The Team House - John Mullins: MACV-SOG/Phoenix Program/Special Forces/Blue Light and security consultant, Ep. 48

Episode Date: June 27, 2020

John served in Special Forces, including tours in Vietnam, Central and South America, and the Middle East. After his military service, John worked as a security consultant all over the world. He was also the inspiration for the Soldier of Fortune video game. Check out John's Men of Valor novel series: https://www.amazon.com/John-F-Mullins/e/B001H6Q9HO Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouseBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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. At Bakers, no matter where you order free pickup, you get the same great deals as you'd get in store

so you can save when you order during band practice or at the dog park or wherever. Start your cart with the Baker's app and save from where. wherever today. Bakers, fresh for everyone. $35 order minimum restrictions may apply, subject to availability. You can save an extra $10 when you spend $40 or more on a great selection of participating items. Just look for the signs and save at Bakers. Okay, guys, here we are live episode 49. I'm Jack Murphy. This is my co-host Dave Park over here. You see our guest tonight is John Mullins. John went from the rank of

of private first class to sergeant, or from private first class to sergeant, and then from lieutenant up to major, most of his career in special forces where he served in military assistance command Vietnam, studies and observations group, which many of you have probably heard of. They were doing clandestine operations

into layhouse in Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict. He served in the Phoenix program, one of the most controversial aspects of the Vietnam War, which was targeting the communist shadow government, in South Vietnam. The New York Times, amongst others, other critics of the war, described it as a CIA-sponsored assassination program. We'll ask John what the real deal is. John also served in Blue Light, which is America's first counterterrorism unit. It's the predecessor

to Delta Force. Most of them were Vietnam veterans. These guys were like the real deal. They played the role of a stopgap until we had a full-time counterterrorism capability created. John also went on to serve in numerous deployments with special forces in Central and South America in the Middle East. And then after he retired from the military, he had a real second career as a security contractor. He worked in aviation security. He worked judicial protection down in Columbia, protecting judges from drug cartels. And then he also dabbled in the entertainment industry.

And many of you probably remember John Mullins, as I did. my initial introduction as a teenager was the Soldier of Fortune video game series where you actually play John Mullins. He's the protagonist of the video game that you play as a first person shooter game. And as we were talking about a little bit before the show, I got Mr. Mullins killed numerous times in bloody combat all across the world in this video game when I was a kid. So without further ado, John, thank you so much for spending some time with us tonight. I'm glad to be here. Absolutely.

You know, maybe if you could start off telling us a little bit about, you know, your upbringing and your initial entry into the military and how you found your way into special forces. Yeah, I was a farm boy in southwest Oklahoma and knew there wasn't much future there. And so I graduated high school at 17 and that night I was in the Fort Hood, Texas, going. through basic training. Basic and AIT, and we'd had one of our hired hands back then was an old World War II paratrooper, and he filled my head all kinds of full of stories, and I thought, man, I want to do that. So I volunteered for airborne and went to, was assigned to the 101st Airborne Division, which at that point was still airborne and not air mobile, went through jump school.

but special special forces came along with a little bit strangely for me i uh not 18 year old paratrooper i could whip the world of course uh so get myself in a couple of fights and they then i would have to report to the company first sergeant fellow named charlie waters master sergeant and Charlie had been a marine on guadal canal and he had been a ranger in war, war, in Korea. And now he was my first sergeant. First time we did that, he, I reported to him and he said,

you want the commander's punishment or you want mine. So I knew even stupid as I was at that time. I knew that the company commander's punishment would be in Article 15. I didn't want that. So I said, I'll take yours first, Sergeant. He said, close the door. And I thought, oh, this is going to hurt.

And it did. To his credit, he did not, he didn't just stand me at attention and beat the shit out of me. He, I don't think I ever laid a finger on him, though. I think he only got, the only reason he stopped beating on me is he got tired. So he told me to go out and soldier for him. I did for about a month. And then I was back in front of the first. Sergeant. Shortly thereafter a guy came in and we were all down at the auditorium and

here came this guy and blouse boots and medals up to his shoulder and a totally unauthorized Green Beret and he was giving us the story of the Special Forces and how it was what it did and so forth and how we if we volunteered we'd go to Fort Bragg and we'd pick our to do our aptitude, we'd pick our specialty. So basically the only thing I heard in that whole thing was I'll go to Fort Bragg and it will get me away from First Sergeant before he killed me.

So the way I went, they put me in Como school for about a day, but that did he dodd it, just didn't do it for me. They, but I kept hearing that the rumor that if you, were wanted to be a medic, they'd send you down to Fort Sam, Houston, Texas to go through the first 16 weeks of training. And they also said that there were lots of female soldiers down there. Well, I'm 18. Yeah, that was easy. That was an easy choice for me. Avo went to Fort Sam. I met one of those beautiful young ladies, married her, still married to her.

I can't imagine why she stuck with me all these years, but she did. Went through medical school, finished medic school, which had to be the hardest school I've ever been to in my life. We started with 40 students. We graduated 12. You had to know every tropical disease. The symptoms, signs and symptoms, the treatment, palliative measures, and the only thing you had was a Merck Manual and an infectious diseases book. And what year was this, John? That was 1962.

So it was really tailored for Vietnam or for Indochina for that area? No, it wasn't really tailored for Vietnam. It was tailored for the idea that special forces, people get a lot of false impressions, special forces. It's not a commando unit. It is a force multiplier. Our mission was to go behind enemy lines, recruit, organize, equip, and train, and lead into combat other, so the local people.

Well, you can imagine if the balloon had ever gone, actually gone up in the Soviet Union, you weren't getting out of there. There weren't going to be any medevacs. You had to treat everything there. So that was what we were taught. And it came in very, very well in Vietnam, too, especially in the early years. We didn't have all the MEDAVAC stuff that they had once the American units came in.

My first tour there in 1963, we were right up on the Cambodian border. and we had one air strip, but that was about it. You didn't have helicopters coming in. Usually it was an older America, DC3, that would come in if you needed anything. So it was the same thing. We treated every disease known demand. John, I want to talk about your book series a little later, the Men of Baller series. I'm just curious based on what you're telling me about your first deployment.

Have you ever read Lloyd Little's book, Parthian Shot? No, I don't think I have, no. He was right up there on the border, and he wrote a novelized account of his time as a medic, way up on the border, on the Cambod border early on in the war. I just thought it was a fascinating book. I was interested. But I'd like to tell us about your own firsthand experiences and what that was like.

Yeah, it was one of the things that we did that were, very, very effective was we opened the doors to all the locals for treatment. We had a dispensary there in the camp once the camp had gotten built. And we one of us or both of us had a senior medic and myself and some trainee, Cambod trainees. And we would treat anybody that came in and they came in with everything from from hang nail to to, Typhus. Then we'd also do outreach. We'd go to the villages and hold a mobile sick call out of the villages. While we were doing that, our intel sergeant would be working the lines and he would be gathering information. And they'd just talking to them normally, and they'd be spilling the beans as to what the local VC were doing, where to find them.

It's a great way to gather intel. And I mean, being upriver, I mean, it must have been interesting in Vietnam in, what did you say, 1964? I mean, this is early on in the war before the Marines, before a big army gets there. Oh, 63, yeah. 63. And I mean, I'm no offense to Vietnamese. people, but I mean, that part of the world must have been like a backwater, like going, you know, 200 years back in time.

Oh, at least that. Our biggest enemies were the, were the shamans, the local healers. And quite frankly, they had, they had a point in many cases. Some of the local stuff was, worked pretty well. But of course, we, with Western medicine, we were a little bit arrogant about it. And looking back on it, we did not end up better to. cooperated with them. They, they, I, one of the things that, uh, that not many people think about, they, uh, before I got deployed, uh, they sent me to the dentist there in, uh, in Fort Bragg as, uh,

on the job training. And they, I learned how to extract teeth and to fill teeth and, uh, do basically everything a field dentist could do. I think in that six months, I probably pulled more rotten teeth than most dentists will ever see in their lives. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, things that we really take for granted in the Western world are major health issues

or very common in other parts. Wasn't, I mean, leprosy was still around in that part of the world. Oh, yeah, very much so. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. And malaria, of course, was rampant. It was just expected that you would get sick, pretty sick during that six months, at least once. For me, it was the worst case of diarrhea I've ever had in my life,

sitting on one stool and puking into another one. And at this point in the war, it really is a unconventional warfare situation. like those big like set piece battles that we all associate the Vietnam War with Hamburger Hill and so forth. Like that didn't happen. That hadn't happened yet. Ted offense. Oh, none of that had happened yet. No, not at all. There were no American troops per se.

There were no American units, I should say, other than a couple of aviation outfits. There are no infantry, no artillery, no nothing. It was strictly the locals. We recruited from the local people in that area since, and it was a lot of the Cambodians were fleeing Sienuk. In fact, there was a little revolution against him in those days. So they crossed over the border, and we recruited them and trained them and led them into combat. They were damn fine little soldiers. Do you think that, you know, the whole war could have been different?

if it remained a special forces war, that if they left you guys in there, do you think it was a mistake to bring in the conventional military? I think that they should have brought in the conventional military only to guard the cities, frankly. The, yes, it should have been a special operations war. It inflated and inflated and inflated. And everybody wanted a piece of the action. and they got it. Yeah. Interesting. So when you went there, you were initially sent there.

Well, let's, I mean, I'd like to rewind, if you don't mind real quick, because I think Special Forces Training back then is very different than, say, what, Jack went through. You said that you were medical training was 16 weeks. Is that right? No, medical training was almost a year. Oh, okay. Yeah, it was 16 weeks down at Fort Sam Houston to get.

basic and advanced aid man courses and then the real hard work. Right after that, we were put into hospitals, military hospitals throughout the state, and we did ward work in those hospitals, did our time in emergency. We worked basically everything there and learned a hell of a lot from the doctors to a certain extent. It will a hell of a lot more from the nurses. And then there was dog lab, which separated the people that could hack it and the people that couldn't. Eight-week course, and it was the most intense learning experience I've ever had. So for people who may not know, before, you know, in my day, the medics, I was a weapon sergeant,

weapon sergeant, but the medics went through the medic course and they had the goat lab. Back in the old days, they had the dog lab. It started out as a dog lab, yeah. And that must have been a little bit different because, you know, as human beings, we're much closer to, we've been, we've been coexisting with dogs for hundreds of thousands of years. I mean, were there any of the students that got, like, over-emotional and just couldn't handle that? No, it really didn't happen that way for us. It certainly didn't happen that way. away from me. I hated that damn dog. Every time I'd go in there, he'd try to bite me, which, you know, the way he was being treated. I don't blame him too much. But, no, it's,

you separated it out. I mean, yeah, you can love animals and everything else, but we were being trained to treat human beings. Fascinating. And then, now, did all this happen prior to any other training that you did for special forces. Did, I mean, there was, there was like a selection, though, for you, right? Or at that time? There was no selection in those days. No. And then, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, go ahead. So you did the medic course and then, and then what happened after that? Then we went through the rest of it, the light infantry tactics, explosives, demolitions, you know, some communications work. We didn't get a lot of it because, that was when they were really ramping up the teams in Vietnam.

So it was less than a year of that training that I got before we deployed. So right now you're looking between a year and a half and two years worth of training before you deploy. Yeah. Okay. And then when you did deploy, was it, were you going there just under the U.S. Army auspices? or was it under the military assistance? No, it was combined study division, which was basically the agency.

They were running the whole program. It was nominally, we were military assistance, Vietnam, but we didn't report to any of them. So after that deployment, what we said, 1963, what happened next? for you. I mean, that the war is ramping up, but you've, I imagine at this point, you've decided you want to stay in the military, you want to stay in special forces. Yeah, I certainly did. There was no question at that point. As a matter of fact, I had to extend my enlistment to

go to that first deployment, got back and re-opt, and we did a little bit of training there at Fort Bragg, but I decided that I wanted to, I wanted to be an officer. So off I went and being, well, before that, went through French language school out at Monterey, six-month course there. French because French had been in Vietnam so long that practically all the Vietnamese spoke French. Vietnamese was a little tougher page

to open. So I went there. Then I got commissioned, went through Rangers School, eight of the most horrible weeks of my life. I kept thinking, what the hell am I doing here? You know,

I already know how to be miserable. And that seemed to be the only thing that they were teaching me. But then went back to Fort Bragg and was assigned to the newly formed third special forces group. Yeah. The desk was 65 by then and the fifth had deployed en masse to Vietnam.

So they were chining up the third. It didn't last long because they were taking a bunch of casualties. So in 66 they went on another team back to Vietnam, Central Highlands that time. We were up at a camp named Viventon. It was in the in a valley up in the the highlands all the way around it, they could shoot down on it practically everywhere. We live completely underground. The C-Bs had come in there and built bunkers, concrete bunkers for us because we got mortared and rocketed virtually every day.

The only thing above ground was the head. And that was always fun to be sitting there doing your business and hear plunk and realize that that's more. order coming in. Better worry about your wiping later. I'll show a picture on screen here that you had sent me, John. This is what you're talking about, where you're living underground. Yeah, that's it. That was my hooch. It's amazing. And how how had the work changed from, you know, 63 to 66? Oh, it was a full-scale war about 66. We had the first cab in there. They had had their butts kicked. They're in the eye drawing.

I mean, that was the, you know, from we were soldiers once, right? Yep, exactly. But what, what there's the next one that they really got involved in big time was Operation Crazy Horse. And that was right up the mountains around our camp. It kicked off when one of our recon units went out and ambushed some people coming in and started carrying stuff back. And the first thing I see is a 4.2 mortar site. No, 4.2 didn't come unless in regimental size units. So we knew that there were lots of people up there in those hills.

So we told the cab, that's what they were. supposed to do come in and fight those guys and they pooh-poot us basically said uh yeah we've been through those mountains there's no damn body up there blah blah blah they uh so but we'll send a we'll send a battalion out just so you guys will feel better uh so they uh they did they sent the battalion out and they had then they put the mortar platoon uh in a saddle in between two mountains there There were all the mortarmen, no infantrymen at all, and several, several newsmen there. The NVA assaulted that and killed every single one of them. It was, you can read about it in SLA Marshalls, battles in the monsoon.

So then it was a full-scale fight. The cab was there, had a couple of Vietnamese divisions there, the Korean, the Koreans were kicked in at one point. And then they said, well, we think we've got them surrounded, but we need somebody to go in there and find out exactly where they are. So guess who? Special forces, here we go again. What just happened?

We hear you. Yeah, I can't see you again, no. Oh, I'm sorry. Don't worry about it. I did. So we took a company of, I had Mon Yards at that point. We took a company. There were four, four units that went out to seek out the North Vietnamese.

And we patrol that thing day after day and found a lot of sign of them, but didn't find any, units until one day when we were going up this mountain and my mountain yard commander said, Oh, Trung Wei, oh, Bukuvici. I said, let's go get them. One of the most stupid movements I think I've ever made. So the next thing we know, we're fighting our way uphill against an entrenched enemy. We fought there for most of the day, finally broke through their first line and got a lot of my people killed and killed a lot of them.

And I was roaming around the battlefield trying to, trying to avoid the sniper fire and that were still coming from the hill up above us and the fifth, the 12.17 machine gun that I got behind a big old band. entry and it was knocking off bark on both sides. I was thinking, you know, this is not going to be a good day. Got back, got called the cab, of course, and they were sending, they were shooting a hell of a lot of artillery and the fast movers came in and got a little too close and wounded some more people. But it was a long, hard day. All right, John, can you see that picture I shared with the screen? No, I can't. Okay, okay.

Well, it's the one where you're standing amongst some of the indigenous soldiers, and I don't know if they're South Vietnamese or Montan yards, where there's the one guy who's taking a knee in front of you with a Thompson submachine gun. Yeah, that was our Cambodes, actually. Okay, those are campboats. Yep, I got it now. For some reason, now I've got it back. Yeah, the guy that was with him, the Air Force guy was an Air Force photographer that they sent out.

to document what we were doing. Damn near blew my balls off one day when he was discharging a 45, and it was right between my legs. Oh, my gosh. But so that, now, it was your guys and your Indige Force, your partner force up against, essentially a regiment of North Vietnamese of NVA. Yep. Yeah, who were.

I had one of my patoons, one of my sergeants, Zane Osno, was smart enough to send him around to the flank to try to get around, I try to get around him that way. It's probably the only thing saved us that day. Now, he fought his way, and we continued to fight our way up the mountain. I was throwing through grenades. That was the only explosives we had. I was throwing grenades, ran out of them, started getting them from the mountain yard. cards and they decided, oh, that American, he can throw them further than we can. So they're tossing me their grenades and I'm continuing to do that.

But then it got good to them because they saw me pulling the pins on these things. And they figured, I guess, to shorten the process, they'd pull a pen too and then toss it to me. Oh, shit. Scambling for a live. Wow. Because it's a very high-stress game of hot potato. John, can you give us a little bit of history on who the mountain yards are, like where they come from and why you guys were working with them? Yeah, the mountain yards were totally different people than the Vietnamese.

The Vietnamese were basically Han Chinese who had come down there for years and centuries before. The mountain yards were Indo-Asian. They were more like the more Cambodians and the ties had a lot more genetic resemblance of the mountain yards. They were a slash and burn farm people that go into an area, burn out all the grass, plant their rice and harvest it. When the ground would grow afoul, they'd move on and go someplace else. Some of the bravest guys that I ever worked with are fantastic soldiers, funny as hell sometimes. Toss and live hand grenades at you, yeah. Yeah.

What was their relationship with the Vietnamese? Because they were, weren't they sort of the indigenous people of the area? What kind of relationship did they have with Vietnam? They hated each other's guts. The Vietnamese thought of them as savages. The Montenyards thought of them as youth surpers. There were constant conflicts between them. In 65, there was an actual revolt in several of the camps

where the Montenyards had overthrown and killed in some cases. The Vietnamese that were supposed to be their commanders. and declared their independence. They formed the KKK, which is not the KKK like here. But it was an organization and full role, the front for the liberation of the mountain yard people. And they faded back into the tall bush. 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, 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. At Bakers, no matter where you order free pickup, you get the same great deals as you'd get in store, so you can save when you order during band practice,

or at the dog park, or wherever. Start your cart with the Baker's app and save from wherever today. Bakers, fresh for everyone. $35 order minimum restrictions may apply, subject to availability. You can save an extra $10 when you spend 40 or more on a great selection of participating items. Just look for the signs and save at Bakers. And so what was America's interest in the mountain yards? Why were we working with them and why were they working with you?

Because it was the only ones that we could actually depend on. I pitied the guys, the Special Force of teams that were down in the Delta because there were no mountain yards down there. So you had a mixed batch of soldiers that you had got from various sects, the Waho and various others. The Huahau, the Buddhists. The Montiards in three corps, it was mostly Montiards, and I-Corps. It was all Monti-Corps. And that was the only people we could actually recruit from the Vietnamese weren't about to do it and they had been all anybody of soldiering

age had already been snatched up by the army anyway there was also the nuns who were the were of chinese heritage but totally different than than the Vietnamese live separate part of Saigon Cholan was almost all nuns and they were damn fine fighters too. Most of our Mike forces and three corps were not young soldiers. So by that by the end of that deployment what was your your impression of you know how the war in Vietnam was shaping up in the direction it was going in? I was I thought at the time that that we I mean we couldn't just say screw it and come out but but we're our hands were tied in so many ways that I didn't see it ending anytime soon.

So which is good because I liked war at that point. When you say your hands, I'm sorry, when you say your hands were tied, are you talking about U.S. policy and what you were? U.S. policy, yeah. Can you tell us some of the ways in which your hands were tied? Well, they, they, they, they, this negotiation business was, was always bogus. the North Vietnamese had no intention of ever negotiating a settlement. And there were certain areas that they wouldn't let us go into Cambodia and Laos, for instance.

That's where the staging came from. They weren't all those North Vietnamese divisions weren't down in South Vietnam. They were living the high life over across the border. And until we, until SOG cranked up, they mostly got a way. with it then of course the various bombing halts and all the rest of it bring them to the negotiating table blah blah blah the Vietnamese had one strategy and one strategy only send as many Americans home and body bags as you can and sooner or later the American people will say that's enough and it worked people

don't people don't read their history after Okinawa and especially after Iwo Jima, there was a very strong anti-war effort in the United States. People were saying, why the hell would we kill another half million soldiers just to invade Japan? That was, with all the wonderful things you hear about the greatest generation, that was very active at the time. If it had not been for the atomic bomb, we probably wouldn't have. Did you know a little unknown fact that the

purple hearts that people are still getting now the actual metal was bought and paid for in 1945? Because they were anticipating Japan. They those were the ones that they were they were expecting that many casualties. Wow. Yeah, that there is a whole interesting history there and then that And it also leads into Korea because the Japanese capitulated faster than the army expected. And there's a whole other story there about how North Korea was born.

But I think that kind of also leads us into your next deployment to Vietnam, what you had mentioned, was Studies and Observations Group. I was wondering, maybe you can describe to us the innocuously named Studies and Observations Group. and what that was and how you found your way into it as a special forces officer. It had been started in 1965, I believe, with one of the more colorful characters that has ever been in the United States Army, a fellow major at that time named Lowry Torney. He had changed his name to Larry Thorny. but Lauri had been in the ski school up in Finland when the Russians invaded in World War II came out with the Manorheim Cross twice. The Russians captured him after the war, threw him in prison, he escaped.

They caught him, threw him in prison again, he escaped, made his way to Germany, fought with the Vafin SS against the Russians. After the war, of course, that wasn't regarded very well. So he went to South America for a while until the heat died down and then came up and joined the American Army. But he was perfect for the mission. I mean, this guy had been a guerrilla all his life. Was Larry a Lajak soldier? I've heard conflicting things about that. Was he a Lodiac?

Yes, he was. He was. Okay. Yeah, definitely. And he was one of the first casualties we had in Sog. The first, as a matter of fact, the first across-the-border mission in the Laos, they flew their helicopter into a mountain. I was expected to see him walking out of there. He didn't think that guy could be.

You knew very personally, John? Yes, it is. What kind of, I mean, he. I knew him personally. He was a major. I was a lieutenant. We weren't exactly buds. Right.

Well, I mean, do you have any recollections or experiences about him that you can share? Because there's this continued fascination with Larry, I think, that, you know, he served under three flags. And as you said, one of the most colorful people to have ever served in special forces. Yeah, he hated the communists. That was his main function. life, the Russians, the bastards that had invaded his country. And then he'd fought against them in World War II. And now he just found a new place to fight them. But that they found that it was feasible to run small reconnaissance patrols over there. And so then they started jenning up.

It didn't start as SOG per se. It started up as projects, Omega, Sigma. And of course, there was Delta, which was the in-country recon. Sog basically came later on when they consolidated everything in the studies and observations group. They did that the studies and observation because they didn't want it to be special operations group. There'd be too many newsmen around sticking their notice. up your butt. Yeah. Always call something exactly what it's not and people go, oh, that's fine. Yep. That sounds good. Who wouldn't want studies done on Vietnam? That's, sounds good. Yeah, it's like

the Sephardic course. It's like the special forces, advanced, recont, tactic, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's got like nine letters in this acronym. They just made it so bizarre and so complicated. Like, nobody can, what the hell is that? Exactly. We're very good at that thing. How did you find yourself into the map-be-sog, John? I had been back to the States for a short period of time. they always thought that you should get more, more leavening in this man's army. So they sent me down to Fort Benning.

And I had put in my, the little deal that you fell out, some of your non-military skills. And I'd put in there that I had some gunsmithing skills. So they put me in Fort Benning, and I became the original. Army instructor for the Quick Kill program. And I don't know if you've ever heard a Quick Kill. No. It's an instinctive shooting program that was sold to the Army by a world-class shotgun shooter.

And it was, you know, our encounters in Vietnam were 20 feet. You didn't worry too much about sight pictures at that. You just needed to get it in the general area and get a round down range. Well, with this, we eliminated on the guns that we gave them. We started off with Daisy BB guns, took all the sights off of them, and would stand next to the shooter and throw these little aluminum discs up in the air, and they would have to engage that disc. And the positive reinforcement that they got from plinking that disc was just amazing to watch.

And then we'd transfer or transmit over the of course to small targets on the ground and then go from that to actual using in M16. But we'd we'd put a slat of wood over across the top so they couldn't look through the sides. And then it was strictly instinctive shooting and worked very, very well. Then the Army sent one of the regiments from the 82nd over to Vietnam, and that they pulled all the officers in order to fill the rest of the slots that had been, they needed to fill. And so they sent me up to be an airborne officer in Fort Bragg. My main takeaway from that was that was during the time of the Martin Luther King riots. So here I am on a gun jeep in my nation's capital, fully loaded and authorized to apply lethal force should it be necessary. Wow.

You know, I never thought that I'm sorry. You probably didn't expect that when you're enlisting. No, I did not. No, I most certainly did not. But one funny story about it. They built it in an empty office building there. So I'm going through and checking with my sergeants and telling them what were we going to do the next day. And I get up to about the fourth floor, and I've got everybody, every binocular we had in the company is focused on this building across the road.

So when I walk in, everybody starts polishing the binoculars. Okay. Yeah, tell me what you're really doing. So they gave me a set of binoculars and pointed out a building across the road. And there were several girls over doing a strip tease for the boys. So what, how long did that sort of rotation in D.C. last for it? A year. A year.

Yeah. Yeah. And after that, I knew I didn't want any more part of the conventional army. So I volunteered to go back. And I had to go through Natrang at the headquarters there and all the admin. and everything else. And there was this major, Mark Ponzillo, and he and I had hit it off, and he said, John, you need to come with me. And he was going to SOG. So what the hell? I'll go with you. So where I went. And did you know what it was when you were going? Oh, yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah.

I knew very well what it was. So were you up at CCN and Contum? I was at all three of the FOP. these at one time or another. Yeah, I was running something called the Borden Project. It was a, it was we were putting people in and doing recon in not only Laos in Cambodia, but North Vietnam before the bombing halt of 68. So we, depending on where we were putting them in, that's where we launched out of. Are you allowed to talk about, you know, what that entails? Because I mean, I think we all know, and honestly, I have no idea what that project is. And I would like to think I'm somewhat well read.

I have absolutely no idea what that is. It was, we were going into the prisoner war camps in South Vietnam and recruiting soldiers out of them. And changing, changing their point of view. and then taking them back over across the border. And who better. So you were inserting double agents? Yeah. That's fascinating.

The biggest recruitment tool that we had is we took them down to Saigon. They had been told innumerable times that, oh, they're American oppressors, they're so evil, the people are suffering. And Saigon was just, most bustling scene that you've ever seen there in 68. So they realized they'd been lied to all that time.

Yeah. Yeah. So that's, I mean, that's just fascinating to me. And I mean, I imagine it must have been very a challenging assignment to first identify these guys in the POW camps. Then you've got to flip them over to the American side like you just described. And then actually insert them with a credible cover about where they've been. while they were missing and what they were up to.

Yeah. Yeah, it was, it was quite involved. And we did have a couple who paid lip service to it. And we expected that. And that was, that just went with the game. How did you cover your tracks then? Because if you, knowing that some of these guys might flip, were you worried that they would expose the program and put in jeopardy?

Anybody else you sent up? No, because we. the ones that we could pretty well identify, the ones that were going to flip. So we took precautions. Their life expectancy wasn't very long. That's all I'm saying about that. Removing the firing pin from their Kalashnikov, for starters.

That's one of them. When was I? Oh, so I mean, I guess my follow-up to that would be, So did that turn out to be a good source of intelligence for studies and observations? Oh, indeed. Really? Yeah. Yeah.

We called in many a B-52 strike over that one. So was that something that the recon teams that the RTs were involved in? Or was that it was just a completely separate parallel program? No, they were totally separate. Interesting. Wow. It's always something new to learn. Yeah, that is amazing.

Now, how does it? obviously these guys had to be given some sort of trade craft, right, in order to communicate, in order, you know, just different types of things. Were you guys teaching on that? Did you have assets or partners that were teaching? Oh, yeah. We had partnerships with Vietnamese. They're the look long doc, the Vietnamese special forces. And some of those guys were very, very good. some of them weren't worth the powder and let it take pull on the hill. But it was so, but we had the cream of the crop. And so then you had mentioned to me, again,

something else I didn't know about you. You told me yesterday when we spoke briefly that you were also a senior advisor in the Phoenix Project, your final deployment of Vietnam. And maybe you could tell us a little bit about that, totally separate from Mac V. Saag. The Phoenix Projects was one of the more controversial programs that we ran in the war.

It was very controversial. Yeah. It, I volunteered for it, frankly, because I was tired of killing Snuffies. Some poor bastards jerked out of a rice paddy in North Vietnam, given a modicum of training,

weapon and told down there and kill the American Imperial. I wanted to take out the people who had sent the people out, and the Phoenix program was designed exactly for that. Every province had an infrastructure, a shadow government. Those were the people who were pointing out targets. There were doing assassinations of anybody who was cooperating with the Americans.

So the guys then Phoenix program were specifically targeted. And it took a hell of a lot of intel, as you can imagine. But once you started getting them, getting someone talking, you'd be amazed at the stuff that they'll come up with. And one of the things was they were shit scared of the Phoenix guys. They were, they knew that their life expectancy, was balanced upon whether I said, you know, this guy's useful or this guy's not useful. And we recruited the people out of people who had a grudge. My Phoenix, my Phoenix soldiers were the survivors of Tet 68.

Their families had been marched out into the sand dunes and buried alive. The biggest thing, biggest problem I had was to keep them from kill. killing these guys. I don't know how many times I told, God damn it, you can't get Intel off a dead man. They really wanted to kill them all. Yeah. So go ahead, Dave. I was just going to ask, were you familiar with the Phoenix program? Did you volunteer for it? Were you recruited in? I volunteered for it, yeah. You had, you know, in over there, everybody knows everybody else at at one point or another. And I had a good friend who said, I'm going to Phoenix.

And I said, well, hell, I'll go to Phoenix too. And so we did some very good work there. And that was until Senator Jay William Fullbro, it stands up on the floor of the Senate and denounce it at an assassination program. And they pulled every one of us out of the program. Sent us back to the states, told us we could need it.

never go back to Vietnam. This was 1970. And it was, it was, it was just ridiculous. As I said before, we saved more lives than got killed because we wanted information out of them. And once the Americans left, that left the Vietnamese to run a reign of terror, which they did. What do you think then, John, about the criticisms that have been made about the Phoenix program in subsequent years that, you know, they say you guys were a CIA-sponsored, you know, hit squad, that you were assassinating civilians, that is sort of this slash and burn operation? No. No, no, absolutely not. Our records were meticulously checked by the province, poik, the province officer in chief. And he was an old hand in this business. And you didn't lie to this guy. I mean, he knew everything.

One of the most impressive men I ever knew. He was a South Vietnamese intelligence officer? No, this is American. Oh, agency guy. Yeah, the point. Yeah, the point was American. This is a guy who had fought all through South America. And he was a soldier's soldier.

And he took to me for some reason or another. I think that the interesting thing about the Phoenix program is also the many parallels between that and what today's generation of special operations soldiers has done and that you hear about the Joint Special Operations Task Force in Iraq and Afghanistan, the whole notion of high-value target, catch-or-kill operations, that it all very much parallels the things that you're talking about, John, that, you know, you guys had provincial reconnaissance units. We had, you know, CTPs and all these other kinds of, you know, similar acronyms almost.

It's like almost a direct mirror image of, you know, what we tried to do in Vietnam. in some regards. Yeah, we had enough people holdovers, I think, that taught generations of special forces and some of the things that had worked and some of the things that didn't. And I believe that the success of our special operations community now is based upon a lot of that.

I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more since I, you don't have so many opportunities, to talk to somebody who is intimately involved in it. Like, what was that process like for you guys as far as your, your targeting cycle, you know, the cycle of operations about, you know, it sounds like it was an intelligence-driven effort to at least, yeah, try to pinpoint who the ringleaders were in the shadow government in South Vietnam. What was it?

How did you go about that and how did you, you know, begin removing the shadow government from the civilian population? It was in the beginning, it was stuff that the Vietnamese, the local Vietnamese had gathered, whether they be police forces or the, and the police force in some cases was quite good. And they knew who was doing what. They just couldn't get permission to move against them. We could. So we got a lot of intel that way. And then once we started rolling them up, they rolled up. They sang their hearts out. But at one point, there was a North Vietnamese battalion that came in from Laos, and they were lost for two weeks.

There were no more trail watchers. There were no guides. They were so a vectored in the 101st airborne. That's amazing. The shadow government that was in South Vietnam was not, I mean, it may have been sort of like a mafia type thing or whatever, but they were working in the interest of the, the comments of the North Vietnamese. Oh, yeah. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. A lot of them, a lot of them were, had been sent down to that purpose, and a lot of them were holdovers from when Vietnam was partitioned. they were told stay in place, there will be a need for you.

What do you think was your biggest, you know, coup over there for you and your teammates as far as operational successes? Like, was there a particularly big VC network that you dismantled or something that really stands out in your mind? Yeah, the entire shadow government of To Attend province. there were virtually nobody left. That's why they gave me the next province up to do the same thing. No good deed goes unpunished.

For anybody who's listening to this on the podcast instead of watching it on YouTube, I just want you to know that John just had quite a little smirk there when he was telling us about that. I mean, you guys must have just totally wiped that out then, huh? I mean, yeah. We had people giving up, walking into, walking into local police stations and saying, thank you. I don't want to die. These guys, they're out there, and they will get me sooner or later.

But it reminds me of, you know, different programs and perhaps shut down for different reasons. But, you know, like Village, the Bills. operations in Afghanistan, once we kind of got it up and running and it started to have an impact, we shut it down. It sounds like the same thing happened with Phoenix. It did. Yeah, it did. It was a big mistake.

But you know, by 1970, that war was won, despite all the bullshit about it. You know, the street without joy that goes from basically from Hui, up to Upper Kwongtree province that they talked about. It was horrible ambushes, blah, blah, blah. I used to drive that road in a Jeep by myself. So what do you think went wrong at that point in 1970? 70, well, two things went wrong. The invasion of Laos was a mistake.

No, Cambodia was a good operation. invasion of Laos was a mistake. It was, it took away the cream of the Vietnamese army. And by that time, they were getting pretty good. And after that, it was all downhill. And the Vietnam conflict, I mean, it's something that I think, you know, quite clearly stuck with you, John,

as it did so many other guys who had served there so long and hard that, you know, you wrote what, four or more novels about 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. The Vietnam conflict, one of them being, you know, the Men of Valor series, and I'm sorry that I have not read them.

I usually, Dave and I try to read the books of all the authors who come on here. And we're pretty good about it, you know, not the past. had ourselves on the back and but you were kind of short notice so I'm sorry that we haven't read your books. Could you tell us a little bit about like after your post war experience why you decided to write these books? It came a lot later. It was and as much as anything else it was catharsis. My first one started out. God, it was way up around 1990, 1995. And I was driving and I was driving and I was.

saw a site that looked so much like that hillside that I told you about earlier with a it was Johnson grass here but it was elephant grass there and the wind was making shapes out of it and it just it spelled down me there for a minute I had to pull off the road of I would probably had a wreck otherwise and I jotted jotted down what I regarded as maybe a first chapter and then I put it away thinking hell nobody's interested in this crap so later on in 2000 went to the big get-together in Washington for us that was our 50th anniversary with special forces and we I met on a published author Mark Barron who had I knew from the third core mic force and I told him that you know it's a piece of shit

so forth and so on. He said, John, you're a no judge your own writing. Take that and send it up to this guy. And he gave me the address of an editor up in New York. So I said, oh, what the hell? What have I got to? What have I got to lose? So I send it up to him and I get a call about a week later from Jim Morris. We want this. Where's the rest of it? I'm thinking, Jim Morris called you. Now I've got to write the rest of it. It was that Jim Morris. Yep. Yeah.

Jim's a friend of mine. Oh, is he? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he is. He's a really good guy. That's so funny. Jim was one who said.

Jim had been, he'd been wounded and there in 60, 66, yeah, 66. And so they put him down in a trang as the awards and decorations officer. until his tour was up. And he buttonholed me there after as I was getting ready to leave Vietnam that time. And I'd been put in for the Silver Star for that action. And he said, John, you screwed up. What do you mean, Jim?

He said, you weren't wounded. If he'd have been wounded, you'd gotten a DSC. Let me. Have a mistake on my part, Jim. I got the picture you sent me of being awarded the Silver Star here. I just put that up on screen real quick. A little younger then. Yeah, a little bit.

I can still see you there, John. John, how old were you in this picture? 28. Wow. Yeah, Jim Morris is a good guy. He lost one of, got one of his balls shot off by communists in Vietnam. Yeah. We'll have him on this show sometime. I have no doubt. He is a very fascinating guy. Oh, he has stories. He's a great storyteller.

You know who else told me, actually told me you were a really good guy. I said you have some great stories. Is Tilt Mayor. Oh, Tilt. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yep. We get together, try to get together every year out at Las Vegas. We drink entirely too much and tell war stories and hug each other a lot. John, yeah, Tilt's a terrific guy too. I love him. And he's another guy. We'll have him on at some point. So definitely, you know, check out the Men of Valor series.

I was looking at them on Amazon. I want to read them now. And, you know, hopefully we'd have you on again sometime, John, to talk about those. But I want to talk about your work. There are, if you go on Amazon, you can also find the other 10 books I've written. Yeah, and I wanted to ask you about that too, because when I type in John F. Morris, what pops up is the Men of Valor series, or I'm sorry, John F. Mullins, the Men of Valor series pops up. I didn't see your other books. Are they under a pen name or something?

No, they're under my name, but you really have to search for them. And they're only online. What are the, what is the series name or the titles? Well, one of them is the Apache County series, where I took one of the characters from the Men of Valor series, who had run afoul of the army and left it and went to work as a contractor, imagine that. Brought him back to, brought him back to Oklahoma, where they talked him into being the sheriff of a small county. in southwest Oklahoma and dealing with all the problems that you have there. That's a five novel series now.

I'm looking forward to checking them out. And on that note, I want to, well, before we move on a contracting and private security, I want to talk about your post-Vietnam career and finding your way into blue light. And there were some things you had laid on me, again, that I thought I was kind of, of well read on blue light. I sent you that whole article I wrote about them, but you were telling me some stuff I did not know at all. So I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit about,

you know, your SF career after Vietnam and finding your way into blue light. Yeah, after Vietnam, since I couldn't go back, I went through Russian language school and then went off to Bad Tulf, which we still had, we still had the first battalion of the 10th Special Forces Group in Bad Toulth in those years.

horrible assignment. Really? Eating German food, learning how to ski. Now, you can imagine, I'd just come out of Southeast Asia. My blood was not exactly attenuated to the Alps. So it was a little bit of an adjustment period there. And I never stood on, Oklahoma's flat. Where was I going to ski?

I'd never been on a ski in my life. But I'd be damn well learned how to ski because that was going to be our way of getting in if the balloon never did go up. So was that called a falling rain? Hmm. I think was falling rain the name of the program at that time, the first of the tenth guys that, you know, if war popped off at the Soviet Union? They, it didn't really have a specific name that I know of anyway. But they put me in at first, at first,

as a area study officer and I was there for a while. And then they moved me over to command a company. And we did some interesting things. We did a lot of exercises with the special forces, special operations people from everything from Norway down to at that time since the shot was still in. Iran. We had them up there.

We went down to Iran to across the Dosti, career desert, which supposedly had never been crossed before. I don't know if that's true or not. But I was miserable. And a lot of MTTs all over the place. My language came in handy, the French in particular came in handy. I worked a lot with French. And all the business of them being, you know,

dropping their rifles. It's bullshit. These guys were good. Yeah. The 13th, 13th parachute regiment, Marine Parachute Regiment I worked with, Twasium Parachutees de Marine. Very good folks. How were you adjusting to this after having been, I mean, in and out of Vietnam for seven years, basically, from 63 to 70. And now you were, you know, working in a more of a peacetime environment, I assume, you know, doing the, you know, the partner force training and stuff like that. Yeah. You're missing Vietnam. Were you missing combat?

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. There was no adrenaline. And I have been accused of being an adrenaline junkie. They, but it was a good assignment. And my wife and kids were with me and it gave me a time to get acquainted with them. I can't say reacquainted because I wasn't acquainted with them very much.

The life had been living. But it spent four years there and then came back to the States and basically just did whatever to pass my time. And then blue light came along. So they, oh, and I went back to land. language school for Spanish. I thought I was going to be headed down to, down to what was then the eighth, but they instead,

blue light wanted somebody who knew languages and who had some skills in swimming and I was a master diver by that point and Halo qualified. So, so they, They formed up a section, a little known section of it that was the maritime side. You know, everybody was worried about airplanes back then because of the hydrojackings. So that was basically what everybody was thinking about, how to get on board an airplane.

How do I go into an apartment building? How do I do this? How do I do that? But nobody had paid much attention to maritime. And those ships that were rolling out of those cruise ships. I mean, they would bring your trunk on board for you. There was no inspection or anything. You could have a company of bad guys on one of those things.

And then once you're out there and you've taken it over, how do you take it back? Right. And it's not the easiest thing in the world. And that was what we were doing, trying to figure out exactly how we could react to things like that. So before we get it. into the maritime branch specifically, could you talk a little bit about what blue light is or what it was and what 77, 78, there is a lot of misinformation out there about what blue light was and what it did. Yeah, it was a reaction to the terrorist threat. I mean, it started with the blowing up of the airliners there in Jordan and the killing of passengers. And then, of course, the example of the Germans who had mounted a very successful operation, the Israelis who had mounted

a very successful operation. And we knew it was going to happen in the United States sooner or later. So SF was not in those years direct action. It was, we weren't, as I said earlier, we weren't. weren't commandos. We could be commandos, but we weren't we weren't commandos. So we had to start up something that would help get the skills that we needed to go into a building, to go into an airplane. And that was long before Delta was even a gleam and Charlie Beck with the eye. So the certain teams would would give them training.

And a lot of it was basic stuff. You know, we weren't pistol arrows. Our wars have been with rifles. So it was going back to school on that. I was lucky enough that that I knew one of the finest pistol shots in the world came right out Oklahoma City, Jelly Bryce. And he took me under his wing and gave me a few pointers. And I went back and started teaching the guys on instinctive shooting.

And again, instinctive shooting. But with a pistol this time, it worked out pretty well. But, I mean, it was all from the startup. It was like fighting a new war. And then, of course, you had all kinds of people who were saying, we don't need that the FBI is going to do that they have the HRT blah blah blah blah and and blue light was staffed up with like some special forces legends as well I mean like all of you guys except maybe the officers were Vietnam veterans like

some Trey raiders Mike force guys dudes like you who had been MacB SAG and Phoenix program like I could you tell the you know people a little bit about who these guys were Yeah, they, and they were, you're right. It was very selective screening. First off, you had to want to do it and weren't retired in place as so many of our people were by then. They were just burnt out. And people who were, dare I say, patriots who knew that there was a threat and it had to be dealt with and who else. So they so yeah we got to we got to pick and choose some really good guys

And there's a goddamn shame what happened later on with with Delta that bullshit about how you'll have to go through selection to be in Delta right Were you at that recruiting meeting? I was not at that meeting now okay there's a yeah I heard that story from many people actually um so blue light was out at mot lake on fort Bragg That's where they were doing all their training. But what you laid on me that I didn't know was that there's this attached maritime branch. Like I literally, I'm learning here as we're talking. What was that? What were you trying to accomplish with it?

Just that was mostly planning, trying to figure out, as I said earlier, how do you get on board a moving ship? You get people saying, oh, you could halo on. Have you ever looked at the top of a ship with all the antennas and every damn thing that's sticking up in the sky? And that's moving. And that ship is moving. Yeah, you're going to go on there on a halo jump? I don't think so. And climb the sides of it?

No, you're not going to climb the sides of it. Whether it's moving or not. You're not going to climb the sides of it. Not if anybody's on board there that has any sense at all. They'd shoot you off those ropes before you could. get six feet up. So there were, there were a lot of considerations in that. But, John, don't we have this whole other unit called Navy SEALs that are supposed to specialize in this? Seals weren't doing, seals weren't doing much in those days. They had cut back on them as well.

And they were, I mean, it sort of became a division of missions. The SEALs were doing a lot in the Philippines and in, Near East Asia, they, so until, until, they formed up Seal Team 6, they really didn't, they didn't do much of that. Their mission was to go in on land, you know, sea air land. They were to come in from the sea, go to land, hit a target, come back out.

As far as ships, they had never even thought about ships. Yeah. And I mean, were you, was this, this was purely planning or were you trying to like develop the tactics, develop the tactics? Oh, we were, we were developing the tactics. Out on the good things about it, we got a lot of free rides on cruise ships. John, how did you find out about blue light? And at what point did you become in its formation did you become involved? in that I was recruited for it recruited and right when it was forming up yeah yeah

and then for an Oklahoma farm boy that learned from swimming a swimming a stock pond I ended up being a being a water baby and then so blue light it stood down

what in the latter part of 78 I believe yeah It went to SOT. You were one of the guys that was retained and stayed at Mott Lake for special operations training or the SOT course. Yeah. Yeah, and we took a lot of them down. By that time, I was almost a full-time instructor down at Key West,

so we'd bring them down there and put them through some exercises. And just, and again, trying to figure out how to do this stuff. Basically, the only thing, the only thing we ever came up with and the ship would have had to been stopped at dead stop, which isn't that hard to do, stop one, that is to go up through the garbage shoot. Really? Mm-hmm. Like, with a grappling hook or something? No. No, with, they had these ungodly sticky pads that they would, that would adhere to anything.

I don't know what they were made of. Really? But you could actually climb with you. Had them on the insides of your feet. You couldn't put your toes out. It was the inside of your feet. You'd slap them up against it and you go there and then slowly move up that garbage chute.

That's awesome. Nasty too. They threw all kinds of shit down there. Right. Through those things. So I found when somebody, somebody mouthed off at me, that was the mission I gave him. Going up to shoot? Yep, go up the shoes.

So what, how long then was, how long did you spend in blue light before it, before it went away? Two years altogether. Two years altogether. Yeah. And how did you, how did you feel about that? I mean, were you tempted to go on to Delta or were you just pissed at them? Charlie Beckwith and I never got along. I had there towards the end of my second tour, I thought, well, I'll volunteer for Delta down there and go do some recon.

You're talking about Project Delta in Vietnam. Project Delta, yeah. I walked into his office and he just started berating the hell out of me. for no apparent reason. And so I turned around and walked back out. Yeah, he really had that effect on people. I mean, and so many people I've spoken to, you know, over the years that, you know, they say, you know, he was a good person.

He was patriotic. And he was smart in the sense that he knew we needed a counterterrorism capability. But he rubbed so many people the wrong way, like yourself and so many others, that recruitment briefing where they brought all the blue light people in that we had talked about. He was just really flippant and kind of disrespectful to all of them. And yeah, again, rub them the wrong way. Yeah, very much so. Yeah. I, uh, Joe Seminoe was a good friend of mine. Uh, Joe was not Joe Seminole. Uh, I was another friend. Oh shit, I'll think of his name in a minute. In any case, he was, uh, he was a light colonel at that time. Uh, and he and he, he and, he

and Beckwith would have at it all the time. So after Blue Light gets shut down, you went over and did SOT, and then you ended up getting deployed down to Central and South America? No. I was getting close to retirement by that time when I wanted to retire. I had no intention of staying much past 20. but I wanted to get my family someplace where I'd get them settled in because I knew I wasn't

going to be just sitting around. So I asked for and got an assignment as an ROTC advisor in Wichita Falls, Texas, moved the family there and got everything settled in. And then took my retirement and went off for three years to Saudi Arabia. I mean, wait, how did you end up from Texas to Saudi Arabia? Vannell Corporation had a contract with the Saudi government to train basically their National Guard. So we had a lot of different skills there, but SF was in high demand. And so the pay was decent and I didn't, couldn't find anybody in the civilian world that wanted to hire me. My peculiar skills didn't exactly do a corporate executive too much.

So took the job, went there and got financially straight and then decided, okay, I'm going to give the corporate America another try. Give them another chance. So I went back to school, got an MBA, and found out pretty quickly that corporate America still didn't have a lot of use from my skills. So I taught for Oklahoma University for a while and then saw an advertisement on a bulletin board, and it talked about a job with the Department of State. And it was so, and it was, I looked through the requirements there, and I said, man, this is a job for me. You know, weapons, ability, explosives, so forth and so on. So I got recruited for the the internet, the state department's anti-terrorism assistance program.

Yep. And we were doing a lot of maritime, a lot of, not a maritime, a lot of, a lot of aviation work at that point. Doing a lot of training. I was also instructor in, in their Render Safe program. So we trained people from 83 different countries in that. And it was built up a lot of contacts. that I use successfully much later on. Then decided I don't like working for the government, too many regulations. So I went up to DC and became a gun for hire.

I joke about that, but most of it was fairly mundane stuff. Treasury had me escort one of their treasury officials down to the Turks and Korn. Kekos, but he was doing an analysis on money laundering. And so I was his bodyguard. And it went to a lot of other places and had it worked out well for a few years. And then I decided to become an entrepreneur. Now, I had at that point, you know, over the years it had festered

in my mind, we're not training right. We're not training realistically. In particular in CQB, because of the constraints that you have with firing live ammunition inside a building of any kind. And of course, Delta built that $7 million monstrosity there at Fort Bragg, so small, it was like having a shoot out in your closet

and they burn it down twice. I thought, okay, the problem here is that the round will ricochet. And if you're in a hard surface, it's going to bounce around until it hits something soft. Maybe your partner. Also, it is it is not only not only ricochet, but it is not only ricochet, but it is not only ricochet, but it it will over penetrate if you're in, say, a building where you don't have thick walls. So if thought, if, you know, when we started the whole thing up with blue light, we were doing everything in the world to try to figure out training, how to do training.

And we built Michelin cities. We built railroad tie houses. In Saudi Arabia, I built an entire village out of target cloth and two by fours. killed a couple of camels that way. So I thought, you know, if we can't change the training facilities, why can't we change the bullet? So I decided I wanted to make a bullet that would not ricochet under any circumstances whatsoever. That would not splash back when you shot at something that was hard. And you wouldn't be wearing those pieces of copper in your face like we all did at one time or another.

It would still do the fit and function of the weapon, still give you adequate accuracy, still have basically the same felt recoil, and figuring it would take me six months and $20,000 dollars with R&D money, and six years later, I had a product. So I'd taken quite a few jobs in between to finance it. But I got it patented. It was called non-toxic frangible ammunition. They're using hell out of it now. But like all entrepreneurs, I was about 20 years ahead of my time and woefully underfunded.

So 9-11 came along and I get a call, said, you've got to come back to work. By that time, I was on the ropes as far as the company. So somebody else licensed it. I went traipsing off across the stands again. And then a company out of Switzerland bought that company. And they brought the guy who had bought the rights was one of those guys who was the smartest guy in the room. So he had made improvements on it since then.

It was disastrous. So they brought me back on board to take care of. to get it back online. And then I found out I was a pretty good salesman. So I did a lot of work with police departments throughout the United States on doing training and using frangible ammunition. So, John, when I was still in the Army and occasionally you would get the flangeable ammunition like the silver-tipped bullets in the shoot house.

Was that from you? No. No, mine had no coating on it at all. To me, if there's a coating on it, it ain't frangible anymore. It is, that coating is going to come off. And it's never the lead that gets you when you're shooting up close. It's a damn jacket. So they tried all sorts of stuff.

And there were various companies that were doing it. And it was a hard road to hoe because it was so totally different. but it's very successful now, of course. I'm not doing a penny out of it, but that's stupid. Certain amount of pride in it. Yeah. And then, so you talked about aviation security,

or getting into flangeable ammunition. The other thing I noticed that I wanted to ask you about was that you did judicial protection down in Colombia. Yeah, that was when I was up in my D.C. days. They had, And of course, another one of those acronyms is a tap. The International Criminal Investigative Training and Assistance Program is run by the Justice Department. And the guy who was running the program had been in SOG, and we knew each other.

So, and he knew I spoke Spanish. So he asked me to put a team. It was shortly after Golan was killed, the presidential candidate. down there assassinated. And they were killing judges on a rate of about one a week. It was Escobar and his boys, the Medellin cartel. Escobar and his crew, yep. Yeah.

And there's your visa photo from going down to Columbia that you had sent there. Yep. So I put a team together and we recruited about half guy, half the team was SF guys and half was former Secret Service guys. That part of it was the biggest mistake I made. Their idea of a judge going somewhere was a six-car motorcade. Well, these judges were riding buses to work.

There was no such thing as these immense protective details. So we had some head budding going on over that. So they wanted... I'm sorry. No, go ahead. So they wanted to do really high-profile moves where you guys wanted to do low-vis moves. Exactly. Yeah, exactly.

And that's exactly how we protected ourselves. When we first got down there, the embassy gave us one of their armored pigs. Now, Columbia, you're already 6,000 feet above sea level, and it was still carburetors in those years. That thing at a top speed of about 20 miles an hour. Yeah. Screw that. So we took taxis. We looked just like everybody else, taking a texie. the taxi. Everybody took a separate taxi and we'd go to wherever we were going to work that day and never had a problem with it. Now, staying in a hotel was a different story. We got to where

nobody had rent us a hotel room in Bogota. They kept blowing them up. Oh, the people trying to kill the judges were? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Oh, I thought, I thought you were leading into SF and the Secret Service guys partying too hard in hotel. Not that the crime scene. If I'd have had a few, if I'd had a few drinks with those guys, there'd been some jaws loosened. Yeah. Yeah, we did not get along. And so then how did you come into the entertainment industry? Like you did some script writing. You, you know, you served as a, as the, obviously as an advisor, a technical advisor, but, But more than that, you were also the feature, the protagonist of a video game series. Like, how did all of that happen?

One second. Before we move into all that, let's get some questions because we've actually gone a while without getting. Okay, okay. So let me ask you some questions because it's really interesting, this next video game stuff. Alex, thank you very much. And sorry, guys, that it took us so long to get your questions. I wasn't tracking the time. what is MacB, SOG, and LARP for the unintended?

I hope I got the acronyms right. Any interesting encounters with Air Grant or Maritime Branch? And I think, go ahead, please. So what is MacB, Sogg and LARC? Well, we already talked about what MacB and Saga is, but maybe the second part. Any interesting encounters with airground or maritime branch? And I've heard of them.

He's talking about the, I believe the CIA's branches, but you already mentioned, Air America that when you were first in Vietnam, and it was them, and that it was our America, which was the predecessor to CIA. So what was your experience with like Air America when you were there? Oh, Air America was the one who ferried us around everywhere. They weren't fighters. They flew old DC3s and some smaller stuff, but they weren't armed. They were logistics people, good guys.

I mean, most of them World War II vets. A lot of them had flown over the hump into China delivering supplies back during World War II. hard partiers, that's for sure. Go to one of their, one of their clubs. And if you walked out sober, they felt like they had been insulted. Yeah. But, no, they weren't actively doing anything. No, most of the air that we depended on in the first was Vietnamese air.

They had helicopters, they had fighters. Oh, really? Okay. And with Aaron Areka, did you, were they were just basic a fairing? How were their pilots, in your opinion? I mean, they're a great pilot. They definitely knew their business. And they'd crank stuff out of that old DC-3, that old Gooneybird, that you wouldn't believe is that thing would do possible.

Another story about the DC-3, though. I was down in shit. Anyway, I'll say about one for another day. Andrew, thank you. Does John have any thoughts on John Paul Van? John Paul Van never really knew him. He had a great reputation. He had done marvelous work in Malaya.

with the fight there. But, and I think that he had, he was more along the lines of what we were talking about earlier. Leave it to, leave it to the specialists. Don't bring those ungodly long logistic tail divisions in here. Bill, thank you very much for the donation. Gordon, thank you. John, get up to the shenanigans with the Aussies in the various programs they were involved with. The SAS are some of my favorite people.

Yeah, they had their own detachment down not too far from where we were based out of there on the third tour. And we'd go and visit them every once in a while. And there's another one of those things. If you left sober, you know, they figured that you'd insulted their hospital. fatality but the damn fine soldiers never had a complaint and never fought alongside them but all the stories that i've heard i know that they were extremely good and the kiwis they were they were good as well very good uh we had we had a we had a had a couple of them a couple of the kiwis out at our camp and we the one of them was a maury and he he

He was a huge guy. And he said, you've got a standing imitation. Anytime you come to New Zealand, you come there and we'll go up in the mountains and drink piss and dance the hawker. Did you ever take him up on it? No, I never got a chance. We will, in September, we're going to have a special forces veteran on Vietnam veteran who worked with the Aussies in Danang. So we'll talk about that then. Good. Yeah, they didn't get a lot of credit. And one of the best war movies I've ever seen is the odd angry shot. Yeah.

Yeah. Silicon family office, thank you very much for the nation. It's tragically funny how everything changes yet nothing changes. And I think this came when you were talking about like the restrictions and prohibitions on the war and how hard it was for you to fight and the stuff with the Phoenix Project. What is John? assessment of the future of special operations and special activities. And then he says in Latin, in order be a terum non v.C. I think that's how you said it. I think frankly it's gotten too big. It is it is becoming the be all end all. And when you do that, you get monoliths that don't move very fast. And that was always one of the things that we did. We adapted. It was very much you run into a situation. There are no rules dealing with it. You better be able to think on your feet.

And I think that we've gotten away from a lot of that. I think we've gotten a lot away from a lot of, and I understand the impulse to protect the soldier. But when I look at one of these guys with all the battle rattle on, and he is carrying 60, 70 pounds before he even start talking about the rucksack. He can't maneuver. He's a person who takes a position and basically stays there. If he falls over on his back, he's going to be like a turtle.

My body armor was my fatigue shirt. And there were times when I wanted to cut the buttons off of that. I took, in fact, when they first brought in the 30 round magazines, I wouldn't use them. That put me an inch further above the ground. back in your day john i mean uh they weren't even called odas yet they were called a teams and an a team was 12 guys and correct me if i'm wrong you had your rucksacks and maybe your entire team's gear fit on one palette right oh yeah if we didn't if we needed something we didn't we didn't have people falling all over ourselves we were at the ass end of the ass end of the

supply line. We were the stepchildren. So when we needed something, we stole it. John, what was your impression? Did you notice the public opinion and political landscape changing as you spent from 63 to 70 there? Were you aware of that? What did you feel about? Yeah, very much aware. I mean, we got stars and stripes. I mean, yeah, they tried to play things down, but it wasn't hard to see. And of course, I still had my trips back to the States. And it was, it was obvious that the tide was changing amongst American people. Did that affect how you felt about it? Did that affect how you felt about Americans, not America, but about the local, you know, the general population? Like, how

did you take all that on board? It didn't really affect how I felt it felt about the general population because I knew that there were a lot of mouthpieces out there, but the general population, it was still bedrock folks. They weren't, you know, all those murdering bastards and so forth and so on. It was so, no, I didn't feel bad about that. And as far as the war went, I wanted to win it. Yeah.

And then what about the Phoenix area? Has it bothered? I mean, did it bother you when it was misrepresented the way it was? I considered the sources, the usual liars. And just like we have now. Yeah. They take anything and blow it out of proportion or flat-ass lie about it. Interesting.

I saw Ian jump in here. He wants to know your best Larry Thorne's story. My best Larry Thorne story. I didn't know him well. You know, I was a very junior officer. He was a field grade by then. All I know is anecdotal. And I know that he was a character.

He loved to, like all. fans. He loved his drink and he loved to fight. So if back to Jack's question then about getting into entertainment and the video game, right? Yeah. Yeah, I had I had written another book which a producer out in Hollywood got interested in. It's a good thought about making a movie out of it called Tracker in the Iceman. I'll put it online here before too long. But he, the movie never panned out as so many of those things do in La La Land out there.

But he called me up and told me that they had bought the rights to the Soldier of Fortune logo and that they were going to make a video game out of it. Or no, a television show. First it was television. show and wanted to know if I wanted to write a couple of scripts. And yeah, sure, I'll write a couple scripts. And I wrote them and they got, they got on the screen and felt pretty good about that. It felt even better about the money.

And they, you're talking about the Soldier of Fortune television show back in the like mid-1990s. Yeah. that was that they it was uh I tried to make it as realistic as possible but it was Hollywood yeah they were doing silly shit that the people don't do and then they for the second season because the ratings were suffering they brought in that basketball player I remember oh I distinctly remember yeah it destroyed the series yeah so it was canceled but then then Neil, the producer, had been talking to the people at Activision about a video game,

and they thought, yeah, we'll do a video game on that. So they wanted an advisor, and Neil asked me if I was going to, if I would do that, and I asked, well, are they going to pay me? And he said, yes. And I said, well, you have your answer then. So off I fly to Madison, Wisconsin, and get with. Raven, there's a development company. And I walk into this place and there's long hallway almost.

No cubicle, the cubicles in it were all just individual cubicles. And you look in there and these fresh faced young people are there doing magic on their computers. The trash cans are full of empty, Twinkie Raptors and Mountain Dew cans. And every Star Wars figure that it was ever brought out lines the walls. It's what if I got myself into? But I did the consulting, tried to talk them into making it a bit more realistic. But of course, they know everything too.

You know, the idea of not looking through your sights is not exactly the way it should be done. But they paid me. And so I went on back home. And a little while later, I get a call from up there and they said, we need a name and a background for our main character. Would you consent to that? And I said, are you going to pay me? And they said, yes. So I became the soldier of fortune.

Immortalized. Yeah, there's two iterations of it. I wrote a large part of the second one. Really? Oh, did you? Yeah. The, I remember, you know, because when the game came out, I was probably like 15 or 16 years old at the time, and I ran out and bought it. And I remember like the load screen when you're loading up the game. And it shows pictures of you, John.

There's like pictures of you in Vietnam in places like this showing up and talking about your career and stuff. And, you know, I'm a teenager like, I want to be just like this dude. I want to do exactly what the, I want to be. be John Mullins. And, you know, of course, that's, you know, I ended up in Ranger Battalion and then SF after that for a while. And so, yeah, you had, you had an impact on my impressionable young mind. Well, I'm glad of that because I've been told so many times you are contributing to the violence of young people. No, I don't believe that. No, it's nonsense. And I hope this interview, you know, with multi-generational between UI and Dave, you know, that the young people see this and they

also consider, hey, maybe making a contribution to the U.S. military. I wish they would, yeah. Yeah, you're talking about the attitude of the people in the United States during the war. I have a wonderful story about that. We had this Navajo Indian SF guy who stood about six. six foot seven inches tall. And he was on a on a at an airport and was getting harassed by somebody who's talking about a hundred and one ways to kill a guy hundred and one way.

He's crees. Oh, so full of shit. So silver leaf unfolds from that chair towers over the guy and says pick a number. Was his name Silverleaf or was it Silverthorne? No, Silverleaf. Silverleaf, because Jim Morris wrote a novel called Silverthorn. And I'm just thinking maybe it was the same guy. Oh, we have a couple more questions real quick.

Thank you, Andrew. Did you have any interactions with the regular army? I mean, you talked about with the 101st, which indicated how the, oh, which indicated how the regular army was degraded. over the course of the war. Did you see a big change between 63 and 70? No, I didn't. The, I mean, the guys were getting shot out by then. I mean, getting multiple tours and that kind of thing, which is never good being away from the family unless you are a warrior. So there was that problem. But they suffered the same problem in World War II and World War I and Korea and everything else.

I mean, war is tough business. Yeah. And more so for the conventional side because they had less choice, I think. They have far less choice and more bad decisions get made. Yeah. That level is so far above that. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you, Max. why is Tiger Stripe so sexy? That was what we had for camouflage. I wouldn't worry about sex. You know, out there with an M16 and, you know, a whole bunch of ammo. You weren't exactly looking for love. Yeah.

Thank you. Again, Andrew, given John's experience with Dennis Rodman, will he be the one to finally end the Korean War? I'd rather doubt that. He's talking about the second season of the Soldier of Fortune television show where they brought Dennis Rodman on. And it was a sharp decline from season one to season two. Yeah, it went silly at that point.

John, this has really been incredible. And I hope we can do it again sometime. And I really encourage people to go and check out your novels, the Men of Bauer novels. And the second one is the Apache County novels. I posted a link there in the chat for people who want to go check it out. If it's okay, I'd like to ask you to stay after we finish for like just 10, 15 minutes to do the bonus segment. If that's cool with you. Dave, do you have something?

Well, as I was going to say, you can still download, you can still get sold your fortune, too. Yeah. For like 10 bucks. And if you want to see like one of the original, like, I mean, you blow up people's limbs. And it's just a fun game. It's just. It was super fun. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. You get that shotgun. You're a god amongst mortals. But, yeah, check it out. If you have a laptop or whatever, it's fun. It's a lot of fun. But thank you, everybody.

First off, thank you, John. Yeah, very much. We, you know, it's funny because you earn so many different things that are mythical at this point for people in our community and people around the community that look into it. And here we've talked for two hours, and any one of those topics could be its own two-hour talk. I mean, you know, I mean, the Phoenix program is, I could spend hours asking questions about that. So in the second novel of the trilogy, the Man of Valoury, it deals with the Phoenix program to a great extent. So, yeah.

And John, do you have any future projects on the horizon, whether they're novels or other other media, is there anything you're working on right now? I've got one that I just finished that is going to piss people off in high places. Let's hear it. What's it about? It deals with the MIA and the secret attorney program. In Vietnam. Mm-hmm. Is this fiction or non-fiction?

It's fiction. I can only write it as fiction. I have a book here. Where in God's name did I put it? I have this book sitting around. Here it is. I've been reading this and I want to try to get the guy who the author died. I don't know if you've read this one, abandoned in place.

No, I haven't read that one. The author is Lynn M. O'Shea and I read that she passed away unfortunately. But the forward is written by the J-S2, Colonel Danny Gordon. And it's about, and I think it was, what year was it? It was early 1980s Jay Sok planned operation to go and rescue MIAs in Vietnam that never happened. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and Bogart screwed it up. Yes, right. Yeah. And so this is a novel that you've written that you're going to publish soon. Yeah. All right. When it's fixing to come out, let me know,

and I'd like to have you on the show again to talk about that specific subject. I will do that. Do you have a release date in mind yet? John, do you have a publication date in mind yet? Did I have a whole lot? I'm sorry? Do you have a publication date in mind yet?

Oh, no, I'm looking for an agent right now. Okay, okay. Well, you stay in touch. You have my email. You let me know, and we'll discuss when it's on its way out. Other than that, I think, unless you have anything, or John, you have anything you want to add before we wrap up and we'll go into the bonus segment afterwards.

Anything I failed to well mention? I don't want to keep you too long. I just want to ask you one quick question. Giving your experience over eight years in Vietnam, when you saw us going into Afghanistan, when you saw the U.S. going into Iraq, what were your thoughts on that? Did you think it would be quick?

Did you think that it would become what it is, you know, almost another Vietnam? in some ways, what were your thoughts and did they evolve over time? Well, it's always easy to be a Monday morning quarterback. But the first thing was that Iraq wasn't our enemy. Iraq was the enemy of Iran, our true enemy. Yeah. Saddam Hussein was an idiot.

His sons were even worse. But the idea that they were going to, that they were going to pose an existential threat to us was nonsense. It should never have happened. It was based on false intelligence. And then we compounded the problem with Jay Arthur Brimmer, who I had my run in with two, who decided that he would disband the entire Rocky Army. Now you've got guys who have no means of support, no money, no food,

They're ripe for recruitment by anybody that I want them. That's where the war started, that babbling unit. And if you're listening, come find me. Well, guys, please remember to give this video the thumbs up on YouTube, share it, like it, leave us a comment. It all helps us bump up in the algorithms and gets noticed and get some visibility. for John and for his work as well. And there's also a link for our Patreon down in the description.

If you want to support the show financially and get access to the bonus segments that we film with all of our guests. And next week will be episode 50. I'm reading the author's book right now, the South African Police Special Task Force. The guy's name is Shane Wade Willard. And this guy did all kinds of wild hostage rescue operations down in South Africa. and he's going to have some pretty wild stories to tell.

So I'm looking forward to that. John, again, thank you so much. And Dave, thank you as well. And I hope everyone enjoyed this episode. And we'll see you guys next Friday. Thanks, guys. We appreciate you supporting us from watching. Oh, you didn't mention the Patreon, did you?

I did. Oh, you just did. Sorry. I was reading comments to make sure we didn't miss anything.