The Team House - Long Range Recon Patrol (LRRP) in Vietnam | Larry Chambers | Ep. 186

Episode Date: January 23, 2023

A national award winning artist (First place winner in the 2011 National Veterans Creative Arts Contest). Chambers is one of 13 exhibiting artists acknowledged by the 50th Anniversary of the Vietnam War Commission to honor and pay tribute to Vietnam Veterans and their families during the 50th Anniversary of the war commemoration. Chambers served with F Co 58th Inf LRP and the originating L Co 75th Rangers 101st Abn (“Merrill’s Marauders’) company one of the thirteen LRRP (long-range reconnaissance patrol) companies in Vietnam. His decorations include the Combat Infantryman Badge, the Bronze Star with (V) for valor and one Oak Leaf Cluster, the Air Medal with (V) for valor and one Oak Leaf Cluster, the Army Commendation Medal, Purple Heart, Good Conduct Medal, National Defense Service Medal, Vietnam Service Medal, Parachute Badge, Recondo School Tab, 75th Airborne Ranger Tab, Vietnam Campaign Medal, Vietnam Civil Actions Medal and the Vietnam Gallantry Cross. Chambers passion is helping other veteran receive their VA benefits and has dedicated himself to helping young veterans by causing a shift in how they deal with the problems they face after they return to civilian life. Check out Larry's books here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/Larry-Chambers/author/B001IQUMOY?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Larry's website: http://www.larry-chambers.com/ Today's Sponsor: Ten Thousand Apparel  https://www.TENTHOUSAND.cc/TEAM The brand believes in being Better Than Yesterday, a stoic dedication to continuous improvement, not overnight success. GO TO : https://www.TENTHOUSAND.cc/TEAM for 15% OFF YOUR PURCHASE! SLNT pronounced “silent” SLNT.com  Keep your gear secure with SLNT Faraday bags SLNT.com  Thank you for supporting the companie that support the show ! To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -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:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #lrrp #vietnam #theteamhouseiBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, Covert Ops, espionage, the Team House, with your hosts, Jack Murphy, and David Park. Good evening, everyone. This is episode 186 of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy. Dave's out at a cybersecurity conference tonight,

and it'll just be me and Larry talking tonight. Our guest, Larry Chambers, is the author of Recondo and Death in Ashaw Valley. He is a former Lerp Ranger served in the long-range reconnaissance patrols in Vietnam. One of his teammates was a former guest of the show, Ken Miller. I hope you guys will check that interview out after this one. Also served with Gary Linderer, you know, a kind of your peer group that wrote a lot about the Lerps after the war. And people like me read those books, you know, in the 1990s as kids. And it certainly found them inspirational.

So, I mean, this is really like a special moment for me, Larry, and I really appreciate you coming on the show tonight. You're welcome. You know, it's exciting. So, Larry, I'd like to start off. talking about, you know, your origin story and sort of like how you grew up and what your pathway was that that eventually took you towards the military. Well, I always, I grew up in the military. I knew I was going to be in the military. Every childhood picture of me is in a uniform. My dad's little cut down officers uniform. And so we lived on an army base called Fort Berry, you know, Fort Cronkite on the San Francisco coast was a missile battery. And so that was, you know, in the mid-50s. And so I kind of remember the old Brown Boot Army,

because it wasn't that long after Korea. And my dad served in Korea's served in World War II. And he got kind of a choice assignment after the war. And so all these, so my friends growing up were privates and corporals that worked under my dad. He ran the radar site on the bay on the Ford. And so, I mean, my dream was to be, was to go to West Point.

My dream was to, then it became, my dream was to, I wanted to be a fighter pilot. And I took the Marine Corps, I remember when I went down to take the Marine Corps flight test, and flunked it. I got such a low score. They didn't even tell me what the score was. It was so bad. I was so nervous because I wanted it so bad. I literally would go blank.

I would, you know, I was one of those kids that I'd take a test and I'd have to read one question 15 times, you know. Does the plane take off? In the air? I don't know. I mean, it was just, it was terrible. So I was, let's say, for the last couple years of high school, I was just so, oh, man, I'll never, I'm never going to get my dream come true. And then I found out I could volunteer for the draft. I mean, this is opposite from all of the stories here.

Oh, I was drafted. I was like, when I got my draft, I was like, yeah. It was like, oh, my God. You know, it was weird, but that I, I loved the Army. I loved being in the Army. I was, my friendships are still lifelong friendships with guys like Miller and Linder and Looney and Burford and all of these guys over the years. And we all, you know, as soon as one guy dies, everybody, you know, we're getting closer. but just lifelong friendships I've never found

I would use my ranger service when I was in business to shame people like if somebody stood me up or was late like 20 minutes I said great you just got my whole team killed what are you talking about? And I go well as far as I'm concerned if you're late you're dead if the chopper comes in and you're going to go like what are you talking about nobody had that kind of I was a stockbroker I worked for you at

after I graduated from university of Utah and and I sort of had to tone that down you know I've sort of kept the whole I'm a because they used to think if you went to Vietnam you were crazy and there was all these guys that had never gone to Vietnam that were crazy and they were and they gave such a bad rap for the guys but and I would hear these stories and I go like that's not the story that I remember. I mean, I remember guys tearing each other apart to get on the helicopter to go out to rescue people and, you know, our teams. And we never left anybody behind. And guys would, you know, take a bullet for it. I mean, it was everything that you see in the

Avenger stories, but we're true, you know, these guys were heroes. And I was just lucky to be, you know, I always felt like I was like the, like the, like the, I just felt I was lucky to be there. I just, you know, I never put myself up to, to think I was anything at the time. I just, I was really good at being alert. I was good being appointment. That's, I used to say, I went from the, I had dyslexia. I mean, I still have dyslexia, you know, which made school. and I was ADD or still guess I am.

So it made school really, really difficult for me. And I remember going in the Army. It was like I moved to the head of the class. You know, I just, I mean, the training was like a piece of cake. I thought it was like, you know, somebody had sent me to camp. It was like fun, like one camp. And I get to Vietnam and it was even more fun. And they had, you know, all the rounds,

they gave you all the ammunition and targets were everywhere. So it was like, oh my gosh, but I couldn't tell this. You know, I come back and try to tell people, you know, like, I don't know if you ever heard of a ranger name of Cox. And he was this guy. And I just talked to his wife. He just died two years ago. And every time he'd seen me, he would like give me a,

he would punch me in the shoulder. He just loved to punch me. It was just like one of these big guys. And I got to where I just let him punch me. So one time, I mean, he was on that mission that you may remember that Gary Linder wrote about, where the whole team got wiped out. By that huge Claymore or something. Yeah, huge NBA Claymore.

And I was on the other team. So I was out too, but we were close enough we could hear him, but far enough of me, we couldn't get to him. and Cox got his, got blown, his arm, like his hand was blown back and his stomach was blown open. He like set his own arm and taped it to his shotgun, taped himself up and was there for the next five hours shooting guys coming up the hill. And you're like, I told that what was at a party, at a college party in like 19, after he came back and there was a guy and he was holding court and he was talking about

you know he plays rugby and I'll tell you what that's a goddamn tough sport that rugby I'll tell you I sprained this ankle I played the whole game with a sprained ankle and a tooth broken and I went like wow you know I had a friend that got his sprained ankle too but he also got

his stomach blown up and his hand was blown you know I started telling this story and people would be like uh in shock you know it was just a little bit too real yeah that whole war you know But, Larry, before moving on, I just want to take a moment to ask you about your dad because he was an Alamo Scout, which was like very unique unit. That Rangers trace their lineage back to. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about his experiences and kind of like what you grew up around.

Well, he was also a functional alcoholic. So he was, you know, he could handle the job, but, you know, mostly he was an alcoholic. So he never, ever talked me about any of that stuff. But that's always, I'd heard that he was part of the, he was in the Philippines. He was wounded in Laité and, you know, the, it came back, I guess. I mean, then they had me after, after he, you know, was sent back home. But so I don't know a lot about, well, I do know this one story, but this is speculation, but he's dead so there's nothing he can do to me. right now. He was a young lieutenant, and I've got a picture of him in his, he's a brand new second

lieutenant out of high school, and he's at a Thanksgiving dinner, and it's 1941 Thanksgiving. So it's like two weeks or something before the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor. And I've got a picture of him, You know, these guys have no idea what's coming down the horn. So he goes, they go when they train in the Philippines, and they did all of that. And I'd heard that he, and like, nah, I shouldn't even tell us. Well, now I've started, I've got to tell the story. But there was like a machine gun nest, and he took a, you know, he's a platoon, he's a platoon leader, right? So he takes his platoon and a whole bunch of the guys get shot.

And he came, they finally came back, and a lot of his guys got shot, and they busted him for it. Oh, wow. Because he lost so many guys. And he sort of never got over. I mean, he never ever talked about that. I heard that from like a half-brothered mine that told me that story. So I can't say it's true, but it's sort of fit. Yeah, it makes sense why he wouldn't want to talk about it too much. But I remember, you know, I remember him as a sergeant first class on this fort, on Fort Berry, and how strike everything. thing was and how, you know, his, his fatigues were like crackled. They were just crisp and the boots were always shined and everything. And I just grew up with that. And I, you know,

so when I got to Vietnam, it was a shock. It was like I grew up in one army. And then there was a gap, you know, from the 50s. And then I go in 68. And I go into a whole new army that I did not recognize. You know, they didn't, a lot of the guys did not have the respect. I mean, not in our unit, but in other units, you know, didn't have respect. for the guys above them and all that stuff. It just had changed. It was, and of course, that war was a lot different, you know, than other wars. And if you were drafted.

So you happily accepted your drafting and joined the Army and your infantry, right? Yeah. And then let's kind of like fast forward to the part where you arrive in Vietnam and how you get yourself on a Lerp team. Okay, but I was infantry, but I went to jump school after infantry training, you know. So I've got the Pah, the 11, 11 Fox drop Papa, whatever that is. And so when I arrived in Vietnam, is that what you did? Yeah, yeah, when you got there and volunteered to be a lurp, I mean, could you walk us through some of that? Oh, yeah.

Like I said, I wanted to do all these really cool things that I couldn't test out to do. So I get there and I, you know, to me, special forces, I don't can't believe that people don't equate this in Vietnam, but I should do. They were like gods, literally walking gods. If you were an SF, you were the coolest thing on the planet Earth. And but it was a four-year, six-year commitment to do that. And I, and what I found out by volunteer for Lips, I could do, you know, I could, you know, I could, 10, 49. or whatever that was into an FOB1 or something if you wanted to. So there's a way to get into SF and not, you know, we didn't, I don't know if they had

the Q course back then or any that stuff, but I was a bunch of these paratroopers that had got there and they sort of, they sort where they were counting guys off and they counted off and this was 1968. And this was, we had lost a thousand guys in the 101st up in the north. And so 101st wasn't exactly everybody's choice, you know, when they get there. But they counted off and I remember they draw like a couple in front of me and you guys are all 1001st. And I jumped up and yelled as excitement because that was my dream come true. I had it all mapped out in my mind.

I'd be 101st and I'd volunteer to do something really cool. And I do that. And everybody was, you know, a lot of these guys. thought it was like nuts for that show of emotion. And then there would be a guy that would come by and they would, this young sergeant gave us a talk about being a lurp, what it meant to be a lurp. And he said something that I would never forget. And it was, look, when you're out, you got five, six guys. And I hate to use this word, but I got to say, at goop because it's a word that was used at the time.

It was used at the time. It's very, you know, I would never use it now. But, um, um, shoot, that made me lose my trend of thought about. Oh, so here's what, so he goes, you're out in the, in the jungle and the gooks don't, they, they can't see you. You can't see them. You're out there trying to find them. He says, look, it's some of you guys are going to go north and you're going to be on a

fire base, you're going to be an infantry company, and you can hear an infantry company all the way to Hanoy that makes so much noise. But Lurps were silent. He told us the whole story. He goes, it's safer behind the lines than it is in front of them. And then we're like, boom, my hand went up and volunteered. And people thought it was crazy when I did that. But I really think that saved my life. It just being in that Lurp company, though it was hard. I mean, it wasn't, you know, cakewalk. But you were around motivated, competent people.

Everybody there was, they were all volunteers twice when we were still on jump status. So, you know, the 101st wasn't on jump status, just us and I think the, you know,

another group like the pathfinders. And that was all. So we still got jump pay. And, um, so you, you sort of self-selected yourself into us.

So you were around like-minded guys. And so that's why my experience of that war is completely different than a lot of the stories. I mean, I don't, you know, I feel bad for guys that I lost, but, you know, I'm not, I don't dwell on that. I don't feel bad about, you know, things that I did. I feel proud of every single thing my team did. We did. And my unit, my Ranger unit. I mean, we were like, we would get up sometimes in the morning and run.

We still had to run, if you believe or not. And we would run through what we called legs. You know, even though they were in 101st, they were still to us legs. And we would run through their barracks at like 5 o'clock in the morning, which, you know, just pissed everybody off. But we were so proud of, you know, that we could piss people off not only in the back, but out in the front, you know, whatever, wherever we were at, we wanted to, like, cause trouble. Yeah, Ken told me you guys were troublemakers.

Ken was, you know, Ken's not a big tall guy, right? Whatever the minimum is to get in the Army, he's like two inches lower than that. But here's the thing. Like one time some new guy came in to our unit and he wanted to fight guys and we're sitting in our team, you know, our team house, our team tents. And this guy came in and I was sitting there and it was, you know, it was pissing on his you know, because he was kind of drunk and he was really mouthing off about how he could beat anybody. You know, you guys are so tough, you know, and all this did. So I went, Miller, come on.

So we went around the back of the tent. Now, this is a cheap shot. I'm sorry, but I co-cocked him. I came from the bottom, and I hit him right in the face and knocked him, cleared down into the road, and he rolled. And Miller and I did high-fives. We thought that was the greatest thing in the world until suddenly he shows back up with that platoon. was like the first platoon and they're all like,

oh, what a cheap shot? These guys are, this one guy that's my size is standing in front of me, and he's going to, you know, he's pointing his finger and stuff like that, and he touched Miller. And it was a mistake. The guy took a swing at Miller, and Miller caught the swing in his mouth,

bit through his knuckle, you know, just almost bit his finger completely off, and then got on him on his ear, and bit his ear off and spit it. So he did that way before, you know, the boxer did, spit the ear out, blood was going everywhere, and all of us just stood back in shock and went, you fucked up. You know that. You should never bite somebody that's shorter than you are because we couldn't get him off. He kept, we were all trying to pry him off,

but he just kept beating this guy up. It was like tragic. It was, you know, it was. Miller, Miller neglected to tell me that story. Well, it's not going to tell that story. No. But I witnessed it. Tell me then what it was like when you first showed up at your unit at 1001st Clurps. What was it like getting there as a new guy?

Well, here's, okay, so I'll tell you what it was like because I was Mr. Odie Colotey like I didn't smoke, didn't drink, didn't smoke dope, didn't even cuss and believed in God. I even, you know, how weird am I? And I show up. And so we're, it was like the first or second day and this guy named Marty Martinez, which was one of the point man who had a huge body count. And he goes, yeah, the goddamn good. And I said, excuse me, he really shouldn't use the Lord's name in vain.

Oh, this guy went freaking awful. It just was so pissed off of me. And what had happened was in our unit, one of somebody got really pissed off. at the company commander, which was before I got there and blew his foot off. So they lost the company commander and they got a new commander about the same time I came in. So I come in a little too clean, a little too like I didn't cuss and everything like that. And now I got the guy who's got the biggest body count in our unit pissed off at me. And I'm like, so he, so it wasn't a few weeks later that I was, I had to go with the ammo bunk, we had to go, I had to go down

the ammo bunker. I was told to go the ammo bunker and we had a machine gun nest thing that we would man all night long. And so I go to get all of the claymores and all that. And he had to climb down into this bunker. And it was dug in the ground. We had tons of C4 and every kind of all kinds of shit inside this thing. And I get in there.

And I find the claymores. As I pull it, like a thermal grenade starts cooking off. And I had no time. I had like dropped everything and just made my way up. I had to go out through this thing. And Dixie Dog, or one of this dog, she came over to see why I was there wanting to get some food. And I grabbed a hold of her and I ran like 15 feet there was a bunker and I jumped in this bunker and then it was like the whole earth blew up. That thing blew up and they had PCP covering on top of the sandbags and that shit was bouncing down and bouncing around and hand grenades were cooking off.

Machine gun ammo was flog. You know, everything was cooking. off and the commander of the at eagle called in to see he thought the north Vietnamese that did an airstrike because it was such a big explosion you know down it was me so into the clouds I come walking I finally I like make my way through I still got Dixie had scrambled out of my arms and I still have her dog tagged I still have it today and I walked out and I went like, uh, hello. It's okay. I mean, what do you say when you, when you blew up all of our ambulance? I think the correct answer was the NBA got us. We had sappers in the wire. I didn't think about that. I wanted to use, but it,

I had no, I just went, eh, it was, that was a nightmare because I had to go down and explain what had happened to these, these young second lieutenants that were an S2 or something. Anyway, I got to take a minute to give a shout out to our sponsors for the show. And then I definitely have more questions for you, Larry. So I want to tell viewers out there about silent. This is you find them at sLNT.com, silent. And these guys make these various bags. You see a couple different models and sizes here.

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too. If you guys are interested, got t-shirts, coffee mugs, all that good stuff. The link is down in the description. So, yeah, thank you to our sponsors. Oh, Larry, just to clarify for people out there who have maybe have not read your book yet or don't know too much about, you know, our military during the Vietnam War, could you describe what the Lerps were and what their mission was? Lerps are long-range reconnaissance patrol. And even though we came 75th Rangers, it was still the same, the same tactics. But we would go, five, six men on a team, and there would usually be two teams would go out into, you know, into a grid square or several grid squares that we had gotten intelligence on. And we would go out sometimes 30 miles away, you know, or further away than the line unit. So we would be the

eyes and years of the division. You know, there's different guys that call themselves Lurps that were Lurps in the division, but they were short, you know, for infantry units. We were, we worked real close with F-O-B-1, which was for operations base one, Special Forces guys, SOG. And so we shared intel, and sometimes we did SOG missions. We didn't even know there were SOG missions, but that mission into the Ashaw Valley that first time was like a SOG mission, even though.

You know, we didn't get a T-shirt, which I'd love to have, by the way, or shorts for doing that. But that was our mission. And sometimes it would be ambushes. If we would see a unit that we could ambush, we would do either a hasty ambush or literally go in and set up. I've done that. We've done that before. We'll, you know, ambush a unit that's been moving into the area. And we were up in ICOR, which I-Corps.

which was way Fuba out to the Ashaw Valley would have been west. But that's kind of good. So tell us then about your first insertion, your first mission as a lurp. My first, you know what I remember was the helicopter ride because even though I jumped out of planes, I'd never been in a helicopter. And it was kind of unsettling to be sitting in the center of that thing. And it just lifted up. It was just the strangest experience. That's what I remembered was, well, actually not what I remember. What I remember was I forgot my rifle, which is like the most embarrassing. You imagine your first mission, and I'm all excited, and I go down to the pad, the launch pad,

where the helicopters were warming up. And I remember the team that were going like, where's your rifle? And I'm like, and I just turn and I sprinted almost like tears are coming down my eyes, back to the hooch and I grabbed my car 15 and ran back down. But it was so embarrassing. So I was living through the shame and then the excitement of the helicopter ride. And the first mission was uneventful. The second mission was the mission where Lenders guys got all shot up. So that was, we found this huge bunker complex. And I remember this deer was chasing these. monkeys. It was weird. And that, it sounded like the whole NBA, fifth NBA regiment was

running down the hill towards us. And we were, we had a 12 man. We called a heavy team. And we were waiting to be, you know, for all these NBA to run into us. And it was this deer, this deer came by. And then a monkey came by. It was like, what? So that, and then I was lucky because I was on, this was Sergeant Burnell, which is a kind of a famous. Ranger 80-second airborne guys know him there. He was in for life. He led that mission because it was so, it was a big deal as it actually turned out to be. And the other young sergeant got killed in his section. So we ended up staying out there until they got everybody out. And we ended up staying out there for like a couple of days. Like we didn't have enough backup. If we had

got into a big fight like that one team did, we'd have been in a lot of trouble. So they had us lay dog. And we just laid in the rain. It was raining, the hardest rain I've ever seen. It rained so hard that, you know, I just would look up and I couldn't even see my Playmore mine said, I couldn't see that far ahead of you.

So we knew that the enemy couldn't see either. So we just sort of like kicked back and waited for a couple days till they could get a helicopter in and get us. So that was the first. Was this the operation where you were wrapped in your chow liner and the NVA walked within like six feet of the patrol? Oh, that was like the second mission or something like that. Yeah, the, that was a that really, I got a lot of gravitas from that because I had set up at night and I, I set, I was right on the edge of the trail. And I had a poncho liner.

And so I kind of read, it was really cold and I wrapped myself in the poncho liner. And I actually had, I'd set my rifle over here and my hands were inside. And I heard something that was like about four in the morning or something like that. And I lifted up into a half sit-up. And right there, walking was an NBA soldier. It came within just like a meter of me. And so I just froze. And then the guys behind me were all, you know, they were always.

all frozen too. And we had something like 20 guys or 20, I forget how many, it was a lot, a lot past. When I got through, I was so glad I had done lots of sit-ups earlier in my life. So I was really, I had a strong core because I literally kept a half sit-up for 15 minutes without even moving a hair. So that was, that was like scary. But it also meant I could take being around enemy really close, which, you know, the old guys went, okay, I want him on my team. So that was really, that was, I moved up in, what do you call it? Stature. Stature.

Yeah, that was the word I was searching for, stature. Sometimes, like, they would, you know, you never know how somebody's going to react in combat. And like everybody thinks because, you know, they can bench press hundreds of pounds and They're all in great shape. It means zero. It means absolutely nothing. The scrawniest looking guys, there are sometimes, are the best lurps and the best

Rangers there can be, A, they'll never give up. They're just hard as nails. And they're afraid of nothing. But one time we took out a young guy who was smarter than all of us. He was really smart kid. And he freaked out. He ended up shooting up. They were surrounded, but we're always surrounded.

I mean, that's part of the drill. And he got so freaked out. He just started firing his M-16 and actually shot one of our guys. And I always remember, it's like, you've got to test these guys. You've got to test somebody before you really get on a team. So all of our guys were, had been through the, you know, a test, so to speak, going on a mission where you're going to be surrounded. And you are, there is no infantry coming to your rescue,

except we'd have air rifles that would come, you know, once you got into a firefight. But, you know, that still might be 30 minutes away. Your sector that you talk about, that your unit covered in the book was pretty interesting because it encompassed like some pretty historical areas like the like Hamburger Hill, A Shaw Valley, a few other notable places. It was a pretty, am I right to say it was a pretty hot area? If you didn't get wounded, we used to say you were gay. I know that's not probably the right thing to say in today's world,

but that was the way we joked around. It was like with them, shit, you know, yeah, this was, it was, it was teeming. I mean, if you look at the, at the Ho Chiman Trail, the way it came in, it dropped in from Laos right in the Ashaw Valley, right over, and then they could go into Wayfou, buy on the rest of the way. Yes, and Way City was in that area also. Yeah, Way City. city was, that's where, that's where our, we were close to that. That's where our rear camp eagle was,

was about five miles from there or something like that, real close. But yeah, it was a hard. Could you tell us? And then there was the Rung Rung Valley. That was another one. You all, we, every, almost after the first couple of, I mean, almost every mission I went on, we got contact, some form of contact. Either we would see enemy, or we got in a firefight and got shot out, one of other. Could you tell us about the mission? This is kind of an interesting one with the black boxes that they wanted you to implant or or in place, I should say. Mm-hmm. I mean when the helicopter got shot down or it was that was that on the way back? Yeah. If you could tell us about that mission and I thought that was interesting. Miller. Miller was on that with me. And so Miller was

and Miller was the sergeant in charge. I was still a spec forward then. And we were planting black boxes. And they were just these black boxes with a little aerial. And we would, you know, they hadn't marked them where they were going to be. And supposedly if any tanks or heavy stuff went by there, you know, the vibrations they would call in airstrikes. So we'd been doing that for a couple days. And the last day we were leaving.

and the helicopter takes off and hit a tree. And it lobbed off about three foot of the blade. So this thing, and we were way in the hell up. And he couldn't land back down because he was out over this big canyon. So he just dove, dove the helicopter. And it was, I don't know if you ever been in a helicopter that lost four foot of the rotor blade. It only has that one rotor. It's like you're in a washing machine.

And luckily, the guy. I got or, you know, auto-rotated the last little bit, but we hit really hard, you know, so hard that everybody banged up against the roof and then banged back down and then, you know, we had, it was weird when that's something crack, when you crash like that, because you don't have a map for that. You don't know where you're at or you don't have your map lined up. So you're on your own, you know. And so we had to set up a permit around the helicopter and took forever before they could, you know, get a big, another chopper in to pull that one out. And Miller and I were the last two. We stayed to the very end. But there's one more story about that helicopter, that crash. So we

come back and Miller had picked up a big bone, like a water bison's bone. And I remember, we always sort of had this competition. And I said I could knock with that bone. the canteen cup off Miller's head. So he stood there. And I was back at the end of the hooch and I threw it really hard. And it missed. Of course, he hit him in the head,

split his head open. And now he's got blood all running down. So he's making himself like an Indian. And he's like, you know, now I know I'm going to catch it because I have to take the punishment from what I just did. And, you know, I just stand there.

And Miller threw that thing as hard as he could. And I put my hand up and it hit my hand and broke my hand. my fingers. So now, you know, we're actually, this would have been an article 15 if, if, you know, we'd have been found out. But we go down to the aid station. Luckily, we crashed in the helicopter. So we went, yeah, we were in a terrible helicopter crash. Miller's all bleeding and stuff. And I'm, you know, my fingers broken. And so I put on, they put me in a like a cast and I cut it down. And I still trained. And I actually, I've got pictures of me and a McGuire rig. And I've got this cast. And I've got this cast. And I put. And I. And I put on, they put up me in a cast. And I'm. And I've got this cast. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I. And I on my hand, you know, that's how Gunhole we were. I mean, we didn't, you didn't go, you get to the hospital and you come back to your unit. We wanted to go back out and, you know, get going, which is not again, what you normally hear, you know, people, people say. But, yeah. And was this about the time that your unit started going into Ashaw Valley or was that later?

It was later. we didn't go into the Aisho Valley until after I got back from Reconda School, which was March, March, 1969. Let's cover that first. I mean, before we get there, was there any other, like, notable missions before Recondo school that you think are important to bring up? I mean, I know there was a lot of them. I mean, I sort of felt like I had a sixth sense.

We were talking about this earlier, and I was, and I'd walk point, and I would, like, know when something was going to happen. I would just know it. And one time, I stopped and we got off the trail and I walked. Burford was the team leader at the time. And so he, he was behind me. And I left and I went into the, I just had this feeling. I went into the jungle. And I went around. The trail was going down this way. And I went. So I go around in the jungle. And I come out behind. And I was stepping over this log and I looked down and I started counting, you know, NVA was like, I just froze and just stopped breathing. Stop. I mean, I had my car 15, but I couldn't, I couldn't, I lost count of the number of guys that were sitting on the ground. They were talking to each other.

And one guy sort of heard me and he even turned around and he looked right at me. But, you know, we had total camouflage on. We had tiger fatigues on. So I'd blend it in. And, you know, you just don't think some white Americans going to show up, you know, in the jungle when they didn't even hear us. But they, that we would have walked into an ambush. But I walked around behind them. And so I literally, I made the decision not to fire them up because I was too close. I literally could reach down and go, excuse me, you guys, I'm now going to shoot you. So, you know, I, I just held my fire and backed up. And, and Burford remember, look, he said, he counted the number of cooks on the ground in my eyes. He could tell that I saw something because my eyes were like

gigantically big. I'd never seen anything like this. So we go back and we set up and and Luni called in an extraction helicopter called him for an extraction. And I was sitting at this bush and I started thinking, did I imagine yet? Did I imagine? I mean, it couldn't have been true. And then suddenly a guy pops up. He was like 50 meters away, which is not that far. And he popped up and he had glasses. And he was like looking around, looking at the trail that I'd left as I ran like a little girl out of there. And he like, track. And I remember he was like looking right at me.

And I was going to like, Perfer. And Berber was over talking. Okay. Now what we're going to do is they're looking at me. So Berber came over and I said, and I saw the one, the guy with the glasses took his glasses down. And I saw I'm talking to one of his guys. And he goes like that, which meant to flank us. And this guy took, he had like an American parachute, which is a camouflage parachute.

And he flicked it once and put it over his head. And he disappeared. And I went like, my heart was like, now I can't see him. But I know this guy's coming around, you know, going to flank us. And so, you know, Burford goes, okay, here's what we're going to do. And we had six guys. Chambers and I are going to stay behind. On the count of three,

your guys are going to take up running. And I remember saying, like, what if Chambers doesn't get to stay behind? What if we'd count and I get to go, shut up? And so he goes, I don't know, I had a weird sense of humor under circumstances. He goes, one, two, three. And we literally had to stand up because there was a brush right there

and like fired up the guys that were in the, that were before they shot at us. And so that that was, I never forgot that mission. And then you guys, I take it broke contact to the, to the LZ and got out of there. Yeah, we got out of there. And then they bring in what's called the, what was our reactionary force. The, yes, I, in SF, it would have been like the, the mic force or a hatchet.

Yeah, like same same. Yeah, same type thing. All right. Let's talk about Recondo School, because that's, you know, the title of your book, Recondo, and a couple chapters in the book are all about it. I mean, that was a very unique course that was held in Vietnam. Could you tell us, you know, why did you go? Why did you get sent?

What was the school all about? Well, the school was actually called Mac v. Fifth Special Forces Recondo School. and it was actually Westmoreland's pride and joy. And they had, they wanted to design a school to teach Lurps. And, you know, we'd had Navy, we had one seal go through there, but we'd have PG. There am I? That's me. Oh, my gosh. Yeah.

I'm sorry, I don't get excited to say myself. but we have all of these smaller unit guys going through this course and it was a three week long course and it was the only school in the army that's me right there that came from

that was that tape I told you that they'd found that's me back then my hat's a little bit too small but other than that that's amazing yeah that's footage that they were taking they had the movie cruise, and I didn't even remember it until I saw on the history channel. They had this, the thing about the Reconda School. But three weeks long, the first week you get there, and it's like any hard course.

I'd never been through the Ranger School course or the Q course or any of that stuff. But, you know, we had to, we got issued a pack with a 30-pound sandbag in it, and we had to run. every day and the runs got progressively longer until you were running eight miles, I guess it was. And they would measure the sand after you got through. And if you had any sand, you get kicked out of school. But what made it really interesting is that we ran through. There's my guide that got the Vietnamese guy right there on the bottom left. He's a great guide.

If you ever go to Vietnam, I'll give you his name. Yeah. And check out where he's, he has a YouTube channel. just type in Larry Chambers and he has a bunch of cool videos on there that you guys can check out. I'm sorry, Larry. There's also a website called Larry, and that's dash chambers.com. And I have a whole bunch of stuff. So the first week, they tried to weed out the guys that aren't physically strong.

And you're tired. I mean, you've been in, you took, first of all, it was an invitation only. You got invited, but you were in and you were sent by your unit. So it was kind of a big deal to get sent there because that, meant you were going to be a team leader when you came back. And so it was a real honor to go. But everybody was nervous because of the swim, the dreaded swim. There was the run. The run was the run was, so you get through the run. But on the second week, they had the swim. And there was a lot of stuff that you were doing. It was nonstop. I mean, you're up to late at night and, you know,

all training all day long, you know, jumping, you know, practicing McGuire rigs and repelling and, you know, everything that any good, you know, combat unit would train you for, first aid, you know, where you'd have to give yourself serving album and at least know how to give yourself, but they had big needles back then. So there was lots of blood everywhere when we went through that part of the course. But the swim, you'd have to swim out 200 meters. And at the time, I was like a lousy swimmer. And I didn't know really how to swim. And I just sort of side thing. But if you touch, there was this two special forces sergeants out in this pontoon boat out in the ocean, and you had to swim around it and swim all the way back.

And that eliminated a lot of guys if they couldn't make the swim. I just remember how exhausting it was because you also ran that day and you're doing a lot of stuff. And so go through all of that. And then we come to the last day. And this is what gives it the distinction of the only school the Army's ever had where you could get killed in it. A lot of the buildings were named after, you know, guys that were killed in the school. You know, they, because we did a live alert mission. And you would rotate at each point.

So they wanted you to, you know, be a team leader. They wanted you to be a Slackman. They wanted you to be a point man. They wanted you to be very secure. You know, you go through the whole thing. So the first two days were out there and it's like just a normal alert mission. And this mission was pulled near Latrang, and the train. And suddenly I'm walking along and I walk into, you know, four or five guys sitting in the middle.

There was probably, it was way more than that because we found like 10 or 15 backpacks. But I, so I fired them up and I turned around and the guy that behind me took off running. He broke the protocol. The protocol, you know, is I sit down in a line of fire. The next guy is. And he took off and it got the other guy worried, you know, we didn't know who these guys were that were in our school. And so I watched these two guys running back in the jungle

and I'm still out there. So I hit the ground and I just, you know, kept putting fire down until suddenly the, on the school, we'd have two instructors that would go out with us. And Louis Lepage, I could still just remember him. He was just like, he was like, God. He was like the toughest guy I'd ever seen in my life. He comes running through the junk. He doesn't care about bullets. Screw bullet. He's got a, he's got his, he's carried a thumper, you know, an M79.

And he shoots the, shoots at it, and it hit the tree. And I remember going like over my head, like, bing, bang, bing, it didn't go off because it didn't go far enough to arm. And he's, he's a, so he comes out where I'm, and we both fire and maneuver back. And so he was furious. at the guys that ran. He was so pissed off. And he goes, Chambers you and my Slackman, you're going to walk us back there. I'm going, oh, my God, why do I keep getting myself where I'm going to do good. Now I have to go back in there. And so I was, so I, so we went back later that same day. And I'm walking along. And suddenly this North Vietnamese guy walked right out in front of me and just like that. And he looked at me and I looked at him and he started to run and I took off running and I ran after him and I tackled him

like a football tackle and I got him down in the ground and and matter of fact LaPage was a little pissed off at me because it's not what you're supposed to do you're supposed to fire him up but I could see the guy didn't have a weapon I was going to shoot an unarmed guy so I figured I could tackle him and he turned out to be this young lieutenant I've still got his um I have it right here I brought it to show but this was the belt buckle that he was wearing see if you can see that and then BELP buckle. NVA bell buckle. So he was, and I've actually tried to find that guy in my trips back to Vietnam, but that,

so we captured this, I captured this NBA officer, like, I thought I was the hero of the day. We give back, and it was like, no, we give it, you know, there's like, you know, business as usual, well, you capture, it was like, no, this is special forces. This isn't like tinker toys, you know. and I but the but the but LePage um ended up getting me an R&R to why I got seven day you know for doing that so I was all happy for that yeah I mean I I think Ken Miller and I think yourself both you know killed enemy and in ricondo school but I mean you actually captured an enemy which is like exceedingly rare I mean everyone was trying to do that yeah yeah this was just totally an accident actually when I I've written back to try to find this guy because I always hoped he turned out to be, you know, would do good, you know, something. And I even went to Condow, which is an island where they sent all the prisoners to try to, I don't know, this delusion of grandeur that I could try to find this guy.

But I, I, I, I, we, the, the, the, you know, they brought in the mic force. Like you said, they brought all that shit in. So suddenly we're around like 300 guys and, you know, we're all surrounded by all these guys, and they were, they, they would, um, they were interviewing my prisoner and the South Vietnamese were, you know, they would just step on his, you know, like, I always see these movies where they, they're, you know, you've got, how do you torture somebody to, you know, use that waterboarding on, they just stepped on the guy's nuts with their boots. And the guy was going like, oh, he was telling everything. So, that pissed me. off. This guy was being tortured. So me and my slack guy, Dutty, that was his name, Dutty.

We go over and we, I don't know if Dutty pushed the Arvin guy away, but we kind of protected the guy all night. He was ours. We risked our life to capture. We're going to let the South evening and he's kill him because they were just butchers. They were, you know, terrible. And then they took him back. They actually took him up in a McGuire, or was a McGuire, or, or, yeah, wire rig out. And then I, so that was my three weeks in recondo school, which was, it was hard. It was really, and I thought a lot of guys, I thought everybody that went there graduated. And I'd find out later that guys that were a lot of them that went there and they didn't graduate, but nobody tells you that. Just they didn't get the recondo patch.

We have some questions. And I'm actually struggling. going to pull it up you have them d um sorry we have we have some audience questions for you as well larry um i'm sorry i didn't mean to get these i didn't mean are these from north phoven are they north japanese possibly possibly so alex uh has won uh i still have your book death in the ayesha valley from sandhill px from osut at benning as jack said a lot of us going into bat always strive to be better wanting to live up to the legacies you guys created thank you for coming on suesponte thanks alex alexo we have a few more okay um you want to get him at the end yeah okay so yeah there's no questions there it's just yeah well we'll we'll get we'll get to a few more

towards the end of the uh the interview so yeah you kept the guy's belt and his belt buckle and war it after that right oh yeah yeah well i stripped him immediately of his belt buckle because that, I got offered $500 for that by a leg officer in Saigon, you know, but I wouldn't give it up. And when you did finally graduate from Rekondo School, you get back to your unit and now you're a team leader? Yeah. So you go back and you're a team leader and I, well, I wasn't, well, I was a team leader,

but that came later. that lightning mission happened shortly. And they made me a sergeant, and I was on R&R. So some time went by, and then suddenly they brought, it was like they wanted to get, and this sounds egotistical, but the best of the best. So they got a bunch of us guys, we're all sergeants, and we're going to go on the first LERP mission back in the Ashaw Valley.

The last time anybody had been in there was the 173rd, and they lost 37 helicopters in so many minutes. So it was a bad place to go. And we were just starting to build all of the different fire bases on the way out to the Ashaw Valley. And so they wanted us to, they wanted eyes and years out there. So we spent five days on the border. And at night, at the daytime we would see hundreds of North Vietnamese in the valley. and then at night we would hear of cutting wood.

And I showed you from going back what I brought back. I guess I could show it now. Yeah, sure. Yeah. So I'd gone back to Hamburger Hiller close to where we were. We got struck by lightning, believe it or not, on our last day of the mission. And we were all paralyzed. And luckily, I mean, we lost comma.

We had one radio that commo finally. And the, you know, they, they, we got out in, in, in, in penetrators. That was what they sent down. It was a basket for lender and then the penetrators for the rest of us. It was where that light thing struck, like blew up your grenades and Claymore's and everything. Oh, it blew. Yeah, we had all of our claim. Luckily, just before that happened, I remember reading the back of my Claymore mind thinking, like, that's a little too close and reading the back of it.

So I went down and I moved it out further. this lightning hit, I just remember this white light and there's like no sound for like a multi-zillionth of a second, a flash. And then I remember going up in the air and blowing blown into a thousand pieces, this deafening sound. And then hitting the ground, which seemed like later, like I always thought I was blown in pieces. And then God went like, nah, not ready yet. Then put me back together, threw me back down on the ground. So I land like down this hill. And I can remember. I could move and I looked down at my legs and smoke was coming off my clothes and it was like I couldn't move, but I could move my arms and I finally kind of got my senses back. I had no rifle. I didn't know where I was. And I and I crawled. This is the scariest I'd ever been in Vietnam. I never really got that scared. But this scared me. I crawled back up the hill and I look around and where we were was all a burnt out circle and no one was there. They were also blown away. But for a few minutes, it seemed like in eternity, I was like,

oh my God, I am alone here. You know, I'm going to get my throat cut. Where's my rifle? And I, so I started looking around and I found my clacker. Clacker is what you used to blow, you know, hard plastic. I don't know if you use those for Claymore's, but it's a hard plastic was melted. So we figured the lightning came down through the antenna, the radio man and put this antenna up in a thunderstorm. Questionable reason for that. And we had to send a sit rep. And when he did, the lightning went down and it didn't hit us directly or it would have killed us. But we got not only the explosion, Gary Linder's backpack had a percussion grenade. And then that blew up. So we got that. And then the backblast from all of the Claymore's that were around us. So we got the backblast.

And that's probably why we're all in some form of paralysis for some of us for a day, you know, a day and a half. You write that when the radio man clicked the hand mic to send up the sit rep. That was when the lightning struck. That's when the lightning hit. Yeah. And I just remember just this white light, which is kind of scary when you think about it. Oh, I am dead. And I kind of was, I kind of just remember the last thing I said was fuck.

I mean, it was pissed me off. I mean, why? You know, like the last day of the mission, there's. something. I just didn't want to get blown up. I mean, anyway, so long story short, in 2015, I go back and hire a guide and go back to Hamburger Hill and I climb up to the top. And I'm looking all around. And they've got it really laid out cool. They've built steps up. There's a like a little shack down below where it tells the history of it. And of course, the Northview, you know, first liar wins or second liar, but they tell how they defeated

the enemy, you know, they defeated us, which was bullshit, you know, it didn't never happen. And so at the top of the hill, there's a Topa and, you know, dedicated to their, their guys that died up there because they lost a lot of guys. And we, you know, we had the third of the 187th, I think it was that went up there and they lost like 87. I mean, it was a hundred guys won't. I mean, it was, it was so bad we didn't get paid for our pay skipped a month because, you know, You know, the guys that did pay and Graves registration were the same guys. So they were backed up from that one, you know, from Hamburger Hill. So I wanted to go up and look around.

I'm digging around. And I find this, which is a log that was in a bunker. And I just, I stuck it in my backpack. And I thought, wow, I wonder, I'll bet. I heard those guys cutting that log, you know, back then. we could have heard them because that's where we think we were hit was on that was somewhere on that hill. I mean, it's kind of a long hill. And it's fun to go back to those places because you would never know, you know, because the jungle covers everything.

A fire bases are all covered over. I couldn't find Camp Eagle. I found the graveyards that we used to, that were close by us, but so much except the, except the In Amberger Hill, the enemy has preserved the enemy. They're not our enemy. The Vietnamese have preserved that as a site, you know, like they did Dind Ban Fu. You go to all these cool places. The museums are just amazing.

But that was that. So then, I, needless to say, I was kind of nervous about going out after that mission. I was, and I went out a couple times and I started, overseeing things because I was waiting for the next shoot at run. I'd never been in an, well, it was the second explosion I'd been in, but I'd never been in anything like that before. And so I was probably a little bit freaked out. So I thought I would do something safe.

So I started flying belly, which turned out to be not as so safe because we were taking fire all the time. And that's where I. What does that mean for folks out there? What does it mean to fly belly? Okay, every Ranger team, LERP team has to have one of their own guys in the helicopter to, you know, to help them get in and out of the helicopter. So you've got all this backpack on and your gun, your ammo and your guns. And you've got one guy that, like, you had to be recondo trained.

So, you know, I qualified. You had to be able to put the ropes together, rope ladders, Aguir rigs, everything. And that's your job. You're in the back. The two pilots are in the front and the two door runners are on the side. And so that's when Miller's team was in a, they were in the second helicopter that, they went out to pick up Miller's team. And I guess they got shot down and the blade went through one of the guys in Miller's team's head,

or he killed him. And so then we fly over and we get shot at. So we, I still remember tracers going up, you know, a little open window, doors open. And Tracer will go by, like that. that and the chopper goes around and all this stuff. And so we came back in and we had to make four separate uh, uh, um, extractions trips.

And so I would throw the, because we were coming in because the helicopter had crashed and the guys had to climb up on the crash helicopter to get in. So I sort of helped them back the helicopter in. I don't know if you know what I mean like sort of like I got out on, I threw the rope ladder out and then I climbed down on the skid, I climbed out on the skid, I climbed out on the skid, and I could see the pilot, and I could, you know, hear him and talk to him and all that. And I would say, okay, we're all, you know, I was talking to him while the door gunners were watching out to the side. And so when I came in, we took some fire, and I didn't have my rifle because I'm standing outside of the helicopter.

So I flipped the bird to this North Vietnamese guy that was shooting at us, which Miller remembers. Everybody on the ground was cheering, and they thought it was so cool. They wanted to see me get shot off of the, off of the skid would have been really, that would have made their day, but he missed. And I went in and I'm joking worse, you know, and I helped the guys in and I got my, I got an air metal with a V for Valor for that mission. And I mean,

this is my proudest medal. It sounded pretty dicey. I mean, like you, was it you and Miller were like the last two guys out? Yeah. Yeah. And how long were you guys on the ground? you two by yourselves waiting for the well Miller was on the ground with another with

with his radio guy and I was still in the helicopter I would take everybody back and then I would come back in the helicopter right right but Miller stayed on the ground for like 30 we had to refuel which was scary because the all he had was cobras flying above them they could talk to but you know and then we finally we got out there and I we couldn't wait to get out I couldn't wait to get it over with and I was I had so much adrenaline pumping and miller is so light, I was on that ladder, and I get down, you know, the old Uy's from the, from the, from the, from the skids to up inside. It's a jump. I mean, it's a hike.

I mean, it's a, I don't know how many feet is. It's a couple of feet. And I was so pumped. I grabbed Miller by the back and just webbed here and threw him almost out. He landed and almost flew out the other side of the helicopter. It was like so stoked to, you know, not that I was so strong, but I was just, you know, like, all hot, hyped up. And by this point, you're starting to get kind of short, too, right?

As far as time in the war. Exactly. So what I did was I started taking radio relay missions, and I would do, like I was on Ripcord when they got hit. And that was an amazing thing. I'd never been around the infantry unit and never wanted to be around infantry unit. Again, it's scary because you're sort of trapped on a hill. You know, I'm used to hiding in the bushes or something or flying away,

but they had to stay there and fight. It was like, oh, my God, when's this night going to get over with? You know, it was like freaky. But anyway, I, then at the end, they asked me to go and recruit guys, which they usually do for the, actually, the better looking guys they asked to go do it. So I don't think Miller got asked or lender. I know didn't get asked to go do that, you know, because they wanted you to represent the Lerps, the Rangers.

Could, could you tell us a little bit about how, like, your unit and how the war changed during your time there because I remember you write in your book about how your sector, your AO, like drastically expanded as time went on and that they started like, you guys were getting, teams were getting inserted sometimes twice a day. It sounded like insanity. Well, this was to our wonderful president, Richard Nixon, just the nicest guy you'd ever want to meet. I'm still, I am not a crook.

I'm not a crook. I remember having a dream one time that I got. got to go dig up his body and I was going to drag it. Anyway, that was another story. But, you know, he had said, he had ran in the 68 election on, to pull the troops out, which he did. But when he, it was a trick. For us, it was a trick because all, they pulled out all of these companies and they expanded

RAO. So we ended up half and, REO like quadrupled in size. I mean, they were flying all, by the time we'd left in 70, You know, they were flying, you know, from all over the place in I-Corps. But they just, the reason why I didn't volunteer to go back, because as you can see in my, I'm sort of gun, I was sort of gun home. But we got this young second lieutenant, and he, you know, just out of a jump school, an officer's school and all kind of school thing.

And he goes, so he takes me out on, we go on a recon, in helicopter, we go out looking for a DZ. And I said, you mean an LZ, sir? And he goes, no,

he drops him to DZ. And I go, why? He goes, well, you're a paratrooper, right? And I go, I am.

I didn't jump out of a plane in two years. Like, we have to jump. You want us to jump out of the hell? Jump out of plane? And he goes, yeah,

he had this idea where he was going to, It was in the Ashaw Valley and he was going to, they were going to pin these guys in and then we were going to jump in and then we would cat. And I went like, you know, I'm getting really short here. I think I need to like find another profession. You know, I don't know what happened that guy. Yeah, somebody's hunting for medals. Yeah. He was looking.

You know what he wanted was the jump with a start. You know, he wanted a combat blast because nobody, nobody with special forces jumped. I mean, you could go down to Latrang and jump with them and get your jump, your Arvin, I mean, yeah, your Arvin jump wings, but to a combat blast hadn't been since Korea. So. Well, you don't, a warp unit. No reason. Is it a, is it a mass, they're not going to do a mass attack infantry assault. I mean, it doesn't make sense. It's stupid.

Yeah. It doesn't make it. That's what I mean. I thought, where are they getting these guys? Because this guy was, cuckoo. You know, it's like, this is not our T-O-N-E, not our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, our, mission. You know, our mission is to go out with five, six guys and find enemy and tell the other guys, tell the good guys, where the bad guys are. And to the, not, you know, it's not in Normandy.

We're not jump, you know. So they sent to you on the Barry Sadler recruitment drive for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah, I went back and recruited guys. And I would, at first, I couldn't get anybody to go, I thought I was trying to, you know, I was what's called being profiling. I was like, yeah, I was Mr. Mann, you know, had all double, double, 101st patches on my shoulders and recondo school and had my body count rope and my NBA belt buckle. And I thought, surely these guys will see me and immediately go, well, I want to be just like you. Instead, it was like, they couldn't wait to get out of that tent.

You know, I'd say what we're doing. And then finally, I would start telling this story of, about I got a map of I-Corps and I said, look, you know, you guys are infantry. I'm going to tell you the story. It was told to me. You know, you're going to be out either on an infantry company and you'll be out. Could be for a month at a time. Could be six weeks, whatever it is.

Or you might get lucky and be on a fire base. You think you're lucky. But let me see this map and I'd hold up the map and I go, I could buy this map on the black market. So every NBA commander has the same map. And so I said, look, what the Lurps do is we go out where the enemies we think are. They don't know where we are. They don't know where we're coming. So they don't see us and we're trying to find them.

So think about it this way. It's safer behind the lines than it is in front of them. And three hands went up. And then the next time I got it, and then four hands went up. I got 26 guys and refilled, you know, because it had to be all volunteer in our, in our Ranger unit. And I refilled it before I left. I was real proud of that. that I got, you know, figured I could sell, then I could be a salesman later in life or something.

So tell us about when you finally finish your tour in Vietnam and, you know, getting on your freedom bird. The fight? Did I talk about the fight I got in? No, the fight with the guy on the plane? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I seem to always get into or start fight. Yeah, fight. Okay, so I got in a fight. Anyway, so we're getting ready to go. And this guy was bragging about killing the gooks. And he was talking about, he was a bus driver.

He ran him over. He was bragging about how many people he'd ran over. And so I'm sitting on this plane. And I can hear the guy talking. There's always somebody who's going to listen. Because if you've got, you know, 200 guys on the plane coming back from Vietnam, 150 of them have never been in the jungle. And, you know, a small number had been in the infantry.

And three guys were special for it. I mean, there was like nobody, you know, not a lot of guys. You know, there's always somebody that would listen to some bullshit guy like that. So I'd had enough. And the guy sitting next to me was 173rd. And I said, do you want to go kill him or will you let me? And he goes, you go kill him first and I'll kill him second. So I got.

And oh, here's what he did. He's at the back of the 707 quick. And back then the seats where the bathroom was wouldn't decline. And he was like, stewardess, stewardess, my seat won't go back. I see you won't go back. So I went back there and I was so fucking mad. I'd never been so mad in my life. Probably every single thing that had happened and boiled up and then and I reached drown and I grabbed this guy and I went inside of his shirt where I could grab his neck. He was kind of a heavy said guy and I pulled him up right in my face. I said, you shut up with that fucker. I'm going to cut your throat. I mean, just pushed him down as hard as I could. And then I come back and I remember walking back in the plane going yeah, you were all applauding. You know, it was it was.

I kind of marched back with my hundred and first patches on and sat back down to my seat. And that guy never said a word the rest of the, we didn't even hear him. I don't even even he was on the plane after that. But anyway, so when I came back, I wasn't, I didn't go, oh, the hippies are, make me so sad. I feel so what I did. I'm so, I would like, bullshit. I had none. I just, I would.

I never had that stuff happen to me, just maybe because they wouldn't do it or something. But I just, I went back to college and University of Utah because I was non-Mormon, but I could get, I heard I could get laid there. So that was like the most important thing. Oh, yeah, you remember that story? That was another story. Yeah, the postscript to your book is the stewardess on that airplane on the ride home. Okay, so I should probably say that story because I get back. And my friend, Dave Cranning, was also, he'd been shot up so bad.

He had a battlefield amputation on the battle. They thought he was going to die. He'd got a machine gun through the chest. His fingers were blown off. He was really in bad, bad, in shape. And he came back, and he had a brand new GTO, and he let me use it to go down. And my last girlfriend, before I left, was two Huxdresser. And she was hot, and she became a stewardess.

And so I was going to drive down and I called her and she was, you know, going to meet me. And I thought, oh, my God, this is going to be great. I'm going to get laid. I'm driving at 110 miles an hour, you know, down from, down. It's from Sacramento. It's called the Winters Cutoff. And I'm going 110 miles. And I remember looking up in my rearview mirror and I saw this way in the back like, you know, just lights flashing like that.

And back then in 1969 or 70, I guess, it used to be. this was during the summertime and I had on flip flops you know flip flops and I'd taken them off so I was driving barefoot and I remember it's against a lot of dry barefoot so I was reaching underneath as he pulled up behind me and I'm stopped I'm reaching under pulling on my shoes like that so when he came up to the he asked me to open the door and as I opened the door I was met with a 357 right in my face and he was just like holding it he pulled me out onto the ground I'm laying out around like, I just better be in. I was like, you know, it was like in a Mickey Mouse voice. You know, I never had a three. I thought I was going to get executed right there. What I didn't know

was this was 1969 and the, the something, the zodiac killer. Zodiac killer had killed people on this same area. And so these cops were not taking any chances. And, you know, and then I had a military ID, but I didn't have a driver's license. And the car wasn't registered to me. I was like, and I did 110. He was, you know, you're doing 110. I went like, no, I'm trying to go get laid. I told him the truth.

And so he sat in there and he had a brother that was in Vietnam. He let me go. He said, just slow it down. Learn the new rules. You know, so I always thought like, wow, it was great. But I ended up going to University of Utah, and by then I got smarter. It was really funny. I guess my brain had a chance to mature, but suddenly, you know, I could go to college,

and then it was, you know, could pass test and all that sort of stuff. Except in the really hard test. I did alert mission one time in to get the, to get a final that I crawled into this guy's office one night, which everybody in the department thought that was the coolest thing. that ever had happened because I got all the answers the old-fashioned way. I thought, what are they going to do? Send me back to Vietnam. Who gives a shit? But I got through that and I always had, I always found a place. I'm like the guy that always finds the perfect parking place and the perfect place to live as I drive around and I know I'm going to find it, six cents, whatever it is.

And I drove past this. I had graduated in the only degree I could get, which was in the Department of Recreational, because they didn't have a lot of reading. I mean, there was some English attached to it. So I had this degree, and I went down to take a test, and I went in California, Manhattan Beach, and there must have been 1,200 people in taken for two positions. So I knew this wasn't going to happen. So I was driving a line on thing.

What am I going to do for living? I went past a brokerage firm, and I saw a brand new portion of brand new Mercedes-Benz, and we're like, I could do that, whatever that is, and went in, and the guy said, This was 1974, and the market had crashed and everybody lost a lot of money. And they hired me. I ended up going to work back to New York, went to work for Yuff Hutton.

And every move, everything I did went up because from 1975 on, the market just steadily went up and up and up and up. But I would get in arguments with people using common sense logic. Like back then you could get bonds. They were called Big Macs. They were the municipal bonds for New York City. And they were 10% with a 10% yield tax, double tax free. And I got a buck a bond, which is unheard of. And the old brokers would say, don't you realize you're screwing these people?

And I go, look, I was just in New York. I looked around. Everybody had jobs. They just built. They had just completed the towers, the Twin Towers. This place is humming. It's not going to happen. And I was right.

And those bonds, everybody made a ton of money. So I started thinking, this is a piece of cake. everything I did was making money. And I thought, I'm now going to become a real estate developer. So I started building condos in Park City, Utah. And at one time, I was the biggest, I had the biggest contractor in Summit County. We built like 160 units down south and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I hit the snag where I ended up losing like, because it, like, $27 million or something like that.

And it was really sad. But I decided, I moved back to California after that big loss, paid everybody back that I would money to. And I came back and I went like, what can I do? You know, and I had all this experience. And I thought I'd written an article. I started writing articles. And the very first article I wrote became a cover story on Pension World Magazine.

I had this knack for writing. And I started doing that, you know, 50 books later. When, I know when a lot of, when a lot of Vietnam veterans came back, I mean, it wasn't popular to talk about the war. And so I'm wondering, like, when did, when did the idea get into your mind? I mean, you and Gary and Ken and all of you wrote about the war. I mean, how did that come about for you guys? Ken Miller, because of Ken Miller. It was about 20 years later, you know, and if you'll see,

every war the books come out 10 or 15 or 20 years later because people are there's been a gap and now they want to read about it and Miller had written Tiger the Lurp Dog which is our dog great novel and he was and that's how he knew the editor at Random House and mil and linder asked me to write about you know I told you about reconda school and capturing the NBA officer so um excuse me So I wrote about 30 pages. It was single space. There was no paragraph breaks or nothing. And I sent it back to Linder, who had grown up with nuns beating his hand so he could spell

and write everything perfect, you know. And he goes, it's great, but paragraphs don't go on for 20 pages, one paragraph. Okay. So I sort of had to learn that on the job, too. And I remember, he goes, you know, you ought to send this to my publisher. So I put 30 pages. I hired an editor to edit for me. I sent it to him.

I sent a FedEx, you know, on Wednesday and Friday, I get a phone calling. I'm my name's Owen Locke. I'm with Random House. I want to buy your book. No negotiation, no agent, nothing, and bang. That's awesome. Yeah, it was amazing. And that's why, you know, we're sort of clumped together.

It's because of Miller, Miller's contact, you know. And now people were ready to start talking about the war and talking about the experiences. Yeah. Well, they're still, I mean, I, I remember. remember the last, I did a tour, Random House sent me on a tour, and I went around and I spoke at B. Dalton's, and I remember this one B. Dalton. And this guy, this young guy goes, so are you crazy? Are you really crazy? I mean, he was asking all these stupid, ridiculous questions. And no. And so I have, as you can see, my sense of humor isn't necessarily for everybody. It's good for combat vets. But the average civilian is going to get pissed off of me really quick. So I'm talking

about, I'm telling some story and I'm talking about these Marines. This is a true story. We were out at at this dump where we would test fire our weapons or shooting rats or whatever they were doing. And these Marines

walked by and they were set up and they were shooting. And I made something of it. I said like, yeah, these jar heads. I said jarheads. This woman gets up in the front and she's got my book and throws it at me and goes, my husband was a Marine and he died in Vietnam and she turned around and marched out.

And the only thing I could think was to say was I didn't kill him. I'm sorry. You know, this is just what happened. With combat vets, I can make fun of Navy SEALs. I can make fun of Air Force paracomandos because if I'm in that group, it's okay. But if you're not in the group, you better watch out. You're going to have a mouthful of fist. so it's it's like we you know we get to joke around about i mean you know i'm making light of a lot of

stuff because that's probably how i bury things but um you know i feel like i feel like my sense of humor kept me saying in nom and and i would be very inappropriate like on one mission it might have been the ashore valley mission we were going out and they were they were they with the talk and they had big maps set up and this guy from S2, this captain was shown well. There's, we think there's 15,000 of the 5th NBA Regiment up here and the four. There's a recon of 3,000 North Vietnamese coming down here. We're going to insert you. And I remember raising my hand and this thing is packed.

We've got helicopter pilots, the two teams, everybody's there. And I raised my hand and he goes, yes, Sergeant Chambers. And he goes, should we even bring any food? or anything or just like a lot of extra ammo. And everybody's going, Chambers, shut up. You'd get so pissed off because I would say these goofy comments, but the way they painted it, we weren't coming back. So I figured, why'd bring a bunch of extra stuff

if we're only going to go out and get, you know, shot? And you've made, I mean, you mentioned that a little bit, but you've also went and like spent a lot of time in Cambodia and made numerous trips back to Vietnam. What was that sort of like, I mean, retracing your old patrols in some instances. Well, I spent a lot of times 10 years in Cambodia. So, you know, I was, you know, guys will say, yeah, I did, I did three tours in

NAM. I go like, well, I did 10 years in Cambodia. So it's career. No, I went back to Vietnam, basically on a dare. I took my son to Thailand and he wanted to go surfing and stuff like that. So anyway, he was there and he was going back to school. And I stayed. And I met these women and I was up in Chiang Mai. I don't know if you know Thailand, but Chi Mai is way north. It's a beautiful little city. And I was thinking I was going to live there.

This is great. I like this. And I had no thoughts of ever going back to Vietnam, even though it wasn't that far away. And I got in this argument with this real super liberal woman who was Canadian. And she told me how wrong the war was and how certain things didn't happen. And I was like, rather than argue with her, you know, she goes, I didn't. And she goes, we're so close. Why don't you go find out for yourself? And I went, I will.

So I got a ticket and I flew, I flew to Laos and then from Laos. I flew into Hanoi. And I remember that first night, I felt like, this is 2012 or 11 or something like that. And I felt like, wow, I'm here. I'm just no, no backup, no ammo, no gun, no anything. I wonder if they're going to recognize me. I was just thinking like, what if some, oh, I remember him. I shoot him. Get him. You know, all these weird things go through your mind and drive into Hanoi on a beautiful brand new four-lane

highway. And I stayed at the, at the Hanoi Hilton, not the one that's famous, but the real Hilton, where Bush had stayed when he went, when he visited there. And they were so nice to me. And I got the last room. And I'm watching, I'm watching television was the HBO special when McNamara said like six times how it was a mistake that we went into Vietnam and this didn't happen that didn't happen and this was wrong and I remember throwing the remote control at the television and breaking and I was so pissed off and that sort of started my quest to find out I started what's called the Hidden History Project and I would go to the archives in in Annoy where there's no internet connection to them There's just raw stuff.

I showed you this one picture, which is of Ho Chi men, is really the thin guy in the center. And the rest of all Americans. And then General Jap is the guy in the white suit right there. He was working with the OSS. So there's all of these things in Ho Chi Men's archives that he wrote about and that all of the letters I saw that was addressed to Truman, that Truman never read, they were going to open up.

They wanted to give us access to, you know, high fong. See, the problem was with the French. They had been enslaved by the French, and if Roosevelt would have lived just a few more months and Truman wouldn't have been president, there would have been, Vietnam would have been put in a conservative, like a trustee ship like Hong Kong was for 30 years and then go back to Vietnam. That's what Roosevelt wanted to do. He hated the French.

That's why, you know, people forget the Vichy French. I mean, the French rolled over like in capitulated in about, was it a week when they rolled into France? Well, what people don't realize that Hitler now had access to the second largest Navy in the world, which was the French Navy. And they were everywhere, which meant also Vietnam. Vietnam was called Indu China. people don't realize into China is Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. And it's, and it was all under the Vichy French. And they just opened the doors for the Japanese Imperial Army to come in. And what the, the, the Japanese had to deal with the French, they said, look, you keep your jobs. And that will free

up more men, so we go kill Americans. So basically, the Vichy French, we're doing all the support stuff and the airports and everything for the Japanese. You know, people, everybody knows about Pearl Harbor, December 7th, 1940. They don't know about December 8th. 250,000 people were killed on December 8th. When the next, when the fleets, you know, went through the whole rest of Asia, killing, you know, Singapore and Indonesia and, you know, the Philippine, all all through there on the 8th. And that, that are, that, that, that, that, that, um, uh, fleet came out of Vietnam.

That's where it sailed from and those airplanes. And I, you know, and I started reading how Ho Chi men had, the Vietnam had rescued American pilots. And he walked one all the way back, you know, it took a month to get to Kunin, China. And what's great is if you get older and you can travel, which I love to do, I would go and trace these places. I would trace where Ho Chi Men went. And I would trace where the OSS were in China, in Kuhun. and Kuman, China, and there's a great big thing and says, you know, thanks America, you know, he saved China. You never hear that now. That's all been like it gets covered over

with the new communist government doesn't want to hear a lot about that stuff. But it's all out there. You know, if you visit these museums. And so I started finding out more and more stuff and finding out this history that was sort of hidden from us young guys that it wasn't that we were fight in the communist. We had inherited this thing because the French said the French name, there's no such thing as a Viet Cong, you know, by the way. That's a bullshit term. That was made up by the French, Vietnamese communism. But there's no Viet Cong. You know, they know, you know, that's the French, when you go to Vietnam and you start looking around, you could look at the memorials. There's a memorial to the American, they call it the Americans war. Yeah. And so that was

10-year war. And it's a, it's a topa, like a, you know, shrine, little shrine, blah, blah, blah. And then we go to the French monument, and it's this big, great big, because they fought him for 200 years. And of course, then you go, then my guy goes, oh, yeah, but that's nothing. And he takes me to the monument to the war with China, which is up on a hill, which is this massive, great big thing. You know, they've been fighting them for 2,000 years. They hated the Chinese. Yeah. They still hate the Chinese. You know, they tolerate them. They would get weapons from, but if somebody, like I remember reading in the State Department in the 40s, there was, or 50s, 60s, there was zero Vietnamese or anybody of Asian descent that was in the State Department. If somebody would have came over and just

counted the number of cannons that were, I saw in this one museum for every, you know, every 100 years that they fought with the Chinese, they would know that we were never going to, that it wasn't backed by China. You know, all of our intel, all of our information was skewed by the French. You know, and you can read all about that. I want to go off onto that topic. But that just got me deeper and deeper into I wanted to help. And so I sort of had, it was sort of my giving back. I went into Cambodia and found, I showed you that picture earlier I'd found of all of the B-52 strikes. I mean, this is the photograph I'd showed. Yeah, yeah.

So that, let's see, is that, it's like that. So that's, anyway, it's hard to show that. But that's Cambodia. We just, we dropped more tonnage on Cambodia than any country, even during World War II, more tonnage-wise. And you can, and all of this, I got this from Yale University, but the Air Force keeps accurate records. And so all of those are bomb sorties. And of the, I think of the 8, 8500 sorters, 3,000 of them didn't even have a mission. They just went out and dropped bombs.

And so, you know, I'm in Cambodia and I've met a lot of people that lost their grandparents that, you know, B-52s fly so freaking high. You don't know it's there until the bomb blows up. So, you know, and that just pushed all of these young people into Pol Potts arms. Pol Pot was the crazy guy that thought Mao was the greatest thing since sliced bread, but he was going to take it to the next level, take Cambodia back to year zero. So he executed you if you wore glasses, if you had an education, you know, they would, if you didn't, if you broke a needle in stitching, if you couldn't have a family picture. I mean, they literally just destroyed that culture.

And of the 7 million people probably killed 3 million, either forced labor, you know, because they dumped the people out of Phnom Penh and marched them out into the farmland. And they became farmers. And they would do ridiculous things like I saw this one place where they were trying to build a reservoir uphill. But they were stupid. The people that were running that had no education. Even now, today, and hopefully this doesn't, Hunsian doesn't, well, he won't care. He's the prime minister of Cambodia.

He's a third graduate education. You know, people, they didn't have a lot of education back then. And he fought with Pol Pot, and then he went over on the Vietnamese side and came back in and kicked the Cameroge out. And then he became the prime minister. That's 30 years ago. And he's still the prime minister today. But I decided, I'm living here. I'm going to help these people.

I've joined the Rotary Club, the VFW. It's really neat when you're the VFW, and your VFW is the guys, the name of it is the guys that were on that merchant marine ship that got blasted after at the end of the war, you know. So we get to go to the embassy and hang out with all these cool young, you know, soldiers and Marines that are stationed in Phnom Penh. and also the finding missing soldiers. I got to work with our guy. It's called Stone is the code name for it. But the main guy for the finding and missing soldiers is even in Vietnam, is stationed in Phnom Penh.

So I got to know him. And what I would do is I'd say, look, you know, I know the way these people think. Let's give them something. So let's give them. I did this big painting of the Vietnamese. when they went through the gates at the end of the war. And I thought, just give this to them because they give us intel on our missing guys.

We still have 1,250 guys missing. And I found out all of the rigmaral that goes through it to try to find them. It's amazing. The North Vietnamese have 400,000. And all it says on their births on the death certificate, location, south. So they had nothing. So I even found these, they're called corp, they're psychics. They're corporate, they're corpse finders.

They have this psychic thing. And some of it works and stuff like that. But it's like so bizarre. So I, I helped this woman who has an organization to find their missing soldiers. And I found 250, 250 graves in Phnom Pan. just by talking like this and one of my Kami friends said, I know where there's this grave site that's Chinese, but it looks like Vietnamese.

And we went there and it was all these Vietnamese graves because the Vietnamese lost, they lost 86,000 men fighting the Cameroos after we were gone. We know nothing about all these wars that went on. And when you go there, I mean, if I'm there, I'll take you around, I'll take you a scene rip. And there's a museum, the best museum you've ever seen,

because all the tanks and the, artillery pieces were left where the last battle was aimed at each other. They're still there. It's just, it's amazing, you know, to find that, that kind of, that kind of stuff. That's crazy. Yeah. Sorry for going on and on. No, no. This is all like fascinating to hear about. I was wondering if you could also tell us about, you know, some of your art, you know, that some of it you can see behind you. If you could tell us how you got into painting and, you know, some of your work is also Vietnam themed well it was a lot of it was actually I did I did this this was this

brochure that I made and these are all I can't hold that I can't hold it straight these are all paintings that I did this one let's see which one is it this one this one one first place in the VA's art contest of like 4,500 different VAs across the country and it wasn't even one of my favorites but I I guess what it is was it captured, you know, what that guy was going through. A moment, yeah. Yeah, a moment. And this is me and the one, this is me and Tubby Clause.

There was a, these would be photographs and then I would paint them. So that was that. And then I started painting like my girls, like this, well, it's hard to do this when you're. It's reversed. Yeah, everything's reversed. But let's see. I just show you some other ones. that are, I just did this one the other day or a few weeks ago.

I like to copy stuff. And so that's Picasso. And then there's another one of my, I saw her in downtown, Ho Chi Minh City, which is Saigon, for those of you that won't call it, Ochieman City. And we talked about this earlier, but that's always been one of my reliefs, you know, probably You read way before I wrote anything about Vietnam, but I would paint. Well, it was funny when I finished writing that story or the death in the Ashaw Valley, I stopped talking about it.

There was nothing else to talk about. It was really weird. It was like I got it out of my head and down on paper where it belongs. And so, you know, the way I faced my PTSD was like they say bite the dog, the bitch you, you know, bite the hair on the dog, whatever that saying is. Going back there did more to help my than a thousand therapists because I got to see the Vietnamese as loving real people with loving families. And these people treat, by the way, if you're a veteran of Vietnam War and you go to Vietnam,

you're a class higher than any of the tourists. They love Americans that come back. I mean, I've seen Ho Chi Men's body. I waited in line. And I had, me and another veteran were there. And this little old guy, old is my age, come up and he had his NVA uniform on. And all he wanted to do was shake my hand for coming here. It was just so moving to, it's still real for a lot of these people.

It'd be like, I'm sure, the way there's still a war must have been, you know, in America. It went on for a long time. There was just pain. There's still going on. Well, that's still raw there. there's still guys are, I mean, when I first moved to Cambodia, we were averaging at least one young kid would get killed a week with a bomb, you know, picking up a bomb, you know, something. You know, it was one a week and now it's, it's, I don't hear that much about it. So that's dropped down a lot. But, you know, it in a country where it's just scattered, not only with bombs that the, that the, um, uh, Pol Potts guy's left.

But every time, you know, I don't know if you ever seen, though, what comes out of B-52, those little cluster munitions. Cluster munitions. They look like balls to play with, and they just go everywhere. I've got, you know, you go into Laos and you can go and I went into this museum where actually President Obama had gone into. And there's all of these, it's sad because there's all of these makeshift, Like they cut their own foot.

Like they cut the wood thing for their foot. If they've got their foot blown off, they build their own prosthetic foot or hand or arm, you know. Still. I mean, that still goes on. And, you know, there's, Laos especially, who's still got a lot of, I've got a friend over there. I get every day, I get stuff from him on Facebook. And we drive motorcycles over there and drive a motorcycle. I mean, if you want to go down the Ho Chiman Trail, I've got.

the guy. We could go do a tour and it'll blow your mind. You'll see because everything's left the way it was. Like they only a couple years ago, they found a giant Chinese tank that the that the Vietnamese were using in Laos and it got covered over like the turret was blown off and then somehow got covered with dirt and then they were doing a bridge and they uncovered this complete tank, you know, with the with the rounds in it and everything still ready. to fire. That's still you find. Amazing. You know, that's going to be gone soon. You know, the scrap guys will get it, but it's still

there. Dee, do we have any viewer questions that we can hit up? I think we have some viewers got some questions here. Give me one second. Alejandro, again, not to fanboy too much, but would it be okay if I reach out to you to send me

to send my book to you and get it autographed? Oh, absolutely. But what I will request is that you send a return envelope paid for. I have people do that and I end up spending, you know, $6 to send a book that I made 30 cents on. But here's my, my address is 125, Surfway Unit 339, Monterey, California, 93, hold on.

93-something. 93940. and my email is Larry at L chambers.com That's really nice of you Larry Oh, sure Scott G Thank you I wore 10,000's tactical pants

Doing a job interview and I ended up getting the job There you go Good for you Ringing endorsement Um Alejandro again thank you Can you tell the story about the lightning strike? Oh, he did

Yep um Joe's By the way, I got a purple heart for that lightning strike. And Miller was the one that pointed out. He said, did you ever read your purple heart? It's for enemies against America. So God is like your enemy.

I mean, Miller would always, you know, he was the most educated of all of us. And he would somehow turn something on us with it. Joe's, thank you. Was radio direction finding every capability you guys used to locate the enemy? No, no. No. Ralph, thank you. That might have been later.

Have you used your recon skills in the finance securities industry? If so, what techniques were useful and what, and was it in an urban environment? Urban environment. Well, I was a stockbroker in Salt Lake City. But, yeah, I definitely, I, actually, to brag, I opened up more accounts for E.F. Hutton in one year, I've set the record. I opened up 300 accounts. And what I would do, and this is when my partner that started the same time, he opened up 24. But I opened up so many accounts because what I would do is like, I'd walk outside and I looked around and I went like, wow, there's this golden.

In Salt Lake City, there's the temple, you know, the Mormon temple, but then there's also the, not the White House, but the governor, you know, the, governor's mansion or something. Well, yeah, for the, you know, it looks like the White House. And I'd look up there and they had a gold. It was the top of the building was gold. And I went like gold, money. So I called up the treasurer of the state of Utah and I opened up the account. My first order was like $8 million, it was no, $800,000 bonds.

And I wasn't even sure how to buy them. But I would like run into my manager, but like, I just got this guy on the phone. wants to invest, you know, he's going to roll over his mortgage money and we put together old bond portfolio. But so I would, I would do that. I would, I would make sure, because we were we up and there was Merrill Lynch and we'd start at like, start at five o'clock in the morning. I would start at four o'clock in the morning. I made sure that nobody was earlier than me. This is in my early years when I was starting because I had more time to get on the phone and call people. So I would go in at four, just as an ego thing. I found out that my,

I found out that the president of this school, I found out, I'd find out what people would make. And then I would like, oh, somebody had fired me once. And it was another brokerage firm early on when I started. And it was because I couldn't pass that first test. I'd never taken a business class. I didn't know. So I used to, every month, I would send him my run. And I was, at one time, I was averaging $20,000 a month, but one month they made $40,000, just like 1978 when that was a lot of money for a month.

And I would send in my run and just like, just to earn. So I guess I used my ego to make to make myself be the best me I could be. I never did anything illegal or wrong or anything like that. but I just would push myself, push myself, because I knew I could take it. You know, like one time I gave a talk to, this was at the Santa Barbara Writers Conference. It's the last time they were invited me. I went and I talked to all of these women that wanted to write memoirs, and I'd written that Riccundo thing.

And I was writing every day because I had two kids to feed. And I got up and I said, look, it's unfair because you can't compete against me. I've got to make a living. I'm not doing this because I've got some extra time. and I want to like write something. You know, I'm doing this because I got two kids to feed an ex-wife and probably soon to be another ex-wife. I've got to pay it.

I got a lot to do. And that's the attitude you've got to take with writing. And I just would send stuff out to anybody. And there's a, well, you're not supposed to send it to the editor. I'd call the guy up. He's just a guy or a woman. Hi, it's Larry Chambers. I got an article.

And I figured out I would give them the article free. and I'd have some corporate, like you have a sponsor. I had sponsors that would pay me, so I didn't need money from the magazine. So pretty soon I'm writing, I was writing three columns a month and two books a year, sometimes three books a year. And I did that for years. So, you know, I guess that's how I used it. I just used my tenacity.

And you know what I always would remember is standing there, getting that that that that that that that that air metal pinned on my chest i was so proud of that that and when i do that i would like get into a stance and i could just go all day long i don't need drugs i don't need anything you know i don't need to drink i just would just on pure like pride or i don't know the way to explain it but i didn't use i didn't sneak around and steal stuff you know to get if that was what the guy was wondering. I didn't do that. I just used tenacity. Tenacity would be the word I would say. One more, Scott G. When you were attending University of Utah, what was your opinion of the economics classes slash professors and any Marxist economics they taught you?

Since you planned. I didn't. I didn't take any economic classes. I took, I was a ski instructor back then. I graduated from, I went, I became a ski instructor. I taught at Alta, and I got certified at Alph Ingan, which is the hardest ski school in Utah. I mean, there's the best of the best. And so I taught for the University of Utah, and I combined that. I sort of made, after I got my first, my bachelor's, because I'd already graduated from junior college before I went in the Army. Then I came, got the bachelor's, and then I got a master's degree, and I used the skiing as a part of a part of that.

I told you I was dyslexic in ADD, so I avoided anything. Now, to tell something on myself, the first book I read, I probably wasn't, it was Catcher in the Rye, and I was probably 30 years old when I read a whole book, a whole novel all the way through, was the first book I'd ever read, because I just avoided reading. I was so bad at it, so dyslexic, I couldn't read. And, you know, so I'd, like, cheated most of my way through grammar school. You know, how they were going to put me back in the third grade. but I learned how to forge my mother's signature.

And I took the note home and said, no, he needs, he's going to go on. You know, and I just wouldn't cheat. But I, nobody knew, I was undiagnosed. Nobody knew what that stuff was. Yeah, yeah. Or how to deal with it. All right. Last one, Mike, thank you.

Thank you, gentlemen, for hosting another extraordinary man who did extraordinary things for our country. Thank you, Mike. Thank you for those kind words. Yeah, no, I feel the same way, Larry. I mean, thank you again for doing this. And I really hope that folks out there will read his, I mean, you have, as he said, lots of books out there. Some of them are about finance. Tonight we were talking about Recondo and the other book Larry wrote Death in Eshaw Valley, are definitely going to be of interest to our viewers. I plowed through this book in a couple days.

I really hope you guys will check it out. Larry, his YouTube, his website, you'll be able to find it just down below in the description to this video or podcast if that's how you're listening to it. Larry, any final thoughts? Anything else that I failed to cover that you want to get out there? Well, yeah, this is, this is for like for vets. I mean, one of the things that I've done is I went in Cambodia, I found a woman that had five young daughters and I've supported, she should understand. I remember telling her, you're not going to understand, you know, I don't want anything from you. I want to help your family. And I, I've sent them through school. I pay for food, lodge, for where they live, for meals, for their clothes. I've

done that for 10 years. And I've had some people help me, excuse me, along the way. But I sort of indirect or directly adopted this KMai family. And I have to tell you for a veteran, I have so much meaning in my life. Because that's what they say, you know what, what makes you for, you know, I'm 75 years old. I'm happy as shit. And I've got two great kids. that are adult children, Logan and Kristen, in America, but I've got all of these people that I've helped in Cambodia, and I just feel proud of that, you know, not like, oh, what Vietnam did to me. It's so I suggest, you know, going and taking on a mission, something like in, in, in, in, our motto in Rotary is service above self. And that's what I get so much more out of helping somebody

else than my dumb shit stuff. It's been really interesting to see a lot of the Afghanistan veterans helping out Afghan immigrants in the aftermath of the war and helping them come here and settle down. And it's been interesting to see all of that. Like the guy that wrote about this early on was, you know, the real, it was,

he was in a concentration camp. And he saw that the two, there was two groups, of people that made it, the ones that were super religious, so they held on their religion, which I'm not in that group. But the other one was they created a sense of meaning. That's why you'll always hear, you know, they're adamant about the Holocaust and about what happened. They will you, they're not going to ever let that die because that gives them purpose and meaning in their life. And that's what those guys helping the Afghanistan vets or trying to get somebody, all that stuff, that just gives you like a goal, a tangible goal to reach and do that's good.

And, you know, you feel good about you. I mean, what a great feeling, you know. Larry, thank you again so much, man. And next, coming up this week, we're going to have two shows, actually. We're going to have on the 24th, Alex Hollings, is a former Marine, and he writes a lot of aviation stuff, a lot of aerospace news. And then on Friday, episode 88, Mark Denball, who is a warrior who represents one of the inmates down in Guantanamo Bay. So we're going to have him in studio.

It's going to be an interesting episode, different perspective than what we usually get around here. So, yeah, Larry, I mean, this has been amazing. Thank you so much, man. And, you know, please stay in touch. Let us know if we can help in any way. Yeah, you bet. Well, thank you. It's been fun. Absolutely. All right, we will see all of you guys next Friday. Or actually before that. We'll see you with Alex first, and then on Friday.

Okay.