LRRP/Rangers in Vietnam with Kenn Miller, Ep. 56

okay guys we are live we are on the team house right now this is episode geez i think this might be episode 56 i apologize for never being able to keep count uh but tonight's episode uh i am jack murphy here with our guest tonight ken miller uh ken served in the works in vietnam the orps are their long range reconnaissance uh patrols which they went through several different incarnations of it uh eventually reorganized his ranger companies and we'll talk about this with ken uh for sure he was uh in the 101st works and rangers uh did three extensions in vietnam served all the way from private to recon team leader uh he's sort of a condo school graduate uh and then after the war he went over to uh taiwan and uh pursued his education learned mandarin which he speaks fluently um he's definitely ken what was your your phd on i don't have the phd i made a point of stopping at every space where i'm about to get something like that because i came from a family everybody in my family my parents my sister my first cousins and their parents all had boku uh they're all academics oh they were all academics so you know i my father was the president of the university of nevada when i was in high school and i was determined to go into the military and my parents were not pleased but they they let me make my own decision but every day the last half of my senior year in high school every day i was called down to the counselors and saying you won't get mad you won't get drafted your father is the president of the university and i think i already have if uh enlisted you know i'm just waiting for the time to come uh it really annoyed me and that the idea that because of what my father was doing that i'm above this this was the whole draft thing in the vietnam war was not very not very fair and i was really offended at them saying that we'll get you this so you don't have to and i already decided that i wanted to i wanted to go into to be a paratrooper partly because i was young and wanted it you know wanted adventure and all of this sort of stuff but also as strange as it might sound because i was raised up raised up not in reno but in ann arbor michigan as a liberal and to me a good liberal is not going to let just the kids who aren't aren't rich do all the wars and i think wait a minute you know people in vietnam are having communists forced on them it's a good liberal you got to go fight that and uh you know i was young and idealistic so you know i when it comes to when it comes to getting i've gone to seriously gone to three universities three good ones and uh i always stop at a certain point i don't want a phd because there's so many of them around in my family and it i wanted to be the the you know the black sheep is that why you went to taiwan after the war rather than pursuing a normal yeah well i was fascinated from the day that uh the plane that i was on landed at townsend airport and we got on a bus to go to benoit to the repo depot i was fascinated with east asia and taiwan didn't have a war going on at the time well it did obviously it still does but it wasn't like vietnam i wanted to really learn about east asia and my wife has told uh vietnam my wife is uh taiwanese chinese and she i remember her telling a vietnamese friend of hers oh you know vietnam was was ken's first love and then her friend says oh where does she live now oh it's just i i i got fascinated by that part of the world and i still am and i was quite recently very happy i was really depressed at what the pandemic is doing to america and our response to it has not been good but i i was very glad to know that taiwan and vietnam really had really had their [ __ ] in order when it came to that because do you think that's part of um coming from an asian culture as opposed to a western culture which is oh yes individualistic the first thing the first thing is people in east asia have is a tradition i mean if you have a little cold you put on a mask this is this is very common it's nothing unusual the other thing is the confusion the confucian culture you it's not just i want mine you know no it's we belong to a culture we belong to a to a family to a to a neighborhood to a to a country and i think this has made it easier for east asia to to you know you don't see uh bikers in japan or south korean taiwan and they all have them but you don't see them going and going on at a big rally and not wearing there's some drinking ah this is just real no it's it's a different culture the attitudes like that i think it worked for them and was bad for us so let's uh let's take it uh back to the the beginning uh ken i i want to hear about your arrival in vietnam you mentioned it briefly in your initial fascination with east asia um tell us what year was that that you arrived in vietnam what was that experience like seven it was uh late spring in 67 and uh you know i was uh right out of right out of jump school and uh so proud to be a paratrooper and i just really wanted to get into it and uh the plane you know we landed in the philippines at for about two hours and then back then on to vietnam and i got there they put us on a bus and i'm looking out the windows the bus had these mesh on them so nobody could throw a grenade in the window on us and i'm just watching it and i just and this is cool i like this place man this is fascinating and that's where i still am sort of [Laughter] and you know from there you go to the replacement depot and you know i was terrified the thought that they would put me in a leg unit yeah i just no no no no but but they didn't that went to the 101st my first unit was in uh a troop second of the 17th calf which was theoretically and officially the recon unit for the whole first brigade which was all there was for the 101st in in vietnam at that time the other two brigades were still in fort campbell and uh basically it was a a road recon sort of thing you know but uh we did a lot of work with the lerp uh platoon which was completely not an official unit but we worked with them and he got to know these guys and so i just kind of moved on over there yeah what do you mean they were not an official unit like who who were well you know the it was a provisional unit the the lerp unit it was a it was part of of the brigades uh headquarters headquarters company but it you know it was a provisional unit and uh so but i went there and then when the other two uh brigades came back i came to vietnam from from fort campbell they had a company already a lerp company that had been organized and so forth so we joined that you know and i couldn't imagine wanting to do anything else the only you know the only thing else i would have wanted to do was if i had been uh if i could have done it without having to leave vietnam i would love love to have been on an a-team just so i could be around mountain yards i wanted to see what that was all about but uh you know i'd have i would have had to go back to fort bragg and go you know through all a whole bunch of stuff and then i'd probably get back and they said oh you were alert for the hundred first okay here you're gonna be over and uh project delta or something like that yeah yeah so you know i was glad to stay where i was eventually uh they stopped letting us if he had too many uh if if you extended voluntarily extended finally they said nope you can't extend anymore no more extensions and so i'm leaving i i remember being on the bus leaving benoit to go back to tanzania and just i don't want to leave i don't want to leave here i want to stay here you and uh and who was it pat kadena who's over there for like five years yeah he was there much longer than me pastor dino was you know just amazing he was in he was in the 173rd slurps but i knew him but not real well right right he passed away recently i know unfortunately and he was he was beyond he was beyond uh beyond whatever the the the he was beyond it you know i mean so uh ken for the you know there are young people listening to this who like barely even know what the vietnam war is like can you or explain articulate for people out there what is a work what is a work company like what what are we talking about stands for lerp is stands for long-range reconnaissance patrol and then later they took out the reconnaissance thing and made long-range patrol so they could give us other things other than just reconnaissance which they had already were doing we were doing raids and all sorts of other things beforehand it was just on paper a change uh and we knew we were alert we knew that we were rangers because there were no re you know there was a ranger school but there were no ranger units in there in the army we knew that we were the rangers and we weren't surprised when they officially made it that in on the 1st of february 1969 which is a birthday for in my opinion for the whole uh 75th ranger regiment but fort benning does not pay any attention to that yeah we don't count that one doesn't count but it we were you know i uh recently did a book review of this book and it's a hold it up for us please yeah uh war on the run the epic story of robert reign of roberts rangers of robert rogers and the conquest of america's first frontier this is a hard book to read because it it goes into great detail great detail but it's fascinating because this is a before the united states was a city and it was a brutal life and a even more brutal war and uh that's sort of what our american rangers were up until the 1970s they were a provisional unit it was that you got recruited uh recruited volunteers income in the theater and uh they were always troublemakers when they were back when they weren't out and this is i'm guessing i'm gonna i'm gonna share a picture here of a young troublemaker ken oh that's a i don't know who that guy is but you know i i remember coming back getting off that and uh off that helicopter and the first sergeant said you know what you need don't you i said yep yep you know i know what i need and the next day i got a haircut [Laughter] you know we were different we were very different from what the from what the rangers are now you know we were kind of uh scaffolders scoffs scoff lot scoff lives i'm getting senile so i don't remember words very well but you know we were always kind of trouble makers and you know drinking and having having a good time when we weren't out in the field and uh we knew that you know our units could be just taken out anytime they could just and any of us any of our teams could discipline but one thing about recon is you may not get a chance to say goodbye to the world when you have only six people and you're not you don't have uh what do you call it the now social distance you didn't have you didn't have that in a small recon team you had to be able to touch the guy around you can you talk about that like what the the the mission of a work team and what you guys actually did out there in the jungles our main thing was to go out and we would get uh they would show us a map and then they would have intelligence come in and tell us this is what we think is here on this place and that place and then the team leader and the assistant team leader and sometimes the whole t would go out and fly over the area that the day before just to see and looking for uh lz's for landing zones and uh looking for uh looking for i know the words but they're not coming to uh like lz's and uh where the river is and where this little uh hill is and where there's something and we would come back and then we'd have about a day with the whole team to just go over the go over the map go over the map go over the map and uh do our uh our drills you know you know what happens if you get hit from here you hit from there and then we would go out and often we would be waiting by the helicopter that and then they couldn't get in helicopters and still if the if the smog if the fog was so bad and if it was raining it couldn't get us in and they wouldn't be able to get us out and so we would be sitting there and just damn and then you know we're ready to go and then they cancel it that would happen about a third of the time it seemed like it depended on where you are in vietnam but when you're up in i-corps and you're going west toward laos that's pretty pretty common what which firebase was this you were working at well we were for we were at camp lee camp eagle which was the 101st and okay and a bunch of other groups but the thing about camp eagle was we were the first people on it right after the tet things starts to starts to smooth out a little bit around saigon and and benoit in that area and other places uh we get a we get a three teams three six-man teams okay you guys go get all of your stuff get ready and we're going to take you down to the down to the airstrip at benwa uh you have you have be ready in an hour and what's going on what what's happening they didn't tell us we had one lieutenant and then the rest were just three recon teams and we get on on the helicopter or on the helicopter on the plane and we fly and we don't know where we're going and then we land and it's raining out the the the uh again i'm forgetting the term the ramp the ramp goes down and we get out in the rain and we don't know where we are and there's and then we can hear over the rain we could hear screams and moans and people oh god that kind of horrible [ __ ] that you don't like to hear but you hear sometimes and we go over and we don't know what's going on then we go toward the where the the side of the the air porters and there's a little navy a navy clinic there and there's guys out in this out in the rain and just so many people mainly marines because the battle of way was going on and this is taking them to get in there this that's the pla plane that we went up was full of people on stretchers and so we go to the to the na the naval clinic you know and uh our medics each team would have a medic how well trained they were could be go from being a an sf medic to being somebody that just had it in the in in the unit training but they go over and the navy doctor said get the hell out of here you we appreciated but this is a uh we don't have any pla place for any more people and then up comes a uh deuce and a half truck and there's a or somebody some some some indigenous guy and a guy with a green beret driving it you guys are 100 first lerps yeah get in and they took off and they put took us to a cemetery you know the vietnamese and chinese cemeteries with the kind of round thing and then the body that looks like an egg and they dropped us off there and gave us some some combo information and what are we doing and we can hear and see a lot that's going on across the river and and way we were about two miles away i guess and we were a trip a a trip uh like if you know if they if the north vietnamese come south we're supposed to be able to let fob fob1 and a bunch of other people notify them that the enemy's coming south towards they put you out there as an lpop just like early yep and we did the best we could to make ourselves feel somewhat good in the in the in the graves and uh nobody else was there just the 19 of us and then the battle seemed to go down and go down a little bit and uh day by day more and more people came usually from our originally it was just guys from our unit but we were by the time we left uh two years later or something two and a half years later uh camp eagle was a huge military city but we were the first people there and i just and the the battle of way was going on right there and we wanted to be in it and we were at the same time kind of glad that we weren't because i mean as soon as we got off the plane we saw and hurt right how bad it was and you guys were i mean a six-man work team or even throwing you guys together as as a 19-man work platoon and just sending you out there as infantry is also kind of the wrong answer like that's really not the right way to use you guys we were used in various ways at one point we were a palace guard for the general oh yeah of course that kind of thing you know oh we have this elite unit we can do whatever we want with with them and they don't really matter so ken six six guys on a work uh lerp team what are the duty positions on that on the patrol you got team leader assistant team leader okay you have a well the first guy is you know you have one he's these these are the words that i know that are in my head they're so far back into you have a point man then you have a slack man and everybody has their area that they're that they're of it's their they cover their covering so you have 360 as you're moving and you're moving this way you're moving that way if you're the if you're the point man you're dealing with what's in front of you higher and what's low and then the slack man behind you is watching to for you and then the guy behind him has got a an arc of that he's watching and over here they do and it the last guy would be every other maybe every other step or so if if possible sometimes you know you you can't always do it exactly the way you should but you know we'll be turning around check behind you and then if you're leaving a trail try to get rid of it and your job was to go to check out certain places that intelligence wanted you to check out or if you see something that's interesting you do but all the time you're you're on the somebody's on the radio and usually you would take your your booty hat down around here and whispering yeah and whisper in it and so forth and uh going in the scariest thing always was when you're coming in most of the time we the helicopter would go like this up and down up and down up and down so the the enemy would not know where you're going in and consequently you didn't come down and stop and get out of the helicopter we'd have to go out of it while it's still moving and the consequence of this is uh every guy i know who did recon in vietnam with the exception of john singleton meyer who i think tilt is his nickname you you know yeah i know john quite well yeah yeah i think tilts lied because she said no i don't have any of those problems but everybody else does because of the way we have to jump in on moving helicopters we could have sometimes as much as a hundred pounds on our backs and bang uh uneven ground you know it's just uh but we thought okay well god this hurts what you do is you just walk it out and that's fine at the time but it catches up with you many years later you're you're talking you were were you wearing a rucksack or did the rucksacks go out first and then no no no you'd be wearing your rucksacks oh my god and you're falling you you must have felt fallen six feet six feet down through the elephant grass oh yeah oh yeah and sometimes more than that and you know every now and then somebody on a team would have their their uh their ankles shattered yeah you got to pull them right back out yeah and which one of the worst uh things that happened to the company when i was there that's they that happened the guy got uh taken out medevac out and then the survivors from the team after this happened this is this is in uh a lot of the books from our company this is what happened in november 20th 1968. gary the the sixth silent men's series yeah gary linder was badly hurt there but everybody was that's the action where gary was awarded the silver star yeah and um i had switched to go on another team i was on was on that it was a heavy team they had two teams together and i uh wanted to go with the other team because they had a more it seemed like they would have more interesting uh mission we were supposed to do a raid on a on a camo site a north vietnamese communist commonwealth site and so i traded with i traded with another guy and he got killed on that one and we we got to the commonwealth site but there was there were some wires still hanging down but there was nobody there or anything and then we had to just go to ground while these guys are fighting for their lives and i'm i'm not and we wanted to go we wanted to go but we were you know like five clicks away and this was this place was just full of of north vietnamese so we wouldn't have gotten very very very far um what what how did this mission kick off what was the whole process that that started this whole because i'm trying to remember gary winderer's book is this the one where they ambushed some vietnamese nurses yes yes okay yes could you tell us a little bit about that mission and how that all unfolded yeah because i was on i had gone to the other team for that mission but i so i'm listening to it i was an rto there so i'm listening to everything that's going on and i could hear it fairly well on the radio but what happened was they came in and whether going in one of the guys shattered his shattered his uh ankles so in the morning two of the guys took him back to that back to an lz to get him out and then they came back and they got you know the whole team got the whole heady t team got together and uh you know they they assumed that and probably rightly that the local nva figured that the team had left and all it was was just one guy left and then they set up on a on a trail and i i think you know it really bothered gary linder for life and probably still does because his wife was a is a doc it is a nurse and nobody wanted to kill the nurse but there was i as i remember that wasn't just the nurses there were some other officers with them too and they they were a uniformed nva they they were not yes there was personnel they were not civilians and they didn't know right off that that's what it because of the height of the the grass they couldn't see them well yeah and they're they're in uniform and they're just walking past and they set up a hasty ambush and then i don't like to say this but the guy who was team leader for that team shouldn't have been and he was the only guy that i knew the whole time i the only enlisted guy i knew in time i was in vietnam who would sit there and think about i want to get this medal i want to get a dsc and i want to get the medal around and so he says well you know gosh we just pulled this his ambush and so what you do when you're pulling you get everything you can off the bodies and if you have a prisoner you get them and you get the hell out of there you're only six guys you can't stay for a big fight well this was a heavy team so it would be 12. one guy had already yeah still 11 guys not much yeah but you know oh no i'm i'm the team leader he was young and ambitious far too ambitious and uh he said well we're going to stay here and ambush our own ambush because that's they'll never expect us to do that and they didn't expect him to do that but they ended up uh ambushing the ambushes and a big fight went on for a long time and one guy riley cox got his his intestines out in his stomach out of his stomach and stuffed him in with his sweat uh towel and stayed there and find it i could hear him on the radio he had a car 15 and a and a shotgun i could hear the shotgun and everybody was wounded and three guys were killed right off and it took a long time and then to get in uh to get a reaction force in they got everybody that was in the company that was back in the rear and they just grabbed stuff and one guy tony tricera who just recently died of carving 19. tony tercero was going home the next day he'd already turned in his weapon and everything and he's in uh army skivvies uh uh you know tight uh shower machines yeah flip-flops and he grabbed a on a rifle that had never been fired grabbed that and he's putting putting rounds into the into the magazines on and he just took over gets on the helicopter and tells that that the uh crew we're you're tate they're two helicopters they were guys that we knew that carried us in and out all the time i said we're going in and they went in and you know tony's not prepared and not wet dressed further even and he's the first guy off so he just takes over takes over wow takes command and all he ever got for that was a broad start with v and he should have got a dsc uh but riley cox got a silver star and should have got a dsc or an or a medal of honor he had his guts in his lap and kept fighting and then finally when the reaction force came in he got really angry get the [ __ ] away from me i'm staying here tell everybody he's ready you know he didn't want to be taken taken out until everybody else was gone and i glad that i wasn't there and i think less of myself because i wasn't does that you know i i just want i switched the guy that i switched with was got killed and he got killed in my place and i had a you know there's a lot of things that if you're in a war you carry some guilt for stuff and it really bothered me when i after after the war when i come back and then all these people would oh well you you must really have some great guilt problems don't you [ __ ] you you know i mean guilt thailand was yeah because of things i could have done and didn't do or wasn't fast enough or i wasn't thinking enough or or something but they're thinking that we're over there just massaging down people children and oh there's some children let's shoot him or something i mean i didn't want to hear that we all carry a weight of guilt for things that we shouldn't but just kind of done that a little bit better so and so would have lived you know but is that that really hard ken to um uh to be the rto and you have to listen on the radio your friends being shot up and killed and like you're you're doing your job and you are helping but as a soldier it's like you feel like you belong there like you should be there shoulder to shoulder we definitely all of us we had a lieutenant with us on on the team i was with on that the one that would like the camo site yeah and uh that's one of the reasons i wanted to go there i thought there would be a more interesting mission and uh i wanted to see the lieutenant out on the field you know because most the time he's in the helicopter putting us in and out and all of us wanted to just head for right where they were and if we could sort of hear the fact the firing a little bit even without the radio depending on the on the wind or something but you know we would have never gotten very far right and the last thing that that that they needed was another team pinned down so we just for the next couple days we just go to ground and can so much of what you're talking about here and you're describing and i i just have to point it out is that you describe it so beautifully in in your novel here that uh i i read this a few months ago tiger the work dog and so many of these experiences that you're talking about or fictionalized in this book but i mean they're they're you describe it in in this novel with so much eloquence um and i i feel that you really describe the mission that works do and um the challenges and the environment and all of it is in there and i mean there's more we can we can talk about i'm sure we will but i really think that people who are trying to get a better understanding of the work mission and what you experienced i think that novel is a great place to go they can i probably used book stores or amazon might have it amazon has it's on it's on amazon yeah it's on amazon yeah one of the things is i used the name for one of the guys on my the last team that i when i was a team leader support i used marvel mccann's uh first name for one of the characters marvel kim in the book yeah the korean-american yeah and i had a feeling uh in the years since that he's got two other reasons to things that i could have done better in on our last mission you know that i feel guilty to warn him about but i but from what i've heard he said he's just pissed off that he used his name but you know none of us have seen him he's one of the guys that hasn't come to a reunion or anything but uh some guys don't like that they just want to put the war behind them and totally forget about it yeah he was he was from california but he was originally from guam and guam had of all the parts of the united states guam had the most people uh percentage-wise killed in the vietnam war wow and the city that had the most uh is uh east l.a yeah uh i i just one thing about the about the army that i felt more at home there than i generally do anywhere else is that you had everybody you had every kind every we didn't have any australian aborigines in that i knew in the u.s army everything else but i did run into an australian aborigine with the the uh aussie sas had one there i ran into him later and back in the rear but you know i like that that's how it should be everybody should be you know working together and a lot of that's been lost i think and a lot of that that kind of nostalgia that you have for the vietnam war which is as terrible as it was there are a lot of things you look back on fondly right oh a lot a lot i was more alive than than i have been since and i had a sense of that i was doing something and you know if you're a lurp and you're a good one you've been doing it for a while once you go into to what you insert into it the first thing you do is you get away from from where the helicopter was and then you find a place and you laid out you lay dog just quiet very quiet you're sitting there and you're listening and you're feeling the wind and you know which way the wind's blowing you're listening to every sound and if a psyche cicada makes a sound you're aware of it everything all of your senses are so amazingly aligned i've never been able to get that anywhere else and you know but i can i can still do better than most people probably i'm i think just concentrating and using your sense organs and knowing what this might mean and what that might mean and you sit there for a long time for a while you you let the helicopter leave you know into your into your booney hat and then you move on and it one thing that that i don't know how common this is but we would go into areas where the enemy had been and where they had a camp and they'd moved and often these were camps that were there and for each for new new troops coming in they would be there before they set off to do something else so you don't know when they might be coming back but quite often we'd be into these these places and uh there'd be leeches everywhere you know if there is anywhere but i would just i would look there's man because they want to be down by water and you know and i would think what are the other guys what do they do for they don't have the kind of the leech the the mosquito and leech repellent that we do what do they do for that you would end up having certain kinds of feelings of brothership with the guys on the other side and uh i've had conversations only twice both in america once with a local vietcong and one with a a guy who was a chinese uh sino chinese saint of yet guy who got kicked out when china invaded vietnam after the war you know he was and he worked in the race a chinese restaurant where my wife was working and you know i really you know they all all these guys end up apparently they say hey we liked you guys man it was a war we had to try to kill you you know said and what really gets me is that the newest thing from the sentinels sfa magazine is basically these three books a review of three books one is by aaron banks and i think all sf guys know who aaron banks is but he was in hanoi uh right after after the war ended here's another oss guy that was there and then here's the big one you can see how many uh well if you can hold it up a little bit ken we can't really oh there you go everything you could possibly know this is very end but you read this and you'll see that they have pictures of of oss guys you know that's all sf guys sitting there training the vietnam and here's general [ __ ] right there and then hose right there and i did these three books together for the sentinel and re-reading it and knowing the things that over the years that i've studied learned it's a heartbreaker it's a heartbreaker and it's not something that it's easy to say around other vietnam veterans that hey these the guys we were fighting they're our friends now uh first i i i won't say which group but you could one of the groups has got pretty good relations with with the vietnamese special forces now and vietnam is one of america's favorite or our best friends right now the people we fought are our buddies became our buddies very quickly and the ones that i've talked to said we always were on your side and both sides of the vietnam war figured the united states was their natural ally and friend that's heartbreaking you know it is yeah because they had already you know they they had more bigger concerns with next-door neighbors right and always yeah and they they had uh i mean maybe you can speak to it a little bit ken but i mean the the vietnamese had defended themselves from the japanese and then the french and then we show up well it goes much much further back look vietnam is right here and right here is china vietnam and china uh at least maybe not manchuria that far off to the north to the northeast but of china and vietnam you go back they're the same people you got to go back about 2 000 years or more and there's so much in common that what is not in common is important to both to both countries uh and china has been trying to take over vietnam forever right because they say what's wrong with you guys man you know look at you should be part of two two of our provinces this is the basic i had vietnamese friends in taiwan who others foreign students they we should be chinese and you know the americans and the and the koreans would sort of sit there well yeah i see that part of you and i also see your point of view uh you know they're either very close or they're at each other's head they're you know traditionally for 2000 years very close are at war with each other and china is the big thing that they worry about but china also is it's also sort of home to vietnam and i mean you read i'm reading a biography of ho chi minh right now and all of these guys all could speak you can speak mandarin and so forth you know you can't really separate the two except by having them at war with each other so vietnam's always worried about china but the french were there and they wanted them out of there for a long time and the u.s policy was to get the french out of there but that was roosevelt and roosevelt died and truman did not know what was coming up what was going on the british and the french were already trying to set for the french military to come back and take vietnam over right after world war ii and the japanese were there but they were ready to get go back to japan we completely lost you know you know good luck to everybody and and uh you know if i feel like if we had given the viet men uh a chance and they were begging the oss and america in general we want somebody that'll stand with us as to so the chinese will say okay you got a big brother here get rid of the french said and you know the ex ho chi minh was a communist no question uh there's reasons that somebody that was born at the end of the of the 19th century could become a communist you know if you're seeing how bad things could be right right right right if you look at the history he and the people around them were very initially very very willing to have all sorts of vietnamese involved in this let's get an independent country and unified and the french came back and who brought the french back within like a month or two after ho chi minh was elected president for the whole damn thing u.s navy liberty ships brought them brought the french military and we supported them at uh beyond that all the way through and you know one of the things in that that ken burns thing about the vietnam war i like most vietnam veterans i did not like it yeah tilt thought it was [ __ ] oh i i thought it was well for one thing they don't even mention mountain yards for rsf or anything and it's obviously they're on the side of the north not the south and uh both sides had a reason for what they were doing but that's beside the point but the whole thing but the first two episodes that give you the background leading up to this what was good and in there they make the point that everything i've read in all of the books like this and so forth the people who were there at the time ho chi minh kept saying listen we understand i lived in the united states for a while i've lived in in england i've lived in france i've lived in the soviet union i know the i've seen the bad side of communism in the soviet union and i know what's coming off and i know that you're terrified of communism but don't let that be the main thing you're looking at that's not our main right right and i believe him you know i if i heard that right after i came back from vietnam or in the first 10 years i would get angry but do you think do you think ken that as a country that we made a big mistake by conflating vietnamese nationalism with sort of international communism yeah we we you know americans and humans in general it's it's like people cannot accept that lee harvey oswald this loser this got a couple of lucky shots off yeah oh no no it's you know it was a huge huge complicated conspiracy which is just doesn't does not make any sense but we always are looking for con for conspiracies right right very much so we actually have and uh you know the the international communist thing how did that last how long did that last after viet after the north vietnamese uh one won their civil war two two two two years and they're fighting they're fighting their next-door neighbor who is communist you know it's not a big so much for the domino theory right yeah uh you know you humans humans are screwed up and you know it's easy to look back now and see and see the mistakes that everybody made yeah but you know humans are fallible uh ken i mean that's a that's like there's a lot to chew on there quite frankly and um you know i know for you and for so many of the the other guys i know and to a lesser extent myself i mean it's all a lot to take in when you go to the vietnam memorial in washington dc and you see all those names on the wall and think about that that's tough to deal with one thing that has come out of the vietnam war though is a very strong friendship i worry about i worry about the arvind veterans yeah but uh the the [Music] the communist veterans and i think that that's probably not so they're not in each other's throats the veterans is any more than we were after our civil war i hope it's they get over it completely because man that's a that's a good country you know no matter it's not perfect no place is but i like vietnam you know and the fact that okay i can i do we have one more minute of course you can oh okay i don't know how much uh i recently re re-read a book that i read when it first came out i was in college in taiwan and i didn't like it i resented it because i was so much still this gung-ho paratrooper you know we're right and the you know the enemies and this book this novel shows the side of everybody in this complicated mess and i resented that and it's the book the novel by jonathan rubin an sf guy oh yeah i have it right here i haven't read it yet but uh the barking deer it's i i i think it's the greatest book the greatest novel at least in english and probably in any language that's come out from that war really and you see everybody's point of view and everybody's the pressures that are on them and why they're doing this and why they're doing that and you know that jonathan rubin who wrote that book also after the military after sf he he had an i'm not going to say a whole lot about what he did but he had a very interesting career afterwards it was related but he told me a story on the phone when i was reviewing his book and he said he went back to vietnam for the first time and he's fluent in vietnamese and french and ra day rod days one of the the major uh mountain yard nations and he was in even an sf very rare to have somebody who was fluent in all three uh one of the main characters in the barking deer is the shaman this radev shaman and he said he went back to vietnam he took two copies of his novel and one of the the first place he went to see the village where his a team had been he said and there's the shaman the old shaman still around and he remembered him and he gave him a copy of the book and it's the first book he he wasn't even sure what a book was but he gave him the book and he put it into his bach into his sack of sacred things and then a few days later he's in hanoi and he's walking and he's talking to people as he's going wrong that's where general jopp lives and this is what oh he listens oh yeah just go knock on the door he loves to see americans to see american veterans which has been known for ever since the war ended you know he was oh come on dude let's talk to let's figure out what exactly what happened yeah i mean we haven't had too many enemies that are that so gracious yeah after the facts comes to the door in a in a kind of uniform and uh invites them in and they spend two hours drinking tea and talking over everything and then he gives general job the copy of his book and general john goes and puts it right between a book by marx it's in french and book uh the analytics of confusion the analytics of confucius in chinese and put it right in between the two of them and you know what comes out of all this is what's wrong with humanity yeah yeah it's like in that uh had he and i but met beside some quail country and we could have sat right down and wet right mineo nipperkin but ranged like infantry and staring face to face i shot at him and him at me and killed him in his place that uh wasn't hardy i think wrote that porn the man he killed you know the phrase that frame of reference of war that takes all these ostensibly normal people and places them into this conflict with one another that otherwise you know they wouldn't have had any grievances with one another well you know a friend of mine that i grew up with was in the battle of way it's a marine years later you know it was back in in ann arbor where i grew up and where he and he's i said how do you feel about this he said man he said this the battle of way he said we were in here and it was just the worst thing in the world and nobody could understand it except for the guys that were trying to kill us and that we're trying to kill and so we have more in common with each other right right right everybody else in the world right and you know one more thing i want to say about the battle of way in uh this year in april i don't remember the date right now but it was early in april i decided to look at it in 1965 68 after the battle of way there were just there's a huge massacre a lot of people a lot of civilians got killed in the be just being in the middle of it a city but there was a lot of really vicious murderous einsatzgruppen sort of death thing done to civilians in way and it was one company apparently that i've just recently found out uh that did most of that and that was their job one mba company yeah the average nva guys would never have been doing that stuff you know they'll they might shoot civilians if there's a americans or arvin's on the other side you know between them that that's war but we got a mission in april which is a few months after after the battle uh to go out and try to find a certain uh bodies of people who had been taken out of way up the perfume river and then somewhere in that area there was a bunch of little tributary rivers going into the perfume river and there's intelligence that that's where a lot of the people are going so we were sent out to find him your six-man work team this was this was another heavy team okay because we wanted a lot of guns we wanted you know so we had 12 guys because this was very much their their place and it wasn't that very far from from way really or from camp eagle but it was far enough and i was uh an rto and i was a slack man for uh one of the guys on my team who was point man and we come around this this these bamboo thick bamboo and bang it hits us in the face the smell let me go up and there's a huge uh open grave and there's bodies in there that have been in the in the rain and the snow this sun and all of this and one of them is parts of it just out of there and there you could see where a tiger or a leopard had gone in and got it and came out with it and eaten jesus leave it there and you know you couldn't there wasn't much flesh but it was like parchment the skin was on the bones and their civilian clothes and a lot of the hair with blond people blond-haired people and we're looking at this what the so this is what they sent us to to find and you know i'm the smallest guy and so you know they start saying hey miller here get you got a rope you know go down there and count the bodies and i got another miller picture i'm going to throw up here please please continue okay and the guy the helicopter uh the pilot behind me i went to ait and jump school with him oh no [ __ ] and then he went to went and became a helicopter pilot uh but you know so i'm sitting there and i've got a i've got a camera we all had these little pin double e cameras i said we got a camera we just take pictures and count the heads you know i don't think they really were going to have me go down there but you know and uh we stayed there and put up a nice 360 security and uh waited well a graves registration unit and uh an infantry company from the 101st would come in we had to wait for them to come there they were looking at this and just and when they got there we we got on the same helicopters that they came in and went back and that's the first time ever that we got information to send intelligence where we actually were told what intelligence had found and what they told us and but i didn't get my i didn't get the pictures back that was my [Music] but those are the pictures you can see in certain books now what happened was germany west germany at that time was trying to be a good citizen in the world and they had medical teams uh in vietnam i think in both east germany west germany interesting west germany had them in the south uh ships you know hospital ships and i think they would sometimes go up to the north too but they were trying to just do good medicine stuff and one of them was they were making a new a new dental uh a new dental part of way university medical school and the germans brought off a few million dollars worth of the newest stuff and they brought in a lot of a lot of people including uh a couple she was a hygienist and he was a dentist and all of these people were making a modern dental clinic for way university and the special operations company of the sixth battalion or a brigade i'm not sure of the pavement was the killing group and they're the ones and they went in and got a lot of people and they got all of the people from way university's uh dentistry department and took them up the river one round one round one round just to the back of the head killed them all left him there these are not people that are taking sides in the war these are people that are trying to help people with their teeth and their health and that gave a certain moral clarity to me that i think was it made it easier for me to hate all the guys on the other side yeah yeah but i don't know but i do hate the guys that were in those units it's just like you read about the nazis in ukrainian and you and so forth yeah yeah you guys yeah you get into the you had to prove that you were a psychopath to just to get into those units and you know but all the way went through all that this beautiful city went through come christmas time toward the end of 1968 way university's imperial palace traditional music orchestra put on the show for the first arvin division and the hundred and first and the first irving division by the way was good you know it's not one of these ah these are marvin darvin's no good the first irving division had their [ __ ] in order and we all had to go and none of the none of the know that she's well i don't want to just listen to this group music you know you know you're going you're going and we go there and we knew some of the guys from the heck bow company from the first arvin division because that was their equivalent of us and listen we go in there and there's all these gi's and all of these arvinds and there's these it's weird instruments to us it wouldn't be to the arvins and they start that christmas on you know uh slaves sleigh ride bells ringing yeah yeah they start that and these music and these instruments we've never seen and ever i could what what and then they go on and and all these guys who said i don't want to hear this music and then at the end everybody wow i will never get over that and i will always love the city of way that they got bounced back and they did and they invited us to that it really moved me and it seemed a lot of people were moved were these uh instruments like um like similar to like the gamelan in indonesia like do you know what they were they're you know yes they're they're vietnamese versions there's some of the some of them are just vietnamese but most of them are east asian music i know this because my wife is a is a musician and plays the gujan i don't i forgot what it's called in vietnamese but it's it's the chinese zither okay okay yeah yeah there's there's a couple different instruments that are very similar um and i'm sorry i can't remember the names either in japanese it's called koto in chinese it's gujan i forgot where it's it's laying like horizontal uh and then they pluck the strings kind of like this and uh that's where i fell in love with that kind of music and a lot of us were just hey this is cool this is cool music you know and some guys anybody got a joint this is good music it was that kind of thing you know it's just and uh in my house i get to hear that kind of music all the time the vietnamese version of the that is slightly different but not much uh you know all of those string instruments in the world probably originally came from persia yeah yeah but yeah and your wife is taiwanese yeah yeah uh you know right now uh taiwanese are chinese but chinese butt you know because it was terrible when mao was there and then there was a period of time where after mile died things were i shouldn't be talking about this but i don't care where care were relationships across the strait of time the taiwan straits were very good and you know even now there's people who live in shanghai and they fly every day to uh to work in taipei or something but it was really going good uh in the early part of this of this century xi jinping became president and he'd gone to school and i think in ohio or idaho or something you know he'd go to school in the united states and he's you know modern uh politician can speak english and he was good but now he's turning all of men and china into just a really scary uh artificial intelligence surveillance state yeah panopticon state yeah and claiming making claims to the whole china sea and uh you know a lot of people who are proud to be ethnic chinese are now who we didn't used to say well you would say well i'm chinese now they're saying i'm taiwanese right right and that's that's really sad because the world needs a good china and a strong america and you know and china should have learned that i hope that they've learned their lessons not to go picking or trying to pick up on their neighbor to the south because they always get their asses kicked whenever they go after vietnam vietnam always kicks their asses in the end ken i want to get i want to get back to some of your own experiences for a moment i want to ask you about recondo school which i thought was very interesting um because it was um well i'll let you describe it but what's interesting about it is that it took place inside vietnam and the final mission was a live combat mission yeah yeah and you know everything was in theater just like everything that with the with the lerps and and the first 75th rangers were all in the theater you know just traditional american ranger stuff uh we didn't have access to the ranger school and we wished we could have but we couldn't get there it was for lieutenants and then later for the the instant ncos that went to the nco school to become an nco which were the idea of that was very resented by the troops in vietnam that some guy can come in and he's an e6 with a with a ranger tab and he's been in the army less time than you've been in vietnam but what the trouble is the guys that did this when they came over they were good dudes and they were they had their [ __ ] in order and you know so we couldn't we couldn't hold it against them you know but we we resented the army for giving them this we wanted to go to ranger school and we couldn't i offered to say listen can i use my my next extension my my 30 30 day uh can i use that no i can't because they were had to turn up you know platoon leaders through the send them through the ranger schools okay i can see that but there's still a kind of nasty feeling because world war ii and a good number of the korean war rangers were given the uh the tab for for combat service yeah service and the sf tab you get for that and you know we've brought up bring things up and range your rendezvous and the last time i've been to ranger rendezvous was 2011 and i'm not going to another one because we're saying okay look i understand now the way it works is ranger school now to the ranger units is what the the recondo school was for us you're going to be if you're going to be a reader you have to go a company if you're going to be a leader you go there it's a leadership thing where you learn and recondo school was excellent and it was fun and you know everybody i know that went to recondo school uh probably half of them ended up going on to sf as soon as they could because boy did i mean we were just we look without sf the lerps would have been completely [ __ ] over sf was always looking out for us and they set up this wonderful school and you know what can i say uh you know what what did they train you guys on like what did you do when you get there and what what is the course entail uh it was similar to uh we didn't get to do any jumps we did a lot of uh rappelling and uh you know getting in rigs and being pulled up and everything we didn't do any getting we all kept saying hey can we get a job while we're here you know and i said yeah i wish you could you we could but uh it was a commando well thing it was a three three week uh all day and most of the night uh thing a lot of a lot a lot of classroom work uh very heavy on on on navigation very heavy on that for good reason and communication medical things you know i would drawing blood from each other and doing giving each other you know a serious serum uh jesus man all the stuff i i the words in your in your uh in your defense ken it was like what 60 years ago now yeah it was 50 something years ago you know you know serum albumin serum albumin that we'd be giving each other okay okay this so that you're you're so that your organs don't go down with you if you bleeding too much from blood loss right yeah from blood loss and so we would be practicing that also but we practiced that in in in the company area back in the in the unit too uh and sometimes they would be throwing dirt on you and hitting you just so you can do it when you're when you're under stress but the there was nothing in the recondo school that was [ __ ] nothing it was all and the good thing about it was we got to eat at the uh special forces uh uh mess uh club or whatever it is the food was the best food i had in the army but and you know you have all of these all of these uh old old dudes you know i mean they might be 29 or something of e7 29 but you know we had there were still guys that were world war ii oss guys were still around him and uh you know we're looking at these guys you know wow we really admired and the instructors were pretty much our age a little they were a bit older than me you know but you know in their mid-20s on on up uh these guys were these were guys we yeah i'll go anywhere with these guys man they were cool and they they knew their [ __ ] and they were just no nonsense no [ __ ] they just uh you know everybody i think everybody that ever went to a condo school is really proud so what happens is you know now in the ranger thing you're not completely arranger until you have your tab we never had an opportunity to get a cat tab but uh could i get up for just a second yeah yeah yeah no no worries ken go for it i no it's it's good a good break because i can give you the guys the obligatory call to action and ask all of you to like subscribe and you know mash that like button there guys thank you i i know i hate doing it i sound like a telethon guy um but you know please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already thanks oh what's up ken okay now look so if we're walking around this and you know somebody in in the in the bats now not really i mean my experience is that the relation is oh you know we're we're family but it's bitter that we were not allowed and at the last uh ranger rendezvous i was at this is what the the uh business meeting was about said look everything we had we would have ranger uh we'd have our ranger scrolls or we'd have before that on lerp squirrels we had the recondo school thing here uh all of this everything we had that set us apart we had to take off as soon as you got off the plane coming back to kona yeah yeah and people were bitter about that and i don't blame them and also uh guys would sometimes you'd come back and uh you're on your class a's you're getting your class a's and they said well you got to stay here till tomorrow all right and you know uh you're going to be uh on the on the line in the mess house anyway you know an e5 in his class a's let me just do some just nasty [ __ ] but anyway so here ken so yeah someone's asking if you can hold up your tab again so we can say uh your scroll your ranger scroll okay here uh lima company airborne rangers 75th infantry yeah and then here's a recondo tab a little higher please oh there you go so this is what we have this is brand new before that we had a a lerp tab that completely you couldn't wear it you know but this is this is our way of saying yeah yeah yeah yeah you know well you know ken that was uh before rangers were like formally institutionalized and i know you're gonna you're gonna um come and try to strangle me if i get on the free the cretan abrams thing in 1974 or whatever it was but uh before rangers were institutionalized we disbanded rangers after every single war and you got you guys were that you know you had those things you made in company in country your condo tab your ranger scroll and then after the war was over they're like hey we don't need you anymore go away yeah that's exactly that that's why i say that we were the lerps and the original uh 75th reign 75th infantry ranger not 75th ranger we were the last traditional american rangers one of the but one of the things that makes us different is vietnam veterans in general feel like we got [ __ ] on yeah okay and rightfully i think we have that fee you got to get over it and most a lot of guys haven't gotten over it politically particularly but uh we would we were aware that world war ii rangers and members of of uh meryl's marauders as soon as the war is over as soon as there was a ranger school these guys all were were given ranger tabs and and uh you know legally i mean and about half of the rangers that were in the korean war got the tab without going to the school and bob gilbert who was our he was at one point was our our first sergeant and his old three three war uh three war ranger you know just tough old guy he was he may have been in charge of the ranger school when you went through i don't know i was that was probably before your time no no i went through in 2004 so i'm sure he was retired yeah so yeah it was but he's still around and he's he's he's a character but he he was telling me the last time i was at fort benning he said you know i can tell you all of the people that you know said there's a list from the between the korean war and the vietnam war uh just about any infantry officer that was a captain or above can go through a two-day uh walk-through of the reindeer school and get the tab no [ __ ] i didn't know that he said he he said it you he said he said and then you're not supposed to tell anybody about this because this is this was something just i think maybe maybe it was uh majors on on up but you know he said oh yeah he said officers yeah he said and he said i understand the bitterness too because you know he went through it and went through hell as a right after being in the 187th well in korea he comes back and goes to ranger school what was um what was your your test mission like your final your mission in recondo school when you went out into the field we uh it was just a normal uh it was what we normally did except that we didn't know everybody in the team as well we'd been in this three weeks together in the school and so forth there would be one advisor as we called him one of the one of the sf guys that were on the cadre and then the rest of us would have to rotate so everybody did every job in the basic and uh they we get on the helicopter we get on when we land in it and these are areas that probably weren't as weren't as scary as the asha valley and the wrong wrong in places like this where we were normally you know this was not too far from the trap but it was not a place where there was no enemy they were there and uh we landed and you know we did exactly just like what what we were used to on the team i was on uh there was another guy my butt the other guy from the hundred and first and i were on the same team we were the only ones from the 101st there except for a new sf guy who and uh they so it was pretty much the same thing we figured we were a little bit better than the guys who had been lerps from the from the leg units and we were but it's not their fault you know the guys who were with if you were with 101st 173rd or the first calf you your your division has got better uh senior ncos and so forth who've been through these schools and so forth so everything is going to be a little bit better but uh the guys that were made it that far through the school had their [ __ ] in order anyway and we'd go out and we'd be doing this and we were in an area where there was a lot of bamboo a lot of bamboo and then there was some open area out here and bamboo and bamboo is nasty stuff to have to go through and to try to be quiet and so forth uh one of the things i remember is one of the times that i had to be uh point you know we everybody did every little job in the thing every position and i'm on one point i hit a rusty tree that's what we would call that's a tree that looks like it's rusty because it's covered with red ants looking up looking down looking over here in my whole my whole area and i go like this and it suddenly i just it's all over the place and uh the sf uh advisor you know an old e7 he has everybody just kind of kid around me and they said all right tell you how to [ __ ] just slap everybody slapped the [ __ ] a few times don't make too much noise you know and uh you know i still had robert hill and it was kind of funny and then about three or four hours later uh we hear people moving uh around the other side of of the bamboo coming this way and along come i i don't know if they were nva or local vc they were in green but dirty and uh they all had aks so i've probably they weren't skis and they came around and they saw us and we saw them but we heard them come in first and so we hosted them no [ __ ] so you had a contact on your tests oh well we and they got some rides some rounds up on on us but didn't hit anybody and uh a couple of at least a few of those guys got away and we didn't go right you know you don't chase you know you you don't go chasing people who want you to chase him into it faded into an ambush yeah and uh none of us were hit uh but we i i killed one a guy so you know i mean there is an advantage to that i shouldn't be happy about having killed somebody particularly he's just another soldier or something but whenever i hear somebody say well you were near went to ranger school they don't know how well we went to register how many people did you kill in ranger school [Laughter] you know so that's kind of nice we can see and also uh now we can say hey no female soldiers have ever gone through the range through the recondo school you know now they're going through ranger school they're going through sf they're going through buds pretty soon it's a whole new world yeah uh which i don't think is a good idea i uh i'm a big fan of tammy duckworth for example and two military things i i really do believe women are better at than men and there have been some stat studies that say this one is pistol shooting women that have tape and men that have taken the same uh kind of training the women are slightly better at it uh if they can if it's not something you're too big for them and helicopter that's good they make good helicopter uh things i believe that that's fine but i was an anthropology major at taiwan university and took some at university of michigan too and so forth and one thing i learned about humans and and just about all mammals is that it ain't just the plumbing you every society has this is a woman's role that's a man's role and it can be fluid which one it is an example i don't remember the hopi and the navajo one of them in one of these groups the men did the did the pottery and then the other one the women did the pottery okay it's but that you have to have some sort of differentiation and males need to get away from females females can get away from males uh well in theory and uh you look at elephants you look at uh not not the walls but you look at elephants you look at bears you look at uh uh orcas you look at sperm whales you look at all the i'm not sure about the crows but all the other intelligent social mammals at least have got something where the males can get the hell away from the women and go off and do something this is what humans would do women would do you know hunter hunter and together the women would do the gathering the men would do the hunting this is a very standard thing and there's still lots of people in the world who live this way and it's true my wife loves to to shop i don't i want to go get the stuff and get out yeah yeah yeah get me the hell out of here i want to go out and do things and i want to do it with the guys be away from it and i think that it's i think it's folly to think that you can integrate uh tank crews and infantry platoons i think it's uh actually unnatural and that doesn't mean that the women can't do it as well as the men uh or at least most of the stuff that but i just don't think that this is good it's pretending that we're something other than the animal that we are right you're not allowed to say it now no you're not you know it's not like politically correct to say it i think you're right i think i think women can actually do some of these jobs better than we can i mean there's certain special forces roles um where women can you know learn foreign languages and communicate with people and do things way better than guys can um but at the same time i think there's a movement out there that people want the military to be this reflection of progressive liberal values and it's really the one thing that combat cannot be combat soldiers can never be a representation of that progressive society they want um because combat is primitive and it's ugly and it's nasty i think that my feeling about it is to a great extent that the military was being punished by having done the right thing and done it very successfully when it came to when it came to racial uh when it was getting rid of it's desegregated yeah yeah desegregation it worked with the military much earlier and much better than it did in the other part of american society the army desegregated before america did yeah oh much more much where so consequently uh all of these people who don't know anything about the military have been using the military as a social uh social uh experiments uh experimental clinic thing or something and uh that's that's just not right i i think there's just also a very big difference i i noticed between a lot of the you know we would call them legs ken people who and i have nothing against them but they served in the air force they worked and essentially a corporate job it was like a corporate environment they came into it and yeah they could be a good infantryman but yeah yeah they're pokes they they worked in a sort of quasi-corporate environment except they were a uniform and i know that sounds offensive to some people but i think there's just a huge cultural difference between those people who did that job and they're american patriots and we need them and god bless them yeah and guys like ken who are out there in combat and what you're experiencing it's just the necessities and the priorities are just so different between those two they're they're radically different worlds and i think that male males should have certain protective instincts for women for females uh if we don't okay you're gonna have a whole bunch of uh a rapist out there yeah yeah they'll be that there's going to be problems and again it's nasty to say that and we none of us like it but we can see the the military has a huge sexual assault problem yeah i mean i mean it's backed up by the data like it is a problem it's a huge problem and the military is not handling it very well yeah well they they didn't do a lot of thinking before they did gender uh integration yeah and and i don't blame the women for that that's not their fault it's the army and the way their policies are uh i years ago when gary linder and a whole bunch of us had this magazine uh here behind the lines yeah do you remember did you ever see that i remember it okay well what we did behind the lines one of the things i had to had to do was to review a book about gays in the military and i'm reading this and i'm thinking okay you know this was not something that was expected or accepted in my day and you know you didn't want to be found to be a gay guy in in the military at all in my generation yeah yeah backwards and there's lots of stories about people who are who were gay who didn't even hide it but suddenly that they use it against them to get them out of the way yeah doing their job well and i'm reading this book and i think jesus these people are getting [ __ ] over but who really got screwed over were women because hey baby come on over here i got something for you you know i said no thanks yeah yeah dyke i mean that kind of thing would be was happening a lot and uh what hit me was very interesting was the navy and the air force were just you know this was happening all over the place yeah those two things and these guys say hey baby come on you know and she said no you're not my kind i don't want you know yeah yeah lesbian and then next thing he's saying you know she's a lesbian the next thing you know this patriotic girl that's working herself very hard for her country is kicked out with a bad uh yeah you know it's outrageous but in the army and the marine corps what would happen would be somebody some guy tries to do that to a girl and he's likely to have a built up his ass saying who the hell do you think you are who you're not no you you you say she's a lesbian you're just jealous get the hell out of here yeah you know i mean the the the marine corps and the army handled that far better uh because you you know i don't know why but it it they handled it far better than than the army and or then that air force and the navy did in fact i still have that book somewhere here that i had to do the review of uh yeah no it it's definitely interesting um but it ken i wanted to ask you also um about you know you your extensions in in theater that you went over to nam what was it a two-year tour it was a one-year it was a one-year tour and then you extended three times yeah and uh that'd be twice for six months and then once for three months okay uh for six months you could get a three or a 30 uh day uh a 30-day vacation what's what's the army term for oh when they sent you on uh on like mid mid tour leave yeah and a leaf so you'd get a 30 day leave and i the second time i had one i'm talking to i'm talking to my first sergeant i said listen can i get at least half of the ranger's school i'll do it on my own leave time and they said yeah i wish you could but you can't you know so that that's a part of the thing but the uh you know going back all if it's a three-month extension you get an extra r r and a and a and a leave uh the same for a week or something that you know and you can go to one of the rnr places which is probably better than going back to the states at that time uh going back to the states one of the times i went back was in 1968 and the democratic convention and they have all these you know it was a riot outside and you know i'm on the side of i'm on the side of the the national guard guys at first against against the protesters but then i see on tv there's a national guy standing there there's some woman in her car who's got her window down and she looks like my mother or something and here's some national guard guy with an m79 right up against her cheek like this holy [ __ ] and i'm thinking let me go back get me out yeah yeah get me the hell out of here yeah and uh my family had moved my senior year in high school they moved to uh to reno so my father became the president of the university and before that he'd been at the university of michigan so i grew up in ann arbor which is quite a liberal town and uh i went back on one of my 30-day leaves extension leaves i went back to ann arbor yeah that's the experience mopar had in your novel yeah get me out of here and i did i got i i can remember going back early and you know hey man don't you have another seven days i'm here i'm here i want him i just i didn't i didn't want to ever leave i mean this is i was quite with the idea that you know sooner or later it's going to catch up with me but man this is my life and then uh you couldn't after you couldn't get another extension and there was one thing you could get an extension for and the only thing a guy named ray zojack from our company and he was quite a soldier he and i both wanted to extend again and they wouldn't let us and then we found out well if you go to if you uh go talk to so and so and so and so and uh you everything goes right yeah we got a place for you to sog and you know all right yeah yeah and so bob gilbert this who i've mentioned a couple of other times he's you know bob gilbert gets us there were three of us and one of them died last week our last last month last year senility but the three of us wanted to extend again and we couldn't and we found out that you know yeah you can see and what happens is if you don't make it you know if if sod doesn't want you you know then you know the army will give you wherever the [ __ ] they want to send you and we went in and talked to bob gilbert and bob gilbert said look i was in sf for three years in germany i don't like it what do you mean what what do you don't like about it i don't like the hat you know all this sort of stuff he said look you guys don't know what's being done i know what your my what your missions will be when you're going to get to you're going to get to a a large site and everybody there already knows each other they've been to the schools with each other their family lives next door to your family in in fayetteville or something he said and you guys are going to get in there and they'll be glad to see you and they'll like you but there's going to be there are missions that is being sent to cnc that you don't want to go to and they're going to send if they get a sense of an american so sid you better rather than somebody that they've known for years and i said what does he say well for what i can tell you is sometimes they just taking people out of the out of the prisons and the jails of saigon and may and putting them on a team to send in you want to join john mullins told us that story in a previous interview we did about how they were running double agents yeah and you know basically what and it wasn't until years later and i'm out of the been out of this military and i'm reading a book about uh called uh sideshow about about the bombing of of the bombing of cambodia and laos and i'm reading this at here's the stuff i read these sf guys these they're being sent on on bomb damage assessment tanks because they have they're using the b-52s and trying to knock out all of the mva stuff in cambodia and laos and you know those plagues are dug way down and they've got concrete you know the size of a of an elephant's ass and you know and they've have teams that are getting shot off shot up right on right on the yeah he said and when i get one of those it might break their hearts but they'll send you rather than the guy that they've known for 10 years right right and i that's what it was all about what bob dear bob uh gilbert gilbert gilbert gary darian was the third guy that that he he's telling this but i'm reading that book and i'm reading stories about that and you know the two harvard uh brothers that were down in the bottom bottom of the white house finding the the dulles brothers not the dulles no the dulles brothers was a generation the uh i'll remember it yeah i know i'm sorry i don't know two harvard professors but they were down working for working for lbj and then for nixon uh finding the finding the targets for these strikes that the air force even didn't know about and uh you know finally some some officer said [ __ ] you we're not going on this issue [ __ ] you we're not going and next thing you know they're going to get him they're going to toss this guy into prison forever he's an sf officer and uh what happened was some other officers and a couple of generals had the guys kidnapped sent to okinawa and they gave him an entirely deep entirely different uh identity for a while what so that they couldn't they just because the that's crazy these these harvard dudes in the basement of the white house wanted to get this guy and they you know they saved him because it was [ __ ] i mean they're just sending teams they're just sacrificing you know it's we'll walk up to walk up the pyramid to last night or something you know so ken you were eventually you rose to the level of being a recon team leader yeah and i mean you kind of got to do it all on the work team yeah and but then i mean it's one of those things where like the merry-go-round comes to an end like you were having a hell of a good time in vietnam but like what happened that eventually you had to go home and what was that like well uh i was torn uh there were two things that guys senior than me senior and we had been doing one which was go to sf and just you know i didn't want to go go through a whole bunch of stuff at fort bragg i just wanted to be you know with mountain yards or or a recon team or something but okay i'll do that you know and i probably and then the guys that had been in sf that were in our unit or that we knew the sf guys that nearby you know they're saying hey you know they're not going to send you back here they're going to send you to germany or something i think and then the other one was to become an ri and um what they would do is they send you and you're running guys through your pt and all this sort of [ __ ] and so you have kind of a shitty kind of e5 job and then for a few months and then you go to the school and you get out and you become an ri and what man these guys that had been doing that you know just some of these guys milton lockett and some of these dudes man they're they're saying it sounded like the best thing in the whole world to be an r hi said because you've got all this free time and you and then you're doing it when you're really doing it and so i'm really thinking about this and then my sister sends me a letter and this is i got that letter two days before i left vietnam so it came just in time uh because i was still could have come back up my mother had a uh some kind of a an aneurysm not an aneurysm but a stress stress stroke stroke from me continuing to to uh be a werp yeah to be a lurp and you know i should have been home then and then going well i'm getting home but i'm going back and you know all this and they didn't tell me about this and my sister told me that she'd been in the hospital at stanford and so and okay and you know there were a lot of also there were a lot of girls that i knew back in michigan and in nevada and everywhere that you know that i wanted to i wanted to kind of get together with them you know a little bit too and you know i mean going on r r is pretty nice but it's not but that i i just felt like this was my this was my life this is what i'm gonna do and uh they didn't let me do it all the way in i was planning to go back to vietnam this last spring and uh these little nasty little things called viruses got in the way of everything yeah but do you realize that i'm a i'm a member of chapter 78 sfa but you know just i can't remember the word not right now but it's an a on my the special forces association yeah yeah so my number is an a which is means that i'm not you know sf but i'm one of the ones oh you're like an honorary member or an associate member associate member associate that's it and i'm a life associate member which is rare and we our chapter built a uh built a obstacle course for the for one of the rotc units oh really schools here and uh when it opened we went down there as all soul guys and here's all these rotc kids you know and uh that was cool watching them go go through their stuff and we're trying to do it you know realizing that we're not as young as we [Laughter] and i'm talking to one kid his last name was fam p-h-a-m and uh i said there were you vietnamese he said you know where's your family first saigon i said you know people from saigon still call it saigon but uh i said oh yeah do you do you speak of vietnamese he said uh i do now uh i said i do know a lot better he said my parents were just going crazy because i was forgetting all my vietnamese all the way from from first grade up i'm just english english english and it's it was really getting to them and then i went to vietnam and my at all everything i forgot came back and i learned a whole lot more and i said but they said and they forgave me i said forgive you for what's for going back and i said well what did you go back for he said well that was last year a year before last this year i'm going back again i said what was it an rotc scholarship what he said yeah we have an exchange program for the people's the people's army of vietnam's rot whatever their rotc thing is he said you know yeah that's and so my parents are all fine with it they said they've gone back since since i went just to see you know family members and so forth they wouldn't have otherwise but they were ready to they were ready to disown me that's i mean wow times times change yeah i mean yeah times have changed this guy from uh there's one special uh unit that i i won't mention well i just did i guess one special unit but they do regular uh things from from fort lewis over to uh over to vietnam to do things and a lot of anti-terrorist stuff that they're working on and uh one of these guys came to one of our chapter meetings because his family lives down here just and so all the old vietnam vets just said wow man you know what it was like and he said oh let me tell you he said it's a he said we get there and he said we get to meet the other the guys and they said they could all know they all have some because everybody has to learn english at least some of it now in vietnam he said so you know we meet the guys and then the next day we go out and there's all these old people around these old guys around they're just sitting shaking their head and scratching their head they said i can't believe it they wow you know and he said who said he said i guess you know well that guy's he's my uncle over there and this is over there yeah old nba guys they're just delighted to see american green berets over there working with i mean you know this is and again you realize and see you know humans humans and chimpanzees these are the dumbest apes there are we would do this with this one speaking of which what was it like for you when you came home after the war trying to it started your academic career going back to college i mean what what was that like in that in that time frame uh i didn't like it i didn't like students i didn't like academia even though you know i started going to the university of nevada when i came back and they had the anti-war moratorium thing in october and i was taking classes there and here's all this anti-anti-war people and they you know and you know they're bad-mouthing us like you know hey are you gonna be another nazi over there you know and you know that's and i wanted to kill him my father's the president of the university i wish i wish i had an m16 and a whole bunch of regular i mean i wanted to just hose them down that just infuriated me and uh you know because there's a baby baby killer sort of [ __ ] being thrown it it's crips i mean they're not doing it to me necessarily because i'm in civilian clothes but yeah you're going to be a babies killer you know oh no you you know all these people these guys and then i'd hear all these students hey you're going to the you're going to the uh the uh the the thing tonight you know we're having a lot you know lighting candles and do this there's going to be lots of women there lots there can be lots of [ __ ] there lots of lots of weed i think this is what the war this is what this war is to you this is no i mean this it took yeah yeah it took me a long time and if i can just share one of my own experiences that maybe you'll be able to relate to a bit um when i was i think maybe it was just after i got out of so i got out of the army i went to college did four years and it was right about that time i think i was graduating college i went to the um it was like a book release party so uh a journalist named uh jeremy scahill was um putting out this book with uh glenn greenwald um it was the big like data dump all these documents had leaked it was like our generation's version of the pentagon papers all these documents had come out and they uh did this book release and i went there with all these hippies all these peace creeps in this big room and they had a projector screen playing footage of uh drone footage like the black and white drone footage from afghanistan and like you know they're dropping bombs blowing things up and they had this like kind of like fat guy with a beard come out and he was like okay you know here's a rap i made about drones and like he starts rapping about drones up on the stage and it's just the most surreal thing i'd ever seen in my life that here's real military footage of this of drones dropping bombs and ostensibly killing people in afghanistan or iraq with this like hippie rapping about drones in front of like 500 other hippies like it was just the weirdest goddamn thing i had ever seen i was like is this the war i fought in is this is this what it means to you like what what the hell is going on here was he a anti-peace guy or was he a drone guy they're all they were all very much anti-war and yeah yeah they're all very much against the war um which i i understand on one hand i get it you know i i understand the argument against it but that it's sort of like commercialized into this sort of like we're gonna do a rap a rap song about drones with the real footage of the drones behind you like it was all very very odd to me there was a at the university of nevada when i came back there were two guys one was a an sf guy who was and i think he was in saigon the whole time and the other one was a was a marine who had been in the battle of way and i could have been friends with him and it was impossible because they had switched over to be where all everybody in vietnam that in the military is a murderous scumbag and i was too and all of this and you know i'm sorry i don't want to be a turd caught like that and they were getting all these all these piece piece creep girls so they would go to all of these these rap things where everybody would sit not like rappers rap but where are you just talking yeah rap sessions and they all snapped their fingers yeah yeah oh but you know oh and they'd be talking about all of this and these guys would go go in and they would make up stories of atrocities that they did in vietnam and then they would start crying and then all these girls would come oh it's okay it's okay okay and this is the only one and i'm thinking is this the only way you guys can get laid just no i mean and then one of them it goes on to this day mr miller to this day it's still happening war is nasty yeah and you got and but uh there's a lot of people i i get freaked out by people by wannabes too and by people who well you know i would have gone but oh yeah in fact i'll send it to you later he emailed but read henry v shakespeare's henry v and also in henry the fourth uh i forgot if it was part one or two but this guy's saying oh and you know it was i too would have been a soldier if not for those those vile guns that make it possible for somebody beneath me to kill somebody as good as me and you know and then and then oh well they're they're carrying a body past me and he's sniffing and and here's this guy that's this one this officer and he's saying i want to kill it if he wants to kill the [ __ ] i'll find it for you and send that part to you email me yeah please but i you know i'm not sure that shakespeare was shakespeare i i sort of think that the earl of oxford was yeah yeah yeah because whoever wrote that stuff was highly educated yeah and also saw a little bit of con of contact you know and knew the law and all this but i i'll send i'll send it to you i don't want to have to go through it all yeah yeah no whenever you get a chance it's a it's war is for these people that well i would have but you know such and such and i've forgotten who they've been a few a few politicians that said oh yeah well i would have i would have gone in to vietnam but uh my iq was too high they wouldn't let me you know i mean this is some sanitary i remember i don't remember who it was but it was saying this kind of stuff what kind of people and i get freaked out i want to gary lender lives and lives in uh not jensen what is it in missouri that the place that uh homer uh that homer on springfield not springfield it's the inner entertainment place in missouri oh my gosh i i i'm sorry i don't know you know the one i'm talking about it's the one that homer simpson said oh that's that that's mark that's uh that's uh where uh the christian people go to instead of las vegas or something i forgot oh i no i don't know branson branson okay okay so i wanted to say that that gary and some other people are put together in branson and it's good seeing all these veterans around and everything but then they have all of these smiling uh smiling people with you know their flags on their on their jackets and all this sort of stuff but that have never never spent a moment in their their side on the sidelines you know yes yes you guys are right you know but they don't mean it uh you know there's certain kinds of do you know that yeah yeah there's these [ __ ] out there like john bolton that talk about exactly someone asked him about why he didn't serve in vietnam and he was like oh well you know there are better things i could do than die in a rice paddy somewhere well cheney when he was a secretary of defense uh somebody asked him what what why he didn't serve in vietnam he said i had other things to do with my life i sure did yeah thank you for your service yeah thank you for your service welcome home brother yeah you ain't my brother you know yeah that that stuff bothers me a lot yeah can i i think we've been going for like over two hours at this point and i i think we could me and you could go like another three hours and like it would be like blinking an eye um i i want to ask you to stay for the little bonus segment afterwards for like 10-15 minutes but before we wrap this up here um any final thoughts that you want people to know about the works about the vietnam war anything that you want to say to folks out there who listen to this it was unnecessary unwise but i think that the people on our side the people on the other side the people on our side meaning the americans the australians the south koreans and the thais the filipinos that were new zealand and the arvins and the mountain yards that were on our side and you know and the people who were in the pavement who the nva and the people the local the local gorillas we all thought we were doing the right thing not everybody did but each side thought that they were doing the right thing the moral thing the correct thing and all of us had some reason to there was some truth for it for all of us but it was a big stupid foolish thing that shows that humans we might be very smart but we're not very wise and at the same time it's something that as foolish and unwise as the war was something that really stuck with you and defined your life in so many ways i think can that you know you wrote you wrote this novel you wrote tiger the work dog you wrote a non-fiction book called six silent men about it and this is something that has come it it did define your your not just your young life but it came to define you know who you became as a man later in life i often think how different my life would be if if i had taken advantage to not go in the military and just go on to college and do all this and go to the rap sessions go to rap sessions and you know and uh i would be a much better um i would have been able to i would have had more money that i could spend for my family but we managed to manage you know we managed to get our kids through college and good schools and uh and we are doing well enough now that we spent a lot of money on good good charities mainly animal charities and but uh you know i was supposed to be another professor or something and i you know i just oh i did what i wanted to do and what let me tell you i was born i was conceived in austin texas and i was born in ann arbor michigan so it was you know college towns uh in washtenaw county michigan where ann arbor is they have in the in the court room they have a list of all the people from washington county who died in various wars you look at the ones from from the vietnam war and i knew almost every single one of the guys in there weren't very many from ann arbor who died in washington county but you look at this smaller towns celine dexter chelsea man they've got more people are than people from my age range that i would have known coming up in ann arbor they had more people from these little towns than ann arbor had from my generation of people who died in the war and it was unfair you know the rural kids working-class kids minority kids and nobody will ever tell me that that it was fair and that it was there was any equality equality to it yeah yeah there wasn't uh i knew one other professor's kid and i knew in what people i knew in when i was in the army and people i've known veterans i've known since i've known one other professor's kid i know doctors kids most of them were army doctors their fathers how many people there was something how many people in in the house and senate lost a kid in the vietnam war i think it was one during the time of the vietnam war reminds uh me of our our uh a current politician of ours who got three deferments for his bone spurs yeah yeah well i i can look at myself in the mirror and i know that if i met tammy duckworth and there's nobody else around and we could just sit down and talk or something that she would talk to me yeah yeah no she's she's for real she's a real she's for real and [Laughter] what's his name i won't say it what's his name can't say that and neither can his his spence or any of these others it bothers me a lot to see my fellow veterans their politics sometimes really freaks me out and i i can't hold it against them but i was like that for 10 years after the war and there's a good reason for us to feel that we got stabbed in the back and all of this sort of stuff but this country would be a lot better if the vietnam veterans had outgrown this and had not let it just fester and i'm talking about people that i love yeah that really strikes home with me ken um well the the what i see in your generation and also in my own generation of guys who are carrying around a lot of anger from the war and and that that manifests in how they view american politics we have an advantage over the over a year over your generation you guys will never ever be able to sit down and have a cup of coffee or certainly not a beer with the guys that you had to fight against you know you how many isis guys and so forth yeah yeah ain't no way yeah and i i will i will i will never respect them the way that you came to respect the vietnamese and the and they respected us and you know it's the same thing world war world war ii you know the enemies were against were purely evil enemies but not purely evil soldiers and they were just doing what we were just doing just like the north vietnamese guys were and you know and so how long did it take very very soon you know i mean as soon as as soon as you stop shooting each other your buddies or you can be and goes to show the folly of war but so we have something else to do right now right uh yeah i well i just want to read a couple comments here real quick before we go on to that um uh alejandro says thank you mr miller for your books that we grew up reading and for your service for being an inspiration to generations of rangers an example and standard that we aspire to be suesfonta one of us and uh he also asked a question down here what are your thoughts on core level or c being disbanded a few years ago so i guess he's asking about the current worst units in in the army being disbanded i think it's probably a mistake uh i you know you definitely need that and and it was working well i mean i i remember the first golf war and go to fort campbell and talk to the guys from the hundred first the nurse guys and you know they were sitting there saying man you know we're dug in on the on this hill and just so many people going by and they're just anything and it's reached the point where you're thinking god i hope these guys get out of here before they surrender because i don't know how to deal with them but you know i mean it was it was good but what happened was somebody in the once oh your surveillance you know you don't need you don't need to have uh to have a a machine gun or something you know you just you know are that's reconnaissance you don't you don't need this people that have never done it don't know it you know say you have a reconnaissance unit that's just supposedly in theory just reconnaissance i can speak from experience you know my was i was an rrp lerp and an lrp there's a difference in them there's a ranger it's not a big difference at all but when we had two hours in there we were still doing raids we were still doing ambushes we were still doing all of the kind of stuff we were still taking doing point for uh for our infantry company you know we're doing all all of this stuff and you know don't say a reconnaissance well that's just you know that's just reconnaissance you're just going sneaking around and of course they think they can replace you with a drone these days too yeah and they can't drone can't stay in the air all day and all night well what else what i remember thinking when drums first came out was they can't look at the bottom of a of a bridge they can look to the bottom of the beneath the bridge but they can't they probably can now can they just turn up and but maybe from an angle yeah but they just don't know uh you there's no rep we have we haven't yet been able to replace the notion of having you know a leader's recon or or a human reconnaissance team on the ground and if we ever do that i hope that you know it's just machines fighting machines and not letting um so i think that's that's it we'll go we'll do the bonus segment in one second ken um i just want to say ken thank you so much for spending like two and a half hours with us tonight and uh special thanks also to your son for helping fix all this he enjoyed talking about you know he's awesome yeah he's a good guy and um and thank you to everyone who came here and watched the show tonight everyone who will watch it you know in the future um please subscribe to the channel if you haven't already uh you will like us you can uh leave some comments below tell us you know do you think we're doing good you think we're doing bad let us know uh and there's also a link down in the description for our patreon page if you guys want to support the site or support the channel i'd like to yeah i don't know how to do all of this ken you don't have to do any of that i'm talking to the listeners whatever you want i'll just give it to you just ask me uh and um and uh yeah i guess that's kind of that's kind of it i'd like to apologize for my senility and forgetting words groping for words no no need to apologize ken it's really an honor to have you here and you're you're one of our og's uh you're one of the guys we go to for knowledge and you know i really appreciate it really respect you um so i mean it's a privilege for me to be able to interview you and to have you here on the show i i have to say speaking for my generation of lerps and rangers it's amazing amazing to see what grow grew out of us when you look at what the they have now the rain the ranger regiment has got its own uh it's got everything now every day it's it's it's got its own am i battalion in my battalion and there's nobody that's better at that job in the whole world than than the 75th rangers and it's because of you guys you know we stood on your shoulders well yeah no it is you guys had it yeah but although there is something to that because a lot of the guys did stay in up into the yeah yeah i mean bob gilbert is still around being being his old ruffle self maybe maybe i have to twist your arm and see if i can interview bob at some point um but uh so guys next week next friday uh our guest on the show is going to be ed coogler who served as a marine scout sniper in vietnam um and uh i have started familiar maybe he wrote two books um i think one one is about his time in vietnam and one is about ptsd and kind of recovering from uh from what he went through in the war so we'll have him on next week um and i have to this coming week i have to read his book so that i know what the hell i'm talking about if you get gary linder around sometime and i would love to get have you had tilt up john singleton i have i have tilt scheduled for hold on i'll tell you guys right now september 25th john mayer will be on the show i i keep wanting to say john singleton mosby so i just call him tilt okay mosby is a fascinating character we'll have to have that conversation um so but i i'm sorry to cut you off but we're we're gonna stop the episode now we'll go into the bonus segment um hope to see all of the rest of you guys there and uh one way or the other i'll see you next week so thank you

Channel: The Team House

Views: 70,878

Keywords: LRRPs, LRP, Ranger, 75th Ranger Regiment, LRRP, Special Forces, Vietnam War, Kenn Miller

Id: AEdMX55i5Ko

Length: 155min 10sec (9310 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 21 2020