#227 Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

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Dynamite Dick Thompson, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Honored to be here and really appreciate the opportunity to

sit in this chair

and

in this room, particularly as you're getting ready to transition to the new one.

So

honored to be here.

Honored to be a SOG guy on your show.

Honored to sit across from you, and I truly mean that.

This came highly recommended from our mutual friend, John Stryker Meyer.

And

he's told us a lot about you.

And,

you know, I just, this is the last interview in the studio.

And I wanted the perfect guest to

shut the lights off with.

And it is a real honor to be sitting here with you.

So thank you for making the time to be here.

And

I'm really honored to document your story and your history.

And it's going to be good.

It's going to be a powerful interview.

You ready?

Ready.

Looking forward to it.

Me too.

Me too.

So every guest starts out with an introduction here.

Dynamite Dick Thompson.

Last interview in the studio.

21-year retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Green Beret Ranger and MAC v SOG operator who ran over 20 cross-border recon direct impact missions into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam.

Awards include four bronze star medals, two with V for Valor, two air medals for aerial combat, one with V for Valor, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Gold Star for Valor.

Natural-born tracker raised on your grandparents' farm, you could smell the NVA in the jungle.

Distinguished member of the Airborne Ranger Training Brigade, served as a professor of military science at the University of Georgia, author of SOG, codenamed Dynamite, a two-book series about top-secret missions that were once classified for 20 years.

A PhD in psychology, founder of high-performing systems, and author of The Stress Effect, teaching leaders how to make decisions under pressure.

Among your hobbies, you are a master scuba diver.

You've made over 1,200 free-fall halo parachute jumps, earned a black belt in karate, karate, and you're an Iron Man.

You're a husband, a father, a grandfather, and most importantly, a Christian.

Thank you.

I'm sure I'm missing some.

But

yeah, like I said,

it is an honor to be here with you.

And so

I just want to do a life story with you, document everything you've been through, and

hopefully bring a lot of hope to veterans that are coming home from war and that are trying to find their new way in life.

So

once again, it's an honor.

Thank you.

And

one of the things that we started doing in our company back in the 90s was

we traveled all the time, always going through an airport.

I implemented a policy that said if you see someone in uniform or you can tell they're a veteran standing in the Starbucks line, pay for their coffee.

Thank them for their service.

And then, so everybody had a special credit card from a company card, you know, to pay for that with.

And then a little bit later, we bumped it up some more.

And what we started doing is also giving them

challenge corn.

Oh, man.

Thank you.

That

basically says, thank you for your service.

We care about you.

Welcome home.

And, you know, we'll give that out.

I've been doing that now for a long time.

It's not the big, fancy one like, you know, the corn John gave you, but it's one that

We could share with a lot of veterans who had never never been welcomed home.

So, you know, I'm a little biased along that line because,

you know, when I came home, people literally spit at me coming through the airport.

And,

you know, I also talk later on that my biggest challenge in the beginning, coming home from Vietnam,

was

restraint.

Coming through the airport and listening to somebody yell

baby killer, murderer, or whatever,

but noticing that

they were not close like you and I are now.

They were back at what they considered a safe distance.

And I used to think,

they have no clue.

I can close the distance between us in less than a second,

because I'm not carrying 90 pounds of gear.

And I could be real ugly to you when I got there.

So I have to restrain myself, know that I could do that, but I don't have to do that.

And just a lot of things, just based on coming from the Wild West back to a country that has some laws and is civilized, you know, I've got to come back to this world.

And one of the things that I try to work with veterans on is

understanding the skill set you have

and how to use it.

Because most veterans think, well, you've taught me all this war stuff and tactics.

I can't use that stuff back in the civilian war.

Yes, you can.

You know how to plan, make decisions, organize.

I mean, you have a whole skill set.

that can help you be successful.

And you got to apply some of the SOG techniques that we'll probably talk about in a little bit to keep moving forward.

And you can be successful.

So, anyway.

I love that.

I love that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Everybody starts off with a gift.

Thank you.

Vigilance elite gummy bears

made right here in the USA.

It's just candy.

There's no marijuana in it.

No CBD.

Just candy.

So they're legal in all 50 states.

John Meyer said

there might be something in here.

He said he noticed some kind of charge after he ate something.

Yeah.

So I'll put it right there.

And if I start to run down after a while, I'll consume a couple of them.

But thank you.

I really appreciate that.

Hey, my pleasure.

My pleasure.

And then

one more thing before we get going.

So I have a Patreon account and that's a subscription account.

And we've turned that into quite a community.

I think we're at 85,000 patrons now.

And

they're the reason that I get to be here and that I have this amazing team that I'm surrounded by.

And so one of the things that we do is we offer the Patreon community the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

So this is a question from somebody you might know.

John Stryker Meyer.

Please explain how you carried seven Claymores, Buku Car 15 rounds, hand grenades, and M79 rounds.

I believe you carried it on most missions.

Oh, and I forgot your pistol.

How did you carry all that?

After the first mission that I went on, where I carried the normal loadout,

I used up so much ammunition in the ambush that we went into this this is not going to work so

once I became the team leader then instead of carrying five frag grenades per person

per team member I upped it to ten

so

What that did was, and I usually went out with six or seven people.

So if I had seven men on the team carrying ten frag grenades apiece, that's 70.

With 70 frag grenades, you can do some serious damage.

So

I also upped the Claymore to three per person.

Some people,

like the M79 man, usually didn't carry a Claymore because he was carrying so many

grenades with him.

But everybody went to three.

Seven-man team, 21 Claymores.

Wow.

And then I also started

at night on the most likely avenue of approach coming into our

remain overnight position.

I would put out seven claymores, daisy chained.

One click, seven claymores go off,

ten and a half pounds of C4,

4,900 steel balls traveling at 4,000 feet a second.

The blast,

the steel balls would just shred whatever was out there.

And if you were far enough back or happened to be behind a tree and survived,

you would say,

this guy's crazy.

Nobody sets off all of their claymores at one time.

So now the survivors, we can go down and get them.

And they start to come.

That's when they run into three more daisy chains, and that goes off.

So you catch them by surprise with that.

Wow.

And then they start running into claymores on time fuses that are randomly going off as they're trying to come.

And yeah.

So

in their dossier that they put together on me, it was, this guy's a nut.

Don't go charging after his team because he's going to run into all those Claymores.

And

at night, you want those area-type weapons like the Claymores and those frag grenades.

You can start chunking frag grenades at them.

They don't know where they come from.

And they're just going off everywhere.

Man.

And then

I like,

well, let me say, if you shoot at me, I'm going to shoot shoot back.

I really don't like people shooting at me, so I will shoot back.

So I found I needed to carry more ammunition.

And most guys will carry, you know, 800 rounds or so, or maybe 700, some 600.

I went to 1,000.

I carried 50 20-round magazines.

50 20 round magazines.

And in my 20-round magazines, I put 20-rounds

because

I used brand new magazines every mission.

I would draw new magazines, so everybody had new magazines.

So they'd only been loaded for three or four days.

So the springs were fine.

They were working good.

So I never in a firefight had my Car 15 jam.

Not from

the number of rounds in the magazine.

But, you know, so my people had a lot of them.

I didn't force them to put 20

if the 18 rule had been ingrained in them,

but I encouraged them to put in 20.

Because when you run up against the NVA,

you're sitting there with a 20-round magazine for initial contact.

The

NVA's got a 30-round magazine.

They've already got 10 more rounds than you do.

You run out first, and then the firepower shifts totally over to them now.

So, until we finally got the 30-round magazines, we were a disadvantage every time as soon as we started.

So, you needed to be able to load faster and

shoot longer.

Man, I never thought about that 20-round magazine versus 30-round magazine.

It's a big difference.

Yeah, yeah.

How long did it take them to get you guys 30-round magazines?

We didn't get, you know, I got there in 68.

We didn't get the 30-rounds until

69.

And when we first got them,

they couldn't get many.

So I could go draw one 30-round magazine per Car 15.

Oh, man.

So we all have one, you know, in our weapon to start with.

That was after they made a tweak.

I discovered early on, as did a lot of other people, that if you have that 30-round magazine and you car 15 and you jump off the skid of the helicopter, when you hit the ground,

your gun got lighter all of a sudden because the magazine's laying down in the mud.

Because

the spring

on the magazine retainer wasn't strong enough to hold that extra weight.

Wow.

So the shock of hitting the ground, the magazine would fall out.

So we had to take the weapons back in, have the spring changed,

even to a stronger one, so the magazine would stay in there.

Jeez.

But at least

you had a 30-round magazine to start with.

But, you know,

I guess my teams just had problems, discipline problems, maybe.

It seemed that We lost our 30-round magazines almost every time we were in contact.

And I'd have to go back to

S4 and draw some more 30-round magazines to replace the ones we lost.

Wow.

And

what, you know, but then that

somebody noticed one day, how are you guys getting so many 30-round magazines?

You're only supposed to have one per gun.

Your guys are all carrying more.

Well, I guess they found some of the ones they lost.

What kind of pistol were you carrying?

I tried different ones.

I carried a

1911

.45 caliber pistol.

It was heavy.

It only held seven rounds.

But man, if you hit somebody with that,

it would put them down.

I mean, it hits hard.

But then I changed to a Browning high-power 9mm,

because now I double the amount of ammunition number of shots in there.

So I played with those a little bit, and then I started carrying

a high-standard.22 caliber long rifle with an integrated silencer

because that thing was so quiet.

Little hush puppy, huh?

Yes.

You know, you've got to be careful where you shoot them.

You know, 22 if it hits a vest or something,

it's not going to penetrate.

So I tried to go for softer spots like the temple.

I did a lot of practice and trying to get a guy, and particularly a tracker, if he were tracking me,

then I would tell this team, you guys keep going, I'm going to drop back.

Somebody's behind us, I'm going to drop back here and have a little chat.

So I could go back and take out a tracker.

I could take out a dog.

I could do things without, you know, a big disturbance.

And particularly at night,

there were times when we had people walk inside our little perimeter.

I mean, we were all within arm's reach of each other in a little circle.

And sometimes you'd have somebody walk right through the middle of it.

So you couldn't open up with a Car-15 because it just light the whole area.

But with that 22,

I could tap you, particularly if I set off a claymore, made a little noise, shot you at the same time.

Nobody'd ever know I took you out.

Wow.

You had people inside the perimeter when you guys were at arm's length distance and you're only six to nine people.

How many times have that happened?

Several.

And

we can talk maybe in a little bit about where I had a

longer experience of someone inside.

That's pretty cool.

Let's talk about it now.

We were,

I had 22-man team.

We had put two of our recon teams together

because we were going after a group of NVA that had a group of American prisoners that they were trying to take

through Malaos

into

North Vietnam and we were trying to stop them

and We had stopped for an RON.

We had 22 people so it was a circle

almost as big as this room in here

and

they were already arm's lengths apart.

I was in the in the center

with my assistant team leader

and

It was about 21.30.

It was dark.

You couldn't see your hand in front of your face

And I was really tired.

My eyes were starting to roll back in my head.

I was leaning against a tree.

And I heard a twig break.

And I opened my eyes and I was thinking to myself, that sounded like a twig break inside the perimeter.

And then I heard another one.

And I realized someone was inside our perimeter

and was coming directly toward me.

I'm laying back, I have Car 15 laying across my lap

and I can hear this person moving

and I knew all of our people knew the rule, once you go down, you don't get back up at night.

Anybody moving is a bad guy.

And this guy's coming right toward me.

And I think he's going to step on me.

I slid my selector switch over the full auto

and I'm laying there and he's coming and

the air is so thick and at this point I can mentally see a silhouette coming at me, although I can't really see the silhouette at you.

I know where it is based on the sound and now I'm starting to hear him breathe.

I'm starting to hear his heartbeat because he realizes he's inside the perimeter

and he's probably about to get killed.

So his heart is thumping.

He's coming right at me.

I can't open up because I don't light the whole perimeter up and we'll be in trouble.

So I couldn't get to my knife.

So I decided just as he gets to me, I'm just going to shoot my left hand up.

I'm going to grab a hold of his chest, whatever he's got there, and I'm going to pull him at the same time raise my leg up and trip him.

I'm going to pull him down to the ground.

I'm going to hit him in the side of the head with the muzzle of my Car-15 as I'm bringing him down.

If he yells, if he fires his weapon, I'm going to pull the trigger.

So he's coming.

He got into position.

I grabbed him.

I jammed the muzzle into the side of his head, just cut a big gash in his head.

I bring him down down face first into the mud,

and he didn't say a word, didn't make a sound.

It scared him so bad, he didn't even grasp when I grabbed him.

And then I started thinking, now what?

I'm sitting here holding this guy face down in the mud.

What am I going to do with him?

And then I heard a whisper.

And the whisperer was Chung Wee, Chung Chung Wee, Lieutenant in Vietnamese.

Lights, lights.

What?

And he said, lights, lights.

And I looked up the ridge towards the top of the mountain, and you could see lights,

lanterns coming down the mountain.

About 400 people, if he counted one or two people in between each lantern, probably 400 people coming down the ridge line toward where we were.

That's not good.

We're on a ridge line like that.

We picked it so people couldn't get around us.

They're coming straight at us.

But then I turned and I looked down the ridge.

They were that same number coming up the ridge.

And they were going to come right to us.

We were going to be right in the middle when they got up here, about,

you know, I guess it made it 800.

Whoa.

So

then I realized the guy that I've got face down in the mud is the Vietnamese captain that we took on this mission with us.

He didn't, you know, he didn't have the experience.

He didn't realize it when he got up to come tell me there were lights coming

that I might shoot him.

or somebody might shoot him or knife him.

But anyway, you know,

he did call that to our attention.

And so these guys are all coming at us.

They're going to intersect right on us.

So

my

RTO

crawled over and said,

sir,

you want it on the radio.

And

I got the radio.

And this is This was a KY38 with the KY28

manual code loader in it and all that stuff.

You had to have that daily code set in this

coder.

You had to be on the right frequency.

This was the highest security radio that you could manually carry around.

Anyway, so I was talking, you know, I answered it, and it was Saigon.

And

they said, you are now a prairie fire emergency.

Meaning, everything in that part of Southeast Asia now belongs to you.

Everything, every asset that's within range of you, every asset that still has armament left is being diverted to you to try to get you out.

And I'm looking up and down,

I can see how we are prairie for our emergency.

So

I copied that.

I got my assistant team leader over and said, here's what's going on.

And then the RTO says,

sir, you've got to hear this.

And I said,

WTF, Schaefer, what?

You know, I've got 800 people coming.

Why don't you going to tell me?

I picked up the radio, the hands up.

And there's a Vietnamese woman on the radio.

Classes.

There's no way that she can talk to this radio, but she's talking to this tactical radio, secure one.

And

she's reading our obituary.

What?

She's reading our obituary that we were all killed in action that night.

She's reading

name by name of everybody who's laying in that perimeter.

And she reads

my name.

She reads off

Dick Thompson

and keeps going.

The Saigon's monitoring.

And they heard her read my name off as Dick Thompson and they say,

okay, she made a mistake.

She doesn't even know his name.

Who is Dick Thompson?

His name's Henry.

No one at that point on that side of the world knew me by Dick Thompson except for Eldon Bardswell,

later Major General Bardswell.

And we'd been on the same team before.

But somehow she knew my name that no one else knew.

And

as I'm listening to it,

there's music in the background.

Not just music,

but I realized this is the same music

that as a little kid

at 12 o'clock every day at my grandmother's house, She would say things like, boys, boys, quiet and down.

I need to hear the obituaries in the county.

And there's a southern kind of music that they played in the south when they would read obituaries, read about somebody that had died.

And they're playing this in the background as they're reading our names off as being killed in action that day on a super-encrypted radio that they couldn't possibly be talking on.

So

it kind of got our attention.

I would imagine.

So I got a team leader together and

we put our plan together

and

we were armed.

We had four machine, M60 machine guns with us, you know, four grenadiers with us.

We had all those claymores.

We were loaded for bear.

But

that kind of got all of our attention.

That started at nine o'clock at night.

It was almost 1700 the next day when we got out.

We just banged it out with them right and left and had one catastrophe after another.

But we got out and we got everybody out with us.

You got everybody out?

Wow.

There are a lot of bad guys that

were left.

Holy shit.

What was the radio?

Did you ever figure that out?

Somehow they'd gotten a hold of one.

They'd gotten a hold of one of those.

They got the radio.

They had to have gotten the codes and the frequencies

from the compound.

We think part of what happened was

eight days before we were at the launch site

getting ready to

launch on this mission.

and a team was overrun.

And,

you know, the

launch site commander came in and said, look, your mission's just changed.

You're now bright light.

Your team's going to go in to try to

recover the team that just got overrun.

So they changed their mission.

And we went out there and fought it out for a couple days.

And when we came back, we had to have some recovery.

We had to replace some people that were wounded during a firefight.

So it was eight days before we could go back and run our original mission.

So they had eight days to get more intel on us and figure out what was going on.

And we had some spies there at CCN in the camp that we didn't know about.

So.

Man.

Well, I got another gift for you.

And

the

KY38 radio,

that's 54 pounds of radio plus all the batteries the big batteries that it goes through

nobody wanted to carry those things you had to have a PRC-77

to hook to this

KY38

so you half of it was on your front chest half of it was on your back oh man

it was unreal

Anyway, I'm sorry, I interrupted you.

Go ahead.

No, no, no.

Well, not much has changed today.

Nobody wants to carry the radio, but it's not 50 pounds.

But hey, since we're talking about everything you've carried,

I got you a little present here.

So I got a friend over at Sig Sauer.

His name's Jason,

and I told him you were coming on, and he is just fascinated with MACV SOG guys.

He wanted me to present this to you.

Oh, wow.

Go ahead, hold it up.

So that is the SigSauer P365

macro Legion

and holds 17 rounds plus one in the pipe.

It has that red dot.

We were talking about red dots at breakfast.

It has the slide cuts in the front to help you with the muzzle flip and recoil.

It's made out of all metal.

And that is the latest and greatest everyday carry handgun from SigSauer.

So

we wanted you to have that.

That is awesome.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

Wow.

Fortunately, I'm driving home, so I don't have to try to carry this on a plane.

But,

yeah,

so we wanted you to have that.

So when

you get your

new studio completed,

including your firing range,

hopefully I can get invited back up to see if the thing works on your range.

We'll invite you back, you and John.

Maybe we'll have a little shooting competition.

Oh, yeah, he'd love that.

I'm sure you'd whip John's ass in a shooting competition.

Oh, yeah.

I'll tell him he better start practicing.

That's great.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

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Well, I'd like to get into your story here.

So we always start with: where did you grow up?

Grew up in a little town called Walholla, South Carolina, up in the north western tip of South Carolina, right up above

Clemson University.

And

spent a lot of time outside.

And, you know,

my mother's family had four sons.

And when World War II came along, all four of them were deployed, you know, and in World War II.

My father was deployed along with him, so there were five men, you know, from the family

there.

And

three of the brothers, four brothers came back.

And my father came back.

And then when Korea came along, you know, my father was called back in, so served in Korea.

And they talked about some Army stuff, mostly at my prodding and saying,

what does this mean?

What is a platoon?

What do you mean have a reserve?

What's a reserve?

What?

All kinds of questions.

You know, I was just full of questions about Army stuff.

And

then when I was about seven years old, I decided

I want to have an Army.

So I got with my cousin, Carl, and I said, you're the first member of

my army.

And I had heard about Rangers.

I'd heard them talk about what the Rangers did.

So I decided it was going to be, you know, a Ranger Company.

So I formed the 69th

Ranger Company.

And it was commanded by General Thompson, of course.

But we needed more than one other member.

I needed to command more than one person.

So I started recruiting my other cousins that are about the same age.

We got

all the close ones in, the ones I liked, got those guys in.

Brought in one female cousin, Pat, which was actually cousin Carl's sister.

We brought her in, so we had a whack in the Army.

Then we started letting people outside the family in, so

it grew bigger.

And I still got

the log book

for Thompson's Rangers at home the actual log are you serious and you can open it up and you can it's getting pretty faded now but you can see notes you can see people's names you can see the note you can see information about the only court-martial that we had so

there was one of the members of the company that

gave me some lip and

he ended up getting court-martialed and booted out of the Ranger group.

But

I still have that book.

You know, I cut two pieces of cardboard for the covers and taped it together and put the paper inside.

And

it's pretty cool.

But I still have it after all these years.

So really got into

Rangers.

And,

And, you know, the family did a lot of hunting.

My father liked to hunt.

So

I was brought up with weapons and shooting and hunting and tracking.

And every time I, my parents both worked as I was getting older.

So every opportunity I got,

I was in the woods by myself.

hunting, tracking, tracking deer, tracking whatever animals I could find

and studying them.

You know, what do they do?

How do they move?

And then I got this idea, I need to be invisible.

How can I be invisible?

So to be invisible,

it's not just that you are not visually seen.

If I'm invisible, you can't hear me.

You can't smell me.

You know, I just don't exist.

I'm just, I'm here, but I'm not here.

And how do you do that?

So I'd practice slipping up on deer or rabbits or whatever I could find out there.

And then

my cousin Carl started coming over and we'd take, we had a little army pup tent.

We'd carry that thing a couple hundred meters up on the hill in the woods and put it up.

It would go out and once I got a BB gun, we'd go out and shoot some birds,

you know, little birds, and

build us a fire and we would roast them.

And

we would say, Well, what else do rangers eat?

You know, let's give us some ranger food.

Let's go kill something else and let's come eat it.

And you know, we'd camp out there and pretend we were rangers and we'd go on missions and different things like that.

And, you know, we got older.

And

then,

when I was 13,

my parents sabotaged me because I knew I was going to be a ranger.

And Santa Claus came and brought me a chemistry set.

You know, I used to watch Shock Theater

at midnight on Saturday night.

You know, they'd build Frankenstein and werewolfs and change people's brains out.

They can do that.

Why can't I do it?

So I started, you know, catching rats.

I'd catch rats and bring them into my lab

and I'd knock them out.

At that time, if you went into a pharmacy, we call them drugstores at that time, if you went in there, I mean,

if you could get permission from your parents to buy a syringe, a real syringe, which was a big deal at that time because only drug users and medical people had access to the syringes but

talked the pharmacists into

letting me buy one so I had a syringe and then I could shoot the rats or the birds or whatever up knock them out and I could go in take their brains out and see if I could swap them and bring them back swap swap their hearts things like that

and try to you know, from shock theater with Frankenstein, you know, all the electricity from lightning went in him.

I would plug them into the outlet.

Tended to fry their little hearts and stuff.

I never could get one to start vacuuming.

I could put them in there.

I just couldn't get them to work again.

The psych test must have been a lot different to get into the berets back then.

Yeah, so I really got into chemistry.

And then at some point I got into, well, let's build some rockets.

You know, Thompson Rangers need some rockets

to launch it to the bad guys.

So I studied rockets and rocket fuel and the chemistry around it.

And

again, back to the pharmacy.

I need some potassium nitrate.

I need some charcoal.

And I need some sulfur.

What are you going to do with that?

I said, oh, I'm building some bottle rockets.

Okay.

I had so much

of those chemicals in a foot locker in the house.

If my mother had realized what that was

and what it could have done to our house,

but anyway, you could build rocket fuel out of that

and then discovered later you could build bombs out of that too.

So I built a launch pad.

I built a lab

in the barn and built an actual launch pad out behind it.

I had a window so I could look out there and see it so I didn't get hit with shrapnel stuff that exploded on the launch pad.

And I'd launch them off of there.

One day I built a big one.

It was almost three feet high,

exploded on the launch pad.

actually broke windows in my neighbor's house.

So

I decided I needed to go back down to smaller ones so they didn't do so much damage as they didn't work.

So I played with explosives.

I

did all kind of chemistry stuff.

I mean

when I was in high school

I took

the advanced chemistry course.

I didn't even have a book.

I just basically shut up for class, took the exams,

and maxed out the course because I was going down to Clemson University to the library, reading all the articles, reading chemistry books,

getting, and I found that

if you got the older chemistry books around the turn of the century, around 1900, they were like recipe books.

They didn't just talk about theory and how, you know, if you mix these two components, then you get this.

It was a recipe.

This is how many grams

of whatever it was that you were going to use and mix together, and this is how you mix it together.

They told you how to do all this stuff.

So I was learning that and

really, really into chemistry.

I got a scholarship to the University of South Carolina on chemistry.

You had a pet, too.

I'm sorry?

You had a pet.

I had several pets, but I had one when I was really young

that was of particular interest.

I was in

third grade, and my parents came, got me out of school and took me home and said, we've got a surprise for you.

What is it?

Well, you have to wait till we get home.

So we got home, got out.

And there was a spider monkey.

So it's a monkey.

You know,

he's on a little chain, a leash, so he's running around doing things.

And I thought, that's cool.

I snatched that little Joker up.

I found out about monkey teeth really quickly.

I mean, he about bit my finger off.

So anyway, I didn't,

I kind of liked him, but I was careful with him because I knew he would bite.

We ended up building a small house that was outside close to the barn, and he would sleep in that at night.

And we put a light bulb in there

for heat because it was winter time.

And I went out one morning and looked in there, and

I could see his tail sticking out the little door.

And I grabbed his tail, and I thought, wow,

this is strange.

He's not moving.

And I pulled him out.

And he was literally just straight out.

He looked like a monkey on a stick.

And he was frozen.

A monkey on a stick, huh?

He was frozen.

And his little mouth was open, all his little teeth are showing.

You know,

I was not happy, you know.

I mean, I forgave him for all the biting, but, you know, I ran back in the house, and I gave him to my mother.

And I said, you know, he's dead, he's dead.

And she said, I don't know if he is or not.

Let's try this.

She wrapped him up in a little blanket and put him on top of a little oil heater that we had so the heat was coming up to try to warm him up, thaw him out a little bit.

And then she heated up some milk and took an eyedropper and squirted that warm milk down his little mouth.

And I mean, she kept working with him.

And after a while, you know, his little mouth started moving.

And

she thawed that jugger out.

She thawed him out, and all of a sudden he came back to life.

Oh, I thought, oh, this is really cool.

If you can freeze somebody somebody to death and then just thaw them back out, I mean, how cool is that?

But anyway, they had the monkey and

he caused so much trouble that

we ended up swapping him for a dog.

So he had to go away.

You didn't take that and

ask for volunteers from

your army to freeze, did you?

No.

I'm not saying I didn't think about it.

But

Maybe the guy that got court-martialed could have had an ultimatum.

I did take college students.

Oh,

shit.

I have to be careful how much I tell you about it, but I did take college students.

And I was interested in

what happens

if I put you into sleep deprivation.

If I don't let you sleep for a while, what will happen?

So

I got permission to do some research at the University of Georgia using college students.

And

so I got a group of volunteers from the ROTC department.

These guys were all in the ROTC

Ranger Company there to

University of Georgia.

Of course, they can do anything.

So they volunteered to do it.

So

they had their full gear on.

We took them out in the National Forest, full gear,

carrying a 40-pound rucksack,

and

continuous movement.

We'd stop for a 10-minute break every once in a while, but continuous movement,

no sleep.

Every four hours they had to take a test.

One of the tests they had to take was a cognitive test.

You know, it's basically addition and subtraction, just a couple sheets of addition and subtraction.

And then they would rate, after they finished it, I would say, well, compared to

When we first started, when you were fresh before you'd lost any sleep,

compared to that, how well you think you did this time?

And they would say,

it's pretty easy.

I did just as

well this time, just as accurate

as I did on the first one.

I'm looking at the scores and thinking that didn't happen.

One of the things that I discovered was that after 24 hours with no sleep,

that you lose about 25% of your cognitive ability, particularly to be able to do things like math.

The scary thing is, you don't know it.

You think you're still just as good as you were when you started out.

And, you know, it doesn't stop at 24 hours, it keeps on going down.

And

you don't see things.

Things happen in front of you, you don't see it.

Things you see sometimes didn't happen.

You know, you hallucinate, you do all kinds of things.

And, you know, as a ranger instructor for a number of years,

you know, with the ranger students, we didn't feed them much.

We didn't let them sleep.

We kept them running up and down mountains all the time.

And

they would hallucinate.

You know, you'd lose them.

You're going through the woods and all of a sudden you say send up to count.

They start sending the count up, and you realize you're missing about 10 or 12 people.

You stop, you go back, you know, it's night, you go back, and here's a guy standing behind a tree, just standing there, thinking that tree in front of him is his buddy.

He's supposed to be following.

His buddy's not moving, so he's just standing there, and nobody behind him is moving.

They're all waiting.

And when I went through, my ranger buddy and I, you know, we were already SF qualified and everything.

So we just thought we're going to have some fun.

You know, so

if you're walking along, you had your little patrol cap on, you had the little ranger eyes in the back, the little fluorescent tabs in the back of the hat,

so the guy behind you could see you in the dark.

You take your hat off and kind of put it over to the side, and as you're walking along,

you just

start, you know, you're getting yourself lower and lower, and you're lowering that hat around, and the guy behind you, he's following you.

Now he's fiddling around trying to,

where's the drop-off?

Where's he going?

And

we found that.

We found if we did stuff like that, it was hilarious to us, and it kept us motivated.

You know, we could do all kinds of things.

and

we had fun in Ranger School but anyway humor keeps it going yeah it keeps it keeps you moving right along

especially in the darkest hour yeah

so

anyway with the sleep research

that was a major study that the military used because one of the One of the things when I was put on the Airland Battle 2000 team to figure out how are we going to go 100 hours straight with the ground war when we move into the 21st century.

How can we go 100 hours straight, leaders be able to lead, soldiers be able to function, aviators be able to fly, you know,

without

100 hours of that sleep?

So I did a lot of research around that.

And

then I started going to NATO nations and briefing the Army staff.

Here's what we found.

Here's what you need to do to be able to function.

And I remember very clearly when I briefed

the commander of the UK forces.

I gave the presentation, and this is what special ops are going to have to do,

and then what the soldiers and aviators would do.

And I finished that presentation.

And the general got up and he said, Thompson, that was a good briefing.

But I can tell you now, we're not doing any of that crap.

These guys are just going to have to drive on.

We're not doing that.

Okay, there's a price to pay.

And then shortly after that, Falkland Islands came along.

And all of a sudden, they ran into problems because they didn't have enough pilots down there to meet the

safety requirement, the sleep and rest requirement between missions.

They tried different chemicals to

help them be able to do that.

Because when a pilot comes back from a mission,

his eyes are like that.

He's wired from all the stress and everything.

He can't go to sleep to start with.

When he finally does go to sleep, he can't wake up.

And if you give him a chemical that knocks him out right away,

Then you can't get it out of his system.

You know, six hours later or four hours later when you wake him up and say, you got to go, you got to fly another mission.

He's still trying to figure out who he is.

But there are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready because when the Gulf War, you know, the Ground War started, the Ground War went 100 hours.

Now, my brother was an Apache pilot.

And, you know, he was telling me all the time about it.

I go fly a mission, I turn around, I come back, I land while I'm rearming, refueling, I'm sitting there in the cockpit eating a sandwich, drinking a coffee,

because as soon as they get me rearmed, I'm going back out.

I gotta go fly another mission.

And

so, you know, that stuff was going on all the time.

And you're just not as effective.

And somewhere

somewhere around five hours or five days without any sleep, zero sleep,

people start to die.

And the university said,

you know, we can't keep supporting your research

if you have your students dying.

So you've got to stop keeping them up that long.

They didn't actually die, but

they were getting close enough that they were concerned about it.

Wow.

So I hear people always...

How long were you keeping these people up?

Holy shit.

We ended up stopping them after,

I think it was 72 hours as far as we would go.

But

I hear people tell me all the time,

man, I can go five days without a problem.

Young guys, I'll tell you that.

You think you are.

I remember in Angel School, sitting in the bleasters.

And an instructor's standing in front of us.

It was a creep there.

He's standing in front of us, and he's talking.

And it seems like mid-sentence, mid-sentence, he says,

Thompson, in the creek.

And I think, what did I do?

You were asleep.

And I think, no,

I wasn't asleep.

In the creep.

Do push-ups until I get tired.

Make sure your face goes under every time.

You know, so I went out there in the creek trying to drown myself, you know, doing push-ups.

And

my Ranger buddy said, yeah,

you were sitting here, but you were asleep.

You were setting up, your eyes were open, but you were asleep.

And

I began to realize, yeah,

you go to sleep and you don't realize it.

In fact, some of the research shows that there are more people killed in traffic accidents

with drivers falling asleep than there is with drunk drivers.

Interesting.

Almost everyone that drives or been driving for a while can tell you, you know, you've had an experience late at night and you're sleepy and your head's bouncing around, and all of a sudden, just before you hit the bridge abutment,

you feel the car run off the shoulder and you jerk it back into the road because you were asleep.

You didn't know it.

And,

you know, if you're driving a drone, you're driving whatever, and you go to sleep,

the drone's on its own now.

There's no telling where you're going to put that thing.

If you're watching a radar screen, you don't see the aircraft coming.

You don't see the blips.

You're looking at it, your eyes are open, but you don't see it.

There's a whole series of things like that that

I did a lot of research on.

and particularly using it with special ops.

And still now I go out and I do a lot of presentations with different groups, particularly high stress groups, special ops groups, on

sleep deprivation, things to help you get around it, to be able to function better, longer,

and what's going to happen if you don't.

So that's a long answer to whatever you asked me about a monkey or something, I think.

Well, I want to get into that, what you're doing nowadays towards the end, but you went to school, you dropped out of school, correct?

Yeah,

I was in school, and

at that time,

every night on the 5 o'clock national news,

there'd always be a segment about what was happening in Vietnam.

Interestingly enough, very different from what we have today,

you know, the reporters would be saying, man, we're crushing those guys.

I mean, we're just crushing the NBA, and we're doing this, and we're doing that.

And I started thinking,

I don't,

I wanted to go to Vietnam, you know, so I could, you know, do my patriotic duty like my uncles and father and everybody had done.

It's going to be over.

If I wait until I finish school, it's going to be over.

So I decided to

take a break from school,

go in a list for three years,

go do my thing, come back, pick back up where I was in school, and continue on.

No intent, no desire to really

be a career person.

I wanted three years, and then I wanted to get back to chemistry and do my thing.

So I stopped.

My mother was not happy.

My father supported it.

My mother kind of freaked out over it.

I told her, I'll go back to school.

She said, no, you won't.

I said, I'll go back to school.

I'll get a doctor, but I need to go to do this first.

And then, you know, I get to the recruiting station and

went down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina.

You know,

they put us in the barracks, went to sleep.

About three o'clock in the morning,

all the lights come on, and there's some guy yelling and screaming to the top of his lungs to get up and get to attention in front of your bunk.

And then I hear bunks being pushed over, you know, double

bunks pushed over, people falling out on the floor, and this guy yelling and hollering.

I got my buns up and got to attention in front of my bunk there, and I looked

and I said,

he's my size.

He's got a big smoky bear head on.

He's my size, and he sounds like a giant coming through here.

And what is that on his shoulder?

A ranger tab.

So I thought, that's it.

You got to do that.

And then he

took us on a run, and we was singing all this stuff about I want to be an airborne ranger.

I want to live a life of danger, all this kind of stuff.

And I thought, this is cool.

If I'm going to be in three years, I might as well, you know, this is what I want.

I get a chance to, you know, be a real ranger now, not just, you know, what I used to play at.

So all of a sudden,

you know, I still didn't have, I still didn't intend to stay in beyond the three years, but I wanted to be a Ranger while I was in and go to Vietnam as a ranger.

Why not?

What was the sentiment of Vietnam at the beginning of the war?

Terrible.

It was terrible.

The country, the country's divided now.

For in America.

But

in America, it was divided.

They had,

you and I, for example,

as soon as people looked at our heads, they could say, well, he doesn't have hair down to his shoulders.

His hair is not parted in the middle.

He's in this group over here.

You and I are in this other group, and we're much more likely to be patriotic, support the war, and go do it.

These other guys, these long-haired hippie guys over on the other side, they're against it.

They're all smoking marijuana and they're doing whatever.

I'm kind of of exaggerating, but it was divided.

Those people, anti-war, going to protest, do all this kind of stuff.

So

there were some people who were for it.

Most people were against it, and they were out protesting.

And, you know, I had some good friends that

had moved on the other side.

They were total anti-war.

But some of the stuff you were hearing, it's, you know, we're killing babies, we're killing old women, we're doing all kinds of things like that,

which wasn't necessarily true.

But, you know,

I got really excited about the Army and what we were doing and kept thinking,

they're paying me to do this.

Can you imagine?

what it would cost if you just wanted to go jump out of an airplane and have a thrill like that.

They paying me to go do that and all these other things.

And the more I got into it,

the more I enjoyed it.

And

when I finished AIT, they just said, you're going to OCS.

You went to OCS right away.

Yeah.

So you need to go to OCS.

And I said, they talked me into it, said, you know, you can still get out at the end of your three years.

Your two-year requirement that you'll get from OCS will be over, and you can still get out of the Army.

You'll still get to go to Vietnam.

And you can probably do some of these other neat things like airborne, Ranger, stuff like that.

So I started volunteering in OCS to go to airborne school and to go to Special Forces.

So when I finished OCS, then

I just went from there to airborne school.

I was already at Benning.

I went to airborne school and then

they sent me to Bragg and went through the officers Q course up there and

became SF.

And then from SF I went to Rangers and then went to filth group in Vietnam and

did what my buddy said.

Didn't really do what he said.

I did the opposite.

He said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for SOG.

Why is that?

And when I asked that question, he said, if you do, you're going to die.

And if you don't die, you're going to come home with the crap shot out of you in a nutcase.

That's if they find you.

Do not volunteer for SOG.

And I said, what do they do?

I said, nobody knows.

You have to get there.

and you know volunteer and get there and then you'll find out what you're going to do but you you're going to die or come back as a nutcase.

I was 21 years old.

At that time in

history, we thought

that your prefrontal cortex up here in the front of your brain, we thought that the only thing it really did was hold up your cranium so that your front end of your head didn't kind of cave in.

And we thought it was fully developed.

By the time you're 20 years old, you had all your prefawn cortex

abilities.

Really, you got to be about 30 before it's fully developed.

So before it's developed,

you tell somebody, you're going to volunteer to go anywhere and do anything,

anytime,

and never say a word about it for 20 years.

I can do that.

I mean, that's a a recruiting poster to a 21-year-old.

And

if you look at the SOG pictures of the Americans on those teams,

almost all of them are little baby face guys.

You look at Tilt, at John Schachermeyer, you look at his little baby face, you look at my little baby face, you look at Eldon Bardswell's little baby face.

I mean, all three of us, within two or three months of the same age,

we all look like little baby faces because we'll go charge that hill.

We'll go to another country and do things.

By the time you're 30, you're saying, let's let the younger guys do that.

I don't need to have that kind of action anymore.

If you stay, if you're still there at 30 and you're still doing missions like that, you know, as you saw with some of the SEAL work you were doing,

you know, it's starting to have a bad effect on you.

I mean, there's a limit to how much stress you can take and recover from it, you know, easily.

So

we don't take good care of our special operators in particular.

Yeah.

We keep throwing them back out there in the middle of all the stress with no break,

with no opportunity, you know, to heal some.

And then

we put all these restrictions out there.

Don't mention the word mental health.

Don't say you're getting a little stressed

because we'll take you off the team.

With tier one guys,

like you, like the SOG guys,

I mean, I had to pass, you know, the flight physical, I mean, just blow it out of the water every year,

or I couldn't be on a team like that.

You can't be tier one.

You can't be Halo.

You know, you've got to have perfect ears, perfect eyes, perfect everything,

or they'll take you off the team.

And what do you do?

Same thing in sock.

I mean, I used to come back and take forceps and pull pieces, and I've got scars all over, pull pieces of shrapnel out.

and not say anything about it, you know, because I didn't want to get taken off the team.

You know, and civil guys do it all the time.

Rangers guys still do it.

You're not going to report anything,

but you don't have to.

So did you go right into SOG?

From the Green Bridge?

Yeah.

When I got there,

when I got to Vietnam,

I met a buddy of mine in the bar that first evening when I got there.

And he's the one that told me, whatever you do, don't volunteer for SOG.

Because he'd been there a month before me, so he knew all kind of stuff, right?

So

the next day,

went through all in processing.

And at the end of the day, then I ended up in Colonel Bazatz's room, and he said, I'm looking through your folder here.

You volunteered for the Army, you volunteered for OCS, you volunteered for Airborne, you volunteered for Ranger, you volunteered for Special Forces, you volunteered for Vietnam.

I've got the most important job that you will ever have an opportunity to do,

but you have to volunteer for it.

And I said,

you're trying to get me to volunteer for SOG?

He said, yes.

I said, what do I do?

What does SOG do?

He said, I can't tell you.

He couldn't tell you.

I can't tell him what they do.

I just tell you, you're going to have to volunteer and sign the volunteer paper to go to SOG.

You're going to have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, 20-year agreement, that you won't say the word SOG, you won't say anything about what you guys did for 20 years,

or you're going to receive the full punishment of the law.

But if you'll do that, you can get into SOG and you can do things that nobody else can do.

So, the next day

I was supposed to be at the airfield.

They sent me down to the classified end of the airfield where the blackbirds, the black C-130s and C-133s, were all parked.

You know, nobody could go down there.

So, I went down there,

got on an aircraft to

go up to in a train

and

there were no seats in the plane when it got there,

just seat belts on the floor.

So the crew chief came by and he said sit on the floor and buckle in and there were three or four of us, sit on the floor and buckle in because when we take off we're going to climb as fast as this thing will climb.

so that we don't get hit on the way out.

And then when we go to land up in the train, we're going to dive toward the ground like we're crashing so we don't get hit on the way down.

And you guys just hold on.

You're going to have a great ride.

Got there, got off the plane,

and they told us where to move to.

And they said, you know, there's a SOG bus there that's going to pick you up and drive you on up to Denan.

So we went over where the bus was supposed to be and there's a black school bus sitting there.

All the windows are shot out of it.

There must have been 200 bullet holes in the bus.

The seats are all ripped apart where bullets have been hitting.

And there's a driver there.

Went up to him and said,

is this the bus

to Denane?

And he said, yeah.

What happened?

And he said, well, there is this one pass that we have to go through.

And the NVA liked to ambush us up there

on a fairly regular basis.

So, you know, kind of shoot the bus up and the people are in it.

We're going to pick up a SOG team in a few minutes.

As soon as they get here,

then we'll leave.

All you have to do is just do what they tell you.

Whatever they tell you to do, you do and you'll live.

If you don't, you'll probably die before you get there.

And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere,

here's a line of about seven or eight guys headed toward the bus.

I mean, they disappeared.

And I'm looking at them and saying,

I never seen anybody like this before.

I mean, I've been to Special Forces, I've been to Rangers.

I don't recognize the equipment they have.

I don't recognize the uniforms they have on.

And

they're scary.

I mean, if they had this little short, like a little short M16, some of them have, you know, grenade launchers that have been cutting down to that long.

They were camouflaged, they held bandanas around their heads, hand grenades all over them.

Scary looking dudes.

They got on the bus and said,

And they immediately took up defensive positions on the bus.

The team just arrayed itself around the bus, and they were all at the windows, ready to shoot in whichever direction the fire came from.

And the guy who was the team leader, he said, if we run into trouble, you get face down on the floor of the bus and don't move until we tell you.

Copy that.

We didn't get ambushed, but wow, you start thinking, what did I get into?

Jeez.

Yeah,

I'm talking to Elden Bar 12.

several years ago before he passed.

He said, oh yeah, I still can see that bus in my mind all shot up like that and wondering what have I gotten into.

Is that what you were wondering?

Yeah.

I said, hmm,

this is different than what I thought.

But, you know, it's going to be exhilarating because

I'll be on a team like that in a few days.

I'll start becoming one of those guys.

I mean, those guys made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

And when they get around other people,

you can see everybody just kind of backs away, gives them room.

They don't get close to them.

They don't make eye contact with them.

If you look them in the eye, for the most part, you see death.

I mean, they're just,

they've seen things nobody else is seeing.

And you can't not see it once you've seen it.

So I thought, you know, that part's probably pretty cool.

So

went on up, got to

Da Nang,

and the little guy that picked us up there said,

I'm going to take you to your quarters where you'll stay tonight.

Tomorrow, you'll get your assignment.

You'll get briefed.

And you might want to, we have a movie theater set up kind of out here.

You know, we put a couple pieces of plywood together.

We got a movie projector and we show John Wayne and other kind of movies out there.

And we have have some bleachers up.

You might want to go out there and watch the movie.

This will be the last chance you get to take a break and relax a little bit.

Been in the bleachers about, it's dark, I've been in bleachers about 15 minutes, marble mountains behind us and all of a sudden it looked like the 4th of July.

Red tracers, green tracers, flare stuff going everywhere.

And I'm face down in the sand.

And the guy sitting in the bleacher said, Oh, I'm sorry, sir.

I should have warned you.

This happens every night.

Just watch the movies.

They won't shoot down here.

You know, and in a few minutes, all those green tracers will be gone because they're dead.

The teams up there on top of the mountain will take them out.

Everything will be fine.

Just enjoy the movie.

My heart's pounding.

Holy shit.

So, you know, I never cleaned it up.

They were dead.

And

you know, I had to pick a code name, so I picked the dynamite code name.

Then I went up to Fubai,

where, you know, John Myers is already up there.

I went to Fubai.

We got off.

It was about five or six of us.

We went up there.

The Sergeant Major came out and he had a little list.

He got us all together and he said, all right, and he read the names off and he said, all of you guys

are going to leave tomorrow to go

back down toward Natrang to 1-0 school to learn how to be a SOG team leader.

I said, well, you didn't read my name off.

Thompson?

Oh,

no, you're not going down there.

You're SF qualified, you're Ranger qualified.

I'm putting you on a team this afternoon.

You don't need to go down there.

What you don't know that's going to be taught down there, the team's going to teach you over the next few days before you go on your first mission.

Wow.

And then

he said, you know, tomorrow morning, I need you to report into

the S-4.

Sergeant Jones has a mission he'd like for you to help him with that I need an officer for.

If you would help him for that, and then we'll link you up with your team and you can get started.

Okay, they put me in quarters, went to S4 the next morning, and

the sergeant said,

We've had some casualties, and we have their personal effects here.

They've all been packed up in duffel bags.

Before we can ship them back to their families, their personal effects back to their families.

The effects need to be

signed, you know,

reviewed and signed off by an officer.

So I need you to just go through each of these seven duffel bags.

Make sure there's nothing in there that would be classified, no pictures, no,

you know, anything that could be classified, and

pack them back up, sign the sheet, and we can get them out of here.

First duffel bag I picked up,

friend of mine from Fort Bray.

He went,

sorry.

It's okay.

He went about 30 days, you know, before

me

and just disappeared.

Nobody knew where he went, what assignment he got when he got there.

He just went into a black hole.

And, you know, so he's been there 30 days.

Now I'm inventorying his personal effects to send back to his family.

Saw got real

so I did that, linked up with a team.

You know, went to work.

Started training with the team because we had a mission coming up in a few days.

Trying to learn everything I could before we went out.

But anyway, that was a long story of how I got to

He had some civilian clothes,

letters, you know, to his parents.

I mean,

you know, people's personal kinds of things like that.

They were letters that, you know, that had come come from their families.

There were letters they had written that they hadn't mailed yet.

Things they'd had in their hooch,

personal kinds of things that they would put in there.

So, I mean, probably half to two-thirds of it, you know, I took out.

But I had to read the letters, you know, to their families.

And,

you know, that was brutal.

Just brutal.

And you were close with with him?

Yeah.

I just...

Anyway, we...

What was his name?

Stacks,

Lieutenant

Stacks, Stan

Stacks.

And,

yeah.

You know, we went through the officer,

SF course up there, and,

you know, hung out some after that.

But it it was just a shock to my system.

All of the first bag, you know,

the duffel bag with your name stenciled on the side of it.

And I picked that up, and it just,

holy cow.

Man.

Now I know where he went.

He went to SOG.

Like my friend had told me, you know, a couple of days before, don't volunteer for SOG.

You're a dead man walking if you do.

And then, you know, here's

stacks all of a sudden.

I'm sorry.

So,

I mean, I got put right to work, which, you know,

I'd rather get to work.

Let's go do it.

I learn fast.

If you show me, I'll learn it.

And wasn't expecting to get ambushed the first time out.

Let's take a quick break.

Sure.

When we come back, we'll get into your first mission.

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All right, Dick, we're back from the break and we're getting ready to get into your first mission with SOG.

But you know, something that I found interesting that

you didn't mention is SAG did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention, correct?

Right.

Why is that?

Well, we were not supposed to be in the countries we were going into.

We didn't have permission to go into those countries.

So

we

all missions were conducted without ID cards, which you can't do, and be covered with the Geneva Convention.

No dog tags, nothing,

in the beginning, nothing that said U.S.

on it.

Now, later on,

M16s and CAR-15s and those types of weapons became so ubiquitous in that area

that anybody could be carrying something, a weapon that said U.S.

on it.

So they took the restriction of that.

In the beginning, you carried a

STEN gun or Swedish K or something like that rather than American guns.

So they took that off.

But

because we had no identification of any type on us,

then we were considered spies if we were caught.

And it was also

gave the U.S.

government plausible deniability that they didn't have anything to do with us.

And that's what prompted the different uniforms and different gear and everything.

Wow.

Now, you know, like I said, later,

I mean, we went to the regular jungle fatigues or tiger stripes or whatever.

Very interesting.

Let's get into your first mission.

Okay.

We had kind of started it before before where they assigned me right off the bat.

So even the SOG rule was even if

you come in as an officer like I did,

when you went to a team

you could not go as the team leader.

You had to go out as

an assistant team leader for a certain number of missions until the team leader that was vetting you said,

you know, this guy's ready to lead a team.

So

I went out with team RT Alabama to start with

to get, to learn really what it was like and get vetted because it's

just a river.

But there was something about when you crossed that river into that other country,

everything

was different.

different.

I mean, you didn't make contact with 20 or 30 guys and have a gun battle.

You made contact with 500.

You know, it was like kicking the top off of an anthill.

I mean, they would just swarm.

Once they figured out where you were, they were coming from everywhere to try to get you.

And

the other

thing it was, it kind of reminds me of jiu-jitsu in in that with jiu-jitsu,

you and your opponent kind of lay down in the floor and you get your best hold on each other and then they say, go, and you try to fight your way out of it.

With us, they would

take us into Laos or wherever, set us down, put the NVA all around, just hundreds and hundreds of them all around us.

with us in the middle, and then they'd say, go.

Go accomplish your mission mission and then see if you can get out.

So you started off surrounded with every mission.

And just

there are just so many of them when you did.

And then I worked mostly up north with Laos, you know, North Vietnam.

The terrain up there is very mountainous and

double, triple canopy jungle, thick vegetation.

I mean, most of the time when I made contact,

you would, you know, this close to me,

maybe

10 meters, maybe, 15 meters.

That's when we made contact.

And I probably couldn't see the other 20 people who were with you because they were standing a couple meters farther back in the vegetation.

I could hear the gunshots.

I could see the bushes moving as

the blast came and things like that.

So a lot of times I was shooting at just movement, shooting at sound, shooting at the one or two that I could see and bullets were just coming from everywhere.

You were never shooting at one, you might think you're shooting at one person, but there's 30 or 40 shooting back at you.

And

it was when you made contact in Vietnam, which we'd go do a lot just for practice so you can have a live shoot back target.

You know, you run up on five or ten guys

and have a gunfight.

But

when five or ten turns into a hundred and two hundred and they're more coming,

it becomes difficult.

So

the hardest or the easiest thing

is to get inserted.

And sometimes that's a real problem, but still getting inserted seems to be the easiest part.

Accomplishing the mission becomes really difficult.

Getting out becomes almost impossible.

And it's like that almost every mission.

And

you get in, trying to accomplish the mission with everything going on, but then how do you get out?

I mean, it can go on for hours and hours and hours trying to get out because you can't get the fire suppressed enough to get a helicopter in.

And

I mentioned prairie fire emergency earlier.

If we were about to be overrun, if I call on the radio and declare prairie fire emergency, everything within range that has ordinance is getting diverted to me to try to help get me out.

So all of a sudden, I mean, there were times when I'd have 14 gunships in orbit waiting their turn to come in.

You know, five or six F-4 Phantoms in orbit ready to come in.

Some

other types of aircraft all in orbit, just waiting their turn to come in and expend their ordnance on the bad guys so I could try to go out.

So, anyway.

What was it like when you, I mean, you show up as an officer

to

the most elite unit at the time

And

they want you to lead one.

And how are you received by those guys?

Young guy, 21 years old, only been to the schools, you know, qualified SF, qualified Ranger.

But, you know, even in today, that doesn't mean much when you show up to the team.

I can't imagine what the reception's like.

for a for a junior officer to show up at a team like that of those type of men to be led.

John Meyer might have told you what the perception was.

He did.

Yeah.

He told me one time that

he said,

you were one of the few officers

that

actually wanted to go out and was not afraid to go out.

and could perform when you were out there.

And he said, you know, that made you different than most of the officers.

And most officers, they went out a few times and they didn't go back out again.

You know, they found another job.

But, you know,

enlisted NCOs did that too.

I'm telling you, when you go over there and experience what it's like,

You have to think long and hard before you say, I'm ready to go back.

Because it was just so different when you went out there and

you know

I was I thought I was given a a fair chance

sergeant gentry deck

he didn't seem to have any qualms he just you know we'll see what you can do

it's my team and you know I'll tell you what I want you to do and you do it and you know I was okay with that.

And

the guys in,

when you went into the lounge, the club,

you could sit with more senior guys there, people with more experience, and they would chat with you.

And

I think

first or second day I was there,

This

E7 was talking to me.

He came over and

met me and

we started talking.

And at one point he said,

let me tell you something, Lieutenant.

Never, ever

shoot an NVA less than three or four times.

Every time you shoot one, you shoot them three or four times.

If they twitch, you shoot them three or four or more times.

Don't ever assume that you've shot somebody and they're dead

because we've had a lot of SOG people kill,

shot in the back because they walked past the NVA that they had shot and thought was dead.

Damn.

He said you make sure you do the job the first time.

And you know that was that was a rule I adopted.

There's no single shots.

There's no double tap.

If I shoot you, I'm going to shoot you.

You're going to get hit a lot of times.

And

most of the time, I shot short bursts on my automatic.

I'd shoot, you know, three or four round bursts because I want to make sure I hit you.

I want to make sure you're going down.

And

you know, if you don't go down fast enough, I'm going to hit you with three or four more rounds.

And you know, that was one of the reasons I carried a lot of ammunition.

So

the deck was very open to having me on there, particularly

after

we had the first mission.

We'd go out, we're doing a last light

insertion,

and we were going to go do a wiretap once we got on the ground.

So we'd go out, it's starting to get dark.

We circle around and we come in.

on our run toward the LZ.

Deck gave a thumbs up.

That means get out on the skids.

We're 30 seconds out.

I climbed out on the skids.

The other American climbed out on my side with me

and the door gunners right next to him.

I mean, we were on a Huey.

And we're coming in really low.

And we're just going across the tree.

I mean, the skids are almost dragging into the top of the canopy.

And we're going slow.

And I was thinking,

an NVA could knock me off of this kid with a rock.

I mean, we're just barely moving.

I'm exposed to the world standing out here.

And wow,

there's a little village over there.

It looks like six or seven hooches in a little village.

That wasn't in our briefing.

There was nothing said about a village being that close to where we were going in.

So we come on up and

they had blown a hole in the canopy and it was just barely big enough for the chopper to just set straight down in.

So we're settling down in there and I'm scanning

the tree line

still thinking, I've been you know, a setting duck out here.

And we get down, it looks like like as far as we're going to be able to go.

We're still about six feet from the bottom of the bomb crater.

And I'm thinking, we I've got to jump off the skid down in this thing with 80 pounds of gear.

I'm going to break both legs

when I hit down there.

And

while I'm having that thought, you know, it's time to suck it up and just jump.

So,

you know, I bent my knees so I could, you know, kind of hop off.

And as I bend down, this guy, NVA, pops up right there, 10 feet away from me, you know, in the bomb crater, AK-47.

Holy cow.

So instead of jumping in, I straighten my legs up and hop back up on the edge of the floor of the aircraft.

As I do that, he pulls the trigger on the AK.

My legs moved just in time.

They went right across in front of me and they hit the American that was on the other side of me.

They hit his legs and took him out from under him.

He started to fall.

I grabbed the back of his harness with my left hand.

I put a half a magazine into that guy.

I dug him back up into the aircraft.

You know, he's yelling and hollering, you know, about his legs.

Blood's going everywhere.

The two

in digg behind me both open fire

going out of the helicopter, one on each side of me.

And I'm getting powder burns from their multiple flashes, going death as that's happening.

The door gunners opened up,

and it's just unbelievable the number of bullets that all of a sudden are coming, crisscrossing inside the aircraft.

hitting the aircraft.

You can hear the metal clangs as they hit.

I see another one.

Now I finish off my magazine on him.

Now I've got to reload and

that's when I discovered what stress does to you find motor coordination.

So I reached to try to get a magazine out of my pouch.

My hand is just soaked with the blood that's squirting out of his leg.

I'm trying to get the magazine out.

I couldn't get it and it was stuck in there.

My hand was slick.

I finally got it out,

but when I went to put it in, my hand was shaking so much.

I couldn't get it in the magazine wall at first.

I finally got it in there so I could start returning fire.

The next one came right out of the pouch.

It wasn't that big of a deal, but it went in a lot easier.

I had never experienced that level of fear before.

I mean, I just, and it's hard to believe today that that many bullets could come at you

that fast

and none of them hit you.

So

I started returning fire, knocked some guys who were in the trees, knocked them out.

At the same time that's happening,

you know, we had two Cobra gunships that were coming in, you know, right beside us.

They opened up with their mini guns.

And so you have 4,000 rounds a minute coming down from the Cobras,

hitting right next to us, ricochets going everywhere.

There's tracers all over the place.

They're firing.

The next two Cobras right behind them are firing 40 millimeter.

That's exploding all around us.

Everybody in the aircraft on both sides are shooting.

You can see the tracers crisscrossing on the inside.

You know, the pilot,

I think that's the first time he's been ambushed like that with people that close.

And it seemed like he just

froze or stopped or something because we were just sitting there.

I was thinking,

we need to be going up, getting out of this hole.

And finally, we started moving.

The aircraft shaking and trembling all over and going up.

The bad guys are all shifting their fire up.

The Cobras are coming in.

You know, they're just circling around and coming in.

And then

we had some Skyraiders, A1 Skyraiders, coming in, flying across in front of us and dropping 250-pound bombs, not right there, but off to the side.

I found out later those

hooches in the village over there were not hooches.

They were tanks with thatch.

put around them to make them look like, you know, they were thatched houses over there.

They were actually tanks, and they started moving when all this started happening.

You know, so the A1s went after them and started putting the bombs.

So with all the other stuff that's going on, when those things start, the bombs start going off, now you're getting these blast waves coming across that's trying to knock the helicopter into the trees, you know, and we're getting hit with the blast.

But finally, you know, we got up and

were able to start moving

and flying away from it and we're still getting 51 calibers and things coming up at us.

And

I looked over, you know, at Sergeant Deck

and he looked around at me and he's grinning like a horse eating salt briars and giving me a thumbs up.

And I was thinking oh my God, he thinks that's the coolest thing he's done lately.

He enjoyed that.

And

he did.

And I thought, wow.

He's done this quite a few times.

So it's not his first radio, but

he enjoyed that.

Scared the crap out of me.

Then we get back when we have the conversation of,

Lieutenant, if you don't learn to change magazines faster, you're going to die.

But every time,

except for the last time, every time we went on a mission, as we would be extracted, when I'd look over at him, I'd see that big grin and thumb up.

He was so excited about that.

So,

yeah, that got my attention.

I bet it did.

Unfortunately,

before the mission, the camp commander up there had

called me over, wanted to talk.

And he said, I just, I know this is your first mission.

I want you to understand.

We're not going to put you out there where we can't get you back.

If we put you in there, we're going to bring you back.

I said, Okay.

So when I got back from that mission and got to the hooch and

spent some time with Jack Daniels,

I decided to go talk to the camp commander.

Learning experience, you know, to go to the camp commander and tell him his baby is ugly, there's some problems with the process.

But, you know, he didn't fire me.

That was good.

He recognized,

you know, had had a significant experience there and then compounded it with a little Jack Daniels.

So I didn't do that.

I definitely learned from that.

What did you think the problems were?

I thought part of it was

at Fubai, we had a range.

We had a big open area, huge open area, that we would go to to do immediate action drills, to

test fire different weapons and things.

You could shoot in any direction out there.

But it's not the jungle.

The jungle is very different.

When I'm out where

I can see a thousand meters out in front of me,

that's different.

I'm 10 meters and 15 meters out.

It's about the range of my vision.

And then after that mission, you know, the next one, we got on the ground and just moving through the jungle and particularly moving once

contact is made.

It's very different.

So

when we got down to Da Nang,

we had a jungle we could go practice in, Monkey Mountain.

We could go over there, and you were in a real jungle, so you could practice moving, falling over logs, stepping in holes, and all that kind of stuff.

But I learned a lot from that.

One of the things was I want more ammunition.

And I've got to be able to get the magazines out.

So I had the magazine stuffed in the canteen pouch.

So what I did was I took a piece of parachute cord and some duct tape.

and I made a loop,

taped it onto the side of the magazine so there was a loop sticking up on that center magazine.

I could just stick my finger in and I could jerk that magazine out.

Once it was out, the rest of them were loose.

They were easy to get out.

You came up with that yourself?

I had heard somebody talk about, you know, putting a loop on it or a string on it or something.

And I thought,

that makes sense.

So I tried that.

Yeah, you know, when I was practicing, that first one would come right out.

So I started, you know, doing them all like that.

But just, you know, that was part of it, was learning that, making sure I had them in the right place, making sure,

since I was right-handed, the grenades were in the pouch on the right-hand side,

magazines on the left-hand side, you know, so you could go with them.

Water was in the back.

And then after a couple of times on the ground, I started to flatten out what was on my waist.

To me, it seemed like the closer you could get to the ground,

the better your chance of surviving,

because I'd be laying on the ground and my rucksack's getting hit.

So, I thought if I could get a little bit closer, that gets me

a little ways farther.

I mean, I'd come back when I'm a ruckshot, a rucksack shot up on just about every mission.

I'm laying down, but the bullets are coming that close.

Better side picture, too.

Yeah.

And

so, you know, I started making little changes like that.

And then once I became team leader,

then I, you know, implemented those changes to the whole team.

But some of them, along the way,

you know, I would make suggestions to Deck and say, what if?

What if as soon as we get in excuse me, we get into our remain overnight position,

Quick meeting before everybody goes down.

This is the direction we're going to go if we get hit.

This is our avenue of escape.

Here's where we think they're coming.

The Claymores are out there.

So

we started having that little quick debrief

like that.

and then started the after-action reviews where we did kind of a formal after-action review with the team.

I implemented our

talk deck into implementing a running password.

If we got scattered and you're running and you coming up on somebody,

we would have a running password.

Example,

bug fuzz.

And you think, that makes sense.

Well, not only does it not necessarily make sense, it was hard for them to say.

So if I don't speak the language and I hear you say something,

bug fuzz, I can't understand what you're saying, I don't know what it means, so it's hard for me as the NVA to use that same word to come running into you.

So

every time we were compromised and had to use a running password, the next time we went out, we had a different one.

So I kept changing those.

So just putting things in like that.

And Deck was pretty good about

going along with that.

And then

Christmas we went out.

And it was going to be

the last mission that

this team ran out of Fubah, they were going to close Fubai down.

And we got in really heavy contact.

And

when we finally got on the helicopter, and they were just really pummeling the helicopter, and we got on it and we started lifting off.

I looked over at Dick,

expecting, you know, the big grin and the thumb up.

And he just looked up at me and then he looked back down.

I was like, oh, crap.

You know,

he must have gotten hit.

I mean, he's never done that before.

He must have got hit.

So I kind of crawled over there to him and grabbed him by the shoulder and said, Are you okay?

And, you know, he said, no.

I'll talk to you when we land.

So

when we got on the ground, I grabbed him up and I said, what's going on?

And he said, I'm done

I'm done

when we get when we get to Denang

I I'm gonna have a different job

don't tell the team I'll tell the team but I don't want to tell them right now

but I won't be on the team after this after we get to Denang

And, you know, I thought that was good.

He had recognized it was time to do something different.

And

I found some people

couldn't or wouldn't recognize that.

You've got to know when you've gotten up to the edge where you're now dangerous, dangerous to yourself, dangerous to the rest of the team.

And you need to take yourself out.

Because even though you had to sign up for six missions or six months

after the first mission if you went to the one your team leader and said I'm done I don't want this any I can't do this anymore I want out

that was fine

you know you would be taken out and either put somewhere else in in the

the NANG or wherever you were or

back to special forces and go to a regular special forces unit or something

because you didn't need to be going out there if

once you had decided that you couldn't do that.

The volume of fire was so heavy, so intense when you were out there.

All decisions had to be made quickly.

And you had to continue to adapt because those suckers were coming at you.

And

just,

you know,

with me, it was, now I'm going to be the leader.

I need to be learning more.

And

I started watching the NVA.

What did they do when we make contacts?

Is there a pattern to how they behave when we make contact?

And I started to see a pattern.

And

just a

example.

If you're an NVA and we make contact and you go down behind a tree,

95% of the time,

when you decide to return fire back at me,

you will

come around the right side of the tree.

From your perspective, the right side of the tree.

The muzzle of the AKA will come around, your forehead will be right behind it.

If I know that, so I'm out here, from my perspective, I watch the left side of the tree, and I'll see you start to come around it.

And I've already zeroed in on it, and I'm ready.

When I see that muzzle come around, I know your forehead is right behind it, and I'm ready to, you know, launch three or four rounds at you.

And I told my

team, I implemented it with the next team.

And I said, they'll do that every time.

I said, watch.

Just watch.

They'll do that.

And you can take them out.

And we came back and we debriefed it and they said, wow.

They do.

They shoot around that side of the tree or rock or whatever it is.

I said, okay,

here's the big thing you've got to realize.

We do that too.

We're humans.

We're going to shoot around that right side of the tree every time unless we train it out of ourselves.

Or you're left-handed.

Or you're left-handed.

So we've got to practice

doing that, but we know where they are.

When they go down almost without fail, they will shoot from where they went down.

When we go down, we've got to roll one way or the other.

Don't shoot from where you went down because they're going to shoot right where they saw you go down last time.

You've got to move.

before they start shooting and they'll get you.

And there's a whole series of things like that that I call the the human reaction to combat that humans do instinctively and they don't even realize they're doing it most of the time but if you know how they're going to react you know which way they're going to run and what they're going to do that gives you the advantage

it gives you the advantage with

close quarters and combat you know when I

I watch people, you know, from the catwalk, I watch people go through the rooms, clearing them and everything, and I think, oh, my God,

you know, if that Joker was in the air with live ammo shooting at you, he's going to take you out.

And, you know, they're just, in the U.S.,

for example,

if

you come into this building,

And I know you're coming in as a SWAT team, for example, or as a stacked with military.

You're coming in.

I can take you out, but just by shooting a row across the wall there, I'll get half your team because you're all leaning up against that

drywall, and that bullet's going to go right through it.

So I can take out a bunch of you right there.

There's a whole series of things.

Don't stand close to the wall.

If I shoot at the wall and I hit the wall, even drywall, A lot of times you can get a ricochet that's going to come off that wall, just a little ways.

And if you're standing a couple feet from it, it's going to hit you.

How you hold your weapon when you go in there.

I won't go into all that right now, but I really started working with them on

what I was, what was called quick kill when I went through the training.

How to shoot from the waist and hit your target every time.

You don't have to aim.

We went through a whole course of brag on that with BB guns and then graduated graduated to M16s.

And some of the work I do with active shooters and stuff like that and

showing the police,

you and I both turn into the hall at the same time.

I'll hit you three times before you can get your weapon ready to fire.

Because I'm already ready to fire.

I just need to see a target.

And I can hit you without moving my weapon at all.

And you've still got yours at a down port, and you've got to try to bring it up.

And what will happen in that situation is as you're bringing it up,

you'll be able to spend the rest of your life

thinking about why you did it that way.

Of course, the rest of your life is going to be about a half a second, but

I know there are lawyers, I know there are safety things, but you've got to think about your opponent

and about how to take them out.

Anyway, but we did all kinds of practice on the range.

Pictures in the books out on the range of us shooting from there, putting the silhouettes out and practicing hitting those things.

If you're 20 meters or closer, I'll hit you every time without aiming.

I used to put five silhouettes out there.

and

let one of the team members say go.

And as I was falling to the ground, I'd hit all five targets before I hit the ground.

And you can do that.

But you've got to practice.

And they loved it.

You gave them techniques they could use that would work.

They loved it.

How did it feel to take over the team?

I was excited.

I really was.

A little nervous because I didn't know this team.

I took over the team when we moved to Denang.

They actually split up

Alabama and kind of sent them to different places

because Deck was going to a different job.

And

I took over RT Michigan.

The 1-0 had been wounded, and he was gone.

There was a guy, Spec 4, on the team, Eldon Wardswell.

Hard dude, good dude, you know,

SOG, legend, Delta force commander forever.

I mean, just you name it, special ops-wise, he did it.

But at that time, he was my assistant team leader.

So

working with him was good.

We got another American in for a while.

It was a mountain yard team, good team.

And Eldon and I worked together, you know, really well.

What was your first mission as team leader?

The first one, oh,

it was when

we were going to try a new insertion technique.

There was a

company of the 101st that had moved up right up next to the border, the Laotian border.

So the plan was

they were going to insert us into the

101st company.

So on one of their resupply missions and where they were bringing in some additional

new recruits in there,

we were going to put the team on those helicopters, dressed like the 101st, steel pot, all that kind of stuff.

We were going to fly in, get off just like we were new people coming in,

and then we would spend the night there in their perimeter.

And at first light, we would go down to the stream, big stream that was down there,

with the water supply.

So we would go down with some 101st guys dressed like them to get water, except when we got down there,

we would change into our Superman suit.

stuff the 101st stuff in a bag.

Those guys would get the water and go back

to the perimeter and we would move out across the river

into

the jungle.

So we would make that clandestine insertion.

First time

and really the only time that I ever had a chance to have

to be within range of artillery.

701st had set up a fire base out there to support them.

So once we

got inserted

and had a conversation with the

company first sergeant coming over and saying, all right, I want you guys to dig in around here.

And my interpreter looked at me and said, we know Dig.

I said, tonight we do.

We know Dig.

I said, look.

They're probably going to get hit really hard tonight.

Bullets are going to be coming from everywhere.

And you guys look like the guys who are shooting at them.

You need to be down in a hole or you're going to get shot from inside the barrel.

We did.

So okay.

So they dug in.

Sure enough, we got pounded that night.

You know, the hole saved us.

But that was cool.

But I had

You know, that evening I had met with the company commander and a fire support officer and a couple of lieutenants lieutenants and I kind of laid out for them this is what we're going to do

and here's here's what I need.

I want

target, you know, artillery targets plotted on these areas right here, these coordinates, and I want them named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

I want to be able to just call up and say from Monday, you know, right 200, down 100, fire for effect.

And

it was funny, you know, he was company commander and he looked at me like, wow,

that sounds, I never heard of that before.

That sounds cool.

I said, when I need it, I need it.

So

we went in, crossed over.

And

we were doing there was a hatchet force that was across the road over on the other side, and we were supposed to make sure no one approached them from the side of the road we were on.

So we had the targets plotted out there

and

we heard some mortars that first night firing at the hatchet force.

I could tell they were close to one of our targets, so I just called it in

and they dropped some 105 rounds over there and that shut the mortars up from that position so so we started doing that but after

about three days

um the launch commander decided we needed to be resupplied

ammunition and water

and i kobe said they were coming and i said no i we don't want to resupply don't

well he needs your grid coordinates so they can they can hover and drop the supplies down through the canopy.

No, I'm not going to tell him where I am.

So in a few minutes, Covey came back and he said,

if you're not going to tell him where you are, he's going to drop them at the last set of coordinates we had on you guys.

No,

when you do that, they're going to know right where we are.

It's too late.

I can see them coming.

So sure enough, they dropped all that stuff down.

So we ran down and grabbed most of it and hit it, took the water with us and moved out quickly, but more.

They were on us shortly after that.

And

things didn't go well.

Artillery worked pretty good, but there were just too many of them, and now they knew where we were.

That's where I got that big insight about if you stop moving, they're going to surround you.

We got into those rocks and I stopped us.

I thought we could defend from there.

Big mistake.

They just circled us just like a big amoeba when we were their supper.

The only way we could get out was to go up.

So eventually got the fire suppressed enough they could drop McGrath rigs down for us and pull us out.

So I sent Bargewell and

the other American and a couple of Indig out on the first aircraft.

I stayed there with the other two indig

and

you know just kind of battled it out.

So

we could fight in place and die.

We could try to run and escape someplace and get away or we could go up those ropes.

I decided we'll go up the ropes

but We hadn't nobody to give us fire support from the ground.

So, man, they were just shooting away at us as we were going up.

I got a couple rounds in the radio,

killed my radio.

Big chunk of shrapnel went into my survival radio that I was wearing right over my heart.

It buried itself in there,

killed that radio.

And, you know, both the indigen got wounded as we were going up, and we're flying along 7,000 feet, 100 miles an hour,

oscillating back and forth.

I could see my rope fraying on the edge of the floor of the helicopter.

No radio, no way to call and say,

I'm developing a little problem up here.

I couldn't tell him that the other guys were wanted,

but

we made it to a fire support base.

And

in the book,

there's a picture in there of a helicopter coming in to a fire support base.

And you can see three guys hanging on the ends of the ropes down below him.

The guy that's the lowest on the rope is me.

And then the other two are hanging right above me.

So what had happened is Bargewell and his little group came in first.

These guys on the fire support, they they never seen anybody coming from that side of the border or hanging under a helicopter like that.

So there was a guy there who had bought a brand new mini Polaroid camera before he came over to Vietnam.

He brought it with him.

So he saw Bargewell and his group, you know, come.

He ran and got his camera, came back out in time to see

me and my two guys coming in and took a picture of it.

So they set us down, they got us in the helicopter, and they started, just as they started to lift off the ground, this guy comes running over, holding his arm up in the air with something in it.

I reached down and took it as we lifted off, and it was a picture that

he took as we were coming in.

Have no clue who he was,

but he took an actual picture of us live coming in hanging on those ropes geez so that's pretty cool yeah

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But anyway, we got back good

Good debriefing.

One of the things that I had figured out by then was

doing an after-action review is

not

just to figure out what went well, what didn't go so well, what you might want to change.

But it's

psychologically, it gives me an opportunity.

If I'm upset about something you did,

I think you left me hanging out, you didn't have my six or whatever.

It gives me a chance to bring that up and let's get it settled right here, get it off the chest.

It gave me a chance to, you know, I could facilitate what was going on so you guys didn't go duke it out after a while.

But we could get that resolved and get your stress level back down and, you know, we could move forward.

And then we also did

These are the post-training things we're going to do based on what we did out there.

One of them in this case was,

why did we not have those stupid harnesses on to start with?

I mean, you could wear a Swiss seat, you could have it on, you could have it, you know, just wear it a little loose if you wanted to, and all you have to do is tighten the knot up, and you could snap onto that joker and go.

But to try to put on a Swiss seat

when you got bullets coming at you from every direction, then you're trying, you're flat down on your back trying to get that thing on, and you're trying to

return fire.

I mean, that's not easy.

Why not put it on beforehand?

I mean,

you know, just little things like that that you can think of now.

Let's go practice that.

Let's implement that as an SOP.

So we started doing things like that, and

it was pretty good until

Dick Meadows came in and

said,

can Bardswell take over the team?

I said, sure.

No problem.

He knows exactly what he's doing.

So, anyway.

Where did you go from there?

That's when I did the run on the beach with

Dick Meadows the next morning and did the best review all the people.

And then he put me on

this other super top secret mission to go into the My Gea Pass.

And actually,

John Meyer had also been given that mission and they canceled it at the last minute.

They gave it to me.

I told the people in Saigon when I went down for a briefing,

I said, this is not going to work.

I said, I know you think there's no one up on that ridge that's going to be protecting

those convoys going through there.

I said, I guarantee you, there are people up there.

Why do you think they're not up there?

Well, we fly over there all the time and nobody shoots at us.

I said, Of course they're not going to shoot at you.

They don't want you to know they're up there.

But when you put a team up there, they're going to walk right into them.

Here's my recommendation:

Play on a target 1,000 meters away

on that ridge line.

Let's hit that target about, you know, with L4s, about 2 o'clock in the morning.

While that's being hit, let's fly a Huey

at about 300 feet, lights out, full blast, coming across this little clearing that's on that ridge.

I'll slide out of the helicopter.

No reserve, because I won't need it too low.

I'll just ease out.

I'll be on the ground within a minute or so, pack it up, hide it.

I'll move up there to the ridge.

They'll never know I'm there.

I'm one person.

They're not going to find me.

And worst case is, they do find me.

And what do you lose?

You lose one crazy SF guy.

Not a whole team.

Not some helicopters trying to get him out.

You know, I can go do that.

It'll be a lot more secure and easier to do if you just let me go do it myself.

Holy cow.

I mean, they just went bananas.

I was crazy.

There's no way they were going to let me go out by myself.

So.

But that mission ended up getting canceled anyway.

You volunteered for a singleton mission in Vietnam.

Yeah.

I mean, it just looked to me like there were a lot of SOG missions where the mission was to go set on a ridge line or go find the location of a battalion, just go do something.

Nothing kinetic about it.

Just sneak and peek and find out, get the information, get it back in, get out.

that I could just go do.

I mean, drop me out there in the middle of the night.

Nobody's going to be expecting it.

Helicopter comes across that low.

Nobody's going to think you're going to parachute in.

It just screams across through there.

They don't see it.

It's dark.

They hear it.

They just don't know what happened.

They know it didn't stop.

And, you know, I just carry the survival radio.

And I even carry the PRC-25.

all that garbage.

I don't need all that weight.

I just need to get in there.

I need to send you a signal when I'm ready ready to come out.

And, you know,

if things are too hot or too bad around that area,

I'll start walking.

You can pick me up somewhere else.

And if you can't find me, you know I'm walking toward the border.

It might take me a while, but eventually I'll get there.

And

Meta said, no.

You're crazy.

I'm not putting you out there by yourself.

He said no.

Camp Commander said no.

SOG Chief said no.

You can't do that.

And then

fate said,

I'm going to activate

RT dynamite.

Everybody else has said no,

but fate is about to say yes.

You are about to be activated dude

so

that's when i did the r mission

holy shit let's go into it

so

yeah i mean

i felt

like i was i was convinced i could just i could move

quieter, farther,

more effectively.

And with some missions, you know, it was just me.

I didn't need a team with me because I wasn't going out there to make contact or to fight anybody.

I was to be silent, hidden, collect the information I needed, and get out.

So

when I did go out, it wasn't all that silent, but

still worked.

How many times did you do that?

Only got to do it the one time.

But, you know, it ended up.

I had to go.

There were a bunch of people in trouble, and somebody needed to go get them and lead them out.

So I did that.

Can you be a little more descriptive?

I I had just come back from a mission,

a rough mission, and they were going to give me two days.

Let your team have two days, take a break before we give you your next mission.

So I decided I was going to leave camp, go downtown for a couple of days.

Because if I stayed in camp, somebody was going to find me and give me something to do.

I was heading for the gate.

Heard a helicopter coming.

Helicopter landed on our pad, a lot of activity going on around it.

And

one of the people there fumbling around with the helicopter saw me walking toward the gate.

He started yelling.

I couldn't understand him,

so I moved closer to him and he ran over to me and he said,

Do you know how to rig McGuire rigs to the floor of a helicopter so that we we can use them.

We've got an emergency going on.

I said, sure,

done that lots of times.

I can rig that up.

So I ran over.

I had a had my Car 15 and a bandolier with me, set that against the condensed container, jumped in the helicopter, started

making all the appropriate ties.

fastening it down, getting them rigged and ready to go.

And then the helicopter started to move.

Told a crew chief, I said, hey, I'm still on here.

And he said, sorry about that.

We've got to go.

We're in trouble.

So he said, you just have to go with us.

I said, okay.

I mean,

I don't know what you're going to do or anything, but yeah, I guess I'll go with you.

So I sat back and I just kind of started thinking about what was going on.

And I had this one

vision just started playing over and over in my mind.

And it was that the helicopter in front of us got shot down.

When we got there, the only way to get to the helicopter was

to go down the Maguire rig.

I dropped the Maguire rig and go down the rope.

But it was like I was looking into a black hole.

I couldn't see what was really going on.

Anyway, I pulled the crew chief over and said, you know, I've had this crazy vision.

You know, helicopter in front of us is shot down, and now we're there.

And

I think I might have to go down and do something.

And he said, you're crazy.

I said, yep.

And about 10 minutes later, he pulled me over and he said, you're not going to believe this.

They just shot down the middle back helicopter in front of us.

I said, okay,

that's interesting.

In my mind, I started thinking, I think RT dynamite might have just been activated

because somebody's going to have to go down there.

So when we got there, the first helicopter

that they shot down, it crashed and burned.

Three survivors, the pilot,

the co-pilot, and NTO that was was on there with him.

The medevac got there,

dropped a Maguire or a jungle penetrator down.

They put

the co-pilot and the sergeant on the jungle penetrator.

Medevac started pulling it up.

It got hit, lost power.

It went forward.

And the jungle penetrator is just like a big grappling hook that you're sitting on.

So

they were about 100 feet in the air and it got caught on a big limb, the cable snapped and it was just like you know the medevac had been shot out of a slingshot or something.

It just fired it right through the canopy

and

into a ravine.

So when we got there we circled around.

I could see the helicopter was

face down into a ravine and you the crew was still in it.

You could see the fuel spilling out over them.

I could see, you know, 40, 50 NVA coming up the ridge toward that.

It was going to take them out plus any, you know, a tracer, anything ignite that fuel.

They were all going to burn and they were so banged up and everything they couldn't get out of the ship.

So

I told the pilot, circle around,

hover, you know, close to that hole, and I was going to drop a McGuire rig and go down there.

So I bored the

Crew Chief's M16

and

stepped out on the skid.

We're about 400 feet high

in receiving fire and

McGuire rig went down.

It was 150 feet long.

But it was still up above the canopy that was 150 feet high.

But

I told the crew chief,

get him to lower it some because I've got to, I'm going to go down.

I didn't have any gloves or anything.

Turned out to be a

brand new nylon rope.

And I thought, you know, if I squeeze really hard and I wrap my feet around it, I can slow it down enough.

It's not going to burn that much.

About 30 feet down, and I realized the flaw in my plan.

I couldn't squeeze it that hard.

The rope had already turned red.

It was just taking everything off both ends.

I was bleeding, blood running off my elbows, people shooting at me.

I ran on down.

When I got to the McGuire rig, I was able to, you know, because it was pretty big, I was able to stop.

But, you know, I was 20 or more feet up above the canopy at that point, and he was taking enough fire he was going to leave.

So I knew I needed to go ahead and just drop into the canopy before he carried me off, and I'd be too high to do that.

So,

you know, I

dropped,

went into the canopy, and

I discovered it was really hard, even in a jungle canopy, to be able to grab a hold of something and hold on to it.

when you're falling through.

So it took me about 100 feet or so bouncing off limbs and things before I finally

managed to hit with my stomach and kind of wrapped around a big limb.

Got my breath.

I broke a couple ribs and things as I was falling through.

No meat on my hands.

Climbed down.

As soon as I got to the ground, two NVAs standing there, so

terminated.

them.

How'd you do that?

That technique I was talking to you before where I'd put put five silhouettes out, and I'd just go full auto as I went down to the ground.

Because I still had the M16 that I took from the crew chief.

I'd lost one of the magazines, but I put another one in it.

He'd given me a bandolier with five magazines.

So I took those two out and then started moving toward the crew.

that was still trapped in the helicopter.

The pilot started shooting at me

because he didn't know anybody else was down there, you know, where I was coming from.

I could hear that little 38 popping as he was shooting at me.

So I'm yelling at him and telling him, hey, I'm the rescue team.

And

finally he had to reload and when he reloaded I charged him and

You know, once he saw me, he was kind of in shock because he's looking at me and thinking, you're the one that needs to be rescued.

You know, you're all bloody from head to toe and torn up and everything.

But anyway,

I managed to get all of them out of the aircraft and move them to a safe space.

So if it exploded, you know, it wasn't going to get them.

So then I had to go.

There was a SOG team that the initial helicopter had went out to try to pick some of the members up.

So I went to where they were

and I heard

I heard an American voice speaking kind of loud.

So at that point I thought, well,

they must not be captured.

I mean there's an American talking.

And I got a little closer and I could see the

1-0, the team leader.

So I yelled to him

and

told him I was I was coming in not to shoot, tell these people not to shoot.

He said, come on in.

I kept,

if I back up a minute, I kept telling the pilot of the other crew, I said, I'm going to get you out.

You just need to do what I tell you.

I will come back and get you.

Don't move from where you are right now.

I go up to the team.

So I go in and there's

an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel.

standing there talking to the team leader, telling the team leader that he's in charge of the operation now.

He's the senior man on the ground, and he's in charge.

So when I got there

and heard him saying that,

I said,

you're not in charge.

You're on the ground now.

I'm the senior ground commander, and I'm in charge.

He said, you're a lieutenant, and you are not in charge.

And I said, you need to look around.

because all of a sudden all the indig

had turned their weapons toward him

they had figured out what was going on I said

they are about to make you disappear and your body is never going to be found

you need to be quiet and do what I tell you

So he quietened down.

I went down and got the

two guys off the jungle penetrator, brought them up,

used the radio, called for help,

and told them I needed explosives.

So a Marine CH-46 came out, dropped 50-pound blocks of C-4 and some fuses and fuse ladders, blasting caps.

So I blew a big,

several trees down to create a hole in the canopy, got some gunships out, started working the gunships, and eventually I got everybody up the jungle penetrator into the CH-46.

I got up, went up last, and

we flew away.

Holy shit.

You had a premonition.

Yeah.

And

that was a long day.

I get back to camp,

and the camp commander is in there with some aviation colonel

and they're upset about something.

And I said, I'm back.

And he's an aviation guy.

I said, you didn't get everybody.

I said, I got everybody that was there.

You didn't get the crew chief from the CH-34.

What crew chief?

I got everybody that

the pilot said was his.

I said,

you didn't get the crew chief.

You got to go back out and get him.

The pilot didn't tell me that the crew chief on his helicopter was missing.

The Air Force guys told me, didn't tell me.

Oh, my God.

You know, I'm still I'm bleeding like a stuck pig, and I said, you need to go back out and get him.

I need to get my hands treated first and then you know

I'll go back out there.

But

we decided to wait and you know let me take some of my new team and go out there the next morning and get him.

But came a storm that night.

It was two days before I could go back out there.

But I took my new team and went back out,

went to the helicopter where the body was supposed to be.

And sure enough, with all the rain, you could see his femur sticking up out of the wreckage on the ground,

plus all the flies and the smell and everything.

We got him.

I was also supposed to blow up the Huey medevac.

So I got the rest of the C4 that I had left out there

inside

the aircraft, packing the C4

in it.

And here come the NVA again.

Now I'm inside.

The bullets are starting to come in because they realize I was in the helicopter doing something.

And

it's hitting the C4, but it's not going to bother the C4.

I'm safe until I put the blasting cap in.

So got everything ready.

decided, okay, this is it.

Stick the blasting caps in, set the two fuse igniters on, jumped out, and managed to climb up the ridge I had put the team up on, this ridge up above the

helicopter.

And as I was going up the bank, the NVA assaulted the helicopter.

They thought I was still in there.

I got up on top, I'm looking down.

And

they're standing next to the helicopter with the time fuse burning.

Told my guys to get down.

40 pounds of C4.

Whoa.

Fortunately, it was down in that ridge, so most of the blast went linearly, you know, down the ravine, and then the rest of it went straight up, but it still

hurt, you know, the blast.

And then the rest of the NVA attacked.

We had a big firefight for an hour or so.

And finally, we managed to withdraw using the gun chips and stuff.

Then it started pouring rain.

We stayed out there another two days and we came back in and

then the aviation guy flipped out because I blew the helicopter up.

I said, you told me to do it.

I told you to destroy it.

I didn't tell you to blow it up.

I said, well, it's in a million little pieces along with body parts right now.

So,

anyway.

Wow.

I know that was a long story, but

I did get to go out that one time initially by myself and do some things.

Holy shit.

When I first told

the medevac pilot, I said,

he said, where's the rest of you in?

And I said, it's me.

I'm your rescue team.

Yeah, but where are your rest of you?

I said, it's just me.

You know, just

do what I tell you.

I'll get you out of here.

We can do this.

And they were just really disappointed.

This one guy came in here to get us.

Jeez.

So, anyway,

I could have done some other missions where I didn't have to fight out there.

you know, if I'd gone in alone.

Did you like the fighting?

I mean, it was exciting,

but

I didn't have a problem with going in and not fighting if I could accomplish the mission.

I thought we had missions on a fairly regular basis that came up.

I didn't need a team.

You just needed somebody that could sneak around out there, gather the information we needed, and come out.

Shit.

Did the killing bother you?

No.

And I think what happened

was on the very first mission, you know, I kept saying to myself,

it's okay.

I mean,

this is war.

They're bad guys.

They're going to kill me if I don't kill them.

And it's okay to kill them.

It's okay to shoot at them.

You know, I've got to remember that.

And I kept saying that over and over.

I have to do this.

It's okay.

And when that first one jumped up and shot at me, then,

you know, I didn't think about

that anymore.

I just started, you know, defending and shooting back.

Did the killing ever affect you as time went on?

Yeah.

How so?

You know, just the fact that you had to do it.

And

if

you're over there at the wall and you're shooting at me,

that doesn't bother me.

Shooting back at you doesn't bother me.

If you're standing there and you're not shooting at me,

to just take you out without you realizing it,

like some of the trackers that I did with the 22,

you know, that I had to think more about, you know, particularly afterwards,

that I I would just do that.

There are also

some times where

I had to take people out really up close.

That K-bar that you have over there,

I found, I started carrying that.

and I found

really close quarter stuff,

you know, that was quick and easy.

You know, it's it's about as up close and personal as you can get.

How would you do that?

In through the side of the neck.

If you go in straight in right there

and go out, you'll get the juggler, you'll get the carotid, and

it's over, it's over in a minute.

I mean, it's

it's un unreal how fast you bleed out like that.

And you can do that

quietly.

And

I think I mentioned to you before that those are some of the things that I talk to special ops guys about.

Not

talk to you know, law enforcement about that, but with the special ops guys, if you have to do things quietly, you don't have night vision,

you don't have all your electronics,

there are ways to get right up next to someone

and if you need to do it quietly.

How many times do you think you have to do that?

Four or five.

And just

yeah.

And, you know, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's not.

First time I did it,

you know,

I was just, you know, fighting for my life.

And,

you know, I was about to lose.

But I needed to.

How are you about to lose?

Because a friend of his showed up.

I mean, I'm on the ground with this guy.

And his friend showed up

and saw us down there and

realized that you know what was going on, that I was a bad guy

and had his friend.

So I had to deal with his friend and then take care of him.

I had to shoot him.

But just there were a few times where I just

got caught up in a I'm going to take a prisoner.

I'm going to get this guy and take him back in and for whatever reason wasn't able to do it.

Shit.

I changed to the K-bar,

I don't know, about midways, I guess.

I tried the SOG knife.

For me,

it just felt too small.

Because I wanted something that if I wanted to cut down a

you know a limb for a pole or to do something with, I wanted to have enough weight that I could hack through it or a piece of cane.

But I also wanted something big and strong enough that if I pushed it hard, it was going to go,

particularly, you know, when you get around the soft tissue in the neck and it goes fast.

And a K-bar is a big enough blade that when it goes in, it's hard to miss miss one of the arteries in there.

You could get in

quickly.

But I am a nice guy, but sometimes

you have to do things.

Does that stick with you?

Yes.

Yeah,

there are some things that you just

you can't unsee, you can't undo, you can't get rid of.

You can start to deal with it.

But it's

so far, it's always been there.

And it's not where I like to spend a lot of time.

When we were talking to John about you before the interview, he had mentioned that your only regret was not closing your mouth when you killed people up close.

Well,

I think what happens or happened

was I became so focused on what I was doing.

I mean, it's life or death, it's a fraction of a second here, you got to do something.

And I was so focused on

doing the termination thing

that for some reason my mouth would be open.

I don't know if I was talking about their ancestors or what,

but

if you're using a K-bar,

and you're up that close, you're going to get hit with a rush of blood.

And if you got your mouth open,

you're going to get a mouth full of blood.

There are least

two or three occasions where

I put a five or six round burst into somebody's face right up close to them when I'm right there with them

and

their head just explode.

Brain matter, tissue, bone, everything's going to hit you, you're going to be covered with it.

And the blood, if you got your mouth open, is going into your mouth too.

And I've had

that happen

on a few occasions because I didn't have my mouth closed.

But

shit.

Yeah.

There are not a lot of people out there that have that experience.

Most people are probably smarter than me.

They didn't get themselves into that situation.

When you're looking at taking somebody out that close and you're thinking about it,

I mean, how the hell do you get that fucking close to them?

And think about it, exactly what you're going to do.

Yeah, well,

the opportunity, you know, presents itself.

It's not, in most cases,

it's not that that's what I start out to do,

unless it's dark and I'm sneaking up on you because I need to take you out

without making any noise then I'm thinking mostly about how do I get from where I am to where you are without you knowing I'm coming and knowing that I'm there

and

you know the

what I'm trying to do is get from here over there

And now I'm next to you.

You don't know I'm next to you.

And

you're going to feel

a sting

on the side of your neck.

You're going to feel warm blood go out and everything's going to fade to black.

And your knees are going to start to crumple.

And I'll catch you as you're going down so you don't make noise.

But it's over very quickly.

But I'm spending most of my energy and thought process about how do I get to you.

I've got to get over there without you knowing that I'm there if I'm going to do something like that and be quiet and not discovered.

So there are things that I'm going to do depending on the terrain.

I may do a distraction.

I may toss something over in another direction for you to hear just to redirect your attention for a second while I can get closer to you.

Depends on how much I know about what the terrain's like.

Is it raining?

Has it been raining?

I mean, if it's raining, I'm going to be all over you.

I don't have to work hard to get close to you.

If it's not raining and everything's really quiet, I have to be very careful because I can't see the ground.

and I'm going to step on something and

twig's going to break or something and you're going to hear it.

And

one thing is:

if I've got a pebble, if I've got something that if I do break a twig here, I can launch that little pebble off to the other side of you over there, so you hear that louder than you heard this.

And now you will turn that way.

And that gives me a chance to get closer.

Did you come up with that?

You are a fucking master.

In that case, right?

That's what my friends.

I can argue that.

But you know, it's just

this is still really high on topic, but

how you walk.

Typically we put our heels down first

and then the rest of the foot comes down.

But what I had read about

decades ago was

that American Indians

slipping up on their prey whether it was another Indian tribe or animal whatever

is that they went toe first

if I go this way and I step on a trigger a twig

it's like there's a little amplifier there and it's throwing the sound out in that direction If I step on it and break it with my toe, the sound's coming back this way.

So you don't hear it as much.

So I used to have my little guys

toe down, toe first, toe first.

Let's practice that.

Toe first,

and you'll be quieter.

I had a thing that I call invisibility.

I used that hand signal.

If I did that, go invisible.

Be invisible right now.

Be invisible.

Nobody can hear you.

Nobody can smell you.

Nobody can

know anything about where you are.

Change how you walk.

And we started changing how we move through the woods.

I don't know if you hunt deer or not, but

if you watch a deer,

he's the hardest to see when he's coming directly at you until he stops.

And when he stops, what he...

He screws up with is he starts looking right and left.

And when he starts moving his head, you'll see it because the

different color in the skin, any movement like that you'll see.

Horizontal movement is much easier to see than vertical movement.

So instead of the porn man

walking through the jungle, you know, moving his weapon and twisting his body back and forth so he thinks he's going to be ready to fire

you know if he encounters somebody,

that's just giving him away.

Don't move the weapon.

Scan your eye.

Your eyes are not, you won't see him.

The eyes move.

Keep your weapon here because you don't know if he's going to be over there or over here.

So if you do it like this, now he's, but he's actually over there.

By the time you can get back around to him, you're dead.

Split the distance.

So

teaching them how not only for the foreman to do that, move the whole team

straight.

You start zigzagging,

you're easy to see as you're coming.

So I started teaching them all kinds of invisibility.

No soap,

nothing that you can smell for the last three days before we go out.

I don't want them to smell us when we're out.

They'll smell the soap because they're not used to soap.

And soap just stands out when you go out out there.

In fact, I even got to the point where I started making them eat North Vietnamese-type food

because I told them if we're out there and we're out there four or five days, eventually you're going to have to poop.

And when you poop, I want it to smell like NVA poop.

And if they find it, I want them to say, Oh, that's

one of us.

Sweat.

My father told me

when I was a little kid one time, there's

a dog, a strange dog, and the dog was growling at me.

And, you know, my father went over and petted him.

And

now it's just a little kid.

I said,

why is he growling at me?

And he's not growling at you.

And my father said,

he knows you're afraid of him.

How does he know that?

He He just does.

He knows you're afraid of him and he's intimidating you.

He knows I'm not afraid of him.

It took me,

you know, a couple of decades to figure out what was going on.

When you

all sweat is not the same.

You go out and do some exercise or it's hot in here and you sweat, yeah, sweat smells

if you sweat because of fear

fear

sweat smells very different.

It's much stronger and it smells different.

So if you're laying in an ambush site waiting to ambush me, and you know when you ambush a SOG team, those jokers are coming after you.

You're laying there sweating with fear, sweat, I'll smell you.

On more than one occasion, I've just stopped the team, stop.

You know, they're there.

I can smell them laying up there in the woods I can smell the sweat

dogs can smell the difference between fierce sweat and normal sweat so they it's easy for them to tell that you're afraid of them

so

they want you to relax I want you to your poop to smell like NVA poop They don't want any soap or anything like that on you that people can, that the NVA can smell.

So that's all part of being invisible jump up and down nothing should make a sound on you when you jump up and down you should have nothing on you

that's bright all the the buckles and metal things on your harness need to be painted black or wrapped in black friction tape

so they don't shine

you need to be camouflaged all the stuff counts

take pictures of them and say look what does this look like?

That looks like Ben

laying on the ground because you can see all the buckles on him.

Or you can see he's got two yellow smokes on him.

The bottom of the yellow smoke is white color, is yellow.

And it's got a kind of a light white band around the thing.

You can't have that.

It makes you show up.

And how you walk,

how you approach people, it's all part of being invisible human in the daylight and ways to do that.

Maybe giving you more than you want to know, but

you know, something I didn't say at the beginning is the Vietnam generation is what inspired me to go into the SEAL teams.

Hearing you talk, I'm just realizing so many of our TTPs and SOPs and all that kind of stuff

came from

you guys.

It's pretty surreal for me.

I think

a lot of it did

came

from SOG guys.

Because of the intensity of the missions and where we were going, if you were going to survive, there were things you had to do.

And we learned things.

You know, I felt stupid

when I realized that some of the people who came after me in 70

started using

the earplugs that we use on the range

when they'd get on a helicopter.

Because you're right on the helicopter, unprotected ears.

It'll be two hours plus when you get off of that thing before you get your full hearing back.

So you do a security stop and you're out there trying to listen and see if you hear anybody moving.

You can't hear yet.

And I discovered that for me

when

I saw a headset hanging in the helicopter, we were on the way out.

I saw a headset and I asked a crew chapter, can I use that?

And he said, sure.

So I got the headset and I put it on.

and then discovered,

I used to watch the door gunners.

They're sitting there and we're going out and their heads bouncing up and down.

And I thought, wow, it's rough riding on the outside where the door gunners are.

I put that headset on and I thought,

he's listening to Credence Clearwater Revival.

You know, their heads moving with the beat of a stupid, the pilots have got the radio station on.

I mean,

I didn't know that.

And And then I realized that when I got off the helicopter, I could still hear.

But later on, some guys realized just pop the earplugs in before you get on the aircraft.

When you get off, pop them out, put them in your pocket, you can hear.

So there are a lot of things like that that people discover.

You know, it kind of irritated me that I didn't think of something that simple, that obvious.

But there are a lot of things you can do.

Did you have any

personal pre-mission rituals or anything that you would do before you go out on an op?

Some guys pray, some guys write a letter, some guys listen to music, some guys...

I used to watch this video of

terrorists

stripping gear out of the guys from Rud Wings.

They would video it.

They would video

stripping our KIA of their rifles, their helmet, their night vision, their IDs, their magazines, everything.

I used to watch that before every op.

Did you do anything?

Some of mine was mental.

I

And I'll just start with once I got on the aircraft while we were waiting to take off,

you know, I'd always say a prayer.

Let me preface this with,

I can't carry a tune in a bucket, you know.

Singing,

you would not, you'd think it was a dying calf in a hell storm or something if I tried to sing.

But mentally, you know, I can't, you know, so I would always do amazing grace.

And

then, you know, I may mix some other little things in with it

as then I transition over to

the mission focus.

What do I have to do?

When the countdown starts, what do I have to do?

What am I looking for?

What's the plan?

Who's going?

going first, which way are you going?

What do I need to do with the team?

I'm reviewing the plan.

Then I may throw a little more amazing grace in there just before we get there.

And then it's back to

the box breathing.

So

by the time I get out on the skid,

I've already been doing it for a while, but doing the box breathing.

because that will

relax your arteries, it has an impact on your vagus nerve, it calms you down,

because they know that when we get there,

if we engage right away, all of that stuff's coming at me and I'm standing out on a skid because I'm getting ready to jump off.

And I've got to think about the other things that we're going to do, not those bullets coming at me.

Bullets,

at least to me, bullets can be a real distractor.

You hear those things cracking by you,

it can distract you from what you're supposed to do.

And I had to find a way to turn loose of the bullets and see what's going on, see the battle space, know what I needed to change, make sure I was going to tell you guys what the difference was.

I was going to give you the signals.

And same, you know, on the ground, once you make contact,

a disadvantage we we had was then you couldn't hear.

Car-15 so loud, AK-47s are so loud, and you're so close to each other, and

you're there, and I'm trying to tell you, go left.

You can't hear what I'm saying.

Not that you know, even this close with all the car-15s and everything firing, grenades going off, rockets coming at you, you know, and I'm horning,

you know, I'm having to do hand signals and stuff to get people to move.

And then once you drop down out of sight,

then

I'm trying to remember you went there, he went there, he went over there, and telling all my people, this, if you get hit,

and I'd make them practice, if you get hit,

start yelling, hit.

I need to know someone's hit.

I need to know a general direction of where they are.

If you're hit, I will come get you, but I need to know

the vicinity to look for when I come over there.

So start yelling, hit.

I know you're alive, and I can eventually find where you are, and I will get you.

But if you don't yell,

I don't know where you went down.

I don't know that you've even been hit.

So there are things like that, just making them yell, hit, hit, hit, because they could say that close enough that I could understand it

and loud.

And

just practicing those things, it made them

more confident that if something happened to them, that I would get them.

And they saw it on different occasions where, you know, I snatched somebody up and I made sure we got him on the helicopter.

And, you know, know, the word spreads.

You know, Thompson might be a nutcase, but he'll put you on the helicopter.

Anyway.

How many friends did you lose over there?

I have a list of 34.

34.

And

I didn't lose

Bargewell over there,

but I put him on my list when he passed away a few years ago, seven years ago.

You know, the reason I'm asking is there's a lot of people that struggle with lost friends in combat.

And that's not how many people were killed.

That was just the guys I knew.

And we were either on the same team together or we knew, like Tilt.

You know, Tilt would have been on my list, you know, because I knew him well.

Lynn Black would have been on my list.

It's not a list you want to be on,

obviously.

But it was, there were a lot of other people who were killed.

I just didn't know them.

How did you compartmentalize that in the middle of it?

Difficult.

You know,

trying to realize that

I couldn't do anything about it.

They were gone.

I could remember them.

I couldn't make sure, you know, they wasn't forgotten.

I couldn't bring them back.

In some cases, I could contact their family

later.

It's just very difficult.

And

I think

at times, in some cases,

it probably influenced my thinking of

just let me go by myself.

That way I don't have to worry about losing you.

Makes sense.

And in fact, you know,

if you read the book when you get in there, you'll see that

I would keep having that discussion

with Meadows where I wanted to go alone.

You know, I would use when he would just deny that, I'd finally come back and say, well,

at least I'll just be the only American on the team.

I'll take the little guys.

I'll be the only American.

Don't put another American on a team with me.

You know, so

he would do that most of the time.

And I think some of that was influenced by,

you know,

I don't want to lose you.

So

there's just so many.

And

John and I have had this

conversation recently.

It's almost like

now,

today,

it's almost like being back in talk.

How so?

Every day.

Every day

there's a list that comes out on the phone.

So we have a lady, Bonnie Cooper, who has worked for the

Special Ops Association

in various ways, particularly the website, but she monitors

SF and particularly solid people,

obituaries.

And

I've told her before, Bonnie, take a break.

You know,

try not to let so many people go.

away like that.

I mean, it's like every few days you're seeing somebody's name.

You know, because we're in that age group now.

I mean, I can relate.

With us, it's suicide.

Yeah.

And, you know, then,

you know, it's,

I can, I think I can

understand

why they do it, what they, what's going on.

But you, I mean, I've got people I talk to every day.

And, you know, what I'm trying to do is prevent that.

I mean, you have a PhD in psychology.

Everybody's trying to get to the bottom of this.

And

I've had so many friends that have killed themselves.

I can't even count them all.

I quit counting.

You know, I think...

And you know about the struggles with addictions and booze and

opiates and

everything,

you know, and

I think it just takes one second.

It does.

You know, and there's, there's, you know,

there are some decisions that you can't take back.

I think about it sometimes and share sometimes, you know, when I was standing on the

skid of the helicopter holding on to that

rope,

Once I stepped off,

that decision was made, and there's no changing it.

I was on the rope and on my way down.

You know, there was no opportunity to say, well,

I don't think I want to do this.

And

that decision to pull the trigger, to do whatever it is that you're going to do,

once you make it,

and you can make it very fast.

I mean,

I talked to

a guy who had decided, you know, this is it.

I'm going to hang myself.

And he went in his bedroom and

tied a rope up, climbed up on a stool, and was getting ready to put the noose around his neck.

And his little daughter walked in.

What are you doing, Dad?

And,

you know, he came back down.

If she'd have been a few seconds later,

and it

and it's hard to tell sometimes where people are

they can they can change into that mode and make that decision so quickly

how do you honor your friends that have been killed or taken their own lives

well for

50 years or so

I

run

in their memory

well when I was when I was active doing Iron Man I would

you know today's swim is for these people

the runs for this the bikes for that

and still do that

on the

the what I call the angel versity

versatory of their

So on that day,

you know, we do the names of all the people

and

then

I let

that person, whoever it's Angel vs.

is,

I let them lead the run.

And,

you know, so and I post it.

I put it out on social media

so that

people remember.

I've been doing that, and you'll see in the back of the book, and in the book, you'll see every month

there's a section in there.

Here are the guys of those 34, here are the ones that died this month.

My friends,

and even though there are a lot of other people that died, I've got them in there

at the end.

Well, every day,

when I post, I've got the list of the 34.

So I post all of them, post the pictures,

and then

highlight the one that died that day.

And some with sod people, sometimes it's three or four that died that day.

Maybe the whole team got wiped out.

And,

you know,

their parents are gone.

Your parents would be over 100 years old, you know, so they're not there, but, you know, they still have, you know, brothers, sisters, wives, whatever, some of them.

So I get a message every once in a while.

But I also have

a group of

you know, Afghan and,

you know,

that whole group of people.

I've got about 35 of those.

So I interact with

their families, but you know, I post them on the days that they died.

I mean, as a

as a SAG operator who's been through this a long time ago and

have navigated your way through it up to this point, what advice do you have for my generation who's dealing with this?

How do you move past it?

Some of it is I try to put some principles, solid principles in the book.

The moving forward.

I mean, in the book, it's related initially to

combat,

but it's still combat when you're not in combat.

Things happen.

You've got to keep moving forward.

You got to do it.

And

once you stop, all kinds of things happen.

And moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically.

And like

old guys like

John, you know, he's an old guy.

We have to

kind of watch each other and take care of each other and contact.

And I was talking to

a teammate of mine

earlier this week.

And he was telling me he's afraid to call people now.

You know, our sob guys.

He said, I'm afraid to call.

I'm afraid they won't answer.

I'm afraid I'm going to get a family member or something.

And they're going to tell me, you know, he's gone.

But

you got to keep checking.

Keep moving forward.

And keep remembering.

In the book, it talks about

people die.

People die twice.

The first time they die is when their heart stops.

The second time they die is when people stop saying their name.

So

that's why I use the the list.

I go down that list and say it.

Their families, and then particularly, you know,

your group,

their families are still alive, their parents are still around.

And, you know, I get emails from them all the time

saying thank you, you know.

So

it's not easy, but applying some of those principles like that and just

you gotta, you can't bring them back.

You gotta keep moving forward.

And sometimes you think about

like Bardswell, for example,

remembering that

all of

God's angels

don't sing in the choir.

Some of them are warriors.

I figure Bargewell worked himself up pretty high into the warrior group.

So some of us are going to end up there, I think, and you know, that's good.

And, you know, at some point,

you know, most of us will see each other again.

Hopefully in the right place.

I'm with you.

If we haven't talked about it yet, what mission in SAG

sticks out more than all the rest of them?

For me, a mission I went on.

A real contender for that would be

the one where I had the woman on the radio.

The gunfight went on so long, almost 24 hours,

and just one thing after another.

I mean,

in that mission, after,

you know, saw the lights coming,

the weather had socked us in, couldn't get air support in,

so we had to use something called combat sky spots.

You know, an L-4 is coming by,

he's going to drop

a bomb just based on the radar saying you're in the right place.

And, you know, so working with that, you know, the first one he dropped was like 3,000 meters off.

But, you know, we worked, so we had to work through all of that.

And then,

you know, we were in contact.

this daylight and we were in contact and I saw

in the book, I just call it the Grim Reaper coming in.

I think the devil showed up and said

I'm coming for you.

So, some discussion back and forth like that.

And got to the point where

we were being overrun.

And

I called a comp

CBU in right on top of our position.

I just said,

if you guys are going to overrun us, I'm going to take as many of you with us as I can.

So I had Covey find a plane that had CBU.

And

we're in a little circle of this size.

You know, a canister of CBUs has like 250,

you know,

grenades in it with explosives in it that come raining down.

So either the 250,

15 of them landed either inside this perimeter

or just outside.

15 of them.

And, you know, explosions everywhere, people screaming, all this kind of stuff.

And I saw some of them hit, and I thought,

it hit, but I didn't hear it explode.

I must be dead.

I'm still seeing itself, but I must be dead.

And then I realized, you know, I'm not dead.

They didn't go off.

Wow.

So,

oh.

I obviously got some help from above.

You can't have 15 duds all in

the same place at the same time

and not go off.

You just can't do that.

That's not going to happen, you know, without some divine intervention.

So

the old

image came back again, and

he's just shaking his head and walking off into the vegetation.

It was like, I thought I would get you, but I didn't.

We go, we're trying to fight our way down.

We get ambushed, trying to go toward the LZ.

We managed to survive that and get through it.

We got down to the extraction LZ, and my porn man, you know, stopped us.

I went up to see why he stopped us,

and he looked at me and he said, Bomb.

What?

bomb.

And I looked out at the LZ

over on the left side of it, sticking up out of the mud, was a 500-pound bomb, unexploded.

That's the one

that we didn't hear explode last night when we were trying to adjust them.

It went into

our landing zone.

Now there's a 500-pound bomb sitting there.

That's the only place we can get out.

The NVA don't know it's there, and we're going to be in a firefight with them.

And if somebody hits it, it's going to take all of us out and whatever aircraft we're coming in to get us.

So we've got a real problem here to deal with that.

So I got, you know, hold Covey and had him put the word out:

don't put any ordinance on that side of the LZ when you're trying to help us.

And so finally we're bringing the aircraft in.

I'm out,

I'm having to stand up with a VS-17 panel,

bringing the aircraft in, trying to get them to where I wanted.

Got down to the last aircraft and I'm trying to throw the last people up there and that's where I hear the loud

drop.

Everything went silent and there's a you know booming voice that says drop.

I just got to my knees, and when I did, a stream of machine gun bullets, RPG bullets, came across and cut a hole that big side of the helicopter.

Sheesh.

You know, where I was.

So.

Another premonition.

So I said,

yep,

I'm getting a lot of help to try to get me out of this.

And so finally,

got the last, threw the last guy up on the helicopter and off we went.

Thought, man,

that was

a long mission.

As a team leader, when you're calling air power in on yourself to take you and as many of them as you possibly can, is that a team decision or is that a personal decision?

In my case, you know, I told Bruce.

who was acting as my assistant, I told him and the other American, this is what I'm doing, because I mean they're coming across us.

I mean we've got a few seconds to make a decision, get down, get all the team members down because it's coming.

And I told Cubby, you make

have him make one pass

and put the CBU on top of us.

If I don't come right back up on the radio,

then have him make the second pass

But listen for me because if I come back up saying

I'm still here,

don't let him put another one on us.

We didn't have to use the second one.

Did you support

Hamburger Hill?

No.

No.

Oh, oh, no,

I'm thinking supporting another way.

Yes.

There was an NBA division that was being moved around that they were going to bring up there

and just crush the 101st.

And

I was assigned the mission to go find them and stop them.

So

I figure with six people, how hard can it be to find 10,000 people?

in a group.

So surely I can find them.

But

they didn't cooperate well.

That's when they shot the helicopter down I was in, broke my back,

some ribs.

And one of my guys got in my helicopter, shot through the thigh.

I got them and finally got them into a bomb crater

and

spent most of the day there

fighting and putting in airstrikes and

eventually got out and they said, you've got to go back tomorrow morning.

We don't have the division, what's left of the division, which we figured was down to about 7,000.

We don't have them pinpointed enough for the B-52 strike.

We need you to go back in and get some more data.

They put pistol belts around me with a piece of wood behind it, a little pad.

I didn't carry my rucksack because

I couldn't lift any weight like that

and went back out there.

But

I got the coordinates,

gave it to the B-52s.

That evening they came in and wiped the rest of them out.

They dropped 66,500-pound bombs in that

little rectangle I gave them.

Oh, and

we mentioned my

grandson, grandson-in-law at lunch.

His father's, no,

his

mother's father flew B-52s in Vietnam.

Interesting guy to talk to.

And at one point,

we thought we had pinpointed the date that he might have actually flown that mission that came in and took these guys out, but

he was flying a different mission.

But

that would have been cool.

Wow.

What was the final op?

the final one

there uh

it came right after shortly after that um that one we were talking about the

there was a little one we went and knocked out an

underwater bridge

I couldn't figure out how they kept getting the trucks

on down the trail.

They were going off the trail under the canopy and they had built a bridge that was just below the water so you couldn't see it.

They were driving across it and coming back on the road.

They still work on this bridge that you could see,

but we keep bombing that.

Somehow they were still getting across.

So we went out, I took that out, dropped a bridge

on a different mission right in there.

The one where we were going to drop the big bridge,

I had to crawl on my hands and knees across an open field to get to where I could really see the supports and things on the bridge.

There was a bush out in the center of the field, about that high.

So if I peeked my head up a little bit in the grass, I could see the bush, so I used that to navigate, crawled under it,

went about 10 meters, and then

caught on fire.

That bush was covered with big fire ants and they got all over.

I had to strip out there in the middle of the field,

you know, thinking, how many NVA are on that bridge are going to go across that bridge when I'm laying out here almost naked, you know, and my team, they don't know what's going on.

They're back there in the edge of the woodline thinking, what is he doing?

He's taking his clothes off out there in the middle of the field.

Oh, I mean, I almost died from that.

Okay.

I mean, because we didn't, you know, we didn't carry antihistamine with us.

I was so loaded with all their venom.

Damn.

Yeah, there were...

There's two or three short ones like that toward the end, and then,

you know, the commander plucked me out.

They plucked you out.

Pull me off the team and say I'm going to move you into operations here for a while.

Did you want to do that?

No.

And I didn't want to work for him either.

So because I had my plan was to extend for six months.

But after working for him for a while, I decided, no, I'm not going to do that.

I'll go ahead and rotate back to the States,

you know,

give him six months or so to go away,

and then I'll come back

and have a new commander,

polish my skills up for six or eight months, and then come back and be better.

But then I didn't get a chance to come back either.

Did you get addicted to the adrenaline?

Oh, yeah.

The killing.

Oh, yeah.

The combat?

Yes.

How did you address it?

And that's a

real issue because that happens to special ops guys.

You get so addicted to the adrenaline.

Finding something else that will give you the adrenaline rush that's not maybe not quite as dangerous.

In my case,

one of the things was,

you know, free fall, halo.

particularly if you

can burn it on down a little closer than what you're supposed to do

and I was I was in a situation where you know

I put the halo team together I was the leader of the halo team

and you know

I could do just about anything I wanted to.

So

I could look at the terrain and see this little tiny

opening on a ridge line there in the mountains and say, hmm, I wonder if I could hit that at two o'clock in the morning

and land right in that little

opening, put ranger students out there on their back.

holding the flashlight up with a red filter on it in the shape of a T or whatever letter I wanted

and see if I can get in there.

So I was doing a lot of different things like that that would give you a rush.

And

I was also very fortunate

that

when I came back from SAG,

I went to the Rangers

and everybody had to have a combat experience.

to be there as one of the instructors.

So, you know, I had 40 guys

there that were all talking with each other and helping each other.

Everybody kind of understood about combat.

They didn't know I'd been in Massag, but still, people were shooting at them, too.

So

we had a support group there.

And we were doing things that could give you

adrenaline rush.

So that helped.

Well, let's take a quick break.

When we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home.

Okay.

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

And, you know, I'd like to document what it was like for you,

not in the military, but

what was it like for you coming home from Vietnam,

seeing how Americans were acting towards veterans?

And I want to cover this.

I was not happy.

You know, it started as I was

coming through the airport and seeing that

people

in general were not reacting favorably toward

the soldiers coming home.

I think in my case, just coming through the airport,

I had my beret on.

So that was kind of like a force factor that was just people were getting out of the way.

They just let me through.

They didn't want to get close to me.

And the ones that yelled something were always, you know, at a distance.

But it was there.

And like I mentioned earlier, I think I had friends that had been friends at one point, but

kind of went away

because of the war.

And some of them never came back in terms of of coming back and being a friend.

I mean, they just

once they separated from me they just stayed that way, you know, because I stayed in the military.

So

I was disappointed with that.

I think staying in the military helped me.

It did.

Because I was around obviously people who believed in being in the military.

Military

went through a lot of changes, you know, going going forward.

Because once you stopped the draft,

then getting people in, it really changed

the people who were coming in.

But the general attitude, I mean,

still out there.

When I got out of the military and started the consulting company,

I didn't tell people I'd been in the military, clients.

I never mentioned the military.

Really?

What the hell do you think you've been doing for the last 20 years?

Being a consultant, going to school, doing whatever.

But,

you know, the military just had a bad name.

And if I mentioned I'd been in the military,

it's interesting.

A client that I had for years started out with,

they flew me out to meet with the executive team

before they hired me.

So

I'm talking to him and the CEO looked up at me and he said

what are you going to tell me about how to be a CEO and run this?

What do you know?

And

he knew that I had been in the Army because he had hired somebody that knew me

that had been in the Army.

And he said,

all you know how to do is tell people what to do, to yell at them.

And, you know, I don't know how you're going to help me out at all.

And I said, well.

You have people in the organization.

And when you have people in the organization,

there are certain difficulties and problems that will come up just because you have people.

It doesn't matter who the people are or what they are.

And I know how to help with those types of problems.

And it's not yelling at people, it's not doing anything like that, not being a dictator.

That's not my philosophy.

I don't believe that that's the way to be a leader.

And, you know, I'm I'm going to be working with you to see what's going on and help you find solutions that will work with your people.

So we talked like that a little bit and he

met with his team for about 20 minutes and called me back in and said, okay, let's get started.

And I worked for him for years until somebody else bought the company.

But

I just didn't tell people.

But

once 9-11 happened,

yeah, tell people you're in the military, that's a good thing.

Oh, yeah, appreciate your service.

I mean, you're just

all the way until after 9-11.

I'm sorry.

You didn't experience that until...

I mean, there were people

who

I knew or had known or grown up around

older people

who would say, you know, thank you for your service and things like that.

But people who hadn't known me before,

find out I was in the military, it wasn't necessarily, you know, congratulations or thank you or anything

for a long time.

We had a bad reputation

because of Vietnam.

But then you know because of going to the all-volunteer army

you know

that was a disaster

do you want to go to jail or you want to join the army oh I'll join the army

you know I can put you in jail with drugs use or you can join the army I'll go in the army

and

you know it was just different

But 9-11, all of a sudden,

a punishment instead of an act of service.

Yeah.

And

everybody wasn't like that, but a lot of the people I ran into were.

And, you know, I would,

you may have already asked John about that, but

I would

just see what

most vets say, the Vietnam vets say.

When did it change?

And there are Vietnam vets out there right now that are still angry, very angry.

And if you try to tell them, you know, thank you for your service, I mean, it'll bite your head off

because they're so angry about, you know, why didn't you tell me that 50 years ago?

It's worked out, you know, for me, I think.

I've been very fortunate.

Do you carry any animosity from that?

I hate that it happened.

I think we screwed up Vietnam rawly.

I think there are a lot of things we could have done to make it better.

I don't think we,

as soldiers, I don't think we went over and did the kinds of things that most people thought we were doing.

I don't think we were running around killing women and babies and doing things like that.

I'm sure some got, you know, killed.

It's war.

And,

you know, shrapnel and bombs and things, bullets, they don't care.

If somebody gets in the way of it, it's going to hit them.

And

it's hard to have a war and not have someone, you know, killed or wounded.

That's innocent.

Yeah.

What prompted you to get your PhD in psychology?

Psychology came about because

as I as I watched what was happening on the battlefield and trying to understand

Like with my indigenous team leaders

They've been going out on SOG missions, you know for two years or so

And now they're going out with me for a year.

And when I leave, they're going to go out with the next team leader for a year.

Why would they do that?

I mean, some of these guys were 50% scar tissue.

Why would they keep going out and getting shot up or killed on a regular?

We paid them, but it wasn't enough money to make it

worth getting killed for or mangled like a lot of them did.

And then why would the Americans go out, the operators, why would they go out and do this?

Why not go to a regular unit or why not come to SOG and go to a staff job

and not go across the fence?

The addiction.

It was dangerous to do that.

Once you got out there and survived it a time or two,

you could start to get addicted to it.

And, you know, there are cases that I talk about in the book where I could see they were addicted to it.

How could you tell?

Well,

my roommates, you know, we were, for the most part, put in rooms with, you know, two people to a room in the recon company.

And my roommate

came back from a mission and he told me that

Wow,

they thought they were going to get me this time.

They thought they were, I outsmarted those guys.

So they're not as good as they think they are.

I said, Dennis,

they are good, you know.

And if they almost got you,

you need to be careful.

You need to think about it.

And then

he came back to me

a couple of missions.

Well, before he came back a couple of missions later, I woke up,

you know,

in the middle of the night because I just,

I could feel somebody looking at me.

And I woke up and Dennis is standing right there, lights out, looking down at me.

My car 15 hanging on the wall right next to me.

I grabbed that, you know, and I was ready to shoot him.

And I realized it was him.

Dennis, what are you doing?

I said, nothing.

I was just thinking.

And he wouldn't talk about it.

He got back to bed, went to bed.

And then

he wanted to talk because he was getting ready to go on another mission.

And he said,

I don't have a good feeling about this one.

I said, I thought you felt like you were doing pretty well.

He said, there's something about this one.

I don't know what it is.

I can't shake it.

I just feel like I'm not coming back from this one.

And

we chatted about that feeling.

And

I told him,

just my thought talking to you.

It's not over today.

It's over.

And I don't know where that's coming from.

I'm just telling you,

if I were you,

first of all, I wouldn't go on the mission.

I would go turn it down.

I know you're not going to do that,

but that's what you should do.

But if you go,

just keep in mind it's not over until it's over.

You know, be very careful.

You know, very careful.

Not realizing that his assistant team leader was talking

to my buddy

that same thing.

He said,

you know,

I think the captain is really good.

He's a really good operator and team leader.

But I'm scared.

There's something about this mission.

I'm scared.

And so we were having these two separate conversations and Bruce didn't know that I was talking to Dennis.

I didn't know he was talking

to the other guy.

And they went out

and got to, they came back to finish the mission, supposedly

got back to the extraction LZ undetected.

They were waiting on the helicopters to come get them.

And

all of a sudden, you know, you heard that

call on the radio,

prairie fire emergency, prairie fire emergency.

You know, we're overrun.

And then it goes off.

Cubby can't make contact with them.

You know, you just radio silence on their part.

So

we realized we're going to have to send a Bright Light team out there.

And

this is one where I was already at the the launch site,

so they changed my mission to Bright Light to go out there.

But about 30 minutes after the message that we heard that was where they were overrun,

then on the emergency radio on the guard frequency,

there was a voice

that came on and saying, God, help me, please, somebody help me.

An American voice on

the guard frequency.

The Covey that was out there didn't know,

didn't know these two guys personally, so he couldn't tell if that was one of their voices or somebody else.

He couldn't tell which one of them it might have been on the radio.

But

sent a team out, they recovered

two survivors of the indigenous.

They got them back back in, and I was on standby to go back out there to try to find

Dennis and the 1-1.

And

listening to these two guys tell what happened

and what they did after it happened.

Bruce was there with me, and we were talking.

Something's not right.

Something just doesn't sound right the way they're telling it.

So when we did go in,

it didn't take long told Bruce.

I mean, we were in contact, you know, continuous contact.

We had to fight our way in, continuous contact the whole, you know,

time we were there, didn't get back out until the next day, but continuous contact.

I told Bruce, I said, nothing where we are looks like what they described.

I mean,

this is just not the place where it happened.

I think they were wounded, they were scared,

and how far they ran, which way they ran,

was just not correct.

Not that they were intentionally, you know, doing it.

But I think they were so stressed out,

they didn't know where they had started from and how far they went.

I said, I think we're

2,000 meters probably away from

where it actually happened.

But we were in such heavy contact, we were in the middle of a bunker complex,

we couldn't really stop and do anything about it

then.

Never found them.

They were eventually declared,

presumed, dead, and

so the families couldn't get some closure.

Have you ever gone back to Vietnam?

No.

I've been invited a few times by people.

I probably, and Bargwell went back.

I probably should have went when he went.

He actually went back and he found

the interpreter that we had

on the team that we were on together, actually tracked him down and found him.

Terrible story.

I mean the guy's just

living in poverty, his family's in poverty.

You know, the NVA put him in, you know, re-education camp, all those guys, they killed them, put them in re-education camps for years, took everything they had,

you know, like a lot of the stuff in Afghanistan.

Sounds almost identical.

If you're supporting the Americans and the Americans pull out and leave you,

you know, it's not going to be a good thing for you.

I mean, yeah.

Afghanistan was just a repeat of what we've already done.

We did the same thing, you know, Vietnam.

What did you learn in your studies for psychology?

When it comes to

war.

Well,

I think it helped me

to have a framework for looking at

how people

respond in combat, how they can get addicted to different things, get addicted to the

adrenaline rush,

those kinds of things.

It helped me to understand,

I think,

the impact of fatigue, sleep loss,

getting wounded,

stress, the different

changes.

It just,

it's interesting.

We take soldiers and we train them and we train them and train them on the range.

Here's what the sight picture's got to look like.

Here's how you do all this stuff.

Front sight focus, on and on and on.

And then we put you out there and have those targets start shooting back at you, stress level skyrockets.

And now you discover you can't see the sights.

Your vision changes.

You don't have close vision anymore.

Everything is

You know, within the range of your weapon sights, everything's blurry.

You can't get that sight picture when you stress skyrockets.

So now you're trying to hit something and

don't realize that you can't focus, you know, like you've been trained.

So there are a lot of things like that that I had the framework to go back and look at, think about,

and then

go test out see what works and what doesn't and

so that's one side of it the other side is how do you help people move forward start moving forward again

what is it what is it that you can do for them and everybody's a little different and you've got you have to understand that they're starting at different places they're a little different

your approach needs to be different

and I found that you when I'm talking to vets who

are struggling,

particularly if it's combat related,

that one thing that they seem to be looking for is,

I want someone that I can talk to who understands what I'm saying.

I don't care how much book knowledge you have.

I don't care how many books you've read or stories you've heard.

you you just don't know what it's like

and you can't understand me and and i tell you

and you say yeah you know that's the way war is and what

i said you're not hearing me

yeah and and you know john and i were having a discussion a number of years back

And I said, you know, one of the things,

one of the things that's different about you and I and the rest of most of the other world out there

is

when you and I read one of these SOG books and we're reading about the gunfight that's going on.

It's not nice and quiet like it is here and we're just reading the words and hearing it or you know seeing what's going on.

We hear it

You know

that we see that F4 coming.

It's silent.

It's not making a sound until it passes us.

And once it goes past us, and that sonic boom hits us, and that bomb comes in, or the napalm comes in, and the heat and the smell and everything is, I mean, it's so loud right now.

We can't read that book and not hear it.

You know, other people can read it.

They don't hear that stuff.

They don't smell the napalm.

You know, people who have been there do.

And when they're talking to somebody who hasn't been there,

they realize it.

And

I always, I was telling, I did a podcast with

Mike Glover.

And a few minutes into it,

you know, I realized he knows what I'm saying.

He's been there, he's done it, and

we're communicating.

We're on the same wavelength here as we talk about what's going on.

You know, it's like you and I.

You've done it, you've seen it, and we can talk about it, and we're connecting while we're doing it.

But if you're some

doctor in a VA hospital somewhere, or therapist, and and you haven't experienced it,

it's hard to connect.

You know, because the vet realizes it right away.

It doesn't take him or her but a few minutes to realize you got some book knowledge, but you don't know what I'm talking about.

You can't really empathize with me.

You can sympathize, but you can't empathize.

Anyway.

Did you feel a lot of resentment towards

regular everyday Americans that had not served, who were

calling you baby killer, woman killer, whatever?

I didn't, I don't, resent that they haven't served.

You know, I'm okay with that.

I mean, it's serving,

I don't think it's

good for everyone.

I don't resent that.

If they haven't served and they want to call me a baby killer, then, you know, I'm not happy with that.

If he wasn't there, don't tell me what I do.

I think a lot of vets in

different generations feel that type of resentment.

What advice do you have for them?

There are different generations,

and

except that

we're not going to send everybody.

Everyone is not going off to serve.

That's not the way we're set up.

And even if we were, I think because of the different generations that we have, and the outlook and philosophy of the different generations,

it would be difficult.

You know, when we were doing the all-volunteer army and we were just dragging people in right and left and putting them in the army, whether they wanted to be there or not, it created so many problems.

You know,

to go in the service and do what needs to be done,

and I'm not talking about war, just to serve, to be a good

soldier or SEAL or whatever,

it takes the right attitude.

You've got to want to do it.

You have to believe in it, at least to some degree.

And I think it's good that we have a program where you can get out.

You go sign up.

You don't have to stay 20 years.

You can get out before then.

And I think that's good.

A lot of people,

I had a basic training company one time

and

I had a guy

that just

at first he said he really wanted to be in the Army

and then he got he just kept getting into trouble and he'd go talk to the chaplains.

And the chaplains would call me up and say, you know,

George, not his name, but George,

George is a good soldier.

You've got to give him a chance.

I mean, he's a good soldier.

And he kept, we had several conversations about George, and I was just misunderstanding him.

He was a good guy.

And then I got a call from the chaplain saying, is George there?

You know where George is?

I said, I'm sure he's here in the company area somewhere.

Why?

That low life stole my boombox while he was up here talking to me yesterday.

And he,

oh man, he flipped an arm.

So anyway, went to the barracks and sure enough, there was a chaplain boom box and took it back to him.

And then finally,

I decided to go ahead and process the paperwork to let him go, get him out of the army.

The day of the company graduating, he was still in, but he wasn't going to be able to graduate.

And he came to me and he said,

I know you're going to have a graduation ceremony this morning, and I'm not going to be there.

But

I stayed up most of the night last night,

and I wrote a poem.

And,

you know,

I'd be honored if you would read this poem at graduation today.

He said, let me see it.

And I said, this is the poem you wrote last night.

Yes, sir.

Okay, so

the title is,

I am the

infantry.

He said, yes, sir.

He's standing here.

I'm looking on the wall right behind him.

And I'm not reading what he wrote.

I'm just reading off the

picture that's hanging on the wall back there with this poem on it.

I am the infantry.

Yes, sir, I wrote that.

I'm the queen of battle.

Follow me.

Word for word, off of that.

He copied on this piece of paper and he gave it to me.

He told me he wrote it and he wanted me to read it.

Some people don't need to be in the service.

Even if they want to, some of them don't need to be.

I don't know.

I've looked at

Korean Army,

mandatory two years.

You know, when you hit a certain age, you've got to go into the Army for two years.

When I was in Korea, I had 32

CATUSAs, 32 Koreans

who

for whatever reason, they were able to get

to serve their two-year

obligation in the U.S.

Army.

As long as they did well, they could do their two years with the U.S.

Army and then move on.

Because the ROC Army is hard, and they're hard on the young guys.

So I had 32 of them.

And

all I had to do was mention,

I think you're going to have to go back over to the ROC Army.

What do you want me to do?

I'd do anything.

In fact, I actually sent one back.

They came, got him, yelling, screaming, drag him into the Jeep, and he was yelling out the back.

I'll do anything.

I'll do anything.

Just don't send me back.

So they do it two years.

The North Korean Army, I think, is seven years.

It might be that we have some kind of service program, whether it be military or something else that

people do.

I don't know.

Everybody's just not cut out for it, I think.

How did you meet your wife?

I was stationed at Delanaga, Georgia,

in

the Ranger

camp up there, now the called the 5th Ranger Battalion,

as an instructor.

And a friend of mine had

set up a date with her, my wife's roommate,

but she told

my friend that she wouldn't date him unless it was a double date.

So he needed to get someone,

get someone to, you know,

go out with her.

So it would have been a blind date.

So he got one of our other friends that

said he would go, but something came up and he, at the last minute, he wasn't going to be able to go.

So my friend came to me and said,

would you fill in for him?

I really want to

take this girl out and she won't go unless I have somebody for her roommate.

So I volunteered to go.

And we got it approved.

It was going to be a different person.

It was going to be me showing up.

But when I got out of the car

to go in with my friend to pick him up,

somebody on her hall looked out the window, saw me coming across the the parking lot and um

I was on crutches.

I had

I had a really bad landing and

screwed my knee up

on a parachute jump.

Um

and somebody on the the hall yelled that he's got a wooden leg.

And word spread fast that, you know,

I had a wooden leg.

And she wasn't going to go, but convinced her that I didn't have a wooden leg.

I had a real leg.

So

we went out and we had a, you know, we had a really good time, except for she did have to sit on parachutes that we had in the back of my friend's car that,

you know, the trunk was full.

We had a bunch of other parachutes there.

You know, if you got a bunch of parachutes and you got a helicopter that you can use for, you know, a short period of time, you don't want to have to stop and repack.

You have several parachutes, you go jump, you hit the ground, you put on a new one, you go jump.

Anyway,

so we kind of

hit it off from there.

Once I didn't go back to Vietnam, then we decided to get married and

51 years we're still here.

Congratulations.

What's the secret to a successful marriage?

She's always right.

And

I would

do

well to remember

that whether I think so at the time or not, that she's going to end up being right.

I mean, because she really is right.

So

I need to listen more.

And, you know, she went to, graduated from college at North Georgia Military College.

So she understood

about the military.

The Ranger camp was right there.

She knew about Rangers.

And

just one quick thing.

Her family, for the most part,

there was one section of road and land around it that her grandparents, I guess, had owned at one time.

And

so you're giving it to her kids.

So most of the family lived in that one spot.

And I told her when I went over there to pick her up,

I said, one hand grenade take out most of your family.

They're all right here together.

But anyway, they would have this big Christmas party,

you know, family would all come in and

get together every

few days before Christmas.

And

so

this year I got invited.

We're not married yet, but I got invited to it.

And

I mean, the house is full.

But

like that time,

most of the men are gathered in one room.

And, you know, so I went in to kind of meet them.

And

one of her uncles said,

Grene says, you're a ranger.

No, but before.

He asked me a question about invasive species.

He said, you know, the pine needles are just killing the pine trees out here.

What do you think about that?

I said, that's not good, having, you know, an invasive species like that.

And

a little bit later, he asked me another question about trees.

and I

said

when do you keep asking me questions about trees he said well you know Gourney said you were a ranger

I said I am a ranger

I am a

I'm an Army Ranger

You could have heard a pin drop in the whole room.

You're in the Army.

You're an Army Ranger.

They did not have a good reputation in that area.

But, and it was like, holy cow,

she's dating an Army Ranger.

And then somebody in there just,

I didn't get to see exactly which one it was.

How many people you killed?

And

it was just silenced.

But then they decided, you know, they would let me in, the family.

But,

yeah, I thought, why am I getting all these questions about trees?

I don't.

Oh, man.

What are you doing to keep busy today?

Today,

I'm really enjoying spending time with you.

This has been great from start to finish.

Very impressed with what you've done, what you're doing,

with your new facility that you've got set up, having the opportunity to come up and spend some time to get to know you better.

I mean, this has been awesome.

Well, Dick, it's been

a real honor to interview you, and I would love to get you and John out there.

here pretty soon and we'll have a range day, break that noose again,

tell some stories.

Hey.

Have a fire.

I'm all for it.

Me too.

Me too.

Man, I'll tell you.

I couldn't think of a better person to close this studio down with than having you here.

And

it just means the world to me.

And thank you for being here.

I appreciate it.

It was a great honor to be able to come in and do this and be the last person.

But even if I wasn't the last person, just to get to come in and spend the day with you and chat about all these different things and

meet you

and be able to

put you on a friend list and say, I know this guy.

So I really appreciate that.

And

there was some discussion

this morning when we ate breakfast.

So,

John, I tell you, I got you back.

I'm here.

You need me.

You call me.

And

I appreciate it.

Appreciate everything you've done.

Well, I extend that.

Same to you.

Thank you so much.

Seriously.

Thank you.

It's been an honor.

Nice.

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