Cleared Hot Episode 188 - John Stryker Meyer and Mike Glover

ladies and gentlemen got a hell of a show for you today but before we get into that please join me as we discuss briefly the brands that make this podcast possible this episode is brought to you by babel and perhaps you have travel abroad playing for this year or this summer and you need to learn a language for your destination you can do so with babel the number one selling language learning app from ordering in restaurants or asking for directions or just to gain a deeper understanding of the culture babel makes the whole process of learning a new language addictively fun and extremely easy bite-sized lessons you can actually use in the real world babel is a can't miss travel essential a lot of things i like about this my favorite those short 15-minute lessons that make it a perfect way to learn a new language on the go unlike the language classes we likely all took in high school babel is designing their courses with practical real world conversations in mind stuff you need for 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guilt-free cereal at magicspoon.com cleared hot and use the code cleared hot to save five dollars off that's it let's talk about my guest today god damn this episode was amazing i was linked up with mr john striker meyer through jocko actually i'll take a step back i was introduced to him by listening to him on the jocko podcast i couldn't believe it when we started directly communicating and then he agreed to come up and record an episode now he was a green beret specifically a green beret that served in the mac v sog in the vietnam era which i know very little about but i know another green beret i know quite a few green braves actually but this one mike glover a repeat guest on the podcast phenomenal human being is more of what i would say is the modern era of green beret and i could think of nothing better than getting somebody from the vietnam era and somebody from the global war on terrorism era getting them together and talking about whatever we want to and that is what episode number 188 is all about let's get into it clear hot episode 188 with john stryker meyer also known as tilt and mike lover enjoy okay [Music] okay i'm looking at danger close now they gave me a commission at the 12 year mark if you can believe that that's how i knew without a shadow of a doubt that the military advancement system was completely broken did jaco get a commission too yeah but he got well i guess both of the commissions were real he got an education before his commission oh okay he went to college and i think the navy paid for his but was he a seal before he was oh wow he was an enlisted seal before i think he started off as a calm guy oh wow okay so he's an old school dude kind of old like 80s oh yeah oh yeah oh yeah we're talking full oakley blades oh they're a team guy wow yeah and then that's before ramadi yeah oh yeah this is this is before 2000 the tightest of the tight shorts is this charlie sheen error ish he was post post charlie sheen yeah but because ramadi was 2006. that's that's where that was 06. but he came in jacob came into i'd have to say the 90s he came into the military okay oh okay that'd be my guess early 90s yep yeah that makes sense that would be my guess where the hell did we even begin well this coin is amazing it is thank you so much for that john it's my honor tilt is your call sign right yes that's my nickname till that's so awesome yeah rattling pinball machines when you are not appreciative of the results well you see when you guys lose you walk away pissed when i get when i lose i shake this [ __ ] out and see my name in neon and then i walk away fair indeed um i mean the best way i think to describe that coin mike you let me know is if you could john perhaps give us a history of mac v song where it actually comes from and what it was sure we can give the quick thumbnail sketch to get in yeah um our government and its infinite wisdom in the early days of the southeast asia conflict in vietnam it uh entered into a treaty or a pact accord of some kind because um after the ambient foo fell in 1954 the communists were still moving people south because south vietnam was independent corrupt issues of course but anyways those were our that was our future ally so our government and an agreement that we would withdraw all of our combat troops from cambodia and laos and the north vietnamese the calmness being the honorable scumbags that they are had all agreed publicly on and of course um by that time they had been coming down the ho chi minh trail for several years bringing down the trails expanding it because they knew that things were moving forward and our presence was continuing to support south vietnam they continued to influence anything they could to work against the sitting government because you know the communists will do anything to take it over so um in 1964 by that time our government withdrew the troops our white operation white star our green berets that are in laos but were all withdrawn and were they there publicly at that time this was uh like uh i don't want to say uh i guess would be an unclassified operation like everybody knew they were there yeah they they knew they were there but there was no they didn't talk about it much this is under eisenhower before kennedy gets in then under kennedy that withdrawal because kennedy and his administration believed whatever they thought but anyways the bottom line was by 1964 they said we need to have cross-border operations and of course this the uh the calmness in our state department tied our hands in the very beginning and for across the border missions in the cambodia they said you can only go with five men you can't carry american weapons and even in cambodia as late as 1968 we still had no attack air the majority of times with just helicopter gunships that's cambodia so 64 the sequel work kicks off it ends in 72 it's an eight year sequel war had a chief sog who was the overseer of it always worked with the air force to get our assets in and by the time i arrived in 68 that war had been going on for four years and uh there by that time they were developing uh sag hunter killer teams that were designed and trained to when we were on the ground in laos of cambodia their job was to find us and kill us anybody and just to kill the americans not dean ditch and um that's an interesting mind [ __ ] oh yeah to sow discontent distrust weird the indigenous people came back but the americans are dead yeah that'd be a tough one you're taking you're taking trust equity out of the bank account probably unintentionally but that's going to be very effective amen so by jan on january 1st 69 when our first team got hit on the morning of january 1st 69 three americans are wiped out and the indigen escaped they went back picked up the bodies and then that psychological impact hit and like in my case we were lucky because our team was really tight our team i entered the sequel war in may of 68 came into camp our st idaho disappeared sort of instant opening in recon that's how i started spider parks had been the team leader so he was on the old team he just got promoted so he missed that mission and fortunately for the team our interpreter hep and sal who was a counterpart they were they didn't go on admission so we built the team around them in sog itself the the mcv song was that built from the green beret community is that the inception of that right in the very beginning there were navy seals that ran some recon and saw i got a contour in the early days and then there was like a photo shoot and they're like we got to get out of here [Laughter] no more hair gel we're out here like what wait i'm not getting a book publisher immediately i'm out we don't have the small mirrors oh those are for signaling not like [Laughter] so i'm not sure but yeah that and of course the seals at that time were doing the missions on the coast yeah taking teams up going in there you had your two medal of honor recipients norris and mike yeah um oh man if you hadn't uh yeah i know damn it it'll come to us right away but anyway so they were doing everything up north and in fact um a guy i grew up with in trenton new jersey and we got our sod briefing i met him there and he was getting briefed he said i've been out with the seals they kept going up north and they needed a camo guy so he was riding with the seals as a camo guy going up north on whatever those little boats were that they had with big engines so my dad interesting enough i just did a podcast with a guy who wrote you'll dig this book it's called the the hardest place ten a history of the patch valley qnr uh corngal all of that and uh he had heard my dad was in the brown water navy so my dad those boats were probably mark ones so when i left the seal teams we were working with mark fives my dad was cruising around with probably at the time a glorious handlebar mustache but two twin fifties and just foot pedals to mow [ __ ] down nice that's how and that's how i ended up hearing about seals was from him they were an insertion extraction platform brown water navy going in and out of the delta and we have one of our teams that was on a quote training mission in country on an island we couldn't get helicopters to them and they got run into the sea and the navy came in and saved their ass they got run into the sea on a training mission yes [Laughter] i've been on plenty of training missions all in the u.s and the biggest threat that i had was uh tripping and falling and hurting myself because we were shooting blanks yeah there was a stump on uh that mission that we talked about outside the the uh tailwind there was a tom stumpf somebody i heard no this is stump oh okay yeah without the last letter he's an a1 skyraider pilot okay and he literally saved the sf team yeah because it was on day four the mission they've been in and at that point they got the full attention of the nva and they're up against wave attacks and they ran out of claymores and they were getting ready to get overrun the better the weather was bad and the uh 1-0 was talking directly to tom and said save us yeah and of course i learned this after the book is written yeah but so tom found a hole in the sky came down and made the gun runs and broke the back of the wave attacks yeah he said he was so close you could see that he had you know you could see his shave status yeah that morning because he was so close to like so and this is a1 skyraider close support my last mission we had some gun runs with a1s and on one of the gun runs he was so close i could tell you that when he came in he flipped on the side a little bit he was smoking the philly charoot of course yeah i saluted the course that's so awesome oh yeah can you even imagine mike that like i grew up in a world where um i mean my world as a as a young man and me and annie have talked about this was reading john plaster's secret commandos and sog and he's the godfather of sog writers absolutely well what's cool is i met him uh when i graduated q course in o3 at a book signing at the airborne special operations museum he came and he signed a book but my whole my whole premise for like understanding what the military was going to be was from a sog experience right really i wanted to be a saw guy and yeah that it was all from that like the first book i read really in depth and in detail that made me want to be a sniper was the ultimate sniper that plaster wrote that was available at fort bragg and you know general jackson's and ranger joe's you could pick it up but i'm a 12 year old like reading through this stuff 12 years old you know i was telling andy like our generation now when we got out and started doing just even having these conversations like this a part of the community that we we belong to just as yours is it's like dude why are you talking about anything that we did and i'm like well one it's helping people and it's educating them but also a lot of things are lost and so if you have an in-depth conversation about it you're also inspiring the next generation so i was inspired by saw guys like you who were coming out like plaster um and telling their stories yeah 20 years later we waited 20 yeah absolutely i mean it was the role the nda was 20 years right yeah and then when you guys started coming out that inspired a whole generation of warriors and my fear is like even now there's only a few select guys that are coming out talking about stuff um from especially from the early giwa era yeah and inspiring the next generation and if we don't keep doing that who's going to be the next generation to fight for this country i don't know who that's going to be i mean if i think back about the first books that i was ever able to get my hands on it was men with green faces so even my generation so i joined the military august 1st 96 and almost all of the information i could find was vietnam based and not specific at all and actually the teams vietnam was actually really the first time that the teams were tested in their in their metals you know the maritime environment where they would start from the water go operate on land and come back to the water which we slightly deviated from in iraq and afghanistan well but team one earned their spurs downstairs they did but it's the same thing about mike reading about your generation and inspiring i read about the guys at team one literally i remember reading when i'm like 12 13 years old about ambushes where they would you know again the men with green faces and they'd paint their face up which is i mean you probably have worn camo face paint i'm gonna say mike and i probably have not for real i did it a lot in training evolutions garrison and training a lot but that is what that is what spurred my desire those stories of hearing about that well actually i mean i i think it it got it hooked its hooks into me early but those stories that i were able to find it was unbelievable i do agree with you that i think that you have to continue to have those conversations well let me say on a footnote thanks to what you're doing and jocko and now i understand you're doing some podcasts yeah yeah see this is the next wave of the future because there are people responding to that uh my first jocko podcast two years ago if you haven't seen it yet jocko podcast number one a zero yep um but fantastic i've had responses literally from around the world that's so cool and there are young people that say in fact i gotta answer kid now he's waiting saying hey i want to do it so i tell them you know go online read what you got to do get in shape and learn land nav but they're that's your advice people reach out to me saying they want to be a seal i'm like just quit now it's easier yeah start working on your publishing deals start writing man do you have an outline for your book yet no you're trash like you go into the seal teams with your book written [Laughter] i can say whatever i want you can because yeah it's kind of true though there have been quite a few seal books and you know here's the thing i think it matters how you talk about it um you know 30 seconds out right the clothing brand shawn evangelista he's been on the podcast before he's coming up on saturday we're going to do another episode and he wanted to open with when is sharing too much you know at what point does it become uh you know a negative consequence to the community you know when is the juice worth the squeeze and i think a lot of it has to do with how you talk about it because we can sit here and talk about all of our experiences and not give away the ttps that's where i think it is too far where people try to monetize the actual tactic technique or procedure that we are taught oh yeah that that i think is a bridge too far but talking about the experiences or the lessons that you learned about yourself that is invaluable and i think that's what springboards the next generation as well i mean i hope it makes an impact i'll be honest completely selfishly it is incredibly cathartic for me personally to sit down and talk about some of the past experiences it has helped me address them and then work my way through them so if other people benefit from it that's great but i mean full disclosure i'm probably benefiting the most from it out of anybody yeah yeah i feel the same way since i've been my podcast my personal podcast is actually called mike force name is that right yeah my name's mike but mike force i understand obviously the the qrf elements you guys had but everything in my mind about well let me just interrupt for a second to say mike force because this is from our ear but one of the veterans of mike force jack tobin he explains it says you saw guys went out you're a clandestine you watch look for the enemy and then you try to avoid contact with mike force we hunt for those [ __ ] that's awesome you were super arrogant to name it after yourself like i have my own i had no idea that it actually know this i'm like wow mike is at a different [ __ ] level and the mike force they saved many lives when a camp would be overrun or in the process of being overrun who do you send mike force that's so awesome oh it's incredible i should probably clarify that because maybe you don't know i read that i'm like god what an arrogant douche but also i love him so i'm listening here we go man how do you clarify oh man clarification number one michael i just like the the idea of um i mean i'm almost at a loss for words because looking at sag growing up everything that i wanted to be as a green beret tied back to that experience that's amazing yeah and i always like i was always disappointed because i like guys would always the hard hitters and special forces the green berets that were like there and they had been built around a culture they read about or their grandfather or father fought in they were there and they wanted to be a sog guy and we talked about i remember having conversations in the firebase in koner province really um thinking like how do we reinvent these reconnaissance type operations and use some of your guys's ttps that we knew about and kind of do some of the things that we were doing which were cross-border at the time um to to enact and to facilitate all the things that we were doing the right way and we actually had i remember in uh on my first oda my first attachment 366. um a lot of the guys that were there like ben bittner who's uh was killed later but a good friend of mine we were all about mac visage and so we started doing recon missions on our own not our own accord but yeah as an oda um to do good clarification small indigenous operations because you know the re the recon answer for the military is like you need 15 guys you know you need a minimum of a 240 two saws air support and all these things and i'm like these guys were doing recon missions in vietnam sometimes without any support right their qrf and in one case with an in-dig uh mountain yard commander i believe was like one guy like nobody was willing to go so this one dude hops on the bird and he's like i'll go just send me i'm i'm gonna be there so it's like i i constantly live this vicariously through you and your experiences unbeknownst to you obviously but it's so what's what's uh what's really cool andy and the fact that you know you had me come out here because you told me uh john was going to be here is there by the way i'm here because he told me you're going to be here [Laughter] um i i think that your generation is is is now passing away right it's like oh yeah it's like our your generation growing up and seeing world war ii veterans go and we are losing all of this information and experiences and stories that's such an impactful thing including transitioning which i want to talk about later including like a simulating and culture and then and then coming out and talking about stuff i reached out to an sfa it was a facebook special forces association page and i said hey my name's this i'm a green beret i don't think i'm a douchebag you guys can vet me i'm trying to talk to mcvi saw guys or vietnam error sf guys because i want to start archiving the history not even for a podcast i just want to put it on a microphone so we can record it and so we could you know hold that put it in the smithsonian and save it for future generations because once you guys are gone all of that is gone um which means you know we gotta extract everything we can and john we gotta interrogate the hell out of them get it all out you know you said something interesting talking about being up in you know the northeastern province literally walking distance from pakistan trying to figure out how you replicate what your units were able to do i mean correct me if i'm wrong we're talking two u.s service members and three to five indigenous personnel that would launch with you guys maybe two or three two okay so a few of our guys ran solo they're by themselves but they're indeed but that's those are separate stories but they're so let me tell you what would happen if you submitted over powerpoint which is how we got mission approval something like that in the modern military i don't even know if they would bother to respond to you they at least in every battle space that i ever worked in they would never even consider that level of risk i mean i wasn't joking we were sitting um out in front of the restaurant before we came up here i cannot believe that every single one of you do not have a medal of honor like the things that you guys did and the risk you were willing to tolerate is something that i have a hard time wrapping my head around it because it is so completely different than the military world that i grew up in and operated in like mike's not joking 15 people you may even still get told that that's not enough and then you're going to need to have the experts huh yeah well by somebody who's going to actually bottom line it right expert or not but impose the sf guys thinking on their own yeah yeah yeah but that's the the solution became more numbers not less this you know i remember my first rotations to afghanistan we were in hilux the best vehicle on the face of the planet it's basically a forerunner for people listening but i believe they could go vertically i mean it was crazy what they could go over and my first tour there we weren't armored at all i mean you could punch a hole through this thing with a butter knife and then it went mandatory humvees then mandatory up armored humvees then mandatory mraps and every time that you do that it requires you know an mrap's gonna hold like maybe six people plus a driver a gunner and a vehicle commander mechanic yeah you're gonna need that or you're gonna end up blowing it up in the in the field which is also fun sometimes too yeah really but oh yeah but then you go from needing one vehicle now the minimum force is you gotta take four out of the out of the door and then you need to have a qrf on standby and then you need to have mandatory assets overhead a predator or a reaper or fixed wing close air support there's no hey i'm going to take another american or just myself in a few of the a a or a p and go solo mich you would get laughed out of that mission approval process it went the other direction it became a it became a matter in my opinion and i can only speak for myself but what i saw is it became a numbers game and i mean an escalating numbers game not a decreasing because maybe even the first steel stuff in vietnam small units and they would go and just disappear into the vegetation they would do either reconnaissance ambush grab one until they couldn't get the hell out of there i'd never got to do a mission that was like that never oh yeah i almost there's a there's a almost a guilt in me because i i'm a historian of war so i've studied all wars and i'm very passionate about the understanding of strategic warfare and how we fight it and when i see guys from vietnam especially mac b saw guys and in my own context for you know i have four four and a half years of combat nine combat rotations and i feel guilty because i know it's like it's not it's nothing like what these guys have gone through agreed and so like i can't even there's there's maybe a handful of times where i felt like like this might be it and and those those were very rare even in specialized units even more so because the more special you are the more support assets you have you don't even have to pull security because you get a flare system that could see the heat that you can't see with your naked eye and so in in war um it's very rare even in the global war on terror to kind of even get close to the replication of even one combat operation i mean that that operation that you talked about with jocko tailwind was a four-day op yeah and you had i mean each person which was 16 i believe 16 green berets was injured twice at least because they had 30 plus 30 plus purple hearts and um you know a couple uh indigent were killed but when you think about just that operation in comparison to like my experience yeah i've killed a lot of bad guys i've got a lot of combat but that is a completely different level and and so i i want people to understand like when they're hearing this like you don't get the opportunity to sit in a room with a guy that that has experienced this kind of thing around that culture that's really war like i don't consider the jihad war more people were killed in chicago and then the in the same time period than the uh war that was fought in iraq and there's one more sidebar to what you just said about um operation tailwind and how the military does not retain its history or learn from past experiences because this is september 1970 marine corps air assets and we had air force army all supporting that team on the ground about 10 years later you had the debacle in the desert where the mermaids couldn't even talk to the air force yeah which started json yeah desert one desert one yeah of course even there it took seven years to get json yeah so what a feat what an accomplishment that was right for tailwind um and i remember uh listen to the story there was a cnn 1998 which a couple years after i went in the military uh report on aka the communist news network yeah well it's crazy like when you when when when you guys were when like the the um the discontent for cnn was early on because they wrote that article where ted turner wrote apology letters or at least one letter one to the to the captain um but that's insane that you guys it was twisted even decades later that it was some kind of years later yeah there was some campaign to launch uh chemical weapons and then and then heard her own right there was a well yeah they they said that we that the that that team used the sarin gas and and they said the mission was to go into laos to find dissident americans who had deserted and that we went in well the team went in and killed americans and of course they killed women innocent babies and children too like they always throw that line in at the end yeah which is completely false they use tear gas to break that last attack yeah cs and that's what saved saved their bacon literally because the wave attacks continued like they did yeah and and the first hit so the final day there was three helicopters first one left with auto wounded second one left with more ground fire and the third one that's where mike rose's got to see the tear gas was still in the air and the nva are coming out of it a little bit off balance that gave them enough time to get on the ch-53 delta and to take off as it's taking off the door gunner sergeant stevens i think it was gets shot in the neck through and through and mike rose saved his life as they're leaving yeah and then they crash oh yeah right over there they go over the first mountain the first engine goes out yeah and the if they go over the second mountain top and the second engine goes out and the pilot has to auto rotate in they never trained on auto rotation with a fully loaded helicopter with green berets and intel and everything they got from that mission wow and when they did crash auto rotating in the uh team captain crushed 14 of his teeth into dust yeah gene mccarley mike rose gave me that number yesterday a couple days ago yeah and i never realized it but and they got thrown out of the helicopter of course several of them and uh but they survived it all they came back crazy good guy indeed how do you get selected um sorry any of them no i was gonna i was gonna ask i was gonna i think it was more you were gonna go the selection for mac vsauce yeah yeah i was gonna well so along with that did you get any additional training for what you were gonna be doing in vietnam or did you go from the greenberry pipeline and it's just like hey here's your new job figure it out on the on the fly no we're well in my case again uh i was very fortunate after we're done with the regular sf training uh i was in of the combo geek so they sent a bunch of us down to fort gordon we were down there tdy for three months on rtt they wanted sf top secret seat clearance to do that r r then we came then we went to nam yep so we had traditional in-country training learned how to work with tac air helicopters they had a couple of experimental helicopters we worked with he wanted to make sure that when you use these you didn't chop your head off getting on and off the birds and stuff in country training and patrol i don't remember that and then when we had gone through training we had guys that bend the knob two or three times they said after your in-country training a little guy's going to come out and say to you we're looking for volunteers don't do it go to an a team learn about the people the country go see what it's like well hell this is 1968. john wayne was in the green berets they just showed it while we were going through the in-country training so sure enough in-country training is done out comes the little guy we're looking for volunteers and johnny mcintyre my buddy goes for what sarge can't say either you're in or you're right damn it i'm in yeah and that's it so we saw the movie so we jumped out of our chairs me rick howard and a bunch of our guys mcintyre but did they give you additional so obviously so once obviously you volunteered because right here we are right so we do that go up get the top secret briefing and again we've been students for now 15 months so we go in we get our pens and pads out ready to take notes and the sergeant major walks that put that [ __ ] away this is a top secret briefing that's when everything changed right there and so he says in front of you is that what do you call that the non-disclosure mda yeah so we so we said you got to sign that first before you say anything further so either you're in or out if you don't want to sign it get out so we all stayed we signed it and he pulled like one of these black curtains and pulls it down as vietnam with all the cities and across the fence lay us with target boxes and cambodia with target boxes and we go welcome to the secret war this is where it is but what about additional training like like hey now we're gonna put you in the pipeline or it's like welcome to the show here's your car 15. well every everybody was individual yeah so when you came in like in our case the team gets wiped out we get a new one zero and then we had we hired uh four or five new vietnamese and three of those were 15 years old oh [ __ ] me brought them in and said we all train together you start out with the basics every day you go through all the drills live fire how much time we talking well we had monsoons also so we were training dealing with monsoons so in my case um we didn't get on the ground for a real target until august so the team is formed up at the end of may into june train through june deal some monsoons july and then we train for a special mission to put in the air force census in the asheville valley which for us was our premier target did the mission no gunfire they fought when they wanted to fight then we put it in the same air force sensors up at caisson and again no ground fire nothing to speak of and then uh we had a practice mission again minimal contact and then um spider parks then left the team to go fly covey and don welcome became the team leader i was assistant team leader and then we had our first mission echo 4 where we've been on the ground for a second day and we made contact they kept coming at us maybe i have to wave so you you get to train so when you when you're when you showed up and you got selected you say hey i want to be in this and the guys that are with you that just came there with you do they try to uh train you together to be in the same recon team oh you go through your training well first thing is you you would get selected for the team yeah now here's another example tom cunningham came into our camp in the early week of august i don't know it would be at the end of july so tom cunningham comes to he's gone through the pipeline volunteered for sog comes in uh st louisiana the 1-0 was a peat boggs the 1-1 was john walton the medic and they trained up quickly for two days i think it was a saturday august the 3rd 1968 they go in that's his first mission so he was in camp less than a week but he had he had some experience and they trained him up enough where john knew him says i know tom he's a he'll be a stand-up guy if we get into a fire fight where they got over a run three times the third time the team gets overrun the 1-0 called in a an a1 skyraider gun run on the team the 20 mike mike rounds hit mike hit tom twice one round hit the pre-rc 25 wounding the 1-0 the second round sent tom flying through the air with his leg blown off hanging on just by some sinu and so that's another example and john walton the medic to his credit brought tom back alive they hadn't ended up been shot four times john brought him back as well as the 1-0 now one of the little people was killed they had to leave him there because uh the fr again here's the first helicopter that comes in it's a kingby south vietnamese air force they pick up the peat bogs and the wounded and ditch take off because the second helicopter is going to come in and the second helicopter gets shot out the third helicopter gets shot out the first one comes back with captain tin and he picked up john walton and and walton had the he and the one in disney had not been wounded are there by themselves on the ground get on the king bee and take off it was so high and so hot that he couldn't take off vertically he had to do a run to get enough lift just to get over the trees and then he did laps in the valley a day before he came back all while under enemy fire mike do you know of a single story that even resembles that in the last 20 years of warfare there's been a there's been like a like there's a there's the one that happened in shot shock valley where the whole team became a great team one of the guys john wayne walding yeah one of the guys lost his leg pinned it to his um he lost his leg from the knee down pinned it to his thigh and stayed in the fight uh one of the team sergeants what was in the sif with me and uh extraordinary acts of heroism but it was like one instance of combat right and then i feel like that was a thursday that was like a normal day yeah and then like friday they're like hey guys get your stuff we're going again it's insane so the the how come they don't do that with us i've always wondered how come they don't like band of brothers right you got guys who are trained um they go to sand hill they they get all their training together and then they deploy a splatoon you got uh recon elements that are mac visa guys that are trained as a volunteer get selected together but in our community you don't have that you you're typically trained i'm a i was a half korean guy speaking french getting deployed to the middle east you know i mean like they don't it's very randomized there's no uh like i would want like i wouldn't i want to go to basic training with dudes that i'm going to serve with in combat you know that we're going through the pipeline together and we're going to be a recon team or a platoon or a squad or a troop and we don't do that we don't do that very well at all it's like a numbers thing yeah i was going to say it might be uh the end result of the size of the growing size of the force and maybe it hits a tipping point where they can't do things like that but i mean what you're just i mean so that's a week after the guy had been you know raises he came into camp on a monday i think it was a saturday he's gone forever but you know thank god to john walton he kept him alive tom went out got married had his wonderful wife they had two children and sadly he lost his wife years ago but uh the kids are still going on he's up in the grand estate crazy oh yeah yeah cool how was your uh how was your first experience in combat was it what you thought it would be oh no because you guys got into what i'm going to call a doozy yeah well see don't forget like um we got into our fire fight october 7 68. on october the 5th we had st alabama the nine-man team that went in up against 10 000 nva and the only reason why we know the number because lynn black who was the assistant team leader in that who became the team leader talked to the guy that ambushed him really five years later wow yeah how did that affect your head space um when you were proximal to all of that happening and maybe it hadn't happened to you yet because you were early on like you said you'd done oh it's still green as grass green is grass but you're like you have to at some point under you're like oh my god like this is 100 percent real because alabama's happening and all these other things what what's going through your head when you haven't experienced it yet but every all these other units that are around you were going well john and i were good friends so after the august third mission the first thing we talked about that night and the next day was what did you learn and he had gone down tdy to khan tomb also and when he came back they had some lessons down there they picked up so we always talk to each other at least on on the basic level you know so on october the 5th when they get into this world of [ __ ] and the reason why they did they had an inexperienced team leader he had rank they made him the team leader pulled off a team leader who had experience in the ao first major because he didn't have as much rank he was a lower ring yeah so he came from germany a 10th group and they because he had the rank he made him a team leader he goes in lynn black who had a tour of duty with the 173rd was familiar with the nba and they saw an nva flag he says hey there's at least 3 000 people here let's let's get out they took enemy fire and the team leader goes no we're going down the path again that violates the first rule so they got ambushed uh sadly the point man was killed on contact the 1-0 was killed and another team member was wounded and they walked into an l-shaped ambush that nva troop they had 50 nva up there and they fought they finally eventually pulled back and so 20 25 years later they went to back try to find the body of the 1-0 after that effort that's when lynn black talked to the general and the guy was a colonel on the day he came in he said yeah we had 50 envy up there and they talked back and forth and and the colonel told them we had we had a division lindsay we thought it was a battalion of 3 000. and they had between the air force our gun ships marine corps gunships the muskets they went all day literally they lost a jolly green giant and another jolly green giant crashed afterwards they lost a kingby which was a south vietnamese air force so we were on standby to go in as a bright light and the bright light was to go in to help a team out well the covey said there's too much [ __ ] going on there's too many enemy if you go and it's going to get worse so then we changed to go back because october 6th we got inserted so our miss or so answer to your question our mindset was right now we're bright light get ready so you you take you put away all food and water just guns bullets and body bags and bright lights bright lights whoever's designated qrf for us like a a search and rescue for correct for or whatever that's that's what that was for so that we got withdrawn from that we went back changed our gear to get ready for the mission first light the next day we're on the bridge going in so we were on the ground for a day the second day we had trackers we knew we had trackers the day before we just couldn't shake them so two o'clock they hit us but the 1-0 don wilkin was smart enough um he puts on top of a little knoll and so we're in triple double canopy and when they came out of the jungle our knoll was small enough they only sent so many so we just kept blowing them down the hill and then finally at one point don says to me look at that and i couldn't see because the jungle was just dark and what they were doing was stacking up the dead bodies because they want to get on top of the dead bodies to shoot down at us get some mike so they're stacking bodies to get defilade yeah they want to get they want to get a little they wanted to achieve high ground via corpses yeah i'm going to integrate that into my next gunfighter carbine course yeah and so here's the other one you talk about tunnel vision so at one point we had a wave attack going i'm going into the jungle and [ __ ] our point man opened fire now i thought he was shooting over my shoulder into what was coming up the hill at me or coming out of the jungle we got back to base the next day i said you know my ears oh it was because you had a full blast on full automatic of a car 15. and i said man why were you shooting over my shoulders you dumb [ __ ] to the right the nva were coming up they're just getting ready to kill you so i'm looking here and there's a guy right there you didn't even know until post brief right what was your we're so spoiled in the in the military man like like well they didn't have ear pro like you know there's no earphones no i mean we had noise cancelling electronic power i gotta tell you i want to run over your mother to get those nods you have today oh yeah no kidding that would have changed some things yeah oh crazy um so what was your talk to me about your kit setup because i know like a lot of macv saw guys preferred like rpd's that were cut that was later that was later yeah what what was your so it was car 15 was my sweetheart yeah yeah i had three during my time my two tours there yeah so yeah we had 600 plus rounds for the car 600 what is that that's that's well remember over 30 mags because we're talking about 100 wow 20 round mags and sometimes we always had a couple of extra uh you know those little brown packages with the uh bullets and the bullets in it yeah in case yeah and then uh about 10 to 12 frag grenades and maybe 10 to 12 rounds for the m79 yeah which included one cs and then we always carry at least one willy peter yeah i carried the radio and then a battery for that the rest of it was he for the 40 minutes yeah so we use those stumpers like vietnam air thumpers oh yeah always made me proud down yeah we saw that all right yeah all right i got some kills with the thumper pirate guns those things are badass i got to tell you there's i had a guy a navy seal who added a thumper i know of one there's a there was a area four in iraq at baghdad yep task force mission we just got back and it was a seal sif task force mission and we came back and i was we were getting the staging area dropping off pucks task force and i heard and everybody was like looking around like dude did somebody just ad a 40 mic and then and then and then the lull kind of everybody was like no that didn't happen and all of a sudden you hear because on the distance it biop it hit it landed on the airfield and you hear it and then it's incoming incoming yeah so everybody gets their cib and their cab badges and their combat matches but uh what happened was what had happened was one of the navsoft guys had um m79 loaded on its back which whatever they teach their own i would never i would never do that personally but we just came off the target yeah he might have had it hot and we were in engagement as well so he has it on his back and he gets hung up and at that time we were running open back humvees so no armor but we were we were sitting on like benches right and he got caught up on something and he pushed through it coupe and then shot around off his back well he goes we have this brief and everybody's like pointing fingers and talking about stuff and one of the armors comes in and sure [ __ ] that m79 was a vietnam era 79 all of ours were we found out later yeah and they weren't like upgraded and you could put it on safe and push through the safe you could pull the trigger the whole time so it he apologized to the entire troop and everybody was like hey man [ __ ] happens like no harm no foul and and he moved on i was like only in the g watt with task force with that circumstance specifically could you do that i was on a target once where a green beret 80 to 40 mike mike twice really no i'm not gonna lie i'm just trying to outdo your story because we're talking [ __ ] about is it on a ladder you got it god damn it he's talking to you i got your answer for you here's your answer uh my first self-inflicted wound was when we were cutting back the m79s oh really good because the question was if you cut them back how far can you cut them back and have the rounds still rotate enough get it yeah that it activates yeah it has to rotate yeah for people listen it's what is it 33 yards yes it's 33 yards piezoelectric electric fuse that is activated by the twist yes so you can adm into the ground in front of you not recommended yeah i've seen it though a hot grenade yeah and it not go off it will not go off but also you shouldn't soccer kick it after that also i've seen it might that off it uh never went off and we called eod shortly there well so in my case we kept trying so finally we had it down to the absolute minimal length yep so boop boom it goes off really quick and so i turned to rick howard my buddy i said hey rick i think a bee just stung me he pulls my shirt so you dumb ass you just shot yourself yeah shrapnel from the shrapnel from it around because that was as we were cutting them back so that way so there's your harry dumbass story for today going back to what was it alabama that was oh yeah what was the criteria as long as they had radio comms with a unit on the ground would they continue to provide air support like what was there what was their criteria where they would stop doing that and assume that they were lost oh if they stopped talking okay and uh which could suck because radios suck up rounds sometimes too yeah that's what i'm thinking i'm just trying to figure out well they lost comms and then you also had the nva that came online interfering with the comma and the classic example the tragic example was the first time the king beat came in for a resupply and they said uh we're gonna pop smoke well then you know the tradition is don't say the keller yeah so as he's coming in and say okay we're gonna pop white well whatever they pop the nva guessed and popped the same things of the kingdom went to the nva gas and got blown out of the sky to an ambush oh yeah can you hear me on this i can oh yeah yeah we hear you loud and clear anything on this you can't hear anything but yeah it's it's dead it's just that that new budget set up man how is your headset dead yeah i don't know it's it can't hear myself through the headphones that's weird i can hear you yeah let me fix it test test this test test test test i could hear static in my headphones but i can't hear the voice through the mic oh there it goes you're back what'd you do test it yeah it's good now look at that that's really good now i just added five minutes to editing an hour oh sweet what did i do i unplugged it did i say anything weird no i unplugged it plugged it back in you high-tech wizard you he's good at this i am super limited i go off switch on switch and if it doesn't work i immediately start googling like technical support i can't do any of it myself now smart oh so you like um on the kit thing can you go back just real quick yeah please so on the kit were any of the kit that you had because we used to have we had a you know me and uh andy had a black side dotx right you can get black side specialized equipment whether it was munitions ammunition guns we had that also okay so you were able to get specific types of weapon systems that you weren't able to get right and we also had experimental stuff of course the car 15 was new yeah so when i first got into 68 they were a rare commodity fob what were they using before that um anything like m16s basically no no no well some guys carried 16 but they had the swiss k the grease gun a couple guys carried a sten which like i don't understand that at all but that was the early days and of course you know they said they didn't want to have weapons that were us-made attributable right so the swedish k was a weapon of preference and of course it fired from the open bolt which is like that's just nuts yeah but uh then along came the car 15. did you have any problems with the car 15 never never i had three my last tour dude they got a brand new one right out of the wrap the box and everything yeah took it down to the range it was perfectly zeroed really oh yeah i know what happened to one of them which i bet mike hasn't heard this story but we'll have to get to that how'd you not today no it's an unbelievable story um how'd you lose the first one or was your that's the first one the trapeze incident was the first one here without the greatest of ease yeah um how'd you lose the second one uh end of my tour duty okay turned it in then came back the third the second tour i got the third car how long did it take you to start getting or maybe you never got comfortable i guess the better question would be how long did it take until you started clicking with that environment that you were in like i always found with me first five to seven operations like they have this level of hyper awareness right everything is a threat and then the last five to seven nothing is a threat it's like very equally dangerous sides of the pendulum swing one is because you're not in tune with your environment and the other one is because you're just completely complacent because you're kind of over it how long did it take you to get comfortable in that environment you were operating in well after that target on october 7th from that day forward i was comfortable more comfortable in the jungle than back at base camp didn't like the [ __ ] at camp really that's why that's why we're there that's why we signed up to bsf yeah you wanted to fight yeah yeah and to or to do the mission preferably if i have my drugs i prefer to go around a five-day recon do wiretaps take pictures and come home write a nice after-action report go downtown get a steaming cream or something like that or whatever and then go back to work to take five days off but by november our attrition rate was so low that there were days when our team was the only operational team in camp and when i arrived there they had 30 recon teams so by november which is four months later or five months later they're down to us being the only operation that's between teens being wiped out uh wounded in action sick illness transitions guys going home and uh so we had days where you just go out and and go to s3 in the morning here's your here's your target were you guys involved in the targeting at all or were you just receiving targeting packages we've come out of to our headquarters then we get it and then any of our reports would go back to our headquarters in saigon then right to the white house they had a special sog envoy there that was picking up the the reports and stuff holy [ __ ] that is not how my reporting channel went this is a little different a little more sync pack involved uh it was just emails you know i would i would do some emails and send it up and oh god first off the operational tempo that he's describing is insane not maybe not the operational tempo but what was occurring during those operations yeah and the tempo associated with that level of activity is mind-blowing it's like bomber it's like world war ii bomber statistics exactly the same thing that's a great great analogy every time you go out you're definitely going to lose a crew or two or three maybe oh yeah did you notice the nva changing and adapting their tactics as you guys hang out in the country yeah and of course we heard the rumors about them having the sappers and the killer teams and those were specifically designed by them to track max members okay and and by the end of the war they had they had up to a battalion that they were training up for those missions what kind of training were they giving them do you know i don't know we're just beginning to learn about that and uh stand by to stand by okay i just know that they are trained up and we were told that initially they would just come in nothing but a loincloth and of course august 23rd 68 the day of the greatest green beret casualty in our sf history we lost 16 green berets they planned for a year a sapper attack on a moonless night which was august 23rd 68 on our base camp which is fob-4 and da-nang they came in and they planned on a day we had a promotion board and we had also the headquarters that had been at the air base of da nang came into the buildings on our headquarters area at ccn fob-4 sounds like they had some inside baseball knowledge oh absolutely to plan that yeah yeah and and they even did their final briefing that night in the base in the indigenous mess hall and they had in the morning they found what they they had charts and and their maps and things on that for their final briefing tour the commanders and the sappers and stuff two of our loyal indians went up saw them saw something suspicious they got their throats cut and they hit the hit and they were under that firefight all night it was one of those tragic episodes but the sappers were real and that that told us right there that they're dead serious and they wore headbands we came to die really and they did i also enjoyed operating in a loincloth oh i know that sounds freeing playing water polo not in the military which is essentially what a speedo is um did you when you guys operated did you know how big this whole thing was or were you so mission focused and kind of um basically you were operating on a trib to anything were you just like in your own little world operating or what did you know like hey this is a big deal these things that we have going on this is making very large strategic um you know the the gates that you guys are meeting is very strategic because it's at the white house but did you know that at the time or are you just mission focused and dude no we we knew that the reports went to went to the big house and we knew that this was the uh that was our tip of the spear then yeah you're the super bowl this is right so we knew that um but on the other hand we also knew the reality of on the ground yeah and what they're what how they're working against us and so um we and on top of that we never realized how completely compromised we were in that they had a spy in our mac vsauce headquarters in saigon and don't forget too the additional thing was that um when the uss pueblo was seized by north korea in november of 67 they did so at the behest of the russians and when that ship came in it was an intel ship that had the latest state-of-the-art encryption equipment and radio equipment which the russians took to cambodia at the time the johnny walker spy ring was also operating and they would get the cat codes and the other codes and get them to russia which would get them to cambodia so that they were able to listen to a lot of our top secret common army air force not sure about navy navy yes and maybe the marine corps and they had that insight now how well they used it but we know they had it of course we learned this years later well it almost seems like when you guys would insert it was almost a matter of an afterthought that there were going to be people expecting you tracking you i mean so they obviously knew you were coming that almost became part of like the expected portion of operation the classic example we're going into an lz with the south vietnamese air force at the last second i forget one of my i think was sal who my counterpart yelled to the door gunner in vietnamese and the helicopter pulled away sal saw how i'll never know a wire across the lz that was attached to a 500 pound bomb had he not told them that to avoid that wire it vaporized yeah yeah we'd be fertilizer in layoffs today now they knew we were coming yeah they had time to put that together wow and then um the other thing was they always had point people so when we took off people there would say which direction which athletes we were on at the border they had watch stations so when they would continue the helicopters so that was their additional intel network we knew about it and the key thing was just to get on the ground to try to avoid the trackers when there was that incident of seeing the wire across the lz did that send any like red star clusters up inside of hq like hey maybe our ship has a few leaks um because the wwtf factor was multiplied in our minds the guys on the ground that all the reports go back to sign on and even like we wanted better radios as far back as 68 begging for radios which never really happened until later and uh we later learned from cia guys that talked to russians who were there during who were part of the russian secret war in vietnam who said hey we're amazed those saw guys never got more sophisticated radio equipment because they rdf this all the time so we got to the point where if we were on the ground no comma unless it was unless it was time for emergency yeah yeah because we just if they come by for a comma check would be just two clicks on the handset oh interesting yeah because their rdf was sharp so they how did they rdf you guys did they just triangulate you yeah okay yeah and the classic example we had a team that was uh pat eddington was the one zero he looked asian and i forget what his true ethnicity was but he looked asian i think he was micronization too yeah look man he had that look see you could have he had it he had it all nva team two hoy's they all came over to our side one mission was to go to an american p.o.w camp pat's on the ground with his team going to the camp up on fm comes a voice in perfect english pat ennington we know you're the one zero of rt cobra which it was you're going to this pow mia camp i'm telling you if you continue with the mission by the time you get here every american pow will be dead i will personally kill them so you got a choice you can continue with the mission or go to [ __ ] home well pat says i think i'll go home now holy [ __ ] jesus can you imagine that what another time lynn black and douglas turtle so doug's got the radio the frenchman my buddy right this is this is between my tours of duties i'm back squandering the tenth group at fort devons but the frenchman's on the ground and in clear english a guy consists frenchman we know where you are we know where rt idol is you and lynn black are there now the interesting thing about that first comment is a week earlier the third american on the team went home he derosed so the guy talking to him who he believed was a cuban knew his intel knew there was only two americans and he talked back and forth to him and said we're going to come get you and so lynn hears doug talking to the guy and lin gets on the phone and talks to this guy and the guy goes we know where you are and when lynn goes well he says yeah we got your six digit accord and lingos well here's my eight digit coordinates come get me [ __ ] and so then then at the top here's the top that's the part you'll like he goes you know you're what your mother was a piss-poor hooker because if she was a good hooker you'd be in the states now you wouldn't be stuck in laos power moves how's that oh power missiles by the way in the j yeah flexing in the j hooker and so by the way they never came for him because he had high ground [ __ ] i mean the world mike and i came from encrypted radios i mean you could switch it over to being uh you know in the open if you wanted to but there be no reason to so we're talking encrypted or purely digital or or yeah or iridium it's like i can't even imagine i mean i guess we could have gotten on the icon that's cool i think i would have yeah i mean i may or may not communication i may or may not have been around when an interpreter got on the icon a few times and talked a little bit of smash shih tzu those are my favorites but i mean there's no way they were getting a hold of the ability to talk to us over our radio networks i guess they could have already left us but i don't think they had that technology available but what you're describing and that man there are some red flags in that obviously the specificity of the information like that to me i feel like in the modern era would be a dead stop re-compartmentalize everything figure out i would hope that that's what they would do figure out where the [ __ ] the leak is coming from and then build from there because that's insane oh yeah i mean that's the most inside baseball you could have on what's going on there and this is where the one zeros are talking to each other saying these are the problems we know we've got [ __ ] when you when you guys were doing operations is it like you know a bomber crew goes out in world war ii they do a specific run and they get retired right they that they're 25 missions 25 missions right what what is the criteria for you guys and then how is that experience and working up and leading up to it how did that feel because i i imagine when entire teams are getting wiped out what's like the psychology of you guys to stay sane in it because i know you're in the fight but you're like hey this my buddy just got you know he just got killed with his entire team so it was getting serious was there well keep in mind keep in mind i i landed there in may of 68 so around 20th may 22nd of may and by that time we had at least four or five teams wiped out you had roy benavides that had his experience may 8th yeah that's a ccs case yeah that at that time we didn't even know about it because he's down south we're north and we had another team everybody was killed except for the 1-0 who he needed for three days john allen came back and we had another team that was wiped out on the 27th of march a second team um the 1-0 is on the ground and the helicopters come in they can't lift the full team he puts a mounting yard on helicopter lesson leaves him on the ground they don't come back and he's he this is just in the first five months of 68. so you know what uh the like anybody it's like we got to get on with the next target yeah you try to learn what you can you get the mission answer to your question because you got to continue on that's why we're here so there's i'm assuming there's no risk mitigation like there's like you guys are all in it doesn't seem like the pace of songs well the other thing was um you served in saga as long as you wanted the the the thought was if you got on a team when you first get there you'd run recon for eight or nine months the last couple months you would have light duty somewhere you didn't have to stay on the team or anytime you wanted off like we had a gentleman that came on our team for echo 4. he came in from the 173rd had a tour of duty outstanding soldier and after that mission he finally came up to me and said hey i can't do i've never seen anything like this in my life i can't do it wow i said hey thanks you tell me now and then uh we got him a good job we worked with him and said thank you for being honest yeah all volunteer all volunteer and uh and also you know like again we were hurting for men so they were bringing people from 173rd 101st and then at some point they even brought in some legs just to have a manpower to see if they could run or not really i'll let you describe what a leg is you are me folk yeah indeed well yeah i don't know where it originates from but i know traditionally a dirty nasty leg yeah dirty nasty it used to be a huge thing right when we had maroon berets and and it was only about airborne it was a big deal it was if you were a dirty leg non-airborne qualifier non-airborne qualified guy indeed um so when you're doing these operations and and the pace is going to where it's what it's at um what are you guys doing to kind of keep morale back at the firebase back at base are you guys allowed you said you had mentioned rnr are they allowing you guys to decompress to come back to stay healthy or is it just constant well in our case because of november december of 68 the op temple they just needed people on the ground yeah so at some point um by november we had the team trained up well enough that i could rotate the little people out so bubba sure was with me he was my assistant team leader he came on in october and dom flew covey with spider and so uh we had days three or four days in a row where we go out in the morning get shot out of the primary secondary and alternate that they're low on fuel go back get a new target do it again and so this happened like two or three days in a row the third day we finally get inserted in the afternoon and even then the weather's questionable and i went on the ground and it was a little bit more of an open area i put the team online and we just went up this hill for like a long period of time because usually we'd do a 10 10 you know move for 10 wait for 10. well this day i just pushed everybody we eventually got to a road a double lean highway that you couldn't see from the sky crossed it set up a wire tap had a perfect ambush in place and um when we were getting ready to blow it spider came back over a couple hours literally two or three hours later and said i gave him the code for pow and we'll meet you back at the lz and that's when he said don't move don't fart don't do anything i'm at ten thousand feet and i can't see the mountain you're on yeah the pucker factor went to minus zero about then we heard the tanks above us and the people who were ditty bopping up and down the trail were taking pictures of them on the trail they had their aks on their shoulders officers we should clarify he's talking about the ho chi minh trail yeah it's not like a little foot it's not a foot pack yeah and it had varying sizes but this one was really large and of course we just getting across the trail like that was fun but we had trained up on our little people were just great yeah so we were there and then that was the beginning of five days of just that was the night the guy came in and touched my boot you haven't heard that story no i want to hear this we got it oh let's well and so i have a question that maybe could lead into this out of all the things you guys launch on an operation obviously you're you volunteer to join the military volunteer to go down the green bay pipeline you volunteer for so yeah i read the book the green berets out of college my dad goes hey dummy yeah you know so i knew i was going to go in and i didn't want to get drafted and i read that book i said that's it i'm going with these guys if i can qualify for this and luckily they lowered the standards so they i got through it that's how it worked for me as well in the standard section indeed but you get in country and you start doing these operations out of all the the things that involve the risk you know getting shot out of your lz contact with the nba uh [ __ ] weather rolling in and you being isolated no overhead uh you know air support getting into firefights having the trackers out of all the things that you were exposed to what put the hair up on the back of your neck the most uh that those first two seconds of the fire fight of just in general of every fire fight yeah that's that moment in time you trained your whole life for um because again we had to get that fire superiority within those first two seconds and my little people were just the best how often would you see the enemy you know what we didn't see him as often you think we would because a lot of times our people were so good that they would uh fire we wouldn't we never got ambushed yeah we would hear them coming for us so we would usually launch the first series of rounds and then we gained fire superior right on top of that because they could just switch those magazines out and continue to go and that would be the long and short of it if you don't get that far superior those first four or five seconds you are dead meat yeah the momentum works in both directions because if you gain it you can steamroll a larger force but yeah being on the receiving end of that that's got to be just so that was it i mean for me that's the moment you know yeah um which you didn't get into one of those the night that an nva man touched his boot which i'm sure that mike would love to hear yeah well we had the ambush set up and we by the way we had a wiretap running for over an hour sal had climbed a telephone pole put up the wire tap covered the wire with mud so anybody from the trail would never see it and we had the ambush set up with claymores c4 in the middle so at six feet any person would be knocked down everybody else is killed security claymores and one in the back for good luck so we had to pull it all in after we talked to spider and then the trail activity picked up everybody's nervous now we hear the tanks short while later we hear the dogs we moved into darkness we at just about dark as we came to a stream or a brook or something was running water had banks on about 10 12 feet we went in the stream for an hour at night it was noisy but we knew the dogs were down there and within the water the water covered our noise and the team i had a team go up back up and back and then we put down um mace and uh black pepper for the dogs and [ __ ] up their noses and then finally we went up to the bank team put up the ron i'm facing the bank long story short they were coming at us with hundreds of people all the lanterns and the dogs were coming up the mountain they didn't realize how far up the mountain we had gotten and that's the only thing that saved us and so around one two o'clock in the morning two guys in va go up the stream and i'm watching them walk past how far away from you do you think they were oh god i don't know 15 20 25 feet with lanterns though so one lantern ran out of fuel turn around and come back and when i walked past hep my interpreter coughed [Laughter] medicine just keep the cough down but anyway that's another story so i would make a long story short whenever the wind blew this guy came up the hill wind would blow and i'm sitting there and my feet spread car 15 pointed and you're doing you're basing this off of sound right you can't see this guy oh yeah you do this it's nothing you can feel the air but you can't see your hand so we're talking pitcher so a guy comes up and eventually he touched my 10r regular jungle boot i heard he go i'm just sitting there if he moved one more step or did anything sudden it would have been aviva durchie and so he he waited for the wind to move and when the wind blew he moved back down then he and his body left we got the first light and went north so they would move with the wind yeah he was so good he knew his damn oh yeah that's the name of your book that's the name of annie's book is that it he moved with the wind i like that subtext with fantastic hair he moved with the wind that's incredible so like there was very a lot of the the recondo school was stood up during this time period right right but you guys never had the opportunity to go you know i'm not sure to be honest we got our in-country training it may have been the reconnaissance school i just don't remember yeah to be honest with you some of it was like the original recondo was hey you go out and do because when you mention those when you mention those training missions yeah the original recondo school which i believe started in 60 late 60s but they but they did do training they did the training they had the 1-0 school later yeah long time they did the live uh hit as part of their training in vietnam for a part of their uh right the in-call education damn yeah and they often made contact yeah sure as part of their and so here's the sidebar to this story the next day we we moved all morning all day up this mountain by near the end of the day um we sal and [ __ ] ran into uh because we were really spread out because it was less vegetation and they saw woodcutters and so the woodcutters left we left them alone because they weren't armed they didn't bother us woodcutters isn't people cutting wood yeah okay they were harvesting or doing something and and we heard them but we wanted to get up this mountain so at some point we said we had eye contact this is what sal said i never saw him what tools are you guys using to navigate through this terrain we talking map and lens out of compass are you talking just relying on your local nationals at this point we just want to get to the top of the mountain that we were on yeah no i mean in general though like what did you guys take in the field oh yeah no we had a mat with they would have a target box a six by six that would be cut out of a real map yeah so if your target would be center they would cut out the box so that if we got killed or captured there they couldn't tell anything beyond that no gps though we're talking no i challenge anybody we had it we had our compass well see now i'm a city slicker i have my little people i go to sal we want to go here yeah we're going to do this for sure and we're we're cool totally cool mike how would you describe the complexity of map and compass navigation in the jungle oh man it's well it's it's um almost impossible reckoning you can't use you don't use a lot of uh terrain association at all so a lot of it is is moving literally from terrain feature to terrain feature which could be a tree yeah or you know as far as you could see which would any time i've yeah it's like i look up and that's my azimuth and then what i see i'm walking to getting on the other side of it and the continued movement you gotta do that quite often yeah repeat ad nauseum yeah almost an impossible task very impossible well very impossible to stay especially in terrain that you don't know it very with a standard topographical map i don't know what scale you guys were using but i'm assuming 150 150 it's a standard scale for us yeah but but it's like man to be able to do reconnaissance in those kind of in conditions and environments without the technology because i'm trying to in listening to your stories i'm trying to extract all of the things that we would have that would have made that same thing like i'm doing this i'm walking on a electronic gps a samsung phone tethered to my forearm and i'm like this is easy i can do this yeah with overhead sensors you probably might have fusion goggles so you got thermal and night vision through the jungle yeah so easy like why are these guys bitching this is my four ounce solomons or oh i got a little rough spot in my shoe here's your two fun little sidebars this mission um the first night we're on the mountain um we heard russians talking on the radio and we heard an aircraft fly over our target and two or three mountains away lit up like broadway and it was the nva getting a resupply from the russians wow and while we were on that mountain the second sidebar is the people the cardiographers that made the map forgot a mountain a mountain was missing because we're up we knew what mountain we wanted to go to but there was another mountain in the way of our objectives so they forgot to leave they just so that's an interesting conversation between two like no dude it's this one it's like no man it's this one and [ __ ] you dude that map there's supposed to be a mountain there yeah yeah and this is the one where like we were talking this morning or about the rice on my tooth yeah my tooth one of my teeth fell apart really in the middle of this yeah so i was packing them with rice wow and then when we left we left under heavy enemy fire yeah and this was like standard this is i imagine yeah it was always most usually we always left under enemy fire only question was how much is your standard sop for um reacting to contact and and especially in reconnaissance in this case always break contact oh yeah or are you at all trying to flank maneuver this is not ranger tactics yeah your brain try to continue or at least to survive because with the jungle you don't know how many people are behind the folks firing at you with the rangers you attack your ambusher which is a rock solid tradition yeah but in our case we we trained just the opposite to break away contin like move break away did you have like a i know i'm asking this because you know i went to ranger school as a child i was 18 years old yeah but we we we learn things like black and gold like you select a black and gold which are contingency movements where you would break contact too like uh i believe it was like a standard terrain feature away and out of sight and out of sound of the enemy did you create your breaking contact points along the way or did you just bug out from where you were at and you stayed on azimuth together uh the first thing was survival in the break break to contact yeah and then from there because we were compromised to be on the radio the mission's over i mean a lot of times headquarters we do break contact and continue mission which is like colonel if you get your dumb ass down here with me if you want to do that we will do that but right now i'm the one zero and i'm calling a prairie fire emergency covering contact wow so then you go from surveillance to survival got it so making contact meant compromise which are criteria to send in the right wow so heavy on air assets oh absolutely without the air assets i mean i'm i'm fertilizer and layouts a long time ago wow man was it has there ever been uh has russia ever been open about how much involvement they had in that area i'm curious if they had their own version of mac visa operating they in the areas that you were and if so how many people were actually there no they um there's an old um youtube out there where the russians held their russians had their own vietnam secret war reunion and the numbers they put out youtube so this came out now maybe 15 years ago and it came out and it's just they were mostly cannon cockers anti-aircraft folks now we do know from fact we had marine corps gunships that saw russians in the dmz and we had other recon teams from kontoum that ran into russians further south we ran into chinese that were bigger and other teams ran in some chinese that were there and of course we had the cuban dude that was talking to lynn black um so there are foreign advisors was there but the majorities guys were cannon cockers and like here's another sidebar from operation tailwind the nva by 1970 had the ack act which is like world war ii when the bombers are flying you see that oh yeah yeah the shrapnel goes out for the aircraft yeah well the helicopter when they went in to the target and when they came back we're getting ackak in the air and one of the medics on that he was up in one of the stands 15 years later and he's up there in the capacity of some diplomatic service but he had his sf pin on and they're at a briefing and some young russian lieutenant consultant says i see your sf thing were you in sag yes the bottom line was this lieutenant's dad was on a russian ack act unit in russia i mean in laos that probably was the one trying to shoot down doc padgett insane small little sidebar oh yeah so you guys signed 20-year ndas yes what did you tell your friends and family that you were doing in vietnam uh we were busy very busy and we earned our paycheck and uh but remember this when you came home 1970 nobody really gave other than your family and a couple of friends they were fairly you're glad you're home what was it like well you know it was pretty bad we had good days and bad days okay want a beer yeah cool these are deer hunter days remember that movie yes oh man but even so even inside of the green beret community how many of them even knew about mack v sog was this something that was a closely held secret even inside of the community uh not too cl closely held i mean like the guys who were in with me in training group the camo guys they all said you know go to an a camp first yeah do not volunteer for projects that's where people die so yeah and um i mean life in an a camp in vietnam was nasty yeah i would rather run song missions any day than being in a camp because you're just static you're waiting for them to come get your ass so when did you first start hearing about sog from people other than those that were actually in the unit when did it actually peek its head out into public recognition oh um well the i started doing a couple articles for soldier fortune magazine but i did i had to use a gnome desire because um the newspaper i worked for at the time had they known i was writing for soldier force and they would have fired my ass in new york city i mean so i had a gnome degenerate for that and i started doing stories like in the mid 80s okay and so those were the first stories about and soldier of fortune had done an independent thing uh on sog so that's the first time it surfaced that i saw it and then dave maurer did a book but it was called fiction the dying place which is just a brilliant book and he starts off with this guy on the first page he's got a guy in his gun sight getting ready to kill him and so that was the first book and then john plaster yeah yeah the dying place david maurer and um the plaster started working on his books and he came out with his first book that was the first non-fiction book and then john had also worked with operation tailwind when cnn and time magazine did their erroneous inaccurate scandalous stories there were suits law action and then john learned more about sog itself and so he helped to get and worked with the army brass to get a puc that was awarded to sag and that was awarded april 4 2000 at fort bragg so that was the first time officially other than the litigation that they said this is sog we were there we were acknowledged they had a little service everybody got your coin and you went home wow i mean john then john's books came out correct me if i'm wrong when you were getting your briefing where they're saying no notes no diaries your recollection of dates is [ __ ] startling to me how do you i mean how did you retain this knowledge i'll be honest i forget what we had for breakfast this morning me too so it's you know it's like you had the salad me or you yeah but i mean i look back to my career which i mean it's uh i feel like at this point we're comparing oranges to bowling balls yeah um and i can't remember dates of operations maybe a maybe a month maybe a year but there's a good chance i'm gonna be wrong your recollection of these exact dates is fantastic well two things when i started working on the soldier fortune stuff um we learned these i learned about the special operations association which was formed by recon guys and hatchet force and then it was expanded to all the air assets the helicopter units that just saved our ass every day and then we brought in this bad pilots too offered the f4s but you know how air force jet jockeys are okay fine but so those were unions so we got to meet the guys so when i do a story i talk to guys oh that collective knowledge then i worked on across the fence my first book uh which by the way i couldn't have done it without my wife because we had four teenagers and a newborn in the house she goes you gotta write the book so with her support we did it but going through the interviews and now talking about it again it comes back and you work on it because i was able to interview all the guys who were there some guys have better memories than me but now thanks to the books with jocko podcast talking about it and going back trying to get the factual patterns on these things have you heard mike that uh john himself is doing sodcasts i saw it yeah i already subscribed to it yeah yes so awesome yes so awesome thank you well what's cool is it's the same experience that we're experiencing now just a different form factor right because with with a laddered uh time period of catching up so like i uh you know when i see um all of the guys especially the aviators that are a huge component to sog getting them out and seeing if they're alive and having the conversations to put pieces together it's so important to do it now i mean the time is now right we have we don't have time on our hands and it's not going to be on our side we have to get these conversations had um how when you when you wrote your first book or even did you soldier a fortune thing did you have a hard time were people like talking to you about like hey you shouldn't be doing this or was there any i mean it's less popular as far as numbers wise i can imagine it was more narrow but did you have a problem with that there was always a few people but you know basically you'd be like you pretend you're talking to an officer [ __ ] off i'm doing it no offense andy yeah nothing personal sir you can call me sir if you want to we loved we loved the few good officers that were out there as i'm sure you would have been in that category so you never know jerry's out yeah hey after 17 years man you earned your spurs that's not necessarily white house on right there yeah yeah but don't forget to the urinal perhaps but by the way we're not leaving today without you talking to me a little bit about pakistan oh yeah if you can i can yeah yeah pakistan with me at some point that's why we're here man you know the passing of the torch if you will indeed the next generation you guys generation but see you you thought about it though you thought about that experience and this is the great thing about sf and even with the seals that when the people that are doing the operations talk about it they're always looking for a better way to do business yeah how to improve it now you've got stuff today you got more lawyers over there and you have combat troops at times the rules of engagement are far worser i was going to ask that what rules of engagement were you operating under well we're supposed to get fired at first but once we went across the fence let's [ __ ] the rules yeah who is who told you you need to get fired at first because that's idiotic of course but that's just you know backyard bureaucrats and this is in country stuff i mean they had bad incidents you have young soldiers or young marines that would fire people and we had cases like one time our idaho came out of a target and they they landed at uh one of the marine air bases on one of the hilltops and um the marines came up to our south vietnamese started giving them [ __ ] and that's not gonna fly yeah yeah and so hep spoke really good english and he told them in all certain terms and i was i forgot i was there for that but most of the shouting was done by the time i got and i heard i went over and corrected the situation but we had a recon team that came into contact on an in-country drill with marines and they fired them up the marines opened fire on our guys oh [ __ ] and we fired back call that what would that be a green on blue yeah or yeah that's a crayola palette you don't want to [ __ ] yeah and then earlier we were talking about the team for psyops where all the americans are killed the vietnamese e e to the border and when three break out one was killed by a marine because they were envy they looked like there were south vietnamese carrying guns wow and the marines didn't think about why they're carrying car fifteens yeah what was your i mean in the wars that mike and i fought in you know they talked about geneva convention you know expectations of people that we would detain and likely expectations at least of what we could expect if captured ourselves what was the expectation if you guys were to be captured i had the last hand grenade right here and that's it i'm not going to be a pow but that time we knew we had heard the stories of horror what kind of stuff i mean i i'm not familiar with the stories what kind of things were happening oh the uh they started with the navy and air force pilots that were pows up north gotcha that were shot down handle hilton type stuff correct and they were just treated wretchedly and inhumanely of course and so we heard heard that and then of course nick rowe who was a green beret captured early in the war he was captured tried to escape several times finally did escape and we heard stories from him uh not directly but stuff that came through channels so myself and mcintyre and a few of the other guys we all just carried the last hand grenade if we got wounded if we're gonna go we're going to take as many as the [ __ ] with us as we can it's kind of a power flex that is you know dick colonel nick rowe he wrote the book five years to freedom incredible book um oh yeah but he started our schoolhouse it probably started the air force schoolhouse as well that spun off the army schoolhouse because uh i know our schoolhouse which is ran by special warfare center that taught started teaching right after nicaragua's experience all the guys that went through the pipeline but then that broke off into different sections which included the air force and jpr8 joint personnel recovery and all the stuff but that that experience with you at that time nobody knew except for the handed down information and you guys are learning every single day i can imagine like because i know when we're in the g watt you know we show our kids all screwed up right everything we're doing is like what are we doing and then you look at us now it's like completely different yeah and then you you take it back to that time period and you guys were inventing warfare because it's very different from world war ii and germany and here's our other lesson when mcintyre and i went through our combo training we got recycled i had a hardest time getting up to speed for morris code the guy who brought us in on weekends and at night worked with us day and night on the stuff with uh paul villarosa sfc he had three tours of duty we loved the guy and he was a coma wiz he could uh send and receive at the same time wow and he he used a bug and he was super fast anyway he trained us he earned our respect we get to vietnam during or shortly after our top secret briefing we learned that paul villarrosa died on the first mission sog mission out of fob 4 in da nang which was the january 1st 2nd or 3rd 1968 wow and additionally what they did to him they fried him literally with a um napalm the the fire you know the flamethrower flamethrower thank you and they and they forced one other american to stay alive to watch it wow when they fried him and they killed another team member of somebody and did you need but i forget who the american was but when he came back they took him right to saigon and that was part of the psyops that we were up against so we knew what happened to paul who was our hero and our hero who had bet three tours of duty is fried on uh in a target yeah so they're not following talk about psyops oh no none of the rules genevic convention but first of all everybody in america doesn't realize today that the commerce the first rule is you will lie you will say anything you want to to the media the media will report it that way but it will not be the truth and that's the way it was then they said that they had no combat troops and layoffs lying through their ass yeah and today they lied yeah what what's your what was your relationship with your indigenous guys like i grew up you know as a green bereans and many countries building rapport and my favorite experiences were working with endage with it was like uh i posted a picture the other day on well how many sets of vintage do you have i only have one you probably got how many i got like 10 sets i love the term sets one of my favorite sets was in uh uh in konark province i had a civilians that we transitioned into afghan special forces before afghan national army probably canaries yeah yeah yeah was that right super like historical locals that were just super pumped and motivated yeah they wanted to be there they were hungry for it we paid well but uh i posted a picture of me uh on an op it was a long uh long-range operation in a place called coacha valley which was a some of bin laden's old stomping grounds we had an mh-47 that that was shot down all kinds of crazy stuff happened and i'm smoking a cigarette and it was the there's a blue box it's a white and blue blocks like pine something pine or something like that or like you could take a puff of that cigarette and blow it into a uh you know a napkin or something it was just black tar just disgusting and i don't smoke i'm not a smoker but that day yeah somebody asked me they said well i didn't know you smoked and i was like to build rapport with these dudes i would do anything yeah i hung out with them i drunk i drank tea i wouldn't do anything i was just gonna have some interesting questions for you thursday night i was i was done you noticed where the question would come from yes oh yeah okay yeah i mean i did serve in the navy it was a semen um but did you have a good rapport with them and then what happened to those relationships after you guys left well the first part of the question it was spectacular yeah i mean i i was so fun that's why when the tour of duty ended i felt guilty as hell leaving yeah and of course i it helped to have lynn black and the frenchman go on the team and they ran a shitload of missions the five months i was gone yeah you know they were in good hands good hands yeah yeah and uh that and likewise the indigenous take great care of them and so when i came back it was like oh it's like old homecoming so it was great uh the rapport was um you know but i had to earn it like you know when spider parks introduced me to the team i go in and the and the counterpart was sal who was like 98 pounds soaking wet 50 pounds of heart and he looks at me he goes to the interpreter hep he goes he's too tall his feet are too big and he looks stupid yes oh yeah and that was the assessment so this is june early june i met sal or maybe even at the end of may so it wasn't until october 7th on that mission you proved yourself did it there wow and you know and the most significant moment was we're on we're on the king b flying home now right i look at sound he goes he gave me the nod that's it that was it that's all you got i would take that moment in time that's so amazing oh yeah but it took a while yeah and he had me pretty well accurately feet are too big looks stupid you know yeah and sao was the head of the indigenous zero one he was the team leader for the vietnamese side so he and hep when the team got uh several members lost they recruited the young people brought them in yeah train them from train them up yeah and we trained together and they took care of them we took care of the american side and when it came to the mission everything came from us we talked to sam what we wanted to do who's going to do what and he made it happen he would make it happen what happened after well april 30th 1975 one of those most saddest days of my life wow because that's the day the vietnam war saigon fell yeah and just sitting there going like [ __ ] me to tears all of our people that saved my life the king bee pilots the team members they're still there and then uh indecent interval came out when frank snapped at the story on um how the cia did not destroy her documents and the nva had full run of their documents about this top secret operations they had the names and addresses of all the people [ __ ] on top of that oh yeah did they wind up hunting down the all the time some did now like sal was just so savvy he went to saigon and and blended in yeah and i'm not sure how he did i never talked to sal after i left really yes sadly the only person i talked to was hep have you ever tried to go back and see if any of those guys are around nope well first of all i was just the you know just the simple reporter going from paycheck to paycheck no extra grass around and then got involved to have my family so between the family and work and living paycheck to paycheck it's just you guys go on with life yeah man i always wondered about and they're always in the back of my head so the good news with hep was um the history channel did a uh a story on a song called suicide missions it came out in 2000 and in it the picture from across the fence was there i had it and long story short heff's nephew saw it called the history channel they called me i called him he was nine miles from my house what and he gave me hep's phone number and i called up hep in houston and we finally got together happiest day of my life we got to see if those guys are still around no they're excellent are they gone yeah we buried hep uh three years ago what about saul no we lost him on valentine's day seven or eight years ago okay and then doti kwang who was with lynn black on october the fifth one of these staunch nba with cowboy um we recruited him to idaho and we lost uh kwang i think was five years ago oh wow i heard about this all from hep he was able to keep and we sent money over we tried to get sal and then back but between a corruption and you know we're just poor poor soldiers i um there's a guy named omar in um in texas who's a truck driver this guy's a truck driver and his brother is a truck driver he was one of the original operators that we trained in the iraqi counterterrorism force so this is the closest thing that i think modern green berets had to mac v sog which was um the commanders in extremist force which i was in um is a specialized direct action special reconnaissance unit unit that works with specialized special emissions units and they're like the think of it as like the regional swat team in the area that responds to crisis responses and and then hands it off to the the tier 1 units one of the original missions that we got tasked for is take a bunch of iraqis pull them out of iraq train them in jordan train them to be specialized operators and then go in in small units and conduct counter-terrorism operations in iraq and we did that in o3 and so from 0.304 all the way through the g-watt until 2014 we operated with the iraqi counter-terrorism force um every green beret that rotated that was a sif member and including task force that were using them at the tail end of of the uh of our part of the g watt in iraq up until 14. uh we were doing that omar was an operator his brother was an operator and they they they left iraq to live the american dream and stand up here and this fall um i'm trying to get evan involved for black rifle coffee because this fall i'm going back to iraq um really i got five trips to iraq but i'm gonna go back there for a sixth trip to document the iraqi counterterrorism force and all they accomplished because they're hot [ __ ] that if it wasn't for the ictf that were that were started by green berets they wouldn't have destroyed isis and mosul or or um really or bill they're the sole reason there's a documentaries out about it but there's some reason that they sacrif half of the ictf that we trained up are dead in the fight against isis about about 10 of them we lost in combat operations overseas but i want to go back interview the main dudes that stood them up that helped that i have four rotations with them or three rotations with them and then tell their story but also highlight guys like omar who's still alive we're still young we're still able to tell this because i hate to hear that these guys that play such a significant role because we've done it we've left these guys behind in afghanistan and iraq and we're doing it again again and again keeping the wall street had a hell of a story yesterday on it it's insane it's insane it's a heartbreak it is heartbreaking it break it it hurts bad to know that those dudes i mean even the afghans that i serve with they were with robert miller who was a third guy who got the medal of honor posthumously i worked with those in digs handing them over to rob who was an 18 bravo just really and and he got killed fighting uphill against the enemy but some of our endage that were there got killed as well and those guys are still there i mean they don't they live war you know their life they don't get a rotation out they don't get the you know high five out and i just there needs to be more done about that yeah i mean and you know and the other thing just getting back to to the end did for a while there there's much more of an intimacy nothing sexual or anything but just that they're closer yeah you know you play poker the guy sitting next to you have his hand around your shoulder or on your leg yeah there's nothing fancy smashy about it but it was really close i got i really enjoyed that my second tour of duty i ate my meals at night in the indus mess hall with the team yep yeah and that was just great fun and then um i left camp suddenly because me and the ceo had this disagreement and that night we had a party drank everybody everybody passed out eventually hep was the last one to wake my interpreter right and so we're outside this must be two or three o'clock in the morning and um he goes my and he they never say myers my my you need anything else i said no we're done he laid down and passed out right there in the sand but that's how loyal he was right to the end you know so i picked him up dusted them off carried him into the team room put him in bed yeah and then left i had two weeks left in country and then i deer roast down so you never saw him again no i saw hep yeah but nobody else in the team gosh man when you left after your first rotation there did you know you'd be back for a second no no i didn't know what the future held did you want to go back for a second um yeah i did but i did but i didn't at that time i i was engaged to a gal and the way things worked out i thought i was going to go back she ended things and i said fine so let's go and went back and just seeing the team again seeing lynn and uh being back where special forces belong which is doing the hardest missions getting out there mixing up with the bad guys to try to help have an impact somewhere how was your transition out of that life um i lucked out you know when i came when i went back i had um my family was there they've been praying for me from day one grand mom striker i'm convinced that the one of the reasons why i'm survived is because of the prayers by divine intervention like what sal said you know and um my friends from church were there went right back to school i had to get get i flunked out yeah i had to make up the classes and then i wanted to get my degree so um i figured to go back to school and that was my mission to really focus on that transition and i mean it gnawed at me feeling guilty about leaving behind a team occasionally guys that come through trenton like eldon bargewell when he was heading to ocs he stopped by we had meal he goes he thought about coming back and lynn and i talked about trying to get a job with the agency but then lindland did a great job at a tv studio he's getting paid tons of money for his artwork and i just kind of went with the flow and we ran a pow mia center at college um we started that for over two years selling the powma bracelets just bumper stickers raising awareness about our pows what year was that uh 71 through 73 until they came home so probably not a popular year to be selling those things oh no no no crazy oh yeah but again there were those who didn't like it but nobody was opposition enough they would go through the administration and say we we put this thing in the student school new student newspaper office and we had the pow mia concern center we had we whenever we get the story out there we we worked on it to raise the concern about the mias i mean as of today we still have 50 green berets that are missing in action in laos alone then you threw in 80 plus aviators that died supporting them yeah oh yeah and in fact our soa reunion this year is going to acknowledge all of the kias that are still mia it's a big number yeah it's huge think about your work i mean you had one or two people at moa and everybody went [ __ ] blind until they got them yeah and today we talked about ours yeah still fit with 1500 or when over a thousand 1 584 as up today wow in vietnam for the vietnam war includes all of vietnam laos cambodia china few in thailand and there's a couple in china where av years i think wow how much time from your second rotation until you started school and dove back into the the after of your military career next month i came home in may of course i came home and my dad got me got me a job driving school buses for some pocket change and the first week my first drive is i got a school bus full of black children taking him into a white neighborhood in chambersburg new in trenton which was an italian section of town it was part of the integration and we got stoned and rocked windows broken on the school bus jeez straight out of vietnam did that oh yeah and me without my car 15 man because i saw a couple of people i really wanted to hurt i just came i just came from trenton trenton's are not the best place in the world today even today what are you doing well there's training denigrated the state i got the i trained the state swat team or state patrol swat team state new jersey state police yeah oh yeah yeah good p good good guys oh yeah good guys and they're getting it's like war there for sure they're busy in that place oh yeah so when did you start telling your family exactly what it is not to the book came out i was gonna say wow so what was their reaction to what old tilt was up to in vehicles you know that's kind of funny you know mom never talked about i don't know if my mother ever ever read it because it was so hard particularly when i went back when i told her i was going back i was out of leave time so i had gone down to the pentagon got my orders cut cleared base came home said hey i'm going back to nam and mom was really heartbroken but dad just said okay let me know if you need anything and uh went back and uh that was really hard that was the hardest part about going back and so after my little brother knew we talked dave and i talk all the time so even there it's like he read the book first then the questions would come off the book yeah i bet across the fence what you're until that point what year what did you read the book it came out no three in 2003 so yeah so it came out 30 plus yeah and then i redid it you should know the math on that mic you're the quant i know i got it a nice round number 33 yeah yeah but um so dave and i talked we still do to this day my little brother who's taller than me and uh um then we redid we did the expanded edition of across the fence about 10 years later we threw in 50 pictures three different chapters including the one where the frenchman got shot in the back four times and lived to talk about it wow yeah the four rounds go through his back through the radio through his fatigue and each round broke the skin on his back and ran out of energy wow put him right on his face and douglas i jumped up i wanted to fight those commie bastards and they left they all thought he was dead oh really yeah oh my god and he had his pants taped so that night he's in the shower and he goes uh his back hurt and they realized he'd been that the rounds had broke the skin on his back and he threw the four slugs out in the sand wow i told her if i'd been me i would have kept at least one at least one for sure oh yeah just for for who knows what good god oh yeah when you were part of a mcv sog in that year that you were over there how many operations do you think that you went on well you know in my mind when you're going into the lz and getting shot out three times twice a day that's almost a mission i'm gonna go ahead and count that one that's counted yeah okay and if you did it in the evening and the morning i'm gonna give you two things on that your big heart yeah you know i never i lost count do you have any estimate i have to think about that it sounds like it would be hundreds at least oh no no it wouldn't be that high because just the turnaround time um good there were a few where we were actually on the ground for several days you know like that one there were socked in uh the coldest time of my life was in the dmz we get inserted again there's questionable weather we go in and there my point man when he came off the king bee almost broke his ankle and so we went in with two king bees so i think some was on the second one i forget now but he really hurt his ankle and we couldn't move and so i called for a distraction to come back and get him and we would just run without him well in that short period of time he got socked in and they wouldn't come back there was a lieutenant flying covey with our fact and they he said now you guys continue to miss it i said well one guy can't move we're not moving anywhere without him the weather closed in and we were on the ground five days and five nights and the dmz was rained how much food would you guys take with you on an operation um usually carry rations for five okay but in this case we we cut it a little bit short figuring that the weather's bad we didn't and we hadn't we've been shot out of so many targets yeah what about water what about water are you procuring off the land right usually ignition tablets well just try to yeah have the salt the uh the purification pills iodine right yeah yeah exactly so tastes less water you'll ever have indeed and it had that so yeah we try depending on where we're going because usually in layoffs there would be a stream or something we get water out of and even there we'd be very careful you know so yeah we just carried one canteen for water we had the lerps which were dehydrated rations and so you put the water in wrap it up put it next to your body and a few hours later and have body heat heat it up yeah and then eat it that way and then every when we ate they had indigenous rations too which were rice and then they had shrimp fish and things like that with special flavoring and again these were developed by our special operations department where when they designed them specifically for indigenous troops they put vitamins in there so it helped them with their health yeah and uh so that would be just a bag with rice or flavor you mix it up a little bit yeah what was what was your lowest point during that year there with mcvi song uh that that missionary where the boot was touched because that next day when we went straight up the mountain all day and right near the end before we got to the top after we had contact with the wood cutters and there's no shots fired i mean sal had gone out with the uh sewn i think it was and they had seen them and the woodcutter saw them so they went that away then we went more to the right around that mount trying to get to the top before dark and we had been on a move since first light and it was getting around maybe three four o'clock in the afternoon and we took a break and when i went to get up i fell down lily just fell and went on my face and i was just sitting there for a minute lying there going like oh man i just want to roll over and go to sleep but i also knew that every eye on that team was on my dumb ass so i went to get up again it happened again went down i hurt my bad knee landed on my face and i'm near terror firmer with that [ __ ] on my face and that was my worst moment right there because i just really wanted to go to sleep but i knew that i was the one zero yeah and um just got my ass up and we finally got to the top of the mountain the last light thanks to sal he got us up there what was your most rewarding moment in that year that we were there oh there's a few um no having successful wiretaps and again you never you know how it is with the cia you give them 10 000 things you never hear anything unless you [ __ ] up and they want to blame you for the [ __ ] up okay that's that's the way the cia operates when it comes to us mike do you have anything to add no that's true no yeah i've been there that's why i'm not there yeah you got integrity yeah it's a pain in the ass oh yeah and and there were and there were know we had that missile on thanksgiving day at 68. the mission was find three nva divisions the first the third and the seventh nva divisions were m.i.a literally and we had done a whole intel study that night had photographs for the first time which i'd never seen before high elevation photos maybe came from black birds or u2's i assumed they were black birds anyways we picked out where they were we had a thanksgiving dinner before we went to the target we'd go in we're on the ground maybe an hour or two walked right into a base camp fire still lit one still had a pot on the fire and what we figured out was later was that one had just left and another one was coming in so the point element and the tail security all came at us now we're in cambodia much more wide open 200 300 400 feet you could see and the image i'll take to my grave is the nva running at port arms towards us and we had to make it back to the lz so we were doing a fire our rotations yep and then the claymore mines put them down then we used the claymore mines with a five second fuse as we continue to move back and then the the 20th sos air force the green hornets got there in time with the gun runs the five seconds on our claymores we got back and got out under the just right the last second and we went back at a second thanksgiving dinner got back to base had a third thanksgiving that's how you do that indeed indeed ssop have you ever used a claymore mic that had a five second delay no i don't think i have no it's not authorized yeah oh it's not right yeah there's a reason for that right i'm pretty sure the minimum is like 30 seconds on the time fuse because there's a plus or minus factor with that we did get in trouble for wiring claymores to the front of our vehicles like we had the gmvs in afghanistan and we had them on the front we took a picture during like it was actually what do they call those pictures where you send them to headquarters and they go they give you a thumbs up it's uh storyboards right yes so he gave him a storyboard and was us doing an op and we had claymores rigged on the front because if you got into a situation where you had even breaking in contact you could at least clack off the front end of your vehicle directionally towards the bad guys oh yeah front towards the enemy and then contact and they were like you that's you can go to jail for that like oh what that's not a thing see it's crazy and that misses what i call a jocko mission because jocko goes you know uh he says you you found him i said yeah that's a jocko mission the good news is i found him the bad news is we found him yeah double-edged sword you guys did the australian pill i saw on discovery channel that's what you guys are known for the australia the australian pill which is the oh where you like open fire and then you break contact and the discovery check that's all you guys do that's your thing right i do that everywhere i do that inside of hallways in rooms actually that's how i clear rooms sometimes bananas so you're in a staggered file yeah and everybody goes to their field of fire and it's just the first guy shoots to start with runs back and then everybody just peels back yeah it's fancy i noticed when he said that you pegged into that you're like yeah yeah yeah i know we know that yeah we ours wasn't a sophisticated user we're we're just linear going yeah so one guy opens up and then rolls out yeah yeah traditional center peel center pill and then we had our m79 guy and then bubba and i used our m79s too so we'd fire off the car 15 far off the m79 round and reload during the peel we were told that the 20 rounds in two seconds wow but i'd be surprised if it took that long it's probably not been like a second and a half but it's but that to this day just thinking about that fire power so like oh my god did you we never had 30 round mags did you ever feel like you were out gunned with 762x39 in the in the jungles like did you want more and what what what grain bullet were you guys using do you remember i couldn't tell you i i go to s4 give me bullets and they did okay yeah but i don't know but no never felt on a gun the car and that's that's oh yeah yeah um so at that time what was the manufacturer it was a steiner colt steiner i think so well ours had the cold emblem on the light we had some car 15s as well yeah time period well the whole book now this is called the ar-15 by um larry larry larry and then james warpley but they have a huge book on it and they have all the history of the car 15. yeah you guys were the first unit in vietnam to use the car 15 right right and the air force had them before we did the uh the uh power rescue men real okay really yeah interesting oh the air force gets everything first sometimes interesting yeah in this case they had them times have changed yeah well the prior rescue is still still outstanding troops oh these guys are just amazing spectacular you in one of your podcasts you're talking about the 53s the ch-53s deltas yeah so i did the last op in 2008 of one of the 53s that we were told historically and significantly was used during your time period really sog missions yeah they actually they actually is it's just a two engine version instead of three because the new ones had three yeah it was the two it was a two because jocko had mentioned it but he used you used the 50 okay as well is that right but these ones in our training uh we we were landing on the x on the on these like front door like right in the middle of the of the thicket and we had used them for i think one because they were marine they were flown by marines right and uh we used them for one rotation and the last flight i remember we did an off where we were very successful and they said uh the lineage on this bird they did mack v sog missions during vietnam whoa and i was like what i couldn't believe it man i was i was like in the bird like i don't this is amazing like we get to i get to fly in this bird that was in filling or x filling mac if you saw guys during vietnam well you know we talked to the door gunners who talked about how they go back to base at night and they would use beer cans to plug up their bullet holes on those ch-53s i believe it too well i noticed you guys are doing a lot of drinking so our marines [Laughter] we provided them with the cold beer because you you guys could drink there was no uh general order number one which is no alcohol in theater that was our general order number one no we no strictly adhere to at all times you guys can burn it down i mean you guys get you guys we had our clubhouse man okay and then at one point in fact i just learned this little tidbit from a guy that ran recon who became the club manager and when he took over at the end of 68 he was 25 000 dollars in debt from the club somehow so he went out made these deals wielding deal got all these expensive liquors and things bought it at base price and then sold to the air force and the marines and anybody nearby fob one and within the two months he made up all the money so we had a had a profit nice oh yeah i like it and some of our guys were very big dreams you guys you didn't do a lot of drinking downrange i have i've heard about it all right i heard stories i got drunk once yeah before mission and we never i never drank i wanted to be a awake for sure yeah i was the same if we got hit at night it's like i want to be ready yeah i never toyed with any of that if we had some down time due to weather perhaps we would watch band of brothers and have cocktails and ambien that's a classic cautionary tale antics yeah john how much of uh your experiences in vietnam how much of an impact did they have on your life going forward and i asked through the lens of my dad one of the reasons i first came to montana uh we lived in missoula when i was very very young yeah like i remember it snowed and i got in trouble for throwing snowballs in cars and [ __ ] you too yeah i just think that's what boys do but my my mom basically gave my dad the ultimatum you will go work on yourself and fix yourself or i'm out and the kids are coming as well in his experience i mean again brown water navy the things that he was tasked with doing hugely different than the things that you were doing and i would i could only describe i would describe your experiences as very intimate with your enemy the proximity going into their backyard similar in a lot of ways i think that the units that mike and i came from you're going to the place where they would maybe least expect you where they may feel the most comfortable it's very it's very upfront and in your face um did you notice any impact on your life things that you needed to work through based off your experiences in vietnam um well you missed the adrenaline more than anything yeah and so you wind up doing little things like in the middle of a snow storm doing 120 miles an hour because a couple highways where there's lighting so when you're doing 120 you can see the snow in the back that's really cool wow that's a new one an inverted snowstorm yeah yeah so it's like jumping yeah and we and i don't know i missed missed that part of it and of course the guys and the vietnamese feeling guilty all the time but just tried to get on with life um and there were you know just other things that were going on between school a social life a little bit and um it was able to um move forward now i thought it was pretty cool squared away but i went to a party a family party maybe 10 12 years ago and heard somebody talk to my sister she was what was john like when he came home he was pretty messed up so i trust sounds very familiar yeah yeah i trust my sister more than i do me on something like that maybe talk to linda she might give you a better scoop did you did you feel it internally though um and i asked that because i struggle to remember who i was when i was 18 when i joined the military and people will ask me you know do you feel different post your military service than you did going in and the answer is of course yes but i also went in as a teenager right and i came out in my late 30s so [ __ ] absent combat i'm still going to be a different person well but i know it had an impact on my life i do notice differences in myself and i actually will take the the feedback from people who have known me during that time period more than my own self-assessment because i think we're really good at lying to ourselves probably and and in my case i um you know i was 20 years old when i went in so even there i was an immature 20 years old and so when i went in i came out as a better man so i felt like i raised my platform for my internal self-appraisal i had been with the best unit and in that war and i used that as a self-assurance factor and there were many times we had [ __ ] that was going wrong at the student newspaper or later in professional life going through divorce whatever no matter how bad it was nobody's firing ak-47s or rpg's at it's yes that's what my dad says often he uses a slightly more colorful language which i'll leave out for the purpose of this podcast but that's so true though right and you know we never had anybody putting willie willie peter in front of a claymore just to make it more effective i had not thought of doing that we did that in the future i regret not having experience it can light up it can light up the enemy for you as you're getting pulled out on ropes we did that once but um so that's but for me that was the bottom line it was like the pride and of course the country at that time was so crazy and you got that idiot john kerry he was just a lion scumbag and that had such an impact to this day would still suffer from his lies yeah and so personally i just took pride in what i'd done like typical sf guy which is to be my examples or spider parks and the men i served with who i judge every man i me and me you are i judge you compared to my guys pat walk and spider parks and you know john mcgovern lynn black you kidding doug the frenchman those are our guys you went to war with and so i always had that that factor there and the family you know mom and dad just support us down no matter what and during those early years just going to college it was like a real rat race between college not doing very well it's got enough to get the degree at least and then working driving school buses and doing a powma thing because that was the conscience drive a heart issue and glenn lane robert owner still moa to this day we tried to do the best we could with a limited resources that time to get public attention to it that's still going on today yeah did you keep in contact with a lot of the guys from the unit or did you just lose contact because obviously everybody's doing their their thing there were a few guys lynn and i were in contact for a while the frenchman and then eldon bargewell would write occasionally because we were really close um and then um as time went on that disappeared and there was like a void because again i was married family want to be a good dad just blessed with the amazing girls who by the way my second daughter gave me my second grandson today what yes good timing how did you arrange that andy his practice really just practiced kind of lining up navy officers but anyways my daughter came through his beautiful grandson and uh seven pounds 19 ounces congrats that's awesome yeah he's back there he's shining so um just try to do that mission you know get the work and then we got working on the books and then uh spider parks told me about the special operations association and this was 1983. i'm still in trenton didn't do anything much i just became a member and then we moved to california that's only 300 miles from vegas where we had to be unions so finally for a couple years me and jeff jenkins we were together and we used to drive to vegas get there in the morning hang out wait the security guards left sneak in fake a badge so we'd have to pay a mission or anything get the free food crash with one of the guys in this hotel room that night and then drive home why and we get to see the guys you know would you would you ever go back because like i so when i uh i just saw this yesterday when i i went to i went to um e7 school which is uh a knock it was called another okay and uh real young e7 and i got the leadership award and when you get the leadership award they gave me a book a mcv song book i i was trying to think of the author who wrote it it was uh it was a medal of honor recipient and oh um um and it's a black book with a mac visage oh wtf uh is that what i call it what's called whiskey foxtrot no uh it's something on leadership um anyways i know anything about leadership yeah yeah a medal of honor recipient mcv saw guy they give you that book and they give you an sf association lifetime membership right and so i have that in an envelope that i never opened inside the book and when you told me i was doing this podcast i started picking up all my mcv song books and i'm like oh this is cool and i was like what the [ __ ] i was like i was like oh yeah whatever invitation yeah i would never so i i would never go to that but i feel like there's a period of time where you just lose everybody like everybody you walk away you kind of find yourself and then at some time at some point you kind of come back and gravitate towards the community for you guys it's maybe the navy seal foundation or maybe a local chapter or an organization but i think you hit the nail on the head i think you have to find yourself first and then come back to it yeah i think the people that struggle the most and this is just completely my opinion are the ones that don't take the time to find themselves and they just define themselves by what they used to do yes i don't i don't think i'm ready for it like i even thought about entertained because the green bay the green beret association or the greenberry foundation like the navy sale foundation is incredible like the things they do it's very big scale like and they're helping an impact because of that scale yeah um green beret foundation i've seen them fail a phone call you know i've seen them fail like a thank you for a 25 000 nation you know to a like i've i've linked that up and went hey let's do and then they don't even send it thank you not even like hey thanks for your 25 which is a guarantee you're not going to get another 25 grand exactly exactly so sad but true so i i look at the myself and i go well if i want to do that i'll just do it myself because i feel like i could do that right but even i wouldn't do that like right now because i'm not ready and i don't know what that is and even said in 83 this is 83 so this is way post war i mean we're still in there's two there's a special operations association formed by sag sag was formed that because there was a special forces association that was formed by the a-team guys yes and so in the very dark days yeah um right after during vietnam war they were recruiting wanting sf guys to go in so i joined but they didn't pay much attention to song and to young guys they had the career as far as they had been in the decades they've been 10 15 years now i was only in for three and a half years 19 months in country yeah running missions a lot of a camp guys didn't want to run yeah so we had the soa and that's the one that's the special operations and we're recruiting today otherwise if they don't improve the recruiting it will he'll be like the uh doolittle raiders he'll be down to the last man standing and he gets the bottle scotch gets drunk and goes home yeah that's absolutely right are you do you personally are you gonna get involved in that i i am not part of any association i have never been to a single seal reunion they do west coast and east coast one cove had obviously changed some of that i've never been to one i don't have an interest yet to go um i need to i need to figure out my own path a little bit more i think before it's hard to find your own men if you can you have a guarantee to see the guys you served with wouldn't that make it more yeah compelling so i got invited to a tomb guard reunion uh i was a guard at the tomb of the unknown soldier when i was 18. and get out yeah it's a crazy thing i don't even know how it happened i'll send you pictures real skinny you were spit shined huh i was i was um but i it when i i'd never had i'd never want to do any of that and just recently a buddy of mine austin he was actually one of my new guys at the tomb i trained him as a as a young e3 and um he asked me said hey we're this is like the 80th anniversary he said hey come to the 80th anniversary and it's the last time you could wear your uniform because you could wear your uniform in it and the army finally went back to like a squared away uniform like the world war ii era uniform i forget the name of it but uh away from the blues and then i was like well man my family's never seen me in uniform um i i never had a reason to be in uniform but maybe i'll just do it just for that for my family so i could hang that up and give it to my kids one day and and i expressed an interest and he signed me up for it november i still haven't committed personally but i'm like but there's a greater cause which is the family right but but it's also connecting with those guys that i really had an affinity for because there's a lot of sf guys that i just don't like man i i stand in my community and i'm sure there's plenty in my community that don't like me either exactly yeah and i think that's what it is is is inner inner community there was a lot of rivalry and a lot of we eat we like to eat our own and well he had his own a type yeah that's bound to happen it's just sad but so true yeah but i like the reconnection idea stepping away after the transition and being a civilian and going how can we inter-operate to help each other advance our businesses our lives our families whatever it means moving forward that's huge and then you get to the history you've got to get the history from your era yeah and for no other reason you do it for your children yeah that's that's what i've been telling him right because um he's like i'll never write a book and i'm like look your responsibility is impacting not only the lives of people young people who aspire to be you but also that legacy that you leave behind in archives for your family or for generations to come and you know we don't think our stories are extraordinary especially when compared to a man like you but it's it's a story and that experience in some context is going to help some kid go man i want to be a navy seal i don't know why you'd ever want to be the name of silver green right now but no chiseled features rugged handsomeness above average hair yeah i mean do you need me to keep going the best clothes the best clone in town yes it's true it's so true you might forget the gun but the never forget the comb and mirror that's true no i'm really kidding how can you forget it's got a pocket on your belt for it that's first line but see here we are i move like the wind and first line gear and like today's podcast these are the kind of things that reach the younger people because i too like your story about you when you're 12 years old looking at it or reading a song something or another whatever it was and plaster books yeah he's the godfather of sog writers yeah and then we have um the the seal side of it everybody's story is different and i think that if you do think about it you should think about it from the approach of your story not the iii so much but how i got involved and then the people you deal with along the way i mean my god not many people get shot with an ak at what 10 and a half feet was it yeah somewhere between 10 to 15 feet most people are better soldiers than me so they would have not [ __ ] been standing where i was yeah enemy marksmanship seriously i'll take one over here enemy marksmanship on aisle one here we are can you see me am i in enough light right now thanks bang so but that story been and and the way you've bounced back i mean those are the kind of things that inspire our youth there are people out there and this new medium what we're dealing with today podcasts and jocko and a couple other people that do podcasts um that is it has an impact i've seen it now since the first podcast i did with jacob that's when i've seen the outreaches from literally around the world yeah australia new zealand poland a couple dudes from russia say i'm here but you know i like your stuff okay fine but that's the way and there are people from sf in fact january went down for sf graduation and rsfa chapter 78 we prayed for the barbecue before the graduation i had breakfast with a young man who read across the fence he wanted to go to sf and he was down there in between he had gone through the assessment was waiting for the first day to start sf training we had breakfast together oh that's really cool and there's there's many examples like that so in your case and you're going to write a book too you said no i'm mike's going to write a book i'll answer for him the [ __ ] yes he is he's always writing it right now it's unprepared but see when you do this by mike glover you won't you won't yeah oh man but you don't know who will impact and i don't know i mean i mean instagram every day i'll get at least one note from somebody who's been impacted by the podcast and then some will be kind enough to say hey i saw you on jocko and oh yeah i read your book too but either way that's you know you're talking about the future and hopefully we can get there are young people out there that respond yeah how did they wind down mack vsog um like everything else um clandestinely because they had to shut it down officially but then they stayed in there there was the the acronym i never remember but they had to wear black hats for a while so they changed the name probably of course changed the uniform kept the same mission right and then by that time the several of the guys were all carrying sawed off them rpds and uh multiple rounds magazines just going in super heavy and uh nick brockhouse's book we few um just talks goes into some more detail about that just an incredible book uh his time in the ground was he got there in 1970 71 right at the tail end oh yeah and they were but again they were able to get in sometimes and oftentimes they didn't and when they did they made contact but again the guys in the ground working well with tac air i mean like you guys talked today you have your air force atac i can't imagine that me it's like i'm controlling the airstrikes and you know it makes me hate when somebody else is directing error because you guys use kovi like fact controllers fak a's basically yeah well we had yeah the code name was covey for our facts but the secret was had an air force pilot and a green beret in the right seat that's crazy and that guy had been on the ground there's no rookies here the covey riders were the men who've been there so they could talk to you and john plaster there's at least one tape out where they recorded john talking some young radio operator down the guy was freaking out on the radio and john said you better settle down i forget what his wording was but and uh he said settle down or you're going to die now trust me do this do this do that the kid did boss he got the [ __ ] team out that's so awesome that's john plaster and john had been on the ground yeah he ran missions many and he had i think john had three tours of duty did you ever meet bob howard talked to bob on the phone once yeah but remember bob was put in for three medals of honor yeah and he was putting he at least get one of them he did fine he's got one finally yeah he was again he he earned the award as a sergeant he was an s4 at the time and i don't think he was ever assigned to a recon team but he always went out and strap hanging to help other teams in trouble the worst missions he went on would be bright lights yeah and um he was put in for 11 purple hearts he only got eight yeah got commissioned as an officer too yeah now here you go he earned the medal of honor as a sergeant yeah but then he gets promoted so the day gets awarded the medal of honor he's an officer yeah sir i mean that's the way it should be yeah of course i'm stuck on this uh covey you know pilot left seat greenberry right seat i want to see him switch one day yeah be like hey dude it's thursday you wanna you wanna swap seats you wanna get on the ground you talk me through flying this thing and i'll talk you through talking on the radio we'll see even there they cross-trained our people so that's why in case something happened to them in case the poll gets shot yeah they wanted the green beret to be able to land it and they did so could be talking about yeah there's a little bit of that going on i went to i was one of the first snipers to go they forced me to go to jtag school which was called special operations terminal air controllers yeah something like that and so uh we were cross-training sf green berets so if i was in a i know i was one of the first sif guys to go because i was the only one in third group that was uh jtac qualified because we had to do a recalls i was the only guy who showed up it was that dude it was it really was one of the hardest things i've ever gone through like tough course technically it was super difficult and you're talking lat long which is a different language than mgrs i could i could speak mgrs but lat long is completely different and then the engagement of you and the bird is so important because that's your lifeline oh yeah and it's it's so in each bird varies depending on who you're talking to and what service they belong to but it was incredible to hear like even in sog with john plaster all of the communication and all the stories they have were all bird and pilot related but you never got to see those guys after the fact never they flew away into into the horizon and you never saw him no and that's why the great thing about the soa my last year as president we brought in this bad pilots to a1 oh my god the stories really because yeah the we the classic is one where the um the team is in a world of [ __ ] and then once joe says bring it in close he does a gun run he said no bring it in closer he comes in and his um and he was the uh wingman so that so the squadron leader said don't do it and he went in anyway and did what the ground commander asked for and when he did it the way he explained it was he did the gun run or a napalm run so close that when he pulled out there was radio silence he goes [ __ ] he like hit the tee he smokes him yeah and he said it was the longest seconds of his life wow but then he came back and said thank you do it again wow now he got his he got his ass chewed out for not listening to his squadron leader yeah but the man on the ground he saved do you have any regrets looking back on your career and sog and kind of all the things that you transitioned into in your civilian life uh hmm whoa i gotta think about that one for okay ask me another 15 20 minutes got a little time to think about it that's a good one though oh yeah so we here's a question if you would at some time i think cause i got a question for you mike in the modern we still haven't heard about pakistan oh that's true yeah so in the modern era is there i mean do they teach the modern green brains in the pipeline about sog do they have their place their legacy and their history i mean basically they need a [ __ ] shrine built to them which in army speak is probably a building dedicated to them but is it is it taught the way that you think it should be yeah so it's interesting when when you go through special warfare center now or when i went through a note 2 um i went to selection and during the invasion of afghanistan and i went through the q course during the invasion of iraq so everything we were learning was from vietnam all of our instructors were not vietnam era guys but they were taught they were in that law period in the 80s and so a lot of the doctrine that we had in hand for example the book on firebases which i still have which supposedly you could sell for a thousand dollars on ebay i've been making copies in my basement of course um but you will be launching that on the store andy's private label them so it's just there's cover on it um it's those documents and that doctrine is all vietnam air in fact the firebase book which is fascinating is all from hand written accounts from guys and firebases in vietnam or saw guys that's what we were told and if you look at it everything from the punji stick like how to counter an attack or an ambush um how to build a firebase and the perimeters of security how to set up a patrol base and a recon operation we were told we're all based on a lot of oda tactics in vietnam even doctrinally and even with the literal hands that would be more hate camp than saul for sure for sure and then when i've noticed like even in the swic the special warfare center halls uh even in the leadership you know we we have um a lot of the people who talk to us during our graduations in leadership schools and a lot of the things that are told us taught us um taught to us culturally are all sog related there there are eight there's some a camp stuff related but most of it's sog related so sog is like the tier one tip of the spear culturally for building green berets in robin sage um uh in small unit tactics and all the things that we've done and it's even it's even there in the the branding i mean i remember instructors having mac v sog you know books t-shirts hats uh all my oda my first oda in afghanistan we all made the mac vsog patch and would wear that on our ball caps with velcro because it it was just like reliving and we would have recon teams that were named instead of states they were just named after uh guys that were killed in combat like right you know we have recon team bittner and we go out and conduct operations named after ben but it it's part of our culture for sure a hundred percent of this well we've had we've had third group guys that were in afghanistan yeah they started wearing sog recon team patches yeah and they called valor yeah yeah yeah oh no no this is dirty i'm totally joking yeah yeah i was in third grade for a period of time sure yeah well and they and the one guy i still talk to him today he's he's now a warrant on his uh oda and uh he said send me do you have a patch and i said yeah i'll send you a patch but you got to get it dirty and he did really and he had the team so we had pictures we did a couple things for for our local newsletter and then for the drop yeah on those guys where that was just so cool they called them their shield yeah my my team sergeant who he was he was killed but my team sergeant his dad um i don't know his first name but his last name was booth was uh on rt maine i believe rt maine yeah yeah he was rt maine and his granddad was an oss guy and he like he has the lineage oss mcv sog and he was a green marine was killed it was crazy man his son right now is in the army right now oh is that right yeah his son's in the army it's crazy what a legacy crazy man crazy so look before we before he shut down you got you talked about pakistan i'm dying to hear about well i didn't do anything only tell us the classified things yeah yeah yeah why i you know i did uh so all of my my career um i wanted to be a ground branch guy my entire career was like paramilitary operations right that's what i want to do like i wanted to be i interviewed the the special activities division chief well be just like evan haffer yes yes i wanted to do that it's taller but taller and more handsome more ripped and chiseled more swabbing the boner yes yes um evan's gonna he's don't remove my stuff from brcc please um so let's return my phone call evan please i i always wanted to be since mike spann was killed uh early on in the g watt sure i got the opportunity to interview his boss who's the special activities division chief on 9 11. this is months ago but since that time period i wanted to be in the cia sure so i knew a course curriculum and career field i knew exactly what i needed to do to achieve that as a pmo a paramilitary operations officer yeah and so i went through everything the only thing i was missing was my degree i got my college degree as a a team sergeant like nickeling diamond online courses no kidding yeah like it was very difficult to do you're college-educated 15 years i don't know if i'm educated but he majors in mathematics on abacus i specialize in advocates major in abacus so i got i got my degree yeah and then i transitioned and you know one of the duty stations that i had with the the agency was was pakistan and i had a transitional phase where they they the sequester happened when i went to get hired as a staffer for the cia and it they put a stop loss or not a a hiring freeze on all positions for the cia isn't that mostly just a tax classification though it is it is but they said they couldn't hire so like they wouldn't they wouldn't allow me to go they wouldn't allow me to or anybody to go through a process to in process even though i had basically been recruited i was i was recruited in libya i was ready to go and uh so they'll pay you via 1099 opposed to w-2 yes so so they won right basically well they made me a contractor and i did i did grs work for as a contractor and then realized in in some of these countries including yemen pakistan libya the politics that are all involved in at the agency uh especially because the agency is so close to the government right so i mean policy drives intel collection which drives operations or intel priorities which drives operations so being on the operational side my whole life i'm like well i want to be on the intel collection and warfighting side of the agency and realized it's even closer to the flagpole and the difficulties i was having in libya operationally were compounded and more profound in being a cia guy and realized i wanted to step away and in fact really and when pakistan i i think i told you this andy my my partner my writing partner in the agency was ryan owens brother who was killed he was a dev guy and was killed on a hostage rescue in africa um but after all that stuff transpired i'm like dude i want to start i want to have like a life because my in committing to being a paramilitary operations officer you have i many of my friends are chiefs in divisions of the central intelligence agency and their entire life is that and i love them for it thank god there's men like that who have committed their lives but i felt at that time period which was at this point 22 years into it i've given enough i'd walked away as a sergeant major in special operations and special forces and and had the cia job and was like i'm done and i actually decided that in pakistan um no kidding yeah in pakistan i you know pakistan is like if you could take the team america movie um and then the the the the the [ __ ] uh stereotypical theme of the guys running around and with the big big beards that to me was pakistan uh especially team america combined with tropic thunder which tropic thunder every stereotype i was like this place is crazy but i actually enjoyed uh i was impressed or not i was in peshawar but i enjoyed pakistan but i had a whole myriad of experiences so what kind of a mission would you run in pakistan a whole bunch of different stuff i mean we can you talk about any just the one that teases a little bit it's nothing sexy i don't care but you did it i didn't so the world that world what that world which exists between afghanistan and pakistan that world exposed me to like me me going like in shock going there's this thing that exists like politics no no like technical capability yeah like technical capability going whole [ __ ] like i thought i was exposed on the army side on the green side right that there was al this world got in in the agency world and went holy [ __ ] man like this is crazy um but all of that uh said in pakistan that's where i decided to hang it up we had a [ __ ] uh i've been in two earthquakes in my life one in afghanistan in 2005 which was a major earthquake that killed thousands of people from pakistan that originated and the second one in 2015 in pakistan uh 10 years later which was another record breaker that killed a whole thousands of people in pakistan and i was like it wasn't cause the [ __ ] it wasn't because of that uh uh earthquake but i was like i'm [ __ ] done i can still shake you up a little bit it does like i was tired of living in shipping containers and babysitting [ __ ] uh case officers that was the bottom line like it's fair yeah yeah i'm a master at a babysitting um you have successfully avoided answering my question which is tell me one little missing mike uh i did go back and get a brick from uh a bottom bat from your boys um from uh the the bin laden hit uh yeah but i i failed to get it into my bag before i left country i had i had the break from osama midlands compound was like [ __ ] yeah and then i left it on the bookshelf as a as a book uh uh what is it the bookend a bookend goddammit and it's probably sitting there cause somebody's like who the hell would use a brick for a book or they hucked it they're like this piece so for the third time what one little mission you did he can't tell you i can't yeah so i say i can't i'm in the 20 you're cool well i'm in the 20-year window you're in the twelve okay now we're gonna now we're covered okay good now i feel better i'm trying five years in the 20-year window but nothing but but to be honest nothing is sexy as sock well i don't know about sexy but anyways nothing you guys did it though nothing else that's why you got to get those stories down write them when you're fresh i i here's what i propose oh he's writing here's what i propose that i do the voice for your audible for your book only if i can do the voice for yours [Music] from my book you've got a better word he has a voice for radio for sure and a face yeah absolutely horse of course i got the best face for a radio oh man this has been this has been an awesome experience yep one hanging question though biggest regrets oh yeah the request regrets question biggest regret oh if there are any there's got to be one there's one well i mean the regret was just the way i left suddenly because i really at that point my um my i had to stand up my enlistment to go back and uh i the paper had been put in for a direct commission which i didn't care much about but it's just like okay if i'm gonna go on with the career here and um the way life worked out for me that it's just funny how life all unfolds yeah um so i regret leaving them and on april 30th i regret that i wasn't um in a position where i could go back and get my people yeah the guys that saved my ass so many times both the vietnamese on my team and those king bee pilots i mean some of the stories um again jocko podcast with cowboy oh they're crazy i've listened yeah which is a 258 or 247 which is cowboy no 258 was cowboy he was on with alabama and he was in country for 16 years before he got out incarcerated re-educated yeah and then captain ahn who was the king bee pilot who lost both hands after a king b crash wow and the reason why he lost his hands when he got shot up the fuel tank got ruptured there's fire in the cockpit he could have landed right away and saved himself and his crew but he would have landed with the communists he would have become an instant p.o.w he flew over one mountain and landed wow where he was safe and lost his hands yeah well he still has hooks today wow oh yeah and he still smokes a pack of cigarettes every day with his hook wow if you have two hooks for hands you can smoke as much as you [ __ ] want indeed he's the guy i was telling you about that did that one rescue mission where nobody would go right and he just he went he's like i'll i'll go yeah and he also we had a night mission where um a hatchet force had been extracted under heavy gunfire the last helicopter out with the team leader on it gets shot down crashes the team leader gets a broken back and on captain on flew lynn black and idaho in at night by himself to an lz and then lynn was able to get in and they had a medic with him williams who was strap-hanging and he could move in the jungle at night and they got to the the uh the 1-0 the team leader dave gordon got him out and on came back for him and pulled him out at night wow oh yeah i'm assuming he didn't have night vision goggles or anything well you know what he said what they told jocko he said um chocola asked me hey how can you fly a knight he says i've flown in vietnam for so long i know the terrain i know layoffs wow he could fly it blind basically oh yeah because you know the the what the south vietnamese did they took a lot of the radio equipment out the only radios they left in was the ones they talked directly to covey and to their base i guess yeah because how do we know that in our clubhouse and fob one the marines would come in and they and they can't be possibly coming of course the marines are always kind of like hey you guys you know so one day they said when we're in da nang we'll race you to fob one and we're going to beat you the marines go no you can't they go yeah we will and so what the the vietnamese didn't tell the marines was they'd taken all that extra weight out so they flew directly from from vietnam to nangamine over the high van pass straight to fob1 the marines had to go around it yeah because they couldn't get the elevation oh wow and they beat him and then they also said we can back up the king bean and the marines go that's not an atop there's nothing there about backing up an age 34 and they go bet you 100 bucks and they won oh yeah good god that's amazing man our king be possible that's why i'm here so the regret is that's the biggest regret that a not to do more to get them back and uh between the team and uh the king bees okay mike we got to get you to the airport uh how long have you been podcasting for close to three hours a couple minutes three hours okay no serious yeah yeah yeah i knew this was gonna be a long one i i'm glad you pushed it left for my timeline yeah for sure yeah thanks for doing good generally if you take away on the way out or what oh i'll probably crush them away you used to making accommodations for the green side of the house it's no big deal that's true that's true john thank you for sharing so openly with your experiences it's unbelievable and thank you for everything that you did in vietnam thank you it absolutely it's hard to describe um how i mean i'm at a loss for words for how impactful and how unbelievable it is to me that the things that you guys were doing it's uh it's it's a order of magnitude greater than anything i was ever exposed to in my military career really yeah well it's my honor because see as i'm looking at it from my perspective for you what jocko's doing with the podcasting you gents are doing the next mission which is to get our stories out and your stories and your stories sir when you can talk about them but that's really important that's our history and that's where the future will come from these there are young people that listen to that they are listening and they'll be more particularly as our education system continues to fail at least in pubic schools yeah mike closing thoughts no i just uh it's been an honor andy thank you for inviting me on to this and and um thank you for sharing your experiences today i think it's it's it feels very full circle to me like like there's a lot of things that me and andy have talked about on the podcast that i i talk about in my podcast and build in my business and company that um having this experience here with your generation of warriors that fought in in sog and and vietnam where it feels like right like it gives me the i hate to say it this way but it gives me the affirmation and the validation i need to feel good about moving forward with my mission with our missions of continuing to tell your stories without feeling this burden of whatever it is right because you know quiet professionals has always been our motto in special operations but there's a there's something to be said about after you do that like andy said sharing experiences without sharing ttps right that are so important in life now because of the failed broken systems and family unit and the list goes on that we need to inspire our next generation and you inspired me um without you even knowing it um the the the band of brothers that you served with and mac visav inspired me and all the warriors that i fought with all of them were inspired by mcphee song even the seals that i served with knew about sog and their missions and all the men who fought in vietnam and without you guys doing it and leading the way i don't think i would have got off my ass and did anything about it well let me add this then uh from your story and your story which i saw the first interview with you with andy that took courage your story talked about what you've been through during the wars and afterwards finding yourself that takes real courage and i think that's more inspirational than anything and that i really salute that personally on a personal level and i think that shows the spec ops um esprit de corps itself for you to bounce back like that and to beat today and andy for you to bounce back i'd still be feeling sorry for myself and pad itself somewhere if i took that ak around that's what i do on fridays okay well you know but but that's that's my salute to you i think from one generation to the next and even today i that's why i really enjoy going back to the graduation to meet the new sf men yeah and to meet each different generation and i've read some of these books about your wars and you guys did it you carried on you took our tradition and moved forward and made it better hell yeah gentlemen amen thank you thank you again to 10 000 for supporting this episode of the podcast 10 000 is a direct to consumer company no middleman so you get premium fabrics trims and techniques that other brands they simply can't afford get 15 off of your first purchase when you go to 10 000.cc not dot com dot cc and enter the code cleared hot thank you again to babel for supporting this episode right now when you purchase a three-month babel subscription you'll get an additional three months for free that is six total months for the price of three just go to babel.com and use the promo code cleared hot that is ba bbel code cleared hot for an extra three months once in from the free i've got the west bank of the river who's going to give it to you in the grove roger give me that gun run wait along that back ladies and gentlemen thank you thanks for taking the time to tune in whether you're listening on an audio only platform or you're watching on youtube i appreciate that you take the time every week to tune in people ask me a lot what can they do to help me spread the word and the answer is actually embedded in the question the biggest thing you guys can do to help me if you enjoy the podcast and you think it would be helpful to others is subscribe and share with other people and if you have the time go on to apple podcasts and leave me a rating and a review if you think the podcast sucks tell me it sucks and leave a zero star review or the lowest stars possible if you have a question comment or suggestion you can go to clearedhotpodcast.com there is a contact me button right there which will land in my inbox and the last thing if people are interested in helping out what you can do is fly the old flag and by that i don't mean an actual flag because i don't have any of those i'm talking about t-shirts or sweatshirts or hats whatever it may be again cleartotpodcast.com click on the shop tab and hopefully something in there looks like it would be an item you would like to wear around town and then you could tell people what it is when they ask you but that is it the biggest thing i can say is thank you i truly appreciate it until next time see ya

Channel: Cleared Hot Podcast

Views: 401,200

Keywords: andy stumpf podcast, andy stumpf, podcast, world record, jre, military, powerfuljre, andy stumpf wingsuit, navy seal, united states navy seals (organization), cleared hot, cleared hot podcast, andy stumpf cleared hot, joe rogan, fitness, motivation, us army, john s meyer, mike glover, mike glover cleared hot, cleared hot mike glover, john s meyer cleared hot, cleared hot john s meyer

Id: GKjtFEc2vsY

Length: 180min 34sec (10834 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 05 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/TinKicker]

His best pod…ever.

[u/standardmethods]

Andy's reaction to Bob Howard being put up for the medal of Honor three times is just priceless

[u/Noorviko]

First episode I've heard, im now about 5 deep. Great podcast

[u/According-Item1742]

When ever mike starts speaking about “the political” it kills because it’s clearly not his wheel house and he has no idea.

[u/According-Item1742]

The balls on John Meyer are insane… fighting in those conditions with the lack of support insane.