Delta Force Plank Owner SGM Mike Vining (throwback episode)

Original air date 5/1/20 Sergeant Major Mike Vining is one of the original members of Delta Force. In 1980, he was a participant in Operation Eagle Claw, a failed attempt to rescue 52 American hostages held in Iran. Forty years later, Vining reflects on the mission, its legacy, and the impact it had on today's Special Operations Forces. get ad free epsiodes and help support the show here: https://www.patreon.com/c/TheTeamHouse Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss.

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

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• 1:34Jack Murphy?

  All right, folks. Here we are, episode 40 of The Team House. I can't believe we got to 40 already. I'm Jack Murphy. Here, I think a few screens over, depending on how your view is organized. You'll see co-host Dave Park, and you will also see our guest for tonight, Sergeant Major Retired Mike Vining.

• 1:55Jack Murphy?

  Sergeant Major Vining is, you know, honestly, you're one of my favorite veterans to interview. I've had the opportunity to twice before and it's always really a lot of fun. Sergeant Major Vining entered into US Army Basic Training in 1968 and became an Explosive Ordnance Disposal Technician. He was deployed to Vietnam and received the Bronze Star in 1971. And in 1978, he volunteered for a new unit that was being formed. He became one of the original members of Delta Force. And when the unit was validated and stood up in 1980, Sergeant Major Vining was one of the participants in Operation Eagle Claw. This is the operation we're going to talk about the most tonight.

• 2:40Jack Murphy?

  I think that the bulk of this of this stream will be talking about Eagle Claw because just on the 24th last week, we came up on the 40th anniversary of Eagle Claw. And that was a Delta Force mission to attempt to rescue 52 American hostages being held at the US Embassy in Tehran. Now Sergeant Major Vining went on to do much more in his career. He was also in Operation Urgent Fury, the invasion of Grenada. He went back to Delta Force where he served as the Chief EOD Technician, the Research and Development Sergeant Major, and the Breaching Sergeant Major. And then he rounded out his career at JSOC as the Special Plan Sergeant Major. On top of that, as we were talking just before the stream started,

• 3:24Jack Murphy?

  Mike Vining is also an avid mountaineering and climbing, rock climbing enthusiast and spelunker. Just really so many amazing things that that Mike has done in life. And we're really honored to have him here tonight. We can't possibly get to all of it, so we're really not going to try. We're going to try to focus on Eagle Claw since it is the 40th anniversary to hear about Mike's experience there. And, you know, what the legacy is of that operation all these years later and the impact it had on special operations. And then we'll take some questions from the viewers. I think many of you will probably have questions for Sergeant Major Vining. So we'll try to get to as many of those as possible. So Sergeant Major, thank you again for joining us tonight.

• 4:09Speaker 06

  Well, thanks, Jack, and thanks, Dave. Well, Eagle Claus, I guess it started on four November of 1979 when the US Embassy in Tehran was taken over for the second time, and this time it was a more permanent takeover. I was with B Squadron, and we were out in Breckenridge, Colorado during this time, and we were on a ski trip, winter training, and skiing at Arapaho, Keystone, Loveland,

• 4:49Speaker 06

  at the time, when we got the word that we need to get back to the unit. So, we didn't know what was going on, so we got into Colorado Springs, took a flight out, landed at McCall, got picked up at Camp McCall, and got into the unit. It was briefed that the US Embassy was taken over, and we started the planning immediately to retake the embassy. We went into isolation up at Camp Perry, Virginia, a place called The Farm. It was also where, like, the facilities that we stayed at was where some of the people

• 5:34Speaker 06

  that participated in the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban operation. That didn't go so well either. So, we did the training there, we got the embassy layout, we had a 3D model of the whole embassy compound, the buildings you could take apart. The agency built this model for us. It was like 10-foot by 10-foot model of the facility. Then, every day, we would go and lay out, and use an engineer tape, the layout of the buildings and stuff like that, and go through the steps.

• 6:14Speaker 06

  And then we'd have to take the engineer tape down because of any Russian Soviet satellites that would come over. And that was most of the thing. We would do all of our training, we'd sleep during the day, do our training at night. And so that was the start. Then we went out in December timeframe, we went up to Yuma Proving Grounds, they're out in a remote area where there's this hangar out there. And then we started working with the helicopters out there. Now, these were the RH-53 helicopters. And we had Navy crew that

• 6:58Speaker 06

  crewed these. The RH-53D helicopter is a Navy helicopter used for counter mining. And what they normally do is fly during daylight hours. They do a grid pattern search. They they have a some type of sensor that they drag in water behind the helicopter to search for these mines. And so they just do grid patterns. So, and these are the crew and pilots that we had. They were not used to flying desert nighttime and with night vision goggles. And that was a totally new experience.

• 7:39Jack Murphy?

  Just to point out real quick, Mike, for some of our younger viewers, they're thinking, what about 160th, the Night Stalkers? What about all those cool helicopters? 1980, that unit did not exist. Those helicopters literally did not exist.

• 7:53Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's a good point, Jack. The US inventory, the 53 was the only helicopter that had the lift capacity and the distance with an internal fuel to do the mission to carry the number of people. We didn't have those CH-47s that we could do aerial refuel and You know, like the late model CH47s. And so we were stuck with the 50, the old 53s. Well, we had problems with the Navy crew. They just couldn't learn fast enough to operate.

• 8:32Speaker 06

  So they, we got Marine crews, Navy helicopters and, and, but this was a mixed group of, of airmen from the Marine Corps. These were not people that worked together. So it was just people from the various Marine Corps, crew members, pilots, and, and then they had to start to work together as a team. And, and we still always had problems with the 53s. They would, I don't know, get lost. They wouldn't land where we wanted them to land and just had difficulty with the 53s. And that was always been the issue we had.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  And a lot of times we'd be flying into 53s and it's just like, while they were learning, and we just felt like sandbags. We didn't really need to be in those 53s while they were learning how to fly at night with night vision goggles, but we were. And so then we went out to Fort Irwin. We did a rehearsal out at Fort Irwin with the aircraft, the, the, the MC130s and the E, well, they, we used the MC130E models. And we also did exercises out there at Nevada Test Site.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  We set up at Area 25, we set up a wall to simulate the embassy wall. And we would practice going over the, the wall. We would have ladders with ropes on them. And we would put the ladders up, throw the ropes over, then hand climb down the knotted ropes. And we did that, every day we'd put our kit on and practice going over, putting ladders up and going over the wall. We even had a wall built and still there in the old stockade on Buttonah Road at Fort Bragg. And every day we'd have to go over that wall.

• 10:38Jack Murphy?

  Could you talk a little bit about the kit you were wearing and as far as rehearsals, what your, what the projection was that what your role would be, you know, what building you were going to, what the actions on were. Because also, I think it's interesting that like, a lot of the kit was kind of custom designed for this operation.

• 10:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, our vests were, each of us made our own vests. I could sew, and we had a lot of people that could sew, and we would sew up our own vests, customize our vests to fit whatever kit we were carrying. We would have like a 14, everybody carried a 14-foot sling rope, nylon sling rope. So we, basically, our uniform was blue jeans, civilian shirt, and then we all had a dyed green field jacket. We had American flag that we could expose, put on with Velcro when time came, so that they would know that

• 11:38Speaker 06

  we were Americans. We had watch caps. We had, we grew beards, let our hair grow long. And, and, and that's kind of our uniform. And we would have to practice crawling with, on the floor, so that we wouldn't make any noise. Everything had dummy cords tied to it, so we wouldn't lose it. We had three elements. The Delta had, we had a white, red, and blue element. The red element was A Squadron. The white element I was in was, was B Squadron.

• 12:20Speaker 06

  And we had a blue element, which was the Sniper Observer Support element. And, and, and then we divided up the different things. For the, for the white element, one of our areas was the Ambassador residence. And so my team, once we went over the wall, we would approach the Ambassador's residence, go through the kitchen door, and then there was a stairway. Since we entered the kitchen, we would, stairway led up to the second floor.

• 12:58Speaker 06

  And, and we would, my team, that I was a four man team, Bill Zumwatt was the team leader, we would clear the, the second floor of the Ambassador's residence. And once that, and we felt that there was hostages there. And then, once that was cleared, Bill and I would go up to the roof of the Ambassador's residence, and we, we had a, like 120 foot nylon rope that we would throw over the, the, the building, and then Bucky Burris, Colonel, Lieutenant Colonel Burris, was down at the bottom, and people that had M72s, laws, we dropped those off there.

• 13:42Speaker 06

  And we would then, he'd tie them to our rope, and we'd pull them up on roof, and we, Bill and I would overwatch the main gate, in case anybody came in through the main gate with the laws. The Chancery was another area where hostages were, that was the red element. There was a building called, warehouse called The Mushroom. We believe there was hostages in those areas, so those are some of the, it was a big compound.

• 14:13Speaker 04

  Mike, how, how old, how old was Delta at this point in time?

• 14:19Speaker 06

  How old was Delta? We, so, we became activated.

• 14:26Speaker 06

  Just, I would say, just a few, we were only a few months activated. Um, you know, Delta form, uh, started going together in October of 1977. I got there in February of 78. So, but we did not, you know, we had, there was another element with Fifth Special Forces. It was called Blue Light. Now, uh, back then, the news media and a lot of people, even today, do not know the difference. They think Blue Light and Delta is the same thing. But Blue Light was set up with Fifth Group guys as an interim rescue force until we stood up.

• 15:10Speaker 06

  And then, once we stood up, Blue Light then went down. Some of the Blue Light people then went through our selection course and came into the unit. Uh, so we had several Blue Light members, but Blue Light and Delta was two different organizations.

• 15:26Speaker 04

  Weren't they, weren't they somewhat, I, I've heard that they were somewhat competitive at one point in time where it was a question of who, who was going to stick around or is, is that accurate or no?

• 15:38Speaker 06

  Jack, you want me, you want to answer it? You want me to?

• 15:41Jack Murphy?

  Well, I, I mean, I, just based on my interviews with Blue Light members, uh, they were a stopgap. They were never going to fill that role. Um, so, but the members, they did feel competitive, like it was a competition between this new, these new upstarts in Delta Force and these, uh, Blue Light guys who, and honestly, many of those Blue Light guys were Mac B Sog, Mike Forrest, Suntay Raiders. I mean, they were real guys. They were the real deal. So they did feel like it was very competitive, but Blue Light was never going to be the permanent CT unit.

• 16:13Speaker 06

  No, but I think they had visions that they may.

• 16:17Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 16:18Speaker 06

  That's right. They had aspirations that, and then a lot of them, Beckwith went and talked to them about coming, once they were standing down to come over it. And a lot of them didn't think they would have to go through the selection process, that they should just be able to go into because of their background, their history. But everybody had to go through selection.

• 16:42Speaker 04

  So was Blue Light still around when, when the whole Iran, uh, Iranian hostage thing kicked off?

• 16:50Speaker 06

  Yeah, they, they were still.

• 16:54Speaker 06

  I would say, yeah, I don't know exactly when they were deactivated, but I think they thought that they would have a part in the mission.

• 17:03Speaker 04

  Right.

• 17:05Speaker 04

  So, so Delta was new, so it was all, it was all very conceptual at that point in time. What was, was this hostage rescue mission something that had sort of been, not, not, obviously not in Iran, but, but had this, had you, had you trained for this prior? Was this part of the concept of, of what Delta would be when it stood up?

• 17:28Speaker 06

  Well, our, we had one unclassified mission and that was, that was POW rescue.

• 17:38Speaker 06

  And there was always felt that there were maybe people held in Laos, North Vietnam, still from the Vietnam War. So our unofficial thing was like a Sante type mission. That was our unclassified mission. Other things is the, all the terrorists hijacking airliners and take buildings and stuff. And that's what we practiced on was hostage rescue against terrorists in buildings, trains, buses, and that kind of stuff. We even brought it, we brought a train in and practiced on trains there at Fort Bragg.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  And for the younger viewers, like the seventies was, was a hotspot of, like, when we thought of terrorism in the seventies, it was, it was generally like aircraft hijackings and, and thing, you know, you know, train, you know, that they would take over something and demand, you know, or take over a vehicle.

• 18:42Jack Murphy?

  So that have political demands, yeah.

• 18:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 18:45Speaker 06

  And then we had different scenarios that these missions would be in, whether they be permissive, that we would have the permission from the government to go in and do that hostage rescue. There'd be semi-permissive, I don't know exactly what you call semi-permissive, but then there was non-permissive. And, and, you know, we really didn't think we would have a non-permissive mission. And of course, the hostage rescue in Tehran was a non-permissive mission. And it was just difficult, you know, a lot of people compare, tried to do comparisons between what the Israelis did in, in, in Tebe.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  Right.

• 19:27Speaker 06

  Uganda, but it, we, they had more, it was just much more difficult on a scale than the Tebe type mission.

• 19:37Speaker 04

  So how long did it take, how long did it take? Because you're right, because in Tebe was kind of a, it was permissive, right? Where the Israelis went in there with the permission on the.

• 19:49Jack Murphy?

  No, no.

• 19:50Speaker 04

  No, they didn't. I'm sorry.

• 19:51Speaker 06

  They, yeah, they, they flew in, landed, they, they had some limo cars that like Idi Amin would, you know, so they didn't know what was going on, whether it was Idi Amin coming in there or what. So, yeah, it was.

• 20:06Jack Murphy?

  It, it was much more streamlined in the sense that they flew like, what, like one or two C-130s down the Red Sea, turned into Uganda, landed, did the operation. And the mission you guys planned, I mean, maybe you talk about it, like the scheme of maneuver that developed throughout Plan Eagle Claw was very complicated.

• 20:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, because, um, yeah, so we picked out a desert one site that'd be a refill site. And we'd looked at different scenarios in how to refill these helicopters. One was doing an aerial drop with fuel bladders. That didn't, we did test on that. And like some of the parachutes didn't open and the bladders hit and exploded. And so it was that we decided to have three MC130s lead in followed by three EC130s, which is a command electronics bird that has an electronics module in there, but we just took,

• 21:09Speaker 06

  he took that out and then you put in a 3,000 or 3,000, 5,000 gallon JP5 fuel bladder. So it was like a giant water bed inside of the EC130. So we had those come in there and then we would have the eight helicopters come in from the aircraft carrier, the Nimitz,

• 21:32Speaker 06

  and fly into the Desert One site. We would refill the helicopters, the ECs and MCs would take off back to go to Oman, Mosarria in Oman and wait for us. And then we would take, after the helicopters are fueled off, we'd go to the Desert Two site, a hide site. There was a warehouse that they would put us up into, the helicopters would go someplace else and we'd just put camel net up there. We'd wait during the next daylight hours there. Then the following night, trucks would come in that had already been arranged. Dick Meadows and his group had trucks that were already

• 22:14Speaker 06

  in there. They would come and pick us up and we'd take these trucks to the embassy. While we're doing that, the Rangers are coming in and they're taking an airfield. And so then when we get the hostages, we take them over to the stadium, soccer stadium across the Roosevelt Road. And once we got on that, we'd go to the Ranger airfield and then get onto the fixed wing aircraft and go on, go on out with the hostages. So it was a two night operation inside of Iran.

• 22:56Jack Murphy?

  And could you speak a little bit to the, to the intelligence piece and how that developed as this operation went on? I mean, I think Wade Ishimoto was the chief intel officer for the unit at the time. But as I think we've also talked about in the past, there was a problem with getting reliable information out of Tehran.

• 23:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, the CIA people that were part of the embassy were trapped, were now hostages. We really didn't have any country, any in-country assets that we were getting intelligence from, because they were now hostages. So there was a lot of, you know, that was a big lack of intelligence. That was a big failure. Another thing was the weather conditions at this time of year. I, you know, I've experienced dust, dust storms, the haboos,

• 24:00Speaker 06

  and somehow, I don't know, that piece of the puzzle got really, the weather part got really explained to the weather conditions, to the Marines, and what to do if they run into a dust storm. So when we ran into the dust storm, I was on the lead MC-130. When we ran into the dust storm, the, the fixed wings all flew on top of the dust storm. We were gonna fly low because there was, Iran, Iran had some radar. We knew where their radar was. We was also worried about getting picked up by the Soviets, the Russians, and

• 24:43Speaker 06

  that they would tip off Iran that we were coming. So we were gonna, we were gonna fly in low nap of the earth. But dust storms obscure radar. And so you don't, so what the helicopters should have done when they encountered the dust storm is just try to get above the dust storm and keep, keep booking, but they just kept flying through that. And they flew through two dust storms and they, that was pretty tough on them. And we did not have any communications with the helicopters because we were all, you know, radio silence, but we did have stackcom radios and the helicopters had sec- secure

• 25:28Speaker 06

  stackcom radios. But back then, in order for them to use the stackcom, they would have had to land the helicopter, set the radio up and get the antenna, the right azimuth and ang, all that, and then talk to us. We, they did not have it mobile on the aircraft. So they, they did carry, I think a few of the helicopters did carry a stackcom radio.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  Um, well, when, you want me to go when, to Desert One and when we land, when landed and seen all the headlights?

• 26:05Jack Murphy?

  I, I, I would, um, but I, I would also like to ask, of course, this is a loaded question, you know, Mike, was there ever a, a full mission rehearsal that brought all the elements together before you guys kicked off the mission in April?

• 26:20Speaker 06

  We never had a full mission rehearsal. One reason that was, I heard was because of operational security. Um, we just did pieces of the mission and, um, and that was probably a big failure. Uh, but, uh, there was never a full rehearsal with everything. Um, yeah, that was, that was somebody's judgment call.

• 26:48Jack Murphy?

  There, another little interesting sidebar, um, that I don't think many people are aware of is that Dead A had a small presence also on, on the mission.

• 26:59Speaker 06

  Right, the Berlin detachment, Dead A. Um, Beckwith just wanted our group to focus on the embassy. Uh, there was, um,

• 27:11Speaker 06

  I mean, was there's three others that were held over there at the

• 27:15Jack Murphy?

  The Chancellery, the MFA.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And so that was given to dead A people. Um, and they had, they were carrying MP5s. And we were all carrying CAR-15s. So that, that piece was given to them. And they had some suppressed MP5s too.

• 27:43Speaker 06

  And, uh, so yeah, our mission was just focused on the embassy. So there was another, some, those other guys that were over there at the other place.

• 27:54Jack Murphy?

  And so then what happened when the unit got spun up? And they said, this is going forward and you guys launched that, I think the first location was Egypt?

• 28:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, we are, we flew into Wadi Kenya, Egypt, which was an old Soviet base, had, had hangars for mag aircraft and it was in pretty bad shape. The, so, uh, but we took it over. And so that was our staging area to get everybody flew into there. And then that'd be called your ISB intermittent staging area. And our forward staging base was in Mas- Masariya, Oman.

• 28:40Speaker 06

  And, uh, it's an island. And the Brits had a, a base, airbase on there that we took over or shared with the Brits. And then from there's where we launched. So we took C-141s to Masariya. And then from there we picked up our 130s.

• 29:03Speaker 06

  And so that was it. Then we launched. And when we got to Desert One, the Desert One site, there was headlights down on the road. This road was supposed to be a dirt road that, and it was a dirt road, that very little travel on it. And but then we we saw headlights down below. So we actually had to circle a few times before we did land. And soon as we landed, opened up the ramp and everything, here we see a pair of headlights coming down the road. And Beckwith says,

• 29:44Speaker 06

  stop, it was a bus, and said, stop that bus. So one of the, somebody fired a 40 millimeter.

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• 31:20Speaker 06

  In front of the bus and the bus stopped and the next thing you know, there's forty four Iranians on there. So we had forty four Iranian detainees. I just learned that they were, everybody on that bus was actually related to each other. They, and I just learned this recently.

• 31:42Jack Murphy?

  It was like a family reunion?

• 31:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, that's what they were going to is a family event. Uh, and they were traveling from one city to another city. And so they were all, so once they stopped the bus, we got everybody off there, had to go through their baggage to make sure that nothing, there was nothing that they carrying that could be a threat to us. And so for a while, then our team and a couple of other teams, we were guarding these detainees. Cause you know, as Americans, we do not take hostages. We, um, we just detain people for a period of time. So they were detainees, not, so we had forty four of our own. And, uh, I can, they were just, uh, they were just scared.

• 32:25Speaker 06

  Um, aircraft were landing, people were walking by and it just, uh, to them, I don't know what was going, they thought was happening. And then

• 32:35Jack Murphy?

  World War Three.

• 32:36Speaker 06

  Yeah. Well, then up down the road comes this fuel truck. And so the ranger, the road ish and the ranger roadblock team went out there and they fired a couple, few rounds in the radiator of the fuel truck. And then one of the rangers shot a law and that hit underneath the fuel truck and caught the fuel truck on fire. So that's, the fuel truck sat there burning. The guy in the, the oil tanker truck, he got out and ran into a vehicle that was behind him and then they took off. So now we got a, a bus with forty four people. We got a fuel truck that's burning.

• 33:17Speaker 06

  And, um, the fine now they, then eventually the fuel truck explodes. And it's a big, huge fireball in the dark, mid dark sky and just lights up the whole area. And, um, Then the other aircraft, some of the aircraft that were coming in when the fuel truck was burning, that was affecting their night vision goggles. And then finally, the helicopters seen a fuel truck on fire. So the helicopters started landing and of course, they were like forty, at least forty-five minutes late landing there. And then of the eight helicopters, we only got six on the ground.

• 33:59Speaker 06

  And the six is the minimum that we had determined to do the mission. One helicopter turned back to the Nimitz. Another helicopter was abandoned, had a blade indicator light came on. So they abandoned that helicopter and then another helicopter landed and that crew jumped down to that. So there was only six helicopters that arrived there. The one that turned back was having some kind of problems with heat, overheat, something was overheating. So now we have six there. And then they find out that the, one of the helicopters has a hydraulic, some kind of hydraulic issue,

• 34:43Speaker 06

  which is a, that's it, you know, it's grounded. So it was made, the determination was made that now we only have five helicopters, which is not enough to do the mission. So it was, at that point, it was determined that, because we said we needed six. And the thing is, we also estimated we could have lost another helicopter at the hide site. Like the next night, when they would start the helicopters up, for some reason, one won't start up, then we'd be down to four helicopters. So that we, we would have had to leave some of our rescue force behind to get the hostages out.

• 35:28Speaker 06

  And that was.

• 35:30Jack Murphy?

  So Colonel Beckwith had to make a pretty difficult decision at that point.

• 35:34Speaker 06

  Right. And of course, Carter went along with it. It was the criteria, you needed six. And mission would be abort at five, and that's what it was. So, but now, you know, time you get all this stuff around, the fixed wing now were running very low on fuel. They had, the fixed wing aircraft needed to leave quick. The helicopters had all been refueled. So what, so we got into one of these EC 130s, I think it's EC 130 number five. And, um, and we get in there and we're, we're heading back. We're gonna, the, the plan was that maybe

• 36:17Speaker 06

  we could restart the mission in 48 hours. We would take the, we would take the Iranians that we have with us and, you know, later on, you know, get, they'll find their way back to Iran. But we would take up everybody with us and we would try to do the mission again. So what they needed to do was the two helicopters was behind our aircraft. They needed to move them, but the one helicopter that was to our left rear behind us. When it landed, it landed hard. It had flattened its tires.

• 36:58Speaker 06

  So it could not, it could not move on its wheels. So it had, so the CCT, CCT guy had to tell it to, because we were, our prop wash was blowing dust on these two helicopters. We wanted to take off. So CCT directed the helicopter to leave, to reposition. When it took off, it kicked up dust. The pilot got vertigo. And he came around and he ran into our front left side and crashed into us. Um, and we were inside the helicopter, I mean, inside the aircraft.

• 37:39Speaker 06

  I was up near the front of the aircraft and some of the guys had took, we had taken off all of our equipment. I, I had a, I besides, I was carrying a five gallon water can on my back. I had a rucksack frame with a five gallon. And so I took my, uh, Kevlar off and put it on top of the five gallon water can. And then we, we all carried, we had, everybody had E and E kits and sewed into our jackets with maps and everything. We had 10,000, everybody was carrying $10,000. I had $5,000 in Iranian money and $5,000 in US money.

• 38:20Speaker 06

  And so, but I, where I'm gonna carry, I put it between the, the, my Kavlar, the different parts of my Kavlar, I had my money stuffed in there. And, uh, but then when the helicopter crashed into us, the rotor blades cut into the top of the fuselage. And, uh, but we didn't have a clue what was going on, what was that? And the next thing I knew, there was like this rocking motion as we rocked. And, uh, and then the, there was an explosion and the left front cockpit door blows in. Just boom, and nothing but fire, flames just come in.

• 39:02Speaker 06

  What happened was the internal fuel tank on that RH-53D had ruptured.

• 39:09Speaker 06

  And, um, the pilot and co-pilot of the 53 actually made it out of their helicopter through their cockpit windows. But they were burned pretty bad. They had up to third degree burns. They had inhaled this hot gas and fumes. And so they crawled out from their helicopters, but the three marine crewmen were trapped inside the back of the helicopter. And they, they perished. And then in front of our cockpit, the five crewmen up at the air force up in the front, they were trapped in there and they, they all were killed.

• 39:52Speaker 06

  And so all this fire, just flames came in. So one of the airmen, crew members tried to open the, the left rear paratrooper door. That's the side that the helicopter crashed on. When he opened the door, cracked it a little bit, there was nothing but flames there. So he shuts the, shuts the door. And then they opened up the right rear paratrooper door and the flames are intermediate. There's flames and then there's not flames. When they crack, when that helicopter crashed into us, the observers on the ground that were watching this whole thing. We, the fireball completely engulfed our aircraft and they thought that

• 40:34Jack Murphy?

  You were all dead.

• 40:35Speaker 06

  Everything was gone to the observers on the ground. And so

• 40:41Speaker 06

  we just started bailing out of that right rear paratrooper door. Somebody hollered, don't panic. Uh, I thought it was, um, Dave Cheney, that Sergeant Major Cheney that hollered at, but maybe one of the Air Force, uh, loadmaster said that. But anyway, just people were not, no panic, just getting on out. And you're on this giant fuel bladder that you're bouncing up and down. I remember Chris Abel stood up and he says, haul ass. Nick saying, no, he's flat on his face down. He's on the ground on the fuel bladder. And it's just was difficult.

• 41:21Speaker 06

  And then you could hear small arms start cooking off, just popping off inside the aircraft. And then when I, I didn't think I would make the door. I thought it, it, it was impossible.

• 41:34Jack Murphy?

  Cause the flames are still coming towards you.

• 41:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's flames inside the aircraft and we're on the giant fuel bladder. And, um, I thought, I said, oh God, is this how it's going to end? You know, because I just thought that I only had seconds to live. That I, I didn't make the door. And then when I got to the door, I just dove out and rolled. There was some hot metal there, rolled on some hot metal and got onto my feet. And, uh, just ran, I could hear hand grenades cooking off the explode, the hand grenades. And then not getting very far, we had six red eye missiles onboard that, uh,

• 42:18Speaker 06

  onboard our aircraft and the red eye missiles were our air defense. If we were at desert one and the Iranians came in and spotted us or whatever, we did have some red eye missiles.

• 42:29Jack Murphy?

  It's the predecessor to the Stinger missile.

• 42:32Speaker 06

  Yeah. Sweet. And then those started cooking off and going out into the desert. These red eye missiles started shooting off. And then the first aircraft I tried to get on, they waved me away. They were, all the aircraft were moved because there was stuff coming, flying through the air. So that all the aircraft were just trying to clear out away from the carnage here. And so eventually I got on another EC-130. And then there was the pilot, for the marine pilot was on the ramp of the, somebody had helped

• 43:09Speaker 06

  carry him and put him on the aircraft. And he, he was having difficulty breathing. He had a nylon cord around his neck that was burnt into his neck. I took the cord off his neck. And so I stayed with the pilot and worked with him off the four hour flight back to Oman, just trying to comfort him. And we did not have each, I don't know why we didn't have a medical pack on each aircraft. All they had was these little first aid things that, on the 130s. They didn't have nothing but

• 43:53Speaker 06

  dressings and different other things. We needed a medical, we needed IVs, we needed morphine, we needed all this stuff. And every aircraft should have had a medical package on it because we're trained to use it. I was, I had already, I had, prior to going to Delta, I had gone through EMT training. So I was nationally certified as an EMT, but we just didn't have any of this stuff. And then, so when we did, so the dead A guys actually were carrying morphine. So we got morphine from the dead A guys and we started getting, injecting the pilot and co-pilot with

• 44:37Speaker 06

  morphine and give them water. I mean, they were burned. They get their, one of the Air Force guys said, take off his gloves because his hands were burnt, the pilot's hands were, it says, no, we're not taking off his gloves. Take off his gloves, his skin's coming off too. And so we did get that. And when we took off, we never had accountability at Desert One of who was there and who wasn't there. When we, our aircraft and we took off, we ran into that, next to the road was a dirt burnt bank, berm. We hit that berm really hard, our aircraft

• 45:18Speaker 06

  did, and we leant up into air and came down and then kept going. But then once we got airborne, they came over and said over the speaker saying that we may have damaged our landing gear and we may not have any good landing gear when we get ready to land in Oman. And then when we get to flying for, and it's a four hour flight, we were flying for a little bit and they said, well, we may not have enough fuel to get back. We may have to ditch at sea. So, and I'm like, wow, what a night, you know, make no landing gear. Now we're gonna have to make ditch at sea, but we made it back.

• 46:01Speaker 04

  And the landing gear did come out of the aircraft?

• 46:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, and their landing gear did come back out.

• 46:06Speaker 04

  Like, did, what, did the guys, when, obviously you guys didn't know what happened when, when everything started. Did you, did you think you were like, did you think you were under attack? Like, what, what was going through your mind when all that started off?

• 46:21Speaker 06

  Initially thought we got hit by something, but didn't know what, you know, that, yeah, like, we might have got attacked. I, at first, that being a helicopter running into us, that wasn't in their mind, wasn't in my mind, that we got hit by a helicopter at first. But it soon became apparent that that's what happened.

• 46:44Speaker 04

  And, and how many, how many 130s, which are the, the planes, for those of our viewers who don't know, they're, they're, you know, cargo planes or transport planes, how many of those were on the ground at the time at Desert One? Because you said you had six helicopters.

• 46:59Speaker 06

  We, we had six, we had six aircraft. We had three MC 130E models and we had three EC 130E models. So we had six aircraft on the ground.

• 47:11Speaker 04

  And roughly how many personnel?

• 47:19Speaker 06

  I think our assault force was around a hundred and twenty some people. Our totals, I don't know the numbers. All of B Squadron was on that helicopter, on that EC-130 that the helicopter ran into. And so, we all made it out of there. The loadmaster made it. The loadmaster was burnt pretty bad, the Air Force loadmaster. A couple of guys helped him out. He, he was kinda on fire. And Paul Lawrence was one of the people that helped him out of the aircraft. And he, I think he was the last person out of the aircraft, was the loadmaster.

• 48:02Speaker 06

  Um, so, so now we have, you know, five fixed wing on the ground. And immediately, I don't know why, but the, um, the helicopter crews abandoned their helicopters. And their rotors are running, everything. They abandoned them first thing and jumped in on the, on the fixed wing.

• 48:29Speaker 04

  So, all the helicopter crews got out of the helicopters, left them running, and, and got on the fixed wings?

• 48:34Speaker 06

  True, yeah. I, I don't know why they did that. Um, they had, they'd been refilled. They could have flew back to the aircraft carrier. Also, we provided each aircraft with destruct charges. That we had an ammo can, they had C4 thermite grenades, we had time fuse in there. So if helicopter had to be abandoned, it was supposed to be destroyed. And none of those were destroyed, those helicopters. Now, the thought was that they might call off some fixed wing off the Nimitz to come in there and destroy those helicopters.

• 49:19Speaker 06

  But they decided against bringing in the fixed wings. And then... They had helicopter crews, they had documents that they shouldn't have had on those helicopters. There was, and I've seen some of these documents with Iranian markings on them explaining in Farsi what these documents are for, but they had all the routes and everything and.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Which would have revealed Desert Two as well, I imagine.

• 49:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, yes, yes, it had all, had our hide site, it had the, had there where they were gonna go, it had the approach to the embassy, how to leave the embassy, where we were, the Arranger Airfield. They had all that information that they had left behind. It was a treasure trove of documents and information. So, of course, you know, we had Dick Meadows and his crew

• 50:19Speaker 06

  there in Tehran that was supporting us. So they, you know, they had to get out of Tehran because they know that they had inside, you know, inside help, that inside in the country.

• 50:33Speaker 06

  So, I don't know why all that stuff is there, why it wasn't destroyed or taken with them, or why even what some of that stuff was even present on those helicopters, but, you know.

• 50:46Speaker 04

  And this is probably before, like, Group AARs were, were a thing where, where these, where these helicopter pilots or crews would stand up in front of the group and say, "Yeah, well, we left the helicopters because..."

• 51:03Speaker 04

  Right? I mean, they, they, there would, nobody, I mean, you never found out why?

• 51:08Speaker 06

  No, they, I can tell you, I saw the, the helicopter crews, when they came in there, the pilots and co-pilots, they were, they were wiped out. They, I can tell you, that, those dust storms took a lot out of them. They struggled through that. They, they were mentally, I think.

• 51:29Speaker 06

  Whipped uh when they got to Desert One and the thought of getting back in a helicopter and flying back to the aircraft carrier, they they didn't want no part of that. So I can't know, I don't know who gave them permission.

• 51:46Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 51:47Speaker 06

  To abandon those and why they weren't destroyed. Uh, our guys were considering going there to destroy those helicopters, but they were told to just, we need to get out of here. Uh, because like I say, the air, the fixed wing were running low on fuel. And of course, this even the accident delayed the aircraft there longer.

• 52:11Jack Murphy?

  So there's

• 52:14Jack Murphy?

  there's one story that you had shared with me. I that is not in Colonel, Colonel Beckwith's book, which would be kind of funny, except, you know, for the loss of life on the mission, where Colonel or Colonel Beckwith is ordering people out of the back of the C-130 and then the crew chief in the plane are ordering them out. So they're all going in like a circle up the ramp and then out the side door and around and around as they get yelled at by two people.

• 52:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was in Oman. When we got to Oman, when we got to Oman and they had one of the C-141s was set up as a medevac C-141. And so we were told, so we got to Oman, that's when we did a head count. Who was here, who wasn't there? We determined that we left eight people behind, you know, five Air Force, three Marines. And so, and like my team got split up during the, the accident. And so I didn't know who Bill's, Eric Haney and Bill Zumwalt were, where they were. Chris Abel and I were together on our

• 53:21Speaker 06

  aircraft. So not until we got to Oman, did I see Bill Zumwalt and Eric Haney.

• 53:31Speaker 06

  So know that they made it out okay. And so then we had to get on. So they told us, you know, we only had few medical casualties. The Air Force loadmaster and the two Marines, pilot, copilot Marines, but they had the whole C-141 with stretchers and stuff. We were told to get on that aircraft. Somebody on the ground told us that's the aircraft we're taking back to Egypt. So as we get on that aircraft, they're screaming at us and telling us to get out. So we go, we go in the aircraft and up the ramp and then we're leaving out the front door. And then they were told to get back in line. So there's a continuous circle of people getting

• 54:12Speaker 06

  in the aircraft and getting out. And also Beckwith, I was with it, standing next to Beckwith with Don Feeny. And Beckwith says, looks at Don and me and says, where's your weapon? And I said, my weapon is on that EC-130, you know, everything I, I just, this is all I got out with, you know, I didn't grab my weapon or anything. And he, he said, and a lot of people just abandoned, if you had, had your weapon physically in your hand, then you might have got out with it. But he, he said that, well, you're, you're stupid. Beckwith called Don Feeny

• 54:56Speaker 06

  and I stupid. And we're like, well, we may be stupid, but we're alive, you know? And he had heard that somebody had gone back into that aircraft and got their weapon out. He had heard that. Nobody that left that aircraft went back in that aircraft. But I, you know, that's just, that's Beckwith. He's a character. He'd fire you in a minute and then hire you back.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  Did, uh, did you leave your kevlar with the $10,000 on the aircraft?

• 55:30Speaker 06

  I did, my kevlar.

• 55:33Speaker 04

  When everybody else heard that story, did they all leave their $10,000 on the aircraft too?

• 55:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I had to sign a statement. That's what happened. But yeah, it truly, it got burned up.

• 55:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. Was there an anecdotal story of somebody who had fallen asleep and thought that the plane was airborne?

• 55:50Speaker 06

  Frank McKenna. Well, see, as we got in the aircraft, it all got, was dark. And the props were running. And when that helicopter, it almost felt like the brakes were being released. When the helicopter ran into us, at first I thought that that's the, we're releasing the brakes and we're going to start to move. But yeah, people were whipped and stuff. And Frank McKenna, he since, Frank since passed away with cancer. But Frank woke up and then saw the commotion. He saw the fire and he saw the people running out. And he said to himself, what are these fools doing? Cause he thought we were actually in the air. And we were jumping out. We didn't have parachutes.

• 56:35Speaker 06

  And, but he got in line with the rest of us and he just thought, you know, he's going to worry about getting out of this aircraft and then he'll worry about landing nicks, one thing at a time. So when he jumped out, he went out and he got flat and stable. Well, he hit the, he hit the ground and it knocked the wind out of him. And of course, people were walking over the top of him. He had to roll out of the way. But yeah, he actually thought we were in the air, but he jumped out with us because it wasn't no fun staying, you know, staying in that airplane. So that was Frank.

• 57:15Speaker 06

  And then, um, then another funny incident once we, we got in with the, you know, with the pilot and co-pilot and we're looking for something to give them. The only thing that we had that they gave us in our survival kit was Percocet. Yeah, or Percodan. And, uh, so, so I think it was Glenn Nico hollered out and said, uh, somebody check their E and E kit for any Percodan, you know? And, uh, Bruno Urbaniak turns to, um, I forget who he turns to, turns to, oh, Jim Switters, I think, and says, Nick, Nick says, we need the E and E to Percodan.

• 57:59Speaker 06

  And, uh, and Jim says, well, I'm not leaving this aircraft. So luckily Bruno, you know, didn't get off the airplane and head to Percodan, wherever that was.

• 58:11Jack Murphy?

  Right.

• 58:12Speaker 06

  But, but anyway, we got the morphine and that's what we needed instead of pills.

• 58:19Jack Murphy?

  So after, after, you know, what blew up in the press and was called the debacle at Desert One, you guys almost immediately went into planning, uh, a, a second attempt to go in and rescue the hostages.

• 58:33Speaker 06

  Yeah, we did, as, um, I think it was called Honey Badger. Well, let me get these, we had different operational names. Now, uh, for example, the, the planning for the Iran hostage rescue mission was called Rice Bowl in the beginning. And there's a little confusion with all these different names. But the reason we called it Rice Bowl was that if anybody picks up on what we're doing, they might associate it with some mission in Southeast Asia. So, so initially the planning phase was Operation Rice Bowl. And then the, the operational phase was Eagle Claw. And then we had, uh, the Honey Badger, which was the follow-up. And there was another code name to.

• 59:17Jack Murphy?

  Snowbird, baby?

• 59:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, Snowbird, yeah. And I think Snowbird was the part with the, uh, putting the, the rocket motors on, uh, a 130. That was Snowbird. And of course that. That plane just, they put these rocket motors on, I think, and tried to lift off with it.

• 59:39Speaker 11

  A lot of aircraft carrier.

• 59:41Speaker 06

  Yeah, not, not all the rocket motors fired and it's completely destroyed that C-130. They had all the rocket motors on. That was, they were going to land that in there and take it off with this. That was one plan. But they took the hostages and took them and moved them out to different areas, different prisons, and we never had intelligence to you, to do, do a second mission. How did the press find out?

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  To call it the debacle at Desert One, one, they had to know of the mission and two, they had to know of Desert One. How did they find out?

• 1:01:46Speaker 06

  Well, of course, the Iranian press was the first group of people there at the Desert One site. Today, it's a very popular tourist site. There's a building there, there's commemorative, and this time on April 24th, every year, they have a big celebration there. It's a big deal. You can see the wreckage of still there, the helicopter and this EC-130. And so the press were there, and of course, in the initial press reports, they said that

• 1:02:25Speaker 06

  the C-130 ran into the helicopter. When you first news, they were trying to figure out what took place here, and trying to put the pieces together. And in the beginning, they had it really all messed up when they were first reporting what actually took place there. So, yeah, I don't know, again, how Jimmy Carter came on and explained to the American people that he gave the order to do the mission, and the mission, there was

• 1:03:03Speaker 06

  casualties, and eight servicemen died. And of course, Jimmy Carter took full responsibility. I know, one of the things is, we went there to get 53 hostages, not 52 hostages. And I always hear 52, 50, 52. Because 52 was the end number that was released 44 days later.

• 1:03:32Speaker 06

  What, in this, this mission took place in April 24th, the night of the 24th, morning of the 25th. In July, one of the hostages, and his last name was Queen.

• 1:03:46Speaker 06

  Got really, really sick. And he, they released him. He had, um, MS. I think he was later diagnosed with MS. So he was released in Jul- in July. And then now there was 52 hostages. So 50, uh, so on the inauguration day, when 44 days, there was 52 hostages that were released at that point. But Queen was there when we were doing it. We were, we were after 53 of them.

• 1:04:20Jack Murphy?

  Uh, and, and just for viewers who are interested, it might also be worth pointing out that this is when the whole Argo incident happened as well.

• 1:04:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. Yeah. Cause some of the embassy employees were not in the embassy at the time of the takeover. And so they went, they had some safe houses and eventually they seeked, uh, help with the Canadian embassy. And, uh, and then the Canadian embassy assisted in getting these others that Americans out. What was it, nine of them? Nine of them?

• 1:04:52Jack Murphy?

  Eight, eight or nine. And it was, uh, Tony Mendez that, uh, went and got them out, I believe.

• 1:04:58Speaker 06

  Right. And it's, yeah, the movie Argo is very accurate in that, that part of the mission.

• 1:05:06Speaker 04

  Was, so at this time, Delta is a kind of a fledgling organization. Um, and, and I, I think that we'll probably go into like, how this affected the whole JSOC idea and things like that. But obviously this was a pilot error that caused this, but were there any repercussion? I mean, did, did any of this fall on Delta immediately? Like, okay.

• 1:05:33Speaker 06

  So there was a Holloway Commission was formed up to, um, investigate what happened.

• 1:05:42Speaker 06

  And they made a bunch of determination. It was mostly command and control, interoperability, be able to communicate with different forces. And to have a unified joint force that's trained together. So they made, so they came up with all these, what some of the stuff that went wrong, you know, by putting all these different organizations together. And so that was the genesis for the Joint Special Operations Command. So JSOC stood up on Pope Air Force Base,

• 1:06:21Speaker 06

  which adjoins Fort Bragg. And that's where JSOC formed up. And then 1992, I went over to, I served at JSOC from 92 to 99. I was still assigned to Delta, but I was duty at JSOC.

• 1:06:41Speaker 06

  And so, so because of the mission, JSOC stood up to, to, that was the Joint Counter-Terrorist Organization. And JSOC, one of the things they did was they did quarterly exercises, the Joint Training Readiness Exercises. And they did EDRs, Emergency Exercises. And so we put all these pieces together and had one headquarters, you know, Air Force, Marine, Navy, and Army in JSOC. And so in 92,

• 1:07:19Speaker 06

  I went over and I was a Sergeant Major from 92 to 96 in JSOC, the Exercise Sergeant Major. My job was to go out and find training sites, to exercise sites, to do these joint quarterly exercises that involved everybody, Rangers, Air Force, all the players, Navy SEALs, SEAL Team Six, Navy Dev Group.

• 1:07:49Speaker 06

  And then I, I was always going to, when I was there, I was always the controller on the Ranger target. So I was the safety controller for, for the Rangers, which I had, that was always a pleasure for me to work with the Rangers and it was a really great bunch of guys. So I, I really liked that.

• 1:08:10Jack Murphy?

  I was just gonna ask Mike, how did your experience from Eagle Claw, your lessons learned, how did that impact how you ran the training exercises and these readiness exercises down the line?

• 1:08:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, I wish we would have, I would have always wanted to do a joint training exercise that was Eagle Claw, the, the whole to redo Eagle Claw all over again. That was, I would have liked that to have been done. We never did that when I was there. I would have liked to see how, say, 10, 15 years later, how we would do Eagle Claw today at that time. And I think that would have been a great experiment to do, but we, we never did that. Most of our joint exercises was, you know, the Rangers always did the airfield seizure.

• 1:09:09Speaker 06

  That was always their piece of pie. And we always had a SEAL target and then a Delta target. And SEAL targets could be a ship that was underway. We did a lot of, you know,

• 1:09:30Speaker 06

  improvised nuclear devices type exercise. A terrorist group has a improvised nuclear device, or they've, they've captured a real nuclear device and fixed it up to make it an improvised nuclear device. So we would have to go in there and we'd take that and of course, NEST, the NEST, the Department of Energy, nuclear emergency search teams would be involved in those type of exercises. We did several, like Sun Dog was one of them. Mighty Derringer was another NEST with a nuke.

• 1:10:08Speaker 06

  Type scenario and we do, you know, biologic, you know, we might be a chemical biological facility that we have to take and destroy. So those were some of our JRXs.

• 1:10:24Speaker 04

  And this is 160th, the Special Aviation Wing got, was stood up around.

• 1:10:32Speaker 06

  After, after Eagle Claw, yeah, yes, the 160th Special Operation.

• 1:10:38Speaker 04

  Special Operations Regiment.

• 1:10:40Speaker 06

  Yeah. It stood up.

• 1:10:42Speaker 04

  And was that, I mean, I don't know if how, because you are an air wing, but was, was that a competitive thing for the Army to get? What, I mean, did, did, I mean, obviously, the Navy, the Marine, you know, Marine pilots on a Navy bird, it didn't, didn't work out and they were inexperienced and it's not, it's not really their fault because they didn't have that training up to that point.

• 1:11:06Speaker 06

  That's true. Navy, Navy 53s are different than Marine 53s. And they were, and when you have a, if you're in a Marine 53 and you have a blade indicator malfunction light, come on, what they, they have nitrogen in, in the rotors and the blades. And if there's a crack, the nitrogen leaks out. I guess it's a radioactive nitrogen. A sensor goes off saying, you got a cracked rotor blade. Marine helicopters, you got, you got to land, that immediately land that helicopter, the blade indicator. Not so, I guess, with the Navy ones. You could still fly the Navy ones with a blade indicator. That's what I've

• 1:11:51Speaker 06

  been told.

• 1:11:53Speaker 04

  And so, how, how did the, I mean, was it ever competitive? Or do you know how the Army got the gig? Or was it just because it was the Army working with a primarily Army, you have the SEALs, but, but it's primarily Delta and Rangers?

• 1:12:12Speaker 06

  I, I think they, they looked at the CH47s and figured that they could modify the CH47s, make them air refuelable, make them so that they have a larger carrying capacity.

• 1:12:30Speaker 06

  Cover a greater distance. So, you know, only the army was flying CH-47. So I think they, it was mainly, I would think it was aircraft driven. And then, of course, that, and after that Blackhawks came online after, and so we had, we used Blackhawks for the first time in Grenada. And that's another story. We went in with six Black Hawk helicopters there at Richmond Hill Prison. And I tell you, we lost one of our helicopter number four was shot down. But had those been six Huey helicopters there in Grenada, all six

• 1:13:14Speaker 06

  of those helicopters would have, we would have crashed all six helicopters because they, they shot us up pretty bad. They had ZSU-23s that they were shooting at us, 12.7s and 7.62 we were hitting from both, from the Fort Frederick that was shooting to us at Richmond Hill Prison. And then the people came out from the prison and were shooting up at the bottom of our helicopters and bullets were going through our helicopters. But we had self-sealing fuel tanks in those Blackhawks. And that was amazing. Those, I really liked the Black Hawk helicopters compared to the Hueys. But that was our first use

• 1:13:59Speaker 06

  with those. And of course, after Grenada, you know, we had, still had interoperability problems with Grenada, talking to the Marines, talking to the Navy. So, and that's where US SOCOM was, they did another investigation and formed the US Special Operations Command formed after that.

• 1:14:22Speaker 04

  So what is the difference for, for our viewers? What is the difference? So Joint Special Operations Command stood up after Eagle Claw. And then Grenada happens, was that 84?

• 1:14:33Speaker 06

  Eighty-three, October 83.

• 1:14:36Speaker 04

  So that happens?

• 1:14:38Speaker 06

  October 23rd.

• 1:14:39Speaker 04

  So, so that happens in October of 83. And then what, and then, so then they come up with, SOCOM, what, what's the difference between the two organizations? Why, why the need for the two of them?

• 1:14:55Speaker 06

  Well, USOCOM is a, JSOC is basically a black unit. Okay, it's, it's primarily, the assets are what we call black, not black units. What black soft. JSOCOM is both black and white. It's a broader spectrum. In JSOC, you really have the, like SEAL Team Six, you got Delta, you got the Rangers. Whereas with USOCOM, you've got the US Army Special Operations Command, you've got all of the SEALs. It's, and it's a four-star position.

• 1:15:39Speaker 06

  JSOC, I believe now, is a two-star position. Is that, I think, today?

• 1:15:47Jack Murphy?

  I believe.

• 1:15:48Speaker 06

  Yes, a two-star, whereas USOCOM's a four-star.

• 1:15:52Speaker 04

  So, so JSOC is a smaller, it's a smaller element. Do the, did the units in JSOC, do they also fall under SOCOM, or are they two separate things?

• 1:16:04Speaker 06

  Yeah, we fall under USOCOM. JSOC does. JSOC is more of an operational organization. It, it controls whatever missions are going on, on the ground. Whereas USOCOM is the larger four-star SINK command. And, you know, it, it lets, like, JSOC run the missions. There's a real good book out about JSOC. I'm trying to think of the title of the, the book.

• 1:16:46Speaker 06

  But I, I read it and it's an excellent.

• 1:16:51Jack Murphy?

  Are you talking about Relentless Strike?

• 1:16:53Speaker 06

  Relentless Strike, that's an excellent book. Have you read it?

• 1:16:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, yeah, that's Sean Naylor's book.

• 1:17:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, great book. So I recommend, if you want to know more about JSOC, that's the book to read.

• 1:17:09Jack Murphy?

  And you also mentioned that there's a new book out about Eagle Claw that really fleshes out the operation in a way that's never really been done before.

• 1:17:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have, let me go get a copy of it right now.

• 1:17:20Jack Murphy?

  Sure.

• 1:17:22Jack Murphy?

  Guys, thank you for watching tonight live with Sergeant Major Mike Vining. We're gonna get right back to him. But again, thanks for joining us live and please remember to subscribe. Okay, this is it.

• 1:17:34Speaker 06

  That's, that's the book right there. And it is a by Osprey. It's part of the Raid series, which excellent Raid series. And Justin Williamson put this together. It's got a lot of photographs in it, illustrations, you know, so this, this book came out for the 40th anniversary of Eagle Claw. And Colonel Nightingale, do you, you know?

• 1:18:03Jack Murphy?

  Keith Nightingale.

• 1:18:04Speaker 06

  Huh?

• 1:18:05Jack Murphy?

  Keith Nightingale.

• 1:18:06Speaker 06

  He's got a brand new book, I think comes out in August.

• 1:18:10Jack Murphy?

  Really?

• 1:18:11Speaker 06

  Yeah. And it's, it's on Amazon. You can preorder. I can't, I got it on my want list. Because I knew him working with the Rangers. And he's got Eagle Claw and all the other, you know, Grenada and, and, and books. I think that one comes out in August.

• 1:18:29Jack Murphy?

  All right. His name's going on my list for potential guest.

• 1:18:32Speaker 04

  Future guest, August guest.

• 1:18:34Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:35Speaker 04

  Um, but we have some questions that we should probably get to because I haven't been, so Alex, thank you, Alex. First off, thank you, everybody for joining us. Please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already and hit the little bell for your notifications. Alex, thank you. Alex, Sergeant Major, Alex wants to know, what is it like being the ultimate life form?

• 1:19:00Speaker 06

  Ultimate life form. I'm just an average guy, but you know, I just wanted to do something different when I was in the Army. And I had spent 10 years in EOD. I, I wanted to go into Special Forces. I had put in for Special Forces as a medic. I had a school day to be a Special Forces medic. But then I got the phone call that they formed up the unit in Fort Bragg, a new unit. They wanted six EOD people as part of the, the unit to be operator qualified. So I put, you know, being a Special Forces medic, I

• 1:19:41Speaker 06

  went to Fort Bragg for the interview. And two weeks later, I was in, starting OTC.

• 1:19:49Speaker 06

  Operator Training Course.

• 1:19:51Speaker 04

  And, I mean, how did they sell the unit to you? I mean, were you aware of blue light at the time? Like, how did they differentiate themselves between, you know, Delta and Special Forces?

• 1:20:04Speaker 06

  Well, I called up and talked to somebody there at the Stockade. And I just knew that they were forming a special unit and they wanted six EOD people. And, you know, peacetime, you know, I've been Vietnam and this is post Vietnam EOD. We're doing range, you know, you know, grenades at the grenade range at Fort Leonard Wood. I wanted something different. And so I went for the interview, flew there. And then they talked to me about what they were trying to do. And so two weeks later, I got PCS orders to Fort Bragg. It sounded really interesting.

• 1:20:50Speaker 06

  We had in OTC one, we had six EOD guys try out. Only two, two of us made it through OTC one. And then in OTC two, we had another six EOD guys and only two made it through that part. And then, of course, we went to, we got there late. They had already run the selection assessment course and we were going into the operator training course. But under the thing, we had to go through the selection assessment. We had to pass that. So in the fall of 78, we all went through the selection assessment course and only three of us passed the selection.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  So you went to OTC before, you went to the operator trainer course before you went?

• 1:21:33Speaker 06

  We did it backwards. We went to OTC first, five months of OTC. Then I, then I went to the, in the fall of 78, went to select, I didn't, we had two back to back selection courses in fall of 78. I got pulled on the first selection course after about five days because my times were slow. So I got pulled. I had to go in and talk to Colonel Beckworth. Colonel Beckworth says, you want to stay here? And I says, yes, I do. He says, well, you're going to have to go through selection again. So within the, so the, the next selection course, I went through and I passed it.

• 1:22:10Speaker 04

  Wow.

• 1:22:11Speaker 06

  Uh, and then I went to airborne school because we, we were all legs. So, and that, so in the spring of 79, I went to seventh group at Fort Bragg was actually running an airborne course. So I went through airborne school at Fort Bragg with seventh group.

• 1:22:29Speaker 04

  That's amazing.

• 1:22:30Speaker 06

  We did things a little backwards.

• 1:22:32Speaker 04

  Uh, David Maynor, thank you, David. Uh, when the Chuck Norris movie came out, I'm assuming it means Delta Force. When the Chuck Norris movie came out, did you guys know about it? And did you get a group together to see it?

• 1:22:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, we, we knew about it. Uh, Chuck Norris, you know, John Wayne was an iconic figure and Martha Ray, um, were for special forces.

• 1:22:57Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:22:57Speaker 06

  Uh, Chuck Norris wanted to be our special movie star and Beckwith had nothing to do with Chuck Norris. Chuck Norris tried to contact us and Beckwith just didn't want anything to do. Of course, you know, uh, also, uh, after Eagle Claw, we got a lot of letters actually came to the unit, people writing in thanking us. So when you, we had staff duty, we would go through all the letters and read them. There was people that wanted Beckwith's autograph, uh, but he did not do any autographs.

• 1:23:33Speaker 04

  Now, you, you were a top secret unit and people were sending you letters?

• 1:23:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I don't, I don't know how they addressed them, but they, you know, we had a regular post office box there at Fort Bragg. And, uh, so we, yeah, we'd get all these letters and we'd read them at, when we had staff duty at, at night.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  That's pretty cool though. So you had John Wayne as, as the iconic SF guy. Then Chuck Norris wanted to be the Delta guy. And then we had what Nicholas Cage as the Ranger in Air America, or not Air America, but, uh, Con Air.

• 1:24:04Speaker 06

  Uh huh. Um, but yeah, Chuck Norris never got through the door.

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  No. So was the movie not well received?

• 1:24:14Speaker 06

  It was pretty hokey. Uh, you know, uh, it had nothing to do with Eagle Claw. It had more like, uh, you know, there was some hostage plane hijacking, some hostages and, but, um, yeah, it was, it was entertaining.

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, Matt, thank you very much. Zach, thank you very much. He just donated with no questions, I don't think. And then Jonathan W., did Mike know Ronnie Strahan, S.T.R.A.H.A.N.?

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, the name sounds familiar.

• 1:24:48Speaker 04

  He is Jonathan's cousin.

• 1:24:52Speaker 06

  Yeah, the name sounds very familiar, but I can't say how I can place him.

• 1:24:59Speaker 04

  DJ, thank you very much for $2 donation. Thank you for sharing your experience. Is there anything you can share about the rumors about a possible Laos mission for MIAs in the early 1980s? Commander Major Haney mentioned it in his book as after concurrent with Desert One.

• 1:25:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was always, we always had that mission. We had a planning cell for the POW. If we ever found in Southeast Asia, any of our POWs were still being held for whatever reason, because they may not have been, we felt that they may not have been considered POWs. If they had committed a crime, then they would be char, say they killed a guard or something like that, then you lose your POW status and you're a criminal. And, or whatever, for whatever

• 1:25:56Speaker 06

  reason. So we always had a cell that was looking into, I was never part of that planning cell, but we had several of these planning cells for different, all different kinds. And our unit, only a small number of people would be privy to these, any of these operations. They would, you'd be read into the program, and then when you left the program, you'd have to be read out. So, yeah, but I, as far as, you know, because who was that, the ex-special forces guy?

• 1:26:38Speaker 04

  Oh, um, Bo Gritz.

• 1:26:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, Bo Gritz. Yeah.

• 1:26:46Speaker 06

  I don't think we ever got anywhere. None of that stuff ever panned out. We had a lot of missions that we would spin up for, you know, like that lost pilot during the first Desert Storm with whether or not he was being held prisoner.

• 1:27:06Jack Murphy?

  Oh, yeah, I remember this.

• 1:27:07Speaker 06

  Yes, I'm trying to remember his name. And we would always plan on that. We were even planning on going to the his aircraft crash site and searching that in Iraq. But we never, we never did do that. But that was, but he was determined that he was killed in that plane crash.

• 1:27:29Speaker 07

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• 1:27:44Speaker 08

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• 1:28:56Speaker 04

  Did you have many Sante raiders either in the unit or that were part of that had the input?

• 1:29:05Speaker 06

  We had two. Jack Joplin was our medic, chief medic, and he was a Sante, on Sante mission. And we also had Dick Meadows. And those were the two Sante people that we had.

• 1:29:23Speaker 04

  Interesting. And for, I mean, for those who don't know, what's the book on Sante? Is it direct? No, that's synthetic. But it is Sante.

• 1:29:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:29:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's a good-

• 1:29:33Jack Murphy?

  Operation Ivory Coast, I think.

• 1:29:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, it sounds right.

• 1:29:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, so, yeah, about the Sante raid and-

• 1:29:43Jack Murphy?

  There's also, there's also a book out that I just became aware of about JSOC planning a potential POW rescue mission in Laos for, you know, POWs from the Vietnam War. And I ordered it, I haven't read it yet, but I guess I'll, I'll get back to you with, if there's anything in there that's useful.

• 1:30:04Speaker 04

  Ian, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Sergeant Major, for sharing your experience with us. We truly appreciate it. Hopefully you understand GWOT humor. Here goes, could you beat Chuck Norris in a fight? Because, yes.

• 1:30:19Speaker 06

  Nah, I don't think so. I think he's got more moves than I got. I'm a demo guy. You know, if it has to do with explosives, that's, that's it. I could outdemo Chuck Norris with explosives. I know, so.

• 1:30:35Speaker 04

  There you go. Chester Brown, thank you very much. And he's just said, thank you guys for your service. Gordon Bradbury, thank you. Good day. It's an Australian, it's an Australian donation. So he starts out with, can I- Good day. Who can do good day?

• 1:30:53Speaker 06

  Good day, mate.

• 1:30:54Speaker 04

  Good day, mate. Alright. Um, I just know, uh, look at the size of that Guiana. Guiana. Anyway.

• 1:31:00Speaker 06

  Guiana.

• 1:31:01Speaker 04

  Guiana. Uh, did you get any TD, did you get any TDY trips to Hereford, UK? Or down to Perth, Australia for some decent Aussie beer?

• 1:31:12Speaker 06

  Uh, uh, yeah, Hereford. I've been to Hereford several times, working with the SAS. I did a lot of stuff. The first time I climbed, uh, Mount, um, Denali, Mount McKinley at the time, Denali today, was with nine guys from the SAS. They invited, uh, a couple of us got, uh, Americans to go with them from Delta. I was the only one. So, so the first time I climbed it in 1990, was with nine Aussies, I mean, nine Brits from the SAS, 22 SAS. Um, I've worked with the New Zealand SAS, uh, been to New Zealand twice, working with them when I was in,

• 1:31:52Speaker 06

  uh, they, they used to have an exercise every other year called Gone for One. So it's a joint exercise between the Malaysian Scouts, the Australian SAS, the New Zealand SAS, uh, the British SAS, the British SBS, uh, and then we had the CC, the Air Force CCT guys, um, and, uh, we had the SEALs and Special Forces, Delta. We, and every, so we used to have those exercises. And so I went on one of those in New Zealand

• 1:32:35Speaker 06

  and worked with the New Zealand SAS and did some climbing with the New Zealand SAS down in the South Island. Did mountain training. When I was in B Squadron, we had different troop, different teams in B Squadron. I was an assault troop, but we had like mobility troop, air troop, water troop, mountain troop. And so I, I was on the mountain team in, in, uh, Delta. And so we did mountain training all the time. So we were doing skiing when, uh, Eagle Claw happened.

• 1:33:11Speaker 06

  I was out from Grenada happened, I was out rock climbing at Leavenworth, Washington, doing rock climbing when we got called back for Grenada, so.

• 1:33:23Speaker 04

  Did you, for, what were the similarities and differences between Delta, the Australian SAS and the British SAS?

• 1:33:35Speaker 06

  Hmm, I really don't know too much with the difference between the two Australian and British SAS. They all have their selection and assessment things, but the New Zealand SAS guys, a lot of them, great majority of them were of Maori descent. They, they did really well for selection assessment. And they were, they did, you know, of course, the British SAS does it in the Beacon Hills. And we copied, we copied everything from the Brits, Delta did from the SBS.

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  During OTC one, we had instructors from the SAS, teaching us how to shoot and a lot of things. And so our selection assessment was modeled under theirs. The New Zealand SAS, they do it more in the North Island, in the more of the tropic swampy areas and, and stuff like that. But I was really impressed with the New Zealand SAS guys that I worked with.

• 1:34:45Speaker 04

  Fascinating. Oh, and since you have been to Hereford, can you answer the universal question of what color is the boathouse?

• 1:34:53Speaker 06

  What color is the what?

• 1:34:55Speaker 04

  The boathouse.

• 1:34:56Speaker 06

  Hmm, I don't know.

• 1:34:58Speaker 04

  Never mind. Rod of God, thank you for the donation. And that, oh no, and Alex, thank you. What was it like to work with Kate McBrier and Larry Vickers? What does Delta do better than other spec ops units in the US or other, or any other military?

• 1:35:18Speaker 06

  Yeah, I knew, I knew Larry Vickers. And who's the other one?

• 1:35:22Jack Murphy?

  Katie, Katie was in Blue Light, so I don't think Katie didn't cross paths.

• 1:35:28Speaker 06

  Oh, okay. I know Larry Vickers. What we do different?

• 1:35:34Speaker 06

  You know, we work closely with the SEAL Team Six. I, the, in two areas that we work closely with are sniper observers, cross-trained with both units, and our breachers. And so I was a breacher, I was EOD, but I was also a master breacher in Delta. And I was, for a while, for many years, I was in charge of the breaching R and D research. And when we did a breaching trip, research trip, whether it was SEAL Team Six was doing it, Delta was doing it, or the FBI hostage rescue team was doing it, all three of us worked together.

• 1:36:16Speaker 06

  So if I did a breaching R and D trip of how to get through, I'm looking at getting through some concrete walls with rebar and stuff like that, coming ways to defeat that, then the SEAL Team Six breachers and the HRT breachers would be on the same trip. So we cross-trained in those areas really well. Um, you know, SEAL Team Six guys, you know, their forte is, you know, water ops, um, and operating close to the shore, and, you know, and, and of course, we, you know, our, our

• 1:37:01Speaker 06

  stuff's more inland stuff, but we, you know, we did have water teams and we did a little bit of water stuff, but, uh, we, you know, we just have our own niche.

• 1:37:12Speaker 04

  Do, um, how, how, I mean, I, when, when JSOC was being formed, or maybe later on, because there's a lot of mission creep now, but was it still, was, was there a lot of mission creep then, where people competing for the same job, you know, different units?

• 1:37:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, there was some of that, whether they felt that Delta was being favored, or SEAL Team Six might have felt that Delta was being favored for certain missions over them. But, you know, we all had our special thing. And so, you know, you put the right unit to do the mission, and if it was more of how we were trained, we would never think of trying to do a maritime mission, or trying to board some cruise ship that was cruising, you know, at 14,

• 1:38:13Speaker 06

  15 knots, and try to board on a cruise ship. And, you know, so we all had our different specialties, but certain things that we cross changed, like I said, with the snipers, observers, and with the breachers, those two, we trained together. And we did a lot of training. So...

• 1:38:41Jack Murphy?

  Mike, you know, before we move on, and I don't know if there'll be a few more questions, but I definitely wanted to get in there. Going back to Eagle Claw, now that we've come up on 40 years, what do you think the legacy of that mission is all these years later, you know, both for special operations, and maybe for you and, you know, your fellow operators personally, when you look back on it?

• 1:39:06Speaker 06

  Well, you know, it was, yeah, we felt confident in Eagle Claw, our part of the mission. We knew if we could get to the embassy, we would be successful. We trained so hard in that. I even would dream about it at night when I was asleep, you know, going through and up that stairs, and, you know, on the second floor, and searching the rooms.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  So it was real disappointing when we knew we could be successful, and we never got a chance to do what we were trained to do.

• 1:39:45Speaker 06

  And but the legacy, of course, was there was a lot of, we had a lot of issues, a lot of problems. And of course, we already talked about JSOC being formed to solve some of those joint issues that we had interoperability issues. And then, of course, after Grenada, we had USOCOM. And so, you know, when Desert Storm came out, you know, we were given the scud hunting mission in Western Iraq, along with the with the British SAS. So they divided, we divided the pie up between them and us to do the scud hunting. What, you know,

• 1:40:29Speaker 06

  we were not very successful in finding the scuds and having them taken out. But just our presence there on the ground really prevented them from exposing those scud launchers. We were afraid, we wanted to keep Israel out of the conflict. And if they would have launched a couple scuds and hit Israel, then Israel got in there and that would have made things messy. But I think we did pretty good. We had an accident. A helicopter crash. Helicopter crashed into a, just outside the airfield. We were at a place called in

• 1:41:07Speaker 06

  Saudi Arabia called RR. It had a small hill, about the only hill around. And it was really, visibility was really poor. The helicopter came in. It was medevac in one of our guys, Sergeant Major Pat Hurley, had injured his back. And so we had two Delta medics on that flight, Otto Clark and Rodriguez. And they, the helicopter ran into the mountain and everybody on the, that mission on that helicopter died. Yeah, I had to go in and clean up that, all the ammo they had on that helicopter and destroy it.

• 1:41:49Speaker 06

  But you know, then now, you know, after that, probably the next mission we had was Haiti. And we operated off the aircraft carrier USS America, CV sixty-six. I, so that was the Joint Task Force headquarters. We had two-star general.

• 1:42:11Speaker 06

  Peter Schumaker was commander of the thing and we were going to invade Haiti and put the, reestablish the government in Haiti. So we had, had two teams of SEAL Team Six onboard that held on the aircraft carrier. We had, we had a whole battalion of Rangers from one battalion onboard. A company from another battalion and a platoon, I think, from a third battalion on, on that aircraft carrier. And we had, of course, Task Force One Sixty, One Sixty on there.

• 1:42:54Speaker 06

  And so I was the senior enlisted advisor. I was a senior ranking person enlisted on the aircraft carrier for the Joint Task Force. And that was interesting. We spent forty-four days on aircraft carrier operating off that. Of course, you know that we did not have to do a forceful seizure of Haiti.

• 1:43:21Speaker 06

  Former President Jimmy Carter, I'm trying to think who else was involved. Was it Colin Powell was involved? Anyway, they, they convinced the government that for a peaceful, peaceful, they would go to exile someplace and reinstate the government. And so that went pretty well. That was the first time we operated on a float forward support base on USA. And there was a lot of lessons learned to operate on the aircraft carrier.

• 1:43:56Speaker 06

  And, and that was in nineteen ninety Four? Four. You know, in my opinion, we should have been operating on an aircraft carrier during Somalia in eighty ninety-three. We should not have been at that airbase in Somalia, and that was a big mistake because every move we made operating off that was we were watched. And we should have been offshore and been flying missions in from offshore. And, but that's a lesson learned.

• 1:44:32Speaker 04

  When you said there were a lot of lessons learned while working off an aircraft carrier floating forward operating base, like what are some examples of those lessons learned?

• 1:44:42Speaker 06

  Well, we were like the air wing, the air component on the aircraft carrier. So when you, we had to, you know, we had to provide, I had to provide twenty-four KPs for the, for the, for the, for the galleys there on the ship. I had twenty-four hours, you know, twenty-four hours, seven days a week, I had to have twenty-four of our guys. So the Rangers came to me and every day I'd have two meetings. I'd take all the senior enlisted from all of the JSOC elements and all the ship's chiefs from the different compartments on the chief. And twice a day we would have meeting and we would iron out all the problems that we would have.

• 1:45:27Speaker 06

  And so the Rangers said that they would provide the KPs if I didn't sign them any other details on the ship. So I, the Rangers took over that. We had to do underway unwreps on the ship. So the SEALs said that they would do all the unwreps. They would have to move the cargo from the hangar bays to where they needed to go into stores. And so I had the SEALs do that. So everybody stepped up their part, but you know, we had to work out laundry issues because we've spent forty-four days on the ship. So we had in forty, so we had laundry issues, we had library issues, we had the weight room,

• 1:46:10Speaker 06

  you know, the gym. Our guys were actually breaking the gym equipment. And, you know, the only difference between a prison gym and an aircraft carrier gym is the prison gym is a better gym than the aircraft carrier gym, because our guys kept breaking all the gym equipment. So I told this guy, I says, you give me a list of all broken equipment, what parts you need, and I'll get them to you. The library guys wanted our guys to leave their ID cards when they checked out a book, to leave their ID cards. At any minute, we could be calling people up on deck, and we can't be going around. I said, I guarantee that if a guy checks out a book, you're going to get that book back. I guarantee it. And

• 1:46:52Speaker 06

  then I told all the Ranger Sergeant Majors, that book, if you get, your guys check out a book, it's going back. And, and so that kind of stuff. The ship has no tobacco policy ship. Well, the Rangers are dipping and chewing and stuff like that.

• 1:47:14Speaker 04

  They live on dip, yeah.

• 1:47:15Speaker 06

  Yeah. And, and so what, so what they were doing when they were on the flight deck, the Rangers were, and this is in the beginning, they have what you call pad eyes on the flight deck. A pad eye is where you lock down secure aircraft machinery, a couple, they got a crossbar thing with a hole, and that's where you connect to. Well, the Rangers were spitting in the pad eyes with their tobacco stuff. Well, before any air operations, you have to do a FODW walk, a foreign object damage walk. So anybody up on the flight deck, when you call, when they call a FODW walk, everybody gets online, and you walk the flight deck

• 1:47:57Speaker 06

  to look for washers, nuts, screws, anything. And every pad eye's got to be searched, in case, in case there's a nut or screw, because, you know, that could, during air operations, that could be the rotor washer, a jet could take that, and that could kill somebody or damage equipment. So you do a FODW walk. Well, in the beginning, Uh, when they called the fod walk, everybody would head down below deck. You not do, it's a, you're on deck when the fod walk calls. Uh, you, you gotta do a fod walk. You gotta walk deck. Well, when you're searching those pad eyes with tobacco juice was a, so I said to, it said that we cannot stop the Rangers from chewing and dipping at, at this time. You do not want to

• 1:48:42Speaker 06

  have a bunch of Rangers on board this ship without, you know, going through nicotine withdrawals. So we set up a special area on the ship, uh, sponsors six at the back of the ship where the Rangers could chew and dip all they wanted. We had events on, we had like a little Olympic, had to set up Olympic up. We had to keep the Rangers, Rangers, you have to keep busy. Otherwise you're just into trouble. So we had different things to keep Rangers busy, you know, uh, different things like, um, like a scavenger hunt type thing. Also where they can learn how to get around and move in the

• 1:49:23Speaker 06

  ship from one location to another, because the aircraft carrier can be quite confusing. You, you got all the different, uh, markings that you have in the ship that tells you where you are. And so it was a learning curve. Um, so some of our one sixtieth guys were putting decals on some of the Navy equipment, some of the stickers on Navy equipment. So then, so then the Navy started putting stickers on, uh, the helicopters and I said, you gotta cut that stuff out. Nobody's putting stickers on anything. And it, yeah. So whenever my telephone would ring, I always got

• 1:50:05Speaker 06

  bad news. I never got good news. I had, I had fights in the kitchens, some, some.

• 1:50:14Speaker 06

  Cookie to telling the range spec for Ranger to do something and that Ranger wasn't going to do it and next thing you know they go they start fighting.

• 1:50:26Speaker 04

  How did, how did the, the Army, the Ranger, especially Rangers and young privates, how did they adjust to, to Navy culture? Because it's very, it's very different, you know, like the officers in the Army and the officers in the Navy on board a ship, it's a different culture.

• 1:50:44Speaker 06

  Yeah, it is. It was problems, but we got a lot of them sorted out. It was a big learning curve. Then we had to figure out laundry, you know, we'd sign people to go down to the ship's laundry and do, do the laundry for your group and stuff like that. I did, I did, I did every detail on the ship. I personally did went down, did laundry. So I knew how the process went so that I could be able to say, okay, you know, I did it so you guys can do it. Um, yeah, Rangers were good. You just got to keep, you know, keep

• 1:51:21Speaker 06

  them busy. And that's the biggest thing. You know, this all is about rank on a ship. Like, you know, if you were like the ship store, for example, it, there's only so many people allowed in a ship store. I don't know, maybe three people can go in a ship store and everybody waits outside the ship store in line, except for if you're a chief, if you're, you know, E7 or above, you don't have to wait in line. You have, you can go and up there. So we were all standing out there. I mean, this is SEAL Team, this is myself, SEAL, bunch of SEAL Team Six guys. Everybody standing out there is E7 or above.

• 1:52:02Speaker 06

  And this Navy chief tries to cut in front of us and he said, hey, hey, hey, you know, get in the back of the line. And the guy says, you know, we're not wearing rank. And the guys says, Chiefs, Chiefs can cut in front of the line. We're all Chiefs here.

• 1:52:17Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:52:18Speaker 06

  In the back of the line.

• 1:52:19Speaker 04

  Well, because not only are they wearing their rank, but they're wearing a different uniform.

• 1:52:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:52:24Speaker 04

  Than everybody else.

• 1:52:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, it was, it was interesting. Um, I, I spent a lot of time with the ship's captain. We would actually, uh, him and I would then would get out when there's no air ops going on, we'd walk the flight deck and just talk with the ship's captain. I had, uh, I dined with the ship's captain several times. Um, got to really know, know him. And at the end of the, when this thing was done, so what we did was we, you know, we, we left, departed, um, North, Norfolk, Virginia on the aircraft carrier without the air, any

• 1:53:05Speaker 06

  air component. So then we flew down the Georgia coast and then, then one sixtieth flew on to the aircraft carrier off the Georgia coast. And then we steamed down to Haiti and then we did different drills. We had to do like man overboard drills where you had to count for everybody, had to do battle stations. We had to go through all that kind of stuff. So it was really different. And so I was the, like the senior enlisted advisor for the joint task force, but I was also safety during air operations. I put on a white jersey,

• 1:53:45Speaker 06

  had a helmet on, had my ears and I would be up monitoring safety on the flight deck for any operations for our guys. Cause you know, we had a bunch of army guys now flying helicopters on and off and, and make sure everybody's got the right equipment on there and. And so I've got a picture hanging up on the wall with with the USS America and all of our Army helicopters.

• 1:54:15Jack Murphy?

  That's really cool.

• 1:54:17Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:18Jack Murphy?

  Mike, we've got a couple more questions here. Jonathan, he said he wanted to add a little bit more context about Ronnie Strahan. He was a retired CSM out of SOCOM.

• 1:54:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:54:30Jack Murphy?

  And he said he was a son, he was also a Sun-Tai Raider. So he figured you guys knew each other.

• 1:54:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I did. I knew the name. I heard of him, but we never met. I don't think we've met.

• 1:54:43Jack Murphy?

  David asks, did you learn to breach with a night armaments master key? Do you know where the idea of putting a shotgun under the barrel of a rifle came from?

• 1:54:57Speaker 06

  Well, we had, we did, we carried, we carried 12 gauge shotguns and we had some 10 gauge shotguns that we would do for breaching, shooting locks and such forth like that. We used, you know, we came up with different explosive breaching charges using linear shaped charge, flex linear shaped charges. We used, one of the things we use is conveyor belt material, Goodyear 330B rubber conveyor belt material to absorb the, using that to, we put the explosives on top of that.

• 1:55:40Speaker 06

  The explosives then compresses the rubber. It distributes the force evenly out. And so, and we would do different charges.

• 1:55:51Jack Murphy?

  Like a platter charge.

• 1:55:52Speaker 06

  Well, yeah.

• 1:55:54Jack Murphy?

  Like a strip charge.

• 1:55:55Speaker 06

  Yeah, but, but using conveyor belt rubber.

• 1:55:58Jack Murphy?

  Yeah.

• 1:55:59Speaker 06

  And we use.

• 1:56:00Speaker 04

  Did you come up with that because like just applying the, the, whatever it was, uh, C4, C2, whatever you guys using would blow through the door. So, so you came up with the idea of using the strip, the rubber as a strip charge?

• 1:56:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's more of a kinetic thing. It distributes the, the, the, the, the force out evenly. You know, sometimes there's like maybe metal and reinforcing underneath that metal. But otherwise you put explosives on top. It's just going to punch through that.

• 1:56:32Speaker 04

  Right.

• 1:56:33Speaker 06

  Using a medium such as the cover belt rubber. And we found out that was the best kind of rubber is the Goodyear 330B. It had three layers of nylon cord through it. And sometimes we, we'd make fancy stuff. We would cut through certain areas, add more explosives to different parts of it. We'd make a sandwich type thing with it.

• 1:56:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:56:56Speaker 06

  Uh, and so that, that worked really well. We've, so we've, um, for hostage rescued, the FBI, they like to do a lot of water impulse charges using explosives and water. But you know, that's in a permissive environment where you've got water and you're right next to your structure and you can just take your bunch of water and fill it up. But if you're in a non-permissive environment, you're not going to be carrying extra water around. You're going to be drinking it, uh, to, so we, we, our stuff's more designed for non-permissive environments.

• 1:57:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:57:34Speaker 06

  So different thinking between the FBI.

• 1:57:37Speaker 04

  Well, you're like, using like an IV bag. I mean, it's heavier, right? It's heavier than just using the, like a Goodyear strip charge or something like that, which is just a really flexible charge. That's fascinating because you guys probably developed so many of the charges that are just like standard now.

• 1:57:54Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was, uh, it was amazing. I, you know, initially Beckwith did not want us to write anything down during his tenure as commander. We, he did not want, I don't know, he didn't want us to document anything.

• 1:58:08Speaker 04

  Mike, if you read in his memoir, he got that from the SAS because when he was over there, they believed you had to have it all up here. And if you couldn't hold it in your, in your brain, then you didn't need to be in the unit.

• 1:58:21Speaker 06

  Yeah, but that doesn't good when you start losing people, people are leaving.

• 1:58:25Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, you don't have the, um, the institutional knowledge gets lost.

• 1:58:30Speaker 06

  Right. So I, I actually put together the first breaching book in Delta, actually assembled it and every, every team breacher had a copy of the breaching book because our charges became so sophisticated, you know, we had different levels. We had four different levels of breaching charges. We had what level one breaching charge is a charge that's open source thing, you know, it's at the law enforcement does it every, you can find level one breaching charges on the internet and stuff like that. And so that, you know, so that was our level one. Level two stuff was starting to get more specialized where you

• 1:59:13Speaker 06

  know, some of our wall charges and stuff like that. Then we had level three charges where they were more complicated. We had, we have stuff that we can use to open doors on passenger aircraft, for example, if the doors are denied, if they tie down the doors, like one aircraft, they took the neckties, the Egyptian aircraft, they took neckties off the passengers and the exit, overwing exits, they use the neckties and tied them up. But we had charges that you could put on there and if they had them tied up, it

• 1:59:54Speaker 06

  would just snap the handle and the door would go in. So, you know, that was kind of like our level three stuff. Then we had level four stuff, which is limited to know stuff. Only a few people in the unit were privy to our breaching charges that we considered level for information charge. And that's, I'll leave it at that.

• 2:00:17Speaker 04

  Were you, were you doing, I, I, obviously you were exchanging techniques with like, uh, the FBI's HRT and the SAS.

• 2:00:24Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 2:00:25Speaker 04

  Um, and then experimenting, but then were you also consulting, I don't know, professor? Like we're, how, how were you gaining all this knowledge?

• 2:00:33Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. I also, I belong to the, I also became a member of the society of-

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• 2:02:08Speaker 06

  Explosive engineers when I was in the unit. And we had access to all the scientists, like at Lawrence Livermore,

• 2:02:21Speaker 06

  Fandia. And so we had all these, you know, Dr. Cooper, all these experts. We did a lot of testing out at Nevada Test Site. We do a little testing out there. We did testing at Socorro, New Mexico, out at New Mexico Tech.

• 2:02:46Speaker 06

  And so we worked with different people. And of course, we got to the point where all of our stuff was instrumented. We would have it high-speed cameras. We'd have pressure sensors and stuff like that. So we hired the Army Corps of Engineers Waterways Experiment Station out of Vicksburg, Mississippi. And so when we did any breaching R and D things, the Corps of Engineers instrumented all of our tests. Fascinating.

• 2:03:19Jack Murphy?

  Yeah, it's science.

• 2:03:21Speaker 06

  My budget was several million dollars. I had a seven to eight million dollar breaching budget.

• 2:03:27Jack Murphy?

  Well, you must have been like a kid in a candy store, Mike, because I mean, this is your, this is your thing. This is your passion.

• 2:03:33Speaker 06

  Right. Yeah, it was, it's really neat to be able to come up with that stuff. I mean, we had, one of our things was in Libya. Have you guys heard of Tarhuna in Libya? Gaddafi had these, had, in the mountains, the Tarhuna Mountains, he had bought two Swiss tunnel boring machines, like they did the tunnel under the English Channel. Gaddafi bought two of them, and he dug two parallel tunnels in this Tarhuna with this tunnel boring machine. And what he was going to do is set up a, a chemical production, this underground chemical

• 2:04:16Speaker 06

  production facility when Gaddafi was there. He had one set up at Rafta. Rafta was a small scale chemical. He made some mustard and different other things, but it was small scale. It was open. But he wanted to take this big, big production chemical agents underground. And we knew all this was going on. We could see the construction at Tarhuna and stuff like that. Now, he told the world that this was the great man-made water project. He told, the reason he bought these two tunnel boring machines was going to make water reservoirs for the town of, you know, for Tripoli and all that kind of stuff. But we knew that he

• 2:05:00Speaker 06

  was going to do these two things. He's going to make side channels in there and put it under. So, the plan was, when I was in JSOC, J3 Special Plan Sergeant Major, I was in charge of target defeat of hardened targets. Our goal was before he would set up a chemical production facility, we were gonna go in and destroy his tunnels. We were, and so, you know, tunnel boring machines are huge. And as they go in, they do the concrete, the reinforcing steel and stuff as they go in to the tunnel. And there wouldn't be nothing to destroy, except for the tunnel itself. We would have to implode the tunnel. So, we found the right, and this was on sandstone.

• 2:05:45Speaker 06

  So, we found the right sandstone out at New Mexico Tech, Socorro. I went all over the country looking at sandstone with the Corps of Engineers. We picked the sandstone there. So, we set up concrete, just exactly like the tunnel boring machines. And we'd go in with drilling machines and drill parallel holes outside of the concrete, between the concrete and the sandstone with these drilling rigs. And then we would pump in bulk explosives and actually implode these tunnels. It'd be a big operation. We would have had to gone in with hovercraft. We would, we planned on having garbage trucks full of slurry explosives. We would have drilling rigs, so we would go in.

• 2:06:31Speaker 06

  And so, this was, we were planning on doing all this. And then actually going and taking over the tunnels and imploding them. But anyway, somebody decided that it's better to tell the world what Gaddafi's up to. And so, it was announced to the world what he was doing. And then Gaddafi ceased operations because of the publicity and, and stuff like that. But that was gonna be a major operation. I was going into Libya and imploding. That would've been pretty cool, too. Yeah. So, we, we were trained on how to do, now, you know, today, now we have what we call a heavy breaching cell

• 2:07:15Speaker 06

  in, in the unit. And people to, because it started getting, breaching started to be a big thing.

• 2:07:23Jack Murphy?

  On that note, actually, someone asks if you have any experiences in Africa that you might be able to speak of, I guess aside from Libya.

• 2:07:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, the only thing I did, I did a couple tours in Sudan when I was in the unit in the early 80s. The president of Sudan was a guy named Namari at the time, and his vice president came over and talked to the United States and stuff. He wanted somebody to go, a team to go over and evaluate the presidential security of Sudan. So I, there's two of us from the unit that were part of that detail, Bud Morgan and myself. So we went with team and the other guys were from a unit called ISA.

• 2:08:16Speaker 06

  ISA is an intelligence security agency. It's the, it was a military intelligence cell that was set up at the time. And so we went in and we evaluated his security, all of his, looked at his palace, his, all this stuff. And then when I was there, they realized my background. And so I went and I looked at all the storage facilities.

• 2:08:54Speaker 06

  They had a plant there in Khartoum that made 9mm and shotgun, 12-gauge shotgun shells. So I went there and looked at the production, looking at safety and all that. And they had two ammunition storage areas there, and I tell you, that was a mess. You know, they... You know, everything was, I went into this powder magazine and, and I go in there, there's no lightning protection. There's, I go in there and there's pallets, wooden pallets with nails on it. There's, there's powder on the floor, loose powder on the floor. There's

• 2:09:37Speaker 06

  no static, no static electricity precautions where you have to ground yourself and wear non-sparking shoes and all this kind of stuff. And I go, I walked in there and I'm like, my gosh, just one spark, this whole thing would go, go off. Completely. In Sudan. And so I, I, I made, and they had, and then they showed me some Russian blasting caps and stuff like that. Well, they, the Russians don't shunt their blasting, electric blasting caps. For whatever reason, these were, these were electric blasting caps, all unshunt, unchanted.

• 2:10:18Speaker 06

  And it's just, so I made a lot of safety recommendations and stuff like that. So, we did this thing and I, I set up a, I proposed that they, they have a VIP IED search team

• 2:10:36Speaker 06

  that does presidential security sweeps, looking for improvised explosives. And I, I sent all this stuff up and told them what they needed. So when we left there, and normally, the, the, the agency goes in and would do the next phase, is go in there and train, take these people, whether they bring them back here to the States in a secure location or go there, they would train, they would, the agency is responsible for training that. But the agency was busy. So I was asked to go back into Sudan and train an army team to search for IEDs and to be able to dispose of IEDs. And so I went back into Sudan. And at this time, in Khartoum, they

• 2:11:21Speaker 06

  were having terrorist attacks. There were problems, the civil war was going on in Chad. And they were electronic timers, sophisticated electronic timer devices going off in the city of Khartoum at this time. So I worked with the Army EOD team there in Sudan. We had a call, they had a great intel network. I don't know if anything, the Sudanese had a good intel. Got a call where there's two suitcases of explosives coming into the airport. So we go over to the airport and they find these two suitcases, they're International Airport, and they take them into this room and big suitcases, they go click, click, and they

• 2:12:04Speaker 06

  open up the suitcases and they're full of Semtex explosives. Just packed full, nothing but Semtex explosives, these two suitcases. And I'm standing there watching them do this and I'm saying, you know, you intercept very many of these, next time you go click, click, and open, it's gonna go boom, you know. So I, you know, we had to bring in x-ray, they didn't have x-ray machines, we brought in x-ray machines. And I told them how to remotely open suitcases like these. I told them how to remotely open, to search cars and how to remotely open and search cars and how to do all this kind of stuff. So I taught

• 2:12:49Speaker 06

  them all that stuff. And then, of course, as soon as Nomari went to Egypt, they had a coup and he was out.

• 2:12:57Jack Murphy?

  I'm gonna, I mean, you've been very generous with your time, Mike. I'm gonna get, try to get through just a couple more questions here real quick. And then we still have the bonus segment to do. So thank you for being patient with us. One guy here is asking, is it accurate to say that the Brits trained Delta?

• 2:13:16Speaker 06

  I would say that would be good because we had instructors come in here. We had one guy named Ginger Flynn. He was a shooting instructor. They, they, they taught us how to shoot, how to double tap. That was a big thing that every, when we, every target, we would have to put two rounds into every target before we transitioned to the next target. To ensure that we had a kill, that came from the SAS. Um, one of the things we had to shoot is instinctive. We had to learn to, they took off our sights

• 2:13:54Speaker 06

  on our weapons. So like we had, our first weapon was an M3, M3 submachine gun, 45. That was our first assault weapons and they took our sights off that. And with an M3, you can trigger control two rounds really easy. Go to two rounds, two rounds, two rounds. It's really easy to trick, once you learn to shoot an M3 grease gun. And so that was our first assault weapon and we had to shoot three by five inch cards. So they would have instinctively shoot three by fives.

• 2:14:29Jack Murphy?

  Wow. At what range?

• 2:14:32Speaker 06

  Uh, it's close. It was all instinctive, like your room clearing. So it was all close quarter battle type instinctive shooting, but our targets were three by five inch cards.

• 2:14:41Jack Murphy?

  Max asks, Sergeant Major Vining, do you have any advice for someone who plans on enlisting in the army?

• 2:14:51Speaker 06

  Oh, well, it depends on your passion, you know. Um, you know, uh, you know, what, I, you know, I have a grandson in the army right now. He's with fifth group. He's, he's in a support. He's, uh, he's in one of the fifth group Italians, but he's a 91B. He's a wheel vehicle mechanic with fifth group at Fort Camel. So I have a grandson there. He wanted to, his passion was to, uh, work on vehicles, learn to trade so that when he gets out of the army, he had a scholarship to go to a tech school as a mechanic, but

• 2:15:35Speaker 06

  he chose to learn, went to the school at Fort Lee and strange, he's a 91B vehicle wheel mechanic. When I was in, a 91B was a medic.

• 2:15:48Jack Murphy?

  Al, I'm sorry, go ahead, Mike.

• 2:15:51Speaker 06

  But you can make the, I made the army whatever you want to make, and I think you go in with the right attitude, you can make it whatever you want to make it, and it's a great learning experience.

• 2:16:06Jack Murphy?

  Alex asks, what's your favorite thing that goes boom?

• 2:16:11Speaker 06

  Large stuff, big stuff.

• 2:16:16Speaker 06

  The biggest thing I blew up was in, was about 50 years ago, coming up to 50 years ago today, was the largest enemy, yeah, was the largest enemy ammunition weapons cache found in the Vietnam War in Cambodia. During May and June of 1970, Nixon authorized us to go into Cambodia. So that, so we went in there and of course, they had all their staging areas, their stockpiles and stuff. And this one cache was found by the first Cav, second of the 12th, it was, well, it was, it was the first of the ninth paint team actually found the cache site from, from

• 2:17:01Speaker 06

  a, an OH, was it OH-6 helicopter?

• 2:17:09Speaker 06

  And they found the stacks of ammunition in the jungle, and the second of the 12th captured the thing, became known as Rock Island East, you know, named after the famous arsenal in Iowa, Rock Island. There was over 300 tons, 320 tons of weapons and ammunition in these caches. There was several stacks of site, I think there was 28 stacks in the jungle on a trail that was a quarter mile long. And then we had to, they set up a perimeter and we had to set it up and blow. I was part of a seven man EOD team that flew in and we

• 2:17:53Speaker 06

  blew that up. It took us about six days to set, put explosives on it and set it up to blow. And now some of the ammunition and weapons were backhauled out. But yeah, that, we used 300 cases of C4.

• 2:18:12Speaker 06

  And we used 12 cases of detonating cord, there's 3,000 feet in each case. And so we had, we buried the detonating cord lines underground. And then, and then when we would withdraw, we had a two-ship HLZ. And we set up charges around the perimeter to go off at interval times to keep the enemy, because the enemy was out there wanting to retake back the rock, the cache site. So we had these charges to go off. And then when the last two helicopters came down, then we had 10 priming systems of 15 minutes each to make sure this whole thing go.

• 2:18:54Speaker 06

  And if they came in and cut one of our detonating cord lines, we had another detonating cord line to go at. So we pull our 15, our 15-minute fuses, the E8, myself, we run to the helicopter. And as we get to the helicopter, the captain on helicopter, he says, "Cut the fuse, cut the fuse, cut the fuse." So we run back out and we just cut fuses. So cut all our lines. We don't know what's going on. Go back to the helicopter and then he says, "Light it, light it," you know? And that, we didn't have no more fuse igniters, you know? So we had to go back or now we, our 15-minute lines are cut. We don't know what kind of time we got.

• 2:19:39Speaker 06

  So we're splitting, we're splitting time and fuse, we're putting a match head in and lighting, lighting it. And when you get a spitback, you can light a second one quickly off us. So we light a bunch of them. And then we get on the helicopter. And while we're lighting this stuff, our, now our primitive charges are going off. And so there's explosion. Well, these helicopter people have, don't have no idea what's going on. They think we're being mortared. And you can see they're bouncing, they're ready to leave, you know? And because they think we're taking incoming. So we, we light the things, we get on the helicopters. And then the helicopters can't lift off. We're too overloaded and, and, and stuff.

• 2:20:23Speaker 06

  So the door guard taps me on the shoulder, says, you, you, you get off, you have to get on the helicopter behind me. Well, we get off on the ground and, and they have the same problem. They drop off a couple of people and then these two helicopters take off. There's like five of us on the ground. And, you know, I'm the only EOD guy on the ground. The rest of the guys are infantry echo recon guys on the ground. We got the charges are burning and no other, and their helicopters just took off. So I was getting ready to go back and cut fuses again, because I don't want to be on the ground when this thing's off. And this other helicopter comes in and I don't, he was in orbit out there, comes

• 2:21:04Speaker 06

  in and picks us up and takes us out. And we're not very far away when it goes off. And it was pretty impressive. Uh, we did take some ground fire, uh, on taking off. And then it blew up. And I have slides of this too. And they could see our mushroom cloud from 50 miles away. And that was Rock Island East, largest ambulance.

• 2:21:30Jack Murphy?

  Unreal.

• 2:21:33Jack Murphy?

  The la- last question, then we.

• 2:21:37Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:21:51Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant. So I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:22:02Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 2:22:07Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:22:13Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart radio app today.

• 2:22:33Speaker 10

  You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite slots, live blackjack, live craps with a live dealer. New players $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again.

• 2:22:57Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:23:03Jack Murphy?

  We should probably start wrapping this up. Do you have any funny stories about inexperienced officers?

• 2:23:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, I see.

• 2:23:13Jack Murphy?

  It sounds like you just told one, actually.

• 2:23:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, I have a funny teammate. This guy, I'm gonna mention his name. He's a great guy and stuff like that. His name's Don Greer. He reminds me so much of Wile E. Coyote, you know, the character on Wile E. Coyote. When we were in New Zealand, we had to go, I was working with him, he was a sniper observer, and we were doing recon on targets. We're dressed in civilian clothes. Our cover was we were two schoolteachers from the United States. We were on bicycles and we were reconning different military sites and stuff like that.

• 2:23:56Speaker 06

  And Don, one of the things, we had to cut across, there's this creek or river with this big clay bank, and we had to cut, sneak, had to traverse across this thing to get to our target site, you know, without it being exposed to stay concealed. So Don starts going across this clay bank, and it was just like Wile E. Coyote. You could see him clawing, and as he starts to slide, his fingers were digging in, his toes were digging in, and he was clawing and sliding, and eventually he just went

• 2:24:35Speaker 06

  Down into the water splashing, just, I tell you, I was laughing so hard up on the hill. I was, my stomach was hurting. It was the funniest thing. It reminded me so much of Wile, it was something Wile E. Coyote would do. And so there were some other things like that, but I was, I had a blast with, with him.

• 2:24:59Jack Murphy?

  Mike, thank you so much.

• 2:25:03Speaker 04

  DJ, real quick, DJ, DJ left a comment. Uh, thank you. My father spent time in Sudan in the eighties, as well as a member of the African Nations Peacekeeper Mission, as well as the Congo. And he has similar stories about the craziness there, too.

• 2:25:17Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:18Jack Murphy?

  Yeah. Yeah. Thanks so much for joining us tonight, Mike. It's always a pleasure and really a lot of fun to, to speak with you. And, uh, and to hear some of these stories, especially, uh, it has a special importance because of the fortieth anniversary of Eagle Claw. Uh, I'm really glad we got to have you here and talk about that. Um, we kind of blew right through what I wanted to talk about for the bonus segment. So maybe like for that, if you don't mind, uh, Mike, we could talk about the Georgia prison riot and Operation Pocket Planner.

• 2:25:49Speaker 06

  Yeah, that was really interesting.

• 2:25:51Jack Murphy?

  We'll, we'll, we'll start that in a, uh, after we finish here, if that's okay.

• 2:25:56Speaker 04

  And if you want to see that, join us on Patreon. One dollar a month. One dollar a month.

• 2:26:01Jack Murphy?

  It's there. Um, so yeah, thank you everyone who joined us live. Um, thanks, Dave. Thanks again, Mike. Um, if you like what we're doing here, please subscribe to the channel, little subscriptions right down there. And, uh, you give us a little thumbs up and hit the bell icon so you get notified when we go live, uh, next time, next week. And on that note, our guest next week is a veteran of third special forces group, served a lot of time in Afghanistan. Has some really hairy stories, uh, guy I know, really good dude. Um, and I'm excited to have him here next Friday. And just a very last thing I have to say is please go and visit our sponsor for

• 2:26:41Jack Murphy?

  this podcast. It is High Speed Daddy and they make tactical equipment for today's dad. If you need lunch pails, if you need diaper bags, things like that that are made out of tactical nylon, they have all of it for you. It is at highspeeddaddy.com. And if you go there, you will get a 15% discount if you enter the discount code on your order. It's, it's just my name. It's Jack, J A C K. So, um, yeah, go check them out. And again, the link to our Patreon is down in the description as well. If you like what we're doing and you'd like to see us keep doing it.

• 2:27:19Jack Murphy?

  Thanks, guys.

• 2:27:24Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:27:38Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:27:49Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you, you're not alone.

• 2:27:54Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:28:00Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:28:21Speaker 10

  Hanging out at the pool is great. Relaxing and playing Vegas-style games on my phone at the same time. Drinking one hand and a blackjack in the other. It's all at Spinquest. Over 1,000 games, including your favorite slots and table games. Be cool with this summer special. New players get $30 coin packs for 10 at spinquest.com.

• 2:28:44Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:29:11Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:29:25Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:29:36Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:29:41Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:29:47Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:30:07Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Kris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players, a $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:30:31Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:30:46Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:31:00Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:31:11Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:31:17Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:31:22Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:31:43Speaker 12

  Oh, I have had no luck lately. Wait, lady luck?

• 2:31:47Speaker 02

  Brettsky, I got you. I've had so much luck on spinquest.com. They have all of my favorite games, slot games, live blackjack, craps, and bubble craps. You can even get a $30 coin pack for just 10 bucks.

• 2:32:01Speaker 12

  10 bucks for 30? I'm headed over to spinquest.com right now.

• 2:32:05Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:32:25Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At The Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:32:40Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:32:51Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:32:56Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:33:02Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At The Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At The Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:33:22Speaker 02

  Hey guys, Lady Luck here. I just love the fall season. Cris Mornings Pumpkin Spice Latte, and it's the best time to cozy up and play Spin Quest. They have over a thousand different slots in all my favorite casino-style games. And they're running a deal for all new players. A $30 coin package for just $10. So this fall, grab your favorite blanket, visit spinquest.com, and download the app today.

• 2:33:46Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:33:57Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast. A show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:34:12Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to "I'm deathly allergic", in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:34:23Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:34:28Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:34:34Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeartRadio app today.

• 2:34:54Speaker 10

  Happy birthday, America! It's time to celebrate and play your favorite Las Vegas casino games by American-owned SpinQuest.com. What's better than fireworks and American pie? Hitting a blackjack in the palm of your hand, and you won't lose your fingers. Over 1,000 games, including slots and live dealers. And $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. SpinQuest.com. Buy American players for American players.

• 2:35:18Speaker 03

  Spin Quest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:35:32Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:35:47Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:35:58Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:36:03Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:36:09Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more, because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:36:29Speaker 12

  What's up, everybody? It's Brezky. I just got done stealing candy from all of the kids in my entire neighborhood, and my stomach just hurts so bad I can barely get off my couch. But don't worry, I can still spend a thousand of my favorite slots and play all of the live table games I love on spinquest.com. New users get a $30 coin package for just $10. Go to spinquest.com or download the app today.

• 2:36:53Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:37:06Speaker 07

  Hi, I'm Jenna Oshkowitz. You might know me from Glee. This is At the Table, the food allergy podcast, a show about food, connection, and what it really looks like to live with food allergies. Each episode, we hear stories from real people like Daniel.

• 2:37:21Speaker 08

  People would always think I was lactose intolerant, so I just kind of shortened my explanation to I'm deathly allergic, in a big way that defined a lot of my childhood.

• 2:37:32Speaker 07

  And while there are challenges, there are moments that remind you you're not alone.

• 2:37:37Speaker 09

  One of the best guys that I dated, he made a point to memorize all my food allergies.

• 2:37:43Speaker 07

  So join us and hear their stories and more. Because living with food allergies isn't just about what you can't eat. It's about still having your seat at the table. Brought to you by Genentech and Novartis. Listen to At the Table, the food allergy podcast, on America's number one podcast network, iHeart. Follow At the Table and start listening on the free iHeart Radio app today.

• 2:38:03Speaker 10

  Happy birthday, America. It's time to celebrate and play your favorite Las Vegas casino games by American-owned Spinquest.com. What's better than fireworks and American pie? Hitting a blackjack in the palm of your hand, and you won't lose your fingers. Over 1,000 games, including slots and live dealers, and $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Spinquest.com. Buy American players for American players.

• 2:38:27Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit Spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:38:34Speaker 00

  She's been thinking about this sleepover all week, but I think about her food allergies all the time. Fortunately, her doctor prescribed Zolair, omalizumab. It's proven to significantly reduce allergic reactions if a food allergy accident happens.

• 2:38:47Speaker 01

  Zolair 150mg is a prescription medication used to treat food allergy in people one year of age and older to reduce allergic reactions due to accidental exposure to one or more foods. While taking Zolair, you should continue to avoid all foods to which you are allergic. Don't use if you are allergic to Zolair. Zolair may cause a severe, life-threatening allergic reaction called anaphylaxis. Tell your doctor if you ever had anaphylaxis. Get help right away if you have trouble breathing or if you have swelling of your throat or tongue. Zolair should not be used for the emergency treatment of allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis. Zolair is for maintenance use to reduce allergic reactions, including anaphylaxis, while avoiding food allergens. Serious side effects such as cancer, fever, muscle aches and rash, parasitic infection, or hardened circulation problems have been reported. Please see Zolair.com for full prescribing information. Ask an allergist about Zolair. This is an advertisement for Zolair,

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  paid for by Genentech and Novartis.

• 2:39:34Speaker 10

  You know what? It sucks to be bored. But when I get on my phone and play real casino games on Spinquest.com, the time flies by. That two-hour wait at the DMV seems like 10 minutes. Play your favorite slots, live blackjack, live craps, with a live dealer. New players, $30 coin packs are on sale for $10. Play Spinquest.com and you'll never be bored again.

• 2:39:57Speaker 03

  Spinquest is a free-to-play social casino. Void where prohibited. Visit Spinquest.com for more details.

• 2:40:04Speaker 13

  Monday night brings one more big matchup to settle into. And when every play matters, the last thing you want to do is step away to figure out dinner. That's where DiGiorno comes in. Get a DiGiorno pizza ready before kickoff, then enjoy restaurant-quality taste fresh from your own oven while you stay locked into every play. Stock up on DiGiorno over the weekend so when Monday night rolls around, the only thing you sweat is the game. Shop now at the link in the episode description. It's not delivery, it's DiGiorno.