The Team House - Special Forces Captain in Vietnam Shares Toltec Wisdom | Jim Morris | Ep. 152

Episode Date: July 2, 2022

During his third tour of duty in Vietnam where he served as a Green Beret, Jim Morris was wounded badly enough to be retired from the army. He came home bitter, angry that his career had been ended. After reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, he realized that many members of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters had also been combat officers. Following this spiritual “hint,” he spent the next couple of years as an acid head, even skydiving on LSD. Awakened by his LSD experiences, Morris immersed himself in the books of Carlos Castaneda as well as in Kriya yoga, Charismatic Christianity, and A Course in Miracles. From these experiences he was led to Toltec spiritual teacher don Miguel Ruiz and began a deep spiritual journey of change. Sharing his journey from PTSD to spiritual awakening, Morris recounts his time as a civil rights advocate for the Montagnard people in Vietnam and his years as a war correspondent at the same time he was following Castaneda’s Warrior’s Way. He describes his momentous meeting with don Miguel Ruiz as well as his travels around the world and in the astral realms. Sharing how his wife developed dementia and later became paralyzed, Morris explains how it required all his Toltec training, all his military training, everything he had to share her final years in a meaningful and fulfilling way. Written from a deep understanding of Toltec techniques this book shows in a heartfelt and resonant way what a spiritual path can give you. Get Jim's book "The Dreaming Circus" here: https://www.amazon.com/Dreaming-Circus-Special-Unlikely-Toltec/dp/159143453X Today's Sponsors: SAP Gear (Stately Asset Protection) https://SAPGEAR.com Veteran-owned company, Stately Asset Protection’s retail store specializes in handmade and unique survivability products. Use the code “TEAM” for 15% off your order! https://SAPGEAR.com For all bonus content including: -2 bonus episodes per month -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests -Ad Free audio feed 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):Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Yeah. If you're going to give us a great review, please do. 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, folks, this is episode 152 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with my co-host, David Park. Tonight on the Team House, we're super excited to have friend, author, Special Forces veteran, James Morris. He's the author of a number of different great books.

the devil's secret name, war story. He was a correspondent for Soldier of Fortune magazine for many years. After his service in Vietnam, Jim traveled around to various war zones, Beirut, El Salvador, really all over the place, covering conflicts for Bob Brown at Soldier of Fortune magazine. And he continues to write to this day at the age of, I think you're 81 or 82 now, Jim. I'm 85. 85. 85 years young.

Jim is still writing, still learning. His latest book is The Dreaming Circus. I just finished reading it yesterday. The book is really about, I wrote a review for it, so I'm a little introspective, I guess, or retrospective about the book. I, you know, I think that a lot of the war memoirs out there, including the one that you wrote Jim back in the day, the one that I wrote, it's very much about sort of a coming of age sort of story, a soldier's story. The one you just completed, the book you just wrote, answers another question that not enough people address. It's what do you do with the whole rest of your life after you survive as a veteran? How do you reintegrate back into society? How do you figure out what to do

with yourself and how do you live a good life? And I thought the dreaming circus really makes a strong attempt to answer some of those questions. So I really enjoyed it. I'm glad you did because you know, it's dear to my heart. The thing about the dreaming circus is, well, the thing about it is, is when I got out of the army, I was, I needed an attitude adjustment. And the dreaming circus is basically the story of my attitude adjustment, which took a long, long, long time. Because when I got out, I was pissed.

Okay. I was retired with a disability. And, um, uh, not to be bragging, but I was. I've got four purple hearts and I lost my left nut. I lost a big chunk out of my right arm and I couldn't do what I love to do anymore. And so I was, you know, I was working as a tech writer in Norman, Oklahoma, and not happy about it. And, okay, along about that time, I read the electric Kool-Aid acid test by Ken Kese, or not by Ken Keezy, but by Tom Wolfe about Ken Keezy. And that was the story of the Merrick Franksters and the story of LSD and all of that.

And I got into all that because it was interesting and it was fun. and it was also highly illegal. And I would like to point out that all the things I was doing that were illegal then are now prescribed to people for exactly the same purposes I was doing them. No, they didn't describe the prescribed the Grateful Dead, but that was a bonus. Yeah, the, all right, ask me a question, Jens.

Well, no, I think maybe this is a good place to start. I'm, as you point out, some of psychedelics are now being used in medically supervised treatments for PTSD. It's, it's getting closer to being accepted, right? We're getting closer to that. Well, they were before, they were before that, too. I mean, okay, my late wife, Myrna was a patient of, uh, Dr. Oscar Janegger, who was a guy who gave Carrie Grant LSD. He gave, I'm trying to think of this famous female author that I know as well as I know my own name.

That's one of the things that happens when you're 85 is word, just drop out of your vocabulary for about 10 minutes and you either find a synonym or stand there looking like an idiot. but in any case, Oz Janegger gave Kerry Grant LSD and he was he was already clearing space for his Nobel Prize

when the when the FBI showed up and confiscated they thought his entire stash I don't think they got it all but they also got all his records they didn't want him publishing it was

it was amazing because well, especially when you consider that Keezy had got into LSD in drug experiments at Stanford that were sponsored by the CIA. Right. So the whole hippie thing was essentially a collateral damage from CIA drug experiments. And that's, I mean, if you've got a sense of. of irony, you have to enjoy all of that.

Anyway, yeah, I did that, and I did it for about three years. And, you know, I went to, all right, we're going to be on here a long time. So I'll tell you this one time, the time that I took, the absolute most LSD I ever took, I took a full hit of Berkeley Sunshine, and I went to a Johnny Winter concert. And I'm going in the door, and this hand, right? roughly the, okay, perceptions are altered. This nine-foot-tall, 400-pound policeman grabbed my shoulder, and he said, say, hey, aye, hey, hey, you earn that patch?

Oh, oh, I'm wearing my field jacket, and I still had the SF combat patch on it. And I said, you're fucking right, I earned it. And he said, where was you at? that. And I told him, you know, a couple of camps and that I had been at. And he, you know, I was at Boon Bang and then later I commanded the team at Camduck. And he said, you ever hear of B-56?

And I said, oh, yeah, that's Project Sigma. You work for Ralph Utigard. He was my demo instructor. And so he said, well, I guess you got as good excuse as anybody. And I just went in. I don't know. Anyway, I did that for about three years. And then I realized that when I'd started it, I was way too uptight. And I was getting too loose, you know?

I mean, it was just getting kind of... You were skydiving on LSD. Well, I did that, yeah. And anyway, so I didn't make a habit of it. The guy, this is another thing, the guy who was the world. world champ when I started skydiving and I'm not going to say his name because he probably did but if he's still alive he might not love me saying that this guy used to this guy made dozens of skydives on LSD and just well anyway but I truly if anybody out there is thinking

about it I do not recommend it when I when I did I actually I had a malfunction I had a right side closure I was jumping a peric commander mark one which is the round canopy and I had a right side closure so I was you know plummeting to earth pretty fast and so I was trying to shake it out that didn't work and the guy was jumping with he was just off to you know off about it's only about 75 feet from me so anyway he'll get rid of it so I oh yeah get rid of it now you know dump to shoot, pull the reserve, and landed in a muddy pond and didn't get hurt.

So that was a good thing, but I never ever even thought about jumping out of an airplane on LSD again. And, you know, after three years, I thought, all right, you're getting too loose, dude. So I jumped my, I dumped my stash down the, down the toilet, flushed it. And I haven't had very little contact with any of that kind of stuff since then. What was, Jim, before moving on from that, I would like to, since, you know, it is being used to treat people more and off, more often. What was your takeaway from that experience with psychedelics? What were the positives and what were the negatives from your point of view?

Okay. well the negatives were almost every time I did it I wound up having a conversation with the policeman but the positives were that well what they do is they all right um castaneda said this about power plants he said um they awaken you from the torpor of your normal everyday thought and uh you know they shake you up they all right and I just did another interview with a new age Gaia program, and I said exactly the same thing. But psychedelics will let you out of the box you're in into a larger room.

They will not let you outside. You've got to do that on your own. And there are a lot of ways to do it. And I tried most of them, and the one that worked for me was, Don McGillory's Toltec training. And I did about 10 years of that. The thing is, it's not 10 years before

it kicks in. Things get better every step of the way, all the way along. And I finally got to where, well, I've done an awful lot of things that if you ask almost any sign that they'll tell you, oh no, that's impossible.

But they are possible, and there are other scientists who are catching on to it. There are some scientific principles that are not recognized scientific principles, but I think that they will be. And when they are, Lid's going to be off. It's going to be great. When you came to shamanism, like, older in life. I mean, you were in like late 60s, I believe, when you first started getting into it. No, I was in late 60s when I found a teacher. Okay.

But I was, I was 30, maybe 7, 36, 37 when I started reading. Okay, I had another tech riding job. This one was for the post office service, post office, which had a school system in Norman, Oklahoma. And so they hired me on a six-month contract to turn one of their manuals for a device a device of red zip codes called a zip mail translator and they wanted me to convert this manual into programmed instruction so you could take a little bit of it and then answer a question and see whether you know multiple guests true faults that sort of thing and see if you were picked up and then before you go to the next section well they give me six months to do this and i finished a

third of it by noon the first day. So I thought, oh, golly, you know, that's not going to work. So, but anybody who's reading a hardback book with the cover, you know, with the lure of dust jacket, they decide, looks like they're working. And I started reading Carlos Castaneda. And I thought, well, this is really interesting. This guy's got a whole different take on life. And the thing was that he,

What he called his system is the warrior's way. And, you know, I missed the army and I thought I had loved being a warrior. And basically what they seemed to be telling me how to do was to take the attitude of a warrior into normal life. And that's what I needed to do. I was in a, man, I hated. civilian life, especially in Oklahoma. And, you know, so I started studying this stuff. Well, Castaneda says that the basic difference between the warrior and the average man,

and this is important, the basic difference between the warrior and the average man is that whereas the average man sees everything as either a blessing or a curse, the warrior sees it as everything as a challenge and I've I maintain that that holds true whether you're a warrior in a war or you're a warrior trying to find yourself a shamanic path and you know that's that's the attitude that's the main attitude adjustment or that's one of the main attitude adjustments is to is to quit taking things as a blessing or curse and take them as a challenge and find find the way to deal with it and i started doing that and um well and once i i started practicing those things i was doing i was

practicing lucid dreaming you know which and i got to where i could do it you know i could know i was dreaming in my dreams and therefore controlled a dream and and do things that I wanted to do. And what I found is that when you do that, your astral body is kicked loose from your physical body. And like, okay, and the best lucid dream I had in that thing, I checked in on my mother. And it was 3 a.m.

I was asleep in Norman at 3 a.m. and my mom was sitting on the couch in their house. She had a lot of trouble sleep. She was a terrible warrior, my mom. And she got up, she threw her guts up every morning at 3 a.m. the whole time I was in Vietnam. Anyway, I, you know, I mean, I wasn't there. I was not physically there, and she couldn't see me.

feel me but she did later confirm that yeah she'd been up at 3 a.m. at that morning and so you can say well that was a coincidence she did that a lot or you can say well your after body was there and you saw your mom that's what I prefer to believe but you know you can you can go with either one so I did you know I did a little bit of lucid dreaming and I started going on vision quest that didn't didn't work very well I got run out of Wichita National or the Wichita National Forest I believe is what it's called there's a herve of buffalo there a pretty big one and this herd of Buffalo incidentally is all it all descended from a herd of

buffalo of 13 buffalo that were brought back to Oklahoma from the Bronx Zoo these are not wild buffalo but anyway they chased me out of the park and one time I was there and I was in a I was doing a lucid dream well what what I got was was I had a 56 Mustang but what I know 66 mustang and I got a very vivid mental image of my Mustang and I realized okay it's not anyway it wasn't it was actually it was it was September 12th 2001 the day I had my first or this day I started my first successful

Vision quest and I was out there looking for a spirit animal and I came out with bear But that you know that was all right I was at my sister Shirley's in Kabul Missouri and she had a farm and I was scheduled to go in on the day after 9-11. And so I'm sitting there in the morning. I have a, you know, chamanic morning ritual thing that I do, and I was doing that.

And I got a phone call from this lady I was seeing at the time, and she said, is your TV on them? I said, no. He said, turn it on. Okay, so I did. And time to see the second power. go down and no the first tower go down and I immediately all right my friend Rick Rescorla was the chief security from Morgan Stanley which was in the

World Trade Center so I called I called Rick's office and rang and rang and rang and didn't go through and so then I called there was an 800 number you could call to find out if somebody was okay and they told me erroneously that Rick had made it, but he hadn't. All right, to make a long story short, my friend Rick Rescorla was the biggest hero of 9-11. Morgan Stanley lost six people. They had, I think it was 1,700 people in the tower. And Rick got them all out, and he and his assistant were going upstairs in the building

when it came down to look for stragglers and that's where we lost him a bunch of people in the office of the joint joint chiefs and i we uh randy randy lee mostly who is a the chairman of joint chief speechwriter uh lieutenant colonel and he and i were working to get rich rick the presidential medal of freedom for for what he had done and um that didn't work but he finally did get the presidential citizen's medal from Trump. And if you

want to, if you want to see the coin that they passed out at that thing, it's just about four feet away from me now. Anyway, that was,

that was a great event. Jim, I'm... The only time I've been in the White House. I want to get back to the book. We do have to give a quick shout out to one of our sponsors for the show, which is Sapgear. You guys can find it, sapgear.com.

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

to raise healthy and happy children. That's why Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them build confidence in their parenting journey. Everyone deserves to have someone they can turn to for support with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. Being a parent can be really challenging.

Child and Family Resource Network focuses on connecting pregnant parents and those with kids under the age of five with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit child and family resource network.org today. So Jim, back to you. your latest book, The Dreaming Circus, is a lot of your books have been memoirs. They've been autobiographical.

But this one I felt was much more personal, much more, you did a lot of interrogating of your childhood, your upbringing, your experiences in Vietnam, maybe in a way that you hadn't before. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit about that because you use these shamanic techniques to kind of go back and reassess your personal history.

And I was wondering if you could kind of take us a little bit through that journey through looking back at your past and how it influenced your present. Yeah, well, the first version of this book was the last half of the book. And because I didn't want to write a book about myself, I wanted to write a book about all those techniques. And that's pretty much what the last half of the book is and how I learned them and you know what what I did with them and so forth but I realized that you know this is it's kind of an adventure book and you need to know who's having the adventure so I just thought all right what you got to do is you've got to write up

every spiritual turning point in your life to show how you got to this place so I kind of started doing that. And some of those, like how I got into, how I got into SF, you know, there was no, there was no, what's the word? There's no pipeline. Yeah, there was a cue course, but you didn't have to go through selection. That's the word. selection. There was no selection. I just, okay, I wanted to join special forces since the first time I ever heard of the unit, which was, I read an article about it in the magazine when I was a freshman in college. And so when I got in the Army, I immediately wanted to go to jump school. Well, son of a bitch. I hadn't done anything physical for a

couple years. I'd worked. I worked my way through college, but it was all in things like librarian and retail sales and Mickey Mouse stuff. And I didn't pass the jump school physical when I went through Iobc. So I went to Fort Dix to train basics and started working out. And the first thing I did was I lost 30 pounds. And then I started running and And, but my biggest problem was upper body and I could not do a pullup. I could not do a single pull-up. And so by this time I was a range officer. I was running the record ranges at Fort Dix.

So I had a pull-up bar put in my range check. And so I would run, I would run, okay, I ran a mile on Monday and I worked up to five miles on Friday. And then Saturday, when I didn't have to physically be on the range because it was a maintenance day, there was no firing, I would run 10 miles. And in the meantime, I would run back and grab the pull-up bar and lunge on it. And that's all I could do. But I kept lunging, and suddenly one day, son of a bitch, I was looking over the top of the bar. And so I thought, well, if you can do one, you can do two. The problem was I couldn't even do one before.

So I worked my way up to 10 and went to jump school. And that was the proudest day of my life, was, you know, graduating from jump schools. But, okay, I'd promised my wife, my first wife, I'd promised her that I would get out of, I'd do my two years and get out of the Army. And I had to go indefinite to get to jump school. I said, you can't just have, okay, we've been extended for a year, up to a year, because of some crisis in Berlin. I forget which one. They used to add a bunch of them.

And so I thought, well, a year is a year, so I went indefinite. And because they said, up to a year is not good enough. You've got to have at least a year to do. So I went indefinite. Well, then all my friends got let out after eight months. months and I was afraid that I would end up in some MEC infantry unit and driving and I didn't want to do that and so I went to the Pentagon to the infantry branch to make it quite clear that I wanted to get out and I was talking to this young

major he was I think he was that maybe 30 and he said Have you been talking anybody down here, Lieutenant? And I said, no, sir. And they said, well, I have here a set of orders sending you to the first Special Forces group. And I said, he said, it's not too late. And I said, sir, never mind. You just send me those orders. And I will go to Okinawa and be delighted to do it.

And when I walked out of the Pentagon, I was laughing so hard I fell down on the hood of a car. I mean, it was just like my whole life had changed. I had gone from being a leg lieutenant to an international adventurer in one moment. Well, okay, as far as I know, that was the only class that ever had non-volunteer officers in it in the Special Forces Qualification course. And a lot of those guys didn't pan out. on my first team the team that we relieved their

we relieved their commander had been relieved and the exo had finished it up the anyway well okay I remember in one one class we took

we were all we were sitting in an auditorium but they pulled guys out of the auditorium and they put them in the situation situation where they were to meet a hypothetical guerrilla chief and to deal with this guy. So the first guy, all he wanted was to want him to airdrop trucks to him because he wanted to establish a trucking company after the war. And then the next guy wanted to be a general. And the officer that was trying to deal with this guy had absolutely no idea.

idea how to do it. He was one of those guys who was in our class who really had no business being in this because he didn't believe in it. He didn't understand it and he couldn't do it. And I'm sitting there in the audience thinking, if somebody asked me that question, you want to be a general, I would just say, okay, you're a general. And he would say, or are you often to make me a general? You're a captain. And, you know, and, you know, and, you know, and, you know, in the scenario I was lieutenant at that point. But you are, you know, are you authorized to make, I'd say, look, if you start signing your radio messages, general so-and-so, they need you.

Nobody's going to tell you you're not a general. And by the time the thing is over with, believe me, you'll be a general. Not a problem. Just do it. And that would have worked. Well, it worked for, um, one of the, one of the American guerrillas in the Philippines. He was the first lieutenant when he escaped,

and he was a full colonel when he came out. And, okay, Don Blackburn and I can't remember this guy's name, he was, but Don Blackburn, who retired as a brigadier general, he and this guy would start referring to each other as one rank higher in their messages back to MacArthur's headquarters in Australia. and that's how they work their way up from lieutenants to colonels. And so you can do that stuff. You know, I mean, if you're in a guerrilla operation,

you can do wonderful wild and crazy shit. Yeah. And also in a counter-guerilla thing. I mean, God, we used to, well, anyway, the truth is I really want to tell horse birds to you. guys but let's talk to yeah we look i we want to we do want to hear some more stories and then because i think that that's all a part of you and it all like leads on this journey and i kind of want to go back to the beginning because you know you you walked you know you you were this hardcore

war you like you said four purple hearts right this hardcore warrior in vietnam and then you got out and you you sort of um went you know you became a long hair hippie no but you you you you you You know, you found an outlet that, you know, with the LSD. You wrote the book, the strawberry, the strawberry soldier. Was the strawberry soldier? Strawberry Soldier was my first book, which was also, it was, it was, I do not recommend it. And besides that, there are like maybe five copies of copies left in the world, and they'll cost you $350 bucks.

Well, then we're going to buy all of them and corner the market. No, no, it's a crappy book. It has a couple of good chapters, but it was a learner. Sure. You know, my first three, four books were a learner. Sure. And that's, Strawberry Soldier is not a good book. It's not, I'll tell you, I was, I was in grad school in Arkansas, and I reread it after about, oh, maybe 10 years after, no, about eight years after it came out.

And I thought, this is crap. these sentences don't work you know and so no don't don't but the reason I'm bringing it up is because it was sort

it was it was a little bit of your experience right it was a veteran returning home yeah it was that and experimenting with LSD so you had this journey that led you to shamanism

where did you start out growing up did you have a religious or a spiritual background before you joined the military? Oh, man. It was, no, okay, what happened is my grandparents took me to a revival meeting when I was eight. And that guy's Hillside, Hillfire and Brimstone service, just scared the shit out of me. And so I was, until I started reading science fiction, and maybe 11 or 12, I ran across the word agnostic.

in the sci-fi story, and I know what it meant, so I looked it up. And from that, I learned, oh, not everybody buys into this story. Well, the story doesn't make sense. I wouldn't buy into it. The only reason I bought into it is because, you know, everybody, all my authority figures said to buy into it. But this guy is saying, so I became, you know, a militant atheist. And so, you know. Did you carry that atheism with you throughout Vietnam?

Were you influenced by the traditions around you at all? Well, by that, okay, what I discovered in Vietnam was there's something, you know. Okay, the incident was, I had a, when I was PIO, I had a, or I. We were calling it I. They changed names of everything. I think the Army has like 15 useless lieutenant colonels that they have changing nomenclature for no purpose other than to give these clowns symptoms to do. But anyway, I was the information officer, and I had a corner office with a

typing desk in the corner, and I was sitting there overlooking a sidewalk that led from our enlisted club, which we called the Preboy Crub, and I would see guys that I knew from Okinawa come walking down the sidewalk and immediately if I saw some guy I knew that I hadn't seen for like four or five years I would everything I knew about this guy would pop into my head and every time they would come to a dead stop in the middle of the sidewalk look all around not see anything and go on so I realized okay there's some there's some connection there and that is absolutely something that modern science that shouldn't be I know everybody has really had that experience but I had it like six times in exactly the same way I went outside and and looked at the louvers that were covering that window to keep it cool inside and you could not see inside no way anybody out there could have seen me

but every time I would glom on to somebody they would come to a dead stop and look all around and like I said that happened six times so I knew there was something, you know, and the truth is you're not even supposed to be able to figure out what that is because it's just the human mind can't handle it. You can handle some of it. You can get a kind of a concept, but what you end up with is a metaphor. I would say that our view of... cosmology resembles the real thing about the same to the same degree that a Roadrunner cartoon resembles the southwest desert. You know, I mean, we have an idea. We can kind of manipulate that idea and get some effects.

We can, in fact, tune ourselves to Great Spirit or God or Cosmo or whatever. Whatever name you want to give it, we can kind of hook into that. Yeah. But no way do we get the whole story because we can't handle the whole story. Yeah. Now, when you were in Special Forces in Vietnam and working so closely with the Indage, were you exposed or taken interest to, because there's a lot of Buddhism mixed with sort of their local shamanism,

or, you know, I'm not exactly sure. But, you know, depending on which indage you worked, was there, were you ever drawn? to any of that? I was interested in it. And, you know, they had the Jari tribe, which the people I was working with, they had a shaman. They had actually had several, but one of them was left. He was called the King of Fire.

And I never met him, but Jerry Hickey, who was a brand corporation anthropologist. And he knew more about the mountain yard. anybody else published two books about him and he took Bill Foodie our junior medic who was a spec-for-acting buck sergeant at that time Bill took him to meet the King of Fire and he had an old French ID card with his name on it we relied a few I just kind of loved that you know and Bill incidentally retired from the military is the highest rank off of our team. He was a colonel in the Air Force when he retired as a surgeon.

I got this weird cough, and I'm trying to make it go away. It will shortly. We'll just deal with it for a little while. Yeah, no worries, Jim. I was wondering if you could tell us. There's actually maybe, like, this is sort of a deleted scenes from the book, because you let me read an earlier draft. And you had a whole sequence in the book, the originally.

about the story in Vietnam when you got one of your balls shot off by those communists. And it was actually... That's a war story. It's actually, I mean, it's a really... It's a really funny story. I mean, the way you wrote it is very funny.

And I was wondering if you could share it with us. Okay, well, I was out with what became the mic force. There was a... an area and my A.O. My strike force would just not go there. You know, the officers, the Vietnamese officers

wouldn't take them there. And I wanted to, in fact, I later found out Tom Kiernan and a friend of mine who was the guy who took the team in that replaced Donlin's team when his team got shot to shit and he got the middle of honor. Tom,

had my camp duck my my camp and he how he got people to go into that area was he got helicopters loaded him up on helicopters let him out on the other side and they had to walk through the objective to get home that's the only way he ever did it so the mic force was going in there and I just hooked up with them you know It's my first experience as a strap hanger. And that country was so rough. We were five days out and ten clicks from my camp. We just start out on a mountaintop in the morning,

eat lunch in the creek down below and ends the day on another mountain top. So we had walked probably 50 kilometers up and down, but 10 as the crow flies well so we were running out of supplies and the Australian warrant officer Billy Baxter who was in charge of the company Billy said okay what we're going to do is we're going to bury the supplies we got left for the next person that comes through hike down to the road the highway and go after the camp we make it back on the day and so I went ahead and disarmed a bunch of spear traps on the trail because before that happened I had I said okay

we know they can hear us because you know these helicopters have been buzzing around and so I'm going to go ahead to the to the next intersection trail and then what I want to do is I want to do a stay behind ambush on that trail and Billy thought that was a pretty good idea but then we got delayed a half a day because they decided to bring in the rest of our supplies and the enemy heard that

and by the time we got to that place they were there so you know the point was ambushed and everybody got down and so I said, where's Mr. He, who was the company commander as opposed to Billy Baxter the Australian advisor? And he wasn't there. He was further back in the column for some purpose.

And I thought, we just sit here. We're going to get picked of pieces. So I yelled my battle cry, which is, come on, come on, come on, let's go, let's go, let's go. And I charged this ambush, and we overran it. and killed a bunch of guys and they pulled out. And so I'm standing there looking at this expiring corpse on the ground and our interpreter was going crazy. He was just terrified and he was screaming, kill him, kill him, blah, blah, blah.

And I said, nobody wanted to kill him. and Billy said, I think they're up there on that hill. And I said, give me five guys, and I'll go take a look. And so I set out, and they had a stairway split logs with an actual, no, they didn't have a handrail. But a stairway going up this hill, and so I'm charging off up this stairway with these five guys. and so then I realized as we sort of hit where you can see the military crest of the hill I said okay I'm exposed here so I jumped to the left and as I jumped to the left I got hit in the right shoulders that guy must had that perfect psych picture when he shot me and so

I went down and I squeezed off the you know the all the stories about how the M-16 didn't tend to was prone to jam. Well, these were AR-15s. We've had those first, and they didn't have the, you know, the plunger on the side to correct the... No, Ford assessed. So this thing was just locked up solid, man,

and it was the second... Okay, I had had that happen on the last patrol on the first tour. It didn't have any negative effects then, but anyway, that was the same deal of the... the the AR-15 jammed on the first round of the second magazine

in the rain. So anyway, I'm laying there and my guys were all down and I'm trying to fire and I can't fire and I can see this guy

and so I said, all right, give me a fucking carbine and some guy that I couldn't even see threw me his carbine so now I had an M2 carbine

and I was looking up that hill and I could see guy poked his head up and I shot at him and he went back down and I counted and it took it was 10 seconds before he got back up and I thought in 10 seconds I can get up here and kill that son of the bitch and so when he poked his head back up I fired at him again and then I got up to go get him and some other asshole that I couldn't see shot my left nut off actually he just kind of clipped it and

I lost interest in taking that hill at that point. And with, you know, I crawled back down the hill. And Billy was there. And I said, look, if you want to get those guys, first of all, you've got to have some indirect fire, get an M79 on it. And I've been yelling, give me an M79. Nobody could hear me down the hill. So I said, put some indirect fire on it.

You can take that hill. He said, okay, good show. And meanwhile, they were, you know, bandying up by scrotum, which at this point looked like an eggplant with hair on it. And, I mean, a big eggplant. And. No bragging. Well, they bound that up. Yeah, well, they bound that up.

And there was another small wound on the right cheek of my ass that I was bleeding from, and nobody spotted that. So I started, I tried to walk out. But I just lost so much strength that finally I couldn't do it. So they carried my bleeding ass back to an LZ. And in my, I did check to be sure that everybody else is out. And then I let them, okay, you know that horse collar deal that you're supposed to sit in? Well, I couldn't sit in it. I was hanging from my knees and clinging to the ring at the top of it.

And that's, they winch me into that helicopter and the thing was going to zoom around with me hanging on it. And but I managed to hold on until he got me into the chopper. And so they landed at Camduck and I got to see Diwi on my counterpart for the last time. I really liked him. And I got to see John Kessling, my team sergeant. And somebody took my randle number one and I never saw that again. and they got me to the hospital and the doctor was he said well he said okay he said here's the deal if you if that nut will eventually heal but it'll take six months and it's not going to interfere with

your functioning if we take it off and you'll be back in six weeks and i said okay take it and so We were lying there and I was lying there and everybody else was standing up, but I was lying there and I said, do you know, do you know the song Johnny Small? And they said, no, how does that go? And so I sang a little song, oh, my name is Johnny Small, fuck y'all. My name is Johnny Small, fuck y'all. Oh, my name is Johnny Small and I've only got one ball. Fuck you all, fuck you all.

And I came out. out of it missing the nut. While I was in that, in the hospital that time, when I finally got to where I could kind of get up and move around a little bit, I got, okay, I got a compliment that I would rather have than the equivalent medal. Jack Morrison, who had been the most decorated Australian in the Korean War, and got another DCM in Vietnam, was in there.

And, okay, so I finally got up. And I gimped there was a little bar in the hospital, and I was going to limp off down to the bar. And I ran into Jack Cade. And the night before I went out on that patrol, I had said that I would give my left nut for a 30-day leave, and I got a 30-day convalescent leave out of the deal. Jack said, you won't be saying anything like that again.

I said, no, I don't think of it was. I went into the bar I went into the bar and there was Jack and I, you know, I couldn't sit on the stool. I had to like park the right cheek of my ass on the stool. And I was drinking a scotch and water

and he said, what are you doing here? And I said, I'm having a drink. And he said, we're done it at? And I said, you're fucking righted her. And he said,

my God, you're an L of a man. And I consider that the highest compliment I have ever received. And to have Jack Morris and say that, it's worth a lot. Jim, do what? I just have to ask, did you ever, or how many times

did you use the fact that you got a nut shut off as an opener to talk to a woman in a bar? What I usually told him was that I was sterile. And you'd be amazed at the reaction I got before the still, women were delighted to hear that they could screw me and not get knocked up. And I got a lot of trim like that.

Jim, can you, well, anyway. Can you tell us the story about, you mentioned the story about Project Delta and how it got its name? Oh, okay, yeah. Well, okay, how did Delta get its name? Originally, Project Delta was called Operation Leaping Lena. and Larry O'Neill, who was later killed commanding a microsoft company during Tett, but he was the air movement officer or some such thing in the S-4 shop at that time. And what he used to do when Leaping Lina had a huge priority.

So if it was going to Leaping Lina, he just would draw a triangle on the boxes that were headed that way. And, of course, the Greek letter Delta is a triangle. And so people started calling it Project Delta from that. That's how Delta got its name, and Delta Force got its name from that. And I'm sure there's nobody in Delta Force today who knows where the name came from. But that's it. Larry O'Neill drew a triangle.

It's all from the Greek, yeah, from the Greek triangle, which is the Delta, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And Charlie Beckwith was the commander of at one point before At one point, yeah, yeah. Chuck Allen had it when I was playing with him. And I was never, I was never in Delta, but I was accepted in Delta.

Chuck wanted me to raise him a reaction company of Mountain Yards, which I could have done quite easily. And I would have commanded it. And, but then I went off and got hit. and got hit, so I never did get to do that. You said you, I think you wrote that. You only got shot on the patrols you didn't plan. That's a fact.

I have never, I've never had any serious, I've tripped over a couple of fungi stakes, but I've never had any serious wounds. I never lost a man. No patrol that I planned and led lost to anybody. Not an American, not a mountain yard, nobody. and I'm really proud of that. And we weren't slackers. We were on the trail.

We killed a lot of them. We just didn't die. It was always the ones where you were a strap hanger on someone else's patrol you got hit. Well, truthfully, they were patrols in much more dangerous places than anywhere in Fubon province. Mostly what we would do is wander around until we got shot at. and then shoot back and they would run off and we'd try to catch them and that wouldn't work. So it took us, I knew what we needed was we needed an intelligence net so we could ambush them instead of being ambushed by them.

And it took me four months, it took me four months to get to the point where I could organize an intelligence net. And I just, okay, I had this aha moment. and so my best interpreter was a guy named Philippe Drun and Philippe had been fighting the conch since he was 12 years old he was he was terrific he was he was belief was good in the woods he was a mountain york and um here's how i organized my intelligence net i said hey phil go fire go hire some spies and the next day i had my intelligence that's how we got that that ambush that we got the you know the best operation I

ever ran was we were just sitting there by the trail and waiting for him to come by and that's that's all I did for the last two months we were there and and well that's all I that's all the operating I all the operating I did I was doing a lot of administrative stuff. But, yeah, we did that. And they're, okay, the old man, my CEO, Cruz McCullough, who was, he's gone now. Cruz is the best man I have ever known, pure and simple. I name my son after him.

I love the guy. All right, before I tell you about this operation, this operation, I want to tell you about another one. He planned an operation called Operation Bat. And the objective of Operation Bat was to reopen the road from where we were. It was an old highway that the Viet Cong had dropped trees across and, you know, he couldn't drive on it. The Vietnamese planned to take an engineer battalion and a year to reopen that road. And Cruz said, I can do it in a week with our organic transportation.

and the con owned that area and nobody wanted to go you know and all the guys that were going to go they asked me to try and talk him out of it and the night before they were supposed to go I said sir I believe and there's not very many people you can say something like this too

I believe and every man on this team believes that you are going to get wiped out I'm going to lose a bunch of people and you're going to you're going to lose all of our organic transportation. And he heard me. He listened. And he sat there on his bunk for a half hour thinking. And then he said, nope, I figured it out.

And they went on an operation. It was a huge success. They reopened that road. they went into Pladen Angway, which is one of our camps. Billy Wall was a team sergeant in that camp. Anyway, so the night they were due to come back, Bill Foodie was along on that jot. And he said, so we're going to be going back down the road we opened. And Cruz said, no, if we go back down that road, we'll be ambushed.

We're going to open another route on the way back. And so they just went back closer to the river where it was rougher. and Fudy said at one time they would like use the winch and they would drive a truck up a hill by winching it up the hill and driving at the same time and then they would drop it down the other side of whatever was blocking the road and Fuddy said the night they got back food he said to me I think they were afraid of him and I said who and he said the trucks trucks were afraid of the old man and anyway

he led one operation into the area to the south down there and they there was okay Vern Gillespie used to have another camp down there that operated in that area and he had been a pen pal of the VC commander until a B-team commander couldn't stop to it

And these guys were, you know, were coming for you. Fuck you. That kind of thing with the American commander and the VC commander, which I just think that's unbelievable. Yeah. And anyway, they got hit. Foodie got hit in the leg. Let's see. Ken Miller, not the author Ken Miller, but another Ken Miller.

It's a very common name. for calling Toyota. This is Jan. How can I help? Hi, thanks for telling my family and me about Toyota's national sales event. We got a new RAV-4 during the event, and it's been great. Well, that makes me happy. Right now through September 6th, it is the best time to drive off in a new Camry hybrid, Tacoma, and more. So what are you up to? You know, we took the RAV-4 to a great spot, and now we're exploring a cave. Amazing. Yeah, my wife talked me into Spalunking. I'm actually a complete and absolute amateur. Amateur. An absolute amateur.

Huh, I could have done without the echo on that. Toyota's national sales event is on. Visit your participating Toyota dealer today to enjoy every last second of summer. Toyota, let's go places. See your participating Toyota dealer for details. Dealer inventory may bury. Event end September 6th. Oh, we lost you, Jim.

You're going to have to call them and tell them to sign back in. Hey, folks, stand by real quick. We had him on phone audio. we just lost them. We'll have to get back. Hey, everybody, if you're listening, we really appreciate it. Please like and subscribe to our channel. Also, if you'd like to buy us some booze or help the show keep the lights on,

booze before lights. But please join us at patreon.com. Patreon.com backslash or support slash or the team house. And, yeah, you get free bonus episodes. And what else do they get, Dee? Oh, wow. Yeah, we've lost audio. They get two bonus episodes per month,

add free audio feeds. Yeah, so I think you'll have to call back in again like you did before. Access to bonus segments with like guys like Mike Binding, like some legends. Yeah, because otherwise we won't be able to hear you. And yeah, and snacks for us to get snacks for us, which is cool. Yeah. Patreon.com slash the team now. Yeah, I don't know what happened.

There you go. And here you are experiencing all the wonder of live. live broadcasting. So Jim go to back to the microphone and hit that little arrow.

Also, check out Jim's books. He's written a lot of books and some of these books are legendary if you have not read them. His latest book

is The Dreaming Circus, which kind of explores his journey as from a special operation soldier to experimenting with LSD to being led into shamanism finally in the later years, you know, not later years. I mean, he's still a young man, obviously.

But the devil's secret name, war story, fighting men, above and beyond, silver nail, chimps with nukes. Just a number of phenomenal books that he's written. And you can find them all on Amazon or your local bookseller, those still exist. Yeah, but if you're not watching live right now and you're listening or watching later, all the links are in the description or in the show notes. Hold on a second.

Check it out there. Exactly. We'll do it live. Hey, hold on. Let's see if we're in here, Jim. Okay. Oh, hold on. Yeah, we got you.

And we're back. Okay. Here we go. That worked. Okay, so Jim, I'm sorry. You were describing to send the actual. Yeah. Yeah.

Turn off the phone now. No, no, don't turn off your. phone? No, no, he's not dialed in. Oh, he's on. He's on actual audio. Oh, wow. Yeah, you'd hang up the phone. So, where were you, Jim? Seeing you or hearing you. Oh, shit. Can you hear us? No?

Jim, we can hear you. It's not us. It's him. Oh, for fuck's sake, again. Modern technology. Modern technology. What can you say? Hey, Jim. It's the best. Yeah. So, hey, I'm going to need you to do the, go through the process again go down on the microphone on the lower left hand corner and hit that arrow okay i've muted jim uh so we we can't hear jim right now and then where it says like switch to

phone or something like that well we can hear him he can't oh he can't hear and audio options go to audio options okay i'm hitting audio options and the only thing i've got here Oh, it says leave. Phone call. Yeah. Yes. Okay, guys. While we're waiting, we also, because he hung up on you, right?

He's got a call in on the audio. Yeah. So, you know, talking about our friends at Sap Gear, some of the other great things that they have. And Jack and I will be taking these with us when we go to DevCon, because we know how those scoundrels are. But they have these, the Mission Darkness. Faraday bags. And for those of you who don't know, a Faraday bag blocks all electronic signals. So it'll protect you from Bluetooth. It'll protect, you know, yourself. Like if for any reason you ever don't want your phone being tracked, and believe it or not, there are legitimate reasons

for not wanting your phone being tracked. Having a Faraday bag is a great thing. You know, dropping your wallet in a Faraday bag, if you don't have a... a wallet that protects the RFID cards is a good thing also. But check out our friends of Sapgear. Check out all their stuff. They have great escape stuff for apprehension avoidance. These NFC tags. Yeah, Jack's Rock and his one of the bracelets.

There's a little handcuff key on there. Can you hear us? We are back. We're getting a bit of an echo. Yeah. Give it one more try right now. James, Jim, can you talk? Yeah.

Yeah. And I was telling some elaborate lie. Oh, I know why. It's because he's on here twice. Hold on a second. It's not your fault. I'm going to go to gallery. Oh, yeah.

And I'm going to... You see my Patreon thing? All right. How about now, Jim? Okay, you muted me. Yeah, but we can hear you. We can hear you. Okay, you can hear me, and I can hear you.

hear you. Yes, sir. This is wonderful state of affairs. Jacko, full screen. So I was telling the story of that, of that operation that Cruz ran down south. And basically, he got all the information on the, I'm going to try and keep this kind of short. He got all the information on the upcoming Monton Yard Revote. Look at the Saigon.

and about a week later, this super spook flew in and told us we were lying, and the old man threw him out of the camp, and then when the revolt came, well, special forces was ready for it because the word was ever, we weren't the only people who figured it out, but that was rather annoying when the sky flew in there and told us we were lying. Just making this up for whatever reason.

Right. I don't know why he'd want to lie about that. And, well, anyway, so the old man threw him out. I want to tell you something about my CEO. Nobody who knew him thought he was going to retire with fewer than three stars. And he was ambitious. He wanted to do that. He was an artillery officer.

So when we got back to Okinawa, he transferred to the 173rd. And about a month after that, that he came over to my house. They were getting ready to deploy to Vietnam, the first Army combat troops in Vietnam, the 173rd. And he said, Jim, we're going to lose this war. And I don't want to stick around to watch. And he resigned.

Wow. Wow. What was the feeling? Was that a general feeling over there that the U.S. just had no general strategy? And people felt like, like, we're going to lose. or that there's no definitive victory. Before I went to the first time, went the first time,

one of our NCOs who had been told me, he said it's going to take 30 years to win this war. And I think it's just a principle. You can win a counterinsurgency war, but it's going to take a generation to do it because the people that are in charge they're now aren't doing it right, and the old guys aren't going to let go.

Right. And the only way you can actually win an insurgency is start training cadets. And by the time one of those cadets make a general, you're winning the war. Did you see... I was going to ask you that when, you know, when you saw things sort of going down in Afghanistan,

at that point, did you feel, Did you see similarities between that and Vietnam and then over the long period? No, when we went into Afghanistan and didn't just, you know, pick al-Qaeda's ass and get out, I thought, you cannot win a civil war in a country where the national sport is civil war. You know, you can take the pennant, but next season they're all going to be back out there again. Right, right. Right. Yeah. Now, the sides may shuffle around a little bit, but that's what those folks do.

They wage civil war. Jim, I was wondering, could you know, could you tell us the story about Operation Dumbow Drop and how all that came to be? Because you were a big part of that, how the film came around. Okay, here's what happened. One of our camps, Trubon, they had put in a sawmill as a civic action. project and they logged all the logs around the camp and trucks just wouldn't work in that area. It had to be elephants. So they're requisitioned an elephant and from the S5 shop. And whoever took the call said, yeah, sure, we'll do that.

And without doing anything to figure out how you were going to, well, What we discovered, what we found out is that, okay, we had an animal tranquilizer that we used on water buffalo and other animals, most of water buffalo. But it took so much of this stuff to knock out an elephant that, you know, you had to shoot the elephant and the ass with nine darts to knock them out. And there are not very many elephants that will stand still while you do that. So, so the S5 came over to my shop, the I.O. shop, and he, because my phone was better, I guess. Anyway, we started calling zoos in the United States. And, of course, the first thing we had to do

was convince the operator we weren't drunk. But we finally got a guy at the Cleveland Zoo who told us there's an experimental animal triangulizer named M99 that will knock out an elephant in a heartbeat. And so we said, okay, so we got to get us some of that. And he said, where do you get it? And he said, well, it's manufactured by Rickinson's Sons in Leeds, England.

So the next night they came over, and we tried to call England from the Trom, which we finally, okay, what we finally got was the setup where we had the operator in Navaire, and that's where we lost the signal. So the Navaire operator was talking to the guy at Rekinson Sons, and he said we had to have a narcotics import license, from the State Department to order this stuff. So then we sent us a request to the State Department. And they just, of course, they just thought it was funny,

but they finally authorized us. We finally got some of this stuff. And Scott Gant, who was in the five shop, was the project officer on this. And he managed to buy an elephant in the Tron, and then we had to figure out how to move it. Well, the first thing we were going to do, we were going to

somebody said there drop and we said sure yeah we can do that we figured we could take 400 400 foot cargo shoots to to lower an elephant to the ground and we weren't going to just

strap you know we weren't going to walk them out the door they would be knocked out strapped to a cargo pallet and that cargo pallet well there was a lady in Mabel Raymond Hawkins of the British Society for the Prevention of cruelty to animals

who just put a stop to that. I mean, she just said, you can't, you know, she thought we were going to walk them out the door. And she said it would, you know, crushed their, you know, not good for the elephant. So we said, all right, never mind, we'll do it another way. And they took them in by flying crane.

And as it happens, that was, they took them in when Frank Orions, covered that and I was off covering Delta in the ash out at that point and they dropped the elephants about two days from when Martin Luther King was assassinated so that just blew my elephants I mean everybody covered the elephant drop everybody there were AP, UPI, ABC, CBS, NBC, everybody and Reuters I could go on and And they all wrote it up and it didn't run anywhere. It was, you know, it was, okay, I, I, one of my, one of my projects was to convince people that we weren't just bloodthirsty killers.

We actually did nice things for people. Right. You know, I built a, I built a leopard colony when I was at my first camp. That was, I was a project officer on that. The scariest I've ever been was splitting a jug of rights wine with the chief of that leopard village off the same straw, you know. I mean, that was, that had an enormous fucker factory. And, but the elephant thing just that didn't happen, you know, it didn't work. So, as a PR.

Right. Now, it actually worked. I mean, they, like, didn't Disney do a movie on it? Oh, yeah, we got the elephants in there. Yeah, the elephants got in there. Actually, actually, we developed, we delivered four. elephants. We delivered two to Camduck and two to

Trebonne and Trubon was attacked and one of the elephants ran away. But they still had that one elephant, I think, to work there for a while. But yeah, so their sawmill was functioning. They had a good thing to us. But the one you guys

dropped, I mean, he got his airborne wings and everything worked out, okay? No, we did not ever air-dropping elephant. It got canceled altogether. It happened in a Disney movie, but it didn't happen in real life. Oh, okay. So then how did you get them in? We took them in sling loaded under a flying crane.

Oh, okay, okay. So he got his air assault wings. Yeah, they got that. Yes. Well, there was a little of that going on. One of our mountain yard companies got the 1001st combat patch. They were pretty proud of that. Yeah, because they got flown in.

Well, they were, I don't remember the name of the operation, but the 101st was committed, and this mountain yard company was anchoring, I think, their left flank. And they thought, well, that's really cool. We'll give those guys our combat patch. That's great. And so they got, yeah, yeah, that was cool. Well, when we were doing refugee work later,

the State Department was enormously resistant to bringing, mountain yards from Thailand to the states but the as it happened the Thai ambassador had been in a hundred and first and when we we told him that one of our companies had the hundred first combat patch that turned that did around and eventually you know we got it was 220 mountain yards the first well there had been like a dozen here before that we were just here when the when Vietnam went down but I We got the first 220 in, and then the same group, much easier a couple of years later, with a correspondent.

I want to give this guy credit. His name is Nate Fayer, and Nate was kind of the Hunter Thompson, the war correspondent, and he found an 800-man full-ro unit. That was the Montanyard Sephardt Separate Organization, operating in Cambodia, and by that time they'd been kind of co-opted by the Khmer Rouge, who they had to cooperate with just to survive.

Right. But we got those guys out in the State Department. They didn't give us any heat about that at all. It's just like, no, we're not going through that again. And so those guys got over, and there are, I think, probably now about 5,000 mountain yards in the United States.

Yeah. So, and that's all kind of as a result of those first two 200 that we got in. So I'm very proud of that. And you were very active in that effort. You were very active in that effort too, right? I was a PR guy, and it was a natural story.

So we made, you know, I was on every, all the national news shows. I was on, there was a show, kind of a, ABC had a kind of a road show 60 minutes that they did called West West 47th or West something. Anyway,

Meredith Vieira was the correspondent on that and she was 23 at the time. And that was a great show. I wish I had a copy of it today. And so, you know, that we, yeah, we got them in. Yeah.

And it worked like ganglust. Now, Jim, so you said, you told us up top that when you left, when you retired, you were angry. What was it that you were angry about at this when you left? I was angry about being a civilian in Oklahoma as opposed to a special forces officer in Vietnam. Yeah. Which is, you know, what I had always wanted to do and what I still wanted to do. And the closest to the best of that was when I hooked up with SOF a couple years later. That was great.

You know, I mean, it was, Jesus, it was fun. And there was actually only one day of it, though, that was as scary as a bad day at Vietnam. And that was in El Salvador. Salvador was a bloody war. and you know my friend Greg Walker was part of the effort to get those guys to recognition they deserve because the Army wasn't going to admit that anybody ever actually fought in El Salvador which they most certainly did I did and those 55 advisors they wouldn't let them send more than 55 guys So they were working 18-hour days.

They would send them for three months straight. They would work 18-hour days for three months straight doing the work of several hundred guys. And theoretically, they were allowed to carry anything but pistols. And what most of them had was it like a Matt 49 or something? like that in a gym bag maybe a car 15 because you know yourself the reason that

the pistol is not an offensive weapon is because it's a crappy defensive weapon you know I mean it's a pistol you know and if you get if you get in a real combat situation where the other side has multiple automatic weapons

that pistol is going to do you as much good as a big rock. And I'm still mad about that, that the army folded about that. There was one story in the New York Times, and the guy who wrote it had been a Marine captain, he must have known what he was doing. And so they would not let guys going into a combat situation

carry anything but a pistol. and I'm sure that that was a stricter that was widely violated. Well, folks, if people were interested, you can go watch our past episode with Greg Walker. He's been on the show before talking about it. Oh, I didn't know Greg had done it. Oh, yeah, yeah. We've had Greg on here. And Ken Miller has also been on the show, who you mentioned briefly.

So, yeah, there's a lot of crossover. Well, he mentioned a different Ken Miller. No. It seems to be a podcast whose main job is to interview my friend, so I appreciate it. Yeah. So you left angry. Well, you didn't leave angry, but you're angry because you're now in Oklahoma, which I can, I mean, I, look, I grew up in Kansas, so I understand being angry in that general sense. but

but what led you when was the first time you tried LSD why did you try it what like what were you thinking okay my my friend

my friend Zoltan Malachai oops I'm sorry I did not mean to say his full name scratch that my friend Zoltan okay we had a coffee drinking group I didn't know Russ Corla in Vietnam

I knew him in the OU writing program and you know that's for a scoreless pictures on the front of we're on the front cover of weaver soldiers he was a major hero in that battle got a silver star for it and uh he was part of our coffee drinking group and zoltan was it was mostly writing students and we'd sit there and tell stories and um zelton one of the stories he told was um he had okay he had taken a uh he He had spent a year in the writing program at Iowa, which is very prestigious literary literary. And we were taught by, with OU, we were taught by a bunch of old Pope fiction guys,

who were terrific. And anyway, so Zoh went for a year in Iowa and he said, these people are, no, they're just doing airy-fairy stuff. I don't want it. But while he was there, he went to a party out in the country. at Kurt Vonnegut's daughter's house. And he was tripping for that party. And they had a blizzard.

So he was going back and he said, I was driving back on a pair of the oldest, baldest tires you have ever seen. And there were cars off in the ditch on either side of the road all around me, but I was tripping. And I was down. in those tires and i just willed them to rip the road all the way home and i said i got to try

that stuff and he said he said thursday and that led to you know chapter one and uh dreaming circus and what was what we we did that can you tell me what can you tell us like what your first experience was like what was there a shift like what what was that for you Well, okay, I started to come on in Zoll's apartment. And, okay, here's happened. What happened once while I was there. We had gone to the grocery store, and I just, the grocery store was amazing to me, and the oranges were amazing to me.

And we picked up this gorgeous blonde that Shelley Hargis, I call her in the book. and I just immediately of course fell in love with her and the mascara was running back inside her eyes and running back out again and I thought that was weird and all the little serrations on the oranges were like wriggling and all of that and so I decided I was going to eat this orange and when I pulled the peel off I could see the Pope inside there and it was just like waving and it was what I said to Zola I said I have discovered the orange I'm the Christopher Columbus of the orange and then I you know I said the thing is this huge orange planted in my hand you know and so he said well let me show you something

and he took off a piece of the orange and he squirt the the piece of the orange and he squirt the the juice or the oil in the orange field threw this candle and were like you know and it was just it was he said that normal head trick so that was that was one thing um okay long story uh after we took after we took shelly home uh we went for a walk and um we were just walking down the street and i passed this car uh where the engine was running and that cracked us up because all that power was going nowhere and it was a symbol of our horrible civilization where nothing really worked right and there were like Turkish rug patterns in the concrete and then well we mooched around and some stuff happened that's really not worth talking about and we went to see some some friends of Zolz and um Their name was, their names were, well, Bob was this guy's name, and he kind of looked like, oh, God, who's the movie star in the Biker movie,

Biker Head movie. See, I'm dropping things. Anyway, he looked like that. Like Peter Fonda? And he has this kind of Deanna Durbin hairdo. Hmm? Peter Fonda? Dennis Hopper.

Oh, Dennis Hopper. Okay. I missed. And his girlfriend. his girlfriend was just wearing like a shorty nightgown and her left tit was hanging out. She started telling the story about a Ouija board and how she and her girlfriend had got into a Ouija board and the Ouija board had told her she was barren and he had to look it up. I had realized by this point this girl was perhaps the most stupid person I'd ever met.

And so my nickname for her was just stupid. But anyway, the Ouija board told her that she was going to die when she was 25 in a fire in Chicago. And so at that point, they locked the Ouija board back up. And I just felt so bad because I was absolutely sure everything the Ouija board had told it was true and was actually going to happen. And then I told this Ouija board story that my dad had told me about my grandfather. And I was having a hard time telling a story because I was still, you know, we were way past speaking and down where you're kind of rational again, but I was still pretty screwed up. So I was telling a story about my grandfather had died. He died in a hospital, and my dad had always wanted to make contact with the dead.

So he went to these two ladies that were working on a Ouija board in someplace in Missouri Ozarks. and they immediately they got in there this Ouija board thing whatever they call it started hopping around and it said that and it was identified itself in the spirit of my deceased grandfather and dad said how did you die because there was some question about that and the Ouija board said didn't die I was murdered and so dad said who did it and the Ouija board said a guy named H. Atterbury had done it. And so, so dad said, what do you want me to do about it? And the Ouigi board said nothing. And it's being taken care of. But my dad's not one to let sleeping dogs lie. And so about two weeks later, he called his hospital and asked if they

had an attendant named Atterbury. And sure enough, they did. Oh, that's when he went back to the Ouija board and said, what do you want me to do about it? And he was told nothing that's being taken care of. Then he went back and called the hospital again and asked to speak to Atterbury and he said, we died. So I said, okay. And somebody said, well, what did he die of? And I said, beach me. You know, dad never said. And so later when we left, because I got, I got really paranoid in there. I got freaked out. I just wanted out of it. I did not like, I like, I like, Bob and stupid okay but some other people came in and they just there were bad dopers I didn't want to be there and so we left and then we got so he asked

you know is that's story true and I said well you know dad told it to me for true and then we got pulled over by a cop and you know he said I Let's see a little ID over here. So we popped over and whipped out our ID and showed him all of our pillar of the community cards. And he was so embarrassed, you know. I mean, he realized he had stopped two citizens for walking on the sidewalk, which is why the city put it there.

And so he apologized and told the usual lie that we thought you were some guys that we think done some burglaries over here. and, you know, I mean, I had cops that pulled me over, use that, you know, use that excuse for pulling me over about four times. So, you know, and then, we said, no problem, officer, have a good shift, you know, and off he went. And I went home, and that was the end of my first trip. So was that trip, would you, would you describe that? Because you've had this big spiritual journey in your life.

Was that trip, was there any sense of spirituality or openness in that? Or was it more recreational at that time? Okay, my interest in it were twofold, because I, you know, I'd read about, I'd read the Kool-Aid test, which is mostly about tripping for fun. But I'd also read, I think I'd read Alda Sexley, and I'd read some other people. And I knew that, you know, that people were getting spiritual insight. from it and I wanted that too and and I'm trying to think of any spiritual insights that I did get and mostly those times the one time the one time I'm thinking of that I did get some spiritual insights was

I I was I was specifically for that I went to the woods devil's den state park in Arkansas off. And I was tripping out there by myself. And I was overcome with guilt for leaving my first wife because, well, it was a mess. And I wasn't wrong to do it. And there was no way I was going to go back. But she was a good mom to my kids. And he loved me.

And anyway, I was just overcome by guilt. And the spiritual insight what I got was, you got to forgive herself. and go on because you can't go back, you know. You just got to take the lesson and use it as best you can. And that was a first-rate spiritual insight. Could you talk a little bit more about that, Jim? Because I thought in your book in the Dreaming Circus, there's quite a bit in there. I think you said you've been married five times in life.

And you've told me in the past about, you know, how you led a very chaotic life in so many ways. I was wondering. Well, I did, but, okay, in the married five times thing, I want to, I want to make it clear that, okay, when I finally discovered I was part Cherokee, I realized that that was in the Cherokee society, that was normal and it was right. And a lot of people in the area where I come from, they have it, a lot of them, don't know their Cherokee, but they have that. I mean, people got married and divorced like crazy in the Ozarks and in Oklahoma

before that. My mother was married three times. She was widowed once, but she was married three times. My dad was married three times. My dad was married four times. One of my sisters was married four times. One of them was married three times. One of them got married

once and never would do it again. But, you know, I mean, so it wasn't weird that I got married and divorced a lot but it also has to do with the way I was raised you know I wasn't raised as

an athlete I wasn't raised as a as a book nerd you know but the books that I read were adventure stories and then when I got to where and I wanted to have some adventures I didn't want to just read adventure stories

so but my I'm okay we moved around a lot it was the my year my fifth grade year I was okay mine

I had hurt myself while my mom was at work and there was no forget the daycare that didn't happen in those days there was nobody to watch the kid and so my instructions were to come home

lock myself in the house and wait until she got home by which time it was usually dark. And so that's not something an 11 year old boy wants to live through. And every time,

it affected me in the way that when I was married, I felt trapped. I never really wanted to get married, but I would fall in love with these women who wanted to get married and then, you know, I'd be nice and I'd marry him and then I'd hate it. and then I'd leave.

And that was basically how that worked. This is not my favorite topic, John. Yeah, I get it. I just wanted to kind of hash out a little bit of that because it's in the book, and I think it was part of your journey towards eventually finding Mirna. Well, that's okay. Yeah, yeah. I can see why you ask, and you deserve an honest answer.

But I've got to tell you, it's not something I like to talk about. I get it. Yeah. Yeah. What was the conclusion as part of this journey? I mean, what were the changes you had to make in your life to lead to a more positive type of relationship that you ended up having? Well, okay. All right.

That has to do with, there is a movie out there which you can order called Dreaming Heaven is the name of it. And it's a story of a trip to Teotovacan. And I was on that trip. Now, this story, because they cover everybody's trip, and they couldn't do this part of mine. But I realized early on, my roommate was a guy named Steve Allen. It doesn't look anything like Steve Allen, TV, Steve Allen. Nobody probably remembers him anyway.

But he was a producer on this Dreaming Heaven movie. and so I was showing him we all got there a little early and I was showing him around Teo and when I went to the woman's I guess temple there's a pavilion for women

in there and I got smacked upside the head walking through a passageway in that thing and that was my first clue that this trip for me was about my relationship with women one of the teachers is a woman

named Jenny Gentry, who's a great teletech teacher. She's an especially great teletech teacher for women. But and I knew her well. I'd been with her a couple of times and I mean,

I've been on trips to her to Machu Picchu and various other places and I met her at a party at Lee McCormick's and her dad had been a Marine and he wanted to be buried in Arlington and I gave her some connects that I didn't know anybody

who could do it, but I knew people who knew people who could do it, and I gave her those connections, and it worked. She got her dad in Arlington. And so we were friendly, but all of a sudden, everything she said pissed me

off. And the first thing was, she said, I want you to when you're wandering around out, when you're wandering around, we want to take off your sunglasses, want to get the full light well okay I didn't have any clear glasses I had very shade lenses and you know my glasses would clear up when I went inside or at

night but they just automatically clouded over so I didn't have any other glasses but my sunglasses and my vision's not great and walking around on those pyramids is it's dangerous and it was scary and so I kept trying to sneak my sunglasses on and she kept stopping me and anyway I was just and I just wanted to tell her to shove it, you know, I need to wear these sunglasses. And so, but I didn't because I didn't want to, you know, she was a friend and I didn't want to take her down a peg in front of the other students. That was just not, that was not the way to go. but one night she jumped on Steve for something

in one of the last classes and I I knew why Steve had done what he had done and she was saying he was he had cheaped out and was missing the spiritual lesson which you should have got and I got up in her face and I told her she was basically full of shit

and that was the first time I'd ever done that you know all of my relationships with women my way getting my way was to manipulate and con basically because that's what I'd done with my mom and um that sort of freed me from that and okay by that time I was married to no that was before

Myrna and I married and then when her health started going bad um okay she was spending tens of thousands of dollars a year on meds and I'd been married four times. I did not want to get married again. I was just, I'm through with that. You know, we can live together. We can, it means as much, blah, blah, blah, blah. But I realized that I could save her tens of thousand dollars a year if she was on my GI insurance.

So we got married and it changed everything. And that was amazing that we went through that ceremony and we both felt married and it worked and we had quite a few good years together and then she started going bad and you know I mean she's

her head head went south rapidly and you know I mean the first last three years of her life she was paralyzed from the solar plexus on down she was largely

bedridden and there was no way she was I didn't want her in nursing home and I tried an assisted living and that didn't work out and so I sold her house thank God I sold her house she had bought it for a quarter of a mill and housing was crazy and I sold her house for almost a million bucks and I had enough money to keep her alive in another home with hot and cold running caregivers and everything she needed as best we could and people there who loved her 24-7 for the last three years of her life and that's how long she lived like that. and you talk about solidifying the Toltec stuff and okay what happens when you get through the Toltec training and they say okay you're now you're now a warrior hunting power and I was

hunting power for Mernet and okay I have this theory like Miguel could do stuff like make the fog come and go away and you know he's done that and he's he did a trick one time at not you pitch you where they were in a lightning storm and he would point and that's where the lightning would strike and then he would point again and that's where the lightning would strike and I asked him how I did it and he said well you know if you if you clear your mind you're connected to everything if you clear your mind and get rid of the internal dialogue the universe will tell you things and he said I didn't make the lightning strike I just

knew where it was going to and you know but those kind of things well the the powers that you're not supposed to have that I started picking up for healing powers because Myrna was he was dying and she was anicky about it she did not want to die and I learned I couldn't save her life but I could make the panic go away. And I learned a couple of healing techniques. The one that worked the best was called the Emotion Code. I picked that up off an interview show on Gaia,

the one I just was on. But anyway, it's a great technique. I use it daily on, you know, I'm still doing, I picked up a lot of healing skills. Gents, I'm going to have to eat my second cough drop. No worries. Yeah, well, here it is. Hey, can you see me?

Can you hear me? Yeah, we got you. Yeah, we got you, Jim. Okay. Okay, if you got me, that's good. I'm going to, yeah, I somehow knocked you down. But there you are. Okay.

Okay. Jim, I was wondering if you could describe, There's a series of techniques in your book that you talk about. Some of the ones that stand out in my mind, you talk about intent, personal history, dreaming. I was wondering if you could talk about some of those tools that really, like, helped you. Sure, sure. I'm delighted to. Okay.

Most of this I got originally from Castaneda, although Don Miguel's people do all of this. stuff and some but somewhere in Castaneda his teacher Don Juan says the key to all these matters of sorcery which is what he calls it is stopping the internal dialogue in other words to still your mind which is what you do in meditation but the to to tech techniques they have a lot of ways that you can do it while you're out and about one of them is like listening to the sounds of the world just do everything tune in to the sounds around you another one is okay castaneda calls it the right way of walking

but the version I caught I learned is called the sensory walk I used to walk in Topanga State Park every day I love that and the first thing you do is let your eyes go wide you know you're not focused on any one point you just kind of take in everything and then the next thing you do is open your ears up and the idea is to melt into all your five senses feel the breeze hear the words look at look at the wide angle thing until there's so much sensory input coming in that you can't think you just can't think and when you do that that you step into another world.

Basically, you're tripping. You know, I mean, it's like, it's a lot like where LSD used to take you, but you don't need any drugs to get there. And you don't have any thoughts for a while, but when you come back, the thoughts that you do have, they're better, they're insights, they're useful data, things that you can make your life better with. I'll tell you, when I would go walk to the park, I used to walk past this house.

I had a big thick wall around it. It must have been worth maybe two, three million bucks. And this guy, they had some dogs. I mean, like, they had dogs that would run out and snap and snarl at you. But when I was doing a century walk, when I walked back to that house, they wouldn't come out. they didn't sense that I was walking past the house and and one time I got almost past and then the thoughts kicked back in again and then they came out snapping and snarling at me and trying to eat their way through the head and there were

deer in the park when I was in that in that situation I could walk right up to those deer but one time I walked in there and I wasn't doing that I was writing a story in my head and it was a combat story. It was just one of the SOG operations that, well, I hadn't been on it. I was never a part of SOG, but Delta did the same thing, only in Vietnam, not over the fin. And I've been out with Delta, you know,

anyway, I knew what I was writing about, but it was, it was violent stuff. And I just had all these violent thoughts in my head, and the deer took, off like when I was like a hundred feet from them and if I had my mind was quiet I could walk right up to him so that that's that's one thing intent okay that was a hard one for me but it's what people are calling now the law of attraction and well what the law of attraction is is that which is like unto itself is drawn

and if if you have a goal and you're not resistant you'll get it and most people are like full of resistance the minute you want something I mean I did this for years I couldn't get published because I wanted it too bad you know I just

I just it was like I was just all choked up about and the only times I would get published was when something so horrible would happen that I'd forget about that for a while and then the stuff would start coming through and you know science says this can't be but they will say that it is because it is and how it works okay um we live in a in a in a field uh young calls it the collective unconscious uh Carl Jung the psychologist um psychiatrist I guess he was um

and all knowledge is out there. All of it's out there, and you can access all of it if you know the techniques. And the first one is to quiet your mind. And when you do that, you can make things happen to you. I found this apartment that way. I found the house I moved Murna into that way. I looked at one house in all of Los Angeles.

And, okay, here's how I did it. I pulled up the ads and I muscle tested them. And, okay, if you do this, that's no. If they stick, that's a yes. And I muscle tested every three-bedroom rental in Woodland Hills. I only got a yes on one. I looked at it. It was perfect.

I rented it. That's one thing. Well, I've done a lot. lot of stuff. We've got cars that way. Oh, Myrna's principal caregiver was a guy named George Hernandez, who was just coolest guy. And I found him with my, oh, I found the agency by muscle testing and they sent me George. And he was great. He made, he made, he finally got rear-ended and got his spine compacted and we had to replace him. But for about two years, he did

to make men his life happy than anybody else and he was terrific George was enormous he could he could pick her up and just put her in his car he had a he weighed about 400 pounds they had a crowned Vic and so he would take her for rides that's how he got out that's how she got out to see the world he was wonderful and I found him with muscle testing which I started doing that with the emotion codes, which is when I was hunting for power. That was one of the healing techniques that I picked up. Okay.

What are we covered? Freeing yourself from personal history was another one? Okay, yeah. Well, this would seem to be a contradiction. Erasing personal history, this is castaneda's thing. Miguel's not that big on it. but the idea is that once people have an image of you you are you're kind of a prisoner of it you know people are going to make you act like your image of them

and you kind of fall into it or you kind of start believing it yourself and his idea is if you want to be a successful shaman you've got to kind of create an aura of mystery around yourself so how you do that is by avoiding personal history this cough will go away in a minute and let's see lose self-importance that was that was a hard one for me and I finally realized after I actually I was writing the last chapter of dreaming circus and I I realized that I wanted that to I wanted to sell the book I wanted to be a success and I realized no that's that's self-importance you know you're you're trying to run

nothing is important nothing nothing at all is really important and whether you sell this book is not important whether the book sells is not important whether the book success is a success is not an important everybody who's ready for it will find it somewhere and if you get the book out maybe some people will find it that way but they'll find it anyway and so that was an enormous queering for me and you know they say you this is a spiral you go this spiritual advancement thing You don't go, you go. And that was another round on the spiral for me,

was to start over with the very first lesson I learned from Castamata after I'd done all that stuff and written all that book. And I have to say, I think I've moved on a little bit past that and picked up a few more things and can do a few more things that I couldn't do before. Outside of the phenomena, like the muscle testing and the mindful walking and things like that, what what has this done to like to your personhood right to to to Jim Morris the

Vietnam veteran the you know all these things what has that all this done well I used to be just just eating up with and I think most people are just eating up with my thoughts with things that had happened to me that were this constant buzz in my head, you know, and that son of a bitch and that you were, you know, you're all this stuff is just going on in your head all the time. Not now. Not so much. And my life is like we're sailing.

you know, what it's done for me is to make me happy most of the time and teach me how to get happy when I start not being happy. Jim, back to my... That's why I think it would be... Back to a little bit like my introduction to the show and that I think there's a lot of books out there and stories of war and et cetera,

but I don't think there's many that like inform... I mean, maybe there's the Hakaguri a few books like that about the samurai that have information in there about for the returning samurai what advice would you give to these guys out there who are military veterans and they're going through the same experiences, the same sort of anger

that you had when you were a younger? Okay, the advice I would give them is there is a way. There is a way. And it's going to be different for everybody. I mean, you know, for some people, they can find it in their evangelical Christianity. And if that's what works for you, go for that. Some of them can find it in shamanism.

Some of them can find it in Roman Catholicism. Some of them can find it in Buddhism. Some of them can find it in a meditation course. My friend Morgan Ayers, who is also was a former Dreamboy, who is one of the the only guys that I know that's really interested in this woo-woo stuff he found it with with Tai Chi and that kind of stuff I mean he really got into that she gun Tai Chi and those guys you know they'll teach you to fight but they'll teach you to fight calmly and so there is a way now I can recommend any number of Toltec

You know, if you've got a substance abuse problem, call Lee McCormick. If you're a woman who has been humiliated or misused in some way, call Jenny Gentry. If you, if you, Don Miguel's sons, Jose and Miguel Jr. are great Toltec teachers, super teletech teachers. And the last time I went to one of his meetings, I picked up a, uh one sentence that i picked up from uh from hose which was he said the minute you learn to love yourself your life will change but it ain't easy to learn to love yourself particularly not if you're carrying a lot of PTSD but that's true now if you if you want to learn that lesson um he'd be a good

guy he'd be a good guy to go to now um uh uh hose say he's he's a rocker he's a he's a he is a very modern young man now his brother is Miguel Jr is serious before before Miguel talked him into teaching become a total tech teacher he was a real estate broker so he is he's really grounded and he's okay there's two there's two pads two paths two shamanistic paths one of them is called dreaming and the other one is called stalking and I'm mostly a stalker Miguel or no I think Miguel is junior is mostly a stalker Jose is a dreamer are ex a lot he's most amazing guy and he can he could he can take you places

you never know you could go just by listen just the way way he talks. And I've heard him many times go off on one of his sermons. And the things he says really don't make a hell of a lot of sense, but it doesn't matter because they will put your head in the place that you can't get to almost hardly any other way. These guys are amazing. And so, you know, I don't think there's any central compendium of Toltec teachers. but if anybody can get in touch with me, I could probably get you hooked up with one who can do you some good. And if you're in L.A., I would teach you myself, you know, I can do that.

So what was it? The big lesson is there is a way. If this isn't the way for you, you know, see, it's got to be the right guy, you know. That's the thing. It's not evangelical Christianity or a Catholic priest. It's the evangelical preacher. It's the right Catholic priest. But if you set your intent for it and don't block it with anxiety,

it will happen. That's another one of those things, which is absolutely true. When the student is ready, the teacher will appear. And it took me years. reading about that stuff before I was ready for a teacher. But when I was ready, there was Miguel. Yeah. Yeah, I wanted to bring that up, Jim, because I sent you in the email yesterday, actually,

that I feel like you and I are maybe on the same track in many ways because we were both, I mean, even just what you were saying about, you know, a single mother, growing up, reading adventure novels and deciding you want to have some of your own being in special forces, becoming a writer afterwards. And now here I am. I'm almost 39 years old. And when I read your book, and I think that I can relate

and accept some of these mental exercises and meditation, but when it comes to some of the more, I guess you say, New Age sort of concepts and astral projection, this is where my skepticism, I guess, comes in.

Not that I'm saying, like you said, if it works for somebody, it works for them, I'm happy for them. But Mike, personally, I'm a super atheist like you were

when you were younger. And I wonder, in another 40 years, do you think, am I going to get to where you are, Jim? Well, okay. Here, Ken Miller's an atheist, too. So we have this discussion. I've said everything, I've said this before. But if you consider the universe in effect,

then it must have a cause. And we don't really know much more than that. We call that God, but we don't know much more than that. Or we call it the Big Bang, but... Yeah, yeah, all of that. What is that? Okay. Here's something you can't...

Here's something you can't do. Try and think of something beyond the universe. You can't do it. Your mind won't handle it. Try and think of no universe. Try and think of what it would be like if there were absolutely nothing. You can't do it. You know, the human mind cannot...

conceive of that you have to use other other some other facilities and rational thought and the main trick technique of course is to quit thinking rationally or otherwise and okay um part of Castaneda I go back to him a lot because he really wrote it all down really well I don't think I could have been a student of his he was nasty to his students and I'm way past hazing I don't go for that but okay he says that the universe has two main components which he calls the tonal and the Nahual Miguel calls the Tonal the dream of the planet or your personal dream and in other words the tonal is everything and the Nahua

as everything else because what the universe that you're cognizant of is bounded by your senses you know and the senses interpret a band of vibration the world that you see it doesn't exist

what makes it is all your gadgets in your head that bring it into perception and bring it into your perception but you have to understand that there's there are vibrations beyond that

where your senses don't go we perceive in three dimensions four if you count time but there are infinite dimensions and you don't have direct access to them

but if you stop the internal dialogue you do you have access to them all and but you know you don't get it all at once but you pick up bits and pieces here and there a castaneda says people bring gifts back from them a while well they're not physical gifts but their ideas they're that's you know i mean that's Einstein conceived of the theory of relativity in a dream. In other words, he pulled his theory of relativity out of the Nahuahal. You could also, well, anyway, that's where all that stuff is.

And all of these, every religion, you know, like if you actually pray and really with it, and you expect an answer, well, you get one. That is an excursion into the Nahuil. Okay, am I clear here because I really didn't. You're saying that there's something beyond the material world that we perceive. Oh, well, okay, and you have to agree with that because it's self-evident, right? Sure. Yeah, we can't see atoms, but we know they're there.

You know, it's true. So what you need is a means of access to that. and to access that you have to quiet the internal dialogue and you know all I mean a lot of the new age world is just insipid I'm sorry but it is and but it's there are real insights there there is real value in it and there are wonderful teachers out there who are no part of it, you know. But you don't,

what you don't want to do is just turn yourself over to somebody, you know, say, okay, this guy's got it. Like a cult. No, keep your critical faculties, test everything.

Right. You know, all the way through. Be careful. Because you can go, you can go wrong in this stuff and get yourself really screwed up. You can go crazy doing this stuff.

So, but you can also find the answers you're looking for. Mm-hmm. so it's it's tricky but it's real and you know I love all of my people I want to give a shout out to one of my teachers who is I haven't mentioned Heather Ash Amara who is just fabulous and she has taken me through so much and showed me so much and I learned so much from her that I don't want to finish this without mentioning her but Jack if you're going to go looking for somebody, I'd send you to Lee McCormick because you and he would get on

like a housefire. He is a cool guy. There you go, Jack. Enlightenment right around the corner of it. Look up his website. You'll have fun on it. All right. All right. McCormick. I'll take a look. Friend him on Facebook. You know, you'll get a sense of who he is if you do that. Jim, this book, The Dreaming Circus, it's out now. People can go and pick it up on Amazon. I should also mention you wrote a novel called Battle of Sorcerers, which is a fictional novel about Toltec sorcery, I guess a little bit about what we've been talking about here tonight, right?

Well, yeah, it is. I'll tell you how that came about. My sister discovered that we were part Cherokee, and I started reading up on Cherokees. I learned a lot about, you know, their Cherokee shamanism and that kind of stuff. But I really know the Toltec thing. Well, I found out from a friend of mine that the FBI had so many,

this was some years ago, the FBI had so many agents investigating the finances of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma that they had built them their own holiday in. Wow. And I thought that was just amazing and really funny. And in my atheist days, I was going to write a satirical novel, a satirical gospel, a satirical novel about the story of Jesus. And I could never, I just couldn't make it work.

It was, it sucked every time I did it. But when she told me that, I thought, okay, if you make your Messiah character a Cherokee medicine man and the Romans are the FBI

and the Pharisees are the Ketawa Society which is a really conservative tribe within the tribe of Cherokees you can tell the story that way

so that's That's what I did. But the hero of it is a retired special forces warrant officer, DEA agent. And the FBI is trying to get this guy to frame our Cherokee Saucer for peyote, which he doesn't use. And my guy switches sides, and he just becomes this guy's apprentice and resigns from the DEA. and well, I don't want to give the plot away. Well, you read it, Jack. Tell him, it's a fun book.

Yeah, people can go pick it up on Amazon. It's cool. And just a couple user questions here. Klineen, thank you. Another viewer asks, did Jim ever try mushrooms as a warrior shaman of sorts? Yeah. I wanted to ask you because you know.

What I have found with Shrooms is that I can get in exactly the same place with meditation techniques without, you know, buying a bag of buds. Yeah. And I wanted to ask you about that because you'd mentioned LSD, like when you'd first come out of the Army, it was kind of popular at the time. But through the like this, the shamanic journey that you've taken, I wanted to ask you about other hallucinetics about, you know, mushrooms, ayahuasca, things like that.

Have you tried those? You recommend them? Or do you think that meditated? I've tried ayahuasca. I've taken and I haven't tried well I haven't tried DMT as DMT when I was in Peru I smoked some salvia which that was weird and the principal ingredient of salvia is the mt so I guess you can say I've done DMT too but yeah I've done shrooms I haven't I haven't taken peyote. I have an offer from some

Comanche dudes in Oklahoma to take peyote and I'm still thinking about it but I haven't done it yet. But you know most of those things I can say that things like vision quests, things like some of these like right way walking and some of these other techniques, you don't need psychedelics. I mean, maybe some people I needed them to break me out of, I mean, I was a squarehead when I started all this stuff.

And, you know, I needed something to break me open and make that. But that's all you're going to get out of that. I don't think, now, what people have said about ayahuasca, maybe that's a different thing. Incidentally, do you guys know how you've become an ayahuasca shaman? No. I doubt. Okay, a friend of mine told me that.

If you set out to become an, what it takes to become an ayahuasca shaman is that every ayahuasca shaman who is out there and is aware of your existence tries to kill you psychically. And if they can't do it, then you become an ayahuasca shaman. Interesting.

Brutal. Yeah. Yeah, they're not kidding. John says, here's a question for you, Jim. Do you feel your generation of soft personnel are harder than the ones that came to age during the global war on Terra era? No, I don't think we're harder. We may be crazier.

You know, I mean, okay, for instance, when I was in, the number two guy on the team was the first lieutenant. We didn't have the warrant officer. And we had old captains. We had, you know, captains. would come into SF who had 10 years experience in the infantry or one of our one of our best eight team commanders was happy yokem who was the medical service corps officer and he didn't want to go back to the hospital he wanted to run 18 and he was great um and also we had a lot more freedom I mean, okay, when my first team, we were in two corps, which was 40% of the land area of Vietnam, well, when they, at that time, we had, we didn't have the fifth group. We had USA SFV, USA Special, US Army Special Forces Vietnam. We were still sort of indirectly working for the CIA, not for MACV.

They had a B team in each core area. So we had one B team over all the A's in each core area. Well, in I Corps, they had six A, but in two core, we had 26, not A teams. But those guys didn't tell us what to do. It was all they could do to get, you know, to keep us supplied and handle our paperwork. We were operated absolutely freely. nobody told us what to do and we had one of the most successful teams in in two core I think it may have been the most successful team in two core we had the

highest skill ratio which wasn't high because we were still you know doing small unit raids and ambush but you know and we were always out most teams were sending two Americans on a patrol with a company of Martinards we sent five but we had an officer with every company-sized patrol and an NCO with every platoon because we wanted that kind of control and it worked for us. Anyway, I'm getting sidetracked.

I think one of the big differences... We may have been crazy. I think one of the big differences, Jim, is that the technology was not where it is today and because of that, we asked, yeah, we asked your generation of soldiers to do things that were crazy. That would just not happen today. Well, you know, those pictures I sent you of me playing war in Vietnam and all that? Yeah.

And the first one, you'll notice I'm carrying an M2 carbine. Yeah. You know, I carried an M2 carbine for four months, my first four months in Vietnam. The radio we used was an A&GRC, one of the, but it was the same radio that the OSS used in World War II. Yeah. They called it the RS1. Yeah.

And, you know, so yeah, you guys have got better gear. No question about that. It does bother me that, well, you know, if they're doing it like they were doing it and 6768, the guys that they, you know, guy goes through training a captain, you've got to be a captain as an officer to get into, to go through the course. And your first assignment,

you're going to be an A detachment commander. And so you're leading 11 guys who are more experienced than you are, you know? I, I mean, I'm sure those guys are good. and, you know, they've got an... But they're not... They spend a long time listening before they start talking, I would imagine.

So, Jim... So that's a concern. Yeah. I guess, you know, starting to kind of wrap up here, I know we've kept you for a few hours now. What are the big points? What are the big salient? Hey, this is the most fun I've had this week.

This is great. I've had a lot of good time. I'm glad to do. to hear that. I really am, and I've been looking forward to having you on this show for a long time. I mean, we talked about it like nine or ten months ago, you know, before the book came out. Yeah. And we planned it this way because the book came out, what, a week ago? It's actually not out. It came out a couple of weeks ago in Kindle. Okay. Okay. And it'll be out on the 22nd, as the date they've given me in the hardcover.

Again, guys, this book is The Dreaming Circus, Special Ops, LSD, and my unlikely path to Toltec wisdom. You can get it, you know, I mean, I hate to plug Amazon, but I feel like that's where you buy everything now, right? But also, like, do yourself a favor. You're an order it direct from Barron Company, the publisher. There you go. Down with our corporate masters. Go to the Barron Company website and order it direct. But I also really want to highly recommend all of Jim's other books, including Strawberry Soldier, which goes from...

No, don't recommend Strawberry Soldier. I'll tell you the good ones. I'll tell you the ones you should read. All right. War story, fighting men, the devil's secret name, and above and beyond. Those are my good soldier books. The others are learners. Well, and a Battle of Sorceres, that's worth reading, yes?

Yes, it is. Absolutely. If you're interested in this shamanic stuff, that's good. Yeah, that's good, too. Yeah, war story is one of my favorite Vietnam memoirs, and if you can tell, I've read a lot of them at this point. You know, but war story was one of my favorites, and it really resonated with me.

I read it just kind of as I was getting out of the Army, going through and feeling a lot of the same things you did, Jim, and reading your book, it really struck me. I mean, you can take Vietnam and replace it with Iraq. You can take communist and replace it with terrorists. And the Special Forces experience was nearly identical between the two conflicts. And I got to tell you this. I met a guy from Iraq who had been in Iraq,

and his team sergeant gave him a copy of war story and said, here, read this. This is how it's done when it's done right. Yeah. Yeah, it's, it really, that book really resonated with me. And, yeah, so I definitely hope people will go and check it out. So, Jim, what are some of the salient points that you hope people take away from the dreaming circus? There is a way, oh, from the dreaming circus?

Well, same deal. There is a way. It may not be the shamanic past, but if you can, here's some leads to that. And I gave them some leads to some other things. Of course, a miracle is great, too. But, you know, you've got to find the right way for you, but there is one. And whatever it is, you can find a way to live a happy life. It's there.

It is there. There's so many people, I think, need to hear that. Yeah, because if you look at our rates of suicide, substance abuse, all the horrible shit that, you know, we all know is out there. Yeah, I really hope that message gets through to people. Well, you know, some of the things I've said, like the key to all these matters of sorcery is to silence the internal dialogue. You find a way to quiet your thoughts, and you can do it just by listening to sounds. You can do it with meditation techniques. You can do it by walking in the woods.

but that is the absolute key to all this stuff. And if you learn intent, you can use it to build the life you want. Jim, thank you so much, man. You know, you're such a legend and it's such an honor to have you on to share your story with people. Like, we're so humble and we're so appreciative. Well, you know, Dave, I'm delighted to hear you say that because I knew Jack, I knew Jack like my stuff, but I've had some concern that you might think I was crazy. So I'm really glad to learn that you do not. No.

Well, Jack will tell you, I know, like I've read Carlos Gassaneda stuff. I've read Dan Millman, like I've read like all of that. you know, Jack will tell you that I, you know, I have a fairly deep education, a lot of that stuff. So it's all very fascinating. Yeah, excellent. Well, listen, the first thing I did when I was, you know, to teach, doing the source room, I did a, I took all the teaching parts of the first forecast in native books and ended them into a manual. And I will be perfectly happy.

I'll send that. I'll email that to Jack and he can pass it on to you if you'd like. Yeah, perfect. Love it. Okay, I'll do it. And if you were willing, we'd love to share that resource with, you know, particularly veterans, but anybody who's looking for it, if you're willing, I don't know if you want to keep that close hold until you publish it.

I'll send it to anybody. Nobody, I mean, it's all copyrighted material. I can't make money off of it. Right. Okay. But nobody's complained about my showing it to people. A compilation. Understand. Yeah.

Jim, I know you're, you don't strike me as the person that can ever stop writing until they nail your coffin shut. What's the next book? Not if I can help it. Not as well. For one thing, it actually keeps my mind working. Yeah. And, you know, I mean, hey, I'm 85 years old. I'm rated 80% disabled by the VA.

And I'm living a pretty normal life. Yeah. And that's a miracle enough in itself. Now, are you still sterile, though? Like, are you still using that in bars or what? I don't have to, but my girlfriend's glad. Jim, what's the next book that you're working on? Okay.

What I'm, what I'm, okay, here's something. A while back, I was, I got out this, I wrote a novel kind of based on my second marriage. and it's my hippie book and I've got it out and re-read it and I thought, well, this needs some work, but it ain't bad. And so I've taken about a year and I'm just almost true

to start trying to sell that thing called Love and Vane. All right. That's a good title. I'm looking forward to reading it, Jim. Again, man, thank you so much for doing this. This has been a great conversation. Any final thoughts before we let you go tonight? other than just to thank you both for hopefully doing some good and for sure having a good time.

And thanks a bunch. I really appreciate it. Yeah, I'd love to do it again sometime, Jim. I can listen to some of these. I know that you're maybe a little bit over the war at this point, but I love hearing these worst stories. That's why I keep asking you about it. Well, you know, it's like me and Miller, you know. We start out talking about something else.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. then it's there I was at 30,000 feet with nothing but the silkworm and number nine needles. Folks out there, next week, next Friday, we're going to have J.R. Seeger on the show. He was the leader of one of the first CIA paramilitary teams in Afghanistan after 9-11. He was the team leader of Justin Saps team that we had on a few weeks or a few months back. So we're excited to have JR on the show. Also a pretty prolific author. I was going to say a prolific fiction author, actually.

Phenomenal work. Yeah. So we will be here with JR next week. Jim, again, thank you so much, man. I hope everyone goes and checks out the Dreaming Circus, some of his other works, Battle of Sorcerers, War Story, the Devil's Secret Name. Those are all terrific books.

It's all the description. It's down the description. And remember Jim's message. There is a way, even if you don't see it right now. Adios, gentlemen. All right. Take care, Jim. Thanks, Jim.