#193 John Stryker Meyer - MACV-SOG: The Secret War in Vietnam

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For the first time, I can tell you I killed the man.

Don't feel good about it, but, you know, that's war.

How many enemy combatants are you guys thinking the other day?

they started stacking up the dead bodies so he could climb up on the bodies so he could shoot down at us so they were using the bodies as a barricade yeah men who had been wounded they would disembowel them

their head off stick their head in the in the cavity where the bowels were jeez

john stryker meyer

Welcome to the show.

Honored to be here.

Honored to be in the seat where Legend, Sarah, Super Bad have sat previous before me arriving.

I'm honored to be here, sir.

Well, I'm honored to have you.

Thank you.

It's been a long time coming.

We've known each other for what?

Almost five years now.

Five years?

Has it been that long?

Yes, sir, because I saw your podcast.

First one.

Sean Ryan's show Numero 001 with you and Mike Glover.

I saw that.

I couldn't believe it.

I knew Mike because he's Special Forces.

And we we'd heard about some of the other navy seal podcasters that were popping up and at that point five years ago is when i met jocko willink and i said who's this sean ryan guy i listened to that show i was like oh my god i listened to it twice and that was such a gripping like a different feel to it particularly when you and mike were sitting there talking about how during your mass depresses times.

It's like, oh my God.

But it's really well done.

Thank you.

And I've been a fan ever since.

And then I said, when we moved to Franklin, we were renting in Franklin for a couple of months before we bought our house.

And I reached out and you said, yeah, let's get together for breakfast.

Hell yeah, man.

Glad we did.

Me too.

Glad we did.

But, yeah, it's an honor to have you here, John.

It really is.

I've been saving this.

I've been saving this opportunity.

And so I've really been looking forward to it.

And it's going to be a long day.

Hope you're ready.

I'm up for it.

Absolutely.

You kidding?

Because

there's other podcasts, but yours is different.

And it's the details.

And even like you and I were talking before here about Tyler and

what a great interview.

And those kind of interviews, that's what's making the new media today in America.

People are turning to that for the truth.

And then just your interview with Brett.

I mean, I just turned it on for a minute and go, oh, this girl, nice young girl.

Look at Ryan.

He's doing,

he's done this great show here.

Brett Cooper.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Oh, God.

I know, right?

I kept listening to it.

Anna's listened to it.

23 years old.

Who would have thought?

Yeah.

And she graduated from high school when she's 15.

I barely got out of high school when I was 18.

I know.

I mean, it's kind of like, this young lady is amazing.

So you kept listening to the story and what she's been through.

And then when she lands at the Daily Wire, it hits the ground running.

It's like, just, but that's the new media.

Yeah.

Because the old regular media, it's just the majority of them, sad to say, they don't report the facts.

Yeah.

But, well, John, I'm excited, man.

I've been, like I said, I've been wanting to do this for a long time, and I just

we've been busy.

Yeah, we've been busy.

Absolutely.

And

I wanted to make sure we developed a friendship before

we got you in here.

And we definitely did that.

We absolutely did, sir.

But

so a couple, I want to,

this interview is going to be, you know, it's going to be your life story and all about, you know, growing up, Vietnam, post-service, journalism.

We're going to hit all of it.

But also in this interview, I'd like to get a couple of history lessons.

Sure.

So I'd like to get, you know, some history about Vietnam and some history about Mac Visa.

And

because a lot of people listening, including myself we don't know a lot about that a lot about that war what it was about and uh

there aren't a lot of there aren't a hell of a lot of people to know about mac visog so well yeah i mean look at

today they do these on-the-street interviews

when they interview the young americans majority of them don't know that

who was in the north and the south in our american civil war they don't even know that yeah let alone North Vietnam and South Vietnam, what the difference was or what side we were on.

And nobody gets the truth about the harsh realities of communism and anybody that links themselves to communism that you've seen today with Sarah and her people.

They're different brands, different names of repression and taking away people's rights.

But they're all the same.

And thankfully, you got people out here talking about those things.

That's why I'm honored to be here.

Thank you.

Julie.

Well, everybody starts off with an introduction.

So,

John Stryker-Meyer, you are a U.S.

Army Special Forces Green Beret veteran who served in Covert Military Assistance Command Vietnam.

Studies in Observation Group MAC V.

SOG, or simply SOG, during the Vietnam War, running dangerous top secret missions in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, missions that you weren't unable to talk about for 20 years.

You're the recipient of two bronze stars with V devices, a purple heart, an air medal, the combat infantry badge, U.S.

and Vietnamese parachutist badge, Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm, among others.

You completed your college education at Trenton State College after returning from Vietnam and worked as a journalist until 2008.

You're the author of Across the Fence, The Secret War in Vietnam, and co-author of On the Ground, The Secret War in Vietnam and SOG Chronicles, sharing your first-hand experiences and those of your fellow Green Berets.

You are a host of the podcast SOG Cast, where you delve into untold stories of SOG combat veterans as well as some of the heroic aviators who supported Green Beret teams on the ground across the fence behind enemy lines.

And more important than all of that, you're a husband to Anna of over 30 years, whom you have had five children.

And most importantly, you're a Christian.

Amen.

Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you.

Again, it's an honor to be here, sir.

But,

you know,

everybody starts off with a gift, John.

Oh, indeed.

Let me guess.

I hope it's legal in 50 states.

Even you.

Is it legal in all 50 states?

I don't know.

I mean, I don't know.

I think so, but you know, with RFK in the house, then

they're probably probably going to be illegal here any day.

But

Vigilance League gummy bears, I do believe they are still legal in all 50 states.

Very good.

They are, I could take it.

Made here in the U.S.

But, sir,

because we're here in

a gift exchange mode, I have for you a special gift that I brought today.

I'm a member of the Special Operations Association, and last year we had our 48th reunion where we celebrated the 60th year since the Sequel War was founded.

MAC V-Sog, the Military Assistance Command Studies and Observations Group, was founded and started in 1964.

Last year was the 60th anniversary.

And on that coin, there is that picture on the back of a helicopter, which is from my personal time, which was Echo 4.

We had a target.

We had been in contact for four hours.

The South Vietnamese helicopter pilot, Captain Tin, flew in, hovered for 10 minutes while we struggled through elephant grass to get to the helicopter.

He pulled us out, and that helicopter had 48 bullet holes in it.

Wow.

Wow.

He got us back.

We get back to our base at FOB1 in Fubai.

I go up, climb up, say, You saved our ass.

Thank you.

Come on into the club.

I want to buy you a drink.

He goes, I'm sorry, I'm flying home.

My wife is holding dinner for me.

Oh, yeah.

Damn.

Yes, sir.

Man,

this has my favorite saying of all time on here.

You have never lived until you've almost died.

For those who fought for it, life has a special flavor that the protected will never know.

Amen.

That quote was written on the wall when I got to Afghanistan for the first time in the hooch that we were staying at.

And I took a a picture of it and still to this day,

it's my favorite quote.

When I first got the FUBAI in 1968, if you're really a cool green beret, you got a Zippo cigarette lighter.

And I have that on my official FOB1 cigarette lighter.

That saying is on it.

Oh, man.

Absolutely.

That's part of our SOG history.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Thank you.

And I got one other thing for you.

Oh, no.

Yeah.

So, you know.

I'm happy with the...

Being a Christian.

444.

You know what that means?

No.

444.

This is a number that appeared to me several times right after I

found God.

Yeah.

And it just kept appearing.

And super long story short, I was driving.

Right after I found God, I had these three appearances like right in a row that just slapped me in the face.

And I was driving back to work

and I had 444 on my clock.

444

gas left empty.

And it was four hours and 44 minutes after I'd had this conversation with my IT guy, Adam, about

Guardian angels.

He wanted me to know that I had guardian angels watching over me.

And so

I called Kimball, who runs all the social media here.

Yeah.

And I said, hey, Google what 444 means.

I want to talk about this when I get back.

There's obviously something.

Yeah, yeah.

And he looked it up.

I got in here, and it means

your guardian angels want you to know they're watching over you.

Whoa.

How crazy is that?

Whoa.

Yeah.

Yeah, because there's no doubt in my mind that the only way I survived the secret war was through the grace of the Lord.

There were times when I should have been dead, so dead, so many times.

And

there had to be divine intervention.

I'm just a dumbass city slicker out there trying to do the right thing by God and country, you know.

But thank you, sir.

I appreciate that.

You're welcome.

You're welcome.

Absolutely.

But,

all right, John, you ready to get into it?

Absolutely, yes, sir.

Where'd you grow up?

Trenton, New Jersey.

Yeah, the capital of New Jersey.

We were there.

Dad was a milkman, and I grew up on a milk truck with dad, a devout Christian.

And

mom was

a church organist and a choir director and a piano teacher.

And so

they met at a church in Trenton because mom drove down from Belmeb, which is about 20 miles away, to play organ and tend to the choir.

Well, dad, he was a good musician, but he couldn't sing for he was a horrible voice and he was young.

But he joined the choir.

He joined the choir.

He did.

He met Dorothy Grace Stryker.

And in January 1943, they were married up in Harling, New Jersey, the Dutch Reformed Church.

And they lived happily ever after.

And

so three years later, I was born, 1946.

1946.

79 years old.

Yes, sir.

And grew up on a milk truck with dad, watched him, and

we had common interest in baseball because that was the sport then.

And we'd have our catches and worked a lot at church.

We had a church community there, and

just grew up there every Sunday.

In the early days,

dad delivered milk seven days a week.

So on Sundays,

we'd get up, do the milk route, change,

get to church on time.

Wow.

Absolutely.

Do you any brothers and sisters?

Yeah.

We have, I got a younger sister, Linda.

She's up there in Lakewood, Colorado.

And a little brother, Dave, and he's in Aurora, Colorado.

They both went west from Trenton many years ago, but they love it out there.

And then we lost a little brother.

We lost him at five months back in 1951.

He had heart congestion of some sort.

Probably, if it happened today, they probably could have saved him.

But in

1951, they couldn't.

They didn't have the medical procedures in place.

Man.

Oh, yeah.

What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

Yeah, I was just a goofy kid.

Loved baseball.

Thought I was a cowboy.

You know, my granddad Meyer bought me a cap pistol.

Now, we had no alcohol and no guns in the house.

And when granddad Meyer bought me a cap pistol, there were some issues.

But granddad pulled rank on mom for the one time that I ever saw him do it.

And she let me bring the cap pistol in the house.

So we played Cowboys and Indians, went to play little league ball.

I was never the brightest student in school, but usually could get it done well enough to

get through the grade and get promoted to the next grade.

Played piano.

We had a.

You played piano?

Yeah,

I could read music before I could read words.

Because you think about it, with music, you only have eight letters, A through G.

The damn alphabet's got 26 letters, man.

In kindergarten, that gets really rough.

I can read music before I read words.

Do you still play?

I'm rusty, but yes, my mom gave me her Steinway, so

I go up there and tickle the IVs once in a while.

How about Anna loves that?

Oh, she does, absolutely.

Yes, she's my biggest fan.

And we have stories about that.

The first serious date we had, I took her back to my house and cooked dinner and stuff.

I took her into the living room and I turned the light out.

She's like, oh my God, what's going to happen?

I'm here with this green beret.

She's apprehensive, but I played Chopin for her.

Wow.

And I figured this woman is such a classic.

If there's any way, if she likes classic music, I can use this to try to gain her hand in marriage someday.

And the rest is history, brother.

It worked.

It did.

It worked.

Thank God she likes Chopin.

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What else were you into?

Were you a troublemaker?

A little bit.

Yeah.

No, but again, growing up in the church like that, and mom and dad were pretty close reins on us.

And if we stepped out of line, and even then, neighborhoods, if Mrs.

Zabrowski saw me doing something, like, Johnny, you shouldn't be doing that, she would kick my ass.

And then

she'd tell mom.

And mom admired when she's not happy,

baby.

So that, between that and the church, you always had influences keeping you on the track.

And

by the time I got to high school, I was in the marching band for a year.

We had vocal groups.

I was involved with that.

Played JV soccer.

And

dad didn't want me to play football.

He's worried about my knees.

because I'd hurt my knee playing soccer in eighth grade.

But I finally played football in my senior year with Elvin Bathea and a couple other people.

And my high school quarterback, as it turns out, Hal Kroski,

he went MIA on a mission in Camp Bodia in February of

1969.

Wow.

So every February comes around, I think of my quarterback.

But I, because I had missed the first two years, I was on the team.

Did all the practices, went to all the games, geared up, but never crossed the line.

But I loved it.

I loved loved every second of it.

So you wouldn't consider yourself to be

an athlete?

Yeah, not a very good one.

You know, I just love, I love baseball.

It's such a head game.

And I have a dominant eye.

And when I grew up, you know, I wanted to be an Air Force pilot, had model planes and build them.

And I had a lot of earaches.

So mom would always get me a little plane to make or link logs or something like that.

But deep down inside, I wanted to

fly a jet.

Well, at some point, I remember talking to one of the eye doctors saying, someday I want to be a jet pilot.

He says, nah, with your vision, it's not going to work.

So I settled for the next best thing, jumping out of airplanes.

Really?

Yeah, of course.

Plus,

yeah, when I went through jump school,

I had a 102% pay raise.

Because in the May of 67, when I go through jump school, a private,

I think I was still a private E1.

The pay was $50 a month.

Damn.

Now, jump pay for an enlisted scumbag, you know, was not officers' pay, but enlisted was $55 a month.

So the first paycheck, I bought my Cochrane jump boots, and the rest is history, man.

Nice.

Yes, sir.

It has 16 jumps overall.

So how do you just go from, I mean, was it immediate?

You were just like, all right, I can't be a pilot.

I guess I'll jump out of planes.

No, no, it was a much longer progression than that.

It took me two years to flunk out of college.

So I was there just literally just doing the wrong thing.

I went in as a music major, transferred to be a phys ed major because the music department chairman learned that I was playing soccer.

He says, you either got to be a music major or a jock.

Well, I don't like being talked to like that.

So I went to the phys ed department.

I knew the soccer coach because I went out for JV soccer.

And I knew the baseball coach, a great guy.

And so they signed me up, transferred to PhysEd, still flunked out.

Took me two years, flunked out.

And that summer I worked at Yosemite National Park.

And

when I was up there, I got a letter from dad, hey, you flunked out.

Be advised.

The draft board's coming for you.

And I swear, again, like this divine intervention stuff.

Within a few days,

one of my jobs was to pick up trash in the southern part of

Yosemite, and it's in the Womono, which is down by the southern gate, down by the big trees.

So I used to go out and walk, maybe anywhere from five to ten miles, pick up the trash.

And I got to the point where I had it really clean.

So I would jog,

pick up the trash, and I would go to a bookstore and get a book.

Well, one day I'd go into the bookstore, and there's a book, The Green Berets.

Now, this is 1966, the summer of.

In 1964,

a Green Beret received the first Medal of Honor for combat in South Vietnam.

And through high school, we read that in the history class, it was mandatory reading in the New York Times back when it was a real newspaper.

And they talked about Southeast Asia, Kennedy, the assassination of Diem, all that.

So we knew about it, but it was still far away.

And if you gave me a map, I wouldn't have been able to find Indochina.

But I read that book.

I said, son of a bitch,

if I can make it with these guys, I want to go with them.

Because I knew at that time, in 1966, you know, people were getting drafted.

The draft was on.

And you got drafted.

You would have eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced training, one month leave, and you're going to Vietnam.

Well, like I said, I'm a city slicker.

And I didn't have much experience with weapons.

My cousins and I would go out and shoot.

We when I go up to my cousin's farm, shoot the shotguns and 22s, things like that, but

not real training.

So I figured, with these guys, I'll get more training.

I'll need that.

So if I can do it, so enlisted, airborne unassigned.

I went through basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

And one of my medals that I'm really proud of is the expert badge for shooting.

We qualified in the M14.

When we went to the range, it was two degrees below zero.

Two degrees below zero in your calling?

Qualifying.

Damn.

And my last shot, I got 60, which you needed to be an expert.

I polished that metal up and wore it proudly for my entire time in the military.

After that, we had advanced infantry training.

And then during advanced infantry training, they had the,

whenever it was a rainy day, they would take us to a big auditorium.

Everybody was sitting on the floor.

It would be career day.

You learn about different MOSs.

So we're sitting on the floor and they had a stage up front with steps on each side.

And you had these cooks that would come up.

The military police would come up.

And the cooks are like, hey, come with us.

You'll never be hungry.

Okay, but none of those guys were in shape.

And other people, Signal Corps came in, crypto people came in.

The very last guy was a Green Beret.

a little

tough guy.

And it would be raining.

That's why we're inside.

We're all sitting on the floor.

He comes up, walks through us, did a vertical jump on the stage, turned around and goes, I'm here for special forces.

I'm a recruiter.

Anybody interested to see me?

Anybody here interested?

Well, I jumped off the floor.

I read the book.

Me and about four or five other guys.

I'm looking around like hundreds of people are sitting on their ass.

Said, you guys are going to go to Vietnam in a couple of months.

If I can get in with these guys, I want to get some more training.

So yeah, that was it.

Went down, did the psychological test,

and

passed all the tests of physical stuff.

How tough was it?

How tough was the physical test?

For me, not tough.

I was in good shape for running, swimming.

I could swim enough to survive.

Not like SEAL swimming, but just enough.

Get that little side.

If worst comes, the worst hit the side stroke and just go until the cows come home, you know?

What was the psychological test like back then?

I don't know.

It wasn't too bad.

You kind of figure there's a couple you know that are trying to lead you a certain way.

So you want to answer.

Just make sure you're right.

Well, anyway, whatever it was.

Fuzzy bunnies.

That's what I tell everybody when they're getting ready to take the psych test.

Just think fuzzy bunnies.

Yeah.

For sure.

So he, so the final day comes and all the people that had signed up were there.

And so he dismissed the people that didn't make it.

And there was a bunch of us.

He brought each one in one at a time.

I'm the last one.

He brought me in and made me stand there for like, it felt like an eternity.

And so he finally, he goes, okay, Meyer.

He said, you're lucky.

They lowered the standards.

So he either busted my chops or they lowered the standards.

Either way, I was, I said, am I in or not?

He goes, yeah, you're in.

So we went from air, had jump school at Fort Benning,

had a zero week there, and bought my first pair of jump boots, began to polish them up.

Three weeks, and through all that time, it's like that harassment thing, you know, just like in the movies, it's the same.

And a jump school is a little different.

They literally throw you out of your bunk at 2 o'clock in the morning.

It's kind of, okay, I've seen the movies.

I know how this plays out.

So we went through it all.

And then

we had five jumps to qualify and went through that pretty much much without any major injuries or anything.

And

then we went to Fort Bragg and we left on a Friday night, packed us up on the bus, drove from Columbia, Georgia, or Columbus, Georgia, up to Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

We don't get there till 11, 12 o'clock at night.

So the bus comes out.

Everybody gets out.

We're just waiting to get screwed with, you know.

have people come out and harass and harangue and stuff.

And

we're all standing around.

Some guy comes out with flip-flops and shorts and a shirt with a clipboard

welcome to special forces training group it's Friday night

here's the barracks for a temporary barracks you all go find a bunk now all right is anybody here hungry

we got the mess hall over here the cook is there make you some sandwiches if you want go what the cook's gonna make sandwiches for me

A private first class.

You kept waiting for him to screw with you, you know?

And they didn't.

So we were there for the whole weekend.

And he says, Monday morning, there'll be a formation.

Be there.

That was it.

So we went to all the meals,

the mess hall was, the little PT just to stay in shape, and began training.

So that was May of 67.

When did the Vietnam War start?

Well, on officially, it was in the early 70s, like 56, 57.

We had Green Beret teams that went over, and the CIA was working with their programs programs there.

And

after Kennedy became really unhappy with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs and a couple other incidents,

they

was the invasion of the CIA was working to take Cuba back from Fidel Castro, and it was a completely botched mission.

They had planned to attack, go in, and then win over the hearts and minds of the Cubans.

And the people that worked in the operations side of the CIA had a different location planned, and a key part was going to be air support with A1 Skyraiders and anything else.

But somebody changed the plan, and they put it in the Bay of Pigs,

which was

not as well of an area.

The other area had train lines, highways, mountains where people could go hide in the mountains from any communists that would come hunting for them.

But this area, the Bay of Pigs, was also where Fidel Castro took vacations.

So he and his people knew it.

Anyways, that invasion attempt was failed, and Kennedy refused to give them air support.

And

that was a big incident that blew up nationally, internationally embarrassing to the United States.

and to Kennedy.

And by at the end of 63, they took away the covert side of the CIA in Vietnam.

And they formed Mac Visa.

And I think it was January 1964.

It was officially announced.

So the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group was formed up.

It took a while to get things in place, like any military operation.

But

by 65,

We had people who were beginning to form.

They had a base up at Cam Duck where they were doing training.

And

they began running missions across the fence.

And some of them would be, just in those days, you know, the NVA didn't have their act together in Laos or Cambodia.

Our guys could go, they would patrol in,

but they often made contact if they were in.

And by the time I arrived in 1968,

they had, the NVA had 25,000 troops.

in Laos.

What does the NVA stand for?

Oh, sorry, North Vietnamese Army.

It was officially the People's Army of Vietnam, but it was the North Vietnamese Army for us.

It was the NVA.

And they were trained up north, had training from the Russians and the Chinese.

And

like by 68, that was our worst year in the Vietnam War.

The highest year for casualties amongst all U.S.

troops.

because we had the Tet Offensive in the beginning of the year, as well as Saog.

We had the highest year of casualties that year.

So

that's just the way that went.

I don't know if we get back to some of the beginnings.

I've been wandering a little bit.

Yeah, no, let's rewind a little bit, please.

How old were you when the Kennedy assassination happened?

I was in high school.

We were in choir practice.

And the choir director, who was a Navy veteran,

somebody came in and talked to him.

He stopped and he turned around.

And then he came back and faced us.

He said, we're done.

He says, somebody just shot their president.

So I was

17 at the time.

17.

Yeah.

In high school.

And we always had choir practice in the auditorium.

And everybody was stunned.

So he said,

it was always the last class of the day.

He said, if you all want to go home early today, you can.

You're dismissed.

And he was weeping.

And Harry Mulder was tough, but but a great guy.

Because I was a, we had music classes.

We had been in the band for one year.

And vocal, we had a male glee club, had the chorus,

and then there was a special group.

And we would meet in the mornings at

an hour before school started, and we'd have practice with the special group.

There would be,

I forget how it broke down.

I think we had like

12 guys and 12 girls that were taken out of the choir.

And we practiced special numbers, did a little choreography and everything.

But Harry's just a great guy.

What did you think about the Kennedy assassination?

I was outraged.

Just couldn't believe what happened.

What was the pulse of the country?

Just total outrage, just to think that some...

And again, we're just reading from the media, Oswald, some scumbag that had been to Russia, was able to get up to the book tower

and to shoot the president in Dallas.

And you knew that there was a lot of political strife down there.

It was not a Democratic stronghold in Dallas at that time.

And

we had heard within days that Kenny had been advised not to go to Dallas because of hostilities or hostile attitude towards him.

And

as it all evolved, as it evolved, then when Oswald gets killed, you figured that we've lost the source of what really happened that day, Hoping that somebody give him some truth serum or something and say, what really happened here?

Because he looked too stupid to be able to do anything that would be that sophisticated to get a weapon and go up and kill the president

and go into this building that you would just assume the CIA, I mean the Secret Service would have more

of a protective

before they go into a target area, before the president goes anywhere, they look at all the buildings and supposed to scope those things out.

There's a lot of questions asked, but even in my little furtive mind.

Yeah.

I mean, just

go down a little rabbit hole here.

I mean,

you know, all these years later, they're getting ready to release the files, supposedly.

You know, I know they released a bunch, I don't know what's in them yet, but I mean, what do you think?

What do you think that was?

Well, recently, Glenn Beck has done some stuff on it, a little bit of a deep dig.

And

when he talked to Cass Patel, Cass said, when you look at this stuff, it's not who, it's

what was going on.

And so they're beginning to roll up a lot of strings that are coming off of that

from

apparent CIA involvement at some level.

And on the internet, there's at least one guy saying, I killed the president.

And I've never listened to it because I just figured he's a kook.

But again, Glenn Beck is saying at least there was things there that there was CIA involvement.

And,

you know, when we were involved with the CIA, most of the times it was doing things that were mission-oriented to hurt the communists.

So everything was like mission-oriented.

And,

you know, we had mixed emotions dealing with the CIA even in 68 to 69.

It was a one-way street.

Give us information.

But we'd never get anything back, which is fine.

We're trained professionals.

We're out there snooping the poop.

And like one of the things we would do, we'd do wire taps.

And the CIA says, if you listen to the wire, there's nothing going on.

Tape it anyway.

Tape it.

We have, at that time, state-of-the-art cassette recorder with a cassette.

And then the wire would go up.

And then our little people, that's an affectionate term for my South Vietnamese.

We had them trained up.

They would climb the pole or the tree,

tap it in, and then if it was on a a telephone pole, they took mud with them and they would cover the wire.

So anybody going by, they wouldn't see the wire.

And we would tape it.

And

when we were done, we turned in all the blank tapes.

For us, it sounded like blank tapes, but the CIA would amplify it a hundred times.

And they said they were able to get great intel off of those tapes.

Wow.

To me, it just sounded like nothing.

Interesting.

But if the CIA is happy, I'm happy.

At least in that case.

And we get,

there'll be a couple other war stories later.

We have some CIA angles.

But let's get back to our rewind.

Yeah, so let's.

So back to you show up,

special forces training.

Yes.

You get the weekend.

You get your sandwiches made for you.

What was that Monday like?

Oh, from that time on, it was just like

I couldn't believe I was there.

It was just

growing up as a a kid and thinking about this is an opportunity.

By now, everybody knew the Green Berets.

The song had been out, the Ballad of the Green Beres.

And

so the book had been out.

And of course,

Roger Donald was the recipient of the first Medal of Honor from the Vietnam War.

His A-Camp got overrun in July.

of 64.

He earned the Medal of Honor.

So that was the first Medal of Honor awarded by President Johnson to Roger,

who fortunately I became friends with years later.

But so we knew about that

and knew about that history and more stories were appearing in the paper.

In 1965 you had the I Drag Valley with We Were Soldiers Once, that story.

I mean, never told that way in the media, but took the movie and the book that Joe Galloway did that would just give you accurate insights into that.

But that was an obvious escalation.

We knew the 173rd Airborne was there, the Marines were there.

And, you know, you have footage.

There's footage of the Marines going into Da Nang.

Well, the special forces story side of that, the Marine photographers were really pissed with the Green Berets when the Marines invaded Da Nang, when they went in with their beach assault, because some of the Green Berets had been out water skiing.

And they're in the background water skiing.

So they had to edit out the Green Berets water skiing.

Oh, shit.

That's one of my favorite.

That's hilarious.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

So there's that fun side of life there, too, you know.

Well, what was the training like?

And

how many of you guys were there?

You know,

I'm no good on numbers.

I was strictly focused on me, got to know a couple guys.

And

in the beginning we had phase one, which is general training, you know, mission, map reading,

orientation.

Can you get the point A to point B?

I instantly found a guy from Texas who had grown up in the woods.

Me and him were really good friends because I knew, I wasn't quite sure of my compass trainings and bearings that way.

But we got through it all.

had a little bit of hand-to-hand and forced marches, things like that.

And

then after phase one, you went to phase two, which was MOS training.

So with Special Forces, you have five MOSs,

Commo, Demolitions, Weapons, Intel,

and Medics.

And the Medic course, at that time, the Green Berets, as they are today, the Medics are the best in the world.

Their training was over a year long.

Now, in fact, it was so tough.

I knew that was an MOS that I couldn't take because they had classes.

They would go in and do a class all day, and first thing in the morning, they would be getting tested on what they had been taught the day previous.

And they lost a lot of people because that was a rigorous course.

And then when they're done, you had the dog lab where they would wound a dog.

You had to patch up the dog, sew its leg back on, and then they would go to emergency rooms around the country.

They still do this today with the emergency rooms.

They still do it.

Oh, yeah.

The SEALs send their guys to the dollars.

Yeah, sure enough.

And we had for years the seals were coming through that medic course now i don't know if they still do or not because the seals have expanded so much their training i don't know when i was then they were still doing it but yeah but it was good and so that's our mos

and so i got commo

at that time as morse code was the key part of the commo we had other classes on

on uh

you know, just FM radios, AM radios, handheld stuff.

You had the basic training, but the the hard part was the Morse code.

Myself, Johnny McIntyre, Tony Harrow, we all flunked out.

We got recycled.

And when we got recycled, there was a sergeant first class Villarosa, Paul Villarosa.

He took us under his wing.

Now, he had been the Nom three times.

On his neck was a tattoo.

cut here

and he was tough and he was amazing he could he tattooed tattooed

a line that said cut here.

Oh, yeah.

A couple other tattoos, which I don't remember.

But he was an amazing Morse code.

He had been in

the maritime service previous as a communicator.

And he could take,

he could do Morse code with both hands.

He could send and receive at the same time.

And his speed was so fast.

And they had a thing that's called a bug.

And the bug was a

handheld for you to do your Morse code signals, but it's really fast.

Well, he would make that thing sing.

So he took us in.

He came in at night.

We could come back at night for extra.

He would be there with us.

We went in for the weekends.

We finally got

with Morse code, you had five-letter groups,

and you had to get 15 or 18 word groups per minute to graduate from Commo.

It took a while, but we made it.

What was...

So you wanted to go to Vietnam?

Yeah.

I've seen all the war movies.

You grew up with the Duke and everybody else with their war movies and

God and Country.

So what did you,

what was it like for you getting trained by

special ops guys that are coming back from Vietnam?

It, you know, it was really,

it was just, I just felt like I was in the element that it was new and different.

For me, it was so,

so far out that I was just happy to be able to, and be able to, every time I graduated to the next phase, kind of like, we made it, you know, I kept waiting for them to say, like that recruiter, you're lucky.

We lowered the standard.

Somebody's going to come along and have a reality check.

And so, how the hell did you get in here this far?

Get out of here.

Go to, go be a cook somewhere at a leg unit, unit, you know?

I kept waiting for that, but we kept going on and we made it through.

How'd they treat you guys?

You know,

it was different.

It wasn't like basic AIT and jump school.

There, they gave you rules.

You had to abide by them.

Whatever they told you to do, you had to do it.

But they also...

If you asked a question, a lot of times they would answer the question.

And it just felt like they were training us to go to Vietnam.

And we knew that we had this mission against communism.

We had seen what communism had done in Hungary.

We had seen and heard about things in Russia.

And we heard about Mayo Test Tongue.

We never realized just what brutal killers they were of their own people, mass murderers effectively.

But we knew communism sucked.

We saw Fidel Castro.

and what happened to Cuba.

And so we knew that we were up against the forces of the darkness at that time.

And we're training for that.

And at that time, the Green Berets, the only thing we knew about were the Green Beret A teams that went over.

So you had an A team, there would be a senior medic and a junior medic, and for all the MOSs, and then you'd have the

team leader, and then there'd be an officer who'd be a captain.

And then there'd be an executive officer.

But the team sergeant ran the team.

But there'd be that delicate balance between them.

So that's what we trained up for: A teams going to Vietnam.

And

through that training, we came to finally to the FTX.

You put together your first A-team

without the officers.

And we would go in as a team, had missions, the Common Guards, we had to set up the wires.

And of course, here's Army training.

This is December 1967.

Our training is in the Urari National Park, National Forest in North Carolina.

It snowed.

We had like a foot of snow for our training prior to going to Vietnam, which is like the perfect

icy moronic WTF situation.

You know, it's like, what?

We're going to go to Nam, and we're here in the snow.

And, of course,

my Texas buddy who had helped me get through with the orientation.

We were in the como together and he was my joint mate.

we were supposed to take turns sleeping well he fell asleep on his watch the instructor came by and tore down our tent kicked our ass put us out in the snow

but we survived it got through and put up the antenna and we jumped our jump so we finally jumped at night and we jumped at night at 800 feet And that's a pretty close jump.

I mean,

the only ones I heard about some of your programs, some of the guys from today, when they jump at 400 feet.

And we had a couple of guys later on with SAG, we had five halo jumps into Laos.

And then we had 12 or 13, depending who you talk to, static line jumps, some in Laos and then some in South Vietnam when they were supporting aid camps that were under siege.

They would talk about jumping at 500 feet, no reserve, because you just go out, the string pulls, and you're you're landing.

And in my case, 800 feet happened really quick because I was the combo guy.

So you had your parachute and your emergency parachute, your equipment bag, your M14 bag, and then we had an additional bag because we had to carry, we had a, our radio was a,

we called the Angry 109, and you used that for Morse code.

And in order to get that radio, you had to have a handheld generator that sat on a metal frame that you sat on.

So you would have somebody would sit there cranking the generator, and then you put the antenna up

and communicate back to base.

So

you had that metal seat,

the generator, which was heavy, complete with the handles.

And then the radio plus the M14 and plus other equipment, sleeping bags and stuff like that.

So when he jumped, I jumped heavy and jumped out.

And just by the grace of the Lord again, there was one little road.

And I came out, the wind took me and I landed, did a PLF there,

and went and did the FTX, a field training exercise.

We were out there for five or six days and nights.

Got through it, came back for some final classes.

And it was around, I don't know, December 14th, 15th, somewhere's around there.

This is graduation.

Here's your certificate.

Congratulations.

Here's your pass for a leave for Christmas.

In our case, the Commo guys, there was a bunch of us that went TDY to Fort Gordon, Georgia

for 12 weeks of radio teletype because the A camps needed,

and of course we didn't know it, but SOG needed

communicators with top-secret clearance to run the radio teletype.

Did you know what SOG was at the time?

We had heard something about a deadly

top-secret secret mission in Vietnam, and it was scuttlebud.

And, you know, once, and with our combo class, particularly once we got recycled, so we knew all the instructors, and they knew us.

And so as you get near the end, they could tell who's going to graduate.

And at the end, there'd be a coffee break or something.

And we get to talk of, hey, you've been to Vietnam.

They've all been there at least two or three times, like Sergeant Villarosa.

And so we're going through this and

they go, look, when you go to Vietnam, you're going to get

in-country training.

And when you're done with that, get assigned to an A-camp.

There's operations out there, people just die.

And they're going to come out at the end of your in-country training, you're going to say, we're looking for volunteers, but they won't tell you what it is.

Don't do it.

Go to an A-camp, get used to Vietnam.

Okay.

So

we go through our radio teletype training.

Johnny McIntyre and I, we got busted.

We got busted from a private first class to private educe.

Those legs down.

They just didn't like us leaving base at night, going downtown to howl the wolves.

So Johnny and I got going downtown to where?

To

Augusta.

We called the Disgusta, but Augusta, George.

Disgusta, huh?

Yeah, it's right outside.

What happens in Disgusta?

Well, it was amazing.

They had a couple of really cool nightclubs there.

You could drink a lot.

My dad was kind enough to let me take our Pontiac down there, so I had a car.

And Johnny McIntyre and I, we drove down.

We were there.

So at night, they'd come by with a base inspection like at 10, 10.30,

all tucked in, who we had our clothes on.

The second he left, man, bing, we're out to the parking lot.

We were downtown.

The bars would close at 2 o'clock.

And Mac and I would go across the border to South Carolina because their bars there were open until 5.

So we'd leave about 4.30 so we'd get back to base.

We would have got along great together.

Oh, yeah.

This is like.

So at some point during this training, you know, McIntyre and I drove home.

And that night, we stopped

at a bar

and John and I are sitting there on the TV.

So this is now the TED Offensive is kicking in.

And we're going through this training.

And on the TV, I don't know if it was CBS

but here's it you can see this grainy picture of a tank

and they said this is a NVA tank that broke into Lang Vei a Green Beret camp which is in the northwest corner of South Vietnam right just south of the DMZ not far away from Laos

and this NVA tank tried to overrun the base last night Those Green Berets were fighting for their lives.

McIntyre and I go, holy shit, we're going to die die when we get there.

We drove home, took all our money out of the bank.

We didn't want our family fighting over our money if we died.

We go home, take all our money out, drove back to base.

And every night we went out for steak.

We spent all our money.

Of course, went to the bars.

Spent it all in Disgusta.

Indeed.

There was a little sweetheart down there.

Johnny had his girlfriend.

I met this gal.

And

before we were done with the training, then we had a a month's leave and then we went to Vietnam.

I arrived in Vietnam

at the end of April 1968.

So before we get into Vietnam,

are you saying that when they would take these volunteers,

that was Saab?

Yes, absolutely.

And they had a couple other operations.

By the time we got there, they had the Mike Force, which had been operating since 1963.

And the Mike Force was the first QRF, basically.

And when the A camps would get hit, they would need someone to come in to help them break the fight.

And Mike Force was just outstanding.

We had a friend of mine, his name was Jack Tobin.

He was in the Mike Force, had several tours over there, highly respected Green Beret.

Met him years later.

He was president of the Special Forces Association.

And I was on the Special Operations Association Board of Directors.

We met at the reunions.

And Jack introduced me to a friend.

He goes, this is my friend Tiltmeyer here.

He was in SAG.

Now, SAG, they'd be out there snooping and pooping.

He was just doing intel work.

Yeah, they made some contact with the NVA, but with Mike Force, we were out there hunting for those commie motherfuckers.

And that was the difference.

And Mike Force would go out, and they just had an outstanding reputation.

They broke many a siege that the aid camps would be under siege by the NVA and the Viet Cong.

But that was the difference.

But I learned that years later.

In this case,

we heard the scuttlebutt.

We heard the scuttlebutt.

So we went through the country training, which is three weeks.

So

can you describe what the war was about at that time before you went?

Well,

we knew that the Viet Cong, and you heard about all the legends, the Viet Cong is just the peasant fighter, the farmer by day, fighter by night, defending what he thinks is his country.

They don't talk about any of the NVA, the communist people that are supporting them, that are in country, that are with the majority of the Viet Cong units.

And

so we knew, and of course, when we go through some of the Special Forces training, we're told about the communist infiltrations.

told about how they're operating.

Of course, we had horror stories about what the Viet Cong would do to a village or to people that weren't friendly.

What would they do?

You name it.

We had

one of our Medal of Honor recipients

had,

he was in a special forces operation.

They had gone into a village and worked with the people, the children there.

for a period of time.

And it was

strictly a hearts and minds operation.

They would go in, the medics would go in, always do sick call every day, work with the children.

They built some schools, other training facilities, things like this.

At some point,

the Viet Cong came in and killed everybody, every man, woman, and child, to send a message to any other village that would think about working with the Green Berets or Americans.

They were just profoundly cruel and

that way.

And,

you know, that shook John.

How would they compare to

like a modern-day terrorist like ISIS, al-Qaeda, where they're beheadings, where they're, I mean, they burn people alive

today in Syria, you know, they're crucifying people and shooting them at the back of the head.

The Christians there were hurt.

I don't know if they would be specifically targeted.

I don't mean just the Christians.

I mean, mean, I know, but

they would cruise them, burning people alive.

They would.

They would do it all.

You know, during the Tet Offensive

in the town of Wei, which is the old imperial capital, they had killed a bunch of civilians.

Anybody who was educated, nurses, doctors, they took a bunch out and killed them.

They had a mass grave, which

received not enough publicity, but this is during the Tet Offensive.

And we had other cases where they would torture people to get them to come over to their side if they didn't they would kill them

and for me when we get

how would they torture them well

you you name it they would do the fingernail thing beat them up

get them to come around if they didn't then they would just shoot them And, you know, of course, the guys that were in country, the A-camp guys, they always had to worry about booby traps.

Even if you saw the movie, The Green Beret, they had those big pungy ambush things where if you walked in it, it would pick you up and then a rope would pick you up and your weight of your body would swing you into

like pungies that were all coated with animal dung.

So when you slammed into it, like in the movie, where they picked up the one guy, and his body was impaled on those pungy stakes.

And they had pungy pits.

And if anybody stepped in, of course you had the infection off of those.

And in my case, with Paul Villa Rosa, our hero, the guy that helped us get through training,

he ran the first mission out of FOB4, his fourth tour of duty.

He ran a mission into Laos.

They ran into a heavy unit.

He was wounded.

And at some point, he was captured.

They killed several other team members, but they kept one American alive, an SF guy,

we never knew who it was.

But Villa Rosa, they got him, and they came in with a flamethrower and literally burnt him alive at the stake.

And they killed a couple of other Vietnamese.

They torched them too.

So

when we got done our briefing, we heard about Paul Villarosa.

And it was like, that was culture shock to the max because he was our hero.

He was a guy who did three tours, survived all that, and his first mission out of FOB4,

killed and tortured.

Wow.

And of course, you always had the story.

We had teams where

men who had been wounded,

they would disembowel them.

cut their head off and stick their head in the in the cavity where the bowels were.

Jeez.

And the other part was sometimes they would cut their dick off and stick it in their mouth and then put that in.

Now I never saw that personally.

Didn't you see that?

Say again?

You never saw any of that?

Nothing like that.

But we heard about it.

And it was from our guys.

Before you went, you heard about it.

Some before and then some while we were there.

Other teams had come up against.

And so the premise of the Vietnam War was the NVA and the Viet Cong pushing communism into Vietnam.

Right.

And so

where does Laos and Cambodia come into play?

Well, they were, quote, neutral countries.

In the beginning, we had Operation White Star, which had Green Beret teams in Laos.

But under that change of plan of converting to Mac V Saug,

Kennedy, They had an accord or

some kind of a political agreement that

America would pull any and all combat troops

out of Laos and out of Cambodia.

And the North Vietnamese and the communists would do the same thing.

They were all there and they agreed to this accord.

Well, of course, the communists were just lying douchebags, as we all know.

And publicly they say, yeah, we're out.

Well,

in 1957, they had started to open up, reopen the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

which went from Hanoi down to Vietnam, across, down through Laos into Cambodia.

And there'd be trails that would come in to South Vietnam.

And that would be the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And that would be the way that supplies, the manpower.

And

as early as 57, they began working on it.

By 59, the Politiboro in Hanoi said,

We are going to form an official unit for the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

It'll be 559,

May 59.

So that's when it was formed.

They had a colonel in charge of it, other people.

So from 59 into the 60s, they already had rudimentary supplies and manpower coming south, agents, etc.

And

so we would go, not we, but they would go through that expanding.

And so then the Air Force would start targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And it wasn't just a trail.

It would be different branches coming down and going into the country, into South Vietnam.

And that's what that was designed for.

And

so by the time I arrived, our first...

Well, before we go,

sure.

What was the pulse of the country about Vietnam at the time?

Well,

we believed our presidents.

Even that lion scumbag, Lyndon Johnson, saying that this is communism.

They're here to overtake the country, and we were familiar with the domino theory from Eisenhower.

And here's Dwight David Eisenhower, our World War II fame,

and

a good president.

And if he's saying we've got the domino theory, they were of great concern to us, well, we all believe them.

And

anything we could do to stop communism having seen what it was.

So

the majority of the country, I would say, was very supportive of it.

And by 66, you're beginning to get some protesters.

And,

you know, there might be other, quote, Vietnam experts that talk about the protest and who was really against it.

But

I always felt supported from the beginning.

And by the time we land in 68, there's now more demonstrations.

some college campuses and whatnot.

But I always felt like they're just so far removed from it.

And you never know who's putting the anti-war sentiments in their head.

And I mean, there are things the South Vietnamese did wrong.

You know, President Diem, who was assassinated with a coup in November of 63, he was really harsh.

Catholics were a minority.

religious minority.

And then you had the Buddhists that were against him.

And some of the things that that family did

made it very difficult to support.

And then the media, of course, would play up these things and report.

That's what actually happened.

But meanwhile, you had the communists that were coming into the country,

thwarting the people

and wanting to take it over so that they could control the people and the land.

And,

you know, like, My classic example for me, once I got on my recon team, we had people,

three members of our team had grown up and born in North Vietnam, came south with their families in 1954,

and they all knew our government is corrupt in South Vietnam.

But

we prefer corrupt government over communism with Ho Chi Minh.

Because we can live here, we can still flourish, I can raise a family, I can do my crops.

We know when the communists take over, they're going to fuck you over any way they can, can, as only communists do.

And they were willing to die for it.

And that was my bond with my little people.

And there are other people in Vietnam.

Again, there are some that didn't want anything to do with the war.

And again, there's people like peasants who are there

getting whatever they're told from the Viet Cong or the local villagers.

You know how it is with

getting accurate information

out to the huddle masses.

well john let's take a quick break okay when we come back we'll pick up with uh stepping ground on vietnam i'll drink to that

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All right, John, we're back from the break.

One thing I forgot to do at the beginning is we have a Patreon account.

Oh, indeed.

Yeah, our Patreon account is, it's a subscription network.

And these guys, a lot of them, have been with us since the very beginning.

And we built it into quite a community.

And so, one of the things that I do for them is I give them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

Indeed.

So, this is from Rich Benjamin.

Does Tilt think we waged the Vietnam land war in the wrong country?

How does he feel the end result would have been if we waged a land war in Laos

and Cambodia?

Good question.

In the very early days, if we had really been in the military World War II frame of mind to win,

and

it's been documented, the North Vietnamese most feared, particularly in the early days around 64, 65,

that the U.S.

would cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail completely, go in with a however do it.

So in answer, I mean, I'm biased.

I think think that had we addressed that war as we did world war ii with the wind mentality not let the state department dictate dictate terms such as

when we have mac visa

running missions they wouldn't even let us run missions in cambodia until 66.

And when they ran the missions, they even dictated the type of weapons initially you could carry.

And when I ran missions in Cambodia, I was down to TDY for a couple weeks.

We had no tack air.

What we had was helicopter gunships, and we had the 20th

Special Operations Squadron from the Air Force, the Green Hornets.

Those guys were hot shit.

I mean, all of our helicopters, the majority of our helicopter assets were hot shit, but those guys were the hottest because they were the Air Force, had the latest state-of-the-art

Hueys, most powerful, had the mini guns that were flexible, and they saved my ass.

They saved our team ass.

So in answer to that, I think it would have been different.

Mine Haipong Harbor, cut off Cambodia so they can't come in with the supplies, tell the Russians and the Chinese we're not fighting you, but don't you bring supplies and you cut off all our supplies.

I think it would have been, it still would have been a long one,

but eventually it could have been a different outcome.

Thanks for answering that.

Rich is a huge fan of yours, so I'm going to have you sign this card for him.

Gladly.

And I know Rich.

He was at our last reunion.

He was a videographer there.

Oh, really?

Absolutely.

He's got some incredible footage of A1 Skyraiders and some interviews with our Skyraider pilots.

Good man.

Oh, man.

Well, he'll love this then.

Absolutely.

I'll sign it with a capital X just for him.

Perfect.

Perfect.

All right.

So let's move into Vietnam.

Yes, sir.

Let's go all the way back very first day in country.

Well, you know,

we had a month R ⁇ R.

I went up to my cousins.

They were farmers up in New Jersey.

I hung out with my cousins, worked the fields up there with them.

It was spring, early April, and just hung out there for a couple of weeks with them.

Went back home to my family, left,

and

I took the flight in.

And when we landed in

Cameron Bay,

It was just like, it's just hard to believe.

Like you've heard, you've had other people describe this to you, but when you get to that door and the airplane door is open, you walk out and go down that first step, you look out, here's all these Vietnamese.

And we were told in training group, advanced infantry training, everybody could be the enemy.

So your first thought is, oh my God, these are potential enemies out here.

I don't have no gun, no nothing, except my duffel bag, right?

And but the stench

of the countryside, because they always had rice rice patties around and they used human

defecations to fertilize their fields and when it's about 100 degrees it just felt like i needed a knife just to cut through the humidity to walk down the steps and the stench was just unbelievable and we went down had a little quick in-country briefing We got transport to 5th Special Forces Group headquarters in the Trang.

And that was in Toucor, had a beautiful beach.

And at that point, in

April of 1968, that was where all the training was done for in-country.

So we're there.

We had, I think it was three weeks of in-country training.

Everything from patrols and our patrols, we had no combat, no combat of any sort, but we learned all the patrol tactics that they used.

and worked tack air, helicopters, had classes on, again, about communism and whatnot.

And

we had every kind of helicopter except an H-34, which we'll get to in a few minutes.

And

then at the end of the training, oh, and the last week they showed the film, The Green Berets, with John Wayne.

It's like, far fucking out, man.

Look at this.

Hell yeah.

Yeah, so

we get done.

And just like they told us in training group, the last day, we're there, you know, we had do all the needles and stick yourself and all this stuff, you know, how to survive basic first days of combat wounds and things like that.

Little guy comes out.

We're looking for volunteers.

So my good buddy Johnny McIntyre goes, for what, Sarge?

Can't say either you're in or you're not.

Well, hell, we just saw the movie.

What would the Duke do?

I don't care what the guys in training group said.

The Duke would go, sign me up.

So we all volunteered.

All of you guys did yeah a lot of us they uh we had gone through the combo training together that we had been together for a year since training group basically by the time uh april got there so me rick how john mcintyre tony harrell our hands popped right up into the air we all volunteered we go up to uh

to da nang

and

This is our first culture shot.

We stayed at a safe house, a Da Nang safe house.

It's house house 22.

And

so

we go in and have food, eat.

They got security.

The area is secure.

And they told us not to worry about anything, but whatever you want, you can eat.

Just go up to the bar, tell them what you want.

If you want to drink, eat, drink, be merry.

And I forget what the prices were for the prostitutes up on the second floor.

But we had lovely ladies up there that spread their wares around, you know.

So that first day, Mac and I, we're there, we're eating and whatnot, and they had a couple of barmaids there, and one was really nice.

She's really educated, good English.

So we talked to her, and Mac and I both had girlfriends, so we weren't interested in anything.

So she could tell we were harmless, and we sat up with her, went upstairs, had to take a shower.

So as we go up, there's this big open floor area.

with all these beds.

You could hear a couple guys

getting it on right there.

So we go into the shower.

There's a guy taking the shower.

And in the corner, there's a young lady squatted down, shaking that Coke up and douching with the Coca-Cola.

So we just found a new use for Coca-Cola, you know?

Holy shit.

So this is like growing up in Trenton, New Jersey.

Welcome to South Vietnam.

Wow.

So that's a little bit of culture shock.

So while we're there,

some of the guys from the Mike Force came in and they stayed overnight.

and they were talking, they could tell that we're green as grass, so they had nothing to do with us because we're just green-ass green berets.

But they were talking about the shit they had been in and they had helped to relieve somebody either in the Ashaw Valley.

And the Ashaw Valley was up north, right on the border of Laos.

It was a very ragged border.

But that was one of the main places when the Ho Chi Minh Trail came down.

There's at least two separate branches off of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that came into the Ashaw that would then go into South Vietnam to Hui

and then Phu Bai and then later down to the Nang area.

So

we were there

just,

I don't know, that moment of time hearing these guys talk about it and it's kind of like, man, this is where we are.

What were they talking about?

They had talked about the actual combat and they were dirtied up.

They had, they were They literally came in, dropped their gear at the gate, and they were sitting there just talking, obviously still sweating and wherever they had been.

And it was just like,

okay, these are SF guys that helped some SF team somewhere.

Now, I'm not sure.

I just, I'm just too long ago to remember.

Because we're new, they probably wouldn't talk about specifics anyway.

But they were in contact and they had talked about what the enemy was doing, how tenacious they were.

So

the next morning

we, McIntyre and I

and

John, we all get together to go to the Da Nang Airport to get a flight to Fubai.

And oh we had our briefing first.

I'm sorry, we had our briefing.

So in the morning we go down, we get a briefing, go into the room, curtains are on the windows up front, there's a map with a sheet over it.

And

so we've been students for over a year now between basic and everything.

So we're all like pulling our pads and pens out.

Sergeant Major walks in.

Put that shit away.

This is a top secret briefing.

And

right in front of you, there's an NDA.

Read it.

And if you want to stay, sign it.

If you want to leave, you're welcome to leave.

There's no hard feelings.

And this is a top-secret briefing.

Said it again for good luck.

So we all signed.

And then the curtain, they pulled the sheet off the map.

So there's a map we're looking at.

Here's South Vietnam.

What did the NDA say?

Say, yeah?

What did the NDA say?

Oh, you can't talk about it for 20 years.

If you talk about anything or take any pictures, you could be prosecuted federally.

And I forget what the penalties were, but they had prison terms and fines that were all defined in the NDA.

Had you talked about anything about it?

And the Sergeant Major, the first thing you said was, read these.

You can't talk to your mama, your girlfriend, or anybody.

No pictures no nothing

you can't talk to anybody about this mission unless it's somebody else that you're working with at your base welcome to the secret war

this is top secret and your reports go directly to the white house

okay so there's the map vietnam i core is up north two core which is cantoum the Trang on the on the beach, three core, which is Saigon, four core, which is much bigger, but it's all the swamps and waterways.

Just a horrible, horrible AO.

I never got down there, fortunately.

And

we go through the, then look at Laos.

Here's target boxes, six by six target boxes, all the way up and down.

And then in the Cambodia, some targets.

And so he went on to explain a little bit.

This is what we do.

We go across the fence into Laos or into Cambodia.

You'll run top secret missions.

You either be with with a recon team or a hatchet force.

So a recon team will be two or three Americans and you'll have indigenous personnel.

And that would be, they could be Montagnards, South Vietnamese, they could be Nungs or Cambodians.

In some cases, they have Cambodian hatchet force.

So the recon teams would be small units, like they could be teams that run a mission could be four, six, eight, maybe up to twelve.

And then a hatchet force is a platoon or a company-sized operation.

And there you would have the number of green berets for each squad and a platoon leader and explain that basic structure.

So we all signed them, did the briefing, and then they took us over to

get a helicopter up to FOB1.

The next day, we get the helicopter ride up.

So again, it's culture shock.

We had all that training with helicopters, but nobody told us about a Kingby, a South Vietnamese Air Force H-34.

Helicopters developed during the Korean War,

and they were built by Sikorsky.

They had a B-17 rotary engine that the pilots essentially sat on top of.

So it was a nine-cylinder B-17 engine.

And then the back had a

passenger compartment with one door on the right side.

And for where we sat, when we looked up, we could see the pilot's feet on the pedals.

So we're down, and so for our flight, it's like, what the hell is this?

And all of a sudden, here's a South Vietnamese guy flying our helicopter.

Where we're used to, Americans, it's like,

okay, here we go.

And so me, Johnny McIntyre, and

John, we get in.

And

as I sit down, I see the guy in the microphone go,

because we're green.

You got new starch pad, new jungle boots and everything

so we go up we're flying up highway one going down highway one

and it's just just for a first flight and so we're going along we come we go past the Fubai airport and we go past the second arbor training division and all of a sudden the helicopter goes like this to a 90 degree on its side to a turn

and it did a 360.

Well

I saw that guy.

I thought they were going to do something like that.

But McIntyre and John Hutchins are going like, oh, fuck me, the tears.

What's going on?

You know, they're hanging on like that.

And the door guard is going,

we got him.

So we turn around

and we land.

We get off the helicopter.

A recon team gets on the helicopter.

Spike Team Idaho.

The team leader, who I didn't know, is Glenn Lane.

And his 1-1 assistant team leader is Robert Owen.

I forget they either had four or six Indigenous troops.

They take off, never heard from again.

Welcome to the Sequel War.

So we go into base, sign in,

and

as we go,

there's a long pathway.

And the second Arvin compound is right here, a big fence.

And then there's the road in, and then you turn left.

There was S1, S2, S3,

and then on the other side was S4 for supply.

So we go in, report in an S1, and I come out, and I hear this voice, Tilt Meyer.

And I'm with John McIntyre.

So I was in A Company in training group.

Johnny Mac was in B Company, and we beat his softball team in every game.

And the reason why we beat him was Spider Parks was our pitcher.

And I hear, Tilt Meyer,

Spider Parks.

Holy shit, Spider, you're here?

We had gone through training group together.

And of course, he made fun of Johnny McIntyre because he's a B company puke, you know.

And so then Spider took us around, showed us the base.

And

Mac went to a separate room.

And Spider said, No, you come down.

You stay with me.

You know, that's A Company guys.

You B Company guys.

You go somewhere else.

So I went down with Spider, had a bunk with him.

And

they were monitoring the team progress.

And

after lunch,

Spider goes, you know, I'm going to go to S3.

Come along.

I want to see you can meet the people in S3.

He says, we haven't heard from the team.

Well, they never heard from the team ever again.

And two days later, one or two days later, Spike Team Oregon went in with

George Thurnberg and Mike Tucker.

They went in with, I think it was five or six in dig.

They flew into the LZ that Idaho had landed on.

They found, they saw some tracks in the grass where the team could have gone.

They began to move, following it, trying to figure out where the team might be.

And

they moved for a short distance and they saw a checkpoint down on a road that was far off.

I forget how far away it was, but bottom line, the NVA knew they were there.

They turned around and came back and began to make contact with them.

And the team went into a big bomb crater

and the whole firefight started.

They were in that bomb crater for a long period of time and they started throwing hand grenades in and then they started throwing in American hand grenades.

And so George caught the first hand grenade and threw it out.

The second or the third hand grenade that came in,

Mike threw one out, but the next one went down further further and he couldn't get it in time.

And when it went off, it exploded, it literally blew his jungle boots off.

Push his plus shrapnel, and the medic on the team

was

severely injured, and he was paralyzed from the waist down from the impact of the grenade.

So there's firefights going on.

They do tack air.

They finally bring in the first Kingby.

That's the code name for the South Vietnamese H-34s.

First Kingby comes in.

They get the wounded and the medic, get them to put them into the helicopter.

They take off.

The second helicopter comes in.

And so it's just down to George and a couple of people.

And they're right in the middle of the firefight.

They're going back and forth with each other.

And again, TAC Air is being used.

Helicopter comes in.

George gets to the helicopter.

And one of the guys had been wounded.

So he puts the wounded guy in.

as he turns around he sees an nva now george is left-handed he turns around

and this guy shot george with his ak

and george turned around and killed him but before he did there's another nva popped up he goes to the nva and then he shot him

now he never knew this Because it happened so fast, but Spider Park saw him do it because Spider was in the third helicopter.

Was it what we call the Chase Medic?

Because whenever the first one of two helicopters are designed for the team, the chase helicopter is there in case the other one gets shot down or if you need a medic.

And so

Spider was there on the chase ship, saw George do that, but they got pulled out and they were several months recuperating from

those wounds and things.

And we never heard from Idaho again.

So

with our team,

we were just, again, divine intervention, in my opinion.

We had Spider Parks, who had been on Idaho.

He had just been promoted to a brand new team.

He's going to be the 1-0 of another recon team.

He had been promoted.

Glenn Lane signed off on it, recommended he get his own recon team because Spider was just really sharp.

And

Hep, the interpreter, who spoke four or five languages.

He used to improve my English once I got to Gnome.

And then Sal,

who was the Vietnamese team leader, the counterpart to the team leader, the American Green Parade.

Hep was sick, didn't go.

Sal was not his rotation.

They rotated because they had

10 or 12 South Vietnamese on the team.

So when you ran a mission, we'd only take four or six in Dig with you, Indigenous personnel.

We just said in Dig.

And on this case, Sal missed.

So with Spider, he got Don Wolcan, who had some experience in country.

We built the team.

Spider was the 1-0 team leader.

Don was the 1-1 assistant team leader.

I was brought on as the 1-2, the radio operator.

And

we rebuilt the team.

Sal and Hep went out.

They hired

three or four new guys.

Three of them were 15 years old.

15 years old.

15 years old.

Son, Chow, and Cal were hired up.

Brought them in, and then Spider put us through the whole training process.

And he and Sal worked together.

And

every day we did everything from the ground up.

Everything from just basic patrols, we'd go out, go outside the base, and then go down through the village.

And they had trails and things down there.

And we would go down, do contingency drills.

Work through live fire, then we'd go up to the range with live fire, do the same thing with the contingency drills, rappelling off the tower, and then just classes on basic first aid stuff, and then repelling from helicopters, getting pulled down on strings.

Because one of the innovations that SOG made

was

this whole extraction by ropes.

And

so that was all part of the training.

Even trained

our team so that a helicopter would come in.

If we would be pretending that we were in a firefight, the helicopter would come in, and with the H-34s,

when the DIDS would get in the helicopter first, one would go to the window on the left side, and another would go to the window behind the door.

So that would give us increased firepower on both sides, and then everybody else would get in the helicopter.

And then just every kind of training you could think of.

And we just went down to the range, put thousands and thousands of rounds downrange.

And

that was part of training up Idaho, ST Idaho at FUBAI FOB1.

And,

you know, Johnny Mack was,

he had the first mission.

He went out and they had a team, they inserted an elephant grass and they had a lieutenant who was the team leader.

And he jumped out of the helicopter before its wheels, because elephant grass can be anywhere from like eight to 12, 13 feet tall.

And Spider told us, when you're in Elephant Grass, wait till you see the ground.

Do not jump.

You can't see the ground because you might hurt yourself.

What is the young lieutenant?

Didn't listen to Spider, jumped out and broke his ankle.

So they were compromised.

And

because Mac was new on the team, they decided to pull the whole team out.

Well, they came back, they made contact before they came in.

with the helicopter to pick them up.

And Mac came back because, holy shit, till you should have seen this firefight

said these these nva are serious out here

and uh

he came back put the lieutenant and then uh on the fourth of july john was working with his web gear

and he cut through the web gear and it hit a bed post it ricocheted up and came back cut him through the lower

lower through the eye and through his up here on his lid.

And

it was like he came out and the medic said, we got to take you down to the Marines.

And they took him to

the closest medical facility.

And they passed him up a little bit.

They said, we'll let us sit overnight because we got a 4th of July party going on tonight.

And

during that night, the infection set in.

They took John back and we never saw John again until we got back in the States.

He was medevaced.

That was like, my my best buddy went down.

Damn.

Right.

Just like

on an accident.

So so trivial.

Horrible.

Let's talk about your very first mission.

So well the first three are kind of boring, really.

They're very successful, minimal gunfire.

What was the mission?

They were to insert Air Force sensors.

And by August and September, we had the monsoons that were going on.

So when the weather would break, we would try to run as many missions.

So we had trained up.

The Air Force had a three-part sensor.

They had a central unit with an antenna on it, and then it had a coaxial cable that ran for several feet.

And then each unit, everything had to be buried with only the antennas behind vegetation.

And so the first one we put in was in the Ashaw Valley, which was at that time.

We had three Green Beret camps in the Ashol Valley that were further south of where we went into this trail.

And each A camp had been overrun.

Just the NVA said this is our territory.

They ran those A camps out and there's a great book out that's called

Assault Valley and it just talks about that camp.

So each of those three camps were overrun and pushed out.

We knew that history.

We go in

Spider was the 1-0.

We took

an E8 with us from S3 who was familiar with the equipment.

and we had another 1-0, very experienced, Les Daniels from a Spike Team, Rhode Island.

And so because Don and I were new, the plan was we would go in and Don would take some people to the north end, and I would take a couple of guys to the south end of where they were operating, and they would all

install those monitoring devices.

So we were on the ground a few hours, and this was the Asshole.

And we knew the Ashol by that time we had heard about it and they had these huge pungy pits there had been a lot of rain the monsoons had washed away some of the cover for these pungy pits some were as big for animals but there were smaller ones and as we were coming back don and i were walking past one of those pungy pits and he and he slipped and started to fall into the pungy pit.

And I grabbed him.

I said, get back here.

I'm not ready to be the one one yet.

I'm just the radio operator here.

We came back.

We got pulled out.

We were working.

The first CAV did the insertions and the extraction on that.

And

they thought we were going to get hit hard being in the valley.

Nothing happened.

And we had TAC air stacked up.

So when we left, the.51 caliber opened up on the east side of the Ashaw.

Well, they hit that thing with napalm.

They hit him with a gun run.

They wiped that.51 caliber out several times.

But we didn't get shot at.

And then in September, we did the same thing.

We had another mission.

We inserted the same device, but this time it was just our team, Spyder, Don, and I.

We went up.

What was the device doing?

It was monitoring anything on traffic, anything that went by, they could tell from the vibrations what it was, whether it was people, animals, or trucks, or tanks.

And so they would record, and then the Air Force would come by and electronically pick up the intel from that central command box we put in.

Gotcha.

That's what we're told.

Now, I'm, you know, I'm just like the low man in the totem pole here.

So, my job was: you're going to be security, you're going to go here.

You see bad guys, kill them.

And if we need help, you'll be on the radio, call TAC Air.

That was my job.

So, I don't, anything beyond the specifics.

And then, the second one,

Don and Spider did the assertion with with Sal and Hep.

They did the assertion, but I was still overseeing possible attack air if we needed it and security for one of the perimeters.

But it was in

right next to the Khezan Marine Corps base there.

It was one of the main roads that

went past Khezon.

What were you carrying?

For weapons?

What was your loadout?

Oh,

I had a Car 15,

which was a modified M16, had a shorter barrel, and then it had the first classable stock.

And

I loved it.

It was a great weapon.

And that's what I carried the whole time.

So in the beginning, I was only carrying maybe 500 rounds, plus hand grenades.

And by

August, we had developed sold-off M79s.

We cut the handle down as much as we could, just so you had enough to hold it.

And then we cut the barrel back as close as we could to the end where the wood comes out of the platform that holds the metal barrel.

Cut it right to that.

And

we trained up on that because it was just extra firepower.

So we always carry 10 to 12 rounds for that, 10 to 12 hand grenades, smoke grenades.

We had both large and small smoke grenades.

And then in the beginning, I said like around 500 rounds.

And then

Spider and Don and other teams, like I talked to John Walton, who had been on

another team, and they had a couple of missions where they barely got out alive and they ran out of bullets.

And so I then carried over 600 rounds.

And we had only 20-round magazines, no 30-round magazine like today.

So you had 20-round magazines, but only 18, because we were told that if you had too many, the spring would not work.

It may not feed them correctly.

So

we had

the old

BAR web gear, had nice shoulder pads, had pouches, and the pouches could hold three or four magazines, and then one on top.

And then we had electric tape on them.

And so that's what we trained in.

Just how to get those things out, swap them out as fast as you could.

And

secondary.

Say again.

Secondary?

Pistol?

No, we had the Sawdolf M79.

We always carried

either double odd buck or flashettes

because

we didn't, I didn't carry a pistol.

Because most of the times we were so efficient at the quick magazine change that if we were caught in a situation where they charged us and we didn't have a magazine, we still had the flashettes.

And that double odd buck with the M40, with the M79,

that was just devastating stuff.

And then later, some of our guys messed around.

They began putting flashettes in them.

What is a flashette?

Like a small dart.

And so when they would come out, it would be just like a small parody darts and just kill anything in its range within.

And again, it's close, like a super big shotgun, you know.

Blade?

Yep.

They developed some of those.

Now, again, I'm told this.

What I personally had, we always had the double-odd buck and Doug and Lynn Black, a couple of these other, they were auto-weapons guys.

They were always tinkering with these things to improve them.

And they had those flash tests that they personally designed.

They would carry a couple because if you needed it, that first round would slow down anything coming at you.

Knife, I mean.

Oh, I'm sorry.

We had a SOG knife.

Specially designed.

We had our own supply system.

CISO was based out of Okinawa.

And early on, they were set up so any supplies that went to 5th Bessel Forces Group and SOG,

sometimes things would go to the agency for weapons that they needed them.

And

they developed what was called a SOG knife.

And when I went through my end processing with S4, got the web gear and everything, I got my SOG knife.

And so we always carried that right on the web gear on the shoulder straps.

Had the SOG knife right there, upside down, so if you pulled it out, it's ready to go.

Whereas if you're in the jungle, sometimes reaching out might be a little bit too difficult.

But down here, you can pull it out quickly.

So that's where the SOG knife would go, CAR-15, magazine pouches, hand grenades.

We always had to take a mask, a gas mask with us.

And

then we had,

after the second insertion of the Air Force sensors, we had a mission in the Ashell Valley, but it was on the east side of the Ashaw.

And Spider Parks at that time said, we're just going to do a practice mission.

Our team's going to go in.

Another recon team is going to go in.

We're going to do parallel movements.

And if we make enemy contact, we're going to have tack air stacked up.

And we just want our team to get used to a new team.

So

we went out, made no contact.

But the second night we were on the ground, We were in an area heavily infested with mosquitoes.

And in the morning, because I had a night watch watch up until about midnight or one o'clock, but I fell asleep.

When I woke up in the morning, mosquitoes had bitten my face so much I could barely open my eyes.

I poured water on them and everything else just to get my face like all puff-faced from those damn mosquitoes.

I've never seen anything like it.

But the other team was so good, they ambushed a Pathet Lao.

ambush that was set up for them.

And the Pathet Lao was the Laotian version of the Viet Cong, but they weren't as good as the Viet Cong.

And we didn't come into contact with them too often, but this other team ambushed them.

So we got pulled out,

and Spider got promoted to Cubby Rider.

And a Cubby

was our Ford Air Controller.

And Cubby was the code name for our FACS.

So it was the Air Force 02 at that time, a Cessna push-pool, engine in the front, engine in the back.

And then Spider would be the Cubby rider.

And the way that was designed was he always had a cubby rider who had experience on the ground so that when a team made enemy contact, the cubby rider could fill in

the pilot as well as the team on the ground and talk to them through experience.

And so

One of our greatest learning centers for us was in the clubhouse.

All the guys that would come back from a mission, they would talk to us.

There's a few senior NCOs like Spider Parks, Pat Watkins, John McGovern.

They would all answer any questions we had.

And when a recon team would come back from a mission, we would definitely talk to them if they would talk to us.

And that's how I got to know John Walton.

John was

an SF medic.

And he was just an outstanding guy.

And we met.

It's one of those deals where, what does your dad do?

Well, my dad's a milkman back in Trenton, New Jersey.

What does your dad do?

He's got a five and dimes store.

He's running with his brother up in Bentonville, Arkansas.

So what the hell's Bentonville?

And we teased him more and more about Bentonville than

we should have.

But John was a good sport about it.

So I got to know John, and he had run a mission.

where they were TDY down in Cambodia.

They got put into a target.

And it's supposed to be a two-day mission, but it stretched out to five.

They ran out of water, ran out of food, and he came back.

They were in a really nasty jungle, some kind of gross, but his arms came back all cut up.

His pants and everything were torn to shreds from the thorns and stuff, and they made contact.

And what I remember most was John talked about it.

He talked about every little thing.

And that's when...

We began to talk.

We bonded our friendship all.

We played poker together a lot.

John was a phenomenal poker player.

And so that relationship grew with him and the other guys.

Whenever a team came back after a mission, if they would talk about it, we'd talk about it to see if we could learn anything off of it.

So I went through those three missions.

Why wouldn't they talk about it?

Well, some guys were just, we had one team that came in.

They had an inexperienced radio operator that called in a gun runner on his own team.

Killed two, wounded a couple others.

And sometimes things like that you just don't want to talk about.

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So

we had

August the 3rd, 1968, John Watton's team, which was Spike Team Louisiana.

They were into a target

on the ground a couple hours.

They got overrun by the NVA.

And

in between times, there was one time when John was sitting there, and to his left was an indigenous soldier, one of the South Vietnamese.

John was left-handed.

So his Car-15 was pointed this direction.

and he heard a noise.

He looked over his shoulder, and there was an NVA that popped up out of the jungle with a big Cheshire grin on his face.

He stood up with his AK, and John saw him.

He's coming around.

This guy opened fire with his AK, put four rounds into the South Vietnamese and was shooting at John, but John killed him, blew him back into the jungle.

So John began to do first aid, patch up a South Vietnamese.

This thing went on.

They got overrun a second time.

And on the last time they were getting overrun, the team leader called in a gun run on the team itself.

And the A1 Skyraider

made a 20 mic mic, 20 millimeter gun run across the team.

The rounds killed one of the South Vietnamese team members.

And the second with Tom was Tom Cunningham.

who was the radio operator.

He came into camp on Sunday or Monday.

This was Saturday, August the 3rd, 68.

And the gun run, 120 Mike Mike round, hit his radio, this PRIC-25, PRC-25, FM radio.

The shrapnel exploded, wounding the team leader.

The second round hit his leg and took off his leg, and he was flying through the air.

He had an out-of-body experience seeing himself flying through the air with his leg dangling by sinew.

And he landed, he called his name out, and then he returned to his body.

And within seconds, John John was there, began to patch him up.

He passed up the team leader who had been severely wounded also.

And they called in airstrikes.

First helicopter comes in, Captain Tin,

who was the same captain that we talked about a little earlier.

Tin comes in, picks up Pete Boggs, Tom Cunningham, and the South Vietnamese who's wounded.

The team member who was dead, they left him at the LZ.

Because it's August, they're in high Laotian Mountains.

He could only take three.

So he took off.

Second King B came in and got shot out.

The third King B attempted to come in and got shot out.

Well, Captain Tin heard this.

He turned around and came back and landed and picked up John, who was on the ground.

with the South Vietnamese.

And he could see the NVA coming up there.

They're going, shooting in with their M79 Car-15s.

and John told the

cubby rider if you don't get us now we're dead

Captain Tin comes in now

the H34 is too heavy to take off he had the struts on the side

so the wheels he lifted it up gets running downhill all while under enemy fire had enough lift just to get over the treetops but not enough transitional lift to leave.

He dips down into the valley, did two or three laps in the valley, get up speed all while under enemy fire, then takes off and comes back to the base.

They went right to the

medical center.

And even there,

when they go into

the medical center, John goes in, they roll in Pete Boggs, who is the team leader.

They roll Tom in and they put the third stretcher.

John puts the indigo on the stretcher.

They're going in.

They go, no, no, no, we don't do South Vietnamese here because it was an American facility.

John turned his car 15 and said, you will do it or you'll die right here.

So they let him in.

So they heard about this exchange

and they went to give Tom an intravenous because he lost so much blood.

And because of all the commotion with John,

they made a scene there, obviously.

And the guy, the doctor, was so upset he couldn't do it.

So John went over, did the cut down, and put it in Tom's supervenus to keep him alive.

Well, let's talk about

your first

firefight.

Well, yeah, because my, and again, so these are the guys we talked to.

I talked to John that day.

And just as a small footnote, he's left-handed.

He's dealing poker that night.

So we're dealing the cards.

I go, hey, John, what's this thing across the top of your wrist?

Oh, I hadn't seen that.

He says, it must have been from that NVA that shot my teammate there.

So when he was pulling his gun up, his Car-15, the round went across and took three layers of skin off.

Wow.

Yeah, you talk about divine intervention.

So we get to October.

Spider Parks is flying Covey.

Don Wolkman is now the team leader.

I'm the assistant team leader.

And we had Jim Davidson that came on the team.

We were assigned a mission for October 6th.

And for October 5th, Just a quick footnote, because this is one of our most historic SOG missions.

We had a nine-man recon team that went into the Ashol Valley and they ran into 10,000 NVA

and we lost three men that day

and the NVA lost 90% casualties that day.

They had a 10,000-man NVA division.

The reason why we know that, Lynn Black, who was on the team, had had a tour of duty previous with the 173rd.

He took over the team because the team leader, the point man, were killed.

The team leader was inexperienced.

He walked the team into an L-shaped ambush with 50 men.

One of the men up there was a colonel, an NVA colonel.

Well, that colonel called Lynn Black

27 years later, because

the government had gone back to try to find the team leader's body.

And Lynn had worked with the government, gave matt coordinates, things like this.

Well, Lynn gets a phone call, and this guy's a, he was a colonel in 68, but now he's a big general up in North Vietnam.

He goes, He says, I was the commander that ambushed your team that day.

So they talked back and forth.

And then at the end of it, Lynn goes, We had a bad day.

We lost three men.

So we know this from the colonel, he, of course, then a general.

He says, We had a bad day too.

Between your recon team, TAC Air, helicopter gunships, you inflicted 90% casualties on our 10,000-man division.

Wow.

Wow.

Now, that's October 5th.

Right around noontime, they talked about putting a bright light in.

And a bright light would be a team that would go in to get down pilots, or in a case like this, where a team is under heavy contact, or if they got wounded, the bright light would go in to help relieve them and help get them out.

So we were given bright light duty for that.

But Lynn Black said, no, we got too much here.

There's too much anti-aircraft fire.

We don't want to risk bringing another helicopter in.

So we canceled the bright light.

The next day, we launched for the target.

And that is the photograph on the front of across the fence where we took pictures.

And we never did it again because if you look closely at the picture, Hep and Sal are really unhappy.

They didn't want to take pictures.

They were superstitious.

But six-man team, we got up early,

launched into a target, Echo 4.

We had two kingbies for the insertion.

So Don was the team.

He jumped out first, and

we were,

the helicopter came in with the right wheel and the right door facing a bomb crater.

And there was elephant grass on the bomb crater.

And the helicopter, because of the time of day, was warm, it was kind of moving up and down.

It couldn't come to a complete hover or stable hover because the other wheel was dangling off the side.

So Don jumped out and disappeared.

And the helicopter moved over.

I waited a little bit and I thought it was close to

the bomb crater.

So I jumped out, missed the bomb crater because I was carrying so much weight.

I rolled down the hill and then Don had rolled down the hill.

And then Fook, who was our point man, he jumped out and landed on the bomb crater.

So the second helicopter came in.

All the guys got out, but Don and I had to crawl back up the hill, up that bomb crater, to get to the damn team.

And by the time we got there, I was sweat.

I was ready to go back.

I was ready to get back.

I was tired.

But we moved for a couple of hours.

And then once we moved, we in triple canopy, we moved for 10 minutes, stopped for 10 minutes just to listen.

Because the jungle had its own.

own vibration of life.

And when we stopped moving, eventually it it would come back.

And you hear the birds, the crickets, the insects, and all this kind of stuff.

And the thought was: if you stop for 10 minutes and that doesn't come back, you've got company.

How did you learn that?

Just from our little people.

That's part of our training.

We talked about it all the time.

So we moved 10,

10, and 10 through the jungle.

And

about

we've been in maybe two, two and a half hours.

And all of a sudden, there is this ruckus coming towards us in the jungle.

And

it just sounds like, what the hell?

Is it the NVA?

So we hear the noise.

Fooks, the point man, he pulls over.

Don gets behind him.

I'm behind.

And we got the Car-15s out, getting ready to pull the pins off the hand grenade, you know.

You know how the pins go through.

Get it ready so you can pull it quickly.

And we get online.

Here they come.

We got overrun by monkeys.

By monkeys?

Monkeys.

What do you call a flock of monkeys?

A herd of monkeys?

Let's call it for this purpose.

A flock of monkeys overran.

They had to be combi monkeys, but they overran us.

And we're sitting there going, oh, Jesus.

So we put the pins back in and get everything back, get back online.

How many monkeys were there?

A lot.

We didn't take time to count.

We were just so happy to see monkeys and not NVA soldiers charging at us with AKs.

So we moved maybe maybe another hour or so,

got hit by bees, Foot got stung, Don got stung really bad.

So we had to stop putting mud on the bee wounds and we moved for the rest of the day.

By around about four o'clock or so, we began to hear trackers shooting.

And the NVA, when they knew a team was in the area, they would have code back and forth with weapons.

Of course, they had radios of some sort, I assume.

And we heard them begin to shoot.

Sometimes we can never quite tell if they're trying to direct us into a way to go.

But our mission was initially an area recon just to find out what was going on.

But they told us that there was an American POW camp that was in that target box.

So Don was like, that's my priority mission.

If we can get to that American POW camp, that is what we have to go for.

So in our minds, that's what we're going towards.

We move up until last light.

We get in and set up an RON, a rest overnight slot.

And

right before final dusk, at the last five or ten minutes, there's a gunshot from one of those trackers who had come within 10 yards of us.

And that was jarring.

They fired that shot off.

to have them that close.

So we set up the RON, we put out Claymore mines at night.

And of course,

during the night, we would take turns rotating.

And

my tour duty was around one o'clock.

So within 10 yards, somebody shoots.

Yeah.

But again, the jungle is so thick, you couldn't see.

I mean, it was triple canopy, like I could see Don when he's in front of me, but I couldn't see the point man,

who Don could see.

And the person behind me could see me,

but, and that was Hep, the interpreter, and Hep couldn't see see dawn that's how thick that vegetation is when you're moving that's about the width of this room yeah

absolutely we have our six men in this in this area and not able to see each other wow sure

so so you guys only moved during the daytime oh yeah we had we would have we would have killed for some of your nogs

And

so we set up the RON.

I was up at one o'clock and I heard something move.

I could have sworn it moved and it finally got in front of one of our Claymores.

I couldn't tell if it was a tiger or if it was

the tracker.

I wasn't sure.

I told Don, I said, look, I've been listening to this thing.

It's in front of the Claymore.

Of course, what we had been told was the NVA, if they had a chance, they would get a Claymore and turn it around.

So if you fired it off, it would come back and you get the whole blast of the ball bearings on the Claymore mine.

So, I think they were that good.

Oh, yeah, they had done it.

We had teams that they had done that to.

So, I told Don, I said, I think I got an NVA in front of the Claymores.

There's something out there.

I want to blow it.

And he said, No.

I said, I thought he said, Go.

So I clack that.

I get that old MK-57 and clack that Claymore.

It goes off.

It was quiet for the rest of the night but dawn was pissed sal was really pissed with me for firing that thing off

so first light we moved out we moved uh again 10 and 10 throughout the day around about 12 30 one o'clock we had the we were trying to get up this one mountain to go down and the and the jungle was so rugged with the rock formation and everything and the growth there's like a little goat trail that kind of started down here went up.

And so we got out in the goat trail.

How could you guys, I mean, how do you navigate and shit that thick?

Our little people were so good.

Don was good with a compass.

And we just, you know, Sal and Fook, Fook was our point man for that mission.

And then Sal had trained him up.

So we told them where we're going and they knew.

They worked it.

Of course, on that mission, Don was doing all the coordination between the point man and talking to Hep for anything further.

So

looking for a POW camp

within a target square, how big is a target square?

Six by six box.

Six click, six click, six click by six click.

So how would you guys,

how would you look for, what was the method to find a POW?

In this case,

we knew we had to move away from the LZ and go to a general area that the intel reports were approximate where it was.

So we were en route to that.

We had been in the jungle moving.

It got so rough.

We found this little goat trail.

So normally we just stayed away from trails.

But on this day, we went out.

And by now, I was the fifth man in the formation.

Sal was the tail gunner.

I'm fifth man.

Hep

and then Don and then Fook running point and Robinson, our sixth man, was

between us.

And so we're going up this trail, maybe for,

oh, it must have been like a half hour or so.

We really done some extensive climb.

It's pretty steep.

At one point, when you get near the top, we start to turn.

Sal is back there.

He and I, he goes, he makes this really loud hissing sound.

I turn around, and he's looking backwards, and he's pointing down the hill where we had come.

There were two NVA, tall NVAs with pith helmets, AK-47s at Port Arms, standing there in black.

And

they look tall.

They may have even been Chinese.

So I told Sal, I'm going to get the M79 and put a round on those assholes.

He said, no, no, tell Wolcan.

So I told Don.

At that point, he took us straight up the hill, got to the top of a little knoll.

We got up there about two o'clock or so.

We set up.

a defensive perimeter up there.

He says,

get on the line, call TACAR.

We're going to be in a prairie fire emergency.

So I get on the radio, make a couple calls, no response.

And we were in the perimeter.

We had a little break.

I get a can of apricots out.

I could use a break.

So I'm opening my apricots.

Fook,

Hep, and Sal opened fire, and then Davidson opened fire.

And it's like, do Mammy.

And up the hill, we're coming NVA.

And Sal had heard them first and blew them back down the mountain.

I spilled my apricot nectar, put the can down, get into the firefight.

And the firefight went on.

They kept coming back at us, time after time,

up that little mountain, up the hill.

But the hill was small enough that there could only be so many people.

And some guys came up from the side and some came up from the left side.

But the vegetation was rough.

We're on top of that hill.

Sal could tell them when they're coming and Foot could hear them.

And this went on.

So now I'm on the radio.

We have a prairie fire emergency.

So when a team is on the ground

and when we're in Laos,

not in Cambodia, but in Laos, if you call it a prairie fire emergency, any and all attack air that was within any distance would be diverted from their targets to come cover us.

And of course that would include the A1 Skyraiders, the

old Korean war planes, but those are the ones we love the best.

They could stay on station the longest with the most ordinance.

They could carry the same amount of weight that a B-17 carried in World War II.

But this was a single engine, huge engine.

And

most of them were single pilots.

The A1E was a two-face.

with a pilot and a co-pilot.

But they didn't use those too much for SOG missions because they were just so, they just needed as much orders as we could get.

And nobody answered the radio.

This firefight went on for well over two hours.

Finally,

I forget, we made contact with somebody.

It may have been a Phantom jet.

He gets a hold of Spider.

Spider Parks comes over.

We were close to

the hill there.

It was a little bit more open area.

I was able to get the mirror flash, flash it in so Spider could locate exactly where we were.

And then within a short while, we attack air.

And

how close were these guys getting?

Well,

if we were like here, the jungle would be that wall, and they would be coming out of that wall.

Holy shit.

So we're talking

five, six yards at the most.

And again, a lot of it's so weird because the jungle was so thick, because they could see what they're coming towards us.

If they're coming up that hill, they would be firing at us

and Then we would see the the gun fire or their or their feet or something from their bodies first We would never even see their face of them But they kept coming you know and at one point and I forget if it was Before or after we reached Spider for the TAC Air

But Don Wolcan came over to me because sometimes there would be like a little break

And he goes, look at what they're doing.

I couldn't tell.

He says, no, look.

He says, you see the bodies they started stacking up the dead bodies at the top of that hill because they wanted to get the bodies stacked up so they could climb up on the bodies so they could shoot down at us so they were using the bodies as a barricade yeah

and to climb up on it because they knew that we had the advantage from the height and they wanted to get the dead bodies so they could shoot down at us And they stacked them up.

We stacked them up.

You stacked them up.

Well, we killed them, them, then they stacked the bodies.

And it was like, that stuck with me.

Because if the NVA, after you kill them, and they put their dead bodies there to climb up to kill us, that tells you about the dedication of these guys.

So at some point,

I'm firing

into the next batch of NVA coming at us.

And Fook opened fire.

And

I thought he was shooting over my shoulder

so my ear was shattered I just couldn't hear for shit

and

I didn't say anything because we were just so busy fighting

so the next day when we debrief in the in the in the hooch we all came back after mission we'd always talk about it with the entire team with spider and the hep

At the end of it, I turned the fuck, I said, fuck, why were you shooting over my shoulder?

He goes, dumbass.

There were three NVA that were crawling up the hill.

They were aiming at you.

I killed them before they killed you.

And so I was so focused here, and thank God Fooks saw them there.

And so

we went on.

That was the first time.

How did that, I mean, how did that end?

Well, we finally had Tachair.

And the first run we had was an

A1 Skyraider, a napalm run specific.

I'll never forget it.

And

Spider got low on fuel.

He connected me with the Skyraider pilot.

So he knew where we were.

We popped smoke.

He came in and said, we're going to do a napalm run.

And I told him, bring it as close as you can, because they kept coming at us.

And he says, now, y'all put your head down.

It's crispy critter time.

He came in with that napalm run.

It's the first time I ever smelled human flesh burn.

He was that close.

Just takes your air away.

Came back with gun runs.

They did CBU runs, cluster bomb units.

And then

the judge and the executioner showed up, and they were gunships attached to Frontier Mari-Cal Division, the 176th.

and the muskets.

And they had boarded with us at FOB-1.

So we knew them by name and they did amazing gun runs on all three sides because they were coming at us from the front and on the sides.

And at one point

they were crawling up the hill.

I was on the radio with Spider and I could just see this guy crawling up the hill.

So I'm talking to Spider quietly.

And then the guy stuck his head up.

I just fired one round, but I forgot to let go of the radio.

And the shot hurt his ears, but he could tell that we had been in this contact for so long.

So finally, he sees an LZ that we couldn't tell, but it was elephant grass.

And the elephant grass is 8 to 12 feet tall,

and it was right behind us

where we had no or only minimal enemy contact.

He says, you just go past that, there's the elephant grass.

And it was maybe, again, 10 or 12 yards at the most but it was that thick stuff so we go we're pushing through it but it's so hard to get through it i fell down then wolcen walked across my back all the guys walk on my back wolken fell down we stood at his back meanwhile i'm directing gun runs with the helicopter and a kingby that came in on that coin that we showed you earlier captain tin from the South Vietnamese Air Force, the 219th Squadron, came in and hovered in that elephant grass because he couldn't land.

There were small trees there.

Had he landed, the blades would have just destroyed the helicopter.

But he hovered for 10 minutes.

So we struggled to get through this elephant grass in between shooting at the NVA, directing gun runs.

And we finally get to the Kingby.

And at one point,

the gun runs came by so close.

It was the first time I had shell casings go down the back of my neck from the judge and the executioner.

But I was like, oh shit, but that's like, oh, that's cool, thank you, you know, because they were that close shooting the NVA coming at us.

And Captain Tin hung up there.

Don and I threw all the guys in.

Don grabbed my shirt and his hand slipped.

And by now my adrenaline's pumping.

I grabbed him and threw him up, all 220 pounds,

up into, oh, up into the Kingby.

And then he reached down and grabbed me, pulled me me in and we left now i'm down on my last magazine last hand grenade and as we pulled out it's almost almost dark

and

it was just the weirdest thing because we're as we're leaving you to look back at the jungle this rich dark green emerald green here's all these little sparkling lights from ak-47s and green tracers coming up at our kingby so for me that's my first major firefight Holy shit.

And only by the grace of the Lord do we get out of there.

And thanks to Captain Tin.

This is another significant moment for me.

We're in the helicopter now.

We lift up.

We're finally past all that.

We fired off our last bullets, the last grenade.

We're flying back.

It's beautiful sunset.

Most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in my life because we're like alive, you know.

And so I look over at Sal,

and Sal goes, he gave me a nod.

When Spider introduced me to Spike Team Idaho,

Sal turned to Hep.

He goes, he's too tall, his feet are too big, and he looks stupid.

But on that day, October 7th, 1968,

he gave me a nod.

He's like,

you've done good.

And to me, I'll never forget that moment.

Because by that point, we were on a team.

We were tight.

Sal saved us on the ground.

I did all the airstrikes.

Get back to Fubai.

Captain Tin, you saved our ass.

Come on, let me buy you a drink.

No, my wife is holding dinner for me at home.

I want to see my children.

So two days later, he comes back.

He goes,

You know, we had 48 bullet holes in that helicopter.

Well, needless to say, whenever the King pilots came, they never purchased any drinks.

Not in our club.

And so Captain Tin saved John Walton on August 3rd.

That was our day.

Wow.

He came back.

He and those guys later on, several missions.

They just under enemy fire.

And there was at least that day, there's at least one other day where we had been in a firefight.

Well, hold on.

Yeah.

So you guys come back.

Yeah.

Oh, there's a floor show on.

A what?

A floor show.

There was some kind of a floor show, like an Australian floor show in a club.

Normally, when the team would come back after a firefight, like what we had been through, there'd be guys out there with beer.

There'd be a truck and everything.

But this night, there was just one guy with a truck, no beer.

And we took us back, and because I was the radio operator, Don went in to report to S3 or to S2, give them the intel briefing.

I got the team, gave them the food and stuff, and there was a floor show, so nobody came out.

And so I go into the club.

There's John Waltons, John's there, and we're talking back and forth.

And so John goes, Hey, did you kill anybody today?

Yeah.

So, you know, for the first time, I can tell you I killed a man.

Don't feel good about it, but,

you know, that's war.

Because that guy stuck his head up and I hit him.

And

it sticks with you, you know.

Spider-Parks came over and said, you know, you had that firefight and you hurt my ear.

He said, but you did the right thing.

So if you didn't kill him,

think about what he could have done to the team.

So that was my

welcome, you know.

That's the real war right there, bad.

And they were serious.

And we never forgot that moment with them stacking up the bodies of their comrades so they could kill us.

And we're just lucky to get out of there.

Captain Tin,

he's still alive today out there in down in Carlsbad,

California.

He's down there with his son.

Every once in a while, we talk to him to try to give a little call, stay in touch.

So, when that guy stuck his head up,

what went through your head

at that exact moment?

Oh,

he's a bad guy.

He's got to go.

None of this thinking about it.

You know, there are other times we were in firefights.

I can remember my third-grade teacher, Sunday school teacher, Myrtle Reichard.

She said, thou shalt not kill.

I heard her voice more than once saying, thou shalt not kill.

But I said, sorry, Myrtle.

You know, this is us or them.

We're at war right now.

I'm sure the Lord understands that.

Besides, we're killing communists.

My favorite kind of communist is dead.

And so I really didn't think about it.

Now, I talked about it with John.

It really hit home.

And then Spider

afterwards came by and talked to me and says, remember, in the future, don't

let that radio go when you're shooting because you hurt our ears up there in the plane.

And then we had the team meeting the next day when Fook told me that.

And

learned, lessons learned, what we could do better.

And then with that, Don got promoted to a cubby rider.

How many enemy combatants do you guys think he killed that day?

I have no idea.

Because of the limited frontage,

And the fact that once it came up from the sides, I know Fook

had killed some more that came up.

And from the ones in front, I mean, to have enough to stack up bodies that were,

as I looked at it, it looked like they had to be at least a foot off the ground,

maybe more from the dead bodies that they're stacking.

And they were stacking them down the hill.

So they wanted to get up on that stack to just shoot at us.

So we never counted.

And the majority of them were just in the front of that jungle edge and into the jungle that went right down the hill.

But they had to to get up that hill to get to us.

So, probably two, three bodies high.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we don't never knew how many or how many were wounded.

We had cases, other teams, when they would kill the NVA

and they'd go over the area and there'd be no bodies, but you see the blood trails where the NVA would pull their dead out.

They were hardcore.

And by 1968, the NVA had 25,000 troops that were in Laos, at least.

And they had developed

hunter-killer SOG teams.

These teams were designed to hunt our SOG teams and make contact, and they would be sappers.

They only wore a loincloth,

maybe some sandals.

And they would carry an AK and a magazine.

And they would come in, or a hand grenade, and they would come in just to kill the Americans, leave the Indigenous alive, just for psyops.

And the Sappers,

in August 23rd of 68, the Sappers had hit our base camp at Da Nang,

and they had prepared for it for over a year, and they killed 16 green berets in one day in FOB4.

And

that was the most serious casualties in SF Special Forces history was that day at Denang.

And I wasn't there for that.

I was up at L4B1,

heard about it, and we sent down a relief force that went down and relieved the camp and helped them clean up, get the dead bodies and stuff.

But I missed all that because we were getting ready for

our insertion the next day on the

sensors.

We were doing mission prep on that with the team.

How quick after that first firefight was the next mission?

Well, Don got promoted.

And a couple days after the mission, Jim came up to me.

And Jim was, he was outstanding on that day, on that hill.

He was there, rock solid.

He said, Tilt,

he says,

I spent a year with the 173rd in combat.

I ain't never seen no shit like this.

Never.

I can't do it, brother.

I don't want you to to feel like I'm letting you down.

He said, no, no, no.

So I'm glad you told me because that day you were there with me, our team,

and you were part of us against them.

And

you can always tell your grandchildren that you and me and Don and the team, we stood up against the communists, and you were an outstanding soldier.

I'll be forever in your debt for that.

And so you just tell me what you want to do, and thank you for being honest.

So I went to the sergeant major, we got him a new assignment and then he left a couple weeks later, but he never said goodbye.

And

but he did well that day and it was not an issue.

So

then I had to get a new assistant team member and a couple days later Bubba Shur and the Frenchman Don, Doug, The Frenchman Laterno arrived at FOB1.

And these new guys just gone through training group.

They came up to the base and

John McGovern,

somehow he had heard about the Frenchman, and he liked the Frenchman.

So he told the Frenchman, we got to get you on a Spike Team Virginia.

And so Doug went to Spike Team Virginia, and we heard about John Bubbashore.

And so

we recruited John.

He came over.

trained him up and by the end of the month we ran a couple of general missions.

And then November, we just had balls to the walls.

And

we got several different missions out of there that were

just amazing.

And

it was just Bub and I.

And by that time, I so respected the Vietnamese on our team, I didn't want a third American.

Because our little people are so good in the jungle.

They always ran point.

We usually had them on the tail gunner position.

And

so that's where we started up.

How did you feel when you got the nod?

Oh,

I carry that two with me today.

Sal gave me that nod.

I was just like, oh my God.

I was officially nod of approval.

It took a while, you know, from

June or the end of May there.

till October the 7th, 1968 AD.

But it was well worth the wait.

And we never, and we always got along.

But that was the official, okay, you're part of the team, you've done good.

And we all knew about Sal because he and Hep

by 68, they'd been running for two and a half years, missions across the fence.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

I know.

Tuon had been running for a couple years.

He was our grenadier.

He could put a 40-millimeter

grenade up a gnat's ass at 500 yards.

I mean, he was so good with that thing.

Just phenomenal firepower.

And good people.

So Bub and I, we had

in early November,

not one of my finer moments, but we had trouble finding LZs.

So somebody came up with the bright idea of, let's get a daisy cutter.

Look for a swath of jungle where there's no trails, no roads visible from the air.

We'll drop a daisy cutter in it.

It'll knock down all the trees.

And then the team can land or rappel in.

They get on the ground and then do an area recon right there.

Okay?

So that's us.

So

the first day,

I forget what the aircraft was that carried a 2,000-pounder, but it had a daisy cutter.

So I'm the team leader.

I'm on the Kingby, has two steps into the Kingby,

and I'm stepping out out and the bomb goes off.

We can see the bomb and the kingby's following in right behind it.

You know, the dust is settling and the kingby couldn't land.

So he hovered.

I repelled down.

Halfway down the rope, I could hear somebody yelling

across that area where, again, there's still dust in the air,

but nobody's shooting at me.

So I'm going down the rope and I hear another voice.

So there's one up to where I'm facing and one back here in the area where we just blew up a bomb.

So I land and I give Henry King, who was a strap hanger with us that day, I gave him the sign, no,

the mission is canceled.

I get on the radio, I tell Covey, we're compromised, there's people here, because when you're compromised, why go on with the mission?

Our job is to go in, snoop, and poop.

So the mission is canceled.

I unhook, the Kingby takes off, and I'm on the ground for a while.

And I can hear more people coming back and forth.

And finally, I'll see an NVA come down, open fire on him, don't have it anymore with him, but they're still

talking back and forth.

I can't tell what they're saying because I just grew up in Trenton.

My foreign language is English, let alone Laotian or whatever we're speaking.

So finally, the Kingby comes back.

Captain Tuong is flying.

Dropped the rope down.

I hook in,

and we had a Swiss seat.

And it's a rope Swiss seat.

You tie it in, tie it off on the side and then you have a D ring and then the Swiss seat comes down with a sandbag and a D ring on it.

You hook the D ring in, you get pulled up and then you have a D ring on your shoulder harness that you're supposed to hook into.

So if you get shot your body remains in the seat and on the rope.

Well as Captain Tuong begins to lift off, I gave him the sign he lifts off.

I can see the NVA again.

So I

shoot another

NVA soldier.

We're coming up the rope.

Somebody else is shooting at the helicopter now.

So I turn around and shoot where the gunshots are coming from, but I can't, I don't see any people.

I just see the gunshots.

I turn around, fire an M79 round at them.

Now we're getting lifted up.

Captain Tuwong hears the gunfire.

I'm not out of the jungle yet.

So he pulls me.

through the jungle.

So now it's like

we're playing pinballs, but I'm the pinball here.

And we're ricocheting off the trees and I had not hooked up my D-ring yet.

So I ricochet a few times and I get bounced back and forth and both of my arms are cut up from the rope as we're getting as we're getting bounced around.

Finally we come out of the jungle

and he lifts up further and we're going back to South Vietnam.

And I tried to get the D-ring harness.

I couldn't get it hooked because of the wind.

You know, whatever we're flying, 90, 90 miles an hour, whatever the speed is.

We're going and

I point up to King, I go, let's go down, you know.

And

so I can see him, but he's like 150 feet away.

I'm down there dangling, and I'm moving, I'm rotating my arms because my arms have been really cut up here.

And as I went to rotate, I hit a packet of air or something and flipped me upside down.

And as I'm upside upside down, now I look up one more time.

I go to King

like this.

My web gear and my backpack all come back on my neck.

And I got my legs spread.

The Swiss seat is down to my knees.

Shit.

Oh, yeah.

And so, and I can feel this choking off.

I'm trying to pull the web gear and the backpack.

It's all on my neck.

I can't get it off.

And it's like, oh, this is not good.

So finally, we get another air pocket and

the rope goes down to my feet.

And I'm hanging by my feet.

The Swiss seat is on my feet.

I'm choking out now.

And I'm just like a New York City hooker with my legs spread there, just trying to keep that rope on my feet.

And

my life flashes before my eyes right before I'm ready.

I know I'm going to pass out.

I've passed out

once before in my life.

I knew what that feeling was.

So I'm getting ready to pass out.

Bing.

There's the front page of the newspaper back in Trenton.

I'm really pissed because the front page of the Trenton Times has my death in South Vietnam.

ASLI, I died in Laos.

B, it's below the fold.

By 1968, our guys had been dying.

It's such a common news.

that we didn't rate above the fold on page A1 of the Trenton Times.

I saw my girlfriend from kindergarten, the girl who broke my heart when she moved to California, Dolores, sauced my car, a couple other things, my dad's milk truck, and I passed out.

What I didn't realize was Captain Tuong

had been descending.

And when I passed out, it was right over a patch of elephant grass.

So I fell maybe 12, 15 feet at the most and was unconscious.

Henry King jumped out, took off my web gear, pulled the stuff off my neck, picked me up, threw me in the Kingby.

And it was one of those moments where as I hit the floor, I was like, oh, God, that hurts.

But,

oh, I'm happy.

That's happy pain.

I'm alive.

And all my web gear, my Car 15,

my Solid Off M79 with a stylized hoster.

And my SOG knife.

They're all still there in Laos.

But we got out, flew back,

went to S4, went to S3 first, gave them a quick briefing, and

we

had to get new gear, geared up, and the next day we were back for another mission.

Damn.

Oh, yeah.

And

the other sidebar to that, the day before that I repelled in, they did the daisy cutter, and the daisy cutter exploded.

And as I was going to, as the helicopter began to descend, we had secondary explosions.

They had over a dozen secondary explosions.

So here we were

with the best intel available at the time, figuring this is a chunk of jungle where there's nothing there.

We just repel in, do an area recon.

We blew up one of Ho Chi Minh's caches.

Wow.

And to this day, Ho Chi Minh is trying to figure out how we figured that out by mistake.

Damn.

Just another day in SOG.

Oh yeah.

Just crazy.

John, let's take a quick break.

Sure.

Then we'll just pick up right where we left off.

Oh great.

Fair enough.

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All right, John, we're back from the break.

Indeed, thank you.

We're getting ready to hit November.

November 68.

November 68th.

First, though, where did the name Tilt come from?

Ever play pinballs?

Yeah.

See, when you play a pinball machine and you lose, you walk away pissed off.

When I play a pinball machine and lose, I shake the shit out of it, see my name in Neon, then I walk away.

Right on.

Indeed.

Let's get into November.

Yeah, November,

that was one of our crucible months there.

You know, Bub and I

we teamed up.

By that time, we were comfortable with each other and the little people.

They really liked Bubb a lot.

Good man.

And

so

after that mission,

we had a couple days where in the morning we would fly into an LZ,

primary, get shot out, secondary, get shot out, and then the alternate, again, get shot out, go back, have lunch.

They would want to get a team on the ground so bad that they would say, here's your new target.

And then here's Covey.

Covey, go find him in LZ.

Before that, we were doing visual reconnaissance.

We'd fly over the target area, look for pick out LZs, get familiar with it.

But one of the issues by that time, one of the issues that we were dealing with was how much SOG was compromised.

We knew that wherever we took off from, whether it was from FOB-1

or whether it was, we had a launch site at Kuang Tree.

And then later we had FOB3, which was at Khe SOG, that was closed in June, but they moved the title to Miloc, and they were there until the end of November.

They

suspected that they had observers there.

So whenever our helicopters would fly west from South Vietnam into Laos, that they would give a vector where we were going.

And we know that they had observers at the borders.

So when we went across into Laos, We assumed that somebody would say, here comes the helicopter.

There are this vector.

boom.

We never knew how much we were compromised.

That's why it's going to be a next story in my fourth book that I write.

This is just how much we were compromised.

And during this time, Bub and I learned that.

One morning

in the South Vietnamese Air Force,

when they inserted a team,

they didn't do a low nap of the earth thing because in the layouts we had the mountains and everything

and they had what they called falling yellow leaf where they would,

because of the way the engine was designed, they could put it in neutral and they would spiral down.

At the last second, they would engage, flare, land, bing, we're out the door.

They take off, the second chopper would come in, the same thing.

On this mission, we had gotten shot off on an LZ, we're going to the secondary.

We're going in,

and as we're doing this, just start the spiral,

Fook or Sal, I forget which one yelled to the door gunner and we aborted.

I'm going like kumbiak, what happened?

And they saw a wire.

Somehow, they saw a wire across the LZ.

That wire was attached to a 500-pound bomb.

Had we hit the wire, it would have triggered the bomb that would have destroyed us and the helicopter.

Wow.

So we knew we were...

You were able to see that coming in?

I know.

Not me.

We're talking about my little people here.

Oh, they were phenomenal.

It was like a miracle.

It's just another day in Saul, but this is today's miracle.

For us to get out of Echo Fours, in my mind, to this day, is always a major miracle.

But in that case, it was just unbelievable.

So we go back.

We had this.

We finally had another mission.

We're on the ground.

We get shot out within a day.

Leave with not too heavy contact.

What was that mission?

It was just an area recon.

They put us in, we're on the ground, we had trackers early, and some guys would tend to

elongate the mission and I would try to push it as far as we could.

But once I thought we were compromised,

and then Spider-Park said, if you're compromised, they know where you are.

It's just a question of time before they get enough people together to wipe your team out like they did with Idaho in May.

So I tended to be very conservative that way.

We got out, no problem.

So next day, another day we go in, primary, secondary, alternate, lunch, primary, secondary, alternate.

We finally, on the next day, we finally got inserted in the afternoon and the weather was spotty.

We get inserted and we had Hengry King with us and he was carrying the experimental pump M79 just for extra firepower.

We were going into the target was Echo-8.

It was a target that had a lot of enemy activity.

We didn't know quite why.

And

we got in, and

the LZ, the Laos, do slash and burn.

So they would slash an area, cut down a lot of vegetation, grow crops until the soil got depleted, then they would burn it out.

We had an area where we landed, I put the team on the ground, we went up this this mountain, and then

instead of doing the 10 and 10,

I just wanted to do something different.

And we got on the ground, we moved for almost an hour.

We finally came to a trail.

The trail was big enough to drive a tank down it.

And it was a kind of trail from the air you couldn't see it because the NVA and their

and the indigenous people they forced to work with them tied branches over so you would never see it from the air.

So we get this big trail, we cross it, there's a telephone pole, Sal goes up, hooks up the wiretap,

we set up an ambush and our ambushes were designed where

this is by Lynn Black, who specifically designed this, where he had a block of C4

so that six feet away from that block, any person would be knocked on conscious by the blast of the C4.

Anything outside of that blast would be claymore mines that would kill everything else, both in front, excuse me, and in back

of that person that was knocked unconscious.

So we set up the ambush, claymores are put out, claymores for side security, claymores in the back.

Sal's running the wiretap.

We're sitting there, and Bubba goes, hey, we can get us an R ⁇ R.

Because they had the rule.

If you capture the live POW,

you got $100 and you got an R ⁇ R anywhere in the world.

$100.

Yeah.

It's 1960.

That's big money in 68, man.

Was it?

What do you hear me tell?

That's still big money today for this peon.

But anyways, so we're like,

yeah, we're joking about it.

Spider came out for a combo check.

Now, we've been on the ground now for three or four hours

and he's flying Covey and I give him the code, Spider code, whatever it was.

We got a POW.

We'll have one.

We'll meet you at the LZ in one hour.

He comes back and says, I'm at 10,000 feet.

I can't see the mountain you're on, let alone

an LZ.

I'm telling you, whatever you're doing, stop, get to the top of the mountain, and wait till till the weather blows over.

The weather closed in, and we're going to be socked in for three or four days.

So don't make enemy contact.

If you do, we can't come and get you.

And there's no tack air.

Okay, so we pulled down the wire tab, pulled in the ambush.

And as we're doing that, above us, we hear tanks up the mountain.

Literally, a tank sounding.

and another truck starting up.

And when we had the uh

we first got there, we set up the ambush, the NVA are walking up and down the road.

Kai

had their AKs on their shoulders.

We saw a couple officers, but I wanted to get the clearance from spiders so if we could blow it to get a quality POW.

Well, after Spider says, don't do it, we pulled everything in

and then we went to the left because we had come up the mountain.

And we moved out, we crossed the trail, because the trail kind of bent up the mountain, and we crossed it again.

and

when we crossed it we do one man at a time person in the same footsteps going across and the tail gunner comes by and cleans it up

we moved for a while and it's getting dark now

and then we could hear dogs dogs down by the LZ

so it's almost dark now Sal climbs up the tree I have Sal go look, see what we got coming at us.

He comes back, his eyes are like saucers.

He told Hep, Buku VC, and we could hear the dogs now.

There's several dogs coming up that mountain.

And he goes, there's Buku VC, and he says they're from here, meaning all this areas down the mountain from us with Buku lights.

And he could see some places where there's actually NVA behind the lights.

So we don't know how many, but they're coming and coming hard.

So we moved a little further.

Right about dusk,

we got into a stream and we turned left and went up the stream for maybe a half hour 45 minutes and I had the team go out a couple times to make false trails for the dogs

and Then we put down black pepper and pattered mace so if the dog hit it was fuck up their nose So we went further for like I said it was dark We're not used to moving at night, but I wanted to set it get as much distance between us and the dogs as possible.

Sal agreed, because whenever I did anything like that, through HEP, I would talk with Sal, that Bubba, and Henry King, who was strap hanging with us, let them know.

On this mission, we had eight men.

So we finally come to an area in that stream bed.

We climb up

and we set up an RON with the eight guys, and I'm facing the little stream bed or the creek, whatever it is, but there's water in it.

So

we hear more dogs, We can hear the noise down there.

About midnight, one o'clock, two NVA walk past us in the stream or the creek.

They go up for a while.

Their lantern ran out of fuel.

They turn around, they come back.

Now I can hear him.

I don't know if anybody else on the team could.

Later on, Fook told me he could hear him.

But again, we're not talking because I'm facing that and Fook was on my right, but he was facing another direction but I could have touched him if I wanted to.

So I'm pointing here.

They walked past right about here in front of me in that little creek.

Hep coughed.

They stopped.

At that point

one of them turned around and only when the wind blew He would start crawling up the mountain towards me.

When the wind blew, I could hear him move.

When the wind blew, and I was sitting there like this, feet spread, Car 15 on single shot.

So I figured, if it happens, it's going to be just one shot.

That's all it's going to take.

Because at that point, we're playing hide and go seek with the NVA Army there.

They're trying to find us.

Well, eventually he gets to me.

So they knew you guys were there.

Oh, yeah.

How did they know?

Helicopter.

It's just so damn noisy.

Did you guys ever do false insertions?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

We did that.

Fake insertions, sometimes do two or three touchdowns and then get out of the helicopter or the third LZ.

We did that.

We did it in Cambodia as well as Laos.

The Laos was a little harder because of the mountains, but it was a tactic.

One thing we did.

And plus with the concern about being compromised, we would have a briefing.

And we put down primary, secondary, alternate LZ, send it to Saigon.

Then when we had the actual pre-mission briefing with the helicopter pilots and Covey,

we pulled Covey aside and say, go find us another LZ

and a secondary.

Because we know we're just compromised.

We don't want to take a chance on them waiting for us again with another 500-pound bomb.

So that was one way to deal with it.

Anyway, this guy comes up.

He touched my boot.

I could hear him catch his breath.

I'm just waiting.

If he he had moved suddenly, he would have been dead.

But he waited.

Your boot?

Yeah, my size 10.

I was wearing a size 10 regner at the time.

Touched my left foot.

He touched it.

I heard him catch his breath.

If he moved suddenly, it would have been his last move.

But he waited.

I mean, he sat there for,

well, by this time, you know how time extends itself.

I mean, seconds turn into minutes and hours.

But when the wind blew, he backed up.

Wind blew again, he went down.

Finally, he gets to his buddy, and both of them left.

So, this is all it took a while.

And I want to say it happened around maybe two or three o'clock in the morning.

I just forget.

I mean, I had my Seiko watch on.

I could see,

look at what time it was after he left, but I just forget what time.

At first light, we were up and out of there.

And we moved up that mountain all day.

And

twice, once or twice, our point man,

who now was son and he had sal right behind him, they encountered woodcutters.

But none of the woodcutters had weapons and they were indigenous people.

And there was nobody there to make it appear as though they were affiliated with the NVA in any way.

So we continued to move.

And,

you know, we had gotten near the top.

And at one point we took a break, and I'm beat because we had moved all day.

We just broke.

Now, here we were doing 10 and 10 to really be cautious, but we were going up that mountain.

And then we took a break for Chow.

But we continued to move as much as we could because we just wanted to get to the top of the mountain before dark.

Set up a strong RON at night with extra claymores.

And

I went to stand up and I fell down.

I literally fell on my face.

So I get up again, fall down again, I land on my face.

And I'm lying there.

It's like, all I wanted to do was roll over and go to sleep.

I was so tired and so beat.

And after last night with the, because I didn't get much sleep that night.

And, but I knew the whole team was looking at me.

And I'm going like, you just got to get your weary ass up.

So I finally got up.

We got up to the top of the mountain, set up a nice RON.

Sal's guys did wonderful work with the Claymores.

And that night,

around about one or two o'clock, and we always had combo checks.

They had an airborne command control ship that flew over Southeast Asia 24-7.

In our case, they would usually fly by around midnight, one o'clock.

We'd do a combo check.

And because the NVA had really extensive RDF, you know, the radio directional finding equipment um

we would just do click click with the handset.

And then they would say, Roger, receive.

So they knew we were okay.

If there was a situation, we had to report.

But anyway, they did the midnight comma check.

About an hour and a half, two hours later,

Bubba wakes me up.

He goes, you won't believe this shit.

Look at the mountain.

So like a couple mountains over,

the whole mountainside lit up with bright lights.

So we begin scanning on on the dial and we get Russian.

There's a Russian aircraft coming in for an aerial resupply in layoffs to the NVA.

Wow.

So now I get on, I'm on the radio.

I'm doing my ERC-10, my emergency radio frequency, which is like 243

ultra-high.

And we carried those if the other radios didn't work.

and did the radio, all the different frequencies.

I can't get anybody.

It's like, where's the cop when you need one?

But they came in, they did the resupply and left.

And that was a weird night.

So we were up there for three more days.

Spider would come by with combo check, just let us know how high up he was, but no break in the weather during the day.

And finally,

the fourth night, we moved downhill.

Say, you can move out now and

try to continue with the mission.

So we got down

halfway down the mountain and we came to one of the weirdest things.

It looked like Stonehenge.

In the middle of Laos, here are these huge monoliths that looked like Stonehenge.

They didn't have any across the top, but these big things that came out of the ground.

So we set up our RON in the center of this, put out the claymore mines.

And

set up the RON.

It was a quiet night.

And then in the morning, first light, we could hear dogs.

And the dogs picked up our trail.

You could just tell they were barking more excitedly.

And so

Spider came by.

I told him that they were on us.

Be a question of time before we make contact.

And we moved out.

And we moved to an open area where Spider said, go to this vector here.

You've been on the ground for five days.

We'll pull you out.

And he he came back 10 minutes later and said, Well, we're going to be delayed.

There's another team that declared a prairie fire emergency.

So we had to wait.

Well, they kept coming, and they went through that RON.

And we had

Bubba put down a Claymore mine,

and then Sal put down a couple of tow poppers.

So the Claymore was triggered.

We knew they were pissed now.

And then they heard at least two tow poppers go off.

So during that time, they came out.

Sal and Hep were in the back.

They had a light contact.

Then we got the word from Spider that the 101st Airborne was going to come in to pick us up.

And that was the first time we'd had American slicks since the mission to Nashaw Valley, because we had always used the South Vietnamese, the king beast.

And

at one point, the gunships came down, Scarface, Marine Corps Scarface, came in, and they got shot to shit.

They made a second run, they got shot up again.

And we could see the enemy up the hill on the back side.

And we went out with our M79s.

And King had that pump.

He went, chunchung, cha-chung, cha-chung.

Me, Bubba, and Tuon also fired our M79s up that hill where the gunfire was coming from on the ships, on the airships.

I slowed them down.

101st came in.

And I told Bubba, you got to be the first man out there.

You tell those young guys that are door gunners, we've got South Vietnamese, don't kill my little people.

So he did because, you know, we had bad experiences with that, with young door gunners that shot up some of our little people by mistake without realizing.

Because some of the guys just thought all South Vietnamese were NVA.

So we got out, had a good extraction.

That night back at the bar, we finally get back to the bar.

And Scarface is there.

And there's Lieutenant Colonel Robinson, who was the OIC.

And he was like pissed he says look you see my helicopter the flexiglass had been shot out had bullet holes in it and uh

so he's really said you guys every time we come out to get you my helicopters get shot up and now i want to be out there supporting you guys he's so i buy him a few drinks you get three or four drinks in them and i went back to s2 gave a debrief came back and robinson colonel robinson was still there still bitching and moaning i said sir does that mean you're not going to come next time he said no I didn't say that.

We'll be, you call, we'll come.

And they did.

They got shot up really bad.

And they were flying those old UEs, UE gunships.

That when they had a full load of orders, they could barely get off the ground.

Sometimes, with the heat, the door gunners would get out and run alongside the helicopter where they started getting a little momentum going, and then they jumped back in the helicopter just seeing those guys do that.

So, um, right after that, we um

we were called into S3 and they said, we want to send you TDY to FOB6, which was down at Honuktau.

And at that time, there were six FOBs that were operating.

FOB1 was Fubai, two was Contoum, which was in Tukor.

And they did targets in both Laos and Cambodia.

FOB3 had been Khezan, which when Khezan was closed, the Marine Corps base was closed in 68 June.

They transferred our FOB to Milok.

Excuse me, FOB4 was the Nang, FOB 5 was Bami Tuat, all targets for Cambodia.

FOB 6 was Honop Tau, was northwest of Saigon, and they were all Cambodian targets.

They were low on operational teams, so we were sent down to TDY.

So just Bub and I and the team went down.

And

we had been there a day.

And the day before Thanksgiving, the OIC,

Colonel Drake, called called us in and said, look, we got a mission tomorrow.

And said, S3 is going to brief you.

But it's Thanksgiving Day.

And if you guys pull this mission off, before you go into the target, we'll bring you a Thanksgiving dinner.

Good to go, Colonel.

We go in for the briefing, and the mission was to find one or any of the three missing NVA divisions.

So this is November, near the end of November, like this is November 25th, 68.

And we knew

that they were missing.

And the concern was because the Tet Offensive in early 68, that the NVA were rinding up for another Tet Offensive in 69.

And with 30,000 NVA missing in action, WTF times two.

So

we're up late.

And during that briefing, we got pictures from

really high up

about different areas.

And the pictures were the first pictures taken by

the Blackbirds, the

72s, the S-72s

and

they were amazing.

So we had all that and we had the latest intel reports over there with the colonel.

We got to approximate a target area and we were working with the

Green Hornets, the Air Force Special Operations Squadron.

And those guys were hot shit.

They had the latest UE, the latest weapons, and those UEs were more powerful than anything we have seen with the Army.

But the rules of engagement were different in Cambodia.

No tack air, no Covey.

Only thing that was up were helicopters.

And the only support we had would be helicopter gunships, which would be 2.75 rockets or mini-guns or M60s.

And fortunately here,

these guys were just hot shit pilots.

So we did,

in the morning, we got up first light.

We go to the launch site.

Here comes a helicopter with Thanksgiving.

So we sat down, had Thanksgiving, had our big meal, jumped on the helicopters, launched into the Target.

And we get in the Target, we moved for a while, and we literally walked into an NVA base camp.

And later what Sal figured and Fook,

they thought that one of the NVAs had just left left because there were still fires burning and one fire like had a pot still hanging over

so one NVA division had just left and another one was coming in

well when we're there we went in we started taking some pictures and sal gives me that sound that hiss of his and then he goes buku vc and his eyes are like saucers and he points up to the north And off in the woods, now this is Cambodia.

This is not Laos.

Cambodia, the vegetation was different.

Maybe one

canopy.

And it was open.

You could see for almost 100 yards some places, maybe a little bit longer.

And off in the distance, we could see NVA soldiers with pith helmets with their AKs running down port arms looking for us.

Shit.

Oh, yeah.

And somehow...

Because we didn't make any noise or anything, but they turned and started coming towards us.

So we began to move back.

We go into our full retreat move, go back, I declare a prairie fire emergency.

As we're beginning to move back, Sal goes, Douma.

And now from the south, we got the same thing coming up.

NVA with AK-47s and pith helmets running up.

They see the other unit, and they both all come towards us.

So now we open fire, two on, myself and Bubba, hitting them with M79s.

We began falling back.

We put down claymores to slow them down.

At one point, Bubba had a claymore with a five-second fuse on it.

We put that in the ground and then moved back.

Of course, it was in front of the tree so the backblast wouldn't get us.

And we had that claymore and we're moving back, rotating each other, going back.

And we finally get close to the LZ.

We put down two claymores.

As the NV got really close, Bubba blew off one, and I waited, and then the helicopter landed.

In between, right before he landed, we had two gun runs, at least two gun runs with their miniguns and it just slaughtered them.

It just killed them.

We don't know how many.

No time to count.

The helicopter lands.

Everybody's loading up.

As I see more NVA coming, they're right in front of my claymarks.

They click that MK or MK-57 clacker, blows them up.

Run back.

We get on a helicopter.

We're pulling off.

It's me and Fook.

And so there's a little bit of jungle.

And there's some of the NVA are running.

And we're in the opening area.

It had been raining a couple of days before.

And a couple of the NVA come out and they're trying to stop.

And you can see the mud from their boots coming up and hitting the propellers.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

And so me and the door are going to hit this one guy.

Fook hit the other guy.

And they blow back.

And we're pulling off.

As we're leaving, I get a white phosphorus grenade.

We've been told no white phosphorus in Cambodia, but this was so close that I could see those NVA down there.

I threw a white phosphorus down at them and we leave.

Helicopters all get shot up.

Our helicopter had over a dozen hits, but none of our guys, none of the Air Force guys got hit.

And those Air Force guys from the Green Horns were hot shit.

They just saved our ass that day.

We go back to the launch site now with the Air Force guys

and they go, hey, it's Thanksgiving.

Come on in, have a Thanksgiving dinner with us.

So we gave a quick

verbal report on the radio back to headquarters.

Went in, sat down with the Air Force, had Thanksgiving dinner.

As we're wrapping up, somebody comes out and says, hey, man, they want you back at Honuck Tau, ASAP.

And I said, okay, so we go back to Honuck Tow, talked to the colonel, talked to S3.

gave them all of our reports.

Bubba took the team out, gave them overnight passes, took care of that.

And

after we're done with the debrief, it was around five, a quarter, six or so, Colonel Drake goes, hey, you guys, it's Thanksgiving.

Come on down, get a Thanksgiving meal.

You have one for breakfast, you can have one for dinner.

So we had three Thanksgiving meals in one day.

Unbelievable.

So the next day we just cleaned our weapons.

We did some weapons, some practice on the range.

The next day we had an insert we wanted to do a trail watch and we wanted to get a POW really bad

perfect insertion we get on the ground

and we go over to I think it was like highway 31 in Cambodia and it's one of these deals where the jungle is like still one canopy but it's thick and it's so thick that when you go up like you push your hand through and it's all clear there's your road But anybody on the road can't see you.

Even if they're like you and I distance, the jungle is so intense

we can't see each other so these trucks are coming down i'm taking pictures of the nva and their trucks and just some civilian cars and there have been of course motorcycles and mopeds and stuff like that going by

so in between bubba went out and put in an anti-tank device buried it put it out there brought back the debts because we want to go we're going to blow up a truck with troops in it capture a live POW and get out because the Air Force was so quick to respond we knew we could pick it up and be out of there in 20 minutes or less

get it all set up we pull back in the clear on my radio because I'm carrying the radio I always carry the radio

ST or RT Idaho you are to stop the mission return to base ASAP per the order of General Creighton Abrams He replaced Wesmoreland and he was now the overall commander for all armed service troops in Vietnam.

Like WTF, so instead of being a good combo guy, say, I can't hear you, we did it.

We pulled back

and we did an extract,

no gunfire.

They just came in, pulled us up, took us back to base, and we got back to base.

It's like WTF, we had the ambush set up.

We could have had a POW.

Premier Syanouk in Cambodia filed a protest over a white phosphorus grenade that we threw down on the NVA.

He wasn't upset about the 100,000 NVA who were in Cambodia.

That was cool.

But us and our white phosphorus grenade, he was upset about.

So to Colonel Drake, he was really cool, he says, okay, he said, what happened out there?

I said, well, sir, you know, we got it pulled out under fire.

I put that thing right down that guy's head.

I wanted them to suffer as much as they could.

He says, you forgot about the rules of engagement.

I said, well, yes, sir.

I just bent them a little bit.

He said, okay, well, what's the official story?

I said, sir, I really regret that that hand grenade threw a fell out of the helicopter.

I still don't know how it exploded on contact with the ground.

It must have been that fall.

He says, okay.

I said, don't do it again.

He covered my ass with crate and aprons on that.

But that's how upset they were.

They pulled us out of the fucking field on that.

Just unbelievable.

So the next day, we're back.

We got inserted.

Perfect insertion again.

And there we did that multiple.

He sent you out of the field for a fucking white phosphorus grenade.

Yeah.

And a complaint from the premier of Cambodia, Sinook.

He talked about political bullfucking shit.

Excuse my French, sir.

God, it was just, we were furious.

Because they didn't know we were there.

It was the perfect insert.

That ambush, we would have gotten the POW and war out of there.

We had all the handcuffs ready to go, the plastic time me downs and everything.

We were psyched.

Bub and I, once again, were planning our R ⁇ Rs, you know.

Because it was just, it was like a dream mission, a perfect insertion.

We did the fake, fake land,

got right there, South, took us right out to the road, set everything up, put the claymores out for security, and man, we were ready to roll.

And Bub was just so good with explosives and stuff.

So the next day we get inserted again,

and this time it was in the afternoon.

We had a good insertion, we're set up at night, put up the RON, but it was hinky.

I mean, just hinky being

on the ground in Cambodia because everything's so flat.

There's no mountains and minimal vegetation.

The south found a couple of places where we could pick for a good RON, put out double claymores.

And during the night, I was just hinky all night.

We got up in the morning, moved out, and we were going to go back to try to do another POW snatch

and again Covey came back or somebody from the 20th came out give a combo check and said by the way go to an LZ

you're being extracted ASAP

and I said why he said we can't say they pulled us out again this time we came back and Colonel Drake was there and said hey

You just lost a helicopter up at FOB1.

A Kingby went down with seven green berets and they lost the whole crew.

So I've got to send you back to FOB1 because you're low on personnel up there now.

He says, our guys are training up, but we'll be able to cover our missions here.

We went back on November, I'll never forget it, November 30th, 1968, a Kingby, we had a mission that was called Eldest Sun.

And this is part of the PSYOPS, where the ammunition was doctored.

So they fired an AK-47 round that had been doctored.

It was Eldest's son, it would explode in their face.

And they put the,

they used 82 millimeter mortars, and those were doctored.

And so when they popped it in the tube, it would explode and just kill everybody because the shrapnel from

the tube as well as the rocket would kill any of the NVA right next to it.

And it had a psychological impact on the NVA.

to discourage them from using their ordnance, have to question it.

And so this unit, it was just a throw, it was a strap hanger mission.

Somebody up at the base said, Hey,

we want to do an eldest son mission.

We need six or seven guys.

We got a site.

So, they gave them extra ordnance, and they were going to go to this cache, put in the stuff,

and leave and just leave it out there for the NVA to pick up and use it and blow themselves up.

While they were en route, they got hit by anti-aircraft fire.

The Kinkby went down and crashed, and they lost everybody.

Damn.

Horrible.

Yeah, November 30th.

So

we went back north and within a few days we had another mission which was just a routine mission and then we had some downtime because of weather and then we came to Christmas Day 1968 and

Didn't even realize it was Christmas because we had been so busy planning, working things out.

And they had a mission where they wanted us to go in on a mountaintop for a trail watch and also look for enemy fuel lines.

Because the NVA were bringing down fuel lines from North Vietnam that were coming down into Laos, and the fuel lines would come down to refuel the trucks as they came down the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

But nobody had found any yet.

So our mission was to get this hilltop, get it inserted,

do a general area recon, then the next day move out to try to find some of those fuel lines.

So

in November of 68, President Johnson declared a bombing halt in North Vietnam.

And

all of, not all, but a lot of the anti-aircraft weaponry that had been up in North Vietnam began coming south.

So on Christmas Day, our target was just into Laos, maybe five or ten clicks into Laos.

And we had a kingbeast.

Captain Tuong, the one who pulled me out when I was upside down,

he was our pilot that day.

And instead of doing a yellow leaf Asparrow, he wanted to just go in low level, go right up and set down.

Well, somewhere he made a mistake.

We came in, we went up the mountainside, and halfway up the mountain, there was this little knoll.

He touched down on the knoll instead of going all the way up.

But we got out

and there was a lot of elephant grass.

So he's right there in the elephant grass.

He took off

and the elephant grass was thick.

Again, it's 10 to 12 feet.

To the south and to the west, and even to the northwest, it was so steep we couldn't go anywhere.

So Fuk led off to the east.

He's our point man.

And with Bubba May, Lynn Black was there with us.

And then we had Tuan, Fook and Hep.

And so we're there moving out.

and within a half hour or less,

we made contact, like contact with the NVA.

So we came back and we're back on that little knoll

and Lynn and I are talking.

It's like, well, the northeast is the last place that we can go.

And Lynn goes, but there's no activity there.

We don't see anything.

We've had contact here.

And then people started shooting at us from down the hill in the south.

And we were throwing hand grenades.

All of a sudden,

the elephant grass catches fire down the mountain and the wind

from that mountain area was blowing those flames up the hill and then the NVA were going around when they saw that they were going around and setting fires on the base of that knoll that we're on so at one point the elephant grass was burning we're looking down the hill you have all these smoke waves and then the heat waves you see you could look through and you could see the nva there lighting stuff further down the mountain.

But they weren't shooting at us.

They were all lighting up the mountainside.

So I declared a prairie fire emergency.

Spider was flying cubby that day.

We couldn't go.

Oh, and Spider comes out and he goes, do not go to the northeast.

We had an intel report.

There's an NVA ambush waiting for RT Idaho there.

I never had an intel report like that.

So we didn't go.

Now we're fighting the fire.

Landon Bubba cut S4,

try to blow the flames back down the hill.

But the mountain and the wind and everything was blowing that stuff up.

Thankfully, Captain Tuong got there and he came up above us and he came down the mountain flying sideways.

And I looked up and saw Captain Tuong and I recognized him because from that day, mission when I was upside down and other missions, and we of course had bought him drinks, he came down and he landed and the proposed bars blew back all the flames.

We jumped on that kingby.

When he lifted off, whoosh,

all of the LZ was covered with flames.

Wow.

And of course we left under fire.

So we were firing at the NVA as we pulled out.

So that was Christmas.

And we barely got out of there that day.

And that night I took a shower.

And when I'm walking back, to my hooch from the shower, because the shower was over to the left, past the officers' barracks, and our hooches were here and

we uh as I walked back to my room I hear this little cheap transistor radio playing silent night

I go son of a bitch it's Christmas

I'm thinking about threatening mom and daddy grandmom you know what they're doing on Christmas day

and then I thought you know this is fucking crazy

I don't think I'm going to see my birthday we keep having missions like this Thanksgiving Day the upside down, October 4th, Echo 4, Echo 8.

This is, I don't think I'm going to see my birthday, but we'll just keep pushing on.

My birthday was January 19th.

But that moment in time standing there, I just didn't think we'd ever see the light of day until the new year.

Because they were bringing in more NVA and their tactics were getting tougher.

There's more of them.

What did the rest of the team think?

Never talked about it.

That was just private.

We closed FOB1 in the early January.

And of course, New Year's Eve, everybody's worried about a big, they had intel reports we're going to get hit.

So New Year's Eve, nobody got hit.

We played poker.

They closed the clubhouse early.

And Spider, we had a team on the ground.

And they got inserted on New Year's Eve day.

And they weren't happy about it, but they got inserted.

Spider went up at midnight, made a como check with him, and said, look, guys, be alert.

First thing thing in the morning, that team got hit.

All the three Americans were killed.

The three indig were left alive.

And

the bright light went in later that day and they were able to recover the bodies, bring them back.

And

that really struck home because, again, there are some teams that didn't have like the close relationship that I had with our little people.

our South Vietnamese.

I talked to Hep and Sal said, look, this is some Americans Americans and even some of the digits are going, like, why did the Americans die and the Vietnamese didn't die?

So, if you hear anything, you let me know.

Well, we didn't have any problem, but there are some people that were really unhappy about it.

And it had an impact in the camp, just the fact that we lost three men from FOB4.

And

that was just another example of them changing their tactics.

and they hit him, hit him hard.

So within the next couple of weeks, we had to begin to pack up for the move.

They were closing FOB1 at Fubai.

What we didn't know at the time was Intel had a report that the NVA were preparing another attack on FOB1 like they had done at FOB4 in August of 23rd of 1968.

We didn't learn that till years later.

We packed up

and we went down.

They flew us down to Kingby.

Captain Tin flew us down to FOB4.

We moved in down there.

And then

Bub and I had one more mission.

And

we had a mission where it was, I forget what the mission was, but we got on the ground.

Again, it was spotty weather.

It's January.

We get inserted.

We're on the ground and we moved.

It was a little bit more,

it was not as high in the mountains.

We were closer to the Vietnam border.

So the mountains weren't as severe, but there's still hills and things.

We moved moved for a few hours, and then Bubba had left behind a Claymore mine that was rigged.

That claymore went off.

So we knew that the trackers were at least there, and they would be trying to track us.

So we moved for a while longer.

We're getting near the end of the day now.

And we found a little clearing, and I called a tactical emergency.

And I got a hold of Covey, and Covey said he would be there shortly.

And

while we're waiting, Sal was putting out a Claymore mine.

And when he was moving back, he opened fire on the NVA coming at us from the north.

He opened fire, reloaded, hit him through a hand grenade and came back.

Then they hit us from the other side, which would be the east.

And then later they came at us from the side, from the south side.

So they were coming at us, but we were just a little bit of a high ground where they're coming off of that climbing up the mountain and we were like at a little small plateau and

cubby arrives we get tack air lickety split and we were just really lucky but we had been in contact they kept coming at us first from the south i mean from the north then from the east and then from the south and it just different troops would come and we had those firefights and it got pretty intense with the south and the east side.

So Cubby goes, hey, try to blow down a couple of trees so we we can get a helicopter in.

So in our spare time, in between the firefights, Bubba rigged

death charges to chop down the trees.

Well, you chop down two or three trees, but there was enough vegetation around that the trees couldn't fall.

Then once he blew them off the stump, the other trees would catch him.

So no helicopter could land.

We had to do strings.

So now we're back.

The helicopter comes back.

He tells us,

you're going to be extracted on strings.

We'll do it in two helicopters.

And in my mind, it's beginning to rain.

It's near the end of the day.

And the helicopter looked so high up when he threw those ropes out, I couldn't believe the ropes even reached us.

We were just really lucky.

They came down.

There were four ropes.

And I told the team, we're going to all go out of here together.

We put together three of the Vietnamese, two Vietnamese together, and then Bub and I had separate strings, and then the third Vietnamese.

And

so we had two and two.

However, it was, we figured it out.

We all put our Swiss seesaw in the middle of the firefight.

And then I talked to Bubba.

I said, hey, you know that claymore mine with the white phosphorus you got taped to it?

I said, do me a favor, put that on the tree here so we get extracted.

Put a time fuse on it.

So when we get extracted, that'll blow and that'll buy us some time to get out of the jungle.

he looked at me like WTF are you out of your mind and I said Bubba do this he said we don't get out of here now so he did it he put it up there put a time fuse on it we all hooked up they were lifting out I was on the rope that was the longest the lowest Bubba goes out and as he's going out he pulls that fuse and it lifted us straight up

and

We were just really lucky because

we weren't in the super high mounds and it was January, so it was cooler.

And I rolled the dice saying, take all six of us now.

Because it was just the dark was closing in, darkness.

And as we went up, that thing exploded.

And you just see the Claymore with the white phosphorus hitting those troops.

And for the first time, we could see their faces and stuff, well, from above.

As we got pulled out, And then right near the end, they were able to get us completely cleared.

They didn't drag us through the trees.

And there was 101st airborne guys that did that.

And we got pulled out, got back to base.

And I yelled to Cubby as soon as we cleared that tree.

I said, hey, we got all six here.

Don't bring the second helicopter.

And we had done A1 Skyraider gun raids.

We had 500-pound bombs that we used.

And that's one of those deals when you're on the ground, you just get elevated from the concussions.

You know how it is with the 500-pounders.

And it was just really close, just another day in SOG, you know.

Oh, yeah.

A couple days later,

Bubba came up to me and said, you know, this has been a long run.

He says, would you mind if they offer me a job up in headquarters?

I said, Bubba, he said, you've been a fucking stud, man.

If you want to go to headquarters, please go.

Because I just forever be in your debt.

You've just been a complete stud with me, all these missions, all we've been through, and we're still alive to talk about it.

That's fine.

you go.

So he went up to headquarters and then Lynn Black came on the team.

And Lynn was, he had been one of the 173rd.

He had that mission on October 5th that we briefly mentioned.

He was just an amazing guy.

Did you ever want to leave?

No.

No.

Why not?

Because,

well, two things.

After all that training, we knew that the Green Berets in Vietnam were special.

But SOG was special within the special unit.

And it was just really an honor to be there.

You know, we had all those special little privileges and quirks, like if we had to get on a flight to go to Saigon as a courier or something, we had passes.

If we flip that pass, if that plane was loaded, somebody had to come off so we could get on it and fly.

So we knew that we were the tip of the spear.

It was just an honor to be there.

to operate under those rules of engagement, even though we couldn't tell anybody about it.

You know, you write letters home to mom.

Hey, the weather was nice.

Yeah, you like my Vietnamese team members.

They're just wonderful guys.

We have a good time together.

I would have letters from grandmom stryker, and mom and mom would always write, and dad would write, and of course, brother and sister have a little correspondence, but never anything about what was going on.

And,

you know, years later, when my first book came out, dad read it.

He goes, You know,

I can never figure out why that black guy came by and picked up our trash.

He said he would come by regularly and pick up the trash.

Well, dad got a job at the post office,

and the post office was where the FBI was located.

And dad saw that guy coming out of the FBI office.

He goes, oh, he picked up your trash to see if you said anything or if we said anything to you.

that would have violated your NAD.

Wow.

That's how serious they were about it.

That's a real kick in the pants.

Those FBI agents were on it.

So Lim was there.

We had a couple of missions, nothing really that extraordinary.

And then we planned for a special mission where we were going to go up to Muguia Pass.

And Mugia Pass was up in Laos.

above the DMZ River.

You had the DMZ River that flowed through.

That's what divided North Vietnam from South Vietnam.

And then when it entered Laos,

it still continued to flow from the west to the east.

And that was divided.

We had targets that would be like MA 10, MA11, 12, 13, 14, 15.

And those were the areas that we were working really hard to try to find those pipelines.

And then above that, further north of

the river, was the Mugia Pass, which was where

any vehicular traffic from Hanoi coming south had to go through the Muguia Pass

and the Air Force knew it the NVA knew it and they had all kinds of anti-aircraft weaponry there

and

the plan was for us to go up on a plateau go in heavily armed with mortars take in extra guys extra claymores, and then

set up with the Air Force with the weather being clear for the next 48 hours just to back up that pass and then wipe out any supplies coming down to Ho Chi Minh Real.

Because the Intel reports said there weren't many, quote, many enemy there.

So we were going in heavy.

Lynn was going to take an M60.

We had a Captain O'Byrne with us, Michael Byrne, for intel purposes.

And

we were just wired up.

And that's the picture of my second book of being inspected was prior, day prior to that mission when we launched for it.

Now, we launched, and when we were in

to Laos above the DMZ River, they called us off.

They said that an aircraft had been shot down.

One or two aircraft had been shot down at the Muguia Pass, either that night or the day before.

And they said, eh, they shot down Phantom jets.

Maybe they might shoot down a slow-moving helicopter.

So they canceled it.

We came back, and then I went home two days later

at the end of my first tour of duty.

So at the end of April, went back to the Trang, signed out, went back home, saw mom and dad for a few days.

I had a little sweetheart down in Georgia, visited her for a couple days and then reported to Fort Devons, Massachusetts

up in the 10th group and was there and that was just god-awful duty.

Just hated every second of it.

And

A lot of guys like Spider, Pat Watkis, Jeff Johnkins, Tony Harrell, Rick Esteson, and those guys all went to 10th Special Forces Group, but they were in D Company.

And D Company was a full Green Beret company with A team set up, their training, they were doing missions.

And

so it was

a real company with Green Berets.

I was sent to Signal Company because of my MOS.

And it was chicken shit.

They had two young lieutenants in there.

They ran it like basic training almost.

And then we had the

fellow platoon sergeants that had been in 10th group, and none of them had been to Vietnam.

And they were proud of the fact that they had not been to Vietnam.

They were proud that they had not been to Vietnam.

That they had gotten out of it.

And they were kind of, at one point, they were kind of like, how could you be so stupid to not figure out a way to get out of that?

I said, what are you wearing on your head, asshole?

We had some words.

So I was there for five months, just got off of duty.

But we had young kids and we had competitions for signal competitions, you know.

So I tell these kids, look, we're going to win this competition just to piss everybody off because they hate me and they hate you guys because we keep winning the contest.

So my guys were sharp.

You had to go out and set up the net.

Whoever could set up the net the quickest and make combo back to base the quickest and all this kind of stuff.

Our guys did it.

And

so

we had a couple incidents at local bars.

And I decided, Spider-Parks told me that there's a gal in the Pentagon, Billie Alexander.

This is a wonderful woman.

Her sole job was assigning Green Berets to Southeast Asia, which would include that as well as Okinawa.

We had the first special forces group assigned there.

It was like a Wednesday or Thursday.

I drove down overnight, down to the Pentagon.

First light, Pentagon opens, 7 o'clock in the morning.

I was there with a bottle of wine, whatever her favorite wine was, Spider told me, and we had flowers.

Asked for Billy.

And then back then, it's like the doors were wide open.

You walk in, hey, where's Billy Alexander?

Oh, yeah, she's down here.

So I go down, knock on the door, walk in, ask for Billy.

She was over in the corner desk.

Hi, Billy.

My name's John Meyer.

I'm up of a 10th group.

I hate it.

And I'd really like to go back to CCN.

Oh, we could use people like you.

You've been there before, yes.

And

so we chatted a little bit.

I gave her the flowers and the wine.

Went back to my car, took a nap,

came back about 3 o'clock.

Billy says, here's your orders.

Go back.

My ETS was up December 1st.

She said, if you really want to go back, I've got to

extend your ETS into April.

Said, please do it.

Says, I don't want to be at Fort Devons Devons another day.

Went up to Fort Devons, cleared the next day, cleared the base, cleared the company.

Went home to mom and dad, gave them the news I was going back.

And on Monday morning, had a flight back to Fort Lewis and

heading back to Vietnam.

And I arrived up at Fort Lewis.

Jeffrey Junklins was there.

Jeffrey lived in La Jolla.

We had served together at FOB1.

He had a couple of amazing experiences that we could talk about another day.

So Jeff and I flew back to Vietnam together.

We landed in Cameron Bay, the same culture shock, getting off the plane, just smelling everything about it.

But instead of waiting in line and being processed, we had our duffel bags.

We had our orders already.

And we saw a Jeep that wasn't being used.

We requisitioned it, drove up to Natrang,

and he had a house up there where he had some friends that he had known from his, he had had four tours of duty previously.

So we visited this house and some of the mama sons,

and

they had these huge beds with mounds of marijuana and they had three women on each bed all rolling joints to sell to the GIs.

Amazing.

I wasn't into that.

But Jeff was up there and we hung out and had a nice lunch.

We finally reported for duty at Nitrang.

Because we had been there before,

cleared the base, went right up to CCN, reported into the Sergeant Major John Hobbes, and

I asked him if I'd get back on Idaho.

He said, yeah, Lynn Black is out there.

He could use a 1-1.

I said, yeah, let Lynn be the 1-0 because he's been on the team for a while.

So it's just one of those great moments.

I walked from headquarters down to the hooch.

Nobody was there.

I could hear shooting out in the range.

So Idaho was out on the range.

Lynn was running through the drill.

And as I'm walking out, the shooting stopped.

Nero coming back.

And that was such a joyous occasion seeing them.

Of course, it's like, you know,

they did everything, attack my sexual preferences on down to being dumb and stupid and everything.

It was really great to see the boys again.

So we celebrated, had a great Vietnamese meal that night with them over in the Vietnamese mess hall.

And we were back on the team.

So Lynn was the 1-0 for a while.

We ran a couple of missions, and then I became the 1-0.

And then the sergeant major goes, look, you got too much experience here.

Lynn, I want you to go somewhere else, tilt, just take over Ido again.

So I took over RT Ido.

Went back, and

it was an interesting time.

Lynn and I put together in our spare time, we worked

on a manual for running Recon.

Talked about the SOPs, and Lynn was just in phenomenal arts.

He drew up artwork for LZs, helicopters, strings tractions, anything we needed art for.

Lynn did it all.

Put it together, turned it and never heard another word about it.

But

I was there until

early part of April.

We had a mission.

We had a disagreement with our base commanding officer.

And then

we had a halasius party when I left at that time.

I was down in the trying for two weeks, then my ETS ran out.

I did guard duty at night.

The sergeant major told me, he said, you know, you got a choice.

You can extend.

I can give you any assignment because of your experience.

Or you go home and the re-induction, the reductions in force were starting at that time.

And I knew that was all bad.

You know, just going through those reductions in force are horrible.

And I said, well, I'll just go home.

Went back April 25th, signed out, went through the out processing, and you get the physical doctor looks at your ears and he goes, hey, you know,

your ears are bad.

You should have never been in the Army.

You should have never been here with ears like that.

I said, well, it's a little too late, Doc.

Did you ever get shot over there?

No.

No, I had shrapnel.

And again, talk about just the luck of the draw.

We had shrapnel a couple of times.

One time, a piece of shrapnel came up.

I had a weak little skimpy blonde mustache, hit me right here and knocked my head back, and stuck in.

But it ran out of energy.

The worst injury I ever had was from shrapnel

when Chow didn't throw the hand grenade.

We were practicing on base, and Chow threw the hand grenade, and it went off, and it's just like, oh.

So the shrapnel went through.

I was wearing jungle fatigues with buttons on them.

And the shrapnel went through the button and it went into my groin

and bled like a pig.

And our medics were busy with some kind of training.

So they packed me up and took me down to the Army hospital down there.

And the Army doctor went in with the sutures.

And they're digging around.

They said, wait a minute,

no anthesia or anything?

No anesthesia.

He goes, oh, I'm sorry.

I thought they gave it to you.

Well, he gave it to me again.

He was in there digging around.

He couldn't find it.

He says, look,

that piece of shrapnel lets you know when it wants to come out.

Passed me up.

And the second he left, man, I cleaned up.

I stole a pair of fatigues.

And I was wearing another pair of jungle boots or something.

What I was wearing were all bloodied up.

So all my bloody clothes were left.

I jumped in them and walked out of the hospital.

Found the telephone, called base, and they came and picked me up.

I'd rather be in the hands of Green Beret medics than those doctors that would dig around.

Now talking about that piece of shrapnel,

this past Wednesday I was in for an MRI because my urologist wanted me to go in to get an MRI because my PSA numbers are up a little bit.

I've always had high PSA numbers.

But she was concerned, so I go in for the MRI and I told the guy before he put me in the tube, I said, you know, be advised.

I have shrapnel in my groin.

Okay, let's take a picture.

picture I go in there we get all wound up put the stuff going it goes in there the thing is gone and it stops suddenly he pulled me out and he said that shrapnel is so big that we can't get a clear picture of your prostate or anything else they had a big black blob damn on their photo so that little piece of shrapnel came back but now 55 years later Damn.

Yeah.

What was it like coming home for you?

Each time for me, it was good.

I mean, I didn't have what a lot of the other vets had.

I wore the uniform.

People knew the Special Forces guys.

So I don't think a lot of SF guys were messed around with.

And I was proud of the uniform.

And

each time when I came home, I had mom and dad were there and

family.

I had my old church.

And the guys that I grew up with, we played softball.

We had a bowling team, put together a bowling team with the young guys.

And the transition for me was relatively compared to what other guys went through.

You know, and I had flunked out of college.

That's why I went in the Army.

So I knew I had to get, I wanted to get my degree

because mom had a degree or certificate for her days when she was a young girl.

And I really wanted to get a degree.

And I went back to school.

I had been phys ed, but they came up with a political science major.

I loved it.

So I became a political science major and a minor in English for writing.

And at that time, the GI bill was $200 a month.

Whether you went to Harvard University or Trenton State College, as I did, $200 a month was your GI bill.

And so I went back to Trenton State.

My dad got me a job driving school buses.

During that time, got involved in the school newspaper there and drove school buses just for the chunk change and ran my GI bill right down to the so I used all 36 months of it.

What was it like in school for you?

With a bunch of kids that had never been to war?

Yeah, it was really different.

But in some ways,

the majority of the kids, there was never

much of an issue.

We had other veterans on campus.

And I wore my fatigue jacket for several years.

And my footwear was my jungle boots, my original pair of jungle boots.

I wore them for years

on campus.

What was it like not being able to talk about what you did?

That's Dave B.

Gore.

That's what you're supposed to do.

So,

and anybody who really was trying to ask questions about it, I say, well, no, we were special forces.

We did a lot of hard work, dangerous stuff.

And I talk about my little people right away.

We worked with the South Vietnamese, so my story about Vietnam is different than a lot of regular Vietnam vets who went there.

I mean, they would go there without any culture or indoctrination at all or appreciation of their history.

When your dad read your first book

and read it,

what was that conversation like?

It was pretty quick.

It was quick?

Yeah, yeah, because

he read it.

And, you know, at that point in time,

I was living in California.

Mom and dad had moved from Trenton to Colorado where my brother and sister were living.

And Dave had three kids there.

So they had it very close to those grandkids.

And

they loved Denver area.

So they were there.

And we talked on the phone.

But it was about that garbage man that first and foremost.

He said, you guys did some crazy stuff.

But

never too much beyond that.

And he was always like respectful and distant, always very supportive.

Never, ever any doubt or anything from dad or mom for that matter.

Now, when I went back to Vietnam a second time, mom cried.

That wasn't easy, but I had to do the right thing for me.

Explained to her why I had to do it.

And of course, I didn't tell her about the MPs coming in the base on Monday, the day after I left.

And they wanted to talk to me about a couple of bar fights.

There had been some property destruction, allegedly.

Allegedly.

But at this point, point, I'll take him to fifth.

You could talk about SOG, but you can't talk about the bar fights.

Well, it was Spider-Parks and the guys, you know?

Tony Harrell.

I mean, Tony, he was like a bruiser.

Let's hear what.

Well,

we were in this bar, and

there's some other Army personnel there.

There's words between a regular Army guy, a leg.

and one of our guys.

And so there's words that one guy throws a punch and Tony's there supporting our guy.

And

there's a couple fights.

So, whenever there's a fight, I would always be rear security.

So, their guys are doing the fighting.

I'm making sure nobody hits them from the back

because I'm not a really good fighter.

I never was good with my hands, other than playing the piano, you know.

And

somebody, and to this day, I don't know who, but somebody had picked up one of those chairs and threw it at the six-foot mirror.

And the beer bottle, not beer, but all the liquor bottles, and the mirror shattered.

So somebody thought that may have been me, but I don't know.

Back then, I drank a little bit more than I do now.

In fact, I don't drink now.

So anyway, that may have been the incident.

And while I was there,

you know,

I got a job pumping gas on the weekends and just to make extra money.

I had a really nice 442W30.

It was a 1969.

That car was slick.

And so we had that for a few months and then the insurance got too costly.

And

I blew up the engine on the New Jersey turnpike at 130 miles an hour

going home.

But the warranty covered it.

The car dealer was really kind.

And then we got it rebuilt.

And

what about the aftermath, John?

I mean, all the killing.

All the adrenaline, everything you did.

Well, that adrenaline thing was always something that you clearly missed.

I mean, you know,

you and everybody you've ever talked to have been through that.

In my case,

I tried to stay physical.

I went back to school.

I played soccer, the JV soccer team.

I wasn't that good, but I knew the coach.

And the coach let me come out and play because I was a veteran.

And I'd get a little game time at the end of the game when either we had lost or won a game.

But it was part of just being physical with it all, you know.

And my new mission was I had to get back and I wanted to get that degree.

So I really focused on that.

Had a few interesting girlfriends along the way and then got involved in a school newspaper.

It was the signal.

And there was an ad in the paper for a sports writer.

So I did some sports.

And then did some features like book reviews, movie reviews, of course record reviews, Led Zeppelin,

you know Emerson Lincoln Palmer, all this great music that was coming out then.

I mean good times, bad times, King Crimson.

So I did all that, but I started doing opinion columns.

I was the only voice on the paper that was, when we invaded Cambodia, I talked about saying, this is cool, it's a good deal.

We should have done it a long time ago.

People flipped out.

But, and in fact, one time,

after one of my columns, I get a phone call from this kid.

He's crying.

He says, you got to stop writing that shit.

I said, why?

He says, well, my name is John Meyer, and my mother thinks it's me writing that shit that you're writing.

So from that point, I made my byline, the initial J.

Stryker Meyer.

And that was my byline for the next 30 years.

And but I did that, and then we got involved in news.

And in the spare time, I was doing photography.

I just loved shooting.

And they had a little cheap

Yashika camera that was a signal camera.

So that was mine.

And I used it and we finally got a photo lens.

So I did photography and spent a lot of time in the dark room, wrote stories, and then became editor.

And our editorships ran from January to December.

so that when the new school year started, the editorial board would be strong and we could recruit new people into the newspaper from there.

So I was editor for two years,

day and night, worked every day on that paper for two years.

And then at the end of it, got hired by the Trenton Times in Trenton, New Jersey.

And

I hadn't had a vacation in over like two and a half, three years.

So I drove out to Colorado to see my sister.

for a couple of days, spent a couple of days with her, and then on the way home, saw Tony Harrow and a couple of friends that I served with and then went to work at the Trenton Times, reported in there January, middle January of 1975.

Worked there for 10 years as a reporter and then

I was owned by the Washington Post.

So this is in the glory days, 1975.

We had Catherine Graham came to our Trenton Times newsroom at least three different times.

twice to the auditorium with Woodward and Bernstein, who were like journalistic guides.

They were all there talking about Watergate and about our newspaper because it was a proud property of the Washington Post.

And

I started out as a reporter just covering local governments.

I was a good reporter, but my writing was weak.

And after my first seven months, the editor, who was a World War II vet, who hired me, said,

the other editors here want you to work on your writing.

I'm going to hire you.

I'm going to fire you as a full-time staff writer, but I want to hire you back as a stringer.

He said,

so

we'll pay you for any article, and you're shooting pictures, any pictures you shoot.

So I did both.

I made more money as a stringer than I did as a staff writer.

And I still covered my old beats.

And then

after, I don't know, eight or nine months, he hired me back.

I came back as a full-time reporter and

did

a little bit more in the municipal beast that I covered the courts.

And I covered the courts for seven years, did investigative reporting along the way in my spare time.

Because the courts, you always had recess in the summer.

They're taking vacations whenever they had an excuse.

And so between covering the courts, we had an opportunity.

Twice we made new law in New Jersey for First Amendment rights for reporters in New Jersey on court cases that I covered.

And we took the the cases all the way to the Supreme Court

and worked with the New York Times attorney, Floyd Abrams, on it.

And

1981, the Washington Post sold

the Trenton Times to a company that was just

on, they came in, the management was there on Friday.

They said, we're here, there's not going to be any cuts or anything.

And that was Friday.

On Monday,

When everybody came to work, there were 60 less people there.

We had a staff of 120 on Friday.

On Monday, there were 60.

And they laid that many people off.

I was one of the ones that remained on because of the courthouse beat and my investigative reporting and stuff.

And

then in 82, one of my editors had moved to San Diego, and he offered me a job.

So I came out and interviewed for it.

But

for some reason, it just didn't work out.

And my first wife was pregnant.

And

so we had our first child in Trenton and I worked at the Trenton Times for two more years and then

on February 1985 we moved to San Diego.

Lived in North San Diego County, worked at the San Diego Union there for

eight years, did a year as a freelance writer working, I mean a general assignment reporter, working it could be nights covering the Clintons when they're coming to town for NAFTA or dead bodies floating in the Tijuana River, things like that.

And of course, in 1985, Kiki Camarin, the DEA agent, was killed after he was tortured by the Mexicans.

And

the FBI had tapes of the torture.

And we learned about who was there.

There was state attorneys,

cops, federales.

state police, all these top people were there.

They were trying to get Kiki Camarin to tell them who his sources were because their DEA was hurting Mexican drug trafficking and they knew that Kiki Camarini was the poor man on that mission.

Wow.

Just horrible.

So we did a bunch of stories and at least two of the stories, particularly we did a story, myself and another investigative reporter, John Stanifer.

We were there and we filed a report.

We had to meet with our lawyers in the morning.

talk to the editors, tell them what we're doing.

And then

the Mexican government filed formal complaints against our newspaper and us particularly.

And they went right to Ed Meese who was the attorney general then.

They did nothing about it because the stories were accurate.

Wow.

Oh, yeah.

Did you deal with any type of depression or

anything after Vietnam?

No, I mean, some nights you just go,

that adrenaline kick.

And the guys.

And being a Green Beret

in a secret war at the top of our game, I missed being being a part of that.

But also, thanks to the NVA, I also knew that the life expectancy wasn't that good.

We had a high casualty rate, one of the highest casualty rates in the Vietnam War.

We've recently had more accurate numbers on that,

but just from sheer experience, just from my introduction to Spike Team Idaho, you know, the team gets wiped out.

There's an opening now.

And that happened several times.

We had, by the time that happened,

we had had two other teams wiped out in Saog.

We had plus we had Villarosa and his team.

Everybody was killed except for the American, and that American was sent back to bring back the message of what they would do to our Saag guys in

Laos.

Did you ever go back to Vietnam?

Never.

Why do you think so many

Vietnam vets moved back to

the area?

Cambodia, Laos.

Oh,

the people, you know, again,

once you deal with the people who live there, not the politicians, not the fucking communists,

and certainly not any of the law enforcement that's there, because that's corrupt also, basically.

But it's the people.

Any American that goes back to Vietnam today is always greeted warmly, 99.99% of the time, because the people realize the difference being under communism and being free

and they appreciate what we had done to sacrifice they know the sacrifice what did you think about the pullout

oh it sucked i mean it seemed very similar to what we just experienced in afghanistan yep and again politicians are involved the two key reasons for the pullouts in our case

We had the Easter offensive of 1972, and the NVA had planned planned that so that they would hit all of our major cities as they did in 1968 and they would crush and just take over Vietnam by force.

Well,

they didn't.

And there's also a secret SOG story here that's never been told before as one of the reasons why they didn't.

And if we want, we could talk a little bit about that.

But in 1972, they were held and they didn't break.

And from that point on,

we removed more people and we had no combat troops left by 1973.

And even Saog was shut down in 1972.

The eight-year secret war came to an official end.

And the promise was the Vietnamese would fight it and that we would continue aid to support them with TAC Air and support their Air Force because their Air Force and helicopter pilots were phenomenal.

And they had some very good units.

But

Congress withheld the funding.

And Ford begged them to keep the money going.

And they cut off all funding.

And without the tack air and that support, you know, everybody will say maybe they would have fallen eventually.

Well, maybe they would have, but the way we did it sucked.

And in my case, I'm in the newsroom and we have seen this happen, the way it's breaking down.

And then April 30th, they came across the AP clacking across.

They tore it off and they announced it in the newsroom.

I went back to the men's room and just sat there for an hour or so, just crying.

Tore up, thinking about Sal, Hep, and the boys, and the guys, they're all there.

And from it all, Hep was the only one that got out.

On that day, Hep's father had arranged for him to get a pass at Tonson at the Air Base.

There was a C-130 pulling out when Hep got there with his wife and his, I think it was his son.

The C-130 had the tailgate halfway up.

Hep gets behind it.

He throws his child in there.

Somebody catches the child.

He helped his wife get up.

Then he fell down.

He jumps up because now the C-130 is moving down the runway.

He runs alongside that helicopter.

I mean, the C-130.

An arm reached out and grabbed him and pulled him into it.

He came back.

Came back to the States.

Took a while to get through it all with a sponsor and everything.

He ended up in Houston.

And

the History Channel did a piece in 2000 called The Suicide Missions.

And that was one of the first productions that aired about SAG.

And they did a good job with it.

And in it, I had that picture that I have on the front page of Across the Fence of Hep.

And the guy from the History Channel calls up and said, hey, there's a guy here who says

his uncle's in that picture you showed.

Well, I almost shit a brick.

This is 2000.

You know, like 25 years they have to leave in Vietnam.

So he gives me the phone number.

I call him up.

It was Hep's nephew living in Carlsbad, nine miles away.

So I called this young man up.

I said, hey, this is me.

I know your uncle connected with Hep.

We had phone calls.

And then his nephew told me, Hep's going to be out.

out to Orange County for a wedding in a couple of months.

I said, well, tell me.

So he gave me the flight number and everything.

So the night that Hep flew into Orange County, I was at the airport.

He came in on a late flight, 9, 9.30 or something.

I'm there.

I hep gets off the airplane.

He goes, my, you're still buku dingy down.

You're too tall and your feet too big.

No, hello.

I missed you.

Now it's like right away.

He says the typical smartass, you know.

Buster your balls.

Oh, yeah, wonderful guy.

I mean, he was a great interpreter.

I mean, like I said, he spoke four or or five languages.

He corrected my English.

That's how good he was.

And, of course, he always wore sunglasses.

But him and Sal, we rebuilt the team around them.

And live today, thanks to the team and their courage, the Kingby pilots, aviators that supported us, fast movers, A1 Skyraiders.

No, even Spectre.

I mean, Hector is one mission.

We went through four Spectres on one night.

Killed thousands.

But we didn't have time to count the bodies oh yeah

so I was very fortunate and again it's like

I just felt that there's divine intervention here many times that helped me get back here yeah I would say definitely so oh absolutely

for sure

well John I just want to say it was an honor to interview you and have you sitting across from me and I'm so glad we did this and

welcome home.

Glad to be home and glad to be here, sitting in the same chair that Sarah sat in,

and all those other great interviews you've had along the way.

There, my god, legend.

We just go down the list, man.

These shows are phenomenal.

Thank you.

So, my wife and I are big fans.

We'll continue to be so, sir.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Brother, cheers.

Until next time.

This is Larry Flick, owner of the Floor Store.

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