MACV-SOG in Vietnam | Dick “Dynamite” Thompson | Ep.366

In this interview, retired Lieutenant Colonel Dick Thompson, a veteran of the top-secret Studies and Observation Group (SOG) in Vietnam, shares his experiences. He recounts his journey from a young enlistee to a highly decorated officer, detailing harrowing missions, the psychological toll of combat, and the unique tactics his unit used. Thompson also reflects on his life after the war and his work helping veterans with combat stress and resilience. Subscribe to our new newsletter!!!! https://teamhousepodcast.kit.com/join Today's Sponsors: GhostBed⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! PIA VPN ⬇️ https://piavpn.com/TeamHouse Fo 83% off plus 4 months free ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 SubReddit: ⬇️ https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/ Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241 The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/ Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSample "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 - Start 09:19 - Dick's journey from enlistee to Ranger. 26:36 - His recruitment into the top-secret SOG. 29:05 - What made SOG different from other units. 35:48 - The ambush on his first SOG mission. 45:07 - A hand-to-hand fight with an NVA soldier. 1:04:25 - SOG's "black ops" tactics. 1:11:33 - The physical demands on SOG operators. 1:19:50 - Dick's career as a Ranger instructor. 1:44:31 - A discussion on PTSD and mental health. 2:11:05 - Dick's final thoughts on leadership and resilience. 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.

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• 1:29Speaker 03

  Special Operations.

• 1:34Speaker 03

  Coburn Ops. Espionage. The Team House. With your hosts, Jack Murphy and David Park.

• 1:50Speaker 04

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to episode 366 of The Team House. I'm Dave Park. Here with Jack Murphy. And tonight, our guest is Dick Thompson, retired Lieutenant Colonel, who wrote a couple of books on MACB SOG. The first one is SOG: Codename Dynamite.

• 2:09Speaker 04

  The 1-0, the team leaders' story. Basically reads like a journal. I'm amazed, like, I'm amazed at how detailed it is. It reads like an action novel, too. It's a lot of, a lot of great stuff. And one of the things I really appreciated was like, at the end of each chapter, you had kind of a lessons learned and everything like that. So, thank you so much for joining us tonight, Dick.

• 2:33Speaker 05

  Thank you. Honored to be here.

• 2:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, um, you know, like, the book focused on Mac, the book focused on Mac B. Sog, and, you know, obviously, that was one of the highlights of your career, but you had a 21-year career. But before that, when you were knee-high, little Dicky Thompson, running around the neighborhood, tell us your origin story. How did you grow up and what led you to the military?

• 3:03Speaker 05

  I, I grew up in basically a military family. My, my mother's five brothers were all deployed to, in World War II at the same time, and my father was also deployed. So, they had everybody over there in World War II. After that was over, my father was also called back in to go to Korea. So, I had a lot of exposure as, as a small kid, growing up, and hearing the family talk about war. And I, I became very curious. So, I asked a lot of questions.

• 3:48Speaker 05

  You know, what is a squad? What is a platoon? What do they do? How do they work? So, I was always asking questions about it. I spent a lot of time living at my grandparents' house on my mother's side, while my father was gone. So, I, I grew up kind of on the farm, but, you know, in a lot of woods. I had an opportunity to go out and spend a lot of time, you know, in an environment like that. When my father got back, then we moved to a small farm. And I would spend hours and hours in the woods alone as a...

• 4:33Speaker 05

  Five, six-year-old, seven-year-old kid, watching animals, tracking animals, trying to figure out, how can I be invisible?

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• 6:45Speaker 05

  How can I walk up on a deer? How close can I get to them? What do their tracks look like? How do they behave? Um, so I was learning the field craft like that. So I got a little older. Um, I had a cousin Carl who would, my age, who would come over and we'd go out in the woods and play army. Uh, camp in the woods at night. Eventually we got to the point where I had a BB gun. We would shoot birds, um, cook them over or fire and, and do the kinds of things. Um, because we heard about Rangers, we'd do the kinds of things that we thought Rangers did.

• 7:28Speaker 05

  And so I formed a Ranger company. And I formed, I formed a Ranger company, started out with myself and cousin Carl. We brought in some other cousins and it expanded out beyond that a little. And then eventually brought in some people who were not related. Um, but you know, I became General Thompson. Uh, and we had, had our Ranger company. I still have that logbook today. You know, a lot of the writing is faded. But it had people's names in it. It had the one court martial that, um, we conducted.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  That was a non-family member. We, we had to let him go, so we court marshaled him and, and he left. But we saw Darby's Rangers, the movie. That got us all fired up even more. So, and I used to hunt and fish. Um, I grew up, you know, firing weapons. So I was pretty good at, at shooting and, and hunting. And, you know, just kind of got into that. And then when I was, uh, 13, I was sabotaged by, uh, Santa Claus. He, uh, he brought me a chemistry set.

• 8:55Speaker 05

  And I used to watch shock theater and these other monster movies and things. Um, so when I got the chemistry set, I started um doing things like trying to swap brains between a bird and a frog. And at that time, if your, if your parents or mother would go with you to the drugstore, the pharmacy, it was amazing what they would sell you. You know, so I had syringes, I had all kinds of things that I got from the drugstore and

• 9:36Speaker 05

  kind of grew up with a laboratory out in the barn. But I hadn't forgotten the Rangers. And I got a, ended up with a scholarship to University of South Carolina.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  Dick, real quick, I, I want to stop you because there was something in your book, you talked about your very first MACB SOG instructor in the barn, in the barn there. Do you, do you want to tell us about that?

• 9:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, when I was, you know, I was, was, you know, about six, I guess, or seven, somewhere around that age. And, and the way our house was, was set up, there was a road, a dirt road that came from the, the highway, came right through the middle of our property and separated our house from the barn. And, you know, we didn't have running water, so we got water out of a well. We didn't have indoor toilets or bathrooms. Uh, we had an outhouse, but it was on the other side of the road where the barn was. And my father bought a, a big turkey.

• 10:42Speaker 05

  Um, in fact, when we were standing face to face, we were pretty well looking in each other's eyes. And he was very aggressive. He didn't want anybody on, on what he called his side of the road. So when I needed to go to the bathroom, I had to try to get into the outhouse before he could attack me. As he would see me, he'd come running at me, jump up on me, knock me down. And, you know, so I complained to my, my father about that. And, and he told me, he said, you know, he knows you're afraid of him. You gotta let him know you're not afraid.

• 11:27Speaker 05

  I said, well, I am afraid of him. That joker knocked me down, attacked me. And he said, you gotta let him know you on that side of the road too. And I said, he's bigger and stronger and faster than me. He said, but you're smarter. Figure out how to outsmart him. So that was kind of the beginning of my, my special operations training. How can I navigate and, and get to the outhouse? And then make it back across the road without him knocking me down? And I finally decided I could throw rocks at him. As, you know, holding back with rocks. I ended up with a slingshot.

• 12:10Speaker 05

  I'd shoot him with a slingshot. But all kinds of E and E trying to get him around him. Then payoff finally came at Thanksgiving. He was invited for Thanksgiving dinner. So I didn't have to worry about him anymore. But it, it really taught me a lot about how do you, how do you hide? How do you go from cover and concealment from one place to another? And, you know, get to the outhouse and then get back.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:45Speaker 05

  I learned a lot.

• 12:46Speaker 04

  So, yeah, thanks. So I, I'm sorry for interrupting you. So you go to college and you're going to college for chemical engineering, correct?

• 12:55Speaker 05

  Well, for chemistry.

• 12:58Speaker 04

  Chemistry, okay.

• 12:59Speaker 05

  Was to, to be a, get a doctorate in chemistry, be a research chemist. And at that time.

• 13:10Speaker 05

  Every day at five o'clock in the evening, the national news would come on and there'd always be a segment about what was going on in Vietnam that that day. And, you know, they they kind of made it sound like we were really winning and it probably wasn't gonna last much longer. And I, in my mind, I thought it's going to end before I have a chance to get there.

• 13:41Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  So, I told my my parents I was gonna take a break in school, enlist in the army, and go in, go to Vietnam, come back, and then, you know, finish school. My mother was not happy with that. My father, you know, thought it was pretty cool. But, um, so I I took a break and enlisted in the army.

• 14:06Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm. And and you-

• 14:08Speaker 05

  Very quick, I'm sorry.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  No. But when you, so when you went to go enlist, you actually went to the, you were headed to the Marines though, right?

• 14:16Speaker 05

  The Marines off, recruiting office and Army, they were side by side.

• 14:21Speaker 04

  Mm.

• 14:22Speaker 05

  Uh, in a building there in town. Um, but, yeah, I, cause you saw the Marines on TV all the time.

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Mm.

• 14:30Speaker 05

  I mean, that's, that's all you heard about. The Army was there and they were doing something, you know, but but the Marines, it's like every other Marines got a camera or something.

• 14:40Speaker 04

  Mm.

• 14:41Speaker 05

  And, you know, they publish everything. Excuse me. And so I, it sounded like they were the ones who were getting something done. So I thought about them, but, uh, after I talked to them, I I went in the Army recruiters and said, you know, uh, what do you got? And they talked me into going into the Army, uh, rather than the Marines.

• 15:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, and you originally thought that you might, uh, be a chemical specialist, a chemical, uh-

• 15:19Speaker 05

  Well, they had said, the Army recruiters had said, you know, you scored really high on all these tests, and we can get you in the Army Chemical Corps. Uh-huh. And I said, "Well, I mean, that might be cool to make all these chemical weapons and different things." You know, so I went in the Army, and thinking about that, and then my first night, Dan at Fort Jackson, I went to, went to sleep in bunk beds with, you know, fifty other guys in the air, and about 3:30 in the morning, all the lights come on, there's somebody yelling,

• 16:03Speaker 05

  screaming, hollering, "Get out, get out in front of your bunk." And I guess the people at the other end of the room were not moving fast enough, and I heard the double, you know, the bunk beds starting to fall over on the floor, because whoever this guy was, he was just turning the bunks over with people in them. And I got out, and I was standing in front of mine as he got down to where we were, and I noticed he, he was, I mean, he was my size. And I thought, "Wow, he's not nearly as big as he sounds, but he's a bad dude." And then I noticed, you know, that black and gold Ranger tab on his shoulder, and I said, "Wow, that's a Ranger.

• 16:48Speaker 05

  That's what these guys are like." I mean, that's cool, I like that. And then, you know, he took us to the mess hall, and we had to double time going over there, and we start with a Jody call about, you know, "I want to be an airborne Ranger, I want to live a life of danger," and all, I mean, I was hooked by the time I got to the mess hall. I said, "I'm, I'm only going to be here three years." I might as well be a Ranger for three years and, you know, turn some blocks over and have some, you know, have a good time. So I started thinking that way.

• 17:24Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you do your basic, you do a leadership prep course, uh, which is like a, like a, it was a, they don't have it now, but when they identify you as somebody who's going to be a leader at, uh, A I T, right? The Advanced Infantry Training.

• 17:42Speaker 05

  Right.

• 17:43Speaker 04

  Uh, you go to the leader prep course, uh, and then you do your infantry A I T. Now here's my question, cause this is, this isn't something that happens really anymore. You did basic and then A I T, and then you rolled right into O C S, the Officer Candidate, uh, School. How did that happen?

• 18:01Speaker 05

  Well, the, the drill sergeant I had, uh, in basic, you know, he made me a platoon guide, uh, fairly quickly because I was, you know, very fit. Uh, I learned quickly and then, uh, I discovered and one night that there was actually a manual, twenty-two dash five, that had all the commands that they were using as we marched around. So, I mean, it didn't take me long at all to go through there and see what the commands were and, you know, the preparatory commands, the execution command, which foot to go them on. So,

• 18:44Speaker 05

  the next morning I started correcting the drill sergeants for a short period of time. You know, then I did a lot of pushups, uh, because I could see when they were doing it wrong. I mean, if you give me the materials, I can learn it.

• 18:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:01Speaker 05

  So anyway, he made me the platoon guide and then, um, you know, I had taken all kinds of tests when I first came in and my drill sergeant, you know, said, "You, you really need to think about going to O C S." And so I'm gonna start putting in your file and pushing you in that direction. And then, you know, that followed up when I was at A I T. And then I, I got orders to, uh, go to O C S at Fort Benning.

• 19:33Speaker 04

  Were you happy about that?

• 19:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, I was ready.

• 19:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 19:39Speaker 05

  By then, and then when I got in OCS and, you know, you got exposed to a lot of things there. Airborne was one, Ranger was one, you know, all this different stuff you were doing, you know, the OCS company I was in was right next to the drop, jump towers, you know. So every day I was watching people come down in parachutes out there, you know. So I requested to go to jump school, requested to go to special forces. And, and I got orders for both of those. So as soon as I finished OCS, I went to jump school, finished that, I went to Fort Bragg,

• 20:20Speaker 05

  went through the Q course up there, you know, became SS qualified. And, you know, went on a team, was prepping to go on a mission to Africa. Cause at that time, the third group was targeted toward Africa. And I had also volunteered to go to Ranger School and Vietnam. So that came through, they sent me to Ranger School.

• 20:51Speaker 05

  And shortly after that, the orders for Vietnam came down and to fill special forces group. And I, I went there and

• 21:00Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 05

  I discovered there was something about special ops that I, I really didn't know about.

• 21:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. One of the things you talk about, which is something they used to do, but they don't anymore, was the quick kill course, you know, they used to use the Daisy rifle for sort of the point shooting. Can you tell us about that? Cause that, I don't know, that school went away. They don't do it anymore, but it was a very valuable school, right?

• 21:27Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 21:30Speaker 05

  They told us, you know, we're gonna go out and do some training. We're gonna do about two weeks of focusing on, on something that is called Quick Kill. So we, we went out to the training site, you know, myself and a group of other young SF guys. And, you know, the instructor came out and he had a BB gun, BB rifle. And he, he threw about a three or four inch aluminum disc up in the air. And he just shot from his waist with a BB gun and hit it.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 22:10Speaker 05

  And he said, you know, you're gonna start with a disc like that. And then we're gonna go down to this size, then this size. And he kept getting smaller and smaller. And he's, he's hitting them out of the air every time, you know, without aiming.

• 22:23Speaker 04

  Right.

• 22:23Speaker 05

  Just pointing and hitting them. That's pretty cool. So we all got our BB guns and, and started shooting at the disc. Then they changed us over with two by fours that had little three inch silhouettes on it. And, you know, you would shoot at the little silhouettes like that. And we got good at that. And then we, we changed over to M16. And we'd actually go through, go down a trail on the range. That target would pop up and you would use a Quick Kill. Sometimes people now still talk about it as point shooting.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  It's, you know, you're, you're not coming all the way up here. You're shooting from down at the waist or chest level at the most.

• 23:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 05

  But it's very fast.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:16Speaker 05

  If, if you're within 20, 25 meters of a target, you're not gonna miss it.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:23Speaker 05

  It doesn't make you long at all. And I, I mean, I, I still put on demonstrations now with, you know, SWAT teams, law enforcement, I still go back to, to Bragg and Campbell, the special ops groups. And I told, I can still hit from there. In fact, if you're carrying at down port, like most people do with a stock laying up there, I said, I'll hit you three times before you can even start to move your weapon up.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:55Speaker 05

  Too slow, uh, the way you're carrying your weapon.

• 23:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 23:59Speaker 05

  You pick a door open and go in a room and there's a guy, they are already pointing a weapon at you, you're gonna die. You know, he will get you if you're not ready to pull the trigger and hit the target.

• 24:09Speaker 04

  How, how hard, I'm sorry, how hard was it to transition from BB gun to the M16?

• 24:16Speaker 05

  It, it really wasn't hard in terms of hitting the target.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 24:19Speaker 05

  I mean, we, we had shot the M16, I mean, we'd done work with the M16.

• 24:23Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 24:24Speaker 05

  Just we hadn't tried to do the, the quick kill. And, you know, and, and to, to jump way ahead. One of the things, uh, that happens with all the services is with your marksmanship training, where, you know, whether it's a pistol or, or rifle, uh, you spend all kinds of time on sight alignment, getting the right sight picture and, you know, all of that. And that's great until your target starts shooting back at you. And then your stress level skyrockets. And when it does, one of the changes that happens is your vision changes. You can't see the sights anymore.

• 25:09Speaker 05

  So you're, you're looking, trying to aim, but the sights are just blurred because your, your vision changes. So you can't really focus on anything until it's out beyond where your weapon is. You know, but with the point shooting, you don't have to worry about that.

• 25:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 25:26Speaker 05

  Cause you're pointing, you're not, you're not using a sight picture like that.

• 25:30Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, so you get assigned a third group, you're prepped for Africa, you're disappointed because you want to go to Vietnam. You go to Ranger School, you get back and you find out that you are going to Vietnam.

• 25:43Speaker 05

  Right.

• 25:43Speaker 04

  And what, when you get to Vietnam, what was your first impression?

• 25:51Speaker 05

  I had, I had grown up in a world here in, in the, the US. And we have laws and rules and rules of engagement and things that you can do. And, you know, I get on a plane and, and 20, 25 hours later, I step off the plane in Vietnam. And soon as I exit the plane, the smell hits me. You know, it's, I mean, the smell is just very different. And I realize, I'm in a different world.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:26Speaker 05

  Very different world. All the noise, the chaos, vehicles running around, planes landing, taking off. And I also noticed that the people, the Vietnamese, were people where I could actually see the tops of their heads. You know, I'm not very tall. I don't see the top of somebody's head very often when I'm talking to them.

• 26:51Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 26:52Speaker 05

  But I could see theirs and I thought, well, this is pretty cool. You know, I'm, I'm at least as tall or taller than they are. A lot of activity going on, just a real adjustment. And the pilot had told us as we were getting close to, to landing, and he said, this is, this is what's gonna happen. I don't want to scare you. But when we, when we get close to the airfield, I'm gonna put us into a nosedive. And we're gonna dive down toward the air, airfield. I'm gonna pull us out at the last minute. And flare out, we'll land, and when we hit the ground, don't unfasten your seatbelt.

• 27:36Speaker 05

  Because I'm gonna taxi really fast around to, to the area where we're gonna unload. You need to be fastened in till we get there. And then when we say, go, we want you to get up. And you guys move out the front exit doors. Because the guys who are leaving are gonna be coming in through the rear doors. So you're going out the front, they're coming in the rear. Because we're not gonna be on the ground for just a few minutes. Because we are a prime target when we're sitting there.

• 28:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:08Speaker 05

  For rockets and mortars to come in on us. So. Just the landing and takeoffs were really different than, you know, what I was used to.

• 28:19Speaker 04

  So you get there and you get some really solid advice, right? Somebody tells you, they give you some good advice and what was that advice?

• 28:32Speaker 05

  A friend of mine had left for Vietnam about a month before I did. So he had been there, he's already assigned to a Mike Force. But he got word that I was coming and he linked up with me, we went to a bar. And, you know, he was telling me all about what's going on and how things work there. And he said, you know, tomorrow you have to go in and fill out all kinds of paperwork and forms and things like that. And at the end of the day, they're going to take you into a room.

• 29:14Speaker 05

  And they're going to ask you if you want to volunteer for SOG.

• 29:21Speaker 05

  And he said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for SOG. I said, I don't even know what it is, why would I not volunteer? He said, if you volunteer, you're going to die. Just hear what I'm saying, you're going to die. If you don't die, you're going to get the crap shot out of you and you're going to go back to the States as a nutcase. That's if they find your body. Do not volunteer for SOG. So immediately, we hung out there for a while and he said, I'll see you back here tomorrow. And so when I came walking in, he looked at me and he said, you did it, didn't you? I can tell by the look on your face, you did it.

• 30:06Speaker 05

  I mean, you are a dead man walking.

• 30:10Speaker 04

  So when you, when you go into that room, how do they pitch, how did they pitch you? Like, what was their big, did they show you like a motivational video with guys coming out of the water?

• 30:25Speaker 05

  No, I'm, I'm 21 years old.

• 30:29Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 30:29Speaker 05

  And, you know, back in that time, we used to think that the front part of your brain, the prefrontal cortex up here, that its primary function in life was to hold your cranium up so that the front of your head didn't cave in.

• 30:49Speaker 05

  We found out later that this is really where risk assessment, decision making, all of those kinds of things take place. This is where the CEO of your brain lives. So, when he looked at my folder and he was flipping through it and he said, you know, you volunteered to join the army, you volunteered for airborne school, you volunteered for, you know, special forces, you volunteered for Ranger, you volunteered to go to Vietnam. I'm about to give you an opportunity to volunteer for the most important thing you will ever volunteer for.

• 31:31Speaker 05

  I said, you're about to ask me if I want to volunteer for SOG? He said, yes. Said, I like what I see here with you. You're perfect for this job. And I said, what do they do? And he said, I can't tell you. The only way you can find out what they do is you have to go there. But I can tell you this, that if you volunteer for SOG, you're volunteering to go anywhere, anytime, do anything, and not talk about it for 20 years.

• 32:06Speaker 05

  I'm 21 years old. My prefrontal cortex has not developed yet. I mean, he might as well be holding up a recruiting poster. Go anywhere, do anything, and not tell anybody for 20. I can do that. I don't know what it is you want me to do, but I, I think I can handle that. I volunteered for it.

• 32:24Speaker 06

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• 34:55Speaker 04

  Now, can you give us, you know, a rundown on, you know?

• 35:01Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 35:16Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 35:27Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 35:32Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 35:38Speaker 07

  So, join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 35:57Speaker 04

  All these guys were coming from SF, or they're all SF. They're all special forces. Why is the studies and observation group, why is that different than the guys in the A camps and, and things like that? Like, what's different? What do they do? Or what did they do? Yeah.

• 36:16Speaker 05

  One big difference is, big difference is that...

• 36:23Speaker 05

  Our targets in our area of operation, they were in different countries.

• 36:31Speaker 05

  I mean, for the most part, Vietnam, South Vietnam, was just a training site for us. We could go out and rehearse missions, we could go get some Viet Cong and North Vietnamese soldiers to come out and train with us and shoot at us, you know, so we could get used to being shot at and we could shoot some people. But when you went across the border, you went sterile, first of all. Nothing said US, no dog tags, no ID card, nothing that said that you were from the US.

• 37:15Speaker 05

  It provided plausible deniability for the president, since he was on TV on a regular basis saying, "We're not in any other countries, we're just in South Vietnam." But all of our SOG missions were Laos, Cambodia, North Vietnam, the DMZ, Thailand, places like that, where we were not supposed to be.

• 37:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:41Speaker 05

  So if we were caught, then we could be executed on the spot as a spy. We were not covered by the Geneva Convention.

• 37:52Speaker 05

  You know, so it was different for us. And then the number of enemy that you would be engaged with was pretty much insane.

• 38:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:05Speaker 05

  I mean, when they tell you, "I want you to take six guys and go out and find this battalion of North Vietnamese and attack them."

• 38:16Speaker 05

  Okay, they should be easy to find. That's a lot of people.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:21Speaker 05

  Not sure how to get away from them, but I thought that'd be pretty cool to to learn.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Yeah. So you so you um you get assigned to RT Alabama, right, and Fubai?

• 38:35Speaker 05

  Um, yes. So when I um you went to Da Nang first, um, and that's where you found out what SOG was, found out everything was top secret, that you couldn't say anything after you walked out of that room. Um, and there were there were three camps, like the one at Da Nang, and then there were some smaller ones. Um, and you got a code name so that, you know, you if you were captured, you could kind of prove or or let the US know it was you.

• 39:11Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 39:12Speaker 05

  Or you, um, and then, you know, I was sent up to Fubai uh that had some of the teams up there. I put us closer uh to the Lao Lishan border and and North Vietnam. Um, so there were about five or six of us that went up there at the same time. And everybody's name was called off by the sergeant major, except mine. And they were told that they were gonna go to um a two-week course to teach them how to be team leaders in SOG. And so I'd say, you know, what about me? You didn't call my name.

• 39:55Speaker 05

  And he said, hey, you're Ranger, Special Forces, you got all this extra training. I'm putting you to work. You're gonna be assigned to a team tomorrow. Uh, and we're gonna get you out uh doing your thing. Well, I thought, well, that's cool. Get started pretty fast.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, and so you get to your team. What was that like when you first got there?

• 40:22Speaker 05

  When I got where?

• 40:22Speaker 04

  To your team.

• 40:24Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, well, on a SOG team.

• 40:30Speaker 05

  It doesn't matter what your rank is. So I came into the team as an officer and, you know, I was the only officer on the team. But I had to go out with the team several times and prove, you know, my ability to lead in combat and work with the SOG teams and learn all the little special techniques that they use before I could have my own team. So I went out as the second in command with a, with an E7. And, you know, he was teaching me, you know, some of the things about being a leadership, being a leader.

• 41:15Speaker 05

  He was also evaluating me and vetting me to be able to be a leader.

• 41:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:22Speaker 05

  So with Alabama, I went out, you know, four times with them.

• 41:27Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:27Speaker 05

  And then I was cleared to be a leader.

• 41:32Speaker 04

  So, you know, you're, you have this kind of like, SOG had a wide range of operations. And like, your first mission was wiretapping, right? So, so do they, like, do they have courses for you guys back at the camp? Like, how do you, you know, if you're doing a pipeline hit or wiretapping or a rendition or, you know, a snatch and grab? Like, how do you, you know, learn these, these different skills?

• 42:03Speaker 05

  For the most part, from operators who have done it before and, and know it. And sometimes if it's something really special, they may be bringing in a CIA guy or somebody else who has the expertise. But the RT Alabama had done wild wiretaps before. So they knew how to do it and I, I learned, you know, as we went out and, and did it. I mean, it's not that complex once you see how it's done. The execution, you know, actually getting it done without getting caught is, is the issue.

• 42:45Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 42:46Speaker 05

  But in, you know, in that particular case, first mission.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  We went out and we were also testing,

• 43:00Speaker 05

  is it better to go in at last light just before it gets dark? So, once you get onto helicopters and get into the jungle, that it'd be very difficult to track you. Or do you go in at first light? So, you have daylight to try to, you know, get some space between you and where you go in. But we were going in at last light. And we're, we're gonna go down into a bomb crater. They dropped a very large bomb and blew a hole into jungle canopy, just barely big enough for the helicopter to set down in. So, we're approaching it. And, you know, the skids are almost dragging on the top of the canopy.

• 43:46Speaker 05

  The team leader's over on one side with a couple of people there, standing on the skid of the helicopter over there. I'm on, on the other side with another American and a couple of indigenous. And we're standing out and we're just barely moving. And I, I was thinking, if an NVA is down there, he could take a rock and knock me off the skid. I mean, we're wide open and we're just barely moving. So, we get to the, to the hole in the canopy and the helicopter starts to settle down in toward the crater. And we get about, we're probably still six feet from the ground

• 44:31Speaker 05

  and he can't get any lower. And I'm, I'm wearing seventy-five, maybe eighty pounds of gear and thinking, if, when I jump off this skid and go down six feet and hit, I'm probably gonna break both legs.

• 44:50Speaker 05

  But, you know, that's what slog people do.

• 44:52Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:53Speaker 05

  So, I get ready. I bent my knees to, to jump in. And just as I got ready to jump.

• 45:04Speaker 05

  I saw some movement on my right about ten fifteen feet away was a NVA soldier with AK-47 pointed up at me and I thought, oh, man. So instead of jumping into the crater, I jumped back up on the edge of the floor of the helicopter just as he pulled the trigger, stream of rounds came by. They missed me because I had jumped back, but they hit the American next to me, took his legs out from under him. So I grabbed him by the back of the harness as he was falling. I managed to pull him up and, you know, took my right hand and hosed down the guy that had just shot at us. I put about a half a magazine

• 45:47Speaker 05

  into him. Got the other guy up, blood going everywhere. Now, everybody's shooting and the whole bomb crater comes alive because they had an ambush set up around it. So there's tracers crisscrossing inside the cargo compartment, somehow missing us. And, you know, I was just amazed that that many bullets could be coming and not be getting hit. I went ahead and emptied the rest of the magazine into a tree in front of me where I could see muzzle flashes and saw a guy fall out. But when I reached to get another magazine

• 46:28Speaker 05

  to reload, I had, you know, my hand was just covered in blood and that made it slick. The magazines were really packed tight into the canteen cover that I was using. I couldn't get the magazine out. And eventually I did get it out, but then my fine muscle control had deteriorated so much from the stress, I couldn't get it in the magazine well. You know, bullets are coming at me and I'm trying to get the magazine in. Finally got it in so I could start returning fire. After I got the first one out of the pouch, then I could get the others without any problem.

• 47:12Speaker 05

  You know, I had just never experienced that level of fear. I had tried to imagine, you know, what it would be like to have a bunch of people shooting at you. And, you know, they're fifteen, twenty meters away at most.

• 47:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:31Speaker 05

  Nothing but air between me and them. And, you know, it's coming at us. You can hear, hear the rounds hitting the helicopter. And, you know, the, the door gunner's right next to me. He's got the M60 going. Two of my, my little guys are behind me. One on each side of my head with a Car 15 firing on automatic. I can feel, you know, the powder burns hitting my face. You know, as all that's going on, I'm trying to shoot. It was, um, probably lasted two or three minutes. It seemed like, you know, all day. But, um, because stuff was hitting everywhere. Anyway, we, we got out of that. And eventually

• 48:16Speaker 05

  we, we got back. And, and on the way back, I looked over at the team leader, sitting on the other side of the helicopter. And he looked around at me. And when he saw me, I mean, he grinned like a horse eating Saul Brier and started giving me a thumbs up. And I, I thought, he thought that was cool.

• 48:35Speaker 01

  (laughing)

• 48:36Speaker 05

  Really enjoyed what we just did. I don't know if I'm going to get to that point or not, based on how I felt back there. But he's pretty excited about this. Then when we got back, we got off the helicopter and he came over to me. And he said, "I'm going to tell you something, Lieutenant. If you don't learn to change magazines faster when people are shooting at you, you're going to die."

• 49:07Speaker 05

  And I said, copy that. I was pretty fast, but I didn't realize the impact of someone shooting at me, how much slower it was gonna be. Yeah. I will start practicing. So, one of the things I tried to do with the books is I wanted to show the reader, this is what I saw. You're looking through my eyes, you're facing my fear, you're seeing what I'm seeing, you see the mistakes that I make, you see the changes that I start making across time, as I learn more and more, how I'm changing the tactics that I'm using with the team, teaching them how to do things differently.

• 49:51Speaker 05

  And you can see a big change as you go across those two books, in terms of how I led teams and how we fought.

• 50:01Speaker 04

  For people who are familiar with SOG and have watched our shows or other shows, you probably know why there was an ambush set up. But for people who don't know, SOG was top secret for everybody except for the North Vietnamese, who, due to the political climate in Vietnam, the South Vietnamese had to be informed of everything that you guys did. And that basically was sent up to the North Vietnamese. So there was always, you know, at least a company, if not a battalion, waiting for you guys, right?

• 50:40Speaker 05

  Yeah. I see a lot of people practicing jiu-jitsu, and the way people do that is you and I are gonna have a match. So, we get down on the floor, I get my best hold around you, you get your best hold on me. And then they say, go. And, you know, then we start rolling around fighting, one of us trying to beat the other. And that's like a SOG mission. You got a whole bunch, the North Vietnamese, you know, 500, 1,000, and you put them out there in the jungle. Then you take this little six or eight man SOG

• 51:23Speaker 05

  team, and you set them right in the middle of them.

• 51:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  And once they're in there, and then somebody says, go. So now you gotta try to...

• 51:34Speaker 05

  You know, accomplish the mission that you went there for, and then you have to try to get out. And the most difficult thing of the whole process is getting out, because now they all know where you are.

• 51:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:49Speaker 05

  And, you know, I used to liken it to, it's like kicking the top off of an anthill. How they just swarm out of the anthill. Once they find out where you are, they just swarm on you.

• 52:02Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. You know, you talked about how this book was through your eyes, and the opening, the opening of the book has a really intense scene with you grappling with North. Do you want to tell us that story?

• 52:21Speaker 05

  Yeah, on, on one of the missions, and I'm gonna go ahead and add a lot, add a little bit more to what's in the front.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 52:35Speaker 05

  The helicopter I was in was shot down. So we crashed on the LZ. I broke my back, fractured my spine, some vertebrae, some ribs, and things like that, you know, when we crashed. One of my guys had gotten shot through the thigh as the helicopter was coming down. Anyway, we're, the three of us were all thrown out. My interpreter was with me. We were thrown out on, onto the ground, and all three knocked out. When I came to, I wasn't sure if I was dead or alive, but as I, my hearing started to come back, I could

• 53:19Speaker 05

  hear the rounds cracking by and digging up the grounds. I figured, I must be alive, because they're trying to kill me. So I I started moving and because there was a small bomb crater there. I started moving toward that and then I my guy that was shot in the leg, he couldn't go anywhere. So I had to go back and I had to get him, drag him to the bomb crater, take his rucksack off, push him into the crater. I had to go back and get my interpreter, drag him to the bomb crater, push him in. And, you know, there's steadily just coming after

• 53:57Speaker 05

  us and and shooting. But the three of us got in the bomb crater. Then our, what we call the cubby rider, the guy's in the plane up above us, he called the helicopter was sitting there, kind of leaning sideways. The blade was almost hitting the ground when it would turn. The wheels were flattened out on it. He talked to the pilot and told him he wanted him and the copilot to get out and let me get him in the bomb crater.

• 54:35Speaker 05

  The pilot said, no, we fix. And this is a very famous Vietnamese, you know, SOG helicopter pilot. I mean, he was shot down four times. I think this was the third time he was shot down. But anyway. These are the Ki-Bees, right? He refused to get out. Yeah. So, so we had, we were in a bomb crater and they're coming across this little grassy area, trying to get us or get close enough to throw a hand grenade. And we're stacking them up like cord, you know, like cordwood all around the bomb crater. I don't know. At one point.

• 55:18Speaker 05

  The idea popped into my head that what I should do is crawl out there in the grass with them, because they're crawling through the grass trying to get to us. I should just go out there with them and snatch one of them up and drag him back into the bomb crater. And again, my prefrontal cortex wasn't working very well. It sounded like a good idea. I mean, I've just got a broken back. It's not a big deal. But I crawled out there and I could hear one crawling kind of toward me. I reached out, I grabbed him by the shoulder, scared him half to death. But he had an AK, so he tries to shoot me. I got his AK. And then

• 56:02Speaker 05

  he got my muzzle, my Car 15, and we're fighting and rolling around. I eventually shot him in the shoulder, but he was overpowering me. I just didn't have any strength left. And then, for some reason, he turned loose of the barrel of my Car 15 and just hit me as hard as he could right in the nose. Just flattened my nose out. Blood went everywhere. My balls were spinning around. But when he turned loose of the Car 15, that gave me

• 56:40Speaker 05

  a second or so to reorient it. And then he realized, I could see the look in his eyes that he knew he was dead, because the muzzle of the Car 15 was maybe six inches away from his cheek. And he just closed his eyes because he knew it was over. And I put a five or six round burst into his head and it just exploded.

• 57:10Speaker 05

  So I went, went back to the bomb crater, decided I'd try to get a prisoner a different day.

• 57:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. That's so well, and then how do they, you know, you have multiple wounded, you're surrounded. How do they extract you guys?

• 57:26Speaker 05

  Well, eventually, using tactical air support, got the fire suppressed enough that they came in and dropped ropes from the helicopter that we passed on and they pulled us out. Captain On in the helicopter, we were sitting on a pretty steep ridge, he got up enough rotor speed to pick it up about a foot or so off the ground and just went over the side of the ridge and right on down to the bottom of the ridge and hit down there. Another aircraft came in and picked him and his co-pilot up down there.

• 58:11Speaker 05

  But, yeah, it was, we came out a lot of times hanging on ropes.

• 58:17Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, those, those Vietnamese pilots were something, weren't they?

• 58:21Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I mean, they were, they were fearless and, and they were good.

• 58:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:26Speaker 05

  They were flying the, you know, CH34 helicopters, the big, big fat ones.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:33Speaker 05

  They're very powerful.

• 58:35Speaker 04

  Now, when you got to RT Alabama, you also were put on a hatchet force. Can you tell us about that?

• 58:41Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, they assigned me, so I had the double assignment. They, they assigned me to, you know, a hatchet platoon, had 50 guys, and, you know, so I was the, the platoon leader for the hatchet force, but it ended up, only thing I did with them was train. I never got to take them on a mission because they kept, kept me so busy with the teams going out. So Alabama kept, kept me busy and then they shut Phu Bai down and sent teams all over. I was sent down to Da Nang to CCN and that's where I picked up RT Michigan.

• 59:30Speaker 05

  What was the mission of the Hatchet?

• 59:33Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 59:48Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 59:59Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you are not alone.

• 1:00:04Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:00:10Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:00:31Speaker 05

  It was to have a, it's kind of like a ranger force, a kinetic, you know, hard hitting impact to go in and, you know, really, you know, kick some booty with the enemy.

• 1:00:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  I mean, you had battunes, but you had companies too. So you could put a whole company in there.

• 1:00:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

  And that was a lot of firepower.

• 1:00:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:01:02Speaker 04

  So they shut down FUBI, so you head to FOB4 to RT Michigan.

• 1:01:09Speaker 04

  And then, can you tell us about a couple of the ops there? Some of them were, I mean, all of them, I'm sure are standouts, and they're in the book, but can you, some of the, a couple that stand out in your memory?

• 1:01:22Speaker 05

  When I first got there, the previous team leader, 1-0, had been wounded badly. And so he was, you know, medevaced. So I took over as the team leader. And there was one other American there, Specialist 4th Class, by the name of Bargewell. And he was a sharp guy. I thought, wow, I mean, this kid is really sharp. And I'm saying kid, you know, I was three months older than him.

• 1:02:04Speaker 05

  But anyway, he had been with the team for a while, a lot of combat experience, really good. He and I got along really well. We had a mission to go in and actually support a hatchet force that was being put on the ground. We were going to be on the other side of the highway to make sure no one came from that side and attacked the hatchet force. But we were going to do it in a unique way. The 101st had a company right on the border with Laos.

• 1:02:45Speaker 05

  The plan was, we were going to fly in with the resupplies for the 101st, for that company, dressed like 101st guys, get off the helicopter that way. And then the next morning, we would go down with the water team down to the river to bring water back. Except when we got there, all of our clothes and things had gone in duffel bags. They would bring our clothes back. We would move off across the river, go into Laos, and maneuver over to where we needed to be. So that was a fairly unique way at that point to do an insertion.

• 1:03:32Speaker 05

  We also had artillery support. Only time I had artillery support.

• 1:03:39Speaker 05

  Because the 101st was close to the water. They could reach us. So I planned all these artillery targets and things out there. And we went in, eventually made some contact. And got in some big battles. And that's when I, I realized that if you stop, when they, when they're coming after you, if you stop, what, what they tend to do, the NVA, what they tend to do is they're just like an amoeba and you're dinner. And they just kind of like move out and just envelop you.

• 1:04:24Speaker 05

  All around you, now you're, you're in the center and they just come in and get you. So because they were chasing us, we got into a rocky area and I thought, this is a, this is an area that not only has some concealment, but it has cover. And we stopped and they just assaulted and assaulted. Eventually we were, we were pulled out by, you know, ropes. I sent Bargewell and the other American that was with us and a couple of his team members, they went out, sent them out first. I stayed with the other three team members that we had. We came out last.

• 1:05:09Speaker 05

  Both of them were wounded coming out. I was, I was hit in the back with, in the, the radio. And I was also hit with a big piece of shrapnel that hit.

• 1:05:25Speaker 05

  My survival radio, I know if you're listening to this on a podcast, you can't see it, but the survival radio was mounted right here in my pocket, right over my heart. It's a huge piece of shrapnel buried itself into the radio and that stopped it from burying itself into my heart.

• 1:05:48Speaker 05

  Got out and all of a sudden, we're hanging at 7,000 feet on the end of a rope, flying at 100 plus miles an hour, freezing to death, because we're soaking wet from all the sweat. And now we're 7,000 feet up and it's cold. And my rope's rubbing back and forth on the edge of the floor of the helicopter and I can see it starting to fray. And my radio's dead.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:15Speaker 05

  Our radio's dead. I can't radio the pilot and say, it'd be nice if we could sit down somewhere pretty soon because my rope's about gone.

• 1:06:25Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:06:26Speaker 05

  But we made it back anyway.

• 1:06:29Speaker 04

  So this is a very nerdy question, but I have to ask, you're part of this covert unit doing things that our country denies. You go to a conventional outpost where the 101st is. How do you coordinate fires with them and tell their arty people, hey, you can't ask who we are, but we might call you and we want you to fire into Laos?

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:07:02Speaker 05

  Well, you have the same, you have the same issue with the helicopter crews.

• 1:07:10Speaker 05

  The pilots get briefed on the mission. They know they're going to cross the river, but the crew, the gunner, crew chief and the gunner doesn't know. But you can see the expression on their face when they see that river coming up and they're still flying toward it. And they're looking down and thinking, oh geez, we've just crossed into Laos or Cambodia or wherever it is. And then they get all their briefings, they can't say anything about it. But with the artillery, they're there and I'm briefing them and saying, I'm plotting these targets on the other side of the river. But you won't be able to talk about this.

• 1:07:57Speaker 05

  I used them and then when we had to get pulled out, um, you know, I sent Bardswell and, and, you know, the other half of the team out first and they flew back to the fire support base. So those guys are out there seeing this helicopter come from way over on the other side of the border, flying right toward them.

• 1:08:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:08:20Speaker 05

  And landing there. So they got pretty excited and they all came out to see what was going on. And then my helicopter's coming, you know, with, with myself and two of my guys hanging under it and we're flying to it. So they knew now there's somebody else coming from over there too. And they set us down. The medics did a quick fix on the, on my two guys and put us in helicopter and we were just getting ready to lift off and I saw a guy running toward the helicopter. He's got his hand way up in the air and he's got something in his hand and we're lifting

• 1:09:01Speaker 05

  off the ground just as he gets to me and I reached, I reached down and I took what he had in his hand and then I, I realized it was a picture. Polaroid had just come out with this small version of the Polaroid camera and this guy bought one just before he came to Vietnam. So he saw the first helicopter come in and he ran to, ran back to his bunker and he got his camera and came back out. So he was ready when mine came in. So I got the actual picture that he took, uh, of coming in, hanging under the helicopter there. I had no clue who he was.

• 1:09:41Speaker 04

  Do you have that picture handy by the, by any chance?

• 1:09:44Speaker 05

  I'm sorry?

• 1:09:45Speaker 04

  Do you have that picture handy by any chance? Is it still?

• 1:09:49Speaker 05

  It's a, it's in the book.

• 1:09:51Speaker 04

  Oh, is it?

• 1:09:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 05

  I don't remember.

• 1:09:58Speaker 04

  That's okay. Hey, I know it gives people one more reason to buy the book.

• 1:10:03Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I mean, the book is loaded with pictures.

• 1:10:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  And I know you're gonna ask me that same question. If these were all classified, how did you get those pictures? Well.

• 1:10:15Speaker 04

  Oh, I wasn't gonna ask that. There are always pictures on classified missions these days.

• 1:10:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm just gonna look right here for just a second. I might be able to give you a page number.

• 1:10:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm just curious how the talk goes.

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  On page 156.

• 1:10:41Speaker 04

  156. I'm just curious how the discussion goes with like the base commander and the fire support officer saying, hey, we want you to turn your guns around.

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  And like, we're authorizing you to fire into Laos, if we call it.

• 1:10:59Speaker 05

  I wasn't privileged to what they were told at the time. I know the company commander kind of freaked out when I told him what we were gonna do the next morning.

• 1:11:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:11Speaker 05

  The fire support lieutenant that he had there freaked out when he said, you're plotting targets on the other side of the river, on the other side of the border. And I said, you're right, because when I need you to fire on those targets, I need you to have already computed everything.

• 1:11:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:34Speaker 05

  When I say, you know, fire target Monday, you know, right 200, drop 300, I need rounds coming in on the target right then, because we're in big trouble.

• 1:11:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:11:47Speaker 05

  So, they just, they just thought, wow, this is, we've never seen anybody.

• 1:11:54Speaker 05

  Plot all these targets and name them like days of the week so they all make sense. And line them up ahead of time. I mean, that's what Rangers did, you know?

• 1:12:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  I did that all the time, you know, when we did training and stuff, so. And used them once we got out there because it could come in quick like that.

• 1:12:18Speaker 04

  You know, we talked about sort of the expanse of operations that Mac Visage did and like, and then, you know, like you had your wiretaps, your search and destroy, eldest son. Even though this was Alabama, eldest son was a very interesting project, right? Do you want to talk about that?

• 1:12:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, one of the, one of the psy ops kinds of things that we did, black ops,

• 1:12:41Speaker 05

  is we would go into North Vietnamese ammunition caches

• 1:12:51Speaker 05

  and add some additional ammunition to it. So, we would, we would go in and put, you know, the 762 rounds for the AKs. We'd put the 51 calibers for the machine guns. We'd put mortar rounds.

• 1:13:11Speaker 05

  But these rounds would explode. So, in a, if we might put out a AK magazine, we have contact and we run. And we leave an AK-47 magazine laying there, fully loaded. But one of those rounds, when it gets to it and the guy shoots, the whole weapon in his head is gonna go away. So, if I see that happen to you, now I'm afraid to fire my weapon.

• 1:13:43Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:13:44Speaker 05

  And there would only be one in there. So, even if you find what's left of the magazine and start pulling the bullets out and checking them, the rest of the bullets are all fine.

• 1:13:55Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:13:55Speaker 05

  It's just one that exploded.

• 1:13:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:13:58Speaker 05

  But that has a big impact on whether or not you want to pull the trigger.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, we were told that, well, I mean, Jack has some firsthand experience with that, but we were told that they rebooted that for the Global War on Terror only since there's a kinder, gentler military or that they only fuse the weapons. Didn't, didn't you?

• 1:14:21Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, there I mean, there were also programs like in Afghanistan where the the tag, track and locate stuff became like a really big deal.

• 1:14:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. But yeah, the ammunition wasn't designed to explode anymore, but just to fuse the barrel because we didn't want to hurt the enemy.

• 1:14:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, and you know, if you think even more recently, um, with with what's uh, what happened, you know, with the Israelis.

• 1:14:50Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:14:51Speaker 05

  And all of a sudden, cell phones are exploding.

• 1:14:53Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:54Speaker 05

  I mean, not cell phone, but the pagers are exploding.

• 1:14:57Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Speaker 05

  It's the same kind of stuff. You rig it so, man, nobody wants to touch one of those pagers after they see explode.

• 1:15:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:15:05Speaker 05

  So now they're afraid of cell phones. They don't want to touch the cell phone. And, you know, they planned and and put those things out there way in advance of when, you know, they were going to use them. But it has a major psychological impact on you. Something like that, you know, blows your buddy's head off.

• 1:15:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then you had like pin uh, prisoner war snatches.

• 1:15:31Speaker 05

  We'd go in, prisoner snatches, go in and snatch up a prisoner to bring out. So you had those, you had the ambushes. We'd have, we'd go watch like the Ho Chi Minh Trail, set up where we could observe that. And when the trucks would start down the trail, you know, we could call the L4s to come in and bomb them. So we'd do those kinds of missions. Sometimes it was a raid. We'd go in and raid a particular place.

• 1:16:09Speaker 05

  I went into a training site on a mission and we crawled up on top of a mountain and called it in because they're not going to chance putting that stuff on their nose. So putting that stuff on their nose. So they were teaching them, you know, how to come after us, how to find us.

• 1:16:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. When when you guys would do like APW or like snatches, were those generally targeted for a specific personality? Or was it just, hey, go get somebody, the highest ranked person you can find?

• 1:16:48Speaker 05

  Sometimes it was, you know, to get a high ranking person, most of the time it's just to get somebody. Get somebody. So, you know, in fact, one of the, one of the missions with Michigan, I set up an ambush and I, I used C4 right in the middle of it. So we had claymores and interlocking fire and everything, everywhere except for this one hole where maybe two people could be in. Mm-hmm. And what they would get is just a concussion coming from the C4 to stun them.

• 1:17:29Speaker 05

  We'd kill everybody else and then jump out on the trail and grab those two guys up, handcuff them, bag them, you know, and drag them off. But, you know, they psychologically, they had been told, you know, that if Americans catch you, they're gonna mutilate you, they're gonna kill you, but they're gonna mutilate you first and torture you and do all this stuff. And they were so afraid of being caught, they'd kill themselves sometimes. Wow. Or their buddies would kill them. Yeah.

• 1:18:06Speaker 05

  The one mission there with, with Michigan, I mean, we had a guy that he's, he's bagged, hands handcuffed behind him and he got loose in the helicopter. 2,600 feet, he went headfirst out of the helicopter and when last seen, you know, he was traveling about 180 miles headfirst into the jungle. Yeah. So he dove out of the helicopter, killed himself, rather than let us take him back. Yeah. Where, you know, he wouldn't have been tortured or anything. Yeah.

• 1:18:48Speaker 05

  But based on what he'd been told, he was not going back with us.

• 1:18:55Speaker 04

  So you know, you, you cover about, uh, not, I don't know, eight, nine missions and I don't want to talk about all of them because people should buy this book. They should read the book. And then what's the second book called, which you said is more intense?

• 1:19:09Speaker 05

  It's just book two.

• 1:19:10Speaker 04

  Okay, book two. So the, the book is, uh, SOG codename dynamite. Uh, link is going to be in the description below, but buy it at your favorite bookseller. Um, it's a fantastic, fantastic like book. I mean, it's very, very detailed. Um, but you know, you SOG, I'm sure was one of the highlights of your career, but you also, you had a very stellar career. Um, is there anything from SOG that you want to talk about that we missed? Cause I'd like to talk a little bit about your career after that, too.

• 1:19:42Speaker 05

  Um, I would just say that, I mean, at, at the time, SOG was, that was the tier one most elite, you know, organization out there. And sometimes people read about those missions, hear about the missions now, and they, they just say, you, you can't do that. In fact, my father-in-law, uh, watched a podcast that I was on with Jaco Willink and he, he watched it and, um, on his iPad and, uh, he's very sharp. He was a World War II guy. And my wife said, well, so, so what

• 1:20:24Speaker 05

  do you think? And he said, he didn't do that. If he'd done all that stuff, he'd be dead. There's no way he did that. And you know, when, when you read those stories and you hear what, what the SOG guys did, that's the typical reaction. You can't do that.

• 1:20:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:43Speaker 05

  And I have people tell me, you couldn't carry that much weight.

• 1:20:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:20:47Speaker 05

  Well, we did. Uh, I used to carry, um, 50 mag, 50, 20 round magazines. And I had somebody just recently say, there's no way you, you couldn't carry. That much weight in ammunition, much less all the other stuff you put with it. So what we did.

• 1:21:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:21:12Speaker 05

  I mean, there was nobody coming to bring your resupply. You had to survive. And in one of the missions in book two there, I mean, it, we were in contact with something like 20, 21 hours, 22 hours before we got out. And you gotta have a lot of ammunition and in a lot of cases, you end up having to go out and take AK-47s off of dead bodies and use their weapons and ammunition.

• 1:21:43Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:21:57Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:22:08Speaker 07

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• 1:22:14Speaker 09

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• 1:22:20Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 1:22:39Speaker 05

  Ammunition against them because you've already used up all of yours.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. You know, for kind of the nerds out there who want to know this kind of stuff, what was your standard like weapon loadout? And I'm sure it depended on, on the operation, but you guys were carrying cars. Did everybody carry a car generally? I mean, do you guys have shotguns? Were there any like?

• 1:23:01Speaker 05

  For the, for the most part.

• 1:23:04Speaker 05

  Well, in the beginning of SOG, because you couldn't have anything that said US, usually it was a Sten gun, a Sten gun or Swedish K, you know, was a non-American weapon. And, you know, by the, by the mid sixties, um, late sixties, US weapons were so ubiquitous all over that part of the world, you know, to have a weapon that had US stamped on it somewhere wasn't that big of a deal. So they started carrying CAR-15s, you know, so they were relatively short, they had the sliding stock, um, and, you know, 20 round magazines

• 1:23:49Speaker 05

  to start with, but, you know, the North Vietnamese had 30 round magazines. I mean, that's a big difference. When you engage another, another group and they've got 10 more rounds in their magazines than you do.

• 1:24:04Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:04Speaker 05

  I mean, very quickly, you know, they can gain fire superiority over you.

• 1:24:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:09Speaker 05

  Because you, you gotta change out magazines at some point.

• 1:24:12Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  So, uh, when, when my team, once I, I took over Michigan, pretty much the standard loadout for fragmentation grenades was, was five per person. Uh, you carried those in a canteen pouch or maybe a couple hanging on you. So five fragmentation grenades. I changed it to 10. So if I took a seven man team out, we had a total of 70 frag grenades.

• 1:24:44Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:24:45Speaker 05

  You know, but you, you can go through 70 frag grenades fairly quickly when there's that many people coming after you. Uh, most, most teams carried 35 magazines. Uh, I carried 50 and, and one reason for that is I don't like to get shot at.

• 1:25:06Speaker 05

  So if you shoot at me, I'm gonna shoot back.

• 1:25:09Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:25:09Speaker 05

  You know, so I probably shot a little more than the average team leader. Plus, you know, it gave me some rounds. I could distribute some magazines if I needed to.

• 1:25:23Speaker 05

  If the other guys had run out.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  So we had, you had that, you'd have a knife of some type. I usually carried my K-bar.

• 1:25:36Speaker 05

  And again, if you listen to the audio, you don't see what I had. This is my actual, original K-bar that I carried on missions and there are places in there where you will, where I talk about using this and how I used it. And this is the one, actual one I was, I'm talking about in the book.

• 1:26:00Speaker 05

  So you had a knife and most people carried a pistol of some type. I got to the point where I carried a high standard, 22-long rifle pistol with an integrated silencer. So I could take out dogs, take out trackers and people without making, you know, too much noise.

• 1:26:24Speaker 05

  But my, my load-bearing equipment, you know, averaged about 35 pounds plus. My rucksack, because I also carried the radio, because I wanted to be able to talk.

• 1:26:42Speaker 05

  You know, my, my rucksack was like 70 pounds or more.

• 1:26:46Speaker 04

  How much water were you taking in there? Cause I mean, some of those missions-

• 1:26:49Speaker 05

  Usually we started out with, if it was rainy, rainy season, season, you didn't have to take as much, but-

• 1:26:58Speaker 05

  Average was like four quarts.

• 1:27:00Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:27:01Speaker 05

  Of water, you know, on your load bearing gear. Um, you know, compass, map, uh, the survival radio I talked about, I mean, this thing's almost five pounds.

• 1:27:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:13Speaker 05

  Just the radio.

• 1:27:15Speaker 04

  Well, the water alone, isn't it, what is it, two and a half, five pounds per quart? I can't remember now. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:27:21Speaker 05

  It's heavy. It adds up.

• 1:27:23Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:27:24Speaker 05

  Very quickly.

• 1:27:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:27:25Speaker 05

  The book there, in book one, uh, there's a table in there where I've got listed. I broke gear down into the three levels. You know, your survival level that you had to last resort, I've gotta have this. Um, and then the tactical level, um, mostly your ammunition and stuff like that. And then, uh, your mission stuff in the rucksack where you might have the wiretap or long range, uh, camera lenses or, you know, special equipment. If you're gonna blow something up, you have a lot of extra C4 and stuff.

• 1:28:07Speaker 05

  But I had it so I could drop the rucksack, I could still fight. If I lost my load bearing gear, I could still survive because I had a knife. I had an extra, um, I had a bandolier around my waist of magazines that would still go with me. If I dropped everything else, um, compass was on me. So map was on in my pocket. So I had these different levels and it's all broken out in there. And it also talks about how much they weigh.

• 1:28:38Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:28:39Speaker 05

  Kind of give you some idea.

• 1:28:41Speaker 04

  Yep. Now, I, you know, you had this 21 year career and I want to ask you, you know, you're in this very secret program.

• 1:28:52Speaker 04

  That's, you know, people are in secret programs now, but you know, because of social media, because of things like that, people are more aware of what's out there these days. But you have this career, do they give you a cover story of, like, people obviously know you're in Vietnam and you're, and up until 1988, so you're there when a lot of people, there are very few, I assume Vietnam vets left in the military near the end of your career. What, like, when people say, what did you do in Vietnam, what can you say?

• 1:29:29Speaker 05

  Well, I, when I, when I left SOG, I came back to the States, I went to, I'm just kidding, I went to the Rangers, you know, and so I had 40 other instructors that I was with that all had combat experience, they've all been to Vietnam, and that helped us support each other, but when they would ask me, you know, I was, I went to Vietnam and I was in the special forces group.

• 1:30:00Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  I had an SF combat patch on and I just, I was in special forces and, yeah, we did a lot of raids, ambushes and different things, but you couldn't mention the word SOG, you couldn't say we did those things over in other countries and, you know, after a while, people just, you know, stopped asking you things like that, they just see your combat patch and assume, you know, you were just in a SF group.

• 1:30:34Speaker 04

  Now, did, did the Army ever, like, tell you, okay, this is officially declassified and give you an official, like, read-off and rollback, or did you just kind of have to figure it out when you could actually start talking about it?

• 1:30:48Speaker 05

  Mostly kind of figure it out. I mean, I had to sign a non-disclosure agreement, you know, when...

• 1:30:56Speaker 05

  When I volunteered.

• 1:30:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:30:58Speaker 05

  For SOG, I had to, I had to sign a voluntary statement that I, I was volunteering to go anywhere, do anything for six months or six missions, whichever came first. And then I had to sign a separate agreement, a non-disclosure agreement, that I wouldn't say anything about SOG, anything about going into other countries or, you know, anything with SOG for 20 years.

• 1:31:31Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:31:32Speaker 05

  So, you know, once SOG shut down, then it was 20 years before you're supposed to be able to say anything about it.

• 1:31:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. So, like you said, after you leave Vietnam, you go to Ranger School to Delanega, right? And what was that like for you? And I'm sure Ranger School was very different back then than it is now.

• 1:31:59Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:32:02Speaker 05

  Back then, we only had to feed you one meal a day.

• 1:32:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:32:10Speaker 05

  And, and that's if, when you were out on patrol, if whoever the patrol leader was when we requested resupply, if he remembered to request food. So if he got carried away on ammunition and the smoke and all that kind of stuff and forgot to ask for food, there wouldn't be any food even in the resupply that day. Or when the, the team went down to pick up the supplies from the friendly partisan, if they forgot to ask for the food, because it would all always be separate from the ammunition.

• 1:32:51Speaker 05

  You know, so they would very quickly hand you all this ammunition to carry back to the, to the patrol. But if you didn't ask for food. They didn't tell you, oh, it's over here. So you would go back to the patrol with no food. So you didn't get anything to eat that day.

• 1:33:11Speaker 04

  I can't imagine that their peer evaluations were that good.

• 1:33:18Speaker 04

  But it was also like, you know, now it's a, it's a leadership school. It's under Trey Doc. But back then it was still very like combat focused, right? Very preparing.

• 1:33:29Speaker 05

  It was combat and, and leadership. But one of the things, um, back then, you know, they, they wanted you to be an E5 or, or higher, you know, to come. They wanted you to have a certain amount of time in the military before you came to Ranger School. They wanted you, they wanted you basically to show up there and demonstrate that you could do all this stuff and that you could tough it out and, and make it through everything. And then they started backing away on, you know, at least when you were not out in the woods on patrol, they had to give you three meals a day.

• 1:34:14Speaker 05

  Couldn't drop you for more than 50 pushups at a time. Couldn't make you low crawl from the classroom down to the mess hall, down the asphalt as a company. So, I mean, there are a lot of, you know, things like that that were just hardship things that they started taking out. And, you know, it was still, it's still tough to go out there for that long.

• 1:34:40Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 1:34:42Speaker 05

  And now, and now you go, you actually go through a, a pre Ranger course before you go to Ranger School. And if you're in the, the 75th, um, you know, you, you have to go through, uh, the, the selection thing to get into the 75th. And, and then, once you're in, you, you know, have an opportunity to volunteer to go to Ranger School.

• 1:35:10Speaker 04

  Yeah. And, and back then also, one of the things you mentioned was that all the instructors had to be combat veterans, right?

• 1:35:18Speaker 05

  Right. Everybody was a combat vet. Um.

• 1:35:23Speaker 05

  And, you know, when I was, when I went up there,

• 1:35:30Speaker 05

  and actually, the Delonaga is now, is now the fifth Ranger Battalion.

• 1:35:41Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:35:44Speaker 05

  So, when I went up there, I created and stood up the HALO team, trained the HALO team, led the HALO team, did demonstrations all around, you know, HALO.

• 1:36:04Speaker 05

  I actually started a parachute club at the North Georgia, what was then North Georgia Military College that's there in Delonaga. Started their parachute club back up, trained the students, threw them out.

• 1:36:22Speaker 05

  You know, I put in, you know, HALO missions into the, not the training that the students got to do, but that they would be out and get a message they had to pick up a pilot that had been shot down. And I would parachute in, they'd see my parachute coming down, they'd have to come find me.

• 1:36:47Speaker 05

  So we did a lot of things like that. We worked on tactical use of HALO and more advanced tactical, you know, procedures and techniques like we used in SOG. I just didn't say that's where it came from. We actually went out and set up desert training, trained the 82nd and some other units in desert warfare before they made their first trip to the Middle East. We set up, and I wrote a lot of the training and everything for

• 1:37:25Speaker 05

  the desert phase of Ranger School. So, for a period of time, there was a fourth phase of Ranger training that was actually in the desert, and it was desert training. And they eventually took that out, but that was in there for a while. So I did a lot of things there in addition to just, you know, train the Rangers. Yeah.

• 1:37:51Speaker 04

  And then when you left, when you left there, you went to Second ID in Korea. And they didn't have a Ranger company there at the time. So that was kind of your initiative kicked that off.

• 1:38:07Speaker 05

  Right. I had, I talked to General Emerson, the Second Division Commander, before I went en route to Korea. I went through the infantry officers' advanced course at Fort Benning. And so when I got orders going to Korea, I, I sent him a letter and said, you know, here's my background. This is what I want to do. When I get there, I can give you a Ranger company of your own that you can use, that can do anything that a Ranger company can do. He was special forces. He got all excited about it. So gave me a company. And when I

• 1:38:51Speaker 05

  first got there, I started training them. Everything from being picked up on ropes, you know, helicopter assaults, things like that. And also, you know, we became the quick reaction force for the nuclear sites. Any, any threat developed around a nuclear site, we were, there were periods of time when we were on a 30-minute alert to launch and

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  go there. But when I first went down to where our launch site was, when I saw the footlockers that had the live ammo stored in it.

• 1:39:43Speaker 05

  I told my first sergeant, I said, you know, I, I, I don't feel good about our ammunition at all. I'm looking at those foot lockers. It looks to me like, based on those steel bands that are around them and how rusty they are, no one's looked at those magazines in there in a long time. You know, get, get some cutters, open one up. And he said, sir, they're court martialed. You, you're gonna get court martialed if you open one of those. Like, you can't get, get the cutters. Yeah. I'm gonna open these, I'll open one, and we'll see what that one looks like. And based on that, we'll decide about the others. The magazines were so corroded, I mean, you

• 1:40:27Speaker 05

  could barely get the rounds out of the magazines. Take a screwdriver and pry them out. I mean, we couldn't have, nobody's weapon would have fired. I mean, we'd have been standing there, you know, with the blades turning, waiting on us, you know, on the helicopters with no ammunition. Yeah. To go. So anyway, I got that resolved. And then, you know, based on my training, it was, you gotta rehearse, you gotta practice. So we're gonna go out and make an assault into, you know, one of the, the sites and see how that goes. It didn't go well at all because when we got to the landing zone, it was trees. Yeah.

• 1:41:12Speaker 05

  For 20 years, they hadn't done anything to the landing zone. Trees had grown up then, so we couldn't land. And all the sites were like that. So scared, I created a pretty big mess. I mean, it wasn't my fault. I just happened to be the one that said I want to test this stuff out. Right. But yeah, I had a good time in Korea. It was, I mean, there were all kinds of competitions. There were something that the division commander had put together called combat football.

• 1:41:48Speaker 05

  Ferocious game and my company won it both times while we were there. We won the division championship. We won the taekwondo, you know, championship. We won the infantry, platoon and stuff championships. So we were selected to put on the demonstration when the president came over. We put on a ranger capabilities demonstration, you know, for him. That, you know, was pretty impressive and he really liked. So we did a lot of things. I mean, I had a great time with it.

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  And then I came from there back to Fort Bragg and ended up in G3. And eventually with the emergency readiness deployment team, where we would test out the ranger battalions and the special forces battalions. We would go in to them at one o'clock in the morning, hand them a set of orders. You are now activated, you know, two hours, the wheels up. We'll give you the briefing on, you know, on the plane is what your mission is, where you're going. And then evaluate their capability to actually do it.

• 1:43:15Speaker 05

  And how was that for you? Oh, loved it. Yeah. I mean, because I was back, you know, and the way I felt, I was back with my, my people. Right. Rangers, those are my people. Yeah. I got a chance to be willing and go out on these. And all of these things were classified, you know, when they were going to happen, where it was going to take place and what happened when you got there. And that, we went to some cool places and, you know, and I enjoyed that.

• 1:43:50Speaker 04

  And then in 79, you, wait, am I getting ahead here? You, you, you became a teacher, an assistant professor, right? And ROTC, no?

• 1:44:07Speaker 05

  Well, sort of, yes.

• 1:44:09Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:44:11Speaker 05

  My assignments officer called while I was at Bragg and said, "How would you like to go to degree completion to complete a master's degree?" I said, "Well, that sounds pretty cool." So as I thought about that, I decided if I was gonna go to school and work on a master's, why not just get a doctorate? If I could find the right school

• 1:44:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44:44Speaker 05

  that would give me credit for residency time while I was working on the master's. And it was a school that had an ROTC department that I could, you know, when I finished the master's degree, I'd be assigned to the ROTC department. That would give me enough time to finish the doctorate while I was there. So I did that at the University of Georgia. I got the master's degree. Started working for the ROTC department. Finished my doctorate, you know, while I was there. And started working on some special op stuff.

• 1:45:27Speaker 05

  What, what happens if, if you have to go for a long period of time without sleep? So, and that, then they sent me to the Command and General Staff College out at Leavenworth. And from there, they assigned me to the Air Land Battle 2000 team, which was figuring out how we were going to fight war in the 21st century. So I had done a lot of research on sleep and hyper-

• 1:46:01Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 1:46:16Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 1:46:27Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 1:46:32Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 1:46:38Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 1:46:58Speaker 05

  Forming leadership.

• 1:47:01Speaker 05

  So they put me on that. And eventually I started going around briefing the NATO countries on this is how we're going to do special ops in the 21st century. And so that, you know, that was fun.

• 1:47:19Speaker 04

  Can I ask you, what was it like? Cause this is 79, so the, I'm assuming like morale is getting a little bit better post Vietnam, but it's still not super high. So what is it like being part of an ROTC at that time?

• 1:47:37Speaker 05

  At that time, particularly University of Georgia, I mean, it was, it was fine. Yeah. People, people liked the military there, the, I mean, Georgia was a land-grant college. So, I mean, at one point in its history, if you, if you were a male and you went to Georgia, you had to be in R L T C the first two years. Oh, interesting. But that went away, you know, a number of years back, but, so it was voluntary. You, you could join. They had a strong, strong program. We had a Ranger company within

• 1:48:15Speaker 05

  the program there. And I was the advisor trainer for the Ranger company. And, you know, we got along well with people on campus, with the exception of the Air Force R L T C. I had a little friction there. I had to be careful because my guys would get so fired up. They'd want to go over and steal their little airplanes and things and, you know, create an issue. But, yeah, that was, that was good. And then, you know, I went to Leavenworth and worked out there. And then eventually,

• 1:48:59Speaker 05

  I got a call from the assignments officer again. It said, how would you like to go back to Georgia and be, you know, we call, we call these R L T C departments battalions now. So you would go back there and be the battalion commander. And I said, you know, why? Why, I mean, why are you offering me this? They said, well, it's always been an oh-six position, but the Army's changed it to now it's an oh-five position. And Georgia says they're not going to accept an oh-five.

• 1:49:37Speaker 05

  And every O5's name that we sent down there gets rejected for some reason. And then we remembered you. You already been there once for an assignment. You got a master's and a PhD from their university. You meet all the education, you know, requirements, the experience requirements. They can't say no to you. I said, well, try it and see. They took me and I ended up having that as my, you know, final assignment in the military.

• 1:50:17Speaker 04

  That's great. I mean, it's kind of a nice way to ease out, right?

• 1:50:22Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:50:23Speaker 04

  Yeah. And then post military, like, what did you do? 21 years and then you're out and then go fishing? Or like, what did you do after that?

• 1:50:34Speaker 05

  Well, I'd always thought the training and things that we did in the military were pretty cool.

• 1:50:43Speaker 05

  Before I got out, I started using some leave and going to some civilian corporate type organizations and saying, you know, let me come in and do some leadership training, team building, whatever. And, you know, so I was doing a little bit of that before I actually got out. And, you know, the civilians loved it.

• 1:51:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:51:10Speaker 05

  Well, I started a company, High Performing Systems,

• 1:51:15Speaker 05

  where it was executive leadership and strategic planning and all that kind of stuff, team building. And in the 90s.

• 1:51:28Speaker 05

  Outdoor training was big. You know, you take a corporate group out into the woods and you have them move across ropes, bridges and stuff in the treetops, you have them rappel off a cliff. Whatever, I mean, what better job could I have, given my background? Yeah. So, I would take them out and, but we would, they would have that kind of training, but then I would pick obstacles, design obstacles that mirrored some problem they were having with their team. And so they'd have to, I'd take them out, they'd have to engage, you know, that obstacle.

• 1:52:09Speaker 05

  And at some point, somebody would say, you know, we're doing the same thing, the same issues that we have every day at work. Mm-hmm. And we just, we, we overcame it here and we got through this obstacle. Why can't we do that at work? And so then, you know, I'd work with them all, okay, this is how you do that. Yeah. And in the, in the process of doing all that, we would be putting their strategic plan together, or building their executive team, or, you know, things like that. And they loved it, but, you know, by the time, you know, the 2000s came along, everybody

• 1:52:50Speaker 05

  said, you know, been there, done that, got the T-shirt, what else you got? I don't wanna, you know, jump off a cliff or whatever. Right. But, you know, then more of my work became focused around, um, stress, decision-making under stress. So, working with law enforcement, working with, continuing to work with, you know, special ops, um, working with, you know, nuclear facilities is very stressful in the control room. Yeah. Those guys in there need, need training. And doing a lot more with vets, because vets need some help.

• 1:53:32Speaker 05

  You know, you need somebody you can talk to that knows what you're talking about.

• 1:53:38Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:53:39Speaker 05

  You know, because I, vets tell me all the time, you know, I'm there in the VA, I go talk to the doctor, whatever his or her name is, and when I'm trying to explain to them what I'm experiencing, I can see it's going right over their head.

• 1:53:54Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:53:55Speaker 05

  They have no clue what I'm talking about. They've read some stuff in a book, they've never experienced it, so they don't know what I'm talking about. So, you know, I do a lot of counseling and stuff with the vets, do different programs for them. So, it's been a big part of our organization over the years, too.

• 1:54:18Speaker 04

  You know, one of the things that's really been highlighted after the global war on terror is, you know, veteran issues, post-traumatic stress, things like that. After Vietnam, there was this big public scare about post-traumatic stress, right? The movie that, you know, made for TV movies about a vet, like, having flashbacks and killing people in the office, stuff like that. What, what kind of, like, resources? Were there resources for you guys back then? How were you guys dealing with it? I mean, you know, obviously it's become a lot more acceptable to talk about now, things like that.

• 1:54:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was difficult. I mean, if you wanted to end your career, you know, get diagnosed as having PTSD.

• 1:55:04Speaker 04

  Uh huh.

• 1:55:05Speaker 05

  Particularly if you wanted to be in special ops. I mean, special ops, I mean, you have to be physically fit across the board.

• 1:55:16Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  So, like, hearing, for example. If you have significant hearing loss, and, and back in those days, we didn't have the headsets.

• 1:55:29Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:55:31Speaker 05

  You didn't have anything except air. So trying to maintain, you know, excellent hearing. It was very difficult because CAR-15s are very loud. Frag grenades are very loud, explosions, all that kind of stuff. But if you were diagnosed with with hearing loss, you couldn't be in Halo anymore. You couldn't jump. You couldn't be special ops. So there were all kinds of things like that, not even PTSD. You know, I used to pull shrapnel out.

• 1:56:11Speaker 05

  If I could get it out, I didn't say anything about it. Right. And a lot of people did that. Right. Because you don't you don't want to have to go and not be special ops anymore.

• 1:56:25Speaker 05

  And then we kind of moved to a phase where we talked about PTSD, but it was still, you know, once it got on your record. Right. You know, regardless of what they were telling you, you were kind of at the end of the road.

• 1:56:44Speaker 05

  They're trying to do a better job now, but

• 1:56:50Speaker 05

  I don't think the people who are working with the military quite understand we all have a limit. And I mentioned to you earlier that when you signed up for SOG, you signed a statement that said six missions or six months, whichever comes first. So there was a recognition that these things were going to be very stressful. But in reality, you could go out on the first mission and come back and say, I can't do that anymore. You had no clue. That's what it was going to be like.

• 1:57:30Speaker 05

  And you could get off the team and get on and get another job within SOG where you were not an operator anymore and still, you know, can continue to work. You just weren't going outside the wire and doing things or across the border.

• 1:57:50Speaker 05

  So, you know, I do, like I said, I do things with groups of vets. Um, I, I created, um, an assessment that I call the arsenal, seven best practices of stress resilience. And nowhere, nowhere in that questionnaire does it ask you, have you considered harming yourself in the last two weeks? Have you considered harming someone else in the last two weeks? I mean, if you go to VA and you take a questionnaire, it's gonna ask you that. You know, but Arsenal goes through and is, you never see that kind of question in there.

• 1:58:35Speaker 05

  But it can still give you an indication of where you are, give you a snapshot of this is where you are right now. And, and here's a list of things you need to go do that's specific to you based on how you answered the questions.

• 1:58:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:58:51Speaker 05

  And the Navy is using it more and more. I just had a marine group, um, order a bunch, a bunch of them, uh, this past week. Uh, and it's, it's spreading because they see it's a way to let people help themselves and get them help without them destroying their career.

• 1:59:17Speaker 04

  Where can people find that if they're interested in it?

• 1:59:21Speaker 05

  Um, it's on my website, but I'll, I can, uh,

• 1:59:25Speaker 04

  What's your website?

• 1:59:27Speaker 05

  I'll send you, I'll send you the, I'll send you the.

• 1:59:30Speaker 04

  Okay. We'll have it, we'll have your website and link below, but for the people who are listening, do you wanna give them your website?

• 1:59:37Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's just, uh, hpsys.com, www.hpsys.com.

• 1:59:47Speaker 04

  Hotel Papa Gang?

• 1:59:49Speaker 05

  You'll, you'll see the arsenal or how you can get to the arsenal. Um, but yeah, we can put.

• 1:59:57Speaker 04

  Fantastic. Yeah. Um, before we get to, uh, question, is, is there anything that, um, we've left out tonight, anything that we didn't cover that you feel like we should've?

• 2:00:13Speaker 05

  I mean, we're getting into some things now that, you know, I have a lot of passion around. I have a lot of passion around special ops stuff.

• 2:00:19Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:20Speaker 05

  But also around the operators.

• 2:00:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:25Speaker 05

  Who have to go out and do that and then live with it afterwards.

• 2:00:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:00:30Speaker 05

  It sounds cool to go out and do it, but you know, you pay a price.

• 2:00:36Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 2:00:36Speaker 05

  The more times you go out there, you guys, you guys know it. You can only kick so many doors down, you know, before you get blown away or before you mentally, you know, can't do it or have difficulty going forward. But there are ways to approach that. There are ways that you and I can work together. When we're working with, with other groups, we, we put a lot of emphasis on buddies. You know, in Ranger School, you have a Ranger buddy. And you and your Ranger buddy have to take care of each other. I watch you, you watch me, and I take care of you, and you take care of me.

• 2:01:21Speaker 05

  And I do the same things even in corporate America. I put them in buddy teams. Every day when you come into work, you check out your buddy. And if you're, you're having an issue, like you stayed up watching the football game last night, and maybe you, you drank a lot of beer, and you're not at the top of your game this morning, you tell your, you tell your buddy, keep an eye on them. You know, there's some decisions and things I have to make today. Kind of, you know, watch me. If you see, see me, you know, getting a little wacky or whatever, you know, take me off to the side and let's talk.

• 2:02:03Speaker 04

  Are there, are there things that you would say, you know, that are basic or common knowledge in the military and military leadership that the civilian world just straight up misses?

• 2:02:18Speaker 05

  When I got out of the army and started doing the corporate work, I never said I was in the military. Because if you said you were in the military and you recently retired, all of a sudden, in corporate America, that meant you had a, your philosophy of leadership was to be a dictator.

• 2:02:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:02:47Speaker 05

  You boss people around, you jerk them around. When I tell you to do something, you say, if I tell you to jump, you say how high? And that was people.

• 2:02:58Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Ushkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:03:13Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:03:23Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you are not alone.

• 2:03:29Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:03:35Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:03:54Speaker 05

  General view of what the military was like and what military leadership was like. So I didn't mention military until 9/11. Once 9/11 happened, all of a sudden, if you were a military person, that was great. Man, thank you. Appreciate your service. But before that.

• 2:04:20Speaker 05

  They just had a different philosophy and you know, later there'd be times when people would find out that I'd been in the military and then they'd say, wow, you're just, you're not what I expected. I'm just surprised that you were in the military because your leadership style is so different.

• 2:04:39Speaker 04

  They probably see Full Metal Jacket and think every day is basically like boot camp or whatever. Yeah. But are there, but would you say that there are things that the military does well that civilians, you know, like a civilian organization, when it comes to like leadership and team building, just often does, don't get? That like you're applying very simple principles, principles that are very simple to you, that seem magical to them?

• 2:05:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I think in the military, we, we understand about teams and teamwork and working together, particularly as you move, you know, towards special ops, but not just special ops, just in other parts of the military too. But understanding we function as a team and, and we can do things quickly. Just think about, you know, we, in the army, we can pick up a brigade sized unit, take them to the other side of the world and have them operating, you know, within a few days. I mean, it's unbelievable. The size unit, we can move

• 2:05:54Speaker 05

  in such a short period of time and they hit the ground running. And you talk to, to a corporate group about moving that much stuff. I mean, it's just beyond their, their comprehension.

• 2:06:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:06:10Speaker 05

  We know how to organize. We know how to plan. We know how to, you know, actually carry things out and, and make them happen. And, and you know, to be honest, one of the things when I'm talking to vets, counseling, and they say, you know, I, I know how to do army stuff. And I said, that's right. And what, what you don't realize is you have this tremendous skill set.

• 2:06:41Speaker 05

  That can happen. Well, I know they don't want me to go shooting, but I'm not talking about shooting.

• 2:06:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:06:47Speaker 05

  You know how to plan, you know how to organize, you know how to execute, you know how to lead, you know how to take care of people. All of those things are extremely valuable out in the civilian world. And you have all of that. You just have to take off the OD uniform and, and, you know, put on your civilian clothes and go do that. It works. And, and that's, that's skills that you have and you can go out and get a job and you, you might have to rephrase, um, you know, what the skill is that you have so it, you know, civilians understand what you're talking about.

• 2:07:30Speaker 05

  But, you know, you didn't waste all that time in the military. You learned even from the things that were stressful to you. You learned how to operate under stress.

• 2:07:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:07:40Speaker 05

  And, and you also learned things not to do. You learned that, you know, if you put your hand on a hot stove and it burns, you don't have to put your hand back on that stove again to know that it's gonna burn. You know, you learn fast from things like that. And, and that's needed out in the, in the civilian world. Particularly now because most people don't wanna work. They don't even wanna go into work. They want you to pay them, but they don't wanna have to go to the office or wherever it is that they're supposed to work. I mean, and that's a real issue.

• 2:08:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:08:13Speaker 05

  Particularly for the younger ones.

• 2:08:17Speaker 04

  Uh, Dee, did you say we have some questions?

• 2:08:19Speaker 06

  We do.

• 2:08:31Speaker 06

  Um, from Matt Gavin, uh, thanks for sharing your experiences tonight, sir. What was the most selfless heroic act you saw during your time in the Army? Thanks, gentlemen. Always a good time.

• 2:08:47Speaker 05

  The most selfless act. Well, I think, I think there are things, particularly in combat, you see it all the time. I mean, you know, with assistant team leader I had, Bargewell, that I mentioned earlier. What I didn't mention at the time was, Bargewell was a spec four when he was, started working for me. He retired as a two-star general. He commanded, you know, Delta, every special ops thing out there. He commanded before he got out.

• 2:09:29Jack Murphy?

  In, in just the last interview we did with Dave Grange, he talked about Bargewell being a squadron commander in Desert Storm.

• 2:09:36Speaker 05

  Right. I mean, he, he was awesome, but he was fearless and, and smart and everything, but he was selfless. I mean, he, he got a distinguished service cross because he didn't like being shot at either. And when a group of NVA fired a B-40 rocket right into the middle of, of the team after I had left, wounded everybody. Big piece of shrapnel went through the cheek on this side, lodged behind his eye on the other side, cut an artery inside of his nose. And then they assaulted. He stood up with an RPD machine gun and took out 20 of them.

• 2:10:20Speaker 05

  And just stood there and just hosed them down as they tried to assault. And then they tried it again, and he took out just about that many again to protect his team and got the team out. I mean, that's the way it was. If you're my team, I'm not leaving you behind. I'm gonna take care of you. And I, I mean, I could go on and on, just talking about him and things that he did like that, but just, just seeing other people. You know, I, I had people who, you know...

• 2:10:58Speaker 05

  Violated an order to come in and try to save my team. I mean, they were told, "Don't dare go over there, there's too many of them." And they came in anyway and got shot down and two of them are still missing in action. I mean, just, but there were things like that going on all over Vietnam every day. Where people were just, you know, putting their life out there on the line to save people, take care of them. So, just amazing what people do.

• 2:11:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. Dee, anything else?

• 2:11:37Speaker 06

  We have a few more from Rick Reddoo. "It sounds like Dick was there around the time my father was also in McVie Sog. Would you happen to remember a tall mustached man named Ty Reddoo? Might have gone by Toby at the time."

• 2:11:52Speaker 05

  I almost remember the name, but I'm not sure. One of the things that happened in Sog is even if you were at the same camp, like you were at Da Nang at CCN, the teams were coming and going so much. And there was a lot of compartmentalization going on. "I don't want to know what your team is doing. I don't want you to know mine because if one of us gets captured, we don't want to be able to compromise the other team." So, there, there's thirty, thirty-four people who were killed that were,

• 2:12:35Speaker 05

  I considered friends or teammates that I knew during that twelve months. But there were seventy-something people actually killed. I just didn't know the other.

• 2:12:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 2:12:50Speaker 05

  I just didn't get a chance to see him or be around him much. I might have seen him in passing, but I'm sorry, I don't remember that particular person. But if he was at Sog, my, my feeling is he's, he's an American hero.

• 2:13:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, and just a bit more, he added, "He was taken from us last, last April, and he was a wonderful father and man. So, thanks, Rick."

• 2:13:23Speaker 06

  Was there any thought at the time that MACV SOG would become something bigger or a unit unto itself after the war? Any discussions about that? Obviously, no one could have foreseen. It was a forerunner to Delta and JSOC, etc. Just curious if anyone was talking about MACV SOG serving in the theaters besides Vietnam and becoming an MOS in the Army? And that's from Bill Gage.

• 2:13:51Speaker 05

  They didn't discuss it with me, but I was a little too low on the totem pole. But I wouldn't be surprised if that was discussed, but I didn't hear it. And my focus was just mission. Go out, do the mission, make sure we came back. And that wouldn't surprise me if at some point they were talking that way. Got you right. They did put together Delta Force. When I was at Bragg, as I mentioned before, when I was up there, I had a chance.

• 2:14:36Speaker 05

  Dick Meadows came. He had been my boss and a good friend. And he came to me when they wanted me to be part of Delta Force, help with the selection process and be part of Delta. So I had an opportunity there, but a lot of the SOG guys ended up over there, and he was one of them. He also contacted me right after I got to Delana, the Ranger Department. Told me I was getting orders the next day and I'd be gone for a while.

• 2:15:20Speaker 05

  The orders were canceled because of some things that were happening at Fort Benning. But that was, I had been chosen to be on the Sante team. They didn't get to go because of a flap that happened down at Benning, not about me, just because there were several of us all of a sudden being jerked out with no notice, no...

• 2:15:51Speaker 05

  Reason for why we were being pulled out or what we were gonna go do, so.

• 2:15:58Speaker 05

  Anyway.

• 2:15:59Speaker 06

  All right, one last one from Corbin. Was there any kind of tactical fingerprinting attributed to LZ ambushes?

• 2:16:15Speaker 05

  You could, you could see the change across time in, in the knowledge of the NBA. Uh, they became smart enough fairly soon to recognize that if a, if a helicopter came out of nowhere and landed in a clearing out in Laos or Cambodia or North Vietnam and then took off, they probably put a SOG team out there. And then they eventually started putting towers in, um, on mountain tops where they could see a valley and see where, if a helicopter came and landed, see where it was. They started putting

• 2:16:59Speaker 05

  um, people they call trail watchers out in different places where they expected that somebody might come in um, to watch. They started doing

• 2:17:12Speaker 05

  uh, a lot more efficient work with triangulation of radio signals to locate where you were to be able to, to come. Uh, they started doing a lot better job of having spies in the camps and getting that kind of information sent out to the field.

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  So they, they became more and more sophisticated and we were trying to become more sophisticated. So we might have three LZs picked. And we would go to the first one and sit down and we might or might not get off the helicopter at that one and we'd go to the other two, but one of those three we'd get off on, things like that, just to try to confuse them.

• 2:17:59Speaker 04

  One of the things you mentioned in your book and, you know, like, so the Americans were totally in the dark about MACV, but you mentioned like when Mad Doc Shriver got killed that there was an announcement in North Vietnam that he had been killed and it was like a celebration. Like, how did it, you know, he's, he's somebody who nobody in America knew who he was, obviously. You know, how did it feel for you guys to know that like, they knew who he was? And, you know, it was public knowledge?

• 2:18:35Speaker 05

  They, they knew who most of the one zeros, the team leaders were. And most of them had, most of us had a dossier on us. So they had a lot of information. When you get into book two, I don't want to give it away, but there's a place in book two that, that will give you chills when you read it because of what they knew and who talked to me, who called me on the radio and talked to me and what they said.

• 2:19:15Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:19:16Jack Murphy?

  Oh, that was, that was you. Like, I've read that story in other books.

• 2:19:20Speaker 04

  Didn't John tell the?

• 2:19:22Jack Murphy?

  John, I think John Plaster wrote about it in his book.

• 2:19:25Speaker 04

  Oh, I thought John Shiger Meyer also mentioned that they would call out people's names on the radio at times, you know. Yeah.

• 2:19:35Speaker 05

  They read, they read the whole list of names.

• 2:19:38Jack Murphy?

  Oh, man.

• 2:19:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. One name they, they should not have been able to know and they knew it.

• 2:19:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's, it's, it's cra- it's crazy how absolutely effective you guys were considering the, the.

• 2:20:00Speaker 04

  The intelligence, you know, the intelligence leak that they had at headquarters.

• 2:20:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:20:07Speaker 04

  You know, the partner nation leak.

• 2:20:11Speaker 04

  But we'll probably have to have you back for book two.

• 2:20:16Speaker 05

  Okay. Yeah. Book two, book two is loaded. Got some really powerful stuff, but you need book one.

• 2:20:24Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 2:20:26Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:20:40Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:20:51Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:20:57Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:21:02Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 2:21:22Speaker 05

  Stage and understand everything. So you can really see the changes in tactics and techniques and things like that.

• 2:21:34Speaker 05

  Yeah. A lot, a lot more than your own stress. And, and you know, I had started out in chemistry, but shortly into SOG, I started changing to psychology, trying to understand.

• 2:21:53Speaker 05

  How to lead mercenaries in combat, how to engage the North Vietnamese? How do you engage people in general? And there's a section in Book Two where I talk about the human reaction to combat. There are things that humans do, regardless of where you're from, in combat, that give you away. And once you start to learn what those are, it gives you an advantage going against the force. You know things they're gonna do. They, it's just instinct and people do it, unless you spend a lot of time trying to train it out of you.

• 2:22:39Speaker 05

  So that stuff is in there, pretty heavy in Book Two.

• 2:22:44Speaker 04

  Is that it, D?

• 2:22:47Speaker 04

  Dick, thank you so much. We really appreciate it.

• 2:22:50Speaker 05

  Well, thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity just to share some things like this, to be able to talk to someone that understands, you know, what I'm talking about

• 2:23:03Speaker 05

  and being, you know, given a platform. People, vets, can be helped.

• 2:23:11Speaker 05

  They can do a lot better. And then, and some of the things that help you get better are not complex. You just need somebody to, to share it with you. And so, you know, try this. Watch this. Here's some things.

• 2:23:27Speaker 05

  Keep moving forward. Don't stop.

• 2:23:31Speaker 04

  One foot in front of the other, right?

• 2:23:33Speaker 05

  That's right. And, and keep going. And practice. You know, there's a whole set of principles in the book. And one of them is keep moving forward. One of them is practice, practice, practice. Because it doesn't matter how good your plan is, you're gonna have to adapt. So you have to adapt and adapt. And I used to know, I knew when I was standing on the skid of the helicopter coming into that landing zone, whether it was a hot insertion or, or not, I knew as soon as I stepped off on the ground, the plan was gonna change. And I was gonna have to start adapting to where we were going, how we were gonna do it, where I was gonna put the airstrikes, whatever, so.

• 2:24:19Speaker 05

  The more you practice and the practice adapting and doing it under stress, the easier it is to do when you get out there and trying to get to the point where you don't let the bullets become a distraction. They're gonna hit you or they're not gonna hit you. You know, if you're the leader, I mean, you just have to assume you're gonna get hit. If you're doing your job, you're gonna be exposed and you're probably gonna get hit. But you gotta do it.

• 2:24:50Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, thanks again. Thank you, everybody, for Patreon subscribers. We're gonna do a quick Team House After Dark after this. So if you're not a subscriber on our Patreon, you should be. You get special bonus episodes and, you know, some cool stuff. But anyway, thank you, everybody.

• 2:25:13Jack Murphy?

  Hey, guys, it's Jack. I just want to talk to you for a moment about how you can support the show. If you've been watching it, enjoying it, but you'd like to get a little bit more involved and help us continue to do this, you can check out our Patreon. It is patreon.com/the team house. And for $5 a month, you can get access to all of these episodes of The Team House ad free. The same goes with our affiliated podcast, Eyes On, with Andy Milburn, Jason Lyons, McMulroy. That one, you will also get all of those episodes ad free. And you support the channel and the show, and we really appreciate it. The Patreon members are literally what has helped this company, this small business,

• 2:25:56Jack Murphy?

  survive, especially during our early years. And you are what continues to help this thing going even as we navigate the turbulent world of YouTube advertising. So we really appreciate all of you guys. There's gonna be a link down in the description to that Patreon page, and there is also gonna be a-

• 2:26:15Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:26:30Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:26:41Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:26:46Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:26:52Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:27:12Jack Murphy?

  Link to our new merch shop. So if you guys want to go and get some Team House merchandise, we got stickers.

• 2:27:19Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:27:34Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:27:45Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:27:50Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:27:56Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:28:15Jack Murphy?

  And we also have patches. And I should mention, if you sign up for Patreon at $10 a month.

• 2:28:22Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:28:36Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:28:47Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:28:53Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:28:58Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:29:18Jack Murphy?

  We will mail you this patch as well. So we really appreciate that. But they're also for sale on the merch shop. And

• 2:29:27Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:29:41Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:29:52Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:29:57Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:30:03Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:30:23Jack Murphy?

  Additionally, they got t-shirts up there, water bottles, a tote bag, coffee mugs.

• 2:30:30Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:30:45Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:30:56Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:31:01Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:31:07Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:31:27Jack Murphy?

  All that good stuff. So please go and check them out and support the show. We really appreciate it, guys. Thank you.

• 2:31:34Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:31:49Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic. In a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:31:59Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:32:05Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:32:11Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:32:31Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about the sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:32:44Speaker 01

  Zolir 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolir, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolir. Zolir may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolir should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including... ...anaphylaxis. Zolaire is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or heart and circulation problems have been reported. Please see zolaire.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolaire.

• 2:33:27Speaker 01

  This is an advertisement for Zolaire, paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:33:31Speaker 02

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