The Team House - Grenada Rangers '83 | Joe Muccia | Ep. 296

Episode Date: September 7, 2024

Support the show here:⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseBooks about combat are compelling. There's an inherent thirst for the stories about brave men, completing impossible tasks under the worst of conditions. Cry Havoc tells the story of how the Army Rangers emerged from the shadow of the Vietnam War, and morphed themselves into what World War II hero and former commander of US forces in Vietnam General Creighton W. Abrams called, "the finest light infantry in the world." In October of 1983, those men would conduct the first mass combat parachute drop since Vietnam and do so under intense fire from Cuban and Grenadian forces.Once the Rangers hit the ground, the action didn't stop. Over three days, they cleared the enemy from commanding positions overlooking the airfield, rescued over 400 US medical students, and conducted an air assault on an enemy training facility, an action that was considered a 'suicide mission'. And yet they accomplished all of their missions in the best tradition of their Ranger forefathers.Grab the book here:https://ssgtmooch.wixsite.com/joe-muccia/cry-havoc-order-herehttps://www.amazon.com/Cry-Havoc-Untold-Story-Rangers/dp/B0CLG63XDFhttps://www.youtube.com/@UCEndPICUbpacytuNmPUWOyA —————————————————————-Today's Sponsors:GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/house____________________________________Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/——————————————————————To help support the show and for all bonus content including:https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#grenada #armyrangersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month. And when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers. But this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House. channel and podcast if you'd like to. And we really appreciate that. So go it and check us out at patreon.com slash the team house. Special operations. Covert ops. Espionage. The team house with your hopes, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 296 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight, Joe Muccia. Joe is the author of Cry Havoc, the untold story of Rangers at War

with his co-author, Tom Greer. We're really excited to have him on the show. This is, as far as I know, the first time many of these stories have been told publicly. This really is from the Ranger perspective of first and second Ranger Battalion guys who jumped into Grenada in 1983,

an operation that has kind of like slipped through the cracks of history in some ways, I feel like. But you accomplished telling these guys' stories through this book Cry Havoc. So thank you, Joe. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this book. No, it's a pleasure. I'm glad to come on and talk about it.

These guys are, in many cases, they're my friends, so it's real easy to talk about them. That's great. So, Joe, I guess the first question, I'd like to ask a little bit about you. Tell us a little bit about your background, your military background, and sort of what led that towards you becoming, you know, something of a historian at this point. Yeah. I'm a retired Marine and I worked for the government. I start out as an intel analyst and by nature, intel analyst, if you're a smart one, you pay close attention to history. I did that quite a bit. And I remember as we were getting

ready to go into Iraq in 03, I ended up sitting down with a lot of guys who were in Desert Storm. A lot of those guys were my mentors when I first got in the Marine Corps. And they kind of taught me. And so I kind of took it to heart in terms of if you're going to understand a problem set, the best thing to do is get with the people who have experienced it before. And that's kind of how it drove me when it came to research for the book. When I got back from Iraq in 2003, I left active duty in 2004. and I continued working on my degree.

And I focused on history. You know, every time I get asked, you know, why'd you take history? You want to be a professor or something? I'm like, no, not really. I just picked it because that was the subject that I really liked. And one of the first projects I had started, I had taken some junior college classes while I was on active duty. And one of them was an American history one.

And there was a Latin America, South America chapter to it. And one of my first squad leaders when I was in the Marine Corps was a grenade. made a Marine. So I reached out to him and he provided me some good stuff for it. And I really wanted to make sure because at that time, we knew it was a joint operation. Everybody who had seen the footage from the operation that had leaked out saw the Rangers jumping at Point Salinas. So to me, the next best thing to do was to reach out to a Ranger and get his inputs to it. This led me to a gentleman by the name of Kip Ryan Hart. Kipp's a great friend.

He was a B Company, Ranger, First Battalion. He was one of the first sticks to drop at Point Salinas, his platoon, first platoon of B Company. He was one of the first Rangers on the ground, actually. And he was a young PFC promotable. He had just gotten back from Ranger School. He had, in his own words, he was beat to shit from Ranger School, but he still made mission. And the insights I learned from Kip, I was like, my God, why hasn't anybody talked about this stuff? I mean, it's so amazing what these guys accomplished, and especially when he started to dig in.

And I talked to his platoon sergeant, Brian Staggs, and Staggs he told me, yeah, we were on the ground, I think, for 25 or 30 minutes before the next, you know, chalk jumped. And I went, wait, wait, wait, there's just one platoon of Rangers. And he goes, oh, yeah, and the battalion headquarters. On the ground for 25, 30 minutes before any other Rangers jumped. He goes, yeah, the AAA was too dense. We had to bring inspector to clear the hills off so we could start the rest of the air drop back up. And to me, that just opened up this can of worms in a good way and digging into what happened there. And again, like you said in your preamble, there's a, I think everybody kind of knows the story in broad terms about what happened.

but it's the real nitty-gritty details that I don't think a lot of people are aware of. And yeah, that's what we try to accomplish with Cry Havoc. So that's how you got your start into researching this topic. Talk to us a little bit about coming together with Tom Greer and how this book starts to come together. Because I have to imagine that's an interesting story in of itself. And of course, we have to mention the late Tom Greer himself, a form of. Ranger, former Delta Force officer who passed away a number of years ago. And you carried the torch for him, too, with this book. Yeah. Luckily, I got to bless off from Tom's family to continue to write the book and get it out there.

I had been researching Grenada in general, more to do a full-length operation, a book about the operation. And it wasn't going to be just a peel-off Ranger book. It was going to be in totality, the entire operation. And Tom reached out to me in about, I want to say 2008 or so, he had basically started interviewing some of the same Rangers I had already interviewed. And they were like, listen, I don't want to do this over again. Just contact Joe and get with him and tell him I said to share my interview with him. And so this is how the relationship began. And at first I didn't know Tom. I didn't know at all.

I didn't know any of his reputation where he had been, the Torabora thing, none of it, knew none of it. And then I had a friend say, oh, yeah, he's an operator. He was one of us. He was a ranger. For those who don't know, Tom was with Charlie Company, Hard Rock Charlie, First Battalion. And he was one of the rangers who got left behind at Hunter. There's supposed to be this mythical second wave that was supposed to come in, and Tom was going to be part of it.

But he ended up being stuck at Hunter the whole time during Grenada. So these guys, they raised him as a young ranger when they came back. You know, everything that the Rangers have been doing at that point had been valid. So it was easy to learn from these guys that you already knew who had already seen the elephant and then come back and teaching you the lessons and reinforcing lessons that you already knew. But Tom, to his credit, kept at it. Like he kept reaching out and I'm like, finally I did the digging in and I found out who he was. And I said, okay, I'll talk to him. And he said, listen, you don't have to share anything with me, but I'm going to share stuff with you because you're writing the broader campaign.

I'm just writing a ranger book for rangers. and Ranger families. And I said, well, that's pretty dynamite. And I started sharing some of the stuff, putting guys in touch with him and him vice versa. And we started talking to a lot of the same people. And sometimes people wouldn't, it took a long time for me to be able to access that community. You know, I'm a Marine. I'm an outsider, not a Ranger, never went to Ranger school.

So I think the only thing that got me the inroads early on was I was a combat veteran. And I think that that was the only thing. that these guys could associate with with me because I'm a jarhead and it took a long time to get those inroads and to Kip's credit and to Dr. Hio from Second Battalion those guys really paved the wave

for me to get to talk to more rangers that were there and Tom didn't need that he was already one of them like he was already one of you guys. He was a ranger he had been an operator. He knew knew a lot of these guys who had went on to

serve in the unit afterwards. He knew a lot of them. So it was easier for him to make those inroads, but we had a lot of cross-pollination in our research. And so the years went by and he kept focusing in on the Ranger book, but he was also writing his

other books, his fiction books about Colton Rainer and, you know, the Delta Forest books that he wrote. But he really had a passion for this story because it wasn't fiction and it was people he knew and respected greatly. And if those of you had the book and have read the opening to it, you know that he reached out to me. And he basically, I was one of the few people outside of his close friends and his family that knew that he was terminal.

And he basically said, look, I've done as much as I can do with this thing and I can't get it any further. Because, you know, as his brother Steve told me, you know, he was trying to write books. He's trying to write his books. He's trying to finish manuscripts and stuff while I'm morphine for the pain. Pain threshold work. And, you know, it was very tough on him. And he was really hurting. And I knew that I told him I would do it.

I would do something with it. And to my failing, I didn't do anything with it right away. It really took another grenade a raider to give me a kick in the ass and get me going on a guy named Todd Bearden, whose dad, Milton, is a well-known personality, CIA personality. Todd, Todd was like, dude, you got to get this thing going. You know, you can't let it just die on the vine. That's amazing. Yeah, we've had Milt on the show a couple times. Yeah.

Yeah, well, Todd really was the one who got this thing re-energized. And between him and the Greer family, I put a lot of pressure on myself to get it done and get it done in advance for the 40th anniversary last year, which thankfully I was able to. I literally got it out the door. I think within three weeks of the anniversary, four weeks of the anniversary. I had sold him out so fast. I had one box of books with me at the reunion down in Savannah, and the guys were pissed off.

I didn't bring enough with me. But Tommy was, he sent me everything. He sent me all of his research. He sent me the shell of the manuscript. He had written, I want to say, about maybe 50, 60 percent of it, but it was rough and it needed a lot of work. there was some sequential issues with it in terms of where things were. I wrote in the notes section, Bruce McGrath was another first platoon B company guy.

He was that first plane load on the airfield. Bruce had found the MC130 chalk listings and their time on target for the drops. Oh, wow. And this was able to really solidify. I knew the planes were all out of order from my interviews, but I didn't know exactly where who is who in the zoo in terms of the stack after the first stick jumped, which was actually Aircraft 3, and then the other ones restacked.

But with that in hand, I was really able to put a pin in it and finish that portion up. And that's when everything started to really coalesce getting the manuscript finished. But there was a lot of the tough sequences were still there that needed to be done, the Grand An rescue, the firefight with Juliet 6 the Jeep team Calvini

and then wrapping it all up and putting a bow on it there was still a lot of work that needed to be done but Tom did such great work and he also had written it in a way I'm actually working on a companion book called Old Scrolls right now I'm interviewing a lot of Old Scleral Rangers that book the genesis of it

was the stuff that went to the cutting room floor from cry havoc he had written this thing that probably would have ended up being about 500 600 pages long if we would have just published it in total but it needed some streamlining and it needed some stuff to get cut and thankfully we'll be able to put that stuff in another book but this way i think it's much more um economical and it reads the the flow of the read is a lot better this way but he he did all the heavy leg work early on so yeah this was really a labor of love for of you guys, you know, it shows. So to start to get into the content of the book, can you start by giving us sort of a little bit of a background about what was going on in

Grenada in 83 that leads up to first and second Ranger Battalion getting this Warno? Yeah, actually as far back as I want to say, 1979, Grenada had been on the State Department watch lists in terms of, hey, we have Americans on the ground there, the medical school there. They've got some political consternation going on. They have a socialist government that is leaning heavily towards becoming full-blown Marxist. They originally, the Maurice Bishop government had reached out to the United States, and they were sort of rebuffed. I don't know the ins and outs of it, and I won't get into it. In the book, I say it right away, I don't really, I'm not a state department guy.

It's not my job to sit there and talk about all the political machinations behind the scene, although he was rebuffed and that led him to lean towards Cuba and later Russia. And this obviously worries when the Reagan administration comes into power after the, you know, in, in 81. Was it 81? Yeah, it was 81. Sorry, I'm old. I'm not that old. when the Reagan administration comes under power, they really start to put a focal lens on Grenada, especially when the airfield starts to get built.

You have the Grenadian saying it's for tourism, but the thing is long enough to handle any of the larger Russian and Cuban bomber fleet airframes, and this worries the Reagan administration, although if they had any imagery analysis done worth its salt would have told them, hey, there's a small parking apron. There's no way they can pivot multiple aircraft around at one time. And this has an effect on the actual Operation Urgent Fury later on as well.

But they become a focal point for the Reagan administration. And then into 82 and 83, there is political unrest. the new jewel movement is formed. It is more extreme Marxist. They think that it's led by Bernard Cord. They don't think that Morais Bishop is Marxist enough. And they decide to overthrow him. But there's a public outcry when Bishop is loved among the people of Grenada.

And he's arrested, but later freed. But then they seize him again and then he's later assassinated. And at that point in time, the U.S. government decides we've had enough. The original plan, they had done a number of exercises at Vigas that simulated a grenade operation where they were going to put a Marine Battalion landing team on the ground and a Ranger Battalion, and they would basically be able to subdue the island and rescue the rescue. political prisoners and that was it. And they do this a couple of times. But finally, after Bishop's assassination, the wheels are set in motion for the U.S. intervention there. On the fears that this could become some sort of communist staging ground, right, even though

that maybe wasn't quite plausible at that moment. I think there was a multi-view opinion that, One, they didn't like the possibility of that airfield becoming militarized. They didn't like that they had a Marxist, communist government in their backyard. They already had one in Cuba. And on top of it, you had U.S. medical students there, and you have the Iran hostage crisis fresh in everyone's memory. So I think all three of those pieces are up front in how they're doing their calculus in terms of when I say, I mean the Reagan administration, how their calculus is forming about how to deal with the situation. But once Bishop is assassinated and a curfew is put in place, a shoot-on-site curfew, that really is what starts everything in motion.

So, I mean, it's, your book is really the Ranger perspective. So if you don't want to get into the top level, but, I mean, can we at least talk a little bit about like how the Reagan administration arrived at that decision? and then how that order makes its way down to the rangers who have to start preparing for the operation. Yeah, I think they looked at it as like a coup de main operation where they would just parachute, you know, a battalion at Point Salinas and they would roll north and, you know, or roll out to the east and secure the students. And then they would backload them and be done. But there were a whole slew emissions laid on, especially for the, special mission units.

A number of them like the electrical power stations, the oil pumping station, radio transmission station on the island. The whole slew emissions that are at least conceptually looked at. The Rangers, First Ranger Battalion had just come off

Ranger Ready Force One. They had just handed it off to 2nd Battalion who had just assumed it. For the Rangers, you know, J-Soc had just been formed

in, you know, again, in the ashes of the Iran rescue. General Schultes, Dick Schultes, was running the show there. He was a conventional guy, but he had a very experienced

special operation staff around him. And they were, they were pushing early on to make it a Ranger Battalion show. Later on, the Marines get added. And there's a lot of the thing I've learned about urgent fury is that there is more urban legend and myth involved in this operation than I think any other military action in U.S. military history. There are so much bullshit and stories that people think they know the truth about what happened or who was alerted or who did this or who did that. And the odd thing about it is typical declassification for papers dealing with stuff is about 25 years.

Well, it's going 40 and a lot of the stuff still hasn't been declassed. Thankfully, the stuff that was relevant to the book was declassed so we could write about it. But for the Rangers, it starts at J-Soc, right? It's Ken Bauer and John Ritzel, who are the J-3 outfit. was at J-Soc. And they are the ones who start the ball in motion. And the first thing they do is,

according to John Reitzley, he informed first bat first. And I talk about this in the book in the notes section, and I encourage everyone to read it. And I think the world of Colonel John, I think he's a great guy. And his memory might be a little flawed

because I ran down the timelines of all of it, and second bat got alerted first, which was proper. They were our Ranger Ready Force One. But the thing with them is they had to stage out of the ISB, which was going to end up being Hunter, they had to fly across country.

So they immediately start recalling. They've got Rangers up at a Halo Jumpmaster MTT out of Yakima. And for first bat, they've got Rangers that are flying all over the place because it's deer season. And they're worried that guys will not be, you know, back then had pagers. You know, you don't have cell phones, the communication, the global communications, not there. So they were worried guys are flying to the four winds to go. hunting or whatever because they just came off of and you figure they're going to be back in the barracks party and hard so no there was yeah no imagine that young rangers in the barracks

party and hard not never happens right so the recall goes out and they start bringing guys back in and for both battalions both battalion commanders had done multiple alerts on consecutive weekends leading up to that. So the guys were really sore about having to come back in. Ah, we're just going to come in, accountability, draw weapons, ruck march, come back, and then we're going to lose half a day, and we're going to be pissed off. And then they come in, and the medics are pulling morphine.

As they call them, the war guns are coming out. And I don't know if they did this in your time. There was a separate set of weapons back then. They had their take them to the field and beat the crap out of them, and then they had their war guns, which were specially sequestered and weren't taken out as often. Oh, no, we didn't have that. Yeah. I thought it was interesting in your book how you talk about, you know, how the guys get recalled for training purposes over and over again.

So when the live thing happens, a lot of these guys think it's bullshit. There are actually, I think, as I recall, a couple people in your book who are like sitting on the plane 30 minutes away from jumping into Grenada still like, this is just an exercise. They're going to call it. They're going to call it all off. Yeah. And the funny thing was, Jerry Perky said it best.

He opened up his ammo pouch and there's, you know, there's real, real rounds in those magazines. And he goes, yeah, but if it was an alert, we wouldn't have these. You know,

he points to his jump master buddy, right? He's like, yeah. But yeah, for a lot of these guys, they rolled into that 18-hour sequence just like normal. Like it was normal. But this wasn't normal, obviously.

as soon as the live ammo came out and the guys described that as a smorgas board you just walked along the tables and picked what you want. I have friends who jumped into Panama with the Ranger Regiment and they were like, no, we got cards that told us how much ammo to take.

Back then, no. And there's a story about Bill Mayville, General Mayville. And he ends up jumping with a Claymore and a belt of 762 M60 ammo in his shirt because they were thinking how long am I going to be down there before I get resupplied? And so these guys told me these are the heaviest rucks they ever jumped.

And all they had was water, food, ammo. No snivel gear, really. A couple pairs of socks if they were lucky. Maybe a poncho liner. So the sequences, first battalion gets alerted, then second battalion. No, second battalion goes first. Okay, okay, because they're on RF1. Yeah.

Okay. So second battalion gets it first. They have to fly across the country to Hunter to co-locate with First Battalion who also gets alerted. What are that sort of the actions on at Hunter? And like at what point did these guys get kind of like briefed on an actual op-word? Like does that happen? Yeah. So first off, the mission changes a little bit.

Originally, Colonel Hagler flies out to Bragg. And they meet at J-Soc headquarters and they go into a planning session, initial planning session, where they kind of do a divisional labor. Who's going to do what? First battalion is going to take Salinas. Second battalion's going to jump at Pearl's airport up on the eastern side of Grenada. So basically, coup domain operations on both of the islands airports. Later on, the Marines get added and Pearls is taken away from second bat, and they are given the mission to follow first in and then conduct a road. March to Calvini, which is the main Cuban and Grenadian training facility on the island,

and they're going to take that out. And in between there, there are also both battalions are going to help to rescue all the medical students and evacuate them or secure them for evacuation. So at that point, they start discussing like, okay, here's specter is going to be in support. What's the jump altitude going to be? They get with the special operations. Special Airmen, Special Operations Airmen to discuss jump altitudes. And originally those guys wanted to go up like 1,200 to 1,600 feet. The Rangers really wanted to jump at like 300 to start. That was the first suggestion, no reserves.

Then the two of them together. Now, the funny thing is I interviewed both battalion commanders, and both battalion commanders told me they made the decision to go at 500. So I came to the conclusion that they got together and they said 500. I called that one because neither one of them seemed to want to back off of they were the ones who made the call. But the 500 was the only one

that they could get the special operations aviators to guarantee them to be able to put them on the DZ without getting every plane blown out of the sky. So that's how they settled on the 500. And you also had your Air Liaison officers, U.S. Air Force A-Loes that were assigned to the battalions were there. to help with the planning. Again, the Specter guys, you had your nightstalkers, you had your smooths. They were all in there doing their, they're going into their separate little rooms and doing their own,

their own coordination. And here's where a lot of the confusion for the operation starts to take place. They had very few maps. So they got copies of the maps and then each one of those cells made their own grid lines. So none of them had corresponding grid lines. So it made it very difficult to coordinate things once they got on the ground. Later on, the defense mapping agency starts churning out maps left and right, but it's four or five days after the operations kicked off. So that's a real limiter for them right then and there. And it makes it very difficult. Unless it's an interunit fire, like let's just say B company mortars are going to fire in support a B company and they're all shooting off the same map, okay, it makes sense. But when you're trying to coordinate fires across the battalion,

man, and you got two battalions and two separate sets of grid systems, you know, two different grid systems. You got, that's a recipe for disaster. So what is this, the final, like, scheme of maneuver that they come up with for the infiltration phase? And how does that start to go when, you know, when H hour comes? Yeah. So the way they work it out is it's going to be a company, the first battalion is going to be your jump clearing team. They're going to jump two aircraft loads of Rangers are going to go down, clear the airfield, and then it's going to be Airland and Tebby style, where the rest of the first and then second

following will pour out of the aircraft and go about securing their portions of the airfield. And the airfield originally is divided up with a company having the eastern portion of it, the hills north of the airfield, and then the eastern portion of the airfield along with the true blue medical school campus. B Company is to the left flank of the left flank of A Company First Battalion, so B Company First Battalion is right next to them. And then you have, if memory serves, A and B company of second bat on the western side of the airfield's northern hills with, I think, they're C company. I'd have to pull my maps out. It's been a minute. On the south side the airfield kind of acting as a quick reaction force.

And then Hard Rock Chalier, the first battalion is attached to Delta for the Richmond Hill Prison Rescue Mission. So that's the basic force laydown. And again, the initial entry method is going to be the jump clearing team in first and then air land the remainder of the force. But because Murphy gets a vote, no pun intended, the parachute option is always on the table and all the parachutes are brought, which ends up working out. Joe, I got to do a quick ad read from one of our sponsors before we get back into it.

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that trained to jump with backpack nukes, Detachment A in Berlin, Detachment K in Korea, and these commanders in extremist force, the SIF. So, I mean, I interviewed dozens and dozens people for this book. I'm really happy with how it's coming out. It's up for pre-order now on Amazon. Paperbacks will be available December 9th when the book is released. And of course, we also want to tell people about Cry Havoc, Joe Mucciah's book written with Tom Greer, the untold story of Rangers at War, and the subject of this podcast, obviously. Joe, you're also doing a podcast. Do you want to tell people a little bit about what that's about and where they can find it? Sure. If you're interested in World War II history, I do a World War II podcast called the We're Not Lost Private Podcast. If you're a fan of Band of Brothers, you'll probably recognize the title in some capacity. We talk mostly Western Europe, but actually I just finished one with a fellow Long Islander about the Battle for Wake Island. So it's pretty broad ranging. If, again, if you like World War II, especially we have a focus for paratroopers in 10040.

First Airborne, 82nd Airborne. A lot of that, we cover a lot, a broad range of topics, but it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good. We will have links down in the description for both Cry Havoc, the book, as well as the podcast, Joe's podcast. So please take a look, guys. The book is available, Cry Havoc is available right now. And give people your website so they can go and get the book directly from you, get autographed copies. I got to read this off this stupid business card, okay? Go for it. It's H-T-TPS, backslash, backslash, S-SG-T-Mooch.

Dot Wixite.com forward slash Joe dash Mutia. I'll have this. I'll send this to you, Jack, so you can throw it on there. If you follow the drop-down menu, you can find the menu for Cry Havoc. You can order it directly from me, and then I'll sign it, I'll inscribe it if you like. And also, like I spoke about earlier in the pod, I'll have a companion book to Cry Have it coming out called Old Scrolls.

It's basically stories of the Ranger Battalions from their formation in 74, 75 up through the early part of 84. It's going to be pretty, I am really enjoying writing this one. It really covers a lot of ground. There's a lot of legend in that Eldon Bargewell, Bob Howard, all these, these legends and Ranger in Special Forces history, I think a lot of, especially the Ranger community, will really get a kick out of it. It was originally going to be like a forbidden tale of the Rangers,

but there's a lot more to it than just telling, you know, telling some stories out of school. And I think everybody will get a feel for, you know, how difficult it was for the first and second Ranger batonians. has to reform after Vietnam and then change themselves from a light, one of the premier light infantry battalions, battalions in the world into almost a special mission force, you know, changing from light infantry to more of a Vietnam reconnaissance patrolling organization

and then into a special unit where they conduct airfield seizures and raids and things of that nature. So it goes through a lot of those growing pains to get to what we now, have as the modern ranger force i will definitely be reading the book when it comes out joe uh you hit us up we'll have you back another time to talk about that one yeah that'd be great let's uh let's get into the interesting part here the jump itself um reading your book going to be completely honest i hope i don't offend um some of the rangers out there the jump sounds like it was a bit of a mess man that it was just chaos and confusion in those aircraft yeah you're not you're not you're not downplaying it at all.

I think the thing that most people don't really understand is, one, the force inbound goes through several order changes. That really throws things off. And then, too, again, as we spoke about before, they don't get to pull off the jump clearing team and then the Entebbe-style land and offload. they end up having to jump and in some cases the word goes out throughout the force rig, derrigg, rig again.

So guys are, and not only that, sometimes during that derriggering, those parachutes are just getting thrown haphazardly onto the, and somewhere, some open space in the aircraft. And then when they get handed back out, you don't necessarily get the shoot back that you were originally rigged. So in some cases, we had guys who were five foot eight getting a rigged for somebody who was foot two or vice versa. So there was a lot of things that went on. And I think while we we laugh about it and we talk about it being a bit of a mess, I think this is where we look at the professionalism of the Ranger Force at that time, that they're able to overcome that, get their Rangers rigged,

get their rucks rigged, and get themselves out of the aircraft and on the ground in fighting order so they can immediately go and conduct operations. I have to also acknowledge with that comment, Joe, that it's not necessarily fair for me to reach back into the past and criticize too much because the things that I had the fortunate experience of having, the TTPs, the SOPs, those are lessons learned from the past, from these guys who developed that stuff for us. So I don't mean to be overly critical of the guys. I know they, and they got the job done at the end of the day, regardless of all those problems. Yeah, I don't think, I don't think any of them would take offense. We all understand there's friction in combat and it happens

and you know what did Mike Tyson say? Everybody's got a plan to get punched in the face. I mean, you know, they get punched in the face early on and not in a way where thankfully no nobody in the Ranger force or the Air Force special air crew or injured during the run-ins. But what happens is the first two aircraft that have the jump clearing team on it have to wave off because of the intense anti-aircraft fire that's coming up. But the third aircraft in line, which had the First Battalion headquarters on it and First Paltuna Bee Company, First Battalion,

bored in on the drop zone. And thankfully, the Cubans and Grenadians had elevated the anti-aircraft guns in the hills. They had sandbagged underneath them, and they couldn't depress below 500 feet. So literally these aircraft are coming in, and there's this fire that's screaming, right over them. This is not to say that didn't take any hits. There were plenty of 12.7 positions and then small arms positions that were firing, but you could tell that they were undertrained

because most of the hits are happening in the tail sections of the aircraft. They're not leading the aircraft enough. But what happens is the third aircraft bores in after Spector softens up everything again. Third aircraft comes in and then the rest of the force waves off. And then for 25 to 30 minutes, that lone ranger platoon and that battalion headquarters that atoc that one is on the ground thankfully they have their alo their senior alo on the ground jim roper he begins to work calling in specter on his own and then meets up with the fist the battalion fist ike is and barth and two of them get together and they start working the hills based on colonel taylor's guidance but all that is happening while the of first platoon, B Company, are assaulting up into the hills and clearing the runway.

And this is a reduced force. It's not a full first platoon because they had crossloaded on the aircraft. So it's not even the entire first platoon of B Company. And so this force is down there clearing heavy light towers, rebar. They're getting all this oil drums off the airfield so that the remainder of the force can come in. And it's pretty amazing that they were able to do this and not one of them get killed during that time. And a lot of them told me, you know, the biggest issue with what the Cubans and the Grenadians did wrong was they didn't come down from the hills and just sweep us off the airfield. They let us build up combat power. Right. And that's exactly what happens. So after they restack, and I apologize, you're going to

have to read the book if you want to figure out who was who in the zoo in terms of the airflow. but they don't go in number order. I will say that. But what's really interesting is when you get into the nitty-gritty and you read about what's going on in each one of the aircraft, and I do that. Tom and I specifically wanted to make sure that there was Ranger representation for each aircraft in the serial coming in.

For 1 through 7, which was the 1st Battalion serial, and then 8 through 12, which was the 2nd Battalion serial. And if you go in there, you'll read, and again, as we talked about, There's a lot of well-known Ranger names in those. And to me, yeah, it was a mess, but these guys just got the job done. They just didn't screw around. They re-rigged guys.

They got them ready to go. There's one instance where Gary Carpenter, the First Battalion Sergeant Major, Gary Carpenter is a legend, made the jump in Vietnam with the 173 airborne. Blessed to have met him and spoken with him several times. and Gary Carpenter almost got sucked right out of the aircraft because one of the retaining straps on his ruck came off and the ruck was dangling when he went to do his door check and Bruce McGraw had to haul him in

so there's some pretty amazing stories in there again I mean there were there were a couple toe jumpers on this wasn't there? Yeah, Bill Fedak was one of them and Marlon Maynard was it Marlon Maynard I think it was Marlon Maynard because Marlon is later killed on Jeep 5, Juliet 5. Bill actually got credit for the jump,

even though he never exited the aircraft, but they hauled him back in and he ended up air landing later on, but he got credit for the jump because he exited the aircraft under fire. True story, yeah, I can't argue with that. Yeah, yeah, Bill is a good guy too. Again, I've been blessed to know a lot of these guys and a lot of them I met on my own, but a lot of them I met through Tom and without Tom's efforts. Some of these stories would have never saw the light of day. So we have the one platoon

that's on the ground for a prolonged period of time. How long is it until the next pass? Oh, you're going to make me open the book now, huh? I mean, thereabouts. I mean, if you don't know. It's about 25 to 30 minutes before that next chalk comes in. So these guys are on the ground there watching, Spector duel it out with these anti-aircraft positions in the hills above the airfield. And they really were worried that the enemy was going to come out of the hills and just sweep them off into the sea. But once that starts happening, and those initial sticks, and I will say this, we always say, oh, it was a 500-foot jump. So the first couple of sticks that went out were about 400, if I remember correctly, the air crew wrote, was 490.

feet AGL. By the time the later second battalion sticks start coming, it's around 700. Because the aircraft, anti-aircraft fire is almost completely abated at that point. Spector has really cleared the gun crews out. The Rangers have assaulted up the hills. They've cleared those hills. They're holding them. And they're looking down on what was called Little Havana, which was the Cuban construction workers compound in a bowl on the northern side of north of the airfield. So the Rangers are all in these positions now. And there's all these little fights, these little tactical level fights that I think a lot of your... Like onesies and two zies, yeah.

Yeah, I think the people that enjoy this kind of material and like this kind of combat memoirs will enjoy those real tactical level views of some very well-known rangers doing ranger things. And I have to point out, you write in the book out a few of them who brought their personally owned weapons with them. So there's like some guys pulling out 357 magnums and shooting. Yeah, I mean, there's one guy I think he had, it was Dale Killinger from Second Bat, he was an A company guy. I think he went with three personal handguns and he ended up giving out like two of them

to two of his Ranger buddies who didn't have, you know, like there wasn't much restriction on that stuff back then. It was in the barracks, but you know, like stuff was kind of, you know, unlike nowadays, like when I was in the Marines, if you had a personally own weapon, you could check it into your unit armory and check it out when you wanted to.

But back then, I think, you know, they had hollowed out ceilings and the cutouts in the wall lockers that you can hide stuff in. And I think the guys took full advantage of that. And so how long is it before we get all of the Rangers on the ground? I believe the last, the first air landing C-130 comes in at 0.736. So the jump kicks off at, was it 556? If I remember, 550-ish. Some of them are jumping during daylight, right? Yeah, it's pretty light out by the time.

You know, a couple of the guys told me it was very light out. A couple of guys told me it was getting light out when they approached, but pretty much it was daylight. And that was a lot of the Rangers were pissed off about that. And they blamed the Marines because the rumor was that the Marines couldn't land in the dark and they had to hold up the Ranger operational. to accommodate the Marines going in simultaneously, which is a bunch of bullshit because I've interviewed a lot of the Marines, especially the Marine pilots from 261 who flew those

missions. All the lead pilots were NVG qualified before they left the States. In fact, when they took off their first cereals to make their assault into Pearls Airport, they took off at 0.330 in the dark in a rain squall. It actually, the reason why the Ranger jump got pushed back was because they had pushed forward was because they had to accommodate some of the SMU units that needed a stage in Barbados. They were late leaving, and then there was some loadout and loading issues, specifically with some TF160 aircraft once they got to Barbados.

And they would have gotten on the ground a little bit sooner if some of those initial aircraft didn't have to peel off because of the anti-aircraft fire. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right. And they put in, AC130 went in and did a recce flight before the jump, the main body arrived. And they were picked up right away. In fact, there was a spotlight that was running that picked up not only the AC130, but it ended up picking up Jim Hobson's aircraft. He's the one who jumped first platoon B company in the battalion headquarters for First Battalion.

So they knew early on that there was something coming. And I don't, you know, and there was other actions that took part. You know, there's some Navy SEAL actions to Reconnoiter, Poinselanis that didn't end up coming, going off because of a number of different issues. So there were a lot of things going on at one time, a lot of elements going in at one time. You know, I think Lantcom at the time it was Lantcom. It's not Lantcom anymore. They don't exist.

But Lantcom at the time wanted to synchronize all of the actions at once, which was ridiculous. He didn't need to do that. Once the first unit goes on, the gig is up. Everybody knows what's going on, right? So trying to synchronize the Marines, the Rangers and the special mission units all at one time was, to me, just a stupid thing to do.

Not to mention they weren't using Greenwich Mean Time. They were using local time versus, I mean, there was a whole host of issues that plagued the operations, But again, I hate to sound like a cheerleader, but the guys got the job done, regardless of all the obstacles, the shitty intelligence about where the positions were, all of that stuff, where the students were. That was another one that comes into play later on with the Grand An's mission, the rescue mission, as I like to call it the 26-minute rescue. One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was that it really does take you in the same. inside the perspective of like the tab spec for a ranger on the ground. And like you're experiencing the chaos as he experiences it.

You know, it's one thing for like you and I years later to pick apart the operation and we understand all these things. But those soldiers in that moment don't have that information. And so there's like some great moments where like a dev grew guy shows up out of nowhere with long hair. Like, oh, hey guys. Rangers are like, what? Who are you?

Or another time we're a J-Soc officer. like orders that, order some of the Rangers to go do some crazy mission. And the guy's like, who are you? What? Not unless my battalion commander says so. Yeah,

I don't work for you, buddy. Yeah. Yeah, it does. There's the tab spec four that, you know, you're talking about.

The guy, that guy, it's up front and prevalent throughout the story. But I also want to point out that the key leadership moments occur. Like, there's a lot of those, like especially in the aircraft before the jump. like guys Dale Kennedy making some really great decisions there alongside Doc Donovan.

If you're a first Ranger Battalion alum, then you know who Doc Donovan is. He's a legend. Yeah, lots of people, though. No Doc Donovan. Yeah. So, I mean, these guys get together at this critical point in time in the jump and they're like, no, don't derig. Just keep your rigs on.

I mean, those are sprinkled in there too. But you're right. I mean, we wrote it that way. We wrote it to be sort of a love letter to the, that tabs, spec 4 who's you know has to be the point the strategic corporal at times right he's got to he's got to lead in assault because i don't know where my sergeant is or i've got to you know i've got to secure these i've got to secure these students because that's our mission and yeah i'd love to go shoot out the armored vehicle that just showed up but my job is to protect these students you know

like there's all these little vignettes baked into it that i think that um rangers especially will get a lot out of... Tell us a little bit about the actual rescue of the True Blue medical students, because it's like a little bit of almost a comical scene that takes place amongst all of this mayhem. Yeah, I mean, you can... You know, the True Blue is on the eastern side of the campus, and I think a lot of the Rangers that were part of the platoon that had to secure them, they knew where the campus was, but they, the approach was through enemy territory. essentially. So as they clear up that eastern side of the runway, it rises up a little bit into

true blue and then drops down. And I think a lot of the Rangers, as they got to that hill and they kind of laid up to get a lay of the land, you're kind of doing that little bit of leaders wrecky before you go charging into the objective, right? And they're looking and they see all these little faces sticking out from between curtains. Like, what the hell is going on? Because these students know what's going on. They've been watching aircraft fly over the airfield for for hours now, or a couple hours at least. And all of a sudden, you know, they kind of, they bounce in there and they start pulling all these students together. And they secure them in the library, which ends up turning into an operating room, especially when the J-Moo shows up.

And but it's funny because they're like, okay, we've got you. Don't worry, we're going to get you out of here. And they're like, what about the rest of us? And the Rangers are like, what do you mean the rest of us? They're like, there's a whole other campus. above the airfield at Grand Anz. And the Rangers are like, what are you kidding me?

No, we'll get them on the phone. Hold on. And they call up the other campus. And they're, yeah, we're over here. We've got 130-something people. And if you give us some time, we'll call the rest in so we can get everybody here. And so the Rangers are like,

uh, okay. And it gets passed up the chain. And it gets handed off to second Ranger battalion. And this happens on the 26. It's the second day. the operation where they go into Grand Ans. And the funny thing was, it was originally going to be a Marine Corps mission, but all the Marine Corps rifle companies had been tasked out to different missions north of the boundary line for the two TFs.

So there were no marine rifle units to assist in the recovery of the students from Grand Ans, but they had the aircraft, and that's what the Rangers needed. And so there was a bit of a, we'll call it a discussion on the bridge of the Guam about who was going to go on the aircraft and rescue the students. The Marine, the Mao commander wanted to be Marines. And he's like, I need, you know, 12 hours to get my Marines together. And Schwarzkopf looks at him and goes, no, that's not going to happen. We're going to put Rangers on those aircraft. They're going to go in and they're going to rescue those students and that's going to be it.

and Swartzcoff was a two-star at the time. The Mount Commander was a Fullbird Colonel. It was a little bit of posturing and a little bit of words throwing around, and then all of a sudden it was you have your orders. I'll fire you, and I'll find somebody who will execute what I want. Storm and Norman was not going to be dissuaded. So thankfully, Granny Amos, who is the commander officer of 261, HMM 261, had gone to VMI with Colonel Hagler,

the second battalion commander, they got together over at Salinas, and they whipped together a plan, fragoed it out to the companies, and basically in 26 minutes, they put multiple flights of helos on the ground. The Rangers went in first on CH46s up along the beach strand. Now, interestingly, the beach, when they first looked at it, the tide had not started coming back in, but by the time they started flying in, the tide was in. So they had a very thin strip of land to put the helos in and Marines don't care. We'll land our heloes in water. And I mean, they're very exposed too out there on the beach. Yeah, they started taking fire the moment they started coming in. They brought in A7s. They brought in AC130. They had the 82nd was on the island by then,

including batteries of their artillery. They were firing 105s at the, what they thought was Cuban positions. So all the supporting fire goes in, but they're still taking fire and a number the aircraft take hits going in. But the most damage gets done to the aircraft by palm trees. And there's a couple of, there's famous pictures of a C.H. 46 sitting on a beach. Everybody thinks that that's their aircraft that got hit and didn't take off. And it wasn't. Sea Company and my buddy Kurt Starr went in on air aircraft.

And the aircraft, basically what happened was the palm tree got hit by the rotorwash, forcing it to go back. and then when it came forward, it hit the aircraft. And they thought it was going to disable it. But the crew chief under fire, the aircraft, the crew comes off the aircraft. The crew chief climbs up there, checks it out. He goes, I think we can make it back out to the flotilla. They get back on the aircraft and they fly it out.

Once the rangers secure all of the students. And the interesting part was, again, they had phone communication between the campuses. So what they did was they told the students, hey, tie white strips of cloth on both arms, so we know your students, mattresses up against the windows and one small bag per, and that's it. And even then, some of those aircraft went out pretty heavy. Now, the Rangers went in in 46s, but they brought 53s in to pull the students out. And some of these were coming out with 60 packs on board, including the flight crew. I mean, they were way overloaded.

Some of them were doing this dip, build up airspeed, rise, dip, rise, dip, out to the flotilla. That's how heavy they were coming out. The 46s came back in, and then one of them did the same thing the other one did. It hit a palm tree, but it destroyed the aft rotor system, and that one was totaled. As a result, a Ranger squad gets left on the beach after everybody's evacked. Now, they call back. Thankfully, they had a radio. They called back.

At first, they were going to e&E them back through the lines, but the 82nd was up there, and they didn't have running passwords to work with the 82nd, and they were worried about getting lit up. So basically the guys in that squad decide to go check out the CH-46, and they pull out all of the life rafts out of it. And one of them shot to pieces, and they get two of them. They put it together, and then they make their way out. Well, one of them starts to sink.

So they basically put all the non-swimmers in the life raft with all the equipment and weapons, and the rest of the guys just hold on the side and paddle. And they finally get out, and they get a small patrol boat from the USS Karen finds them, and then brings them on board. They get their clothes, they get their uniforms laundered. The grenades get thrown overboard because they're worried about salt water contamination. They get fresh ammo.

And that's when that J-Soc officer talks to the platoon leader at the time. And he tells them, no, I don't think so. I've got to wait to talk to my battalion commander. But the next day they come back, they get flown back out, and they're in this brand clean, spanking new uniforms it looks like. Everybody else is dirty.

It's got like two, three days worth of grime and crap on their uniforms. And these guys are all, you know, looking spiffy and, you know, it was pretty,

I don't think it was funny for them. Obviously, you know, there's a lot of unknown there. But again, they make it work. They make it out. They figure it out.

They work the problem out. They find a way out and they make it out without getting themselves killed, which is the, there's, one more big mission that happens during this battle, during this operation. But there's a couple interesting vignettes that I'd like to ask you about.

The first one being the Jeep that unfortunately runs into an ambush on the side of the airfield. And the second, I had no idea that this had happened. You write about the Rangers engaging basically an armored column, like armored vehicles with recoilish rifles. I was like, whoa. Yeah, so on the first day, they really, the understanding of the battle space was very, very thin. And they had worked out scheme and maneuver back at Hunter before they had taken off. So Alpha Company, first bat, had its jeeps.

They were going to use their jeeps like pickets, right? They were going to form of picket line around the airfield along the major avenues of approach. and basically, you know, they were, the jeeps back then were equipped with, uh, recoil, they, well, they never recall this rifle on that, on that one in particular. Um, but they did have, um, flash launcher, the old, I think they're M202s, basically like four laws in a block. Okay. That you could fire.

I think if you remember the old Schwarzenegger movie, Commando, he uses one of them in that. Um, they had flash launchers. They had, um, they had, um, they had, um, they had, um, had a man pad on the back of the, and then they crew mount, they had an M60 mounted on top, and, you know, they had five Rangers assigned to the Jeep. They had the gunner, the Jeep commander, the assistant Jeep commander, and then they had two other Rangers assigned to it. And so it's Randy Klein and Mark Groutemacher, two sergeants, two well-respected sergeants,

Marlon Maynard, Russell Robinson, and Tim Romick on the gun. They roll out to where they think they're blocking position. is. And they're actually being trailed by a ranger named Frank Moore in another Jeep behind them, although Frank doesn't have any other rangers on his Jeep. But they move to an intersection and they stop and Mark and Randy break out the map and they're taking a look at the map. And they're doing a little terrain appreciation. They're trying to figure out where their blocking position is. And Frank runs out of his Jeep and he says, hey, Sergeant, I think we've gone too far. Frank's a speedy four. He's like, I think we've gone too far. And Mark,

like, hey, look, we got it. You can head back. If we go out too far, we'll turn around and we'll come back. And so the guys, Frank turns around, heads back to the airfield because they need the jeeps back at the airfield as well, the spares. And Mark and Randy and crew take off towards what they believe is their blocking position. The intersection where they stopped at was actually where their blocking position was supposed to be. But they keep going out because they think it's further out. Again, the maps aren't very good. and they're trying to do terrain appreciation. They drive past a drive-in movie theater, which up until the last major hurricane that hit the island was still there, but it's not anymore. They drove past that, then they realized they had gone too far. And when they had done that,

a squad of Grenadians had saw them drive by and basically took up line almost like an L-shaped ambush along the roadway, including an RPG. and when they drove back, they fired at the Jeep and they hit it with an RPG immobilizing it. A couple of the Rangers are killed outright. Russell and Marlin are killed outright. Tim is hit by a burst of fire, hits him in the helmet and the leg, and he's also hit one other place. He gets knocked off the gun mount, but he's alive.

Randy is killed outright as well. Mark is able to get out of the Jeep with his 203. They take up position behind the Jeep. and Mark knows they're in dire straits. Tim has his 45, but he doesn't, the M60 didn't fire. It was, I'd have to talk to my buddy, Jose Gordon, again, because he described to me what he thinks was wrong with the gun at the time. I think I have it in the book.

I describe what happened to it from what he told me. But anyway, Mark basically tells Tim, go back and get help. Go run right back to the airfield and get help. And Tim didn't want to leave him. He's like, Sergeant, I'm not leaving you. And he basically makes it an order. And when you're a Ranger, I think he was a specialist at the time. No, he's a PFC.

When you're a Ranger PFC and a Ranger Sergeant gives you an order, you're going to execute it. And just as he goes to take off, Mark Farr is his 40 millimeter. He kills one of the Grenadians and then he charges across the road. and he's shot down as he assaults the other side of the road. Tim makes it all the way back down, but he's bleeding heavily. They secure him, and he basically starts raging. They're killing my team. You've got to go back.

They pull him in the hole. They start treating him. Dr. Donovan shows up. They pack him out to the aid station. But they end up mounting a patrol led by Sid Farrar, Jose Gordon, Max Dello. A lot of these guys are in the book. You can read about it. Tony Nunley. There's a lot of well-known Rangers names that are part of this patrol.

They try and make it out to where the Jeep is, but they can't. They get ambushed. Sid Ferrari's shot. Kelly Venden packs him out. He's awarded a Bronze Star for evacking him out. Him and Johnny Welton finally get Sid, who's a big guy, up the hill. And then a Jeep comes up and is able to evac him. But as they're up there, maintaining Overwatch, they see, this is before,

gets shot, they see these BTR 60s coming down the roadway and they basically set up a law ambush and they miss. And the BTR 60s keep going and they hit this top of this slight rise at the end of the airfield

and all hell breaks loose. Like every ranger within range starts engaging these things. And the weird thing about it is if they would have kept charging down into the airfield with their main guns going, they could have wiped out the better part of two battalions, the Rangers.

But they don't. They hesitate. And that allows the Rangers to get laws and M67 90-millimeter recourse rifles in action. And guys, legends like Jimmy Pickering, right, these guys end up blasting the crap out of these these BTRs.

The first one backs up into the second one, and it stops, and that gives them all the time they need to blast these things. And the third BTR backs out, and then they start calling an inspector, and Spector knocks it out. But guys were telling me,

I'm sitting behind the sides of my weapon like I'm on a range, and these guys are trying to pour out of these BTR 60s. And he's like, we're just knocking them up. They're racking up and knocking them down. They're just bang, bang, bang. These guys are coming out of the, out of the BTRs, and they take them out pretty quickly. And then Sid Farrar gets hit,

and that squad has to pull him back. And they're under fire for a pretty good amount. They actually have to call in some air strikes. And the only thing available are A6s, and they're firing rock eyes. They're dropping rock eyes. Cluster bomb munitions, which are not really the optimal type of munition to be dropping here. But really what they need to do is break contact. So it allows them to break contact and maintain their Overwatch position.

But that's emblematic of all these small little fights up in the hills above the airfield that take place. but it's all interconnected, all those actions. The Jeep, the BTR 60s, the small hill fight there, they're all interconnected, that action. And so there's one more big mission, the Calvigny mission. But in the meantime, I also have to mention 82nd is coming in, Marines are coming in, J-Soc, the prima donnas that they are, we're going home.

It's been 48 hours, if that. Time for us to go. That's enough for us. Well, once they were shot off of Richmond Hill Prison, and then the seal teams were pulled out of the radio transmission. Well, they e&E'd out to see after the radio transmission station mission. There really wasn't much left for them to do. But this is, again, this is in the embryonic stages of J-Soc. They really, their command and control of the Ranger battalions is a little.

tenuous. They belong to J-Socq, but J-Soc was like, okay, the 82nd Airborne Commanders kind of wishy-wash me, might need some more forces. We'll get them back-loaded, but maybe if they're there as like a quick-reaction force on the airfield.

But with all of the battalions that are flowing in from the 82nd, they're used to expand the airhead, but they're not moving out as fast as oh, say, a lot of people in the government. in the military hierarchy would want. So General Trobaugh, who's the commanding general 82nd, basically asks for Ranger support for the Calvini mission.

He basically tells him, look, I'll give you all the artillery you can handle. I'll give you some aviation assets. We'll take care of all that stuff. And even then, Colonel Hagler is like, he's not the idea of flying into a place where they don't have a lot of intelligence about, I mean, the rumors were flying around. It was anywhere from, 500 to 200 to 1,200 Cuban and Grenadians on site, and aircraft positions.

It was a weird, unexpected mission, too, right? I think you write about how the Rangers were, like, turning in their ammunition and, like, getting ready to roll out. Yeah, and this is where Dr. Hillo really explained it to me. He goes, this is where the real, we're not restricted on language usage. Doc said, this is the big mind fuck right here. Yeah. We're on the airfield.

We're turning in our ammo. We're expecting to be bored. You know, we've done our missions, right? We've jumped in. We've secured the airfield. We've rescued the students. We've done all of our missions that we've supposed to do. It's time for us to go home.

And then all of a sudden, these squad leaders and platoon sergeants that show up after getting the initial frago and they're going, we got another mission. And these guys are like, you know, Doc's a real cerebral guy. He wrote his own book. he really explains it better than I do in the book, but he talks about how your mentality shifts. You feel like you're running against the law of averages at that point. You've rolled the dice a bunch of times. You've managed to work, make it out of it.

And you feel like if there's one more roll of the dice, snake eyes coming up and you're done. And, you know, he felt like he had death premonitions while he was on the island a couple of times. So, I mean, again, very cerebral guy, the way he explained it. But, you know, he's like, he said, I just was, I resigned myself to the mission. I went back to this 80-second airborne guy and got my grenades back. And he was looking at me like, you're a medic. And he goes, I'm a ranger.

And the guy just, he didn't get it. The 80-second guy just didn't get it. Like, you know, he's CSM-LG. and I know a lot of people know Leon Guerrero. He used to say killers and healers. I think Doc used to say, he quoted him. He said, where's my healers and where's my killers? And then I think he said to Doc, well, you're a healer and a killer, Doc.

And I don't think the 82nd kind of understood that mentality because a medic's a medic, right, in the 80s second. Whereas a Ranger, every gun counts. Yeah, you're a combat medic. right so doc's like collecting up his grenades guys are reloading mags they're getting claymore mines back from these guys they're you know getting you know links of uh 7662 for the m60s they've got resigned themselves to the mission because they're going in in flights of eight two flights of it's a it's a two flights of four and you can only fit what 15 16 Rangers maybe if you squeeze everybody in 15 Rangers on a black hawk and that's really tight with everybody scroats brunched in there and holding on to each other. I think that's what he told me was about 15 per flight for aircraft. It doesn't take a genius to do the math. 60 in the first four and 60 in the second four against what?

At the minimum 500 was the estimate. I mean, that's dead man's odds, right? Yeah. And these guys, they lift off. And a couple of the guys told me they had never traveled in a Black Hawk as fast as they did that morning. And they were flying just at sea level until they hit the coast. They hit where the cliff line was for Calvini. And when they did, they crested.

They basically popped up and popped down to hit the LZ quick. But what happened was they were coming in too hard and too fast. And a lot of those guys that didn't have a lot of hours in the Black Hawk. And one of the pilots who went on to be a 160 sore pilot who flew in Somalia told me, he goes, yeah, there was an automatic setting with the stabilizer in the Black Hawk. and if you didn't know it was coming, it could really throw you off and it would self-adjust in those early models.

At least I think I'm describing it properly. Anyway, when they popped up, they had too much airspeed and they tried to dump it really hard. And they came up on their tails, basically, when they hit the LZ. And that first aircraft in, I know you tagged General Thomas

on one of your Twitter posts about this thing. Yeah. Actually, I worked in the Pentagon when he was at the J-3 for special operations, talked with him a few times and exchanged a few notes with him back and forth over the years. But General Thomas straight up a couple of years ago said, I don't remember seeing any fire,

but the guys in that first aircraft did. And one of them was WIA, and the other one took a round in a flash of the pressure of his M-16. Somebody said the pilot was hit. I've never seen the pilot. the pilots of that initial craft listed on any WIA listings. So I can't say if they were or they weren't. But that aircraft was the only one out of that first four to get out of the zone.

Because the rest of them was demolition derby. They came in too hard and too fast. One of them broke their back, pirouetted on its nose. It hit Bill Sears, who was the fist NCOIC for A Company, second bat. And it basically danced on Bill's chest like three times. And those of you know Bill Sears, I was lucky enough to know Bill for a number of years and talk with him. He was a paraplegic as a result of his injuries. A lot of guys got really screwed up.

And we lost three damn good Rangers, too. Doc Lannin and Steve Slater and Phil Grenier. And some of those aircraft hit the other aircraft, and then some of them hit. There was a fence line that was adjacent to the LZ. that one of them struck its rotors on and then bashed its tail in landing there was a ditch that it actually landed in the ditch which lowered the silhouette of the aircraft which drove the rotors into the fence line so all this stuff happens is this shower of rotors and you know that's squealing if you've been in an aircraft that's had an emergency you know what that sound is and there's probably a bunch of people watching this have air on the back of their neck standing up when you think about it. that sound, that's what you could hear. And then it was clouds of dust because of the rotor strikes.

And piecing that whole sequence together was really difficult because a lot of the guys only have fragments of memory from that. Right. Whether they purged it from their memory consciously or subconsciously, they could pick up bits and pieces of it, you know, things that would flash across their field of vision. once things settled and the dust settled and they did what rangers do they assaulted through the objective and in the book you'll read about all the subsequent flights and really one of the hardest descriptions was dave cummings who's another ranger legend from second bat who was a ranger

in one of the letter companies in vietnam as well and he was in the second flight of four in the lead aircraft and watched it all go down and dave's um description of it is really heartbreaking. And as far as like the expectations of the enemy force on that target, like it sounded, if I recall correctly, that the target was actually like relatively empty. Yeah, it was pretty much a dry hole. After those initial rounds, it was a dry hole. I mean, a couple of the guys said that they were corpses in the ground around there,

but I don't think that they were there from the initial bombardment. or the ranger actions after landing at calvini so i don't know what the sourcing is for those those those bodies there um but once those a few initial rounds i think it was a stay behind force maybe fired off a bunch of rounds at the aircraft that they were coming in and then beat feet because they knew they were going to be in a hurt locker quick if they stuck around so to me there was i think there was a minimal force there a handful of guys at most They peppered the lead aircraft and took off running because that was the ammo for a lot of the Grenadians. As far as the Ranger perspective in your book, I mean, that's sort of the last combat operation that they participated in before heading home.

I would like to kind of ask you, like concluding thoughts. I mean, you interviewed a ton of these guys, got a lot of different perspectives. I think there's maybe a couple different ways to think about Grenada. One of it was special operations, you know, kind of getting the wind under their wings. One of it was, you know, the so-called Vietnam syndrome, that America was afraid to engage in military action after the Vietnam conflict in Grenada acting as sort of a test bed. No, actually, we can do operations shown again in 89 in Panama.

I'd like to throw it to you in here, you know, your conclusions, your observations from all of the research, that you did for this book. Yeah, well, first off, I'll start at the tactical level and I'll say Ranger training works, right? It's been proven over and over and over again. And no matter how bad the situation is, whether pre-mission or during mission or post-mission, the Ranger methodology, the Ranger training model works.

And this validated it again. And they were, the Ranger force took this. And when I say the Ranger Force, because later on, obviously, you know, in 84, there's a third battalion and then a regimental headquarters and they really start to, that was the thing with the battalions at the time, they were kind of their own little entities. They didn't answer to a regimental headquarters. They were basically a socom didn't come around until what, 87? Yeah, so these guys were kind of operating in their own little bubble. And while there was a lot of cross-pollination in terms of TTPs at the time, I think that they still operated. a little bit in their own world.

But the model, the overarching model was there for both battalions, and it worked. Like the training, the individual training of a ranger, the ranger squad, the ranger sections, the ranger platoons, company, battalion level, etc. It worked. It needed refinement.

It wasn't perfect. But when push comes to shove and the bullets started flying, the ranger model worked again. And it has ever since. And I think they were able to build on that. And like you said, without Desert 1, without Grenada,

we don't have the success in 89 in Panama. That integrated command structure and the Ranger Battalion's, the Ranger Regiment proved it again in Panama. They proved it again ever since that that Ranger model works. But I think, again, we had to go through the stand-up of the battalions and then go through to Grenada to show the evolution of the force, right?

And the force continues to evolve at this point. But I think for Grenada, Grenada was a vital component to showing, hey, we moved away from light infantry. We moved away from the Vietnam recon. We moved into the special operations world. We now do raids. We now do airfield seizures. We do, you know, and then you have Somalia where they're doing direct support for smooths. This, without Grenada, we don't get there.

Or at least we don't get there as fast. And we also don't get J-Socan later on. on SOCOM, exercising better command and control of their organization and not leaving a Ranger Battalion at the hands of a conventional commander who doesn't know how to use them properly. But I would point to at the back of the book, there is a lessons learned portion of it. A guy who started out as a Ranger private, Mike Frank, who was in Second Battalion, who was a B company, and then rose through the ranks and then made the jump as an officer. and 89. So he saw the evolution and he brought out a lot of those points. And he's like,

he's like, are you going to do an after, you know, like a lessons learned thing? And I was like, I kind of thought the book itself was a lessons learned when you think about it. And he goes, yeah, but we could pull those out and really make them precise and really make them succinct. So I would say, um, Mike's did a really good job of pulling those things together and I'm indebted to him for putting those in there. And he later went on to special forces as well. So he brought a lot of, um, institutional knowledge all the way from private to when he retired as a full word colonel. So I would recommend folks going back and looking at that. But we, again, without Grenada, we don't get to where we are as fast.

And who knows what kind of mistakes we make in the run-up and the execution of just cause in 89 without the grenade mission. But yes, it also proves to the world. We're not gun-shy about putting our folks in the field and rescuing Americans and fighting communism in our own hemisphere, although they tried to downplay that a bit at the time. So to me, it's all those things, but to me it's, you know, basically it's a tribute to the guys who executed the mission and to Tom and his family. And, you know, I feel really good that it got out. And it's been well received by the Rangers. So I'm happy if other people like it, but to me, they're the litmus test when it comes to the audience I'm shooting for. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, that's the hardest audience to convince, right? You can't get anything by them. Yeah, if they would have come up to me and told me I was shit, I would have been upset. But, you know, you do the best you can with it. A couple of them told me, not bad for a Marine. So the book is Cry Havoc, the Untold Story of Rangers at War by Tom Greer and Joe Mucciya. You guys can find it now. Joe's website, there'll be a link down in the description.

You can go and get an autographed copy directly from him as a preferred method. You said that the next book is called Old Scrolls. Old Scrolls. That's the working title, but I think I like it a lot. It's going to be called Old Scrolls A Decade of Change. I like it, too. It goes from basically the formation of the Ranger Battalion's 74-75 timeframe up until early 84, but before the formation of the regiment and the 3rd Battalion.

So it's going to cover a lot of those missions that the lessons learned from those, those training exercises and those years of growth that lead up to cry havoc essentially. Joe, thank you so much for writing this book for finishing Tom's work as well and telling the Ranger's story. So many things I didn't know that I learned from reading this book. I really hope that other people will go and pick it up. Thanks. I appreciate it. We got one question for you. Far away.

From M. Corbin. what do you think General Creighton Abrams would have to say about the regiment's evolution of capabilities during the GWAT? Have they become the finest direct action force in the world? I think Abrams probably would have been pleased to see where they evolved into. Obviously, he came from a place in Vietnam where he was not trustful of special forces. And the reason he wanted the ranger battalions formed was because in his mind, if he lived long enough, he was going to disband special forces and the Rangers would be the piece

would be that special operations force that would take the missions. I mean, so to me, I think he'd be pleased to see where they've evolved to. He wanted them to be the finest light infantry force in the world and I think they've got few peers out there. Joe, before we take off, any final thoughts

or anything else that you want to plug before we get going here tonight? No, no, I appreciate everybody coming on and watching. I'm hoping there's a few of the guys that were in this book listening and watching. So if you are, hey guys, good to promote you guys. I know you don't like it. You're a very insular community.

Don't like people speak in your names, but it's okay. There's a lot of love for you guys these days. Absolutely. But thanks for having me on. I appreciate you guys. Yeah, man. Stay in touch. Let me know when the next book comes out.

We'll have you back on again to talk about that. And we will be back on Monday with a retired FBI agent who served in a counterintelligence role. So it should be fun to talk to him. Joe, again, thank you. And we will see all of you guys on Monday. Thanks, guys.