The Team House - LRRP/Rangers in Vietnam with Kenn Miller, Ep. 56

Episode Date: August 22, 2020

Kenn Miller served in all three incarnations of the LRRPs/Rangers in Vietnam working his way up from private to recon team leader and graduated from the MACV Recondo School. After the war, Kenn pursued his education, lived in Taiwan, earned a PhD, and speaks fluent Mandarin. He is the author of Six Silent Men Book Two, a non-fiction account about his unit in Vietnam and the novel Tiger the Lurp Dog. Help Dave recover from being attacked on the subway: https://www.gofundme.com/f/david-parke039s-medical-bills Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse The podcast version of the stream is here: https://soundcloud.com/user-796052562/the-light-reaction-regiment-the-philippines-answer-to-delta-force-w-francis-villanueva-ep-55 SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here: https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links): https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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

and those with kids under the age of five, with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Okay, guys, we are live. We are on the team house right now. This is episode, geez, I think this might be episode 56. I apologize for never being able to keep count.

But tonight's episode, I am Jack Murphy, here with our guest tonight, Ken Miller. Ken served in the Lerps in Vietnam. The Lerps are their long-range reconnaissance patrols, which they went through several different incarnations of it, eventually reorganized his ranger companies. And we'll talk about this with Ken for sure. He was in the 101st Lerps and Rangers did three extensions in Vietnam. served all the way from private to recon team leader. He served a condo school graduate.

And then after the war, he went over to Taiwan and pursued his education, learned Mandarin, which he speaks fluently. He's definitely, Ken, what was your PhD on? I don't have the PhD. I made a point of stopping at every space where I'm about to. get something like that because I came from a family, everybody in my family, my parents, my sister, my first cousins, and their parents all had Boku. They're all academics.

Oh, they were all academics. So, you know, my father was the president of the University of Nevada when I was in high school. And I was determined to go into the military. And my parents were not pleased, but they let me make my own decision. But every day, the last half of my senior year in high school, every day I was called down to the counselors and saying, you won't get drafted. Your father's the president of the university. I already have enlisted.

I'm just waiting for the time to come. It really annoyed me. And the idea that because of what my father was doing, that I'm above this, this was the whole draft thing in the Vietnam War was not very, not very fair. And I was really offended at them saying that, we'll get you this so you don't have to.

And I already decided that I wanted to go into, to be a paratrooper, partly because I was young and wanted it, you know, wanted adventure and all of this sort of stuff. But also, as strange as it might sound, because I was raised up, raised up, not in Reno, but in Ann Arbor, Michigan, as a liberal. And to me, a good liberal is not going to let just the kids who aren't rich do all the wars.

And I think, wait a minute, you know, people in Vietnam are having communism forced on them. It's a good liberal. You've got to go fight that. And I was young and idealistic. You know, when it comes to getting, I've gone to seriously gone to three universities, three good ones. And I always stop at a certain point. I don't want a PhD because there are so many of them around in my family. And I wanted to be the black sheep.

Is that why you went to Taiwan after the war? rather than pursuing a normal education. Well, I was fascinated from the day that the plane that I was on landed at Tonsonet Airport and we got on a bus to go to Benoit to the Repo Depot. I was fascinated with East Asia. And Taiwan didn't have a war going on at the time. Well, it did, obviously, it still does, but it wasn't like Vietnam. I wanted to really learn about East Asia.

And my wife has told Vietnam, my wife is Taiwanese Chinese. And I remember her telling a Vietnamese friend of hers, oh, you know, Vietnam was Ken's first love. And then her friends said, oh, where does she live now? No, it's just I've got fascinated by that part of the world, and I still am. And I was quite recently very happy. I was really depressed at what the pandemic is doing to America, and our response to it has not been good.

But I was very glad to know that Taiwan and Vietnam really had their shit in order when it came to that. Do you think that's part of coming from an Asian culture as opposed to a Western culture, which is individualistic? The first thing is people in East Asia is a tradition. I mean, if you have a little cold, you put on a mask. Yeah. This is very common. It's nothing unusual. The other thing is the Confucian culture.

It's not just, I want mine. You don't know. No, it's we belong to a culture. We belong to a family, to a, to a neighborhood, to a country. And I think this has made it easier for East Asia to, you know, You don't see bikers in Japan or South Korea and Taiwan, and they all have them, but you don't see them going on a big rally and not wearing. There's some drinking.

This is just, you know, it's a different culture, the attitudes like that. I think it worked for them and was bad for us. So let's take it back to the beginning, Ken. to hear about your arrival in Vietnam. You mentioned it briefly in your initial fascination with East Asia. Tell us what year was that that you arrived in Vietnam? What was that experience like? It was late spring and 67. And, you know, I was right out of jump school and so proud of be a a paratrooper and I just really wanted to get into it. And the plane, you know, landed in the Philippines for about two hours and then back then on to Vietnam.

And I got there and put us on a bus and I'm looking out the windows. The bus had these mesh on them so nobody could throw a grenade in, the window on us. And I was just watching it. And I just, this is cool. I like this place, man. This is fascinating. And that's where I still am, sort of. And, you know, from there you go to the replacement depot.

And, you know, I was terrified the thought that they would put me in a leg unit. Yeah. I just, no, no, no, no. But they didn't. I went to the 101st. My first unit was in a troop second of the 17th calf, which was theoretically and officially the recon unit for the whole first brigade, which was all there was for the 101st in Vietnam at that time. The other two brigades were still at Fort Campbell. And basically it was a road recon sort of thing.

It was a, you know, but we did a lot of work with the LERP platoon, which was completely not an official unit, but we worked with them and got to know these guys, and so I just kind of moved on over there. What do you mean they were not an official unit? Like, who were these guys? No, it was a provisional unit, the LERP unit. It was a, it was part of, of the brigades, headquarters, headquarters company. But it, you know, it was a provisional unit. And so, but I went there and then when the other two brigades came back,

or came to Vietnam from, from Fort Campbell, they had a company already, a LERP company that had been, organized and so forth. So we joined that. And I couldn't imagine wanting to do anything else. The only thing else I would have wanted to do was if I had been on, if I could have done it without having to leave Vietnam, I would love to have been on an A team just so I could be around mountain yards. I wanted to see what that was all about.

But, you know, I'd have had, I would have had to go back to Fort Bragg and go, you know, do all a whole bunch of stuff. And then I'd probably get back and they'd say, oh, you were a Lerp with a hundred first. Okay, here, you're going to be over in Project Delta or something. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, I was glad to stay where I was. Eventually, they stopped letting us if he had too many, if you extended,

voluntarily extended, finally they said, nope, you can't extend anymore. No more extensions. And so I'm leaving, I remember being on the bus leaving Benoit to go back to Tansanute Air and just,

I don't want to leave. I don't want to leave here. I want to stay here. You and who was it Pat Tadena, who's over there for like five years? Yeah, he was there much longer than me. Pat Tadina was just amazing. He was in the 173rd Lerbs. I knew him, but not real well.

Right, right. He passed away recently. I know. Unfortunately. And he was beyond, he was beyond, beyond whatever the he was beyond it. So, Ken, for the, you know,

there are young people listening to this who like barely even know what the Vietnam War is. Like, can you explain, articulate for people out there? What is a LRP? What is a LRP company? Like what the world are we talking about? LERP stands for LERP stands for long range reconnaissance patrol. And then later,

they took out the reconnaissance thing and made long-range patrol so they could give us other things other than just reconnaissance, which they already were doing. We were doing raids and all sorts of other things beforehand. It was just on paper, a change. And we knew we were learned, we knew that we were rangers because there were no, you know, there was a ranger school, but there are no ranger units in the army. We knew that we were the Rangers. And we weren't surprised when they officially made it that

on the 1st of February 1969, which is a birthday for, in my opinion, for the whole 75th Ranger regiment. But Fort Benning does not pay any attention.

attention to that. Yeah, we don't count. That one doesn't count. But it we were, you know, I recently did a book review of this book. And it's a Hold that up for us, please. Yeah. War on the run. The epic story of Robert, of Robert Rangers, of Robert Rogers and the conquest of America's first frontier. This is a hard book to read because it goes into great detail, great detail. But it's fascinating because this is a before the United States was a, and it was a brutal life and even more brutal war. And that's sort of what American Rangers were up until this 1970. They were a provisional unit.

It was that you got recruited, recruited volunteers in the theater. And they were always troublemakers when they were back, when they weren't out. I'm going to share a picture here of a young troublemaker, Ken. Oh, that's a, I don't know who that guy is. But, you know, I remember coming back, getting off that and off that helicopter. And the first sergeant said, you know what you need, don't you? And I said, yep, yep, you know, I know what I need in the next day I got a haircut. But, you know, we were different.

We were very different from what the, from what the rangers are now. You know, we were kind of scofflaws, scoffice. Scofflaws. I'm getting senile, so I don't remember words very well. But, you know, we were always kind of troublemakers and, you know, drinking and having a good time when we weren't out in the field. and we knew that our units could be just taken out anytime. They could just, and any of us, any of our teams could discipline. One thing about RECON is you may not get a chance to say goodbye to the world

when you have only six people and you're not, you don't have, what do you call it the now, social distance, you didn't have that in a small, recon team. You had to be able to touch the guy around you. Can you talk about that? Like what the mission of a LERP team and what you guys actually did out there in the jungles? Our main thing was to go out and we would get, they would show us a map and then they would have intelligence come in and tell us this is what we think is here on this place and that place. And then the team leader and assistant team leader, and sometimes the whole team would go out and fly over the area the day before just to see and looking for LZs, for landing zones,

and looking for, I know the words, but they're not coming to. Like LZs and where the river is and where this little, the hill is and where there's something. And we would come back and then we'd have about a day with the whole team to just go over the, go over the map, go over the map, go over the map and do our drills, you know, over, you know, what happens if you get hit from here, you hit from there. And then we would go out and often we would be waiting by the helicopter, and then they couldn't get in.

helicopters and still, if the, if the fog was so bad and if it was raining, they couldn't get us in. And they wouldn't be able to get us out. And so we would be sitting there and just, damn, and then, you know, we're ready to go and then they cancel it. That would happen about a third of the time, it seemed like. It depended on where you are in Vietnam, but when you're up in I-Corps and you're going west toward Laos, that's, pretty common. Which fire base was this you were working at? Well, we were at Camp Eagle,

which was the 101st and a bunch of other groups. But the thing about Camp Eagle was, we were the first people on it. Right after the Tet things starts to smooth out a little bit around Saigon and Binwa in that area and other places. We get a three teams,

three six-man teams. Okay, you guys go get all of your stuff, get ready, and we're going to take you down to the down to the airstrip at Binwa. You have, be ready in an hour. And what's going on? What's happening? They didn't tell us we had one lieutenant, and then the rest were just three recon teams.

And we get on the helicopter or on the plane and we fly and we don't know where we're going. And we land and it's raining out. Again, I'm forgetting the term. The ramp goes down and we get out in the rain. And we don't know where we are. And then we can hear over the rain. We can hear screams and moans and people. That kind of horrible shit that you don't like to hear, but you hear sometimes.

And we go over, and we don't know what's going on. And we go toward the, where the side of the airport is. And there's a little Navy, a Navy clinic there. And there's guys out in the, out in the rain. and just so many people, mainly Marines, because the Battle of Way was going on. And this is where they're taking them to get in there. That's the plane that we went up

was full of people on stretchers. And so we go to the Naval Clinic, you know, and our medics, each team would have a medic how well trained they were could go from being an SF medic to being somebody that just had it in the unit training. But they go over and the Navy doctor said, get the hell out of here.

We appreciate it, but we're, this is a, we don't have any place for any more people. And then up comes a deuce and a half truck. and there's a Hmong or somebody, some some indigenous guy and a guy with a green beret

driving it. You guys are a hundred first lirps? Yeah, well, get in. And they took off and they put took us to a cemetery. You know, the Vietnamese and Chinese cemeteries with the kind of round thing and then the body that looks like an

egg. And they dropped us off there and gave us some some combo information. And what do we do it? And we can hear and see a lot that's going on across the river and way. We were about two miles away, I guess. And we were a trip, a trip thing. If, you know, if they, if the North Vietnamese come south,

we're supposed to be able to let, F-O-B-1 and a bunch of other people notify them if the enemy's coming south. So they put you out there as an L-P-O-P, just as like an early warning. Yep, and we did the best we could to make ourselves feel somewhat good in the graves.

And nobody else was there. Just the 19 of us. and then the battle seemed to go down and go down a little bit and day by day more and more people came usually from our originally it was just guys from our unit but we were by the time we left two years later or something two and a half years later camp eagle was a huge military city but we were the first first people there. And I just, the battle of way was going on right there. And we wanted to be in it. And we were at the same time, kind of glad that we weren't. Because, I mean, as soon as we got off the plane, we saw and heard. Right. Right. How bad it was. And you guys were, I mean, a six-man warp team or even throwing you guys together as a 19-man warp platoon. And you guys, and just sending you out there as infantry is also kind of the wrong answer.

Like, that's really not the right way to use you guys. We were used in various ways. At one point, we were palace guard for the general. Oh, yeah, of course. That kind of thing, you know, oh, we have this elite unit. We could do whatever we want with with them, and they don't really matter. So, Kent, six guys on a Lerp team. What are the duty positions on the patrol?

You got team leader, assistant team leader. Okay. You have a, well, the first guy is, you know, you have one, he's, these are, these are, these are the, the words that I know that are in my head and they're so far back into, you have a point man, then you have a slack man. And everybody has their area that they're, that they're, that's there, they're, they cover, they're covering. So you have 360 as you're moving.

And you're moving this way, you're moving that way. If you're the point man, you're dealing with what's in front of you higher and what's low. And then the slack man behind you is watching for you. And then the guy behind him has got an arc. that he's watching and then over here they do. And the last guy would be every other, maybe every other step or so. If possible,

sometimes you know, you can't always do it exactly the way you should. But, you know, we'll be turning around the check behind you and then if you're leaving a trail, try to get rid of it. And your job was to go to check out certain people.

places that intelligence wanted you to check out. Or if you see something that's interesting, you do, but all the time, you're on the, somebody's on the radio. And usually you would take your booty hat down around here and whisper in, yeah. And whisper in it and so forth. And going in, the scariest thing always was when you're coming in, most of the time the helicopter

would go like this up and down, up and down, up and down, up and down so the enemy would not know where you're going in. And consequently, you didn't come down and stop and get out of the helicopter. We'd have to go out of it while it's still moving.

And the consequence of this is every guy I know who did recon in Vietnam with the exception of John Singleton Meyer, who I think Tilt is his nickname. You know. Yeah, I know John quite well, yeah. Yeah, I think Tilt's lied because he said, no, I don't have any of those problems, but everybody else does because of the way we'd have to jump in of moving helicopters. We could have sometimes as much as 100 pounds on our backs.

and bang, uneven ground, you know, it's just, but we thought, okay, well, God, this hurts. What we do is you just walk it out. And that's fine at the time, but it catches up with you many years later. You're talking, were you wearing your rucksack or did the rucksacks go out first and then you chase it out? No, no, no, you'd be wearing your rucksacks. Oh, my God, and you're falling, you must have fallen at least six feet, six feet down through the elephant, Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. And sometimes more than that. And, you know, every now and then somebody on a team would have their, their ankles shattered. Yeah, and you got to pull them right back out. Yeah. And which one of the worst things that happened to the company when I was there, that's, that happened. The guy got taken out, Medevac out, and then the survivors from the team after this happened. This is in a lot of the books from our company.

This was what happened in November 20th, 1968. Gary Linder. The Six Silent Men series. Yeah. Gary Linder was badly hurt there. But everybody was. That's the action where Gary was awarded the Silver Star. Yeah.

And I had switched to go on another team. I was on that it was a heavy team. They had two teams together. And I wanted to go with the other team because they had a more, seemingly they would have a more interesting mission. We were supposed to do a raid on a commo site, a North Vietnamese commo site.

And so I traded with, I traded with another guy. And he got killed on that one. And we got to the Camo site, but there was, there was some wires still hanging down, but there was nobody there or anything. And then we had to just go to ground while these guys are fighting for their lives. And we wanted to go. We wanted to go, but we were, you know, like five clicks away.

and this was this place was just full of North Vietnamese so we wouldn't have got very very far how did this mission kick off what was the whole process that started this whole because I'm trying to remember Gary Winderer's book is this the one where they ambushed some Vietnamese nurses yes okay could you tell us a little bit about that mission

and how that all unfolded Yeah, because I had gone to the other team for that mission, so I'm listening to it. I was an RTO there, so I'm listening to everything that's going on. And I could hear it fairly well on the radio. But what happened was they came in and, well, they're going in, one of the guys shattered his ankles. So in the morning, two of the guys took him back to that, back to an LZ to get him out. And then they came back and they got, you know, the whole team got, the whole heady team got together. And, you know, they assumed that, and probably rightly that the local NVA figured that the team had left.

And all it was was was just one guy left. and then they set up on a trail. And I think, you know, it really bothered Gary Linder for life and probably still does because his wife is a nurse. And nobody wanted to kill a nurse. But as I remember, there wasn't just the nurses. There were some other officers with them too. And they were a uniformed NVA. They were not civilians per cent.

they were not civilians and they didn't know right off that it's that's what it because of the height of the grass they couldn't see them well yeah and they're in uniform and they're just walking past and they set up a hasty ambush and then uh i don't like to say this but the guy who was team leader for that team shouldn't have been and he was the only guy that I knew, the whole time I, the only enlisted guy I knew, in the time I was in Vietnam, who would sit there thinking, I want to get this medal, I want to get a DSC, and I want to get the medal, and so he says, well, you know, gosh, we just pulled this ambush. And so what you do when to pull him, you get everything you can off the bodies, and if you have a prisoner,

you get him. And then you get the hell out of there. You're, you're all. You're all. You're only six guys. You can't stay for a big fight. Well, this was a heavy team, so it would be 12. 12. But it was only a. One guy had already. Yeah, still 11 guys, not much. Yeah. But, you know, oh, no, I'm, I'm, the team leader, he was young and ambitious, far too ambitious.

And he said, well, we're going to stay here and ambush our own ambush. because they'll never expect us to do that. And they didn't expect him to do that, but they ended up ambushing the ambushes and a big fight went on for a long time. And one guy, Riley Cox, got his intestines out in his stomach, out of his stomach,

and stuffed him in with his sweat. towel and stayed there and I could hear him on the radio he had a car 15 and a and a shotgun I could hear the shotgun and everybody was wounded and three guys were killed right off and it took a long time and then to get in to get a reaction force in they got everybody that was in the company that was back in the rear and they just grabbed stuff and one guy, Tony Tresero, who just recently died of COVID-19. Tony Tresero was going home the next day. He'd already turned in his weapon and everything.

And he's in Army Skivvy's, you know, shower shoes, flip-flops. And he grabbed a rifle that had never been fired, I'd grab that and he's putting rounds into the, into the magazines on, and he just took over, gets on the helicopter and tells that the crew, you're two helicopters. They were guys that we knew that carried us in and out all the time.

And I said, we're going in and they went in. And Tony's not prepared and not dressed further, even. And he's the first guy off. So he just takes over, takes over. Wow. Takes command. And all he ever got for that was a broad star with V. And he should have got a DSE.

But Riley Cox got a silver star and should have got a DSE or a medal of honor. He had his guts in his lap and kept fighting. And then finally when the reaction force came in, he got really angry. Get the fuck away from me. I'm staying here till everybody's ready. You know, he didn't want to be taken out,

to tell everybody else was God. And I'm glad that I wasn't there. And I think less of myself because I wasn't. I just want, I switch, the guy that I switched with got killed. And he got killed in my place. And I had a, you know, there's a lot of things that if you're in a war,

you carry some guilt for stuff. And it really bothered me when I, after the war, when I come back and then all these people would, oh, well, you must really have some great guilt problems, don't you? fuck you you know I mean guilt time yeah because of things I could have done

and didn't do or I wasn't fast enough or I wasn't thinking enough or something but they're thinking that we're over there just massacling and oh there's some children let's shoot them or something I mean I didn't want to hear that

we all carry a weight of guilt for things that we shouldn't but just if I'd done that a little bit better so-and-so would have lived you know is that that really hard

Ken to to be the RTO and you have to listen on the radio your friends being shot up and killed and like you're doing your job and you are helping

but as a soldier it's like you feel like you belong there like you should be their shoulder to shoulder with them we definitely all of us we had a lieutenant with us on the team I was with on that the one that right the comma site yeah and that's one of the reasons I wanted to go there I thought that'd be a more interesting mission and I wanted to see the lieutenant out out in the field because most of the time he's in the

helicopter put in and out and all of us wanted to just head for right where they're they were. And if we could sort of hear the firing a little bit, even without the radio, depending on the, on the wind or something. But, you know, we would have never gotten very far. Right. And the last thing that that they needed was another team pinned down. So we just, for the next couple days, we just go to ground. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five

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

with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Ken, so much of what you're talking about here and you're describing, and I just have to point it out, is that you describe it so beautifully in your novel here that I read this a few months ago, Tiger the Whirp Dog, and so many of these experiences that you're talking about are fictionalized in this book.

But I mean, you describe it in this novel with so much eloquence. And I feel that you really describe the mission that works do and the challenges and the environment and all of it is in there. And I mean, there's more we can talk about. I'm sure we will. But I really think that people who are trying to get a better understanding of the work mission and what you experienced. I think that novel is a great place to go. They can, I probably use bookstores or Amazon might have it. Amazon has it. It's on it's on Amazon,

yeah. It's on Amazon, yeah. One of the things is I use the name for one of the guys on my, the last team that I, when I was a team leader to work, I used Marvel McCann's first name for one of the characters, Marvel Kim in the book. Yeah, they're Korean American. Yeah. And I had a feeling in the years since that he's got two other reasons to things that I could have done better. on our last mission, you know, that I feel guilty to warn him about. But from what I've heard, he said, he's just pissed off that he used his name. But, you know, none of us have seen him.

He's one of the guys that hasn't come to a reunion or anything. But some guys are like that. They just want to put the war behind them and totally forget about it. Yeah. He was, he was from California. but he was originally from Guam. And Guam had, of all the parts of the United States, Guam had the most people percentage-wise killed in the Vietnam War.

Wow. And the city that had the most is East L.A. You know, I just, one thing about the army that, that I felt more at home there than I generally do anywhere else, is that you had everybody. You had every kind, every, we didn't have any Australian Aborigines that I knew in the US Army, everything else. But I did run into Australian Aborigine with the Aussie SAS had one there. I ran into him later and back in the rear

but you know I like that that's how it should be everybody should be you know working together and a lot of that's been lost I think and a lot of

that kind of nostalgia that you have for the Vietnam War which is as terrible as it was there are a lot of things you look back on fondly right? Oh a lot a lot I was more alive than I have been since. And I had a sense that I was doing something.

And, you know, if you're a lurp and you're a good one, you've been doing it for a while, once you go into, once you insert into it, the first thing you do is you get away from where the helicopter was, and then you find a place and you lay down, you lay dog, just quiet. very quiet and you're sitting there and you're listening and you're feeling the wind and you know which way the wind's blowing you're listening to every sound and if a cicada makes a sound

you're aware of it everything all of your senses are so amazingly aligned i've never been able to get that anywhere else. And, you know, but I can, I can still do better than most people probably. I'm, I think, just concentrating and using your sense organs and knowing what this might mean and what that might mean. You sit there for a long time, for a while, you let the helicopter leave, you know, into your boony hat and then you move on. And it,

one thing that, that I don't know how common this is, but we would go into areas where the enemy had been and where they had a camp and they'd moved. And often these were camps that were there and for new troops coming in, they would be there before they set off

to do something else. So you don't know when they might be coming back. But quite often we'd be into these places. And there'd be leeches everywhere. You know, there is anywhere. But I would just, I would look there and say, man, because they want to be down by water. and I would think what are the other guys?

What do they do for? They don't have the kind of the leech, the mosquito and leech repellent that we do. What do they do for that? You would end up having certain kinds of feelings of brothership with the guys on the other side. And I've had conversations only twice, both in America, once with a local Viet Cong and one with a guy who was Chinese,

Sino-Chinese, Sino-Viet guy who got kicked out when China invaded Vietnam after the war. You know, he was, and he worked in the Chinese restaurant where my wife was working. And, you know, I really, you know, all these guys, and apparently they say, hey, we liked you guys, man, it was a war. We had to try to kill you. You said, and what really gets me is the newest thing from the Sentinel, SFA magazine, is basically these three books. a review of three books. One is by Aaron Banks. I think all SF guys know who Aaron Banks is. But he was in Hanoi right after the war ended.

Here's another OSS guy there was there. And then here's the big one. You can see how many. If you can hold it up a little bit, Ken, we can't really. Oh, there you go. This one is got everything you could possibly know. This is very into it. But you read this and you'll see that they have pictures of OSS guys.

You know, this SF guys sitting there training the Vietnam. And here's General Jop right there and then Hose right there. And I did these three books together for the Sentinel and Reefendon. and rereading it and knowing the things that over the years that I've studied, it's a heartbreaker. It's a heartbreaker. And it's not something that it's easy to say around other Vietnam veterans that, hey,

these guys we were fighting. There are friends now. First, I won't say which group, but you could, but one of the groups has got pretty good relations with the Vietnamese special forces now. And Vietnam is one of America's favorite, our best friends right now. The people we fought are our buddies,

became our buddies very quickly. And the ones that I've talked to said, we always are on your side. both sides of the Vietnam War figured the United States was their natural ally and friend. That's heartbreaking. Yeah, it is.

Yeah, because they had already, they had more bigger concerns with next door neighbors, right? Always, yeah. And they had, I mean, maybe you can speak to it a little bit, Ken, but I mean, the Vietnamese had defended themselves from the Japanese

and then the French, and then we show. up. Well, it goes much further back. Look, Vietnam is right here and right here is China. Vietnam and China, at least maybe not Manchuria that far off to the northeast, but most of China and Vietnam, you go back, they're the same people. You got to go back about 2,000 years or more. And there's so much in common that what is not in common is important to both countries. And China has been trying to take over Vietnam forever. Because they say, what's wrong with you guys? You know, look at you should be part of two of our provinces.

This is the basic. I had Vietnamese friends in Taiwan who other foreign students, the Vietnamese. And I said, man, all these guys keep saying that we should be Chinese. You know, the Americans and the Koreans and sort of sit there. Well, yeah, I see that point of view and I also see your point of view. You know, they're either very close or they're at each other's head. You know, traditionally for 2,000 years, very close are at war with each other.

And China is the big thing that they're worried about, but China also is, it's also sort of home to Vietnam and China. I mean, I'm reading a biography of Ho Chi men right now. And all of these guys could speak Mandarin and so forth. You know, you can't really separate the two except by having them at war with each other. So Vietnam's always worried about China, but the French were there and they wanted them out of there for a long time. And the U.S. policy was to get the French out of there. but that was Roosevelt and Roosevelt died and Truman did not know what was coming up what was going on

the British and the French were already trying to set for the French military to come back and take Vietnam over right after World War II and the Japanese were there but they were ready to go back to Japan we completely lost you know you know good luck to everybody and and you know I feel like if we had given the Vietnam a chance and they were begging the OSS and America in general, we want somebody that will stand with us as to, so the Chinese will say, okay, you got a big brother here, get rid of the French, said, and you know, the ex, to, the ex, uh, Ho Chi men was a communist. No question. There's reasons that somebody that was born at the end of the 19th century could become a communist, you know, if you're seeing how bad things could be. Right, right, right, right.

If you look at like the history, yeah. But he and the people around them were very initially very, very willing to have all sorts of Vietnamese and involved in this. Let's get an independent country and unify it. And the French came back. And who brought the French back within like a month or two after Ho Chi Men was elected president for the whole damn thing? U.S. Navy Liberty ships brought the French military. And we supported them at Biendet-Fu. Right. All the way through. And, you know, one of the things in that Ken Burns thing about the Vietnam War, like most of Vietnam veterans, I did not like it. Yeah, Tilt thought it was shit, didn't he? Oh, I thought it was. Well, for one thing, they don't even mention mountain yards for our SF or anything.

And it's obviously they're on the side of the north, not the south. and both sides had a reason for what they were doing, but that's beside the point. But the whole thing, but the first two episodes that give you the background leading up to this was good. And in there, they make the point that everything I've read in all of the books like this and so forth, of people who were there at the time, Ho Chi men kept saying, listen, we understand.

I lived in the United States for a while. I've lived in England. I've lived in France. I've lived in the Soviet Union. I've seen the bad side of communism in the Soviet Union, and I know what's coming off. And I know that you're terrified of communism, But don't let that be the main thing you're looking at.

That's not our main. Right, right. And I believe him. You know, I, if I heard that right after I came back from Vietnam or in the first 10 years, I would get angry. But do you think, Ken, that as a country that we made a big mistake by conflating Vietnamese nationalism with sort of international communism? Yeah. We, you know, Americans and humans in general, it's like people cannot accept that Lee Harvey Oswald, this loser, this got a couple of lucky shots off, yeah. Oh, no, no. It's, you know, it was a huge, huge complicated conspiracy, which just does not make any sense.

But we always are looking for conspiracies. Right, right, very much so. And, you know, the international communist thing, how did that last? How long did that last after the North Vietnamese won their civil war? Two years? And they're fighting their next-door neighbor who was communist. You know, it's not a big...

So much for the domino theory, right? Yeah. But, you know, humans are screwed up. You know, it's easy to look back now and see and see the mistakes that everybody made. Yeah. But, you know, humans are fallible. Ken, I mean, that's a, that's like,

there's a lot to chew on there, quite frankly. And, you know, I know for you and for so many of the other guys I know, and to a lesser extent, myself, I mean, it's all a lot to take in when you go to the Vietnam Memorial in Washington, D.C. and you see all those names on the wall and think about that. That's tough to deal with. One thing that has come out of the Vietnam War, though, is a very strong friendship. I worry about the Arvin veterans. But the communist veterans, and I think that they're not in each other's throo'clock the communist veterans. And I think that that's probably not so they're not at each other's throats, the veterans, any more than we were after our Civil War.

I hope it's, they get over it completely. Because, man, that's a, that's a good country. You know, no matter, it's not perfect, no place is, but I like Vietnam. You know, and the fact that, okay, I, can I, do we have one more minute? Of course you can. Oh, okay, I don't know much. I recently re-read a book that I read when it first came out. I was in college in Taiwan, and I didn't like it.

I resented it because I was so much still this gung-hole paratrooper, you know, we're writing the enemies at this book, this novel. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging.

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

And it's the book, the novel by Jonathan Rubin, an SF guy. Oh, yeah, I have it right here. I haven't read it yet, but the barking deer. It's, I think it's the greatest book, the greatest novel to, at least in English and probably in any language that's come out from that war. Really? And you see everybody's point of view and everybody's, the pressures that are on them and why they're doing this and why they're doing that. And, you know, Jonathan Rubin, who wrote that book also after the military, after SF, he had an, I'm not going to say a whole lot about what he did, but he had a very interesting career afterwards. It was related to, but he told me a story on the phone when I was reviewing his book.

And he said he went back to Vietnam for the first time. And he's fluent in Vietnamese and French and Rade. Rade is one of the major mountain yard nations. And he was, and even in SF, very rare to have somebody who was fluid in all three. And one of the main characters in the Barking Deer is, the shaman, this Radev shaman. And he said he went back to Vietnam. He took two copies of his novel.

And one of the first place, he went to see the village where his A team had been. And there's the shaman, the old shaman still around, and he remembered him. And he gave him a copy of the book. And it's the first book. He wasn't even sure what a book was.

was. But he gave him the book and he put it into his back, into his sack of sacred things. And then a few days later, he's in Hanoi and he's walking. And he's talking to people as he's going, well, that's what General Jap lives. And he says, oh, yeah, just go knock on the door. He loves to see Americans. He loves to see Americans. to see American Federates, which has been known for ever since the war ended. You know, he said, oh, come on, let's talk to, let's figure out what exactly would happen. I mean, we haven't had too many enemies that are that. Gracious, yeah, after the fact. He knocks on the door, and General Jop comes to the door in a kind of uniform and invites him in,

and they spend two hours drinking tea and talking over everything. And then he gives General Jop the copy of his book. And General Jop goes and puts it right between a book by Marx. It's in French and then the analytics of Confucius, the analytics of Confucius in Chinese and put it right in between the two of them. And, you know, what comes out of all this is what's wrong with humanity man yeah yeah it's like in that had he and i but met besides some quaintle country and we could have sat right down and wet right

many o nipurkin but ranged like infantry and staring face to face i shot at him and him at me and killed him in his place. That was Hardy, I think, wrote that poem, the man he killed. You know. The frame, that frame of reference of war that takes all these ostensibly normal people and places them into this conflict with one another, that otherwise, you know, they wouldn't have had any grievances with one another. Well, you know, a friend of mine that I grew up with was in the battle of way.

It was a Marine. Years later, you know, back in Ann Arbor, where I grew up and where he, and I said, how do you feel about this? He said, man, he said, this, the Battle of Way, he said, we were in here and it was just the worst thing in the world. And nobody could understand it except for the guys that were trying to kill us and that we're trying to kill. and said we have more in common with each other

than anybody else in the world. Right. And one more thing I want to say about the battle of way. In this year in April, I don't remember the date right now, but it was early in April, I decided to look at it. In 1968, after the Battle of Way, there was a huge massacre. A lot of people, a lot of civilians got killed just being in the middle of it, a city. But there was a lot of really vicious, murderous, einzatz, Gruppen sort of death thing done.

to civilians in a way. And it was one company, apparently, that I just recently found out that did most of that. And that was their job. One MBA company. Yeah. The average NBA guy would never have been doing that stuff. You know, they might shoot civilians if there's Americans or Arvins on the other side,

you know, between a, that's war. we got a mission in April just a few months after the after the battle to go out and try to find a certain bodies of people who had been taken out of way up the perfume river and then somewhere in that area there was a bunch of little tributary rivers going into the, perfume rivers and there's intelligence that that's where a lot of the people are gone so we were sent out to find them your six your six man work team this was this was another heavy team okay because we wanted a lot of guns we wanted you know so we had 12 guys because this was very much their their place and it wasn't that very far from from way really or from camp eagle but it was far enough. And I was an RTO, and I was slackman for one of the guys on my team, who was point man,

and we come around this, this bamboo, thick bamboo, and bang, it hits us in the face, the smell. and there's a huge open grave and there's bodies in there that have been in the rain and the snow the sun and all of this and one of them is parts of it

just out of there and there you could see where a tiger or a leopard had gone in and got it and came out with it and eating Jesus eat it there and you know you couldn't there wasn't much flesh but it was like

parchment the skin ones on the bones and they're civilian clothes and a lot of the hair blonde people blonde haired people and we're looking at this

what the so this is what they sent us to to find and you know I'm the smallest guy and so you know they start saying

Hey, Miller, here. You got a rope, you know, go down there and count the bodies. I got another Miller picture I'm going to throw up here. Please continue. Okay. The guy, the helicopter, the pilot behind me, I went to AIT and Jump School with him. Oh, no shit. And then he went and became a helicopter pilot.

But, you know, so I'm sitting there, and I've got a camera. We all had these little 10-Double-E cameras. I said, we've got a camera. We just take pictures and count the heads. You know, I don't think they really were going to have me go down there. But, you know, and we stayed there and put up a nice 360 security and waited well. Graves registration unit and an infantry company from the 101st would come in. We had to wait for them to come there.

We were looking at this and just, and when they got there, we got on the same helicopters that they came in and went back. And that's the first time ever that we got information to send to intelligence where we actually. actually were told what intelligence had found. And what they told us, but I didn't get my, I didn't get the pictures back. That was my, but those are the pictures you can see in certain books now. What happened was Germany, West Germany at that time

was trying to be a good citizen in the world. And they had medical teams in Vietnam, I think in both places. East Germany? West Germany. Interesting. West Germany had them in the south ships, you know, hospital ships. And I think they would sometimes go out to the north too. But they were trying to just do good medicine stuff.

And one of them was they were making a new, a new dental. a new dental part of Way University Medical School. And the Germans brought off a few million dollars worth of the newest stuff, and they brought in a lot of people, including a couple. She was a hygienist, and he was a dentist. And all of these people were making, a modern dental clinic for Way University. And the Special Operations Company of the 6th Battalion or a brigade, I'm not sure, of the Paven, was the killing group.

And they're the ones, and they went in and got a lot of people. and they got all of the people from Way University's dentistry department and took them up the river one round, one round, one round, just to the back of the head, killed them all, left them there. These are not people that are taking sides in the war. These are people that are trying to help people with their teeth and their health. and that gave a certain moral clarity to me that I think was it made it easier for me to hate all the guys on the other side yeah yeah but I don't know

but I do hate the guys that were in those units it's just like you read about the Nazis and Ukrainian and so forth yeah yeah you didn't get into Yeah, you get into the, you had to prove that you were a psychopath just to get into those units. And, you know, but all that way went through, all that this beautiful city went through, come Christmas time, toward the end of 1968, Way universities, Palace traditional music orchestra put on the show for the first Arvin division and the

101st. And the first Arvin division, by the way, was good. You know, it's not one of these. Ah, these are Marvin the Arvins no good. The first Arvin division had their shit in order. And we all had to go. And none of the, none of the, none of the, none of the, no, I don't want to listen to this Google music, you know, you're going, you're going. And we go there and we knew some of the guys from the Heckbow company from the first Arvin division because that was their equivalent of us. And we go in there and there's all these GIs and all of these Arvans. And there's these weird instruments to us.

It wouldn't be to the Arvans. and they start that Christmas song, you know, Slay Ride. Slay bells ringing, yeah, yeah. They start that. And these music and these instruments we've never seen. And everyone can have, what? What?

And then they go on and all these guys are saying, I don't want to hear this music on your world. And then at the end, everybody, wow, I will never get over that. and I will always love the city of way. They got bounced back and they did and they invited us to that. It really moved me and it seemed a lot of people were moved. Were these instruments like similar to like the Gamelon in Indonesia?

Like do you know what they were? Yes. They're Vietnamese versions. Some of them are just. Vietnamese, but most of them are East Asian music. I know this because my wife is a musician and plays the Gujan. I don't, I've forgotten what it's called in Vietnamese, but it's, it's the Chinese zither. Okay. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a couple different instruments that are very similar. And I'm sorry, I can't remember the names either. In Japanese, it's called Koto.

In Chinese, it's Gujan, I forgot. Where it's, it's laying like horizontal and they, they plucked the strings. Yeah. And that's where I fell in love with that kind of music. A lot of us will just, hey, this is cool. This is cool music. And some guys, anybody got a joint? This is good music.

It was that kind of thing. You know, it was just, and in my house, I get to hear that kind of music all the time. The Vietnamese version of that is slightly different, but not much. You know, all of those string instruments in the world probably originally came from Persia. Yeah, yeah. But, you know. Your wife is Taiwanese. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, right now, the Taiwanese are. are Chinese butt, Chinese but, you know, because it was terrible when Mao was there. And then there was a period of time where after Mao died, things were, I shouldn't be talking about this, but I don't care, where relationships across the state of Taiwan, the Straits were very good. And, you know, even now, there's people who live in Shanghai and they fly every day to work in Taipei or something. But it was really going good in the early part of this century. Xi Jinping became president, and he'd gone to school in Ohio or Idaho or something.

he'd gone to school in the United States and he's you know modern politician can speak English and he was good but now he's turning all of Maine and China into just a really scary

artificial intelligence surveillance state yeah a panopticon state yeah and making claims to the whole China Sea and you know a lot of people

who are proud to be ethnic Chinese are now who didn't used to say well you would say well I'm Chinese now they're saying I'm Taiwanese

right right and that's that's really sad because the world needs a good China and a strong America and, you know, and Being a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging. Child and family resource network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five,

with free support, services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. China should have learned them. I hope that they've learned their lessons not to go picking or trying to pick up on their neighbor to the south because they always get their asses kicked. Whenever they go after Vietnam, Vietnam always kicks their asses in the end.

Ken, I want to get back to some of your own experiences. for a moment. I wanted to ask you about Recondo school, which I thought was very interesting, because it was, well, I'll let you describe it, but what's interesting about it is that it took place inside Vietnam, and the final mission was a live combat mission. Yeah, yeah. And, you know, everything was in theater, just like everything that, with the Lerps and the first 75th Rangers were all in the theater. You know, just traditional American Ranger stuff. We didn't have access to the Ranger school.

And we wished we could have. But we couldn't get there. It was for lieutenants. And then later for the... the instant NCOs that went to the NCO school to become an NCO, which were, the idea of that was very resented by the troops in Vietnam, that some guy can come in and he's an E6 with a, with a Ranger tab, and he's been in the Army less time than you've been in Vietnam. But what the trouble is, the guys that did this when they came over, they were good dudes. And they had their shit in order.

You know, so we couldn't, we couldn't hold it against them, you know. But we resented the Army for giving them this. We wanted to go to Ranger School and we couldn't. I offered to say, listen, can I use my next extension, my 30-day, can I use that? No, I can't. Because they were, had to turn, you know, platoon leaders through the, send them through the Ranger school. and so forth, okay, I can see that.

But there's still a kind of nasty feeling because World War II and a good number of the Korean War Rangers were given the tab for combat service. And the SF tab you can get for that. And we brought up, bring things up at Ranger rendezvous, and the last time I've been to Ranger Randavu was 2011.

And I'm not going to do another one because we're saying, okay, look, I understand now the way it works is Ranger School now to the Ranger units is what the Rekando School was for us. You're going to be a company. If you're going to be a leader, you go there. It's a leadership thing where you learn it. Recondo school was excellent and it was fun. And, you know, everybody I know that went to recondo school,

probably half of them ended up going on to SF as soon as they could. Because, boy, I mean, we were just, we, look, without SF, the Lerps would have been completely fucked over. S.F was always looking out for us. and they set up this wonderful school and, you know, what can I say? What did they train you guys on? Like, what did you do when you get there? And what is the course entail?

It was similar to, we didn't get to do any jumps. We did a lot of repelling and, you know, getting in rigs and being pulled up and everything. We didn't do anything. We all kept saying, can we get a junk while we're here? You know, and I said, yeah, we wish we could, we could. But it was a commando, well, saying it was a three week all day and most of the night. I think a lot of classroom work. very heavy on

on navigation very heavy on that for good reason and communication medical things you know I would drying blood from each other and doing giving each other

you know a serious serum Jesus man all the stuff I the words in your in your in your defense

Ken, it was like, what, 60 years ago now? Yeah, I was 50-something years ago. But, you know, the serum albumin, serum albumin that we'd be giving each other. Okay, okay. So that your organs don't go down with you, if you're bleeding too much. From blood loss, right?

Yeah, from blood loss. And so we would be practicing that all of them. But we'd practice that in the company area. back in the unit too. And sometimes they would be throwing dirt on you and hitting you just so that you can do it when you're when you're under stress. But there was nothing in the Rekando school that was bullshit. Nothing.

It was all. And the good thing about it was we got to eat at the Special Forces. mess club or whatever it is. The food was the best food I had in the Army. But, and, you know, you'd have all of these, all of these, uh, old, old dudes, you know. I mean, they might be 29 or something or E7, 29, but, you know, we had, there were still guys that were World War II OSS guys were still around.

And, you know, we're looking at these guys. You know, wow, man, look at you. We really admired the instructors. And the instructors used to are pretty much our age, a little. They were older than me, you know, but, you know, in their mid-20s on up. These guys were, these are guys we, I'll go anywhere with these guys, man. They were cool. And they knew their shit and they were just no nonsense, no bullshit.

it. They just, you know, everybody, I think everybody that ever went to Rekondo school is really proud. So what happens is, you know, now in the Ranger, you're not completely a Ranger until you have your tab. We never had an opportunity. You got a cat tab. But can I get up for just a second?

Yeah, go for it. Yeah, yeah. No, no worries, Ken, go for it. No, it's a good break because I can give you the guys the obligatory call to action and ask all of you to like subscribe and, you know, mash that like button there, guys. Thank you. I know I hate doing it. I sound like a telethon guy.

But, you know, please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. Thanks. Oh, what's up, Ken? Okay, now look. So if we're walking around this and, you know, somebody in the, in the bats now, well, you guys, you know, not really. I mean, my experience is that the relationship is, you know, we're family, but it's bitter that we were not allowed. And at the last Ranger rendezvous I was at, this is what the, the, uh, business me,

was about. So look, everything we had, we would have our Ranger scrolls or we'd have before that on Lerp Scrolls. We had the Recondo School thing here. All of this, everything we had that set us apart, we had to take off as soon as you got off the plane coming back to Connors. Yeah. Yeah.

And people were bitter about that. And I don't blame them. And also, guys would sometimes, you'd come back and you're on your class A's. You get into your class A's. And they said, well, you've got to stay here until tomorrow. All right. And, you know, you're going to be on the line in the mess hall. You know, an E5 in his class A's.

I mean, just some nasty shit. But anyway, so here. Yeah, someone's asking if you can hold up your tab again so we can see your scroll, your ranger scroll. Okay, here. Lima Company Airborne Rangers, 75th Infantry. Yeah. And then

here's a recondo tab. A little higher, please. Oh, there you go. So this is what we have, this is brand new. Before that, we had a lurp tab that completely you couldn't wear it, you know, but this is, this is our way of saying. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. For not, you know.

Well, you know, Ken, that was before Rangers were like formally institutionalized, and I know you're going to, you're going to come and try to strangle me if I get on the Creighton Abrams thing in 1974 or whatever it was. But before Rangers were institutionalized, we disbanded Rangers after every single war. And you guys were that. You know, you had those things you made in country, your Rekondo tab, your ranger scroll. And then after the war was over, they're like, hey, we don't need you anymore. Go away.

Yeah, that's exactly. That's why I say that we were the Lerps and the original 75th Infantry Ranger. not 75th rangers. We were the last traditional American Rangers. But one of the things that makes us difference is

Vietnam veterans in general feel like we got shit on. Yeah. Yeah. And rightfully, I think we have that fee. You've got to get over it and most, a lot of guys haven't gotten over it. Politically, particularly. But

we were aware that World War II Rangers and members of Merrill's Marauders as soon as the war is over, as soon as there was a ranger school, these guys all were given Ranger tabs.

And and you know, legally, I mean, and about half of the Rangers that were in the Korean War got the tan without going to the school. And Bob Gilbert, who was our, he was at one point was our first sergeant. And so three war, three war ranger, you know, just tough old guy. He was, he may have been in charge of the ranger school when you went through. I don't know.

That was probably before your time. No, no. I went through in 2004, so I'm sure he was retired. Yeah, so, yeah, it was, but he's still around. And he's, he's, he's a character. But he was telling me the last time I was at Fort Benny, and he said, you know, I can tell you all of the people that, you know, So there's a list from the, between the Korean War and the Vietnam War, just about any infantry officer that was a captain or above can go through a two-day walkthrough of the Ranger School and get the tab.

No shit. I didn't know that. He said, he said, he said, and you're not supposed to tell him. anybody about this because this is this was something this I think maybe maybe it was majors on on up but you know he said oh yeah he said officers yeah he said and he said and he said I understand the bitterness too because you know he went through it and went to hell as a right after being in the 187th in Korea he comes back and goes to Ranger school What was your test mission like, your mission in Recondo School when you went out into the field?

We, it was just a normal, it was what we normally did, except that we didn't know everybody in the team as well. We'd been in this three weeks together in the school and so forth. There would be one advisor, as we called him, one of the SF guys that were on the cadre. And then the rest of us would have to rotate. So everybody did every job. And we get on the helicopter. We get on the, and we land. And these are areas that probably weren't as scary as the Asha Valley

and the rung and places like this where we were normally going. This was not too far from the tribe, but it was not a place where there was no enemy. They were there. We landed and we did exactly just like what we were used to. The team I was on, there was another guy, my butt, the other guy from the 101st and I were on the same key. We were the only ones from the 101st there except for a new S.F. guy who had, and they

so it was pretty much the same thing. We figured we were a little bit better than the guys who had been Lurps from the, from the leg units. And we were, but it's not their fault. You know, the guys who were with, if you were with

the 101st, the 173rd, are the first calf. your division has got better senior NCOs and so forth who've been through these schools and so forth. So everything is going to be a little bit better. But the guys that were made it that far through the school had their shit in order anyway. And we'd go out and then we'd be doing this. And we were in an area where there was a lot of bamboo, a lot of bamboo. a lot of bamboo.

And then there was some open area out here. Bamboo. And bamboo is nasty stuff to have to go through and to try to be quiet and so forth. One of the things I remember is one of the times that I had to be a point. Everybody did every little job in the thing,

every position. And I'm on point, I hit a rusty tree. That's what we would call. That's a tree that looks like it's rusty because it's covered with red ants, with red ass. And I'm going like this,

looking up, looking down, looking over here, my whole area, go like this, and it suddenly, I just, it's all over the place. And the SF advisor, you know, old E7, he has everybody just kind of get around me and he's, all right, take it, fucking, just slapped it. Everybody slapped a motherfucker a few times. Don't make too much noise, you know.

And, you know, I still had to, you know, around here. And it was kind of funny. And then about three or four hours later, We hear people moving around the other side of the bamboo coming this way. And along come, I don't know if they were in VA or local VC. They were green but dirty. And they all had AKs. So I've probably, they weren't an S-K-A-S.

And they came around and they saw us and we saw them, but we heard them coming first. And so we host them. No shit. So you had a contact on your testimony. Oh, yeah, we, and they got on some rides, some rounds up on us, but didn't hit anybody. And a couple of,

at least a few of those guys got away. And we didn't go, you know, you don't chase, you don't go chasing people who want you to chase him into an ambulance. Right, you get baited into an ambush. And none of us were hit. But we, I killed one, a guy. So, I mean, there's just an advantage to that. I shouldn't be happy about having him kill somebody,

particularly just another soldier or something. But whenever I hear somebody say, well, you went to the Ranger School. We went to Rangers School. How many people did you kill in Ranger School? So that's kind of nice. And also, now we can say, hey, no female soldiers have ever gone through the Rekondo School.

Now they're going through Ranger School, they're going through SF, they're going through buds pretty soon. It's a whole new world. Yeah. Which I don't think is a good idea. I'm a big fan of Tammy Duckworth, for example. And two military things, I really do believe women are better at than men. And there have been some studies that say this.

One is pistol shooting, women that have taken, and men that have taken the same kind of training. The women are slightly better at it if it's not something you're too big for them. And helicopter, they make good helicopter things. I believe that that's fine. But I was an anthropology major at Taiwan University, and I took some at the University of Michigan, too, and so forth. And one thing I learned about humans and just about all mammals is that it ain't just the plumbing. You every society has this is a woman's role that's a man's role and it can be fluid which one it is. An example of you, I don't remember the Hopi and the Navajo.

One of them in one of these groups, the men did the pottery. And then the other one, the women did the pottery. Okay, it's, but that you have to have some sort of differentiation. And males need to get away from females. Females can get away from males. Well, in theory. And you look at elephants. You look at not the wolves, but you look at elephants,

you look at bears, you look at arcas, you look at sperm whales. You look at all the, I'm not sure about the crows, but all the other intelligent social mammals, at least, have got something where the males can get the hell away from the women and go off and do something. This is what humans would do. Women would do, you know, hunter and gatherer. The women would do the gathering. The men would do the hunting. This is a very standard thing.

There's still lots of people in the world who live this way. And it's true. My wife loves to shop. I don't. I want to go get the stuff and get out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Get me the hell out of here. I want to go out and do things, and I want to do it with the guys, be away from it.

And I think that it's, I think it's folly to think that you can integrate tank crews and infantry platoons. I think it's actually unnatural and that doesn't mean that the women can't do it as well as the men. Or at least most of the stuff, but I just don't think that this is good like culturally. It's pretending that we're something other than the animal that we are. Right. You're not allowed to say it now.

No, you're not. You know, it's not like politically correct to say it. And I think you're right. And I think women can actually do some of these jobs better than we can. I mean, there's certain special forces roles where women can, you know, learn foreign languages and communicate with people and do things way better than guys can. But at the same time, I think there's a movement out there that people want the military to be this reflection of progressive liberal values.

And it's really the one thing that combat cannot be. Combat soldiers can never be a representation of that progressive society they want because combat is primitive and it's ugly and it's nasty. I think that my feeling about it is to a great extent that the military was being punished by having done the right thing and done it very successfully when it came to racial getting rid of But it's desegregated, yeah. Yeah, desegregation. It worked with the military much earlier and much better than it did. Any other part of American society.

The army desegregated before America did. Yeah. Oh, much more, much more before. And so consequently, all of these people who don't know anything about the military have been using the military as a social experiment experimental clinic thing or something. And that's just not right. I think there's just also a very big difference I noticed between a lot of the, you know, we would call them legs, Ken.

People who, and I have nothing against them, but they served in the Air Force. They worked in essentially a corporate job. It was like a corporate environment. They came into an office. And they can be a good infantryman, but they're pox. Yeah, they're pogs. They worked in a sort of quasi-corporate environment, except they were a uniform. And I know that sounds offensive to some people, but I think there's just a huge cultural

difference between those people who did that job and they're American patriots and we need them and God bless them. Yeah. And guys like Ken who are out. there in combat and what you're experiencing. It's just the necessities and the priorities are just so different between those two. They're radically different worlds. And I think that males should have certain protective instincts for women, for females. If we don't, okay, you're going to have a whole bunch of a rapists out there.

Yeah, yeah, there'll be that there's going to be problems. Again, it's nasty to say that, and we, none of us like it, but we can see the military has a huge sexual assault problem. Yeah. I mean, it's backed up by the data. Like, it is a problem. It's a huge problem. And the military is not handling it very well.

Yeah. Well, they didn't do a lot of thinking before they did gender, uh, in the military. integration. Yeah, and I don't blame the women for that. That's not their fault. It's it's the army and the way their policies are. Years ago when Gary Linder and a whole bunch of us had this magazine here, behind the lines. Do you remember?

Did you ever say that? Yeah, I remember it. Okay. Well, when we did behind the lines, one of the things I had, had to do was to review a book about gays in the military. And I'm reading this and I'm thinking, okay, you know, this was not something that was expected or accepted in my day. and you know you don't want to be found to be a gay guy in the military at all in my generation

yeah yeah back in the day and there's lots of stories about people who are who were gay who didn't even hide it but suddenly they use it against them to get them out of the way doing their job well and i'm reading this book I think, Jesus, these people are getting fucked over. But who really got screwed over were women. Because, hey, baby, come on over here. I got something for you, you know. No thanks.

Yeah, yeah, dyke. I mean, that kind of thing was happening a lot. And what hit me was very interesting was the Navy and the Air Force were just, you know, this was happening all over the place. Yeah. And those two things. And these guys say, hey, baby, come on. And she said, no, you're not my kind.

I don't want, you know, yeah, yeah, lesbian. And then next thing he's saying, you know, she's a lesbian. And the next thing you know, this patriotic girl is working herself very hard for her country is kicked out with a bad. Yeah. You know, it's outrageous. But in the Army and the Marine Corps, what would happen would be somebody, some guy tries to do that to a girl. He's likely to have a boot up his ass saying, who the hell do you think you are? Who, you know, you, you say she's a lesbian, you're just jealous.

Get the hell out of here. You know, I mean, the Marine Corps and the Army Corps and the Army. Army handled that far better. Because, you know, I don't know why, but it, they handled it far better than the Army and or than the Air Force and the Navy did. In fact, I still have that book somewhere here that I have to do the review of. Yeah. No, it's definitely interesting.

But Ken, I wanted to ask you also about, you know, your extension. in theater that you went over to Nam, what was it, a two-year tour? It was a one-year tour. It was a one-year tour. And then you extended three times. Yeah. And that'd be twice for six months and then once for three months. Okay.

For six months, you would get a three, or a 30-day day, a 30-day vacation. What's the Army term for? Oh, when they sent you on like mid-tore leave. Yeah. And a leave, so you'd get a 30-day leave. And the second time I had one, I'm talking to my first sergeant.

I said, listen, can I get at least half of the Ranger's school? I'll do it on my own leave time. And they said, yeah, I wish you could, but you can't, you know. So that's part of the thing. But, you know, going back all, if it's a three-month extension, you get an extra R&R and a leave, the same for a week or something that. you know, and you can go to one of the R&R places, which is probably better than going back to the states at that time.

Going back to the states, one of the times I went back was in 1968 and the Democratic Convention. And they have all these, you know, it was a riot outside. And, you know, I'm on the side of the, I'm on the side of the national. Guard guys at first against the protesters. But then I see on TV, here's some national guy standing there. There's some woman in her car who's got her window down. And she looks like my mother or something.

And here's some National Guard guy with an M79 right up against her cheek like this. Holy shit. And I'm thinking, let me go back. Get me out. Yeah, yeah. get me the hell out of here. Yeah. And my family had moved, my senior year in high school,

they moved to Reno. So my father became the president of the university. And before that, he'd been at the University of Michigan. So I grew up in Ann Arbor, which is quite a liberal town. And I went back on one, of my 30-day leaves, extension leaves, I went back to Ann Arbor. That's the experience Mopar had in your novel.

Yeah. Get me out of here. I want to go back. And I did. I can remember going back early and, you know, I said, hey, man, don't you have another seven days? I'm here, I'm here. I want to, I just,

I didn't want to ever leave. I mean, I was quite with the idea that, you know, sooner or later it's going to catch up with me, but man, this is my life. And then you couldn't, after, you couldn't get another extension. And there was one thing you could get an extension for. And the only thing, a guy named Ray is. Zojax from our company. And he was quite a soldier.

He and I both wanted to extend again. And they wouldn't let us. And then we found out, well, if you go to, if you go talk to so and so and so

and so, and everything goes right, yeah, we got a place for you in Sogg. and you know all right yeah yeah and so Bob Gilbert who I've mentioned a couple other times he's Bob Gilbert gets us there were three of us and one of them died last week or last last month year simility but the three of us wanted to extend again and we couldn't And we found out that, you know, yeah, you can see.

And what happens is if you don't make it, you know, if Saab doesn't want you, you know, then, you know, the army was gives you wherever the fuck they want to send you. And we went in and talked to Bob Gilbert. And Bob Gilbert said, look, I was in SF for three years in Germany. I don't like it. What do you like? What do you like about?

He said, I don't like the hat. All this sort of stuff. He said, look, you guys don't know what's being done. I know what your missions will be. When you're going to get to, you're going to get to a large site. And everybody there already knows each other. they've been to schools with each other their family lives next door to your family

in Fayetteville or something you said and you guys are going to get in there and they'll be glad to see you and they'll like you but there's going to be there are missions that is being sent to CNC that

you don't want to go to and they're going to send if they got to send some in America So I said you better than somebody that they've known for years. And I said, what is he? Well, what I can tell you is sometimes they just taking people out of the, out of the prisons and the jails of Saigon and putting them on a team to send in. You want to go.

John Mullins told us that story in a previous interview we did about how they were running double agents. Yeah. And, you know, basically what, and it wasn't until years later, and I've been out of this military, and I'm reading a book about, called a sideshow about, about the bombing of Cambodia and Laos. And I'm reading this at, and I'm reading this at, Here's the stuff I read these SF guys. They're being sent on bomb damage assessment case because they're using the B-52s and trying to knock out all of the NVA stuff in Cambodia and Laos.

And, you know, those plagues are dug way down and they've got concrete, you know, the size of an elephant's ass. and you know and they've had teams that are getting shot off shot up right on the yeah he said and when they get one of those

it might break their hearts but they'll send you rather than the guy that they've known for 10 years right right and that's what it was all about what Bob Derry Bob Gilbert Gilbert

Gilbert Darien was the third guy that he's telling this. But I'm reading that book and I'm reading stories about that. And the two Harvard brothers that were down on the bottom of the White House fighting. The Dulles brothers? Not the Dulles. No, the Dulles brothers was a generation. I'll remember it.

Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. I don't know. Two Harvard professors, but they were down working for LBJ and then for Nixon, finding the targets for these B-52 strikes that the Air Force even didn't know about. And, you know, finally some officer said, fuck you, we're not going on this issue. Fuck you, we're not going.

And next thing you know, they're going to get him. They're going to toss this guy into prison forever. He's an SF officer. And what happened was some other officers and a couple of generals had the guys kidnapped, sent to Okinawa. And they gave him an entirely different identity for a while. What? So that they couldn't, they, because the, that's crazy. These, these Harvard dudes in the basement of the White House wanted to get this guy.

And they, you know, they saved him because it was bullshit. I mean, they're just sending teams that they're just sacrifice. You know, it may as well walk up the, walk up the pyramid at Tlachnam or something. So, Ken, you eventually, you wrote. to the level of being a recon team leader. Yeah. And I mean, you kind of got to do it all on the work team. Yeah.

But then, I mean, it's one of those things where like the merry-go-round comes to an end. Like you were having a hell of a good time in Vietnam. But like, what happened that eventually you had to go home? What was that like? Well, I was torn. there were two things that guys senior than me had been doing one which was go to s-f

and just you know I didn't want to go through a whole bunch of stuff at Fort Bragg I just wanted to be you know with mountain yards or or a recon team or something but okay I'll do that you know and then the guys that had been an SF that were in our unit

or that we knew the SF guys that nearby they're saying, hey, you know, they're not going to send you back here. They're going to send you to Germany or something. I'm thinking, fuck. And then the other one was become an R.I.

And what they would do is they send you and you're running guys through your PT and all this sort of shit. And so, you have a shitty kind of E5 job. And then for a few months, and then you go to the school and you get out

and you become an R.I. And, boy, man, these guys that had been doing that, you know, these guys, Milton Lockett and some of these dudes, man, they're saying it sounds like the best thing in the whole world to be an R.I., man. you know, just said, because you got all this free time and you know, and then you're doing it when you're really doing it. And so I'm really thinking about this.

And then my sister sends me a letter. And this is, I got that letter two days before I left Vietnam. So it came just in time. Because I was still could have come back. My mother had a, some kind of a, um, an angerism. not an anderism, but a stress stroke for me continuing to be a lurp. Yeah, to be a lurp. You know, I should have been home then and I'm going, well, I'm going home,

but I'm going back and, you know, all this. And they didn't tell me about this. And my sister told me that she'd been in the hospital at Stanford. And so, I thought, okay. And, you know, there were a lot of, also, there were a lot of girls that I knew back in Michigan and in Nevada and everywhere that, you know, that I wanted to, I wanted to kind of get together with them, you know, a little bit, too. And, you know, I mean, going on R&R is pretty nice, but it's not, but that, but that, I, I just felt like this. This was my life. This is what I'm going to do.

They didn't let me do it all the way. I was planning to go back to Vietnam this last spring. And these little nasty little things called viruses got in the way of everything. But do you realize that I'm a, I'm a, I'm a, I'm a member of Chapter 78, SFA, but, you know, just, I can't remember the word right now, but it's an A on my.

The Special Forces Association. Yeah, yeah. So my number is an A, which means that I'm not, you know, SF, but I'm one of the... Oh, you know, like an honorary member or an associate. associate member, associate member, that's it. And I'm a life associate member, which is rare. And we, our chapter built a, built a obstacle course for the, for one of the ROTC units at schools here. And when it opened, we went down. We went down.

there, so old guys, and here's all these ROTC kids, you know. And that was cool, watching them go through their stuff, and we're trying to do it, and, you know, realizing that we're not as young as we. And I'm talking to one kid, his last name was Ph.A.M. And I said, oh, you're Vietnamese. He said, yeah. I said, where's your family family? So, Saigon. I said, people from Saigon still call it Saigon.

But I said, oh, do you speak of Vietnamese? He said, I do now. I do now a lot better. He said, my parents were just going crazy because I was forgetting all my Vietnamese, all the way from first grade up. I'm just English, English, English, and it was really getting to them.

And then I went to Vietnam. And everything I forgot came back, and I learned a whole lot more. And I said, but they said, and they forgave me. I said, forgave you for going back. And I said, well, what did you go back for? He said, well, that was last year,

the year before last. This year, I'm going. going back again. He said, what? He said, an ROTC scholarship. What? He said, yeah, we have an exchange program with the people's, the people's army of Vietnam's ROTC, whatever their ROTC thing is. He said, you know, yeah, that's, and so my parents are all fine with it. They said, they've gone back since, since, since, I went just to see family members and so forth. They wouldn't have otherwise, but they were ready to disown me.

I mean, wow. Times change. Yeah, I mean, yeah, times have changed. This guy from, there's one special unit that I won't mention. Well, I just did, I guess. one special unit, but they do regular things from

from Fort Lewis over to over to Vietnam to do things and a lot of anti-terrorist stuff that they're working on. And one of these guys came to one of our chapter meetings because his family lives down here

and so all the old Vietnam vets just said, oh man, you know, what it was like? And he said, Oh, let me tell you. He said, it's a, it said, we get there and we said, we get to meet the other, the guys. And they said, and they all know, they all have some, because everybody has to learn English, at least some of it now in Vietnam. He said, so, you know, we meet the guys. And then the next day we go out and they say, and there's all these old people around, these old guys around there, just shaking their hand and scratching their head.

They said, I can't believe it. And they, wow. you know. And he said, who's that? I guess, you know, well, that guy's, he's my uncle over there and this is over there. Yeah, old NBA guys. Yeah. They're just delighted to see American Green Berets over there working with, I mean, you know, this is, again, you realize and see, you know, humans. Humans and chimpanzees are the dumbest apes there are. What we do as with this war? Speaking of which, what was it like for you when you came home after the war trying to, it started your academic career going back to college?

I mean, what was that like in that time frame? I didn't like it. I didn't like students. I didn't like academia, even though, you know, I started going to the University of Nevada, when I came back. And they had the anti-war moratorium thing in October. I was taking classes there.

And here's all this anti-war people. And they're bad-mouthing us. Are you going to be another Nazi over there? And I wanted to kill him. And my father's the president of the university. I wish I had an M16 and a whole bunch of things. I mean, I wanted to just hose them down. I just infuriated me.

And, you know, because there's a baby killer sort of shit being thrown in. These scripts. I mean, they're not doing it to me necessarily because I'm in civilian clothes. But yeah, you're going to be a baby's killer? you know, oh no, you know, all these people, these guys, and then I'd hear all these students, hey, you're going to the, you're going to the, the, the thing tonight, you know, we're having a lot, you know, lighting candles and do this.

There's going to be lots of women there, lots of, lots of, lots of pussy there, lots of, lots of weed. I don't think, this is what the war, this is what this war is to you. I mean, it took me a long time. And if I can just share one of my own experiences that maybe you'll be able to relate to a bit. When I was, I think maybe it was just after I got out of the Army, I went to college, did four years. And it was right about that time I think I was graduating college. I went to the, it was like a book release party.

So a journalist named Jeremy Scahill was putting out this book with Glenn Greenwald. It was the big like data dump, all these documents had leaked. It was like our generation's version of the Pentagon Papers. All these documents had come out. And they did this book release. And I went there with all these hippies, all these peace creeps in this big room. And they had a projector screen playing footage of drone footage. like the black and white drone footage from Afghanistan and like, you know, they're dropping bombs,

pulling things up. And they had this like kind of like fat guy with a beard come out. And he was like, okay, you know, here's a rap I made about drones. And like he starts rapping about drones up on the stage. And it's just the most surreal thing I'd ever seen in my life that here's real military footage of this, of drones, dropping bombs and ostensibly killing people in Afghanistan or Iraq with this like hippie rapping about drones in front of, like 500 other hippies. Like it was just the weirdest goddamn thing I'd ever seen. I was like, is this the war

I fought in? Is this, is this what it means to you? Like what the hell is going on here? Was he an anti-peace guy or was he a drone guy? They were all very much anti-war. And yeah, they're all very much against the war. Which I understand, on one hand, I get it.

You know, I understand the argument against it. But that it's sort of like commercialized and the sort of like, we're going to do a rap, a rap song about drones with the real footage of the drones behind you. Like it was all very, very odd to me. There was a, at the University of Nevada when I came back, there were two guys. One was an SF guy who was, and I think he was in Saigon the whole time. And the other one was a Marine who had been in the Battle of Way. And I could have been friends with him.

And it was impossible because they had switched over to be, we're all, everybody in Vietnam that in the military is a murderous scumbag and I was too and all of this. And, you know, I'm sorry, I don't want to be a turd coat like that. And they were getting all these, all these peace creep girls were saying, And they would go to all of these rap things where everybody would sit, not like rappers rap, but where you're just talking. Yeah, rap sessions and they all snap their fingers. Yeah.

Oh, and they'd be talking about all of this. And these guys would go in and they would make up stories of atrocities that they did in Vietnam. And then they would start crying. And then all these girls would come, oh, it's okay. It's okay, okay, and this is the only way. And I'm thinking, this is the only way you guys can get laid? It's just, no, I mean, like, and then one of them. It goes on to this day, Mr. Miller.

To this day, it's still happening. But war is nasty. Yeah. And you got, and, but there's a lot of people, I get freaked out by people, by wannabes too. and by people who, well, you know, I would have gone, but. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

I'll send it to you later in email, but read Henry V. Shakespeare's Henry V. And also in Henry the Fourth, I forgot if it was part one or two, but this guy saying, oh, you know, it was, I too would have been a, soldier, if not for those vile guns that make it possible for somebody beneath me to kill somebody as good as me. And then, oh, well, they're carrying a body past me. And he's sniffing it. And here's this guy that's this one of this officer.

And he's saying, I want to kill it. He wants to kill the phone. I'll find it for you and send it that part to you. I email it. Yeah, please. But I, you know, I'm not sure that Shakespeare was Shakespeare. I sort of think that the Earl of Oxford was. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because whoever wrote that stuff was highly educated. Yeah, and also saw a little bit of contact, you know, and knew the law and all this. But I'll send it to you. I don't want to have to go through it at all. Yeah, yeah. No, whenever you get the chance. it's a it's a it's war is for these people that I well I would have but you know such and such and I've forgotten who there've been a few a few politicians that said oh yeah well I would have I would have gone in the to Vietnam but my IQ was too high they wouldn't let me because my IQ is you know I mean this is some senator I remember I don't remember who it was but it was it was

saying this kind of stuff. What kind of people? I get freaked out. I went to, Gary Lender lives in, lives in, not Janssen, what is it, in Missouri, that, the place that Homer,

that Homer on, Springfield. Not Springfield, it's, the entertainment place in Missouri. Oh my gosh. I'm sorry. I don't know. You know the one I'm talking about. It's the one that Homer Simpson said, oh, that's that's Mark, that's, that's, that's where the Christian people go to instead of Las Vegas or something. I've forgotten. Oh, I know. I don't know. Branson, Branson. Branson. Branson. Okay. So I went to this thing that

Gary and some other people to put together in Branson. It's good seeing all these veterans around and everything. But then they have all of these smiling people with, you know, there are flags on their jackets and all this sort of stuff, but they've never spent a moment. And they're on the sidelines, you know, yes, yes, you guys are right, you know. But they don't mean it. you know, there's certain kinds of, do you know that?

Yeah, yeah, there's these pussies out there like John Bolton that talk about wanting to strong war all over the fucking world. But like when someone asked him about why he didn't serve in Vietnam and he was like, oh, well, you know, there are better things I could do than die in a rice paddy somewhere. Well, Cheney, when he was a secretary of defense, somebody asked him why he didn't serve in Vietnam. He said, I had other things to do with my life. I sure did.

Yeah. Thank you for your service. Yeah, thank you for your service. Welcome home, brother. Yes, you know. You ain't my brother. Yeah. That stuff bothers me a lot.

Ken, I think we've been going for like over two hours. at this point. And I think we could, me and you could go like another three hours and like it would be like blinking an eye. I want to ask you to stay for the little bonus segment afterwards for like 10, 15 minutes. But before we wrap this up here, any final thoughts that you want people to know about the works, about the Vietnam War, anything that you want to say to folks out there who listen to this? it was unnecessary, unwise, but I think that the people on our side, the people on the other side, the people on our side, meaning the Americans, the Australians, the South Koreans, the ties, the Filipinos, there were New Zealand and the Arvans and the mountain yards that were on our side and, you know, and the people who were in the Paven, who the NVA, and the people, the local, the local guerrillas,

we all thought we were doing the right thing. Not everybody did, but each side thought that they were doing the right thing, the moral thing. The correct thing. And all of us had some reason to, there was some truth for it, for all of us. But it was a big, stupid, foolish thing that shows that humans, we might be very smart, but we're not very wise. And at the same time, it's something that as foolish and unwise as the war was. It's something that really stuck with you and defined your life in so many ways, I think, Ken, that, you know, you wrote this novel, you wrote Tiger, the Warp Dog. You wrote a nonfiction book called Six Silent Men about it.

And this is something that has come, it did define your, not just your young life, but it came to define, you know, who you became as a man later in life. I often think how different my life would be if I had taken advantage to not go in the military and just go on to college and do all this. Go to the rap sessions with the hippies. Go to the rap sessions and, you know, and I would be a much better. I would have been able to, I would have had more money that I could spend on my family. But we managed to manage. We managed to get our kids through college and good schools.

And we are doing well enough now that we spend a lot of money on good charities, mainly animal charities. but you know I was supposed to be another professor or something and you know I did what I wanted to do and what let me tell you I was born I was conceived in Austin Texas and I was born and I was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan. So it's, you know, college towns. In Wastonaw County, Michigan, where Ann Arbor is, they have in the, in the courtroom, they have a list of all the people from Washington County who died in various wars.

You look at the ones from the Vietnam War. and I knew almost every single one of the guys in there weren't very many from Ann Arbor who died in Washington County. But you look at the smaller towns, Celine, Dexter, Chelsea, man, they've got more people than people from my age range that I would have known coming up. in Ann Arbor. They had more people from these little towns than Ann Arbor had from my generation of people who died in the war. And it was unfair, you know, the rural kids, working class kids, minority kids. And nobody will ever tell me that it was fair and that it was fair. there was any equality to it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There wasn't.

I knew one other professor's kid. And I knew in what people I knew when I was in the army and people I've known veterans I've known since. I've known one other professor's kid. I know doctors kids, most of them were Army doctors, their fathers. How many people, there was something, how many people in the House and Senate lost a kid in the Vietnam War? I think it was one during the time of the Vietnam War. Reminds me of our current politician of ours who got three deferments for his bone spur.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I can look at myself in the mirror. And I know that if I met Tammy Duckworth and there's nobody else around and we could just sit down and talk or something, that she would talk to me. Yeah, yeah. No, she's, she's for real. She's for real. She's for real.

And what's his name? I won't say it. what's his name can't say that. And neither can his, his, his, Spence or any of these others. It bothers me a lot to see my fellow veterans.

Their politics sometimes really freaks me out. And I, I can't hold it against them. but I was like that for 10 years after the war and there's a good reason for us to feel that we got stabbed in the back and all of this sort of stuff

but this country would be a lot better if the Vietnam veterans had outgrown this and had not let it just fester and I'm talking about people that I love Yeah. That really strikes home with me, Ken. Well, what I see in your generation and also in my own generation of guys who are carrying around a lot of anger from the war. And that manifests in how they view American politics. We have an advantage over your generation. You guys will never, ever be able to

sit down and have a cup of coffee or certainly not a beer with the guys that you had to fight against. You know, how many ISIS guys and so forth? Yeah, yeah. Ain't no way. Yeah. And I will never respect them the way that you came to respect the Vietnamese. And they respected us.

And, yeah, it's the same thing. World War II, you know, the enemies were against were purely evil enemies, but not purely evil soldiers. And they were just doing what we were just doing, just like the North enemies guys were. And how long did it take? Very soon, you know, I mean, as soon as you stop shooting each other, your buddies. or you can be and goes to show the folly of war. But so we have something else to do right now, right? Yeah, well, I just want to read a couple comments here real quick

before we go on to that. Alejandro says, thank you, Mr. Miller, for your books that we grew up reading and for your service, for being an inspiration to generations of Rangers, an example and standard that we aspire to be Suisphanta. one of us and he also asked a question down here what are your thoughts on core level worst sea being disbanded a few years ago so i guess he's asking about the current worst units in in the army being disbanded i think it's probably a mistake uh you know you

definitely need that and and it was working well. I mean, I remember the first Gulf War and go to Fort Campbell and talking to the guys from 101st, the Lurse guys. And, you know, they were sitting there and saying, man, you know, we're dug in on this hill and just so many people going by and they're just pretty much And it reached the point where I think, God, I hope these guys get out of here before they surrender because I don't know how to deal with them. You know, I mean, it was, it was good. But what happened was somebody in the, oh, your surveillance, you know, you don't need, you don't need to have a machine gun or something, you know, you just, you know, that's reconnaissance. You don't need this.

People that have never done it don't know. Say you have a reconnaissance unit that's just supposedly in theory, just reconnaissance. I can speak from experience. You know, I was an LRP LRP LRP LRP LRF and an LRP LRP. And there's a difference in them. There's a range. It's not a big difference at all. But when we had two hours in there, we were.

still doing raids. We were still doing ambushes. We were still doing all of the kind of stuff. We were still doing point for our infantry company. We're doing all of this stuff. And don't say reconnaissance. Well, that's just, you know, that's just reconnaissance. She's just going sneaking around. And of course, they can replace you with a drum these days too. Yeah. And they can't. A drum can't figure out. It can't stay in the air all day and all night.

Well, what I remember thinking when drums first came out was they can't look at the bottom of a bridge. They can look to the bottom of the beneath the bridge, but they can't. They probably can now. can they just turn up and but maybe from an angle yeah but they just don't know you there's no we have we haven't yet been able to replace the notion of having you know a leader's recon or or a human reconnaissance team on the ground and if we ever do that I hope that you know it's just machines fighting machines and not letting anybody get hurt by it. So I think that's that's it.

We'll go, we'll do the bonus segment in one second, Ken. I just want to say, Ken, thank you so much for spending like two and a half hours with us tonight. And special thanks also to your son for helping fix all this off and make it happen. You know, he's awesome. Yeah, he's a good guy. And thank you to everyone who came here and watched the show tonight, everyone who will watch it, you know, in the future.

Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already. I will. You like us. You can leave some comments below. Tell us, you know, do you think we're doing good? Do you think we're doing bad? Let us know. And there's also a link down the description for our Patreon page if you guys want to

support the site or support the channel financially. I don't know how to do all of this stuff. Ken, you don't have to do any of that. I'm talking to the listeners. I want to whatever you want, I'll just give it to you. Just ask me. And yeah, I guess that's kind of, that's kind of it. I would like to apologize for my senility and forgetting words and groping for words.

No need to apologize, Ken. It's really an honor to have you here. And you're one of our OGs. You're one of the guys we go to for knowledge. And, you know, I really appreciate it and really respect you. So, I mean, it's a privilege for me to be able to interview. you and to have you here on the show. I have to say, speaking for my generation of Lerps and Rangers, it's amazing, amazing to see

what grew out of us. You look at what the, they have now the Ranger Regiment has got its own, it's got everything now. It's got its old, in my battalion, am I battalion? in my battalion. And there's nobody that's better at that job in the whole world than the 75th Rangers. And it's because of you guys. You know, we stood on your shoulders.

Well, yeah. No, it is. You guys had it. Yeah, but although there is something to that because a lot of the guys did stay up into the. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Bob Gilbert is still around being his old, rough old self. Maybe I have to twist your arm and see if I can interview Bob at some point.

But so guys, next week, next Friday, our guest on the show is going to be Ed Cougler, who served as a Marine Scout sniper in Vietnam. And I have to read familiar. Maybe you read before. He wrote two books. I think one is about his time in Vietnam and one is about PTSD and kind of recovering from what he went through in the war.

So we'll have him on next week and I have to, this coming week, I have to read his book so that I know what the hell I'm talking about. Get Gary Linder on some time. I would love to get Gary on. Have you had Tilt up, John Seagleton? I have Tilt scheduled for, hold on, I'll tell you guys right now,

September 25th, John Mayer will be on the show. I keep wanting to say, John Singleton, Mosby. So I just call him Tilt. Tilt. Okay, guys. Mosby is an fascinating character. We'll have to have that conversation. But I'm sorry to cut you off, but we're going to stop the episode now. We'll go into the bonus segment. I hope to see all of the rest of you guys there. And one way or the other, I'll see you next week. So thank you.