and you know they would chat with you and they i think first the second day i was there um this e7 was talking to me came over and Met me and we started talking, and at one point he said, let me tell you something, Luton. Never, ever shoot an NVA less than three or four times. Every time you shoot one, you shoot them three or four times. If they twitch, you shoot them three or four more times.

Don't ever assume that you shot somebody in. they're dead because we've had a lot of sog people kill shot in the back because they walk past the NVA that they had shot and thought was dead and he said you make sure you do the job the first time and you know that was that was a rule i adopted there's no single shots there's no double tap if i shoot you i'm gonna shoot you i'm gonna get held like lot of times. And most of the time I shot short bursts on an automatic. I'd shoot, you know, three or four round burst because I want to make sure I hit you. I want to make sure you're going down. And, you know, if you don't go down fast enough, I'm going to hit you with three or

four more rounds. And, you know, that was one of the reasons I carried a lot of ammunition. So the deck was very open to having me on there, particularly after, you know, we had the first mission. We'd go out, we're doing a last light insertion, and

we're going to go do a wiretap once we got on the ground. So we go out, it's starting to get dark. We circle around and we come in on our run toward the LZ. Deck gave the thumbs up. That means get out on the skids, 30 seconds out. I climbed out on the skids. The other American climbed out on my side with me,

the door gunners right next to me. We were on a Huey. And we're coming in really low, and we're just going across the tree. I mean, the skids are almost dragging it on the top of the canopy, and we're going slow, and I was thinking an NVA could knock me off of the skid with a rock. I mean, we're just barely moving. I'm exposed to the world standing out here, and wow, there's a little village over there.

It looks like six or seven hootis in a little village. that that wasn't in our briefing there was nothing said about a village being that close to where we were going in so we come on up and they had blown a hole in the canopy and it was just barely big enough

for the chopper to just set straight down in so we're settling down in there and I'm scanning you know the tree line and I'm still thinking I'm a setting duck out here and we get down it looks like as far as we're going to be able to go

and we're still about six feet from the bottom of the bomb crater and I'm thinking I've got to jump off the skid down in this thing with 80 pounds of gear on I'm going to break both legs now when I hit down there and while I'm having that thought, you know, it's time to suck it up and just jump.

So, you know, I bent my knees so I could, you know, kind of hop off. And as I bent down, this guy, NVA, pops up right there 10 feet away from me, you know, in the bomb crater, AK-47. Holy kill. So instead of jumping in, I straighten my legs up. and hop back up on the edge of the floor of the aircraft. As I do that, he pulls the trigger on the AK. My legs moved just in time. They went right across in front of me

and they hit the American that was on the other side of me. They hit his legs and took him out from one of him. He started to fall. I grabbed the back of his harness with my left hand. I put a half a magazine into that guy. I drug him back up into the aircraft. You know, he's yelling and hollering, you know, by his legs. Blood's going everywhere.

There are two indigged behind me, both open fire, going out of the helicopter, one on each side of me. And I'm getting powder burns from there are multiple flashes, going death as that's happening. You know, the door gunner's opened up, and it's just unbelievable. the number of bullets that all of a sudden are coming, crisscrossing inside the aircraft, hitting the aircraft. You can hear the metal clings as they hit. I see another one.

Now, I finish off my magazine on him. Now I've got to reload, and that's when I discovered what stress does to you find motor coordination. So I reached to try to go, a magazine out of my pouch. My hand is just soaked with the blood that's squaring out of his leg. I'm trying to get the magazine out. I couldn't get it and it was stuck in there. My hand was slick. I finally got it out. But when I went to put it in, my hand was shaking so

much. I couldn't get it in the magazine well at first. I finally got it in there so I could start returning fire. The next one came right out of the pouch. It wasn't that big of a deal, but it went in a lot easier um but i had never experienced that level of fear before i mean i just and i it's hard to believe today that that many bullets could come at you uh that fast and none of them hit you so start returning fire and knock some guys that who were in the trees knocked them out. At the same time that's happening, you know, we've got two Cobra gunships that were coming in, you know, right beside us. They opened up with their many guns. And so you have, you know, 4,000 rounds a minute coming down from the Cobra's, hitting right next

to us, ricochets going everywhere, you know, there's tracers all over the place. They're firing the next two Cobra's right behind them. We're firing 40mm, you know, and that's, it's exploding all around us. Everybody in the aircraft on both sides are shooting. You can see the treasurer's criss-crossing on the inside. And, you know, the pilot, I think, I think that's the first time he'd been ambushed like that with people that close.

And it seemed like he just froze or stopped or something because we were just sitting there. I always think, we need to be going up. getting out of this hole. And finally we started moving. The aircraft's shaking, trembling all over and going up. The bad guys are all shifting their fire up. The cobras are coming in.

You know, they're just suck them around and coming in. And then we had some Sky Raiders, A-1 Sky Raiders coming in, flying across in front of us and dropping 250-pound bombs, not right there, but off to the side. I found out later those hooches in the village over there were not hoochers. They were tanks with thatch put around them to make them look like, you know, they were thatched houses over there. They were actually tanks and they started moving when all this started happening, you know,

so the A1s went after them and started putting the bomb. So with all the other stuff that's going on, when those things start, the bomb, the bombs, the bomb start going off. Now you're getting these blast waves coming across that's trying to knock the helicopter into the trees, you know, and we're getting hit with the blast. But finally, you know, we got up and we're able to start moving and flying away from it, and we're still getting 51 calibers and things coming up at us. And I looked over, you know, at Sergeant Deck, And he looked around at me, and he's grinning like a horse-eating Saul Breyer's and giving me a thumbs up. Oh, my God.

He thinks that's the coolest thing he's done lately. He enjoyed that. And he did. And I thought, wow. You know, he's done this, you know, quite a few times, so it's not his first radio. But he enjoyed that. Scared the crap out of me. And then we get back when we have the conversation of, you know,

Lieutenant, if you don't learn to change magazines faster, you're going to die. But every time, except for the last time, every time we went on on a mission, as we would be extracted, when I'd look over at him, I'd see that big grin and thumb up. He was so excited about that. So, yeah, that got my attention. I bet it did. Unfortunately.

Before the mission, the camp commander up there had called me over and wanted to talk, and he said, I just, I know this is your first mission. I want you to understand. We're not going to put you out there where we can't get you back. If we put you in there, we're going to bring you back. I said, okay. So when I got back from that mission, and got to the hooch, and spent some time with Jack Daniels.

I decided to go talk to the Camp Commander, learning experience, you know, to go to the Camp Commander and tell him his baby is ugly. There's some problems with the process. But, you know, he didn't fire me. That was good. He recognized, you know, it had a, you know,

significant experience there and then compounded it with a little Jack Daniels. So I didn't do that yet. I definitely learned from that. What did you think the problems were? I thought part of it was at Fubai, we had a range. We had a big, open area, huge open area that we would go to to do immediate action drills, to, you know, test fire different weapons and things. There was nothing you could shoot in any direction out there.

And, I mean, you could practice. But it's not the jungle. The jungle is very different. You know, when I'm out where I can see 1,000 meters out in front of me, that's different. And we are, you know, 10 meters, 15 meters out. It's about the range of my vision. And then after that mission, you know, the next one we got on the ground

and just moving through the jungle. and particularly moving once contact is made, it's very different. So when we got down to Danang, we had a jungle we could go practice in. Monkey Mountain, we could go over there, and you were in a rural jungle, so you could practice movement, falling over the logs, stepping in holes, and all that kind of stuff. But I learned a lot from that. One of the things was, I want more ammunition. And I've got to be able to get the magazines out. So had the magazine stuffed in the canteen pouch.

So what I did was I took a piece of parachute cord and some duct tape, and I made a loop. Taped it on the side of the magazine. So there was a loop sticking up on that center magazine. I could just stick my finger in and I could jerk that magazine out. once it was out the rest of them were loose it was they were easy to get out you came up with that yourself i had heard somebody talk about you know putting a loop on it or straying on it to this day and i thought that makes sense so i i tried that and yeah you know when i was practicing that first one would come right out so i started you know doing them all like that um but just

you know that was part of it was learning that, making sure I had them in the right place, making sure, since I was right-handed the grenade in the pouch on the right-hand side, magazines on the left-hand side, so you could go with them. Water was in the back. And then after a couple of times on the ground, I started to flatten out what was on my waist. To me, it seemed like the closer you could get to the ground, the better your chance of surviving because I'd be laying on the ground and my rucksacks getting hit. So I thought if I could get a little bit closer, that gets me, you know, a little ways

further. I mean, I'd come back on my rucksack shot up on just about every mission. I'm laying down, but the bullets had come in that close. Better side picture, too. Yeah. and so you know I started making little changes like that and then once I became teamlier then I you know implemented those changes to the to the whole team but some of them along the way you know I would make suggestions to to deck and say what if what if as soon as we get in

we get into our remain overnight position quick meeting before everybody goes down this is the direction we're going to go if we get hit this is our avenue of escape here's where we think they're coming the claymores are out there so we started having that little

quick debrief you know like that and then started the after action reviews where we did kind of a formal after action review with the team running I implemented a talk deck

into implementing a running password if we got scattered and you're running and you're running and you're coming up on somebody we would have a running password

example bug fuzz and you think that that would make sense Well, not only does it not necessarily make sense, it was hard for them to say. So if I don't speak the language and I hear you say something, bugfuzz, I can't understand what you're saying, I don't know what it means. So it's hard for me as the NVA to use that same word to come running into you. So every time we were compromised and had to use running password, the next time we went

out, we had a different one. So I kept changing those. And so just putting things in like that, and deck was pretty good about going along with that. And then Christmas will go out. And it was going to be the last mission that this team ran out of Fubai. They were going to close Fubai down. And we got in really heavy contact.

And when we finally got on the helicopter, and they were just really humbling the helicopter. And we got on it, and we started lifting off. I looked over at deck expecting, you know, the big grin and the thumb. up and he just looked up at me and he looked back down and I was oh crap you know he he must have gotten hit I mean he's never done that before must have got a hit so I kind of crawled over there to him and grabbed them by the shoulder and said are you okay and you know he said no I'll talk to you when we'll in so when we got on the ground I grabbed him up and I what's going on and he said I'm done I'm done

when we get when we get to the name I'm gonna have a different job don't tell the team I'll tell the team but I don't want to tell them right now but I won't be on the team after this after we get to the name. And, you know, I thought that was good. He had recognized it was time to do something different. And I found some people couldn't or wouldn't recognize that. You've got to know when you've gotten up to the edge where you're now dangerous, dangerous to yourself. danger to the rest of the team and you need to take yourself out because even though you

had to sign up for six missions or six months after the first mission if you went to the one your team leader and said i'm done i don't want this any i can't do this anymore i won't out that was fine you know you would be taken out and either put somewhere else and and um the Danang or where we were, or back to Special Forces, go to a regular Special Forces unit or something, because you didn't need to be going out there if, you know, once you had decided that you couldn't do that. Because the volume of fire was so heavy, so intense

when you were out there. All decisions had to be made. quickly and you had to continue to adapt because those suckers were coming at you and just you know with with me it was and now I'm going to be the leader I need to be learning more and I started watching the NVA what it what did they do when we make contacts is there a pattern to how they behave when we make contact and I started to see a pattern and just a simple example if you're an NVA and we make contact and you go down behind a tree

95% of the time when you decide to return fire back at me you will come around the right side of the tree. From your perspective, the right side of the tree. Muzzle or the A.K. will come around. Your forehead will be right behind it. If I know that, so I'm out here, from my perspective, I watch the left side of the tree, and I'll see you start to come around it, and I've already zeroed in on it, and I'm ready. When I see that muzzle come around, I know your forehead's right behind it, and I'm ready to, you know, launch three or four rounds at you. and I told my team I implement it with the next team and I said they'll do that every time

and said watch just watch they'll do that and you can take them out and we came back and we debriefed it and they said wow they do they shoot around that side of the tree or rock or whatever it is said okay here's But here's the big thing you've got to realize.

We do that too. We're humans. We're going to shoot around the right side of the tree every time unless we train it out of ourselves. Or you're left-handed. Or your left-handed. So we've got to practice doing that. But we know where they are.

When they go down, almost without fail, they will shoot from where they went down. When we go down, we've got to roll one way to the other. Don't shoot from where you went down because they're going to shoot right where they saw you go down last time. You've got to move before they start shooting and they get you. And there's a whole series of things like that that I call the human reaction to combat that humans do instinctively and they don't even realize they're doing it most of the time. But if you know how they're going to react, you know which way they're going to run and what

they're going to do, that gives you the advantage. It gives you the advantage with close quarters in combat. You know, when I watch people, you know, from the catwalk, I watch people go through the rooms, clearing them and everything, and I think, oh, my God. You know, if that Joker was in the air with live ammo shooting at you, it's going to take you out. And, you know, they're just in the U.S., For example, if you come into this building and I know you're coming in as a SWAT team, for example, or as a stacked with the military, you're coming in, I can take you out, but just by shooting a row across the wall there, I'll get half your team because you're all leaning up against that drywall, and that bullet's going to go right through it.

I can take out a bunch of you right there. There's a whole series of things. Don't stand close to the wall. If I shoot at the wall and I hit the wall, even dry wall, a lot of times you can get a ricochet that's going to come off that wall, just a little ways, and if you're standing a couple feet from it, it's going to hit you. How you hold your weapon when you go in there.

I won't go on all of that right now, but I really started working with them on what I was what was called Quick Kill when I went through the training. How to shoot from the waist and hit your target every time you don't have to aim. We went through a whole course and bragg on that with BB guns and then graduated the M16s. And some of the work I do with active shooters and stuff like that and showing the police. you and I both turn into the hall at the same time, I'll hit you three times before you can get your weapon ready to fire

because I'm already ready to fire. I just need to see a target. And I can hit you without moving my weapon at all. And you've still got yours at a down port, and you've got to try to bring it up. And what will happen in that situation is, as you're bringing it up, you'll be able to spend the rest of your life thinking about why you did it that way.

Of course, the rest of your life is going to be about a half a second. But I know they're lawyers. I know there are safety things, but you've got to think about your opponent and about how to take them out. But anyway, but we did all kind of practice on the range of pictures in the books. on a range of us shooting from there, putting the silhouettes out and practicing and hitting those things. If you're 20 meters or closer, I'll hit you every time without aiming.

I used to put five silhouettes out there and, you know, let one of the team members say go. And as I was falling to the ground, I'd hit all five targets before I hit the ground. And you can do that. but you've got to practice and they loved it when you gave them techniques they could use that would work they loved it how did it feel to take over the team

I was excited I really was a little nervous because I didn't know this team I took over the team when we moved to Danang they actually split up Alabama and kind of I sent them to different places, and Coach Deck was going to a different job.

And I took over RT, Michigan. The 1-0 had been wounded. He was gone. There was a guy, Spec 4 on the team, Elvin Bardswell. Hard, dude, good dude, you know. Sog, legend, Delta, Force Commander, forever. I mean, just you name it. special ops wise he did it but at that time he was my assistant team leader um so working in

working with him was was good we got another american in for a while um and it was a mountain yard team good team and eldon and i worked together you know really well so what was your first mission as team leader? The first one, oh, it was one we're going to try a new insertion technique. There was a company in the 101st that had moved up right up next to the border, Lausian border. So the plan was they were going to insert us into the, that 1001st company. So on one of their resupply missions

and where they were bringing in some additional new recruits in there, we're going to put the team on those helicopters dressed like the 101st, steel pot, all that kind of stuff. We were going to fly in and get off just like we were new people coming in. And then we would spend the night there in their

perimeter and at first light we would go down to the stream big stream that was down there with the water supply so we would go down with some 101st guys dressed like them to get water

except when we got down there we would change into our Superman suit stuffed the 101st stuff in a bag those guys would get to water and go back to the perimeter

and we would move out across the river into the jungle so we would make that clandestine insertion first time and really the only time that I ever had a chance

to be within range of of artillery 101st had set up a fire base out there to support them so once we got inserted and had a conversation with the company first sergeant coming over and saying, all right, I want you guys to dig in around here. And my interpreter looked at me and said, we know dig.

I said, tonight we do. We know dig. I said, look, they're probably going to get hit really hard tonight. Bullets are going to be coming from everywhere. And you guys look like the guys who are shooting at them. You need to be down in a hole. Are you going to get shot from inside the perimeter? We did.

So, okay. So they dug in, sure enough, we got pounded that night. And, you know, the hole saved us. But that was cool. But I had, you know, that evening I had met with the company commander and a fire support officer and a couple of them. the lieutenants and I kind of laid out for him this this is what we're going to do and here's here's what I need I want target you know artillery targets plotted on these areas right

here these coordinates and I want them named Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday I want to be able to just call up and say from Monday you know right 200 down 100 fire for respect and it was funny you know he was company commander and he looked at me like wow that sounds I never heard of that before that sounds cool I said when I needed I need it so um we went in crossed over and we were doing there was a hatchet force that was across the road on the other side and we were supposed to make sure no one approached them from the side of the road we were on. So we had the targets plotted out there and we heard some mortars that first night

firing at the hatchet force. I could tell they were close to one of our targets so I just called it in and they dropped You know, some 105 rounds over there. And that shut the mortars up from that position. So we started doing that. But after about three days, the launch commander decided we needed to be resupplied, ammunition and water. And Kobe said they were coming.

And I said, no, we don't want to resupply. I don't, well, he needs your grid coordinates so they can just, they can hover and drop the supplies down to the camp. He said, no, am I going to tell him where I am. So a few minutes, Covey came back and he said, if you're not going to tell him where you are, he's going to drop him at the last set of coordinates we had on you guys. No, when you do that, they're going to know right where we are. It's too late. I can see him kind of.

Oh, sure. enough. They dropped all that stuff down. So we ran down and grabbed most of it and hit it, took the water with us and moved out quickly, but more. They were on us shortly after that. And, you know, things didn't go well. Our told her we worked pretty good, but there were just too many of them and now they knew where we were. We, um, before I got that big insight about If you stop moving, they're going to surround you. We got into those rocks, and I stopped us. I thought we could defend from there.

Big mistake. They just circled us. It's like a big amoeva when we were there, supper. The only way we could get out was go up. So eventually got the fire suppressed enough. They could drop McGuire rigs down for us and pull us out. I sent barge well, and the other Americans. a couple of Indge out on the first aircraft.

I stayed there with the other two Indige and, you know, just kind of battled it out so we could fight in place and die. We could try to run and escape someplace and get away or we could go up those ropes. I decided we'll go up the ropes, but we had nobody to go as far support from the ground. So, man, they're just shooting away at us as we were going up. I got a couple rounds in the radio, killed my radio. Big chunk of shrapnel went into my survival radio that I was wearing right over my heart. It buried itself in there, killed that radio.

And, you know, both the Indige got wounded. as we were going up and we're flying along 7,000 feet, 100 miles an hour, oscillating back and forth. I could see my rope fraying on the edge of the floor of the helicopter. No radio, no way to call and say, I'm developing a little problem up there. I couldn't tell him that the other guys were wanting. we made it to a fire support base and in the book you know there's a picture in there of a helicopter coming in to a fire support base and you can see three guys hanging on the

end of the ropes down below him the guy that's the lowest on the rope is me and the other two are hanging right above me so what had happened is Bargewell and his little group came in first. These guys on the fire support, but they never seen anybody coming from that side of the border or hanging under a helicopter like that. So there was a guy there who had bought a brand new mini-polaroid camera before he came over to Vietnam.

He brought it with him. So he saw Bargewell in his group, you know, come. He ran and got his camera, came back out in time to see me and my two guys coming in and took a picture of it. They set us down, they got us in the helicopter, and just as they started lift off the ground, this guy comes running over, holding his arm up in the air with something in it. I reached down and took it as we lifted off, and it was a picture that he took as we were coming in. I have no clue who he was, but he took an actual picture of us live coming in, hanging on those ropes.

Jeez. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. So, still have it, put it in the book. It's no secret precious metals like gold and silver are gaining traction. From the billionaires to the central banks who are stockpiling gold

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It gives me a chance to bring that up, and let's get it settled, right? You get it off the chest. It gave me a chance to – you know, I could facilitate what was going on, so you guys didn't go duke it out after a while. But we could get that resolved and get your stress level back down. and you know we could move forward and then we also did um these are the post-training things we're going to do based on what we did out there one of them in this case was why did we not have those stupid harnesses on to start with I mean you could wear Swiss see you could

have it on you could have it you know just wear it a little loose if you wanted to and all have to just tighten the knot up and you could snap on that joker and go but to try to put on a swift seat when you got bullets coming at you from every direction then you're trying you're flat down on your back trying to get that thing on and you're trying to you know return fire i mean that's not easy we're not put it on beforehand i mean you know just little things like that that you can think of now Let's go practice that. Let's implement that as a SOP. So we started doing things like that.

And it was pretty good until Dick Meadows came in and said, can Bardswell take over the team? I said, sure. No problem. He knows exactly what he's doing. So, anyway. Where did you go with from there? That's when I did the run on the beach with Dick Meadows the next morning

and did the, let's review all the people. And then he put me on this other super, top secret mission to go into the Migeia Pass. And actually, John Meyer, had also been given that mission and they counseled at the last minute. They gave it to me. I told the people in Saigon when I went down

for a briefing, I said, this is not going to work. I said, I know you think there's no one up on that ridge that's going to be protecting those convoors going through there. And I said, I guarantee you there people up there. Why do you think they're not up there? Well, we fly over there all the time

and nobody shoots out of us. I said, of course they're not going to shoot at you. They don't want you to know they're up there. But when you put a team up there, they're going to walk right into them. Here's my recommendation. Plan on a target, a thousand meters away on that ridge line, let's hit that target about, you know, with LF4s, about 2 o'clock in the morning. While that's being hit, let's fly a Huey. At about 300 feet, lights out, full blast coming across this little clearing that's on that ridge.

I'll slide out of the helicopter. No reserve, because it won't need it. It's too low. I'll just ease out. I'll be on the ground within a minute or so. Pack it up. Hide it. I'll move up there to the ridge. they'll never know I'm there I'm one person they're not going to find me and worst case is they do find me

and what do you lose you lose one crazy as I've got not a whole team not some helicopters trying to get him out you know I can go do that it'll be a lot more secure and easier to do if you just let me go do it myself holy cow

I mean they just went bananas I was crazy they had no way they were going to let me go out by myself so but that mission ended up getting counsel anyway you volunteered for a singleton mission in Vietnam

yeah I mean it just looked to me like there were a lot of SOG missions where the mission was to go set on a ridge line or go find the location of of a battalion. Just go do something. Nothing kinetic about it. Just sneak and peek and find out and get the information, get it back in, get out, that I could just go do. I mean, drop me out there

in the middle of the night. Nobody's going to be expecting it. Helicopter comes across that low. Nobody's going to think you're going to parachute in. It just screams across through there. They don't see it. It's dark. They hear it. They just don't know what happened. They They know it didn't stop. And, you know, I just carried a survival radio, not even carry the PRC-25, all that garbage. I don't need all that weight. I just need to get in there. I need to send you a signal when I'm ready to come out.

And, you know, if things are too hot or too bad around that area, I'll start walking. You can pick me up somewhere else. And if you can't find me, you know I'm walking toward the border. It might take me a while, but eventually I'll get there. And Meta said, no, you're crazy. I'm not putting you out there by yourself. He said no. Camp commander said no.

Sog chief said no. You can't do that. and then fate said I'm going to activate R.T. Dynamite everybody else has said no but fate is about to say yes

you are about to be activated dude so that's when I did the R&R mission Holy shit let's go into it so yeah I mean

I felt I was convinced I could just I could move quieter father more effectively and with some missions

you know it just me I didn't need a team with me because I wasn't going out there to make contact or to fight anybody I was to be silent hidden collect the information I needed and get out so when I did go out it wasn't all that silent but still work how many times did you do that I only got to do it the one time but you know it ended up I had to go there were a bunch of

people in trouble and somebody needed to go get them and lead them out so I did that can you be a little more descriptive I I just come back from a mission rough mission and they were going to give me two days Let your team have two days, take a break before we give you your next mission. So I decided I was going to leave camp, go downtown for a couple of days. If I stayed in camp, somebody was going to find me and give me something to do. I was heading for the gate. Early helicopter coming.

landed on our pad a lot of activity going on around it and one of the one of the people there fumbling around with the helicopter saw me walking toward the gate he started yelling I couldn't understand him but so I moved closer to him and he ran over to me and he said do you know how to rig McGuire rigs to the floor of a helicopter so that we can use them. We've got an emergency going on. I said, sure, done that lots of times. I can rig that up. So I ran over. I had my car 15 and a bandolier with me. Set that against the contents container, jumped in the helicopter, started, you know, making all their appropriate ties and fastening it down, getting them rigged and ready to go. And then

the helicopter started to move told a crew chief i'd say i'm still on here and he said sorry about that um we got to go i'm in trouble so he said you just have to go with us so okay i mean i don't know what you're going to do or anything but yeah i guess i'll go with you I sat back and I just kind of started thinking about what was going on and I had just one vision just started playing over and over in my mind and it was that the helicopter in front of us got shot down. When we got there, the only way to get to the helicopter was to go down the McGuire rig. I dropped the McGuire rig and go down the rope, but it was like I was looking into a black hole. I couldn't see what was really going on.

Anyway, I pulled the crew chief over and said, you know, I had just crazy vision. You know, helicopter in front of us is shot down, and now we're there. And I think I might have to go down and do something. And he said, you're crazy. Said, yep. About 10 minutes later, he pulled me over and he said, you're not going to believe this. They just shot down the motherback helicopter in front of us. I said, okay, that's interesting.

In my mind, I started thinking, I think RT dynamite might have just been activated. Somebody's going to have to go down there. So when we got there, the first helicopter that they shot, down and crashed and burned. Three survivors, the pilot, the co-pilot and an NTO that was on near Willem. The Medevac got there, dropped the McGuire, or a jungle penetrator down. They put the co-pilot and the sergeant on the jungle penetrator. Medevac started pulling it up. It got hit, lost power, it went forward. And the jungle penetrator is just like a big grappling hook that you're setting on.

So they were about 100 feet in the air, and it got caught on a big limb. The cable snapped, and it was just like, you know, the medevac had been shot out of a slingshot of something. It just fired it right through the canopy into a ravine. so when we got there we circled around I could see the helicopter was based down into a ravine and the crew was still in it

you could see the fuel spilling out over them I could see 40, 50 NVA coming up the ridge toward that and it was going to take them out plus any, you know, a tracer anything ignite that fuel

they were all going to burn and they were so banged up and everything they couldn't get out of the ship. So I told the pilot, circle around, hover close to that hole, and I was going to drop a McGuire rig and go down there. So I borrowed the crew chiefs M-16

and stepped out on the skid. We're about 400 feet high. and receiving fire and McGuire rig went down it was 150 feet long but it was still up above the canopy that was 150 feet high but i told a crewtief get him to lower at some because i've got a i'm going to go down no i didn't have any gloves or anything turned out to be a brand new nylon rope And I thought, you know, if I squeeze really hard and I wrap my feet around it, I can slow it down enough. It's not going to burn that much. About 30 feet down, and I realized the flaw in my plan.

I couldn't squeeze it that hard. The rope had already turned red. It was just taking everything off both ends. I was bleeding, blooded and running off my elbows, people shooting at me. I ran on down. When I got to the McGuire rig, I was able to, you know, because it was pretty big, I was able to stop. But, you know, I was 20 or more feet up above the canopy at that point, and he was taking enough fire. He was going to leave.

So I knew I needed to go ahead and just drop into the canopy before he carried me off, and I'd be too high to do that. So, you know, I dropped, went into the canopy, and I discovered it's really hard, even in a jungle canopy, to be able to grab a hole of something and hold onto it when you're falling through. So it took me about 100 feet or so bouncing off limbs and things before I finally managed to hit with my stomach and kind of wrapped around a bit. glim got my breath and broke a couple ribs and things as I was falling through no meat on my hands climbed down as soon as I got to the ground two NVA standing there so terminated them how'd you do that that technique I was talking to you before where I'd put five silhouettes at and I'd just go full auto as I went down to the ground because I still had the the M16 I took

from the crew chief. I'd lost one of the magazines, but I put another one in it. He'd given me a bandelier with five magazines. So I took those two out and then started moving toward the crew that was still trapped in the helicopter. The pilot started shooting at me because he didn't know anybody else was down there, you know, where I was coming from. I could hear that little 38 pop in as he was shooting at me. So I'm yelling at him and telling him, hey, I'm the rescue team. Finally, he had to reload.

And when he reload, I charged him. And, you know, once he saw me, he was kind of in shock because he's looking at me and thinking, you're the one that needs to be rescued. You know, you're all bloody from head to toe and torn up and everything. But anyway, I managed to get all of them out of aircraft and move them to a safe space. So if it exploded, you know, it wasn't going to get them. So then I had to go. There was a SOG team that the initial helicopter went out to try to pick some of the members up.

So I went to where they were. And I heard American voice speaking kind of loud. So at that point, I thought, well, they must not be captured. I mean, there's an American talking. I got a little closer, and I could see the 1-0, the team leader. So I yelled to him, and told him I was coming in not to shoot, tell his people not to shoot. He said, come on in. I kept with the, if I back up a minute,

I kept telling the pilot to the other crew, I said, I'm going to get you out. You just need to do what I tell you. I will come back and get you. Don't move from where you are right now. I go up to the team. So I go in and there's an Air Force lieutenant colonel standing there, talking to the team leader, telling the team leader,

telling the team leader that he's in charge of the operation now. He's the senior man on the ground and he's in charge. So I got there and heard him saying that and I said, you're not in charge.

You're on the ground now. I'm the senior ground commander and I'm in charge. He said, you're a lieutenant and you are not in charge. And I said, you need to look around. Because all of a sudden, all the indige had turned their weapons toward him. They had figured out what was going on.

And I said, they are about to make you disappear, and your body's never going to be found. You need to be quiet and do what I tell you. So he quietened down. I went down and got the two guys off the jungle penetrator and brought him up. Use the radio, a call for her help, and told him I needed explosives. So a Marine, CH46, came out, dropped 50-pound box of C-4 and some fuses and fuse ladders and blasting caps. So I blew a big, several trees down to create a hole in the canopy, got some gunships out, started working the gunships. And eventually I got everybody up the jungle penetrator into the CH46.

I got up, went up last, and we flew away. Holy shit. So that was... You had a premonition. Yeah. And that was a long day. I get back to camp, and the camp commander is in there with some aviation colonel. And they're upset about something.

And I said, I'm back, and he's an aviation guy. I said, you didn't get everybody. I said, I got everybody that was there. You didn't get the crew chief from the CH 35. for. What crew chief? I got everybody that, you know, the pilot said was his. I said, you didn't get the crew teeth. You got to go back out and get him. The pilot didn't tell me that the crew chief on his helicopter was missing. The Air Force guys told me it didn't tell me.

Oh, we go. You know, I'm still, I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, and I said, you need to go back out and get him. I need to get my hands treated first, and then, you know, I'll go back out there. But we decided to wait and, you know, let me take some of my new team and go out there the next morning and get him.

But it came a storm that night. It was two days before I could go back out there. But I took my new team and went back out. Went to the helicopter where the body was supposed to be. And sure enough, with all the rain, you could see his femur sticking up out of the wreckage on the ground, plus all the flies and the smell and everything. We got him. I was also supposed to blow up the Huey, Medevac. So I got the rest of the C4 that I had left out there, inside the aircraft packing the C4 in it.

And here come the NVA again. Now I'm inside, and bullets are started to come in because they realized I was in the helicopter doing something. And, you know, it's hitting the C4, but, you know, it's not going to bother the C4. I'm safe until I put the blasting cap in, you know, so got everything ready and decided, okay, this is it, stick the blasting caps in, set the two fuse igniters all, jumped out, and managed to climb up the ridge. I had put the team up on the bridge up above the helicopter, and as I was going up the bank, the NVA assaulted the helicopter.

They thought I was still in there. And I got up on top, and looking down, and they're standing next to the helicopter with the time fees for it. Told my guys to get down, 40 pounds of C4. Fortunately, it was down in that ridge, so most of the blast went linearly, you know, down the ravine, and then the rest of it went straight up, but it still hurt, you know, the blast. And then the rest of the NVA attacked. We had a big firefight for an hour or so.

And finally, we managed to withdraw using the gun chips and the stuff. Then it started pouring rain. We stayed out there another two days, and we came back in. Then the aviation guy flipped out because I blew the helicopter, I said, you told me to do it. I told you to start, I didn't tell you to blow it up. I said, well, it's a million little pieces along with body parts right now. So, anyway.

Wow. I know that was a long story, but I did get to go out that one time initially by myself and do some things. Holy shit. When I told, when I first told the medevac pilot, he said, where's the rescue man? And I said, it's me. I'm your rescue team. Yeah, but where are you rescue? I said, it's just me.

You know, just do what I tell you. I get you out of here. We can do this. And they were just really disappointed. There's one guy came in here to get us. geez so anyway i could have done you know some other missions where i didn't have to fight out there you know if i'd gone in alone did you like the fighting i i mean it was exciting but i i didn't have a problem with going in and not fighting if i could accomplish the mission

And I thought we had missions on a fairly regular basis that came up. I didn't need a team. He just needed somebody that could sneak around out there and gather information we needed and come out. Shit. Did the killing bother you? No. And I think what happened was on the very first mission, you know, I kept saying to myself, it's okay. I mean this is war

they're bad guys they're going to kill me if I don't kill them and it's okay to kill them it's okay to shoot them you know I gotta remember that and I kept saying that over and over is I have to do this it's okay and when that first

them jumped up and shot at me then you know I didn't think about that anymore I just started you know defending and shooting back. Did the killing ever affect you as time went on? Yeah. How so?

You know, just the fact that you had to do it. And if you're over there at the wall and you're shooting at me, that doesn't bother me. I can, you know, shooting back at you doesn't bother me. If you're standing there and you're not shooting at me to just take you out without you realize that, like some of the trackers that I did with the 22, you know, that I had to think more about, you know, particularly afterwards, that I would just do that. There are also sometimes where I had to take people out really up close, that K-bar that you have over there, I found I started carrying that, and I found a really close, you know, that was quick. and easy you know it's

bodies up close and personal as you can get um how would you do that into the in through the side of the neck if you go in

straight in right there and go out you'll get the juggler you'll get the carotid and it's over it's over in a minute I mean

it's it's unreal how fast you bleed out like that and you can do that quietly and I think I mentioned to you before those are some of the things that I talked to special ops guys about not talk to you know law enforcement about that but with the special ops guys

if you have to do things quietly you don't have night vision you you don't have all your electronics there are ways to get right up next to someone and if you need to do it quietly how many times do you think you have to do that um four or five and just yeah yeah And, you know, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's not. First time I did it, you know, I was just, you know, fighting for my life. And, you know, I was about to lose, but I needed to... How were you about to lose?

Because a friend of you showed up. I mean, I'm on the ground with this guy. And his friend showed up and saw us down there and realized that, you know, what was going on, that I was a bad guy and had his friend. So I had to deal with his friend and then, you know, take care of him, I had to shoot him. But just there were a few times where I just got caught up and I'm going to take a prisoner. I'm going to get this guy and take him back in and for whatever reason wasn't able to do it. So.

Shit. I changed to the K-bar, I don't know, about midways, I guess. I tried to sog knife. For me, it just felt too small. Because I wanted something that if I wanted to cut down a limb or a pole or to do something with, I wanted to have enough weight that I could hack through it or a piece of cane. But I also wanted something big and strong enough

that if I pushed it hard, it was going to go, particularly, you know, when you get around the soft tissue in the neck and it goes fast. The K-bar was a big enough blade that when it goes in, it's hard to miss one of the arteries in there. You could get in quickly. But I am a nice guy, but sometimes you have to do things. Does that stick with you? yes yeah i there are some things that you just you can't unsee you can't undo you can't

get rid of you can you can start to deal with it and you but it's so far it's always been there and it's not where i like to spend a lot of time talking to John about you before the interview he had mentioned that your only regret was not close in your mouth when you killed people up close well I think I think what happens or happened was I became so focused on what I was doing I mean it's life or death it's a fraction of a second year you got to do something and I was so focused on what I was doing and I was so focused on doing the termination thing that for some reason my mouth would be open. I don't know if I was talking about their ancestors or what, but if you're using a K-bar,

you're up that close, you're going to get hit with a rush of blood, and if you've got your mouth open you're gonna get a mouth full of blood there are at least two or three occasions where I put a five or six round burst into somebody's face right up close to them when I'm right there with them and you know the head just explode brain matter tissue bone everything's going to hit you and you're going to be covered with it and the blood if you got your mouth open it's going into your mouth too and i've had you know that happen on a few occasions because i didn't have my mouth closed but shit yeah there are not a lot of people out there that have

that experience most people probably smarter than me They didn't get themselves into that situation, you know. When you're looking at taking somebody out that close and you're thinking about it, I mean, how the hell do you get that fucking close to them? And think about it, exactly what you're going to do. Well, the opportunity, you know, presents itself. It's not, in most cases, it's not that that's what I start out to do unless it's dark and I'm sneaking up on you because I need to take you out without making any noise. Then I'm thinking mostly about how do I get from where I am to where you are without you knowing I'm coming and knowing that I'm there.

and you know what I'm trying to do is get from here over there and now I'm next to you you don't know I'm next to you and you're going to feel a sting on the side of your neck you're going to feel warm blood go out and everything is going to fade to black and your knees are going to start to crumple and I'll catch you as you're going down so you don't make noise

but it's over very quickly but I'm spending most of my energy and thought process about how do I get to you? I've got to get over there without you knowing that I'm there if I'm going to do something like that and be quiet and not discovered

so there are things that I'm going to do depending on the terrain, I may do a distraction. I may toss something over another direction for you to hear, just to redirect your attention for a second. Well, I can get closer to you. Beans on how much I know about what the terrain's like, is it raining, has it been raining? I mean, if it's raining, I'm going to be all over you.

You know, I don't have to work hard to get close to you. If it's not raining and everything's really quiet, I have to be very careful. Because I can't see the ground and I'm going to step on something. Twigs going to break or something and you're going to hear it. And one thing is, if I've got a pebble, if I've got something that if I do break or twig here, I can launch that little pebble off to the other side of you over there, So you hear that louder than you heard this, and now you will turn that way.

And that gives me a chance to get closer. Did you come up with that? You are a fucking master. Nutcase, right? I saw what my friends have that. I can argue that. But, you know, it's just, this is still really going on topic,

but how you walk typically we put our hills down first and then the rest of the foot comes down down but what I had read about decades ago was that American Indians slipping up on their prey whether it was another Indian tribe or animal, whatever, is that they went toe first. If I go this way and I step on a twig, or twig, it's like there's a little amplifier there and it's throwing the sound out in that direction. If I step on it and break it with my toe,

the sound's coming back this way. So you don't hear it as much. So I used to have my little guys toe down toe first let's practice that toe first and you'll be quieter

I had a thing that I call invisibility I used that handsig if I did that go invisible be invisible right now be invisible nobody can hear you

nobody can smell you nobody can you know know anything about where you are change how you walk and we started changing how we moved through the woods. I don't know if you hunt deer or not, but if you watch a deer, he's the hardest to see when he's coming directly at you until he stops. And when he stops, what he screws up with is he starts looking right and left. And when he

starts moving his head, you'll see it because the different color in the skin and there, any movement like that you'll see. Horizontal movement is much easier to see than vertical movement. So instead of the point man walking through the jungle, you know, moving his weapon and twisting his body back and forth, so he thinks he's going to be ready to fire, you know, if he encounters somebody, that's just giving him away. Don't move the weapon. Scan your eyes are not, but you won't see him.

The eyes move. Keep your weapon here because you don't know if he's going to be over there or over here. So if you could do it like this, but he's actually over there, by the time you can get back around to him, you did. Split the distance. So teaching them how not only for the fortman

to do that. Move the whole team. Straight. You start zigzagging. You're easy to see as you're coming. I started teaching them all kinds of invisibility. No soap,

nothing that you can smell for the last three days before we go out. They don't want them to smell us more out. They'll smell the soap because they're not used to soap. And soap just stands out when you go out there. In fact, I even got to the point where I started making them eat North Vietnamese-type food. Because I told them, if we're out there and we're out there four or five days,

eventually you're going to have to poop. And when you poop, I want it to smell like NVA poop. And if they find it, I want them to say, oh, that's one of us. sweat. My father told me, when I was a little kid, one time, there was a dog, a strange dog, and the dog was growling at me. And my father was, went over and petted him. And I said, now I was just, old kid, I said, why is he growling at me and he's not growling

at you? said he knows you're afraid of him how does he know that he just does he knows you're afraid of him and he's intimidating you he knows i'm not afraid of him it took me you know a couple of decades to figure out what was going on when you all sweat is not the same you go out and do some exercise or it's hot in here and you sweat yeah sweat smells if you sweat because of fear fear smet sweat smells very different it's much stronger and it smells different so if you're laying in an ambush site waiting to ambush me and you know when you ambush a sog team those jokers are coming after you if you're laying there sweating with fear sweat

I'll smell you and more on one occasion I've just stopped a team stop you know they're there and I can smell them laying up there in the woods I can smell the sweat

dogs can smell the difference between fear sweat and normal sweat so it's easy for them to tell that you're afraid of So They want you to relax I want you to Your poop to smell like NBA poop

I don't want any soap or anything like that on you That people can that the NBA can smell So that's all part of being invisible Jump up and down Nothing should make a sound on you When you jump up and down You should have nothing on you That's bright

All the buckles and metals things on your harness, need to be painted black or wrapped in black friction tape so they don't shine. You need to be camouflaged. All the stuff counts. Take pictures of them and say, look, what does this look like? That looks like being laying on the ground because you can see all the buckles on him. Or you can see he's got two yellow smokes on him. The bottom of the yellow smoke is what color is yellow and it's got a kind of a light white band around around the thing you can't have that it makes you show up and how you walk how you approach people it's all part of being invisible even in the daylight in ways to do that maybe you're giving you more

than you want to know but you know something i didn't say at the beginning is the vietnam generation is what inspired me to go into the seal teams and hearing you talk i'm just realizing so many of our ttps and sops and all that kind of stuff came came from from you guys It's pretty surreal for you. I think a lot of it did came, you know, from SAG guys because of the intensity of the missions and where we were going, if you were going to survive,

there were things you had to do, and we learned things. You know, I felt stupid when I realized that some of the people who came after me in 70 started using the ear plugs that we used on the range when they'd get on the helicopter. Because you're right on the helicopter, unprotected ears, it'll be two hours plus when you get off of that thing before you get your full hearing back.

So you do a security stop and you're right there trying to listen and see if you hear anybody moving. You can't hear yet. And I discovered that for me when I saw a headset hanging in the helicopter. We were on the way out. I saw a headset, and I asked a crew truck, can I use that? And he said, you're. So I got the headset, and I put it on, and then discovered, I used to watch the door gunners.

They're sitting there, and we're going out, and their heads bouncing up and down. I thought, wow, it's rough riding on the outside where the doorgunners are. I put that headset on, and I thought, he's listening to Credence Clearwater Revival. You know, the head's moving with the beat of the stupid. The pilots have got the radio station on. I mean, I didn't know that. And then I realized that when I got off to helicopter, I could still hear.

But later on, some guys realized, just pop the earplugs in before you get on the aircraft. When you get all, pop them out, put them in your pocket, you can hear. So there are a lot of things like that that people discover and, you know, kind of irritated me that I didn't think of something that simple, that obvious. But there are a lot of things you can do.

Did you have any personal pre-mission rituals or anything that you would do before you go out on an op? Some guys pray, some guys write a letter, some guys listen to music. Some guys, I used to watch this video of terrorists stripping gear out of the guys from Rudwings. They would video it. They would video stripping. RKIA of their rifles, their helmet, their night vision, their IDs, their magazines, everything. I used to watch that before every op. Did you do anything?

Some of mine was mental. I'll just start with once I got on the aircraft when we were waiting to take off. You know, I'd always say a prayer. Let me preface this with, I can't carry a tune in a bucket, you know, singing that you would not, you'd think it was a dying calf in a hellstorm or something if I tried to sing. But mentally, you know, I can, you know, so I would always do Amazing Grace. And then, you know, I may mix some other little things in with it as then I transition over to the mission focus. What do I have to do?

When the countdown starts, what do I have to do? What am I looking for? What's the plan? Who's going for which way are you going? What do I need to do with the team? I'm reviewing the plan. Then I may throw a little more amazing grace in doing. just before we get there and then then it's back to box breathing so by the time I'm

by the time I get out on the skin I've already been doing it for a while but doing the box breathing because that will relax your arteries it has an impact on you a vagus nerve that calms you down because I know that when we get there if we engage right away all of that stuff's coming at me and I'm standing out on the skid because I'm getting ready to jump on and I've got to think about the other things that we're going to do

not those bullets coming at me with bullets at least to me bullets can be a real distractor you hear those things cracking by you it can distract you from what you're supposed to do and I had to find a way to turn loose of the bullets and see what's going on see the battle space

know what I needed to change make sure I was going to tell you guys what the difference was I was going to give you the signals and same on the ground I want you to make contact disadvantage we had was then you couldn't hear

car 15 so loud AK-47s are so loud and you're so close to each other and you're there and I'm trying to tell you go left you can't hear what I'm saying not that even this close

with all the car 15s and everything firing grenades going off rockets coming at you you know and I'm horning you know I'm having to do you know, hand signals and stuff to get people to move. And then once you

drop down out of sight and then I'm trying to remember you went there, he went there, he went over there, and telling all my people this, if you get hit and I'd make them

practice, if you get hit, start yelling hit. I need to know someone's hit I need to know a general direction of where they are if you're hit I will come get you but I need to know the vicinity to look for when I come over there so start yelling hit I know you're alive I and I can eventually find where you are and I will get you but if you don't yell I don't know where you went down I don't know that you've even

been hit. So there are things like that, just making them yell, hit, hit, hit. Because they could say that close enough that I could understand it and loud. And just practicing those things. It made them more confident that if something happened to them, that I would get them. And And they saw it on different occasions where, you know, I snatched somebody up and I made sure we got him on the helicopter and, you know, the word spreads, you know, Thompson might be a nutcase, but he'll put you on an alaconda. Well, anyway. How many friends did you lose over there?

I have a list 34. 34. 34. And I didn't lose, you know, barge well over there, but I put him on my list when he passed away a few years ago, seven years ago. You know, the reason I'm asking is this, law. of people that struggle with lost friends in combat and that's not how many people were killed that was just the guys i knew and we were either on the same team together or we knew like

tilt you know tilt would have been on my list you know because i knew him well lynn black would have been on my list there's not a list you want to be on um obviously but it was there were a lot of other people who were killed I just didn't know them how did you compartmentalize that in the middle of it difficult you know trying to trying to realize that I couldn't do anything about it they were gone I could remember them can make sure you know they wasn't forgotten I couldn't bring them back In some cases, I could contact their family, you know, later. It's just very difficult.

I think at times, in some cases, it probably influenced my thinking of, just let me go by myself. That way I don't have to worry about losing you. Makes sense. In fact, you know, if you read the book when you get in there, you'll see that, you know, I would keep having that discussion with Meadows where I wanted to go alone. You know, I would use, when he would just deny that, I'd finally come back and say, well, at least I'll just be the only American on the team. I'll take the little guys, I'll be the only American. Don't put another American on the team with me.

You know, so he would do that most of the time. And I think some of that was influenced by, you know, I don't want to lose you. Jeez. So, there's just so many. And John and I've had this conversation recently. It's almost like now, today, it's almost like, being back and talk. How so?

Every day. There's a, every day, every day, there's a list that comes out on the phone. We have a lady Bonnie Cooper who's worked for the special ops association, in various ways, particularly their website, but she monitors. SF and particularly sod people obituaries and I've told it before funny take a break

you know try not to let so many people go away like that I mean it's like every few days you're seeing somebody's name you know because we're in that age group now I mean I can relate with us at suicide

yeah and you know then you know it's I can I think I can understand why they do it what they what's going on but you I mean I've got people I talk to every day and you know what I'm trying to do is prevent that I mean you have a PhD in psychology everybody's trying to get to the bottom of this and I've had so many friends that have killed themselves I just can't even count them all

I quit counting you know I think and you know about the struggles with addictions and booze and opiates and everything you know and I think it just takes one second

it does you know and there's you know there's there's some decisions that you can't take back I think about it sometimes

and sheriff sometimes you know when I was standing on the hill the skill of the helicopter holding on that that rope once I stepped off that decision was made and there's no change in it

I was on the rope and on my way down you know There was no opportunity to say, well, I don't think I want to do this. And that decision to pull the trigger, do whatever it is that you're going to do, once you make it, and you can make it very fast. I mean, I've talked to a guy who had decided. this is it I'm going to hang myself

and he went in his bedroom and tied a rope up climbed up on a stool and was getting ready to put the noose around his neck and his little daughter walked him what are you doing dad

and you know he came back down if she had been a few seconds later and it's hard to tell sometimes where people are they can they can change into that mode and make that decision so quickly how do you honor your friends that have been killed or taken their own life well for 50 years or so um I run in their memory.

Well, when I was active doing Iron Man, I would, you know, today's swim is for these people. The runs for this, the bikes for that. And they still do that on what I call the angel versity of their death. So on that day, you know, we do the names of all the people. And then I let that person, whoever's Angelversy, is. I let them lead the run. And, you know, so I post it.

I put it on on social meter. so that you know people remember and been doing that and you'll see in the back of the book and in the book you'll see every month there's a section in there and here are the guys of those 34 here are the ones that died this month you know my friends and even though There are a lot of other people that died. I've got them in there. At the end, well, every day, when I post, I've got the list of the 34. So I post all of them, post the pictures, and then highlight the one that died that day.

And some would sod people. Sometimes it's three or four that died that day. Maybe the whole team got wiped out. And, you know, their parents are gone. I mean, your parents would be over 100 years old, you know, so they're not there, but, you know, they still have, you know, brother, sisters, wives, whatever, some of them. So I get a message every once in a while. but I also have a group of, you know, Afghan and, you know, that whole group of people. I've got about 35 of those, so I interact with their families, but, you know, I post them on the days that they died.

I mean, it's a There's a saga operator who's been through this a long time ago and have navigated your way through it up to this point What advice do you have for my generation Who's dealing with this? How do you move past it? Some of it is I tried to put some principles, SOG principles in the book.

They're moving forward. I mean, in the book, it's related initially to combat, but it's still combat when you're not in combat. Things happen, you've got to keep moving forward. You've got to do it. And once you stop, all kind of things happen. And moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically. and like old guys like John you know he's an old guy

you know he's an old guy we have to kind of watch each other and take care of each other and contact and I was talking to a teammate of mine earlier this week and he was telling me he's afraid to call people now you know, our soft guys. He said, I'm afraid to call. I'm afraid they want to answer. I'm afraid I'm going to get a family member

or something, and they're going to tell me, you know, he's gone. But you've got to keep checking. You've got to keep moving forward. And keep remember them. In the book, it talks about you know people die people die twice

the first time they dies when their heart shocks the second time they dies when people stop saying their name so that's why I use the list go down that list I say it their families

and then particularly you know, they're your group. Their families are still alive. Their parents are still around. And, you know, I get emails from them all the time. And saying, thank you, you know. So, it's not easy, but applying some of those principles like that. And just, you got them, you can't bring them back.

You've got to keep moving forward. And sometimes you can think about, like Bardswell, for example, remembering that all of God's angels don't sing in the choir. Some of them are warriors. I figure, I figured Bardswell worked himself up pretty high. into the warrior group. Yeah, so some of us are going to end up there, I think, and, you know, that's good. And, you know, at some point, you know, most of us will see each other again, hopefully in the right place.

I'm with you. If we haven't talked about it yet, what mission in Saab, Sticks out more than all the rest of them. For me, a mission I went on. A real contender for that would be the one where I had the woman on the radio. The gunfight went on solo, almost 24 hours. And just one thing after another. I mean, in that mission, after, you know,

saw all the lights coming, the weather had socked us in, couldn't get air support in, we had to use something called combat sky spots, you know, an F-4 is coming by, and he's going to drop a bomb just based on, the radar saying you're in the right place and you know so working with that and you know the first one he dropped was like 3,000 meters off and but you know we worked so we had to work through all of that and then you know we were in contact daylight and we're in contact and I I saw a in the book I

They just call it the Grim Reaper coming in, you know, I think the devil showed up and said, no, I'm coming for you. Saw some discussion back and forth like that. And got to the point where we were being overrun, and, you know, I called a, you know, CBOU in right on top of our position. I just said, if you guys are going to overrun us, I'm going to take as many of you with us as I can. So I had Covey find a plane that had C.B.U. And we're in this whole circle of this size.

You know, a canister of CVU has like 250, you know, grenades in it with explosives. in it that come raining down. So out of the 250, 15 of them landed either inside this perimeter or just outside, 15 of them. And explosions everywhere, people screaming, all this kind of stuff. And I saw some of them hit and I thought it. hit but I didn't hear it explode I must be dead I'm still seeing itself but I must be dead and then I realized yeah I'm not dead they didn't go off wow I thought oh I obviously got

some help you know you just you can't you can't have 15 duds all then and the same place at the same time and not go off you just can't do that that that's not going to happen you know without some divine intervention so um the old the old image came back again and he's just shaking his head and walking off into the vegetation it was like i thought i would get you but I didn't we go to we're trying to fight our way down we get ambushed trying to go toward the LZ we managed to survive that and get through it we got down to the extraction LZ and my portman you know stopped us I went up to see why he stopped us and he looked at me and he said bomb what bomb

And I looked out at the LZ, over on the left side of it, sticking up out of the mud, it was a 500-pound bomb, unexploded. That's the one that we didn't hear explode last night when we were trying to adjust them. It went into our landings off. Now there's a 500-pound bomb, sitting there's the only place we can get out. the NVA don't know it's there and we're going to be in a firefight with them and if somebody hits it,

it's going to take all of us out and whatever aircraft we're coming in to guess. So we've got a real problem here to deal with that. So I got, you know, a whole cubby and had him put the word out. Don't put any ordinance on that side of the LZ when you're trying to help us. And so finally,

Finally, we're bringing the aircraft in. I'm out, I'm having to stand up with the VS17 panel, bringing the aircraft in, trying to get them to where I wanted. I got down to the last aircraft, and I'm trying to throw the last pupil up there, and that's where I hear the loud drop. Everything went silent, and there's, you know, booming voice that says drop. I just got to my knees

and when I did a stream of machine gun bullets RPD bullets came across and cut a hole that big side of the helicopter you know where I was so another premonition I said

yeah I'm getting a lot of help to try to get me out of this and so finally got the last through the last guy up on the helicopter and off we went, thought, man, that was a long mission. Is a team leader, when you're calling air power on yourself to take you and as many of them as you possibly can't, is that a team decision or is that a personal decision?

In my case, you know, I told Bruce, who was acting as my assistant, I told him the other American, This is what I'm doing, because, I mean, they're coming across us. I mean, we've got a few seconds to make a decision. Get down. Get all the team members down because it's coming. And I told Cubby, you have them make one pass, put the CBU on top of us. If I don't come right back up on the radio, then have him make the second pass. but listen for me because if I come back up saying

I'm still here he's going don't let him put another one on us we didn't have to use the second one did you support Hamburger Hill no oh oh I'm thinking support in another way yes

there was an there was an NBA division that was being moved around that they were going to bring up there and just crushed the 101st and I was assigned the mission to go find them and stop them so

I figure with six people how hard can it be to find 10,000 people in a group So, surely I can find them. But they didn't cooperate well. That's when they shot the helicopter down I was in,

broke my back, some ribs. And one of my guys got in my helicopter shot through the thigh. I got them and finally got them into a bomb crater. and spent most of the day there fighting and putting in air strikes and eventually got out and said you've got to go back tomorrow morning we don't have

we don't have the division what's left of the division which we figure it was down to about 7,000 we don't have them pinpointed enough for the B-52 strike we need you to go back in and get some more data They put pistol belts around me with a piece of wood behind it, an old pad.

I didn't carry my rucksack because I couldn't lift any weight like that and went back out there. But I got the coordinates, gave it to the B-52s, that even then they came in and wiped the rest of them out. and they dropped 665,500-pound bombs in that little rectangle I gave them. Oh, and we mentioned my grandson, grandson-in-law at lunch. His father's, no, his mother's father flew B-502s in Vietnam. Interesting guy to talk to. And at one point, we thought we had pinpointed the date that he might have actually flown that mission that came in and took these guys out, but he was flying a different mission. But that would have been cool.

wow what was the final up the final one the final one there uh it came right after shortly after that that one we were talking about them um there was a little one there was a little one and we went and knocked out a underwater bridge. You couldn't figure out how they kept getting the trucks on down the trail. They were going off the trail under the canopy, and they had built a bridge that was just below the water, so you couldn't see it. They were driving across it and coming back on the road.

And they still work on this bridge, as you can see. But we keep bombing that, somehow they were still getting across. So we went out, we took that out, dropped a bridge on a different mission right in there. The one where we were going to drop the big bridge, I had to crawl on my hands and knees across an open field to get to where I could really see the supports and things on the bridge. There was a bush out in the center of the field about that high. So if I piqued my head up a little bit in the grass, I could see the bush, so I used that to navigate, crawled under it, went about 10 meters, and then caught on fire.

That bush was covered with big fire ants, and they got all of them. I had to strip out there in the middle of the field. you know, thinking how many NBA are on that bridge are going to go across that bridge when I'm laying out here almost naked, you know, and my team, they don't know what's going on. They're back to the edge of the wood line thinking, what is he doing? He's taking his clothes off out there in the middle of the field. Oh, I mean, I almost died from that. Okay.

I mean, because we didn't, you know, we didn't carry antihistamine with us. I was so loaded with all their venom. So, man, you know, there were two or three short ones like that toward the end, and then, you know, the commander plucked me out. They plucked you out. Pull me, pull me off the team and say, I'm going to move you into operations here for a while. Did you want to do that? No. And I didn't want to work for him either.

So I, because I had, my plan was to extend for six months. But after working for him for a while, I decided, no, I'm not going to do that. I'll go ahead, rotate back to the States, you know, give him six months or so to go away. And then I'll come back and have a new commander, polish my skills up for six or eight months, and then come back and be better. But then I didn't get a chance to come back either. Did you get addicted to the adrenaline, the killing? Oh, yeah.

The combat? Yes. How did you feel? I mean, that's a real issue because that happens to special ops guys. You get so addicted to their adrenaline. Finding something else that will give you the adrenaline rush that's not, maybe not quite as dangerous. In my case, one of the things was, you know, free fall, HALA, particularly if you can burn it on

down a little closer than what you're supposed to do. And I was in a situation where, you know, I put the Halo team together. I was the leader of the Haleoid team, and, you know, I could do just about anything I wanted to, so I could look at the terrain and see this little tiny opening on a ridgeline there in the mountains and say, hmm, I wonder if I could hit that at 2 o'clock in the morning and land right in that little opening, put Ranger students out there on their back, holding the slice light up with a red filter on it in the shape of a T or whatever letter I wanted and see if I can get in there.

So I'm doing, you know, a lot of different things like that that would give you a rush. And I was also very fortunate that, you know, when I came back from the SOG I went to to the Rangers and everybody had to have a combat experience to be there as one of the instructors so you know I had 40 guys in the air that we were all talking with each other and helping each other and everybody kind of understood about combat they didn't know I'd been with SOG but still people were shooting at them too so we had we had you know support group there and we were doing things that we could give you

adrenaline or adrenaline rush so that help well let's take a quick break when we come back we'll talk about what it was like coming home okay all right dick we're back from the break and you know i'd like to document what it was like for you not in the military but what was what was it like for you coming home from vietnam seeing how americans were acting towards veterans and i want to cover this I was not happy, you know, and it started with, I thought, was coming through the airport and seeing that, you know, people in general were not reacting favorably toward, you know, the soldiers coming home. I think in my case, just coming through the airport, you know, I had my beret on. So that was kind of like a force factor that was just people were getting out of the way.

They just let me through. They didn't want to get close to me. um and the ones that yell something were always you know at a distance but it was it was there um and you know like i mentioned earlier i think i had friends that had been friends at one point but um kind of went away because of war and and some of them never came back in terms of coming back and being a friend. I mean, they just, once they separated from me, they just stayed that way, you know,

because I stayed in the military. So I was disappointed with that. I think staying in the military helped me. Because I was around, obviously, people who believed in being in the military. The military went through a lot of changes, you know, going forward. Once you stopped the draft, then getting people in, it really changed the people who were coming in. But the gentle attitude, I mean, it's still out there.

When I got out of the military and started the consulting company, I didn't tell people I'd been in the military, clients. I never mentioned the military. Really? What the hell do they think you were doing for the last 20 years? Being a consultant, going to school, doing whatever. But, you know, the military just had a bad name. And if I mentioned I'd been in the military,

It's interesting. A client that I had for years started out with they flew me out to meet with the executive team before they hired me. So I'm talking to them and the CEO looked up at me

and he said what are you going to tell me about how to be a CEO and run this. What do you know? And he knew that I had been in the Army because he had hired somebody that knew me that had been in the Army. And he said, all you know how to do

is tell people what to do, to yell at them. And, you know, I don't know how you're going to help me out at all and I said well you have people in the organization and when you have people in the organization I there are certain difficulties and problems that will come up just because you have people didn't matter who the people are or what they are and I know how to help with those types of problems and it's not yelling at people people, it's not doing anything like that, not being a dictator.

That's not my philosophy. I don't believe that that's the way to be a leader, and, you know, I'm going to be working with you to see what's going on and help you find solutions that will work with your people. So we talked like that a little bit, and he's met with his team for about 20 minutes and call me back in and said okay let's get started and work for him for years until somebody else bought the company so but i just didn't tell people but once 9-11 happened yeah tell people you're in the military that's a good thing oh yeah appreciate your service i mean you just you didn't get that All the way until after 9-11.

I'm sorry? You didn't experience that until... I mean, there were people who I knew or had known or grown up around older people who would say, you know, thank you for the service and things like that. But people who hadn't known me before find out I was in the military. It wasn't necessarily, you know, congratulations or thank you or anything for a long time. It's just we had a bad reputation because of Vietnam. But then, you know, because of going to the all-volunteer army, you know, that was a disaster.

Do you want to go to jail or you want to join the army? I'll join the army I can put you in jail with drugs use or you can join the army I'll go in the army and you know it was just different

but 9-11 all of a sudden it became a punishment instead of an act to service Yeah and I'm everybody wasn't like that but a lot of the people

I ran into or. And, you know, I would, you may have already asked John about that, but I would just see what the most vets say, the Vietnam vets say. When did it change? And there are Vietnam vets out there right now that are still angry, very angry. And if you try to tell them, you know, thank you for your service. I mean, it'll bite your head on. because they're so angry about, you know,

when you tell me that 50 years ago? You know, it's worked out, you know, for me, I think. I've been very fortunate, so. Do you carry any animosity from that? I hate that it happened. I think we screwed up Vietnam. royally. I think there are a lot of things we could have done to make it better. I don't think we, as soldiers, I don't think we went over and did the kinds of things that most people

thought we were doing. I don't think we were running around killing women and babies and doing things like, I'm sure some got, you know, killed. It's war. And, you know, shraping on and bombs and things, bullets. They don't care. If somebody gets in the way of it, it's going to hit them. And it's hard to have a war and not have someone, you know, killed or wounded. It's innocent. Yeah. What prompted you to get your Ph.D. in psychology.

Psychology came about because as I watched what was happening on the battlefield, and trying to understand, like, with my indigenous team leaders. They've been going out on the SOG missions, you know, for two years or so. And now they're going out with me for a year. And when I leave, they're going to go out with the next team leader for a year. Why would they do that? I mean, some of these guys were 50% scar tissue. Why would they keep going out and getting shot up

or killed on a regular rate, we paid them, but it wasn't enough money to make it, you know, we're getting killed for or mangled like a lot of them did. And then why would the Americans go out, the operators, why would they go out and do this? Why not go to a regular unit or why not come to SOG and go to a staff job and not go across the fence? The addiction. And it was dangerous to do that. Yeah. Once you got out there and survived it, a time or two, you could start to get addicted to it.

And, you know, there are cases that I talk about in the book where I could see they were addicted to it. How could you tell? Well, my roommate, you know, we were, for the most part, put in rooms with, you know, two people, to a room in the recon company. And my roommate came back from a mission and he told me that, wow, they thought they were going to get me this time. They thought they were going to. I outsmarted those guys and, you know, so they're not as good as they think they are.

I said, Dennis, they are good. you know and if they almost got you you need to be careful you need to think about it and then he came back to me a couple of missions

well before he came back a couple of missions later I woke up you know in the middle of the night because I just I could feel somebody looking at me and I woke up and Dennis is standing right there lights out looking down at me

my car 15 hanging on the wall right next to me I grabbed that you know and I was ready to shoot him and I realized it was him Dennis what are you doing said nothing I was just thinking

and he wouldn't talk about it he got back to bed, went to bed and then he wanted to talk because he was getting ready to go on another mission and he said I don't have a good feeling

about this one I thought you felt like you were doing pretty well he said there's something about this one I don't know what it is I can't shake it I just feel like I'm not coming back from this one and we chatted about that feeling and I told him just my thought talking to you it's not over to it's over and I don't know where that's coming from I'm just telling you if I were you first of all I wouldn't go on the mission I would go turn it

down. I know you're not going to do that, but that's what you should do. But if you go, just keep in mind it's not over until it's over. You know, be very careful, you know, very careful, not realizing that his assistant team leader was talking, you know, to my buddy, that same thing you say you know i think the captain is it's really good he's a really good operator and team leader but i'm scared there's something about this one mission i'm scared and so we were having these two separate conversations and and bruce didn't know that i was talking to dennis i didn't know he was he was talking to the other guy um And they went out and got to, they came back and finished the mission.

Supposedly got back to the extraction LZ undetected. They were waiting on the helicopter to come get on. And all of a sudden, you know, you heard that call on the radio. Prairie fire emergency, prayer, fire emergency. You know, we're overrun. And then it goes off. Cubby can't make contact with him. You just radio silence on their part.

So we realize we're going to have to send a bright light team out there. And this is the one where I was already at the launch site. So they changed my mission to bright light to go out there. but about 30 minutes after the message that we heard that was where they were overrun, then on the emergency radio on the guard frequency, there was a voice that came on and saying, God, help me please, somebody help me, an American voice on the guard frequency. The cubby that was out there didn't know, didn't know these two guys, personally, so he couldn't tell if that was one of their voices or somebody else.

He couldn't tell which one of them it might have been on the radio. But sent a team out. They recovered two survivors of the indigenous. They got them back in, and I was on standby to go back out there to try to find Dennis and the one-to-one and listening to these two guys tell what happened

and what they did after it happened and Bruce was there with me and we were talking something's not right something just doesn't sound right the way they're telling it So when we did go in, it didn't take long and I told Bruce, I mean, we were in contact, you know, continuous, had a fighter way in, continuous contact, continues contact, oh, you know, the time we were there, didn't get back out until the next day, but continuous contact.

And I told Bruce, I said nothing where we are looks like what they described. I mean, this is just not the place where it happened. I think they were wounded, they were scared, and how far they ran, which way they ran was just not correct. Not that they were intentionally doing it, but I think they were so stressed out, they didn't know where they had started from and how far they went. I said, I think we're 2,000 meters probably away from where it actually happened. But we were in such heavy contact.

We were in the middle of a bunker complex. We couldn't really stop and do anything about it then. Never found them. They were eventually declared, presumed. dead and you know so the families could get some closure have you ever gone back to vietnam no i've been invited a few times by people um i i probably and bargewell went back um i probably should have went when he went you know he actually went back and he found

the interpreter that we had on the team that we were on together actually tracked him down and found him terrible story I mean the guys just who live in poverty his family's in poverty

you know the NBA put him in You know, re-education camp, all those guys, they killed them, put them in re-education camps for years, took everything they had, you know, like a lot of the stuff in Afghanistan. Sounds almost identical. Yeah, if you're supporting the Americans and the Americans pull out and leave you, you know, it's not going to be a good thing for you. I mean, yeah, Afghanistan was just a repeat of what we've already done. We did the same thing, you know, Vietnam.

What did you learn in your studies for psychology in comes to war? Well, I think it helped me to have a framework for looking at how people, respond in combat, how they can get addicted to different things, get addicted to the, you know, adrenaline rush, you know, those kinds of things that help me to understand. I think, you know, the impact of fatigue, sleep loss, getting wounded, stress, the different changes, it just it's interesting. We take soldiers and we train them and we train them and we train them on the range.

Here's what the site picture's got to look like. Here's how you do all this stuff. Front site focus on and on and on. And then we put you out there and have those targets start shooting back at you. Stress level sky rockets. And now you discover it. You can't see the sites.

Your vision changes. You don't have up-close vision anymore. Everything is blurry. You know, within the range of your weapon sites, everything's blurry. You can't get that sight picture when you stress skyrockets. So now you're trying to hit something and don't realize that you can't focus, you know, like you've been trained. So there are a lot of things like that that I had the framework to go back and look at, think about, And then, you know, go test out, see what works and what doesn't.

And so that's one side of it. The other side is, how do you help people move forward, start moving forward again? What is it that you can do for them? And everybody's a little different. And you've got to understand that. They're starting at different places. They're a little different. your approach needs to be different

and I found that when I'm talking to vets who are struggling in particular if it's combat related that one thing that they seem to be looking for is I want someone that I can talk to

who understands what I'm saying I don't care how much book knowledge you have. I don't care how many books you've read or stories you've heard. You just don't know what it's like. And you can't understand me. And

I tell you, and you say, yeah, I'm going to, you know, that's the way war is, I'm awful. I said, you're not hearing me. And, you know, John and I were having a discussion a number of years back. And I said, you know, one of the things, one of the things that's different about you and I and the rest of most of the other world out there is when you and I read one of these SOG books and we're reading about the gunfight that's going on, it's not nice and quiet like it is here.

and we're just reading the words and hearing, you know, seeing what's going on, we hear it, you know, that we see that L4 coming and it's silent. It's not making a sound until it passes us. And once it goes past us and that sonic boom hits us and that bomb comes in or the napalm comes in and the heat and the smell and everything is, I mean, it's so loud. Right now, we can't read that book and not hear it. You know, other people can read it. They don't hear that stuff. They don't smell the napalm. You know, what people who have been there do, and when they're talking to somebody who hasn't been there, they realize it.

And I always tell them, I did a podcast with Mike Glover. And a few minutes into it, you know, I realized he knows what I'm saying. He's been there, he's done it, and we're communicating. We're on the same wavelength here as we talk about what's going on. You know, it's like you and I, you've done it, you've seen it, and we can talk about it. and we're connecting while we're doing it. But if you're some doctor in a VA hospital somewhere or a therapist and you haven't experienced it,

it's hard to connect. You know, because the vet realizes it right away. It doesn't take him or her but a few minutes to realize you've got some book knowledge, but you don't know what I'm talking about. You can't really empathize. with me. You can sympathize, but you can't empathize. Anyway.

Did you feel a lot of resentment towards regular everyday Americans that had not served who were calling you baby killer, woman killer, whatever? I didn't. I didn't. I don't. resent that they haven't served you know I'm okay with that I mean it's serving I don't think it's necessarily good for everyone I don't resent that if they haven't served and they want to call me a baby killer then you know I'm not happy with that if he wasn't there don't tell me what I do

I think a lot of vets in different generations feel that type of resentment. What advice do you have for them? There are different generations, and except that we're not going to send everybody. Everyone is not going off to serve. That's not the way we're set up. And even if we were, I think because of the different generations that we have and the outlook and philosophy of the different generations, it would be difficult.

You know, when we were doing the All Volunteer Army and we were just dragging people in right and left and putting them in the Army whether they wanted to be there or not, it created so many problems, you know, to go in the service and do what needs to be done, and I'm not talking about war, just to serve, to be a good, you know, soldier or seal or whatever, it takes the right attitude. You've got to want to do it. You have to believe in it, at least to some degree. And I think it's good that we have a program where you can get out, you know, you go sign up.

I mean, you don't have to stay 20 years. You can get out before then. And I think that's good. A lot of people, I had a basic training company one time. And I had a guy that just, At first, he said he really wanted to be in the Army, and then he got, he just kept getting into trouble, and he'd go talk to the chaplains. The chaplains would call me up and say, you know, George, not his name, but George, George

is a good soldier, you've got to give him a chance. I mean, he's a good soldier, and he kept, we had several kinds of, about George and I was just misunderstanding and he was a good guy and then I got a call from the chaplain saying is George there you know where George is I said I'm sure here in the company area somewhere why it's that low life stole my boom box while he was up here talking to me yesterday and he oh man he flipped an art so anyway went to the barracks and sure enough there was It's chaplain, boombox, and took it back to him. And then finally, I decided to go ahead and process the paperwork to let him go,

get him out of the Army. So the day of the company graduating, he was still in, but he wasn't going to be able to graduate. And he came to him and he said, I know you're going to have a graduation ceremony this morning. Now I'm not going to be there, but I stayed up most of the night last night, and I wrote a poem, and, you know, I'd be honored if you would read this poem at graduation today. I said, let me see it. And I said, this is the poem you wrote last night. Yes, sir. Okay, so the title is

I am the infantry. He said, yes, sir. He's standing here. I'm looking on the wall right behind him. And I'm not reading what he wrote. I'm just reading off the picture that's hanging on the wall back there with this form on it. I am the infantry. Yes, sir, I wrote that.

I'm the queen of battle. Follow me, word for word, off of that. He copied on his piece of paper, and he given to me. He told me he wrote it, and he wanted me to read it. Some people don't need to be in the service. Even if they want to, some of them don't need to be. I don't know. I've looked at Korean Army.

Mandatory two years, you know, when you had a certain age, you've got to go into the Army for two years. When I was in Korea, I had 32, well, Catusa's, 32 Koreans who, for whatever reason, they were able to get, to serve their two-year obligation in the U.S. Army. As long as they did well, they could do their two years with the U.S. Army and then move on because the Rock Army is hard, and they're hard on the young guys. So I had 32 of them, and all I had to do was mention, I think you're going to have to go back over to the Rock Army. What do you want me to? I do anything. In fact, I actually sent one back.

They came, got him yelling, screaming, drug him into the Jeep, and he was yelling out the back. I'll do anything. I'll do anything. Just don't send me back. So they do it two years. The North Korean Army, I think, is seven years. So it might be that we have some kind of service program, whether it be military or something

else that people do. I don't know. Everybody's just not cut out for it, I think. How did you meet your wife? I was stationed at Delanooga, Georgia, and the ranger camp up there, now the call the fifth Ranger Battalion as an instructor. And a friend of mine had set up a date with her, my wife's roommate, but she told my friend

that she wouldn't date him unless it was a double date, so he needed to get someone to, you know, go out with her. So it would have been a blind date. So you got one of our other friends that said he would go. But something came up, and he, the last minute he wasn't going to be able to go. So my friend came to me and said, would you fill in for him? I really want to, you know, take this girl out and she won't go unless I have somebody for her roommate. So I volunteered to go.

And we got it approved that, you know, it was going to be a different person. It was going to be me showing up. but when I got out of the car to go in with my friends to pick them up somebody on her hall looked at the window saw me coming across to the parking lot

and I was on crutches I had I had a really bad landing and I screwed my knee up parachute jump and somebody on the hall yelled that he's got a wooden leg and word spread fast that I had a wooden leg and she wasn't going to go

but convinced her that I didn't have a wooden leg I had a real leg so we went out we had a really good time except for she did have to set on parachutes that we had in the back of my friend's car that, you know, the trunk was full, and we had a bunch of other parachutes there, you know, if you got a bunch of parachutes and you got a helicopter that you can use for, you know, a short period of time,

you don't want to have to stop and repack, you have several parachutes, you go jump, you hit the ground, you put on a new one, you go jump. But anyway, so we kind of hit it off from there. Once I didn't go back to Vietnam, then we decided to get married, and 51 years, we're still here. Congratulations. What's the secret to a successful marriage? She's always right. And I would do well to remember.

whether I think so at the time or not, she's going to end up being right, I mean, because she really is right. So I need to listen more. And, you know, she went to graduate from college at North Georgia Military College. So she understood, you know, about the military, and the Ranger camp was right there.

She knew about Rangers. And just one quick thing, her family, for the most part, they had, there was one section of road and land around it that her grandparents, I guess, had owned at one time and started giving it to her kids. So most of the family lived in that one spot, and I told her when I went over there to pick her out my, I said, one hand grenade, take out most of your family. They're all right here together. But anyway, they would have this big Christmas party, you know, family would all come in and get together every, you know, a few days before Christmas. And so this year I got invited. We're not married yet, but I got invited to it. And, I mean, the house is full.

But, you know, like that time. most of the men are gathered in one room and you know so I went in to kind of meet them and one of her uncles said Grenet says you're a ranger

no but four he asked me he asked me a question about invasive species he said you know the pine needles are just killing the pine trees out here what do you think about that I said, that's not good, having, you know, an invasive species like that. And a little bit later, he asked me another question about trees. And I said, when do you keep asking me questions about trees?

He said, well, you know, Grenade said you were a ranger. I said, I am a ranger. I'm an army ranger you could have heard a pin drop in the whole room you're in the army you're an army ranger they did not have a good reputation in that area but and it was like holy cow

she's dating an army ranger and then somebody in there just I didn't get to see exactly which one it was how many people you kill and it was just silenced but then they decided you know they would let me in the family but

you know I thought why am I getting all those questions about trees I don't oh man what do you do doing to keep busy today? Today I'm really enjoying spending time with you. This has been great from start to finish. Very impressed with what you've done, what you're doing, with your new facility that you've

got set up, having the opportunity to come up and spend some time to get to know you better. I mean, this has been awesome. Well, Dick, it's been a real honor to interview you, and I would love to get you and John out there here pretty soon. And we'll have a range day, break that new Cig in, tell us some stories. Hey? Have a fire. I'm all for it.

Me too. Me too. But, man, I'll tell you. I couldn't think of a better person to close the studio down with than having you here. And it just means the world to me. And thank you for being here. I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this and be the last person.

But even if I wasn't the last person, just to get to come in and spend the day with you and chat about all these different things and meet you. So, and be able to put you on a friend list and say, I know this guy. So I really appreciate that. And there was some discussion this morning when we ate breakfast. So John, I'll tell you, I got you back. I'm here. You need me.

You call me. And I appreciate it. Appreciate everything. you're doing. Well, I extend that same to you. Thank you so much. Seriously. It's been an honor.

Good night, bless. It's nice. signature on it for the movie the Sandlock. The Red Sox blood, the brew is blood, they run deep. Add in the best celebrity interviews. Robert De Niro here on the Rich Eisen Show. How are you, sir? Just got over a 24-hour virus.

The antidote is to appear on the Rich Eisen Show. There you go. I would have done it earlier. And you've got the Rich Eisen Show podcast. There is a medicinal quality to appearing on this program. Follow and listen on your favorite platform.