Vietnam Hall Of Fame Sniper Ed Eaton | Unsubscribe Podcast Ep 280

SCAVLAND IS OUT NOW! https://store.steampowered.com/app/3373500/Scavland/ We are honored to host vietnam veteran Ed Eaton! Watch this episode ad-free & uncensored on Pepperbox! https://pepperbox.tv/joinunsubscribe WATCH THE AFTERSHOW & BTS ON PATREON! https://www.patreon.com/UnsubscribePodcast 👕 Merch & Shoes https://bunkerbranding.com/pages/unsubscribe-podcast 🔋 Energy Drinks https://drinkechelon.com P. O BOX: Unsubscribe Podcast 17503 La Cantera Pkwy Ste 104 Box 624 San Antonio TX 78257 ------------------------------ THANK YOU TO OUR SPONSORS! SHOPIFY Free trial at https://shopify.com/unsubpod FUM Head to https://www.tryfum.com/UNSUB and use promo code UNSUB to get your free FÜM Topper with purchase, and start The Good Habit today! GHOSTBED Get an extra 10% off already reduced prices at https://ghostbed.com/unsubscribe with code UNSUBSCRIBE at checkout. HEXCLAD Find your forever cookware @hexclad and get 10% off at https://hexclad.com/UNSUB! #hexcladpartner PONCHO OUTDOORS Get $10 off your first order at https://ponchooutdoors.com/UNSUB when you enter your email. ------------------------------ FOLLOW OUR SOCIALS! Unsubscribe Podcast https://www.instagram.com/unsubscribepodcast https://www.tiktok.com/@unsubscribepodcast https://x.com/unsubscribecast Eli Doubletap https://www.instagram.com/eli_doubletap/ https://x.com/Eli_Doubletap https://www.youtube.com/c/EliDoubletap Brandon Herrera https://www.youtube.com/@BrandonHerrera https://x.com/TheAKGuy https://www.instagram.com/realbrandonherrera Donut Operator https://www.youtube.com/@DonutOperator https://x.com/DonutOperator https://www.instagram.com/donutoperator The Fat Electrician https://www.youtube.com/@the_fat_electrician https://thefatelectrician.com/ https://www.instagram.com/the_fat_electrician https://www.tiktok.com/@the_fat_electrician ------------------------------ unsubscribe pod podcast episode ep unsub funny comedy military army comedian texas podcasts Chapters: 0:00 Welcome To Unsub! 3:02 Ed’s Military Background & Basic Training 24:54 Ed’s Book 37:40 How Ed Became A Sniper 46:22 Ed’s Helicopter Story 1:14:46 Military Logistics In Vietnam 1:23:45 Funny Vietnam Stories 1:32:54 Ed’s Book Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:57The Fat Electrician?

  They started calling in my kills as our sniper. I didn't tell anybody I'd flunked or passed sniper school. I just went back to my outfit.

• 1:04Donut Operator?

  It's the corn sweat. And I'm like, the what? Ah, the corn sweating this time of year.

• 1:08The Fat Electrician?

  My balls were sweating.

• 1:10The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, good. Yeah, I want a circumcision on a boat. Hold still.

• 1:14The Fat Electrician?

  No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I always figured out I'm gonna be fine. I bow [BLEEP] my pants.

• 1:41The Fat Electrician?

  We have hit a million subs. One million subs. Thank you. Show brought this from Ireland.

• 1:51The Fat Electrician?

  Thank you. Cheers.

• 1:55The Fat Electrician?

  Oh my God. I know that is not a shooting whiskey and that was a sin, but dear God, that is delicious. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. A million times. Thank you. We have hit a giant milestone that in a million years I would have never thought possible, but it's possible because of all of you. So thank you guys so, so freaking much. Y'all are amazing humans and I truly, truly appreciate this opportunity. I am fucking stoked. Also, just randomly enough, our video game releases Friday at noon, Scavlance. Go check it out on Steam. Code's down below. Leave a review. I cannot tell you officially to leave a good

• 2:37The Fat Electrician?

  review on Steam, but if you leave a good one, I'm a love you. We'll all love you. And if you leave a bad one,

• 2:49The Fat Electrician?

  I'll also love you. And then on top of that, we, all of us, you can go check us out on Twitch and watch us stream. Enjoy the episode. Oh yeah, we gotta pop the cans. Everyone ready?

• 2:59Donut Operator?

  Beautiful.

• 3:00The Fat Electrician?

  I'll pop this guy. Okay, on the count of three. One, two. One, two, three.

• 3:10The Fat Electrician?

  You know, that's good shit.

• 3:12Donut Operator?

  You don't have to lie.

• 3:14The Fat Electrician?

  No, it really is. White claw, yum yum. My, I never drank it. My wife drinks it, but I hadn't ever took a sip till just now.

• 3:24Donut Operator?

  Welcome to the unsubscribe podcast. I am joined today by my co-hosts Eli Double Tap, the one and only Ed Eaton, Nick the Fat Electrician, and myself, Bro Nut Bobberator. Thank you for joining us.

• 3:37The Fat Electrician?

  You're very welcome.

• 3:40The Fat Electrician?

  Everyone's changed that seat so much. Like, man, who, who Donut has many faces? You're the only one that people will confuse though.

• 3:47Donut Operator?

  Yeah. What do you mean? I am Donut.

• 3:49The Fat Electrician?

  I know. It's nice to meet you, Donut.

• 3:51Donut Operator?

  He's a, he's my Tyler Durden. One of these days I'll, I'll come to realize that.

• 3:55The Fat Electrician?

  And now we got Mr. Ed on. Ed, what's up, brother? Nick set this one up and I'm.

• 4:00Donut Operator?

  I mean, we're all stoked for this one. Nick was very, very stoked, especially if you read our text messages. That was just a very funny text thread.

• 4:10The Fat Electrician?

  Well, to be honest with you, I had never heard of you guys, but I had two guys I served in Vietnam with called, called me up and emailed me whatever and said, hey, I saw that the fat electrician's talking about you. I'm like, who the fuck is that guy?

• 4:27The Fat Electrician?

  And he's not even fat. That's what the weird thing is. But yeah, anyhow. So, and then he calls me up months later and, and by that time I'd watched your podcast and thought, hell, you guys are my kind of people. So, yeah.

• 4:40Donut Operator?

  Perfect.

• 4:41The Fat Electrician?

  And I love Texas, so this is a piece of cake for me.

• 4:44Donut Operator?

  Hell yeah.

• 4:45The Fat Electrician?

  And it sounded like it was, you're, you're our kind of people just from, again, the book, the drink. You have bad taste.

• 4:54The Fat Electrician?

  Well, you're a fellow grunt. You know, all of us grunts have bad taste. A hundred percent. Dude, well, thank you for coming down. We're super stoked for this. I know we have, I mean, you have, if you want to go to, I mean, where do we even start? You have like a crazy story, but then just even leading up to that.

• 5:11The Fat Electrician?

  Well, I mean, I guess, you know, what Sniper Hall of Fame?

• 5:15The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, it was quite the honor. Surprised me. It happened a couple of years ago. First time I ever had a general wanting me to sit next to him. So yeah, the army named the sniper classroom after me and then at the same time did a nice little, in fact, I'll give you guys pictures if you ever, and some of this, well, you might, you probably got it on my website. Anyhow, yeah, pretty cool. And I think there's a lot of people a whole lot more deserving than myself, but nevertheless, I was the one. So first Hall of Fame inductee into the Army Sniper Hall of Fame.

• 5:55The Fat Electrician?

  No.

• 5:56The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 5:58The Fat Electrician?

  Then what we got, you've been, you had a special on History Channel about you?

• 6:03The Fat Electrician?

  History Channel did a story on me. Unfortunately, they didn't finish the story at, but.

• 6:10Donut Operator?

  They had to make way for Ancient Aliens.

• 6:12The Fat Electrician?

  There you go. Yeah. NRA TV did a, it's actually better than History Channel one, I think, but it did the rest of the story and it was a very well done film, even though it was done my, my home as opposed to Hollywood was for the, I did the first one, but. Well, I mean, like what your, if we rewind, you started, well, your dad served in World War II. He was a Marine vet. Correct. And Korea. Yeah. Oh, I didn't realize he did both. Yeah. Dang. So you had that leadership and that, how was your pops at that age? Just like? Well, you know, I had, I couldn't go to school till my giggling was straight and,

• 6:56The Fat Electrician?

  you know, I had to stand inspection for dinner every night, but no, it's not, having rules is not a bad thing, you know? It makes life easier for you as you get older. So. I mean, to set you up. This is the time during the draft and you signed up. Well, I had actually joined the National Guard as a high school half lunchtime vet. Four of us walked across the street.

• 7:24Donut Operator?

  He said as a vet.

• 7:25The Fat Electrician?

  Across the street from the high school to the National Guard outfit. And even though we all needed our parents' signature, but my mother was more than happy to do it. She was afraid I was going to join the Marine Corps or something else kind of stupid. So, so anyhow, I did that. But, you know, and then I, I had never really even heard of Vietnam in 65 to speak of, but people are going, now people are dying that I know and I, people are starting to get divided. Should we be there? Shouldn't we be there? And I just sort of felt that I needed to go and see for myself. And, and so I went active and hoping to be a combat medic.

• 8:08The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. How did you end up being 11 Bravo?

• 8:10The Fat Electrician?

  Well, in order to be a combat medic, I would have had to have re-upped. And I thought, you know, I might, I might, I just only have to survive one year of infantry and, and then I'll have my GA bill and, and I'll serve. It'll all be good. So that's kind of what went down there. So. Soldiers don't change over time. It's always like, oh, re-up's a big ask.

• 8:32The Fat Electrician?

  Wars change. The guys that fight them don't.

• 8:36Donut Operator?

  I love those old photos.

• 8:37The Fat Electrician?

  Soldiers don't. That is one of the most, I mean, even with Iraq, it's how you, they would hook you. It was like, oh, you'll get a $20,000 sign, re-up bonus and you're in Iraq. So it's no, it's non-tax. You get it all right now. Five years. And like, then I watched my buddies, they signed up for it. They did that. And then like, I'm like, yeah, I mean, why did you do that? I really wanted to be a pilot and I passed all my warrant officer stuff and, and my dad, being the ex-marine, he fed the Marine Corps all my info and I had the scores high

• 9:18The Fat Electrician?

  enough to get into the Marine Corps air program, but that's six more years, you know, and I just, I didn't know if, whatever. So I decided I could survive one year.

• 9:32The Fat Electrician?

  I.

• 9:32The Fat Electrician?

  Rather erroneously.

• 9:34The Fat Electrician?

  We, we said this on a podcast we filmed previously this week and I brought it up again. It's every time there's an army guy that with a crazy story that did incredible things, it always starts with, I almost went into the Marine Corps, but then I went army instead. And then they proceed to just go do a bunch of crazy stuff anyways.

• 9:52Donut Operator?

  That Sammy said was like, yeah, the line was too long.

• 9:55The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 9:56Donut Operator?

  Yeah.

• 9:57The Fat Electrician?

  He showed up, the line was shorter for the army. So we went there instead.

• 10:01The Fat Electrician?

  My dad and I, he didn't write me for six months. He's pissed off that I joined the army, but. I like his mouth. It's like my son's going to war. It's like. We got along pretty good. We'd go out to the bar and he'd go, hey, this is my doggy son, Ed. And I'd go, yeah, this is my short-haired father.

• 10:20The Fat Electrician?

  Did your father teach you to like shoot everything growing up? Absolutely. They were mountain people.

• 10:29The Fat Electrician?

  So my great grandfather got killed in the uh, the battle of the prelim to the battle of Nashville. Forget the name of it now.

• 10:40The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, the Battle of Nashville is a wild thing. But anyway, it was part of the Battle of Nashville, but it's the early part down in Franklin, I think. But uh, so, so uh, Dude, you're throwing a flashbang at us. Yeah. You have Nick or history, Nick over here like, So my whole family moved to state of Washington, right on the Oregon border. Uh, and they were mountain people. That was about the only land that was really left a homestead that was worth a shit. And, and so my dad was raised on the mountains and raised in a tough manner. Uh, 14 miles to school, literally. So you had to do, well, my grandmother was a school more army, a long story, all that crap.

• 11:25The Fat Electrician?

  But uh, so uh, my dad and cousins joined the Marine Corps right after Pearl Harbor. And uh, uh, that's kind of how that went down. But uh, but yeah, shooting was a big part of, we never ate beef and, or at least in the house until,

• 11:44The Fat Electrician?

  I don't know, maybe senior year or later, high school. So venison or? Yeah, venison and elk. Yeah. Yeah. So you literally lived out like true mountain people where it's, Yeah. And back then you could get four or five deer, uh, family, you know? I mean, you could get a doe and then you get a buck and so it was all good. But yeah, I, I can remember him getting me in the backyard with a piece of shit 22 and, and had buck sights. And the only way to adjust to buck sights was uh, he's a heavy smoker. He'd bring out a little match, piece of match and stick it under there and move it around and so whatever.

• 12:27The Fat Electrician?

  So going into,

• 12:28The Fat Electrician?

  Lost my zero. My match stick moved. That's a wild statement.

• 12:32Donut Operator?

  I mean, when we, when we said we wanted match grade sites, I don't think that's what we were thinking.

• 12:37The Fat Electrician?

  Exactly. Yeah. So what was uh, going in basic training like for you?

• 12:42The Fat Electrician?

  Well, a piece of cake actually, because I, I played six years of football away then. And uh, uh, humped up every goddamn mountain you can imagine. So I was immediately made a squad leader, that kind of crap. And um, yeah, so that wasn't a big deal. Infantry training surprised me. It was pretty tough.

• 13:07The Fat Electrician?

  The 26 mile march with two weeks of shit on your back and after spending two weeks in the boonies was,

• 13:16The Fat Electrician?

  It was almost asking too much because we're humping seven, 10 miles a day anyhow, playing war. And now all of a sudden you gotta throw everything on your back and go home for 26 miles. But uh, Well, it's a good question with basic, because I think a lot of us, our basic was very different. Even like next month, like, and you get to see a decade, every decade, it just got softer is what I say. Yours, you're, it's wild to hear. It's like, oh, it wasn't bad. I'm like, how was your childhood if you looked at like Vietnam, basic training like?

• 13:49The Fat Electrician?

  Well, the crazy part is like, not only did the standards get lower, cause like the, you know, the basically, the biggest march I had to do between medic and basic, I think was 10 miles.

• 14:01The Fat Electrician?

  Oh my God.

• 14:01The Fat Electrician?

  It was like, it was like eight or 10, but the other part of that is my gear is way better than yours was too. Like the, the rucksack I had is way better than the rucksack you had, and I only had to go half as far.

• 14:12The Fat Electrician?

  Mine was half full of water being out of Fort Lewis. So I had an extra, whatever pounds added to that. Oh, dude, Fort, oh, you, you still call it Fort Lewis. It's, it's not called that anymore.

• 14:24Donut Operator?

  What's the name now?

• 14:25The Fat Electrician?

  Mc, uh, Joint Base. Fuck them. It's Fort Lewis.

• 14:29Donut Operator?

  10-4.

• 14:31The Fat Electrician?

  That's what it was for me. It was the year after I got out because I was stationed at Fort Lewis and then it switched. And I was like, what the? You know, I have an interesting story about what is done then. So my old unit is now a basic training unit in Fort Jackson, South Carolina. So we go down there for a union and the army is just really treated us good. They sent buses, took us out and took us to each and every range, you know? And which was really important to me was my best friend had a range named after him. And uh, uh, Ronager in my book is who I wrote anyhow. So here they are like, oh, come on, Jack, come on, Jill, let's get over the hill, you know? Like, oh, you don't feel okay, go ahead and stand out to the side.

• 15:15The Fat Electrician?

  I'm going like, what the fuck, man? You know? So, So you're heckling the current recruits? So we invited the cadre and uh, Bravo through the 60th to our dinner. And they also brought their colonel, the battalion commander.

• 15:35The Fat Electrician?

  And I asked him, I says, you know, how, how come basic training so long? It's, it's longer than it wasn't. Well, it takes about two or three weeks for us to get him in shape for basic training. I'm going, okay. So these guys are all infantrymen, all the cadre were all had combat infantry badges. And uh, I says, so how long's infantry, infantry training? I says, how come this so much longer? Well, it takes us a couple of weeks to get him in shape for infantry training. So I said, you got, so you're telling me that people of today's era are a month to five, six weeks behind? Where you guys were just 40 years or you know, just 27 years ago.

• 16:17The Fat Electrician?

  And that's, that's the truth. That's, that's how soft we as Americans got.

• 16:23The Fat Electrician?

  I spent a lot of time in Fort Benning right now and, and trust me, Americans were in good hands. Men still have testosterone. And there are men that want to be men and they, they're the ones that want to be infantrymen. They're the ones that want to be Rangers, Warfighters. Airborne, special forces, anything they can be other than a regular guy. So yeah, it's, it's all good. I'm, I'm pretty proud of our military right now.

• 16:52The Fat Electrician?

  So, I mean, going into that, because I, I did read your book. And one of the things that was really cool for me to see is that a lot of other war memoirs don't really talk about a lot is you spent quite a bit of the book talking about how just the elements of Vietnam kind of kicked your ass when you first got there. Of the climate. I mean, you were sounding like you were a pretty in shape guy and you were still having a miserable time when you first got there.

• 17:15The Fat Electrician?

  Well, it was the hot season to begin with. So every day's 95 to 105 and,

• 17:22The Fat Electrician?

  100% humidity.

• 17:23The Fat Electrician?

  It's the Mekong Delta and you'd wake up in the morning, you'd think it's a fog. No, it's just, it's just the, the water and the rice paddies warming up is all a little further, you know? Oh, wow. It was really steam more than anything, you know?

• 17:39Donut Operator?

  I, I found that out last time when we were in Iowa, that you guys deal with that. What is it called?

• 17:43The Fat Electrician?

  The corn sweat.

• 17:44Donut Operator?

  Yeah. What the? I had never heard of this before.

• 17:48The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 17:51The Fat Electrician?

  It's a word. It's not evaporation. It's uh, transpiration. Transpiration. All the corn in Iowa, when it's tall, when it gets hot out, the corn sucks groundwater up into the stock, which causes condensation on the corn because the groundwater is cooler than the atmosphere. And then it sweats out and turns into humidity. So it's like above 100% humidity. It's, it's like you're getting punched in the face with hot water.

• 18:15Donut Operator?

  It was miserable.

• 18:16The Fat Electrician?

  It's aggressive.

• 18:16Donut Operator?

  What the fuck's going on here?

• 18:17The Fat Electrician?

  You have to feel it because you were in Iowa.

• 18:19Donut Operator?

  Yeah. They were, they were like, it's the corn sweat. And I'm like, the, the, uh, the what?

• 18:23The Fat Electrician?

  That's a weird statement.

• 18:24The Fat Electrician?

  I thought Nick was fucking with me.

• 18:25Donut Operator?

  I had never heard of it. I'm like, what?

• 18:28The Fat Electrician?

  The corn sweating this time of year?

• 18:30Donut Operator?

  Oh, of course, the corn sweat. What the fuck is corn sweat?

• 18:34The Fat Electrician?

  The corn is sweating. I'm not, I'm not kidding.

• 18:37The Fat Electrician?

  My balls were sweating.

• 18:39The Fat Electrician?

  Connor, you been sitting on a business idea?

• 18:42Donut Operator?

  Oh, I've got so many business ideas, Eli. My newest one is that I'm going to sell pants to slugs.

• 18:48The Fat Electrician?

  Well, Brandon, tell him what he can do about that.

• 18:52Donut Operator?

  I'm gonna sell salt washed jeans to slugs. Fucking with my customer base, man. Well, either way, you can find your customer base and sell to them on Shopify. I don't know how many slugs are on Shopify. More than you'd think.

• 19:04The Fat Electrician?

  Are you saying Shopify will make the business easier for Connor to make it happen?

• 19:08Donut Operator?

  As easy as it can be. From the moment the first slug's ready to pay.

• 19:12The Fat Electrician?

  Shopify also powers millions of businesses worldwide.

• 19:16Donut Operator?

  I do know that because the first couple of businesses I started, I actually used Shopify and it made it actually manageable to do.

• 19:21The Fat Electrician?

  We actually all use Shopify with bunker and everything we do. All our businesses actually do operate under Shopify.

• 19:27Donut Operator?

  When snail trail jeans finally takes off, I will be using Shopify.

• 19:31The Fat Electrician?

  With Shopify, nothing stands between your idea and making it a real business.

• 19:36Donut Operator?

  Except slugs ability to use the internet. But go make one. Start your free trial at Shopify.com slash unsub pod.

• 19:43The Fat Electrician?

  Start your trial at Shopify. S H O P I F Y dot com slash unsub pod.

• 19:51The Fat Electrician?

  Unsub pod, U N S U B P O D. You know, I, it, that my, my first mission might've been our, my worst mission in that.

• 20:02The Fat Electrician?

  I had never dealt with that kind of heat and da, da, da, but.

• 20:07The Fat Electrician?

  Part of it was because I was a new guy and I wasn't quite in shape. We dusted off. I think, I forget how many guys, but a bunch of them didn't come back. They were permanently had brain damage. From heat exhaustion.

• 20:24The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, they were full on heat stroke.

• 20:26The Fat Electrician?

  And they did, yeah, a heat stroke and they did not get us water for a couple of days. We were literally going to the rain. All the hooches had a rain barrel where the, that's the rain would come down after.

• 20:42The Fat Electrician?

  Well, it's full of mosquitoes is what it's full of. So you'd like. Spread mosquitoes away and suck up some water, you know, and like. Knowing full well, you're probably going to get malaria at some point or another. You keep on doing that, but.

• 20:59The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, from that standpoint, it was brutal. Then, of course, you're, you're. First time actually having somebody shoot at you is. Not as cool as they make it out to be. That is like a god, I always figured out I'm going to be fine. I'll be fine. Trust these. He's gonna have a problem. I about shit my pants, man. This is god fearing stuff, you know? I literally had rockets flying over my head that far. The sad thing about it was I actually saw the son of a bitch that sat up in front of me. But I'd never seen the enemy before and I, I'm thinking, well, I need to call somebody to see, make sure it's not somebody from my element, you know? And.

• 21:45The Fat Electrician?

  So I. So I tear the radio. Away from the prick twenty five. I tore the handset away from, so I couldn't call anybody. And then they laid into us, but, uh, yeah, it's anyhow, I just. But as far as element wise. We literally finally got to the Mito River, which is probably the largest arm of the Mekong Delta.

• 22:14The Fat Electrician?

  We're drinking out of it. We're that thirsty. And I literally, honest to God, because everybody shits on the Mekong all the way from Laos, all the way down to where we're at. Somebody up the river, not very far, had a nice fresh turd. Floating right by me, not long after I'd taken a drink. A life straw. Hey, at least it was after. Silver linings. Anyhow, was, so that kind of went downhill from there. Yeah, downstream, so it's like.

• 22:46The Fat Electrician?

  Great bunch of guys. We looked out after each other and.

• 22:51The Fat Electrician?

  What was, like, if we can go back just to. Basic for one quick question, it's like. You're saying, hey, it wasn't that bad. It was easy, especially going through what you went through afterwards. Where the drill starts, this is the time period where they could hit you, right? They wouldn't hit you. They would have you, other people hit you.

• 23:13The Fat Electrician?

  I, I, here's, here's, here's how they.

• 23:15The Fat Electrician?

  Battle bullies.

• 23:19The Fat Electrician?

  No, here's, here's, here's how they did it. Battle bullies, what? Here's how they did it. It happened to me. So I'm the squad leader, right? Somebody drill sergeant comes to me, goes, Eaton. I want to make sure, I can't remember his name now, but I want to make sure he knows.

• 23:36The Fat Electrician?

  He knows what, I want to make sure he knows. I want to make sure he's learned his lesson. When he, we show up formation tomorrow, I want to look at him and know that he has learned his lesson. Going like, what the fuck are you talking about? Didn't take me long and I realized, shit, I gotta go fuck guy's head up, you know?

• 23:54The Fat Electrician?

  So me and another squad leader pulled a blanket party on the guy and dumped him up a little bit and.

• 24:01The Fat Electrician?

  So that's how they did it. Damn, I just imagine this being like an error of communication. He shows up all fucked up the next day. Like, what the fuck did you do? I just wanted you to talk to him.

• 24:12The Fat Electrician?

  I wouldn't even just say, it's like, hey, I learned my mistake, drill sergeant. Why is that the black and blue, right? No. We had a real interesting situation in basic training. We had a. Entire platoon of guys that all came from the Idaho Boys Home. All sixty of them, every frigging one of them they put together. Which was probably a mistake because those guys already had their own pecking order, you know? Well, the army realized that right off the bat, so they doubled up on NCOs at night and, and during the day and. But they had one kid, Peewee, a little redheaded dude. Peewee loved to get his ass kicked, you know? He loved to be this center of attention by just, you know?

• 24:58The Fat Electrician?

  Crazy pastime. He would do it on purpose. Yeah, I mean, he literally would. And so I happened to be going to the CQ, a charge of quarters. Late at night, as a squad leader, I could do that. The rest of us, nobody else could leave the area, but. Here's this goddamn drill sergeant. He's like, he has Peewee on the front porch and. It's only that wide and it's concrete. Peewee get on that stop at the top of the porch and get in a dying cockroach. And you stay there till I tell you to quit. So he's there in the dying cockroach, which is your arms and legs sticking up mirrors, all it is. At an angle, forty five degree angle, which does get tiresome at the fall.

• 25:41The Fat Electrician?

  Anything gets tiresome because in your brain, it's like, oh, they made him do it for thirty seconds. It's like, no, drill sergeants will. Make you hold that for hours.

• 25:52The Fat Electrician?

  Till I get tired.

• 25:55The Fat Electrician?

  So the drill sergeant goes to the back of the barracks, catches somebody fucking up. And he says, okay, gentlemen, here's the deal. If you're not outside and in formation within twenty seconds, you're all going through, we had these sand, little crawl sand pits. Next door, forty yards of sand. You're gonna have to crawl through those, which. That wasn't so bad, but now you have sand all over you, all over the barrier. You gotta clean it up everywhere.

• 26:21The Fat Electrician?

  Making sugar cookies.

• 26:25The Fat Electrician?

  So what happened? What, what happens? You got fifty nine guys kicking the door open, charging as hard as they can, and here's Peewee. You know, just trampled the shit out of that poor guy. Oh. But he realized right then and there that he needed to straighten up.

• 26:46The Fat Electrician?

  Did you guys ever have to do Superman's?

• 26:48The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 26:49The Fat Electrician?

  Superman drills for a punishment?

• 26:51The Fat Electrician?

  Will you do that?

• 26:52The Fat Electrician?

  No, no, no, no. You fall into formation and then the drill instructor is like, all right. Three minutes, I want you back here in formation, wearing. The bottoms from your dress uniform, a combat top, your beret, your rubber boots. And your cold weather gloves, go. And you had, everybody had to be wearing the exact same uniform. And you would just do it over and over and over again. And if anybody was fucked up, he'd just smoke the dog shit out of you while you're wearing like. Your cold weather gear in July, like. They call it, they call it Superman's because you had to change really fast, like Superman, yeah.

• 27:27The Fat Electrician?

  Dude, all the, it, it's crazy when you hear all the different stories. It's like, oh, this is what they're going to do to you. We had, uh. Learned one mistake where I was really good at flutter case. I could. I could always max my PT.

• 27:39The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, you got those tiny legs.

• 27:41The Fat Electrician?

  Dude, exactly. It's moving two inches like. And great for that, bad for running. And road marching. Drill sergeant Maynard was like, at this, he had me doing it for like. Three minutes. He's like, how you feeling, Quavis? I was like, I'm fine. I was like, you can't smoke a rock, drill sergeant. Worst. I could have ever said was that and he's like. It was at this moment.

• 28:07The Fat Electrician?

  I was like, oh, I fuck, I'm real hard right now. How you doing now, Quavis? Rock's real fucking tired, sir.

• 28:16The Fat Electrician?

  Speaking of, uh, the, the turd in the river and almost shitting your pants. I, I think there was a story where you did. Your pants and you needed a new pair for a particular reason.

• 28:30The Fat Electrician?

  You know, the funny thing about that story is, well, let me tell you how I wrote my book, first of all. I started.

• 28:41The Fat Electrician?

  Hiding things from my mother and my, my wife. And then I started, well, I don't want to call this son of a bitch out or I don't want. So I started, I had a list of things I couldn't say more than anything.

• 28:56The Fat Electrician?

  So I thought, I can't write that way. I just got to tell the story, tell my, the way it is. Uh, I did send it to three of the guys that I served with so they could help me with the timeline and the names and accuracy and so forth. And one of them happened to be a uh, ex-writer for Hearst Newspapers, uh, had a master's degree in writing and happened to be our FO and it was Zeke. You, I read a lot about Zeke, but anyhow. He just demanded that I keep in all the whorehouse, the fuck, the other shit in there, you know, but the reality of it all, so.

• 29:36The Fat Electrician?

  I mean, it did, because I've read your book, obviously. It's, well, it's a

• 29:42The Fat Electrician?

  Speaking of shitting his pants.

• 29:44The Fat Electrician?

  It is genuinely one of my favorite war memoirs I've ever read and I've read a lot. And it reminded, I told him in the car, it reminds me a lot of, um, I've talked about it before, uh, John Lewis Barkley's book, Scarlet Fields, No Hard Feelings. And it's for the same reason of like, he didn't, he didn't try to like paint himself as like Superman, super tough guy. He told, he, he highlights all the mistakes that he makes. And he's like, yeah, got lucky. I screwed that up and got lucky anyway. So it's, it's, I don't know. It's a very, uh,

• 30:13The Fat Electrician?

  Humanizing.

• 30:13The Fat Electrician?

  Humanizing real perspective of like, nah, I was a kid.

• 30:16The Fat Electrician?

  You know, there are a lot, biggest reward I've received writing that book is I've gotten so many emails, letters from infantrymen, army and marine corps both. Thanks for just being honest about your fears, you know? But back to what the hell you're at, oh, the Well, I, I will say just to So there's a, the chapter in my book, I think it's called Shitting in the Pants. What's the chapter's name? What's it about?

• 30:46The Fat Electrician?

  So I'm a platoon sergeant at this time and you know, we're, we're set up, we're set up in a canal and it's actually a coconut grove and, uh, I gotta take a dump, which

• 31:00The Fat Electrician?

  you know, really, we hardly ever ate or drank out in the fields. So you hardly ever, you, you probably would never pee for days on end. And, uh, so anyhow, so I, I go a couple, three dikes away from everybody to take my dump and I'm, I'm squatting there. That's a very different unit of measurement in Austin. I'm getting ready to pull my pants up. Here comes these two VC running along. I, I just poof, poof, see them between the trees. And they're just, they're unloading both their 30 round magazines right at us, you know, and so I jumped backwards, you know, and grabbed my pants, put them on, jumped back to my, where my rifle was and, and, uh, I get back there and pretty soon my,

• 31:43The Fat Electrician?

  my men are going, oh man, that's hell, you know?

• 31:48The Fat Electrician?

  I realized, oh, I scooped it all up in my pants. So so, so I went and, uh,

• 31:58The Fat Electrician?

  took a mud bath and, um, threw my trousers away and figured I'll just grab a pair of trousers in the morning when we got a resupply chopper.

• 32:10The Fat Electrician?

  So in the morning I called in for a pair of new trousers and

• 32:15The Fat Electrician?

  and about that time I get a, a radio from my company commander. He says, Eaton, he says, uh, when that resupply ship's come, comes in, he says, you need to be here because Colonel Pete's coming in also. And he wants to award you a, a bronze star in the field, which we had never heard of such a thing, you know, how they just usually gave you one. Nobody ever handed it to you, never made a big deal out of it, you know? So are you just Winnie the Pooh-ing it at the moment? Was that? Yeah, evidently, yeah. Well, I, I had a strange week. I'd, I'd, I'd killed a lot of people that week just from, just by being there and happen chance. I, I think I attribute it to the fact I hunted a lot when I was young, you know, I had good eyes for movement and, but, um,

• 33:01The Fat Electrician?

  so now I'm freaking out. I'm going like, so.

• 33:04The Fat Electrician?

  But I mean, you're out in the field in your underwear at this point.

• 33:07The Fat Electrician?

  No, I have no underwear. You don't wear underwear, but they didn't.

• 33:11The Fat Electrician?

  The literal translation. He looks like a Ringworm, ringworm would just double up if you had underwear. But so anyhow, uh, so it's okay. Which one of you guys want to, uh, give me your pants?

• 33:26The Fat Electrician?

  It's not one of my men, but says, you guys are going to make me order you to give you your pants? Yeah, we're going, you're going to have to order us. And about that time I found it out because we needed to do a clover leaf to protect the area for the incoming choppers. And I just made sure that I, uh,

• 33:48The Fat Electrician?

  wasn't around, you know, to be there. So it all worked out fine. Are you just walking around with your like brown top on and boots? Yeah, yeah. His balls are swinging.

• 34:01The Fat Electrician?

  I was actually in a, can't even remember where it was, restaurant one time and this guy introduces me to this deity his and, uh, never meant to go for my life. And she says, are you Sergeant Mudcock?

• 34:17The Fat Electrician?

  True story. Well, one of my men called me Sergeant Mudcock and that was kind of what, you know? It stuck. Yeah.

• 34:24The Fat Electrician?

  You know, if I do a fat electrician video, that's going to be the title.

• 34:32The Fat Electrician?

  Big S R, little S R.

• 34:35The Fat Electrician?

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• 34:38The Fat Electrician?

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• 36:12The Fat Electrician?

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• 36:23The Fat Electrician?

  Another part of your book that was crazy to me was, um, we're kind of jumping around a little bit, but when you were on the hospital ship, you said that they had literally announced over the loudspeakers, offering anybody on the hospital ship, circumcisions.

• 36:38The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, I was, I, uh, it was after I had gotten wounded, uh, well, helicopter crash slash, excuse me. He's like, buy a microphone.

• 36:51The Fat Electrician?

  Anyhow, boiled down, there was just two of us in the whole damn little, it's only 20 man hospital. And, uh, doctor got bored, I guess. So he announced one morning, you know, every morning on the ship, they go, you'd blow their whistle, sweepers, sweepers, man your brooms. Give this ship a clean sweep fore and aft and all those wishing a circumcision and report to the ship's hospital. They're talking about it like it's a fucking flu shot.

• 37:16The Fat Electrician?

  Well, it's

• 37:18The Fat Electrician?

  anyhow, a shitload of people showed up. They wanted their, their circumcision. So, so we had a lot of fun with that. So made sure playboys were hanging around, you know, made sure they, we talked about sex after their, so they do the circumcision and they gave these guys little spray bottles, you know, to spray on their dick when it tried to get hard, you know?

• 37:43The Fat Electrician?

  We had them spraying all night long. Finally, to remember the point that some of them even ran out of spray. They're like, Just, just dudes being bros trying to get their guys hard.

• 37:54The Fat Electrician?

  Like, I thought that was really weird. So then I looked into like, why, why would they even do that? And apparently, apparently it turned into like a fairly common thing where the army was in marine corps, I guess, were like offering circumcisions to people that were already in the hospital because the hygiene conditions were so bad in the field that they were having so many soldiers get, I think it's called balintitis. Basically you get like an infection on the head of your dick and the head of your dick swells up and it was taking guys out of the field.

• 38:24The Fat Electrician?

  Weaponized dick cheese.

• 38:25The Fat Electrician?

  So they were, yeah, exactly. So they were literally like, if you're already there, they're like, hey, do you want this done? So this isn't an issue later. Kind of like getting your wisdom teeth removed before deployment.

• 38:34The Fat Electrician?

  By the army though. Yeah. The last people I trusted is like, I gotta go off. I didn't think about that. This is the army doing it. That's what I'm like. No, no, it was the Navy doing, I was on a Navy ship.

• 38:46The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, I want a circumcision on a boat. Hold still.

• 38:51The Fat Electrician?

  It's a wave pattern.

• 38:54The Fat Electrician?

  Ribbed for her platter mouth. But to be all, to be fair, I think most of the guys were in there because they thought they could get a deer or two out of the field. Wait, you didn't get time? Well, you can't go out to the field with a sewn up dick. I know, but how much time did you get off from dick?

• 39:14The Fat Electrician?

  A couple, three days, we'd miss a mission. At least you at least miss one mission, you know?

• 39:19Donut Operator?

  Three days doesn't seem like enough time to heal from that.

• 39:22The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. I don't know. I, I didn't keep track of them.

• 39:27Donut Operator?

  That's a.

• 39:30The Fat Electrician?

  It'd be such a weird call to hear, especially like when I was entering things like, hey, do you want circumcision? Come on in. We're gonna take care of that for you.

• 39:40Donut Operator?

  But I wonder what percentage of the military was not circumcised at that time? Cause Americans, that's like a fairly.

• 39:45The Fat Electrician?

  A huge percentage. Yeah. My era, my era, there were actually, as I recall, more people that weren't circumcised than there were, you know? And the argument against it was you're restricting your penis from getting larger by trimming down the skin, you know, if you have extra skin, your penis can be extra large. Like when my mom got me clothes, I'll grow into it. Yeah.

• 40:12Donut Operator?

  Approximately 20 to 30% of American men to this day are still uncircumcised.

• 40:16The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Donut Operator?

  I didn't know that.

• 40:17The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 40:18Donut Operator?

  I would have thought like culturally, I just thought that was.

• 40:19The Fat Electrician?

  What about back in the day though? Am I, how was it in 1960s? Yeah. I'd assume quite a bit more. America's the one place that does it. Well, I mean, it's worldwide, it's, it's a lot less common to be circumcised. Well, they used to ask you, do you want your son circumcised? Now they ask you if you don't want him circumcised.

• 40:39Donut Operator?

  In the 1960s, so well, this would be people born in the 40s.

• 40:43The Fat Electrician?

  Sixty percent.

• 40:43Donut Operator?

  In the 1960s, newborn male circumcision rates in the United States reached an all time peak of approximately 83 to 85%. This means that roughly 15 to 17% of American baby boys born during that decade were uncircumcised.

• 40:54The Fat Electrician?

  What about 1940s? But the 40s is, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's where I'm like, I wonder about that. Yeah.

• 41:01Donut Operator?

  40s, approximately 20% still.

• 41:04The Fat Electrician?

  You just get your PP cut is again by the military is the last place. If for anyone that doesn't know this, the, you do not have them work on you for anything. The army does any wisdom teeth pulling. I got lucky with any of my dental. They're like, do you want us to do it? Or do you want to go off base to a doctor to get any dental? I was like, fuck it. What? That's an option. It's like send me off base. I think one of the funniest things about that, I just remembered. So they had a little surgery room with portholes in it could be in a Navy ship, right? You just had to stick it through a porthole? So, so the, the head.

• 41:40Donut Operator?

  The worst glory hole ever.

• 41:44The Fat Electrician?

  The head corpsman there and, and us, so we would look. Corpsman were doing it. No, the head, the head corpsman.

• 41:56Donut Operator?

  At that point he was.

• 42:00The Fat Electrician?

  Anyhow, so we looked through those little portholes and, and of course the patient could see us and we go, oh my God, like it just cut something off. And he'd go, and he'd act like, oh fuck, we screwed with him. So it was fun. Jesus, that is, so you're going, man, I want to get, how long were you in before your big event? Cause I want to, I want to talk about that. Cause you already talked, we're talking about like injury cycle. Yeah. So. But I know that people would love to hear, especially you. Were you telling that Nick does a fantastic job? The one for lack of better words, made me famous, if you will. The history channel. Yeah.

• 42:43The Fat Electrician?

  Can we, before we get there, can we, can we talk about your experience leading up to it? Cause I think that's, that's the coolest part to me is a lot of people are probably, a lot of people probably don't realize that you technically weren't a sniper when that event unfolded. And so, I mean, just kind of more about your experiences. So I was one of the first 30 people trained through fruition of sniper school. And I was the first one that flunked.

• 43:13The Fat Electrician?

  And what they, what they did is they started with 35, 40 of you and they, we did open sights for like a week and then they just took the 10 best shots. And so then they put us through the school and, and I was the top shot in open sights, 300 meters, man. But 900 meters, I had somebody else calling wind for me and I only got two out of five into the, into the silo. So I flunked by one shot.

• 43:44Donut Operator?

  They didn't let you bring your matchsticks.

• 43:47The Fat Electrician?

  So, so Aaron lied in argument. I mean, the instructors were arguing, well, you know, this guy called that kind of wind, that guy called that kind of wind. And maybe that was the issue. And it's not, rules are rules. So, so anyhow, so I went back to my unit and

• 44:06The Fat Electrician?

  what I had learned, so I started mounting starlight scopes on M16s and using it at night and. This is a brand new thing. Yeah. Can you kind of tell the audience what a starlight scope is? Yeah. It's the first nighttime scope really, you know, it's, some bitch was huge, you know, it was like that big around. It was like, by the time I, I regress anyhow. So,

• 44:36The Fat Electrician?

  they start calling in my kills as our sniper. They didn't realize I'd, I didn't tell anybody I'd flunked or passed sniper school. I just went back to my outfit. So the other time they call in a kill, they're like, oh yeah, our sniper, Ed, he, so the comment of the sniper school, he has me on the board. Ed, Ed Eaton here. Well, actually my, I was black eye is what I was. So, or bad eye, excuse me. So. Great sniper name. That was your call sign? So he's keeping, and so the instructors, they know what's going on now. So they realize. But I always came by the school every time I was in the base camp just to say hi. And,

• 45:16The Fat Electrician?

  so one time I did, senior NCO says, hey, Ed, we've been thinking about this and we need to get you a goddamn rifle. This is worth a shit. So they gave me a XM21 that extra that they had and, and, and that's what I was carrying as a platoon sergeant and carrying the night of the helicopter crash. So. XM21 is just sniper, sniper five. Yeah. M14. Okay. Yeah. So I had went through.

• 45:45Donut Operator?

  That's funny. Cause it, the, it's the M21, but back in the day it would being the XM21, it was still experimental at the time. That's kind of, that's the cool note.

• 45:53The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. It was.

• 45:54Donut Operator?

  It was the cutting edge.

• 45:56The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. I mean, it was the only automatic weapon that could shoot inside a minute, you know? Inside a minute is a minute angle. So I mean. Right. One inch, one inch, one inch over a hundred yards. Yeah. Yes, sir. So, yeah. So I went in, I was a RTO at first, which was a good experience. I hated it. Wasn't able to move very fast, you know? I wanted to be able to defend myself and shoot back instead of following. I had a crazy ass goddamn squad leader. RTO radio guy, right? Yeah. Okay. Dude, trying to find, I could not, if you put me in front of a radio right now, I would not be able to do anything. Yeah. Cause people don't realize you have to like reset it, flash it to communicate to each other.

• 46:37The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. But we had a nice little, we had schooling and AAT on it. So then I, I got rid of that. So then I was an art, a grenadier, M79, man, which was really nothing more than a learning position to be point man. So then I was point man. And then, and so we voted for who, who was to be the next squad leader and who was to be the next platoon sergeant. Didn't have anything to do with rank. So I was voted to be the next squad leader and I, I literally had a sergeant underneath me. I was a C4. He didn't like that. So anyhow,

• 47:18The Fat Electrician?

  so that's kind of how all that started. That's how I got up into that rank. So I was a, a platoon sergeant, the night of April 3rd and company commander came to me one night and said, Colonel Pete needs, you know, we need two choppers full of guys to go check out some radio transmissions in a certain area. So, I really didn't, to be honest with you, didn't want to go. I just got off a mission. We're beat up and tired and, and the only guys that were volunteering were people that really didn't know what they were getting

• 47:55The Fat Electrician?

  into. But I felt I needed to be there for them, you know? So, so, yeah. So anyhow.

• 48:07The Fat Electrician?

  You are a sniper at this point. So I know you're saying it's like, hey, they, they canceled. No, I'm still not a sniper, but I have my sniper rifle. No shit. Okay. So like, okay.

• 48:17Donut Operator?

  He was a non sniper doing sniper shit.

• 48:18The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. After I get out of the hospital and I've get that, that rifle back to them, which was beat up till the stock was split in two and the mount was all askew and, and they decided how, so I was the first guy to be able to take the sniper test over again. So that was out pretty good. Oh yeah. So from that point on, I was full time sniper.

• 48:44Donut Operator?

  I have to ask too, how'd you like the thumper? The M79?

• 48:47The Fat Electrician?

  You know, the cool thing, it reminds me of shooting a bow.

• 48:52Donut Operator?

  Yeah.

• 48:52The Fat Electrician?

  You don't need sights. You just need to shoot often enough. So the little computer up here understands the distance and it, I mean, I can remember dumping rounds in 150 yards inside little one man. They like to make bunkers only big enough for Vietnamese, not as Americans. So.

• 49:17Donut Operator?

  Big enough for a 40.

• 49:18The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 49:23The Fat Electrician?

  Most amazing shot I actually ever made was we're sitting on a riverbank waiting for boats to extract us and here comes this VC, military age, plying down the river. He doesn't see us to the last minute and we're like, "Lie day, lie day," and he's not coming over and so I shoot a parachute Willie Peter roundup in the air. It lands in his boat.

• 49:56Donut Operator?

  Bad day.

• 49:57The Fat Electrician?

  Talk about lucky is what it really amounted to.

• 50:04The Fat Electrician?

  I tried to get around it. It's just like, "No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no." It's burning a hole in the bottom of that wood sandpan right away.

• 50:16Donut Operator?

  Damn. Yeah, no, that's been my experience too with the M79. It's just like point shooting is just, it's just easier. The sights, I don't know if the sights are just wrong.

• 50:24The Fat Electrician?

  I tried the sights. In fact, I raised hell because I didn't have sights. They found them for me. I, first wood line I came into, "Oh, that's about 200 yards. Let me see." Oh, I missed. You know, it's just, you just need to be, you need to be able to go, "Boop." Mine's going to correct immediately. Boop.

• 50:46Donut Operator?

  And there's so much variation on the ammo too, like the weights and the distances and everything. That's why you saw like a lot of those guys, you see pictures and things like that of guys that just carry the M79 like on their rig and shit, especially a lot of the, like the special operations guys, where they would just cut the stock off and they'd cut the barrel off. So like they would cut it right before the sights.

• 51:06The Fat Electrician?

  Turn into a big pistol.

• 51:08Donut Operator?

  Yeah, it's just a giant, it looks like a pirate, literally like a pirate gun. It's just a sawn-off M79. Don't know to what effectiveness they were used, but I know they've used them.

• 51:19The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

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• 51:26Donut Operator?

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• 51:35Donut Operator?

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• 51:44Donut Operator?

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• 52:19Donut Operator?

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• 52:34The Fat Electrician?

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• 52:37Donut Operator?

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• 52:56Donut Operator?

  What's happening? What's going on?

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• 53:02The Fat Electrician?

  Sleep better, stay cooler.

• 53:04Donut Operator?

  This is a threat.

• 53:05The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, now going back to that night, so everything's, you felt the need to be there. You're like, "Okay, I just gotta be there." Yeah, so anyhow, what the deal was is there was some unusual radio transmissions coming out of this area. And it was actually a fairly long distance from where we're at. We were already the southernmost element in Vietnam, in the Mekong Delta. Which wasn't a good deal because those guys would come all the way down through Laos, Cambodia, and then they'd use that river to, so we constantly got into brand new troops. It wasn't like they walked all the way down from Hanoi to the Mekong, you know? I mean, we literally got guys that would be in country a day or two.

• 53:50The Fat Electrician?

  So anyhow, so we fly in, it's night and it's an unusual rice paddy in that it's, has a good foot of water and a shit, a good six inches of absolute peanut buttered mud. You know, you just, you know, immediately your feet are weighing 10 pounds and extra and so we're clearing the, I'm clearing, my team is, we're clearing the hooches on one side and Camp Perkins, he's clearing them on the other side and we never do meet and it's just slow going.

• 54:31The Fat Electrician?

  And we got a problem in that the helicopters are telling us that they're running low on fuel and we need to configure. So we go up to the rice paddy but along with that, I'm stuck in this hooch, has a huge bunker. Bigger, you can tell it's more than a personal bunker for the family, you know? I'm trying to get them to come out of the bunker and they're making crying baby sounds and shit and didn't want to kill no babies, so we let them go. I didn't want to, you know, didn't have the time to deal with it any longer and so

• 55:16The Fat Electrician?

  so we get out into the rice paddy and I'm talking to Camp Perkins because now we're hearing voices behind us and and so I don't fly out with my own bird. I don't fly out with my men. It doesn't matter because, "Oh, that's the end of the mission, right? They don't need me," so. We fly off and then we start taking a body count and we're short a man. So we fly back and sure enough, here's this dumb son of a bitch, FNG, new guy. You guys call them pugs, right? Cherries.

• 55:54The Fat Electrician?

  No, FNG is the right one.

• 55:58The Fat Electrician?

  So the next chopper comes in to pick him up and and then the guy on the other side jumps off. It's just like, "Fuck one." You know, just stupid shit, but. So anyhow, we're running between that chopper and the enemy and oh, as we're leaving to begin with, they lay into us. But we have two Cobras and these Cobras just blow the shit out of everything. But they don't have the kind of rockets needed to blow these bunkers up that were in there. In fact, for the very first time, we found concrete.

• 56:43The Fat Electrician?

  Which is unusual down there, so. That means it's established, it's not these dirt holes. This is like an actual bunker.

• 56:50Donut Operator?

  A compound.

• 56:53The Fat Electrician?

  So anyhow, they pretty well expend most of their [__] and we all fly away. So the Colonel, he's going home and and the Cobras are going home and the only people that are in communications are us two Hueys and so we go back down and we got our ass shot down and so the chopper rolls and most all of our weaponry was thrown out into the rice paddy. Or the mud. You couldn't see it, you know?

• 57:31Donut Operator?

  Like a complete roll?

• 57:33The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, yeah. Yeah, we're probably going 60 knots and it just.

• 57:37The Fat Electrician?

  And it's dark at this point in time too.

• 57:39The Fat Electrician?

  It's midnight. So it beat the dog shit out of everyone of us, of course. And a few of us had bullet holes in us and I didn't have one at that point, but anyhow. So I'm stuck underneath the helicopter. I'm trying to get out and Captain Pergans, he's stuck and, and uh, so I realized there's still guys in the helicopter. So I jumped back up in the helicopter, just laying on its side now and to try to help people out. And I get everybody out of the helicopter and we're still receiving fire. These guys are still wanting our ass is what it amounts to. So um,

• 58:24The Fat Electrician?

  uh, I try using the M60 on the side of the chopper, but it's not, it's not working. In fact, mo- most all the ammo had already been ripped off and thrown out to the rice paddies somewhere while the chopper was running. You were, you had, the helicopter was pinned you down and you crawled out from under? Yeah. When I finally rolled, I was underneath. In fact, I actually remember dared to get my chin above the water. It just, little surely I worked my way out of it. Captain Pergans, he was under there even worse. In fact, his hips were broken out of that deal. So uh, so here I am up there anyhow, and finally they, they find, they find two rifles.

• 59:08The Fat Electrician?

  One's the M16 and one's the, my M14 and uh, which is good. I have actually, I have ammo for my M14, but I didn't have any ammo for my 16. So uh, I think it was a door gunner. He threw me up the M16. I'd rattle it off and then I'd throw it back at him. He'd put it back up. He'd throw it back up and.

• 59:31The Fat Electrician?

  And this is midnight. So are you, are you just shooting at muzzle flashes basically?

• 59:34The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, yeah. On tracers, you know, they were using, they quit using tracers right away. Well, they really quit using tracers once I figured out where they were at. So I have my rifle and I'm shooting and it's not having any effect at all. And um, not surprisingly, it's, scope was askew and so, but I did catch one round splash in the water that reflected enough for my starlight scope to pick it up. And uh, I realized it was down to the left, so I just started shooting up and to the right and, and then I started hitting the little bastards. And uh,

• 1:00:13The Fat Electrician?

  so anyhow, that, that was working out pretty good. And uh, and then he's throwing up the M16 still. And so I'm trying to act like I'm more than one person, you know, but that's kind of a lonely deal. I mean, here you are, it's a shitty place to be on top of a helicopter. You don't have any cover, you know? And but it's the only place I felt that I could be of effect. You know, I needed to have that fuel of fire. And uh, so that went on for some time. Finally, uh, you can read a whole story about it in my book, but. It was 30 on one, like that's what they're saying. It's like. Yeah, I have, I have no idea. I have no idea what it is. Some of the guys I was with say more, some say less, so.

• 1:00:58The Fat Electrician?

  But it's still enough where you were the individual on.

• 1:01:01The Fat Electrician?

  Outnumbered.

• 1:01:01The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. Easily to say outnumbered. And as an infantry dude, you have like conceal, cover or concealment. And you're like, I need this vertical superiority so I can just. Well, I really wanted to be in the wood line behind me because the chopper by that time was smoking and fuel all over hell. So I was kind of worrying about it burning, catching fire at any minute. But anyhow, so finally, uh, they figured out that we weren't going home. And so here came Colonel Pete and this guy was great. We called him Pistol Pete and he deserved, he gets off that helicopter and he's

• 1:01:46The Fat Electrician?

  With a 1911?

• 1:01:47The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, with tracers, 1911 with tracers. Good God.

• 1:01:52The Fat Electrician?

  Literally hung solo.

• 1:01:54The Fat Electrician?

  I didn't know they had tracers in 1911, yeah. So anyhow, he's a great man. And I ended up being his platoon sergeant and the sniper's later on, but uh, um, so we got some guys aboard and then another helicopter comes in and we get some guy and now here I am, I'm all by myself still. I'm going like, how in the fuck am I, I'm never gonna get out of here, you know? Now here, and here comes the Cobras back that they don't really have any ammo. They fired what they did have and which was minimal. And uh, so I got a ride on the outside of a Cobra in the middle of the night. That's what I, dude, I was, I, that part of the story, I was like, wait, he was on a Cobra?

• 1:02:38Donut Operator?

  What were you holding on to?

• 1:02:39The Fat Electrician?

  Did he get on? I was like, I don't, I'm gonna have to ask this question. Cause again, Cobras are not passenger vehicles. No, they aren't, yeah.

• 1:02:46Donut Operator?

  What, what were you holding on to?

• 1:02:48The Fat Electrician?

  Well, they have a little ammo door, which is about that wide. Hmm. And then the strut's right there. And then of course, then you got the rocket pod aiming at you and there's still one rocket in that son of a bitch that he couldn't get to go off. So in fact, I remember knocking on the canopy and pointing at it. He goes, yeah, anyhow.

• 1:03:05Donut Operator?

  So you were.

• 1:03:06The Fat Electrician?

  Don't worry about it.

• 1:03:07Donut Operator?

  You had your back to a dud rocket that theoretically could have gone off at any time.

• 1:03:12The Fat Electrician?

  I have no idea what it could have done. Don't fire, it shoots him back on. But I had, I had a ride out of that hellhole is all I cared about. But so, so we're flying along at tree top, which is what those guys like to do because that doesn't give the enemy much time to really get, you know, shot at you. And uh,

• 1:03:32Donut Operator?

  I'm sure you appreciated that as well at the time.

• 1:03:34The Fat Electrician?

  Just a dark, dark night and you know, my chin's, skin of my chin's flapping around and how, I have rigor mortis now. I can't even move.

• 1:03:46The Fat Electrician?

  How much can you see? Cause it's still dark out and you're sitting on the rail of a assault helicopter going right over the canopy of the jungle.

• 1:03:55The Fat Electrician?

  Well, you, you couldn't see a whole lot because as a pilot, I was looking inside that. I knew the theory of flight on a, on a Huey and I, any helicopter. So I'm watching the gauges. I'm just really interested in what the hell these guys are doing, you know? What are the, what are the RPMs and that shit, you know? So anyhow, finally he, he slows down. You can feel it because my chin quits flapping and and settling down. But we're hovering and he goes, knocks on the canopy, get off, get off. Cue, I ain't getting off. I can't even see the horizon, number one, let alone the ground. I don't know if I'm one foot or 10 feet up, you know?

• 1:04:35The Fat Electrician?

  So finally he pops the canopy up and goes, get the fuck off, you know? So I mean, so there's one other guy in the helicopter by then. My, I, I regress a Pistol Pete had kicked his, asked his tiger scout to stay with me. So there was actually two of us. So he was on the other side of the, of the Cobra. So anyhow, we're laying there and going like, what the fuck, man? Where did, there's nobody around here. Like it's dark, nope. Pretty soon we hear Vietnamese talking. I'm going, oh shit, man. I'm, I'm, it's not over with. I'm still gonna die.

• 1:05:16The Fat Electrician?

  But uh, we figured out, we, they dropped us next to a uh, uh, an Arvin compound is what it was. So uh, the next best.

• 1:05:26Donut Operator?

  A what now?

• 1:05:27The Fat Electrician?

  Arvin, Army of Republic of Vietnam. The good guys.

• 1:05:32The Fat Electrician?

  Good Vietnamese.

• 1:05:33The Fat Electrician?

  The good Vietnamese. Were you with, uh, going back to like. But I couldn't walk by then. I mean, I literally had to push myself away from the helicopter. I had no you know, action or anything to. And you didn't feel that during, cause adrenaline, a lot of people don't realize that level of adrenaline. It's just, you're, you're just going like, you don't notice anything at all. You just, oh. Well, I got shot in the finger. I had shrapnel in my chin. I didn't notice any of it till and my back was broken and I found out later my neck was broken. Yeah. You know, so. And at that time it was.

• 1:06:10The Fat Electrician?

  And that was from the crash? The initial crash?

• 1:06:13The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, yeah. And how bad, uh, during the engagement, your wood, your stock on your XM21? 24, 21?

• 1:06:23Donut Operator?

  21 broke?

• 1:06:24The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. So you had all these little things? Imagine the stock having a split all the way from the butt to the pistol grip. Yeah. So instead of being a six inch stock, it was like a eight, eight inch stock or something like that, you know? Just hanging there. But uh, that really didn't have any effect. It was the scope being askew that was screwing me up at first. But once I figured, figured that out.

• 1:06:50Donut Operator?

  And now through that.

• 1:06:51The Fat Electrician?

  As far as I'm concerned, that saved my day, you know?

• 1:06:53Donut Operator?

  Through that scope, um, how, like even, even with it being supposedly night vision, how well could you see through it?

• 1:07:01The Fat Electrician?

  Whole lot better. You can see with the naked eye.

• 1:07:03Donut Operator?

  Fair enough.

• 1:07:04The Fat Electrician?

  Uh, it depends on the night. You needed quote, a starlight. You need some kind of light in order for things to be reflective, you know? So the darkest of nights, I might be able to see an extra 50 feet at the most, you know? But and they, they, because of what you're doing though, they had, you downplay, you are a true infantryman and it, it explains how you wrote that book where you don't want you want, uh, the, the silly stuff you did. You want to, you don't want to glorify that side. Cause again, gun battles, movies make it sound awesome until you get in one and then you're like, this sucks. Well, oh, that's not as cool as it sounded like.

• 1:07:45The Fat Electrician?

  Or it looked like on the movies. I don't like that. And then you're experiencing it. But your action made it seem there was a whole bunch of people, way more US soldiers there than there was. Right? There, meaning at the chopper wreck? Yeah. Cause the, the enemy thought there was probably more than just.

• 1:08:07Donut Operator?

  Oh, I was gonna ask about that too. How, how did you present yourself as an appearing to be a larger force?

• 1:08:14The Fat Electrician?

  Had two rifles.

• 1:08:15Donut Operator?

  Well, that, that's a good start.

• 1:08:17The Fat Electrician?

  I, I was appearing to be two guys. That was, that was it.

• 1:08:20Donut Operator?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:08:22The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. So, but I never knew what I was gonna get from that M16. It might be fucking magazine full of tracers or which would have got shit in my pants because I just told them right where I was at again, you know? Thanks, Clad. Listen up, fellas. If all is here, that means football's in season.

• 1:08:40Donut Operator?

  The [__] does that have to do with a pan? I don't know. Game day meals, Sunday hosting, Friday night lights. CTE. And a lot more time in the kitchen. For your wife. Whether you're making burgers before kickoff, wings.

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• 1:09:25The Fat Electrician?

  They also have a six piece set.

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• 1:09:47The Fat Electrician?

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• 1:09:59The Fat Electrician?

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  Just head to hexclad.com/ unsub. That's H E X C L A D dot com slash U N S U B.

• 1:10:10The Fat Electrician?

  Support our show and let them know who sent.

• 1:10:14The Fat Electrician?

  You, us. We sent.

• 1:10:15Speaker 05

  Unsub sends their regards.

• 1:10:17The Fat Electrician?

  We M U to this.

• 1:10:19Speaker 05

  Hexclad.

• 1:10:19The Fat Electrician?

  Hexclad.

• 1:10:20The Fat Electrician?

  What was, what was your experience with the M16? Cause I know it, at least for a good chunk of the Vietnam War, it was not seen as a reliable weapon.

• 1:10:28The Fat Electrician?

  The early ones, uh, thanks to United States Navy giving the Marine Corps shit.

• 1:10:36The Fat Electrician?

  They were the only problems they had. Army recognized it early. What they did was they slowed down the action from like 750 rounds a minute to 600. And, uh,

• 1:10:51The Fat Electrician?

  Teflon coated some stuff and chrome coated some other stuff, you know, and it was a phenomenal rifle. It was better than AK. AK would, I don't know how many AKs we ran into over there that were left on the field. They have a little cable inside of them and that cable would rot out so fast down there in the delta. From the humidity and the heat. Like the recoil spring? Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So. I know the chrome, the chrome line barrel came because it was, the 16s were having that issue at that first wave of them. It's like rusting, having. And that's why, that's why the Marines want, preferred to go back. They, a lot of them went back to the M14 and stayed that way as long as they could. And I don't blame them a damn bit.

• 1:11:35The Fat Electrician?

  The ones I had in training sucked. They had the same shit they gave the Marine Corps. You could hardly get through qualifying.

• 1:11:44The Fat Electrician?

  Without a jamming, you know? My, uh, my great grandfather, uh, was a combat engineer, like did a, uh, operated like a, a combat dozer in, uh, the Pacific in World War II. Yeah. And then he was in Korea and to some degree he was in Vietnam. Yeah. And so, uh, man had a bit of a career, but he loved the grease gun. No matter where he was, he would always try to pick up a grease gun. We were an interesting unit. The third of the 60s was kind of a test unit. So we got test clothing, different kinds of clothing that nobody else got. We got different kinds of boots, nobody else got and stupid little things they'd give us, including weapons. Automatic shotguns and grease guns and shit. And we'd try them out and if we liked them, we'd keep them, but, uh. That's kinda cool.

• 1:12:30The Fat Electrician?

  The, the grease guns was, you know, it's just, they were nothing but nine millimeters or 45s. Yeah. They, they weren't accurate. They, you know, from, but you know, for a jungle situation, not a bad deal, but.

• 1:12:46The Fat Electrician?

  When you or was anybody else in your unit? Cause I've heard a lot of like guys, especially point guys would actually have their parents back home, mail them like their Mossberg or their Winchester shotgun from back home and they'd carry that on point over the M16.

• 1:12:58The Fat Electrician?

  We didn't have a problem with that was we, we had access to all that we wanted. And we had one guy, I remember he carried a shotgun for quite a while.

• 1:13:08The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, you know?

• 1:13:11The Fat Electrician?

  I did not know they did that. That is a wild thing to be in combat. And then you're like, hey, can you send me, me bling over in Iraq? And then I'm like, Brandon, can you send me the AK-50, please? Just for like two weeks. I get it. I'm like, cool there.

• 1:13:24The Fat Electrician?

  It has check marks on it.

• 1:13:26Donut Operator?

  The idea, like this time in our country where like you could just mail a gun to a combat zone, like Harry Potter getting the fucking new broom or some shit. It's like, just, uh, here's a shotgun, not only across state lines, no transfer, but just like also like into a different fucking country that we're currently in a, in a war.

• 1:13:44The Fat Electrician?

  Live streaming, you can raise money to get better.

• 1:13:46Donut Operator?

  The funny thing is, is I've got a Hunger Games style.

• 1:13:49The Fat Electrician?

  The funnier part is, is like, you know for a fact, if mom was mailing a shotgun, it came with like cookies or some shit too. You know what I mean? Like it came in a care, it came in a care package.

• 1:13:59Donut Operator?

  Cause that's, I mean, to a lesser degree, not like mailing it from home, but like, it's kinda crazy. Cause now everything's so uniform, especially NATO standards.

• 1:14:05The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:06Donut Operator?

  There's like just the shit that you use. This is what you were issued. This is what you will use. Um, back in the day, it was just kind of, the further you go back, the more it was just kind of no man's land. Like with Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders, uh, like buying Colt potato diggers. Like the, the machine guns. He's like, no, no, I've got money. My guys are gonna have the best.

• 1:14:25The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. My best friend who also was, uh, platoon sergeant right before me, he got killed and, uh, so as a result, I was awarded all of his goodies that weren't able to go back home. And, uh, one of them was a 357, uh, 38 pistol that was sent to him by his parents. And, uh, so. That's still wild. Like the idea of just getting that in the mail. Be like, cool. I get to try a new firearm over during the war. Did you, uh, did you take it home? You know, I, I did felt, feel comfortable with it.

• 1:15:05The Fat Electrician?

  Him and I were really, really close. I just didn't feel comfortable with it. So I gave it to another platoon sergeant.

• 1:15:12The Fat Electrician?

  So.

• 1:15:13The Fat Electrician?

  In, um, in your book, you talk about, I don't know if you developed the tactic or if somebody else and you adopted it, but I'd never heard of anybody doing it before. How, as, once you were kinda working that sniper role, you would actually use tracers to tell attack helicopters where the enemies were at. I thought that was really interesting. Like how did, did you develop that or did you learn it from somewhere? Did you pick it up?

• 1:15:35The Fat Electrician?

  No, it, it wasn't me. I, I think it actually came out of a different battalion, but, uh,

• 1:15:42The Fat Electrician?

  we called them hunter killer teams. What we did was so we'd have a team of snipers and one guy would lay out Fort Door and one guy would lay out the starboard door. That's left and right in army terms.

• 1:15:58The Fat Electrician?

  You go down the rivers and, uh, if you saw, first of all, anything at night was down the river was free kill. Because it's, they knew, everybody in that whole war knew you don't move after dark or we're gonna shoot at you. They, United States that put out so goddamn many little flyers and they all knew what the rules were. And then stacked right behind us would be two Cobras. And, uh, we all didn't run lights. Had a little light on the very top that could kinda tell the chopper, the chopper above could still where you at at least. Anyhow, I'd shoot around and, uh, tracer round.

• 1:16:41The Fat Electrician?

  Then I'd get onto my radio and I would start talking to the Cobras. And I'd tell them what I saw and, uh,

• 1:16:51The Fat Electrician?

  and how far away my round was from the actual target. And, uh, so these guys would just fall out of the sky following that tracer. And then beauty about the, got caught in the air and smoked dope.

• 1:17:11The Fat Electrician?

  Anyhow.

• 1:17:15The Fat Electrician?

  They'd fall in on that tracer and they, beauty about the Macon Delta was it's all flat. So these guys could watch their altimeter. And then they knew when to flare out and when to pop these lights on. They had extra lights on them. And it's like, I think they're called Zeon lights, but it's like lighting up a football field, you know? Zeon, that's what they'd be called. Those are like, they're fucking fool, but these are bright, especially in that time and it's the middle of darkness. You kick those on? It's crazy.

• 1:17:43The Fat Electrician?

  You were in the bathroom, but he, that basically they had a tactic where the snipers would use tracer rounds to tell the attack helicopters where the enemy was at.

• 1:17:52The Fat Electrician?

  To. At night, yeah.

• 1:17:53The Fat Electrician?

  At night.

• 1:17:54The Fat Electrician?

  On the, on, on the, on the rivers. I'm just thinking like, being VC on the other side, like, huh, you missed. And there again, there again, was one of my lucky shots. I, uh, I targeted this lone little dude on a sandpan and, and they peeled off on it. And of course we kinda peel off to the other side and you kinda have to turn your head around and watch, see what they're doing. But anyhow, we, we broke for lunch and refueling and, uh, which is midnight. And, uh, I went up to the Cobra pilots. I says, why didn't you guys lay into that dude? He goes, we didn't need to, you shot him.

• 1:18:39The Fat Electrician?

  So I guess the final So here I am in a helicopter shooting at a moving sandpan on a moving river like how lucky can you get you know

• 1:18:49Donut Operator?

  Yeah, task failed successfully.

• 1:18:51The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, exactly. But that was my fun. And as a platoon sergeant of snipers, I chose that.

• 1:19:01The Fat Electrician?

  We had a night hunter killer team. I that was where I was going, you know.

• 1:19:05Donut Operator?

  Every time. Now, did you have, since you were in that special or that unit that did get to test stuff for your camouflage? Was it still just like basic greens? Or did you actually get

• 1:19:14The Fat Electrician?

  No, we had The only people had camouflage or allowed to even have camouflage were a snipers and the lurps. That was it.

• 1:19:25Donut Operator?

  Dude lurking is also like

• 1:19:27The Fat Electrician?

  But you and like those two jobs are absolutely

• 1:19:30The Fat Electrician?

  Lurps, long range reconnaissance patrol. These are the guys that would go hump fifteen, twenty, thirty miles out in enemy territory doing reconnaissance missions.

• 1:19:40Donut Operator?

  That's one way. That is one way.

• 1:19:42The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, yeah, those guys were crazy.

• 1:19:45Donut Operator?

  And also you, I mean, you guys

• 1:19:48The Fat Electrician?

  After No, years later, excuse me, years later in the Vietnam War, they they started issuing camouflage to the infantry. But but I'm talking sixty eight, sixty nine.

• 1:19:59Donut Operator?

  Yeah, towards the end of it.

• 1:20:00The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:01Donut Operator?

  It's like well before like drones or anything like that. Just like, hey, Timmy.

• 1:20:06The Fat Electrician?

  So after after the helicopter, obviously, you're jacked up. You got to go to the hospital. You got to recover. Circumcision thing happens and then

• 1:20:15The Fat Electrician?

  I didn't get a circumcision.

• 1:20:16The Fat Electrician?

  No, fair. You got to make fun of people.

• 1:20:18The Fat Electrician?

  Full blown dick.

• 1:20:21Donut Operator?

  My anteater is proud.

• 1:20:25The Fat Electrician?

  You recover and then how does that lead up to you going back to sniper school and actually graduating?

• 1:20:33The Fat Electrician?

  Well, I you know, I would go back. The sniper's school was pretty close to the port where we would so on the ships you would if you got close to your area and you had some time off that usually about three or four hours off. But that's all you needed to go get drunk. So you know, so we'd go into the base camp. And one of the very few first places we'd hit would be so I'd stop and stay high. And they had cheap beer. There was dime beer. So had paid twenty cents in the NCO club. So but anyhow, I rolled in there after that. And they says, Hey, you know, we've been talking and we're going to let you take the test over.

• 1:21:10The Fat Electrician?

  So you didn't have to go through the whole program again?

• 1:21:12The Fat Electrician?

  No, I just

• 1:21:13The Fat Electrician?

  Retake the test.

• 1:21:13The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, they gave me three days to sharpen up and and then a test day and

• 1:21:20Donut Operator?

  And you're you had all the kills. Like, as you're saying, that guy had that on that board and you're probably leading it.

• 1:21:26The Fat Electrician?

  That was a funny. That was the funny part of it because once he found out, he had to wipe all those numbers off and start all over again.

• 1:21:35Donut Operator?

  Oh, no, that's kind of funny. Like having on the the professional scoreboard, some guy who's not even like part of your crew.

• 1:21:41The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:41Donut Operator?

  It's like a stock car racer getting smoked by a casual in a Honda Civic like, wait a minute, because I guarantee you weren't on the bottom of that board.

• 1:21:48The Fat Electrician?

  Were you at the top? Oh, no, no, no. I mean, those guys have been there longer than I had as snipers. But I by no way or means was a top sniper. I was only a sniper for a few months. That's that's mostly straight infantryman Vietnam. But

• 1:22:06Donut Operator?

  Imagine the shit that the guys at the bottom got blown. It's like you're getting smoked. You're getting blown out of the water by an eleven Bravo. He's not even a sniper.

• 1:22:14Donut Operator?

  Oh, yeah, that guy is definitely like, just put him through school. We don't have to erase

• 1:22:17The Fat Electrician?

  Which another interesting part of the story. I mean, how did you end up with the XM twenty one? I mean, there's got to be a story there. You were homies with a buddy that hooked you up or

• 1:22:26The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. So the one I had on night of the helicopter crash.

• 1:22:30The Fat Electrician?

  Because I mean, you weren't a sniper yet, but you had the new experimental sniper rifle. There's a story there.

• 1:22:35The Fat Electrician?

  So I yeah, so I'm in, once again, taking advantage of the ten cent beer at the sniper school.

• 1:22:43The Fat Electrician?

  And these guys go, hey, you know, we've been talking and and the armor says he has an extra rifle that really has no, you know, so we're thinking we can give it to you. And so then they go, let's go see if Major Pell is coming to sniper school, Major Pell. So they had to go make sure he wasn't anywhere around when they did that. So, okay, here you go. Don't show up here with that rifle, though.

• 1:23:10Donut Operator?

  Dude, there your war was so much cooler when it comes to that. It's like coming back and be like, let's get some beers, guys. It would have been absolutely insane to me. I cannot wrap my head around that, like mid combat or coming back from a gunfight and drinking.

• 1:23:25The Fat Electrician?

  He also he also stole a bunch of ice cream from the Navy at one point.

• 1:23:30The Fat Electrician?

  That was a great story.

• 1:23:32Donut Operator?

  And then go for it.

• 1:23:33The Fat Electrician?

  Go for it.

• 1:23:33Donut Operator?

  I want to hear it. Brandon, Brandon, look what I got you. I got you your own poncho shirt because you don't own one. I've never had one. Editor, play any clip of unsubscribe.

• 1:23:44The Fat Electrician?

  You do always wear them. Why?

• 1:23:45Donut Operator?

  That's because Poncho makes shirts for guys that actually go the outside.

• 1:23:49The Fat Electrician?

  That's right. You will touch grass when you wear a poncho.

• 1:23:53Donut Operator?

  You don't have to if that scares you. But if you do like touching grass, these are a great shirt for you.

• 1:23:57The Fat Electrician?

  They have an intermesh to like

• 1:23:59Donut Operator?

  Yeah, dude, that's what that's why it breathes so well. Like, actually, like in in West Texas summer, like I'm on the road in West Texas all the time. Ponchos are like the uniform because they they look good. You know, the pearl snaps, everything like that. But they also actually breathe. So you can be outside and just kind of roll the sleeves up and like you look good and you feel good.

• 1:24:16The Fat Electrician?

  The boys in the pearl snaps.

• 1:24:18Donut Operator?

  And ladies love them, for the record.

• 1:24:20The Fat Electrician?

  It's probably the best shirt he's ever worn.

• 1:24:23Donut Operator?

  I'm not even kidding. On my daily attire, Poncho is like seventy five percent of it.

• 1:24:28The Fat Electrician?

  I think everyone wears ponchos.

• 1:24:30Donut Operator?

  Yeah, because it's great. Like, it's it's comfy. You if you need to be professional, it can look professional. But otherwise, just like going around, it breathes well. You could be outside doing sporty shit. Like, it's just it's all around just good for anything.

• 1:24:41The Fat Electrician?

  And they do have a little bit of stretch.

• 1:24:43Donut Operator?

  They didn't have to worry about the cost of refilling my wardrobe with ponchos because we had the code unsub.

• 1:24:47The Fat Electrician?

  How much do you save with that code?

• 1:24:48Donut Operator?

  Well, I'm glad you asked. If you go to ponchooutdoors.com/ unsub, you'll get ten dollars off your first order.

• 1:24:54The Fat Electrician?

  It's a hell of a deal, Brandon.

• 1:24:56Donut Operator?

  To make it even better, you get free shipping on top of it.

• 1:24:58The Fat Electrician?

  By God, I'm going to start wearing poncho.

• 1:25:01Donut Operator?

  You'd be crazy not to.

• 1:25:03The Fat Electrician?

  So the Navy always was with us. They would feed. First started, they would look at you and say, your army, and they'd give you a hamburger. Or your Navy, I'll give you a kind of a steak, you know, I'll give you better food. Then they finally get that. We called them on that. So then we all got to eat the same. Only when we were in, the minute we left, they they had ice cream. They had all kinds of cool shit, you know, that we didn't get. They were saving it for themselves when we weren't aboard ship. You see, we were only aboard ship at one every four or five days. And only for twelve hours at a time anyhow. Just long enough to get some ringworm off of us and go back out is what it amounted to.

• 1:25:44Donut Operator?

  It was shit shower save and then you're back out on mission.

• 1:25:47The Fat Electrician?

  So this one day, we all we have a, we can all go to town. The ship, everybody on the ships going to town. So are we, you know, and and I can't remember why, but there is a handful of us. I think it was four or five of us. We

• 1:26:03The Fat Electrician?

  we missed the boat. And so we had to wait for a half hour for the next boat to take us to the base camp.

• 1:26:11The Fat Electrician?

  And so we start talking about, you know, those sons of bitches are eating ice cream. But we're not around, you know. So we went up to the galley. We broke into the into the freezer. And here's all these big five gallon cartons paper, you know how they did in paper, you know?

• 1:26:26Donut Operator?

  Yep, brown paper.

• 1:26:27The Fat Electrician?

  Five gallon. So we all grabbed a five gallon, five gallons of ice cream each of different flavors. We took it all the way down to the bottom of ship where our birthing area was. And we're like, eating this ice cream. Pretty soon, you know, you got shit. We didn't need a gallon, but you know, maybe at the most. So here's this twenty twenty five gallons of ice cream. It's melting as we leave. It's hot down there. The Navy didn't like giving us air conditioning. So we come back and those cardboard sides had broken and the ice cream was all over hell. We didn't give a shit. We're walking through it. We're going to do what we could. Now we have ice cream all over the ship.

• 1:27:14The Fat Electrician?

  The Navy was there. The Navy was never happy with us anyhow, because we were muddy and

• 1:27:21The Fat Electrician?

  we didn't know what they were doing. Starboard and port, you know, so.

• 1:27:26Donut Operator?

  I do. You left with just ice cream in Vietnam, which is

• 1:27:32Donut Operator?

  It's funny, ever since the Pacific, like that story you were telling, like how much the the logistics, like the supply train or the supply chain of the US military, we just flex on our enemies with shit like

• 1:27:41The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, the ice cream ships.

• 1:27:43The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, ships. You know, that's a sad thing about what's happened to our military. And it's all because of fucking congressman, from what I know. But so not only did the USMJ have different rules and regs when it came to lock from combat to stateside, for example.

• 1:28:02The Fat Electrician?

  Combat as an NCO, I was God. I could put you in jail for six months, no questions asked, you know. Oh. Can't do that now. No, that's a news to me. Yeah, and uh, and the same thing with logistics, uh, they didn't give a if the form was filled out or not, they needed a truckload of this shit or a boatload or what the hell, they just got it to the front. I swear to God, I could have probably got on the radio and said, tomorrow morning, I don't need some pink underwear. This sons of bitches would either dyed it or found it, you know. They, it was amazing, but these guys were good at logistics in Vietnam

• 1:28:45The Fat Electrician?

  were amazing what they did. Uh, so they got it, they got it to us, you know. Well, it's the, it's the paperwork and it was that wave of, I, I've talked about it about like when the peak surge is happening in Iraq.

• 1:29:01The Fat Electrician?

  That's what I experienced. That was it. And then my guys went back two years later and they were like, oh man, we had to fill out paperwork for the one gunfight we got into and there was paperwork and all this dumb shit. I was like, wait, what? You had to? How many rounds did I shoot all that crap, you know? And it's wild to think to have to do that, especially after a gunfight, cause again, during the peak, it was they were throwing AT4s, they were just throwing ammo and they gave, but have fun. I didn't realize though, also NCOs having that level of command. Well, I didn't, I didn't know I did. I didn't know I had that kind of power. I remember, Thank God. I got, I got rid of two guys. Uh, I just, and the way I would do it is I wouldn't even

• 1:29:44The Fat Electrician?

  confront them. I'd just say, hey, you're supposed to get on the next jopper. Then I didn't want the confrontation.

• 1:29:50The Fat Electrician?

  To uh, to piggyback what he was saying about being able to order anything, I, this isn't verified with like official documentation, but there's this recurring story in the Navy that apparently on a ship, a boiler technician ordered a fuel valve and it was like important. So it was labeled priority. Like we need this shit right, right now. And there was a typo with the clerk or this technician and whatever the part number just happened to line up with like a portion of the top turret of an Abrams tank. So they delivered the top portion of an Abrams tank on accident to a US Navy ship. Like what priority? Okay, here it comes. Don't know what you're doing with it, but here you go.

• 1:30:30Donut Operator?

  I would be also very concerned. Like what the fuck do they need an Abrams turret for on?

• 1:30:34The Fat Electrician?

  Doesn't matter. It's priority. Hurry.

• 1:30:36The Fat Electrician?

  Yes, sir. Actually, they were, they were using tank turrets in Vietnam on Navy boats. Really? The river, see down where we're at, they, we didn't have the plastic boats that you see on TV because they would last one day. I mean, they're plastic. They aren't gonna last. So the boats we used had like three foot walls on them. And they still wouldn't keep a anti-tank round from coming through, but at least they kept RPGs and small arms fire. And that was our landing cleft, you know, like World War II, but, and then the gunboats literally had Sherman tank turrets on them. Oh shit. With sawed off barrels. It was great, man. Yeah.

• 1:31:16The Fat Electrician?

  It's like riverines, right?

• 1:31:17The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah, the Navy came up with some cool shit. They had, they had, we called it the Zippo boat, which had like 25 minutes of nothing but napalm. Why'd they call it the Zippo, bro? I'm sure that's not a racist term.

• 1:31:33The Fat Electrician?

  Like a lighter.

• 1:31:34The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:31:36Donut Operator?

  Get your head out of the racism, Eli.

• 1:31:39The Fat Electrician?

  The funniest one was they came up with this boat that shot water. And it worked out really good because it shot this stream of water about a hundred meters and it would like just level a coconut tree. And if you hit a bunker, it would blow the bunker up, you know. So they had a regular, what they call a tango boat with the, so they put two big cat engines in there, one squirted to the left, one to the right. So Swabes would say, starboard port. And uh, they ran into some mud one day. So those things were sucking up water so hard, they, one of them started sucking some mud up, killed the engine. They didn't have a, think about kill switches. And so the other one was still working. They

• 1:32:22The Fat Electrician?

  just flipped the boat upside down. So now here you are stuck in this little canal that's so small, you can't even turn around on, you know, but uh, so it's kind of interesting what they used on it. But yeah, you couldn't, plastic boats weren't, and swift boats, John Kerry type shit, they didn't last a day down there.

• 1:32:42The Fat Electrician?

  Did you ever have any experience with like, I know the, the gun trucks of Vietnam are famous, the, where they were just basically building Mad Max vehicles?

• 1:32:50The Fat Electrician?

  No, we, I mean, we had, we had a lot, our, most of our ammo came from Saigon down. That's pretty fairly secure road down to our major base camp. Dong Tam was the name of it, but south of Dong Tam is, that's a whole different story. But um, yeah, pretty crazy stuff.

• 1:33:10Donut Operator?

  On the logistics side of things, it reminds me of that movie. Have you seen it? The uh, I forget the actual name. It's like the world's greatest beer run.

• 1:33:16The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:33:17Donut Operator?

  Yeah. That was pretty good. Just the guy who just like wants to go like link up with all of his buddies that are deployed.

• 1:33:21The Fat Electrician?

  They thought he was a CIA asset, so they let him through.

• 1:33:24Donut Operator?

  Yeah, he just kept fucking going with it. Cause he's the, failing up, looks like a CIA dude and he's wearing a Hawaiian shirt in country with no orders. It's like, oh fuck, we're gonna take him wherever he needs to go.

• 1:33:37The Fat Electrician?

  And his friends are like, what the fuck are you doing here? It's like Donnie or whatever is, is Chip.

• 1:33:43The Fat Electrician?

  So I, what, what happens when your, your tour comes to an end? Cause I think you wind up in Australia for a period of time and have some fun. You know?

• 1:33:52The Fat Electrician?

  I wanted, I wanted to go to Australia.

• 1:33:55The Fat Electrician?

  Oh, sorry, sorry. Drinking with Australians.

• 1:33:57The Fat Electrician?

  I, yeah, I met them in Saigon. That was funny and shit. So I, I run into this Lerp medic from my unit. And we both have camouflage fatigues on, which was rare. And these two Aussies, they wanted our fatigues bad. So I'm going like, fuck you. My buddy.

• 1:34:20Donut Operator?

  You're like, I just got these pants.

• 1:34:22The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. So the, the medic, he wanted one of those Aussie hats, you know, they had that nice big old fold over Aussie hat. And uh, anyhow, one thing led to another after mass quantities of alcohol and we all just switched uniforms. So we went around partying in Saigon. They knew Saigon in and out. That's where they were stationed. And uh, so they decided, we all decided we're going to a whorehouse. So, so we go to this whorehouse, but the goddamn Aussies are now in American uniforms and they go through there. These

• 1:35:03The Fat Electrician?

  guys go crazy. American, gee, I know, you know, can't come, you know, can't come. And finally they pull a goddamn pistol on us. So we finally said, okay, I guess we don't come. So uh, No one's coming that day. But we know more than God outside of that building. And here is a jeep full of Koichons, Vietnamese police, Australian police, military police, and American MPs. We don't get 50 feet outside that building and we're grabbed. So the Americans grab the Australians and the Australians grab me. They're trying to figure out what the hell is going on here, you know?

• 1:35:46Donut Operator?

  Cause they're about to get hanged as spies.

• 1:35:49The Fat Electrician?

  So finally this bird colonel, he, he, he's like, okay, here's the deal. You guys just get the fuck out of here. He says, we don't want to see again. It's like, what's the big deal then? He goes, we've been across the street watching this place for ages. These guys are printing MPC military payment currency in the basement, but it's off limits to Americans. Probably the president of South Vietnam was in on that. Who knows? But, but no, the Aussies could go in there and have fun, but the Americans couldn't, so. Were you like, I'll go undercover. So anyhow.

• 1:36:27Donut Operator?

  I'll do my research.

• 1:36:30The Fat Electrician?

  The Aussies, the Aussies decided we should go home with them. We, means we needed a bed. Our bed was 50 miles away. So anyhow, so next thing I remember, I'm, I'm hungover like crazy and, and um,

• 1:36:49The Fat Electrician?

  I remember somebody kicking me in the butt on my feet. Get these bloody Americans out of here. And the guy, he goes, who the hell are you? Anyhow, so we had to give back the uniforms.

• 1:37:05The Fat Electrician?

  Nick, what was your text about? We could see if we can keep it or not?

• 1:37:16The Fat Electrician?

  It was just cracking me up. He's like, like, uh, the whorehouse. I was like, oh, Ed had good times all over. Whorehouses, God. We literally had full bird colonels, well, I shouldn't say that. Lieutenant Colonels, battalion commanders that would send teams of people to go to another battalion's whorehouse and steal their horse. They'd offer more money.

• 1:37:47Donut Operator?

  Talking about them like cattle.

• 1:37:48The Fat Electrician?

  They needed new tal, they needed new talent.

• 1:37:50The Fat Electrician?

  It's like a draft.

• 1:37:53The Fat Electrician?

  They're just thinking of their troops, man. They needed new talent and.

• 1:37:56The Fat Electrician?

  Second battalion, second pick of the draft, drafts, Kwon Ling.

• 1:38:05The Fat Electrician?

  I made it.

• 1:38:07The Fat Electrician?

  You know, Colonel Hackworth, he, he talks about that in his book. Uh, I can't remember which book it was he wrote. I'm in one of his books, I think Steal A Soldier's Horse, but he writes about stealing horses from other, from other units.

• 1:38:25The Fat Electrician?

  You know, it's such a different horse than my, like, anything I experienced.

• 1:38:31Donut Operator?

  Your horse were livestock in that war.

• 1:38:34The Fat Electrician?

  It's crazy to hear just that. Yeah, he'd, he'd send them with a goddamn three quarter ton and a pocket full of money and they'd come back with a bunch of women, you know? It's a Colonel? A light Colonel. Oh, thank God.

• 1:38:50The Fat Electrician?

  No, he, he wouldn't go himself. I know. Just, he's like, got a job for you, brother.

• 1:38:56Donut Operator?

  Nowadays, morale boost looks like a pizza party.

• 1:39:00The Fat Electrician?

  It's fallen told. They're gonna have mandatory fun day.

• 1:39:05The Fat Electrician?

  One of the first times I ever went to a whorehouse was right outside of Dong Tam. It was all, they were all off limits. You weren't, but you know. So I decided to go down there and Jesus Christ, I'm not there like one minute and this drunken son of a bitch in E7 is, he's just tearing the place up, raising hell, throwing shit around.

• 1:39:26The Fat Electrician?

  You know, it's all bamboo walls and tearing the place up. And I got the hell out of there. It was just not a bit trouble. So I go back the next time and I'll be damned if there isn't an MP raid on the place. So here's like two jeeps of MPs with a three quarter ton paddy wagon. And they're hauling all of us GIs off. I look and it's that same son of a, the, the NCO in charge of that raid is the same son of a bitch that was in there tearing the place up drunk on his ass, you know? I was hoping you pulled a grandpa's, since you walk in, you see the MPs, you turn around, like you put your head down, you come back in, you go back out.

• 1:40:05The Fat Electrician?

  So as they're hauling me off to the paddy wagon, I, I see him and I, uh, I, I grabbed him. Oh, I put that guy in my Jeep, would you? So he put me in his Jeep. So we get inside the base camp. He goes, get the hell out of here. So.

• 1:40:23The Fat Electrician?

  That's the whisperer. I know.

• 1:40:25The Fat Electrician?

  It's a Spiderman meme?

• 1:40:29The Fat Electrician?

  How about we don't talk about this?

• 1:40:33The Fat Electrician?

  Bygones be bygones.

• 1:40:36Donut Operator?

  I'm shocked and appalled to find gambling in this establishment. Here you're winning, sir.

• 1:40:42The Fat Electrician?

  The best whorehouses I ran into were, were in northern part of them. This, this goddamn outfit had two whorehouses and one of them you could get a steak dinner. Mom only lets us have one. Yeah. You guys were lucky. You got to watch a film. Shit. It's just wrong how they treated you guys.

• 1:41:10The Fat Electrician?

  You're writing your congressman. Yeah, exactly.

• 1:41:17The Fat Electrician?

  Not enough. That can't be right.

• 1:41:23The Fat Electrician?

  Fuck it. While we're on the topic, one of the funniest parts is I was actually laughing last night reading it is when you were talking about how you got given a couple of days of leave after graduating sniper school, passing the test.

• 1:41:35The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:35The Fat Electrician?

  But you were out of money. You didn't have enough money for a whorehouse. So you're like, can I take it later?

• 1:41:48The Fat Electrician?

  Well. Put it on my tab. It wasn't too bad of a deal because you had a place to stay, free food and free beer. It was a R and R center kind of deal. And right next door, of course, is a whorehouse.

• 1:42:04The Fat Electrician?

  And I did have enough money for one hour. I just like, it's like, well, just put it on, wait till the first. The rest of the three days I had to sit there drinking my beer, watching these other guys come and go. I'm going like, Jesus, you know?

• 1:42:22The Fat Electrician?

  Ed. This is what it is.

• 1:42:25The Fat Electrician?

  Dude, it's been an absolute pleasure having you on. First off, uh, top, explain your book or where, where can the people find your book and you? Well, it's on Amazon, Kindle, Audible and paperback and soon to be another probably 60 days, uh, hardcover revised edition with some more accurate stuff. But, uh, it, it, how it actually came to be was that, so I'd already been in like five books and six magazines. And, uh, then History Channel did the gig on me and this Hollywood, um, script writer gets

• 1:43:06The Fat Electrician?

  ahold of me and I fired him off for like a month or so. And every week he'd call me up and finally he says, well, you know, I'm just going to get your story from the guys you served with. And I says, well, that's the problem because they all exaggerate shit and, you know, it's all something always ends up being wrong. And I says, I'll tell you what, I'll, I'll actually write this story, my story down for you. So I'm doing that. And at the same time I thought, I need to make this accurate. So I sent it to three guys I was in Vietnam with and one of them happened to be a, or forward observer, Ed Zeke, and he was a, um, a writer for Hearst newspapers had a, after Vietnam, he played football for Michigan and

• 1:43:49The Fat Electrician?

  got a master's degree in English. And so he's helping me along with this and just not as much as I was hoping. He just let me go out of it. Anyhow, so I get through, but I'm just talk, I just talked about the day I got there to the day I left. And he's demanding I talk about who I was, how did I get there? You know, what it was like to come home. So he ragged on me and ragged on me. And, and, uh, finally I, I decided, oh, what the hell? So,

• 1:44:25The Fat Electrician?

  strangely enough, this never happens. So I sent the memoirs to one, one publisher. This guy meets me at shot show with a $10,000 check. I mean, how many authors get that happen to them, you know? So, uh, we start talking and I said, well, you know, I want the dispersal. It wasn't causing him, him any more money. It's just that we're going to have to change the way the contract was written. He said, no problem. I'll, I'll, um, go back to New York. We'll finish it. I'll send it to you. You sign it and I'll send you the money. I get back to my booth at the shot show. I'm there with Americansnipers.org and we are

• 1:45:10The Fat Electrician?

  raising funds for active duty snipers because the army doesn't know how to provide snipers with, uh, with what they need. Supply sergeants don't have a clue what they're talking about. So anyhow, we do a better job than, than army does. That's what they must do. Uh, but anyhow, uh, so I go back to my booth and there's this card from this dude and I call him up and yeah, what, what is he? And he said, well, he says, one of the snipers that you guys supported over in Afghanistan, uh, you personally have supported, uh, Sergeant, uh, uh, Reese,

• 1:45:53The Fat Electrician?

  uh, he says, uh, he tells me you're writing this book and that you're a little bummed out because you're going to have to probably sign with somebody and you'd really rather self-publish. And he says, uh, so have you thought about self-publishing? And I said, well, I have, but I really don't want to spend the $8,000 it costs to do it right, you know? And this dude writes out a check for $8,000 and then writes that one out for $10,000 for American snipers. And I says, I can't take this money. I need to know what the hell you want. I just want a book. That was all he wanted. No shit.

• 1:46:29The Fat Electrician?

  So he allowed me to be editor, you know, the whole route. So, uh, and I think therein lies why that book is so good to especially my brothers. And, you know, I've even had Marines write me and say, man, thanks for just being honest about your fears and, you know, how things went down and that kind of stuff. So.

• 1:46:58Donut Operator?

  That you're not going to have some woke publisher tell you, you can't talk about whorehouses.

• 1:47:02The Fat Electrician?

  Yeah. Well, I'm serious. Like.

• 1:47:04The Fat Electrician?

  Well, I was worried about my mother more than anybody else. But she already knew I was kind of a whore monger.

• 1:47:15The Fat Electrician?

  I'm telling you, it's one of the best memoirs I've ever read.

• 1:47:18The Fat Electrician?

  Really? Oh, I'm excited.

• 1:47:19The Fat Electrician?

  I've read a lot. It's one of the best ones.

• 1:47:23The Fat Electrician?

  I get this email from this professor. That's the best goddamn Vietnam memoir I've ever read. And I've read over 150 of them. He says, I've read every goddamn thing I can read on Vietnam. And, uh, so I says, well, obviously you weren't an English professor. He writes back, he goes, I sure as hell am. He says, this is not about the editing when it comes to punctuation and spelling and this and that. It's like, it's like how it flows, how it gets the point across, how it, he says, uh, so that, that was my, my biggest academic kudo. So, uh, yeah. And, uh, I'm not going to brag any further in what he had to say, but.

• 1:48:08The Fat Electrician?

  I will.

• 1:48:09The Fat Electrician?

  As a history professor, Nick, Nick vouches for you.

• 1:48:12The Fat Electrician?

  It's fantastic.

• 1:48:13The Fat Electrician?

  It's the most text we've got about a book, uh, really. Yeah. Texting us about the book. It's you.

• 1:48:21The Fat Electrician?

  That and another guy that self-published. It's, it was Ed and, um, the Pied Piper of Saipan were the two books. And I was texting you guys like crazy about it. But, and he also self-published. So.

• 1:48:34The Fat Electrician?

  Did you guys get to tell the story as you want to? And it's, and especially individuals like yourself. Well, you know, some of the stuff in the, I mean, like, I was interviewed a little bit for the, uh, by a guy under my name of Lanning. He wrote the book Inside the Crosshairs. And, you know, and I told him, I said, you know, my, my kills are all under a hundred meters or 600 meters, excuse me. And he goes, oh, Ed's kills were all over 600 meters. I'm like, he's a fucker, you know? There's not a sniper in the world that would believe that crap, you know? So those things were embarrassing. So that was kind of my will to try to correct things just by telling the frigging truth. If you like it or you don't, I don't give a shit, be honest with you. So.

• 1:49:19The Fat Electrician?

  Just wanting to tell the story right. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. It's a true soldier that doesn't want, you don't want to glorify anything. You're just like, hey, this is what actually happened. Cause it is embarrassing if one of your guys, like if any of my friends seen what I did and I. Just by telling the truth, I'm glorifying myself, I thought, by just being proud that I went from a stupid ass country boy to a platoon sergeant to one of the first 55 snipers in the history of the army. You know, I mean, like, that was enough. I might as well tell the truth while you're at it, you know? So. Ed, holy shit, has been an absolute pleasure having you on. We are. Great podcast. So thankful for you coming out, hanging out. How long we've been doing this shit so far?

• 1:50:01The Fat Electrician?

  Two plus hours?

• 1:50:02The Fat Electrician?

  Almost two hours. Yeah. We're almost about to creep up to two hours. Pretty cool. Brandon, if you want to close this out.

• 1:50:08Donut Operator?

  Absolutely. Thank you for joining us on this episode of the Unsubscribe Podcast. I am joined today by Eli Double Tap, Ed Eaton, Nick the Fat Electrician and myself, Bronup Operator. Thank you so much.

• 1:50:21The Fat Electrician?

  We love you.

• 1:50:22The Fat Electrician?

  Goodbye. Adios amigos.

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