#227 Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

Henry L. (Dick) Thompson, Ph. D., is a retired U. S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and legendary MACV-SOG operator known by the codename "Dynamite." Serving as a recon team leader from 1968 to 1970, he led over 20 high-risk black operations deep into enemy territory in Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam during the Vietnam War's secret campaigns, earning a reputation for bravery in brutal firefights and hand-to-hand combat. After 21 years of military service, including roles in Special Forces, Airborne, and Ranger units, Thompson founded High Performing Systems, Inc. in 1984, where he serves as President and CEO, providing leadership solutions, training, and assessments for corporate, military, law enforcement, and firefighters in high-stress decision-making. A psychologist, Mensa member, and Ironman triathlete, he authored, among other books, the bestselling "SOG Codename Dynamite" series, including "A MACV-SOG 1-0's Personal Journal" (2023), sharing firsthand accounts of combat psychology and spiritual warfare. Thompson advocates for mental resilience, veteran support, and applying combat lessons to everyday leadership. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://betterhelp.com/srs This episode is sponsored. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/srs and get on your way to being your best self. https://bruntworkwear.com – USE CODE SRS https://bubsnaturals.com – USE CODE SHAWN https://bunkr.life – USE CODE SRS Go to https://bunkr.life/SRS and use code “SRS” to get your 25% off your family plan https://shawnlikesgold.com https://helixsleep.com/srs https://moinkbox.com/srs https://mypatriotsupply.com/srs https://patriotmobile.com/srs https://rocketmoney.com/srs https://shopify.com/srs https://simplisafe.com/srs Henry Dick Thompson Links: Website - http://www.hpsys.com IG - https://www.instagram.com/hps_ceo X - https://x.com/HPSys SOG Codename Dynamite: A MACV-SOG 1-0's Personal Journal - https://www.amazon.com/SOG-Codename-Dynamite-MACV-SOG-Personal/dp/B0C9SB8JGP 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

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

• 0:03Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 0:04Speaker 00

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

• 0:09Speaker 01

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

• 0:16Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped moving? You stall, you freeze in there, that's what.

• 0:20Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 0:25Speaker 01

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

• 0:30Speaker 03

  There is so much NFL on ESPN right now. Monday Night Football, plus pregame and postgame. NFL Live, NFL Primetime. Everything you need to stay on top of every game, every week. Unbelievable. And now, NFL Network is on the ESPN app. More football, more coverage, more ways to watch. Football's on, all season long, on ESPN and streaming on the ESPN app.

• 1:05Shawn Ryan?

  Dynamite Dick Thompson, welcome to the show. Thank you. Honored to be here. And I really appreciate the opportunity to sit in this chair.

• 1:17Shawn Ryan?

  And in this room, particularly as you're getting ready to transition to the new one. So, honored to be here, honored to be a Sog guy on your show. So, honored to sit across from you, and I, I truly mean that. Came highly recommended from our mutual friend, John Strike Meyer. And he's told us a lot about you, and, and, you know, I just, this is the last interview in the studio, and I wanted the perfect guest to, to shut the lights off with. And it is a real honor to be sitting here with you, so thank you for making the time to be here.

• 1:59Shawn Ryan?

  And, and, and I'm really honored to document your story and your history. And it's gonna be good. It's gonna be a powerful interview. You ready? Ready. Looking forward to it. Me too, me too. So every guest starts out with an introduction here. Dynamite Dick Thompson. Last interview in the studio. 21-year retired Army Lieutenant Colonel Green Beret Ranger and MACV SOG operator who ran over 20 cross-border recon direct impact missions into Laos, Cambodia, and North Vietnam. Awards include four Bronze Star medals, two with V for Valor, two Air Medals for Aerial

• 2:42Shawn Ryan?

  Combat, one with V for Valor, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Gold Star for Valor. Natural-born tracker, raised on your grandparents' farm, you could smell the NVA in the jungle. Distinguished member of the Airborne Ranger Training Brigade. Served as a professor of military science at the University of Georgia. Author of SOG Code Name Dynamite, a two-book series about top-secret missions that were once classified for 20 years. A PhD in psychology, founder of High Performing Systems, and author of The Stress Effect: Teaching Leaders How to Make Decisions Under Pressure. Among your hobbies, you are a master scuba diver.

• 3:24Shawn Ryan?

  You've made over 1,200 free-fall HALO parachute jumps, earned a black belt in karate, and you're an Iron Man. You're a husband, a father, a grandfather, and most importantly, a Christian.

• 3:38Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 3:40Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure I'm missing something, but, but, um, yeah, like I said, it is an honor to be here with you, and so I just want to do a life story with you, document everything you've been through, and, um, and hopefully bring a lot of hope to veterans that are coming home from war and that are, they're trying to find their new way in life. So, once again, it's an honor.

• 4:07Speaker 05

  Thank you. And, um, one of the things that we started doing in our company back in the 90s was...

• 4:17Speaker 05

  We traveled all the time, always going through an airport. So I implemented a policy that said, if you see someone in uniform, or you can tell they're a veteran, standing in the Starbucks line, pay for their coffee, thank them for their service. And then, so everybody had a special credit card, a company card, you know, to pay for that one. And then, a little bit later, we bumped it up some more. And what we started doing is also giving them challenge corn.

• 4:57Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 5:01Speaker 05

  Thank you. That basically says, thank you for your service. We care about you, welcome home. And, you know, we give that out. I've been doing that now for a long time. It's not the big fancy one, like, you know, the corn John gave you, but it's one that we could share with a lot of veterans who had never, never been welcomed home. So, you know, I'm a little biased along that line because, you know, when I came home, people literally spit at me coming through the airport.

• 5:43Speaker 05

  And, you know, I also talked later on that my, my biggest challenge in the beginning, coming home from Vietnam, was restraint. Coming through the airport and listening to somebody yell, baby killer, murderer, or whatever, but noticing that, you know, they were not close like you and I are now. They were back at what they considered a safe distance. And I used to think, they have no clue.

• 6:22Speaker 05

  I can close the distance between us and less than a second. Cause I'm not carrying ninety pounds of gear. You know, and I could be real ugly to you when I got there. So I have to restrain myself, know that I could do that, but I don't have to do that. And just a lot of things, just based on coming from the wild west, back to a country that has some laws and is civilized. You know, I've got to come back to this world. And one of the things that I, I try to work with veterans on is understanding the skillset you have. And how to use it.

• 7:07Speaker 05

  Cause most veterans think, well, you've taught me all this war stuff and tactics and that. I don't, you know, I can't use that stuff back in the civilian world. Yes, you can. You know how to plan, make decisions, organize. I mean, you have a whole skillset that can help you be successful. And you gotta apply some of the SOG techniques that we'll probably talk about in a little bit. Um, to keep moving forward and, and you can be successful. So, anyway, sorry.

• 7:39Shawn Ryan?

  I love that. I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody starts off with a gift.

• 7:50Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 7:51Shawn Ryan?

  Vigilance Elite gummy bears made here, made right here in the USA. It's just candy. There's no marijuana in it. No CBD. It's just candy. So they're legal in all fifty states.

• 8:04Speaker 05

  John Meyer said, "There might be something in here."

• 8:10Speaker 05

  He said he, he noticed some kind of, of charge after he ate something.

• 8:15Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 8:16Speaker 05

  I'll, I'll put it right there and if I start to run down after a while, I'll consume a couple of. Well, thank you. I really appreciate that.

• 8:24Shawn Ryan?

  Hey, my pleasure. My pleasure. And then.

• 8:28Shawn Ryan?

  One more thing before we get going. So I have a Patreon account and that's a subscription account. And we've turned that into quite a community. I think we're at 85,000 patrons now and they're the reason that I get to be here and that I have this amazing team that I'm surrounded by. And so one of the things that we do is we offer the Patreon community the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question. So this is a question from somebody you might know. John Stryker Meyer. Please explain how you carried seven Claymores, Buku Car 15 rounds, hand grenades, and M79

• 9:12Shawn Ryan?

  rounds. I believe you carried it on most missions. Oh, and I forgot your pistol. How did you carry all that?

• 9:23Speaker 05

  After the first mission that I went on where I carried the normal loadout, I used up so much ammunition in the ambush that we went into, this is not going to work. So once I became the team leader, then instead of carrying five frag grenades per person, per team member, I upped it to 10. So what that did was, and I usually went out with six or seven people. So if I had

• 9:59Speaker 05

  seven men on the team, carrying 10 frag grenades apiece, that's 70. With 70 frag grenades, you can do some serious damage. So I also upped the Claymore to three per person. Some people, like the M79 man usually didn't carry a Claymore because he was carrying so many grenades with him. But everybody went to three. Seven man team, 21 Claymores.

• 10:35Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 10:36Speaker 05

  And then I also started at night on the most likely avenue of approach coming into our remain overnight position, I would put out seven Claymores, daisy chained.

• 10:53Speaker 05

  One click, seven claymores go on. Ten and a half pounds of C4, forty-nine hundred steel balls traveling at four thousand feet a second. The blast, the steel balls would just shred whatever was out there. And if you were far enough back or happened to be behind a tree and survived, you would say, "This guy's crazy." Nobody sets off all of their claymores at one time. So now the survivors, we can go down and get them. And they start to come.

• 11:35Speaker 05

  That's when they run into three more daisy chain, and that goes off. So you catch them by surprise with that. Wow. And then they start running into claymores on time fuses that are randomly going off as they're trying to come. And, you know, so in their dossier that they put together on me, it was, "This guy's a nut. Don't go charging after his team because he's gonna run into all those claymores." And at night, you want those Areti type weapons like the claymores and those frag grenades. You could start chucking frag grenades at them. They don't know where they come from. Yeah. And they're just going off everywhere.

• 12:20Speaker 05

  Man. And then, I like, well, let me say, if you shoot at me, I'm gonna shoot back. I really don't like people shooting at me, so I will shoot back. So I found I needed to carry more ammunition. And most guys were carrying, you know, eight hundred rounds or so, or maybe seven hundred, some six hundred. I went to a thousand. I carried fifty twenty-round magazines. Fifty twenty-round mag. And in my twenty-round magazines, I put twenty rounds.

• 13:00Speaker 05

  Because I used brand new magazines every mission. I would draw new magazines, so everybody had new magazines. So they'd only been loaded for three or four days. So the springs were fine, they were working good. Um, so I, I never in a firefight had my CAR-15 jam. Not, not from the number of rounds in the magazine. But, you know, so my people had a lot of them. I didn't force them to put 20 if, if the 18 rule had been ingrained in them. But I encouraged them to put in 20.

• 13:42Speaker 05

  Because when you run against, up against the NVA, you've got ears setting there with a 20-round magazine for initial contact. The NVA, NVA's got a 30-round magazine. They've already got 10 more rounds than you do. You run out first and then the firepower shifts totally over to them now. Yeah. So until we finally got the 30-round magazines, we were at disadvantage every time as soon as we started. So you needed to be able to load faster and, you know, shoot longer. Man, I never thought about that 20-round magazine versus 30-round magazine. It's a big difference. Yeah, yeah.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  How long did it take them to get you guys 30-round magazines? We didn't get, you know, I got there in 68. We didn't get the 30 rounds until, um, 69. And, and when we first got them, it's, they couldn't get many. So I could go draw one 30-round magazine, um, per CAR-15. Oh, man. So we all have one, you know, and our weapon to start with.

• 14:55Speaker 05

  That was after they made a tweak. I discovered early on, as did a lot of other people, that if you have that thirty round magazine in your car fifteen and you you jump off the skid of the helicopter, when you hit the ground, your gun got lighter all of a sudden because the magazine's laying down in the mud. Because the the spring on the magazine retainer wasn't strong enough to hold that extra weight. Wow. So the shock of hitting the ground, the magazines fall out. So we had to take the weapons back in, have the spring changed, to a stronger one.

• 15:39Speaker 05

  So the magazine was staying there. Jeez. But at least you had you had a thirty round magazine to start with. But, you know, I guess I guess my team's just had problems, discipline problems, maybe. It seemed that we'd lost our thirty round magazines almost every time we were in contact. And I'd have to go back to, you know, S4 and draw some more thirty round magazines to replace the ones we lost. Wow. And what, you know, but then that, somebody noticed one day, how you guys getting so many thirty round magazines? You're only supposed to have one per gun. Your guys are all carrying more. Well, I guess they found some of the ones they lost.

• 16:27Speaker 05

  What kind of pistol were you carrying? I tried different ones. I carried a, you know, nineteen eleven forty-five caliber pistol. It was heavy, only held seven rounds. But man, if you hit somebody with that, it would put them down. I mean, it hits hard. But then I I changed to a Browning High Power nine millimeter. Because now I'd, you know, double the amount of ammunition, number of shots in there. So I I played with those a little bit. And then I started carrying

• 17:12Speaker 05

  a high standard twenty-two caliber long rifle with an integrated silencer.

• 17:22Speaker 05

  Because that thing was so quiet.

• 17:25Shawn Ryan?

  Little hush puppy, huh?

• 17:26Speaker 05

  Yes. You know, you gotta be careful where you shoot them. You know, 22, if it's a vest or something, it's not gonna penetrate. So I tried to go for softer spots like the temple. And I did a lot of practice and trying to get a guy, and particularly a tracker. If you were tracking me, then I would tell those teams, you guys keep going, I'm gonna drop back. Somebody's behind us, I'm gonna drop back here and have a little chat. So I could go back and take out a tracker. I could take out a dog. I could do things without, you know, a big disturbance.

• 18:06Speaker 05

  And particularly at night, there were times when we had people walk inside our little perimeter. I mean, we were all within arms' reach of each other, in a little circle. And sometimes you'd have somebody walk right through the middle of it. So you couldn't open up with a CAR-15 because it just lighted the whole area. But with that 22, I could tap you, particularly if I set off a claymore, made a little noise, shot you at the same time, nobody'd ever know I took you out.

• 18:40Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. You had people inside the perimeter when you guys were at arms-length distance, and you're only six to nine people? How many times did that happen?

• 18:50Speaker 05

  Several. And we can talk maybe in a little bit about where I had a longer experience of someone inside. That's pretty cool.

• 19:04Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about it now.

• 19:07Speaker 05

  We were, I had a 22-man team. We had put two of our recon teams together because we were going after a group of NVA that had a group of American prisoners that they were trying to take through Malaus into North Vietnam, and we were trying to stop them. And we had stopped for an RON, we had 22 people, so it was a circle. Almost as big as this room in here. And they were already arms length apart. I was in the, in the center with my assistant team leader.

• 19:52Speaker 05

  And it was about twenty-one, thirty. It was dark, you couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And I was really tired. My eyes were starting to roll back in my head. I was leaning against a tree. And I heard a twig break. And I opened my eyes and I was thinking to myself, that sounded like a twig break inside the perimeter. And then I heard another one. And I realized someone was inside our perimeter and was coming directly toward me.

• 20:32Speaker 05

  I'm laying back, I have Car Fifteen laying across my lap. And I can hear this person moving. And I knew, all of our people knew the rule. Once you go down, you don't get back up at night. Anybody moving is a bad guy. And this guy's coming right toward me. And I was thinking, he's gonna step on me. I slid my selector switch over to full auto. And I'm laying there and he's coming. And the air's so thick. And at this point, I can mentally see a silhouette coming at me.

• 21:16Speaker 05

  Although I can clearly see the silhouette. I knew, I know where it is based on the sound. And now I'm starting to hear him breathe. I'm starting to hear his heartbeat because he realizes he's inside the perimeter. And he's probably about to get killed. So his heart is thumping, he's coming right at me. I can't open up because that'll light the whole perimeter up and we'll be in trouble. So I couldn't get to my knife.

• 21:48Speaker 05

  So I decided, just as he gets to me, I'm just gonna shoot my left hand up. I'm gonna grab a hold of his chest, whatever he's got there. And I'm gonna pull him, at the same time, raise my leg up and trip him. I'm gonna pull him down to the ground. I'm gonna hit him in the side of the head with the muzzle of my car 15 as I'm bringing him down. If he yells, if he fires his weapon, I'm gonna pull the trigger. So he's coming, he got into position. I grabbed him, I jammed the muzzle into the side of his head, just cut a big gash in his head. I bring him down face first into the mud.

• 22:32Speaker 05

  And he didn't say a word, didn't make a sound. It scared him so bad, he didn't even grasp when I grabbed him. And then I started thinking, now what? I'm sitting here holding this guy face down in the mud. What am I gonna do with him? And then I heard a whisper. And the whisper was Trung We, Trung We, lieutenant in Vietnamese. Lights, lights. What? And he says, lights, lights.

• 23:12Speaker 05

  And I looked up, the ridge toward the top of the mountain, and you could see the lights. Lanterns coming down the mountain. About 400 people, if you counted one or two people in between each lantern. Probably 400 people coming down the ridge line toward where we were. And that's not good. We're on a ridge line like that. We picked it so people couldn't get around us, they're coming straight at us. But then I turned and I looked down the ridge. There was that same number coming up the ridge. And they were gonna come right to us.

• 23:54Speaker 05

  We were gonna be right in the middle when they got there, about, you know, estimated 800. Whoa. So then I realized, the guy that I've got face down in the mud is the Vietnamese captain that we took on this mission with us.

• 24:13Speaker 05

  He didn't, you know, he didn't have the experience, he didn't realize it when he got up to come tell me there were lights coming, that I might shoot him, or somebody might shoot him, or knife him. But anyway, you know, he did call that to our attention. And so these guys are all coming at us, they're gonna intersect right on us. So, my RTO crawled over and said, "Sir, you're wanted on the radio."

• 24:55Speaker 05

  And I got the radio, and this is, this was a KY38 with the KY28 manual code loader in it and all that stuff. You had to have that daily code set in this coder, you had to be on the right frequency, all that. This was the highest security radio that you could manually carry around. Anyway, so I was talking, you know, answered it, and it was Saigon. And they were, they said, "You are now a prairie fire emergency."

• 25:37Speaker 05

  Meaning, everything in that part of Southeast Asia now belongs to you. Everything, every asset that's within range of you, every asset that still has armor left, is being diverted to you to try to get you out. And I'm looking up and down, and I can, I can see how we are a prairie fire emergency. So, I, you know, copied that. I got my assistant team leader over and said, "Here's what's going on." And then the RTO says, "Sir, you gotta

• 26:17Speaker 05

  hear this." And I said, "WTF, Schaefer? What? You know, I've got 800 people coming. Why aren't you gonna tell me?" I picked up the radio, the handset.

• 26:33Speaker 05

  And there's a Vietnamese woman on the radio. Classic, there's no way that she can talk to this radio, but she's talking to, to this tactical radio, secure one. And she's reading our obituary. What? She's reading our obituary that we were all killed in action that night. She's reading name by name of everybody who's laying in that perimeter. And she reads my name.

• 27:15Speaker 05

  She reads off Dick Thompson and, and keeps going. And Saigon monitored her and they heard her read my name off as Dick Thompson and they said, "Okay, she made a mistake. She doesn't even know his name. He's, who, who is Dick Thompson?" "His name's Henry." No one at that point on that side of the world knew me by Dick Thompson, except for Eldon Bargewell, later Major General Bargewell. And we'd been on the same team before. But somehow she knew my name that no one else knew.

• 27:59Speaker 05

  And as I'm listening to it, there's music in the background. Not just music, but I, I realized this is the same music that as a little kid at 12 o'clock every day at my grandmother's house, she would say things like, "Boys, boys, quieten down. I, I need to hear the obituaries in the county." And there's a southern kind of music that they played in the South when they would read obituaries, read about somebody that had died. And they're playing this in the background as they're reading our names off

• 28:43Speaker 05

  as being killed in action that day on a super encrypted radio that they couldn't possibly be talking on.

• 28:52Speaker 05

  So, it kinda got our attention.

• 28:56Shawn Ryan?

  I would imagine.

• 28:57Speaker 05

  So, I got a team leader together and we put our plan together. And we were, we were armed, we had four machine, M sixty machine guns with us, you know, four grenadiers with us, we had all those claymores, we, we were loaded for bear. But, that kinda, kinda got hold of our attention.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  And, that started at nine o'clock at night, it's almost seventeen hundred the next day when we got out.

• 29:33Speaker 05

  And we just banged it out with them right and left and had one catastrophe after another.

• 29:41Speaker 05

  But, but we got out, you know, we got everybody out with us.

• 29:44Shawn Ryan?

  You got everybody out? Wow.

• 29:48Speaker 05

  There were a lot of bad guys that were, were left, but...

• 29:54Shawn Ryan?

  Holy shit. What was the radio? Did you ever figure that out?

• 30:00Speaker 05

  Somehow they'd gotten hold of one.

• 30:03Speaker 05

  They'd gotten hold of one of those, they got the radio, they had to have gotten the, the codes and the frequencies, you know, from the compound. And we think part of what happened was, eight days before, we were at the launch site,

• 30:20Speaker 05

  getting ready to, uh, launch on this mission, and a team was overrun. And, you know, the, uh, launch site commander came in and said, "Look, your mission's just changed, you're now bright light, uh, your team's gonna go in to try to, uh, recover the team that just got overrun." So, they changed their mission. And we went out there and fought it out for a couple of days. And when we came back, we had to have some recovery, we had to replace some people that were wounded during the firefight. So, it was eight days before we could go back and run our, uh, original mission.

• 31:02Speaker 05

  So, they had eight days to get more intel on us and figure out what was going on. And we had some spies there at C C N in the camp that we didn't know about.

• 31:14Speaker 05

  So...

• 31:15Shawn Ryan?

  Man.

• 31:19Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I got another gift for you.

• 31:20Speaker 05

  And the KY38 radio, that's 54 pounds of radio, plus all the batteries, the big batteries that it goes through. Nobody wanted to carry those things. You had to have a PRC77

• 31:41Speaker 05

  to hook to this KY38. So half of it was on your front chest, half of it was on your back.

• 31:49Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 31:51Speaker 05

  It was unreal. I'm sorry, I interrupted you. Go ahead.

• 31:55Shawn Ryan?

  No, no, no. Well, not much has changed today. Nobody wants to carry the radio, but it's not 50 pounds. But hey, since we're talking about everything you've carried, I got you a little present here.

• 32:13Shawn Ryan?

  So I got a friend over at Sig Sauer. His name's Jason. And I told him you were coming on, and he is just fascinated with Magpie Sog guys. So he wanted me to present this to you.

• 32:26Speaker 05

  Oh, wow.

• 32:28Shawn Ryan?

  Go ahead, hold it up.

• 32:32Shawn Ryan?

  So that is the Sig Sauer P365 Macro Legion. And it holds 17 rounds, plus one in the pipe. It has that red dot. We were talking about red dots at breakfast. It has the slide cuts in the front to help you with the muzzle flip and recoil. It's made out of all metal. And that is the latest and greatest everyday carry handgun from Sig Sauer. So we wanted you to have that.

• 33:07Speaker 05

  That is awesome.

• 33:10Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 33:11Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 33:17Speaker 05

  Fortunately, I'm driving home, so I don't, I don't have to try to carry those on a plane.

• 33:24Shawn Ryan?

  But, uh, yeah, so we wanted you to have that.

• 33:29Speaker 05

  So when, when you get your, your new studio completed,

• 33:38Speaker 05

  including your firing range,

• 33:42Speaker 05

  hopefully I can get invited back up to see if the thing works on, on your range.

• 33:46Shawn Ryan?

  We'll invite you back, you and John. Maybe we'll have a little shooting competition.

• 33:52Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah, he'd love that.

• 33:54Shawn Ryan?

  I'm sure you'd whip John's ass in a shooting competition.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:00Speaker 05

  I'll tell, I'll tell him he better start practicing.

• 34:05Speaker 05

  That's great. Thank you.

• 34:06Shawn Ryan?

  You're welcome.

• 34:08Speaker 00

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

• 34:15Speaker 05

  They all keep the blame on me.

• 34:17Speaker 01

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

• 34:24Speaker 02

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

• 34:28Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  I'm not the first nanny.

• 34:33Speaker 01

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

• 34:38Speaker 06

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  How do I negotiate so many great travel deals? My greatest gadget, the Priceline app. It's got hotel deals, flight deals, rental car deals, all of those deals in a bundle. Deals, game day deals, concert trip deals. No one deals more deals than Priceline. Hold your horses, there's more. The app lets you filter hotels by neighborhood, vibe, star level, and amenities like pools and spas and beachfronts. And, wait, I'm not done. Stop cutting me off.

• 35:08Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I'd like to get into your story, story here. So we always start with, where did you grow up?

• 35:16Speaker 05

  Grew up in a little town called Walhalla, South Carolina, up in the north western tip of South Carolina, right up above Clemson University. And, um, spent a lot of time outside.

• 35:38Speaker 05

  And, you know, I, uh, my, my mother's family had four sons. And when World War II came along, all four of them were deployed, you know, in, in World War II. My father was deployed along with them, so there were five men, you know, from the family there. And they, three of the brothers, four brothers came back. And my father came back. And then when Korea came along, you know, my father was called back in, so, served in Korea.

• 36:22Speaker 05

  And they talked about some army stuff, mostly at my prodding, and saying, "What does this mean? What is a platoon? What do you mean, have a reserve? What's a reserve? What?" Excuse me, all kinds of questions, you know, I was just full of questions about army stuff. And then, when I was about seven years old, I decided, "I'm gonna have an army." So I got with my cousin Carl, and I said, "You're the first member of, uh, my army."

• 37:03Speaker 05

  And I had heard about Rangers, I'd heard them talk about what the Rangers did, um, so I decided it was gonna be, you know, Ranger Company. So I formed the 69th Ranger Company. (laughing) And it was commanded by, you know, General Thompson, of course. And, so, but we needed more than one other member, I needed to command more than one person. (laughing) So I started recruiting my other cousins that are about the same age. We got, you know, all the close ones in, the ones I liked, got those guys in.

• 37:45Speaker 05

  Brought in one, um, female cousin, Pat, which was actually Cousin Carl's sister.

• 37:54Speaker 05

  We brought her in, so we had a whack in, in the army. Um, then we started letting people outside the family in, so it, you know, it grew bigger. And I, I still got the, the logbook uh for Thompson's Rangers at home, the actual logbook. Are you serious? And you can open it up and you can, it's getting pretty faded now, but you can see notes. You can see people's names, you can see the note, you can see information about uh the only court martial that we had. Um, there was one of the members of the company that um gave me some lip and um

• 38:36Speaker 05

  he ended up getting court martialed and booted out of the Ranger group. But, you know, I still, I still have that book. Man, that's cool. You know, I, I cut two pieces of cardboard for the covers and, and taped it together and put the paper inside and uh it's, it's pretty, pretty cool, so. But I still have it after all these years. So, really got into uh Rangers. And, and it, you know, the family did a lot of hunting. My father liked to hunt, so I, I was brought up with weapons and shooting and hunting

• 39:17Speaker 05

  and tracking and every time I, my parents both worked uh as I was getting older. So every opportunity I got, uh I was in the woods by myself. Hunting, tracking, uh tracking deer, tracking whatever animals I could find um and studying them. You know, what do they do? How do they move?

• 39:42Speaker 05

  And then I got this idea, I need to be invisible. How can I be invisible?

• 39:49Speaker 05

  So to be invisible, what, it's, it's not just that you are not visually seen.

• 39:57Speaker 05

  If I'm invisible, you can't hear me.

• 40:00Speaker 05

  You can't smell me.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  You know, I just don't exist. I'm just, I'm here, but I'm not here. And how do you do that? So I practiced slipping up on deer or rabbits or whatever I could find out there.

• 40:19Speaker 05

  And then my cousin Carl started coming over and we'd take, and we had a little army pup tent. We'd carry that thing a couple hundred meters up on the hill in the woods and put it up. It would go out and, once I got a BB gun, we'd go out and shoot some birds. And, you know, little birds and build us a fire. And we would roast them and we would, we would say, well, what else do rangers eat? You know, let's, let's get us some ranger food. Let's go kill something else and let's come eat it. And, you know, we'd camp out there and pretend we were rangers and we'd go on missions and different things like that. And, you know, and we, we got older.

• 41:02Speaker 05

  And, and then, when I was 13, my parents sabotaged me. Because I knew I was gonna be a ranger.

• 41:14Speaker 05

  And Santa Claus came and brought me a chemistry set.

• 41:20Speaker 05

  You know, I used to watch shock theater at midnight on Saturday night. You know, they'd build Frankenstein and werewolves and change people's brains out. And I said, they can do that. Why can't I do it? So I started, you know, catching rats. I'd catch rats and bring them into my lab and I'd knock them out. At that time, if you went into a pharmacy, we called them drugstores at that time. If you went in there, I mean, if, if you could get permission from your parents to buy a syringe, a real syringe.

• 42:00Speaker 05

  Which was a big deal at that time because only drug users and medical people had access to syringes, but I talked the pharmacists into letting me buy one. So I had a syringe and then I could shoot the rats or the birds or whatever up, knock them out, and I could go in, take their brains out, and see if I could swap them and bring them back. Swap their hearts, things like that. And try to, you know, from shock theater with Frankenstein, you know, all the electricity from lightning went in him. I would plug them into the outlet.

• 42:42Speaker 05

  Tended to fry their little hearts and stuff. I never could get one to start back. I could put them in there, I just couldn't get them to work again.

• 42:51Shawn Ryan?

  The psych tests must have been a lot different to get into the big berets back then.

• 42:59Speaker 05

  So I really got into chemistry and then at some point I got into, well, let's build some rockets, you know, Thompson Rangers needs some rockets to launch it to the bad guys. So I studied rockets and rocket fuel and the chemistry around it. And again, back to the pharmacy. I need some, I need some, I need some potassium nitrate. I need some charcoal and I need some sulfur. What are you gonna do with that? I said, oh, I'm, you know, building some bottle rockets. Okay.

• 43:37Speaker 05

  I had so much of those chemicals in a footlocker in the house. If my mother had realized what that was and what it could have done to our house. But anyway, you could build rocket fuel out of that. And then discovered later, you could build bombs out of that, too.

• 44:01Speaker 05

  So I built a launch pad. I built a lab in, in the, in the barn and built a, an actual launch pad out behind it. I had a window so I could look out there and see it so I didn't get hit with shrapnel stuff that exploded on the, the launch pad. And I'd launch them off of there. And one day I built a big one. It was almost three feet high. It exploded on the launch pad. Actually broke windows in my neighbor's house. So I decided I needed to go back down to smaller ones. So they didn't do so much damage as

• 44:41Speaker 05

  they didn't work. But, you know, so I, I played with explosives. I did all kinds of chemistry stuff. I mean, when I was in, in high school, I took, you know, the advanced chemistry course. I didn't even have a book. I just basically showed up for class, took the exams and maxed out the course. Cause I was going down to Clemson University to the library, reading all the articles, reading chemistry books. Wow. Getting, and I found that if you got, if you got the older chemistry books, around

• 45:22Speaker 05

  the turn of the century, around, around 1900, they were like recipe books. They didn't just talk about theory and how, you know, if you mix these two components, then, then you get this. It was a recipe. This is how many grams of whatever it was that you were gonna use and mix together and this is how you mix it together. They, they don't, you know, do all this stuff. So I was learning that and, and really, really into chemistry. I got a scholarship to University of South Carolina on chemistry. You had a pet too? I'm sorry? You had a pet?

• 46:04Speaker 05

  Um, I had, I had several pets, but I, I had one when I was, you know, really young. That was of particular interest. I was in, I don't know, third grade and my parents came, got me out of school and, and took me home and said, "We've got a surprise for you." "What is it?" "Well, you have to wait till we get home." Till we got home, we got out, and, and there was a spider monkey. So, so it's a monkey. Uh, you know, he's on a, he's on a little chain, at least, so he's running around doing things and I thought, "That's cool." I snatched that little joker up and I found out about monkey teeth really quickly.

• 46:49Speaker 05

  I mean, he about bit my finger off. Um, so anyway, I didn't, I kinda liked him, but I, I was careful with him because I knew he would bite. Um, and we ended up building a, a small house that was outside and close to the barn and he would sleep in that at night and we put a light bulb in there to, you know, for heat because it was winter time. And I went out one morning and looked in there and, you know, I could see his tail sticking out the little door and I grabbed his tail and I thought, "Whoa, this is strange. He's not moving."

• 47:31Speaker 05

  And I pulled him out and he was literally just straight out. He looked like a monkey on a stick and he was frozen. A monkey on a stick, huh? He was frozen and his little mouth was open, all his little teeth were showing, you know, and I, I was not happy, you know? I mean, I forgave him for all the biting, but, you know, I ran back in the house, in the house and I gave him to my mother and said, "You know, he's dead, he's dead." And she said, "I don't know if he is or not. Let's try this." She wrapped him up in a little blanket and put him on top of a little oil heater that we had, so the heat was coming up to try to warm him up, thaw him out a little bit.

• 48:11Speaker 05

  And then she heated up some milk and took an eyedropper and squirted that warm milk down his little mouth and, I mean, she kept working with him and after a while, you know, his little mouth started moving and she thawed that joker out. She thawed him out and all of a sudden, he came back to life. Oh, I thought, oh, this is really cool. If you can freeze somebody to death and then just thaw them back out. I mean, how cool is that? But anyway, they had the monkey and what? He caused so much trouble that uh we ended up swapping him for a dog. So he had to go away.

• 48:54Shawn Ryan?

  You didn't take that and uh ask for volunteers from uh from your army to freeze, did you?

• 49:01Speaker 05

  No. I'm not saying I didn't think about it, but.

• 49:07Shawn Ryan?

  Maybe the guy that got court martialed could have had a uh ultimatum.

• 49:12Speaker 05

  I I did take college students.

• 49:15Shawn Ryan?

  Oh shit.

• 49:20Speaker 05

  I I have to be careful how much I tell you about, but I I did take college students. And I was interested in what happens if I put you into sleep deprivation? If I don't let you sleep for a while, what will happen? So I got permission to do some research, University of Georgia, using college students. And so I got a group of volunteers from the ROTC department.

• 50:00Speaker 05

  These guys were all in the the ROTC, you know, ranger company there to uh University of Georgia. You know, of course, they're they can do anything and, you know. Uh so they volunteered to do it. So they had their full gear on, we took them out in the national forest, full gear. Um carrying a forty pound rucksack and continuous movement. We stopped for a ten minute break every once in a while, but continuous movement. Uh no sleep. Every four hours, they had to take a a test. Um one of the tests they had to take was a cognitive test.

• 50:44Speaker 05

  You know, it's basically addition and subtraction, just a couple of sheets of of addition and subtraction. Um and then they would rate after they finished it, I would say, well, compared to.

• 51:01Speaker 05

  When we first started, I mean, you were fresh, before you'd lost any sleep. Compared to that, how well you think you did this time?

• 51:12Speaker 05

  And they would say, "It's pretty easy. I did just as well, well this time, just as accurate as I did on the first one."

• 51:22Speaker 05

  I'm looking at the scores and thinking, "That didn't happen."

• 51:28Speaker 05

  One of the things that I discovered was that after 24 hours with no sleep, that you lose about 25% of your cognitive ability, particularly to be able to do things like math.

• 51:45Speaker 05

  The scary thing is, you don't know it. You think you're still just as good as you were when you started out. And, you know, it doesn't stop at 24 hours. It keeps on going down. Climbing.

• 52:00Speaker 05

  And you don't see things.

• 52:04Speaker 05

  Things happen in front of you. You don't see it. Things, things you see sometimes didn't happen. You know, you hallucinate. You do all kinds of things. And, you know, as a ranger instructor for a number of years, you know, with the ranger students, we didn't feed them much. We didn't let them sleep. We kept them running up and down mountains all the time. And, you know, they would hallucinate.

• 52:33Speaker 05

  You know, you'd lose them. You're going through the woods and all of a sudden, you say, "Send up to count." They start sending the count up and you realize you're missing about 10 or 12 people. You stop, you go back, you know, it's night. You go back and here's a guy standing behind a tree, just standing there, thinking that tree in front of him is, is his buddy that he's supposed to be following. His buddy's not moving, so he's just standing there. And nobody behind him is moving. They're all waiting. Are they, and when, when I went to, my ranger buddy and I, you know, we were already SF qualified and everything. So, we just like, "We're gonna have some fun."

• 53:11Speaker 05

  You know, so if you're, if you're walking along, you had your little patrol cap on, you had, had the little ranger eyes in the back, the little fluorescent tabs in, in the back of the, of their hat. So the guy behind you could see you in the dark. You take your hat off, you kind of put it over to the side, and as you're walking along, you just.

• 53:43Speaker 05

  You know, you're getting yourself lower and lower, and you're lowering that hat around, and the guy behind you, he's following you, now he's feeling around trying to, where's the drop off, where's he going? And, you know, we, we found that, we found if we did stuff like that, it was hilarious to us, and it kept us motivated, and, you know, we could do all kinds of things, and, uh, we had fun in Ranger School, but, anyway.

• 54:12Shawn Ryan?

  Humor keeps it going.

• 54:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, and it keeps, it keeps you moving along.

• 54:16Shawn Ryan?

  Especially in the darkest hour.

• 54:18Speaker 05

  Yeah, so, anyway, with the sleep research, uh, that was a major study that the military used, because one of the, one of the things when I was put on the Air Land Battle 2010, to figure out, how are we gonna go a hundred hours straight with the ground war, when we move into 21st century? How can we go a hundred hours straight? Leaders be able to lead, soldiers be able to function, aviators be able to fly, you know, without a hundred hour, you know, a hundred hours of that sleep?

• 54:58Speaker 05

  So, I did a lot of research around that, and, and then I started going to NATO nations and briefing the army staffs, here's, here's what we found, here's what you need to do to be able to function, um, and I remember very clearly when I briefed the, uh, the commander of the UK forces, I gave the presentation, and this is what special ops are gonna have to do, um, and then what the soldiers and aviators would do, and I finished that presentation, and he, the general got up and he said, Thompson, that was a good briefing, but I can tell you now, we're not doing any of that crap, these guys are just gonna have to drive on,

• 55:43Speaker 05

  we're not doing that.

• 55:46Speaker 05

  Okay, it's a price to pay. And then shortly after that Falkland Islands came along. And all of a sudden, they ran into problems. Because they didn't have enough pilots down there to meet the uh, safety requirement, the sleep and rest requirement between missions. Uh, they tried different chemicals to, um, you know, help them be able to, to do that. Because when a pilot comes back from a mission, you know, his eyes are like that, he's wired from all the stress and everything. He can't go to sleep to start with. And if finally he does go to sleep, he can't wake up. And if you give him a, a chemical that knocks him out right away,

• 56:30Speaker 05

  then you can't get it out of his system. You know, six hours later, or four hours later, when you wake him up and say, you gotta go. You gotta fly another mission. He's still trying to figure out who, who he is. Um, but there, there are ways to do some of that that we worked on. Uh, getting ready, because when the Gulf War, you know, when the ground war started, the ground war went a hundred hours. Now, my, my brother was a Apache pilot. And, you know, he was telling me all the time about, you know, I go fly a mission, I turn around, I come back, I'll land. While I'm rearming, refueling, I'm sitting there in the cockpit, eating a sandwich, drinking a coffee.

• 57:12Speaker 05

  Uh, because soon as they, they get me rearmed, I'm going back out. I gotta go fly another mission. And, um, so, you know, that stuff was going on all the time. And you're just not as effective. And somewhere, uh, somewhere around five hours, or five days, without any sleep, zero sleep, uh, people start to die. And the university said, you know, we can't keep supporting your research if you have your students dying. So you gotta stop keeping them up that long.

• 57:54Speaker 05

  They didn't actually die, but you know, they were getting close enough that they were concerned about it. Wow. So I hear people all the How long were you keeping these people up? Holy shit. We ended up, we ended up stopping them after, I think it was seventy-two hours as far as we, we would go. But I hear people tell me all the time, man, I can, I can go five days without a problem. Young guys, I'll tell you that. You think you are. I remember in Ranger School, sitting in the bleachers and instructor standing in front, in front of us, there's a creek there.

• 58:36Speaker 05

  He's standing in front of us and he's talking and it seems like mid-sentence, mid-sentence, he says, Thompson, in the creek.

• 58:48Speaker 05

  And I think, what did I do? You were asleep. And I think, no, I wasn't asleep, in the creek. Do push-ups until I get tired, make sure your face goes under every time. You know, so I went down in the creek, trying to drown myself, you know, doing push-ups. And I was, and my ranger buddy said, yeah. You were sitting here, but you were asleep. You were sitting up, your eyes were open, but you were asleep.

• 59:20Speaker 05

  And I, I began to realize, yeah, you go to sleep and you don't realize it. In fact, some of the research shows that there are more people killed in traffic accidents with, with drivers falling asleep than there is with drunk drivers. Interesting. Almost everyone that drives or been driving for a while can tell you. Yeah, you've had an experience late at night and, and you're sleeping, your head's bouncing around. And all of a sudden, just before you hit the bridge abutment, you feel the car run off your shoulder and you jerk it back into the road because you were asleep. You didn't, you didn't know it.

• 1:00:02Speaker 05

  And, you know, if you're driving a drone, you're driving whatever, and you go to sleep.

• 1:00:10Speaker 05

  The drone's on its own now. There's no telling where you're gonna put that thing. If you're watching a radar screen, you don't see the aircraft coming. You don't see the blips. You're looking at it. Your eyes are open, but you don't see it. There's a whole series of things like that that I did a lot of research on. And particularly using it with special ops. And still, now I go out, I do a lot of presentations with different groups, particularly high-stress groups, special ops groups, on sleep deprivation, things to help you get around it,

• 1:00:50Speaker 05

  to be able to function better, longer, and what's gonna happen if you don't. So that's a long answer to whatever you're asking about a monkey or something like that.

• 1:01:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I wanna get into that, what you're doing nowadays towards the end. But you went to school, you dropped out of school, correct?

• 1:01:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was in school and at that time, every night on the 5 o'clock national news, you know, there'd always be a segment about what was happening in Vietnam. And interestingly enough, very different from what we have today. You know, the reporters would be saying, "Man, we're crushing those guys." "I mean, we're just crushing the NBA, and we're doing this, and we're doing that." And I started thinking, "Well, I wanted to go to Vietnam, you know, so I could, you know, do my patriotic duty like my uncles and father and everybody's done."

• 1:01:57Speaker 05

  It's gonna be over. If I wait until I finish school, it's gonna be over. So I decided to take a break from school, go in list for three years, go do my thing, come back, pick back up where I was in school, and, you know, continue on. No intent, no desire to really be a career person. I wanted three years, and then I wanted to get back to chemistry and do my thing.

• 1:02:31Speaker 05

  And so I stopped. My mother was not happy.

• 1:02:37Speaker 05

  My father supported it. My mother kind of freaked out over it. I told her, "I'll go back to school." She said, "No, you won't." I said, "I'll go back to school. I'll get a doctor, but I need to go to do this first."

• 1:02:52Speaker 05

  And then, you know, I get to the recruiting station and went down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina. And, you know, they put us in the barracks, went to sleep. About 3 o'clock in the morning,

• 1:03:10Speaker 05

  all the lights come on, and there's some guy yelling and screaming to top of his lungs to get up and get attention in front of your bunk. And then I hear bunks being pushed over, you know, double bunks pushed over, people falling out on the floor. And this guy's yelling and hollering. I got my buns up and got the attention in front of my, you know, bunk there. And I look,

• 1:03:38Speaker 05

  and I said, "He's my size."

• 1:03:44Speaker 05

  "He's got a big Smoky the Bear hat on. He's my size, and he sounds like a giant coming through here. And what is that on his shoulder? A ranger tab." So I thought, "That's it.

• 1:04:02Speaker 05

  You gotta do that." And then he took us, took us on a run, and he was singing all this stuff about, "I want to be an airborne ranger. I want to live a life of danger," all this kind of stuff. And I thought, "This is cool. If I'm going to be in three years, I might as well, you know, this is what I want. I get a chance to, you know, be a real ranger now, not just, you know, what I used to play at."

• 1:04:27Speaker 05

  So all of a sudden,

• 1:04:30Speaker 05

  you know, I still didn't have, I still didn't intend to stay in beyond the three years, but I wanted to be a ranger while I was in and, you know, go to Vietnam as a ranger, you know, why not?

• 1:04:42Speaker 05

  What was the sentiment of Vietnam at the beginning of the war? Terrible. It was terrible? You know, the country, like, country's divided now, you know. In America. But, uh, yeah, in, in America, it was divided. So, uh, they, they had, you and I, for example, um, soon as people looked at our heads, they could say, "Well, he doesn't have hair down to his shoulders, his hair's not parted in the middle, um, he's in, in this group over here, you and I are in this other group, and we're much more likely to be patriotic, support the war, go do it.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  These other guys, these long-haired hippie guys over on the other side, they're against it, they're all smoking marijuana, they're doing whatever, and I'm kinda exaggerating, but it was divided, those people, anti-war, you know, protest, do all this kinda stuff.

• 1:05:46Speaker 05

  So, there were some people who were for it, most people were against it, and they were out protesting.

• 1:05:56Speaker 05

  And, you know, I had some good friends that had moved on the other side, they were total anti-war, but some of the stuff you were hearing was, you know, "We're killing babies, we're killing old women, we're doing all kinds of things like that," which wasn't necessarily true. But, you know, I, I got really excited about the army and what we were doing, and kept thinking, "They're, they're paying me to do this. Can you imagine, uh, what it would cost if you just wanted to go jump out of an airplane and have a thrill like that? They're paying me to go do that."

• 1:06:40Speaker 05

  And all, all these other things, and the more I got into it, um, the more I enjoyed it, and they, when I finished AIT, they just said, "You're going to OCS."

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  You went to OCS right away? Yeah, so you need to go to OCS.

• 1:06:59Speaker 05

  And I said, they talked me into it, said, you know, you can still get out, end of your three years, you'll be, your, your two-year requirement that you'll get from OCS will be over, and you can still get out of the Army, you'll still get to go to Vietnam.

• 1:07:16Speaker 05

  And you can probably do some of these other neat things like airborne, Ranger, stuff like that.

• 1:07:22Speaker 05

  So I started volunteering in, in OCS to, to go to airborne school and to go to Special Forces.

• 1:07:31Speaker 05

  So when I finished OCS, then I just went from there to airborne school, I was already at Benning. I went to airborne school and then they sent me to Bragg and went to the, Officer's Q course up there and, you know, became SF. And then from SF, I went to Rangers and, and then went to Phylk Group in Vietnam and, and did what my buddy said.

• 1:08:01Speaker 05

  Didn't really do what he said, I did the opposite. He said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for SOB. Why's that? And when I asked that question, he said, if you do, you're gonna die. And if you don't die, you're gonna come home with a crap shot out of you in a nutcase.

• 1:08:24Speaker 05

  That's if they find you. Do not volunteer for SOB. I said, what do they do? He said, nobody knows. You have to get there, and, you know, volunteer and get there, and then you'll find out what you're gonna do, but you, you're gonna die or come back as a nutcase.

• 1:08:42Speaker 05

  I was 21 years old.

• 1:08:46Speaker 05

  At that time in, in history, we thought that your prefrontal cortex up here in the front of your brain, we thought that the only thing it really did was hold up your cranium so that your front end of your head didn't kind of cave in. And we thought it was fully developed by the time, you know, you're 20 years old. You had all your prefrontal cortex abilities. Really, you gotta be about 30 before it's fully developed. So before it's developed, you tell somebody you're gonna volunteer to go anywhere, do

• 1:09:28Speaker 05

  anything, anytime, and never say a word about it for 20 years. I can do that. I mean, that's a recruiting poster to a 21-year-old. Uh huh. And if you, if you look at the SOG pictures of the Americans on those teams, almost all of them are little baby-faced guys. You look at, at John Strachan Meyer, you look at his little baby face, you look at my little baby face, you look at, you know, Eldon Bardswell's little baby face. I mean, all three of us are within two or three months of the same age. And we're, we're all look like little baby faces because we'll go charge that hill.

• 1:10:12Speaker 05

  We'll go to another country and do things. Uh huh. By the time you're 30, you're saying, let the younger guys do that. I don't need to have that kind of action anymore. Uh huh, uh huh. If you stay, if you're still there at 30, and you're still doing missions like that, you know, as, as you, you saw with, with some of the SEAL work you were doing. You know, it's starting to have a bad effect on me.

• 1:10:40Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh, uh huh.

• 1:10:41Speaker 05

  I mean, there's a limit to how much stress you can take and recover from it, you know, easily. So, we don't take good care of our special operators in particular.

• 1:10:57Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Speaker 05

  Who are, we keep throwing them back out there in the middle of all the stress with no break, with, with no opportunity, you know, to, to heal some. And, and then we put, we put all these restrictions out there. They don't mention the word mental health. Don't say you're getting a little stressed because we'll take you off the team.

• 1:11:24Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:24Speaker 05

  The tier one guys, you know, like you, like the SOG guys. I mean, I had to pass, you know, the flight physical, I mean, just blow it out of the water every year. Uh, or I couldn't be on a team like that. You can't be tier one. You can't be halo. You know, you gotta have perfect ears, perfect eyes, perfect everything. Um, or they'll take you off the team. And what do you do? Same thing in, in SOG. I mean, I used to come back and take forceps and pull pieces. I've got scars all over. Pull pieces of shrapnel out and not say anything about it, you know, because I didn't want to get taken off the team.

• 1:12:05Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:12:06Speaker 05

  You know, and civil guys do it all the time. Rangers guys still do it. You're not gonna report anything.

• 1:12:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:13Speaker 05

  You don't have to, so.

• 1:12:15Shawn Ryan?

  So, did you go right into SOG from the Green Berets?

• 1:12:20Speaker 05

  Yeah. When, when I, when I got there, um, when I got to Vietnam, um, I met a buddy of mine in the bar that first evening when I got there. And he's the one that told me, whatever you do, don't volunteer for SOG. Um, cause he'd been there a month before me. So, he knew all kind of stuff, right? Um, so.

• 1:12:44Speaker 05

  The next day, went to all in processing and at the end, end of the day, then I ended up in Colonel Wazlats' room and he said, "I'm looking through your folder here. You volunteered for the Army, you volunteered for OCS, you volunteered for airborne, you volunteered for Ranger, you volunteered for Special Forces, you volunteered for Vietnam. I got the most important job that you will ever have an opportunity to do, but you have to volunteer for it." And I said, "You're, you're trying to get me to volunteer for SOG?" And he said, "Yes."

• 1:13:27Speaker 05

  I said, "What do I do? What does SOG do?" And he said, "I can't tell you." He couldn't tell you anything? "I can't tell you what they do. I just tell you, you're gonna have to volunteer and sign the volunteer paper to go to SOG. You're gonna have to sign a non-disclosure agreement, 20-year agreement, that you won't say the word SOG, you won't say anything about what you guys did for 20 years, or you're gonna receive the full punishment of the law. But if you'll do that, you can get into SOG and you can do things that nobody else can do."

• 1:14:10Speaker 05

  So, the next day, I was supposed to be at the airfield. They sent me down to the classified end of the airfield where the Blackbirds, the black C-130s and C-133s were all parked. You know, nobody could go down there. So I went down there, got on an aircraft to go up to in a train and...

• 1:14:40Speaker 05

  There were no seats in the plane when it got there. Just seat belts on the floor. So the crew chief came by and he said, "Sit on the floor and buckle in." And there were three or four of us. "Sit on the floor and buckle in because when we take off, we're gonna climb as fast as this thing will climb so that we don't get hit on the way out. And then when we go to land up in the train, we're gonna dive toward the ground like we're crashing so we don't get hit on the way down. And you guys just hold on, you're gonna have a great ride." Got there, got off the plane. And they told us where to move to and said,

• 1:15:22Speaker 05

  you know, "There's a SOG bus there that's gonna pick you up and drive you on up to Da Nang." So we went over where the bus was supposed to be and there's a black school bus sitting there. All the windows are shot out of it. There must have been 200 bullet holes in the bus. The seats are all ripped apart where bullets have been hitting. And there's a driver there. Went up to him and said, "Is this the bus up to Da Nang?" And he said, "Yeah." "What happened?" And he said, "Well, there is this one pass that we have to go through.

• 1:16:05Speaker 05

  And the NVA like to ambush us up there, you know, on a fairly regular basis. So, you know, kinda shoot the bus up and the people who are in it. We're gonna pick up a SOG team in a few minutes. Soon as they get here, then we'll leave. All you have to do is just do what they tell you. Whatever they tell you to do, you do and you'll live. If you don't, you'll probably die before you get there." And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, here's a line of about seven or eight guys headed toward the bus. I mean, they just appeared. And I'm looking at them and saying,

• 1:16:47Speaker 05

  "I've never seen anybody like this before." I mean, I've been in Special Forces, I've been to Ranger. I don't recognize the equipment they have. I don't recognize the uniforms they have on. And they're scary. I mean, if they had this little short, like a little short M16. Some of them have, you know, grenade launchers that have been cut down to that long. They're camouflage, they have bandanas around their heads, hand grenades all over them. Scary looking dudes. They got on the bus and said, and they immediately took up defensive positions on the bus.

• 1:17:30Speaker 05

  The team just arrayed itself around the bus and they were all at the windows, ready to shoot in whichever direction the fire came from. And the guy who was the team leader, he said, if we run into trouble, you get face down on the floor of the bus and don't move until we tell you. Copy that. We didn't get ambushed, but wow, you know, you start thinking, what did I get into? Jeez. Yeah, I was talking, I'm talking to Alden Bartwell, you know, several years ago before he passed. And he said, oh yeah, I still can see that bus in my mind, all shot up like that and wondering what have I gotten into? Is that what you were wondering?

• 1:18:15Speaker 05

  Yeah. So, hmm, this is, this is different than what I thought. But, you know, it's gonna be exhilarating because I'll be on a team like that in a few days. I'll start becoming one of those guys. I mean, those guys made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And when they get around other people, you can see, everybody just kind of backs away, gives them room. They don't get close to them, they don't make eye contact with them. I mean, if you look them in the eye, for the most part, you see death. I mean, they're just, they've seen things nobody else is seeing. And you can't not see it once you've seen it.

• 1:19:00Speaker 05

  So, so I thought, you know, that part's probably pretty cool. Yeah. Went on up, got to, uh, Da Nang. And the little guy that picked us up there said, uh, I'm gonna take you to your quarters where you'll stay tonight, tomorrow you'll get your assignment, you'll get briefed. Um.

• 1:19:22Speaker 05

  And you might wanna, we have a movie theater set up kinda out here. You know, we put a couple pieces of plywood together. We got a movie projector and we show John Wayne and other kinda movies out there. I mean, we have some bleachers up. You might wanna go out there and watch the movie. This will be the last chance you get to take a break and relax a little bit. Been in the bleachers about, it's dark, bleachers about fifteen minutes. Marble Mountain is behind us and all of a sudden it looked like the Fourth of July. Red tracers, green tracers, flares, stuff going everywhere. Boom, and I'm face down in the sand.

• 1:20:05Speaker 05

  And a guy sitting in the bleachers said, "Oh, I'm sorry, sir. I, I should've warned you. This happens every night. Just watch the movies. They won't shoot down here." You know, "In a few minutes, all those green tracers will be gone, 'cause they're dead. The team's up there on top of the mountain. We'll take 'em out. Everything'll be fine. Just enjoy the movie." I said, "Why?" You know, my heart's pounding. Holy shit. So, you know, the next day we got our briefing. And, and I, you know, I had to pick a code name, so I picked the dynamite code name.

• 1:20:44Speaker 05

  Then I went to, up to Fubai, where, you know, John Myers was already up there. I went to Fubai, we got off, it was about five or six, I was going up there and the Sergeant Major came out and he had a whole list. He got us all together and he said, "All right." And he read the names off and he said, "All of you guys are gonna leave tomorrow to go back down toward Nitrang to one zero school to learn how to be a SOG team leader." I said, "What? You didn't read my name off? Thompson? Oh, uh, no, you're not going down there.

• 1:21:28Speaker 05

  You're SF qualified, you're Ranger qualified. I'm putting you on a team this afternoon. You don't need to go down there. What you don't know, that's gonna be taught down there, the team's gonna teach you over the next few days before you go on your first mission."

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  Wow. And then, he said, you know, tomorrow morning, I need you to report into the, to the S4. Sergeant Jones has a mission he'd like for you to help him with that I need an officer for. If you would help him for that, and then we'll link you up with your team and you can get started. Okay. They put me in quarters, went to S4 the next morning, and the sergeant said, we've, we've had some casualties, and we have their personal effects here, they've all been packed up in duffel bags.

• 1:22:29Speaker 05

  And before we can ship them back to their families, their personal effects back to their families, the, the effects need to be signed, you know, reviewed and signed off by an officer. So I need you to just go through each of these seven duffel bags, make sure there's nothing in there that would be classified, no pictures, no, you know, anything that could be classified, and pack them back up, sign the sheet, and we can get them out of here.

• 1:23:05Speaker 05

  First duffel bag I picked up, friend of mine, home for a break. He, he went, um... Sorry.

• 1:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  It's okay.

• 1:23:25Speaker 05

  He went, he went about thirty days, you know, before me, and, you know, just disappeared. Nobody knew what he, where he went, what assignment he got when he got there. He just went into a black hole. And, you know, so he's been there thirty days, and I'm inventorying his personal effects to send back to his family. And...

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  SOG got real.

• 1:23:57Speaker 05

  So, did that, went and linked up with the team and, you know, went to work. Started training with the team because we had a mission coming up in a few days.

• 1:24:11Speaker 05

  Trying to learn everything I could before we went out. But anyway, that was a long story of how I got to. What was in the bag? Um, he had, you know, some civilian clothes, um, letters, you know, to his parents. I mean, you know, people's personal kinds of things like that. There were letters that, you know, that had come from their families. Um, there were letters they had written that they hadn't mailed yet.

• 1:24:44Speaker 05

  Things they'd had in their hooch, the personal kinds of things that they would put in there. So, I mean, probably half to two thirds of it, you know, I took out.

• 1:24:57Speaker 05

  But I had to read the letters, you know, to their families. And, you know, that was brutal, just brutal. And you were close with him? Yeah, I, I just, anyway. What was his name? Uh, Stacks, um, Lieutenant Stacks, Stan Stacks. And, um, yeah.

• 1:25:26Speaker 05

  You know, I, we went through, uh, the officer court, the South Course up there and, you know, hung out some after that. But it was just a shock to my system all of the first bag, you know? The, the duffel bag with your name stencil on the side of it. And I picked that up and it just, holy cow. Man. Now I know where he went, he went to SOG. And like my friend had told me, you know, a couple of days before, don't volunteer for SOG. You're a dead man walking if you do. And then, you know, here's, here's Stacks all of a sudden. I'm sorry.

• 1:26:07Speaker 05

  So, um, I mean, I, I got put right to work, which, you know.

• 1:26:15Speaker 05

  I'd rather get to work. Let's go do it. I learn fast. If you show me, I'll learn it. Wasn't expecting to get ambushed first time out.

• 1:26:28Shawn Ryan?

  Let's take a quick break.

• 1:26:29Speaker 05

  Sure.

• 1:26:30Shawn Ryan?

  When we come back, we'll get into your first mission.

• 1:26:32Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 1:26:36Speaker 07

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee. Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care

• 1:27:21Speaker 07

  to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the House Majority PAC dot com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 1:27:45Speaker 00

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

• 1:27:48Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

• 1:27:49Speaker 00

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

• 1:27:54Speaker 01

  Tom Cruise is. Digger got us into this mess. And Digger's gonna dig us up. From the director of Birdman and the Revenant.

• 1:28:01Speaker 02

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

• 1:28:06Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 1:28:09Speaker 02

  I'm not the first then.

• 1:28:10Speaker 01

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

• 1:28:17Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Dick. We're back from the break, and we're getting ready to get into your first mission with Sog. But, you know, something I found interesting that you didn't mention is Sog did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention, correct? Right. Why is that?

• 1:28:36Speaker 05

  Well, we were not supposed to be in the countries we were going into.

• 1:28:40Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:28:41Speaker 05

  We didn't have permission to go into those countries. So we, all missions were conducted without ID cards, which you can't do, and be covered with a Geneva Convention, no dog tags, nothing, in the beginning, nothing that said US on it. Now, later on, M16s and Kar-15s and those types of weapons became so ubiquitous in that area that anybody could be carrying something, a weapon that said US on it.

• 1:29:23Speaker 05

  So they took the restriction of that. In the beginning, you carried a, you know, a Sten gun or Swedish K or something like that, rather than American guns. So they took that off, but because we had no identification of any type on us, then we were considered spies if we were caught.

• 1:29:46Shawn Ryan?

  Is that what?

• 1:29:46Speaker 05

  And it was also, it gave the US government plausible deniability that they didn't have anything to do with us.

• 1:29:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's, that's what prompted the different uniforms and different gear and everything. Wow.

• 1:30:02Speaker 05

  Now, you know, like I said later, I mean, we went to the regular jungle fatigues or tiger stripes or whatever.

• 1:30:11Shawn Ryan?

  Very interesting. Let's get into your first mission.

• 1:30:16Speaker 05

  Okay. We had kind of started it before where they assigned me right off the bat. So even, the SAG rule was even if...

• 1:30:29Speaker 05

  You come in as an officer like I did. When you went to a team, you could not go as the team leader. You had to go out as an assistant team leader for a certain number of missions until the team leader that was vetting you said, you know, this guy's ready to lead a team. So I went out with Team RT Alabama to start with to get, to learn really what it was like and get vetted because it's, it's just a river.

• 1:31:11Speaker 05

  But there was something about when you crossed that river into that other country, everything was different. I mean, you didn't make contact with, with 20 or 30 guys and have a gun battle. You made contact with 500. You know, it's like kicking the top off of an anthill. I mean, they would just swarm. Once they figured out where you were, they were coming from everywhere to try to get you. And the other, the other thing, it was kind of reminds me of jiu-jitsu in that with jiu-jitsu, you, you and your opponent kind of lay down on the floor and you get your best hold on

• 1:31:56Speaker 05

  each other and then they say, go, and you try to fight your way out of it. With us, they would take us into Laos or wherever, set us down, put the NVA all around, just hundreds and hundreds of them all around us with us in the middle, and then they'd say, go. Go accomplish your mission and then see if you can get out. So you, you started off surrounded with every mission. Shish. And, and just.

• 1:32:30Speaker 05

  There are just so many of them when you did. And then I worked mostly up north with Laos, you know, North Vietnam. The terrain up there is very mountainous and double, triple canopy jungle, thick vegetation. I mean, most of the time when I made contact, you would, you know, this close to me. I mean, ten meters, maybe fifteen meters. That's when we made contact and I probably couldn't see the other twenty people who were with you because they were standing a couple of meters farther back in the vegetation. I could, I could hear the gunshots.

• 1:33:13Speaker 05

  I could see the bushes moving as, you know, the blast came and things like that. So a lot of times I was shooting at just movement, shooting at sound, shooting at the one or two that I could see and bullets were just coming from everywhere. You were never shooting at one, you're not think you're shooting at one person, but there's thirty or forty shooting back at you. And it was, when you made contact in Vietnam, which we'd go do a lot just for practice so you can have a live shoot back target. You know, you run up on five or ten guys and have a gunfight.

• 1:33:56Speaker 05

  But when five or ten turns into a hundred or two hundred and there are more coming, it becomes difficult. So the hardest or the easiest thing is to get inserted. And sometimes that's a real problem, but still getting inserted seems to be the easiest part. Accomplishing the mission becomes really difficult. Getting out becomes almost impossible. And, you know, it's like that almost every mission. And you get in trying to accomplish your mission with everything going on, but then how do you get out?

• 1:34:41Speaker 05

  I mean, it can go on for hours and hours and hours trying to get out because you can't get the fire suppressed enough to get a helicopter in. And I mentioned Prairie Fire Emergency earlier.

• 1:34:56Speaker 05

  If we were about to be overrun, if I call on the radio and declare Prairie Fire Emergency, everything within range that has ordinance is getting diverted to me to try to help get me out.

• 1:35:12Speaker 05

  So all of a sudden, I mean, there were times when I'd have fourteen gunships in orbit waiting their turn to come in, you know, five or six F-4 Phantom in orbit ready to come in, some, you know, other types of aircraft, all in orbit, just waiting their turn to come in and expend their ordinance on the bad guys so I could try to get out. So, anyway.

• 1:35:39Shawn Ryan?

  What was it like when you, I mean, you show up as an officer to the most elite unit at the time, and they want you to lead one? And how are you received by those guys?

• 1:35:57Speaker 05

  Um.

• 1:35:58Shawn Ryan?

  Young guy, twenty-one years old, only been to the schools, you know, qualified SF, qualified Ranger, but, you know, even in today, that doesn't mean much when you show up to the team. I can't imagine what the reception's like for a, for a junior officer to show up at a team like that, of those type of men to be let.

• 1:36:19Speaker 05

  I, John Meyer might have told you what the perception was.

• 1:36:25Shawn Ryan?

  He did.

• 1:36:25Speaker 05

  Yeah. He, he told me one time that, um, he said, you, you were one of the few officers that actually wanted to go out and was not afraid to go out and could perform when you were out there. And he said, you know, that made you different than most of the officers. And most officers, they went out a few times and they didn't go back out again.

• 1:36:58Speaker 05

  You know, they they found another job. Um, but, you know, enlisted, NCOs did that too. I'm telling you, when you go over there and experience what it's like, you have to think long and hard before you say, I'm, I'm ready to go back. Because it was just so different when you went out there. And, you know, I was, I thought I was giving a, a fair chance. Um, Sergeant Gentry Deck, um, he didn't seem to have any qualms. He just, you know, see what you can do.

• 1:37:41Speaker 05

  Uh, it's my team and, you know, I'll tell you what I want you to do. And you, you do it. And, you know, I was okay with that.

• 1:37:50Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh.

• 1:37:52Speaker 05

  And, you know, the, the guys in, um, when you, when you went into the lounge, the club, um, you know, you could sit with more senior guys there, people with more experience and, you know, they would chat with you. And I, I think first, the second day I was there, um, this E7 was talking to me. Came over, met me and, and we, we started talking and, and at one point he said, uh, let me, let me tell you something, Lieutenant.

• 1:38:28Speaker 05

  Never, ever shoot an NVA less than three or four times. Every time you shoot one, you shoot them three or four times. If they twitch, you shoot them three or four more times. Don't ever assume that you shot somebody and they're dead. Because we've had a lot of SOG people killed, shot in the back because they walked past the NVA that they had shot and thought was dead. Damn. And he said, "You make sure you do the job the first time." And, you know, that was, that was a rule I adopted. There's no single shots.

• 1:39:12Speaker 05

  There's no double tap. If I shoot you, I'm gonna shoot you. I'm gonna, you're gonna get hit a lot of times. And most of the time, I shot short bursts on automatic. I'd shoot, you know, three or four round bursts. Because I want to make sure I hit you. I want to make sure you're going down. And, you know, if you don't go down fast enough, I'm gonna hit you with three or four more rounds. And, you know, that was one of the reasons I carried a lot of ammunition. So, um, Deck was very open to having me on there, particularly, um, after, you know, we had the first mission.

• 1:39:56Speaker 05

  We'd go out, we're doing a last light, um, insertion, and we were gonna go do a wire tap once we got on the ground. So we, we'd go out, it's starting to get dark. We circle around and we come in on our run toward the LZ. You know, Deck gave a thumbs up. That means get out on the skids, thirty seconds out. I climbed out on the skids. The other American climbed out on my side with me. And the door gunners right next to me, we were on a Huey. And we're coming in really low, and we're just going across the trees.

• 1:40:41Speaker 05

  I mean, the skids are almost dragging the top of the canopy. And we're going slow, and I was thinking, "An NVA could knock me off of the skid with a rock." I mean, we're just barely moving. I'm exposed to the world standing out here. And wow.

• 1:41:04Speaker 05

  There's a little village over there, it looks like six or seven hooches in a little village. That wasn't in our briefing. There was nothing said about a village being that close to where we were going in. So we come on up and, and they had blown a hole in the canopy and it was just barely big enough for the topper to just set straight down in. So we're settling down in there and I'm, I'm scanning, uh, you know, the tree line and I'm still thinking, I'm just, you know, a setting duck out here.

• 1:41:47Speaker 05

  And we get down, it looks like as far as we're gonna be able to go, we're still about six feet from the bottom of, of the bomb crater. Um, and I'm thinking, we, I gotta jump off the skid down in this thing with eighty pounds of gear on, I'm gonna break both legs, you know, when I hit down there. And while I'm, I'm having that thought, you know, it's time to suck it up and just jump. So, you know, I bent my knees so I could, you know, kinda hop off. And as I bent down, this guy, NVA pops up right there, ten feet away from me, you know, in the bomb crater, AK forty-seven.

• 1:42:31Speaker 05

  Oh, we killed him. So instead of jumping in, I straightened my legs up and hopped back up on the edge of the floor of the aircraft. As I do that, he pulls the trigger on the AK. My legs moved just in time, they went right across in front of me and hit the American that was on the other side of me. They hit his legs and took him out from under him, he started to fall. I grabbed the back of his harness with my left hand, I put a half a magazine into that guy. Um, I dragged him back up into the aircraft, you know, and he's yelling and hollering, you know, about his legs, blood's going everywhere.

• 1:43:14Speaker 05

  There are two, um, indigenous behind me, both opened fire, uh, out, going out of the helicopter, one on each side of me. And I'm getting powder burns from their muzzle flashes, going death as that, as that's happening. And, you know, the door gunners opened up. And it's just unbelievable, the number of bullets that all of a sudden are coming, crisscrossing inside the aircraft, hitting the aircraft. You can hear the metal clangs as they hit. I see another one. Now, I finish off my magazine on him. Now I've got to reload.

• 1:43:55Speaker 05

  And that's when I discovered what stress does to your fine motor coordination. So I reached to try to get a magazine out of my pouch. My hand is just soaked with the blood that's squirting out of his leg. I'm trying to get the magazine out. I couldn't get it. It was stuck in there. My hand was slick. I finally got it out. But when I went to put it in, my hand was shaking so much. I couldn't get it in the magazine well at first. And I finally got it in there so I could start returning fire. The next one, you know, came right out of the pouch. It wasn't that big of a deal, but it went in

• 1:44:36Speaker 05

  a lot easier. But I had never experienced that level of fear before. I mean, I just, and it's hard to believe today that that many bullets could come at you that fast, and none of them hit you. So, start returning fire, knocked some guys that who were in the trees, knocked them out. The same thing that's happening, you know, we had two Cobra gunships that were coming in, you know, right beside us. They opened up with their miniguns. And so you have, you know, 4,000 rounds a minute coming down from, from the

• 1:45:18Speaker 05

  Cobras, hitting right next to us, ricochets going everywhere. You know, there's tracers all over the place. They're firing, the next two Cobras right behind them are firing 40 millimeter, you know, and that's exploding all around us. Everybody in the aircraft on both sides are shooting. You can see the tracers crisscrossing on the inside. And, you know, the pilot, I think, I think that's the first time he'd been ambushed like that with people that close. And it seemed like he just...

• 1:45:54Speaker 05

  froze or stopped or something because we were just sitting there. I was thinking we need to be going up, getting out of this hole. And finally, we started moving, the aircraft shaking, trembling all over and going up. The bad guys are all shifting their fire up, the Cobras are coming in. You know, they're just circling around and coming in. And then we had some Skyraiders, A1 Skyraiders coming in, flying across in front of us and dropping 250 pound bombs, not right there, but off to the side.

• 1:46:33Speaker 05

  I found out later, those hooches in the village over there were not hooches. They were tanks with thatch put around them to make them look like, you know, they were thatched houses over there. They were actually tanks and they started moving when all this started happening. You know, so the A1s went after them and started putting the bombs. So with all the other stuff that's going on, when those things start, the bombs start going off, now you're getting these blast waves coming across that's trying to knock the helicopter into the trees, you know, and we're getting hit with the blast.

• 1:47:12Speaker 05

  But finally, you know, we got up and we're able to start moving and flying away from it and we're still getting 51 calibers and things coming up at us. And I looked over, you know, at Sergeant Deck and he looked around at me and he's grinning like a horse eating Saul Briers and giving me a thumbs up and I'm thinking, oh my God, he thinks that's the coolest thing he's done lately. He enjoyed that and he did. And I thought, wow, you know, he's done this, you know, quite a few times, so it's not his first radio, but he enjoyed that.

• 1:47:57Speaker 05

  Scared the crap out of me. Then we get back and we have the conversation of, you know, Lieutenant, if you don't learn machines magazines faster, you're gonna die.

• 1:48:09Speaker 05

  But every time, except for the last time, every time we went on a mission, as we would be extracted, when I'd look over at him, I'd see that big grin and thumb up. He was so excited about that, so, yeah, that got my attention. I bet it did. Unfortunately, before, before the mission, the camp commander up there had called me over, wanted to talk, and he said, I just, I know this is your first mission, I want you to understand, we're not gonna put you out there where we can't get you back. If we put you in there, we're gonna bring you back. I said, okay.

• 1:48:52Speaker 05

  So, when I got back from that mission, got to the hooch, and spent some time with Jack Daniels, I decided to go talk to the camp commander. Learning experience, you know, to go to the camp commander and tell him his baby is ugly, there's some problems with the process. But, you know, he didn't fire me, that was good. He, he recognized, you know, I'd had a, you know, significant experience there, and then compounded it with a little Jack Daniels, and, so, I didn't do that again. I learned, definitely learned from that, but...

• 1:49:36Speaker 05

  What did you think the problems were? I thought part of it was, at FUBI, we, we had a range, we had a big open area, huge open area, that we would go to, to do immediate action drills, to, you know, test fire different weapons and things, and there were nothing, you could shoot in any direction out there, and I mean, he could practice, but it's not the jungle. The jungle is very different, you know, when I'm out where I can, I can see a thousand meters out in front of me.

• 1:50:10Speaker 05

  That's different where I'm, you know, ten meters, fifteen meters out. It's about the range of my vision. And, and then after that mission, you know, the next one we got on the ground and just moving through the jungle and particularly moving once contact is made. It's very different. So when we got down to Da Nang, we had a jungle we could go practice in. Monkey Mountain, we could go over there and you were in a real jungle. So you could practice movement, falling over logs, stepping in holes and all that kind of stuff. But, but I learned a lot from that. One of, you know, one of the things was I want more ammunition.

• 1:50:56Speaker 05

  And I've got to be able to get the magazines out.

• 1:51:01Speaker 05

  So had, had the magazines stuffed in the canteen pouch. So what I, I did was I took a piece of parachute cord and some duct tape and I made a loop, taped it on the side of the magazine. So there was a loop sticking up on that center magazine. I could just stick my finger in and I could jerk that magazine out. And once it was out, the rest of them were loose. It was, they were easy to get out.

• 1:51:28Shawn Ryan?

  You came up with that yourself?

• 1:51:30Speaker 05

  I had heard somebody talk about, you know, putting a loop on it or a string on it or something.

• 1:51:36Shawn Ryan?

  Still use that to this day.

• 1:51:37Speaker 05

  And I thought, that makes sense. So I, I tried that and, you know, you know, when I was practicing, that first one would come right out. So I started, you know, doing them all like that.

• 1:51:51Speaker 05

  But just, you know, that was part of, was learning that, making sure I had them in the right place, making sure, since I was right-handed, the grenade for, in the pouch on the right-hand side, magazines on the left-hand side, you know, so you could, you could go with them. Water was in the back.

• 1:52:13Speaker 05

  And then after a couple of times on the ground, I started to flatten out what was on my waist.

• 1:52:20Speaker 05

  To me, it seemed like the closer you could get to the ground.

• 1:52:25Speaker 05

  The better your chance of surviving. Because I'd be laying on the ground and my rucksack's getting hit. So I thought if I could get a little bit closer, that gets me.

• 1:52:37Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:52:38Speaker 05

  A little ways farther. I mean, I'd come back and my rucksack shot up on just about every mission. I'm laying down, but the bullets had come in that close.

• 1:52:48Shawn Ryan?

  Better sight picture, too.

• 1:52:49Speaker 05

  Yeah. And so, you know, I started making little changes like that. And then, once I became teamlier, then I, you know, implemented those changes to the, to the whole team. But some of them, along the way, you know, I would make suggestions to, to Deck and say, "What if, what if, as soon as we get in, we get into our remain overnight position,

• 1:53:20Speaker 05

  quick meeting before everybody goes down, this is the direction we're gonna go if we get hit. This is our avenue of escape. Here's where we think they're coming. The claymores are out there." You know, so we, we started having that little quick debrief,

• 1:53:40Speaker 05

  you know, like that. And then started the after-action reviews where we, we did kind of a formal after-action review with the team.

• 1:53:51Speaker 05

  Running, I implemented, or talk Deck into implementing a, a running password. If we got scattered and you're running and you're coming up on somebody,

• 1:54:06Speaker 05

  we would have a running password.

• 1:54:10Speaker 05

  Example, bug fuzz.

• 1:54:15Speaker 05

  You think, "That makes sense." Well, not only does it not necessarily make sense, it was hard for them to say. So if I don't speak the language, and I hear you say something in bug fuzz, I can't understand what you're saying. I don't know what it means. So it's hard for me, as the NVA, to use that same word to come running into you. So every time we were compromised and had to use a running password, the next time we went out, we had a different one. So I kept changing those. And, yeah, so just putting things in like that.

• 1:55:00Speaker 05

  And Deck was pretty good about going along with that. And then Christmas, Christmas we went out, and it was gonna be the last mission that this team ran out of food by. They were gonna close food by down. And we got in really heavy contact. And when we got, finally got on the helicopter, and they were just really pummeling the helicopter. And we got on it, and we started lifting off. I looked over at Deck, expecting, you know, the big grin and the thumb up. And he just looked up at me,

• 1:55:45Speaker 05

  and then he looked back down. I was, "Oh, crap." You know, he must have gotten hit. I mean, he's never done that before. He must have got hit. So I kinda crawled over there to him and grabbed him by the shoulder and said, "Are you okay?" And, you know, he said, "No. I'll talk to you when we land." So when we got on the ground, I grabbed him up and I, "What's going on?" And he said, "I'm done."

• 1:56:23Speaker 05

  I'm done.

• 1:56:26Speaker 05

  When we get to Da Nang, I'm gonna have a different job. Don't tell the team, I'll tell the team, but I don't wanna tell them right now. But I won't be on the team after this, after we get to Da Nang.

• 1:56:44Speaker 05

  And, you know, I thought that was good. He had recognized it was time to do something different.

• 1:56:54Speaker 05

  And I found some people couldn't or wouldn't recognize that.

• 1:57:04Speaker 05

  You've gotta know, you've gotten up to the edge where you're now dangerous. Dangerous to yourself, dangerous to the rest of the team. And you need to take yourself out, because even though you had to sign up for six missions, or six months,

• 1:57:23Speaker 05

  after the first mission, if you went to your team leader and said, "I'm done, I don't want this anymore, I can't do this anymore. I want out." That was fine. You know, you would be taken out and either put somewhere else in Da Nang, or wherever you were, or back to Special Forces, and go to, you know, a regular Special Forces unit or something.

• 1:57:51Speaker 05

  Because you didn't need to be going out there if,

• 1:57:55Speaker 05

  you know, once you had decided that you can do that.

• 1:58:00Speaker 05

  Because the volume of fire was so heavy, so intense when you were out there.

• 1:58:09Speaker 05

  All decisions had to be made quickly. And you had to continue to adapt, because those suckers were coming at you.

• 1:58:18Speaker 05

  And just, you know, with me, it was, now I'm gonna be the leader. I need to be learning more. And I started watching the NVA. What did they do when we make contact? Is there a pattern to how they behave when we make contact? And I started to see a pattern. And just a simple example. If you're an NVA and we make contact and you go down behind a tree,

• 1:58:59Speaker 05

  95% of the time, when you decide to return fire back at me, you will come around the right side of the tree. From your perspective, the right side of the tree. The muzzle or the AK will come around. Your forehead will be right behind it. If I know that, so I'm out here. From my perspective, I watch the left side of the tree, and I'll see you start to come around it. And I've already zeroed in on it. And I'm ready. When I see that muzzle come around, I know your forehead's right behind it. And I'm ready to, you know, launch three or four rounds at you. And I told my team, I implemented with the next team.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  And I said, "They'll do that every time." I said, "Watch. Just watch. They'll do that. And you can take them out." And we came back and we debriefed it, and they said, "Wow. They do. They shoot around that side of the tree, or rock, or whatever it is." I said, "Okay. Here's the big thing you gotta realize."

• 2:00:09Speaker 05

  We do that too. We're humans. We're gonna shoot around that right side of the tree every time unless we train it out of ourselves.

• 2:00:19Shawn Ryan?

  Or you're left-handed.

• 2:00:20Speaker 05

  Or you're left-handed. So we've gotta practice doing that. But we know where they are. When they go down, almost without fail, they will shoot from where they went down. When we go down, we've gotta roll one way or the other. Don't shoot from where you went down. Because they're gonna shoot right where they saw you go down last time. You gotta move before they start shooting and they get you. And there's a whole series of things like that that I call the human reaction to combat that humans do instinctively. And they don't even realize they're doing it most of the time. But if you know how they're gonna react, you know which way they're gonna run and what

• 2:01:03Speaker 05

  they're gonna do, that gives you the advantage.

• 2:01:08Speaker 05

  It gives you the advantage with close quarters in combat. You know, when I watch people, you know, from the catwalk, I watch people go through the rooms, clearing them and everything, and I think, oh my God. You know, if that joker was in there with live ammo shooting at you, he's gonna take you out. And, you know, they're just, in the US, for example, if

• 2:01:38Speaker 05

  if you come into this building

• 2:01:42Speaker 05

  and I know you're coming in as a SWAT team, for example, or as a stacked with military you're coming in,

• 2:01:51Speaker 05

  I can take you out, but just by shooting a row across the wall there, I'll get half your team. Because you're all leaning up against that, you know, drywall, and that bullet's gonna go right through it. So I can take out a bunch of you right there. There's a whole series of things. Don't stand close to the wall. If I shoot at the wall and I hit the wall, even drywall, a lot of times you can get a ricochet that's gonna come off that wall just a little ways. And if you're standing a couple of feet from it, it's gonna hit you. How you hold your weapon when you go in there. And I won't go into all that right now, but I really started working with them on

• 2:02:34Speaker 05

  what I was, what was called quick kill when I went through the training. How to shoot from the waist and hit your target every time you don't have to aim. We went through a whole course of brag on that with BB guns and then graduated the M16s. And some of the work I do with, you know, active shooters and stuff like that and showing the police. You and I both turn, turn into the hall at the same time. I'll hit you three times before you can get your weapon ready to fire.

• 2:03:12Speaker 05

  Because I'm, I'm already ready to fire. I just need to see a target. And I can hit you without moving my weapon at all. And you've still got yours at a down port and you've got to try to bring it up. And what'll happen in that situation is as you're bringing it up, you'll be able to spend the rest of your life

• 2:03:34Speaker 05

  thinking about why you did it that way. Of course, the rest of your life is going to be about a half a second, but I know there are lawyers, I know there are safety things, but you've got to think about your opponent and about how to take them out. But anyway, but we did all kind of practice on the range. Pictures in the, in the books out on the range of us shooting from there, putting the silhouettes out and practicing hitting those things. If you're 20 meters or closer, I'll hit you every time without aiming. I used to put five silhouettes out there and, you know, let one of the team members say go.

• 2:04:18Speaker 05

  And as I was falling to the ground, I'd hit all five targets before I hit the ground.

• 2:04:25Speaker 05

  And you can do that. But you gotta practice.

• 2:04:29Shawn Ryan?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:04:29Speaker 05

  Um, and they loved it. You gave them techniques they could use that would work. They loved it.

• 2:04:39Shawn Ryan?

  How did it feel to take over the team?

• 2:04:41Speaker 05

  I was excited. I really was. Um, a little nervous because I didn't know this team. Uh, I took over the team when we moved to Da Nang. They actually split up, um, Alabama and kinda sent them to different places. And cause Deck was going to a different job. And I took over, uh, RT Michigan. The onesie road, the morning he was gone, there was a guy, Spec Four on the team. Uh, Eldon Bargewell, um, hard dude, good dude, you know? SOG legend, Delta Force Commander forever.

• 2:05:23Speaker 05

  I mean, just you name it, special ops wise, he did it. Um, but at that time, he was my assistant team leader. Um, so working in, working with him was, was good. We got another American in for a while. Um, and it was a Mountain Yard team, good team. Um, and Eldon and I worked together, you know, really well. So.

• 2:05:50Shawn Ryan?

  What was your first mission as team leader?

• 2:05:53Speaker 05

  Uh, the first one, oh, uh, it was one where we were gonna try a new insertion technique. There was a, a company of the Hundred and First that had moved up, right up next to the border, Lausanne border. So the plan was.

• 2:06:18Speaker 05

  They were gonna insert us into the one hundred and first company. So on one of their resupply missions and where they were bringing in some additional new recruits in there, we were gonna put the team on those helicopters, dressed like the one hundred and first, steel pot, all that kind of stuff. We were gonna fly in, get off, just like we were new people coming in. And then we would spend the night there, in their perimeter. And at first light, we would go down to the stream, big stream that was down there with the water supply.

• 2:07:02Speaker 05

  So we would go down with some one hundred and first guys, dressed like them, to get water. Except when we got down there, we would change in our Superman suit, stuff the one hundred and first stuff in a bag. Those guys would get the water and go back, you know, to the perimeter. And we would move out across the river into, into the jungle. So we, we would make, you know, that clandestine insertion. First time, and really the only time that I ever had a chance to have, to be within range of artillery. So one hundred and first had set up a fire base out there to support them.

• 2:07:47Speaker 05

  So, once we, we got inserted and had a conversation with the company first sergeant coming over and saying, "All right, I want you guys to dig in around here." And my interpreter looked at me and said, "We no dig." I said, "Tonight, we do. We no dig." I said, "Look, they're probably gonna get hit really hard tonight. Bullets are gonna be coming from everywhere."

• 2:08:20Speaker 05

  And you guys look like the guys who are shooting at them. You need to be down in a hole. Or you're gonna get shot from inside to the rear. We did. So, okay. So they dug in. Sure enough, we got pounded that night. And, you know, the hole saved us.

• 2:08:40Speaker 05

  But that was cool. But I had, you know, that evening, I had met with the company commander and a fire support officer and a couple of lieutenants. And I kind of laid out for them. This, this is what we're gonna do. And here's, here's what I need. I want targets, you know, artillery targets plotted on these areas right here, these coordinates. And I want them named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

• 2:09:13Speaker 05

  I want to be able to just call up and say, from Monday, you know, right 200, down 100, fire for effect.

• 2:09:24Speaker 05

  And it was funny, you know, he was company commander and he looked at me like, wow. That sounds, I never heard of that before. That sounds cool. I said, when I need it, I need it.

• 2:09:38Speaker 05

  So, um, we went in, crossed over, and we were doing, there was a hatchet force that was across the road on the other side. And we were supposed to make sure no one approached them from the side of the road we were on.

• 2:09:59Speaker 05

  So we had the targets plotted out there. And we heard some mortars that first night firing, you know, at the hatchet force.

• 2:10:11Speaker 05

  I could tell they were close to one of our targets. So I just called it in. And they dropped, you know, some 105 rounds over there. And that shut the mortars up from that position. So, so we started doing that. But after about three days,

• 2:10:31Speaker 05

  the launch commander decided we needed to be resupplied.

• 2:10:37Speaker 05

  Ammunition and water. And I, Covey said they were coming. I said, "No, we don't want to resupply." "Don't..." "Well, he needs your grid coordinates so they can just, they can hover and drop the supplies down to the camp." He goes, "No, I'm not going to tell him where I am."

• 2:10:56Speaker 05

  So, a few minutes Covey came back and he said, "If you're not going to tell him where you are, he's going to drop them at the last set of coordinates we had on you guys." "No, when you do that, they're going to know right where we are." And it's too late. I can see them kind of...

• 2:11:15Speaker 05

  So, sure enough, they dropped all that stuff down. So, we ran down and grabbed most of it and hid it, took the water with us and moved out quickly, but boy, they were, they were on us shortly after that. And, you know, things didn't go well. Artillery worked pretty good, but there were just too many of them and now they knew where we were.

• 2:11:40Speaker 05

  We, um...

• 2:11:43Speaker 05

  Before I got that big insight about if you stop moving, they're going to surround you. We got into those rocks and I stopped us, thought we could defend from there. Big mistake. They just circled us, just like a big amoeba when we were their supper. The only way we could get out was to go up. So, eventually you got the fire suppressed enough, they could drop McGuire rigs down for us and, and pull us out. So, I sent Bargewell and the other American and a couple of indigenous out on the first aircraft. I stayed there with the other two indigenous and, you know, just kind of battled it out.

• 2:12:25Speaker 05

  So, we could fight in place and die. We could try to run and escape someplace and get away. Or we could go up those ropes.

• 2:12:38Speaker 05

  I decided we'll go up the ropes, but we hadn't, there was nobody to give us fire support from the ground. So, man, they're just shooting away at us as we were going up. I got a couple rounds in the radio. Killed my radio. Big chunk of shrapnel went into my survival radio that I was wearing right over my heart. It buried itself in there, killed that radio. And, you know, both the indiges got wounded as we were going up and we're flying along

• 2:13:19Speaker 05

  7,000 feet, 100 miles an hour, oscillating back and forth. I could see my rope fraying on the edge of the floor of the helicopter. No radio, no way to call and say, "I'm developing a little problem up there." I couldn't tell him that the other guys were wounded. But we made it to a fire support base. And in the book, there's a picture in there of a helicopter coming in to a fire support base, and you can see three guys hanging on the end of ropes down below them.

• 2:14:04Speaker 05

  The guy that's the lowest on the rope is me, and the other two are hanging right above me. So what had happened is Bargewell and his little group came in first. These guys on the fire support, but they'd never seen anybody coming from that side of the border or hanging under a helicopter like that. So there was a guy there who had bought a brand-new mini Polaroid camera before he came over to Vietnam, and he brought it with him.

• 2:14:39Speaker 05

  So he saw Bargewell and his group, you know, come. He ran and got his camera, came back out in time to see me and my two guys coming in and took a picture of it. Now, they set us down, they got us in a helicopter and they started, just as they started lift off the ground, this guy comes running over, holding his arm up in the air with something in it. I reached down and took it as we, as we lifted off and it was a picture that he took as we were coming in. Had no clue who he was, but he, he took an actual picture of us live coming in, hanging on those ropes.

• 2:15:21Shawn Ryan?

  Jeez.

• 2:15:22Speaker 05

  So that's pretty cool.

• 2:15:23Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:24Speaker 05

  So, still have it, put it in the book.

• 2:15:26Speaker 07

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• 2:15:57Speaker 06

  Bonjour, compadre. It's the

• 2:15:59Speaker 02

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 2:16:01Speaker 06

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• 2:16:26Speaker 05

  But, anyway, we got back. Good, um, good debriefing. One of the, the things that I had figured out by then was doing an after-action review is not just to figure out what went well, what didn't go so well, what you might want to change, but it's

• 2:16:51Speaker 05

  Psychologically, it gives me an opportunity. If I'm upset about something you did. I think you left me hanging out. You didn't have my six or whatever. It gives me a chance to bring that up. And let's get it settled, right? You get it off the chest. It gave me a chance to, you know, I could facilitate what was going on. So you guys didn't go duke it out after a while. But we could get that resolved and get your stress level back down. And, you know, we could move forward. And then we also did. And these are the post-training things we're gonna do based on what we did out there. One of them in this case was.

• 2:17:34Speaker 05

  Why didn't we not have those stupid harnesses on to start with? I mean, you could wear a Swiss seat. You could have it on. You could have it, you know, just wear it a little loose if you wanted to. And all you have to do is tighten the knot up. And you could snap on to that joker and go. But to try to put on a Swiss seat. When you got bullets coming at you from every direction. Then you're trying, you're flat down on your back trying to get that thing on. And you're trying to, you know, return fire. I mean, that's not easy. Why not put it on beforehand? I mean, you know, just little things like that that you can think of.

• 2:18:17Speaker 05

  Now, let's go practice that. Let's implement that as a SOP. So we started doing things like that. And it was pretty good until Dick Meadows came in and said. Can Bartzwell take over the team? I said, sure. He said, no problem. He knows exactly what he's doing.

• 2:18:48Speaker 05

  So, anyway.

• 2:18:51Shawn Ryan?

  Where did you go from there?

• 2:18:55Speaker 05

  That's when I did the run on the beach with Dick Meadows the next morning and did the, let's review all the people.

• 2:19:05Speaker 05

  And then he put me on this other super top secret mission to go into the Magia Pass. And actually, John Meyer had also been given that mission and they counseled it at the last minute. They gave it to me. I told the people in Saigon when I went down for a briefing, I said, "This is not gonna work." I said, "I know you think there's no one up on that ridge that's gonna be protecting those convoys going through there." And I said, "I guarantee you there are people up there. Why do you think they're not up there? Well, we fly over there all the time and nobody shoots at us." I said, "Of course they're not gonna shoot at you.

• 2:19:49Speaker 05

  They don't want you to know they're up there. But when you put a team up there, they're gonna walk right into them."

• 2:19:57Speaker 05

  So, here's my recommendation.

• 2:20:03Speaker 05

  Plant a target a thousand meters away on that ridge line. Let's hit that target about, you know, the elf four is about two o'clock in the morning. While that's being hit, let's fly a Huey at about three hundred feet, lights out, full blast, coming across this little clearing that's on that ridge.

• 2:20:28Speaker 05

  I'll slide out of the helicopter.

• 2:20:32Speaker 05

  No reserve, 'cause you won't need it, too low. I'll just ease out. I'll be on the ground within a minute or so, pack it up, hide it. I'll move up there to the ridge. They'll never know I'm there. I'm one person, they're not gonna find me. And worst case is, they do find me. And what do you lose? You lose one crazy S.F. guy. Not a whole team. Not some helicopters trying to get him out.

• 2:21:03Speaker 05

  You know, I can go do that. It'll be a lot more secure and easier to do if you just let me go do it myself. Holy cow. I mean, they just went bananas. I was crazy. They had no way they were gonna let me go out by myself. So, but that mission ended up getting canceled anyway. You volunteered for a singleton mission in Vietnam? Yeah. I mean, it just looked to me like there were a lot of SOG missions where the mission was to go set on a ridgeline, or go find the location of a battalion, just go

• 2:21:45Speaker 05

  do something. Nothing kinetic about it. Just sneak and peek and find out, get the information, get it back in, get out, that I could just go do. I mean, drop me out there in the middle of the night, nobody's gonna be expecting it. Helicopter comes across that low, nobody's gonna think you're gonna parachute in. It just screams across through there, they don't see it, it's dark, they hear it, they just don't know what happened. They know it didn't stop. And, you know, I just carried a survival radio. I didn't carry the PRC-25, all that garbage. I don't need all that weight. I just need to get in there, I need to send

• 2:22:28Speaker 05

  you a signal when I'm ready to come out. And, you know, if things are too hot or too bad around that area, I'll start walking. You can pick me up somewhere else. And if you can't find me, you know I'm walking toward the border. Might take me a while, but eventually I'll get there. And Metta's, Metta said, no. You're crazy. I'm not putting you out there by yourself. He said no, camp commander said no, SOG chief said no. Can't do that.

• 2:23:12Speaker 05

  And then

• 2:23:15Speaker 05

  fate said

• 2:23:18Speaker 05

  I'm gonna activate

• 2:23:21Speaker 05

  RT dynamite.

• 2:23:24Speaker 05

  Everybody else has said no, but fate is about to say yes. You are about to be activated, dude.

• 2:23:34Speaker 05

  So that's when I did the R and R mission.

• 2:23:39Speaker 05

  Holy shit. What's going on?

• 2:23:44Speaker 05

  So

• 2:23:47Speaker 05

  yeah, I mean,

• 2:23:49Speaker 05

  I felt I was convinced I could just, I could move

• 2:23:56Speaker 05

  wider, farther, more effectively. And with some missions, you know, it was just me. I didn't need a team with me because I wasn't going out there to make contact or to fight anybody. I was to be silent, hidden, collect the information I needed, and get out.

• 2:24:19Speaker 05

  So

• 2:24:23Speaker 05

  when I did go out, it wasn't all that silent, but

• 2:24:29Speaker 05

  still worked.

• 2:24:34Speaker 05

  How many times did you do that? I only got to do it the one time.

• 2:24:40Speaker 05

  But, you know, it didn't end up, I had to go. There were a bunch of people in trouble and somebody needed to go get them and lead them out. So I did that. Can you be a little more descriptive?

• 2:24:59Speaker 05

  I, I'd just come back from a mission, a rough mission, and they were gonna give me two days.

• 2:25:08Speaker 05

  Let your team have two days, take a break before we give you your next mission. So I decided I was gonna leave camp, go downtown for a couple of days. Because if I stayed in camp, somebody was gonna find me, give me something to do. I was heading for the gate.

• 2:25:28Speaker 05

  Heard a helicopter coming. Helicopter landed on our pad, a lot of activity going on around it. And

• 2:25:38Speaker 05

  one of the, one of the people there fumbling around with the helicopter saw me walking toward the gate. He started yelling. I couldn't understand him, but, so I moved closer to him and he ran over to me and he said, "Do, do you know how to rig Maguire rigs to the floor of a helicopter so that we can use them? We've got an emergency going on."

• 2:26:05Speaker 05

  And I said, "Sure. Done that lots of times. I can rig that up." So I, I ran over. I had a, had my Car 15 and a Bandolier with me. Set that against the contents container, jumped in the helicopter, started, you know, making all the appropriate ties and fastening it down, getting them rigged and ready to go.

• 2:26:29Speaker 05

  And then the helicopter started to move.

• 2:26:33Speaker 05

  Told the crew chief, I'd say, "Hey, I'm still on here."

• 2:26:37Speaker 05

  And he said, "Sorry about that.

• 2:26:40Speaker 05

  We gotta go. We're in trouble."

• 2:26:43Speaker 05

  So, he said, "You just have to go with us." "It's okay. I mean, I don't know what you're going to do or anything, but yeah, I guess I, I'll go with you." I sat back and I just kinda started thinking about what was going on. And I had this one vision just started playing over and over in my mind and it was that the helicopter in front of us got shot down.

• 2:27:13Speaker 05

  When we got there, the only way to get to the helicopter was to go down the Maguire rig. Drop the Maguire rig and go down the rope.

• 2:27:26Speaker 05

  But it was like I was looking into a black hole. I couldn't see what was really going on. Anyway, I pulled the crew chief over and said, you know, I had this crazy vision. You know, helicopter in front of us is shot down, and now we're there. And I think I might have to go down and do something. And he said, you're crazy. I said, yep. And about 10 minutes later, he pulled me over and he said, you're not gonna believe this. They just shot down the Medevac helicopter in front of us.

• 2:27:59Speaker 05

  I said, okay, that's interesting. In my mind, I started thinking, I think RT dynamite might have just been activated.

• 2:28:11Speaker 05

  Somebody's gonna have to go down there. So when we got there, the first helicopter that they shot down, it crashed and burned.

• 2:28:23Speaker 05

  Three survivors, the pilot, the copilot, and NCO that was on near with them.

• 2:28:33Speaker 05

  The Medevac got there, dropped a Maguire, a jungle penetrator down. They put the copilot and sergeant on the jungle penetrator. Medevac started pulling it up. It got hit, lost power. It went forward, and the jungle penetrator is just like a big grappling hook that you're sitting on. So they were about 100 feet in the air, and it got caught on a big limb. The cable snapped, and it was just like, you know, the Medevac had been shot out of a slingshot or something. They just fired it right through the canopy and into a ravine.

• 2:29:18Speaker 05

  So when we got there, we circled around. I could see the helicopter was face down into a ravine, and the crew was still in it. You could see the fuel spilling out over them. I could see, you know, 40, 50 NVA coming up the ridge toward that. It was gonna take them out, plus any, you know, a tracer, anything, ignite that fuel. They were all gonna burn, and they were so banged up and everything, they couldn't get out of the ship.

• 2:29:54Speaker 05

  I told the pilot, circle around, hover, you know, close to that hole. And I was gonna drop a McGuire rig and go down there. So I borrowed the crew chief's M16. And stepped out on the skid. We're about 400 feet high in receiving fire. And McGuire rig went down. It was 150 feet long, but it was still up above the canopy that was 150 feet high. But I told the crew chief, get him to lower it some, because I've got to, I'm gonna go down.

• 2:30:36Speaker 05

  No, I didn't have any gloves or anything. Turned out to be a brand-new nylon rope. And I thought, you know, if I squeeze really hard and I wrap my feet around it, I can slow it down enough, it's not gonna burn that much. About 30 feet down, now I realized the flaw in my plan. I couldn't squeeze it that hard. The rope had already turned red. It was just taking everything off both ends. I was bleeding, blood running off my elbows, people shooting at me. I ran on down. When I got to the McGuire rig, I was able to, you know, because it was pretty big, I was able to stop.

• 2:31:21Speaker 05

  But, you know, I was 20 or more feet up above the canopy at that point, and he was taking enough fire, he was gonna leave. So I knew I needed to go ahead and just drop into the canopy before he carried me off, and I'd be too high to do that. So, you know, I dropped, went into the canopy, and I discovered it's really hard, even in a jungle canopy, to be able to grab a hold of something and hold on to it when you're falling through. Took me about 100 feet or so bouncing off limbs and things before I finally managed

• 2:32:05Speaker 05

  to hit with my stomach and kind of wrapped around a big limb. Got my breath. I broke a couple ribs and things as I was falling through, no meat on my hands.

• 2:32:18Speaker 05

  Climb down, as soon as I got to the ground, two NVA's standing there, so terminated them. How'd you do that? With that technique I was talking to you before, where I'd put five silhouettes at, and I'd just go full auto as I went down to the ground. Cause I still had the M16 that I took from the crew chief. I'd lost one of the magazines, but I put another one in it. He'd given me a bandolier with five magazines. So I took those two out and then started moving toward the crew that was still trapped in the helicopter. The pilot started shooting at me.

• 2:33:02Speaker 05

  Cause he didn't know anybody else was down there, you know, where I was coming from. I could hear that little .38 popping as he was shooting at me. So I'm yelling at him and telling him, "Hey, I'm the rescue team." And finally, he had to reload, and when he reload, I charged him. And, you know, he, once he saw me, he was kinda in shock because he's looking at me and thinking, "You're the one that needs to be rescued. You know, you're all bloody from head to toe and torn up and everything." But anyway, I managed to get all of them out of the aircraft and move them to a safe space.

• 2:33:45Speaker 05

  So if it exploded, you know, it wasn't gonna get them. So then I had to go, there was a SOG team that the initial helicopter had went out to try to pick some of the members up. So I went to where they were, and I heard, I heard an American voice speaking, kinda loud, so at that point, I thought, "Well, they must not be captured. I mean, there's an American talking." And I got a little closer, and I could see the one zero, the team leader.

• 2:34:20Speaker 05

  So I yelled to him and told him I was, I was coming in not to shoot, tell these people not to shoot. And he said, come on in. I kept, if I back up a minute, I kept telling the pilot and the other crew, I said, I'm gonna get you out. You just need to do what I tell you. I will come back and get you. Don't move from where you are right now. And I go up to the team. So I go in and there's a, an Air Force Lieutenant Colonel standing there, talking to the team leader, telling the team leader that he's in charge of the operation now. He's the senior man on the

• 2:35:04Speaker 05

  ground and he's in charge. So I got there and heard him saying that, and I said, you're not in charge. You're on the ground now. I'm the senior ground commander and I'm in charge. He said, you're a lieutenant and you are not in charge. And I said, you need to look around. Because all of a sudden, all the Indige had turned their weapons toward him. They had figured out what was going on. And I said, they are about to make you disappear and your body's

• 2:35:48Speaker 05

  never gonna be found. You need to be quiet and do what I tell you. So he quietened down. Only down I got the, the two guys off the jungle penetrator, brought them up, used the radio, called for, for help, and told them I needed explosives. So a Marine CH-46 came out, dropped 50 pound blocks of C4 and some fuses and fuse lighters and blasting caps. So I blew a bit, several trees down to create a hole in the canopy, got some gunships

• 2:36:32Speaker 05

  out, started working the gunships. And eventually, I got everybody up the jungle penetrator into the CH-46. I got up, went up last and we flew away.

• 2:36:49Speaker 05

  Holy shit. You had a premonition. Yeah.

• 2:36:55Speaker 05

  And that was, that was a long day. I get back to camp and the camp commander is in there with some aviation colonel.

• 2:37:08Speaker 05

  And they're upset about something. And I, I said, I'm back. And he's, he's an aviation guy said, you didn't get everybody.

• 2:37:19Speaker 05

  I said, I got everybody that was there. You didn't get the crew chief from the CH thirty four.

• 2:37:26Speaker 05

  What crew chief? I got everybody that, you know, the pilot said was his.

• 2:37:33Speaker 05

  Said, you didn't get the crew chief.

• 2:37:37Speaker 05

  You gotta go back out and get him.

• 2:37:40Speaker 05

  The pilot didn't tell me that the crew chief on his helicopter was missing.

• 2:37:48Speaker 05

  The air force guys told me, didn't tell me. Oh, God. You know, I'm still, I'm bleeding like a stuck pig and I said, you need to go back out and get him.

• 2:38:01Speaker 05

  I need to get my hands treated first and then, you know,

• 2:38:07Speaker 05

  I'll, I'll go back out there, but.

• 2:38:10Speaker 05

  Uh, we decided to wait and, you know, let me take some of my new team and go out there the next morning and get him. But came a storm that night. It was two days before I could go back out there. But I took my new team and went back out. Um, went to the helicopter where the body was supposed to be. And sure enough, with all the rain, you could see his femur sticking up out of the wreckage on the ground. Uh, plus all the flies and the smell and everything. We, we got him. Uh, I was also supposed to blow up the, the hue, his medevac.

• 2:38:52Speaker 05

  So I got the rest of the C4 that I had left out there. Um, inside the, uh, the aircraft packing the C4 in it. And here come the NVA again. Now I'm inside, bullets are starting to come in because they realize I was in the helicopter doing something. And, you know, they're hitting, it's hitting the C4, but, you know, it's not going to bother the C4. You know, I'm safe until I put the blasting cap in, you know. So got everything ready and decided, okay, this is it. Stick the blasting caps in, set the two fuse igniters on, jumped out and managed to climb up the ridge.

• 2:39:35Speaker 05

  I had put the team up on, on this ridge up above the helicopter. And as I was going up the bank, the NVA assaulted the helicopter. They thought I was still in there. And I got up on top and looking down and they, they're standing next to the helicopter with the time fuse burning. Told my guys to get down. Forty pounds of C4. Boom. Fortunately, it was down in that ridge, so most of the blast went linearly, you know, down the ravine.

• 2:40:16Speaker 05

  And then the rest of it went straight up, but it still hurt, you know, the blast. And then the rest of the NVA attacked. We had a big firefight for an hour or so. And finally we managed to withdraw using the gunships and the stuff. Then it started pouring rain. We stayed out there another two days and we came back in and then the aviation guy flipped out because I blew the helicopter on. I said, you told me to do it.

• 2:40:49Speaker 05

  I told you to start. I didn't tell you to blow it up. I said, well, it's in a million little pieces along with body parts right now.

• 2:41:00Speaker 05

  Anyway.

• 2:41:03Speaker 05

  Wow. I know that was a long story, but I did get to go out that one time initially by myself and do some things. Holy shit. When I told, when I first told the, um, the medevac pilot, I said, I, he said, where's the rescue man? And I said, it's me. I'm your rescue team. Yeah, but where are your rescue? I said, it's just me.

• 2:41:29Speaker 05

  You know, just, just do what I tell you. I'll get you out of here. We can do this. And they were just really disappointed. There's one guy came in here to do this.

• 2:41:45Speaker 05

  Jeez. So, anyway. I could have done, you know, some other missions where I didn't have to fight out there. You know, if I'd been going out alone.

• 2:41:58Speaker 05

  Did you like the fighting? I, I mean, it was exciting. But I, I didn't have a problem with going in and not fighting if I could accomplish the mission. I, I thought we had missions on a fairly regular basis that came up. I didn't need a team.

• 2:42:18Speaker 05

  You just needed somebody that could sneak around out there and gather the information we needed and come out. Shit.

• 2:42:27Speaker 05

  Did the killing bother you? No, and I think what happened was on the very first mission, you know, I kept saying to myself,

• 2:42:39Speaker 05

  it's okay. I mean, this is war. They're bad guys. They're gonna kill me if I don't kill them. And it's okay to kill them. It's okay to shoot at them. You know, I gotta remember that. And I kept saying that over and over. Is, I, I have to do this. It's okay. And when that first one jumped up and shot at me, then, you know, I didn't think about that anymore. I just started, you know, defending and shooting back.

• 2:43:16Shawn Ryan?

  Did the killing ever affect you as time went on?

• 2:43:19Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:43:20Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 2:43:20Speaker 05

  I, you know, just the fact that you had to do it and

• 2:43:28Speaker 05

  if, if you're over there at the wall and you're shooting at me,

• 2:43:34Speaker 05

  that doesn't bother me. I can, you know, shooting back at you doesn't bother me. If you're standing there and you're not shooting at me, to just take you out without you realizing it, um, like some of the trackers that I did with the 22,

• 2:43:54Speaker 05

  you know, that I had to think more about, you know, particularly afterwards,

• 2:44:00Speaker 05

  that I would just do that.

• 2:44:04Speaker 05

  There are also some times where,

• 2:44:11Speaker 05

  I had to take people out really up close.

• 2:44:16Speaker 05

  That K-bar that you have over there.

• 2:44:21Speaker 05

  I found, I started carrying that and I found really close quarter stuff.

• 2:44:30Speaker 05

  You know, that was quick and easy, you know, it's, it's about as up close and personal as you can get.

• 2:44:40Shawn Ryan?

  How would you do that?

• 2:44:43Speaker 05

  Into the, into the side of the neck. If you go in, straight in, right there, and go out, you'll get the jugular, you'll get the carotid and it's over, it's over in a minute.

• 2:44:59Speaker 05

  I mean, it's, it's unreal how fast you bleed out like that. And you can do that quietly. And I think I mentioned to you before that those are some of the things that I talk to special ops guys about, not, I won't talk to, you know, law enforcement about that, but with the special ops guys, if you have to do things quietly, you don't have night vision, you, you don't have all your electronics.

• 2:45:36Speaker 05

  There are ways to get right up next to someone. And if you need to do it quietly.

• 2:45:44Shawn Ryan?

  How many times do you think you had to do that?

• 2:45:47Speaker 05

  Hmm.

• 2:45:50Speaker 05

  Four or five.

• 2:45:54Speaker 05

  And just.

• 2:45:57Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:46:02Speaker 05

  And, you know, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's not. First time I did it, you know, I was just, you know, fighting for my life and.

• 2:46:15Speaker 05

  I was about to lose. But I needed to.

• 2:46:19Shawn Ryan?

  How were you about to lose?

• 2:46:22Speaker 05

  Because a friend of his showed up. I mean, I'm on the ground with this guy.

• 2:46:29Speaker 05

  And his friend showed up. And saw us down there and. Realized that, you know, what was going on, that I was a bad guy and. And had his friend. So I had to deal with his friend and then, you know, take care of him. I had to shoot him. But just, there were a few times where I just. Got caught up in a, I'm gonna take a prisoner. I'm gonna get this guy and take him back in and. For whatever reason, wasn't able to do it.

• 2:47:08Shawn Ryan?

  Shit.

• 2:47:13Speaker 05

  Yeah, I changed to the K bar.

• 2:47:19Speaker 05

  I don't know, about midways, I guess.

• 2:47:23Speaker 05

  I tried a sog knife. I just, for me, it was, it just felt too small. If I, because I, I wanted something that if I wanted to cut down a. You know, a limb for a pole or to do something with, I wanted to have enough weight. That I could hack through it or a piece of cane. But I also wanted something. Big and strong enough that if I pushed it hard, it was gonna go. Particularly, you know, when you get around the soft tissue in the neck. And it goes fast. And a K bar is a big enough blade. That when it goes in, it's hard to miss one of the arteries in there.

• 2:48:04Speaker 05

  You could get in quickly.

• 2:48:12Speaker 05

  But I am a nice guy. But sometimes you have to do things.

• 2:48:23Shawn Ryan?

  Does that stick with you?

• 2:48:24Speaker 05

  Yes.

• 2:48:27Speaker 05

  Yeah. There are some things that you just, you can't unsee, you can't undo, you can't get rid of. You can, you can start to deal with it. And but this, so far, it's always been there.

• 2:48:47Speaker 05

  And it's not where I like to spend a lot of time.

• 2:48:54Shawn Ryan?

  When I was talking to John about you before the interview, he had mentioned that your only regret was not closing your mouth when you killed people up close.

• 2:49:06Speaker 05

  Well, I think,

• 2:49:09Speaker 05

  I think what happens, or happened,

• 2:49:14Speaker 05

  was I became so focused on what I was doing. I mean, it's life or death, it's a fraction of a second here, you gotta do something. And I was so focused on

• 2:49:28Speaker 05

  doing the termination thing

• 2:49:34Speaker 05

  that for some reason my mouth would be open. I don't know if I was talking about their ancestors or what, but if you're using a cable, you're, and you're up that close, you're gonna get hit with a rush of, of blood. And if you got your mouth open,

• 2:49:56Speaker 05

  you're gonna get a mouthful of blood. There were at least

• 2:50:03Speaker 05

  two or three occasions where

• 2:50:07Speaker 05

  I put a five or six round burst into somebody's face, right up close to them. When I'm right there with them. And, you know, their head just explode. Brain matter, tissue, bone, everything's gonna hit you. You're gonna be covered with it. And, and the blood, if you got your mouth open, it's going into your mouth, too. And I've had, you know, that happen on a few occasions because I didn't have my mouth closed.

• 2:50:38Shawn Ryan?

  But. Shit.

• 2:50:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:50:46Shawn Ryan?

  There are not a lot of people out there that have that experience.

• 2:50:51Speaker 05

  Most people probably smarter than me.

• 2:50:55Speaker 05

  They didn't get themselves into that situation, you know?

• 2:50:58Shawn Ryan?

  When you're looking at taking somebody out that close, and you're thinking about it. I mean, how the hell do you get that fucking close to them?

• 2:51:12Shawn Ryan?

  And think about it, exactly what you're gonna do.

• 2:51:16Speaker 05

  Yeah, well, the opportunity, you know, presents itself. It's, it's not, in most cases, it's not that that's what I start out to do. Unless, unless it's dark and I'm sneaking up on you because I need to take you out, without making any noise, then I'm, I'm thinking mostly about, how do I get from where I am to where you are without you knowing I'm coming? And knowing that I'm there? And, you know, the, what I'm trying to do is get from here over there. And now I'm next to you. You don't know I'm next to you.

• 2:52:01Speaker 05

  And you're gonna feel a sting on the side of your neck. You're gonna feel warm blood go out, and everything's gonna fade to black. And your knees are gonna start to crumple, and I'll catch you as you're going down so you don't make noise. But it's over very quickly. But I'm spending most of my energy and thought process about how do I get to you?

• 2:52:32Speaker 05

  I've got to get over there without you knowing that I'm there. If I'm gonna do something like that and be quiet and not discovered. So there are things that I'm gonna do depending on the terrain. I may do a distraction. I may toss something over in another direction for you to hear just to redirect your attention for a second while I can get closer to you.

• 2:52:59Speaker 05

  Depending on how much I know about what the terrain's like. Is it raining? Has it been raining? I mean, if it's raining, I'm gonna be all over you.

• 2:53:10Speaker 05

  I don't have to work hard to get close to you.

• 2:53:17Speaker 05

  If it's not raining and everything's really quiet, I have to be very careful 'cause I can't see the ground and I'm gonna step on something.

• 2:53:27Speaker 05

  Twig's gonna break or something and you're gonna hear it. And one thing is if I've got a pebble, if I've got something that if I do break a twig here, I can launch that little pebble off to the other side of you over there. So you hear that louder than you heard this. And now you will turn that way.

• 2:53:50Speaker 05

  And that gives me a chance to get closer. Did you come up with that?

• 2:53:55Speaker 05

  You are a fucking master. Nutcase, right? So all my friends. I can argue that.

• 2:54:03Speaker 05

  But, you know, it's just...

• 2:54:09Speaker 05

  This is still really on my own topic, but how you walk.

• 2:54:17Speaker 05

  Typically, we put our heels down first

• 2:54:21Speaker 05

  and then the rest of the foot comes down.

• 2:54:24Speaker 05

  But what I had read about decades ago was that American Indians...

• 2:54:33Speaker 05

  Slipping up on their prey, whether it was another Indian tribe or animal, whatever, is that they went toe first. If I go this way and I step on a twig, it's like there's a little amplifier there and it's throwing the sound out in that direction. If I step on it and break it with my toe, the sound's coming back this way. So you don't hear it as much. So I used to have my little guys toe down, toe first, toe first. Let's practice that. Toe first and you'll be quieter.

• 2:55:14Speaker 05

  I had a thing that I call invisibility. I used that hand signal. If I did that, go invisible, be invisible right now, be invisible. Nobody can hear you, nobody can smell you, nobody can, you know, know anything about where you are, change how you walk. And we started changing how we moved through the woods. I don't know if you hunt deer or not, but if you watch a deer, he's the hardest to see when he's coming directly at you until he stops. And when he stops, what he screws up with is he starts looking right and left.

• 2:55:59Speaker 05

  And when he starts moving his head, you will see it. Cause the different color in the skin and there, any movement like that, you'll see. Horizontal movement is much easier to see than vertical movement. So instead of the point man walking through the jungle, you know, moving his weapon and twisting his body back and forth, so he thinks he's going to be ready to fire, you know, if he encounters somebody, that's just giving him away.

• 2:56:33Speaker 05

  Don't move the weapon. Scan your eye, your eyes are not, you won't see him. The eyes move. Keep your weapon here because you don't know if he's gonna be over there or over here. So if you do it like this, now he's, but he's actually over there. By the time you can get back around to him, you're dead. Split the distance. So teaching, teaching them how not only for the front man to do that, move the whole team. Straight. You start zigzagging. You're easy to see as you're coming. So I started teaching them all kinds of invisibility.

• 2:57:14Speaker 05

  No soap, nothing that you can smell for the last three days before we go out. I don't want them to smell us when we're out. They'll smell the soap because they're not used to soap. And soap just stands out when you go out there. In fact, I even got to the point where I started making them eat North Vietnamese type food. Because I told them, if, if we're out there and we're out there four or five days, eventually you're gonna have to poop. And when you poop, I want it to smell like NVA poop. And if they find it, I want them to say, oh, that's, that's one of us. Sweat.

• 2:58:02Speaker 05

  My, my father told me when I was a little kid, one time there's a, a dog, strange dog, and the dog was growling at me. And, you know, my father was, went over and petted him. And I said, now it's just a little kid, I said, why is he growling at me and he's not growling at you? And my father said, he knows you're afraid of him.

• 2:58:28Speaker 05

  How does he know that? He just does. He knows you're afraid of him. And he's intimidating you. He knows I'm not afraid of him. It took me, you know, a couple of decades to figure out what was going on. When you, all sweat is not the same. You go out and do some exercise, or it's hot in here, and you sweat. Yeah, sweat smells. If you sweat because of fear, fear sweat smells very different. It's much stronger and it smells different.

• 2:59:08Speaker 05

  So if you're laying in an ambush site, waiting to ambush me, and you know, when you ambush a SOG team, those jokers are coming after you. You're laying there sweating with fear sweat, I'll smell you. On more than one occasion, I've stopped a team, stopped. You know, they're there. I can smell them laying up there in the woods. I can smell the sweat. Dogs can smell the difference between fear sweat and normal sweat. So they, it's easy for them to tell that you're afraid of them. So, um, they want you to relax.

• 2:59:50Speaker 05

  I want you to, your poop to smell like NBA poop. I don't want any soap or anything like that on you that people can, that the NBA can smell. So that's all part of being invisible. Jump up and down, nothing should make a sound on you when you jump up and down. You should have nothing on you, uh, that's bright. All the buckles and metal things on your harness need to be painted black or wrapped in black friction tape, um, so they don't shine. Uh, you need to be camouflaged. All the stuff counts. Take pictures of them and say, look, what does this look like?

• 3:00:31Speaker 05

  That looks like Ben laying on the ground, because you can see all the buckles on him. Or you can see he's got two yellow smokes on him. And the bottom of the yellow smoke is what, it's yellow. And it's got a kind of a, a light, white band around, around the thing. You can't have that. It makes you show up. And how you walk, how you approach people is all part of being invisible human in the daylight. And ways to do that.

• 3:01:09Speaker 05

  Maybe giving you more than you want to know, but.

• 3:01:16Shawn Ryan?

  You know, something I didn't say at the beginning is the Vietnam generation is what inspired me to go into the SEAL teams. And hearing you talk, I'm just realizing so many of our TTPs and SOPs and all that kind of stuff came, came from, from you guys.

• 3:01:37Shawn Ryan?

  It's pretty surreal for me.

• 3:01:40Speaker 05

  I think a, a lot of it did, came, you know, from SOG guys. Because of the intensity of the missions and where we were going, if you were going to survive, there are things you had to do and we learned things. You know, I, I felt stupid when I realized that some of the people who came after me in 70, started using the earplugs that we use on the range.

• 3:02:14Speaker 05

  When they'd get on the helicopter.

• 3:02:18Speaker 05

  Because you ride on a helicopter unprotected ears, it'll be two hours plus when you get off of that thing, before you get your full hearing back. So you do a security stop and you're out there trying to listen and see if you hear anybody moving. You can't hear yet. And I, I discovered that for me, when I saw a headset hanging in the helicopter. We were on the way out, I saw a headset and I asked the crew chief, can I use that? And he said, yes. So I got the headset, I put it on and then discovered.

• 3:02:58Speaker 05

  I used to watch the door gunners. They're sitting there and we're going out and their heads bouncing up and down and I, I thought, wow, it's rough riding on the outside where the door gunners are. I put that headset on and I thought, he's listening to Creedence Clearwater Revival, you know? Their heads moving with the beat of the stupid, the pilots have got the radio station on. I mean, I didn't know that. And then, then I realized that when I got off the helicopter, I could still hear.

• 3:03:38Speaker 05

  But later on, some guys realized, just pop the earplugs in before you get on the aircraft. When you get off, pop them out, put them in your pocket, you can hear. So there are a lot of things like that that people discovered. You know, it kind of irritated me that I didn't think of something that simple, that obvious. But there are a lot of things you can do.

• 3:04:05Shawn Ryan?

  Did you have any personal pre-mission rituals or anything that you would do before you go out on an op? Some guys pray, some guys write a letter, some guys listen to music, some guys... I used to watch this video of terrorists stripping gear out of the guys from Red Wings. They would video it. They would video stripping our KIA of their rifles, their helmet, their night vision, their IDs, their magazines, everything. I used to watch that before every op. Did you do anything?

• 3:04:48Speaker 05

  Um, some of mine was mental. Um, I...

• 3:04:57Speaker 05

  And I'll just start with, once I got on the aircraft, while we were waiting to take off,

• 3:05:04Speaker 05

  you know, I'd always say a prayer.

• 3:05:08Speaker 05

  I, and let me preface this with, I can't carry a tune in a bucket, you know? Singing, you would not, you'd think it was a dying calf in a hellstorm or something if I tried to sing.

• 3:05:26Speaker 05

  But mentally, you know, I can, you know? So I would always do Amazing Grace.

• 3:05:35Speaker 05

  And then, you know, I may mix some other little things in with it as, as then I transition over to the mission focus. What do I have to do? When the countdown starts, what do I have to do? What am I looking for? What's the plan? Who's going, going first? Which way are you going? What do I need to send, do with the team? I'm reviewing the plan. Then I may throw a little more Amazing Grace in there just before we get there. And then, then it's back to

• 3:06:12Speaker 05

  the box breathing.

• 3:06:15Speaker 05

  So by the time I'm, by the time I get out on the skid, I've already been doing it for a while, but doing the box breathing.

• 3:06:26Speaker 05

  Because that will relax your arteries, it has an impact on your vagus nerve, it calms you down. Because I know that when we get there,

• 3:06:41Speaker 05

  if we, if we engage right away, all of that stuff's coming at me and I'm standing out on the skid because I'm getting ready to jump off. And I've got to think about the other things that we're going to do, not those bullets coming at me. But the bullets, at least to me, bullets can be a real distractor. Notice, you hear those things cracking by you?

• 3:07:04Speaker 05

  It can distract you from what you're supposed to do. And you, I had to find a way to turn loose of the bullets and see what's going on, see the battle space, know what I needed to change, make sure I was going to tell you guys what the difference was, I was going to give you the signals.

• 3:07:25Speaker 05

  And same, you know, on the ground, I want you to make contact. Disadvantage we had was, then you couldn't hear. Car fifteen so loud, AK forty sevens are so loud, and you're so close to each other. And I'm, you're there and I'm trying to tell you go left, you can't hear what I'm saying. Not, even this close with, with all the car fifteens and everything firing, grenades going off, rockets coming at you, you know, and I'm, I'm warning, you know, I'm, I'm having to do, you know, hand signals and stuff to get people to move. And then, once you drop down out of sight, and then, you know, I'm trying to remember,

• 3:08:07Speaker 05

  you went there, he went there, he went over there, and telling all my people, this, if you get hit, and I'd make them practice, if you get hit, start yelling, "Hit." I need to know someone's hit, I need to know a general direction of where they are. If you're hit, I will come get you, but I need to know the vicinity to look for when I come over there. So start yelling, "Hit." I know you're alive, and I can eventually find where you are and I will get you.

• 3:08:49Speaker 05

  But if you don't yell, I don't know where you went down. I don't know that you've even been hit. So, there are things like that, just making them yell, "Hit, hit, hit." Because I could say that, close enough, that I could understand it, and, and loud, and just practicing those things. It made them more confident that if something happened to them, that I would get them. And, and they saw it on these different occasions where, you know, I snatched somebody up and I made sure we got him on the helicopter, and, you know, the word spreads.

• 3:09:33Speaker 05

  You know, Thompson might be a nutcase, but he'll put you on the helicopter. Anyway.

• 3:09:42Speaker 05

  How many friends did you lose over there? I have a list, um, thirty-four. Thirty-four.

• 3:09:57Speaker 05

  And I didn't lose, you know, Bargewell over there.

• 3:10:04Speaker 05

  But I put him on my list. He passed away a few years ago. Seven years ago.

• 3:10:14Shawn Ryan?

  You know, the reason I'm asking is there's

• 3:10:17Shawn Ryan?

  a lot of people that struggle with lost friends in combat.

• 3:10:22Speaker 05

  And that, that's not how many people were killed. That was just the guys I knew. And we were either on the same team together, or we knew, like Tilt. You know, Tilt would have been on my list, you know, because I, I knew him well. Lynn Black would have been on my list. It's not a list you want to be on.

• 3:10:43Speaker 05

  Obviously, but it was... There were a lot of other people who were killed. I just didn't know them.

• 3:10:50Shawn Ryan?

  How did you compartmentalize that in the middle of it?

• 3:10:54Speaker 05

  Difficult.

• 3:10:59Speaker 05

  You know, trying to, trying to realize that

• 3:11:05Speaker 05

  I couldn't do anything about it. They were gone. I could remember them. I could make sure, you know, they weren't forgotten. I couldn't bring them back.

• 3:11:17Speaker 05

  In some cases, I could, you know, contact their family, you know, later.

• 3:11:24Speaker 05

  It, it's just very difficult.

• 3:11:31Speaker 05

  I think,

• 3:11:34Speaker 05

  I think in, at times, in some cases,

• 3:11:39Speaker 05

  it probably influenced my thinking of

• 3:11:44Speaker 05

  just let me go by myself.

• 3:11:49Speaker 05

  That way, I don't have to worry about losing you.

• 3:11:56Shawn Ryan?

  Makes sense.

• 3:11:58Speaker 05

  In fact, you know, if you read the book when you get in there, you'll see that, you know, I would keep having that discussion with Meadows where I wanted to go alone. You know, I would use, when he would just deny that, I'd finally come back and say, well,

• 3:12:22Speaker 05

  at least I'll just be the only American on the team. I'll take the little guys, I'll be the only American. Don't put another American on the team with me. You know, so he would do that most of the time.

• 3:12:41Speaker 05

  And I think some of that was influenced by, you know, I don't, I don't want to lose you.

• 3:12:49Shawn Ryan?

  Yes.

• 3:12:52Speaker 05

  So, there's just so many. And John and I've had this conversation recently. It's, it's almost like now, today, it's almost like being back in SOD.

• 3:13:11Shawn Ryan?

  How so?

• 3:13:13Speaker 05

  Every day. There's, every, every day, there's a list that comes out on the phone. So, we, we have a lady, Bonnie Cooper, who's worked for the Special Ops Association in various ways, particularly the website, but she monitors SF and particularly SOD people of issueers.

• 3:13:46Speaker 05

  And I've told her before, Bonnie, take a break. You know, try not to let so many people go away like that. I mean, it's like every few days, you're seeing somebody's name. You know, because we're in that age group now.

• 3:14:04Shawn Ryan?

  No, I mean, I can relate. With us, it's suicide.

• 3:14:08Speaker 05

  Yeah. And, you know, then, you know, it's...

• 3:14:17Speaker 05

  I can, I think I can understand why they do it, what they, what's going on.

• 3:14:26Speaker 05

  What you, I mean, I've got people I talk to every day.

• 3:14:32Speaker 05

  And, you know, what I'm trying to do is prevent that.

• 3:14:36Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, you have a PhD in psychology. It would, everybody's trying to get to the bottom of this. And I've had so many friends that have killed themselves, I just, I can't even count them all. I quit counting.

• 3:14:52Shawn Ryan?

  You know, I think, and you know about the struggles with addictions and booze and opiates and everything, you know, and I think it just takes one second.

• 3:15:06Speaker 05

  It does.

• 3:15:08Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and then.

• 3:15:09Speaker 05

  And there's, there, you know, there's, there are some decisions that you can't take back. I, I think about it sometimes and share sometimes, you know, when I was standing on the hill, the skill of the helicopter, holding on to that, that rope.

• 3:15:27Speaker 05

  Once I stepped off, that decision was made and there's no change in it. I was on the rope and on my way down, you know, that there was no opportunity to say, well, I don't think I want to do this.

• 3:15:43Speaker 05

  And that decision to pull the trigger, do, do whatever it is that you're gonna do. Once you make it and, and you can make it very fast. I mean, I, you know, I, I talked to a guy who had decided, this is it. I'm gonna hang myself and he went in his bedroom and tied a rope up, climbed up on a stool and was getting ready to put the noose around his neck. And his little daughter walked in, what are you doing, Dad?

• 3:16:28Speaker 05

  And, you know, he came back down. If she'd have been a few seconds later.

• 3:16:37Speaker 05

  And it's hard to tell sometimes where people are. They can change into that mode and make that decision so quickly.

• 3:16:52Shawn Ryan?

  How do you honor your friends that have been killed or taken their own lives?

• 3:16:58Speaker 05

  Well, for fifty years or so, I run in their memory. Well, when I was active doing Ironman, I would, you know, today's swim is for these people. The runs for this, the bikes for that, and still do that on what I call the angel versary of their death. So on that day, you know, we do the names of all the people.

• 3:17:39Speaker 05

  And then I let that person, whoever's angel versary is, I let them lead the run. And, you know, and I post it. I put it out on social media so that, you know, people remember. Been doing that, and you'll see in the back of the book, in the book, you'll see every month, there's a section in there. Here are the guys, of those thirty-four, here are the ones that died this month, you

• 3:18:24Speaker 05

  know, my friends. And even though there are a lot of other people that died, I've got them in there. At the end, well, every day, when I post, I've got the list of the thirty-four. So I post all of them, post the pictures, and then highlight the one that died that day. And sometimes with SOG people, sometimes it's three or four that died that day. Maybe the whole team got wiped out. You know, their parents are gone.

• 3:19:04Speaker 05

  Your parents would be over a hundred, a hundred years old, you know, so they're not there, but you know, they still have, you know, brothers, sisters, wives, whatever, some of them. So I get a message every once in a while, but I also have a group of, you know, Afghan and, and you know, that, that whole group of people. I've got about thirty-five of those. So I, I interact with their families, but you know, I post them on the days that they died.

• 3:19:47Shawn Ryan?

  I mean, as a, as a SOG operator who's been through this a long time ago and, and have navigated your way through it up to this point, what advice do you have for my generation who's dealing with this? How do you move past it?

• 3:20:06Speaker 05

  Some of it is, I tried to put some principles, SOG principles in the, in the book, the moving forward. I mean, in the book, it's related initially to combat, but it's still combat when you're not in combat. Things happen. You've got to keep moving forward. You've got to do it. And once you stop, all kind of things happen. And, and moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically. And like, like old guys like John, you know,

• 3:20:47Speaker 05

  he's an old guy. We have to kind of watch each other and take care of each other and contact. And I was talking to a teammate of mine earlier this week, and he was telling me, he's afraid to call people now. You know, our SOG guys, he said, I'm afraid to call them. I'm afraid they won't answer. I'm afraid I'm going to get a family member or something and, and they're going to tell me, you know, he's gone.

• 3:21:24Speaker 05

  But you gotta keep, you gotta keep checking, you keep, keep moving forward. And keep remembering, in the book it talks about, you know, people die, people die twice. The first time they die is when their heart stops. The second time they die is when people stop saying their name. So, that's why I use the, the list, I go down that list and say it. Their families, and particularly, you know, your group,

• 3:22:07Speaker 05

  their families are still alive, their parents are still around. And, you know, I get emails from them all the time, saying, "Thank you," you know. So, it's not easy, but applying some of those principles like that and just, you got them, you can't bring them back, you gotta keep moving forward. And, and sometimes you can think about, like, Barge Well, for example.

• 3:22:47Speaker 05

  Remembering that all of God's angels don't sing in the choir. Some of them are warriors. I figure, I figured Barge Well worked himself up pretty high into the warrior group. You know, so some of us are gonna end up there, I think, and, you know, that's good. And, you know, at some point, most of us will see each other again, hopefully in the right place.

• 3:23:28Shawn Ryan?

  I'm with you. If we haven't talked about it yet, what, what mission in SOG sticks out more than all the rest of them?

• 3:23:38Speaker 05

  For me, a mission I went on?

• 3:23:48Speaker 05

  A real contender for that would be the one where I had the woman on the radio.

• 3:24:00Speaker 05

  The gunfight went on so long, almost 24 hours.

• 3:24:06Speaker 05

  And just one thing after another. I mean, in that mission, after, you know, saw the lights coming, the weather had socked us in, couldn't get air support in.

• 3:24:22Speaker 05

  We had to use something called combat sky spots. You know, an L4 is coming by, he's gonna, he's gonna drop a bomb just based on the radar saying you're in the right place.

• 3:24:39Speaker 05

  And, you know, so working with that, and you know, the first one he dropped was like 3,000 meters long. And then, but, you know, we worked, so we had to work through all of that. And then, you know, we were in contact, daylight. And we're in contact and I, I saw in the book, I just call it the Grim Reaper coming in. You know, I think the devil showed up and said, "Now I'm coming for you." Saw some discussion back and forth like that.

• 3:25:18Speaker 05

  And got to the point where we were being overrun and, you know, I called a CBU in right on top of our position. I just said, "If you guys are gonna overrun us, I'm gonna take as many of you with us as I can." So I had Covey find a plane that had CBU.

• 3:25:49Speaker 05

  So we're in this little circle this size.

• 3:25:53Speaker 05

  You know, a canister of CBUs has like 250, you know, grenades in it, explosives in it that come raining down. So out of the 250...

• 3:26:11Speaker 05

  Fifteen of them landed either inside this perimeter

• 3:26:18Speaker 05

  or just outside. Fifteen of them. And, you know, explosions everywhere, people screaming, all this kind of stuff. And I saw some of them hit, and I thought,

• 3:26:32Speaker 05

  "It hit, but I didn't hear it explode. I must be dead. I'm still seeing itself, but I must be dead."

• 3:26:41Speaker 05

  And then I realized, you know, when I did, they didn't go off.

• 3:26:48Speaker 05

  Wow. So, oh.

• 3:26:53Speaker 05

  I obviously got some help from above. You can't, you can't have fifteen duds all up in, in the same place, at the same time, Holy shit. and not go off. You just can't do that.

• 3:27:10Speaker 05

  That's not gonna happen, you know, without some divine intervention. So,

• 3:27:19Speaker 05

  the old, the old, uh, image came back again, and

• 3:27:25Speaker 05

  he's just shaking his head and walking off into the vegetation. It was like, "I thought I would get you, but I didn't."

• 3:27:36Speaker 05

  We go, we're trying to fight our way down. We get ambushed, trying to go toward the LZ. We managed to survive that and get through it. We got down to the extraction LZ, and my portman, you know, stopped us. I went up to see why he stopped us, and he looked at me and he said, "Bomb." "What?" "Bomb."

• 3:28:04Speaker 05

  And I looked out at the LZ. Over on the left side of it, thickened up out of the mud, it's a 500-pound bomb, unexploded. That's the one that we didn't hear explode last night when we were trying to adjust them. It went into the, to our landing zone. Now there's a 500-pound bomb sitting there. That's the only place we can get out. The NV8 don't know it's there, and we're gonna be in a firefight with them. And if somebody hits it, it's gonna take all of us out and whatever aircraft we're coming in to get us. So we got a real problem here to deal with that.

• 3:28:48Speaker 05

  So I got, you know, my old cubby and had him put the word out. Don't put, don't put any ordinance on that side of the LZ when you're trying to help us. And so finally, we're bringing the aircraft in. I'm out, I'm having to stand up with a VS-17 panel, bringing the aircraft in, trying to get them to where I wanted. I got down to the last aircraft, and I'm trying to, to throw the last pupil up there. And that's where I hear the, the loud "drop." Everything went silent, then there's, you know, booming voice that says "drop."

• 3:29:32Speaker 05

  I just dropped to my knees, and when I did, a stream of machine gun bullets, RPG bullets, came across and cut a hole that big side of the helicopter.

• 3:29:43Shawn Ryan?

  Jeez.

• 3:29:44Speaker 05

  You know, where I was, so.

• 3:29:47Shawn Ryan?

  Another premonition.

• 3:29:49Speaker 05

  So, yeah, I'm, I'm getting, I'm getting a lot of help to try to get me out of this. And, uh, so finally, got the last, through the last guy up on the helicopter, and off we went. So, you know, I thought it was a, a long mission.

• 3:30:09Shawn Ryan?

  As a team leader, when you're calling air power in on yourself to take you and as many of them as you possibly can, is that a team decision or is that a personal decision?

• 3:30:22Speaker 05

  In my case, you know, I told Bruce, who was acting as my assistant, I told him and the other American, this is what I'm doing, because, I mean, they're coming across us. I mean, we got a few seconds to make a decision, get down, get all the team members down, because it's coming. And I told Cubby, you make, have him make one pass, put the CBU on top of us. If I don't come right back up on the radio, then have him make the second pass. But listen for me, because if I come back up saying, I'm still here, don't let him

• 3:31:05Speaker 05

  put another one on us. We didn't have to use the second one.

• 3:31:12Shawn Ryan?

  Did you support Hamburger Hill?

• 3:31:20Speaker 05

  No.

• 3:31:21Shawn Ryan?

  No.

• 3:31:22Speaker 05

  Oh, oh, I, no, I'm thinking support in another way. Yes. There was, there was an NBA division that was being moved around, that they were going to bring up there and just crush the 101st. And I was assigned the mission to go find them and stop them. I figure with six people, how hard can it be to find 10,000 people in a group? So surely I can find them. But they didn't cooperate well. That's when they shot the helicopter

• 3:32:05Speaker 05

  down I was in, broke my back, some ribs. And one of my guys got in my helicopter, shot through the thigh.

• 3:32:19Speaker 05

  I got them and finally got them into a bomb crater.

• 3:32:24Speaker 05

  And spent most of the day there. Fighting and putting in airstrikes. Eventually got out and they said, you gotta go back tomorrow morning. We don't have.

• 3:32:39Speaker 05

  We don't have the division, what's left of the division, which we figured was down to about 7,000. We don't have them pinpointed enough for the B-52 strike. We need you to go back in and get some more data.

• 3:32:54Speaker 05

  Don't want. They. They put pistol belts around me with a piece of wood behind it, an old pad.

• 3:33:04Speaker 05

  I didn't carry my rucksack because I couldn't, I couldn't lift any weight like that. And went back out there.

• 3:33:13Speaker 05

  But I got the coordinates. Gave it to the B-52s that evening and they came in and wiped the rest of them out. And.

• 3:33:26Speaker 05

  They, they dropped 660, 500 pound bombs in that little rectangle I gave them.

• 3:33:39Speaker 05

  Oh, and. We mentioned my.

• 3:33:45Speaker 05

  Grandson, grandson-in-law at lunch.

• 3:33:52Speaker 05

  His father's, no, his mother's father flew B-52s in Vietnam.

• 3:34:02Speaker 05

  Interesting guy to talk to. And at one point, we, we thought we had pinpointed the date. That he might have actually flown that mission that came in and took these guys out, but. He, he was flying a different mission, but. That would have been cool.

• 3:34:22Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 3:34:27Shawn Ryan?

  What was the final op?

• 3:34:32Speaker 05

  The final one.

• 3:34:41Speaker 05

  It came right after, shortly after that, that one we were talking about.

• 3:34:50Speaker 05

  There was a little one, we went and knocked out a underwater bridge.

• 3:34:59Speaker 05

  I couldn't figure out how they kept getting the trucks on down the trail. They were going off the trail, under the canopy, and they had built a bridge that was just below the water, so you couldn't see it. They were driving across it and coming back on the road. And they still work on this bridge, as you can see. But we keep bombing that, somehow they were still getting across, so we went out. We took that out, dropped a bridge, on a different mission right in there.

• 3:35:37Speaker 05

  You know, the one where we were gonna drop the big bridge.

• 3:35:42Speaker 05

  I had to crawl on my hands and use across an open field to get to where I could really see the supports and things on the bridge. There was a bush out in the center of the field, about that high. So if I peeked my head up a little bit in the grass, I could see the bush, so I used that to navigate, crawled under it, went about ten meters, and then caught on fire. That bush was covered with big fire ants. And they got all of them, I had to strip out there in the middle of the field, you know, thinking, how many NVA are on that bridge, are gonna go across that bridge when I'm

• 3:36:25Speaker 05

  laying out here almost naked, you know? And my team, they don't know what's going on. They're back there in the edge of the wood line, thinking, what is he doing? He's taking his clothes off out there in the middle of the field. Ah, I mean, I almost died from that. Okay. I mean, because we didn't, you know, we didn't carry antihistamine with us. I was so loaded with all their venom.

• 3:36:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, there were two or three short ones like that toward the end, and then...

• 3:37:00Speaker 05

  You know, the commander plucked me out.

• 3:37:04Speaker 05

  They plucked you out? Pulled me, pulled me off the team and said, "I'm gonna move you into operations here for a while."

• 3:37:13Speaker 05

  Did you wanna do that? No.

• 3:37:17Speaker 05

  And I didn't wanna work for him either, so. So, I, cause I had, my plan was to extend for six months. But after working for him for a while, I decided, "No, I'm not gonna do that. I'll go ahead, rotate back to the States.

• 3:37:36Speaker 05

  You know. Give him six months or so to go away. And, and then I'll come back. And have a new commander.

• 3:37:47Speaker 05

  Polish my skills up for six or eight months. And I come back and be better, so. But then I didn't get a chance to come back either, so.

• 3:37:57Speaker 05

  Did you get addicted to the adrenaline? Oh, yeah. The killing? Oh, yeah. The combat? Yes. How did you feel that? I mean, that's a real issue, cause that happens to special ops guys. You get so addicted to, to their adrenaline.

• 3:38:13Speaker 05

  Finding something else that'll give you the adrenaline rush. That's not, maybe not quite as dangerous.

• 3:38:22Speaker 05

  In my case, one of the things was, um, you know, free fall, halo.

• 3:38:31Speaker 05

  Particularly if you

• 3:38:34Speaker 05

  can burn it on down a little closer than what you're supposed to do.

• 3:38:40Speaker 05

  And I was, I was in a situation where, you know.

• 3:38:45Speaker 05

  I put the halo team together. I was the leader of the halo team. And, you know.

• 3:38:53Speaker 05

  I could do just about anything I wanted to, so I could, I could look at the terrain and see this little tiny opening on a ridge line there in the mountains and say, hmm, I wonder if I could hit that at 2 o'clock in the morning and land right in that little, a little opening, put Ranger shooters out there on their back, holding the flashlight up with a red filter on it in the shape of a T or whatever letter I wanted, and see if I can get in there. So I was doing, you know, a lot of different things like that

• 3:39:35Speaker 05

  that would give you a rush. And, and I was also very fortunate that, you know, when I, when I came back from SOG, I went to, to the Rangers, and everybody had to have combat experience. To be there is one of the instructors. So, you know, I had 40 guys in there that were all talking with each other and helping each other. Everybody kind of understood about combat. They didn't know I'd been with SOG, but still, people were shooting at them too,

• 3:40:13Speaker 05

  so. We had, we had a, you know, support group there. And we were doing things that could give you, and drill in your adrenaline rush. So that helped.

• 3:40:29Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home.

• 3:40:34Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 3:40:50Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Dick, we're back from the break. And, you know, I'd like to document what it was like for you, not in the military, but what was, what was it like for you coming home from Vietnam? Seeing how Americans were acting towards veterans, and I want to cover this.

• 3:41:13Speaker 05

  I was not happy. You know, it started with I was coming through the airport and seeing that, you know, people in general were not reacting favorably toward, you know, the soldiers coming home. I think in my case, just coming through the airport, you know, I had my beret on. So that was kind of like a force factor that was just, people were getting out of the way. They just let me through. They didn't want to get close to me.

• 3:41:58Speaker 05

  And the ones that yelled something were always, you know, at a distance. But it was there. And like I mentioned earlier, I think I had friends that had been friends at one point, but kind of went away because of war. And some of them never came back in terms of coming back and being a friend. I mean, they just, once they separated from me, they just stayed that way, you know, because I stayed in the military.

• 3:42:36Speaker 05

  So I was disappointed with that. I think staying in the military helped me. It did. Because I was around, obviously, people who believed in being in the military. Military went through a lot of changes, you know, going forward. Because once you stopped the draft, then getting people in, it really changed the people who were coming in. But the general attitude, I mean, it's still out there. When I got out of the military and started the consulting company.

• 3:43:23Speaker 05

  I didn't tell people I'd been in the military. Clients. I never mentioned the military.

• 3:43:32Shawn Ryan?

  Really? What the hell did they think you were doing for the last twenty years?

• 3:43:36Speaker 05

  Being a consultant, going to school, doing whatever. But,

• 3:43:43Speaker 05

  you know, the military just had a bad name. And if I mentioned I'd been in the military,

• 3:43:52Speaker 05

  it's interesting. One of the, a client that I had for years started out with,

• 3:44:01Speaker 05

  they flew me out to meet with the executive team. So, um, before they hired me. So, I'm, I'm talking to them and the CEO looked up at me and he said,

• 3:44:17Speaker 05

  "What are you gonna tell me about how to be a CEO and run this? What do you know?"

• 3:44:26Speaker 05

  And he knew that I had been in the army, uh, because he had hired somebody that knew me, um, that had been in the army. Um, and he said, "You, all you know how to do is tell people what to do, to yell at them, and, you know, I don't know how you're gonna help me out at all."

• 3:44:53Speaker 05

  And I said, "Well,

• 3:44:55Speaker 05

  you have people in the organization. And when you have people in the organization,

• 3:45:03Speaker 05

  there are certain difficulties and problems that will come up just because you have people. Doesn't matter who the people are or what they are. Uh, and I know how to help with those types of problems. And it's not yelling at people, it's not doing anything like that, not being a dictator. Uh, that's not my philosophy. I don't believe that that's the way to be a leader. And, you know, I'm gonna be working with you to see what's going on, help you find solutions, uh, that will work with your people."

• 3:45:39Speaker 05

  So, we talked like that a little bit and he's met with his team for about twenty minutes and called me back in and said, "Okay, let's get started." And I worked for him for years until somebody else bought the company. So, but, I just didn't tell people. But, once nine eleven happened, yeah, tell people you're in the military, that's a good thing. Oh, yeah, appreciate your service. I mean, it was just- You didn't get that all the way until after nine eleven? I'm sorry? You didn't experience that until-

• 3:46:21Speaker 05

  I mean, there were people who I knew or had known or grown up around, um, older people who would say, you know, "Thank you for your service," and things like that. But, people who hadn't known me before, um, find out I was in the military, it wasn't necessarily, you know, "Congratulations," or "Thank you," or anything, um, for a long time. It just, we had a, we had a bad reputation. Because, you know, because of Vietnam, uh, but then, you know, because of going to the

• 3:47:03Speaker 05

  all-volunteer army, you know, that was a disaster. Um, "Do you want to go to jail, or you want to join the army?" "Oh, I'll join the army." Um, you know, "I can put you in jail with drugs use, or you can join the army." "I'll go in the army." And, you know, it was just different.

• 3:47:30Speaker 05

  But nine eleven, all of a sudden, maybe we were okay. It became a punishment instead of an act of service. Yeah. And I'm, um, it, everybody wasn't like that, but a lot of the people I ran into were. And, you know, I would, you may have already asked John about that, but I, I would just see what the most vets say, the Vietnam vets say. When did it change? And there, there are Vietnam vets out there right now, they're still angry, very angry. And if you try to tell them, you know, thank you for your service, I mean, it'll bite your head off.

• 3:48:14Speaker 05

  Because they're so angry about, you know, why didn't you tell me that 50 years ago? You know, it's, it's worked out, you know, for me, I think, I've been very fortunate, so. Do you carry any animosity from that? I hate that it, that it happened. I, I think we screwed up Vietnam broadly. I think there are a lot of things we could have done to make it better. I don't think we, as soldiers, I don't think we went over and did the kinds of things that most people thought we were doing.

• 3:48:56Speaker 05

  I don't think we were running around killing women and babies and doing things like, I'm, I'm sure some got, you know, killed. It's war. And, you know, shrapnel and bombs and thing, bullets, they don't care. If somebody gets in the way of it, it's gonna hit them. And it's, it's hard to have a war and not have someone, you know, killed or wounded. That's innocent. Yeah.

• 3:49:30Shawn Ryan?

  What prompted you to get your PhD in psychology?

• 3:49:34Speaker 05

  Psychology came about because as I, as I watched what was happening on the battlefield and trying to understand, like with, with my indigenous team leader. They'd been going out on SOG missions, you know, for two years or so. And now they're going out with me for a year. And when I leave, they're gonna go out with the next team leader for a year. Why would they do that? I mean, some of these guys were 50% scar tissue. Why would they keep going out and getting shot up or killed on a regular?

• 3:50:15Speaker 05

  We paid them, but it wasn't enough money to make it, you know, worth getting killed for or, or mangled like a lot of them did. And then why would the Americans go out, the operators? Why would they go out and do this? Why not go to a regular unit or why not come to SOG and, and go to a staff job and not go across the fence?

• 3:50:42Shawn Ryan?

  The addiction.

• 3:50:43Speaker 05

  And it was dangerous to do that. Yeah. Once, once you got out there and survived it a time or two, you know, you could start to get addicted to it. And, you know, there are cases that I talk about in the book where I could see they were addicted to it.

• 3:51:01Shawn Ryan?

  How could you tell?

• 3:51:04Speaker 05

  Well, my, my roommates, you know, we were, for the most part, put in, in rooms with, you know, two people to a room in the recon company.

• 3:51:16Speaker 05

  And my roommate came back from a mission and he, he told me that, wow.

• 3:51:27Speaker 05

  They thought they were gonna get me this time. They thought they were, I outsmarted those guys and, you know. So they're not as good as they think they are. I said, Dennis, they are good, you know?

• 3:51:45Speaker 05

  And if they almost got you,

• 3:51:49Speaker 05

  you need to be careful. You need to think about it.

• 3:51:55Speaker 05

  And then he came, came back to me.

• 3:52:01Speaker 05

  A couple of missions, well, before he, he came back a couple of missions later, I woke up, you know,

• 3:52:09Speaker 05

  in the middle of the night, because I just, I could feel somebody looking at me. And I woke up and Dennis is standing right there, lights out, looking down at me.

• 3:52:22Speaker 05

  My Car 15 hanging on the wall right next to me. I grabbed that, you know, and I was ready to shoot him. And I realized it was him. Dennis, what are you doing?

• 3:52:37Speaker 05

  I said, nothing, I was just thinking.

• 3:52:42Speaker 05

  And he wouldn't, wouldn't talk about it. He got back to bed, went to bed. And then, then he wanted to talk. I said, just getting ready to go on another mission. And he said,

• 3:52:54Speaker 05

  I, I don't have a good feeling about this one.

• 3:52:59Speaker 05

  I said, I thought you felt like you were doing pretty well. He said, there's something about this one. I don't know what it is. I can't shake it. I just feel like I'm not coming back from this one. And we chatted about that feeling and I told him,

• 3:53:21Speaker 05

  just my thought, talking to you.

• 3:53:25Speaker 05

  It's not over till it's over.

• 3:53:29Speaker 05

  And I don't know where that's coming from. I'm just telling you,

• 3:53:34Speaker 05

  if I were you, first of all, I wouldn't go on the mission. I would go turn it down. I know you're not going to do that. But that's what you should do. But if you go, just keep in mind, it's not over until it's over.

• 3:53:51Speaker 05

  You know, be very careful.

• 3:53:55Speaker 05

  You know, very careful, not realizing that his assistant team leader was talking, you know, to my buddy, the same thing. Saying, you know, I, I think the captain is, is really good. He's a really good operator and team leader, but I'm scared. There's something about this mission, I'm scared. And so we were having these two separate conversations and Bruce didn't know that I was talking to Dennis. I didn't know he was, he was talking to the other guy.

• 3:54:39Speaker 05

  And they went out and got to, they came back and finished the mission. Supposedly got back to the extraction LZ undetected. They were waiting on the helicopters to come get them. And all of a sudden, you know, you, you heard that call on the radio, prayer fire emergency, prayer fire emergency. You know, we're overrun. And then it goes off. Covy can't make contact with them. You know, you just radio silence on their part.

• 3:55:20Speaker 05

  So, we realized we're gonna have to send a bright light team out there. And, and this was one where I was already at the launch site. So they changed my mission to bright light to, to go out there. But about 30 minutes after the message that we heard that was where they were overrun, then on the emergency radio on the guard frequency, there was a, a voice that came on and saying, God, help me, please, somebody help me. An American voice on the, the guard frequency.

• 3:56:01Speaker 05

  The covey that was out there didn't know, didn't know these two guys personally. So he did, he couldn't tell if that was one of their voices or somebody else. He couldn't tell which one of them it might have been on the radio. But, sent a team out, they, they recovered.

• 3:56:25Speaker 05

  Two survivors of the indigenous. I got them back in and I was on standby to go back out there to try to find Dennis and the one one. And listening to these two guys tell what happened and what they did after it happened. Bruce was there with me and we were talking. Something's not right. Something just doesn't sound right the way they're telling it.

• 3:57:05Speaker 05

  So when we did go in, it didn't take long. I told Bruce, I mean, we were in contact, you know, continuous kind of fighter way in, continuous contact, you know, the time we were there, didn't get back out until the next day, but continuous contact. And I told Bruce, I said, nothing, where we are, looks like what they described. I mean, this is just not the place where it happened. I think they were wounded, they were scared, and how far they ran, which way they ran, was just not correct.

• 3:57:49Speaker 05

  Not that they were intentionally, you know, doing it, but I think they were so stressed out, they didn't know where they had started from and how far they went. And I said, I think we're, you know, 2,000 meters probably away from where it actually happened. But we were in such heavy contact, we were in the middle of a bunker complex, we couldn't really stop and do anything about it, you know, then. Never found them. Sheesh. So. They were eventually declared, presumed dead, and, you know, so their families could

• 3:58:34Speaker 05

  get some closure. Have you ever gone back to Vietnam? No.

• 3:58:44Speaker 05

  I've been invited a few times by people. I probably, and Bargewell went back.

• 3:58:55Speaker 05

  I probably should have went when he went.

• 3:59:02Speaker 05

  He actually went back and he found the interpreter that we had on the team that we were on together. I actually found, tracked him down and found him.

• 3:59:15Speaker 05

  Terrible story. I mean, the guy's just living in poverty, his family's in poverty.

• 3:59:27Speaker 05

  You know, the NVA put him in, you know, reeducation camp, all those guys, they killed him. Put him in reeducation camps for years, took everything they had. You know, like a lot of the stuff in Afghanistan.

• 3:59:41Shawn Ryan?

  Sounds almost identical.

• 3:59:43Speaker 05

  If you, if you're supporting the Americans and the Americans pull out and leave you, you know, it's, it's not gonna be a good thing for you. I mean, yeah. Afghanistan was just a repeat of what we've already done. We did the same thing, you know, Vietnam.

• 4:00:08Shawn Ryan?

  What did you learn in your studies for psychology?

• 4:00:14Shawn Ryan?

  Comes to war?

• 4:00:19Speaker 05

  Well, I think it helped me to have a framework for looking at how people respond in combat, how they can get addicted to different things, get addicted to the adrenaline rush.

• 4:00:40Speaker 05

  You know, those kinds of things that helped me to understand, I think, you know, the impact of fatigue, sleep loss, getting wounded, stress, the different changes. It just...

• 4:00:59Speaker 05

  It's interesting. We take soldiers and we train them and we train them and we train them on the range. Here's what the sight picture's gotta look like. Here's how you do all this stuff. Front sight focus, on and on and on. And then, we put you out there and have those targets start shooting back at you. Stress level skyrockets. And now you discover, you can't see the sights. Your vision changes. You don't have up-close vision anymore. Everything is blurry. You know, within the range of your weapon sights, everything's blurry. You can't get that sight picture when your stress skyrockets. So, now

• 4:01:41Speaker 05

  you're trying to hit something and don't realize that you can't focus, you know, like you've been trained. So, there are a lot of things like that, that I had to framework to go back and look at, think about, and then, you know, go test out. See what works and what doesn't. And, so, that's one side of it. The other side is, how do you help people move forward, start moving forward again? What is it, what is it that you can do for them? And everybody's a little different. And you've got, you have to understand that.

• 4:02:21Speaker 05

  They're starting at different places. They're a little different. Your approach needs to be different. And I've found that, you know, when I'm talking to vets who are struggling, in particular if it's combat-related, that one thing that they seem to be looking for is, I want someone that I can talk to who understands what I'm saying.

• 4:02:53Speaker 05

  I don't care how much book knowledge you have. I don't care how many books you've read or stories you've heard. You just don't know what it's like. And you can't understand me. And I tell you, and you say, "Yeah, you know, that's the way war is." I'm like, "You're not hearing me." And, you know, John and I were having a discussion a number of years back. And I said, "You know, one of the things, one of the things that's different about you

• 4:03:32Speaker 05

  and I and the rest of, most of the other world out there is when you and I read one of these SOG books and we're reading about the gunfights that's going on, it's not nice and quiet like it is here. And we're just reading the words and hearing, you know, seeing what's going on. We hear it. You know, that, we see that F-4 coming. It's silent. It's not making a sound until it passes us. And once it goes past us and that sonic boom hits us and that bomb comes in or the napalm

• 4:04:12Speaker 05

  comes in and the heat and the smell and everything is, I mean, it's so loud. Right now, we can't read that book and not hear it. You know, other people can read it. Nah, they don't hear that stuff. They don't smell the napalm. You know, people who have been there do. And when they're talking to somebody who hasn't been there, they realize it. And I always, I always tell them, I did a podcast with Mike Glover.

• 4:04:53Speaker 05

  And a few minutes into it,

• 4:04:57Speaker 05

  you know, I realized he knows what I'm saying.

• 4:05:03Speaker 05

  He's been there, he's done it, and we're communicating. And we're on the same wavelength here as we talk about what's going on. You know, it's like you and I. You've done it, you've seen it, and we can talk about it, and we're connecting while we're doing it. But if you're some doctor in a VA hospital somewhere, or a therapist, and you haven't experienced it, it's hard to connect. You know, because a vet realizes it right away. It doesn't take him or her but a few minutes to realize, "You got some book knowledge, but you don't know what I'm talking about."

• 4:05:47Speaker 05

  "You can't really empathize with me. You can sympathize, but you can't empathize."

• 4:06:01Shawn Ryan?

  Did you feel a lot of resentment towards regular, everyday Americans that have not served, who are calling you baby killer, woman killer, whatever?

• 4:06:17Speaker 05

  I didn't, and don't resent that they haven't served. You know, I'm okay with that. I mean, it's serving.

• 4:06:29Speaker 05

  I don't think it's necessarily good for everyone. I don't resent that. If they haven't served, and they want to call me a baby killer, then, you know, I'm not happy with that. If he wasn't there, don't tell me what I did.

• 4:06:50Shawn Ryan?

  I think a lot of vets in...

• 4:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  Different generations feel that type of resentment.

• 4:07:01Shawn Ryan?

  What advice do you have for them?

• 4:07:04Speaker 05

  That there are different generations. And except that we're not going to send everybody. Everyone is not going off to serve. Um, that's not the way we're set up. Um, and even if we were, I think because of the different generations that we have and the outlook and philosophy of the different generations, um, it would be difficult.

• 4:07:35Speaker 05

  You know, when we were doing the all volunteer army and we were just dragging people in right and left and putting them in the army, whether they wanted to be there or not, it created so many problems. You know, to go in the service and do what needs to be done, and I'm not talking about war, just to serve, uh, to be a good, you know, soldier or SEAL or whatever, um, it takes the right attitude. You've got to want to do it. You, you have to believe in it, at least to some degree.

• 4:08:14Speaker 05

  And I think it's good that we have a program where you can get out, you know, you go sign up. I mean, you don't have to stay 20 years, you can get out before then. And I think that's good. Um, a lot of people, I, I, I had a basic training company one time. And, and I had a guy, um, that just, at first he said he really wanted to be in the army.

• 4:08:49Speaker 05

  And then he got, he just kept getting into trouble. And he'd go talk to the chaplains. And the chaplains would call me up and say, you know, George, not his name, but George. George is a good soldier. You gotta, you gotta give him a chance. I mean, he's a good soldier. And he kept, we had several conversations about George. And I was just misunderstanding him. He was a good guy. And then I got a call from the, on the chaplain saying, is George there? You know where George is? I said, I'm sure he's here in the company area somewhere. Why? It's that lowlife stole my boombox while he was up here talking to me yesterday.

• 4:09:33Speaker 05

  And he, oh, man, he flipped. And so anyway, went to the barracks. And sure enough, there was the chaplain's boombox. And took it back to him. And then finally, we, I decided to go ahead and process the paperwork to, to let him go, get him out of the army. So, um, the day of the company graduating, he was still in, but he wasn't gonna be able to graduate. And he came to me and he said, I, I know you're gonna have the graduation ceremony this morning. And I'm not gonna be there. But I stayed up most of the night last night. Uh, and I wrote a poem.

• 4:10:18Speaker 05

  And, you know, I, I'd be honored if you would read this poem at graduation today. Said, let me see it. And I said, this is the poem you wrote last night? Yes, sir. Okay, so it's, the title is, I am the infantry. I said, yes, sir. He's standing here. I'm looking on the wall right behind him.

• 4:10:52Speaker 05

  And I'm not reading what he wrote. I'm just reading off the picture that's hanging on the wall back there with this poem on it. "I am the infantry." Yes, sir, I wrote that. You know, "I'm the queen of battle. Follow me." Word for word off of that. He copied on this piece of paper and he given to me. He told me he wrote it and he wanted me to read it.

• 4:11:18Speaker 05

  Some people don't need to be in the service. Even if they want to, some of them don't need to be.

• 4:11:29Speaker 05

  I don't know. I've looked at Korean Army.

• 4:11:36Speaker 05

  Mandatory two years.

• 4:11:39Speaker 05

  You know, when you hit a certain age, you've got to go into the Army for two years.

• 4:11:46Speaker 05

  When I was in Korea, I had thirty-two Katusas. Thirty-two Koreans who, for whatever reason, they were able to get to serve their two-year obligation in the US Army.

• 4:12:07Speaker 05

  As long as they did well, they could do their two years with the US Army and then move on. Because the Rock Army is hard and they're hard on the young guys.

• 4:12:22Speaker 05

  So I had thirty-two of them. And all I had to do was mention, "I think you're gonna have to go back over to the Rock Army." "What do you want me to do? I'd do anything." In fact, I actually sent one back. They came, got him yelling, screaming, drug him into the Jeep. And he was yelling out the back, "I'll do anything. I'll do anything. Just don't send me back."

• 4:12:49Speaker 05

  So they do it two years. The North Korean Army, I think, is seven years. So it might be that we have some kind of service program, whether it be military or something else that people do. I don't know. Everybody's just not cut out for it, I think.

• 4:13:11Speaker 05

  How did you meet your wife?

• 4:13:16Speaker 05

  I was stationed at Delana Good Georgia. In the Ranger camp up there, now the called the 5th Ranger Battalion.

• 4:13:31Speaker 05

  As an instructor. And a friend of mine had set up a date with her, my wife's roommate. But she told my friend that she wouldn't date him unless it was a double date. So he needed to get someone.

• 4:13:52Speaker 05

  Get someone to, you know, go out with her. So it would have been a blind date. So he got one of our other friends that was, said he would go, but something came up and he, the last minute, he wasn't going to be able to go. So my friend came to me and said, would, would you fill in for him? I really want to, you know, take this girl out and she won't go unless I have somebody for her roommate. So I volunteered to go. And, and we got it approved that, you know, it was going to be a different person. It was going to be me showing up. But when I got out of the car to go in with my friends to pick them up.

• 4:14:37Speaker 05

  Somebody on her hall looked out the window, saw me coming across the parking lot and I was on crutches. I had, I had a really bad landing and screwed my knee up, parachute jump.

• 4:14:57Speaker 05

  And somebody on the hall yelled that he's got a wooden leg. And word spread fast that, you know, I had a wooden leg. And she wasn't going to go, but convinced her that I didn't have a wooden leg. I was, I had a real leg.

• 4:15:20Speaker 05

  We went out, we had a, you know, we really had a really good time, except for she did have to sit on parachutes that we had in the back of my friend's car that, you know, the trunk was full, and we had a bunch of other parachutes there. You know, if you've got a bunch of parachutes, and you've got a helicopter that you can use for, you know, a short period of time, you don't want to have to stop and repack. You have several parachutes, you go jump, you hit the ground, you put on a new one, you go jump. Anyway, so we kind of, we kind of hit it off from there. Once I didn't go back to Vietnam, then we decided to get married, and fifty-one years, we're still here.

• 4:16:05Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations. What's the secret to a successful marriage?

• 4:16:09Speaker 05

  She's always right.

• 4:16:16Speaker 05

  And, and I would, I would do well to remember that whether I think so at the time or not, that she's gonna end up being right. I mean, because she really is right. So I need to, I need to listen more. And, and, you know, she went to graduate from college at the North Georgia Military College, so she understood, you know, about the military, and the ranger camp was right there, she knew about rangers, and, and I, just one quick thing, her family,

• 4:16:55Speaker 05

  for the most part, they had, there was one section of, of road and land around it that her grandparents, I guess, had owned at one time, and started giving it to her kids. So most of the family lived in that one spot, and I told her, when I went over there to pick her up, I said, one hand grenade, take out most of your family, they're all right here together. But anyway, they would have this big Christmas party, you know, family would all come in and get together every, you know.

• 4:17:33Speaker 05

  Few days before Christmas and so this year I got invited, we're not married yet, but I got invited to it and I mean the house is full, but you know, like that time, most of the men are gathered in one room and you know, so I went in to kind of meet them. One of her uncles said, "Grenace says you're a ranger." No, but four, he asked me, he asked me a question about invasive species. He said, "You know, the pine needles are just killing the pine trees out here.

• 4:18:18Speaker 05

  What do you think about that?" I said, "That's not good, having, you know, an invasive species like that." And a little bit later, he asked me another question about trees. And I, I said, "When do you keep asking me questions about trees?" He said, "Well, you know, Grenace said you were a ranger." I said, "I am a ranger. I'm a, I'm an army ranger. You could have heard a pin drop in the whole room. You're in the army?

• 4:19:02Speaker 05

  You're an army ranger?" They did not have a good reputation in that area, but, and it was like, "Holy cow, she's dating an army ranger?" And then, then somebody in there just, I didn't get to see exactly which one it was. How many people you kill? And it was just silence. But then they decided, you know, they, they would let me in the family, but, you know, I thought, "Why am I getting all those questions about trees? I don't..."

• 4:19:39Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man. What are you doing to keep busy today?

• 4:19:48Speaker 05

  Today, I'm really enjoying spending time with you. This has been great from start to finish. Very impressed with what you've done, what you're doing with your new facility that you've got set up. Having the opportunity to come up and spend some time to get to know you better. I mean, this has been awesome.

• 4:20:14Shawn Ryan?

  Well, Dick, it's been a real, a real honor to interview you and I would love to get you and John out there here pretty soon and we'll have a range day, break that noose again, tell some stories.

• 4:20:32Speaker 05

  Hey.

• 4:20:33Shawn Ryan?

  Have a fire.

• 4:20:34Speaker 05

  I'm all for it.

• 4:20:35Shawn Ryan?

  Me too, me too. But, man, I'll tell you. I couldn't think of a better person to close this studio down with than having you here. And it just means the world to me and thank you for being here.

• 4:20:52Speaker 05

  I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this and be the last person, but even if I wasn't the last person, just to get to come in and spend the day with you and chat about all these different things and, you know, meet you. So, and be able to put you on a friend list and say, "I know this guy." So, I really appreciate that. And there was some discussion this morning when we ate breakfast. So, John, I'll tell you, I got you back. I'm here, you need me, you call me.

• 4:21:35Speaker 05

  And I appreciate it, appreciate everything you've done.

• 4:21:38Shawn Ryan?

  I extend that same to you. Thank you so much.

• 4:21:42Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 4:21:43Shawn Ryan?

  Seriously, it's been an honor.

• 4:21:44Speaker 05

  Good night.

• 4:21:45Shawn Ryan?

  Have a nice.