The Team House - MACV-SOG, SPECIAL FORCES, VIETNAM | Dale Hanson | Ep. 220

Episode Date: July 13, 2023

During the Vietnam War, Dale was a highly decorated Green Beret who served three years as a commando in the famous SOG program, whose mission involved extremely dangerous raids far behind enemy lines. This unit received more decorations and suffered higher rates of casualties than any American unit since the American Civil War. On one of these raids, Dale earned the first of several purple hearts as his right hand was mangled by a burst of machine gun fire. It is ironic that he became a sculptor, a field in which one’s hands are so critical. Dale Hanson is an accomplished sculptor who has led a life of adventure and enjoyed numerous accomplishments. He is a black belt martial artist, an author, a pilot of fixed wing and glider airplanes, has flown aerobatics and is a Special Forces underwater diver. He is a disabled veteran and a member of MENSA. Grab Dale's book: "Born Twice: Memoir of a Special Forces SOG Warrior" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dale-Hanson/author/B001KD7KE0?ref=ap_rdr&store_ref=ap_rdr&isDramIntegrated=true&shoppingPortalEnabled=true Check out Dale's sculptors here:⬇️ http://www.dale-hanson-studio.com/ Today' Sponsors: The AARP Veteran Report⬇️ https://aarp.org/VETREPORT Free, Twice Monthly email newsletter that salutes military service & provides a mixture of inspirational human stories and practical info for vets. https://aarp.org/VETREPORT Hello Fresh ⬇️ https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse50 Get 50% off plus free shipping by hitting the link!⬇️ https://www.HELLOFRESH.com/teamhouse50 To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter:  https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️  https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️  https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [e-mail] #macvsog #greenberet #vietnamBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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And if you're going to give us a not-so-good review, why don't you just send us an email and we'll talk about it. Special Operations, covert ops, espionage, the Team House, with your host, Jack Murphy and David Park. Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 220 of the Team House. I'm Dave Park with our guest co-host, Andy Milburn, and our very special guest tonight. Dale Hanson, Dale, we tried to have a show with them. Dale's from the, what do they call Alaska? The great, yeah, the great state. Yeah, the great state way.

And we had to try to have a show with him a while back. The connection was bad. So we brought Dale down with us. Matt V. Saug veteran and sculptor, writer, haikuist. quite an accomplished career, Dale. Thanks. Thanks for joining us. Thank you. Real quick, before we get with Dale, I just need to do a quick shout-out for our sponsor. When you need dinner fast, don't call for delivery. Think HelloFresh.

They're fast and fresh recipes already in just 15 minutes. Go to HelloFresh.com slash T-Mouse50 and use the code T-Mouse 50 for 50% off plus free shipping. So now to you, Dale. So, Dale, again, thank you for coming down and joining us. A pleasure. We had to cut your last show short because there was a little bit of bad connection. And yours is the story one, everybody to hear. So start us with your origin story.

How did you grow up and how did you get drawn into the military? I was born in a tiny little town and raised a little – it wasn't a sod house, but my grandparents were. but a clapboard four-room house, no electricity, no water. It's just in northern Minnesota. Yeah, northern Minnesota, you know. And I spent my first years there, and then I moved to International Falls, the cold spot of the United States, the northernmost town, continental United States. But my dad had, there were seven brothers, and all seven of them went to war, four in World War II, two in Korea.

and then on my mom's side it was the same thing one of the brothers was killed and the battle of the bulge and stuff but i kind of grew up in the matrix of if you were a healthy male in your country needed you you you went there was no excuse people uh looked down at you deservedly uh if you didn't go to war and uh i remembered hearing their stories and their wounds and i remember once my uncle melvin when I got shot in the leg, showing me his back and the mass of scars that he had. And so that was kind of the matrix I went through. And I got born again as a Christian when I was five.

And that might sound like just, you know, you join the Elskirts Club or something, not a big deal. But it was because it changed your character. And it was one of those things that drove my character. And there was a verse in the Bible. that says then Jesus grew and waxed in wisdom and stature in favor with God and man and I thought if we're supposed to be like him we should do it in all those areas not just religion so it was physical mental spiritual social so growing up I wanted to mature and be the best I could in all those physically you know my workouts were you know three sets of 35 pull-ups and in 70 in my sets of dips so I worked out hard I studied as far they could intellectually, the math, the science, the language, and all that kind of a thing. And anyway, when the Vietnam War went on and communism was big, I knew philosophically and spiritually,

I hated communism, I hated socialism, and I wanted to do my part to stop it. But I was in college, my last year of college, and I thought, I mean, I'm seeing in the newspapers, 400 people this week died. And I thought, you know, I'm prepared to go. I'm ready to go. Physically, emotionally, mentally, I'm prepared to go. And so my last year of college, I says, I can't stand when I'm prepared to die watching other people who may not be. So I said, if I'm going to quit, though, I'm going to be in the best there was.

And there was one more aspect that really solidified my decision to go. And if you were to take the 12 apostles in the Bible, and there's someone. did a study, it said how many people living and dead totaled, over 2,000 years heard the basic story. And I don't know where they got the conclusions, but they said one billion. And then in 1918, all the communist leaders, it just happened to be 12 of them that got together and they were going to do the entire world. And of course, you had the Stalin and all the rest of them. and they got together in 1918 the Russian Revolution, etc.

And from 1968 when I enlisted from 1918, that's 50 years. So in 50 years, I asked some people how many people living and dead had heard the story of Christ, just the basic story. And they said 2 billion. And so I thought,

in a prospect of twice as many people becoming communist in 50 years as had even heard the story in 2000 years, there's a significant danger that needed to be arrested. And so that's it. And with confidence and with conviction, I should say, I was just quitting and listened. I said, I'm going to be here until the war ends.

And faith, because your book, your phenomenal book, you know, on your time in Matney's Saw, is called Born Twice. And people read this book, you will not be disappointed. And that's part of that, right? that first. There's two aspects that are born twice. The biggest reason is that the change of characters because I think my memoir is a little different than most of me have read in the sense that I spend maybe 50, 60 pages, even to back up. When I was overseas once I watched one of the Vietnamese gals washer our clothes, and she hung it on the concertina wire to dry. And it was

laid out flat, nobody inside. And it had his jump wings, his his combat infantry badge, his rank, his name, you know, all these things, and the sog patch. And I looked at the thing and I said, you know, it's flat. It's just an empty uniform. There's nobody in it. And it just so happened. He got killed that day.

And I watched them come in hanging underneath the helicopter with his pant legs, empty legs, you know, just blowing backwards. And I thought, you know, if I'm going to write, I want to put the character, the people that were actually devolved. for the most dangerous unit in American history. I wanted to put a character, a person in there. In writing a book, they say, if you don't flesh out the character,

nobody cares what's going to happen to them. So I spent those pages at the beginning talking about character, what made me who I was. That's the first half of Born Twice. The second half, there's a motto in Special Forces, I think it's John Stewart Mill. Says, you have never lived until you've almost died. for those who fight for it,

life has a flavor that protected will never know. And most of us who are overseas and just barely, barely come back, it's almost like you were born again. You have a new life, you have a new lease on life, new outlook on life. And so when I was writing,

I wanted to make sure those aspects were in there. Anyway, so we'll see. And so then you were in your last year of college, Vietnam, well, what year was that? So Vietnam was already going. Yeah, graduate from high school, 65, so it was end of 68. I actually took double loads. Okay.

Like a fool. I took the hardest classes. I mean, Greek theology, ethics, exegesis, and a whole deal, and worked full time. So maybe I quit college just to get away. Vietnam was a kind of prospect. Yeah, no kidding. And what was your first stop into the Army? Enlisting.

Fort Campbell, I think it was. And I made an undergraduate out of there, and I got promoted on that. And I could not believe what I would do with $64 a month. You know, amazing. And then I went to Advanced Infantry Training. It was out of graduate out of that. Three of us were. And I got promoted on that one, too.

But that was an interesting one because it's a secret advanced infantry. It's amazing. Most people have never heard of it. but it was out of Fort Gordon 10 miles in the woods and it was paid for by access government funds, they said. And it was all designed for commandos and airborne. And we lived in Quonset huts, we were 10 miles in the woods and a bunch of sadistic people that ran the thing.

We were up at 3 and bed at 11 or 12, you know, that kind of thing. And they just ran you ragged, you know. That's where it took the special forces test because I enlisted with the guarantee that, I could try. And that's why you ended up in AIT? Yeah, that was AIT. And 600 of it. They did a battalion at a time. And there were 600 of us that took the test. Only three of us passed for special forces. So it's pretty demanding. What was the test back then? Well, I don't know what the test is now. So I can't tell you if it's different. But they gave you three tests at the same time. One was oral. They played

the recorder. And the moment that was done, you had to put down an answer because they were going to the next. There was one that was written, and then there was a third one, and I don't remember exactly how that was presented. But all three were going on in exactly the same time, and you had no thinking time at the end of it

because they went to the next one. And I think it was designed to put pressure on. So, you know, a lot of people can cogitate and come up with some plausible answer. And this was, they wanted people who think reflexively. And that was part of it.

I'm sorry, when you think back to that, that seems, you know, because selection and assessment had become so scientific since then. But when you,

when, and so it sounds to us, almost rudimentary, right? Almost random. And yet, you know, reading your book

and other books about the Salg era, it worked, right? I mean, it worked. You know, am I wrong? But it seemed like,

you guys when you write about your experiences that it doesn't seem to be a lot of weak links in the chains so something back then really did work right um what's wrong with modern movies is that um you'll have some blonde-haired captain who comes in and is supposed to save the world and then he goes in he finds uh 12 derelict green berets and he has to whip them into shape and teach them

and they all have their problems and all that stuff the biggest fallacy of movies. The thing is in special forces, there are no privates. They're all specialized people. They're trained. They have the intelligence. They can think under pressure. And any one of them could have taken that team and been Miss Captain Wonderful.

And so what you were saying is exactly true. There's a uniformity in special force. You know, what is it? The movie or the song, if you don't know, then I can't tell you that. Badger Courage. Remember that? And obviously it's the beret.

And it's a uniform thing. If you got that, it tells you that you all have that character. Yeah. So did you, were you aware of special forces when you were going into this advanced infantry training? You know,

I don't think I was. The closest I came to it was my father. And like, you know, there was SAS and OSS and all the rest. But common people, like you and I before the war probably never heard of such a thing but I think I mentioned in my book that my dad joined just before Pearl Harbor in World War II and they weren't going to take them because he discovered he was colorblind but he insisted and persisted and they got

through but they discovered the fact that he was colorblind meant he couldn't tell blue and green which meant camouflage didn't help and so I they had the front lines. He was in Iwo Jem on Guadalcanal. You're Marines take credit for it all, but there was a certain army group that was attached to them all. I know all about that from jump school.

I were reminded every day. Yeah. Anyway, he was the Ewa Jem on, Guadalcanal and Tindian and a couple others. But they had the front line, and then they had the outposts, and then they had what they called second scouts. He was the first scouts. He was the first scot.

There was way, way behind enemy. lines and he was a crack shot he's an unbelievable shot. I remember I was deer hunting with my dad and we came out of the woods and he had a 308 automatic had five rounds and I think five deer just ran you know just full blast and heard bang bang bang bang and I'm raised in my gun and I heard bang bang bang bang bang bang bang five shots five deer went down before I got my gun up and he was that kind of a guy and I never talked much about the war but when I would have done. ask him things. He would tell me various things. And you know, like a

simple thing, like a chin up. He would say you can't, a chin up is worthless. He says, try and climb over a wall with a chin up. You've got to have it this right. Yeah. Or having your arms wide apart so you get beautiful broad chest. He says, what can you do with it? And he says, I'm going to push

you. You stop me. And he went to push me. Put my hands out. He says, where are your hands? They're chest part. And so these little snippets and things he would tell me, only when I asked, you know, kind of indicated there was something special beyond the norm.

And so it took the ballot of the Green Beret and Robin Moore's book. And I got to meet some of the characters that Robin Moore wrote about when I was overseas. So when you went to this advanced temperature training, because is it, am I assuming right?

And that that was sort of the training course that sort of special forces and people were using at that time to prepare them or it was something else i don't think s i knew about it it was some someone came up with the idea and it was uh uh to train people to be commandos and special forces people and uh it was a whole they weren't necessarily a high caliber of people because i used to throw knives a lot i i love throwing knives and um i would at the end of the day i would go out and practice my judo and then i'd go throw my knives and um i would go out and throw my knives in the woods and i had a

certain spot and all over the place you'd find socks mid socks and inside of it there would be the kiwi shoe polish with the lid gone and they would put that in and they would be sniffing kiwi shoe polish it was the first high i guess yeah and it was was full of it yeah yeah it was like these derelict and people you know this is fine you don't know what a sentence was yeah yeah yeah but and then the catrie that was in his cap crock it was the name of it if i didn't say it the cadres were the graduates and honor graduates of NCO school. That was their first assignment to run us. And then they had the permanent staff, which were basically sadistic.

The honor graduate would be given staff sergeant stripes when he got out. And the other one would be a buck sergeant. And that's who ran us. By the time I got through jump school, the word was that every single one of those cadres had been assigned at the 173 airborne and were all right. already killed. Wow. So that's the fighting at that time.

Yeah. But it was all designed to make them into commandos and stuff. And the top 10% of the class, or top 20% would either go into H. You'd be instead of Charlie, 11 Charlie. It'd be 11H for the direct fire. The hotels. 11C, which was the mortars. Yeah.

They wound up in the mortars. And it was a disaster. And of sorts, I shouldn't even say that. but when they got you awake at 3 in the morning and rest you all day until 11 at night, you couldn't really digest, you know. It wasn't a learning. Yeah, I don't know.

So you went from this advanced infantry training, which are you saying that it wasn't as effective as they were trying to? Well, I'm sure it was because you learned to growl when you ate. I mean, it was, I mean, you're just, you know, let's go kill them. Yeah. get them. So the product they were producing was good. You didn't necessarily need an awful lot of brains to charge a hill.

Yeah. You know, and so the product they were producing were good, and I'm sure there were many good people out of it, you know, many, many. I only noticed the ones that were sniffing Kiwi. Yeah. So you went from that directly to airborne school? Jump school, and it was the largest thumb school in history.

We had the normal jump school from Vietnam. And then the governor of Texas decided that none of his National Guard were going to be pencil pushers. And so he had assigned the entire Texas National Guard to go to our jump school. So when it was 12, 1, 1,400 of us. So we were jumping C-141s and all that stuff, the big stuff, you know, the scary airplanes at the beginning, you know. Yeah. And then after jump school, what was your next step? That was special forces.

Okay. Yeah. And then how did you, so was there a selection portion of that? Like, how did you end up in special forces? How did it come on your radar and then how did you end up going? Well, basically reading the book, hearing the music, deciding I wanted it. Yeah. When I enlisted in 68, I just told the recruiter, I want it in writing that I get a chance to be in special force.

I mean, you can't be guaranteed. Yeah. Yeah, but you want the chance. Yeah. So right after jump school, my orders, you know, special forces for break. And then once you got there, what was, like, what was your introduction? What was the training like there? It was good.

It was harassment. I think it was to produce pressure. It was, you learned everything that special forces does, except for your MOS degree, your specialty. But it was designed that intellectually. emotionally, physically, you'll, you'll, you have the material. Once you finish that, you'd get the bray, but no flash on it. Okay. You didn't have to wear a baseball cap anymore.

But that was essentially the final weeding out other than if you failed your MOS. Okay. It was good. It was very good. So you basically started, you started with, with kind of the, essential patrolling, like the tactics side of special forces before you went on to your MOS.

And then what MOS did you go on to from there? Well, and that's a different story too. Everybody had, there's five MOSs in special forces. So, a common weapons, demolition, they were engineering, medics, and 11F. 11F is operations

and intelligence, but you had to be an E7 with five years in special forces in order to go to the class. but they apparently have lost a lot of our people in SOG and so they opened it up one time and they said that you could go in without being a high rank and so the only thing was is Adam Major came out and did a talk and an interview

and he said you had to have a minimum 130 IQ you had to pass this course and immediately you would be sent to a and I recall him saying SOG other people say a specialized program or some other euphemism but for some reason sog stuck in my head and then the other caveat that he said was that 85% of us would be dead in three months so anyway I um I did the statistics for Dale Hansen to live one year if 85% die in three months what number do I have to start with to end up with me and it's a number approaching

4,000. One in 4,000 would live a year in SOG. You know, so that's fine. I'll live. Right. You know, so we volunteered in our 37 of us that went and made it. It's amazing. And I mean,

MacV. Sog had, I think their casually rate was over 100%. Like everybody in SOG was injured. Yeah. You're guaranteed. You're dead or wounded in a year. Do you mind taking a step back and just describe it? Not all our listeners will be familiar with SOG and the background, you know, from its formation in 61, I think, you know, with, it's under Colby, right?

He was the station chief. Yeah. Kobe may have been. I forget some of the personalities in there. I think Kobe was a part of it. Sog went by various names, the euphemism. Studies and observation group is one that was changed to at Start Office. started as a special operations group, and then they changed it as studies and observation group.

And then, of course, it was CNC, command and control. So as soon as the air of discovery came out, they would change the name. And I remember writing letters home telling them you have to change the name, because at one time we were Task Force to Alpha Echo. And so they kept changing the name. But CNC or FOB, forward operation base. But it's run, run essentially by the CIA,

by the agency. Which is one of the reasons that General Abrams hated special forces because we had a couple thousand green berets, and then we had our own army. We hired our own army, trained our own people, and the commanding general of all military people and Vietnam really had authority over us.

We gave him deference and saluted and all that, but our orders, came from the CIA. We didn't get money or clothing or anything from the government. So we were on separate rations. And a lot of times we'd get captured guns and we'd sell the guns or trade the guns for case of stakes or something like that. Did that ever cause you problems, you know, that dual chain of command?

Or did it seem to work quite effectively? Yeah, I think our commanding staff, you know, the colonels in charge are like CNC. probably filtered out a lot of that so we didn't feel it. But we were aware of it. One of the things that Abrams in particular, who really was conventional, really disliked special forces, one of the very few...

He really disliked? Oh, he disliked us, yeah. Yeah, and one of the things he could do, he could assign us our officer staff. A lot of our officers went through the ranks and so forth and were great people. but he also could, in fact, the book I'm writing now, I'm covering at Jebron's mission, and they assigned a Marine second lieutenant

who had never been in combat, I'm sorry. No, no, no, that's fine, I'm glancing at Dave because just that phrase prepares this for the worst. Right. And he never been in combat, knew nothing about special forces and sent him to take over one of our teams.

Because that was a slap in the face. Yes, and I don't know if I'll get to it, you know, but the arrest of Colonel Roe was his, the greatest chance he had to put his thumb on special forces. And he wanted us under his authority in command, you know. That's wild. I'm sorry to interrupt you. I just need to give a quick shout out to our sponsors tonight. First off, hey, everybody, you should cook. And if you're going to cook, you know, one of the hardest things about cooking is, like, you cook the same stuff over and over again.

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You don't need an AARP membership. Just check it out. You'll love it. And that's thanks to our sponsors. So, Dale, so you go through the special, you get the Fox program, the intelligence officer, or the intelligence, not officer, but the intelligence billet. So special forces is special to begin with.

Like when did you know that you were going into something that was even, you know, in the darker side of the black ops than just special forces? Yeah, I'm not sure where all that seems. deeped in, but I certainly had a, maybe it was even from a basic on, getting some of it. But I mean, Robert Moore, you know, 100 men will test today, only three. Yeah. Yeah. And I knew there would be, it would be a challenge.

But who knew what the challenge was? Right. I thought, you know, I used to have dreams. I said, well, they're going to put a hundred of us into a room and the three standing are going to be, well, I'm going to be one of them. Right. You know, but I knew there was something unique about it. I knew there was espionage and things and a guerrilla warfare behind scenes in any war. And I just assumed that they were the ones.

No, was there a, so you volunteered, Green Brace would volunteer for SOG. Was there a selection process beyond that, or was it basically OJT? Well, it was very thorough. It was very good. It covered everything from, you. European to the war that we were fighting, European in a sense that spy techniques and cutouts and fingerprinting and I mean, anything you'd have to do about setting up a spy network or anything like that was totally James Bond, you know. And then the other aspect of it was the operations part of it. They would the officers were in charge of an A team say, but it was the operation sergeant, your SOP sergeant, who ran it.

You know, and he would set up the programs, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, depending on what side I was working on the intelligence or the operations. Yeah. So, and of course, the split team concept, it was designed 12 green berets so that if you split up, six and six for some reason, you would have, you know, each side would have a medic and a demo and weapons. Right. And so forth.

And, of course, you're cross-trained as well. Yeah. Now, were you given an option to go SOG, to go special forces or a local? or were you just kind of put into the stock pipeline? I think when you volunteered to go 11F, that sealed your fate. Yep, you were dead. Okay. So that, yeah, that was the branch.

Yeah, that took you dead. And it was, and it actually was a little bit James Bondian after that, because after graduation, like in the James Bond movies, they had M and Q and all those guys and Mrs. Moneypenny, we had the same thing. They had Q who invented everything. We had B, Mr. Baker, who invented almost every,

probably half the things you've used in your work. Mr. Baker invented them. And then Mrs. Moneypenny was Mrs. A, Mrs. Alexander. And I would like to say that I walked into her office and I took my brain, I threw it and landed on the hat rack with the flash sticking out.

But it didn't work that way. But Sergeant DeLuca, and I'd love to have you talk about him down the line. In fact, it's a fascinating story. DeLuca was our first sergeant, you know, and in fact, he scared the liver out of me once. We were going to do a parachute jump, but it was the first time I jumped the C-141. I don't know if you guys did that. And they had Jado. Still had a jump school when I, I, and it just screamed in your ears as half jet, you know.

And DeLuca, I was sitting across the aisle for me, and I'm getting ready to jump out of this plane. And anyway, he kind of just needling me for fun, you know. He says, Daly, he says, he says, you ever jump on these before? And I said, no. He says, you be careful because of the Jado, it'll burn your shoot off. He says, don't jump out of there.

Just put your toe out and do a little hop. Jeez, thanks, you know. Now I can think about it. I was always nervous jumping anyway. It's great. Now I can think about fire, you know. But anyway, DeLuca at the end of Levin'F school, I said, we're getting ready to go to Vietnam, you know, Sogg.

But we haven't heard anything. It's been more in a week. He said, well, call Mrs. A. And he gave me her phone number. And right away, I thought, Agatha Christie, a gray-haired lady, with chopsticks in the bun in their ear, and maybe a cat in her lap and she's the one I'm talking to. And anyway, I said, she's an old lady.

And I knew it to look and said, no, blonde, a real looker. And I called her and he says, well, you guys really want to go? And I said, yeah, we've been waiting to go, you know. And she says, I'll work on it. And so I called her the next day. And she says, I'm working on it. I called her the third day. And she recognizes my voice, Dale,

they're done. You got your orders. You're on your way and delay in route. And there we were. We're on the way. And you kind of know you're in for it because when you land and to get the train, the headquarters of special forces,

and you actually see a SOG veteran who's coming in there, maybe to get his tooth fixed or something, you know. And we saw one coming into the barracks. You know, there's a place that's transient, you know. He walks in there and he's got a long handlebar mustache. He looks like he's in another world just staring ahead. And he wasn't strak either. I was always strak, you know.

But he was, pads weren't very pressed or anything like that. Came in and he just wandered in, put his stuff on the bunk. And then we saw that red patch, the sog patch. And it was like it's not, the rumors aren't true. Someone does live through. that, you know, and his name was Kersbaum. And those of us were going to go to CCC, which is contum, the C, C, C, C, North, Central and South. Those of us were going to go to Central. We were on the third lift. We had to wait an extra day. And there was just a few of us in there. And we looked

at him, and Mike Buckland was another guy who went through with me and Dennis Bingham and Randy, Ray, and all those guys died except Mike. And anyway, we saw him and saw the sock patch. and his name was Kirshbaum. And just a, not just a legend. All the guys that were in Sog there were incredible people, you know. Well, anyway, Mike Muckle winds up being on his recon team in a couple weeks, you know, and he's on Kirchbaum's team, you know. And anyway, amazing stuff.

What was your mission, Dale, when, I mean, how was it brief to you? Yeah. I mean, do you remember and? Yeah, well, Special Forces, of course, had many missions overseas. Yeah. They had the A teams. I think there's about 30 of them.

And each one had 12 Green Berets. They hired their own indigenous army, given an area, and their job was to keep the communists out of it, you know? And we had special projects. And then we had our, you guys called them reaction forces. We called them,

had different names for them. Like Mike and Hatchet. Mike and Hatchet Force. Yeah. In C&C, we called them Hatchet Force. And I think in the B teams, and of course they had A team, team, C team. They called them

our Hatchet forces, I think it was. And then we had SOG. And we had mainly recon teams. And it'd be one or two green berets, sometimes three. We'd hire our own people, train our own people and they'd get our missions. When you'd to hire your own people, those were the indigged locals. Yeah. Yeah, people come in, look

for work. Yeah. And we hire them off the street. Wow. A lot of times they fought with the French in Indochina. in the 50s, you know, or they worked with special forces in another project and we would vet them and train them and get their experience. And there was one I mentioned, it was in the book too, where we just did not take them. It was after one zero school and half my team was dead or gone or whatever. And we needed some more people and four Cambodians came in.

And they looked like Montaneers. They were just stolid, tough, muscular people. They came in, unsmiling, everything else, you know, and they wanted work. Well, my Vietnamese in the team were terrified of them. And we interviewed them and all of the stuff. Well, it turns out that, and their trip coming from Cambodia into Vietnam, they bumped into a bunch of Buddhist monks and killed them, decapitated them and set all the monks down alongside the trail,

each of them with his head, holding his head in his arms like that. And I thought, you know, I don't think I want them on the team with me, especially behind me. You know, and the Vietnamese felt that way. So we turned some away. Yeah. Yeah. I was going to ask you how you did the vetting.

I mean, it's extraordinary. Now, with the benefit, looking back, biometrics and all this other stuff that we use, but the vetting you did was just down to gut feeling and talking to the locus. I don't know to what extent we had a database. Somehow we would communicate and we could put in a name and it would say, anybody know this guy and maybe an A team up the line would say he worked for us on the A team. He was really good and reliable. I don't know exactly how we got the information back and forth, but maybe through our S-1.

But the system worked for you. It worked. There were times, I think, they've had teams wiped out because of Viet Cong or whatever that infiltration. Now, in special forces, you know, all across the board, you know, not only did they use the Vietnamese or fight alongside the Vietnamese, but also the Montan yards, the Mong, the Nungs, right? Like, there were a lot of tribal, you know, different tribal elements in those areas that, Right. I had the only melting pot team, I think, when I was in Rican for a while. I had Chinese and Vietnamese, and I think there was a Lao in there as well.

But mostly they were one thing, you know. And my Chinese that I had, I think I mentioned in the book, I was really strong back then. And I had a couple of my Chinese were just really muscular. And they said, you Chinese men, we're going to get names. for you. And they went in, they don't have a witch doctor, but somehow my name is Oriental, Hansen, Han, son, you know. And so they went and they found the warrior dynasty. They found the Chinese character for Han, and then another one for Sun. And when I went into combat,

we went as sterile, nothing to mark us as American or anything, but they would take magic marker. And on my back, above the rucksack, they would write in Chinese, Han Sun, Kambalia Chin, which means Hansen never die and God would look down and he'd see that guy and he said that's my guy I'm going to take care of him yeah they wouldn't let me go on the field they say no we have to yeah you know but anyway we had to Chinese and um and then when I went into the companies then then it was uh montignards and montyards I really love too Chinese struck me as very very intelligent uh um strong put together intelligent educated um in the in the Vietnamese um um You don't want your daughter to marry one.

You know, over there, you know, I had good ones, and I loved them. Because if enemies were running their own, trained by the original SOG guys for a while, didn't they run their own recon teams, the first observation group or something back in the early 60s, were they no longer operating by their time that you were there? I think they had various programs. Some continued on, you know, like that was the Hamlet programmer. Yeah. Yeah, that's one of them.

And then someone went by the wayside, which we'd be happy to talk about when we get to Colonel Rowe, you know, because one of our programs basically aren't totally erased, essentially. Really? Yeah. So, okay. So we'll go chronologically. So you show up to Command Control Central and on a recon team. Now, you're a, you've been through a lot of training, but you're still a frustrated boot in some ways. Like, you haven't been in combat.

A lot of these guys have, how do they work you up? Like, what kind of training do you do to get ready to be on a two or three man team and take out Indige, who know a lot, really, right? Essentially, you're the weak element for a little while. Yeah. It's interesting when I came into CNC, Bob Howard. the most decorated man in history was the first sergeant there and I, as one said,

I said, I wanted to get on recon. He says, well, go over there, I'll tell Bob you're there, and he, through the phone, anyway, Bob Howard met me and all this stuff, you know, and we just hit it off for all the tours we were there.

And he says, I got the team for you. And it was Norm Doney, who was kind of a legend in special forces also. And so Norm Domey took me and, and he, He says, what do you want from me, which is unique?

I want you. You know, I want you what you want. He said, what do you want from me? Yeah, yeah. And I says, I want your job. So then you guy. I said, I want your job in six months. You know, I want to be the one zero.

Yeah. I want to take the team, you know. And he says you will. And while other people are enjoying things, he and I were working and doing things and doing age rules and working with the team. And those, uh, we called them. Doni ladders. Those three there's a, they're cables, three cables that go down

that replaced the rope ladder. Those three cables and it has the little hollow tubing in between. We built the first ones in the SOG and the first ones used in special forces. Delta Force used them. And Doni was in Delta Force.

Delta Force as opposed to Delta Project. I said it backwards. Delta Project. Yes. The original Delta. It felt wrong. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway,

We made those on our weekends and stuff and got to be the thing to go. So we practiced on then, and we had a great colonel in charge of a camp, Colonel Hap. And he went out and watched us and how we worked and why they worked so well and everything and got all the one zeroes doing it. But anyway, he just hand-taught me everything and just tutored me beginning to end and work me into the team immediately. And we did all the IA drills over and over and over again. And, of course, you do them first on paper and then you walk it through and then ultimately do it through the jungle and all that.

That's really, that's a really interesting story because, you know, you think about classically when the new guy, as he joins a unit. That's not the way he's received, you know, but it sounds as though, I mean, there was just no, there was no room in SOG for that kind of bullshit, right? of Hayden you be you know we're going to put it through this in dock or anything it was yeah yeah there's no time for yeah it was yeah you're gonna you yeah my life's gonna depend on your when you write away so i'm gonna teach you everything i know yeah you wear the bray so you're totally qualified to do the work you simply have to know how we do things right you know and of course a lot of people have to you have to do it you have to get in jungle yeah because it's terrifying yeah i don't mean jungle combat it's terrifying especially when you're sneaky peeing for a day two

days or something and you haven't even heard a twig speak but you know and all of a sudden it's an explosion thing and shells and yeah all that you know couldn't you be more quiet you know shoot quietly what so what was your first uh patrol like and if that wasn't your first contact what was your first contact like um i i think i mentioned it well we had locals you know and they weren't that big of a deal you guys had exchange fire or that kind of a thing or have them do the signal shots around you, things like that, or snapping the bamboo sticks, trying to drive you somewhere or they'll letting you know that you're there.

We had that one that I wrote in the book, which was supposed to be just a local, you know, and we almost didn't get out of it, you know. We didn't have any Hueys. So we had King B pilots with the H-34. and King B's are an incredible bunch of people because they lived that helicopter. That's their life, year after year. And they inserted us and stuff.

Ben Hatt was just getting under siege, one of the A camps by the big seizures in Vietnam. The communists hit him with tanks and everything. Well, we were kind of looking for the enemy, looking for trails, base camps, things like that. And the communists were on us all. almost right away. And we were just evading them and all that stuff one after the other. And we would come across trails as wide as your room here, wider than the couch, which a small

truck could go down it, in which there's a blade of grass. It's been used so much. And I remember going on that trail to examine it. And there were footprints and water was still seeping into the footprints. So they were just smack in front of us. and they were just filtering through the area, one after the other. And they were chasing us and all that kind of thing, and having firefight after firefight. And then we knew we were cut off from any LZ,

and we also knew that the communists would be covering every LZ. So the ladders, you know, called Bob Howard in camp, and we said, remember what we built. We need to have you come in with those. and so Bob Howard went out there with his people and they assembled those ladders on the kingbees and they came in and the king bees were not used to him either because they had to be rolled up and so forth

and we barely got on that thing and we were under fire and the chopper was taken off dragging the ladders through the trees almost pulling the chopper down that's happened to me three or four times where we would get tangled up and you know good and well that somebody's going to cut you off with a knife rather than pull down the chopper.

Now, was you were using the ladders, you guys didn't, was this prior to like the sky hooks and the spy rigs and stuff like that? Or was there a reason these ladders were better for you guys than? Sky hooks, the penetrator? I guess I'm thinking about the different, like the different types of rigging systems to get you guys out. Yeah, the sky hook could only take one person. That's right, that's right. And usually you catch a spy, and that was pre-James Bond.

That was something we had that probably Hollywood copied, you know. And then the jungle penetrator, I don't remember us ever having access to it. But I know it was there because on one of our missions, when we found the artillery that was bombing Ben Hett, and they called him that massive airstrike, Doc Padgett told me that they used jungle penetrators to get through the jungle and get weaponry out and a wounded man out. So they existed, but I never saw them. We usually either landed or did the ladder.

Of course, reverse it to coming in. We'd repel in. Never laddered in, but it repelled in and landed in. How did that work? So you just jump on, they come in, half of them, you jump on the ladder. How many of the, I mean, two or three of you? Yeah.

And presumably, you know, the crew chief is signaling you got him. And then the pilot would just take off with you. Kind of like with the rope ladder, you're the best to do it on the end because they can't roll up on you. If you were wounded, the good thing on that is if you got so tired, you couldn't go up any higher, just snap like into one of the rungs.

And they could roll up underneath you and almost be like a cot, which was really great so that was an excellent thing but basically two or three at a time and the rest of us would cover I mean it was the homemade

thing right yeah on one of our missions they have three those cables coming down and I remember on one of them I think it was the one I was just talking about a fire was so intense

that it was cutting through and it cut through one of the three chords oh wow you know so it was pretty pretty heavy be fire. Yeah, because so what we're talking about for anybody not following is we are talking about extraction methods for

troops on the ground, especially when they're in contact. And the helicopters, you know, would not be able to land. And a lot times it was because it was in the jungle. Other times it was simply because they were under fire. But sometimes it was both. But the thing is, is that there were different types of extractions, but

you're talking about having basically a ladder system that the guys would climb up. And then the helicopter can't just take off because the guys are still below the tree line. Right. Right. So the helicopter

our shast says go straight up while under fire. You guys are all under fire before it can like start moving out. Right. And that's the third time I was wounded because we were under tremendous fire and had three ropes coming down.

One of the ropes were shot through. And we were hanging on. two of the other guys were on the other link. I was already wounded. I couldn't tie the knot. But I snapped in. And then we started to go up. But the fire was so heavy.

The pilot kind of panicked. Instead of clearing the trees, he went horizontal. And drug us through the trees, and we tangled. And it almost pulled me in, too. I couldn't, I'd still go to sleep after all these years. Yeah. and banged through the trees and so. Then when we finally hung up,

it was just one of those, you know good well, they're going to cut the ropes, you know, let you fall. Right. And it was just at that moment, I had my one good hand, rifle cradled like that

and cutting as fast as I could. And when it cut through, we sprang into the air, like a bow and arrow. And then they took us to an A-camp where we'd, get off the strings. And I remember he was almost out of fuel

because it was a pretty horrendous battle. And flew us through a storm. So you were cutting himself loose from the entanglement from the tree. Yeah, cutting the limbs off. Before the crew chief cut you. Exactly. Yeah. I wasn't cutting me off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So that was the third time you were wondering.

I mean, so your first patrol, though, before you were ever wounded, Your first patrol was just supposed to be a local thing. But one of the things we've talked with other veterans from MacV. Sog is that headquarters of MacV. Sog was compromised, right? That you guys were going, I mean, you guys were taking it to the enemy, large numbers of enemies, but almost any time you landed, they knew where you were. Because somewhere in the headquarters element,

like in, you know, in Vietnam, though, they had a, they had like Vietnamese and whomever, officials who were feeding all this information to the Viet Cong and the NVA. Right. Were you guys, do you remember being aware at that time or at any time when it came into your awareness? Yeah. We had certain programs that we never told the Vietnamese for that very reason, moles and so forth. and again with Colonel Roe was the big one of the big examples but a lot of times our programs and so forth

we would try to isolate from each other but you know the brotherhood is so strong right you know I remember once those of us in CNC just decided to go down the street to the mic force you call it reaction force just to visit them you know I see our other brothers what they're doing and all that kind of a thing and that was interesting too

because the whole Mike force was out fighting around Ben Hett with the enemy and stuff. This guy that we were visiting is the only guy left, and he was wounded twice, and he was in there with a cook, and there were some people in the compound for guards. But he was the only one that was left, and we visited with him, and he took around through the cheek, and I forget what the other one was, but rough times just visiting each other. I don't know if that answered that question.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So was that your first mission? Was that your first contact? What was that? Because firefights are generally very confusing to begin with. If you don't know exactly where the enemy is, it can be very confusing. You hear fire, you're not sure.

I can only imagine what that's like in a jungle. what is that like for you if you remember that? Kind of like you say, usually you're totally involved. And usually you know the direction. So that answers a lot of questions. The second thing is your leader, your team leader, one, zero. It's kind of a philosophy I've got. It's like if you're the leader and you're under fire,

either platoon or recon team or whatever it is, whatever direction you're being fired, always saw it. Well, the first thing is overcome, you know, their fire as fast as you can, just full blast, full automatic and all the stuff. But your first thing as a leader, because the first one is reflex. Right. Your first thing as a leader is get everybody doing the same thing at the same time. It can be the wrong decision. You can always change it. Yeah. But you need to keep team integrity. So I would just point to my point man. In this case, I would say noi. His name is noi. I say, noi, there. And I give him a direction. And so he would go and the guys would follow and

they would do our immediate action. But we had team integrity then. Right. And so that was my first job. And it's like your immediate action drill is the first thing overcome fire. Right. Then you go into your immediate action drill right away. And if you know it like a reflex, that helps you so much. But then after that, it's like, okay, now what is the situation? am I being assaulted? Am I chased? How many of them are there? Do I turn around and assault them?

Right. Or do I d-de-mound and get out of there? Right. So for your immediate action, it's like for you guys, first thing was to make to like achieve fire superiority. Like get rounds going. Yeah. And then you know, and then you guys are going to kind of assess the situation

and determine what action needs to happen. I mean, how many training iterations do you have to go through with those guys in order to, because if you guys start taking fire and the guy in the back doesn't know where the fire is coming from, obviously he has to have a cool head, right, to see where the, you know, you don't want people firing in a bunch of different directions, right? Right. But that happens for people. And sometimes you don't want them to fire at all. Right.

Flashes and stuff. Sometimes you only use like grenades, you know, because they don't know where it's coming from. Right. And they can be shooting the other way. And a lot of times, too, you close by, you might have a toe pop or a mine that you left. And they fired off, you know, and they might be close enough that you could actually engage them.

But it's better off if you're at RECON, make some distance away from you and let them shoot ever all around themselves in the air, not knowing where you are at all, you know, and then continue the mission. Because you would like to continue the mission if you can, you know, otherwise, you know, the first time you have in contact,

you're gone, you're done. Right. You know, take me home. I want to go my mama, you know. So break contact, continue mission. As a matter of fact, Norm Doney, my team sergeant, by the salt and pepper shakers in the mess hall, had this sign on every single table. It says, take two salt tablets and drive on. And, you know, it's like, I remember talking to a medic.

Same thing. You say, your arm, my arm hurts when I do that. Don't do that. Right, right. I broke this arm. Well, you got two of them, don't you? Yeah, the salt tabs became replaced by Motrin, but I think that that kind of stayed in the middle.

We have a little guest here, a little spider coming down. I just sit, yeah. So what? It's a humigate. Don't eat that. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So how, what was your,

progress with with the recon team after like your first mission and you know like what what how did it go after that i think it was fine it was fine i you wind up being satisfied with what you did um and norm would could trick he's a guy who was not effusive with compliments you know he didn't goof up too bad you know right he he was the ultimate teacher you know my lifetime friend then on the rest of my life. But he was an ultimate teacher. And I used to talk about adventure.

He says, adventures when you make a mistake. Good point. Yeah. That's a great phrase. And things you're talking about are, I mean, you're making them sound easy, but everyone knows how extraordinarily difficult, just fire discipline. Yeah. Right?

I mean, you're coming about knowing when to return fire, knowing when that is not, you know, That's counter to the mission and responding accordingly because you shoot, obviously, it's too late to be told not to. Achieving that kind of discipline, using a, you know, cross-culturally. Not just among your guys is quite, I mean, that's real leadership, right? Yeah. You know, there probably wasn't a lot of yelling and screaming, but you guys got the job done. Yeah, none of that. Never, never, I never heard yelling.

from our people. What was it? Very non-marine. Well, even the Marines, though, they had those successful, very successful cat. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. But, like, how

did that happen? Were there guys who showed up who just temperamentally weren't suited because of how they worked with the indage or how they viewed them? Yeah. I think

I think most of our guys realize that we're here this is our first tour, second tour, whatever it is. These guys have been here 15 years and they've been fighting and all this kind of a thing. And this is their country and they have to live here when we leave. And we have a lot to learn from them as well. One of my things I dislike about officers in particular is they feel they have to shout and all this kind of thing.

I'm in charge. I give the order. I never saw that. With our endage, there was an expertise that was shared. They knew who the leadership was. For one thing, I got the paycheck. But they were very good, extremely good,

very professional and all that kind of a thing. All they needed for me is direction. You know, and they were my friends. I would be invited to their weddings. If they get wounded, I would visit them in the hospital. hospital. Yeah, if they got killed, I would get some people and we take a three-quarter-ton truck and drive to the village and do condolences with the family and see the old man in the

village and all that kind of a thing and put them in the body bags, of course, and all that kind of a thing, you know, but there was, it was like another family way from him. In the book you've got there, I think it's in the second to the last chapter in there. was when I described leaving, leaving the country. And I think when I was reading the book, I almost started to cry because it was so hard for me to say goodbye. And when I was leaving at the gate, I shouldn't even tell you this because I might cry.

But anyway, there's a five-ton truck. And my people were on the bed of that truck, being taken to the airport or someplace to do a mission and stuff. And I could hear, you know, Hansan, Han son, Han son. And they gave me a Mont-yard bracelet, which I never took off. The only reason I don't have it now is that wore so thin. It was thinner than paper. It just fell off.

But they said Han-san, Han-sun. And they gave me their bracelet. But they didn't engrave it because they were several tribes. And they all had different tribal singles. And anyway, to watch. them and look at them and and and uh um bea was one b i e h we all called him beer of course you know and he had napalm took off his upper lip and he always had that sneer shorter than most of them but he was my shadow and to say goodbye to bea and the other ones you know it was so hard for me

yeah and uh remember when they left the gate and went down the road you know i watched them i stood in the road and I watched them until they were just a tiny dot. Yeah. And then as I said in the book, you know, one of the guys must have seen what was happening and he just went up and he says, time to go, Sergeant. Yeah. Dale, we've talked about, you know, the challenges obviously of operating against the enemy, but can you talk a little bit about just the challenges of operating in the jungle itself?

I mean, you're from Minnesota. I mean, it didn't come. come naturally to you, right? I mean, how did you learn? What were the things that you learned? What were the impressions that you have? Hunting skills and so forth carried over. Yeah.

You know, quietly and you know, when to put toe first and heel first. And a lot of times you, quite mad, would clear the way for you and stuff. But basically listening and stopping often. We had sometimes, only could cover one click in a day, a thousand meters and one whole day.

just going so slowly and so quietly and observing everything, you know. And the crazy thing is you could be trying so hard and it's hot and dry or whatever rather than rainy and it'll be hot and dry for a while. And then everything you touch was brittle and word break and you're trying so hard to be quiet and the grass would be loud against your pants only to find out for the last three, four hours you've been following right alongside a high-speed trail. in which there's absolutely no sound, no vegetation on it, and they could have heard you, you know, and you're doing your best.

You know, but it's hard. The biggest thing is going carefully, knowing exactly what's going on around you. And I think in that last mission I mentioned, last mission I mentioned. Are you moving at day or at night or both? If you moved at night, you had to move at night. But you can't be that quiet.

You know, you don't know what you're going to bump into. Right. And there's a lot of parameters you've got to watch for. Like when to eat, when to eat, when to communicate. We were so far behind lines. We were beyond radio range. So we had a radio relay site that occasionally, if you're not too far, they can hear you. Or a covey would come by in the bird dog.

And he would go into the next valley or something. I'm sorry, a covey airplane. And it would check on us maybe morning and night. And that was nice. And it wouldn't fly directly over you. Just maybe the next valley, you could hear it. And you would have a prepared message. And it was called a one-time pad.

I don't know if you guys had that. Yeah, the old, I've seen them. Yeah, yeah. We had one-time pads. We made the code message. And you never did it in the R-O-N. They were made overnight. And you had it already, and you could hear them.

And you'd make contact. And it was such a thing that whoever was doing the radio would lay on the ground with a tarp over the head. And they wouldn't even whisper it. It would be air. They would just air it. And it would be one-time code. You say who and so forth. I-Cack.

And then you would say the codes. And it would all be five letters and stuff. It would be team okay and all the stuff or one casualty or whatever it is, you know. And give the signal. And then you move. because they might have our radio direction finding and things like that. Never did it as you went into the RON because they could find you and follow the RON, you know, and you never ate in the RO.N because they could smell it maybe.

So you did that stuff before you went in there. How did you live? I mean, water, food, because we're talking, we largely, a lot of our listeners are like Dave and I, Afghanistan, Iraq. So, you know, we got into kind of a luxury. of John Halls. Yeah. And so it's very interesting.

I've, for me and for listeners to think about, I mean, this was a, that was a huge logistics burden that you didn't need, so you had to.

Yeah, and basically, we ate well, steak on Sunday, or water buffalo, whichever it was, you know, and we would make our own rations.

That was Mr. Baker, who invented all these things, you know, the kind where you, you carried it in your pocket and then you put water in it and you put it in your pocket and it would be body temperature yeah oh yeah and he invented those and you would have them all pre-prepared before you went on the trip you know and and maybe an hour before you're going to

eat you put the water in and put it in your pocket and then you would stop and squeeze it into your mouth um all the time you're watching and looking and um so sog had its own rations that you weren't using them. Yeah. Yeah. And water, was that a, you know, customarily probably in the jungle wasn't? Yeah, I carried only one canteen.

And our unit was a little different on my recant team. It's the way I did it all the time, but I see all the movies and stuff, and I don't know how they could carry. To put it in a perspective, I carried 600 rounds of ammunition, you know, 600 rounds. Like 5-5, 6th or round magazines?

Yeah. Wow. 500 runs. But if you figure the cyclic rate of a car 15 is 850 rounds a minute, you got enough ammunition for 50 seconds. Right. You know, so you better be careful and carry lots of ammunition,

especially if you can't get resupplied. Yeah. Because that will tell me where you're at. Yeah. But in order to carry them, I used canteen covers and had six canteen covers. We kept our back completely empty, so you never took your web gear off during your,

mission ever. And the front right, I could get eight, we take the landers out. I could get eight grenades in that one because Donie, my team later, didn't want grenades out like they do in Hollywood because he says the communists could shoot at them. Yeah. Especially white frosters. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, eight grenades. And then I had three of them where you laid two magazines down flat, and that raised the rest of them up a little bit. They had seven or eight upright. bullets out, shells down. And so we had that. 20 round.

Yeah. And one minute. Yeah. Yeah. Those had to be 20. Yeah. And then. That's a great story though.

I have to get that. Yeah. And then one canteen. And then the other one was the RT radio, which is a survival radio. And I think we had a couple other survival things in there. And that was attuned to every aircraft in Southeast Asia. had that frequency. So when you hit that thing,

everybody heard you. You know, I don't know if you had the same. Yeah, I think they were like emergency, like there are the, I can't remember what they call now. Yeah. But what, I mean,

what's funny about this, what's interesting is when you think in the 50 or so years since Dale was, it's longer than 50 years, right? but since they've been doing this, how technology has leapt and leapt, you know, on communications. That's why I find it's one of the things I find so fascinating

that what you and your guys were doing was essentially no different than, say, when you read about the chindits in Burma. Yes. You know, I mean, you were much smaller teens, but the principles and what you had available to you were pretty much the same. Right. and I don't know if they've improved on the radio, but Rick 25 was 25 pounds.

Oh, yeah, they've improved a lot. Yeah. Okay. That was heavy. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you mentioned your car 15 and how much. It was interesting because you talked about carrying a Swedish K at first,

and somebody turned, who turned you off to that? Well, it was required. Okay. Yeah, because since we're over the fence. Right. in communist territory, and we're supposed to be in Laosur Cambodia or North Vietnam. We were sterile, which meant had to have foreign weapons. So I carried an AK-47 once, and in the firefight, it was so hot, the oil sizzled.

You know, and then I carried the Swedish K, which is a 36 round magazine, 9mm, and we had a silencer on the end of it. And then a heat plate, because it would get hot too. and it was totally silenced. The only thing was is the bolt going back before you can hear the bolt. But one of the sad things about it was

the cycling rate was so slow that you could actually, full automatic, you could do an individual shot. So it would go, bup, pop, pop, pop, pop, instead of your AK, which is very fast. And then John Plaster

had a mission once. And he said, that it wouldn't penetrate the leaves. Right, the 9mm. Yes, the 9mm. Yeah. And so he went to Colonel Lap. And I was just ready to go on a mission with my Swedish K.

And Colonel Lab says, yes, I think the communists have captured enough of ours that ours are sterile now. Enough of the Car 15. Yeah. So that's okay. So we switched to the Car 15, which we reconfigure your gear. Yeah. And you actually had a chance. But the downside being now the magazine capacity, right?

Yeah. The first round. Outmagged. Yeah, the first round was a 30. And so when we take the first round, we throw it down our shirt. You know, so after that, I could change magazines in two seconds. Yeah. Nobody else could because I'm left-handed.

And the AB 16 and a car 15 is designed for a right-handed person. And the magazine releases on that side. Right. You know, and the bolt retriever is on that side. Well, if you're left-handed, I was strong enough. I didn't have to have the rifle leave my shoulder. This left hand could release the thing while I'm going for the new magazine, and I could throw it in, and then the magazine retriever is on the hand.

So two seconds, and I'm up for bear again, which is really good. So the first one is third year round. After that sustained firefight, you're just going after magazines, one after the other. Yeah. And, of course, you don't want full amatic unless you have. after you want to conserve. You got 50 seconds worth of ammo. And you're carrying everyone.

Yes. You talk about the Brightline mission before you went to the One Zero school? Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah. I never got committed into the ground, but it was on them. And we were ready to go a couple times, you know.

But Brightlight as a whole, we would take one A team, not an A team, one recon team, and they would do a week. and we trade off. Okay. And the point was, if you had a team in trouble and you needed like a body, you had to get a body or they need extra bodies or they're not going to get out, something like that, we would be committed. So the choppers would come in, pick us up at bright light, and then we would get on the shoppers. They would insert us right in the middle

of the firefight to help them out, help them get out, whatever was needed at that time. And it was kind of interesting because it was docked toe. Yeah, d'Acteau, which was a three-month, I think it was a three-month battle. The communists really tried to take Dacto. And I think Fourth Infantry was there and some other people. It was a real horrendous vital. Well, the place that we wound up was we had a little tower and three buildings. And one of those buildings was the mortuary.

And that's where we stayed. You know, and we had concrete floors. They all slanted to the middle where there was a drain. And the walls only went up halfway so that for smell, they could just drop the tarp on the top, you know. And that was where we were for the week. It would be hot, you know, and no showers and things like that. You could monitor the radios and wait to be called. Yeah.

And then, do you know why they never called you for that battle or why? They would either get out or no missing bodies or something like that. Yeah. So if they didn't need you, there's no point in putting you in, you know. Yeah. But it was close a couple times. Yeah. Yeah.

Okay. And so you, as soon as you showed up, you said you wanted to go to one zero school and then you find yourself going to one zero. And what is one zero school and what was that like? Yeah. Usually when you went to one zero school, you figure why do I need to go to one zero school? Because I've been in the field three, four, five, six months. And I've been doing this, you know, and some of them. were actually one zero's you know but you were assigned to go there i think regular people going

into um vietnam had a different uh recondo school they went to yeah and then the rest of us in cnc we went to one zero school which i think was three weeks and it's very very intense everything you needed to know about anything whatsoever um and then they had a mission at the end of it all and it would be an all green beret mission the only All Green Beret mission that it was ever on. And it was interesting. And it wasn't like Robin Sage. It was like a legit mission.

No, it was the real thing. Yeah. Yeah. And that's the story and it's on. I don't have to say it long. But we did a mission for the Australians and in their sector. And they had a section of Vietnam. And so they had a mole in their headquarters.

And the Vietnamese seemed to know. everything they were doing. So when we went to get our briefing for the mission, a three-quarter ton-tuk took us, and we went out of Long-Ton. There's Long-Ton and Long-Ton. Long-Ton is that gigantic battle the Australians had. Long-Ton is where one-zero school is.

It's almost the same, and not too far apart either. But we got into this three-quarter-ton-tuck, and we went down all these abandoned roads and stuff and kind of nervous country in a way. And then we went across some fields, and there in the middle of a bunch of trees on the edge of the field was a big canvas tent and Australians had a secret headquarters in there. And so we went in there to be debriefed and a major in the Australian Army

swaggered in with a swagger stick and he had exactly horizontal under his arm, had that thin mustache, had the knee socks and the shorts. I could have said, you're Australian, aren't you? And they have a hard time, along with the British, letting down, to be a human, you know. But he says, I think I've got one for you, Yakes, you know, in this mission. But anyway, what it turned out was that the communists had so infiltrated it that the rubber companies had made a deal with the Viet Cong. that if you don't bomb our rubber plantations, we'll turn the other way

when you have your headquarters in the rubber plantations. So we had to deal with the communist well, the communist headquarters for that part of Vietnam was hidden in those rubber plantations and this major wasn't having any of it. He wanted me to go find him.

So I was a point man on that element. There were five of us. And I think it was a three-day mission or something like that. and it never saw so many booby traps in my life. Just everywhere. You couldn't go anywhere without movie drops. You know, just you get the sunlight a certain way.

Is that a spider wet? No, it's a wire that's heading to an empty can with a grenade in it. You know, just everywhere, you know. And it was really thick, and I was on my belly crawling. It was so thick. And got to this one spot. I just knew something was wrong. and I got to this one spot

and just inching my way forward and I smelled the guy's breath. It was a nook mom. I don't know if you know what nook mom is. It's rice water. Like soy sauce in a way. Yeah, so what they put it with fish. Yeah, like the fish sauce.

They hang up the fish. Yeah, yeah. Very distinctive. I smelled his breath. And I said, that guy is close. And I just didn't move until I knew where he was. And finally he moved. I could see his shadow.

And I do right where he was, and it's kind of an average spot. But I don't think he knew I was there, you know. So anyway, I, you know, put my hand behind me and give the danger signal and all that stuff, you know. And we slowly started back. And I believe in prayer. I do. And I, there's no way I can go backwards as quietly as I went frontwards, close enough to hear, smell somebody's breath. And not have him hear me.

That is close. Yeah. And I said, God, help me not make any noise to cover our retreat. And no sooner did I say amen in my brain that a jet took off and flew right over our head. And it was time to turn around, tell the people, you know, and we slid out of there. And another story there too is. So you slid out and you slid out, went back, but then you knew. Yeah, I just mark it down in my book.

This is where they're covering things. They were using the French roads and so forth. They do all of their, you know, moving supplies and troops and things like that. That's a really interesting story because I've heard that we smell, you know, of milk, of dairy products. I mean, Americans, Westerners, things we eat, deodorant, all this, that other cultures can smell us. there's another, you know, Lessons Learned. Doni was one of those guys at the end of every mission. You wrote down Lessons Learned, you know.

And the major said that there's only one caveat to that mission is that apparently they lost a couple choppers and their headquarters did not want to lose any more choppers. So they said that we had to recon all the way around the LZ or they wouldn't come and get us. That's crazy. Yeah, we've talked, you know, we've talked to, you know, we've talked to. other guys who, you know, who have talked about, like, they could, a lot of times they could, they could only rely on the king bees that, or, you know, that, exactly. Because a lot of American units just were not, they weren't, they weren't going to do it. They wanted to turn, make us look bad.

So anyway, going into this thing on the, going all around the, LZ, I thought, this thing is so, such a big LZ over here that by the time I got all the way around it, enemy could move in it where I just started, you know. And it turned on it was an LZ that was shaped like an hourglass and a narrow spot in the middle. And I thought, well, the logical thing, if this guy's worried about having a helicopter shot down, is for me to monitor the middle when I can see the two halves.

And so that's where I set up. Well, duh, I never thought, and you probably would do it again anyway. but an enemy that needed to go on the other side doesn't go to cross the middle of it he's going to cross the narrow part so he's not exposed in a danger area and he went right across the top of me and so i i was ready to shoot you know and we slid into the muck and i i told i gave my fingers i said five seconds you know and it was going like that and uh this was so these guys were We're walking towards you. Yeah, I could see them coming because the sun was showing. I could see some reflections and stuff. But I could see they had a point element, so they're disciplined,

eight or nine and ten guys in the point element. And then the bigger unit behind that, maybe a company or more. So anyway, when the point element was getting to me, I knew I could take the point element. There's eight or ten of them. And I think two or three of them were Viet Cong. dressed in black the other ones were NVA the Viet Cong had the rifles over their shoulder and the others had the guns out so I was gonna take out the NVA first

and then I would go to the Viet Cong but I went ahead to I was hoping they would go by when I had to I would open up on them I take out the NVA first and then go to the Viet Cong you know and the same thing the same thing happened you know I got my people we slid into the muck and hoped I And it was, the field was a little bit higher than the muck, so I could kind of peek up in the grass. And just about the time I was going to go like three, two, playing went over, you know, and covered that.

Well, anyway, the point down that took off running, and they ran past me, and then I could hear the other guys trampling, the big bunch, you know, and I thought, oh boy, this is a little bit more than I want to take, but you got no choice. And I already had my game plan. And I'd empty my rifle out and I'd start tossing grenades over the lip so I wasn't exposed.

And maybe I could take them out that way, you know. And anyway, they all took off running. And I waited down there for about five, six minutes, and I peaked up above, there's nobody in sight. And then I wanted to make sure. And so we did a recon to where they were heading. And I found an empty leg full of rice, you know, how they did that. And I think it was a magazine. And I kind of was laughing because here's some NVA going to a target without a magazine in his rifle.

Yeah. You know, but it's interesting because it's a lessons learned. You did what you think is the right thing. Right. You probably would do it again. Right. But it's also the thing that didn't turn out then. Yeah.

You know, you talked about, you know, like doing the full circle. And like, you know, some of the people we've talked to, especially talking to Roger Lockshire who was, who is 100, he was on, you know, he was with the 101st. He was a doorgunner and crew chief. Oh, yes, good man. Yeah. I like him. But, you know, he talked about the problems that you guys would have with American pilots,

where because you guys were really in the shit a lot of times that outside of these guys, like, like Scher and the others like him, and then the Vietnamese King B pilots, did you have a bit of a contentious relationship with American air support? Usually they showed up well. For one thing, we invited them for steak night. They got to be a part of our people. Yeah. No contensions.

Usually when the Vietnamese pilot team, it was when they, for some reason, the Americans went and they wanted to show us up. But yeah, there's a good point on Mike Buckland mentioned at one time when he was coming from a mission about a pilot coming in and how rough we had it on the ground. He says that he was always amazed because when they came in to get us on the LZ was the most tense, tense, dangerous,

adrenaline-filled moment of their lives. But when we came out of the jungle beyond the plane, it was a sense of relief. It's like what we had gone through it was so much worse than the chopper coming in to get us, you know. Yeah. Yeah, because they do. They have to sit there.

They totally exposed hovering while they're just soaking in fire. Yeah. You know, you guys were running a lot of cross-border operations. So I don't imagine you had a lot of interaction with like big army or the larger military. Right. But were there ever times when they were ever very beneficial to you? guys or very like a detrimental to you guys? We could use their artillery for support if they were close enough.

We used that. Other than that, we really didn't have much. It's not that we ignored them or didn't like them. It's that we were just so busy with our own things, you know. We would see them at the PX or something like that. Yeah. And the rubber plantation thing you mentioned, like that was a, that's kind of a big, kind of a big deal that really didn't get talked about much.

The fact that DuPont and whoever else it was had these rubber plantations that the Americans agreed not to attack. And so the Vietnamese, the NBA set up full camps in these things. Right. Was that, you know, like if you guys, I don't know if this was ever, because you mentioned about for the Australians how they wanted to go after this. But was that ever an issue for you guys personally outside of that? About security the LZ. Yeah, no, no, not the LZ, but like the rubber plantations and stuff like that. No, we were too far north.

Okay. We were the hills, central highlands, which was actually mountains and forests and stuff, less jungle. You had it down low, but yeah. Yeah, a completely different environment. Okay. Yeah. Okay.

You also talk about Colonel Rialt. Yes. Curr and Ro. Yeah. Ro. Ro. Oh, okay. Colonel Ro.

Yeah. It's spelled Ro. Okay, Ro. Okay. I apologize. Can you, can we talk about that now? Yeah. The biggest thing is to get the backstory first.

Sure. The thing. We had a project. We had many projects over there. One of them was called Gamma, G-A-M-M-M-A. And, of course, I minored in Greek. It's one of the Greek letters, gamma. And it was kind of like SOG in a sense because they had all these teams, they had recon, they had stay behind, they had the spies, all that kind of a thing.

And it was mainly behind enemy lines and denied areas and so forth. Project Gamma was really well done. And it was sponsored, of course, by the CIA. And at one point, they were responsible for 75% of all intel. for all of Vietnam. That's how productive it was. But at some point, they got a mole in there. And they special forces kept secret from the Vietnamese because of security. It was a productive, good program. But anyway, somehow they got a mole. And the guy turned out he was actually hiring, he was infiltrated so highly into Gamma that he was actually hiring people and sending

them out on the missions and all that kind of a thing only to have them betrayed doubled ambushed captured entire units would be wiped out or they would find an extremely lucrative target with all kinds of stuff in there and then they would send it a company only to find that hours before everything was taken away and moved you know and there's a huge controversy spy network that's involved. So anyway, CIA Special Forces finally got to the place that even though that was 75% of the intelligence, it wasn't worth the casualties. And so they canceled the program. Well, anyway, so the people went to various places. And then a line unit in Vietnam raided a Viet Cong unit.

And it was a good mission. And they killed the people. They dispersed them. And they got into the headquarters building of it. And as they were going through, they found pictures of the guy who was doing all the buy mark and everything. They found them all. And he was in the communist headquarters being awarded, decorated. And he was a hero over there. They found out who he was. So anyway, special forces wanted to get him. They wanted to know how far the infiltration was and all that kind of a thing. But how do you get him back? So they invented a new program. like Gamma, oh, we got this new program. So he comes by and he volunteers.

He's going to help. As soon as he comes into the camp, they arrest him. And they give them sodium pentothal. They give them the polygraph tests. They ask them questions, all this stuff. They don't torture. We don't. As far as I know, I've never seen torture by an American.

But anyway, he fails at all. And in anger, he says, we are not going to help you Americans. And so now they got the problem, what to do with this guy. And they can't give them to the Vietnamese because they didn't tell the Vietnamese the program existed. And so the logical thing is to give them to the CIA. The CIA had a couple programs and kind of like our special forces, they changed the name every once in a while. It was called Phoenix, Project Phoenix. And then it was called Prue, PRU, stood for a provisional reconnaissance unit.

And the total job of that is to eliminate the fifth column. And two to 400 Vietnamese non-military were executed through the CIA. And the interesting thing is, is that a scream berets would have been not entitled to POW status because we were sterile. You know, and so they, the same thing. For them, we were kind of a fifth column. We could have been executed as well. So anyway, we go to the CIA, whose job it is to get rid of these people. Well, the CIA doesn't want him because he already said he's not going to help us and work with us.

So there's no value in him. So they said, we don't want them. So special forces says, well, what do you want us to do? He says, liquidate with extreme prejudice, of course. And of course, you know the three levels. Liquidate with prejudice. liquidate with extreme prejudice. That means execute.

Liquidate with prejudice is where you ruin the reputation. It's always ineffective, you know, that kind of thing. So Special Forces is tasked with killing this guy. So I enjoyed writing in the book because I kind of make it almost like Sherlock Holmes because I got the guys in the wharf area in the harbor and stuff, and they're going in the dead of night,

and they're getting this guy with this inert body and a bag who's still alive. and you know the weather-beaten windows and buildings and stuff you know and the rats running across the wharf and a guy coughing in an empty building of TB and stuff

and they get into a skiff in the harbor and they go out to sea and when they get to a certain place they lift his body high and up out of the guaddles of the boat and they shoot him twice and they had with a high standard I think it was shoot him twice

in the head and kill him, put them back in the sack and dump them overboard to where the sharks are below and in the story. But somehow Colonel Abrams, or General Abrams, hears it. I don't know how we did. Probably the CIA did it. So Abrams goes to the CIA, yeah, the CIA throws us under the bus. Oh, the Green Berets got him. And so Abrams goes and he arrests the commanding officer of all green berets in Vietnam be your car in part in Cambodia or I mean Iraq and Afghanistan and so he arrests the colonel to major and six other guys so he puts eight of them in the stockade and Longbin jails and they're in conics is five feet by eight feet long I traded like criminals and a long long bin by the way it was notorious

wasn't it okay yeah it's lived beyond its years Yeah. So anyway, he's going to try him. And Abrams does not want him to go to the States where the stories get out and where he gets a fair trial. He wants them hung right there. And he's going to put the foot on all special forces. I'm the boss. He wants to hang him?

No, euphemistically. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. At this stage. Yeah. But he basically wants like a military tribunal there without. Absolutely. Committed him to prison for a long time and all the guys and stuff.

So anyway, we were in Cents. Special Forces is really furious. And the irony is that Kern Roe had only been in charge for two months. Right. And his decision was made before he even got there. So anyway, we let the word out, and I helped in it. But we decided we were going to let Abram. had his little phony officers in our camp in S-1 and so forth.

And I saw a couple of us were talking in the back in the parade field. And I saw there's two officers out having a smoke. And so I said loud enough that they could hear, but not loud enough that they would think I wanted them to hear that we're ready to go spring Colonel Roe out of jail. And I said they've got 2,000 mott yards ready out of the mic force. And I said all the recon teams are ready. And I says, it's going to be hard to shoot another American. Don't know if they're going to shoot back at us, but we're going to go get them.

And the word was out for quite a while. We're going to go get them. So the next day, those captains must have said something because the word came out immediately that he was shipped to the states. Turns out it was a lie. But that was the word that was let out. So we had no target to spring them. But the fact that they believed that. Yes.

You were going to do that. Yeah. Just the illustration of Abrams. Which enters into our mission, last mission, where we got the mission, got the information that exonerated him because we proved that it was a spy that he got. So it's interesting stuff, you know. It's fascinating. And it's fascinating how the information got to him.

you know, how the information got to him, but also wasn't conveyed that he was a spy and they had information, right? Yeah. And then why wasn't he open to it? Like he didn't ask, you know, Roe and those guys? We actually know the name of the guy, the Special Forces. I mean, the CIA head of the CIA threw us under the bus, you know, which is kind of crazy because we would kind of give them names for the fifth column, you know,

We worked together, and we were actually payrolled, just special forces, this is payrolled by the CIA. You know what's disturbing about that story? I mean, I sit here and go, yeah, it's unbelievable. But at different times, different places, we've all seen that, right? We've seen, we've seen guys with outsized egos, very, very envious and jealous of an organization that is doing good things for the same course, but outside the purview of their control. and so instead of saying

instead of having a collaborative approach it is resentment and you need all the tools and he's a conventional the sad thing is the commander it was a tanker in the war

and probably a Marine you know no and the mindset is conventional warfare Well, the whole point of Vietnam is that we wanted to have conventional warfare and when we have asymmetrical warfare and you're the other guy. That's right. It undermines the platform that has brought him to everything that has brought him to this point in his career and now this is a very different.

Yeah. Well, the other side has to use guerrilla warfare because on a conventional warfare, they would die. They know better than they'd be it. Right. So they had the guerrilla warfare. which is why special forces had to spread out and have all the A camps and all of this. We were fighting guerrilla warfare. And it was a mindset that he couldn't adjust to. And the communists did conventional warfare a few times. And I met once with the French and did Ban Fu. With General Yap.

And this is a story that doesn't fit perfectly with what we're talking other than a generality. but General Yap, the North Vietnamese general, thought that we have enough resources and stuff. We can surround the French at Daim Mufu and maybe win. The French thought, well, this is our opportunity because now they're all in one spot, we can wipe them out. And it didn't quite go. But here's the backstory that most people don't realize

is that while this was going on, Korea was going on. And so France begged the United States, don't sign an armistice because that will free up all the Chinese to help them at Denden Fu. Right. Yeah. And so what we did is we have no love for the French

because of World War II and all this stuff. I mean, they didn't fight well. The marquee was such a small percentage of the population. One in 10,000. So we deliberately signed the armistice for Korea and two million Chinese went over to help General. Yeah. Wow.

Yeah, I didn't. Yeah, the time, that's, I hadn't thought of that, because the armistice was signed, I forget one month, in 1953, and Dean Ben Fu, I mean, was simmering from 1953, but the big, the culmination was 1954. Which freed them up, yeah. Yeah. And so that was the first one. Well, the communists, if they think they can win us conventionally, they'll do it. So, so they, it wasn't, been, it yet was, wasn't quite doctal. One of the other big sieges. and they thought they could do it. And so they surrounded us, they had the tanks. And of course, oh, I know it was KSan. Kaysan. Kaysan, and they hit the Special Forces camps first with the tanks.

And then it was Kaysan, except it didn't turn out like they hoped. They kind of lost. So the next big one they wanted was Manhattan. You know, they did it. They attacked many Special Forces camps. But the other way that they could get good press coverage is if they said a military, base at such and such was overrun. Right. But if they say

12 green rays was overrun, it doesn't get the mileage. But Ben Hat had a firebase as well. And so they thought that's the next big one. And the people that were fighting some of the other sieges went over to Ben Hat. They were attacked in the morning with 10

tanks. And we told them the intelligence that are people. And they said, no, they have no tanks. And they said, you're hearing road building. equipment, you know. And so. Yeah. And so they got attacked by all these tanks and stuff. So a lot of things emerged on the basis of that.

A lot of our missions and so forth when we skipped over, but then we go to Colonel Rowe and that mission, which is one mission later. Yeah. Yeah. But anyway, that's I diverted with when we talk conventional. We're getting to that was the

general. And he can't think other than in that mindset of conventional warfare so special forces doesn't fit into his matrix right you know and so he we're a nuisance you know get rid of those people we want and the other thing was is that um when you take the special forces people you were taking the highest uh 10 percent of the intelligence which is their officer corps yeah same thing with the foreign legion that you are or even if it's not completely true a sense that you're taking right from the same pool and thus diminish it for them In the Marine Corps, we certainly dealt with that when MArsoc was formed.

And that was the resentment was you're taking all of our good guys. The French was the same thing. Their big military school, the top 10% went foreign legion. The next 10% went to the airborne. So they think, well, if you didn't have those Green Berets were on, we'd have some strong officers. So developing strong officers. the kinds that he had.

So what, so all that was going on, you guys, what happened after the Roe incident? Yeah. And that kind of went into our last mission before I went into companies and the other stuff, you know. Donie was gone by then.

And I was my roommate and, I want to say, Jim Morris. No, Joe Morris was gone. We had a strap hanger, Bobby Garcia, the three of us, and four Vietnamese. We went behind lines. The target name was Delta 50.

Delta 50. Lima 50. I'm sorry, been many years. Lima 50 was the name of the target. So we were way behind lines. And it's pretty crazy because when we land, we infiltrate, get off the chopper. We'll get off that LZU, use the helicopter noise or something, get off that LZ because that's a danger area.

They're going to come and sit and wait for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, and half hour and see if we need to be picked up again, you know, if they're right on us, you know. So anyway, I had the radio then and it was good. So we said, good day, send off all the assets and they went home, you know. So we started moving and within a half hour, they were on us. And we were in steady combat until the next afternoon

when we got picked up. And we started getting moving. And I remember this one place, we were moving, and it was, we were so quiet. I mean, you couldn't hear even a breath. You know, it was just absolutely quiet. And we stopped, you know, for, you know, how you do a listening stop or whatever. We stopped. And we had trackers right beside us, you know.

And I was back with my tail gun or blah. And here in the length of the room, we had enemy trackers, you know. And so, we fired him up and killed the first tracker. And Bob turns to me, he says, Hunson, Hanson, Hensan, him die. We think him die, you know. And he says, but two men, two men, you know, and no can't see, no can see, you know.

And we're looking, look, and we know there's two of them there. And we can't find him, and then Bob Garcia comes running over there. And he's looking, you know, and finally he sees his feet underneath some branches. So he fires him up with an M79 grenade launcher, and bops them. and then for that point on they're on us I mean the brush is cracking they're chasing us

they got dogs for a day and a half dogs barking and chasing us and all that stuff and we had CS powder you know and it would sprinkle that on our trail and the dogs would sniff that and they'd ruin them for a while at least you know

and then you could hear them online you're just online trying to get us you know but we were in the headquarters and and it got progressively worse after that, you know. And we would, again, the leadership thing, you know, get everybody doing the same thing at the same time.

And wordly said, just gave it direction, you know, and the point man heads that way, and we all go, and we break contact. And once you break contact, you know, maybe change mission, change direction again and start maneuvering, and they'll find you again. And it was like that over and over and over again. And then we got to a place where we had a trail crossing us.

And all of a sudden there's a whole bunch of people on the trail right in front of us. So we fire them up. You know, and I don't know how many we killed. But I ran forward. And there were three of them, right smack in front of me with their AKs. And so we're trading slugs, you know. And I put two of them down and guess what? Have to change magazines.

I reach to change magazines. And the guy's got 10 more rounds. So he opens full on. and he gets me in the hand. And it blows my fingers off. Essentially, this one was just a piece of string holding. I had it in the palm of my. Your right hand.

Oh, you're left-handed. Yeah. So I wouldn't lose it, you know, and it blew the fingers on, ten nails off and the ends of them. And it blew the knuckle out of this, you know. And so, man, I'm trying to change magazines. I'm getting a finger stuck in between them and, you know, and it's flopping around, you know.

Finally, I get the magazine change. And I had one of my Vietnamese, and I think there's three of us engaged him finally and put the third guy down, you know. And so Ken Worthley, another Minnesota guy, ran over and we put an ace bandage around my hand real quick. And I just had the tip of my little finger, sicking out, and that fingernails blown back or, you know, in my thumb, you know, and that's how I had to fight the rest of the time. And again, you just break in contact, go, break contact, and ambush your back trail, you know, everything. So you're still off to your target at this point, right?

Well, the target is 10, 10 meters or 10 clicks by 10 clicks. You know, not a specific thing, but it's just looking for trails, bunkers, you know, anything like that, intelligence. Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I thought this was. Yes. And it is.

And it is, too. Because it winds up being sort of serendipitous because we're praying, actually, several of us were Christians. We pray for Colonel Rowling, some justice to be done. done and what can be done, you know, and all that stuff, you know. So anyway, we're fighting and all this stuff. And finally we get into an RON and, you know, do the sit-wrap. And we said we're going to continue the mission. So I'm still wounded.

And we're still going to continue this mission with my hand like it is. And we get into an R-O-N position on the side of a hill. And I don't know. to what extent you've experienced this in your war, but you can, you know, half a dozen of you guys spread out. The fight I'm fighting here is not the fight on the other end. You can be finding a completely different thing.

On my end, I could hear trucks. You know, the Hoechie Men Trail is going right by. One of the forks is going by, and I can hear our engines, you know, and I can hear the tailgates and stuff. And I can see the lights, like the moon rising over the top of the hill, you know, just slightly, you know. And boy, they're lining up on us like crazy. There's hundreds of them at that time.

At the end, they figured 2,000 trying to kill us, you know. And so anyway, you know, trying to memorize the area, you know, how it gets pitch black. If you move at all, everything's gone. You never stay just like that. And memorize what's in front of you, you know. And I thought it was kind of worthless, but I had four Claymore mines in front of me. And I had the clickers of four Claymore mines in front of me. And so I just had those where I could get to them.

My hand touching them had something solid underneath them so I could blow all four of them. And that's two. But you're essentially one-handed at this point. Yeah, the other one is there, but judicious use of it, you know. And anyway, I'm here. I hear him snapping. I hear it down on the road and I can hear them snapping and stuff. And my man Buddha, Ba, it was Buddhist, you know, and I always had this gold Buddha around

his neck and when things were really bad, boy, and he was pretty calm, but when it was really bad, well, he'd take that Buddha and put it in his mouth and if he got killed with Buddha in his mouth, he's going to heaven. He teased me about Christianity and, oh no, Buddha, him number one. think Jesus number one, Buddha number one, look here, you know, put him in his mouth, you know. But anyway, he comes to me, he says, Bukovici, Bukovici, you know, and you can just hear your clothes.

But I can hear them coming up the hill, and then I hear those dogs. And I let the other guy on the other side of me know. And so I'm here with my hands on those clickers, and I say, God just plug the noses of those dogs, you know, And that enemy force, I don't know how many hundreds there were, but they went right through my position and the dogs never smelled us. Wow. And they just went right through us, you know.

And anyway, the next morning we started trying to make out, you know, continue the mission. And as we're going down, we found another high-speed trail. We made up along the trail and a bunch of NBA come down this trail. and we fired them up and killed everybody actually killed every single one of them but in front of me there were three that went down

and I ran out on this site Garcia and Ken Wardley ran up to me too and my tail gunner blah and he looked at them and he said them not NVA

them not NVA them Chinese they're tall haircuts, the whole kind of a thing. Stuff you're supposed to memorize when you're 11F, you know, all the details. And they had a satchel. And in that satchel, it was wads of money.

There was orders. There were lists of names. And I forget it was. There's a Tokorov pistol. And there's two ID tags for GIs. Finanzet. Yeah. And it was a, it was a,

incredible. They said it was the largest intelligent flying at the Vietnam war by any small unit. It was a senior officer too, wasn't it? You'd killed a senior officer? Yes, and it were two colonels, and the highest ranking people ever killed behind lines.

Did you ever find out if those ID tags for the U.S. soldiers were those soldiers missing? Yeah. We didn't know. All we know is their ID tags shown up in Cambodia. Right. Yeah, and we went over there and being level enough. You know, we take everything we can for intelligence.

We took this stuff, his rifle, and we undressed them, and they're shooting us. Bullets are going like crazy, and there's rockets going off in the trees. We undress them. We take his pants. We take his shirt, his shoes, his rifle, a piece of hair, all that stuff. Because they will look at his gun, they'll look at that, and I'll say that stock came out of Czechoslovakia.

The cotton that was grown for, this is clothes, was grown here. It was textiled in this place. All the intelligence is there. It's funny, the things you remember, but I remember undressing him, and he wasn't full of blood. He must have just instant death. But I could see all the bullet holes, but when we would pull on the clothes,

I see the blood rise like a dull rod, didn't pour out. It just rose a crazy-looking thing. And then when the leg would go down and it would sink back and all, I said, boy, I've got to have nightmares about that. You know, and so anyway, we get all this stuff, and they're after us big time, you know. And then we make radio contact with FOB because we hear it in them. There's no point to go into a one-time pad because they know where we're at.

And they give instructions to an LZ. and we start making it for the LZ and we are hit big time and I go through three rifles mine gets shot in two anyway we're just going through them like crazy and ammunition and all of stuff

but at this stage are you the only one who's been wounded on the team? Yeah one of the the Vietnamese was wounded slightly and then I got wounded but you're being hit three times by this yeah if I count dragged through the trees as the time under fire you know. So then anyway, we start getting to the LZ and they really hit us. I mean, rockets are artillery. I mean, everything you can imagine. The B-40 rockets, you know, they fire them into the trees. They explode in the trees. Thisrapnel comes down, you know. And of course, the small arms fire. They're just assaulting us like crazy. And weirdly said, I covered the other end. You know, so I ran down to the other end and I'm firing. It's interesting.

Because the Covey writer was a guy who was shot three times with AKs. It's another story. And you're going to have to guide me back where it was because I'm old and I forget. But a guy I prayed for in combat and he and his partner were in a life and death situation. And I was praying for him. And NVA came up with AK-47 and the shot point blank, got him three times in the chest, got the other guy three times in the chest. And when we got him out, we saw him get out of the helicopter. No blood.

and the guy standing up and I looked at him and I was in shock and he says I know Dale it's your prayers and he opened up his shirt and the welts were that the bullets went through the cloth stopped at his skin the same thing where the other guy and that one ended funny too

because I'm walking and dazed across the compound and it was a really successful mission because the helicopter flew over it probably wasn't 50, 75 feet high and that helicopter did a victory roll

and I swear to you a helicopter flying upside down you know normally only does that once yeah yeah yeah make for a landing so anyway we got these guys we're on the LZ and they're attacking us big time you know and I'm shooting

down and the cubby right now is just talking about the guy who shot three times became a covey writer he was the cover writer that day and and for people who don't know the cubby rider the cubby is like a little small scout right a little scout aircraft yeah and it's just two guys right a pilot and a copilot or a writer they're the brains and the director the stage director for everything you know so i'm on the other end he told me i went to the school of a school after the war and he was on the cadre you know and he said dale that end when you were

holding off the communists. She said you held off three platoons. So I 120 people by myself. Well, anyway, went through one rifle and then I grabbed the rifle that belonged to that colonel and I was shooting with that one. And it's so interesting, but the smell of his breath, his sweat and his mind, if you can believe this, his mind, I could smell the fear of that guy, whichever one it was that pistol or rifle we got.

And anyway, I was shooting at the enemy with that one and someone shot at me from the side and the bullet went between these two fingers of the good hand, went through the comb of the rifle and shot the rifle in half. So it's kind of horrendous. So anyway, and then my guy Baugh on the other end, and I'm looking around and I think I'm the only guy alive. I don't see anybody. But then boss, I hear it. Strange what you can hear over a firefight, but I hear hands on, hands on, hands on. And I look over there and boss standing up there. And he's frantic. He says, Wordily, him die. Worthley, him die. So I ran over there and Wortherly was shot through the neck and died instantly. And we had the satchel and had dead one zero. So anyway, I yelled at Ba, I says, get him out of here. And I was using sign language. You know, get the harness, put the harness, you know, his harness is one. get him and the chopper was coming in i said snap him into the harness put the satchel down his neck yes yes you know and so and i ran off to my spot to hold off the enemy while they got out of there and i figured they're the only ones but then i hear um bob garcia yell and he's frantic

he runs over to me and he says where's ken where's ken ken wordley and i says he's dead uh uh he got shot in the neck. He's dead. I sent him out. And then he's standing up in the middle of this fire fart and he starts screaming into the radio. He says, I want 500 palm bombs 50 meters out. And we've already got everything in the world. And they're all around us. And I don't know if you know when you're, if it's the same in Iraq, but in Vietnam when you're in enemy country, if you're surrounded by them and you're starting to call in aircraft, they get close to you. because they figure if they get so close, you don't dare use aircraft on.

But anyway, he says, I want it 50 meters out, and I can hear the guy, you know, and then all the explosions and everything, I got to hear him what he's saying, and I can hear the pilot, crazy stuff. Anyway, he says, I can't tell five meters from 500 meters from up here.

He says, I want it, and he starts swearing into the radio. He says, I want 50 meters, I want 500 pounds. He says, I want it right now. That's an order. so they started dropping 500 palm bombs right on top of us. I mean, the trees were going down, the limbs were going down and everything. And then a person, I don't see him either.

I don't see. They're assaulting us. Later on, they said there was 2,000 of them on the LZ trying to get us. And I don't see him either. So I'm thinking I'm the last guy alive. And I've tried to send all the team out, you know, and I'll stay down here. So anyway, all of a sudden I realized I'm all by myself, you know, and I don't have the radio because I was wounded.

Someone else grabbed the radio. And so I thought, ah, I got the survival radio. So I grabbed the survival radio. I have no idea who to talk to. You know, all I know is that when I push that button, everybody in the world hears it. Right. You know, so I... Is that emergency transmission that goes out?

So being the professional that I was, I pushed the button. And I says, is there anybody out there? I want to know I'm not by myself. They're human points. Yeah. So how many had you already sent out at this point? Because I know you had your KIA, but how? So four.

Okay. Four. Because Bob Garcia was actually there. He crouched down so he could call in airstrikes more. And then the other Vietnamese guy was Noia, I think it was. And he was still there and alive. And then I was on the other end. And then I heard the yelling at me.

Dale, Dale, come, and the chopper was down. They threw down three ropes. And I watched one of the ropes get shot in half. And I watched it falling down like a snake. You know, oh, man, this is busy stuff. Very encouraged. Yeah. Yeah.

And so the other two hooked into the other line. And I went over there and I looked at that and I thought, I can't tie the knot. So anyway, I grabbed the little finger and I tied the biggest knot I could think of. what do you call it when you overhead just one loop and I stuck it in that snap link and I forgot one more thing

then they assaulted and I got shot in the back of the head and so this time I'm shooting like crazy and then I got in the back of the head and I didn't pass out I remember the sound was gah and I go back there and I feel and I can feel shrapnel in the back there and with the finger of the hand

I pull like that and the shrapnel comes out of my skull and I'm alive, you know, and I didn't have a helmet on at the time? Did you go through or were you, do you not? No, I only wore a flap hat. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And, you know, not that you said that, I don't know if I even had it. Yeah. Yeah. So, so you, you managed to tie like just a basic. Just an overhand knot. Yeah. Just an overhand knot. Yeah. And then, and then the the other guys, was bought, already out? He was all right out with the body.

Okay. And I had Noi, who was on my point man. Uh-huh. And Bob Garcia, who was very cool under pressure. Did a wonderful job all the way through with good man. And you'd refer to him as a strap hanger. Yeah. I was at 1-0.

When Donie, when I came down to 1-0 school, I was a 1-0 team because Donie, the team leader, went to be the first sergeant of recon. He replaced Bob Howard, who went to get the Medal of Honor. And so I took the one zero slot, but it was with the idea that Ken Worthley was on extended leave. When he got back, he could have his team back. So he came back as a one zero, I was the one one. And I didn't have lots. I had one mission with Ken Worthley.

And I think he wanted somebody he knew well. And he went through combo school with Bob Garcia. So he strap hanged. So there was three Americans and four Vietnamese. So anyway, and then we hooked in, and the chopper was starting to take hits. And instead of clearing the trees, he drug us through the trees. And I almost got pulled in two, you know, and I'm at the bottom, wrapped up in the trees and stuff. Just what you needed at that point.

Yeah, exactly. And it was hacking like crazy for a long time. You know, my legs would go to sleep for just minutes. Yeah. You know, and it just battered. John Plaster wrote a thing, a description of what my legs were like when I came out. And just, you know, the cloth was all torn and your black and blue and, you know, all the nerves are torn and everything else. But then we take off and they had spent so much time on the target that we were running out of fuel.

So they took the most direct route. And I think it was Ben Hat. But it might have been dock. I think maybe Doc Pack. one of those two I think it's Doc Pack took a bee line to Doc Pack but he couldn't

there was a storm and he couldn't go around it because we didn't have enough fuel so we went straight through that thing and it's amazing it was like steel balls hitting you you're going 120 miles an hour

and yeah and landed down there and Norm Donie was there to help me get and Mike Buckland bless his heart you know I mean all of his friends

you know and I'm wounded something Mike, it's why once I'm getting wounded a few months later, but bless his heart, they flew there to meet me and get me off the strings. And oh yeah, and the other thing was since I was on a single rope, the other guys could hold on to each other. I was on a single rope, and it turned around and around and around until it wouldn't go anymore, and then it would unwind. And I was so sick.

I was so sick and dizzy and wounded. And of course, the adrenaline. He was in there. How nervous were you, like, about that knot? Were you watching it the whole time? I wasn't sure if it was going to hold. Yeah. Yeah, and it did.

And it was, and another phenomenon, I don't know if other people have experienced it. But if you're using my water here, this is the bottom in the helicopter. You got rope here and a rope here. And this is Hansen, and this is somebody else. And the chopper is going to bank for a turn. Hanson's rope is going to go down and I think it broke and I'm grabbing onto anything

I can grab like a like a vice because all you feel is a sudden yeah because I can feel my rope going down and I'm just assuming I'm going to fall 5,000 feet and I grab as high as I can and I just hang on in that for life you know and 45 minutes I'm hanging under that thing it's just anything could go wrong

you know crazy you know I just think what what an affirmation of faith right I mean there must be a lot of people who saw what happened to you that day and thought I want whatever he has yeah and there were a lot of Christians there too and I was in a firefight once with a guy

and he was so calm in his spirits he went to a church in a Protestant church in Anchorage he was from and we were about to be overrun by the communist and that's one was I was counting seconds when we're going to get up and fight you know and and I was going like this and I happened to look at him and we were laying in in some muck and there's some water and there's some polywogs little frogs went he had a little sticky he's playing with the polywis waiting for me to say one you know as I've never been that calm in my life you know but it's contagious isn't it

Calm is contagious, just like panic is contagious. Yes. Yeah, you know, it's interesting, but someone can shout, and the next person can say something calmly and quietly, and it has more impact than the shout. Amazing. Yeah. Donie, I never saw him raise his voice.

I would talk to Bob Howard and never raised his voice. I've seen sometimes where he shook out the medal four or five times, you know, and even get a bronze. I was there one time our camp was under fire and you do stupid things even when you've been in the round for a while but they were hitting more of the city and they were starting to come into our camp

and so I stood on the wall trying to see where the flash was where he was shooting and Bob Howard in the most decorated man in American history he walks up and so he doesn't embarrass me he just quietly says Sergeant Hansen, get off that wall. He could have screamed it.

Yeah. But he saved my dignity. He was, he was, and it wasn't an order. It was an observation that I should have noticed. And I jumped right off that wall and just, you know, a calm. So many heroes I've known and they're calm and what they're doing. I've heard, you know, real courage described as grace under pressure. That's exactly.

And I really like that. That is. really like it. That is. That's precisely what that is. You mentioned that, you know, first off, I'll ask you, did you get a Valor Award for that particular mission? I got a bronze. Okay. If we were in any other unit, we would have got high metals. And that, that's one of my, you know, one of my questions to you is that Mac V-Sog was put in, they were put in such horrible situation. And I don't mean you guys went into, because of your missions, but because a lot of times have the compromise already, like you guys, for most of the operations, the McVe Sogg went on,

you were under fire almost from the time you got on ground. And you're still like, yes, we're under fire, but our mission is not over. So let's run these guys around for two or three days while we accomplish our mission. And, you know, And the thing is, is do you think that because every mission and every member of Macri Saug was unending acts of uncommon valor that basically they just didn't give you guys medals? Because it's like, we can't give them all medals all the time. And you can say, who's a commanding officer before Abrams? It starts with a westmoreland. Westmoreland came to visit our camp one time.

And he said every single person that saw who gets on that helicopter should get a silver star. That's how dangerous the missions were. And I'm writing up on Ed Zebrun's mission. And I've got a copy of a letter from the, I think it's General Singlob, who was writing the awards people. He says, I realize that you are not giving medals to special forces until the other units catch up. And I've also heard high-ranking people who don't think the rest of us have heard it, but, you know, in their hearing. But I also heard some of those people say, that could be a silver star, but that's what they do. Right.

Yeah. In other words, like we're made of different things. You know, we don't have blood. I got nervous every time when someone gave me a mission, it was like electricity shot to me. And it was that initial thing. It's like jumping out of the plane when they say stand up. You know, you get that, I don't know if you guys do it, but that adrenaline that goes through you and that dread.

But you take care of it. And I think that's part of courage is doing things when you're afraid. Grace under pressure, as you said. Yes, I mean, I'm... Courage under pressure, yeah. I'm always fascinated by that. the reactions of people, how they manage their own fear,

but how they not just manage their own fear, but act in such a way that it manages the fear of others. And as you point out, it isn't necessarily by yelling lots of instructions. Sometimes it's just by example, you know, or the quiet word. And something you guys were talking about reminds me of, and I can't remember who told me this story,

but it was a guy who was on SOG, who was with Sog and then he went to somebody he went to a conventional unit or maybe it was a a green bray unit and he got a silver star and his former Sog buddies were bragging him so what the hell did you do and he said remember those days we had at sook i had one of those days right i was with the different units yeah we did get our medals and i know from some of the subsequent wars that we've been medals were awarded to the units to be given out before they even had to have the missions. Yeah. Not special forces, but, you know, other wars were, and it was always that, the officer in charge got one, one higher than. Right, right. The officer is going to, yeah.

Yeah. It's like, it's like a John Kerry Silverstone. Yeah. You know, there are many of them that really deserve the medals, but it's so phony, you know, a guy gets, gets a bronze for achievement or a bronze for something. No, the first thing on my mind were you an officer? Yeah, of course you did. And, you know, and what's, what's odd to me about it, and I appreciate, and I appreciate, you know like the government whomever it is trying to go back and relook at Vietnam relook at you know

at events that happen even you know in Afghanistan Iraq and say look this person should have gotten a higher medal let's put them in but especially for Vietnam and when we go back further like a lot of times that they do that it's

like the person has already passed and it's sort of like it doesn't cost anybody any money it's it doesn't take anything out of their pocket to to put somebody in for something like it doesn't cost an officer a single penny to write up one of somebody in his command for something that is and look there are a lot of good officers who do do that yeah um but then there are a lot and like you said the officers will usually get one one medal up you know a lot of times regardless for the contribution. It's just a really weird thing

we have in our country, in our military, how we award those. It's almost like the Germans with the Iron Cross. You know, they had the Iron Cross, the Iron Cross first and all that stuff. Then you had the Knights Cross and the Knights Cross with blades and then diamonds. You had to be an officer to get higher than a higher Iron Cross. Right. Yeah. So all those really high metals, there are officers. This isn't to disparage officers, but it is an observation.

I mean, some officers could use a little disparity. No, but no, I'm just kidding. But, yeah, it's a really unfortunate thing. And, like, hearing about, you know, time and time again about MACV SAG and the operations you did and the conditions that you did them under. And the fact that it's like, well, if you were in the 101st, or if you were in another unit, yes, what you did that day, absolutely silver star at the bare minimum you know at a bare minimum you know and and on up but because

you're in that unit and you guys do that every day you know yeah well even even a simple thing like when i set the team out and i went off to the edge to hold up hold them off while they got out leaving myself on the ground right i was the only one there absolutely yeah absolutely in another unit that would have been something um you know i wonder the how important it should be or is. I'm playing devil's advocate here. I know I'm no you're going to get all kinds of

hate mail for saying that, but I think we get, you know, ever since Napoleon said I can get a man to do anything for a piece of ribbon on his chest. I think too slavishly we get caught up in this whole metal thing. I've seen the most absurd behavior.

Absurd. Even the combat action ribbon. I'd like to see all metals striding out the window and everyone knows what they did at the end of the day right and

the most important thing you have is your rep well like you said you're going to get a lot of letters so I don't necessarily first of all I don't think that people who win awards generally are trying to win an award when they do

what they do not everyone but I have seen the lure of awards drive ridiculous behavior not in a

not not in a profession not like on the tip tipty edge of the spear like where you were there's no time for that shit but in in other units soft or conventional

I've seen and it doesn't matter officers too tie themselves into knots about who got what and awards and maybe I've I've just had a very jaded opinion.

I can tell that, you know, I know that what I'm saying flies in the face of what we're brought up to kind of, you always look at a guy's chest, right? I just think, it's such bullshit. We all know, you know, think about the, I mean, my daughter's christening,

all right? I've, you know, the Marine Corps kind of prides itself on being parsiminous about awards, but we still hands shit out. My daughter's christening. I've got chest full of, you know, ribbons. And my father, you know, second war veteran and a lot of his, you know, this is a while ago.

You know, my brother was 30 now. Yeah. But they're still alive and they're all there at the christening. They're all like, what did you do? And I'm starting to get just blush because I'm thinking, oh, my God. Yeah, like my father, you know, did the entire Pacific War and did all those things. It never got any. Never got anything.

Right. He's got the campaign medals and that's it. Yeah. And my brother looked up a bunch of things that found out that he deserved two bronze stars. Never even gave it to him. Yeah. And I think a lot of times it's recognition, but on the other hand, too, is the people who I think are most. Who matter.

The people who matter. Yes. Like your father not having a bronze star didn't change one iota. when you felt about him it gives you a credential in life and some things but it was the expression

in special forces oh it was a campaign poster to get you to join special forces back in the 60s I saw it on the wall it was a very calm picture of a green beret

and it was not bright colors and all it said was it says more about you than you'd ever say about yourself. Yeah. You know, and I thought that was so powerful.

And a lot of, you can't say, well, I got these medals, I got this, I did that, because you come across as often as not as a blowhard.

Yeah. You know? I definitely feel, though, like the Medal of Honor should, I mean, I can see your discussion with, like, other metals.

You know, these, but the Medal of Honor is, you know, it's one of those things where when given, when given, and not every Medal of Honor

has been given appropriately and not everybody who deserves one has gotten one obviously but it is one of those words I think where you know when somebody has truly done something absolutely selfless I had a dream once that

and it was kind of interesting it had to do with a guy who falls on the grenade and is killed and he gets the metal of honor and then another guy falls on a grenade and it's a dud and people aren't nervous and they laugh

you know but it's the same heroism yeah yeah yeah yeah no there's actually a it's interesting you should say that there's actually there was a a case in Afghanistan

where it someone was written up for an award for trapping a grenade did you hear about this? No. Trapping a grenade with his helmet and it was kind of set up between him and his buddies. And yeah, anyway, I'm taking it. But that's my whole point, this lure of awards.

I agree with you. You know, the major awards should be there, but all this other trash, to include the combat action ribbon, to include the Combat Infantry badge, is all absolute horseshit. And it encourages bad behavior, not bad behavior.

It encourages just a, wrong mindset. Okay. This is my last appearance, I think, on this. No, no. I do. No, listen, I've seen people who do things. And you can say, well, yeah, I say, you either have integrity or you don't.

But I, you know, case in point, I think that you get a lot of people who are very impressionable, who want to impress other people by getting, getting, getting, you know. All officers? No. Come on. You're in charge. My son, it is a private.

I know. I know. I know. I'm just... It's only because the promotion. The promotion system broke down that I was commissioned in the first place. So, so was this your last combat op?

No. Okay. Yeah. I spent five months hospitals in Convalescent leave. Okay. And I came back for two more tours. Yeah. So you went five months and then did you come back to recon or did you go?

Yeah. Eventually, I was going to go back to recon. My friend Mike Buckland met me and he was saying I think it was almost the day I got there. The last of our class other than he and I were killed. And I was on my way to get back on the recon company, recon team. And he says, I don't think you should go right now. we took an awful lot of our own people casualties and something they were filling in some of the ranks

with 75th Rangers, I'm sorry. Which are fine, they're great, they're courageous and all that kind of thing, but they haven't been trained in SF. They don't know SOG. And later on, I was debriefing them all because I was in the intelligence. And they would go out on a mission

and they would get in a firefight right away. you know and then they would get pulled out and come in they read each other up and they had no idea what they were sent for you know and Vietnamization was going strong pretty clearly

we weren't trying to win I was in two-core Vietnam you know there's four cores you know I was in two core which is Laos Cambodia Vietnam and

I think almost all the American units were gone. Fourth infantry was pulling out. What year was this, Dale? That would have been 70. Yeah.

Yeah. So explaining that. Yeah. But anyway, a long short was I agreed to set aside for a little bit. And so I went into intelligence. That's true. Your tail wind is a famous mission.

I did the intelligence brief. for some of them. And some of my good friends were on tailwind, a great mission. And then I was doing that for quite a while. And my help from being 11F and from Norm Doney looking for details, I think maybe a good debriefer, briefer and debriefer. How to take somebody who's coming in from the field, who's tired, he's exhausted, may have slight wounds, may have just barely made it,

adrenaline has just exhausted him and say, look, I needed to brief you while it's still fresh and usable. And I'll say, how long do you need to get things ready, you know, to take care of your team? Because when you get back, the first thing is take care of your team, you know, maybe prepare for the camp getting hit or something, you know. And I say, how about two hours? Will that be fine? Then come in and then just draw everything, things he forgot. Did he realize that he saw? With your background and experience, I imagine it made you a perfect debriefer.

I think so. I mean, you've got rapport right off the bat, which is a key part of debriefing. Yeah. You don't have to establish yet. Yeah. You've got credibility. Yeah. So I did that for quite a while.

And then I went to Ford Drum, which in a way's ever heard of before. But it was one of our top secret projects. and very small. And as far as I know, only CNC Central, CCC did it. I don't think north or south did it. But it was essentially like a covey, but a little bit more dangerous. We would do it with two planes. There would be one in a pilot and then a Special Forces guy in the back seat.

And one plane would be 5,000 feet in the other right at the trees. you know, and they would direct you. Sometimes you tip the wings to get between the trees. And if you were going, looking down and you saw the NVA below you and they looked up, it could be you could recognize who he was if he was a relative, that close, you know, and it was pretty hurried stuff. And the way I got into it was I was halfway happy debriefing, you know, except I felt really guilty for not being in the field.

but that morning there was Mike Buckland, Ted Buzrick, me, a couple other people that did only a half a dozen special forces but our job was essentially doing what a recon team does behind enemy lines, checking bomb damage reports looking for new roads, underwater bridges, you know, everything

you know, troop movements, artillery, anything And anyway, that morning I started who had never flown one before, he started first class who got assigned to us and really didn't know much about SOG. I think he was special forces, but came in and thought, and I think Mike Buckland was gonna take the mission. It was a hot mission and he says, well I'm gonna take it. And Mike says it's a real dangerous one.

He says, you don't want to do this on your first mission. He says, well, I wear the stripes, I'm going to do it. So he went out on it, and he found good stuff. He went back to look twice, and that's the kiss of death. Because when you go back the second time, you're dead. Right. And so he got shot through the head in the back seat. And I remember the Bejure was in charge of S2.

He came back in, and of course it's sterile. So he had his dog tags on top of his cupidol. lamp you know and he just goes in and he picks up the dog tags off the lamp and he goes into his office and he comes out and said he was killed so I went in and

after thinking or not thinking depending on how you look at it I just went in and I said I'll take his place so that's how I became a bird dog guy and the pilots who flew it literally a dead man's shoes. Literally a dead man shoes

yeah yeah literally and the guys who flew us were Army and they called their unit the headhunters. And so my chapter of my book, I called Months with the Headhunters. You know, and it was good. It was interesting.

It was Harry. I wasn't very good at it for a while because being the bottom plane, which is where I enjoyed. I had the car 50 with one hand in the camera with the automatic click, click, click, click, click, click, click. on the other and I was just sicker in the dog because we were going like this between trees and all this stuff, you know, and I was learning how to puke in a bird dog, you know, started

puking out the window and the wind, you know, throws it back in and trying to puke in a bag and throw the bag out, and a bag comes in. And finally I got to where it was worth something, I think. But I did that for a while. And it was good. It was worthwhile. And a lot of our missions oviated the necessity of sending a recon team on the ground. And it was interesting. You could find, you could see a shine there and it would say, well, that's an artillery piece.

Another shine said, that's the sun on the windshield. And then you see another one, and then you see another one down the line. You say, well, let's put a line between them. That might be a road. And you say, well, there's a stream up there. Let's go check the stream. No bridges.

So you look and look and all of a sudden you notice it's a different color down there. It's an underwater bridge and you find all these interesting things. It's fascinating. Now did you I imagine though when you were taking

these pictures and you mentioned the shine you probably had some pretty hot like imagery analysts that you know really could pick this stuff out especially a Bob BDA Bob Damby's assessment. You go through there and like an arc light is what the code name for B-52 was an arc light would come through

and it would level everything on ground level be gone but all the trenches and bunkers where they were are still there and you're doing the Bob damage assessment but the NVA are curious what happened too and they're over there and if you're careful and look you'll find them out there looking up and they're doing the same thing. And you can bring your pictures in and they're going to find a leg stuck in the top of a tree or something like that

in bodies or things that were left standing, you know, or before pitcher, which was a warehouse and now there's nothing in it. And really telling intelligence, you know. And the guys would have stereoscopic not just a magnifying glass but a stereostopic

and all the things pop out in three dimension pretty interesting and it's amazing isn't it when you think I mean all the technical means that we have now what you're talking about is a little bit

of technical stuff but it's really it's it's the human eyeball trained right to pick out certain things I mean it's a very I don't use the term primitive but when we talk about

all they think about all the things we use now and rely on ISR I mean things that weren't even in service when we came in right it's reconnaissance what reconnaissance means maybe the same thing but the methodology has changed

almost beyond recognition the way you were doing it down aside from the fact you're on an aircraft, aside the fact you had a camera in the hand, but a lot of the basics hadn't changed since, you know, yeah, Second World War or before, right? Yeah, yeah, all the way back to Robert E. Lee when... That's right.

Yeah, what was the cavalry man who went off, and he went too far north, and Gettysburg was going on, and he says, you were my eyes and ears, my intelligence. Killer angels, yeah, I'm trying to think, we were going to get people calling in now. How can you forget that? How can I forget that? Yeah.

Okay, can you forget him? Well, I'm pretty sure. I'm not American, so I didn't drive a little shit. So, so with, how long did you spend in that project? Jeb's to it. Just a few months.

Okay. Yeah, and then I wanted to get on the ground again, so I joined the companies. Okay. So it was just what you called Reaction. Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah.

And we, Spike team, reaction team, Mike Force, you know, it's whatever the name is. So I forget what we called it back then, though. But anyway, that was very interesting. When Tailwind hit, there was a company. There was 16 Americans with that company. When I was in this company, there were three of us. And when we went on this one mission, we added two.

But as it was, I went in, got accepted into the company. Went in there and there was a first sergeant. Each of us would take one platoon. So I had a platoon, the first sergeant, have a platoon. The captain would have a platoon. So I went in and I met the first sergeant. That was his 12th year in Special Forces in Vietnam.

So he was there right at the end of the French, stayed there the whole time. He was in the black pajama bunch where they would go in and set up an army. They sit there for six months, you know, and he was one of these guys that everything can work. And he made everything work,

and he went to get excited about anything. But at the end of the training day, he would go to the bar, and he sat in that one stool until the next morning. And then we had a captain who was in the German, kind of like their special forces. what you call it. And he represented them in the Olympics and all that stuff and the biathlon and all that. And he went into the American Army and a very sharp guy.

And this company was his war machine. And he didn't think we needed more than Sergeant Hansen. And he and the other first sergeant, you know, and he kept telling me, you're missing Vitt by War Machine, you know. And as I discovered, just one of our small missions and stuff, I was getting the mail for the three of us at the post office. And I picked up the mail and there was a letter for him. But as I was picking it up, it looked like my grandma's German writing. The hecker side of the family is German. And it looked just like my grandma's writing. And I was looking.

and it was addressed to the captain from Otto Scorzini. Really? Yes. And it was one of many of them. Are you still alive at that stage? I think he died. Yeah, incredible guy. But Otto Scorsini wrote him many letters. And Otto Scorzini was considered the Scarlet Pimpernel of World War II, the number one commander of the entire war, Hitler's right-hand man,

although I think he was for Germany, other than Nazism. He's the one. He got two iron crosses. They got the Knights Cross and Russia got wounded too bad. He had to come out. He parachuted into Holland. Attacking those bridges.

He's the one in Normandy, his people were the ones that turned around the road signs and impersonated Americans. He made a hit. He was supposed to do a hit to kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill when they met. I forget where that place was. Yalta. And they found out about him. So they canceled the meeting. And then he assassinated Winston Churchill, only to find out it was his double. But he got him. And then he after the war, he went into, oh boy, I forget the guy, I think it was Spain. And he went into Spain. And then

the Mossad, Israeli intelligence came up to him. And he thought they were an Israeli hit squad because of Hitler killing the Jews. And they said, no, no, we don't want to kill you. We want to hire you. Yeah. He says, I don't need money. But if you get me off of, who's the guy who wrote all the books on Andy Nazi?

Hendynesefell. Huh? Feesenthal. Simon Feesenthal. Get him off his head list. He says, if you get me off his hit list, I'll take out these scientists. They're trying to make a bomb to bomb Israel. So within a month, they were all gone.

And then he was a personal bodyguard for Ava Perron in South America. And then it was rumored that he was teaching special forces, Americans, girl warfare. To wit, my captain, Jaime Roche. And so whenever we were on a mission, and I got this guy who can never be killed because he's been fighting for 12 years, got this German who's got a war machine, you know, and I'm trying to. trying to be in between with common sense. You know, and you can't be diplomatic with a German Prussian captain, you know, and the other guy won't listen because you're too young.

Yeah. No, that was an interesting time for SF because there were other influences of just those ardent anti-communists who were, you know, were coming from anywhere they could. Yeah. You know, yeah, it's fascinating. Yeah. A lot of the Germans, yeah, a lot of the Germans who fought for Germany in World War II were actually anti-Sovets. They were anti-communists.

They wanted to get the Russians. They weren't even aware of some of them of Nazism. Right. The Legion, Foreign Legion fought at Jean-Benzhou. Yeah. over, you know, I don't want to quote percentages, but more than half were former German guys. And it's kind of, again, I don't mean,

but a fascinating story, you read about Dien Bufu, the Legion's role in Indochina and Dian Bianfou, they even had some former concentration camp guys in the same units as Germans, somehow the Legion made it work. Or they made it work. It's extraordinary. So were you still at Command Control Central as part of this reaction for the Mic Force Hatchez?

And how was that like different for you from going from Recon to now you're on reaction force? Yeah. You don't have to be quite so sneaky. Sometimes you don't even want to be sneaky. You want to come, try come and get us, you know? Yeah. You can actually cook a meal if you wanted to. I never did. that one of the bad points

was that if you got in trouble and a recon team was in trouble they figured you could fend for yourself we're going to help the recon. It makes sense. But your lower priority on support. Other than that, it just seemed a little bit more comfortable other than the fact you're going to slug it out

whereas in recon you can break contact evade, you know, and then continue the mission if it's possible. You know, a lot of guys would break contact in a recon and go day after day being chased and they would break contact and all this stuff and continue on. Now, as a reaction force, was your primary mission to help troops that are American troops or, yeah, American troops that were already in contact? or was it when an element a large an element had been spotted to go in and engage them regardless if there were U.S. troops in contact?

Both of those are possible. The other ones are search and destroy. You find local targets and get rid of them. Another one would be road introduction where they would put the people in right on top of the Hoshman Trail. And we've actually had a recon team who did that, Team California once. But we had companies or platoons. they would come in.

They'd have their rifles and their shovels and their food and ammo and 150 sandbags, you know, just empties. And they would just plop down there and they'd make up a fort. And they'd knock out the first and the last vehicle of a convoy, calling air strikes. Yeah. And basically announced nothing is going to pass this highway until we say so. And they'll spend a week there stopping all traffic on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

prisoner snatches is a possibility more prisoner rescues than snatches because it's more of a recon thing to snatch a P-O-W than it is a company. Were there successful prisoner rescues like before they got a prisoner to a camp or something like that? There were some. Americans, you mean? Yeah. You know, I'm not sure about Americans. I know the book I'm writing now about Ed Zebron and some of the other people

I know the seals overran a POW company were all south of it means but they got some out and then of course the sadness is that we are so skeptical about our American government sometimes that we don't think they even want them and I've covered that quite a bit

in the book but not Keyeson, what's the one, 20 miles from Hamley. Sonte. Sante. The scuttlebutt is that the reason Sante was picked was that they knew the prisoners were gone. You know, and kind of a sad thing. But, I mean, it was 20 miles from Hanoi.

There were 10 miles away. There was 12,000 NVA troops and a base, and it was so gutsy. You know, 50-some SF guys went in and did it, but flawless. Bull Simmons. Yeah, both of them. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He subsequently was Ross Perrault Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, Iran,

Yeah. Yeah. In 1979, right? That's an interesting story, too. Yes. I remember the first few of my SOAR special ops reunions that I went to, Ross Perrault would go to those.

to those and he had a million dollar reward for anyone who could get an American POW I covered the POWs quite a bit in the book and how cynical I got because of the previous wars how we left him deliberately and I covered John Noble and his thing when I was in sixth grade I saw him and talked to him in a Lyssela but he was an American German he's American citizen who was German and he was German and he was And his family had a factory in Germany. So when Hitler took over and stuff, they seized the factory, and he just happened to be over there checking his factory.

And so they put him in a concentration camp. And he wound up at the end spending the whole war in a concentration camp, along with American soldiers. And at the end of the war, Russia overran Germany, and they stole everything. They took the trains, and they filled them up with everything they could out of Germany. But instead of free any of the POWs, they just made German POWs, Russian POWs. So John Noble was there with thousands of Americans sent to the Gulag.

And he had a phenomenal memory. And John Noble had the lists and personal data to memory of over 5,000 American POWs. And in 1958, I think it was. I was in sixth grade, and I heard him speak at Elyssium, talked to him at Lang. and the way he got out is that somehow a Swiss diplomat happened to be in the area and he got his piece of paper with his name and contact information that went directly to Eisenhower and Eisenhower got him out but he said there was zero emphasis about getting any of those people and he said to the time when I graduated at a high school not a single American was freed none we left every I that's Yeah. That's an incredible story. It gets worse. It gets more timely. When the war ended, our technology isn't as good as what yours is.

But we do where all of our prisoners were. We know my name, if they're in a bamboo hutch, if they're in Czechoslovak, if they're in Laos, Cambodia. We knew where they were. And we had a list. Well, Henry Kissinger in Operation Homecoming had that list. and when they started releasing them they'd come off the plane and stuff he checked the names off the list well anyway there were 600 names that we knew that they had mainly pilots and special forces people who did get released and we know that they had them and so Kissinger folded up the list and put it in his pocket and he said that's acceptable casualties for peace and years later five or six years ago

they asked him what was the most regrettable thing of his entire life he says that list of paper you know that so we have a history of leaving POWs it's an awful thing it's i'll tell you another one i know your tape is going to go forever um bob howard most decorated man in american history was sent to get POWs out and he and i used to know the names of the other two guys three Americans, they went across the lines, and they found a base. And the interesting thing was there's a typical thing where the United States government didn't think, thought it was empty. That's why they sent them. Well, anyway, he went over there and it was 20-some American POWs that he could see. This was this joint still trying to. He was on a ridge line in the military crest,

and they were down there. He could see them. And he could see the enemy soldiers, but he knew that we could take them. So he sent back the message that. ultimately goes to wherever Washington, D.C. or something, the return message that came back was liquidate the merchandise. What? Liquidate the merchandise. Jesus. Yeah, so he refused. And when he came back, they arrested him.

This is the most decorated. Yeah, that was the problem with him. They arrested him as a deserter. And all of a sudden, the State Department says, you can't charge the most decorated man in American history with desertion. And the other guy, I think it, I forget his name now. It's almost where I can say it. But that night he took off. He says, I'm not having any of this.

He took off. He was stabbed in an alley in Bangkok. But he lived, you know. There's a book called Kiss the Boys Goodbye. And that's pretty interesting. When was this? When Howard did this? It was late.

It was late. It was after ground forces had been with. withdrawn post. Yeah, it was post. 73, right? 73 was when the so it was 73 when the last very last ground truth pulled out,

except for the advisors, right? Was it 71? I don't know that. Because there were advisors still on the ground in 73 for the spring offensive. Yeah. But in any case, you're saying it's late in the war and he was, well.

Yeah. Yeah. It's something I don't know. It's an aspect. Another one. Robert Garwood was a Marine. And he was a private first class. And he was a POW.

And nothing wrong with him. He was a bona fide captive GI. Marine. You don't call him GIs, do you? Okay. Marine. Grunt. Okay.

But anyway, he was captured. And it turns out that at home, he was a mechanic. And so the NVA couldn't put the vehicles back together. They're selling on the highway. So Garwood was the one that they'd have a guy to watch from, and he would go down and he'd fix the vehicles along the highway. Well, one time a Swiss or somebody happened to come by, and he says, my name's Robert Garwood, and I'm a POW. And the word to come out, and Robert Garwood got released by the personal intervention of the United States government, and they got him out. But the problem was, is the moment his plane landed,

he was branded as a deserter and to this day he's never been interviewed about the American POWs that he knows Are you kidding me? Yeah, they've never interviewed him because who cares what a deserter says? And so they simply destroyed the messenger. I interrupted you.

No, no, no. No, you didn't have to why I was simply following up on something you'd said something you'd said too reminds me of the story. Who was the guy? Doug Hodcastle the sailor, 18-year-old sailor, fell off an aircraft carrier, right? Yes.

Off the coast of North Vietnam. Yes. And he memorized, I forget, how many names. Yes, I remember that story. It's an extraordinary story similar to that. But so many, afterwards, and at least this is what they taught us at CIS school, that so many POWs were released attributed to the fact that this 18-year-old kid, had memorized their names and said, no, I've seen this guy.

He's still alive and had gone public and told their families and everything. He came to talk to us at CIS school, actually, became a professor. Anyway, I'm wobbling on. But I find the topic, it's, I think the reason why we find this so incredibly disturbing, well, it's obvious why we find it so many, you know, it's okay. We accept the fact we make. be killed in combat when we go to you know we accept that we may be taken prisoner but there's always a feeling that you know the loyalty works both ways to some extent right yeah and i think the

loyalty we had an s f is that if we were captured you can count on the guys that will get you yeah yeah what about uh sorry Dave was it it I'm I was just it it's just weird to me how how many ways Afghanistan refra like mirrors Vietnam and not that we had US POWs but we left a lot of

Americans just on the ground outside the wire when we pulled out like people who couldn't get into the airport people who were still in place for whatever reason and the way we treated the Afghan and not everybody like

there were elements, you know, there were people who worked hard to get Afghans out, you know, our peers and, and, but the way we treat the mountain yards and lungs, you know, like everybody who worked with us, it's just, it's just very frustrating. The way the institution. To think that it, you know, it was. 50 years later and we were, we fought the exact same war, did the exact same thing. I mean, from the, you know, Vietnamification, Vietnamification, you know, like, take, you know, just all of it.

It's, you know, conventional leaders not trusting the soft to, to handle, you know, it's just, it's so bizarre to me. Yeah, at least we didn't have lawyers okaying that, the hit before we shot. like you guys did. Yeah. Yeah. That happened, I mean, I know to a lot to where it became like the rules of engagement. The institution sometimes becomes mindless. I've seen it in police work once, and I know I've seen it.

I've heard of a similar kind of a thing in military, but a criminal is shooting at the cop. And he shoots or the soldier. And then he's changing magazines. And the cop happens to shoot before the new magazine is in. And he just shot an unarmed man. You know, and they go after him for that. Yeah. It's just insane. Yeah.

Yeah. It's wild. Anyway, I want to make sure, you know, we talk, we finished talking about you. You know, so you did this time with the reaction forces. What, and what about after that? after that I spent the course the last month or so

two months maybe they don't want you to get killed you know so I just say in security you know okay ran the security of the company and stuff like that yeah

and all told like how much time did you do you know during not necessarily in country but like during the Vietnam War how much time were you in service during that time oh a little under four you years. Yeah. So I made

seven at five you know and so I was kind of on a fast track but I wasn't sure to stay in. Yeah. Everyone says get out and you know see what you want to want to do and I got out in an inertia. You know you get out

you almost need an event to get you back. Yeah. You know so. And how did you deal with that inertia? Because you had been going I mean you had the security bit but you had been in these extremely high like stress environments for so long yeah i i still uh i i still have the reactions uh a lot of noise somebody come up i i i gets gets me i come on guard a lot of times people come up behind or quickly or certain things you know um i do not like my back against a door you know you

yeah they do the same thing um but i've got those things and i i try to relegate that into uh reaction than training rather than nervousness and things like that. So I really adapted well, and I think a lot of it was, because I never had a, what do-escalation time. I never had any of that. Just the next day you're home, you know, and, but I was doing fine. It worked. Decided I was going to go to flight school and, you know, maybe be a pilot.

If I was going to write books, you can fly. If I was going to be a farmer, I could dust my crops, you know. or be a Bush pilot in Alaska, you know, whatever it would be, you know. So I started doing that and did the aerobatics and the gliders and all that kind of a thing. And met my wife and then wound up in Alaska. And it's interesting too because I wound up in police work and I never wanted to be a cop in my life. And I was in California. And I was a superintendent of oilers in a steel mill.

I got hired on the basis of the fact that I was Special Forces. My wife got a job there and they never hired a spouse, you know, a family member. And they said to the personnel director, he said he made E7 in five years. They said, bring him in. He's hired. So I was their supervisor there. But the thing was is that my employees working for me made twice as much as I did. I had to sometimes do a paycheck and a half to make the rent.

You know, and this is crazy. So I signed up to be a cop. I sat in a newspaper and they were looking to fill in a placement. So I went up to take the test. And I was naive, you know, California. And anyway, I went in and it was a high school coliseum. And there was 1,200 people taking the test for two positions. And so I took it as a,

I scored in the top three. And, you know, cold. There were people going to school to take the test. Well, anyway, I scored in the top three, and I went to the board. And the first person asked the first question, have you ever killed anyone? That was a kiss of death. And my boss, who was a Marine and he owned the factory, wanted to promote me. And he was wondering, why?

What basis did they have that they didn't want me? because it might affect his decision. He says we can't have anyone like that walking our city with a gun. And so is this crazy? So I went to Alaska. My wife and I didn't like cities and all that. And same kind of a thing, not much for work. So I was teaching martial arts in the colleges.

There's two colleges. And all the cops and the troopers were my students. So as soon as there was an opening in the police department, And they said, you're going to be a cop, a new form of arrest. You know, they had to lure me to the chief, and I took the test and got a 98 and became their cop, you know, and went to the academy, undergraduate out of that, you know, so it's not kind of a fast track. With one bad thing, I arrested people. And you don't want, they don't want you to arrest and they have you swear that you're going to do it.

But anyway, a long way to say something simple is that we had a different. domestic terrorist in town. It came in, and I had to take them out. And they found out that there was a drop of non-white blood in him. And so they said it was racist and all that stuff. They had hit men to kill me for more than a year. I had to have a mirror and check for bombs under the car. When it started the car, I had to have the doors open in case it went off.

You know, I could get blown out maybe instead of blown up, you know. and it was interesting a time but anyway that's supposed to be leading to something no I'm so yeah now just yeah like when did your life go

and so anyway at the end of it all nobody dared to hire me because they were afraid their businesses would be blown up or sabotage you so I was carving something a piece of ivory

as a piece of stone and I carved a seal out of this soapstone and one of the artists came by the house, a friend of mine, one of my hunting partners, he's a painter, and he came by and he says, hey, that's good. He says, that could sell for about $1,200. Wow, you know, never, never quantified things that way. I thought of Calibur's talent, you know. And then later on in the same week, four things happened in one week, later on the same week I was carving an ivory whale and I don't know where I got the ivory

but it was carving with the most arcane basic tools files and knives you know and I carved a whale and he came by he said that's really good and so he says here give me that and he went he came back an hour later and gave me a check for $200 and he said I sold it to a gallery and I didn't even have it on the base yet and then he called me up that afternoon

to say that the gallery had already sold it for $400 that day. And then the fourth thing happened that week was that the best carver in Alaska came by. He was kind of a legend of sorts. Came by the house and he, I don't know if you know what the old lard cans they had in the farm. Those big square cans they used to have lard in.

Well, he came by, he had one of those that was all clean. It was full of ivory scraps. He just walked in. And he says, hi, my name's Jim Fluschman. And he walked in to my dining room table. He just dumped the whole thing out. He said, here, pick out what you want. I never met the guy before.

And so right away, I did a quick calculation. I'm going to take things that are labor intensive rather than material intensive because I didn't know what he was going to charge. And all I had was my retirement and what I had in my retirement system that pulled out. So anyway, I pulled out what I dared to. and he says well you're going to need some accents you're going to need some bases they push a bunch more and I said well how much do I owe you and he just took his arm

and he put what I didn't want slid it back into the can and headed for the door and he says nothing God told me to bring it over here wow yeah and so I told my wife I says you know as dumb as I am I said you know there's something to this and your carvings for anybody who wants you I mean your carvings are amazing

and it and it's it's So amazing to me that you just, like, started doing it and you were good at it. And if you guys want to check out Dale's carvings, check them out at Dale-hansomash-hansom-thus studio.com. Amazing, amazing, amazing work. You probably don't need to, the book, too. I mean, books, born twice. This is the book. Really, Dale's stories have come through this, but there are a lot of stories in the book.

that we didn't have time to cover here. If you just read the first few pages this, I guarantee you won't put it down. I mean, if you're a human being. And let's talk about your other books too, because you have poetry, you have haikus. Yeah, which- The haiku was interesting because I started writing

haiku in Vietnam. It was an Oriental poem, 17 syllables. And I started writing them. And there's the first section. has things about Vietnam. And I did something in that book at the beginning when I called word pictures. And I never heard of the term,

but I made it up myself called word pictures. Instead of writing a picture or writing a story, I just wanted to write a short paragraph or description so that if you were in combat or in war and read that, you'd say, ah, that's exactly what it was like. Well, anyway, I published that first one and I brought it to the SOAR reunion.

And on the basis of that, book, everybody says you got to write the Vietnam one, which is the fourth book I wrote. And I had so many things in the fire that I was doing that I decided to finish those next two books, which I

enjoyed an awful lot. And so we have the last white seal hunter, which is a fiction. It's a novel. Right. Correct? Right. World War I soldier comes back out of the war. and he wants to have the last great adventure.

So he goes to Alaska. And he meets all the great people that made Alaska and all the great adventures. That's amazing. A great concept for a book. Yeah. And then short stories, the great catch. Right, short stories.

And my whole philosophy on writing is I want good literature. Because we can all pin something down. We can, as we're talking, we've probably said all kinds of things. We could have said better. And we all make mistakes when we're talking. but I sure don't want to put them in print.

You know, so I wanted a good literature. It forces you to take the time and discipline to. Yeah, yeah. To put thoughts down in a coherent manner and it's... So when did you publish your first book? Because you have four books out in it right now, and you're working on a fifth, right? And, like, when did you... When was your first book published?

Probably, oh, boy, probably seven, eight, nine years ago. I don't remember exactly. So a while after Vietnam. Yeah, a long time after. Yeah, it's raising a family and, you know, teaching martial arts and all that kind of a thing. You just family has so much. But I had so many things I wanted to do. And, you know, of course, the hunting and getting the moose and the caribou and all that kind of stuff.

But my whole life and attention was so bifurcated that there's no time to sit down and say, this is what I want to do. Right. But I want a good literature. And I look back at all the books that I've got a good library, certainly a thousand books in it. And I look at the books and say, which are the books that I would read twice?

Or which are the ones that have lasted the centuries, you know, the Herman Melvin, but all the rest of them. And what was different, they didn't curse, they didn't have sex, they didn't have any of these things. They just had good literature and the values were there. and I said if I'm going to write and take the time to write I want the kind of a book that you'd say it was a good book

as well worth reading more than once and I can recommend it to my son you know I wouldn't be embarrassed and I wouldn't have to say there's a lot of cursing and there's things you want to skip you know so I want a good literature and I'm reading things now that I read 30 years ago and I never I didn't I'm belaboring it I didn't want soft cover. I didn't want to write a book where the only reason to read it is to see how it ended. And it winds up being left in the toilet seat and the subway. You know, because it's done and you know how that ended. So you've written four books in about eight years. How many carvings have

you done in about that time frame? Original carvings since Vietnam, about 17,000. Yeah, 17,000. Because I'm all these carvers and say, oh, I'm a carver and all this stuff. How many have you done in your life? 150? Well, that's just an accidental carver. If you're supporting a family, you finish your carving, you keep on going. You know, like the last half

of that story, how I got started after the guy just swept back all the scraps. I told my wife, I said, you know, there's something that can't be ignored here. This is something to it. I says, but this guy who's the best carver, in North America, perhaps, was a peddler. And his rent would be due.

He would do a carving. He'd go sell the carving. And I said, I'm going to get a sonata shot. I'm going to carve faithfully. Every day, all winter long. And when spring comes, I'm going to have an inventory. Spring came. I had a whole inventory filled the whole table.

And I invited all the retailers to come by. And by noon, every piece was gone. and I had orders for 500 carvings. And it was like that for the next 30 years. Just a carve, carve, carve. And the gratifying thing is two things. But one is that God created us. And I think we have this thing as his creatures.

We like to make things. And the other thing is this is one thing I can do where I control the outcome. I go on a mission and stuff and half my people are killed. and we don't even find a result or I arrest some guy who's beat his wife to death

and he's out on the street in a year. It's like you have no control of the end. It's just you and the material and the most gratifying of all is I started with ivory. Precious I could be a pork carver and the ivory would carry over the work. End up with wood which you

burn in your stove and the only reason anyone would look twice is what you did for it. Yeah. And so that is kind of a way to look at what I'm doing. It pays for the bills and I create something. I think there's another way too, Dale. I mean, I really like the fact that you could wallow in the just the bankruptcy of human nature, right? So you've had experience a bit.

The whole thing about hiring as a cop and then when you got hired, And you could spend every day just getting pissed about that, but you don't, you don't even dwell on it in your story. Instead, you talk about this guy who came in. You know, you've come back to him three or four times because he changed your life, right? The guy who came in, but he changed your life because you let him, right? And then, so, I mean, you know, it's not, I'm not waxing philosophical here. I'm just saying that in the two or three hours we spent talking. you've talked about people who are inspirations to you

and you've held on to that. You haven't spent a lot of time and no one will blame you if you did talking about all the shitty things that happened or blaming things to that. Yeah, yeah. God has always put good mentors, good people in my path whether it's Bob Howard or Norm Doney

or a high school teacher or give you just one word of wisdom. But you're going to be willing to accept it and run with it right. Yeah. Yeah. It's been a terrific conversation. I mean, and I know there's so much more

that we can talk about. I just, uh, you have a small bladder. No, it's, I, you know, we've kept you here for over three hours. But your story, your story is incredible. And we deeply, We are so glad that we could get you down here, you know, because as nice as Alaska is for the weather and, you know, the seal hunting.

I mean, you know, for what it is, it's obviously not great for Internet connections. That one, okay. That's a good reason to like it. Yeah. Right. So people can find your books on Amazon. on. And look, get, at a bare minimum, um,

read Born twice if you, if you like our show and we assume you do since you're watching it, you'll love this. Um, you know, and, you know, this,

I haven't read this. I'm sorry I haven't yet, but it, I mean, it just has sort of like the Jack London feel, you know, you know, the,

you know, the, the adventure type of thing. Interesting. I'm interrupting. As you're a, closing, Jack London wrote over 100 books, lived all the adventure, was in the South Sea, I was out of San Francisco fishing and all this stuff. When he was in Alaska, he did the gold rush. When the last saw him and I got him in the book, and you see all the pictures

of Jack London, a very handsome guy. You'd like to look like him yourself, you know. It's not how he looked at the end. He lost all of his teeth. His jaw was completely, ruined his one side was paralyzed because as he was living the adventures he had a scurvy and the scurvy was so bad and Jack London for all of his years died at age 40 and I see people I see it all the time these the great writers of old and they die at a young age not not that doing good things that makes you young but what they accomplished yeah you know it's like I feel so guilty when I see how much they have done and how little I have done, you know. You've written four, I mean, okay.

Yeah. I mean, you haven't done little. So, I mean, right now I feel like I should go home and like do write or do something because I've done little, you know. But so, yeah, so great short stories. And man, everybody loves us. a haiku everybody loves a haiku so and also Dale Hanson Gallery Dale Dale yeah Dale's studio yeah Dale dot or dash you don't have to do it just Dale Hanson's oh you don't have to do the dash yeah

links in the description but is there any place else people can find you if you know to check out your stuff aside from I think I look we came out on audible if that's what you mean Barnes and Oval and Kendall and stuff like that. Okay, fantastic. So that is it. Thank you very much, everybody. We deeply appreciate it.

We deeply appreciate you. Say again? Thanks Andy for co-hosting. Yes, thank you, Andy for co-hosting. This is great. This is being. Really appreciate it. I'll come back at your invitation.

You're always invited. If something ever happens to Jack or, Dave. Yeah. So thank you, everybody. Have a great night. Oh, wait. Do we already close out?

We have some questions. Let me get to those questions real quick. I really apologize. Usually, Jack's closing, and I'm looking up questions. But let's see. Let me just get these few questions. I apologize, everybody. Do we have questions?

Okay. Actually, Cat Chaser, thank you very much for the sticker. And then we had a couple questions on Patreon. on. Well, we talked about, we talked about how McVe So Jimbo, I hope we answered that question for you. And Isaac, did you or anyone you know ever come across evidence of Russians in Vietnam? Yes. There's a very good story on that. We had some Black Deserts and on other occasions Russian advisors and the Rican teams were finding him and there's an excellent story and the guy's still alive he's old but um

uh norm dony was telling me about him but anyway uh we kept having reports about russians advising them and compromising our american teams so anyway his name is dennison the american guy but anyway he went out he says i'm going to get those russians and he went out and set a recon team and he ambushed the russians and cut their heads off he brought a sandbag with him and he dumped their heads in the sandbag, got back to the FOB, the CNC, and caught the first plane to Saigon, and got to the country team. The country team is usually the ambassador, commanding general, all that stuff, people who run the war. And he walked, just burst right in, walked into the business meeting, took the sandbag and rolled the heads out onto the table. And then he went

over to the ambassador, and he pried the mouth open on this rush. And he says, see those teams. Russian. And he got what left the room, went back to the FOB. That's amazing. And, you know, any repercussions? Huh? Any repercussions? I don't think you want to mess with a guy like that. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, honestly, like people say, you know, chopping a head off, you know, it's a horrible thing. But in this, in this context, how else do you prove that you've got Russians? You can't take the whole bodies back with you. Right. Right. You know. Yeah, that's fascinating. take the picture and it's kind of blurry.

Right, right, right. So, all right, that's it. Thank you, everybody. We deeply appreciate it.