The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 253: Bill Whittle—"They Get to Shoot Nazis... That's Fun!"

Episode Date: May 30, 2022

After reading a short Memorial Day mystery called Visiting Hours Mike speaks with Bill Whittle about the protocols of Arlington National Cemetery, the price of freedom, and the need for gratitude.  ��

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So number 253, this one's called, they get to shoot Nazis. That's fun with an explanation point where it's an exclamation. Did I get it wrong again? You got it wrong again. It's exclamation. You're exclaiming, not explaining. I know, but I'm just, I'm horrified by how many times I've said it wrong in my life. I pride myself on using the right word, usually.

Usually? Yeah, usually you're real good at this kind of stuff, but explanation. Yeah. Get to shoot Nazis. That's fun. Explanation point. No. You just said it again. I did it again. You said explanation. That's my fatal flaw. They get to shoot Nazis. That's fun. Exclamation point.

It's hard to say, but yeah, you got it. You got it, right. I've been talking for a minute, and all I've managed to tell you is the title of this episode. Let me add to that by saying, it's a terrific conversation, if I don't say so myself, with our old friend Bill Whittle. We invited Bill in because we are in real time right now approaching Memorial Day. And, of course, D-Day. And I just wanted to have a conversation.

about gratitude in general. There's so much going on in our country. There's so much going on with our military. A couple of years ago, right around this same time, I wrote a very short story that I would like to share with you first. Some of you may have heard it,

if you have, feel free to skip ahead six minutes. If you haven't, I think you'll enjoy it, and I think it will inform the conversation you're about to hear with the one and only Bill Whittle. They get to shoot Nazis. That's fun. exclamation point. Nice.

Here we go. According to the President of the United States, America would never see another soldier like him. And the President was probably right. Certainly, no one soldier had ever seen so much action. Two world wars, a stint in Korea, and more battles than he could recall. Now, retired at long last, the old soldier is relaxing in the place he calls. home, looking down on a field of green and the wide river that flows below. It's a good home, as homes go, at a fine place to welcome his family, who come to see him every day. In fact,

there they are right now, strolling up the driveway to say hello. The old soldier is always available during visiting hours. Always. A lot of men, his age, wind up alone and forgotten, especially in a place like this, but not him. Family members are always dropping by to spend time and share a story or keep him up to speed on the latest news from home. Just last week, his daughter Susan had stopped by to tell him his grandson had been accepted to Harvard. How about that? And just yesterday, cousin Billy brought word the old general store where he had met his wife, God rest her soul, was now a Starbucks. Ah, well, time marches on.

These visits from loved ones are lifelines, just like the letters he received in France all those years ago. June 5, 1918, one day after the Battle of Bella Wood. He was only a private back then, a teenager from Baton Rouge, among the first wave of Marines to charge into that unspeakable meat grinder on the Marne River. He was still in shock from what he had seen on that terrible day, the withering machine. Sheen gun fire, the constant shelling, and the brutal hand-to-hand combat. But then, a letter from Bakersfield arrived with his mother's writing on the front. A letter from home, which he read in a muddy trench surrounded by dead friends. What?

His kid brother had made the basketball team. When did he grow so tall? Sally? The little tomboy from down the block was Biloxi's buttermilk festival queen? unbelievable, and Freckles, the Cocker Spaniel, just had a litter of ten puppies, all of which were being named in his honor and given away to good homes around Boise. With every sentence, the young Marine had felt a little more human, a little more determined to make it back home to the people he loved.

Obviously, that determination paid off. Not only did he make it back from Bella Wood, he made it back from the Ardenne. the Battle of Iprey and San Miguel, each one bloodier than the next. For his heroism, he was awarded the Medal of Honor, as well as the Victoria Cross, unprecedented. But the old soldier was still a young man and just getting started. When the Japanese bomb Pearl Harbor, guess who was sleeping peacefully in his bunk aboard the USS, Arizona? He was a lieutenant by then, one of 1,500 sailors assigned to the mighty battle. when a torpedo bomb fell from the sky and sent them all toward the bottom of the Pacific.

Somehow, he had made it back to the surface, only to find the ocean burning with thousands of gallons of gasoline and littered with hundreds of his shipmates burning to death in the salty brine. It's a miracle that anyone survived that terrible morning, and yet, just six months later, there he was again in the coral sea, and then again. at the battles of Midway, Corregador, Mindanao, and Luzon. After that, it was back to Europe where he stormed the beaches of Normandy, fought the Battle of the Bulge, and distinguished himself at Anzio.

Through it all, no matter where the war raged, those letters from home always found him, little lifelines that reminded him of why he was over there in the first place. His family could never know how much that meant to him. or how much their visit today would lift his spirit. His final battle had taken place in Korea. 14 November, 1950, the Chosan Reservoir. A cold front from Siberia sent the temperature plunging to 36 degrees below zero. He was a captain by then, commanding a few good men

who were slowly freezing to death around him. It was the bloodiest battle he'd ever seen, even though the blood of his wounded men froze before it had a chance to flow. Again, he never expected to find himself among the survivors, the frozen chosen, as they were called, but neither did he expect a visit from the President of the United States who stood before him long after his return and proudly declared to all assembled

that there would never be another soldier like him. As his loved ones draw near, the guards step aside, leaving him to relax in his usual spot, while getting the latest updates from Biloxi or Boise or Baton Rouge, or was it Bakersfield. Honestly, it's hard to keep it all straight. He is old, after all. An old soldier, whose real family includes every dead American who never made it back and all the loved ones who still grieve their collective passing. The president was right.

There will never be another soldier like him, because today every soldier's DNA is kept on file, so his or her remains, no matter how small, can be positively identified. Thus, the old soldier really is the last of his kind, a legendary warrior who everybody has heard of, but nobody knows. A faceless hero who looks down on a field of green and the Potomac River that flows below. There, in a place called Arlington, you can find him still, waiting for visitors and relaxing for eternity. In the tomb he calls home.

The tomb of the unknown soldier. Anyway, that's the way I heard it. Well, it's a bad sign that everybody's giggling after a rather serious story. Bill Whittle, it's great to see you. Good to be back. It's like you never really left, you know? That was such a great conversation we had a few months ago. I don't want to speak for him, but when we look back and we evaluate whatever the episode was,

you know, I say, was it Bill Whittle quality? And he'll typically snort and shake his head. and we just get on with our lives because how do you top what we did last time? I don't know, but we're going to give it the old college try, Mike. I wanted John, because it's kind of like Memorial Day, and it's sort of like D-Day, and we're coming into both of those things. Father's Day somewhere on the other side of it, don't know if that's relevant or not. I just thought you'd be fun to talk to about gratitude and about our military,

and Chuck and I were just saying, you know, that story that we, we just played was one of the last things I wrote before we got super lazy and devolved into this extemporaneous, completely unscripted, utterly irresponsible format. So I wanted to play it again for people and then honestly just kind of get your take on it because, as I may have intimated, I admire your take. Well, thank you. Welcome. Was it any good? Did I get anything right? You got a lot right, Mike. I won't give you the actual score because I don't think anyone's ever seen cry on camera before and I don't want to destroy what's left of your image. Seriously, the one thing you said that really did strike me hard was that this was going to be

the last of the unknown soldiers that there won't be any unknown soldiers anymore because it's a remarkable thing really. You know, my dad took me to see the tomb of the unknown soldier when I was very young and had to explain to me that this was somebody buried and they didn't know who it was. They just knew he was from our side, and that was it. And I remember at first not being able to comprehend really what that meant, you know, and then it finally became clear to me that, oh, this is everybody. This is everybody who we don't know. It could be any of them. And so therefore, it's all of them. It's like Schrodener's tomb, you know. It's like you don't know who's in there, so it could be anybody. Right. That Arlington experience made a big impression on me. And then my dad died in

2002, and he was interned at Arlington. And the really remarkable thing about that is he was the first person to tell you, he never did anything heroic. He wasn't in combat. He signed up, lied about his agent, lied about, you know, a hernia and stuff that he had to get into the army. He was a second lieutenant and got there in April of 45, so there were, you know, maybe a week or two left in the war in Europe. But because he signed on the dotted line, that enabled him entitled him really to be interned at Arlington if he wanted to. So he had a, like a private service a lot of people went to, but this was a couple months later. And so there were not a whole lot of people there and had a little time to kill. So I went out walking. It was October morning in 2002.

And I don't ever remember being that cold. It was, well, I live in California, Florida, and Bermuda. It's not a real statement. But nevertheless, it was really cold day. But by the way, Bill, isn't it interesting how weirdly cold the East Coast, can feel, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the actual temperature. It's the humidity. I guess, man, but I've been all around the world and I've been cold in a lot of places, but being cold in Virginia and Baltimore, it's singular. I think Mark Twain said the coldest winter he ever experienced was summer in San Francisco.

Yeah. But anyway, I had some time to kill, and the thing that struck me the most, Mike, was that all of these tombstones are exactly the same. And if you walk down the rose, it's almost like, They're like cohorts. You'll see a sergeant, and he'll be right next to a major general. And then there'll be a captain, then there'll be a major, then there'll be a private. And none of them have any more ornamentation than the others.

And some of them, I took the time to look at the date. Some of these, like it was a sergeant or something, he had been in the Army. I mean, he died when he was 18 or 19. It might have been in the Army for, what, six months. Some other guy, you know, World War I, World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War. And they're right there side by side. and I was so struck by that. But the real impact didn't happen until later

because my dad was pre-mated, so there's a box like this, and it looks a little cheesy going in on a cason, you know, when you've got a cracker box. So these guys got this thing down so beautifully. So they had an enormous metal casket with a flag over and a little compartment for the ashes. And freezing cold early in the morning,

and we start walking along, and the thing that struck me the most was how quiet the honor guard was. They were just drumsticks on the rim, right? And I remember thinking of myself, this is so quiet that only the dead can hear it. That's how quiet it was. Turn the corner, was overcast. I know this sounds like it's made up, but this is actually what happened.

So we went past this tree. The sun came out and right at that exact moment, this army band, which had been there, just erupted into this triumphant fanfare. You know, it was like Caesar entering Rome. It was a bum, ba-va-va-ba-ha-ha-ha. And that just knocked all the crud right off of me. I really just rewired me on the spot. It really did. So we got to the place and they did the folded flag and they said our brother William has come to, you know, rest with heroes and all of this stuff. And when it was over, I talked to the guy who ran the service, Major Crisp.

And I was getting back in the van and I hadn't been in Washington very much. I looked down the lawn. There's just big ugly gray-green wall there. I said, is that the Pentagon? He says, yeah, that's the Pentagon. In fact, that's the side that the airplane hit. I said, wow, were you close? He said, I was on that hill right over there. He said, we heard this scream. We'd been told that something had happened. We heard the scream. We thought it was an incoming bomb or a missile. And then 50 feet above our head, that's five stories, right? I mean, that's just, you reach up and touch. Just this flash of aluminum, hit the building. I remember feeling the heat on my face. I don't remember the sound. And then he said, but then it started raining. It started raining little pieces of aluminum and little pieces of people, he said. And I said to him, this is 2002. I said, are you aware of the fact that right now in France, the number one bestseller is a book about hollow?

This is an inside job and stuff. He said, no, I wasn't aware of that, but I'd like to talk to that guy. I'd like to talk to him too. So I wrote about this and sent it to a whole thing. a guy who had a great blog, a USS Clueless, guy named Stephen Den Best, brilliant guy. And he said, do you mind if I publish this on the page? I said, no. I just wanted to tell you what was going on. We were gearing up for Iraq, and he was talking a lot about the military. So he ran it, and it got a lot of attention. I'd be honest with you, I wouldn't be here if it

hadn't been for that essay. That essay got a lot of attention and got me started on my blog, eject, eject, eject, and so here we are. But that place is special, and the military knows what they're doing. They know how to make that important, you know? Well, isn't it funny that the way to make it unforgettable was to make the tombstones identical? The way to make it stand out was, in fact, to take the reverse commute in almost every aesthetic decision. You walk through a cemetery today, most graveyards today, they're marked by their uniqueness. This headstone here, that one there. There's a square.

There's an obelisk. There's a rectangle. This we take the originality and the uniqueness of our own lives and somehow try and repurpose it in death. But so much of the military, I suppose, is based on coming together and being a team and caring more about the guy on your right or to your left. And so why wouldn't the ultimate resting place somehow resonate and redound to that? Kind of brilliant when you think about it. It's so American. What it's basically saying is that an 18-year-old who's been in the Army for three weeks

has paid the same price as a Major General who'd been in the Army for 30 years. They paid the same price. And my dad was a hotel manager, and he made a lot of money for a bunch of hotels. He was a very good hotel manager. But when his career was winding down, he ended up getting fired on the phone, that kind of thing. And 45 years after he signed on the dotted line for the U.S. Army, I went out there early that morning in October, and there were 40 young men who were about his age when he went over to Germany, 40 young men in the Honor Guard, another 40 young men in the Army band,

they're standing out there in attention in the cold, and I'm thinking to myself, this is why this country needs to be defending, right? Because no matter what else is going south in our society, that military understands that that obligation needed to be honored, and they turned out. You know, my dad got the, he was a second lieutenant. He got the funeral of John F. Kennedy. Well, that was my next question. What was his rank? I was thinking it's like a tactical to practical conversation, which I've had a lot in terms of technology. But in terms of emotional IP, like the number of men and women who have gone from the service into some kind of, like your dad ran hotels, not one hotel.

hotel, but he ran hotels. That's not a minor thing. It's something we might dismiss easily, but that's, I mean, that requires a very specific sort of brain. And I don't know if this is true, but I have no reason to doubt it. Somebody I trust told me once that around 1980, somewhere between 80 and 85, 100% of people who managed banks served in Vietnam. 100? 100%. Yes. That's astonishing. I found it astonishing too. But then when you think about it, it's a pretty amazing thing. And I did, sorry for the sidebar, but I'm always interested in the way an officer becomes a gentleman, a gentleman in business, and so forth and so on. I didn't say he was a gentleman. I just said he was a hotel manager. You know, Mike, Skip, my stepdad

is buried at Arlington. And I saw the same type of thing that Bill described, except there wasn't a band. There was just a lone bugler who played taps. And he was hidden, you know, I mean, I eventually saw him, but he was up on a hill behind a tree. And it's a thing that I'll never forget. It was an amazing thing and no dry eyes in the house if we were in a house, which we weren't. But Mike, I mean, you really put your finger on what made it so special for me. Yeah, my dad was, you know, it was kind of a big deal for a while. But when his usefulness expired, he was essentially just thrown away. That's kind of common for many kind of people. But the country didn't throw him only. Arlington didn't throw them away.

The Army didn't throw them away. United States didn't throw them away. And the thing that to me is most important is I'd always thought that Arlington was reserved for people who were heroes. I did too. My dad was never shot at. He was an MP. He said one time I looked down the barrel of a 45, he said it was like going into the Lincoln Tunnel. But that was it, right?

And that really got me thinking to the main part about this, especially on this Memorial Day weekend. D-D-D-D-D-D-Dum. Is it weird to love people but despise human resources? If so, well, color me weird. It's not to say I don't respect the millions of people who work in HR departments and companies all over the country. I do. It's just that I don't envy him.

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Ziprecruiter.com slash row. The smartest way to hire. On some level, it didn't matter that he wasn't shot at because he'd signed on the dotted line, which meant that he could be sent to be shot out, right? It's the enlistment. It's the signing up that is the act because now you are essentially saying for the next period of time, somebody can make me go and stand some place where I'm likely to get killed. And I'm willing to do that.

I'm willing to willingly do that. And so on some level, when you sign up for the military, you are turning your life over to someone else. and that's what's being honored, I think, at Arlington is the fact that you were willing to do that. My dad had his graduation from his second lieutenant class, and it was 30 guys or something. I had to search hard to find my dad because he was thin as a rail back then. And you look on the back and everybody signed it kind of a yearbook thing. And the question was, what do you expect to be doing after the war? This would have been probably maybe early 45.

And virtually all of them, including my father, said, I expect to be killed fighting for my country. in Germany. That's what they thought. They thought they're going to get killed fighting for their country in Germany. And then when that war ended, they were damn sure they were going to get killed during the invasion of Japan. And I think the thing in my career that I'm most proud of is the atomic bomb thing. We talked about that last time with the Anola Gay, and nobody's cheering about the fact that we had to do that, but it saved a lot of lives, a lot of American lives, saved a lot of Japanese lives. All this to say that, you know, the strain and stresses on servicemen are so enormous that only other people who have been there can talk to them about it.

It feels that way. And that, to me, is what the Memorial Day is most about. You have a band of brothers. You have the happy few. And they all have a shared bond. And the resulting shorthand allows them permission to do and say a lot of things that the rest of us can't. And, And yet, this is the weekend, this is the day, this is the opportunity for us to do the only thing that we can do, maybe not the only thing, but to extend a measure of curiosity, both intellectual and emotional, and to offer something like gratitude. And I say something like it because I think gratitude has become a confusing thing for people as well.

It's fraught. I know we can riff on that indefinitely, but something happened. since the last time you and I had a chance to talk. And that was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. And it's just left, it's further complicated the notion of gratitude. How do you talk about that? Where do you put that? You know, it was the first question I asked to my friend Travis Mills and everybody else who was over there.

And so this Memorial Day, I think people are grappling with that. They're grappling with their own drama from lockdowns and everything else. ay, aye, aye, y'ay, it's a difficult time to feel grateful, and yet it feels to me like it's the most important thing we can do. Well, the first thing I would say about that is that the country is not the government, and the government is not the country. When that was going on since you mentioned it, I thought somebody received and carried out the most appalling orders that I think an American soldier has ever had to face. I would certainly rather go ashore on the first wave at Iwo Jima than beat the guy to go to a gate and tell American citizens who are thrusting their passport through the bars that you can't come in here. You have to go out back there and go to the Taliban and that we cannot let you in. There's no question that the men who had to carry that order out felt more sick about that than anything in their lives, and that will start them for the rest of their lives.

They should never been put in that situation. Call it what it is. When I saw somebody falling off a C-17, you know, I said, I don't believe this is my country. I just can't believe it. But when I said the government is not the country, those decisions were political decisions made by people. Not saying there weren't military decisions, but it was not the guys on the ground at the gate who said, no, you can't come in. You know, for a certain fact that they were very seriously thinking about, you know, I'm just not going to obey this order. Of course.

But then you've got these surging masses out there. Nobody knows what's going on. knows what's going to happen after that. But that was not our finest moment. And so you're stuck with this dilemma. You've got a military that won every war it ever went into, and then a government that has lost the peace in the last three. And what do you say to people who've given their all or had their friends turn into a pink mist right next to them in order to accomplish something, and they did accomplish it? Most people don't realize this, but when we left Vietnam, When American forces left Vietnam, the North Vietnamese communists were back behind the line that they started on.

And South Vietnam was a free country. They had been defeated. And it was only in the year after that that the Congress decided, well, we're not going to vote to support it. So when you ask people, what's the point? And you have to deal with that, it's a tough thing to answer. But the thing I would say to all of the veterans who may be watching this or people who have veteran relatives or just next time you see one, these individual cases and these individual instances don't matter. What matters is we live in Disneyland.

People have gone to hell so that we can live in Disneyland. I don't have to worry about my wife getting mortared. I didn't have to worry about my mom getting shot going to the weighted groceries. We take it for granted. But it's not. This is not the world. The world does not look like America. America is what it is because there's a force field.

And that force field around this country is powered by the sacrients. of people who have signed on the dotted line, and most of them came home, but some of them didn't. And on some level, Mike, what we're really experiencing is we're experiencing the consequences of how successful those people were. Yes. I was literally halfway through writing the word consequences to remind myself to riff on that, because the consequences of enlisting and fighting are writ large at this place called Arlington. But the consequences of enlistingham, but the consequences of enlisting, consequences of making a poor decision in battle, especially among our highest ranking members. This is the thing that confuses me. I don't know if you've read any Jack Carr.

I don't think so. I heard him interviewed the other day. Former SEAL, bestselling author today. In fact, his most recent book, I think, is being made into a series on Amazon. And I think you'd like him a lot. But he was talking about a little reported phenomenon whereby the consequences of being a general and making the kinds of mistakes that have been made over the last 20 years, once upon a time, would have resulted in immediate dismissal. In fact, most of them, he says, would have taken themselves out. Just out of honor. Yeah, just out of shame. Shame. Out of shame. It's the death of shame. It's the death of shame. And so when you have high-ranking powerful people who either refuse to step aside or acknowledge that mistakes were made or are being protected for political reasons, when that becomes the thing, and Jack argued that clearly it is the thing, then you wind up with a corporal on one side of the gate saying no to an American citizen, with a passport who simply wants to come in.

And I have to think that somehow or another, that kind of conspicuous absence of accountability and consequence must trickle down, just like everything else. I heard a remarkable story from the source. One of the great honors of my life has become close friends with Dick Retan and Bert Retan. Bert Retan's a legendary aircraft designer.

His brother Dick flew Voyager around the world nonstop, but Dick was a fighter pilot and Dick was a member of the Misties, they were the fast forward air controllers. Forward air controller brings down artillery and directs fire and so on and really coordinates the battle. And we used to send them over in small, slow airplanes and just getting shot down. So they started putting them in F-100s and two-seat F-100s and they'd go and zoom over there and show them where the targets were.

And when gunfire would come up, Dick said, if somebody shot at me, I'd turn the jet around, I killed that guy. Nobody's shooting at me and getting away with it. He was legendary. But here's what Dick said. This is a true story. It's absolutely true. And I'm not a-

I'm sorry, dude. You can't just blow by that. because what you basically just said was it's a question of manners. It's exactly right. It's like, do not have the common sense to not shoot at a Misty F-100? You people have been out here for years. Yes. What's the matter with you?

If you don't do something, then you're just the kind of moron who's going to take another shot at another one of my friends. Consider it a blessing on society. Attention must be paid. This actually happened. This is a true story. So one of the American pilots, a Navy pilot, I think got shot down and he goes into the, you know, deep into the jungle canopy. And needless to say, we got rescue helicopters there,

and Dickerton is in an F-100 circling the site. So Dick is closest to the guy with a handheld radio, so he's able to talk to the pilot on the ground, and he's relaying things back and forth from headquarters because he's got a big radio. So somewhere in the process of this rescue, they're taking enough ground fire that somebody back at the base says, we're calling this one off. We're bringing the helicopters home. We're not going to lose another three helicopters getting this guy out of the jungle. They radioed to Dick, they tell him we're not coming. Dick got on the radio and he said, who made that decision? Somebody said, what do you mean? Who made the decision? General so-and-so. Get him on the radio. What? Get him on the radio. I want him on the radio because I want to know what words I'm supposed to

use to tell that guy that nobody's coming after him. And Dick said to me, see, we had a deal, right? The deal was I would risk my young ass for this country. And if I got in trouble, they would come after me. and try and get me out of trouble. So I have to tell this guy now that we're going to break this bargain. I want to know the language. I want to know the exact words that I'm supposed to use. Get them on the radio. So 10 minutes goes by, you know, and the next thing you know,

helicopter's on their way back out again. And this is the accountability thing. As an amusing end to that story, they get over the canopy. The pari jumper goes down with the rope, finds the pilot. They're taking so much ground fire. They're shooting the hell out of this Huey. The guy who went down, the PJ says,

go, go, go. Well, what a heroic act. But they hovered in place, got the pilot on the rope, pulled him up, got out of there what the military calls the speed of heat, which is faster than the speed of sound, but slower than the speed of light, and winched them in. So when they winched him in, they said to the paratrojump, I said, man, that was the most heroic thing I've ever seen telling us to get out of here. And he said, I was telling you get out of here because big pieces of helicopter were falling on it. You're falling on me. So anyway, so this guy that they save, right, immediately gets back to the base and he decides he's going to court-martial everybody.

And he turns out to be like the biggest dick in the entire armed forces. And every one of them is saying, why do we just should have left the guy back there, you know? No good deed. But that's morale. That's what makes people go. And now you see in Ukraine, you see Russian soldiers being left on the field and reliable reports that Russian commanders are shooting their own wounded because they can't walk. that's really happening.

And you wonder, well, what's the difference between us and them? Well, you could start there, you know, be a good place to start. When I walk it back as far as I can go, it's not quite that. It's not quite the degradation of consequences at the highest levels because that's an internal problem. That's a system problem. And I think it could probably be fixed pretty quick with the right head, right? because the smart stuff trickles down too. The thing that worries me is the thing that we started with.

And it's the reason I wrote the story that I did on the Memorial Day that I did because it's gratitude. It's the, it's us. Look, right now, they're what, two and a half million podcasts are out there. I'll bet you a giant hunk of them for Memorial Day have brought in soldiers and Marines. And I think that's great to have a conversation. But the conversation I want to have, you didn't serve. your dad did. Chuck didn't serve. And I'm ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed of it either.

No, I am ashamed. On some level I am. I really am. I am somewhat ashamed that I didn't. But you can't, Bill. I'm glad I didn't. Look, I'm glad I didn't too. I was a Boy Scout. I don't get any credit for that. But here's the thing. This is a weird point to make. But it's like the value of an audience versus the value of a performer. And it's so much easier to give the credit to the performer, the person on the stage, the person in the arena. Yep. But the majority of us aren't there. We're simply benefiting in some way.

So if you take the audience out of the performance, then it's the ultimate kind of monument being built to oneself. And if you take the country out of the equation, if you take the gratitude, and the people who ought to have it and who ought to express it, if you remove them, arbitrage that out of the equation, it's just madness. It's just a giant bloody game of chess with horrible, horrible stakes. No one really wins. No one really loses.

So it's us. And that's a very clunky way of saying, you're not on here because you didn't serve. You're here because you give a damn. I do give a damn. You know more about this topic in general. And for that reason, I think everything you've done since your dad's passing in this space, this attempt to communicate and somehow reach across and grab our fellow citizens by the lapels and give them a shake and say, look, damn it, the unknown, the tomb is still there. Those rows are still there. Those gardens of stone are still being watered with the tears of the survivors, for God's sakes.

how do we not care enough? How do we not care? There's something wrong with people who don't care. There's something missing. You want to know the nicest thing anybody ever said to me? Aside from that? No, seriously. Early on when I was writing eject, eject, eject,

somebody wrote to me and said, to be about 2003, and said, Bill, I went ashore with the first wave at Iwojima, and I just want to let you know, I think you're worth a battalion. Wow. Wow. What do you say to that, Mike?

You know? How do you answer that? I don't know because... You just keep trying to do whatever you're doing and pay it back. You mentioned the audience and maybe the way for people to think about this relationship between civilians and the military. I'm internationally recognized major celebrity, obviously, and you do your little thing, too. But we both had the experience of being up on stage in front of people live, and we both know that this is a feedback loop. when you have a hot audience, you just get better and better and better.

And the hotter the audience is, the more willing you are to take risks, the more willing you are to improvise it, and you just get better and they get better. When you've been a part of it, it's astonishing. And maybe that's the way to think about the relationship between the military and the civilians. It is a feedback loop. It's a constant loop. The more respect and gratitude we give to our soldiers, the more people will want to be

soldiers and the better soldiers they will be. The better soldiers they are, the more comfortable. our lives are, the safer our lives are. And as long as we don't forget who made all this possible, this can go in a beautiful direction. But in the exact opposite way that a hot audience can get you going, there have been times when I've walked out there, usually after they tell me I'm going to go on at 8 p.m. and there's nine politicians and it's 1130, you know? And I realize the first thing I have to do is I have to get defibrillators on this audience. You know, just get them back to life. Breathe, damn it. It's hard to slap 300 people at the same time. You got to go all the way down

the aisles, it's tricky. A stick helps. But the country and the culture can also go down that road too. They can go down to a road where they show less and less respect. Fewer and fewer people want to be a part of it. Soldiers become more and more robotic, more and more automatones. They become more and more conscripts. And you go right down into that hole. And I'll tell you what, there's just a lot going on in this country that's really terrifying. But the relationship between the military and the civilian population, I have never seen. and anything like it. By the way, soldiers, not just from third world countries, I mean, soldiers from Britain and Australia and Germany, they'll come here and they'll see how we treat our

soldiers and they're just slack jawed. They just can't believe it. Yeah. You know, anybody who's in uniform would like to board the plane now? Yeah. I think he's earned the right to board the plane ahead of me. You think? Yeah. Yeah. The greatest generation didn't name themselves. No, they did not. We named them, right? Once we, the people, got a full and better understanding of what we, the military, on our behalf, at our behest, did in Germany and the Pacific, once that memo really sunk in, then the die was cast. And we understood. We understood who buttered our bread.

And they became the greatest generation. to think that in that same basic generation, the men and women who came back from Vietnam were greeted in a very different way. Those parades were different. There wasn't ticker-tate. It was spit. It was vitriol. And so what do we really think is going to happen as a country that doesn't think of its soldiers

in the same way that we did in the second? World War. What do we think is going to happen next? And might that not be part of the reason why there's such a lack of accountability and consequence at the very highest levels? I look at the skilled trades. I talk about this every day. Why do we have 11 million open jobs? Why is it so hard for people to hire plumbers and steamfitters and pipe fitters? Well, it's because I think, in general, the lack of appreciation for that skill is at an all-time low. That's why Dirty Jobs is such a remarkable show. And I don't get paid for being here, by the way.

Seriously, Mike, that show was a profound influence on me, and I know on everybody else who's a fan of ears who talks about it. Because you didn't just tell him, you showed him what it's like. I don't know if we talked about this last show. I think we were in a house here in California, and we had a possum die under the house. And we started to get that smell, you know? And it had been under there for three or four days,

and I thought I don't really want to go into there. We found one of these animal removal services. And this guy does this for a living. He crawls through this, you know, the little thing like this and crawls underneath the whole house. And he comes out with this plastic bag. And he comes out just dousing himself with water. He does this for a living. He's about to throw up, you know.

The federal government is not going to close America's skills gap. They have an important role to play for sure. But if we're serious about reinvigorating the skilled trades on a national level, we need more organizations like Skills USA, making a real difference on a local level. These guys have been around since 1965, and today they are relevant like never before, with hundreds of chapters in schools all over the country and hundreds of thousands of students participating and competing every year.

Nobody is doing more to train the next generation of skilled workers than Skills USA. And I'm encouraging you to at least consider being a part of this movement. Skills USA advisors and volunteers aren't just teaching trades. They're launching careers and strengthening the backbone of our country by mentoring the next generation of industry leaders. In high school, you could be among the people who are making this movement explode. Join the skilled trades movement. Support career and technical education programs through Skills USA. There's no better way to do it.

You can volunteer at a local chapter. You can start a chapter in your own town. Or you can just go to their website and see the impact for yourself and see, too, how easy it is to get involved. Thousands of kids are being introduced to the trades in a way that's absolutely positively moving the needle. The goal is a million members by 2030. I think it's doable. I'm doing what I can to help them. Learn more at skillsusa.org slash mic.

That's skills, USA.org slash Mike. I'm talking skills, U.S. skills, U.S. skills. USA. And I tip the guy $200 cash on the spot, and I'm not showing off about that because the thought that was so clear to me was if this guy or somebody like him wasn't here to do this, then I would have to do it. Because my wife's not going to do it, and I wouldn't let her, so it's going to be me. And it wasn't me.

And I am exceedingly grateful that there are guys like this who will do that for me. And all of that, I remember, I think the first Dirty Jobs episode I saw, this was probably 10,000 of them. You were just cleaning this gunk out of a hose or something. It was just awful. It was disgusting. And I thought, yeah, you know, these are the people we should be celebrating. It's not so tough to be a movie star, you know. It's not a terribly hard life. And our reward system and our value system is what it is. The money goes where people's decisions are. If you want to pay Tom Cruise more than you pay the guy who comes and gets the animal from under your house, that's how a free market works. but to recognize these people and to understand they're there.

And you know, and the one thing most people don't even realize, they look out at a city and all they see are the buildings, right? They don't see the water lines. They don't see the power lines. They don't see the sewage lines. It's like looking at the skin of somebody and not seeing their circulatory system or their lymph nodes or any of it. They just see this.

And the garbage just disappears and the water's on when you turn the thing and I switch on the light and the light comes on. Well, there are people working right now right the second who are making this. happen they don't get any recognition for me to have a you know a venting cappuccino and it's not money it's not just money money matters but it just seems like it's so much easier for people to throw their hands up and say well wait a second if we really value the military if we really value the firemen if we really value our teachers then why is it that they're paid so poorly and that's where the

the discussion ends and we're all just left feeling terrible about this kind of, call it a transactional disconnect. But the thing that worries me more is that there used to be a higher level of gratitude and appreciation for all of those things. And this is also transactional bill. And it's part of the reason why people volunteer. It's not just a love of country. It's not just a will to serve. You know, Ein Rand talked about it in terms of the pitfalls of altruism and the idea that doing a selfish thing isn't always bad. And doing a good thing isn't always selfless. In other words, people enlist because they want to. People fight fires because it makes them feel good to risk their lives.

Yeah, they don't do it so somebody pat them on the back at a bar. And they don't do it purely for a paycheck. It's all of a piece. And if the basic gratitude starts to seep away, then that will create the hole through which all the other stuff will fall. I'm afraid. And again, look, how many people listening have been to Arlington? What percentage would you guess, really? For your audience, I bet it's probably in excess of 30 or 40 percent at least, I would say.

I bet you're right. For the average audience? 2%. How many Americans have been to Arlington? if you're talking about the entire country, it's certainly way less than one. How many MyLy Cyrus fans have been to Arlington? You know, I'm not, I just, first name it came out of the hat. Probably zero, right?

And they don't know. Remember when we used to get taught civics, but by taking American history out of the classroom, you're taking away people's ability to connect to this kind of heroism. We're all of us here in this country. We're all descended from heroes, all of us. I did an interview early on when I started getting on camera, when I was still amazed that they wanted to be on camera. I interviewed a guy.

I'm just going to give him his first name. His name was Leon. And Leon was a boatsman on a Higgins boat at Taraa and at Iwojima. So he's the guy in the little thing that looks like a floating dumpster, just a big hunk of metal. Yeah, it's a little floating box with the propeller. Yep, exactly. So he's the guy who steers that, right? Now, Tara was a particularly horrible situation because they planned for it very well,

but one little thing they didn't anticipate was the tides. So rather than getting these guys all the way up on the shore and these, they were armored enough to stop small arms fire. So instead of being able to get to the shore at Taraa, they hit the reef and they were still two, 300 yards out in bay. These guys had to jump out and wade through chest deep water with all their gear and all the machine gun fire everywhere. And it was a nightmare. And interviewing him, I came to realize something that I'd never thought about before because, frankly, we've seen saving Private Ryan and all of these movies and we know what happens. The Marines go ashore and they get all chewed up by machine guns. And I remember thinking, it'd be kind of nice to be the guy driving the boat, you know, get the hell on out of here.

Yeah. But what I did not realize until I talked to this guy was, yes, you get to get the hell on out of here, and then you've got to come back again. And then you get the hell out of it and you have to come back again. And you get out and you have to come back again. And worse than that, I said to him, because it was dawn on me as I was talking to him. So you took the first wave in. Nobody knew it was going to happen. But you saw what happened to the first wave.

And then you had to go back and get a whole bunch of fresh kids. You knew what was going on out there. They didn't know, but you knew. You knew where you were taking them. And he said, yes, I was Sharon. I was the boatman on the river of death. I was taking these young men across the river sticks to die. And I knew it, and they didn't.

And I thought, good Lord, you know, you think, oh, our guys drove a boat, you know. Just the consequences of that. The thing he remembered most about Terrell was some guy, he's taking wounded off, The first wave goes in, he brings in the second wave. They're taking the first wave wounded off. And some guy was laid out on the deck real close to where his position was. And the guy didn't seem to be hit terribly bad, but the guy felt like he was. And he turned to Leon, and he basically just said, remember me.

And Leon said, yeah, okay, and got back to driving the hell out of there. And when he looks down again, the guy's gone. So Leon remembered him. And then I remembered him by interviewing Leon, and now you get to remember him. And we're back to the unknown soldier again, right? I don't know this guy's name. I couldn't possibly identify him. I don't think Leon could have.

I certainly can't. But we remember him, right? Some guy died on a Higgins boat on the way back to the hospital ship off of Taraa, and we're talking about him now. And we're all choked up about it. The man who everybody remembers, but nobody knows. That's exactly right, yes, precisely. Hmm.

So how do we teach it? Like, how do we teach gratitude without doing what I'm doing right now, which is holding up my finger? Like, I'm right on the verge of shaking my finger, right? I'm right on the verge of scolding someone. I felt it a second ago when you said how many Miley Cyrus fans have been to Arlington. You could cross out Miley and write in anybody else. Anybody else, right. But to make the point, we have to name names and we have to ask a question in a way that begs a certain response.

and what winds up happening is we just criticize. It's not a criticism. Oh, I know what I wanted to say, Bill. You actually said it perfectly. We're robbing students of the opportunity to feel grateful. That's right. That's so different than saying, hey, you ungrateful turd, come here. Come here.

Look at this picture. Now what do you think of that? Now, do you feel grateful? No, actually. I feel like you just put a boot up my butt, and I hate you even more than I did, and now you're even less credible than you were. before. What can we do to give people an opportunity to feel to be choked up by a story like the

one you just shared to be open to hearing it in the first place? Well, first rule of screenwriting is don't tell somebody to show them, right? When saving private Ryan went out, my dad saw that movie and he got invited to an advanced screening and I said, what did you think? And he said, It was very realistic. That's all he said. That Normandy landing in saving private Ryan, that little stretch of seven or eight minutes is certainly in the top ten pieces of seven or eight minutes ever put on film, without question. And he was such a masterful storyteller that it wasn't just like, oh, God, look at this horrible thing.

It's like you're in the middle of it. And that kind of thing helps. But they don't get to hear any of these stories, the story about Leon. I don't know. I could probably do this in three minutes, Mike, but I could tell you my favorite story of heroism from World War II. and tell me this wouldn't be the greatest movie you ever saw. It's 100% true, right? Absolutely 100% true. So just to set the stage, the war in the Pacific is winding down. America's moving towards the Philippines. We're going to land in the Philippines. Japan knows this is the absolute last chance to stop the Americans.

And so there's this enormous four-day naval battle called the Battle of Leytee Gulf, which took place in four different locations and lots and lots and lots and lots of moving parts. I'm not going to get into the details, although the details are fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. but the short form is, on the morning of 24th October, 1944, at the northern end of this American landing zone, there were six escort carriers. They were called Jeep carriers. Kaiser built them super fast. They were not designed to keep up with the fleet. They only held a third of the number of aircraft that the fleet carriers had. They were called CVE for carrier escort. And the guys who were in him said they were called CVE because they were combustible, vulnerable, and expendable. That's what they were. They had no water tank compartments, nothing. They're just 10 halls to move airplanes. So the furthest north of these

groups was Task Force 3 called Taffy 3. And surrounding these six thin-skinned aircraft carriers were four destroyers and two destroyer escorts, which are half a destroyer, right? Just even small. Well, because of the moving pieces and so on, the Japanese had launched probably the most powerful surface fleet that ever been in the water. Yamato, the giant enormous Japanese super battleship, was in front. There were five or six battleships behind it, seven or eight cruisers and something like 30 destroyers, right? This is the top of the line surface naval action group. And there are six tin cans protecting these six carriers. And they look up and all of a sudden they see these pagoda masks coming over the horizon. And next thing you know, these colored splashes start going up

because each battleship had its own die marking so they could tell where the shots were going. All of a sudden, it's raining green water, and they look over the horizon, and they see just this armada coming at them, and they cannot run them. So the Jeep carriers start heading south as fast as they can. The escorts are in tight, and a guy named Ernest Evans, who was commanded USS Johnston. He was an American Indian, full-blooded American Indian. He had been on a U.S. Navy ship at the beginning of the war when they got walloped in the Java Sea, and he said, I am never running from the Japanese again, ever. He was given command of USS Johnston one year before to the day,

and he basically said to his helmsman, he said, full left rudder, all ahead flank. And he took one destroyer back to face four or five battleships, a super battleship, three or four, five cruisers, and 30 destroyers. By himself, he just sailed back there. Once he went, the captain of USS Roberts, which was a destroyer, destroyer escort, Bob Copeland. So we can't just sit here, you know. Nobody ordered him. He just went. He just went. So Evans is charging into the teeth of this thing. And you give you an idea

about this. There's 30 or 40 ships in this Japanese force. USS Johnson weighed less than one turret on the Yamato, right? He's got five-inch guns that are going to just bang off the hall. It's going to be like throwing BBs at the thing. But he had torpedoes. The problem is you had to get within 4,000 yards of torpedoes and the guns on the Yamato go out to 26,000 yards. So there's a bit of a problem there. So this American Indian is, he's lit up and he is heading straight for these guys

and they're swerving around. They're chasing the splashes. They figure if a round goes here, steer for that because they won't shoot in the same place twice because they figure they're moving. Worked out pretty well. He got in there. They launched their torpedoes. They blew the bow off of the Japanese destroy. Just blew the whole front end of it off, took it out of the fight.

They take an enormous amount of punishment Ernest Evans has his shirt blown off of him because this round goes into the wheelhouse. He loses fingers on his left hand. He finds a handkerchief, ties it up, heads back into this smoke that they laid out. And as he goes into the smoke cloud, as he comes out on the other side where the Americans are, he sees two more destroyers. USS Hole and USS Heerman are heading into the fight as well. Now, just these two.

He's out of torpedoes. He's got one engine. The only defense that destroyer has is its speed and maneuverability. lost that. And as he's heading back to safety, he sees these two destroyers going in to make their run and the little destroyer escort too tagging along behind. And Evan says, we're going back. We can draw some fire. You know, we can draw some fire onto us so that these guys will make their torpedo run. So this goes on for two hours. And in probably the biggest miracle and naval history, these six tin cans turned back the most powerful surface fleet of the war.

The Japanese thought they were fighting cruisers when they were fighting destroyers. Pilots from the Jeep carriers took off. Most of them didn't have any ammunition. They start making torpedo runs on the Japanese ships, but they don't have any torpedoes, but they're drawing fire, and they're making them evade. And every time they evade and swerve, that gives the slower Jeep carriers a chance to get a little more distant. between them. Some of these pilots, one guy came down and he was out of ammunition, out of machine guns, didn't have any bombs, didn't have any torpedoes. So he runs alongside this Japanese battleship. He pulls out his revolver and, you start throwing it that way. Another guy had nothing

to drop on this Japanese cruiser but a Coke bottle, so he threw that. He threw a Coke bottle down on him. And they won. They won. It's the most amazing story in history. USS Johnson goes down. Ernest Evans is last seen on the, they had their steering shot out, so he's at the back of the ship the whole time shouting down to these enormous sailors who are turning the rudder without hydraulics and it's so much work they could only do it 15, 20 seconds for that to swap them out. So Johnston goes down. Ernest Evans has never seen again. Hundreds plus people of the crew get in the water. They'd been seen by an American fighter aircraft and he wagged his wings so they knew where they were. So they thought help was on the way. But when he got back, they

transposed the coordinates wrong, and they sent people looking 400 miles from where these guys actually are in the water for two days now. Sharks start to take them, and delirium starts to take them, and on the end of the second or third night, I can't remember which, these guys are hallucinating. They say they can see islands and there's couples and there's a dinner party, and we can see women and gowns and guys with tuxitos. I'm going to swim over there and get some water. A couple guys said, Skipper, I can see our boat. I can see USS Johnson. It's 20 feet below us. I'm just going to go down to the galley and get some water. I'll be right back. all of this happens, right?

And it's all true, Mike. It's true without exaggeration. And I am trying very hard to be able to tell these kind of stories because filmmaking is getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and special effects are getting easier and all the rest of it. But just because I have to put it in there, it wasn't during this battle, but to give you an idea what these guys went through on a separate battle where they had been shelled, they went into a compartment that had been hit by a shell, Japanese shell, and they knew that there was at least one guy in this room. And they went looking for him, and they saw a mattress had been put up against the wall.

And they thought, well, maybe the guy had been hiding behind the mattress. But what they realized when they looked behind the mattress was the guy hadn't been hiding behind the mattress, he'd been hiding in front of the mattress. And the explosion had blown him through the steel springs. It basically just minced him. This is what these guys were dealing with. And I look at this and I listen to this and I say, this is the best story I've ever heard ever in my life. It is the most incredible story I've ever heard. And no one talks about it.

No one knows about it. And that's got to stop. So it's time to get entertainment and movies to show people, because you can tell them all you want to. They're not going to. They won't know. I don't really know. And I've studied it really hard, but I don't really know. I just know what the shadows of it look like.

But when you see that tiny little destroyer on its own just turn around and head into this fleet so these guys could escape, it's astonishing. And the best part of the story is they sank one of the Jeep destroyers, one of the went down. And these guys who've been running for their lives for two and a half hours now, who were sure they're going to be swimming in 10 minutes for the last two and a half hours. They're just running for their lives and they see all this stuff going on. And finally they see the Japanese fleet turning around and sailing away to the north. And one guy on the bridge looks at the city, says,

damn it, boys, they're getting away. You know, you can talk about the moment of enlistment as the moment, like the samurai moment. Right. But everything to a degree, when you see one man affirmatively deciding that, no, he's just not going to run from the enemy anymore, and then putting his money where his mouth is. And his life. All of it. And by the way, the lives of his crew. Everybody else on the boat.

And today we're conflicted, right? Today, the thoughtful person would say, now, wait a second, how's that fair to the bosun? How's that fair to this guy? He didn't make that pledge, but actually he kind of did because when he enlisted, right? So I get it. Hearing you tell the story, too, I didn't know that story. But Chuck, how many things that Bill just said reminded you of something you had seen? Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I think of the Indianapolis. Yeah, right. Of course. You know what else I think of? What? Boat pulls up next to the carrier and guy fires a pistol at it. Those little moments of defiance. I almost said futility.

No, defiance is the word. It's defiance. Guess what? Stephen Spielberg, the end of saving private Ryan, Tom Hanks lying there about to be run over by a tank. And he starts firing his full. 45 at it. Right.

Utterly futile and yet totally defiant. And then, of course, the planes come in and blow up the tank, and we all know how that ends, but you're so right. It starts with a story, whether a tabelous celebrity writing about the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier or Stephen Spielberg, trying to do something that is so drenched in verisimilitude that somebody like your pop has no choice,

but to look at it and go, Pretty realistic, which is some pretty high cotton. We're all trying to do the same thing. Yeah. Well, first of all, I'm not sure you made the B list yet. Secondly, Faster. Glorious bastard.

When did you first hear the story of the Indianapolis? Because this is going to the point that I'm trying to make here. You know when I heard it. When? Robert Chaw freel freelanced it. Jaws. Robert Chal freelanced it as Quint in Jalls. That's the first time virtually anybody had ever heard of the Indianapolis.

It was when Robert Shaw, who was drunk off his ass, completely blasted, sat down and told the story about being on the Indianapolis, and you got Richard Dreyfus who said, you're on the Indianapolis, so that adds something important happened. He tells that story and all the horror, and you can see that underneath all of this, you know, or Quint, you know, it's like this guy has just been so horrifically wounded. And he's finally talked about it, maybe for the first time ever. And then he realizes he's just opened up emotionally. And so he got to close that off, but we delivered the bomb, you know, it's like, okay.

Oh, and by the way, sorry, but in the same way that the hero in, what is it, the Gulf of Laity? Lady Golf, yeah. Lady Golf, right. He's not going to run. He's not going to run from the Japanese anymore. Quint, he's not going to run from that shark. No, he's not. Why? Because of something a good screenwriter would call an inciting incident. But the screenwriter is just trying to capture the reality of it. Quint was a fictional character, but the sailors who went through that weren't fictional.

And once you've gone through that, what are you going to be afraid of after that, Mike, right? 800 guys go into the water and, what, 200 come out and the sharks get the rest. And you're just watching your buddies just get pulled under and they said that kind of scream. It's a kind of almost an human scream sound that humans don't make unless something like that. So after that's over, you know, it's kind of hard to imagine you're going to get too upset about, you know, not being able to make the rent or whatever the case may be. And that's a thing about the greatest generation, I think. And I think that's why people like you and me and boomers and stuff, we had great parents.

And I'm speaking for my dad here, but pretty much the entire, like the vibe of the generation was, we don't want to talk about this. Number one, we don't know if we can talk about it. Number two, we don't want you to know what we protected you from. You don't need to be exposed to me telling you what it looks like to have your best friend's brains blown all over your face. Right. And so on some level, the counterculture revolution of the 60s was a rebellion against how bland things were in the 50s. These guys came home and they're listening to Perry Como and movies are like seven brides for seven brothers.

You know, just this pablam and stuff. It's like these guys had heard enough loud noises. They didn't need any more loud noises. They didn't need any more excitement. They didn't need any more adrenaline. They just wanted to just just live. Yeah, just decompress and deal with them. And I always thought that was tough.

You mentioned Vietnam veterans earlier. The last two parades I've been to that had a bunch of veterans, when they announced the Vietnam veterans, they easily got three times the applause that anybody else had gotten. And that's what I mean about this relationship I don't think has ever been better. Because a number of people serving the military gets smaller and smaller and smaller as a percentage of the population. Shameless plug. Long before she was Peggy Rowe, my mom was Peggy.

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We've set aside $10 million for this year's applicants, thanks to a number of very effective fundraisers, including the one with my grandfather's name on the label. I refer, of course, to Noble Tennessee Whiskey, K-N-O-B-E-L, which is now available in a variety of delicious mash bills, all of which you can peruse at noblespirates.com. In fact, if you spend $100 and use code Carl, C-A-R-L, you'll get one tube of orange bitter-infused sugar cubes for free. That's Code Carl with a C to get nine sugar cubes, ingeniously engineered, to make nine perfect old-fashions every time.

It's my favorite way to support Microworks and my favorite whiskey to sip responsibly after a long day of interviewing people on this podcast. Pick up a bottle at noblespirits.com. K-N-O-B-E-L-L-Pirits.com. May the nobleman come to bring a bottle for everyone. One day when the waitin is done, we'll take a drink and go. Bill, when you mentioned that before about them sort of saving us from the stuff that they had lived through, I had just written that down in an effort to save us from the kinds of things

that they had to go through. The greatest generation may have done us a disservice in not sharing these things, in not telling these stories to make us on the edge of our seats and go, well, what happened next? My grandfather, you know, got a purple heart. He served in Patton's Army. He helped liberate Europe. And every time I asked him how he got the purple heart, he told me a different story. I have no idea what happened to him.

You say to them, you're a hero. He said, no, no, no, no, no, no. The heroes are the guys that didn't come back, right? This is how they behaved. Exactly. The Vietnam bets didn't talk about it, and the Iraq war bets don't talk about it, and the Afghan war vets don't talk about it. And it's because they can't. I got to be, and still I'm friends with, oh, they haven't seen him in a while,

with a guy named Mike Schlitz, who was a sergeant, was a ranger. He was on a patrol in Baghdad. He had a couple of new guys. He was supposed to be in an MRAP and an up-armored truck, but they had a Humvee that was unarmored, and he didn't want the new guys in that, so he rode with that. On their patrol, they came back. On the way back, they hit an IED to 122 millimeter artillery shells fused together,

blew this thing into the sky. Mike goes flying 200 feet. There was a lot of liquid propane in the explosive. Mike gets up and looks and sees, his trashed Humvee over there. So he gets up and starts running to help his guys. But as he's running, he realizes he's on fire. And he's like really on fire. And he goes down and his guys get him out of there. The guys on the Humvee were killed. So Mike Schlitz, when I first met him, was on a private jet, was on a business jet for an organization called Veterans Air Lift Command. And these

are people that have private jets who take military people, wounded people, anywhere they want to go, anytime they want to go there, and they treat them like movie stars because that's what they deserve. And at first time I saw him, I was sitting this far away from him in this little cabin. And I remember telling myself, you have to look him in the eyes. You cannot look away from this guy. His head looked like a scar-covered bowling ball. His eyelids had been burned off. His ears had been completely burned off.

He had two hooks for hands because his hands had been burned off. And he didn't want to live. He wakes up after a medically induced coma and he's just, you know, this thing. He's like a special effect, you know, in a modern movie kind of thing. And the thing that kept him alive was his unit was rotating back to the States. The first thing's out of his mouth, by the way, when he woke up is, how are my guys? And his unit was coming back to the States and he wanted to live to see that. So he did.

They put him on a private plane that had a cargo door because he was in a bed. He couldn't get up. He's absolutely immobilized. And here's the part that really matters. When it was clear that they were taking this badly wounded soldier back to the thing, the people at the FBI at the airport, fixed base operation, who were not in the military, who were not being paid, had nothing to do with anything. They built this wooden ramp on their own time to get him into this thing. They get him to the other end. His entire unit is there.

They pull him out and it's snowing. And he has no skin, right? It's gone. So he can't get snow on him. It's really bad. So as they pull his hospital bed out, all of his buddies form like a canopy over him, you know? And they just wheel him in. And then when he came in, everybody stood up and applauded.

He didn't do it for the applause. He did it because he wanted to be back with his guys. And that's something that people on the outside, like the three of us, will never know. We'll never understand it. We can appreciate it and we can admire it. And in my case, anyway, envy it, but we'll never know it. And Mike has gone on to do a number of, he just goes out and raises money for things. And the great thing about Mike was, and I realized this early, it was like, this guy,

I introduced him once at a fundraiser we did. There's one thing you can't do it with Mike Schlitz, and that's feel sorry for him because Mike Schlitz is an ass kicking ranger and he will come over there and kick your ass. I saw him in a restaurant once from behind. I didn't recognize him at first because he had ears. And I went up to him and I said, hey, Mike. You said, hey, how are you doing Bill? He said, you like my new ears?

They're prosthetics. I said, yeah, they're nice, but why did you get little girl ears? You know, why couldn't you've gotten man-sized ears? And he said, because when you haven't had ears for seven years, when they put these things on, I just couldn't believe how gigantic they were, you know, it just seemed ridiculous to me. You know, so we'd kid around and he'd say, I'll see you next time. He said, oh, wait a minute, let me see if I can find a palm reader. You know, he doesn't have any palms.

He's got hooks. And that attitude is not possible without the attitude of the people back home. and it's been a great honor in my life to be friends with Gary Sinise under the radar without any publicity or any news crews has built 72 houses for vets who they can't use the sink in a normal house. They've got to build it low because it can't get out of the woodshy. Yeah. And so I think the heart and soul of the country, Mike, is really intact

and that all of the stuff that we're seeing is horrifying because we know that that kind of rot will eventually get there. but the heart of this country is really sound. And that's why watching all this stuff hurts. If the key to all of it, if the key to creating a more grateful nation is to tell more compelling stories, then what on the horizon for you is exciting? How do we get to a place? You kind of hinted at it before, but technology is evolving.

I got a buddy who actually produces dirty jobs with me now. who got a show on Netflix called Liberator, which uses something called Trioscope, which is live action, but in front of a green screen. Looks like a graphic novel. Yeah, like a graphic novel treatment onto real actors. And the advantage is you can create the Ardennes without shooting at a practical forest.

It's really a trip when you watch it. I narrated the first episode, And when I watched it, like the first two minutes, I couldn't get my head around it. And then, like, three or four minutes in, I stopped seeing the device and got totally pulled into the story. Chuck and I said this when Travis Mills was on the podcast. First thing you see is, my God, there's a guy with no arms and no legs. And then three minutes later, there's my friend Travis. When the personality is right, you don't see the size of his ears.

that's right. Right. That's right. Unless it's to joke about it. What's next for storytelling? Well, I've watched YouTube dial my views down continuously and then when we start to build them up again, overnight they'll just drop to half of what they were the day before. And we don't need to get into that. That is what it is. But it got me thinking real hard about this. I have no interest of making cartoons or stylized stuff. I really like realism. But somewhere around two years ago, I began to realize that video games were starting to show was a level of realism that was approaching indistinguishable from real life and that that was only going to get better every single day that went by. And then I realized that these game engines, what I'm using is Unreal 4 and now Unreal 5,

it's kind of like a puppet show. The software is free. And as you said, if you have enough of an eye, I could make Lawrence of Arabia in this room. Certainly in two years I could make Lawrence of Arabia in this room and you wouldn't know the difference or you just wouldn't know. So what difference does it make? So I realized we weren't barking up the wrong tree, but we were missing a big part of the audience. So just as an experiment, I went to the top five conservative commentary sites. I looked at their last 20 videos on each one of them, totaled them up, and then I did the same thing for five top gaming channels on YouTube. And I compared the two, and conservative commentary is about 3% of the pie. So all of the effort is going into that 3%. Everything Daily Wire is doing,

everything, Blaze is doing all of these guys that we all know who are doing great work. Most of them friends of mine. I don't mean any of this to be disparaging. All of this is going into this three or four percent of the pie and that pie is getting older. And that pie doesn't need the message. Meanwhile, here's 95, 96, 97 percent of people who are playing video games. And here was the thing that was like getting hit with a thunderbolt. I'd been playing video games since the beginning. It was just at the exact right age. And somewhere around two, three years ago, I was worried about how these kids are all doing everything virtually. And then it hit me. It's like, what do you do? in a video game. Pretty much every video game, more or less the same thing. You make money and you

buy weapons. And I thought, I like making money and buying weapons. And I'm a conservative. What does this mean? What does this mean? And then I realized that the enormous popularity of things like Call of Duty and Arma and all of these first person shooters and so on. And a couple of years a video game came out called Red Dead Redemption 2 is a Western thing. Fantastic game. Made $525 million in two days. And I thought, why? And then I realized it's because this allowed this entire generation to play cowboys and Indians without somebody bitching about it all the time. Right.

And that's when I realized this entire generation is playing computer games because it gives them a chance to act like conservatives. They get to shoot Nazis. That's fun. Jump out of airplanes. Drive fast. You know, hot chicks. You can't beat the biology out of people, Mike. They keep their head down in the daytime.

And they do all the things that they're told they're supposed to do and all of the woke. stuff that they're not going to fight the system. They go home, they close the door, and next thing thing you know, they're jumping out of C-47s and they're gunning down SS guys. And that's when I realized that it's not a question of this generation is lost. On the contrary, they have found a way on their own to behave like their fathers and grandfathers, and the fathers and grandfathers don't know it. So when I looked at the numbers and the total number of views and stuff, I realized that video game animation is the visual language that this generation speaks. It's what they've grown up with.

This animated stuff is getting more and more realistic. This is the language they speak. They don't go to movies that don't watch TV. They either play video games or watch other people playing video games on YouTube. And I said, these are the people we need to reach. So I bet the entire farm and then I borrowed some money about a second farm on going into that space. Yeah. Well, I believe in it.

And it's scary, Mike, you know, It's like anything else. You convince us a work, and then at nighttime, you think, yeah, but what if it doesn't? Well, I'm committed. But basically what I'm doing is I put together almost like a proof of concept thing. I put together like a 14-minute allegory about these two knights who encounter this burned-out forest and they see all these creatures and the fatally open-minded and the willingly blind and they're perpetually enraged and all those other stuff.

They get to this dungeon and then you suddenly realize what this dungeon is and it's basically telling a political message. But what is really doing is it's giving these people permission to land there. You know, it's giving them permission. It's okay to make fun of this stuff. And it's also doing it in a visual language that they're going to watch because this is what they watch. It's not some guy standing in front of a green screen talking like it has been. I've just, you know, I've got monsters and sexy robots and guns and explosions and fire and all kinds of cool things.

What's the plan? How are you going to get your farm back? And the second farm. Yeah, you got two farms in the wind. When is it out? Where can we see it? And how long before you become a master of the universe? That's the trick.

So my plan is after a great deal of thought, I put this thing together to show to adults what could be accomplished by this in terms of this is what one guy did in his spare time by himself who had to learn the software, right? So we're doing a membership thing because I've run a membership-based company. and we're also going to be taking, you know, one-time donations on PayPal. We get enough money to get that thing finished. We'll have it in plenty of time for the elections.

We'll float it out there. And then from that point, we get serious. And I want to do, and I've already got well-developed, a science fiction TV show. There's a giant hole in the culture where Star Trek and Star Wars used to be. It's just an enormous hole where those things used to be. And everybody's trying to copy them. Nobody's got any original ideas. but I'm a pilot and taught astronomy and work with Dak Harkheim for years and stuff.

And I know this stuff. So, but one step at a time, right? Show people that you can do it. And then when they see that it can be done well, then you throw it out there and see what the numbers are. Because the metric, if you're trying to influence the country, if you're trying to get young people who've never heard any of these stories before, the metric is how many of them want it. That's what counts. You throw $100 million on a big thing. video that could seem by 500 people or vice versa.

Right by farm. Yeah. Better to do the vice versa. I mean, is this the kind of technology that could allow you to bring that story to life that you told? Absolutely. Yes. Nice. Tom Hanks did another movie called Greyhound, which was about a Fletcher class destroyer was in the Atlantic.

But in my house, I can produce those kind of special effects. And I don't know what I'm doing. I'm a writer and a director. I know how to set up shots and light them, but I had to learn this software. I get a couple of animators on this and we're in business. And I am 100% convinced that this is where the future is. And I think it's where the future is because that's where the future is, right? I don't mean in a hypothetical way.

I mean, where are today's young people? What are they doing and what are they watching? They're over there watching this stuff. Well, why don't we put some of our stuff out there so they can see that too, you see? And then if they get a taste of it, if they hear these kind of stories about Leon and Ernest Evans and stuff, how do you walk away from that? you don't walk away from it. You lean into it. Yeah, you lean into it.

How can people lean into it with you? How can they help? Well, they can come to the website and either make a PayPal donation or become a member. We have a small group of citizen producers who believe in this enough. Don't make me big, Bill. Just tell me the website. The hell is the website, Billwittle.com. Thank you.

Was that hard? No, no. Yeah, you know it's a little hard for me. I know it's hard. But look, if it's that hard for you to say Bill Whittle.com, how hard was it for some kid to come back from Anseo? And answer the question, you know, would you see, dad? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. You go to billwittle.com and you poke around and you see what this jagged little pill is doing with his life right now and his considerable skills to keep the conversation lively.

And Bill, that's what you've been doing for as long as I've known you. It's going to be fun to see how this plays out, man. I think it's going to be a huge success moment because it is already. Somebody's putting their message out there for these people and they're consuming it in large numbers, right? We might as well be us. what if I'm just spitballing here, but the kind of storytelling you're describing is appealing to me, but what if you were able to take this technology and then after an interview with the gentleman from Tarawa, for instance, you keep that as your trunk, in his words, telling that story, the Higgins boat driver, Leon,

and you'd simply take the technology to bring the story to life as he told it. That's one way to do it. You can take the documentary approach or you can write a screenplay about what happened. And the kind of historical movies I would like to do would like to have a title card at the beginning. It says what you're about to see is not based on a true story. It is a true story. It is as close as we have been able to, after extensive research to get every single detail right, we haven't exaggerated anything. And the good news is, is it just behind my wall here is Hollywood's over the hill. It's about as left-leaning as it comes. But entertainment is inherently conservative. because entertainment is about individuals. I use this way too often, but I'm very proud of it. The reason you can tell that entertainment is about individuals is because no one has ever going to pay to see a James Bond movie where James Bond confronts the evil supervillain with a harshly worded letter from the United Nations

and drives off in a Prius at a reasonable speed, right? No one wants to see this. No one wants to see this. Story. People in compliance, honey, get in here. They're in compliance. People want heroes. that's how we're wired, and we should be giving it to them.

We shouldn't be walking away from this pop culture. What do you expect if you walk away, right? As you know, we never really have a title until we get to the end of these things. And according to my clock, we're at the end. But with your permission, since it's a quote from you, they get to shoot Nazis. That's fun. Seems to me like just the kind of title that we would want on a memorial day. Thank you.

Thank you, Mike. It's been a pleasure. Always, Bill. Thank you. And by the way, Michael Reagan was going to join us today. I'm sure hope he's feeling better. You pinched hit at the last minute. And surprise, surprise, smacked it out of the park for us.

So we appreciate it. Again, don't hang up because our technology is held together with Kleenex and Spit. And until this is fully uploaded, poor Chuck will remain on the verge of something like complete and total vapor lock. When you leave a review, which we hope that you'll do, tell us who you are. Tell us who you are. And before you go, won't you leave? Stop.

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