John Mullins: MACV-SOG, Phoenix Program, Blue Light, and security consultant: Ep. 48

okay guys here we are live episode 49 I'm Jack Murphy this is my co-host Dave Park over here you see our guest tonight is John Mullins John went from the rank of private first class to Sarge are from private first class to sergeant first class and then from lieutenant up to major most of his career in Special Forces where he served in military assistance command Vietnam studies an observations group which many of you have probably heard of they were doing clandestine operations into layouts in Cambodia during the Vietnam conflict he served in the Phoenix program one of the more most controversial aspects of the Vietnam War which was targeting the Communist shadow government in South Vietnam the new york times amongst others other critics of the war of described it as a CIA sponsored assassination program laughs john what the real deal is john also served in blue light which is America's first counterterrorism unit was the predecessor to Delta Force most of them were Vietnam veterans these guys were like the real deal they played the role of a stopgap until we had a full-time counterterrorism capability created John also went on to serve and numerous deployments with special forces in Central and South America in the Middle East and then after he retired from the military he had a a real second career as a security contractor Newark an aviation security he were traditional protection down in Colombia protecting judges from drug cartels and then he also dabbled in the entertainment industry and many of you probably remember John Mullins is I did by in my initial introduction as a teenager was the soldier of fortune video game series where you actually played John Mullins he's the protagonist of the video game that you play as a first-person shooter game and as we were talking about a little bit before the show I got mr. Mullins killed numerous times in in bloody combat all across the world when I was a kid so without further ado John thank you so much for sometime with us tonight I'm glad to be here absolutely uh you know maybe if you could start off telling us a little bit about you know your upbringing in your initial entry into the military and how you found your way into Special Forces yeah I was as a farm boy in southwest Oklahoma and knew there wasn't much future there and so at graduated high school at 17 and that night I was meant for Texas going through basic training basic in AIT and then we'd had one of our hard hats back then was an old world war two paratrooper and he filled my head all kinds was full of stories and I thought man I want to do that so I volunteered for airborne and it went to was assigned to the hundred and first Airborne Division which at that point was still airborne and not airmobile we went through jump school but especially was Special Forces came along with a little bit strangely for me I not eighteen-year-old paratrooper I could whip the world of course so get myself in a couple of fights and then I would have to report to the company first sergeant fellow named Charlie waters Master Sergeant and Charlie he had been a marine on Guadalcanal and he had been a ranger in world war in Korea and now he was my mother my first sergeant first time we did that he he I will report it to him and he said you want to come to commanders punishment he want mine so I knew even stupid as I was at that time I knew that the company commanders punishment would be an article 15 I didn't want that so I said I'll take yours First Sergeant he said close the door and I thought oh that's gonna hurt and it did to his credit he did not he didn't just and me at attention and Beach get out of me he aybe I don't think ever laid a finger on him though I think he only got the only reason he stopped beating on me as he got tired so he told me to go out and soldier for him I did for about a month and then I was back in front of the First Sergeant shortly thereafter a guy came in and we were all went down at the auditorium and here came this guy and blouse boots and medals up to his shoulder and totally unauthorized Green Beret and he was giving us the story of the Special Forces and how it was what it did and so forth and how we if we volunteered we'd go to Fort Bragg and we'd take our to Purdue to our aptitude we'd pick our specialty so basically the only thing I heard in that whole thing was I'll go to Fort Bragg and I will get me away from the first starting before he killed me so the way I went they put me in camo school for about a day but that date he died it just didn't do it for me they but I kept hearing that the rumor that if you were wanted to be a medic they'd send you down to Fort Sam Houston Texas to go through the first 16 weeks of training and they also said that there were lots of female soldiers down there well I'm 18 yeah that was easy that was an easy choice for me awful went to Fort Sam met one of those beautiful young ladies married her still married to her don't can't imagine why she's stuck with me all these years but she did went through medic school finished medic school has which had to be the hardest school I've ever been to in my life we started with 40 students we graduated 12 you had to know every tropical disease the symptoms signs and symptoms the treatment palliative measures and the only thing you had was was a Merck Manual and an infectious diseases book and what year was this job that was 1962 so it was really tailored for for Vietnam for Indochina for that no it wasn't really tailored Vietnam it was tailored for the idea that Special Forces people get a lot of false impressions Special Forces it's not a commando unit it is a force multiplier our mission was to go behind enemy lines or going to recruit organize equip and train and lead into combat other so local people well you can imagine if you if the balloon had ever gone actually gone up and in the Soviet Union you weren't getting out of there there weren't going be any medevacs you and you had to treat everything there so that was what that was what we were taught and they came and very very well Vietnam too especially in the early years so we didn't have old medevac stuff that that they had once the American units came in my first tour there in 1963 we were at right up on the Cambodian border and we we had one airstrip but that was about it you didn't have helicopters coming in usually it was an old Air America dc-3 that would come in if you needed anything so it was the same thing we treated every disease known to man John I I want to talk about your your book series a little later than men of our series I'm just curious based on what you're telling me about your first deployment have you ever read a void whittles book Parthian shot no he was right up there on the border and he wrote a novel novelized account of his time as a medic way up on the border on the campo border early on in the war I just thought was a fascinating book that's interesting but I'd like to know you tell us about your own first-hand experiences and what that was like yeah was one of the things that we did that was very very effective was we opened the doors to all the locals for treatment we do we had a dispensary there in the camp once the camp had gotten built and we one of us or both of us had a senior medic and myself and some trainee Cambodia knees and we would we would treat anybody that came in and they came in with everything from from hangnail to to typhus then we had also do outreach we'd go to the villages and hold a mobile set call out of the villages the while we were doing that our Intel sergeant would be working the lines and he would be gathering information and they'd just talking to him normally and they'd be spilling the beans as to what the local VC were doing were to find him it's a great way to gather Intel and I mean I'd be an up River I mean I must have been interesting and Vietnam and what do you say 1964 I mean this is this is early on in the war before the Marines before a big army get 6363 and and I mean I'm no offense to Vietnamese people but I mean that part of the world must have been like a backwater like going you know 200 years back in time Oh at least that our biggest enemies were the with the shamans the local healers and quite frankly they had they had a point in many cases some of the local stuff was war work pretty well but of course we with Western medicine we were a little bitter again about it and we did looking back on it we did none better to have cooperated with them they they I one of the things that that not many people think about they got deployed they sent me to the dentist there in in Fort Bragg as on-the-job training and they'd I had learned how to extract teeth and to fill teeth and do basically everything a field dentists could do I think up in that six-month I probably pulled more rotten teeth than most dentists will ever see in their lives yeah yeah I mean things that we really take for granted in in the Western world are major health issues or very common wasn't I mean leprosy was still around in that part of it oh yeah very much so yeah very much so yeah and it malaria course was rampant it was just expected that you would get sick pretty sick during that six-month at least once for me it was was the worst case of diarrhea I've ever had in my life sitting on one stool and puking into another one and at this point in the war it really is a unconventional warfare situation like those big like set-piece battles that we all associate the Vietnam War with hamburger hill and so forth like that didn't happen oh no that happened no no no there were no no American troops per se there were no American units I should say rather than a couple of aviation outfits there no infantry no artillery no nothing it was it was strictly at the locals our we we recruited from the local people in that area since and it was a lot of a lot of Cambodians were fleeing sea anoke and in fact there was a little revolution against him in those days so they crossed over the border and we we recruited him and trained him and led him into combat they were damn fine little soldiers and do you think that you know the whole war could have been different if it remained a special forces war that if left you guys in there do you think it was a mistake to bring in the conventional military I think that they should have brought in the conventional military only to guard the city frankly the yes it should have been it should have been a special operations war it inflated and inflated and inflated and everybody wanted a piece of the action they they caught it yeah so when you went there when you were initially sent there well let's I mean I like to rewind if you don't mind real quick because I think Special Forces turning back then is very different than say what Jack went through you said that you were medical training was sixteen weeks is that right no medical training was almost a year oh I was yeah I was it was 16 weeks down at Fort Sam Houston to get basic and advanced aid man corsets and then the real hard work right after that we were put into hospitals military hospital throughout the state and we did Ward work in those hospitals in our time an emergency yeah we we we worked basically everything there and learned a lot from the doctors to a certain extent bill held a lot more from the nurses and then there was dog blood which which separated the people that the could Hackett and the people who couldn't eight-week course and it was it was the most intense learning experience I've ever had the so for people who may not know before you know in my day that the medics I was a weapon sergeant but the medics went through the medic course and they had the the goat lab back in the old days they had the dog lab it started out in the dog lab you know and I that must have been a little bit different because you know as human beings were much closer to we've been we've been coexisting with dogs for hundreds of thousands of years I mean how were their any of the students I count like over emotional and just couldn't handle that now it really didn't happen that way for us it certainly didn't happen that way for me I hated that damn dog every time I'd go in there he tried to bite me with which you know the way he was being treated that I don't blame him too much but no it's you separated it out I mean yeah you can love animals and everything else but we were being trained to treat human beings fascinating I mean now did all this happen prior to any other training that you did for Special Forces did I mean there was there is like a selection now for you right or at that there was no selection in those days no and then I'm sorry go ahead no go ahead you did the medic course and then what happened after that then we went through the rest of it the light infantry tactics explosive simulations you know some communications work we didn't get a lot of it because that was when they were really ramping up the teams in Vietnam and so it was less than a year of that training that I got before we deployed so right now we're you're looking between a year and a half and two years worth of training before you before you eat deploy it okay and then when you did deploy was it were you going there just under the US Army auspices or was it under the military assist no it was with combine studied division which was basically at the agency they were running the whole program you were nominally we were military assistance Vietnam but we didn't report to any of them so after that deployment well we said not 1963 what happened next for you I mean that the war is ramping up but you I imagine at this point you've decided you want to in the military you want to stay in Special Forces yeah certainly dear there was no question that at that point as a matter of fact I had to extend my enlistment to to go to the to that first appointment got back and re upped and we did we did a little bit of training there at Fort Bragg but I decided that I wanted to I wanted to be an officer so off I went and being fought well before that went through French language school out at Monterrey six-month course there French because the French had been in Vietnam saloon so long that practically all the Vietnamese spoke French Vietnamese was a little tougher page to open so I went there then I got commissioned went through Ranger School eight of the most horrible weeks of my life I kept thinking what the hell am I doing here you know I already know how to be miserable and that seemed to be the only thing that they were teaching me but then went back to Fort Bragg and was assigned to the newly formed third Special Forces Group yeah the this was 65 by then and the fifth had deployed on mast to Vietnam so there was chinning up the third didn't last long because they were taking a bunch of casualties so in 66 they went on another team back to Vietnam Central Highlands that time we were up at a camp named Vinton he was in in a valley up and up in the highlands all the way around it I could shoot down on spectacle everywhere we live completely underground the Seabees had come in there and built bunkers for concrete bunkers for us because we got mortared and rocketed virtually every day the only thing above-ground the was the head and that was always fun to be sitting there doing your business and here Punk and realizes that that's mortar coming in but it better worry you bet you're wiping later and I show a picture on screen here that you had sent me John this is what you're talking about where you're living underground yeah that's it that was my hooch it's raising and how I'd the word changed from you know 63 to 66 hello the full-scale war about 66 we had the first cab in there they had had their butt kicked there in the I drank yeah I mean knows that does the you know from we were soldiers once right yep exactly but what what there's the next one that they really got involved in big-time was Operation Crazy Horse and that was right up the mountains around our account it it kicked off when one of our recons units went out and ambushed some people coming in and started carrying stuff back and the first thing I see is a 4.2 mortar sight well the 4.2 didn't come I'm in less than regimental size units so we knew that there were there were lots of people up there in those hills so we told the cab and that's what they were supposed to do come in and fight those guys and they poo-pooed us basically said yeah we've been through those mountains there's no down body up there blah blah blah they said but we'll send and we'll send a battalion now just so you guys will feel better so they they did they sent a battalion out and they then they put the mortar platoon in a saddle in between two mountains there there were all the mortarman no infantryman at all and several News newsmen there the NVA assaulted that and killed every single one of them it was you read about it in Fla Marshalls battled in the monsoon so then it was a full-scale fight the cab was there and had a couple of Vietnamese divisions there the Koreans were kicked in at one point and then they said well we think we've got them surrounded but we need somebody to go in there and find out exactly where they are so guess who special forces get here we go again what just happened we hear you yeah I can't see you no don't worry about it I that we so we took a company of had mon yards at that point and we took a company they were forking for you of us for units that went out to seek out the north vietnamese and we patrol that thing day after day and found a lot of sign of them but didn't didn't find any any units until one day when we were going up this mountain and my mountain yard commander said oh wrong way Oh beaucoup VC as I said let's go get him one of the most stupid movements I think I've ever made though the next thing we know we're in we're fighting our way up hill against an entrenched enemy we we fought there for most of the day finally broke through their first lines and got had a lot of my people killed and killed a lot of them I was roaming around the battlefield trying to trying to avoid the sniper fire and they were still coming from the hill up above us and fed the 12.7 machine gun that I got behind a big ol banyan tree and it was knocking off bark on both sides my thinking you know this is not going to be a good day got back got called the calves of course and they were sending they were shooting a hell of a lot of artillery and the fast movers came in and got a little too close and wounded some more people but it was it was a long hard day all right John can you see that picture I shared with the screen no I can't okay okay well it's it's the one where you're standing amongst some of the indigenous soldiers and I don't know if they're South Vietnamese or or Mountain yards where there's there's the one guy that's taking a knee in front of you with the Thompson submachine gun yeah that that was our Cambodia okay those are cam boats yep I got it yeah there's a guy that was with them they're the Air Force guy was an Air Force photographer that they sent out to to document what we were doing damn near blew my balls off one day when he was discharging a 45 and I was between my legs oh my gosh but so that not you it was your guys and you're indeed force your partner force up against essentially a regiment of North Vietnamese yep yeah I had one of my platoon one of my sergeants as a NAS no and was smart enough to send him around to the flank to try to get around try to get around them that way it's probably the only thing saved us that day now he fought his way and we continued to fight our way up the mountain they always thrown through grenades that was the element that was the only explosives we had I was throwing grenades ran out of started getting them from the mountain yards yes they he decided oh that American he can throw them further than we can so they're tossing me there and I'm continuing to do that but then it got good to him because they saw me pulling the pins on these things and they figured I guess to shorten the process they'd pull the pin too and then toss it to me I'm scrambling for a lab because a very high stress game of hot potato hey John fer can you give us a little bit of history on who the mountain yards are like where they come from and why you guys were working with them yeah the man yards were totally different people than the Vietnamese Vietnamese were basically Han Chinese who had come down there for years you know centuries before the mountain mountain yards were indo-asian they they were more like the more Cambodians and the Thais had a lot more to genetic resemblance the Montagnards they were slash-and-burn farm people they'd go into an area burn out all the grass plant their rice and harvest it and when the ground would grow fallow they had to move on and go someplace else some of the bravest guys that I ever worked with fantastic soldiers funny as hell sometimes some grenades action yeah yeah what was the relationship with because they were weren't they sort of the indigenous people of the area did they what kind of relationship did they have with the Vietnamese they hated each other's goods the Vietnamese thought of them as savages the mountain yards thought of them as used surfers there there were constant conflicts between them there was a in 65 there was an actual revolt and several of the camps were the mountain yards had overthrown and killed in some cases the Vietnamese that were supposed to be their commanders and declared their independence they formed the KKK which is not not the KKK like like here but it was it was an organization full roll the front for the liberation of Mountain yard people and they've faded back into the end of the tall push and so when what was America's interest in the mountain ours why why were we working with them and why were they working with you because it was the only ones that we could actually depend on I pitied the guy who Special Forces teams that were down in the Delta because there were no Mountain yards down there so you had a mixed batch of soldiers that you'd got from various sects the wahoo and very Buddhists they won yards in three Corps it was mostly modern yards and two Corps and I Corps was all menthe yards yeah and that was the only people we could we could actually recruit from Vietnamese weren't about do it and they had bailed if anybody of soldiering age had already been snatched up by the army anyway there was it were also the nuns who were the were of Chinese heritage but totally different than the Vietnamese no separate part of Saigon : was almost all gnomes and they were damn fine fighters to most of our Mike forces and three core were not young soldiers so by that by the end of that deployment what was your your impression of you know how the war in Vietnam was shaping up in the direction it was going in I was I thought at the time that that we I mean we couldn't just say screw it and come out but but we our hands were tied in so many ways that I didn't see that it ending any time soon so what's good because I like more at that point when you see I'm sorry when you say your hands were tied are you talking about US policy and what you were politic can you tell us some of the ways in which your hands were tied well they they they this negotiation business was was always bogus the North Vietnamese had no intention of ever negotiating a settlement and we there were certain areas that they wouldn't let us go into Cambodia and Laos for instance that's where little staging came from they weren't all those North Vietnamese divisions weren't down in South Vietnam they were living again the high life over across the border and until we until SOG cranked up they mostly got away with it then of course the various bombing halts and all the rest of it and bring him to the negotiating table blah blah blah the enemies had one strategy and one strategy only send its many Americans home and body bags as you can and sooner or later the American people will say that's enough and it worked people don't people that will read their history after Okinawa and especially after after evil Jima there was a very strong anti war effort in the United States people were saying why the hell would we kill another half a million soldiers just to invade Japan that was the with all the the wonderful things you hear about the greatest generation that was very active at the time if it had not been for the atomic bomb we probably wouldn't have did you know a little unknown fact that the purple hearts that people are still getting now they actual metal was bought and paid for in 1945 because they were anticipating Japan they those were the ones that they were they were expecting that many casualties Wow yeah that there is a whole interesting history there and then and it also leads into Korea because the Japanese capitulated faster than the army expected it in there's a whole other story there about North Korea was born but I think that kind of also leads us into your next appointment to Vietnam it was what you had mentioned was studies and observations group that's wondering it maybe you can describe to us you know the anak you ously named studies and observations group and what that was and how you found your way into it as a special forces officer it it it had been started in 1965 I believe with one of the one of the more colorful characters that who has ever been in the United States Army a fellow major at that time named Lowery torn he had changed his name to Larry Tony but Lowery had been in the ski school up in Finland when the Russians invaded in world war two came out with the mannerheim cross twice the Russians captured him after the war Thrym in prison he escaped and he they caught him threw him in prison again he escaped made his way to Germany fought with with the waffen-ss against the Russians after the war of course that wasn't wasn't regarded very well so he went to South America for a while until the heat died down and then came up and joined the American army but he was aid he was perfect for for the mission I mean this guy doesn't go all his life what was a was Larry a la jack soldier I've heard conflicting things about that was he alive Jack yes he was he okay yep definitely and he was one of the first casualties we had and saw the first as a matter of fact the first across the border mission and the layoffs they flew their helicopter into a mountain I always expected to see him walking out of there you didn't think that guy you you knew very personally John what kind of I knew him personally he was a major I was I was a lieutenant you know we weren't exactly buds right well I mean do you have any recollections or experiences about him that you can share because there's just this continued fascination with uh with Larry I think that you know he served under three flags and as you said one of the most colorful people to have ever served in Special Forces yeah he he would he hated the communists that was his main yeah function who I I've you know the Russians the the bastards that had invaded his country and then he'd fought against them in World War two and now he just found her and found a new place to fight him but that they found that it was feasible to run small reconnaissance patrols over there and it so then they started ginning up didn't start as SOG per se it started up as projects Omega Sigma and of course there was Delta which was the in-country recon SOG basically came later on when they consolidated everything and study it's an observations group they did that the studies and observations because they didn't want it to be special operations group there'd be too many news men around stickin the notice it up you but yeah always call something exactly what it's not and people go that's fine yep that sounds good who wouldn't want studies done on Vietnam that's it's like like the the sephardic course it's like the Special Forces advanced recon tactics bla bla bla bla bla it's got like a like nine nine letters in this acronym they just made it so bizarre and so complicated like nobody can exactly we're very good at that thing how did you find yourself into Internet nappy sock John I had been back to the States for a short period of time they they always thought that you should get more more leavening in this man's army so they sent me down to Fort Benning and I had put in my little deal which you fell out some of your non military skills and I'd put in there that I was I had some gunsmithing skills so they put me in Fort Benning and I became the original Army instructor for the quick kill program I don't know if you've ever heard a quick he'll know it's an instinctive shooting program that was brought that was sold to the Army by a world-class shotgun shooter and it was you know our encounters in Vietnam were 20 feet you didn't worry too much about sight pictures at that you just needed to get it in the general area and gonna get around downrange well with this we we eliminated on the guns that that we gave them we started off with Daisy BB guns took all the sights off of them and would stand next to the shooter and throw these little aluminum discs up in the air and they would have to engage that disc and the positive reinforcement that they got from blinking that disc was just amazing to watch and then we transfer or transmitted over the of course to small talk it's on the ground and then go from that to to actual using an m4 m16 but we'd with a flat of wood or across the top so they couldn't look through the side and then some say it was strictly instinctive shooting and worked very very well then the army sent one of the regiments from the 82nd over to Vietnam and that they pulled all the officers in order to fill the rest of the the rest of the slots that had been they needed to fill and so they they sent me up to be a airborne officer and and Fort Bragg my main takeaway from that was that was during the time of the Martin Luther King riots so here I am on a gun Jeep in my nation's capital fully loaded and authorized to apply lethal force should it should it should it be necessary never thought that what I'm sorry you probably expect that when you're enlisting no I did not know most certainly did not but one funny story about it they billeted us in an empty office building there so I'm going through and checking with my sergeants and telling them what were we gonna do the next day and I get up to about the fourth floor or and we have got everybody every binocular we had in the company it's focused on this building across the road so when I walk in everybody starts polishing the binoculars okay yeah tell me tell me what you're really doing yes they gave me a set of binocular and find it out a building across the road and there were several girls over doing a striptease for the boys so what how long did did that sort of rotation in DC last year here yeah yeah after that I knew I didn't want any more part of the conventional army so I volunteered to go back and I at the you had to go through the trying at the headquarters there and all the madmen and then everything else and there was this major marked on Zillow and he and I had hit it off and he said John you need to come with me and he was going to SOG so ah what the hell I'll deal with you so I went in did you know what it was when you okay yeah so we're were you up at a CCN and contemn I was at all three of the FO bays at one time or another yeah I was running something called the Borden's project it was a we were putting people in and and doing recon in not only Laotian Cambodian but North Vietnam before the bombing halt of 68 we depending on where we were putting them in and that's where we launched out of are you allowed to talk about you know what what that entails because I mean I think we all know and honestly I don't I have no idea what that project is and I would like to think I'm somewhat well-read I have absolutely no idea what that is it was we were going into the prisoner war camps in South Vietnam and recruiting soldiers out of them and changing changing their point of view and then taking him back over across the border and who better so you were inserting double agents yeah mm-hmm yeah we we did the biggest recruitment tool that we had we took him down to Saigon they had been told innumerable times that all their American oppressors they're so evil the people are suffering and Saigon was just the most bustling scene that you've ever seen there in 68 so they realized they've been lied to all that time yeah yeah so that's I mean that's just fascinating to me and and I mean I imagine it must have been very a challenging assignment to first identify these guys in the POWs camps then you got to flip them over to the American side like you just described and then actually insert them with a credible cover about where they've been while they were missing and what they were up to yeah yeah it was it was quite involved and we did have a couple who paid lip service to it and was and we expected that and that was that just went with the game how did you cover your tracks then because if you knowing that some of these guys might flip were you worried that they would expose the program and put in jeopardy anybody else you sent up no because we the ones that we we could pretty well identify the ones that were going to flip so we took precautions their life expectancy wasn't very long that's all I'm saying about that removing the firing pin from their Kalashnikov oh oh so I mean I guess my my follow-up to that would be you know did that turn out to be a good source of intelligence for studies and observation oh yeah yeah we we called in many a b-52 strike over over that one so it's something that the Recon teams that the RTS were involved in or was that it was just a complete no separate parallel throw they were totally separate interesting Wow it's always something new to learn yeah that is now how did obviously these guys had to be given so sort of tradecraft right in order to communicate in order you know just different types of things were were you guys teaching them that did you have assets or partners that were chica yeah we had partnerships with the Vietnamese they there they looked long not a doctor yet the Vietnamese special forces and some of those guys were very very good some weren't worth powder later dick blown the hill but it was so but we had cream of the crop and so then you had mentioned to me again as something else I I didn't know about you you told me yesterday when we spoke briefly that you were also a senior advisor in the Phoenix project your your final appointment to Vietnam and maybe you could tell us a little bit about that it's totally separate from McAfee SOG the Phoenix project was one of the more controversial programs that we ran in or was very controversial yeah it it I volunteered for it frankly because I was tired of killing Snuffy's some poor bastard just jerked out of a rice paddy in North Vietnam given a modicum of training weapon and told down there and kill the American imperialists I wanted to take out the people who had sent the people out and the Phoenix program was designed exactly for that the every province had an infrastructure a shadow government those were the people who were pointing out targets there were doing assassinations of anybody who who was cooperating with the Americans so the guys then Phoenix program were specifically targeted and it took a hell of a lot of Intel as you can imagine but once you started getting them getting someone talking to be amazed at the stuff that they'll come up with and one of the things was they were [ __ ] scared of the Phoenix guys they were they knew that their life expectancy was balanced upon whether I said you know this guy's useful or this guy's not useful and we recruited the people out of out of people who got a grudge my Phoenix my Phoenix soldiers were the survivors of Tet 68 their families had been marched out into the sand dunes and buried alive the biggest thing biggest problem I had was to keep him from killing these guys I don't know how many times I told God can't get in intel off a dead man they really wanted to kill them all yeah so you know go ahead I just got asked were you familiar with the Phoenix program did you volunteer for it were you recruited I volunteered for it yeah you had you know in over there everybody knows everybody else said at one point or another and I had a good friend who said I'm going to Phoenix and I said well hell I'll go to Phoenix too and so we we did some very good work there and that was until senator J William Fulbright stands up on the floor of the Senate and denounces it at an assassination program and they pulled every one of us out of the program sent us back to the States told us we could never go back to Vietnam this was 1970 and it was it was just ridiculous other as I said before we saved more lives than then got killed because we wanted information out of them but and once once the Americans left that left the Vietnamese to run a reign of terror which they did what do you think then John about the the criticisms that have been made about the Phoenix program in subsequent years that you know they say you guys were a cia-sponsored you know hit squad that you were assassinating civilians that is sort of the slash and burn operation no now absolutely not our our records were meticulously checked by the province port province officer in chief and he he was an old hand in this business and you didn't lie to this guy I mean he knew everything and one of the most impressive men I ever knew and South Vietnamese intelligence officer no I listened American Oh agent guy yeah the point yeah the pork was was was American and this is this is a guy who had had fought all through South America and he he was a soldier soldier and he took to me for some reason or another I think that the interesting thing about the the Phoenix program is also the many parallels between that and you know what today's generation of Special Operations soldiers has done and that you hear about the Joint Special Operations task force in Iraq and Afghanistan the whole notion of high-value target catch or kill operations not at all very much parallels the things that you're talking about John that you know you guys had provincial reconnaissance units we had you know CT pts and all these other kinds of you know similar acronyms almost I saw I got almost a 4x mirror image of you know what we tried to do in Vietnam and some in some regards yeah it's we had enough people hold o words I think that taught generations of Special Forces and some of the things that at work and some of the things that didn't and I believe that the success of our Special Operations community now is based upon a lot of that as wondering if you could tell us a little bit more since I yeah you don't have so many opportunities to talk to somebody who is intimately involved in it like what was that process like for you guys as far as your you're targeting cycle you know the cycle of operations about you know get you it sounds like it was an intelligence driven effort at least yeah try to pinpoint who the the ringleaders were in the shadow government in South Vietnam what was it how did you go about that and how did you you know begin removing the shadow government from the civilian population it was in the beginning it was stuff that the Vietnamese the local Vietnamese had gathered whether they be police forces or they and the police force in some cases was quite good and they knew who was doing what they just couldn't get permission to move against them we could so we've got a lot of Intel that way and then once we started rolling up they rolled up they they sang their hearts out at one point with a there was a North Vietnamese battalion that came in from from Laos and they were lost for two weeks there were no more trail Watchers there were no no guides there is still a vector today and one hundred and first Airborne so this shadow government it was in South Vietnam was not I mean it may have been like sort of like a mafia type thing or whatever but they were working in the interest of the economists of the North Vietnamese oh yeah yeah definitely yeah a lot of them a lot of them were we had been sent down for that purpose and a lot of them were holdovers from from when Vietnam was partitioned they were told stay in place there will be a need for you what do you think was your biggest you know cou over there for you and your teammates as far as operational successes like like there was there a particularly big VC network that you dismantled there's something that really stands out in your mind yeah the the entire shadow government of to attend province there were there were virtually nobody left on that's why they gave me gave me the next province up no good deed goes unpunished for anybody who's listening to this on the podcast instead of watching it on YouTube I just want you to know that John just had quite a little smirk there when he was telling us about that I mean you guys must have just totally wiped that out then huh I mean yep we had people giving up walking into walking in to local police stations and saying thank you I don't want to die these guys they're they're out there and they they will get me sooner or later but it reminds me of you know different programs and perhaps shut down for different reasons but you know like the village stability operations in Afghanistan once we kind of got it up and running and it started to have an impact you shut it down yeah same thing it sounds like the same thing happened with Phoenix it did yeah it did no it was a big mistake but you know by 1970 at war with one despite all the [ __ ] about it you know the the street without joy that goes from basically from way up to upper Quang Tri province that then they talked about it was horrible ambushes bla bla I used to drive that G Drive that rode in a jeep by myself so what what do you think went wrong at that point in 1970-71 well two things went wrong they the invasion of chaos was a mistake no Cambodia was it was a good operation in the Asian Laos was mistake it was it took away the cream of the Vietnamese army and by that time they were getting pretty good and after that it was all downhill and the Vietnam conflict I mean it's something that I think you know quite clearly stuck with you John as it did so many other guys who had served there so long and hard that you know you wrote what four four or more novels about the Vietnam conflict one of them been you know the men of our series and I'm sorry that I have not read them I usually Dave and I try to read the books of all the authors who come on here and we're pretty good about it you know not to pat ourselves on the back and but you were kind of short notice so I'm sorry that we haven't read your books could you tell us a little bit about like after your post-war experience why you decided to write these books it came along like her it was and as much as anything else it was catharsis my first one started out god it was way up around 1990 in 1995 and I was driving and I saw a site that looked so much like that hillside that I told you about earlier with it it was a Johnson grass hidden here but it was elephant grass there and the wind was making shapes out of it and it just had spellbound me there for a minute I had to pull off the road I would have probably had a wreck otherwise and I jotted jotted down what I read maybe a first chapter and then I put it away thinking Ellen nobody's interested in this crap so later on in 2000 went to the big get-together in Washington for us it was our 50th anniversary the Special Forces and we met and published author Mark parent who had I knew from the 3rd Corps Mike force and I told him that and you know it's piece of [ __ ] so forth and so on he said John you're no judge your own writing to take that and send it up to this guy and he gave me the address of an editor up in New York so I said what the hell I forgot to what do I got to lose so I send it up to him and I get get a call about a week later Jim Morris said we want this what's the rest of it I'm thinking more a call to you now I've got to write the rest of it it was that Jim Morris yep yeah she was a friend of mine or is he yeah yeah he is a really good guy that's so funny Jim had been he'd been wounded and there in 60 6666 and so they put him down in a trying as the awards and decorations officer and until the tour was up and he buttonholed me thereafter as I was getting ready to leave Vietnam that time and I'd been put in for the Silver Star for that for that action and he he said John you screwed up what do you mean yeah he said you weren't wounded if he'd have been wounded you gotten a DSC let me take on my part Jim I got a I got the picture you sent me of being awarded the Silver Star here so I just put that up on screen real quick a little younger then a little bit I can still I can still see you there John John how old were you in this picture 28 yeah Jim Morris is a good guy he he lost one got one of his balls shot off by communists in Vietnam yeah we'll have him on the show sometime I I have no doubt he is a great storyteller you know why who else told me actually told me you were a really good guy said you have some great stories as a tilt mayor Oh tilt yeah yeah yep we get together and try to get together every year out of had at Las Vegas we drink entirely too much and tell tell war stories and hug each other a lot China yeah it tilts a terrific guy - I love him and he's another guy we'll have him on at some point so definitely you know check out the the men of valor series I was looking at the money Amazon I want to read them now and you know hopefully we have you on again sometime John to talk about those but I want to talk about how there are there are if you go out go on Amazon you can also find the other ten books written yeah and I wanted to ask you about that too because when I type in John F Morris what pops up is the men of our series I'm sorry John F Mullins the men of our series pops up I didn't see your other books are they under a pen name or something no they're under my name but you really have to search for them and they're only they're only online what what are they what are they what is the series name or the titles well what I'm one of them is the Apache County series where I took one of the characters from the men of valor series who had run afoul of the army and left it and went to work as a contractor imagine that brought him back - brought him back to Oklahoma where they talked him into being the sheriff of a small county in southwest Oklahoma and dealing with all the problems that you have there there's a father that's a five novel series now I'm looking forward to checking them out and you know on that note I want to well before we move on a contracting in private security I want to talk about your post Vietnam career and finding your way into blue light and there were some things you laid on me again that I thought I was kind of well read about on blue yeah I sent you that whole article I wrote about them but you were telling me some stuff I did not know at all so I just wonder if you can tell us a little bit about you know your SF career after Vietnam and finding your way into blue light yeah I after Vietnam since I couldn't go back I went through a Russian language school and then went off to bad health which really we still had we still had the 1st battalion and the 10th Special Forces Group and bad tilts in those years horrible assignment really eating German food now you can imagine I just come out of Southeast Asia the blood was not exactly attenuated to the Alps Facel it was a little bit of an adjustment period there and I never stood on Oklahoma's flat yeah where was I gonna ski I'd never been on ski in my life so but I but damn well learned how to ski because that was going to be our way of getting in if blue never did go up so was that called a falling rain hmm I think foot was falling rain the name of the program at that time the the first of the 10th guys that you know if work popped off at the Soviet Union they it didn't really have a specific name that I know of anyway but a they put me in at first as as their area study officer and I was there for a while and then that moved me over to command a company and we did some interesting things we did a lot of exercises with with the Special Forces Special Operations people from everything from from Norway down to at that time since the Shah was still in Iran we had them up there we went down to Iran to across the dusty career desert which supposedly had never been crossed before I don't know if that's true or not but the and a lot of a lot of Mt T's all over the place my language came in handy the French in particular came in handy I worked a lot with French and all the business of them being you know dropping their rifles it's [ __ ] these guys were good yeah 13th 13th the parachute regiment marine Parachute Regiment and I worked with plug him parachute Eastham I mean very good folks but how are you adjusting to this after having been I mean in Vietnam in and out of Vietnam from 64 seven years base 70 and now you were you know working in a more of a peacetime environment I assume you know doing the you know the partner force training and stuff like that you know missing Vietnam are you missing combat oh yeah absolutely absolutely there was no adrenaline and I have been accused of being an adrenaline junkie the that but it was a good assignment my wife and kids were with me and it gave me a time to get acquainted with them can't say reacquainted because I wasn't acquainted with them very much the life had been living that that spent four years there and and came back to the states and did did basically just did whatever to pass my time and then blue light came along so they know and I went back language school for Spanish thought I was going to be headed down down to what was then the eight but they instead blue light wanted somebody who was who knew languages and who had some skills in swimming and I was a master diver by that point and halo qualified so so they formed up a section a little known section of it that was the maritime side you know everybody was worried about airplanes back then because of the hijackings so that was basically what everybody was was thinking about how to get on board an airplane how do I go into an apartment building how do I do this how do I do that but nobody had paid much attention to maritime and those ships that were rolling out of those those cruise ships I mean they would bring your trunk onboard for you there was no inspection or anything you could had a company of bad guys on one of those things and then once you once you're out there and you've taken it over how do you take it back right and it's not the easiest thing in the world and that was what we were doing trying to figure out exactly how we could react to things like that so before we get into the the maritime brain specifically could you talk a little bit about what blue light is or what it was and what's that 778 like there is a lot of misinformation out there about what blue light was and what it did yeah it it was a reaction to the the terrorist threat I mean it started with the blowing up of the airliners there and in Jordan and the killing of passengers and then of course they the example of the Germans who had mounted a very successful operation the Israelis had mounted a very successful operation and we knew it was going to happen in the United States sooner or later so SF was not was not in those years direct action it was we weren't as I said earlier we weren't commandos we could be commandos but we weren't we weren't commandos so we had to start up something that would that would help get the skills that we needed to go into a building to go in to go into an airplane and that was long before Delta was even a gleam in Charlie Beck was I so the certain teams would would give them give them training and a lot of it was basic stuff you know we won't earn Pistoleros Armel our wars have been with the rifles so it was going back to school on that I was lucky enough that that I knew one of the finest pistol shots in the world came right out Oklahoma City jelly Bryce and he took me under his wing and gave me a few gave me a few pointers and I went back and started teaching teaching the guys on you know instinctive shoe and again instinctive shooting but with a pistol West time that worked out pretty well but I mean it was all from the store it was it was like fighting a new war and then of course you had all kinds of people who were saying we don't need dead they FBI is gonna do that a happy HR key blah blah blah and and blue light was staffed up with like some Special Forces legends as well I mean like all of you guys except maybe the officers were Vietnam veterans like Sun Tan Raiders like for skies dudes like you who had been mackney SOG and Phoenix program I I could tell the you know people a little bit about who these guys were yeah they and they were you're right it was very selective screening first off you had to want to do it and weren't retired in place as so many of our people were by then they just burned out and people who were darris a Patriots who knew that there was a threat and they it had to be dealt with and who else so they so yeah we got to we got to pick and choose some really good guys and it's goddamn shame what happened later on with with Delta that [ __ ] about hell you'll have to go through selection to be in Delta right were you at recruiting meeting though it's not okay there's a yeah I heard that story for many people actually so blue light was out at Mott lake on Fort Bragg that's where they were doing all their training but wait you ate on me that I didn't know was that there's this this attached maritime branch like I literally I'm learning here as we're talking what was that what were you trying to accomplish with it just that was mostly planning trying to figure out as I said earlier how do you get on board a moving ship you get people saying oh you could halo on if you ever looked at the top of a ship with all the antennas and every damn thing it's that's sticking up in the sky membership is moving yeah you're gonna go on there and a halo I don't think so and Klima sides of it no you're not gonna climb a side seven whether it's moving or not you're not going to climb the sides of it not if anybody is on board there that has any sense at all I'd shoot you off those ropes before you could get six feet up so there were there were a lot of considerations in that but by John don't we have this whole other unit called Navy SEALs that are supposed to specialize it's like weren't doing SEALs weren't doing much in those days they had cut back on them as well and they were I mean it it sort of became a division of missions the sales were doing a lot and the Philippines and in Near East Asia they so until until the they stormed up she'll take single team six they really didn't they didn't do much of that their mission was to go in on land you know sea air land they were two men from sea go to land hit a target come back out as far as ships they'd never even thought about trip yeah and I mean were you was this this was purely planning or were you try not like develop the tactics develop it now we were we were developing the tactics think about it we got a lot of free rides on cruise ships John how did he find out about blue light and at what point did you become in its formation did you become involved in in that I was recruited for it recruited and right when it was forming up yeah and yeah Oklahoma farm boy that learned from swimming a swimming of stock pond I ended up being a being in a water baby and then it's a blue like it stood down what in the latter part of 78 I believe yeah so to you you were one of the guys that was retained and stated Montlake for special operations training or at the SOT course yeah yeah and we we took a lot of them down by that time I was almost a full-time instructor down in Key West so we'd bring him down there and put him through some exercises and just and again trying to figure out how to do this stuff basically the only thing the only thing we ever came up with and ship would have had to been stopped at dead stop which isn't that hard to do stop one has to go up through the garbage chute really mm-hmm like with a grappling no oh no with they had these ungodly sticky pads that they would that would have adhere to anything I don't know what that were made of really but but you could you could actually climb whether you add them on you fit on the insides of your feet you know you and you couldn't put your toes out there was the insides of your feet you'd slap them up against it and go there and then slowly move up that garbage chute that's awesome nasty they threw all those things so I found somebody somebody mouthed off at me that was permission I gave so what how long then was how long did you spend in blue light before before it went away two years altogether ears all together yeah and feel about that I mean were you tempted to go on to Delta or were you just just sit down Charlie back with him never got along they had there towards the end of my second tour I thought well I'll volunteer for Delta down there and go go do go do some recon and project Delta in Vietnam project Delta yeah I walked into his office and he he just started berating the hell out of me for no apparent reason I turned around walked back out yeah he really had that effect on people I mean and so many people I've spoken to you know over the years that you know they say you know he was a good person he was patriotic and and he was smart in the sense that he knew we were the counterterrorism capability but he brought so many people the wrong way light like yourself and so many others that recruitment briefing where they brought all the blue light people in that we had talked about I he was just really flippant and kind of disrespectful to all of them and yeah again rubbed them the wrong way yeah grammar - yeah I Joe Seminole was a good friend of mine Joe was not Joe Seminole I was another friend oh [ __ ] I'll think of a new name in a minute in any case he was he was a light colonel at that time and he and he and Beckwith would have at it all the time so after blue light gets shut down he went over it did SOT and then I you ended up getting the point down to Central and South America no I was getting close to retirement about that when I wanted to retire I had no intention of saying he had much past 20 but I wanted to wanted to get my family someplace where I get them settled in because I knew I wasn't gonna be just sitting around so I I asked for and got an assignment as an ROTC adviser in Wichita Falls Texas mm-hmm moved the family there and got everything settled in and then took my retirement and went off for three years to Saudi Arabia I mean wait how did you end up from Texas to Saudi Arabia Vanel corporation had had a contract with the Saudi government to train their basically their National Guard so they we had a lot of people a lot of different skills there but SF was in high demand and so the pay was decent and I did couldn't find anybody in the civilian world who wanted to hire me my peculiar skills didn't didn't exactly do a corporate executive too much so took the job went there and got financially straight and then decided okay I'm gonna give the corporate America another try give him another chance so I went back to school got an MBA and found out pretty quickly that corporate corporate America still didn't have a lot of use for my skills so I taught for Oklahoma University for a while and then saw saw an advertisement on a bulletin board and it talked about a job with the Department of State and it was so and it would look through the requirements there and I said man this is a job for me you know weapons ability explosives so forth and so on so I got recruited for the Internet the State Department's anti-terrorism assistance program ATF yep and we were doing a lot of maritime a lot of non-maritime a lot of a lot of aviation work at that point and doing a lot of training I was also instructor in in their render say I IDI render safe program so we trained people from 83 different countries in that it was built up a lot of contacts that I used successfully much later on then decided don't like working for the government too many regulations so I went up to DC and became became 'la a gun for hire I joke about that but most of it was fairly mundane stuff Treasury had me escort uh one of their Treasury officials down to the Turks and Caicos but he was doing a doing a an analysis on money laundering and so I was his bodyguard went to a lot of other places and had it it worked out well for for a few years and then I decided to become an entrepreneur now I had at that point you know over the years that had festered in my mind we're not trending right we're not training realistically in particular in CQB because of the constraints that you have were firing live ammunition inside a building of any kind and of course Delta built that seven million dollar monstrosity there at Fort Bragg so small it was like having a few doubt in your closet and they burnt it down plus okay the problem here is that the round will ricochet and if you're in a hard surface it's going to bounce around until it hits something soft maybe your partner they also they it it is it is not only not only ricochet but it will over penetrate if you're in say a building where you don't have thick walls so if thought if you know if you you know when we started the whole thing up with with blue light we were doing everything in the world to try to figure out training how to do training and we built Michelin cities we built railroad tie houses and Saudi Arabia I built an entire village out a target cloth into by force filled a couple of camels that way so I thought you know if we can't change the training facilities why can't we change the bullet so I decided I wanted to make a bullet that would not ricochet under any circumstances whatsoever that would not splash back when you shot at something that was was hard and you wouldn't be wearing those pieces of copper in your face like we all did at one time or another it would still do the fit and function of the weapon still give you adequate accuracy still have basically the same felt recoil in figuring it would take me six months and twenty thirty thousand dollars R&D money and six years later I had a product so I had taken quite a few jobs in-between to finance it but I got it patented it was called a non-toxic frangible ammunition they're using hell out of it now but like all entrepreneurs I was about twenty years ahead of my time and woefully underfunded so 9/11 came along and I get a call said you got to come back to work by that time I was on the ropes as far as the company so somebody else licensed it and I went traipsing off across the stands again and then a company out of Switzerland bought that company and they brought the guy had who had who had bought the rights was one of those guys who was all this a smartest guy in the room so he had made improvements on it since then they it was disastrous so they brought me back on board to to take care to get it back online and then I found out I was pretty good salesman so I did a lot of work with police departments throughout the United States during training and using frangible ammunition so John when I when I was still in the army and occasionally you get the flange able ammunition like the silver tips bullets in the shoot house was it was that from you no no my mind had no coating on it at all to me if you you if it's a there's a coating on it it ain't frangible anymore it is that coating is going to come off and it's never the lead that gets you when you're shooting up close it's a damn jacket so they've tried all sorts of stuff and there were various companies that were doing it and it was a hard row to hoe because it was so totally different but it's very successful now of course I don't get a penny out of it but that's a certain amount of pride in it yeah I and then so you talked about aviation security or getting inflatable ammunition the other thing I noticed that I want to ask you about was that you did judicial protection down in coal that was when I was up in my DC days they had the they of course another one of those acronyms is it cap the International Criminal Investigative training and assistance program run by the Justice Department and the guy who was running the program had been in SOG and we knew each other so and he knew I spoke Spanish so he asked me to put a team and it was shortly after DeLong was killed the presidential candidate down there assassinated and they were killing judges on the right about one a week Escobar and his boys the Medellin Cartel khabar and his crew yep you know and there's your a visa photo from going down to Colombia that you'd sent me yep so I put a team together and we recruited about half God half the team was SF guys and half was former Secret Service guys and that part of it was the biggest mistake I made their idea of a judge going somewhere was six-car motorcade well these judges were riding buses to work this there was no such thing as they immense protective details so we had some head-butting going on over that so they want sorry so they wanted to do really high-profile moves where you guys wanted to do low-vis moves exactly yeah exactly and that's exactly how we protected ourselves when we first got down there the embassy won't gave us say one of their armored digs now Colombia you're already 6,000 feet above sea level and it was still carburetors in those years that thing at a top speed of about 20 miles an hour yeah screw that so we took Texas and we looked just like everybody else taking his taxi everybody took a separate taxi and we'd go to wherever we were going to work that day and never had a problem with it now staying in a hotel was a different story we got where nobody had Rena so hotel room means to be in Bogota they could blow him up the people trying to kill the judges were yeah oh oh yeah all right I thought about you were leading into SF and the Secret Service guys partying too hard and grinds it but if I had a few thought I've had a few drink he's still with those guys there had been some jaws loosened yeah yeah we did not so then how did you come into the entertainment industry like you did some script writing you you know you served as the Madhvi or a technical adviser but not more than that you were also the the feature the protagonist of a video game series like how did all of that happen one thing before we move into all that let's get some questions cuz we've actually gone a while with them okay okay questions cuz I cuz it's really interesting video game stuff Alex thank you very much and sorry guys it took us so long to get your questions I I wasn't tracking the time what is Mac be SOG and lark for the unintended I hope I got the acronyms right any encounters with air grant or maritime branch and I think they go ahead please so what does Matt be SOG and mark well we all we already talked about what Matt gasps SOG is right now yes any interesting encounters with air-ground or maritime branch and never heard of them he's talking about the the I believe the the CIA's branches but you already mentioned Air America that when you were first in in Vietnam and it was them that it was our America which was the predecessor to CIA so what was your experience with like air America when you were there so Air America was the one who ferried us around everywhere they weren't fighters they they flew old dc-3 and some smaller stuff but but they weren't armed they they were logistics people good guys I mean most of them World War two vets and they had a lot of them had flown over the hump and into China delivering supplies back during World War two hard partiers and that's for sure gonna go to one of their one of their clubs and if you walked out sloper they felt like they had been insulted but but now they they weren't they weren't actively doing anything now most of the air that we depend on them in the first was we had enemies there they had helicopters they had fighters oh really okay did you were they they were just basically erring how are their pilots in your opinion I mean how they're great pilot they they definitely knew their business and they'd crank stuff out of that old dc-3 that goony bird that you wouldn't believe is that the thing wouldn't do possible now there's another story about the dc-3 though I was down in down in [ __ ] anyway I'll save that one for another day Andrew thank you does John any thoughts fine John Paul van John Paul van never really knew him he had a great reputation he had done marvelous work in Moya with with with the fight there but and I think that hid that he had he was more along the lines of what we were talking about earlier leave it to leave it to the specialists not don't bring those ungodly long logistic tale divisions in here they'll thank you very much for the donation [Music] Gordon thank you John get up to the shenanigans with the Aussies in the various programs they were involved with [Laughter] the SAS for some of my favorite people yeah they they had their own detachment down not too far from where we were based out of there on the third tour and we'd go and visit them every once in a while lose another one of those things if you left sober you know they they figured that you'd insulted their hospitality but this damn fine soldiers never had a complaint I never fought alongside them but all the stories I've heard I know that they were extremely good and the Kiwis they were they were good as well very good we had we had had a couple of them a couple of the Kiwis out at our camp and we the one of them was a Maori and he huge guy and he said said you've got a standing invitation any time you come to New Zealand you come there and we'll go up in the mountains and drink piss and dance the haka did you ever take him up on that no I never got the chance we will in September we're gonna have a Special Forces veteran on Vietnam veteran who worked with the Aussies in Danang good yeah they didn't they didn't get a lot of credit and one of the best best war movies I've ever seen is the odd angry shot yeah it was Australian yeah so cop family office thank you very much information it's tragically funny how everything changes yet nothing changes and I think I think this came when you were talking about like the restrictions and prohibitions on the war and and and how hard it was for you to fight and the stuff with the Phoenix project what is John's assessment of the future of special operations and special activities and then he says in Latin in order Bey teram known VC I think that's how he said I think frankly it's gotten too big it it is it is becoming the be-all-end-all and when you do that you get monoliths that don't move very fast and that was always one of the things that we did we adapted it was very much you run into a situation you there are no rules dealing with it you better be able to think on your feet and I think that we've gotten away from a lot of that I think we've gotten a lot away from a lot of because and I understand the impulse to protect the soldier but when I look at one of these guys with all the battle rattle on and he is carrying 60 70 pounds before he even start talking about the rucksack he can't maneuver he he's a person who takes a position and basically stays there he falls over on his back he's gonna be like a turtle my my body armor was my fatigue shirt and there were times when I wanted to cut the buttons off of that yeah I took in fact when they first brought in the 30 round magazines I wouldn't use them that put me an inch further above the ground this is back in your day John I mean they weren't even called OTAs yet they were called a-teams and an 18 was 12 guys and correct me if I'm wrong you had your rucksacks and maybe your entire team's gear fat fit on one pallet right mm-hmm oh yeah if we didn't if we needed something we didn't we didn't have people falling all over every our selves we were at the ass end of the ass end of the supply line we were the stepchildren so when we needed something we stole it [Laughter] don't we what was your impression like did you notice the public opinion and political landscape changing as you you spent from 63 to 70 there were you know I mean were you aware of that how what did you feel about of yeah very much aware I mean we got stars and stripes I mean yeah they tried to play things down but it wasn't hard to see and of course I still had my trips back to the States and it was it was obvious that the tide was changing amongst American people in that if did that affect how you felt about it did that affect how you felt about Americans not America but about the local you know the general population like how did you take all that on board it it didn't didn't really affect how I felt it felt about the general population because I knew that there there were a lot of mouthpieces out there but the general population was still bedrock folks they weren't you know all those murdering bastards and so forth and so on there was so no I didn't I didn't feel bad about that and as far as as far as the war went I wanted to win it yeah and then what about the Phoenix area it has it bothered I mean get it bother you when it was misrepresented the way it was I considered the sources the usual the usual liars and just like we have now yeah take take anything and blow it out of proportion or flat ass lie about it I saw Ian jump in here he wants to know your best Larry thorne story my best Larry toerner story I didn't know him well you know I was a very junior officer he was he was he was a field grade by then and all I know is anecdotal and I know that he was he was a character he loved to like like all finns he loved his drink and he loved to fight so if back to Jack's question then about getting an entertainment in the video game right yeah yeah I had I had written another book which a producer out in Hollywood got interested in it so good thought about making a movie out of it called trekker new Iceman I'll put it on online here before too long but he and the movie never panned out if so many of those things do and in la-la land out there but he called me up and told me that they had bought the rights to the soldier of fortune logo and that they they were gonna make a video game out of it or no a television show at first it was television show and wanted to know if I wanted to write a couple of scripts yeah sure I'll write a couple scripts and I wrote them and they they got they got got on the screen and felt pretty good about that felt even better about the money and the soldier of fortune television show back in the mid-1990s yeah that they it was I tried to make it as realistic as possible but it was Hollywood yeah they were doing silly [ __ ] that that people don't do and then they for the second season because the ratings were suffering they brought in that basketball player I remember I distinctly remember it destroyed the series yeah it was canceled but then then nailed the producer had been talking to the people at activation about video game and they thought yeah we'll do a video game on that so they wanted an advisor and Neal L asked me if I was gonna if I would do that and I asked well are they gonna pay me and he said yes and I said well you have you answered that though offer flyer to Madison Wisconsin and may get with Raven there's a development company and law walk into this place and there's its long hallway or almost no cubed the cubicles in it were all just individual cubicles and you look in there and these fresh faced young people or they're doing magic on the city with their computers the trash cans are full of empty Twinkie wrappers and Mountain Dew can and every Star Wars figure that it was ever brought out lines the walls that's what I got myself into but but I did did the console whole thing tried to talk him into making it a bit more realistic but there of course they're they know everything too you know the idea of not looking through your sights right exactly the way it should be done but they paid me and so I went on back home and a little while later I get a call from up there and they said we need a name and a background for our main character would you consent to that and I said are you going to pay me and he said yes so I became became the soldier of fortune immortal I yeah there is two to two iterations of it i wrote a large part of the second one oh thank you the I remember you know because I when the game came out I was probably like 15 or 16 years old at the time and ran out and bought it and I remember like the load screen when you're loading up the game and it shows pictures of you John there's like pictures of you in Vietnam in places like this showing up and talking about your career and stuff you know I'm a teenager like I want to be just like this dude I want to do exactly what I want to be John Mullins and you know of course that's you know I ended up in Ranger Battalion and then stuff after that for a while and so yeah you had you had an impact on my impressionable young mind well I'm glad of that because I've been told so many times you are contributing to the violence of young people I don't believe that it's nonsense and I hope this interview you know with you know multi-generational between UI and Dave you know that the young people see this and they also consider it hey maybe making a contribution to the US military I wish they would yeah yeah you're talking about the attitude of the people in the United States during the war i have a wonderful story about that there we had this Navajo Indian SF guy who stood about six foot seven inches tall and he he was on a at an airport and was getting harassed by somebody who's talking about 101 ways to kill a guy a hundred and one he's full of [ __ ] oh so Silverleaf unfold from that chair towers over the guy and says pick a number what was his name silver leaf er was a Silverthorne no it's silver leaf silver leaf okay because Jim Morris wrote a novel called Silverthorne and I'm just thinking oh maybe it was the same guy yeah yeah we had a couple more questions real quick thank you Andrew did you have it any interactions with the Regular Army I mean you talked about with the hundred and first which indicated how the Oh which indicated how the Regular Army was degrading over the course of the war did you see a big change between 63 and 70 no I didn't they I mean the guys were we're getting shot out by there and I mean getting multiple tours and that kind of thing but it's never good and being away from that you are warrior so there was that problem but they suffered the same problem in World War two and one and Korea and everything else I mean war stuff movement yeah and more so for the conventional side because they they had less choice I think they have far less choice and more bad decisions get made yeah that levels so far about that oh yeah yeah yeah absolutely thank you max why is tiger stripes so sexy as what we had for camouflage wouldn't worried about sex you know up there with an m16 and yeah a whole bunch of ammo you weren't exactly looking for love yeah thank you Andrew given John's experience with Dennis Rodman will he be the one to finally end the Korean War I rather doubt that he was talking about this in the second season of the soldier of fortune television show where they brought Dennis Rodman on and it was a sharp decline from season 1 to season 2 yeah I wouldn't do it went Philly at that point Oh John this is really been incredible and I hope we can do it again sometime and I really encourage people to go and check out your novels of the the men of our novels and the second one is the Apache Apaches County novel I posted a link there in the chat for people want to go check it out you can only fit so if it's okay I'd like to ask you to stay after we finish for like just 10-15 minutes to do the bonus segment if that's cool with you and with Dave do you have something wise I guess a you can still download you can still get sold your fortune - yeah well I can walk and and if you want to see like one of the originally I mean you blow up people's whimsy it's just a fun game it's just it was fun yeah yeah yeah you get that shotgun you're a god amongst mortals but yeah check it out if you have a laptop or whatever it's it's fun it's a lot of fun but it thank you everybody first off thank you John thank you very much we you know enjoyed it it's funny because you were so many different things that are ethical at this point for people in our community and people right on the community that look into it and here here we've taught for two hours and any one of those topics could be its own two hour yeah talk I mean you know I mean the Phoenix program is I get spend hours asking questions about that so in the second the second novel of the trilogy the man of minute Valerie it deals with with the Phoenix program to a great extent and John do you have any future projects on the horizon whether they're novels or some other other media's or anything you're working on right now you know I've got one that I just finished that is going to piss people off and high places let's hear it what was it about it deals it deals with the MIAA and the secret attorney program in Vietnam mm-hmm is this fiction or nonfiction it's fiction only rather the fiction I have a book here where in God's name reading this and I want to try to get the guy who the author died I don't know if you've read this one abandoned in place no I haven't read that one the author is Lin M oh Sh a and I read that she passed away unfortunately but the foreword is written by the JSOC s to Colonel Danny Gordon and it's about and I think it was what year was it it was early 1980s jsoc planned operation to go and rescue Mis and Vietnam that never happened yeah yeah yeah and Bo Greg screwed it up yes right and and so this is a novel that you've written that you're gonna publish soon yep all right when it when it's fixing to come out let me know and I'd like to have you on the show again to talk about that specific subject have a release date in mind yet John you have a publication date in mind yet did I ever oh I'm sorry you have a publication date in mind yet oh no I'm looking for an agent right now okay you have my email you let me know and we'll discuss when when it's on its way out other than that I think unless you have anything or John you have anything you want to add before we wrap up and we'll go into the bonus segment afterwards anything I'll mention that I don't want to keep you too long I just want to ask you one quick question giving your experience over eight years in Vietnam when you saw us going into Afghanistan when you saw the u.s. going into Iraq what were your thoughts on that did you did you think would be quick did you think that it would become what it is you know almost another Vietnam and in some ways what were your thoughts and did they evolve over time other so it was easy to be a Monday Morning Quarterback but the first thing was that Iraq wasn't our enemy Iraq was the enemy of Iran our true enemy yeah Saddam Hussein was an idiot his sons were even worse but the idea that they were going to that they were going to pose an existential threat to us it was nonsense we should never have happened it was based on false intelligence and then we compounded the pro the problem with J Arthur Bremer who I had my run-in with - who who decided that he would disband the entire Iraqi army now you got guys who have no means of support no money no food they're ripe for recruitment by anybody better one them that's where the war started that babbling idiot and if you're listening come find me [Laughter] well guys please remember to give this video the thumbs up on YouTube share it like it leave us a comment it all helps us bump up into algorithms and it gets noticed and gets some visibility for John and for his work as well and there's also a link for our patreon down in the description if you want to support the show financially and get access to the bonus segments that we film and with all of our guests and next week will be episode 50 I'm reading the author's book right now the South African Police special task force the guy's name is Shane Wade Willard and this guy did all kinds of wild hostage rescue operations down in South Africa and he's gonna have some pretty wild stories to tell so I'm looking forward to that um John again thank you so much uh and Dave thank you as well and I hope everyone enjoyed this episode and we'll see you guys next Friday thanks guys we appreciate you escorting us and watching oh you didn't mention later on did you I did oh you just did sorry comment to make sure we didn't missing

Channel: The Team House

Views: 126,448

Keywords: Combat Medic, John Mullins, MACV-SOG, Phoenix Program, Blue Light, Special Forces, Green Beret, Vietnam, Soldier of Fortune

Id: if-7Eytesnc

Length: 117min 45sec (7065 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020