The Team House - John Cronin served in Recon, Force Recon, Rhodesian Light Infantry, Selous Scouts: Ep. 60

Episode Date: September 21, 2020

John Cronin has lived a life of adventure from serving in Vietnam with Marine Recon and Force Recon to traveling to Rhodesia where he served in the RLI and Selous Scouts. Afterwards her pursued academics going to school in the Middle East, and even got kidnapped in Beirut. Get access to bonus segments with our guests: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse SubReddit: 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/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. We're screaming. Okay, guys, inshallah, everything is working as it's supposed to be. This is episode 60 of the team house. I am your black square monolith disembodied voice, Jack Murphy. Sorry, my camera's not working today.

I'm out of town on business, so we're doing this remote today. Here with co-host Dave Park. Dave is here. And then we are joined by our guest tonight, John Cronin. John Cronin is the author of his memoir, The Bleed. And John has a very unique experience having served in Marine recon and force recon in Vietnam. And then he went over to Rhodesia and served in the Rhodesian Light Infantry and the Salus Scouts. So we're very lucky to have John here.

I read his book many years ago now, or it feels like many years ago, it wasn't that long ago that he put it out. I was really impressed with it. It's just a very well-written book, but also John has a very unique experience, having served in these two different conflicts with four different units. So, John, thank you so much for joining us here tonight. We really appreciate it. It's been a real pleasure and certainly an honor to be invited. So thank to both of you. John, I was wondering if you could start off by talking to us a little bit about, you know, where you came from, your upbringing, your family. I mean, in your book, you have a whole history of your dad. I mean, you come from a military family.

So I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about all that. We go back to the Revolutionary War, actually. I had a distant relative who was a captain in, it wasn't on his staff, but he was in Washington's command group at Valley Forge. So we can date our history pretty well back to the late 18th century. And I've had relatives in every war that I can think of since then, except, except with Q in probably 1900. And that's a, I mean, certainly in civil war, we had relatives from the Fifth Merrill audit Antietam.

A couple were killed up there, World War I, Korea, World War II, and so on. So we have a pretty sound history in that respect. My dad was a tanker in World War II and was captured at the Battle of the Bulge when he was overrun by elements of the Six Panzer Army near St. B in Belgium. And he spent a couple of months in a German prisoner war camp and escaped as the Russians were making their move. And then later served for a while in Korea and then served as an officer who was working on the weapons development at the Pentagon.

I had an uncle who was a navigator in the 8th Air Force in World War II. And my from Vietnam, I had two cousins in Vietnam. So we have quite a history. It goes back in that respect. And I was just sort of carrying on that tradition, I guess you could say. Yeah, you were kind of like military through and through. I mean, you went to VMI, right? I did go to VMI, where my father and brother and uncle all went,

but I was a terrible rat that's a freshman. I mean, I was just, I was absolutely horrible. I accumulated way too many demerics, and I got boned out as they term it, kicked out two final exams my rat year. And here I was 19 years old and single and able-bodied and out of school. So it was 19 late, you know, summer 66,

where was I going? Well, I was headed to over to the big pond. I mean, there's no question about it. And so I got drafted. Of course I got drafted. But I felt like if I were, if I were going to get drafted, I was certainly going to go to Vietnam, and I wanted to go with people who had volunteered for it, as opposed to people who were going to be sent over there, much against their will.

Now, there'd be great combat types in that group, but then there'd be a lot of people who weren't so anxious to be there. But I felt if I'd join the Marines, at least these guys had volunteered to join the Marines, which meant they were sort of volunteering to go to Vietnam, and I felt my chance, might be a little better of surviving if I did go with the volunteers. And so that's how I ended up in the Marines for three years from 66 to 69. I love that little anecdote in your book. You were talking to, I think like an old woman or something like that. And like when you told her that you were joining, that you were in the Marines and you're going to Vietnam,

she looked at you like you were a walking dead man. Yeah, yeah, that was in our Episcopal church in Alexandria. and she was elderly. And I mentioned that to her, and she took my hand and said a prayer and burst into tears. And I had to sit her down. I wasn't sure she was going to make it, you know, into the chapel. So by the time I got ready to go to Vietnam, I was really tired of people crying over me because they knew they were looking at a dead guy right there on the spot.

And they weren't saying it, but you could tell. I mean, we were taking casualties, and this is in early 67 to mid-67, and our KIA rate was starting to climb up, and it was not a good place to be headed to. And people understood that intrinsically. They wouldn't say it to your face, but they looked at you like you had a cross on you. And then I was wondering if you could talk to us a little bit about your experience, you know, arriving in Vietnam and how you found your way into recon, because it's not like you were. classed as a recon Marine. Like you kind of had to, I don't want to say, well, I cheat and steal, but you had to cajole your way into the unit.

Yeah, it wasn't as easy to get into that unit as I thought it would be. I thought all you had to do was, you know, say, hey, this is what I want to do. But you have to go through a kind of a selection test. But when I got there, I was actually in an MOS, military occupational specialty that, was radio trained, but it was also in Morse code.

And these were the kind of people that Recon was looking for. And so when I got to Vietnam, I found that one of the billets that was open was for Recom battalion, and there were no other 2533s or Morris Code operators in the room. There must have been 200 of us in there waiting for assignments. And so when they said we need a, you know, an air. MOS that corresponds to this billet. Is there anyone here? And I was the only to raise my hand. And so this guy from RECON said, great, you're coming with us. And I said, well, what about the selection test? And he said, well, you're going to take it when you get there.

And so I got on a C-130 and I flew down with him to TULI, which was a bit south of Danang. And I went through that sort of selection process when I was down there. If I hadn't passed it, they would have sent me right back up to Danang, and I would have gone right through that building area again, and I probably ended up with the infantry as a radio operator. But the problem was I would have been sent back to the rear with the back of radio operators, because that's what these guys were doing. And I didn't want to sit there taking sit reps and status reports and resupply and that sort of thing. I wanted to get to the bush. And the only way I could do that, I felt was going through a recon unit.

And they didn't waste any time with me. They pretty much sent me straight out. Keith, tell us me how to going out with recon. I had, mind you, I was 20 years old, and I had no military experience to speak of. We went through this sort of jungle training in at Camp Pendleton, but all they had were these little pop-up targets of paper machet. and, you know, it was kind of rinky dink. They did the best they could, but after all, you're not in a real deal.

And so, honestly, I like all the NICs over there, these new in-country guys, really didn't know what we were doing. But I did have people who at least had the decency to take me aside and say, okay, you're going to be out there as a radio operator. That's a 25-pound radio you're going to be carrying plus a battery, plus equipment. you're going to be humping with about 80 pounds on your back. You better be in good shape because we don't want to medivac you for being, for having a heat exhaust or a heat stroke or something.

So, you know, we hope you can hump this stuff because we're in hills, and that's what we're going to be doing. And so patrol, and we were placed up in an area called the Tam Key province, which was very mountainous. And we had a patrol leader who was not particularly well suited for recon. A guy had come in from the MPs. He was the first lieutenant, and he was a mustanger, which meant he'd served in the ranks before, but he did not have a recon mentality.

He took a sort of infantry mentality into recon, which you simply cannot do. You're not out there to make contact. You're out there to observe and call in fire support and maybe call the infantry in. But he didn't pay attention to the signs. He didn't listen to his NCOs, and he put us on a bald hill. And it was about three days before the NBA finally pinned us down, because we were calling in a lot of artillery in this valley. And we were killing NBA, and they knew that there was an observer group up there,

but it just took them three days to find us. And on the fourth morning, they hit us. And that was the first patrol I had. I'd been in the bush three days and we just got, we just got shot to pieces on that one. It wasn't as bad as my fourth patrol, but it was a hell of an introduction for being in-country only, what, a week and a half, I guess it was. John, how many guys were on your team at that time? What size was your patrol?

That's a good question. Battalion Recon ran different patrols than forced it. Battalion ran larger teams of 12, 15 men, 18 men. when I got to force on the next tour, they slimmed down quite a bit. And Force Recon only ran three and four and five men teams. So this first tour, I was up there with about 15 guys. And that was not a particularly good number. You're too large to say clandestine and you're too small to do something if you get hit.

And so we were in that sort of nether world of being, too small but too large. And it caught up with us. In fact, on two of the four patrols, it caught up with us. Was one of those when you were, I think you described in your book where the NBA, like, hit you with a human wave attack. And like the way you describe it in the book, it just sounds insane, where they're like charging your position. Those guys were, those guys just simply didn't seem to be afraid. of getting killed.

I've just never seen anything like them before. They probe you from about last light until first light. Sometimes they'd stay out there all night in front of you, and they'd move around, and they were like little ghosts out there. And they would send signals by taking a piece of bamboo, maybe a stalk of bamboo about 18 inches long, and they'd feather it with a machete or something. was really, really fine-grained at the top.

And they could sort of wave this, and you'd hear this very slight brush out there to your right or to your left. And then if you really listen, you'd hear it on the other side of the perimeter, maybe five, 10 seconds later, where this guy or this team over there was acknowledging the fact that this first guy might have been in place and he was ready to go, or that he'd found an early warning device like a trip wire or a mouse trap or an early warning flare, but they would signal one another using this sort of method. And MBA units had their different ways of doing this. But the team that the people that hit us were using these little bamboo stalks. And when they finally hit the first trip flare, the guy made a mistake.

He was a sapper. and he had gotten up to within about 50 feet of our perimeter before he hit that trip flare, and the whole side of the hill sort of lit up. I mean, they have quite an illumination coefficient. And as I looked over to my right, maybe 30 yards away, the whole hillside seemed to move. And it seemed that everybody in the world was getting up in front of me and running at me. It scared that ever live in hell out of me. I've never seen anything like it before.

Yeah. 15 or 20 of them that got up side by side, no helmets. And some of them were wearing shorts, and they had web gear on, and they were all firing AKs. And they were sweep these AKs in a very sort of close arc of about 45 degrees, extremely well disciplined. They'd go down, and there would be somebody else right behind him. who would come up and then get in line and assault.

It was extremely well coordinated, and it was really intimidating. And right in the book that, like, you had to like lob frag grenades and you were trying to get the range correct and then go to the Claymore's. They're telling you to blast those. Yeah, they, we had Claymore set up right behind these trip fires,

these really warning devices. And we'd had about, six claim were set up. Two sides of that hill were cliffs, so we didn't have to worry about those, but the other 180 degrees were the sides where they hit us and on both sides simultaneously. And when you throw grenades, you've got such adrenaline pumping that you almost always overthrow these things. It's just a given. I mean, you try to cut down your arc, but you're so pumped that invariably you're going to throw these things 20, 30 feet over their heads and way down the hill and they're going to explode harmlessly. So the guy I was with who was a, on a second tour of

vet, said, before we got hit, he said, look, we're definitely going to get hit tonight. I'm telling you. So cut your arc down when you throw, pull your pins, say outgoing, so we know it's outgoing, and make sure you don't throw this thing like a football or baseball, you know, 30 yards down the hill. And so I tried to do that. And then as we were getting it, he screamed Claymore, Claymore. So I had the hellbox, and I popped that. And I guess somebody over on my right popped at the same thing. Went off simultaneously.

And the hill sort of shook under us. Because those things are really powerful. And you could see the spray of, of debris go up in the face of those claimors, plus the backlash on those things also kicked up a lot. And it took some of the NBA down with it. It, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it illustrates somebody. There are like 800 ball bearings in this, in this package of C4 that's about, you know, maybe size of two cigarette cartons. So not only is it extraordinarily loud, but it is really damaging for, uh, anybody in an infantry assault.

Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today.

Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and family resource network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. One of the other things, you know, before moving on, I thought that was really striking about, you know, the description in your book, which is very vivid, by the way, was you talk about how the enemy would police up their

dead. And by the time it got to be mourning, it was like the firefight had never happened. And you're thinking, like, was this a dream? Like, what happened? Yeah, they were extremely efficient in that respect. Even in the middle of a pitched firefight like that, they would pull their dead behind them. NBA were broken down into teams of threes. And you, you know, you always had two vets and you had a rookie with them. And it was almost like they were a net unit so that they would never forget themselves. They wouldn't get homesick. And if these new guys had issues, they could always talk to their teammates.

And if a guy got killed, their two teammates would pick him up by his heels and they would drag him out. If all three were killed, then another team would drag them out. And it was an extremely efficient way not only of clearing the battlefield of bodies, but more importantly, it didn't leave any information for us. And if we didn't know how many we killed, we had no idea if our tactics were being successful or not. Yeah, it's a simple strategy, but it was extremely effective. And someone like Westmoreland never understood this at his level. Yeah.

And he always felt like the more bodies you have, the better the operation and the more successful operation. It was it was completely counterintuitive to what the NBA did. They wouldn't leave bodies around. And so he felt, oh, well, Neil, we have to change tactics and so on. And I credit the NBA and VC2, especially main force. with doing that sort of thing and leaving us sort of guessing about the kinds of effectiveness that our tactics had. If we ever got information about bodies and kills, it almost always came from captures.

Yeah. I mean, it seems like it probably had to have a bit of a demoralizing factor also in the sense of, you know, you know who on your team was injured or killed. and then you feel like maybe you kick some ass or whatever, but you look out and there's nothing there. There's not that sort of reinforcement, visual reinforcement to say, okay, yeah, you know, we got some, we got ours too.

Yeah, it was kind of spooky. It really was kind of spooky. I mean, you'd hit a guy, and you would see him go down, and you'd wait for first light maybe an hour later, and there was nothing there. Yeah. It was just weird. You'd see blood trails.

you might even see equipment there, but there was no body. And not only would they pick the bodies up, but they would pick body parts up, because those claimers would tear somebody to pieces. Right. And so if there are arms or legs missing, which they're often worth, they'd take them too. And they'd usually take them and bury them about 100, 200 yards, maybe 300 yards, from the scene of the contact, and they'd bury them in these slit trenches, which were only a couple of feet deep.

But first they'd cut their throats and cut their stomachs, open so that the hot air didn't expand the bodies and give the burial sites away. Interesting. And so it was very difficult, often to find, even find the bodies, unless you had dogs out there with you. And some teams in infantry units carried dogs for that very reason. I mean, the dogs were very good in spotting tripwires and so on, but they were also good in picking up body sense.

Yeah. Very interesting. Can you tell us, John, about antennae vats? Alley and the contact where you were pretty seriously wounded? My team leader was a first lieutenant who, as I mentioned earlier, had been killed on my first patrol. And so the fellow who took over from him was a staff sergeant who used to be a D.I. out in San Diego. And honestly, he was terrible.

I don't know where he came from. I think it was a, I think it was also an MP unit that the lieutenant had brought him with, as I recall. But he had no temperament for recon work. And you could tell that easily. He didn't have the, he didn't have the vocabulary. He certainly didn't have the training. And the worst part about that was that he wouldn't go to his NCOs, like his lieutenant, wouldn't either, and talk to them and ask them, how do I approach this issue?

He was, it was like he was too proud to do that. And so we had multiple contacts on our insert from Denang into Antenna Valley, which is a valley that sits about 10 miles west of Danang, and it was a feeder area into Denang itself. And the NVA and VC used to use these valleys to bring their men in from Laos and they feed him through the valleys and into the urban areas, which is, of course, what their ultimate objectives were. So we were in the valley to interrupt this flow of men that was coming through on their way into Danang. And we had plenty of targets of opportunity.

I mean, we'd sit on hilltops and we'd have some 50 binoculars and we'd call artillery in or air strikes. and if the targets were large enough, they'd even bring infantry units in to sweep an area. But this fella had the wrong attitude. And even when we had several contacts on our second, third, and fourth day, he wouldn't move us. He'd keep us in the same area. And so we'd had a major contact on the afternoon of the third day,

a point to point where we'd had about half a platoon walk in almost to our inside our perimeter. And it wasn't anybody's fault. It had just rained up there. I mean, it was in October's beginning of the rain season. And nobody heard these guys. It was a very common occurrence in Vietnam for that to happen. You'd be on a trail and suddenly you'd look up and 10 feet away would be a VC or NBA.

And you never heard them coming. And they didn't know you were there. And so these were really surprise offerings. this team, this group, this half of shoes, had walked right into us. We had up right there on the hilltop, but he wouldn't move us. He kept us there. Not only did he keep us there that afternoon, but he kept us there that night. And so the next day when we went down for our uplift, which was, as it turned out, the same insert point, he wouldn't even move us to another insert point on the side of the valley floor. We got we were going to get picked up exactly where we got dropped in.

So anybody with a grain of common sense could figure out what we were going to do. We were on this hilltop. We were sitting 300 yards above where we got picked up or where we got inserted. Hmm, maybe these guys are going to come down and get picked up the same place that got dropped off. So they set up an ambush along this one trail that was leading down. and damned if we didn't walk right into it. And they were waiting for us. They were about estimates where there were about 50 of them that had lined in an L-shaped ambush.

And there were 18 of us. And they caught us right in their gun sites from the kill zone. And I mean, we went down and we got pinned down there for the better part of five or six hours. I got hit almost immediately. from a guy in a tree who hit me from about 30 feet away. And he later got killed by one of our appointment, hitting him with a 12-gauge pump and blew him right out of that tree.

But they were spraying us from two sides. We couldn't move. We were absolutely pinned down. And we took several wounded there. And they finally got all the wounded medevaced out using these air-sea rescue hoists because we were in triple canopy so the chopper wasn't going to land. And once they got the wounded out, and they started clearing some of the other team out, there were only five guys, four guys left.

And it was getting last light. And they were only going to be able to make one more attempt. And then they're going to have to leave these guys in for the night. And if they'd left them and they'd been killed, there's no question about it. They would never survive to the morning. So they came up with the idea of taking all their equipment off, and they had about eight or nine pounds of C4 with them. So they set a five-minute delay and took off and had no equipment on them except their M-16s.

And they ran through about it. It couldn't have been more than a 10-yard break in the NVA lines. I don't know how they found it, but they ran right through it and right out into the open and got on this chopper. And it's like a movie because you could, I guess one guy told me, You could see the rounds picking this water up right behind them. And it was like something filmed out of an apocalypse now. The chopper got these guys up. And as they did, something like 80 or 90 NDA buzzed right on top of this huge pile of equipment

with this 10 pounds of C4 and it blew up just as they got there. and the bird dog, Army bird dog that was flying above and directing fire said that he saw people flying out like, they were like insects that had been blown out of a beehive. He said it was a damnedest thing he'd ever seen in his life. And they ended up in trees, you know, 50, 60 yards away. And it probably killed about 50 or 60 of the end of the end of the day. And that's how these guys actually broke contact and got out of their life. It was a hairy scene. How were you, you said you were injured, like, what was the extent of your injury or your injuries at that time?

The only cover I had when we had that contact, that was a really sickening feeling. You know, you're walking down. It's as quiet as the inside of a church. And suddenly there's this burst of fire in front of you. and you just know that you got trouble ahead of you. And I got hit maybe 15, 20 seconds after the initial burst of fire down. Our point had actually made contact. And this, the only cover I had was a boy, about four feet high.

It was a real intelligent place to go because a bullet's not going to go through a big open bush or anything, right? Bush is going to stop. There's no question that Bush would stop. I don't know what I was thinking. But I knelt behind this bush, and the next thing I knew, I was about six feet behind where I'd been in the bush. That bullet that hit me, it actually lifted me up and sent me about five or six feet through the air. The bullet hit me in the thigh, and it, I was kind of crouched down like a catcher, and the bullet sort of traveled up the thigh, hit me about midway up the thigh, went in until it ricocheted off. the femur, went under the femoral artery and came up about another four inches and then traveled

about four inches through the air, hit me in the stomach, then went in and spun off the hip and went through me and came out my back right near the spine. So it tanked me pretty well. I had these two big holes in my leg in a third and a fourth in my stomach in my back. So this guy, I mean, And this guy placed his shot really well. Yeah, but it also sounds as though you got really lucky. Like, I mean, the bullet was in proximity of a lot of very vital areas from scene proof. Yeah. It almost hit one of my boys.

I think it missed that by like an eighth of an inch. The surgeon said he'd never seen anybody lucky in his life in that respect. And it missed my spinal cord by about a quarter inch. So I mean, I was, when I was in the hospital at first med battalion, I'd just come out of surgery and I just came out of recovery and I felt this sort of thing scratching my back and I reached behind me and I'm in a shell casing, the brass shell casing that had worked its way out of the wound itself. And they'd already taped the bullet to my shoulder, the surgeon's head. But I still had pieces in me. And even now, if I go for a cat skin, whatever, they always see this bullet. bullet that's next to my spine back there. Wow. I really lucked out. It was an AK and it had, in fact, it was Armour Piercing, AK.

And why it didn't go all the way through me, I think, is because it hit my web belt and everything else and all kinds of equipment before it actually hit me. But you can see the black, or the, I guess he had a black tip on it. We had black tip on our armor piercing. I'm not sure what they had on the armor piercing. But that's, it turned out that's what it was. So how long did it take you to recover from that? I went through the surgery, initial surgery there.

I then got medevaced out to Clark Hospital in the Philippines. And I was there about four days, five days. And I had the worst pain in my stomach one morning. And the surgeon came in, a young guy, Air Force captain. and I told him, look, I can hardly breathe and it just hurts like hell to inhale. And he jammed his finger, two fingers into this bullet wound. I thought he was good. I thought I was prepared to scream, but it didn't hurt at all.

And all he did was pull out this infection. I mean, he said, oh, yeah, you've got peritinitis. And that's where the initial surgeons in Danang had missed a very, very small fragment that had penetrated. the intestine and I was getting a poisonous substance into my stomach and it was slowly poisoning me. Right. So they had to go back in over the same incisions at first time, which was a great deal of fun and relieved this this, this, this, this peritinitis. And so I came out of that. That was, that was unbelievably painful. I get met up back to the States. at Naval Hospital over in Bethesda and it gets infected again.

So I've got to have another surgical procedure once I'm there. And it's given me some issues off and on over the years. I get these blockages in the intestine because, you know, they cut away a lot of intestine. Yeah. To sew everything back together again. But, you know, you look at the alternative and you always say, well, can always be worse. Yeah. Yeah, right.

Now, at this point in time, I mean, you know, you were in a lot of pain. You'd undergone a lot of treatments. Were you at all rethinking your desire to be in the bush and be out there like hooking and jabbing? I've thought about that over the years. And I don't know, perhaps I was a little altruistic about things in those days. But I thought, you know, the Marines have put a lot of time and money into me. They trained me. They spent untold thousands of dollars to teach me Morse code. They sent me overseas. They sort of armed me and so on. Who knows how much money they've invested in,

in just little John Cronin. And all I gave them was seven weeks in the bush. I felt like I owed the Marines something. I own at least a bush trip, a full bush trip. So while I was at Bethesda recovering, and I was there for four months, I signed what's known as an administrative action form, an AA form, and I waived my overseas control date, which means I essentially volunteered to go back. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children.

That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. It's normal to feel uncertain about whether you're doing the right things to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today.

And it took about six months to wind its way through the maze at the headquarters, Marine Corps. but finally in July of 68, I got my orders back over there. And when I went, when I returned, darn if I didn't get to the same Butler building I had the first time around, it looked exactly the same. He had phantoms and Skyhawks and 1 30s and choppers and all kinds of stuff taken off from that airport. Laddest place I've ever been. But the same guy was there calling out the same orders for the same some of the same units.

And they said, we've got to bill it for third force recon of a quang tree, but we need a 2533. And there was my MOS again. Nobody else in the room had it. So I raised my hand for a few minutes, a full tour this time where I had, I ran 23 patrols with them until August of 69. and then I sort of rotate it back home. That's amazing. I got hit again, exactly one year to the day from when I got hit the first time. And this was a, we ambushed a group up near, Quaviet, which was right on the border with North Vietnam.

Very, look like the North Sahara, very open, old rubber plantation, old trench rubber plantation, kind of deserty, no jungle, just. all shot to pieces, palm trees. And the NBA used to infiltrate and exultrate men through this area because it was real easy to move through. And so we caught a squad of them that was headed back into North Vietnam one night. And it goes back to what we were talking about earlier. I mean, we killed, I mean, killed at least six of them. but we get a mortar from the army that was in a little perimeter not far from us they sent a 60 daylight a 60 flare up there was nothing there yeah these guys were killed almost in front of us

and somehow they pulled these bodies out and we saw a couple of pith helmets and that was it it was a it was a strangest thing you can imagine you know because you see these guys go down I mean, the guy I was with was using a shotgun, and I could see a guy leave his feet. He got hit squarely in the chest. There was nothing there. It was just spooky kind of business. Yeah. And then, so a year to the day, is that a year that you currently celebrate?

Is it a year? Is it a day that you stay in bed to make sure that nothing happens? Yeah, October 12th, 1967, and October 12th, 1967. in October 12th, 1968. And only about an hour apart. It was sort of uncanny. Yeah. The Chesty Puller, who was a very renowned Marine,

had his son almost killed the same night. He was down with one of the infantry battalions down outside of Nang. And he lost, this guy lost both his legs, same night I did. and he obviously retired from the Marines. But that was a, October was a bad month because it was, it was getting toward the end of the summer. It was getting toward the rainy seasons. So the NBA were pushing a lot of people up and out and back and forth into Vietnam. And up in that area, they used to bring them down by elephant.

All their supplies were loaded down to the DMZ by elephant. and then man-packed into South Vietnam. But if you were sitting in our base, you could actually see these elephant moving down these trails if you looked into North Vietnam, which was only a few Ks away. Yeah. Was it frustrating not being able to call air on those elephants?

I mean, you know. Yeah. Yeah, we weren't allowed to call strikes into North Vietnam. Yeah. Once they crossed the Benhigh River and got in the southern part, you could do that. But they were real cagey about that. They knew what our limits were.

And so they, they, they sort of waved this, almost waved this in front of our faces. Yeah. I mean, they had, they had forts over there where they were waving the NBA flag. Yeah. It was surreal. Yeah. And, I mean, they had a big fort over there with several hundred men.

And it just is huge NBA flag that was up on a pole. and it was almost like they were, you know, giving us the middle finger in that respect. John, I wanted to ask you about that picture in your book of the 500-pound tiger. Those tigers were some of the scariest creatures that roamed those jungles. There was so much food available for them, not with American bodies, but with NVA. and VC bodies that they no longer had to hunt. And they got a taste for human flesh, and that's what they looked for.

And I'm sure it was a lot easier to hunt humans than it was to hunt elk and whatever and bush pig and whatever else they went for. And that particular tiger had killed a marion. Marine a few nights before. This guy had just gotten married, as a matter of fact, and he just returned from leave at home. It was a sergeant and is with Third Force Recun. And he was with a team, I think it was a four-man team.

And that Tiger had come up on them in the middle of the night and come right into their little 360. He used to sleep like the spokes on a wheel. You know, you put your equipment in the middle. and you'd sleep to the point where you could touch one another. That's how closely aligned they were. And you always had a man on guard, of course, an hour on and then you wake somebody else up. But the fellow on guard didn't even hear this tiger

as he came up the trail, grabbed this sergeant through the chest and shoulder, and dragged him 200 yards down the trail, and they couldn't find him until the next morning. And it was a horrible thing. I mean, a guy was half eaten by that point. But they shot the tiger while he was still with this man. And that's a tiger they brought back and strung up that you see a photograph of in the book.

It's a male. And you're right. They weighed about something like 500 pounds. How did they find that tiger? It was there the next morning still eating this guy in the trail. It didn't move. and they came down the trail first light, and there he was. And they shot him as he was, as it came upon him.

Yeah, it was really sad. Did your patrols ever get stalked by tigers while you were out there? You know, once it did. I was with, I was with three other guys, and we were up in an area north of Charlie 2, a real thick jungle and a lot of elephant grass. And there were four of us. and we felt like we were being followed. It's just one of those things you kind of sense.

The noise would stop, would be really quiet, then it would be moving on, and stuff would start happening again, you know, in the air. You could hear the, you could hear jungle moving around you, you know, the birds and whatnot. And then you'd stop, and everything would stop with you. And he wondered, what on earth was doing this? Was there somebody behind us?

that these animals, these animals that were picking up. And so we'd set these ambushes up along these trails. And nobody ever walked into this ambush. It was really, really unreal. And the third night of experiencing this, we set into this 360, and we were an elephant grass that was about six or seven feet high. and I heard the loudest screech that you can possibly imagine. It was ear splitting and it was a tiger that had been following us.

And he was only about 20 feet away. And he, I think he was about to make a move and hit one of us inside this little perimeter. The guy I was with knew a bit about big game. I mean, he used to hunt big game and so on. And he said that he was pretty sure this thing was about to hit us. And he, after he roared, we all sort of fired. But he had run away by that point. But we could tell it was a tiger because he had urinated in the grass around us to mark territory.

And as I mentioned in the book, it smelled like movie popcorn. Most distinct odor you've ever smelled just like buttered popcorn. and when you came across that odor, you knew that a tiger was there, and he, it was a male, and he was marking, he was marking his turf outlining exactly what his hunting grounds were. And we happened to be evidently right in the middle of his hunting grounds. Really? Yeah. And that's why he had been tracking us.

That's one thing you do not expect when you go into combat is that in addition to the enemies, you have to worry about tigers. Not only tigers, my friend, but you had snakes over there. They called two-stepers, which were like crates. They wouldn't bite you. They chew through the soft tissue in your hand or so when you were asleep. So you never even knew you were being bitten. And they could kill you in that way.

you had Bubonic plague same plague that killed one-third of Europe back in what 13th century that came off of rats the rats were the size of small cats and if you were asleep at night

in some of these base camps and you happen to drop food on you these rats would come up and they would get on your chest whatever and eat this food and sometimes he right through your uniform. They were huge. They had a lot of problems with that up at Kaysan. Army had a lot of problems with that down at Choochee and other places like that where they had

these big bases and where you had food that didn't quite get buried the way it should get. And so you really had to watch out for plague. We had, I think there was something like 15 or 20 men who died over there from plague, even though you got shots before you left. a lot of hepatitis. You get hepatitis really easily from dirty needles, which some guys, you know, would get when they go into the bills. They just, they were just stupid about that kind of thing, mainline and heroin and so on. And you get hepatitis from really bad water. There were so many things that you could get. There were two types of malaria. was the mountain regular malaria and both could kill you. Just all kinds of little critters you had to watch out for and diseases too. You had to take care of yourself and be smart about it. Yeah.

And I mean, being that you were in a jungle environment and the temperature and the long patrols and probably even back at basis sometimes, it's a lack of resources. I mean, was it tough to maintain hygiene and to be care of yourself? and things like that. In the, this same woman I told you about in church had seen, I saw her again between tours. And she wanted to know if we boys were looked after when we were out in the jungle. And were we able to take showers out there?

And I said, no, ma'am, we can't get showers. We have to live out there. She said, do you mean you can go days without a shower? They don't give you boys showers? I said, well, no, ma'am, not when we're in the jungle. She said, the bathroom. Where do you go to the bathroom? I said, well, we go in the jungle.

She said, they don't have toilets for you out there? What kind of place is this? Why aren't they taking care of you? What about the food? Is it any good? I said, well, we eat, we canned food. they don't have they don't have hot food for you out there she was as sweet as they come but absolutely clueless sure so we'd get back to the rear area and we would have these things but

you know honestly Dave when you get into the mess hall the marine mess halls anyway you'd have stuff like powdered ice cream right and powdered eggs which were which were green like grass. It was most awful stuff you could possibly imagine. It was just awful. I would try to sneak over to the Army mess over with the 25th infantry

and they'd let me in a lot of times. Best training I ever had was down with special forces when I was in the Trang. I was down there for a month in 68 and we went into the Air Force mess hall when we were down there. It was like walking into a D.C. restaurant. It was air-conditioned.

It was the best food I've ever had since I was in a service. Anyway, the food back there at Recon was not anything to talk about. Yeah. Now, how was Recon set up that? Because you mentioned you're going from Recon to Force Recon. Like, how was Recon set up at that time? What were the, aside from the team sizes, you know, recon going out in larger teams, was there a difference in their?

missions was, there a difference in their focus? Was there a difference in their training? Like, why was force, force, force, and recon, battalion, and battalion recone? It always irritated the guys in battalion that we had extras in force that they didn't get. For example, in force, if you wanted to go to jump school or you wanted to go to school, these quotas came up about once every two months, and they were down in the Philippines, and you'd get a month off for this kind of training. So this was highly sought after. The guys in the battalion didn't have these opportunities. A lot of these guys had just sort of been drafted out of infantry units because Recon

needed to fill its ranks, and they didn't get any specialized training. Team sizes were a little larger. They'd often work in eight, nine-man teams. as I said, we'd go down to four, three and four men teams. The missions were a little different too. We were sent out on snatches a lot of times. They didn't go in for that. They did almost strictly patrolling, but we'd have specialized stuff.

They might want us to take a bridge out every now and then, or a minor road, or as I said, try to pull a snatches. try to pull a snatch off with some of these units. You could get in trouble doing that. And if you weren't smart about it, you had to be real careful about who you hit out there because you could see a small team come by you,

three and four men. I think it's a perfect opportunity to pull somebody out. But then you wait three minutes, and you find out just a point element for a platoon or a company. And then you're in real trouble if you make a move. and don't, and, you know, don't survey the territory before you. So how would you conduct a snatch operation? Was that something that they had to basically invent the TTP or the tactics for while they were in country?

Or was it something that somebody had been able to train them on? Yeah, they, you pretty much, you pretty much self-taught on that. There was no real training for it. There were guys who had done a lot of that. I went on two of those, and we were successful on one of them. One of them, we weren't. But generally speaking, the NBA would either walk in small or large groups. There was nothing sort of in between.

And if you saw a four-man group coming down, and they had their rifles over their shoulders, and they had pots and pans clanging, which they did because they felt like they owned the area, you could pretty much guarantee that these guys are by themselves, and that they weren't, they were just going from A to B. If you had guys with their weapons down and they might have been looking around, they were probably point for a larger unit. So you had to stay away from them. But the loose gooses, if you could identify them, you could see them.

You might be able to get out of the trail in front of them and behind them and cut off both avenues and then tell them to drop their weapons. They knew you wouldn't have to speak Vietnamese to get that done. And then if you're fortunate, you could get all four, but sometimes they wanted to put up an argument

and, you know, the shooting would start, and you might get one of them. Yeah. That way. It happened. Yeah. And were they,

so they weren't really designated snatches so might, like, targeted by more sort of random go out and go bring us some guys. Exactly, exactly. These were targets opportunity. They would say, if you can do it, go ahead. You rarely get a dedicated snatch.

But yeah, if you had a chance at it, it was, you know, you take it. But you just had to be so careful with this stuff. I write in the book about a guy named Graves. Lieutenant Graves, first lieutenant, who tried to pull this off and made the mistake I told you about a moment ago.

He hit a four or five man element that he wanted to pull a snatch on, but instead of pulling the snatch, he just shot him without looking at terrain anywhere around him.

And it turned out that there was a battalion about 200 yards behind these guys. And these Marines, he was in an eight-man team, no, six-man team, these guys got surrounded so quickly that there was no way out. He ended up getting himself killed along with four of his three or four of his teammates, plus a chopper got shot down, a slick got shot down everybody on board was killed plus one of the reactionary forces from bravo one three i think it was he was killed and all because this guy didn't have sense enough to wait it out and figure out what the hell his surroundings were and who he was dealing with

he'd come over he'd been holding in force for something like a month this is like his third patrol and it was uh ended up getting a medal of honor of for it, but I always thought it was, and the guys that were over there thought this was just misplaced. And the theory wasn't, they wanted this whole thing to go away, and that was one way to do it. That's really controversial to say, John, but I think that I'm just going to say, I don't know about that specific case you're talking about, but I'll say that the military awards the Medal of Honor in some instances to gloss over mistakes. question about it and i i don't i don't hold anything against any medal of honor recipient out there i don't want people to think that that you know they engaged in real acts of valor um uh in the war

that i served in uh just speaking towards that um but the military as an institution has some uh i guess ulterior motives and how they go about awarding the medal of honor at times Well, I couldn't agree with you more. And this was a perfect example of this where this officer had blown it in three or four different ways. And the battalion commander just sort of threw up his hands and said, we can't let this sort of thing, the real story get out. Because it's just, it's too embarrassing. He made too many mistakes. So we're going to rewrite this and that's what happened.

I know this goes against the grain. And if there were Marines from headquarters, Marine Corps or somebody from the official, you know, websites who monitor these medals of honor and these awards, they're probably, I'm sure they disagree with me, but I'm telling you, I spoke with enough guys in that company over the last few years to know that what I'm telling you is exactly what happened. John, could you talk to us a little bit about coming back? home from Vietnam and how this wild-ass idea got into your head that you were going to head over to Africa. We're going to go back for more.

Yeah, I know. As I indicated earlier, I never graduated from college the first time around. So I felt, you know, this is, in those days, I had the idea that I wanted to make the Marines a career. And if I were going to do that as an officer, I would, of course, need a degree. It wasn't imperative, but it certainly would have helped my chances for advancement. And so I, in 1969, as I got back, I'd done three years enlisted, and I, the Citadel, the military college down in South Carolina, had a program for veteran students where you, if you had an honorable discharge, and you could show you my D-D214s with an honorable discharge, they would allow you entry into their veterans program.

You didn't have to produce any college transcripts. They figured if you'd done your honorable service, that was enough for them. It was a really generous program that they'd opened up. And so in 1970, that's what I did. There were about 300 of us down there at the time in this sort of inaugural class. And I spent the next three years taking courses,

six courses of semester and so on, so I could graduate in three years. once I did I got my commission as a second lieutenant and I went back in the infantry and I was down at Lejeune for most of the time a couple of floats that I went on but by the time my commission ended in 1976 I'd been offered a couple of companies by lieutenant colonels they decided that I might be the kind of material that could command a you know a company of theirs but I thought it was it was a kind of a dry run in those days. The war was over. I didn't want to go on maneuvers. I didn't want to go on floats the rest of my life. I wanted to do something more. And I was 29 years old. And I thought, you know, there's, I'm an idiot for doing this, but I'd like to, I'm going to try to find a way to go to the bush. And as that idea struck me, Rhodesia became a fairly hot topic in the news.

This was in 1976 now. The ward had been going over there on there for eight years by that point, but it was really starting to heat up. And I've been reading about it. I knew some people who had done research over there, and academic research, and I thought, give it a shot. So I wrote to their officers,

from their headquarters, a place called King George's Six Barracks in Salisbury, Redisian. And I got a reply and said, you know, we don't guarantee you anything, but come on over here. Just prove that you did what you did, and we'll take a look at you. So I flew over there, and August of 76, and I went through the interviews, and they said, okay, we'll take you in as the same rank you are now as person tenant, and we'll send you to you to whatever unit you want to go to. So I chose the Redisian Light Infantry because it was a little more infantry oriented by its very name. Plus they were doing something called Fire Force, which was quick insert contacts that were going in on certifiable targets. And I thought, this sounds like

something I'd like to do. John, were you airborne from being in force recon? I got hit. I got hit. I got hit before both schools. I got to I was I was played both scuba and jump school and both times I got hit a week before I was I was supposed to go to those two schools. So I had to wait until I got to Rhodesia to get jump qualified and they sent me down to south Africa town called Blumfontein up in the north. And if you ever want to go to hell on earth, you go to bloomfinery, you go to bloomfin contained South Africa. It is one dead rock town. There's there's nothing going on. Plus they don't speak English to you because they think, you know, you're not American, but they think you're English. And they hate the English anyway. A lot of South Africans do. So they wouldn't, I'd talk to an English and they'd speak to me in Afrikaans until they found out I was American and they say, oh, you're not English. And then they reply in English. So I was down there for three, three weeks of jump school. And I went back up to Rhodesia. And that's when we got para qualified

for Fire Force because you had to be power qualified to get into that unit. So I mean, this is all like so surreal to think about now, John. I mean, as, you know, this was before my time, of course, but I mean, I don't know what you think when you look back on it, but the fact that you were able to hop on a commercial airplane, fly to Rhodesia, you say, hey, I'm a Vietnam vet. Can I serve your airborne infantry unit and go to war and they looked at your paperwork and interviewed you. Yeah, yeah, sure, John, you'd be a lieutenant. You just got to go get airborne qualified and, you know. That's how it worked. It sounds ridiculous, but it was very, very informal in those days. And they wanted to make sure you were who you said you were. And so when I went through the interview,

it was with a board of about 10 field grade officers. They were all made. and above and they asked me a lot of questions about tactics what I would do in this situation what I would do in a situation like that and how would I act here and so on and that interview lasted about an hour and a half and once they were convinced that I had some idea about how to react on fire. It was only then that they offered the commission, but they did it right on the spot. And I mean, I went in as nobody,

and I came out of a first lieutenant. And they gave me my rank right there. They call them slip-ons, but you put your rank on your shoulder. And then three days later, I was with the Radizadezalite infantry, and two days after that, I was out on fire force.

Wow. It's amazing. Wasted no time at all. And I went into the bush. So I was there five days, and I was out on my first fire force mission. And we got in a heavy contact that night. So it was less than a week. And that's, as I said, they were informal. They expected you to perform, particularly as an officer.

I didn't lead any unit in those days because I was new. I didn't know the ropes. And they put me under a sergeant for my first. for my first operational deployment of a month. And once I finished that, and I got the O.K from the sergeant, he made the commander, who was a major, then put me in charge of one of his troops, which was a 30-man unit.

And I took over that as a troop officer. So they had an informal way of sort of commissioning you, and then they had an informal way of testing you. And you had to pass these little drills. Nobody told you what they were, but they had their way of sort of filtering out the goobers. Why do you think that was, as opposed to something more formal? Is it because they needed people,

but they also needed to vet them, that they didn't have these long, formal sort of selection type of thing? Exactly. exactly. They were hurting for men, but they weren't going to take any guy off the street. And I say that they made a mistake once where they took some French nationals. And some of these guys had been with the Foreign Legion and some had been just with the French army and some were just French nationals who wanted to join. And it was a tremendous mistake. These guys were, these guys were terrible. They'd get ambushed on the way to the PX or something.

like that. I mean, they were just, they were dreadful. They were just dreadful. So they, they, they did that one experiment and they never went back to that at all. And after that, they, they were pretty good in the way they filtered out people. Yeah. Very interesting. Go ahead, Jack. Well, I mean, can we talk a little bit about fire force missions and their whole concept of vertical envelopment that, you know, the, the listeners may not be familiar with and sort of your experiences, I mean, going out on combat jumps with these guys out in the African bush. I mean, it's pretty incredible. The type of mission you're talking about, I think, was adopted by the Redisians from the Americans

who used to have what they called reactionary forces, where there would always be a group. the Army started this, and the Marines sort of followed suit, where these patrols would be out there, but there would always be a force on standby at a ready pad, and usually it'd be a platoon or so, so that if any unit got into trouble, these guys would jump on these choppers, and they would go right out into the bush to help these Army and Marine units. And this is what I was talking about with Graves, a few minutes ago. It was a ready team. It was a ready pad team from, from a Bravo First Battalion, Third Marines. Well, fire force was much like that. The concept was developed around the

Americans where we would go out as a commando, which was about 100 men, 80 men, 90 men, 100 men, and we would go to these fire force bases, which were sprinkled throughout the country. There were about half a dozen of them, mostly on the eastern border with Mozambique. And we would go is a commando and we would live in these uh sometimes they were permanent hooches and sometimes we had these big tents we'd set up and then the air force would station helicopters there with us it'd be a gun ship called a k-car or a kill car and then there would be uh two or three g cars or general purpose cars which were troop carriers and that would be if you had a k car in three gs would be

one plus three k car and four gs one plus four but usually the most five five force continues had about a one plus three or one plus four and so there would be groups out in the bush whose job it was to locate teams or sections of guerrillas and this is what slew scouts did a lot of and they'd be an op and they would watch these areas and if they saw movement down there in crawl lines which are village lines or along river beds or whatever they would call our fire force headquarters, which was, as I said, sprinkled through several bases along the eastern border. We would then run to our choppers. The commando commander, who was usually a major, would get into the K-car, where you'd have a pilot and a door gunner, and he was on a 20-millimeter

cabin, and the three of them would take off, and then you'd have these G-cars follow. And they had a pilot, a gunner with twin 30s, and then you could put a four-man stick in there. So these weren't large units, but they were, we weren't fighting large units over there. It wasn't like the NBA where they'd walk around, you know, company battalion size formations. These guys usually worked in sections in Rhodesia, about eight men, 10 men, somewhere in there. So our contingents were just fine to combat these groups of guerrillas. And then we would fly and the team that was in OP would see us coming in. We'd always come in very, very low, right off the deck.

So we wouldn't give, you know, they'd follow riverbeds or whatever. So they wouldn't reveal by sound, you know, that we were approaching. And then about four or five hundred meters out, this K car would pull up into an orbit of 700 feet. And we G cars would stay behind, a few Ks up. and the OP would talk him over the target. And when we thought we were on the target, the K-car thought it was on target. It'd throw a red smoke out,

and the O-P would say, right, they're right in there, or 200 meters north or west, whatever. And so the K-car would go over there and throw another smoke out. And once they pinned this target down, then the G-cars would come on station, and the Army commander in the K-car would say, all right, I want this stop over here. These four main groups are called stops.

I want that stop there. I want that stop there. And so the pilot in the K-car would talk the pilots from the G-cars into the location. Once this army troops are on the ground, the whole operation would be taken over by the Army commander who was sitting in the K-car, and he would move these stops around. Now, the way Dave brought up a little earlier about the parrots, we could run 18 Paris in a C-1-3rd in a Dakota. So we flew, we didn't have the 130s. The South Africans had those. All we had were the, we were the, the, the, the, the, the, the 47s. So we'd put 18 men in those. And generally what happened is those men would drop out in a, in a line. I mean, you're not

going to drop Paris in a circle. You're going to drop them in a straight line. So they would go down and they would be in a straight line. And then you'd have the G-Car men who, who had been in a sort of a semi-circle. So what you'd have is basically a half-circle. And the Paris would then sweep in a straight line towards these G-car stops and push these gorillas into these stops. And the concept worked beautifully. If we knew where these guerrillas were, we could get them about 80% of the time.

Really? John, for the people who maybe, because not all of our viewers are massive, like, military history, you know, Boston and whatnot, can you tell us a little bit about Rhodesia, like, what was going on and why was it flaring up? Who were they fighting? And what was the draw? Because there were a lot of people going to Rhodesia to help and things like that. So, sort of can you give us that information? That country back in 1890 was a British protectorate, and it was a mining country. There was a tremendous amount of gold in that area, and that's what drew European settlers there, particularly British settlers. And so eventually it became a British colony. And by the time I got there in 76, there were about 250,000 whites who are what they called Europeans there. And there were 6 million African nationals who lived in the country. And the country was not only a mining country because they, I mean, they mined a lot of tin, gold, magnesium, manganese.

But the big thing they mined was chromium, which, used for stainless steel. It hardened steel. So that was a huge, huge export commodity, as was tobacco and tea and beef. All of these things were highly sought after in Europe and even the United States. But the problem that the Redisians had is they weren't sharing power. The Europeans came in. They dominated the political situation there. The guns. government and they were not particularly smart in how they apportioned power because they didn't allow African nationals to share in the power arrangement. And so it irritated, as it should have, a lot of African nationalists. And they took up arms. And by the late 1960s, this objection

to white domination took the form of armed resistance. And that's really when the war began, was 1968. And so when I got there eight years later, this opposition from two separate guerrilla armies, one based on one tribe and one based on the other, was well formed and the Redisians were fighting for their life. The war was costing them about a million dollars a day to prosecute, it doesn't sound like much to us.

But for a small country back then, it was a chunk of change. And what they didn't have was manpower. They could only draw from this European community. And they had some African soldiers. They had a couple of battalions of Africans who volunteered. But by drafting these whites into the security forces, what they were doing is they were taking them out of the economy.

And it really hurt their economy a lot. And so they needed people from abroad to come over there and supplement these Army and Air Force units, but mostly Army units. And that is why they were so receptive to people like me who volunteered to go over there. This situation could have been easily remedied if the Europeans and the whites that were controlling power

had the sense enough to pick African nationalists who were moderates and bring them into the government and say, let's share. power. It can be easily done. And we can avoid this bloodshed. But you had this real hardcore white supremacist right-wing particle of people who had a strong political background who would not allow the government to make such concessions. And that is what spelled defeat ultimately for the Redisian government. They just, they simply wouldn't compromise. when they had the chance to, and there were black nationalists who were willing to compromise,

and they let the chance go. That was the official policy that Ian Smith government was to form a multiracial government. But what do you think happened there? They weren't able to act fast enough and implement it? He was actually in talks with Joshua and Como as early as 1976. and he had a chance to remedy this by 78. He could have brought in Como and his army, which were called the Zipras,

and they were from the Indebele tribal region, he could have brought them out of the war and taken them completely out so that the government would have been left with only one guerrilla army to fight. But the problem was there were elements from his own guerrilla, group called Zipra, which ended up shooting down two Viscount passenger aircraft.

And they, in one, they shot it down and there were several survivors who came out. In the second one, they shot it down and the Zipra guerrillas came down and they murdered everybody, all the survivors. Once that happened, that was in 78, I think it was late 78. that spelled the end of any compromise that whites would permit Smith to make. And from then on, he had no chance, whatever, to reach any sort of political compromise with in Como or anybody else. But there was always that hardcore right wing that objected to the government talking to anybody. They just couldn't see the logic of bringing people into the government who were not going to request that the whites cut their throats.

And Smith was all for that. He was a moderate, really right to the court. But by 78, his back had been pushed against the wall by this element. And he was not able to compromise anymore. Well, it sounds like not only with the element, but also with the action. of some of the guerrilla forces that, you know, once they start, once you start taking down airliners, how do you negotiate, like, how do you bring those people on, even with the international community looking, you know, so it, you know, it starts out bad on one side,

and then all of a sudden it's bad on both sides, and then where is the middle ground at that point? That's right. You know, what was really interesting was that there's a common perception that the guerrillas were all good, and the European community and the Redisian Army was all bad. There were a couple of writers for some major newspapers, one with the Washington Post and one of the New York Times. I knew them both. I'm not going to mention their names,

but I knew these journalists, and they were the major correspondence for both of those papers in Rhodesia at the time. And funny thing was, I met them when I was in Beirut, a few years later, very small community. Yeah. But both of them wrote major articles in their papers that said, look, you don't have all the good guys on the side of the guerrillas. Believe me, you've got some real terrorists there, some people who are, who are unbelievably cruel and who want nothing but to murder every European, they can get there.

hands on. Let me tell you, there are definitely two sides of this war. And you need to consider that when you weigh what the Rhodesian government has done. I'm not saying the weight of being politically correct is all on the side of the guerrillas. But believe me, the whites have an argument where let's doing this with a compromise. And some of the black nationalists do not want to do this at all. Isn't the two sides idea even sort of a kind of a simplistic 30,000 view of it because, you know, there's out or 30,000 foot view of it because then you have you tribal considerations, right?

And it's not like the tribes are always in harmony either, you know, that if you let one tribe in, that's not necessarily going to, that's not going to make other tribes necessarily happy, just simply because, you know, now there's parity in skin color or whatever. Precisely. Precisely. In fact, that's really a good point because one of the things the Rhodesian government counted on was these tribes and the animosity they held towards one another. You had the Indebeli, which was run by Joshua Como,

and they occupied the western part of the country, and they composed about 20% of the average. African population. The other 80% of the African population was Shona, is Shona, and that was what Robert Mugabe commanded as the civilian leader of that. Those were known as Zanla. And those two tribes did not then and do not now care for one another, one iota. Right. And in the Saloo Scouts, if you ever found a group where people had to cooperate with one another, it would have been the Slu Scouts. But even there, we had to be careful about mixing Shona and Indebeli. In my group, two groups, we had 80 men, almost 90 men.

89 of those men were Shona. We had one Indebelli in that group. It was a sergeant. Hell of a good guy. But those people agreed to sort of disagree. They weren't friends, but he was a sergeant, and they made themselves get along. But there was a little animosity there. But that was on our level.

You imagine what it was like in the bush. Very often, those two groups would fight one another rather than go attack a white unit. Right. And there was tremendous infighting. among the Zanla and the Zipra guerrilla armies. I think that's one of the things that Americans and Westhards in general do not appreciate in tribal societies is the depth of animosity and the length and the year, like hundreds of years of animosity. And, you know, it's similar to in Iraq, the Sunni-Sheas split, you know, the tribal split, especially in Afghanistan, the tribe. double splits, there had been blood feuds, Hatfield and McCoy feuds going on, you know,

for hundreds of years between two villages on the opposite side of, you know, a mountain range or whatever. And the atrocities that they would bring upon each other were incredible, you know, an abhorrent, you know. Well, there was plenty of that in Redisian. And in fact, the combined operations headquarters counted on. those two armies fighting one another in the area called Midlands where they actually where they actually shared a border and in that area that sort of split the country you had the the end of belly on the western side and the Shona on the eastern side we didn't have to worry about security matters there because those

two guys those two groups were always going at it and they were not bothering the white farmers in those areas yeah now in the deeper parts of the country, yeah, they were, but not along the border area between those two groups. And they, when I say they'd go after one another, I mean, they would, these were organized battles that they would have against one another. And it lasted throughout the war, and it was particularly prevalent after the war ended in 1980, when you had Mugabe take his Zanla-oriented army which was being advised by North Korea in those days, and they went into Matabili land,

and they murdered 30,000 Ndebelis. Yeah. Men, women and children. We're talking about, yeah. Yeah, we're not talking about, yeah. No, no, no. They erased whole villages down there in Matabili land. So, John, because that was a question I was going to ask you,

but you brought it up. You know, you talk about North Korea. What were the external factors and what were the motivations, Was it economic? Was it political? Because obviously these two tribes were not necessarily, and other black nationals, were not necessarily all acting without the aid,

the advising, you know, the advisory and things like that of other countries or other entities. So what were the different factors that were feeding into this conflict? The communist powers, felt this was a perfect opportunity to make their presence known in a developing country. And Africa was fertile ground for these competitors back in the 1970s and 1980s. And so they chose sides.

The Chinese ended up supporting Mugabe and Zanla. And in the big camps in Mozambique, you found. A lot of Chinese and they would take groups that had aptitude for this sort of thing, and they would ship them off to camps in Tanzania or Vietnam or more likely than not into China itself. And they would train them in various logistics and tactics. But the point you make that right there is they were really ideologically pure. much pure than the Russians were. And so a lot of the training of the guerrillas who were sent to China was ideological.

A lot of self-criticism sessions dating back from the Mao era. And they came back, a lot of these section commanders and these political commissaries, came back thoroughly indoctrinated in Chinese communism. The Russians, on the other hand, were the ones that helped the Zipra, Mukomo's people. and they had their camps built up in Zambia, FC camp and so on F2. And these big camps had Russians and they also had Cuban advisors up there. And if you were selected for further indoctrination, you might well be sent to Egypt or Libya or right back to Russia itself. And you would be trained in much the same way that the Chinese trained their people, small unit tactics, crew served.

weapons, medicine, some were even taken and trained as pilots, although none ever flew in the war. They were, they did fly in Russia. They were a handful that did that. And then once they had done their training, it's been six months or so in these countries, they would then be returned to Russia, excuse me, to Redidja. Now, the interesting thing was, now I won't belabor this topic, But the really interesting thing was that the people, we captured a lot from both sides. The Zipra people who went to Moscow said that there was a tremendous amount of racism that went on there from Russians who denigrated these Africans who had come up there to train. He said it was a terrible, terrible problem.

But in China, absolutely not the case at all. the Chinese people treated these African nationalists with a tremendous amount of respect, and they never had issues with any sort of racist content at all. That's interesting. And felt like they were really appreciated while they were in training in China. Now, John, I was wondering if you could tell us about the Fire Force mission you were on, where you came face to face with another very interesting American. over there, Bob McKenzie.

Yeah, yeah. Bob was with the, was with the fourth division in Vietnam. He was an Army Corporal, Fourth Infantry Division. Was that the Audi-Mercre division?

That I'm not sure of. I don't know. I don't know. It doesn't matter. Anyway, he got shot really bad, with a by an NVA who was using an M16 of all things. They got hit three or four times in the chest, almost got killed. And he went to Viet, went to Rhodesia in 1971, or late 71, early 72,

and got in from almost the ground floor and joined the Special Air Service, went through their selection, and then went through the commissioning process and became an officer. And when I met him in 1976, he was by then a captain. And he had a very good reputation over there, even at that time. And when I did meet him, as soon as I arrived, he had already been awarded a bronze cross of Rhodesia, which was equivalent to about a silver star.

And he'd been awarded a silver cross of Rhodesia, which was equivalent to about a Navy cross or a Distinguished Service Cross. So he had a tremendous combat reputation. And he was considered one of the real stars of, you might say, the American forces in Rhodesia at the time. And I worked with him on a couple of external operations, one in Mozambique, another one in Zambia. And he and I were good friends. I knew him really well, and I always liked Bob. I got along with him beautifully and our people worked together pretty well.

He was quite a guy. I mean, after Rhodesia, he worked in some of the, what, Transke or Siske down into South Africa, some of the, what they were, you know, they were trying to brand as black homelands. It was basically the apartheid government trying to hold on to power. But, I mean, Bob was down there. And then he was in what, he died in Sierra Leone in 2000, right? That's correct. Yeah, he was down in Transkech.

Guy, and he worked actually for Colonel Ron Reed Daley, who was the commander officer of Slew Scouts, who was working as a private security consultant at the time in Transkeye. And a lot of ex-Sloos scouts and a lot of ex-SAS, excuse me, went down there, and we're working with him in that capacity. Yeah, Tim. I'm sorry? And then you're right. He went up to Sierra Leone and he was with another American and they were with Sierra Leone army forces that got ambushed by guerrillas up there and he and this American got killed at the same time. I mean, allegedly he was eaten by cannibals, which is not so far flung considering I think it was the

that got them. That's correct. There is an enduring practice. This was particularly prevalent in the 1960s when you had the sort of age of revolution in Africa where eating part of your enemy, particularly his heart, gave you his power and his bravery and his ability to fight. And this is, I suspect what was behind that incident up in Sierra Leone. That would be my guess.

So going back to your own experiences in Rhodesia, I'd really like to hear about how, I mean, we could talk about the RLI and some of these, I'd love to talk about these external operations also. But I think, for the sake of time, maybe we can have you back on again sometimes. I would like to talk about how you transitioned from the RLI over to the Sulu Scouts, which was like one of the most unique units that's in contemporary military history for sure.

I had been with the RLI for about a little over not quite two years, and there was a change in commanders. We lost major Jeremy Strong. He went to headquarters. He became a lieutenant colonel. We had another fellow come in, Ian Buttonshaw, but he broke his hip down in South Africa jumping. And then we had a third guy come in and I didn't get along with it all. He later got killed in a fire force incident.

But he and I were not on the same page from day one. And there was no way that he and I were going to tolerate one another in the RLI. So I ended up going to mid-operations, mid-ops in Guelo, which is right, sort of a smack in the middle of the country. Picture Rhodesia is about the size of Montana. And then pick the center of Montana, and that's pretty much where this town was. And I went there as an intelligence officer. And I stayed there about four or five months, and I figured, I've got two years left to do, 18 months left to do. in this, I'm on a short service contract, there's no way I'm going to spend my time in a,

in a bedroom community that's full of a bunch of cattle ranchers. And there's just nothing happening here. And so I called a friend of mine who was in Slew Scouts that commanded one of the, one of the companies over there, one of the groups, Richie Passportes, and I said, I want to come across. What can I do? And he said, well, as, luck would have it. There's a selection that is going off in about three weeks. And if you want to go on it, you tell me right now and I'll put your name on it. And I said, put me on. So I trained. My colonel down there in Wellow was really kind enough to allow me some time off in the afternoons where I could train. So I did a lot of running with a sandbag because they had quite a bit of that

selection. I did a lot of rope climbing, that sort of thing. And in September, October of 78, I went up to Lake Kariba, which is on the Zambian border, and I started their selection process, which was about a two-week ordeal. I can't use any other noun for that, that involved running and log rolling on your stomach and rope climbs and no food for the first four days and more running and sit-ups with this 90-pound maquani log and it was it was just brutal and plus this was in i said october this is in november now of 78 which was so It's the middle of the summer in the southern hemisphere. It was just unbelievably hot.

And so we didn't have any food. We weren't allowed any food for the first four or four and a half days, but they'd give us water. And we dropped from 93 on my selection to 20, just like that in the space of a few days. And so that was about a week of that really grueling training. and now I was a captain by that point and what they would do, there were about four or five officers left at that point.

Only two of us ended up making it. But what they would do is they would test the officers a lot differently than they would test the enlisted because they would give us little problems at night when we were absolutely exhausted and say, all right, you're going to move into this ambush site. You've got 15 men.

I'll give you 10 minutes to make your plan how are you going to do it? Well, you'd say, okay, here's a L shape in the road. I'm going to put an early warning team 100 meters down here, two men down here. I'm going to put another early warning team 200 meters on this end. I'm going to put my men here. I'm going to put my machine gun or RPD, which we were carrying in.

I'll put that here, blah, blah, blah, and, you know, I'll just myself. So you had to set this sort of thing up. So they'd give you these little problems for the officers and see how they handle them. And then they would mentally grade you on this. And as I said, there was one other officer and I who sort of passed these tests. And then for the last six days, seven days on the course, we would do the endurance march, where they put 55 pounds of rocks in your pack. They pay them so you can't dump them out and pick up, you know, rocks.

later on, which some guys make these things blue or black, whatever. And then at the end of the selection, they'd look and make sure you had 55 pounds of rocks in your pack. And we ended up walking about 20Ks a day, up the hills and down the hills and up the hills and down the hills. And they'd give us a little bit of Bill Tong, which was a stripped hippo,

maybe stripped kudu. it was like it was just like a dried like Bill Tom right now it's sort of like beef turkey right like beef turkey exactly exactly so it'd be

as I said it might be Kudu or a word hog or something like that and they'd give us a little bit of mealy meal which we could use to make a kind of a bread paste and that was it and they'd give us a little bit every day and then we walked up this mountain

at the end and back down again And if we passed all of that, we would have made selection. So some courses only passed about six or seven percent. Others passed maybe 15, 18 percent. And once you were in, you would then go on what they call a dark phase, where you now learn how they operate with these guerrillas and with the pseudo teams. And they would bring in operators. These are African operators.

A lot of them had been former guerrillas themselves. And they would teach us the mechanics of moving at night with these gorillas and making contact with other teams at night and so on. So once I finished all that, I was given my colors. I was given the stable belt and the beret. And then I went to a group as a second in command of one of the three groups in Slew Scouts. That's amazing. Before we go on with your time of the Sluo Scouts, I want to, I am sorry to kind of roll things back. We have some people that have asked some questions and donated, and I want to make sure we get to them.

And some of these are going to go back to earlier in the conversation. Thank you, Andrew. Andrew, I want to know at the Citadel, were you a classmate of James Rigney Jr.? He was the author, Robert Jordan. I know Robert Jordan was the Citadel person. I know the name. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, I know the name. I don't think he was in my class. I graduated in 72. In fact, I graduated at an odd time in December of 72 between semesters. I don't think he was in my class. Remember, I wasn't wearing a uniform then. I wasn't in the four cadets. I was a civilian there.

So I didn't, you know, go through any battalion and marching and any of that stuff. So I knew only a few people there, but I'm almost certain he was not in my class at the time. Yeah. Alejandro, thank you very much. I saw that you, Alejandro, are doing it twice to ask a question. He's a great interview. I want to say it's amazing what you guys were able to do and achieve. He's talking about you guys in, you know, in Rhodesia. Not you, not what you can achieve, not what you're achieving now? No, no, no. Our achievement is limited to getting people like you on our show. That's what's amazing. But yeah, he's just, you know, giving the limitations of what Rhodesia has.

So those were those were the two questions that come up. I just curious, these, these Africans that were in the Seleu Scouts and you said that had been, you know, some of them had been part of these black nationalist tribal communist forces, whatever. What was their change? Why did they come, why did they come over? A lot of them got absolutely fed up and completely. disenchanted with what their armies were trying to accomplish. They saw the illogic of it. They didn't like that they were, these armies were actually killing a lot of Africans. And it happened a lot. They would go through villages and they would commit these disciplined murders where they would just pick out an African at random during one of these night meetings and accuse him of cooperating with the security forces and then and murder him right there on the spot and they would bayonetting take a half an hour, three quarters an hour to bayonet this guy to death or cut his hands off or cut his tongue out.

Just senseless, senseless cruelty just to prove that they knew that they had special medicine, mootie, they called it, and that they could discern that these people were cooperating with the enemy. in fact, there was just some poor guy who'd been fingered by a neighbor of his with a blood feud that you were talking about that went back years. Right. And had said, yeah. And I saw him talking to a policeman, you know, two weeks ago. Oh, really?

And then they would, they'd murder this guy right out of hand. So it was a, it was a system where there was such a bunch of arbitrary killing that a lot of, a lot of, a substantial minority got fed up with that and just said, I'm not, I'm not doing this anymore. I can be better use. I can live my life better or I can I can handle things better if I'm with the security forces and I'm going to come across. Some of these guys were, were, had been captured and they'd been sent up to Bendura, which was a fort up in the northeast. And they had been talked to by our propaganda teams, and they had said, look, yeah, I'm, okay, I'm not doing this anymore. What do you guys need from me? And so they would go to Slew Scouts. Now, they had to pass

selection just like everybody else did if they were guerrillas. And I was on, as I said, there were 20 of us who passed, 10 African, 10 European. Five of those guys had been gorillas only a couple months before. That's amazing. And I shared, you know, I mean, I shared tents with these guys. And you kind of, are you really one of us now? Is this what you're really trying to do? But they, we never had an issue in Slew Scouts with one of these guys turning. Was that due to a vetting process to determine?

Or was that because the enemy had never really tried to infiltrate Slew Scouts? Another interesting issue. Once these guys became. SLEU scouts. They were not put up on operations initially. They were, we lived in, we worked out of forts. These are self-contained entities that nobody could get into it all. Had walls 15 feet high, doors were guarded, you could not just walk in. Even members of security forces could not get into these Slew Scouts forts. As I said, completely self-contained. Bedroom quarters, mess hall, medical, operations rooms, radio. Everything was contained within the walls

of these forts. And they were probably 100 meters by 100 meters all the way around. These African nationalists, these guerrillas, who were now part of Slew Scots, would not be sent on operations, but they'd be allowed to sort of roam around for a couple of weeks. And these other Africans, these other operators would look at them and talk to them and sort of feel them out and and just get an idea of whether they were the real deal or whether they were posturing. It was astonishing how perceptive they were if there was any problem with them, if they discerned any problem with them at all. Maybe they weren't convinced that these guys were,

were authentic converts. And if they weren't, they weren't shot or anything. They were just sent back to Bender and they were kicked out of the unit. But as I said, in the 18 months I did this, I never met one that didn't make the grade. Once they went through selection and they were put in the fort, these guys always passed this sort of informal interview, you might say.

It's interesting. John, what do you think the sort of, I guess it's a chicken or a type of question. The black nationalists may probably, I mean, obviously there was something there because there was this sort of white supremac element to the government where they would not share power. But how much do you think of it was like the black nationalism and the desire for equality? How much of it do you believe it was the communist coming in and manipulating, motivating, you know, fine-tuning things? Like, did you have a sense of like what was driving this or I'm sure they both were, but was one more significant than the other? There was, communism was never an issue. these were not communists who were fighting this war.

I always, it was sort of like in Vietnam. You had the North Vietnamese and you had the main force VC who were nationalists before they were communists. Really, all they wanted to do was unify North Vietnam and South Vietnam. That was their primary motive right there. And Ho Chi Men said this on any number of occasions. that this reunification is what we're primarily after. Yes, we're communists, but we're not, we have no designs on territory outside of South Vietnam.

Right. Mugabe was not, was not, he himself was a Marxist, but that organization was not a Marxist organization. Those people could not spell communism that had to save their lives. They were no more communist than I was. A lot of them, a lot of them were in it for kicks. They were in it for the money they could get by robin buses and rolling over villagers and a little hot shot attack on a farming unit. And the sort of swagger coefficient they would get by walking around the villages with an AK

saying, what a badass I am. but they weren't they were not communist at all i mean even their political commissars were not communist they'd spout this stuff but they weren't really convinced and i'll tell you why i know this is that we interrogated any number of people i probably sat in on half a dozen i probably said half a dozen one day i probably sat in on 50 or 60 interrogations in the time i was just scouts, maybe 15 or 20 of them were homicides or PCs. These guys are no more communist than that bookshelf behind you. Absolutely not. And so for them to claim that Marxism was the driving force behind their organizations was absolutely out of the question. They, yes,

there were some black nationalists there. And I, I met some, some in interrogations and they were some hardcore dudes because they were not going to, they were not going to come across his security forces. And there's nothing left, but these guys bit the dust at the end of the war because they were, you couldn't do anything with them at all. But the general rank and file gorilla was in it because he was bored. He didn't have a job. Unemployment was a little high among the African population. And they had nothing better to do. And some of these guys just joined out of curiosity.

A lot of them never fought at all. Or the only time they ever fought was just before they got killed by fire force. So it's not as though you had two hardcore communist armies. Right. And were thrust against the government. Right. John, could you tell us a little bit about pseudo-ops and what they were and any notable ones that you were a part of? Pseudo meant secret classified.

And Radizier was broken up into a lot of zones that were like many states. And whenever the Slew Scouts were about to go into an area, that area would be frozen. So that would tell the local police and the local joint operational command structures, in whatever town that was, that the scouts were coming and that no military operations, no police operations, no operations of any kind were to be conducted in that area because we would be working there day and night. And so if an area was frozen, all the command structure from that area knew, with police and, you know, the guard force and so on, all the, they knew is that the scouts were coming. We never confided in them what we were doing because

a lot of it was classified stuff that they didn't need to know about. But if an area was frozen, they could count on it being frozen for probably a week at a time. And then when it was unfrozen, they knew that they could send their police reservists back in and patrol and so on. But our guys would always dress exactly like the guerrillas. I remember the first time I ever saw them when I was in the RLI, it shocked the hell out of me because I came upon them in the bush when I got off a chopper. And I thought I was facing a section of Zemler. It scared me half to death. And it was only then that I realized these were Scouts operators. But they had long hair. They wore blue jeans and leather. They had beards. They were wearing the most.

horrible looking AKs because they never got good AKs in training, so they're not going to walk around with new AKs in the bush. With boreholes in them, you know, I mean, they looked exactly like the real deal. And these guys would operate at night in sections of four and five men where they would go down into villages that they knew legitimate guerrillas were at. and they would actually intermingle with them, incredible as it sounds, and pass themselves off as legitimate gorillas. And the way they could do this was that we would work with what we called faces. And these were guys that had been captured, gorillas who had been captured, that we would then take back into the bush and use as a way to introduce our guys to legitimate guys. Now, the only way to do this is if you had killed or captured the whole element of a section, if one had gotten away, you couldn't use anybody as a face because he'd blow the guy's cover.

So you have to account for everybody in the section. And if you did, you could take one of those guys and use him to reintroduce your people back to legitimate guerrillas. And I'm telling you, before I got there, it didn't happen as quite as much in the late 70s, but in the early mid-70s, the scouts would wipe out section after section after section, doing exactly that. And they would always try to leave one man alive or capture everybody, but take one man and reintroduce them right along the line. It was astonishing.

The number of casualties and the losses that these guerrillas took because of the pseudo operations that scouts employed to connect from one section to the next one to the next one. And it worked, it worked like a clock. And I mean, that was based on the, the countergang experience from the Mao Mao uprising in Kenya, right? That's correct. That's exactly right. They got that idea then. And there were a number of intelligence officials with the army and with the police who had been with British forces in Kenya in the early 1950s. And it simply gravitated to Rhodesia, and they used that experience to sort of inform the Redesian security forces about how to do this. And some of these guys actually came in from Malaya back in, you know, 1952 or so. So they were, these are old soldiers who had had a tremendous amount of experience with pseudo operations.

I know this isn't exactly politically correct nowadays. But some of the Salus Scouts, the white members of the Salus Scouts, were able to infiltrate also essentially in blackface. I was wondering if you had ever had that experience going into the crawls at night disguised. You know, I didn't because I didn't speak Shona. But my officer commanding was a fellow named Basil Moss, and he was more fluent in Shona than most Shona. and he always said the way you can tell if somebody's fluent in a language with native fluences if they can tell a joke in that language and his i mean he grew up in in rhodesia he spoke shona from an early age and in the early 70s he was actually an air force officer an air force captain when ronre daly drafted him into salus scouts because of his language skills wow and he became the officer commanding when I met him as a major of two groups. So I was his assistant as a captain.

And before I had arrived in a couple of years before I had arrived, he had actually gone down into villages at night with his section. And he had to use blackface. And he wore a kind of a hooded garment. and he didn't do a lot of talking, but he sat in a crawl one night where the detachment commander, who has been equal to about a captain. So he commanded probably a couple hundred guerrillas in various sections, lashed Fasel's group because they weren't killing enough Europeans.

And he walked back and forth in front of these men. I think he went down with five or six of them and pointed finger. at him and Basil actually replied in Shona, he didn't look up, but he replied in Shona that he was going to do a better job and so on. And this guy bought every, every bit of it. He was a famous thing I'd ever heard in my life. He was the only Saloo Scout who ever really did a lot of, and he did a lot of that stuff. But he went down probably half a dozen, 10 times and imitated a legitimate gorilla in these crawls at night. It was the kind of bravery that, you know, it is beyond me.

It's something I, you know, that eludes me. It's just amazing what he was able to. Yeah, it's amazing. Hey, John, I don't know if we really talked about our touchdown, but for the people who might not know, what was the primary objective of the Saloo Scouts as opposed to like the RLI and things like that? How did your mission change?

The sole mission of the unit was always to infiltrate these groups from the inside out and to bust them up from the inside out. And the way we did that was, as I said, we would take these, we would take faces and we would re-infiltrate these groups and then capture these groups or kill them, kill every one of them. There were times when the mission was so successful where we'd have a pseudo group of six or seven guys, and they would go in and they would meet this new group. Now, they would either do it through a face, or if we didn't have a face, we would use one of these young kids called Mujibis,

and they were like liaison kids, and they would take messages back from one group to the next that were operating in a certain area. But for us to do that successfully, we had to have the passwords. And so we would use captured guerrillas to tell us what those passwords were. And we always made sure we kept these things current. So we had the passwords. We would establish a presence in an area, a resident group that lived there would hear about this new group coming in. Of course, they wouldn't know who we were. They just, you know, it was another group. Could have been a transit group coming through from Mozambique. But they would hear about this new group in, and they would want to find out what in the hell are you doing in our territory.

So they'd send him Mujiba, a young kid over, and this Slew Scout pseudo group would then give him a password, establish legitimacy, then this kid would arrange for a meeting. So the two groups would meet. They'd have a lot of fear, do whatever, you know, and this other group would fall asleep or something. and in the wee hours of the morning, usually around first light, our guys would be up, and they would surround this group and say,

with first light, you guys are under arrest. And they said the scenes that took place after that were something you had to see to believe. Guys would pass right out. They'd vomit. They would shit. They couldn't believe that they were now,

they'd now been arrested by security forces. And that's how they would capture whole groups at a time. And then they would use one of these two or three guys' faces. When you used a face instead of the Mujiba, how did you know that the face wasn't going to like tip off the other guys or sell them out, you know, sell out the Saloo Scout team and, you know, give these guys a heads up. Hey, they're going to come.

You got to kill them when they come. They always, they weren't allowed to breathe. unless the Slew Scouts were with them. And the one thing they told them before they'd go out is they'd say, if you even look like you're going to say something that I don't like, I'm going to put a bullet through your head. And it's funny how these guys would pay attention to that. And they never had their cover blown.

In all the time that I was working with those guys, they never had their cover blown once by our face. Interesting. So those faces were never left unintended. Like when they would go to do these introductions, they wouldn't go in advance. And say, hey, no, no, that's a good point. They'd always have somebody with them. And our guys, if they had to kill somebody, they had silenced weapons.

Yeah. They would use to make sure. These are usually 22s that they carried. We had a question earlier. Thanks, Tvar. what's your opinion of the FAL? I like that weapon. Are we talking about the...

Yeah, I assume it's the web, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Belgian weapon. Is this, is that what we're talking about? I'm sure he's talking about the Finfowl. Yeah. About what? The FNFAL rifle.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That was the Belgian automatic rifle we used. that was a killer. That weapon was as good as any weapon I've ever used. I always liked the M14. It was 762. I was never crazy about the 16. I've never used an AR-15. That was after my time. But I just, I wasn't, I wasn't enamored of the 16 because it was so damn hard to keep clean, particularly in the chamber. But the 14 was what I trained with in, at Paris Island. And it was a weapon. like carrying a lot. And when I got to Rhodesia, they handed me another 762. And that thing had the stopping power. You could stop a truck with that. And we had an adapter that we would put on the

front where there would be no recoil at all. Absolutely none. And you could double tap that, and you're lift about an eighth of an inch. 20-round magazine, well, 18 rounds in the magazine. And it just had this, it could stop anything. Very reliable. I never had a stoppage in the entire time I carried one. I carried an AK when I was with Scouts, but it was just dependable weapon.

Guys, I just want to take just a hot second to talk to all the viewers out there. There's about 120 people watching this live, super cool. And, you know, I think, you know, John's been an awesome guest here. And I just wanted to remind everyone, please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and give us a little thumbs up or thumbs down if you think we suck. And you comment below. Let us know what you think one way or the other. And down the descriptions of the video, there's also a link to our Patreon site if you guys are interested in supporting the stream financially and getting access to the bonus

segments we do. So thank you everyone for joining us tonight. And John, what's the name of your book for the people who want to grab it? It's called the bleed, just the bleed. And it was a reference to what the Marines used to call a combat zone because that's where you'd get hit, you'd let it out. So they called the bush the bleed because you do a lot of it out there. Any bush, where you're fighting. desert mountains it'd be the bleed um we're starting to get in like two and a half hours here and i was going to ask you to do like an extra 10 minutes for the bonus segment with us john so maybe like we can wrap it up i think we i'd love to do a second show with you at some point sure but um maybe if you could talk a little bit about um how you left rhodesia the conclusion of the war um

and how that came about the war ended in the fighting ended in December of 1979. And that's when the Lancaster House agreements were pretty much being proffered by both the British and the Americans. And by early 1980, there was virtually no fighting at all. There was some, but it was, it was scattered. And the war ended with independence. Mugabe's election on April 18th of 1980. I had gotten pretty sick by that time. I had drunk some bad water. And I think it was in Mozambique when I did this.

And I can almost remember the operation where it was. And I had paratyphoid. So I was just as sick as I could be. And so when I left the country, I had a girlfriend over there at the time. So I stayed another six months after the end the war and I left in December of 80 and then flew back to the states and it took me years, years before I was actually well, again enough to hold a full-time job down. So I'd been sick

for quite a while with this paratypoids. But I taught after I got back, I taught a little bit and I went to graduate school and ended up teaching for a career and also working on some government contracts that had to do with educational administration and so on. I went to the Middle East for a while. But once the war ended, there was a percentage of guys who stayed on a very small percent and actually went into the Zimbabwean army and became officers or whatever in the Zimbabwean army. And then there were quite a few who went down to South Africa. And initially, I got interviewed by the South African Special Forces, as a lot of scouts did.

And I was brought down there by the South Africans to join their armed forces in their their commanders. But I was so sick by that time that I couldn't take the offer up. And I had to turn them down. And that's when I returned to the States as a result. probably just as well. I mean, they were operating up in southwest Africa at the time. Had a lot of friends who did that and went up there and got that kind of experience, but it wasn't for me. I know you've got a, you know, a family now, a bunch of kids. Are you still a college professor? What are you teaching nowadays?

Yeah, I teach international politics. I teach it with a university that does a lot of online work as well. Of course, most people are doing these days. I've been with them for about 25 years now. Wow. And I'm 73 years old. There's no ageism with this profession, so that's nice. And so I can expect to be with him really as long as I want. And I had to go get a PhD to get this line of work.

And so I ended up going to the University of London at the school of Orient. and African studies where I was specialized in the Middle East Affairs. And it's an area that occupies me quite a bit. And so that's the area that I sort of concentrate in as a teacher. Have you found that one of the challenges in the academic arena, and I'm sure that a lot of teachers like correct us as time goes on and travel and see the world. But there are a lot of internal factors in politics.

there are a lot of, you know, in human relations and things like that. Do you find that like sometimes other teachers who are teaching about these things kind of only see it from like the outside view, sort of outside the bubble, because they've never been ingrained in a different society like that? Yeah, yeah, you do, Dave, you see a lot of that stuff because they don't go anywhere. And I'll give you a real good example of this. When I was in London at working on this doctorate, I had a guy who I sat in and audited a course on political dynamics of modern Middle East.

You know, it's a basic survey course that I just decided to attend. This guy was a British professor. He spoke Arabic better than most Arabs. He had never been to the Middle East. Wow. Hey, he had never, the guy had never, I don't think the guy had been out of London. he was this weedy

little pencil net professor type and I think he was scared to death at the idea of actually traveling over there

and maybe getting eaten by an Egyptian or something but the fact that he would have learned the language as well as he did and never having and never have gone over there

absolutely astonished me I was open-mouthed and I think I probably insulted him to his face, but I didn't know what else to do. It's shocking so much. So you find people like that who are area specialists, but who don't really do a lot of traveling. And they get their learning from YouTube and they get their background from, you know, formats like that. But they don't, they don't dip their toes into foreign cultures. Yeah.

Yeah. Strange but true. It's interesting because Jack and I have talked about this before just amongst ourselves and with people on the show that even U.S. foreign policy is so often misguided because even our experts don't really understand the culture they're dealing with. Oh, yeah. Yeah, this is all too true. This is one of the reasons why I've always found the CIA to be an organization

that is filled with really, really good professionals. you look at these guys, and I've known quite a few of these people, both from an academic and an operational side. And the academics are people who have actually lived in these countries. They are language specialists. They were the only people in the entire history of the Vietnam War, whoever judged that war accurately in terms of pinning down. Hocci men's motives and saying, look, you are going to have to deal with nationalism if you hope to make a dent in this war.

The problem is we have American so-called specialists, as you just pointed out, who don't know the first thing about culture? Martin Mara. Robert McNamara, who is Defense Secretary under Nixon, Nixon, under Kennedy and Johnson, said, I do not trust experts. And he was talking about CIA at the time, who had the reputation of being correct about so many things concerning that war. If we'd listen to them more and not listen to some of the people who had been policy makers at the time, perhaps we wouldn't have lost 60,000 people in country and we wouldn't make such a mess of things over there.

Right. I'm not saying they did everything right. And they're not saying they've done everything right, but sure. But even to this day, they have specialists who should be respected for what they know in terms of foreign policy. John, this is an amazing man. And after reading your book, you know, years ago now, I'm so glad that, you know, I could make your acquaintance that, you know, you could come on here and speak to Dave and I and really to the, you know, what will be thousands of people who are going to see this. So I'm just so happy we're able to have this. conversation. And I hope that people will go and check out your memoir, The Bleed. It's available on

Amazon right now, guys. So you head on over there and get a copy, and I promise you won't be disappointed by that book. You know, it's a very vivid account. John's a great writer. It's even really funny in some parts of it as well. And just these experiences of him serving in these four different units across two different wars is something really, unique that I don't think you'll find in another book. That's just say, Jack. Thanks. It is on Kindle Unlimited, right? Yes. It's both an e-book and paperback.

John, can I get you to stay just for like 10 more minutes? Sure, of course. I'm going to ask you about getting kidnapped in Beirut. Yeah, well. Hold on, hold on five, please. Okay. Hey, if you guys want to hear about John getting kidnapped in Beirut, join our Patreon for only $1 a month, $1 a month, and you can help feed Jack and I, Bafroyd. And guys and cows out there next episode, next Friday, the guest is John Stryker-Mayer. He was the 1-0 on R.T. Idaho in MacB. Sagh.

old friend of mine really good guy um also a terrific author um so i'm really excited that we'll be talking to him next friday so again thank you john and uh thank you dave thanks sir thanks everybody been a pleasure so you want me need