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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,
nickels in there to start with.
And then I started counting up,
how much that was going to cost me.
And I went,
so I started using the five-dong piece.
It's a brass coin,
the same size as the nickel.
And it's brass.
So I could put four of those
in on top of the buck shot,
on the base of it.
And then three rounds of buck,
you know, the balls on top of that
and close it up,
see what?
That at close range,
both barrels will blow a man in half.
I know that's for a fact.
You've seen,
you've blown a man in half.
That guy came up on me in the elephant grass.
And I let loose it about eight feet.
And his legs were there
and his top of his body went there.
Yeah.
Because the brass doesn't deform.
And it comes out like little saw blades in that,
or a flat.
And it just,
it cut him in half.
I was surprised myself,
oh, you know, bad it was.
And after that,
that was the load for the shot gun.
What were the slugs doing?
Why do you say they weren't doing the job?
To wasn't enough of them
to really get a patterned.
They either,
too many of them went out to the side.
Rather than hitting the center of the mass,
the flat coins worked better
because it held together as a mass.
And it was devastating.
It would cut down brush, too.
Shit.
But, you know,
you learn and you adapt.
You, you know,
you did all kinds of crazy shit with guns.
How many times were guys sneaking up on you?
I think three times
that I actually had to,
had to use the shot gun.
Because I was quick reloading that gun.
I could drop the old drum,
put a new drum in
and get it in a matter of seconds.
You know, just when we were,
I was always nervous about somebody coming up on me
when I'm crouched down or bent over the gun.
They didn't want to get shot.
And having that,
the shotgun handy was,
you know,
a max-oldy complainer.
Quit waving that thing around.
I'm only going to shoot you on intent.
That was a good weapon.
Good weapon.
Did the killing bother you?
Did the killing bother you?
Did it get to you?
No.
Most of them were jumbled together.
Years afterwards,
some of them were like,
oh, I had a,
it's in the book.
I had a ghost that haunted me for a long time.
What?
A ghost.
We'd come back when I was,
you know, I had a malaria relapse
and he'd be visited.
And when I'd get tired or,
you know, didn't take care of my,
you know, my drinking and that,
I'd wake up in nightmares.
It was a,
just 16-year-old, 15-16-year-old kid,
MBA.
He had,
he came up on me real quick.
Well, actually,
I fell on top of him.
I got blown,
we were trying to dig in on this little incline
that never pushing us.
And grenade went off and blew me
and one of the other yards
down in a little gully
that was behind us.
And that, they were coming up it.
And I landed in amongst about five or six of them.
And the only thing I had was an entrenching tool.
And I killed them with the entrenching tool.
And I remember them.
Like I said,
I don't think about them often.
But I remember he was the same age
as my little brother.
Fuck, man.
The others,
a member of screaming,
yelling,
teak-beard,
coming at us,
or they came up on me real quick
and I dropped them.
You know,
they didn't really get to look in their eyes
or see their face.
You know,
they were on the ground and screaming
after they were on the ground and that.
But most of that's a jumble.
Every once in a while,
want to pop up, you know,
because it's something that be deadly.
See a piece of terrain that looks just like we were in.
You know,
you'll come back and they'll pop up.
You know that?
They didn't have PTSD.
Before that, they called it battle fatigue.
And we never thought we were battle fatigue at that.
You know,
years afterwards,
we realized that,
you know, we had drinking
and anger problems.
And why?
And the military finally accepted the fact
of what it was and started,
the VA started treating it.
But,
you know, in the early days,
we just managed to push it aside.
A lot of drinking.
You know,
I know a lot of guys that got into the bottle
and then welded the cap on after them.
Yeah.
How would the ghost appear to you?
How would the what?
The ghost.
What about him?
How would he appear to you?
Be a nightmare and need,
to be like I last saw him
when half his head came to open.
And when I falling out
and he would wake me up
and he'd just be,
in the book,
I described one of his visits.
I'm on the lake in Minnesota
and I'm fishing with my little brother.
And he's,
he's got this old yellow rain jacket on
that my mom hated in that.
And he's been over.
He's not facing me.
He's facing out the back of the boat.
And he's fishing.
He's got a line in the water
and that, and he's sobbing.
Sorry.
It's okay, Nick.
Chip.
Pussy.
It's okay.
And anyway, I reach over
to touch his shoulder
to find out why he's crying.
And he turns around.
And it's the kid,
not him.
And he,
he grabs my hand.
And I stand up
and he steps off the back of the boat with me.
And I'm going down
under the water
and he's holding on to my hand
and I can't get him to let go.
And then I wake up.
Shit.
It's okay.
Yeah, well,
I don't want to be a pussy.
I don't want to go there.
You know, I have a really good friend of mine.
His name is Chris Fettas.
He was a sniper for a dev group.
And I had him on.
And he had to kill two kids
on a hostage rescue mission.
And he has nightmares similar to that.
And he had sons.
Some of them never leave you.
They're that age.
And his nightmares, his sons
look up at him.
I haven't had to visit from him
in ten years.
That's five, baby.
And it's always when I'm worn down
and then it comes back.
Or like today.
How do you deal with it?
I push him back.
Push him back.
Don't let him in.
I try not to think about things like that.
I try not to think about some of the guys
that I know that got blown to pieces.
One minute they were there
and next minute there's some kind of hamburger meat
with bones sticking out of it.
You just deal with it.
First of all, the psychiatric industry
is a bunch of hui.
All those therapists that try and talk you through it.
And I did a little bit of that
when I was in Germany.
And the problem is that they put a jacket on you
and then now you're barred from an enlistment
and all that shit because you're a Louis Lupian.
So nobody goes to them.
And two sessions I went to was,
yeah, listen, Pozo,
you don't even know what you're talking about.
You're trying, you're kind of sending.
And that's, that's an insult.
You know, I've got problems.
I'll deal with them.
Thanks.
So I can get out of here.
My generation, we just dealt with it.
I see some of these guys now
with the traumatic brain injury
from bombs and that.
And it's a very PTSD.
First of all, a Navy SEAL God bless his soul.
I found that psychedelic mushrooms
can be used to treat PTSD.
Psychedelic mushrooms,
it's a friend of mine, Al Mullen, another medic
who understands this completely,
how it's done and all that.
And the VA is just now starting
to accept it as a treatment protocol.
It's a psychedelic mushroom,
some kind of bark from a tree.
It's eye-baking.
And crystallized secretions
from some African frog.
It's a US toad.
Is it a US toad?
The Sonoran toad.
We're talking about five of me ODMT.
Pin-eye began.
Oh, cool.
I've done it.
Have you done this?
No, no.
Why not?
Yeah, I got too much shit to do right now.
They are neck.
But the other thing they found out about it.
A lot of guys.
The other thing they found out about it.
It cures drug addiction.
Yup.
You've got your meth, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, whatever.
It takes away the total desire
to have those substances in your body.
That is the method they should use
for cleaning up the drug addiction
and the homelessness in this country.
Just grandma off the street
to come in a re-education compound.
Micro-dose their food
until they finally realize
that they don't want to be on it
and then put them through the treatment.
But no, I haven't done it
or haven't even approached it.
I did it.
Did it help?
Fuck yeah, it helped.
I haven't had a drop of booze
in almost four years.
Really?
And it was effortless.
Yeah, that's why all these fucking bottles are still here.
Otherwise, they'd all be gone.
Yeah.
But it...
Nick, I'm not going to bullshit you.
It changed...
It fucking changed my life.
Well, maybe I'll get around to it someday.
I don't drink that much anyway anymore.
My normal consumption
is probably a glass of wine with dinner.
This tilts a lot more
than just taking the booze away.
What?
This stuff helps a lot more
than just taking the booze away.
Well, I'll talk to Al.
I'm sure he'd like to watch
while I go through it.
Yeah.
And I would trust him
to watch while I go through it.
No.
Is it offered to the VA?
No.
You have to go to Mexico.
Yeah.
Well, I go to Mexico all the time.
Well, not all the time.
Maybe I can...
Where's it in Mexico City?
I can't say exactly where it is
because...
Because...
What are you doing?
You just arrived in a laundry bag
and they dropped you off.
That's right.
At a clinic?
Yeah.
I will tell you off camera where it is.
Yeah, okay.
And if you want,
I will connect to you with the people.
Like I say,
I might think about it.
I hope you do.
I'm not usually this weepy or loopy.
That's okay.
That happens a lot in here.
I get like that when I think about the yards laying on top
of me to keep me from getting hit again.
No.
That's another one that brings the tears.
Yeah.
Probably because I owed him money
more than like...
Or they thought that I owed him money.
Do you want to talk about the
prisoner capture attempts?
No, what?
The prisoner capture attempts.
The prisoner capturing prisoners.
Oh, yeah.
Well, that didn't hurt that wall that well.
We really...
How we only had...
Well, when I was there,
only had one real prisoner stat.
And we went there to do a prisoner stat.
The area was high concentrations
and it was laced with trails,
that careers and et cetera.
If they knew that you were wiretapping
or that they had moon beam overhead,
trying to listen for radio signals
and locate things on the ground,
they would use careers on trails
going back and forth between the different units and that.
We set it up to do a snatch.
And it was fairly simple.
We found a trail, high speed trail,
knew that they would use it
if they got pressed on that.
We started using air support to bomb them
and make them get up and start moving around in that.
And they knew if we were bombing them,
they'd have something up there listening for radios
at the same time so they...
Anyway, we're set up in this trail.
Kind of cool.
It was a really large tree
but from over there where the wall is.
And Mac was behind that.
And I was over here
behind some slightly smaller trees in that.
And I had a silence 22.
And Mac had a silence gun in that.
And anyway, the yard just spread out
to kill anybody behind the ones we want.
We're going to let a couple of them go through
yards or on the other side of Mac,
a couple of them and three or four of them
behind me over here down the stretch out of that trail.
So they started bombing
and making them get up and move around in that.
We heard that Peter Patter
a little feet coming down the trail.
And they had three guys.
Actually four.
One guy slightly ahead.
The guy in, the next guy was an officer.
We knew he was an officer
because it's, you know, collar tabs.
And he had a map case.
And the guy behind him
and then a third guy.
Or, yeah, a third guy behind him.
And I waited for him to get by.
And Mac stepped out
and shot the first one in the leg
and pistol whipped him.
And then shot the second guy.
And I got the third and fourth guy.
I killed them.
And the one guy, when I shot him,
he said, brother in Vietnamese.
And it turned out later that the guy
in the front was his brother.
And he was calling out to him.
And the guy that we shot
and captured, you know,
shoot him in the legs so they can't run off.
For the turn of kid on him, grab him,
cuff him up, start carrying him,
start digging him out to get to a LZ
to get pulled out.
We did all that
in a matter of minutes and we're gone.
Well, we took the, we stripped the bodies,
went through their pockets
and everything, threw it into a sack.
I think we used an A7-8 bag.
Though they're all their equipment,
except for the guns.
And pulled the bodies
and took the guns apart
and threw it out under the underbrush
and hid the bodies in that.
Sometimes we take the bodies back
with a stew so they can do an autoption,
see what they were eating,
see if they had any kind of parasites,
that sort of shit.
You know, how doctors get involved.
But we grabbed the guy.
We went to the extraction LZ.
They, they dropped the strings.
And we decided to put
a cumin, the one zero,
or a zero wand.
And I think some pot on there
with the prisoner.
And then Mac and I
and the other yards got on
the second chopper that came in.
And we lift out
and the way we go
into the blue yonder in that.
The ones we're watching
the one in the front.
And suddenly it looked
like somebody dropped
a rucksack.
Those are three yards
with the prisoner on the first one.
And it, we thought
somebody dropped a rucksack.
It was the prisoner.
What had happened,
they had to trust up.
And they didn't get
to snap the link
and then tied it up to them.
And he started swinging around
down underneath the aircraft.
And he came back in
and he bit cumin in the face
and held on to them like that.
And cumin just pulled out a knife
and just sionara.
There he goes.
All the way to the ground.
And we were already counting
the bonus money.
Let's see that though.
It's 300 for you.
300 for you.
And the yards all get a month pay.
We get to go to the trunk,
get laid.
And we watched them go
all the way to the ground.
We got to the refuel point.
It was an old fire base.
And they land.
Everybody's rolling
up the strings.
And then we go see
cumin's bleeding all over his face.
And then Mac goes,
what happened?
And they explained it to them.
Well, you know,
why didn't you kill him?
You better be out of faith.
You know,
number 10, DC.
That's the way, you know,
we're not going to get paid money for it.
Well, don't need money.
You need to kill DC.
That was the end of the conversation.
That's how Boudre threatened us.
Because when we got back
to the launch site,
we were sitting in a little
mess-all portion that we drank beer in.
And we were joking about
what we were going to tell maintenance.
Well, how we lost the prisoner.
We're going to tell him that,
I tied him in with some not-
I learned in the seascaughts.
Or I had,
I forgot to rope and I had packed it
because I had too many candy
bars in my rucksack.
And I used a piece of rope we found out there.
And Boudre was listening
over in the shadows.
He goes, you know,
you're lucky.
I just don't tell maintenance
what you two are really up to.
Yeah.
But then,
it's a good mission.
Just things went bad
at the last minute.
I have here that
you were interrogating
the captives in the field.
No.
No.
Never had time for that.
Well, you might do impact
interrogation on me.
How many more are with you?
You know, where are they?
And the yard's handled that.
But you don't have time to do that.
You snatch them and you run
until you're getting them back
is everything.
And turning them over to people
and like I said,
impacts, though.
How many guys were with you?
That sort of any slap?
Yeah.
Let's go.
You know, the most valuable
POW that I heard of
that CCN got
was Eldon Bargewell.
What do you think
that POW did for a living?
He was the battalion
mess sergeant.
No, shit.
So, you know,
who we had to feed?
The names were?
What units they were?
Where they were at?
All the rations?
He had all this wealth of information
because he was the mess sergeant.
The guy we grabbed
the only thing that...
Well, he was a senior lieutenant
and he was the...
And we're acting
in some sort of S2 capacity
because the map case
had...
You know, just like we used
the covers and he had units marked on it
and all that.
It was a tactical map.
So, you know,
it wasn't a line officer.
And we pulled a bunch of shit
out of his pockets that, you know,
gave the guys inside
and said, well, he was an intelligence officer.
I remember Eldon told me
he said to one time they found
a carved into a tree
born in the north to die
in the south.
Bam.
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I mean, you got to remember
these guys are GI's,
just like us.
Just wearing a different uniform.
Yeah.
Hardcore little sons of bitches.
I'll give them that.
Sounds like it.
Yeah.
And a lot of respect for them.
I didn't have any respect
for the B.C.
Because they were
ash and trash,
you know, militia.
But the pebbin,
they would come to bombs
to get at you.
And keep coming.
You know,
take casualties.
Damn.
Were you on an operation
too that,
did you retrieve downpilots?
Oh, yeah.
We did a couple of times
on, on bright lights.
Choppers, you know,
you're doing a bright light.
Choppers go in.
You're, you're the one.
You got to go get them.
Yeah.
We want to remember,
I think the chapter's
called blue eyes.
We went in on a chopper
that had gone down
on an insert.
And we,
uh,
uh,
uh,
uh, one one,
and a door gunner
had not gone in with,
uh, with the helicopter.
They had leaped free
from the wreckage.
Or when they hit the water,
they got thrown free.
Everybody else was dead,
you know,
and it burned afterwards,
which is bad.
Uh, I did another one.
Oh,
one of them,
I had the,
the guy delivered to me.
Another bright light,
uh, one of the choppers
was going past,
got shot to shit,
took an RPG right,
right in the transmission
and fell out of the sky.
And the door gunner
got blown up
to the slope.
He landed like that far away
from me.
He still had the M60 in his hand,
except the barrel was cut in half,
from shrapnel on that.
And, uh,
the other,
the other guy's, uh,
uh,
the chopper rolled down the hill,
and we were going to go down
to it and see if anybody survived.
And, uh,
you know, that was
another one.
We went in,
uh,
later on the afternoon on the wreckage.
And we got there,
and we got up on,
we could see the chopper
in the brush below us.
And we could see movement around it,
but according to,
uh, the cubby,
everybody had gotten pulled out.
So, we thought it was MDA,
going over the wreckage
and that pulling shut out
and that's a cook
through a grenade down there,
and it landed up.
The chopper was
laying on the side like that.
The grenade landed here,
went off,
through another grenade
that landed on the other side
of the chopper
and it went off.
And we heard this voice,
please don't throw
another grenade down here.
And it was America.
Oh, boy.
So, we could go down,
it was one of the door gunners,
and his leg was pinned
under the underside of the aircraft
and that hit
almost gotten out
and then the aircraft
rolled over on him.
So, we managed to break,
break him out of the wreckage
and that got him back
and, uh,
the, uh,
funny story.
They take him to the
a vac hospital
and he's in one bed
and the co-pilot
is in another bed.
In the middle of the night,
the staff wait, you know,
here's a ruckus
and he's in there trying
to strangle the co-pilot.
And what had happened
was when they
announced the aircraft,
they just left him
and took his M60
and reported that he was dead.
So, they took his gun
and left the aircraft.
And he was trying to kill
that warrant of it.
Yeah.
Yeah, a number of times
we went in on a,
I went in on a,
on an F-4.
The,
one pilot had either
failed to eject
or partially ejected.
He was still in the aircraft.
He was dead.
We, we found him,
it's kind of jammed
up against the,
the ejection seat
went out about halfway
for something folded in it
and stopped it
and the rockets
and the,
the ejection seat
burned him to death.
I mean, he was toast
from,
not to waste out.
Everything was burned off.
Damn, yeah.
Not a, not a nice way to go.
No, kidding.
I don't have nightmares
about him because he's
there for us.
Yeah, that,
that was the worst part.
People,
when they burned.
That's,
I can't understand
getting blown to pieces
and shot up,
but I don't want
to ever see another
burned body again.
Yeah.
How was it leaving?
Leaving was,
happy sad.
Yeah, I,
I hated to leave you.
I actually thought about
just going off
in the bush with the yards.
I,
I loved them that much
and I really
had no ties to the,
my family, of course,
but I really had no ties
to the civilized world at that
point.
I've been with them so long
I was brew.
Yeah, a lot of guys were
like that thought about,
you know, because they,
they closed the,
when they closed off the,
when they started moving
American troops out,
we knew that they were
going to close and abandon
the yards.
The South Vietnamese went
for sure and the American,
American command weren't all
that, you know, reliable
to take care of them.
We were.
They were our family.
So we were stealing
shit for them.
Ammunition,
mortars,
rifles,
flamethrowers,
anything, because,
when big American units
like America,
and the,
and the mechanized,
what was the name of it?
Ten mechanized or something
like that.
When they left Quantray,
the PDO yard was full of stuff.
Floor fans,
big piles of,
of wrenches and sockets, you know,
anything you could
matter,
comics, containers
with mortar ammunition,
actual mortars,
machine guns and all that.
It is fucking,
left it for the Vietnamese.
So we were going
up there raiding it.
And every time we went
to my lock,
we were taking
fling loads.
The pilots were in on it.
They knew what we were doing.
Every time we went
up there, we filled
up the helicopters,
either with ourselves
or with equipment
and ammunition.
And then a
sling load of stuff
underneath it
and would fly it up to my lock
and it would disappear.
And at least give them
a chance to fight.
You know,
when the thing happened.
But it was very,
very sad to leave them.
And sad to leave the,
the guy,
the allies.
The guy,
these are your brothers,
you know.
Sounds a lot like
Afghanistan.
It sounds a lot like
how we love
Afghanistan.
Oh, yeah.
Well, I'm sure.
We just abandon those people.
I'm sure.
We just, you know,
be trail, you know.
Not you.
But the
dipshits in charge.
Yeah.
I had a lot of anger
about that for a long time.
You know.
When I went back,
I found two of my yards.
You went back?
And I went back twice.
How was that?
Enlightening.
No shit.
I had a friend
that paped me.
So I wasn't traveling
on my passport.
And Canadian.
So I actually went back.
The first time I did a project
I had a, I was working in an environmental.
And we came up with a
a system where we were treating
waste,
shit, with anaerobic microbes,
which, which increased the,
and anaerobic means
doesn't need oxygen.
And what it does is those microbes
eat the shit in the pathogens
and they produce methane.
And we were
built these silos in the ground
with lining with clay
and on top of it was a cement
plug with a shaft down it
with an agitator.
And that was run from the top
and it would stir the shit.
You make it real liquid.
You know, you put some,
some straw organic material
in there, but it's mostly
shit and water.
And then you cook it in the,
in the microbes,
it makes methane.
It comes out to the top.
It goes over here.
You do humidify it.
And you can run a
reciprocating engine on it
just like natural gas.
Because that's what natural gas is
methane.
So I had a contact
in Canada.
They got a contract
to try and use the system
we had.
And Vietnam was
four of these big pig collectives.
They brought all the pigs in
from surrounding villages,
put them in one big building
and they had a lot of pig shit.
Fine, we'd create electricity
with it.
And when silo got done cooking
down at the bottom of the silo
was this thick,
really black material
that was kind of,
part of it was a slurry
and part of it was kind of grainy.
Pure nitrogen.
So they would take that out,
you'd empty the silo,
you'd take it out,
lay it out on iron sheets,
dry it out.
You've got 90% nitrogen fertilizer.
In fact, they were
taking the fertilizer
and actually bagging it
and selling it
to the farmers
to replace using human shit
in the benzoyl,
which stops a whole bunch
of other diseases
by using the...
It was so rich they had to hit it
with pot ash
in order to reestablish
a livable pH of it.
So I went back for that
and I had a good time
for about three months
and I went back one more time
that just had a...
I had the first time
I heard rumors
about the reeducation camps
and how some of the yards
had survived
and I had a...
I made a contact there
in Denang
and he told me
that he knew some mutton yards
that had gotten out
of the education camps
that were kind of living
like street beggars
and I went back
and I found two of the guys
from CCM.
One of them was on my team.
No shit.
And I managed to get him
enough money to get him out
of Denang and back up
in the Highland.
One of them were missing
an arm.
The little people
had SCU
tattooed on their special
commando unit,
tattooed on their arms
and if the North Vietnamese
found it, they chopped
our arm off.
So both of them had their arms
chopped off from here down.
But now it's a
really great reunion.
I found out about, you know,
how their families had gone
back up in the hills,
how they actually had fought
a running battle back
into the mountains
and a trail of tears,
so to speak.
Damn, man.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I got a star
of my map for that one.
Fuck.
I have a
affinity for primitive cultures.
You know, the yards were basically a
semi-iron age tribes
when we came along with all
our man toys and war
and they adapted to it
like ducks to water.
And they are the finest natural
warriors I've ever seen.
In other countries,
all of them pretty
much share the same kind of culture.
You're a warrior
and you're a member of the tribe.
And the first
duty is to protect the tribe
above everything else.
Protect the tribe.
Well, Nick, let's take a quick break
and when we come back,
we'll talk about what it was like coming home.
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All right, Nick.
We're back from the break.
We're kind of wrapping up Vietnam.
We have wrapped up Vietnam.
What was it like coming home for you?
Oh.
Total decompression.
Um, and shock.
I mean, uh,
the height of the
thing in that, um,
I was only spit on once.
Uh, and that was in Oakland
and they were a bunch of Buddhist
or something. I remember
punching them really hard
and all kinds of robes flying around.
But, uh, coming back to the states,
you're, you have nothing in common
with your high school friends.
You have very little in common with, uh,
the outskirts of your family.
Your mom, your dad, your brother,
and sisters, you know,
all there for you.
Yeah, I was fortunate.
Uh,
and that,
you know, I had a support mechanism there.
But once again,
after about, uh,
I don't know,
two weeks of being home,
I really started getting itchy feet.
I wanted to go
around people that I,
I knew.
You know, so I,
I got in my car
and went back to the cries of my mother saying
that I abandoned her
after she carried me for nine months.
Yeah.
Neutraled me for, you know,
years, you know.
But, uh,
I went right to,
I stopped on the way from Fort Bragg
to visit a friend of mine.
I knew from the Mike Force.
And,
I spent about,
you know, you know, visitors
and fish have the same three-day limit,
especially with wives.
So, after about the fourth day,
she started getting,
you know, the skunk I look
when she looked at me.
You know, and she knew she was going to have to retrain them
after I'd been there for a while.
So, on the fourth day,
I told them I was going to take off
for Bragg and, you know,
I have,
she made me chocolate chip cookies for the trip
and I suspected that they might have had
X-lax in them.
They didn't.
But, uh, I, I, I drove the Ford Bragg.
I checked into the six group again.
And, uh,
it was a wild time.
I was on the team.
We did a lot of stuff.
We were always training. We were always going someplace.
And, it helped, uh,
didn't have a lot of, uh,
personal relationships.
You know, I just,
I just couldn't get into that.
I got laid.
But, I didn't get into personal relationships.
And, and gradually, uh,
why not?
Just weren't ready?
Didn't want to let myself go.
I didn't want to trust somebody
that hadn't gone to what I went through.
And, I, I saw all my friends that were,
you know, having problems with their marriages
and their girlfriends the same thing.
You know, we, uh,
we drank a lot.
A lot, you know,
I, I managed to control myself
so I didn't get any lot of trouble.
But, uh,
like I said, I, once you've been
on that kind of adrenaline high,
it's hard to give it up
for ice cream cones and cognac, you know?
Yeah.
So, it was, uh,
took a long while to totally decompress
to the level where I was
socially acceptable.
And, uh,
you'd, you'd be looking at people
and go, they'd say something,
and you'd go, you'd stupid fuck,
you know, and then go at it.
Um,
but,
I think what
really saved me
was I got married
when I,
and I, I'm really sorry for her
because, uh, she,
she was, uh, 19
and I was 27
and, uh,
I had, had a baby daughter.
And, uh,
I got orders to go to Berlin,
which in,
in those days was, like,
grabbing the brass ring
and, and hitting the top.
And I was getting ready to go to Berlin.
She knows she was
going to have to,
she was an achy girl from, uh,
my, uh,
like, it's the name of that town
up in San Francisco Bay,
Monterey.
Not Monterey, uh,
I can't take it to the name,
Paul Alto.
No, for the North upright, uh,
shit, the big electronics center now, uh,
Silicon Valley.
Uh, I'll think a bit later
after we get up to it, saying, you know,
but, uh,
her, her parents were from there.
Her sister had married a guy
from the fifth special forces group.
And they, their marries
was already on the rocks.
When I met her,
I got married in Monterey,
full military wedding,
of which spider parks
and two other guys tried to stab me
with the sabers when I walked down to it.
Yeah, we'd been drinking, you know.
But, uh,
got married.
Uh, she got pregnant.
We drove to, uh,
four devins.
My next assignment.
And, uh, I was at four devins
and things just
fell apart.
Uh, I was working as a bouncer
at a place in Lemister,
the pre-extra money.
I'm going to get paid all that much.
I told somebody the other day,
the E7 asked me,
he says, how much did you make as an E7?
Someone might pay,
it was $1,250 a month.
And he went white.
And I was, when he told me what they
were doing right there on the spot.
But, uh, you know,
money was tight.
You know, I was gone a lot.
The first year I was at four devins
I saw are 112 days out of that year.
The rest of the time,
I was either on exercises,
flint mock,
mobile training team,
wherever.
And it just, it fell apart.
And I went to West Point
to, you know, every year,
the cadets, the software cadets,
get, uh,
patrolling,
mountaineering,
rubber wraps, all that training and that,
and, uh,
and, uh, and everything's new.
They get everything new, new jeeps,
new weapons, new fatigues, new poncho liners,
you name it.
And, uh, when I came back from,
uh, from that training,
I had a week
to clear post
and when I got back to,
uh, four devins,
I walked into my, uh,
government housing,
and there was nothing in it.
All my clothes were piled
in the middle of the,
of the living room.
And all the furniture was gone.
There was, uh,
a container, a sour milk
in a refrigerator and a beer.
And I sat there,
and, uh,
and I sat there on the floor
and had that beer and I,
I called up Jay Graves
and told him what happened.
He said, don't say anything.
I'll be there in 30 minutes.
And, uh, he came down
and picked me up,
took me up to his place
and dropped me off with a well-known gangster,
a real criminal.
And I stayed with him for, uh,
a week,
and I made a mistake of
going back to California
and patched things up,
which didn't work out at all.
I got back there,
I, I tracked her down
to a nightclub,
and she was sitting on her ex-boyfriends lap.
When I jumped him
and bit a dollar size
whole lot at the top of his head,
and the fight was on.
And,
the bouncers decided
they didn't want anything to do with me
and they didn't want one of them to arm.
And, uh, I just escaped
and got outside,
realized how badly I'd fucked up
and still tried to go back
and talk to her.
And when I got there,
her father stormed out the front door
and shoved me
and I hit him and he had a heart attack.
Yeah.
So, uh,
from there it was a bad flight
to get somewhere
and I hired a private plane
to fly me to
another city
and then caught commercial air.
When I got back to Boston,
I,
I stopped in
such an out of here some place
and I called Jay.
I said, uh,
I got in some trouble and he goes,
we know.
I said, what do you mean you know?
He said, don't go to Boston,
they're waiting for you.
It will warrant.
And I said, well, okay.
So, I flew into New York City
and, uh,
Chester got it loved him.
He died here
two years ago.
Former Marine
from the late 50s,
Fleet Marine,
who became a criminal.
He, uh,
he was,
expected he was involved in this
or that. He was a one-man crime wave.
Boosting trucks,
selling the stuff, you know.
Um, uh,
great guy, just full of life.
He, uh,
I had, uh, travel orders and a ticket
on, uh, you know,
the contracted airlines
and that, uh, leave from Boston
and go to Frankfurt
and then on to Berlin.
He bought me a first-class ticket on, uh,
British Airways
out of Connecticut
and into Frankfurt.
And, uh, that's how I escaped the net.
And
the group actually covered my ass.
They told them that I was on classified orders
and that, uh,
I had already left and that, uh,
they no longer were responsible for me.
They'd have to talk to my receiving unit
but unfortunately, that was classified
and it couldn't tell them how, uh,
with the group commander involved in that loop.
And so,
I went from there to Berlin
and Berlin really was the,
the healing process.
You know, it was,
it was exciting.
It was demanding.
It kept me occupied.
It was, you know,
I was in an environment that I absolutely loved.
Uh, Berlin is still one of my favorite cities.
They're in Munich.
You know, those two
hit the top of the charts.
You know,
then, you know,
uh, I was speaking German
almost all the time,
either in my job or, you know,
I was living out on the economy.
I had a really nice flat
over in Salendorf
that, uh, was, uh,
it was just magic.
I had two motorcycles and a polvo.
So, uh, I had plenty of stuff to, you know,
mental health stuff.
Get on to Harley and put something
exciting between their legs
and take a drive, you know.
And I, I met a,
I met a woman there that was in ASA,
Army, Army Security Agency.
She was, uh,
a rural comprehension specialist,
listening
and being able to translate.
She couldn't speak Russian,
she could listen to it
and understand the dialects and all that,
named Claire.
And Claire,
wow,
she was, uh, she was something.
I, I lived with her for
almost
four years
before I dumped out of the Army.
And she just,
you know,
recently surfaced.
And, uh,
our relationship eventually fell apart
because I didn't want to get married.
I decided I was never getting married again.
And she wanted to get married.
I didn't.
So, she went off and married, uh,
a real nice guy, a Warren officer
and built a life out of that.
But, uh, the time in Berlin was, uh,
really healing because it was just so much going on.
It was, uh, and it was,
we were doing stuff like, uh,
you know,
today, we did a lot of work
with the Zunder Nine Zots Commando,
SEK, which is their
counter-terrorist, counter-intelligence
police.
And they were great guys.
I mean, every, every one of them were just
really talented. They were like special forces.
Same attitude, same, same skills.
I mean, just wonderful guys.
Oh, yeah.
I managed to,
about halfway through there,
to the United States.
So, I lined them up with all my
friends and contacts that were in California,
Arizona, places like that.
Every one of them came back with a saddle.
That they were going to put in their bar,
downstairs, and use that as their stool
to sit on.
And they, uh,
a lot of interaction with them.
We did a lot of counter-surveillance
and surveillance of their targets,
uh, what better way to learn.
You know, we'd follow
Soviet agents, East German agents,
criminals, whatever they had on the
ticket list.
Or we'd do counter-surveillance,
you know, with, you know,
with their guys trying to follow us.
You know, we played a rabbit
the hair.
So, you really got good at
people watching it
and being able to sense it
in that.
And all the little tips of the trade
and then, uh,
had a funny story.
I had the Volvo
and I wanted to get another car
and get it registered
as a German vehicle.
So, I wanted to get a Volkswagen.
But I knew this guy,
German guy, he owned a bar
up in the turkey sector.
Gunter.
Gunter was afraid of his
girlfriend, right?
And Gunter,
Gunter was aggravating
when he was fun sometimes.
He had a Measuresmith.
You know what that is?
No. Okay.
After the war Measuresmith,
the actual Measuresmith factory,
designed a car that was powered
by a motorcycle engine.
And that, uh, two wheels
in the front, one wheel in the back.
And it actually looked like
the fuselage of a Measuresmith 109.
The K, you had to get in it,
you had to pull the canopy back,
climb in the front seat
and had a passenger seat behind you
and that.
And then, uh, I had,
I fell in love with it the first time I saw it.
It's shit I gotta have this, right?
So, I make a deal with Gunter
for $2,500 cash.
And I bought that thing from him
and he's, you know, he's fussing about the paperwork.
Wow, you know,
what if you get in an accident
and I'd prefer if I drove with you and that,
you know, so come up and pick up the car.
Say, oh, okay.
The date, when I went up to pick it up
of where the leather jacket,
the leather flying helmet
and a white scarf
and goggles.
And he goes, oh no.
That happened in the back.
Come on, we'll get down there. Don't worry.
Did you been drinking? No, not at all.
I had a flash underneath the seat already.
And I was barely well lit.
We took off down the hobble,
which is like in the center of Berlin,
there's a freeway.
Before we got a quarter away
out of the turkey sector,
I already had two police escorts
trying to catch me.
And I'm weaving in and out of traffic.
I've got the canopy pulled back
and the scarf's out the window
and I'm cackling as I'm going along.
And I got far enough ahead of them
and I was using the shoulders,
everything I could to avoid them in that.
We came up on the Grunabold exit,
which if you turn left,
you go over to Klayali,
where the consulate is
and Berlin headquarters
and my B.E.Q.
was over there too,
but my apartment was further down
over in Salendorf,
which is next to the Big Bonzae,
the lake there.
So I see the cut-up.
And if you turn left,
you go over to the American side.
Right, you're on the horse trails
that go around up there.
The Grunabold is a 12-mile long,
three-mile wide park,
all forests and hiking trails,
horse trails, all that.
And that measurement
could scoot in there
and the cop cars couldn't.
Nice. So I'm fucking throwing mud
going around corners taking
because I know the whole area,
we go out there and do exercises and that, you know.
I finally lose all of them except one.
And he's right on my fucking tail.
I'm thinking, that's some of the bitch.
He's got to be a dirt track driver
and that. So I got down
towards Salendorf
and there's an alley
that cuts off to the right
off the horse trails and that
and gets to the end
and there's just enough space
to get that mezzar-schmidt through
and it goes on a long,
down to the Hobble River
where it's paved walkways
and that and it's like
a block and a half up to where
my apartment is,
which is an old mansion.
I got the second floor.
So I get down there
and the guy's right behind me
and I'm looking around
and I'm saying,
then look familiar and I see the hedge.
I said, well, just cut through the hedge.
It's a general slope.
Turned to the right.
There was a moment of waitlessness
and then we hit the water.
It was the wrong alley.
Went through the hedge
out about 20-30 feet
and straight down into the river.
When I surfaced,
I came to the surface
and I'm looking around for Gunter
and he surfaced, he bubbled up
to the top a couple of seconds later.
First thing out of his mouth was,
you.
So I said, well,
here we have more problems.
We need to get out of the water
for one thing.
We got to shore
and there was a taxi stand
not far from there
with a lighted telephone pole.
You pick it up and call a taxi
and I called my flat
and Claire was there
and I said, you need to come pick me up.
That's a location.
There was a little guest house
that was closed
but the place we used to go
and have a wine
or cheese plate, whatever.
I said, come down here and pick me up.
What was the name of that?
Something for us.
She shows up about 10 minutes later
with the bolts wagon
that I had bought her
and we packed Gunter into the back
but we drive all the way back
up to bedding.
Going up and down the street
driving around, you know,
looking for us.
And then we get back
up there and all the way up there
until it's a look.
It's simple.
I've already signed the pink slip.
Just tell them, don't even show them
the pink slip.
Tell them it was in the car
and that somebody stole the car.
You'll get your insurance
or pay for the car.
No problem.
But three days later
I go into the attachment
and I walk in the team room
and one of the guys
from the scuba team comes in
and throws the license plate
from the Measuresmith
and says, you might want to keep this
and little after that
I walk back in
and my team started
with a wonderful guy named Craig Chuck.
He was sitting at his desk
and my leather flying helmet
that's all sudden
and everything.
He's tapping it with a pencil.
Then you might want to put this
in with that plate.
The evidently the scuba team had been called out
by the German police stiving team
because they were trying to recover
two drunks that had gone
into a hobble river
and they were dragging the river
for their bodies and that.
Holy shit.
It was a healing process.
A great group of guys,
great mission.
So a lot of really, you know,
a lot of guys from Project
went to DEADAC.
There was probably, when I was there,
there was probably
20 of us that had been in Projects.
You know?
Like all your friends
that you don't want as a character
would show up.
But the only sour point about it was
I was there when
the general that wanted to get
control of the attachment
sent his hatchet man down there
and he hated me
with a passion
and the feeling was
fucking mutual.
He made sure he wasn't in front of me
and then he jumps
just in case his static line
got disconnected.
A couple of those.
You know, you know,
there's a sour taste
but they are there.
There's no denying it.
They're little martinets.
They think they're shit
of the stick.
Nick, where's your daughter now?
I tracked her down.
One of the guys that I used as
an instructor was up.
The head of the SWAT team
in Costa Mesa
and a homicide detective.
He got out. He became a
private eye.
And he tracked her down
to San Jose.
And she was living in
San Jose about
two miles from where
grandparents were.
And
I found her on
the internet.
And Senator
I really hate to break it
to you this way.
But I might be your natural
father.
And she took her
site down the next day.
And that was the last I heard
of her except
how long ago.
But five or six years ago
my phone rang.
And a young man
was on it.
Somebody
goes, are you Nick Brock?
I said, yes I am.
He says, I'm your oldest
grandson.
And I heard a bunch of yelling
in the background.
The woman's voice.
And he never called back.
As far as they know,
she's in San Jose.
My ex-wife married a
agent.
So that all wrapped
together. It probably
would go back and try
to establish
the Leo ties.
So,
they still think about her.
What would you say to her?
I'm sorry.
Do you think you'll get that
opportunity?
Who knows? When in the
lottery?
That suits a lot of hard
feelings.
Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe
she'll see what I'm doing now.
So, I wouldn't put money on it.
But, you know, if you've done
any interviews before.
What? If you've done many
interviews before.
A couple of.
I did one with
a guy that captains
from SF.
That was a good one.
I just did one last night
with two LA cops
that's called war stories.
They were fun.
They were like,
I don't know.
I know there's some dark
shit in your path.
Don't lie to me.
I hope you meet her again.
I hope you get to say that to her.
I do too.
I do too.
You know, I don't have any real
regrets in my life.
I'm not a perfect man.
I got a lot of flaws.
I admit my flaws.
I live with them.
There's no such thing as a
perfect man.
According to my partner,
he's close to it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well,
we covered a lot of ground.
We did.
How are you feeling?
Well, I'm fine.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
I'm fine.
You know, the first two were about
projects.
And they,
without my trying,
they became cult books.
You know, I've had many, many people.
I didn't write it for the public.
I wrote it for the guys I've
read with.
And I'm happy as hell.
I wrote this book,
Vagabons,
because I had a contract to supply
a West African nation with
six, seven,
thirty, seven, three hundreds
on a lease.
And they happened to know
a wonderful man in London that I'd been
in a freight business with in Africa
that had all these airline
how to get airplanes
and run an airline and that.
And we set up a lease contract
with them for six years.
Contract was signed.
Money was being transferred
into escrow.
I moved from Palm Desert
to Tucson,
because they were going to paint all the planes
and, you know,
put the library on them and that
and do the sea check and that for the
sent them to Africa.
I got there
in a month later.
Sure.
I was set to make
thirty, five thousand a month
on a six year contract.
So I got there and that's
when I moved in,
I signed a lease for two years
with my business partner
as a co-tenant.
And everything dropped out.
So we were locked up
for COVID.
We were sitting there,
we watched everything on Netflix
and said, what are we going to do?
What else is the military?
So we wrote the book, 67 days,
start to finish.
Nice. Pushed it through.
I had a wonderful editor
in London Oxford.
A woman named Ruth Shepard
been really good to me.
The owner of the company
I would gladly run over
with a pickup truck.
She is wonderful
and her staff is wonderful.
She got it approved,
and it doesn't do as well
as the other two books.
And it was all about
what he and I did after
we got out of the military.
We rescued kidnapped children
in Algeria,
Guatemala,
rescued people
in Mexico
from kidnapped, real kidnapped gangs.
And
one in Chechnya,
which I'll never do again.
Why not?
I didn't actually run that thing.
That was a friend of mine
that had the contract in that.
I came up with a way of
tracking the victim.
And I used the Russian,
Jeff and I had gone to Russia.
Oh, God, back.
It's one of the things we did.
We went to Kazakhstan
with an asphalt company
that was trying to get a contract
to build four lane highways
connecting Kazakhstan
with the rest of Russia and that.
And they used cold mix concrete,
which they're cold mix asphalt,
which you can use in already conditions.
That's where they built a
Alcan highway out of
no prostitutes, all that stuff.
So we had met
my friend in London
introduced us to the KGB
at a very high level.
And
we went to Moscow
and
met the head of director at night
who was
a Lieutenant General
in the KGB
had a beautiful baritone voice
but fluent English and fluent German.
And
where was it going with that?
So anyway,
we went to Kazakhstan.
It's in the book.
The adventure is going
over there and doing that.
And
were we on the airplanes
or on the...
I lost my track there from them.
We were going to Russia.
Yeah, we went to Russia
for this deal with the asphalt company
and that was one of the things
and
while I was there,
it made really good contacts
with the KGB.
And after
you understand the KGB did not belong
to the central government.
It belonged to the Communist Party.
So when the Communist Party
fell out,
they no longer had a mandate
to operate. So they were going through
all this
writing about how they were going to build a new Russian.
And that's how they came up with the
FSB,
which is what they have currently in that.
But the KGB also owned all kinds of things.
They own cities
where they had research going on.
They had no roads going in or out.
Everything came in by air.
Scientific facilities.
They owned gold mines.
They owned
oil fields.
And they were funding themselves.
But
they were looking for cash.
And
on the thing in
Chateau, we actually rented
a spet's nose
outfit.
We had come up with a way
to
track them.
And actually the Russians
came up with it.
And it was a friendly isotope.
And the victim
was an industrialist
from the West.
Tried to make an oil deal with the Chachans.
The Chachans grabbed them demanded money.
Basically, I went.
The first group that went in
and they just killed them.
It took the money.
The second group,
went in where SAS guys
and they shot their way out of it.
And my friend who was an SAS guy
actually picked up the third
and came up with this plan
that if we could locate them,
we also could
put it up force to actually grab them.
So the Russians came up with two tricks.
One was a way to track them.
And that was a friendly isotope.
Only two places in the region
where you could buy the medicine
that he needed to stay alive.
So they broke in there
and dozed all the medication
with that friendly isotope.
If he peed on the ground,
they could detect it from the air.
So they did a nest team
flying back and forth doing the grids
and they located them in a mountain
village.
And they came up with a substance
they could treat the money with.
Within 24 hours you were dead.
So they dozed the ransom.
They picked it up.
They had already located the village
in about two o'clock in the morning.
They went in and rescued him.
There was about eight of them
that were still kicking
and everybody else was dead.
No old people and no children.
All young people in the village.
The Russians are,
they've got finesse sometimes
pulling the court.
Damn.
My trip over there
and my association with them.
I knew who they were
and I knew what the communists were.
They were sworn enemies at one time.
But I watched them rebuild
after a total collapse in the system.
I asked Vladimir the general
and said,
what kind of government do you think
you're going to have?
It won't be communists
because that's a law.
And it won't be Western either.
But one thing it will be
is Russian.
Totally Russian.
And that's it. It came up
with a free market society
still with the messages
of one strong man
and one strong party.
And I admire them
for being able to pull through
with a totally collapsing.
And they're
interesting to watch the events
and watch Trump work with them
and trying to
realize that, you know,
the Europeans
were raping them
after the communism fell.
They went and made deals
with all the steel plants
and the shipyards
and Poland and all that
and basically fed
the US this thing about,
they were buying everything
and making joint ventures.
Oddly enough,
the Kazakhs,
the one group of people
they would rather do business
with Germans.
Because the Germans
keep meticulous records.
So it was really interesting.
We did a lot of things
with a lot of different people.
And eventually
we trained SWAT teams,
we had a lot of personal
bodyguards in Mexico
ended up supplying
my clients with armor cards
that were produced
in my partner's plant
in Mexico City.
And try to stay away
from working with the government.
That's
you can get on a lot of
kimchi without that
you know,
too much effort with that crowd.
A lot of lives.
You get painted
so you know something.
And you feel it's in your
because the person
you are is your best interest
to tell federal law enforcement.
The minute
you do that, they start building the jacket on you.
If you're hanging out with these people,
obviously you're a bad guy.
So I
did that once
and regretted it
when I swore never again.
You know, I meant somebody's life.
Yeah. But
I just don't have a lot of trust
in their ethics.
Yeah. So anyway,
to present time,
we come back to
Jeff Miller, my partner,
came out here
and met
a studio, a
production company called
Show Dog Studio.
He was a really great guy.
John Attard,
former NCO
and the Royal Fusiliers.
Back way back when.
And he made an offer
to love the books
that we can turn this into a Netflix series.
So that was the offer
that he gave us
that what they're currently
planning is to turn it into a streamer.
He is in the book
as the basis.
Every chapter can become
an episode.
Congratulations.
Well, I'm happy about it when the
Check Clear is a Mac.
Well, that's pretty funny.
You know, it's
the things going to be called
American Ronin.
And not my choice, but
it'll work.
Sounds pretty badass to me.
They can keep Hollywood out of it.
You know, make it, you know,
stick to the story.
I hope I'm not speaking
out of turn here.
Personally, I think it will
actually start writing
sometime this spring.
And filming
maybe fall
and release in late
26.
And everything works.
Well, that will be awesome.
And we'll see.
I can't wait to see it.
I'm pleased with it because
it's interesting.
I think it's going to be good to go
that's grandpa.
And I'm doing everything I can
that we're in that scene.
Anyway, that's what I'm doing now.
I'm still writing every once in a
while.
I wrote a fiction book
years ago that I may
get published.
It's about
Gaius Casca-Longeness
who was the centurion
of Stab Christ in the
side.
On the hill.
And as the myth goes,
when he stabbed him in the
side, a clear liquid,
he hung on across what happens
to your plural cavity
fills up with liquid.
And you suffocate.
You know, the between the bleeding
and the trauma you suffocate
in your own juices.
When he pushed the lance
into his hands, his shoulders,
and he had a milky eye
that was from a sling stone.
And his sight return,
his rheumatoid,
arthritis,
and that was all gone.
And as Christ looked at him,
the myth is that he says,
as you are centurion,
so you shall remain
until we meet again.
And Robin Moore
wrote a series of books
about Casca,
the eternal soldier.
And I met Robin
at the SOA.
And I said, you know, I'd really
like to do an update on that.
Do you have a, how do I get
to use the copyright
on the character?
And he goes, Casca is not
copyrighted.
Casca was a real person.
He was a spaniard,
Iberian.
Put, put,
Pylem Prima,
the headspirit,
the most senior centurion
every legion in that.
He was actually
the centurion that had the guard mount
in the center of the city.
And that's how he came to be there.
No kidding.
And you go to South America, that myth
pops up every once in a while.
The Roman, you know, the Romans around soy.
I wrote a fiction book
that was based around the banana wars
in El Salvador
and that brought it up to date
and that.
And I just never published it.
Well, I hope you do.
I'm fiddling around with it still.
Anyway, I don't want to keep you too late.
No, Nick.
It's been an honor.
It's been an honor for me.
Really?
I watched you on TV and I go,
and there's something about that guy.
It's an honor to get your story out.
You're going to make me blush.
Come on.
You've lived a lot of lives.
And I've lived a long
and eventful life.
And I've met a lot of good people.
I've met something that weren't
some of them passed
not by my hand.
But I think the thing I learned
is I love being human.
Now, every aspect.
The agony and the ecstasy.
Good.
Stay away from redheads.
All right.
I will.
Oh, wait.
Thank you.
Cheers.
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The Shawn Ryan Show
