Long-Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) in Vietnam | Kregg Jorgenson | Ep. 312

Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Sergeant Jorgenson first tried to join the Marines, but the recruiter was out to lunch. Their loss was the Army’s gain. Kregg arrived in Vietnam in 1969 and joined the Long Range Reconnaissance Patrol (LRRP) as part of the Army Rangers. On November 17th, 1969, Kregg’s five-man team was engaged by a vastly numerical force. Two men were killed immediately. A third was incapacitated and was in desperate need of medical attention. That left only Kregg and his team leader to fight off the attacking enemy. Kregg is also a prolific author, check out his books here⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Books-Kregg-Jorgenson/s?rh=n%3A283155%2Cp_27%3AKregg+Jorgenson ___________________________________________________ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnPodcast/featured —————————————————————- Today's Sponsors: Stay Safe Digital Academy⬇️ https://staysafedigitalacademy.com Use the code “theteamhouse” for $10 off!! GhostBed⬇️https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 50% OFF!!! ____________________________________ Pre-order Jack Murphy's new book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" today! ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— To help support the show and for all bonus content including: https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse -AD FREE AUDIO -AD FREE VIDEO -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Team House merch: ⬇️ https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963 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 Want to sponsor the show? Email: ⬇️ [email protected] 0:00 start #lrrp #vietnam Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:30Jack Murphy?

  Hey guys, it's Jack. I just wanted to talk to you today about a way that you can help support the podcast if you're not already. To support the channel is to become a Patreon member. So we have Patreon memberships that start at just $5 a month, and when you sign up, you get access to all of our episodes ad-free. That's the big bonus for that. I mean, we also do some Patreon bonus episodes for our subscribers, but this is the biggest and best way that you can support the Team House channel and podcast if you'd like to, and we really appreciate that. So go and check us out at patreon.com/the team house.

• 1:11Speaker 02

  Special Operations.

• 1:16Speaker 02

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

• 1:32Jack Murphy?

  Hey folks, welcome to episode 312 of The Team House. I'm Jack here with Dave, and our guest on tonight's show is Craig Jorgensen. He served as a WARP in Vietnam and is the author of many, many books that I've, me and many of you probably have been reading for years. Very crazy G.I. His latest, or one of his latest novels is Chasing Romeo, and Dave over there has MIA Rescue, which is a nonfiction story. Well, Very Crazy G.I.'s also nonfiction.

• 2:02Jack Murphy?

  And we're really excited to have Craig on the show tonight and talk to him about his career. I'm going to give a quick shout out to our sponsor for tonight's show. Friend of the Team House and former CIA officer Dale Bendler empowers young adults to navigate modern day dangers. Earlier this year, the Team House was honored to have in studio retired Marine and 37 year veteran of the CIA Dale Bendler on episode 265. You guys probably recall that Dale served in some of the world's most dangerous environments. And since retiring from the CIA, he has dedicated himself to help people get home safe. Dale runs one and two day in-person safety courses in Miami, covering everything

• 2:43Jack Murphy?

  from cyber safety to stalking safety to drink spiking. From his teachings, he found that concerned parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles were specifically asking Dale to provide safety training specifically designed for teenagers and young adults. It is with great pleasure that we are able to announce that Dale has just launched an online course specifically tailored for the safety threats that teenagers and young adults face. Key areas of Dale's training are cybersecurity, including mobile phone theft, cyber bullying, sex extortion, unsafe online dating practices, even emerging threats like AI driven scams. But he also covers active shooter scenarios, physical assaults, drink spiking, fentanyl, demonstrations in crowds, transportation safety, including rideshare services, public

• 3:28Jack Murphy?

  transportation, carjackings, road rage, and staged accidents, and last but not least, stalking. Dale told the show that I may never know if I've saved someone's life. Maybe they avoided the wrong rideshare or left a party because of a bad feeling. Knowing I've made a difference is enough. So this information, the course itself, there is a one hour young adult safety course. It's available now at www.staysafedigitalacademy.com for $89 after a $10 discount using the coupon code the team house. That's one word, the team house. So my daughter is going to take the course. Got her in the chute to go in and go through the online safety course.

• 4:12Jack Murphy?

  I've spoken to Dale a number of times about what he does. And that's why like, I'm actually very happy to be able to present it here and try to get other people to go sign up because Dale's courses are not like surviving the zombie apocalypse or prepping for nuclear war. It's not that kind of thing. It's like very practical stuff. Like if your kid's on a field trip and he gets separated from the class, what should they do? You know, it's very, very practical things for, to help keep kids safe. So I hope you guys will go and check it out. Don't delay. Give the gift of safety and peace of mind this holiday season and empower young adults in your life to face modern day dangers with confidence.

• 4:51Jack Murphy?

  That's www.staysafedigitalacademy.com and use the code TEAMHOUSE at checkout to instantly save $10 and help young people protect themselves. We'll have a link down in the description for you guys as well to click on. So without further ado, Craig, welcome to the show.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  Thank you, guys. Enjoy being here. Thank you.

• 5:14Jack Murphy?

  So Craig, let's, we'd like to start at the beginning with our guests, ask them about their origin story. Tell us a little bit about how you grew up and how that took you towards the military.

• 5:25Speaker 03

  My father was career military. He was in the Coast Guard. He served in the Pacific, World War II. He was aboard the Spencer and he was also, he was a Mustang officer and he was on the LST 793 invasion of Okinawa. And so every three years we would move, you know, if you're a military family, every three years, you pack up your stuff and you move. Well, the Coast Guard is on the East Coast or West Coast, or we lived in Japan for three years as well. But so you crisscross the country many, many times. So when someone says, where are you from? I'd say, well, what year?

• 6:04Speaker 03

  But I lived on the Presidio at the army base because the Coast Guard didn't have a base, facilities at the time, my brothers and I. And when I was 10 years old, let's see, I got a visit at school from the FBI to look for the grenades that my brothers had and his friends had borrowed from an army bunker. And they gave them to me to hide. They wouldn't let me throw them at 10. I was too young. But I got to carry them in my backpack. And as we were down on Baker's Beach, and they would throw them in the ocean, they'd explode, fish would come up, MPs would drive out the far end of the beach, and they would say halt, which to us kids

• 6:46Speaker 03

  meant run. And they said, I said halt, which means run faster. So we would scramble up these cliffs and we'd hide. Now, eventually, I think the guys got caught. So I'm in school, they, you know, I think my brothers told me to hide these or go bury them. I buried them in the woods. And next, you know, day later, I got a FBI, two FBI agents, you know, I think I was fourth grade or something, and came and got me out of school to go dig them, dig them up. My brothers at the time, and the Colonel's son, ended up going, I think they ended up doing, once a week, they had a report into the FBI to say, yeah, we're not doing anything. I hadn't, because I was 10, they probably looked at me like I was young, young and dumb, which by the way, carried

• 7:29Speaker 03

  well into my teen years. But yeah, so I mean, I grew up in a, as I said, a military family. On the Presidio, right next to us, we lived in a duplex, was a Vietnamese family, and this is 1960. And my parents were godparents to their, a couple of their children. So I got to know some of the Vietnamese. So now you go brush forward to 1967, 68, I graduated in 68.

• 7:56Speaker 03

  And my two older brothers were drafted. My oldest brother became an artillery officer. And my other brother ended up having health issues and he got out. And so I wanted to, I wanted to join because, you know, I mean, you know, when you're 18, you're young and dumb and you weigh like 140 pounds, you know, I want to go fight. So went down to recruiter to join the Marines. The Marine recruiter was not there. And probably it was a good thing for the Marines. And Army recruiter was there with toothpick in his mouth. I said, hey kid, what do you want? I can give you anything. And of course, I signed up for, you sign up, you go do the ASFAB test. Apparently I did pretty well in the ASFAB test. And he goes, you ought to be an Army Intelligence.

• 8:41Speaker 03

  So I signed up for something called image interpretation. Went through basic training. I did really well in basic. I realized, oh, I like shooting and I shoot so much better when my eyes were open. I did really well. I went off to Fort Hollerbird, Maryland to, you know, the intelligence school. And I got so bored that I asked to drop out and volunteer for infantry. Now, I was 18. You can make fun of me all you want, but you know, it's like, this is not the Army I signed up for. I wanted to be, you know, I wanted to do something. So I thought my platoon sergeant was going to cry. Took me into the lieutenant. And I said, yes, sir, I'd like to volunteer for infantry. I thought he was going to cry. They took me into the sergeant major.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Sergeant major says, kid, you don't want to do this. I said, Sergeant major, I really do. And he goes, okay. And he says, we'll transfer you over. He says, if you want to go to a fort close to your home. I was from Seattle. He said, we'll send you to Fort Lewis. Well, it was during the winter. I don't want to go to Vietnam training in snow. So I volunteered to go to Fort Polk, Louisiana. And then I think all three, the platoon sergeant, the lieutenant, and then the sergeant major cried. Got down to Fort Polk and Fort Polk was closer to Vietnam than anything I've ever seen. Went to NCO school. I did, I did okay. Went, got over to Vietnam. And when you first arrived at the repo depot,

• 10:08Speaker 03

  you know, you saw this guy come out with a black beret, Ranger scroll. Perfectly starched, uniform, spit polished Cochrins. And, you know, they say, yeah, we're looking for volunteers to be Rangers. So about forty of us, new guys, thought, we'll go sit in the bleachers and listen to this guy. And, you know, of course, you go and you listen to him and he says, okay, you know, if we go out five days at a time, you come back in, you have a two day stand down, then you go back for five more days. And we said, well, how long does the infantry go out? He says, oh, they'll go out for weeks at a time. And there's a hundred of them and everybody knows where they are. And if you go with five guys, and we said, how many people?

• 10:51Speaker 03

  They said, five. And half the people in the stands, the volunteers, left. And the remainder of us, we end up volunteering. And then we got a helicopter ride up to Fugven. Fugven, they got to the Ranger Company, put us in a Ranger tent. And RIP didn't exist back then, but harassment and RIP sort of did. We had a two to three week Ranger training course, was a LARP course. And, you know, it began in the morning at ODOC thirty. Sometimes some of the Rangers would wake us up with a CS grenade. Toss it in the tent. I mean, a tent was horrible. It's a platoon sized tent. You had a cot.

• 11:36Speaker 03

  I don't think we had, I don't believe we had foot lockers. We had nothing but our, you know, your duffel bag. Because from day to day, if you didn't pass the training and you had a test, you didn't pass the test, you were gone. So we lived in this open tent, sandbags all around it. Pre-ODOC thirty, they would get us out for PT. We would do our calisthenics. And in the rainy season, which it was, they'd have us crawl in the mud out to the road. And we'd get a thirty pound rucksack, a rifle, LBE, and then we'd begin a five mile run around the perimeter of the camp. Sometimes when it was being mortared.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  You know, and you wouldn't know that until, I mean, until it started happening, which was, to me, it was a funny experience because I was one of the few guys standing up, watching the mortars hit. And one of the, one of the grunts was smart enough to tell me, get the hell

• 12:31Speaker 04

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• 12:45Speaker 00

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• 13:15Speaker 03

  Down kid, that is, that's, that's a mortar. And you know, you hear the stuff whizzing by, you don't know what the hell it is. After three weeks of training of everything from medical training, calling and artillery, map reading, navigation, Maguire wig training, ambush, Australian peels, learning how to work in a team formation. And you had a test, you had school test in a classroom, and then you had the practical stuff. So if you didn't pass a test, boom, you're gone. And then three weeks later, two weeks, two and a half week, three weeks later, and I think they had made the school, it had to be long enough to actually got a certificate. And General E.B. Roberts, the division commander,

• 13:58Speaker 03

  who by the way, jumped in at Normandy, he had, he had an eye patch, he had a one eye. And he came down and congratulated us, gave us our Ranger berets.

• 14:10Speaker 03

  At our scrolls, I'm laughing because my Ranger beret was a Vietnamese one that I looked like the popping fresh doughboy, you know, I couldn't wear it correctly. He was didn't have that right swag angle, you know, angle. So.

• 14:24Jack Murphy?

  I think you use, you use the term in your, in your book, Craig. He looks like the Pillsbury doughboy turned Paris pimp. Was that, was that.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  It was. Yeah, it was. It's one of those things you look at. It's like, oh my God. You look at the photos now, we kind of laugh, you know, but we had some really good people in the company. George Passarelli, the company commander was a former SOG guy. And you had First Sergeant Guerin, who was really good. Passarelli was replaced by, let's see, Captain Griffins. And he, I think he was a SOG helicopter pilot guy. So you had a cadre of people that were phenomenal special forces, Ranger big brothers that, you know, really just good folks and really looked after us. We had two platoons in the unit. Operationally, I think

• 15:13Speaker 03

  we probably had six or seven teams at any one time. And that just depended on were people sick, were people wounded, were people on leave, you know, you'd be sometimes you'd fill out another team. But, you know, I was luckily lucky to have some really talented team leaders and that paid off, that paid off later.

• 15:32Jack Murphy?

  To, to like walk this back just a little bit for folks. As I recall, there were sort of three incarnations of this during the war, right? There was the long range patrols, long range reconnaissance patrols, and then Ranger companies.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:47Jack Murphy?

  This is 19, I think 67, 68. Where, where, where, where in that trajectory were you? What were these units when you arrived? And, and where, where, where were you and what company was this?

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Sure. You bet. It was 1969 and it was the hotel company first, hotel company 75th Infantry Ranger attached to the first Air Cavalry Division. And, and then the headquarters, our, our company was located at Camp Gourved at Phuk Vinh, Vietnam, 3 Corps, down in 3 Corps. We were, I think most of our missions were mostly jungle related along the border. And it was one of the main infiltration routes from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, if you will.

• 16:34Jack Murphy?

  Tell folks a little bit about this, what Ranger companies were doing when you arrived. What was this mission? Because it's fairly unique.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  It was. You know, they started off as reconnaissance where, you know, the guys, the early guys would go out and they would, you know, just sneak and peek. They would look for Viet Cong units. They would look for North Vietnamese units. They would gather up as much critical data and information as they could. Then, without being seen, they would end up being, you know, exfiltrated maybe five, six days later. They would pass along that information to command. By 1968, it began to be

• 17:14Speaker 03

  long-range reconnaissance, patrol and ambush. You know, could you ambush smaller units? And then things like snatch missions, tapping into to enemy lines that you find out there, planting

• 17:30Speaker 03

  intelligence material that was, you know, detrimental to the North Vietnamese. It could be, you know, most of the time it was ambush. You'd go plant your claymores. You'd wait for a, you know, a small unit that wouldn't overrun you. And then you'd either you try to capture a POW. And you wanted a POW. A POW, there was a company policy that for every prisoner of war that you brought back, you'd get a two-day in-country R and R. So, I mean, it's like, don't kill them. Let's go capture as many of these guys as we can.

• 18:02Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 18:03Speaker 03

  The trouble is, when you're out with five to six people, when you're sneaking and peeking, it's all good when nobody knows you're there. When you're found out, you probably have 15 to 20 minutes. And if you don't get a help, a gunship or something out immediately, then you're going to start taking your hits. And at times, we took some heavy hits.

• 18:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Tell us about your first patrol.

• 18:32Speaker 03

  First patrols are wonderful because you're afraid of everything. You know, the dark scares you. You get out into the jungle and it's so dark at night. You can barely see your hand in front of your face. I had one team leader that says, okay, we found a trail. It had some good sign on it, sign being footprints, boot prints, bicycle tracks, because they'll use bicycles to haul in mortars, rockets, and God knows whatever. So you set off off the trail. You move off the trail, maybe 10 yards. You go plant some claymores and put them at angles. Because, you know, that 100-yard distance that you're taught in basic training and AIT to blow a claymore doesn't apply in combat in the jungle. You have to be able to see your claymores.

• 19:16Speaker 03

  And you have to be able to make sure they're not going to be turned around on you. So you plant your claymores and then you'd wait to see who walked by. And then the team leader would make the judgment. Does you blow the claymores? Do you initiate the contact? Or do you, is this a point element? Right. Is this a 10-man point element for a 200-man unit? Right. Now, saying that, before our first mission, one of my buddies who I graduated with, he was put on a team that very night at graduation. They went in at sunset and this was

• 19:51Speaker 03

  prior to, I think, Fire Support Base Buttons getting attacked. And they counted 300 North Vietnamese go by their position. 300. Which of course, nobody believes. You know, you say, that's nonsense. Now, I spoke with my platoon leader, Mike Brennan, and he was at the Ranger 50th Anniversary as well. Mike is a wonderful guy.

• 20:17Speaker 03

  Mike took that information up to Command. Command says, well, we don't know what to believe on that.

• 20:24Speaker 03

  The Colonel ended up taking it to the General. The General says, well, if my LRP says it's true, then we're going to plan for it. So they planned for it. They got, I think they got the artillery pieces down, lowered. They had gunships all ready. And sure enough, predawn attack, far sport base buttons got hit, and hundreds of North Vietnamese were dead in the wire.

• 20:47Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 20:47Speaker 03

  So that gave you immediate credibility.

• 20:49Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 20:49Speaker 03

  It also scared the hell out of you to know that this guy's very first graduation is that night that he had 300 North Vietnamese go by him 10 yards away.

• 21:00Jack Murphy?

  And that incident's fictionalized in your book.

• 21:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, you know, with fiction, you can write more truth than you can with with nonfiction. You know, I can't remember. I thought it was a good friend of mine who told me, he says, hey, if you want to write some truth, write fiction. I said, why? He says, because if you call somebody a son of a bitch in a nonfiction book, you can get sued. Whereas you can call somebody a son of a bitch in fiction, and hey, it's just fiction, you know. But and also fiction allows for creativity, for, you know, for correcting all the mistakes that you saw or that you did. You know, I don't want to pretend I'm anything other than a LERP Ranger at one time. And then I was a squad leader in a recon platoon in the 1st of the 9th as well. And by the way, the 1st of the 9th was the

• 21:47Speaker 03

  recon element for the 1st Cavalry Division. The 1st of the 9th Squadron had four troops, A Troop, B, C, and D. A, B, and C were aerial rifle, well, not really aerial rifle. You had one platoon of scout helicopters, the low birds. You had one platoon of Louis lift ships and crew. You had one platoon of gunships, and you had one platoon of infantry. We were called the Blues. And our job was recon, aircrew, rescue, and QRF. And that was every day you're out there, you know, for shot down helicopter. Every day you're out there for doing a QRF on a LERP team that may need it, which came in handy later when we went in for a team for Cambodia.

• 22:31Jack Murphy?

  So tell us your first mission.

• 22:35Speaker 03

  First mission. I was so scared. I think I got stuck as a medic. And you're the medic because you had to carry the extra heavy weight of the medic bag. And you have about ninety pounds on your back. You can't really stand up too straight. You're carrying a extra battery for the radio, your PRC twenty five that you'd be lucky if it gets three miles. You're carrying all your rations, your water, ammunition. And so you set up for the night. You set up in a wagon wheel perimeter. Five or six guys. I think I was on a six man team, the first, first one. You're sitting back to back. And as the sun is going down, the jungle is getting darker and darker. And you hear, hear some weird sounds in the jungle and

• 23:20Speaker 03

  team leader set us up in, in a, near a bamboo clump. And I thought, man, this is great. Nobody, nobody could see us from the trail. We're well hidden. And, and then it suddenly occurred to me, there was bamboo viper snakes in the bamboo. So I, I pulled out my knife and I think I weed whacked the entire area, the entire night. So I, anytime a leaf would blow and a shadow would move, I'd cut it, cut it. So the next morning, you know, there was nothing but, you know, probably twenty five acres of, of cut up leaves. And being the new guy, I think I even woke the team up one night because of a, of the gecko lizard, we call the fuck you lizard. I don't know if you've ever heard of the, the lizard, but

• 24:03Speaker 03

  oh, it's wonderful. It, it, there was, it's called a fuck you lizard. And you'd heard about him and you thought, oh, this is nuts. You know, there's no such thing. And there you are out in the jungle at night, you'd hear

• 24:17Speaker 03

  and I thought, well, that could be a girl I used to date, or that could be the Vietcong. And then I, you, how you woke up the person next to you, you squeeze their arm or squeeze their, their leg. You know, you're pulling, you, you pull a two hour guard during the night. So it was my turn to monitor the radio and while the rest of the guys slept. And I woke everybody in the team up, you know, and I'm pointing to my ear and I heard something. And, and then of course the team leader, all the team members are sitting up, listening. They grab their weapons, you know, their adrenaline is going a mile a minute. And then the lizard, of course, said, "Fuck you!" And I said, "That's it!" And they all looked like they were going to gut me.

• 25:00Speaker 03

  In what little light there was, moonlight coming through, I thought they were gonna gut me. And that turned out to be the lizard. So that was my first mission. So you're the new guy, you kill every leaf around you, and you wake the entire team up because of a gecko lizard. Nothing happened. That was the first picnic mission. You came back in, you're filthy, dirty, you're scummy. As a LRRP, you take nothing out with you but your rucksack, LBE and weapon. You may have a small piece of towel that you'll put over your face for the millions of mosquitoes that you can play connect the dots on those bites the next morning. But after five or six days in the jungle, you stink, you smell.

• 25:43Speaker 03

  You come back in, you get a shower, and you're just, you know, re-up-arm, get your backpack, get everything ready, and then wait until you get the next mission.

• 25:52Jack Murphy?

  What was the, you know, on average, the duration of these patrols?

• 25:56Speaker 03

  Five to six days.

• 25:57Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  Five to six days. It depends on, you know, what they wanted. You know, sometimes it would be just right outside of Phuket. Other times it would be up near the dog set in Cambodia, or was just surrounded three sides by Cambodia. Other times it would be up north near Budape, up near, you know, the Cambodia area, Special Forces Camps up there as well. But, you know, you just didn't know, wherever the intel, the G2 decided they wanted some information, you would go to that location. Helicopters would fly in, they'd do, I think Ken Miller was talking about it. You know, they would do pretend drops, you know, drop-offs. So they'd come down to one, you know, natural clearing in the jungle.

• 26:44Speaker 03

  By the way, the natural clearings are actually sumps. During the dry season, they're dry. During the rainy season, they'll fill up with water. So helicopters would come in low, pretend to land, take off again, make another false insertion, and then drop you off. Had ten seconds to un-ask the helicopter. So boom, you're off the helicopter. Team leader is racing you into the jungle. Fifteen, ten to fifteen yards into the jungle. He'll do a button hook move. He'll come back about ten yards. And you will cover your own trail that you made. And then wait, and you call it laying dog. You would lay there and just wait to see were the Vietcong there? Were they following you? Was anybody on your trail? And if so, you could ambush it because they would be following the trail that five or six

• 27:29Speaker 03

  of you made. Now, when five or six of you with rucksacks are going through a jungle, you leave a big, big trail. And if you're, if you're doing it at dawn, you also leave a dewdrop trail on the grass in the landing zone because it, the grass will bend over and the dewdrops will just dissipate. And it's like a big drop green ribbon. So it gives you to your direction of movement. If it's a wet LZ and you're going in and it's mud, well, you leave a lot of muddy footprints going through. So, um, um, most of the time, you could infiltrate. You get in and then you just, uh, the team leader, you, you would have over your next four to five days, a grid map. And you had to search every part of that, that four grid area.

• 28:13Speaker 03

  And to make sure that, uh, what people thought was there either was there or wasn't there. And that was the value of LERP at Ranger Teams. Um, the military at the time was using, I think, what they called a pile on effect. You send in a small LERP team, five guys, to see if there's anything there. If they find something, you bring in a platoon. If it's too much for the platoon, you bring in a company. If it's too much for a company, you bring in a battalion. So, but if it's nothing there, you don't have to send in a battalion. You don't have to send in a company. That's, uh, you send in a company, you're, you're taking up a lot of helicopters. You're, you're using a, what, a hundred and something men to, uh, which by the way, can't be quiet.

• 28:51Jack Murphy?

  Right, yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 03

  That, that's the most difficult thing, I think, is, um, I, I felt sorry for the grunts because.

• 28:59Speaker 03

  There were some of the grunts that would make so much noise, you know, scream out, hey, who's got a cigarette or whatever. And you felt sorry for the guys who were really just were doing their best to be quiet and run a good operation. And as I said, a hundred people, the Vietcong would know where they were, so they'd start probing them or they'd start hitting them. With a small team, nobody's really sure where you are, as long as you're quiet. So.

• 29:22Jack Murphy?

  I think that, you know, I've been reading about WERPs and, you know, thankfully interviewing some of you guys as an adult, but I've been reading about you guys since I was a teenager myself. And it's shocking to me that there hasn't to this day been like a real like a movie or a television series about you guys. I mean, just five or six guys in tiger stripes out by themselves in the jungle doing these patrols. I mean, it's hair raising stuff. And it's incredible. And you were all very young, too.

• 29:51Speaker 03

  We were, yeah, I think I was more afraid of acne than I was at the time. But because I wasn't knowledgeable enough yet to be afraid of the Vietcong or the North Vietnamese, we were young. I mean, I was a sergeant at nineteen.

• 30:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Speaker 03

  So, by the way, when you get to a Ranger, when you got to Ranger Company, your rank didn't matter. You go through the training when you're assigned to a team. I had one spec four E four team leader. And, you know, the first thing they tell you is that you're not the leader. And I went, fine by me. You know, my goal was to learn as much as I can and try to be a good team member. I just wanted to contribute to the team and try to do a good job. And so I had a great team leader later on, a guy named Jim McIntyre. Jim died, by the way, he passed away. I think he had an aneurysm in 1994, in his 40s. Wonderful, wonderful, brave, brave guy. In fact, I want to tell you a little bit about him if I can, if you'll let me.

• 30:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, please.

• 30:53Speaker 03

  Okay, Jim.

• 30:56Speaker 03

  He was a private on a team. When a team got in contact, one of the guys, Rick Arden, who was a Ranger who told me this story, said that they were getting ready to toss a grenade out. Well, grenades, throwing grenades in jungle is really difficult because there's so much stuff and they bounce back. And the grenade fell back within the team. And Jim McIntyre, this PFC, saw it, threw his rucksack on the grenade and jumped on the rucksack. Or angled it enough that when it exploded, he went up, came back down. He was not, you know, the guys were slightly wounded, but he didn't die. Wow. He got an impact silver star from General Roberts on the spot. He was promoted to Sergeant E5 on the spot.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  He was a natural woodsman. I mean, the guy was just really good in the field. He was from upstate New York and he was just a good woodsman. A lot of the guys weren't. You have to remember, guys from Chicago, inner city, guys from, you know, maybe Boston, inner city, maybe Miami, inner city. Brave guys, but they'd never had any time in the woods or out, you know, anything, you know, that resembled a jungle. So these guys would, you know, wake you up in the middle of the night and say, "What's that?" And say, "Well, it's a bird." But the city boys, and I grew up a lot in the countryside, so I had a lot of fun playing in the woods and used to play in the swamps in Florida.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  And I probably made a lot of rafts and never floated too well. And finally, actually got one, we would catch snakes. But we would camp out for the weekend. So the jungle didn't scare me as much as I said acne did. But now getting back to Jim. His next, one of the missions that followed, he was on a team. They were getting pulled out, exfiltrated out. The helicopter crashed going out of the LZ. And so a couple of guys were wounded. He went into this fire support base called Becky. And Becky.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  proves to be an interesting story. The other, a lot of the team members were, were air vac, medevac'd out. He was going to be pulled out the next day. Well, that night Becky gets overrun and Firesport Base Becky got overrun. I think they destroyed a lot of the artillery, hand to hand fighting. So Jim was involved in that on his next, you know, on one of the follow up missions. So here's a guy that is in the thick of it and has a sense and smarts enough to really take the fight to the enemy. Then the mission that I was on, on Jim's team, we got hit by 45 North Vietnamese. Two of our guys were killed.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  Third one was shot up badly and Mac was taking the fire to the NVA coming in at us. And he was telling us to fire. He didn't know the other guys had got shot and killed and badly wounded. And he turned around and his jaw kind of dropped. He got me to fire at a 180 and you're doing a 180 to keep the, the North Vietnamese from coming in from around you. And then he, he was just taking the fight to enemy. We were fighting with every weapon we had. We sometimes would carry an M79 grenade launcher besides our M16. We had an M14 automatic that would, you know, sounded like an M60 when it's fired. I think Jim had a Car 15 at the time.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  So we were, I mean tossing grenades and we were firing everything we could. We found out a QRF couldn't come in for us. And this is in Song Bay, right outside of Firesport Base Buttons. So.

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• 35:24Speaker 03

  Well, the QRF that was supposed to come in for us couldn't. They were off doing something else. And we were told to leave our dead and then E and E off to this clearing where we would get picked up. Well, Jim kind of turned around, looked at me and he says, we're not leaving our dead. And I nodded and I thought that was the bravest thing I've ever heard anybody say. And it's also the most frightening thing because we were, you know, you're kind of manning the radio. And I was giving the radio to one of the wounded guys, horribly wounded. The poor kid had probably, I mean, his legs, both legs were shattered at the thigh. And you're trying to fire, you're trying to pull the other people back to safety.

• 36:07Speaker 03

  And you never feel more useless where you can't help these wounded guys because you have to set up the perimeter to keep the, you know? And we're talking 10 yards away. They kept probing at us, coming in at us and firing. Luckily, I mean, we, I think we were down behind a tree and the other guys weren't. But that was Jim. And Jim, by the way, the QRF that came for us came from Mike Brennan, Staff Sergeant Ernest Bostarge, Sergeant Charlie Ochoa, and a whole, Greenlee, and a whole bunch of these guys from our Ranger company that got a helicopter to fly way the hell out to Song Bay where we were. They were going to repel in for us, but by that time, the medevac came in, gunships came all around us and gave us a 360 fire.

• 36:52Speaker 03

  We sent our wounded guy up first. We sent the two bodies up. Mac sent me up and then he got pulled up. But, so that's the type of Rangers we got to work with, where guys who had put their life on the line to help you. And, and then the team leader like Jim McIntyre, who was probably, as I said, one of the, he was the real John Wayne. He was a genuine hero. Yeah. I was, I was lucky enough to been on the team with him. Yeah. Come back in and, and I got, turns out I got malaria on that mission. So now I'm in the hospital. So, so my 140 pounds dropped down to 135, I think. I spent about two to three weeks in the hospital. And I come back and they, I think they were concerned about me. They

• 37:38Speaker 03

  You know, I wanted, I got called up to squadron to be the squadron commander's jeep driver. And I turned him down. And I said, I'll volunteer to go up to Apache Troop. And I didn't know how to drive a stick. I was too embarrassed to say I couldn't drive a stick. So I turned down a safe jeep driving job. And I went up and volunteered for the recon platoon up in Apache Troop where some of our Rangers had gone to. Because you get tired of going out with five guys. And our recon platoon up there, we had 23. We had four machine guns. Now, a platoon is only authorized one machine gun. But since our job was aircrew rescue. Every time a helicopter got shot down, we would borrow an M60.

• 38:23Speaker 03

  So, and our platoon leader, who was a special forces lieutenant, Jack Ugley. He didn't care. You know, the more firepower we had, the better. So our 23 man platoon had four M60 machine guns. You know, all the gunners looked like Pancho Villa. Most of us carried an extra 100 rounds for the 60. And it came in really handy with firefights and we got into a few. We got into a really bad one on March 19th. And we ran into a battalion.

• 38:54Jack Murphy?

  Craig, I'm sorry to interrupt. I gotta let Dave do a shout out to our other sponsor. We'll get right back to that one, okay?

• 39:03Speaker 03

  Peace, Jake.

• 39:04Speaker 05

  And actually, before we go there, because I wanted to ask you a couple of questions about sort of about the LERPs or about the recon missions. But real quick, thank you to our sponsor, Ghostbed. If you sleep hot at night, and many of us have, and I still do, I'm a hot sleeper. You know just how disruptive it can be. Whether you're having trouble falling asleep, you're waking up sweating in the middle of the night, or all of the above. That's where Ghostbed can help. As the makers of the coolest beds in the world. Ghostbed is your go-to for cooling mattresses, cooling pillows, and even cooling bedding. From their signature Ghost Ice fabric to patented technology that adjusts with your body temperature. Every Ghostbed mattress is designed with cooling in mind. So whether you want a plusher mattress.

• 39:47Speaker 05

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• 40:32Speaker 05

  ghostbed.com/ house and use code HOUSE at checkout again that's ghostbed.com/ house with the code HOUSE at checkout to saving whopping 50% off site-wide also if you're not in the bed market for a bed check out their pillows check out their bedding it's all great stuff um so great I I'm curious because you know you mentioned when you guys were going out with you know with Rangers that you know that you'd go and do these block searches or whatever at that time where was intelligence driving operations or was operations driving intelligence or was it a mix of the two

• 41:13Speaker 03

  I believe that intelligence was driving operations you know they would send you into an area where they you you have to remember the first of the ninth that that the first of the ninth squadron owned the LRP company they owned the scout dogs they owned all the recomplitude the recon element first of the ninth was the recon element for the division so typically you a pink team a low bird a 086 scout helicopter and a gunship would go out first light and they would go searching looking in the jungle and the low bird would be flying at treetop level looking for trails looking for bunker complexes and if they spotted something that would give them some intel

• 41:57Speaker 03

  To pass along to, you know, your S2, your G2, God knows, but who knows what the finer minds were thinking.

• 42:03Speaker 05

  Right.

• 42:04Speaker 03

  But in theory, all that good intelligence would go back and then they would designate missions or patrols from that. With a reconnaissance platoon with Apache troop entailed in, if our low bird spotted something that was active, our platoon would go in. And we went into many occupied bunker complexes. Because we were next to the border, the North and East would go across the border, knowing that we couldn't chase them.

• 42:29Speaker 05

  Right.

• 42:29Speaker 03

  So we would follow up to the border and then be told, you know, to stop. Sometimes they would get occupied and you'd be in a fight for your life that we took some hits and March 19th is the mission that, I'll get to that a little bit later, but yeah, the intelligence, I believe dictated the missions.

• 42:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, and I can't run over my other question now, but something just came up for me. When you were watching, based on the border issue in Vietnam, because it was a very real issue.

• 43:06Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 43:07Speaker 05

  Based on that, when you were watching the war in Afghanistan unfold and knowing that like a lot of the Taliban was coming across the border, Pakistan, and then going back, what were your feelings about that?

• 43:19Speaker 03

  I was so angry that I just felt so sorry for the Afghan vets because I knew that, you know, what is Afghan, the, you know, empire of lost, you know, of lost armies, you know, that you knew that eventually you're going to be pulled out. And I just viewed it as a desert version of what Vietnam was. And I, my daughter was in, spent 20 years in the Air Force and she was in Special Operations Intelligence. And every time she was in Afghanistan, Iraq, or Syria, I would go nuts. You know, I mean, it's, I have nothing but immense respect for the veterans of Afghanistan and Iraq and elsewhere, you know, the places that, you know, they go to. Because.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  You know, I think nobody appreciates the military until the barbarians are at the gate.

• 44:08Speaker 05

  Right.

• 44:09Speaker 03

  And, and I didn't like the pullout of Afghanistan. That made me cry. It just reminded me so much of Vietnam.

• 44:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:16Speaker 03

  That we left so many good, great people behind and, and cut it and run, if you will.

• 44:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:22Speaker 03

  You know, and it's, and I've spoken to some Afghan vets and, you know, you guys got my admiration and, and respect. Cause that's, as I said, I think that was a desert version of what we went through in Vietnam.

• 44:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it's interesting that it played out so, in so many ways, it played out the same. And that somehow borders tend to be our kryptonite. You know, like, like the enemy is always, you know, safe across the border.

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's like a bad game of tag.

• 44:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  You know, suddenly it's like, oh, you're out of bounds, you know, they don't count. And you can see them over there. When we went into Cambodia in the summer of 1970, we found huge bunker complexes. I mean, there was, that was a Cosvet headquarters. We came back with, you name, I mean, tons of equipment and, and whatnot. So we knew where they were. And SOG had told us, you know, SOG had had so much information. And they were wonderful about what they passed along. However, you know, politics played a big deal into all of our wars.

• 45:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  And so the politicians defined where we could go, where we couldn't go, the rules of engagement. You know, it's, you know, wars have to be, I think it was, was it Sherman? Who said the war has to be hell? Otherwise, it'll just keep going on and on, that type of thing.

• 45:42Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 45:42Speaker 03

  You know, that if you don't end, if you don't fight it and end it quickly, then it becomes just a horrible, horrible thing.

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah. Well, and that reminds me of my second question, actually, is, you know, you guys are going out, like you mentioned, sometimes you were going near other, you know, firebases or, or other people's areas.

• 46:02Speaker 05

  How were you guys managing like the battle space deconfliction to ensure that you weren't that you know, blue on blue engagements weren't happening?

• 46:12Speaker 03

  Hopefully that the information like you had a relay, we had, we call them an X-ray. The X-ray, the relay station would either be up at Nui Badin Mountain, or sometimes they'd be out of a fire support base, and they would let the fire support base know exactly where your locations were. You had to, you know, you, you, you had to make your check-ins every hour to let people know where you were. And there were some blue on blue, there was those attacks. I think some teams got hit by gunship, roving gunship patrols. I don't think, I was never part of a patrol that got hit by anything else. More often than not, it was just Viet Cong and, you know, North Vietnamese backyards. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's

• 46:57Speaker 03

  all their playground, it's their bunkers, it's their fighting position, it's their machine gun pitch, you're finding rice, you're finding dropped equipment. So you know they're there. It's a question of, do they know that you're there? With the recon platoon, it became a little bit easier because we had gunship. It's so much easier to sneak into a bunker complex when you have a low bird flying at treetop level making noise. So Ed Beal and I were the point man for the recon platoon, and Ed, by the way, was another hotel company ranger. And we, we just got, we got treated really well, Apache Troop. Some of the LERPs out there, the former LERPs and Rangers, they said, hey, come on up, we'll give you a steak. Oh, by the way, here, here's a glass of whiskey. It's like, you know, we, we can

• 47:39Speaker 03

  eat well? And Apache Troop, we only went out on, in, during the day. We never went out at night. Sullen went out on a night patrol. So you would go out for a day mission, you may go out two missions at a, at a day. A helicopter may get shot down, you're called in to go in and rescue the crew or bring out the dead and, and survivors. Then you're called in to check out a bunker complex that a LERP team or one of the, the low birds had found. But when the low bird is flying at treetop level, your ground, your 23 people on the ground can make a lot of noise, and the North Vietnamese hiding their bunkers can't hear you.

• 48:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, so on these like rescue, on these like down pilot or these down helicopter rescue missions, I imagine sometimes it was a race?

• 48:26Speaker 03

  It was. Yeah, it was a race.

• 48:31Speaker 03

  Sadly, when a helicopter goes down in the jungle, there's not much left. You know, if they're lucky enough to maybe crash into a, well, not even lucky. I mean, if they can make it to a clearing of some sort. But, you know, helicopters are not made, you know, they're not made for, you know, take tumbles and rolls. We found one helicopter, a missing gunship that had went lost for a year, that went upside down and crashed through the trees. And we found the pilot impaled with a tree. And the front gunner, part of his bones were inside the helicopter. And part of his bones had been dragged away by animals. So that helicopter was missing for a year before we actually found it in the jungle. So what we did is we pulled the remains out.

• 49:16Speaker 03

  And their wallets were still there. Everything was intact. Their pistols were still there. The ammunition in the Cobra gunship was fresh and clean. So, you know, we pulled out as much of the ammo as we could. And then we would plant C4 on it. We would be given the order to destroy it in place. So Ed Beal and I became some good and bad bomb makers. We once blew up a North Vietnamese fish farm. And I think if you talk to any of the Blues or any of the crew members, helicopter crew afterwards, they'll probably swear when they hear our names. We found a North Vietnamese bunker.

• 49:58Speaker 03

  It was a fish farm, covered by trees, fed by water. Thousands of these little fish. And it was their, you know, it was their 7-Eleven for fish, if you will. And the lieutenant says, we should destroy it, or we got the order to destroy it. So Ed Beal and I, he said, you know what? We can make a bomb. So I think we used a pound of C4, two pounds of C4, det cord. We set the thing off. Picture a mushroom cloud of mud and fish going up in the air. Now picture that mushroom cloud of of fish and mud falling all over the platoon and into the trees and everybody was covered in fish guts. So all you heard was a collective, "Son of a bitch."

• 50:42Speaker 03

  Then, of course, when the helicopters come to pull you out, you're stinking of fish guts. They have to wash out and clean their helicopters, so the crew chief and everybody's mad at you. So and sometimes we made some good bombs that destroyed stuff. Sometimes you just wish you had, you know, YouTube available back then because everybody would have laughed their butts off.

• 51:02Jack Murphy?

  Craig, I, before I interrupted you, it sounded like you wanted to tell a story about that recon platoon going into a hairy mission. Was there something you wanted to return to there?

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, that's a day I think all of us believe we should have died. We were sent into a place called the Dog's Head. Now, if you're not familiar with the Dog's Head, you guys, are you familiar with fire support base Ellingsworth? You know of the story or the book?

• 51:30Jack Murphy?

  Honestly, no, not offhand.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  I'm not.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Okay, I'll preface it. March 19th, we got a, an order, we got a briefing to go into the Dog's Head. Dog's Head is upper left corner of the Vietnam map of Tannen Province. It looks like a canine profile. It is surrounded three sides by Cambodia.

• 51:52Jack Murphy?

  Was that the area that was known as Fish Hook?

• 51:56Speaker 03

  It was right near the Fish Hook. The Fish Hook and the Dog's Head, yeah, very close, very close. And it's just the main ramp, off ramp for the Ho Chi Minh Trail, if you will. We, as soon as we land in the, in the clearing, three helicopters go in. Our platoon gets off, we have 23 guys. We, there's a trench line all around the landing zone and there are 51 caliber pits. No, no weapons, but, but the pits themselves and a trench line. So Ed Beal and I look at each other and we're going, okay. Luckily, we had a South Vietnamese scout too, who was very good. And our South Vietnamese scout, we're looking around, we're seeing footprints everywhere,

• 52:38Speaker 03

  fresh boot prints, the North Vietnamese tennis shoe type print, not to mention the Ho Chi sandal tire treads. And you know, the Vietnamese scout looks at us, he says, "They're here." We went, "Oh, okay." We try to, Ed tries to convince our lieutenant to leave he and I behind, inside the jungle line, so that when the platoon starts moving out, we'll ambush the guys we know are gonna come in behind us. And lieutenant says, "No, I don't want to break up the platoon. We need you guys." So, um, uh, we move back into our squads. I was squad leader, Ed and I normally walk point. They had a different guy walking the point at that time, a guy named Dennis Henderson.

• 53:21Speaker 03

  We start walking, oh no, no, this is the 19th, I'm sorry. I'm, this, I'm getting that confused with a week, one week later. Okay. But, uh, we start moving inside, we're finding fighting positions. We're fighting bamboo camps. We're fighting, uh, finding helicopters made out of bamboo. And they, and they would teach their people how, where to shoot a helicopter. We're finding, uh, wooden RPGs. Um, it was a training camp, a training area. So we move further in the bunker, and you're checking out as many of these bunkers as you can. Now picture dozens and dozens and dozens of bunkers and fighting positions. Underground, covered with logs, with a trail system.

• 54:05Speaker 03

  And it's all in trees, by the way, so this is all in the jungle. So it can't be seen, really, from the air. You got double canopy, covering most of it. And there's fire pits, there's stuff everywhere. And we're finding fresh rice, dropped equipment. It's like, okay, did they go run across the border like they normally do? So we had the gun, uh, the lifts, or, uh, low bird break away. So when the low bird broke away, we started hearing Vietnamese talking. And it was like, huh, it's not a good sign. So, um, it's like, okay, you get all your people, you know... You get all your people ready for something. You're not sure what. We go check out the nearest bunkers, don't find anything. So it's like, is it our imagination? Did we pretend we heard something?

• 54:50Speaker 03

  So I walk up to a bunker. My Vietnamese scout says, "Cover me, I'm gonna go check this fighting position." Fighting position is fifteen feet away. He walks over towards this fighting position and green tracers start coming out. So he's firing at the guy inside there. The bunker I have my foot on, well, you're not near the opening. You never stand near an opening. And next thing I know, an RPG cone starts coming out of the opening. Oh shit. And I know that the guy can't fire it because the back blast will kill he and other people in there. So I grab the RPG and I toss it over my shoulder. And as this guy comes out, I shoot him. And then I'm, then we're down in, behind these fighting positions.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  And now we're getting dozens of whack-a-mole Vietnamese climbing out of bunkers. And you're, the worst shot that you had in your platoon couldn't help but shoot five or 10 targets. These targets are only 10, 15, 20 feet away. Anything further than that in the jungle, it's kind of a blur. But you're seeing faces, you're seeing band-aids, you're seeing AKs, you're seeing RPGs. Uh, so to come out of a bunker, you gotta put your weapon out first. So you saw a hand and a weapon come out and the head would pop up and you'd shoot this guy. And this guy may be five feet away in a covering bunker, covering the position you're on. So, um, next thing we know, we have a ground attack coming at us.

• 56:16Speaker 03

  What saved us besides our gunship and the low bird was the fact that, um, we're inside their bunker complex. Their fighting positions are facing out and we're inside. So they have to climb out of the openings to get to us or, or run down the trails. Right. They can't, they can't mass for a massive human wave attack because of the trees. So you see these guys charging at you and they're dodging trees. And it's like, well, shoot, I, you know, you can't miss. I mean, we kept firing and firing. We were in a contact, uh...

• 56:50Speaker 03

  Probably from, they say an all day thing. We got in about seven, seven thirty. We didn't get out of there until like six or seven o'clock that night. Kickouts of ammunition. We had a QRF come in for us. They kept coming at us. We had four guys wounded. Ed Beal, one of my best friends at the other Ranger point man, he got grazed with a bullet on the side of his head. He's right next to me and he's bleeding. Now, head wounds, of course, look horrible.

• 57:16Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 57:17Speaker 03

  So, and I grab him and he goes, "No, I'm fine. I'm fine. Leave me alone." It's like, "You don't look fine." Now, and he moves off to another bunker with a, with a, our scout and the bunker that I'm on, I figure, okay, I know I shot and killed a guy in there. I shot him in the head. I know he's dead. So I start to move and near the firing position, an AK-47 starts coming out. So I'm right next to this thing and I see this, you know, the wooden stock up top. So I grabbed the AK and I yanked that out. Then I threw a grenade inside the bunker. The bunker that had the RPGs. So, yeah. Two and two never came out to four.

• 57:59Jack Murphy?

  So you have some, you have some hearing issues, I take it?

• 58:03Speaker 03

  Oh, the whole bunker went up, came back down. Now you're sitting in a depression. And you can't, you're bleeding out the ears. The medic comes running up to me. I go, "No, no, I'm fine. I'm fine." And we're grabbing AKs. We're using all of our ammunition. Now, we would go out with 25 magazines. We would carry an extra 100 rounds for the M60 gunner. I tried to get my guys to carry at least three grenades each. You know, they could carry a backup weapon. I carried as a backup weapon, an M3 grease gun. By the way, Jack, that I bought off a special forces guy.

• 58:32Jack Murphy?

  You don't say.

• 59:18Speaker 05

  I'm shocked. I'm shocked to hear that.

• 59:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, one of our guys bought a Thompson submachine gun and we were trying to buy the flamethrower, but our lieutenant wouldn't let us.

• 59:28Speaker 05

  So 25 magazines, I mean, obviously, like, did you, well, maybe not obviously, did you carry a lot of that in your ruck then? I mean, like, how many did you have in your rig? And then how many were in your ruck and stuff like that?

• 59:39Speaker 03

  We didn't carry rocks with the Apache troop, with the recon platoon, we only carried ammo.

• 59:43Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 59:43Speaker 03

  So we just, we went hunting for bear. So one of the guys from Korea had a bar or Browning Automatic. He only had, I think, four or five magazines because the thing was too damn heavy.

• 59:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 59:54Speaker 03

  I think I had three 30 round magazines for my M3. The springs were kind of worn on it. So I mean, it was like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. But you didn't have to worry about emptying out 30 rounds real quickly because you could knock down a tree after about four, five hits with a 45. But it was heavy and thing never, you know, M3s never jam. I mean, it's the most simplest weapon I've ever seen. My M16, I think I fired up all 25 magazines. We had a Japanese photographer with us that day. We got kickouts of ammunition. I get a tap on my shoulder and I look around and the photographer gives me a loaded magazine. So he's loading magazines.

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  Okay, I was going to ask you, when they would do those kickouts, would like, would they, would it just be a speedball of ammo? Or would they, would they be preloaded mags for you guys?

• 1:00:43Speaker 03

  No, it would be nothing more than a case of 5.56 or a case of 7.62. And some were dropped over in the North Vietnamese areas because we were that close.

• 1:00:53Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:54Speaker 03

  You know, and it's kind of like, well, okay.

• 1:00:56Speaker 05

  But they can't use it, thank God.

• 1:00:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:59Speaker 03

  And then, and after about three or four hours of continuous, I mean, we had guys come at us, I killed a guy coming at us with a ban head. And he died, and I'm not kidding you, right where you guys are sitting, right that close.

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  And when I grabbed his weapon and pulled it in, because I thought, well, if I'm going to run low on ammo, maybe I can grab his magazines. He had a rag in the end of the barrel. And it was fully loaded. So he could have shot Ed Beal and I, but instead he wanted to ban head us. So his anger, I always tell people, his anger and hatred towards us got him killed.

• 1:01:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:01:34Speaker 03

  So, and after about three or four hours of the firefight, you're getting kickouts of ammunition and then you're beginning to wonder. What have we gotten into? And we have bodies all around us now. Yeah. And, and, and they're still coming. Yeah. It's like, holy crap, when is it gonna end? Uh, our gunships, we were outside of artillery range for any fire support base. So the gunships, um, were protecting us. Well, maybe I, I don't know if we were outside because our lieutenant was doing everything to call in. He was calling, he kept our platoon really tight. And, uh, God bless him, man, he was brilliant guy. Um, and then our gunships from Apache troop, our own people just started pushing them back and pushing back the North Vietnamese.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  So we only had to deal with the ones that were closer to us. Yeah. And, um, at the end of the firefight, before we get, well, let's see. We had a, a platoon of grunts from fire support base Illingsworth come in supposedly to be a Q R Q, Q R F. Now, before we got out of that, as we were trying to make it way back to Noz, we got into another firefight. Um, I'm doing slack behind Ed, Ed Beal, Ed Beal's kills a machine gunner and his, as a loader on a trail. And I'm shooting at another guy, uh, next to them. And we start taking this machine gun fire. So now we're in another firefight for about another 30 minutes. Less than 25 yards from the open clearing where we need to be for the helicopters. Yeah. Where the rest of the grunts were.

• 1:03:00Speaker 03

  And, um, so, um, we finally worked our way out to that. Uh, I had probably had two AKs over my shoulder. I, I think I might've grabbed an RPG because I didn't want those bastards to have that. Yeah. Uh, and they're, by the way, they were firing at RPGs at us. Well, you can't fire RPGs in the jungle. Yeah. I mean, these things, you know, you're, you're raining shrapnel. Yeah. And I can laugh about it now, but I can tell you very much at the time. Yeah, it was, you're pretty much pissing yourself going, well, um, you know, this is probably it. And, um, and they just kept coming at us. We were credited with killing 39. We know there was more blood trails. Uh, so we come back in, you're dead, but tired.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  Our, our, uh, our squadron, our Apache troop commander was a guy named Paul Funk, Captain Paul Funk. Now Paul Funk retired as Lieutenant General Paul Funk. And I, I can't, let me just tell you, this guy was a wonderful guy as a captain. He was a gunship pilot. And he was the guy that you wanted as your, as your troop commander. We get off the helicopters, uh, two of us or three of us, four of us had to go to the AIDS, uh, the hospital first, the field hospital to be treated. I had a mild concussion, some shrapnel on my back, um, from, um, from, uh, an explosion in a bunker that I don't know how it happened. Um. It's kinda like, yeah, well, I wasn't thinking very well. Um, uh, one of my guys got shot in the thigh. Ed got grazed.

• 1:04:24Speaker 03

  So we come back from the hospital and we have to go back the next day, but we come back in and Paul Funk has the cooks grilling steaks. And we come back into the company area, he hands us an ice cold beer and shakes our hand. You know, it's like, I don't recall anybody ever doing that, you know? It's like, okay, he actually gave a damn about us now. Um, six days later, well, not even six, six days later, after the 19th on the 25th, we're sent back into the area. So guys in my squad, I couldn't get convinced to, to take more ammunition. Now we're carrying cannons, uh, you know, anything they, nuclear bombs, you know, anything they can find to take with them to kill, you know?

• 1:05:08Speaker 03

  Uh, that we don't want to repeat what happened. Right. So, um, uh, we come into another landing zone, a different, uh, clearing. And sure enough, there's machine gun pits all around that. And there's fresh footprints and there's dropped equipment. And it's like, okay, we don't believe they're running back and across the border. So, um, uh, Dennis Henderson is walking point at the time. Ed Beal and I primarily walked point for the reconnaissance platoon. Um, and, um, Jack Uglie always says that we were his A team. And, uh, Ed and I, thanks to our, our South Indianie scout, got to be pretty good at point. Uh, and I think it had to do with being a Lurper or Ranger. Um, when you're in a squad or in a platoon, in a company, when firing happens, you don't know what's going on. All you hear is a firefight.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  But when you're on point, you know exactly what's going on because there shouldn't be anybody in front of you. Right. So Dennis, um, Dennis, we, we take a break. It's, think about 100 degrees. So you're sweating, you're, you're, you're tired. A CBS news crew was with us, Richard Threlkel and his, uh, cameraman, a guy named, uh, was Skip Brown and a, uh,

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  And a sound guy. So they took three of our guys. Now we only have 20 guys. So they, and they wanted some, you know, I guess some combat footage of recon. And Dennis says, hey, I'm missing some stuff. I'm missing all the, there's, think of in the jungle. Uh, cause the CBS report says, and, and they go back down the trail. Well, we didn't go back down the trail. We went another trail to go out. You know, you never go back down the same way you came in. But think in terms of when you're in a bunker complex, there are multiple trails. So I could see the trail we came down and Dennis said, hey, would you take over point? And I said, sure, no problem. So I, I get in and I have a new slack guy behind me, a brand new guy.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  And he's not quite up to the job just yet. I, nothing against him. He just knew. And I tended probably, you know, you know, I had to probably move in a little bit faster than I should have. Um, I come around this one bend in the trail and look over to our trail and our footprints that are going this way has a North Vietnamese tennis shoe going, crossing it. And I thought, well, shit, that shouldn't have been there. So I went down on one knee and I'm looking at it. And then a guy screams and then a guy who's maybe five yards away, uh, he shoots me in the right leg. I shoot him, he goes down and then I see all these, uh, orange flashes coming at me. And, uh, the first thing in my mind, and I know you guys are going to trigger in on this.

• 1:07:41Speaker 03

  Uh, keep that weapon pointed down range. So I wanted to yell at the, the North Vietnamese soldiers, you know, damn you, keep that weapon pointed down range. But, uh, I was down in the brush. They couldn't see me. The guys know, my platoon know I was shot. I was down. Now you're in a firefight. And I thought, well, okay. Um, I shot the guy that shot me. I need to put in a new magazine. I went to reach a new magazine and I took some more fire, but I shifted my position. My front thigh muscle popped out, probably a, I don't know, rose up.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  About this high. Wow. And it's it's ugly. Um, you know, I I took off my first aid bandage and it's too small. Uh, it was too small to to wrap it up. So I took off my shirt. I wrapped my shirt and used the sleeves to to tie it closed. Um, I thought, okay, I gotta do something. And I started to grab another magazine. And I thought, well, I look, I see a tree. I thought, if I can get to that tree, I know I can be fine, because it's back towards where the guys are. So, um, uh, I'm thinking about it. I'm a little bit scared to try again because I don't want to get shot again. And, um, um, our Vietnamese scout came out and jumped right in front of me, starts firing at those guys. That bought me the time to crawl behind this big ass tree. And, um,

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  and then, uh, one of the guys in the squad had a radio. So I called the, you know, my lieutenant up. I said, hey, bounce a medevac and we got one line two, which means a wounded. He says, who it is? And he says, I said, well, this is, uh, blue four, four, uh, al- alpha. And he said, well, who's wounded? I said, blue four, four, alpha. And you're, when you're shot, uh, you guys will probably know you're, the pain doesn't really set in right away. Your, your shock, you can't quite believe it. Um, uh, I didn't know I got shot in the other thigh until the medic came up. Medic gave me a shot of morphine. Well, with a shot of morphine, nothing hurts after that. I mean, it's kind of like, yeah, okay, guys, you know, shoot me again. Uh, bring me a beer. Is that whiskey?

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Um, so, uh, you know, Doc rips open the back of my pant leg and my left hamstring is cut, cut in half. So, um, he bandages that thing up. Um, Doc says, hey, I'm gonna carry you back to the lieutenant to the, I said, no, you're not. I said, if you try to pick me up, we're both gonna get shot because we're gonna be moving too slowly. I said, you go. And he says, I'm the medic. And I said, yeah, and I'm a sergeant. Go. And he took off running. And then I got up, because I have morphine, I stand up and fell right on my face. I realized my legs don't work. So I'm, I'm crawling. Then Dennis Henderson, the guy I was walking point for, came up, scooped me up and carries me back.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  That's when you see that CBS, uh, interview. That's when they start asking you some questions. It's possible they, they cut out some of the swearing I might have had in there when they're asking a few things. I got lifted out on a guire rig, or not a guire rig, but a jungle penetrator. Helicopters getting shot at.

• 1:10:37Speaker 03

  The bandages, I get pulled up, I get stuck in a tree and the bandages get pulled off. The medics aboard the medevac helicopter, wonderful people, those are ballsy people. They have to hover while they're taking fire to pull you out. So they got me on onboard, they flew me onto the emergency hospital at, or field hospital forty fifth surgical. The crew comes rushing out the helicopter and then they're cutting away everything they got on you, putting in IVs and everything else. And getting into pre-surgery. And the pre-surgery is to close off anything arteries, anything that's bleeding. Pulling out dirt, your uniform is dirty, by the way, any cloth that gets in there gets infected. And Vietnam being so, so high in heat, which you guys probably found in the desert, even a small cut will get infected.

• 1:11:22Speaker 03

  So, um, um, that night, um, or that afternoon, Paul Funk and, and the platoon leader and the guys came in. And said goodbye to me because we thought, you know, I thought I'm going, I thought I was going home. And I have all kinds of morphine in me, so I'm just happy. I have a pillow. Now, Jack, tell those people with the ghost beds that sleep not only is essential, but good sleep is wonderful.

• 1:11:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, and morphine helps.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  And morphine helps. And I was sleeping, I was sleeping on, you know, drinking a mountain, mountain dew or something. And I just thought, boy, this is great, until the morphine wore off. Then they flew me out the helicopter next morning to Kuchi. Uh, medics came rushing out, took a look at your tag, whatever it had said about your wounds. They sent me down to the ninety-third, uh, ninety-fourth or the twenty-fourth evacuation hospital, Long Bin. And that's where your surgery takes place. They pull you in and it's a meat house. It's, it's a butcher shop. There's probably ten to fifteen guys waiting to go in. There's this double doors that open up and all kinds of surgeons in there and crews.

• 1:12:25Speaker 03

  And they dragged me in there, uh, you know, your anesthesiologist is just real clever, he hooks the crap up and says, you know, count from a hundred backwards. I think I got to ninety-eight and I was out. You wake up, I think I was hours and hours later in a darkened, very serious injury ward, and that frightened me more than anything, frightened me more than anything I've ever seen in the jungle or outside of the jungle. And it's a bunch of young guys. Yeah, that's where I have immense respect for the nurses and the doctors and the medics. But, yeah, so that was, and I didn't get my one-way ticket out of the Vietnam War, as that CBS News thing says.

• 1:13:08Speaker 03

  That was six days after I got my second Purple Heart from the shrapnel. So now I have my third Purple Heart getting shot. And each one seemed to up the ante. And I thought, well, okay. Then I volunteered to get out of the hospital, go back to my unit. Now I'm a mature 20-year-old, so I still don't know squat. You know, my IQ is probably two. Get back to my unit, my first sergeant, he didn't know what to do with me. He says, oh my God, I sent your stuff home. We thought you went home. I said, okay. Go back to your hooch, go back to my hooch, and there's a new guy in there who took over my hooch. And he said he took over from the sergeant who got greased. And I said, well, that's me, get out.

• 1:13:52Speaker 03

  My buddies came back in, and then I ended up going back out else for some other missions. Now, before, now you have to remember, March 19th is the day we ran into the battalion. March 25th is the day we ran into more of the same battalion people where I got shot. Seven, six days after that, Fire Support Base Ellingsworth was overrun. And that's in The Dog's Head. There's a book about it called Fire Support Base Ellingsworth. Patchy Troube is not mentioned at all in there. You would figure the intelligence would have gotten to the higher hires to know what we ran into on the 19th. Right. But for some reason, it didn't get mentioned.

• 1:14:34Speaker 03

  But now Jack Hugley, our retired Special Forces Lieutenant, who became a captain, he ended up as friends with one of the guys, one of the lieutenant colonels or captain who became a colonel. And the captain didn't know anything about our firefight either. And they were in a firefight the very next day in our same area. So they hadn't received that information. But on Ellingsworth, the mortars, this was a brand-new fire support base. I think I've read where they had maybe one or two strands of barbed wire up and a berm. That was it. They had artillery shells, and I don't know if this is the case, if memory serves me correct. Usually, they would ship them underneath a bunker so that if incoming came in, they wouldn't get hit.

• 1:15:18Speaker 03

  But because they had arrived, maybe arrived late or something, they, it took a direct hit and the ammo exploded. They had, they had people, artillery got hit and overrun and blown up. Pete Lemon, a former Ranger with a division, I want to, could be the Big Red One, they had gone home. He was finishing his tour with a recon platoon that was on Ellingsworth, and he got the Medal of Honor. So, and if you read his story, it's like, it's one hell of a story. And, but that was all in, in March, within a, a short period of time. So every time I hear the Dog's Head, I tend to cringe a little bit. It's kind of like, yeah, I, I don't have good memories of the Dog's Head.

• 1:16:01Speaker 05

  Do you know, do you know why the, was the intel getting stove piped? Was it, was the dissemination just not fast enough? Like, why didn't these elements know that you'd been in contact?

• 1:16:13Speaker 03

  You know, I, I think, I, I believe you hit the nail right on the head there, Dave. I think stovepipe and, and the information, the communication methods, if you will. Nowadays, we have cell phones, and we have the Internet, we can find stuff out instantly. Back then, you had a field phone, you had a Prick 25 radio, you had stuff that was after-action reports that may have taken a week to write up.

• 1:16:38Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:16:39Speaker 03

  And, and may have been turned over to battalion or, or squadron, squadron got them up to headquarters. That could have been a what? Three weeks later? So, I've read, one, one Sergeant Major was telling me that he, he thought they had, when they left, he thought they had three metal filing cabinets of information that was never acted upon, that they took with them, that they just couldn't go through it enough and get it to send out.

• 1:17:07Speaker 05

  Right. They can't process it. And, you know, and to be fair, like, things were typed up. And you know, things were typed up, there were hard copies, and then how do you disseminate it? You know, it's not, they didn't have Sipernet, or you know, the internet, and you know, I get it, it's just, especially if they were all in a certain area, it's just, you know, it's odd that they didn't sort of develop, you know, a sort of a hasty, you know, like a hasty kind of- Flash report. A flash report, you know, to all elements in that area, hey, this just happened, be aware.

• 1:17:43Speaker 03

  You know, maybe I wasn't privy to it, or it just seemed to me that, you know, you would have had more barbed wire up on fire support base Ellingsworth if you knew that you had a battalion that was getting hit over here. But again, I don't know what the finer minds knew, and I don't know what the people knew. I just, my respect just goes out to the grunts, the pilots, and the people on the ground doing the job. Because they may not have all the information, but guess what? They have to deal with it. And they have to deal with the situation. And so, I mean, we can look back and say, boy, if they had this, if they, you know, after, you know, armchair quarterbacking of, because I'm good at that, I can look back and see, boy, if I was only smarter, would have done this,

• 1:18:26Speaker 03

  and this B would have happened. But yeah, I think it was stove piping, and I was, I think it was communication at that level at that time. Now, you mentioned something that you said typed up. Does anybody really know what a typewriter is anymore?

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, I know.

• 1:18:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, I typed, I typed my first book on a typewriter with a five gallon bucket and a whiteout and a paintbrush. So, I mean, when these computers came around and the internet came around, I, boy, I'm in, I'm in hog heaven right now. If I want to research something, I go on Google and research it real quickly.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  Right. Yeah, you don't have to turn around to your Encyclopedia Britannica, or write letters to- National Geographic. Exactly.

• 1:19:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I gotta get, I have to, you know, respect, give you a little props for you guys as well, because having watched a bunch of these prior to being on this thing, you guys had some, have had some pretty intelligent people on, and to learn stuff, I've learned a lot just by listening to them, and I thought, oh my god. The things we don't know.

• 1:19:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:28Speaker 03

  Is is amazing.

• 1:19:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:19:29Speaker 03

  You know, um, the newspaper, the news media, they may mean well, but you know, they don't always get the information correctly. You know, um, I think even your lowest G I will tell you what's going on in a firefight better than maybe, you know, some, um, some news guy who shows up for half an hour then leaves.

• 1:19:47Speaker 05

  And doesn't understand. I, how, how important to you guys, because obviously, you know, you, when you, you know, you go through the infantry training, and then you show up and then you do the L R P train, or the L R P, or the Ranger training for three weeks. How important were things like the battle drills, like knowing those, like knowing how to respond to a near ambush, so that you're not going down in the prone, because if you went down prone in an ear, you're probably never getting back up, right?

• 1:20:14Speaker 03

  Yep, exactly. You know, we would practice the Australian peel.

• 1:20:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  So you have your Ranger file as you're going, you know, every, each person is facing out a different direction. Rear scout is facing backwards, and then a team leader, and this was in between missions. So a team leader would go, contact left. So he would turn left, fire up, you know, simulate firing up a 20 round magazine, next person in line turns that direction, fires up, and you follow him out, and you're literally taking, making sure you got all your people, and you're firing, you're, you're sending hundreds and hundreds of rounds down where you're taking fire. And you got to be so good at that, that, uh, I mean, you, you know, you drill and drill and drill and drill, until it became second nature. Uh, we also did a lot of, um, you know, um, just point and shoot firing.

• 1:21:04Speaker 03

  You know, it's kind of like, it's not, you, you don't have time to get down behind your, you know, your, your iron sights.

• 1:21:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:09Speaker 03

  So it's like, okay, um, in fact, when I was going through A I T, we did a thing, uh, with, uh, a, a metal disc with B B guns. So they would top, toss them up in the air, and we thought it was really stupid at the beginning, and then at the end, we realized we could hit.

• 1:21:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25Speaker 03

  Those metal discs with a B B gun.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:26Speaker 03

  And I told, I told, I've told some people about that training, they were saying, oh, bullshit, it never happened. And then I found an article about how.

• 1:21:33Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. There, I'm, I can't remember who. The guy who used to do all that training, but you can still find his books on like eBay and stuff, the point shooting, because he used to work with like-

• 1:21:43Jack Murphy?

  That was like Fairbairn or someone like that.

• 1:21:44Speaker 05

  I don't think it was Fairbairn, it was, it was a guy who was like-

• 1:21:47Speaker 03

  Was it Jeff Cooper, or was it, was it one of those guys?

• 1:21:50Speaker 05

  I think he worked with Daisy though, right? The BB gun company.

• 1:21:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. It was definitely a Daisy, it was a Daisy, um, uh, BB gun.

• 1:21:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:21:58Speaker 03

  And that really, believe it or not, that really helped in the point and shoot.

• 1:22:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:02Speaker 03

  You know, um, you don't have the lux, the time and luxury to go down on the ground. Uh, when you're, when you're in a high site on a LERP team, you're down on the ground, you're down behind something. You may be down only behind your rucksack.

• 1:22:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:14Speaker 03

  Uh, sometimes there's brush, uh, and when you're facing a trail, if you go down behind a fallen log, a fallen tree, thinking that you're safe, that trail could turn off to the left in the brush and you don't even know you're being flanked.

• 1:22:28Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:22:29Speaker 03

  So you may take the fire from a different direction.

• 1:22:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:22:32Speaker 03

  And, and that was the trouble with the jungle, I think.

• 1:22:34Jack Murphy?

  Craig, can, uh, can we start talking about the operation that you described in MIA rescue?

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:22:41Jack Murphy?

  I think that's like pretty unique and a lot of people don't understand that, you know, actually LERPs did go across the border a few times.

• 1:22:48Speaker 03

  Uh, well, and also that was during the Cambodian invasion.

• 1:22:51Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:22:52Speaker 03

  Or, well, in, in cursion, if you will.

• 1:22:54Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:22:54Speaker 03

  Um, and so Dever, Deverton Cochran and, um, I think it was Carl Laker, uh, team leader, assistant team leader, they were lead, leading a team up, uh, in that area in Cambodia. Um, five man team, the team, uh, I was told by one of the guys that, uh, they got their night hall position and he didn't think, Dev didn't think it was safe enough. So he moved the team, decided to move the team a little further. And I'll, I'll get to the area and describe it and you'll understand why.

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  Say eptiviepti.

• 1:23:41Speaker 07

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• 1:24:12Speaker 03

  That he did what he did. And when he started moving the team, this was getting towards sunset for a night hold position. They were ambushed. So Cochran was shot. Laker was shot. Ron Andrus, the fourth, third guy, was shot. Royce Clark, the fourth guy, was shot. The fifth guy didn't make it into the kill zone yet. And I think Deverd and Cochran either had the emergency radio, the IRK-10, and Laker had the PRIC-25, or it was the reverse. But both of those guys went down in the kill zone with both radios. So the two wounded guys are trying to crawl back,

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  and they're still taking fire, still getting shot. That night, we get a call. Now, the team is missing in action. You know, the radio relay station on Fire Sport Base, David in Cambodia. Now, David has been operating with ground attacks coming at him. And we're talking dead bodies. Even before you're flying there, you're seeing dead MVA soldiers everywhere. So they lost contact with the team. Now, they heard the gunshots. So they heard something was going on, but they had no way of knowing. They couldn't contact the team. Not a good sign. So.

• 1:25:34Speaker 03

  We got a call that a team was in contact and missing and taken in. And my lieutenant came knocking on the door saying, hey, we need volunteers to go on this mission to try to locate these missing LERPs. Now, having been in a team that got hit, man, I owed, I owed the, these guys a whole bunch of stuff. So Ed, Bill and I volunteered. We started going from a hooch to hooch to find volunteers. We had about 15 of us. Dwayne Blor, Tony Cortez, Jim Braun, the radio man, Doc DeValley, the medic. So you have 15 people. We were flying out that night in the rain. Bill McIntosh was one of the helicopter pilots and it's foggy and it's rainy.

• 1:26:19Speaker 03

  We land predawn at fire support base, David, just as the sun's coming up, and it's a mud pit. We get inside the base camp or in the fire support base and one of the Rangers, Dwight Hancock, who had escaped and evaded, made his way back to the fire support base, and he's the one that told them what happened. Wow. And so he said, you know, he knew that two of the guys were out and hiding, but he couldn't say what happened to the team leader or the assistant team leader. So he said, okay. So we got back in our helicopter and we started flying out in the vicinity of where the team was last known. And now it's foggy, the rain had stopped, now it's foggy.

• 1:27:03Speaker 03

  And you're going through clouds of fogs and you come across these hills, rolling hills that look like a golf course. And then down in the valleys are these stretches of jungle. So there's only so many places that they could have, could have hid. So now it's a question of, okay, which stretch of jungle is it? So we're flying around and we spot one guy with his hand up and he's waving at us and our crew chief is about ready to shoot him because you can't tell, you know, here's a guy in urtle, you know, with the flower pattern on and covered in blood and dirt. So we say, hey, don't shoot, that's one of the guys. We go down there, we pull him in and poor guy is just badly, badly wounded, doesn't have a weapon and all he has is a knife and.

• 1:27:47Speaker 03

  We said, okay, where are the other guys? And he says, well, one of the guys was crawling off this other direction, a few hundred yards away. And we're looking for brush and everything. And so we, Ed and I, take a squad and we start, we locate the second guy. And we, we carry him back to the helicopter and we get those two guys out of there. And we said, okay, where were you guys ambushed? And he says, down in the brush, down in the brush. So it's like, okay, which draw, which brush was this? So the platoon sets up on a high ground to a gun position because one of the wounded Rangers tells us that they're all around here, the NVA are around here, they were searching for these guys all night with lights.

• 1:28:29Speaker 03

  These guys, wounded guys were crawling and hiding. And luckily, the rain had saved them in the fog because they were searching, the NVA were searching for them with flashlights. So those guys get ferried out. Ed and I start going down this one draw. We, we move inside this tree area and we find a badly shot up area. Ed finds a knife and we, we assume that's, there's no bodies though. We're, we're finding blood, but there's no bodies and there's just a knife.

• 1:28:59Jack Murphy?

  And there, how many people are still unaccounted for from the team at this point?

• 1:29:03Speaker 03

  Two.

• 1:29:04Jack Murphy?

  Two more.

• 1:29:05Speaker 03

  Two of the, two of the five, yeah. Two were badly wounded, the fifth guy isn't. And we, we can't locate the bodies anywhere. Now we're, we hear the platoon in a firefight. So it was like, Ed and I are about a hundred yards or something away. So it was like, okay, let's make our way back up to the, you know, we, we have to make our way back up to the draw. We get back up there and our machine gunner, Dwayne Blor is covering us and God bless him for that. Dwayne is, is going through some serious health issues right now, but a solid gunner. If you see that CBS News report, you'll see the guy down on one knee with a M60, that's Dwayne Blor. One of the finest M60 gunners I've ever, ever seen. Ed and I get back, we were with the platoon, we try to tell the people what we found, but

• 1:29:49Speaker 03

  you can't, we got a firefight going on. So now we're taking fire from another line of jungle on a next hill over. And this is maybe, what, a hundred yards? So I mean, it's, it's no big aim and shoot. Our gunships are firing it up. It goes quiet. We get a platoon from, a QRF from David, Fire Support Base. David comes out. The lieutenant gets these guys online in the open to go across towards the tree line. They make it about halfway across and they're shot up. And so they're trying to fall back, couple of guys wounded. Tony Cortez, a guy who was next to me, guy who ended up retired as Command Sergeant Major, by the way.

• 1:30:33Speaker 03

  Tony was a draftee, so how he retired as Command Sergeant Major, you know, that's a funny, I could tell you funny Tony stories, but Tony was just a brave guy. And Tony puts down his rifle, runs out there, under fire, grabs the first guy.

• 1:30:46Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:30:48Speaker 03

  Comes back, digs eggs, takes this wounded guy back. And this poor kid, this one kid, he looked like he got his jaw shot off. So he's out there just moaning and it's god awful. You realize you can't do anything because you're taking fire. Tony runs out again, grabs this guy and brings him back. So now we're up and firing, you know, to protect Tony. So we're in that firefight, we got the two guys out. Hancock had made it back, he's safe. We can't locate the other two. And now we're in a firefight. Firefight winds down, in theory it winds down. Ranger company comes in with some of their people and they still can't locate them. To this day, Deverton Cochran and Carl Laker are both listed as missing in action presumed

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  dead. From the, I've spoken to Royce Clark, one of the survivors. I got a nice letter from Ron Andrus. When I was writing the book, I was interviewing those guys with letters and phone calls. And they, those guys went through multiple dozen, a dozen or so surgeries. They were that badly shot up and wounded.

• 1:31:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:31:59Speaker 03

  So the two survivors, God bless them. Again, it comes back down to what Rangers do. And what's, what's special operations are doing. When they're doing patrols and missions that other people aren't doing, they're paying a price. Every time you see a scroll, every time you see a tab, every time you see one of those berets you got back there, where's your beret? I don't see it up on a shelf. Yeah, I look at that, it just, you know, it broke my heart, by the way, when they gave everybody black berets.

• 1:32:26Speaker 05

  Ocean's sake.

• 1:32:29Speaker 03

  I couldn't believe, I was so, Shinseski, when he did that, man, I tell you. You know, because, uh, um, yeah, that was such a wonderful thing to, to, to earn. When you earned it, you were, you know, you felt like you, you deserved something and got it.

• 1:32:43Speaker 05

  Well, and that was his thing is like, uh, the Rangers have, uh, you know, such a degree of professionalism and esprit de corps. Well, if we give the berets to the whole army, they'll feel that way too. It's like, that's not quite how it works.

• 1:32:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's not how it works.

• 1:32:59Jack Murphy?

  I, I, I think, I think you see it with like the new army PT test, the ACFT or whatever they call it, that they're trying to like, hold the entire army to like, special ops, physical training standards.

• 1:33:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:10Jack Murphy?

  But as they quickly found out.

• 1:33:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:33:12Jack Murphy?

  The entire army is not going to raise to that, to that level.

• 1:33:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, when I was at the, uh, 50th anniversary of the Rangers at the second bat, boy, I tell you, uh, you know, America's in great shape with those guys. Those guys are fire breathers. Those guys can do anything, you know, and, and I want to say something right now. I think for our LRP and Ranger Operations Vietnam, we were very good in the jungle. We had years to perfect it and learn. We outdid the Vietcong. We learned from their techniques. We've learned from Australians. We learned from the special forces guys who were there. I mean, a lot of our cadre were special forces. So we got to be very good at what we did for that specific theater. And seeing the Rangers out there at the battalion, it's like, holy crap, doesn't matter.

• 1:34:01Speaker 03

  Rain, winter, snow, put them in the desert. These guys are fire breathers, you know, and, and, you know, you guys were tasked with doing a lot more than we ever had to do. On a good day, I could spell Ranger, you know? And, um, um, I think there's an end, yeah, one end, but, um, um. Now, I can make my jokes and all that, and I, I try to, I love comedy, so I'm gonna keep doing humor. By the way, I did cartoons for Army Times.

• 1:34:26Speaker 05

  Nice, really?

• 1:34:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, uh, remember all those little smartassisms that they made us do pushups for?

• 1:34:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:34:33Speaker 03

  Army Times paid me fifteen dollars per cartoon.

• 1:34:36Speaker 05

  You know, you, you would be viral on social media now if like, if that, or if that, if social media doing those, you know, doing those, uh, this is the military type cartoons, like if that was a thing when you were doing them, um, you'd be viral, cuz that's, cuz a lot of people make their money doing that now.

• 1:34:55Speaker 03

  I'm not smart enough. I, uh, my time has passed. I am seventy-five. I look at the, um, I look at the time that I have left. I've got a couple of projects I'm gonna work on that aren't military-related. Uh, one, one or two are, but they're different. They're, I, um, I love westerns, you know, Elmore Leonard. Uh, if you guys were big Justified fans, he started off with westerns. And, uh, people forget that, you know, he wrote, um, um, you know, uh, some, Three Ten to, Three Ten to Yuma.

• 1:35:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:35:25Speaker 03

  Valdez is coming. Um, you know, he did some of the best westerns ever. And I, I love a good western, and I, I'm going back to doing some comedy and doing some other things.

• 1:35:35Speaker 05

  Tell us about, um, well, I wanna talk more about your writing career. But let's, let's wind down your time in Vietnam first and tell us about how that kind of, your, your time in country came to a close and, you know, getting out of the army.

• 1:35:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, my time in, in country, uh, came to a close. I mean, after, after that LARP mission, I was pretty much done. The, um, uh, the first sergeant gave me, uh, just, uh, to finish off whatever weeks you had left, is doing, you know, uh, whatever I wanted to do. He would send me down,

• 1:36:06Speaker 03

  he was a great guy, by the way. He would send me down to Benoit to price cameras. And, uh, the first time he sent me down to Benoit, well, Benoit had snack bars, they had Go-Go bars, they had, you know, a little bit of everything. So I went down there that morning. I priced cameras in the PX, and I came back that afternoon. And he says, "What the hell are you doing, Jorgenson?" I said, "Well, these are the prices in the camera." He goes, "I didn't really want you to price cameras." So he was giving me some free time off.

• 1:36:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:33Speaker 03

  I could go down there and yeah.

• 1:36:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:36:34Speaker 03

  So, uh, but, uh, and he, he since passed away. Uh, but a wonderful guy and, and I stayed in touch with a lot of these guys after the war. Um, I'm still involved with hotel company with a lot of my buddies. I'm still in, involved with, uh, Apache troop and, um, um, it, it's, uh, and you know, your military buddies are your military buddies or family. Some are family, some are like, you know, if he says, well, all military guys are brothers. Yeah. Well, Kane and Abel were brothers.

• 1:37:01Speaker 05

  Yeah. Right. Right. Yeah.

• 1:37:03Speaker 03

  But we, we, we, we respect and admire the good ones.

• 1:37:06Speaker 05

  Yeah. And you know, it's funny because, uh, we just had a, I, this conversation recently, or I just did with, with, uh, some people is that like, sometimes the guys who you would absolutely trust to do anything to, they would, they would like run out in a hail of bullets to come grab you.

• 1:37:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:37:27Speaker 05

  Aren't, aren't really the people you want around your family.

• 1:37:30Speaker 03

  I know.

• 1:37:30Speaker 05

  You know? And then sometimes like the nicest guys in the world, the guys who you trust with everything, they're not that guy. There's a guy who might like hide behind a tree while you get shot up. So it's, it's like this, it's like this weird thing, right? That, that, um.

• 1:37:47Speaker 03

  It is. And in combat, you see that in firefight, you see that, that, uh, the people who talk brave aren't always the ones who are coming up to a fight. And I think one of the, I, I remember this one new guy, he probably weighed, I think if he weighed a hundred and 10 pounds soaking wet, you know? He, oh, and he looked a little bit goofy and yet when the firefight happened, man, he stepped up to the plate.

• 1:38:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:09Speaker 03

  And that's, that's what you want. You just want people who will do the job with you.

• 1:38:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  And, uh, I remember a couple of people that, uh, uh, they talked brave after the firefight, but during the firefight, you know, it's, it was, I don't want to, I don't want to disparage too many folks.

• 1:38:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:25Speaker 03

  There was one or two that you kind of sit there and you knew who the, the guys that you could count on. I mean, even to this day, I, you know, they are, they are brothers in arms.

• 1:38:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:34Speaker 03

  Ed Beal, Tony Cortez, uh, Jim Braun, Jack Ugley, my platoon leader, uh, Mike Brennan, Ernst Bostard, uh, just a combination of Rangers, Special Forces buddies that are just wonderful people that you served with in combat.

• 1:38:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:49Speaker 03

  And those are the people, yeah, that you'll always admire and respect.

• 1:38:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:38:52Speaker 03

  And like, you know, I was, like I said, 19 when I got there, young and dumb. And I I tell people I survived Vietnam thanks to the good people I had around me.

• 1:39:02Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:39:03Speaker 03

  Who were looking after me when I was too stupid to look after myself.

• 1:39:06Speaker 05

  How how did you, because you know, we, I don't know what the World War II vets, like what they experienced in terms of the whole stolen valor thing, but it was a really big thing post Vietnam and

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:18Speaker 05

  and not just right after Vietnam, but well into like the eighties, right? And even nineties. That, you know, you'd have guys talking about being LRP or MACB SOG or whatever. Was that something that offended you a lot? Did you ignore those guys? How did you feel about that?

• 1:39:35Speaker 03

  Um, you know, it was really funny. When I went to work for the custom service, we had a former command sergeant major for special forces, a guy named Ray Garofalo. If you ever see the book Inside the Special Forces, there is a picture of the short squat, you know? That's Ray. So Ray went to work for a custom service and my first day on the job there. You know, Ray says, "Were you in the military, son?" I said, "Yes, sir, I was." And and he goes, "Who are you?" They do twenty questions.

• 1:40:06Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 1:40:07Speaker 03

  And you better answer all the twenty questions correctly.

• 1:40:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  And I said, "I was a LRP Ranger and I was a recon platoon." "Where were you there? Where were you in Vietnam?" So it's kind of like, "Well, I was there in nineteen sixty-nine, part of seventy, in Phuket, in Tainan in Song Bay." And he goes, "I was in Tainan at the time." And and he didn't tell me of special forces, but you know, this guy had three or four combat tours. And he retired as a command sergeant major for the twenty-fifth infantry division at Tainan. So I said, "Well, okay, I was a LRP." He goes, "Which unit?" And I said, "Hotel company, first calve out of Phuket." And General Roberts was the command and our first, our our CEO, first CEO was George Passerelli, then Griffiths.

• 1:40:51Speaker 03

  And he goes, "Mm-hmm. And what was your MOS?" You know, and you go through the whole thing.

• 1:40:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 03

  And what did you carry? And then finally, about a couple of days later, he goes, Okay, you know, I just got the okay from him. And, uh, but we had one guy that came in who claimed to have been something and Ray ripped him apart. Everybody, this guy was making up this story. And, and Ray says, I don't think that ever happened. I think, I think that, I think you're not telling. And he wouldn't swear, you're not being truthful. And, uh, it turns out the guy was lying and, you know, but we, that's the first time I ever encountered that. And, um, um, um, most of the time, people, people didn't know what LERPs were. If you say you were LERP, they give you a roll aid because they thought you belched.

• 1:41:36Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36Speaker 03

  You know, um, uh, they, they, you know, people knew what Navy SEALs were. People would tell you Special Forces when, uh, Rangers, well, the Rangers came in at seventy-four, nineteen seventy-four. So people were just beginning to tell you who the Rangers were. And, and, uh, when you said LERP, they would just kind of look at you and, and shake your head, um, and shake their heads. And you're just kind of going, ah, that's okay. Now I got a call from, when my book came out, Gary Lindor called me up. And Gary was telling me that he's going to put together this magazine called Behind the Lines and would I write for it? So I said, sure, you know, I'm happy to. So I worked with Gary on Behind the Lines, uh, for all seven years.

• 1:42:13Jack Murphy?

  Wow.

• 1:42:13Speaker 03

  Uh, that, that was in existence. Got to know, uh, Ken Miller is probably the smartest LERP that we'll ever run into. And, um, uh, we, just a bunch of characters. Ray Martinez, another good guy.

• 1:42:26Jack Murphy?

  Oh, Ray, Ray, I would love to interview him.

• 1:42:29Speaker 03

  Uh, Ray is a wonderful guy. If you get a chance to do that, do that. He's, uh,

• 1:42:34Jack Murphy?

  And, and I, and you, you sent me an issue of the magazine and I loved looking through it. It was like so awesome. And, uh, Greg Walker, eh, published some stuff.

• 1:42:43Speaker 03

  Greg, I know Greg real well. Greg's somebody.

• 1:42:44Jack Murphy?

  He's, he's been, he's been on this show.

• 1:42:47Speaker 03

  Great. I saw, I wa, I watched his interview as well.

• 1:42:49Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:49Speaker 03

  And I know Greg was, uh, also the editor for Full Contact Magazine.

• 1:42:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:53Speaker 03

  Martial Arts. I was, I wrote for the Martial Arts Magazine for about twenty years and I got to know Greg really well. And, and our military, uh, shared experiences. And you get to know some wonderful people and you really do. And it's, uh, it's a hoot. Um, uh, but yeah, it, the stolen valor part, that's something I saw basically after movies like Platoon. And, and the idiots who would come out of the movies going, now I know what the war was really like.

• 1:43:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:19Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, okay. Apocalypse Now was, you know, people forget that is nothing more than Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Right. Even including the characters' names of Colonel Kurtz, Kurtz, or the bad guy Kurtz. And when you look at Platoon, Platoon had the right uniforms, they had the right look, they were burning shit in barrels and living out of bunkers, the Aegis for the guys looked correct, Oliver Stone, you know, what was, I think he might have said, all those things did happen, I'm not sure, over nine and a half years, you know, if you take, if you write about New York City, for everything bad that happened in nine and a half years, you'd never go into the city. Right, right.

• 1:44:02Speaker 03

  So, I think Platoon had a lot of that, but I was happy to see the patches were correct, I was happy to see the weapons were correct, and the fact that Dale Die, Dale Die was one of the editors I worked with at Soldier of Fortune magazine, and I freelanced, by the way, and people go, oh, you worked for him, I said, no, I freelanced, and I needed, I needed to eat and needed to feed the kids, you know, pay the bills, so I would send a magazine article in and they would buy it, I'm like, oh boy, I'll send another one, and you don't get published on a regular basis, you get, you know, maybe four months later you got another article in there, but Dale went on to be the technical advisor for Platoon, for Saving Private Ryan, for Band of Brothers, and he even had roles in

• 1:44:45Speaker 03

  each one of those, you know, those films, so I have a nice letter from Dale when he was leaving Soldier of Fortune, and I was going, I was leaving to write my book, and I still have that, that I hold on to, and I go, I know Dale Die.

• 1:44:58Jack Murphy?

  So, what was your first book, and that, which was your entryway with Gary Linder?

• 1:45:04Speaker 03

  Acceptable Loss.

• 1:45:06Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  And that's a term that the military uses, that, you know, you're all familiar with, like, okay, we've lost enough people now, we'll end this, you know, it's when the public and the Congress gets pissed off, you're right, and my book, the title was Acceptable Loss: An Infantry Soldier's Perspective, and I just got tired of all the...

• 1:45:28Speaker 03

  You had a bunch of phony veterans, they called them tripwire veterans that were, you know, CBS and all these people, guys living in the woods, they said they were combat veterans.

• 1:45:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:45:38Speaker 03

  And, you know, they would go and get some sympathy. And then in-depth research turned out these guys weren't combat veterans. And, but they were milking that, you know, that stolen valor part. My wife was with me downtown Seattle one day and there's a, there's a guy, he says homeless vet, and, or Vietnam vet, homeless. So I said, well, hey, you know, which division were you're with? And he says, oh, it's been so long, I can't remember.

• 1:46:08Speaker 03

  So now I get pissed. And I said, look, where were you in country? He goes, oh, I can't remember that. I said, you know, you can forget your mother-in-law's maiden name, you can forget, you know, where you put your car keys. But if you were in division in a combat unit, you'll never forget that division.

• 1:46:24Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:46:24Speaker 03

  And my wife had to yank me, pull me away from him because I was slobbering at the mouth. But, you know, if it's, if it's a legitimate vet, I'll toss in something.

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:46:34Speaker 03

  You know, I mean, everybody has their issues and that. And, but I don't like, you know, we all embellish our careers, you know, I mean, I, I, I'm really pissed off at you two right now. And I'll tell you why. You, you guys are really computer experts with CGI, and this is what you're showing people?

• 1:46:53Speaker 05

  You, you overestimate us. We, we are just a couple of like grunts. Yeah, I mean. Who had to hire a civilian, a dirty civilian. Really, really are. To produce this because we couldn't do it. A couple of grunts trying to use all this audio video equipment. We're, we're like, we're like monkeys at the monolith. There, there's, this book is one I would like to bring up to people, very crazy GI that you wrote. And I think, I think what's unique about this book is, you know, a lot of the books and movies about Vietnam are, as you've mentioned a bunch of them, Apocalypse Now, Platoon. And we've also, you know, heard your stories as well about being a WARP in Vietnam. Pretty, pretty horrific stuff. Like, it's pretty hair-raising stuff.

• 1:47:39Jack Murphy?

  This book tells a different perspective.

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• 1:47:53Speaker 06

  Say epti vi epti.

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• 1:48:26Jack Murphy?

  Of the Vietnam War. This is all the funny stories. It's all the absurd stuff. It's the fun stuff that happens.

• 1:48:33Speaker 03

  And you guys, you guys have heard, I guarantee you, when your podcast is not going, when, you know, prior to starting, you're going to hear some funny stories from incredible people that you will never air.

• 1:48:45Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  I was collecting those stories over the years when I was working with Behind the Lines Magazine, and it was just, you know, sometimes vets would say, you can use my name, please don't use my name. I had Sergeant Major Ray Garofalo gave me one of those stories. He says, I don't want, please don't use my name, you know, and I said, okay. And then when the book came out, he goes, you can use my name now, you know? He thought it was better, you know? And I got a couple of the stories from a Marine Sergeant Major, who was my K-9 instructor when I went through K-9 school. And he gave me two of the Marine stories, and just a wonderful guy. And then I started collecting these stories. Now, one of the funny, some of them I couldn't publish, some of the stories I got.

• 1:49:33Speaker 03

  One pilot, there's a couple others I wanted to publish, the editors didn't want them. You know, there was one pilot swears to God he saw a UFO over there, a helicopter pilot. You know, there was one story in there about the guys who found all the money in the US dollars in a bunker and then shipped at home. I've had two to three different people. You know, to call me up over the last thirty years saying, I'm glad you didn't use my name.

• 1:50:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  Seriously, you know, that many?

• 1:50:07Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:07Speaker 03

  But now, the funny part is, Random House didn't want to publish that book. When I sent it in, they said, nobody's interested in short story and those things. They're really not interested. And I said, okay. So my wife and I self-published our own book called Boukoudinkedel. And if you'll see, the subtitle of that book is Boukoudinkedel. It just means, you know, French and Vietnamese are very crazy. Which, by the way, at the time, we didn't know French. We didn't know Vietnamese. You know, we were, we were struggling. Some of us, I could barely litter with English, for God's sakes. But especially me. I, when they rejected those stories, my wife and I self-published it.

• 1:50:49Speaker 03

  And the book got four really good national reviews. And we made all our money back with the first hundred that we sold.

• 1:50:56Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 1:50:57Speaker 03

  And we only printed up like five hundred of them. You know, and then I got a call from the editor saying, hey, we'd like to buy that book.

• 1:51:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:04Speaker 03

  And of course, they only give you an advance, a small advance. And then they gave me half of the advance because they didn't think it would be that good. About four or five months later, I got a call from them and say, hey, we want you to do another Very Crazy G.I. That's been our best seller for the quarter. And, and I had to turn them down because those, those stories took me seven years to gather up.

• 1:51:26Jack Murphy?

  To collect, yeah.

• 1:51:27Speaker 03

  I was working a job that didn't allow me to travel. And you, you know, gathering up the stories are difficult. You guys, finding people to get on your book, your podcast.

• 1:51:37Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, sure.

• 1:51:38Speaker 03

  Coordinating and editing and doing all the stuff that you have to do. That takes a lot of work and people don't, behind the scenes, don't understand it.

• 1:51:45Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:51:45Speaker 03

  You know, we, we get to watch and we think, oh, everything's smooth, but not all the time. So, yeah, I, I quit. I wanted to write my own stuff for Vietnam, so that's when I started doing my own. That's when I did my Western. And, you know, I, I had such a fun time. My wife and I drove all down through Apache country down in Arizona. And I had a fun time just doing the research on that one.

• 1:52:07Jack Murphy?

  What, what's the title of your Western and what's it about?

• 1:52:10Speaker 03

  Eighteen eighty-six, The Last Campaign. And I took a Civil War Ranger from Mosby's guys, got him out west, working with Al Seber. And Al Seber, by the way, people think he was just a Indian scout. But Al Seber actually was a wounded veteran with the first Minnesota at Gettysburg. So he, he, he got seriously injured at Gettysburg before he went out to become a cowboy. So I, I, I did that one and, and I submitted, I had to submit it to New York because they want turned down rights. They said, well, we're not interested in Western. I said, okay, that's one. And then I did stalking the dragon, which is the humor story, uh, which is, is, it's, it's an absurd humor story about a journalist who gets forced to go on a special

• 1:52:54Speaker 03

  operations mission to capture Ho Chi Minh.

• 1:52:56Jack Murphy?

  And you, you said, you said the inspiration for that story was like a, an actual stolen valor case that you're like.

• 1:53:03Speaker 03

  It was.

• 1:53:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:04Speaker 03

  We're not a soldier. We, you know, Gary would get a table at Las Vegas for the special forces convention and we had it for, uh, behind the lines magazine. So I had Ken Miller there and you had, uh, maybe Ray Martinez, uh, uh, Doc Norton, who was a, wrote a wonderful book on the, uh, Marines of Vietnam. Mike Walsh, who was a, um, a team leader for what? SEAL Team Two. I was on another side, maybe Larry and a couple of these other guys.

• 1:53:29Jack Murphy?

  This, this is a group of people you don't want to bullshit.

• 1:53:33Speaker 03

  Well, and this, well, you'd have idiots come up to you and one guy dressed as a French Foreign Legion air. Now we have, we have buddies, uh, who went and fought, um, not with the French Foreign Legion, but, uh, who, who went into, uh, Rhodesia. They would, they would come back and saying, I fought in Rhodesia. Well, one of our guys actually did that and ended up with the South African Defense Force Two after Vietnam and after Rhodesia fell. So, I mean, and if you can't pass the test of answering his questions, then he's going to call you out on bullshit. Um, so the guy that came up to me, well, the, the guy with the, the French Foreign Legion outfit, you know, I said, you know, shall I put, you know,

• 1:54:11Speaker 03

  you shall put, you, you parlez français, you know, you know, pour français? And he couldn't speak French. And I thought, there's no way you're going to be in a French Foreign Legion without knowing something.

• 1:54:23Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:54:23Speaker 03

  You know?

• 1:54:24Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:54:24Speaker 03

  And then this, this young guy walks up to us and he's got a half of, you know, BDU on and, or at that time as the Erdel, um, or could have been Tiger. Tiger, by the way, we had to buy those uniforms. We were issued urtle.

• 1:54:37Speaker 05

  The tigers?

• 1:54:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, the tigers we had to buy. And they were cheap, cheaply made. So when you're out in the jungle with a tiger, tiger fatigues, and you catch a branch, you may rip all the way up to your crotch.

• 1:54:49Speaker 05

  Oh, really?

• 1:54:50Speaker 03

  Yeah. So it's kind of like, if you wanted, if you had a good set of tigers, a legitimate set, man, you held on to those.

• 1:54:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:54:57Speaker 03

  Um, just like a good beret as well. We didn't always have the, the finest, but, um, uh, yeah, but this kid came up to us at the convention. And he was telling, you know, I was in Vietnam, I was in the Nam. It's like, okay, you know, you hear that a lot. And it's like, all right. And of course, you're trying to be polite. Well, who are you with and when? I was, I did special operation stuff. And it's like, oh, okay. He says, yeah, I was on the mission to capture or to kill Ho Chi Minh.

• 1:55:22Speaker 05

  Ho Chi Minh?

• 1:55:23Speaker 03

  Who? He said, Ho Chi Minh. M I N, I said, M I N G? I said, yeah. I said, where'd you go to basic? What? Where'd you go to A I T? What was your M O S? And he just started going back into the crowd and disappearing. And I thought, boy, that's. And that just kind of inspired to do that. One of the, one of the articles. That actually got me inspired to do the book. Cause I wanted to do something where, uh, a, a, a rural area guy gets pulled into something, not for his own doing. But for another reason that is funnier, funnier than hell.

• 1:55:53Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:55:53Speaker 03

  Uh, and he ends up going on to special operations. And I won't tell you what he does, but it's, it's funny. It's, it's, it was so much fun writing that book.

• 1:56:01Speaker 05

  What, what's the title of that one?

• 1:56:03Speaker 03

  Stalking the Dragon.

• 1:56:04Speaker 05

  Stalking the Dragon.

• 1:56:05Speaker 03

  So, yeah, it won a 2010 Best Humor Award from, uh, Reader's Views.

• 1:56:09Speaker 05

  Oh, that's great.

• 1:56:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was, uh, you know, I, I, and my wife was back in, when we had the big square computers. I'd be sitting there typing at night, you know, she'd be sitting down with the kids and I'd be laughing. She'd go, what's so funny? I said, oh, this, this one, you know? So, yeah, so that, that book, uh, turned out to be a joy. I, I like humor. I love you, military humor.

• 1:56:31Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:56:31Speaker 03

  It's, it's who we are. It's what we do. And communication, if we can, if we can communicate with people and get our points across. Uh, I don't, I don't think there's any book that I've written out there that I wouldn't rewrite. Uh, I look at it now as being, boy, maybe the next one will be better. Maybe the next one will be better. But it's, it's, uh, it's a disease because it's, it's who we are. It's like, you're, you know, how do you feel from your first podcast? Which I saw, by the way.

• 1:56:55Speaker 05

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry about that. Yeah. We apologize deeply.

• 1:57:00Speaker 03

  That's the way I am with my books. I look at it, you know, I had some, oh God, it was that, a friend of mine, he was a sergeant major in the guard and he was a federal police officer and it was at his retirement party and so I went down to his retirement party and he introduces me to this guy who's

• 1:57:23Speaker 03

  who went through a special forces and fought in Iraq and he's a legitimate deal. And the guy goes, yeah, this is my friend, this is Craig Jorgenson and he goes, oh wow, do you know the guy that wrote the book? You know, oh, I know a guy, the guy who wrote the book, Acceptable Loss. I said, yeah, that was me. He goes, man, that's the reason I joined the army. I went, oh shit, I apologize.

• 1:57:45Speaker 03

  And, you know, and I ran into a young ranger down at Fort Lewis who was telling me, I think it was, I want to say one of the hooligans, you know, that platoon is, the hooligans.

• 1:57:54Speaker 05

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

• 1:57:59Speaker 03

  I don't either.

• 1:58:00Speaker 05

  Do you remember what company he, you know, I was there. I was there. I can't believe we I was, yeah.

• 1:58:06Speaker 03

  Oh, you, you would have seen a whole bunch of us out with walkers and wheelchairs and going from, you know, we'll get to the, we'll get to the, the gunship eventually.

• 1:58:16Speaker 05

  I, I, I'm not sure if, I'm not sure if I would have seen you because I was in an ice bath for so long after standing for some of those, like, my back was just like, all right, I'm done.

• 1:58:26Speaker 03

  I, you know, I came home and I did the same thing. I crawled in the bathtub. I, you know, I got, grabbed a beer, grabbed two, extra strength, etc. And my wife said, how was it? I go, I'm too old.

• 1:58:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:40Speaker 03

  And, you know, watching those guys do their stuff, whether it was a fast repel, whether they were doing the shooting, the canine thing. I was a canine guy for five years, so I, I really enjoyed watching the canine. And, but I thought, I, I'll be lucky enough if I can hold the door for these guys. You know, it's, I appreciate what you guys did because you guys are in, you guys now are feeling like Vietnam vets because you look at the younger generation and they look at you as being old and you're not. are in a perfect, you know.

• 1:59:11Speaker 05

  I I.

• 1:59:12Speaker 03

  A perfect age.

• 1:59:12Speaker 05

  Just watching them, I had to take Motrin. Like, you know, I like it was sympathetic pain I was getting just from watching them do their stuff.

• 1:59:20Speaker 03

  They hated, I hated the fact where they said they they were born after, you know, uh, after two thousand four.

• 1:59:27Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's that's hard. That's hard for me. Yeah, I I'm struggling with that.

• 1:59:31Speaker 05

  We had a, well, I had a similar experience that one of the young Rangers was out there. Uh, we were up in, you know, their their bar area in their in their coffs, you know? And and he was like, man, I I used to watch your show all during high school, and I guess we've been going for like five years now. So the idea that our kid could have been watching us in high school and be in the military now is like crazy.

• 1:59:55Speaker 03

  But he's like. Yeah, but you you think in terms of it's it inspires them. And I'll tell you the good thing that you guys do that we book, the guys who do the books can't do, is is the fact, what the hell I got, oh, man.

• 2:00:07Speaker 03

  Is that you guys have the opportunity to speak in depth with your people you're interviewing, week after week after week. So you're getting all of these people. So if a kid is thinking about joining the military. They need to watch you guys to see what Rangers, what Special Forces, what SEALs, what CIA, what colleges, what value college may have, if they want to get a career in, say, intelligence or whatever.

• 2:00:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:00:33Speaker 03

  Um, you know, um.

• 2:00:34Jack Murphy?

  I think too, like, you know, when, like I was saying earlier, when I was a kid, really, the only books available were about warp Rangers in Vietnam. And so we're talking.

• 2:00:43Speaker 05

  Maybe some SEAL books.

• 2:00:45Jack Murphy?

  When I'm, when I'm, there were some SEAL books.

• 2:00:46Speaker 05

  UDTs.

• 2:00:47Jack Murphy?

  But, yeah.

• 2:00:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:00:48Jack Murphy?

  Also, also, also Vietnam era.

• 2:00:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:00:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, cuz I'm talking about like the mid to late nineteen nineties, you know, I'm like sixteen, seventeen, eighteen.

• 2:00:58Jack Murphy?

  The one contemporary book was Black Hawk Down. Everything else was Vietnam and I mean, I love you guys, but what Rangers were doing in Vietnam was not the same thing that Rangers were doing when I got to battalion in 2003. So there was not any sort of avenue to learn about that job, that profession, really. You can learn about the legacy and the lineage, but not what they do today. And I think with these podcasts, ours and some of the others out there, it gives an opportunity for these young Americans to like, whatever they're interested in, like they want to be a combat medic in Ranger Battalion? Or they want to be an 18 Bravo in Special Forces?

• 2:01:40Jack Murphy?

  Or do they want to be a trauma surgeon? Like there is a podcast you can find with a guy who did that entire career.

• 2:01:48Speaker 05

  The, I'll add on to that though, that, that, you know, warfare is so circular and, and you know,

• 2:01:57Speaker 05

  like what they were doing in World War II, they were doing in the GWAT, like some of that stuff in terms of like Fallujah and, and some of the Ramadi and stuff like that. And so, so there will be a day though, when you guys coming on and speaking, you know, talking about jungle warfare and, and you know,

• 2:02:16Jack Murphy?

  It'll come back.

• 2:02:17Speaker 05

  Talking about the things that you did and you trained for and what you did in ambushes and these things. Those will be relevant again because nobody's, nobody's looking at fighting in a desert.

• 2:02:29Jack Murphy?

  Oh, look, look at the trench warfare in Eastern Europe today.

• 2:02:32Speaker 05

  Right, exactly. You know, you look at Ukraine and trench warfare and wouldn't it be nice if we had World War I vets, you know, recordings of World War I vets on talking about their experiences? So that people weren't relearning these lessons.

• 2:02:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, you're, you're correct, reinventing the wheel.

• 2:02:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:50Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, I was, I was pissed off at the army when they got rid of the Lursa groups. You know, it's like you need long range surveillance somewhere.

• 2:02:58Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:58Speaker 03

  You know, and you need, you know, and. You need to have eyes in the sky. You need to have eyes on the ground.

• 2:03:05Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:06Speaker 03

  Have to have boots on the ground, finding good intel to add to what you think you know. I think the drone warfare is amazing and changing the battlefield now as we see it. I think of as Vietnam vets, we're like the last of the Indian fighters, if you will.

• 2:03:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  You know, it's like, yeah, our helicopters were all horses. We went out looking for stuff. And we'd run into the Vietcong or the NVA and they were fighting with primitive, you know, communications devices and stuff, just like us.

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:03:34Speaker 03

  So we were mostly, you know, we're fighting each other. We were good for the jungle, I think. The helicopters were the wonderful. I'm glad, I was real proud to be in the first Cav Division. We had helicopters. We sell them if ever. I mean, I think Gary or Ken was telling me about one LERT mission, where they dropped them off on the back of a deuce and a half.

• 2:03:58Speaker 03

  You know, it's like our helicopters, I mean, my goodness. You know, we'd load on three UEs. We knew the pilots. We knew the crew chiefs. They were our people.

• 2:04:06Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06Speaker 03

  That's the other thing. And when we got shot and injured, our guys came in for us. And when we got into a firefight, and if the pilots didn't like you before they got shot down, those pilots loved you when you came in for their rescue.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  You know, I was just going to mention because, you know, you say that you guys were like the last Indian fighters. And at some point, you know, because you think of drones and a lot of technology. Well, if we're ever fighting in the jungle again, those drones probably will not be as relevant.

• 2:04:31Jack Murphy?

  A lot of them.

• 2:04:32Speaker 05

  You know what I mean? And so many of the things, you know, the army or the air force, I guess, you know, or the military in general, you look at the A-10, which they've been trying to scrap. You look at the AC-130, they've been trying to scrap since Vietnam. And, you know, the Blackhawks, like, these airframes have proven themselves time and time and time again. And they have not been able to find anything to replace them. And people will say, we don't need this airframe anymore. And then all of a sudden, this airframe is saving people's asses, no matter, you know, 30, 40, 50 years later.

• 2:05:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, the Warthog, that A-10, you know, you see them shot up and they're still flying. And they're still knocking out, you know, and you're absolutely right. You know, I think reinventing the wheel, reinventing the equipment, it's like, okay, what works, what doesn't work. You know, the first M16, the Stoner they had, didn't have that forward assist.

• 2:05:24Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:25Speaker 03

  So those things jammed because guess what? The jungle is dirty. There's sand, there's dirt. And there's also leeches, mosquitoes, tigers, rhinos, crocodiles. I didn't know Vietnam had crocodiles. Or, or a Bigfoot, its own version of a Bigfoot.

• 2:05:43Jack Murphy?

  The Sasquatch story and very crazy.

• 2:05:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:05:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Craig, tell us about Chasing Romeo. You mailed me this book. I read it this last week and I really loved it. Tell us about this series and what this is about.

• 2:05:57Speaker 03

  People don't realize that by 1971, most of the Ranger companies, LRP companies, were pulled out of Vietnam. So you may have had four or five left, but the war wasn't over. So you still had, the NVA were still coming down in the thousands. That's the other people think, oh, there's only 100 Vietnamese or whatever. There were thousands of those people coming down. What, the 67, 68 Tet Offensive saw 80,000 Viet Cong North Vietnamese soldiers in coordinated attacks. 80,000? So the numbers. So I was thinking, you know what, I like LRP's. I like, I was real proud to have been a LRP. Real proud to have been Ranger. Real proud of the guys I worked with. I got to know a lot of the

• 2:06:41Speaker 03

  guys from earlier times. And I was really proud of their stories. And I thought, you know what, let's see if I can write something that will be interesting to read for a person just picking up a book. What is a LRP? What did they do? So supposedly I invented a company, our company, which is Romeo and the Fanatic talk back then. And I attached them to MACV headquarters, because not MACV SOG, but MACV headquarters. And then I loaned them out to a fictitious fire support base or Camp Mackey and to pull LRP missions. And then I stuck a special forces company commander and first sergeant in there. And then I had some fun with it. And I thought, okay, what are the stories that you remember? What are

• 2:07:25Speaker 03

  the stories that would get people to see how harrowing the job was? Because it's fiction, but most fiction is based in truth, has some truth somewhere. Did you go out in five and six man teams? Yes, we did. Did you get in firefight? Yes, you did. Did you, were some of, some of the patrols, did you lose people? Yeah, you did. Were some of them?

• 2:07:45Speaker 03

  What did you find when you were out there? You know, um, so I wanted to do my own series. So I did the first book and I said, well, it's got to have a follow up book. So I thought, okay, I, I came up with the second one. It's called the belly of the beast, which I think the funniest R and R story you'll ever read.

• 2:08:00Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:08:01Speaker 03

  As well, the first, the first sergeant in, in Bangkok.

• 2:08:03Jack Murphy?

  I'm looking forward to it.

• 2:08:05Speaker 03

  It's, I'll send it, I'm gonna send you guys, I'm gonna send you the Western as well, but.

• 2:08:08Jack Murphy?

  Okay.

• 2:08:09Speaker 03

  Um, and now I finished the third one. It where I, you said you asked me earlier if I wanted to have Adler be the company commander.

• 2:08:17Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:08:17Speaker 03

  Well, the timeframe didn't allow, because by, by 1972, all the LRB companies were gone out of Vietnam. And, uh, uh, they were by 73, there was no what, no ground forces left, basically. You know, what by 75, you had, you had minimal stuff in the, in the big bases, but not much. The combat was winding down Nixon's Vietnameseization. He was pushing it on the Vietnamese to take over the, the bulk of it. So the third book is called Sweet Sorrow, which, you know, the, the Shakespeare parting is that Sweet Sorrow. So I wanted to do the, suddenly these guys were doing a really good job as a LRB company. Get informed that the, the company's being shut down.

• 2:08:55Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:08:56Speaker 03

  So I saw the, I saw the faces. I got invited out to one of the Lursa units when they were being stood down. And watching the heartbreak in the soldiers faces, you know, the, um, you know, and it's must.

• 2:09:08Jack Murphy?

  I. Yeah, it's, it's, it's to put in all the, a lot of hard work and then to be told by the army like, we don't need you anymore.

• 2:09:16Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:09:16Jack Murphy?

  Like it's.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  Goodbye, we don't need you.

• 2:09:18Jack Murphy?

  Not, not a great feeling.

• 2:09:19Speaker 03

  Right. Yeah, and it's, it's, it's a thank you, you know, don't let the door hit you on the way, on the butt on the way out. And, um, so I wanted to do something, but I wanted to own my own series. You know, the big book companies in New York will own the rights to those first books. I'll never see them, uh, with, with ebooks out there, I'll never see, I'll probably never own them again. Um, I had one lady called me up, uh, years ago. She wanted to do a treatment on a script on one of the books. I could not give her permission because I didn't own the rights.

• 2:09:49Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:09:49Speaker 03

  So, so I referred her to the editor back New York and New York said that, um, they weren't going to give her a position unless she paid for it. It was a big amount of money. So I, I, I thought, well, a treatment is nothing more than an idea to, to do a, you know, a script that will need to be shopped around and, and of course, nothing ever happened out of that. So I thought, okay, um, I want to own my own books. You know, I want to be responsible for, and I, I self-publish these. I, I work with Book Locker Press and, and, I get more than, than I ever got from the big book companies, by the way. So I, I've learned something about business along the way. Um, why did I do the next, the next

• 2:10:31Speaker 03

  book? Because this book paid for the next one. And the belly of the beast paid for the next one. So as long as I can keep those paying for each other, I'm going to keep writing.

• 2:10:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  I did a real funny book. This is, this is, this is my first non-war book. It's called In for a Penny, In for a Pounding. And my wife, my wife makes fun of me. She says, your Western and your, your Civil War book. She goes, uh, your, your Western is nothing more than Vietnam with Indians.

• 2:11:02Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:11:02Speaker 03

  I said, okay. She goes, your Civil War book is, is Vietnam again. I went, okay. This one is not. This one is about a adjunct professor who gets laid off and discovers that he has a knack for forging Hemingway's signature. So, um, he ends up selling something to the wrong person. And, um, so I, I, and it takes place in New York. So it's, uh, you know, I, I just had so much fun writing and research. Now I'm doing the second book on it. Um, I can't tell you what's going on with it because, but I'll, I'll send you guys, uh, I'll send you a bunch of these books just so you can either read them going.

• 2:11:36Speaker 05

  Love them. Yeah, I'd love to.

• 2:11:37Speaker 03

  He's a shitty writer, or he's a really good writer. Uh, but I'll tell everybody.

• 2:11:41Jack Murphy?

  You're, you're, you're legit, man. Even, even back in the day, 20 years ago, reading your books. I mean, it was clear that you had talent as a writer.

• 2:11:49Speaker 03

  Well, thank you. You do too. I'm, I'm enjoying Reflexive Fire, by the way.

• 2:11:53Jack Murphy?

  Oh, thank you.

• 2:11:54Speaker 03

  I don't like you guys because you're too smart. You know, it's like.

• 2:11:57Speaker 05

  Not me. Jack, Jack's the brain to the operation.

• 2:12:01Speaker 03

  When, when I was writing my Civil War book, I had four or five chapters that I gave to a special forces medic buddy of mine to read. And he's a gun expert. I hate gun experts, but they're, they're wonderful people. And he read my first four or five chapters and said, boy, this is really good, but none of those guns existed. So I had to go back and he gave me all kinds of information, what I could use, what, how, you know, if you wanted to use a Henry, how far it should, which actually had bullets at the day, which one were cap and ball, what, how far a musket could shoot, did they have rifle barrels, how far did the rifle barrel go. And so, talking to him, and I love the guy, but he's still a son of a bitch, as far as I'm concerned, because

• 2:12:45Speaker 03

  I had to go back in with a typewriter and change all that. But I love writing, I would encourage everybody, you guys, tell your stories, because your relatives, your family will have no idea what you did, unless they see something like this, and they still will get a chance, in your own words, to see what you can put down on paper.

• 2:13:07Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:13:08Speaker 03

  I've taught some writing seminars, and what I try to tell people, if you're in for it for the money, then you're in the wrong business. If you want to make money, become an electrician, become a plumber, you know, but writing, it's such a hit and miss business. I have two friends that are very successful writers, and most of us, the bulk of us, are, I like to think we're the minor league writers, but we're still in the game, and you love the game, and you just love the game.

• 2:13:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, what I always try to tell veterans, because I think we were talking a little bit before the show, I mentioned that I get contacted by the children of a lot of Vietnam vets, who want to know what their dad did. And so I really encourage veterans, like, if you don't want to write a book, you don't want to go on a podcast, totally get it, understand, but write like 10 or 20 pages about your experience for your kids and your grandkids, and put it in a shoebox.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  I think if, I think if you talk to my kids, my oldest daughter will, you know, you'll ask what division he was with, she goes, oh, the one with the horsey. So, you know, but, you know, you look at him, he was a Ranger, it's like, you know, and then when you have a...

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• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  Like I have a Ranger hat up here that one of my team, or Charlie Ochoa, one of the guys, Rangers, really good guy, gave me when he and his wife came up to visit. And if you wear the hat, people go, "You're a Ranger?" I said, "Yeah." "Well, what time does the park close?"

• 2:15:14Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:15:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, so I was like, "Yeah, okay."

• 2:15:17Jack Murphy?

  What, you mentioned that you're working on a sequel to In for a Penny, In for a Pounding, is it? And there's a third in the Chasing Romeo series coming.

• 2:15:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's, I'm finishing editing right now on that one. It should be out either late December or first part of January.

• 2:15:32Jack Murphy?

  Oh, cool. Okay, so that's right around the corner.

• 2:15:35Speaker 03

  And it's, I sent it out for some reviews because I wanted to see, you know, non-veterans to see, can it, do you like, do people like the storyline?

• 2:15:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:15:47Speaker 03

  And I'm getting some really nice reviews on it. So it's, and I think vets, I think vets will like it because, you know, you're trying to be honest with it. It's like, you have some good people, you've got some lousy people. You've got some CIA people that are pretty good, you've got some that, you know.

• 2:16:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:04Speaker 03

  And I try to do my best to throw humor in there because, you know, and you guys know dang well that when it's miserable and you think that nothing's gonna get better, you hear some of the funniest lines that come out.

• 2:16:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. I think that this book absolutely, like, somebody who doesn't know what LURPS are, or what LURPS did, or unfamiliar with this sort of Vietnam recon experience, like, this is a book I would give them and recommend and, you know, and this is something I would give to an 18-year-old kid for Christmas, like.

• 2:16:37Speaker 03

  Oh, well.

• 2:16:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:16:38Speaker 03

  I appreciate that. There's, you know, Burford's book on Team Leaders, you got November Rangers from Vietnam, Gary Linder's book Eyes of the Eagle, Eyes Behind the Line, Phantom Warriors, Ken Miller's book Tiger the LRRP Dog.

• 2:16:52Jack Murphy?

  Oh, I love that novel so much.

• 2:16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I've got it. I have a Ken autographed one for me years ago.

• 2:16:58Jack Murphy?

  It's so, it's so good.

• 2:16:59Speaker 03

  It, you know, it's on my shelf and it's in my heart. Six Silent Min series. So, I'll recommend, in fact, I even got one here, that is, the First Cav put together a history of the LRRP Rangers from the time they were started, and it was in the voices of the individuals.

• 2:17:19Jack Murphy?

  That's cool.

• 2:17:19Speaker 03

  So, it's the history of the LRRP Rangers from the Vietnam, the First Cavalry Division, and it's by John LeBrun and Bill Carpenter. And my books, you know, when you're trying to write somebody else's story, you only see it through these lenses.

• 2:17:35Jack Murphy?

  Uh-huh.

• 2:17:35Speaker 03

  And when they're, and when you were talking about it earlier, you're correct, when you sit down and write in your own voice, your kids, your family members, your friends can see it, and it's in your voice. That's what I liked about Carpenter's book and LeBrun's book. It's these guys that never get their stories told. And, you know, people say Vietnam vets don't talk. You know, veterans, that's crap. You know, you go to a reunion, and you're remembering, you're kicking up stories with some of your buddies, and your family may never want to hear. And after after shouting that whiskey there on the table, you may want to talk more freely.

• 2:18:13Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:15Speaker 03

  But but you know, those veterans do talk. They talk to each other and veterans. And I've helped a couple vets write, work on their their books. Jerry Boyle, a gunship pilot, wrote a book called Apache Sunrise. And Jerry called me up one day and he called me grunt all the time and I call him Rotorhead. And he goes, hey, grunt, I want to, I want you to write my book. I'll tell you, you just write it. I go, Jerry, that's not how it works.

• 2:18:42Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Speaker 03

  And I'd say, I want you to, I sent him a blank calendar and I said, okay, every day I want you to write one page. And every day, put that calendar on your refrigerator or your bathroom mirror so you see it. Every day, you write one page. And then at the end of the year, you have 365 pages. You can get rid of 100 and you'll have enough for a book. And he goes, well, that's easy. And I said, yes, sir.

• 2:19:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, let's let's see. Yeah.

• 2:19:05Speaker 03

  I said, well, you know where you want to start and you know where you want to end. You arrived in Vietnam, you left Vietnam. Is that what you want to do? He goes, yeah. I said, well, that's the alphabet. Now fill in the rest of the letters. Get yourself index cards of B all the way through Y and not Z because Z is you're leaving. And start writing, writing down notes. So he called me up about a week later. He goes, I wrote 20 pages today, grunt. And I said, hey, good for you. He goes, I don't have to write anymore for a while. I said, Jerry, that's great. He called me up, you know, another week later, I have to get five more pages. Good for you. You're way ahead of schedule. Then about two weeks go by and nothing goes, I haven't written a damn word. You didn't tell me how hard this was. But the fact of the matter is, he got his book done. He got it published by Random House.

• 2:19:49Jack Murphy?

  Good for him. Yeah.

• 2:19:51Speaker 03

  Called Apache Sunrise and it's from a gunship pilot's point of view.

• 2:19:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, a lot of people don't get how much work it actually is to write a book.

• 2:20:00Speaker 03

  Writing is like self-imposed isolationism. You know, you're when you're sitting in, Jack, I'm looking at yours because you did a lot of research on weapons and places and and islands I never heard heard of until I had to Google, you know. I know where Naruun is now. I know what happened to Maurice, by the way. But as you're reading it, you realize all the research, whether it's Kazakhstan or whatever, you have to know, you have to be able to put the people in that position. And you have to write it enough and clearly enough so the non-military people looking at it can read it.

• 2:20:33Jack Murphy?

  Right. I did not probably do a great job of that on my first book.

• 2:20:39Speaker 03

  We're all guilty of that.

• 2:20:41Jack Murphy?

  It's a learning experience. Do we have questions for Craig?

• 2:20:45Speaker 05

  We do. So let me pull them up real quick.

• 2:20:48Jack Murphy?

  We have, so this is, this is, you know, going out live, Craig, so we have like viewers who are gonna have some questions for you here.

• 2:20:55Speaker 03

  Oh, I apologize to the viewers. But tell your viewers remembers Black Friday, so they got, you guys had a discount on a guest, right?

• 2:21:04Jack Murphy?

  You're 20% off.

• 2:21:06Speaker 05

  First off, Wendy Lane, thank you very much for joining our YouTube Tier One Operator.

• 2:21:12Speaker 05

  Blackhawks are on the way to pick you up. All right, Sully, thank you very much. I'll put questions on Patreon if I can to you. Of course, Sully. What do you think of Oliver Stone's film Platoon? Does it have a basis in reality?

• 2:21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. You know, Oliver Stone was with the First Cav Lurk Company. You guys know that, right?

• 2:21:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, he was a Vietnam veteran, yeah.

• 2:21:35Speaker 03

  He was with the First Cav Lurks before he went to the 25th Infantry Division.

• 2:21:38Speaker 05

  Okay, I didn't know that.

• 2:21:40Speaker 03

  And did you know that we had two people in the platoon named Barnes and Elias? In the unit?

• 2:21:46Speaker 05

  Oh, no. Really?

• 2:21:47Speaker 03

  Yeah. So I don't know if that, I don't know if that was memory or whether he just had it as a coincidence, but, you know, I walked out of the movie very angry and very upset because it showed murder, it showed rape, it showed, you know, fragging and all this other stuff that, granted, it did happen. If that happened to one unit...

• 2:22:12Speaker 03

  It never happened in the Ranger Cup.

• 2:22:13Jack Murphy?

  It's like all of the terrible things compressed into a two hour film, right?

• 2:22:17Speaker 05

  Right, right.

• 2:22:18Speaker 03

  And it's also for Hollywood, you know, you have to remember Hollywood is gonna do the sensational. Um, you guys remember the movie Midnight Express?

• 2:22:25Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:22:27Speaker 03

  Okay, and Oliver Stone wrote that.

• 2:22:28Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:22:29Speaker 03

  And Oliver Stone, remember the ending where he takes the Turkish jailer and slams his head into the Crotak? Well, that's not how the book ended. Uh, he didn't, the real guy didn't kill the guy, um, in, in his jailer. He found, he was on an island, he found a boat and he rode off the island. But Hollywood is gonna do what Hollywood does. They wanna sensationalize, they wanna do it. And, uh, what I liked about Stone's book was the technical advice from Dale Dye. He made these guys, you know, a bunch of Hollywood actors quit. They didn't wanna be in the movie because it was too tough in the Philippines.

• 2:23:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:08Speaker 03

  Uh, Stone and Dale Dye made them live out in the jungle. They cleared his place, they made him build, uh, bunkers, they had him live in the bunkers. They, they were eating sea rations, they were pulling guard duty, they were pulling patrols, they were burning shit. Uh, that has, and the dirt and the dust and the heat. Um, the only thing I didn't like about is the Viet Cong sneaking in at the night, you know, like ninjas.

• 2:23:33Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:23:34Speaker 03

  Now they did. Now, Viet Cong are like any other army in the world. When, there were times, uh, we would watch them walk down a trail at night with flashlights and radios. And, you know, they're going through dark areas, well, they can't see, they're not ninjas, they're like anybody else in the world. So, but Hollywood, being sensationalized, has to do what Hollywood does. Um, the, the actors, the actors, every one of those actors went on to become big names. Johnny Depp was, remember him as a young interpreter?

• 2:24:00Speaker 05

  Willem Dafoe?

• 2:24:02Speaker 03

  Willem Dafoe, Behringer.

• 2:24:04Jack Murphy?

  Behringer, yeah.

• 2:24:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. You know, Francisco Quinn, Lawrence Fishburne. Every one of those guys, you know, Charlie Sheen, every one of those guys had propelled them up to, you know, Hollywood's next, next adventure.

• 2:24:20Jack Murphy?

  I, I, as I was saying earlier, it's all, I'm dismayed that there hasn't been a movie about WURPS, a movie about MACV SOG, and I, I think the thing is, the, the sad thing is, I think American society is ready for it. I think our culture is ready for it. They're ready to, they're ready to see a movie about what their fathers and grandfathers did in Vietnam. But maybe the holdup is, is in Hollywood. Maybe Hollywood isn't ready for it.

• 2:24:47Speaker 03

  You know, it's, you know, we're not well thought of. Vietnam vets aren't well thought of. I mean, you're still, I'll see some of the reviews for my books and people will either hate you because you're a Vietnam vet, or they'll, they'll like you too much because you're a Vietnam vet. If someone tells me they enjoy the book, I, I really like that part, the best part. Because what I try to show is that it's humans, is that we're human beings caught up in it. We're young, 18, 19, 20-year-olds. You know, you had, may have a mature 22-year-old who's your platoon leader.

• 2:25:18Jack Murphy?

  Salty.

• 2:25:19Speaker 03

  Yeah, 22, 25 tops, and he was an old man as a captain. But most of the people we served with were just well-meaning, great people, good people.

• 2:25:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:29Speaker 03

  They didn't have to, they didn't have to have the finest of educations to be some of the finest soldiers you will ever see, or the finest people. I had a black platoon sergeant in Germany that I think his highest he went to was eighth grade. That guy could strip apart an M113 or M114, knew everything about it. Multiple tours of service in Vietnam and a great guy. Couldn't get promoted because he only had an eighth grade education, so he was a staff sergeant. But you look at that, it's like, You know, why can't you honor that service?

• 2:26:01Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Speaker 03

  Why can't you just, you know, appreciate the person?

• 2:26:04Speaker 05

  And, and you know, and there were so many, there were so many myths, I think, about Viet, about, you know, the Vietnam vets.

• 2:26:16Speaker 05

  You know, like, we still, I mean, I remember in, like, the late seventies, early, maybe probably, like, through the eighties, the idea of the Vietnam Vet and their post-traumatic stress, and, you know, working a normal job, and then all of a sudden, having a flashback and losing control, and, you know, that they were a danger to everybody around them. You know, just these ideas, these mistaken things that were attached to, you know, and now

• 2:26:47Speaker 03

  The veterans, yeah.

• 2:26:48Speaker 05

  You know, and now through studies, they know that, like, if you have post-traumatic stress, you're a bigger threat to yourself.

• 2:26:53Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:26:53Speaker 05

  Than you are to anybody around you.

• 2:26:56Speaker 03

  That's right. And, and the, and the stress that you experience in combat is not something that's, that's turned off very easily.

• 2:27:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:27:02Speaker 03

  You know, that, uh, when, when you hear a gun, when you hear a loud bang, and it's an explosion, when you guys are in combat, you know damn well, you're gonna react to it.

• 2:27:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:27:10Speaker 03

  And it's the same thing with the, I think with us Vietnam vets, we were treated so poorly when we came back.

• 2:27:16Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:27:16Speaker 03

  That, uh, it, it's a bitterness.

• 2:27:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:27:19Speaker 03

  It took me a long time to get over the bitterness of it, and, and then Hollywood didn't just help us with a lot of the movies.

• 2:27:24Speaker 05

  Right, yeah.

• 2:27:25Speaker 03

  And you kind of sit there, and, you know, and people, you know, I think, it's one of those things.

• 2:27:31Jack Murphy?

  I may be in a bit of a bubble, Craig, because of what I do, but I feel like there's a lot more love for you guys today than there was, you know, I, I know when you guys got back, it was not a, a very good homecoming, but I, I think you see, like, the, the meteoric rise, really, of all these, like, all these people are watching interviews about Mac Vi's son guys, and watching these interviews about-

• 2:27:52Speaker 03

  Oh, man, those, those guys were tremendous, man. Stryker, yeah, Meyer Stryker.

• 2:27:56Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, John, yeah, yeah, John, John's an amazing guy, but, I mean, that, these are getting so many views, that there's so much interest in it, I think says that there is a segment of, of contemporary American society that they're ready to hear your story.

• 2:28:13Speaker 03

  What the interesting thing is, when I came out with Chasing Romeo, I have fans now in Poland, in Ireland, in England, and these guys are Vietnam reenactors.

• 2:28:23Speaker 05

  Yeah, really? Oh, that's wild. Interesting.

• 2:28:27Speaker 03

  I've got invited to some Vietnam reenacting stuff and you almost have a flashback because, you know, these guys are, you know, they're, you know, they say, you want to come out to our event? And they're living in, you know, in bunkers and tents.

• 2:28:40Speaker 05

  Some of it is very convincing, too, when you see the pictures. Yeah.

• 2:28:44Speaker 03

  And they pay a lot of money for those uniforms and everything to look like it. And now the funniest thing I saw was a barbecue thing that was made out of a 55 gallon drum barrel. And it had Agent Orange on the side of the barrel.

• 2:28:59Speaker 05

  That's wild. You know, I'll tell you that, you know, I like from the GWOT perspective, that there was such a like cultural backlash against the way, I think almost a national shame that was held and a sense of guilt, the way Vietnamese or Vietnam veterans were treated, that even people who disagreed with why we were in Iraq or Afghanistan would go out of their way to say, I hate these wars, but I support the troops, right? Because

• 2:29:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:29:38Speaker 05

  And a lot of times when you meet people, they're like, oh, thank you for your service. You know they're saying it because it's, they feel like it's obligatory. And I think a lot of it comes from that national shame of how Vietnam veterans.

• 2:29:52Jack Murphy?

  Well, it's also because the Vietnam veterans were in like positions of power by the time you get to the early 2000s. Like they had rose up, grew society. And there was no way that they were ever going to treat us like they were treated.

• 2:30:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:30:05Jack Murphy?

  There's no way that was ever going to happen.

• 2:30:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, you had John McCain and you had a whole bunch of folks that had experienced things that when they came into it, they were looking out maybe for veterans a lot better. I know that, I mean, we, I had heard when I was in college, I dropped out of college a couple of times. You get tired of being called a baby killer.

• 2:30:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:30:23Speaker 03

  You know, you get tired of all that. And you got that. You got that from the teachers, the instructors, the professors. And, you know, and so I'd drop out of college and I'd go back or I'd take courses. I finally got, my degree looks like a patchwork quilt. I finally, you know, which by the way, I went to night school, so I only get smarter after the sun goes down. So, but what I've learned is that over time, perceptions change. And the people who were against the war, were anti-war, no longer, I think they view it as failed diplomatic, you know, diplomatic policy as opposed to the GIs themselves.

• 2:31:01Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:31:02Speaker 03

  The GIs, the young soldiers, especially the young men and women, what you're asking them to do in Fallujah, in Afghanistan, in Vietnam, in God knows wherever, is these ugly, ugly jobs to satisfy some politician and decision who got you into that place.

• 2:31:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:31:22Speaker 03

  You know, we don't dictate policy, but we have to carry out the policy.

• 2:31:25Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:31:26Speaker 03

  And then who the biggest critics are when it comes to rules of engagement.

• 2:31:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, I just want to ask you one more question. Is there, is there any resentment or grumbling or whatever at all from the Vietnam veteran community regarding the way GWAT vets, like, were getting attention about the suicides, were getting attention about the post-traumatic, you know, where, we didn't necessarily get ticker tape parades either, but there, but there is definitely more of a national focus. At least, even if it's just for show, right? Even if it's just, again, coming from the, sort of this national

• 2:32:09Speaker 05

  guilt, this subliminal guilt for the way Vietnam veterans, is there any, I don't know, do you guys or any of the guys in the community look at the way the GWAT vets get addressed and treated and go, oh, like, those lucky, like...

• 2:32:27Speaker 03

  I, I, I heard it a little bit, but not much. I think most of my buddies, my immediate friends, we're proud of you guys. We're proud that they had yellow ribbons out there. We're proud of the fact that you were getting some recognition for the jobs you were doing because there was a little bit of that bitterness of, of, you know, why didn't it happen to us?

• 2:32:47Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:32:47Speaker 03

  You know, you, you gotta, times moved on. And I think I was, my daughter, my oldest daughter spent 20 years in the air force and she was in those war zones. I was scared shitless for her, I'll be honest. Yeah, as a father, you know, you're worried about your kids in combat. And, but I knew that they were doing good jobs over there. I knew they were doing their best to help people. And, and as I said, it's, soldiers have to, have to carry out failed diplomacy. Whatever State Department and whatever the president tosses the people into, you have to deal with it. And they're not getting shot at. Their kids are not getting

• 2:33:27Speaker 03

  shot at. You know, it's more often than not your neighbor's kids and somebody else and, you know, you look at it right now, you don't have too many people joining the military.

• 2:33:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:33:38Speaker 03

  I think, I think, I think everybody should join the military. You know, I learned how to make a bed, for God's sakes, you know?

• 2:33:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:33:45Speaker 03

  I pick up garbage once a week on the beach. I learned from something about police call in the military.

• 2:33:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 2:33:51Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:33:51Speaker 05

  And, and that's one of the things that like the military gives you is if you see a piece of trash near, near a trash can on the street, you're, you're likely to go pick it up. Like, you're gonna police it up.

• 2:34:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. But it's the little things you don't even think of. Or the, you know, the inspiration you got from some lieutenants or some captain that said, kid, you ought to go to college when you get out. Or your, or a first sergeant, sergeant major saying, use your GI bill. Make sure you use your GI bill.

• 2:34:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:17Speaker 03

  And I know a lot of vets that just don't.

• 2:34:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:20Speaker 03

  You know, they, they won't go to the VA. And we all have issues. I've got, I've had about six leg surgeries after I got shot.

• 2:34:27Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:34:27Speaker 03

  Over the years. Now, because I'm geezerly, it's like, okay, how can I make my life? How can I enjoy my time now that I have left? How can I, you know, how can I keep writing? How can I do some good things with my family, for ourselves, to enjoy the time we have left?

• 2:34:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:41Speaker 03

  And I would tell all veterans now, be nicer to yourself.

• 2:34:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:45Speaker 03

  Don't kill yourself. Kill that negative thought.

• 2:34:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:34:48Speaker 03

  You know, kill that negative thought. If you're having a tough time at one location, And with some people, maybe you need to change that location and and get away from those dark feelings because, you know, late at night, we'll get them. We all get them. You know, late at night, you remember who was lost, remember how they were lost.

• 2:35:07Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:35:07Speaker 03

  And then when you see the cut and run things that they do, you know, pulling out of Afghanistan or Iraq or whatever.

• 2:35:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:35:14Speaker 03

  You sit there going, you know, did we really help anybody? Were we really there? You know, and you know you did.

• 2:35:21Speaker 05

  Right. And and you know, the interesting thing about both Vietnam and Afghanistan in particular is it was the veterans, it was the people who had worked with, you know, the yards or the Nong or whomever, you know, whomever else. And then the veterans who had worked with, you know, the Afghan, you know, soldiers.

• 2:35:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:35:42Speaker 05

  That were like, we have people we need to get out because and in our in our government, our our government, like, I don't know why any country or, you know, indigenous group ever trust our government, because we do not have a good history of of taking care of the people who took care of us.

• 2:35:59Speaker 03

  That's an excellent point, Dave. We were, I was talking with a few of the other veterans at the reunion, we were talking about that exact thing, is that how do you get people to trust you when you say, if you look at Afghanistan, when we left, all these wonderful people who really put their lives on the line to help us and to help their country become a free country.

• 2:36:19Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:36:19Speaker 03

  To help their women be able to go to school, be able to vote, you know, and what do we do? We left them there.

• 2:36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:26Speaker 03

  And we know that they were getting executed. The veterans who've gone back in there, what is that, that pineapple express or whatever they call it?

• 2:36:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:36:33Speaker 03

  God, God bless those guys. God bless them.

• 2:36:35Speaker 05

  Yeah, we had Scott Mann on the show.

• 2:36:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:36:38Speaker 03

  Yeah. I haven't got to that. I haven't got to that one yet. I'm working my way through all of them.

• 2:36:42Speaker 05

  That's a lot.

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  I'm cherry picking.

• 2:36:44Speaker 05

  What else do we have for Craig? Uh, Soli, thank you very much. What do you think of people who avoided the draft? And he said Muhammad Ali, but we had Trump, Biden, Clinton, like, like, you know, it was a thing, right, during the draft?

• 2:36:59Speaker 03

  It was a thing. It was, um.

• 2:37:02Speaker 03

  I enlisted, you know, because I came from a military family and I, uh, I was, I just wanted to enlist. I wanted to be a Marine, couldn't be a Marine. And even after I joined, by the way, and I got down to the, I have to put this in here. You know, when you get to your physical and you're unaware where you're going? Yeah. Yeah. And you're going through a hundred guys at a time. We had the Marine guys going by, counting every other fifth guy, pulling him out of line, saying, you're a Marine, you're a Marine. So the guy in front of me was number five. He says, you're a Marine. The guy goes, I don't want to be a Marine. I said, I do. And I, I said, I'll go with you. And I started going with him. And then the Army guy came back. He goes, you would listen to the Army. You're not going anywhere. And, uh, it, you know, I, I laugh about it, but, um, you know, it was the uniform. Had nothing to do with the Marines itself. It was that dress blue uniform. Yeah.

• 2:37:47Speaker 03

  You know, uh, my buddy who was a, a Blackfoot Indian that, that went to high school with at Chief South High School. He came back after, uh, uh, getting wounded at Khe Sanh. And he had this beautiful dress blue uniform and every girl in the school was just eyes focused on him. You know, it's kind of like, I didn't want to be Marine. I wanted the girls to look at me. So let's be honest, but, uh, yeah, I, I think, uh, yeah, that, that was, that was an interesting, interesting turn, but, you know, the military, uh, it, it has its good points and it's done a lot for us. And, uh, I think the draft, at the time, we, I remember a lot of people in college, when I came back from Vietnam, they were telling me,

• 2:38:32Speaker 03

  uh, oh, you were too stupid to get out of going Vietnam. You heard that? And then I would look at those people and I'd say, uh, I'd politely say, you know, fuck off. And, um, um, I'm swearing, I apologize to people that I found out there, but, um, it's, it's not that. I, I came from a military family. My dad was very proud. He grew up in, in the depression. They had nothing. And the Coast Guard gave him a job and gave him a career. And so, um, I think every citizen owns, should.

• 2:39:02Speaker 03

  Do service, you know, if you don't want to be in uniform, go work in the Peace Corps.

• 2:39:06Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 2:39:07Speaker 03

  But go work in something and do something to help, you know, help buy your stake in being a citizen.

• 2:39:12Jack Murphy?

  Do you have any particular heartburn about people who dodged the draft when the draft was a thing?

• 2:39:20Speaker 03

  Uh, no, I have heartburns about their reasoning behind it. You heard a lot of, um, uh, the war was wrong and that's why I dodged it. You know, did you really dodge it because you were wrong or because you didn't want to go? You know, what was your reasoning behind it? Uh, some people were

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• 2:40:22Speaker 03

  Scared, they didn't want to go. And I understand being scared, all of us were scared. And, uh, but I still, my respect is for the guys who went and put their hands up. By the way, some of the finest soldiers I ever met, draftees. And some of the guys who ended up with career military, start off as draftees. You know, and, um, um, so, so, yeah, I mean, uh,

• 2:40:45Jack Murphy?

  I believe the term, the term Ken Miller used to describe the draft dodgers that suddenly started talking tough after the war was over. I think the term he used was bellicose pussies.

• 2:41:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would have to say that's correct. You know, it's, uh, I'm trying to be diplomatic and, uh, you know, if you don't want to fight, that's fine, you know, but just be, just be honest in your reasoning behind it. You know, if you told me that you studied about Ho Chi Minh and the Vietnamese and their, you know, how many wars they were in since, you know, the last 2,000 years and why the French, the Japanese, blah, blah, blah. If you tell me you something you knew the history of the time and that was your reasoning for not going, then I can believe you. You had a crisis, crisis of conscience or something like that? I don't, I don't know, I don't know anybody that committed war crimes over there. Right. You know, we fought against, you know, people will say, yeah, you committed a crime just by going there, but we fought against guys who were coming at us with machine guns, with bayonets. Right.

• 2:41:45Speaker 03

  Um, and, uh, you know, our people, when someone's coming out with a, with, shooting at you with a dish gun, when someone is coming at you with an RPD, when someone is hitting, firing an RPG-7, hitting you with mortars and, uh, you know, 122 could, what, Katusha rockets, um, or with, you guys had more, I think more IEDs than we ever had. Yeah. But, you know, the, the booby traps. Yeah. I never saw, I saw one booby trap and I was over there and I, we were laughing. My, my Vietnamese scout and I were just laughing because they put a grenade, um, in a can and they used a string and they, they hired, they hit, tried to hit the ankle length string with a piece of vine that was green at one time and then it was a week later, so it was all brown. It died, yeah.

• 2:42:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you look at it and he's laughing and, and, you know, he says, ah, must be North Vietnamese, uh, city boy, you know, so, but that's the only one I saw over there. I, I, you know, um, uh, so, yeah, yeah, each war, each war is different. I, I would say that, um, for people fighting, um, if you're fighting for a good cause, and that's the other thing, never vote for a politician who's going to send. Your kids to a war zone when they won't send their own.

• 2:42:57Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:42:58Speaker 03

  You know, and uh, the, and, and vote for the person who's actually gonna try to do the best for the country. And not the one who's gonna, you know, I dislike all these politicians who end up millionaires while they're in office.

• 2:43:10Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:43:10Speaker 03

  And then they, or they try to cut veterans benefits afterwards.

• 2:43:14Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:43:14Speaker 03

  Um, you know, it's, serve your country, serve your family, serve your, you know, serve yourselves as best you can. But come on, take some pride. You got that black beret hanging up on there. You knew damn well at one time, man, you were the stud. You knew damn well when you finished the Q course, you came from out of Camp McCall, man, you had that green beret. When they presented that to you, was, how did that feel?

• 2:43:38Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:43:38Speaker 03

  Jack, how did that feel?

• 2:43:39Speaker 05

  You feel like you're on top of the world, right?

• 2:43:41Speaker 03

  Exactly. And you're wearing it, it's kind of, you're proud of that. You get that black beret, you go, I'm a Ranger.

• 2:43:46Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:43:47Speaker 03

  And it means something.

• 2:43:48Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  You know, when General Roberts gave us our berets and our scrolls, you know. Now that, that's the other part about, I'll get to the Vietnam part that I disliked about the army. After we left Vietnam, uh, we couldn't wear our scrolls and we couldn't wear the black berets anymore. So that was a no-no. The army did not recognize Rangers until 1974. So, um, uh, that was one of those things. Well, and you're not really a Ranger, you were just a LRRP in Vietnam.

• 2:44:12Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:44:13Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 2:44:14Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:44:14Speaker 03

  Um, and it took me a long time to get over that little bit of bitterness, cause I lost some good teammates and I served with some really good people.

• 2:44:21Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:44:22Speaker 03

  And I'll, I'll proudly, every chance I get, I'm gonna praise them as much as I can.

• 2:44:26Speaker 05

  Hell yeah. Well, and the, and the thing is, is like, big army, like, the Ranger Regiment would never say that. The Ranger Regiment would never say that you weren't Rangers, right? I mean, you're part of, you're part of their legacy.

• 2:44:38Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:44:38Speaker 05

  It's the big army that, you know, you know, is all caught up in that kind of stuff.

• 2:44:44Speaker 03

  I almost had a tear in my eye out at the, the fifth, third anniversary because everybody was going out of their way to make us feel welcome in the second bat. Uh, Hotel Company Colors went to the second bat. So they recognized us being as Rangers and it's like, I, I never felt more welcome at a place in my life, you know, it's like, oh my God, these guys are, you know, it's like, I told my wife, I said, you know, maybe we did some good, you know?

• 2:45:10Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, Solly, thank you very much. Uh, X A S, uh, let me read this, okay?

• 2:45:18Speaker 05

  Okay, um.

• 2:45:23Speaker 05

  He has two questions here that are kind of this, I'm gonna read them together. The first one is ex SAS soldier Eddie Stone said on the show SAS Survival Secrets. If you can soldier in a jungle environment, you can basically soldier anywhere in any environment. And then, do you agree, should the US insured troops do more jungle training to produce better soldiers? Because we shut down our jungle training program.

• 2:45:54Jack Murphy?

  Uh, it's, no, it's, they reopened it in Hawaii.

• 2:45:57Speaker 05

  Oh, they did, okay.

• 2:45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, the 25th, I think the 25th over there reopened it. Yes, you should train for every environment. Because, you know, and I don't know how you guys, I'm not laughing, I'm just sitting, I'm shaking my head. I don't know how you guys could train in the winter. Cold drives me nuts. You know, your desert environment, your, whatever environment, you guys, you guys belong to that era where you actually could do it all. You guys fast roped, it didn't matter where you went, you're going in. We were good in the jungle.

• 2:46:32Jack Murphy?

  The modern, the modern army is interesting in the sense that, you know, we're probably the only army that has a truly global mandate. And our soldiers have to be prepared to fight in the snow, to fight in the desert, to fight in the jungle, to fight in urban areas, right?

• 2:46:48Speaker 03

  I will, I have one more funny Vietnam thing about it, because I want to say about Rangers. We captured three North Vietnamese soldiers. And we were flown into the border area, and there was a stack of rifles on top of this bunker. And one of our guys went over and snatched up all the rifles. And then our Vietnamese scout talked these three North Vietnamese soldiers to come out, and we took them prisoner. So I was bringing them out, you know, prisoner. You know, you're giving them C rations because you're gonna make them walk point out. Because, you know, you don't want to trip a booby trap or anything else. So they don't want to trip it. And we've got out there, we're waiting for the helicopters coming in, and of course, you're, you know, you're tying them up and whatnot.

• 2:47:32Speaker 03

  And we had the interpreter, so Ed and I, we had our Ranger scrolls, we're going, so who are you guys really afraid of? You afraid of the LERP, the Rangers, Special Forces? And you're pointing to you and you want them to nod. You want to get the enemy to say, "Yes, we were afraid of you." And through the interpreters, all three of them said, "The Marines."

• 2:47:56Speaker 03

  And I said, "Would you ask him why?" And he says, "They said they're all crazy." So that's all for the Marine audience out there.

• 2:48:05Jack Murphy?

  I mean, there's parts in parts of Asia where people seriously believed that in order to become a Marine, you had to kill a member of your family. There's all this propaganda that...

• 2:48:16Speaker 03

  No, that's only in Special Forces.

• 2:48:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:48:20Speaker 03

  Dave and I don't do that.

• 2:48:22Speaker 05

  Exactly, exactly. I just want to say, though, that there is something about the jungle, right? So I think two big tests of people is one, water, water operations. Like, it takes a lot out of you. And the other is jungle operations. Jungle operations are physically and tactically some of the most challenging environments to work in. And I mean, some elements, like the SAS, they still use jungle environments as part of their selection and training process, right?

• 2:49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, Training Team Brunei does that, yeah.

• 2:49:07Speaker 05

  There's something very specific about the jungle that it's incredibly... And not saying the desert doesn't have its own challenges, and there aren't challenges everywhere, but the jungle really is sort of a dividing line in being able to operate tactically a lot of times.

• 2:49:27Speaker 03

  It's primordial. I mean, you get out there and everything there wants to eat you or kill you. You know, it's like fighting a war in a zoo without bars. You know, with Vietnam, we were carrying a dead guy out one night. We had to go through a swamp. We're trying to evade this area that's going to get hit the next morning. The Air Force is going to bomb the crap out of it. So we're moving through this swamp and we're carrying this dead guy, dead GI, with us. And we're moving, we're getting to the sandbar where we're going to be picked up a little bit later. So the helicopters came in. And as the helicopters were coming in, the pilots were saying, "Okay, we're going to come in over on the other side. We'll be coming in from this direction to pick you up. And we're going to avoid the crocodiles."

• 2:50:12Speaker 03

  And we were going, what did he say? And that shocked the heck out of us because up until that time, I never knew there were crocodiles in the swamp in Vietnam. And we're, we're up to chess level carrying a dead guy, you know, and, and, um, um, you know, it's, you could hear tiger growls at night. You have leeches. God help you if you went, when you went through a stream, you have to check your, your armpit, your groin area, your back, because the leeches would attach to you. And sometimes they become your warm little friends because the little skinny leeches, the more blood they take, the warmer they become. So it's like, okay, I'm using them as heat pads. Um, the jungle is very hot in the daytime and it's like walking, I always call it like going through a sauna with your uniform on.

• 2:50:57Speaker 03

  And then at night it, uh, it gets cold and wet. So the next, and keep in mind as we never slept, we never had a camp, never had a fire. So you're, you're just laying out there and you're just, you're kind of shaking and cold in the morning.

• 2:51:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:51:10Speaker 03

  So, um, the jungle was, I grew up in Florida and Georgia, 11 years as a kid down there. I played in swamps, the swamps didn't scare me, snakes didn't scare me. Um, I should have been more frightened by the snakes.

• 2:51:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:51:23Speaker 03

  Um, but you know, we had wild pigs in Georgia, feral hogs that would chase you. So, I mean, the, the woods didn't scare me as much as I said acne, you know, when you're 20 years old. When I got shot, it was, it was horrible. I lost everything I had and I lost February, Miss, Miss February from 1970, the fold out Playboy, you know, magazine, you know? And at 19, I really thought women, you know, came and were folded in thirds and had staples.

• 2:51:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:51:52Speaker 03

  But, uh, uh, you know, it's, um, you don't have those, the jungle and living on fire support bases that are mud, you know, it was, uh,

• 2:52:04Speaker 03

  You guys came up with a, it was your generation that came up with the phrase embrace the suck.

• 2:52:09Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:52:10Speaker 03

  And that, you know, I, I, I think that is the most perfect phrase I've ever heard. Because like World War One, I think soldiers everywhere, they're laying in mud, they're moving in mud. And then someone, you know, some major will fly in a helicopter going, why aren't your boots clean?

• 2:52:24Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:26Speaker 03

  And you're living in mud. So, uh, uh, it's the harsher conditions. I, I, I, I think we, we take, we took some glee in it.

• 2:52:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have to, right? Like that's, it's your coping mechanism.

• 2:52:38Jack Murphy?

  You guys, you guys take pride in it. Like you do the mission that other people can't.

• 2:52:42Speaker 03

  Oh, we hated the rimps. I mean, we hated the rimps down in the

• 2:52:45Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:46Speaker 03

  Because we desperately wanted to be them.

• 2:52:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:50Speaker 03

  You know, we wanted that job at the snack bar.

• 2:52:53Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:52:56Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:52:56Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I mean, there were times I was regretting my decision to go from

• 2:53:00Jack Murphy?

  To volunteer.

• 2:53:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, and to go into infantry. But you know what? I am so proud that I went infantry and I'm so proud I had a chance to, to be a LERP. And I'm so proud that I had a chance to, um, serve with Apache troop as well. Some of the finest people I ever met, good, good people. And, uh, you know, it, it, have our stories heard now to have people saying they want to hear them. That's, that's something as well. Cause back in the day, nobody wanted to hear anything.

• 2:53:26Speaker 05

  Yeah. Um, DB Cooper, thank you very much, uh, to our tier, as a tier one operator. Uh, thanks for subscribing to the channel. Um, M. Corbin, uh, why is ice cream important from rail boosting? And you mentioned the steaks. Why, why is food, simple pleasures like ice cream or steak or whatever? Why is that so important when you're out there like that?

• 2:53:49Speaker 03

  It is, um, you know, we, as LERP missions, we only had sea rations or LERP dried, dehydrated rations. And we didn't, we, by the way, you didn't have, always have water. So sometimes you had to get your water out of a stream that was muddy. You threw your purification tablets in there and it, you know, when you're, you're eating your food and it tastes like a, a swimming pool.

• 2:54:08Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:54:08Speaker 03

  And, um, so when you got back and someone was barbecuing, cause we didn't Have a mess hole. We only had mess tents and they would, you know, they'd use grills. They would be out there charcoal grills and cooking stuff and you, you had some cooks that made some amazing things and little things that would, would just change your whole attitude.

• 2:54:27Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:54:27Speaker 03

  Uh, you had beer at five cents a can, you know, but back then, um, we could drink. I wasn't 21. That's the other thing. I came back from Vietnam. I was a sergeant, a Purple Hearts, a couple of other medals and stuff and still had shrapnel in me and I couldn't get a beer in the, in the airport. Uh, when in fact they treated me like an adult in Vietnam.

• 2:54:47Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:54:47Speaker 03

  The army, army treated me better than the civilian world, but um, at that, at that time. But food, oh my goodness, when you got a cook who could make something, you know, out of nothing, or you had a GI buddy who, who suddenly came in with, uh, you know, spicy sauce and lemon, lemon pepper ingredients, you know, and, and you're pouring them into your C rations and, and it's kind of like, well, that's not bad. And then you realize later, you know, the food was crap, but at the time it was wonderful.

• 2:55:15Speaker 05

  Right.

• 2:55:16Speaker 03

  Ice cream, an ice cream machine. Uh, but we didn't, you know, if, if you had a generator, then you could have an ice cream machine. Uh, and, uh, the one time you would get ice cream, you, it was like, woo, you know? It's not Christmas, but it is.

• 2:55:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:55:31Jack Murphy?

  Dee, do we have any Patreon questions?

• 2:55:37Jack Murphy?

  That's all the ones on YouTube?

• 2:55:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. Well, Dee's looking that up. You know, it's funny cause I grew up watching the A team and, and it was, it was one of the things that made me like think about the military. But you know, you talk about the guy who comes in with the spicy sauce and you know, face, right? From the A team. There was, there was always that guy everywhere. Like you don't know, you didn't know how he was doing it, but he was always working these like back alley deals and would show up with stuff like, how did you get this? He's, ah, don't worry about it.

• 2:56:09Speaker 03

  You know, I told you about that sergeant major that I was working with with customs. And he was a command sergeant major at Tainan Base Camp. And, uh, you know, he was, one day we're talking, he goes, "Well, you're with the camp." And I said, uh, "Sergeant, you know, I was." And he said, uh, he says, "Oh, we had this rogue unit at the end near the, you know, near the dump." And boy, they were nothing more than pirates and brigands and...

• 2:56:30Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:30Speaker 03

  And I said, "Oh, you're talking about what Apache, I think you're Apache troop, the first of the ninth?" "Oh, man, they blah, blah, blah, stole my Jeep." And I said, "Are you talking about the one with the Lincoln Continental, um, fiberglass thing on the back?" And he goes, "How did you know that?" And I said, "'Cause I was in Apache troop." "And my buddy had stolen his Jeep." "But you're not stealing, you're borrowing."

• 2:56:53Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try to get Ray Martinez on the story. But I, I read, I read a book that has some legend about how he stole a truck full of Crown Royale.

• 2:57:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I, you know, um, the GIs we're talking about, you know, that maybe we might not have at our, our family dinners, were some incredible people. I know one pilot that stole a, um, a tray warmer, a, a, for the mess tent. And it was hanging out the size of the Uwe. But he went down and he somehow, yeah, I mean, you don't, you know, you're borrowing. You're not taking the equipment out of the country.

• 2:57:31Jack Murphy?

  Right, right. You're not selling it. You're not selling it on eBay. You're, uh, yeah, re-appropriating. Yeah, re-appropriating.

• 2:57:38Speaker 03

  We had, we had a whole bunch of things, uh, Jeeps and mules and, and, uh, probably a deuce and a... Cause, uh, even in the war zone, they had, uh, um, inspections, you know, uh, general, uh, you know, what was it? The, uh, what was that, the, uh, uh, what was that general inspection they did? You know, they, the bean counters would come around and they'd check all your stuff to make sure you had...

• 2:58:00Jack Murphy?

  Oh, like accountability and everything, yeah.

• 2:58:02Speaker 03

  Yes. And, and one of us would be given the task of driving the deuce and a half with all the stolen items in the truck around the camp while the, the bean counters came in from Saigon, checked everything over, like, "You should have one Jeep, you should have one deuce and a half, you should have one three-quarter truck." And it's like, "You bet, you bet."

• 2:58:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, we got it.

• 2:58:21Speaker 03

  And then when they, with, yeah, then when they fly out, we'd bring back in all the stuff that we borrowed, you know, and, um, and/or it was borrowed from us later. You know, if you scrape under some of those bumpers, you'd find a lot of unit names.

• 2:58:34Jack Murphy?

  What do we got there, Dee?

• 2:58:36Speaker 02

  So we have Louis Vasquez. What was it like serving with Dave Torres?

• 2:58:42Speaker 03

  Oh, Vasquez, thank you for that question. Dave Torres was a wonderful Ranger. He was one of my buddies that died on November 17, 1969. And I loved Dave. Dave was... You have to understand, when you have a teammate, you know, your teammates, you get to know those guys really well. Dave was one of those just really good people. He and Julia Zaporozak were the ones that died on that day. And yeah, it's kind of heartbreaking. There's not a November 17 that doesn't go by where I say a little prayer to those guys. Dave

• 2:59:24Speaker 03

  probably saved our team at the moment. When one of the NVA started walking in us, Dave actually shot him with the M14, and then he was shot. And it was a very tough time. So, Mr. Vasquez, thank you for that question. Dave Torres was a genuine American hero. Dave Torres was a wonderful Ranger, and Dave Torres should always be remembered and respected.

• 2:59:53Speaker 02

  Another one from Israel. "Very crazy GI was one of the first Vietnam books I've ever read. Thank you for writing it. Did the Cav Lurps ever utilize novel weapons like the 101st Lurps with the sawed-off M14s or shotguns? Or was there just a strong preference to the ex-M177s and M16s?"

• 3:00:16Speaker 03

  Never underestimate the minds of a GI. We actually had a crew that took a minigun and attached it to a Jeep. And they put it on, we had, you have to pull bunker duty at night. So a guard duty at night. You had four bunkers or four or five that our unit was attached to that you had to pull guard duty on at night. And they backed a Jeep up there. You put a 1,500 round can of ammo in it and they hooked it up so that the gas pedal determined the rate of fire. And so every night they would give you a mad minute. So headquarters would, you know, it was go, okay, we want you to, you can fire up.

• 3:00:57Speaker 04

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• 3:01:11Speaker 00

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• 3:01:41Speaker 03

  You know, you're gonna do a mad minute when this flare goes up. Someone would knock a flare and all around the perimeter, people would open up with what they had. And these guys, they went through 1,500 rounds in about 10 seconds, you know? And it was, you know, it was like, what the hell was that? GIs cutting off, M79s cutting off the shoulder stock to it to make it a pistol grip of a M79 grenade launcher. So it became like a shot, a giant shotgun shell, or a giant shotgun, that you could fire flak rounds in it. And in the jungle, that became a great little shotgun. GIs cutting off barrels. Yeah, they cut off barrels. And what happens when you cut off the barrels? Flames come out. And at night, and if you're in firefight at night, that directs all the enemy fire towards you.

• 3:02:28Speaker 03

  Barrels, M60s, if you didn't fire in controlled burst, they would melt, they would turn orange. And in the dark jungles, you could tell an idiot that wasn't using controlled fire, you know, controlled burst. And if that barrel went, you may, hopefully you had a spare barrel that you were supposed to carry. But if that barrel went, you were down one M60 machine gun.

• 3:02:51Speaker 02

  Alright, one more from Sully. Would you meet any former enemies in person? Uh, would you travel back to Vietnam?

• 3:03:00Speaker 03

  I was just back in Vietnam six months ago, seven months ago. And I was going back, uh, I had a beer with a bunch of, bunch of guys and, um, I was trying to find the guy that shot me. I was, wanted to buy him a beer for being a shitty shot. And, um, um, the Vietnamese are very welcoming and open to us now. They were, been invaded by the Chinese for what, 2,000 years? Uh, Ho Chi Minh's famous, famous statement, um, when the French came back in after World War II, Ho Chi Minh said, uh, when people are saying, "We don't want the French in", he said, "It's better to eat shit, French shit for another 200 years than Chinese shit for another thousand." And, um, so, I mean, even after the Vietnam War, what, 79, 80?

• 3:03:44Speaker 03

  The Vietnamese came across and attacked the northern, or the Chinese came across and attacked the northern provinces. So, um, yeah, I, I had a good time there. I spoke with a lot of young Vietnamese. Uh, they were coming up to take my picture because I, I'm the only guy in, in, in Vietnam who has white hair. Everybody else dies or black. Um, they are, they're very welcoming, they're very hardworking people. Uh, I did, I went up to the Nui Ba Den Mountain, uh, the Black Virgin Mountain where I spent a couple, you know, a couple of nights there at one time and, and right now it's an amusement park, not a, it's a, um, it's a Buddhist temple.

• 3:04:26Speaker 03

  Uh, you go into this giant parking lot, you buy a ticket, it takes you to an escalator. You go up to a, um, funicular, uh, a cable car that takes you to the top of the mountain to the snack bar atop. And, uh, there's gift stores and there's five stories of different temples and everything. Beautiful garden. Uh, I had one guy ask me, he said, uh, "Have you been on the mountain before?" I said, "Yeah, but the gift shop was closed."

• 3:04:53Speaker 03

  Uh, the, the, I, I like, actually I like Vietnam, other than the heat. The heat is still the same. Uh, very, very hot. Uh, the Vietnamese people were very welcoming. They're very warm. They look at our war as being a blip on the map. Uh, they have a lot of war museums because that's how they make it make make some money. You pay to go in the war museums, but uh,

• 3:05:15Jack Murphy?

  That's what uh, Larry Chambers said that. He said that, you know, Vietnam veterans are very much welcome there nowadays.

• 3:05:23Speaker 03

  They, I had some great talks with local Vietnamese and, and uh, you know, if you take a look, I mean, what they have, I mean, if, when you go there, you're gonna find Starbucks, you're gonna find Amazon Fresh, you're gonna find uh, you know, pizza shops, uh, kids in jeans, kids listening to music, kids singing rap for God's sakes. You're gonna run into everything. So our culture, uh, what people hated um, about uh, the war, they didn't necessarily hate about the uh, the culture that uh, was there. You know, the French, the French left them with great pastries, by the way.

• 3:05:59Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, when, when you look back on it, I mean, do you kind of admire the Vietnamese and their, their struggle for independence and that they fought the Japanese and the French and they fought us. They stood up to the strongest military in the world. I mean, it seems like they really wanted to be their own country.

• 3:06:18Speaker 03

  I, I read a good book, uh, what was it? Uh, Operation Copperhead or something about uh, was it Aaron Banks and those guys with the OSS? They worked with Ho Chi Minh in World War II, fighting against the Japanese.

• 3:06:29Jack Murphy?

  I think so.

• 3:06:30Speaker 03

  And one of the OSS guys says that uh, Ho Chi Minh had a picture of Abraham Lincoln on his wall and that the North Vietnamese Declaration of Independence is basically a copy of ours. And we did not work with him because he was a socialist and a communist. Yeah, we went with uh, the other folks. Um, you know, the South Vietnamese Kennedy was a Catholic. He had a, what the Archbishop or Bishop in, in Saigon was Catholic. The Diem brothers were Catholic. Uh, so um, that had something maybe perhaps to do with us being there. I don't know. Uh, I don't know enough of their history. All I do know is from the history that I've read and what I've studied and the Vietnamese I spoke with is that they treat us well. They're

• 3:07:12Speaker 03

  are nice people. Uh, they were fighting for the independence of their country and um, they have it now and they seem to be making the most and best with it. They're also good trading partners, by the way. We do a lot of trade with Vietnam now.

• 3:07:26Speaker 03

  Do I agree with all their politics? No. Do I agree with our politics? Heck, no.

• 3:07:32Speaker 03

  I'm an independent, you know?

• 3:07:33Speaker 05

  But, you know, but there were two sides in Vietnam. Were, I mean, were the South Vietnamese, in your opinion, also fighting for the independence of their country from communism?

• 3:07:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I believe, I believe there's many sides. I mean, you talk about the Nung Chinese, the mountain yards. The mountain yards or the Dega, what the French call the mountain yards, but the indigenous people. They were looked down sometimes as being second-class citizens in their own country. The, um, the South Vietnamese are a different family than the North, the Trin. If you look at the Trin and the Nguyen, the Nguyen family, if you will, the Trin up north and then the Nguyen down south. And they've fought each other for hundreds of years. And if you look at the wars over Vietnam over the last 1,500 years, there always to be a struggle. It was mostly with China, by the way, trying to take them over.

• 3:08:28Speaker 03

  Most people don't realize the Vietnamese actually fought off the Mongol invasion.

• 3:08:32Speaker 05

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 3:08:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was, I found that little tidbit and I thought, ah, this, you know, this, it tells me a lot about their tenacity.

• 3:08:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, these people like to fight.

• 3:08:42Speaker 03

  And I, and I'll tell you what I respect about the North Vietnamese, was when Cambodia was going on and Pol Pot was murdering all this, all this people.

• 3:08:55Speaker 03

  The Vietnamese went in there and stopped that war. So in the 90s, the Vietnamese ended up taking out and forcing those guys to stop. So, I mean, the Kemmerouges were actually attacking some southern provinces. So the North Vietnamese said, you know, they've been fighting the war, so they said, like hell you will, and they pushed back in. So while I, while they were adversaries, I wouldn't, I cannot trash the way they fought. And I cannot trash their bravery. When those guys were coming at us with bandits and we were shooting them, you know, they were doing this for their country. We were fighting for our country, but you know what? We were also fighting for our buddies next to us.

• 3:09:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:09:33Speaker 03

  And we were fighting for the damn politicians that got us into that war.

• 3:09:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:09:37Speaker 03

  So that's the thing. I probably have more animosity towards the politicians than I do the Vietnamese.

• 3:09:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, isn't that the case that, you know, soldiers tend to have more in common with one another than they do with the leaders of their own country?

• 3:09:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, what was that soccer game in World War I where the Germans came out and they played with the Brits?

• 3:09:56Speaker 05

  It was like on a Christmas Day, right? I think it was on a Christmas Day.

• 3:09:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then the British commander got, all those guys got chewed out for that. And, but you see the humanity come to, come to play.

• 3:10:06Speaker 05

  Right, right, right.

• 3:10:07Speaker 03

  Um, our, our former, my South Vietnamese scout, who was really a Daniel Boone and taught me a lot of stuff, and taught Ed Beal a lot, we thought we were good as Rangers. This guy had been fighting the war, and he was a former Vietcong who, they called him Kid Carson Scout. I don't think I've ever seen a braver man fight, fight in a war. This guy, he, he taught us a lot, he was very loyal, very brave. Uh, unfortunately, I, I don't, the Vietnamese took their retribution against the South after the war.

• 3:10:37Speaker 05

  Right.

• 3:10:37Speaker 03

  Um, which, the refugees, I've been getting my hair cut by the same Vietnamese lady for the last thirty something years. We have some great Vietnamese restaurant, we have some great Vietnamese Americans, and, uh, maybe if it wasn't for the war, we wouldn't have had those people over here. I suspect in another ten years, we're, we're probably gonna have some phenomenal Afghan and Iraqi people as well. Is that the people who, who appreciate what we have here, the freedoms that we have here.

• 3:11:04Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:11:04Speaker 03

  You know, um, you know, I, I'm not gonna, you know, I won't be a rah rah, stand on a box saying, we, you know, we're America, we're the best in the world, but you know what? We're pretty damn good. The flag we have, if someone burns a flag in front of me, I'm gonna beat them with a baseball bat. That flag represents what we can be, it brings us all together, you know? Um, I worked with some incredible people in the military, you guys did too. You know, people we would never socialize with otherwise, people from different, uh, you know, economic backgrounds, different religions, suddenly now they become your best buddies. Who are, who you're out there looking, who's gonna protect you? Who's out there you're drinking with? Who's the one that, you know, there's, uh, suddenly they're, they're good, close friends and good people. And, uh, would we have gotten that otherwise by not serving?

• 3:11:49Speaker 03

  Would we have known that? But we also know who to hate for training us the ways that they did at times.

• 3:11:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:11:59Jack Murphy?

  Craig, where can people go to find you and find your books and find your work if they're interested in reaching out to you?

• 3:12:07Speaker 03

  Mostly just in Amazon books. If they like the books, would they please give them reviews? The small books like Chasing Romeo 1886, because they're small books, it's the reviews that triggers their algorithm that keeps them in the warehouses. And just because I'm a minor league writer, and you can find those there. I'm on Facebook, you know, picking up trash once a week on the beaches of Puget Sound. I belong to a couple. I taught tactical track and worked for the Tactical Tracking Operations School for 20-plus years. And we probably

• 3:12:46Speaker 03

  taught our last search and rescue class last year or so. But, you know, mostly these days, you're gonna find me upstairs typing, editing, swearing, you know, going, "I didn't mean to say it that way, damn it." You know, come on, you guys are writers. You know what you do. You're producers. You guys know what you do with your editing and all this crap. It's kind of like, "I just want to be done with it," you know? But, yeah, Amazon is probably where they can find the books, especially the small press books.

• 3:13:17Jack Murphy?

  And I have to give a shameless self-promotion. My book coming out December 9th, which is called "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History."

• 3:13:28Speaker 03

  I want to read that. That's next on my order list. I've got that on my list for Christmas.

• 3:13:32Jack Murphy?

  Craig, I will send you a copy. We're trading books here. I'll shoot you one.

• 3:13:37Speaker 03

  I think, you know, the lost stuff is like the very crazy GI stories. When you find some of these stories, you know, it's like, "How come we never heard of these before? How come we didn't know that? We should have known that." But, yeah, it's not a shameless plug. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you what it takes to write a book. You're locked behind a computer now these days. You're there for hours, weeks, days, and months. Trying to turn out something that is worth reading. And what you can do is go on Amazon, find his books, order his books, then give them a good review.

• 3:14:10Jack Murphy?

  Well, it's, it's, well, it's like you said, Craig, when you're a minor league writer, guys like you and me, we gotta be out there hustling.

• 3:14:17Speaker 03

  Oh, you do.

• 3:14:18Jack Murphy?

  That's how it is.

• 3:14:19Speaker 03

  You know, people, you know, people, I, I don't, I won't go into what, how little you make when you sell a book. But it's like the old, the old record companies, remember back in the fifties? Where the people sang the songs and they never, they never got more than a few bucks.

• 3:14:32Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:33Speaker 03

  That's still the way it is. With the small books, we actually act, can make a little bit of money. You know, the IRS recognizes as being professional writers, so that helps. And, um, um, you know, I want to, I want to keep writing the sequels and have some fun with it. And I want Dave to read, read my Civil War novel going, I like this book.

• 3:14:53Jack Murphy?

  Shoot, shoot it, shoot it over and I'll, I'll give it to Dave.

• 3:14:56Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure.

• 3:14:58Jack Murphy?

  Uh, next, next, uh, coming up on Monday, we're going to be back in the studio with a former Gurkha.

• 3:15:06Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 3:15:06Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, excited to have him on the show. I've actually, 5:00 PM. I've been, I've been to the Gurkha Museum in Nepal. It's pretty cool. It's like five stories. It's, uh, yeah, that unit has a amazing history.

• 3:15:20Speaker 03

  I, can I add something?

• 3:15:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, please.

• 3:15:24Speaker 03

  Uh, we had the British Jungle Warfare School come over for two of our tracking events. And they brought a whole bunch of Gurkhas.

• 3:15:30Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:15:30Speaker 03

  Those, those little guys have no quit in them at all.

• 3:15:33Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they're no joke.

• 3:15:34Speaker 05

  No, they, they, yeah.

• 3:15:37Speaker 03

  We had it in the high desert and they came over and they said, I say, where are the trees? Um, you know, they were wonderful, wonderful people. And, uh, I, I got my, uh, I've got my Gurkha, I, I have a actually, uh, kukri at, at, uh,

• 3:15:51Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I, I, I have one here in the, here in the office that I bought when I was in Kathmandu. Um, yeah, there, there's.

• 3:15:58Speaker 03

  You were actually in Kathmandu? Holy crap.

• 3:16:00Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. There, there, there are stories about Gurkhas, like decapitating Pashtuns in Afghanistan in like the 1800s.

• 3:16:09Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:16:09Jack Murphy?

  I, I read, I read a history of the unit years ago. It's like, holy shit, it's crazy.

• 3:16:14Speaker 03

  What was a famous story about them where, uh, the British officer was telling them they have to jump out of planes? And, um, the Gurkhas, half of them were going to quit. And, uh, until they found out they were going to wear parachutes.

• 3:16:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah, I've heard that. I've heard that.

• 3:16:31Speaker 03

  Whether that's true or not, that is, that really talks about to their bravery and, and, you know, the British Army are very lucky to have that regiment.

• 3:16:39Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:16:39Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they are. Oh, Craig, any, any final?

• 3:16:44Speaker 04

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• 3:16:55Speaker 06

  Say epti v epti.

• 3:16:57Speaker 00

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• 3:17:28Jack Murphy?

  Thoughts? Anything that we failed to cover in this interview?

• 3:17:31Speaker 03

  Uh, no, you guys actually, I'm, I'm sorry with all the humor and smartassisms that I gave, but.

• 3:17:37Jack Murphy?

  No, I love it.

• 3:17:38Speaker 03

  I get through life now on humor. If I don't look back and laugh at something, then I prefer to laugh as opposed to crying. And I prefer to write the books down and let the stories, let the people read them to get, to maybe see a humanistic side to what it's like to be in service in a uniform.

• 3:17:55Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:17:55Speaker 03

  You know, it's, we weren't Sergeant Rock from, we weren't Rambo's, you know, we weren't the guys from Platoon. We were just, we were a combination of a little bit of everything and, and some good things and some bad things. A lot of, a lot of crap happened in Vietnam that was evil. And even at My Lai, people forget the name of U Thompson. And U Thompson should always be remembered. U Thompson and his three-man crew were actually landed at the far end of My Lai for, as Callie and his people were killing people, he was rescuing the villagers. He told his machine gunner to keep his gun on the GIs and that if they were gonna keep coming forward, he was gonna shoot them. So he actually pulled

• 3:18:38Speaker 03

  people out from My Lai and was saving people. So when you hear about GIs, you know, always doing something evil. And there was, I think there was one kid, James Joseph Dursey, I think he was a PFC. And he was given an order to shoot these people and these women and children in a trench. And he refused and he was just crying. He said he wouldn't do it. I have more respect for that kid than I do for Lieutenant Callie or any of them.

• 3:19:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:04Speaker 03

  You know, I will take that kind of bravery and that type of courage. And like Hugh Thompson, and Hugh Thompson, I think, got a soldier's medal for that. Hell, he should have got a medal honor for that.

• 3:19:13Jack Murphy?

  We recently talked to a British para in Afghanistan who had a story like that when he was a sniper and he was ordered to take a shot. It was like, no, this is wrong. And he outright refused, said, no, I'm not, I'm not gonna do that.

• 3:19:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:19:27Speaker 03

  We were, we would do it, we did an operation at this, we were pulling a patrol outside of a special forces camp. And most of their indigenous people would come out. You had a little kid come out with an M16. He may have still been 12 years old, smoking a cigarette. And, you know, a lot of these kids, and they were ragbags. They had nothing. These kids had nothing. And they're trying to protect their village because this, you know, everybody and their brother wants to get it. South Vietnamese didn't like him. They, I think they referred to him as moi, which is savage. The North Vietnamese didn't quite like him either because they weren't Vietnamese. Was it the kin, the kit? Totally different existence of people. They were more of the lines of Malaysians, if you will.

• 3:20:10Speaker 03

  But guys in my squad dug out all their sea rations and they were giving them to these kids and his families because they had nothing. So I saw GIs giving away all of their food that they had to these Vietnamese who had nothing. And, you know, that's the type of GIs I remember.

• 3:20:29Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:29Speaker 03

  You know, so that's, you know, and God bless that British soldier for saying, no, I'm not gonna do that.

• 3:20:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:35Speaker 03

  We have to stand up. Sometimes we have to stand up and find our conscience and say, no, we won't do that.

• 3:20:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:40Speaker 03

  You know, maybe, maybe I'm naive. I'm sure I was naive when I got to Vietnam. Because I knew we were gonna win. And you know, getting shot a couple of times taught me that maybe, maybe I need to slow down a bit, you know, but I would not change those days for, for anything. I am glad I did it. I'm glad I served with the people. Mr. Vasquez was talking about David Torres. As I said, one of the bravest Rangers I've ever met and nothing but respect for him. And, and same thing, you guys know it. You guys know who you respect. You also guys know who you, you know, it's like, yeah, who you're not going to have a drink with, you know?

• 3:21:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:21:20Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:21Speaker 03

  If I ever get out to New York, I'll buy you guys a drink.

• 3:21:23Speaker 05

  Oh, no, no, no. If you get out to New York, you drink for free.

• 3:21:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, for real. Guys, go check out Craig Jorgenson on Amazon. Chasing Romeo, awesome novel. There's a link down in the description and he's written many other books about Vietnam and a few that are not about Vietnam that I hope you guys will go and check out. Craig, thanks so much for this interview, man. This has been awesome.

• 3:21:49Speaker 03

  Ah, super. I am like, I have to thank you guys very much, not just for the interview, but for your service as well. People don't realize what it takes to get that black beret. People don't realize what it takes to get that green beret. People also don't realize what it takes to do a podcast and to do it and keep doing it and keep doing it. You've got some of the finest minds that I've ever seen from the military, from CIA, from intelligence groups, from a little bit of everybody. And I'm fascinated, not all of them, some of them are going, holy hell, this guy's crazy. But, but a lot of them, you look at it going, there were some very fine people doing some fine things.

• 3:22:27Speaker 05

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:22:27Speaker 03

  And those are the ones we have to applaud.

• 3:22:29Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:22:29Speaker 03

  And I, and as I said, it's better than a college course because you learn a lot. Watch it an episode or two and you'll learn some things you thought you knew and now you know better, you know?

• 3:22:40Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, that's for sure. That's, that's why I still enjoy doing this all these years later that you're like learning something new all the time.

• 3:22:46Speaker 05

  And, and, and we're blessed, you know, that people like you and, and others, you know, will deign to come on here and tell your stories.

• 3:22:55Speaker 03

  Can you hold on for a minute? I gotta go get my wife from upstairs just so you can tell her that I'm, that, that you're blessed.

• 3:23:00Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:23:01Speaker 03

  She won't, she won't believe that.

• 3:23:02Speaker 05

  Dee, clip that and we'll send it to them.

• 3:23:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah. Um, yeah. So Craig, Craig, thank you. And we will see all of you guys on Monday. We'll be back then.

• 3:23:16Speaker 04

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• 3:23:30Speaker 00

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• 3:24:01Jack Murphy?

  And I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving weekend. That's about it.

• 3:24:07Speaker 04

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• 3:24:21Speaker 00

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• 3:24:52Speaker 03

  Thank you as well. And as I said, thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity to be on the podcast.

• 3:24:57Jack Murphy?

  Thank you, Craig.

• 3:24:59Speaker 04

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• 3:25:13Speaker 07

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• 3:25:43Speaker 03

  Don't go find a better guest.

• 3:25:46Jack Murphy?

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• 3:25:51Speaker 04

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• 3:26:02Speaker 06

  Say epti v epti.

• 3:26:04Speaker 07

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• 3:27:04Speaker 02

  I like things my way. My coffee, my schedule, and my treatment. So I talked to my doctor about self-injecting with the Vivgard Hytrulo Pre-Filled Syringe, which contains efgartigimod alpha and hyaluronidase QVFC. It's injected under your skin subcutaneously. It means I can inject in my space, on my time. It's my treatment, my way. Visit vivgardmyway.com. That's V Y V G A R T myway.com. And talk to your doctor about Vivgard Hytrulo. Brought to you by Argenx.