Combat Story (Ep 24): Terry Buckler | Green Beret | The Story of the Son Tay POW Raid | Silver Star

we are going to rescue 70 american prisoners of war maybe more from a camp called sante the target is 23 miles west of hanoi this is something our american prisoners of war have a right to expect from their fellow soldiers our mission is to rescue prisoners not to take prisoners he was down on stage he had a big map in north vietnam had a big red circle around hanoi and another one around sante and when he finished his little talk there i mean it was just dead silence like for you know maybe five seconds at the most and then it was just like everybody jumped up and was yelled hollering and whistling and saying let's go get them that's what we're here for and uh and bull kind of calmed everybody back down and said you know this is a strictly volunteer mission uh we have a 50 50 chance of not making it back and he said if anybody wants to uh back out now now's the time to do it nobody did 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 terry buckler the youngest of 56 green berets on one of the most dangerous and daring missions in u.s military history when they went 300 miles behind enemy lines into north vietnam to rescue american pows at the sante pow camp terry is part of a rare group known today as asante raiders the mission does not have the intended outcome as you'll hear in this interview but changes the lives of morale for hundreds of american pows for years to come i sincerely hope you enjoy this front row seat to one of the most impressive selfless and expertly planned and executed operations in our military's storied history enjoy terry and cliff thanks for taking the time to share this interesting story with us today hey we're glad to be here and yeah and terry just for for the benefit of those listening this is as many of the people who listen will notice this is the first time i've interviewed two people at the same time so i want to make sure that we establish who's who here as we talk about the sante raid and this fantastic book who will go and we'll read excerpts from that but if i could terry just if you could introduce yourself briefly we'll get into your childhood what what you experienced in combat and then cliff i would ask the same before we get into the meat and potatoes of this so terry over to you if you could just share your role in what we're about to talk about here with the sante raid all right well first of all it's a pleasure and an honor to be here and look forward to this a little bit about myself i grew up on a farm born on a farm and lived there until i was 18 years old graduated from high school and my dad felt like once you graduate you're on your own and that's kind of the way it was in our family and so i moved out and uh went to work for a company uh building in a factory and got drafted and actually i volunteered for the draft in march of 1969 uh after being inducted into the us army i went to fort leonard wood for my basic after basic i uh at that time i volunteered for special forces and uh with finished basic and my ait at fort leonard wood i was a 12 bravo engineer and from there went to jump school and from jump school special forces uh training uh once finished training i was assigned to seventh group at fort bragg and uh from there we is where the history starts yeah and and so and i'll have you pause there and we'll jump to cliff here and just to say like um terry and cliff wrote this fantastic book terry you are a participant in the mission that we're going to talk about so that's why i just wanted to set the scene for that cliff you i know as we discussed earlier probably feel like you participated in this event from all the research and work that you've done there um and you do have a very close connection to it beyond that so i'll just pause to let you share that briefly cliff and then we'll dive in as a matter of fact during the sante raid i was four years old so my father is the one who participated in it he was the aircraft commander of lime 2 one of the c-130s that escorted the helicopters to the north vietnam airspace for me i grew up obviously as an air force brat i ended up going to the air force academy i graduated in 88 i flew b-1 bombers and all through the years i've heard stories from my dad about the sante rape with the 50th anniversary coming up which was just this past november uh terry and i started working for quite a few months to try to get a book published that terry had had a vision for since 2012 and it was a real just honor to be able to interview these gentlemen terry's story but also 40 other participants including pows air force army navy and support personnel and and part of the book is we give a lot of credit to the hundreds of people that made it happen amen yeah oh it's a fascinating it is a fascinating read including the interviews that are contained in the back especially from the pows and what they went through and so that's a great segue um what i'd like to do is just terry it's a really fascinating description of your childhood and so i just want to set people up because you are you do become the youngest person on this raid the youngest soldier and there's there's a lot of firsts for you on this so i'd like to just back up to you you almost brushed over it with your childhood like you didn't even have i think it was running water or electricity for many years like can you just talk us through briefly what you what terry was like as a kid before we dive into this sure i uh growing up on a farm uh i was born in a three-room bedroom house or three-room house and i have two older brothers when i came along they told me they expanded to a fourth room and that's where my two brothers and i lived and it was about the size of a pow cell and but uh we all survived it as the pows did and uh life on the farm was uh you know we raised cattle pigs chickens and uh did some grain farming we got later on we farmed about 500 acres that my father rented and uh so growing up on the farm was a fun life enjoyed it and uh i miss it in a lot of respects but that's just what makes you what you are sometimes and uh it was a good good experience for me and my brother my dad served in world war ii and uh in the philippines and my oldest brother was nine years in submarines nuke subs in the in the uh navy my middle brother didn't pass his physical as when he was drafted so he stayed home and was a fireman for 25 years so still wore a uniform and uh did his part for what was needed in the community at that time and you know uh i i've always felt it's been an honor and a blessing to serve with the men that i did serve with as as you know from the book this was my first time in combat and i i just marvel sometimes that the opportunity to serve with men like bull simons dick metals colonel sidner uh those uh papi kittelson uh jake jokovico uh dan turner was my captain and dan kept me straight and saved my life more than once good man yeah oh and i definitely want to dig into that part with with uh captain dan turner there are some items there that i want to explore and i would just i would almost back up here to uh as you're describing your family in this military history or tradition in the family did did you and your father discuss combat before you went to uh to vietnam now my dad took me to the bus station on my way to kansas city to do the induction or doing my physical for the draft and on the way in that morning dad had never really talked about what he did in combat in the philippines but uh one thing he told me that not to do is volunteer for anything and as you can tell i really paid attention to what he said spoiler alert um that fell on deaf ears yeah yes it did but uh his heart was in the right place and he was looking out for me and uh but no we he didn't really talk a lot about what he did and uh he he had been awarded i think bronze star in the philippines so and i think later on you guys have a discussion is that right terry if i'm remembering it correctly you finally do but it's long after um your time yeah we uh he had had a stroke and i used to go back up to he was at the hospital in columbia missouri there and i lived in kansas city so on the weekends i would go back up and one weekend while there was just he and i and we had an opportunity to share some of the stories of what we had gone through and what we experienced in in combat and also just in the military in general it was uh i wished i'd have recorded it but yeah you know hindsight's always 20 20 on us but a good man and he's a good father yeah uh it's funny so i'm the youngest of four boys and i've got um my father flew huey's in vietnam for a tour and then i have two older brothers one flew kiowa helicopters and the other was a tank commander and then i had another who just didn't find his way into the military so a lot of similarities and i did have a few discussions with my old man before i went over flying helicopters in afghanistan but certainly not as many as the the discussions were not as rich as when when i came back and we had both kind of been through that and we talked about it so it's really special to hear i i my daughter uh what prompted like uh cliff was saying i started the book in 2012 that's the year my daughter went to afghanistan and she was at the 82nd airborne and i started thinking back and she started asking me what did i do when i was in the military and that's what prompted me to say well maybe i ought to put this in writing for children's children's children so the book was written and i i say it's not my book it's our book because there's a lot of other people that have contributed to the the mission but also to the book and what they did and i learned a lot and because you know each there was three elements red wine green leaf and blue boy and we all had our separate admissions uh statement while we were on that chopper so some of the things that were going on in the green leaf i wasn't aware of and they weren't aware of some of the things on red wine and nobody knew what was going on in blue boy because they were kind of on their own inside the compound but uh it was uh interesting to hear some of the stories from those guys and those were included in the book as well yeah oh it's great it's great and then cliff i might just hand this over to you for a moment if you could explain because your father played a special role in this as well i mean you guys fact check me if i'm wrong here but i was trying to do the math between the i know the way that the raid plays out and we'll talk about this is is approached differently but we're essentially talking about hundreds of miles behind the enemy lines right like into north vietnam and i think i like from the d from the from where the north and south divide it was like a 450 mile trek into north vietnam that's how deep we're talking about and your old man was was flying one of the aircraft going in um so i would just ask you if you could tee up what uh first of all fact check me on the numbers but also if you could talk about your dad growing up and what his life was like as a pilot who was getting ready to go into that and what you're thinking of is uh danang basically is the furthest north base that they possibly could have launched from uh in south vietnam but looking at it geographically you can see that you're actually closer from certain parts of thailand and eudoran air base is that base that's closest and so that's where they end up launching from it's a 330 mile trip from udon to the sante pow camp and just like you're saying that whole uh 330 miles is hostile to rain because the northern part of laos was you know certainly uh unknowable um uncertain and you had uh you know best intel of where the safe areas were and that's where they ended up choosing to uh to eject from the f-105 that ends up uh having haven't been shot down by a sam that's right at the end of the story and it ends up having uh sort of a a heart-lifting story about that because these guys my father and a lot of the guys in baltimore were involved in rescue and so to to have a rescue sort of top off the whole event um is something that they live for you know they really wanted to be a part of that that rescue of that crew so um so that 330 miles is something that is especially you know the last 150 uh from the north vietnam border to sante that's where you know you are in some of the most highly guarded airspace in the world yeah and so if you can like i think it takes a special pilot to to want to go and do that or volunteer to do that if you could tell us just a little bit about your father what he was like and just as we get set for this story um a lot of the training takes place at eglin air force base and that's with special ops mc-130s but some of the resources were drawn um from in-country resources and launching from udorn was actually not uncommon at all from my father that was their normal tdy they would go for a three-day tdy of flying three days uh with long missions and the missions were either from sun up till about noon or from noon to sun down and they would be on a constant alert looking for any navy or air force or army anybody that gets shot down behind enemy lines and in conjunction with the helicopters and at this point in 1970 was primarily hh-53s but on the raid they actually also use an hh-3 by this time all the hh uh what are they 43s pedros are already you know retired or at least less and less used so the key thing that made the sante raid possible a technolo a technological leap was that refueling of helicopters air refueling of helicopters was made possible by the the first aircraft that was able to do that is the hc-130p which is what my dad was flying alert from eudorn constantly for that whole 12 months so perfect great setup here um what i would like to do then terry just as as we we kind of talked about you talking to your old man he takes you to the bus stop you kind of start you share you're assigned to brag eventually um if you could let's set the scene for how you find your way into the company of these other i think 56 green berets assigned or who volunteered for this mission if you could take us to that point first okay i was at seventh group at fort bragg in the uh i had been training up in that haley national forest and sf you're either training or deployed and i happened to be not deployed but training and uh when i i can't i was sent back to bragg to get some supplies and a couple of my buddies were telling me there was a bull simon's was down to the little white house and it was looking for volunteers for a mission and so i myself and a couple of buddies decided we'd go down there and see what was going on because will simon's is an icon in special forces and i never met the man and never all i knew was his reputation and that in itself was he's kind of like the john wayne of special forces and uh so we went down there and i got down there it was packed uh the auditorium with probably 500 plus special forces guys waiting to see what bull had to say and he came on stage and it got dead quiet and he uh had a little stogy which he chewed on more than smoked i think and he said he was looking for men volunteers for a moderately hazardous mission and that we'd be back by christmas and there was no tdy and which kind of eliminated some people but he said if you're interested in it and be back here 1300 hours and we'll start the interview process and so you know i thought heck yeah i'm game and glad volunteered for vietnam twice and never never got a whiff of it so uh next afternoon or that afternoon came back to uh sun into the white house and they sent us back to our barracks there was a couple of sergeant majors command sergeant majors who were doing the interviewing and i interviewed and they asked me some you know questions to try to throw me off and want to know if i could weld and i grew growing up on a farm we were always busting something and sam chisholm one of our neighbors had welded everything for us so i'd watched samwell in a lot of pieces over the years and figured hell i can weld so i told him i could and uh then they wouldn't know if i could scuba dive and i said no i hadn't hadn't done scuba diving and but they thanked me for my time and i thanked them and thought well at least they interviewed me i went back to nada haley a few days later and colonel called me into his office and said pack your bag you're going back to bragg you were selected to go on this mission of course nobody knew at that time anything about what it was and you know it was just a bull simon's was looking for men and i went it was made my uh little debut there as uh we filled out our will which was kind of i've been on several training missions and uh never filled out a will but uh so i wrote a letter to my parents explaining what i had done and why and gave it to a couple one of my buddies and said hold on to it if i don't come back mail it and fortunately i got to tear that letter up and then when i got back so uh but uh i went down on the advanced party and did this i was a grunt at that time because uh any special forces e5 buck sergeant is uh lowest rank so uh i was kind of the private if you will but uh first did our knitter thing now yeah so it if you could and you know maybe terry and or cliff on this one for i think bull simon's represents such a an overarching character for this with kind of that lead role and you you were mentioning that he had this kind of storied background could you share a little bit more about like what made him so special at the time before you participated in this raid the bull yeah well uh everybody in special forces knew bill simons uh knew who he was he was actually involved in the philippines back in the days there we had two men on our our uh group papi kittleson pappy kittleson uh unbeknownst at the time was about to break make history when he went on the raid he was the only american to be on four pow raids he was the youngest he was 19 on the cabana twine plw rate in the philippines to rescue 513 pows and he was a iowa farm boy and one thing i had on papi was a half an inch i'm happy was i'm five six and he was five five and a half but uh he had a lot more experience than i did that's for sure and uh he was just a a great uh mentor as well and uh but the the bull was just everybody knew bull simons and he didn't question the man and he was famous for getting guys taking them into bad areas and bringing them home safely and that's exactly what he did i mean how many full birds do you know ground go on the ground when they're 56 years old i i gotta say like i think as people hear this interview and then read this book we'll just be amazed that that this was able to be executed the way it was even with the hiccups that happened along the way bringing people back like it is amazing that that happened and you're right the fact that you got a full bird on the ground execute and that is pretty phenomenal and and he he was uh i have to tell you kind of how it came about when i first went down there the first thing we did was put up built the mock-up and then we uh the talk building the air force came in and did an inspection making sure it was safe to hold our planning sessions in there and then we put a three rolls of constantino wire around and put a field phone out there the only way you got in that building was uh somebody would come in we called into the building tell them who it was they would send somebody out to escort them in and and we had uh guarded the building 24x7 and we had a live ammo with the orders to shoot and if anything went awry and uh i was there one day and it was just me and colonel simons and he asked me how things were going and i said well sir uh you know i didn't come down here to pull guard duty and i wanted to be on the mission because what the guards were doing when we weren't guarding we either sleeping or training with the troops so we were pretty busy guys and that went on for about a month and it was you know being a young buck and anxious and wanted to get on mission not knowing where really what it was and uh so i told him what i thought and uh he took that little stogy i'll never forget took that stogy out and he he was about six one six two and he looked down at me and he says you just hang in there young man things are going to change and a couple about a week and a half later they made the first cut and i didn't have full guard duty anymore so that's great i was happy about that that's great and then so what what i want to do in just a second i'm going to read an excerpt from the book uh the mission as as um colonel simons relays it to you i want to read through that because i think it sets some great context i might just ask cliff if you could um i mean this mission is predicated on rescuing pows could you give just some context of what the pow situation was like at the time and why this was so important to to execute then and i i will just say a big plug for the book the interviews in the back with with folks who were pows and what this raid meant to them like it'll make it it'll make your hair stand up it'll probably make you cry reading it so it's pretty special so i would just say clip you could set the scene with that and then i want to read through the mission that colonel simons delivers yeah most people are aware of the torture and the misery the plight of the of the pows but i just want to point out the fact that the north vietnamese would not acknowledge who they had they wouldn't acknowledge where they were holding them and of course wouldn't allow uh third parties to come in and verify that they were you know alive and healthy but they wouldn't even tell it how many pows you have um but in may of 1970 it was estimated there were about 335 maybe the way to say that is at least 335 and the the opportunity to ever see a pow meaning uh reconnaissance or intel asset um would only be when uh the propaganda films were released and so you know those were at uh the uh the zoo downtown and in hanoi hilton so those interior pow camps were something that you could never hope to to spring them from uh it's not the kind of thing where rescue mission would ever be feasible uh in the downtown pow camps but in may of 1970 for the first time there were signals sent that were received by both uh sr-71 and buffalo hunter drones which would fly you know they'd be screaming at you know say a couple hundred feet over just sort of crisscrossing through and in may of 1970 they they as a matter of fact some of the pows give this story in the book leroy stutz is one describes how they would try to arrange the laundry in ways that would be uh signals that intel would recognize like for instance a k is a symbol that indicates that they could be uh you know available for rescue also an arrow they laid out laundry and weight that the arrow would point to maybe a way that you might be able to enter from um and uh and maybe putting a p an o and a w and in the book we we asked leroy stutz one of the pows who did it to actually sort of recreate an artist's rendition of what kind of symbols uh he laid out so it was pure misery and and sante was an outs it was about 23 miles outside to the northwest of hanoi to where we one knew that americans were there two uh that we thought there was a chance that a rescue could be planned and that's when the pentagon uh it's a uh it's uh colonel norman frisbie uh and general blackburn who put together a feasibility study to try to see if they could come up with a reasonable rescue plan and that's that's happening in may of 1970 and by july 4th or 1st somewhere around there when uh admiral thomas moore takes over as the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff they've got it in in a good enough form to present it to him and he enthusiastically receives that and gives some assets uh budget and uh commitment to make the next phase happen that first phase up to this point that i described is called operation polar circle that's that feasibility study happening in the in the dia headquarters actually they wanted to get out of the pentagon as quickly as possible meaning they didn't trust that it wouldn't leak so they wanted to get a very secure place and what they chose is um on the in the arlington area it's called arlington hall which is part of the defense intelligence agency and that's where they did all this planning including building a uh a diorama that uh shows the exact layout from all the imagery putting their best description of what the interior of the sante compound looks like for the grain berets to start planting emissions so from that point up to about july 1st it's called operation polar circle after that as they start to get into committing air assets uh special forces assets um and then of course at eglin you know the facility is a secret facility for the planet that becomes called operation ivory coast so thanks for the setup there cliff that's perfect description of what's going on with the pow situation and then some of the training preparation sites for this i'm just going to read what bull simon describes as the mission so this is the kernel leading this for those who are listening on a podcast and not watching this on youtube you might like i'm going to have a picture a bow on here that you can see so you i encourage you to look at it to envision the way he might say it with that with the stogy or whatever it is in his mouth because his picture is like it it's what you want from this colonel going on this mission right exactly so here's so if you can picture this 6162 crew cut guy with the stogie with the map behind him he says the following we are going to rescue 70 american prisoners of war maybe more from a camp called sante the target is 23 miles west of hanoi this is something our american prisoners of war have a right to expect from their fellow soldiers we're all part of the same military family we want these men to know that they are not abandoned by their military family no man should feel that way that's why we're going in there after them you are to let nothing nothing interfere with this operation our mission is to rescue prisoners not to take prisoners if there's a leak we'll know it by the time the second or third chopper sets down if we're walking into a trap if it turns out that they know we're coming don't even dream about walking out of north vietnam unless you've got wings on your feet we'll be a hundred miles from laos it's the wrong part of the world for a retrograde maneuver if it happens i want to keep this fourth force together we'll back up to the song colin river if we have to and by god they're welcome to cross to come across that damned open ground we'll make them pay for every foot across that son of a so i just i loved reading that um i think it just sets a great tone if you could terry like when you were hearing that what was what was it like for the folks where were you at at the time was this at eglin early on in the process no this was uh we had no idea where we were going until we actually got when will simons came on stage that night and we were supposed to be there at 1800 hours it was a little i'd say a theater it was probably set maybe 75 to 100 people and the old wood benches and he was down on stage had a big map in north vietnam had a big red circle around hanoi and another one around sante and when he finished his little talk there i mean it was just dead silence like for you know maybe five seconds at the most and then it was just like everybody jumped up and was hollering and whistling and saying let's go get them that's what we're here for and uh and bull kind of calmed everybody back down and said you know this is a strictly volunteer mission we have a 50 50 chance of not making it back and he said if anybody wants to back out now now's the time to do it nobody did and he said okay go back to your billets and grab your gear and go to the hangar we had a hangar there where we had our weapons and radios and all of our stuff ammo and all that stored and uh that was we got that checked our weapons checked our gear batteries for our radios and all that and uh put us on a 130 and flew us up to eudorn that's crazy i mean morale was above and beyond i mean we for three months we had been wondering where in the hell it was all kind of rumors you know first because of the flight pattern of you know we did a couple of three and a half hour flights and the old timer saying well we're going to cuba something going on in cuba because of the river and eglin and about a three hour flight over to cuba they thought so and then there was a lot of aircraft that had been hijacked so we knew it was some type of rescue mission based on the training we did because what we did you know there was 109 guys went down there and 56 of us went on the mission and but we used the support guys were just as important because we we all had backups too if something went wrong with us for whatever reason everybody had a backup and uh so we had plenty of people willing to to go on the mission not knowing what it was but the guys that were supporting us they they would take them out to buildings and put them in there and they'd hide and then they would have guys that were uh saying that they had fraternized with the enemy and the other guards or other powers wanted to kill them so we had to be able to handle that those are the type of scenarios they threw at us and uh you know so we knew it was some type of rescue but we just didn't know what or where but when he told us where we were going and the odds are coming back uh nobody nobody even flinched they just said okay let's go get them and uh so we went over got our gear checked it out and i remember all the old timers coming up to me because i was i was the kid of the group and they were telling dan turner get his ass back here in one piece you know and uh you know told me the one thing they kept telling me don't hesitate don't hesitate you know if you got an opportunity to do it because you won't may not get the second one and i know you do and we will get into that because it's it's uh and we got to talk about dan turner still i might i might just ask cliff if this is an appropriate time because opsec is critical here like you guys are training for months right terry i think it says 170 training missions on target is that right rehearsals yes rehearsals and and that's interesting i've interviewed a dozen folks who are from the special ops community green berets rangers um delta folks seals and the the commonality like there are several commonalities that are emerging now but one of them is just practice the amount of practice that goes in for execution is unlike anything i experienced in the conventional side and it sounds like that's what you were part of exactly you know when i talk to military people you know groups i always say you know we all hate training the training saved our ass i'm a firm believer that when we went to plan green it was like no big deal we just knew we knew exactly what to do i got to tell you the anxiety was a little high but uh you know it was it was almost like we were back training except bullets were coming this way made a little difference out of it but the the reaction of the guys from all of them was the same i mean green leaf blue boy red wine everybody just because of the training uh you know the only thing we didn't train for is not having pows of course we didn't know we were going to have them to start with and then what happens when greenlee come back in after landing yeah facility but you know it was it was good the training was real yeah oh man no it's just so interesting i i did want to say that right here uh terry's kind of pointed to a feature of the book that is truly from terry's heart and it has to do with life lessons there are nine life lessons spread throughout the book and two of them that come to mind that we just mentioned was one how did he have a reason to think that his job as guarding the talk the tactical operations center it just seemed like it was the low man on the totem pole but the left the lesson that he learned some shares out of this you never know how significant your job is it may seem insignificant to you but you need to always do your best because it could be life-changing in this case um terry tells the story how bull specifically mentions that if security had been compromised well you're gonna you're gonna find out pretty soon on this mission um and terry mentions in the book that he thinks back to that time that he was responsible for operation security at the tactical operations center the second lesson that i think of right there is about the importance of training that you know it's a matter of maturity where you have to take your training seriously you have to seek it out at all opportunities and and do your best in the training as well even though you might think it's boring for you it's going to really make the difference at some point either for you or for someone next to you yeah i make the analogy of a football team you don't get to the super bowl but not training yeah and this was our super bowl the only difference was it was a life or death situation not a not a million dollar winner it's so true and cliff i actually wanted to talk about this offset component because as you just described terry you guys didn't know exactly where you were going until literally the last moment but cliff i would imagine as pilots they had to have route planned this in advance right so was there just was there separation amongst the uh the ground forces and the aviators to avoid that discussion because i would imagine they have to think through this especially at night yes and let me mention john gargas john gargas retired as a colonel at the time he was a major he was one of the main planners he was a navigator for one of the mc-130s that would take in and john is uh is so generous with his time and his effort to share all this background of what was going on he was uh heavily involved in our uh anniversary 50th anniversary ceremony celebrations this past november and he's a good friend of terry's and mine matter of fact terry and john and i are going to be on a panel at texas tech university here in another two weeks sharing at the vietnam center that's uh in honor of congressman sam johnson who was a p.o.w he's passed away now but the archive there his name is and the operations security was something where the certain as as you can imagine compartmented information so the uh the a1 aircraft were provided in country but the a1 skyraider pilots actually were all brought in from eglin so they were training um at eglin and the green berets were training at duke field which is on eglin air force base but it's an auxiliary field auxiliary field number three in england is duke field and uh in the book we sort of show the the differentiation of how uh how secretive terry's probably got a couple of stories on that i want to mention one other thing before i hand it off though uh the colonel who's in charge of security his name's uh max newman he's a real german kind of a guy and his call sign is blue max which is after the german medal and and uh he is very very tight-lipped even now because even trying to interview him it's it's kind of hard to get back but he'll share little bits of information terry i think you ought to share that one about the uh the air force guys who were taking photographs yeah what what he was talking about we were coming in one night and uh you know most once we had been training most of our training started at night then and probably i've been saying sixty percent of our training was night training we go through it three times that night and uh we were coming in one night and it was just about dust and uh there was some air force guys that were taking pictures of us jump coming off the choppers because they were landing right down from where our barracks was and all of a sudden these two cars pulled up you know and next thing you know they're taking their film and dumping it out you know handing them back their cameras i mean these guys came from nowhere and i'm sure the air force boys thought holy crap what have we done but uh that just our security was very very tight at while we were there at eglin i know uh you know in the three months we were there they brought in a band one night and brought in some girls and we later found out that these were uh ladies of the military that we're trying to find out if us young bucks were loose-lipped or not but we held our own and uh we kept our mouths shut that's impressive yeah i love it they looked at everybody looking cranny on us i guess friday night was our friday night fights we had a lot of fights internally but that's just normal a little hooch in you and you have a tendency to think you can whip the world there and so but well i mean you guys were contained there i mean you didn't have there's no tdys there was no communication right like you were just by yourself so i think it was even more of a pressure cooker yeah we we could we got mail and we got uh we could make a phone call but phones were bugged and we found out later and our mail was checked so tyrone natalie who slept next to me we were in the old barracks uh world war ii barracks and i used to steal his letters because his wife gloria she used to put fur fume on them and i would take them and put them under my pillow and adelie would tell the things that go on among soldiers right so uh yeah so i wanted to i wanted to talk a bit now about um captain turner right so dan please yeah please fact check me if i get this wrong terry you were selected like hand picked to be his rto for this operation right not just any old person like you were going to be a right-hand man of this captain going into this fight yes um i just i want to read another segment out of the book that when you ask him why he chose you right and to your point cliff this comes after one of the life lessons and and this was asked several years after because i always wondered how did i get selected you know who made the final i want that guy yeah right then and it's important because he gets it right right like we learned once you guys hit the ground he got it right so here's what he says amongst all these green berets seasoned vets that he could have chosen from he chooses you right so he says uh during training i noticed you and your young gung-ho attitude you responded positively to any and all tasking didn't give any excuses and got things done without a lot of supervision you were in great physical shape if i needed you to carry my butt out plus there was that intangible thing the stuff you can't really define when i looked in your eyes i knew i wanted to use my rto there was just something about the way you carried yourself that told me uh you were way beyond the experience level of an average 20 year old the only approval i needed was uh colonel budd's uh colonel bud sidner and he approved without any questions right that's um could you just talk about the relationship you have with him at the time i know it wasn't it was short-lived but like it probably felt like a very long time based on the type of anxiety you described and what you went into together right yeah dan was uh just a great mentor to me and uh you know he you know i screwed up a couple times and he let me know it i remember one incident uh we were going through the process of uh we were a two-man group there was a two-man team in fact we were the only two-man team on the mission and uh i was a few feet away from him and he looked over at me did one of these numbers i got when he did that i thought i'm in trouble now i walked over there and he stick his arm at you and he says you see that i said yes sir he says you're going to be that close to me and if you're not i'll shoot you and i always believed he would have shot me and that's just dan's way of making sure i got the message and uh but uh he was uh dan saved my life a couple of times on the raid and vice versa so uh it's just the way it worked and you know when when dan passed away it was a real uh a loss for the sante raiders and uh we're i'm still very close to the family his wife barb and the kids his kids so yeah you know that's you know you've got friends that you're like that too and you know how it works so it's special yep it is about that uh closeness like family you one way you can kind of get a little taste for that is uh on our on our facebook page for the sante raid association you see what terry's talking about you've got family members of so many of the raiders and they're you know remembering and appreciating each other uh of course their relative but also these other friends and that they've known through these brothers you know these uh truly like a band of brothers what we're talking about and we're down to 22 raiders out of the 56th oh things are old age is catching up yeah i hate hearing that um cliff i i'm going to direct this to you terry if it's more appropriate that you answer it please i want to start getting into the mission and talk a little bit about the task organization right because there's a lot of moving pieces here you you mentioned it red wine blue boy there's lime the apples right i just want to give people an idea of the force that's going in and just also again for context we're talking about a three-hour flight of three helicopters there's there's fixed wing that's leading the way we got no night vision right so all these people who are looking at what we do today try to imagine going into the heart of enemy territory no night vision at night when most people don't fly at night especially like my old man would tell me like those they rarely flew at night in vietnam right because you just you didn't have the capability so the lighting had to be right you're going in you didn't even know exactly where you're going until moments before like this is a crazy raid it's amazing how it works so well so cliff if you could set the stage of the task organization who's doing what on this yeah now it developed over uh the months of september and october um but the final plan ended up being uh what terry was describing as the the speech from uh from both simons that you read that happened at the cia compound at tuckley here royal thai air force base and then it's about a 30 minute flight like terry said they hop on a c-130 that's just to transport them to udorn and there they walk on the on the flight line direct to their helicopters the helicopters are lights out there is going to be no external radio calls among the among the hh53s and hh3 there'll be no calls to ground no calls to tower and as a matter of fact you know they've got a colonel up in the air air traffic control tower to say at this moment don't ask any questions of course make sure nothing else is moving uh at u-dorn and and so they taxi out and take off it is uh cherry one i'm sorry first it's lime one is the hc-130p that the five h53s uh form up on and one hh3 so it's six helicopters behind one aircraft and that uh hc-130p lime one and then there's lime two is airborne with them as well so lime one carries uh leads that entourage to the north vietnam uh border at that uh join up point um they meet with the mc-130 that then takes lead all six aircraft all six helicopters transition over to the mc130 cherry one and that cherry one takes them on to the sante pow camp they have an ip at which they're uh everybody including a1s now a1 skyraiders uh they all have two pilots in them uh they seat four but they've only got two that's very common so two pilots per a1 and those a1 skyraiders are with the call sign peach so you can see the theme there somebody at the pentagon thought that a fruit salad you know combat you know kick ass uh scare the enemy out of their sports you know and so anyways the peach aircraft uh five of them form up on a second mc-130 uh which is also basically at they were supposed to form up over vientiane so that'd be in the southern part of laos but they carried them all the way to that ip and then everybody's going to enter basically from due west of sante and come straight on in um everything has to be timed around the slowest aircraft and the slowest aircraft is the hh3 that's called the jolly green giant and the hh-53 is called the super jolly green giant but they were having to do this at 105 knots and for a c-130 to be at 105 knots you know they're real close to stall speed so it's uh an intense flight at a thousand ago so this whole thing with the buffeting of you know thermals and it's difficult enough you know with the terrain the ups and downs of the terrain um but it's also at night and no ratings so it's just a spectacular feat that required that much training and planning and commitment and professionalism and cliff i mean no gps either right like this is map navigation at night limited comms multi-ship formation mixed aircraft helos and fixed wing madness right like just crazy going in here the only time that a radio call is made um there is one call uh just sort of in the blind uh made that is the wind corrected uh bearing that they would be coming in from the ip to help the helicopters know what uh what's going to get them to there but they need to of course stay with cherry 1 all the way to it and then the the first time that radios are used is when cherry one rises to 1500 agl rises to 1500 hosts they've been so low this whole time and then rises to a 1500 hdl and says alpha alpha alpha and at that point then you know you're free to use the radios sorry just quickly clip why why choose a thousand agl so a thousand feet above ground level um would you not want to be lower is it just a safety factor like we don't really know what's out there let's just maintain this safer altitude yeah the the real answer is uh that there is going to be some stacking in that formation and that these okay so lime is at a thousand cherry is going to take over the formation by coming under them so the cherry one comes undone because the helicopters they've got no smash they vote their only energy they're gonna get is by going downward so they're gonna descend to cherry one and take over from there that's all the way from the uh you know basically from the north vietnam border all right next 120 miles jeez so terry thanks for letting us nerd out a little bit on the aviation side here that's that's fascinating for me to hear and i know a lot of folks who are pilots will love hearing this um you know it was uh and on the flight end you know you get up a little walk around a little bit you got a lot of time to think and what kept going through my mind you know my buddy was getting married that night one of my best friends and getting married that night back in clark missouri and here i was you know halfway around the world and i mean it looked like you could reach out and touch the trees as we were flying our pilots my hat is off to those guys i mean they uh they knew what the heck they were doing and uh it was a quarter moon so we could see the you know looking out and seeing the other aircraft it's just it was uh quite a view i wish that it had a camera because we need a picture to see that and where we were at and but they did a hell of a job and uh yeah and tara i wanted to ask like kind of so you're 20 years old at the time is that right do i have that right so you're 20. this is the first combat experience you're about to go into right and i had interviewed tom satterly who was a delta operator for 20 years his first combat really the way he describes it is black hawk down right like that was his first foray into combat and as i was reading this i was like holy crap terry is doing the same thing like he's going into this monumental event for his first experience so you know you said there's a lot of anxiety you're getting up walking around can you just dive in a little bit more like what was going through your head if you can remember well on that yeah i have a very vivid memory of it when i first got on the boat or ship you know looking around all the guys were laying sitting down and getting comfortable and these guys you know you know were laughing talking to one another and then other guys were either sleeping or praying you know their eyes closed and um you know i had three it was about a three and a half hour flight so you had a lot of time to think about you know at 20 years old your my short life passed in front of me you know and then knowing my buddies were getting married at that time and you know i just you had a lot of time to pray and uh that's for sure and and i did some heavy praying and and thank god uh he was listening but it was just amazing and when we when we started tethering in to land uh i mean uh it just seemed like we were on another training at that point and uh as we were you know sharing one came up dropped the flares and uh we we've started tethering down to land and that's about the time i had a headset on so i had one ear covered in one ear open so i could hear captain turner tell me what to do or what not to do and we were the last ones off our ship and just as we were sitting down the call sign came on and it said playing green and i couldn't believe i heard what i heard so i said say again you know and they came back all them playing green sergeant hal sf hal said going to playing green and i looked at dan turner and i told him dan uh captain turner it's playing green and he looked at me with that old look like you gotta be kidding he said are you kidding us no sir and he said we'll pass it on so and about that time our our mission if it changed what you would do is just pass it to the next guy so everybody on the ship knew we were going to play in green well playing green to us meant that green leaf had been shot down or had mechanical problems but it was not with us anymore and there were 22 guys on that ship so we went from 56 -22 yeah and they had a lot of firepower on theirs they had you know a 60 cal machine gun carrying it and uh m79 grenade launchers and they they were their job was to take care of the guard house and all of a sudden that became our mission and uh red wine became the assault chopper and we had about five or six guys doing what you know 22 guys were going to do but our mini gun opened up on that and you know that was a real thrill for me to stand you know a couple of feet from the minigun and that thing fired off about 4 000 rounds and seemed but it was still a training mission in my mind actually i mean uh i i tell you know i didn't get i was i was not afraid as much as i was excited about yeah finally we're finally doing what we're been training to do so we're coming in we're short final basically there are flares deployed right that's cherry two i think you said so this is like the only illumination they're gonna get out besides the moon to come in and land it cliff if you could describe like here's what was supposed to happen and then terry i'm gonna pass it to you for playing green which is an audible at the last minute change everything we had just planned for and execute this audible right so cliff here's what it should look like and then let's talk about the the military reality of no plan you know surviving first contact oh yeah um so at the point when cherry one who has been leading all six aircraft to this point as at the point that they pull up uh there is uh two key aircraft two cree two key helicopters the first one that's gonna go over the compound is apple three it is strictly with the role of a gunship and it's using those miniguns that terry was just talking about to shoot at the two guard towers that are going to be the first threat two guard towers that are on the west uh wall so at the northwest and the southwest so as you come in from the west and it's pretty much due west you know coming into the west they slow down 20 feet above the uh wall and are shooting in both directions now you know the two miniguns are taking out those those guard towers and that happens like clockwork nothing except the original plan then he passes over and turns right uh takes out a barracks area now everything's going just great you know okay and then the second key aircraft is banana banana is that hh3 the slowest one it has the assault force that's the blue boy assault group and those men are the ones who are going to land inside the compound and it's sort of basically a planned crash landing and and that also goes as planned well when those two aircraft with this char uh carry one departed the rest of them the rest of them needed to find a little bit of a separation because they're going to come in right after blue boy comes in well unfortunately they started drifting off to the right and they of course are very low and there happens to be and it was already pre-briefed there happened to be something that looked a lot like the pow compound in all the briefings it was known as the secondary school and the secondary school you know they didn't know exactly what it was it was clearly something military maybe early on it looked like a school kind of campus but but unfortunately that wind wind drift and the fact that you know like you're saying you don't have gps you don't have ins you you're you're just going to be at the at the whim of the wind and it really got them heavily so in that last mile prior to the camp they had drifted off enough to the right to where they started to see the first lights and that was the secondary school well uh all of the aircraft recognize it at the last moment they're over they're literally over and you can see the flight plan in the uh joint chiefs staff after action report they actually all went over the secondary school and did a hard and i'm talking like 90 degree uh left bank and went on to the sante pow camp which was due north of that unfortunately in all now you got flares you've got some explosions you've got a battle simulator going off um it's it's in the confusion of it the last aircraft to the farthest to the right so everybody else is peeled off to the left he couldn't see he was already focused and he goes and lands right there at the secondary school it's apple one it has green leaf on it and uh and and lets off those 22 green berets there at the secondary school the bottom line is they treated it just like it was the sante pow camp but in their write-ups afterwards they say i mean it's just pretty obvious within a few steps you're out there and you're getting you're you're getting to your area but within a few seconds you already know this is not a pow cam for instance there are no two two-story buildings at the actual sante podem camp and one that you see right there prominent is a two-story building and the the best they can do is uh take out what they can because they immediately start receiving fire it's a pretty substantial fire fight that that happens apple one has already left is already departing and so and apple one quickly gets told this is this is not it well that moment when everyone realized that apple one was not there that's that moment that terry was talking about when it was announced planned green which means we do not have green leaf support group with us at santa fe terry so you're 20 years old you're hopping off the aircraft you got an audible you're with captain dan turner right just take us through this raid please at that time our minigun opened up and we started off at our chopper sat down and we were deflating and uh dan was right in front of me i was following him off and as we were stepping off the back of the chopper he was there was a my my first encounter with him was there was a uh one of the guards from the inside the compound was coming out and he was firing at dan and you know this was this was the moment you don't hesitate and one of the things that we had was a new scope that we had been using and trained with and our accuracy from night firing went from misses of about 50 to hits to up dot 90 to 95 and the idea was all you had to do is put that dot on what you wouldn't shoot and pull the trigger and the first thing i did was put the dot on the boy's chest and pulled the trigger and got dan and clear and we got off so then from there we started doing our own the the guys on the red wine that knew what plant green was wence to their mission and we had had our mission our job was then my job was to get to the radio communication building as quickly as we could because you know we're 20 miles from hanoi now doesn't take long to drive 20 miles the planners gave us 30 minutes on the ground before we had reinforcements coming in now cliff was talking about the a1es those guys were flying a figure eight above us so we had an a1e over us at any time and we were supposed to blow the bridge coming over the river and if for any troops coming from hanoi well because of planned green we we didn't have the resources to blow the bridge so that was turned over to the a1e guys keep their eye on if anything started up that take it out and that was their job i might add too that one of the important parts of the planning was when the planters were looking at the pows they didn't know what the orders were for the guards so when they were doing the planning on this the reason we crashed inside the compound we wanted to be able to take out the guards and they figured within a minute we had to control the inside of the for the guards so if they were ordered to shoot you know the pows we had to take them out first so that was one of the reasons why they crashed inside the compound and then they did a great job of getting it in and getting out and nobody getting hurt in the crash other than one air force guy a fire extinguisher fell off and broke his ankle but that was and then joe murray got shot in the back of the leg uh on red wine uh our element but uh the guy that did that didn't live to tell about it either but anyway that was part of it but i i i still to this day believe that the guys on green leaf saved the mission because that that group down there was roughly a hundred of them and uh they were not vietnamese based on what our guys told us and those guys could have been up there in a heartbeat and we would have really been fighting a lot more than we expected and so i think the element of surprise took out those guys and gave us the the ability to go ahead and do plant green and they executed that great i mean our guys on paper on red wine did a good job apple one went back picked up their green leaf brought them back and dropped them off just like they would in the real thing now it took a little bit of communications to get them caught up with the red wine guys but that happened pretty quickly and dan and i had cleared a couple of buildings we needed to clearly on our way to the commonwealth shed when we got to the combo shed and we were getting ready what would we do we'd throw a concussion grenade in that would blow things apart in there and then we dan would hit the ground and i would swing over him and we'd just do a crossfire inside the building because bull simons had told us take no prisoners and we had to come back through that same area so we wanted to make sure everybody was neutralized so we wouldn't be held back and couldn't get back on our ships to get get back to udon so on the way through there um just as we got to the commonwealth shed that's when i heard on my headset negative items now items was code word for powers and i i looked at dan i said dan or captain turner it's negative items and he said are you sure and i said i just heard it and uh we went ahead and went in the comment shed just to make sure but there was there was nobody in the comments yet they'd already beat feet out of there and uh but we don't know i don't think they would have been able to make a call that quick but they may have but regardless we were heading out of there anyway so that's when they started extract and so we started pulling back from the same place we just came through knowing that everybody was neutralized in that respect and uh got our choppers and i will say one thing the cia in the uh the mock-up they made barbara was a replica of the compound and the surrounding area and when we weren't practicing we would go in they had it's about a six foot by five foot uh layout of the compound and they gave you a little prism and you would take that prism and you look down through that prism and it looked like you were on the ground at the same height you would be if you were standing there so you get acclimated as quickly as you could and the one of the things the cia had made was a little bitty bicycle which wasn't been about an inch or two long setting out in front of the common shed being from missouri you got to show me i looked at that and there was that damn bicycle there was no way yes it was that just amazed me now the one thing that was off a little bit we had taken a chainsaw and to cut down the light poles for our lz to get bring the choppers back well the problem with the light poles they weren't wood they were concrete so chainsaws don't cut concrete so the guys doing their lz had to move it out a little bit further to bring the choppers back in so we we started coming back in we got on the choppers and we started doing a head count and uh we were one man short so we did another head count and we were still one man short and you know that chopper wasn't leaving until we had a full head count and then the next time around dan countered himself and uh and we got on the bird and took off and that's when it got hairy for us dan and i there was a pj set between us i was on the left side dan was on the right side and as a chopper lifted up and turned we were looking over the lights of hanoi and you know uh i'm thinking hannah always got little bitty you know grass huts and everything this looks like a major city that you'd be flying into a major kansas city or you know chicago someplace like that and we hadn't been in the air probably oh i bet we weren't in there 30 40 seconds or maybe a minute i don't know it went by pretty quick and all of a sudden our chopper just dropped like it was going down i thought we were crashing and that's when this light pole ran up our tail and i had never seen a sam and i i hollered over captain turner what what was that and he looked at me i don't know and the pj sat between and said that was a sam and we were going oh my god and uh that's that's when it really to me got a little scary because we're setting ducks you know up there and uh you know we i never anticipated uh having a sam take us out you know if my feeling was if i'm going to get taken out of the uh vc or someone like that doing it not a not a sam missile but it i got a real appreciation for what pilots go through well i gotta say there's a funny comment earlier on in the book um i think it's when colonel simon's when the bull is initially looking for recruits and he says that i've got a moderately hazard operation for people and i think later on after you execute you're like if that's moderate what is high risk for this guy right yeah that's exactly what went through my mind on that flight in you know moderately hazardous and beat back by christmas but it was a very positive attitude yeah if i can ask you terry when you're on the objective yeah and i think you guys correct me if i'm wrong i think you're on the ground for 27 minutes if that's right right i mean sounds like a long time based on what you just said but it probably felt like an eternity right what um when you heard the no items right no pow's present what went through your mind what and the heck went wrong where why why and you know it's just like all this training and i mean we were so geared up to bring back pows i mean that's all we could talk about on the way from udorn and just thinking about the families what they're going to go through they're going to have a great christmas this year you know they're going to be able to celebrate and it was like you know sticking the heart you know and uh but you know the the good thing that happened and and i think cliff had responded to what the p.o.w cliff you want to pick that up yeah i really do because this is something that history needs to rethink historians very often use the word failure they say it failed to get any pows but the the case that we lay out in the book is that it was absolutely a success and that's because of the the priority of the mission was to send the message and that is of course get as many pows as you can but when you do the math if there were 60 or 70 pows at sante pow camp think about it's a total of 335 you're getting something like 15 of the pows so our for for people to say that it was a failure when the mission overall was not just to grab a few but it was to have the strategic effect on all the pows and that is namely to make sure the north vietnamese know that we will come for our own that that the pows have not been forgotten that it was inevitable that the pow is everywhere at all the pows pow camps we're going to hear that america does care now remember that they were they were being basically brainwashed day by day um mo i would say many or most of the pow camp cells had a little radio the one thing they did is within earshot they had a radio speaker that was pumping you know hanoi hana into their brains all the time and the message to them was that your country is in disarray all of the peace movement and the the way that veterans are being treated in america proves that america does not care about you as a pow sitting in a cell that nobody even knows is dead or alive nobody knows where you are and that your country your government doesn't even care enough to try to do something they're not even trying you know like they'd like to say that at the negotiating table there was not enough they could send you home if they would just stop the uh you know the aggressive behavior that was being pumped into their mind when a bottom line in the end every last pow got the message and the pows tell their stories and book of how amazing it was for them to know that their country their military brothers cared about at one of our reunions commander doug clower who was the sro at uh sante he got up at one of our reunions and said that if anybody thinks ahsante raid was a failure he said they need to come and talk to me because he said we all and he was talking about the pows agree that the sante raid was one of the best things that happened to us because from that time on they started getting better treatment the beatings quit they brought them all together in one cell where they had 50 or 60. they started teaching classes you know they started they were able to help one another and and that were sick some of these guys were on their last leg and needed assistance you know feeding and getting them showered and get them cleaned up and things like that so uh some lives were saved there there's the plw's have some great stories i mean yeah david ford who was a pow for six seven years is in one of the camps and they brought in a doctor who was french that north vietnamese did and the doctor spoke didn't speak vietnamese but he spoke french in one of the pows and his compound spoke french and they were talking he was telling him about david he had a really bad abscessed tooth and it needed to be pulled and the doctor french doctor said well i will get that taken care of in fact i'll have him bring some novocaine as well so a couple days later they brought a doctor in a nurse and they took david out and they kind of tapped on the two find out which one was bad and ripped in and pulled it out and when they got it pulled out then they gave him a shot and overcame in the arm and [Music] david when david unfortunately passed on but uh he could tell that story really good [Laughter] cliff go ahead it looks like you were oh sorry i didn't mean to cut you off there terry keep going no that that's just the way they uh some of the stories they had tell you know about what's going on and how they did things and uh my head may not say they are such they're my heroes yeah terry i wanted to point out that other uh life lesson that you have that is that people need to add humor they need to make an effort to contribute some humor everybody needs to find a way if the pows in their misery could find ways to tell stories to each other get each other chuckling then as a life lesson you need to be that kind of a positive person that tries to add some humor and see humor appreciate humor and i got i got to say like the fight nights come to mind there's some other ones about the the humor aspect and i would just say like people who are listening have heard a lot of the rape but there's so much in the book that's just worth the sidebars the the personalities the interviews and i did i i had this i have two segments i want to read from the pows because i mean it's gut wrenching reading some of these like what they went through it's really really difficult but you know like i think people who listen to this podcast would probably appreciate this type of thing but to in their in their own words these are pows at the time describing they were at other camps nearby or had heard about this so one of them is uh air force captain leon lee ellis right so he was at the sante pow camp from 67 to 73 right so part of what he says is though we were not right rescued by the raid the raid is capitalized like this event in many ways our sanity and teamwork were saved by the event we will always be indebted to the raiders for what they did for us and then another one that i thought was great was um navy commander paul gallanty also at sante 6673 writes over seven years in this place he says sante raid itself was the most memorable moment of my captivity we knew uncle sam wouldn't forget about us sante raid proved that and it's it's clear listening to or reading through these different accounts from pows some of them have been in solitary confinement there's one for 11 months in his own camp after this happens it spooks the north vietnamese they move them and consolidate them into rooms of 40 or 50 people where and so terry you mentioned sro right so for the non-vets out there the senior ranking officer who is essentially in command who's you you establish a military hierarchy once you're in this scenario right so they have that hierarchy that's created you are now in contact with others you can share stories they have classes in math and language and and it allows them to get through this horrible period in in time so yeah to say it's a failure is crazy not not one of you raiders is lost on the mission you all come back and it gives some peace of mind to these people who have been in the in propaganda zone for four years basically for some of them right like it's an amazing achievement exactly you want to mention that uh you you just mentioned leigh ellis lee ellis is going to be with us uh april 10th uh in a a seminar symposium at texas tech university it's virtually it's a virtual symposium uh also leroy stutz that i told um you know in in telling the effects um what what they formed there all of these coming together at the hanoi hilton basically also the plantation but they formed what was called the fourth allied pow wing and a lot of people have heard of that and seen the the shield or the the patch for uh the fourth allied pow wing that was formed uh only as a result of the sante raid in other words that was their moment at last when they had access to be able to take care of each other's wounds to help people who were struggling psychologically of course many were despondent many were you know uh despondent because they had had to divulge some information you know under torture you're going to eventually give something you're eventually you're going to break and so now they were together and able to sort of minister to each other you'd mention college classes church services they could have uh you know celebrations of of american holidays it felt like they were finally with their brothers they were with americans another book that came out just in 2019 was from another pow who had been at sante pow camp and that's carlisle smitty harris and he talks about the the radical transformation that happened and this is only two days after the sante raid so um uh navy commander mike mcgrath is the historian for the namm pows and he keeps in touch with all of them keeps their stories for you know accuracy and uh he even has the official lists of the memorized lists of all the pows and we list all the pows in the in the book and what we're trying to point out there is that all of them these are the rooms they were in the actual locations they were in as of uh just a couple of days after the sante raid and prior to that they had been scattered among so many pow camps um so you know it's it's wonderful when you hear from the pows even now like april 10th or in 2019 with the book of how rich that sante raid was what it communicated to them and then we also know that it communicated so much to the families of the pows it communicated so much to future pows you know a classmate of mine uh rob sweet was a was a pow in iraq for 19 days and so you know future pows know that commitment that america will do whatever it takes and there is no lack of volunteers to go on these missions to do what it takes to bring those pows one thing i want to add too about lee lee has a couple of books out and one is lead with honor and that's another good book to read if you're interested in this time of error of the history yeah yeah that's the pows are just unbelievable people if if i could ask um terry and cliff so we're first of all we're wrapping up here soon i just have a couple more questions but one that i think comes to mind um as i was reading through the book if you could share why wasn't there weren't any pows there right like obviously they just didn't the intel wasn't there to tell them they didn't want to spook the target set in advance but what was it that made it that there weren't any pows at the camp at that time the biggest comment that i've heard is the well went dry at the compound they were in and you know they needed water and plus there was also in a flood zone if it didn't give a a lot of rain coming they they could have flooded in that area but the the biggest comment we i've heard i don't know uh cliff which what you think but the well had gone dry there and they didn't have the facility to do it so yeah i can say that smitty harris in his book from 2019 he explains that the well had run dry and that he believes that was the primary thing that caused them it was july 14th when they removed all the pows from there and they took him about 15 miles south of there to a new camp that the pow's called camp faith lee ellis believes that yes the the fact that there was um uh the well had had run dry as well as flooding and then a third thing that those combined to make it really just an ugly pow camp and one thing from the middle of 1970 uh after the death of um the regime was starting to think about uh how to use the media and they knew that if it gets out that the squalor of sante pow camp is what pows are being kept in so they they wanted to try to eliminate that and so this camp faith was a new year more recently built one so uh lee ellis will point to those there's one other thing um we've got interviews and they're not in our book but but we uh sort of with john gargas especially who's just a great historian a planner on the raid but also a great historian since he has interviewed a lot of north vietnamese uh commanders and the that final question i think comes i think that's the strongest argument to say that all of them combined just make it uh you know something where they knew they were going to have to close the sante pow cam it was just too ugly too too much of a pr uh problem with them repositioning that way but the the one thing that i want people to know and this is a myth that's out there it was not because they had any inkling or hint of the planning of a rape yeah there was absolutely incontrovertible evidence that that these testimonies from these north vietnamese commanders they had no hint it was as it was stated alpha alpha alpha that was the moment that they realized the sante pow campus one thing we didn't talk about was the use of the navy as well this was the largest nighttime uh battle the navy did that night and they were a decoy for us and i'm going back to the planners i i you know the the more i really realize what took place in this the more i respect i have for the planner yeah they thought of everything and the security uh when when general manor and bill simons went around talking to all the admirals and everything they had a letter from the joint chiefs of staff saying whatever these guys need give it to them and no questions and that's that is pretty heavy it is so one one thing to point out is that the pack.com commander pacific command it was uh john mccain's father so wow admiral mccain was one who was told as early as july and he was not you know allowing he was not sharing that with his staff but he knew that when the time came he was going to need to tell admiral bartjar is the on-scene commander to support this and it was only about um about two weeks prior to the event that the navy was brought in and the ask was can they make a huge diversionary raid and i'll tell you the navy was superb they were ready to do it on the spur of the moment it took three aircraft carriers it was the hancock the ranger and the oriskany those three aircraft carriers gave 59 sorties 59 aircraft that did this raid on hyphong harbor and it totally succeeded in making the north vietnamese look the absolute opposite direction away from science god that's amazing what a great that's just incredible to hear so terry i i want to get you guys out of here i have a question for you in particular and then i've got two more questions for both of you so terry um something talking to post 911 vets who's the majority of who i speak to but i've interviewed probably three or four vietnam vets but certainly for the post 9 11 vets myself included there's this feeling that in your 20s you because you're in the military as a veteran like you've experienced a a very rich purpose and mission-based environment that you might not have later on right and and through the combat and the camaraderie and cliff i know you know the same thing from from being in the air force terry for you being 20 years old going on a this type of like seminal raid that 56 other green berets the legend of bull simon's being on it what um how hard was it coming down from that later like did were you able to find purpose later on in life after having this happen that early in your lifetime well if you had asked my wife she said i found the second purpose you know i know i've been blessed in being able to be a part of a raid like this with no experience in combat you know i i look back on it i think they took a chance on me i couldn't let them down that was not my dna to do that and you know from this i have had the good fortune of meeting a lot of wonderful people that uh i probably wouldn't have met had i not accomplished what i did at the raid but the raid was uh it was a god thing to me you know i mean i really truly believe that the good lord was with us that night and uh took care of us brought us home and uh you know when we landed back at pope air force base we had already been debriefed and one of them my memorable moment was not the rage so much as after the raid when i came back home and was getting off of the flight and turned around i looked and i saw all these wives and children running out to meet their husband or father and i thought my god these guys had daughters my age kids my age or older and they were willing to lay their life down for somebody they didn't know and i that has stuck with me and and i look at our military today we have that same calendar and i mean if you said i need a mission i you would have more men than you have a need for yeah and that is that's the dna of an american to me and what all about and the military is as you know you know once you've been in the military there's a camaraderie that you just can't explain to non-military people and uh you know and that field sticks to me today and my daughter has now experienced that and it's a great feeling and and that we have such as good military and uh i just can't say enough about it yeah well um so that's great to hear and i know there's a great photo of your daughter uh landon her final jump at benning right at jump school and i think it's you is it dan turner that are out there taking a photo of her no dan turner took that all right that's awesome that's it that just shows like how long that that bond lasts yeah i mean he didn't know we were there and uh that was her night jump her fifth her fifth jump of the night jump with equipment and she she was the last stick the last one off and it was about 2 30 in the morning and she come running up there and dan hollard hannah and she looked and saw who damn was and he snapped her picture and then hollered at me and i found her [Laughter] and then so to both of you last two questions here um i i'd like to ask everybody i interview these two things um one is was there anything so terry for in your case on this raid and then cliff in your career was there anything you carried with you into combat that had sentimental good luck value a talisman or that just meant something to you that you wanted with you during that mission for you terry and then cliff as you as a pilot or or if you know for your dad how he would have answered this well for myself you know we went in uh with no rank or anything uh we were sterile and uh you know you didn't take anything you didn't need and uh i just took uh prayers you know uh that's i had my praying for the guys and uh that we came home back safely and hoping we'd have a you know we had two extra choppers to bring back more there were more chopper or more powws than we expected but unfortunately we didn't need them uh but when i when you talk to the pows and you realize what an impact it had on their life you just you can't help but be satisfied knowing that what we did even though we didn't rescue them physically we rescued them mentally and give them the strength and the fortitude to move forward yeah in the situation they were in yeah ryan i might say something kind of similar you know i didn't have something material to to carry with me but um knowing that i was doing something significant you know i i carried that with me in the cockpit and wherever we deployed to and this is part of the answer to what you were saying to your host 911 veterans you know as they leave the military they're carrying that with them there are life lessons that you learn and you know in the corporate world business uh both terry and me people appreciate veterans uh and what i mean to say is that they know there's something special that you've learned there's a life lessons there's maturity there's dealing with stress and so you know in our book we try to get veterans to tell their stories and one of the life lessons is veterans you have a mission you have the ability to talk with other veterans and as you know as we all know it's in the news for some veterans that really really really need to tell their stories and they need to talk and they need to have somebody that knows how to listen to their stories because of course it's like the pearls before swine you don't want to share a story and then somebody says oh that's great you know and they don't really know what to do with it veterans know what to do know how to talk yeah yep it's true and just the last question i think i know the answer to this but you know terry for yourself on the right cliff your career and then if you could channel what your dad would say um everything that you went through the difficulty and the anxiety and uncertainty would would you do that all again yes yes let me say that my dad has been willing to tell stories uh he's pretty good at telling stories and he's been willing to talk about the sante raid but you see there's something special when he gets together with other veterans and they can talk and really tell the stories in a way that's appreciated the sante raid um it was i'm in alabama right now our alabama senator jeremiah denton who was a pow he was a navy guy he became an admiral and then a u.s senator his summary of the vietnam war he said that the sante raid was the greatest thing that happened in the vietnam war and that's that i think a lot of the sante raiders uh terry and my dad and those that were at the reunions and that we talked to so often they know there was something really special that happened there and uh it's something that we can be proud of it's something that america needs to tell the story right of course there's sadness about the vietnam war but this one this is a story that tells part of the heart of americans it's very very special to all the rapes it's kind of interesting since we released the book how many non-military people have read it and the comments uh when when i wrote the part of the book about myself and about what i did it was it was things that not to brag or anything it's just what happened and the life that i had as a kid anybody can end up it shows that you don't have to be a graduate of the military academies no no pun there mr cliff but i was a high school graduate i hadn't even gone to college yet and you know i made the top half of my class possible so [Laughter] and i was going to say terry we don't even mention like you know you've run a successful business since then for many years like both of you have these great stories to tell afterwards it just says a lot about the character and what went into this i'm so thankful that you wrote this book you took the time a lot of people who listen to my podcast are not necessarily veterans and they just appreciate hearing these stories so i can imagine you got the same response with the book yep good i it's amazing how many women have read it and liked it that you know because one of the things we we took pride in doing is you know military's full of acronyms and you know like sro you know you know we talked that lingo but what we did in the book and i think we did a good job of this is you know if we use that linger we also explain what it was so and then the story would have pictures to follow instead of having all the pictures in the middle we wanted what we just discussed and the publishing company i think really did a good job of working with us on that so that's great and i will have links to your facebook page um anything else so people can find you i know you mentioned a symposium coming up in april it sounds like people might be able to follow on that is there anything else you just want to put on people's radar before we wrap up here gentlemen vietnam magazine is going to be doing a nice article on it and this next next month uh they've uh how many people have reviewed the book now uh you got the air force commandos 80 that we're seeing uh and also you people can go to the santa raid.com and get a lot of our stories and a lot of the spirit of the sante raid association and [Music] that's perfect well thank you so much for the time both of you thanks for taking the time to write this book i mean it's it's a gift to so many people and i i highly recommend it just to hear the words of the people the pows in particular just hit me hard um you can really appreciate what this was all about and terry it's great just seeing your story unfold in the pages here so thank you for doing that and cliff thanks for telling your father's your father's story there too yep well thank you we appreciate and look forward to see in the video

Channel: Combat Story

Views: 40,942

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, son tay

Id: S2aBPSduiT8

Length: 108min 20sec (6500 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 08 2021