#260 Dale Hanson - Why MACV-SOG Had an 85% Casualty Rate and 1-in-4000 Odds

Dale Hanson is a highly decorated Vietnam War veteran and Green Beret who served three years as a commando in the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group (MACV-SOG), conducting extremely dangerous reconnaissance missions deep behind enemy lines. Born in Queens, New York, and raised in Saco, Maine, with family ties to Minnesota's harsh winters, Hanson was influenced by his family's military legacy—his father, born in 1894, served and died when Dale was eight. Given the name "Kam Baw Ya Chin," meaning 'eternal life, never die,' by his Chinese mercenary counterparts, he led recon teams facing high casualty rates and earned numerous decorations. Hanson is also an accomplished sculptor, MENSA member, black belt martial artist, author, pilot of fixed-wing and glider aircraft (including aerobatics), and Special Forces underwater diver. He shares his experiences through his memoir Born Twice: Memoir of a Special Forces SOG Warrior (2016) and SOG Missions to the Well, highlighting the challenges, heroism, and lack of recognition for SOG soldiers. Hanson advocates for honoring veterans' sacrifices, preserving military history, and using personal stories to educate on the realities of covert warfare. Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: Receive 30% off your first subscription order. Go to https://armra.com/SRS or enter SRS to get 30% off your first subscription order. Right now, you can try Aura free for 14 days when you visit http://aura.com/SRS Our listeners get 10% off at https://BetterHelp.com/SRS. Head to http://DRINKAG1.com/SRS you’ll get the welcome kit, a Morning Person hat, a bottle of Vitamin D3+K2, and a AG1 Flavor Sampler for free. Dale Hanson Links: Studio Website - https://www.dale-hanson-studio.com Amazon Author Page - https://www.amazon.com/stores/Dale-Hanson/author/B001KD7KE0 SOG Site - https://sogsite.com/product/born-twice-memoir-of-a-special-forces-sog-warrior 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 foreme of the explosion on our rig.

• 0:03Speaker 01

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• 0:59Shawn Ryan?

  Mr. Dale Hanson.

• 1:01Speaker 05

  Sir.

• 1:01Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the show.

• 1:03Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 1:04Shawn Ryan?

  It's an honor to have you here. So, I started interviewing your generation of veterans this year. And I've had, I think, three Vietnam vets on this year. And I just want you to know that, you know, I was in the military. Went to Iraq, Afghanistan, did some contract work for the agency all over the Middle East. And I just want to say that your generation is... The Vietnam era is what was really the motivating factor for me to enlist in the SEAL teams.

• 1:48Shawn Ryan?

  And I've watched all the movies, read a lot of the books. I mean, I just was infatuated with the Vietnam War and what you guys were doing over there. So, it really is a true honor for me to be able to interview you guys.

• 2:04Speaker 05

  Thank you.

• 2:05Shawn Ryan?

  And you came very highly recommended from John Stryker Meyer, our mutual friend. And...

• 2:16Speaker 06

  Tilt's a good man too.

• 2:18Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, how long, how long have you guys known each other?

• 2:21Speaker 06

  Um, we didn't know each other in Vietnam, but we knew each other after.

• 2:25Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:25Speaker 06

  He was DNC North, I was seen Central, so we were only a couple hundred miles apart, but our missions were, you know, parallel rather than at the same time. So I, I knew him at the first Army reunions, the special forces ones, and got to be friends right away, you know, yeah, who cannot be friends with Tilt?

• 2:43Shawn Ryan?

  Right.

• 2:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:44Shawn Ryan?

  Such an awesome guy. All you guys are awesome people, man. But, um, well, everybody, everybody starts with a introduction here, so Dale Hanson, welcome home. Thank you. A born again Christian since the age of five, a special forces operator and Vietnam war veteran who served three tours in the secretive MACV SOG at command and control central. Innovator behind the adoption of the 30 round magazine for the CAR 15 in the, in SOG, solving a critical battlefield issue through personal initiative. Author of numerous books, including Born Twice and SOG, Missions to the Well, which

• 3:27Shawn Ryan?

  you detail your missions and those of your comrades. Pursued martial arts, black belts, pilot training, police work in Alaska, and a successful career as a sculptor. Currently, you're a pastor of, of a small Baptist church. You're a husband, father, grandfather, great grandfather, and servant of Jesus Christ. Amen. Welcome again to the show. You said that well. Thank you, thank you. So, so, uh, I'd like to do a life story on you, where you grew up, what childhood was like, getting into the Vietnam War, how you got into MACV SOG, and then, um, you know,

• 4:08Shawn Ryan?

  I think an important thing for all generations of veterans who went to war is, uh, is the transition home and, and how you got over some of the traumatic events and.

• 4:20Shawn Ryan?

  How you got back into into uh the civilian life and um and uh and yeah, but I'm just curious. Are you from Alaska?

• 4:30Speaker 06

  No, a northern Minnesota.

• 4:32Shawn Ryan?

  Northern Minnesota.

• 4:33Speaker 06

  Most town in continental United States, the cold spot in the United States. And I was mentioning to one of the guys that thirty percent of Canada is south of northern Minnesota. And Maine and Washington state are three hundred miles south. If you go to longitude and latitude. And it seems to come down right there at my hometown is pretty cold.

• 4:58Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 4:58Speaker 06

  Really cold.

• 4:59Shawn Ryan?

  So how did you wind up in Alaska? Was that getting the hell away from everybody?

• 5:04Speaker 06

  Uh, it was after after the war, after a whole bunch of stuff.

• 5:11Speaker 06

  I I think my wife wanted to go more than anything else.

• 5:16Speaker 06

  That that's probably it and uh she went to college in in Sitka, Alaska. And um the president and his wife just made her into a daughter, you know, and uh uh she was a Miss Alaska kind of a thing too. Beautiful woman, very, very smart, smarter than me by a long ways. And uh um uh it was it was difficult in in California if after the war and I don't know exactly why. Um but anyway, she says, let's go to Alaska and she called the president and we had a job, you know, right away. And we went up there and we've been there ever since and it's a um a beautiful place. It's small, um conservative.

• 6:00Speaker 06

  I don't know, we we've just been there forever.

• 6:05Speaker 06

  Lots started in Minnesota where we grew up. A small farm town, uh house, a clapboard. My dad came out of uh World War Two. He was at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Tinian and another one, the big one, but he was army. Because Marines get all the credit for it, but they would attach this one regiment of army on all the attacks. And so he wound up at all the uh the big battles and he came back. And basically, he wanted to be a farmer, get away from things, be quiet. And so we were on this single-story clapboard house, no electricity, no running water.

• 6:48Speaker 06

  I remember as a young boy, we had a well. And my dad took me out to the well, and I was pretty small, a couple of years old. And he took me over to the well, and he says, "This is where we have our butter and our cheese" and stuff, and we put it in the well. He said, "Never go there, never go there, because you'll drown and we'll never find you." And, but then after a certain amount of time, my dad and mom moved to International Falls. You couldn't make a living on the farm and so forth, so he got a job in the mill. And that's where he stayed until he died.

• 7:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  Working hard there.

• 7:32Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 7:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:34Shawn Ryan?

  Well, before we get too in the weeds here, we've got a couple of things to knock out. So, everybody, everybody gets a gift here. So, those are Vigilance League gummy bears.

• 7:49Speaker 06

  I love gummy bears.

• 7:50Shawn Ryan?

  Made in the USA.

• 7:51Speaker 06

  Perfect.

• 7:52Shawn Ryan?

  Legal in all 50 states. Good to go.

• 7:56Speaker 06

  Perfect.

• 7:57Shawn Ryan?

  And then, just one more thing. We have a, I have a Patreon account. It's like an online community. And then they have been with us since the beginning, when I was doing this in my attic. And so, one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question, because they're, they're literally the reason that I get to sit here with you today. And so, this is from Moose. "How was our country, how was our country different before you left for Vietnam versus when you came back? It seems the country has changed in many ways as it was during Vietnam.

• 8:37Shawn Ryan?

  What do you think of the state of our country now, and are you hopeful for our country's future?"

• 8:44Speaker 06

  An extremely good question. And...

• 8:48Speaker 06

  I think we seem to notice things when they happen quickly and violently and in great degree. We're losing our country incrementally, piece by piece, and most of it is the moorings that we have. We were founded, in your own recollection, we were founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic. We were a Christian nation, specifically we didn't believe in forcing someone, so therefore you had the privilege of not believing as well. But all of our documents, you know, we hold these truths to be self-evident. We are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, pursuit of happiness and so forth.

• 9:31Speaker 06

  Everything about our country was on those moorings. And if you look at the media and so forth, those moorings have disappeared. And sometimes I think the only thing that holds it together, the glue and so forth, is well-being. People figure as long as I am happy and well-being and my bills are paid and all that stuff, I'm happy with the country. And we watch and let it dissolve. And some of the old preachers from years and years and years ago would say that, apart from revival, you know, our country will be lost. I mean, what will it take to save America?

• 10:12Speaker 06

  You know, in every state in the United States, the major city is left-wing to the point of almost being socialist. So I have a lot of concern for America. And like the old time, it's gonna take revival, people are gonna have to turn back to the moorings, which made us great in the first place.

• 10:34Speaker 05

  I don't think I could have said that any better myself. Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Man, it's, uh, it just, I don't know, just makes it more real when somebody like you says it. Really does.

• 10:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 10:56Speaker 05

  But, all right, let's move into the interview. So...

• 11:05Speaker 06

  Where did you grow up?

• 11:08Speaker 06

  Say once more. Where did you grow up? When did I grow up? Where? Uh, mainly, um, International Falls, Minnesota. Um, I guess some of the foundational things about life and who made me, or what made me what I am. I, I think it's kind of instructive to, to, you see the end result of who you are. You know, what made you into that? You know, what are the, what was the ingredients in that recipe? And, uh, there were a couple of them for me that were foundational that made the character of Dale Hanson, who I am. And, and the first one was when I was five years old, I became a Christian, which sounds kind of strange maybe to some people. But, um, I apparently had a good mind

• 11:53Speaker 06

  and I could converse with adults on pretty much a, a straight level. And I, I was hearing the preacher and he was, I, I remember so clearly, he was, um, he was so intense on the sermon. And, uh, his head was sweating, had thin hair and he, his head was down. And it was almost like he was preaching at the pulpit instead of us and, and, uh, in, in his heart, it was just exploding in, in his heart. And he, and he says, at the invitation, he says, you are, you need to stand at the bridge of decision and look into the churning waters and dive to yourself and die to yourself and come up a new creature.

• 12:34Speaker 06

  And, um, uh, I wanted to be a Christian at five years old. And I understood it from my Sunday school teacher. But when he spoke that, uh, it was a foundational thing to me. And so, uh, all week long, um, I had nightmares about it. Because, because as a, as a, as a child, I can understand straight literal language, but I didn't understand metaphor and simile and comparisons and allegories. You know, I didn't realize that he's making word pictures to make it clearer to people to understand. Well, as a boy, I remember. The one place that there was a bridge was between

• 13:18Speaker 06

  International Falls, Minnesota and Canada, that place. And all the gigantic lakes of northern Minnesota, Rainy Lake and all the rest of them would pour through that gully into Lake of the Woods in the western half of the state. And down below that bridge, it just churned and it beat against the rocks. It was like, almost a yellow as it wore the rocks away. And I, in my mind, I kept thinking, this must be where it happens. And, um, and so I wrestled with it all this week. If I want to be a Christian, I have to be willing to do that. And not understanding, you know? So that next week, my parents weren't there, but I sat on the edge of the pew.

• 14:01Speaker 06

  And when the pastor gave the invitation, I went forward. And I was only five years old and the pastor thought I must have gotten away from my parents or something. And he said, what can I do for you, son? And I says, I'm ready to have you throw me off the bridge. And I thought that morning, when the church was dismissed, we would go over there to the Canadian border and that's when it would happen. And all of a sudden, he realized his metaphor was way over the head of a young boy. And, um, so he looks to his wife and he says, Mabel, this young boy would like to know how to become a Christian. And so we went back into the back room and I sat in a little red chair. I just vividly remember it. She sat in the chair next to me and she told me the plan of salvation, which I already

• 14:46Speaker 06

  knew, that we are born sinners, that man is a sinner by choice and by character, and that we are separated from a holy God. And there's nothing of our own merit that we can do to earn that, but Jesus Christ came. And he was God and he was born of a virgin and represented me in the human race. And so he died on the cross with Dale Hanson's sins. And, uh, and so I get saved by believing that and accepting, the Bible talks about the gift of eternal life.

• 15:25Speaker 06

  And I accept Christ's gift that he did on the cross and I became a Christian. But as a young boy- All that at the age of five? Yeah, at five. And it must have been one of the first- Things of definitive courage that I did because beyond just the spiritual thing, I physically thought that I was gonna be tossed off that bridge or jump off myself. But, you know, obviously it was wrong because I was understanding the metaphor. But, um, that's been who I am the rest of my life. The Bible says you're born again, which is how I got the title for my first Sog book,

• 16:06Speaker 06

  you know, is that the experiences in Vietnam and what we went through was horrendous. Our odds of living was one in 4,000. And it was so unique that when you come out on the other end, you're not the same person again. And, um, so anyway, that was kind of the first. That's a vivid memory for a five-year-old. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember, I don't know what happened to my brains, you know, but I remember being across the breakfast table from my grandma Hanson and one of my uncles. And I would be talking to them, talking to them, and they would just be smiling and

• 16:50Speaker 06

  listening to me talk, you know, and it never occurred to me till much later, you know, that what that was like, you know. But there were a couple other cornerstones in my life that made me who I was. Perhaps the third one, I didn't say a second one, but as a young Christian, you want to be as Christ-like as you can, you know? You want to, I mean, you're a new person, you want to emulate or emulate. One is burn, one is copy. I don't remember which is. Me neither. Yeah.

• 17:35Speaker 06

  But you want to emulate Jesus Christ and be as much like him as you can. And I was reading the Bible, I think I was about 12, 13 years old, and I came across a verse in the New Testament, Luke 2:52, the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, 52. And it talks about Jesus, he was 100% God and 100% man. He had to be God or he'd be a sinner just like us, and he had to be man to represent me. So.

• 18:08Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 18:12Speaker 06

  Forgetting where I'm at.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Seeing the. Age thirteen, you're reading the Bible. It goes like this, "And Jesus grew and waxed in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men." And of course, the word wax means increased and increased. And I was really captivated by that verse. It said, "Jesus was perfect in four different areas. If I'm going to emulate Him, I should be also in those four areas." Which so often in Christianity and spiritual things, we think of just the spiritual. But it says, "And Jesus grew and waxed in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men."

• 18:56Speaker 06

  And so, as I was looking at that as a young teenager, He was perfect physically, intellectually, socially, spiritually. And so, I tried my best to be as close to perfect as I can in all those areas. So physically, I worked out hard. I don't know if anyone in the high school ever did, but I worked out hard. My pull-ups, three sets of thirty-five, and the dips was three sets of fifty. And so, when I worked out really hard, I jogged and all that kind of a thing. And then intellectually, I tried to read good literature. I read the classics and all that, and books on logic and thinking and so forth, so you could actually reason clearly.

• 19:41Speaker 06

  And of course, socially and spiritually, I'm a little bit clumsy socially. I'm a little bit shy, but nonetheless, I try, you know. And so, that is one of the things that made me as well-rounded as I am today, if I am at all well-rounded, because I tried to encapsulate all four of those areas in my heart. And of course, the third thing is getting shot. You know.

• 20:13Speaker 06

  I was thirteen years old and you know, the first one kinda gave me a certain amount of courage. A lot of people ask me, what is the number one ingredient to be a green beret? You know, and I always think, well, people expect me to say, and they're true, like, physical, um, strength, intelligence is in there, and there's several, a bunch of them. But after three years of combat, um, I think that number one thing of a leader, especially in that kind of a war, is being able to make a decision under pressure. You know, um, probably more than anything, when it is so violent and wild and turmoil

• 20:56Speaker 06

  that you can't even think, you gotta come up with the right thing to do. And, um, I was hunting with my uncles, I had my, I was there, my brother was a year and a half younger, and then my cousin was two years younger, and two of my uncles, and my uncles, uh, we were, we were, young guys were gonna do a drive, and they were gonna go on the other side of a pretty large forest area. And so they, they went around, uh, and they left their cars, or they were in the field. And so they said, well, give us at least a half hour. So they were walking around to the other side, and, um, I, I looked at my cousin, I, I says, let's go for a spin in the car.

• 21:41Speaker 06

  And, uh, my uncle, all cars back then, would go a hundred, all of them did. Uh, before, I don't know what they do nowadays, but they don't. Uh, and my uncle Walt could do a hundred and twenty like nothing, he was just fast. But anyway, I, I went over there, my brother was having none of that, my uncle got in, but I had a thirty thirty Winchester, lever action. And so I opened the lever of the thirty thirty and slid across the seat, you know, barrel toward me, but it's inoperable, you know, with the thing. Well, I didn't notice, but my cousin, who was a couple of years younger than me, said, well, that doesn't look right, and he shut it. And that left it not only loaded and primed, but cocked, you know?

• 22:24Speaker 06

  So it's cold Minnesota, I'm driving across the highway, and, um, all the bumps where the furrows were, where the farmers were the year before, and it's just bouncing, bump, bump, bump, and then the railroad tracks, I'd be coming on the highway, bump, bump, you know? It was just as I hit the highway. That went off and it went through my hip, the cheek part and out my tailbone, a quarter inch out and um uh my leg shot out just stiff as a board, just totally stiff. It was like it was made out of wood, you know, on the accelerator. And I'm heading down the highway and this car is going, break next speed, going faster and faster.

• 23:06Speaker 06

  And I got both hands trying to pull my leg off the accelerator and I couldn't, it just would not come. I was pulling, I'm pulling, pulling. Now, instead of steering with my elbow, I've already got a hand on that steering wheel. And so I'm steering, trying to keep it on the highway and I'm grabbing the cloth on my pant leg and pulling, trying to get my foot off the accelerator. And we're going a hundred and twenty and we're going down the highway and my cousin jumped out right away. He knew something was dreadful. But then I um uh it the shock came out and I was able to pull it off my the accelerator. And so I pulled off to the edge down there and got it out of gear.

• 23:48Speaker 06

  And I just sat there and I knew this this was significant. And before I knew it, my two uncles ran over, they found out what happened, they ran over. I slid over to the other side, my uncle went behind the steering wheel and the other one in the in the back. And we headed for a little hospital, twelve miles down the road in World, Minnesota. And he was driving full speed, a hundred and twenty, all the way down there. And we got to the hospital and the road is separated from the hospital doors by a hundred and fifty feet, maybe, maybe a little bit more with the long sidewalk. And the uncles ran out to carry me to the hospital.

• 24:32Speaker 06

  And it's like definitively, I needed to appraise the situation, even at thirteen years old. I said, no, I gotta walk because by trying to walk, I could assess how bad I was. I just knew that that's the thing, you know, more than what a doctor can tell me. It'll tell me if I'm broken, broken bones, you know, all this stuff. And I walked all the way to the door. And at the door, I, I, all strength was gone, the weakness was there and they grabbed me, put me in there. And I remember that, that night, you, you probably haven't had occasion

• 25:11Speaker 06

  to think of it, but when you have a lot of bleeding, they put a rubber sheet on top of the mattress so it doesn't get ruined. And the nurse came in and I, I asked the nurse, I says, "Am I supposed to slosh?" And she says, "What the?" I says, "Am I supposed to slosh?" And I turned my body sideways and you could hear the blood, it was sloshing. Holy cow. Out. And she just dropped her stethoscope, took off running and it seemed like an instant and the doctor was there. And I was definitely bleeding out, you know. And I spent probably a week there. My parents brought me home to International Falls, it's a hundred miles

• 25:52Speaker 06

  from World, and had all the blankets and pillows in the car. I remember the first week after I got home, I says, "I gotta go to church." I don't know, I didn't want to make a spectacle on myself, but I just thought I should be in church. And so my dad dropped me off, he says, "Are you sure?" Because he wasn't a church going guy. And he says, "You sure?" And I said, "Yeah." And I didn't realize until he left, but there were steps going up. Oh, man, I gotta walk up those steps. But I walked up those steps and I had a Bible in my left hand and a pillow in my right. And I went to the, the back pew so wouldn't, you know, disturb anything and put that pillow down and sat on, sat on the pew. But

• 26:37Speaker 06

  it was only in retrospect, from years later, that I, I kinda thought and realized that, you know, you know, even at that young age, I was making decisions under extreme pressure. A thirteen year old can't handle much more pressure than that, you know. Yeah.

• 26:55Speaker 06

  So anyway, uh, uh, uh, those were three events just growing up that I thought were formative in my life and going, getting older, you know, college and all that and the military, you know, you realize that I can handle stuff. Maybe other people can't, but I know I can, you know, and it's, it gave me a comfort and even the, the simple thing about being a Christian, going, going to combat, knowing that you're going to kill people and, and all that kind of thing. I, that was resolved in my mind too. Uh, and that it's permissible to take a life for self-defense, capital punishment, war, you know, and I, that's not a problem with me. And I looked at all the, the, the characters,

• 27:36Speaker 06

  uh, Moses was adopted by Pharaoh's daughter to be perhaps the next Pharaoh and he would have been a general in the Egyptian army. And then, uh, uh, David, you know, King, uh, King David, the shepherd boy who killed Goliath. Uh, they used to sing, Saul hath killed his thousands, but David is ten thousands. And all the way down the line, there were heroes. And, and in the New Testament, when it talks about the Christian life, uh, Ephesians six talks about putting on the armor of God and, and all this kind of thing. So, so the metaphors of war are there and, um.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  That's interesting. So you, you actually, you did all the research before you what?

• 28:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:24Speaker 05

  Most of the time.

• 28:24Speaker 06

  Well, I was actually in college, I'm a military student and, um, uh, uh, I think it was in my third, third year, a year to go. And, um, I believed in the war. I'm very anti-communist. And, uh, anyway, I kept thinking, reading the newspaper, so many GIs have been killed and all that stuff. And what, I'm thinking, I'm ready to die, you know, if I have to, you know, not, I'm not eager, but I, I'm ready. And, you know, the least I can do is do my part. What, what a shame it would be at the end of this war, being healthy and intelligent, that I didn't do my part. So I, I quit and enlisted with the, the previsal that I be able to try for special forces.

• 29:09Speaker 05

  Wow. So you, you, you wanted special forces, right?

• 29:13Speaker 06

  Yeah. It's the only thing. If I'm going to do this, I'm going to be the best there is. That, that's all there is to it. I'm not going to be anything else, you know?

• 29:21Speaker 05

  How old were you when you made that decision?

• 29:24Speaker 06

  Probably twenty-one.

• 29:26Speaker 05

  Twenty-one?

• 29:26Speaker 06

  I think so, third year of college.

• 29:28Speaker 05

  What were you in sc- what were you in school for?

• 29:32Speaker 06

  Major?

• 29:32Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 29:33Speaker 06

  Theology.

• 29:34Speaker 05

  Theology?

• 29:34Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Of course, you take all the other stuff.

• 29:38Speaker 05

  What was the one thing that you saw that did made you decide to go the military route?

• 29:44Speaker 06

  Um, I th- I- it me- uh, that's- that's a good question, because it makes me think, it was probably atrocities I saw from the other side. How horrific communism, I knew philosophically how bad communism is and how they enslave and murder people. But, um, to see it firsthand, and of course, you had the one American who did this atrocity for the whole war, um, Cali, the Thai Cali. Uh, but- but it was routine fare for the- for the enemy. They would wipe out entire villages and so forth. Or leave one alive so that he could tell people who did it, General. And that might have been a good part of it.

• 30:32Shawn Ryan?

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• 31:46Speaker 05

  So when you went to the recruiter?

• 31:48Speaker 06

  No, it wasn't a recruiter at all.

• 31:50Speaker 05

  Were you drafted?

• 31:51Speaker 06

  No, no, I enlisted. Actually, I had a perfect deferment. Students got two S. Ministerial students got four S. They couldn't touch you, you know. No, I'm gonna go in this thing. So I drove down to Minneapolis and took all the tests and enlisted. And I wanted to see it in writing. I have the right to try for Special Forces. They can't give it to you, but I can sure try for it. You know, and I did well. I was undergraduate on the basic and got promoted. And then I was undergraduate on AIT and got promoted. And then, AIT is interesting to Camp Crockett.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  And I don't know if you've ever heard of that. But it was a secret military installation in the United States to train people to fight. And it was outside of Fort Gordon, 10 miles in the woods. And it was paid for by excess funds is what the euphemism was. And there were 600 of us there. And it was all people who were gonna go commando airborne and things like that. And we took the Special Forces test there. And there were 600 of us and only three of us passed it.

• 33:12Speaker 05

  Are you serious?

• 33:13Speaker 06

  And I was one and Mike Buckland was another. And there was another guy, I think his name was Sormson.

• 33:18Speaker 05

  600 people and three?

• 33:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, only three.

• 33:22Speaker 05

  Three individuals passed it?

• 33:23Speaker 06

  It was an interesting test. And I don't know if it's a routine one. But they had three tests done at exactly the same time. One was oral and they read it on microphones. But the minute the scenario was read, they go to, went immediately to the next one. You had to immediately put down the answer. And then one was literal, where you were reading the words. And then there was another one that was visual, where they saw pictures. But three of them were at the same time. So you had to divide your attention at three different tests at the same time. And then in most cases, you had no time to really deliberate the answers. You had to intuitively put down the right one. You know, so it was an interesting challenge.

• 34:08Speaker 06

  I've not seen. That they have done that since.

• 34:12Speaker 05

  Interesting. Are there a lot of people that went through that? This is the first time I've heard this.

• 34:18Speaker 06

  I don't know if we were, I can't imagine we were the only class. Because it seemed like everything was set up, but it was like Quonset huts and so forth. It was, it was wild. It was very, very basic. I used to do nunchucks and throw my knives. And at the end of the training day, I go out behind the Quonset hut and I'd, I'd throw my knives. You know, I had a little spot I would go in. And I looked on the ground, all over the place were stockings with Kiwi shoe polish in them. And these people were taking shoe polish and taking the lid off and put them in a sock. And they were getting high on shoe polish.

• 34:59Speaker 05

  What?

• 35:00Speaker 06

  Yeah. So they were all over the place. I guess it was the only high they had, you know? So I, I, it wasn't too long till I realized that we weren't all top tier recruits up there.

• 35:16Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 35:19Speaker 05

  So you passed that.

• 35:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 35:21Speaker 05

  Then what happens?

• 35:22Speaker 06

  Got to leave, then went, went to training in Fort Bragg for special forces. Finished Phase One, which Phase One is designed to make you quit or weed you out. That's it. Phase Two, I forget what that was, but anyway, and the third one was for 11F. And that was never done to someone who was not a high rank NCO, E7 or above.

• 35:54Speaker 06

  We had a lecture by a major, I think he came in. And he, I remember him saying SOG. Other people say, no, they said a highly classified unit, but I remember SOG. And, but anyway, he says, we have this program in Vietnam in his special operations group. And.

• 36:20Speaker 06

  You need to be 11F to go. That was your MOS. And that was hard. You had to be a senior NGO, but we were going to let this small group of us do it. It was 37 of us. And but then the proviso at the end of it, he says, at the end of this, all of you people, all graduates are going to be sent directly to Vietnam to SOG. And 85% of you will be dead in three months. So the first thing I did is I went back and said, well, how many do you have to start with? If every three months, 85% die and it's over 4,000. So the odds of living a year in SOG back then was 1 in 4,000.

• 37:05Speaker 06

  Assuming, you know, he wasn't just trying to scare us, but

• 37:08Speaker 05

  Holy.

• 37:08Speaker 06

  It seems, you know, fairly accurate in the sense that of my class, you know, most of them were killed.

• 37:18Speaker 05

  Wow. 1 in 4,000 just to live for one year.

• 37:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. So and it was a super good class. His intelligence and spies and all this kind of thing. It even had safe cracking and I mean, all that part that you could be the James Bond coming out of this thing as well as the commando. And so at the end of it all, we got relieved, flew off to Vietnam. And landed up in Nha Trang, the headquarters of special forces. And C C North, Command and Control. It went by several names, Command and Control. It went by SOG, Special Ops. It went by Studies and Observation Group. And it seems to me there was a couple others too.

• 38:06Speaker 06

  Euphemism that he kept changing the names, you know. But the first day, North and South flew out and the next day,

• 38:16Speaker 06

  my group was that Khantum.

• 38:18Speaker 05

  Wow. Let's just rewind real quick. I mean, what is going through your head when they tell you? Eighty-five percent of you will be wiped out. You do the math. It's one in four thousand. I mean, what's going through your head?

• 38:31Speaker 06

  For some reason, it might be a characteristic of youth, but you're kind of indefatigable. You think that if there's one that's gonna live, it's gonna be me. And I don't know how to say it. You want to be in the most worthwhile program of all, accepting the idea that there's gonna be tremendous risk involved in it. And you're willing to take the risk when you're young. You just think, nothing's gonna get me. You know, as it was, I got popped more than once in my tours, so.

• 39:12Speaker 05

  Did they tell you what McVie Sog would encompass of what the job description was, what you would be doing?

• 39:18Speaker 06

  Pretty much. We know mainly it was gonna be intelligence gathering, a lot of that. Now, we had the Mike forces too, you know, the strike forces as a part of us, perhaps to exploit things that we found and so forth. But that was a part of it too. So you get there and the person who I met first was Bob Howard. And we hit it off really well. And he was first starting a recon because they wouldn't let him go in the field anymore because for the third time they were gonna put him in. He's supposed to get his Medal of Honor. And it's funny because in college, I knew Greek

• 40:02Speaker 06

  because the New Testament was written in Greek. I had to learn Greek, you know. And I'm walking by the team house and there's an outline of a horseshoe up there, which in Greek is Omega. And Bob Howard said to me, he said, "What are you looking at?" I says, "Omega up here." I says, "Was there a project here called Omega?" And he says, "I need to paint that building." That's all he said. But Bob was, his, his wife taught Sunday School in, in Alabama, in a little tiny Baptist church. And he's just a great man, you know. And we talked,

• 40:44Speaker 06

  you know, and he says, well, I think I've got the guy for you. And, um, and we left the headquarters and, and there he is, Norm Donnie, was my one zero. And Norm had a Silver Star and seven Bronze. And, uh, it was his third or fourth tour. And, and Bob Howard tells Donnie, he says, I think I got the man for you. And, uh, and talked with Norm Donnie. And some of those guys can take your measure pretty quickly. And they know what you're going to be like, um, whether you're going to falter in the field and all this stuff. And, and he took the measure.

• 41:23Speaker 06

  And, um, uh, it was great. And it was interesting because, um, uh, he had come from the mailbox, and his wife had sent him a magazine. And the cover of the magazine was men's magazine, and the cover was Sergeant Donnie, six man, Mission Impossible team, drive out and kill 200 VC. And that was my team leader.

• 41:50Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 41:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 41:52Speaker 05

  What's the backstory behind that?

• 41:54Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, he, he was doing his recon. He, he caught them doing PT on a riverbank. And he just called in the airstrikes and stuff and just nailed them, you know?

• 42:04Speaker 05

  Wow. Wow. Would that feel like to be?

• 42:07Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 05

  Have that guy as your leader?

• 42:09Speaker 06

  Yeah. But Donnie, Donnie was, um, not only was a team leader, but he, he just, he was going to teach me everything he knew. I was going to be a sponge. And, um, he wound up being my team leader, my father figure, my mentor, and my friends. And after the war, I would see him in Oregon, you know, and, uh, just a wonderful man, you know, a great man. And he retired after, I don't know, 25 years or so in the military. How big was your team? Say again? How big was your team? Uh, there were three Americans and I think we had, I think it was five or six in Dij.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  And my team was a little bit unique because most of mine were Chinese. So I had Chinese and Vietnamese.

• 43:00Speaker 06

  And then we started to lose some wounds, you know, um, so we were down to like six and three, you know? Damn. How much training did you guys do before you went out on operations? Oh, constantly. Uh, the only, of course, you, you'd be prepared well enough that they could grab you and say, "We need you to go in right now," and they would be confident. But, um, when you get a mission, the first thing is, uh, the talk, the headquarters would find Donnie or me if I was leading it. And they'd say, "This is your warning order and you've got a mission and, and, uh, the briefing will be tomorrow at two o'clock." And so now you know something's going on, so you make sure your people don't go to town on leave

• 43:45Speaker 06

  or something like that. And then the next morning you get your warning order, uh, I mean, um, the mission briefing, and they'll say, "This is where you're going. This is what you got. This is what your mission is," all that kind of a thing. And, uh, you kind of appraise it. Uh, it's just like one where, um, I'm gonna need more defensive things or, or, um, you know, you key it to the mission and so forth. And then if it required special training, then you take your people and you go to the range or whatever and do that specialized training that they don't normally do. And then, um, you give a brief back in which, uh, it's in a briefing area

• 44:26Speaker 06

  and, and all the people are there, the commanding officer's there, the S2, the S3, S4 is there. Everybody's there and anybody could ask you any questions they want about the mission, you know, and the captain and, and the colonel and all the rest, you know? And, um, uh, when they're totally satisfied that you're ready and, and you got a, a degree of success looking ahead, then they'd okay it. And then you'd have a time when, uh, the choppers are out there and you, you meet them out there and get inserted into the target area.

• 45:04Speaker 06

  A lot of people talk about, you know, I did forty, fifty missions. I don't know how you can do that if you go through the, you know, warning order and all that kind of a thing. And the average intelligence mission is seven to ten days. Damn. You know, my missions overseas aren't that many. It's less than ten. But I had a lot of them in country too, which we didn't count. You know, the old timers wouldn't count that. Only counted SOG because SOG missions were deep in enemy denied and controlled territory, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. Those were our missions. Anything else that

• 45:48Speaker 06

  we did, we kind of regarded as just training missions. Interesting. Yeah. And Donny, I remember Donny, I used to talk about, oh, it was just a training mission. Donny says, don't forget, fifty eight thousand people have been killed in those training missions, you know. You had to remember that because it's in Vietnam, it's still dangerous. What would some of the missions be in Konos? Over the fence? Yeah. Intelligence was probably number one, you know, and sometimes it's strike action. My team in particular was specialized to be a prisoner of war snatch. That's what we

• 46:29Speaker 06

  did. And usually you'd want to have a couple of extra people because you have the snatch, you know, the attack element. And you want to have somebody behind you with a radio in case something goes south. And then you got the two wings, you know, the security. So the wing can say the comment or something like that, or, you know. So you're talking about two on each wing and an attack element and then somebody behind. So ideally you'd have about ten people. But it's hard to hide ten people too, you know.

• 47:05Speaker 06

  But we would have the attack element and I'm not sure if I'm getting carried away here, but a lot of times we would have a couple claymores and we have a claymore here, a claymore here and in between we have a dead, not a dead space, but an empty space. And that's where we would time it so the prisoner was right there and we blow the claymores, everybody down there is done. Then we run out there and grab the prisoner while he's still in shock, you know, and tie him up, search him, the whole deal and get off the road quick and then get your people to come in. But that's one of the, one of the big ones, are specialized in POWs and a lot of them did go for POWs.

• 47:44Speaker 05

  How many POWs did you guys?

• 47:47Speaker 06

  Uh, well, we got two, but they both died. Uh, had one died in the, uh, in, in the, uh, in the medics in the bed, he just, he just plain died. And there was one that, um, I believe an NBA sniper shot him at the helicopter. He could have been shooting us, but I think they popped him, cause we were ready to just lift him on and, and, uh, he took the shot and he went down just like that. And I think, I think they took their own guy so that he wouldn't talk, you know? Yeah. And of course.

• 48:23Speaker 05

  So you guys were, were getting our POWs?

• 48:25Speaker 06

  No.

• 48:26Speaker 05

  You were taking?

• 48:27Speaker 06

  We were trying to catch POWs. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Usually when, when we are trying to get our own POWs, that's a pretty big unit.

• 48:37Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 48:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 48:39Speaker 05

  What would you do with, if, when we're taking prisoners of war, what are we doing? What would we do? What would you guys do?

• 48:46Speaker 06

  Um, well, you want to interrogate if you can. We don't torture. I've never heard of torture, but, um, interrogate, all that kind of a thing and let the S2 people figure out how to do it. Um, I remember, I can't remember what mission it was, but, um, took out this guy and, um, uh, he was alive and all, and all that stuff. And he, he, he looked at me and he said, "We think you, you'd be dead already, Green", you know, all that stuff, "Coming from the ground and come up and we think you'd be already dead, you know, and we know can kill", you know? And so I, I remember I mentioned in one of the books, but I, I was, um, Going to go on a mission that I didn't think I was gonna survive it.

• 49:31Speaker 06

  And um, so I, I, I took the camouflage.

• 49:36Speaker 06

  And I reversed the protocol. Cause you, usually, you know, the, the shadowed areas, you kind of lighten them up a little bit. And I reversed it. I, I took the, the shadowed areas and I made them dark with that dark green. And then the, the high, highlights your cheeks, I made them with the lightest.

• 49:53Speaker 06

  And then I took a bunch of horizontal, that, that beige kind of a color. And I put horizontal ones out here, so I looked like a death mask in green. And I, and I didn't think I was gonna live, but boy, if, if, if they came after me, they, they were gonna think they were someone to, to deal with, you know? No shit. Yeah. So. Why didn't you think you were gonna make it? I don't remember. I don't remember which one that was. That's probably one of those things you try to forget. Yeah, um, I thi- I think it was simply the, the intelligence we had, the people who had been there before. Things like that. You know, I remember. Did you paint your face like that often? Did I think like that often? Yeah.

• 50:38Speaker 06

  Um, I, I did, you know, you talk to the, the SOG guys. They're a little bit reticent to tell you their anxiety. I don't think many of the guys talk. I, I'll admit it, I was, there were many times I didn't think I was gonna live.

• 50:55Speaker 06

  But, but it's, it's not cowardice at all. What it is, is that when you're gonna go anyway, it shows the opposite. Uh huh. You know? There's a, I, I remember my friend Doni, um, Novi, um, he fought in World War Two against the Germans, he was in the Czech Resistance, and then he went and, uh, fought in, in another war in Korea, and then he came to our war, and by then, he was, he was old. And I got to know him in, actually, in a training group, and he ran the mortar, uh, pool. Uh, because he's too old to go to the, the field, you know, and, um. No shit. And I was doing martial arts big time. Huh? You were serving with World War Two guys? Yes.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. That's incredible. And Novi fought the Germans from the Czechoslovakia deal. He's a, he's a big Czech guy. He told me once that I, he couldn't remember how many times he swam the Rhine.

• 51:54Speaker 06

  Amazing, you know, but Novy was just amazing. I'll get sidetracked, but Novy, um, Novy says, I was always stealing his employees because I was really into martial arts and, and doing that nunchakko, you know. Well, we had this teak from Vietnam, it was really hard, and I would always get his guys to mill it on their milling machine, you know, and you keep taking my guys. I remember I was getting ready to go on one of these really rough ones, and I think I was talking to Novy, and he gave me a book of poetry, and I was reading it, it was poetry

• 52:34Speaker 06

  of the wars, you know, and, and this one was, um, I memorized it, I was really nervous about going out the next day, and the poem was, "All night long, thrown against a buddy slain, with his gnashing teeth, bared to the full moon. I was writing letters full of love, never had a hugged life so dear." Wow. Yeah, and it's things like that. Novy would give me something like that. He'd never, never suggest for a moment that you're nervous, you know, but he would do something to encourage you. Novy was interesting too, because he, he, Novy was a friend, you know, and he had the

• 53:19Speaker 06

  mortar pool, and then there was one who ran the mess hall, and there was another one who ran the club, and they were going from Kontum to Plekku, six miles away, to buy stuff for their needs, and Novy was in the, in the Jeep too. Well, on, on the way, the NVA or the VC attacked the Jeep and blew it up. I mean, it flew up in the air upside down, and Novy, um, landed sitting up like, like I am this morning with his back against a tree, and a bullet creased his forehead and just blood was coming down, and, uh, the, the one who's driving the Jeep couldn't get

• 54:01Speaker 06

  out from the steering wheel, and they shot him, and then the other one, when the Jeep flipped over, he was under the Jeep, and he could see the NVA, and he tried to move his foot so that they wouldn't see it, and they saw the movement and they shot him in the head. Well, they went to Novy and...

• 54:19Speaker 06

  And uh, uh, then all the blood there and Nobi's eyes were wide open. He's just like that and he's just frozen, you know, and um, anyway, they, the one Vietcong said, him died, him died. They went over and they saw his ring. They tried to pull off his ring. And they couldn't get the ring off, so one of them grabbed a knife and they started sawing on his finger. And they, they sawed his finger off and they held up the, the ring to the light, you know, and Nobi, who is totally cognizant of what's going on, wouldn't move if he could, you know, but um, he kept, I cannot move because these guys will finish me off, you know, but he watched them do it, you know.

• 55:04Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 55:05Speaker 06

  And when I saw him in the hospital in, in Pleiku, just a good man, you know, old. Uh, he gave us a couple of classes in eleven F school in, in um, Fort Bragg, you know.

• 55:22Speaker 05

  What's it like to be able to serve with World War Two generation?

• 55:27Speaker 06

  Sidion.

• 55:27Speaker 05

  What's it like to be able to serve with the World War Gen-, World War Two generation? I mean, I would imagine that.

• 55:32Speaker 06

  Good, it was really good. There were a couple of them.

• 55:38Speaker 06

  I, I don't, I, I think that they, they thought of it more in terms of service and it was only the unique aspects of it that were related to what we did, that they would mention at all. Um, guerrilla warfare and all that kind of a thing and they would mention that. But it was never, in, in the context or, or, it never seemed like they were trying to show that they um, had an experience that was better than us. It was bigger and all that kind of a thing, uh, because of the, the world war as opposed to, you know, Indochina.

• 56:16Speaker 06

  But there was so much I got from them. Um, and Nobi was one, um,

• 56:24Speaker 06

  But they never bragged about it, talked about it, really. They just, this is a thing that they, they knew and they did, they experienced and went through. And there were lessons to be learned if you, as a young guy, would, would talk to them about it and they'd say, you know, I, I went through something like that. But there were people, it's like my own father, you know, he did the entire war against the Japanese, you know, and never talked about it.

• 56:51Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 56:51Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:52Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 56:53Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah, there were some good ones there.

• 56:57Speaker 05

  Very interesting. Let's talk about your first mission. Your first mission.

• 57:04Speaker 06

  First mission, oh boy.

• 57:07Speaker 05

  What was it?

• 57:08Speaker 06

  Uh, it would have been recon. Would have been with, uh, with, with Don, uh, Donnie and Jim Morris.

• 57:18Speaker 05

  How long were you in country before your first mission?

• 57:21Speaker 06

  Oh, not long at all. Month and a half, maybe.

• 57:24Speaker 05

  Month and a half?

• 57:26Speaker 06

  Almost right away, because I got a team right away. Uh, other, some of the other guys took a while to get a team. Um, I don't remember which is the first, the first ones.

• 57:37Speaker 05

  Do you remember waiting for your first mission?

• 57:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, and, and it, it wasn't fear, it wasn't nervousness or anything like that, it was anxious.

• 57:46Speaker 05

  Were you excited?

• 57:47Speaker 06

  Ready to go, yeah, I want to go and get this done. Knowing full well, of course, that, that the danger is there. But, uh, Donnie, my, my team leader, had, had such a confidence in his demeanor and stuff, you know, he knew what he was doing and I was confident he knew what he was doing. And, uh, we're gonna do this. And, um, boy, I, I, I did maybe the three with Donnie.

• 58:14Speaker 06

  I think the one that kind of stands out, but I don't know if it was the first one,

• 58:21Speaker 06

  was Ben Hat was under siege.

• 58:25Speaker 06

  The communists, of course, would siege major places like the French, Dien Bien Phu. That broke their back, you know, it was like they had no more will to fight and so forth. They tried to do the same thing to the Americans and of course Tet Offensive was a disaster unless you looked at the news, you know, then they made it, oh, they attacked 200 places in Vietnam and what they don't say is they lost everyone. But I was with Doni and we were

• 58:56Speaker 06

  doing a reconnaissance thing on the Ben Hat. We were way behind the lines and our thing was to gather intelligence and our motto that people don't mention to you is that break contact and continue mission. A lot of times people get in contact and then they want to get out. And the real motto in SOG is you break contact and then you continue mission. So you break contact, you avoid the enemy and all this stuff and you get some distance between you, then continue the mission, you know. With Doni and there were enemy everywhere, just totally, just saturated. And they were all going toward Ben Hat and the big siege was going on and it seemed like

• 59:39Speaker 06

  I had been watching the siege for quite a while. And anyway, we come across a trail system and Doni and I went onto the trail, the other guys were security, and it looked really well traveled and I looked down here and there were footprints in the mud. That was so new that the water was just starting to seep into the footprint. So it had to be like a minute or two minutes ahead. Wow. Yeah. And so anyway, now we're hearing movements down the line and they're coming again from the other end and I had the camera and I took a picture of that footprint with the water

• 1:00:24Speaker 06

  just starting to seep in there and I just barely got off that trail before the first people started going by. But we don't fire them up because their job is intelligence, you know. So you let them go by, your job is intelligence. And so we're continuing on, we're looking for enemy and finding this intelligence. We R O N for the night. Remain overnight, you know, you use the same term. You know, R O N. We R O N for the night and as I'm in there, I can hear the communists walking all over the place. I even could hear the trucks down the highway farther away and even tailgates going. And sometimes that's not a good sign because it means they're unloading troops to come after you, you know.

• 1:01:09Speaker 06

  But as we're kind of waking up and all this stuff, you know, I had this smell that brought me back to when I was a boy mowing lawns. It was the grass, green grass has been mowed. It was like, it just was so familiar to me. So I got up and well, we maneuvered to this trail area. And it was probably from me to you, probably six feet wide, eight feet wide, maybe wider, where the people, the N V A were going by battalions toward Ben Hat, trying to take them out, had mowed it down and walked through it so much.

• 1:01:52Speaker 06

  It was, it was, all the grass was broken and, you know, that smell from grass being down and stuff. It was just strong, really strong. And I'm looking and it's like, they are saturated in this area, you know, we're going to be in trouble pretty soon. Well, anyway, Donnie and I and the team, we're maneuvering along this road, we're about to come off the road. And all of a sudden I looked down and I saw common wire. It was hidden quite well, but I found common wire. And so as soon as we got safely off the trail, I mentioned to Donnie, you know, whispering, I said, common wire, you know. And we went over and sure enough, there was common wire.

• 1:02:37Speaker 06

  So I said, there has to be a headquarters up here somewhere. Of course, I'm just whispering, you know. And so Donnie and I leave the team and Donnie and I start following where the Kamal Wire is, trying, because we figured the whole team, we're not gonna get there quietly. So, so Donnie and I start working our way along where the Kamal Wire is. And it goes for quite a while. Then all of a sudden, I get to like a low area where there's like an old river or something like that. And then on the other side, I hear the artillery that they're using

• 1:03:13Speaker 06

  to bombard Ben Hat. It was, I don't know, 50 artillery pieces, 105s, 155, that kind of thing. And they're going boom, boom, boom, in the camouflage. But I can see the leaves blowing every time the shell comes out, you know. And we get closer and I start getting close. And I can see where scores of artillery pieces are left along here. This is what was bombarding Ben Hat. And it is the, the place where all the artillery was. So anyway, we start looking for landmarks to get it really zeroed down to exactly where that would be

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  on a map. And I saw like where that old river was, where there was kind of a cliff face. And I said, that's it on the map. And so then, and we isolated, we got, and we knew exactly where it was, you know. So we make our way, join the team, and do a sit rep back to the FOB. And said, we found the artillery, basically what we're saying, that is bombarding Ben Hat. And they said, immediately, go, and I forget what it was, the nearest LZ, and they said, as fast as you can go. And so we get to this LZ where a chopper is gonna pick us up. Well, at the same time, we were there, our mic force, our strike force from FOB, that's out there with a company, but they're a few miles away

• 1:04:41Speaker 06

  from us. And I was talking to a couple of the guys after the war, because what they wanted to do, they're gonna bomb it. And they wanted us out of there, you know, because it was gonna be a saturation bomb. Well, anyway, they told them because they could take a recon team out quite quickly, but they couldn't likewise do that to a company, you know. So the order that came to them was a maneuver, and I think they said seven clicks fast, as south, as fast as you can go. And anyway, I was talking to the guys afterward. They were going so fast they could hardly breathe. And about the time they got seven clicks away and we were off in the choppers,

• 1:05:26Speaker 06

  100 B-52s hit the place.

• 1:05:28Speaker 05

  A hundred?

• 1:05:30Speaker 06

  I didn't know there were that many in existence, but the word came down 100 B-52s hit the place.

• 1:05:36Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:05:37Speaker 06

  And I didn't know we had that many, you know.

• 1:05:40Speaker 05

  They didn't either.

• 1:05:40Speaker 06

  And maybe it's hyperbole. Yeah, so anyway, we get out, get back to base, and that is the day the siege of Ben Hat ended. That intelligence flying that we found, you know, and they dropped in all the B-52s, that ended the siege at Ben Hat.

• 1:06:03Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:06:04Speaker 06

  Interesting, yeah.

• 1:06:05Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:06:06Speaker 06

  You look back and say, we did something. Yeah.

• 1:06:10Speaker 05

  And that was the first one?

• 1:06:12Speaker 06

  I think it was.

• 1:06:13Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:06:15Speaker 06

  We may have had some locals, you know, probably, you know, close by, that we called locals. And of course, Donnie had to constantly tell me, 58,000 have been killed in locals, you know, in country. You know, don't get overconfident, you know.

• 1:06:32Speaker 05

  Wow. What can you, um, could you, would you mind? What was the MiG force?

• 1:06:38Speaker 06

  The MiG force? Well, we had companies of people that would attack targets of opportunity. They went by different names depending on MiG force, Strike Force, I forget what they all were. Hatchet Force, I think is what we called ours. And I was on Hatchet Force for a while. It just went by different names depending on who you were attached to.

• 1:07:00Speaker 05

  So were they, you were attached to them or they were attached to you?

• 1:07:04Speaker 06

  They were part of the FOB, so.

• 1:07:06Speaker 05

  Were these MAPS, were these SOG guys as well?

• 1:07:10Speaker 06

  SOG guys, yeah, they're all SOG. Usually, there were fifteen Americans and about a hundred and twenty, usually Montagnards, you know, in the old days, and these days were about done, just before I got there, we had battalions of Chinese. And over the years, the Chinese had about been wiped out. And I had four Chinese on my team, and they might have been the last fighters, as far as I know. You know, who knows if they retired to Pensacola, who knows?

• 1:07:44Speaker 05

  Wow, wow. That's a hell of a first mission.

• 1:07:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, it was.

• 1:07:52Speaker 05

  Holy shit.

• 1:07:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:07:56Speaker 05

  Did you, did you develop any patterns or rituals or anything in particular that you or you and your team would do before operations?

• 1:08:10Speaker 06

  I don't think so. Not spiritual or anything like that. I think I would always try to encourage our people. I had a closeness to our mercenaries that I don't think anyone else really had, but I mean, I'm one of the guys that I could put my arms on them and I could hug them or I could tease them and all this stuff, you know, and it never interfered with my command, because they knew when the time came, okay, what I said was it. But I, I think prior to all these missions and all this stuff, I'd always make sure my people were emotionally and ready for the missions, you know, they weren't Christians

• 1:08:52Speaker 06

  per se, I had, most of them were Buddhists, I think, you know.

• 1:08:58Speaker 05

  How would you prepare yourself?

• 1:09:00Speaker 06

  Well, day by day, I always prayed, I tried to read the scriptures every day. But with me, I'd always do the prayer, but it was like. It wasn't like a lot of praying. It was almost, I don't want to diminish what I was doing. As you would perhaps say grace to yourself when you eat a meal. You know, you've prayed, and it's not a long prayer. A lot of times going on a mission, unless there was something unique about it, I would pray, "God, be with me. Help me to be wise. Help me to be courageous," and things like that. "Protect me," things like that.

• 1:09:40Speaker 06

  But I didn't pray a long time. I think my time there was in a readiness platform, emotionally and spiritually.

• 1:09:50Speaker 05

  Gotcha. Did you carry any sentimental stuff, pictures of family?

• 1:09:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:09:58Speaker 05

  Anything?

• 1:09:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, usually never told them what we were doing. Once in a while, I might say if somebody died, I would probably be more prone to tell my dad or my brother. Definitely not my mom, you know, or someone like that.

• 1:10:16Speaker 05

  Now, what I meant was, did you carry any sentimental type things on your person during operations? Maybe a small Bible or pictures of your family or anything that you thought would keep you...

• 1:10:34Speaker 06

  Totally sterile.

• 1:10:35Speaker 05

  Totally sterile?

• 1:10:36Speaker 06

  Totally sterile. I mean, absolutely. But the only thing about me that would violate the sterility of it all is when my Chinese would write my name in Kpabu Chin on my back. I don't think we mentioned it, but my name is Hanson, which renders well if you're Chinese. It's Han Sun. You know, and they said, "We have to go to the witch doctor. See how best, the most suspicious way to write your name." And so the first half was easy. The Han Dynasty was the warrior dynasty of China. And I forget now, after these years, about what the sun was. But then they would write "Kanbao yu chen",

• 1:11:21Speaker 06

  which means "never die". So I'd go out in the field and my Chinese would run, "Oh, Han Sun, we forgot", and on my back, and usually above my collar, where God could see it, or their God could see it, they would put the Chinese characters, "Dai", "Han Sun", "Kanbao yu chen", "never die", and in their mind, God is gonna be looking for me on this mission. Wow. Yeah, I didn't discourage it. So you got pretty close with those guys? Oh, yeah, no kidding, yeah. Go to lunch in town with them or something like that, you know? Yeah, yeah, good people, yeah.

• 1:12:03Speaker 06

  And they never took advantage of it, ever. You know, just good people. Let's take a quick break. Okay.

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• 1:14:03Shawn Ryan?

  All right, Dale, we're back from the break. Nice shooting, by the way. That was a damn good time. But we just wrapped up your first mission with SOG. And so, wanted to move into some of the other missions that really stick out in your mind. I mean, I know you did three different tours over there. I think you said 50 missions, 20 of which, if I remember correct, are in combat.

• 1:14:36Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:14:37Shawn Ryan?

  And are in Southeast Asia.

• 1:14:41Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:14:42Shawn Ryan?

  And so, I'd like to talk about the mission that you did for the Australians.

• 1:14:50Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  Of course, South Vietnam was divided up into sectors. The Koreans had some, Australians had some, and Americans, of course. And there might have been someone else in there, too. In that mix, the Australians somehow had been very much infiltrated in their headquarters or whatever it was. So, anyway, we were tasked with a mission for the Australians. And it was an all Green Beret team, all five of us. And when it came time to get the mission...

• 1:15:29Speaker 06

  I don't remember how we got there, if we went by chopper or by a truck or something. But it's definitely far away from anything. It was in the Thule somewhere. And we went across fields and stuff from when the French were there. And when we went across several of these fields and so forth, there was a huge tent like they had in World War II and so forth, a squad tent or bigger than that even. And that was a makeshift headquarters for the head of the operations for the Australians. So the five of us went in there and the Australian commander came out, he was a major. And he's built, he's looked exactly like Hollywood.

• 1:16:13Speaker 06

  He had the shorts and all that stuff and the knee-high socks and all that. And he came out to see us and he had the hat and he had that really trimmed mustache and all. And he was quite formal as Asian, I mean, European people are. But anyway, as it turned out, there was so highly infiltrated that this major didn't think he could get any mission started from his own people, from his own headquarters and so forth. Because someplace along the line, there were people who were double agents and so forth.

• 1:16:52Speaker 06

  So anyway, he gives us this message, this mission. He said that Kosvin, the headquarters for the communists in South Vietnam, they were quite certain, had their headquarters centered inside of a rubber plantation from the French. And people were bought off. The French didn't want anyone to know about the presence of the NVA in the Vietcong because they didn't want the rubber plantations bombed. And of course, Kosvin, the communist, certainly didn't want it known by anyone. And...

• 1:17:38Speaker 06

  So we were tasked with this mission and the other thing was a South Vietnam and some of the other people were being bought off. So there's this triple thing here. Someone is paying the money to look the other way. They have the headquarters in the rubber plantations, the French know it and so forth. So we were given a mission to find that headquarters and report only to that major. And so we were in that tent and he was giving us all the parameters of the mission. And of course, it's intelligence gathering is not about getting a spy or anything like that. So we start on this mission and we're making our

• 1:18:19Speaker 06

  way toward what we think is the rubber plantation. And there's a lot of enemy around, although a lot of it is ex-farm land and things like, so hard to find places to hide and so forth. But we start making our way toward what I think is the headquarters. And I was the team leader and I took point.

• 1:18:42Speaker 05

  Were you co-mingled with the Australians?

• 1:18:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:18:45Speaker 05

  Were you, was this a joint operation?

• 1:18:47Speaker 06

  No, not a joint operation, just for that major. And once we got the information, we give it to him and he'd take over from there.

• 1:18:54Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 1:18:55Speaker 06

  But the closest we would get would be a helicopter, one of theirs. And he would give us only one. And some of the parameters were about what you could shoot and not shoot at, things like that. So anyway, we're going through the bushes and all that kind of a thing. And I've never seen so much bombs and booby traps and stuff all over the place. I couldn't believe it. And it would be really moving slow, I was on my knees and stuff like that. And I got to a place, I could just sense the enemy was there. I just knew it. And the ancillary sounds or hum or something, there's something big close by.

• 1:19:41Speaker 06

  So I'm on my belly, I'm crawling through my belly, through the really thick tangle that's there, and I'm really going slow, because I know somebody's in front of me. And I get to a certain spot in this tangle, and I smell something. And I freeze, I don't move or anything like that. And as it turns out, it was the breath of their sentry that was there on the edge of the line. And I am so close, I can smell his breath. And so anyway, it's like now it's taken me hour, hour and a half to crawl this far without being heard.

• 1:20:20Speaker 06

  Now, it's enough information to know that that, which I thought was really the headquarters for the cosmon, so now I need to back out of there. And I could barely go forward quietly. And now here I got a guy who's breath distance away, and I gotta go backwards. And, boy, how do I do that? And I kind of gave a signal to the guys behind, I could get my hand back there. And I could see his shadow. Once I located him by smell, I didn't move until I could kind of see him. And then I could see his head move in the shadows slightly on the other side. So anyway, I prayed, and I did that quick prayer. And I says, God,

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

  there's no way I can back out of here quietly. Can you cover the sound? And about the time I said, amen, a jet took off from someplace 50 miles away, and went directly over the top of us. Are you serious? Yeah, just absolutely certain. And so I backed up as quickly as we could. We got our, tried to make our way back to an LZ. And lessons learned too, because I know I'm gonna give that major his information, he's gonna drop the big bombs, you know, assuming his headquarters will let him. But as I'm going back, just a lesson learned, as I'm going back and trying to lead my people

• 1:21:42Speaker 06

  to a place where we can picked up, I find an LZ, and it's actually a little bit too big. It's too enticing, you know, it's too big. But they said that they would not pick us up in any LZ unless we had recon all the way around it. These are big LZs. I said, this is crazy. By the time I worked my way all the way around, what's to say if somebody didn't go where we started from, you know? It was crazy. And it was an hourglass-shaped LZ, so it was wide on the two ends and narrow in the middle. And I thought the best I can do is to set up right in the middle of it. I can watch both hemispheres and then call in for my extraction.

• 1:22:22Speaker 06

  And as I'm there, all of a sudden, I see movement across the hourglass from me. And it's NVA, big, big time movement, company or battalion, big time, coming across. And I could read their mind almost. They didn't want to cross an opening either. And so they would go across the narrowest place, right over the top of me. And so now it's one of those things of praying that they'll go by and be ready to take out this many. And they had a front element, a patrol element in the front. And I think there was about seven or eight of them, and I thought, I was pretty certain I could take that element out.

• 1:23:04Speaker 06

  But then the rest of them, you know, we would put them under fire. But you know, once they collected themselves, they'd overrun us, no problem. Damn. So anyway, long and short, we called for the extraction. Same kind of a thing, God help us to get through this thing. And same thing, an aircraft came by. And the point element took off running as fast as they could, went right past me. And I'm shorter than here to you, and went right past me, went out looking and took off. And then the rest of the element followed suit. So we're ducked, we're in the mud, and we got as low as we could go. And then we sunk into the mud.

• 1:23:46Speaker 06

  And then the chopper came in and they wouldn't go if we were under fire, etc. Very strict rules of engagement, but they got us out. And I gave the debriefing, gave it to the major. And I have no idea what happened, you know, you you hope that they took out the place, you know, so.

• 1:24:09Speaker 05

  You never got confirmation?

• 1:24:11Speaker 06

  Never got confirmation that they did anything.

• 1:24:14Speaker 05

  No shit.

• 1:24:15Speaker 06

  I suppose entered it different countries or something they didn't.

• 1:24:19Speaker 05

  What did he say when he got on the intel?

• 1:24:21Speaker 06

  Um, very Prussian, if that's a good word, um, strict and all that stuff, formal, you know, um, British or, you know, that kind of a thing. They took our information and so forth and thank you Yankee. And that was it. We're gone.

• 1:24:38Speaker 05

  No shit.

• 1:24:40Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 05

  Did you do any joint operations with any foreign guys?

• 1:24:44Speaker 06

  No, no, not that I remember anyway.

• 1:24:47Speaker 05

  Yeah, that wasn't, was that a thing back then or everybody was pretty segmented into their?

• 1:24:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, they had their own areas of operation and all that.

• 1:24:55Speaker 05

  Got you.

• 1:24:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:24:56Speaker 05

  Got you. Let's, let's move into Lima fifty mission in Cambodia, the Lima fifty mission in Cambodia.

• 1:25:06Speaker 06

  Which we, we call them the biggest intelligence find of any small unit of, of the green, of the Vietnam War. Um, that takes a backstory to, to, to bring you to it. Um, the communists had infiltrated headquarters in Saigon significantly to the point where a lot of people were being informed of what we're going to do and so forth. We had a, uh, special forces had a project called Gamma, one of the Greek letters, alphabet, a gamma, uh, B, C, and our one, um, uh, it was called Project Gamma and actually a couple of names

• 1:25:44Speaker 06

  you would probably know that the Finnish, uh, number one commando, uh, was, was on that and, and actually was killed coming out, uh, on one of the missions. Uh, and anyway, um, uh, we, we were, um,

• 1:26:04Speaker 06

  At the place with this intelligence line that so many people and teams were being compromised that they actually scrubbed the team, Project Gamma, and which was really bad. At that time, Gamma supplied 75% of all intelligence for the Vietnam War. Those special forces guys that were up to the fence and some of them over the fence into the other countries, but 75% of all intelligence came from them. So it was a real gut-wrenching thing to cancel the program. So anyway, Project Gamma gets canceled. And then I wind up on a mission, it's Lima 50.

• 1:26:49Speaker 06

  If a number ends in two digits, it's Cambodia. If it's a single digit, like India six, it's Laos. So this was in Cambodia in that tri-borough area where things were really hectic. So this was Lima 50, and we were on this mission. And it was just dense with enemy all over the place. I just couldn't believe how many there were. My roommate was from Minnesota as well, and he, because it was his team to start with. He, as he came back from leave, he took over the team. And then I was there and Bob Garcia was there. And then we had our indigenous people.

• 1:27:32Speaker 06

  And we were sent on this mission to gather intelligence and so forth. So we're on the mission, two or three days, really, really hectic stuff, real thick stuff. And bumped into some communists. And one of them was when I lost my fingers on my hand, a whole bunch of them. And we got into a firefight. There was a lot of them. I was throwing grenades and we had the M79 grenade launchers really going like crazy. And shooting as fast as I could. Well, anyway, three of them jumped up in front of me and

• 1:28:13Speaker 06

  and I and the M16 had the 20 round magazine then the 30 round wasn't invented yet. So I got three NVA soldiers, each of whom have 30 rounds in their magazine. And I managed to get two of the three, but the third one still had 10 rounds in his magazine. He's expended 20 of his rounds. So he fires at me and I was reaching for another magazine. So as I'm reaching for the magazine, his bullets went about there. It took off the little, the middle finger and it was just hanging by skin. And then blew the different bullets, of course, and then one blew the knuckle out of the forefinger. And then a series of bullets took the ends of all the fingers off.

• 1:28:58Speaker 06

  And all the fingernails wound up in the back of my hand. So it took a long time to get the magazine and I'm changing the magazine, trying to put it in in a magazine well of the M16. And the finger keeps flopping into the well and I can't get it changed fast enough. And finally, you know, I swing it into the palm of my hand and slam the magazine in there and we another guy arrives at the scene and I'm there, we took out the third guy. And there were lots and lots of enemy all over the place, you know. And as I'm thinking here, the next day we took out the agent.

• 1:29:42Speaker 06

  I'm trying to remember this, get it categorized right in my mind, but anyway, long and short. We R O N in the night and set up a small perimeter. And in the night, we stayed on the ground and in the night, I could hear the shouting. I could hear the trucks coming. I could hear the tailgates coming down. So I knew they were lining up in the Ho Chi Minh Trail below us. And I heard dogs. So I knew they had tracker dogs coming at us. And so. We're sitting there, uh, uh, waiting to be overrun. And, uh, I've got four claymore mines in front of me. And I didn't think I could push the plunger well.

• 1:30:27Speaker 06

  So I found something solid on the ground. And I had four claymore mine plungers right in front of me. And as they were coming up the hill, I had my, the heels of my hand on the four plungers ready to take them out and the dogs are coming up. And again, on that mission, I, I prayed God, plug up the noses on those dogs. I could hear them coming and, and, uh, Ba was my tail gunner. And, uh, one of my other guys was on the other side of me and they come up and they're just, you could tell in the dark, VC come, VC come. They're really, really nervous. And, uh, I know Ba put his Buddha in his mouth. He thought if he was killed, had died with Buddha in his mouth, he'd go to heaven. So I could tell with the way he was whispering that he had Buddha in his mouth.

• 1:31:11Speaker 06

  And, um, so anyway, they, they came by and they went right up the hill. I could hear the, the, the grass and the twigs breaking right in front of me. And then it was kinda quiet and I'm ready to pull these plungers. Next thing I know, I could hear them passing on the backside of me and, and never heard us, never saw us, and the dogs never smelled us. Wow. You know, it's just incredible, you know? So anyway, so, um, next day, um, we get up, we start, um, R O N, uh, relieving the, the area and all that. And we, we find a, a pretty extensive trail system. And, uh, coming down that trail system are, are several N V A. And we decided to take them out.

• 1:31:51Speaker 06

  Um, two of them were Chinese and they were couriers and they were on their way to South Vietnam. And, uh, they were, uh, the highest ranking people ever killed behind enemy lines in the war. And, uh, we, we got them, they were both colonels. How'd you kill them? Uh? How did you kill them? Firearms, uh, automatic weapons, just shot them all. And, and actually I was shooting, uh, along with, uh, um, Ken Wordley. And we, we put them all down and then I could hear more of them. I was, actually I was throwing grenades with my hand and it was really messed up because I had a, a ace bandage just wrapped around it, but it dried like a cast. And so I only had the tip of my little finger and my thumb sticking out.

• 1:32:35Speaker 06

  But I was trying my best to throwing grenades with that and it seemed to manage. And then, um, killed them. And then it was pretty evident right off the bat that there were high ranking Chinese NBA type people and they had a huge satchel. And so we ran over there and we started undressing them totally. Taking every bit of intelligence we could. Langley could look at the pants and say, well, the cotton was grown over here and on down the line. They could do a thorough thing. We took samples of hair, you know, everything. Take his health, everything. And then we looked in the satchel.

• 1:33:13Speaker 06

  In the satchel, and I missed some things too, that you really need to know. In the satchel was, I think they said 200 pages of top secret orders and so forth. Wow. The siege at Ben Hat had just finished and he had the names of 52 NBA soldiers who shot themselves so they wouldn't have to fight on Ben Hat, you know, wounded themselves. And he was administering discipline. And then there was a location of two underground factories in the Kuchi Tunnel system and the coordinates of how this guy could find them to give them their awards. And then there was one underground field hospital in the Kuchi Tunnel system and how to find them.

• 1:33:58Speaker 06

  So we had all of that. And there was a couple American IDs and I don't know exactly what all happened. But to back you up, just a slight bit. We found the double agent, basically, we thought, who was turning in all the people and caused Project Gamma to fold. And the problem then was how to get him. Because when the project folded, he kind of just disappeared. So what's CIA, you know, this SOG is basically under the CIA.

• 1:34:37Speaker 06

  They came up with a bogus, brand-new program, and they were looking for people to work in it. And this guy, Chuon was his last name, volunteered. "Oh, I'll work for you, Americans, ready to do the same thing he did before." So, once they got him, and he was not in a raps, they grabbed him, they arrested him. And they gave him sodium pentathal, they interrogated him, they didn't torture. What is sodium pentathal? What is sodium pentathal? Tooth serum. Does that work? Does that work? Apparently, it does, yeah, sodium pentathal, yeah, tooth serum. Yeah, and they, anyway, he was, I'm not going to tell you, Americans, anything.

• 1:35:18Speaker 06

  You know, he knew he was compromised, all help is done, you know? So, the thing then is, America, the CIA had two projects, the same project, just the names changed. Prue and Phoenix. And once it was called Phoenix, the Phoenix Program. And then, when press started to find out about it, they changed it to a Prue Provisional Reconnaissance Unit. It sounds innocuous, you know? So, anyway, their job, their specific job, was to eliminate the fifth column in South Vietnam. The people who don't wear a uniform but are fighting. Their job was to put them out, to kill them, you know? So, our people bring Chuon over there and say, "We've got him.

• 1:36:03Speaker 06

  We're going to deliver him to you, and you can do your thing." And they said, "He's your baby, you take care of him." And so, they just dumped him back in her lap. So, Colonel Ro was the new commander of special forces, had only been in country a month. And then, several of his chief of staff, they said, "It's up to us." So, they took Chu, gave him sodium pentathal so he was asleep, put him inside of a gunny sack.

• 1:36:32Speaker 06

  And then they took him over to Nha Trang Harbor and started going out to sea. And when they got significantly out to sea and the sharks were thick, they lifted him up so that his head was shown and they, with a high standard, with a silencer, they put two rounds in his head, stuck him back into the sack, and dumped him overboard into the ocean. End of the problem. But somehow, the press got word, and I don't know how, and the United States government arrested Colonel Rowe, the commander of all special forces in Vietnam. They put him in Stockade Prison in Long Binh, outside of Saigon, along with seven of his people. And they were there in Long Binh Jail for a long time.

• 1:37:17Speaker 06

  No shit. And anyway, they were, and even to back up further, Abrams hated special forces, and he did not like them at all. For one thing, the people in special forces would have been his officer corps, because they were at a top echelon in intelligence and character and all that stuff, you know. If there were no green berets, he'd have an officer corps, you know. But anyway, he put him in Stockade and kept him there. Well, the mission that we were on when we killed the Chinese couriers, and we brought that back, and actually, the mission isn't done yet, because the communists, when we took out those Chinese, they knew

• 1:38:01Speaker 06

  they had something really big. We had something big, because there's their two dead bodies, and one of them has stripped skin, and the whole thing they knew, and the satchel charge is gone. So it's like every communist in that part of the country was just charging, trying to get us. And we were trying our best to get out. And then the next afternoon, we had more firefights. And then this one, I got shot in the back of the head, and the bullet went across my head. You got shot in the back of the head? Yeah, but I didn't pass out. I remember, just as if it was yesterday, the sound I

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  made was ngah. You know, I just, ngah. I just, I don't know why you remember some things. But anyway, I reached back with my good hand, and with my fingernails, I raked it across, and the shrapnel came out. You know, and so there it was again. So then we get to an LZ and the communists have got us surrounded. There's several hundred of them. They figure six hundred to a thousand of them and we're holding them off big time, you know, as long as we can. And so we're fighting, we're trying to get airstrikes and all that to get us out. And it's getting pretty wild. I went off on one edge to hold up a flank. They were coming up one flank.

• 1:39:25Speaker 06

  The rest of the guys were on the other end and I was shooting as fast as I could, you know, and then aiming and all that kind of a thing. And one of the guys on the other end, his M16, it wasn't working right, car 15. And so they thought, well, Hanson is so slow, we need to gun on this side. And when I should have been, we got that. I got the carbine and so forth. So I had the carbine and my own rifle and so forth. So they come by, we need to get your rifle for a while. We're being overrun. So like a fool, I give them my rifle and I'm holding them off with this M1 carbine, which is interesting. And

• 1:40:05Speaker 06

  I mentioned it in the book. Three smells, it's just like smelling the guy's breath in the thicket. I could smell his sweat. It's like the extreme, I don't know, how do you explain it, that duress of the sweat? I could smell his sweat. And I could smell the fear. I could smell his fear. I just, right there when I held his gun to my face. And then I could smell his thoughts. It was all on the smell. If you've ever heard anyone talk like that. But I could, the minute I started shooting with his weapon, I knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling. It's incredible. But it's true. And I'm not

• 1:40:49Speaker 06

  a psychic or anything like that. What was he thinking? Yeah. So I'm holding him off with an M1 carbine. And they're charging from this side, they're charging from my front left. And all of a sudden, the bullets come from my front left as I'm aiming, because I only got so much ammo. And as I'm aiming, the bullet goes between two fingers on this hand and goes right through the comb of the rifle and essentially breaks the rifle in two, although it's just holding together by a couple pieces. And so it's not my day, you know. And so anyway,

• 1:41:24Speaker 06

  In the middle of this firefight, one of my people, Ba, my Vietnamese guy, Ba, he comes running halfway to me and he stands up straight in the firefight. It's just the anguish of his voice. And he says, "Hanson, Hanson, Wurthley him die, Wurthley him die." Which was, the acting was zero. And you, you think about thoughts, and you've done it yourself in combat, and you think, "What made me think of that?" The first thing that went through my mind is that Ba wanted me to bring him back to life. And I yelled, I said, "What do you want me to do about it?" You know, like, "I can't make him come back alive." Then I realized, "Okay, I understand." And, and I ran over there.

• 1:42:09Speaker 06

  A chopper was coming in. And I, I said, "Take the rope, wrap it around Ken Wurthley, you know, Swissy, and wrap it around him, and take the satchel and put it down his shirt. And you and he get out of here." Because I wanted that out of here. So, um, uh, he did. He did. And then one of the other Vietnamese from the other end ran to the helicopter too and got on. And so, then I went back to my place and, um, oh, and, and I get my rifle back. Um, I think it was from him. So I got my rifle back now. So I'm fighting with, with a one-piece rifle and a wounded rifle, you know, and I'm fighting. And, um, uh, things, things are, are getting pretty wild, but then all of a sudden, um,

• 1:42:54Speaker 06

  Ken Wurthley, uh, Bob Garcia runs over and he says, "Where's Ken? Where's Ken?" And I said, "He's dead. I just sent him out." And, uh, then Bob and I are from here to your wall apart. And he gets on the radio and he looks at me for confirmation. He says, "I want, um, I think it's the big bombs, whatever it is, 500, whatever it is, I want it right on me and I want it right now." And he says, "It's too close." And he says, "You'll be killed." And he says, "I want it right now." That's an order. He looks at me, "That's okay with you?" "Yes, because we're about to be dead anyway." And so, he runs to his end, and then the bombs start coming like crazy all over the

• 1:43:36Speaker 06

  place, you know, and, and, uh, enemy is still around, you, you can't kill them all. And so then the chopper comes, another chopper comes, and I hear yelling for me. And I, I, I run over there and it wasn't that far away, maybe fifty feet, seventy-five feet. And Bob Garcia and the other Vietnamese are already hooked up. And they say, Hanson, come on, come on, hook up. And I thought, in that interval of time, I was the only one left on the ground. I thought they were dead because I was hearing nothing at all. So, and this is before the second chopper come. And so I, I got on, on the RT-10 radio, the survival radio, which you probably have yourself, or whatever the radio is now, but it was, used to be a two-piece, then it was a one-piece.

• 1:44:21Speaker 06

  And I got on the radio, and I think I'm the only one left alive. And so, um, I get, I, I, I don't know who to call. I don't know any call signs and all that stuff. And all I know is that when I push that button, every aircraft in the Southeast Asia is gonna hear it. And so I push that button, and I say, is anybody out there? And it, it was so cool. And the Covey Rider was a, a, a dear friend of mine, one, one I prayed for, and he lived. And, and, and he says, I got you, Dale. I got you, Dale, the calmest voice in the world. That's what I wanted to hear more than anything else. They've got me, we're gonna be okay.

• 1:45:06Speaker 06

  We're gonna get out of this thing, even if I'm the only one left, you know? Then I hear them calling, and there's two of them left, they're already hooked up, ready to go. And then I get in, go over there, and then with my wounded hand, I can't tie the knot. You know, you know how that knot is, bring it through yourself? It's like I don't have a hand to do it with. And so I thought, the only thing I can do is I can make the biggest overhand knot and pull it through the loop, snap it in, and hope I did it, you know, it worked. And the chopper lifted off, and it hooked, you know, it's tightened on itself, and that was good. But then it never ends, this mission.

• 1:45:49Speaker 06

  Then the chopper is taking heavy hits. And so instead of going straight up until we left, cleared the forest, he went horizontal and dragged us through the foliage. And I hooked up in the branches of the trees and I was about to be pulled off. And I, my first assumption, and I'm sure it's what would have happened, is that the crew chief would have seen the dilemma and he would have cut the rope. No use losing the chopper and us, you know? So he, about the time, he was probably thinking that in his head, I got the last branches done. And we sprung 100 feet in the air. It was like it was a bow and arrow.

• 1:46:33Speaker 06

  We just shot into the air. And then we headed toward a base, a duck peck or Ben hat, one of those. And I remember a couple of things. One is that I was spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning. Cause the other guys were hooked together on two ropes. Oh, another thing too, is that when that chopper came in, there were four ropes. And as I'm looking up, looking for one for me to hook on, the fire was so intense that one of the ropes got shot in two. And I watched it fall to the ground like a snake, you know? And so I grabbed the one, made the biggest overhand lock, stuck in. Then I'm stuck in the trees and the tree is just bending.

• 1:47:17Speaker 06

  And it's just a second or two before he cuts it. But then when I get the last branch done, you know, and I got the rifle over the shoulder and cutting with my K-bar, you know? And boy, when they gave, we just shot into the air like a bow and arrow. And on the way back, they were low on fuel. So they couldn't make any detours. So they drew us right through a hailstorm. And I remember we were about beat to death by that hail. Geez. It was awful. There's one thing after another. And then when we landed. Think it was Ben Hat, but Norm Doni, my old team leader and father figure,

• 1:47:58Speaker 06

  and Mike Buckland, who went through all the training with me, thirty-seven of us, and he's about the only one left alive besides me, you know? And they're there waiting for me and hugging and all that kind of a thing. So glad to see us. And I remember too, because the guys were so glad to see me and hug, that I remember I got some Vietnamese there too. And I, yeah, I'm like I'm half drunk, you know, being twisted in the air, you know, spinning and spinning as far as it'll spin. And then we go the other way, so sick and everything else. But I went over and I hugged my Vietnamese. They're important too, you know? And I went and I hugged them and I said, "You OK?", and made sure they were good, you know?

• 1:48:43Speaker 06

  And that was the mission. And we were, I was at Plekhu Hospital, Field Hospital. And Norm Doni and Mike Buckland came to see me. They drove six miles from Kontum to Plekhu to see me and all that stuff. And we went outside and found a table outside under the sun. And he gave me the heads up, "This is what you guys found", you know, and they're not the highest intelligence line of any small unit in Vietnam. Tailwind was gigantic, but there was about a hundred and forty people getting it. And it was a whole complex. But what we got was significant.

• 1:49:25Speaker 06

  And after that, they had no choice but to release Colonel Rowe and his people out of Long Binh jail. But they still insisted on trying them and all that kind of a, just a mockery thing, a control thing, because they wanted to control special forces. And it bothered Abe because he didn't have control over special forces. We were under complete different auspices.

• 1:49:55Speaker 05

  Damn. Holy shit.

• 1:50:01Shawn Ryan?

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• 1:53:11Speaker 05

  When you say you could smell his thoughts before you killed him, what was he thinking?

• 1:53:19Speaker 06

  Say it once more.

• 1:53:20Speaker 05

  When you said you could smell his thoughts before you killed him with his own weapon.

• 1:53:26Speaker 06

  Well, the guy with his weapon, I could do that. I don't know what is what we transmit. Perspiration and all that kind of thing. I definitely smelled his perspiration for sure. And in that, I could smell adrenaline, the fear adrenaline. I could smell it just as clear as can be. And the thinking auspices. Of course, you can't write down the sentence that he said, but you can sure factor out the concept, what he's going through his mind. It was amazing. Yeah.

• 1:54:03Speaker 05

  Is that the first operation he lost anybody?

• 1:54:10Speaker 06

  I think so. I think so. We had several when we lost people.

• 1:54:17Speaker 05

  How did you get through that?

• 1:54:19Speaker 06

  It was difficult with Ken Wordley from, he grew up in a place just a hundred and fifty miles from me and all this stuff. And that is, when I was on in the hospital, I went and I met his parents and, and all that. It was so difficult and, um, really difficult. And there were times, I know, I was coming back from either the hospital or one of the missions. I remember Mike Buckland met me and he says so and so died. And I was on the middle of the compound and I started to weep. And I just started to cry, you know, and that happened more than once.

• 1:55:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, damn. Dale, what, what, what advice do you have for today's generation who's lost people in war who are trying to get over it?

• 1:55:16Speaker 06

  Families.

• 1:55:17Speaker 05

  Families, friends, people that have lost teammates.

• 1:55:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. If they're Christian, they believe in an afterlife. Okay, you're gonna see him again. And we're in sorrow now, you know. But if they don't have those kinds of feelings, about all you can share with them is, well, he didn't suffer long. Or it was for a good cause. And though you love your son, grandson, you know, what he did sacrificially is incredible. Actually, my, the second SOG book is SOG, Missions to the Well. And in the Old Testament,

• 1:56:00Speaker 06

  King David was a shepherd. And he was raised in the town of Bethlehem. And he wound up to the note of the king, when he went to visit his brothers and Goliath was out there and David killed him with a sling, you know. But ultimately, he winds up being the king of Israel. And the people praised him. They said, Saul has killed his thousands, but David his tens of thousands. But David came from Bethlehem.

• 1:56:37Speaker 06

  And the Philistine army had invaded the land and got between Bethlehem and David's army. And he's sitting down at a day of fighting, and he says to himself, not realizing anyone heard it, he says to himself, "Oh, what I would give for a drink of water from my hometown in Bethlehem." And three of his people heard it. And out of their love and loyalty to David, they fought their way through the entire Philistine army, went to the well in Bethlehem, and got a flask of water, and fought their way all the way back to David and presented it to him. And that's how I came up with the title of the book, "Missions to the Well."

• 1:57:21Speaker 06

  When we do things so selflessly, at great cost and sacrifice, and perhaps permanently maimed in some way, or give our lives, you know, that's what David did, is missions to the well. Where sacrificially, you at the cost to yourself, do something for someone else. And that's probably the kind of thing I would share to a family. I'm not sure how many of them would take it, perhaps not at the beginning, but down the line, they might.

• 1:57:52Speaker 05

  Thank you for sharing that.

• 1:57:54Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:57:55Speaker 05

  Do you remember the first time you killed another human being?

• 1:58:01Speaker 06

  An enemy? I don't.

• 1:58:07Speaker 05

  You don't?

• 1:58:08Speaker 06

  I don't. I don't. And I think, and I think because of my ethic on taking a life, it's okay to kill for self-defense, capital punishment, and more. And so I don't have that guilt matrix to really make me, you know, cry sorrow, whatever it is. Perhaps sometimes when you take out the first one or two that you got. You figure you got him because the fighting is diminished, but they're on the other side of the branches and stuff, and you know you got him.

• 1:58:45Speaker 06

  But you didn't see the dying, you know. Yeah, sometimes you go back and think, you know, he came from a family too, and he probably didn't want to go to South Vietnam and fight for Ho Chi Minh, you know. Yeah, it's really hard to give comfort in that time.

• 1:59:04Speaker 05

  Did it ever bother you?

• 1:59:05Speaker 06

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:59:09Speaker 06

  Only philosophically, when you realize that that person probably didn't want to be there, or may not have wanted to be there. But as far as my part in it, it didn't bother me. It needed to be done, it had to be done. And so, you know, there were times, I don't know how many I took out, but there were lots, you know. And I just don't think about it, you know. Yeah, I got plenty of things to worry about on an upcoming mission, then, you know.

• 1:59:41Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:59:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, same thing with you.

• 1:59:43Speaker 05

  Did you, did you ever, did you stay in Vietnam the whole time, or did you come back home at all?

• 1:59:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, I came back for a couple of months of it. Five months leave, so it was in three hospitals, and one up in Fitzsimmons Hospital in Denver, and one in Japan, and one in Saigon, I think it was, but three different hospitals, and then convalescent leave at home. And what I did, when it was time to go back, I can pick one place to go to en route. And so I put my finger on International Falls, Minnesota, and I put the other finger on the other side of the globe, and it said Cape Town, South Africa. And I said, I only go there. And then every time the plane stopped, whether it was Greece, Rome, Africa, or whatever it was,

• 2:00:35Speaker 06

  I traveled in there.

• 2:00:38Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:00:39Speaker 05

  Did you have anybody to come home to?

• 2:00:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:00:41Speaker 05

  Did you have anybody to come home to?

• 2:00:44Speaker 06

  Uh, a brother to come home to.

• 2:00:46Speaker 05

  Did you have anyone?

• 2:00:48Speaker 06

  To come home to.

• 2:00:48Speaker 05

  Were you married yet?

• 2:00:49Speaker 06

  No, I wasn't married. Um, my family was there. My brother, my brother was there. He had a year and a half on the one hundred and seventy third airborne.

• 2:00:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, that's interesting. On the break, you had told me that your brother was also of Vietnam.

• 2:01:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's interesting.

• 2:01:05Speaker 06

  I called my mom from Japan.

• 2:01:09Speaker 06

  And said, I'd been shot in Vietnam. And, uh, my brother, and my brother was in the room. And she says, Mom, I know where. And she said it was in the head and the hand. And she says, How'd you know that? He said, I felt it.

• 2:01:27Speaker 06

  Yeah. He said, I felt it. We were pretty close, but he said, I felt it.

• 2:01:33Speaker 05

  Wow. Is he still alive?

• 2:01:35Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah. He's a couple of years younger.

• 2:01:37Speaker 05

  Are you guys close?

• 2:01:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, really close. Very good man.

• 2:01:42Speaker 05

  Do you, do you guys talk about the war often? Do you relate with each other or?

• 2:01:47Speaker 06

  Um, some, but quite limited. Um, I don't think some of his missions were quite as hairy as mine were, although he had some, um,

• 2:02:00Speaker 06

  but sometimes, usually it's in connection with me writing something or trying to find something out, you know, um, you know, writing the other two books, you know, you know, the immense amount of time it takes to to find the witnesses and the documents and all that. And I remember I was trying to find a witness uh, to siege up in head, actually, and I called the day he went into hospice. You know, and that's the kind of thing it was. Be more difficult every year, I'm sure. You know?

• 2:02:31Speaker 05

  Man, man.

• 2:02:36Speaker 05

  So we talked about, let's talk about the, the Car 15 30 round magazine.

• 2:02:44Speaker 06

  Car 15. And of course, what I mentioned before was, you know, changing the magazines is that they had, after the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong was essentially wiped out, 35,000 Viet Cong. So it had to be, and their primary weapon was the SKS or the, the captured American, the Car Carbine. So the NBA came with theirs, the RPD and the AK-47 and all the rest, you know. But the AK-47 had a 30 round magazine. So that was one help. We had, well, they have 16,

• 2:03:25Speaker 06

  but we couldn't carry it overseas for a while because we had to go sterile. No tattoos, no laundromats, no nothing, completely sterile. And, because if we were captured, granted, the United States will disavow any knowledge of us, you know, the old adage.

• 2:03:44Speaker 06

  So in that one firefight I was at, you know, the three of them stood up. There was a whole bunch, but there were three right in front of me. And we were trading bullets and the one guy emptied his rifle on me. The other one was just about done. But I got the other two, and I don't know if they were finished with their magazines or not, but I got two of them. And then the third one still had 10 magazines. I'm reaching for the magazine. And that is, we'd already started trying to find a producer to make them, because we saw the need when the AK-47s came in. And so we all put in $50 toward it. John Plaster

• 2:04:26Speaker 06

  headed it up, and he started finding manufacturers all over the world who can do this for us quickly. And by the time I got back from the hospital and all that, we had, each of us had at least one 30 round magazine. And it wasn't very long after that, the United States followed suit and we started having 30 round magazines. But it was crucial for us, you know, just like the RPD with the drum. Held fifty rounds, you know, and if you're in the initial firefight and you got fifty rounds to lay down that first assault, that's significant, that's significant.

• 2:05:04Speaker 05

  Damn. Well, I still can't believe you're the reason we have thirty round magazines.

• 2:05:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did not be able to carry it in the first place.

• 2:05:15Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:05:15Speaker 06

  The magazines, the weapon. Yeah, yeah, finally, we, we really complained. We went to our CEO, whoever they love, Colonel Apt, A B T, great man. He should have gotten his star, except he had a heart attack after the war. But we said, look, sir, this is our situation. We're out of ammunition and they're still shooting. And he says, I'll look into that. And I don't know if he orchestrated the wordage of it all. But basically, they said that the communists had captured enough M16s that the M16s no longer sterile. And so it doesn't readily identify you as an American.

• 2:05:59Speaker 06

  So that's how we got the okay to use it, you know?

• 2:06:05Speaker 05

  I mean, it is kind of interesting, right? That, I mean, if they had thirty round magazines, why would they be picking up weapons that only have twenty round magazines? You know? But, but, did you have any downtime in Vietnam?

• 2:06:21Speaker 06

  We had R and R.

• 2:06:22Speaker 05

  What would you guys do on R and R?

• 2:06:24Speaker 06

  I went to Bangkok every time. I love Bangkok. Nice people, friendly, courteous people, which I totally enjoyed it. You go to the beach and all that kind of a thing. And it was nice. I totally enjoyed it. You got totally away from the war and everything else. And anywhere with the other guys, C C N, C C C, C C S, you know, the other three units, they would come in and, how are things in the north? You know, what do you do differently? Stuff like that.

• 2:06:59Speaker 05

  What, I mean, was it welcoming in Thailand?

• 2:07:03Speaker 06

  Yes, yeah, yeah. The Khmer Rouge, not the Khmer Rouge, but the Cambods and the Thais, they're the smiling people. Very beautiful, friendly people.

• 2:07:18Speaker 05

  What people would

• 2:07:22Speaker 05

  would the enemy send in spies or I mean was I would imagine there was a there was there was that was a hotspot for R and R from

• 2:07:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, and to catch a drunk G I and be his friend and find out what he has to say. I'm sure that would happen. Didn't it didn't. It's not one of the things that happened to us.

• 2:07:41Speaker 05

  No, no reports of it, no warnings, nothing like that.

• 2:07:44Speaker 06

  I think our people were a little bit smarter than that.

• 2:07:46Speaker 05

  Have you ever gone back over there since?

• 2:07:49Speaker 06

  Uh, no, I haven't, I haven't.

• 2:07:52Speaker 05

  Not anywhere near it?

• 2:07:53Speaker 06

  No.

• 2:07:54Speaker 05

  Would you?

• 2:07:55Speaker 06

  Would I?

• 2:07:56Speaker 05

  Would you?

• 2:07:57Speaker 06

  I think I would. I think I would. Um.

• 2:08:01Speaker 06

  But I don't think I would go to Vietnam though. You know, a lot of the guys that go to Vietnam afterward, they they say, well, they're basically

• 2:08:11Speaker 06

  communism needs capitalism to survive. And so they they're they're into business and all that kind of thing and and um welcoming the foreigners and all that. So um, I don't think they're

• 2:08:26Speaker 06

  anti-American in their sentiment, at least when they talk to us. A lot of our guys go over there, especially ones that are looking for M I As and stuff like that.

• 2:08:37Speaker 05

  Let's talk about the post-hospital work in S two intelligence Fort Drum.

• 2:08:43Speaker 06

  At Fort Drum. When I got back the second time, um. We had been in a way, and I'm going to insult people, but we had in a way had lost so many of our special forces people.

• 2:08:58Speaker 06

  We were somewhat decimated. And our ranks were filled with Rangers and so forth like that. They didn't have quite our training. And when we would go on a mission, if it was intelligence, we broke contact, continued mission. And I remember one of our guys, Mike Buck, and he says, don't go back to recon yet, because um, there's a new batch of people out there and they don't seem to have the same ethic that we do. And so um.

• 2:09:27Speaker 05

  The same ethic?

• 2:09:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, ethic in the sense of your job, your job, you have to go out in a Collect the information. A lot of our guys would go out. They see the enemy, they get in a firefight. Usually they initiated it. And then they would ask for an exfiltration. So the missions were being cut off simply because they didn't break contact and continue the mission. And so they were saying that our old guys are kind of disappearing. You need to sit back and watch for a while. So I did. And what was happening was four drum.

• 2:10:06Speaker 06

  It was a secret, a program that only about six of us, special forces and six or eight pilots ever knew. They flew bird dogs and all that. And our job was going behind the lines, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, not Thailand, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia. And look for intelligence. And if it was fruitful, you wouldn't have to send a recon team in there, expose them to being killed. Or if you did send one in there, it was to confirm or deny or find a vulnerability. So we were four drum.

• 2:10:47Speaker 06

  One of us would fly about four or five thousand feet and the other one about ten, twenty feet. And so the top one up there would say, there's a villa in a highway out there that looks like trucks. And so we would come down in the low level, sometimes below to trees and actually tilt wings to get between trees. And I would be out the window taking the pictures, snapping pictures and finding enemy intelligence. It would be new segments of road, truck parks, things like that, really important things. And that's what we did. And we're

• 2:11:26Speaker 06

  I think there were four or five of us, special forces. And I was in doing intelligence and because I didn't want to go on the ground right away until I we factored this out. So I was on the ground and briefing, debriefing teams so they could go out. And having been on the ground, I certainly knew what they needed to know and so. So that was good, you know, as far as intelligence. But as and we shared the same office. So that morning, one of the pilots, the backseat observer was killed. He was taking pictures out of the window and boy, that looks lucrative.

• 2:12:09Speaker 06

  He tells the pilot to go back and I want to take another picture. Pilot says, no, no, you don't go back twice, you know, that's lethal, you know. But he says, no, I insist this is really good. And he goes back a second time and he gets shot in the head and dies. So then the major who was in charge of intelligence was a little bit concerned. He says, well, now I wonder what we'll do now to replace him. So I told him, I says, I'll do it. So I started doing the bird dogs. So Mike Buckland and some of the other ones would teach me what to do. And we had the Leica cameras and all of that. And so it was quite hairy.

• 2:12:52Speaker 06

  We're definitely way behind enemy lines for sure. And of course, you had Inor Dam Sienok, the emperor of Cambodia. And then I forget who was in North. Basically leased or gave North Vietnam and China the western 30% of his country to do their thing, which is where SOG missions were. We knew where they were. So that's what we were monitoring. And so it was densely populated with enemy, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the figures and all that. And we could put it on a map really, really clearly. And we could find the truck parks and so forth.

• 2:13:37Speaker 06

  And in underground, underwater bridges in the rivers, they make a bridge underwater. And you could see on the shore, you could see where our truck was. And then on the other side, there's an exit, you know, in between, there's a, there's a bridge, you know. And, but we did that for quite a while. It was extremely lucrative intelligence wise, you know, is a very good one. And I did that, I suppose, only a couple of months. My other, my roommate that I was with in, in training group, he stayed with it. And I said, I gotta get back on the ground. I feel like I'm not doing anything, which is probably silly at that point, you know.

• 2:14:21Speaker 06

  So rather than go back to recon right away, I went to a company. And, and that's a story in itself.

• 2:14:31Speaker 06

  We had, I, I went to a company, there were only two Americans instead of 15. And there was a captain and a first sergeant. And now there was me. So the three of us each took a platoon and we were it. And then just before my first mission out with them, we got one more American and we put him in charge of mortars. So we had mortars with us now. But, but it was a kind of an interesting deal. The captain was German and from Germany, was a German special forces.

• 2:15:12Speaker 06

  Made his way to the United States and joined special forces in the United States. I was.

• 2:15:20Speaker 06

  We'll test your World War II memory here. I used to go get the mail, go to the post office and, you know, if the other guy's got something, I'd drop it off. Well, anyway, I was picking up a letter for the captain. His name was Jaime Roche. And anyway, as I'm picking him up, you know, because you look at the back to see who it's for, and I said, that looks like my grandma's handwriting. You know, she was in Germany, from the old country, turn of the last century. So I look at the writing and it's Otto Scorzini. I don't know if you know him. He is the most decorated commando of World War II. He's the number one guy of Germany.

• 2:16:03Speaker 06

  He's the one who parachuted at Normandy, turned all the road signs backward. He's the one when Tito was in an impregnable fortress prison on the top of a mountain, he's the one that got him sprung, went up there, flew up there with a small plane, busted him from jail and got out with him. He, I can't remember all this stuff. It's in the book for sure, but a dozen things that he did, unbelievable. And after the war, he was the personal bodyguard for Eva Peron of, was that in South America there?

• 2:16:42Speaker 06

  And one time he was in Egypt and two Israelis came up to him, and of course, he's on the guard because he figures, you know, German Nazi, all that stuff, you know? And he says, are you here to kill me? He said, oh, no, no, we're not here to kill you. We want to hire you. And he says, what do you want me to hire, hire me to do? He says they have six Egyptian scientists that are about to make a nuclear bomb to drop on Israel. We want you to get rid of those scientists. And apparently it was very close to being finished. He says, okay, what do I get out of this? He says, what do you want?

• 2:17:25Speaker 06

  And remember the Nazi hunter, the Jewish guy who got so many. Well, anyway, he says, I want you to get my name off of his hit list. And I'll take out these scientists. They said, okay. And within a week, six dead scientists. No. And Otto Scorsini's name was off the list. So, and there were so many more, I wish I could remember them. But we're, we're in this company. Usually fifteen or sixteen Americans in a company. And he's the captain. And he's Prussian in his attitude. You don't talk to enlisted men and all that kind of, he's very Prussian, like old time Germany, you know.

• 2:18:08Speaker 06

  And, and he, we, we would have a mission or something like that. And, and he would call the people to attention. And they would turn to the first sergeant and said, first sergeant, take over. And they would salute. The first sergeant would take over. The captain would go to the officers' club. Then the first sergeant would turn to me and say, Sergeant Hanson, take over the company. And then he would salute. I would salute. He would go over to the club and sit in the same bar stool he always sat in when we weren't going to the field. And so basically, for six months at least, I had a company all by myself and it was great. They were Montenir tribesmen, loved them, you know, and, and it was a reciprocal thing to,

• 2:18:53Speaker 06

  you could just see the affection that they had as well. And we had one bad mission as a company. And we had seventeen firefights. And I forget, three days or something like that. That's a lot of fighting, you know, seventeen firefights. And we come back and captain goes to the officers' club. And first sergeant goes to the bar. And then I got the company. Well, anyway, I go.

• 2:19:27Speaker 06

  Someplace around the campus and they find me in the operations center and they find me and they say Dale, he says, we got a mission for you and we just got out. He says, that mission you were just on Saigon says was so lucrative, they want you to go back in there. And so, oh man, we had 17 firefights. So on the way to the officers' club, Dale, the captain, so he can take charge, I go by the dispensary and I ask whoever the guy is in charge. I said, we're going back in a difficult mission. I said, do you have a medic that I can take with me? And he said, yeah, so and so.

• 2:20:06Speaker 06

  So I find the captain and he stands at attention, you know, it's like, you know, you don't, you're never at ease among the enlisted swine. And anyway, I said, sir, we got a mission. We're going in the same place. And I said, and I passed the dispensary and I says, we can take a medic with us. And he looks at me and he stands ramrod straight and he says, Sergeant Hanson, you're messing with my war machine. It's just crazy. Damn. But it was interesting stuff, you know, just a crazy mission, difficult mission, lots of fighting. And there was a place in that mission too where Vietnamization was going strong.

• 2:20:51Speaker 06

  Not, it's years and years before you're military, but Americans, wanted Americans out, but we didn't want to abandon the South Vietnamese, so they had Vietnamization more gradually. We would teach them and they would take over our jobs and stuff and so forth and then leave them at least capable of a

• 2:21:17Speaker 06

  Doing the missions and so forth. Well, a lot of the Vietnamese nation was really good. Now, there were three of us, plus the guy on the mortars, four of us with this company. And we find this huge complex. It looked like a western fort, except they had trenches all the way around it, logs and all that stuff. And it was formidable with the fighting pits and everything. So when we found that area, my people were the ones that cleaned that out and so forth. And anyway, we, the next morning, it was a difficult time.

• 2:22:02Speaker 06

  We actually went down the hill and charged them as they were about to have their breakfast and all that stuff. And we basically wiped them out and took over their position. The captain and the first sergeant decided that they're going to go all the way around, back up the road system to the backside and then do a push and push the people to me back at the old site. And that's fine. So I get my people, so we're all ready for the attack. And I'm confident that we can hear them when they come through and we'll take them out. Well, anyway, now I'm hearing them come. I can hear the brush crackle and all that stuff. And there's some shooting up above and they're coming toward me.

• 2:22:46Speaker 06

  And I know any minute now we're going to have a big firefight. And I look left and right and I get my people and I, you know, give them the heads up, this is going to happen. And all of a sudden, I hear shouting. And I look back beside me and there's two Vietnamese lieutenants who I never saw before. And I, how in the world did they get there? Well, it turns out we had an ammo resupply. And Vietnamese nation and Saigon says we have to have these two guys. So they're here and they're in my element. And I didn't even know they were there. Then all of a sudden, they start yelling and shouting in the radio as loud as they can. And I know exactly what they're doing. They don't want to get in a firefight.

• 2:23:29Speaker 06

  And they want to warn off those people so they don't have to be in a firefight. I yell at them. As much as you can yell, you know what I mean? Get it there, you know, and, and oh, they keep yelling and ignoring me totally. And I, I get closer and I yell, you know, and they ignore me again. And so I, I went over there and I grabbed their, their radios and I threw them over the embankment. And then I went back to my position because they are so close. You know, within two minutes, we're going to have a firefight, you know? And I look back at the sky and, you know, look behind because I'm not sure that they're not going to try shoot me, you know? So now I gotta watch my back as well.

• 2:24:11Speaker 06

  And I look behind me and I have three of my Montney or Triasmen each facing those Vietnamese with their rifles out, you know? You, you do not touch hands on, you know? It's, it's great, but a lot of that, that stuff toward the end of the war.

• 2:24:25Speaker 05

  Right there.

• 2:24:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, no kidding. Yeah, and we had a lot more firefights. That mission to seventeen is a lot.

• 2:24:33Speaker 05

  Seventeen?

• 2:24:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:24:35Speaker 05

  Firefights?

• 2:24:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, we had, on that same mission, the first night.

• 2:24:39Speaker 05

  How did that firefight go down?

• 2:24:42Speaker 06

  Uh, we won everyone, hands down. I, I took minor wounds. That's it. Uh, nobody killed or anything like that. Um, so we did well, uh, and so forth. Um, on the, uh, that, the night before, we slept right on the road. Which I, I think that was Cambodia, but I don't think it was on the Vietnam side. Uh, I think we're in, in Cambodia. And, and I think part of the Ho Chi Minh Trail has gone by and it's really well-traveled, that kind of a thing. And, uh, uh, we're, we're there, um, and, uh, the first sergeant says, we stop here and we R O N on top of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, right on top of the highway system.

• 2:25:26Speaker 06

  And so I'm here, I'm thinking, if I don't get shot, I'm gonna get run over by a truck, one of the two, you know? And so we did, we spent the night there and, and then the next morning, um, I assaulted with my platoon down at, at that site where the big bunker complex was, you know? Yeah, interesting stuff.

• 2:25:45Speaker 05

  Yeah. Wow. Damn. How long were you in that unit or?

• 2:25:51Speaker 06

  The companies?

• 2:25:52Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:25:53Speaker 06

  It wasn't that long. I don't think it was six months. Um, well, maybe it was because it was a full year.

• 2:25:59Speaker 05

  What did you like better, SOG or that?

• 2:26:02Speaker 06

  Um, well.

• 2:26:05Speaker 06

  Most gratifying, but also the scariest was recon. I mean, you're over there with a half a dozen people in the middle of bad guy country with thousands in between. You know, that was downright terrifying at times.

• 2:26:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 2:26:21Speaker 06

  You know.

• 2:26:21Speaker 05

  I'll bet it was.

• 2:26:22Speaker 06

  Yeah. And you know, interesting, you look at the guys and they never showed it, really. I don't think any of us really showed it well. But it was nervousness, not fear.

• 2:26:35Speaker 06

  Some kind of an apprehension and appreciation of what you're about to go through. And you know, this is not going to be easy. And

• 2:26:47Speaker 06

  you're well trained. Your assets are there, they're fine. They'll come and get you no matter what, you know. We had good support all the way through. The people in operations and some of these other places, they're good people. The Colonel Apt, just a sweet, good man, you know.

• 2:27:11Speaker 06

  You know, he's like, you could be a commander without being a gruff like, you know what I mean? You don't have to be unlikable. Just know, let your people know that what you say is it. And when they understand it, why yell and shout at them and treat them poorly? He was not that way. You know, remember, we made the first ladder in Vietnam, exfil.

• 2:27:39Speaker 06

  I forget what you call the ladder. It was the rungs that went across and the three ropes and those stuff. And Donnie and I made the first ones. And he said that when they were in Delta, which is Delta Project, not Delta Force. He said they used them over there. So Donnie and I, on some Sunday afternoon, we made Donnie ladders. We always called them Donnie ladders. And we made those things and they were good. They were really good. The collum, a rope ladder, you know, your feet go straight out, you know. How do you, it's hard. But these would work. And if you got, if you're wounded and so bad off, wherever you happen to be in the ladder, you just snapped off right there. And the people up above could roll the ladder up underneath you. It's like you're in a stretcher.

• 2:28:24Speaker 06

  It was just perfect, you know. And we made the first one. And I, I remember, um, we wanted the, the CO of the, the camp to see it. And so Colonel Lapp came over there and oh, he says, this is just great, you know? And so we had everybody over there and, and, uh, it got to be the preferred way of getting in and out. Of course, we still did the rappelling and, and some of them did the parachuting in, you know?

• 2:28:51Speaker 05

  Damn.

• 2:28:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:28:52Speaker 05

  How did you wind up on the Hatchet Force?

• 2:28:56Speaker 06

  Hatchet Force, uh, that's when I came back from the hospital and, um, uh, I, I wanted to get back on the ground per se and not just in, in the, the bird dog. I actually physically wanted to get on the ground and fight. I don't know if I felt guilty for not being on the ground. Uh, I don't know what the reasoning was, but it just seemed that I wanted to be there, you know, uh, where the, the guys were, where the, the fighting is and so, so, um, it didn't take long to get on it because, uh, uh, when I, when I mentioned it to the, the, the CO, he says, you know, A Company really needs you, you know, um, only had two Americans, you know?

• 2:29:38Speaker 06

  Uh, a lot of the other missions, you know, there were 15, 16 Americans, you know? Uh, squad leaders and platoons and companies, all that, yeah.

• 2:29:49Speaker 05

  Any, any significant stuff with the Hatchet Force?

• 2:29:52Speaker 06

  Hmm, yeah, yeah. It's, it's a good bunch of guys. We had two for a while and then it was down to one. And then there were Mike Forces and then, uh, some of these other ones depend on, on who you were attached to. Mike Force would, could be to the B Team, you know, when we were on the A Team and, um, uh, or, or in the projects, you know, so, um.

• 2:30:18Speaker 05

  So this, the Hatchet Force is basically a, a reaction, a quick reaction force for.

• 2:30:23Speaker 06

  Or, or you're looking for trouble, one of the two, um. And we could go out as a platoon or, or a company.

• 2:30:31Speaker 05

  So when, by the time you got into the hat, I'm just curious, by the time you had gotten to the hatchet force, you had said that, that SOG was kind of being infiltrated with, with inexperienced.

• 2:30:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:30:44Speaker 05

  Operators.

• 2:30:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, and I don't want to offend people by doing that.

• 2:30:48Speaker 05

  And so what got, kind of where I'm going with this is, you know, by the time you were at the hatchet force, would, had you already seen the inexperienced infiltrate the SOG?

• 2:30:58Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:30:58Speaker 05

  And so what, what was that like being a reactionary force for, for a SOG unit that is less capable than when you were at?

• 2:31:08Speaker 06

  Um, I, I think in some ways it showed up in the recon first, because the outage that we had in, in SOG was, okay, you get in a firefight or something like that. And the outage was always break contact and continue mission. So as much as you can, you overwhelmed them, broke contact, E and E to, to, to get them out of the way. And then, um, continue the mission if you can, because your job is gathering intelligence. And, uh, the fact that, you know, unless, unless it was overwhelming force and it's imminent, uh, disaster for you, you, you don't call for an exfiltration, you, you continue the mission. That, that ethic didn't seem to carry over to the new guys.

• 2:31:53Speaker 06

  Cause so many of them would get in a firefight and then they pulled out. And then went to AND and, and got their Bronze Star or whatever, you know? And, and we would, we, we had some missions that, that we are, it was so dense and so forth. And you had to sneaky Pete so much. And yet, uh, you were so successful at it that you didn't have a firefight. And then you come out of the thing and people would think, well, you had a dry hole and nothing happened. You know, because you didn't get in the firefight and it's like, man, we did what we were supposed to do and didn't get in the firefight. You know?

• 2:32:30Speaker 05

  How would, how would the hatchet force work? Would you be, how, how, how, would you be co-located with a SOG unit? That's on a mission?

• 2:32:40Speaker 06

  Um, they could. In other words, if they found something significant, they could radio the information. They could send in a reaction force.

• 2:32:49Speaker 05

  So they would turn it over?

• 2:32:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, they could do that.

• 2:32:52Speaker 05

  Okay, okay.

• 2:32:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:32:54Speaker 05

  What kind of significance? I mean, I have there that you did a, a significant cross-border operation.

• 2:33:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, uh, things that needed to be acted on right away, or they're gonna lose their significance.

• 2:33:07Speaker 06

  Perhaps, uh, something that stalled the enemy movement going south, wherever they were. That, that gave you an opportunity right there. If you act right now, um, you're gonna do all right. You know, um, uh.

• 2:33:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think that's about it. Just, it has to be significant for the recon team to pass it over. Because when the, when the recon team gets pulled out, they may be compromised simply because of the helicopter and all that.

• 2:33:39Speaker 05

  How, how, I'm just curious, so how?

• 2:33:44Speaker 05

  I'm trying to, I'm, I'm just trying to figure out what the dynamic is between the, the hatchet or MIKE force to the SOG unit. I mean, would this be?

• 2:33:56Speaker 05

  The way I envision it is, you know, when, when, when I would go out with, with a SEAL team or every once in a while with a, with, um, at the agency, if there were air assets, if there was a blocking force, if there was anybody else involved, everybody sat in with the same, for the same exact brief.

• 2:34:14Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:34:14Speaker 05

  But, I mean, with what you guys are doing, I mean, I think you signed like, was, was it like a 20 or 30-year waiver? Like, like, um, non-disclosure agreements and, I mean, you know, and so I don't, how? I, I guess what I'm asking is how in tune was the hatchet or MIKE force?

• 2:34:33Speaker 05

  With the SOG unit, did they know everything where they're going, everything? Or were they just in a, they waiting just to get called?

• 2:34:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, top secret, you knew your own mission, that's it. So if you were captured and tortured, that's all you can tell them? Yeah, so, um, yeah, you, you, for the most part, you wouldn't know, um, what the next team is doing.

• 2:34:54Speaker 05

  So the hatchet force really has no idea what the SOG unit is doing?

• 2:34:58Speaker 06

  Right.

• 2:34:59Speaker 05

  Unless...

• 2:34:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, they're part of SOG.

• 2:35:01Speaker 05

  They're part of SOG.

• 2:35:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, we had a reaction force, different names for it, but we had one in the compound.

• 2:35:08Speaker 05

  Okay, so they were very in tune with what you guys were doing?

• 2:35:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:35:11Speaker 05

  Locations, everything? Locations, the actual, the actual mission set, the objectives, all that, the hatchet force would be right into that. Would they be out in the field at the same time the SOG unit was?

• 2:35:25Speaker 06

  They could be, uh, you know, like, uh, SOG recon people, they would like to have six or seven, like, in CCC, my area, they would like to have six or seven teams on the ground all the time.

• 2:35:38Speaker 05

  Okay.

• 2:35:38Speaker 06

  So, um, it's possible all of them can be in trouble, and that happened, and I wrote about it in the, in the book. But, uh, and then there'll be a company as well. Now, if, if a company or platoon gets in trouble, and a recon team gets in trouble, they're more vulnerable because of their small size. So air action would be deferred to the small one, or the most vulnerable, one with, you know, I suppose a platoon with half casualties or something would, would get some precedence.

• 2:36:09Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 2:36:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 2:36:10Speaker 05

  Gotcha.

• 2:36:15Speaker 05

  Well, Dale, let's take a break.

• 2:36:17Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 2:36:17Speaker 05

  When we come back, we'll talk about leaving Vietnam and coming home.

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• 2:38:38Speaker 05

  All right, Dale, we're back from the break. We have wrapped up your SOG career in Vietnam. What's it like coming home?

• 2:38:50Speaker 06

  It, um, I think World War II people had parades, you know, and people were excited. Uh, when we come home, it was in the matrix of dissatisfaction and hatred and things like that, and, uh, I think people coming back from the war in some regards were almost treated as criminals by certain aspects of the country. Um, and most places, um, not really regarded at all. Uh, it was a kind of a sad thing. I remember I sat down at an airport and the first person I saw tried to steal my beret. It was just, you know, it was just kind of crazy stuff.

• 2:39:33Speaker 06

  But, um, yeah, and I guess the only thing is, what now? You know, I think we all have that kind of a feeling. I suppose if you were coming to retirement and you, you, you thought, okay, I've always wanted to have a farm, you said, what now? I got it figured out already. And a lot of us are coming through times in which, um, emotions are at a crescendo. Um, uh, extremely exciting things are happening all the time. And, uh, now you're coming home and, um, and it's like, what now? You know, it's, it's interesting.

• 2:40:10Speaker 05

  How old were you when you came home?

• 2:40:11Speaker 06

  Um, uh, twenty-five, maybe?

• 2:40:18Speaker 05

  Twenty-five years old?

• 2:40:19Speaker 06

  I think so.

• 2:40:20Speaker 05

  Holy, yeah, man. All that by age twenty-five?

• 2:40:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:40:27Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 2:40:28Speaker 06

  And we only touched the...

• 2:40:30Speaker 05

  The top of the iceberg, the rest of it is in the books and so forth, you know.

• 2:40:34Speaker 00

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

• 2:40:38Speaker 01

  On October 2nd.

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

• 2:40:44Speaker 01

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

• 2:40:51Speaker 02

  What would happen if I stopped drilling? You're stalled, you're freezing there, that's what.

• 2:40:55Speaker 01

  With great power comes great deniability.

• 2:40:58Speaker 02

  I'm not the first man.

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

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

• 2:41:04Speaker 02

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 2:41:07Speaker 08

  It's me, the.

• 2:41:08Speaker 02

  Priceline Negotiator.

• 2:41:10Speaker 08

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  What about a third time?

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• 2:41:20Speaker 02

  Seems like you just started.

• 2:41:22Speaker 08

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• 2:41:26Speaker 02

  Time to read the timeline.

• 2:41:28Speaker 08

  Fine. No one deals more deals than.

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:41:31Speaker 08

  Please stop.

• 2:41:31Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:41:32Speaker 08

  Touche.

• 2:41:33Speaker 02

  Priceline.

• 2:41:34Speaker 08

  Priceline.

• 2:41:35Speaker 05

  What, um, I mean, what did you, did you hide out when you came back? I mean, we've all seen, we've all, I mean, we haven't experienced it. And I wasn't alive back then, so I don't, you know, I don't know exactly what that was like. But, you know, from, from, from the people I've talked to and what I've seen and footage and, and, and the way, the way Hollywood betrayed it, which who knows if that's fucking realistic or not.

• 2:42:08Speaker 05

  But it looked horrific. The way that you guys were greeted when you came home looked horrific. I don't know how anybody could handle that. I don't know how I would have handled that. I probably would have left the fucking country. I would have been so disgusted. And, um, it was, was that bad, wasn't it? It's kind of, and, um.

• 2:42:33Speaker 06

  I think you go home, if you got a home, like my parents, you know, because I wasn't married. And you go home to your parents and so forth, and you see all the people that you're glad to see and so forth. And it's always, what now? What now? What's next? You know, life hasn't ended. It's starting. It's a new, you know, not matrix, but it's a new thing that is happening. And it's a little bit difficult and you kind of don't want to go uptown to the store and bump into people. You kind of don't know what to expect in your world.

• 2:43:12Speaker 06

  You know, I thought of going back to college again, and I really didn't want to. I don't know. I think it's Teddy Roosevelt. He says, "He who knows the scriptures thoroughly has a college degree in his mind." Yeah. So, anyway, I never went back to college. I studied, studied all my life, but it was on topics I wanted to learn, you know, and became well-versed in some things, you know.

• 2:43:44Speaker 05

  What did you get into? I mean, what was reintegration into civilian life like? What were you? Who did you gravitate to?

• 2:43:52Speaker 06

  Yeah. It wasn't too long, and I figured I needed to work. It was a reality thing. And so, the old paper mill where I worked in college, you know, in the summertime, you know, that was one thing to do. You know, and it's like, I don't want to spend my life in the woodroom watching a bark peel off of logs. You know, there's something better in life than that. It's a difficult transition. Some people had no choice. You know, they went home. They took the welcome home and then they had to go to work and that was it.

• 2:44:35Speaker 06

  They continued life from that point, you know. That was it. Kind of difficult in a way, hard to explain to, you know. One of those things you experience but don't articulate. So you got into martial arts? Yeah, still did, still did some of the martial arts. I didn't teach it though. But I kinda kept up with it personally, you know, remembering the akatas and all that stuff. I couldn't tell you a kata today. It's just so far removed. But back then I did. Yeah, when I, when I got back, that's right, I was a cop.

• 2:45:18Speaker 06

  I think that's after I got back, yeah. Didn't you use the GI Bill to become a pilot? I did, I did. I used the GI Bill to become a pilot with the idea of being an airline pilot. And I, I took the courses and got my commercial in San Francisco area. And I passed the commercial. And the only thing left was instrument and whatever else you had to do. And when I was, was doing that, they discovered that the guy who gave me my commercial checkride had also given me a lesson at some point in the past. And there was some kind of a conflict and they wouldn't count my commercial test

• 2:46:02Speaker 06

  because he had given me a test, I mean, a lesson. So anyway, I had to wait until we got to Alaska to get it done. And went to Alaska and signed up for this guy who's gonna give me the pilot checkride. And so I'm sitting at the airport waiting for him to, he has a student in front of me. And I'm waiting for him to give the test and whatever he's doing or lesson to this student. And I watched him take off, I think it's the student was driving, flying. And I watched him take off and it goes straight up in the air into a hammerhead stall. And it crashes on the edge of the runway into the ocean.

• 2:46:44Speaker 06

  And they never, ever find the plane and they never find the pilot. But the girl comes up and she actually become, two broken legs. And she comes up and becomes Alaska Airlines pilot. And then it took six months before they had somebody to replace this guy.

• 2:47:04Speaker 06

  And when I would go to get my sign off on the test, he'd never show up. He was just not reliable. And after a while, I said, this is, this is just crazy. It's not gonna work. And so I'm, I was still teaching martial arts in the college and all that. And, uh, uh, over time, uh, all the cops and the state troopers were my students. And so, um, uh, there was an opening. It was in the police department. They, they come and got me. They all but kidnapped me. He said, Dale, you gotta be a, a cop. You gotta be a cop. And, and so I went down and took the test. Where is this? Sitka, Alaska. Yeah. And I maxed the test. You know, I got, I maxed the test.

• 2:47:49Speaker 06

  And, uh, of course, they thought there was something wrong with the test. You know? But I, I passed it and, um, and, um, and then, then I, I went through the academy. And they had four categories. Academic, physical fitness, driving and shooting. And I got number one in all four. Never been done before. What a badass. That's when I was shooting more. Never been done before? No, no. Nice. People would get one, but not two, you know, something like that. So anyway, I, I got out of the, um, I became a cop. My problem as a cop is that I enforce the law. If, uh, you wound up speeding 20 over and I got you, you got a ticket, period. And they hated me for that.

• 2:48:32Speaker 06

  You know, you're not supposed to enforce the law. But, uh, anyway, I was there one day and, uh, to give you a background, uh, leading up to it. Uh, Vietnam War and communism was really big in the United States. It still is, but I believe it's sub rosa. But, uh, they had the, um, Black Lives Matter was a big thing. Uh, Martin Luther King was a member of over 120 communist front organizations, the most of any American. And, and so that was going big in the fifth comb dividing America. Well, in, in Alaska, they, they were trying to, to segregate the natives from the rest of the people. And, and, um,

• 2:49:16Speaker 06

  It was a kind of an easy fix for them because we have 300 villages. And some of them only have 100 people and stuff. There's no way they could have school, high school and stuff for all of their kids. So Alaska has regional schools, they have five regional schools. And one of them is in Sitka. Well, they had people inside who would try to indoctrinate them into communism. And I would go as a cop, I would go into these rooms to see something for, from a student, you know, some complaint or something. And I would go in there and, and there was these red and black, that's the native colors, the red and black posters, they were all the same size and everything. And they would be in a row, either in a hallway or in a room.

• 2:50:01Speaker 06

  It would be Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud. And there would be two or three more and that would be Stalin and Mao Zedong and all the rest. In other words, these are your heroes, Red Cloud and all the rest of them. And it's just factored right into the rest of it. In other words, Stalin and, and all the rest of those people are equally your friends. And they were, they were getting this big deal. Well, anyway, in, in the Dakotas about that time, there was an uproar in one of the reservations. And they were barricading themselves against everybody and the citizens were furious.

• 2:50:42Speaker 06

  So they had, it was surrounded by, believe it or not, special forces, I don't know how they got that, and state troopers. And they surrounded the camp. And everybody said, oh, they're, they're under siege. But no, they were facing outward so that citizens wouldn't come in and end the problem. Well, anyway, I, I won't say the name because he's still alive and, and I've had contracts on me. This man headed it up. Well, in Sitka, Alaska, his sister headed up the, the native uprising in Alaska. And

• 2:51:17Speaker 06

  She was really wild, virulently anti-white and all the rest and pro-communist and so forth. Her boyfriend parked his car along the highway just before all the people would go to work. The mill site was three, four miles down the road along the ocean and he parked his car there and every time a car came by, he would stand out of the car, stand in the highway and put his gun out with both hands and then when they stopped, he would go like this and urge them out of the car. And it was absolutely clear in everybody's mind, they were going to be executed by this guy. There was no question in their minds.

• 2:52:01Speaker 06

  And so they would gun it and they would take off and he would empty the gun on the car. And he shot eight carloads of people. And so I got the call and the call was this guy shooting at people. He had a rust-colored pickup in Canopie and he was standing toward town at a certain speed. And I had this image in my mind, rusty old truck, rust-colored, they said, you know. And so I was looking as I went and I had a maroon car. It was the investigator's car that they gave me because I was the shift commander. So I'm heading down the highway as fast as the car can go and all of a sudden I see

• 2:52:42Speaker 06

  this car at one of the turnoffs, you know, where people can pull off and watch the sunrise, you know. And it was not rusty, it was rust-colored pickup in Canopie. And I looked at it, I thought, it's gotta be him. And I stopped about 35 meters away and in fact, I know that's 35 because they paged out the scene. And off to my right, I would have got closer probably, but off to my right was another car. And I didn't know, but that the two of them were together on what they were doing. So I had to make sure I wasn't between the two cars. So I stopped about 35 meters. I got out of the car. And he did the same thing to me. Come out, put the guns up and started to do this

• 2:53:23Speaker 06

  number and I yelled at him to drop it and he started to shoot and one of those bullets hit the sign above my car and then another one went whizzing by and I yelled at him. I said, "Drop it" and he started to shoot. So I was kind of lucky in a way. Standard automatic transmission, but this shift is in the right. I'm left-handed so I can get the car stopped. I can get it into park. I can throw the door open with my elbow and with my good hand, I can pull the gun out and it's only just a couple of seconds. And anyway, he's still shooting at me. So I yelled, "Drop it" and I shot

• 2:54:07Speaker 06

  twice and he went down, straight down. And it was kind of an interesting thing because Army experience, Special Forces experience, I always kept my eye on that other one. He went down with both hands underneath him and I didn't see blood and I thought, "This guy's faking." So I basically rolled across the road so that when he came up, I wouldn't be where he saw me last and I'd take him from there. And so anyway, another squad car comes, it's fast. He's so fast, he slammed down the brakes and was skidding sideways and he comes out with a shotgun, you know. And in the meantime, I got traffic coming

• 2:54:50Speaker 06

  from the mill and I don't want them in the middle of our ambush, you know. So we're stopping these cars. An ambulance finally comes and we haven't even checked them out yet and I won't let them through there. My scene is not done yet, you know. I don't want this guy to go over and get shot and I just held him back, you know. So anyway, when the other cop came, he had the shotgun on him. I rolled him over and his hands were underneath, but the gun was off the side. When he went down, it went just a few feet to the side. I didn't see it. But anyway, he... Went down and all that stuff, called for the ambulance and uh, or you know, called the ambulance, you can have them now and we uh, put him in the uh, in the ambulance and uh, at the um, uh,

• 2:55:35Speaker 06

  hospital, the surgeon, who's a friend of mine, I knew him pretty well, a very sharp man, um, he said both, my bullets went in the same hole and came out an inch apart on the back. Glad to hear that, you know, and um, so anyway, he's down there and, and he also said that um, uh, by denying people to come to him, you know, for his aid, you know, which, what could they do? Um, uh, he said if, if he was in, in the surgeon's gown with his gloves on and he was shot on the bed, he could have saved him. But that's perfect, you know, and so, um, so, so there he is and um, uh, of course I got a certain amount of time, I got to deal with the crime scene and all that,

• 2:56:17Speaker 06

  you know, then I get back to the station and it's about seven o'clock and um, I, I call my wife because I figure she's gonna hear something on the street, you know, and I want her to be assured that, you know, this is a good shoot, you know, so I called her up and, and, and she answers the phone and I says, Kath, I, I, I just don't want you to worry about, you know, what you might have heard, but I said I had to kill a man last night and my wife, special forces wife, says, I just have one question, why did it take you two shots? Holy shit, are you serious? That is perfect, that is just absolutely perfect. You picked a good wife. A, a good woman.

• 2:57:03Speaker 06

  She, she knows exactly what you need, you know. Damn. Then, and, and then, um, it's seven in the morning. I couldn't think of a better question to ask, I should have thought of that. Yeah, I couldn't either. I, I should have thought of that as an interviewer. Seven in the morning. Why did it take you two?

• 2:57:22Speaker 06

  I wanted to see if I could get both in the same hole. Nice. Then, uh, uh, seven o'clock in the morning, eleven thirty on Alaska Airlines, three hitmen come to kill me. That fast, uh, uh, they, they were coming on a private jet, they got onto this one. And, uh, it wasn't Alaska Airlines, they came on a private jet and they were flown here specifically to kill me. And, and they made it here within four or five hours of the shooting. And, uh, the, the gal who was heading up the, the uprising, so to speak, in Sitka. Hope he had another six rounds. Brother was the one that headed the one up into the Dakotas. And, and, um, uh, so, so they, they are very anti-white, anti, anti-American in, in a lot of ways and so forth.

• 2:58:07Speaker 06

  So then the bullets started flying for a year, probably a year, um, uh, had contracts on me, um, uh. Once they almost got me, um, my wife, my wife and I would help in the Trooper Academy and she would play the, uh, the harassed wife or, or the beaten wife or something and the, the new students would come in and, and, you know, interview her and all that. And she was at the, the graduation ceremony, which was across the road from me, about a hundred yards in. And, uh, their graduation was now, so she was, uh, asked to be there for the graduation. And, um, so we have a, a new baby and, uh, I was carrying the baby in my arms.

• 2:58:51Speaker 06

  And, uh, as I'm walking past the window, my dog barked, it was a funny bark. Uh, it was like something, you know, warning type bark, you know? And I turned like this to see what my dog barked at. And the bullet went through the window and right where my head was. And, uh, we had a stained glass seashell in the, in opposing window. And it went right through the center of the seashell. So he thought the seashell was my head, so it went just like that. So, uh, I would have run him down, except I had a baby. You know, what do you do? I would have run him down without a gun, I would, I'd taken him out, um. But then I asked one of the, I called the dispatcher, I said, someone just tried to shoot me. And I says, but I'm worried, my wife is across the road at the graduation ceremony for the police.

• 2:59:36Speaker 06

  And I says, could you make sure she doesn't come back until this is all solved, you know? So one of the cops, a friend of mine, his name was Ernie Starr, went over there and he was walking down the aisle and my wife was on the aisle seat. And serendipitous, this is the way things happen in life. He goes up to her and he's gonna whisper to her that Dale, they just shot at Dale, don't go home now. And it was that auspicious moment when the entire place just happened to be totally silent at that second. And the entire place heard it, they just shot at Dale and don't go home. But this is a trooper and cop graduation ceremony.

• 3:00:21Speaker 06

  So within two or three minutes, we had fifty cops and troopers charging into the woods across the road from me, trying to get this guy, you know, they never did. And then like you, you know, I've had the contracts on my life and all that stuff too. And for a whole year, I had to have the mirror that goes around so you don't have bombs under your car and be careful, you know. But the big thing with me is you can, you can give them a victory by acting scared and nervous, you know, act confident and they haven't got a victory at all. And I just took the normal scares, God will take care of me, I hope.

• 3:01:04Speaker 06

  And I just took the normal precautions and carried through life. And I think my confidence kept people from trying things that they would otherwise wanna do. They did crazy things like invite me to go snowmobiling. Guy I didn't know at all, he was gonna, wants me to go snowmobiling with him, you know, things like that. And lots of stuff that happened for about a year, you know, and then the department says I'm politically hot, you know, and not that they did anything for me really, and I should look for more work and I quit. And I gotta tell you this too, how we got into carving and so forth.

• 3:01:49Speaker 06

  I was, you know, what do you do? What do you do when people don't, are afraid to hire you and figure their business would be assaulted or boycotted, you know?

• 3:01:57Speaker 05

  You gotta start your own business.

• 3:01:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's, it's pretty difficult.

• 3:02:02Speaker 06

  I carved a lot when I was a kid. My mom says I carved up all the soap. But I was carving and uh, uh, it's four things happened in one week and one was my friend, he was the, one of the best painters in Alaska, my hunting partner. And Keith came by and I was carving a soapstone seal. Gonna make it for my wife. I don't know where I got the soapstone or anything, but I'm carving that and he goes, oh, he says, that's really good. He says, that's worth about $1,200. Whoa, and that's the first time I ever uh, put a dollar value or figured that there was a monetary value on something I did. Never thought of it, you know?

• 3:02:45Speaker 06

  And then um, about two days later, I was carving a whale in ivory. Again, I don't remember where I got the ivory, but I was carving this whale. And I must've did a pretty good job because I didn't have it on a base yet and I didn't have an accent under it. And, and he says, Dale, he says, that's really good. He says, let me have that for a minute. He went down to one of the gift stores and he sold it to them for a hundred dollars. Come back, gave me the hundred dollars and he called me up that afternoon to say the gallery had already sold it for $200. And then there was the fourth thing that happened that same week.

• 3:03:25Speaker 06

  A guy I never met before, who was the premier carver in Alaska. A really great carver, a good man. And he came by my house, he knocked on my house. I never met him in my life. And I, I opened up the door and he came in, headed for my table, my kitchen table. And he says, my name's Jim Fleishman. And, and he walked over there and, and he had a lard can, those big ones they had in the old country, full of lard. And they're about that tall. They must hold five, 10 gallons, you know? It was full of ivory scraps. And he dumped it all on my table. And he says, pick up what you can use. Pick up what you want.

• 3:04:09Speaker 06

  And I had no idea how much this was gonna cost, you know. So I picked out as much as I dared, that was labor conscious rather than material conscious. That make sense? Mm-hmm. What I'm saying? So I picked out a whole bunch of pieces. And, uh, and he said, well, you're gonna need some accents, some basses. He started pushing a whole bunch more stuff to me. And, and I said, well, how much is this gonna cost? You know? And he takes his arm and he, what I didn't pick, I easily lit it all back into that big metal can. And, and I said, how much is this? And he says, nothing. God told me to bring it over here.

• 3:04:49Speaker 06

  And I told my wife, as dumb as I am, after four things happening in one week, I says, Kath, there's something to this. But I said, if I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do an honest show of it. Uh, this guy's the best carver in the state. And, uh, he does, people call him all the time, but he's a peddler. And the rent comes due, he does the carving and sells the carving, pays the rent. I says, I'm not gonna be a peddler. I says, I'm gonna carve faithfully all winter long. And when spring gets here, I'm gonna ask all the stores to come by and see what they wanna buy. And I did it. I carved all winter long. And, uh, when spring got there, I could fill the table pretty much with carvings.

• 3:05:32Speaker 06

  And, uh, invited the store owners come by and, and, uh, they picked out virtually everything. And at, at the end of, um, about three hours, four hours, something like that, there wasn't a single piece on the table. And I'd orders for four hundred and fifty more carvings. Whoa. Yes. And, and it stayed like that for the next twenty years. Just I never caught up in twenty years. It's just, or year after year, and I would do a show maybe, or, um, call a store and they say, can you get this, this, this? And they knew the quality level and they knew I would deliver and all that. It was like that for twenty years and I basically I raised the family on carving and I still carve.

• 3:06:13Speaker 06

  It's been great and with everything there's little anecdotes that you can pick up in life, you know. It's like I see people that do carvings with ivory and I look at the carvings and they're not necessarily good. You know, he's got some years to go, you know. And but I look at that and what's gonna happen, and it does happen, is that the media, the ivory carries over poor work. You know, so people desperately want an ivory carving and if anything the historian say it's primitive art.

• 3:06:50Speaker 06

  And excuse the poor carving, you know, and so that that works and I I can sell things that way.

• 3:07:01Speaker 06

  But when I started doing wood, I did soapstone and I actually started doing bronze and silver pewter and all the cast pieces too. And about two hundred and fifty casts. But when I started doing the wood carving, my greatest gratification was there. Because I'm starting with something that's intrinsically worthless. You burn it in your stove and so forth. And I take this this thing and it's only what I do to that that makes a difference, that makes someone want it. And that is the gratification I get on the carving. Is that you?

• 3:07:44Speaker 06

  It's the ultimate reward. When I was a cop, I don't care how many crimes you did, they let you out on your OR and it's worse today by far. It's like there's no, I feel sorry for the cops and some of these other people who can see no reward for their labor. But the wood is the one that I can see. I I look at the piece and I say that that is good and I'm satisfied. And for me to say I'm satisfied, that's a that's a unique word, you know.

• 3:08:20Speaker 05

  I pulled up your website. Those carvings are incredible.

• 3:08:25Speaker 06

  That's about fifteen years old too.

• 3:08:27Speaker 05

  Man.

• 3:08:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:08:28Speaker 05

  It's.

• 3:08:30Speaker 06

  Have a lot of talent. Yeah. How long? How did you meet your wife? Um, it's interesting. I was just telling him. When I was in San Francisco. Uh, we were going to flight school. And uh, to be air Alaska airline pilot. And I was working in a mill, uh, uh, Fraser Johnson, I think it was. Uh, just assembly line stuff. And uh, uh, anyway, Mike and I were out flying. And uh. Uh, I said, I got, uh, we're flying together. We were doing touch and goes on the bank. Uh, of San Francisco Bay, just on, on the bank. And uh, I said, I gotta go to work. And he says, well, I'm gonna do one more touch and go and go in. So I, I went to work. And I'm punching in the, the clock.

• 3:09:14Speaker 06

  And, and the foreman comes out. He says, Dale, he says, your roommate just crashed his plane. And he's at the emergency room in the hospital. Uh, he wants to know if you could come out. Of course, you know, and he let, let me go in the time and all that. So I went to the hospital. And he was messed up. It really was, uh. He said his leg was broken. I said, the other one doesn't look too good either, you know? Not what he wants to hear. But he had cuts on his face and all over and. Broken this and that, you know, it was a pretty bad shape. You know, but he says, could I, could you send for Kathy Carlson? Uh, maybe she would come up from Seattle and see me. And I said, sure, you know, and I did, and I called her.

• 3:09:56Speaker 06

  And I said, Mike Buckland was in a, a furious, uh, plane crash. He was wondering if you'd come and see him. And Kathy. Was a beautiful gorgeous woman. She was like Miss Alaska and all this stuff. Because the college president and his wife wanted her to do it. She's not that way, but. And brilliant, brilliant lady. And um. Anyway, she came down and picked her up at the airport. Went straight to the hospital and all that and. Would take her to dinner and then, you know, um. And when the time came to take her back to the airport, you know, she went. Next weekend, she came again. And uh, uh. And Mike is starting to slowly get a little bit better.

• 3:10:35Speaker 06

  And then the third week, she comes up. And I'm seeing Mike, Mike is starting to improve a little bit. And, and I'm sitting in the kitchen as she's packing up the last of her things to go to the airport. And I had no idea, I was gonna say it, but I said, Kath, marry me. And she says, okay. And that's it.

• 3:11:00Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 3:11:01Speaker 06

  No flowers, no nothing, just, and, uh, just a good woman, beginning to end, you know. And we've been married fifty-two, three years, I think.

• 3:11:10Speaker 05

  Fifty-three years?

• 3:11:12Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13Speaker 05

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

• 3:11:18Speaker 06

  She has to obey me. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. Cut that part out.

• 3:11:24Speaker 05

  Oh, man.

• 3:11:25Speaker 06

  Never sees that.

• 3:11:27Speaker 06

  I don't know.

• 3:11:29Speaker 06

  We, we love each other very much. She's, um, consideration, maybe, I don't know, because I don't know what I do right. You know?

• 3:11:38Speaker 05

  What does she do right? What does she do right?

• 3:11:41Speaker 06

  Oh, she's just a good.

• 3:11:42Speaker 05

  What's kept you around for fifty-three years?

• 3:11:44Speaker 06

  She takes care of me for everything. If I'm doing something wrong, you know, like on this trip, she says, Dale, you're dehydrated. You need to drink more water. You're not thinking clearly.

• 3:11:55Speaker 06

  Okay, hook me up to a hose.

• 3:11:57Speaker 05

  Always watch it out for you.

• 3:11:59Speaker 06

  Oh, always watch out for me. Yeah, yeah, good woman.

• 3:12:03Speaker 05

  And you became a pastor at a?

• 3:12:05Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 3:12:05Speaker 05

  A small Baptist church?

• 3:12:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, um, probably for at least twenty-five years.

• 3:12:11Speaker 05

  Are you still doing that?

• 3:12:12Speaker 06

  I'm still doing it. Love to study the Bible. And, uh, my, uh, my sermons are really Bible-based. And there's a website, Sitka Bible Baptist Church. And the sermons out there, not the last ten, fifteen years, because I don't know how to do it myself. But we have maybe two, three hundred sermons on there. But my people are just great. They want to hear truth from scripture. They want to hear the scripture. They want it articulated in a fashion that it's understandable, logical, and so forth. And I haven't lost anybody other than moving away from town. That's about it.

• 3:12:56Speaker 06

  But just good people, you know, I'm just so honored to be their pastor. And we're small because we're on the college campus. And sometime later, they close off vehicular traffic on the campus. So you can't have a sign out that people are going to see, come to church, you know. So it's word of mouth, things like that, you know.

• 3:13:20Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:13:21Speaker 06

  But I have just good people all down the line, you know.

• 3:13:26Speaker 05

  What is, what is, what is one truth from scripture that you?

• 3:13:31Speaker 06

  One truth?

• 3:13:33Speaker 05

  Everybody know?

• 3:13:34Speaker 06

  Um, since you say one truth from scripture, I would have to relate it to, not the plan of salvation. I'd have to relate it to the starting point. The scripture is true and reliable. So when you look at it, you can count on it being true and then find all the other answers. Does that make sense?

• 3:13:52Speaker 05

  It does.

• 3:13:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, because I see so many people, um, sound reasoning, logic, some of these things that are missing, they're not taught in school. Absolutely, people don't know how to think. They listen to the propaganda and all that kind of a thing. And they believe it without thinking, you know. And it's so sad, it's sad that America, beginning as it was, no longer has the ability to think clearly, even, even I really conscious. You know, you're getting propaganda mills.

• 3:14:30Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 3:14:30Speaker 06

  Rather than how to think. Logic, I taught logic a couple of times, logic and thinking.

• 3:14:36Speaker 05

  And it is a, it's sad, it is, critical thinking is departing this country at a rapid pace. And, you know, but I will say that, that, um,

• 3:14:52Speaker 05

  It looks like the younger generations are smartening up to this. Yeah. So that, that gives me hope for my kids. Yes, yeah. You could be a good dad. How old are your kids? How old are my kids? Yeah. They're both toddlers. They're both what? Toddlers. Toddlers? Yeah, four and two. Cool. But. That's a beautiful age, too. It's a fun age. Oh gee. Going camping this weekend. Yeah, oh good. So, yeah. Dale, once again, I'm honored to be able to, to, to share your story and, uh, and it was an honor to meet with you and shoot with you and get your story and, and, um, I just get to know you, so.

• 3:15:36Speaker 05

  Thank you, and I, I appreciate it and I, I hope there's something of help to somebody out there. Yeah. Lot of nuggets in there. Good. Thank you. God bless. You too.

• 3:15:59Shawn Ryan?

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