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Ep #5 Coffee Expeditions: John 'Tilt' Stryker Meyer - US Army Special Forces Green Beret and Author
54 Plays5 months ago
Welcome to another exciting episode of Coffee Expeditions, where we dive deep into fascinating conversations with extraordinary individuals from all walks of life. In this episode, we have the honour of hosting John 'Tilt' Stryker Meyer, a legendary figure in the world of special operations and a former Green Beret who served during the Vietnam War.
Join us as we sit down with John 'Tilt' Stryker Meyer, who takes us on a gripping journey through his time with the highly secretive MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group). As a member of this elite unit, John participated in covert operations that pushed the boundaries of military strategy and courage. His stories provide a rare glimpse into the challenges and triumphs faced by those who served in one of the most intense and unconventional warfare environments.
This episode of Coffee Expeditions is a must-listen for anyone interested in military history, leadership, or personal stories of resilience and bravery. John Stryker Meyer’s experiences provide a unique and powerful perspective on the Vietnam War and the enduring legacy of those who served. Whether you're a history enthusiast or simply curious about the human spirit's ability to overcome adversity, John's stories will captivate and inspire you.
Grab your favourite cup of coffee and join us for an unforgettable conversation with John Stryker Meyer on Coffee Expeditions. This episode promises to be both enlightening and engaging, offering listeners a rare opportunity to learn from a true American hero.
For more about John Stryker Meyer check out his books and social media:
Instagram: @jstrykermeyer
Podcast: SOG Cast
Website: SogChronicles.com
Books: Across the Fence, On the Ground, SOG Chronicles
For more from Coffee Expeditions check us out on Spotify, Apple, YouTube and Instagram
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Transcript
Radio Operator Experiences and Team Rebuilding
00:00:01
Speaker
um um
00:00:09
Speaker
Okay, and we're live. We've got episode five of our coffee expeditions podcast. Today I have an amazing guest. um I was thinking to myself, like to say that this is ah you know um humbling and a privilege is a huge understatement. The fact that this guest is coming on for my little podcast here is just really, really a privilege. I want to introduce um his name is John Strykermeyer. He's an author, but he's also a veteran of the Vietnam War. John, if you just can maybe just introduce yourself real quick, that'd be great. Good morning, John Strykermeyer out here in the lovely downtown White Bluff, Tennessee. like Connecting with you electronically, Reed. Yeah. check it in I appreciate it.
00:00:56
Speaker
We made it work. Finally, thank you so much.
Connecting Through Podcasts and Training Challenges
00:00:58
Speaker
ah ah One thing that um you know I met you through, how I was introduced to you was through Jocko's podcasts. um The episode 180, 181, and 182, if people haven't actually listened to those, I'd highly recommend it. I've listened to a lot of podcasts over the last 10, 12 years, and those are probably three of the top ones that I'd ever um Listen to and then of course I've you know read your books across the fence and on the ground and ah We got to kind of know each other a little bit because I reached out to you for a signed copy of your book and your generosity Absolutely blew me away. I was like it's so nice of you You sent a copy to me and we've been able to kind of stay in touch ever since so I when I reached out to you for this podcast, I didn't actually think I'd have a chance to get you on. So the fact that you've actually agreed is just, you know, again, it's really, really a privilege. and i thank you are You know that. Yeah. Yeah. So I was going to like start with that. Like, so where, where did you, where did you grow up and kind of how, what kind of want to talk about what led you to get into the military? And then we'll talk about your role in there and and whatnot. But, uh,
00:02:06
Speaker
ah yeah Well, basically, I grew up in Trenton, New Jersey. ah Dad was a milkman. My mom was a choir director, organist for a church. It's just a ah basically a dull life just growing up in the ghetto. you know right right yeah in interesting We just didn't know. We were like lower middle class or whatever that category. We were happy. Grew up always playing baseball, football, sports, went to high school. Not a good student. Went to
Draft Notice and Enlistment in the Army
00:02:34
Speaker
college. It took me two years to flunk out. at the Trenton State College and never really had thought much about the military. But when I flunked out, my dad goes, the draft board's coming for you. This is 1966. And back then, there was still an active draft. And so I went and I was working Yosemite at the time, Yosemite National Park. And after I got that note from my dad,
00:03:04
Speaker
i um um Read the book, The Green Berets. And you know, we had history classes. We knew about Southeast Asia, about Vietnam, but we didn't have all the ins and outs about all the politics. So um I just ah learned a lot in that book. And oh when we were going down, I talked to a couple of people who'd been drafted and they they got
00:03:36
Speaker
When you get drafted, you had eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced infantry training, a month leave, and then you were shipped to Vietnam assigned to a regular army unit. I'm a city slicker. and My mom wouldn't even let me have a cap pistol in the house until my granddad overruled her. wow yeah yeah We were very concerned. you know So I knew I needed more training. I read that book andy and these people were trained and like to think out of the box, and they were a different kind of soldier, very unique in a unique war. I said, oh, if I can do this, I went down to the um army recruiter, talked to him, told him what I wanted to do, enlisted for airborne on assignment through basic training, advanced infantry. And then during advanced infant infantry training, ah we had the opportunity to apply for special forces. So they ran us through a battery-based psychological test, physical,
00:04:36
Speaker
The run, jump, swim, prove that you can swim. yeah And at the end of it, they brought us all in. And they ah half the guys were dismissed because they didn't make it. And they then they kept another group. They kept bringing it in each one. I'm the last one. When I go in, the sergeant goes, Mario, you're lucky we lowered the standards.
00:05:03
Speaker
So I was in. And, uh, here we are, the rest is history. Man, that
Combat Experiences and Military Skills
00:05:10
Speaker
it's, it's incredible. Um, so you, well, just to backtrack for two seconds, so you played ah quite a bit of sports growing up then did you, or was that nothing a big part of it? Yeah. I, uh, in ninth grade, I was, um, I love baseball and I threw my arm out in ninth grade at junior high school. Myself and Larry Hilton were the competitors for the opening game and our our ninth grade. team had beat the high school JV team, which had 10th and 11th graders. Oh, ah pretty good pictures. This is not great. Anyway, I threw my arm out and then ah played soccer at high school my last year. My dad wouldn't let me play football till my senior year. And I just I loved it. Just loved playing sports, but I wasn't that good. I was a music major, went to college for two years. Like I said, I flunked out. Oh, ah you so you went to you went to college for music, you said? Yeah, started out as a music major.
00:06:01
Speaker
what were you What were you playing? Just all kinds of instruments? or oh It was ah as a music major with voice and piano as a minor. Wow. Interesting. I didn't i did not know that that you that you'd done that. That's interesting. I play a little bit of guitar, but I wouldn't say I'm good at all, but but I try hard. While your guitar gently weaves? yeah Yeah. They wait when I play them and they, um, so you, then you ended up, you flunked out of college and ended up in Yosemite. And what were you, what were you, what was your role there? yeah I know you were only there for a little brief time if, or I should say, I think the link that you and I have. yeah Yeah. My primary job was with a garbage man, but my secondary job was a firefighter.
00:06:48
Speaker
Right. Yeah. Only time in my career, I could truly say I was a firefighter, although I never fought any fires. Yeah. okay were they doing um Because the guys I came out from New Jersey with, they were all the firefighters and I was the garbage man. I picked up their trash. Interesting. I'm up there one day and I go in and and theyre they're getting the truck ready, you know? yeah and And I said, what's going on? I said, oh, we got a fire. I said, really? So you need extra help? I said, nah. He said, come on and have lunch with us. Because it was over 6,000 feet elevation. Oh, so it was way up there. Yeah, so it's high. So it wasn't burning. Like when I think of a fire, you put your ass there and try to put it out. We had lunch. They had a couple extra for beers. They loaded up the fire truck with the refrigerated unit.
00:07:40
Speaker
They went out and fucked the fire. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. yeah it's ah Sometimes it's a little different between wildland firefighting and like sort of urban or like, you know, structural firefighting. But um yeah, that's that's cool. so And then from there you went straight to and enrolled and signed up for the army. Is that correct? or Correct. I came home. I went back to a junior college for a month and I was in a ah in a French class. And I avoided answering any questions because just um I was just ah was just there marking time to see what was going to happen with the draft board and everything else. And at one point, the teacher finally came to me with a yes, no question. She had to answer yes or no. So I'm in a French class and she goes, ask me the question. and I said, see.
00:08:31
Speaker
So I answered it in Spanish. I said, this is an indicator that this is the wrong track. Yeah, this is not right. I'm trying to deal with reality. Um, see when you entered into the army, uh, so I'm a civilian, i've I've never been in the military, but I've you know done a
Top Secret Missions and Emotional Toll
00:08:50
Speaker
lot of reading over the years, or I shouldn't say a lot of fair bit of reading because I've always taken a keen interest in the military. I have a huge respect for it military personnel, you know, Canadian, military American, British military. Um, and I, you know, the only little bit that, um, I can imagine what training would like, would be like is what I've seen in the movies. So things like.
00:09:10
Speaker
you know full metal jacket in the opening scenes when they have the you know the boot camp and the you know the hard drill instructors. Can you describe a little bit what that was like and like how you how you felt because I've talked to some guys and they were like I wasn't a big deal I just kind of followed the rules and open and then I've talked to other friends of mine that are like oh yeah like it was tough it was it was really challenging and I know for myself personally I think One of the things that sounds silly, but I'd have a hard time with a guy yelling in my face and inch away from my, you know, you know, screaming at me for the mistakes of me or whatever. But, but how did you find that? Well, you know, I had the benefit of seeing a lot of World War II movies. And so I saw what they went through and it's a game. It's kind of like, we're here. We're going to act like assholes. Let's see if we can break you and get you kicked out of here.
00:10:01
Speaker
So with that frame that back frameme or framework my mind, I just said, this is a game. I know they're going to play this. So let's go forward. And that's the way I approached it. So whenever they threw us out of bed in the morning, they did all the bullshit. We knew this is basic training. We had seen it before. And ah even a advanced safety training, they they hassle us. but We got to jump school. That was different. There they threw you out of your beds at two o'clock in the morning, oh but it was the same thing. yeah It was just like, and we had guys that would crack. And then you had training, you know, different levels of training. You jumped out of a 32 foot tower with a harness on your back just to practice getting in the door. So you jumped out of the airplane. Well, we had guys who'd be crying for their mother up there.
00:10:52
Speaker
right no Don't throw me out. What are you crazy? you got You got this strap behind your back. You're cool. yeah I loved it. It was fun. Yeah. i that To me, like and not knowing how I would respond, but um so everything obviously that I say is with the utmost humbleness, but it looks awesome. Some of the things that you guys get to do, is just it just sounds like something. I actually parachuted twice when I was younger, once when I was 18 and once when I was 19. forgot to do like a static jump and like solo because I actually wanted to go into military. I wanted to go, well, I dreamed of being in the Air Force since I was a little kid, but I also i wanted to be, you know, maybe a soldier. I actually wanted to be a U.S. Marine. I, you know, i i' had I'd actually phoned the recruiter and asked, hey, is there any way I can come down from Canada and and sign up? But they're like, well, you know, try your army first. And then what had ended up happening was after seeing the recruiter,
00:11:50
Speaker
Uh, they said, go and, uh, you know, get some more courses. Cause I had nothing behind me and this was for the air force. And so that's what led me to firefighting. I ended up, you know, signing up for the volunteer firefighting and then, and then I fell in love with that. And that's the course that I stayed on. But, uh, it sounds like you enjoyed it right away, especially, you know, with some of the cool things like jumping out ah off, off of, uh, off that platform. Oh yeah. And then they had a. part of it was they had like a 250 foot or 200 foot tower where they'd go up and there used to be a game at state fairs where they have a parachute and the tower would lift you up and then there'd be sand and then you'd get dropped. what That was just, that was the coolest thing in the world.
00:12:37
Speaker
And some guys were like, even flipping out with that, I'm going like, I want to do it again. You know, that's awesome. Yeah. That's so cool. Um, and, and then did you do quite a few jumps like, uh, after that, like you get five jumps, five. Yeah. So that's part of the training and, uh, had a couple of, you know, embarrassing ones or wound up running across the guy's parachute to try to get off it. Cause he was taking my wind. Oh. And, uh, so by the time we both got down to the ground, it was a little bit of a harder landing. That should have been right. but so logicly Are those the big ground parachutes that don't really have a huge, they don't have a lot of control. They're all around. Yeah. You pulled the, uh, toggle, sweetie had two on each side and you pulled them down. It was really slow to react. Right. Yeah. It wasn't like you see today's guys with those square parachutes. Yeah. They turn and go backwards, sideways, up, down. Yeah. hard You're going straight down. You turn slowly. and And you kind of hit pretty hard with those. Don't you? Like, isn't it something where you have to kind of tuck your ankles over so you don't like break your ankles or can you, can you actually call it a parachute landing fall? Right. Put your legs together and then you try to go down so that whenever you land your whole body impacts. So if you're, if you're going to the left, you land, roll,
00:14:01
Speaker
and do a complete roll. If you go forward, you land, so your legs are all together. That's the theory behind it. Interesting, right? Yeah, because the ones that I did, sorry. Controlled falling. Yeah. Cause you're coming in pretty hot on those. Um, the, the ones I had were, uh, their rectangle, like you'd said. And the nice thing with that was I had a ah guy talking to me through a speaker. So he was guiding me down and a lot, a lot nicer landing. So from there you went to, did you go, you went to dance infantry or, or, or after that, is that what got you into the green braid training? Yeah. From after jump school.
00:14:41
Speaker
Lily got down on a Friday Buses came of course the buses were late and we drove yeah up to Fort Bragg North Carolina jump schools at Fort Benning in Georgia and then from there we drove up to Bragg got in late at night and You know, we were used to being yelled at so when we went in there we just the suit we got the buses we were waiting for the guys to come out and and harass us and make the usual noises and Well, we were there for like maybe five or 10 minutes before anybody even showed up. And so when they did show up, the guy comes out with flip flops, a t-shirt, and some shorts. Welcome to Special Forces Training Group. um We're all waiting like, aren't you gonna mess with this? Aren't you gonna hassle us somehow, you know? And the guy goes, look, this is Special Forces Training.
Life at FOB 1 and Special Forces Training
00:15:37
Speaker
Um, the mess halls over here, if you want to get a sandwich, we told them you're coming so you can go get something to eat. And then, and this is Friday. So the weekend is yours. Go to headquarters company, sign in, get a bunk. And then, uh, we'll see you on Monday morning. why you not go to You know, again, I'm really surprised. The weekend was there. Just got orientated, orientated, as they said in the army and winter mounts from the different places had breakfast. got caught up on sleep. And then Monday morning, we had a formation and began training right then. Interesting. That was May 1967. And how old were you then, John? I was a grand total of 20. 20, yeah. And and um what was, ah ah to me, that seems so exciting to to enter green braid training was, what were some so sort of big things that you took away from that, or memorable moments from the that part of the training?
00:16:37
Speaker
Well, again, is the very first thing is the men I met, some of the guys who went through training group was we had, at that time, there was I think there were three companies at training group, Special Forces is Training, A company where I was, B company, my buddy Johnny McIntyre, and a couple other guys were, and then C company. And then the guys in A company were like Spider Parks, Tony Harrell, Rick Estes, Rick Howard, guys that, ah we began building literally lifetime friendships. And um we trained together there. um Rick Howard and Rick Estes and I, we all and Tony, we all went through commo training. Because ah with the Special Forces, you had um different MOSs. You have a medic, commo, demo, ah weapons, intel. And then you had the an officer, an executive officer.
00:17:37
Speaker
who so we all built around the concept of a 12 man, 18, where you have a captain and then a lieutenant back then. Now they have a warrant officers. And then you have two men, two for Intel, there'd be a senior and a junior, twomatics two medics, two commo, two demo and two weapons. And that's 18 worked together to train out wherever you sent. So my job was commo, And one of the things to we carried away from it was um our trainer was a guy named Sergeant First Class Paul Villarosa. He had had three tours of duty already. Across his neck, he had a tattoo cut here. Interesting. oh You know, McIntyre and I, we really struggled. But he came in at night and worked with us. And then he worked with us during, on weekends. We finally passed, got up to speed. We had to get Morris Code.
00:18:35
Speaker
at a certain rate of ah word group per minute. Okay, we graduated. We had the, and and the very last phase was an FTX. So this is December. We're training to go to Vietnam. We jump into North Carolina, URE forest, and the second day of the mission on the ground, we had a foot of snow. This is just like, okay, this is classic army training. We'll put you through a snow storm to get you ready for Southeast Asia. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Totally different climates. Absolutely. And then we jumped in a night at 800 feet. So it's it's a very short jump. We had at least one broken back and two or three broken legs. You could hear guys in the trees ah ah howling from pain. Really? And that was the beginning of our FTX. So we're out there trained up. We got done. We graduated. Here's your certificate. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.
00:19:32
Speaker
And then the combo guys, we went down to Georgia for 12 more weeks, had a month leave, then we reported at the end of April, 68. So by that time, TET had been going on, had slowed down a lot, and but there was still some residual actual contact extra contact going on from the TET offensive. So we reported in country, get up to the trang, And that was the base for all special forces in Vietnam.
Arriving in Vietnam and Team Briefing
00:20:03
Speaker
And so we're there the first night, we got mortared and the indigenous barracks next to ours took two incoming. They killed several people. And when they exploded, the debris came over and just hit our roof and stuff. You could hear it hear the guy screaming. So we all ran downstairs, go to the weapons room. It's locked. Oh, geez.
00:20:27
Speaker
So then we'd go out to the, to the front line and it was just the Vietcong messing with us. Just PSYOPS just dropping a couple of mortar rounds in that, you know, there's a war going on. That was your first night that you were there. Yeah. Holy crow. Welcome to Vietnam. Yeah. And then from there we had in country training and you know, Sergeant Villa Rosen, a few other of our trainers at the end of our training cycles, we got to know these guys, you know, particularly Villa Rosa. And so they all said, look, when you go to Vietnam, you guys are green. Learn about the country. Get on an A-team. Just take life easy. And they said, they're going to come out and ask for volunteers. Don't do it. Those guys are all dying. OK, so we go to Vietnam, get their country training. At the end of it, the very last day, here comes a little guy. Hey, we're looking for volunteers.
00:21:25
Speaker
Ryan McIntyre goes, for what? They go, can't say either. You're in, you're not. So we had just seen the movie, the Green Berets with John Wayne. Right. Yeah. Dude. Yeah. we We all signed up for it. And the next thing we know the next day we're up in the name. We got the top secret briefing. So we went into this room with with desk and everything, but all the windows are blacked out and there was a black curtain up front. the sergeant major comes in and we've been students for over a year now so the first thing we're pulling our pads and pens out the sergeant major goes put that shit away this is a top secret briefing in front of you is an NDA a non-disclosure agreement read it sign it if you want to stay if you don't want to stay you can leave now there's no hard feelings well we all signed up welcome to the secret war
00:22:17
Speaker
Yeah. Then he, uh, at the, we signed him, he turned around and pulled that black sheet or white sheet, whatever it was, he pulled it down. And there was a map of Southeast Asia. Here's Vietnam. I core up out of DMZ two core, three core, four core and layouts and Cambodia. There were target boxes. And then he went on to explain what the secret war was. And then here we all got dispatched myself, McIntyre. Rick Howard, Estes, we all went north to F-1B1, Fubai. And even there was like the little culture shock. We come, we go to the Da Nang Air Base and we get into the air base and they go, there's your ride. And we had trained with all the American helicopters, you know, UIs, some of the older ones, some experimental aircraft, the Chinook. And they had, at that point they had had a,
00:23:14
Speaker
the HH-3, which was a bigger Sikorsky helicopter. We trained with all these and in country we trained with them. We trained a little bit with Spooky, the air, the gunships for that provided cover on the teams on the ground. But we had never seen an H-34 Sikorsky, owned by South Vietnamese. We're going WTF.
00:23:39
Speaker
well with that no Nobody ever said anything. It was a culture shock. And so Sikorsky, you had a right door, and you got it as a passenger compartment. From there, you could look up and see the feet of the pilots. So they were higher in front of the aircraft. And when I go on the door gunner, I can see the door gunner talking something, but he's smiling. So we get in. Oh, here's the other thing. They have a runway. So the F4 jets are taken off. We go out there and wait for the jets to leave. Then they go out and turn on the runway, go down the runway, because they had the struts with the wheels. We go down, then we take off, just like the F4s. It was too funny. So we're going down Highway 1, and ah it was just a beautiful ride, you know? And so we're riding, here's Highway 1. We go past the Fubai Airport, all of a sudden,
00:24:38
Speaker
We're literally on our side. They flip it on the side to do a turn. And all of a sudden, you're looking down at the road. Well, I've seen that guy, that door gonna talk and a laugh. I figured they're gonna do something with the new guys, you know? Yeah, yeah. Johnny McIntyre and John Hutches are going like, oh my God, we're gonna fall out. Well, it's a difficult force kept kept us in the helicopter. We're just in shock. I can't imagine the heart attack that that must have given is I would have been just absolutely terrified because one second when You're looking at the view the next thing you're looking down a highway one on our side is they're turning right? Yeah, yeah for sure So so then but get to a more serious side of this discussion at that point We get off the helicopter a recon team gets on a helicopter with spike team, Idaho
Weaponry and Combat Tactics
00:25:31
Speaker
Ben Lane was the team leader to 1-0. Robert Duval-Owen was the assistant team leader and some south feeding me. They get on a helicopter, go into a target, get inserted, and we walk back to the base. That's our first time on the base. I go in base, and within 10 minutes, I run into Spider Parks. and Spyder was my pitcher on our company, a softball team. So I knew Spyder from a company, great Tony. And so it was like, wow, this is wonderful to see a friendly face ah base in the sequel war. And ah so he told us, that he had a team's been inserted there. I used to be on a team, but I've been promoted. And he said, if you're interested, you can run recon with me and my new team. Fine. During the day,
00:26:25
Speaker
there was no more comma from the recon team. That team got wiped out. So this is today, we today, you know, being what, July 23, 2024, um, we still have 50 green berets that are still listed as missing in action from the secret war in Vietnam. There are most of 1,575 Americans that are still listed as MIA, in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War. But that's how serious that was that day. So that's my introduction. So Spider Parks, get because the team was wiped out, but he had been on Idaho, they made him the team leader. Don Wolkum became the assistant. I was the radio operator. And we met the there's some of the survivors, the other Vietnamese on teams. The team would have any words from seven to nine or 10
00:27:24
Speaker
indigenous troops. Well Idaho was South Vietnam, Vietnamese. So we lost three or four Vietnamese that went down with the team. And then Sal, who was the was the ah Vietnamese counterpart, it was his rotation to miss that mission. And Hep was the interpreter. And thank the Lord, Hep was sick and he didn't go. So we had Sal the team leader, Spider who had been on the team, And HEP who was an outstanding interpreter and we rebuilt the team with spider parks. It's really lucky. So we did man do a lot of training. We had a first couple of missions. We inserted the sensors in the asphalt Valley and one up by case on the base that had been in this in the historic siege earlier in 68. And then we had a couple other missions, but they're more like training missions.
00:28:23
Speaker
Interesting question was the night ambushes and stuff outside the base but those not they didn't really count as a mission and So after that spider-pros got promoted to a covey riding and we had facts a Ford air controller and Our code name was Covey And so you have an Air Force pilot it would be an o2 little Cessna little puss pool Cessna Air Force pilot, but we had a Covey rider And that would be one of the experienced green berets who had been on the ground so that when they made radio contact with a team on the ground, they were familiar with the language, the situation, what it was like to be on the ground. And they could, sometimes they could literally calm people down if they were on the radio to help them survive, you know? So Sparta got promoted, Don became the one zero. And then we had our first mission
00:29:23
Speaker
and was Target Echo 4, and that was October 6th, 1968. The day previous, Lynn Black was with ah Spike Team Alabama. Nine-man team went into a Target. ah They ran into the 10,000 NVA that day. Jeez, yeah. And um we we lost three team members that day. The team leader was inexperienced. He walked the team, literally walked into an L-shaped ambush. So he was killed. The point man was killed instantly. And they were in a firefight all day. And years later, Lynn Black talked to the North of the Vietnamese army officer who had ambushed him. Oh, interesting. Oh yeah. And so he said, you know, that was a bad day. We lost three people. And then the commander goes, well, iss it was a bad day for us. You inflict, you and the tack air inflicted 90% casualties on us. Holy crow. And Lynn goes, we saw it was a battalion and we knew, we thought it was 3000 men. He goes, no.
00:30:24
Speaker
It was a division base camp that you came into. Wow. And we had 10,000 men. Holy crow. And they, in between tack air and the recon team, at one point they killed so many, they were stacking up the dead bodies. When they ran out of ammo, they picked up the enemy weapons and used them against the enemy. Man. We're listening to this. Fifth, on first light on October 6th, we're up, get on the helicopter and we inserted into a target echo four. Wow. We were on the ground for a day. Uh, we got overrun by monkeys. Yeah. That's how you read that. Yeah. Oh yeah. So I think this is the chapter you're talking about, right?
00:31:06
Speaker
Yeah. Um, I was just thinking, uh, just if we could just take a good, just a step back, like one of the things that like, I was going to mention that really impressed me with your story was, and you just touched on it briefly is the incredible individuals that you came across, like guys like spider parks, captain. ten It just seemed like you were surrounded by amazing people. Is that like a fair assumption? Like Lynn, Lynn black, these guys just sound, unbelievable to me. they in ah And this, like, I can't say it enough to people that, you know, are, you know, interested is like, try to read these books, have a listen to the stories, because it we're really only going to just touch a tiny little bit of what you and your teammates went through. But guys like that just sound like incredible individuals, Captain 10, the pilot that you had coming this the, the level of bravery. It's just, it's unbelievable, really, like,
00:32:01
Speaker
Yeah, because, you know, we like we briefly touched on the South Vietnamese Air Force. Yeah. So for us not being trained, nobody told us about it. You jump on that culture shock like, oh, wait, our lives are now in the hands of our allies. Right. Well, again, this is a major blessing because those pilots were absolutely fearless. Yes. And over time, they saved our recon team. Not only would they put us in, But they came back and pulled us out. Yeah. and and Under heavy fire. Yeah. On August the 3rd, we had a team, a recon team that got overrun three times. The last time they got overrun, the team leader called in an A1 sky raider gun run on his own team to break the enemy attack. And so during the gun run, it killed one of the South Vietnamese team members.
00:32:56
Speaker
and There were two 20 mic mic rounds that hit Tom Cunningham, who was the radio operator. One round hit his radio, exploded the shrapnel, wounding the team leader. The second round hit his leg and threw him into the air. And Tom had this out of body experience where he saw his leg dangling as he flew through the air. When he landed, he wasn't sure if he was alive or not. They called out his name and then he returned to his body. Now, John Walton was the team medic. He saved Tom. It was a South feeding music got shot four times. He saved him. And so when it was time for the extraction, Captain 10 came in, picked up Connie Ham, the team leader who was wounded because August the third was high elevation. He could only take three men. So he left and was John Walton on the ground.
00:33:52
Speaker
And John Wallen was the son of Sam Wallen from later on Walmart fame. Oh, I see. Greenberry Medic. This is an outstanding medic. Interesting. And two other teams came in and got shot out. I mean, Kingbees came in and got shot out. Ten came back, landed, picked up John and the other team member, the dead soldier they left behind because they didn't want to wait. And so he he could barely. He took off, but he couldn't get enough transitional lift to leave. He just had enough lift to get over the helicopters. He dipped down into the valley and circled around, getting enough momentum, then flew back to base. Wow. Just the lead level. Oh, that's amazing. Incredible pilots. Right. So on ah October 7th, we got into a firefight at two o'clock.
00:34:46
Speaker
And we went two hours without any tack air. They kept coming at us. We're stacking up their bodies. And we finally got tack air in, directed the strikes, um napalm runs, gunships, fast movers. And the first time we used napalm where I could literally smell human flesh burning from the nose. No, man. Jeez. At last light, Captain Tin came back and hovered. And the Spider Parks was flying Covey. He found an LZ that we could go to, but it was about maybe 10, 15 yards away with elephant grass. The elephant grass is anywhere from 8 to 12 feet tall. It's hard to get through. It took us 10 minutes to get to the helicopter, trying to throw the team on.
00:35:36
Speaker
We lifted off and he pulled us out. I was down to my last magazine and my last hand grenade when we left. So we're in last light, flying back to Fubai. And we flew south for a minute. It was the most beautiful sunset we'd ever seen. yeah i know And again, the jungle was lighting up with all these little red lights and green tracers all coming up to try to shoot us down. But Captain Tin saved us. saved our whole team that day. The same Captain 10 from August 3rd, and he flew us back to Fubi. He said, Colonel, I mean, Captain, come in. I want to buy you a drink. He says, no, my wife is waiting for me to come home for dinner. He flew home to see his wife and kids.
00:36:21
Speaker
Wow. Oh yeah. Yeah. It's, it's, it's remarkable. The, like the, the, the level of coolness that would take, I just, I, I can't even imagine how, how calm he, you know, he is. And, and even just like, you know, when I read your stories, like all of you in terms of having, um, being able to make decisions operate, you know, uh, effectively and, and like, One of the things that like, okay, just to take a step back. So you're part of Mac V SOG. Um, can you just describe a little bit about what, uh, your role and their, and, and the organization's role was and you know, why you were getting inserted into on that mission? Oh, sure. Um, and the early part of the Vietnam war in the very early sixties, the CIA was doing some operations across the border, but they,
00:37:15
Speaker
But because of the Bay of Pigs and some other incidents, incidents Kennedy, President Kennedy, was upset with the CIA, and he ordered them to end any involvements in layoffs in Cambodia. So America agreed to pull back, and we had some green berets that were over there, Operation White Star, where it had green berets in layoffs, and it was another operation in Cambodia with some of our people. They were all withdrawn. And so there was an agreement that neither we nor the communists from North Vietnam would have any, quote, combat troops in Laos or Cambodia. Well, by the time I get there in 68, in Laos they had 25 to 30,000 people, and NVA soldiers, that were coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail, bringing supplies to South Vietnam. Cambodia had anywhere from 50 to 100,000 NVA. Now,
00:38:15
Speaker
That's okay, but they lied, but this is a whole PR thing. ah We had the top secret war from 1964 until 1972, which was designed to go run missions across the fence to learn what the enemy was doing. They have an area recon, point recon, specific targets like by 68, the NVA were running fuel lines down from North Vietnam into layouts. And that way they'd bring more fuel, be less trucks, less targets for the Air Force. us But we learned about the pipeline. So we would be a missing, we would blow them up. We did wiretaps. We did bomb damage assessments. So there would be an arc light. And the arc light would be a B-50 strike on a target, an enemy target in layouts or North Vietnam. And then we would go in and then have to do
00:39:14
Speaker
assess the damage. Interesting. And they turned to be a pretty dangerous mission because um the Air Force said, oh, when we dropped the bombs for an arc like everybody be dead. No, no, no. There was some pretty pissed off NVA. Yeah. So we had teams that had major confrontations with the enemy on there, but that's one of our missions. We also did wiretaps. And of course the PLW snatch was a key because anytime you get a live prisoner, I mean, that we would get a bonus of a hundred bucks and we get a five day RNR anywhere in the world. So that was for us. If yeah have you if you brought someone back. From a operational perspective, nothing better for Intel than from a prisoner. So we had trained hard, long and hard to try to capture a prisoner. And they usually weren't, they usually weren't very happy about cooperating.
00:40:12
Speaker
no no yeah That's why we had to seek a war. It stands for Military Assistance Command Vietnam Studies and Observation Group. That's why my understanding is you had to sign that NDA that you were talking about earlier because you were doing, I guess you call them black ops in Laos and Cambodia. Is it my understanding that you actually never did a mission in Vietnam? Were they all across the fence, so to speak?
00:40:44
Speaker
All my missions were across the fence. yeah We had a couple of training targets in country, and we put in some Air Force sensors that were right on the border. you and There's no signs that said welcome to Laos. You had this jungle thing, so it was like an approximate border. We put in some of the Air Force sensors, and we had minimal contact when we did that. Because when you go the and NVA and the Vietcong, they would only fight when they wanted to fight. And so, but because we had that agreement from 1963, from those accords, technically, our US government needed plausible deniability, meaning if I get killed, I could have nothing going on in the case of an American. No dog tags, no photographs, no names, no no correspondence from mom or girlfriends or anything like that. And that way, if we got picked up,
00:41:43
Speaker
or killed, they would say, well, we got this Caucasian body. They knew we were Americans. We knew the North Vietnamese were there. But they lied publicly saying that they weren't there. And so that was part of that subterranean battle yeah underneath the jungle of Triple Canopy. And then as late as September of 69, there's a tape with President Nixon saying, we have no combat troops stationed in Laos. That's true. We weren't stationed, we flew in by helicopter. Right, yeah, yeah, he flew flew in and flew out. And as it turned out, we had one of the highest casualty rates of war. Because the NVA, by 68, they were training up sappers. And those sappers were highly trained to, if a recon team got on the ground, their mission was to find us, to track us,
00:42:36
Speaker
and then they come into the our perimeter close and kill the Americans, but leave the indigenous troops alive for psyops. And ah up north, we lost a team on January 1st of 69. November of 69, we had another team got wiped out. And again, they killed all the Americans, left the indigenous alive for psyops. man, that must've been really hard psychologically for, uh, for you to like, if they're leaving the indigenous South Vietnamese alive, but only killing American soldiers. I can't imagine what that would do to the, to your, to the teams. a pretty big No, there would be the people in camp that hadn't worked like with the South vietnam Vietnamese, like we had. So by January 6th, no, I'd been on that team for six months.
00:43:31
Speaker
I knew them. We had been through these several missions together. And I was alive in January, thanks to them and the king beat pilots and tack air that we used whenever we made contact with the enemy, including, you know, the A-1 Sky Raiders. So, yeah, we were just very fortunate to be alive at that point. And so on my team, I just told Hep and Sal, look, if you hear anything, Negative you come to me right away and we'll deal with it Or if you get an intel report about anybody that could be a vc or nva Again, let me know and they go we'll take care of the communist
00:44:11
Speaker
ah well you're Your South Vietnamese um teammates just sounded incredible in terms of like like, I remember distinctly in a few of the missions, sal just having almost a sixth sense of when North Vietnamese soldiers were close or Viet Cong soldiers were close. Is that something that kind of blew you away? Because it seemed like, he almost like he kind of knew ahead of the rest of the team. Is that true? or Oh, absolutely true. because ah Sal, by the time I get there in 68, happened Sal had been running missions for at least two plus years across the fence with Idaho. and And they were fortunate not to be on the teams that got wiped out because Idaho got wiped out twice early on in the war. And then in May of 68 and by the grace of the Lord happened, Sal had missed that mission. And so we rebuilt the team around them. So yeah, I never worried about him
00:45:08
Speaker
when we were in the field, man, it was us versus the Communists. And we had three guys on our team, at least three, Quang, Sun, and Tuon. In 1954, after the NBN Fu fell, that was a French base, the North Vietnamese defeated them in the final defeat, France formally left Vietnam. And there was a period of 18 months where anybody in Northfield could go goes South. Anybody in the South could go North above the DMZ. Nobody went North. Right. Hundreds of thousands of people came South. Interesting. There was spies, but my guys, they came down with their family. Several of the King P pilots ah came down with their families. Could nobody, they knew, like my little people, my South Vietnamese knew that
00:46:00
Speaker
their government in South Vietnam was corrupt. No question. There was an entity that they knew and were familiar with. They preferred that and they were willing to die for that corruption, even with the corruption in place, before being under the thumb of communism. Interesting, yeah. Oh, absolutely. and they sound like They put their lives on the line every day coming out. The the ah level of bravery, again, I come back to it. When I first started listening to the podcast on Jacos that you were on, I came back and i words couldn't describe so you know the the things that you know you'd gone through and I shared it with my crew. um and And again, just everyone was just uh, just, you know, blown away by, you know, the stories and and the things that you went through. One one of the things that, uh, uh, I want to chat about was, okay. So when you, when you came from the main base and you went to FOB one or four or operating in base one, uh, you met spider parks, you, you went, um, one of the things that was interesting is you talked about a couple of poker games that went awry. And the reason I wanted to chat about that was just to get a feel for it what it must've been like as a young guy.
00:47:15
Speaker
Greenberry showing up there and and and you talked about that you learned very quickly to Never go weaponless anywhere and and it really struck because I just trying to put myself in your shoes I just like holy man. I would just be on pins and needles just in the operating base. Is that true or oh Well, yeah, and it's a lesson to Johnny McIntyre and I learned Within the first three or four days. We were at food by that will be one um Now, one of the things that Special Forces, the Green Berets did that separates us from any other unit, we work with the indigenous people of the country, one fashion or another. So our aspect here was to run top secret missions across the fence. So in our same base camp, we had Montignards, we had Chinese, Nungs, who are basically ah from Saigon area, who are Chinese,
00:48:13
Speaker
but they grew up in South Vietnam and they're very patriotic, they're fearless fighters, just amazing men. You had the regular South Vietnamese, and then you had Cambodians sometimes. Now, some of the Montagnards hated the Vietnamese and reciprocal, so you never mixed them on a team. You had a Montagnard team, Cambodian team. Oh, interesting interesting. Or Vietnamese like my team, but you never brought them in to mix them up. Well, in the first couple of days, and I forget it which which indigenous cheated, but there's a poker game and with the indigenous troops, and the one guy lost, he went and got a hand grenade. I think he was Cambodian, he came back and threw a hand grenade into the mountain yards, had just taken his money. Well, all of a sudden, the base camp erupts. We hear all this shooting, and then ah some of the team members, the indigenous troops were running around with her,
00:49:13
Speaker
M16s and one of the guys who I'd just been introduced to on my team came around the corner and put his M16 right in my face. The McIntyre and I were like, I gently picked up the M16 and said, don't do that. And then we calmed them down. and But the Special Forces guy went in, each one got their team, passed up the wounded. We had to go do through the ceremony to, no, I didn't do this personally. But there were at least two or three casualties, me meaning killed by the hand grenade. So they had to settle all that down and work with it. So that's the poker game that went awry.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, it's just what an and butda like what a place to be without so many different you know ethnic and people with ethnic backgrounds. and and um is that when you also you kind of I remember you saying like that was like the last time you didn't walk anywhere unarmed. Oh, yeah. It's just not worth worth it. And so in FOB one, you had um a few things like, so it's it's set up with like, you know, your commanding officer and XO. And then you have different areas like S1, S2, S3. Are those basically like ah branches of that base? It's a typical military. Every every base will have an S1 for personal matters, awards and decorations. S2 is intelligence. S3 is operations. S4 is supply.
00:50:46
Speaker
And so with the secret war, we had our own ah private organization that was in Okinawa that gave us our rations, uniforms, weapons. We had all kinds of different experimental weapons that we tried out during the time, different uniforms, so tiger stripes, plane, jungle fatigues. And ah so that would all be a part of it. And then after mission, you go to S4. get renewed ammo, get new magazines for any ones you left, you lost in the firefight and take it from there. And then and then your teams, um so we touched on it briefly, that we yeah there's there's Hatchet Force and Spike teams. And can we just talk about kind of how how they were, though though like the different, sort of the or they call those were set up? In 68, the code name for a Spike team
00:51:40
Speaker
I mean, a recon team was a spike team. So it'd be ST Idaho. And we had, at FOB1, the recon teams were named after the states. We had Idaho, Alabama, um Alaska, North Carolina, Connecticut. And then that would be two or three Americans with six to maybe nine or 10 indigenous troops. and that we would all train again. Then for a mission, the Americans, and after I became a team leader, after Echo Four, I became the one zero, the team leader for Idaho, I got to the point where I like to have just me and another American, because the South Vietnamese were so good. Just so, yeah, so effective and so capable. I wanted another American, so if I got shot, he could carry my dumb ass out. If I got shot, I could get him out.
00:52:39
Speaker
You know, we're just bigger physically than ah our are Vietnamese counterparts. And that would be a spike team. Later, in 69, they began to call them recon teams. The rest of the war. Hatchet Force was a larger size operation. And the the classic example was in September of 1970, we had Operation Tailwind at 16 Green Berets from a bee company. at Canton with 120 indigenous troops that went in to relieve a CIA operation that was further west, west of our area of operations. They went out there, they were on the ground for four days. They had, at the end, day the 16 Green Berets on that mission we received 32 Purple Hearts. Holy crow.
00:53:34
Speaker
and They had over 50% of the indigenous troops and all the Americans were wounded. Various degrees of wounds. Had one medic, Gary Mike Rose, who was awarded the Medal of Honor at the White House by President Trump in October 23, 2017. Just amazing day to be in the the White House. We went down with Mike when he got his award. And it's from that mission.
00:54:05
Speaker
So hatchet force could be a platoon or even maybe just a couple of squads sometimes, but usually it'd be a platoon or a company. And they would go out for bigger operations. If a team was in trouble, sometimes they send a hatchet force. Sometimes they would block the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Block it, then the traffic would get backed up. The air force would come in and just blow all the trucks to smithereens. Oh, interesting. They kind of bottleneck it, so to speak, or shut it down really well for a day or two. And then the NVA would come in with artillery, mortars, and it would be a pitch of battle. They were to deal with the team leader had knew the history. So he went and he kept moving every day, every night. He moved for four days. They destroyed two enemy cafes.
00:54:59
Speaker
got a ton of intelligence out, they helped to save the CIA operation. So it was a complete success. But like I said, they had an extreme amount of casualties and Mike was the only medic on that team. Even Mike and the team leader was wounded on the first night of the mission from s shrapnel from an RPG, but they drove on.
00:55:22
Speaker
And, and your, your team, um, you touched on it briefly there. So you have designations like one, one, one, zero. And what can you just describe those real quickly? The one zero is the team leaders. That's the man with the most experience. And then the one one would be the assistant team leader. The one two would be technically the radio operator. But in my case, I always carry the radio. I want it to be in control. Particularly we got tack air going. We had a couple of cases of ah younger people or somebody making a mistake with tack air. And a mistake like that could be a fatal mistake. So we didn't want to take any chance. I always did the tack air myself. um And then our counterparts, the zero one would be our Vietnamese team of Roussel. Zero two is the interpreter. And then, of course, we had a Grenadier. I thought it was a zero nine, zero three, whatever it was. but
00:56:21
Speaker
So the sort of zero first would be for our Vietnamese counterparts. Each team member had their own number. And so if something happened with a casualty or something, we would know what who had been wounded, whatever it was. ah yeah I see. And ah we didn't talk about it yet, but your nickname is Tilt. And I know that that was something that in the book, they talk about giving out nicknames, but you you'd already had that nickname, I think, if I'm not mistaken. yeah We grew up playing bim-ball machines, so I got that name early on.
00:56:53
Speaker
kind of stuff. I wasn't very good at it. In fact, years ago, my five-year-old daughter defeated me in a game of pinballs. She could barely watch the flippers, but Meredith was able to get out there, hit the flippers. Peter's dad in a pinball. That's awesome. Okay. So, and now one of the things that I want to talk about, like, I want to go back to the mission that you'd brought up, of course, and just chat a little bit more about that. But what's fascinating to me and ah like the reason I find it also fascinating about your training is
00:57:26
Speaker
When we talk about your loadout, like when I go like, you know, hiking or hunting or, you know, I, I way over pack, like I, it's like, you would laugh at me, like this stuff I bring, it's like, it's basically like, uh, you know, bring him an apartment with me for comfort. And when I looked at your loadout and you talked about it with Jaco, it was like, holy smokes. Like it really to me defines the mission. The danger you guys were in the things like what you were preparing for is it? Would you be able to just chat about what you generally carried in and when you went on your missions? Yeah um Particularly after echo for a mission from October 6 and 7 of 68 The emphasis was always on firepower So I always carried more than 600 rounds for my car 15 that car 15 is a modified version of the m16 had a classable stock
00:58:18
Speaker
and it had a shorter barrel to it. So it's more much more flexible, easy to move in the jungle with that. And then we always had 600 plus rounds, and we only had 20 round magazines then. And they were told that only put 18 rounds in each magazine because the springs, sometimes if they would overload, they may not feed properly. So in the middle of a firefight, you don't want magazine failure. So we always carried a few extras. for good luck, but 600, we carried a, um, assault off M 79 grenade launcher. And it fired a 40 millimeter round and we always carried H E had one round for gas and then another round for smoke or CS like a tear gas tear gas. Right. If you're in contact and things are just going to shit,
00:59:16
Speaker
We fire off the CS, and now we all we always carried gas masks. And the CS would disorient people enough, hoping to break contact and for survival purposes. And then sometimes we would carry a .22 with a silencer on it. and But those were our primary weapons, a CAR 15, the M79, and then 10 to 12 hand grenades. I carried the radio with a battery for it. plus smoke grenades when directing tack air, you had to pop smoke so they can direct the tack air off the smoke. and And then other personal things, everything from lirps, which were dehydrated rations, and a mirror, pin flares, map, notebook, pens, things like that. And then a cravat, tourniquets, in case you needed them for something like that.
01:00:15
Speaker
And then a a sweater at night, the jungle could be chilly. You know, yeah, you're used to a hundred degrees temperature. So it gets down to eighties at night. Yeah. butter on You know, yeah, i should get a little short rain jacket that cover your shoulders, had a hood, went down to your waist. And when you're on the ground, it's raining. If you weren't careful, the rain would come down your back and go right into your pants.
01:00:42
Speaker
man, that, that just sums it up incredibly, like the, what you're, what you're going in and carrying, um, you know, nothing like no sleeping bag, no, you know, no comfort. but Did you carry much in the way of water or was it just a little bit or would depend on the area of operations? Like in layouts, uh, we would do a VR, get a map study depending on the time of year. If there was water in the streams, can we carry less canteens? I see. And we always carried the purification pills. Like iodine or something? or i dinil or Yes, exactly. So on our first couple of missions, we always come to a stream and even at a stream would be extra caution because we knew others would want water there. One person at a time would go down, filter canteen up, pop the pills. ah could Anyway, anything we could do to lighten the yeah the weight factor, we would do it. yeah
01:01:36
Speaker
how How much did that all weigh? Do you do you recall? One time i I put it on a scale, like a rinky dink scale. Yeah. It was over 80 pounds. Jeez. And I'm not sure how accurate that is. It could be all five, 10 pounds one way or the other. Yeah, that's, that's a, it's that's a huge, that's a huge. And then one of the things that also struck me is you did an extensive amount of training.
Combat Readiness and Reloading Techniques
01:01:59
Speaker
I believe it was spider parks, but it could be wrong, but the team trained a lot with a hip firing that car 15. Is that correct? Oh, sure. Yeah. and And because a lot of times we made contact, we'd have time to come up to you. So if you're firing from your hip, you just turn around, open fire. Whereas if you, if you have a hip on your hip,
01:02:20
Speaker
By the time you come up to your shoulder and aim, you could be dead. So we trained extensively that way. And there were a few times that actually had the time to extend the stock, get the weapon to my shoulder and aim it at a particular target was rare. So rare that you can remember a couple of times. Cause a lot of times we just fire him from the hip or loose because we're on the ground. and then trying to shoot so different angles. and interesting it's It's interesting because you know obviously being a civilian, not really knowing, you know watching movies, and sort of like you just have no idea, but that's just such a critical point that like time matters so quickly when you engage.
01:03:09
Speaker
and what One of the things too that you chat about in the book was, and we'll get into it a little bit more, is that when you would get into an engagement and there'd be huge gunfire, there'd sometimes be a moment of silence where everyone's reloading and whoever could kind of reload quickest seemed to, that was the who obviously came out with the advantage. And it sounded like Sal and like some of the South Vietnamese were incredible at that. Is that true? or that That's, that's a cold fact. I mean, yeah pain we we had so many. days, months, and weeks on the range. Even in between missions, sometimes we go down there and just to run through the immediate action drills over and over again, just so you kept on top of your species. You knew where your magazines were, and then you do the drill, like you peel back. Somebody's always firing at the enemy. and Interesting. On the other hand, ah with our people, our little people, we never got ambushed.
01:04:09
Speaker
because they were so cautious. And we were in the jungle, we didn't cross jungle, I mean, we didn't walk on trails. We would cross the trail and try to leave no evidence that we had crossed it. And and no don't forget for your people like yourself that may not be familiar with the CAR 15, you fired 20 rounds in a second and a half. Jeez, wow, yeah. And that's all, and of course the weapon would tend to rise a little. So you had to ride that weapon down, but that's part of the training. And that's what you're talking, the answer to your question. Yes, there was a couple times when after that initial engagement, it was this moment of silence where all you could hear were people dropping their empty magazines and slamming in the new ones. So when the firefights going on, time expands.
01:05:04
Speaker
So like a second is broken down into many parts of a second. And when that silence happened, it always felt like a very expanded time. It's kind of like, holy shit, look how quiet it is. When in reality, it's just a matter of a second and a half or so while everybody's dropping and reloading. And yes, our team, our South Vietnamese, we always won that battle because wow And here's a part of that too. Of course, the NVA had 30-round magazines. We had 20. And we had one of our guys, Dale Hanson. He ran a mission out of contume. His initial contact, he came up against three NVA. He killed the first two and ran out of bullets. The third guy shot him
01:05:55
Speaker
and shot off one of his fingers in the middle of the firefight. Oh, geez. Dale stayed in and ran the mission, completed the mission over four days or four or five days. Oh yeah. Just incredibly tough. This book is great by the way. Is that right? Oh yeah. Okay. i'll I'll definitely, I'll check that out for sure. Oh yeah. Dale Hanson. He's just a great guy too. So just that's the kind of situation you're up against. And after your question, It happened. It was weird. But again, when theyre when you're going on full automatic, I usually call it an apocalyptic death war. Because you just fired 22. One round, you hear how loud it is? Yeah. And you fire, you got six men firing CAR 15s or M79s and the enemy firing their AK47s or SKS at us on full automatic. It's just, it's insane.
01:06:47
Speaker
Yeah, it just must be just yeah loud, deafening, smell of gunfire, imagining everything else going on. And just, you know, it's incredible that you guys, what you you know, how you did, how you operated and were able to keep things together and, and um you know, get through your missions. Just to paint in a picture, like I obviously want to really chat about your that mission we were chatting about earlier. But just to paint a picture going back for the listeners or viewers. So you had your cubby rider up top, which sometimes it was like spider parks and he's in a Cessna. He'd be your air sort of coordinator. He's coordinating um like the King B's coming back in. He's coordinating the A1 Skyhawks and then F4.
01:07:28
Speaker
yeah and and um And then you're on the ground and and basically doing your mission. Now, before, when you when you got in inserted, the whole idea was to, you you you didn't want to be um discovered, so to speak. And when that did happen, then i not is that generally when, okay, they this mission is compromised and we need extraction? Is that kind of accurate? So we made enemy contact. Once we made enemy contact, then we get on the radio to try to get
01:08:00
Speaker
some kind of air coverage. And sometimes in the layoffs, because of the mountains, it might take anywhere else from two to four or five hours. We had teams that were in enemy contact before getting hold of anybody. So while we're in the middle of a firefight, once we made radio contact, like in Echo 4, we made contact with a fighter pilot who contacted Covey, who eventually came out over our station. We're in triple canopy. So the first thing i've got to do is to make a visual contact with him Direct him into where we are all by mirror or by smoke. So on that day There was a spot in the uh jungle when he went by could hit him with a flashing so he could see my mirror Right then come in then when we direct attack air We would pop the smoke and run and then operate all the tactical gun runs things like that off the smoke
01:08:59
Speaker
but you had to get all that coordinated first. So then I would talk to to Spider. He would say, okay, we got an A-1 Skyraider. They're coming in with an eight-pound run or 500-pound bombs, the fast movers, whatever. And then we had the helicopter gun sheists. We had the judge and the executioner and the muskets. And eight they came right down to Napa the Earth when they made their gun run. It's just phenomenal. And then our A-1 Skyraiders. they They were a plane developed at the end of World War II. They flew during the Korean War and they were designed for close air support. And they could stay on station for two or three hours. Interesting. Okay. They carried the same amount of weight in ordnance that a B-17 could carry. Oh, wow. Really? I didn't know that. Incredible. Interesting. So they could have everything from bombs, napalm,
01:09:58
Speaker
cluster bomb units, machine guns, mini guns, 20 mic mic, 40 mic mic, depending on what each plane was set up to have for ordinance. Interesting, interesting. We love the stats. Oh yeah. and And just for people like listening, one of the things that struck me also is like, I have to remember there's no there's no GPS at this time. There's no you know cell phones or night vision. ah You guys are operating on, you know, You know, it's incredible what you operated on and coordinated with just very like, you know, like nothing compared to what we have today. is so tonight You got to confirm where we are. And then the NBA sometimes would even, they often monitor our frequency. So if Covey spider would say pop a smoke, I would, he wouldn't say pop a yellow smoke. You say pop a smoke. And so we had teams that said, okay, I'm going to pop a yellow smoke. Well.
01:10:57
Speaker
The covey rider would see two or three yellow smokes pop up. Oh, yeah. So okay when he would say pop a smoke, I would pop it. Then he'd say, OK, I see a violent smoke or yellow or white smoke. Is that you? I see. Sometimes with Lynn Black on that one day at their mission, he they did that. He said, pop a smoke. They popped it. And the NVA guest had popped it in Keller. A helicopter came in and they shot it down. Oh, geez. Okay. Yeah. It's a deadly game. Yeah. And like you said, ah dense jungle. So like like a miles of 150 feet in the air. Wow. Three separate layers of jungle growth.
01:11:42
Speaker
Wow. Yeah, just incredible. And so, um, going, but going back to your, to that mission that, um, that we were talking about earlier, you, when you went in on that mission, uh, who always, who always on, on the team that day? Uh, Don Walken was the team leader and he was the one zero. I was the one one. And Jim Davidson was a new member of the team. He had come in from the one 73rd airborne volunteer to serve with us. Hep Sal and folk. fuck rate point for the entire time. And ah we were on the ground together with them to move 10 minutes, wait 10 minutes to listen to the jungle because the jungle has its own life cycle of rhythm. And when we stopped moving, usually within five or 10 minutes, the regular noise and the animals, the monkeys, insect noises would all come back. Didn't come back.
01:12:42
Speaker
That meant something else was going on. We just assumed the worst that would be the NBA. Yeah, that they were that they were maybe close and and ah yeah and because the jungle was wasn't getting noisy again from the from the creatures that were in in the in in there. right um but On that one, was it like was it true that you guys were looking to blow up fuel lines on that one? No, the primary was just at an area of reconnaissance. okay And then they told us about an American POW camp. We had a report of a POW camp. So Don and I wanted to go to that, to find that camp to see if we could get, find it A, B, somehow do a tactical operation to try to get the American prisoners out. But we made contact on day two, so we could not go forward in the mission. We were compromised. Then you go from mission to survival.
01:13:38
Speaker
Right. And you, was that one, the one where you, uh, going back to the elephant grass, was that the one where you guys inserted into deep elephant grass? And, uh, because what I found interesting with that is that like you're saying earlier, it could be like 10, 12 feet tall. So you, the chopper comes in and you go to exit and you don't even know what footing you have. Uh, is that correct? Or was that a different mission? No, that was Christmas day, but, uh, What you had to do was that the prop force would generally blow it down, but you had to make sure you could see the ground because the helicopter pilots and the crews, they would tell us jump. They didn't care if we were 10 or 12 feet in the air. yeah They wanted us to get the hell off the aircraft so they could get back to base, sure yeah not be hanging over as a possible target. so um And we had cases of a lieutenant that broke his ankle, other people that got hurt jumping out too soon.
01:14:37
Speaker
I see. Oh, Sparta told us and we trained up so we could see that ground. So when it pushed it down, it was clear enough that we only had a couple of feet to go. We jumped out and hit the ground, got on with the mission. I gotcha. Yeah. Yeah. Um, yeah. So, so you, you made it through this one. Was that one, was that the one that you're talking about before to you that, um, when you, when you're going through, you're doing your 10 minute on 10 minute off and is that when you did come across the monkeys? Yeah, very first mission. yeah We hear him coming. So the team got online, we pulled the pins out of hand grenades, had the car 15 on full automatic. And then over at top of us came a herd or a flock of monkeys of what do you call a group of monkeys. I don't know what they're doing somewhere in a hurry. And they were walking and squeaking going over us making all the noise and went their way. And so I don't even even know what's what but spooked him.
01:15:35
Speaker
and but Yeah, they went their way we continue our way and then of course earlier we've been on the ground maybe an hour and a half and fuck got stung by bees. Oh, I don't walk got hit by bees. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, and um When you when you when you when you're doing that one, ah sorry, I'm just going to kind of just make sure I'm on top of it. you'd You'd heard, I believe, if not mistaken, you heard a shot ah behind you guys. Right. Is that correct? from The enemy would once they knew a team was in the in the in the ah in the jungle. They would try to find us and they had a way of signaling each other with their rifles. And sometimes they have tracker dogs.
01:16:21
Speaker
And on that occasion, we heard some signal shots in the afternoon, and it kept getting closer. And as we were moving, i'll we never knew. We couldn't figure out what actually happened. By the time we set up our ROI night to rest overnight, there was a one of the trackers was maybe 20, 30 feet in front of our one of our parameters and fired around. So it was close. Yeah. Yeah. I never had contact. So first light in the morning, before first light, the whole team was awake. We had claymore mines out so that if they hit us, we'd be ready. They didn't hit us. We moved and then about two o'clock we got on top of a knoll and then they came after us. And the knoll was small enough that they can only put so many people up at one time.
01:17:14
Speaker
So they would come up this jungle, this little hill, come at us, and we'd just blow them back in the jungle. I remember in the book and talking about that mission, that was um ah kind of a very advantageous position for you guys, because you had a ton of MVA coming up that up towards that Nola by that point. Is that correct? or Oh, yeah. They kept coming. And a lot of times, you would see the weapon or hit a gunfire you wouldn't see ah an NVA come out of the jungle and rushes. Because we could hear them, between the weapons and the noise. And this whole front, but just that's the way it opened up. And the hill had the little slopes. So some were coming up, some would be directly, some would be on the side. Because at one point, I was shooting at people in the jungle, and fuck open fire. And I thought he was shooting with me. But when we debriefed, because it really hurt my hearing.
01:18:12
Speaker
I'm the radio guy. I try to listen to Spider. And and um so I said, hey, why were you shooting over my shoulder? He goes, no, you dumbass. The NVA were coming up the hill to get ready to kill you. I killed them. oh man And yeah, so you, when you guys woke up in the morning, uh, I think one part that had happened was that you're continuing your patrol. And then I think it was yourself or or Sal saw two and NBA soldiers standing and kind of laughing or grinning at you guys. Is that correct? Well, that was part of that mission where at one point about noon, about one o'clock or so, we came out of the jungle because it was so steep and there was an animal path. I see.
01:18:56
Speaker
So we got on the animal path and we were going up the side of this mountain to get to the top. Cause we wanted to get over the mountain to get down to go towards that area where the POW camp was that they held Americans. So the the trail went around and we went up and then it kind of twisted to the left and then it bent. Well, uh, fuck. And then walking went around that. Um, ah Sal was the tail gunner. and I was never five in in the March of Order. And I hear Sal hissing and I turned around and he pointed way back down that trail. There were two invades of standard report arms, tall, they may be Chinese and they're smiling. So they didn't point their AKs at us. They were just standing there. So I told Donna and then Don,
01:19:52
Speaker
Got around the corner. Then we went up to that. We found that little, no, no. And that's when they, they were pursuing you up that, up that path. Then that's when they hit us.
Mission Protocols and Air Support
01:20:03
Speaker
And, and you, so one thing that I had to kind of, um, figure out a little bit is that the area that you operated in the operate operational areas called Prairie fire. Is that correct? Yeah. That's a code name. We had a North Vietnam code name was nickel steel. They asked. was Prairie Fire and then Cambodia was ah during by 68 it was Daniel Boone and then it became a Salem House.
01:20:31
Speaker
and and And that's what led to like, the what and that's where the term now, because you guys are compromised with these NBA soldiers coming up. ah You, you're calling trying to get hold of Covey and or spider parks. And that's where now it becomes classified as a prairie fire emergency. Correct. So when a team made contact, the mission is compromised. If we declared a prairie fire emergency, any tack air in the air within a distance over Southeast Asia, could be directed to our location before the recon team or hatchet force. Right, okay, I see. It was called a Prairie Fire Emergency. Because sometimes we had teams, I had a couple of situations where I knew we were compromised. We hadn't made enemy contact, so people would ask for a tactical emergency to get pulled out before the contact. But most of the times it would be enemy contact, and we always left under enemy fire. The only question was how much?
01:21:31
Speaker
right yeah yeah she Like we found that the Echo 4 mission, ah Captain 10 told us that King B, he flew, he hovered for 10 minutes for us. That helicopter had 48 bullholes in it. Holy crow. And nobody aside was killed. Wow. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And um so they just to just to go back to the King B helicopters that we were talking about earlier, they're kind of a big big helicopter. They're not like they're bigger than a Huey. Aren't they are a little bit bigger than a Huey. They could carry, um, maybe a comparative weight. I really forget the specifics, but yeah I knew that they could carry a six man team. That's why I like the six man team, because, um, like with echo four with contact, we got the whole team out with one helicopter. A lot of times the second helicopter comes in and the NBA knows they're not stupid.
01:22:28
Speaker
They know there's less team members there. They would push harder to overrun the team as well as just shoot down a helicopter. Could they get an award if they shot down a helicopter? I see. And then and and on this mission, you were trying to get ahold of the cubby, but that took, ah did it did not take a little while, but you were enabled. Two hours at least. Yeah. And you were, you were in contact the entire time. Is that correct? or Yeah, they kept coming at us and we took turns. ah Sometimes it'd be a few guys, sometimes it'd be a whole wave. Again, we don't know how many, just if they would open fire, we'd literally blow them back into the jungle. One point, Don came up to me and said, can you see what they're doing? And I couldn't see it and what the NVA had done. We had killed so many of their soldiers that they were stacking up the dead. And they wanted to get on top of the dead so they could get an angle to shoot down at us.
01:23:22
Speaker
jesus It's like, that sticks to me. That tells you about what we're up against. Yeah. Yeah. It just really puts everything into perspective. And again, like I said, you know having listened to your the podcast and also just so I don't forget, you have also have your SOGcast, which I listened to two or three on. Those are great podcasts as well. yeah We just posted a new one today. It's ah number 48 with Dick Thompson. Oh, right on. Okay, good. I'll check that out for sure. Oh, yeah. No, there they're incredible stories. And and like you say, I mean, that just puts it in perspective what you guys are up against. um And its it's it's it's the most humbling for me to to talk to someone like yourself and like listen to these stories because yeah nothing that I've ever done comes even close to that, right? And I can't imagine how
01:24:11
Speaker
How I would act and react or be able to, you know, whether, whether I'd have the ability to have the, I don't know. That's just, that's a whole nother thing that what you guys. right Your job was too hot for me, buddy. I didn't want it to be a firefighter. oh yeah yeah Um, so eventually you got ahold of cubby on that mission yeah and then air support started coming in. And, uh, we talked about the A1 sky or this, uh, the sky writer and the fours. Yeah, I was lucky on a side note. I was lucky to see an F4 Phantom fly years ago. It's one of my favorite aircraft. I love e yeah military jets um and I got to see one fly back in like 89 and it was awesome just to, you know, cause they don't fly much anymore. I don't think if, if at all, right. There's only a few of that and they have to be really rich to keep them flying. Now here's the thing about the F4 Phantom jet.
01:25:03
Speaker
When you go through training group, they tell you, when you use a fast mover for tactical error, keep this in mind, the bullets will arrive before you hear the aircraft. Man. Because with the musket gun ships, the sky raiders, helicopters, um any other aircraft, the Covey, you would all hear them coming. They're coming. I see. But with the Phantom Jet, It's one thing to be told about the ordinance will get there before you hear it Yeah, but when your head's down on the ground and they come through to with a minigun No, no, it just explodes. You don't hear anything. Yeah, come up then you hear them hit the afterburner when they pull out when they're heading out Wow amazing crow When you
01:25:55
Speaker
When you got a hold of Covey in this one, you were able to start now coordinating those attacks. And and one of the things that ah that was you know um you know interesting to me is it sounded like you would make a ah coordinated strike or Covey would coordinate the strike. And the MVA learned that if they push towards your team, that might offer some safety from that strike. Is that correct? or Right. They called it close to the belt. they would want to get close to our belt because they could hear A1s or the helicopter gunships making their gun runs. They wanted to get as close to our belt. So we knew they were coming when they heard it. So there'd be that little death dance. We'd get more people coming towards us as they hear the sky reader. It's all like within a matter of seconds, you know? They're coming at us that we had to blow them back. And then they would strike with the air strike.
01:26:53
Speaker
And uh, in that day we had napalm bombs cluster bomb units And it's just they but they kept coming jeez. Yeah, holy crow. Oh, yeah and How how I one thing I wasn't too sure of was what what led to you finding a landing or an extraction point for this one I didn't it was spider parks sweater. Okay. Yeah, because he was flying covey because he'd been up there so long He knew where we were he said um I don't see any LZ, since I see a spot that it might be enough to get a helicopter to hover. I see. And we hadn't seen it. From where we were, it was a steep hill, but right behind us, there was an elephant grass that we hadn't seen. There was some jungle, we hid it. Then we're in the elephant grass, trying to get to the king bee that was hovering there for 10 minutes.
01:27:51
Speaker
yeah and And so ah he came in hovering, you had to work through that elephant grass and and you were still you were still fighting all the way back to the chopper, correct? Right. Yeah. And so the other part would be like, I was the first guy heading towards the helicopter, God is the biggest. I fell down, Wolkam ran over me, all the little people ran over me, Lily, on on my back, then Wolkam fell down, so I ran over him. So as it turned out, it worked and we got us moving through the elephant grass. And then there'll always be somebody by taking care of the real security as we moved. I see. And then we get to the helicopter and then Don and I threw everybody on the helicopter and he went to throw me on. I slipped. I just grabbed him by his lapel and threw him up. And then he reached down and grabbed me, pulled me now. And that was your down to your very last magazine. Is that correct? like your last Last hand grenade. And also,
Helicopter Evacuation and Team Bonding
01:28:50
Speaker
One of the gun runs was so close that it was the first time I had shell casings from the M60 machine guns, the 7.62. The shell casings landed in the back of my neck and it burnt my neck. so first of all i shit bring well Wait a minute. These these are our friendly fire. Yeah. Yeah. I'll take all And but we that reminds me we talked a little bit about um the judge and the executioner that sounded like those two pilots were Unbelievable. They were part of the Marine Corps. Is that correct? oh No, no, they were the muskets out of 176 That's right it came up for numerical division and they were assigned to us. They actually built a barracks on our base and
01:29:32
Speaker
They stayed there. over They were based there permanently from ah July all the way through to the close Fubai. The judge executed with just amazing, fearless, young warrant officers and ah could regale you with many a story about them, just man i unbelievable. They're just like a lot of our other Americans that were from the 101st, the first CAV. so When we were in contact, ah they would come in close. We had Scarface from the Marine Corps. Yeah, that's right, Scarface. And Scarface was a task during the entire war for eight years. Yeah, just incredible individuals all the way around to to make everything come together. One thing, too, so when you got on, the one thing that struck me is when you got on the helicopter as a team.
01:30:22
Speaker
It was, it wasn't like, you know, um, obviously I have a huge respect for like, you know, uh, athletics and sports and professional athletes. And that, you know, when you play a game, I've only ever done recreational sports and you win the game. You got a sense of like overall, like joy. And you know, a lot of times it might be some cheering or whatever, but you guys got on there. There was none of that. That was just all quiet. Is that correct? Like it was kind of like Sombre. It's just like, it puts things into perspective that when, Things are that dangerous and that extreme. It's just that you're just thankful to be alive after those hours of being on the ground. ah Can you just talk to that a little bit or? Well, no, I mean, you've you've basically outlined that the the thought process because. In addition to that, when you're leaving, seeing all the gunfire coming, you don't know if you're going to even survive the exfiltration or not, right? Yeah, of course. kk You had to lift up out of the jungle.
01:31:19
Speaker
and then get moving. So there's that little twilight zone time was going up, getting forward momentum and it's all slow motion. Yeah. And there's a here blasting away at us. He first told me 48 bull. I'm going like, that's incredible. But then I really thought about it was like only 48 because so many people were shooting at us. Yeah. Yeah. with And yes, when you're there, it's like you would smile. Like Sal would give me a nod and I was like, yeah Hey, welcome to the show. You've done good today. Yeah. yeah Cause that was your, that was your first big ah contact. Was it not? Yes, sir. Yeah. Yeah. And you, and you're, you're, uh, had a funny one that the, uh, the, the, the South Vietnamese soldiers kind of looked at you like, well, who's this tall guy and is he going to actually fit in? And it sounds like that, that was a huge respect after that mission. Well, I, when spider introduced me to the team, Sal turned to Hep.
01:32:17
Speaker
and said, he's too tall, his feet are too big, and he looks stupid. You know, and Hep wouldn't tell me that. Hep never told me that until after six or seven months. He was saying, hey, come on, Hep, what did Sal say that day? He would change the topic. So once I proved myself, and then he finally told me, he said, you're okay. He said, you're crazy, but we still, you're okay, you're on the team. ah So after that mission, then now you were you headed back to base and then I would imagine there'd be a pretty big debriefing. Every mission you had a debrief. there would be You go into S2, give a quick after action, and then the following day be much more detailed. They want to know everything from what the jungle vegetation was like,
01:33:09
Speaker
enemy forces, what we came up against, any kind of weapons, tactics, things like that. But Donald was a team leader, so he did the majority of that. Whereas when we landed, got back to football, I went down to the mess hall, got food for the guys, got cold drinks out of the clubhouse, and took it for Nair. one thing that like i'm i'm Well, and this is a big you know thing like for me is Jocko has helped me out huge with leadership. I've been studying his stuff for about
01:33:40
Speaker
I don't know, five or seven years. And I've been lucky to meet him a couple of times. And, um, you know, I, I, I'm fascinated with that topic. It's helped his teachings have helped me out huge with my job. And cause there's a lot of things I didn't really understand about leadership. Obviously I'm still learning and trying to be a better leader all the time. But what was, what was it like for you in terms of like, did you find that there was a lot of great leaders at f FOB one, or was it a bit of a mix and, and is it okay to chat about that a little bit or. Well, yeah, we had. The majority of the SF men were just incredible. and we have The only thing was the varying levels of experience and time on the ground. I see. So we had senior SEOs like John McGovern. He was an E7. Pat Watkins, Spider Parks that had a lot of missions under a belt. So we always talked to them. Excuse me. And when any of our contemporaries came back, like John Walton, John McIntyre,
01:34:40
Speaker
When anybody came back after a mission, after their debrief, we would talk to them. I see. To see what they learned. Was there any change of tactics, any new weapons, any kind of ah issues with communications? Because there was always commo issues. We just carried that PRC 25 FM radio, but the NVA monitored it. Sometimes they would come on during the mission, during a firefight. We're trying to call and attack air. it was overrided They it. They would play music. yeah Oh, I see. Oh, interesting. channels They would try to change channels with us. Interesting. So the cubby rider would always be in contact with the one zero change channel, go up five down five. And sometimes just go to Eric ten or emergency high frequency radio. I have combo because there's so much interference on FM.
01:35:39
Speaker
Was that, was that PR 25 was that similar to what you see in the Vietnam movies where guys are carrying a huge radio on their back? Yes. Yeah. Same, same kind of thing. And I, we always carried it in our back and our rucksack. And then the NVA would always try to kill the radio operator first. Cause he knew that was the combo link. We had a flexible antenna and the flexible antenna would be under my arm or in the back stack. And then I have the actual hands that would come under underneath my arm. into my jacket. So it'd be minimal visibility on the, uh, for the radio. Just a huge, uh, just a hugely important, uh, aspect of your mission because how to get out, you need to be able to communicate and I got your vital link back to back to home. Yeah. there um There are times when you'd be on the ground, you have common checks. So it got to the point when, um, be a common check. If he got inserted in the morning to be a common check at noon, one o'clock,
01:36:37
Speaker
would be pre-ordained, pre-planned. And when they'd come over, there'd be a covey rider saying, you know, Idaho, how's it going down there? And I would just do a click click on the handset. I see. Because the NVA and the Russians had extensive ah RDF, radial direction finding equipment that they'd home in and then triangulated onto the team. I see. So we were minimized when we were on the ground, minimize any commo who to covey. or to the Airborne Command Center. We always have a commo check around midnight, one o'clock in the morning. So it'd be morning, before night, going into the RON, and then around midnight, a commo check.
01:37:21
Speaker
ah right on And ah just to make sure you're okay. I just want to read about an hour and 48 minutes in time. Are you okay for time, John? or Oh, yeah. Sure, sure. Okay. Yeah. Again, I just want to make sure you're okay. That's awesome. So um now, when you i wanted to chat about your other mission to, and so you have the you have the two books, Across the Fence and On the Ground, and you had a flashback at the beginning of the book and On the Ground, and that leads into the mission um yeah
01:37:51
Speaker
ah which is in like you know quite fascinating. Can we chat bit a little bit about the flashback? and like Is that something that you had quite frequently after the war? I can only imagine the intensity that you went through and that obviously leaves ah leaves a mark on anyone that's been through what you went through. Can we just chat a little bit about the ah the flashback first and then we'll we'll get into like kind of what the mission was all about? Yeah, that was um that was a one of the one one-time-only flashback. I may have had a couple others, but that was the one that really stuck in my mind. It was at my daughter's piano lesson, and she was playing piano, and I was outside in the back porch in Vista, California. At the time, we lived in California. And in the background, there were these huge
01:38:48
Speaker
grove of eucalyptus trees. And it was kind of a stormy day, but it wasn't raining. I'm on the back porch so I could hear her talking to the teacher, hear the piano, and I'm on the back porch. ah And on the distance, I could see those eucalyptus trees. And then all of a sudden, it was like, bam, it was this mission that you're talking about wow where we had gone. This was the one to go in to blow up enemy fuel lines. and When we got inserted, it was spotty. The weather was spotty. We got on the ground. We moved for a few hours. Bubba had left ah Claymore with a booby trap on the LZ. So if anybody followed us, well anyways, they hit that. right And we knew that they were down at the LZ and they would be looking for us. So we moved, um got to a little bit higher ground.
01:39:48
Speaker
and And Sal heard them coming at us from the north because apparently there was several different patrol elements that were out looking for us. So we had contact to the north. Sal and Hep suppressed that. I declared a Prairie Fire emergency. And fortunately on this mission, we got a hold of Covey really quick. It wasn't Spider, I forget who the Covey was, but the Covey ride came out, located us, And then um call it we began to call it intact air. And um he said, you know, it's near the end of the day. It's starting to rain. The weather's closing in. I don't know if we're going to be able to get you out or not. So that's part of our drama. And there's no LZ. So we made contact. we're on I forget for how long. But we used some of our claymores. They came out from the north. Hepburn South took care of that.
01:40:49
Speaker
There was contact later to the East and the South. I forget the exact, but they kept coming at us from different locations. right Blowing them back, blowing them back. And finally Covey said, there was a little area that you might be able to get strings down to you all. You got to go to the North. Well, Sal and Hep were not happy about that because that's where we had the initial contact. But anyway, we went up, went past the dead bodies because we didn't have time to pick up any intel. We wanted to get to the clearing because we were fighting against the weather and it was starting to rain. So we did the clearing. It was a small clearing and Bubba put down some C4 to try to blow down some trees so the helicopter could get in to pick us up. Well, he blew and cut him off, but there was so much vegetation that when the trees got blown off the stump, they just fell on other trees, never landed.
01:41:45
Speaker
oh no Didn't clear up. Okay. Now we're in this with all the trees smoke and everything from John blowing up the trees trying to clear the LZ a little the enemy kept coming at us and then we finally um said okay, they're gonna drop strings and the hit So the flashback was from the moment when I look up and the first helicopter comes in so at the piano lesson I can see the trees moving and I remember that helicopter because it was so high that was like triple canopy. They threw down the ropes with the sandbag on it and the wind was blowing. It's raining. He's up there hovering and going like, oh, this is, this is, this could not, this might not go well. Yeah. Yeah. anyway We made contact, continued with contact on and off. The, our people hooked into the web gear and actually we had a Swiss seats and they were a 12 foot piece of rope.
01:42:44
Speaker
It goes around on your waist and through your groin and he had a D ring on it. Then the rope would come down with a sandbag with a D ring. You hooked into it. And then you had a D ring on your harness. He hooked into. So if you got shot, you would stay on the rope. We had people got that didn't do that, that got shot off out of Lily out of her seat. Oh, geez. oh we're We're doing that. And then I told Bub, I said, Hey, when we we get pulled out of here, Get a claymore mine. He had a claymore with a white phosphorus on it, taped to it. I said, put that up there and put a time fuse on it. So that when we're going up, this will go off. He goes, no, no. I said, no, do it. We got to get out of here and yeah like anything we could do to buy time. Could the helicopter had to go up before, I want to say drug us through the jungle. Yeah, through the canopy. yeah We did it.
01:43:40
Speaker
It got and then the the copy goes, we're going to do two helicopters. Well, four ropes came down. I put four of the little people on two ropes. Bubba had one. I had one. And I gave him the signal to pull us up. And only by the grace of the Lord did we get out of that day. Yeah, I pulled up that ah ah claymore exploded with the white phosphorus. It was just incredible. you You see the enemy down there. Of course, there were those that died from the blast. And then beyond that periphery, you could see them shooting at us as we're leaving. And so then I called Covey and said, we're all out. The entire team is out.
01:44:23
Speaker
Well, and that that's a fascinating part of it because I was thinking about that where um they were going to try to extract just part of the team with with one helicopter and that becomes a weight issue. how high How high would those ropes be approximately? Like a hundred feet or? Over a hundred feet. I want to say maybe 150. Yeah. So that chopper is hovering there. They're, they're worried about weight, but you're, you're having to make kind of an executive decision on the ground. It's like, no, no, no, no. We need to get everybody out now. And, and like you say, by the grace of God, like that chopper did its job and and pulled you out through it. And it sounded like you guys had to work through the canopy a little bit still to kind of get past the branches. We always had that pinball syndrome, you know, we're, we're yeah pinball ricocheting off the trees, but that's okay because they, they got us up through most of it. And then.
01:45:09
Speaker
after the there was so much enemy gunfire. And after that after that Claymore went off with ah with a white phosphorous, they just freaked out. And so there's two things. It was cold because it was raining. And we weren't like in layoffs would have had higher mountains. The mountains we were in weren't as high as the the normal mountains. There was a target that was closer to South Vietnam. okay And so in my mind, Elevation cold. We know that us could pull us out with that weight I see so I made the ah they rolled the dice because the weather was closed and by now it's raining And of course, we're we're getting poor as we get pulled out if we get done being a pinball Getting ricocheted off the jungle to get out Now we're riding in this in the rain. So the rains like pellets on our face and everything. Oh man and cold I bet Oh just froze our balls off
01:46:08
Speaker
just And then when you're riding in that Swiss seat, after a while, you lose all circulation in your legs. So when you can't walk, you you you land. Sometimes we had teams that got drugged through barbed wire. Oh, geez. Or get drugged down a runway because there would be like sometimes be one person would be lower and maybe the door gunner wouldn't see the person low. So he'd be telling the helicopter pilot for the people up here, get them in without realizing there was somebody dangling. i' bads And they would, they'd carry you all the way back to FOB one that way. or no it would be Once we crossed the border, get back to South Vietnam, they had a hilltops where they had artillery set up. okay And so sometimes we try to land there, it would depend. And one time we landed in the middle of the Ashaw Valley and it's like, Oh my God. And we couldn't walk. So, you know, they had to come out help us get into the helicopter.
01:47:07
Speaker
We are part of our high angle team at work, so we're responsible for rope rescue. and Our area doesn't get a lot of rope rescue because we don't have a ton of like mountains. There is areas in this region that we live in that have extreme mountains and like lots of things going on. the nurse We have a group called the North Shore Search and Rescue, and they do amazing things. and But having said our gear is quite Gucci, it's quite nice. And I'm thinking trying to compare to what you had. And like we have like double redundancy, two ropes on everything, you know, like this stuff's like 10,000 pounds strength. And so like comparatively, it sounds like that that Swiss seat and whatnot was just ah like probably a little bit um scary to be to be getting hooked into. Is that correct? Or is that just kind of what you're used to? Again, give me alternative. Stay here yeah overnight with the NVA.
01:47:58
Speaker
That's right. We took the ride. Yeah, I took the ride. The other thing that we didn't chat about too much and um is your guys' use of claymores. It's quite fascinating because I've always ever thought of claymore mines as just something you set up and like someone comes along trips it and you know as maybe a protection barrier, but you you guys use them for quite a few different roles. Can you just chat about that a little bit? or Yeah, the claymore mine was a I'm trying to think it'd be maybe like the general size or something like like this and have a bend to it. And if I said face towards enemy would have, I think 500 or 600 ball bearings with plastic explosives. So when you detonated it, there would be the wall of ball bearings that would go out. And I forget what the radius was, but it was very impressive.
01:48:54
Speaker
be The primary use was for RON security. So that we set up the RON at night, you put out claymores. So if any enemy hit us, you could blow out the claymores. Tactically, once you're in contact, like that, that missionary, we had used claymores. When, as we were going to the LZ, Bubba put them down with time fuses on them. And we were down and we ran a mission out of Cambodia. ah Thanksgiving Day and we found an NVA base camp. They came at us hard. It was flat, more open and we used the claymores extensively with ah with a clacker, with time fuses and a couple times we put down claymores with a five second fuse. You're getting that close to it. You put it down, pull it up against the tree and you go the other way. man That would blow up and that would slow down the NVA enough that we could get back to the LZ.
01:49:53
Speaker
I yeah imagine if nothing else, if you set out on a five second fuse and they're chasing you, even if you didn't, uh, you know, uh, if, even if they didn't receive like injury or casualty, the just explosion alone would make them pause for a while. yeah So you could, you could get a little bit farther away. Well, and then past they was run they ran into it and like one of our guys, well, Dick Thompson, he's done his books. It's, it's called a codename SOG codename dynamite. And very on he went very heavy. At night he was set up a perimeter with seven claymores all chained together. yeah And then behind it there would be three claymores. oh cheese wow he He carried more claymores per team than any team I ever heard of. and Interesting. And he used them a lot. Wow.
Jungle Warfare and Intelligence Gathering
01:50:41
Speaker
Oh yeah. And of course we used them in ambushes. So we have an ambush with a kill zone with plastic explosives that would knock one person out. And the claymores would kill everybody else.
01:50:52
Speaker
In on a trail then we had claymores on the side security and rear security So if any enemy hit us, we could blow the claymore off what one thing to like well just going back to we we briefly talked about sapper and um ah Soldiers and it's interesting. I did a little bit of research on that um and ah one of my one of my um guys on my crew right now is an ex combat engineer out of the British army. And he, I didn't realize this, but that combat engineer term was, they called him so sappers. Oh yeah. But in the Viet Cong or the North Vietnamese army, the sappers were more commando based. Is that correct? Correct. They were trained by 68. Uh, the end of 68 or 69, they had a battalion of sappers that were trained in layoffs. They trained up.
01:51:44
Speaker
could come for us. wow And they were they were trained to find us. Then when they found the team, their top commandos would come in wearing a loincloth, maybe a bandetta with an AK or a satchel charge with one or two magazines and maybe some kind of footwear. So they would come in and they were very stealthy. um So we were very fortunate. We never had direct contact with them. But as I said in the beginning, On the mission on January 1st, 69, in November 3rd and November the 10th of 69, we had teams that get hit by sappers. All the Americans left the indigenous life. And so by end of 69, early 70, they had over two battalions trained up, trustee they we called them SOG, Hunter Killer Teams.
01:52:41
Speaker
Hmm, man. That's just terrifying. Like in my mind, that's just like, just, you know, I can't, I can't imagine. And was it true, like going back to the claim words that they would sometimes try to come in and turn those claim words around? Like if you guys were in an ROA and like a rest overnight position, uh, they would come in and try to find your claim words and turn them around on you. That was the concern we always had. yeah Yeah. We never had that on our team. And there was, um, I don't remember any team directly. But I know some of the A-Camps, Greenboro A-Camps, where the enemy would get in and turn their claymore around so you detonated it, would come back into the camp.
01:53:20
Speaker
Man, that's just, man. The other thing, a little bit different, but related topic was like, you know, how was it at nighttime for you? Because I can't imagine how dark that would be in ah in a triple canopy, um you know, covering. Was it just like pitch black or how, like, could you see anything? It was darker than pitch black. You could put your hand in front of your face, you could feel the breeze, and it'd be this close, but you couldn't see it. cheese We had no no night vision at that time. yeah yeah They had a starlight scope. That was the early night vision, but it was big, long and heavy. They never took it to the field, just too much weight.
01:54:06
Speaker
Too much weight. And ah what were some of the other, um you were saying earlier that you got to play with some pretty cool state of the art equipment. what were What were some of the other cool things that you got to play with at that time that kind of, kind of that you remember? Well, you know, part of our training was not only did we train on our weapons, but we trained on enemy weapons. They also had a choice. They had like a crease guns. the Swedish Ks, Stenghals, and a few of those were with silencers. oh and for Some guys, they carried them a few times with the idea that they would take them out for an ambush where they could um kill somebody and have a complete silence. and Everybody hit a round being fired. And then they had experimental things like they had ah a rocket launcher for a weapon that was ah handheld
01:55:03
Speaker
It was in one of the James Bond movies. They they they actually used something like that. Oh, really? Yeah. And when it fired, like with the first two or three feet, if you had hit you, it wouldn't be too hard, but it got propulsion going. But once it got going, it hit. And we had one of our teams that carried him out and they fired it and misfired in the jungle. So we stopped. Nobody carried him to the field after that. I see. um I remember one of the missions that you you were chatting about. It's kind of funny now, but like at the time it was probably state of the art is, um, you had to, um, the guys had to input a, uh, a tape cassette and that was like state of the art back then. Is that true? boot state our yes We did our wiretaps. Yeah. And so like, all right. We, and again, so our South Vietnamese, they could climb the telephone pole or the tree where the wires were. They would climb up, put the wiretap in.
01:55:56
Speaker
and climb down the tree and put mud on the pole. So if anybody's walking, they wouldn't see the wire. And then they hook into it, then monitor it. And the CIA told us to always do the recording. Even if we didn't hear any talk, because the NVA phones, when they put them in the cradle, they were still alive. Oh, I see. And so the CIA would return the tapes. And of course, we never hear anything back. But they would amplify them 100 times. And they said they got intel for those. off of those phone conversations. So you would leave that tape cassette there and then come back and grab the tape and like swap it out with us. Oh, I see. Okay. We had tap. It was time to move. They pull it down and we pull it down. I got, I got you. I got you. Okay. Interesting. Um, the air force sensors, we put them in, there'd be a ah central unit with two coaxial cables and they're all buried. Everything was buried as just an antenna showing. So any traffic that came back or forth,
01:56:56
Speaker
It would monitor it, then the Air Force would come in and monitor what they picked up. Oh, thanks for road traffic. Road traffic, human, animals, whatever. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. Wow. No, that's amazing. Uh, we've covered a lot of ground here already today. Is there anything else that like that, that you could share with us, like that comes to mind or any like highlights that, uh, uh, other than that, that they I mean, those are a couple of key ones, but I know there's so many more and I'd love to do this again, of course with you. Um, but, uh, anything else that, uh, that you could share with the listeners?
Historical Reflections and Closing Remarks
01:57:31
Speaker
No, I just think that, um, no, we, uh, when we had, uh,
01:57:37
Speaker
We had April 30th, 1975, and today's veterans had August of 2021, the disgraceful pullout of Afghanistan in such a way that behind equipment had 13 people killed at the Abbey Gate. And the parallel, the only difference was, like in my case, I was just a poor reporter at a local newspaper and just living paycheck to paycheck. and couldn't do much to help our little people, guys that got me out alive. Whereas Afghanistan vets, they had cell phones and our SF people were able to help get thousands of Afghan allies out of the country. In fact, SODCAST number 46, we interviewed one of our guys who's Tom Lanning. He was a technician for SODCAST. He was a
01:58:35
Speaker
He helped over a thousand people get out of Afghanistan. yeah And he did this while he was in the army, at night, on spare time. Sometimes he'd be juggling two or three cell phones. Wow, holy crow. I think um Tim Kennedy had chatted quite a bit about that too. I think he had a bit of an involvement with trying to get people out of Afghanistan as well. Yes, he did. i I've never listened to tim Tim's podcast enough, but I've seen a couple of ah snippets. of him talking about that experience, those experiences. And like in my case, on whenever I look back on it, it's like the men I served with, both the Green Berets, I always judge people, any guy that I meet today, I judge them against the people I served with, including myself meeting them, I'm alive today thanks to them, the King, the pilots, our tack air. It was a great team effort, you know fighting communism.
01:59:30
Speaker
Just, just incredible, incredible individuals all the way around when you did two tours, is that correct? John, back for a second tour. And I had, um, I extended my enlistment in the army. So I go back, get back on, uh, my recon team. And so it basically it was a, it was a five month extension. So there me and the CEO had words in April, 1970. And, um, came home two weeks later because the reduction of force was coming. And to this day, I've just been very grateful for the people that I served with and those who put their lives on the line for the teams on the ground. Yeah. I mean, it's definitely, you know, again, like thank you for your service and all your teammates. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's just one of the most humbling stories that I've ever heard. And when you, when you came out of.
02:00:24
Speaker
Um, the military you went into, um, eventually you became, uh, well, of course an author, but you were in, you were a reporter for quite a while. Is that, is that true? I don't talk about it anymore because the media today is such an embarrassment. I mean, it's just, it's not real media anymore. It's just they have the mass media just seems to be programmed. Yeah. For more propaganda as opposed to reporting news. Right. Yeah. And then the decisions about stories they don't print. We won't print any stories. I mean, NPR was proud of the fact that they've refused to print a story ah about Hunter Biden's laptop. Yeah. The epitome of journalistic corruption. Right. Yeah. In my mind. Yeah. Yeah. Because journalists normally try to find them to try to find the news or report on what's going on and whatnot. But both sides of the story. Yeah. Yeah. Not just so Biden, but we we can get into another whole
02:01:21
Speaker
Yeah, for sure. Yeah. No, absolutely. One question. what One question I'm asking. I mean, Joe Biden has been hiding for five or six days. Nobody knows where he is. Right. Yeah. And then he also asked me because, well, the White House said he's really, is he dead or not? Or is he alive? What's the story? We don't know. Yeah, no, no, it's so strange. So such strange times. One, one question that I'm trying to ask all of the people that come on the podcast is, I don't know if do you, do you drink coffee by chance or is it Pope Catholic? Do you like sex?
02:02:00
Speaker
So one one question I ask everyone is, uh, if you were to have a cup of coffee with anyone, uh, you know, historically alive or past, is there anyone that, uh, that you, that you would, uh, that comes to mind that you'd want to have coffee with? George Washington. Oh, right on. Absolutely. Yeah. yeah And that'd be an amazing conversation, right? Indeed. Yeah. Yeah. I, I've been saying, um, cause I, like I've with a couple other guests, I've been saying Napoleon is one that I'd love to have a conversation with like maybe a couple of days outside of one of his big bottles and a tent just to kind of have a chat and sort of sit down and, you know, sort of, you know, pick his brain on these tactics and the different things that he, that he's done. But, uh, Oh yeah. We need an interpreter. Yeah. That's right. I would actually. Yeah. That's right. It was always wrist and Churchill.
02:02:53
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah. That's another big one that comes up. A lot of people would love to have a sit down with Winston Churchill. And I said to my one friend, Stefan, uh, yeah, I guess you'd have tea with him and he laughed at me. He goes, no, uh, Winston would definitely want, uh, you know, a whiskey or something along those lines. or Sure. Well, thank you so much, John. Uh, I've got about a million other questions and I'd love to chat about all the other missions too, but, uh, I figure like this is a couple hours and you know, you, your time is valuable too. And I appreciate you coming on and and taking the time to, to chat with me about this. It's been great. Oh, thank you. It's it's my honor. And, uh, always glad to talk to a firefighter, hardworking firefighter, you know? Oh, thank you. I will hear more of your stories.
02:03:36
Speaker
The fire service has been a blessing for me. I you know i came from not a lot and you know it really I had a lot of guys that were really kind of almost like dad figures for me and they really guided me along the way or father figures and it kind of really set me on a good track. and You know, it's a lab and I've been, you know, I've got between career and volunteer time about 33 years now. So it's, it's been, ah it's been, it's been a terrific, uh, journey for sure. Lots of adventures, ah nothing like yours, but but but fun my my wife's cousin is a Ray Hamill. He was a firefighter with LA fire. Oh, right on. And he had incredible stories. I mean, they lost men. Yeah. And there's, there was one fire. He was fighting on the roof and they caught it on camera when the roof collapsed.
02:04:24
Speaker
man so Oh, yeah. and In Trenton, we had some horrific fires there where we lost firefighters. It's just like um unbelievable. So there's a lot of risk involved fighting fires. It's one of those things, you know, i I try to say to the young fellows and and that it's just, you know, don't get complacent because this job can bite, you know, if if if you're not, if you're not, you're not on your game, right? So it's definitely one of those things where it's important to try to train and and be aware. And hopefully everyone goes home safe at the end of the day. Absolutely. Yeah. Well,
02:05:03
Speaker
Well, thank you so much, John. I appreciate your time. It's great. Uh, it's, uh, I hope maybe in the future we can have you back on. That'd be amazing. And just remember yeah model with your skill and your talent. We can go places. ah Thank you so much, John. I appreciate it. That's awesome. time God bless. Thank you. That's great.