The Team House - Legendary CIA Paramilitary Officer Jan “Dutch” Wierenga w/ Kim Kipling | Ep. 144

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

Master Sergeant Jan W. “Dutch” Wierenga is a little known but highly respected Special Forces and CIA legend. He has served the USA for sixty years in total, in some of the most dangerous and difficult circumstances imaginable. Born in Indonesia in 1936, he and his family spent a total of four years imprisoned in Japanese and Indonesian internment camps under unspeakably harsh conditions. They were rescued under fire by British Gurkha troops in 1946. He was running jungle combat patrols by age 16, and emigrated to Holland by cargo ship in 1955. He arrived in the USA in 1960, became a US citizen and enlisted in the US Army in 1963, serving three tours in Vietnam. A Green Beret, he was a Recon Team leader in the then-secret, now legendary MACV/SOG, running some of the most harrowing and highly-classified missions of the Vietnam War. He later served as a Special Forces Team Sergeant, Recon Instructor, HALO parachuting instructor and First Sergeant of the Special Forces Training School. He was the Senior NCO at the founding of the Survival Evasion Resistance and Escape (SERE) program under COL James “Nick” Rowe. Dutch earned numerous combat decorations including the Silver Star, four Bronze Stars and the Purple Heart. He retired from the Army in 1986. Dutch then joined the CIA as a Paramilitary Operations Officer. He conducted numerous clandestine missions for CIA, including serving as a Battalion Adviser to the Nicaraguan “Contras” and acting as Chief of Station in a war-torn African country. He became a beloved Training Instructor at the CIA's “Farm”, serving in that capacity until he finally retired in Spring 2022. Now, his incredible life story can at last be told. This book is the biography of this remarkable American patriot. It contains numerous period photos, and first-hand descriptions of Vietnam combat, CIA operations and other historic events. It was written by a friend and CIA colleague. Today's sponsors:👇 Chill Boys Undies https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ Save 15% on your first order by using our discount code "TEAM15" And keep the boys cool! https://www.CHILLBOYS.com/ Thank you for supporting the companies that support the show! For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon!👇 https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Welcome to The Team House, episode 144. I am David Park. And unfortunately, Jack can't be here tonight because of a virus. It sounds like a beer. And, but we don't say it because we don't want to get demonetized. But joining us tonight is our friend Kim Kipling, who has written a couple of great books. But the one we'll be discussing primarily tonight is about Dutch. Can you say his last name for me again?

Dutch Waringa. Yes, a legendary MAC v. Saug and paramilitary, MacV. Saug and paramilitary, MacV. Saug and paramilitary officer for the CIA. And first off. Kim, thank you very much for joining us tonight. We appreciate it. Oh, Dave, thank you so much for having me. It's great to be with you.

I've enjoyed your program for quite a while. It's a big honor to be on here with you. So thanks a lot. Thank you. And, you know, it's interesting that you wrote these books, but you're somebody with quite a story yourself. Can you tell us basically your origin story, how you became the superhero that you are today?

Well, nobody that knows me would agree with that assessment. You just blew your credibility and your opening. segment, but that's cool. Sure, thank you for that. Born and raised in Columbus, Georgia, Fort Benning, Georgia. My dad was an employee of the Army World War II vet. My mother was also a World War II vet, Navy. So I grew up in the shadow of the Infantry Center, and all of my early scout leaders and role models were SF officers and NCOs, Rangers, airborne officers, back from Vietnam, wanted to teach life lessons. So became an Eagle Scout and learned. learned a lot of life lessons from those guys.

I went off to got a Navy ROTC scholarship, went off to university, got a commission in the United States Navy, and I was a surface warfare officer, active duty for over eight years. Decided my career path lay elsewhere. You cross swords with senior officers and know if the Navy tends to let you know it's probably a better idea for you to move on. So I got hired by the CIA in 1990 as an operations officer and did two tours. as an OO and at that point became a PMO, was able to move over to what was then called military and special programs division,

later renamed Special Activities Division and enjoyed a wonderful career in the agency. Retired in 2012, been contracting ever since, and that's pretty much the deal. That's fantastic. Now, what was it to drew you to the Navy as opposed to the Army having been around all those, all those guys in the army for so long.

Yeah, I made a lot of people very angry with that. I was kind of banned from the officers club for a while. Well, first of all, the Navy offered to pay me to go to college, which is a good deal. I had kind of grown up on World War II, you know, movies, submarine, Flicks, Clark Gable, shooting torpedoes. And I liked the idea that the Navy is this sort of mobile combat system. The ship goes places and does stuff. And it's a very, very specialized group of people.

Everybody has a unique role to play, and the whole thing comes together is this amazing complex machine of war. And that appealed to me, and the travel part, the navigation part all appeal to me. So I enjoyed it a great deal, honestly. It was a good place to grow up. And what's the job of a surface warfare officer? Well, those are the officers in the Navy that are assigned to the surface ships. You perform whatever function is, you know, it's all leadership, obviously, as an officer. You're a line supervisor as a beginner, analogous to a platoon commander.

You go up from there. You can generally speaking specialize in engineering, combat systems or operations. I was an ops guy, navigation guy. And you take whatever ship you're assigned to and you perform its mission until you're assigned to another one. That's pretty much what it is. And are young sailors as hard? to corral as young soldiers are or harder? You know, my instinct is the only reason it's easier is because they can't escape unless

they're very good swimmers, but they have all sorts of ways to get back at you and that inside that big metal box full of machinery and yeah, they're hilarious in their own right. That's awesome. And then like what drew you to the agency or how did you find out about it and as the surface warfare? I think a lot of people's impressions are often you have to have, you know, this military back, like this special operations background and stuff like that. How did you, how were you introduced to the agency and what caused that shift?

I was, I was obviously interested, you know, looking for something beyond the Navy. And one of my junior officers I was managing and leading at the time had been through the agency's recruitment process right up to the point of saying yes. and then the Navy had finally agreed to let him go on active duty for a couple of years. And he had put the agency off and said, can I come back in two years? The Navy's finally letting me come. So, you know, when I said, hey, I was interested in doing something else. He knew me quite well.

I was his supervisor. And he brought me a clipping out of the Los Angeles Times newspaper. It was a job fair for the CIA and said, you need to go see these people. And that started the process. It was a good fit. It was a good thing for me. Yeah. And so when you became an operations officer, like how did your time in the Navy?

Did that help you? Did that hurt you? Because a lot of people who go in are mostly civilians, correct? Right. Absolutely. And the agency has been trying to de-emphasize military veterans for some time. They're trying to hire a more diverse mix than the historical white male military experience probably ground force. Honestly speaking, as an operations officer, you've got to be able to engage in a

variety of conversations with a whole wide range of people. You need to understand a little about a lot of things. Well, as a surface warfare officer, believe me, it was a wonderful training ground for that kind of work. You've got to understand everything from steam engineering to electrical theory, radar theory, gunnery, misslery, acoustics, anti-submarine warfare, weapons, you know, flight, aviation as either helicopter or fixed wing. It's an extremely diverse skill set as a SWO that you have to know about. And that stuff served me extremely well as an operations officer. I knew enough about a lot of things to be able to engage in meaningful conversations with a whole range of people. And it has served me very well. That's great. And

And so can you tell us a little bit about how your career with the CIA started and what steps you took? Sure. Well, I got hired as an OO, an operations officer, and I went through training at the farm. As you do, that's where I first met Dutch Warringa, actually, was as a student in operations training there. Not the field trade craft course, the OO side of the house, but the hard skills side, the SOTC, which was called in those days. and there's a section of the book about that. Went through that training and got assigned to, you know, past the course, which was always good. Not everybody does.

Went off to two field assignments for the agency. That rabbit died, did fairly well. And then became a PMO from there and moved over. But I kept, honestly speaking throughout the course of my career, I kept dipping my toe back into the OO world. I never became a pure PMO and only did that type. of work. I was a deputy chief of the station. I was a chief of a base. I spent me at this point, including retired time over 16 years as a trainer, trade craft or hard skills trainer. So I've done

a whole lot of the training gig for the agency as well. Yeah. Can you lift up that book? Actually, both your books, but first Dutch, because you mentioned meeting him while you're at the farm. Yeah. There you go. And this is Dutch Waringa, right? Yeah. And then what about your second book, the one that came out in March? Sure. That's this one. Which is a completely different type of book. Absolutely. Yeah, very, very different. It's entitled Neptune's Asylum, see stories from the 1980s U.S. Navy. And it was a collection of the funny, interesting, tragic, exasperating things that I either happened to me or I knew about from my time on active duty as well and uh you know i used to tell these stories to friends and they were they would always

say dude you got to write these down so i did a bunch of emails you know here you go guys i'm retired now i got time in my hands let me write them down before i croak and they were like dude you got to publish these you have got to write a book so after writing the first book i kind of knew how to do it now and i thought well why not it's already written i might as well so that's where the second book came from that's fantastic uh real quick when you get a shout out to our sponsor um Chill Boys. Chill Boys makes fantastic underwear, long johns, and socks. They use bamboo cotton, which is super comfortable, guys. Like, super comfortable. If you've never had bamboo cotton, you need to give these to try. Check out, check out chill boys. Like, we genuinely love this

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We help protect and grow everything you've worked so hard to build. We are AccroSure. Now, back to you. So you ran the full gamut. You said you were a PMOO. Can you tell us a little bit about what that is? Sure. Well, the agency, obviously, was chartered in 1947,

and its primary mission was to do strategic intelligence collection and reporting to support the executive branch of the United States. That's one of the agency's main jobs. The other main job the agency has is to conduct special activities. such other activities may be necessary to support the U.S. interest in response to presidential findings. And that's primarily done by paramilitary operations officers. So you have people who are fully certified as an ops officer.

They have the same training, the same certification. They can do the same job as a traditional ops officer. But they also bring military skills and abilities to the table. So they can either perform those types of functions, either with, either alone or with groups of indigenous that they've trained, or they can work effectively in non-permissive, dangerous environments where a guy with a background in investment banking might not be so comfortable, a PMO is willing to go to that place, function, and thrive in it, and carry out the mission. So that's kind of what PMOs do. And, you know, a lot of times, like, we've had some PMO's on before who have either been former Special Forces or former Marines. How did you fit in as a Navy guy. Is there a place for you? A lot of people would say no and poorly. I don't

agree. Well, you know, SOG, the arm of the agency that was the paramilitary arm was called the Special Operations Group. And it had a variety of missions. And those missions, obviously the insignia is, you know, indicative of several different types of arena that those missions take place in. And obviously there are aviation missions, there are ground missions, and there are maritime missions. I obviously was a maritime specialist, given my background. That's fantastic. So you met Dutch, and what did you first, like, what were your first impressions of him? And when did you realize sort of what his legacy was?

Well, I remember meeting Dutch for the very first time as a student. we arrived for the special operations training course the satsi as a trainee and they were showing us the building we would be training in and walked us through the gym facility there and dutch was working a piece of weight equipment he was curling and dutch was not a young man at this point uh you know but he was exercising and one of the other instructors said hey everybody this is dutch he's hard as woodpecker lips and you know okay Roger that well sure enough you get to know Dutch you learn a little bit about

his background you listen to him do his thing as an instructor and you realize he is as hard as woodpecker lips and he knows a great deal about a lot of things so he was immediately credible and immediately a person you looked up to and respected and wanted to learn from if

you were paying the slightest bit of attention and had an ounce of brain power so I knew him as an instructor he later was a teammate. When I went down there to be an instructor of the Satsi some years later, Dutch was still there teaching. And we got to be teammates and friends at that point. It was no longer a teacher-student relationship.

It was an instructor-peer relationship. And he's been my friend ever since. I mean, when I read about, you know, we've had a lot of very fascinating people in this show. And people with very diverse backgrounds. and who have been through a tremendous amount in their lives. But just when I read about Dutch's childhood, my jaw dropped, like when did you first start learning, when did he start opening up about that kind of stuff to you?

Well, you know, Dutch is one of those guys that legend and rumors surround like a holy aura. You know, wherever he goes, people know, people know a little bit about him. And they go, ooh, that's Dutch, you know. And the legend grows in the telling. He's not shy about telling you, yeah, when I was a kid, I was a prisoner of war. But Dutch is a man of very few words, and he is anything but the center of attention as far as he is concerned. He is not about, hey, look at me, quite the opposite. He's like, pay attention to what I want to teach you.

But, you know, when you find out a little bit about his background, you go, wow, that's amazing. Well, then you got to get to know Dutch a bit. I was privileged to get to know Dutch a bit and to start asking him about those. days and he would tell you a little more but Dutch's man a few words and he will never use 20 if five will do you know so it really came to a head this a little over a year ago December plus a year ago hadn't seen him in a while we bumped into each other in the halls of the training school where we both were still working and did the bro hug and said hey Dutch let's go to dinner man let's talk it's been a

long time and so I thought you know if i take him to a vietnamese restaurant the smells and sights and sounds might spurs the memories i might get a good war story out of this well it worked so uh we're sitting around the table and he starts talking about how he he guessed that his story would never be written another co-worker had talked about it but never got around to it and then it drifted away and i and i kind of looked at him and said dutch are you saying you want your biography written because dutch is a very humble guy this is out of the ordinary And he said, yes, that's what I mean.

And I was like, well, dude, I write. I would be honored to write your biography in a way we went. That's fantastic. 13 months from chicken satay to book on Amazon. It's incredible. I mean, and I apologize to everybody for looking at my phone because I read this on Kindle. And so my notes are on Kindle. Can you hold up the book again?

I put the link in the Amazon link. And I would just want people to know that I'm like looking at my notes. But. And for everybody who's going to listen to this later, we'll have the link into every description. Right. The link will be in the description. So Dutch's story starts when he's five years old, right, during World War II. His family, tell us about his family background, his father's side, his mother's side and things like that.

Sure. No problem. So in the early part of the 20th century, Indonesia was still a Dutch colonial possession. It was a remnant of a much greater global empire. And there were quite a few rich Dutch families who controlled large tracts of land and made huge amounts of money. You know, sort of the standard pattern of history. So Dutch was born to a very, very wealthy family. Father was Dutch born.

Mother was the daughter of a native Javanese. The family properties were on Java. The white Dutch's mother's mother was full blood Japanese and in fact they descended of Indonesian kings. She was essentially a court princess. So wealthy man meets and marries a half Indonesian quasi princess. And they set about having a family. The Dutch's dad had previously been married, had two sons, his wife had died and when one was an infant. And then Dutch, Dutch's mom and dad married and they set about having several more children, four more, including Dutch. So very wealthy family, lots of money. Early 1930s Java, they own two automobiles.

You know, that's the kind of status we're talking about. They own a river resort with five swimming pools and 13 bedrooms in the main house where they lived. So everything's great. And Dutch has a great quote about that. He said, yeah, I was born with a silver, silver spoon in my mouth. And then after 10 seconds, he goes, yeah, that quickly went to a wooden spoon. Because all was well, you know, they're living the life of luxury. And then, of course, in May of 1942, the Japanese army invaded Java. And so these European families were considered to be the enemy. And the Japanese interned them in these prison camps. Dutch's father and two eldest brothers went well one eldest brother went away to join the Dutch colonial army they were

captured and became prisoners of the Japanese separately one of Dutch's elder brothers was taken by the Japanese as a forced laborer and taken off to Japan in a pig crate and a freighter and then Dutch Dutch's mother and his two sisters were imprisoned in a Japanese internment camp for two years if you've ever seen the movie Empire the Sun with a very young Christian bail, that's pretty much what it was like for Dutch. It was a Japanese prison camp and a very hard time. You know, and you talked about some really interesting things that I didn't, I hadn't known about the Japanese at the time. The first, they were sort of already laying the ground work for their invasion with these economic programs that were meant to be like free economic zones,

but really economic takeover programs. Yep, that's correct. And the other thing that- Yeah, they had set up what they called the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and sold it as we're all going to be happy rich Asians together when what they meant was, yeah, we'll come in and take over and run everything. And they did. Yeah. Yeah.

So it was a difficult time. And the other thing that you mentioned that was thought was really interesting was one of the things the Japanese would do in these Asian countries at this time was appeal to Asian nationalism, as it were, a culturalism or whatever, but say that these Westerners were all invaders. But from history, no, the Japanese were not kind to any Asian countries, but they used this. And actually, actually fomented a lot of very anti-Western rhetoric and hate that lasted far past World War II. Absolutely right. It was a tool to get everybody to accept.

their leadership and say Asia for the Asians, man, we're going to be, you know, we're going to kick these, these Guilo out of here. And in fact, it was very cynical and it led to an absolute Holocaust in Indonesia. It led to the deaths of many hundreds of thousands of innocent people. Yeah, it was one of the more horrific aspects of World War II. There were no shortage of those, but this was one of them. So, so Dutch was essentially in an imprisoned, internment or a Japanese internment camp for about two years from at age five. Correct. And that's exactly right.

The conditions were incredibly austere, right? They were awful. He said they were sleeping on the floor in the corner of a room with whatever blanket or straw mat you could get. Barbed wire all around it. Centries walk and post with rifles and bayonets. Minimal rations. Big steel cage out in the sun.

If you did anything wrong, you got. locked in the cage for a day or two or three or five out in the weather. He personally said he was, he was never really abused beyond he spent some time in the cage, but others were. He was fortunate in that regard. But, you know, a lot of people died disease. A lot of people died from mistreatment. And he and his family fortunately survived at all, relatively intact. Right. And there was never any Western invasion or resistance in Indonesia in Java, Indonesia. It was just, they bypassed that area completely.

That's correct. The Allies never retook Indonesia or Java. They just bypassed it and ended the war in the way we all know that they did. Interesting little note, Dutch's brother, Meal, who was taken off to Japan in a big crate to be a forced laborer, witnessed the explosion of the second atomic bomb over Nagu Kess He was within sight of it, saw it happen. But yeah, they just, it all just sort of one day the Japanese opened the gates and left their posts and released them.

Yeah. Because the war had ended. Well, it was not only, I mean, first off, his brother meal was basically shipped off. One of the reasons was because when the Japanese would come check out their resort, he would challenge them the wrestling matches and would beat them, right? And they're like, oh, he's exactly. Throw them in a swimming pool. Right.

And his father and his brother who were part of the Dutch forces who surrendered, his father was actually at the camp that Bridge over the River Kwai was based on. That's correct. The father and brother were captured and separated, didn't know what happened to each other. The father was first sent to Changi Prison in Singapore and spent some time there, but he was part of a group that was planning escapes and trying to build crystal set radios so they could listen to news or whatever so he got shipped to the the labor camp at katchanaburi thailand which is where they were building the tai birma railway in the bridge over river kwea and he didn't do well he was he was older he was in his forties at that point and that was a horrific episode of mistreatment and you know the japanese record in war war two's got plenty of them but that was a good one and he was literally lying on his deathbed from mistreatment and malnutrition and almost miraculously upwalk's number

one son who was also there had been sent there as soon as he was captured and this brother apparently had very strong natural powers of medical healing he he became a trained nurse he nursed his father back to health gave him part of his rations and kept him alive as one of those miraculous stories so yeah they were both there and they both survived it So the war ends, the Japanese open up their gates, and Dutch and his family are able to go right back to business as usual, right? Back to the top of the- Well, not exactly. No. The rich five swimming pool, 13 bedroom house, you know, they didn't have that anymore.

So they kind of leapt into the nearby town and just went to an empty house that belonged to another Dutch family. The mother knew the owners and figured they're gone. They left before the war. won't mind and they just kind of squatted in a house for a couple of months trying to figure out where's the rest of the family what are we going to do how are we going to live and they you know scrounged for food and did what they had to do to survive but unfortunately that only lasted for a couple of months and then the Indonesian civil war kicked in in a big way and their fortunes went even further downhill and what what happened at that

point. Well, they, the family of course were Dutch citizens. They were the hated Dutch enemy. And so Indonesia, the Indonesian independence guerrillas who were trying to throw all Europeans out of Indonesia and become an independent nation, imprisoned them again, basically grabbed them, rounded them up, shoved them into a prison camp, locked the gate behind them. And it was far worse than the Japanese camp. Yeah. Almost no medical treatment, very, very, very limited rations, no clothing, no medical attention. There was an old cavalry base, cavalry unit, military facility, and they were housed in the

old stables on the dirt floor. They were literally eating grass. They were tending a patch of grass and when it would get tall enough, they'd clip it and take it in and eat the grass. They were eating snails they could find in the morning dew, catching. rainwater. Dutch almost died from malnutrition at that point. He was suffering from some significant medical problems. Another prisoner, an elderly woman, had had some vitamin pills that she brought in with her, and she gave him to his mother and said, look, he's young, he needs these, I'm old, I don't.

And Dutch credits her with saving his life. And they were there for almost two years, well over another year and into 1947. So if anything worse than the Japanese camp, by far right and you mentioned also that they were eating like laundry paste for such starch made out of laundry paste exactly they would get told okay do the laundry for us and they would give them starch powder which they would smuggle a part of it out and make it into a paste and eat it they were desperate and awful time and that you know they would just kind of randomly and wantonly behead people who they felt had come in with some some hidden wealth or money or they thought they were hiding it Yes, absolutely. The Indonesians had no mercy whatsoever for these European colonial citizens.

They didn't care if they lived or died, frankly, hopes they would die, and set about trying to exterminate them, essentially, in more than one way. I mean, the imprisonment was one thing. When things got bad enough in Indonesia in the course of this war that the European powers finally felt they had to intervene. Nobody in Europe, nobody in the U.S. wanted to go back to war in the Pacific. We're done with that. But it got so bad they had to send in forces to try and establish some order. And so they would say, okay, we're going to help you all out. We'll put you all in this convoy and take you to a better place. And then they'd have the convoy ambushed on the way, things like that.

It was a brutal, nasty program of intimidation. intimidation and extermination that the Indonesian rebels put on for several years. And so, so they were there for what, about another two years or so, two or three years? Dutch says it was about two years. If you look at the dates, it's, it's well over one year and approaching two years. And then what happened after that? Well, the, again, the British, and the region where Dutch was being held, that was that was in a little, town called Maguilang. The British forces were the ones who came into establish orders. So the British sort of made them release them. Same deal as before. They

leant into town and occupied an unoccupied house that belonged to a Dutch citizen. And unfortunately the rebels took exception to them being there. Dutch's mom was they set up a checkpoint nearby and Dutch's mom was telling the British colonial authorities about it, hey, that security forces, hey, they're doing this checkpoint and they're stopping people. They didn't like that. So they started just kind of shooting through the house at odd hours of the day, banging on the doors. We know you're in there. We're going to kill you all. But they never did. Dutch says, I'll never know why. They could have burned the house down with us in it or they could have come in and killed us all, but they never did. So one day, Dutch's mother

hears English being spoken. And Dutch's family spoke five languages at home as part of their sort of cultural birthright. So she heard English being spoken in the backyard and she took a chance and opened the door and it was a detachment of Gurkhas led by a British officer. And so they quickly said, you know, you probably need to leave here. This is a really dangerous place. Come with us. And they were almost immediately taken under fire. They were literally evacuated from that house under fire by these Gurkhas and Dutch was basically being shepherded by a Gurkha. who was forced to defend himself with his cookery when a guy rushed him. He watched the Gurkka cut a guy's throat with a cookery right over him, you know,

as they were crawling away from the house. Yeah, Dutch, in the book you mentioned that Dutch said that he learned how to low crawl underneath Gurkha. So that's when I learned how to low crawl underneath the Gurkha. Yeah. Yeah. No, it's fascinating. So they got them out of that area and then relocated them where?

They flew them out to Surabaya and they were reunited as a family now. So the father and elder brother had been returned from imprisonment in Thailand and the another elder brother had been taken from the camp he had been in for men and boys and the mother's sisters and Dutch. They were all brought back together in Surabaya and they were able to move back to Jakarta as a family. That lasted for a while but ultimately they had to move to move to another property that was owned by a distant relative. It was a cousin was managing it. And he said to duchess father, hey, come help me manage these rubber plantations. I need your help. So they moved away to bandoom, which is in western java, and they lived there for several years

working and managing that rubber plantation. Yeah. And it's interesting because all things were not okay. The Indonesian government was still trying to get rid of all Westerners and take take their properties. So what were they doing in order to facilitate that? Absolutely right. So rubber at this point was a very profitable substance. It had all sorts of necessary applications in military and civil life. So rubber was very profitable. And they had these extensive rubber plantations they were running. So the Indonesian senior Indonesian government officials said, number one, we'll steal what we can and steal the profits for ourselves. and number two will run these foreigners off and take these properties for ourselves.

So they began to hire and send in saboteurs. They would come in either tap rubber and try to take it away and sell the sap or they would burn down the plantation, burn down the equipment sheds, burn the equipment that you needed for harvesting and try and intimidate the workers and run them off. So they were attacking the rubber plantation as a method of both intimidation and ultimately stealing the property. So the owner, Dutch's cousin and Dutch's father, managing the property, said, look, we got to defend our family interests. And so they hired trained and equipped local guard forces. And, you know, post-World War II, there were plenty of surplus weapons lying around. No shortage of people knew how to use them.

So they stood up mobile guard forces to guard the plantation. And so Dutch is, this is 1952 we're talking about now. So, you know, Dutch is in on the order of 15, 16 years old. And he's finished, pretty much finished schooling, as it were. And, you know, his dad said, well, do you want to go out with him? Well, you know, what do you say at that point? You say, absolutely. That sounds like fun, right?

So Dutch made his first combat patrols in 1952 as a teenager trying to guard those family properties. And it wasn't an administrative patrol. Let's just walk the fence line. It was a combat patrol in jungle conditions, and they did, in fact, have contacts and exchanges of fire. And it's funny because his dad was not cutting him any slack. Like, what gun did he have him carry at that time? Yeah, Dutch's dad was apparently a very hard dude, a very, very merciless guy. So he said, he grabbed a Thompson submachine gun and said, here you go, Dutch.

This is your weapon. And he looked at the Guard Force community. He says, if he tries to change that, he is not going to change it. That's his weapon. So he's carrying a Thompson in spare magazines. And, you know, that's a pretty heavy load for a teenager. Yeah. He said, he said, you know, I never touched one again after those days. It's like an 11 pound weapon in the magazines are like a pound, a pound and a half, right? Exactly. That's blueed steel in the finest American ordinance. Boy, it's a load. Right. That's so funny. That's crazy. So Dutch actually runs quite a few of these patrols. He does. He does. And he's, he

He credits that with the beginning of his career as a recon soldier. He learned how to patrol. He learned the fundamentals of soldiery out there in that rubber plantation with that Indonesian Guard Force commander, lessons that he credits with having served him very well in later years. So then what happened after that? So he's 16, 17 running these patrols, 15 to 17 running these patrols. Right.

Okay. So the Indonesian government was not going to give up. They said, we really do mean to steal these properties from you and we really like you to leave. And so they weren't able to do it that way. So they basically grabbed Dutch's father and cousin and threw them in prison for two years on trumped up charges. You are supporting insurrection. You are, you know, equipping anti-government forces, which wasn't true. So now they're in prison and being pretty severely treated.

So their only recourse, of course, they now had some more money. The rubber plantations have been making some money, so they had money in their pocket again. So Dutch begins, finds a lawyer. The lawyer has connections. The connections have connections. Dutch begins carrying large bank rolls of currency around in his pocket and meeting judges and lawyers and government officials in bars and passing them bribes. And over a period of two years, he finally successfully bribes his father and out of jail, out of prison.

And not long after they were released, it became apparent that, you know, they were still hunting for them. They were going to try to grab them and do it again. So the family decided really is time to leave Indonesia for good and they did. So Judge got both his prior training for Mac V-Sog and his prior training for the agency by the time he was 17 years old, 18 years old. He learned that life or a real. earns that life early. That's fact. Practical exercises, not taught in a training course. That's correct. And so where does the family go then from that area? Well, Holland was, Holland, of course, was the ancestral home. They were Dutch citizens. So they go back to Holland.

that was all supposed to go together on a passenger ship. And this was, let's see, Christmas of 1954. They're on their way down to the docks, and a guy apparently tried to steal Dutch's jacket or something, and Dutch engaged in a fight with him, and kicked the guy to put him down, did so successfully, but he kicked him so hard, he burst a hernia.

So he's in tremendous pain and they take him aboard the ship and the captain says he's not coming aboard here. I got no medical treatment for him. I can't operate on him. He's not coming. So he had to go back to a hotel and his mother and father left without him and went back to Holland. Dutch and his cousin, who he had bribed out of jail, lived in a hotel for six weeks after they found a doctor to operate on the hernia and fix him up. He recuperated for six weeks and now he's ready to travel. So his cousin, who was a real character himself, believe me, the story of this cousin's a book in and of itself, but unfortunately he's gone and nobody can get the story.

But anyway, he said, hey, you know, you've done a lot for the family, you've been a good guy. What do you want to do? You want to take a trip or you want to go the other way? That's what are you talking about? He said, well, I can put you on a passenger liner and you'll be there in six weeks. Or I can put you on a cargo ship and you'll be there in about six months. And Dutch, you know, he thought, hmm, that sounds pretty good. So he took the cargo ship option.

And they gave the captain a whole bunch of money and said, hey, give him money when he wants it and show him the world. So put the first officer of the ship in charge of him and took him from port to port to port to port, teaching him what life was about. Kind of a world cruise. And does Dutch have many stories about that time? Or are they mostly? He has not mentioned any specific stories. and given the fact that I was a sailor, I could imagine that I probably shouldn't pry too deeply in there. Right, right. So then he arrives in Holland some six months and many years of experience later.

That's correct. Yeah, he shows up in Holland and he has to find something to do to support himself. He's a high school graduate at this point and has to earn a living. After not too long, he enlists in the Dutch Army, does a full enlist. two years as trained as a field artilleryman has very few memories of that time really didn't make that big an impression on him and frankly for Dutch he's always had a very very high degree of physical fitness and a very high tolerance for discomfort so you know the Dutch army was not that difficult for him after that enlistment he got a minor government job as a

functionary somewhere deep in the bureaucracy in the Hague but he already knew he wanted to come to America so he put him in an application for an immigration visa. And it took two years for that to be approved, but it ultimately was and he was able to immigrate to the United States. Yeah. And so then he had some buddies, right, that he was coming with.

He did. They were these five guys. They were all very good friends and they had all gotten approval to come. So they kind of paled up and they all got on the same ship, the SS Rindom and they arrived in American March of of 1960. They were assigned sponsors and sent off to California to, you know, begin new lives as Americans. And unfortunately, the rules in those days were that you had to have a job within six months, so they'd deport you. We actually used to have control of our national borders. We no longer do, but at this time we did. So they, two of them couldn't make it and had to go back

to Holland, but Dutch did and he stayed and, you know, God bless America that he did. did they have to have jobs within six months. Dutch Dutch Wairinga, Wairinga? Yeah. And I'm just making sure we're live again. We are. Okay, great. So anyway, thanks for those of you who are still hanging out. And I know a lot of people will be back to watch this again and we'll try to fix up the technical issues. But anyway, Kim, we were talking about Dutch

arriving in the United States with five friends and having to have a job within six months. So can you tell us sort of what happened from there? Sure. So he came and got a job with Montgomery Ward's department store in Cortez-Madira, California. Had a sponsor, was a World War II bomber pilot, took care of him. And he did quite well at Montgomery Ward, correct? Can you hear me? Kim, can you hear me?

Hey, Kim, I think you may have the stream on. So the stream that's live is 10 seconds to late. So if you can mute that, it'll probably help you. 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.

Do you got me, Kim? Okay, you got, I can't hear. him now. Oh, no, yeah. Um, if you need to unmute it. Yeah, just if you have this stream playing in the background, it's, it's a little bit delayed. So you might hear like a, uh, uh, how do I shut that off? You could just exit out.

I mean, anything you'd like or just could, you can mute the actual stream itself is a little, a speaker. You just hit that and mute that itself. You've muted yourself right now on, on the, uh, on the actually YouTube player, you got the YouTube video up, though. That's what's going to. Okay, hang on, hang on. I got, I got an idea.

That's why we do it live, folks. Get to see how the sauce is trying to make. I'm trying to figure out how to get rid of it. Yeah. There we go. Hang on. Hang on. I was looking for you while we were gone, so.

Yeah, once you hear your replay after, you know, 10 seconds later, it's a bit jarring. And this is why we do it live, folks. Yeah, just like Bill O'Reilly's kind of that. Yeah. Okay. Is that wetter? Yeah, that's good. Can you hear you know?

Now we're in business. So that's all right. So we were talking about he went to work for Montgomery Ward and he started out like in warehouse or shipping. Yeah, he was he was you know loading shelves and loading trucks and then he moved him up to truck driver and then he the reorganized the stocking system in the warehouse you know because it was disorganized so he said I can fix this and one day the boss came by and said hey come with me we're going to the men's department get you a couple of suits because

we want you to work sales and he worked his way up to the assistant. manager of the men's clothing department at that Montgomery Ward store. You know, he did a good job for him. But he wasn't content with a job at Montgomery Wards. He was not. You know, Dutch is a guy that wants to contribute in the ways that he can. And of course, you got to look at what the time was. This was, you know, Vietnam War was getting started and things were changing.

So he decided, hey, it's time for me to join the Army. He had done some parachuting. He actually did a few static line jumps in the Dutch in Holland before he joined the Dutch Army. And then he had joined a free fall club in California and had done some free falling already. So he enlisted in the Army in September of 1962 and was immediately marked for airborne. I went to airborne school in March of 1963. great. And it's funny because you write about when he went to basic training because he had already

been, because of his background, because he had already been a parachutist because of his time in the Dutch Army, his drill sergeants were just kind of like, yeah, go go hang out with the jump club on Ford Ord. Can you imagine in today's army something like this? No, you cannot. But yeah, basically they said there is no use in putting this guy through basic training again. And so why don't you go to the parachute club you belong to and jump and pack parachutes and try out some different parachutes and tell us what you think.

So Dutch's experience in basic training for the U.S. Army was off jumping at Ford or which is pretty cool. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, he had none of the U.S. military like Army basic boot camp, basic training experience. Exactly. They just basically said, check in with us once in a while. come PT with us and then take off for the day and go jump, which his comment to me about that was that wasn't the greatest thing. It taught me a gentleman's life. Probably wasn't the best decision they could have made, but he enjoyed it for sure. And so then after, you know,

Vietnam, like you said, is kind of kicking off. So after Army Basic, what he went to the advanced infantry training and then where did he go after that? Right. He went to airborne school, became a qualified paratrooper and he had already volunteered for special forces some people had talked to him about it he'd taken the test he passed him he was expecting orders to sf school and when his orders came in they were to the 82nd airborne uh and he was he was not expecting that and it wasn't what he wanted so he kind of questioned it but you know he said hey you're a foreigner and a private and you go up to an nco and say hey wait a minute whoa my orders are wrong you know the answer is private shut up and report to the So he did. He reported in there and spent a few months stateside with them. The battalion he reported to was about to go to Vietnam. And he was not yet a U.S. citizen and could not go to Vietnam, go to war, until he was a U.S. citizen. So instead, he was still a little mad at not getting into SF like he thought he was going to. So he early re-enlisted for Germany. And he went and did a couple of years.

with the 82nd in Germany. He reported to the 2nd Battalion of the 5.09 in Minds, Germany and did two years there. Right. And at that point, had he met his wife at that point? I mean, he had met his wife in North Carolina prior to that, and he was about to deploy, and they decided to get married. And so not long after he got to Germany, he was able to bring them over to be with him in Germany. His wife had a previous marriage and had a daughter who Dutch subsequently adopted.

And so they came over and joined him and had a tour in Germany. Yeah, that's fascinating. And then from Germany, was it he came back and got a citizenship, correct? That's correct. He came back from Germany after that tour was assigned to the 101st Airborne, and they had orders to go back to Vietnam, to go to Vietnam. He was only home for like eight months. And so right before they deployed, literally weeks before they deployed in December of 1966, on the 30th of November, 1966, he went down to the courthouse, took the test, raised his hand, and became an

American. Right. So, so he deploys with the 101st, and immediately when he gets there, they asked for volunteers for specialized training and of course that's being Dutch you know raises his hand has no idea what they're asking for but says sure I'll do it that's that's Dutch in a nutshell who do we need to do this I'll do it that's Dutch so they send him off it's actually a man tracking school run by the British Army in Malaysia and so he goes and he takes the class in the jungle environment learning how to track human beings through the jungle does very well, so well, in fact, they asked him to stay on as an instructor. And he spent time there doing that for the next year and a half.

So they would basically, U.S. Army soldiers would come into the school, go through it, and then the instructors would take them back to Vietnam and go out with them for their first few patrols, making sure they knew what they were doing. So he actually ran combat patrols with the one of first in that role as the leader-slash-instructs. instructor slash monitor of man tracking teams, which were attached to much larger conventional units. Yeah, that's fascinating because I don't know that we've ever heard, at least for myself, I've never really heard of these units and they're not really written about, but they were classified units in and of themselves, correct?

Absolutely. I got a fascinating correlation of all this. When I wrote the book, I sent a copy of it to my old Scoutmaster, who's a retired Army colonel infantry and s f at one point and he said you know i was in the hundred and first in that a oar in that year we had a separate compound a small covert classified unit we didn't know what they were doing they they posted their own guard force we never quite knew what it was about but we had them they were there and and he verified the fact that that unit was there at the time doing what they were doing he also verified the whole walter kronkite anecdote which which dutch had told him

me about. Kronkite was in fact in the theater at the time. So it was a great sort of correlation from my old Scoutmaster, who I'm still in touch with. Colonel Maynard, if you're watching, thank you for everything, sir. You were awesome. Yeah, can you tell us about the Walter Kronkite incident? Because that's kind of a funny historical anecdote that somewhere out there, there's film footage to back this up. Absolutely. So apparently Walter Kronkite came to Vietnam. This would have been let me see what year this was this would have been 1968-ish and this was at the time the army was integrating the armed forces and so there was a lot of question about how well was this working was it a good idea was it not a good idea so cronkite was in the theater doing a documentary

on how well integration was working and he was visiting various units and asking soldiers what they thought about it. Apparently some soldier he asked about it said, well, it's the same mud and the same blood and that became the title of the program, which aired on CBS in 1969. So Dutch is sitting outside or outside their little classified compound at this point and up walks Walter Cronkite with a cameraman, sticks the camera in their face and says, who are you boys and what are you doing? And Dutch, for whatever reason, had a case of the ass about this and basically said, none of your business and you need to get out of here. And so Cronkite basically said, well, do people have a right to know, son?

And, you know, what's this all about? And Dutch pretty much told him off, said, look, you don't have a right to know. You don't need to be here. And oh, by the way, we're not here to protect you. Your cameraman makes, you know, $250 a day. My guys make 50 cents an hour and they're not here to defend your dang life. you need to go back to a safe area and get out of our face. So he kind of tells off Walter Cronkite, I don't think that particular conversation made it into the program, but footage of Dutch did,

and Dutch's sister saw it on the evening news and told him about it. I saw you on the news with Walter Cronkite. So it's in CBS's archives somewhere. There's a picture of young Sergeant Waringa. I doubt it's him giving the middle finger to Walter Cronkite, but that was the incident. And it's interesting that you mentioned it because this school, this man-tracking school, like it wasn't what we would consider a trade-doc training and doctrine school of today that when they grow, the teachers at the school would deploy to Vietnam to advise their students to make sure they're getting it right. So like the rubber had to meet the road.

Absolutely. Yeah, this was, they would go from the training environment to take that detachment back, attach them to a larger army unit and go out on combat patrol with them looking for the enemy. And the man tracker detachment was very small. You're looking for a much larger enemy force trying to find it so that our own force could then fix it and attack it. So you're by definition, a small team of people trying to bump into company battalion, elements. You know, it's kind of a, kind of a sketchy deal, but they did it. And were those elements, the American elements that they were working for, were they always happy when this man tracker

found the enemy? No, Dutch in fact, says that they were not appreciative. They didn't want them. They didn't really want to engage the enemy. They didn't want to get into it. You got to remember what the U.S. Army was like at this time. Right. And, you know, these conventional forces were not all that interested in battalion level engagements with the North Vietnamese. And that was the whole point of this team was to find them so they could go out and, you know, duke it out. So they were not terribly popular with the conventional forces. Yeah, it's fascinating. So he finishes up that tour at the man tracking school and goes back and finally goes to SF, even though he had previously passed their selection or assessment, correct?

That's right. He finishes what is essentially two tours. It's like much more than a year, so it counted, I think, as two tours in that role and takes all the tests again. He had a couple of SF guys that pointed him in the right direction and referred him and whatnot, and he gets into SF at that point. And so he goes to Special Forces qualification and training from September 68 to May of 69, puts on his green beret for the first time in May of 1969, and immediately right away back to fifth group to Vietnam. So, you know, he was right back in the war immediately upon getting his beret. And what was the war like for special forces at that time? Special forces had several different things going on. Everybody's familiar with the A detachment, A-team mission to go out, hire, you know,

win, hearts and minds, train in ditch forces, extend our reach into those areas. A wonderful, honorable, you know, cornerstone mission of the USA to this day. But they also had this covert war going on due to the nature of the Vietnam War. So you had this unit that had been stood up called Military Assistance Command Vietnam's Studies and Observations Group, Mack V-Sog, highly classified, even to the extent that Green Berets who were not briefed on it were not briefed on it. They were not told about it. They didn't officially know it existed.

And this has to do with the politics of the Vietnam War. The Vietnamese army were using neutral nations, Laos and Cambodia, as safe havens. They were removing huge amounts of material, troops, munitions, through those countries to the fight in North Vietnam or South Vietnam. So that had to be dealt with. That had to be monitored. It had to be attacked in so far as it could be. And the U.S. therefore, had to pretend that we were not in those neutral countries as well. So basically a clandestine covert war had to be conducted. And the unit that fell to, among others, was MacB. You know, it's been talked about a lot, but you did talk about in the book a bit,

about the political situation surrounding Vietnam and how hard it was for our soldiers to fight that war because of all the political pressure on them. and that the Macfee Sogg, you know, studies and observation was sort of set up to attack these enemies where they were, you know, where we, where there are soldiers couldn't because of politics. Exactly right. So they had to do very difficult, very dangerous, very hard things in a deniable way and on the quiet. So, you know, they're not getting, they're not getting. noticed. They're not getting lauded for their achievements. They're taking enormous casualties and it's kind of buried in the in the static because we're not willing to admit it's going on for political reasons. They're also having to coordinate with a dysfunctional thoroughly penetrated Vietnamese government and army that the NVA had had and Vietong had decades to seed the South Vietnamese government and army with traitors.

and spies and so these guys were basically being compromised from the get-go. They had to, for political reasons, brief the South Vietnamese government and army on their proposed operations, their planned operations. Well, those details were getting leaked in near real time to the North Vietnamese. Right. You know, there are literally NSA intercepts of report going out to the to the field, to the units in the field at that point. A team is coming, Here's their landing zone. The team is eight people. The Americans are by name, and their mission is such and such. And they plan to insert at this time. You know, that level of compromise. To me, I've been very, very privileged in writing this book to meet and know a number of MacBissog

veterans, some of which I knew through the agency, some of which I've met since starting this process. And of all the things that I find honorable and amazing about MacB Sog veterans, about Mac V. Sog is that these guys weren't stupid. They knew their missions were being compromised. How many times do you need to arrive at an LZ and they are waiting for you there to figure out they know we're coming? They're taking enormous losses. They're losing friends and brothers every day. And those brave bastards got on the chopper anyway.

Right. You know, you mentioned that to me is Mac V Sog. And you mentioned that in your book that they had the highest, they suffered the highest casualty rate of any unit in Vietnam, but they also have the highest kill rate. Kill ratio. Kill ratio against the enemy of any unit in Vietnam. That's correct. They were phenomenally affected.

Out of curiosity, and I'm just like, I'm just speculating right now based on what you've said and what you've written. You know, the CIA and the special operations community have been blamed in the past for for being so secret and keeping things so much in the dark. Do you think that some of these experiences from these MAC v. Saug guys who further went on, you know, to influence the CIA and the special operations to be at large, the fact that every operation they did was sold out because of spies, not only Vietnamese spies, but some Americans, too, at the Macs.

V-Sog headquarters, do you think that that caused them to withdraw and become more and more insular as they influence these other programs? You know, honestly, I don't. And here's why that lesson was paid for in blood long before Vietnam. You know, the OSS understood operational security. The Jedberg teams understood operational security. It certainly hammered the point home, and I fervently hope the lesson has not been lost to this day. But, you know, it certainly made, reinforce the impression, but I don't think it was the first time they ever saw that particular slide in the classroom.

Right. I think they understood operational security as paramount. MacV. Sog did what it could to reinforce operational security, but the politics of the war made it impossible. Right. And they were just horrendously compromised, and it cost a lot of very good men in their lives. And you mentioned that there were a couple of Vietnamese in the Mac because everything that MacBissog did had to be brief to South Vietnamese and that there were a couple of Vietnamese that were captured as as spies. But there was even at least one American. Yeah, that's what I understand.

I don't have the full details on that. I wasn't writing a history of MacBissau. Sure. My understanding is at least one American in the ops section in Saigon was found to have been selling Michigan. information. Right. How much can be attributed to him as opposed to others. The scale of the compromise was so great that it cannot be laid at the feet of one or two people. Right. This was a network of spies who were compromising their information. Right. Well, and we've heard from other MACVSAG veterans in the sense of even their radio frequencies, like everything about their operation was compromised

before they ever even went in. For they left the tarmac. Absolutely. And so you were talking about teams of six to eight men going in being compromised and still still like putting a vast amount of hate onto the enemies that go that absolutely challenged both both by extension using airpower and artillery and personally in contact when they made contact these guys were exceptionally mobile they were exceptionally heavily armed carried a lot of firepower and they were exceptionally brave and skilled and they would they would lay waste to what was in front of them yeah without losses they took horrendous losses but these were absolutely ferocious warriors and they deserve credit for that that deserves to be remembered and i know like you said you didn't start out to write a history of

macfee's sog but you did get some really great stories from people in addition to dutch but other people with their stories. And there really is quite a bit of history. And some of it untold until now about Mac V. Sog in your book, Dutch. So there were three elements or the three combat elements of MacV.Sog. Can you tell us a little bit about what those were, like the, and why Dutch decided to go to CCN? Well, there were, again, I'm no MacVSog expert.

I can tell you what I've learned. there were three regional commands, roughly analogous to battalion size elements at this point. Command and control North, command and control Central, and Command and Control South. Command and Control North was in Dunang. And so when Dutch got to fifth group, they asked him, hey, you know, we need volunteers. Stuck his hand up, didn't know what he was volunteering for. They said, okay, it's this thing called SOG. And so, So they took him to the compound and now he had volunteered. So let's keep track of the amount of volunteering going on here.

Volunteered for the U.S. Army, volunteered to be a paratrooper, volunteered to be Special Forces Soldier, volunteered for a MACV SOA. Okay. So they said, well, where do you want to go? North, Central, or South? He said, well, which one's best? And they said, well, in the South, enemy's not so bad. In the Central, some tough, some not so tough.

Up north, it's the worst of the worst. You got Chinese, you got North Vietnamese, Viet Cong, you got Russians, you got all kinds of bad actors. That's the rough spot. What does Dutch do? He says, sure, I'll go to North. So off he goes to command and control north. And they, you know, with his experience and seniority, Dutch is usually older and usually more experienced than everybody else in whatever class he's in. And so they were already looking at him as a recon team leader, which in those days, MacBee Sog,

that term was a one zero. That was the code that was used for the leader of a recon team. So they put him through the one zero school, which was in longtime Vietnam. And a class of SF soldiers would go through the school. And based on how they did in the school, they would assign them whatever role they thought was appropriate. Dutch is immediately assigned as a recon team leader

at Command and Control North and tasked to form a new recon team. Earlier recon team by the same name had been wiped out. They said, well, you got an empty slot on the board, the name that isn't in use, build a new team. And that's what he did. Yeah. And you know, we were talking a little bit about the statistics, but in your book, you say, 1960 had been exceptionally costly year for MacB Sog. Seagg 79 SF soldiers had been killed and far large numbers wounded. Every recon man, that year was wounded at least once and about half of them were killed. Exactly. Exactly. One hundred percent casualties,

among the recon teams that year everybody got wounded at least many of them were killed yeah um just an incredible an incredible mission history and that was what these these guys dutch included but these guys in 1969 were signing up for that's exactly right yeah that's exactly right they stuck their hand up and said i'll do it send me uh and they did you know so dutch was uh Dutch was very fortunate. He had another American SF soldier, a gentleman named Steve Hoffman, assigned as his 1-1 or assistant team leader. Sergeant Major Hoffman went on to a distinguished career. He retired as the squadron Sergeant Major from Delta Force many, many years later. So the two of them built what was called

Recon Team Anaconda. I had about eight Cambodians originally and the two of them. And so they stood it up, trained them, got them ready for mission, and ultimately took them out on operational missions. And Anaconda had existed prior, right? And the team was sort of lost to a man, basically? My understanding is there was a previous R.T. Anaconda that was wiped out. Dutch's memory is what it is on this one. MagV. Sog's records are not perfect.

Right. You know, it was a busy time. Nobody was sitting around with a chalkboard taking notes for posterity. Right. But his memory of it is, is that an earlier reoccurts. recon team, Anaconda, had been wiped out and he was told to build a new one. Right. And one of their first missions was to go out and look for. That is what Dutch remembers. Look for any trace. They would go, you know, this was not

uncommon among MacVosaw recon teams. If there was a team lost, they would go and try and recover whatever they could, to learn what had happened, recover bodies if they could be recovered, recovered, recovered weapons if they could be recovered. But he said, no trace. he maintains that some of the equipment of that earlier team later turned up in a war museum in Vietnam. Yeah. So it's pretty obvious that they were compromised and killed. But there are no hard and fast records that I've been able to find that can substantiate this.

Yeah. And this is where you also say it was eventually discovered that there was an NBA officer working inside the SOG S3, the operation section in Saigon. In Saigon. Yeah. Yeah. there were plenty of spies there were no shortage of them to go around um and then again and this is based on sort of the information even though there's it's hard to find eventually an american in saug op 35 operation section was also found to have been selling missing information that's right

that's what i've heard yeah um uh so tell us sort of about the missions the mission prep cycle because you talk a bit about isolation and and some of the reasons they would go into isolation prior to their operations sure well a recon team might be assigned any number of missions could be all kinds of different things could be area reconnaissance unit unit enemy unit location reconnaissance uh telecommunications wiretap could be bomb damage assessment could be monitoring the trail for traffic could be prisoner snatch could be p ow rescue it was sort of classic SOF missions before that term was even coined. And so they would basically get a target. They would be told, we need this thing done,

whatever it is, and the team would be assigned to do it. So they'd get their orders and they would go into isolation in a different part of the camp than they normally lived in and prepare for a week or there about for that mission. Everything, you know, sand table study, map reconnaissance, briefing what a mission plan was going to be, how they were going to approach it, where they were going to insert, what they were going to do, train their indage to do it, and then ultimately give a mission brief to a senior officer and said, sir, here is our plan, and the officer would go, yep, sounds good to me, son, go with God,

and away they would go. Another reason for this isolation was we're talking about people with very, very heightened sensory awareness in a combat environment. So out of place odors, out of place traces that indicate, hey, this is not another Vietnamese or a Cambodian on this trail. This is a foreigner on this trail. I just found where he took a poop. And that's not Vietnamese poop. That's American poop made by American chow. And that could result in a detachment of anti-recon commandos that comes.

company strength hunting them down. So these guys would eat Vietnamese food. They'd stop smoking American cigarettes. They'd stop bathing with American soaps and shampoos that had scents in them. And they would basically cleanse their bodies of any foreign odors that would give any clue that they were not Vietnamese in the area. And even the guys who smoked, even if they weren't allowed to smoke out on the trail, even if they smoked, they would start smoking Vietnamese.

Local tobacco. Local tobacco. So it doesn't smell different. Your sweat doesn't smell different. Nothing is going to give away clues of your presence. Jungle boots in those days, and I guess still do, have the little vents and the environment. And they were literally worried about foot powder getting out of those vents and leaving a trace of white powder on the trail and going, wait a minute, that's not supposed to be here. Vietnamese don't use foot powder.

Right. And compromising the team. They were down to that level of detail of mission security. It's amazing. You know, it's funny because in a lot of the stories and their own ingenuity creating things, they were talking about making their own gas grenades. Gas grenades in the shower. I love that.

Yeah. Yeah, they were apparently very useful for prisoner snatch. If you can get everybody coughing and sneezing, they can't fire back. They're busy hacking up, you know, yellow flim. It's easy to grab them and stuff them in a cuff and take them back with you. So they had no such thing available to them. So they would basically take off all their clothes, going to shower, put a big sign up, says shower out of commission, don't come in here.

And take canteens and fill it up with ground CS tear gas powder, strap a little C4 on the outside with a blasting cap. And presto, you got a CS grenade, you know. Yeah, pretty cool stuff. It's amazing. It really is. Yeah. I mean, there are so many stories in here, both from Dutch and from Hoffman and from others

about these operations that they ran. And at the time, when he first got to CCN, they were working with Cambodians, correct? Yes. The original members of RT Anaconda under Dutch were all Cambodians. They had a number of missions together. They had an awful contact on the 26th of April of 1970, where one of them was killed and several others were wounded.

not long and Sord Major Hoffman was badly wounded as well. Not long after that, there was a policy change in the theater, and the Cambodian units were disbanded, and the Cambodes were sent back to Cambodia. So then at that point, they stood up a Nong Chinese team. They replaced them with Nong Chinese, but the original R.T. Anna Konda under Dutch was all Cambod. Do you know anything about what that policy change was?

Was it political or why it happened? I do not. It was, you know, it's historically noted. I don't recall exactly what it was, but it was just like, I think it was, there was something going on in Cambodia now. And they said, this is now a political liability to have Cambod's on this side of the line. So send them home and deal with somebody else. It's out there. It's in the open record. You can find it about it. I don't remember exactly what it was. And so the Nungs were the ethnic Chinese, right? Yes. Ethnic Chinese mercenaries. widely respected and feared. Those guys were serious business. Not that these Cambos weren't. They were good fighters too. Everybody, I've been very privileged to talk to a number of Mackby Saw veterans in the course of this process. And every one of them is exceptionally respectful about and devoted to what they call their little people, both Cambodians and the Nongs. They were very, very brave. And they were brothers. Bottom line,

they were brothers. They loved them and went to great lengths to fight by their sides. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, we heard the same stories for the guys who worked with the motton yards and whatnot. Exactly. The indigenous peoples that they worked with were always very like stalt work warriors. When they committed, they committed. Right. And they put their lives on the line four and with us. And we to the best of our ability. as a nation, I truly hope, did our best to compensate them appropriately and show them the same degree of loyalty. Right.

Yeah, I can't remember if it was the Cambonians or the Nungs that Dutch had mentioned, but it's in your book. And he had said that, like, sometimes they would get into arguments because the partner force wanted to go out and attack a force like five times, ten times their size. And he's like, no, we'll just stand off and bomb them. Yeah. His his his his his his canbo's would be like hey there they are there's only a company of them Let's kick their ass you know and he and he was a whoa whoa whoa boys let me get a B 52 in here

You know we'll do this the smart way right let me bring in a spad and we'll drop some napalm on him and Everybody'd be much happier but these guys were ready to go mix it up you know right They were just like hey there's the enemy I can see him let's get them yeah You know and and and that was sort of that he said that's how they were when they fight, they fight. They want to get to it. So yeah, he had a, he had a beloved team. He respected them greatly and they, you know, they did very well by them. And they were fearless and firefights, like laying down, like standing in the open to engage enemy in order to protect the Americans that were with them. Absolutely. I think there may be a cultural or religious aspect of that. I know when

you talk to MacB Sog veterans also, they talk about the King B pilots, the Vietnamese pilots that flew the H-34 King B's. And these guys would hold hover to extract a team with machine gun fire going through the aircraft, you know, both sides of the aircraft, ping, ping, ping, and new port holes appearing. And they would hold hover as long as it took. And when they asked him about this, they said, you know, you're crazy. You're out of your minds. Thank you for doing it. But you're nuts. They would say, look, if it's my day, it's my day. And if it's not, it's not. And I have no control over this. So in the meantime, I got a bird to fly. Right. And that's what they would do. Yeah. It's fascinating. Yeah, it's crazy. It's quite something.

Oh, and because he was talking about, I believe this was with the Nungs, his interpreter, Hong Cha, Hong Chalai. No, that's Jim Wheeler. That's Sergeant Major Jim Wheeler. Oh. There's another friend from a tremendous, tremendous, tremendous agency officer and a tremendous recont team leader, R.T. Alaska, that's one of his combat experiences he talks about. Did you recall? Lost his, lost his interpreter, which would have been his zero one, his ethnic team leader. Do you recall that story? Because it really reinforces everything you've just said about. Sure, sure. I was, I was very honored that Jim chose to share some of his experiences with me and allowed me to put them in the book because they absolutely deserve

corporate memory. We need to keep these kinds of things on record. So they were out on a mission and they were compromised and ultimately formed a defensive position and, you know, called a prairie fire emergency, which was a code that the one zero's could use, which basically meant American team in contact, in danger of being overrun, we need help right flipping now. And when they declared a prairie fire basically any American forces that were available should should line up to help and particularly air support so they would sometimes get dozens of aircraft stacked at 10,000 foot intervals ready to deliver ordinance on their behalf until they could get them out of there. Anyway, they declared, Jim declared a prairie fire and they had a massive firefight going on. The first contact of that firefight was three grenades came into their position. Jim's interpreter, a very, very brave and accomplished gentleman named Hong Chaleigh,

grabbed those grenades, stuffed them under his chest, and took the impact and was killed. The other members of the team were wounded. Yeah, just grabbed him in, busheled him under his chest, and took him. Now tell me, you know, he knows what he's doing. He doesn't imagine that this is going to go well. He did it. So the other members of the team were still wounded. Almost everybody on that team that day was either shot or grenade wounded or both, including Jim. But Hong Chali

did that for his team. It's incredible. And when you write about him, he spoke five languages. He had a wife that he adored, played five or six musical instruments, wrote music and was a tremendous singer. Absolutely. A very

a vibrant, accomplished, intelligent man who is willing to sacrifice all of that for his team. You know, it's occasionally, whether it's Vietnam or, you know, Latin America or Afghanistan or Iraq, like occasionally you hear people talk about Americans waging war against other people like the brown man or whatever. But like from your stories that you gathered from these guys, was that the experience where they were they waging war just against these people because of race? It seems as though they had these partnerships. No. I don't think, you know, I'm never, I've not met everybody in the world. I know racism exists.

But the vast majority of people that I know that have chosen this career, either as an. intelligence officer, paramilitary officer, or as a professional soldier, that's not how they think. They're there to do the mission their country has sent them to do. If they're told to fight an enemy, go where I'm told to go, fight whom I'm told to fight. Somebody else bigger than me makes that judgment, but it's the what did the gentlemen say, what the soldier say. It's the same mud and the same blood. Right. And I don't think, I don't think racism, slacks, extremism slash white supremacy is a major facet in today's military or paramilitary or paramilitary forces. I think those guys are perfectly willing to be teammates with

anybody trustworthy who believes in and is sworn to the same ideals that they are. I don't see it. I haven't experienced it and I don't think they would countenance it. I just don't see it. Did it exist? Sure it existed, particularly in the 60s and 70s. We're a product of our times. Another colleague of hours, very, very accomplished officer, Willie Merkerson, McV. Sogg Man, highly respected, distinguished service cross recipient probably should have gotten a Medal of Honor, is my understanding. Did not, he's African American. Draw the lines. Now, a lot of Sogg awards were downgraded, partially because they were trying to keep this unit on the down low. If you have a whole bunch

of Medal of Honor recipients showing up in line at the White House, it's hard to keep it quiet. Did it exist? Sure it did. But the professionals that I know and deal with that is not in their makeup. Right. That they considered these partner forces as much of their force. Absolutely. There was a genuine affection and regard and loyalty to these men. To this day, they are, yeah, this wasn't about, hey, let's go beat up on a bunch of little brown guys. It was let's go beat up on the people my government has sent me to beat us. up on. Right. And that's the way they saw it in my belief in my estimation. Yeah. No, it's just, you know, and not just from you, but from other, from other authors, from other Mac V. Sog,

even from guys working in Afghanistan, working with partner forces there, you know, trying to bring them home, you know, bring them to America after the fall. Absolutely. There's tremendous loyalty being shown and deserved by some of the people who did very, very, things on our behalf and who face certain annihilation if they stay behind. And it's known they worked for our forces. So, yeah, I would agree with him. Yeah. Now, one of the things, they were working a lot with the Maguire rigs and then the Stabo rounds.

And you talk about some of the, I don't know, hilarious and kind of tragic stories. Yeah, not so sorry. Can you tell us what the McGuire rig was and then what the Stabo rig was? Sure. So a lot of times these guys would have stirred up a hornet's nest and need to be gotten out right now, you know, and there was no HLZ worthy of the name available. You don't have a clearing where it's really convenient to bring a helicopter in and hover or land it, let them all jump on and leave. So they developed an extraction method, which they call going out on strings, basically long nylon ropes, dropped from a helicopter at a high hover, and they would attach themselves to these ropes. just get lift off and fly back to wherever they came from hanging 100 feet below the helicopter on the end of a nylon line for 45 minutes or so. Yeah, it doesn't sound like a lot of fun, not something I would be eager to sign on for. There are records of them flying through bad weather. There were a number of losses, one, a horrible case where a wounded man and another

partner were in a McGuire rig, flew through a hail storm, thunderstorm, lightning storm. and when they ended up getting back to where they came from, one of them was gone and the other was unconscious and had awful rope burns. And, you know, it was clear he had hung onto his buddy as long as he could until he lost consciousness and had to drop him, you know, dropped him. But anyway, so the McGuire rig was basically drop a nylon line with a big loop sewn in the end of it with a little bit of padding in the loop and you got another loop for you to stick your wrist in and sit in the loop, hang on, and away you go.

You know, rig one of those from a tree branch and try that for 10 minutes or so. And then imagine flying 45 minutes, 100 feet below a helicopter like that. Right. Not much fun. Prior to that, they were using these aluminum ladders, 90-foot aluminum ladders suspended from the helicopter. And so they're literally, you know, rucksack, combat loadout, exhausted from missions, climbing 90-foot up an aluminum ladder in flight to get back in the burr. Under fire at times, right? Exactly. You know, a little bullet, big sky, but still, damn, you know.

So they ultimately developed a thing called a stabo rig, which was a modified parachute harness that you basically used as your LBE, and it had the leg straps. And in a hurry, you just attach the leg straps and you had a couple of hard points you could clip a carabiner into. Down came a rope with the appropriate hard point on it. You clipped into that, and now you don't have to hang on. You just kind of, you know, extend your arms and slipstream a little bit and fly away. It's still very uncomfortable.

The harness is cutting into. Anybody's ever been in a parachute harness knows that's not something you wear for fun. But, you know, that was much preferable to the ladder and much preferable to the McGuire. Right. And they used it. And it saved a lot of lives. Now, because, you know, they were using these places where they didn't have his LLC. Sometimes, like, guys were getting caught up in trees.

Absolutely. Yeah, there were a number of instances of people being dragged through trees or caught in the tree and literally were so and brought the helicopter down. The rope got so entangled that crashed the bird. That did happen. But, you know, if you're looking at this is my shot to get out of here or I can stay by myself and fight to the death. It's a better deal. It's my understanding. I can't say I've ever done it. It sounds to me like a better deal. Now, Dutch, it was Dutch, I believe, who had a story about where the helicopter crew on landing misestimated their, like how much the rope had stretched, correct? That's Jim Wheeler's story. That's the man sergeant major Jim Wheeler's story. Again, Jim is a big, strong Hawaiian dude. And he and another member of his team were the last two left, an earlier bird had come and gotten the other members of RT Alaska.

out. So there is Jim and one in one indage left. The bird dropped four ropes. A Huey could take four guys on strings max. So they came over and dropped four ropes on sandbags and only one of them makes it down to where Jim is. So it happened to be that this particular rope was both a McGuire and a hard point for his stave up. So Jim basically had his indige climb up on his shoulders and hook into or get in the the McGuire and then he hooked onto the stabo and it could fly them both out with him sitting on Jim's shoulders. Now Jim's not a small guy, tough as nails. So now you two guys on one rope, they're like 130 feet below the helo due to the stretch factor. The helicopter is all at night. Helicopter

flies back to Fubai and makes a normal approach in the dark and they're 30 feet lower than they think they're going to be. So they start dragging them down a perforated steel plate runway um jim's got mini grenades start coming off of his rig and going off he's got a white willie pete goes off his rig and goes off so the tower says to the bird holy crap you're under fire you know so what does he do he pulls pitch and you know goes on or down the runway ways to get out of the fire zone and basically drags jim and his end edge down the runway for several hundred feet drags them across a helo revetment up one wall into the end of the revetment up the other wall down the other side busts them up good style i mean they were they were hospitalized with a long

recovery after that yeah in the book i mentioned jim like he had in radio and he managed to get over to his back but it ground the radio down to like nothing it had ripped off the rubber jungle boots soles completely off and ground a prick 25 radio down to like an inch and a half thick i mean Yeah, awful. Like that's great for Tom and Jerry, right? A helicopter dragging somebody over all this stuff. But in real life, like, there was some serious damage. In a Disney film, it might be good for a laugh.

In real life, please don't make me do that. Right. Wow. It's amazing. It's amazing. Yeah, there are, I just want to say that your book, it's a great story about Dutch. And Dutch is a remarkable human being. and I highly recommend reading it just for his story,

but there are also so many other great stories in here about that show you like highlights of the life and the experiences in MacVSog in general. Well, thank you. I hope I did them justice. That's all I can say, but thank you for your comment. Yeah, absolutely.

Let me see what other notes I have. because like I said, there's so much in here. Oh, so one of the things you mentioned because, you know, we've talked, well, a lot of people have read who are interested in this kind of history, have read the books by and about Billy Waugh. And we also have Dutch, but they're two very different personalities, right? They are. I cannot claim to know Billy will.

I bumped up against Billy in a training role back decades. ago. I was, I did not know him well. Billy's exploits and achievements are well documented now. And you know, this is, this has been from the beginning Dutch's story. When Dutch was talking, I was not correcting. I was listening. Right. Taking notes, you know. So I don't, I don't edit opinions and I don't presume to judge. I'm not worthy to judge either one of, you know, of that. They are very different people in my experience and I ran that part of the book by other people who knew them both and said, is this fair? Am I being fair? And they said, yes, you're being fair. So I took some comfort in that. They're very different personalities. Dutch is quiet. He is thoughtful. He is confident,

plenty confident and capable, but he's not, he's not brash. He's not sort of hyper-aggressive. he's not going to be, you know, hey, let's go. We're ready. Let's go. If anything happens, we'll figure it out. You know, that's not his style. He's a planner. He's a, here's the procedure. Here's what's worked before. We're going to fall back on that. Now, if he has to innovate, he'll innovate, and I bet you a paycheck he's going to win, but he's not going to rely on that skill as mission success. He's going to try to do it by the book in proven ways. they're very different personalities. And so, and Billy was quite senior to Dutch. He was a sergeant major when Dutch was a staff sergeant. So there's an innate tension there anyway. Right. You know, anybody's, you guys get it.

You understand. And so they're respectful to each other. As far as I know, they've never exchanged a harsh word, but they see life and mission and performance in different ways. Right. And that doesn't detract from the accomplishments of either of them. Not at all. They both got plenty to be proud about. They both accomplished amazing things. It just makes them different guys and they approach life and mission in a different way. Right. Yeah. No, that was, I don't, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't mean to be disrespectful of anybody that was in that unit doing that job. I'm, you know, Dutch is entitled to his opinions and it was my job to put them out there. Right. And I think that, you know, this isn't a situation, you know, where whether two other human beings go on, this isn't a situation where people who are not involved need to pick sides or feel a certain way.

You know, it's just two great operators who operated differently, who knew each other and may not have seen eye to eye about things. Absolutely right. And how uncommon is that in military service? you serve with somebody you don't agree right never happened to me and my active duty yeah right exactly yeah exactly um so some of the people that you wrote about uh and honored in this book uh were john walton yep um if you want to talk about these guys a little bit you can but i but i could also just go i met you know i actually had the honor of meeting john walton late in his life uh he he was a naval reserve officer, believe it or not, long after Vietnam. And I happened to meet him in that in that regard.

He was a reservist assigned to a major NATO exercise that I was taking part in. A very humble man, a nice guy. I mean, he's one of the richest people in the world. He's not running around, you know, rubbing that in your face. He was a very, very brave man, a skilled combat medic, apparently, Silver Star recipient, amazing poker player by all accounts. I wrote in the book that Dutch said, you know, I could never figure out why he didn't need his salary. And my understanding of that was, well, of course, you know, his dad's the founder of Walmart. He doesn't need a salary. Well, another team member of his, a very close friend of his came back and said, no, no, no.

The reason why he didn't need a salary is he won thousands of dollars playing poker with us. You know, so, okay, Roger that. So John Walton was the son of Sam Walton, but also a very accomplished. Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart. That's correct. Interesting. I didn't know that. Yeah. And then Jim Wheeler. Yeah. Jim Wheeler, we've talked about quite a lot. A distinguished recon team leader went on to a distinguished career in the agency. Yeah. And Jim Wheeler was a bit of practical joker like when it came to Dutch and others, right? Not just Dutch, but yes, it was with Dutch. A couple of funny things there. So it was fun. First of all, when Dutch was well liked among the people at MacBissog who knew him, mainly because he was willing to share his knowledge and expertise.

If you were a new guy and you're reporting into the unit and you've got an NCO who's a recon team leader who's willing to sit down with you for an hour or two of his spare time and share his knowledge with you, how much would you value that? Right. You know, I certainly would. Not everybody was like that. So anyway, they would love to play jokes on Dutch. They had this little bar. They called the Recon Club there at the base at Dunang. And so Dutch would walk in and they'd go, let's hide from Dutch.

And they'd scatter all over the camp and hide. Now he's all by himself. Well, that's when we want to be lonely. You know, it's a drink by himself. So he would use his man tracking skills and track him down all over the camp and find them hiding behind old drums or in the shitter or whatever. You know, it was just very funny. So that's one funny story, but another funny story that Jim liked to tell was after Dutch was wounded, he is gimping around on a crutch because he had a great big hole blown in his leg and that's healing.

And so he would sit down in the mess hall and Jim would sneak up behind him or turn around from his seat behind him and basically loosen the screws in his crutch. So when Dutch went to stand up, the crutch would collapse and Dutch would fall in his ass and everybody would laugh. You know, that's Jim Wheeler. So it's nice to have friends, isn't it? Yeah, for sure. Oh, and he also talks about, or Dutch tells the story about when he goes up to the cold weather training. Yes, yes. So Jim gets Dutch to come and support some cold weather training he's got going on.

And Dutch arrives, you know, he doesn't know exactly what his task is going to be when he gets there. so he's not like carrying a full field load out you know so jim says i need you to go out overnight with the students okay fine they're on patrol i'll go out overnight with him said well i didn't bring a sleeping bag jim says no worries i got a sleeping bag for you so in the press of business he just kind of throws it at dutch and dutch you know goes on mission but it's not a sleeping bag it's a sleeping bag cover there's no insulation it's a canvas bag and uh so that's basically damn near froze today said i had to huddled by the fire shivering all night. You know, that's the, yeah, that's Jim Whitton. Steve Hoffman or Dustin Hoffman, as it were. Yeah. I got a chance to speak several times with

Sergeant Major Hoffman, wonderful human being, you know, career speaks for itself, very, very positive about Dutch and basically attributes a great deal of his professional knowledge to Dutch's leadership in those early days. Yeah. You know, tried to get Dutch into Delta force for Eagle Claw, actually. Came to Dutch's house. Wonderful story of how he got back in. So Sergeant Major Hoffman got badly wounded on the 26th of April, 1970, when the mission

where Dutch received his Silver Star, bad leg wounds, and was medically discharged from the army. Went to work for IBM. So Dutch gets back from Vietnam in early 19, 71 is assigned as an instructor at the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg. And at this point, Sergeant Major Hoffman is working for IBM. So Dutch being Dutch, he says, hey, come to visit, love to see you, come spend some time at the house.

And while he's staying at Dutch's house for most of a week, Dutch is inviting every member of MacV Sog that's at Bragg over for dinner and come see Steve, you know. So that is and and Sergeant Major Hoffman said, that was it. I was done. I was done with IBM. You know, I wanted back in the Army back in special forces. And he did and did a 30 year career. Yeah, that's amazing. And then you mentioned that he went on to Delta Force. And at one point, he approached Dutch about, hey, I want you to join this unit, but I can't tell you what's going on. I want you right now. We got something big in the hopper. You'd be great for this.

Want you, want you, want you, want you. But I can't tell you what it is. And very uncharacteristically for Dutch, he said, no, I need to know what you want. You know, what's up? And he could not tell him because it was Operation Eagle Claw. It was the Iranian hostage rescue operation. And Dutch, he couldn't tell and Dutch wouldn't sign if he couldn't tell. And he did not join Delta at that point. Yeah. It's amazing. Yeah. And potentially fortuitous for Dutch, given, you know, the casualties and what happened on that operation.

Yeah. I mean, you know, as I understand it, eight people were killed out of a much larger force. Right. But, you know, a formative, I'm no expert in Eagle Claw, but a formative event in the history of special forces in the United States. I think we tried to learn a lot of lessons from that operations failure. Yeah. Yeah. Don Malley. Don Malley was the one, two, on the 26th of April 1970. He was the second American on the team after Steve Hoffman, the nominal radio operator, but the one, too, didn't. operate the radio the one zero usually did a very nice man had a long conversation with him he went on to be a one zero of r t asp after that mission and was himself wounded and uh and then went on to a career on the support side of delta when he retired from the army and then went seeing man i love the story

in the book about him uh so he's sitting around the hooch one night and they have this captured RPD machine gun that they would take on missions from time to time because it makes a different sound and leaves different brass on the ground and you can't necessarily tell Americans are there, you know, that kind of thing. So somebody says, hey, Don, I got a C rash and can. I need to open over here. You got something to open this with. And he says, sure, and they toss him the can and he basically shoots it open with the RPD right there in the hoot, which I love that story. I think that's pretty good. Yeah, it is. And is he the one who called Hoffman, Dustin Hoffman? and set a hand coming for you?

So in the firefight on the 26th of April, the team was patrolling and a team of anti-recon hunter, recon hunter team that the North Vietnamese Army stood up to deal with McVSogg Recon teams. They chartered large, you know, they chartered units to hunt these guys down, track them down and kill them. So the team is a little bit spread out in patrol order. and the

Zero One, a Cambodian named Chau Sock, heard something. So he gets up and leaves this position and goes downhill to scout what he thinks he's heard. Well, Steve Hoffman goes with him, you know, battle buddy, sticks with him, goes down the hill a little ways, and they

walk up and there's like 16 or 18 recon hunters right there. So Chow Sox takes them under fire immediately, drops like three of them, and then gets hit himself in both legs. Steve Hoffman is wounded by a grenade and has to drag Chow Sok into a position of defilade nearby, try to tend Chow Sox wounds and return fire as he can.

It's a very chaotic scene. So they are separated from the rest of the team. In the meantime, the other element has triggered now an ambush on Dutch's portion of the team. They get hit. Point Man is hit in the femur and killed. He lived nine hours, unfortunately, but he did die. guy named Kim Ting, Cambodian named Kim Ting, very brave young man. And so Steve Hoffman and child soccer, isolated and away from the team.

So Don Malley sees this and yells over to Steve Hoffman, who he called Dustin Hoffman, like the movie star, and says, I'm coming for you, Dustin, and runs across 40 meters of open ground, through enemy fire, grabs Hoffman, runs back across that open area, drops him off with the team, runs back across it under fire to get Child Sock, and runs back across it with Child Sock, returning him to the team. Now, put that in today's context of a, you know, a modern day war, right? Right, right. Don Maley's reward for that was a bronze star with a combat V. Right. Right. Things have changed in the United States Army, in my opinion. Yeah, for sure, for sure. And, you know, for better or worse, she's to say, but those guys definitely a lot of them did not get the recognition that they deserved at that time.

Absolutely. You know, guys that were on bright light missions under fire, rescuing recon teams, taking tremendous firing wounds, would come away from that with an Army commendation medal with a V. Right. You know, an ARCOM with a V. Right. Oh, okay. And, you know, they weren't in it for the medals. None of these guys are, you know, I was out there to earn a medal and I deserved it and I didn't get it you won't ever hear one of them say that right but as an american citizen who appreciates what they did i'll say it they deserve recognition they never got right yeah it's amazing and do you think that that was just a sign of the times do you think that it was because it because they did try to keep uh macfey sog keep them at a lower profile do you think it was a combination of both or more

i think it was both of those things you know we many things have inflated at over the years. I know in the Navy, we give away Navy achievement medals for a good performance putting together a social event these days. It was both. And again, there were a lot of personal decorations given to MacB Sawg. A bunch of medals of honor, bunch of distinguished service crosses, bunch of silver stars and bronze stars. But at the same time, there was this pressure to downgrade awards because they didn't want to attract too much attention. Right. A very famous MacB. Sog soldier, Colonel Bob Howard, ultimately received a Medal of Honor on his third nomination for it. You know, all were deserving nominations.

They were downgraded twice. And the third time the Army finally said, I guess we're going to have to give it to him. Right. You know, there's no, he's going to keep doing this until he'd give him what he deserves, you know. Right. And he kept telling him, stop, stop going out. You know, you've done enough. You've taken enough risk.

Don't do that. And he would get on the damn bird and go. Right. You know, he was just that kind of soldier. And even with the reluctance to award these soldiers, you know, a higher award, did you say that nine of them, nine, that they still received an inordinate amount of a medal of honor. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Remember correctly, the Distinguished Service Cross is 22. Yeah. That's huge. That's huge. Yeah. It's amazing what these men did. I mean, it's amazing. boggles the mind uh and then um we have cliff newman so our major cliff newman was very kind to give me

his memories of the day one of the fascinating things i was able to do in writing this book was i literally talked to three american survivors of the same shot down helicopter in vietnam same bird same day same event talked to all three of them uh so serge major newman is well known because he was the first man off the ramp in the first hate jump first combat halo jump in US Army history and which means world history. He was the first guy off the ramp with RT Florida that night first combat use of halo. His first combat was on the bright light team that came and got Dutch's team out on the 26th of April 1970. Was a recon team leader himself. His mission had

been weathered out. They were sitting around a launch site, couldn't go because their their insertion point was weathered. So they called you, Dutch called the prairie fire needed a bright light team to come extract them and they needed a chase medic and typical of a macb sawg operator he said well i'm not a medic but i can put on a band-aid and if you need me i'll go and he got on the bird expecting it to be a chase chase medic mission on a bird you know well next thing you know he said well damn if they didn't land the bird next thing you know i'm on the ground you know and involved in the fight so they got out of there everybody but the point man who was killed that day made it out alive and and you know that's that story yeah that that and

that's also the day the dutch won the silver star correct that's the mission that dutch won the silver star for he was he was uh successfully fighting you know off the ambush kept the team alive and returning fire effectively exposed himself in the open giving hand signals and directing team fire doing when he did he was throwing grenades. He killed a machine gunner in the opening burst. His very first burst out of his car 15 killed a machine gunner that Adam Vinned. And then he exposed himself in the open area to bring in the birds and put them in the right place and get the team extracted.

So absolute Silver Star, you know, you read the citation. It speaks for itself. That's amazing. And then the other, the last one, not the last person in the book, but one of the other people you highlight is Andrew Brassfield. Staff Sergeant Andrew Brassfield. One of the few African Americans in SF in that time, skilled Recont Team leader in his own right. He was born in Missouri and so he named his recont team our team Missouri went through one zero school with Dutch. There's a photo in the book of Dutch with his one zero school class all kidded up ready to go on mission.

Somebody snapped a photo and immediately behind Dutch is staff sard Brassfield. He when Dutch were friends and he He, you know, Dutch being born in Indonesia did not have the racial baggage that many Americans had at the time. He has no racial animus whatsoever. There's no prejudice in Dutch's body. And so he was friends with Steph Sarton Brassfield and who confided in him, dude, I don't think I'm going to make it through this. And that's in fact what happened. He was killed in Laos on mission and his body was never recovered. Yeah. Yeah, that was, it was interesting because one of the stories you told was about. about his truck, when he first got to the United States and his truck across the United States

in the train where he was basically assigned to this immigrant family who did not speak good English. And he was essentially assigned to escort them. And it was not, it was not comfortable. It wasn't good. It wasn't like they weren't good conditions. But there was an African American on the train. And, yeah, that's was in the shower compartment cleaning up. in this African American you know a train car has only got one bathroom right so Dutch

sees him waiting outside the door and says hey come on in and the gentleman couldn't wouldn't do it because of Jim Crow at the time it would have gotten him in great trouble you know Dutch had no idea what was going on he was like you didn't understand this at all of course he was concerned the guy was perfectly welcome to share the compartment with him but that was that was the time that it was you know early 1960s in in America was a very different time than today Right. And coming from Holland where they didn't have that history, he had no idea why, like what was going on. No, he couldn't understand it. He's what's up with this? You know, I don't understand. Yeah, fascinating. I mean, there are so many amazing stories in here. I know we've kept you for.

I stay with you as long as you like. Quite a while now. Oh, you ought to talk about Dutch's lap, the end of his army career, all the things he did in the army after Vietnam because there were quite a few. Yeah, yeah, let's talk about that. Actually, can we talk about Steve Hoffman's account of the mission that they do at night where they wind up in the base camp and they don't know about it? Oh, yeah. So they went on a southern Laos mission, and this would have been summer of 1970. So it's much lower altitude than they're used to.

It's a flatter terrain. It's much hotter. more humid farthest southern mission they ever ran and on the third day they ran out of water their indigid drunk all their water they were low on low on fluid obviously and and so at this point they're they're desperate for water they got to get water bottom line so they come across a fairly well-used trail and dutch makes the call we just got to follow this trail it obviously goes somewhere and we got to find water so it's a very dark night and And they patrol into an area.

And the way Steve Hoffman described it, he said, you know how you can just tell when you're next to something in the dark? You can't really see it, but you just sense that it's there. He thought it was a tree. And he went to lean against it to take some load off, and it was flat. It was the side of a building, side of a hooch.

They have wandered into a base camp along the trail where basically, you know, company size or more units of soldiers would be transported, in legs down the Ho Chi Men Trail and they would get them off the trail and into these hootches and let them sleep for the night. And then they pack them up and take them another leg of their journey to the battle the next day. So they have wandered into a base camp in Laos of numerous hooches, which fortunately for them are currently unoccupied. So they find in Dutch says, hey,

there's got to be water here. We got hootches. We've got to have water. So they find a nice clear spring and they fill up their canteens and they back off a little ways to see what happens well sure enough not too long after in comes a fairly good size contingent in north vietnamese moving into the camp for the night so dutch calls in an airstrike a couple of spads a couple of a one sky raiders with snake and nate and they lay waste to the base camp they kill a bunch of folks and ultimately have to be extracted the following day they they are ultimately um they hear approach along you know where they're hiding a hundred meters or so away and they think okay the game's up they know somebody's directing these airstrikes right and they get extracted but yeah they that's good story yeah so yeah let's talk

about touch after his military career well let me just let me let me let me sketch the end of his military okay because i think anybody that's ever worn a green beret needs to know this yeah um so After he is wounded in August of 1970, on mission, he's shot in a helicopter in flight on insertion, big hole in his thigh, 15 fragments that are still in his leg. He gets assigned as an instructor at the SF school back at Fort Bragg, recon instructor.

He does that for three years. He then becomes a Halo instructor at the Halo school at Fort Bragg. He is a member of the original Halo committee. The Army decides we need to form a committee of Brain Trust to keep Halo moving forward and progressing in terms of technique and materials and design. He's a member of the original Halo Committee. He then goes to ROTC at the University of Vermont as an instructor for two years. There comes back and he has now made Sergeant Major

and the Army wants to send him as a first sergeant to a major unit. He didn't want to go to a leg unit, he didn't really want to go to a conventional unit. And they said, well, how would you like to be first sergeant at Camp McCall. And he said, I'd love that. So he did a tour his first sergeant of Camp McCall running the SF school that he had graduated from 10 years earlier. He wanted to be a team sergeant again. So he went to the second battalion in the seventh group and was the team sergeant from June in 1980 to January of 1982. Culmination experience, you know, all his skills leading an active SF team. At that point, he was thinking about retiring and a very distinguished S.F officer, Colonel Nick Roe, had heard about Dutch.

And had heard about Dutch's childhood experience. And he said, Colonel, Colonel Roe, for those who don't know, was a prisoner of war, the Vietnamese for five years, not even Hanoy Hilton. We're talking bamboo cage in the jungle, wrote an amazing book called Five Years to Freedom, one of the great forbears of the SF community. Colonel Roe came to Dutch and said, you are not retiring, you're going to help me set up this POW training course, which we now know is Sear, Survival Evasion, Resistance, and Escape. Dutch was the senior NCO under Colonel Rowe at the founding of Sear School. That's amazing.

Yeah, it is. Anybody that's been through Sear, you have benefited from Dutch's experience. You have learned lessons that he helped to build and teach. After that, he put on another course called Ler Su, which was basically underground reconnaissance, It's going early at night, dig a hole, stay in that hole for 21 days and report what you see. That didn't go so well. Commanding officer of special forces at the time, and Dutch had a little wager about whether Americans would be willing to do that. And the very first running of the course, the team leader, the officer, came out of the hole too early, and Dutch lost the bet.

So anyway, there was a little bit of disagreement with the brass toward the end of the career. And he had had enough, and he went to Colonel Roe and said, that's it. It's time for me to go. and he retired from the Army on the 1st of January of 1986 as a sergeant major. So, you know, if that were the end of Dutch's story, it would still be an incredible career. It would still be an amazing contribution to America, but that's not what he did. He then volunteered to join the CIA as a paramilitary operations officer. So from February, 1986 to 1999, he served as a PMO for the agency. And, you know, it's funny because in your book, at that point, when you start writing about the agency, at that point, you had to go through the agency's publications, you know, review board or pre-publication review board.

And they redacted certain things. And I really was amused by how you kept the redactions in because for some of the things, it's absolutely so obvious about what you're talking about that it, that you know historically and everything that it's almost ridiculous why they redacted the actual person or location at that time you know i all i can tell you is i'm i'm you know i had to do what i had to do and when they say you can publish your book if you take this out my answer was not okay let me engage in a protracted battle with you for the next five years it was okay roger that right and to do the best i could with uh you know leaving him as it was right that's the best i could do i'll take it out but i'm also going to add this addendum to to point out your how ridiculous this is

i've got an inexhaustible store of snark and i chose to employ some of it as a weapon in response yes i did yeah so uh so he went to work as as a paramilitary operations officer what did that entail for him and how did they like what did that lead into for him Gotcha. Well, I mean, he obviously came to the special operations group of the CIA with tremendous skills and abilities. There was no need to train Dutch and anything to do with soldiery. So basically teaching him how to use the agency's data systems, you know, how to log on and read your traffic in the morning and send a, send a cable, send an Intel report, right? And send, you know, they got that out of the way. And then he was assigned to SOG, the agency's special operations group as a working PMOO. paramilitary operations officer. So one of the one of the things he did right away was a covert action program targeted at a North African country, which is a really good story. I recommend people that are interested read the book. It's a great example of the kinds of things that the agency is tasked to do in American interests and then at the last

minute somebody goes, ooh, I don't know, right. Yeah, let's don't. Never mind. Yeah, you know. You know, and all that preparatory effort is just sort of thrown away because somebody decides not to take the risk. Kim, I need to take a real quick break, but can you talk about a little bit about the Contras and Dutch is involved with it? Thanks. I'll be right back. Absolutely. So after several programs, TDI's missions that Dutch went on as a paramilitary operations officer, One of the big things the agency was doing in those days was support to the Nicaraguan countries. A government of Nicaragua had come in to Sandinistas that were a Marxist, pro-communist government that was not in America's interest and not frankly in the interest of the people in Nicaragua had come to power. So President Reagan signed a finding that said we're going to do what we can to undermine and overthrow these guys. It's not a good idea to have this going on in our hemisphere. It's not good for America.

So of indigenous forces called the Contras were stood up, trained, and equipped, and they did basically battle with the Sandinista forces, undermining their rule, their control of their territory, the economy of Nicaray would to bring them down. Dutch served in that capacity from 1988 to 1991, but the culmination of his experience was he was assigned as an advisor to a battalion of Contras. And in reality, what that meant was he was a battalion commander. So he was training them, equipping them. He was paying them, administering the battalion, sending them on their missions, taking care of them when they came back, making sure they could perform as expected in the field. So he was essentially the battalion commander, a battalion of Nicaragua in Contrast. And he was there right up until the end of the program, shut that battalion down when orders came down.

to do that in 1991 they had to stop the program defund the battalion collect their weapons and explosives and send them all home as you might imagine you know a bunch of guys have gotten accustomed to having weapons and explosives and control of their area are not terribly eager to turn those things in and go back to being whatever it was they were before so he had a bit of a leadership challenge which fortunately being a green beret had prepared him for dealing with indigenous forces unit decommissioning all things that are covered in special forces training so he uh decommissioned that the talian collected their weapons from them paid him off had a little ceremony where they all gave speeches

and saluted one last time and took down the flag and thus ended his involvement and frankly the contra program and they weren't uh overly uh motivated to turn over their weapons initially right no they were not there was one unit of his battalion one company of his battalion that said we're not giving any of these guns back we like these you can't have them and uh he literally had the the unit realized that dutch was at some risk because he was the one making the hard decisions and carrying through on the policy so they posted the best unit of the battalion the recon platoon around his quarters to guard him make sure he didn't get assassinated you know and he basically took the leadership of that company and said, look, you don't understand. There are two other

battalions within an hour's drive of here. I will call them in here, and they will take your weapons from you if you don't turn them into me. And they knew he meant business, and they grumbled and handed over their rifles and their explosives and went home. Yeah. Kim, I just want to thank you real quick for handling that portion of the show by yourself. I was over hydrated. I was over hydrated and didn't have a partner to cover for me. We've all been there. It's no problem. I want to go back real quick because you talked about, you know, his experience as a PMOO initially with the agency and seeing sort of the bureaucracy of them putting a hold on things. Or, you know, like, I think that a lot of people have this idea of the agency and the military and these things being these hyper aggressive organizations. But over the years, they've changed quite a bit, right?

at least said the command of one. Very much. So the agency that I know today is not the agency I joined in 1990. It is a very different organization in a lot of different ways. And my personal opinion is not for the better. It's not the company that I joined when I joined it. And no, you know, people have this notion of the agencies out there rogue doing things that nobody's approved and an individual operator

decides to go Colonel Kurtz, you know, it's not that way, unless you're at the very, very, very top of the agency. Now, I won't speak to the actions of directors or former directors, you know, but the individual officer, you don't have that ability. You're not out there calling those shots. You're doing the mission you've been given to do the best of your ability. And so, you know, it wasn't like that at all. And it, you know, so they say, okay, the president, the process is this. The president signs a finding and says, I hereby find that the following situation is a clear and present danger to the security of the United States, and I want something done about it, period. The agency then comes up with a plan to address that problem, and they submitted up a chain of command, right? And somebody up, you know, National Security Council may go all the way back to the president and says, okay, this is what the best option we think to do what you want done is.

And they go, okay, you're authorized to do it. go get it. So that then starts the process of preparation and training and supply acquisition and all the things that have to be done to make it possible. Well, you know, there are some people, there are a lot of very skilled career bureaucrats in the CIA. They're really, really, really good at, you know, keeping their career on an upward trajectory and avoiding as much personal risk as possible. And so they all said, yeah, yeah, we think this is a great idea. Yeah, that's what we ought to do. When in fact, in their heart of hearts, they're going,

man, I hope we don't ever have to do this because there's a lot of risk involved. Right. And when it comes down time to do it, so they'll wait, they'll sit back. They're not going to be the one to rock the boat. They're not going to be the one to stick their hand up and say, ooh, I don't think this is such a good idea. Right. Because then you, you know, you look like a coward.

You look like a malcontent. You're not with the team. But ultimately, they're hoping something will happen. The guy you're there to undermine dies of a heart attack. you don't need this program anymore, no problem. Right. But it finally comes time to pull the trigger and execute the mission. And somebody up the chain of command, either a senior agency person or a senior

national security council person or perhaps the president, but unlikely the president, more likely it's a minion, says, no, let's don't do it. Right. Too hard. Or let's wait. It's not a good time. We'll wait, we'll wait. Well, you'll wait for three months. months, five months, six months a year, two years, it dies away. It never happens. Stuff changes. And they don't have to make the hard decision. Right. And that's what I talk about in the book.

And when you say, you know, somebody in the bureaucracy, a career bureaucrat in the agency says there's too much risk, they don't necessarily mean to the risk of the people actually conducting the operations officers. No. They mean to their political career. Right. Either themselves or the agency's reputation or their, or their, or the you know imagine for a second the raid that killed bin laden okay imagine if that had failed and we had taken losses right imagine the fallout from that right right now you know if you know if you know where bin laden is to a to a fair degree of certainty you got to go take that shot you

got to do what's got to be done in my opinion director pinetta absolutely did the right thing right But, you know, there are people who counseled. There are people who counseled at that time. Oh, sir, not real sure. Mm, territorial sovereignty of Pakistan could cause a big problem. Maybe we ought to wait, you know. Ben Linen will die of old age before those guys will get on board. Right.

You know, right. So somebody's got to make a hard decision. Unfortunately, in that case, the hard decision was made. Right. And, you know, and that goes all the way up to the president, no matter, you know, who's the president, whether what you think of the president, like there's political fallout for them if the operation goes back. We can look back at evil. Absolutely right. Right. Absolutely right. Yes, there are costs to doing it. There are costs to not doing it. There are costs to trying it and failing.

Right. All of those things are realities. But, you know, to an operator, the politics doesn't matter. The mission matters. The politics, that's not the issue. The mission is the issue. And the, the political considerations often great on the operator who sees it as a very clear choice of this is a worthy mission that needs to be done. Right, right. It's interesting. It almost makes me think that sometimes the clandestine nature of these operations aren't just, you know, to protect the United States from, you know, repercussions. But also if it goes bad and the story doesn't get told, then the problem. politicians don't get blamed, which gives the policy.

They're insulated from it. Exactly. There's no need for it. Now, you know, lest everybody think that I think I'm a national security expert or an expert political advisor, you know, I retired from the agency and the grade equivalent to a disgruntled colonel. So don't take me as appearing to be more than I am. I have the perspective I have and I freely admit it might not be the perspective of somebody

senior to me. Yeah, I mean, yeah. So we talked about Iran-Contra and then Dutch from there moved on to West Africa. He did. You know, one of those garden spots that had a small station, difficult environment, very, very austere, extremely poor country, civil disorder, no real rule of law. One of those places you don't send an investment banker to is COS. It wouldn't be a good match. Right. And so that's the kind of natural fit for a PM officer who's willing to put his hand up and say, yeah, I'll do it. And he can function effectively in that environment. So they came around and looked for volunteers. And of course, Dutch's default answer when asked to volunteers, yes.

And he went off to West Africa to a post that I'm, you know, I was somewhat shocked. They wouldn't let me name the post. I was like, okay, I'm not saying there's a station there today. I'm saying there was a station there in 1994. before, you know, but that's their policy. So it is what it is. Difficult, tough, dangerous place. He did it for two years as acting chief of station. He wasn't senior enough to be made the actual COS, but he was left holding the bag and he was acting chief of station for most of two years in that very difficult place. Well, what's interesting about that, sort of, is we have had an analyst on before in a more recent telling of their experience in that place who was given permission to name it. So.

Buddy, it's a mystery. I can't explain it. It may be that the word got back to the PRV. Hey, this is, this is Kim we're talking about. He's a known jerk. So, you know, give me. Who knows, man. You just, yeah, you must not have kissed the right asses at the right time.

I don't know. I made a career of that, in fact. I was very good at doing the wrong thing. So from there, Dutch goes to the farm. That's right. The then-chief of Ground Branch comes to him and says, hey, I want you to go down to the farm as an instructor. Now, Dutch is, so this is 1996,

and Dutch was born in 1936. You do the math. You know, field ops, particularly paramilitary ops, young man's game, very fit man's game. Dutch has always been very fit, but you know, the sands through the hourglass, so are the days of our lives. There comes a time when it's time to hang up the spurs, you know. And so he didn't want to go, but the chief said, look, you don't understand. I've just been made chief of the training facility down there, and I want you there. So you're going. Right. And so he did. He went down and became an instructor on the hard skill side of the

farm, not the trade craft school, but the shooting and driving and field craft side of the farm. And did that until his retirement in 1999. And then they said, well, you know, we'd really like you to stay as an instructor, but as a contractor, would you do that? And what does Dutch's answer? Yes. And he did it for 23 more years, only retiring a couple of weeks ago, actually. And, you know, you talked about that portion of of the farm because that was where you first met Dutch, correct? Well, I first met him as a student, but I first got to know him and be his friend

as a co-instructor on that side of the house. On that side of the house. And so it's the SOTC. Yes. And can you tell us a little bit about that? Sure. The history of the agency or the Directorate of Operations, the operations officers for the agency was, of course,

grew out of the office's strategic services in World War II. OSS is the forerunner to the agency. And you know what kind of operations those guys did in World War II if you don't, you need to read up on it. It's pretty fascinating. I actually had the chance to meet and spend a week with a member of an OSS Jedberg team once.

It was a remarkable. Wow. Guy named Douglas Bazata, he's been written about. Anyway, so the agency knew that it was preparing officers for duties in difficult dangerous places. And they had what was called the paramilitary course that many case officers went to after they became case officers in the field tradecraft course. Over time, that morphed into what became the SOTC. And there were lots of differences there. First of all,

you know, that kind of stuff is a lot of fun, shooting and driving and flying around in helicopters and jumping out of parachuting and taking boats out on the river and that kind of stuff. all great fun and the agency of the 1980s was becoming a different organization was becoming you know different than it had been so first thing they they had to do was more and more and more operations officers were going to be not military experience men and not necessarily white males and there were going to be a lot more women as case officers and then it was we don't think only officers are deserving of this kind of training this will be a great recruiting tool and a great incentive for officers of all four directorates who are joining the agency for a

career to give them this fun exciting training so it morphed into what became done as the satsi the old p m course was renamed and became the satsi and it was essentially a you know fairly light but nonetheless meaningful field tradecraft course map reading, land navigation, shooting a variety of weapons, driving cars, running boats, and it culminated in parachute training. You know, there have not been a whole lot of parachute insertions on mission when the agency since the Vietnam War, but, you know, it's a way to get to work when business class travel is not an option.

And it is a wonderful personal growth, personal confidence training tool that changes you in alterably. I'll tell you my opinion is that first parachute jump when you leave the door of the aircraft, you're a different human being for the rest of your life than you were before you did. So I don't know if you agree with that, but I, that's the way I see it. That's fair. So the kind of confidence that instills is a useful thing and an officer, you want to go out and do dangerous things. Yeah. So the SOTC became, you know, attended by a much wider variety of people and it was increasingly watered back in terms of physical requirements. The physical demands of it got less and less and less over time.

But it was still being done at the time when I went through as a trainee and for some years after. So that's what Dutch was teaching primarily for as long as it existed. And then when that was done, he moved over to one of the, I mean, he's useful for a lot of things and they used him for a lot of things over the decades. But he primarily focused on one of the training courses, first as an instructor, and as time marched on and physical realities became what they were in a training support role right up until the end of his career. So correct me if I'm wrong, because I think I'm following you in from your book. But Sotsie, is it the special operations

training course? Was that what it was called? That's what Sotsie stood for. Okay. And initially, it was a really hardcore course designed to bring operations officers or case officers who didn't have a strong military background sort of up to speed if they were it was a special training course it was yes that's correct when it was the old it was called the paramilitary course in its earliest days right and it got guys ready for those missions in vietnam where you were out with a provincial unit as their advisor you know you were out in the hinterlands of Laos recruiting Montan Yards and forming up a company-sized element to Harry, the Vietnamese. You know, there were guys that did that in Vietnam. Most of them were Vietnam

combat veterans who had been sheep dipped into the agency. But nonetheless, you had a whole bunch of people assigned to roles as operations officers around the world where they needed hard skills. They needed to be able to function and deal. And that was its role. It gradually morphed over time into the SOTC, which was less and less and less lethal, less and less and less physically demanding and more and more a fun training experience that would bond the trainees and give them some confidence and give them some useful skills, but with a vastly smaller expectation they would put them to use in a hostile environment. Right.

So when they go, so for the operations officers, we're not even talking about like logistics and analysts and people like that right logicians and analysts but for the operations officers originally when they went through this course it was physically demanding they would shoot move and communicate they would absolutely rut marches pt patrols through the woods carrying blank firing weapons m60 machine guns with a belt of 200 on you know go from here to there make your extraction time recon that site you know here comes your para drop of your water and your ammo and your battery for your radio, you know, mark a drop zone, take that stuff in. It was all of that.

And over time, you know, that sort of lethal intent was largely watered down. So over time, people would go, well, look, logistics officers, analysts, they might be these austere environments and need these skills. And then they would be put in the course. But then they might go up through the ranks and go, you know, like that, was bullshit how I was treated in that course. And I don't think they should treat people that way anymore. And they need to like taper this off.

And so gradually the more people they let in, the more the course was diluted. Is that correct? I think that's fair. I think there were a lot of people who were very uncomfortable in that, in that environment with those demands being put on them. They didn't see the relevance of it. Hey, I don't do that.

That's not what I do. I'm never going to have to do that. don't want to do that. Why should I be forced to do this, be very uncomfortable and do all these things? And I don't really want to remember too hard and remember too well how poorly I did it. You know, so let's just shut this down. This is all BS. Nobody needs to be doing this. You know, we'll prepare them for their overseas assignment with a two-week course and get them marginally qualified on a handgun and send them on their way. Right. You know, it was a totally different mindset of what was appropriate. And again, this is all pre-September 11, 2001. You got to put it in the

context of a pre-9-11 world. Right. You know, it was not the same world we live in today. And then post-9-11, did that course come back? Did it regain its structure or did it, did anything happen? Unfortunately, it did not. It was still going on at 9-11 and for a few years, a very few years, after the first thing that happened is there was a huge hiring surge for 9-11 there were a lot of people hired because we were going to need a lot of officers that strained the training uh training pipeline tremendously and we were not staffed to put through casts of thousands you know number one number two people were like we need to get these officers to the field as soon as possible right away we can't afford this and so the first thing they did was cut out the airborne training

Well, the jump training had actually gone away before that. It had come and gone a couple of times, but it was reinstated, ultimately, as a good thing, because it is a good thing for reasons already said. And so they said, but, you know, if this officer who we've just spent a year and a half training breaks his leg on a jump, and now we can't deploy him on schedule, that's not helpful. And, you know, and oh, by the way, the fatter members of the class, the slower, weaker members of the class who couldn't pass the PFT, they don't get to do it and that's not fair and they're looked down on by their peers for the rest of their career because they didn't jump out of the plane and everybody else did you know or are they

chickened out in the door or whatever um we're just going to knock this airborne training thing out right we can no longer afford this right at the time when in fact that's a really useful thing right and then within a couple of years after that satsi itself was disestablished and they went to a modular training approach where you prepared the officer if he were going to a post where they needed a firearms qualification, you gave them a firearms qualification. If they were going where they needed to learn the defensive driving part, you put them in the defensive driving course and you sent them on their way. Yeah, interesting. And so Dutch was there until the end of Sotsie and then he continued, he continued contracting even after the demise of Sotsie.

That's correct. And he went on to teach, you know, Dutch will teach whatever they needed him to teach to whoever they sent to train. And the The farm trains a variety of people. You know, Team Alpha, Mike Spann, first team into Afghanistan, first casualty in Afghanistan. I met Mike briefly when he came to the base to do some pre-mission training before that deployment. That team came and did some workups to get ready and then went off into history and God bless Mike's band. But you know, that's one end of the spectrum. The other is here's a new trainee, just joined the agency three months ago and we're giving them this, you know, experience to get them ready

for their first TDIY, you know, everything in between. Right. No, it's fascinating. And, you know, what final issue, what would you like to say about Dutch? Like, where is he now and how? I'm happy to say, Dutch, so Dutch retired officially as an officer of the agency in 1999. He retired as a contractor about two weeks ago, officially. He is happily remarried to his wife, Kathy, who is a lovely human being, loves a

him to death, takes very good care of him. He is enjoying retirement, retirement, looking forward to some travel with Kathy, looking forward to not having to do all those things that you have to do when you're still working and enjoying the sun coming up in the morning and good taste in food that he likes and coffee and, you know, enjoying the golden years of his life after 60 years of contribution to our nation. It's amazing. I mean, it's truly amazing. And And, you know, we hope he has many more. And, you know, one of the things you talked about in the book, but we didn't really talk about was his first marriage, which was a very successful, very long-lasting marriage.

Absolutely, 42 years. Married for 42 years and had an adopted daughter who herself had two sons. They are working police officers. They are both Army veterans. They both deployed to Iraq. And I'm not sure if both of them went to Iraq and Afghanistan. But between the two of them, they went to Iraq. Iraq and Afghanistan. Their MOS was military policemen, but they were used as

dismounted infantry in those deployments. You know, you know very well what that was like and what that meant. They're both working police officers, and they are serving our country as guardians of our civil society. You know, so he clearly passed along the notion of selfless service to his grandsons, both of whom are apparently fine Americans. Yeah. No, it's an amazing story. I like, he's said from a child who was essentially a prisoner of war not a you know not a a uniform soldier but but in a japanese internment camp for a couple years at the age of five you know he spent four or five of his formative years in prisoner camps starving to death being guarded by guys with

bayonets and you know and then his story from there it it's the type of thing that you would see in a and think it was fantastical. Yeah, you know, if you tried to sell this as a screenplay to Hollywood, every agent you talk to would say, there is no flipping way. This is utterly unbelievable. Right. suspension of disbelief is not achievable here.

Right. Sorry, this interview is over. Right. It's all true. It's all true. It's amazing. And, you know, I don't know that in the Army, there is an equivalent term as sea stories. But for some reason, the Navy has sea stories. And there's a reason for that. There's a reason for that. Sailors get up to Skippy every damn day. Yes, they do. They do funny stuff. You know, you're confined. Who was it that said, you know, going to sea in the Navy is a lot like prison with the opportunity to burn to death or drown thrown in as a benefit, you know.

And they're not wrong with that. So I was I was a Navy officer. I retired from the reserves. I was spent over eight years on active duty as a surface warfare officer. Almost all of that time was on ships. I spent one year as an Admiral's aide and the rest of the time I was on ships. Yeah. And sailors do funny stuff on a daily basis, you know, and and so I had all these memories of things that happened. Some of them are funny. Some of them are sad. Some of them were just interesting to me. I remembered them with, you know, hey, that's pretty cool. That's different from what the average human being knows in terms of life experience. And I thought, you know, I'll tell these stories to friends. Well, I would do that and they would say, dude, you got to write these down. That's funny. You know, that's really interesting. So then I wrote them down as a series of emails for friends and relatives, and they were all like, you got to write a book. You got to put these in a book. So I did. Some very kind friends encouraged me. And I created the second book. And hold it up, do you mind?

Yes, no, please. Please do. Okay. So the second book is entitled, Neptune's Asylum, see stories from the 1980s, U.S. Navy. And it's all of those memories of those things that happened or that I heard about from firsthand from other people who were there when they happened while I was on active duty.

It's, you know, I got to tell you, I'm proud of the book. I think it's pretty good. It's funny because, like I was telling you, you know, a lot of people often ask since I was both active Navy and active Army, which one I liked most and it's like, well, you can't compare the two. But the stories from the Navy are always, you'll never get stories like that from the Army. There's just something about young sailors, especially young, each year old men, but young sailors being overseas.

Yep. After being at sea for 30, 45 days, you just can't compare. They're off the chain when they're on liberty and they will do amazing things, not necessarily for the good. No. That's true. No, I remember seeing a meme one time, a little cartoon that it made me laugh so much. And it was like of, it was a drawing of the continental, like a cartoon of the

Continental, the first Continental Congress. And they're like, you know, oh, October 13, 1775, the Continental Navy has just been established. And somebody goes, oh, we just got our first liberty violation. Exactly. Exactly. That's the nature of it. And sometimes it's.

like you know you've looked them square in the eye you've told them you are not to do the following things and they say oh sure thank senior chief five minutes later they're doing it right it's just the way it is no it sounds like a great book and i haven't read that but i definitely will because thank you those stories if you honestly if you guys probably just want a great experience of reading i imagine a bunch of short stories 62 chapters it's short stories they all stand alone so you don't have to follow a narrative you open the story you'll be able to read it from start to finish with everything you need so if you want to read one chapter a night before you go to bed it works really well for that my friends tell me yeah and there's there's there's interesting there is

sad there is infuriating and there's really funny yeah all in there it's just its own culture which i think is great that you wrote a book about it because it deserves a reading for sure You know, people, particularly soldiers, Marines get a better idea. Marines see it as they go on float and they go, okay, I get a glimpse into this other world and they, you know, they get a chance to learn about it. But airmen and soldiers have no idea what shipboard life is like. It's not anything like what they do. The hardware may be similar, but the life is very different. If you want to know what your brothers in the blue uniforms have been doing, this is how you can,

find out. Yeah. Yeah. And, and, you know, Marines, like, they have some pretty, pretty fun stories, too, but they still fall under a very strict, like, military hierarchy. We're in the Navy that doesn't really exist. On a ship, you have your shops and you have your different departments. And, you know, you do have your LPO and your, you know, chief and stuff like that. But it doesn't, it's not quite the same. And so when you go out. Yeah. You know, yeah. I would say that Marine Corps discipline is the gold standard of military discipline.

You know, those guys are very good at that. They're accustomed to that and they live that life. God bless them. Respect the Marine Corps tremendously. But, yeah, in the Navy, it can be a little difference. Yeah, absolutely. Let me just look up real quick. So can you hold both those books up again for us?

Sure. Be happy to do it. All right, so get the glare off of them. So the first book and both of these books are on Amazon and I know that they are both on Kindle and Limited if you guys have Amazon Prime. You can download them and read them for free. They're also available in the description. I recorded the audio book for below in the description. Okay, the links are down in the description.

We put them both also put them in the chat. but read Dutch if you really want an amazing story about you know a fantastical human being and also a really great inside glimpse into macfizog in general and also some great stuff about the CIA and the paramilitary officers and then Neptune's asylum for some great sea stories um and you're you're planning on a third book right or a novel you think well there's a novel in my head you know, it's kind of a love story hidden in a post-apocalyptic collapse adventure novel, but I haven't yet made the first keystroke. So it's going to be quite some time before that one becomes available.

That's going to take me a while. Fantastic. Well, please, when you have it out, let us know, and we will plug it nonstop. You're the man. Thank you so much. You've been very kind. Of course. Next week is Rick Prutter, right?

Is it? I believe so because next week is Rick Prado finally. So next week is Rick Prado. Former CIA. Former CIA officer. And then I think the week after that is a former enlisted Marsock operator. Yes. Peter Perry, a recon raider.

Bingo. Right? A USMC recon raider. And Rick Prado just, he just came out with a book. I can't recall the title of it, though. Neither can I. I'm sorry, guys. I think it's called Shadow Warrior.

It's Rick's career history. That may be so. And we will read that before next week. But yeah, check us out next week for Rick Prado. Please check out Kim's books. Don't forget to like, subscribe. And join our Patreon. Like check out some of the behind-the-scenes stories.

The guys tell. And actually, can you hang around, D? Or do you need to get home? You're right? Kim, do you mind hanging out and telling us a couple of good C stories for our bonus segment? I'd be happy to do it. Whatever you like. Okay, great. So thank you very much, everybody, for joining us tonight. Next week, Jack will be back and we'll be far more organized instead of my TBI adult brain.

We'll have some actual guidance. But thank you, everybody, and have a good night.