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

Nick Brokhausen is a highly decorated U. S. Army Special Forces veteran who served in the secretive Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG) from 1970 to 1971, conducting high-risk reconnaissance missions deep behind enemy lines in Vietnam and Laos. On his second tour in Vietnam, he joined Recon Team Habu in Command and Control North (CCN), participating in some of the most dangerous operations of the war. With a 15-year career in the Regiment, Brokhausen undertook classified missions across the globe. He is the author of "We Few: U. S. Special Forces in Vietnam" (2018) and "Whispers in the Tall Grass: Back Behind Enemy Lines with MACV-SOG" (2019), offering firsthand accounts of SOG's covert operations and the camaraderie among elite warriors. He advocates for preserving the history of special operations and honoring the sacrifices of Vietnam veterans. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Drink Mindful. Be Mindful. - https://drinkmindfulbev.com Get 30% off your first subscription order at ARMRA by going to https://ARMRA.com/srs or entering code SRS at checkout. Go to https://shopbeam.com/SRS and use code SRS to get up to 50% off Beam Dream Nighttime Cocoa—grab it for just $32.50 and improve your sleep today. Join thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their family—apply today in just minutes at https://meetfabric.com/SHAWN Try ZipRecruiter for free at https://ziprecruiter.com/SRS. Nick Brokhausen Links: Amazon Author Page - https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B07CKVZHTP Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:34Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. Nick Brokhausen, welcome to the show.

• 0:38Speaker 02

  Thanks for having me, Sean.

• 0:40Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor having you guys.

• 0:42Speaker 02

  Likewise.

• 0:43Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you, thank you. So we got connected through tilt, correct?

• 0:48Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, tilt. It's so nice to see him in men's clothing again.

• 0:52Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, my God. What did he used to wear?

• 0:55Speaker 02

  Well...

• 0:58Shawn Ryan?

  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, you know, when I was growing up, the Vietnam generation is 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 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 that...

• 1:42Speaker 02

  Stop, I'm gonna have to buy a new hat.

• 1:46Shawn Ryan?

  Right on. But, no, I'm being serious, so welcome home.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  Well, I appreciate that. And I gotta tell you, the new generation, every once in a while, I get the distinct honor of working with special forces, SEALs, whatever. You know, and I gotta say, you're all right, proper rascals. The same spirit, the same drive, the same professionalism is still there. You know, it's a pleasure to interact with them, and it gives me faith that we actually have a chance to recover the republic.

• 2:27Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah, you know, that I know every, every new generation gets a lot of shit, you know, but um, they weren't as hard and they're not as tough and but uh, but the ones that I made are shit hot fucking operators and um, lots has changed. I feel like I'm a dinosaur now. I'm sure, I'm sure you do too. So with the way warfare is conducted now, but um, those guys are, are true, truly innovative and uh, it's really cool to see. But.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  You know, the, all the SEALs, Special Forces, they, they've all evolved. And in some aspects, they've become one dimensional. You know, and Iraq was a, and, and Afghanistan was a reason for that. They became door kickers. You know, our generation was more working with the indige and, and training them, equipping them and leading them into counter insurgency and that. And they're slowly but surely going back to that. And I'm glad to see that. Cause that's really where you're, the individualism and the teamwork really shine when they start

• 3:40Speaker 02

  going back to the basic, cause you know, SF was ba- was based on the OSS. You know, and you, you, our lineage was that you were gonna get jumped into somebody else's country and you might spend seven years there, you know, fighting a war and that. So, you know, the, the, the training for it, the mentality, the, the uh, 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 uh, they can become a really effective tool.

• 4:14Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah. You know, we haven't really talked much about the OSS. Do you, do you, do you wanna go into that a little bit?

• 4:22Speaker 02

  Well, what I know about it, I'm, I'm not Victor David Hanson and I'm no great intellect. I do read though. Yeah, the OSS was, you know, in the beginning, when they, 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 agents actually ended up going. And they, they did a compromise with

• 5:00Speaker 02

  him. 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 there was, 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 warfighters, people that could go in, provide strategic intelligence on the, on the Nazis and on their military and what they were doing in other countries and that. And what he did is he picked

• 5:45Speaker 02

  businessmen, people that had traveled in, in Germany, people that traveled that were, they were maybe natives of Italy, Bulgaria, Armenia, whatever, and, 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 to how they operated. But the whole thing was based on clandestine, you know, we're, we're not going to be, make a big show like the Commandos and that, we're going to drop you out of a Langston bomber in 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.

• 6:29Speaker 02

  And then after the war, they uh, they got rid of the OSS and it became the Central Intelligence Agency. And it really ruined it when they did that because it uh, it took away some of that uh, expertise and Elon of the operators from World War Two. Uh huh. But yeah, the OSS was a very effective tool. I just read a white paper written by a EAT from uh, Tenth Group, guy named Kevin O'Connor, OC, 280 pounds of moving Irish intellect.

• 7:09Speaker 02

  Uh, 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 and that within it. For one thing, centralized purchasing. There's so much redundancy in the purchasing. Uh huh. And, and second of all, it, it, it does away with each of, each service having their special oper- operations division and that. Put them all, put them all in, in one unit, make them all warrant officers. So, perfect rank to operate in. You know, you got officers, you got warrant officers, but you don't have NCOs anymore.

• 7:53Speaker 02

  And if you transfer into it, you automatically become a warrant officer. When did this white paper come out? Uh, he wrote it, oh, I know. He wrote it and Al Mullins uh, edited it, thank God. Um, but, oh, about six months ago. Six months ago? Yeah. And he, I, I think he sent it to the Secretary of Defense, or he might have sent it to Center as, you know, a suggestion. You know, here it is. I think that's a genius idea. Well, it, it's got some. Got some flaws, but it, it's much better than what they're operating under now. What, I'm just curious, why do you think that would be better? I have my own opinions, but. Uh, let's see, how do I put it?

• 8:38Speaker 02

  They've got the ability to act without massive oversight. You know, this, this whole organization in special forces stands on the shoulders of 12 men. And they forgot that. You've got psyops and you've got civil affairs and you've got, you know, ribbon cutting, outfitter, some other hoofula. Those are all support units. They're not special operations. I don't consider them a special operation. I'm sure that people in psyops argue 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.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Those guys are where the rubber meets the road. And, you know, we, I'll give you an example. Over the years, I had people come to me and go, wow, what kind of special school did you go to get in C C N? Well, a prior felony helped. You know, it's, uh, we were selected because it was just another S F assignment. It was no more than that. You'd go there, you'd do your thing in Vietnam, and then you'd come back to the States, you might get assigned to Red Empire or the 10th Group. And then you did the missions that they had on the board and that.

• 9:59Speaker 02

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

• 10:10Speaker 03

  You know, it's, that's, that's interesting. What, what, so what, what units would he have? What did, what did the white paper say? What?

• 10:24Speaker 02

  Well, he broke it down into how they would, you know, structure it, the T O and E. And, you know, how, how would, the big thing that he was concentrating on was, uh, I'm looking for the right word here. Sometimes I trip. The, 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.

• 11:01Speaker 02

  He, uh, you know, another thing was, you know, the weapons, try and do similar weapons. Uh, so you don't, again, relaying back to why buy six different systems? When two actually will do the job?

• 11:15Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 11:16Speaker 02

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

• 11:27Shawn Ryan?

  I hope they do it. I mean, I know it would, uh.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  I tell you what, I, I think I might have a copy of it. I'll, I'll forward it to you.

• 11:34Shawn Ryan?

  I would love to read it.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  That's uh.

• 11:35Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, I think that it would be.

• 11:39Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I gotta be honest. I didn't know that's how it used to be, but.

• 11:43Speaker 02

  Well, you know, we, today you go in the fifth group, you stay in the fifth group.

• 11:49Speaker 02

  In my day, you go to the 10th group, you'd be there for three years. You might get transferred to dead A or get transferred to the, to the sixth group or, you know, the first group, whatever. And that allowed for a lot of cross-pollinization and that. You met guys that were doing different things.

• 12:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  And, and you were able to give your input and take theirs and, and move on with it, you know?

• 12:09Shawn Ryan?

  You know, not only that, but the, the first thing that came to my mind when you're talking about, you know, um, you know, consolidating all the special operations under one umbrella that's not the Navy, Army, Marine Corps.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  No, it's own, actually, it's his own branch.

• 12:25Shawn Ryan?

  It's his own branch. I've always thought this was a good idea. I think, I think it'd piss a lot of people off because the history would, you know, that would be the end of the Green Berets, the Navy SEALs.

• 12:34Speaker 02

  Well, I made the suggestion one time that you had to put the Navy under the Marine Corps.

• 12:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  I pulled my pecker out in front of them.

• 12:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, but, but, uh, I think, I think it just gets rid of the competition. And when I mean competition, I don't mean, you know. Green Beret a SEAL, I mean, competition is in the, the salesmanship that goes into who's gonna get, what specific operation that I would think that that all goes away because it will be put on some type of cycle.

• 13:07Speaker 02

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

• 13:10Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, and then the other thing is, you know, after World War II, we had all these bases all over the world, you know, Germany, everywhere, right? And, and, and those become the commands themselves, you know, UCOM, CENTCOM, Afcom, PACOM. And so, you know, those, 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

• 13:53Shawn Ryan?

  when there's two wars, 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, that is happening right now.

• 14:13Speaker 02

  A good example of that waste of, 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. He didn't like the fact that we were opcom to the 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 then basically. made the excuse that the cover that we were using was too transparent and they should reorganize it.

• 14:56Speaker 02

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

• 15:37Speaker 02

  about, I think, four years before they got totally spun up. But you kept that mission and, and kept the primary mission and then added a mission after you got control over it of doing, uh, security for all the diplomats overseas. Checking their houses, checking the embassies, checking their toilet, you know, whatever, you know? And then the guys did a, that unit did a superlative job, but it was, it was unnecessary. Yeah. You know, they could have made a separate unit to do that, you know, cause the dip security guys was the State Department, mostly SF anyway. And, you know, they've got that job. Yeah. It's redundancy, you know?

• 16:59Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into your story real quick. Well, not real quick. It's gonna be, it's gonna be a long interview, but everybody starts off with an introduction. Nick Brokhausen, a Green Beret with a 17-year career in the US Special Forces, including multiple combat tours in Vietnam. A veteran of the highly classified MACV-SOG, running covert recon missions deep into enemy territory in Laos and Vietnam, is part of Recon Team Habu in Command and Control North.

• 17:35Shawn Ryan?

  The author of "We Few: US 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.

• 17:52Shawn Ryan?

  "I'm cured for life of ever dating redheaded women, or even making eye contact with them."

• 17:58Speaker 02

  Never make eye contact.

• 17:59Shawn Ryan?

  "It isn't that I'm bonkers over them. They find me as some sort of training aide. I just don't have the deranged state and body fluids for that exercise anymore."

• 18:08Speaker 02

  I don't, really. I run from them.

• 18:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit, I love that.

• 18:17Shawn Ryan?

  Well Nick, before we get started, I've got a couple of things here, so, everybody that comes on the show

• 18:25Shawn Ryan?

  gets a bag of these. Those are Vigilance League gummy bears.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Oh, good, for the trip back.

• 18:31Shawn Ryan?

  That's right, that's right.

• 18:32Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 18:33Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. Made here in the USA, and I got, have you ever heard of USCCA?

• 18:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Well, USCCA has a soft spot in their heart for, for Vietnam vets, just like I do. And so they wanted me to give this to you.

• 18:48Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you.

• 18:50Shawn Ryan?

  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.

• 19:09Speaker 02

  Well, I'm old school.

• 19:11Shawn Ryan?

  And help you.

• 19:11Speaker 02

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

• 19:15Shawn Ryan?

  Well, if you do leave a witness.

• 19:19Speaker 02

  Uh, well, you know.

• 19:20Shawn Ryan?

  USCCA will be there to help you.

• 19:22Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 19:23Shawn Ryan?

  So, as long as it's, you know, legitimate self-defense, so, but, uh.

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Legitimate self-defense, isn't that an oxymoron?

• 19:31Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, I don't know, but.

• 19:33Speaker 02

  Well, thank you.

• 19:34Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  And thank them.

• 19:35Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome. All right, Nick, so I want to do, I want to do a life story on you, starting at childhood. So where did you grow up?

• 19:44Speaker 02

  Um, my life started in nineteen sixty-nine when I was accepted into special forces selection course.

• 19:52Shawn Ryan?

  Brought you that, is that where you want to start?

• 19:55Speaker 02

  Uh, well, you know, I grew up poor, relatively poor. My, my parents were, uh, my, my dad was a, um, former Army Air Corps, my stepdad. And my mom, uh, was a waitress, a cook, you know, uh, it's like from Clockwork Orange, what, what are you? Well, my father was Russian, my mother was a waitress, you know? But, uh, they raised four kids on a waitress salary and a, and a bartender. And we, we actually.

• 20:35Speaker 02

  We, we lived in North Dakota and my dad had a farm. Um, we had a six hundred and forty acres or something like that. We raised cattle, hogs, uh, chickens and, and grain. You know, we, we sold all of the above. Mm-hmm. And, uh, two years of drought and, uh, another two years of floods put us out of the farming business. Shit. So 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, uh, Glenwood. And, um, he opened a bar, hotel and restaurant, all in one building. Hmm.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  And that's where I spent my, um, from the time I was a pre-teen until I was, uh, you know, old enough to be drafted or whatever. And, uh, it was a great life. I mean, I, you know, we, I hunted, I fished. I skipped school to go squirrel hunting, you know, Nice. hid the, hid the guns in a hollow tree outside where the, where they had the, what do they call it? 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, uh, ran a trap, a trap line for a number of years. Um, for make money to buy school clothes. No kidding?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the, the Montgomery Ward and JCPenney's. You know, you'd order your school clothes and that, and your school clothes in the year before became your work and play clothes. What would you sell the fish? Huh? The trout line. Oh, trap line? Yeah. Uh, outside of Glenwood. It was all woods, woods and farmland. We trapped mink. Uh, there was a big swamp area. That, uh, a number of them, that, uh, that, uh, muskrat, mink, um, martens, fisher cats. You know, all of which brought good money and. Porcupines. No kidding? Yeah, now. I got caught.

• 22:50Speaker 02

  My brother and I, you know, we, we killed these four porcupines. And there was a bounty for porcupines. That you had to take the nose. Right, and then you pickle it and you take it down to the game warden and he'd send it in. You know, and you get, I think it was like twenty-five bucks for a porcupine. So we're, we're skinning the porcupines and that, and I skinned the pads off their paws and dropped it in the pickling. It's a nose. So instead of one nose, we now have five noses per porcupine. So we, we're dumb kids, you know, we, we turned them all in. And that game warden was drinking buddy of my father.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  He called my father up and he goes, "Well, either your 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. Of course, it comes back, "These are paws and these are noses and that." And they took us down and, you know, scared the shit out of us by locking us in a jail cell. I think I was like twelve or thirteen at the time, you know. A lot of fun, you know, and I, I learned, I learned how to exist in the woods. Yeah. Learned how to track, learned how to, you know, learned animals, learned their habits. Had 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.

• 24:22Speaker 02

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

• 24:31Speaker 02

  eventually evolved into, I, I learned the ground rules for the military and then applied for special forces and was accepted in nineteen sixty-eight or sixty-nine. And, uh, I went to, went to jump school, went to SF selection course, came out of the selection course and, uh... Went to Vietnam for my second tour.

• 24:58Speaker 03

  What was your first tour?

• 24:59Speaker 02

  The Marines.

• 25:01Speaker 03

  The Marines, you were a Marine.

• 25:03Speaker 02

  Did I smumble that?

• 25:04Speaker 03

  Why are you mumbling?

• 25:06Speaker 02

  I didn't, I didn't. I have a lot of respect for the Marine Corps.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Me too.

• 25:10Speaker 02

  Taught me my craft, taught me that, you know, I actually could work under pressure. Um, you know, when I first transferred services, you know, that you gotta go through the, you know, basic training, A I T and that, 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 D M Z. Uh, during the Maya, during the, uh, the Pueblo Incident.

• 25:45Speaker 03

  I'm not familiar with that.

• 25:46Speaker 02

  There was a spy ship that the North Koreans captured. And at the same time, they sent a forty man commando outfit down to Seoul to try and assassinate the President of, 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 run and gun battle started there. And they, uh, I was, um, my company was assigned as a, um, backup unit to the Koreans. The White Horse Division that eventually went to Vietnam when the Koreans.

• 26:31Speaker 02

  And they tracked down the last fifteen 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 then I got transferred from there and then back to Fort Benning to go through jump school and then eventually into Special Forces.

• 26:50Speaker 03

  Why did you join the Marine Corps first?

• 26:52Speaker 02

  I got drafted.

• 26:53Speaker 03

  You got drafted?

• 26:54Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 03

  How did the, okay. What was that like?

• 26:59Speaker 02

  It's like the Marines.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  To get drafted? I mean, how did the letter come?

• 27:03Speaker 02

  I was going to enlist. You know, and, uh, it, it just, uh, time and events caught up with me before I could enlist. And in those days, you couldn't step out of the line and, and move over and enlist and take a, a three year in the Army. Once you were designated, you went, you know? And it was, uh, it was interesting.

• 27:27Speaker 03

  What was your first tour like?

• 27:29Speaker 02

  What?

• 27:29Speaker 03

  What was your first tour in Vietnam like?

• 27:36Speaker 02

  Uh, line company, you never knew where you were going, just know that you were gonna get in a fight. And eventually, you know, you'd get mauled or you'd maul them and then come back to it. And the same thing was in Korea with, uh, 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 hunter killer patrols. Same exact thing, just more intense in Vietnam than it was in Korea.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  No shit?

• 28:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 28:09Speaker 03

  How was South, how was Korea?

• 28:11Speaker 02

  What?

• 28:12Speaker 03

  How was Korea?

• 28:13Speaker 02

  Cold.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  Cold?

• 28:15Speaker 02

  Cold, wet, nasty, everything smelled like human shit. And well, the, the militarized zone, there was nobody over there. They basically cleared all the Koreans out of there in the southern part of the DMZ. When, once you crossed the Mjum River, you were in the demilitarized zone and that extended up to the actual border. And then, well, you had the, the line of towers and wire, which they were just putting in during that time. They didn't have them at, originally, we, there was just foxholes. You, you did, went out and you had set up machine gun positions and, and in the foxholes and a lot, like a line outfit does, you know? And then gradually they started replacing that with a fence system

• 29:00Speaker 02

  and, uh, twenty-five foot wooden towers with machine guns in them. And then, and then they had gates and there was a minefield this side and a, a death strip that was raked and cleaned so you could see tracks and that, and, and then on the north side of the border, there were, uh, uh, there were some minefields, but there was a lot of old minefields left over from the war. You had to really be, a lot of them were marked and a lot of them weren't. You had to be really careful where you were moving about. Um, the, the hunter, I, I liked the hunter killer patrols better than I liked the static.

• 29:41Speaker 02

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

• 29:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  A lot of interesting, that's where I first discovered kemschi. Kemschi? Kemschi, you know what kemschi is? No. Pickled cabbages. Oh, I do know what that is. Wow. There was a, they, they make kemschi, I make my own now. Nice. And you store it in porcelain jars. And, and the old days, you used to put like a straw stopper in the top of it, and it was about that big a round in it. I stepped through one of them out in the DMZ, and pulled my foot out, I go, what is that? And the Koreans I was with went, went nuts. Ah, kemschi. You know, and they started dipping it out with their canteen cups and that.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  But a lot of destroyed villages, uh, really kind of ghostly moving around and, you know, they, uh, a lot of fog. Uh, a lot of activities some months, and a lot of months with no activity. You know, they were always trying to probe the wire. Hmm. And get through and slip infiltrators in. There was a funny story, there was a, our sister unit was a third battalion of the thirty eighth. And they had, there's two bridges that cross the M Jim, one down by Paminjun and one up north by Nulari. And the one up north was called Freedom Bridge.

• 31:13Speaker 02

  And they had machine gun posts along the bridge, looking down into the M Jim River, which at that point is probably

• 31:23Speaker 02

  a couple hundred meters wide. And, and if during the monsoon season, it's flooded, it's moving fast. This was kind of in between. Hmm. And one of the machine gun posts opened up. Just blast away, said, I got a submarine in the water.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  And of course, that Sergeant of the Guard, Lieutenant 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 Sykes to make sure he wasn't, didn't crack up and that. And then, you know, he's going, no, I saw a submarine, I saw a submarine. Ah, bullshit, right? Two weeks later, a mini sub washed up on a sandbar. Are you serious? Between that bridge and the next bridge with, with the crewman still in it. He had shot the, the conning tower and the one guy got stuck in the escape hatch and they all drowned. Well, he died of, they made him a staff sergeant and sent him back to the States. Wow.

• 32:24Speaker 02

  There was all kinds of little incidents like that. They, you know, they tried many subs off the coast, many subs up the M Jim. Um, a lot of times trying to come across in rafts, you know, either rubber rafts or rafts they made out of vegetation and try and just float across and make their way, strip down and come across. Of course, in those days, we had the mighty PRC six walkie talkie for, at squad level and I think it was the PRC ten, which you had to calibrate all the time to keep it on frequency. You spit, there was too much humidity in the air for it to stay on frequency. Ha ha.

• 33:07Speaker 02

  A lot of, yeah, the, the weapon was, uh, M14s and I, I think when I first got over there, we still had BARs for the squad automatic weapon and that, uh, rather than the M14 E2. Cause all that shit was going south. Hmm. But, uh, interesting tour. I, I remember when it took, uh, from the DMZ to Seoul.

• 33:36Speaker 02

  Was a grueling, bouncing, jarring ride in the back of a Deuce and after took three and a half hours. On the Audubon now, the freeway, takes fifteen minutes to get from Seoul to the DMZ.

• 33:51Speaker 03

  Jeez. So how long were you, how long were you there?

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Eleven months.

• 33:58Speaker 03

  And where did you go from there?

• 33:59Speaker 02

  I went to, uh, jump school.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  You went to jump school?

• 34:03Speaker 02

  Right, and from jump school into selection.

• 34:06Speaker 03

  When, where was the Vietnam, where was the Vietnam?

• 34:09Speaker 02

  Before that.

• 34:10Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 34:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:11Speaker 03

  Do you want to talk about that?

• 34:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's the same as, as Korea, being a grunt, you know?

• 34:20Speaker 02

  I, I have an undying love for the Corps. If they'd have spent all that money on the Corps, they would have had a true UW capability. Like I said, I made a suggestion once that the Marines should be in charge of the Navy. And it was, uh, it wasn't well taken in that, you know? But it's, uh,

• 34:45Speaker 02

  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, uh, that helped me a lot when I decided to transfer over. Yeah, 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 up the chain of command for a slot to open. And so it was, you know, and you know, at that, at that time, Special Forces was vogue. And go into the Green Berets, you know, it's the, you know, be all the man you can be, or whatever the slogan was.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  And I, I found it interesting. I found it really interesting. Cause I, I read a lot when I was in high school, like you said, about the OSS and about the Commandos and the Rangers and, you know, and, uh, you know, the Raiders, you know, all, all those specialized outfits. And it seemed like the thing that I could fit well in.

• 35:51Speaker 03

  How did you, did you see any math, uh, any SAW guys when you were in the Marine Corps?

• 35:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 35:58Speaker 03

  No?

• 35:59Speaker 02

  No, no. You know, when I, even when I was at CCN, we, I, we worked with Tong Dushan, the SEAL, SEALs over at Tong Dushan.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  How was that?

• 36:11Speaker 02

  It was fun. I mean, they, they had a warrant officer named Mr. Johnson, funny guy, funny guy, whip cruel too, if he had, had to be. And, uh, we used to change, you know, equipment, you know, you need this, well, I got some extra of that. RPD links, yeah, we got some of those, you know, uh, RPDs, yeah, we got four of those extra and that, back and forth. And we did a couple of missions where they supported us with, uh, one time with, with a full SEAL team on a amphibious, uh, landing to, to blow up a bridge.

• 36:48Speaker 02

  And, uh, 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, uh, we found their boats. They were, they washed up down, down, uh, the coast and that, and they managed to infiltrate in and get picked up by a helicopter and that. But, uh, they didn't make the target, no, we didn't make the target consequently too, bad storm.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 37:19Speaker 02

  Uh, they, they had some, uh, Marines with the, the SEALs that were working with the nasty boats. Uh, you know what the nasty boats are?

• 37:27Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 37:29Speaker 02

  Uh, they, uh, it gets kind of convoluted, uh, the CIA ran some of the projects and the military was gradually taking over from them. The nasty boats were Norwegian, uh, PT boats.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Real fast, you know, armed to the teeth and that, and what they were doing, they were going up into North Vietnam and taking agents and putting them ashore with those boats and then, and same thing, doing raids and coming back out. And there was, there were, uh, Force Recon Marines that were with the, with the SEALs, working on that project and that.

• 38:09Speaker 02

  I never, it's like now, you see all these guys that, you know, claim that their unit was MACSOG. You know, Force Recon was MACSOG. I don't know if it was ever on the TOE. I never saw Force Recon running recon missions for MACSOG. They might have, you know, I was in one project, there were two others, three others. You know, that's possible. But, you know, MACSOG 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.

• 38:52Speaker 02

  And up anything north into the Highlands and 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 TOE for MACSOG, MACVSOG, 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

• 39:34Speaker 02

  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 platoon, or whatever, you got three platoons, so you had six guys in each company and they had three companies.

• 40:11Speaker 02

  So 18 there, 36, it's went 48, people that are on the ground, running operations, on the ground. And I've met 18,000 of them since I left the war.

• 40:26Speaker 02

  Because everybody, I was in mech, we saw, yeah, sure you were. Yeah. It's a very small group and I think there was during its entire time, if you took those numbers and translated into nine years and that, 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, you know, I go to the SOA every year because there's 30 guys I like to drink with that are like brothers. The rest of that hoopla with the politicians and that, I've never been to a business meeting yet.

• 41:13Speaker 02

  Right on. They've tried a number of times to shut the bar down during the business meeting. And one time we got physical with the sergeant at arms and they've given up on that idea. We don't go there for that, you know? Yeah. And these days, well, when when we first started the SOA, 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 riders 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

• 41:57Speaker 02

  time. The colonels got in charge. And then they started, they needed members. So they said, well, if you served in a unit that supported mech socks, 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 that were dumb enough to come back and pick us up, you know? But, you know, I didn't want their basketball control officer and their, you know, their, their H and R guy, whatever they call them. So you ended up with a lot of people that were reps that that got blessed into into the organization. I got you.

• 42:38Speaker 02

  But there are fewer and fewer of us left every year. You know, the ranks are really, really thin ink. Yeah, yeah. So what, did you actually?

• 42:48Speaker 02

  A bunch of pussies dying off early.

• 42:54Shawn Ryan?

  Did you, did you get out of service and then re-enlist in the army? Or did you?

• 43:00Speaker 02

  No, no, straight across the board and transferred. Well, yeah, and left that one and had to join the other.

• 43:05Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 43:06Speaker 02

  Basically.

• 43:08Speaker 02

  That's how it worked in those days.

• 43:09Shawn Ryan?

  And you joined the army to go MACV SOG? To go?

• 43:13Speaker 02

  No, no, I joined the army to go special forces.

• 43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 43:16Speaker 02

  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.

• 43:24Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 43:25Speaker 02

  Eh, we'll just put you over here. You'll be comfortable.

• 43:28Shawn Ryan?

  Gotcha.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  You already know what mosquitoes are like.

• 43:32Shawn Ryan?

  Let's, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll get into selection.

• 43:39Speaker 02

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

• 43:43Shawn Ryan?

  You don't?

• 43:44Speaker 02

  I'm joking.

• 43:48Shawn Ryan?

  Want to stay up to date on all things SRS? You bet your ass you do. Our newsletter brings you the latest SRS news and critical updates. Get instant alerts on the newest episodes. Never miss a beat. Exclusive intel briefs from counterterrorism expert Sarah Adams. You've seen her many times on the show. She's going to give unfiltered insights on global terrorist activity. For Patreon exclusives, you're going to get epic range days with me and damn near every guest that's come in the studio. You're also going to get behind the scenes content and guest updates. You're going to get first dibs on new merch drops and limited edition items that will never be sold again.

• 44:30Shawn Ryan?

  Plus, exclusive offers from our partners you won't find anywhere else. So subscribe to the Vigilance Elite newsletter right now.

• 44:45Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Nick, we're back from the break. We're getting ready to get into selection.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  Well, selection. Well, in those days, it was phase one, phase two, and phase three. Phase one was at Camp McCall. I can't remember how long it was. I think it was like a month. You went out and you learned basic patrolling, you learned survival, you learned target recognition, all the things that, you know, woodcraft and that. And you jumped in and you lived in, in those days, we lived in tents, GP mediums. And the only structures at Camp McCall were tarp paper shacks for the headquarters and the medic shack and the classrooms were, you know, open air or sometimes, you know, under canvas and that.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Interesting, interesting four weeks, really intensive training with, you know, guys that the guy who, funny story, the guy who taught survival was an E7 named Rodney, Rodney, I think was his first name, Nail. And Nail had a black eye patch because he'd gotten shot by an AK through his eye, now one side. And he was a typical crusty old redneck, 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 chickens and

• 46:18Speaker 02

  wrap them in mud and then put them in the coals of a fire and go do patrolling all day. When you came back, you just peel the mud off and it's 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 pool shark when, before he come in the army and that. Real cool guy. He said his nickname was Fast Eddie. And

• 46:57Speaker 02

  Nail is sitting, we were getting ready to get, go back to Fort 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 Ford deuce, because they looked like little cheese packets. Mm-hmm. So just bite off a little bit, it was nicer glycer. So, but 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. Holy shit. We're laying in the hospital ward and the doctor comes in and he goes, he had his clipboard,

• 47:42Speaker 02

  he goes, uh, let me ask you something. Do either one of you two gentlemen know Sergeant Nail? And, uh, yes, sir, I said, well, he usually gets one or two of the students in every class. Holy shit. We don't have meningitis, but you do have some damage to your capillaries and that, yeah. But it was, you know, it was a good, good training, a lot of good guys that went through, you know, a training group with, that later, you know, went over to, uh, to become part of SOG or, at that time, they were still filling up the A teams over there, they were still active and the Mike Force was active still.

• 48:23Speaker 02

  Then I went to, from there to weapons training and I was an 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 you transferred, the next phase of that training was heavy weapons training. And you train, and it was both foreign and, and US. So we shot, you know, the Bren gun, we shot the, you know, the RPD, we shot, you know, the Medson, the, uh, the Swedish K, all of those were in, in the curriculum and that.

• 49:05Speaker 02

  Both classes, assembly, disassembly, so you could do it in the dark. And then finally range, got to the range and, you know, combat course, you know, and regular marksmanship training and that with each weapon.

• 49:20Speaker 02

  And then you transferred to mortars and and we trained on the four deuce, the eighty one, the sixty, and both the Russian eighty-two and and the Russian equivalent of the sixty. And then recoilless rifles, the fifty-seven millimeter, the one oh six, the Russian equivalent, and German equivalents and that. And then the four deuce, we did the four deuce and then the one oh five howitzer. So we learned up to the one oh five.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 49:57Speaker 02

  Doing both. And you train both in the gun crew and then the fire direction control and then the forward observers, live fire on the ranges, calling in fire while the rest of, you know, we, 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 intensive 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

• 50:36Speaker 02

  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.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:04Speaker 02

  Very intensive course in demolitions and that. And then the, the radio engineers, oh yeah, the medics, you know how medics are, right? You know, sick, sick. If there's a strange, strange, really goofy lane, religion anywhere in the world, you can bet both your medics are practicing. And highly intelligent with the bedside manner of Dr. Mengele. They, they go for a real long course. And in those days, it was over a year. They'd go to, they, they do a

• 51:46Speaker 02

  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 to treat the wound, manage the wound, heal the wound, bring the dog back, right?

• 52:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, live tissue training.

• 52:03Speaker 02

  And all the, you know, the cruelty, the animal people got, got on their case and they changed over to doing on goats. And the only step different is removing the Arab from the back of the goat. You know, but that very intensive course. Um, to this day, I would rather have a special forces medic treat me than any doctor.

• 52:28Speaker 03

  No kidding?

• 52:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, there's, in fact, there's, there's a guy that teaches the SEAL teams combat medicine. A guy named Ron Broughton.

• 52:37Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 52:38Speaker 02

  Who was in Berlin with me. He originally was in project 404 in Laos. And he went, he came to Dead A and he was a medic there. And he eventually, he runs like 20 emergency rooms in Florida and teaches up at, uh, the, what is it? Little Creek?

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 52:57Speaker 02

  You know, combat medicine there.

• 52:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:01Speaker 02

  Muscled up, really dyed almost white blonde hair and we call him Doc Savage.

• 53:07Speaker 03

  Nice.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  And, uh, and he does have the bedside manner of Dr. Manuel. Ah, it doesn't hurt that bad, you know? But, uh, uh, special forces medics, they 18, what do they call them? Deltas?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Uh, is that the same in the SEALs? 18 deltas? Yeah.

• 53:25Speaker 03

  Well, they're going through the Army's Delta course.

• 53:28Speaker 02

  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.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  No kidding? I didn't know that.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Training was that good and that, that well respected and that. And to this day, it's one of the best courses that the military offers.

• 53:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, don't leave them alone with your girlfriends or household pets.

• 53:57Speaker 02

  They uh, 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 twelve man team, there'd be two officers assigned to it. They had gone through their own course over here, which, you know, taught them now 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, and uh, phase three also had a real intensive class in the beginning of it, which was called methods of instruction.

• 54:41Speaker 02

  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 uh, of data into one hour and make it stick. So the dumbest guy in the class could get it. Then you moved on from there and that. And it taught you things like, you know, stage presence, you know, don't walk around with air force gloves on. Hands in your pockets, you know. Don't be a sword fighter with the, you know, with the stick, you know. And, you know, and how to tell jokes to lighten things up and that, you know. Some of the jokes I heard were really lame too. But that was a, a good part of that.

• 55:23Speaker 02

  And they, they taught you the um, special forces operations as a A team. What each MOS's responsibility were. You know, how to tie each other together with a team sergeant and then with the, with the officers and that. And uh, once you, once you graduated from that, you, in, in those days, you didn't get a flash on the back of your beret, behind the crest, until you graduated from the, the uh, the Q course as they call it now. 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.

• 56:07Speaker 02

  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 sixth group. Like I said, it was a holding area. For people that, and I was in the sixth group, I think for like six months. Seven months, something like that. Uh, we did a real interesting, in, in those days, the, the Red Empire, bling, didn't have South America. It was the eighth group, which was stationed out of Panama.

• 56:48Speaker 02

  And we did an MTT with the sixth group. We went down with them and we, 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 are strange. All of them were Indians. Uh, big barrel chested, you know, they, they all operate above 6,000 feet so that, you know, in the flatlands, they can, they can run forever. Yeah. But they were tracking them down and they, we were providing radio operators and some, uh,

• 57:28Speaker 02

  um, I, I went down there as a mortar instructor and that with the, with the two inch or 60 millimeter. There, it was easy to pack around in the mountains and get it, get it in the battery real quick. And they, they were just starting to use indirect fire when they caught. These, these bandit groups, which eventually became the Cinderola Luminosa, were thirty, sixty, a hundred man groups and 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 were right behind them, trying to close them up.

• 58:13Speaker 02

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

• 58:21Speaker 02

  About sixty kilometers over the mountains and finally caught them in, in makeshift bait camp and raided them and killed all of them except about maybe ten or fifteen that escaped out of the net.

• 58:34Speaker 03

  You were on that?

• 58:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 58:35Speaker 03

  How many of them were there?

• 58:37Speaker 02

  A little over a hundred when they started.

• 58:41Speaker 03

  Holy shit. So you guys killed eighty-five, ninety people?

• 58:44Speaker 02

  They were no match for the, 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 and they were vicious, vicious, absolutely. They'd kill the children and throw them down the well and then got done raping the women and kill them and throw them down the well. You know, poison the water and move on to the next target and that.

• 59:12Speaker 03

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

• 59:14Speaker 02

  They were bandits.

• 59:16Speaker 03

  They were just?

• 59:17Speaker 02

  They were just bandits. And they, eventually the communists came in and kind of moved them or cadreed them and, and changed them into a, you know, a insurgent force against the, uh, the, the, the government and that. It was, it was interesting.

• 59:39Speaker 02

  How do I put this? We, while we were up there, we found a, an ink of grave.

• 59:48Speaker 02

  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, uh, the, like they're Loki, you know, and I had them in my rucksack, right? And, uh, when we were in the mountains, they, they came around that.

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  They came around, they pulled, the sergeant would pull out a, what looked like a bar of soap, kind of a brown colored bar of soap, would take a penknife, cut a sliver off, give it to you and say, chew this. And it helps you assimilate oxygen in the high altitudes and that. Well, it was coke. It was cocaine based material and that. So normally they would give one bar to every three or five men and that. And it ended up, he was giving me one bar by myself. So I went and used it. After a while, I didn't need it and that. I was just chucking it in my, uh, my rucksack. So we flew back to Bragg. They'd line us up and customs comes. They're gonna search everybody's bag. And they, uh,

• 1:00:58Speaker 02

  dumped my bag out and I was really worried they'd find the two little caracata thing. They weren't even interested in that. When that, cause it says on the outside of the cardboard box, you know, product de coca, right? So as soon as that fell out, they were interested in only that. So they, they got me standing there and I had like five or six bars in my rucksack. And he goes, what's this? So well, it's the stuff they gave us to assimilate oxygen in high altitudes and that. And they're like, really? So they called for my sergeant major, who was Sergeant Major Louis Brown, little short guy. Um, it looked like a fireplug they painted a face on. And he comes out there and,

• 1:01:44Speaker 02

  what the fuck have you done now? I, I, I, I don't know. I mean, it's a, and he's standing there with me and the two customs guys are standing there and we're like acting like, what's the problem here? And the older guy, the younger guy turns to 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, I got through with my two little caracata figures and that, you know?

• 1:02:10Speaker 03

  Congratulations.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But, uh,

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  We'll have to add drug smuggler to your, uh, introduction.

• 1:02:17Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. The, uh, 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, I came back from Bolivia and about a month later, I got my orders to go to Vietnam.

• 1:02:42Speaker 02

  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 a wake, right? So when we got to Nitrang, I sent him with our orders. I said, go over and make sure we don't get policed up by one of those press gangs. Because we were at the regular repo depot in Saigon, the Tonsanu or wherever. And I sent him over with the paperwork for the, we were supposed to go to the Mike Force. And he comes, because the press gangs from the regular army divisions,

• 1:03:25Speaker 02

  we're 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 platoon sergeants or squad leaders to the division. He comes back and I had, he brought back some Bomby Bob beer and a net. And I had stolen a CO2 fire extinguisher. We were busy lowering his 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 red one. And I'm going, oh, but obviously it's not all bad news because he's back here and he's grinning. He goes, I ran into a guy.

• 1:04:11Speaker 02

  Now Bernie was mid to late 40s, was a buck sergeant. He'd been a master sergeant. He got out of the army and got into a high-tech field of air conditioning. But he didn't have the accounting skills, so he went bankrupt. So he rejoined the army. Bulbous nose, Irish face, you know, looked like an oversized leprechaun. So he's, I got us a good deal. This guy I know, he was in the Davy Crockett platoon 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 a...

• 1:04:54Speaker 02

  An oversized mortar that shot a one kiloton atomic shell. Holy shit. And it was, and the instructions were, get in the battery, get the, 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 T one E in all the army divisions at that time. Uh, I think Bernie might have been slapping leather to the guy's wife for a while. Comes back and he goes up, I got us assigned to the special forces unit, there's a waiting line to get in.

• 1:05:36Speaker 02

  Then Bernie, the only 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 and 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 whatsoever, and all of them were nuttier than a, than a squirrel. So I go, oh, this can't be good, but it is voluntary. So we, we left Natriang, we went up to Da Nang and as we were, when, when we, uh, when we were met at the airport, the most decrepit deuce and a half I've ever seen in my life

• 1:06:18Speaker 02

  was our transportation from the airport to CCN FOB four. And driving it was another friend of Bernie's that he'd known in the regimental combat teams in, uh, in Korea, who had a plate in his head. He also had instructions from the army, he was never to have pharmaceuticals and alcohol in his bloodstream, and he had both when he picked us up. Stevie Comerford, got a DSC, and he driving like a madman, you know.

• 1:06:49Speaker 02

  When we pulled into the compound, they were launching, one of the launch sites was shut down and they were using Da Nang as a 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, with the crest on everything, everything cemented, colored stones and that. You know, Bernie, this doesn't look like one of those show camps. This might be a little different than that. And that was my introduction to CCN. Wow. Sorry to travel so fast. No. Yeah. So you get there.

• 1:07:31Speaker 02

  Do you know what MAC SOG is yet? I knew what MAC SOG was because I knew some guys that were there before. It was, I was proud to be there. It was also in the back of my mind was, this is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer 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 went? I arrived with a, I think there were nine of us. Nine of you? That got assigned there and

• 1:08:05Speaker 02

  a year later, three of us were still running Raycon. And the rest were either wounded or dead, you know. But we had a real high attrition rate, you know. So, anyway, we process in, we pull in the front gate, get off the deuce 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 them. They had a 106 mounted on it. And it's a flat, looks like a coffee table on wheels. Open seat with a driver, 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

• 1:08:50Speaker 02

  know, various.

• 1:08:53Speaker 02

  Parts of uniforms and that drinking wine. And when we got out the truck, the cat calls started. Ah, new meat. This is great. Yeah. Whatsoever. And the guy, they came out and they took us in, they processed us in. And I think two guys went to the hatchet force and the rest of us got assigned to recon. So we got our briefing from the sergeant major. You know, this is a voluntary unit. This is what we do. We're a strategic recon outfit. You're going to be assigned to a recon team. When you get down to recon company, the recon company commander will brief you and assign you to your teams. Fine, dandy.

• 1:09:37Speaker 02

  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 planet inhabitant. Thick neck, square face, crew cut, blonde. And we were standing outside the orderly room and the door bursts open 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 Manus.

• 1:10:17Speaker 02

  Says, I'm the recon company commander and this is your briefing, your orientation and spoiling my drinking time. Says, you can call me sir, you can call me motherfucker 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.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  So I said, uh, sir, you know, worst thing I could have done is this is a voluntary unit.

• 1:10:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, it is, peckerhead.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  You a barracks lawyer or what? And said, well, what did that guy do? He wanted to quit and I hate quitters. Said, since you're so astute in that, I'm gonna sign you without even interviewing. And I'm gonna sign you to RT Habu. And you can go over there and make that hooch a collective IQ of three. And that's how I got assigned to Habu.

• 1:11:24Speaker 03

  Right on.

• 1:11:24Speaker 02

  I love Larry. He's in a, he's in a hospice at home now, but uh.

• 1:11:30Speaker 03

  Oh, man.

• 1:11:30Speaker 02

  Just absolutely the best officer I ever served under. And Larry, Larry had been in projects in the very beginning when he's still wearing box hats. You know, the yellow name tapes that showed, you know. And, um, he protected us from all the bullshit and took the flak for all our shenanigans and that. Yeah.

• 1:11:55Speaker 03

  Sounds like a good man.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, when I stole the half track, he confiscated it. Not, not because he wanted it for any other purpose and it had two big whip antennas on it. With little guy on and no radios, just so it would slap back and forth when he slammed on the brakes and that. You know, you don't need to say that I'm confiscating it.

• 1:12:18Speaker 02

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

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

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

• 1:12:29Speaker 02

  When what?

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  When you checked into Habu, how did it go?

• 1:12:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, yeah.

• 1:12:36Speaker 02

  They had just come back from Quantre and they were on stand down and they, uh.

• 1:12:44Speaker 02

  Do you need to throw up or? Nope. Oh. Doing that.

• 1:12:49Speaker 02

  Just reading my notes.

• 1:12:52Speaker 02

  Uh, Jimmy Johnson and Minnie Mack were in the hooch.

• 1:12:58Speaker 02

  Snake was up at, at headquarters. He was the one zero. And, and Danzer, Danzer and Mack and Jimmy Johnson. So they're sitting there, they're cleaning weapons. And Mack was cleaning a, a 22 with a silencer. And I walked in, I said, and he goes, before you say anything, you're obviously the new guy. And you've obviously run into Daiwe Manis. 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.

• 1:13:44Speaker 02

  About that time Castillo, the Cuban, I think he was on Bolton's team at that time, walks in, oily little shit that he is and, and, 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 a, with the 22 and it starts peeing all over the floor. Holy shit. And he never misses a beat. He goes, just as a, as a cautionary, don't have anything of value around these two or they'll bubify it. And he drank the beer and went out. That was my introduction to Habu. Right on, man. And it was, we clicked right from the beginning.

• 1:14:26Speaker 02

  And Mack, Mack and I stayed together, I think the longest. Uh, I stayed on Habu until like two months before I left and I took over as a one zero Crusader.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  And of course, there was some chicanery in there. We had convinced Manus that I stuttered when I got excited. So he's absolutely no good on the radio and the one zero in those days normally carried the radio and that until Boudreau caught us chuckling about it and then threatened us. He said, I'm gonna tell Manus what you two have been doing. So, but we ran together solid for 11 months. Wow. And did some interesting stuff. And we got Cookie. Cookie was a bonus. Cookie,

• 1:15:20Speaker 02

  Robert Cook, from the Dahlia, Georgia, olive skin, had the mannerisms of a Mississippi riverboat gambler. Had a complete solid eyebrow all across here and he called everybody Stretch. Well, Stretch, you know. He, he was a, first time I saw him and he was a Ranger. Hmm. He had Ranger strings on everything. Ranger string to his compass, Ranger string to his camouflage stick, Ranger string to his peanut radio, you know, all packed it. I, I used to tell Mac, we just throw him down in front of the NBA. They'll get all tangled up in all those strings and we'll be able to escape. Yeah.

• 1:16:04Speaker 02

  But really, really intense professional guy. The, on the team, Mac was the one zero. He was a Buck Sergeant. He was actually, I outranked him. Uh, but when Manus finally did interview me, he goes, I'm assigning you to R T Habu and the one zero now is, is McGlothlin. He's a Buck Sergeant. You got any grief with that? I says, does he come back with the same number of people he went out with? What does that got to do with it? He said, well, if he does, I'm willing to change his diapers if that's necessary. So, he was the one zero. Really, really cool, calm, under, under fire. Never got flustered

• 1:16:49Speaker 02

  at, at Alabama. Well, I guess we're gonna have to move because it's getting kinda hot here. And Danzer actually was the, uh...

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  Was the 1-0. But they had just come back from, uh, or right after that, I, I, I went to, uh, I think I went to 1-0 school, cause you couldn't run Laos unless you went to 1-0 school down a long time.

• 1:17:19Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:20Speaker 02

  And, uh, they ran the bright light on Doc Watson and baby Jesus Lloyd, both of whom have been lost on, uh, a mission up in the Diao, Ernie Ashao. Uh, the bright light went in. Dancer was a 1-0, cause Snake had gone home on emergency leave. And, uh, they got on the ground. Uh, the Ashao Valley is built in a series of steps. Goes up, levels off, goes up, levels off, got real sheer.

• 1:17:55Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:17:55Speaker 02

  And, uh, they, they got inserted on the top, uh, of the plateau. And they started working their way down. Cause what had happened is that, uh, they pulled Sammy Hernandez out. They, they got in a hellacious firefight. And they pulled Sammy Hernandez out on strings. And, uh, 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.

• 1:18:29Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 1:18:29Speaker 02

  When they found both of them, they were both 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 couldn't reach them. They, they were out about, they were up at the level where they could stand and see out and, and to them, but they couldn't reach them. They were trying to get long branches and that. Try and pull them, pull them back in and recover the bodies. And they decided, it got dark, and they decided to spend the night on the top of the plateau. So they, it wasn't far, it was like maybe a hundred meters to the top. They got back up on the top, set up in a RON, in a half horseshoe, uh, thing.

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  And...

• 1:19:17Speaker 02

  Five o'clock in the morning, thereabouts, they heard trucks pulling up the trail on the top and troops dismounting. Shit. And they unloaded about three companies of 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 a RP, RPG, two, two RPGs, two rounds hit. And one of, 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 and that.

• 1:20:01Speaker 02

  And they started dialing everybody in, fighting, throwing, they were 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 for him 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 him. Everybody got down to the bottom. Danzer got blown off the top of the cliff. Damn. He was behind his rucksack and the radio was in the rucksack and he had the handset

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  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, the handset in his hand. And he was shocked. You know, it wasn't functioning totally. Cliff Newman, who was also a one zero, had been strap hanging with him. He took over command of the team and they, they had one of the chase medics was also with a, a Wood, 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 and the MVA were trying to come down hopping from rock to

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

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

• 1:21:38Speaker 02

  Just performed outstanding. He got the, you know, the nine millimeter pistol and I think a Silver Star for that. And eventually went and ran the recon club for us after that. He's,

• 1:21:55Speaker 02

  he was basically responsible for getting everybody out that was still living and breathing. And they extracted him with a with a CH-53 and they worked over the top of that ridge line, turned it into a killing ground with that with air support and got a heavy hook in there and pulled him out of there. He was just recently, they're trying to get his Silver Star changed to a Medal 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 was approved under the Biden administration. And then when the new

• 1:22:37Speaker 02

  administration came in, they just killed it out of politics. They killed it? They killed it. Except that now. And we think it's because the guys who approved it were all Biden appointees. But Newman earned that medal seven times over that day. You know, you know, that this thing with approval higher awards from a lesser award. When Paris Davis got, do you know him? I don't. Paris Davis, read his Silver Star and his Medal of Honor, which he eventually

• 1:23:19Speaker 02

  got. He was a Colonel. He was a young captain at the time.

• 1:23:26Speaker 02

  He did stuff on a mission that they make movies out of. Went out from the, you know, saved people that were wounded, dragged them back into the perimeter, went back out, captured prisoners, brought them back and, and basically got everybody out of it and that. And they, I think he got a Silver Star for it. The Army didn't like him because he was black.

• 1:23:50Speaker 02

  In those days, the armor corps is what ran the army. And there was a lot of racial prejudice and they they thought he was just uppity. And then they weren't going to give him a medal of honor. He got out retired as a colonel. He was my commander at Devon's for a while. Best group commander I ever had. And then he eventually, the guys got together and they they went back and redid it and got his Medal of Honor here last year. Finally, he was awarded. He was at the convention last year. Uh, I love Paris. He was a special. And he, uh,

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  I, uh, I had to go to race relations classes. And in those days, you had

• 1:24:36Speaker 03

  What classes?

• 1:24:37Speaker 02

  Race relations. Equal opportunity race relations. They picked two NCOs.

• 1:24:42Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 1:24:42Speaker 02

  So they picked me and a guy named Johnny King, who was a full-blooded chakaria Apache. Right? To go to the classes and there's guys from my battalion, right? And there's two guys from third battalion, whatever, two guys from headquarters and all that. And we're supposed to be, learn how to be, um, correct, politically correct and be able to hold classes to train the rest of the chimpanzees in the techniques of being politically correct. So we're in this classroom and they've got, uh, they got a guy, uh, he's a associate professor or something like that from Boston College.

• 1:25:27Speaker 02

  Complete with the revolution knitted black power cap on and the dreadlocks and all that. And he's talking not about, you know, well, 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 ninety-four.

• 1:25:51Speaker 02

  So King is sitting in the front row. He unbuttoned his field jacket and was nodding off. Everybody was nodding off except me. I'm watching to see all of them fall asleep. And the instructor came over and kicked King's foot. Said, "Wake up." And he uncoiled out of that seat and pulled a crucer bowie out of somewhere and had it against this guy's throat. And he's going, "They used to kill my people for sport, and I still like them 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.

• 1:26:33Speaker 02

  Well, I turned the thermostat up, but nobody knew it at the time. Yeah, Paris. You had one job, and that was to keep an eye on that blanket ass savage, and you failed.

• 1:26:48Speaker 03

  What was your first mission with MACVISAQ?

• 1:26:51Speaker 02

  It was, uh... We went to the... Was it the Ashao? I think it was the Ashao. Lower end of the Ashao. And it was a recon mission. Linear recon. We were supposed to follow this trail and see if we could find common wire. So another team could come in and put a wiretap on it. And we landed at this target... Particular target was, uh... Was in an old caldera. And the trail ran up through the center of it.

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  And it was reported there was a North Vietnamese regiment in that caldera somewhere. And we were going to go in and do linear recon and partial area recon inside that six-by-six no-bomb. And when they... When they put us in...

• 1:27:55Speaker 02

  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 around that one mission. Anyway, my job on the team was to fight the team as a unit, mine and Cook's. And Mac handled the radio, made sure, you know, 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, laying them in down below and that. And I saw these NVA break out of this ravine, like we're down here like this, over here is this ravine, and there's a ravine that runs up, follows

• 1:28:37Speaker 02

  up that way. I saw him break cover 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 to, fuck, they got the radio and I got the bidget at the same time. This is bad. So I get up there. And he starts yelling at me, will you please get down, you're drawing fire. And he's got his pants down. And I look and what he's checking to see if his junk is still there, because he's got a shrapnel wound on the inside of his leg. And I'm thinking to myself, this is the coolest son of a bitch

• 1:29:22Speaker 02

  in the world, he's masturbating. He's got the, like that, went down and grabbed a Cubby was on the line, I go, you'll have to wait a minute, the one zero is masturbating. You said that? Oh, yeah. And Dave Cheney, big Paiute Indian was that Cubby writer, you go, well, besides that, what else you got? And then we called in airstrikes and eventually pulled out. I remember we got back and I had my basic load normally when I was carrying a CAR 15 was one, two, three, four, canteen cup covers with six magazines, one of which

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  was a 30 round magazine, and six 30 round magazines and AK vests.

• 1:30:13Speaker 02

  Two canteen covers with mini grenades, uh, two M six sixty seven baseball grenades and a W P grenade and plus extra stuff for, you know, we carried a machine gun, we carried a belt, uh, ammo and a thing and when, when I got back on, back to the launch site, I had two magazines left.

• 1:30:35Speaker 03

  Holy.

• 1:30:36Speaker 02

  And my pistol ammunition, everything else I shot. I would have blown up a nuke and told them it was kids playing with fire would have helped, you know, but it was just, it was that intense. And I, I'm telling Mac, I said, God damn, that was intense. He goes, that was a training mission. So you're kidding me. Said, no, and, and the yards like you, by the way, cause you've got dialogue when you're, when you're hyperventilating. You know, that was my first mission.

• 1:31:06Speaker 03

  Sheesh.

• 1:31:07Speaker 02

  It, uh, it, it just went on from there. I mean, uh, you got into the rhythm, you know, you might, you go back to, to on-site, you'd either pull a bright light for a team that was going in or, or you were done and you went back to Da Nang 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.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  How did that, how did that, I mean, how did that compare to your Marine Corps deployment?

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  Oh, the world of difference, world of difference.

• 1:31:41Speaker 03

  What was the major differences?

• 1:31:42Speaker 02

  The intensity of combat.

• 1:31:44Speaker 03

  Really?

• 1:31:45Speaker 02

  The, and, and you, you have no idea, well, you do probably, how loud combat is.

• 1:31:55Speaker 03

  Hmm.

• 1:31:56Speaker 02

  And the smell and the deuterous, the dust, the explosions, the, uh, you know, the blood, it's, uh, you're.

• 1:32:06Speaker 02

  Many times, fighting at very close range with these, you, we were heavy enough that we could give a company a black, black eye. You hit us and we were gonna hit you so fucking hard that you'd wanna back off. And that's how we survived. We'd, we'd pick the 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 and 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 and anything else you could throw out there. Claymores on coat hangers.

• 1:32:51Speaker 02

  Claymores on coat hangers? Yeah. Cap them and 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 claymore 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. 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 that. And a lot of mini grenades. Lot of mini grenades. How many guys were you rolling out with? Normally, it was the three of us or sometimes just Mac and I.

• 1:33:34Speaker 02

  But the three of us after a while, it was, that was a, three Americans and from six to eight Montagnards. Sometimes we'd take ten Montagnards with us up to lunch site in case we got tasked with a bright light. We'd have extra, extra guns on the team. Cause remember, they gotta have enough helicopters to get you in and get you out. So you can't overload them and that, you know. But normally, six to eight yards and two or three of us. How often were you guys going out? Ah, well.

• 1:34:09Speaker 03

  Every night?

• 1:34:10Speaker 02

  Every what?

• 1:34:11Speaker 03

  How often are you guys going out?

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  Well, uh, the rotation was you'd go to a launch site. I, the only, only two times they gave us a target after we ran a target, uh, while we were up there and we did the isolation thing in the, in the hooch at the time and it was a, a, a, an ambush. We were trying to get a prisoner. But most of the time you'd go to a 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 to the launch site, three or five days back, then sometimes one day, you know, you, after a while, um, I was telling, what's his name, didn't it?

• 1:34:58Speaker 02

  I had one target, I can't remember whether it was Hotel Six or, I think it was GM ten, Demilitarize Zone Ten. It was that Caldera thing again. I ran it four times and my cumulative time on the ground was a little over an hour.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  In four times.

• 1:35:19Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:35:19Speaker 02

  That, you know, 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. Cause they knew if you got on 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, full push, trying to get on top of you. Now, once you could break contact, kill enough of them, make them back off. Then, then you could start doing an IED drill and getting, getting a path to where you could grab some terrain. When we looked at the target areas, we specifically picked terrain that was in the neighborhood of where the LZ was.

• 1:36:02Speaker 02

  Or along our path, if we got hit, we're gonna go here. Cause that's defensible. We can't defend it here or over here, but we can there if we get air power in.

• 1:36:14Speaker 03

  Shit.

• 1:36:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, the

• 1:36:21Speaker 02

  brings back a lot of memories.

• 1:36:24Speaker 03

  I bet it does.

• 1:36:27Speaker 02

  Yeah. Sometimes I can smell it.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  Are you doing alright?

• 1:36:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, no brains, no headaches.

• 1:36:40Speaker 03

  Roger that.

• 1:36:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't normally get weepy. I get weepy over the little people.

• 1:36:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, our T Habu was a, was a Bru war party. Plain and simple. Just like, uh, 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. Uh, just the finest, finest troops I ever worked with were the yards.

• 1:37:15Speaker 03

  No kidding?

• 1:37:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:37:17Speaker 03

  How long were you there?

• 1:37:18Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 1:37:19Speaker 03

  How long were you there?

• 1:37:20Speaker 02

  How, how long?

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  How long were you with that specific unit?

• 1:37:24Speaker 02

  Oh, for 11 months straight with, with Habu. And when I took over Crusader, they were also a Bru team. So, you know, we had Sedang, Bru, Radé, all different tribes. Uh, the, the Bru looked like Bushmen, real short, you know, very, you know, sometimes almost African features in some of them. Uh, the Sedang, lighter skinned and they filed their teeth. So they look, when they grinned at you, they looked like wolves.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  No, she doesn't.

• 1:37:58Speaker 02

  They had tattoos. And Radé looked like Polynesians, very good looking people, beautiful. All of them are beautiful people, but, uh, the Radé women are stunning, you know? And then we had some Jiraii. And some of the teams were Vietnamese and some of the teams were, uh, ah shit, Vietnamese and Nungs, big fucking Chinese. Rick Hendricks had all Nungs. He couldn't remember their names, so he named them after, uh, Donald Duck's nephews. Huey, Dewey, Louis, whatever. You know, and it's, uh, Huey spoke English like he was from Southern California.

• 1:38:46Speaker 02

  We, funny story. My team's going to Quantre, the launch site, and Hendricks's team is coming back. Or no, we're coming back. We're at Quantre. We're getting ready to go back to Da Nang. And Hendricks' team comes up there. He's got seven, Huey, Dewey, Louie, and 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 Da Nang, and Hendricks and his team start filing off, you know, with all their man jewelry and that, clink, clink, you know,

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  and they're coming down, and the preceding them are 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 face, I swear, it looked like a horse. It was long, and the other was kind of portly. And they were all outraged, you know, going, whatever. They go over towards flight control over there and that, and Hendricks comes out. Hendricks is going, he's kind of chuckling to himself, and that, here's what happened. They're on the plane, and they're in orbit, getting ready to land and that, and Horseface starts going, "Wow, what are these gooks doing on the plane with us? You

• 1:40:11Speaker 02

  know, why are we here with these gooks and everything?" And Hendricks is, Huey started in by, "Well, actually, are you official army prostitutes? Is that what that uniform is?" And that blaked her eyes up wide open. This is a, "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 a trick for both of you unless there was a werewolf involved."

• 1:40:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, 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. They, you know, they may be, you know, they may not say the best of things and that." And he says, "I understand your mission being Red Cross and all that, where you put up the, you know, the, the maps with the name, the state, some lucky guy gets an extra doughnut and that." And he says, "Look here." He sticks his finger out through his fly and he goes, "Looks like the state of Florida." And everything ended there. And we ended up, the guy from the flight light comes out, "You need to get on that caribou and get it on now. They've contacted the provost marshal and they're on their way here right now."

• 1:41:26Speaker 02

  So, yeah, Hendrix, him and his nungs, his star English pupil.

• 1:41:33Speaker 03

  Man. You know, I was talking to our mutual friend, John Stryker Meyer, before he got here.

• 1:41:40Speaker 02

  Yeah, Tilt hides a lot of his sins.

• 1:41:43Speaker 03

  He had a, he had a couple of questions for you. He wanted to know about the pet monkey at CCN.

• 1:41:49Speaker 02

  Fucking monkey. Mac had a pet monkey. I don't know where he acquired his spider monkey. I know, it's actually, I think it might have been a gibbon. Anyway, it was a nasty little piece of shit. We, we had, we had a pole with a perch on it outside our hooch. And of course Sergeant Major was like, Billy Waz going, "Get rid of that fucking monkey. I don't want to see that fucking monkey." And, and, and Mac, Mac kept it just to aggravate the, the Sergeant Major. All the dogs in recon company hated this thing because it would sit on his perch, scream at him, roll up his shit and throw at him. And all of them wanted, most of all, UGMO.

• 1:42:31Speaker 02

  UGMO was a mixed breed, two of which weren't from this planet, right? Kind of looked like a Shar Pei that had cancer. And Cook and I were secretly feeding it screwdrivers with Darbonne. You know, 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. Wouldn't bother my stuff or Mac's, always went after Cook's stuff. So one night we got sick of it, you know, and get rid of this goddamn monkey once and for all. Mac was, Mac went downtown.

• 1:43:10Speaker 02

  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 Darbon and screwdrivers at an accelerated pace until finally it started to have storm, right? And we're sitting in the doorway watching the monkey and he's out there rolling it up shit, throwing it at the dogs that are over 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.

• 1:43:44Speaker 03

  The dogs did?

• 1:43:45Speaker 02

  The dogs did. Right? And so we're, uh, 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 Ugmoh instead. So Ugmoh was out of the pack at that point. So we decided to cover. It was lightning, right? So we go, wow, we can cover up this crime. So we set fire to the, to the pole and the remains on the ground. So when Matt Kim stumbled back in there later on the night, he found the, found the monkey and woke us up and went, ah, it must've been a lightning that hit it. And he goes, next one,

• 1:44:27Speaker 02

  we thought we got away with it. And as we were getting ready to go breakfast, he goes, uh, by the way, uh, I think it was Pulley. Pulley told me all about how my monkey died. And 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. Yeah. I hated that thing. We offered to buy him another one. He goes, nah, you two as pets are enough.

• 1:45:02Speaker 03

  What is with the World War II helmet?

• 1:45:05Speaker 02

  Uh, well.

• 1:45:09Speaker 02

  Family heirloom. I wanted, 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. When, the day I got it, the patented helmet was, was a fruitcake. Even the yards won't eat fruitcake. Really, they, ah, whoosh, number ten. So, I get it, I get that, she'd put my Luger in a family-sized box of Cheerios. Uh, the only dry cereal we got at the mess hall was Grape-Nuts. You know, little hard crunchy rocks. So Cheerios was like a special thing, so I run over to the mess hall.

• 1:45:51Speaker 02

  And, uh, I'm sitting there with 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 Manus walks up to the table. And then came the, the handle and the receiver and the magazines and he goes, "Well, how did he say, how did he put it?" And he goes, "Uh, what are those, that doesn't look like a box of Cracker Jacks, my man." But, uh, the helmet was, uh, was fun to, I wore it on bright lights. Where you're going in, you know you're gonna shoot. I figured, you know, the NBA go, "Who signed the Germans on?" Yeah, so. And, other people borrowed it. Eldon borrowed it one time. Burjwell?

• 1:46:36Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm. And, uh, who else was it, uh? I wouldn't let Jimmy Johnson wear it because he looked like something really grotesque. Big ears hanging out from underneath it, that, yeah. But yeah, I, I brought it back. When I came back, I had it in my, my luggage, my bags. And the MPs tried to confiscate it. And, uh, everybody that was there ganged up on it, "No, no, no, no, no, that was sent from, by his mom to him." And they just, "Okay." So I, I managed to get it back to the States. A, uh, pissed off girlfriend got rid of it. Uh-oh. I was offered ten grand for that helmet. I'll bet.

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  With, with my name and pictures of me with it and that, it was worth ten grand. Which I bring up to her once in a while, yeah. "Hey, you missed out on that one."

• 1:47:33Speaker 03

  What is with the sawed off RPD?

• 1:47:38Speaker 02

  A lot of guys have, well, not, not just me. Before I got mine, I had, well, the Philippine Armors up at, uh, S4 would, would saw them off, make sure that it was just the right length and you didn't fuck up the rate of fire too much.

• 1:47:53Speaker 02

  It's, we had sawed off M60s too. Uh, the sawed off M60 had a, a tendency for the fucking barrel to fall out in, in mid-stroke. Uh, 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. Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum. And, and some of us like Castro, I, I did on mine too. I put a oil funnel on the front of it. And when that thing went off, it really sounded like a 50 and it would shoot a gout of blue-green plasma out about six feet in front of it. At night, it was horrifying.

• 1:48:36Speaker 02

  But it, uh, lighter, uh, easier to move around in the bush, which you'd carry a lot more ammo with it, cause of, 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, I got so I can make it sing. And it was real effective on bright lights. You, you need a lot of firepower. You need a down. You need something that can chop through brush to get to them. The RPD is your, your weapon. Which was excellent for that. I taught myself how to load the, you lift the cover just like you do on an M60 and that, but it's, it's got a feeder strip

• 1:49:21Speaker 02

  that, 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 that still has the feeder clip, but you gotta 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, um, uh, uh, high power that I, I carried. Or the Silas 22 if I was carrying it, we might stumble on somebody that we could capture.

• 1:50:02Speaker 02

  But, uh, I, I had the armor is, uh, make me a sawed off 12 gauge. Coach gun. That long with the, the little pistol handle and that two barrels. And I carried 25 rounds for it in my one zero vest and one of the up here and either in loops or in the pockets if I had a vest on. Otherwise I kept them in a, in a canteen cup cover. And I had 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, uh, I started, I was using double lot buck and slug.

• 1:50:46Speaker 02

  And then I, I came up with a bright idea that slug just wasn't doing the job that it should. Um, so I started, I took the double lot buck out. I left the, the bottom four. And then I put, uh, I was putting nickels in there to start with and I started counting up how much that was gonna cost me and I went, hmm. So, uh, I started using the five dong piece. It's a brass coin, the same size as a nickel and it's brass. So I, I could put.

• 1:51:21Speaker 02

  Four of those and on top of the buckshot at the base of it. And then three rounds of buck, you know, the balls on top of that and it closed it up. Seal it. That at close range, both barrels will blow a man in half. I know that for a fact.

• 1:51:41Speaker 03

  You've seen, you've blown a man in half?

• 1:51:43Speaker 02

  That guy came up on me in the elephant grass and I let loose at about eight feet. And his legs were there and his top of his body went there.

• 1:51:53Speaker 03

  Shit.

• 1:51:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, because the brass doesn't deform and it comes out like little saw blades and that or a plaque. And it just, it cut him in half. I was, I was surprised myself how, you know, how bad it was. And after that, that was a load for the, for the shotgun.

• 1:52:11Speaker 03

  What were the slugs doing? Why, why do you say they weren't doing the job?

• 1:52:14Speaker 02

  There wasn't enough of them to really get a pattern. Uh, they either, too many of them went out to the side.

• 1:52:28Speaker 03

  Gotcha.

• 1:52:28Speaker 02

  Rather than hitting the center of mass. The, the flat coins worked better because it held together as a mass. You know, and it, uh, it was devastating. It would cut down brush too.

• 1:52:39Speaker 03

  Shit.

• 1:52:40Speaker 02

  But you know, you, you, you learn and you adapt. You, uh, you know, we did all kinds of crazy shit with guns.

• 1:52:50Speaker 03

  How many times were guys sneaking up on you?

• 1:52:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I think three times that I actually had to, had to use the shotgun. Cause 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. I didn't want to get shot. So, and having the shotgun handy was, uh, you know. Max would complain, quit waving that thing around. You know, I'm only going to shoot you on intent.

• 1:53:31Speaker 02

  That was a good weapon, good weapon.

• 1:53:37Speaker 03

  Did the killing bother you? Did the killing bother you? Did it get to you?

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  No, um, hmm.

• 1:53:48Speaker 02

  Most of them were jumbled together. Every, you know, years afterwards, some of them, oh, I had a, it's in the book. I, I, I had a ghost that haunted me for a long time.

• 1:54:00Speaker 03

  What?

• 1:54:01Speaker 02

  A ghost. I would come back when I was, you know, I'd have, I had a malarial relapse and he'd be visiting and when I'd get tired or, you know, didn't take care of my, my, you know, my drinking and that, I'd wake up in, in nightmares. It was a just sixteen year old, fifteen, sixteen year old kid, MBA.

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Um.

• 1:54:26Speaker 02

  He had, uh.

• 1:54:30Speaker 02

  Uh.

• 1:54:38Speaker 02

  He came up on me real quick.

• 1:54:41Speaker 02

  Well, actually, I fell on top of him. I got blown, we were trying to dig in on this little incline and that, and they were pushing us. And, uh. 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 him with the entrenching tool. And I remember him.

• 1:55:19Speaker 02

  Like I said. I don't think about him often, but I remember he was the same age as my little brother.

• 1:55:25Speaker 03

  Fuck, man.

• 1:55:32Speaker 02

  The others, I remember them screaming, yelling, teeth bared, coming at us. Or they came up on us real quick and I dropped them. You know, I didn't really get to look in their eyes or see their face. You know, you hear them kicking around and screaming after they were on the ground and that. But, uh, most of that's a jumble. Every once in a while, one will pop up, you know, because of something that he did. Or you 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.

• 1:56:12Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:56:13Speaker 02

  Before that, they called it battle fatigue. And we never thought we were battle fatigued at that. You know, it was 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, uh, you know, in the early days, we just managed to push it aside. Lot of drinking, you know. I know a lot of guys that got into the bottle and then welded the, the cap on after them.

• 1:56:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:56:46Speaker 02

  And, uh...

• 1:56:51Speaker 03

  How would the ghost appear to you?

• 1:56:53Speaker 02

  How the what?

• 1:56:53Speaker 03

  The ghost.

• 1:56:55Speaker 02

  What about him?

• 1:56:56Speaker 03

  How would he appear to you?

• 1:56:59Speaker 02

  Uh, it'd be a nightmare and he'd, he'd be like I last saw him with half his head caved open and one eye falling out and he would wake me up. And he'd just be, in, in the book, I, I described one of his visits. I'm, I'm on the lake in Minnesota and I'm fishing with my little brother. And he's, uh... He's got this old yellow rain jacket on that my mom hated and that. And he's bent over, he's, he's not facing me, he's facing out the back of the boat.

• 1:57:43Speaker 02

  And he's fishing, he's got a line in the water and that, and he's sobbing.

• 1:57:59Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 1:58:00Speaker 03

  It's okay, Nick.

• 1:58:05Speaker 02

  Shit, pussy.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  It's okay.

• 1:58:09Speaker 02

  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.

• 1:58:20Speaker 02

  And he, uh, 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.

• 1:58:43Speaker 02

  Shit.

• 1:58:44Speaker 03

  It's okay.

• 1:58:45Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I don't wanna be a pussy, I didn't wanna go there.

• 1:58:50Speaker 03

  You know, I have a really good friend of mine. His name's Chris Fettis, he was a sniper for a death group.

• 1:59:00Speaker 03

  And I had him on.

• 1:59:04Speaker 03

  And he had to kill two kids on a hostage rescue mission.

• 1:59:11Speaker 03

  And he has nightmares similar to that.

• 1:59:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:14Speaker 03

  And he had sons.

• 1:59:15Speaker 02

  Some of them never leave you.

• 1:59:17Speaker 03

  They're that age and his nightmares, his sons look up at him.

• 1:59:22Speaker 02

  I haven't had a visit from him in ten years, maybe five, maybe. And it's always when I'm worn down, you know, then, then, then it comes back. Or like today, you know?

• 1:59:41Speaker 03

  How do you deal with it?

• 1:59:44Speaker 02

  I push him back, push him back, don't let him in.

• 1:59:50Speaker 02

  And I try not to think about things like that, try not to think about some of the guys I know that got blown to pieces. But, you know, one minute they were there and next minute there's some kind of hamburger meat with bones sticking out of it.

• 2:00:07Speaker 02

  You just deal with it.

• 2:00:11Speaker 02

  First of all, the psychiatric industry is a bunch of hooey. All those therapists that try and talk you through it and that. I did a little bit of that when I

• 2:00:23Speaker 02

  when I was in Germany. And the problem is, is that they put a jacket on you and then now you're barred from enlistment and all that shit because you're loopy inside. So, nobody goes to them. And two sessions I went to was, yeah, listen, bozo, you don't even know what you're talking about. You're trying to, you're condescending and that's, that's an insult, you know? It's, you know, I got problems, I'll deal with them. Thanks. Sign my slip so I can get out of here.

• 2:00:58Speaker 02

  My generation, we just dealt with it. I dealt with it. I see some of these guys now with the traumatic brain injury from bombs and that and severe PTSD. First of all, a Navy SEAL, God bless his soul, found that psychedelic mushrooms can be used to treat PTSD. Psychedelic mushroom, there's a friend of mine, Al Mullins, 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 psychedelic mushrooms, some kind of bark from a tree.

• 2:01:39Speaker 03

  It's ibogaine.

• 2:01:39Speaker 02

  And crystallized secretions from some African frog.

• 2:01:43Speaker 03

  It's a US toad.

• 2:01:46Speaker 02

  Is it a US toad?

• 2:01:48Speaker 03

  The Sonoran toad. You're talking about 5-MEO DMT and ibogaine.

• 2:01:53Speaker 02

  Oh, cool.

• 2:01:54Speaker 03

  I've done it. Have you done this?

• 2:01:55Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 2:01:56Speaker 03

  Why not?

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  I got too much shit to do right now. They are.

• 2:02:02Speaker 03

  Nick.

• 2:02:02Speaker 02

  But the other thing that they found out about it.

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  A lot of guys.

• 2:02:06Speaker 02

  The other thing they found out about it, it cures drug addiction.

• 2:02:08Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:02:09Speaker 02

  You've got your meth, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, whatever. It takes away the total desire to have those substances in your body.

• 2:02:20Speaker 02

  That, that is the method they should use for cleaning up the drug addiction and the homelessness in this country. Just grab them off the street, stick them 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 I haven't even approached it.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  I did it.

• 2:02:43Speaker 02

  Did it help?

• 2:02:44Speaker 03

  Fuck yeah, it helped. I haven't had a drop of booze in almost four years.

• 2:02:49Speaker 02

  Really?

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  And it was effortless. Yeah, that's why all these fucking bottles are still here.

• 2:02:56Speaker 03

  Otherwise, they'd all be gone.

• 2:02:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  But it, Nick, I'm not gonna bullshit you, it changed, it fucking changed my life.

• 2:03:06Speaker 02

  Well, maybe I'll get around to it someday. I don't drink that much anyway anymore. You know, my, my normal consumption is probably a glass of wine with dinner.

• 2:03:16Speaker 03

  This helps a lot more than just taking the booze away.

• 2:03:19Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  This stuff helps a lot more than just taking the booze away.

• 2:03:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I'll talk to Al. I'm sure he'd like to watch while I go through it.

• 2:03:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:29Speaker 02

  And I would trust him to watch while I go through it.

• 2:03:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:03:33Speaker 02

  Is it offered through the VA?

• 2:03:36Speaker 03

  No, you have to go to Mexico.

• 2:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, I go to Mexico all the time.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  Well.

• 2:03:43Speaker 02

  Well, not all the time.

• 2:03:44Speaker 03

  Maybe I can...

• 2:03:45Speaker 02

  Where's it, Mexico City?

• 2:03:47Speaker 03

  I can't say exactly where it is because, because...

• 2:03:52Speaker 02

  What, you arrived in a laundry bag and they dropped you off?

• 2:03:56Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 2:03:57Speaker 02

  At a clinic?

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. I will tell you off-camera where it is.

• 2:04:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, okay.

• 2:04:01Speaker 03

  And if you want, I will connect you with the people.

• 2:04:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, like I say, I might think about it.

• 2:04:08Speaker 03

  I hope you do.

• 2:04:11Speaker 02

  I'm not usually this weepy or loopy.

• 2:04:15Speaker 03

  That's okay. Happens a lot in here.

• 2:04:20Speaker 02

  I get like that when I think about the yards laying on top of me to keep me from getting hit again. You know, that's another one that brings the tears. Yeah.

• 2:04:34Speaker 02

  Probably because I owed them money. More than like, or they thought that I owed them money.

• 2:04:45Speaker 03

  Do you want to talk about the prisoner capture attempts?

• 2:04:50Speaker 02

  The what?

• 2:04:50Speaker 03

  The prisoner capture attempts.

• 2:04:53Speaker 02

  The prisoner?

• 2:04:54Speaker 03

  Capturing prisoners.

• 2:04:57Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, well, that didn't turn out all that well. Uh, we really, Hab, we only had, well, when I was there, only had one real prisoner snatch. And we, we went there to do a prisoner snatch. The, uh, the area was high concentrations. And it was laced with, uh, trails that couriers and et cetera. If they knew that you were wiretapping or that they had moonbeam overhead trying to listen for radio signals and locate things on the ground, they would use couriers on trails going back and forth between the different units and that.

• 2:05:41Speaker 02

  We, we set it up to do the, uh,

• 2:05:46Speaker 02

  to do a snatch. And it was fairly simple. We, we found a trail, high-speed trail, knew that they would use it if they got pressed and that, and they, we started using air support to bomb them and make them get up and start moving around and that. And, uh, they, 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 on this trail. Kind of cool. It was a really large tree, but from over there where the wall is. And Mac was behind that.

• 2:06:26Speaker 02

  And I was over here behind some slightly smaller trees and that. And, and I had a, a silenced twenty, twenty-two. Was it twenty-two? Yeah. And, uh, and Mac had a silenced gun and that.

• 2:06:45Speaker 02

  And uh, anyway, the, the yards are spread out to kill anybody behind the ones we want. We're gonna let, couple of them go through, yards are on the other side of Mac, couple of them and three or four of them behind me over here down, stretched out on that trail. So they start bombing, making them get up and move around and that, we hear that pitter patter of little feet coming down the trail and uh, and it's three guys, uh, actually four. One guy, slightly ahead, the guy and the next guy was an officer.

• 2:07:29Speaker 02

  We knew he was an officer because it's the, you know, collar tabs and he had a map case. And uh, the guy behind him and then a, a third guy, but, or, or, yeah, third guy behind him and that, and I waited for him to get by and uh, Mac stepped out, shot the first one in the leg and pistol whipped him. And then shot the second guy, uh, and I, I got the, the third and fourth guy.

• 2:08:09Speaker 02

  I killed them and uh, 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, the guy that we shot and captured, you know, shoot him in the legs so they can't run off, uh, put a tourniquet on him, grab him, cuff him up, start carrying him, start deeding 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, or I think

• 2:08:51Speaker 02

  we used an A78 bag. So their, all their equipment, except for the guns, and pulled the bodies and took the guns apart, threw it out under the underbrush and hid the bodies and that. Sometimes we'd take the bodies back with us too, so they could do an autopsy and see what they were eating, see if they had any kind of parasites, that sort of shit, you know. You know how doctors get involved. But we grabbed a guy, we went to the extraction LZ, they, they dropped the strings, and we decided to put Koeman, the 101, and I think

• 2:09:34Speaker 02

  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 left out, and away we go into the blue yonder and that. We're the ones, we're watching the one in the front, and suddenly it looked like somebody dropped a rucksack. There were 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 him trussed up, and they, they didn't get to snap and link him in tight enough to him. And he started swinging around down underneath the aircraft. And he came

• 2:10:16Speaker 02

  back in, and he bit Koeman in the face and held on to him like that. And Koeman just pulled out a knife and just sayonara, there you go, holy shit, all the way to the ground. We were already counting the bonus money, I see that though. That's 300 for you, and 300 for you, and the yards all get a month's pay. We get to go to the trans, get laid, and we watched them go all the way to the ground. We got to the refuel point, it was an old firebase. And they land, everybody's rolling up the strings and that, we go see, Koeman's bleeding all over his face and that, and Mac goes, what happened? And he explained

• 2:10:59Speaker 02

  it to them. Well, you know, you, why did you kill him? He bit me in the face, you know. Number 10, DVC.

• 2:11:08Speaker 02

  That uh, so well, you know, we're not gonna get paid money for it. So well, don't need money. Need to kill VC. That was end of the, end of the conversation. That's how Boudreau threatened us. Cause when we got back to the launch site, we were sitting in the little mess hall portion that we drank beer in and we were joking about what we were gonna tell Manus, well, how we lost a prisoner. We're gonna tell him that uh, I tied him in with some knot I learned in the Sea Scouts. Or uh, I had uh, I forgot the rope and I packed it cause I had too many candy bars in my rucksack. And that we, I used a piece of rope we found out there and Boudreau was listening over in the shadows.

• 2:11:51Speaker 02

  He goes, you know, you're lucky. I just don't tell Manus what you two are really up to. Yeah. But that, it's a good mission. Just uh, things went bad at the last minute.

• 2:12:04Speaker 03

  I have here that you were interrogating captives in the field?

• 2:12:11Speaker 02

  No.

• 2:12:12Speaker 03

  No?

• 2:12:13Speaker 02

  No. Never had time for that.

• 2:12:15Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:12:16Speaker 02

  Or, oh, I would, you might do impact interrogation on me. How many more are with you? You know, where are they? And, and the yards handled that, but you know, you don't have time to do that. You've got, you snatch them and you run until, cause getting them back is everything. And, and, and turning them over to people that can really, and like I said, impact stuff. How many guys were with you? That sort of hitting slap, slap. Yeah, let's go. Uh, the, you know, the, the most valuable POW that I heard of that CCN got was Eldon Bargewell. What, what do you think that POW did for a living?

• 2:12:59Speaker 02

  He was the battalion mess sergeant.

• 2:13:01Speaker 03

  No shit.

• 2:13:02Speaker 02

  So we know who, who he had to feed, what their names were, what units they were, where they were at, all the rations. He had all this wealth of information because he was a mess sergeant.

• 2:13:17Speaker 02

  The, the guy we grabbed, the only thing, he was a senior lieutenant. And he was the, and we're acting as some sort of S2 capacity because the map case had, you know, just like we used, clear plastic covers and he had units marked on it and all that. And it was, it was a tactical map. So it wasn't a line officer. And we pulled a bunch of shit out of his pockets that, you know, gave the guys in Saigon to know he was an intelligence officer.

• 2:13:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, I remember Eldon told me, he said, the one time they found a carved into a tree, born in the north to die in the south.

• 2:14:03Speaker 03

  Damn.

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• 2:14:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, you gotta remember, these guys are GIs, just like us, just wearing a different uniform.

• 2:14:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:14:41Speaker 02

  Hardcore little sons of bitches, I'll give them that.

• 2:14:44Speaker 03

  Sounds like it.

• 2:14:45Speaker 02

  I had a lot of respect for them. I didn't have any respect for the VC because they were ash and trash, you know, militia. But the PAVN, they would come to bombs to get at you. And keep coming. Take casualties.

• 2:15:03Speaker 03

  Damn. Were you on an operation too that, did you retrieve downed pilots?

• 2:15:11Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. We did it a couple of times on, on Brightways. Choppers, you know, you're doing a bright light, choppers go in, you're, you're the one. You gotta go get them.

• 2:15:26Speaker 02

  I remember, I think the chapter is called Blue Eyes. We went in on a chopper that had gone down on an insert and we uh

• 2:15:37Speaker 02

  uh the the the one one and the door gunner had not gone in with the with the with the helicopter. They had leaped free from the wreckage or when they hit the water, they got thrown free. Everybody else was dead then, you know, the and it burned afterwards, which is bad. Uh I did another one. Uh one of them I had the the guy delivered to me. But 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.

• 2:16:20Speaker 02

  And the door gunner got blown up 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 and that. And uh the other, the other guys, uh well, the chopper rolled down the hill. We were gonna go down to it and see if anybody survived. And uh

• 2:16:45Speaker 02

  no, that was a another one. We went in and the 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 the cubby,

• 2:17:03Speaker 02

  everybody had gotten pulled out.

• 2:17:07Speaker 02

  So we thought it was NBA going over the wreckage and that pulling shit out and that. So Cook threw a grenade down there and it landed up. The chopper was laying on the side like that. Grenade landed here, went off. Threw another grenade, it 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 American.

• 2:17:31Speaker 03

  Oh, boy.

• 2:17:32Speaker 02

  So we go down, it was one of the door gunners. And his leg was pinned under the underside of the aircraft and that. He had shit almost gotten out and 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 evac hospital and he's in one bed. And the co-pilot is in another bed. The middle of the night, the staff wait, you know, hears a ruckus and he's in there trying to strangle the co-pilot.

• 2:18:13Speaker 02

  And what had happened was when they unassed 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 officer.

• 2:18:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, a number of times we went in, I went in on a, on an F4.

• 2:18:39Speaker 02

  The, one pilot had either failed to eject or partially ejected. He, he was still in the aircraft. He was dead. And we, we found him, he was kind of jammed up against the, the, the, the ejection seat went out about halfway before something folded in it and stopped it and the rockets and the, and the ejection seat burned him to death. He was toast from about the waist down. Everything was burned off. Damn. Yeah. Not a, not a nice way to go. No kidding.

• 2:19:18Speaker 02

  I don't have nightmares about him because he's Air Force.

• 2:19:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that, that was the worst part. People, when they burn.

• 2:19:32Speaker 02

  And that's, uh, I, I can understand getting blown to pieces and shot up, but, uh, I don't want to ever see another burned body again. Yeah. How was it leaving?

• 2:19:45Speaker 02

  Leaving was happy sad. Yeah, I hated to leave you. I actually thought about just going off in the bush with the arts. I loved them that much and I really had no ties to the, my family of course, but I really had no ties to civilized world at that point. I'd been with them so long, I was brew.

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, a lot of guys were like that, thought about, you know, because they, they closed, when they closed off the,

• 2:20:23Speaker 02

  when they started moving American troops out, we knew that they were gonna close and abandon the arts. The South Vietnamese went for sure and 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, machine guns, rifles, flamethrowers, anything, because when that big American units like Americal and the, and the mechanized, what was the name of it? Tent mechanized or something like that. When they left Quan Tre, the P D O yard was full of stuff.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  Floor fans, big piles of wrenches and sockets, you know, anything you could match. Conex containers with mortar ammunition, actual mortars, machine guns and all that. And just fucking left it for the Vietnamese. So we were going up there raiding it and every time we went to Myeloc, we were taking sling 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 Myeloc and it would disappear. And at least give them a chance to fight, you know, when the thing happened.

• 2:21:46Speaker 02

  But very sad to leave them and sad to leave the guys.

• 2:21:51Speaker 03

  The Allies.

• 2:21:53Speaker 02

  The guy, these are your brothers, you know?

• 2:21:55Speaker 03

  Sounds a lot like Afghanistan.

• 2:21:57Speaker 02

  Huh?

• 2:21:57Speaker 03

  Sounds a lot like how we left Afghanistan.

• 2:22:00Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Well, I'm sure.

• 2:22:02Speaker 03

  We just abandoned those people.

• 2:22:03Speaker 02

  I'm sure. We just, you know, betrayal, you know, not you, but the dipshits in charge, you know?

• 2:22:11Speaker 02

  I had a lot of anger about that for a long time. You know, when I went back, I I found two of our my yards. You went back? I went back twice. How was that? In lightning. No shit? Yeah, I had a friend that papered me. So I wasn't traveling on my passport. Uh, and, uh, Canadian. So, uh, I I actually went back the first time I I did a project, I had a I was working in environmental. And we came up with a a system where we were treating um waste, um shit

• 2:22:53Speaker 02

  with anaerobic microbes, which which increase the anaerobic means doesn't need oxygen. And what it does is those microbes eat the shit and the pathogens and they produce methane.

• 2:23:08Speaker 02

  And we built these silos in the ground. We lined them with clay and on top of it was a cement plug with a shaft on it with a uh, agitator. And that was run from the top and it would stir the shit and 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 through the top, goes over here, you dehumidify it, you can run a reciprocating engine on it, just like natural gas. Cause that's what natural gas is methane.

• 2:23:49Speaker 02

  So, uh, I had a contact at, uh, in Canada. They got a contract to to try and use the system we had. In Vietnam with, uh, four of these big pig collectives. They brought all the pigs in from the surrounding villages, put them in one big, you know, building and, you know, they had a lot of pig shit. Fine, we'd we'd create electricity with it and when the silo got done cooking down, at the bottom of the silo was this thick, really black material. There was kinda it was part of it was a slurry and part of it was kinda grainy, pure nitrogen.

• 2:24:35Speaker 02

  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 ninety percent nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, they, they were taking the fertilizer and actually bagging it and selling it to the farmers, right, to replace using human shit in the Benjo holes, which stopped a whole bunch of other diseases by using, they had, it was so rich, they had to hit it with potash in order to re-establish a, a, a livable, uh, pH in it. So I went back for that, and, you know, I had a good time for about three months. And I went back one more time that, uh, just had a curi-, I,

• 2:25:19Speaker 02

  I had, the first time I heard rumors about the, uh, re-education camps and how some of the yards had survived. And, uh, I had a, I made a contact there in, in Da Nang. And, uh, he told me that he knew some mud 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, I managed to get them enough money to get them out of Da Nang and back up in the Highlands. Both of them were missing an arm. The, the, the, the little people

• 2:26:04Speaker 02

  had SCU tattooed on their, a special commando unit, tattooed on their arms. And if the North Vietnamese found it, they chopped their arm off. So both of them had their arm chopped off from here down. Fuck. Um, but, uh, that was a really great reunion. Yeah, 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, uh, a trail of tears, so to speak. Damn, man. Hell, yeah. I think I got a star on my map for that one. Fuck.

• 2:26:57Speaker 02

  I have a affinity for primitive cultures.

• 2:27:03Speaker 02

  You know, the yards were basically a

• 2:27:06Speaker 02

  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. And I've worked with other groups in other countries.

• 2:27:24Speaker 02

  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.

• 2:27:43Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Nick, let's take a quick break. And when we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home.

• 2:27:51Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:28:35Shawn Ryan?

  And today, you can try it for free. It's ziprecruiter.com/srs. In my experience, finding the right fit for the team is everything. ZipRecruiter's matching technology is great. Because it immediately finds qualified candidates that check all your boxes. To save you time, they recommend specific screening questions you can add to your post to filter through the highest quality applicants before you even start the interview process. It's no wonder they are the number one rated hiring site based on G2. Ask key questions and hire faster with ZipRecruiter. Four out of five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day.

• 2:29:17Shawn Ryan?

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• 2:29:30Shawn Ryan?

  Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus, unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions, our new SRS onsite specials, and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now, support the mission, and become part of the Sean Ryan Show's story.

• 2:30:14Shawn Ryan?

  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?

• 2:30:27Speaker 02

  Total decompression.

• 2:30:31Speaker 02

  And shock. I mean, the height of the anti-war thing and that. I was only spit on once. And that was in Oakland and they were a bunch of Buddhists or something. I remember punching them really hard and all kinds of robes flying around. But coming back to the States, you have nothing in common with your high school friends. You have very little in common with...

• 2:31:07Speaker 02

  The outskirts of your family, your mom, your dad, your brothers and sisters, you know, all there for you. Yeah, I was fortunate.

• 2:31:20Speaker 02

  And that, you know, I had a support mechanism there, but once again, after about a, oh, I don't know, two weeks of being home, I really started getting itchy feet and wanted to go around people that I knew. And so I, I got in my car and went in back to the cries of my mother saying that I abandoned her after she carried me for nine months, nurtured me for, you know, years, you know. But I, I went right to, I stopped on the way from Fort Bragg to visit a friend of mine that I knew from the Mike Force.

• 2:32:05Speaker 02

  And I spent about, I don't know, you know, visitors and fish have the same three day limit, especially with wives. So after about the fourth day, she started getting the, you know, the skunk eye look when she looked at me, you know, and she knew she was gonna have to retrain them after I'd been there for a while. So on the fourth day, I told them I was gonna take off for Bragg and, you know, I, she made me chocolate chip cookies for the trip and I suspected that they might have had Ex-Lax in them, but they didn't.

• 2:32:42Speaker 02

  But I, I drove to Fort Bragg, I checked into the sixth group again, and it, 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.

• 2:33:03Speaker 02

  Didn't have a lot of, uh, personal relationships. Uh, just, I, I just couldn't get into that. I got laid, but I didn't get into personal relationships. And, and gradually the- Why not? Just weren't ready? Didn't wanna let myself go. I didn't wanna trust somebody that hadn't gone through 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.

• 2:33:43Speaker 02

  You know, I, I managed to control myself so I didn't get in a lot of trouble. But, uh, like I said, I, once you've been on that kind of an 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.

• 2:34:12Speaker 02

  And you'd, you know, you'd be looking at people going, and they'd say something and, and you'd go, you stupid fuck, you know, and then go at it. Um, but I think what

• 2:34:28Speaker 02

  really saved me was I got married. When I, and I, I'm really sorry for her because it, uh, she, she was, uh, nineteen and I was twenty-seven.

• 2:34:45Speaker 02

  And, uh, I had, had a baby daughter.

• 2:34:50Speaker 02

  And, uh-

• 2:34:53Speaker 02

  I got orders to go to Berlin. Which in those days was like grabbing the brass ring and hitting the top. And I was getting ready to go to Berlin. She knows she was gonna have to. She was an 18 year old from, uh, my, uh, what's the name of that town? Up by in San Francisco Bay. Monterey? Not Monterey, uh, uh, I can't think of the name. Palo Alto? No, further north, up right, uh, shit, the big electronics center now, uh. Silicon Valley? Uh, I'll think of it later after we get off this thing, you know?

• 2:35:36Speaker 02

  But, uh, her, her parents were from there. Her sister had married a guy from the fifth special forces group. And they, their marriage was already on the rocks when I met her. I got married in Monterey, full military wedding. Uh, which Spider Parks and two other guys tried to stab me with the sabers when I walked down through it. Yeah, we'd been drinking, you know? But, uh, got married. Uh, she got pregnant. We drove to, uh, Fort Devens, my next assignment. And, uh, I was at Fort Devens for about two years with her and things just fell apart.

• 2:36:20Speaker 02

  Uh, I was working as a bouncer at a place in Leamester to, for extra money. And we didn't get paid all that much. I told somebody the other day, the E7, asked me, he says, how much do you make as an E7? So my pay was $1,250 a month. And he went, what? And I was, when he told me what they get paid now, I wanted to rob him 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 Fort Devens, I saw her 112 days out of that year. The rest of the time I was either on exercises, flintlock, mobile training team, wherever.

• 2:37:04Speaker 02

  And it just, it fell apart and I went to West Point to, to, you know, every year the, the cadets, the sophomore cadets get, uh, Uh, patrolling, mountaineering, rubber wraps, all that training and that and uh, and um, 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 posts before I went to uh, or no, I had a month's leave and a week to, to clear posts.

• 2:37:45Speaker 02

  And when I got back to uh, Fort Devens, 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 um, a, a, a container of sour milk in the refrigerator and a beer. 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 thirty minutes." And uh, he came down, picked me up, took, took me up to his place and dropped me off with a

• 2:38:25Speaker 02

  well-known gangster, a real criminal. And I stayed with him for uh, a week. And I made the mistake of trying to go back to California and patch 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-boyfriend's lap when I jumped him and bit a dollar-sized hole out of the top of his head. And the fight was on. And I, the, the bouncers decided they didn't want anything to do with me after I broke one of them's arm. And uh, I just escaped and got

• 2:39:08Speaker 02

  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. So, uh, from there it was a mad flight to get somewhere. I hired a private plane to fly me to another city and then caught commercial air. When I got back to Boston, I stopped in Cincinnati or someplace and I called Jack. I said, "Hey, I got in some

• 2:39:52Speaker 02

  trouble." And he goes, "We know." I said, "What do you mean, you know?" He said, "Don't go to Boston Airport. The state police are waiting for you with a warrant." And I said, "Well, okay." So I flew into New York City and Chester, God, I loved him. He died here two years ago, a former Marine from the late 50s, Fleet Marine, who became a criminal. He, uh, he was, the FBI always suspected he was involved in this or that. He was a one-man crime wave, boosting trucks, selling the stuff, you know. Great guy, just full

• 2:40:37Speaker 02

  of life. He, uh, I had travel orders and a ticket on, you know, the contracted airlines and that to leave from Boston and go to Frankfurt and then on to Berlin. He bought me a first-class ticket on British Airways out of Connecticut and into Frankfurt. And that's how I escaped the net. And group actually covered my ass. They told them that I was on classified orders and that I'd already left and that they no longer were responsible for me. They'd have

• 2:41:19Speaker 02

  to talk to my receiving unit, but unfortunately that was classified and they couldn't tell them with the group commander involved in that loop. And so I went from there to Berlin and Berlin really was 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. Berlin is still one of my favorite cities. There in Munich, you know, those two hit the top of the charts.

• 2:41:58Speaker 02

  Then it, you know, I was speaking German almost all the time, either in my job or, you know, where I was living out on the economy. I had a really nice flat over in Salendorf that was, it was just magic. I had two motorcycles and a Volvo. So I had plenty of stuff that, you know, mental health stuff. Get on a Harley and put something exciting between your legs and take a drive, you know?

• 2:42:31Speaker 02

  And I, I met a, I met a woman there that was in ASA, Army Security Agency. She was a oral comprehension specialist, listening and being able to translate. She couldn't speak Russian, but she could listen to it and understand the dialects and all that, named Claire. And Claire, wow. She was, she was something. I, I lived with her for almost four years before I, I dumped out of the army.

• 2:43:08Speaker 02

  And she just, you know, recently surfaced. And she, 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, she went off and married a, a real nice guy, a warrant officer and built a life out of that. But the time in Berlin was really healing because it was just so much going on. It was, and it was, we were doing stuff like.

• 2:43:43Speaker 02

  You know, dead A, we did a lot of work with the Zunder Neinzats Kommando, S E K, which is their counter terrorist, counter intelligence police. And they, 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. I, uh, I managed to, about halfway through there, there were six of them going on vacation 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

• 2:44:26Speaker 02

  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, uh, we'd follow Soviet agents, East Sherman 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 the rabbit, the hare. So you really got good at, uh, people, people watching you and being able to sense it and that. And all the little tips of the trade and that.

• 2:45:08Speaker 02

  And then, uh, 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, in, uh, the Turkish sector, Gunther. Gunther, Gunther was afraid of his girlfriend, right? And Gunther, Gunther was aggravating, but he was fun sometimes. He had a Messerschmitt. You know what that is? No. Okay, after the war, Messerschmitt, the actual Messerschmitt factory,

• 2:45:51Speaker 02

  designed a car that was powered by a motorcycle engine. That, uh, two wheels in the front, one wheel in the back. And it actually looked like the, the fuselage of a Messerschmitt 109. The key, 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 that, uh, I had, I, I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. Shit, I gotta have this, right? So I make a deal with Gunther 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 when you're going back to your house and that? I'd prefer if I drove with you and that, you know, so come up and pick up the car.

• 2:46:36Speaker 02

  Said, okay, the date, when I went up to, to pick it up, I wore the leather jacket, a leather flying helmet and a white scarf and goggles. And he goes, oh no, said, hop in the back, come on, we'll get down there, don't worry. Said, have you been drinking? No, not at all. I had a flask underneath the seat already and I, I was fairly well lit. We took off down to Havel, which is like in the center of Berlin, there's a freeway.

• 2:47:06Speaker 02

  Before we got a quarter of the way 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 skirts out the window and I'm cackling as I'm going along. And I, I got far enough ahead of them and, and I was using the shoulders, everything I could to avoid them and that. We came up on the Grunewald exit, which if you turn left, you go over to Clay Alley where the consulate is and Berlin headquarters. And my BEQ was over there too, but my apartment was further down over in Salendorf, which is next to the big Bahnsee, the lake there.

• 2:47:49Speaker 02

  So I see the cutoff and if you turn left, you go over to the American side. If you turn right, you're on the horse trails that go around the the Gruenwald is a 12 mile long, three mile wide park. All forests and hiking trails, horse trails, all that. And that Messerschmitt 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 son of a bitch, he's got to be a dirt track driver and that.

• 2:48:33Speaker 02

  So I got down towards Salendorf and I, there's an alley that cuts off to the right off the horse trails and that and gets to the end. And there are just enough space to get that Messerschmitt through. And it goes on a long gentle slope down to the Hubble River where it's a paved walkways and that. And it's like a block and a half up to where my, my apartment is, which is an old mansion. And I got the second floor. So I get down there and the guy's right behind me and I get, I can't, I'm looking around. I'm saying, doesn't look familiar and that. And I see the hedge. I said, well, just cut through the hedge. It's a gentle slope.

• 2:49:17Speaker 02

  See if this baby can take some damage. Turned to the right. There was a moment of weightlessness 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 Gunther. And he surfaced, he bottled up to the top a couple of seconds later. First thing out of his mouth was, I hate you.

• 2:49:50Speaker 02

  So I said, well, yeah, we got more problems than that. We need to get out of the water for one thing. And then uh, we we got to shore and there was a taxi stand not far from there. There was a lighted telephone pole. You can 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. It's such such a location. There was a little guest house that was closed, but the place we used to go and have a, you know, wine or cheese, cheese plate, whatever. I said, come down here and pick me up. What was the name of that? Something Forest. And she shows up about about 10 minutes later

• 2:50:31Speaker 02

  with the Volkswagen that I had bought her. And we packed Gunter into the back of it and we drive all the way back up to bedding. And by that time, the whole park's full of fucking police cars going up and down the streets, driving around, you know, looking for for us. And then uh, we get back up there and all the way up there and tell them, so look, it's simple. I've already signed the pink slip, right? 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 insu- you'll get your insurance will pay for the car. No problem. Everything's handled,

• 2:51:11Speaker 02

  right? But three days later, I go into the detachment 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 uh, from the from the Messerschmitt. He says, you might want to keep this. And uh, little after that, I walked back in and my team started with a wonderful guy named Cray Chuck. He was sitting at his desk and my leather flying helmet was on his desk, all sodden and everything. And he's tapping it with a pencil. Says, you might want to put this in with that plate. So evidently, the scuba team had been called out by the the German police diving team because they were trying to recover two, two drunks that had gone into

• 2:51:56Speaker 02

  a hobbled river and they were dragging the river for their bodies and that. Holy shit. It was a healing process. Sounds like quite the healing process.

• 2:52:09Speaker 02

  A great group of guys, great mission. Uh, saw a lot of really, you know, a lot of guys from Project went to Dead Eck. There was probably, when I was there, there was probably

• 2:52:22Speaker 02

  twenty of us that had been in Projects, you know? It's like all your friends that you don't want as a character would show up.

• 2:52:33Speaker 02

  But the only sour point about it was, I was there when one of the general that wanted to get, get control of the detachment sent his hatchet man down there. And he hated me with a passion. And, and the feeling was fucking mutual. He made sure he wasn't in front of me and any jumps. Just in case his static line got disconnected.

• 2:53:01Speaker 02

  Bet a couple of those. Yeah, you know, they're, they're everyone, they're a sour taste, but they are there. There's no denying it. They're little martinettes that think their shit doesn't stick.

• 2:53:14Speaker 02

  Nick, where's your daughter now?

• 2:53:19Speaker 02

  I tracked her down.

• 2:53:22Speaker 02

  One of the guys I used as an instructor was a

• 2:53:27Speaker 02

  the head of the SWAT team in Costa Mesa. And a homicide detective, and when he got out, he became a private eye. And he tracked her down to, uh, San Jose. And she was living in San Jose about a about two miles from where her grandparents were. And, uh,

• 2:53:50Speaker 02

  I found her on, uh, the internet. And sent her a, a note that, you know, 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, uh, but how long ago? About five or six years ago. My phone rang.

• 2:54:19Speaker 02

  And a young man was on it, uh, somebody. Post teenager, but that young. And he goes, are you Nick Brockhuis? And I said, yes, I am. He goes, I says, I'm your eldest grandson. And I heard a bunch of yelling in the background, woman's voice, and he never called back. So, far as I know, she's in San Jose. Married a, my ex-wife married a Cajun. So, that all wrapped together, it probably wasn't a good idea to go back and try and establish familial ties, so. I still think about her, you know?

• 2:55:01Speaker 03

  What would you say to her?

• 2:55:03Speaker 02

  I'm sorry.

• 2:55:08Speaker 03

  Do you think he'll get that opportunity?

• 2:55:11Speaker 02

  Who knows? Winning the lottery, and that soothes a lot of hard feelings. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe she'll see what I'm doing now. And try and make contact or so. I wouldn't put money on it, but you know.

• 2:55:26Speaker 03

  Have you done any interviews before?

• 2:55:28Speaker 02

  What?

• 2:55:29Speaker 03

  Have you done many interviews before?

• 2:55:32Speaker 02

  Well, this, yeah, a couple of them, you know, and I did one with, uh, who was the guy, the captain from S F? That was a good one. I did, uh, I just did one last night with two L A cops that, uh, it's called War Stories. Uh, they were fun. One of them was a former Marine. I kept telling her, I know there's some dark shit in your past. Don't lie to me.

• 2:55:59Speaker 03

  I hope you meet her again.

• 2:56:00Speaker 02

  Hmm?

• 2:56:01Speaker 03

  I hope you get to say that to her.

• 2:56:04Speaker 02

  I do too. I do too. You know, I, I don't have any real regrets in my life. Uh, I'm not a perfect man. I got a lot of flaws. At least I admit my flaws, you know, and I live with them.

• 2:56:23Speaker 03

  There's no such thing as a perfect man.

• 2:56:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, according to my partner, he's close to it, yeah. Yeah.

• 2:56:37Speaker 02

  Wow. We covered a lot of ground.

• 2:56:40Speaker 03

  We did. How are you feeling?

• 2:56:43Speaker 02

  Well, I'm fine. Yeah. I wrote three books. Now, the first two were about projects.

• 2:56:50Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:56:51Speaker 02

  And they, without my trying, they became cult books. You know, I've had many, many people, and I didn't write it for the public. I wrote it for the guys I bled with. And I'm happy as hell when one of them walks up to me and goes, "Way to go, Nick." Uh, but the public seemed to take it them well, and they, they, I'm still getting paid royalty, so I guess they're doing all right.

• 2:57:17Speaker 02

  I wrote this book, Vagabonds, because I had a contract to supply a West African nation with, uh, six, seven thirty-seven three hundreds on a lease. And I happened to know a wonderful man in London that I'd been in the freight business with in Africa that had all these airline, how to get airplanes and, and run an airline and that. And we set up a lease contract with them for six years.

• 2:57:49Speaker 02

  Contract was signed, money was being transferred into escrow. I moved from Palm Desert to, uh, Tucson because they were gonna paint all the planes and, and, and, um, you know, put the livery on them and that, and do the sea check and that before they sent them to Africa. I got there, and a month later, COVID came ashore.

• 2:58:12Speaker 03

  Oh, shit.

• 2:58:13Speaker 02

  And everything, I was, I was set to make thirty-five thousand a month on a six-year contract. So I got there, and that, that's when I moved in, and I signed a lease for two years with my business partner as a co-tenant. And everything dropped out. So we, we were locked up for COVID. We're sitting there, we watched everything on Netflix, and said, "What are we gonna do?" "Let's write a book about what we did after we got out of the military." So we wrote the book, sixty-seven days, start to finish. Nice. Pushed it through. I had a wonderful editor in London, Oxford, a woman named Ruth Shepherd.

• 2:58:53Speaker 02

  Been really good to me. The owner of the company, I would gladly run over with a pickup truck. But, uh, she's wonderful and her staff is wonderful. She got it approved, got it published and that. And it doesn't do as well as the other two books, but it's, uh, and it was all about what he and I did after we got out of the military. We, uh, rescued kidnapped children in Algeria, Guatemala, uh, rescued, uh, people in Mexico, uh, from kidnapped, real kidnapped gangs. And, uh, one in Chechnya, which I'll never do again. Why not?

• 2:59:37Speaker 02

  I didn't actually run that thing. That was a friend of mine that had the contract and that. I came up with a way of, uh, of tracking the victim, uh, and I used the Russian, Jeff and I had gone to Russia.

• 2:59:52Speaker 02

  Oh God, back, uh, it's one of the things we did. We went to Kazakhstan with a, um, asphalt company. That was trying to get a contract to build, uh, uh, four-lane highways connecting Kazakhstan with the rest of Russia and that. And they, they use cold mixed concrete, which are cold mixed asphalt, which you can use in arid conditions. That's what they built a Alcan Highway out of. Cause no proceeds, all that stuff. So we had met, uh, my friend in London introduced us to the KGB, uh, at a very high level. And, uh, we went to Moscow and, uh,

• 3:00:36Speaker 02

  you know, I met the, the head of director at nine, who was, uh, made lieutenant general in, in the KGB. Had a beautiful parrot tone voice, but fluent English and fluent German. And, uh, where was I going with that? So, and anyway, we, we went to Kazakhstan. It's in the book. It's, uh, you know, and the adventures of going over there and, and doing that. And were we on the airplanes or on the, I lost my track there for a moment. You were going to Russia. Yeah, we went to Russia for this deal with the asphalt company and that.

• 3:01:19Speaker 02

  That was one of the things and while I was there, I made really good contacts with the KGB. And after communism fell, 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 Russia and that. And that's how they came up with the FSB, which is what they have currently and that. But the KGB also owned all kinds of things. They owned cities where they had research going on. They had no roads going in or out. Everything came in by air.

• 3:02:03Speaker 02

  Scientific facilities, they owned gold mines, they owned oil fields. They, and they were funding themselves, but they were looking for cash. And on the thing in Chechnya, we actually rented a Spetsnaz outfit. We had come up with a way to, 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 Chechens.

• 3:02:46Speaker 02

  The Chechens grabbed him and demanded money, basically how it went. The first group that went in to try and pay the ransom, they just killed him and took the money. The second group went in were SAS guys and they shot their way out of it. And then my friend who was SAS guy actually picked up the third and he came up with this plan that if we could locate them, we also could.

• 3:03:12Speaker 02

  Put enough 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. There were only two places in the region where you could buy the medicine that he needed to stay alive. So they broke in there and dosed all his 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 him in a mountain, mountain village. And they came up with a substance they could treat the money with. If you touched the money, within 24 hours, you were dead. So they dosed the ransom.

• 3:03:56Speaker 02

  They picked it up. They, they had already located the village, and about 2 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. Damn. All young people in the village, so, you know. It was, uh, the Russians are, they've got finesse sometimes, and sometimes they're bull in the court. Damn. But they're, you know, I, my trip over there, my association with them. You know, I knew who they were, and I knew what the communists were, and, you know, they were my sworn enemies at one time. But I watched them rebuild after a total collapse of their system.

• 3:04:38Speaker 02

  I asked Vladimir, the general, I said, uh, so what kind of government do you think you're gonna have? He goes, well, Nick, it won't be communist, because that's law. And it won't be Western either. But one thing it will be is Russian, totally Russian. And that's what he came up with, a, a free market society, still with the vestiges of one strong man and one strong party. You know, and, and I admire them for being able to pull through without totally collapsing.

• 3:05:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, they're uh, it's interesting to watch the events and watch Trump working with them and trying to, because he realizes, you know, the West, the Europeans were raping them after the communism fell. They went and made deals with all the steel plants and the shipyards in Poland and all that and basically fed the US this thing about, you know, how crooked the communists are and they're still in control while they were buying everything and making joint ventures. Oddly enough, the Kazakhs, you know, the one group of people they would

• 3:05:50Speaker 02

  rather do business with? Germans. Because the Germans keep meticulous records. So it was really interesting. We uh, we did a lot of things with a lot of different people. And eventually, we trained SWAT teams, we trained personal bodyguards in Mexico, ended up supplying, you know, my clients with armored cars that were produced in my partner's plant in Mexico City.

• 3:06:19Speaker 03

  Damn.

• 3:06:20Speaker 02

  Uh, tried to stay away from working with the government. That's, you can get on a lot of, a lot of kempshi without, you know, too much effort with that crowd.

• 3:06:33Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:06:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, as you know.

• 3:06:36Speaker 03

  You have lived a lot of lives.

• 3:06:38Speaker 02

  You get painted, say 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 that you do that, they start building a jacket on you.

• 3:06:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:06:56Speaker 02

  Now, if you're hanging out with these people, obviously, you're a bad guy. So I did that once and regretted it in the end, and I swear never again. You know, if it meant somebody's life, yeah, but I just don't have a lot of trust in their ethics.

• 3:07:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:07:16Speaker 02

  So anyway, that to the present time, we we come back to Jeff Miller, my partner, came out here and met a studio, a production company called Show Dog Studio, run by a really great guy, John Attard, who's a former NCO in the Royal Fusiliers, back way back when. And he made an offer to love the book, said, 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. Oh, okay.

• 3:07:58Speaker 02

  Using the book as the basis, you know, and basically, every chapter can become a episode. Congratulations. Well, I'm happy about it when the check clears the bank. Wow, that's pretty fucking. You know, it's a, the, the, the thing's gonna be called American Ronin. Not my choice, but it'll work. Sounds pretty badass to me. You know, if they can keep Hollywood out of it, you know, make it, you know, stick to the story. When do you think it will go? I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here. I, I, me personally, I think that we'll actually start writing sometime this spring.

• 3:08:40Speaker 02

  And filming maybe fall and release in late 26. Actually, if everything works and that. Man, well, that will be awesome. Yeah, we'll see. I can't wait to see it. I'm pleased with it because it's, it's interesting. He's pleased with it because he wants his grandkids to go, that's grandpa. (laughing) And I'm doing everything I can to ruin that scene.

• 3:09:08Speaker 02

  Anyway, that's what I'm doing now and I'm still writing every once in a while. I wrote a fiction book years ago that I may get published. It's about Casca, Gaius Cascalogenus, who was a centurion that stabbed Christ in the side. No shit. On the hill. And as the myth goes, when he stabbed him in the side, a clear liquid, he'd be hung on a cross. What happens is your pleural cavity fills up with liquid and you suffocate. You know, between the bleeding and the trauma, you're suffocating in your own juices.

• 3:09:50Speaker 02

  When he pushed the lance through his side, that clear liquid splashed out on his hands, his shoulders, and he had a milky eye that was from a sling stone. And his sight returned, 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 called 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.

• 3:10:34Speaker 02

  How do I get to use the copyright on the character?" And he goes, "Casca's not copyrighted. Casca was a real person. He was a Spaniard, Iberian, and he actually was the, how do you call it? Pilem Prima, the head spear, the most senior centurion ever legion and that. You know, 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.

• 3:11:17Speaker 02

  So I wrote a fiction book based around the Banana Wars in El Salvador and that brought it up to date.

• 3:11:26Speaker 02

  And I just never published it, so.

• 3:11:28Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I hope you do.

• 3:11:29Speaker 02

  I'm fiddling around with it still. Anyway, I don't want to keep you too late.

• 3:11:34Shawn Ryan?

  No, Nick, it's been an honor.

• 3:11:36Speaker 02

  It's been an honor for me.

• 3:11:38Shawn Ryan?

  Me too.

• 3:11:39Speaker 02

  I've watched you on TV and I go, there's something about that guy.

• 3:11:45Shawn Ryan?

  Well, seriously, it's been an honor to get your story out and, um.

• 3:11:52Speaker 02

  You're gonna make me blush, come on.

• 3:11:54Shawn Ryan?

  Then one you have been through, you've lived a lot of lives, bud.

• 3:11:58Speaker 02

  Well, I've lived a long and eventful life. And I've, I've met a lot of good people. I've met some that weren't.

• 3:12:10Speaker 02

  Some of them passed. Not by my hand.

• 3:12:16Speaker 02

  And, but, uh, I think the thing I learned is that I love being human.

• 3:12:25Speaker 02

  Every aspect, the agony and the ecstasy.

• 3:12:29Shawn Ryan?

  Good.

• 3:12:31Speaker 02

  And stay away from redheads.

• 3:12:33Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 3:12:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 3:12:34Shawn Ryan?

  I will.

• 3:12:37Speaker 02

  Oh, wait. Oh, thank you. You too. Cheers.

• 3:12:53Shawn Ryan?

  No matter where you're watching The Sean Ryan Show from, if you get anything out of this at all, anything, please like, comment, and subscribe. And most importantly, share this everywhere you possibly can. And if you're feeling extra generous, head to Apple Podcasts and Spotify and leave us a review.