Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) in Vietnam | Gary Linderer (throwback ep)

Gary Linderer is the publisher of Behind the Lines, a magazine that specializes in US military special operations. He served in Vietnam with the LRPs of the 101st Airborne Division, earning two Silver Stars, the Bronze Star with V device (for valor), the Army Commendation Medal with V device, and two Purple Hearts. Gary's books : https://www.amazon.com/stores/Gary-A.-Linderer/author/B001KHOOIG?ref=ap_rdr&shoppingPortalEnabled=true&ccs_id=5aa1b86d-83f3-4258-adc1-41fa9c021663 Support the show here: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse Grab Jack's new thriller "The Most Dangerous Man" here: https://a.co/d/05NN09wy 00:00 — Start / Vietnam LRP veteran Gary Linderer joins The Team House 01:05 — Growing up with a WWII pilot father and trying to become a military aviator 03:46 — Arriving in Vietnam and volunteering for the 101st Airborne LRPs 08:46 — What LRPs did: long-range recon, helicopter insertions, and working far beyond friendly lines 12:41 — First patrol: immediate contact with a suspected Chinese communist fighter 20:31 — Life inside the LRP company: small teams, stand-downs, and constant readiness 23:37 — The Nui Ke mission: rocket belt patrols, mortars, and air support 29:42 — Night insertion back into Nui Ke and escaping under heavy .51-caliber fire 36:04 — November 20th heavy-team mission against the 2nd NVA Regiment 43:30 — Claymore ambush, killing an NVA major, and recovering the map case 49:53 — Enemy explosive wipes out the team and the fight to keep everyone alive 55:27 — Medevac under fire and the reaction force rescue 01:08:45 — Returning from the hospital as one of the “old guys” in the unit 01:12:14 — Search-and-rescue mission for downed helicopters near Firebase Tomahawk 01:26:36 — LRP weapons: M16s, CAR-15s, Swedish Ks, shotguns, and ammo loadouts 01:29:59 — Coming home from Vietnam, getting married, and carrying the war back with him 01:35:50 — LRPs becoming Rangers and fighting to preserve the LRP legacy 01:38:22 — Writing the books: letters home, reunions, and documenting the LRP experience 01:48:03 — Silver Star, Ranger legacy, helicopter pilots, books, and final thoughts Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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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• 0:28Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to episode 224 of The Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with Dave Park. Our guest on tonight's show is Gary Linderer. Gary served in the Lurps, a Long Ranger Connaissance Patrol, which became Ranger Companies later on in the Vietnam conflict. He's the author of a number of different books. We have a few of his here, the Phantom Warrior series, amongst others. We're really excited to have Gary on the show. We've had a few of his teammates on before, Larry Chambers and Ken Miller. So this is, I feel like, a long time coming, Gary. So thank you so much for joining us tonight.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Good to be here.

• 1:03Jack Murphy?

  So Gary, look, man, I mean, it's an honor and a pleasure. And I'm gonna pitch you the question I pitch all of our guests. You know, tell us about your origin story, about how you grew up, what your upbringing was like, and what sort of propelled you towards military service?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  I was the oldest of eight kids.

• 1:24Speaker 02

  My father was a World War II B-17 pilot. And growing up, couldn't get him to tell a lot of stories about his missions in World War II. But I aspired to be a pilot myself. When I graduated from high school, I was a primary, I had a primary appointment to the Air Force Academy. And in May of my senior year, when I went to take my physical, they found out I had a brain concussion at a football game my senior year in high school. And they informed me at the end of May that I was going to have to wait a year to attend the Air Force Academy. Back then, if you waited a year, you would be drafted.

• 2:05Speaker 02

  So I ended up applying at the last minute to Missouri University. I attended Missouri University for two years. I was an Air Force ROTC. And at the end of two years, I ran out of money. My parents couldn't afford to pay for my junior year. So fearing that I would be drafted, I went ahead and enlisted. I tried to enlist in the Air Force Aviation Program. At the time, you had to have a college degree. Same thing with the Marine Corps and the Navy. So I went to the Army as a last resort. And they told me, well, you can be a helicopter pilot, but you can't go to OCS. For six months in 1967, unless you had a college degree, even the Army wouldn't send

• 2:50Speaker 02

  you to OCS. This was in the fall of 67. So I enlisted for airborne infantry. And I was told by my recruiter that they would probably remove the requirement to have a college degree while I was in training and I could reapply. So I went through basic training and AIT. And I went to jump school. And during jump school, I reapplied. The Army took the requirement away. I reapplied for OCS. My orders came down for OCS the day after my orders came down for Vietnam. So I was engaged at the time to my high school sweetheart.

• 3:34Speaker 02

  And I came home on a 30-day leave. And I tried to find out if I could delay going to Vietnam and go to OCS. They said, there's no way. Vietnam order superseds everything else. So I came home and my fiancee found out I was going to Nam. And she wanted to get married before I left. And I said, no. We went together for five years through high school and college. I said, let's wait till I get back. So anyway, I went to Vietnam. There were five guys in my group that went over for my jump class. Only five guys I knew on the aircraft. We landed and all five of us had orders for the 101st Airborne Division.

• 4:17Speaker 02

  So during P-training, preliminary training, preparatory training, that the 101st offered, the week-long training course, they had different people come by and speak to us about joining these different organizations, volunteer organizations.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  And they had a dog handler come by and he talked to the whole group, like there was 200 of us in the group, and he gave this pitch about being a dog handler and going to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia for the training for two weeks. And none of the five guys I had served with volunteered for this, so I passed up on it. And I like dogs, excuse me, I grew up with dogs, so I almost went that route. The next guy that came was a real stud. He was a Lerp. He had tiger fatigues on and a red scarf around his neck, starched tiger fatigues, really looked like a stud.

• 5:12Speaker 02

  And he gave us a talk about what Lerps did, and that we were the elites of the army and, you know, we operated behind enemy lines and six-man teams, and really made it sound exciting. And all four of the guys I went over there with raised their hand to volunteer. And I, not wanting to be left out, I did the same thing. They flew us up north to Fubai, and there was a jeep waiting for us that took us to the company reunion, or the company unit. And the first sergeant came out and said, "Gentlemen, come in here, I want to tell you what you're going to be doing." Well, he didn't make it sound so glorious.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  We went in and he explained that life expectancy of Lerps was, I'm sure he exaggerated because we hadn't lost that many people. But he made it sound very much akin to being a second lieutenant in a line unit. It didn't sound too inviting to us. I remember writing my first letter home to my fiancee and telling her I really screwed up. So anyway, they assigned each one of us to a team as a replacement, and that entire team trained with us daily for two weeks. And they told us any one man on that team could blackball us, and if they did, we'd

• 6:33Speaker 02

  go to an infantry company immediately, no questions asked. I grew up doing a lot of hunting and fishing, and I was pretty comfortable in the woods. I was an explorer scout, the boy scout, so I could already read a contour map. And I think I did pretty good working out with my team, and at the end of my two weeks, I was accepted as part of the team. Not long after I got there, we had a new company commander that came to the unit. And he had come to us from a line company. And he wasn't very popular. He immediately made us have, we stood two formations a day. We ran in the morning, seven miles.

• 7:15Speaker 02

  We had to wear our uniforms, our fatigues, jungle fatigues with the sleeves rolled down, even on work details. And nobody liked this guy. After about two weeks, he stepped on a toe popper mine going into his tent one night. And they almost disbanded our company because of it.

• 7:34Jack Murphy?

  That's crazy.

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I was still new to the works.

• 7:36Jack Murphy?

  That's crazy how the Viet Cong slipped through your wire.

• 7:39Speaker 02

  That's what we thought.

• 7:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 7:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. Especially in a work unit.

• 7:43Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  One shouldn't have been able to come in and do that.

• 7:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Trying to take out your, trying to take out your leadership.

• 7:49Speaker 02

  They had a hard time finding somebody that would volunteer to be company commander after that. They sent a black major over and he refused to stay in the company area at night. He would come over, hold a morning formation and go back up to division headquarters for the rest of the day. We'd see him the next morning again.

• 8:08Speaker 02

  Well, I guess it was almost three weeks later. Captain Ken Eklund volunteered to take our company. Captain Eklund had been with First Brigade, is with an infantry company with the 327th. And he had an excellent record. He didn't lose a man in a year over there in 1965, West Pointer. He became our company commander and he was an outstanding company commander.

• 8:34Speaker 02

  I didn't really go out on my first mission. I got there in early, early June of 68. By the time I trained and we went through this rigmarole with the, with the captain that stepped on the toe popper, it was August before I actually went out on a patrol.

• 8:51Jack Murphy?

  Gary, for folks out there who don't know or don't understand, can you explain what your unit did, what a work was and what your mission was?

• 8:58Speaker 02

  When I was there, primarily, we were reconnaissance, long-range patrol. We would pull missions that lasted anywhere from three to seven days. Most of the missions were 20 to 40 kilometers away from the base camp. So, we were out quite a ways past where the infantry companies were working, as opposed to battalion reconnaissance units that worked in much closer. Normally, we inserted by helicopter. There were a few missions where we did a walk-in or were dropped off along a highway by truck, but normally, we were taken in by helicopter.

• 9:42Speaker 02

  And we either hovered just above the ground and jumped out, or we rappelled in, or we had, there's a couple of missions, we actually went in by rope ladder. The assertions were normally at first light or last light, and we would hit the ground, usually in a small clearing, run into the jungle and immediately set up a tight perimeter and we'd lay dog for up to an hour, just listening. Normally, if the enemy had a trail watcher, or we were close to a base camp, they would come to see what the helicopter was all about. We had a choice of continuing the mission, or if we were compromised, the helicopters were

• 10:24Speaker 02

  standing off a few miles away, they would come back in and try to pull us out. When we pulled a mission, it was usually in an area, we called it an area of operations, an AO, that was anywhere from four to seven clicks, 1,000-meter clicks in diameter, or in dimensions. The clicks might be in a square, they may be oblong, it depended on the terrain. Before a mission, the team leader and the assistant team leader would do an overflight and try to locate landing zones, potential landing zones or extraction zones, where

• 11:03Speaker 02

  the streams were for water purposes, and where possibly the enemy might be hiding. So, when we went on a patrol, usually, our patrol route was predetermined.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  We based it on contour maps and what we saw in the overflight. So when we went in on a patrol, we weren't locked into that patrol route, but we would try to follow it as closely as possible. A team consisted of a team leader, an assistant team leader, two scouts, and two radio operators, a senior and a junior radio operator. The senior radio operator, his communication was with the either a radio relay team or the company talk, Tactical Operations Center. The junior radio operator, his was sit on an artillery base where artillery support came from. We had a lot of communication problems.

• 12:00Speaker 02

  Our missions were usually back in the mountains. And where we were, the mountains were very similar to eastern Tennessee. Very rugged, very steep, a lot of double canopy, water in most of the valleys, but that's where the enemy usually was too, around the water. So we had to be careful trying to resupply water on missions. So that's pretty well what we did. We didn't cover a lot of ground. We moved short distances, very silently, did a lot of listening. We tried not to run trails. We would try to parallel a trail, far enough off that we could see somebody coming up or down it where we wouldn't make a lot of noise.

• 12:41Jack Murphy?

  Gary, I mean, where do you even begin? I mean, do you want to start, tell us about your first mission that you started to get into a little bit?

• 12:51Speaker 02

  My first mission, we had an E7, was the team leader. I won't mention any names. I was pretty impressed by him. I thought he was very professional. We landed in this Alpine country, not Alpine country, Piedmont country, rolling hills, not a lot of cover, right at the base of these tall mountains. We landed about, I think it was about seven or eight in the morning. And there were six of us. I was the new guy. The helicopter came in and was still moving when we jumped out. I remember I hit on my toes on my feet and did a somersault immediately. Not realizing that when a helicopter is moving, you don't jump out like that.

• 13:35Speaker 02

  Really, I felt like a total ass when I did my tumble and came back up on my feet. I thought that probably kicked me off the team when we get back from this mission. Anyway, we ran about a hundred meters off the LZ into a bamboo thicket, right at the edge of the bottom of the mountains. And there was a trail, high-speed trail going up through the bamboo. I was walking slack for the point man, who happened to be the team leader, an E7. We went up that trail about a hundred meters. And he announced that we were going to have a break. And we stopped in the middle of this trail and took a 10-minute break. This is right after we inserted.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  And I found out later that he was, we were playing dog at the time, but in the middle of a trail. About 15 feet above us, above the point man, the trail made a turn to the right, 90-degree turn. And you couldn't see it out of it because the elephant grass and the bamboo was too hot. So we're sitting there in the trail and all of a sudden, I look up and here's a, I think he was a Chinese communist. He was six foot tall. Came around the bend in the trail. He had khaki fatigues on and a red bandana around his neck. He had a bootie cap and he had an AK-47 slung over his shoulder. And everything froze. Nobody moved.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  He stopped in mid-step and stood and looked at us and we both looked at him. And the guys behind us, I'm not even sure, the farther down the trail, I don't even know if they saw him. They were pulling security in different directions. And all of a sudden, the guy grabbed for the sling on his AK-47. When he grabbed on the sling, the E7 ripped him just across the chest with his, with his,

• 15:29Jack Murphy?

  Was that?

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Car fifteen.

• 15:32Jack Murphy?

  Car fifteen.

• 15:33Speaker 02

  Okay. I had an M16 and I had, I had my finger on the selector switch, thank God. And I flipped it to fire and on full automatic and I ripped him again. And every time we hit him, he'd stagger backwards and you could see the dust come off his uniform. And you could see the splotches of red coming across his chest. And all of a sudden, the guy turns around and runs back around the bend in the trail. And we heard him fall. And we're sitting there, the E7 didn't say anything. The guys below us didn't know what was going on. They all stood up and I'm still sitting on the ground, you know, I had fired 20 rounds out of my magazine. And all of a sudden, it occurred to me, you better reload.

• 16:16Speaker 02

  And I dropped the magazine and put another mag in and a stick came flying over the, the uh, uh, elephant grass and the bamboo and landed in the trail. Then pretty soon a rock came over. So the E7 figured he was a point man for an element. And he jumped up, said, everybody back to the LZ. So we all jumped up and the E7 pulled rear security and we ran 100 meters back to the LZ. The helicopters were still on station, so they came in and picked us up and took us back to the LZ. We went through a debriefing, my first one. And we all told what we saw. The other four guys on the team never saw this guy.

• 16:59Speaker 02

  Even when we fired, they didn't see him. Uh, so we reported what happened and the, I wasn't going to say too much, I was still too new. And the E7 said, I think this guy was a Chekhov. He said he had, when we shot him, his hat came off and he said, he had a flat top, his hair had been cut recently. The guy was huge for an Oriental. So I, I agreed with him, uh, cause I basically felt the same thing myself. Um, that was my first patrol. I was on the ground, probably 30 minutes at the most.

• 17:31Jack Murphy?

  Oh, man.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  And I, I remember thinking, God, I thought these people were little. This, this guy was as big as I was. Jerry was the first of my 28 missions.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  Hey everybody, this is D. I'm the producer of the Team House. If you're hearing me right now, sorry, and it's because you're not a member of our Patreon. And if you'd like to help support the show, you can go to patreon.com/the team house. That link is in the description.

• 18:01Speaker 03

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• 18:39Speaker 00

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• 19:07Jack Murphy?

  So Gary, back to you. And so that was your first mission, less than 30 minutes on the ground, and encounter with an unexpected encounter there, it sounds like. What was the what was the next step for you as as you integrate it into your team and get jacked up, I guess, for the next mission that's coming your way?

• 19:28Speaker 02

  Well, we normally would pull anywhere from two to four missions a month.

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Coming in from a patrol, we usually get a three day stand down between that mission and another one, which was basically spent either resting if it was a long patrol, repackaging our gear, rearming if we fired any ammo on the mission, you know, replacing the LURF rations we took with us. We were always ready, our rucksacks were always ready to go on another patrol. When you're first in country, you pretty well stay with your team. After you get a little bit of experience, you end up doing a lot of fill-in missions where you might go out as an extra man on another team, or if somebody's at recondo school,

• 20:17Speaker 02

  or on R and R, you fill in on that team. I was surprised how well we all did the same thing in the field. Normally on another team, you'd think you wouldn't fit, but after you had five or six months under your belt, it was amazing. You could go out with any team and pretty well be comfortable with it.

• 20:39Jack Murphy?

  How many WURF teams, these six man teams, how many were in your company?

• 20:43Speaker 02

  Our T O and E called for two platoons with six teams in a platoon. Normally, we ended up with about four teams in a platoon because of casualties, or ETSs, DROs, guys going to recondo school, R and R, sick, wounded.

• 21:02Jack Murphy?

  So this is a small, tight knit 20 to 25 to 30 man unit, really?

• 21:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. We had radio relay teams, which usually consisted of three to four men that would normally go out on a fire base, or actually go out as another team and relay our combo back to the rear, especially when we were a long way out, like in the Ashel Valley. Sometimes they would send a spotter plane out at certain periods of time, and we'd relay through that spotter plane. So it just depended on where we were and what kind of combo we had anyway.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  I was lucky, I didn't have a lot of hot missions, probably until I was there for four or five months. I think my, my next hot mission, this was in August, that first mission, I was on a mission, the 3rd of November, that turned out to be very hot. Matter of fact, four of us were decorated on that mission. And then November 20th, I was on another very bad mission where we had four killed and everybody, eight guys wounded on a heavy, heavy team, 12 man team, everybody got hit.

• 22:17Jack Murphy?

  Let's, uh, let's start with the first one that, that was pretty hot in November.

• 22:21Speaker 02

  The first one, Camp Eagle, our division base camp, was in a huge cemetery in Vietnam. There were graves everywhere, big concrete graves, right off of Highway 1, probably seven miles southwest of the city of Way. From where Camp Eagle was, oh, maybe seven miles out, the mountains started. And there was a rolling peat muck up to the mountains. Right, right along the base of the mountains ran, ran the Songbo and the Perfume River. So there was a major waterway that came from the ocean into the city of Way and, and came

• 23:02Speaker 02

  to the mountains and then ran south along the base of the mountains. There were a couple of abandoned firebases right at the near edge of those mountains. One of those was called Nui Chi. There were still chopper pads up on top and bunkers and, uh, that we, it was, it was in what we called the Rocket Belt. We used to catch a lot of 122 millimeter rockets from back behind Nui Chi. Radar would pick them up as soon as they launched, but they, the enemy kept launching them from, from that proximity. So they were going to put our team out there on top of the mountain and we were supposed to walk off the backside and hopefully be available in that area when the rockets were launched.

• 23:48Speaker 02

  When we landed, or actually, we didn't land, the helicopter came in on top of Newey Key, which was abandoned at the time, and for some reason, our team leader said, "Don't sit down on the chopper pad, we'll jump off." Well, we jumped off the, onto this PSP chopper pad, jumped off of that onto the ground, and we looked underneath it, there was a 250-pound bomb underneath the metal chopper pad. If that chopper would've sat down, it would've blown us all to hell. I don't know what told him not to tell that pilot not to land there, but he did. This was about 10 o'clock in the morning, and we, there was two fingers that came down off the, that mountaintop.

• 24:32Speaker 02

  One ran down towards the river, and the other one ran down to the south. The other two sides were very steep. We started down the, the one to the river, and it was no vegetation, it had been cleared by the engineers when they opened up that fire base, a lot of big boulders. We got about halfway down that ridge line, and we started taking mortar fire. And we could hear the mortars launching from farther down in the valley and on the other side. So, they were, they were, it was a very narrow ridge, and the rounds were straddling us. They were hitting on both sides, and it seemed like they couldn't put one on top. So, we're sitting there, and Ray Zoschak, our team leader, he gets on the radio, the

• 25:16Speaker 02

  artillery radio, and starts calling in artillery on the mortar positions. And after about three adjustments, he put it right on top of where those mortars were launching. I turned around and looked, and I saw four NVA going up that other ridge line, and it was also pretty open. And they were trying to get to the top of the fire base. I hollered to Zoschak, and I said, "We got company, and they're coming up the other ridge." He said, "Take the rest of the team, and get up, get up there ahead of them." So, four of us took off running, and Zoschak and their radio operator, Billy Walkabout, they stayed there and kept calling in artillery on the mortar positions.

• 25:57Speaker 02

  So, we beat the enemy to the top of the fire base, and four of us scattered around it, because we didn't know where they were coming up from. And, so, we split up, and, and each one of us took a different point around that fire base, east, west, north, and south. About fifteen minutes later, Zojak and Billy Walkabout came back up to the top. And we stayed out there for two or three hours. And we were, the helicopters came in, gunships, they started taking fifty-one caliber fire from a couple of different locations. We were still on top of the mountain, they were, they couldn't get any slicks out to pull us off because they were involved in another team being extracted.

• 26:41Speaker 02

  So we were kind of stuck out there midday. I was sitting there on the south side of that firebase, looking down that ridgeline where the enemy had come running up. And all of a sudden, we had an F-4 Phantom come in, dropping bombs right across, coming in perpendicular to that ridgeline, dropping bombs right where the vegetation started. After he made his first pass, I saw four NVA soldiers break cover and run across the ridgeline to get to the other side of the ridge. And I opened fire on them, they were probably seventy-five yards away from me. And I dropped two of them, and I think I hit a third one because he, he looked like he fell when he got into the cover, and I missed the fourth guy.

• 27:25Speaker 02

  I hollered to the rest of the team, I had movement out in front of me. And we, Zojak called in artillery on that ridgeline after that, the helicopters pulled out. They came and got us probably five-thirty in the evening. We flew back to Camp Eagle, we went through a debriefing, told them what we had. And Captain Eckland comes out, he said, "I got some bad news for you guys." He said, "Division called down, they want you to go back in where the martyrs were." And this was off the ridgeline, we had taken martyr fire from down in the valley, heavily jungle.

• 28:06Speaker 02

  So anyway, one of the guys that was on the mission with us, he got kind of baked a little, he got heat stroke after laying on one of those flat rocks in that afternoon on the firebase. So he was too sick to go back out, so we had a guy volunteer to take his place. It was probably eight-thirty at night, pitch dark. The two helicopters came and sent down on our chopper pad, we loaded up. Nobody felt good about this mission. They flew us back out, and keep in mind, we were only seven miles away from Camp Eagle, and you could see our company area from the New Ekey Mountain.

• 28:43Speaker 02

  We flew out there and the helicopter came in this valley, the same valley we had taken mortar fire from, and there was a huge boulder, probably the size of a house with a flat top on it. And the helicopter came in and kicked its floodlight on, spotlight on, just as it got to the bottom of the valley. And when he kicked it on, that boulder was right there. So we all, he hovered over the top of the boulder, and we all jumped out on top of this boulder, and it was probably another eight to 10 foot drop to the ground. Well, we got off the boulder, we set up security right around the base of the boulder, and the helicopters departed for Camp Eagle. It wasn't 10 minutes after the helicopters were gone, and we heard

• 29:25Speaker 02

  bamboo sticks clicking on the opposite ridge line, over a distance of probably 400 yards, probably six sets of bamboo sticks. And they were clacking them together, trying to stay online. So we're sitting there, and Zojak radioed back to the company area and said, they know we're here. He said, they're coming down the ridge for us now. But five minutes later, we heard a Chinese bugle blow. And then we started hearing whistles, police whistles. And they were covered a pretty long distance. So we realized that, Zojak

• 30:06Speaker 02

  said, here's the story, guys. Here's the other thing, the ridge line behind us, the one that we had taken mortar fire on, there's also sticks clacking up on that ridge line to our backside. Zojak said, the only chance we got, we set out three claymore mines pointing uphill, in the same general area. He said, let them get on top of us, we'll blow these claymores, and then we bust through them and find our way back up to the top of New Ekey, and get extracted. So that was our plan.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  We had radioed back and reported all this to the company area. And they said, we're going to try to pull you out where we put you in. And we're thinking, my God, it's pitch black in here. They got gooks coming down both, both ridge lines on us. Those helicopters will never survive coming up this fowl. What, what happened is Captain Meacham, one of our pilots, he comes out and he flies up the valley, probably 150 feet off the ground and starts taking heavy 51 caliber fire from, from two different locations to trace small arms, tracers all over the place.

• 31:15Speaker 02

  While he was doing that, WT Grant, our other pilot, he comes up the floor of the valley, probably 50 feet above the floor of the valley, below the ridge lines, and comes up and with no lights on, and, and we pulled a pen gun flare, not a pen gun flare, a, a, yeah, pen gun flare, and we, we shot it and stuck a strobe light down a M79 we had, and, and he guided in on that signal and hovered over the top of that rock that we went in on. Well, we had a hell of a time getting back up on top of that rock. I think only two guys were able to do it, standing on the shoulders of the other guys.

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Well, Grant kicked out a ladder, and the ladder was at the base of the rock, so we, we had to climb that ladder to get into the helicopter. And the two guys on the rock, one of them was Zojak, the team leader, and the other guy was me. Well, I was the second to last guy up the ladder, Zojak was the last one. And while I was climbing up the ladder, Dave Bedron stepped on my fingers when he stepped back on the ladder and mashed the hell out of my fingers. I was still six, six runs from the chopper. And I mean, he mashed my fingers good. I finally got in the chopper that one of the door gunners got out and pulled me in. Zojak deranged himself on the ladder and hollered

• 32:40Speaker 02

  for the door gunner to get out of there. So he's, he's riding the ladder coming out at night. And I remember coming out of there, the 51 calibers picked up on us because we had to climb to get out of there. And I remember it looked like somebody was throwing lights through our helicopter. I mean, the rounds were coming all around us. Helicopter never took a hit. Uh, there was two 51 calibers. They, they pulled off of Captain Meacham, started firing at our helicopter coming out of there. We had to make a U-turn to fly back to Camp Eagle. So it was a, nobody got hit. Uh, amazingly, Meacham's chopper took two rounds. Grant's didn't take any. With all the tracers coming out of there,

• 33:24Speaker 02

  you know, I don't go to 4th of July shows anymore because I've seen a better one.

• 33:29Jack Murphy?

  It's like, uh, like Star Wars, right? With the

• 33:33Speaker 02

  It was, it was a mad minute times 10. It was really something to see. We, we, we figured there had to be a hundred weapons fired at us coming out of there. And how we got, didn't get hit, I have no idea. That was November 3rd. That was a one day mission.

• 33:49Jack Murphy?

  What, what was the feeling when you

• 33:51Speaker 02

  Two missions in one day.

• 33:52Jack Murphy?

  What, what was the feeling when you guys get back to the FOB? And I mean, that's a close call, right?

• 33:55Speaker 02

  Uh, I'll tell you, I, I probably had six close calls in Vietnam where, where you just, you know, you're not going to survive it. Uh, would you, would you come to that conclusion? The experience I had is the peace came over me. You know, once you accepted, I'm going to die here, you know, it's, it's almost like, uh, you're not afraid anymore. You know, you've accepted the fact you're not going to survive that. Um, I've had, I've had my share of close calls in my life. I, I told my wife, I just got out of the hospital three years ago with a close call. I said, I think I got two left.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  I wrote myself off four times enough.

• 34:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 34:42Jack Murphy?

  And then you mentioned, I think you said maybe it was later on in November that you went in with a heavy.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  November 20th, we went out on a heavy team.

• 34:53Speaker 02

  I was the assistant team leader on the second team, the primary team. His assistant team leader was the overall assistant team leader of the operation. We went out in the Run Run Valley, which was a big valley that back in the mountains that ran into the Ashel Valley. And intelligence had reported that the, uh, the, uh, second NVA regiment had just come into that valley. The second was the regiment that went into way during K-68. They were very, very professional, great fighters, bad, bad reputation.

• 35:32Speaker 02

  The reason we went out with a heavy team is this regiment had a reputation for hunting down warp teams. They didn't like us. So we went in with a 12 man team. Uh, it was a first light mission. We went out in, in two helicopters and we came into a landing zone that was, uh, it was all elephant grass. The helicopters, it was in a ravine on top of, right at the, right at the base of a wooded ridge line. The first helicopter went in, the guys got out in the skids and they jumped in the elephant grass. The elephant grass was 15 feet high, plus it was a ravine. And it was, the elephant grass was flat across the top, so we thought it was a clear, a flat area.

• 36:18Speaker 02

  Six guys went in and none of them landed on their feet. I mean, they all hit hard. We saw what happened, so when we went in, we actually got out and were hanging on the skids with our hands and trying to drop, you know, give another four or five feet before we hit the ground.

• 36:36Speaker 02

  My team leader, Jack Sars, he landed on a log, a teak log laid in that elephant grass, broke both his ankles. And he didn't know it at the time, but we found out later they were broken. So all twelve of us were on the ground, several of us were pretty shaken up, me included. Jack couldn't hardly stand, but we got him up on his feet. We walked probably thirty feet through that elephant grass into the edge of the woods, and immediately into the edge of the woods was a high-speed trail, six feet wide. I mean, it was big enough for carts. No vegetation on it, pure dirt. And it ran along the base of the ridge.

• 37:17Speaker 02

  The team leader stopped the team there, and he said, "Linder," he said, "you and Suzan, go to the right up that trail and do a point recon and find a place to set up an ambush." And he sent two more guys to the left. Suzan and I probably went a hundred feet, and the trail made a bend, ninety degrees, and went up the side of the ridge. And it wasn't a very tall ridge, it was probably maybe eighty feet high. And right at the bend was a trail watcher's bunker, empty. We checked it out, it was empty. And it looked like it hadn't been used recently. And it was probably sixty to seventy feet up that trail to the top of the ridge,

• 37:59Speaker 02

  and it made another bend to the right and went down the top of the ridge, the trail there. So we started up that, after the trail watcher bunker, we started up the ridge line. We got about halfway to the top, and we heard a gunshot, single shot, about three hundred meters away to the east. And Suzan said, "They know we're here." And I said, "Yeah." So we went back to the team leader, and they had heard the shot too. And we told them, "Well, we found a trail watcher bunker, and right at the top of the ridge, where that trail turns to the right again, there's a knob right there on top that looks down that trail." I said, "That would be a good spot for an ambush, or an observation post."

• 38:43Speaker 02

  So he called the other two guys back in and we walked up the trail and we got to that knob and he said, "This is a good spot." So we all pulled up on top of it. We sat up in a circle around that knob, which was probably only 50 feet across, no bigger than that. And it was probably three or four foot higher than the trail itself. On the backside of it was a bluff, straight up and down, probably 80, 90, 100 foot, pretty steep, unclimbable. To the west was a saddle that went up to a higher ridge on the other side of the saddle.

• 39:22Speaker 02

  And the saddle was probably 80 feet across. Below us was the LZ we came in on and the trail at the edge of the woods. And to our east was the trail where it came up the ridge. So we're sitting right on top of this knob, the trail dog legs around us, there's a bluff on one side and a saddle on the other. We spent the entire day there, this was probably 10 o'clock in the morning when we got up there. We spent the entire day there, nothing happened. That night, there were about four or five groups of NVA came down that trail with lanterns, no flashlight, just lanterns. They were looking for us. We don't blow ambushes

• 40:04Speaker 02

  at night, unless you knew what you were ambushing, you didn't do that at night. So we let them go by and we reported it with silent commo, with clicks on the radio. And the next morning, Sires, the guy who broke his ankles, his feet were so swollen, he couldn't get his boots on. So we decided that we would take him back to the LZ, which was only 150 feet from us, and extract him, medevac him out. So Riley Cox, guy we called Dozer, and Frank Susan helped him down to the LZ. A helicopter came in, dropped the jungle penetrator and hoisted him out. The two guys came back up to the perimeter and we heard two shots

• 40:48Speaker 02

  fired, same area, we heard that one shot fired. So we figured that they thought we all left. So it wasn't too long after that, maybe eight, eight thirty in the morning, a single NVA came down the trail, whistling, making all kinds of noise, and behind him was about ten more, about fifty feet behind him. Well, we didn't, we didn't try to snatch the one guy, we didn't kill him, and then the others came by, he was baited. And they, they didn't come back, they went on down the trail, never came back. So we're sitting there about, I think it was eleven o'clock in the morning, and, uh, uh, the team leader said, uh, I heard

• 41:29Speaker 02

  him whisper, "We got company." And, uh, we could hear people talking. And I was, my Claymore was the first one in this ambush, and I'm laying back on my back on this, on the side of this knob, and I could see from here on up, anybody walking down the trail. I looked over, and there were nine NVA. At the time, I thought they were Arvins, because they were wearing green jungle fatigues and bootie caps. One of them had a tiger fatigue bootie cap on. And they were talking, making noise, they come walking down the trail, and I'm laying there thinking, this is an, uh, Arvin unit, South Vietnamese unit, what are they doing in RAO? Well, about that time, uh, the team leader snapped his fingers, which

• 42:12Speaker 02

  was the sign to blow the ambush. I blew my Claymore, and the other five Claymores went off simultaneous, we had a six Claymore ambush. The final Claymore fired down the trail. Well, there were nine of them, excuse me, ten of them, and we killed nine of the ten in the ambush. The point man had gotten out of the kill zone, and he had an AK-47 slung over his arm, and I had my Car-15 in my right hand, I'd clacker on the Claymore in my left. When I blew the Claymore, I saw him through a gap in the trees, running down the trail, and I one, one-handed shot at him and shot over the top of him. Frank

• 42:52Speaker 02

  Sousa jumped to his feet, and Frank opened up on him, and I saw the guy, he had a towel around his neck, it flew off. So I thought, I think Frank, Frank hit the guy. And he, the guy was running downhill, and he, towards where that trail watcher bunker was, and he dove off the side of the trail on the left, he disappeared. Well, we all ran, four of us ran out to check the bodies. Four of them were nurses, Army, uh, NVA nurses. I, I immediately, I felt like shit, because my claymore killed two of them. Uh, the rest were guys, uh, one of them had a forty-five automatic in a holster, and he had a matte pouch over his shoulder.

• 43:37Speaker 02

  We found out later, he was the XO of the Second NVA Regiment.

• 43:40Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 43:41Speaker 02

  Uh, we took the map case, stripped all the bodies. Uh, what made me feel better, all four of the nurses had forty-five caliber automatics, nineteen elevens, in their rucksacks. So we had five pistols and two AKs we recovered. Two of the guys were not armed, and the point man who was armed got away.

• 44:02Speaker 02

  We, uh, pulled back up on top of the knob, and the team leader calls in a report, tell, tell them what we got, and, uh, we're sitting there, and normally when you blow an ambush, you get the hell out of Dodge. You don't stay there. Well, he decided to stay there. He called for a reaction force or an extraction. And, uh, he was pretty proud of himself, you know, having killed nine out of ten NVA, including a major. And, uh, we sat there for fifteen, twenty minutes, and they finally called us back and said, "We can't get you extracted. All of our helicopters have been taken for a battalion-sized combat assault. So we, we have no aircraft available."

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Uh, it was probably going on noon when this happened. Uh, that's not true. Uh, we, we blew the ambush at nine, it was probably closer to eleven when this happened. So we're sitting there, and, and he said, "We can't get a reaction force to you because the helicopters, we have no helicopters there."

• 45:03Speaker 02

  We had a platoon from the 2nd and 17th cab, which was our, our reaction force, our ready reaction force, they, they, they were tied up, they couldn't get out to us. So, anyway, the assistant team leader of the, of the team leader that was in charge of the whole team, we saw him walk over to the team leader and whisper in his ear, and the two of them got in an argument. I mean, the team leader kept shaking his head, and we're sitting there, and he went back to his position, and Frank Souza, Frank Souza and I, who were the ranking people on the other team, we went up to him and said, "Man, we gotta get the hell out of here." I said, "You know, there's a base camp 300 meters away from us, and we just killed nine people, they're gonna be coming for us."

• 45:47Speaker 02

  He said, "We're staying here till they get a reaction force." The team leader said this. So, anyway, I guess it was 1 o'clock in the afternoon, and he tells his assistant team leader, he said, "Captain Eklund's out looking for us, trying to locate us, go down in the saddle where the trees open up, and flash him when he comes over the top of us, with a signal mirror." Jim Venable was the ATL, he went down, and he's down there flashing his helicopter, and we hear an AK-47 open up, and he goes down. He was hit in the neck and the arm, broke his arm, and went through his upper arm.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Frank Souza and Riley Cox ran down and grabbed him and dragged him back up into the perimeter, and right after they got him in the perimeter, we, about 15 NVA, come charging up the hill from where we had come in, the original LZ, online. And we opened up on them, drove them back, killed a couple of them, they were probably 50, 60 more yards away, not quite, a little closer than that. And for the next two hours, they kept doing this. They'd hit five, 15 kids at a time, from different spots, they'd come across the saddle, never did try to rush us in a large bunch, but we could tell from the gunfire, there was quite a few NVA around us at the time.

• 47:14Speaker 02

  And we were, we were adjusting artillery as close, we had artillery busting.

• 47:20Speaker 02

  Fifty, sixty feet away from us, walking it into us.

• 47:23Speaker 04

  Holy shit.

• 47:24Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking, boy, they're, we're gonna push them right into us. They're gonna try to get close to us, but they didn't. There wasn't enough cover for them, I guess. After the artillery, we had gunships, finally got four gunships out to us. And we, we went through a total of eight Cobras in the next two hours.

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 47:43Speaker 02

  They were firing rockets and hovering over the top of us, doing pedal turns and firing rockets down all around us on the ridge line. Uh, we had, I think we burned up two S F fours from Danang came in and fired support for us. And, uh, while this was going on, that bluff behind us,

• 48:03Speaker 02

  some NVA somehow or another climbed up that bluff and set up a forty pound chikungam right along the edge of it. There was a lot of brush right there, but it was steep on the other side. We had one guy back there pulling security leaning against this big tree. His name was Mike Wright from Kansas City, Missouri. And I'm sure he was watching what was going on across the perimeter from him. Cause we didn't expect anything to happen along that steep side. That's where, and Mike was right there. About two o'clock, three o'clock in the afternoon, the team leader said, everybody pull back to the top. He said, I'm gonna bring the artillery in closer. And at the time, we had a Cobra sitting right over the top of us, doing pedal turns and firing rockets all around us down the ridge line.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  I, I remember, I turned around and looked and several of the guys had gotten up into a crouch and were pulling their rucksacks with them, heading back to the top of the knoll. We, we had been spread out down along, rounded. I, I started shinnying backwards. My rucksack was in front of me and I was pulling it with me as I shinied backwards. And all of a sudden, everything blew up. And I, I remember turning my head and seeing this ball of black smoke roll over the top of us, dirt. And I couldn't see anything else. Everything finally started settling down and turned around and nobody was up. Everybody was down. And I remember thinking at the time, I'm the only one left.

• 49:31Speaker 02

  And we had a pact in the lurbs that we wouldn't let anybody be taken alive. And I was gonna shoot anybody that was still alive and kill myself. I'd made up my mind to do that. And all of a sudden Riley Cox, across the perimeter from me, he sat up, he big guy. And when he sat up, his intestines fell out in his lap. And this part of his arm was broken, right here, and hanging down like an elbow, right here. Riley had a shotgun. He was armed with a shotgun on top of it. And he was on the other side of Frank Souza, around the perimeter from me, and Kerry Clifton, my best friend,

• 50:11Speaker 02

  who had volunteered, traded with another guy to go out on this patrol because he wanted to be on the team with me. Kerry, he pushed himself up off the ground and his throat was ripped out. And when he looked up, blood just spewed out of his throat, right in front of me. And Billy Walkabout, I heard him behind me, said, "Were you hit? Are you hit?" He was behind me and he'd been hit through both hands.

• 50:42Speaker 02

  When I realized there were other guys still alive, it took me a couple of minutes to get myself back together again, because I had made up my mind. I don't even remember thinking. I was just, I was gonna shoot them all. And I saw Riley Cox over there. He took the towel off his neck. He pushed his guts back in his stomach and stuck that towel in there to hold his guts in. And he pulled a bandage out of his rucksack and tied his arm back like this.

• 51:10Speaker 02

  And starts pumping that shotgun, one-handed, and fighting with that shotgun, if he could pump.

• 51:18Speaker 02

  The enemy didn't come for a while. When they did, they weren't attacking. They were trying to walk up to see what had happened. And Riley starts duking out with that 12 gauge, pumping it with one hand, shooting it left-handed. And he had, he had 40 rounds with him. I think he already fired about 10. When that shotgun ran out of ammo, he got Mike Rife's Car 15 and started firing that Car 15. I don't even know how this guy, how he functioned. The radio operator, the team leader, was hit above his ear with a piece of shrapnel blew out the top of his head, but he was still alive. And Terry Clifton was dead by then.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Um, Mike Reif, the guy that was sitting by the bluff, it, he got hit with a claymore. He wasn't 10 feet from it. When they grabbed his arm to pull him away from the tree, he was pinned to this tree. His arm came out of his sleeve, it severed his arm, his shoulder. He was killed instantly. Uh, I crawled over to, to the, to the radio operator and he had a chunk of meat as big as my fist taken out of his, right above his knee. And he was on the radio reporting what had happened after he got hit and he went into shock. You could see him going into shock. I took the radio away from him and I got on the radio and I, I, in the clear, I didn't

• 52:46Speaker 02

  use any code. I told him we're hit. Everybody's down. I said, you better get somebody out here quick or don't bother with it. Um, Billy Walkabout was the only guy that could walk. He got up on his feet and he, he was, both his hands were hit pretty bad. They, uh, we, they sent a medevac out and, uh, it came in, well, before the medevac got there, I went over to Frank Sues and I crawled over to Frank Sues and Billy came over and Frank had a little hole right dead in the center of his chest. And I, I thought, well, he'd been shot. And, uh, I, I remember grabbing a plastic off a battery and putting it over the hole

• 53:28Speaker 02

  that treated as a sucking chest wound and there was no suction. We rolled him over onto a puncho liner and he had a hole in his back about that big around. And I could see inside, he's right lung and it was shredded. The ribs were broken. So whatever hit him just tore out his, from his, his whole shoulder blade area and skull.

• 53:50Speaker 02

  We rolled him back over on a Vietnamese, North Vietnamese tansho liner we had. Plastic, one of the guys had it. And we wrapped that around him and still tried to treat it as a sucking chest wound, but we never did get suction on it. And he was unconscious. Um, we got a medevac in and we decided to get Sousa out first because he was, we thought he was hurt the worst. We drug him over, they dropped the jungle penetrator, we strapped him to it, they hoisted him out. And the helicopters taking gunfire from surrounding area constantly. And they came back in again, started taking more fire and the dust off started drifting.

• 54:33Speaker 02

  And it was drifting down towards that saddle. Billy Walkabout ran down there and grabbed the penetrator with his arms and ran back up to the top of the hill dragging that penetrator with him. And we got Contreras out that way. He did that another time before we got another wounded man out. Uh, he ran down the hill towards the enemy, no weapon, grabbed that penetrator and ran back up the hill with. So we got three of the wounded out and I told Riley Cox, I said, you're going out next, Riley. He said, no, I'm not. He said, I'm staying here. And at the time, he was, he was on the car 15.

• 55:14Speaker 02

  Anyway, it's probably close to five o'clock in the evening and two, there were two pilots had been listening to this on the radio. They, uh, they broke formation, flew back to the company area and radioed ahead, have a reaction force waiting on the chopper pad. We're going to pick them up and take them out to rescue these guys. When they got to the company, everybody in the rear in our company was down on the chopper pad waiting to board. Twenty-three guys got on two choppers, 13 on one, 10 on the other. Way overloaded. Yeah. These UEs were made for six or seven guys plus the crew. Tony Tassero was going home the next day. He'd already turned in all of his gear and

• 55:57Speaker 02

  his weapon and was down on the chopper pad playing tag football when the word came in. Tony went up to supply and grabbed a Kar-15 from the armory and, excuse me, an M16 and a bandolier of ammo and he was in shower shoes and shorts and no shirt on. And he got on the chopper like that. He gets out to the, when he got out to us, he found out that that bandolier of ammo was boxed ammo. It wasn't in magazine.

• 56:26Jack Murphy?

  Oh, no.

• 56:30Speaker 02

  They flew out. They had a hell of a time getting off the chopper pad because they were overloaded. One of the guys had his arm in a cast and Bill Meacham, the pilot to run, said, "Son, get off of the helicopter." And the guy stuck a rifle in the back of his helmet and said, "Just take off, sir." So he comes out with his arm in a cast. They flew those guys out to the same LZ we went in on, which was now no cover. The airstrike and everything blasted all the elephant grass away. Where we had to jump 15 feet above the ground, they landed and let these guys out. And all 23 of them, as soon as they got on the ground, the pilot told them the direction they needed to run because they

• 57:09Speaker 02

  could see us up on top of the hill coming in. And they headed up the hill. Up on top, where we were, Billy Walkabout was behind me and I heard him holler, "Warp's, warp's up here!" I turned to him and I said, "Shut the hell up. You're going to tell them where we are. They're the enemy." All of a sudden, I realized, "They know where we are."

• 57:34Speaker 02

  It went along. Clint Guthmiller came running up the trail over the dead bodies with an M60 and sat up looking down that ridge line on the top of the knob. Then the rest of the guys poured in. They immediately started getting the wounded guys taken care of to get them out. They, they got, they got Billy Walkabout and I went out together on a jungle penetrator. And they finally got Rodney Cox to go. He was the last man. He was the last wounded man out. They had to force him to go out. It was dark by then, the 23 man reaction force had to go back down to the LZ in the dark.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  By the time they got to us, the first cab had come in, 35 of them, wouldn't get off the landing zone. Not the first cab, second to the 17th cab. They wouldn't get off the landing zone, they stayed down there. And when the helicopters came in to extract everybody, they pulled them out first, then our 23 guys went down there, they had no lights, no anything. They had to use Zippo lighters to mark the landing zone for the helicopters. 11 of the 23 guys were wounded. None of them bad, thank God, but they got those guys out, I think it was 9:30 at night, they got them out. That made me an advocate of the Brotherhood.

• 58:57Speaker 02

  I mean, I still love those guys for what they did that day. My fiance had sent me a St. Christopher medal. I remember holding it in my hand out there, realizing that the NVA were going to get this medal when they find my body. And I broke myself off, I'm not coming back from this one. So I probably had three or four more hairy ones after that, as a Ranger. They sent me to the hospital, triaged me. Besides the shrapnel in the back of my leg and my calf, sometime during the battle I'd been shot in the left leg too. But they think it was a ricochet, it was only, you could almost see the head of the bullet, they pulled it out with tweezers.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  So all my wounds were leg wounds, which I attribute to the fact that I was shinny and backwards up that hill when this thing went off, and all that was on top of the hill was my legs. I spent a month in the hospital at Cameron Bay. Almost got killed in a Korean riot. Korean, at the hospital I was in, South Koreans had about, there was many South Koreans at Cameron Bay as were Americans. They were there for rheumatism. They couldn't handle the weather.

• 1:00:12Speaker 04

  Oh.

• 1:00:12Speaker 02

  So they were used to cold weather, this hot weather made them, caused rheumatism. So none of them were wounded, they were just there, you know, recovering in the heat down there, then they were going back up to their unit. Well, there was a riot during the USO show and I was on crutches. And, uh, Koreans, and they're over a can of beer. Uh, there's like two hundred Koreans and two hundred Americans. And the Koreans thought they're all black belts and, uh, they're gonna take this beer from this American. So they grabbed this six pack of beer from this guy and the guy jumped up, went over, took it back. Well, the Koreans didn't care for that. And they got up, was ready, doing this stuff, ready to kill some Americans.

• 1:00:54Speaker 02

  And, uh, one of their NCOs came down and told them all to go back to their company area. So they're all back at the company area and, uh, well, let me tell you what, what caused the riot. They were hollering back and forth, uh, nobody was going across the aisle between the two groups. And all of a sudden, from the back of the Americans, a loaded beer can comes flying over and hits this Korean between the eyes and knocks, drops him. Well, that really pissed them off, I'll tell you. They were ready to kill after that. Anyway, they sent them back to their company area and about fifteen minutes later, we were watching this Filipino USO show. Uh, they were, one of these Filipino girls was playing Jello Submarine, uh, and we heard

• 1:01:39Speaker 02

  this roar in the background. Here come all these Koreans back and they got shovels and picks and baseball bats. Well, there was a bunch of us in the front two rows on crutches and we all thought, well, they're not gonna bother us. All the Americans jump up and take off running. All it was a good. The Koreans come waging in and start beating the hell out of everybody with, with tools and stuff. I crawled up on the stage, pushed by a, a Korean officer, a Korean senior NCO, and I crawled behind the drums on the stage.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm left there thinking, well, they were, they were gonna hit me. I saw him take a crush away from a guy out in the audience and started beating him with his own crush. So I was glad I was behind the drums. Um, anyway, a few minutes later, five, six MPs come running up with a lieutenant and the lieutenant's blowing a whistle and come running up the aisle and he's hollering at these Koreans and he's got a couple of Korean officers with him and a Korean buries the pickaxe and he's turning him.

• 1:02:42Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  Off him. My God, I, they sent me here to recover. Uh, the next day I talked to my, the Colonel in charge of the hospital. I said, I want to go back to my company. And he said, well, he said, you need another two weeks here. I said, put me on a profile and send me back to my company. I want to spend Christmas up there, not here. So anyway, he, he gave me a pass and I flew back up to Fubai. Uh, I was on profile for two more weeks and ended up flying belly man on a, on a extraction insertion helicopter for a month until my wound healed.

• 1:03:17Jack Murphy?

  And so Gary, I'm trying to recall from reading your book many years ago now, that, that explosive, that forty or fifty pound explosive that went off, I, I think that's maybe like what my generation would have called an improvised explosive device. And if I, if I recall correctly.

• 1:03:31Speaker 02

  It was made out of the bottom of a, of a thirty-three gallon barrel.

• 1:03:34Jack Murphy?

  And, and was it, was there, there were like nuts and bolts in it that they pulled out of some of the guys?

• 1:03:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, any, any kind of metal. It was non-directional. It had, it had plastic explosive C four behind it. They just pushed it out, not in a fan. You didn't know where it was gonna go.

• 1:03:49Jack Murphy?

  And so, and, and if I recall correctly from our interview with Larry Chambers, this is, you came back to the unit and find Larry there as a new guy, right?

• 1:03:57Speaker 02

  No, Larry, Larry actually came to the company in Au- uh, late August of, of, uh, sixty-eight.

• 1:04:04Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:04:04Speaker 02

  So Larry was there when that, he was out, he was out with another twelve man team when we got hit.

• 1:04:09Jack Murphy?

  Because I, I remember, there's something in my mind, I remember like you, you had come back after being wounded, you came back to the unit and he was there as like a, a, a more junior LRB.

• 1:04:20Speaker 02

  Well, I'll tell you what you're confused with. When I got back to the company, I'd been there six months. All the guys that came over with the vision, who were the old guys when I got there, they came over in November of sixty-seven. Well, they were all D- they're all D-roast while I was in the hospital.

• 1:04:37Jack Murphy?

  I gotcha.

• 1:04:38Speaker 02

  So when I came back to the company, you know, Ken Miller was the first guy I ran into.

• 1:04:42Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:04:42Speaker 02

  It was like I went to a new unit. I didn't recognize anybody.

• 1:04:45Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  A lot of new guys.

• 1:04:47Jack Murphy?

  Um, Dave, do you need to do this, uh, this read?

• 1:04:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, we just, uh, we wanna, uh, hey, when you need dinner fast, don't call for delivery. Think HelloFresh. Their fast and fresh recipes are ready in fifteen minutes or less. Go to hellofresh.com/teammouse50 and use code TEAMOUSE50 for fifty percent off plus free shipping. Um, hey, guys, uh, you know, cooking is good. It's cheap. Like, don't order out. It's expensive and bad for you. Um, HelloFresh has over thirty meal plans, so you'll never run out of ideas. You know, uh, e- even if you're not used to cooking, you get the ingredients, you get the, uh, recipe, you get everything you need. You can try new things. You'll be a stud, uh, you know, or a studette. Um, you know, they have meal plans that are way cheaper than eating out. Um, and, and cheaper frankly

• 1:05:35Speaker 04

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• 1:06:08Jack Murphy?

  And while, while we're here, I want to give a quick shout out. This is not a sponsor of the show or anything. They're friends of the show that I, I just want to talk about real quick is, uh, Badger Six. Um, the, we've had guys involved in this charity on the show before, uh, Toby Harden, Justin Sapp. Um, really want to, um, what the Badger Six is, uh, It's a charity specifically to bring back the Afghans who worked with the CIA and Special Forces in the opening days of the Afghanistan War. And these guys are now working to help their former friends and allies immigrate to the United States. And so they're holding a charity event. It's going to be on September 8th at the Pauling Mountain Country Club.

• 1:06:49Jack Murphy?

  It's, I think there's going to be some shooting clays and then they're going to have a lunch and there'll be a talk. You're going to get to meet some of the original folks who invaded Afghanistan, David Tyson, Justin Sapp, Mark Nuch, Bob Pennington, another former guest on the show, Alan Mack, who's a 160th helicopter pilot. All those guys are going to be there. So I really hope you guys will, you know, consider going to this event, supporting this charity. You find out more about them at Badger6.org. So again, that's, that's going to be September 8th. So Gary, so then you, you come back to your unit after this very interesting stay, your

• 1:07:31Jack Murphy?

  recovery at the hospital. So you, you said that when you got back to the unit, it was sort of like a different cast of characters almost.

• 1:07:39Speaker 02

  I had gone from being a middle guy to being one of the old guys. I was an E5 at the time and two thirds of the company had D-ROST while I was in the hospital. So there wasn't a lot of experienced hands on deck when I got back to the unit.

• 1:07:58Jack Murphy?

  What, what was that like? Were you, were you now more of like a mentor and a trainer for some of the younger guys?

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  I was earmarked to be a team leader. Matter of fact, I had a recondo school date for November 28th. And when I got hit, I was in the hospital and my recondo date, date came up and then in the LURPS, when you graduate from recondo school, you've got to have six months left in country or you, or you don't get to go. Well, when I got back to the company, I only had five months left in country, so I didn't get to go to McNeer Condo School. Um, I got a team, probably more because there wasn't enough qualified people in the company in late March of sixty-nine. Um, they gave me my own team. I was fairly good at reading maps, as good as anybody else in the company.

• 1:08:49Speaker 02

  Uh, I could look at a contour map, picture what that looked like out in the jungle, and not look at that map again on a mission.

• 1:08:55Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  And I, probably because of my scout training. Um, they gave me a team in March. I, I think I led five patrols. Uh, my last mission was the mission, Chambers probably told you about the one we got hit by lightning on. Uh, I was supposed to be the team leader. We actually had four guys on that team that had been team leaders. And, uh, there was a shaken bag, E6 came into the company, who was taking over my team. So I actually went out as his ATL to break him in. Um, that was April twenty-third, that mission was. And that was, I still had six weeks left in country when I got out of the hospital on that one.

• 1:09:40Speaker 02

  Um, and I was, I was done. I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't have gone out on another patrol after that. Uh, I, I wasn't gonna take an R and R because I didn't want to spend the money. I was getting married two weeks after I got home, so I didn't want to dip into my savings. Um, and I, when I got out of the hospital, I took my R and R. And I was AWOL two days getting back. I made sure I didn't have thirty days left when I got back to the company. Uh, I was, I was, I always say I was afraid, I was finished. Getting married, you know, four weeks, or six weeks after that, I kept thinking, this is a bad time to get killed. And, uh, I didn't want to do that to her, so I, I just didn't want to go out again.

• 1:10:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, after that operation where the team got struck by lightning, I mean, I can imagine that that shook everybody up. Ken was out there on that one, too, wasn't he?

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  No, Ken wasn't.

• 1:10:34Jack Murphy?

  Oh, he wasn't. Okay.

• 1:10:35Speaker 02

  Unfortunately, Ken was in the other platoon.

• 1:10:38Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha.

• 1:10:38Speaker 02

  So I never got to go out with you. We were good friends, but I never got to go out with him.

• 1:10:41Jack Murphy?

  Gotcha. Um, so before leaving Vietnam, any other like significant ones that patrols that you'd like to highlight before moving on?

• 1:10:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was on a, I was on a patrol with Ron Mother Rucker.

• 1:11:00Speaker 02

  As a matter of fact, I was a team leader on that patrol. There was a Cobra helicopter had gone down south of Phu Bai, been shot down in the mountains. And a Loach went out looking for it, and it didn't come back either. So there's two helicopters missing down by Fire Base Tomahawk. It's a pretty tall jungle, steep mountains, and it was in a fog on top of it. So they, we got a call with the company, and we had two teams on stand down, the rest of them are out in the field. And one of them was my team, and I was sharp, two guys on the team. And the C O came in and said, Sergeant Linder, he said, grab two guys and you're going to go out on a search and air rescue mission.

• 1:11:45Speaker 02

  And he said, Sergeant Fadley's team's going to go out, too. He said, you're going to have to repel it. So he said, rigged for a repel. So we did, we packed our rucksacks. Excuse me, we didn't pack our, one guy had a rucksack with a radio. We didn't, he said, don't take your rucksacks, you'll be out before dark. So we grabbed our web gear, no maps of the area, nothing, one canteen of water apiece, no meals. We go out, they fly us out in sunny weather to Fire Base Tomahawk. We land on Fire Base Tomahawk, and General Melvin Zeiss comes out in his helicopter, lands on

• 1:12:22Speaker 02

  the fire base and gives both teams a pep talk and tells us, there's two helicopters down out there. We got a captain and a warrant officer and one of them, the Cobra, and the Loach went out looking for him with a lieutenant colonel, a major, and a warrant officer at it. And they, they haven't come back. We think we know where they are. We're going to put you guys in on top of them. If they're wounded, get them out. If they're dead, recover the bodies, get them out. So anyway, off in the distance, you could see the fog. Far Bay Tomahawk was still in the sun. It was a mountain overlooking Highway One out by the coast, and it wasn't in the fog at all. So we got on our helicopters and we fly out and we fly into the fog.

• 1:13:07Speaker 02

  And I remember thinking at the time, looking down and seeing the treetops that looked like broccoli sticking up out of mashed potatoes. That's what it looked like.

• 1:13:16Speaker 02

  Uh, the chopper pilots who were, who were not our chopper pilots either. They flew into this fog and they finally, uh, Fadley's team went in first and rappelled in. We had no idea how tall the trees were. All we could see were the tops of them. So we didn't know if we had enough rope to hit the ground on. Uh, couldn't see the ground at all. Like they, they bring my team in behind Fadley's to a different area. We were 300 yards apart. And I was the first one out of the helicopter and my Car 15 was slung over my back and, and I rappelled out of the helicopter. You know, I did a fast rappel. I landed in the middle of a high-speed trail. I turned around, there's a freshly poured concrete bunker behind me. No, no camouflage on it.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Well, you know, my, my butthole had squeezed shut. I was soprano from that end.

• 1:14:09Speaker 02

  My radio operator comes down behind me on the same rope and gets tangled about 15 feet above the ground with his handset cord. And he's stuck on the rope. I'm trying to wave the door gutter to bring the helicopter down lower. And he finally comes out low enough I could reach above him and cut the rope. And he fell about five, six feet and hit the ground. And the next guy down ran out of rope and fell about 10 feet down. And then the other three guys came down the other rope on the other side. So we're all standing there and I'm pointing at this concrete bunker. And we get off the side of the trail and we set up and they were supposed to have put us in the same place Fadley's team went in. Well, there's no Fadley's team there.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  And we're, we're going through the helicopter pilot, tried to relay to Fadley's team because we couldn't pick them up on the radio. And we came to the determination, they put us in a different spots. So anyway, uh, Fadley decides to fire his weapon. And he fires one shot and I could tell he was a long way from us even with the muffler from the spaw. And you know, I, I did, I had to answer him. I fired back twice, real fast, two quick shots. And I, I told the pilot to tell him to come to me. So Fadley comes to me, it took him a good forty-five minutes to get to my location. And it's like five thirty in the evening. So we get online, twelve of us, and we sweep up the ridge line.

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  And about six thirty, we stumble into the Cobra. It had gone down through the trees and the tail boom had broken off. And the cockpit was open and there was a boot and a helmet laying next to the helicopter. Oh, man. No pilot, no gunner. And it's almost dark by then. And we swept around that helicopter two or three times, online, trying to find those guys, couldn't find them. And we moved about two hundred yards, straight across the ridge, not up higher, not down lower. And we found an area where there was depression and four big teak trees, one on each corner with a depression in the middle. And we just, it was just that big enough for twelve of us. So we got in this and it offered a little bit of protection in case we got hit during

• 1:16:22Speaker 02

  the night. And we knew there were gooks in the area because the Cobra had been shot down, there were bullet holes in it. And that bunker, you know, I didn't, that wasn't a mushroom, somebody did that. We're laying there at night and Fadley, who was, he was in his sixth, he decided we're gonna have one guy on at a time, security. I always posted two guys if we were in enemy territory and we knew they were around. Anyway, Fadley posted one guy for forty-five minutes at a time. Well, I had the one thirty time, the one thirty forty-five minutes. And I, I woke the guy next to me, who was a new guy, his

• 1:17:03Speaker 02

  name was Gillette. And I, he was a radio operator. He had, he had my team's radio. He was laying next to me and I reached over and shook him awake. And I laid back and went to sleep. But, uh, I think it was ten minutes to two. Something woke me up and I was laying on my back and I looked to the right and I remember it looked like a shadow disappeared off this way, across the perimeter. And I look over at Gillette and Gillette's laying there with his, he was sixteen, across his chest, shaking like this. And I reached over and I whispered into his ear and I said, "What's the matter?" He said, "Two NVA came into our perimeter and were looking down at the guys and they just left."

• 1:17:47Speaker 02

  And I said, "Why did you shoot them?" And he said, "There's a sapling next to me and I couldn't bring my weapon around." So he had to sit there and watch this go on. Well, I woke up everybody and for the rest of the night, we all stayed awake. The next morning, uh, we went out and started sweeping again and we got a radio message from the rear that said there was a line company, Charlie Company, first of the three twenty-seven, was coming out to link up with us. They were walking in. So there was a ridge line above us and we didn't know it at the time, but that ridge line had been covered several times by US troops. There was a big trail going up the top of it and it was pretty wide open on top.

• 1:18:32Speaker 02

  Well, we heard these guys coming and we couldn't get, couldn't get them on our radio yet, but they were above us, probably a hundred and fifty yards up the hillside and we could hear them talking. And all of a sudden, an AK forty-seven opened up and we heard, we heard them, we heard those guys fire, they fired a couple of rounds and were hollering and we didn't know what was going on. They finally got to us on our radio and said, "A trail watcher just shot our four, four man lead element across the legs." This trail watcher was in a bunker up on top and he left those four point element guys getting across from me and opened up, shot every one of them in the legs. So we're sitting there in, in this depression, twelve, twelve of us, and we hear the bush,

• 1:19:15Speaker 02

  bush breaking, coming down this ridge line, right at us, I mean, dead at us. So we're all, we got one claymore pointed uphill, that's all we got out. And all of a sudden, this NBA breaks through the cover right in front of us. He's not fifteen feet away. He had his sandals in this hand with his AK-47, and he was running with this like this. When he saw us, he lowered that AK-47 and emptied that magazine right over the top of us. Well, I was sitting back against that tree with my Kar-15, and before I could shoot him, he fell behind a big log that was uphill from us. And it wasn't eight feet

• 1:19:57Speaker 02

  from us. Well, a couple of us jumped up and did this and shot a guy behind that log. I don't think we hit him. And Dave Bedrin pulled a frag out and dropped it over the top of the log. That killed it. Tore up his AK-47, too. So of all the places for this guy to run, he runs dead end to us, 150 yards down that hill. We called the line doggies. He said, "We got your assassin." He said, "He run dead end." We told him what happened. So we went up and linked up with these guys. This was the second day of a one-day mission. We spent the next seven days on the ground out there. No food. The only food we got was what we could mooch from the line doggies, which wasn't much. We had plenty of water

• 1:20:42Speaker 02

  because it was raining almost all the time. While we were out there, they put in another team because another loach had come in and located that other helicopter. And it was three miles up the valley from where we were. It was nowhere near that Cobra we found. So that was Rucker and Sires on that team. Those guys rappelled in, and the three pilots were all burned to death. And they landed on top of them, went right through their bodies. They were fried. They pulled the bodies out in body bags, pieces of them, and hoisted them out. And then they told them, "You couldn't get them out. They had to walk down and link up with us three miles away."

• 1:21:25Speaker 02

  So they came down the stream that was at the base of the ridge we went in on. Well, we went down to the stream, the twelve of us and thirteen of the line doggies recon element were with us. So there was twelve of us and thirteen of them because with that many enemy in the area, they didn't want twelve guys trying to link up with these six. So we got down to the bottom of the hill that night and we're going up that creek at night, following this creek up. And we found a little knoll next to the creek and we got on top of the knoll and laid there sleeping, all twenty-five of us. And that night, I don't know how many times we heard a tree crash.

• 1:22:05Speaker 02

  I don't know if it was in the rain or what, but here's something waiting in the stream. And we came to the conclusion later that the NVA knew we were in there. If they had enough stuff in there, they didn't want us to find it. So they followed us, but didn't make contact with us. We also figured they probably had those pilots. So we end up linking up with the other team the third day and turned around and come back down the stream. And this was, it wasn't the third day, it was the seventh day of the mission, the last day. We spent four days up on the ridge line with that line company. We get down, we're coming down the stream and they told us we're gonna have to walk out. They can't helicopter, the infantry company up on top of the ridge, the rest of them,

• 1:22:50Speaker 02

  they were gonna do another sweep and they were coming out, they were gonna walk out too. So we get down to just about where we're down below that infantry company, they're five hundred meters up on this hill, and they tell us that the fog is lifting. They're gonna get helicopters in and pull us out. So we're down there, we find a big spot next to the stream with a lot of dead trees and stuff in it that had been defoliated. And we took our claymores that the line company guys had, and we were knocking down the big trees with a back blast from the claymores and clearing this area so a chopper could get in. Well, we got it big enough for one chopper and naturally the line doggies got out first. And there was 18 of us still on the ground and these choppers were coming in.

• 1:23:33Speaker 02

  One chopper would leave, fly down the valley, 10 minutes later, another one would come in. So I was on the second last chopper going out and we had just got off the ground and I heard the door gunner on my chopper holler, "Gooks on the LZ." Well, what had happened is the last chopper had landed to pick up Rucker and Sars's team. And Rucker had just gotten on the helicopter and turned around and an NVA stood up out of the grass about 15 feet behind John Sars, looking at him like this, didn't have, didn't have a weapon up, just looking at him. Well, Rucker killed him and Sars turned around and shot another one. So they had followed us to the LZ but weren't messing with us. So

• 1:24:14Speaker 02

  those guys got out okay, didn't take any fire. The line company did that final sweep and found the pilot to October. He had been hiding the whole time.

• 1:24:23Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:24:24Speaker 02

  This gunner had broken his ankle on the, on the crash.

• 1:24:27Jack Murphy?

  That's why he took his boot off.

• 1:24:28Speaker 02

  He got him out of the chopper, took his boot off, carried the guy a little ways and they got separated during the night because the NVA were looking for him. Same night those two found us, the same night they, that's when they found those pilots or were looking for the pilots. So we spent seven days in there with no maps, uh, no poncho liners, colder than hell out there in that fog. And that was the most miserable time I had in Vietnam.

• 1:24:53Jack Murphy?

  I mean, that's, it's, yeah, it's incredible.

• 1:24:56Speaker 02

  I'm not going to sell any books out of this, you realize it.

• 1:24:59Jack Murphy?

  Well, once you, once you start, yeah, once you start talking about a, a downed helicopter and your, your boss is telling you it's a one day mission, uh, we all know from army experience, it's not going to be a one day mission.

• 1:25:10Speaker 02

  They didn't tell us about the fog and we're going to have time to pack any rucks up.

• 1:25:15Speaker 04

  Um, Gary, can you, uh, for people who might not be familiar with it, can you, uh, tell us about the difference between like the M16, the Car 15, which one you preferred and, and, and, you know, what, how that.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, I carried an M16 for, I guess, five months. Uh, I think until early November of, of 68, that's when I got a, you couldn't get a Car 15 unless somebody went home that had one. We, we traded SF guys for the Car 15s and the ones they gave us were, had the boring shot out of them. So, I mean, they were, it was like a musketeer. They weren't very accurate past. Fifty fifty meters. Uh, no blurring on them. So you can imagine what you know how South guys are.

• 1:26:00Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Oh, we all do.

• 1:26:02Speaker 02

  I know. So, I mean, they were pretty well shot up. We had, uh, we had a couple of Swedish Ks in the company. I think we had four shotguns. We had a couple of, uh, uh, I think we had two grease guns and it was up to you what you wanted to take as long as you get your hands on it. There was a couple of missions I carried a Swedish K, walking point, because the Swedish case had silencers on it. Uh, they weren't much for range and we couldn't get enough magazines. I think there was only four magazines per weapon. So you were limited on how much ammo you could carry with a Swedish K. Usually if a guy took a Swedish K out with him, he carried a Car 15 too. Um, same problem we have with the grease guns. I think there was only three magazines for each grease gun.

• 1:26:47Speaker 02

  Um, I don't think I ever carried a grease gun. I don't remember doing it. I did carry a 45 pistol with me a few times. Um, I used to carry, I, I was known to carry 1800 rounds of ammo. I mean, I, I humped some ammo and I used to carry eight to 12 frags too. Uh, my first team sergeant told me, he said, it's better to need than to have not than to have, or to have it to need not than to need and to have not. And I took that as gospel. Even when I go deer hunting, I'll take 50 rounds with me. I'm a pretty good shot, but I, you can't shoot 50 deer, but I hate to be caught with no ammo.

• 1:27:28Speaker 04

  Was, uh, was the Swedish K a 7.62 or a 5.56?

• 1:27:32Speaker 02

  It was a, it was a, uh, it wasn't a 5.56. It was a, like a nine millimeter.

• 1:27:39Speaker 04

  Oh, was it nine millimeter? Okay.

• 1:27:41Jack Murphy?

  I'm trying to remember myself.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was, we had, we had two Stenz guns, Stenz guns. Look up Swedish K.

• 1:27:48Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I've got to pull it up right now.

• 1:27:49Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:27:52Speaker 02

  All I remember is it was, we only had four magazines for each weapon.

• 1:27:55Jack Murphy?

  I'm, I'm embarrassing myself. Yeah, it's a forty-five. Oh, no, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. No, no.

• 1:28:00Speaker 02

  Greece.

• 1:28:01Jack Murphy?

  It's an M forty-five Swedish K, but it's nine by nineteen millimeter. You're, you're right. You were right, Gary. It's nine, nine mil.

• 1:28:08Speaker 02

  And that, yeah, that was the other problem we had. It was hard to get nine mil ammo there too.

• 1:28:12Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Forty-five ammo and five point five six was, was easy to get. Even AK ammo was easy to get. And we had a few guys that carried AKs. John Looney, who looked like an NBA, uh, would often wear black pajamas on patrol and walk points because he looked like one. He would carry an AK forty-seven. I didn't like him because you couldn't tell who was fired at who when they, when one of our guys was using it.

• 1:28:40Jack Murphy?

  So Gary, talk to us about coming home from Vietnam. I mean, you had quite an eventful tour. Coming back, two weeks later, you're getting married.

• 1:28:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:28:49Jack Murphy?

  What, what was it like coming back from, from, from Nam and getting discharged from the army and coming back to civilian life?

• 1:28:56Speaker 02

  When I, when I ET or de- roast, I had a, you know, I told you I got shot in the leg?

• 1:29:01Jack Murphy?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:02Speaker 02

  On November twentieth.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  They, when they packed that wound, they removed the packing too fast and it formed an abscess. And when I got back from R and R in May of sixty-nine, my left leg, my thigh swelled up, a big red spot on the side of my leg. It stuck out about two inches. Well, when I was clearing Nam, clearing records, that thing was so painful. I, I, when I got down to Benoit to clear, to clear Vietnam. I went to a, a hospital there at night to see a, the emergency room. And a medic came and he said, Jesus Christ, he said, you can't go home like that. And he, he said, I gotta lance that. When he lanced it, a plug shot out of my leg.

• 1:29:47Jack Murphy?

  Oh, man.

• 1:29:48Speaker 02

  About the size of my finger. It was hard pus, looked like ivory, and hit the ceiling and fell down on the.

• 1:29:53Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:29:55Speaker 02

  And he said, man, that thing's under pressure. He said, you can't go home like that. I said, man, I'm getting married in two weeks. I said, I gotta go home. I talked him into wrapping it. And he said, as soon as you get back to the States, you go see a doctor. He said, you got a bad infection.

• 1:30:11Speaker 02

  I got to, they flew us to Japan and then flew me to Fort Dix, New Jersey, of all places. I flew all the way across Canada. And my next duty station was at Fort Bragg, North Carolina with the 82nd. But I was on a permanent profile. I couldn't jump anymore. And I thought, why in the hell are they sending me to an airborne unit? I'm on a leg now. When I got to Fort Dix, I went to get travel pay to buy a ticket to go home. The ticket was 36 bucks, a lot of money nowadays, but 36 bucks back then, to fly to St. Louis from Philadelphia.

• 1:30:47Speaker 02

  They wouldn't give me travel pay because my next duty station at Fort Bragg was only 250, less than 250 miles from Fort Dix. And they won't give you travel pay till you get to your next duty station unless it's over 250 miles. So here I am with nine dollars on me in Fort Dix. And I went to the Red Cross and told them my story. And they said, well, not much we can do about it. So I had to call home and have my dad wire the money to Western Union in Philadelphia, take my nine bucks and pay for a cab to go down and get the wire and go back to, walk back to Fort Dix to buy an airline ticket to come home.

• 1:31:31Speaker 02

  So I was in the States two days before I got to leave to come home. Wow. Two days of my leave.

• 1:31:38Speaker 02

  So I had to call my fiance and tell her what happened. And I had the feeling she didn't believe me, but we're still married, so.

• 1:31:48Speaker 02

  I flew home and for some reason, I thought it would be cool to be the last guy off the plane. And I could see them all out there at the airport standing, waiting for me. So I waited till everybody got off the plane. I waited a little bit longer. And I could see the look of dread on their faces. And I come walking off the plane and I don't think she ever forgave me for that. My parents, her parents and she were there at Lambert Airport in St. Louis, waiting for me. Um, I got home, called a bunch of my buddies. I had one of them say, you weren't Nam? I thought, where in the hell has he been? I sent that forty-five, I took off that NBA Major home in nine pieces. The only part that didn't make it was the box or the magazine.

• 1:32:34Speaker 02

  Magazine didn't make it. Rest of it made it. So I stopped by to get that weapon from him. And he told me, he said, I never got a magazine. You sent a magazine. I sent a magazine with ammo in it. He said, I never made it. So I, I salvaged that from my, and I sent a NBA rucksack home and an NBA flag and a, in the signal mirror that was in my pocket when I got hit by lightning. It shattered when it wrapped me around that tree. So I, those are my souvenirs from Vietnam. Uh, we got married two weeks later. My hair was still too short. Uh, they made us get a haircut the day before we left Nam, everybody. And I mean, they buzzed us too. So I wasn't happy with that. But, uh,

• 1:33:17Speaker 02

  I didn't, didn't run into a lot of, the only negatives I had. When we got off the plane at eleven thirty at night in Philadelphia, there were about two hundred hippies lined up on the other side of the cyclone fence with signs hollering at us. And the MPs wouldn't let us at them. I mean, boy, I wasn't playing, wanted to go after those people.

• 1:33:34Speaker 04

  Peace creeps.

• 1:33:35Speaker 02

  That's the, that's the only negatives I had. Nobody spit on me. Nobody really acted like they gave a damn, but, uh,

• 1:33:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:33:44Speaker 02

  I wasn't put down for it.

• 1:33:45Speaker 04

  What year did you leave Vietnam?

• 1:33:48Speaker 02

  I left, uh, June second, nineteen sixty-nine.

• 1:33:51Speaker 04

  So you, you were, uh, in the, you were still in the Lurps? Because you were still in Lurps right as they transitioned to Ranger.

• 1:34:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I was there. We went to bed one night in Lurps and woke up the next day and there were orders on our outdoor bulletin board saying you are now Rangers.

• 1:34:08Speaker 04

  Do you know how that happened? Why that happened?

• 1:34:11Speaker 05

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• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  I don't know if you have visibility on that, but how did that come about?

• 1:34:45Speaker 02

  I think they wanted the heraldry of the LRS were all different units. Fifty eighth infantry, fifty first, fifty second. They wanted to give us a common bond. So somebody came up with a brilliant idea that we all, all of a sudden we were Rangers. And our mission didn't change. I remember getting in an argument with a bunch of young Rangers at third bat in ninety two. We were trying to get the LRS accepted into the seventy fifth Ranger Association. Which we, my company started that.

• 1:35:17Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:35:17Speaker 02

  It was one hundred first Rangers that started that association in nineteen eighty six. These guys said LRS weren't Rangers. I said, what the hell do you think we were in Vietnam? He said, oh, you guys were Rangers. I said, I went to bed one night a LRS and woke up the next day I'm a Ranger. And I said, these guys did the same thing we did. I said, if you accept us, you should accept them.

• 1:35:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:39Speaker 02

  And we formed a long range reconnaissance association in two thousand fifteen, which now has a thousand members. Uh, there are no more LRS. So it's, it's an organization that unless they recreate LRS, it's going to die out someday.

• 1:35:52Jack Murphy?

  They, they will one day. They always come back.

• 1:35:55Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I agree. Those don't, those don't do well in the jungle.

• 1:35:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yes, sir.

• 1:36:01Speaker 02

  Anyway, uh, the day we formed that association, the president of the seventy fifth Ranger Association called us and wanted us to bring that organization into the seventy fifth. And the guys voted at the meeting, there wasn't one vote in favor of it.

• 1:36:14Jack Murphy?

  Hmm.

• 1:36:15Speaker 02

  A lot of the guys that were worse were Rangers.

• 1:36:17Jack Murphy?

  But Gary, Gary, the, the, the worse and works are, have been accepted into the Ranger Regiment Association though, haven't they?

• 1:36:25Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:36:25Jack Murphy?

  They haven't really.

• 1:36:26Speaker 02

  No, we, we turned it down. They tried to accept, they tried to bring our association into it.

• 1:36:31Jack Murphy?

  I'm sorry to hear that.

• 1:36:32Speaker 02

  We rejected it. The only reason they did that, uh, It's because, you know, their organizations are losing people too. The Vietnam vets are dying out and they saw a chance to pick up a bunch of new members and, you know, I belong to both organizations. But I'll tell you, we, we host the annual WERP Association reunion right here in Branson every year. And it's, we, we booked three solid hotels with a park between two of them and our event is in that park for seven days. It's a good event.

• 1:37:05Jack Murphy?

  So as, as time goes on, I don't know if you tried to put the war behind you or, or if it was something that was always with you, but eventually you and your teammates kind of became, I don't know what's the term I want to use, like spokesman of a sense for the, the Vietnam experience and certainly the WERP experience and all these memoirs that you publish. Could you talk to us a little bit about how maybe your personal impressions changed or what, what led you into publishing and writing?

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  I, 1986, my unit was the first company from Vietnam, any kind of company that organized a company reunion, 1986. I was contacted by our company clerk, two years before that, he asked me if I would help locate some of the guys that served in the unit. Well, you know, when you come home from the war, you promise to stay in touch. There were no internet back then. So we had to, we had to find people by telephone. And I fortunately had a company roster with the original homes where everybody was from. I told this guy I'd help him. We spent two years and we put the first reunion together in 1986 at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. We had 186

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  guys show up. Plus 24 from other WERP units that heard about this. They, they also can. From that reunion, we decided to farm the 75th Ranger Association. So Bob Gilbert, the next year, put that together and we farmed that association. Matter of fact, I think the first three presidents were from my unit. I had not thought much about NOM.

• 1:38:45Speaker 02

  I hadn't talked to a lot of people about it. I stayed in touch with John Sires and a couple of the guys from my unit were in my wedding, matter of fact. And I stayed in touch with probably five or six guys. When we had that first reunion, I remember telling my wife, I said, I don't think I'm gonna go. I said, hell, I put on weight. It's been 20 years. I said, they won't recognize me. I won't recognize them. I don't remember their names. And she said, I saved all the letters you wrote me. She said, they're in a shoebox. Why don't you read through the letters and it'll refresh your memory. So the night before the reunion, I sat there and read through 243 letters.

• 1:39:27Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:39:28Speaker 02

  And come to find out, I had described every mission I was on, and not in great detail, but it was like a diary, day by day. And I told who was on the teams with me and basically what happened, didn't give details. And I remember thanking him when I was done, I thought, my God, I said, when I get back from this reunion, I'm gonna sit down and write this out so my sons can read what I did when I was in the war. So I, this was back before I had a computer. I could type. I didn't have a computer. Didn't have a typewriter. So I bought four legal sized yellow tablets and I hand wrote out my first

• 1:40:08Speaker 02

  two books, wrote it out as one book in six months' time. And I'm sitting there and Ken Miller, who had already come out with Tiger the Lurk Dog, he called me and he said, how's that diary coming? I said, I'm done with it. He says, why don't you send it to me? I said, Jesus Christ, kid, it's on full tablets. And he said, well, send it to me. And so I went out and burned copies of all those pages. And I sent him the copies. And he wrote back and he said, this is pretty good. He said, I'm gonna send this to a publisher friend of mine, Jim Morris. He was at Berkeley Books.

• 1:40:42Jack Murphy?

  We've had, we've had him on the show, too.

• 1:40:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, Jim?

• 1:40:44Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:40:45Speaker 02

  Well, anyway, I don't hear from Jim. And Ken calls him. He says, Jim's leaving Berkeley. He said, he's not gonna be a publisher anymore. And I thought, well, that figures. He said, I got another guy I'm gonna send it to, Owen Lockett at Ivy Books, Random House. And I said, okay. And he said, I was gonna send him a couple of chapters. He said, matter of fact, he said, why don't you type up a couple of chapters and send him those chapters? So I went down and bought a typewriter, used typewriter, and I typed out that November 20th mission and the November 3rd mission, the two in New Ikey and the 12 man heavy team. And I sent him to Owen Locke. He said, it'll take him six months to read it. He said, just tell him that the book's done. Here's two sample chapters. He said, you'll

• 1:41:27Speaker 02

  probably hear from him in six months or you won't. So I sent those two chapters to Owen Locke and that was on a Thursday. Next Tuesday, I get a phone call and he says, Gary, he said, this is Owen Locke. I said, who? He said, Owen Locke. I said, so? He said, Owen Locke, Ivy Books. I said, you're bullshitting me. I said, Miller, is this you? I said, damn it, this is Owen Locke. He said, I'll buy your books and the rest. I mean, I had nothing else typed up. The book was still handwritten. So I sent him my original tablets. And he called me back, I guess it was three weeks after that. And he said, well, I got

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  some good news and some bad news. He said, you want what you want first? I said, I want the bad news. He said, you got too much here for a book. So I knew it. And he said, we'll make two books out of it. And he said, he said, could you type it up and send me the rest of it? I said, yeah, I can do that. So I typed the rest of it up and sent it to him. And he, they brought the first two books out nine months apart, which upset me because it was the first half of my story till I got wounded, then the second half of the story. And I had, I had 5,000 letters of people called me, six months, within six months of that first book coming out, wanted to know where the hell the rest of the story

• 1:42:48Speaker 02

  was. And then a short time later, I get a call from Owen. He says, Military Book Club wants to combine your books and bring it out in a hardcover, which is the way I originally wrote it. So they sold the rights to Military Book Club for Black, Braced and Painted Faces, which was those first two books. They sold 20,000 copies in six months and applied for another 20,000 and Random House wouldn't give it to them.

• 1:43:17Speaker 02

  Because they were competing with the paperback. So anyway, I think a year went by and I thought, well, you know, I told my story. My company needs to have its story told. My company lost seventy six guys in Vietnam. By far more than any other LARP Ranger company. The first cab, I think, lost forty two. They were there a year longer and we still lost. We were in a bad area. So I talked to Miller and Ray Martinez. And we decided that Ray would write the first brigade, hundred and first LARP story, the original LARPs. Ken would write F fifty eight and I would write the L seventy fifth part of it. So we did that.

• 1:44:00Speaker 02

  I had a bunch of guys from other units calling me and saying, how come none of our guys are writing books? I said, got me. And he said, I thought to myself, by God, I'm going to write a story from every LARP Ranger unit that fought in Vietnam. And I'm going to do two books or three books, whatever it takes. So I'm going to recognize all of those companies with one story each. And that was the Phantom Warrior series. And I've had, I've had publishers call me, Orinlock called me, Chris Evans from, he was with, he was with Stackpole Books at the time. Wanted me to write more books and I said, I'm done. You know, I did what I wanted to do. I did what I wanted to accomplish.

• 1:44:42Speaker 02

  I'm, I'd rather help other guys get their stories told because nobody can tell a story like you can. You know, if you experienced it, somebody else can't write your story.

• 1:44:50Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:44:52Speaker 02

  So I, I've ended up helping a lot of guys get their books published.

• 1:44:55Jack Murphy?

  I think you said you were involved in something like eighty six different books?

• 1:44:58Speaker 02

  Forty two.

• 1:44:59Jack Murphy?

  Forty two. Well, okay, I doubled it, but that's forty two is still a lot.

• 1:45:03Speaker 02

  Almost. It was, and I, you know, I've helped some SEALs. I have one guy that was a school teacher, got drafted when he was twenty six, married with a kid.

• 1:45:13Jack Murphy?

  Holy shit.

• 1:45:13Speaker 02

  Got drafted, I was teaching, he wrote Class Room to Claymores. I helped to get published. I helped several SEALs, quite a few LARPs. John Burford, I helped him get his book published. He'd be another good one to interview.

• 1:45:28Jack Murphy?

  And you, uh, you said you're involved in another book that hasn't been published yet with Ray Martinez.

• 1:45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's, uh, Ray actually wrote it. I, I did the editing on it. Uh, it's David Dolby. He won a, uh, Medal of Honor and a Idran when the first Cav got wiped out there.

• 1:45:45Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:45:46Speaker 02

  That was the story.

• 1:45:49Speaker 02

  He got a Medal of Honor and pulled four more combat tours in Vietnam after his Medal of Honor.

• 1:45:53Jack Murphy?

  Wow. Incredible, Gary.

• 1:45:57Speaker 04

  That, that's really unusual too, especially during Vietnam, because I, I know that like, once you won a Medal of Honor, the military was very reluctant to let you go back.

• 1:46:06Speaker 02

  Let me tell you, President Johnson turned it down. When he was presented the medal, he told President Johnson, he said, President Johnson said, what can I do for you? He said, send me back to Nam. He said, I, I can't do that.

• 1:46:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:17Speaker 02

  A year later, he was back in Nam with a LERP unit.

• 1:46:20Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:46:22Speaker 02

  So I mean, he, I don't know how he did it, but he did it.

• 1:46:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:25Speaker 02

  The man, the man loved to kill NVA.

• 1:46:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:46:28Jack Murphy?

  Uh, Gary, these, these books have had like such a big influence, not just on, on me. You know, I read these when I was like in high school, then they influenced me to join the army and to, to go to the Ranger Regiment. And I, so many, I think, of my peer group were in the same boat, you know, they read these books as young men and like, whoa, that's what I want to do.

• 1:46:49Speaker 02

  You know, I've been, I think that's why I got inducted in the Ranger Hall of Fame. It was more of the books than anything else. There, there's guys with more decorations than me that have done more for the regiment than I have, but, uh, I think that's why I was.

• 1:47:02Jack Murphy?

  You, you, you did, you did such an incredible story of telling yours, telling your story, telling the LERP story and telling the stories of your teammates, you know, and, and I, I don't think, you, maybe you don't want to say it, Gary, but correct me if I'm wrong, you were awarded the Silver Star for that November 20th operation.

• 1:47:19Speaker 02

  I was actually put in for a DSC.

• 1:47:21Jack Murphy?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:47:22Speaker 02

  But they already gave, two other guys were put in for Medal of Honors and it got kicked down to DSCs. I was given an impact Silver Star and it was, after it was put in for DSC, they left it as a Silver Star.

• 1:47:34Jack Murphy?

  It's incredible, Gary. And, and so, uh, do we have questions for Gary?

• 1:47:39Speaker 04

  Uh, let me check real quick. I, yeah, I don't, I don't, I didn't see anything.

• 1:47:45Jack Murphy?

  We'll check real quick.

• 1:47:51Speaker 04

  People are enthralled, like, nobody, nobody asks questions because they're just enthralled. Out of curiosity, you know,

• 1:48:03Speaker 04

  you guys became Rangers and then Rangers, you know, went on, you were the 75th Infantry, which the 75th Ranger Regiment came out of. Have you been following the Rangers? Like, what is your...

• 1:48:17Speaker 04

  It's quite a legacy that they have, right? Because we talked about World War II and then the LRP units in Vietnam. And then they formed into more of a direct action unit. What, you know, do you have any opinions about that? Or what do you, how do you think the legacy is followed?

• 1:48:35Speaker 02

  Well, I'm proud to be considered a Ranger, but I'm not a Ranger. You know, in my heart, I'm still a LRP. They called us Rangers, but we didn't pull a Ranger mission. Some of our missions might have turned into a Ranger mission, but our mission was primarily reconnaissance. We weren't out there to kill people. Usually when we did, it was self-defense. We were almost always outnumbered. We, you know, you'll never find a LRP that'll let a chopper pilot buy a drink. I mean, that's no joke. They saved our butts so many times. You know, Bill Meacham and W.T. Grant both wrote books that I got published for them. They were courageous pilots.

• 1:49:20Speaker 02

  Their motto was, "If we put you in, we'll get you out," and they meant it. And we knew that, or we probably wouldn't have gone out on those missions.

• 1:49:29Jack Murphy?

  I'm sorry, go ahead, Gary.

• 1:49:31Speaker 02

  It's all right.

• 1:49:31Jack Murphy?

  I was just going to ask you if you could tell people the titles of your books that you authored.

• 1:49:36Speaker 02

  I wrote, my first book was Eyes of the Eagle. The second half of my first tour was Eyes Behind the Lines. You can't get a new, but you can buy a usual once in a while. The combined book is Black Berets and Painted Faces.

• 1:49:54Speaker 02

  Six Island Men's, the series, I wrote book three. Ray Martinez wrote book one, Ken Miller wrote book two. And Phantom Warriors, book one and two were my final two books.

• 1:50:05Jack Murphy?

  And you also ran a magazine for, for a period of time.

• 1:50:09Speaker 02

  My brother, who was a army journalist, he spent his entire three years in Hawaii. Wrote for the Stars and Stripes and some other newspapers in the military.

• 1:50:22Speaker 02

  I, he talked to me after my books came. Matter of fact, I hired him to write my first book. And my wife read the first 30 pages and she says, you need to fire him. She said, you write, you tell your story better than he does. So I fired him. I still ended up giving him half the front, the front end. Check for it though, since I hired him, but I fired him and he came back to me after the books came out and he said, we had to do a newspaper. So we sat down and we put together a 36 page black and white newspaper, which was the first issue.

• 1:50:59Speaker 02

  And I got Craig Jorgensen and Mike Martin and, and several guys that had been published before to write articles for it. And I did the David Dolby interview, the only time he's ever been interviewed.

• 1:51:14Speaker 02

  And that came out in black and white and I, I took a bunch of copies down to Ford Benning and we ended up, we published it for six years, took it to a, to a green and white and, and black newspaper for the next four issues. Then we took it to a black and white magazine. Then we took it to a full color magazine. Ended up with 35,000 subscribers, which isn't a lot. We didn't make any money, but we broke even on it. And I made a lot of the guys that wrote for us became authors. A lot of them got published.

• 1:51:44Jack Murphy?

  It's wild, man.

• 1:51:46Speaker 04

  That's fantastic. Yeah. So KM, thank you very much. Great stories, great stream. Did Mr. Gary ever serve with TV actor Nicholas Worth? He had said he was Ricondo in an interview.

• 1:52:02Speaker 02

  No, there was no Nick Worth in my unit. That doesn't mean he was not recondo. He could have gone to recondo school. There were some battalion reconnaissance units that sent guys to recondo school and a lot of the battalion recon units called themselves LURPs. We call them slurpies. Short, long range control. But they didn't do what we did, but they usually operated in a platoon size or double squad size element and they stayed out longer. Not too far from an infantry company. A lot of them referred to themselves as LURPs. Second of the 502nd with the 101st, that battalion, their recon element, they were called recondos. You've heard of Tiger Force?

• 1:52:42Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:52:43Speaker 02

  Tiger Force, Hawk Recon, Recondos, those were all battalion reconnaissance units.

• 1:52:49Speaker 04

  Paul Janik, thank you. Thank you, Team House, for bringing us badass dudes like Mr. Linder. Well, we appreciate Gary for spending a Friday night.

• 1:52:59Jack Murphy?

  Yes. This has been an amazing interview, Gary, and thank you so much for sharing.

• 1:53:03Speaker 04

  We have one more that just came in. Jim Scott, thank you so much. Thanks for your service, Gary. Did you know a Silver Star recipient named Kinzer? And if so, can you relate any experience you had with him? I can relate.

• 1:53:16Speaker 02

  Kinzer. Yeah, I knew a Kinzer. I'm not, I don't think he was in my county. I knew a Kinzer. Who was he with?

• 1:53:24Speaker 04

  It said he was a Silver Star recipient and then Jim said, I can relay it to him, but he didn't say what unit he was with.

• 1:53:32Speaker 02

  If it was Pat Kinzer, he was in the First Brigade of the 101st LURPs.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 1:53:39Jack Murphy?

  One more question?

• 1:53:41Speaker 04

  Oh, what was the other question? Oh, okay. DJ Sneed, thank you. How did LURP and LURSH units differ from MACV SOG?

• 1:53:49Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:53:50Speaker 02

  MACV SOG would cross the border into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. We stayed in Vietnam, South Vietnam. That was the main difference. They worked with indigenous troops. We didn't very often. Sometimes we took a kit Carson out with us. The experience we had taking out three Arvin soldiers and three Americans didn't work out well because of the language barrier.

• 1:54:16Jack Murphy?

  Gary, is there anything else that you want to tell people upcoming, whether it's like a Ranger Association event, or anything else that you want people to know about?

• 1:54:24Speaker 02

  Well, you know, if you're a Ranger, join the Ranger Association, go to the rendezvous. The Brotherhood is still strong. If you're a LERP, go to the Long Range Reconnaissance Association, join it, come to our rally every summer, every June in Branson, the Brotherhood is just as strong there.

• 1:54:44Speaker 04

  And Jim said it was Pat Kinser that he was talking about.

• 1:54:48Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, I knew Pat Kinser.

• 1:54:49Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:54:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Cool. So, yeah, Gary, again, man, it's been amazing to hear your stories and I'm so glad that we could finally do this. It's just great.

• 1:55:00Speaker 02

  Well, I'm sorry it took so long.

• 1:55:02Jack Murphy?

  Not at all, man. It's worth it. And, oh, and I was supposed to mention Larry Chambers wanted me to mention that he felt he's the most handsome of the three of you, you and Ken.

• 1:55:13Speaker 02

  Notice my hair's still brown.

• 1:55:18Jack Murphy?

  I had to throw that one out there for Larry.

• 1:55:21Speaker 02

  I'll give him that. He's been married three times. I've been married once.

• 1:55:29Jack Murphy?

  Gary, thank you, man. And, you know, I really hope that guys will continue to go out and read these books. I mean, they really are just an amazing historical account.

• 1:55:38Speaker 02

  Read these, too.

• 1:55:39Jack Murphy?

  My novels, yeah, thank you.

• 1:55:41Speaker 02

  They can read these, too.

• 1:55:42Jack Murphy?

  Thank you, Gary. And I'll send you, I'll send you some copies of my book. And there's, like we were talking a little bit before the show, happy for any introductions to other LERPs. We love to have you guys on the show. We can talk later about that.

• 1:55:58Speaker 02

  Send me a mailing address. I'll send you one of these because you can't get these anymore.

• 1:56:02Jack Murphy?

  I want it. I want, I want one with your Herbie Hancock on it, Gary.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  That's Chambers.

• 1:56:08Jack Murphy?

  Is it?

• 1:56:09Speaker 02

  That's me.

• 1:56:10Jack Murphy?

  The handsome one and the smart one?

• 1:56:11Speaker 02

  The stud. The warrior.

• 1:56:16Jack Murphy?

  And for everyone watching, next Friday, we'll be back. We're going to be

• 1:56:20Speaker 03

  I was asking if other books are selling in the UK.

• 1:56:23Jack Murphy?

  Are your books available in the UK? Do you know that, Gary?

• 1:56:27Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they're out there.

• 1:56:28Speaker 02

  Australia too.

• 1:56:29Jack Murphy?

  And Australia. So next Friday, we're going to have Alana Berry on the show. She is a former CIA case officer, served overseas during the Iraq war. Now novelist, wrote a terrific novel. I just read recently, I believe it's called The Peacock and the Sparrow. I hope I'm not reversing that. Maybe it's The Sparrow and The Peacock. The Peacock and the Sparrow. Terrific, terrific novel. We'll be here with her next Friday. Gary, again, thank you so much for taking the time to do this.

• 1:57:01Speaker 02

  Nice to meet you, David. You guys take care.

• 1:57:03Jack Murphy?

  Have a nice night. We'll see everyone next Friday.

• 1:57:08Speaker 05

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