#193 John Stryker Meyer - MACV-SOG: The Secret War in Vietnam

John Stryker Meyer is a decorated Green Beret who served two tours in Vietnam (1968-1969 and 1969-1970) with the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group(MACV-SOG). Enlisting in 1966, he earned his Special Forces tab in 1967 and joined Spike Team Idaho, later leading Recon Team Idaho at Command and Control North (CCN) in Da Nang. Meyer’s missions took him across borders into denied areas, facing intense combat—including surviving multiple gunshot wounds and leading his team through impossible odds. After Vietnam, he served with the 10th Special Forces Group, then transitioned to civilian life as a journalist and author. He hosts the podcast, SOG Cast, and preserves the legacy of special operations veterans. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://www.tryarmra.com/SRS https://www.betterhelp.com/SRS This episode is sponsored by Better Help. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://www.boncharge.com/SRS https://www.meetfabric.com/SHAWN https://www.shawnlikesgold.com https://www.helixsleep.com/SRS https://www.lumen.me/SRS https://www.patriotmobile.com/SRS https://www.ziprecruiter.com/SRS John Stryker Meyer Links: X - https://x.com/SOGChronicles Website - https://sogchronicles.com Across the Fence - https://www.amazon.com/Across-Fence-John-Stryker-Meyer/dp/0983256705 On the Ground - https://www.amazon.com/Ground-Secret-War-Vietnam/dp/0983256756 SOG Chronicles: Volume I - https://www.amazon.com/dp/0983256780 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:15Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 0:26Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 0:29Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 0:32Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped going? You stop, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:39Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:40Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 0:45Speaker 05

  For the first time I can tell you, I don't feel good about it, but you know, that's war. How many enemy combatants do you guys think that day? They started stacking up the dead bodies so they could climb up on the bodies so they could shoot down at us. So they were using the bodies as a barricade? Yeah, men who had been wounded, they would disembowel them, their head off, stick their in the cavity where the bows were.

• 1:16Speaker 05

  John Stryker Meyer, welcome to the show. Honored to be here, honored to be in the seat where Legend, Sarah, Superbad have sat previous before me arriving. I'm honored to be here, sir. Well, I'm honored to have you. Thank you. It's been a long time coming. We've known each other for what? Almost five years now. Five years, has it been that long? Yes, sir, because I saw your podcast, first one, your Sean Ryan's show, Numero 001 with you and Mike Glover. I saw that and I couldn't believe it, I knew Mike, because he's special forces. And we had heard about some of the other Navy SEAL podcasters that were popping up. And at that point, five years ago is when I met Jaco Willink.

• 2:01Speaker 05

  And I said, who's this Sean Ryan guy? I listened to that show, I was like, oh my God. I listened to it twice and that was such a gripping, like a different feel to it. Particularly when you and Mike were sitting there talking about how during your mass depresses times, it's like, oh my God. But it's really well done.

• 2:21Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 2:21Speaker 05

  And I've been a fan ever since. And then I said, if when we moved to Franklin, we were renting in Franklin for a couple of months before we bought our house. And I reached out and you said, yeah, let's get together for breakfast.

• 2:33Shawn Ryan?

  Hell yeah, man. I'm glad we did.

• 2:35Speaker 05

  Me too.

• 2:35Shawn Ryan?

  Glad we did.

• 2:38Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, yeah, it's an honor to have you here, John. It really is. I've been saving this. I've been saving this opportunity. And, um, so it's, I've really been looking forward to it and it's gonna be a long day. Hope you're, uh, hope you're ready.

• 2:53Speaker 05

  I'm up for it. Absolutely. You kidding? Because, um, there's other podcasts, but yours is different. And it's the details. And even like you and I were talking before here about Tyler. And, uh, what a great interview. And those kind of interviews, that's what's making the new media today in America.

• 3:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yep.

• 3:16Speaker 05

  People are turning to that for the truth. And then just your interview with Brett. I mean, I just turned it off for a minute and go, oh, this girl, nice young girl. Look at Ryan. He's doing, he's done this great show here.

• 3:29Shawn Ryan?

  Brett Cooper?

• 3:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Speaker 05

  Oh my God.

• 3:32Shawn Ryan?

  I know, right?

• 3:33Speaker 05

  I kept listening to it and has listened to it.

• 3:36Shawn Ryan?

  Twenty-three years old. Who would have thought?

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Yeah. And she graduated from high school when she's 15. I barely got out of high school when I was eight.

• 3:42Shawn Ryan?

  I know, me too.

• 3:43Speaker 05

  It's kind of like, this young lady is amazing. So you kept listening to the story and then what she's been through. And then when she lands at the Daily Wire, hits the ground running. It's like, Justin, but that's the new media.

• 3:55Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 3:56Speaker 05

  Because the old regular media is just, uh, the majority of them sad to say, they don't report the facts. Yeah.

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  But, well, John, I'm excited, man. I've been, like I said, I've been wanting to do this for a long time and I just.

• 4:12Speaker 05

  We've been busy.

• 4:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, we've been busy.

• 4:15Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 4:15Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and I wanted to make sure we developed a friendship before, before we got you in here. And, uh, we definitely did that.

• 4:22Speaker 05

  We absolutely did, sir.

• 4:24Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, so a couple, I wanna, this interview is gonna be, you know, it's gonna be your life story and all about, you know, growing up Vietnam, post-service journalism, we're gonna hit all of it. And, and, but also in this interview, I'd like to get a couple of history lessons.

• 4:44Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 4:44Shawn Ryan?

  So I'd like to get, you know, some history about Vietnam and some history about Mag V Sog. And, um, because a lot of people listening, including myself, we don't know a lot about that, a lot about that war, what it was about, and, uh, there aren't a lot of, there aren't a hell of a lot of people know about Mag V Sog, so.

• 5:05Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, I mean, look at today, they do these on the street interviews.

• 5:10Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 5:10Speaker 05

  When they interview the young Americans, majority of them don't know who, who was in the north and the south in our American Civil War. They don't even know that.

• 5:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 5:22Speaker 05

  Let alone North Vietnam and South Vietnam, what the difference was or what side we were on. And nobody gets the truth about the harsh realities of communism and anybody that linked themselves to communism. That you seen today with Sarah and her people, there's, they're different brands, different names of repression and taking away people's rights. And, but they're all the same. And thankfully you got people out here talking about those things. That's why I'm honored to be here.

• 5:52Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 5:53Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 5:54Shawn Ryan?

  Well, everybody starts off with an introduction, so.

• 5:59Shawn Ryan?

  John Stryker Meyer, you are a US Army Special Forces Green Beret Veteran who served in covert Military Assistance Command, Vietnam. Studies and observation group MAC V SOG or simply SOG during the Vietnam War running dangerous, top-secret missions in North Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Missions that you weren't unable to talk about for 20 years. You're the recipient of two Bronze Stars with V devices, a Purple Heart, an Air Medal, the Combat Infantry Badge, US and Vietnamese Parachutist Badge, Vietnamese Gallantry Cross with Palm, among others. You completed your college education at Trenton State College after returning from Vietnam

• 6:44Shawn Ryan?

  and worked as a journalist until 2008. You're the author of Across the Fence, The Secret War in Vietnam, and co-author of On the Ground: The Secret War in Vietnam and SOG Chronicles, sharing your firsthand experiences and those of your fellow Green Berets. You are a host of the podcast SOGcast, where you delve into untold stories of SOG combat veterans, as well as some of the heroic aviators who supported Green Beret teams on the ground across the fence behind enemy lines. And more important than all of that, you're a husband to Anna of over 30 years, whom you have had five children, and most importantly, you're a Christian. Amen.

• 7:29Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the show. Well, thank you again. It's an honor to be here, sir. But, um, you know, everybody starts off with a gift, John. Oh, indeed. Let me guess, I hope it's legal in 50 states. Even you. Is it legal in all 50 states? I don't know. I mean, I don't know. They, I think so, but you know, with RFK in the house, then, uh... Oh, indeed. They're probably... They're probably gonna be illegal here any day. But, uh, vigilance league gummy bears, I do believe they are still legal in all 50 states. Very good. If they are, I could take it. Made here in the US. But, sir, because we're here in a gift exchange mode, I have for you a special gift that I brought today.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  I'm a member of the Special Operations Association and last year we had our forty eighth reunion where we celebrated the sixtieth year since the Sequel War was founded. MACV SOG, the Military Assistance Command Studies and Observations Group was founded and started in nineteen sixty four. Last year was the sixtieth anniversary. And on that coin, there is that picture on the back of a helicopter, which is from my personal time, which was Echo Four. We had a target. We'd been in contact for four hours. The South Vietnamese helicopter pilot, Captain Tin,

• 8:54Speaker 05

  flew in, hovered for ten minutes while we struggled through elephant grass to get to the helicopter. He pulled us out and that helicopter had forty eight bullet holes in it.

• 9:06Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 9:07Speaker 05

  He got us back. We get back to our base at FOB one in Phu Bai. I go up, climb up, say, "You saved our ass. Thank you. Come on into the club. I want to buy you a drink." He goes, "I'm sorry. I'm flying home. My wife is holding dinner for me."

• 9:23Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:24Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 9:25Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 9:26Shawn Ryan?

  Ben, this has my favorite saying of all time on here. "You have never lived until you've almost died. For those who fought for it, life has a special flavor that the protected will never know."

• 9:41Speaker 05

  Amen.

• 9:44Shawn Ryan?

  That quote was written on the wall when I got to Afghanistan.

• 9:48Speaker 05

  Really?

• 9:49Shawn Ryan?

  For the first time in the hooch that we were staying at. And I took a picture of it and still to this day, uh, it's my favorite quote.

• 9:59Speaker 05

  When I first got to Phu Bai in nineteen sixty eight, if you're really a cool Green Beret, you got a Zippo cigarette lighter. And I have that on my official FOB one cigarette lighter. That saying is on it.

• 10:13Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 10:14Speaker 05

  Absolutely. That's part of our SOG history.

• 10:17Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 10:18Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 10:19Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you. And I got one other, one other thing for you.

• 10:22Speaker 05

  Oh, no.

• 10:22Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so, you know.

• 10:24Speaker 05

  I'm happy with the...

• 10:25Shawn Ryan?

  Being a Christian.

• 10:28Shawn Ryan?

  Four four four, you know what that means?

• 10:31Speaker 05

  No.

• 10:32Shawn Ryan?

  Four four four, this is a number that appeared to me several times, uh, right after I've, I've found, found God.

• 10:40Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 10:40Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, it just kept appearing and super long story short, I was driving, right after I found God, I had these three appearances like right in a row that just slapped me in the face. And I was, I was driving back to work and I had four forty-four on my clock.

• 10:59Speaker 05

  Oh, that's.

• 11:00Shawn Ryan?

  Four forty-four, gas left empty, and it was four hours and forty-four minutes after I'd had this conversation with my IT guy, Adam, about guardian angels. He wanted me to know that I had guardian angels watching over me. And so I called, um, I called Kimball, who runs all the social media here.

• 11:23Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:23Shawn Ryan?

  And I said, hey, Google what four forty-four means? I want to talk about this when I get back. There's obviously something.

• 11:30Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah.

• 11:30Shawn Ryan?

  And he looked it up. We got in, I got in here and it means your guardian angels want you to know they're watching over you.

• 11:40Speaker 05

  Whoa.

• 11:41Shawn Ryan?

  How crazy is that?

• 11:43Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 11:43Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 11:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, because, uh, there's no doubt in my mind that the only way I survived the secret war was through the grace of the Lord. There were times when I should have been dead, so dead, so many times. And, uh, there had to be divine intervention. I'm just a dumbass city slicker out there trying to do the right thing by God and country, you know? But thank you, sir. I appreciate that.

• 12:06Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 12:06Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 12:08Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, all right, John, you ready to get into it?

• 12:12Speaker 05

  Absolutely.

• 12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yes, sir. Where'd you grow up?

• 12:15Speaker 05

  Uh, Trenton, New Jersey. Yeah, the capital of, uh, New Jersey. We were there. Dad was a milkman and I grew up on the milk truck with dad. A devout Christian and, uh, mom was a, uh,

• 12:28Speaker 05

  A church organist, and a choir director, and a piano teacher. And so, uh, they met at a church in Trenton. Cause mom drove down from Belme, which is about twenty miles away, to play organ and tended the choir. Well, dad, he was a good musician, but he couldn't sing for, he, he was a horrible voice. And he's young, but he joined the choir. He joined the choir? He did. He met Dorothy Grace Stryker. And in January nineteen forty-three, they were married up in Harlingen, New Jersey, the Dutch Reformed Church. And, uh, they lived happily ever after. And, um, so three years later, I was born nineteen forty-six.

• 13:13Speaker 05

  Nineteen forty-six, seventy-nine years old. Yes, sir. And, uh, grew up on a milk truck, but dad watched him. And, uh, we, we had common interest in baseball, cause that was the sport then. And we'd have our catches and, uh, worked a lot at church. We had a church community there and, um, um, just grew up there. You know, every Sunday, in the early days, dad's, dad delivered milk seven days a week. So on Sundays, um, we'd get up, do the milk route, change, hit, get to church on time. Wow. Absolutely. Any brothers and sisters? Yeah, uh, we have, uh, I got a younger sister, Linda, she's up there in Lakewood, Cali- Colorado.

• 13:57Speaker 05

  And a little brother, Dave, and he's in Aurora, Colorado. They both went west from Trenton many years ago, but they love it out there. And we lost a little brother, he was, we lost him at five months back in, uh, nineteen fifty-one. He had heart congestion of some sort. That probably, if it happened today, they probably could have saved him. But in nineteen, uh, in nineteen fifty-one, they couldn't, didn't have the medical procedures in place. Man. Oh, yeah. What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

• 14:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was just a goofy kid, loved baseball, um, thought I was a cowboy. You know, my granddad Meyer bought me a cap pistol. Now, we had no alcohol and no guns in the house. And when granddad Meyer bought me a cap pistol, there were some issues.

• 14:47Speaker 05

  My granddad pulled rank on mom for the one time that I ever saw him do it. And she let me bring the cap pistol in the house. So we played Cowboys and Indians, went to play Little League ball. Uh, I was never the brightest student in school, but usually could get it done well enough to uh, to get through the grade, get promoted to the next grade.

• 15:11Speaker 05

  Played piano. We had a- You play piano? Yeah, I could read, I could read music before I could read words. Cause you think about with music, you only have eight letters, A through G. The damn alphabet's got 26 letters, man. In kindergarten, that gets really rough. Cause I could read music before I read words. Do you still play? I'm rusty, but yes, uh, my mom gave me her Steinway, so I'm, I go up there and tickle the Arvis once in a while. I bet Anna loves that. Oh, she does. Absolutely. Yes. She's my biggest fan. And we have stories about that, like the first serious date we had, I took her back to my house and cooked dinner and stuff. I took her into the living room and I turned the light out.

• 15:55Speaker 05

  She's like, oh my God, what's gonna happen? I'm here with this green beret. She's apprehensive, but I played Chopin for her. Wow. And I figured this woman is such a classic. If there's any way, if she likes classic music, I could use this to try to gain her hand in marriage someday. And the rest is history, brother. It worked. It did.

• 16:20Speaker 05

  My gosh, you like Chopin.

• 16:23Speaker 00

  Ally here with cash when you need it. You know, for the taxi that saved you, the guy who helped you move. Wait, are you supposed to tip at the car wash? Don't be in. Ally's 75,000 fee-free ATMs mean you always have cash when you need it. Ally Bank member FDIC.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company tore me of the explosion on our rig on October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 16:47Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 16:55Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You stall, you freeze to death, that's what-

• 16:59Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 17:02Speaker 04

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 17:03Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a minute without parent.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  What else were you into? Were you troublemaker? A little bit.

• 17:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:12Speaker 05

  No, but again, growing up in the church like that and mom and dad were pretty close reins on us. And if we stepped out of line, and even then, neighborhoods. If Mrs. Zabrowski saw me doing something, like Johnny, you shouldn't be doing that, she would kick my ass. And then she could, she'd tell mom. And Mama Meyer, when she's not happy, baby. So that, between that and the church, you always had influences keeping you on the track. And uh. By the time we got to high school, uh, I was in the marching band for a year. We had vocal groups. I was involved with that. Played JV soccer. And uh. Dad didn't want me to play football. He's worried about my knees.

• 17:58Speaker 05

  Even because I'd hurt my knee playing soccer in eighth grade. But I finally played football in my senior year with Alvin Bithia. A couple of other people and my high school quarterback, as it turns out. Hal Kroski was uh, he went MIA on a mission in Cambodia in February. Of um. Nineteen sixty-nine.

• 18:20Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 18:20Speaker 05

  So every February comes around, I think of my quarterback. But I, because I had missed the first two years I was on the team. Did all the practices, went to all the games, geared up. But never crossed the line, but I loved, I loved every second of it.

• 18:35Shawn Ryan?

  So you wouldn't consider yourself to be.

• 18:39Shawn Ryan?

  An athlete?

• 18:40Speaker 05

  Yeah, not a very good one. You know, I just love, I love baseball, such a head game. And I have a, a dominant eye. And I grew up. You know, I, I wanted to be an air force pilot. Had model planes, build them and I had a lot of earaches, so mom would always get me in the little plane to make or. Linking logs or something like that, but deep down inside, I wanted to fly, to fly a jet. Well. At some point. Remember talked to one of the eye doctors saying someday I want to be a jet pilot. He says, nah, with your vision, it's not gonna work. So I settled for the next best thing, jumping out of airplanes.

• 19:17Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 19:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, of course, possibly. Yeah, when I went through jump school, I had a, I had a hundred and two percent pay raise. Because in, in the May of sixty seven, when I go through jump school, a private, I still, I think I still a private E one. The pay was fifty dollars a month.

• 19:36Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 19:36Speaker 05

  Now, jump pay for an enlisted scumbag, you know, was not officer's pay, but enlisted was fifty five dollars a month. So the first paycheck, I bought my Cochran jump boots and the rest is history, man.

• 19:48Shawn Ryan?

  Nice.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  Yes, sir, I had sixteen jumps overall.

• 19:51Shawn Ryan?

  So, so how do you just go from, I mean, was it immediate? You were just like, all right, can't be a pilot, I guess I'll jump out of planes?

• 19:58Speaker 05

  No, no, it was, it much longer progression than that. It took me two years to flunk out of college. So I was there just literally just doing the wrong thing. I went in as a music major, transferred to be a phys ed major. Because the music department chairman learned that I was playing soccer. Says, you either gotta be a music major or a jock. Well, I don't like being talked to like that. So I went to the phys ed department and I knew the soccer coach because I went out for JV soccer. And I knew the baseball coach, a great guy. And so they signed me up. Transferred to phys ed, still flunked out. Took me two years, flunked out.

• 20:41Speaker 05

  And that summer I worked at Yosemite National Park. And when I was up there, I got a letter from dad, hey, you flunked out, be advised, the draft board's coming for you. And I swear, again, like this divine intervention stuff, within a few days. I, my, one of my jobs was to pick up trash in the southern part of, of Yosemite. And it's in the Wamona, which is down by the southern gate, down by the big trees. So I used to go out and walk, maybe anywhere from five to ten miles, pick up the trash. And I got to the point where I had it really clean, so I would jog, pick up the trash.

• 21:24Speaker 05

  And I would go to a bookstore and get a book. Well, one day I go into the bookstore and there's a book, The Green Berets. Now, this is nineteen sixty six, the summer of. In nineteen sixty-four, a Green Beret received the first Medal of Honor for combat in South Vietnam. And through high school, we read that we, in the history class, it was mandatory reading of the New York Times, back when it was a real newspaper. And they talked about Southeast Asia, Kennedy, assassination of D M, all that. And, uh, so we knew about it, but it was still far away. And if you gave me a map, I wouldn't have been able to find Indochina. But I read that book.

• 22:08Speaker 05

  I said, son of a bitch, if I can make it with these guys, I want to go with them. Cause I knew at that time in nineteen sixty-six, you know, people were getting drafted, draft was on. And you got drafted, you would have eight weeks of basic training, eight weeks of advanced training, one month leave, you're going to Vietnam. Well, like I said, I'm a city slicker. And I didn't have much experience with weapons. My cousins and I would go out and shoot when I go up to my cousin's farm, shoot the shotguns and twenty-twos, things like that, but not real training. So I figured with these guys, I'll get more training, I need that. So if I can do it, so enlisted airborne on assigned. I went through basic training at Fort Dix, New Jersey.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  And one of my medals that I'm really proud of is the, uh, expert badge for shooting. We qualified in the M fourteen. It was, when we went to the range, it was two degrees below zero.

• 23:05Shawn Ryan?

  Two degrees below zero and you're calling?

• 23:08Speaker 05

  Qualifying.

• 23:09Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 23:10Speaker 05

  And my last shot, I got sixty, which you need to be an expert. I polished that medal up and wore it proudly for my entire time in the military. After that, we had advanced infantry training. And then during advanced infantry training, they had the, uh, Whenever it was a rainy day, they would take us to a big auditorium. Everybody was sitting on the floor. It would be career day. You learn about different MOSs. So we're sitting on the floor and they had a stage up front with steps on each side. And you had these cooks that would come up, the military police would come up. And the cooks are like, hey, will you come with us? You'll never be hungry. Okay, but none of those guys were in shape.

• 23:52Speaker 05

  And other people, Signal Corps came in, crypto people came in. The very last guy was a green beret. A little, little tough guy. And it'd be raining. That's why we're inside, we're all sitting on the floor. He comes up, walks through us, did a vertical jump on the stage, turned around and goes, I'm here for special forces, I'm looking, I'm a recruiter. Anybody interested to see me? Anybody here interested? Well, I jumped off the floor, I read the book. Me and about four or five other guys, I'm looking around like hundreds of people are sitting on their ass. Said, you guys are gonna go to Vietnam in a couple of months. Oh, if I can get in with these guys, I would get some more training. So yeah, it was it. Went down, did a psychological test.

• 24:36Speaker 05

  And, uh, uh, passed all the tests, the physical stuff. And the-

• 24:41Shawn Ryan?

  How tough was it? How tough was the physical test?

• 24:45Speaker 05

  For me, not tough, but I was in good shape for running, swimming, I could swim enough to survive. Not, not like SEAL swimming, but just enough to get that old side, if worse comes to worse, hit the side stroke and just go to the house, come home, you know?

• 24:58Shawn Ryan?

  What was the psychological test like back then?

• 25:00Speaker 05

  I don't know. It wasn't too bad, you kind of figure, there's a couple, you know, they're trying to lead you a certain way. So you want to answer it, just make sure you're right. But anyway, whatever it was-

• 25:11Shawn Ryan?

  Fuzzy bunnies. That's what I tell everybody when they're getting ready to take the psych test, just think fuzzy bunnies.

• 25:17Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 05

  For sure. So he, so the final day comes and all the people that had signed up were there. And so he dismissed the people that didn't make it. And there was a bunch of us, he brought each one in, one at a time. I'm the last one. He brought me in and made me stand there for like, it felt like an eternity. And so he finally, he goes, uh, okay, Meyer. He said, you're lucky. They lowered the standards.

• 25:51Speaker 05

  So he either busted my chops or they lowered the standards. Either way, I was, I said, am I in or not? He goes, yeah, you're in. So we went from there, had jump school at the Fort Benning, had a zero week there and bought my first pair of jump boots, began to polish them up. Three weeks and throughout that time, it's like that harassment thing, you know, just like in the movies. It's the same. At jump school is a little different. They literally throw you out of your bunker at two o'clock in the morning. It's like, okay, I seen the movies. I know how this plays out. So we went through it all and then we had five jumps to qualify and went through

• 26:33Speaker 05

  that pretty much without any major injuries or anything. And then we went to Fort Bragg and we left on a Friday night, packed us up on the bus, drove from Columbia, Georgia or Columbus, Georgia up to Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Going, we don't get there till 11, 12 o'clock at night. So the bus comes out, everybody gets out, we're just waiting to get screwed with, you know, have people come out and harass and harangue and stuff. And we're all standing around, some guy comes out with flip flops and shorts and a shirt with a clipboard. Welcome to Special Forces Training Group. It's Friday night. Here's the barracks for a temporary barracks. You all go find

• 27:16Speaker 05

  a bunk now. All right. Is anybody here hungry? We got the mess hall over here. The cook is there making some sandwiches if you want. Go what? The cook's gonna make sandwiches for me? A private first class? You kept waiting for him to screw with you, you know, and they didn't. So we were there for the whole week and he says, Monday morning, there'll be a formation. Be there.

• 27:41Speaker 05

  That was it. So we went to all the meals, the mess hall was, the little PT just to stay in shape and began training. So that was May of 67.

• 27:52Shawn Ryan?

  How, when did the Vietnam War start?

• 27:55Speaker 05

  Well, uh, unofficially, it was in the early seventies, like fifty-six, fifty-seven. We had Green Beret teams that went over and the CIA was working with their programs there. And, uh, after Kennedy became really unhappy with the CIA after the Bay of Pigs and a couple of other incidents, um, they What was the Bay of Pigs? Uh, was the invasion of the CIA was working to take Cuba back from Fidel Castro. And it was a completely botched mission. Um, they had planned to attack, go in and then win over the hearts and minds of the Cubans.

• 28:36Speaker 05

  And the people that worked in the operations side of the CIA had a different location planned. And a key part was going to be air support with A-one Sky Raiders and anything else. But somebody changed the plan and they put it in the Bay of Pigs, which was not as well of an area. The other area had train lines, highways, mountains where people could go hide in the mountains from the, any comrades that would come hunting for them. But this area, the Bay of Pigs was also where Fidel Castro took vacations. So he and his people knew it. Anyways, that invasion attempt was failed and Kennedy refused to give them air support.

• 29:20Speaker 05

  And that was the, that was a, a big incident that blew up nationally, internationally embarrassing to the United States and to Kennedy. And by, at the end of sixty-three, they took away the covert side of the CIA in Vietnam.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  And they formed MACV SOG in, uh, I think it was January nineteen sixty-four is officially announced. So the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam Studies and Observations Group was formed up. It took a while to get things in place, like any military operation. But, um, by sixty-five, we had people who were beginning to form. They had a base up at Camp Duck where they're doing training. And, um, they began running missions across the fence. And some of them would be, they, just in those days, you know, the NVA didn't have their act together in Laos or Cambodia. Our guys could go, they would patrol in. But they often made contact if they were in.

• 30:21Speaker 05

  And by the time I arrived in nineteen sixty-eight, they had, the NVA had twenty-five thousand troops in Laos.

• 30:30Shawn Ryan?

  What does the NVA stand for?

• 30:32Speaker 05

  Oh, sorry, North Vietnamese Army. It was officially the People's Army of Vietnam, but it was the North Vietnamese Army for us, so it's the NVA. And they were trained up north, had training from the Russians and the Chinese. And, uh, like by sixty-eight, that was our worst year in the Vietnam War, the highest year for casualties amongst all US troops, because you had the Tet Offensive in the beginning of the year, as well as SOLO, we had the highest year of casualties that year. Um, so,

• 31:08Speaker 05

  that's just the way that went. I don't know if we could get back to the, some of the beginning stuff, I've been wandering a little bit.

• 31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, no, let's rewind a little bit.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, please.

• 31:14Shawn Ryan?

  How, how old were you when the Kennedy assassination happened?

• 31:18Speaker 05

  I was in high school, we were in choir practice, and the choir director, who was a Navy veteran,

• 31:25Speaker 05

  somebody came in and talked to him. He stopped, he turned around, and then he came back and faced us, he says, "We're done."

• 31:36Speaker 05

  He says, "Somebody just shot the president." So I was, uh,

• 31:42Speaker 05

  seventeen at the time.

• 31:43Shawn Ryan?

  Seventeen?

• 31:44Speaker 05

  Yeah. In high school, and we always had choir practice in the auditorium. And everybody was stunned. So he says, it was, it was always the last class of the day, he says, "If you all want to go home early today, you can, you're dismissed." He, he was weeping.

• 32:02Speaker 05

  And Harry Molder was tough, but a great guy. Cause I was a, we had music classes, we had been in the band for one year, and vocal, we had a male glee club, had the chorus.

• 32:16Speaker 05

  And then there was a special group and we would meet in the mornings at the an hour before school started and we had practice with the special group. There would be, I forget how it broke down. I think we had like 12 guys and 12 girls.

• 32:32Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 32:32Speaker 05

  That were taken out of the choir and we practiced, special members, did a little choreography and everything and but Harry is just a great guy.

• 32:41Shawn Ryan?

  Well, what did you think about the Kennedy assassination?

• 32:44Speaker 05

  Oh, it's outraged. Just couldn't believe what happened.

• 32:47Shawn Ryan?

  What was the pulse of the country?

• 32:48Speaker 05

  Just total outrage. Just to think that some, and again, we're just reading from the media, Oswald, some scumbag that had been to Russia, was able to get up to the book tower and and to shoot the president in Dallas. And you knew that there was a lot of political strife down there. It was not, it was not a democratic stronghold in Dallas at that time. And there had been, we had heard within days that Kennedy had been advised not to go to Dallas because of hostilities or hostile attitude towards him. And as it all involved, as it evolved, then when Oswald gets killed, you figured

• 33:31Speaker 05

  that we've lost the source of what really happened that day, hoping that somebody gives him some truth serum or something and say, what really happened here? Because he looked too stupid to be able to do anything that would be that sophisticated to get a weapon and go up and kill the president.

• 33:46Shawn Ryan?

  Mm hmm.

• 33:47Speaker 05

  And go into this building that you just assume the CIA, I mean, the Secret Service would have more of a protective, um, before you go into a target area, before the president goes anywhere, they look at all the buildings, suppose they scope those things out. There's a lot of questions asked, but even in my little furtive mind.

• 34:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 34:10Speaker 05

  I mean, just.

• 34:12Shawn Ryan?

  Go down a little rabbit hole here, I mean.

• 34:14Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:14Shawn Ryan?

  You know, all these years later, they're getting ready to release the files supposedly. You know, I know they released a bunch. I don't know what's in them yet, but I mean, what do you think? What do you think that was?

• 34:23Speaker 05

  Well, recently Glenn Beck has done some, some stuff on a little bit of a deep dig. And, uh, when he talked to, to, uh, Cass Patel, Cass said, when you look at this stuff, it's not who, it's what was, what was going on. And so they're beginning to roll up a lot of strings that are coming off of that. From, you know, apparent CIA involvement at some level. And on the internet, there's at least one guy saying, I killed the president. And I've never listened to it because I just figured he's a kook. Um, but again, Glenn Beck is saying at least there was things there that there was CIA involvement.

• 35:07Speaker 05

  And, you know, when we were involved with the CIA, most of the times it was doing things that were mission oriented to hurt the communists. So everything was like mission oriented. And, um,

• 35:21Speaker 05

  you know, we had mixed emotions dealing with the CIA even in sixty-eight, sixty-nine. It was a one-way street. Give us information, but we'd never get anything back, which is fine. We're, we're trained professionals. We're out there snooping the poop. And like one of the things we would do, uh, we'd do wiretaps. And the CIA says, if you listen to the wire, there's nothing going on, tape it anyway. Tape it. We have at that time, state of the art cassette recorder for the cassette. And then the wire would go up and then our, our little people, that's an affectionate term for my South Vietnamese. We had them trained up. They would climb the pole or the tree, tap the, tap it in.

• 36:03Speaker 05

  And then if it was on a telephone pole, they took mud with them and they would cover the wire. So anybody going by, they wouldn't see the wire. And we would tape it. And uh, when we were done, we turned in all the blank tapes. For us, it sounded like blank tapes, but the CIA would amplify it a hundred times. And they said they were able to get great intel off of those tapes.

• 36:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  To me, it just sounded like nothing.

• 36:29Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  But if the CIA is happy, I'm happy.

• 36:34Shawn Ryan?

  At least in that case.

• 36:35Speaker 05

  And we get, it would be a couple of other war stories later. We have some CIA angles, but let's get back to our rewind.

• 36:42Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so let's, so back to you show up.

• 36:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 36:46Shawn Ryan?

  Special Forces training.

• 36:47Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 36:48Shawn Ryan?

  You get the weekend. You get your sandwiches made for you. What was that Monday like?

• 36:53Speaker 05

  Oh, from that time on, it was just like, um, I couldn't believe I was there. It was just, um, growing up as a kid and thinking about, this is an opportunity. By now, everybody knew the Green Berets. The song had been out, the battle of the Green Berets. And, um, so the book had been out. And of course, Roger, um, Roger Donlin was the recipient of the first Medal of Honor from the Vietnam War. His A camp got overrun in July of sixty-four. He earned the Medal of Honor. So that was the first Medal of Honor awarded by President Johnson

• 37:37Speaker 05

  to Roger, who fortunately I became friends with years later. But, so we knew about that. And knew about that history and more stories were appearing in the paper. In sixty-five, you had the Idrang Valley with, uh, We Were Soldiers Once, that story. I mean, never told that way to the media, but took the movie and the book that, uh, that Joe Galloway did that would just, uh, give you accurate insights into that. But that was an obvious escalation. We knew the one seventy-third airborne was there, the Marines were there. And, uh, you know, you have footage, there's footage of the Marines going into Da Nang. Well, the,

• 38:19Speaker 05

  the Special Forces story side of that, the Marine photographers were really pissed with the Green Berets when the Marines invaded Da Nang, when they went in with their beach assault, because some of the Green Berets had been out, uh, waterskiing. And they're in the background waterskiing, so they had to edit out the Green Berets waterskiing.

• 38:44Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 38:44Speaker 05

  Just one of my favorite.

• 38:46Shawn Ryan?

  That's hilarious.

• 38:47Speaker 05

  Oh yeah, absolutely. So there's the fun side of life there too, you know.

• 38:51Shawn Ryan?

  What was the training like? And how many, how many of you guys were there?

• 38:56Speaker 05

  You know, it's, I'm, I'm no good on numbers. I was strictly focused on me, got to know a couple of guys. And, uh, uh, in the beginning, we had phase one, which is general training. You know, mission map reading, uh, orientation, can you get to point A to point B? I instantly found a guy from Texas who had grown up in the woods. Me and him were really good friends. Cause I knew, I wasn't quite sure of my compass trainings and bearings that way. But we got through it all, had a little bit of hand to hand and forced marches, things like that. And, uh, then after phase one, you went to phase two, which was MOS training.

• 39:40Speaker 05

  So with special forces, you have five MOSs, commo, demolitions, weapons, intel, and medics. And the medic course, at that time, the green berets, as they are today, the medics are the best in the world. Their training was over a year long. Now, in fact, it was so tough. I knew that was an MOS that I couldn't take. Because they had classes, they would go in and do a class all day. And first thing in the morning, they'd be getting tested on what they, what they had been taught the day previous. And they, they lost a lot of people. Cause that was a rigorous course. And then when they're done, you had the dog lab. Where they would wound a dog, you had to patch up the dog, sew its leg back on.

• 40:24Speaker 05

  And then they would go to, um, emergency rooms around the country. They still do this today with the emergency.

• 40:30Shawn Ryan?

  They still do it.

• 40:31Speaker 05

  Oh yeah.

• 40:31Shawn Ryan?

  SEALs send their guys to the.

• 40:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure enough. And we had for years, the SEALs were coming through that medic course. Now, I don't know if they still do or not, because the SEALs have expanded so much of their training.

• 40:42Shawn Ryan?

  I don't know, when I was then, they were still doing it.

• 40:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. But it was good. And so that's our MOS. And so I got commo. At that time, as Morse code was the key part of the commo. We had the classes on. On a, you know, just FM radios, AM radios, handheld stuff. You had the basic training, but the hard part was the Morse code. Myself, Johnny McIntyre, Tony Harrow, we all flunked out. We got, we got recycled. And when we got recycled, there was a Sergeant First Class Villa Rosa, Paul Villa Rosa. He took us under his wing. Now, he had been to Nam three times. On his neck was a tattoo, "Cut here."

• 41:30Speaker 05

  And he was tough, and he was amazing. He could-

• 41:33Shawn Ryan?

  He tattooed a line that said, "Cut here."

• 41:38Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. He had a couple other tattoos, which I don't remember. But he was an amazing Morse code. He had been in, um, in the maritime service previous as a communicator, and he could take, he could do Morse code with both hands. He could send and receive at the same time. And his speed was so fast. Um, they had the thing that's called a bug. And the bug was a, uh, a handheld for you to do your Morse code signals, but it was really fast. Well, he would make that thing sing. So he took us in. He came in at night. We could come back at night for extra. He would be there with us.

• 42:17Speaker 05

  We went in for the weekends. We finally got, with Morse code, you had five-letter groups. And you had to get fifteen or eighteen word groups per minute to graduate from Kamo. It took a while, but we, we made it.

• 42:38Shawn Ryan?

  But what was- So you wanted to go to Vietnam?

• 42:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. I seen all the war movies. I grew up with, with the Duke and everybody else with their war movies and, um, God and Country.

• 42:54Shawn Ryan?

  So what did you, what was it like for you getting trained by special ops guys that are coming back from Vietnam?

• 43:02Speaker 05

  It, you know, it was really, it was just, I just felt like I was in the element that it was new and different. For me, it was so- So far out that I was just happy to be able to and be able to every time I graduated to the next phase, it's kind of like, we made it, you know, I kept waiting for them to say like that recruiter, you're lucky we lowered the standard, somebody's gonna come along and have a reality check. And so how the hell did you get in here this far? Get out of here. Go to go be a cook somewhere at the leg unit, you know? I kept waiting for that, but we kept going on and we made it through. How'd they treat you guys? You know, it was it was different. It wasn't like basic A I T and jump school.

• 43:48Speaker 05

  There they gave you rules. You had to abide by them. They whatever they told you to do, you had to do it. But they also, if you ask a question, a lot of times they would answer the question. And it just felt like they were training us to go to Vietnam. And we knew that we had this mission against communism. We had seen what communism had done in Hungary. We had seen and heard about things in Russia. And we heard about Mao Testong. We never realized just what a brutal killers they were of their own people. Mass murderers effectively, but we knew communism sucked. We saw Fidel Castro and what happened to Cuba.

• 44:33Speaker 05

  And so we knew that we're up against the forces of darkness at that time. And we're training for that. And at that time, the Green Berets, only thing we knew about were the Green Beret A teams that went over. So you had an A team, there would be a senior medic and a junior medic and for all the M O Ss. And then you have the the team leader and then there'd be an officer who'd be a captain. And then there'd be an executive officer and but the team sergeant ran the team. But there'd be that delicate balance between them. So that's what we trained up for was A teams going to Vietnam. And through that training, we came to find to the F T X.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  You put together your first A team with without the officers. And we would go in as a team, had missions, the combat guys, we had to set up the wires. And of course, here's army training. This is December nineteen sixty seven.

• 45:33Speaker 05

  Our training is in the Urawi National Park, National Forest in North Carolina. It snowed. We had like a foot of snow. For our training prior to going to Vietnam, which is like the perfect icy, moronic WTF situation, you know, it's like, what? We're going to go to Nam and we're here in the snow. And, and, and of course, uh, my, my Texas buddy who had helped me get through with the orientation, we were in the commo together and he was, he was my joint mate. We were supposed to take turns sleeping. Well, he fell asleep on his watch. The instructor came by and tore

• 46:11Speaker 05

  down our tent, kicked our ass, put us out in the snow. But we survived. Got through it and put up the antenna and we jumped, our jump. So we finally jumped at night and we jumped at night at 800 feet. And that's a pretty close jump. I mean, Yeah. The only ones I heard about some of your programs, some of the guys from today, when they jump at 400 feet. And we had a couple of guys later on with SOG, we had five halo jumps into Laos. And then we had 12 or 13, depending who you talk to, static line jumps, some in Laos, and then some in South Vietnam, when they were supporting aid camps, they're on disease.

• 46:57Speaker 05

  But they would talk about jumping at 500 feet, no reserve, because you just go out, the string pulls your landing. And in my case, 800 feet happened really quick, because I was the commo guy. So you had your parachute, an emergency parachute, your equipment bag, your M14 bag, and then we had an additional bag. So we had to carry, uh, we had a, our radio was a, uh, we called the Angry 109. And you used that for Morse code. And, uh, in order to get that radio, you had to have a handheld generator that's sat on a metal frame that you sat on. So you would

• 47:39Speaker 05

  have somebody would sit there cranking the generator and then you put the antenna up and communicate back to base.

• 47:48Speaker 05

  So I had the, you had that metal seat. Yeah. The generator, which was heavy, complete with the handles. And then the radio, plus the M fourteen and plus other equipment, sleeping bag and stuff like that. So when he jumped, I was, I jumped heavy. And jumped out and just by the grace of the Lord again, there was one little road. And I came out, the wind took me and I landed, did a PLF there. And uh, went and did the FTX, the field training exercise. We were out there for five or six days and nights. Got through it, came back for some final classes. And it was around, I don't know, December fourteenth, fifteenth, somewhere's around there.

• 48:29Speaker 05

  Uh, this is graduation, here's your certificate, congratulations. Here's your pass for leave for Christmas. In our case, uh, the comma guys, there was a bunch of us that went TDY to Fort Gordon, Georgia. For twelve weeks of radio teletype. Could the aid camps needed, of course, we didn't know it, but SOG needed.

• 48:53Speaker 05

  Communicators with top secret clearance to run the radio teletype. Did you know what SOG was at the time? We, you know, we'd heard something about a deadly. Top secret mission in Vietnam. And it was scuttlebutt. And you know, once, and with our comma class, particularly once we got recycled, so we knew all the instructors. And they knew us. And so as you get near the end, they could tell who's going to graduate. And at the end, there'd be a coffee break or something. And we get to talk, hey, you've been to Vietnam. They've all been there at least two or three times, like Sergeant Villarosa. And so we're going through this and uh, they go, look, when you go to Vietnam, you're going to get.

• 49:39Speaker 05

  In-country training.

• 49:42Speaker 05

  And when you're done with that, get assigned to an A camp. There's operations out there. People just die. And they're going to come out at the end of your in-country training, they're going to say, we're looking for volunteers, but they won't tell you what it is. Don't do it. Go to an A camp, get used to Vietnam. Okay. So we go through our radio teletype training. Johnny McIntyre and I, we got busted. We got busted from a private first class to private E deuce. Those legs down, they just didn't like us leaving base at night, going downtown to howl the wolves. So Johnny and I got Going downtown to where? To Augusta. We called the disgusta, but Augusta, Georgia.

• 50:27Speaker 05

  Disgusta, huh? Yeah, it's right outside. What happens in disgusta? Well, it was amazing. They had a couple of really cool nightclubs there. You could drink a lot. My dad was kind enough to let me take our Pontiac down there, so I had a car. And Johnny McIntyre and I, we drove down, we were there. So at night, they come by with the base inspection like at 10, 10:30. All tucked in, we had our clothes on. The second he left, man, bing, we're out to the parking lot, we're downtown. The bars would close at 2 o'clock and Mac and I would go across the border to South Carolina because they didn't, their bars there were open until 5. So we'd leave about 4:30 as we'd get back to base. We would have got along great together. Oh, yeah.

• 51:12Speaker 05

  This is like.

• 51:15Speaker 05

  So at some point during this training, you know, McIntyre and I drove home. And that night, we stopped at a, at a bar. And John and I are sitting there on the TV. So this is now the TET defenses was kicking in and we're going through this training. And on the TV, I don't have a CBS. But here's a, you could see this grainy picture of a tank. And they said, "This is a NVA tank that broke into Lang Vai, a Green Beret camp, which is in the northwest corner of South Vietnam, right to south of the DMZ, not far away from Laos. And this NVA tank tried to overrun the base last night.

• 51:57Speaker 05

  Those Green Berets were fighting for their lives." McIntyre and I go, "Holy shit, we're gonna die when we get there." We drove home, took our money out of the bank. We didn't want our family fighting over our money if we died. We go home, take all our money out, drove back to base. And every night, we went out for steak. We spent all our money. Of course, we went to the bars.

• 52:21Shawn Ryan?

  Spent it all on Disgusta.

• 52:23Speaker 05

  Indeed. There was a little sweetheart down there. Johnny had his good girlfriend. I met this gal. And before we were done with the training, then we had a month's leave. And then we went to Vietnam. I arrived in Vietnam at the end of April 1968.

• 52:44Shawn Ryan?

  So before we get into Vietnam, so are you saying that when they would take these volunteers?

• 52:50Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 52:51Shawn Ryan?

  That was SOB?

• 52:52Speaker 05

  Yes, absolutely. And they had a couple other operations. By the time we got there, they had the Mike Force, which had been operating since 63. And the Mike Force was the first QRF, basically. And when the A camps would get hit, they would need someone to come in to help them break the fight. And Mike Force was just outstanding. We had a friend of mine, his name was Jack Tobin. He was in the Mike Force, had several tours over there, highly respected Green Beret. Met him years later. He was president of the Special Forces Association. And I was on the Special Operations Association Board of Directors. We met at the reunions. And Jack introduced me to a friend.

• 53:37Speaker 05

  He goes, "This is my friend Tilt Meyer here. He was a SOB." Now, SOB, they'd be out there snooping and pooping. He was just doing intel work. Yeah, they made some contact with the NVA, but with Mike Force, we were out there hunting for those commie motherfuckers.

• 53:55Speaker 05

  And that was the difference. And my force would go out. They they just had an outstanding reputation. They broke many a siege, uh, that the aid camps would be under siege by the NVA and the Vietcong. But that was the difference. But I learned that years later. In this case, um, we heard a scuttlebutt.

• 54:14Shawn Ryan?

  Heard the scuttlebutt.

• 54:15Speaker 05

  So we went through the country training, which is three weeks.

• 54:18Shawn Ryan?

  So can you, can you describe what the war was about at that time before you went?

• 54:22Speaker 05

  Well, we knew that the Vietcong, and and you you heard about all the legends. The Vietcong is just the the peasant fighter, the farmer by day, fighter by night, defending what he thinks is his country. They don't talk about any of the NVA, the communist people that are supporting them that are in country, that are with the majority of the Vietcong units. And, um, so we knew, and of course, when we go through some of the special forces training, we're told about the communist infiltrations, told about how they're operating. Of course, we had horror stories about what the Vietcong would do to a village or to people that weren't friendly.

• 55:06Shawn Ryan?

  What would they do?

• 55:07Speaker 05

  You name it. Um, we had, one of our, um, Medal of Honor recipients had, um, he was in a special forces operation. They had gone into a village and worked with the people, the children there for a period of time. And it was, you know, strictly a hearts and minds operation. They would go in, the medics would go in, always do sick call every day, work with the children. They built some schools, other training facilities, things like this. At some point.

• 55:47Speaker 05

  The Vietcong came in and killed everybody, every man, woman, and child. They're sending a message to any other villages that would think about working with the Green Berets or Americans. They were just profoundly cruel and heartless that way. And, uh, no, that shook John.

• 56:09Shawn Ryan?

  How would they compare to like a modern day?

• 56:13Speaker 05

  Terrorists?

• 56:13Shawn Ryan?

  Like ISIS, Al Qaeda, with where their beheadings, where they're, I mean, they burn people alive today in Syria. You know, they're crucifying people and shooting them in the back of the head.

• 56:26Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, the Christians there were hurt. I don't know if they would be specifically targeted.

• 56:32Shawn Ryan?

  I don't, I'm just, I don't mean just the Christians. I mean.

• 56:34Speaker 05

  I know, but here so with the Vietcong.

• 56:37Shawn Ryan?

  Burn people alive.

• 56:38Speaker 05

  They would, they would do it all. Um, you know, during the Tet Offensive, uh, in the, in the town of Way, which is the old Imperial Capitol, they had killed a bunch of civilians, anybody who was educated, nurses, doctors, they took a bunch out and killed them and they had a mass grave, which received not enough publicity, but this is during the Tet Offensive. And, uh, we had other cases where they would torture people to get them to come over to the side. If they didn't, they would kill them. And for me, when we get.

• 57:16Shawn Ryan?

  How would they torture them?

• 57:17Speaker 05

  Well, you, you name it. They would do the fingernail thing, beat them up, get them to come around. If they didn't, then they would just shoot them. And, you know, of course, the guys who were in country, the A camp guys, they always had to worry about booby traps. Even if you saw the movie, the Green Beret, they had those big, pungy ambush things where if you walked in it, it would pick you up and then a rope would pick you up and your weight of your body would swing you into like pungies that were all coated with, uh, animal dung. So when you slammed into it, like, like in the movie where they picked up the one guy and his body was impaled on those pungy stakes.

• 58:02Speaker 05

  And they had pungy pits and if anybody stepped in it, of course, you have the infection off of those. And in my case with Paul Villarosa, our hero, the guy that helped us get through training. He ran the first mission out of FOB four, his fourth tour of duty. He ran a mission into Laos. They ran into a heavy unit. He was wounded. And at some point, he was captured. They killed several other team members, but they kept one American alive. And that's that guy who's, we never knew who it was.

• 58:40Speaker 05

  But Villa Rosa, they got him and they came in with a flamethrower and literally burned him alive. At the stake.

• 58:51Speaker 05

  And they killed a couple of other Vietnamese, they tortured them too. So. When we got done our briefing, we heard about Paul Villa Rosa. And it was like, that was culture shock to the max because he was, he was our hero because he's a guy that did three tours, survived all that. His first mission out of FOB four, killed and tortured.

• 59:16Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 59:18Speaker 05

  And of course, you always had the story, we had teams where.

• 59:23Speaker 05

  Men who had been wounded.

• 59:26Speaker 05

  They would disembowel.

• 59:29Speaker 05

  Cut their head off and stick their head in the cavity where the bows were.

• 59:33Shawn Ryan?

  Geez.

• 59:34Speaker 05

  And the, and the other part was sometimes they would cut their dick off and stick it in their mouth. And then put that in. Now, I never saw that personally.

• 59:42Shawn Ryan?

  Any of that?

• 59:44Speaker 05

  Say again?

• 59:44Shawn Ryan?

  You never saw any of that?

• 59:46Speaker 05

  Nothing like that.

• 59:48Speaker 05

  But we heard about it. And it was from our guys.

• 59:52Shawn Ryan?

  Before you went, you heard about it?

• 59:54Speaker 05

  Some before and then some while we were there, other, while other teams had come up against.

• 59:59Shawn Ryan?

  And so the premise of the Vietnam War was the NVA and the Vietcong pushing communism into Vietnam?

• 1:00:05Speaker 05

  Right.

• 1:00:06Shawn Ryan?

  And so where does, where does Laos and Cambodia come into play?

• 1:00:11Speaker 05

  Well, they were quote, neutral countries. And the beginning, we had Operation White Star, which had Green Beret teams in Laos. But under that change of plan of converting to MACV SOG, Kennedy. They had an accord of some, some kind of a political agreement that.

• 1:00:34Speaker 05

  America would pull any and all combat troops out of Vietnam, out of Laos and out of Cambodia. And then, and the North Vietnamese and the Congress would do the same thing. They, they were all there and they agreed to this accord. Well, of course, the Congress were just lying douchebags, as we all know. And publicly, they say, yeah, we're out. Well, in fifty-seven, they had started to open up the, reopen the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which went from Hanoi, down to Vietnam, across, down through Laos into Cambodia. And there'd be trails that would come in to South Vietnam. And that would be the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And that would be the way that supplies the manpower.

• 1:01:17Speaker 05

  And, um, as early as fifty-seven, they began working on it. By fifty-nine, the Plitoburgh in Hanoi said, um, we are going to form an official unit for the Ho Chi Minh Trail. It would be five-five-nine, May fifty-nine. So that's when it was formed. They had a colonel in charge of it, other people. So from fifty-nine into the sixties, they already had rudimentary supplies and manpower coming south, agents, et cetera. And, um, so we would go, not we, but they would go through that, expanding.

• 1:01:59Speaker 05

  And so then the air force would start targeting the Ho Chi Minh Trail. And it, it wasn't just a trail. It'd be different branches coming down and going into the country, into South Vietnam. And that's what that was designed for. And, uh, so by the time I arrived, our first-

• 1:02:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we go there-

• 1:02:20Speaker 05

  Yes, no, sure.

• 1:02:21Shawn Ryan?

  What was the pulse of the country about Vietnam at the time?

• 1:02:24Speaker 05

  Well, we believed, we believed our presidents, even that lying scumbag, Lyndon Johnson, saying that this is communism, they're here to take, overtake the country. And we were familiar with the domino theory from Eisenhower. And here's Dwight David Eisenhower, our World War II fame.

• 1:02:44Speaker 05

  And a good president. And if he's saying we've got the domino theory, they were of great concern to us. Well, we all believe them. And, you know, anything we could do to stop communists, having seen what it was. So the majority of the country, I would say, was very supportive of it. And by sixty six, you're beginning to get some protesters. And, you know, there might be other quote Vietnam experts that'll talk about the protests and who was really against it, but um I I always felt supported from the from the beginning.

• 1:03:22Speaker 05

  And by the time we land in sixty eight, there's now more demonstrations, some college campuses and whatnot. And uh but I always felt like they're just so far removed from it. And you never know who's putting the anti-war sentiments in their head.

• 1:03:41Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:42Speaker 05

  And I mean, there are things the South Vietnamese did wrong. Um, you know, President Diem, who was assassinated with a coup in November of sixty three, he was really harsh. It was Catholics were a minority, religious minority. And then you had the Buddhists that were against him. And some of the things that that family did made it very difficult to support. And that then the media, of course, would play up these things and report that's what actually happened. But meanwhile, you had the communists that were coming into the country thwarting the people and wanting to take it over so that they could control the people and the land.

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  And uh, you know, like my classic example for me, once I got on my recon team, we had people, um, three members of our team had grown up and born in North Vietnam, came south with their families in fifty four. And they all knew. Our government is corrupt in South Vietnam. But we prefer corrupt government over communism with Ho Chi Minh. Because we can live here, we can still flourish. I can raise a family. I can do my crops. We know when the communists take over, they're gonna fuck you over any way they can, as only communists do. And they were willing to die for it. And that was my bond with my little people.

• 1:05:12Speaker 05

  And there are other people in Vietnam, again, there are some that didn't want anything to do with the war. And again, there's people like peasants who are there getting whatever they're told from the Viacom or the local villagers. You know how it is with getting accurate information to

• 1:05:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31Speaker 05

  out to the huddled masses.

• 1:05:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, John, let's take a quick break.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:05:37Shawn Ryan?

  When we come back, we'll pick up with Stepping Ground on Vietnam.

• 1:05:41Speaker 05

  I'll drink to that.

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:05:56Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:06:02Speaker 04

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• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:06:09Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

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• 1:06:39Speaker 03

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• 1:06:50Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  On October 2nd.

• 1:06:54Speaker 01

  Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me.

• 1:06:59Speaker 03

  Tom Cruise is.

• 1:07:00Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us up.

• 1:07:04Speaker 03

  From the director of Birdman and The Revenant.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you freeze to death, that's what.

• 1:07:10Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:07:14Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:07:15Speaker 03

  Digger, see the trailer online, only in theaters October 2nd, rated R, under 17, not a minute without parent.

• 1:07:27Shawn Ryan?

  All right, John, we're back from the break. One thing I forgot to do at the beginning is we have a Patreon account.

• 1:07:33Speaker 05

  Oh, indeed.

• 1:07:33Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, our Patreon account is, uh, it's a subscription network and these guys, a lot of them have been with us since the very beginning. And, uh, and we built it into quite a community. And so one of the things that I do for them is I give them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 1:07:53Shawn Ryan?

  So this is from Rich Benjamin.

• 1:07:57Shawn Ryan?

  Does Tilt think we waged the Vietnam land war in the wrong country? How does he feel the end result would have been if we waged a land war in Laos and Cambodia?

• 1:08:10Speaker 05

  Oh, good question. Um, in the very early days, if we had really been in the military, World War II frame of mind to win. And, uh, we had, cause he, it's been documented. The North Vietnamese most feared, particularly in the early days around 64, 65, that the US would cut off the Ho Chi Minh Trail completely, go in with a, however, do it. So in answer, I, I mean, I'm biased. I think that had we addressed that war as we did World War II with the win mentality, not let the State Department dictate terms such as

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  we have Mac V Sog running missions, they wouldn't even let us run missions in Cambodia until 66. And when he ran the missions, they even dictated the type of weapons initially you could carry. And when I ran missions in Cambodia, I was down at TDY for a couple of weeks. We had no Tac Air. What we had was helicopter gunships and we had the 20th Special Operations Squadron from the Air Force, the Green Hornets. Those guys were hot shit. I mean, all of our helicopter, the majority of our helicopter assets were hot shit, but those guys were the hottest because they were the Air Force, had the latest state of the art Hueys, most powerful, had the mini guns that were flexible,

• 1:09:41Speaker 05

  and they saved my ass. They saved our team ass. So, an answer to that, I think would have been a different mind high Pong Harbor, cut off Cambodia, so they can't come in with the supplies, tell the Russians and the Chinese, we're not fighting you, but don't you bring supplies, and they cut off all our supplies. I think would have been, it would still would have been a long one. But eventually, it could have been a different outcome.

• 1:10:06Shawn Ryan?

  Thanks for answering that. Rich is a huge fan of yours, so I'm gonna have you sign this card for him.

• 1:10:11Speaker 05

  Gladly. I know Rich. He was at our last reunion. He was a videographer there.

• 1:10:16Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:10:17Speaker 05

  Absolutely. He's got some incredible footage of A1 Skyreaders, some interviews with our Skyreader pilots. Good man.

• 1:10:23Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. Well, he'll love this then.

• 1:10:24Speaker 05

  Absolutely. I'll sign it with a capital X, just for him.

• 1:10:27Shawn Ryan?

  Perfect.

• 1:10:30Shawn Ryan?

  All right.

• 1:10:33Shawn Ryan?

  So let's move into Vietnam.

• 1:10:34Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 1:10:36Shawn Ryan?

  So let's go all the way back, very first day in country.

• 1:10:39Speaker 05

  Well, you know, I had, we had a month R and R. I went up to my cousins. They were farmers up in New Jersey. I hung out with my cousins, worked the fields up there with them. It was spring, early April, and I just hung out there for a couple of weeks with them, went back home to my family, left, and took the flight in, and when we landed in, in

• 1:11:05Speaker 05

  Camran Bay.

• 1:11:08Speaker 05

  It was just like, it's just hard to believe, like you've heard, you've had other people describe this to you. But when you get to that door and the airplane door is open, you walk out and go down that first step. You look out, here's all these Vietnamese and, and we were told in training group, advanced infantry training, everybody could be the enemy. So your first thought is, oh my God, these are potential enemies out here. I don't have no gun, no nothing, except my duffel bag, right? And, but the stench of the countryside, because they always had rice paddies around. And they used human defecations to fertilize their fields.

• 1:11:50Speaker 05

  And when it's about a hundred degrees, it just felt like I needed a knife just to cut through the humidity to walk down the steps. And the stench was just unbelievable. And we went down, had a little quick in-country briefing. We got transport the special forces group headquarters in the Trang. And that was in Tukor, had a beautiful beach. And at that point in, uh, April nineteen sixty-eight, that was where all the training was done for in-country. So we're there, we had, uh, I think it was three weeks of in-country training. Everything from patrols and our patrols, we had no combat, no, no combat of any sort. But we learned all the patrol tactics that they used.

• 1:12:36Speaker 05

  And, uh, worked Tac Air helicopters, had classes on, again, about communism and whatnot. And, um, we had every kind of helicopter except an H thirty-four, which we'll get to in a few minutes. And, uh, and then at the end of the training, oh, and the last week, they showed the film, The Green Berets with John Wayne.

• 1:13:01Speaker 05

  It's like far fucking out, man. Look at this. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so, so we get done and just like they told us in training group. The last day, we're there, you know, we had do all the needles and stick yourself and all this stuff. You know, how to survive, basic first aid stuff, combat wounds and things like that. Little guy comes out, we're looking for volunteers. So my good buddy Johnny McIntyre goes, for what, Sarge? Can't say. Either you're in it or you're not. Well, hell, we just saw the movie. What would the Duke do? I don't care what the guys in training group said. The Duke would go sign me up. So we all volunteered. All of you guys did?

• 1:13:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, a lot of us. The, uh, we had gone through the commo training together. That, we had been together for years since training group, basically, by the time, uh, April got there. So me, Rick Howard, John McIntyre, Tony Harrell, our hands popped right up into the air. We all volunteered. We go up to, uh, to Da Nang. And this is our first culture shock, because we stayed at a safe house. A Da Nang safe house, it's house 22. And, uh, so we go in, we have food, eat, they got security, the area is secure. And, uh, they told us not to worry about anything, but whatever you want, you can eat, just go up to the bar.

• 1:14:26Speaker 05

  Tell them what you want. If you want to drink, eat, drink, be merry. And, uh, I forget what the prices were for the prostitutes up on the second floor. But we had lovely ladies up there that, uh, spread their wares around, you know? So that first day, Mac and I, we're there, we're eating and whatnot. And, uh, they had a couple of, uh, barmaids there and one was really nice. He was really educated, good English. So we talked to her and Mac and I both had girlfriends. We weren't interested in anything. So she could tell we were harmless and we set up with her, went upstairs, had to take a shower. So as we go up, there's this big open floor area with all these beds. You could hear a couple of guys

• 1:15:08Speaker 05

  getting it on right there. So we go into the shower. There's a guy taking the shower. And in the corner, there's a young lady squatting down, shaking that coke up and douching with a Coca-Cola. So we just found a new, a new use for Coca-Cola, you know? Holy shit. So this is like growing up in Trenton, New Jersey. Welcome to, uh, welcome to South Vietnam. Wow. So that's a little bit of culture shock. So while we're there, um, uh, some of the guys with the Mike Force came in and they stayed overnight. And they were talking, they could tell that we're green as grass. So they had nothing to do with us because we're just green ass green berets.

• 1:15:49Speaker 05

  But they were talking about the shit they had been in and they had helped to relieve somebody either in the Ashaw Valley. And the Ashaw Valley was up north, right on the border of Laos. It was a very ragged border. But that was one of the main places when the Ho Chi Minh Trail came down. There's at least two separate branches off of the Ho Chi Minh Trail that came into the Ashaw that would then go into South Vietnam to Way. And then, uh, Phu Bai and then that later down to Da Nang area. So, um,

• 1:16:22Speaker 05

  we were there, um, just, uh, that, that moment of time, hearing these guys talk about it. And it's going like, ah, this is where we are. So. What were they talking about? They had talked about the actual combat. And they, they were dirtied up. They had, they were just, they literally came in, dropped their gear at the gate. And they're sitting there just talking, obviously still sweaty and wherever they had been. And it was just like, okay, these are SF guys that helped some SF teams somewhere. Now, I'm not sure. I just, I'm just too long ago to remember. They, cause we're new, they probably wouldn't talk about specifics anyway, but they were in contact and they had talked about

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  what the enemy was doing, how, how tenacious they were. So, um, the next morning, we, Macintyre and I, and, uh, and John, we all get together to go to the Denai Airport to get a flight to Phu Bai. And, uh, oh, we had our briefing first. I'm sorry, we had our briefing. So the morning we go down, we get a briefing, go into the room, curtains on the windows up front. There's a map with a sheet over it. And, uh, and so we'd been students for over a year now, between basic and everything. So we're all like pulling our pads and pens out. Sergeant Major walks in, "Put that shit away.

• 1:17:49Speaker 05

  This is a top secret briefing. And, uh, right in front of you, there's an NDA. Read it, and if you want to stay, sign it. If you want to leave, you're welcome to leave. There's no hard feelings. And this is a top secret briefing. Said it again for good luck." So we all signed, and then the curtain, they pulled the sheet off the map. So there's a map we're looking at. Here's South Vietnam. What did the NDA say? Say again? What did the NDA say? Oh, you can't talk about it for 20 years. If you talk about anything or take any pictures, you could be prosecuted federally. And I forget what the penalties were, but they had prison terms and fines that were all defined in the NDA.

• 1:18:33Speaker 05

  Had you, you talked about anything about it, and Sergeant Major, the first thing you said was, "Read these. You can't talk to your mama, your girlfriend, or anybody. No pictures, no nothing. You can't talk to anybody about this mission unless it's somebody else that you're working with at your base.

• 1:18:51Speaker 05

  Welcome to the secret war. This is top secret. And your reports go directly to the White House."

• 1:18:59Speaker 05

  Okay? So there's the map, Vietnam, I Corps is up north, II Corps, which is Kontum, Nha Trang on the, on the beach, III Corps, which is Saigon, IV Corps, which is much bigger, but it's all the swamps and waterways. Just horrible, horrible AO. I never got down there, fortunately. And, um...

• 1:19:20Speaker 05

  We go through the, then look at Laos. Here's target boxes, six by six target boxes. All the way up and down. And then in the Cambodia, some targets. So he went on to explain a little bit, this is what we do. We go across the fence into Laos or into Cambodia. You'll run top secret missions. You either be with a recon team or a hatchet force. So a recon team will be two or three Americans. And you'll have indigenous personnel. And that would be, they could be Montagnards, South Vietnamese. They could be Nungs or Cambodians. In some cases, they have Cambodian Hatchet Force. So the recon teams would be small units, like they could be,

• 1:20:04Speaker 05

  teams that run a mission could be four, six, eight, maybe up to 12. And then a hatchet force is a platoon or a company size operation. And there you would have the number of green berets for each, each squad and a platoon leader and explain that basic structure. So we all signed them, did the briefing. And then they took us over to, uh, to get a helicopter up to FOB one. The next day, we get the helicopter ride up. So again, it's culture shock. We had all that training with helicopters, but nobody told us about a King Bee, a South Vietnamese Air Force 834.

• 1:20:46Speaker 05

  Helicopters developed during the Korean War. And they're built by Sikorsky. They had a B-17 rotary engine that the pilots essentially sat on top of. So it was a nine cylinder B-17 engine. And then the back had a, a passenger compartment with one door on the right side. And for where we sat, when we looked up, we could see the pilot's feet on the pedals. So we're down, and so for our flight, it's like, what the hell is this? And all of a sudden, here's a South Vietnamese guy flying our helicopter. Where we're used to Americans is like, Okay, here we go.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  And so me, Johnny McIntyre, and, uh, and John, we get in. And as I sit down, I see the guy on a microphone go. Right, right. Cause we're green. You got new starch pad, new jungle boots and everything. So we go up, we're flying up Highway one, going down Highway one. And it's just, it's just for a first flight. And so we're going along, we come, we go past the Fubai Airport. And we go past the second Arvin Training Division. And all of a sudden, the helicopter goes like this to a ninety degree on its side to a turn. And did a three sixty. Well, I saw that guy. I thought they were gonna do something like that.

• 1:22:10Speaker 05

  But McIntyre and John Hutchins are going like, oh, fuck me the tears. What's going on? You know, they're hanging on like that. And the, and the, and the door guard is going, we got him. So we turn around and we land. We get off the helicopter. A recon team gets on the helicopter. Spike Team Idaho. The team leader, who I didn't know, is Glenn Lane. And his one, one assistant team leader is Robert Owen. I forget, they had four or six indigenous troops. They take off, never heard from again. Welcome to the secret war.

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  So we go into base, sign in. And, uh, as we go, there's a long pathway. And the second Arvin compound is right here, a big fence. And then there's the road in, and then you turn left. There was S one, S two, S three. And then on the other side was S four for supply. So we go in, reported in S one, and I come out and I hear this voice, Tilt Meyer. And I'm with John McIntyre. So I was in A Company in Training Group. Johnny Mac was in B Company, and we beat his softball team in every game. And the reason why we beat him was Spider Parks was our pitcher. And I hear, Tilt Meyer, Spider Parks.

• 1:23:37Speaker 05

  Holy shit Spider, you're here? We had gone through training group together. And of course, he made fun of Johnny McIntyre because he's a B company puke, you know? And so then Spider took us around, showed us the base. And Mac went to a separate room and Spider said, no, you come down, you stay with me. You know, as A company guys, you B company guys, you go somewhere else. So I went down with Spider, had a bunk with him. And they were monitoring the team progress. And after lunch, Spider goes, you know, I'm gonna go to S3. Come along, I want you to meet the people in S3.

• 1:24:20Speaker 05

  He says, we haven't heard from the team. Well, they never heard from the team ever again. And two days later, one or two days later, Spike Team Oregon went in with George Sternberg and Mike Tucker. They went in with, I think it was five or six Indige. They flew into the LZ that Idaho had landed on. They found, they saw some tracks in the grass that where the team could have gone. They began to move following it, trying to figure out where the team might be. And they moved for short distance, they saw a checkpoint down on a road that was far

• 1:25:05Speaker 05

  off. I forget how far away it was. But bottom line, the NVA knew they were there. They turned around and came back and began to make contact with them. And the team went into a big bomb crater. And the whole firefight started. They're in that bomb crater for a long period of time. And they started throwing hand grenades in, and then they started throwing in American hand grenades. And so George caught the first hand grenade and threw it out. The second or the third hand grenade that came in, Mike threw one out, but the next one went down further, he couldn't get it in time. And when it went off, exploded, it literally blew his jungle boots off.

• 1:25:50Speaker 05

  Puts his plus shrapnel and the medic on the team was severely injured. And he was paralyzed from the waist down from the impact of the grenade. So there's firefight's going on. They do tac air. They finally bring in the first King Bee. That's the code name for the South Vietnamese H thirty fours. First King Bee comes in. They get the wounded and the medic get him and put him into the helicopter. They take off, the second helicopter comes in. And so it's just down to George and a couple of people and they're right in the middle of the firefight. They're going back and forth with each other. And again, tac air is being used.

• 1:26:35Speaker 05

  Helicopter comes in, George gets to the helicopter and one of the guys had been wounded. So he puts the wounded guy in. As he turns around, he sees an NVA, George is left handed. He turns around and this guy shot George with his AK and George turned around and killed him. But before he did, there's another NVA popped up. He goes to the NVA, then he shot him. Damn. Now, he never knew this because it happened so fast, but Spider Parks saw him do it because Spider was in the third helicopter. Was it what we call the chase medic? Because whenever the first one or two helicopter designed for the team, the chase helicopters are in case the other one gets shot down or if you need a medic.

• 1:27:20Speaker 05

  And so Spider was there on the chase ship, saw George do that. But they got pulled out and they were several months recuperating from those, from those wounds and things. And we never heard from Idaho again. So with our team, very, we were just, again, divine intervention in my opinion. We had Spider Parks, who had been on Idaho. He had just been promoted to a brand new team. He's going to be the ones zero of another recon team. He had been promoted. Glenn Lane signed off on it, recommended he get his own recon team because Spider was just really sharp.

• 1:28:00Speaker 05

  And HEP, the interpreter, who spoke four or five languages. He used to improve my English once I got to know him. And then Sal, who was the Vietnamese team leader, the counterpart to the team leader, the American Green Parade. Uh, Hep was sick, didn't go. Sal was not his rotation. They rotated because they had a 12,

• 1:28:27Speaker 05

  10 or 12 South Vietnamese on the team. So when you ran a mission, we'd only take four or six indigenous with you, indigenous personnel. We just said indigenous. And on this case, Sal missed. So with Spider, he got Don Wolken, who had some experience in country. We built the team. Spider was the 1-0 team leader. Don was the 1-1 assistant team leader. I was brought on as the 1-2, the radio operator. And uh, we rebuilt the team. Sal and Hep went out. They hired four, three or four new guys. Three of them were 15 years old.

• 1:29:06Shawn Ryan?

  15 years old.

• 1:29:07Speaker 05

  15 years old. Sun, Chow, and Cal were hired up. Brought them in, and then Spider put us through the whole training process. And he and Sal worked together. And um, every day, we did everything from the ground up. Uh, everything from just basic patrols. We'd go out, go outside the base, and then go down through the village, and they had trails and things down there. And we would go down, do contingency drills. Work through live fire. Then we'd go up to the range with live fire. Do the same thing with the contingency drills, repelling off the tower. And then just classes on basic first aid stuff.

• 1:29:47Speaker 05

  And then repelling from helicopters, getting pulled down on strings. Because one of the innovations that SOG made was um, this whole extraction by ropes.

• 1:30:01Speaker 05

  And uh, so that was all part of the training. Even trained

• 1:30:06Speaker 05

  our team so that a helicopter would come in. We would be pretending that we're in a firefight. Helicopter would come in, and with the H-34s, when the indigenous would get in the helicopter first, one would go to the window on the left side, and another would go to the window behind the door. So that would give us increased firepower on both sides, and then everybody else would get in the helicopter. And then you just, every kind of training you could think of. And we just went down to the range, put thousands and thousands of rounds downrange. And uh,

• 1:30:43Speaker 05

  That was part of the training up Idaho, ST Idaho, FUBF one. And, uh, you know, Johnny Mack was the, he had the first mission. He went out and, um, they had a team, they inserted an elephant grass and they had a lieutenant was the team leader. And he jumped out of the helicopter before his wheels, cause elephant grass can be anywhere from like eight to 12, 13 feet tall. And Spider told us, when you're in elephant grass, wait till you see the ground. Do not jump, you can't see the ground, cause you might hurt yourself. What is the young lieutenant? Didn't listen to Spider, jumped down, broke his ankle.

• 1:31:24Speaker 05

  So they were compromised and, um, because Mack was new on the team, they decided to pull the whole team out. Well, they came back, they made contact before they came in, uh, with the helicopter to pick them up. And, uh, Mack came back, holy shit, you should have seen this firefight.

• 1:31:46Speaker 05

  So these, these NVA are serious out here. And, uh, they came back, put the lieutenant. And then, uh, on the 4th of July, John was working with his web gear. And he cut through the web gear and it hit a bedpost. It ricocheted up and came back, cut him through the lower, uh, lower, through the eye and through his, up here on his lid. And, uh,

• 1:32:15Speaker 05

  it was like, he came out and the medic said, we gotta take you down to the Marines and they took him to the, to the closest medical facility. And, uh, they passed him up a little bit. They said, we're gonna, we'll let us sit overnight, cause we got a 4th of July party going on tonight. And, uh, during that night, the infection set in. And, uh, they took John back and we never saw John again until we got back in the States. He was medevac. That was like, my best buddy went down.

• 1:32:44Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 1:32:44Speaker 05

  Right? Just like the, on a, on a, on an accident. So, so trivial, horrible.

• 1:32:50Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about your very first mission.

• 1:32:53Speaker 05

  Well, the first three are kind of boring, really. They're very successful minimal gunfire. What was the mission? They were to insert Air Force sensors. And by August to September, we had the monsoons that were going on. So when the weather would break, we'd try to run as many missions. So we had trained up, the Air Force had a um, three-part sensor. They had a central unit with an antenna on it. And then it had a coaxial cable that ran for several feet. And then each unit, everything had to be buried with only the antennas behind vegetation. And so the first one we put in was in the Ashaw Valley, which was at that time.

• 1:33:34Speaker 05

  We had three Green Beret camps in the Ashaw Valley that were further south of where we went into this trail. And each aid camp had been overrun. Just, the NVA said, this is our territory. They ran those aid camps out. And there's a great book out that's called um, Ashaw Valley. And it just talks about that camp. So each of those three camps were overrun and pushed out. We knew that history. We go in. Um, Spider was the one zero. We took a, an E8 with us from S3, who was familiar with the equipment. And we had another one zero, very experienced, Les Daniels from Spike Team Rhode Island.

• 1:34:17Speaker 05

  And so because Don and I were new, the plan was we would go in and Don would take some people to the north end. And I would take a couple of guys to the south end of where they were operating. And they would all in- install those, those monitoring devices. So we were on the ground a few hours. And this was the Ashaw. And we knew the Ashaw by that time. We had heard about it. And it had this huge punji pit. There'd been a lot of rain. The monsoons had washed away some of the cover for these punji pits. Some were as big for animals, but there are smaller ones. And as we were coming back, uh, Don and I were walking past one of those punji pits and he, and he slipped.

• 1:35:02Speaker 05

  He started to fall into the punji pit. And I grabbed him. I said, get back here. I'm not ready to be the one one yet. I'm just the radio operator here. We came back. We got pulled out. We were working the first cab, did the assertions and the extraction on that. And uh, They thought we we were gonna get hit hard being in the valley. Nothing happened. And we had Tac Air stacked up. So when we left, the 51 caliber opened up on the east side of the Ashaw. Well, they hit that thing with napalm. They hit him with a gun run. They wiped that 51 caliber out several times. But we didn't get shot at. And then in September, we did the same thing. We had another mission. Um, we inserted the same device.

• 1:35:47Speaker 05

  But this time was just our team, Spider, Don, and I. We went up. What was the device doing? It was monitoring anything on traffic. Anything that went by, they could tell from the vibrations. What it was, whether it was people, animals, or trucks, or tanks. And so they would record. And then the air force would come by and electronically pick up the intel from that central command box we put in. Gotcha. That's what we're told. Now, I'm, you know, I'm just like the lone man in the total poll here. So my job was, you're gonna be security, you're gonna go here, you see bad guys, kill them. And if we need help, you'll be on the radio, call Tac Air.

• 1:36:32Speaker 05

  That was my job. So I don't, anything beyond the specifics. Then the second one. Uh, Don and Spider did the assertion with Sal and Hep. They did the assertion, but I was still overseeing possible Tac Air if we needed it and security for one of the perimeters. But it was in, it was right next to, uh, the Kason Marine Corps Base there. It was one of the main roads that went past, that went past Kason. What were you carrying? For weapons? What was your loadout? Oh, um, I had a Car 15, which was a modified M16. Had a shorter barrel. And then it had the first classable stock. And, uh, I loved it. It was a great weapon.

• 1:37:17Speaker 05

  And that's what I carried the whole time. So in the beginning, I was only carrying maybe 500 rounds. Plus hand grenades. And by, by August, we had developed Saldoff M79s. We cut the handle down as much as we could. Just so you had enough to hold it. And then we cut the barrel back as close as we could to the end where the wood comes out of the platform to hold the ba- the metal barrel. Cut it right to that. And, um. We trained up on that because there's just extra firepower. So we always carry ten and twelve rounds for that, ten and twelve hand grenades, smoke grenades. We had both

• 1:37:59Speaker 05

  large and small smoke grenades. And then, in the beginning, I said like around five hundred rounds. And then Spider and Don and other teams, like I talked to John Walton, who had been on another team, and they had a couple of missions where they barely got out alive. And they ran out of bullets. And so I then carried over six hundred rounds. And we had only twenty round magazine, no thirty round magazine like today. So you had twenty round magazine, but only eighteen, because we were told that if you had too many, the spring would not work. It may not feed them correctly. So we had the old

• 1:38:44Speaker 05

  BAR web gear, had nice shoulder pads, had pouches. The pouches could hold three or four magazines, then one on top. And then we had electric tape on them. And so that's what we trained in. Just how to get those things out, swap them out as fast as you could. And What about a secondary? Say again? Secondary pistol? No, we had the Saldorf M79. We always carried either double odd buck or flechettes. Because we didn't, I didn't carry a pistol. Because most of the times, we were so efficient at the quick magazine change, that if we were caught in a situation where they charged

• 1:39:29Speaker 05

  us and we didn't have a magazine, we still had the flechettes. And that double odd buck with the M40, with the M79, that was just devastating stuff. And then later, some of our guys messed around. They began putting flechettes in them. What is a flechet? Like a small dart?

• 1:39:49Speaker 05

  And so when they would come out, be just like a small parry, these darts and just kill anything in this range. But then, again, it's close, like a super big shotgun, you know? Blade? Yep. They developed some of those. Now, again, I'm told this. What I personally had, we always had a double odd buck and Doug and Lynn Black, couple of these other, they were all the weapons guys. They were always tinkering with these things to improve them. And they'd had those flash sets that they personally designed. They would carry a couple, because if you needed it, that first round would slow down anything coming at you. Knife, I mean. Oh, I'm sorry. We had a SOG knife. Especially designed, we had our own supply

• 1:40:31Speaker 05

  system. CISA was based out of Okinawa. And, uh, early on, they were set up, so any supplies that went to Fifth Special Forces Group and SOG, sometimes things would go to the agency, uh, for weapons that they needed them. And, uh, they developed what was called a SOG knife. And, uh, when I went through my end processing with S4, got the web gear and everything, I got my SOG knife. And so we always carried that right on the web gear, on the, on the shoulder straps, had the SOG knife right there, upside down. So if you pulled it out, it's ready to go. Whereas if you're in the jungle, sometimes reaching out might be a little bit

• 1:41:14Speaker 05

  too difficult. But down here, you can pull it out quickly. So that's where the SOG knife would go, car 15, magazine pouches, hand grenades. We always had to take a mask, a gas mask with us. And, uh, then we had, um, after the second insertion of the, uh, Air Force sensors, we had a mission in the Ashaw Valley. But it was on the east side of the Ashaw.

• 1:41:42Speaker 05

  And Spider Parks, at that time, said, "We're just gonna do a practice mission. Our team's gonna go in, another recon team's gonna go in, we're gonna do parallel movements, and if we make enemy contact, we're gonna have tac air stacked up, and we just want our team to get used to the new team." So, uh, we went out, made no contact, but the second night, we were on the ground, we were in an area heavily infested with mosquitoes. And in the morning, 'cause I, I had a night watch up till about midnight or 1 o'clock, but I fell asleep. When I woke up in the morning, mosquitoes had bitten my face so much, I could barely open my eyes. I poured water on them and anything else just to get my face, like, all puff face from those damn mosquitoes.

• 1:42:27Speaker 05

  I'd never seen anything like it. But, the other team was so good, they ambushed a Pathet Lao, ambushed, that was set up for them. And the Pathet Lao was the Laotian version of the Vietcong, but they weren't as good as the Vietcong. And, uh, we didn't come into contact with them too often, but this, this other team ambushed them. So we got pulled out, and Spider got promoted to cubby rider. And a cubby was our, was our forward air controller, and cubby was the code name for our FACS. So it was an Air Force O2 at that time, a Cessna push-pull, engine in the front, engine in the back, and a Spider would be the cubby rider.

• 1:43:12Speaker 05

  And the way that was designed was he always had a cubby rider who had experience on the ground, so that when a team made enemy contact, the cubby rider could fill in the pilot, as well as the team on the ground, and talk to them through experience. And so, um, one of our greatest learning centers for us was in the clubhouse. All the guys that would come back from a mission, they would talk to us. And there's a few senior NCOs, like Spider Parks, Pat Watkins, John McGovern, they would all answer any questions we had.

• 1:43:53Speaker 05

  And when a recon team would come back from a mission, we would definitely talk to them if they would talk to us. And that's how I got to know John Walton. John was, um, an SF medic.

• 1:44:06Speaker 05

  And he was just an outstanding guy. And we met, it's one of those deals where, "What does your dad do?" "Well, my dad's a milkman back in Trenton, New Jersey. What does your dad do?" "He's got a five and dime store. He's running with his brother up in Bentonville, Arkansas." "So what the hell's Bentonville?" We teased him more and more about Bentonville than we should have. But John was a good sport about it. So I got to know John. And he had run a mission where they were TDY down in Cambodia. They got put into a target. It's supposed to be a two-day mission, but it stretched out to five. They ran out of water, ran out of food. And he came back. They were in a really nasty jungle. Some kind of growth, but his arms came

• 1:44:51Speaker 05

  back, all cut up. His pants and everything were torn to shreds from the thorns and stuff. And they made contact. And what I remember most was John talked about it. He talked about every little thing. And that's when we began to talk. We bonded our friendship well. We played poker together a lot. John was a phenomenal poker player. And so that relationship grew with him and the other guys. Whenever a team came back after a mission, if they would talk about it, we'd talk about it to see if we could learn anything off of it. So I went through those three missions. Why wouldn't they talk about it? Well, some guys were just, we had one team that came in, they had an inexperienced

• 1:45:33Speaker 05

  radio operator that called in a gun run on his own team. Killed two, wounded a couple others. And sometimes things like that, you just don't want to talk about. Gotcha.

• 1:45:46Speaker 08

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• 1:46:15Speaker 01

  Mr. President, my company told me of the explosion on our rig. On October 2nd. Causing massive water displacement and triggering a tsunami. They all heap the blame on me. Tom Cruise is.

• 1:46:26Speaker 02

  Digger got us into this mess, and Digger's gonna dig us out.

• 1:46:29Speaker 01

  From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:46:32Speaker 04

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You stop, you freeze in there. That's what...

• 1:46:36Speaker 03

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:46:39Speaker 04

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:46:40Speaker 03

  Digger. See the trailer online. Only in theaters October 2nd. Rated R. Under 17. Not a middle without parent.

• 1:46:45Speaker 05

  So, we had August the 3rd, 1968, John Walton's team, which was Spike Team Louisiana. They were into a target, on the ground a couple hours, they got overrun by the NVA. And in between times, there was one time where John was sitting there and to his left was an indigenous soldier, one of the South Vietnamese. John was left-handed, so his car 15 was pointed this direction. And he heard a noise, he looked over his shoulder and there was an NVA that popped up out of the jungle with a big chest-shower grin on his face. He stood up with his AK and John saw him, he's coming around, this guy opened

• 1:47:30Speaker 05

  fire with his AK, put four rounds into the South Vietnamese and was shooting at John, but John killed him, blew him back into the jungle. So John began to do first aid, patch up a South Vietnamese. This thing went on, they got overrun a second time. And on the last time they were getting overrun, the team leader called in a gun run on the team itself. And the A1 Sky Raider made a 20 mic mike, 20 millimeter gun run across the team. The rounds killed one of the South Vietnamese team members. And the second with Tom was Tom Cunningham, who was the radio operator. He came into camp on Sunday or Monday, this

• 1:48:13Speaker 05

  was Saturday, August the 3rd, 68. And the gun run, 120 mic mike round, hit his radio, this Prick 25, PRC 25 FM radio, the shrapnel exploded, wounding the team leader. The second round hit his leg and took off his leg and he was flying through the air. He had an out-of-body experience, seeing himself flying through the air with his leg dangling by Sinu. And he landed, he called his name out, then he returned to his body. And within seconds, John was there, began to patch him up. He passed up the team leader who'd been severely wounded also. And they called in airstrikes.

• 1:48:56Speaker 05

  First helicopter comes in, Captain Tin, who was the same captain that we talked about a little earlier, um, Tin comes in, picks up Pete Boggs, Tom Cunningham, and the South Vietnamese who's wounded. The team member who was dead, they left him at the LZ. Because it's August, they're in high Laotian mountains. He could only take three. So he took off. Second King Bee came in and got shot out. The third King Bee attempted to come in and got shot out. Well, Captain Tin heard this. He turned around and came back and landed and picked up John, who was on the ground with the South Vietnamese. And he could see

• 1:49:38Speaker 05

  the NVA coming up there. They're going, shooting in with their M79, Car 15s. And John told the, uh, uh, Cubby Rider, "If you don't get us now, we're dead." Captain Tin comes in. Now, the H34 is too heavy to take off. He had the struts on the side, so the wheels. He lifted it up, gets running downhill, all while under enemy fire, had enough lift just to get over the treetops, but not enough transitional lift to leave. He dips down into the valley, did two or three laps in the valley, get up speed, all while under enemy fire, then takes off and comes back to the base. They went right to

• 1:50:23Speaker 05

  the, um, to the medical center. And even there, when they go into this, to the medical center, John goes in, they roll in, Pete Boggs was the team leader, they roll Tom in, and they put the third stretcher, John puts the Indige on the stretcher, they're going in, they go, "No, no, no, we don't do South Vietnamese here." Because it was an American facility. John turned his Car 15 and said, "You will do it or you'll die right here."

• 1:50:52Speaker 05

  So they let him in. So they heard about this exchange and they, they went to give Tom uh an uh intravenous because he lost so much blood. And uh because of all the commotion with John, uh uh they made a scene there, obviously. And the guy, the doctor was so upset, he couldn't do it. So John went over, did the cut down and put it in Tom's uh intravenous to keep him alive.

• 1:51:18Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about your first firefight.

• 1:51:22Speaker 05

  Well, yeah, because my, and again, so these are the guys we talked to. I talked to John that day. And just as a small footnote, his left hand, he's dealing poker that night. So we're putting the cards. I go, hey, John, what's this thing across the top of your wrist? Oh, I hadn't seen that. Says it must have been from that NVA that, that shot my, my teammate there. So when he was pulling his gun up, his car 15, the round went across, it took three layers of skin off.

• 1:51:47Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:51:48Speaker 05

  Yeah. You talk about divine intervention. So we get to October, um Spider Parks is flying Covey. Don Wolken is now the team leader, I'm the assistant team leader. And we had Jim Davidson that came on the team. We were assigned a mission for October 6th. And for October 5th, just a quick footnote, because this is one of our most historic SOG missions. We had a nine man recon team that went into the Ashaw Valley and they ran into 10,000 NVA. And we lost three men that day. And the NVA lost 90% casualties that day. They had a 10,000

• 1:52:30Speaker 05

  man NVA division. The reason why we know that, Lynn Black, who was on the team, had had a tour of duty previous with the 173rd. He took over the team because the team leader, the point man were killed. The team leader was inexperienced. He walked the team into an L shaped ambush with 50 men. One of the men up there was a Colonel, an NVA Colonel. Well, that Colonel called Lynn Black.

• 1:52:57Speaker 05

  Twenty some years later, could they, um, the government had gone back to try to find the team leader's body. And Lynn had worked with the government, gave him MAC coordinates, things like this. Well, Lynn gets a phone call. And this guy's a, he was a Colonel in sixty-eight, but now he's a big general up in North Vietnam. He goes, he says, "I was the commander that ambushed your team that day." So they talked back and forth. And then at the end of it, Lynn goes, "We had a bad day. We lost three men." So we noticed from the Colonel, he, of course, then a general, he says, "We had a bad day too. Between your recon team, tac air, helicopter gunships, you inflicted ninety percent casualties on our ten thousand man division."

• 1:53:42Speaker 05

  Wow. Now, that's October fifth. At during the afternoon, during the, right around noontime, they talked about putting a bright light in. And a bright light would be a team that would go in to get down pilots, or in a case like this, where a team is under heavy contact, or they got wounded, the bright light would go in to help relieve them and help get them out. So we were given bright light duty for that. But Lynn Black said, "No, we got too much here. There's too much anti-aircraft fire. We don't want to risk bringing another helicopter in." So we canceled the bright light. Um, the next day, we launched for the target.

• 1:54:24Speaker 05

  And that is the photograph on the front of across the fence, where we took pictures, and we never did it again, because if you look closely at the picture, Hep and Sal are really unhappy. They didn't want to take pictures. They were superstitious. But, six man team, we got up early, launched into a target, Echo Four.

• 1:54:49Speaker 05

  We had two king bees for the insertion. So Don was the team leader, he jumped out first and we were, the helicopter came in with the right wheel and the right door facing a bomb crater. And there was elephant grass on the bomb crater. And the helicopter, because of the time of day, was warm, was kind of moving up and down, it couldn't come to a complete hover or stable hover because the other wheel was dangling up the side. So Don jumped out and disappeared. And the helicopter moved over, I waited a little bit, and I thought it was close to the, to the, to the bomb crater. So I jumped out, missed the bomb crater because I was carrying so much weight.

• 1:55:31Speaker 05

  I rolled down the hill and then Don had rolled down the hill. And then, uh, Fook, who was our point man, he jumped out and landed on the, uh, bomb crater. So the second helicopter came in, all the guys got out. But Don and I had to crawl back up the hill, up that bomb crater to just get to the damn team. And by the time we got there, I was sweaty, I was ready to go back, I was ready to get back. I was tired, but we moved for a couple of hours and then once we moved, we, in triple canopy, we moved for 10 minutes, stopped for 10 minutes, just to listen. Cause the jungle had its own, own vibration of life. And when we stopped moving, eventually it would come back.

• 1:56:16Speaker 05

  And you hear the birds, the crickets, the insects and all this kind of stuff. And the, the thought was, if you stop for 10 minutes and that doesn't come back, you've got company. How did you learn that? Just from our little people, as part of our training, we talked about it all the time. So we moved 10, 10 and 10 through the jungle and, um, about, we'd been in maybe two, two and a half hours. And all of a sudden, there is this ruckus coming towards us in the jungle. And it just sounds like, what the hell? Is it the NVA? So we hear the noise, Fook's the point man, he pulls over, Don gets behind him, I'm behind.

• 1:57:01Speaker 05

  And we got the car 15s out, getting ready to pull the pins off the hand grenade, you know? You know how the pins go through? Get it ready so you can pull it quickly. And we get online, here they come. We got overrun by monkeys. By monkeys? Monkeys. What do you call a flock of monkeys, a herd of monkeys? This is called, a flock of monkeys overran. It had to be commie monkeys. But they overran us, we were sitting there like, oh, Jesus. So we put the pins back in and get everything back, get back online. How many monkeys were there? A lot. We didn't take time to count. We were just so happy to see monkeys and not NVA soldiers charging at us with AKs. So we moved maybe another hour or so.

• 1:57:47Speaker 05

  Got hit by bees, Fo got stung, Don got stung really bad. So we had to stop putting mud on the, on the bee wounds. And we moved for the rest of the day. By around about four o'clock or so, we began to hear trackers shooting. And the NVA, when they would, knew a team was in the area, they would have code back and forth with weapons. Of course, they had radios of some sort, I assume. And we heard them begin to shoot. Sometimes, we could never quite tell if they're trying to direct us into a way to go. But our mission was initially a, uh, area recon, just to find out what was going on. But they told us that there was an American POW camp that was in that

• 1:58:32Speaker 05

  target box. So Don was like, that's my priority mission. If we can get to that American POW camp, that is what we have to go for. So in our minds, that's what we're going towards. We moved up until last light. We get in and set up an ROI and a rest overnight slot. And right before, right before final dusk, at the last five or 10 minutes, there was a gunshot from one of those trackers who had come within 10 yards of us. And that was jarring. They fired that shot off to have them that close. So we set up the RON, we put our claymore mines at night.

• 1:59:15Speaker 05

  And of course with the uh during the night, we would take turns rotating. And uh my tour duty was around one o'clock.

• 1:59:23Shawn Ryan?

  So within ten yards, somebody's shooting.

• 1:59:25Speaker 05

  Yeah, but again, the jungle's so thick, you couldn't see. I mean, with triple canopy, like I could see Don when he's in front of me. But I couldn't see the point man, who Don could see. And the person behind me could see me. But, and that was HEP, the interpreter, and HEP couldn't see Don. That's how thick that vegetation is when you're moving.

• 1:59:49Shawn Ryan?

  That's about the width of this room.

• 1:59:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, absolutely. We'd have our six men in this, in this area and not able to see each other.

• 1:59:58Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:59:59Speaker 05

  Sure. So.

• 2:00:01Shawn Ryan?

  So you guys only moved during the daytime?

• 2:00:04Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, we had, we would have, we would have killed for some of your nogs. And uh, so we set up the RON. I was up at one o'clock. And I heard something move, I could have sworn it moved, and it finally got in front of one of our claymores. I couldn't tell if it was a tiger or if it was that, that's the uh, the tracker, I wasn't sure. I told Don, I said, look, I've been listening to this thing. It's in front of the claymore. And of course, what we had been told was the NVA, if they had a chance, they would get a claymore and turn it around. So if you fired it off, it would come back and you'd get the whole blast of the ball bearings in the claymore mine.

• 2:00:47Shawn Ryan?

  They were that good?

• 2:00:48Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. They had done it, if we had teams that they had done that to. So I told Don, I said, I think I got an NVA in front of the claymore. There's something out there, I want to blow it. And he said, no. I said, I thought he said, go. So I clacked that, I get that old MK fifty-seven, clack that claymore, it goes off.

• 2:01:14Speaker 05

  It was quiet for the rest of the night, but Don was pissed. Sal was really pissed with me for firing that thing off. So first light, we moved out. We moved, again, ten and ten throughout the day. Around about twelve thirty, one o'clock, we had the, we were trying to get up this one mountain to go down. And, and the jungle was so rugged with the, the rock formation, everything and the growth. There's like a little goat trail that kind of started down here and went up. And so we got out in the goat trail.

• 2:01:48Shawn Ryan?

  How could you guys, I mean, how do you navigate and shit that thick?

• 2:01:53Speaker 05

  Our little people were so good. Don was good with a compass and we just, you know, Sal and Fuck, Fuck was our point man for that mission. And then Sal had trained him up. So we told him where we're going and they knew. They worked, of course, on that mission, Don was doing all the coordination between the point man and talking to HEP for anything further.

• 2:02:15Shawn Ryan?

  So looking, looking for a POW camp.

• 2:02:18Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:02:18Shawn Ryan?

  Within a target square, how big is a target square?

• 2:02:21Speaker 05

  Six by six box, six click, six by click, six click by six click.

• 2:02:26Shawn Ryan?

  So how would you guys, how would you look for, what was the method to find a POW?

• 2:02:32Speaker 05

  In this case, we, we had to, we knew we had to move away from the LZ and go to a general area that the intel reports were approximate where it was. So we were en route to that. We had been in the jungle moving. It got so rough. We found this little goat trail. So normally we just stayed away from trails, but on this day, we went out and by now, I was the fifth man in the formation. Sal was the tail gunner. I'm fifth man, HEP, and then, uh, Don and then Fuck running point and, and Robinson, our sixth man was, uh, between us. And, uh, so we're going up this trail, maybe for.

• 2:03:15Speaker 05

  Must have been like a half hour or so. We really done some extensive climb. It's pretty steep. At one point, when you get to the top, when you start to turn, Sal is back there. Says he and I, he goes, he makes this really loud hissing sound. I turn around and he's looking backwards and he's pointing down the hill where we had come. There were two NVA, tall NVAs with pith helmets, AK-47s that port arms, standing there in black. And they looked tall. They may have even been Chinese. So I told Sal, I'm gonna get the 79, put

• 2:03:54Speaker 05

  around on those assholes. He said, no, no, tell Walken. I told Don. At that point, he took us straight up the hill, got to the top of a little knoll. We got up there about two o'clock or so. We set up a defensive perimeter up there. He says, get on, get on the line, call Tac Air, we're gonna be in a prairie fire emergency. So I get on the radio, make a couple of calls, no response. And we were on the perimeter, we had a little break, I'd get a can of apricots out. I could use a break. So I'm opening my apricots.

• 2:04:33Speaker 05

  Fook, Hep and Sal opened fire, and then Davidson opened fire. And it's like, do mami. And up the hill, we're coming NVA. And Sal had heard them first and blew them back down the mountain. Well, I spilled my apricot nectar, put the can down, get into the firefight. The firefight went on. They kept coming back at us, time after time, up that, up that little mountain, up the hill. But the hill was small enough that there could only be so many people. And some guys came up from the side and some came up from the left side. But the vegetation was rough. We're on top of that hill. Sal could tell them when they were coming, and

• 2:05:17Speaker 05

  Fook could hear them. And this went on. Then I'm on the radio, we have a prairie fire emergency. So when the team is on the ground...

• 2:05:26Speaker 05

  And when we're in Laos, not Cambodia, but in Laos, if you call it a prairie fire emergency, any and all attack air that was within any distance would be diverted from their targets to come cover us. And of course, that would include the A1 Skyraiders, the the old Korean War planes, but those are the ones we love the best. They could stay on station the longest with the most ordnance. They could carry the same amount of weight that a B-17 carried in World War II. So, but this was a single engine, huge engine. And most of the, most of them were single pilots. The A1E was a two-face with a pilot

• 2:06:10Speaker 05

  and a copilot. But they didn't use those too much for SOG missions because they were just so, they just needed as much ordnance as we could get. And nobody answered the radio. This firefight went on for well over two hours. Finally, I forget, we made contact with somebody. It may have been a Phantom jet. He gets a hold of Spider. Spider Parks comes over. We were close to this, the hill there was a little bit more open area. I was able to get the mirror flash, flash it in so Spider could locate exactly where we were. And then within a short while, we had attack air. And How close were these guys getting?

• 2:06:53Speaker 05

  Well, if we were like here, the jungle would be that wall, and they would be coming out of that wall. Holy shit. So, we're talking Yeah. Five, six yards. At the most. And again, a lot of, it's so weird because the jungle was so thick, because they could see what they're coming towards us. If they're coming up the hill, they'd be firing at us. And then we would see the gunfire, or their, or their feet, or something from their bodies first. We would never even see their face with them. But they kept coming. You know, and at one point, and I forget if it was before or after we reached Spider for the attack air, but Don Wolken came over to me because sometimes

• 2:07:37Speaker 05

  there'd be like a little break. And he goes, "Look at what they're doing." I couldn't tell. He says, no, look, he says, you see the bodies? They started stacking up the dead bodies. At the top of that hill, could they want to get the bodies stacked up? So they could climb up on the bodies, so they could shoot down at us. So they were using the bodies as a barricade? Yeah.

• 2:08:01Speaker 05

  And to climb up on it, could they knew that we had the advantage on the height? And they wanted to get the dead bodies so they could shoot down at us. They stacked them up. We stacked them up. You got to stack them up? Well, we killed them, then they stacked the bodies. And I was like, that stuck with me, because at the NVA, after you kill them, and they put their dead bodies there to climb up to kill us. That tells you about the dedication of these guys. So at some point. I'm firing into the, into the next batch of NVA coming at us. And Fook opened fire. And. I thought he was shooting over my shoulder.

• 2:08:46Speaker 05

  So my ear was shattered, I just couldn't hear for shit. And, um. I didn't say anything, because we were just so busy fighting. Um. So the next day, when we debrief in the, in the, in the hooch. We all came back after a mission, we'd always talk about it with the entire team, with Spider and the half. At the end of it, I turned to Fook, I said, Fook, why were you shooting over my shoulder? He goes. Dumbass. There were three NVA, they were crawling up the hill. They were aiming at you. I killed them before they killed you.

• 2:09:23Speaker 05

  And so I was so focused here. And thank God, Fook saw them there.

• 2:09:29Speaker 05

  And so, uh. We went on, uh, that was the first time. How did that, I mean, how did that end? Well, we finally had Tac Air. And the first run we had was an A1, the A1 Skyraider, a napalm run, specific. I'll never forget it. And, um. Spider got low on fuel, he connected me with the Skyraider pilot. So he knew where we were, we popped smoke. He came in and said, we're gonna do a napalm run. And I told him, "Bring it as close as you can," because they kept coming at us. And he says, "Now, y'all put your head down. It's crispy critter time."

• 2:10:15Speaker 05

  He came in with that napalm run. It's the first time I ever smelled human flesh burn. He was that close. Just takes your air away. Came back with gun runs. They did CBU runs, cluster bomb units. And then the judge and the executioner showed up, and there were gunships attached to, from the Maricall Division, the 176th and the muskets. And they had boarded with us at FOB 1. So we knew them by name. And they did amazing gun runs on all three sides because they were coming at us from the front and on the sides.

• 2:10:54Speaker 05

  And at one point, they were crawling up the hill. I was on the radio with Spider. I could just see this guy crawling up the hill. So I'm talking to Spider quietly, and then the guy stuck his head up and just fired one round, but I forgot to let go of the radio. The shot hurt his ears. But he could tell that we had been in this contact for so long. So finally, he sees an LZ that we couldn't tell. But it was elephant grass. And the elephant grass is eight to 12 feet tall. And it was right behind us, where we had no or only minimal enemy contact.

• 2:11:39Speaker 05

  He says, "You just go past that. There's the elephant grass." And it was maybe, again, 10 or 12 yards at the most, but it was that thick stuff. So we go, pushing through it, but it's so hard to get through it. I fell down. Then Wilken walked across my back. All the guys walked on my back. Wilken fell down. We stood at his back. Meanwhile, I'm directing gun runs with the helicopter. And a King Bee that came in on that coin that we showed you earlier, Captain Tin from the South Vietnamese Air Force, the 219 Squadron, came in and hovered in that elephant grass because he couldn't land. There were small trees there. Had he landed, the blades would have just destroyed the helicopter.

• 2:12:23Speaker 05

  But he hovered for 10 minutes. So we struggled to get through this elephant grass in between, shooting at the NVA, directing gun runs.

• 2:12:32Speaker 05

  And we finally get to the King Bee, and at one point, the gun runners came by so close, it was the first time I had shell casings go down the back of my neck from the Judge and the Executioner. And, uh, but I was like, oh shit, but that's like, that's cool. Thank you. You know, because they were that close shooting the NVA coming at us. And Captain Ten hung up there. Don and I threw all the guys in. Don grabbed my shirt and his hands slipped. And by now, my adrenaline's pumping. I grabbed him and threw him up all 220 pounds up into, up into the King Bee. And then he reached down and grabbed me, pulled me in, and we left.

• 2:13:17Speaker 05

  So I'm down on my last magazine, last hand grenade. And as we pulled out, it's almost, almost dark. And it was just the weirdest thing because as we're leaving, you look back at the jungle, this rich, dark green, emerald green. Here's all these little sparkling lights for AK-47s and green tracers coming up at our King Bee. So for me, that's my first major firefight. Holy shit. And only by the grace of the Lord did we get out of there. And thanks to Captain Ten. This is another significant moment for me. We're in the helicopter now. We lift up, finally passed all that. We fired off our last bullets, the last grenade.

• 2:14:00Speaker 05

  We're flying back. It's beautiful sunset, most beautiful sunset I've ever seen in my life because we're like alive, you know? And so I look over at Sal and Sal goes, he gave me a nod. When Spider introduced me to Spike Team Idaho, Sal turned to Hep. He goes, he's too tall, his feet are too big, and he looks stupid.

• 2:14:31Speaker 05

  But on that day, October 7th, 1968, he gave me a nod, he's like, "You done good." And to me, I'll never forget that moment.

• 2:14:43Speaker 05

  Cause at that point, we were on a team, we were tight. Sal saved us on the ground, I did all the airstrikes. Get back to food, bye. Captain 10, you saved our ass. Come on, let me buy you a drink. No, my wife is just holding dinner for me at home. I wanna see my children.

• 2:15:06Speaker 05

  So two days later, he comes back, he goes, "You know, we had 48 bullet holes in that helicopter." Well, needless to say, whenever the King Bee pilots came, they never purchased any drinks. Not in our club.

• 2:15:21Speaker 05

  And so Captain 10 saved John Walton on August 3rd. That was our day. He came back, he and those guys later on, trouble missions, they just under enemy fire. And there was at least that day, and there's at least one other day where we had been in a firefight. Well, hold on. Yeah. So you guys come back. Yeah. Oh, there's a floor show on. A what? A floor show. There was some kind of a floor show, like an Australian floor show in the club. Normally, when a team would come back after a firefight, like what we had been through, there'd be guys out there with beer, there'd be a truck and everything. And, uh, but this night, there was just one guy with a truck, no beer.

• 2:16:05Speaker 05

  And we took us back, and because I was the radio operator, Don went in to report to S3 or to S2, give them the intel briefing. I got the team, gave them the food and stuff. And there was a floor show, so nobody came out.

• 2:16:23Speaker 05

  And so we go into, into the club, there's John Walton, John's there, and we're talking back and forth. And so John goes, "Hey, did you kill anybody today?"

• 2:16:36Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you know, for the first time I could tell you I killed a man. Don't feel good about it, but. You know, that's war. Cause that guy stuck his head up and I hit him. And uh. It sticks with you, you know? Spider Parks came over and said, you know, you had that firefight, you hurt my ear. He said, but. You did the right thing. Cause if you didn't kill him. Think about what he could have done to the team.

• 2:17:08Speaker 05

  So that was my uh. My welcome, you know? That's the real war right there, Ben. And they were serious. And we never forgot that moment. With them stacking up the bodies of their comrades so they could kill us.

• 2:17:23Speaker 05

  And we're just lucky to get out of there. Captain Ten, he's still alive today out there and down in Carlsbad, Cali- California. He's down there with his son. Every once in a while, we talk to him to try to give a little call. Stay in touch.

• 2:17:42Shawn Ryan?

  So when that guy stuck his head up.

• 2:17:46Shawn Ryan?

  What went through your head? That exact moment?

• 2:17:50Speaker 05

  Oh. He's a bad guy. He's gotta go. Didn't even know, no, not. None of this thinking about it. Um. You know, there are other times we were in firefights. I can remember my third grade teacher, Sunday school teacher, Myrtle Reichardt. She said, thou shalt not kill. I heard her voice more than once saying thou shalt not kill. But I said, sorry, Myrtle. You know, this is uh, us or them. We're at war right now. I'm sure the Lord understands that. Besides, we're killing communists. My favorite kind of communist is dead. And uh. So I really didn't think about it. Now I talked about it with John. It really hit home. And then Spider.

• 2:18:35Speaker 05

  Afterwards came by and talked to me. And says, remember in the future, don't you let that radio go when you're shooting because you hurt our ears up there in the plane. And then we had the team meeting the next day when Fook told me that. And, um, learned, lessons learned, what we could do better. And then, uh, with that, Don got promoted to a cubby rider.

• 2:19:01Shawn Ryan?

  How many enemy combatants do you guys think he killed that day?

• 2:19:04Speaker 05

  I have no idea. Um, because of the limited frontage and the fact that once it came up from the sides, I know Fook had killed some more that came up.

• 2:19:18Speaker 05

  And from the ones in front, I mean, to have enough to stack up bodies that were, as I looked at, it looked like there had to be at least a foot off the ground. Maybe more for the dead bodies that they're stacking. And they were stacking them down the hill, so they wanted to get up on that stack to shoot at us. So we never counted.

• 2:19:40Speaker 05

  And the majority of them were just in the front of that jungle edge and into the jungle that went right down the hill. But they had to get up that hill to get to us.

• 2:19:48Shawn Ryan?

  So probably two, three bodies high.

• 2:19:50Speaker 05

  Yeah. Yeah. So we don't, we never knew how many or how many were wounded.

• 2:19:58Speaker 05

  We had cases, uh, other teams when they would kill the NVA. And they'd go over the area and there'd be no bodies, but you see the blood trails when the NVA would pull their dead out.

• 2:20:10Speaker 05

  They were hardcore.

• 2:20:12Speaker 05

  And by 1968, the NVA had 25,000 troops that were in Laos, at least. And they were, they had developed, um, hunter killer SOG teams. These teams were designed to hunt our SOG teams.

• 2:20:33Speaker 05

  And make contact and they'd be sappers. They only wore a loin cloth, maybe some sandals.

• 2:20:41Speaker 05

  And they would carry an AK and a magazine. And they would come in or a hand grenade. And they would come in just to kill the Americans, leave the indigenous alive, just for psy ops. And the sappers, uh, in August 23rd of 68, the sappers had hit our base camp at Da Nang. And they had prepared for it for over a year and they'd killed 16 Green Berets in one day. And, uh, FOB four and, uh,

• 2:21:10Speaker 05

  That was the most serious casualties in SF Special Forces history was that day at Dunang. And I wasn't there for that. I was up at FOB one, heard about it. And we sent down a relief force that went down and relieved the camp and helped them clean it up, get the dead bodies and stuff. But I missed all that because we were getting ready for our insertion the next day on the sensors. We were doing mission prep on that with the team.

• 2:21:41Shawn Ryan?

  How quick after that first firefight was the next mission?

• 2:21:45Speaker 05

  Well, Don got promoted. And a couple of days after the mission, Jim came up to me.

• 2:21:54Speaker 05

  And Jim was, uh, he was outstanding on that day, on that hill. He was there rock solid. He said, "Till," he says, "I spent a year with the 173rd in combat.

• 2:22:08Speaker 05

  I ain't never seen no shit like this. Never. I can't do it, brother. I don't want you to feel like I'm letting you down." I said, "No, no, no." So I'm glad you told me because that day you were there with me, our team, and you were part of us against them. And you can always tell your grandchildren that you and me and Don and the team, we stood up against the communists and you were an outstanding soldier. I'll be forever in your debt for that.

• 2:22:43Speaker 05

  And so you just tell me what you want to do and thank you for being honest. So I went to the sergeant major. We got him a new assignment. And then he left a couple of weeks later, but he never said goodbye.

• 2:22:55Speaker 05

  And, uh, but he did well that day and it was not an issue. So then I had to get a new assistant team member. And a couple of days later, Bubba Shore and the Frenchman, Don, Doug, the Frenchman La Turner arrived at FOB one. And these new guys just gone through training group. They came up to the base and John McGovern, somehow he had heard about the Frenchman. And he liked the Frenchman. So he told the Frenchman, we gotta get you on Spike Team Virginia. And so Doug went to Spike Team Virginia and we heard about John Bubba Shore.

• 2:23:36Speaker 05

  And so, uh, we recruited Johnny, came over, trained him up. And, uh, by the end of the month, we ran a couple of general missions. And then November, we just had balls to the walls. And, um, we got several, several different missions out of there that were, uh, just amazing. And, uh, it was just Bub and I. And by that time, I so respected the Vietnamese on our team. I didn't want a third American because our little people were so good in the jungle. They always ran point. We usually had them on the tail gunner position. And, uh, so that's where we started up.

• 2:24:20Speaker 05

  How did you feel when you got the nod? Oh, I carried that too with me today. It's the Sal game and I'm just like, oh my God. I was officially nod of approval. It took a while, you know, from, from June or the end of May there, uh, till October the 7th, 1968 A.D. But it was well worth the wait. And we never, and we, we always got along. But that was the official, okay, you're a part of the team. You done good. And we all knew about Sal because he, he had helped. By 68, they'd been running for two and a half years, missions across the fence. Wow.

• 2:25:01Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. I know. Tuon had been running for a couple of years. He was our grenadier. He could put a 40 millimeter grenade up a Nazi's ass at 500 yards. I mean, he was so good with that thing. Just phenomenal firepower and good people. So Bub and I, we had a, in early November, not one of my finer moments, but we had trouble finding LZs.

• 2:25:32Speaker 05

  So somebody came up with a bright idea of let's get a daisy cutter. Look for a swath of jungle where there's no trails, no roads visible from the air. We'll drop a daisy cutter in it, it'll knock down all the trees. And then the team can land or rappel in. They get on the ground and then do an area recon right there. Okay, so that's us. So, um, the first day, I forget what the aircraft was that carried a 2,000 pounder, but it had a daisy cutter. So I'm the team leader. I'm on the, uh, King Bee, has two steps into the King Bee.

• 2:26:13Speaker 05

  And, uh, I'm stepping out and the, the bomb goes off, we can see the bomb and the King Bee's falling in right behind it. You know, the dust is settling and the King Bee couldn't land. So he hovered, I rappelled down, halfway down the rope, I could hear somebody yelling.

• 2:26:32Speaker 05

  Across that area where, again, there's still dust in the air.

• 2:26:37Speaker 05

  But nobody's shooting at me. So I'm going down the rope and I hear another voice. So there's one up to where I'm facing and one back here in the area where we just blew up a bomb. So I land and I give Henry King, who was a strap hanger with us that day, I gave him the sign, no. Mission's canceled. I get on the radio, I tell Covey, we're compromised, there's people here. Cause when you're compromised, why go on with the mission? Our job is to go in and snoop and poop. So the mission's canceled, I unhook, the King Bee takes off. And I'm on the ground for a while, I can hear more people coming back and forth and finally I see an NVA come down. Open fire on him, don't have any more with him.

• 2:27:23Speaker 05

  But they're still, they're, they're talking back and forth. I can't tell what they're saying. Cause I just grew up in Trenton, my foreign language is English, let alone the ocean or whatever we're speaking. So finally the King Bee comes back, Captain Tuong is flying. Drop the rope down, I hook in.

• 2:27:42Speaker 05

  And we had a Swiss seat. It's a rope Swiss seat. You tie it in, tie it off on the side, and then you have a D-ring. And then the Swiss seat comes down with a sandbag and a D-ring on it. You hooked a D-ring in, you get pulled up, and then you have a D-ring on your shoulder harness that you're supposed to hook into. So if you get shot, your body remains in the seat and on the rope. Well, as Captain Tuong begins to lift off, I gave him the sign, he lifts off. I could see the NVA again. So I shoot another NVA soldier. They're coming up the rope. Somebody else is shooting at the helicopter now. So I turn around and shoot where the gunshots are coming from, but I can't, I don't see any people. I just see the gunshots.

• 2:28:28Speaker 05

  I turn around firing a 79 round at them. Now we're getting lifted up. Captain Tuong hears the gunfire. I'm not out of the jungle yet. So he pulls me through the jungle. But now it's like

• 2:28:44Speaker 05

  we're playing pinball, but I'm the pinball here. And we're ricocheting off the trees. I had not hooked up my D-ring yet. So I ricochet a few times, and I get bounced back and forth, and the both of my arms are cut up from the rope as we're getting, as they were getting bounced around. Finally, we come out of the jungle. And he lifts up further, and we're going back to South Vietnam. And I tried to get the D-ring harness. I couldn't get it hooked because of the wind. You know, wherever we're flying, 90, 90 miles an hour, whatever the speed is. We're going, and I point at the king, I go, "Let's go down," you know?

• 2:29:25Speaker 05

  And so I could see him, but he's like 150 feet away. I'm down there dangling, and I'm moving, I'm rotating my arms, because my arms have been really cut up here. And as I went to rotate, it hit a packet of air or something, it flipped me upside down.

• 2:29:44Speaker 05

  And as I'm upside down, now I look up one more time, I go to King. Like this, my web gear and my backpack all comes back on my neck. And I got my legs spread, the Swiss seat is down to my knees. Shit. Oh, yeah. And so I could feel this choking off, I'm trying to pull the web gear and and the backpack, it's all on my neck.

• 2:30:12Speaker 05

  I can't get it off. It's like, ah, this is not good. So finally, we get another air pocket. And the rope goes down to my feet. And I'm hanging by my feet, the Swiss seat is on my feet. I'm choking out now. And um, I'm just like a New York City hooker, my legs spread there, just trying to keep that rope on my feet. And um, my life flashes before my eyes, right before I'm ready, I know I'm gonna pass out, I passed out. Once before in my life, I knew what that feeling was. So I'm getting ready to pass out, bing, there's the front page of the newspaper back in Trenton.

• 2:30:54Speaker 05

  I'm really pissed because the front page of the Trenton Times has my death in South Vietnam, A, it's a lie, I died in Laos. B, it's below the fold. By 1968, our guys had been dying in such common news that we didn't rate above the fold on page A1 of the Trenton Times. I saw my girlfriend from kindergarten, the girl who broke my heart when she moved to California, Dolores. Saw my car, a couple other things, my dad's milk truck, and I passed out. What I didn't realize was Captain Tuong had been descending. And when I passed out, it was right over a patch of elephant grass.

• 2:31:37Speaker 05

  So I fell maybe 12, 15 feet at the most. I was unconscious, Henry King jumped out, took off my web gear, pulled the stuff off my neck, picked me up, threw me in the king bee. And it was one of those moments where as I hit the floor, I was like, oh, God, that hurts, but.

• 2:31:59Speaker 05

  Oh, I'm happy. That's happy pain. I'm alive. And all my web gear, my Car 15, my Solid Off F79 with a stylized holster, and my Sog knife. They're all still there in Laos. But we got out, flew back, went to S4, went to S3 first, gave them a quick briefing. And, um, we, um, um, had to get new gear, geared up. The next day, we were back for another mission.

• 2:32:34Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:32:34Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah. And the other sidebar to that, the day before that I rappelled in, they did the daisy cutter, and the daisy cutter exploded. And as I was going to, as the helicopter began to descend, we had secondary explosions. They had over a dozen secondary explosions. So here we were, with the best intel available at the time, figuring this is a chunk of jungle where there's nothing there. We just rappel in, do an area recon. We blew up one of Ho Chi Minh's caches.

• 2:33:08Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:33:09Speaker 05

  And to this day, Ho Chi Minh is trying to figure out how we figured that out. By mistake.

• 2:33:14Shawn Ryan?

  Damn.

• 2:33:15Speaker 05

  Just another day in Sog. Oh, yeah. Just crazy.

• 2:33:21Shawn Ryan?

  John, let's take a quick break.

• 2:33:22Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 2:33:23Shawn Ryan?

  Then we'll just pick up right where we left off.

• 2:33:25Speaker 05

  Oh, great. Fair enough.

• 2:33:29Shawn Ryan?

  I know everybody out there has to be just as frustrated as I am when it comes to the BS and the rhetoric that the mainstream media continuously tries to force-feed us. And I also know how frustrating it can be to try to find some type of a reliable news source. It's getting really hard to find the truth and what's going on in the country and in the world. And so one thing we've done here at Sean Ryan Show is we are developing our newsletter.

• 2:33:59Shawn Ryan?

  And the first contributor to the newsletter that we have is a woman, former CIA targeter. Some of you may know her as Sarah Adams, call sign Superbad. She's made two different appearances here on the Sean Ryan Show, and some of the stuff that she has uncovered and broke on this show is just absolutely mind blowing. And so I've asked her if she would contribute to the newsletter and give us a weekly intelligence brief. So it's gonna be all things terrorists, how terrorists are coming up through the southern border, how they're entering the country, how they're traveling, what these different terrorist organizations throughout the world are up to. And here's the best part, the newsletter is actually

• 2:34:43Shawn Ryan?

  free. We're not gonna spam you. It's about one newsletter a week, maybe two, if we release two shows. The only other thing that's gonna be in there besides the intel brief is if we have a new product or something like that. But, like I said, it's a free CIA intelligence brief. Sign up, link's in the description or in the comments. We'll see you in the newsletter. I'd like to invite you to gain access to an exclusive experience on Vigilance Elite Patreon. Our patrons are the driving force behind the success of this show, and their support allows us to keep doing what we do. Depending on the tier you choose, you'll

• 2:35:27Shawn Ryan?

  get access to benefits like behind the scenes footage before each interview, early access to episodes, end of the month live Zoom calls with me, exclusive merch, and more. Join us and become a patron starting at just $5 a month by visiting patreon.com/vigilanceelite. That's patreon.com/vigilanceelite.

• 2:35:53Shawn Ryan?

  All right, John, we're back from the break.

• 2:35:55Speaker 05

  Indeed, thank you.

• 2:35:56Shawn Ryan?

  We're getting ready to hit November.

• 2:35:58Speaker 05

  November 68.

• 2:35:59Shawn Ryan?

  November 68. First, though, where did the name Tilt come from?

• 2:36:03Speaker 05

  You ever play pinballs?

• 2:36:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:05Speaker 05

  See, when you play a pinball machine and you lose, you walk away pissed off. When I play a pinball machine and lose, I shake the shit out of it, see my name in neon, then I walk away.

• 2:36:17Shawn Ryan?

  Right on.

• 2:36:19Speaker 05

  Indeed.

• 2:36:20Shawn Ryan?

  Let's get into November.

• 2:36:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, November, that was, that was one of our crucible months there.

• 2:36:27Speaker 05

  You know, Bob and I, we teamed up.

• 2:36:32Speaker 05

  By that time, we were comfortable with each other, and little people, they really liked Bob a lot, good man. And so after, after that mission, we had, we had a couple of days where in the morning, we would fly into an LZ, primary, get shot out, secondary, get shot out, and then the alternate, again, get shot out. Go back, have lunch. They, they wanted to get a team on the ground so bad that they would say, here's your new target, and then here's Covey, Covey, go find him an LZ. Because before that, we were doing visual reconnaissance.

• 2:37:13Speaker 05

  We'd fly over the target area, look for, pick out LZs, get familiar with it. But one of the issues by that time, one of the issues that we were dealing with was how much SOG was compromised. We knew that wherever we took off from, whether it was from FOB1 or whether it was, we had a launch site at Kwangtri. And then later, we had FOB3, which was at K-Son, that was closed in June, but they moved the title to Myeloc, and they were there until the end of November. They suspected that they had observers there, so whenever our helicopters would fly west

• 2:37:57Speaker 05

  from South Vietnam into Laos, that they would give a vector where we were going. And we know that they had observers at the borders. So when we went across into Laos, we assumed that somebody would say, here comes the helicopter, there are this vector, boom.

• 2:38:17Speaker 05

  We never knew how much we were compromised. That's why it's going to be a next story in my fourth book that I write. This is just how much we were compromised. And during this time, Bubba and I learned that. One morning, in the South Vietnamese Air Force, when they inserted a team, they didn't do a low nap of the earth thing because in the last, we had the mountains and everything. And they had what they called falling yellow leaf, where they would, because of the way the engine was designed, they could put it in neutral, and they would spiral down. At the last second, they would engage, flare, land, bing, we're

• 2:38:59Speaker 05

  out the door. They'd take off, the second chopper would come in, the same thing. On this mission, we had gotten shot off an LZ, we're going to the secondary, we're going in, as we're doing this, to start to spiral, Phuk or Sao, I forget which one, yell to the door gunner, and we aborted. I'm going like, Kumbia, what happened? And they saw a wire. Somehow, they saw a wire across the LZ. That wire was attached to a 500-pound bomb. Had we hit the wire, it would have triggered the bomb that would have destroyed us and the helicopter.

• 2:39:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:39:40Speaker 05

  So we knew.

• 2:39:40Shawn Ryan?

  They were able to see that coming in?

• 2:39:42Speaker 05

  I know, not me. We're talking about my little people here. Oh, they were phenomenal. It was like a miracle. It's just another day in Sod, but this is today's miracle. For us to get out of Echo Four, in my mind, to this day, is always a major miracle. But in that case, it was just unbelievable. So, we go back, we had this, we finally had another mission, we're on the ground, we get shot out within a day, leave with not too heavy contact.

• 2:40:13Shawn Ryan?

  What was that mission?

• 2:40:15Speaker 05

  It was just an area recon. They put us in, we're on the ground, we had trackers early, and some guys would tend to elongate the mission. And I would try to push it as far as we could, but once I thought we were compromised, and then Spider Park said, if you're compromised, they know where you are. It's just a question of time before they get enough people together to wipe your team out, like they did with Idaho in May.

• 2:40:45Speaker 05

  So I tended to be very conservative that way.

• 2:40:49Speaker 05

  We got out, no problem. So next day, another day, we go in, primary, secondary, alternate, lunch, primary, secondary, alternate.

• 2:41:00Speaker 05

  We finally, on the next day, we finally got inserted in the afternoon. And the weather was spotty.

• 2:41:09Speaker 05

  We get inserted, and we had Henry King with us, and he was carrying the experimental pump M79, just for extra firepower. We were going into the target was Echo 8. It was a target that had, um, a lot of enemy activity. We didn't know quite why. And we got in, and the, uh, the LZ, the Leos is do slash and burn. So they would slash an area, cut down all the vegetation, grow crops until the soil got depleted, then they would burn it out. We had an area where we landed, I put the team on the ground, we went up this mountain, and then, um, instead of doing the ten and ten, I just wanted to do something different.

• 2:41:54Speaker 05

  And we got on the ground, we moved for almost an hour. We finally came to a trail. The trail was big enough to drive a tank down it. And it was a kind of trail, from the air, you couldn't see it, because the NVA and their, and the indigenous people they forced to work with them tied branches over, so you would never see it from the air. So we get this big trail, we cross it, there's a telephone pole, Sal goes up, hooks up the wiretap. We set up a, an ambush, and our ambushes were designed where, uh, this is by Lynn Black,

• 2:42:33Speaker 05

  who specifically designed this, where we had a block of C4, so that six feet away from that block, any person would be knocked unconscious by the blast of the C4. Anything outside of that blast would be claymore mines that would kill everything else, both in front, excuse me, and in back of that person that was knocked unconscious. So we set up the ambush, claymores are put out, claymores for side security, claymores in the back, Sal's running the wiretap. We're sitting there and Bubba goes, "Hey, we can get us an R and R."

• 2:43:17Speaker 05

  Because they had the rule, if you capture a live POW, you got a hundred dollars, you got a R and R anywhere in the world. A hundred dollars? Yeah. Big, that's 1968, big money is 68, man. Was it? Well, you hear me tell, that's still big money today for this beyond. But anyways, so we're like, yeah, we're joking about it. Spider came out for a commo check. Now, we've been on the ground now for three or four hours. And he's flying Covey, and I give him the code, Spider code, whatever it was, we got a POW. We'll have one, we'll meet you at the LZ in one hour.

• 2:43:59Speaker 05

  He comes back and says, "I'm at 10,000 feet, I can't see the mountain you're on, let alone an LZ. I'm telling you, whatever you're doing, stop, get to the top of the mountain, and wait till the weather blows over. The weather closed in, we're gonna be socked in for three or four days. So don't make enemy contact, if you do, we can't come and get you. And with no tac air." Okay, so we pulled down the wiretap, pulled in the ambush, and as they're doing that, above us, we hear tanks up the mountain, literally a tank sounding, and another truck starting up.

• 2:44:42Speaker 05

  And when we had the, uh, we first got there, we set up the ambush, the NVA are walking up and down the road, guys had the AKs on their shoulders, we saw a couple officers, but I wanted to get the clearance from Spider, so if we could blow it to get a quality POW.

• 2:45:01Speaker 05

  Well, if the spider says, "Don't do it," we pulled everything in. And then we went to the left because we had come up the mountain. And we moved out, we crossed the trail. Because the trail kind of bent up the mountain and we crossed it again. And we would cross it, we'd do one man at a time. Person in the same footsteps going across, and the tail gunner comes by and cleans it up. We moved for a while, and it was getting dark now. And then we could hear dogs, dogs down by the LZ.

• 2:45:34Speaker 05

  So, it's almost dark now, Sal climbs up the tree. I have Sal, "Go look, see what we got coming at us." He comes back, his eyes are like saucers. He told Hep, "Buku VC," and we could hear the dogs now. There's several dogs coming up that mountain. And he goes, "There's Buku VC," and he says they're from here, meaning all these areas down the mountain from us. With Buku lights. And he could see some places where there's actually NVA behind the lights. So we don't know how many, but they're coming and coming hard. So we moved a little further, right about dusk. We got into a stream.

• 2:46:17Speaker 05

  And we turned left and went up the stream for maybe a half hour, forty-five minutes. And I had the team go out a couple of times to make false trails for the dogs. And then we put down black pepper and padded mace. So if the dog hit it, it would fuck up their nose. So we went further, for, like I said, it's dark. We're not used to moving at night, but I wanted to set, get as much distance between us and the dogs as possible. Sal agreed, because whenever I did anything like that. Through Hep, I would talk with Sal, that Bubba and Henry King, who was strap hanging with us, let them know. On this mission, we had eight men. So we finally come to an area in that stream bed, we climb up.

• 2:47:03Speaker 05

  And we set up an RON with the eight guys. And I'm facing the little stream bed or the creek, whatever it is, but there's water in it.

• 2:47:13Speaker 05

  So we hear more dogs, we can hear the noise down there. About midnight, one o'clock, two NVA walked past us in the stream. Or the creek. They go up for a while. Their lantern ran out of fuel. They turn around, they come back. Now, I can hear him. I don't know if anybody else in the team could. Later on, a fuck told me he could hear him. But again, we're not talking because I'm facing that. And fuck was on my right, but he was facing another direction. But I could have touched him if I wanted to. So I'm pointing here. They walked past, they're right about here in front of me in that little creek.

• 2:47:56Speaker 05

  Hep coughed. They stopped. At that point, one of them turned around. And only when the wind blew, he would start crawling up the mountain towards me. When the wind blew, I could hear him move. When the wind blew, and I was sitting there like this, feet spread, car 15 on single shot. So I figured if it happens, it's going to be just one shot. So it's going to take. Because at that point, we're playing hide and go seek with the NVA army there. They're trying to find us. Well, eventually he gets to me. So they knew you guys were there? Oh, yeah. How did they know? Helicopter. It's just so damn noisy.

• 2:48:39Speaker 05

  Did you guys ever do false insertions? Oh, yeah. Yeah, we did that. Uh, fake insertions, sometimes do two or three touchdowns and then get out of the helicopter, the third LZ. We did that. We did it in Cambodia as well as Laos. And Laos was a little harder because of the mountains. But it was a tactic. One, one thing we did. And plus with the concern about being compromised. We would have a briefing and we put down primary, secondary, alternate LZ, send it to Saigon. Then when we had the actual pre-mission briefing with the helicopter pilots and Covey.

• 2:49:21Speaker 05

  We pull Covey aside and say, go find us another LZ and a, and a secondary. Because we know we're just compromised. We don't want to take a chance on them waiting for us again with another 500 pound bomb. So that, that was one way to deal with it. So, um.

• 2:49:39Speaker 05

  Anyway, this guy comes up, he touched my boot. I could hear him catch his breath. I'm just waiting. If he had moved suddenly, he would have been dead.

• 2:49:48Shawn Ryan?

  He touched your boot?

• 2:49:49Speaker 05

  Yeah, my size ten. I was wearing a size ten regular at the time. Touched my left foot.

• 2:49:55Speaker 05

  He tossed it. I heard him catch his breath. If he moved suddenly, it would have been his last move. But he waited. I mean, he sat there for, well, by this time, you know how how time extends itself? I mean, seconds turn into minutes and hours. But when the wind blew, he backed up. Wind blew again, he went down. Finally gets to his buddy. And both of them left. So this is all, it took a while. And I want to say it happened around maybe two or three o'clock in the morning. I just forget. I mean, I had the my Seiko watch on. I could see, look at what time it was after he left, but I just forget what time. At first light, we were up and out of there.

• 2:50:39Speaker 05

  And we moved up that mountain all day. And, uh, twice, once or twice, our point man, who now was son, and he had Sal right behind him, they encountered woodcutters. But none of the woodcutters had weapons, and they were indigenous people. And there was nobody there to make it appear as though they were affiliated with the NVA in any way. So we continued to move. And, uh,

• 2:51:12Speaker 05

  you know, we had gotten near the top. And at one point, we took a break. And I'm beat, because we had moved all day. We just broke, you know, here we were doing ten and ten to really be cautious, but we're going up that mountain. And then we took a break for chow. But we continued to move as much as we could because we just wanted to get to the top of the mountain before dark. Set up a strong R O N. A night with extra climbers. And, uh, I went to stand up and I fell down. I literally fell on my face. So I get up again, fall down again, I land on my face. And I'm lying there, it's like, all I wanted to do was

• 2:51:53Speaker 05

  roll over and go to sleep. I was so tired and so beat. And after last night with the, cause I didn't get my sleep that night. And, uh, but I knew the whole team was looking at me. And I'm going like, you just gotta get your weary ass up. So I finally got up. We got up to the top of the mountain, set up a nice RON. Sal's guys did wonderful work with the claymores. And that night, around about one, two o'clock, and we always had commo checks. They had an airborne command and control ship that flew over Southeast Asia 24/7. In our case, they would usually fly by around midnight, one o'clock. We'd do a commo check. And because

• 2:52:37Speaker 05

  the NVA had really extensive RDF, you know, the Radio Direction Finding Equipment, um, we would just do click, click with the handset. And then they would say, Roger, received. So they knew we were okay. If there was a situation, we had to report. But anyway, they did the midnight, midnight commo check. About an hour and a half, two hours later, um, Bubba wakes me up. He goes, you won't believe this shit. Look at the mountain. So like, couple mountains over, the whole mountainside lit up with bright lights. So we began scanning on the dial. We

• 2:53:16Speaker 05

  get Russian. There's a Russian aircraft coming in for an aerial resupply in Laos to the NVA.

• 2:53:26Speaker 05

  Wow. So now I get on, I'm on the radio. I'm doing my IRK-10, my emergency radio frequency, which is like 243, uh, ultra high. And we carried those if the other radios didn't work. And, uh, did the radio, all different frequency. I can't get anybody. It's like, where's the cop when you need one? But they came in, they did the resupply and left. And that was a weird night. So we were up there for three more days. Spider would come by with Kamal check, just let us know how high up he was, but no break in the weather during the day. And finally, the fifth, the fourth night, we moved downhill, say, you can move out now,

• 2:54:10Speaker 05

  and try to continue with the mission. So we got down halfway down the mountain. And we came to one of the weirdest things. It looked like Stonehenge. In the middle of Laos, here are these huge monoliths that looked like Stonehenge. They didn't have any across the top, but these big things that came out of the ground. So we set up our RON in the center of this, put out the claymore mines. And set up the RON of the quiet night. And in the morning, first light, we could hear dogs. And the dogs picked up our trail. You could just tell they're barking more

• 2:54:52Speaker 05

  excitedly. And so Spider came by, I told him that they were on us, be a question of time before we made contact. And we moved out. And we moved to an open area where Spider said, go take this vector here. You've been on the ground for five days. We'll pull you out. And he came back 10 minutes later, said, Well, we're going to be delayed. There's another team that declared a prairie fire emergency. So we had to wait. Well, they kept coming. And they went through the RON. And we had Bubba put down a claymore mine. And then Sal put down a couple of tow poppers. So the claymore was triggered. We knew they're pissed now. And then they heard at least two tow

• 2:55:37Speaker 05

  poppers go off. So during that time, they came out, Sal and Hep were in the back. They had a light contact. Then we got the word from Spider that the 101st Airborne was going to come in to pick us up. And that was the first time we'd had American slicks since the mission to National Valley, because we had always used the South Vietnamese, the King Bees. And at one point, the gunships came down, Scarface, Marine Corps Scarface came in, they got shot to shit. They made a second run, they got shot up again. And we could see the enemy up the hill on the backside.

• 2:56:21Speaker 05

  And we went out with our M79s and King had that pump. He went chung chung chung. Me, Bubba and Tuon also fired our M79s up that hill where the gunfire was coming from on the ships, on the airships. I slowed them down. Hundred and first came in and I told Bubba, you gotta be the first man out there. You tell those young guys that are door gunners, we got South Vietnamese. Don't kill my little people. So he did because you know, we had bad experiences with that with young door gunners. That shot up some of our little people by mistake without realizing. Cause some of the guys just thought all South Vietnamese were NVA. So we got out, had a good extraction.

• 2:57:06Speaker 05

  That night back at the bar, we finally get back to the bar. And Scarface is there and there's Lieutenant Colonel Robson, who was the OIC. And he was like pissed, he says, look, you see my helicopter? The plexiglass had been shot out, had bullet holes in it. And uh, so he's really said, you guys, every time we come out to get you, my helicopters get shot up. And now I want to be out there supporting you guys. He's, so I buy him a few drinks, he gets three or four drinks and then. And I went back to S2, gave a debrief, came back and Robson, Colonel Robson was still there. Still bitching and moaning. I said, sir, does that mean you're not going to come next time? He said, no, I didn't say that. We'll be, you call, we'll come. And they did, they got shot up really bad.

• 2:57:51Speaker 05

  And they were flying those old UEs, UE gunships. Mm hmm. That when they had a full load of orders, they could barely get off the ground. Sometimes with the heat, the door gunners would get out. And run alongside the helicopter where they started getting a little momentum going. And then they jump back in the helicopter. Just seeing those guys do that. So right after that, we um.

• 2:58:14Speaker 05

  We were called into S3 and they said, "We want to send you TDY to FOB 6, which was down at Honk Tal." And at that time, there were six FOBs that were operating. FOB 1 was Fubai, 2 was Kontum, which was in Tu Khor, and they did targets in both Laos and Cambodia. FOB 3 had been Khe Sanh, which when Khe Sanh was closed, the Marine Corps base was closed in 68 June, they transferred our FOB to Mylok. Excuse me, FOB 4 was Denang, FOB 5 was Bami Tuat, all targets for Cambodia. FOB 6 was Honk Tal, was northwest of Saigon, and they

• 2:58:57Speaker 05

  were all Cambodian targets. They were low on operational teams, so we were sent down to TDY. So just Bob and I and the team went down. And we had been there a day, and the day before Thanksgiving, the OIC Colonel Drake called us in and said, "Look, we got a mission tomorrow, and S3 is going to brief you, but it's Thanksgiving Day, and if you guys pull this mission off, before you go into the target, we'll bring you a Thanksgiving dinner." "Good to go, Colonel." We go in for the briefing, and the mission was to find one or any of the three missing NVA divisions. So this is November, near the end of November,

• 2:59:42Speaker 05

  like this is November 25th, 68. We knew that they were missing, and the concern was because the Tet Offensive in early 68, that the NVA were rounding up for another Tet Offensive in 69. And with 30,000 NVA missing in action, WTF times two. So, we were up late, and during that briefing, we got pictures from really high up about different areas. And the pictures were the first pictures taken by the Blackbirds, the 72s, the S72s.

• 3:00:23Speaker 05

  And they were amazing. So we had all that and they had the latest intel reports. We were there with the Colonel. We got a approximated target area and we were working with the the Green Hornets, the Air Force Special Operations Squadron, and those guys were hot shit. They had the latest Uli, the latest weapons, and those Ulys were more powerful than anything we have seen with the Army. But the rules of engagement were different in Cambodia. No Tac Air, no Covey. Only thing that was up were helicopters. And the only support we had would be helicopter gunships,

• 3:01:04Speaker 05

  which would be 2.75 rockets or miniguns or M60s. And fortunately here, these guys were just hot shit pilots. So we did, uh, went in the morning, we got up first light, we go to the launch site. Here comes a helicopter with Thanksgiving. So we sat down, had Thanksgiving, had our big meal, jumped on the helicopters, launched into the target. And we get in the target, we moved for a while, and we literally walked into an NVA base camp. And later what Sal figured and Fook, they thought that one of the NVAs had just left because there were

• 3:01:46Speaker 05

  still fires burning and one fire like had a pot still hanging over. So one NVA division had just left and another one was coming in. Well, when we were there, we went in, we started taking some pictures and Sal gives me that sound, that hiss of his. And then he goes, "Bukku VC" and his eyes were like saucers. And he points up to the north and off in the woods, this is Cambodia, this is not Laos. Cambodia, the vegetation was different, maybe one canopy. And it was open. You could see for almost 100 yards some places, maybe a little bit longer. And off in the distance, we could see NVA soldiers with pith

• 3:02:29Speaker 05

  helmets with their AKs, running down port arms, looking for us. Shit. Oh, yeah. And somehow, because we didn't make any noise or anything, but they, they turned and started coming towards us. So we began to move back. We got it, we go into our full retreat move, go back, I declare a prior fire emergency.

• 3:02:53Speaker 05

  As we're beginning to move back, Sal goes "Dumeh", and now from the south, we got the same thing coming up. NVA with AK-47s and PITH helmets, running up. They see the other unit and they both all come towards us. So now we open fire, two on, myself and Bubba hitting them with M79s. We begin falling back, we put down claymores to slow them down. At one point, Bubba had a claymore with a five-second fuse on it. We put that in the ground and then moved back. Of course, it's in front of the tree, so the back blast wouldn't get us. And we had that claymore, and we're moving back, rotating each other, going back.

• 3:03:35Speaker 05

  And we finally get close to the LZ, we put down two claymores. As the NVA got really close, Bubba blew off one, and I waited. And then the helicopter landed. In between, right before he landed, we had two gun runs, at least two gun runs with their miniguns. And it just slaughtered them. It just killed them. We don't know how many. No time to count.

• 3:04:01Speaker 05

  The helicopter lands, everybody's loading up. As I see more NVA coming, they're right in front of my claymore. It clicked that MK57 clacker, blows them up. Run back, we get on the helicopter, we're pulling off. It's me and Phuk. So there's a little bit of jungle, and there's a couple of the NVA are running. And we're in an opening area, it had been raining a couple of days before. And a couple of the NVA come out, and they're trying to stop. And you can see the mud from their boots coming up and hitting the propellers. Wow. Oh yeah. And so me and the door gun hit this one guy, Phuk hit the other guy, and they blow back. And we're pulling off. As we're leaving, I get a white phosphorus grenade.

• 3:04:45Speaker 05

  We've been told, no white phosphorus in Cambodia. But this was so close, and I could see those NVA down there, I threw a white phosphorus down at them. And we leave. Helicopters all get shot up. Our helicopter had over a dozen hits, but none of our guys, none of the Air Force guys got hit. And that, those Air Force guys from the Green Horns were hot shit, they just saved our ass that day. We go back to the launch site now with the Air Force guys. And they go, hey, it's Thanksgiving. Come on in and have a Thanksgiving dinner with us. So we gave a quick ver- uh, verbal report on the radio back to headquarters. Went in, sat down with the Air Force, had Thanksgiving dinner.

• 3:05:27Speaker 05

  As we're wrapping up, somebody comes out and says, hey, man, they want you back at Honok Tal ASAP. And I said, okay, so we go back to Honok Tal, talked to the Colonel, talked to S3, gave them all of our reports. Bubba took the team out, gave them overnight passes, took care of that. And, uh, uh, after we're done with the debrief, it was around five or quarter to six or so. Colonel Drake goes, hey, you guys, it's Thanksgiving. Come on down and get a Thanksgiving meal. You have one for breakfast, you can have one for dinner. So we had three Thanksgiving meals in one day.

• 3:06:06Speaker 05

  Unbelievable. So the next day, we, we just cleaned our weapons. We did some weapons, some practice on the range. The next day we had an insert. We wanted to do a trail watch. We want to get a POW really bad. Perfect insertion. We get on the ground. And we go over to, uh, I think it was like Highway 31 in Cambodia. And it's one of these deals where the jungle is like still one canopy, but it's thick. And it's so thick that when you go up, like you push your hand through and it's all clear. There's your road. But anybody on the road can't see you, even if they're like you and I distance, the jungle is so intense. We can't see each other. So these trucks are coming down, taking pictures of the NVA and their trucks.

• 3:06:51Speaker 05

  And just some civilian cars. And there have been, of course, motorcycles and mopeds and stuff like that going by. So in between, Bubba went out and put in an anti-tank device, buried it, put it out there, brought back to depth, because we want to, we're going to blow up a truck with troops in it, capture a live POW and get out because the Air Force was so quick to respond. We knew we could pick it up and be out of there in 20 minutes or less. Get it all set up. We pull back in the clear on my radio, because I'm carrying the ra- I always carry the radio.

• 3:07:28Speaker 05

  RT Idaho, you are to stop the mission, return to base ASAP, per the order of General Creighton Abrams. He replaced Wes Moreland, and he was now the overall commander for all armed service troops in Vietnam. Like WTF? So instead of being a good comic, I say, "I can't hear you." We did it. We pulled back, and we did an extract, no gunfire. They just came in, pulled us up, took us back to base, and we got back to base. It's like WTF? We had the ambush set up, we could have had a POW.

• 3:08:11Speaker 05

  Premier Sienok in Cambodia filed a protest over a white phosphorus grenade that we threw down on the NVA. He wasn't upset about the 100,000 NVA who were in Cambodia, that was cool, but us and our white phosphorus grenade, he was upset about. So Colonel Drake, who was really cool, he says, "Okay." He said, "What happened out there?" I said, "Well, sir, you know, we got pulled out under fire. I put that thing right down that guy's head. I want them to suffer as much as they could." He says, "You forgot about the rules of engagement." I said, "Well, yes, sir, I just bent them a little bit." He said, "Okay, well, what's the official story?" I said, "Sir, I really regret that that hand grenade threw a fall of the helicopter, and

• 3:08:55Speaker 05

  I still don't know how it exploded on contact with the ground. It must have been that fall." He says, "Okay." He said, "Don't do it again." He covered my ass with Creighton Abrams on that. That's how upset they were. They pulled us out of fucking field on that. Just unbelievable. So the next day, we're back, we got inserted, perfect insertion again, and there we did that multiple touchdown.

• 3:09:18Shawn Ryan?

  He pulled you out of the field for a fucking white phosphorus grenade?

• 3:09:22Speaker 05

  Yeah, and a complaint from the premier of Cambodia, Sienok. You talk about political bull fucking shit. Excuse my French, sir. God, we were just, we were furious, because they didn't know we were there. It was the perfect insert. That ambush, we would have gotten the POW award out of there. We had all the handcuffs ready to go, the plastic tie-me-downs and everything. We were psyched. Bubba and I, once again, were planning our R and Rs, you know? Because it was like a dream mission, a perfect insertion. We did the fake fake land. Got right to your south, took us right out to the road, set everything up, put the claymores out for

• 3:10:03Speaker 05

  security. And man, we were ready to roll. And Bubba was just so good with explosives and stuff.

• 3:10:10Speaker 05

  So the next day, we get inserted again. And this time, it was in the afternoon. We had a good insertion. We're set up at night, put up the RON, but it was hinky. It was just hinky being on the ground in Cambodia, because everything's so flat. There's no mountains, and minimal vegetation. South found a couple of places where we could pick for a good RON, put out double claymores. And during the night, I was just hinky all night. We got up in the morning, moved out, and we were going to go back to try to do another POW snatch. And again, Covey came back, or somebody from the 20th came out, gave a combo check, and said, by the way,

• 3:10:55Speaker 05

  go to an LZ, you're being extracted ASAP. And I said, why? He said, we can't say. They pulled us out again. This time, we came back, and Colonel Drake was there. He said, hey, you just lost a helicopter up at FOB1. A King Bee went down with seven Green Berets, and they lost the whole crew. So I've got to send you back to FOB1, because you're low on personnel up there now. Says, our guys are training up, and we'll be able to cover our missions here. We went back in November, I'll never forget it, November 30, 1968, the King Bee, we had a mission that was

• 3:11:35Speaker 05

  called Elders' Sun. And this is part of the psyops, where the ammunition was doctored. So they fired an AK-47 round that had been doctored. It was Elders' Sun, it would explode in their face. And they put the, they used 82mm mortars, and those were doctored. And so when they popped it in the tube, it would explode and just kill everybody, because the shrapnel from the tube, as well as the rocket, would kill any of the NVA right next to it. And it had a psychological impact on the NVA to discourage them from using their ordnance, have to question it.

• 3:12:15Speaker 05

  And so this unit, it was just a throw, it was a strap hanger mission. Somebody up at the base said, hey, um, we want to do an eldest son mission. We need six or seven guys. We got a site, so they gave them extra ordnance and they were going to go through this cache, put in the stuff and leave and just leave it out there for the NVA to pick up and use and blow themselves up. While they were en route, they got hit by anti-aircraft fire. The Ki Bi went down and crashed and they lost everybody. Damn. Horrible. Yeah, November 30th. So we went back north and within a few days, we had another mission, which was just a routine mission.

• 3:12:59Speaker 05

  And then we had some downtime because of weather. And then we came to Christmas Day, uh, 1968 and uh, didn't even realize it was Christmas because we had been so busy planning, working things out. And they had a mission where they wanted us to go in on a mountain top for a trail watch and also look for enemy fuel lines because the NVA were bringing down fuel lines from North Vietnam that were coming down into Laos. And the fuel lines would come down to refuel the trucks as they came down to Ho Chi Minh Trail. But nobody had found any yet. So our mission was to get this hilltop, get inserted, do a general area recon, then

• 3:13:41Speaker 05

  the next day move out to try to find some of those fuel lines. So, um, in November of 68, President Johnson declared a bombing halt in North Vietnam. And all, not all, but a lot of the anti-aircraft weaponry that had been up in North Vietnam began coming south. So on Christmas Day, uh, our target was just into Laos, maybe five or 10 clicks into Laos. And the, we had a king bees, Captain Tuong, the one who pulled me out when I was upside down, uh, he was our pilot that day. And instead of doing the yellow leaf asparrow,

• 3:14:26Speaker 05

  he wanted to just go in low level, go right up and set down. Well, somewhere, he made a mistake. We came in, we went up the mountainside, and halfway up the mountain, there was this little knoll. He touched down on the knoll instead of going all the way up. But we got out. And there was a lot of elephant grass. So he's right there in the elephant grass. He took off. And the elephant grass was thick, again, it's 10 to 12 feet, to the south and to the west, and even to the northwest. It was so steep, we couldn't go anywhere. So Fook led off to the east. He's our point man. And with Bubba May, Lynn Black was there

• 3:15:06Speaker 05

  with us. And then we had, uh, Tuong, Fook, and Heb. And so we're there, moving out. And within a half hour or less, he made, we made contact, light contact with the NVA. We came back, and we're back on that little knoll. And Lynn and I are talking, it's like, well, the northeast is the last place that we can go. And Lynn goes, but there's no activity there. We don't see anything. We've had contact here. And then people started shooting at us from down the hill in the south. And we were throwing hand grenades.

• 3:15:43Speaker 05

  All of a sudden, the elephant grass catches fire down the mountain. And the wind from that mountain area was blowing those flames up the hill. And then the NVA were going around. When they saw that, they were going around and setting fires on the base of that knoll that we're on. So at one point, the elephant grass was burning. We're looking down the hill. You have all these smoke waves, and then the heat waves you see, you could look through, you could see the NVA there lighting stuff further down the mountain. But they weren't shooting at us. They were all lighting up the mountainside. So I declared

• 3:16:22Speaker 05

  a prairie fire emergency. Spider was flying cubby that day. We couldn't go, oh, and Spider comes out, he goes, do not go to the northeast. We had intel report, there's an NVA ambush waiting for RT Idaho there.

• 3:16:38Speaker 05

  I never had an intel report like that. So we didn't go. Now we're fighting the fire. Lynn and Bubba cut S4. Try to blow the, literally try to blow the flames back down the hill. But the mountain and the, and the wind and everything was blowing that stuff up. Thankfully Captain Tuong got there. And he came up above us. He came down the mountain flying sideways. And I looked up and saw Captain Tuong and I recognized him because from that day, mission when I was upside down in other missions and we of course had bought him drinks. He came down and he landed and the prop warms blew back. All the flames. We jumped on that King Bee. When he lifted off, whoosh.

• 3:17:23Speaker 05

  All of the LZ was covered with flames. Wow. And of course we left under fire. So we were fired at the NVA as we pulled out. So that was Christmas. And we barely got out of there that day. And that night I took a shower. And when I'm walking back to my hooch from the shower, because the shower was over to the left, past the officers barracks and our hooches were here. And um. We uh. As I walked back to my room, I hear this little cheap transistor radio playing Silent Night. I go, son of a bitch, it's Christmas. I'm thinking about trashing the mom and daddy, grandmom, you know what they're doing on Christmas Day. And then I thought, you know. This is fucking crazy.

• 3:18:09Speaker 05

  Um, I don't think I'm going to see my birthday. We keep having missions like this. Thanksgiving Day, the upside down, October 4th, Echo 4, Echo 8. This is uh, I don't think I'm going to see my birthday. But we'll just keep pushing on. My birthday was January 19th. But that moment in time, standing there, I just.

• 3:18:31Speaker 05

  Didn't think we'd ever see the light of day until the new year. Cause they were bringing in more NVA and their tactics were getting tougher to more of them.

• 3:18:39Shawn Ryan?

  What did the rest of the team think?

• 3:18:42Speaker 05

  Never talked about it. That was just private.

• 3:18:47Speaker 05

  We closed FOB one in the early January and of course, New Year's Eve, everybody's worried about a big, they had intel reports were going to get hit. So, New Year's Eve, nobody got hit. We played poker, they clubbed, they closed the clubhouse early. And Spider, we had a team on the ground.

• 3:19:05Speaker 05

  And they got inserted on the New Year's Eve day and they weren't happy about it, but they got inserted. Spider went up at midnight, made a commo check with them and said, "Look, guys, be alert." First thing in the morning, that team got hit. All the three Americans were killed. The three indies were left alive. And, uh, the bright light went in later that day and they were able to recover the bodies, bring them back. And, uh, that really struck home because, again, there are some teams that didn't have like, the close relationship that I had with our little people, our South Vietnamese. I talked to Hepp and Sal, so, "Look, this is,

• 3:19:44Speaker 05

  some Americans and even some of the indies are going like, "Why did the Americans die and the Vietnamese didn't die?" "So, if you hear anything, you let me know." Well, we didn't have any problem, but there are some people that were really unhappy about it. And it had an impact in the camp, just the fact that we lost three men from FOB four. And, uh, that was just another example of them changing their tactics and they hit them, hit them hard.

• 3:20:12Speaker 05

  So, within the next couple of weeks, we had to begin to pack up for the move.

• 3:20:17Speaker 05

  They were closing FOB one at Phu Bai. What we didn't know at the time was intel had a report that the, NVA were preparing another attack on FOB one like they had done at FOB four in August the 23rd of 1968. We learned that two years later. We packed up.

• 3:20:37Speaker 05

  And we went down, they flew us down to King Bee, Captain Tin flew us down to F before we moved in down there. And then, uh, Bob and I had one more mission. And, uh, we had a mission that was, I forget what the mission was, but we got on the ground, it was again, it was spotty weather. It's January. We get inserted, we're on the ground, and we moved, it was a little bit more, it was, um, not as high in the mountains. We were closer to the Vietnam border. So the mountains weren't as severe, but there's still hills and things. We moved for a few hours, and then, uh, Bubba had left behind a claymore mine that was rigged.

• 3:21:22Speaker 05

  That claymore went off. So we knew that the trackers were at least there, and they would be trying to track us. So we moved for a while longer. We're getting near the end of the day now. And, uh, we found a little clearing, and I called a tactical emergency. And I got a hold of Covey, and Covey said he'd be there shortly. And while we're waiting, Sal was putting out a claymore mine. And when he was moving back, he opened fire on the NVA coming at us from the north. He opened fire, reloaded, hit him through a hand grenade, and came back. Then they hit us from the other side, which would be the east, and

• 3:22:06Speaker 05

  then later they came at us from the side, from the south side. So they were coming at us, but we were just a little bit of a high ground, where they're coming off of that, climbing up the mountain. And we were like at a little small plateau. And Covey arrives, we get tack air, lickety-split. And we were just really lucky. But we had been in contact. They kept coming at us, first from the south, I mean, from the north, then from the east, and then from the south. And it just, different troops would come, and we had those firefights. It got pretty intense with the south and the east side. So Covey goes, hey, try to blow down a couple of trees so we can get a helicopter in. So in our spare time, in between the firefights, Bubba rigged, um,

• 3:22:52Speaker 05

  Debt charges to chop down the trees. Well, he chopped down two or three trees, but there was enough vegetation around that the trees couldn't fall. Then, once he blew them off the stump, the other trees would catch him. So, no helicopter could land. We had to do strings.

• 3:23:09Speaker 05

  So, now we're back. The helicopter comes back and we tell, he tells us, "You're gonna be extracted on strings. We'll do it in two helicopters." And in my mind, it's beginning to rain. It's near the end of the day. And the helicopter looked so high up when he threw those ropes out. I couldn't believe the ropes even reached us. We were just really lucky. They came down. There were four ropes. And I told the team, "We're gonna all go out of here together." So, he put together three Vietnamese, two Vietnamese together. And then Bubba and I had separate strings, and then the third Vietnamese. And, um, so we had two and two.

• 3:23:53Speaker 05

  However it was, we figured it out. We all put our Swiss seesaw in the middle of the firefight. And then I talked to Bubba. I said, "Hey, you know that claymore mine with the white phosphorus you got taped to it?" I said, "Do me a favor. Put that on the tree here. So, we get extracted. Put a time fuse on it. So, when we get extracted, that'll blow and that'll buy us some time to get out of the jungle." He looked at me like, "WTF? Are you out of your mind?" And I said, "Bubba, do this. I said, "We don't get out of here now." So, he did it. He put it up there, put a time fuse on it. We all hooked up. They were lifting out. I was on the rope that was the longest, the lowest. Bubba goes out and as he's going out, he pulls that fuse and they lifted us straight up.

• 3:24:37Speaker 05

  And, uh, we were just really lucky because we weren't in the super high mountains and it was January, so it's cooler. And I, I rolled the dice, saying, "Take all six of us now." Because it was just, the dark was closing in, darkness. As we went up, that thing exploded. You just see the claymore with the white phosphorus hitting those troops. And for the first time, we could see their faces and stuff from well, from above. As we got pulled out, and then right near the end, they were able to get us completely cleared. They didn't drag us through the trees. There was a hundred and first airborne

• 3:25:17Speaker 05

  guys that did that. And we got pulled out, got back to base. And I yelled to Kobe, as soon as we cleared that tree, I said, hey, we got all six here. Don't bring the second helicopter. And we had done A1 Skyraider gun raids. We had 500 pound bombs that we used. And that's one of those deals where you're on the ground, you usually get elevated from the concussions. You know how it is with the 500 pounders. And it was just really close, just another day in SOG, you know? Jeez. Oh, yeah. A couple of days later, Bubba came up to me and said, you know, this has been a long run. He says, would you mind, they offered me a job up in headquarters.

• 3:26:00Speaker 05

  I said, Bubba, say you've been a fucking stud, man. If you want to go to headquarters, please go. Because I just forever be in your debt. You've just been a complete stud with me on these missions, all we've been through, and we're still alive to talk about it? That's fine, you go. So he went up to headquarters and then Lynn Black came on the team. And Lynn was, he had been one of the 173rd, he had that mission on October 5th that we were briefly mentioned. He was just amazing guy. Did you ever want to leave? No. No. Why not? Because, um, well, two things. I just like, after all that training, we knew that the Green Berets in Vietnam were special. But SOG was special within the special unit.

• 3:26:47Speaker 05

  And it was just a really an honor to be there. You know, you we had all those special little privileges and quirks like if we had to get on a flight to go to Saigon as a courier or something. We had passes that we flipped that pass. If that plane was loaded, there somebody had to come off so we could get on it and fly. So we knew that we were the tip of the spear. It was just an honor to be there to operate under those rules of engagement, even though we couldn't tell anybody about it. You know, you write letters home to mom, eh, the weather was nice. Yeah, you like my Vietnamese team members there, just wonderful guys. We have a good time together. I would have letters from grandmom Striker and mom and mom would always write and dad would write.

• 3:27:28Speaker 05

  And of course, brother and sister have little correspondence, but never anything about what was going on. And, uh, you know, years later, when my first book came out, dad read it. He goes, you know, I could never figure out why that black guy came by and picked up our trash. He said he would come by regularly and pick up the trash. Well, dad got a job at the post office. And the post office was where the FBI was located. And dad saw that guy coming out of the FBI office. He goes, oh, they picked up your trash to see if you said anything or if we said anything to you that would have violated your N A D. Wow.

• 3:28:12Speaker 05

  That's how serious they were about it. That's a real kick in the pants. Those FBI agents were on it. So Lynn was there. Uh, we had a couple of missions, nothing really that extraordinary. And then we planned for a special mission where we were going to go up to Mu Gia Pass. And Mu Gia Pass was up in Laos, above the DMZ River. You had the DMZ River that flew flowed through us, we divided North Vietnam to South Vietnam. And then when it entered Laos, it still continued to flow from the west to the east. And that was divided.

• 3:28:54Speaker 05

  We had targets that would be like MA ten, MA eleven, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen. And those were the areas that we were working really hard to try to find those pipelines. And, um,

• 3:29:08Speaker 05

  We had, and then above that, further north of this pipeline, of the river, was the Mugia Pass, which was where any vehicle traffic from Hanoi coming south had to go through the Mugia Pass. And the Air Force knew it, the NVA knew it, and they had all kinds of anti-aircraft weaponry there. And the plan was for us to go up on a plateau, go in heavily armed with mortars, take in extra guys, extra claymores, and then set up with the Air Force with the weather being clear for the next forty-eight hours,

• 3:29:48Speaker 05

  just to back up that pass and then wipe out any supplies coming down the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Because the intel reports said there weren't many, quote, "many enemy" there. So we were going in heavy, Lim was going to take an M60. We had Captain O'Byrne with us, Michael Byrne, for intel purposes. And we were just wired up. And that's the picture of my second book of being inspected was prior, day prior to that mission when we launched for it. Now, we launched, and when we're in to layoffs, above the DMZ River, they called us off. They said that an aircraft had been shot down, one or two aircraft had been shot down at the Mugia Pass either that night or the day before.

• 3:30:31Speaker 05

  And they said, "They shot down Phantom jets, maybe they might shoot down a slow-moving helicopter." They canceled it. We came back, and then I went home two days later. At the end of my first tour of duty. So at the end of April, went back to the Trang, signed out, went back home, saw Mom and Dad for a few days. I had a little sweetheart down in Georgia, visited her for a couple of days, and then reported to Fort Devens, Massachusetts, up in the 10th Group. And it was there, and that was just god-awful duty. Just hated every second of it.

• 3:31:09Speaker 05

  And a lot of guys like Spider, Pat Watkins, Jeff Johnkins, Tony Harrell, Rick Estes, and there, those guys all went to 10th Special Forces Group, but they're in D Company. And D Company was a full Green Beret company with A Team set up, they're training, they're doing missions. And so it was a real, a real company with Green Berets. I was sent to Signal Company because of my MOS. And it was chicken shit. They had two young lieutenants in there, they ran it like basic training almost. And then we had the fellow platoon sergeants that had been in 10th Group, and all, none of them had been to Vietnam.

• 3:31:53Speaker 05

  And they were proud of the fact that they had not been to Vietnam.

• 3:31:57Shawn Ryan?

  They were proud that they had not been to Vietnam?

• 3:31:59Speaker 05

  That they had gotten out of it. And they were, they were kind of, at one point, they're kind of like, how can you be so stupid to not figure out a way to get out of that? I said, what are you wearing on your head asshole? We had some words. So I was there for five months, just got off of duty. But we had young kids, and we had competitions for signal competitions, you know? So I tell these kids, look, we're going to win this competition just to piss everybody off because they hate me and they hate you guys because we keep winning the contest. So my guys were sharp. You had to go out, set up the net, whoever could set up the net the quickest and make combo back to base the quickest and all this kind of stuff.

• 3:32:42Speaker 05

  Our guys did it. And so at the, at the, we had a couple of incidents at local bars. And I decided, Spider Parks told me that there's a gal in the Pentagon, Billy Alexander. It's a wonderful woman. Her sole job was assigning Green Berets to Southeast Asia, which would include that as well as Okinawa. We had the first Special Forces Group assigned there. So it was like a Wednesday or Thursday, I drove down overnight.

• 3:33:14Speaker 05

  Down to the Pentagon. First light, Pentagon opens on the clock in the morning, I was there with a bottle of wine, whatever her favorite wine was, Spider told me. And we had flowers. Asked for Billy, then back then, it's like the doors were wide open, you walk in. Hey, where's Billy Alexander? Oh yeah, she's down here. So I go down, knock on the door, walk in. Asked for Billy, she was over in the corner desk. Hi Billy, my name's John Meyer. Um, I'm up at 10th Group, I hate it. And I'd really like to go back to CCN. Oh, we could use people like you. You've been there before? Yes. And, uh, so we chatted a little bit. I gave her the flowers and the wine. Went back to my car, took a nap.

• 3:33:58Speaker 05

  Came back about 3 o'clock. Billy says, here's your orders, go back. Um, cause my ETS was up, uh, December 1st. She said, if you really want to go back, I gotta extend your, get, extend your ETS into April. Said, please do it. Said, I don't want to be at Fort Devens another day. Went up to Fort Devens, cleared the next day, cleared the base, cleared the company. Uh, went home to mom and dad, gave them the news I was going back. And, uh, on Monday morning, had a flight back to Fort Lewis. And, um, heading back to Vietnam. And I arrived up at Fort Lewis, Jeffrey Junkins was there. Jeffrey lived in La Jolla. We had served together, left, we'll be one.

• 3:34:41Speaker 05

  He had a couple amazing experiences that we could talk about another day. So Jeff and I flew back to Vietnam together. We land in Cameron Bay, the same culture shock, getting off the plane, just smelling everything about it. But instead of waiting in line and being processed, we had our duffel bags, we had our orders already. And we saw a Jeep that wasn't being used, we requisitioned it. Drove up to Nha Trang. And, um, he had a house up there where he had some friends that he had known from his, he had had four tours of duty previously. So we visited this house and some of the mamasans. And, uh, um, they had these huge beds with mounds of marijuana.

• 3:35:23Speaker 05

  And they had three women on each bed, all rolling joints to sell to the GIs.

• 3:35:29Speaker 05

  Amazing. I wasn't into that. I just, but Jeff was up there. We hung out. We had a nice lunch. We finally reported for duty in Nitrang. Because we had been there before. Um, cleared the base, went right up to CCN. Reported into the Sergeant Major John Hobbs and uh. I asked him if I'd get back on Idaho. He said, yeah, Lynn Black is out there. He could use a one one. I said, yeah, let Lynn be the one zero because he's been on the team for a while. So it's just one of those great moments. I walked from headquarters down to the hooch. Nobody was there. I could hear shooting out in the range. So Idaho was out in the range. Lynn was running through the drill. And as I'm walking out, the shooting stopped. They're coming back.

• 3:36:14Speaker 05

  And that was such a joyous occasion seeing them. Of course, it's like, you know. They did everything, attacked my sexual preferences on down to being dumb and stupid and everything. It was really great to see the boys again. So we celebrated, had a great Vietnamese meal that night with them. Over in the Vietnamese mess hall. And uh, we were back on the team. So Lynn was the one zero for a while. We ran a couple of missions and then uh. I became the one zero and then the Sergeant Major goes, look, you got too much experience here. That Lynn, I want you to go somewhere else. Tilt, just take over Idaho again. So I took over RT Idaho. Went back and uh.

• 3:36:56Speaker 05

  That was, it was an interesting time. Lynn and I put together in our spare time, we worked on a um. On a, on a manual for running recon.

• 3:37:07Speaker 05

  Talks about the SOPs and Lynn was just a phenomenal artist. He drew up. Artwork for LZs, helicopters. Strings, tractions, anything we needed art for, Lynn did it all. Put it together, turned it in, never heard another word about it. But uh, I was there until um. Early part of April and we had a mission where we had a disagreement with our base commanding officer.

• 3:37:33Speaker 05

  And then, uh, um, we had a hellacious party when I left at that time. I was down to trying for two weeks, then my ETS ran out. We're at de guard duty at night. The sergeant major told me, he said, no, you got a choice. You can extend. I'll give you any, I can give you any assignment because of your experience. Or you go home and the re induction, the reductions in force were starting at that time. And I knew that was all bad. It was going through those reductions in force are horrible. And, uh, I said, well, I'll just go home. Went back, April 25th, signed out, went through the out processing. And then you get the physical, doctor looks at your ears and he goes, hey, you know, your ears are bad.

• 3:38:16Speaker 05

  You should have never been in the army. Should have never been here with ears like that. I said, was it a little too late, doc?

• 3:38:27Speaker 05

  Did you ever get shot over there? Uh, no, no, I had shrapnel. Um, and again, talk about just the luck of the draw. We had shrapnel a couple of times. One time a piece of shrapnel came up. I had a, a weak, little skimpy blonde mustache. Hit me right here and knocked my head back and stuck in. But I ran out of energy. The worst injury I ever had was from shrapnel. Uh, when Chow didn't throw the hand grenade, we were doing a, uh, we were practicing on base. And Chow threw the hand grenade and it went off and it's just like, ah.

• 3:39:07Speaker 05

  And so the shrapnel went through, I, I was wearing, uh, jungle fatigues with buttons on them. And the shrapnel went through the button and it went into my groin. And, uh, bled like a pig. And our medics were busy with some kind of training. So they packed me up and took me down to the army hospital down there. And the army doctor went in with the sutures. And they're digging around with it. I said, wait a minute, I get no antithet, no anthus, no anesthesia or anything, no anesthesia? He goes, oh, I'm sorry. I thought they gave it to you. Well, he gave it to me again. He was in there digging around and couldn't find it. He said, look, that piece of shrapnel will let you know when it wants to come out.

• 3:39:50Speaker 05

  Passed me up and the second he left, man, I cleaned up. I stole a pair of fatigues. And I was wearing another pair of jungle boots or something. Could they, what I was wearing were all bloodied up. So all my bloody clothes were left. I jumped in them and walked out of the hospital. Found the telephone, called base. They came and picked me up. I'd rather be in the hands of Green Beret medics than those doctors that would dig around. Now, talking about that piece of shrapnel. This past Wednesday. I was in for an MRI because my urologist wanted me to go into, get an MRI because my PSA numbers are up a little bit.

• 3:40:31Speaker 05

  I've always had high PSA numbers, but she was concerned. So I go in for the MRI. And I told the guy before he put me in the tube, I said, you know, be advised, I have shrapnel in my groin. Okay, let's take a picture. I go in there, we go, wow, that puts stuff going. It goes in, it thing is gone and it stops suddenly. He pulled me out and he said, that shrapnel is so big. That we can't get a clear picture of your prostate or anything else. It had a big, black blob. Damn. On their photo. So that little piece of shrapnel came back, but now 55 years later. Damn. Yeah. What was it like coming home for you?

• 3:41:15Speaker 05

  Each time for me, it was good. I mean, I didn't have what a lot of other vets had. I wore the uniform. People knew the special forces guys. So I don't think a lot of SF guys were messed around with. And I was proud of the uniform and each time when I came home, I had, mom and dad were there and family. I had my old church and the guys that I grew up with. We played softball. We had a bowling team, put together a bowling team with the young guys. And the transition for me was relatively, compared to what other guys went through.

• 3:41:53Speaker 05

  You know, I had flunked out of college. That's why I went in the army. So I knew I had to get, I wanted to get my degree. Um, cause mom had a degree or certificate for her days at, when she was a young girl. And I really wanted to get a degree. And I went back to school. Had been phys ed, but they came up with a political science major. I loved it. So I became a political science major and a minor in English for writing. And, uh, at that time, the GI Bill was $200 a month. Whether you went to Harvard University or Trenton State College, as I did. $200 a month was your GI Bill. And, uh, so I went back to Trenton State. My dad got me a job driving school buses.

• 3:42:36Speaker 05

  And, uh, during that time, got involved in the school newspaper there. And, uh, drove school buses just for the chump change. And, uh, ran my GI Bill right down to the, so I used all 36 months of it.

• 3:42:52Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like in school for you? With a bunch of kids that had never been to war?

• 3:42:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, it was really different. But in some ways, um, the majority of the, of the kids, there's never, never much of an issue. They, they, we had other veterans on campus. And I wore my fatigue jacket for several years. I, and my footwear was my jungle boots, my original pair of jungle boots. I wore them for years on, on, on campus.

• 3:43:18Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like not being able to talk about what you did?

• 3:43:21Speaker 05

  Um, that's de rigueur. That's what you're supposed to do. So, and anybody who really was, was trying to ask questions about, say, well, no, we were special forces. We did a lot of hard work, dangerous stuff. And I talk about my little people right away. So we worked with the South Vietnamese. So my story about Vietnam is different than a lot of regular Vietnam vets who went there. I mean, they would go there without any culture indoctrination at all or appreciation of their history.

• 3:43:53Shawn Ryan?

  When your dad read your first book.

• 3:43:58Shawn Ryan?

  And read it. What was that conversation like?

• 3:44:02Speaker 05

  It was pretty quick.

• 3:44:03Shawn Ryan?

  It was quick?

• 3:44:04Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, because um. He read it. And you know, at that point in time. Um. I was living in California. Mom and dad had moved from Trenton to Colorado where my brother and sister were living. And Dave had three kids there, so they had they're close to those grandkids. And um.

• 3:44:27Speaker 05

  They loved Denver area. So they were there. And we talked on the phone. But it was about that garbage man, the first and foremost. Said, you guys did some crazy stuff.

• 3:44:40Speaker 05

  But never, never too much beyond that. And he was always like respectful and distant, always very supportive. Never ever any doubt or anything from dad or mom for that matter. Now, when I went back to Vietnam a second time. Mom cried. Uh, that wasn't easy, but I had to do the right thing for me. Explain to her why I had to do it. And of course, why I didn't tell about the MPs coming in the base on Monday. The day after I left. And they were, they wanted to talk to me about a couple of bar fights. There had been some property destruction, allegedly.

• 3:45:14Shawn Ryan?

  Allegedly.

• 3:45:15Speaker 05

  But at this point, I'm taking the fifth.

• 3:45:18Shawn Ryan?

  You could talk about Sog, but you can't talk about the bar fights.

• 3:45:21Speaker 05

  Well, it was Spider Parks and the guys, you know? Tony Harrell, I mean, Tony, he was like a bruiser.

• 3:45:28Shawn Ryan?

  Let's hear what?

• 3:45:31Speaker 05

  Well. We were in this bar. And um. There's some other army personnel there. There's words between a regular army guy, a leg. And one of our guys, and so. There's words that one guy throws a punch and Tony is there supporting our guy. And um. There's a couple of fights, so whenever there's a fight, I would always be rear security. So their guys are doing the fighting, I'm making sure nobody hits them from the back. Because I'm not a really good fighter. I never was good with my hands other than playing the piano, you know? And. Somebody, and to this day, I don't know who, but somebody I had picked up. One of those chairs. And threw it at the six foot mirror.

• 3:46:14Speaker 05

  And the beer bottle, not beer, but all the liquor bottles and the mirror shattered. So somebody thought that may have been me, but I, I don't know.

• 3:46:24Speaker 05

  Back then I drank a little bit more than I do now. In fact, I don't drink now.

• 3:46:30Speaker 05

  So anyway, that may have been the incident. And while I was there, you know, we had a, I got a job pumping gas on the weekends. And just to make extra money. I had a really nice four, four, two, W thirty. It was a nineteen sixty nine. That car was slick. And so we had that for a few months and then the insurance got too costly. And I blew up the engine on the, on the New Jersey turnpike at a hundred and thirty miles an hour. Going home, but the warranty covered it. The car dealer was really kind. And then we got it rebuilt and.

• 3:47:05Shawn Ryan?

  What about the aftermath, John? I mean, all the killing,

• 3:47:10Shawn Ryan?

  all the adrenaline, everything you did.

• 3:47:13Speaker 05

  Well, that adrenaline thing was always something that you clearly missed. I mean, it's, you know, you, you and everybody you ever talked to have been through that. In my case,

• 3:47:26Speaker 05

  I tried to stay physical. I went back to school. I was on, I played soccer, the JV soccer team. I wasn't that good, but I knew the coach. And the coach let me come out and play because I was a veteran. And I'd get a little game time at the end of the game when either we had lost or won a game. But as part of the, just being physical with it all, you know? And my new mission was I had to get back and I wanted to get that degree. So I really focused on that.

• 3:47:54Speaker 05

  Had a few interesting girlfriends along the way. And then got involved in the school newspaper. It was the Signal. And there was an ad in the paper for a sports writer. So I did some sports and then did some features like book reviews, movie reviews. Of course, record review, Led Zeppelin. You know Emerson Lincoln Palmer, all this great music that was coming out then. I mean, Good Times, Bad Times, King Crimson. So I did all that, but I started doing opinion columns. I was the only voice on the paper that was, when we invaded Cambodia, I talked about, say, this is cool.

• 3:48:37Speaker 05

  It's a good deal. We should have done it a long time ago. People flipped out. But, in fact, one time, after one of my columns, I get a phone call from this kid. He's crying. Says, "You gotta stop writing that shit." I said, "Why?" He says, "Well, my name is John Meyer, and my mother thinks it's me writing that shit that you're writing."

• 3:49:02Speaker 05

  So from that point, I made my byline, "Dinissel J. Stryker Meyer." And that was my byline for the next thirty years. And I did that, and then we got involved in news. And the spare time was doing photography. I just loved shooting. And they had a little cheap Yashica camera, that was a signal camera, so that was mine. And I used it, and we finally got a photo lens. So I did photography, and spent a lot of time in the darkroom, wrote stories, and then became editor. And our editorships ran from January to December. So that when the new school year started, the editorial board would be strong. And we could recruit new people into the newspaper from there.

• 3:49:47Speaker 05

  So I was at it for two years, day and night. Worked every day on that paper for two years. And then at the end of it, got hired by the Trenton Times in Trenton, New Jersey. And I hadn't had a vacation in over like two and a half, three years. So I drove out to Colorado to see my sister for a couple of days, spent a couple of days with her. And then on the way home, saw Tony Harrell and a couple of friends that I served with. And then went to work at the Trenton Times, reported in there, January, middle of January of nineteen seventy-five. Worked there for ten years as a reporter. And then it was owned by the Washington Post.

• 3:50:31Speaker 05

  So this is in the glory days, nineteen seventy-five. We had Catherine Graham came to our Trenton Times newsroom at least three different times. Twice to the auditorium with Woodward and Bernstein, who were like journalistic gods.

• 3:50:46Speaker 05

  They were all there talking about Watergate, about our newspaper, because it was a proud property of the Washington Post. And I started out as a reporter just covering local governments. I was a good reporter, but my writing was weak. And after my first seven months, the editor, who was a World War II vet, who hired me, said, "The other editors here want you to work on your writing. I'm gonna hire you, I'm gonna fire you as a full-time staff writer, but I want to hire you back as a stringer." Said, "So, we'll pay you for any article, and you're shooting pictures, any pictures you shoot." So, I did both.

• 3:51:30Speaker 05

  I made more money as a stringer than I did as a staff writer. And I still covered my old beats. And then, after, I don't know, eight or nine months, he hired me back. I came back as a full-time reporter and did a little bit more municipal beats than I covered the courts. And I covered the courts for seven years, did investigative reporting along the way in my spare time. Because the courts, you always had recess in the summer, they're taking vacations whenever they had an excuse. And so, between covering the courts, we had an opportunity, twice, we made new law in New Jersey for First Amendment rights for reporters in New Jersey on court cases that I covered.

• 3:52:15Speaker 05

  And we took the cases all the way to the Supreme Court. Wow. And worked with the New York Times attorney Floyd Abrams on it. And 1981, the Washington Post sold the Trenton Times to a company that was just, they came in, the management was there on Friday, they said, "We're here, there's not gonna be any cuts or anything." And that was Friday. On Monday, when everybody came to work, there were 60 less people there. We had a staff of 120 on Friday, on Monday, there were 60. And they laid that many people off, I was one of the ones that remained on, because the courthouse beat, my investigative reporting and stuff. And...

• 3:52:58Speaker 05

  Then in eighty-two, one of my editors had moved to San Diego, and he offered me a job. I came out and interviewed for it. But for some reason, it just didn't work out. And my first wife was pregnant. And so we had our first child in Trenton. And I worked at the Trenton Times for two more years. And then, uh, in February nineteen eighty-five, we moved to San Diego. Lived in North San Diego County. Worked at the San Diego Union there for, um, eight years. Did a year as a freelance writer, working, I mean, a general assignment reporter. Working, it could be nights covering the Clintons when they're coming to town for NAFTA. Or dead bodies floating in the Tijuana River.

• 3:53:43Speaker 05

  Things like that. And of course, in nineteen eighty-five, Kiki Camarena, DEA agent, was killed after he was tortured by the Mexicans. And, uh, the FBI had tapes of the torture. And we learned about who was there. There was state attorneys, uh, cops, federally's, state police. All these top people were there. They're trying to get Kiki Camarena to tell them who his sources were. Because their DEA was hurting Mexican drug trafficking. And they knew that Kiki Camarena was the boy man on that mission. Wow. Just horrible. So we did a bunch of stories.

• 3:54:26Speaker 05

  And at least two of the stories, particularly, we did a story, myself and another investigative reporter, John Stanifer. We were there and we filed a report. We had to meet with our lawyers in the morning. Talk to the editors, tell them what we're doing. And then, um, the Mexican government filed formal complaints against our newspaper and us particularly. And they went right to Ed Meese, who was the Attorney General then.

• 3:54:55Speaker 05

  They did nothing about because the stories were accurate.

• 3:54:57Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:54:58Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:55:00Shawn Ryan?

  Did you deal with any type of depression or any anything after Vietnam?

• 3:55:05Speaker 05

  No, I mean, some nights you just go, you that adrenaline kick and the guys and being a Green Beret in a secret war at the top of our game, I miss being a part of that. But also, thanks to the NVA, I also knew that the life expectancy wasn't wasn't that good. We had high casualty rate, one of the highest casualty rates in the Vietnam War.

• 3:55:30Speaker 05

  We've recently had more accurate numbers on that, so but just from sheer experience, just from my introduction to Spike Team Idaho. You know, the team gets wiped out, there's an opening now, and that happened several times. We had by the time that happened, we had had two other teams wiped out in SOG. We had plus, we had Villa Rosa and his team, everybody was killed except for the American, and that American was sent back to bring back the message of what they would do to our SOG guys in in Laos.

• 3:56:04Shawn Ryan?

  Did you ever go back to Vietnam?

• 3:56:06Speaker 05

  Never.

• 3:56:07Shawn Ryan?

  Why do you think so many Vietnam vets moved back to

• 3:56:13Shawn Ryan?

  the area Cambodia, Laos?

• 3:56:17Speaker 05

  Oh, the people, you know, when again, once, once you deal with the people who live there, not the politicians, not the fucking communists, and certainly not any of the law enforcement that's there because that's corrupt also, basically. But it's the people. Any American that goes back to Vietnam today is always greeted warmly 99.99% of the time. Because the people realize the difference between being under communism and being free. And they appreciate what we had done, the sacrifice, they know the sacrifice.

• 3:56:53Shawn Ryan?

  What did you think about the pullout?

• 3:56:56Speaker 05

  Oh, it sucked.

• 3:56:57Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, it seemed very similar to what we just experienced in Afghanistan.

• 3:57:01Speaker 05

  Yep, and again, politicians are involved, the two key reasons for the pullouts in our case.

• 3:57:08Speaker 05

  Uh, we had the Easter Offensive in nineteen seventy-two. And they, the NVA had planned that so that they would hit all of our major cities as they did in sixty-eight, and they would crush and just take over Vietnam by force. Well, they didn't. And there's also a secret SOG story here that's never been told before. That's one of the reasons why they didn't. And if we want, we could talk a little bit about that. But in nineteen seventy-two, they were held and they didn't break. And from that point on, we, we've removed more people and we had no combat troops left by seventy-three. And even SOG was shut down in seventy-two.

• 3:57:52Speaker 05

  The eight-year secret war came to an official end. And the promise was the Vietnamese would fight it and that we would continue aid to support them with Tac Air and support their air force, because their air force and helicopter pilots were phenomenal. And they had some very good units. But Congress withheld the funding and Ford begged them to keep the money going. And they cut off all funding. And without the Tac Air and that support, you know, everybody will say, maybe they would have fallen eventually. Well, maybe they would have, but the way we did it sucked.

• 3:58:27Speaker 05

  And, uh, in my case, I'm in the newsroom and we had seen this happened, where it's breaking down. And then April thirtieth, they came across the AP clacking across. They tore off and they announced it in the newsroom. I went back to the men's room and just sat there for an hour or so, just crying. Tore up, thinking about Sal, Hep and the boys and the guys, they're all there. Um, and from it all, Hep was the only one that got out. On that day, Hep's father had arranged for him to get a pass at the Tonsil of the Airbase. There was a C-130 pulling out. When Hep got there with his wife and his, I think it was his son. And the C-130 had the tailgate halfway up.

• 3:59:12Speaker 05

  Hep gets behind it. He throws his child in there. Somebody catches the child. He helped his wife get up, then he fell down.

• 3:59:21Speaker 05

  He jumps up and now the C-130 is moving down the runway. He runs alongside that helicopter. I mean, the C-130. An arm reached out and grabbed him and pulled him into it.

• 3:59:34Speaker 05

  He came back, came back to the States, took a while to get through it all with a sponsor and everything. He ended up in Houston. And the History Channel did a piece in 2000 called "The Suicide Missions." And that was one of the first productions that aired about SOG. And they did a good job with it. And in it, I had that picture that I have in the front page of Across the Fence of HEP. And the guy from the History Channel calls up and said, "Hey, there's a guy here who says his uncle's on, his uncle's in that picture you showed." Well, I almost shit a brick. This is 2000.

• 4:00:17Speaker 05

  You know, like 25 years after leaving Vietnam. So he gives me the phone number, I call him up, it was HEP's nephew, living in Carlsbad, nine miles away. So I called this young man up, said, "Hey, this is me, I know you, I know your uncle, connected with HEP." We had phone calls, and then his nephew told me, "HEP's gonna be out, out to Orange County for a wedding in a couple of months." I said, "Well, tell me." So he gave me the flight number and everything. So the night that HEP flew into Orange County, I was at the airport, he came in on a late flight, nine, nine thirty or something. And I'm there, HEP gets off the airport, he goes, "My, you're still buku dingy da, you're too tall, and your feet too big."

• 4:01:02Shawn Ryan?

  (laughing)

• 4:01:04Speaker 05

  "No hello, I missed you." No, it's like, right away, he's just the typical smartass, you know?

• 4:01:09Shawn Ryan?

  Busted your balls.

• 4:01:10Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, wonderful guy. I mean, he was a great interpreter. I mean, like I said, he spoke four or five languages. He corrected my English. That's how good he was. And of course, he always wore sunglasses. But him and Sal, we rebuilt the team around them. And live today, thanks to the team and their courage, the King Bee pilots, aviators that supported us, fast movers, A1 Sky Raiders, you know, even Spectre, I mean, Hector's one mission, we went through four Spectres in one night. Killed thousands. But we could, did have time to count the bodies. Oh, yeah. So, I was very fortunate, and again, it's like, I just felt that there was divine intervention

• 4:01:55Speaker 05

  there many times, they helped me get back here.

• 4:01:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, I would say definitely so.

• 4:01:59Speaker 05

  Oh, absolutely.

• 4:02:02Speaker 05

  For sure.

• 4:02:03Shawn Ryan?

  Well, John, I just want to say it was an honor to interview you and have you sitting across from me and I'm so glad we did this and welcome home.

• 4:02:13Speaker 05

  Glad to be home and glad to be here, sitting in the same chair that Sarah sat in and all those other great interviews you've had along the way there. My God, legend. We just go down the list, man. These shows are phenomenal.

• 4:02:27Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 4:02:27Speaker 05

  So my wife and I are big fans. We'll continue to be so, sir.

• 4:02:30Shawn Ryan?

  Thank you.

• 4:02:31Speaker 05

  Yes, sir.

• 4:02:32Shawn Ryan?

  Brother. Cheers.

• 4:02:33Speaker 05

  Till next time.