Combat Story (Ep 19): John Stryker Meyer | SOG Operator & Team Leader | Green Beret | Author

and the nva had come up that knoll in the jungle and in the first hour of firefight we never saw one person they would come out and open fire we blown back into the jungle back into the jungle we didn't see anything until maybe after a couple hours of his fire fight and we finally made contact and we could see like a little hill well they're all dead bodies and the enviery coming back and stacking up the dead bodies because they wanted to get on top of the dead to shoot down better at us welcome to combat story i'm ryan fugit and i serve war zone tours as an army attack helicopter pilot and cia officer over a 15-year career i'm fascinated by the experiences of the elite in combat on this show i interview some of the best to understand what combat felt like on their front lines this is combat story today we hear the combat story of john striker meyer a pioneer in the special ops community who served two tours as a mack v sog operator and team leader in vietnam john led small covert spike teams across the fence on clandestine operations in the laos in cambodia in what many now refer to as the secret war in the vietnam conflict john has three books that chronicle both his stories and those of his fellow solid operators has been featured in various interviews including several with jaco willink and is currently building his own podcast with jaco to tell the stories of other members of the sog community john and jocko are also collaborating on a video game based on sog missions it's amazing john lived through the experiences you're about to hear and i hope you enjoy his stories as much as i did welcome to the show and thanks for being willing to share your story oh thank you ryan honored to be here i gotta say i um i've interviewed a bunch of what i think i would call more modern day uh warriors now tom satterly todd opowski tom shea these guys who are seals delta and rangers and after having after having read across the fence your your book your account of your time in vietnam i would imagine if any of them were here to share they'd say that's like another level of crazy beyond what they'd seen similar what jocko has said in fact but uh i i question how you're even here today after reading some of these stories so i'm very eager to dive in to this experience you shared well yeah you know what i'm when i hear people like jocko say that even i'm amazed yeah yes it's another level of crazy that uh it's hard to understand but the book is so well written so much detail you really understand the characters so i i'd like to dive in and one of the things that i noticed in the book john that you mentioned is eventually you kind of gravitate towards or become almost addicted to the adrenaline the intensity of these missions and i'm curious when you were growing up was that something that you grew up with like risk risk taker more adventurous or was that just developed over time in the army um that's a good question um i have to think about that when i was a kid you know we um we always liked playing sports riding bikes and then pushing things a little bit just to see what you can get away with you know particularly in the teenager years but i never thought about it in that context that's a great question so can we uh what to come back that may all happen within an hour or so at the first hour block no hey it's no problem no i guess in all honesty i mean seriously i i never thought about that way and i don't think it's um something that's a major risk factor i've always like enjoyed pushing things so if you had a bike you want to go as fast as you could roller skates as fast as you could things like that and then um once i've read the book the green berets and it's like oh the the air force recruiter told me i couldn't fly airplanes because i had an eye thing so i said okay well then i could jump out of airplanes that's next was that was that actually your your goal was to fly at first oh yeah um when i grew up that's all i had was model airplanes no no and cowboys you know you had the plastic cowboy figures so when you had an earache be in bed all day my mom would bring in the horses and the cowboys and the bad and the good and things like that and there was something about that that made you want to fly or just or serve well my uncle had uh she he flew um gooney birds over to hump during world war two i'm not sure for how long but i know he served there and i always had his um his unit insignia patch which i kept for years and uh somewheres along the line it disappeared on me but um yeah the flying and jets you know remember as a kid hearing about chuck yeager and then when we were in school i forget was elementary school our first year at junior high school which in my case we're still talking in the 50s like late 50s yeah they had people that came by talking about the air force and they said they had a miniature jet engine and they had it on a very heavy cement block of some sort that weighed like over 100 pounds or a steel block they said this engine is a miniature but it's so powerful we want to show you what it sounds like and the power it's like it was fascinating here's this guy's he cranks up this miniature jet engine it roared like like a tiger and uh it was fascinating so i used to make only whatever the latest air force fast jet was i had the jet a couple of rockets but they were they just weren't as much fun as the jets and then you mentioned you talked to the air force recruiter was that something like you you actually went to them and said hey i want to go fly they checked your eyesight out and then it was a no well you know i i so somewheres i i've worked glasses for a while and somewhere during that time with the eye exams i remember talking to the doctor and we were talking back and forth and i just said you know someday i want to fly jesse says forget about it with your eyes they'll never let you in because i have a dominant eye and a lazy eye and so the lazy eyes the leg and the right eye is my airborne eye just it seems like that never even faced you but was that like a a blow to you you've been wanting to be a pilot and then all of a sudden somebody said that's probably not going to happen yeah it was around 9th or 10th grade you know because uh 9th grade was traumatic for me because i had um i was pitching in 9th grade at junior high school and we had exhibition games with the high school kids and our junior high school team beat the high school and we can't jvd not not the varsity okay okay it was jv but they're bigger but myself for another pitcher we were just smoking them and then i hurt my arm it just fooled around my buddy and was never the same and the my baseball career which i dreamed about from age two all the way through and then the air force thing was like a backup so within by ninth grade it's like oh my god what's next like falling apart here ah um did you john did you come from a military family you mentioned your uncle was there anybody else that in your family that kind of influenced you into the military or was it something you just picked up from what you just described in in all honesty it was just something i picked up um you know we had um over the years uh watched all those world war ii movies you know he just saw the history and saw the what the aviators did during world war ii you know 12 o'clock high all those kind of movies yeah of course there's a couple john wayne movies along the way that um just talked about the patriotism and the extreme sacrifice of our warriors it was kind of like oh my god they did that was the big war then the korean war porkchop hill and uh then later learning about the choson reservoir it was like oh my god yeah you know so like i said it took me two years to flunk out of college so i flunked out dad goes you know they're coming for you and uh right around that time i was working in yosemite and i've read the book the green berets i said that's it if i go i want to go with these guys because at that time you know you had basic training advanced infantry you had a month leaving you're in vietnam and i'm a city slicker you know like clint eastwood said it's important to know your weaknesses or your limitations i guess so i knew i was limited and needed all the training i could get so with the sf route got some extra training yeah so i want to ask you one other thing you touched on it just now actually um the korean war so oftentimes we hear a lot of people talk obviously about world war ii even in your book i think you describe one of your um one of your peers who i think father was in like battle of the bulge for instance and it's always there yeah his dad got a silver start about crazy that's just crazy right so like you always hear about that you rarely hear about the korean war how did that influence you if at all you mentioned like reading about it or hearing about it what was that like for you well you know it was like man that's a i'm i'm glad i missed that war it's brutal and that movie pork chop hill and there was another korean war movie that i saw because in our day i grew up in trenton new jersey and we used to get a tv station out of new york kor channel 9 and on saturdays they would have war movies and when we were kids when it was raining out then we'd be in front of tv and you know just watch the war movies and over time you know everything from the submariners to the john wayne movie for even the the seabees they came away with a deep appreciation i mean uh it's like any vet who sees a movie the hollywood made about them they go that's lousy it stinks it was wrong they should have done this they should have done that well okay but for a city slicker who never knew nothing about nothing other than history books which are dull and boring i mean it's one thing to read about a battle of antietam words twenty thousand union soldiers were killed and nineteen thousand confetti okay that's that's bad must been a lot of dead bodies around okay what's for dinner tonight yeah but seeing these movies on that it kind of turned it up a couple notches in terms of tuning you into the reality of it all you know yeah and uh oh yeah gosh so then fast forwarding you mentioned you're at yosemite you read uh you read the green beret book um by robin moore yeah where where did you go after like how long after that are you signing up where did you go to sign up was it outside of yosemite or what summer job when i got done i came back i tried a junior college just to dodge for a couple more months right it's like i'm still in transient i hadn't talked to recruiters yet so i'm in a french class in a junior college as a third or fourth week and i avoided answering any questions so finally teacher answered me a question which required a yes no answer i said see in my french class and i said maybe it's time to hang this up and let's go face the reality so i went down to the recruiter signed up and then the rest is history from there all right yeah if you can in the book it's really interesting how you kind of talk about the truly how quickly you move from from one training event to the next in your in-country and you do some training could you just step through some of that briefly to give context of how quickly you're in country truly and starting operations well actually from the day that i enlisted to the day i actually put my boots on the ground and in cameron bay and it was gosh 14 16 months because the december 1st i was i enlisted went in unlisted then i went into the army on december 1st or 2nd 66. basic training of fort dix advanced infantry training fort gordon may of 67 jump school from there right after special forces training and then me johnny mcintyre a few other guys got recycled in the commonwealth mos training yeah which included morse code and i had a 10 year and you know and remember the name of sergeant villarrosa he came in on the weekends and worked with us he taught us at night on his own time to help us get through he said you guys can do it you just gotta practice we did so we got through it um we graduated got the certificate of graduation around about december 20th 67. go home for christmas we had to go tdy to fort gordon for three months on rtt training during this time johnny mac and i were proudly busted to private e deuce land in vietnam and april go through the encounter now so we landed at the end of april go through the in-country training for two or three weeks and there was maybe a little down time there i just forget but anyway right um and they told us at bragg at the end of your country training some little guy's going to come out and say we're looking for volunteers for a project do not do it okay so johnny mac and i are there and we just saw the movie the green berets with john wayne what are you kidding me johnny mac what's the project sergeant and he goes forget it either you're in you're out so we signed up right there we volunteered next day we're up in the da nang as we got debriefing the top secret briefing so actually could you could you just share the atmospherics of the briefing where you're in country and they're like hey who wants to volunteer for this because it's really well described in the book you kind of got this audience of folks and then they they describe this other operation or lifestyle you could have could you just talk about that briefly because i found that to be well you know i mean it's it's quick yeah i mean you know because it reminded me of a way when i was when i was going through advanced infantry training there was a day a rainy day we're in an auditorium where we're 500 600 people we're all sitting on the floor and you had different people coming in for mos you know guys coming in for signal from military police the cooks would come in and go you're never going to be hungry this would be you you'll really love working as a cook it's the best job in the army and they had a stage where you had the steps on each side and all these legs would go up the steps and talk about it it was like boring we took a break came back i think it was the second session right near the end right before lunch and they said oh he got one more recruiter and then walks his little banny rooster of a green beret it was raining now he had his beret on he had fatigues didn't even have a fatigue jacket walked in did a vertical jump to the stage turned around and says we're looking for recruits with special forces anybody interested i jumped up off the floor i read the book everybody would stand up and go yeah let's do it me and two or three other guys or 600 that's like so that's on a smaller scale at the end of our uh in-country training that's what happened i forget the exact room but there's you know there had to be 50 or 60 of us in there and i can't even tell you came out but it came out with that we got a project i'm going wow sergeant villarrosa was right and those guys you know we had sergeant wagner and sergeant graham these guys really knew what they're talking about and then right there you just realized everything in your life just changed next day we're up there at da nang they took us to a safe house they needed to talk about culture shock and so we go to the safe house that night and there are guys either from project delta or from mike force they are just came back from a mission in the astral valley where they were relieving one of our units or something but they're a talk of all the combat so mcintyre and i are sitting there drinking our cokes because we're too afraid to drink alcohol and um we're hearing these guys talk and we're like going holy [ __ ] this is like the real war and then the next day we go up for our for our um briefing and that's where we had the whole scene where we go in we take out our pads and pencils like good little students like we've been for the last 16 months and the first thing that sergeant major says put that [ __ ] away this is a top secret briefing he uh before you use one piece of paper 20 years either you're in or you're out if you don't want to if you don't want to stay in this project you can leave now well nobody left we all signed up and the the 20 years was 20 years of secrecy is that right yeah you couldn't talk about like you said you can't tell your mother your girlfriend or anybody so yeah i said and you don't don't put in your letters if you do we'll find out you know on the sidebar on that after my first book came out my dad said to me now i know why this black guy would come by and pick up our trash stop their house and trenton they had a guy from the fbi and dad got a job at the post office because he had been a milkman all his life and the bottom was beginning to fall out of so he got out of it when he could and then he got this job at the post office where my uncle was working and he saw that black guy there and the fbi office was up on the second floor he says those guys came by your now i know why they picked up your trash so just quickly you mentioned leg obviously for those who are listening who are familiar leg is somebody who's not airborne qualified right so i it's come up before indeed um and then you also said something interesting where that decision changed your life which clearly it did right i mean you went and did things that most people won't even dream of did you realize that at the time i mean how old were you then were you 19. no uh this was uh 68 so i was um 68 22. 22. okay so you're 22. did could you kind of sense like all right my life is going to go on a different trajectory because i'm making this i'm volunteering on this one yeah we knew it was different but how do you know how dramatically different it was going to be i mean and we'd hurt but during that in-country training we talked to god we had trainers some of them were all banged up and cast or crutches because they had been wounded but they were part of the in-country training as they recuperated so we heard about the eight camps and you heard about lang vape heck johnny mcintyre and i were in a bar in washington dc when lying vague got overrun with tanks the first time the nba used tanks and we're going like we're going to die we went to the bank took out all our money and spent it before we went to vietnam we didn't want our families fighting over our vast fortunes you know and uh so that was it i mean so we knew that this when they wanted to fight of course k-son was on the front page every day now what they didn't tell you was the marines were there but green berets were the fub3 at caisson running missiles and you mentioned i mean you mentioned a camps you mentioned this uh this scene with you and and mcintyre taking your money out and uh buying steak dinners which is just such a it's just like i think a lot of vets could relate to that like all right i want to make sure i live it up before i head over there here we go like some things never change um but the a camps but just before we jump into that if you could share you you kind of talk about the top secret briefing is that the first time you're kind of brought into the fold for sog and cnc and what you're oh yeah you're gonna be exposed to all i mean of course you know it's like several other guys have written in the books there was a a black curtain across the map so there's the introductions signing he re-explained one more time he said okay now you're in the secret war welcome to the secret war this is what it's about bloop the curtain comes off there's south vietnam with all the cities but then there's layoffs in cambodia and laos north with with these 10 by 10 squares of targets it's like oh that's interesting and everything from that day on it was just welcome to the twilight zone and so truly that's when you are indoctrinated into what everybody knows is mac v sauk right military assistance command vietnam studies and observation group which is a great name and then cnc in particular within that yeah you know funny within our ranks we always said cnc command and control stuff like that we seldom talked about sog but it was studies and observations they did it that way because initially it was special operations group but our entire budget was in the navy budget and they changed the studies and observations because they knew that reporters always look for that stuff you know yeah so when the smart ass reporter comes along studies and observations oh man give me that's boring yeah yeah that's boring it's great and it worked i love it all right yeah me too so you're you're kind of you get this briefing you come out how long is it between the time you receive that briefing and the first time you're on a combat operation before we jump into the op i'm just trying to get an understanding of how long between some time somebody has said hey this is what's really going on and then you're actually in it well don't forget my introduction i mean the real introduction the blood curdling gut check was the day we arrived at fubai i mean you know you forget about the helicopter ride where we're introduced like joker brought this out and i never thought about it until we talked about it with jocko but we had that flight it was on the south vietnamese air force and the old age 34. well all the footage we had seen helicopters were all used what are we doing with this old bird and uh so that was the first thing and you know they introduced us to well you you being a helicopter pilot would appreciate that where we're going up a highway one and when it got to f of b1 they just turned a helicopter on the side that did a right degree turn and all of a sudden you're looking straight down the highway you're going oh my god i'm gonna die and johnny mcintyre those guys just flipped out i thought something was up because i saw the door gonna talk to the pilot smirking but that's our introduction we get off the helicopter here's the part that yeah yeah i get off spike team idaho gets on glenn leans the 1-0 robert owen is the one one with four or five in ditch or maybe six i forget what the in ditch count was they're in a target next day they're missing an action they're still missing in action today those two green berets are part of the 50 plus green berets from leos alone that are still missing in action from the secret war in laos just for context there as you describe this you literally get off of the transport aircraft this other team gets on never to be seen again never right and and you kind of describe this this morose that kind of falls over the fob the next couple days because everyone knows the team's out and is not in comms and nobody knows where they are yeah you know and this is may 1968 so that happens and at the same time this is may when we had um the um the cam duck which was the original uh first mcv sog training base which was an i-corps close to the border and but it was in the valley it had a lot of bad weather issues camp duck got overrun there's a brilliant book called bait b-a-i-t about that that battle the site what went on there incredible story that a camp could overrun there have been three other a camps in the asheville valley that were overrun in 66 65 and 66. so we we had heard about this not only that we had st alaska the entire team was wiped out in may the 1-0 e e for three days john allen they someone a helicopter pilot saw him near the border picked him up and brought him back you know john was never the same again we had another helicopter that was shot down on a target john robertson went down another team got wiped down this is just up at fob1 running targets into the layoffs not messing anywheres else and then during that time the table talk at the clubhouse was still like about all the other teams that had either been wiped out disappeared or one or two people survived and came back to talk about it oh and i forgot the most terrifying part about our briefing in da nang we learned that that paul villarosa our trainer who helped us become green berets was that he ran with some of the first missions out of f1b4 he got wiped out his team and they they it was just a horrible death for him so all this has hitting us within three days you get the f will be one well there is rt i mean spike team asp spike team uh forget the other one but back to back two teams just wiped out johnny calhoun and his team and so team got out johnny calhoun was on the ground helping audience get out and he gets killed goddamn if you can for the people who haven't seen your interview with jocko or read the book yet you mentioned spike team and then in the book it's referenced as st and then a state name off in idaho alaska um what did that typically consist of and if you can describe the one zero reference for people from our in 68 the recon teams were called spike teams because everything had a code name no you wouldn't come out and say this is a recon team oh no we're top secret we have spike teams yeah of course by that time the nva knew what we were um so spike team we had and so the spike team would be two or three americans with anywhere from six to nine maybe ten indigenous troops you would train together as a team on the missions the team leader whose code name would be a one zero so the one zero is the team leader one and one is assistant team leader one two would be the radio operator and in my case even when i became the one zero i still carried the radio because we did our own air strikes this is before close air support doctrine of the air force today where you have the j socks or what's the official title for the air force guys that are assigned to teams jtacs yeah thank you yup and uh so that would be the recon team we had hatchet forces that would have two or three companies and they would pull operations anywhere from a platoon to a company sometimes maybe two companies in rare cases cantu had a very successful hatchet force program and of course the most successful was operation tailwind but we could talk more about that later so then from there it would uh by the end of the year they evolved we just called them recon teams hatchet four stayed the same and each fob had different names we like in the uh fob one fob two we all had state names so hence my team was st idaho never been to idaho and for years thereafter had never been i finally went to idaho a few years ago i was working for a non-profit all the all those years it came full circle and so um if we could just talk about the mission briefly and then we'll get into some of the the experience but the reason you are where you are what is that mission set well here's the other thing too um ryan yeah an answer to your first question we wandered a little bit but i get in the camp in may we did uncountry ambushes but that was we didn't do anything like that for three or four weeks so we were doing training we had to bring together a new team you know fortunately spider parks would became our one zero spider had been on the team he'd been promoted to his own team but when idaho got wiped out he came back 1-0 don welcome became the 1-1 and i knew spider from fort bragg we had going through training group together and i was this catcher on the team softball softball team so we knew him and we had to hire new and ditch we hired three kids that were 15 years old and there was maybe one or two others that were a little bit older i forget who they hired but those three i remember because they were 15. and even then i mean i'm an old man of 22 going i can't believe we're hiring kids 15 years old but we trained up we did in country ambushes every day we're out there the spider had us on the drills weapons rappelling helicopters repelling other helicopters ropes you name it we did it you're an e2 at the time john yeah well yeah when i get there spidey goes you're a knee deuce he said we got to get you promoted to pfc please get that pse stripe roll your sleeves up so people think you're a sergeant love it i love it that's great all right um i i want to talk about the indigenous forces but just real quick if you can sure the mission that you guys are there to do at your fob what was that well our is multi-faceted first of all to go across the fence and there's a series of missions from there they could be anything from an area recon which would be hey what's going on like the one we had in cambodia there's three nba divisions that are missing could you go find them for us or a point recon like um they were coming south with fuel lines by the end of 68 we heard about it go in for that um try to get a pow we had a couple of teams in kantum that were very successful and um dick meadows of legend of the special forces legend he his team picked up 12 separate pows over over one year of running recon and in my case we we tried it a few times we were close a few times but we never were successful john can you talk about the incentive structure for capturing a p.o.w because i i find this amusing yeah if we got a if we captured a live pow and brought it back we got a week's r r and a hundred dollars bonus so we could spend it on r anywheres in the world they know how to motivate a soldier absolutely man i love it okay sorry so you got area recon point recon yeah the wiretaps um pows try to capture pow a few of our teams had heard about an american pow base that was that the nva held we would always try to get to them if we had any intel at all regardless what the primary mission was and uh we had a team that had a unique experience with that but we could talk about that a little later and then um you know there would be uh the point mission like they blow up a fuel line and then we had to do bright light so anytime a team would get in trouble we would go in the bright light was the most dangerous of all missions in that a team was down with casualties or down pilot and they knew you were coming to get them so in that case all you carried was ammo bullets hand grenades extra rounds for the m-79 extra bandages and a body bag and one canteen of water no food that's it and so that's the bright light uh bdas bomb damage assessment you know the air force knows brilliance and you're familiar with that a little bit that's right yeah yeah they said you know what we come up with a big 52 strike one on some of you green berets just go out there and okay stroll through it take a look at the area let us know how effective the bombs were they'll all be dead raw not they were very active and always pissed off so we went in for a bomb damage assessment it could get pretty ugly pretty quick those are the primary missions okay great so just with with that in mind yeah um what i'd like to do is i'd like to transition to your first experience in combat so where you're out of training and you're truly like going across the wire just over the fence however you want to describe it into enemy territory for the first time were you in the 1-1 the 1-2 um who was your your 1-0 at that time what were you feeling like at that moment well here's the thing i mean the first three missions we ran uh one was an in-country training mission but it was an official mission we were on the east side of the oshawa with another team spider was the one zero we made no contact and the other we had another team that ran parallel with us we were on different sides of a ridgeline and we were both moving south for some reason but anyways just like i said it's an in-country training mission but that was the first real one getting inserted everything's geared up we have the covey air assets are there if we make contact we can call in support the other team ambushed a path that lao ambush so that was pretty cool but that was them but then we ran two missions of um so before your contact we ran two missions inserting air force sensors one in the [ __ ] valley and we put one up a caisson off of highway 9 there by the by the base so spider park is going you've run three missions and you haven't even gotten your cib yet wtf and so i said well that's okay with me i'm happy to go all year long without it you know exactly so that all changed on that echo for october to um the seventh uh 1968. i love how you remember that so specifically and just before we dive into it when you were on those those first three training missions yeah those first three were real missions yeah yeah sorry i shouldn't even say training those missions were you as amped up as you thought you'd be like what was that feeling after having seen all the movies that the books you've read was just like all right here i am going in this is a real deal yeah but you know we always heard even even back in basic training ait the cadre no matter where you went they said remember the enemy will fight when they want to fight and so if they're ready to fight you better have your [ __ ] together because they're coming for you they want to fight on that day and so with those missions is like okay we got it's a good mission it's done we got the the we inserted the air force sensors they're happy we're happy and i'll take a mission with that on fire and uh so that was fine and um but we knew that was going to change and and so the reason why i remember to date so is because lynn black had that historic probably one of the most legendary missions in the eight years of assad history where the nine-man recon team had an inexperienced team leader and the team leader took their team in and they should have gotten back on the helicopters and left but he didn't he was inexperienced he walked the team into an ambush so nine men on a sog recon team came up eventually against ten thousand nva and thanks to the air for support and to the recon team lynn black who was on that mission talked to the nba officer 20 years later who ambushed him wow and he told them that they inflicted 90 casualties on a 10 000 man division on one day so the very next day we get inserted into echo four uh was a good insertion but by two or three o'clock we had trackers we tried to lose them when we set up our ron at night they were close and uh they fired a couple rounds and they're like within felt like within 20 30 feet but again we're in the jungle so you can't see 20 or 30 feet um at 2 o'clock in the morning i was on guard duty we rotated and and woken was right next to me i said i can hear somebody in front of our claymore so i said could i blow it he said no i thought he said go so i blow off a claymore in the middle of jungle two o'clock in the morning nobody on our team was happy about that but i think we may have gotten one but anyways so in the morning we got up left the first light by two o'clock uh um a little before two o'clock we come up a side a steep hill we came out of the jungle just to try to get further up this mountain at one point we looked back we saw two nva stand near port arms and they were smiling so that didn't look good so i told don he took us up to little knoll and we set up the null he says make comma we're going to have and sal our vietnamese team leader was like buku vc and so don told me to try to raise radio traffic and um we made contact so we were so just like just before you get into the contact there john there are a few things that you just described and i think it's it's so unique to the mission set you were in but the insertion right like you describe being shot out of multiple lz's and i'm not saying that it happened in this case but when you say insertion here i'm assuming your insertions are all helo dropping you in oh yes yeah right it's like before they did any of the uh parachuting in so you you do a helo in yeah and then h34 for the south vietnamese air force they took us they dropped us off two helicopters they dropped me don and sal off then the second helicopter came in with jim and the two remaining team members and then how far would you move from that initial insertion point to your bed down site at night that's a good question because when we moved we moved on our traditional um mo which was we moved 10 minutes and then stop and do nothing for 10 minutes just listen because if the jungle sounded right then that was really important and of course sal who who by 68 had been on the running recon for three years hep was our interpreter he had been running about as long as uh sal and then [ __ ] was our point man because sal had trained him up to be the point man so wolken was the team leader i was the 1-1 at that point and then jim was the one too i wanted to ask because you mentioned this in the book book in particular and i think it was on one of your earlier missions where you observe his situational awareness right where he is just so attuned probably to like what you're describing the the movements the sounds everything and you're kind of in awe of it and i've certainly been in that space with a more experienced pilot where they are like five minutes ahead of me in the fight they just can see what's going to happen and how to position things and i i was just hoping you could explain a little bit about that like how long they've been in and what that situational awareness was like and then how long it took for you to feel like you were at a comparable level oh let's let me be honest about that i never got to accomplish that level and i'm alive today thanks to the level of intensity and their intuitive instincts that they had when they're on the ground um sal particularly and uh sal trained up [ __ ] [ __ ] was really sharp uh [ __ ] and a few other members on our team their families had all left north vietnam in 1954 after the north vietnamese defeated the french at the battle of dnbnfu in may of 54. and there was 18 months where families could go south or north well nobody went north to communism but thousands and thousands of families came south and uh [ __ ] was one of them and anyway he was just a fearless fighter and you know time and time again i mean on that missionary we were running point we came across two pit vipers had i been running point i would have been dead [ __ ] saw him another time he pointed out he heard something oh you know again i'm like cappy cheers i don't hear anything but he put he gave us on full alert and so the team and then sal that he and sal made some kind of sign language and then south tolles spread out and all of a sudden we could hear things happening in the jungle well [ __ ] heard that and so we figured oh man they they heard us so we're online the pins are pulled from the hand grenades the car 15 is on full automatic the m79 is off for safety and here it comes it was a what do you call it a flock a herd of monkeys we got overrun by monkeys oh god but that's one of those in one of those times where like that was my first really serious mission and [ __ ] heard it god damn all right well yeah yeah please go go ahead to that first contact at echo 4 and that experience yeah so we're on top of this little hill and um sal wolken and hep and maybe even jim we're all facing one way i was on the far right and i forget where [ __ ] was and when the first contact came but we had set up wilkin told me to get on the radio call a prairie fire emergency which i got on but nobody answered so that that in and of itself was like help help can anybody help and there's like you know what that's like the the the the silence is deafening yeah so i'm bored nobody's answering my radio everybody's hyper it's all set up i'm opening my can of peaches and then sound hep open up and the nva come up that knoll in the jungle and in the first hour of firefight we never saw one person we were that close they would come out and open fire we blown back into the jungle back into the jungle and then at one point i'm firing into the jungle the ak fire is coming at us and you could feel them coming out of the jungle getting ready to emerge and then [ __ ] open fire over my shoulder and oh my he just shattered my my hearing you know and i'm sitting there going gosh darn it so anyways we get back to camp let me just jump back to camp we have our or we're we're in the team room i'll talk i said i said to our interpreter said ask [ __ ] why he was behind me shooting over my shoulder i assume i'm shooting this way and [ __ ] was shooting that way and uh hap goes no what you didn't see was coming up the hill were three or four nva and [ __ ] killed all of them and they were just about to kill you he wasn't shooting over your shoulder so you have that that narrow field of vision you know you're locked in yeah and so anyways i thanked him i said if i have a hearing loss that's fine i'm allowed to talk about it god so what what was the enemy size force that you think you were fighting at that time we never knew yeah i mean it kept coming as and like i said we didn't see anything until maybe after a couple hours of this fire fight and we finally made contact spider came up i think had to be close to a couple hours then we ran a1e skyraiders and then the reason why we knew we killed a lot wilkin came over to me and said you won't believe this look there and he's and we can see like a little hill well they're all dead bodies and the nvier were coming back and stacking up the dead bodies because they wanted to get on top of the dead to shoot down better at us and it was like what at first i couldn't see it you know but then you focused on it and then they kept coming round after round of course you know they could hear the a1 skyraiders coming we had gunships um scarface came that day we had the muskets the judging executioner came in and we went through a series of fast movers so as the first time where you know you being a pilot you you've heard the training where they tell you when you use a jet a fast mover the rounds will get there before you hear it it's one thing to talk about that but it's another thing when the air force guy tells you put your head down and then all that comes slamming into the jungle you don't even hear the jet until he comes by with the afterburners amazing and of course my favorite line from the a1 skyraider pilot is crispy critter time you all put your head down now and we did and though even there don't forget the nva tactics they knew by 68 they knew what a skyraider was and they also got quote close to the belt our belt so when they hear the sky reader coming they would rush us to be close to us to avoid getting napalm gun runs and we dropped bombs napalm you name it cbus the cluster bomb units yeah the amber and and the skyraiders were for us uh you know they were on station law and had an advanced amount of ordinance and i know you mentioned later on as you progress in your tour you still want to hold the radio basically for calling in those strikes were you calling strikes in for that first engagement yeah that was my um how close how do you remember like were you what kind of distance were you putting in for those those first rounds coming down the first couple of rounds we had was the um i remember more than anything in napalm because it was close enough that you could feel suck away your air wow and that was the first time we smelled burnt human flesh because they had they obviously hurt the burn up some of the enemy soldiers and then the uh the 250 500 pound bombs you know you tell the team put your head down and you just get getting that shaking on the ground with your head's in the dirt and just getting bounced around so i i don't know i can't tell you how close yeah but they were close enough that we that we were able to levitate a little bit if if you recall like i remember the first time i had to pull the trigger on a hellfire missile and how nervous i was how nervous were you calling in a fast mover for the first time in combat oh get here as quick as you can i didn't think about that was kind of like you know we're we're we're going through a lot of bulls here and we could use any support we can get so yeah yeah and i i think the fast mover was the first one on scene but don't quote me on that yeah i know we had the a1s and they kept coming back damn yeah and they're right you know then the first gunships were judging executioner from the 176th they came in they went back and refueled then scarface came in with the helicopter gunships and then we finally uh had the king bee that came out and you know and the uh the muskets made a couple close runs and that was the first time that the shell casings they were so close to us on the gun runs that had the first time where the shell cases went in my back and burnt my neck yeah so the first thing is oh [ __ ] you know i was like but on the other hand thank you yeah but that because they were firing above you john yeah that's insane all right the gun run came in so close they could they the king bee was there on a hover and i had been at the back part with the other guys could dawn through the first couple that i got up we helped we threw the last guys and i threw donna in the helicopter and uh at some point during that i remember that's my first neck burn from uh shell casings and in that in that engagement basically did you break contact and fall back to a pickup point no how did that happen we were in contact what spiders was able to pick out a spot that was about maybe 10 or 12 yards that we couldn't see from our knoll but there was a space about 10 yards maybe uh but it was elephant grass elephant grass is thick elephant grass it's not bamboo but it's 12 to 14 feet tall maybe and this was really tall and when you had to go through it it was just hard getting through it the the king bee captain tin hovered there for 10 minutes before we got to it at least 10 minutes and he just stayed there waiting for us which in itself is a there's a whole story of him sitting there anyway we get a couple times i got we began falling down on the stuff and uh i fell down don ran over my back don fell down i ran over his back we finally get to the spot where he's he's hovering and then uh we start throwing the little people on first then i threw don on threw jim on and then uh i was down to my last magazine in the last hand grenade when i moved left um when you guys when you guys x failed in that case were you under contact like in contact as you were ex villains severe i mean it was almost dark so if you can imagine this you could appreciate this um as we're just lifting off i put down my last hand grenade last willie pete and the last magazine and then my last minute i threw out my last m79 round and it's almost dark and you have this dark emerald jungle with i want to say thousands now but hundreds of little pretty little lights and he had these green tracers coming up arcing up to our king bee it was beautiful except it was pretty deadly so we took off and yeah so we left under severe enemy fire wow and then as we're he uh captain tim just flew straight south for a couple minutes and then when that happened it was the most beautiful sunset we'd ever seen so we went from that extreme you know i called that the apocalyptic death roar of the mortal combat and then they're shooting asses we're leaving and then all of a sudden we're above the ground and uh that beautiful sunset we went back they had a floor show nobody was there to greet us they were in the floor show jeez hey you're back good to see you have a good to get a beer and when you came back from that john like what i i don't know you just survived death it sounds did you guys take any casualties in that no amazing so you come back no casualties but you've just been through a serious gun fight what was going through your head in terms of all right i've been here less than a month i've got 11 more of these to go well remember that was october so by that time uh we i'd been at food by um five months okay i mean you still got a long time to go i mean what oh yeah what was that feeling like coming back from that mission well the first thing you wonder if you're going to see christmas or not yeah you know yes october and um it was you know we had heard about the the fire fights and we had all the stories about save as much ammo as you can but um just getting through that it's like we're back at basis like whoa i'm just glad to be alive so we went down got food for the team brought the food and the soda back and then went down to the floor show and then you know my uh my fellow recon man good friend john walton he he and i would always talk after he did a mission i talked to him so i finally had a mission to talk about so john's talking to me at one point he goes hey did you uh did you kill anybody today it's like didn't think about that because you're just trained to get through it you know and uh so i thought about it and then later we had been in contact spider had been on scene and pat watkins came out they took turns rotating as a covey and uh i was on the radio again i was looking down the hill where [ __ ] had had cleared out the nva before and i saw something moving and what it was was i think was the nba's ass he was coming up the hill crawling up we had fire lanes [ __ ] developed a couple of fire lanes down here so i'm on the radio and he this guy poked his head up one round just popped exploded it and uh so i knew my first real that was your first yeah jeez it was like oh my god and you know we talked about it and spider and i later talked he said did you kill anybody yeah he said well remember it's you you were them and so just be count your count your lucky stars if you don't mind just spending a second on that john i interviewed tom shea who's retired navy seal who led a team in helmand province 2009 brutal fighting um and he he described as some of his guys on a seal team in fact were having some of their first kia going around and talking to them to like maintain this human connection so they don't lose sight of it as they're starting to kill people was it hard for you to pull the trigger it sounds like you talked to spider about it you have these discussions with john like was that some was that a bit of an outlet for you no it was more like um just talking about a day on the job but by that point we had trained so much you know all the muscle excuse me all the muscle training from going through training on the range day after day it all paid off and you don't think about it you just think about there's the enemy you got to kill him get the air strikes in is everybody okay and then get the team on the helicopter yeah you mentioned you've mentioned covey a couple times could you just share the context for that and the role it plays in in these missions yeah again it's um unique to sog the way we did it um covey was a code name for the fact four air controller he's basically the liaison between the troops on the ground and tack air in our case there would be an air force pilot in the early days would be an o2 push pool cessna and then there would be a green beret cubby rider and that rider would talk to the team then the rider would just lean over tell the pilot and they would coordinate the air assets from there so it was a wonderful situation because more than once i mean anybody iran who was on the ground in contact we appreciated having experienced a team leader as a covey rider because they knew what you're up against they could make suggestions and in some cases we had uh cubby riders that were dealing with a green one zero or a green team leader and they would calm down say settle down or you're going to die and they they were able to get them to to operate in my case i was just lucky you know we had spider we had gone through the training and when it was time we knew what the uh what the rules of engagement were how to make the gun runs and everything else so we just went ahead and did it you know you describe i i believe it's after st idaho is taken out early on as you arrive you describe your decision to carry a grenade like this is what i'm going to carry with me i'm not going to be taken prisoner um sounds like it's discussed within the teams to some degree um oh yeah right you we had the last hand grenade i guess i i have talked to a few folks where they it's almost like they come to a point in a deployment where they're like all right i might not make it out i come to terms with it mentally family's gonna be okay and i'm not gonna get taken prisoner here like what was going through your mind that how did you come to that decision well very early on um johnny mac and i had talked about it and of course the other guys you know like the young guys are in camp we all agreed that we weren't going to be powers because by that time we knew what the official pows were going through in north vietnam the way the communists treated any captured prisoner um and we by that time we'd had at least one port of one of our guys who had been decapitated he had been disemboweled and then they put his head into the uh into the part of the body where their bowels were and other places other things like that and then with with um with uh paul when he was killed the first kia out of the fob4 um they they they charred him with a with a flamethrower and they knew that the other team members was saw and uh they were trying to make this you know they did psyops so yeah so in our mind we made the determination that if we're down that last hand grenade's going to hold it and we go we're going to take as many scumbags with us as possible god wow i forgot here's a footnote on the king bee that pulled us out that night yeah 48 bulls are different from different ordinance including one that was the size of a baseball that went through the um the top rotor it's so interesting the way you describe it in the book because the um kind of the heroics the courage of the those crews to like captain tim to hover it probably sounds pretty easy but like you're hovering there and and your focus is just like get these guys on board and and you're taking fire the whole time and you really pay a tribute in my opinion obviously coming from another pilot but to that type of courage that was needed in those moments incredible i mean you know at first you know we getting country get that first rodney king b it's kind of like these are old helicopters and they're flown by our allies just how good are the allies you know is that the first question i mean it's just a natural question well i'm alive just thanks to king deposit i can't i can't say it's like one mission echo four there were so many missions that i've lost count i wish i had kept a diary now of each one man what um what was your op tempo like so you described coming out of echo four like are you back in the next day do you get a week like what does that look like well um in that case no we didn't go right back in um was two reasons um we we still had other teams in camp that were inserted and because they knew of the severity of the mission we've been through and then don welcome was the 1-0 so within 24 or 48 hours we went through a team change he landed a job as a covey rider and then it came down to me either being a one zero or getting in a new another one zero i talked it over with the team and spider and they all just said hey let's go for it and so i became the team one zero and then jim who had been on he ran one mission with us he came up from the 173rd and uh he told me brother i can't do this i've you know i had a tour of duty with a herd but i've never seen anything like this because he was with hep and sal in those early initial rushes where they just kept blowing them back time after time and jim just held his ground just a stud of a soldier but he just said i can't do this i said well thanks for telling me i'd rather have you be honest now yeah in the fold in the field so i talked to the sergeant major we got him a new assignment and uh like in the in the book at the end of the chapter i talked to him like 30 years later and jim said i've never been the same never been the same because of the combat or from having left the unit oh no no the combat the combat i imagine can't be they they had to they were right at that point the worst point in the beginning and uh they were just over and over i mean how many times could these guys kept coming that's the dedication of the enemy soldiers were incredible wow yeah so and so to the op tempo like how how often were you going back into the field uh sometimes we it varied on other teams and availability weather always weather every day the whiskey x-ray factor you know um so uh we got um i got a new team member we trained him up john bob assure he trained up pretty quick and we ran a couple of brief missions that we got we're on the ground surely got shot out and then we came to november and again we had um um a mission mission where we tried the um to try to find an llc because we had two or three days where in the morning we went in he gets shot out of the primary of the the alternate and then the secondary lz's you get shot out you're out of gas fly back eat lunch here's your new target that's it cubby will find an lz go out get shot out that can wear you out and we did that two or three days in a row and then um so finally somebody came up with the idea let's try something new let's get a daisy cutter we'll find a patch of jungle where there's no trails drop the daisy cutter the team can repel in you get on the ground and you can go run a mission find out what's going on great idea so the first day you know they dropped the two thousand pounder the king he's coming in i'm standing on on the step got the rope ready to repel and then all of a sudden they're secondary explosions and they had over i forget over three or four dozen secondary explosions that day we had hit a cache an enemy cache you can't win you can't win so you know somewhere to this day ho chi minh is going how'd those guys figure out where that cache was up there in the ho chi minh trail you know but um so we came back and did it a day later did the same thing and this time i was repelling down we had enemies that was around us so we were compromised and that's the one where i got pulled out and got turned upside down i was kind of embarrassed and went back and did it again the next day we went out again got shot out three more times john look could you just i mean you can't just gloss over this turned upside down hooked in i mean could you just just a couple minutes i know it's you probably told him many times before but jesus well only only for you ryan it's frightening all right thanks for your audience thanks well what happened i repelled into the ground down the ground and there were a couple of people talking at first and so where i gave them the sign and i got on the radio said abort for compromise there's people here because you know the idea is you get inserted without being compromised to run a mission so finally there's a couple one or two nva did show up had a brief contact with them um the helicopter pilot had taken off but they came back to pick me up and so i hooked in at that time we had a swiss seat it's a rope c with a d ring and they throw down a 150 foot rope with a d ring and a sandbag on it so we would hook into that and then we had a d-ring on our harness that you're supposed to hook into so if you get shot or something happens you're stabilized and you won't fall out of your rig so i hooked up and the helicopter pilot heard the gunfire from the nva so he lifted off right away so as he's lifting off all of a sudden i'm holding on to the rope and then shooting at the nba and then as we came up instead of going all the way up 150 feet i forget where we were going rising but i turned into a human pinball ricocheted off these trees like trying to fight these and so my arms got blooded up at the armpit i mean the uh and then where the elbow comes together yeah they're both bloody for getting battered getting out of the trees so we break out and i'm holding on i looked down i hadn't hooked up with the d-rings i'm trying to hook the d oh my god so by now whatever 80 90 knots or 100 miles an hour or whatever it can be flies at it's cold and my arms are sore so i rotated and went to rotate again hit an air pocket and it just flipped me upside down it's like oh and my swiss seat ran right down on my knees so i spread my legs and i i'm upside down and all my gear came down on my neck and i'm reaching around signaling the henry king he was my he was on a team get this damn thing down anyways um so then the rope slid down to my feet and i just had my feet spread wide open and then i'm starting to pass out and i finally passed out right before i passed out i i had my life fast before my eyes i saw the headline in the newspaper i was really pissed off because my death was reported in south vietnam that's a lie i'm in layouts and my death was below the fold it was like you know back in the early days of the war every local guy killed would be a story on the front page above the fold so i was pissed about that and then i passed down did you pass out because of the equipment on your neck cutting off i couldn't breathe wow because my uh my harness came down and then um so all the web gear came back on my neck and then also because of my backpack it was entangled somehow so the weight of my backpack with the radio and everything and all my web gear the web belt just came up and choked me i couldn't pull it or break it loose oh so we're upside down and i was worried about my feet you know i mean trying to keep spreading enough yeah jeez when you woke up like where were you uh when i passed out i thought i felt elephant grass and captain tuang had descended i didn't realize it because i'm you know yeah of course anything so i passed out hit the elephant grass i fell maybe 10 or 12 feet and then king came out untied all my web gear left it right there so my car 15 my sog knife is all lying right there in laos to this day jesus but the happy thing was when my head bounced off that metal floor i felt it i go oh that pain feels so still alive it's the ground yeah right no it was it was the metal of the helicopter the king i got you okay um i wanted to ask about when when you were anointed named or placed as the 1-0 yeah how long had you been in country at the time when when you were put in that leadership role it was right around october 10th 12th right around there so i've been in country may june five months and by that time spider had trained the team up really well don wolkman followed his footsteps we continued with the in-country training we ran those missions and uh so i felt fairly confident yeah and um you know i would have preferred to have another one zeros life's a lot easier as a 1-1 yeah anything goes wrong the 1-0 gets blamed and gets chewed out for it but that's right and we had that bad experience with alabama because october 5th um the team leader had walked the team into an ambush on a trail just violated every rule of recon sog recon never walked down a trail when there's a when there's an enemy flag flying you're in that battalion area at least you know you should leave it's time to go home particularly if you're shooting at you but he was too stubborn and he paid the price he died within a short while afterwards can you as you assume the 1-0 rule you could take this however you'd like but what was the relationship like with the as you described the indigenous forces um were you always paired up with the same folks you described like a couple of 15 year olds um well we okay our team we had um at that point it was myself woke and became the cubby writer and then we got a new american john bubbashore so that required you know breaking bubba in and we had a record team so we had a consistent number of men you know sal was the senior member to vietnamese team leader hep was our interpreter and then we had um two on was a grenadier and those are the most experienced people then [ __ ] who was just a great point man so that was the hardcore of the three 15 year old's son son was um trained up to be a point man and by the end by the middle of november um we had sun running point for us on one of our targets wow and then we had the other guys and like i said um when we had that period of time where we tried that daisy cutter there had been a couple days before we'd gone in and gotten shot out in and shot out we tried to daisy cutter i'm embarrassed we come back but the guys are tired because you know you know what it's like if you go in and get under enemy fire three times and you live to talk about it one day you do it twice and then plus a lot of flying back and forth just waiting and getting shot out and one of those times when we were descending sal saw a wire across the lz how does sal see that i don't know but he was able to tell the door gunner because we're in a king bee and he was able to to avert and miss that wire when he came back they hit it and it had a 500 pound bomb attached to it had we hit the wire that we would have just been obliterated just blown out there literally so that was part of that drama so we had the upside down thing the next day or the day after we did it again getting shot out i rotated some of the team members and then we got shot in the morning the afternoon he gave us another target this time we get in and i went in with eight men and uh we got on the ground and it was a it was an old area the the farmers used to do what they call slash and burn and so the area we were in was an old slash and burn area and i got the team we got online it's when we marched for an hour up that mountain only pausing like momentarily because normally we'd do 10 and 10. yeah for this day i wanted something really different i wanted to get away from the lz we were all certain about the weather and so we finally came up to this trail huge trail they could drive tanks down and you wouldn't see it from the sky though so we came to the trail we crossed it set up the ambush and the ambush was designed with claymores with c4 in the middle so that when people walk through it one person would live everybody else would be killed and then one person in the middle would be knocked out with c4 that person would be our pow so we had the pow set up had the clay morris for security claymores in the back sal ran up the wiretap had a great wiretap running spider came back for a combo check i forget how long we've been on the ground two or three hours now and it was perfect we got to cross that trail just everything's just going so good so the ambush is set up i gave spider to code for pow said we'll see you back at the lz and spider goes i'm at ten thousand feet and i can't see the mountain you're on let alone see you and the weather sucked us in so we had to break so a few minutes later we could hear tanks above us and then where people on the trail had been ditty bopping there now they were the ak-47s on the shoulder we saw a couple officers ah and they just had their holster they they we were in some kind of an area that they had a base camp not too far away and then all of a sudden everything changed they're all like scurrying up and down the trail that we hear tanks and so then we finally go okay now we got to get out of here so we pulled down the wiretap pulled in the ambush and the security claim wars moved went back across the trail i forget what direction we looked at the trail we went to the left moved on tonight we came to a stream a small stream by now we can hear dogs a lot of dogs we get into the stream we go up the stream at some point we took a break and the stream was like had high walls on the side maybe 10 15 feet on each side so as as we go out of the stream a little not really a stream like a big brook or something our i set the team out and come back out and come back to get fast trails for the dogs then we put down pattern mace and black pepper a lot of it so the dogs hit it would just screw up their noses you know and at one point in a break sal climbed the tree he came back and his eyes were like this and his eyes are like this man that's like we're in trouble he said there's hundreds of nva coming up the hill with the dogs and their lanterns so we stayed in that brook even though it was dark we never moved at night but we kept going and then finally after a couple hours of moving in the dark um sal took us up the hill set up an ron or a perimeter and i was facing that brook and that's the night when this nba came up and touched my boot but it wasn't like quick oh when he walked past there's two guys that walked past us in the brook they had a lantern they went up they ran out of fuel as a lot of the others now this is two three o'clock in the morning they kept coming for us and these guys were coming back down the trail hep coughed and it's like ah chihuahua so i'm sitting there my feet spread i'm a car 15 pointed and whenever the wind blew that nva would crawl up the hill and finally touch my boot and he just yeah what do you do i just heard he went i could hear him catch his breath and he was close but he didn't do anything for he had ever been any other sound other than him going backwards i would have opened fire single shot and but he backed down but he moved only when the wind blew again retreating down that bank he gets into the brook and it takes off with his guys his other buddy there so before first light we were out of there cheating death again yeah we moved all day you know up that mountain and then because they the weather wasn't breaking so we get up to the top of the mountain about two or three o'clock in the morning russians came in with a resupply they did an aerial resupply and the whole side of the mountain two mountains away just lit up like broadway hey we're trying to get attack air on the calling of these russians right at least shoot down a supply ship exactly god and then i'm curious you you describe i think it's captain tan after you come back from a mission he goes and he you invite him to come have a drink and he's like you know what i got to go back with my family what um what was the dynamic like with the indigenous forces for you guys um in our case we were just blessed with the south vietnamese pilots because they were the majority of their like any unit there's a dud or two and you you'll hear other stories that are negative but in my case you know the recon guides just smiled on me got a captain tin captain tulan there's lieutenant trung each of these men put their life on the line for our recon team so many times and so there was a period of time when they would be able to come into our clubhouse they would come up in the morning get the briefing and then sometimes the after asserting a team they would come back and we always buy them drinks we told them you just cannot you cannot buy drinks here and that night yeah that's why 10 and another time with captain tuang was like after saving our ass come on come on to the club we'll buy a drink he has a floor show well he's he goes i'm sorry my my wife and family are waiting that's the same pile to save john walton's life on august the 3rd captain 10. man um all right i'd like to ask just one more story if i can john what comes to mind is one of the more difficult ones that you found yourself in whether it's from a leadership perspective or just dangerous in your mind but as you're a little deeper into your deployment what what comes to mind for one of those other operations well i mean thanksgiving day 1968 christmas day 1968 i mean you know um on thanksgiving our mission was to find three nva divisions that's ten thousand men each the first to third and the seventh nva divisions were quote missing in action the cia the dia whoever else was out there had lost contact with three nva divisions and that night i worked with the s3 the ceo was there with us and we went over the latest intel reports picked an area for the lz and um we went in the next day it was thanksgiving day and the ceo goes look this is a dangerous target it says and we were tdy now we were downing uh fob six which was honok tow and we were um northwest of saigon and uh he goes this is a bad target because it's a bad target as thanksgiving before you guys go in we'll give you thanksgiving dinner oh cool right never had that before so yeah we go up to the lz we get up to the launch site early at boot up helicopters come in he had a full thanksgiving dinner we get on the helicopters and launch get inserted i forget how long we're on the ground maybe an hour hour and a half i just forget the exact time and we came to a campsite campfires were still burning and we just the thing that drew us to it was we just saw smoke this is cambodia after being in laos where no you couldn't see people more than two feet away or three feet away is so thick with the vegetation here you could see for several hundred yards it was more like a u.s forest and not even heavily forested at that and so we're going into the camp take a few pictures sal's eyes are like man they're like plates now and he's really like there's buku nva buku vc i'm going like hey come on 1-0 i don't see any comments well after i had that stupid thought i never articulated it we could see the nva i forget which one came first but the point element we later figured out that point element from the one division was coming into that base camp and the rear security from another division came back to the base camp and they were running at port arms so that's the image i'll take to my grave with me watching these guys come back and they and they came into the camp um they determined where we were and we opened fire and that's what we were using i called in the gun ships called for emergency exfil we had a prairie fire emergency and um we went back to the primary lz and uh the gun runs kept them off of us and then we also did a um we used a five-second fuses of what our claim was we would put them down put one in front of a tree pull that thing and run you could feel the blast in your back but i slowed them down enough between that the regular claymores or i'm 79 rounds we're doing that fallback thing you know going back and we finally get to the lc they came right in the green hornets from the uh air force the 20th special operations squadron they're still operational today then lads came in they hadn't come in man i don't want to think about it and as we're lifting off it was that lc was muddy and so there was a little bit of jungle there but only like one level of jungle and so they're running poor arms they're coming out into the open and they're trying to stop and and they're digging their heels and they're trying to bring their guns down to poor arms front forward arms to shoot right and the mud clubs from their feet are going up into the props and then me and the door gunner we opened up and just like one of those remember those those cartoons on the tv where you see a guy running and just like goes way back suddenly this is real life those nva came out they're trying to come down we hit them so hard and because we're right on the same level and just literally blew them back into the jungle as we're lifting off god oh it was just like oh yes an answer to your question thanksgiving day you know christmas day we're on top of that knoll but the combat wasn't that intense but we're the whole hill was a fire and captain tulum came in at the last second the prop wars held back the fire long enough so we could get on the king bee as we left the whole hill was just covered in fire god it's funny my i think i told you john my old man was a huey pilot in vietnam 67-68 and sometimes when i've talked to him about this and some of the other pilots that he was with um at the time they would share when they'd go into a hot lz or when they'd go into an lz and pick up troops oftentimes they said if the troops came out of the the u.s troops came out to the aircraft and they turned around to fire it usually meant everything was going to be okay they got worried when when the troops were running out of the tree line diving into the aircraft getting ready to take off because they're like somebody's right on their tail as that's happening uh it sounds like you had a little bit of both with that going on well we trained hours on that just because we wanted that i mean when we went back like when we were to the lz again everything is depending on the timing but we trained on how to get to because we we trained a lot with the king bee so it was one door on the right side of the helicopter and this day luckily it was a yui so it came in our guys hit it and so um bubba and i were the last two to get on the helicopter because he had put another clay morale and uh i blew that he blew one and then we jump in the chopper and as we're taking off they were coming out of that jungle you know there's something to be said for the it's almost the way that the special ops community does it today where you work with the same aviation unit with like 160th it's it's like you had the same pilots who understood your needs schema maneuver that sort of thing day in and day out almost yeah and and the uh fortunately i mean um the green hornets they were really good they had the most powerful the fastest using country i mean what what the army whatever the army had the air force was two steps ahead of them and i remember because when that everything about it was more power you could just feel it lift it off with authority it carried a mini gun with like god thousands and thousands of rounds for a minigun in a helicopter yeah and and they're i think they were the ones that had their first minigun that they could move it more it had more flexibility somehow i forget what the uh what the nomenclature was on that but they were amazing and uh yes you're right and the king these were the same way the south vietnamese man when we were in the [ __ ] they came well so i don't want to take up all your time i have a couple questions that i'm good i'm here on yours no i know i have a couple questions i'd like to ask everyone but um this is slightly aside the point do you have a photographic memory like the detail in the book is great you're talking about things like by the day that you recall is that no strange question but like you really do have incredible recall on some of these details like everything else in vietnam i had help okay yeah fortunately the majority of the people that we wrote about were still alive like john walton uh hep my interpreter was alive and i had i met him in 1999 or 2000 and so that was 30 years in between but hep was around and then of course spider pat watkins uh john mcgovern was still alive and all the guys on our team so everybody we wrote about the majority of people we wrote about uh i could talk to directly yeah oh that's great john did you ever go back to vietnam no no interest if i was in southeast asia i want to go to echo 4 and see what it looks like yeah sorry so what what's the feeling there your sentiment from it because i know for many vets of that time it's it's very hard to even go to the wall in dc let alone go back there i mean in your mind what uh what are your thoughts on getting back well um in my case it was different you know we believed in what we were doing because of all the people on our team they knew that we um we were fighting communism and they knew their government was corrupt but they preferred a corrupt government they knew to communism don't forget 1954 you had thousands of people left north vietnam to move to the south nobody in south vietnam went north and um there's a fundamental principle of it all a lot of our vets that were there um never quite understood that or heard or heard of heard the story from sal or hep or [ __ ] or why they fought why they were willing to die to fight communism that's a form of communism socialism whatever you want to call it world domination they were very ruthless and they kept coming yeah all right does that answer the question yeah it's it's an interesting take i know you did it was two years that you ended up doing well i i my first tour duty was april to april april 68 to april 69 and then i went back in october of 69. i was there for until april 70. got on my old recon team and again we go back to base okay i'll be back at now ccn at danang it's 1969. i'm in on base a week gunther walled and rt maryland gets wiped out on november 3rd seven days later rts is wiped out and and the members from that team walt's team have now they've all been recovered and properly interred in the united states you know uh wall brown donnie shoe when we buried donnie shoes remains and it was a outside concord north carolina when we went from the funeral home to the cemetery guys told me that the that the procession line was 22 miles long wow in north carolina when he came home i'll never forget that and then um rts you know the two members of that team are still m.i.a randy suber his brother and i become really good friends um through that whole loss you know so here we are back in camp two teams wiped out one year later and um it was they were they were they had their act together and after that after your tours there what's what was your decision about like do i stay in this in the military and do this some more do i punch out like what went through your mind for that well my time in recon ended suddenly when i ran into that that kernel um we'd had a discussion about he was forcing a recon team to carry us a scrambler the scrambler was the same size essentially as a as a prc25 so he had the same weight same batteries and you had to carry a huge key punch that was about over a foot long and every day you had to do settings on it and then punch the settings into the scrambler device and then that would enable the scrambler to give you secure communications well when we first used those things they never worked and um so i was going to run a four-man mission and i said specifically i said it's only a four-man team i don't want to carry the screen there's no i'm the lieutenant colonel you got to carry it so well if i carry it and it doesn't work i'm not going to bring it back i'm going to destroy it in the field so long story short we're in contact oh you'll appreciate this so near the end of their gun runs one of the a1s goes by and the a1 pilot came by and as he did his gun run he looked over at me i saluted i could tell you he was so close he was smoking a philly charoot and during that time while we were on the ground and this was it wasn't jungle it was more like a lot of overgrowth high grass maybe some trees and stuff we could hear the enemy looking for us and at one point i'm i'm facing the enemy i have my car 15 up on my hip ready to go and this face emerges from the jungle it's a young kid a young nva soldier he takes one look at me and stopped and just backed up and left i had my car if he'd done anything i would have shot him but he didn't wow so this is my last mission and so what happened was that damn thing didn't work i hit it burn it up and uh we got pulled down on the string now we asked for an extraction because we made enemy contact the commanding officer who ordered me to carry that i can hear him flying in a cnc ship a command and control chip five ten clicks away he refused my request to get pulled down so we continue to continue on made a little bit more light contact finally the covey came back ignored the colonel brought in assets he pulled us out on strings under enemy fire we get back to base he goes where's my scrambler i said it didn't work like i told you i said it didn't work i'm not going to carry that sucker so he goes how do you destroy i said with a thermite grenade put it on top you said you had a lot of smoke you said yeah by that time we made enemy contact that's why i asked for an extraction he goes you know i never agreed to you on those circumstances he says you have to leave pac you pack your bags and get out of camp i'm going to ruin your special forces career so we had a few more words and i told him he was a disgrace to the west point academy and i told him also he said a couple other things i told him he go [ __ ] himself and that right there jesus my command decision i figured three and a half years i had 19 months in sag my body was still pretty much in one piece so i went and what he didn't realize was uh because i came back in october he thought i had a one year tour of duty i had extended to go back to vietnam and so my time and service was up in two weeks so i went back to the train i could have re-upped i could have gotten pretty much any any opening i could have gotten a job but i figured this [ __ ] put in my life just for me to get to get out an arm so i did two weeks of guard duty in the training worked on my tan during the day oh my god but you know what i i did have one more traumatic event i had to tell you that please the viet cong blew up our ice cream machine and our base now the revs had to go downtown they were traumatized they had to go downtown for their ice cream man you know how serious that was so we came home got out the rest is history oh jeez do you do you wish that you had stayed in longer yes and no when i see the the uh how good the delta force is today the kag units with the 160th support i mean oh my god what they can do at night i would have run over your mother for one of your nogs oh i love how you talk about people having i mean you had some of the early sets of knots right some of the people oh i thought in the book somebody else was out with that what we had was a starlight scope okay sorry very heavy no it's okay yeah and so the first one was very long and heavy and when you used it of course it ruined your eyesight at night and then they came out with a smaller one that fit on your they could fit in your car 15. we i didn't want anything to do with it there's just too much trouble because when it was on it made a little noise and then if you pulled your eye off of that eyepiece it would just light up all around you green so it's kind of yeah we'll just we'll we'll just stay up during the night hit the road and sleep a little bit brother and carry all that weight of course you needed batteries yeah so yeah so you kind of wish you you had stuck around with under better circumstances you could have seen that evolution but he said i mean from 1970 until 1980 or 72 to 80 that was when they had those huge reductions in force men who really wanted the career who had planned on it were just ruined and special forces was devastated because the regular army back then hated special forces they gutted it knocked it down in size and uh but people like eldon bargewell and others that hung on got through that rough period of time and went on become legends yeah but it was tough well i know you have a lot going on today and i want to get to that so just these two questions and then we'll jump to uh what you have happening now one thing i like to ask everybody is was there anything that you brought with you on your missions or your deployment that had either sentimental value to you it was a good luck charm a talisman or something like that no nothing no no time for that i just uh you know i i think the only superstition i had was a uh i had a cravat and a cravat that i wore those are the green triangular bandages and i had an old one well it was all by the time i got done but i always wore that just for good luck charm yeah but it's just i just want to get the job done no time for that sentimental stuff do you still have that today i got one somewhere yeah that's cool when we moved i got it i can't find it right fair enough and then uh last question here is about the the time that you spent in and as you described it 19 months in sog you stared down death so many times and it's so well described in the book and the interviews you've done since but looking at all that all the pain you went through would you have gone back and done that again oh yeah in a second because um for me the most painful part about was leaving leaving behind a team yeah that was the way things were set up that was our rules um i didn't like it but i i couldn't i wasn't smart enough to figure a way to get around it too much i could have reenlisted going to another cnc unit but by that time i've been on the ground 19 months with idaho hep sal and even hep left the team uh in january of 70 he left because he'd been running missiles for four years he said hey uh he had trained up another guy to be an interpreter so we had a good interpreter and we had also trained cross trained a couple of other indigenous troops uh hung could speak he was coming along really well ciao could talk english and they were working at it and we also cross trained them in radio procedures we talked back and forth and then how the direct air strikes in the event that we got killed or too severely injured or wounded not to be able to direct airstrikes so we trained those guys on that just in case so um so hep went up to the uh he got a promotion big pay raise god bless him go man yeah so we i my last three months in country were without hep but we had sal yeah and then we recruited doti kwang who had been with lynn black october 5th he was one of the ditch with him and cowboy were the two stellar south vietnamese that were with lynn black that day and it's just amazing soldiers just fearless so you've done it again that's what you're saying yeah and i i was blessed i mean it's blessed with good little people on the team they were fearless and the helicopter piles and yeah hunter and first were there and uh the first cav at different times we had scarface from the marine corps i mean in the early days of 68 they could barely get those old gunships off the ground that the crew chiefs would get out and run alongside the helicopter wait till they got a little momentum up then they'd jump back in just to try to get them before he got their cobras that's right oh man well i know you have a lot going on still so could you share what you have in the works because uh sounds very exciting love to hear more oh well today is one of the most important thing my wife and i um have fulfilled a dream to get out of california so we're now in tennessee that's the biggest thing and uh in fact why we started a little bit late because our grandson was here and we were just doing their moving stuff and their the grandson so that's the most exciting part of all um you know as my wife was the one who encouraged me to write the book in the first place the first time i wrote across the fence we had four teenagers and a newborn in the house and my wife goes i believe in your story write it so i couldn't have done it without anna and so we're here now and so we're we're moving to the next level you'll be the first i can publicly say that jocko and i are working on an agreement where we'll begin doing sodcast i think jacques is going to call them sodcast where i'll be interviewing other sog members and then jacka will post them on his social media i'm really looking forward to we got several men lined up i could tease you with some of those and then we're also working with a company this is top secret but we're working on a a video game is going to come out should be out before memorial day maybe even before my birthday but some would say would be april fool's day april 1st but it's going to be a video game it's going to be based on sog and right now it's being it's being interpreted in seven different languages and they have a staff over 120 people working to produce this video game so myself and ken borre who was the last american 1-0 of rt idaho in 1972 we've been technical advisors we've brought in some more helicopter pilots and a couple other recon guys that have been consulting with this and we're excited about that coming out and then um i'll be working with the podcast and then get book four started so we've got uh many stories that are sog stories that have been told yet just in case people like myself who feel like we're busy then we hear that and uh clearly you have so much going on i'm curious if your wife asked you to write the book because she had heard you tell the stories too many times and she's like go tell them for someone else no you know well you see in the early days of our marriage it was like um what you do when you were in the army yeah what'd you do was it green beret okay well we got four kids what's who's gonna cook dinner tonight you know so we focused on our family first so we didn't talk too much and then over time she met a few of my friends like sparta parks eldon bargewell doug letourneau the frenchman these characters and each one would be like just amaze her and so they've all become dear friends and part of the sog family you know and so now she's familiar with the story she's read all the books of course and she's just very supportive so we're putting together a little uh studio here and i'm lining up some of our saw guys that have not been interviewed yet that's great you get them out there and then you'll have some competition on the airway i love it i love it but it'll be a friendly competition that's right geez john thank you so much for the time sharing all this being so open the book really is i mean i've just read across the fence it's so well told great detail it really comes through highly recommended and best of luck with these other endeavors well don't forget the second book on the ground it begins with a recon team in our worst target and the nva came up tapped him on the shoulder says your turn for guard duty one of my all-time favorite story i failed to get it in the first book so we let off the second book with it it's a great teaser and the third book saw chronicles is the we document one of the most successful hatchet force missions in sog history where the 16 green berets 120 indigenous troops went in to take pressure off of the cia operation in laos deeper than ever and they were on the ground for four days they had a successful intelligence coup they took the pressure off the cia they killed thousands of enemy soldiers and the the green beret medic received the medal of honor from president trump on october 23 2017 from that mission geez and from that mission the 16 green berets received 32 or 33 purple hearts the contact was day and night and they were down there on the ground they lost two seeds 53 deltas shot down and the second one it's a classic story where after being on the ground their launch is the last helicopter out they're taken off as they're taking off with all the last men on the team their intelligence reports that they got from the enemy the first engine gives out he climbed over a mountain they get over the second mountain the second engine goes out and he had the auto rotating for the first time hell yeah i know it's like oh my god better you than me man that's right oh jeez it's a great plug it's a great teaser um thanks so much john for the time really appreciate you and thank you for your service brother i appreciate it we love our rotor heads that's right thanks so much sean take care until next time take care god bless

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 94,591

Keywords: Delta Force, The Unit, Special Forces, Special Operations Forces, Delta, Squadron, Operator, Todd Opalski, Citadel, The Citadel, Force Recon, Marine Recon, Scout Sniper, NCO, Non-Commissioned Officer, Zen Commando, Camp Zen Commando, Ranger School, Ranger, Army Ranger, Costa Rica, Afghanistan, CIA, paramilitary, 1st SFOD, Strategic Outcomes, American Badass, SOG, MACV-SOG, H-34, Helo, Vietnam, VietnamVet, Veteran, Veterans

Id: PtvCcehPuS8

Length: 112min 41sec (6761 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 06 2021