Force Recon in Vietnam & Is WW3 Actually Possible? | Bing West

Bing West looks back on a lifetime of war and policy, from serving as a Force Recon Marine in Vietnam and writing The Village to working in the Reagan administration and covering Iraq and Afghanistan alongside U. S. troops. We also discuss why America keeps repeating the same strategic mistakes, the rise of autonomous warfare, the growing challenge from China, and whether today’s conflicts are converging into something much larger. Grab Bing's books here: https://a.co/d/0iGKYJRo Today's Sponsors: Ultra Pouches ⬇️ Don’t sleep on @ultrapouches. New customers get 15% Off with code HOUSE at https://takeultra.com/ #ultrapouches #ad GhostBed ⬇️ https://www.ghostbed.com/house FOR 10% off! Blue Chew ⬇️ https://bluechew.com/ Get 1 month free when you buy 2 of BlueChew Gold with code "HOUSECALL" For ad free video and audio and access to live streams and Eyes On Geopolitics... JOIN OUR PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse To help support the show and for all bonus content including: -live shows and asking guest questions -ad free audio and video -early access to shows -Access to ALL bonus segments with our guests Subscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse Support the show here:⬇️ https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouse ___________________________________________________ ORDER JACK'S NEW BOOK "THE MOST DANGEROUS MAN" ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️ https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/803651/the-most-dangerous-man-by-jack-murphy/paperback/ Subscribe to the new EYES ON podcast here:⬇️ https://www.youtube.com/@EyesOnGeopoliticsPod/featured __________________________________ Jack Murphy's book "We Defy: The Lost Chapters of Special Forces History" ⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/We-Defy-Chapters-Special-History-ebook/dp/B0DCGC1N1N/ —————————————————————— Or make a one time donation at: ⬇️ https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouse Social Media: ⬇️ The Team House Instagram: https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_link The Team House Twitter: https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePod Jack’s Instagram: https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_link Jack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21 Team House Discord: ⬇️ https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6 "Karl Casey @ White Bat Audio" 00:00 – Start 01:18 – Growing Up Around Marines & Joining the Corps 03:28 – Becoming a Marine Officer & Writing Small Unit Action in Vietnam 04:28 – Force Recon Deep Inside the DMZ 05:26 – Living and Fighting With a Combined Action Platoon 07:34 – Nearly 400 Days Inside a Vietnamese Village 09:52 – How the Combined Action Platoons Actually Worked 13:05 – Tet Offensive & Fighting at Night 16:00 – Seven Marines Killed in a Single Night 16:33 – Writing The Village During the Vietnam War 19:15 – The Tactical Lessons Bing Took From Vietnam 20:00 – Force Recon, Stealth & Operation Stingray 21:20 – Why Bing Blames Lyndon Johnson for the War’s Failure 23:16 – Could the U. S. Have Won the Vietnam War? 25:04 – “If You Go to War, You Have to Fight to Win” 26:53 – Why the War Could Have Been Won at the Squad Level 29:23 – Henry Kissinger & the End of South Vietnam 32:36 – Why America Keeps Repeating the Same Mistakes in War 34:48 – The “Jupiter Complex” of American Power 36:07 – H. R. McMaster, Vietnam & Repeating Old Mistakes 39:05 – America’s Debt Crisis & the Coming Defense Squeeze 42:04 – China, Defense Spending & the Future of Warfare 43:03 – AI, Autonomous Weapons & Killing Legacy Systems 47:14 – What the Fall of Rome Can Teach America 49:02 – AI CEOs, Power & the New “Jupiter Complex” 53:29 – Working for Ronald Reagan 54:44 – Reagan, Somalia & Confronting Soviet Influence 59:18 – The Final Years of the Cold War 1:00:42 – Central America, Oliver North & Reagan-Era Proxy Wars 1:02:40 – Iraq, Jim Mattis & the March to Baghdad 1:03:52 – Fallujah & the Decision to Halt the Marines 1:05:40 – Why You Can’t Fight a War Halfway 1:06:07 – The Fatal Problem of Enemy Safe Havens 1:07:28 – Pakistan, the Taliban & Why Afghanistan Couldn’t Be Won 1:14:32 – Afghanistan: “The Wrong War” 1:15:57 – Why Jim Gant Was the Exception, Not the Rule 1:19:34 – Cat 5 & the 2033 War 1:21:06 – China, Taiwan & America’s Coming Strategic Crisis 1:22:58 – Why the Pentagon Must Move Toward Autonomous Weapons 1:23:49 – Are Ukraine, Gaza & Iran the Prelude to World War III? 1:25:38 – Russia, China, Iran & North Korea Against the U. S. 1:27:34 – Should America Station Troops in Taiwan? 1:29:24 – Cat 5: The 2033 War 1:30:17 – Bing’s Next Projects 1:31:17 – The Last Platoon & Writing Afghanistan as Fiction 1:32:24 – Jack’s The Most Dangerous Man 1:34:14 – Closing Thoughts Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

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• 1:01Jack Murphy?

  Hey, everyone. Welcome to the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with tonight's guest, Bing West. Bing served as a Marine Corps Colonel and went on to have government positions such as serving as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs during the Reagan administration and is the author of many, many works. A lot of, you know, boots-on-the-ground accounts that he did from traveling to war zones and writing about them. One of the more pivotal works of his is The Village, which I believe we'll talk about, but I mean, it's based off of your experiences in the Vietnam War and reminds me actually in some ways of Jim Gant's work, One Tribe at a Time. And, you know, in the

• 1:43Jack Murphy?

  sense that the work is widely well-regarded and everyone agrees this is how it should be done, but then we do something totally different.

• 1:54Jack Murphy?

  So Bing, thank you for joining us on the show.

• 1:57Speaker 07

  It's my pleasure, Jack.

• 2:00Jack Murphy?

  So let's start at the beginning because I really want to talk a bit about your service in Vietnam. Can you tell us about kind of like how you came into the service, why the Marine Corps, and kind of what your pathway was?

• 2:15Speaker 07

  Well, I was born in 1940, so I missed the Civil War and World War I, but I got the others. So my uncles, two of my uncles were platoon commanders in the Marine Corps, and they're on Guadalcanal. And then they come back from the island, and I was two or three, and my mom was having another baby, so she sent me up to the attic where they'd hang out with their group. And, and then she thought, well, they're my brothers, they're the babysitters. And, and the group, whenever they were coming home from the battles, they didn't know how to explain to their parents what they were doing. So they stayed in the clubhouse they had in our room in our top of our house. So between the ages of three

• 3:00Speaker 07

  and seven, I was raised by Marines. Different groups of Marines would come in. I was filled with all the stories. And my mother said she knew something was really going on when the battle of Okinawa was going on. And both my uncles were in the battle, and she was scared to death. And, and I had a favorite blanket that I used to hang on to. And she said, you have to do something to help Uncle Willie and Uncle Tommy. And she said, with that, I opened up the window and threw the blanket out and said, that's for the dirty yellow baskets. And then she knew something was going on up in that attic. And, and when I got out of college and I was supposed to go to law school, I walked down to the cell

• 3:41Speaker 07

  station in Boston to get on the train. And there'd said Marine Corps recruiting across the street, and I walked over and walked in and said to the captain behind the desk, I'd like to join the Marine Corps. He said, well, it's very rare I see somebody come in with a suitcase. You're really in a rush, aren't you? And that's how I joined the Marine Corps. It was ingrained in me.

• 4:06Jack Murphy?

  So you didn't, you didn't have to get drafted into the war. You were ready to go.

• 4:11Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 4:13Jack Murphy?

  And did you go in enlisted then?

• 4:16Speaker 07

  No, I went to OCS. I was a grunt. I had a platoon, and then an 81 millimeter mortar platoon. And the war was in 66, 65 and 66, just heating up. And, and the Marine generals knew they didn't know how to fight it, which was really interesting. And, and I had some education in writing, and they said, Lieutenant, we'd like you to go out into the combat with the different units, because you're a grunt, and then write them up so other lieutenants and sergeants going over will know what the firefighting is all

• 4:57Speaker 07

  about. So I wrote, the first book was called Small Unit Action, Vietnam, where I took 12 firefights I had been in all over the place with different units and put them together and tried to explain what was happening, what was happening, what was happening. And one of them, we went into the DMZ, we being a force recon, five of us, we were deep in the DMZ, and it was the summer of 66, and the North Viet's were attacking, but they were assuming that we wouldn't go into the demilitarized zone. And we, we found an entire battalion. I mean, we were there looking at them, and they didn't know we were there.

• 5:41Speaker 07

  And we hit them with everything we had. We must have dropped 200 rounds of 105 and 155 before they found our position and came up. And then an F-8 was going up north to drop on a bridge, and he dropped two 2,000-pound bombs and just scared the hell out of us, knocked us down. But that was the end of those coming after us, and we got out the next day. So I saw a lot of the heavy action. And then they sent me into a village, which was quite different.

• 6:15Jack Murphy?

  This is with the CAP platoon?

• 6:17Speaker 07

  Yes, it was, they were just starting. And, and this one village had 5,000 villagers, and they had sent in a Marine squad, all of whom had combat experience. And they were fighting every night, every single night they're in a fight. And the Colonel said, I want you to get down there and find out what's going on. Well, I went down there, and, and the villagers were scared to death, but they, they, they just wanted to be left alone. And, and the North Viet's and the Vietcong were putting great pressure on them.

• 6:54Speaker 07

  And the farmers wouldn't fight back. And these 13 Marines came in, and typical Marines, they said, come on, we're gonna, we're gonna go out and we're gonna fight. Well, the first night I went out with them, and there's about the fifth night, sixth night they'd been there, we're going down the main trail, and we have the farmers, whom we call Popular Forces with us, but they had no training. And, and there were brambles on the road, on, on the path. And that was the signal that the Vietcong would use, that they were in meeting with their girlfriends or their family, whatever they were doing, and to stay out of there. So the farmers immediately turned around and started going back. They wanted nothing

• 7:37Speaker 07

  to do with this. And the Marines dragged them through the brambles. We got to the other side of the brambles, and we fought for the rest of the night. And night after night after night, we fought. But during the daytime, we'd wander around the village. You'd have duck eggs, occasionally you'd have a beer, you'd have a lot of peanuts. People gradually began to recognize these 13 young, just teenagers, these 13 teenagers with their cocky attitude are keeping us from having to pay the taxes to the Vietcong. They, the first time that they had some freedom. And we were there for, oh, almost 400 days in that village.

• 8:23Speaker 07

  And when we went to leave, they, they wanted nothing to do with us leaving. They, they said, no, no, no, you have to stay, you have to stay, you have to stay. And every year, I spent four or five years in Vietnam on and off, every year I'd go back to that village, Bin Nhe, to find out how things were going. And they kept insisting, they're still there, they're out in the hills, they're waiting, we know they're waiting. And it, and I went back in 2000, about 2000 with my interpreter, who was a great guy. And when we walked down the trail, everything was the same, except for one strand of electricity that they had, one for the entire village, and everyone could have one small light bulb. They began

• 9:08Speaker 07

  to yell to one another, who are they? And somebody said, it's the kindergarten Marines. And I thought they meant we were that young, but what they meant was that the Viet, the North Vietnamese, after they had taken over the village, changed the name of the village, exhumed the bodies of the Popular Forces that had been killed, and put in the bodies of the Vietcong and North Viet's. And I looked at that cemetery, and they must have had 200, 300 bodies. And I thought, wow, I never had any idea we were doing that much damage at night in those fights. And everyone clustered around, everyone wanted to know, and I had my book that I had written called The Village. And all these old mamasounds

• 9:52Speaker 07

  came up and were looking at the pictures and identifying the individual Marines. And calling, that's Phil, that, that Terry. And I said to my interpreter, Charlie Benoit, who was a great guy, I said, Charlie, this is amazing. He said, what's amazing, Bing? He said, if you were a villager and you had one half acre of rice, that every day you just picked up pieces of rice, that's all you ever did in your life. And for one year, you had this group of Americans there talking with you, wouldn't you remember them?

• 10:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 10:26Speaker 07

  And the thing that struck me is they looked at me and they said, you've gotten old, Dai We, meaning captain. And I looked at them and I thought, I've gotten old, you should look in America. But I didn't do that.

• 10:37Jack Murphy?

  Bing, could you explain to people who aren't familiar what the CAP platoons were? Because, I mean, it's fascinating. It's a kind of program that most people probably associate with Special Forces, but there were conventional Marines doing this during Vietnam?

• 10:55Speaker 07

  What, the Marines had the idea, and now we get into the whole issue of the war fighting.

• 11:05Speaker 07

  And then I'll get into the presidents in a minute, but

• 11:07Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 11:08Speaker 07

  General Wes Westmoreland, who's in charge in all of Vietnam is the standard old army four-star general. And he said the way to win the war was to go out against the North Vietnamese up in the hills and beat them in combat. And then eventually we would kill so many of them, they wouldn't fight anymore. And the Marines under a general, but in Walt said, no, no, no, no. What we should do is we should go where the population is, protect the population and let them stay on the hills forever. What do we care? And, and they, they never, they didn't like one another.

• 11:53Speaker 07

  I was really surprised in those days. Wow. The antagonism of the generals toward each other was something to behold. And they could not agree. So in the north where I was initially with General Walt, he said, I don't have the manpower to be doing this. So I'm going to take individual squads. Once they have six months on the line and I'll take volunteers who want to be with the Vietnamese and I will put 13 Marines, one squad in one village. And they will stay there until they can train the farmers, which generally took a year or a year and a half. So it wasn't short.

• 12:37Speaker 07

  You spent, you, you were there the entire time. Eventually there were 118 of these combined action platoons. And we were protecting about 300, 400,000 Vietnamese up in the north and not one of us, not one village was ever taken by the, by the Vietcong and the North Vietnamese. Not one of 118.

• 13:02Jack Murphy?

  And a key facet of counterinsurgency strategy, right, is safeguarding the population?

• 13:07Speaker 07

  Yes. But it, what, what we, what we stumbled on, and we didn't know, Jack, but what we stumbled on was everyone loves to gossip. Everyone talks to everyone else. So if you have 5,000 Vietnamese and they're chit-chatting away and they're going to market, they're doing a lot of things, there's no way you're going to have a Vietcong or a North Vietnamese battalion from the hills, beginning to come back, come down with its guards and its outflankers and everything without you knowing about it. I mean, you, you, you just, you just don't move, you know, 500 armed soldiers into an area without one farmer saying, whoa, he cawed and passing it on to another and another.

• 13:50Speaker 07

  So we always had an early warning system of when things were coming. And when Tet hit, Tet in February of 68, when they massively attacked everywhere, the North Vietnamese coming down into the area, now, nobody had night vision devices back then, nobody. I mean, so you fought pitch black every night. Well, that gave the, the North Viet's an advantage when they were moving, but on the other hand, once the villagers began to say, whoa, there are people out there and came to the, the individual combined action platoons, these squads who were scattered, the North

• 14:33Speaker 07

  Vietnamese had no idea where we were as they're coming down. And, and as a result, they kept bumping in to these small groups, all of whom were well armed, and then having a shift. And they never got the attack against Da Nang. They got bogged down out in the rice paddies. But an awful lot of coast fighting. And, and the big difference in the coast fights at night, well, two things. First, I, I've never looked why, but our traces are red. And so we had about one out every five. There's a green.

• 15:07Jack Murphy?

  Yup.

• 15:08Speaker 07

  And, and so at night, sometimes it, it was like you were watching and you didn't want to become mesmerized by it, but you, it's, it's like your Christmas time. All these lights are flashing by you both ways. But the big difference was, and the Vietnamese called them bombs, we could throw a grenade. The, do you know that, I guess, with the exception maybe of the Dominican Republic, because they have good baseball players. And no, no other country in the world knows how to put your body behind your, and then when you're throwing a grenade or a baseball or a football. Everybody else has soccer. So they have no comprehension how to throw something.

• 15:49Speaker 07

  So when we get into these fights at night, when the adrenaline was going, we could throw, we could throw a grenade 35 yards. They couldn't throw a grenade 20 yards. So it was like we had our own mortars because we'd be lobbing them, lobbing them. Every one of us carried six grenades every place we went. And we could lob them and all they'd hear is boom, and then a boom. So that was the great advantage we had at night was the grenades.

• 16:14Jack Murphy?

  One of, uh, one of my favorite stories is from a, a Phoenix program guy who told me how the Vietnamese would pull the pins on the hand grenades and then throw them to him. They're helping him out by pulling the pin first. It was the ultimate game of hot potato.

• 16:29Speaker 07

  Oh.

• 16:30Jack Murphy?

  So were, were you in the village when the Tet offensive happened?

• 16:38Speaker 07

  No, I was, I was out of the village at that time. We weren't hit that, that hard on that village, but they hit us with, one night with 200. And I wasn't there when it happened, but of the 13 Marines, seven were killed in the village. And then in one night. And of, of the first 13, altogether 11 were killed. I stayed in touch with a lot of the families for generations. They'd ask about their uncles or about their, their grandfather. Because my God, I thought, you know, now I'm a grandfather, but you know, eventually it was going to happen.

• 17:19Jack Murphy?

  Um, and, oh, and I wanted to ask you about the village. Like, did you write that as part of a Marine Corps study? Like, how did that come about? And how was it sort of received during the war?

• 17:33Speaker 07

  Well, after I had written the tactical manual, Small Unit Action, and I, I always liked to write, some agent picked me up and they said, you know, no one's, it was in 1970 was when I was writing and I was at the Rand Corporation at the time, but the bitterness Jack toward, toward us who had fought in the, in, in the, I was, I was out in California at the time, but the bitterness was just something. It's, we haven't seen the likes of that since.

• 18:12Speaker 07

  And, and the intellectual community, the colleges, the literary community were a hundred percent against. And somehow my first manuscript was returned to me. They said, we're not going to publish this. And then Hopper decided to publish it. And the first review came back and said, Captain West claims to have lived in the village for 370 days with the Vietnamese. The question is, why didn't he write about all the Milas? Now, what are you going to do? It was, but gradually the book seemed to take on its own life as people realized all

• 18:55Speaker 07

  I was doing was telling the story about what 13, 18 to 20-year-old Americans did in, in their sense of decency and their willingness to take a chance. Plus the fact that we, we initially were using M14s with the 7.62 bullet. And that really tears the heck out of the place. And, and what people have forgotten about Marines is that in order to qualify, on the 500 meter range, you have to be able to hit a target that's about this big. Otherwise you don't qualify at all. So we didn't have anybody who didn't know how to shoot. And that made a big, big difference in the grazing fire at night.

• 19:36Jack Murphy?

  Yup.

• 19:37Speaker 07

  But more than anything, I'd say it was the attitude toward dealing with the Vietnamese and, and the way they dealt with us, which was quite different, Jack, than my experiences later in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Vietnamese were open. We could go into their families. We could sit down. We could laugh. You could interact in ways we never could in, in the Islamic nations.

• 20:01Jack Murphy?

  From all of your time that you spent in Vietnam and, and working on these studies and papers, what are some of your big takeaways at the tactical level? I mean, you mentioned marksmanship. Were there any others?

• 20:16Speaker 07

  Well,

• 20:23Speaker 07

  Oh boy, at the tactical level,

• 20:30Speaker 07

  I hated it with the large units. I just hated it when I had to go with the battalions. Because you can't move a battalion without people knowing you're moving a battalion. And then you lose the element of surprise.

• 20:46Speaker 07

  When I was with Force Recon, we went out in small patrols, always at night, and we always hid. And it was called Operation Stingray. And our ability to find them before they found us was huge. Because we're out there by ourselves and we had to rely on stealth. So I would have much preferred if

• 21:15Speaker 07

  if we had intersected all the different combined action platoons. Because each of us had an area that was about four to five kilometers by four to five kilometers. So each of us had 15 kilometers. But then you'd have a space before you had another one. And what I wish we had done was if we had integrated all of them, we would have saved an enormous amount of money and fought a different war in the populated area. But ironically, General Westmoren said, no, that was going to take more troops rather than less troops. So you get back to this huge fight that was going on at the top.

• 21:55Speaker 07

  And then in terms of the big battles against the North Vietnamese that generally took place in the hills,

• 22:04Speaker 07

  the biggest problem by far was that we, and here I get into the higher level, but I'll just say it. I think President Johnson was a disgrace as a president of the United States in a colony.

• 22:21Speaker 07

  He got into a war where he was calling up his friends in the Senate. It's all on the record. I put it in my book, my last book called Cap Five. And he would say, I can't win this war. I can't win this war. Well, why did he send us out there to die then? And his son-in-law, who was a good guy, Johnson pulled him off the lines. Now, you don't do that.

• 22:49Jack Murphy?

  That's what came out of the Pentagon Papers, isn't it Bing? That they knew they were fighting an unwinnable war?

• 22:55Speaker 07

  Well, don't get me going with Ellsberg. I think the man was a traitor. He was a traitor. But that's, you know, and I know Ellsberg, knew him from Rand. But if I just stay on the central, the central point was that President Johnson got us into a war that he was afraid to win because he believed that the Chinese were going to come into the war. And he took the lesson that President Truman never ran for reelection because he went into Korea and the Chinese came in and fought him. And Johnson believed that he would be driven out of office because the Chinese were going to come into South Vietnam. That was his, and he was afraid, yet he sent us there to fight.

• 23:39Speaker 07

  Now, the interesting thing is that the CIA had proof positive that Mao Se tung had been so beaten up by the experience of fighting us in Korea that he had set a demarcation line for all the supply troops that he was sending into North Vietnam and said, under no circumstances will you go farther south because I don't want to tangle with the Americans. So ironically, if Johnson had had the courage, we could have won that war. Because the only way to win it operationally was to go into the north, use the sea, then shatter, they had no industry, no industry in the north.

• 24:22Speaker 07

  They were getting all their supplies from the Soviet Union and China through one port, Haifang. Johnson wouldn't close the port because he was afraid of insulting the Chinese and the Soviets. So if he had fought a war, we could have won that and saved a lot of American lives. And I watched that, and I watched that Jack in other wars I was in. I did not know Johnson. I knew Nixon. I knew several of the other presidents. I didn't know Johnson. But I knew all the people who were advising him. And I knew the general who went in to brief him on the strategy at the beginning of the war

• 25:02Speaker 07

  where we were going to go by amphibious landings, cut the North Vietnamese off at the top and close Haifang. And President Johnson looked at the Joint Chiefs of Staff and said, you sons of bitches, get out of my office. I never want to talk to you again. You're going to get my ass into a fight with China. You don't know what you're talking about. I never want to see you again. And he rejected his own military advice and let us die. Shame on him.

• 25:33Jack Murphy?

  They wanted to, they wanted to do what MacArthur did in Korea at the Incheon landing.

• 25:39Speaker 07

  Correct. Right away, right away. Boom. They weren't going to fool around about it. They had learned their lesson from Korea. So I do not have any respect for President Johnson when he did. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, who fought in the Civil War, afterwards, he said, if you go to war, you have to believe in something and fight for it with all your might.

• 26:05Speaker 07

  And I believe that any president, when he decides he's going to send us out to die and to kill others, he has to imagine that he personally and his policymakers are picking up a sword and they have an enemy and they're going to decapitate him. They're going to cut his head off. That's the attitude he has to bring because war is killing. War is killing and destroying until the other side agrees to your terms. And if you don't understand that, you should not be sending others in to die when you don't know what your end state is. And that's, that was Johnson. He, woo, woo, woo, and we died because of him.

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• 32:42Jack Murphy?

  I mean, there's a lot more that we're, I think we're going to talk about in a little bit, but I mean, the more things change, the more they stay the same, right?

• 32:53Speaker 07

  Yes, yes.

• 32:57Speaker 07

  Okay, I'm at that level. You want me to stay there for a minute, then we go back down to the tactical level of the other wars or?

• 33:04Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, let's, um, let's try to conclude at least our tactical level conversation about the Vietnam War. I think the last thing I wanted to ask you about that is, was your feeling that this conflict would be won at the squad level, but that didn't quite brief well in the big, you know, military machine as far as their approach to war, which is probably they were still thinking of World War II, Korea and so on?

• 33:34Speaker 07

  The answer is yes, but the evidence was before them. And I used to be flabbergasted. In fairness, they, they would ask me to brief. In fairness, even General Westmoreland asked me to brief, but I got nowhere with them, but at least. But the evidence was overwhelming that when we were working with the Vietnamese, sleeping next to them, eating next to them, fighting with them, that less of us were dying because more of them were dying. They, they, they then had a feeling they could win because we were there with them. Then they became more courageous and you get the whole thing working in your favor. But instead, we wanted to keep them away from the war.

• 34:19Speaker 07

  President, General Westmoreland thought he could win the war without big battalions. Then we sent them under President Nixon. When General Abrams was there later in 1970, we sent them into Laos, the, the South Vietnamese without any American advisors. And, and they felt we had abandoned them, so they didn't fight that well. So the answer is, Jack, yes. If we had at the first done what the special forces did, what the Marine Corps combined action platoons did and work with them, not just for a week. I mean, you have to be willing to stay there, but it was more, it was more enjoyable.

• 35:01Speaker 07

  I thought it's a strange word to use about war, but you feel much better if you're with a group that like you, you feel you're doing something, you're, you're sharing the, the death and you're sharing everything else together. So my belief is yes, we could have done a much better and we could have kept South Vietnam intact. But the other thing, Jack, I will say at the end, we would have had to do, which we did in Korea, and everyone forgets about it. We would have had to cut a line across from the sea to Thailand, which is shorter than the, than the demilitarized zone we have in Korea. We would have had to do that.

• 35:46Speaker 07

  And then solidify it. But we did that in Korea and it's worked. But again, when the, when the Joint Chiefs in 1965 recommended that, Johnson threw them out of his office.

• 36:04Jack Murphy?

  At a strategic level, do you think there's anything to like Henry Kissinger suggested in his, in his book, that with, in hindsight, with retrospect, it would have made more sense for us to hold the line against communism in Thailand rather than in Vietnam, considering that the country was already partitioned and was seeking unity, reunification? Do you think holding that line against the red menace would have made more sense in Thailand?

• 36:32Speaker 07

  Well, excuse me for laughing, but we can all come up with different histories that make us look better.

• 36:39Jack Murphy?

  For sure, for sure.

• 36:40Speaker 07

  Henry, Henry is a master at that. I mean, Henry Kissinger was on, and I, I knew Henry. He, he had a way of getting on every side of every issue when he really stood back and tried to figure out who was Henry Kissinger. And, and he was very devious with the press, but the press loved him because he'd give little tidbits to them.

• 37:03Speaker 07

  So comparing Jim Schlesinger, who was, people don't remember who he is now, but he was the Secretary of Defense at the fall of Vietnam, and I was his special assistant then. So I watched him interacting with Henry and President Ford, and it was an education. Because Schlesinger stayed with the troops. He said, we have to continue to support South Vietnam. We have to continue to give them aid. We have to continue to have a strong military ourselves. We have to continue to bomb in the north. And, and Henry had gone over to this idea that we were going to have a détente with the Soviet Union and that Vietnam was something we just had to get rid of.

• 37:45Speaker 07

  And President Ford was not a bright person, so he went along with Henry. And I watched this clash. And when we, when, when Saigon fell, only Secretary of Defense Schlesinger, among all the top people, stopped right then and there and wrote a letter to all the troops and said, you can be proud because you did your duty and your loyalty was to your country and your cause was just. No letter from President Ford, no letter from Henry Kissinger. A letter in the heartfelt was from Secretary of Defense Schlesinger.

• 38:27Jack Murphy?

  Do you think that's because of, you know, his sort of intimacy with the soldiers that came over the years?

• 38:34Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 38:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 07

  Yes.

• 38:39Speaker 07

  Jim Schlesinger also had been director of the CIA, but his, his two favorite people was Creighton Abrams. And, and he was, became chief of staff of the army after he'd fought in Vietnam. And General Lou Wilson, who was Medal of Honor winner, he had fought in Vietnam and then he became commandant of the Marine Corps. And he somehow Schlesinger just had this natural affiliation for the grunts. He, he really liked just being with the infantry. It's what he really liked.

• 39:16Jack Murphy?

  When you sort of like zoom out, what you're describing with Vietnam, that, you know, the bureaucrats saw it as something to get out of the way, to get it over with. That's like something, we did that in World War I, World War II, Vietnam. Like we see all of these conflicts as just like kind of an annoyance as a country, something that we just need to get out of the way and then we move on and forget all about it.

• 39:40Jack Murphy?

  Why do you think we, we approach war that way?

• 39:45Speaker 07

  Well, I have a theory.

• 39:46Jack Murphy?

  Please.

• 39:48Speaker 07

  My, my latest book is called Category Five, Cat Five, The 2033 War, because I think this is going to catch up to us and bite us in the fanny. But my theory, after watching from the top and being on the ground in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, when you go into the White House, the, the aura of the power is overwhelming. The carpet alone is this thick. The Secret Service is standing there as the Secret Service will. And you walk into that old little office and you know, this is the power of the universe. But what happens if you're in that kind of an environment, and I believe this happens

• 40:33Speaker 07

  at the top of, well, the Catholic Church with, with Cardinals, they begin to get this attitude. All senators have this attitude, most CEOs. You really begin to think you're smarter than the other people.

• 40:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 40:47Speaker 07

  Because you have people around you, you're surrounded by aides who keep, you know, kissing your ass. And after a while, you think, well, my ass doesn't smell as bad as other people's does. And you, you, you get this, this, this cockiness that is reinforced by America being so wealthy, so powerful, that at the top, you get into a war and you believe, you don't have to think that you have the bloody axe and you're going to chop somebody's head off because the other side eventually is just going to recognize that power and stop really fighting us.

• 41:26Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 41:27Speaker 07

  That's what we did in Korea. That's what we did in Vietnam. That's what we did in Iraq. That's what we did in Afghanistan. That's what we did in Iran. That's, that's six to six with that attitude. And I call it the Jupiter complex. Zeus, of course, was the Greek god that became Jupiter with the Romans, but he was king of all the gods. And he'd throw thunderbolts at people whenever he got mad at them. He, he was irresponsible, but he was so strong, no one could ever stand up to him. And I believe that our presidents and policymakers and our Congress.

• 42:07Speaker 07

  Has a Jupiter complex because we are so wealthy. And that's what really worries me. And you know, toward the end, I'll get into why it worries me going forward. But yes, you're absolutely correct. It's the cockiness that we're so strong. Once the other guy knows we're that strong, we don't, we don't really have to fight that hard. I mean, that's how, that's how it is at the top. And there we are down at the bottom. We're still slugging it out because no one forgot to tell Joe Smokes on the other side that we were the tough guy. He thinks he's the tough guy.

• 42:40Jack Murphy?

  You know, Bing, I'd like to ask, you know, on, on that note, your perspective about General McMaster, who wrote his thesis paper about how, I believe it's about how the generals betrayed the troops and they misguided the president. But he, he examined the issue of the military failures of the Vietnam War in detail. But then when he got into a position where he could do something about it, it seemed like he, he made the mistakes that he, it's like he studied our mistakes so that he could replicate them.

• 43:11Speaker 07

  I have to say that first, HR is a fun guy. I mean, he's, he's, he's a fun guy. So, and, and he too, like all of you guys now are younger than me, but we're, we're, I'm at, I'm at Stanford Hoover, and so is he, at the Military Historians Group, the Victor David Hanson Chairs. And I knew HR, um, I knew him in Iraq and I knew him in Afghanistan. So I know him for a long time. And I have more fun with him, Jack, about that than I do anything else. I keep zinging him and saying, you know, come on, HR. You know, there you were, you were saying all those guys, you know, my, my era were all screwed up.

• 43:51Speaker 07

  Now look at how badly they, they screwed up your buddies from West Point in Iraq and Afghanistan. Oh no, they didn't. I said, come on, they did, you know? So when are we going to see how they did compared to what their, their grandfathers did, people my age? And so, yes, I have a lot of fun with HR and I'll be on his podcast eventually, but uh, HR, and he has the good sense of humor to acknowledge that I'm on to something when I indicate. It's one thing to criticize people when they're away from you and you don't know them. It's another thing when you went to West Point with them and now you're criticizing them.

• 44:32Speaker 07

  But in fairness, in his last book, wow, he really went after Jim Mattis, who's a dear friend of mine, uh, and some others, indicating that the, um, the cult inside the military, uh, and he put it right in the book, which I gave him credit for, is that a three star is considered lesser by the four stars.

• 44:54Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 44:54Speaker 07

  And that the four stars, and that the four stars only talk to each other. And because HR was the three star, they looked down on him.

• 45:01Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 45:02Speaker 07

  You know?

• 45:04Jack Murphy?

  I, I mean, I think in that there's something a little dark about how you can study these problems so closely, but you can't escape them. And, and maybe, you know, like HR seems like he's a smart person. And maybe if it was me and I was put into that position, I would make all the mistakes too, because you know, the, you know, you're being told something, certain information, and you're like, well.

• 45:31Speaker 07

  Well, oh, well, okay, let me jump all the way up to today.

• 45:38Jack Murphy?

  Go for it.

• 45:39Speaker 07

  And, and see what's happening, which is, because this is going to play out over the next three years. There are two things that are occurring simultaneously, and we don't know how to control them. The first is the Jupiter complex. Our Congress, every single year, spends $2 trillion more dollars than it has. Why? Because they now have 200 million Americans now receive more entitlements than they pay in taxes. In other words, somebody's giving them money and that buys votes. You cannot get elected in America today if you try to change Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, any of them.

• 46:24Speaker 07

  As a result, by about 2033, and it may be 2032, under the next president, the amount of money that we have to pay out of all our revenues to pay for the debt that we already have is going to be more than 25% of all the revenues we have coming in. And the other 75% go to entitlements. That means there is zero money for defense, the FBI or anything else by 2032, which means we have to continue to borrow another $2 trillion. Now people say it's an unsustainable debt. What do they mean by unsustainable debt?

• 47:09Speaker 07

  Unsustainable debt means, right now, you are getting paid 5% for the 10-year federal bond, and you have, and you, corporations will pay you 6% or 7% for their bonds because they need the capital for AI, et cetera. Once you get to 25%, there is no known case of debt service where a country or a corporation has not gone bankrupt. And that means the definition of bankrupt is very simply that the Federal Reserve, because the Congress insists on it, they just create much more money, but there's nothing behind it.

• 47:52Speaker 07

  The taxes aren't coming in, so you have an increase in inflation. You have a decrease in productivity because the amount of money you have to pay somebody to hold a bond has gone up. Therefore, there's less capital to be put into equipment and your standard of living goes way down. That, that's just mathematics. That's going to happen about 2032. Now, when it does, the Congress is going to explode and we're going to go one of two ways. Either we're going to have to cut back on entitlements, or we're going to say, we're going to continue with the entitlements and, and we're just going to go the way of Argentina and just print money.

• 48:37Speaker 07

  That's a huge crisis that's coming. Now, I'm tying this to the military. Okay, we have an enemy. It's called China. I don't, I don't care what the president says. China is our enemy. It's not, it's an autocratic system that wants to replace us. You come now to the military today, and if you look, they're trying to get a big budget for this year, they'll get something, but not that much. But then, Jack, over the next five years, the amount of money for procurement is going to go down because it's going to get squeezed out because more money is going to debt service.

• 49:18Speaker 07

  So we're at a high watermark and now be less money for procurement. So what do you then do? Well, you either stay with your legacy systems, which is tanks, aircraft, aircraft carriers, destroyers, battleships, or you radically change to artificial intelligence, autonomous systems, beginning with the drones, which Ukraine has shown is the future. Now, which way is the services going? Even today, as we talk, there's a huge fight going on.

• 49:59Speaker 07

  Ironically, Secretary Hakesith has terrible press, but the fact is, within the Pentagon, and he has authorized it, there are about five people at the top who are all former CEOs and traders at a very high level, who took one look at this coming in and they said, we don't have the money to continue with these old systems and buy these new AI autonomous systems. There has to be a trade off. And you're going to have to give up something because we don't have the money. And right now, it is an open question whether we change or not. And if we don't change, we're going to get our ass handed to us in a war in the future

• 50:44Speaker 07

  because there isn't enough money. We have to make the change. But the services, the services are really hard to change. Chief of Naval Operations just had a, an interesting article in the Washington Post. He said, oh dear, the battlefield is changing. We have artificial intelligence. We have these autonomous systems. We have all these cheap drones. Look at what Ukraine is doing. So we have to come up with a laser system in order to protect our destroyers and battleships and, and aircraft carriers. I'm thinking, wait a minute, wait a minute. You, you, you'd find the problem and immediately you wanted to keep your legacy systems that

• 51:28Speaker 07

  are huge targets by, by investing all this money in a laser. And, and it, it, to me, illustrated, it's very hard for the generals and admirals to recognize they have to radically change because we don't have the money to do both.

• 51:45Jack Murphy?

  Like taking the pilot out of the cockpit. I mean, that must scare the hell.

• 51:48Speaker 07

  Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Now, the Air Force, I have to say, of all the four services, the Air Force seems to get it more than anybody else, but even they, my God, the F-35 is costing, what, a, something like $100 million a poppy? One aircraft? You get scared about anything happening to that thing, you know?

• 52:11Jack Murphy?

  You know, on that, I think something that I wanted to ask you is, you know, any further insights about why things don't change? That you've been around long enough to see us repeat the cycle in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq. And you described a little bit of what the problem is with sort of the reality distortion that takes place in the White House. But do you have any further comments about why it's so hard for us to change our tactics, to change our strategy? Why don't we learn as a country?

• 52:43Speaker 07

  Well, but I'll come all the way back to being Jupiter. Okay, because as a capitalist system, we do fantastically well. We live so, so incredibly well compared to any other country in the world. Nobody's close to us. England, Norway, nobody, nobody, nobody's in our league. They're 20 to 40% less in the way in which they live by any standard you have. The amount of room we have in houses, the cars we have, the electric watches, you know, the iPhones, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And people say, well, we have an affordability problem. So we're always saying, oh dear.

• 53:28Speaker 07

  And what's the solution? We always say, I'm going to give you more money. That's what we're going to do. We're going to give you more money. So this, and yet, I was just talking with a gentleman today and he was saying, but it's, you know, Bing, you described, there's an end of, end of the road, but we've never seen the end of the road. Somehow, America always has overcome it. But I've reminded him that, do you know that Rome fell in 70 years? Between, in the year 400, Rome was the colossus of AD, Rome was the colossus of the world.

• 54:11Speaker 07

  476 AD, Rome no longer existed as an empire and Rome itself had been sacked. And what had happened to Rome? More than anything else, and Toynbee was the historian who looked at something like 25 to 31 civilizations and came to the conclusion, no great civilization is ever murdered. It's not beaten by another great civilization. It commits suicide. And what he meant was it loses its dynamism and begins to live off its past. And so far, the United States of America surges forward, surges forward with a productivity that no one can match.

• 54:56Speaker 07

  It's because of the capitalist system. The capitalist system is extraordinary. Something like of the, you know, of the S and P top 20 companies, only two were here 20 years ago. And 18 have fallen and others have come and taken their places. General Electric used to be terrific. Now people can't even remember who General Electric is because we have that dynamism. And, and the question some people say is, well, if we can continue that and we have the productivity, then we can put off this debt. But we really can't because it's towering more and more and more. And the other thing I have to just, watching Jack, I mean, I'm flabbergasted to watch

• 55:40Speaker 07

  the CEOs of AI. I mean, AI is the future. There's no doubt about it. But look at those guys. They are full of Jupiter. Three or four of them came out over the weekend and said, oh dear, I'm worried about my system. So government, you have to do something to help us. And they turned into doomers, you know, it's doomsday.

• 56:05Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 56:06Speaker 07

  And I'm thinking, wait a minute.

• 56:07Jack Murphy?

  We need, give us money. Give us more money.

• 56:10Speaker 07

  That's your product. You're going for an IPO and you're telling us, oh my God, I'm going to destroy the world, but I'm unwilling to do anything about it. You have to do it for me. And I thought, talk about conceit. They wanted the spotlight on them because they have so much wealth. They don't care. They don't care. So, oh, I have problems. So now they're central to what people are thinking. That is the conceit of the Jupiter system. And sooner or later, it can fail. I hope it doesn't, but we're testing it.

• 56:47Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, people are identifying these CEOs as the problem itself, I think.

• 56:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, well, they deserve it because they're pulling, they don't have to go before the public and be doing this stuff, but it's like a moth to the flame.

• 57:03Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, they like the attention.

• 57:05Speaker 07

  And all the way back to my, one of my brothers is a Franciscan monk. And, and they have to, every four or five years, elect a vicar, you know, who's had and when that, that year comes, all of them say, not me, not me. So and so, so and so is much better than me. Because the Franciscans, after you serve, your service as the vicar, send you down to clean the pots and pans in the garbage in order to wash away that conceit that you have developed.

• 57:47Speaker 07

  So if we could have every one of our congressmen and senators, once a year, have to go down and clean the garbage and our generals and our CEOs, it may, we may be able to shrink that Jupiter arrogance a little bit.

• 58:01Jack Murphy?

  You know, I mean, I guess this is a sign that I'm entering middle age, Bing, but I've got this interest now in the Roman Empire and I've been watching these films. And I mean, the comparisons are just impossible to avoid at this point.

• 58:18Speaker 07

  Look, what they did with their silver compared to what is now called inflation. Beginning in about 400, they had ransacked the rest of the world. There was no other place they could, they couldn't grab any more money from anybody because they controlled everything. They had a huge tax system, but it wasn't bringing enough because the Senate was doing two things. They were, they had entitlements for the population in Rome. That is bread and circuses were, you know, that was given to the population every day. The population didn't have to work that hard. They gave them the bread and the gladiators to go out and whack each other.

• 58:59Speaker 07

  And the Senate lived in great splendors, we now see from all their buildings. So how did they pay for it? Well, they took the coin of the realm, which was a silver coin, and, and they had some expert shavers and they shaved a little bit of the silver each year from each coin and minted new coins. And this went on year after year after year. That's called inflation. You know, you depreciate, you depreciate, you, you build more dollars because you depreciate every dollar. Well, it finally got by about 460 AD that the, those, the legions out fighting along

• 59:44Speaker 07

  the German border, they now had wafers that were worth nothing. So they had no money. So they walked off the job. When they walked off the job, the Senate had no money to bribe the barbarians. And the barbarians said, we're coming in and take over Rome. That's the cause of when you have too much inflation.

• 1:00:10Jack Murphy?

  And I'm sorry to really jump through the timeline. We're going from 40 AD back to the 1980s. But I didn't want to gloss over, you know, disappointment you had during the Reagan administration. And it sounds like you really were pretty busy during that time period. If you could tell us about that.

• 1:00:29Speaker 07

  Well, I, I mean, I just thought, I've known not that well, but I have known six presidents. And I thought that President Reagan was really my idol. And again, one little story, he had certain principles that he, you just couldn't shake them on those principles. And once people understood you weren't going to shake them on those principles, he had a way of getting things done. And Tip O'Neill was, was the Speaker of the House and very avuncular Irish Democrat, and they got along quite well. But President Reagan believed in the capitalist system. He believed in the small government.

• 1:01:14Speaker 07

  He believed in limited taxes and he believed in a strong defense. And that was it, you know? And then he focused on it. So one, one classic was, I was flying over Africa once. I had to go to the Congo or something and I received a phone call from Secretary of Defense Kaluuchi. I was the Assistant Secretary for International Security. And he said, Bing, you have to drop by Somalia because the president's pissed that you flew over his country and didn't stop to see him. So I flew in and at the same time, Secretary Kaluuchi told me, he said, you know, I think

• 1:01:53Speaker 07

  he's going to let the Soviets come ashore with their resupply of their ships, including their missiles and recalibrate their missiles ashore. So I went in to see, see how far he was, about six feet four tall in his cabinet. And I said, you know, people are a little bit upset with you about this getting back together with the Soviets. And in front of his cabinet, he sniffed and looked at me and he said,

• 1:02:29Speaker 07

  I don't deal with assistant secretaries. The only one who can tell me something if he wants to is the president. I said, all right. I walked out, I called Calucci and we called over and I said, can I get fifteen, twenty minutes with Bure with the president? So they, about two months in advance. So then I walked back in and I said, you got it. You're on his schedule for fourteen April. Well, I could see Bure looked around, was very proud of himself, you know? I said, now, remember, we have to deal with this problem. Don't worry. Okay. The night before, he calls me from the hotel that's, that everyone stays at, I forget the name right now, but he said, you have to come over.

• 1:03:14Speaker 07

  So I came over and I said, what? He said, am I really seeing the president? I said, that's why you're here. He said, I'm seeing him. I said, yes, you're seeing him. And I said, it's you and him. And you, you've told me you're going to let the Soviets back into your country. So the next day, we get there, we, we walk down that corridor and secretary, secretary of state at the time, and something else to do, so I was just taking the meeting. I walk in, the president knew me just enough to call me Red, you know, he didn't know my name, but you know, what do you have, Red? I had a big briefing. I said, sir. He said, no, no, no. He said, what do you have? I said, well, sir, this is President Sia Bure. He's from Somalia, it's on the tip of Africa.

• 1:03:57Speaker 07

  And President Bure is about to allow the Soviet Union to come back into his country and recalibrate their missiles on his shore. And the president is behind his big, big, resolute desk and he looks, and he looks up at Bure for a minute and he said, do you know, the Soviets, that's a bad system. Nothing ever good comes of dealing with them. Are you really going to be dealing with them instead of us? Is that what you came here to tell me? And Bure says, no, no, I didn't come here to tell you that. No, no, they're not coming to my country. And, and, and President Reagan looks at me for a minute and I could have kicked Bure, you know?

• 1:04:42Speaker 07

  The son of a gun pivoted just like that and folded like a deck of cards. And then President Reagan, very benignly said, well, now tell me what you're doing for your country. And well, Bure didn't know what to say to him. And, and so the president said, well, how do you, how do you have money? He said, oh, we sell camel meat to Saudi Arabia. And the president said, well, how do you do that? And he said, well, we drive the camels to the port of Mogadishu, then we slaughter them and we put them on a ship and it goes to Saudi Arabia. And the president says, the Abilene Trail. That's what we did in eighteen seventy. He said, now, let me tell you. He said, you can't just have the cattle, you can't just have the camel.

• 1:05:26Speaker 07

  You have to find a way of getting your own meat packing. He said, then you do the whole thing yourself. He said, then you sell it to the Saudis and you get more money. And so by the time we walked out, after about fifteen and twenty minutes, when you walk out to the west wing of the White House, there are three steps you go down to get in your car. And as he walks out, he's in such a daze that he tripped and I just grabbed him before he fell flat on his face. So that was President Reagan.

• 1:05:55Jack Murphy?

  Well, I mean, it's a fascinating period of history and I don't know, like, if you realized it at the time or not, that it was the twilight years of the Cold War. Um, and, and what did you think of that time and, and what was going on in Afghanistan, El Salvador, Angola?

• 1:06:13Speaker 07

  Oh, I could go on forever, but the, the answer is no. And, and the answer is not at the, at the beginning of President Reagan's presidency. It was not obvious it was the twilight of the Soviet Union. They were thinking of going into Poland. Um, and, and the president, actually with the Vatican and with Richard Pearl, who was there, was terrific, um, they put up a big bulwark. And they, they, they, they basically said, uh, they, they, they helped stop the Union movement in Poland, which became the cancer inside the Soviet Union, which gradually spread.

• 1:06:59Speaker 07

  But all of that took place over the course of about eight years. It didn't just happen at once. He started from one, he was at maybe the twenty yard line, he went all the way down and scored the touchdown. Now, he didn't score the touchdown because he had left office and then President Bush.

• 1:07:14Jack Murphy?

  Right, right.

• 1:07:17Jack Murphy?

  I mean, but you had kind of a front seat for all of that, or at least much of it.

• 1:07:22Speaker 07

  Uh, it was, it was, it was fascinating and, and, um, whoa. I mean, Central America did not work out well. I mean, that just didn't. Um, and again, you get into personalities, but part of it.

• 1:07:38Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I was gonna ask, did you cross paths with Ollie and his boys?

• 1:07:42Speaker 07

  Of course, of course, of course, of course. I, I, I knew Ollie and I got along quite well. Yeah, Ollie North. Um, uh, but what happened, anyway, there you get into antagonisms, both of the Democratic Party and the Congress against the Republicans and the concept of freedom and Nicaragua and the whole mess. But also, President, uh, it, it's interesting how just personalities. Tip O'Neill, the Speaker, wonderful man, but his sister was a member, I, of, was a nun. I think of the Marinos and, and some punks, uh, in the murderers in the El Salvadoran

• 1:08:25Speaker 07

  right, uh, murdered several nuns, murdered them. And, and I think they murdered the, a cardinal priest as well. And as far as, as far as Tip O'Neill was concerned, they were, I mean, you could not move him off Central America and try to explain to him that we need to be helping these people because of communism. As far as he was concerned, they're all a bunch of punks and murderers and don't you dare bring anything like that into my office.

• 1:08:53Jack Murphy?

  But they changed their mind when the Soviet Union, well, when the Sandinistas started to ask the Soviet Union for help. That was, that was what changed the Democrats' mind on some of that stuff, wasn't it?

• 1:09:04Speaker 07

  No, they never, they're not, to this day, I don't believe they've ever, I mean, to this day, I don't believe they've ever changed their minds. And, and that, that punk who's in charge of, uh, uh, Nicaragua is still there, Ortega, forever. Yeah, so, no.

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• 1:10:22Speaker 03

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• 1:10:29Speaker 00

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• 1:10:33Speaker 00

  Three bodies on the ground. With emergencies of biblical proportions. I will send swarms upon you and upon your people. That's one of the plagues of the Bible. And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville. Brian Phillippe joins nine one one Nashville. All new Thursdays on ABC, next day on Hulu.

• 1:10:52Speaker 07

  Well, we haven't touched on, on Iraq or Afghanistan.

• 1:10:54Jack Murphy?

  No, we haven't. You wanna, you wanna tell us about that?

• 1:10:58Speaker 07

  Well, I was on the, I was on the march up, um, to Iraq at the beginning with General Jim Mattis. He and I later wrote a book together called Call of Chaos, that did quite well. Um, uh, Mattis was a terrific general.

• 1:11:14Speaker 07

  But it was obvious, once we got into town, once we got into Baghdad, uh, Mattis did say, and I was there and I heard him say it, um, oh, and, and they're coming down the Marine Corps as well, Hegi, they both said, get us out of here. We, we, we, we don't, we don't want to be here. This isn't our mission. Um, they knew that this thing was going to be a mess and that, uh, the emissary that was there, Jerry Bremer, who was put in by the president, uh, Jerry believed in Jerry to the extent that, uh, he wanted it his way or the highway. And as far as Mattis and the Marines were concerned, we're getting out of here. They, they, they thought it was really messed up.

• 1:11:59Speaker 07

  It was messed up and it took us quite a long while to straighten it out. I was there for the battles of Fallujah and Ramadi. Um, and the big problem there was, in the battle of Fallujah, after several of the contractors were hanged in downtown and then burned. We, and, um, we had, I was with General Mattis and, and the lead battalion, but they had photographs of, of the ringleaders. And, and they had, um, they had the, uh, They had dealt with it, they had everybody there. And, and they were going to go in and, and knock off each one of those guys.

• 1:12:40Speaker 07

  But instead, President Bush and Secretary Powell and Secretary Rumsfeld and emissary Bremer, and it's all on the record, got very angry. In, in Washington, they said, they can't do that to us. They can't push us around like that. And they ordered Mattis to take the town. Those 300,000 people. So he began to take the town. But when you tell the Marines to seize the town, they're going to, they're going to effing seize the town.

• 1:13:09Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 1:13:09Speaker 07

  I was with the lead battalion. We were halfway across the town. It was Easter Sunday in 2004. And all of a sudden, the battalion commander said to me, he said, hey Bing, I, I've been told there's a ceasefire and I have to stop. I said, don't worry. Mattis is not going to let you stop halfway across this city.

• 1:13:26Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Speaker 07

  Which he was. And then we were ordered, the Marines were ordered to pull out. I mean, Mattis was so mad, h- h- his face was just like stone. And we had to turn the city over to the terrorists led by Zakawi. And that set us back for a couple of years because the president lost his nerve. The, the press was indicating the Marines are just running, you know, the, the Kalamal. You have to stop it. So he stopped it. And, and the lesson I took away is, again, you get in a fight, you have to think you're in that fight. None of this stuff about, oh, I'm going to send you out because I'm mad.

• 1:14:09Speaker 07

  And then when, when the going gets tough, say, oh, I quit and pull you out is wrong.

• 1:14:14Jack Murphy?

  One of the other, I think, key things to point out, um, and you can look at it in Afghanistan, you look at it in Iraq, you look at it in Vietnam, is that when the neighboring country provides a safe haven for the bad guys, i- it becomes impossible to really have a decisive victory.

• 1:14:33Speaker 07

  Period. Period.

• 1:14:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:35Speaker 07

  You mean, allowing North Vietnam to be a sanctuary, allowing Syria to be a sanctuary, allowing Pakistan to be a sanctuary, guaranteed you can never win the war. I mean, it's so elementary. And, and I saw that in spades in Afghanistan because they would walk across, the Afghans are great walkers. The big difference between the Iraq war and the Afghan war, when I was on the ground for years with the different troops, is in Iraq, it's flat and everyone rode in, in Humvees everywhere, everyone. You, you, the, the foot patrols were much more rare than armor patrols because of the distances, et cetera. In Afghanistan was the opposite.

• 1:15:20Speaker 07

  With the high mountains, you walked.

• 1:15:23Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:15:23Speaker 07

  And the Afghans are fantastic walkers. They'll walk, they'll walk 15, 20 miles in a day. So they would come back, they would come from Pakistan, attack, and then fold back into Afghans and into Pakistan. We all knew it. And we all knew Pakistan was lying to us. They're wonderful liars, but somehow, uh, you know, president after president allowed themselves to be entangled in this, including, you, you look, look at President Trump. He gets into this mess with, with Iran again because if you strike a king, strike to kill. Because if you don't kill, he's going to kill you.

• 1:16:06Speaker 07

  You don't go in and, and, and kill the lead, the, the leaders and then say, oh, it's done with. Bologna. You whack until it's all over, but not President Trump. He just hit them and thought, oh, they're going to fold. Well, they didn't fold. But the problem then becomes that he turned and said, okay, but we can negotiate. Guess who the negotiators were? The Pakistanis? Come on. The Pakistanis are in league with the Iranians. And, and then he sends out amateurs as, as the diplomats and the whole thing fell apart. Uh, but again, I think that President Trump did exhibit what the other presidents exhibited, this Jupiter complex.

• 1:16:48Speaker 07

  We're so powerful, we can do anything and the other side is going to understand that.

• 1:16:52Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I think, you know, Trump in particular maybe convinced himself of something because of his success with the Soleimani strike in his first term and then the Maduro, uh, thing in Venezuela. Um, so there were a series, oh, oh, and the Baghdadi raid during his first term also against ISIS. A kind of a series of, of, um, you know, very quick, you know, strategic strikes that were successful.

• 1:17:20Speaker 07

  Well, in, in, in, in my book, I, I go through all this and I say, look, any president who is going to use force, in other words, he's going to kill people. And let's not fool around about it. You know, if he, if, if he's going to use leth- lethality, if people are going to die, if there's going to be massive destruction, then his national security advisor, when they're all sitting around, has to keep working until the president has one to two sentences that say, the end state of this war will be by approximately this date. And these are the resources that I'm giving to it to achieve that.

• 1:18:05Speaker 07

  And that has to be written down so that everyone can look at it. And, and, and in four wars, I never saw that happen.

• 1:18:13Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:18:14Speaker 07

  Never. I mean, what would he have written down when he was about to kill them in, in Iran? The end state is that, the end state is that I will kill 20 people and the regime will collapse? If anyone wrote that, they would have said, sir, I don't think that's, you know, I don't think it's going to work that way. Now, the other thing is the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the military. Okay, what's the military's role? Very interesting. The military's role is like a roller coaster. Um, one example at, uh, is Colin Powell, whom I liked very much, General Colin Powell.

• 1:18:54Speaker 07

  Uh, but he was, uh, he was an active political policymaker in the war in Iraq, the first war of the 91. He was in there with the Secretary of Defense deciding on the policy, everything, you know. So, and then you, you, you have General Keen, Kane, the current general. And, and from what I see, General Kane said, I'm going to stay out of the politics and the policy. I'm going to just give my advice as I am asked. Okay, then that means it, it, he's not going to be the one saying, Mr. President, I don't understand what your end state is.

• 1:19:34Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:19:35Speaker 07

  Because the end state is a policy. And he'll, you know, President, the current chairman could probably say, I'm not into telling you what your end state is. You, I'll just follow orders. You ask me, can I kill those people? Yes, I can kill them. Uh, okay, I'm giving you, you know, you, and then you decide whether you're going to do it.

• 1:19:57Jack Murphy?

  Right. So I mean, it's, uh, like a bit of a, it sounds like the Joint Chiefs will pick and choose what they want their role to be, um, depending on the personalities involved.

• 1:20:08Speaker 07

  Well, it, it, it, no, let me, let me back off that way a little bit.

• 1:20:12Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:20:13Speaker 07

  The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the military advisor to the president.

• 1:20:20Jack Murphy?

  Yep.

• 1:20:21Speaker 07

  Um, he can influence the defense budget with the other members of the chiefs. The, each service chief is responsible for training the troops and for equipping them, but not for using them. That is what they call, of course, as you and I know, the combatant commanders like in, um, the Central Command of the Pacific Command. Separate from them is the chairman. The chairman really has no command authority whatsoever. He can't, he can't command anybody to do anything.

• 1:21:00Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:21:00Speaker 07

  Uh, he can give advice to the president. The president then tells the Secretary of Defense, who tells the operational commander, like the Pacific Commander or the Central Commander, what to do. And the service chiefs are only supposed to be providing the equipment, the right equipment over the long period and the training and the manpower. Now you can see there are all kinds of disconnects about how this thing will work and practice.

• 1:21:28Jack Murphy?

  Right. Right. I mean, I was going to ask you, like, i- is there a problem when the chairman just makes this decision? And, and I mean, I understand why they make it. They want, why they want to stay out of politics because that's not a soldier's job, um, to stay out of the policy side. But if you get sucked into just the sort of tactical capability side of it, like, can we do an airstrike at this grid location? Yes, we can do that. Um, is it possible that they lose sight of the forest through the trees in doing that?

• 1:22:00Speaker 07

  Well, I can't speculate on what the current group is doing. I can just see from outside. But I can understand two different positions.

• 1:22:10Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Speaker 07

  Maybe not. Honestly, I can only understand one position, given that everything depends on personalities. I can understand why a chairman of the Joint Chiefs today with the mercurial conceit of the president would say, "I'm not going to get involved in that kind of stuff with him because you don't know. He's liable to say, "You're fired," or you know. So he's going to ask me a direct question. I'm going to give him a direct answer. I don't know who can advise this particular president.

• 1:22:44Jack Murphy?

  Let's, can we turn our attention to Afghanistan for a moment?

• 1:22:48Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:22:48Jack Murphy?

  You know, speaking of not having a mission statement that's written down that every soldier can sort of plug into and understand. I mean, were you surprised that we stayed in Afghanistan as long as we did?

• 1:23:03Speaker 07

  Well, I wrote three books about Afghanistan. I spent five years there on and off. And I was out with maybe forty different platoons all over the place for weeks at a time. And my last book was entitled, "The Wrong War." And I said, "Look, this is crazy.

• 1:23:25Speaker 07

  The area is like two Wyoming's. We do not have the troops, troop to task. There are somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 villages of posthumes who are related to the Taliban. And we have somewhere in the order of less than a thousand platoons. You can't even do a combined action platoon if you could, and you can't because you cannot enter one Afghan house. You'd be killed." Now, you mentioned at the beginning, what's his name again? I forget.

• 1:24:03Jack Murphy?

  Uh, Jim Gant.

• 1:24:05Speaker 07

  Yeah, a good special forces guy.

• 1:24:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:09Speaker 07

  Yeah, he had big gonads. I mean, I'm surprised he wasn't assassinated. And he wrote a great book with a reporter from the Washington Post, and we all heard about him.

• 1:24:21Speaker 07

  But he was absolutely unique in making a liaison with one shake in one village. And, you know, he was maybe the exception that proves the rule, we couldn't do it. Because you couldn't get that many Army and Marine officers who'd be that good, that empathetic, who would find that, you know, so it wasn't like Vietnam. Vietnam was much more open. Afghan is a very closed religious society. Islam puts huge barriers to any outsider, let alone a non-believer,

• 1:25:05Speaker 07

  in how they can interact with the people. And we didn't have the forces to do it, and then we allowed the Taliban to have Pakistan as a sanctuary. So I had recommended a long time ago, and I did talk to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the commanders several times about it, of going just to a good advisory force and trying to hang on to the internal part, not along the mountains, and to the cities. And I understand that the final general we had there for a couple of years really was good and had that working with practically no casualties on our side

• 1:25:50Speaker 07

  and keeping the Taliban enough off balance. So they had part of the countryside, but they didn't have the interior. And I think that balance could have been held almost indefinitely.

• 1:26:04Jack Murphy?

  I mean, do you think that, well, the timetable was set during the first Trump administration, and then the disastrous evacuation happened during the Biden administration.

• 1:26:16Jack Murphy?

  It sounds like maybe you would be more of an advocate of keeping a small American presence in Afghanistan, I mean, indefinitely, maybe?

• 1:26:23Speaker 07

  Yes, I would have. The way that general was doing it, because we weren't taking any casualties. It had gone away from the newspapers.

• 1:26:33Speaker 07

  Now, I can understand, it wasn't the way, one can argue it had gone on too long for that to work. But I don't know. But anyway, you had two presidents in a row. President, well, President Obama didn't believe in it, and then President Trump didn't believe in it, and then President Biden didn't believe in it. So who am I to say anything? I mean, three presidents in a row said, "We're out of here."

• 1:26:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27:02Jack Murphy?

  Let's take a moment here to get into, I mean, we touched on it a little bit, but I think you have more to say about the future of the Department of Defense and about your book, Cat Five.

• 1:27:15Speaker 07

  Sure.

• 1:27:20Speaker 07

  I'm an old grunt, but now I'm eighty-six. And I look back and I wrote this book about all the wars I had been in, all the positions I had held. And I said, "As a historian, what am I looking at here?" And I came away with two things, and that's why I call it Cat Five, "The 2033 War." It is inevitable. It's not a matter of my opinion. It's not a matter of anyone's opinion. It is a matter of arithmetic that the next president, probably by 2032,

• 1:28:01Speaker 07

  will face a collision with our economy. That's just a fact, and it cannot be avoided. The Congress will continue to spend more money than it has. And once you get over 25% of your service for your debt out of your revenues, then the bond market says, "I want a premium for having American bonds." That premium will be somewhere in the order of 6% to 10%. Once you're at that level, you have skyrocketing inflation,

• 1:28:44Speaker 07

  and you have less productivity because more money is being sucked out by the bonds. At that point, the Congress is going to rebel. The Congress then is going to fingerpoint toward each other, toward the president, and we are going to be in a mess. It has nothing to do with my personal opinion. That's the arithmetic that is there. Now, what I point out is that at the same time that's happening, we cannot forget that Chairman Z is going to be eighty years old. And the clock is ticking.

• 1:29:22Speaker 07

  And he has promised that he is going to be in China better than Mao Zedong was. That's his goal. And in order to do that, he said, "I am bringing Taiwan back into the fold. And when I bring Taiwan back, we get a huge boost in our economy because they control the computer chips of the world, and we control AI." So this is big time stuff in terms of him looking at us, seeing that we're convouched by about 2032 with our own economic debt problem that is going to cause us to be at each other's throats,

• 1:30:08Speaker 07

  and saying, "Well, look what Iran did. Iran just closed one port, and we didn't dare send one destroyer to do anything. So all I'm going to do is simply put pressure on Taiwan. There'll be some fig leaf, and I'll say, "Well, Taiwan did this," and then I'll cut off trade. And once you cut off trade, then you buckle everything, and they'll have to come to our terms. Then the United States is finished in the Pacific, and China emerges." So this is what I'm laying out in my book, and I don't have the solution, Jack. But somebody has to fly the flag and say, "Hey, guys, watch it."

• 1:30:52Speaker 07

  And inside the military, I keep telling my friends, "You've got to stop this stuff with your legacy because we're not going to have the money for it." It's not that I don't want you to have battleships and carriers and tanks, but we don't have the money. So stop it and start getting into AI autonomous systems. Whether they do or they don't, I think is an open question in Congress.

• 1:31:19Speaker 07

  You know, Congress, every congressman is given money by the large defense contractors, a lot of money. And I think it's obscene, but it's the way our system works. And the large defense contractors want the battleships. They want the carriers. They want the tanks. They want the big stuff, not the small, cheap, autonomous stuff. So I don't know what the Congress is going to do, and I do worry that they are so angry at this president that they don't, they're not looking at our own future because they're so selfish.

• 1:32:01Jack Murphy?

  What are the things I find myself thinking about, Bing? And I think I agree with where you're going, that we're heading for a conflict. And we can debate the details of how that's going to come about, what it's going to look like. But we're heading there, and what I think about is Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran, and how these three conflicts are becoming intertwined with one another and in some ways merging with one another. And I guess my question to you is, is this the prelude to a Third World War that we're in right now?

• 1:32:38Speaker 07

  Oh, boy. Not, I would hope, the answer is you've touched on something that people are not paying attention to, that there's a convergence going on here and we're being squeezed.

• 1:32:51Jack Murphy?

  Yes.

• 1:32:52Speaker 07

  And we're seeing, and we're seeing that we don't have many partners. Now, we antagonized a lot of them, you know, and so Great Britain and Germany say, well, you started that, don't expect me to help you. And then President Trump says, well, maybe I won't do anything about NATO. Whoa, we begin to fracture as the West. And look, our friends in the Middle East, you know, Saudi Arabia, UAE, Qatar, they won't stand up. I mean, they are very flaccid and they're scared of Iran and they keep backing off and saying, well, you do it, you do it. But they won't do it.

• 1:33:30Speaker 07

  So you can see all of this is a cauldron that will simmer down, but it indicates we don't have a lot of strong friends. We are scared of taking casualties. That's the big thing now. We don't want to have casualties. Then you add the fact that there's no doubt Russia and China and North Korea and Iran have one thing in common. They want to push out the United States of America as a military force. So if something gets going in the Pacific, would all of them cause some trouble? Yes, I believe they would. Yes, I believe they would.

• 1:34:14Speaker 07

  And would, would we see that our NATO allies stood strong with us? I don't know. They could say, well, you've been giving us the back of the hand. And Japan could say, I'm not sure I want to get involved in this. We could be in a, in a real mess, Jack. We could be in a real mess.

• 1:34:35Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, I mean, there are some huge fractures between Russia, China, Iran, in different ways. But if they were to unify, if anything were to unify them, it would be their opposition to the United States. And then we would be facing a threat that I don't think we've really faced since World War II.

• 1:34:57Speaker 07

  No, but I don't see, I, and a lot of it wouldn't be, would not be military shooting.

• 1:35:04Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 1:35:05Speaker 07

  It would be economic, it would be psychological, it would be interfering in the, in psyops, it would be all these different dimensions where they could cause mischief in a lot of different ways. And then see if we had the gonads when the Chinese fleet positioned itself by ourselves to go out and say, I'm going to take 10,000 or 20,000 American sailors killed for the sake of Taiwan. And we might just blink.

• 1:35:41Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you think, I mean, last question before we'll, we'll get in a little bit more into your book and wrap up. Do you think we should station troops in Taiwan? Do you think that's the way to kind of head off a invasion?

• 1:35:58Speaker 07

  Well, I've been arguing for years, but successfully.

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• 1:37:38Speaker 07

  The answer is that would make a vast difference. There are two things that make a vast difference. If gradually, a little bit at a time, we just had tiny little semi-exercises that just get a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, a little bit bigger, so that it would be very difficult for China to take a move without saying, oh, my God, whether I like it or not, the Americans are in it.

• 1:38:06Jack Murphy?

  Right, like North Korea knows.

• 1:38:08Speaker 07

  I think that would help our deterrence. The other thing I believe, Jack, is that AI autonomous is moving so fast and so cheap with drones, that if the Taiwanese themselves wanted to protect themselves, they could do it for 4% of their defense GDP in defense. But they have been unwilling to do it themselves. So the big problem they're going to have if they get squeezed is many members of our Congress are going to say, well, they wouldn't stand up for themselves. Why should we stand up for a country that won't stand up for themselves? And if we've given, my goodness, I'm, I'm embarrassed that we haven't helped Ukraine

• 1:38:51Speaker 07

  much more than we have because they had the courage. If Taiwan doesn't show courage, I don't think they stand a chance of having us stand up for them.

• 1:39:04Jack Murphy?

  Your book, Cat Five, is that out now? Can people can go find that?

• 1:39:08Speaker 07

  Oh, yes. Yeah, it's on Amazon. Cat Five, The 2033 War. And I spent a lot of time on it in the battlefields, trying to show people what the fighting was all about. So I don't, I don't lecture as much as I'm afraid I may have lectured tonight, you know, I try to, I try to tell an awful lot of stories about what it's like to be a grunt, what it's like to meet with presidents and try to balance it both and say, we got, we got a big problem coming.

• 1:39:37Jack Murphy?

  And we'll have some links in the description where people can go and find your books. Bing, you mentioned, you know, the memoir you wrote, co-wrote with General Mattis.

• 1:39:48Speaker 07

  Right.

• 1:39:49Jack Murphy?

  And many others. I mean, it seems like you're still very active. I mean, are you working on any other projects right now?

• 1:39:56Speaker 07

  I am, I have, I have another one for Hoover, Stanford, on our military, and then another one I just wrote about China. So I always stay on, on something. You, you, it's just.

• 1:40:11Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's what you do.

• 1:40:13Speaker 07

  The commandant has told me that if there's another war, if it's in a fairly civilized place, I can go to my fifth war, otherwise I'm excused.

• 1:40:25Jack Murphy?

  Bing, where can people go to find you? Do you have like a website or are you on social media at all, anywhere people can go?

• 1:40:34Speaker 07

  You know, I have to, I am incapable of that sort of stuff, Jack, so I just, you know, I just never got into the 21st century that way. I'm still a grunt at heart.

• 1:40:48Jack Murphy?

  I don't, I don't, I don't totally blame you. If I could just sit back and write books instead, I think I would.

• 1:40:54Speaker 07

  By the way, the best book I ever wrote was called The Last Platoon.

• 1:41:01Jack Murphy?

  That's about Vietnam?

• 1:41:02Speaker 07

  No, no, it was a novel. I'd written several novels.

• 1:41:06Jack Murphy?

  About Afghanistan.

• 1:41:07Speaker 07

  About Afghanistan. And what I did was I took everybody I knew, so that everybody in the book is a real person. But I tried to conceal them a little bit, but, and I, I said it so that this was The Last Platoon sent into Helmand Province. It was just supposed to be a short mission, but then I get the involvement of the president, the druggies that are there, the whole thing becomes an absolute show. But I was trying to illustrate in a, in a seven-day window for one platoon by itself,

• 1:41:51Speaker 07

  how this all mixed up, everything that happened in Afghanistan over 20 years.

• 1:41:55Jack Murphy?

  I'm actually going to go pick that one. I'm going to pick that one up right now after we finish the show. That's right up my alley.

• 1:42:02Speaker 07

  Well, I noticed yours, The Most Dangerous Man, who is that?

• 1:42:08Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's a, it's a Ranger. Well, yeah, see, this is the difference. I was in Ranger Battalion, so the protagonist of the book is a Ranger.

• 1:42:15Speaker 07

  Oh, and where, where is he when this happens?

• 1:42:20Jack Murphy?

  In this book, in West Africa.

• 1:42:22Speaker 07

  Oh, and what years roughly?

• 1:42:25Jack Murphy?

  Like contemporary.

• 1:42:29Speaker 07

  Have you ever heard of Rudy Enders? Rudy Enders, he was the special operations, the director of the special operations group in the CIA. And he was tremendously famous in the CIA for his escapades. And, and one of them is when he went into Angola to bring out the last of the British mercenaries that we were paying when we cut off

• 1:42:55Jack Murphy?

  Oh, the Fenway.

• 1:42:57Speaker 07

  The money to them. And Casey sent him in to, to rescue them and bring them out. And he had, he had a final confrontation with, was his name Hoar, H O A R?

• 1:43:09Jack Murphy?

  Mike, Mike, I don't think Mike Hoar was in Angola. I think you're talking about his Fenway with Peter McAlister.

• 1:43:19Speaker 07

  Uh, no, but he survived, didn't he?

• 1:43:21Jack Murphy?

  Yes, he did. Peter did.

• 1:43:22Speaker 07

  Yeah. This, this, this was the one they executed that they

• 1:43:27Jack Murphy?

  Uh, there's George Washington Bacon, the American.

• 1:43:31Speaker 07

  No, no, this was the Brit, this was the Brit commando leader of, of the mercenaries who, um, who was executed. Anyway, anyway, uh, but Rudy, Rudy pulled that caper off, got the others out and almost had to kill him. You know, Rudy's Rudy Enders is a, is a real classic, you know?

• 1:43:50Jack Murphy?

  So that's pretty cool. I'll look that up.

• 1:43:53Speaker 07

  Yeah.

• 1:43:54Jack Murphy?

  Well, Ben, thank you for sharing your evening with us and telling us about your life and your stories and your books. Um, it's, it's really great to have you on the show.

• 1:44:04Speaker 07

  Well, I'm, I'm honored that you had me on, Jack, because you, you, you have some real characters on your show.

• 1:44:10Jack Murphy?

  Yes, we, yes, we do. And now you're one of them.

• 1:44:14Speaker 07

  All right.

• 1:44:17Jack Murphy?

  And everyone else out there, thanks for joining us tonight and we'll see you next time.

• 1:44:21Speaker 07

  Thanks, Jack.

• 1:44:23Speaker 04

  Hello, everyone. If you're hearing this, uh, you are not a member of the Patreon. You can get your hands on ad free episodes that come out early and you can ask us questions. Maybe we'll answer them. You can also watch the Team House podcast completely ad free and early, and you can also watch it live as we interview our guests. Um, and it's the best way to support the channel. So if you can, if you're open to it, you can go to patreon.com slash the team house. That link is in the description. Uh, we appreciate the supporters and we hope you would consider being one.

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