#180 Major James Capers Jr. - Vietnam Marine Commando Silver Star Recipient

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Speaker 2 Major James Capers, welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 Good afternoon.

Speaker 2 It's good to be here. It's good to have, it's an honor to have you here.
Thank you. So you popped up on our radar, I think about a couple weeks ago.
And

Speaker 2 man, I just want to say I think I mean, it is a real honor to have you here. You're the first Vietnam veteran to be on the show.

Speaker 2 And that's something that I've been really looking forward to getting somebody on the show that served in that war. And to have you here

Speaker 2 is

Speaker 2 just,

Speaker 2 I'm over the moon about it.

Speaker 2 It's such an honor to have you here. We haven't documented this war at all yet.
And

Speaker 2 so

Speaker 2 this is something that I've been real excited about. And so thank you for making the trip.

Speaker 3 It's good to be here.

Speaker 2 So I want to get right into it. So I want to do a life story on you.
And from what I understand, there's a really good possibility that your Silver Star might be getting upgraded to Medal of Honor.

Speaker 2 And I hope this gets to the right people to make that happen. I just want to put that out right up front so everybody listening understands

Speaker 2 how important this interview is. And

Speaker 2 we want to be a part of making that happen and documenting your life story. So everybody starts off with an introduction.
So here we go.

Speaker 2 Major James Capers, you are a retired United States Marine Corps officer and true American hero.

Speaker 2 You are a pioneer in reconnaissance training tactics and recognized for your legendary career that overcame obstacles and broke barriers on and off the battlefield.

Speaker 2 You are one of the first African American Marines to serve in the elite force reconnaissance companies and the first to receive a battlefield commission.

Speaker 2 You are a recipient of numerous awards, including the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars with Vowler, three Purple Hearts, and induction into the U.S. Special Operation Command's Commando Hall of Honor.

Speaker 2 You are the author of Faith Through the Storm, Memoirs of Major James Capers Jr.

Speaker 2 You are the subject of the documentary, Major Capers, The Legend of of Team Broadminded.

Speaker 2 You are a father figure to Team Broadminded, a specialized group of Force Reconnaissance Marines, and you continue to honor their legacy through annual reunions and your ongoing involvement in special operations community.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the show.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 2 All right. So

Speaker 2 we got quite a bit to cover here. Okay.
But what I'd like to start with is your childhood. So I understand you grew up in South Carolina.

Speaker 3 Partly.

Speaker 3 I lived there early years,

Speaker 3 and then my father was put on the chain gang.

Speaker 3 This is back in the old days, 30s.

Speaker 2 What is the chain gang?

Speaker 3 The chain gang is when they took mostly African Americans and put them out and they did did hard labor.

Speaker 3 It was sort of a,

Speaker 3 I don't know, I wasn't born back then,

Speaker 3 but mostly black

Speaker 3 individuals was put on this chain gang, tough living, they took away from their families. My father was on this chain gang, but some way he got away

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 went to Baltimore, Maryland, and I had gotten sick. Before he left, he gave me to a white family.
This was the family that, you know, they were all farmers out in this area. And they took me in

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 brought me back to health.

Speaker 3 And today they're trying to find descendants of that family.

Speaker 2 How old were you when you were given to a white family?

Speaker 3 Probably about four.

Speaker 2 Four years old. Do you have any recollection of that?

Speaker 3 Well there were days when I thought I could remember a female who obviously would feed me and care for me

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 in my memory

Speaker 3 she

Speaker 3 looked like a blonde lady. I could remember a female with blonde hair

Speaker 3 and so that's all I really remember except I was cared for.

Speaker 3 But at some point

Speaker 3 I was given back to my family once I'd been cured. Back in those days, we had a lot of childhood diseases.
We lost a lot of young American, black Americans from those diseases at that time.

Speaker 3 And I was given back to my family, completely cured or healed.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 My mother,

Speaker 3 my sister, and two brothers and myself

Speaker 3 at some point at night a vehicle showed up at our

Speaker 3 shack that's where we lived back in those days and we

Speaker 3 picked cotton cropped tobacco the rolled south

Speaker 3 and the vehicle showed up

Speaker 3 and we uh

Speaker 3 ended up in Baltimore

Speaker 3 and I was

Speaker 3 probably

Speaker 3 five or six or something like that.

Speaker 3 Nobody really knows. There's no records.
There's no records of my being born. I don't have a birth certificate.
Wow. That's the rural south back in those days.

Speaker 3 And I finally got to Baltimore

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 started in school.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 2 you were working in the fields as a five to six year old child.

Speaker 3 Sure. A lot of kids were like that.
Had these bags on your shoulder and you were out there picking cotton. Now you had adults out there that would go along with you, but everybody worked.

Speaker 3 You couldn't stay home unless you were sick, something like that. I picked a lot of cotton and learned to crop tobacco and slopped the hogs and all the rural work.
Everybody worked.

Speaker 3 Wow. There was no downtime.

Speaker 2 Do you remember the vehicle showing up in the middle of the night at the shack?

Speaker 3 Yeah, it was like a old ford

Speaker 3 uh

Speaker 3 like a

Speaker 3 29 ford or something like that one of the old vehicles thrown into the car and we took off what did your parents tell you

Speaker 2 do you remember

Speaker 3 well they

Speaker 3 my father wasn't there he was in baltimore it was an

Speaker 3 Apparently he'd arranged for another group to take us to

Speaker 3 Baltimore.

Speaker 3 So we got in the vehicle and next thing I know, we were in Baltimore as a child. Those are my memories.

Speaker 3 Back in the old days you couldn't eat at restaurants. You know, you couldn't go into the facilities, bathrooms, things like that.
You had black and you had white.

Speaker 3 And so these were things my mother told me how difficult it was for her as a female. And there's been a lot of books written on this subject,

Speaker 3 how African Americans made that transition,

Speaker 3 but almost slavery. It was not slavery, of course.

Speaker 3 We know that that was over, but the remnants were still there. We were treated like slaves.

Speaker 3 And there were a lot of pieces to that. that I saw and I remembered.
But when I got to Baltimore,

Speaker 3 they put me in school

Speaker 3 as a child. I had no birth certificates.
Nobody really knew who I was. And the first James Capers Jr.
passed away, so they renamed me James Capers Jr.

Speaker 3 But there was always some

Speaker 3 feeling that

Speaker 3 I was reincarnating my older brother.

Speaker 3 But no, I had no birth certificate. Years later, we tried to find something out.

Speaker 3 But that was a problem that I had. And even today, I got two birth dates, the 25th of August and the 27th of August.

Speaker 3 Nobody knows how that happened.

Speaker 2 Which birthday do you like better?

Speaker 3 25. Right on.

Speaker 2 So how was it when you got to Baltimore?

Speaker 3 Well, it was euphoria. I loved it.

Speaker 3 Buildings and schools and restaurants, of course,

Speaker 3 wasn't designed for folks like us, coming from the South. We didn't know anything, basically.
We had to learn the system there in Baltimore.

Speaker 3 And went to school, did well,

Speaker 3 graduated high school there.

Speaker 2 Were you welcomed in school?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 They didn't have any of those Jim Crow laws?

Speaker 3 Well, not in Baltimore, but it was an all-black school.

Speaker 3 Everybody, teachers were blacks,

Speaker 3 students were black.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 it was hard for me coming from the South that was certainly different from where I had

Speaker 3 been into Baltimore. That streetlights and automobiles and all those things that I never saw on the cotton fields in South Carolina.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 2 How long did it take you to get used to that?

Speaker 2 That culture culture change?

Speaker 3 Well, it took me a while because I was a country boy.

Speaker 3 They didn't readily accept me into the city.

Speaker 3 You know, I didn't know the language. You know, it took me a while to learn there were stores on East Corner.
And,

Speaker 3 you know, the school was different.

Speaker 3 The children there.

Speaker 3 spoke differently than I spoke from the south.

Speaker 3 But I knew that I could do it.

Speaker 3 And I pressed on.

Speaker 2 How did your family integrate? Were they,

Speaker 2 I mean, was there a

Speaker 2 sense of relief being up there? Was everybody happier?

Speaker 3 Well, I was happier.

Speaker 3 The color of our

Speaker 3 skin took that away. We worked hard.

Speaker 3 And my father

Speaker 3 got a job

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 us children we were happy about that he got a job in the steel mill you know the World War II was

Speaker 3 was there

Speaker 3 I remember World War II

Speaker 3 and he worked in a steel factory and I guess they built ships for the the fleet back in those days, the Maryland Dry Dock Company. And he earned a pretty good living and was able to sustain us.

Speaker 3 But when I became a little older, I sold newspapers and sold junk, did anything I could to add to the company, to the family.

Speaker 2 How old were you when that started? About seven. Seven years old when you started selling newspapers.

Speaker 3 Then they stopped

Speaker 3 because they had a law then that you had to be at least 12 years old as a child to work.

Speaker 3 But no, we did all hustling, whatever you could do,

Speaker 3 you know, to do those types of things to add to the income of the family.

Speaker 2 Did you have any hobbies as a kid or was it just work?

Speaker 3 Mostly work, but yeah, you always find some kind of way to do something, shoot marbles. And

Speaker 3 they don't know about marbles these days, but you know, we did that.

Speaker 3 And we played all of the games, basketball, which we didn't have

Speaker 3 the hoops and things we had took baskets and put them up on a wall or something and that was our net we had to be you know we had to really be creative because they didn't provide anything from us for us

Speaker 3 so we worked hard and I learned how to take care of myself because in a way it was kind of dangerous you know

Speaker 3 Everybody carried knives and guns and things and many days there were firefights. I mean not like a military firefight, but pistols and uh

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Speaker 3 Those types of things were dangerous, and you kept away from that.

Speaker 2 You kept away from that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Did you carry a weapon as a kid? No. No.

Speaker 3 Worst weapon I had was when I joined boot camp in 1956.

Speaker 2 What got you,

Speaker 2 what got you interested in the military?

Speaker 3 Back in those days, everybody,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 after World War I, I joined in 1956,

Speaker 3 but World War II was over and Korea, we were still digging out of Korea. That happened in 54, and I joined in

Speaker 3 56.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I had learned quite a bit.

Speaker 3 We had television there in Baltimore. I had never seen a television before.

Speaker 3 So we had television and we saw these military guys on TV and they were recruiting back in those days. You had to join or they would draft you.

Speaker 3 So if you didn't join, someone would come by and then when you turned 18, yeah, you had to join. some military.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I saw the Marine uniform on TV and I saw some of the recruiters. Man, that looks pretty good.
You know, I'll go ahead and join the Marine. So we did.
My old buddy, we joined

Speaker 3 in June of 1956.

Speaker 2 Did you want to go to war?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You did?

Speaker 3 World War II,

Speaker 3 all the newspapers, we were patriotic. Love that flag.
And we have to go protect it. We were taught that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I really couldn't wait to protect my country.

Speaker 3 That was my thought process

Speaker 3 as a young man.

Speaker 2 Were we involved in any

Speaker 2 conflicts in the year 1956?

Speaker 2 The U.S.

Speaker 3 In the U.S.

Speaker 3 In 1956.

Speaker 2 That was peacetime, correct?

Speaker 3 Well, I joined the the military in 1956. Yeah.

Speaker 3 And I went to war in 1956.

Speaker 2 You went to war in 56.

Speaker 3 I got out of the boot camp, and they sent me the Suez Canal. The Egyptians had closed the Suez Canal.

Speaker 3 And so Eisenhower was our president.

Speaker 3 And he said, you know, we're not going to put up with that. He was a wartime president.

Speaker 3 So he sent the 1st Battalion, 2nd Marines over there.

Speaker 3 And we got it done. We didn't land, but just the appearance

Speaker 3 of that battalion coming in with the American flag, and they opened it back up again.

Speaker 3 I went back in 1957

Speaker 3 when the Syrians

Speaker 3 started a war.

Speaker 3 We went back and we didn't have to land to chase the Syrians.

Speaker 3 We just went back as a show of force.

Speaker 3 And in 1958, I went back

Speaker 3 and we landed in Beirut.

Speaker 3 The Egyptians had closed the Suez Canal. And our job was to get it back open again.

Speaker 3 That's 19, that was 58, when we actually,

Speaker 3 the Syrians and

Speaker 3 the Lebanese started a big war.

Speaker 3 And of course...

Speaker 3 Eisenhower was still president.

Speaker 3 He was president until Kennedy come in.

Speaker 3 And so we went there again. We landed and we fought in the mountains and

Speaker 3 fought the snipers and

Speaker 3 all of the things that was happening in that time.

Speaker 2 Is that the, is 58 when you evacuated Americans from Lebanon? The airport, yeah. Is that the first time you saw combat? Yeah.
Firsthand?

Speaker 2 How did that feel? Describe that experience.

Speaker 3 You know, I mean, I was a Marine.

Speaker 3 It wasn't a problem for me. We landed, we evacuated the airport, we took the civilians out,

Speaker 3 you know, the embassies that were there.

Speaker 3 We got them out. But we had a thousand Marines, though.

Speaker 3 And I was a squad leader, you know.

Speaker 3 I was in charge of some troops, and I had to get it done. I was an NCO now

Speaker 3 and dying for me

Speaker 3 wasn't that big of a deal. I'd been trained by guys that fought in Guana Canal and Ilwa Jima.

Speaker 3 And coming through as a young man, so that's what we were trained to do.

Speaker 3 You're going to fight.

Speaker 3 And we went up at the mountains with the old M1s,

Speaker 3 threw a lot of hand grenades.

Speaker 3 We learned to make parapets and dig foxholes and

Speaker 3 eat terrible rations.

Speaker 3 It was a hard tour, a duty for us, but we all got a nice letter from

Speaker 3 Eisenhower

Speaker 3 thanking us. And then we got one from our commandant thanking us.
Did a good job.

Speaker 2 How long was that battle?

Speaker 3 A few months.

Speaker 2 You were there for a few months?

Speaker 3 A few months. It wasn't that long.

Speaker 2 Was it fighting every day?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We had to go into the mountains, and that's where they were. And some of them had come across from Syria.
You have to understand how this stuff was. Back in those days, nobody liked this, the Syrians.

Speaker 3 But they took

Speaker 3 our money and the things that we brought over there. Now we came in on ships.
They didn't fly us in. The other guys

Speaker 3 that came in from Germany

Speaker 3 Army group came in from Germany and they sort of give us some relief.

Speaker 3 But they could fight.

Speaker 3 They had been in Germany since World War II.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 this is 1958.

Speaker 3 They came in and relieved us.

Speaker 3 And when we were tired, though, we've been fighting in those mountains day and night.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I had my first experiences of killing a human being.

Speaker 3 didn't really bother me I didn't feel any real

Speaker 2 it didn't bother you

Speaker 3 killing a human being I had my first experiences with killing a human being

Speaker 2 well let's talk about that experience

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 3 how was the first human you killed how did that experience go in the mountains up on top of the mountains they had buildings up there and they had their hideouts and things up there so my job was to go up there and clear it out with my squad.

Speaker 3 And I hit a small building, and a couple of the guys tried to run out. I shot and killed both of them.

Speaker 3 I didn't feel anything, nothing, no remorse.

Speaker 3 And then, we, when we were hit at night in the mountains, you know, we fought them off,

Speaker 3 you know. So,

Speaker 3 never lost a battle

Speaker 3 in In 20 years of my experience in the Marine Corps, I was never defeated.

Speaker 3 No one ever defeated me.

Speaker 2 What was it like for you to come home after rescuing Americans in Lebanon during that Civil War? When's the first time you went back home to see your family?

Speaker 3 Well, we were there for a six-month cruise.

Speaker 3 And after we fought in Lebanon,

Speaker 3 they put us aboard ships

Speaker 3 and they sent us back. It took us 30 days to get home.

Speaker 3 You know, it was

Speaker 3 enlightening.

Speaker 3 And then when we were told we were going home, we got home.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 part of that was

Speaker 3 my high school sweetheart.

Speaker 3 which I had fallen madly in love with, Dottie Capris. We were married 50 years.
I still love her today.

Speaker 3 Never remarried.

Speaker 3 That's my son back there. But at any rate, I'm sorry.

Speaker 2 When is the first time

Speaker 2 you went home to your mom, your brothers, and your sisters?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, that was good.

Speaker 3 I came home from Lebanon.

Speaker 3 I was an NCO.

Speaker 3 I wanted to see my mom,

Speaker 3 but I wanted to see, you know, my wife.

Speaker 3 It was my wife, my girlfriend. I met in love with Dottie Capress.

Speaker 3 Never loved a woman other than Dottie Capress.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we weren't married at that time,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 I called on her.

Speaker 3 and it was a whirlwind type of thing and

Speaker 3 this was 1958

Speaker 3 you know this December so long in there we went into

Speaker 3 we went into

Speaker 3 the Caribbean for a while had to do some work down there we had some thugs and whatever so we had to go do that

Speaker 3 and then the Syrian thing popped up all in this area I don't know if I got the timing right. It was a long time ago.

Speaker 3 But 59 came around

Speaker 3 and my three years was up.

Speaker 3 I could either stay in the Marine Corps or I could get out now and go home. But going home wasn't much of an attraction now.

Speaker 3 I'd been with some of the finest military guys in the world.

Speaker 3 I'd fought with them. I'd shed blood with them.

Speaker 3 I want to stay with them.

Speaker 3 But I saw Dottie and

Speaker 3 I decided to stay with the Marine Corps.

Speaker 3 I re-enlisted.

Speaker 2 How did you meet Dottie?

Speaker 3 She was my high school sweetheart.

Speaker 2 You met her in high school? I met her in high school.

Speaker 3 First time I saw her,

Speaker 3 I was in love. She was walking by.
I was with a group of other guys and I saw she had on a yellow dress.

Speaker 3 And I looked at her and I couldn't believe it. I went home and I told my mom, I said, Mug,

Speaker 3 guess what? I saw this girl today

Speaker 3 and she said, sit down, son, we'll talk, we'll talk.

Speaker 3 But I loved her so much

Speaker 3 and every chance I got to see her

Speaker 3 in the halls of the school there was a Carver High School

Speaker 3 and I tried to find a way to sneak around to see her. And sometimes in the hallway,

Speaker 3 I had the nerve to stop her. And I talked to her

Speaker 3 and fell in love

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 when I held her hand

Speaker 3 when she was dying and she winked at me she was dying of cancer I was holding her hand we'd been married 50 years

Speaker 3 but that was that was her

Speaker 3 strong woman military wives You know, back during that time, you know, they got it done because we were gone a lot.

Speaker 3 I did 14 years overseas.

Speaker 3 I fought two wars,

Speaker 3 including the thing in the Middle East.

Speaker 2 When did you guys get married?

Speaker 3 June of 1959.

Speaker 3 I re-enlisted

Speaker 3 and they paid me a lot of money. Wasn't much.

Speaker 3 And today as we look at it and say that was no money at all. But that was great for me because I was a military guy.
I didn't need a whole lot of money.

Speaker 3 At the time, though, when I joined, I was sending my parents monies. That's what we all do.
We had allotments.

Speaker 3 And, you know, because I just appreciated what they'd done for me. You know, coming from the South and all that, and they were not really educated folks.
We were farmers, basically.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I did well, married Donnie. We went to California.
I hooked up with First Force Recon Company.

Speaker 2 Well, before we get to First Force Recon, you were married for 50 years.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 So I want to ask you, what is your, in your opinion,

Speaker 2 what is the secret to a successful marriage?

Speaker 3 We'll tell you. I loved Dottie Caperson the first time I saw her.

Speaker 3 We went through hell. We raised a blind child.
Our first child, Gary, was born blind in and special needs.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 good child. He played the flute, the melodic of the organ, piano.

Speaker 3 But he had other

Speaker 3 difficult things.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 after we were married, or we were married,

Speaker 3 Then the military didn't have schooling for him, for my son.

Speaker 3 Wonderful child. I loved him so much.
I was holding his hand when he closed his eyes.

Speaker 3 He died of appendicitis.

Speaker 3 Then it seemed like the next day my wife died of cancer. And the demons come home.

Speaker 2 How do you stay happily married for 50 years? What's the secret?

Speaker 3 I loved her so much. She kicked me out once.

Speaker 2 She kicked you out?

Speaker 3 Kicked me out once.

Speaker 2 What'd you do? Did you deserve it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I

Speaker 3 went out with the guys and

Speaker 3 stayed overnight and

Speaker 3 I didn't call her.

Speaker 3 And I came home.

Speaker 3 I used to wear cowboy hats. You know back in the old that was one of the things I wore for cowboy boots like I have one now and I wore cowboy hats.

Speaker 3 So she took my cowboy hat and threw it out and went over and stomped on it.

Speaker 3 So I knew that I was in trouble.

Speaker 3 She let me come back in

Speaker 3 but she was such a sweetheart.

Speaker 3 I remember we were

Speaker 3 a snake bitter. She was out feeding the fish at a fish pond.
She was out to feed the fish with her hand. A snake come up and bit her on the hand.

Speaker 3 This takes away from your, what are you you talking about there, dog? I was telling you about that time when a snake bit her.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 she didn't panic.

Speaker 3 She's scared of snakes.

Speaker 3 Bit her on the finger history. She come in and said, sweet dog, I've been bit by a snake.
I panic.

Speaker 3 But I did the first aid. We had to get down to the emergency room.
So we went there, but the snake was not poisonous.

Speaker 3 One of my troops

Speaker 3 who lived next door, he wouldn't kill the snake, brought it down to the hospital, and they looked at it. It was not poisonous, but just the whole idea of her demeanor at that time.

Speaker 3 You know, I think I would have, I've been struck

Speaker 3 close by snakes,

Speaker 3 never got hit by a poisonous snake, but I've been around

Speaker 3 you know pythons and all this other stuff in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 3 But I'm just saying about Dottie, she's so brave, got her taken care of.

Speaker 3 But we went through a lot of challenges together. I got sent overseas

Speaker 3 for 15 months as a Marine path finder back in the old days.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I had to send her home, put her on a train, and send her back to Baltimore.

Speaker 3 with my child and I was gone for that period of time.

Speaker 3 Interesting world back then as far as Marines were concerned

Speaker 3 and the Army guys too you know which we did work a lot with and and the SEALs were just coming on board so they came on board and was 70 61

Speaker 2 and did you work with the SEALs? Yeah. How was that?

Speaker 3 It was good

Speaker 3 because they were young guys

Speaker 3 They were UDT guys at first.

Speaker 3 And then they want to move beyond the high waterline. See, we woke scuba, that's what I did for my time in the military.
You know, I did dive masters and I combat swims, and I did all of that.

Speaker 3 But the SEALs were new guys, they were

Speaker 3 on a wanted demolition team, but they moved them from swimming.

Speaker 3 Then they went beyond the high waterline, which meant that they could go out and blow shit up. Pardon my language.

Speaker 3 They were good.

Speaker 3 They were young. And we had a lot of Marines went over to the SEALs.

Speaker 2 Really?

Speaker 3 Yeah, oh yeah.

Speaker 3 A lot of the SEALs were Marines.

Speaker 2 Interesting.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I knew a lot of the SEALs. I worked with them in Vietnam.

Speaker 3 You know, of course, I was an old guy. You know, I was 29 years old.
I was the dive master and, you know, I did all that because I'd been in for a while and I was good at it. I did.

Speaker 2 Let's go back to 1959.

Speaker 3 All right.

Speaker 2 Where you became the first African-American to join the Marine Corps Special Operations Force Recon.

Speaker 3 That's what they tell me.

Speaker 2 That's what they tell you?

Speaker 3 That's what they tell me. I joined up

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 to join Force Recon at that time, you had to be almost a Superman.

Speaker 2 So did you know what Force Recon was when you you signed up for it?

Speaker 3 I'd heard about it.

Speaker 2 How'd you hear about it?

Speaker 3 Guys had told me about it, and they had a newspaper there. I think it was the Scout newspaper in California, and it had an article on them.

Speaker 3 The guys jumping out of airplanes and swimming and diving. I thought this is pretty cool.
I'd been in the grunts for three years,

Speaker 3 so I went down and took the test.

Speaker 3 They kicked the hell out of me.

Speaker 3 I mean, these guys were nuts.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 3 Do you think SEAL training got to be pretty good?

Speaker 3 You know, we didn't have a whole lot of these guys.

Speaker 3 And I passed, of course. Well, actually, I didn't pass.

Speaker 3 They said I didn't pass. They said, well, come back on Monday.
This is Friday. I took the test.

Speaker 3 Say, you didn't make it. Come back on Monday and take it again.
Okay. Showed up on Monday, took it again.

Speaker 3 They said, put him in there. you know, they took me in to see the first sergeant.

Speaker 3 Then I had to go see the captain.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the captain

Speaker 3 was in his office and

Speaker 3 he had a hand grenade on his windowsill.

Speaker 3 I saw it. I seen hand grenades before.

Speaker 3 And he said something dumb like,

Speaker 3 what will you do with this hand grenade? I said, I throw it out the window with the window was i was sitting the window was open

Speaker 3 and this guy jumped up grabbed the hand grenade and pulled the pin

Speaker 3 it was a joke that they wanted to see if i was going to run

Speaker 3 no i went through all this hell to get here now you're not going to make me run out of this office there but that's a little induction type stuff

Speaker 3 I did three years there. Went overseas with the Marine Pathfinders.

Speaker 2 What was the training like?

Speaker 3 Well, they sent you to jump school and

Speaker 3 all types of pro.

Speaker 3 You had a platoon, had a team,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 out on the West Coast.

Speaker 3 It was crazy. PT

Speaker 3 every day during the day.

Speaker 3 I was married at that time,

Speaker 3 but now you had to live in the barracks.

Speaker 3 And for as long as I can remember,

Speaker 3 we were swimming, running and diving and all kinds of stuff they created.

Speaker 3 The seals

Speaker 3 hadn't come on yet. This was 1961.

Speaker 3 Right there's 60.

Speaker 3 So I went to jump school in 60. That was separate.
Then when I come back, I went through the recon

Speaker 3 indoctrination.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I was a pretty good kid. I could handle myself.

Speaker 3 They were tough. We had guys from World War II in there, not many, but you know, they were new guys.
We had some Army in there. We had some SEALs, not SEALs, but UDT guys.
And the Corpsmen were

Speaker 3 SEALs or Navy

Speaker 3 right yeah Navy guys yeah

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 first force was my indoctrination into special operation

Speaker 2 what did it what did it feel like for you to graduate

Speaker 2 the training

Speaker 3 well we didn't graduate from

Speaker 3 the the training.

Speaker 3 They just put you in a platoon

Speaker 3 You go through all the indoctrination, which is the stuff now that

Speaker 3 jungle warfare and mine clearing and all kind of stuff we went through.

Speaker 3 We didn't have a battalion. It was one company.

Speaker 3 And the folks that ran that company,

Speaker 3 pretty tough guys. And they only took the best guys.

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 toughest guys

Speaker 3 had it

Speaker 3 huge guys. I know where they got those guys from.

Speaker 3 I mean really when I saw those guys

Speaker 3 and they could fight,

Speaker 3 could fight, but a lot of them were overrated, I thought. They came hot dogs

Speaker 3 and I came there for a serious tour of duty. So I got in a little trouble.
Some of the guys

Speaker 3 thought, well, I'm a black guy. So let's give this black black guy a hard time.
Didn't work that way. I didn't back down from him.
No,

Speaker 3 no.

Speaker 2 How did they give you a hard time?

Speaker 3 Because I was black. How? I was the only black guy there.

Speaker 3 What would they do?

Speaker 3 Well, one time after some horrendous program, I was tired. And

Speaker 3 I was in the

Speaker 3 squad bay.

Speaker 3 And I laid down on this bed.

Speaker 3 And the guys came by and

Speaker 3 with this cross

Speaker 3 and put a rebel flag on me.

Speaker 3 And,

Speaker 3 you know, this stuff.

Speaker 3 And they laughed about it. And I saw it.
And I got up, cleaned myself up, let it go.

Speaker 3 You know, indoctrination.

Speaker 3 thought they were going to scare me. No, you don't scare Jim Capers.
I'd worked too hard, you know, to get there.

Speaker 3 And by that time, I had a wife and a child.

Speaker 3 And of course, they paid you

Speaker 3 55 for enlisted, 55 bucks for

Speaker 3 jump pay. And

Speaker 3 I became an officer.

Speaker 3 It went up to $110. I don't know what they do now.
But it was extra pay. So it was an incentive.

Speaker 3 And I enjoyed the tour.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 a lot of racism back in those days i mean uh you know those things that i saw

Speaker 2 and uh it bothered me but it didn't deter me and in 1966 was that your first tour to vietnam yeah

Speaker 2 and so

Speaker 2 what did you think when you got orders to go to vietnam

Speaker 3 I was going. I would like to go.

Speaker 2 You wanted to go?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was at the

Speaker 3 when I come back from

Speaker 3 First Force,

Speaker 3 they sent me back to the East Coast to train troops in something called ITR.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 they learned to you know to do those types of things in the field.

Speaker 3 So I had that type of work to do. I was a sergeant E-5 at the time.

Speaker 3 And I stayed there for a few months.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 force recon was looking for volunteers

Speaker 3 no

Speaker 3 I had been in

Speaker 3 first force did that job okay

Speaker 3 now

Speaker 3 Vietnam guys were bleeding and casualty list was high

Speaker 3 and When I got to Fort Meade,

Speaker 3 I was on,

Speaker 3 what, I don't know, they call it hardship. I had a blind child at home.
So the Commandant of the Marine Corps said that you don't have to go to combat because you've got

Speaker 3 a blind son and a young wife. So I went to, didn't have to go to Vietnam, but I saw the casualty list.

Speaker 3 I saw the news. cycles every night.
I watched it. And all those young men were dying.
I saw the clips.

Speaker 3 and I'm at home at night.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 then they put me on something called a Fort Meade Guard. It was a ceremonial unit.
We went out to Fort Meade, which is where the Star-Spangled Banner was written.

Speaker 3 So I had a little group. We marched out there every Thursday.
marched out there and twirled rifles and carried the flag around And we had a band with us. The band played and we marched.

Speaker 3 And at night when we come home, I had to watch

Speaker 3 young guys carrying the flag in Vietnam

Speaker 3 and bringing the dead Marines home and soldiers home and airmen home.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 one day I asked Dottie,

Speaker 3 she said, I know what you're thinking.

Speaker 3 I know what you're thinking.

Speaker 3 How do you know what I'm thinking? You don't know what I'm thinking. She said, Yes, I do know what you're thinking.
I see the news also.

Speaker 3 I know you're treading. I've been there with you.

Speaker 3 I know it's time for you to go.

Speaker 3 And if you choose to go to Vietnam,

Speaker 3 Gary and I will be here when you come back.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 my adjutant and another officer,

Speaker 3 a couple days later, came to my house,

Speaker 3 lived on the base, Army base,

Speaker 3 and they came to my house and said, Sergeant,

Speaker 3 we know you volunteered to go back to Vietnam or to go to Vietnam. I hadn't been before.

Speaker 3 And I just wanted to talk to your wife about it. My wife said, you don't need to talk to me.

Speaker 3 If you don't need something to eat or drink, your night's over.

Speaker 3 Night's over. He's my husband.
I'm American too.

Speaker 3 I'm a citizen too. I'll be here when he comes back.
And he will come back.

Speaker 3 And gentlemen, your night's over.

Speaker 3 And one of us said, well,

Speaker 3 Miss Capers, we just want to let you know that he doesn't have to go. You know, the Commandant's got him on a hole.

Speaker 3 Just, I'm his wife.

Speaker 3 I gave birth to his child

Speaker 3 and I'll be here. They left.

Speaker 3 I got orders to go to Vietnam

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 joined the Force Recon

Speaker 3 and that was hard.

Speaker 3 Third Force

Speaker 3 was made up of First Force and Second Force.

Speaker 3 Anybody else we can get to have the qualifications. Now I've been in

Speaker 3 the first four, so I'm good to go. So my job was to train the other guys coming in.
I'd already been to jump in.

Speaker 3 I went to scuba school again.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 went to

Speaker 3 Coronado, I think it was. Four-week course.
It was hard,

Speaker 3 but I was honor graduate.

Speaker 2 You were the honor graduate?

Speaker 3 Honor graduate.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 they worked us hard.

Speaker 3 We swam a lot. We did a lot of water work, you know.

Speaker 3 And I enjoyed it, you know, because I had swam my ass off in first force.

Speaker 2 You enjoyed diving?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You're the only person I know that enjoyed diving in the Coronado Bay.

Speaker 3 Well, I did that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 at the end of the course,

Speaker 3 one of my guys was going, well, I had 19 Marines that was in the class, and we were all going to Vietnam. So one of my kids didn't make the

Speaker 3 distance swim.

Speaker 3 Before you graduate, you got to make that distance swim. And they don't give you any slack on that.

Speaker 3 And he was a little bit late.

Speaker 3 So the chief says, hey, Sarge,

Speaker 3 we can't graduate him. I said, Chief, come on now.

Speaker 3 How long have you been known each other? He said, yeah, I know, but

Speaker 3 he didn't make the time swim, so he can't graduate. He'd been through everything else.

Speaker 3 I said, Chief,

Speaker 3 he used to be a pretty good man, but now

Speaker 3 you're not. I said some other words, but he was my friend.
I said, tell you what I'll do. If you let me do this again, I will swim with him.
I will take the last, this is the last part of the course.

Speaker 3 And so he said, yeah, okay, all right, all right, all right.

Speaker 3 And I said, I thought you really were candy ass, Chief, but you made the right decision. I got in the water

Speaker 3 and swam. I don't know how far it was.
I'd already made my swim. I'm good.
Now I'm doing a second swim with him.

Speaker 3 And it wore me out.

Speaker 3 We

Speaker 3 got about 100 meters where we needed to be. My leg cramped up.

Speaker 3 I didn't give up

Speaker 3 and at the end he was tired. I'm trying to hold on to him.
I'm trying to deal with the cramp and all that. But we got through there together.
Crossed the line together. Damn.

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 I did that. And over the years, he still thanks me for that.
No, he should. Went to war and he survived.
Didn't get a scratch on him.

Speaker 3 Tom Nicholson.

Speaker 3 Tom Nicholson.

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Speaker 3 I needed to carry as many men as I could, and I didn't want to have him come back.

Speaker 3 So I swam with him.

Speaker 3 That's documented.

Speaker 3 But that was Jim Capers. I'm in command.
I was platoon sergeant.

Speaker 2 That's a hell of a leader.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 did that most of my career.

Speaker 3 Got shot to hell

Speaker 3 some of the times.

Speaker 3 Did you ever get wounded?

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 Wonderful. That's great.
That is really great. After all the hell you've been through, you know, I'm glad you came home safe and you got a family and you got a great program.

Speaker 3 They tell me that you have one of the most...

Speaker 3 I've heard your program.

Speaker 2 Have you heard some of the other Marines?

Speaker 2 Have you heard some of the other Marines we've had on here from force reconnaissance and Margasak?

Speaker 3 I don't know that time as much. When did you come on anyway?

Speaker 3 What year?

Speaker 2 The show?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 This show started on Christmas Eve of December 2019.

Speaker 3 I'd gone to California after my wife and my son passed. I moved to California.
I lost touch with a lot of things.

Speaker 3 But what I've heard about your show and what I was told to listen to it, you know, I figured you were another candy-ass seal at first, but I found out that you weren't.

Speaker 2 You see that sword right there?

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's,

Speaker 2 I interviewed a Don Graves, who was a flamethrower in Iwo Jima.

Speaker 2 And I interviewed him when he was 98 years old. Oh, great.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he turns 100 years old in May. He's going to be back here.

Speaker 2 I don't know if he's coming on the show or not, but I'm hoping to to have lunch with him at least. But he sent me that sword that took that off

Speaker 2 a Japanese soldier, a Niro Jima.

Speaker 3 That's pretty good, yeah.

Speaker 2 Yeah, he's a Marine.

Speaker 2 And then one of my best friends, Nick Kefalitis,

Speaker 2 he was a Marsock Marine.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 he was my third episode. Cody Alford,

Speaker 2 he was

Speaker 2 also a Marsoc Marine, Honor Man, honor man, I think, of his sniper class. First, first, the youngest Marine to ever reach E8.

Speaker 2 Fought in the Battle of Fallujah. He's a good friend of mine.

Speaker 2 We've had a lot of good Marines on here.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, you've got a good show.

Speaker 2 We've had some candy-ass seals, too, though.

Speaker 3 I've seen a few of those in my life.

Speaker 3 Go ahead. Let me interrupt you.
Go ahead.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Yeah, but

Speaker 2 let's talk let's get back to you. So

Speaker 2 you finished the swim.

Speaker 2 You passed. Yeah.
And you guys go to Vietnam.

Speaker 3 Well, the other part of it was I had to get my one of my other guys to the finish line also, so they wouldn't drop him.

Speaker 2 Another one?

Speaker 3 No, that was I did that just the one time with my my other sergeant.

Speaker 3 It wasn't two of them, just one. Okay.

Speaker 3 And then we came back to Camp Lejeune.

Speaker 3 Then we started training for Vietnam. Some of the guys had to go to jump school and I had taken the swim guys there.

Speaker 3 But we had to go through

Speaker 3 the mine program. We went to

Speaker 3 the jungles down in Panama.

Speaker 3 We went through almost six months of training. Wow.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 And then we uh they put us on a bus at night and sent us to Norfolk.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 how did you like the jungle down in Panama? I did training down there too.

Speaker 3 I went through three times.

Speaker 3 I went through with the force guys that I went through when I was commanding officer with the grunts.

Speaker 3 Actually, just two times I went through.

Speaker 3 And it was hard.

Speaker 3 I was the captain at the time

Speaker 3 and trying to motivate the guys. And

Speaker 3 I took this chicken,

Speaker 3 grabbed the chicken, I stretched him out and bit his neck, I bit his head off. And I

Speaker 3 threw him out there, and the blood was all over me and all over him. And the guys going, yeah,

Speaker 3 motivating.

Speaker 3 You know, we would,

Speaker 3 we had one of my trainers,

Speaker 3 we were in a training part of the program

Speaker 3 in the jungles

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 the instructor

Speaker 3 said, you guys, take it easy now.

Speaker 3 All of us was at the recon guys, we were all in the in the bleachers, and the instructor

Speaker 3 reached down in his boot and pulled out this snake and bit his head off and threw him out in the sand.

Speaker 3 Now, I bit the chicken off, head off, but that was just show for my guys. I had a lot of new guys,

Speaker 3 and we're trying to let them know that the old man can get it done. No, you need to fear me because I will kill you.

Speaker 3 Not they were troops, I couldn't do that, but you're trying to scare them a little. Yeah,

Speaker 3 sure, you've been through that. But we went through almost six months of training, then we finally deployed in April of 1966,

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they

Speaker 3 took us to,

Speaker 3 I forget where they took us, with all of our equipment, dive stuff, swim stuff.

Speaker 3 And we went over to

Speaker 3 on ship, we went over.

Speaker 3 And I think we went straight into Vietnam into the Nang.

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 started setting up camp

Speaker 3 and started operating

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 it was bloody.

Speaker 2 What was the mission?

Speaker 3 The mission was to go behind enemy lines and kill those son of a bitches. That was the mission.
That was my mission. That's what we did.

Speaker 2 Just kill as many of them as you can.

Speaker 2 Kill as many as you can.

Speaker 3 As you could.

Speaker 3 You, if you, it was a...

Speaker 3 If you killed them,

Speaker 3 KIA,

Speaker 3 if you wounded them,

Speaker 3 you know, but we didn't really know if you wounded them or not. A lot of them were wounded, and they crawled away.
You see the blood trails.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 if you were KIA, they gave you credit for it.

Speaker 3 And we killed a lot of them.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about your first mission after the camp was built.

Speaker 2 What did that what did that entail?

Speaker 3 Well, actually, the camp was already built. You know, there was guys there when we came in and they had a mess all set up and all that so we just had to

Speaker 3 had to

Speaker 3 Get our stuff together. We went through some phases

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 Launched from a place called Phu Bai

Speaker 3 And that was already built and We took off in area

Speaker 3 area number five

Speaker 3 Because they had all these pieces of Vietnam in different areas and I got area number five.

Speaker 3 And it was loaded with

Speaker 3 a lot of

Speaker 3 NBC

Speaker 3 whatever those guys were, you know. The Viet Cong,

Speaker 3 the NVA soldiers.

Speaker 3 A lot of them were there and they'd been there for a while and the Viet the Vietnamese soldiers couldn't get them out. And a lot of the Vietnamese soldiers were cowards.
They didn't want to fight.

Speaker 3 No kidding. Didn't want to fight, no.

Speaker 3 They'd been there for all these years.

Speaker 3 And the North Vietnamese come in and wiped them out. So now we got to go in and fight the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese.
There was a border, 16th parallel.

Speaker 3 And the NVA came across the 16th parallel, which is set

Speaker 3 since the earlier wars in Southeast Asia.

Speaker 3 And they came across

Speaker 3 and was coming all the way down in South Vietnam. And we were supposed to stop them.
There were a lot of things

Speaker 3 a part of that.

Speaker 3 We had to set up ambushes.

Speaker 3 We went into their camps.

Speaker 3 We ambushed them at night.

Speaker 3 There are a lot of individual stories about that. I ran 50 missions.

Speaker 3 All of them wasn't from Phubai. I went into Kay Sun.

Speaker 3 I went into Fulak.

Speaker 3 I went into Da Nang.

Speaker 3 All my guys. And we lost guys along the way.

Speaker 3 But I had went from

Speaker 3 staff sergeant.

Speaker 3 We lost

Speaker 3 three officers the first three months. Wow.
Gone.

Speaker 3 So I went from staff sergeant to second lieutenant. Never spent the day in OCS or basic school or officers training.

Speaker 2 How would you set up on the camps? Would you do an L ambush?

Speaker 3 Yeah, we did a lot of those.

Speaker 3 We set up.

Speaker 2 How many guys were you with?

Speaker 3 How many guys?

Speaker 2 Yeah, when you went on a... Let's talk about your first.

Speaker 2 Would you would you work primarily at daytime or at night?

Speaker 3 Both? Both. Oh, yeah.
You'd go out for five days or so.

Speaker 3 Mostly four days, though.

Speaker 3 Cause if you're working hard as we did

Speaker 3 and had the kind of

Speaker 3 combat that we had. We had guys that was injured,

Speaker 3 maybe not gunshot wounds, but it was hard,

Speaker 3 hard terrain

Speaker 3 through the jungles and trying to avoid the damn snakes. And

Speaker 3 I had one guy named Miller, he got bit twice by a snake

Speaker 3 and I had to send him down to Da Nang. for treatment.

Speaker 3 Went down there and damn it, the guy got bit again. When he brought him back to Khe Kayson

Speaker 3 he got hit real bad when we had that last mission at fullock and all of us

Speaker 3 fought for

Speaker 3 four days day and night

Speaker 2 but go ahead go ahead yeah let's we'll get to full up but I wanted to I wanted I just want to talk about your first your very first mission in Vietnam yeah what was what was the briefing the first mission

Speaker 3 we made three combat dives. We came on to the ship

Speaker 3 and they wanted to make sure that the ship had not been, they hadn't placed mines on the bottom of the ship. So I took down the divers and the ship was almost 3,000 feet

Speaker 3 and we went down with scuba gear. We didn't have any

Speaker 3 trousers on. We just wore the the jackets and had the

Speaker 3 oxygen and all of that. We went there as a regular scuba dive and we had to check and see that there was no mines on the ship, on the bottom of the ship.
Didn't run into any, but we saw the

Speaker 3 they had

Speaker 3 something that

Speaker 3 that

Speaker 3 I don't know what the hell it was, but fire was coming out of it.

Speaker 3 And we had to avoid that. You know, the fire was coming out of the, had it in the bottom of the ship.
And we were trying to get around that because I wanted to check the whole ship.

Speaker 3 And one instinct thing had happened. We got there.

Speaker 3 It had pretty air, no problem with that. And we got to the end.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 they had these tiger sharks. See, the Army was supposed to tell the Navy, hey, you're here now.

Speaker 3 Or the Navy was supposed to tell the Army, we're here now. And let's

Speaker 3 don't feed the sharks or the fish because we're going to be in the water. We've got divers in the water.
Holy shit. Well, it didn't work that way.

Speaker 3 Somehow, where the tiger shark showed up, I'm finishing up my dive now.

Speaker 3 And if you ever seen a tiger shark

Speaker 3 up close, they're voracious. And they were feeding the stuff that the garbage that the army had dropped there

Speaker 3 at the base there.

Speaker 3 So I had one man, his buddy line, you're all in buddy lines of course, and

Speaker 3 I had

Speaker 3 10 men or nine men of myself, and his buddy line came loose and he was drifting out to where the sharks were feeding.

Speaker 3 Now

Speaker 3 as a leader, you have to make a decision. That's what leaders do.

Speaker 3 You can't sit on it. I made a decision right here, right now.

Speaker 3 I unhooked my buddy line and swam out there and got him you don't let him die you go out there and you bring him back

Speaker 3 brought him back he's alive he passed away a few years ago

Speaker 3 but that's what i did no no honors no medals wasn't that you save a life because those sharks would have eaten him up i've seen tiger sharks before

Speaker 3 no honors

Speaker 3 But the decision you make when you're leading you make that decision right here right now. You don't think about it

Speaker 3 That's what you do and I've done that so many times

Speaker 2 How about the first mission on the ground?

Speaker 3 Well, we had to get do the dive missions. I did

Speaker 3 We came in we had to clear the ship

Speaker 3 Then we well we when we got in country

Speaker 3 that was early on it it wasn't the first mission we went on

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 We lost a man

Speaker 3 or the

Speaker 3 Marines had lost a man

Speaker 3 and We had to go down and bring his body up and while we were down there We found there was over a couple hundred rounds of

Speaker 3 ammunition down there buried in the mud.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 we brought the kids wasn't much in the kids body

Speaker 3 They'd eaten them up pretty good.

Speaker 3 So we brought up what was left and then we decided to go back down and get those rounds because the NVA wouldn't take those rounds and they could use explosives with them.

Speaker 3 They had them buried there, over 200 rounds. So we went back down and we pulled up every one of them.

Speaker 2 When you said that the body was eaten up, eaten up by what? By sharks. By sharks.
Oh, yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, now we had the Songbo River and they had not just sharks, but they had the Songbo River was a major river. Well, where they had ships come down, not ships, but boats that come down there and

Speaker 3 the Vietnamese, they

Speaker 3 washed in the river a whole bit. There were families around there, but that wasn't my concern.
We wanted to get that boy's body up.

Speaker 3 And we did it.

Speaker 3 And then we found those rounds. We had to get those up now.

Speaker 3 Then Then what to do with it?

Speaker 3 AOD came in and they took the rounds.

Speaker 3 They took the rounds. I didn't lose any men on that one.

Speaker 3 Didn't lose a man.

Speaker 3 But it was a hell of an experience. We made,

Speaker 3 once we got to

Speaker 3 the Nang, we anchored on the ship and we went down and

Speaker 3 Did some other water work. We did a lot of water work as recon swimmers and divers.

Speaker 3 Because the grunts were not divers. When they had a problem, you know, they had to call us.

Speaker 3 I did a lot of that stuff. I was an officer by that time.
No, I really wasn't. I was a staff sergeant.
I didn't get a commission until later on.

Speaker 3 But the first ground missions we went on, we had to go up in the mountains or go in the jungles and hunt down the bad guys.

Speaker 3 And that's the first time they gave us the dogs,

Speaker 3 gave us the war dogs.

Speaker 3 And I had two of them on my first mission and then Argo and King couldn't get along so I kept King. King was killed later on in the full-op.

Speaker 3 Good dog, tough dog would kill you. I had him in a big case, a big cage

Speaker 3 because you couldn't let him out of the cage

Speaker 3 and I had a dog handler assigned to him

Speaker 3 and of course I can handle King.

Speaker 3 We all trained with him and

Speaker 3 he would kill an enemy soldier, grab him by the throat, growing, whatever.

Speaker 3 He killed two in Fulak

Speaker 3 before he got killed.

Speaker 3 First missions on the ground said we had recon zones and we dropped in by helicopter. We were supposed to parachute in.

Speaker 3 but the jungles were kind of crazy and we don't want to get separated, especially if you're going in at night.

Speaker 3 Some of those were probably done

Speaker 3 but uh i didn't want to do my take my guys in by parachute and we had all this stuff there but i didn't i decided to take the the helicopters put us in and we can drop maybe 10 feet

Speaker 3 on the ground in the jungle

Speaker 3 and we stayed out for a while then they come and pick us up by helicopter

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 We would

Speaker 3 have the helicopter land maybe two positions because I didn't want the NDA to know where we were.

Speaker 3 So he would drop in here, drop in there, and we were supposed to be at one place.

Speaker 3 And they knew where we were coming in. We radio and said, We're going to be here.
But sometimes we would drop a flare

Speaker 3 over here.

Speaker 3 We did what we could so the enemy wouldn't know that we're going to be picked up here and and and jump in on us.

Speaker 2 Diversions.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 We did that all of our missions and

Speaker 3 never got caught.

Speaker 3 But we did a lot of those missions

Speaker 3 until

Speaker 3 first part of it coming in on ground, they put us in with First Force. They were already there.

Speaker 3 And we became part of First Force.

Speaker 3 And we fought with them.

Speaker 3 and then we did work with them and then they sent us south and Colonel Waller had a battalion there and he was our first CO. We were training back in the States.

Speaker 3 He was CO of Recon Battalion and so they put us in with him

Speaker 3 and they fed us and took care of the things like that.

Speaker 3 And we stayed with them the whole time. First Force stayed with 1st Recon Battalion at the same time, all the time.

Speaker 2 When When was your first firefight in Vietnam?

Speaker 3 Seemed like they all came together. Damn.
I mean.

Speaker 2 Let's talk about the POW rescue mission ordered by President Johnson.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he did order it. And the CIA handled it.
We had one

Speaker 3 North Vietnam, Vietnamese, was in the camp.

Speaker 3 And he was a young guy, and they thought he wasn't treating the Americans hard enough.

Speaker 3 So they put him in the penalty

Speaker 3 chamber and he escaped. CIA picked him up and brought him to me

Speaker 3 and brought him to our headquarters from division.

Speaker 3 And I took him in. His name was Lap.

Speaker 3 He was 18 years old and he was a soldier.

Speaker 3 He slept in my tent with me.

Speaker 3 He didn't speak much English, didn't speak English, but I talked to him and he had a tent, a rack in my tent with me.

Speaker 3 Good kid, would have been an American kid, would have done well, but he was a warrior now. He'd been trained, you know, by the North Vietnamese

Speaker 3 to kill or to harm Americans or treat them bad, and he didn't.

Speaker 3 So I got him now.

Speaker 3 And he wasn't a bad kid.

Speaker 3 He would do what I asked him to do. I'd take him the child.

Speaker 3 I'd sit at night with him. And I'd show him a picture of my wife.
So she sent me pictures. And he would go, he'd smile, you know.

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Speaker 3 And one night

Speaker 3 I was asleep and I woke up. I knew something was wrong.
I looked over and Lap was gone. You know, oh shit, so I grabbed my pistol and went looking for him.
I saw him.

Speaker 3 Grabbed him. I said, Lap, what the fuck are you doing out here?

Speaker 3 I need to go to the bathroom.

Speaker 3 I said, what? I'm going to shoot you right now, you know.

Speaker 3 Because I was worried that

Speaker 3 the guards in the camp, if they saw anybody moving at night, they weren't supposed to be moving, they thought they were, you know, enemy soldier.

Speaker 3 Because they would try to infiltrate our bases or steal stuff.

Speaker 3 You couldn't tell the difference, eh?

Speaker 3 But I grabbed

Speaker 3 Lap and I brought him back to my tent.

Speaker 3 And I said, Lap, you know, if you got to go to the bathroom, I don't care what time it is, you wake me up, I'll take you there. Because one of these,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 roving sentries, they'll catch you out there and they won't know the difference.

Speaker 3 But I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So he got to be like a son to me.

Speaker 3 I kept him there for all of the training.

Speaker 3 We had to train for for this mission. Oh yeah, we had the shooting,

Speaker 3 the shooting and the language stuff and all that.

Speaker 3 Finally we got it done and they decided

Speaker 3 the mission was a go.

Speaker 3 And then they pulled it, it said, no, we're not going.

Speaker 3 And so eventually we went and we were supposed to jump in.

Speaker 3 And we worked on jumping in. We still had our parachutes and all that stuff, which we brought with us.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 then the weather got bad.

Speaker 3 No, no,

Speaker 3 we're not going to jump.

Speaker 3 I was going to be the jump master, of course, because I'm jump master trained and all that.

Speaker 3 We went in by a helicopter

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 it was a big operation. The SEALs.

Speaker 3 They did some

Speaker 3 recon somewhere. The CIA didn't do any water work, you know.

Speaker 3 But we did the water work,

Speaker 3 checked the rivers, and then it was time to go. So we flew in by a helicopter and we landed and the first night we stayed on a hill watching the area out there.
We could see the fishermen.

Speaker 3 We could see the guys out in the rice patties, but we stayed quiet.

Speaker 3 And then the next day, we got got off the hill and moved toward the camp and avoiding anybody that might have been out there.

Speaker 3 Third day we hit the camp,

Speaker 3 killed the first two guards

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 my job was to kill

Speaker 3 the sentry with my knife. That was I'm the knife guy, you know.

Speaker 3 So I was good at that. So it had me scheduled to kill the first two guards or the sentries with my knife

Speaker 3 but didn't get that far because everything blew up all of a sudden everybody was shooting god damn it uh

Speaker 3 how am i gonna find out what the well they told us where they thought the PLWs was in the tent

Speaker 3 the sentries here the POWs here and they were something over there So my job was to kill these guys, get in there and get the PLWs out.

Speaker 3 Five or six of of them, PLWs.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I got to where I thought they should be, nobody there.

Speaker 3 So I'm pissed.

Speaker 3 And one of my guys saw two guys coming toward the camp and he shot those two.

Speaker 3 And then I'm pissed now.

Speaker 3 Everything's happening

Speaker 3 and no PLWs.

Speaker 3 So I said, if I could blow it up, we blew the whole base up.

Speaker 3 Blew those places where they held American soldiers. Where they held them.

Speaker 3 And I call, this camp will not hold another American Marine or soldier.

Speaker 3 We burned it.

Speaker 3 Yeah, we burned it.

Speaker 3 But I didn't get the POWs.

Speaker 3 And that was hard on us. We trained for so hard and for so long.
And now we're going home without the the POWs.

Speaker 3 Damn it.

Speaker 3 You know, we had a captain in charge.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 I was lieutenant, I believe. But he was in charge of,

Speaker 3 he's dead now, but he was a coward. I hate to say it.

Speaker 3 He didn't belong in

Speaker 3 recon for what we did. He failed scuba.

Speaker 3 You know, he wasn't very good. He could run and all that, but he couldn't do the field stuff.
I think he ran maybe two missions

Speaker 3 and the POW thing.

Speaker 3 He got the Silver Star for that.

Speaker 3 He got the Silver Star. He wrote it up himself.
Oh, man. Got it through.

Speaker 3 When I got hit

Speaker 3 one time, he never come to see me.

Speaker 3 He never come to see me. Never asked how I was doing.
He was out for himself.

Speaker 3 He wanted to to be the general's aide. He didn't get that.

Speaker 3 So he ended up in Force Recon.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he wasn't a bad guy, but he shouldn't have been there.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You mentioned you were good at killing people with a knife.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 I killed a man up in,

Speaker 3 well, one of them I killed.

Speaker 3 We were at Khe San,

Speaker 3 which is a bloody military military base.

Speaker 3 And we had some troops up there, not many.

Speaker 3 But I was doing a mission.

Speaker 3 It started off as a recon mission.

Speaker 3 But now we're thinking that these guys are coming into Khezan

Speaker 3 to reinforce whatever they had there. And they had the base surrounded.
So I'm looking to see what I can do to... get some of these guys out of there and I

Speaker 3 run up on some

Speaker 3 and I killed the first three, shot them with my M16

Speaker 3 and then I

Speaker 3 looked over and I saw another NVA looking out that way and I got him

Speaker 3 by his mouth and I put his foot off

Speaker 3 and ripped him and I stuck my knife down in my cartridge belt.

Speaker 3 I killed him.

Speaker 3 Blood was all over the place.

Speaker 3 He wiggled a little bit, but then he's down.

Speaker 3 I took my nine millimeter. There were two others that was moving in between the trees.
And

Speaker 3 I saw the first one, I shot him, double tap, boom, boom. He fell, didn't move.
And I saw the other one look back and I shot him. Boom, boom.

Speaker 3 I got

Speaker 3 criticized for shooting him in the back.

Speaker 3 They're running.

Speaker 3 I killed both of them. I killed them all.
I cut his throat.

Speaker 3 I killed as many as I could. Kill a lot of enemy soldiers.
But it's up close. You know, we have seven or eight men.

Speaker 3 And you're out in the jungle, you know, most of that time.

Speaker 3 And we used to run those trails at night looking for them. We'd catch them cooking.
You'd smell the food.

Speaker 3 We'd throw a damn grenade in there.

Speaker 3 But unfortunately, we stopped.

Speaker 3 Might have been children in there.

Speaker 3 I had a heart.

Speaker 3 Wasn't a very,

Speaker 3 wasn't a very big heart.

Speaker 3 But yeah, they tried to

Speaker 3 kill me once

Speaker 3 when they

Speaker 3 I was

Speaker 3 black Marine and they had some other stuff for me and they put out a reward for me. This is what I was told by Intel.

Speaker 3 They said that if you kill me, you would get a cow

Speaker 3 and you'd get a

Speaker 3 two weeks in Hanoi.

Speaker 3 And then they were come close to killing me.

Speaker 3 They couldn't do it.

Speaker 2 Not a lot of black force reconnaissance Marines out there, huh?

Speaker 3 Oh no, not in those days, no.

Speaker 3 50s,

Speaker 3 60s. Well, a lot of these guys, we all know they come from maybe cities and didn't have swimming pools that these kids could go to.
There's a lot of social stuff goes on with that.

Speaker 3 But a lot of the guys didn't try hard enough.

Speaker 3 I tried hard enough because I wanted to be there. I knew I could do it.

Speaker 3 You know, so.

Speaker 2 How did that make make you feel knowing that they had a bounty on your head?

Speaker 3 Oh, I didn't bother me.

Speaker 3 Folks have been looking after me all of my life.

Speaker 3 You know, they tried to kill me when I was in Hong Kong. I went there on R ⁇ R.

Speaker 3 I mean, I knew it was set up. They brought this girl to my room.

Speaker 3 She knocked on the door.

Speaker 3 And I was on the phone talking to my wife. I was waiting on the call because you had

Speaker 3 another server to get through to the States and all that. I'm waiting.
And she come to my room.

Speaker 3 She could either capture me or kill me. Ain't nobody would really

Speaker 3 care

Speaker 3 another American, especially being black.

Speaker 3 But no, I'll fall for that.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the time

Speaker 3 Well, there's a lot of times people try to kill me.

Speaker 3 I mean, even in Hong Kong,

Speaker 3 they tried to kill me. And they tried to kill me in Hawaii.
Try to kill my wife and my son.

Speaker 2 How'd they try to kill your wife and your son?

Speaker 3 I have a long history.

Speaker 3 I just come back from a year in

Speaker 3 Europe.

Speaker 3 And when I was in Hamburg, they tried to kill me. They missed.

Speaker 3 When they tried to kill my wife and my son, we had gotten a three-year tour in Hawaii. So, Dottie and I and Gary we went to Hawaii and

Speaker 3 year goes by. You know, we're doing those.

Speaker 3 She won first place in the Hula contest.

Speaker 3 And we're having a great time. You know, I'm enjoying it and met a lot of Hawaiian friends.
And

Speaker 3 I was out of combat because most people don't know what happened to me in Germany.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 But at any rate, and

Speaker 3 one day my general called me

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 he said, Captain, sit down. I was the captain then.

Speaker 3 I said, yes, sir. I figured, oh shit, I've done something wrong now.
General's calling me in.

Speaker 3 He said, I'm sending you home.

Speaker 3 I said, well, general, I just got here.

Speaker 3 We're enjoying this tour. He said, I know, but.

Speaker 3 The plan is

Speaker 3 for,

Speaker 3 I didn't want to mention the name,

Speaker 3 to kill your wife and your son. We've confirmed it.
And so to keep you out of harm's way, I'm sending you and your family home. Now you go home and you talk to your wife and you tell her that you

Speaker 3 no longer will be in Hawaii. Went home.
Dottie's a trooper now. You got to understand who Dottie is.

Speaker 3 which you would have loved her because she was a real real trooper. I said, sweetheart,

Speaker 3 something come up.

Speaker 3 She said, oh, why is it something always comes up when you want to tell me something I don't want to hear? I said, well, sweetheart,

Speaker 3 I just saw the general and he told me that we're in trouble and they

Speaker 3 figured out that you and Gary are going to be shot on Saturday morning at 10 o'clock. And they were supposed to be there.

Speaker 2 Who is they?

Speaker 3 You don't need to know that. That's a long time ago.
Tell me some of your stories, and I'll tell you mine. Now, it wasn't a good idea for her to stay in Hawaii.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 you were a SEAL, right?

Speaker 2 That's right. So you're a tough guy.

Speaker 3 You can handle all this stuff.

Speaker 3 We'll get around to it.

Speaker 3 I went back and told the general that my wife don't want to go

Speaker 3 home. She wants to stay here.
This is the first time in a long time we've been together.

Speaker 3 And, you know, the war was kind of hard on me. He said, yeah, Captain, I know all about that.
He said, I know what happened to you in Hong kong and

Speaker 3 and um i know about them two people you killed by the way i said no i didn't kill those people general he said yes you did i know that i'm lying last bitch the general but that was something that happened a long time ago supposed to be secret but he's a general he's got sources are these the two people that you killed that were running away is that who he's referencing no this was in hong kong i'm talking about You killed two people in Hong Kong.

Speaker 3 That was a long time ago. I was probably talking about my my wife and my son, but he told me that he knew about the people I killed in Hong Kong.

Speaker 2 Who did you kill in Hong Kong?

Speaker 3 Some bad guys.

Speaker 3 I killed them both, and I kicked them off

Speaker 3 and kicked them in the water.

Speaker 3 Cut them all.

Speaker 3 They didn't know who they were fucking with.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'll kill them.

Speaker 3 They tried to kill me.

Speaker 2 How did they try to kill you?

Speaker 3 They tried to set me up. This is Hong Kong now we're talking about.

Speaker 3 They come to my room. Well, they sent this girl to my room.

Speaker 3 Pretty girl.

Speaker 3 I had a wife wife at home.

Speaker 2 Is this intelligence?

Speaker 2 Is it intelligence services?

Speaker 3 We had the British there.

Speaker 3 They owned the base.

Speaker 3 China owns it now.

Speaker 3 British with our allies.

Speaker 3 Sean, there's so many things.

Speaker 3 They diagnosed me with PTSD and they also declared me insane.

Speaker 3 I'm an old guy now and I have trouble dealing with

Speaker 3 some of these issues. I know who you are and what you've done and I appreciate it.
And I'm doing the best I can to do this peace with you. But a lot of it, you know,

Speaker 3 was not known through the channels

Speaker 3 and when I was in Hong Kong I was on RR

Speaker 3 but they tried to kill me they left me alone I wouldn't have bothered them

Speaker 3 but they didn't leave me alone and they had to realize who they were messing with

Speaker 3 so I did kill them

Speaker 3 and I killed a lot more

Speaker 3 yeah

Speaker 3 I know that's what you want to talk about

Speaker 3 but a lot of it a lot of this stuff you know it runs together the timing that was

Speaker 3 I'm 87 years old

Speaker 3 I'm gonna be 88 this year

Speaker 3 I spent 14 years overseas I fought two wars I have 19 holes that I bled from Both my legs have been broken. Right now, I got six pieces of metal in my body.

Speaker 3 Two in my thighs, and down in my lower legs were broken. I got a piece of metal in my left leg.
My right leg is shorter than my left leg.

Speaker 3 I got scars all over me.

Speaker 3 I can't hardly walk.

Speaker 3 That's why I didn't stand when you come in. No disrespect.

Speaker 2 I didn't take any.

Speaker 2 Well, let's move into.

Speaker 2 There was a downed B-52, correct?

Speaker 2 That

Speaker 2 supposedly had a nuclear bomb.

Speaker 3 B-57.

Speaker 2 B-57, excuse me.

Speaker 3 It crashed in the mountains.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I was told, I know it was nuclear equipped. In other words, you could carry a nuclear bomb on it.

Speaker 3 And I didn't know if they had a bomb on it or not. But we were supposed to parachute in,

Speaker 3 left that alone.

Speaker 3 Didn't want to drop into an area like that. I've been in jumps where the area was smoked.

Speaker 3 So we landed on top of the mountain, helicopter. We dropped in about

Speaker 3 10 feet. We dropped in.

Speaker 3 It was a heavy landing. We had our stuff with us.

Speaker 3 And we

Speaker 3 went down to the crash

Speaker 3 and and

Speaker 3 wasn't much there.

Speaker 3 The Vietnamese had already been there. By the time we got there,

Speaker 3 we'd got in there

Speaker 3 at first, might have had a chance to see what's on this thing.

Speaker 3 But we found some

Speaker 3 goggles and

Speaker 3 we knew that somebody had had this aircraft. We brought some of the oxygen bottles back.
I didn't find any bodies.

Speaker 3 We did look.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the story is we knew that there's no point looking any further because there's nobody here. The planes crash

Speaker 3 and hit the mountain. And

Speaker 3 the tail was separated from the body.

Speaker 3 And so I decided, okay, we need to go home now. This is enemy territory.

Speaker 3 And the team broadminded. so we started hiding, went down the mountain and

Speaker 3 started home.

Speaker 3 But it started to rain

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 I told them

Speaker 3 that I needed an extraction.

Speaker 3 Because we could see tracks on the round. I figured that some bad guys are out there.

Speaker 3 So I called for an extraction and they called back and says, no, we can't come and get you because it's raining and the choppers can't fly.

Speaker 3 I said, Well, I'll give you a day, and I'll stay here for a day, roam around,

Speaker 3 and then I either got to stay here until you come get me,

Speaker 3 or I got to come home.

Speaker 3 And after all of that, I decided we're going home. And I got my team together and a little,

Speaker 3 and I, uh, Doroski was a very tall point man,

Speaker 3 still around today.

Speaker 3 I said, Doroski, I said, point man, take us home. And for the next five days, we walked through enemy territory, went through two minefields, swam a river,

Speaker 3 wasn't captured,

Speaker 3 and we got hit the last part of it.

Speaker 3 They opened fire, but that was all right. not gonna bother us because the Marines were coming from the other direction to pick us up.

Speaker 3 So we probably killed a bunch of them, but that didn't bother me because they weren't going to really attack us. And the truck showed up

Speaker 3 and picked us up

Speaker 3 and went home

Speaker 3 and the general said, or the colonel said, why don't you get something to eat? I wasn't hungry. Couldn't eat.
I let my troops go to the mess hall.

Speaker 3 Then I had to go down to the colonel's office to see the CIA guy and

Speaker 3 debriefing. Sure, you've been in a lot of those.

Speaker 3 But they debriefed me and I told them what I knew. I didn't find any bodies

Speaker 3 on the aircraft.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 the colonel said, why don't you go and

Speaker 3 take a nap?

Speaker 3 I was tired. I said, I don't know if I can sleep.
I've been awake for four days.

Speaker 3 almost five days. I've been laying down

Speaker 3 and my eyes had closed.

Speaker 3 And I couldn't get my eyes open. I had mud and dirt, cake, everything was in my eyes.
I was laying there.

Speaker 3 And I couldn't get my eyes open. I was moving my head.
I was trying to get my... I had to do this.
My arms were so tired, I couldn't hardly reach my face. It was a hard, physical

Speaker 3 trip for us. And finally I got my eyes open.

Speaker 3 Then this young kid was standing there. He came in, said, Lieutenant, I got your mail for you.
No, the staff sergeant said, I got your mail for you.

Speaker 3 First different voice I've heard, because I knew my guy's voices.

Speaker 3 And he was different.

Speaker 3 And he shouldn't have been in my tent because everybody knows you don't do that.

Speaker 3 But I had to learn to be a a human being again.

Speaker 3 I've been in the jungle for so long I

Speaker 3 was almost turning into that person. I could eat anything, fight anything,

Speaker 3 sleep in the water, those type of things that was, I had experiences as I was making this, you know, from a

Speaker 3 peacetime Marine

Speaker 3 into being totally involved in this jungle thing.

Speaker 2 Did you feel more involved more at home in the jungle? I did.

Speaker 3 Then you did. Yeah, when they when they

Speaker 3 my time come to go out,

Speaker 3 I had about two and a half days in the rear.

Speaker 3 You get some regular child, see the doc and all that, but I had a doc with me.

Speaker 3 It was uncomfortable. I felt better when I'm out there at watch when I got my knife, I got my pistol, I got my rifle at the ready,

Speaker 3 and I knew I can kill anything. I wasn't afraid.
I had gotten past that

Speaker 3 stage. I was only afraid for my men.

Speaker 2 Well, Major, let's take a quick break.

Speaker 2 And then when we come back, we'll just pick up right here.

Speaker 2 All right. Do you want to water or anything?

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 2 You okay?

Speaker 3 How's it going, Dad? I'm all right.

Speaker 2 All right.

Speaker 3 Where have I been? I guess I took me back to Vietnam, huh? Damn. You took a little bit of trip there, huh? Yeah.
I'm alright. All good? Yeah.
Okay. I'm all right.

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Speaker 2 I know everybody out there has to be

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Speaker 2 All right, Major, you ready to kick it off again?

Speaker 3 We got a TV audience.

Speaker 3 I wear these boots because I've got metal in my legs and it helps me out with stability.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's pretty sharp-looking kicks.

Speaker 3 Well, thank you. You're welcome.

Speaker 2 But, um,

Speaker 2 so we're getting ready to get into

Speaker 3 foolak.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 before we do, we didn't cover the battlefield commission from sergeant to second lieutenant.

Speaker 2 So I wanted to ask you how that went.

Speaker 3 Yeah, well,

Speaker 3 before Vietnam, I'd applied for a commission.

Speaker 3 They had a program

Speaker 3 that you could apply for and you'd go to OCS.

Speaker 3 basis school, you'd come out of an officer.

Speaker 3 I applied for that, but I passed all of the tests

Speaker 3 but they sent me a letter said consider it but not but not selected

Speaker 3 so I didn't get to go.

Speaker 3 The next year my officers said

Speaker 3 try again.

Speaker 3 So I did again and I didn't get selected.

Speaker 3 It was hard on African-American Marines that during that time we had very few officers in the Marine Corps.

Speaker 3 So they had the enlisted commissioning program. So I tried out, but I didn't make it.

Speaker 3 But then

Speaker 3 I guess later on, when they considered me for a battlefield commission, I mean, they just gave it to me. All the officers were dead.
So they gave me the commission.

Speaker 3 I had never gone to OCS or basic school. I had a high school education.
I'd had some college.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I was proud of that.

Speaker 3 For my family, nobody in my family had ever graduated high school.

Speaker 3 And so this was good for them, proved that we could be good citizens. My parents insisted on that.

Speaker 3 And you had to...

Speaker 3 behave yourself

Speaker 3 and I did all those things. And then after I joined the Marines, like I mentioned,

Speaker 3 I did good.

Speaker 3 And then they decided to commission me. Took five minutes.

Speaker 3 Colonel called me in his office.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I signed the documents,

Speaker 3 raised my right hand, and come out a second lieutenant.

Speaker 2 You know, it sounds like the

Speaker 2 bureaucrats

Speaker 2 maybe got in the way of your advancement, but

Speaker 2 the men that you're actually fighting with on the ground had a tremendous amount of respect for you. Is that fair to say?

Speaker 3 Most of them.

Speaker 3 I can't say all of them did, because the commanding officer of my unit,

Speaker 3 when they were looking at this Medal of Honor for me, he said he'd rather die and go to hell

Speaker 3 before I would get the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 2 Why is that?

Speaker 3 He was a racist. He's gone now.
He was within my unit. He was the captain in the unit.

Speaker 3 But he

Speaker 3 went to the POW camp with us.

Speaker 3 Didn't fight.

Speaker 3 He was a coward.

Speaker 3 He

Speaker 3 failed scuba school.

Speaker 3 I never saw him make a parachute jump.

Speaker 3 I don't even know whether he even went to jump school or not because I came in as a sergeant. Then I made staff sergeant there.

Speaker 3 Then I made officer there.

Speaker 3 But Ken Jordan was his name.

Speaker 3 And his goal was to be the general's aide.

Speaker 2 You talked about him earlier.

Speaker 2 You talked about him earlier. Yeah.

Speaker 3 Wasn't a good man, and he didn't

Speaker 3 like me.

Speaker 3 And, you know,

Speaker 3 I went through that as a

Speaker 3 NCO and as an officer, but you know, I was okay with it because I was serving the Marine Corps and I figured I'm good enough to get through. I'm good enough to do a good job.

Speaker 3 I didn't make a lot of rank. You know, I made it up to major.

Speaker 3 I probably could have gone further,

Speaker 3 but I chose to retire.

Speaker 3 You know, I did that almost 23 years.

Speaker 3 I was was up for lieutenant colonel, which I'm sure would have made

Speaker 3 because of my background, my war background and other stuff I'd done.

Speaker 3 But when I retired, I bought a home in Jacksonville and

Speaker 3 my son was doing okay. My wife was doing all right.

Speaker 3 But I think my son had a big part of it too. You know, I couldn't find a school for him and those types of things.
And of course, he's blind, special needs.

Speaker 3 And so I had to deal with that. And

Speaker 3 the

Speaker 3 general told me that he's going to recommend me for

Speaker 3 lieutenant colonel, which has been pretty good for me. I come in as a snuffy.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 then I come home from work one day,

Speaker 3 just before I retired, and my wife, Dottie, was crying. So, man.

Speaker 3 I said, what's up? What's up, sweetheart? She said, Gary got assaulted in school. My son was blind, special needs.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 the demons came home.

Speaker 3 So I had weapons in my chunk of my car.

Speaker 3 I was authorized to do that, so I said, well, this isn't going to work.

Speaker 3 I went down to the school and driving down to the school.

Speaker 3 There was a golf course on the left and some housing on the right.

Speaker 3 I was driving down, I hit a light

Speaker 3 and I waited

Speaker 3 and waited.

Speaker 3 And the more angry I got. I'm going to settle this.
You're not going to assault my child.

Speaker 3 Demons that come home.

Speaker 3 Should have thought better,

Speaker 3 but

Speaker 3 that light never changed.

Speaker 3 That one didn't change, so I turned around and come back home. God once again

Speaker 3 protected me.

Speaker 3 They have no idea what I have done

Speaker 3 had I got there, and some kids' parents was there.

Speaker 3 But anyway, God saved me again,

Speaker 3 and Gary was okay.

Speaker 3 I retired.

Speaker 3 The general came there that day. He tried to talk me out of it, but I think it was time.
I was hurting all over and

Speaker 3 I was CO of Force Recon Company. Wow.

Speaker 3 And had a big retirement for me on the

Speaker 3 parade field.

Speaker 3 Everybody come to see me, the Navy come to see me, and

Speaker 3 everybody was there.

Speaker 3 and I was a major coming from a cornfield and cotton fields. Dottie was there.

Speaker 3 Gary was not there

Speaker 3 but it was the idea that all these people that come to see me retire.

Speaker 3 Good friends

Speaker 3 I'd known since I was a teenager

Speaker 3 and they gave me a

Speaker 3 couple medals. I don't know which one they gave me at that time

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 had the

Speaker 3 band was there and they played the music and the marching band was there.

Speaker 3 And the general gave me a medal, and everybody applauded

Speaker 3 that Major Capers is going home now, the legendary Major Capers who gave it all.

Speaker 3 Then I brought up my ex-O

Speaker 3 young man, he's gone now, he made Major General,

Speaker 3 but he's dead now.

Speaker 3 I introduced him as my relief.

Speaker 3 And then I waded around.

Speaker 3 I couldn't leave the battlefield. Well, not the battlefield, but the parade field.

Speaker 3 Because I want to see all my guys.

Speaker 3 I told Dottie, I said, well, you know, maybe somebody else will come.

Speaker 3 The general had gone, the admiral had gone.

Speaker 3 And I was waiting for somebody to come up, one of my troops that I want to say goodbye to.

Speaker 3 Nobody showed. So Dottie said, you know, sweetheart, maybe it's time for us to go home.
I said, well, let's wait another minute or two.

Speaker 3 And nobody else came.

Speaker 3 I said, okay.

Speaker 3 She drove me home

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 took off my uniform

Speaker 3 and I never put it back on again.

Speaker 3 I have it in a sea bag somewhere, my shed.

Speaker 3 But those are the memories from beginning as a teenager from the cotton fields to being

Speaker 3 awarded

Speaker 3 on the parade field with hundreds, probably thousands, because the

Speaker 3 divisions had their bands and said goodbye to me.

Speaker 2 Let's go back to Faux Locke Fulak?

Speaker 3 Yeah. All right

Speaker 3 Not a pleasant thing to do, but let's go back to Fulak.

Speaker 2 You ready for that? Yeah

Speaker 2 What was going on there?

Speaker 2 What was the mission?

Speaker 3 You know that sort of confusion Sean because uh

Speaker 3 Nobody really figured it out

Speaker 3 except uh

Speaker 3 that was my last mission.

Speaker 2 That was the last one. Last mission.
How much time had you spent in Vietnam until then?

Speaker 3 Nine months, ten months,

Speaker 3 almost a year.

Speaker 3 But we did a lot of work with the Navy, you know, doing the ship bottom searches and the diving and the swimming and all that.

Speaker 3 One night I made a swim of 1,500 meters.

Speaker 3 in enemy territory

Speaker 3 to do some recon on the beaches

Speaker 3 and swam back 1500 meters.

Speaker 3 But Fulak was a different situation.

Speaker 3 I was asked to go in there and the Vietnamese

Speaker 3 had a base on the reverse side of

Speaker 3 Long Top Hill.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 okay,

Speaker 3 my last mission, because my time was up pretty much,

Speaker 3 and I was going to use the last month, I guess it was, doing some work for somebody, helping the new guys coming in.

Speaker 3 But I wasn't commanding officer, you know,

Speaker 3 of the unit.

Speaker 3 You know, I was a platoon commander as a lieutenant. But I commanded most of the unit because I've been around for a while.
I was a little older.

Speaker 3 You know, some of the young officers that would come in

Speaker 3 weren't qualified. They wanted the experience of being there, but

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 that's not a place you go to get experience in the areas that we were in. But in Fulak, I got to Fulak

Speaker 3 and damn.

Speaker 3 Going into Fulak, we stopped off at a

Speaker 3 at a place

Speaker 3 where we had

Speaker 3 some guys that lived in the villages

Speaker 3 with the South Vietnamese

Speaker 3 and they would be in the camps with them

Speaker 3 and they spoke Vietnamese and they would

Speaker 3 help the Vietnamese fight against the North Vietnamese.

Speaker 3 I forget what they call those guys but they were good so I joined up with them

Speaker 3 And well actually I didn't get up there first. I went into one place and we got shot out.

Speaker 3 I mean,

Speaker 3 just blessed all of the place.

Speaker 3 Chopper got hit, so we pulled out of there.

Speaker 3 We didn't land.

Speaker 3 I don't know how the hell they knew we were there coming in that place, a landing zone.

Speaker 3 And the next one we got to,

Speaker 3 we weren't going to quit. We were going in there.

Speaker 3 And they had these

Speaker 3 pieces of

Speaker 3 had grenades on

Speaker 3 on long

Speaker 3 poles that was set up with wire around them and they had these grenades

Speaker 3 with the if you land in the in that area the chopper would pull the pins on the grenades and they would blow from each side so it was booby trapped the whole landing zone yeah

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 Figured that out we got the hell out of there

Speaker 2 and we how did you guys see that in a helicopter

Speaker 3 Training I guess we spent so much time in the damn jungles

Speaker 3 and we saw it

Speaker 3 and then

Speaker 3 the chopper went up

Speaker 3 He just kept going up

Speaker 3 Then all of a sudden he just dropped down auto rotation they called it And he just turned it loose, come on down like that, then restarted about 200 feet off the ground.

Speaker 3 Differently from where we were with those

Speaker 3 booby traps

Speaker 3 and we got to where we needed to be

Speaker 3 and we started operating

Speaker 3 we're angry

Speaker 3 this is supposed to be

Speaker 3 our last mission now

Speaker 3 I'm taking whatever I have left go home

Speaker 3 But most of them are gone.

Speaker 3 It was a hard, hard tour.

Speaker 3 I was an enlisted man. Now I'm in command.

Speaker 3 Jordan, who was commanded first,

Speaker 3 he got out of there.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 Lieutenant Capers now gets the hard duties of taking the guys with me.

Speaker 3 I left one man back because he had a hernia.

Speaker 3 But he didn't want to stay back. He came to my tent and said, Lieutenant, I got to go.
You can't leave me behind. I said, no, Ski, you know, Doroski was his name.
So, you've done a good job.

Speaker 3 You've been with me all the way. You fought a good war.
Now, you go home now and you have a happy life.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 he was the only survivor

Speaker 3 that didn't get killed.

Speaker 3 And I loved him. He's still alive.

Speaker 2 You guys keep in touch?

Speaker 3 Yeah, still alive. I talked to him the other day.

Speaker 3 Came to my wife's funeral, my son's funeral.

Speaker 3 They were both buried together. Wife and my son, but Ski was there.
He was always there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I got hospitalized a couple years ago in Wilmington.

Speaker 3 And I woke up one morning and guess who was standing there? Daraske.

Speaker 3 He says, hey, sir, I'm here. He was my point man.

Speaker 3 Point man.

Speaker 3 Loyal.

Speaker 3 It broke my heart to leave him behind in Fulak.

Speaker 3 But I made the right decision. Because

Speaker 3 the guy that took over, a guy named.

Speaker 2 You all right? Yeah.

Speaker 3 Okay.

Speaker 3 Nick the Greek.

Speaker 3 I replaced DeRusky with Nick the Greek

Speaker 3 and I gave him M60 machine gun

Speaker 3 and it got down to the fact that

Speaker 3 when we used that M60 he blew up everything he got lost a leg

Speaker 3 Nick the Greek did the big man had 19 inch arms And he used that M60 like it was nothing.

Speaker 3 Tough kid.

Speaker 3 But since Doroski wasn't there, he came to me and he said, Lieutenant,

Speaker 3 let me be point man.

Speaker 3 I can do it.

Speaker 3 I said, you know,

Speaker 3 Nick,

Speaker 3 tough job. You know, I'm going to be up front.

Speaker 3 He said, yeah, but I can cover you.

Speaker 3 Somewhere along the line, I let Nick be

Speaker 3 the point man

Speaker 3 with the M60s.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 leading into that, a lot of things, of course, happened.

Speaker 3 Leading into that conversation with Nick, my war dog King was killed.

Speaker 3 How was the War Dog King killed?

Speaker 2 How was the War Dog King killed?

Speaker 3 He was killed

Speaker 3 when explosions went off.

Speaker 3 It was one of them.

Speaker 3 Things that you that

Speaker 3 he killed two enemy soldiers. He's a big dog, trained to kill.

Speaker 3 We had to keep him in a cage.

Speaker 3 Only I and the dog Hannah could hold on, could

Speaker 3 could

Speaker 3 hold him.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Miller got hit. Everybody was wounded.
Craypo lost a leg.

Speaker 2 Is this Foolock?

Speaker 3 Foolock.

Speaker 2 What happened first?

Speaker 2 What happened first there? Sounds like there were three really bad firefights where he lost one Marine. Is that correct?

Speaker 3 We lost the Marine.

Speaker 3 Didn't lose the man in Fulak.

Speaker 2 No.

Speaker 3 No.

Speaker 3 Everybody survived except the dog.

Speaker 3 But we had other... missions where we lost somebody.
Okay. All of us experienced that.
All the platoons and teams

Speaker 3 at

Speaker 3 we killed a bunch of people and some of ours was wounded. Young Stanlin,

Speaker 3 he was my point man with Doroski.

Speaker 3 But he got shot and killed at Khe Son.

Speaker 2 Your team was ambushed in Fula, correct?

Speaker 3 Well, he was with another team

Speaker 3 and they went out on a mission and they got hit

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 grenade came in. What I'm told, grenade came in and he rolled on it and the grenade blew him up.
Everybody was wounded on that mission.

Speaker 3 But he was KIA, young guy. I went to see his mother.
after the war.

Speaker 3 Of course I wrote the usual letters, you know, today your son was killed, I'm I'm sorry, and this and that.

Speaker 3 That was hard to do. I went to see his mother and I apologize to her.

Speaker 3 She accepted it, was okay. Then a few years later, his brother called me.

Speaker 3 But his

Speaker 3 brother,

Speaker 3 his mother and his brother had divorced, and he was raised by his father.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 so he wasn't there, but he did call me some years later to thank me, you know,

Speaker 3 and he never come to see me.

Speaker 3 But I did go see Scanner's mother. He was hit bad.

Speaker 3 And at the time,

Speaker 3 what I was told I was not in that area,

Speaker 3 that he jumped on a grenade, so I put him in for the mail of honor.

Speaker 3 It was the right thing to do.

Speaker 3 And Jordan

Speaker 3 refused to send it forward.

Speaker 3 The kid's dead, and he saved a lot of lives. Those M26s that we carried, you know,

Speaker 3 would kill at least two or three people.

Speaker 3 But he jumped, and we knew his sternum was crushed. So we knew that the grenade was under him.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 now that wasn't at

Speaker 3 Fulak, that was at Kason.

Speaker 3 But you were talking about Fulak, right? Yeah,

Speaker 3 a lot of firefights.

Speaker 3 Boy, that's a long part there.

Speaker 3 How do I simplify it?

Speaker 2 You don't have to simplify it.

Speaker 3 Thank you.

Speaker 3 After the

Speaker 3 POW raid,

Speaker 3 I went to Hong Kong for

Speaker 3 four days.

Speaker 3 They tried to kill my ass in Hong Kong.

Speaker 2 Yeah, you had mentioned that.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 So I come back.

Speaker 2 Do you know who tried to kill you?

Speaker 3 In Hong Kong?

Speaker 3 Thugs.

Speaker 3 You know, they they knew that American Marines and

Speaker 3 soldiers was coming there for PS for

Speaker 3 RR. RR, yeah.

Speaker 3 And they had gang wreck, you know, gang things set up.

Speaker 3 You know, we'd go to the clubs, and sometime you found a dead Marine, and the MPs, which is run by the British, would look into it.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 we had a water war to fight. We were still fighting in Vietnam.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I come back

Speaker 3 and I heard Scanlon was killed.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, because we had breakfast one morning. The colonel told me, he asked me,

Speaker 3 Had I heard about Kayson? No, the Sergeant Major asked me had I heard about

Speaker 3 Kason.

Speaker 3 I said no Sergeant Major. He said we had a lot of trouble up there.

Speaker 3 And he said

Speaker 3 Scanlon was killed. And everybody knew I loved Scanlon.
He was like a son to me.

Speaker 3 Hard,

Speaker 3 freckled face, red hair,

Speaker 3 always smiling.

Speaker 3 And he was, after the war,

Speaker 3 he was coming to live with me for a while.

Speaker 3 So it was kind of personal

Speaker 3 when Scanlon got killed.

Speaker 3 Now they're sending me to Quezon.

Speaker 3 I got there and

Speaker 3 I'm going back to Quezon, I guess it is.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 ran some long-range missions.

Speaker 3 I mean, and

Speaker 3 walking and we came home with a python snake

Speaker 3 20 foot long weighed almost 200 pounds we put him in a big sack brought him back and we didn't cross the river with him because

Speaker 3 it was too heavy so we left him on the side of the river and we swam across the river went up the mountain where our base was we left the snake there we got back and i told the pilots about the snake we had caught.

Speaker 3 He said, ah, you ain't no snake that long. I said, Well, give us a ride with your helicopter.
We'll go down and get him. So he rode down with the helicopter, and one of my swimmers jumped out.

Speaker 3 He landed on the big rock there. Swimmers jumped out, went on, and got the snake.
He was loose, and we brought him back to the base.

Speaker 3 And some of this stuff you've already read, I'm sure, but you've done your homework.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 we put the snake in an

Speaker 3 excavation

Speaker 3 and he was lying there.

Speaker 3 And I think Sergeant Yerman said, well, we got to get him something to eat. So he drove down to town and come back with a damn duck.

Speaker 3 And he tied the duck,

Speaker 3 one leg, and put the duck in the hole there with the snake. Snakes lying in there hadn't really moved.

Speaker 3 Ducks in there quacking.

Speaker 3 I said, you know, that duck looks tight, looks tough.

Speaker 3 He's going to kick the ass out of that snake in there.

Speaker 3 So everybody's laughing. And the mall that's beating up with feathers in it, and the snake is going to eat that duck.

Speaker 3 So everybody's coming by to betting, you know, troops bet on any damn thing, you know, who's going to win this fight.

Speaker 3 The next day,

Speaker 3 we look in this hole and the snake was dead as a doornail. No shit.
Laying out this,

Speaker 3 and the duck is quirking, perking around.

Speaker 3 Yeah, the ducks pecked that snake to death. And everybody was laughing.

Speaker 3 And they believed it for a while that the duck had pecked the snake. And it was an unbelievable story, but it was fun.

Speaker 3 And we took the snake.

Speaker 3 And we gave it to the Montanyards, which is the Montanard tribe, used to help us with Intel in the mountains there,

Speaker 3 an older tribe called Mutton Yards.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 for them helping us, I gave them some of the meat from the snake.

Speaker 3 And we gave them a skin, some of them, and we cut the skin off and they made belts. And some of the troops made belts out of the skin from the snake.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 they named him Goma Powell, which is a

Speaker 3 popular TV program during that period of time. So they named the snake Gorma Powell.

Speaker 3 So they had fun with that name and the death of the snake.

Speaker 3 Okay,

Speaker 3 time to go back killing people.

Speaker 3 Kill them all this time.

Speaker 3 But we had the 324th B Division.

Speaker 3 that had come across the 16th parallel

Speaker 3 and they were going to south. They're going to chase the Americans out.

Speaker 3 But you know,

Speaker 3 Sean, you don't chase Marines out of anything.

Speaker 3 It just don't happen that way.

Speaker 3 Even the Ibajima and Okinawa and

Speaker 3 all those places that we fought in.

Speaker 3 And we always had Corman with us. There's some wonderful stories we had with the Corman.

Speaker 3 Lost, I got a SEAL core man, Doc Burwell. He's still alive.

Speaker 3 He was a coreman. Good man, tough guy.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he used to hold a deep-sea diving record. If you ever heard of Doc Burwell, but he served with us well.

Speaker 3 Good man, tough guy.

Speaker 3 I don't want to get you out of your sequence there, but

Speaker 3 we were talking about

Speaker 3 Fulak.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're talking about Fulak.

Speaker 3 Yeah, Fulak.

Speaker 3 That was my last mission.

Speaker 3 And we got into.

Speaker 3 We were supposed to destroy

Speaker 3 the base camp. The NVA has set up a base camp on the reverse side of the mountain.

Speaker 3 So I had to get in there

Speaker 3 to see how I can blow the hell out of that base camp. I run in some of the guards along the way and kill them.

Speaker 3 Finally saw,

Speaker 3 got to the top.

Speaker 2 How did you kill him?

Speaker 2 Was it quiet? Were you in a firefight?

Speaker 3 It was a firefight.

Speaker 2 It was a firefight.

Speaker 3 All firefights.

Speaker 3 You know, trying to

Speaker 3 get in there.

Speaker 3 We didn't go in by helicopter. We walked in, fought our way in, because I had to see what's on the other side of that mountain.
And I did blow it.

Speaker 3 I called in the Phantoms, and they came in and blew the hell out of it. And they came out wiggling their wings.
They'd come in again, just blew the hell out of it, dropping all kinds of ammunition.

Speaker 3 And then the helicopters helped us out, attack helicopters.

Speaker 3 We accomplished the mission. That base didn't operate anymore.
Team broadminded,

Speaker 3 you know, but we had to find our way there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Fulak,

Speaker 3 no, that wasn't Fulak.

Speaker 3 That was another mission. But Fulak, we all got wounded.

Speaker 3 We actually walked in. We couldn't get the flight in because, like I said,

Speaker 3 they had booby traps and all that. So we actually walked in and we linked up with a group that lived in with them

Speaker 3 and I you know a group of Marines that lived with them no kidding and we stayed with them for the evening

Speaker 3 then we left that night

Speaker 3 And we walked in enemy territory

Speaker 3 with deadly.

Speaker 3 You know, we went around

Speaker 3 rice paddies

Speaker 3 and we went through, got to a graveyard.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 a lot of firing was going on. Everybody was shooting with the, you can see the traces,

Speaker 3 traces going. So I didn't want to walk into that.
So I put my guys

Speaker 3 in a graveyard, had the cement

Speaker 3 things there, so we stayed there

Speaker 3 and watched the battle.

Speaker 3 So, no, we're not going to walk into that.

Speaker 3 So, we spent the night there, a good bit of the night.

Speaker 3 And then,

Speaker 3 when I thought I could get in to where I needed to go, I took off about maybe four to born.

Speaker 3 Team brought my

Speaker 3 and our dog, we took off.

Speaker 3 And looking back on it,

Speaker 3 we linked up with

Speaker 3 some of the Marines that was already out there.

Speaker 3 Linked up with them.

Speaker 3 And they'd had a hard time.

Speaker 3 And they were going to have a hard time.

Speaker 3 I think it was 1-3 or something like that, but they had a hard time. And we'd just come in there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 we started to, you know, we got into firefights. I think we had seven damn firefights

Speaker 3 in those four days. Jeez.

Speaker 3 Bloody.

Speaker 3 We run out of ammunition the second day.

Speaker 3 And the chopper came in and brought some ammunition and grenades to us.

Speaker 3 The last day, I think I threw 19 grenades.

Speaker 3 They hit us hard. We hit them hard.

Speaker 3 My dog killed some.

Speaker 3 I know how many I killed. You don't can't count it up, but they used to want to know how many

Speaker 3 WIAs that you kill.

Speaker 3 And nobody thought about that.

Speaker 3 You know, you're on full automatic. You got your M60, you've got your M79, everything you've got, you're putting it out there.

Speaker 3 Because if they, if you didn't, you could get overrun.

Speaker 3 But there was no chance they would overrun us. We were all wounded.

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 we had killed most of them.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 now it's decision time.

Speaker 3 What do I do now?

Speaker 3 I thought, well,

Speaker 3 we knew that the choppers or the phantoms that blew up on the other side, they're taking care of that other side. So I don't know that I really want to do that.

Speaker 3 Because they might reinforcements from somewhere. This is their damn country.

Speaker 3 And they weren't very loyal.

Speaker 3 Well, we're loyal. We'll fight with the Army.
We'll fight with the Navy.

Speaker 3 But we're not going to fight with the Vietnamese because we don't trust them, number one. Never did.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 the explosions was going off,

Speaker 3 and I started firing

Speaker 3 and kept firing.

Speaker 3 I kept throwing hand grenades

Speaker 3 and sometimes they would hit a tree or something like that and bounce back on the ground.

Speaker 3 And you'd have to make sure that if that thing went off, you were covered.

Speaker 3 So

Speaker 3 we finally had to make a decision to get out of there.

Speaker 3 And both my legs were broken. I was bleeding all over the place.

Speaker 3 We weren't going to quit. We weren't going to give up.
We weren't going to be captured. So we finally got down to the helicopter and landed.
There were two of them. One was circulating around, and

Speaker 3 the other one

Speaker 3 landed.

Speaker 3 And I think you know that story,

Speaker 3 but I'll tell it for your audience.

Speaker 3 The helicopter landed

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 I brought all my men in

Speaker 3 and I was being helped by one of the troops. My dog's body, we brought the dog's body in,

Speaker 3 King.

Speaker 3 And then

Speaker 3 I had a problem getting everybody on that 34, H-34, the small helicopter. Got all the bodies on, King's body on.
But it was...

Speaker 3 I had nine men and a dog. And the chopper,

Speaker 3 it was too light of a chopper to get me on board so

Speaker 3 I told the crew chief

Speaker 3 get my men out of here

Speaker 3 I'll make it find a way

Speaker 3 he said no come on board he grabbed me there was noises going on

Speaker 3 he grabbed me by my harness pulled me on the helicopter and the helicopter went up by 10 feet and crashed. Bam, I fell off

Speaker 3 bleeding all over the place. But I could stand.

Speaker 3 I had broken leg, notwithstanding.

Speaker 3 But this is battle. Your personal injuries don't count.

Speaker 3 He grabbed me again,

Speaker 3 pulled me on board.

Speaker 3 Now I don't know.

Speaker 3 My comment had given me morphine.

Speaker 3 So I don't know if he went up another time or if we just went out of there, but he did take off,

Speaker 3 turned around,

Speaker 3 and it kept going.

Speaker 3 And one of the co-pilot was shot.

Speaker 3 And the pilot

Speaker 3 started going home.

Speaker 3 Then it started to rain,

Speaker 3 lightning,

Speaker 3 and the chapo was wobbling a little bit.

Speaker 3 But we were talking about God

Speaker 3 up in Khe San.

Speaker 3 I was on my knees one night

Speaker 3 after a young

Speaker 3 child

Speaker 3 was injured in one of them firefights at San.

Speaker 3 So I picked the child up and run toward the aid station.

Speaker 3 Time I got there, the child had died in my arms, and I laid the child down when her arms were holding on to my arms. I couldn't hardly lay her down, but I got up, laid her down, and she was dead.

Speaker 3 I went back

Speaker 3 to where I needed to be, and I saw I saw my callan.

Speaker 3 I said, Doc, come here.

Speaker 3 He said, Yes, sir.

Speaker 3 I said,

Speaker 3 I'm gonna need you now.

Speaker 3 They'll be, I figured they'd be coming back in. We had this barbed wire, this department caissons, barbed wire.

Speaker 3 And we had it

Speaker 3 because they would come in at night,

Speaker 3 they'd throw grenades,

Speaker 3 through that barbed wire.

Speaker 3 And so I told the corporan,

Speaker 3 you stay with me.

Speaker 3 And the corpsman said, yes, sir. And he came around and

Speaker 3 stood by my right.

Speaker 3 I was standing.

Speaker 3 And he said, Lieutenant,

Speaker 3 I'm a little tired, you know.

Speaker 3 He said,

Speaker 3 can I sit for a minute?

Speaker 3 I said, yeah, Doc, we got a few minutes. And then we heard those bugles.

Speaker 3 America and you die and all this other foolishness.

Speaker 3 Doc sat down.

Speaker 3 I said, Doc,

Speaker 3 they're coming now.

Speaker 3 Doc fell over dead.

Speaker 3 Dying on his post.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 3 That's what I said, damn.

Speaker 3 He He didn't tell me he was wounded in a hole in his chest. I didn't see it, should have.

Speaker 3 But, said Doc, I called him over.

Speaker 3 I didn't know he'd been wounded, but it's my fault. And over the years, I grieved about that.

Speaker 3 Still grieve about it. The boy sat down there and

Speaker 3 said, I'm just a little tired, sir.

Speaker 3 I'll be okay.

Speaker 3 Damn it. I'll be be okay.

Speaker 3 Brave.

Speaker 3 Where do you get such men from?

Speaker 3 Where do we get them from?

Speaker 3 A young sailor.

Speaker 3 I never knew his name. At least I don't remember his name.

Speaker 3 Sat down,

Speaker 3 and when I said it's time to fight,

Speaker 3 he was gone. He would have fought.
He had fought.

Speaker 3 I always thought about Doc,

Speaker 3 what he might have been,

Speaker 3 what he might become.

Speaker 3 He might have cured cancer.

Speaker 3 He might have done something for all of us.

Speaker 3 But then for me, the demons come home.

Speaker 3 Now you've got to deal with Jim Capers, the warrior.

Speaker 3 I looked up in the sky that night

Speaker 3 and I prayed to God.

Speaker 3 I said, God,

Speaker 3 I need help tonight.

Speaker 3 I need help.

Speaker 3 The little girl I tried to save was gone. The warrior Corman was gone.
And I was on my knees. I'm looking up in the sky.
I said, God, I need you. Please help me.

Speaker 3 I'm praying.

Speaker 3 God didn't say it's going to be okay, son.

Speaker 3 But when I needed it,

Speaker 3 God saved my life at another part, which I'll tell you later on,

Speaker 3 which

Speaker 3 confirms my belief in God. I wouldn't be here today if God hadn't answered my prayer.
He didn't answer it when I was on my knees praying,

Speaker 3 but God answers prayers when he needs to answer them.

Speaker 3 He'll talk to you then. He doesn't do things when you want them done.
He does things when he wants them done.

Speaker 3 I've been through the God thing.

Speaker 3 Trust me, I know what God is.

Speaker 3 And I'll see him again. I'll see my wife and my son.
I believe that.

Speaker 3 I'll see him again.

Speaker 3 May not be a day tomorrow.

Speaker 3 You may jump up and pull a hand grenade.

Speaker 2 I'm all out of hand grenades.

Speaker 3 It wouldn't go off.

Speaker 3 Go off.

Speaker 3 God's got me.

Speaker 3 Kept me alive all this

Speaker 3 time.

Speaker 3 This summer I'll be 88 years old.

Speaker 2 Well, where did God show up?

Speaker 3 Was it in Fulak?

Speaker 2 Where did God show up?

Speaker 3 God showed up in

Speaker 3 Fulak.

Speaker 3 He always showed up when he went to show up.

Speaker 3 Maybe not for me, but other men that would have died and

Speaker 3 artillery came in

Speaker 3 that I didn't know was coming.

Speaker 3 But God showed up when I was coming out of Fulak.

Speaker 3 When the chopper was flying us back to Ahmed,

Speaker 3 it was raining, it was a rough night. We'd been out there

Speaker 3 and it started to go down.

Speaker 3 I was sitting in the doorway and my wounded guys were holding on to me. And the guys in the background were lying down.

Speaker 3 They were crying and you know, moaning, because they would have been wounded pretty seriously. You know, Nick lost a leg and

Speaker 3 the whole bit.

Speaker 3 And I'm standing in the

Speaker 3 chopper, was flying in

Speaker 3 and it started going down.

Speaker 3 I don't know if it'd been out of fuel, it was going down, it was kind of a nasty night. It was that night.
And all of a sudden,

Speaker 3 the hand of God reached out and snapped it.

Speaker 3 caught that helicopter

Speaker 3 and kept it flying.

Speaker 3 I'm told I had no fuel or not enough fuel. But when I asked God,

Speaker 3 God said, now I'll show you that I am God.

Speaker 3 I'll give you my hand. And he kept the helicopter flying.
Everybody on that helicopter lived.

Speaker 3 Those are stories that are real. Because all the men on board saw the same thing.
We were going down.

Speaker 3 High in the hell, there's a helicopter going down. All of a sudden, God grabbed it and kept it flying.

Speaker 3 Then when they took it to the maintenance folks, they said they had no gas.

Speaker 3 They said it shouldn't have been, shouldn't have flown. And I'm told they took it to some place.
It never flown again.

Speaker 3 God can do amazing things.

Speaker 3 That particular night.

Speaker 3 When we were crashing, and all those lives would have been lost,

Speaker 3 and I would not have been a 77 year old man about to turn 88, 78,

Speaker 2 88. 87.

Speaker 3 I'm 87 now. I'll turn 88 this year.

Speaker 3 What a blessing.

Speaker 3 What a blessing.

Speaker 3 I know about God.

Speaker 3 I also prayed when my son was dying in a hospital.

Speaker 3 I was standing by his side

Speaker 3 and he closed his eyes.

Speaker 3 I couldn't save him. I prayed to God.
I wanted a miracle.

Speaker 3 He died in my arms.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 here's what

Speaker 3 I had to finally see:

Speaker 3 that my son is not blind.

Speaker 3 God has him now.

Speaker 3 He's in the bosom of God.

Speaker 3 My wife does not have cancer now.

Speaker 3 God has healed both of them.

Speaker 3 They're happy. They're sitting at the right hand of God and they're waiting on me.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I don't know if God will

Speaker 3 allow a guy like me who hadn't been a nice guy, but I want to believe that

Speaker 3 he'll... forgive me.

Speaker 2 Well, I think he must feel pretty fondly of you if you save that helicopter.

Speaker 3 He didn't just save the helicopter. He saved all of us.
There were human beings on the helicopter. I don't know that had prayed like I prayed, but when I was in Quezon, I asked God to, you know,

Speaker 3 show me a miracle, hit me with a bolt of lightning. But he didn't.
But when that chopper was going down, like I said, God reached hand out with his mighty hand and kept it flying.

Speaker 3 In spite of of the rain and light and everything else was going on,

Speaker 3 I knew it was going down because I saw the blood all over the place. It was full of blood.
Was everybody been wounded?

Speaker 2 I mean, it doesn't sound like the helicopter should have even been able to take off because the first time it couldn't.

Speaker 3 You're right.

Speaker 3 They took it out of service and they said it shouldn't have been flown that night.

Speaker 3 I don't know.

Speaker 3 But I can only say that God

Speaker 3 saved us when we needed needed to be saved. I've had other cases when I prayed,

Speaker 3 prayed for my son. It didn't work, but then God has him now.

Speaker 3 And my wife died of cancer after 50 years of marriage.

Speaker 3 I'll see her again.

Speaker 2 Do you think about dying?

Speaker 3 Do I think about dying?

Speaker 3 No, not really.

Speaker 3 Because I got friends like you to keep me going.

Speaker 3 No, I'm all right. I have

Speaker 3 serious PTSD, so they tell me. And

Speaker 3 I have nightmares.

Speaker 3 The battlefields come back to me. I live alone

Speaker 3 in my home.

Speaker 3 But I have friends that come to see me.

Speaker 3 The government provides a nurse to see me, and old friends come over and

Speaker 3 help me,

Speaker 3 because I can't get around very well anymore. I don't drive, and

Speaker 3 no.

Speaker 3 I've had problems,

Speaker 3 obviously, sleeping to demons comes home. And I don't know if you know what PTSD is, but I'm not a doctor.
But I know that I've had trouble with it.

Speaker 3 And it takes a lot of people to give me a hand these days.

Speaker 3 I still got a piece of wire in this leg and metal in my lower legs and in my thighs.

Speaker 3 I had a heart attack.

Speaker 3 I've had surgery, and you know, the doctor's doing what they can to keep an older guy alive.

Speaker 3 They give me purple hearts, and

Speaker 3 now I understand they're trying to give me the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 3 Won't bring my men back.

Speaker 2 You get a silver star for Bulak.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Sounds like it's

Speaker 2 a good possibility it's going to get upgraded to a Medal of Honor.

Speaker 3 What'd you say?

Speaker 2 It sounds like there's a good possibility that's going to get upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 3 Well, that's what they're telling me. You know,

Speaker 3 there's a

Speaker 3 list of 47 senators and congressmen who sent the letter to the president president and asking him to give me the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 3 Now he's a busy man, President, so I don't know whether he'll get around to that or even if he wants to get around to it.

Speaker 3 I got nominated in

Speaker 3 67 when my general come to see me and

Speaker 3 after Fulak

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 kissed me on the head, forehead.

Speaker 3 And there were folks who, I was full of morphine, I don't really know what happened there, but what folks told me was that he had planned to give me the Medal of Honor or recommended me, Congress gives that or the President gives that.

Speaker 3 He got killed in a helicopter crash. So I

Speaker 3 left and went home and

Speaker 3 did the family thing and

Speaker 3 didn't think about it much.

Speaker 3 until a young general named General James Williams, used to be one of my platoon sergeants, platoon commanders, rather.

Speaker 3 He was now a two-star general.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 he'd heard all these stories from at my reunions, talked to the guys that said, well,

Speaker 3 Major Capers did this. Major Capers did that.

Speaker 3 It wasn't sympathy, but they were there.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Williams, as he came through,

Speaker 3 a young man,

Speaker 3 he decided to call me back to duty. And that's what he did.

Speaker 3 And he recommended me.

Speaker 2 How many of those men that were on that helicopter with you are still alive today?

Speaker 3 One man that I know of, his name was Henry Stanton.

Speaker 3 Huge young man, black kid.

Speaker 3 He was my M79 man.

Speaker 3 He run out of ammunition.

Speaker 3 The explosion hit me and hit him, and I would lean up back against

Speaker 3 a tree or something.

Speaker 3 And I reached around.

Speaker 3 I was holding Stanton, and I reached around to take the dog tags off of

Speaker 3 another Marine that I was holding.

Speaker 3 Well, Stanton I was holding, yeah. I was holding Stanton.
I reached around to take his dog tags off.

Speaker 3 And he looked up to me and he said, Lieutenant,

Speaker 3 I don't think we're going to make it this time. You know, he'd been hitting, lost a kidney, and he's blood all over the place.
He's bleeding out of his mouth,

Speaker 3 some out of his nose.

Speaker 3 Said, you know, we're going to make it. You hold on, son.
You hold on.

Speaker 3 One of the bravest things I ever heard.

Speaker 3 He said, Hand me a rifle.

Speaker 3 I I can still fight.

Speaker 3 After all this explosion and whatever, I said, just hand me a rifle, sir.

Speaker 3 I can still fight. That's a man.
That's a patriot. That's a Marine.
I can still fight.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I'm going to get you out of here, son.

Speaker 3 And everything just, you know, went to hell, but he lives. He's still alive.

Speaker 2 Do you keep in touch with him?

Speaker 2 Do you keep in touch with him?

Speaker 3 I called him and told him that it looked like they want to give me the Medal of Honor.

Speaker 3 He said, oh, hell, sir, they should have done that 50 years ago.

Speaker 3 I said, I understand, but this is what they're telling me now.

Speaker 3 And I got sent a letter that had all the,

Speaker 3 if you saw that or not,

Speaker 3 the signatures, all the sentences of congressmen.

Speaker 3 I didn't know most of those guys.

Speaker 3 But Bull and the team,

Speaker 3 they've been pulling the strings. General Williams and all of the ones.

Speaker 3 I'm proud. I never thought about the marijuana.
I thought about my troops. When they gave me a silver star, I figured, oh, gee, that's

Speaker 3 somebody's pulling strings. I never thought I did anything.
I did my job.

Speaker 3 Like I did when that shock was going to eat the hell out of one of my team members. That's what you do.
Sure, you've done it or you're trained to do it.

Speaker 3 Jaroski is still alive, but he wasn't on the Fulak mission. He had a hernia and I sent him back to the aid station.
He pissed about, he wanted to go. I put Nick in Ski's place.
Nick lost a leg.

Speaker 3 Nick was a big man,

Speaker 3 19-inch arms, 50-inch chest.

Speaker 3 He carried that M60 like nothing.

Speaker 3 But he got hit. I heard him screaming.

Speaker 3 Part of my language, you MFs,

Speaker 3 I'm gonna, you know, he was just firing with his M60, which is a large

Speaker 3 weapon.

Speaker 3 But he got hit and he kept fighting.

Speaker 3 Stamp kept fighting. They all kept fighting.
There was no quitting team broadminded.

Speaker 3 Just my dog.

Speaker 3 Miller is gone now. Crapo is gone now.
You know, Sergeant Yerman is gone now.

Speaker 3 And a few years ago, they put me in a hospital.

Speaker 3 Didn't look good for me.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 God knows.

Speaker 3 I don't worry about it.

Speaker 2 You know, after

Speaker 2 Vietnam,

Speaker 3 you

Speaker 2 were involved with the CIA in the Cold War.

Speaker 3 Well, there was nothing to that.

Speaker 2 No?

Speaker 3 No, not really.

Speaker 3 What were you doing? They tried to get me on full-time. I had done this stuff in Vietnam.
I did the CIA thing there in Vietnam. And I'd help them

Speaker 3 when I was

Speaker 3 This is not Vietnam, but when I was Seal Force Recon, some of the guys that were about to deploy, I'd bring them down to Camp Lejeune so they could go through the Jump Masters course or Rappelling or whatever it was.

Speaker 3 I'd do that for them.

Speaker 3 Then,

Speaker 3 of course, in Vietnam, I did that thing. And

Speaker 3 in Europe,

Speaker 3 but they're a good group. They were a lot of young guys.
I did the did the FBI stuff.

Speaker 3 The FBI gave me two Thompson salt machine guns when I retired.

Speaker 3 No, no.

Speaker 3 You know, I got a young man now.

Speaker 3 He retired, two-star in the CIA.

Speaker 3 I trained a lot of those guys.

Speaker 3 But as far as operating, my operating operations were not very good.

Speaker 3 And that's not what I'm just supposed to say. There's a lot of stuff that I was involved in.
Yeah.

Speaker 3 and you sure she probably have done the same things.

Speaker 3 Not me

Speaker 3 because of what I look like, number one,

Speaker 3 and the way they're set up to operate.

Speaker 3 Now the FBI, I

Speaker 3 you know, tried to help out there.

Speaker 3 I put them through a jump program and jump master program and martial arts.

Speaker 3 I used to run the martial arts program for a long time.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 for different folks that wanna

Speaker 3 kill people.

Speaker 2 What did it feel like

Speaker 2 when you got inducted into the

Speaker 2 U.S. Special Operations Hall of Honor?

Speaker 3 I didn't know about it.

Speaker 2 You didn't know about it?

Speaker 3 No, I

Speaker 3 had lost my wife, my son. I was living in California,

Speaker 3 and the general called me, look at his name now,

Speaker 3 and told me they were coming up with a program

Speaker 3 and they were looking for

Speaker 3 names to submit. And he said, everybody kind of feel like maybe you

Speaker 3 would be the first one.

Speaker 3 And I said, well, I don't know much about it, but they flew me

Speaker 3 from California, where I was living, to, I think I was in, flew me to

Speaker 3 Tampa, might have been Tampa, I don't know. They flew me to Tampa.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 Admiral Olson

Speaker 3 was a SEAL one time.

Speaker 3 and he's still a SEAL.

Speaker 3 Like he's still a Marine.

Speaker 3 He's a nice guy.

Speaker 3 He picked me to give me the first one.

Speaker 3 I didn't get the medal at first. They had to make this.

Speaker 3 Then they sent it to me in the mail.

Speaker 3 Then the Marines, this is the Vietnam medal right here.

Speaker 3 And this is the commando medal, the Raider Medal.

Speaker 3 So this is stuff all presented to me. And

Speaker 3 sometimes I forget to wear it. I don't wear it all the time, but I thought I'd wear it for your show.

Speaker 2 Thank you.

Speaker 3 I wish my wife was here to see this, to see me sitting there with a famous guy like you.

Speaker 2 I'm sure she's watching.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Yeah, she probably is.

Speaker 2 And your son, too.

Speaker 3 Yeah.

Speaker 3 He was a musician, you know. He played the piano, the flute, the melodica, the organ.

Speaker 2 Did he really?

Speaker 3 Oh, yeah, he played.

Speaker 3 Yeah, he played in church.

Speaker 3 But he had other disabilities.

Speaker 3 He couldn't do what I'm doing now as far as hold a conversation. Wonderful child.

Speaker 3 Wonderful child. We used to sit and hug each other before he went to bed.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 a lovable child.

Speaker 3 And one night he knocked on my door owl door

Speaker 3 he said dad I got a headache

Speaker 3 no he said I had a stomachache

Speaker 3 I said okay son

Speaker 3 so

Speaker 3 went to the hospital doctor says well

Speaker 3 you know there's not a whole lot we can do so I brought him back

Speaker 3 the first night

Speaker 3 And then the second night, it got worse, so I took him back to the hospital.

Speaker 3 And they said, well,

Speaker 3 you know, we don't see much we can do with a stomachache.

Speaker 3 Damn.

Speaker 3 So I took him back home.

Speaker 3 Then I took him back the third night.

Speaker 3 Then for me, now I'm having a problem.

Speaker 3 And they had him laid down on the table and he died right there.

Speaker 3 They let my son die.

Speaker 3 You see,

Speaker 3 I'm not a bad guy.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I was angry. My son is gone now.

Speaker 3 There had been a little chapel there.

Speaker 3 The pastor came in.

Speaker 3 My wife was

Speaker 3 and she wasn't there.

Speaker 3 So I'm standing there and I don't know what to do. On one way, I'm

Speaker 3 feeling one way. I'm angry.
My child is lying there dead.

Speaker 3 And they're telling me they're sorry.

Speaker 3 The demons did come home that night.

Speaker 3 I told them, oh, you need to leave me alone now.

Speaker 3 My wife is coming.

Speaker 3 I'll be all right. Just leave me alone now.
And then everybody tried to tell me this, that.

Speaker 3 And it got to the point where I,

Speaker 3 you know, didn't lose control, but

Speaker 3 they didn't know who they were dealing with. I got to kill them all.

Speaker 3 I thought about that, but God stepped in, says, no, you don't. No, you don't.
And my wife finally showed up

Speaker 3 and met her at the car.

Speaker 3 And she came to see our child.

Speaker 3 Then we walked down this

Speaker 3 hall together.

Speaker 3 And we've been walking down that hall together for a long time. The reason I never remarried.

Speaker 3 I can appreciate a pretty girl,

Speaker 3 but Daddy was was special.

Speaker 3 A military wife.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 we got through that.

Speaker 3 Seemed like the next day, Dottie dies of cancer.

Speaker 3 Now I'm thinking, how do I pull this off now?

Speaker 3 The human being,

Speaker 3 I'm sure you had stress.

Speaker 3 But now

Speaker 3 I'm in a place where I don't need to be. I made a plan to kill the doctor.

Speaker 3 I called one of my friends in Arizona,

Speaker 3 and he was going to help me blow up the gas station as a decoy.

Speaker 3 Policeman and farmer would be there.

Speaker 3 And when a doctor came out of the hospital, it was going to kill him

Speaker 3 with my knife.

Speaker 3 I was going to kill him with my knife.

Speaker 2 What stopped you?

Speaker 3 God stopped me.

Speaker 3 How? I'm not good enough to tell you how God works.

Speaker 3 I'm not that good.

Speaker 3 But I know that

Speaker 3 I pulled off the operation. My men was ready to go.
They were volunteers.

Speaker 3 Team from Arizona were here

Speaker 3 in Jacksonville.

Speaker 3 We were going to blow a couple of gas stations

Speaker 3 and you know, that's the easiest stuff to show you and I do that stuff. I can

Speaker 3 you know divert the police force,

Speaker 3 you know, the fire department.

Speaker 3 Then, when the when the doctor

Speaker 3 come out of his office, I was going to be parked.

Speaker 3 I was going to grab him, I was going to cut his throat.

Speaker 3 That's what I do.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 I probably mentioned that kind of stuff too much in your interview, but God stepped

Speaker 3 and I came home.

Speaker 3 Well, I was home and I had,

Speaker 3 my pastor came over to the house. It was about 3 o'clock in the morning now.

Speaker 3 Dottie wasn't crying.

Speaker 3 I didn't know why, but Dottie wasn't crying. I was crying.

Speaker 3 But I think Dottie had to be tough for me.

Speaker 3 She believed in God too. We always went to church.
You know,

Speaker 3 we built the church one time. My troops and I built the church

Speaker 3 from the ground up.

Speaker 3 Stole the wood. I hate to say it that way, but we got to some place.
We stole some old wood. Got it built.

Speaker 3 Dottie was the first lady.

Speaker 3 And I... I had a chaplain that wasn't too far.
He was helping me with it.

Speaker 3 And my son played the piano in church.

Speaker 3 Dottie was the first lady

Speaker 3 and we sang every Sunday and my chaplain prayed

Speaker 3 and it wasn't a big church but we enjoyed that so much. And some of the guys who had been in trouble and that were back in those days we had some serious issues.

Speaker 3 And they'd come every Sunday

Speaker 3 and they enjoyed it so much.

Speaker 3 Some sort of a relief, I guess, by the commanding officer sitting with him in church, and his wife is singing, and his son is playing the piano, and my buddy, the chaplain,

Speaker 3 it was such a wonderful thing to see. Nothing to do with

Speaker 3 anything else but the human spirit. We want to honor God.
and we want to build a place.

Speaker 3 And I'm sure you can relate that in the Bible terms. But

Speaker 3 years later, I went back to that area.

Speaker 3 I went to see if that church was still, it was a little,

Speaker 3 probably about this size, I guess it is.

Speaker 3 I went back there and I parked my car and I looked around. I said, well, I think it was over here.

Speaker 3 I started walking over there and a young Marine came out and just came over and says, hey, sir, are you all right?

Speaker 3 I said, yes, son, there used to be a church about this area over here. He said, no, sir, not that I know of, but I'll help you look.

Speaker 3 So he's walking along with me.

Speaker 3 He said, where do you come from, sir? I said, well, I live in the area, but I used to be stationed here.

Speaker 3 And there was a church over here that we built. And I just thought I would visit it.
He said, no, sir, there's no church here. And I've been here for a while and I've never seen or heard of a church.

Speaker 3 You You wouldn't be lying to me, would you, son?

Speaker 3 He said, no, sir, I never, Marines never lie. Yeah, okay.

Speaker 3 I got in my car and I drove home.

Speaker 3 Daddy and Gary were still alive

Speaker 3 at the time.

Speaker 3 Sometimes it's hard for me to differentiate the timing because we were blessed with good years

Speaker 3 and I've been blessed with good years,

Speaker 3 but my memory is not all that good, which you'll probably see with this interview.

Speaker 3 I don't remember everything like I should, but then again, I offer you the excuse of being 87 years old now.

Speaker 2 You're doing just fine.

Speaker 3 Thank you, sir.

Speaker 3 Appreciate that.

Speaker 3 Appreciate that.

Speaker 3 Well,

Speaker 3 I live by myself,

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 I don't talk to a lot of people.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 I have guys come to see me. As a matter of fact, on the way up here,

Speaker 3 a friend of mine, a three-star general,

Speaker 3 he come to the house to see me.

Speaker 3 And he's probably going to be the Commandant of Marincor one day. Nice young man.

Speaker 3 I was his guest speaker at a Marincor Ball one time.

Speaker 3 So they called me out when they'd need me. I put my tuxedo on and try to hold my stomach in.

Speaker 3 I saw him the other day.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 now we're passing the torch.

Speaker 3 You know,

Speaker 3 young people like yourself and

Speaker 3 the others, they give me a chance to say some things.

Speaker 3 And I appreciate that. I don't know if I can tell you in sequence

Speaker 3 because you never ask an 87-year-old man to say something in sequence because I'm going to be all over the place.

Speaker 2 You established the

Speaker 2 Gary and Dottie Capers Foundation.

Speaker 3 Yeah, I did.

Speaker 3 To help kids.

Speaker 3 Someone's gone now. And I thought I'd honor them.

Speaker 3 By establishing a non-profit organization.

Speaker 3 And I had some volunteers. nobody's paid

Speaker 3 to do certain things to raise money

Speaker 3 well

Speaker 3 Dotty was there

Speaker 3 we started for Gary but Dotty was still alive

Speaker 3 and we started this thing

Speaker 3 and we'd bring

Speaker 3 People in, friends in, raise money for a non-profit. You know, there were a lot of homeless people in our town,

Speaker 3 too many homeless people.

Speaker 3 So now we got to feed them. And we did that.
We moved some to my home. We brought the homeless in, and Dottie cooked for them, washed their clothes, trying to help, just like I'd been helped.

Speaker 3 We don't forget those things.

Speaker 3 When that white family took me in

Speaker 3 and washed my clothes and gave me clothes and fed me, put me down at night so I could sleep and stood watch over me as a black man. You don't forget those things.

Speaker 3 It's a noble example of what America is, what it should be, and what it is, not the way it always is.

Speaker 2 Where do people donate to that foundation?

Speaker 3 Their time.

Speaker 3 Sometimes they donated money.

Speaker 2 If somebody wanted to donate money,

Speaker 3 where would they donate it? We have a website

Speaker 3 and

Speaker 3 Kenyatta happens to be the president of it. He's the young man that came with me.
He happens to be the president of the organization.

Speaker 2 Well, I'll tell you what, we'll put the

Speaker 2 link to the website in the description of this interview. So if anybody wants to donate,

Speaker 3 they could do it. I knew you had a good heart.
I knew you just weren't a mean guy. I knew that.

Speaker 3 It would help us because

Speaker 3 when the virus hit us,

Speaker 3 you know,

Speaker 3 folks lost jobs and

Speaker 3 McDonald's closed.

Speaker 3 And

Speaker 3 I remember when a couple of my guys came to my house and said, Major,

Speaker 3 we lost a McDonald's here.

Speaker 3 I said, well, yeah, that's okay, but I don't eat at McDonald's anyway. But

Speaker 3 they told me that one of the ladies there,

Speaker 3 who had

Speaker 3 a couple of children,

Speaker 3 didn't have a job, and her rent was due. She was going to get evicted.

Speaker 3 The old man, they brought it to the house, nice young lady. I says, how much do you need?

Speaker 3 She said, well, I need about $2,000.

Speaker 3 I didn't discuss it.

Speaker 3 Gave her $2,000 on the spot.

Speaker 3 I have been homeless.

Speaker 3 Not intentionally.

Speaker 3 My folks didn't want to give me away, but they thought it would be better with this family, and they took me in.

Speaker 3 But at any rate,

Speaker 3 the foundation has done good.

Speaker 3 We've had

Speaker 3 a young lady named Ashley Casado. She did the documentary for us.
I don't know if you've ever seen that, a documentary.

Speaker 3 And other folks have jumped in to try to help to raise money for the home. It's not for me.
The government gives me a check every month. They pay me a lot of money for the purple hearts.
I have.

Speaker 3 a lot, but

Speaker 3 I have five purple hearts. I can only only get three here.

Speaker 3 I got so many downtimes. When I got to the hospital, they found holes that I hadn't been, they hadn't told me about

Speaker 3 back of my legs.

Speaker 3 And I said, What the hell the hell that happened? But it's so many firefights

Speaker 3 and you're wounded, but you don't go to the hospital. The corpsman patches you up.

Speaker 3 You know, you're not gonna,

Speaker 3 you need to be there with your troops.

Speaker 3 Always with your troops.

Speaker 3 I did that.

Speaker 3 I'm an 87-year-old man now, and I'm telling stories that happened years ago.

Speaker 3 Nobody gives a damn anymore. Only 2% of our country joins the military.

Speaker 2 Oh, I think a lot of people

Speaker 2 are going to give a damn about this one. So.

Speaker 3 You know.

Speaker 3 Been a little tough tough for the old man

Speaker 3 Been a little tough and he told me I was coming on your show

Speaker 3 I Kept calling you Ryan Shaw

Speaker 3 They said no, no, no,

Speaker 3 I remember now, you know, he's important

Speaker 3 So many people listening to him

Speaker 3 Don't screw it up.

Speaker 3 I'm not important.

Speaker 2 I'm just a guy doing what I like to do.

Speaker 3 I'm happy for you.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Happy to be here.

Speaker 2 I'm happy to be here, too. And I'm happy you're here.

Speaker 2 And on that note, Major Capers, I just want to say once again,

Speaker 2 it's an honor to interview you and to get your story out.

Speaker 2 God bless Dottie and Gary.

Speaker 3 God bless you.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 I really hope your silver star gets upgraded to a medal of honor.

Speaker 3 Be nice.

Speaker 3 Are we done? We're done. You told me you'd leave till 6 o'clock.

Speaker 3 Thank you. Thank you.

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