#276 Nick Brokhausen - The Deadliest Stories From Vietnam with MACV-SOG

Mr. Nick Brockhausen. Welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Sean.

It's an honor having you guys.

Likewise.

Thank you.

Thank you.

So we got connected through tilt, correct?

Oh yeah, tilt.

It's so nice to see him in men's clothing again.

Oh my gosh.

What did he use to wear?

Well, right on.

Well, seriously, I tell all you guys this and everybody

that I've interviewed from the Vietnam Generation.

And I just want to say how much, and I don't say this lightly,

how much of an honor it is to have you here.

And when I was growing up, the Vietnam Generation

has what inspired me to join service, become a Navy SEAL,

and fight for my country.

And it truly is.

It was the movies.

It was the guys.

It was everything to me about the Vietnam Generation

that it just fascinated me from a young age.

And still to this day, I think you guys are just a special

breed of human beings.

And so it means it stops.

I'm going to have to buy a new hat.

No.

Right on.

But no, I'm being serious.

So welcome home.

Well, I appreciate that.

And I got to tell you, the new generation,

every once in a while, you get the distinct honor

of working with special forces, SEALs, whatever.

And I got to say, you're all right, proper rascals.

The same spirit, the same drive, the same professionalism,

is still there.

It's a pleasure to interact with them.

And it gives me faith that we actually have a chance

to recover the Republic.

Yeah.

Yeah.

You know, I know every new generation gets a lot of shit.

You know, but they weren't as hard, and they're not as tough.

But the ones that I made are shit-hot fucking operators.

And lots has changed.

I feel like I'm a dinosaur now.

I'm sure you do, too.

So with the way warfare is conducted now,

but those guys are truly innovative.

And it's really cool to see.

But, you know, the SEALs, special forces, they've all evolved.

And in some aspects, they become one dimensional.

And Iraq was a, and Afghanistan was a reason for that.

They became Dora Kickers.

You know, our generation was more working with the indedge

and training them, equipping them,

and leading them into counterinsurgency.

And they're slowly but surely going back to that.

And I'm glad to see that.

Because that's really where you're the individualism

and the teamwork really shine when they start going back to the basic.

You know, SF was based on the OSS.

You know, our lineage was that you were going to get jumped into somebody else's country.

And you might spend seven years there fighting a war in that.

So, you know, the training for it, the mentality, the nexus was based around that concept.

And I'm glad to see that they're finally getting back to that in such a way

that they can become a really effective tool.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, we haven't really talked much about the OSS.

Do you want to go into that a little bit?

Well, what I know about, I'm not Victor David Hansen.

I'm no great intellect.

I do read though.

Yeah, the OSS was, you know, in the beginning when they started the OSS,

Donovan was given the OSS Office of Strategic Service.

And it was a battle with J. Edgar Hoover.

Because J. Edgar Hoover wanted it all.

He wanted to be, you know, the guy who was putting FBI agents in,

where OSS as agents actually ended up going.

And they did a compromise with them.

They gave him the counterintelligence role in the US and in South America.

So the FBI had limited influence in South America and Mexico.

Because the Nazis had a huge, huge station in Mexico.

They were operating out of Mexico, northern Colombia, places like that, Argentina.

But, you know, the OSS was originally designed to provide war fighters.

People that could go in, provide strategic intelligence on the Nazis and under military

and what they were doing in other countries and that.

And what he did is he picked businessmen.

People that had traveled in Germany.

People that traveled that were maybe natives of Italy, Bulgaria, Armenia, whatever.

And drew them in and formed the OSS.

And they had different divisions of it.

And each of those divisions had a certain amount of latitude how they operated.

But the whole thing was based on clandestine, you know.

We're not going to be, make a big show like the Commandos and that.

We're going to drop you out of a Lancaster bomber and a business suit.

And you're going to get on the ground and go to meet your contacts in that country.

And then start providing intel back.

And then after the war, they got rid of the OSS and it became the Central Intelligence Agency.

And it really ruined it when they did that because it took away some of that expertise

and Iran of the operators from World War II.

But the OSS was a very effective tool.

I just read a white paper written by an E8 from a 10th group.

I named Kevin O'Connor, OC.

280 pounds of moving Irish intellect.

Where he suggested, and it's a good suggestion, is to do away with special ops

and turn it back into the OSS.

And have the same different divisions in that within it.

For one thing, centralized purchasing.

There's so much redundancy in the purchasing.

And second of all, it does away with each service having their special operations division.

Put them all in one unit, make them all warrant officers.

So perfect rank to operate in.

You've got officers, you've got warrant officers, but you don't have NCOs anymore.

And if you transfer into it, you automatically become a warrant officer.

What did this white paper come out?

He wrote it.

Oh, I know.

He wrote it in Al Mullins edited it.

Thank God.

About six months ago.

Six months ago?

Yeah.

And I think he sent it to the Secretary of Defense.

Or he might have sent it to the center as a suggestion.

Here it is.

I think that's a genius idea.

What do you think about that?

It's got some flaws, but it's much better than what they're operating under now.

I'm just curious, why do you think that would be better?

I have my own opinions.

See, how do I put it?

They've got the ability to act without massive oversight.

You know, this whole organization in Special Forces stands on the shoulders of 12 men.

And they forgot that.

You've got siops, and you've got civil affairs, and you've got, you know, ribbon cutting, outfit, or some other hoopla.

Those are all support units.

They're not special operations.

I don't consider them a special operation.

I'm sure that people in siops are arguing about, you know, they actually captured this or captured that when they were out in the countryside.

But really, it's all based on a SEAL team and an A team.

Those guys are where the rubber meets the road.

And, you know, we give you an example.

When over the years, I had people come to me and go, what kind of special school did you go to to get in CCN?

Well, a prior felony helped.

We were selected because it was just another SF assignment.

It was no more than that.

You'd go there and you'd do your thing in Vietnam, and then you'd come back to the States.

You might get assigned to the Red Empire or the 10th group.

And then you did the missions that they had on the board and that.

But it gave you a vast pool of knowledge and cross-pollinization with people that actually know how to operate on the ground.

You know, that's interesting.

What units would he have?

What did the white paper say?

Well, he broke it down into how they would, you know, structure it, the T-O-N-E.

And, you know, how the big thing that he was concentrating on was, I'm looking for the right word here.

Sometimes they trip.

The ability to act independently without micromanagement to give that power and authority and responsibility down to the working level in order to get the job done.

Because that, when the, where the rubber meets the road, that's where innovation comes from.

And expertise.

He, you know, another thing was, you know, the weapons trying to do similar weapons.

So you don't, again, relaying back to why by six different systems when two actually will do the job.

And standardization makes it easier for ammunition, parts, supply, you know, and training, simplifying it.

I hope they do it.

I mean, I know it would, I think I might have a copy of it.

I'll forward it to you.

I would love to read it.

I mean, I think that it would be, you know, I got to be honest.

I didn't know that's how it used to be.

But, well, you know, we today, you go into fifth group, you stay in the fifth group.

In my day, you go to the tenth group, you'd be there for three years.

You might get transferred to dead A or get transferred to the sixth group or, you know, the first group, whatever.

And that's allowed for a lot of cross-pollimization and that.

And you met guys that were doing different things.

Yeah.

And you were able to give your input and take the errors and move on with it.

You know, not only that, but the first thing that came to my mind when you're talking about, you know, consolidating all the special operations under one umbrella

that's not the Navy Army Marine Corps.

Yeah, it's owned, actually, it's owned branch.

It's owned branch.

It's owned branch.

I've always thought this was a good idea.

I think it pissed a lot of people off because the history would, you know, that would be the end of the Green Berets, the Navy Seals.

I made a suggestion one time to be able to put the Navy under the Marine Corps.

I pulled my pecker out in front of them.

Yeah.

But I think it just gets rid of the competition.

And when I mean competition, I don't mean, you know, Green Berets, you see, I mean, competition is in the salesmanship that goes into who's going to get what specific operation.

I would think that that all goes away because it will be put on some type.

It won't all go away, but it'll make it a lot cleaner.

A lot more transparent.

Yeah.

And then the other thing is after World War II, we had all these bases all over the world, you know, Germany everywhere, right?

And those become the commands themselves.

You know, Ucom, Suncom, Africa, Paycom.

And so, you know, those, whoever's in charge of Ucom, for example, has two seal platoons and two SF units.

And, you know what I mean, they have that allocated to Ucom.

And those leaders never want to, they never want to give up an asset no matter what's going on in the rest of the world.

So that creates a shortage because you have to send a fucking task unit of seals to Germany when there's two wars going on in the Middle East.

And if you had something like that, then it rips everything, it rips all the assets from these people that are fucking hoarding it for no reason.

And they all get allocated into the, you see what I'm into the actual war zone, the conflict that is happening right now.

A good example of that waste of talent and energy was, I was in Detachment A in Berlin for six years.

And Dead A reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

And the commanding general of Ucom didn't like that.

They didn't like the fact that we were op-com to Chiefs of Staff and not under his T.O. and E.

And eventually he got his way and got a hatchet man in there and basically made the excuse that the cover that we were using was too transparent and they should reorganize it.

They made it into an MP outfit and gave him the added tendency. Dead A had the counterterrorism mission and their primary mission, which was a stay behind mission,

case the Russians got drunk and decided to invade. And they would invade and we'd disappear into the population and start blowing up their rail yards and telecommunications and that.

And then we picked up the counterterrorism mission because nobody else was ready.

Blue light was in the process of forming and Charlie and Delta were in their infancy.

So we were the, the, the designate if something happened in Europe or the Middle East for about I think four years before they got totally spun up.

But he kept that mission and, and kept the primary mission and then added a mission after he got control over it,

of doing security for all the diplomats overseas, checking their houses, checking the embassies, checking their toilet, you know, whatever.

And the guys did a, that unit did a superlative job, but it was, it was unnecessary.

Yeah, you know, they was the application of a separate unit to do that.

You know, because the dip security guys were the state department, mostly SF anyway.

And you know, they've got that job.

Yeah, redundancy.

They, they've got all of that on the range of stuff in it, and it's assigned task harder.

Yeah, they, you know, is hardened.

Yeah, yeah.

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Let's get into your story real quick.

Well, not real quick.

It's going to be a long interview, but everybody starts off with an introduction.

Nick Brockhausen, a green beret with a 17-year career in the U.S. Special Forces, including

multiple combat tours in Vietnam.

A veteran of the highly classified MACV-SAG running covert recon missions deep into enemy

territory in Laos in Vietnam is part of recon team Habu in command and controlled north.

The author of WeFu U.S. Special Forces in Vietnam and its sequel, Whispers in the Tall

Grass.

You've since had adventures around the world and now run a tech company and an armory.

This is a quote that I love.

I'm cured for life of ever dating red-headed women or even making eye contact with them.

Oh, never make eye contact.

It isn't that I'm bonkers over them.

They find me as some sort of training aid.

I just don't have the deranged state in body fluids for that exercise anyway.

I don't.

Really?

I run from them.

Oh, shit, I love that.

Well Nick, before we get started, I got a couple of things here.

So everybody that comes on the show, it's a bag of ease, those are vigilance leak gummy

beers.

Oh, good for the trip back.

That's right.

That's right.

Thank you.

You're welcome made here in the USA.

And I got, have you ever heard of U.S. CCA?

No.

Well, U.S. CCA is a soft spot in their heart for a Vietnam that's just like I do.

And so they wanted me to give this to you.

Oh, thank you.

This is.

So basically, that is an insurance policy for life.

And if you ever have to defend yourself, your family, your friends, whatever happens,

these guys will provide you the legal advice, the legal funding.

Well, I'm old school.

In help you.

I really don't need the insurance policy if you don't leave any witnesses.

Well, if you do leave a witness, the USACA will be there to help you.

Thank you.

As long as it's, you know, legitimate self-defense.

So, but, uh, legitimate self-defense.

Did you have an oxymoron?

I don't know.

I don't know.

But, well, thank you.

You're welcome.

Thank you.

You're welcome.

All right, Nick.

So I want to do, I want to do a life story on you, starting a childhood.

So where did you grow up?

Well, my life started in 1969 when I was accepted into Special Forces selection course.

Brought to that.

Is that where you want to start?

Well, I grew up poor, relatively poor.

My parents were, my dad was a former Army Air Corps.

My stepdad and my mom was a waitress, a cook, you know, just like from Clockwork Orange

or what, what are you?

Well, my father was Russian.

My mother was a waitress, you know.

But they raised four kids on a waitress salary and a, and a bartender and we, we actually,

we lived in North Dakota and my dad had a farm.

We had a 640 acres or something like that.

We raised cattle, hogs, chickens and grain, you know, we sold all of the above.

And two years of drought and another two years of floods put us out of the farming business.

Yeah.

My dad was able to keep the farm and he took the money from the sale of the machinery and

everything.

And we moved to Minnesota to a little town called Glenwood.

And he opened a bar hotel and restaurant, all in one building.

And that's where I spent my formative, from the time I was a preteen until I was old enough

to be drafted or whatever.

And it was a great life, I mean, I, you know, I hunted, I fished, I skipped school to

go squirrel hunting, you know, hid the, hid the guns and the hollow tree outside where

the, where they had what they call a shop class and we'd skitter out over the roof of the

building, go squirrel hunting all afternoon.

So I was very adept in the woods, you know, we, my brother and I had ran a trap, a trap

line for a number of years, you know, for, make money to buy school clothes.

No kidding.

Yeah.

That Montgomery Ward and JC Penney's, you know, order your school clothes and that, and

your school clothes in the year before it became your work and play clothes.

What would you sell the fish, huh?

The trot line.

Oh, trap line.

Yeah.

Outside of Glenwood, it was all woods, woods and farm line.

We trapped Mank.

It was a big swamp area that, a number of them and that, that, that muskrat, Mank, Martin,

Fishercats, you know, all of which brought good money and, porcupines.

No kidding.

Yeah.

Now, I got caught, my brother and I, you know, we, we killed these four porcupines and

they were the bounty for porcupines that you had to take the nose, right?

And then you pickle it and you take it down to the game ward and you send it in, you

know, and you get, I think it was like 25 bucks for a porcupine.

So we're, we're skinned into porcupines and that, and I skinned the pads off their

paws and dropped it in the pickling of, it's a nose.

So instead of one nose, we now have five noses per porcupine, so we, and dumb kids, you

know, we, we turned them all in and that game warden was drinking buddy of my father.

He called my father up and he goes, well, either you're two boys have cleaned out every porcupine

between here and the Canadian border or they're up to something.

So he sent it into the University of Minnesota.

And of course, it comes back.

These are paws and these are noses and that.

And they took his down and, you know, scared the shit out of us by locking us into jail

cell.

I think I was like 12 or 13 at the time, you know, a lot of fun, you know, I learned, I learned

how to exist in the woods, you know, learned how to track, learned how to, you know, learn

to animals, learn their habits, you know, down a lot of fun with my brother and my little

brother who was built like a crash dummy because that's the only way he survived childhood.

And then eventually, you know, I went into the military and eventually evolved and I learned

to ground your rules for the military and then applied for special forces and was accepted

in 1968 or 69.

And I went to, went to jump school, went to SF selection course, came out of the selection

course and went to Vietnam for my second tour.

What was your first tour?

I remember the Marines.

The Marines.

You were a Marine.

Did I just mumble that?

Why are you mumbling?

I didn't.

And I have a lot of respect for the Marine Corps, you know.

Me too.

He taught me my craft, taught me that, you know, I actually could work under pressure.

You know, when I first transferred services, you know, they got to go through the basic training

AIT and then you're in a casual status for a certain amount of time before I went to

special forces selection course, I went to Korea and I was with the second division

up there on the DMZ.

During the Pueblo incident, I'm not familiar with that.

There was a spice ship that the North Koreans captured.

And at the same time, they sent a 40-man commando outfit down the soul to try and assassinate

the president of South Korea.

And the second division was in the sector.

Everybody in the country was hunting for these guys.

They got recognized at the front gate of the Blue Palace because the guard recognized

their accent wasn't from the south.

And a running gun battle started there.

And they, I was, my company was assigned as a backup unit to the Koreans.

The White Horse Division that eventually went to Vietnam when the Koreans.

And they tracked down the last 15 survivors.

And we were part of the sweep that drove them up on top of this mountain.

And they committed suicide at the last minute and I got transferred from there and then

back to Fort Benning to go to jump school and then eventually into special forces.

Why did you join the Marine Corps first?

I got drafted.

You got drafted.

How did the...

Okay.

What was that like?

It was like the Marines.

To get drafted.

I mean, how did the letter come out and stuff like that?

I was going to a list.

You know, and just time and events caught up with me before I could in less.

And those days you couldn't step out of the line and move over and in less and take a three

year in the Army when you were designated and you went, you know, and it was interesting.

What was your first who were like?

What was your first who were in Vietnam like?

A line company.

You never knew where you were going.

Just know that you were going to get in a fight.

And eventually, you know, you'd get mulled or you'd mulled them and then come back to it.

And the same thing was in Korea with the second division.

We were up on the DMZ and that's all we did was we either were in the towers or we were

over in the DMZ doing hundred killer patrols.

Same exact thing, just more intense in Vietnam than it was in Korea.

No, shit.

How was South Korea?

What?

How was Korea?

Cold.

Cold.

Cold.

Wet.

Nasty.

Everything smelled like human shit.

And while the demilitarized zone, there was nobody over there.

They basically cleared all the Koreans out there and the southern part of the DMZ.

Once you crossed the M. Jim River, you were in the demilitarized zone.

And that extended up to the actual border.

And then you had the line of towers and wire, which they were just putting in during that time.

They didn't have them.

Originally, there was just foxholes.

You didn't went out and they had set up machine gun positions and then the foxholes and like a line outfit does.

And then gradually, they started replacing that with a fence system.

And 25 foot wooden towers with machine guns.

And then they had gates and there was a minefield.

This side and a desk strip that was raked and cleaned so you could see tracks.

And then on the north side of the border, there were some minefields.

But there was a lot of old minefields left over from the war.

She had to really beat me.

A lot of them were marked and a lot of them weren't.

She had to be really careful where you were moving about the hunter.

I like the hunter killer patrol better than I like the static.

Just sitting there all night, getting eaten by mosquitoes in the summertime and freezing your balls up in the winter.

A lot of interesting.

That's where I first discovered kimchi.

Kimchi.

You know what kimchi is?

No.

Pickled cabbages.

Oh, I do know what that is.

Wow.

I make my own now.

Nice.

You store it in porcelain jars and in the old days, you used to put a like a straw stopper in the top of it.

It was about that big around and I stepped through one of them out in a DMZ and pulled my foot out of it.

What is that?

In the Koreans, I rode with when fuckmen nuts.

Oh, kimchi.

You know, they started dipping that with their canteen cups and that.

But a lot of destroyed villages really kind of ghostly moving around in.

You know, a lot of fog, a lot of activities some months and a lot of months with no activity.

You know, they were always trying to probe the wire and get through and slip infiltrators in.

There was a funny story.

There was a our sister unit was a third battalion of the 38th.

And they had that there's two bridges across the image.

One down by Pam and John and one up north by Nuloree.

And the one up north was called Freedom Bridge.

And they had machine gun posts along the bridge looking down into the MGM river,

which at that point is probably a couple hundred meters wide.

And if it during the monsoon season, it's flooded.

It's moving fast.

This was kind of in between.

And one of the machine gun posts opened up just blast away.

It's got a submarine in the water.

And of course, they had started to guard the tenant ran out there and they looked.

They don't see shit, right?

So they the guy was a spec four.

They took him back and they had him down to the the the spikes to make sure he wasn't didn't crack up in that.

And then he was going, I saw a submarine.

I saw a submarine.

I had bullshit, right?

Two weeks later, a mini slip washed up on a sand bar.

You serious?

Between that bridge and the next bridge with the crewman still in it.

He had shot the conning tower and the one guy got stuck in the escape hatch and they all drowned.

Well, he died of it.

They made him a staff sergeant and sent him back to the states.

Wow.

With all kinds of little incidents like that.

You know, they tried many subs off the coast, many subs up to the MGM.

A lot of times trying to come across in wraps, you know, either rubber wraps or wraps.

They made out of vegetation and trying to just float across and make their way stripped down and come across.

Of course, in those days, we had the mighty PRC six walkie-talkie where it's squad level.

And I think it was the PRC 10, which you had to calibrate all the time to keep it on frequency.

You expect there was too much humidity in the air for it to stay on frequency.

A lot of the weapon was M14s.

And I think my first got over to, we still had BARs for the squad automatic weapon and not rather than the M14 E2.

Because all that shit was going south.

But interesting tour.

I remember when it took from the DMZ to Seoul was a grueling, bouncing, jarring ride in the back of a doucin' app that took three and a half hours.

On the Audubon now, the freeway takes 15 minutes to get from Seoul to the DMZ.

Jeez.

So how long were you there?

Love months.

And where did you go from there?

I went to Jump School.

You went to Jump School?

Right.

And from Jump School into a selection.

Where was the Vietnam, where was the Vietnam?

Before that.

Okay.

Do you want to talk about that?

Same as Korea being a grunt.

I have an undying love for the Corps.

If they'd spent all that money on the Corps, they would have had a true UW capability.

Like I said, I made the suggestion once that the Marine should be in charge of the Navy.

And it wasn't well taken in that.

But I learned discipline.

And I learned that I could operate under pressure.

And I learned that I could take a lot of suffering and still keep going.

And that helped me a lot when I decided to transfer over.

First of all, I went in the Army and in Special Forces because you could get promoted.

You didn't have to wait for somebody to die of the chain of the command for a slot to open.

And at that time, Special Forces was bogged and go into the Green Berets.

It's to be all the man to come here, whatever the slogan was.

And I found it interesting.

I found it really interesting.

I read a lot when I was in high school.

Like you said, about the OSS, about the Commandos, the Rangers, and the Raiders.

All those specialized outfits.

And it seemed like the thing that I could fit well in.

How did you, did you see any man, any saw guys when you were in the Marine Corps?

No, no, no.

You know, even when I was at CCN, we worked with Tung Dushan, the SEALS over Tung Dushan.

How was that?

It was fun.

I mean, they had a worn officer named Mr. Johnson, a funny guy.

A wip cruel, too, if he had to be.

And we used to change, you know, equipment.

You know, you need this.

Well, I got some extra of that.

RPD lengths.

Yeah, we got some of those, you know.

RPDs.

Yeah, we got four of those extra in that.

Back and forth.

And we did a couple of missions where they supported us.

One time with a full seat, the SEAL team on amphibious landing to blow up a bridge.

And they, a typhoon or some sort of storm came up.

They got washed way down the coast and didn't make the rendezvous.

And we came in from the land.

And we found their boats.

They washed up down the coast and that.

And they managed to infiltrate in and get picked up by a helicopter and that.

But they didn't make the target.

And we didn't make the target consequently, too.

Bad storm.

Yeah.

They had some Marines with the SEALs that were working with the nasty boats.

You know what the nasty boats are?

They don't.

It gets kind of convoluted.

The CIA ran some of the projects.

And the military was gradually taking over from them.

The nasty boats were Norwegian PT boats.

Okay.

Real fast, you know, armed to the teeth and that.

And what they were doing, they were going up in the North Vietnam and taking agents and putting them with shore with those boats.

And same thing doing raids and coming back out.

And there was there were force recon Marines that were with them with the SEALs working on that project and that.

I never.

It's like now you see all these guys that you know claim that their unit was max on.

You know, the force recon was max off.

I don't know if it was ever on the T.O. and E.

I never saw force recon running recon missions for max on.

They might have, you know, I was in one project or two others, three others.

You know, that's possible.

But you know, max saw originally was the SEALs and special forces.

The SEALs were down south, you know, where you guys, you know, with places flooded, it's your natural habitat.

Keep your skin wet all the time, you know, go into hyperventilation.

And up anything north into the Highlands and up up to North Vietnam was, you know, our kind of terrain.

So it was those two units that basically made up the core of it.

I did a study on my own when I was writing my first two books.

The original T.O. and E for max saw.

Max V saw was 1,174 Americans assigned to it.

That included all the officers, all the, you know, the support units, all the radio relay sites, all the, you know, the people that were at the launch sites.

And the two sections of it that actually ran ground combat operations.

So you take all that support stuff and shove it over here.

You have, all right, we had 18 teams that were recon.

And usually each team had two Americans assigned to it.

So sometimes three, but two normally, that's 36 people in recon company.

The hatchet force, they had two guys per patoon or whatever you got three patoons.

They had six guys in each company and they had three companies.

So 18 there, 36.

It's 148 people that are on the ground running operations on the ground.

And I've met 18,000 of them since I left the war.

Because everybody, I was, yeah, I was in Max V saw.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah.

It's a very small group.

I think there was, during its entire time, we took those numbers and translated into nine years.

And that's about about 4,000 plus people.

And only half of us survived the war, little less than half of us survived the war.

So it's, it's a small, small fraternity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very elite.

And I, I mean, I go to the S away every year because there's 30 guys I'd like to drink with that are like brothers.

And rest of that hoopolo with the politicians and that I've never been to a business meeting yet.

They've tried a number of times to shut the bar down during the business meeting.

One time we got physical with the sergeant of arms and they've given up on that idea.

We don't go there for that.

Yeah.

And in these days, well, when, when we first started the S O A, it was for recon.

And then we went, well, that's not fair.

The guys in the hatchet force should be in it too.

So we let the guys from the hatchet force in.

Then we let the guys that were at the launch sites in and the cubby writers and people like that.

And then when we were out doing things, I went to Africa for a while doing that.

I wasn't going all the time.

The colonel has gotten charged.

And then they started, they needed members.

So they said, well, well, if you served in a unit that supported Macsox.

And that's how we got all the rotor heads in there.

Well, I didn't disagree with the helicopter crews that flew us in.

And they were dumb enough to come back and pick us up.

You know, but you know, I didn't want their basketball control officer in there.

You know, they're their H and R guy or whatever they call them.

So you ended up with a lot of people that were ramps that got blessed into the organization.

I gotcha.

But there were fewer and fewer of us left every year.

You know, the ranks are really, really thinning.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So what, when did you actually die an operate?

Did you, did you get out of service and then reinlessed in the army?

Or did you?

No, no, no.

Did you cross the board transfer?

Well, yeah.

I had left at one and had to join the other.

Okay.

Basically, it's how it worked in those days.

And you joined the army to go Macvison to go join the army to go special forces.

Okay.

And I got, I was in casual status so they, you know, they sent me to Korea while I was waiting to get a slot.

Gotcha.

I will just put you over here.

You'll be comfortable.

Gotcha.

You already know what mosquitoes are like.

Let's, let's take a quick break.

When we come back, we'll get into selection.

Selection?

Well, I don't know if I want to go into that.

You don't?

I'm joking.

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All right, Nick. We're back from the break.

We're getting ready to get into selection.

Well, selection.

Well, in those days it was phase one, phase two and phase three.

Phase one was a camp recall.

I can't remember how long ago.

I think it was like a month.

You went out and you learned basic patrolling and learned survival.

You learned target recognition, all the things that, you know, woodcraft in it.

And you jumped in and you lived in those days.

We lived in tents, GP mediums.

And the only structures in camp McCall or tarp paper shacks for the headquarters and the medic cloud and the classrooms were open air or sometimes, you know, under canvas and that.

Interesting, interesting four weeks.

A really intensive training with, you know, guys that the guy who, the funny story, the guy who taught survival was an E7 name Rodney.

Rodney I think was his first name, nail.

And nail had a black eyepatch because he got shot by an AK through his eye.

Now at one site and he was a typical crusty old red deck, right?

And, you know, he taught you how to, you know, they'd kill snakes and, you know, they'd rabbits and other animals and teach you how to cook things, you know, take a.

Chickens that wrap them in mud and then put them in the colds of a fire and go do patrolling all day when you came back.

You just peel the mud off and it's a roast chicken, right, stuff like that.

So we were getting ready to finish up phase one.

And I was with a guy named Tony Anderson.

Tony got a DSC when RT Kansas got wiped out.

And he was a, he was a pull shark when before he'd come in the army in that real real cool guy.

He said his nickname was fast atty.

And, nail is sitting or we were getting ready to get, go back to Ford Bragg and go into our MOS training.

And, nail was telling us, well, you know, we ain't got no booze here, but you can get high.

If you take the mortar charges from the four dudes, because they looked like little cheese packets.

So just bite off a little bit, it was denture glycerin.

So what he didn't tell us was that all your capillaries explode.

So Tony and I ate a little bit too large of a chunk and we ended up in Womack Army hospital.

And they thought we had meningitis.

We're laying in the hospital ward and the doctor comes in and he goes, he has his clipboard and he goes, let me ask you something.

Either one of you two gentlemen know Sergeant Nail.

And I asked her, I said, well, he usually gets one or two of the students in every class.

Only don't have meningitis, but you do have some damage to your capillaries and that.

But it was, you know, it was a good training, a lot of good guys that I went through, you know, training group with.

Or, you know, went over to become part of Saug or at that time they were still filling up the eight teams over there.

They were still active and the Mike force was active still.

Then I went to from there to weapons training and I was 11 Charlie.

Now I think it's an 18 Charlie or I think they're all 18 BBs now.

But you went to small arms, pistols first then submachine guns and carbines and then rifles and machine guns.

And then the next phase of that training was heavy weapons training and you train and it was both foreign and US.

And we shot, you know, the Bren gun, we shot the, you know, the RPD, we shot, you know, the, the Madsen, the Swedish K, all of those were in the curriculum and that.

Both classes, assembly, disassembly, so you could do it in a dark.

And then finally range got to the range and, you know, combat course, you know, regular,

marksmanship training and that with each weapon.

And then you transferred to mortars and, and we trained on the four dues, the 81, the 60, both the Russian 82 and the Russian equivalent of the 60.

And then recoilless rifles, 57 millimeter to 106, the Russian equivalent and German equivalents and that.

And then the four dues, we did the four dues and then the 105 power sir.

So we learned up to the 105 doing both and you train both in the gun crew and then the fire direction control and then the forward observers.

Light fire on the ranges, calling in fire while the rest of, you know, we had some of you were manning the gun.

Some of you were the FDC and some of you were out there as forward observers and that.

Very intense, of course, very, very compacted.

So a lot of, a lot of practical exercise combined with teaching in the classroom.

And then when you finish that, meanwhile, those others from your phase one who were decided that they were going to be sparkies went to combo training.

And they did Morse code day after day after day after day after day and they learned how to operate both our radios and the Soviet radios and that.

And the engineers went off and learned how to build things, you know, framing framing barracks doing shit like that and also blowing things up.

Very intense, of course, in demolitions and that.

And then the radio engineers, well, oh, yeah, the medics, you know, how medics are right.

You know, sick, sick.

There's a strange, strange, really goofy laying in religion anywhere in the world.

You can bet both your medics are practicing.

And highly intelligent with the bedside banner of Dr. Mangula, you know, they go for a real long course.

And in those days, it was over a year.

They go to fly, they do, they go to the 300 F1 course.

And then they would come back and do dog lab.

And dog lab was, they used to shoot dogs.

And then their job was treat the wound, manage the wound, heal the wound, bring the dog back, right?

And all the, you know, the cruelty to animal people got, got under case and it changed over to doing on goats.

And the only step different is removing the Arab from the back of the goat.

But very intense, of course, to this day, I would rather have a special forces medics treat me than any doctor.

No kidding.

There's, in fact, there's, there's a guy that teaches the seal teams, combat medicine.

A guy named Ron Broughton, who was in Berlin with me.

He originally was a Project 404 in Laos.

And he went, he came to dead A and he was a medic there.

And eventually he runs like 20 emergency rooms in Florida and teaches up at the, what is it?

Little Creek.

You know, to combat medicine there.

Muscled up, really died almost white blonde hair.

And we call him Doc Savage.

Nice.

And he does have the bedside banner of Dr. Manila.

It doesn't hurt that bad.

But a special forces medics, they, 18, what do they call them, deltas?

Is that same in the seals, 18 deltas?

Well, they're going through the army's delta course.

Yeah.

Absolutely wonderful course.

You know, a special forces medics in the old days could get licensed as a practicing physician

in over 20 countries.

No kid.

And the training was that good and that, that well respected.

And to this day, it's one of the best courses that the military offers.

Don't leave them alone with your girlfriends or household pets.

And then when you finish with your MOS training, you went to phase three.

And they brought everybody back together and formed up teams.

Regular 12-man team.

There'd be two officers assigned to it.

They had gone to their own course over here, which, you know, taught them how not to scratch their nuts with a salad fork or whatever.

And they would join the team and then they'd jump you into gobbler woods, exercise.

And you'd actually operate as an A team in an unconventional warfare scenario and that.

And once you, in phase three, also had a real intensive class in the beginning of it,

which was called methods of instruction, where they taught you how to teach, taught you how to teach the military way,

how to compress all that knowledge of four hours of data into one hour and make it stick.

So the dumbest guy in the class could give it.

And then you moved on from there and taught you things like stage presence.

You know, don't walk around with Air Force gloves on, hands in your pockets.

Don't be a sword fighter with the, you know, with the stick, you know.

And how to tell jokes to lighten things up in that, you know.

Some of the jokes I heard were really lame too.

But that was a good part of that.

And they taught you the.

Special Forces operations as an A team.

But each MOS's responsibility were, you know, how to tie each other together with a team sergeant and with the officers and that.

And once you went to graduate from that, you, in those days, you didn't get a flash on the back of your beret,

behind a crest until you graduated from the, the, the cube course that they call a job.

Then you got a, before that, you had a candy, candy flash.

No, you didn't have a flash at all.

It was support troops that had the candy flash, the little ribbon, the same colors as a, as a group patches and that.

Okay. Yeah. And then once you were three qualified, that was the beginning.

You went to a group and you were actively assigned to a team.

And you started operating in a special forces team, you know, and whatever their missions were. Where did you go?

I went to the six group, like I said, it was a holding area for people that, and I was in a six group.

I think for like six months, seven months, something like that.

We did a real interesting.

And in those days, the, the red empire, bling, didn't have South America.

It was the eighth group, which was stationed out of Panama.

And we did an MTT with the sixth group.

We went down with them and we went to Bolivia.

And at that time, they were tracking down bandits in the mountains and that with the Bolivian Rinche, the Rangers.

And which were strange. All of them were Indians.

Big barrel chested, you know, they, they all operate above 6,000 feet so that, you know, in the flatlands, they could, they could run forever.

Yeah. But they were tracking them down.

And they, we were providing radio operators and some, I went down there as a mortar instructor.

And that with the, with the two inch or 60 millimeter, it was easy to pack around in the mountains and get it, get it into battery real quick.

So they were, they were just starting to use indirect fire when they caught these, these bandit groups, which eventually became the Cendero Luminosa.

Were 30, 60, 100 man groups in that. And they lived off raiding villages.

They'd move into a village. They'd kill all the men.

They'd rape the women until they used them up and throw all the bodies in the well.

And move on to the next village and the Rangers are right behind trying to close them up.

And we, we tracked this one group and the time I was there for about.

About 60 kilometers over the mountains and finally caught them in, in makeshift bait camp and raided them and killed all of them.

Makes up about maybe 10 or 15 to the scaped out of that.

You were on that.

Yeah. How many of them were there?

A little over a hundred when they started.

Holy shit. So you guys killed 85, 90 people.

There were no match for the Bolivian Rangers.

You know, they were, you know, they were terrorizing the countryside because nobody, the militias really didn't have the firepower to stand up to them.

They were vicious, vicious. Absolutely.

They killed the children and threw them down the well and then got done raping the women and killed them and threw them down the well.

You know, poison the water and move on to the next target.

What was the point of that? Why were they doing that?

They were bandits. They were just, they were just bandits.

Eventually, the communists came in and kind of moved them, carried them and changed them into an insurgent force against the government.

It was interesting.

How do I put this?

While we were up there, we found an anchor grave.

And I removed a couple of terracotta figures that were inside that grave.

And stuck them in my rucksack to bring them back because they were really, one of them was a corn god.

And the other one was like they were lowkey.

You know, and I had them in my rucksack, right?

And when we were in the mountains, they came around.

They came around and they pulled, the sergeant would pull that up.

It looked like a bar or soap, kind of a brown colored bar or soap, take a pen knife, cut a sliver off, give it to you and say, chew this.

And it helps you assimilate oxygen and the high altitudes.

And well, it was coke.

It was cocaine based material on that.

Normally, they would give one bar to every three or five men.

And they ended up, he was giving me one bar by myself.

So I wasn't used.

And after a while, I didn't need it.

I was just chucking it in my rucksack.

So we flew back to brag.

They'd line us up and customs comes.

They're going to search everybody's bag.

Well, don't my bag out.

And I was really worried.

They'd find the two little caracotta thing.

They weren't even interested in that.

Because it says on the outside of the cardboard box, you know, product decoca, right?

So as soon as that fell out, they were interested in only that.

So they got me standing there and I had like five or six bars in my rucksack.

And he goes, what's this?

So what's the stuff they gave us to assimilate oxygen and high altitudes and that.

And they're like, really?

So they called for my Sergeant Major with Sergeant Major Louis Brown,

a little short guy.

It looked like a fair plug.

They painted a face on it.

And he comes out there and you know, what the fuck have you done now?

I don't know.

And he's standing there with me.

And the two custom guys are standing there.

And we're like acting like, what's the problem here?

And the younger guy turns the older guy.

He goes, you know, I don't think they know what we're talking about.

And then he goes, I'm pretty sure they don't.

They ended up confiscated.

I mean, I got through with my two little caracotta figures and that now.

Congratulations.

Oh, yeah.

But we'll have to add drug smuggler to your introduction.

Oh, yeah.

Thanks.

You know, it was, I thoroughly enjoyed special forces training.

And I thoroughly enjoyed the process by which I finally, finally got on an A team.

And then started, I came back from Bolivia.

And about a month later, I got my order to go to Vietnam.

And I was supposed to go to the Mike Force.

And when we got to Vietnam, I sent this guy, Bernie O'Connell,

never have the Irish involved with anything you're doing.

Because they hear loud noises.

They think it's awake.

Right.

So when we got into Trang, I sent them with our orders.

I said, go over and make sure we don't get policed up by one of those press gangs.

Because we're at the regular repo depot in Saigon, the Tonsanuta wherever.

And I sent them over with the paperwork for the, we were supposed to go to the Mike Force.

And he comes, because the press gangs for the regular Army divisions,

we were looking for NCOs and they'd pay somebody off in Admin.

And they'd take four or five out of the lift and assign them as petunicizers or squad leaders to the division.

He comes back and I had, he brought back some Bommi Bob beer and a net.

And I, I had stolen a CO2 fire extinguisher and we were busy lowering its body temperature in the room.

And he goes, oh, good thing you sent me over there because they, we were on a list to go to the big,

where'd one.

And I'm going, oh, but obviously it's not all bad news because he's back here and he's grit.

And he goes, I ran into a guy.

Now Bernie was mid to late 40s, was a buck sergeant.

He had been a master sergeant, he got out of the Army and got into high tech field of air conditioning.

But he didn't have the accounting skills.

So he went bankrupt.

So he rejoined the Army.

Bulbas knows Irish face.

You know, it looked like an oversized leopard cut.

So he's, I got us a good deal.

The guy, I know, he was in the Davy Crockett pattern with me in Germany.

You know what the Davy Crockett was?

It was a weapon that was deployed down to the, I think battalion level.

And what it was was an oversized mortar that shot a one kiloton atomic shell.

Holy shit.

And the instructions were, get into battery, get the gun ready.

Fire the cannon and try and get a ridge line between you and the target before it goes off.

You know, it was TUNE and all the Army divisions at that time.

I think he, Bernie might have been slapping leather to the guy's wife for a while.

It comes back and he goes up.

I got us assigned to the special forces unit.

There's a waiting line to get in.

And then Bernie, owning the waiting line in this country is at the airport to get out.

So no, no, no, no.

It's a special unit.

It's all voluntary in that.

And that's when my heart fell to my asshole.

And it goes, it's CCN.

Well, I knew some people that had been in projects.

CCC, CCN, but so ever.

And all of them were nuttier than a squirrel.

So I go, oh, this can't be good.

But it is voluntary.

So we left the trunk.

We went up to Denang.

And as we were, when we, when we were met at the airport, the most decrepit,

ducing half.

I've ever seen in my life was our transportation from the airport to CCN, F-O-B-4.

And driving it was another friend of Bernie's that had known in the regimental combat teams.

And in Korea, who had a plate in his head.

He also had instructions from the Army.

He's never to have pharmaceuticals and alcohol in his bloodstream.

And he had both when he picked us up.

Stevie Commerford got a DSC.

And he's driving like a madman.

Now, when we pulled into the compound, they were launching.

One of the launch sites was shut down in reuse.

And Denang is the launch site.

When we pulled into the compound, there was a cobra on fire on the PSP.

And Bernie had been going, oh, this is probably like one of those show camps, you know,

crushed on everything, everything cemented, colored stones and that.

You know, Bernie just looked like one of those show camps.

This might be a little different.

And that was my introduction to CCN.

Wow.

Sorry to travel so fast.

No.

So you get there.

Do you know what MacSog is yet?

I knew what MacSog was because I knew some guys that were there before it.

I was proud to be there.

It was also in the back of my mind once.

This is a voluntary unit.

This is a voluntary unit.

This is a voluntary unit.

This is a voluntary unit.

But, you know, peer pressure, you're never going to say, I don't think I could cut it.

How many of you guys want?

I arrived with a, I think there were nine of us.

Nine of you.

That got a sign there.

And a year later, three of us were still running Ray Cots.

And Russries are wounded or dead.

You know, but we had a real high attrition right now.

So anyway, we processed the end.

We'd pull in the front gate, get off the, the doose and a half.

And I see these really ragged looking fucking gypsies sitting on this.

And they had a, you know what a mule is?

The vehicle?

Mm-hmm.

Marines had it.

They had a one of six mounted on it.

It's a flat, looks like a coffee table on wheels.

Open seat with a drier with a steering wheel and that.

Anyway, there's five or six of them hanging around on it with cut-off jungle fatigues

and wearing, you know, various parts of uniforms and that drinking wine.

And when, when we got out the truck, the cat call started, new meat.

This is great.

Yeah.

What's it ever?

And the guy, they came out and they took us in and they processed us in.

And I think two guys went to the hatchet force and the rest of us got assigned a recon.

So we got our briefing from the Sergeant Major.

You know, this is the voluntary unit.

This is what we do.

We're strategic recon of it.

You're going to be assigned to a recon team when you get down to recon company,

you know, the recon company commander will brief you and assign you to your teams by dandy.

We get down to recon company and my first introduction to Larry T. Manus was a recon company commander.

Former E7 looked like a heavy gravity, a planet, an inhabitant, thick deck, square face,

crew cut, blonde.

And we were standing outside the orderly room and the door burst opened and a body comes flying out

lands in the sand.

And the guy kind of shakes his head, gets up, stumbles out down into the company and that and the door swings open and there's maintenance.

I'm the recon company commander and this is your briefing, your orientation and spoiling my drinking time.

You can call me sir, you can call me mother fucker, sir, or you can just hide when I'm looking for you.

First man, and I, you know, first of all, I recognize that this is a retread.

You know, I mean, that kind of squat bread, you know, is immediately identifiable.

So I said, sir, you know, we're saying I could have done is this is a voluntary unit.

Yeah, it is Peckerhead.

You a barracks lawyer, what did that guy do?

He wanted to quit.

And I hate quitters.

So since you're so astute to that, I'm going to sign you without even interviewing.

And I'm going to sign you to RT hubbub.

And you can go over there and make that hooch a collective IQ with three.

And that's how I got assigned to hubbub.

Right on.

I love Larry.

He's in a hospice at home now.

Oh man.

Just absolutely the best officer I ever served under.

Larry had been in projects in the very beginning.

We were still wearing box hats, you know, yellow name tapes it should have.

And I protected this from all the bullshit.

And took the plaque for all our shenanigans and that, you know, sounds like a good man.

Yeah.

Well, when I stole the half track, he confiscated it.

Not because he wanted it for any other purpose that had two big whip antennas on it,

with a little guy on it and no radios.

Just so we would slap back and forth when he slammed on the brakes and that.

You know, they just heard how confiscated it.

I think it ended up in security company and somewhere else.

So how did it go when you got to, when you checked into Habu?

When what?

When you checked into Habu.

How did it go?

Yeah.

Well, they had just come back from Quantree and they were on standout.

Do you need to throw up or?

Nope.

I can do it right.

I'm sorry.

I'm just making my nose wet.

Jimmy Johnson and Minnie Mack were in the hooch.

Snake was up at headquarters.

She was the one zero.

And Danzer, Danzer and Mack and Jimmy Johnson.

So they're sitting there to clean and weapons.

Mack was cleaning a 22 with a silencer.

Now, I walked in, I said, and he goes, for you say anything.

You're obviously the new guy.

And he obviously run into die-wing maintenance.

Did you question him?

Did you make a comment?

What did you do to get assigned here?

And I go, well, I asked him about it being a voluntary unit.

He says, well, he sent you here just to annoy us because you're obviously a Yankee.

About that time, Castillo, the Cuban was, I think he was on Bolton's team at that time,

walks in oily little shit that he has.

And he goes over to the refrigerator, opens it up, takes a beer out of it,

and starts to hold it up like that, and Mack pings it with the 22,

and it starts peeing all over the floor.

And he never misses the beat.

And he goes, just as a cautionary,

don't have anything you value around these two, or they'll bubbify it.

And he drank the beer and went out.

That was my introduction to Hobbu.

Right on, man.

And we clicked right from the beginning.

And Mack and I stayed together.

I think the longest.

I stayed on Hobbu until like two months before I left,

and I took over as a one-zero crusader.

And of course, there was some chicanery in there.

We had commenced maintenance that I stuttered when I got excited.

So I was absolutely no good on the radio.

And the one-zero knows they normally carry the radio in that.

Until Boudreau caught us chuckling about it,

and then threatened us.

He said, I'm going to tell Manus what you two have been doing.

But we ran together solid for 11 months,

and did some interesting stuff.

And we got cookie.

Cookie was a bonus.

Cookie, Robert Cook.

From the Dowia, Georgia,

all of a skin had the mannerisms of a Mississippi riverboat gambler.

It had a complete solid eyebrow all across here.

And it called everybody stretch.

Well, stretch.

The first time I saw it, and he was a ranger.

So he had ranger strings on everything.

Ranger stringed to his compass.

Ranger stringed to his camouflage stick.

Ranger stringed to his peanut radio.

Oh, packed it.

I used to tell Mack, we just just stormed down in front of the NBA.

No get all tangled up and all those strings will be able to escape.

A really intense professional guy.

On a team, Mack was a 1-0.

He was a Bucksart.

He was actually, I outranked him.

But when Manus finally did interview,

he goes, I'm assigning you to RT Hub.

And the 1-0 now is, is McLaughlin.

He's a Bucksart.

You got any grief with that?

Does he come back with the same number of people he went out with?

What does that got to do with it?

Well, if he does, I'm only going to change his diapers if that's necessary.

He was a 1-0, really, really cool call under fire.

Never got flustered at Alabama.

Well, I guess we're going to have to move

because it's getting kind of hot here.

And Danzer actually was the 1-0.

But they had just come back from, right after that,

I went to, I think I went to 1-0 school,

because you couldn't run Laos unless you went to 1-0 school down a long time.

And they ran the bright light on Doc Watson and Baby Jesus Lloyd,

both of whom had been lost on a mission up in the D.O. or in the ASHA.

The bright light went in.

Danzer was a 1-0, because Snake had gone home on emergency leave.

And they got on the ground.

The ASHA Valley is built in a series of steps.

It goes up, levels up, goes up, levels up, got real shit.

And they got inserted on the top of the plateau.

And they started working their way down,

because what had happened is that they pulled Sammy Hernandez out.

They got in a hellish firefight.

And they pulled Sammy Hernandez out on strings.

And Doc Watson and Baby Jesus were on another set of strings

and the helicopter lost power.

And they were on the strings underneath it.

That slammed into the cliff face.

And when they found both of them, they wrote dead.

They were hanging in the trees.

Max said they looked like they were asleep.

Just hanging there in their harness.

But they were, they could see them, but they could reach them.

They were out about, they were up at the level where they could stand and see out

and two of them, but they couldn't reach them.

They were trying to get long branches

and try and pull them, pull them back in and recover the bodies.

And they decided, they got dark.

And they decided to spend the night on the top of the plateau.

So they, I mean, it wasn't far as like maybe 100 meters to the top.

They got back up on the top, set up in the RON.

And a half horseshoe thing.

And five o'clock in the morning, they were about,

they heard trucks pulling up the trail on the top

and troops dismounting.

And they unloaded about three companies at NVA

and started sweeping.

They knew the team was in there somewhere.

They started sweeping down the plateau.

And they, they opened, opened up on them with an RPG.

Two RPGs, two rounds hit.

And one of them, Horton was with them too.

One, one of some of the shrapnel blew his lower leg off.

And it was partially attached, but it was, it was off in that.

And they started dialing everybody in, fighting, throwing, never throwing stick grenades at them and that.

And eventually, there was nowhere to go.

So they started going down the cliff, just stepped off and went.

I heard different stories.

Mac tried to throw Horton to a tree firm to grab on.

He didn't make it, went all the way down and Mac tried to jump out to the same tree

and didn't make it landed on top of them.

Everybody got down to the bottom.

Danzer got blown off the top of the cliff.

Behind his rucksack and the radio was in the rucksack and he had the handset.

And either a grenade or an RPG hit nearby and blew him off.

He ended up at the pace of the cliff with nothing but the handset in his hand.

And he was shocked.

He wasn't functioning totally.

Clip Newman, who was also a 1-0, had been strapping with him.

He took over a commander of the team.

And they had one of the chase medics was also with a duck woody.

And he was patching up Horton's leg and dealing with the other wounded that were there.

And Mac was covering the ridge.

There was like a cut in it.

The NBA were trying to come down, hopping from rock to rock.

And he was like at the carnival, picking them off between the rocks and that.

And they knew him and just performed outstanding.

He got the 9-millimeter pistol.

And I think a silver star for that.

And eventually went and ran the recon club for us after that.

He was basically responsible for getting everybody out.

There was still living and breathing.

And they extracted them with a CH-53.

And they worked over the top of that ridge line, turned it into a kilogram with air support

and got a heavy hook in there and pulled them out of there.

He was just recently.

They're trying to get his silver star change to a metal of honor,

which he really deserved for his actions that day.

It went all the way through the Chief of Staff of the Army,

all the way through the Secretary of Defense.

And then it was approved under the Biden administration.

And then when the new administration came in, they just killed it out of politics.

They killed it?

They killed it.

We think it's because the guys who approved it were all Biden appointees.

But Newman earned that medal seven times over that day.

And you know, this thing would approve a higher award from a lesser award.

When Paris Davis got, do you know him?

I don't.

Paris Davis read his silver star and his metal of honor, which he eventually got.

He was a colonel.

He was a young captain at the time.

He did stuff on a mission that they make movies out of.

Went out from, you know, saved people that were wounded, dragged them back into the perimeter,

went back out, captured prisoners brought them back.

And basically got everybody out of it and they, I think he got a silver star for it.

The army didn't like him because he was black.

And in those days, the armor corps, what ran the army.

And there was a lot of racial prejudice.

And they thought he was just uppity.

And they weren't going to give him a medal honor.

He got out and retired as a colonel.

He was my commander at Devons, for a while.

Best group commander ever had.

And he eventually, the guys got together and they went back and redid it

and got his metal of honor here last year.

My name was in right off.

He was at the convention last year.

I love Paris.

He was a special.

And he, I had to go to a race relations classes.

And in those days, he had race relations.

A big equal opportunity race relations.

Two NCOs.

So they picked me and a guy named Johnny King who was a full-blooded chakaria patchy.

To go to the classes.

And there's guys from my battalion.

And there's two guys from third battalion, whatever.

Two guys from headquarters, all that.

And we're supposed to be, learn how to be correct, politically correct,

and be able to hold classes to train the rest of the chimpanzees,

the techniques of being politically correct.

So we're in this classroom.

And they've got a guy.

He's an associate professor or something like that from Boston College.

Complete with the revolution knitted black power cap on and the dreadlocks and all that.

And he's talking not about, you know, we got to be careful about how we call each other.

And, you know, these things have been done bad to black people in the past.

And when I walked into the room, I turned the thermostat up to 94.

So King is sitting in the front row.

The button of his field jacket was nodding off.

Everybody was nodding off except me.

I'm watching to see all of the ball of sleep.

And the instructor came over and kicked King's foot.

He said, wake up.

And he uncoiled out of that seat and pulled a cruiser bowie out of somewhere.

And how did it against this guy's throat?

He's going, they used to kill my people for sport.

And I still like him better than I like you.

That's it.

Out of here.

We get sent back to group.

I got sent back because I was with him.

I hadn't done anything.

Well, I turned the thermostat up, but nobody knew it at that.

Yeah.

Yeah, Paris.

We had one job, and that was to keep an eye on that blanket ass savage, and you failed.

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What was your first mission with McVisog?

It was...

It went to the...

It was a D-A-Shell.

I think it was the A-Shell.

Lower-end to the A-Shell.

And it was a recon mission.

Linear recon. We were supposed to follow this trail

and see if we could find Commonwealth.

So another team could come in and put a wiretap on it.

And we landed in this target, particularly target,

was in an old called Darra.

And the trail ran up to the center of it.

And it was reported there was a North Vietnamese regiment

in that called Darra somewhere.

And we were going to go in and do

linear recon and partial area recon

inside that six by six, no bombok.

And when they...

When they put us in,

we came under fire immediately.

As soon as the choppers lifted off,

everybody in the world started shooting at us.

And I remember I came in,

that was a mission anyway.

I'm...

My job on the team was to fight the team

as a unit.

Mine had cooks.

And Mac handled the radio,

made sure the cubby got air into us

when we needed it,

did all that stuff,

kept in communications with cubby.

So I'm fighting my portion of the team,

landing them in down below in that.

I saw these NBA break out of this ravine.

Like we're down here like this.

And over here is this ravine.

And there's a ravine that runs up,

follows up that way.

I saw him recover and run up in that ravine.

And I started moving up to tell Mac.

And I saw a bunch of three or four stick grenades

come up out of that ravine

and land right where he was.

So I run up the fuck,

they got the radio and they got the midget

at the same time.

This is bad.

So I get up there.

And he starts yelling at me.

Will you please get down your draw and fire?

And he's got his pants down.

And I look at what he's checking to see

if his joke is still there,

because he got a shrapnel wound

on the inside of his leg.

And I'm thinking to myself,

this is the coolest son of bitch

in the world, he's masturbating.

He's got the radio hooked like that.

He was down and grabbed a cup.

He was on the line.

And you know,

you don't have to wait a minute.

The one zero is masturbating.

You said that?

Oh, yeah.

And Dave Cheney,

a big, big,

big Paiute Indian,

was that a cup of writer?

He goes,

well,

besides that,

what else you got?

We called it an air strikes

and eventually pulled out.

I remember we got back

and I had my basic load,

normally when I was carrying a car 15,

one, two, three, four,

canteen covers,

with six magazines,

one of which was a 30 round magazine,

and six 30 round magazines

and AKBests.

Two canteen covers with many grenades,

two M67 baseball grenades

and a WP grenade.

And plus extra stuff for,

you know, we carried a machine,

we carried a belt,

ammo and a thing.

And when I got back on,

back to the launch site,

I had two magazines left,

and my pistol ammunition,

everything else I shot.

I would have blown up a nuke

and told them it was kids' plan

with fire,

it would have helped.

But it was just,

it was that intense.

And I'm telling Matt,

he said, God,

damn, that was intense.

That was a training mission.

So you kiddin' me.

So now, and yards like you,

by the way,

because you've got dialogue

when you're hyperventilating.

That was my first mission.

Shh.

It just went on from there.

I mean, you got into the rhythm,

you know, you might,

you go back to the launch site,

you need to pull a bright light

that was going in,

or you were done,

and you went back to denang,

and you get three or four days off,

and then you went back into that process again,

go into isolation,

get your target,

go to launch site.

How did that,

I mean, how did that compare

to your Marine Corps deployment?

Oh, the world of difference.

World of difference.

What was the major differences?

The intensity of combat, really.

You have no idea.

Well, you do, probably.

How loud combat is.

And the smell,

and the deuterous,

the dust,

the explosions,

the, you know,

the blood,

it's, you're,

many times fighting at very close range

with these things.

We were heavy enough

that we could give a company a black, black eye.

You hit us,

and we were going to hit you so fucking hard

that you want to back off.

And that's how we survived.

We, we picked a point,

and we would go for that point

to break through and break out,

and get some running room,

and then find our terrain

that we could defend in that.

And it was,

in that short time period,

like I said,

you'd use up five,

six, seven magazines,

just doing that breakout.

Wow.

And grenades,

anything else you could throw out there?

Uh, playmores,

on coat hangers,

claimores on coat hangers.

Hey, a cap of them

would have them everywhere

and ready to go,

and you put a coat hanger on it.

And it's got the clacker

in the bag.

You pull the claimor out,

and you throw it up in the tree,

and then run to the end of the wire,

and fire it off,

break contact.

And that,

to make sure it's facing the right way.

Yeah.

And then run off,

and then it just clears a path,

or throw it in front of you,

and blow it off,

so you got a clear path.

And a lot of many grenades,

a lot of many grenades.

How many guys were you rolling out with?

Normally,

it was the three of us,

or it's sometimes just Mac and I,

but the three of us,

after a while,

that was the three Americans,

and from six to eight mutton yards.

Sometimes we'd take ten mutton yards

with us up to one site,

and we got tasked with a bright light.

We'd have extra guns on the team.

Good to remember,

they got to have enough helicopters

to get you in,

and get you out.

So you can't overload them in that.

Yeah.

But normally,

six to eight yards,

and two or three of us.

How often were you guys going out?

How well?

Every night?

Every what?

How often were you guys going out?

Well, the rotation was you'd go to the launch site.

The only two times they gave us a target

after we ran a target,

while we were up there.

And we did the isolation thing in the hooch.

At the time,

and it was an ambush.

We were trying to get a prisoner.

But most of the time you'd go to the launch site,

you'd launch,

do your thing,

be back in five days,

get two or three days off,

go back in the system,

go back up the launch site,

three or five days back,

sometimes one day.

After a while,

I was telling what's his name to it.

I had one target.

I can't remember whether it was hotel six,

or I think it was DM-10,

the militarized zone-10.

It was that caldera thing again.

I ran it four times

and my cumulative time on the ground

was a little over an hour.

And four times.

Wow.

Like I said, it was intense.

If you got caught,

or they thought they could catch you with your pants down,

they put everything they could

to kill you and capture you.

Because they knew if you got out of the radio

and got the air power,

they had to grab you by the belt buckle before that.

So it was right at the first edge,

a full push trying to get on top of it.

Now, once you could break contact,

kill enough of them and make them back off.

Then you could start doing an IA drone,

getting the path to where you could grab some terrain.

When we looked at the target areas,

we specifically picked terrain

that was in the neighborhood where the LZ was,

or along our path.

If we got hit,

we're going to go here.

Because that's defensible.

Defend it here.

We're over here.

But we can there.

If we get air power in.

Shit.

Yeah, that brings back a lot of memories.

I bet it does.

Yeah.

Sometimes I get to smell it.

Are you doing all right?

Yeah.

No brains, no headaches.

How's that?

Yeah, I don't normally get weepy.

I get weepy over the little people.

Yeah, we...

RT Habu was a...

was a brew war party,

plain and simple,

just like dog soldiers,

you know, from the...

from the crow.

When we hit the ground,

the last people in the world you wanted to run into was us.

Just the finest,

finest troops I ever worked with were the yards.

No kidding.

Yeah.

How long were you there?

Huh?

How long were you there?

How long?

How long were you with that specific unit?

Oh.

For 11 months straight.

With...

with Habu,

and when I took over Crusader,

they were also a brew team.

So, you know, we had Sedang,

brew,

Roday,

all different tribes.

The brew looked like bushmen,

real short, you know, very...

you know, sometimes almost African features in some of them.

The Sedang,

lighter skinned,

and they filed their teeth.

So they look...

when they grinned at you,

they looked like wolves.

No she didn't.

They had tattoos.

And the Roday looked like Polynesians.

Very good-looking people.

Beautiful.

All of them are beautiful people,

but the Roday women are stunning, you know.

And then we had some Jorai.

And some of the teams were Vietnamese.

And some of the teams were...

Oh shit.

Vietnamese and Nung's.

Big, flicking Chinese.

Rick Hendrix had all Nung's.

And you could remember their name,

so he named them after Donald Duck's nephews.

Huey,

Dewey,

Louie, whatever.

And it's...

Huey spoke English

like he was from Southern California.

We...

bloody story.

My team's going to...

Quantry, the launch site.

And Hendrix's team is coming back.

Or no, we're coming back.

We're at Quantry.

We're getting ready to go back to Denang.

And Hendrix's team comes up there.

He's got seven Nung's.

The Huey, Dewey, Louie, whatever.

And they're on...

I don't know who thought this up.

They came in on a caribou.

And there was two donut dollies on board.

As we're laying in the shade,

waiting for the caribou to turn around

and that get on it,

go back to Denang.

And Hendrix and his team start filing off,

you know,

all their man jewelry and that clean, clean, you know.

And they're coming out in the preceding number

of the two donut dollies.

And they're going,

well, I can't believe this.

I can't believe that those gooks

were on the plane with us.

You know, I will never...

One of them had this base.

I swear it looked like a horse.

It was long.

And the other was kind of portally.

And they were all outraged, you know, going whatever.

They go over towards flight control over there.

And Hendrix comes out.

Hendrix is going.

He's kind of chuckling to himself.

Here's what happened.

They're on the plane.

And they're in orbit, getting ready to land.

And horse face starts going,

well, what are these gooks doing on the plane with us?

You know, why are we here with these gooks and everything?

And Hendrix is...

Well, she we started in by...

Well, actually,

are you official army prostitutes?

Is that what that uniform is?

And that blacterized up wide open.

I think it's a great idea,

but I actually own a whorehouse in the Trang.

And I don't think I could get five bucks of trick

for both of you,

unless there was a werewolf involved.

You know, all in perfect English, right?

And Hendrix tries to throw water on the fire,

and he goes, well, you know,

I know you have to understand they're going on a dangerous mission.

You know, they may be, you know,

they may not say the best of things in that.

And he says, I understand your mission being red cross

and all that, where you put up the, you know,

the maps with the name of the state.

Some lucky guy gets an extra doughnut in that.

And he says, look here.

He sticks his finger out through his fly

and he goes, looks like the state of Florida.

Everything ended there.

And we ended up...

The guy from the flight light comes out of there.

You need to get on that caribou

and get it on now.

They've contacted the Provost Marshall

and they're on their way here right now.

Oh.

Yeah, Hendrix.

Him and his nungs.

The star English by pupil.

Man.

You know what?

We're talking to our mutual friend, John Striker Meyer,

before he got here.

Yeah, Tilt hides a lot of his sins.

He had a, he had a couple of questions for you.

I wanted to know about the pet monkey CCN.

Bucket monkey.

Yeah, Mack had a pet monkey.

I don't know where he acquired his spider monkey.

I know it was actually...

I think it might have been a gibbon.

Anyway, it was a nasty little piece of shit.

We had, we had a pole with a perch on it outside our hoot.

And of course, certain majors like Billy Walsk

get rid of that fucking monkey.

I don't want to see that fucking monkey.

And Mack kept it just to aggravate the sergeant major.

All the dogs in Recon company hated this thing,

because it would sit on this perch, scream at him,

roll up its shit and throw at him.

And all of them wanted, most of all, ugmo.

Ugmo was a mixed breed, two of which weren't from this planet.

It kind of looked like a sharp pay that had a cancer.

And cook and I were secretly feeding at screwdrivers,

with Darbott.

So I hated the thing, cook hated it more,

because the monkey would break into our hooch

and find anything that belonged to him,

and either chew it, shit on it,

or do something else with it.

It wouldn't bother my stuff, or Mack's,

always went after cook stuff.

So one night we got sick of it.

I don't want to get rid of this goddamn monkey once and for all.

Mack was, Mack went downtown,

and we were in the hooch.

We didn't want to go downtown.

We'd been at the club, and we'd been drinking.

So we started feeding the monkey,

Darbott and screwdrivers at an accelerated pace,

until it started to have storm, right?

And we were sitting in the doorway watching the monkey,

and he's out there,

rollin' it up shit, throwin' it at the dogs

and overward down here.

And finally it just went,

and fell over backwards and hit the ground,

and they ripped it to fur and bones in about five minutes.

The dogs did, the dogs did, right?

And so we're, before that,

we had thrown the monkey on Lamar,

when he came back from the club,

and he tried to shoot it, and he hit Ugmo.

Instead, so Ugmo was out of the pack at that point.

So we decided to cover, it was lightning, right?

So we had to go, wow, we can cover up this crap.

So we sent fire to the pole,

and it remains on the ground.

So when Mack came stumble back in there,

later on the night, he found the monkey,

and woke us up, and we were like,

ah, must've been a lightning that hit it, that.

And he goes,

and actually we thought we got away with it,

and as we were getting ready to go breakfast,

he goes, by the way,

I think it was Pulley.

Pulley told me all about how my monkey died.

So that's what happened to the monkey.

He used to, the monkey could sit on his head,

and he'd, like, some kind of weird hat, and he'd go,

how do I look?

Well, it looks like that monkey's got an ugly growth on its ass.

I hated that thing.

We offered to buy him another one.

He goes, nah, you too is pets are enough.

What is with the World War II helmet?

Well, family heirloom.

I wanted my luger.

I had a luger.

So I told my mom,

send my luger over to me, and she sent the helmet, too.

The day I got it,

the impacted helmet was a fruitcake.

Even the yards won't eat fruitcake.

Really?

Who's number 10?

So I get that,

she'd put my luger in a family sized box of Cheerios.

The only dry cereal we got at the messol was grape nuts.

You know, a little hard crunchy rocks.

So Cheerios was like a special thing.

So I run over to the messol,

and I'm sitting there when Mac and Cookie,

we all got our little bowls and the milk and everything,

and we're having Cheerios and that.

As I'm pouring it out,

the barrel of the luger falls out into my bowl,

just as maintenance walks up to the table.

And then came the handle and the receiver and the magazines,

and he goes,

well, how did he say?

How did he put it?

He goes, what are those things?

That doesn't look like a box of cracker jacks, my man.

But the helmet was fun.

I wore it on bright lights,

where you're going in,

you know, you've got a sheet.

I figured, you know, the NBA go,

who cited Germans on, you know?

And other people borrowed it.

Eldon borrowed it one time.

Burjwell.

And who else wanted it to?

I wouldn't let Jimmy Johnson wear it

because he looked like something really grotesque.

Big ears hanging out from underneath it.

But yeah, I brought it back when I came back.

I had it in my luggage, my bags.

And the MPs tried to confiscate it.

And everybody who was there ganged up on it said,

no, no, no, no, no.

That was sent from by his mom to him.

And they just, okay.

So I managed to get it back to the States.

A pissed off girlfriend got rid of it.

Uh-oh.

I was offered 10 grand for that helmet.

Oh, bet.

But with my name and pictures of me with it,

and that it was worth 10 grand,

which I bring up to her once in a while.

And you missed out on that one.

What is with the sought-off RPD?

A lot of dice.

Well, not just me.

Before I got mine,

the Philippine armors up at S4,

would, would saw them off,

make sure that it was just the right length.

You didn't fuck up the rate of fire too much.

It's, we had sought-off M60s too.

The sought-off M60 had a tendency for the fucking barrel

to fall out in mid-stroke.

And the RPD did not have that problem.

And it slightly slowed the cyclic rate of fire,

but it sounded like a, like a 50 caliber.

Don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't, don't.

And some of us, like, Caso, I did it on mine too.

I put an oil funnel on the front of it.

And when that thing went off,

it really sounded like a 50,

and it would shoot a,

go to a blue-green plasma

out about six feet in front of it.

At night, it was horrifying.

But it, uh, lighter,

easier to move around in the bush

which would carry a lot more ammo

with it because it, you know,

it's 52 instead of, or, um,

39 instead of 51.

So the extra weight there in the shells and that.

And it, I got so I can make it sing.

And it was real effective on bright lights.

You need a lot of firepower.

You need it down.

You need something that can chop through brush to get to them.

The RPD is your, your weapon.

Excellent for that.

I taught myself how to load the,

you lift the cover just like you do on an M60 in that.

But it's, it's got a feeder strip

that comes out of the drum

that you have to put through and pull out.

And then slam the lid

and then you're back in,

but if it's in the drum,

if it's in a belt,

it still has a feeder clip,

but you got to feed it through,

hold it, pull it through

to get it out.

I taught myself how to do that.

By reaching over and doing that

and being able to then slam the lid down.

But I wanted something that was,

that I could protect myself with.

You know, I had,

I had the pistol,

the high power that I carried,

or the Silas 22,

if I was carrying a white stumble on somebody

that we could capture.

But, uh, I had the armor,

it was, uh, make me a saw it off 12 gauge.

Mm-hmm.

Coach gun.

That long,

with the, uh,

little pistol handle on that

two barrels.

And I carried

25 rounds for it

in my 10 vest,

and one of the,

appeared, uh,

either in loops or in the pockets.

If I had a vest on,

otherwise it kept them in a,

in a canteen cup cover.

And I added it in a slide holster

in the small of my back.

So when I had to reload the gun,

I'd be reloading it with this hand,

and I'd pull that 12 gauge out

so I could cover myself.

And I started,

I was using double-hot buck and slug.

And then I,

I came up with a bright idea,

that slug just wasn't doing the job

that it should.

So I started,

I took the double-hot buck out,

I left the bottom four.

And then I put,