MACV-SOG Team Leader John "Tilt" Meyer: Ep. 61

there he is john i think uh we're alive already i don't know how that happened like a bad dream i'm back uh let's see here what can we do to fix you up i'm sorry that we got off to a little bit of a premature start right here uh let me fix you up and hi guys and welcome to the team house hi dave how the hell are you long time no see son it's been forever [Laughter] uh we're having just a couple of technical issues as usual uh so what happens when you get two grunts running the tech stuff uh we're live right now john just so you know um pretty scary man you know that picture if you take if you if you take a freeze frame with that shot you put it in your garage you got a one-year guarantee your garage would be rodent-free here we are this is episode 61 of the team house i'm jack murphy here with dave park and our guest tonight is john striker mayor old friend and he was a 1-0 which is a team leader in mac visage on rt idaho re recon team idaho uh mcphee sag of course was military assistance command vietnam studies and observations group they did some of the most dangerous operations of the war deep behind enemy lines they were clandestine cross-border operations into laos cambodia and north vietnam and john was one of those guys uh back what 68 to 70 john right yeah april 68 april 69 and then october 69 to april 70. oh there's no sound what's going on here some people are saying they have sound some people are saying they don't i can hear you fly by uh there's only one person saying no sound no there's a whole bunch of people some people are saying they have it some people are saying no i think it's all uh store games okay yeah some people are saying that they got to reset their browsers yeah geez i'm sorry for the technical issues today everyone i'm not uh sure why things happened a little bit differently than they normally do um but thank you everyone for chiming and letting me know john i apologize again um john is also the author of across the fence on the ground in sod chronicles i have one of his books right here from him uh they are all worth checking out across the fence is uh john's memoir about his own personal experiences in macbee sog terrific terrific book one of my favorite vietnam memoirs and john thank you again we're so lucky to have you here today my pleasure jack and uh it's always good to be around some fellow combat vets we can talk to talk a little bit better um john i think the way we usually kick off the show the way we usually start well in addition to the technical difficulties and ironing everything out is uh asking where you came from uh how did you get your start and we want to know your origin story and i think maybe you can start off by telling us about where you grew up and how you got your nickname and eventually ending up in the military well you know it's it all began in trenton new jersey dad was a milkman mom was the choir director and dad saw this pretty lady playing new oregon joined the choir and before we knew it they're married i was the first of uh four kids three of which survived and uh i grew up in a mult truck and trenton and after graduating from high school um took me two years to flunk out of college after i flunked out of college uh i was working in yosemite national national park and uh um my dad said hey you flunked out getting ready for the draft work we had the draft back then and um i read the book the green berets by robin moore i said that's it if i'm going to war i want to go with these guys they sound crazy and uh um went through i went down and listed and um the rest is here she went through uh got in basic uh basic advanced infantry jump school and advanced infantry back then you can volunteer for special forces they give you the battery attest and the recruitment sergeant at the end of it all goes i'm the last one he goes maya you're lucky we lowered the standards went through the programs and then we had some tdy on rtt before we went to nam and then um went to dom had the in-country training afterwards they said there's a project looking for volunteers and me and johnny mcintyre and so many other guys we all signed up welcome to mcafee sag and of course you you're familiar with the story from across the fence where we flew into fob one get off the helicopter and spike team idaho in 68 we were called spike teams and idaho got on disappeared never to be heard from again and so there was two americans glenn lane and robert owen are amongst the 50 plus green berets they're still missing in ashland layoffs today so there was an instant opening in recon spider parks was there spider and i had gone through training group together and he became a 1-0 and we had to hire some more vietnamese trained for a month dealt with the monsoons and then we started running missions in august of 68. john can you explain that a little bit like in in tat spike team idaho just like disappeared i mean there were side teams that inserted and never made their first comms window right i mean just like disappeared into the ether i was just asking if you could explain a little bit about sog teams like spike team idaho that just disappeared into the ether like there were some that inserted and never made their first comms window if i recall correctly correct um usually most made the first comma but in 68 by may of 68 which this was it was like around may 22nd 23rd um idaho went in they gave a team okay and they were never heard from again and the bright light went in two days later and uh george sternberg mike tucker and perry mike perry went in and they ran they made instant contact with the nva the nva had a car 15s and they had m26 frag grenades one of which blew off the boots of george sternberg and so everybody was wounded some critically and they had one team member that was kia on that and they left him in the bomb crater and now at that point idaho was the sixth or seventh team that had been wiped out in 68 already and so sometimes the team would be on the ground um and in idaho's case apparently they got hit pretty quick and then we had a team like alabama where everybody's wiped out except the 1-0 john allen escaped and he need for three days and then they saw him in the [ __ ] somebody was able to see his panel and pick them up so there's a team that you know for all intents and purposes it was wiped out saved the saving grace was that john survived so 68 was a pretty ugly year and that was only may and and that was the opening on to which you walked onto a recon team yes sir welcome to the secret war what what did you what did you know about sag at that time that you know you're walking in there i mean it was super classified at the time i i don't think john q public knew about it until what the 1990s and what what did you know as a young green beret nothing i'm dumb as i look you know we went in there you volunteer for the project and then you know his funny part was after 16 months of training jack you know how you break your pad out you got your pencils or pen so here we are at the briefing we all break our pants and pencils out and we're sitting there going okay let's go the sergeant beers put that [ __ ] away this is a top secret briefing whoa that got our undivided attention right there and uh we never looked back we went through the briefing and he told everybody if you don't want to it now's the time to leave but nobody left and so we hung in there went through the uh went through the process got the briefing and the next day we flew up to um fob one and that's when we had that little exchange where we lost lane and spiked team idaho did they how much information i mean obviously it was a classified project how much information did they give you at the briefing and and did they did they give you an indication of uh like obviously in vietnam everything was a risk but the higher level of risk that it entailed well they told us it was high risk but you know when you're as green as we were right we're greener than grass right who knows the and the fun thing that we've heard from other people was when they give you the briefing the sergeant major after you sign the documents he pulls the map down and there on the map is there's south vietnam and all it has is the cities then across the fence and layouts and cambodia there's target boxes 10 by 10 by 10 and that would that was each target some more deadly than others and that gave you a sense of what this is all about and it was really an eye-opener and again don't talk about it and that's the way it was i mean we had teams that would do almost identical missions but unless the team members at the pub talked about they would never know yeah and we had that happen a couple of times and in fact jack the the book with the picture on it we were going to go into a mission at the mughia pass and that's what we're getting inspected for by general uh stillwell he was the uh commander for i-corps which vietnam was divided in four cores ib and northernmost so we were getting ready to go into laos northern laos at the reunion about 10 years ago some guy looks at the book and goes hey i remember that mission you guys were out there taking pictures and i was making fun of you guys and baby son you know and he said what was that mission about so i told him he goes you're kidding he said they came to our team they told us to do it we told them it was a suicide mission we said hell no we ain't going [Laughter] so they shopped it around until they found some guys who uh were willing to take it on they found the knucklehead yeah john what was i i mean i i don't want to belabor it too much because i think this audience it has some familiarity but could talk a little bit about the the various missions that sag had because it wasn't just recon right um well and the reason why we had the secret wars because our government had agreed to not have combat troops in laos or cambodia and there was a there was no some kind of an accord reached on it and the north vietnamese being the honorable communist dogs that they were had the same agreement but by 1968 there were 25 to 35 000 nba in laos alone plus the indigenous for folks that had to cooperate with them work on the trails keep them open if they heard their helicopters they had to report the helicopters and where they landed and uh same thing was chewing cambodia where by 69 they had a hundred thousand troops and we we weren't allowed to have anybody there so our hands are tied so our job was to go in a find them see what they're up to do wiretaps pow snatches because as you know the best source for intel is a live pow they can tell you what's what i mean it may take a little extra convincing to have them to talk to you but and you know they were dedicated we had one of our guys in fact it was the troll they had picked up two pows got him into the helicopter and they were checking checking them for weapons and hand grenades well it turned out that one of the uh pows they picked up was a woman well they were shocked and now remember during the h-34 which had a longer passenger compartment to it than a ui and they were in the back of the helicopter with her when they saw it was a woman they were like oh my god and there was like momentary pause but they let go of her she turned around ran and jumped right out the door holy [ __ ] oh yeah these were there they were serious about the mission and that that's these were nvm say again the mva that came down from the south through the ho chi minh trail yeah hard course yeah and that's where they bring the supplies down and our job is also to monitor that and sometimes the we had teams down in the cartoon that would put in roadblocks and then they'd back it up the air force would come in and knock a bunch of them out uh the trucks and transport just to interject but a never-ending battle uh i wanted to ask you about the what you had mentioned about the pow snatches because you and um it was lynn black right you developed a kind of like ingenious method to uh snatch a pow off the ho chi minh trail or an enemy p.o.w epw well the key thing the the the key thing that we were debating and trying to refine was like with how do you have a kill zone with claymores and you get one person alive right so the theory was have a hunk of c4 in the dead center of the kill zone and then the claymores would fan out so that there would be four or five foot section in that kill zone where the the ball bearings from the claymores would not kill them but the question was how big of a piece of c4 is it two inches four inches so lin i can't take credit for this we talked about the concept but good old lynn black lynn maurice black jr he worked on this and he well blown it up so one day he did it he put the certain i figured what the amount was now it's too long ago but a certain amount of c4 put it down at six feet away because that's what we planned everything was at six feet in the jungle and he blew it knocked himself out it worked perfect so he came back to base going hey i figured it out his hair was all blown out of place and he's talking really loud because he couldn't hear a damn thing he damaged his hearing he used himself as the test subject for this say again did he use himself as the test subject for this he did he blew himself up literally and so he was so proud of the fact that he figured it out and it worked i mean it was a really good tactic and so um with that improvement and with that cut of c4 we practice as setting up establishing the ambush and tearing it down quickly and uh because you know november we had a perfect ambush up just like that had everything set up with the c4 and then of course we got socked in we had pulled back and we were on the ground for five days of five nights with them hunting for us with dogs and everything else and did you have the opportunity to use that technique i did not other teams did and it worked really yes yeah it's funny because we had the ambush set up twice the first time we had to pull it down because we got socked in you know i we were we'd been on the ground maybe three or four hours had things set up and we had moved far off of the lz we um normally we would move 10 and 10. we moved 10 minutes wait 10 minutes blah blah here i didn't want to wait i just went we went straight up this hill for almost an hour wore the guys out we got to a big trail frosted got to the other side put up the ambush and it was beautiful it was a perfect insertion and when spider came back for a combo check i gave him the code hey we'll have a pow for us so with that code he would then call the assets we would blow it and then meet everybody at the lc with with a live pow so i gave him the code and spider goes don't breathe don't fart don't do anything i'm at 10 000 feet i can't see the mountain you're on let alone find you an lz and that was the beginning of a long night and they came after us with dogs and everything else and the other time we were in cambodia and we had a perfect damn bush set up and they pulled us out because of uh of a political thing with the prince complaining yeah well over willie pete right oh yeah yeah so weird like you're in the middle of a war you're doing a technically illegal cross-border operation well yeah i mean to top it off i mean the mission that mission our six-man recon team mission was to go find three nva divisions ten thousand each the first the third and seventh nba divisions so hey we went we found them we barely got out of there alive and we used the five second uh fuse on our claymores as we ened back to the primary lz and had it not been for those claim wars and a quick response on assets vp cambodian fertilizer today yeah and yeah we were pissed we left we gave them a little civil near a little white prosperous and they filed a formal complaint with the u.s government they weren't concerned about the 50 000 nva no problem there but that damn willie pete pissed him off and that would have put me over the top too that's just that's just too much there john i agree i was highly disturbed jack and again i was only an e4 i didn't have a clout in that world uh some of the other missions that sag had i want to talk about eldest son and the um the wiretapping the induction cables that that stuff's really interesting i think yeah well wiretaps were uh were interesting because the uh again this is uh 1968 and we had a they gave us a cassette player and we had a cassette i think we maybe even had a highly advanced 90-minute cassette and what the cia told us was and we had from that cassette we had a wire that we trained our little people or south vietnamese to climb up the telephone poles or a tree climb up tap into the wire cut back down they covered a wire with mud so anybody walking past it wouldn't see it and then we turned on the tape recorder right away we wouldn't wait whether we heard somebody or not because the cia said if you record bring it back we'll amplify it 100 times because the nva telephone lines are open all the time whether in the cradle or not like the american phone it goes off so we did that a few times and then the pow snatched well you heard about those and then for the eldest son that was where we carried ammo that was rigged to explode and it was enemy ammo so it'd be round 7.62 for the ak-47s and the sks as well as the uh 82 millimeter mortar rounds and we would carry those on a mission now sometimes like on november 30th there was a specific mission where they had a team of volunteers that went together seven americans and a king bee flew towards laos and the mission was to put in a whole load of eldest son because they found a cache they were going to go in and mix the stuff in and put some more around well that helicopter got blown out of the sky and we lost seven sf guys plus the entire helicopter crew that day on an elder sun mission ordinarily on our missions we would always carry at least at minimum the ak-47 rounds and then we go along the trail maybe drop a couple find a trail we we wouldn't walk on a trail if you crossed it go up and down leave a little bit or if we ever found an enemy cache stick it in there and that was the long and short and we heard amazing reports back and later years later we saw photos on people that had used the rounds to their detriment john when you talked about uh like the sorry the the pow or the the um you know the extraction technique that you developed and then other teams use it successfully what was training like and how much you said that you really share missions but how did the teams interact when it came to you know ttps when it came to and how did your training in sf or ait you know the advanced infantry and then sf differ from what you learned on the ground with you know with the mcv song teams and and you know and then how did you guys spread that information well one of the key things we had was that we always talked in the club afterwards so anytime a team would come back from a mission we would talk about any of the tactics they ran into and that would be for us um that was the prime source of learning in the middle of 68 because there had been a training they had a training academy set up at not the academy but there was a training facility and cam duck camp duck got overrun in early may of 68 so when we landed 68 it shut down and we were on our own plus we had senior ncos who had been there for a while we would talk to them and you know one of the things was hard it's always hard to find lz's so we pioneered this whole rope extraction and again it was refined in the very beginning it would just be a rope then they put a rope with a sandbag and a d-ring on it and uh then our guys would just have a swiss c and then by the end of 68 they had a mcguire see that was a like a big piece of leather or cloth that had a couple hooks in it and it was something you could jump into and hook into a little bit more quickly but it wasn't really stable and then by 69 they had what they called a stable rig that they the straps were tied right into your web gear so that if you wanted to get extracted by ropes you would let them straight let the straps down you could hook them right in and you're ready to go quick uh whereas our way we had the swiss seat you had to put a swiss seat on which was a six foot piece of rope uh you know if you're familiar with that or not for repelling purposes so it goes around you know so you know about that so put the d ring in then the rope try to get it down hook in and then take off and of course as you know too well as you're getting extracted the amount of gunfire sometimes the helicopter pilots wouldn't pull you all the way out you would turn into a human pinball here and you're getting ricocheted off the trees as you're getting extracted well that that happened to you once john right you got drug through the trees and lost a lot of your equipment well yeah first i i got struck through the trees and the reason why um this was we had difficulty finding lz's we can't put the new tactic of saying let's try a daisy cutter in the middle of the jungle so covey went out the first day they found a jungle with no trails they dropped a 2 000 pound bomb and i'm starting i'm getting ready to repel well all of a sudden there's secondary explosions on that day we had over 20 secondary explosions and to this day ho chi minh is trying to figure out how the hell does green berets find out about our cachet well the next day i repelled in halfway down the rope i hear them talking back and forth so i'm on the ground for a little bit just light fire m-79 but obviously we're compromised so i cancelled the mission they came back they pulled me out and when i'm getting pulled out they opened fire on me with an ak so i'm firing at them and i forget i failed to hook up my d-ring so that's that's the old story where we finally get out i got drunk through the trees a little bit so once we get some altitude i'm holding the rope and my arms were cut up pretty bad in the crook of the arms and i was changing hit the air pocket turned me upside down and then the swiss seat went down on my knees so i'm signaling get down get down then all my gear came down my throat was choking me and then it went down on my feet so i'm this you know i'm there like a new york city hooker my leg spread wide holding the seat on and i passed out and the when i passed out luckily captain tuang the king bee pilot had lowered the helicopter suddenly fell about 10 15 feet henry king came out took off all my gear including my sog knife and my car 15 which is still in laos but he threw me in the helicopter holy [ __ ] so that's where i lost oh yeah s4 was not a happy camper that day yeah you talk in your book about the the um the major the s3 major uh that you guys were not too fond of and said that uh he was not uh not only was he not well-liked but the fact that he still had a thick german accent didn't help either right he's the only man to ever call me a coward on top of it but really he just died recently so uh that's the footnote for him but he's gone was he he had experience with him was was he one of the logix guys yes yeah uh most of those guys were tremendous troops yeah yeah and he to his credit i hate to say this but to his credit when he was down at cartoon i'm told he had done some good things down there in recon so i don't know that personally but just to try to be a little bit fair and semi-brown right i hated his balls because he did some some really nasty like you know we were running targets they just wanted to get a team on the ground we come in the morning get a briefing get shot out of primary secondary the alternative come back eat lunch here's a new target no intel report just get on the ground right that was him right they wanted to get people on the ground it's like okay that's the other side of the secret war you know but like i said just d4 one zero you know and and some of the the accidents and misgivings aside i i do want to point out like you i think you guys and the the work teams between the two uh you guys were like the tactical gods out there as far as i'm concerned like you really had to have all of your [ __ ] dialed in because you're a small team on the ground behind enemy lines these guys did not have any of the uh the air cup the kind of air cover that we have today you didn't have the kind of technology that we have today um there are no predator drones and and all this isr and i think that's a big reason why we had to put teams on the ground why we needed guys out there on the ground gathering reconnaissance between that and it being a jungle environment as opposed to you know desert like the the war dave and i served and yeah well um i agree with everything you said except for the air assets we had spads you had the a10 and i would have liked to have had the a10 but the spats could stay on station long they had more ordinance and yes sometimes it would be difficult making contact in triple canopy with the air assets so that was the first part of the challenge but once we made it when we declared a prairie fire emergency we would have everything from gun ships spads fast movers and then at night uh you know one mission we went through four specters and the uh the c-130s right and they brought it within 25 feet closer and we you know that but they came at us there there's there's hundreds of them that night maybe over well probably a thousand i didn't i was too busy to count jack adam like i said we went through four three or four specters at one night but what was that good era what was it you were denied air though was it in cambodia correct uh in cambodia all we were allowed was to have uh helicopter gunships no spads no fast movers and um we had a couple teams that once had gotten to a real world of [ __ ] they may have had spectre for a little while and then the spads came over but they were really close to the border and again sometimes the border would move we'd have a border that would move when the team was really indeed it happens man it happens yeah yeah you had i mean how hard can you tell the border like in in iraq and iran and afghanistan who's keeping track are you the national geographic society over there john i don't know where that border is yeah right what border i don't see no stinking border particularly if i can get some air assets in here yeah what when you when you go dry on four gun ships what is that like for you personally when you get back to base i mean was that like oh that was a hell of a thing or it's like okay whatever on to the next one oh well that was like um just another day inside thank god we're alive thanks to spectre because we were up all night they kept coming at us but they didn't know where we were for playing hide and go seek and about three or four o'clock in the morning as we went through the fourth spectre the clouds began to move in and we lost contact we lost visual with them and so they came at us harder so we would throw a hand grenade you'd hear him coming we throw a hand grenade they scurry away then they would come back well we're getting low in hand grenades so sal and chow went out and found rocks and so we would throw rocks and you hear them scurry away and then you waited a while because my little people could see him now i couldn't see him but sal he he could smell those folks anyways this is the way it went for a couple hours and then we throw a real hand grenade and you hear him dragging the bodies away and we even threw willie pete because we were getting that low and uh nobody father complained on that one jack but i think we were out there all night and then finally came in the morning they got us we when they pulled us out we did extensive uh air cover around the lz and they came in and we went out with minimal gunfire but there were buku blood trails we lost a lot of people yet we never heard them exclaim or anybody if that had been me shot i specter i would have been howling like a dog but it's uh those guys are amazing you know the the interview we did last week with john cronin he was a force recon marine um where was he he uh quetrang i'd have to go back i'm sorry i can't remember about the black rifle coffee company john no no john cronin okay uh his force recon guy but he was telling us how when he was in recon they uh would get hit by the nva and it would there'd be a huge fire fight but it's a spookiest damn thing because when dawn came in the morning they had recovered all their dead already there were no bodies and it was almost like you know it had not happened like the fire fight had not happened you said it was just the creepiest thing oh yeah yeah i was always amazed i mean and there's a couple of missions where we we stacked up the bodies high and um we were busy getting out but uh that mission in particular it was daylight and what we could see were blood trails but no bodies again because we had i told the guys to look for a body because you know if you see one you want to get any maps or any intel that you could get off the dead the dead soldier you never know uh on that note i uh also want to ask you about the incident where you were listening to the radio and i can't remember if it was a wiretap or not but when you were hearing the sm when you're here in russian over the radio yes oh yeah we were that was the same mission where we had to had the ambush set up and the guy touched my boot that night and then two nights later when we were on a mountaintop we would as bored and we heard an aircraft and so i'm scanning through the fm dial came across the channel they were talking in russian so we we put out calls on the emergency beeper and on our fm channel trying to get some air assets but this is like midnight one o'clock in the morning and jack it was the weirdest thing you know how dark it is in the jungle and so we're on a mountain top but still we had some canopy and when you looked out i had i had fallen asleep so i forget it was if it was bubba or henry king came up to me and goes you will not believe this and off in the distance they had lit up their lz with lights for the supply drop and it looked like broadway it was so bright and it was out of our range we had nothing we could shoot at them but uh that was strange but yeah that was november 68. so you saw you saw the soviets bringing in a supply drop sure and you know don't forget at the end of 68 johnson had uh cancelled bombing hanoi so all the anti-aircraft weaponry then came down the ho chi minh trail i mean they had it in 68 but they came down with the heavy stuff then besides the 12.7 the 23 mike mike 37 mike mike is a 57 and uh later on with operation tailwind in uh september of 70 they had a cac and um you know it's like watching a movie from world world war ii movie had the ack acts shooting at the helicopters the ch-53s that were taking the troops in and then when they brought them out and uh we had a medic that's that's to this day was startled by that you know it's like fortunately they missed i know it's contentious in some circles but i mean what was it i mean based on your own experience and also you know what we know about mcphee sag today what we know about the operations and what's been declassified what was the situation with russian advisors in laos and north vietnam in those days well we know that they had over three thousand they're also cubans and there are chinese there and there's no question about it um the russians we we confirmed it there and about now about 12 13 years ago a youtube came out that was a reporter in russia who was attending the anniversary of russians killed in the russian secret war in vietnam so as part of his reporting he reported that there were 3 000 russians had been there and that they had at least 12 or 13 kias so i was really disappointed that we didn't have a higher number of kias those comedy dogs but there was there was a couple times john when your guys recovered like soviet flags right correct not us but other teams and uh we had a a marine corps helicopter pilot uh george miller who was at the dmz he saw a russian in uniform by time he turned around to go back to waxing that russian was smart enough to get it back into the jungle and then of course lynn black and doug letourneau with when they were in idaho in between my tours they had a guy who came up on their grader who was cuban and he was trying to get that in to surrender and they wouldn't of course um the russian came up and said i know where you are and to show you this is a secret war now to give you a sense of how we were compromised they had a medic on idaho the medic had gone home six or seven days before they got inserted into that target when the cuban came up on the radio said i know where you are here's your coordinates and it's the frenchman and the black and black jack he knew them by code names and he didn't say anything about the third american they he already knew they were gone you know because we've had stories about sog being compromised and of course the fun part of that is at some point you know doug was talking to lincoln's who the hell you talking to we're on a mission he goes he gives it to lynn link got talking to the guy the guy said we're going to come and get you and he said i got your quarterback lynn is let me give you our eight digit coordinates i'm on top of the hill this is oh by the way your mother well she must have been a piss-poor [ __ ] because has she been a good hooker you wouldn't have got stuck in vietnam you would have gotten a good job with the russians in europe somewhere but your mom was a piece with a piss-poor [ __ ] they never came for him i mean that means the the unit was completely compromised from from yeah well there's two things you know um when when the uh when the ship was uh captured in korea um the name me right yeah it's like red something red uh red tail or [ __ ] it'll come in i know exactly what you're talking about the koreans the russians asked the koreans to capture the ship because it was a u.s ship had all the radio intel stuff so the second they come into north korea port the russians took all of the encryption equipment that was our latest encryption then at that time unbeknownst to our country the walkers the father and son combination were selling the codes to russians in the u.s right so for several years and this was confirmed later uh by the cia by the navy that they had all those codes and then years later we interviewed a cia agent who had been in germany who talked to the russians that confirmed that they were there and they had the coach they kept saying we couldn't believe the saw guys didn't have more sophisticated radio equipment we could monitor them all the time wow and macv was compromised in uh in saigon right correct at the headquarters yeah and john plaster's book the uh his coffee table book there's a picture of a major george uh gas bar with the spy he's right there sorry i'm just uh digging into our library back here we dig in deep john plaster's book if you guys want that's the regular book but his pictorial is the one with the picture of the communist spy with major gaspard and yes john john i call john the godfather of sog writers because he was the one that fought the early battle he's the first one to do a non-fiction book on sod and it's pretty complicated for this pictorial oh yeah good stuff um and you know all this stuff with the russians it's it's rings pretty true and consistent with uh you know the other things that were going on in um you know angola for instance um and then of course afghanistan so i mean it really was a worldwide war against you know international communism absolutely and you know and there have been a couple op-ed pieces um that talk about how by the americans fighting communism in vietnam other countries indonesia micronesia they had a chance to better prepare in singapore because singapore's got one of the top spec ops units in the world today and southeast asia and they had a chance to get ready and they fought communism there before it got out of hand so by us holding ground in southeast asia that's one thing that nobody will talk about and it was also about reassuring our uh our european allies i mean after the suez incident in the 50s we had kind of snubbed the british and the french and and made them feel uh maybe you know the united states could go either way as far as having our back um then you have the berlin wall go up you have communism expanding all around the world um we fought in vietnam to convince the brits and the french and the and you know our german allies that we were not going to turn away we were not going to back down from the fight and i mean i i'd be interested to hear your point of view on on that john and was it justified i mean you had the the ken burns documentary coming at come out that i know you were very critical of and but i mean for someone of my my age my generation when i go and look at all the names on the wall uh in washington dc it it's tough it's it's tough to deal with and i know it's ten times more for you guys who are there and i i'd really love to hear you know your perspective on it well my my perspective is unique in that on my team i had four soldiers who came from north vietnam at the end of um after world war ii the north vietnamese the communists fought the french and the key battle was the battle of the nbn food well for 18 months after that people in the north could go south and people in the south if they wanted to could go north well thousands of people went south nobody went north and the navy had ships it took thousands of people down well on my team so i i say that because all of our guys they knew that south vietnam was corrupt there's no question about that however our guys preferred a corrupt government they knew as opposed to the communists and they were familiar with and anybody who would take a look at the history of the communists the way they rule today as well as then as well as during world war ii the they ruled by an iron fist look at hungary czechoslovakia all these countries poland i mean do it our way or we'll run you over with our military and it's our way or the highway so my perspective was i went back because i really believed in the team and what we were doing we were fighting communism at a very well top secret level and it turns out our casualty rate was the highest in the war from saag and uh but that mission i believe in i still do and uh at the end now all the major battles our conventional troops won the marines whoever fought won the major battles it was congress that refused a fund and of course there are some political changes there along the way and tricky dick with the watergate that was just you know a lot of things that came together to hurt the overall mission so yeah 58 000 names in that wall not to mention all of our mias today painful and how many mias do we still have over in vietnam laos cambodia yeah the total today is 1586. and that includes china and thailand there were a few pilots that got downed up there never heard from again we lost some in thailand and of course our recon guys and plus you know the avia like you guys have experienced our aviation assets whether they're in your case it would be the apaches and and the fast movers and of course your a30s good stuff and they were dedicated they're the best air force in the world we had the same thing and plus we had the vietnamese air force and um but they they they paid a price for it i mean there was over over 100 aviators and some of our bright lights were for the downed aircraft and uh you know we just always salute the air force for that for their courage because without them we wouldn't be here without the south vietnamese air force that pulled us out as little sikorsky's you know uh some of our guys had 50 plus different holes in their in their king beat we had one our mission from echo 4 we had 48 bullet holes including one that went right through the helicopter uh rotary blade and we always left under fire the only question was how much and how many again i know what that's like you've been there like you said there's what 50 special forces soldiers still mia right 50 green berets from the speaker war that are still there which includes jerry mad dog shriver idaho and a lot of other americans that were there at that time and nobody could talk about it you know and the additional side the pain of the side of that is the families because here's a family all they get is a notification from the army that their soldier died and they'll probably tell them in vietnam even that's not true and it's not the families have gone on all the parents have died some of the siblings have died before they ever learned so in our case we had the special operations association where we had a reunion and we talked about them all the time as well as we had the uh our anniversary in uh 2018 was the 50th anniversary of the night one of our camps got hit at da nang where we lost uh 16 green berets in one night but that was by sappers they knew who we were that was specifically designed to attack saw so we were compromised and yes the casualty rate is painful talk a little bit about that about the the hit on quantum um because i i know you you did a ton of research on that um although you weren't there but you you did a lot of research and wrote about the attack the tailwind uh no ccn when they got hit the the oh that was that will be for august 23rd 68. can you talk a little bit about that absolutely um fob4 was opened in 67 at the end of 67 and um there's a top secret base but anything in vietnam you know they had their spies they knew who we were they attacked the base briefly in december of 67 but we later learned that they planned for a year a sapper attack on the night of august 23rd 68 when there was no moon and um they had we're finding out now some more information about who the exact sapper units were some nva sappers vietcong and the camp is right next to marble mountain and marble mountain was which we didn't realize at the time had several levels underneath the mountain where the vietcong the locals and of course on that attack the nva were there so the 90 attack several dozen infiltrated through the wire into the base and they went into the indigenous troop mess hall where they had a final briefing right on the base and then after midnight is there's some confusion as to when it was launched but our recon company was down by the south china sea there are three rows of hooches down here and when they hit they went down with machine gunners and they lined up at the end of the sidewalk so anybody coming out would be gunned down so like one of the who should we had uh doug godshaw john peters and william brick the third was in there and john peters and doug because um and the reason why it hit that night there was a promotion board there for the entire cnc so you had guys coming in for promotion review and that they had also consolidated the cnc command and they brought it into da nang at the headquarters and they also had their monthly briefing from all the fob commanders so they knew they had a lot of extra people there so all their intel was right on and when they hit they had their machine guns set up down there they went around to the hooches with the satchel charges and it was just a free-for-all and uh even on the mountain on marble mountain they had mortals that opened fire and we had a recon team up there where larry trimble and his nuns were able to kill the mortar teams and they were able to suppress them for the rest of the next two or three days had they not the casualty would have been much higher and there is also just north of fob4 was an nva pow camp that had over 500 nva soldiers and they knew the attack was coming and there was an effort to try to break them out but it was thwarted at the last minute one of our guys had a gunship that came in and made a gun run right between our base and the pow camp that killed all the sappers that were trying to get in to free the prisoners so they could come join the battle there's a free throw all night it's it's not just like total chaos out there uh absolutely and they so they they waited in from the water to get around the perimeter defense right came in on the beach and you remember when i was writing that article about george bacon we talked about this also oh sure because george was [ __ ] passed out on the beach it got shot in the shoulder when these sappers came like it came up uh but we maybe we talk about george a little later he is such a character that's like a whole digression right there and um sadly he was killed in uh angola working as a mercenary on valentine's day 1976 i believe it was i'd have to take a look but back to qantum um what was the counter it was before uh i'm sorry yeah uh what was um what was the counter attack how did how did these guys begin to repel these sappers that had snuck in well throughout the night there was no concerted effort it was individuals that would team up so the camp was really spread out and they planned uh the one key aspect that they missed the talk we had opened up a brand new talk two days before the attack so when they hit when they hit the base they hit the old talk and we had two or three guys that were killed in there and um fortunately the men who were in the talk were able to fend off the attack and keep it going as well as the communication center but they would they kicked in the air conditioners and then they would throw in hand grenades inside and uh but our guys were able to uh get the hand grenades back out the the hole that was just one of the little sidebars that passed down and then we had uh individuals like there was one guy named travis mills travis was in a hooch down the recon company when he came out he got shot right away and he sees the guy that shot him he goes no no no i'm an american he gets shot again he because no i'm on your side he got shot a third time well by now travis being from texas and all he was an officer so you know officers are slow learners sometimes he figured out that maybe this guy wasn't one of our digs but he got shot two more times so here he was shot five times and when he ant one of the guys was going around with an ambulance one of the officers was driving the ambulance and we also had a navy corpsman who had heard all the explosions and came into base that night to help out pick up some of the wounded well when travis got picked up taken back to the dispensary they they gave they triaged him and said well your five wounds are bad but they're not fatal they passed them up and said you're in charge of security the back door they gave a car 15 and there he was for two or three hours before he finally got taken to the main uh hospital off off base but that was just one of the heroes you know for that night but there was a lot of that one-on-one stuff and and and they um most of the nva had just the loin cloth and the many warded headbands that said we came here to die and they died one of them one of them [ __ ] holed up in the [ __ ] didn't they yeah they had a couple there and they were the last two that we confirmed um and uh yeah there was a lot of firepower and they blew themselves up because when they uh somehow our guys learned they were there because at colonel barr lieutenant colonel barr came down from fob one at first light and they started uh by the pow base and then he came south to fob4 came in and started sweeping through the camp and when that was going on somehow some of the guys that were in the dining hall heard about these guys in the [ __ ] so they went out and there was a firefight and then the guys in the [ __ ] that blew it blew up the [ __ ] a good [ __ ] and themselves which cost the war jack i'm telling you it's a testament to the amount of chaos when the fact that they kicked in the air conditioners into the top they threw in grenades the people in the top picked up live grenades tossed them back out when that's just a detail of the overall fight and not you know what i mean like that's insane in and of itself but that's just one small detail of what was going on in that moment yeah we and we had guys that uh i mean some of the tragic deaths i mean like william breck brick as i said when he came out of his hooch he was gunned down immediately by the nba gunners and we had another lieutenant who when the satchel charge was thrown into the the transit barracks the explosion had a two by four that went through and pierced his chest and nailed them literally nailed it to his bed killed him instantly and that was just you know just some of these odd things that happened during the night and the hand not much hand-to-hand but hand grenades and shooting people to 45s and pat watkins and then they were in their in their transit barracks they could see the shadow of this guy and pat only had a 45 he's no good student so he shot a couple times but they still threw the social charge in this just stuff went on late and all throughout the night and there was some big [ __ ] show also with like help not arriving until like 24 hours later as i recall well no that's not right uh colonel barr came down from fob1 and they were there first light so the attack was launched after midnight um and the radio signals went down to our headquarters in the train so the triangle set up a force and they were there by mid morning or late in the morning okay so but colonel barr got there first and he had a bunch of volunteers from fob one that went down with him and they cleaned house anything left over then they went through the whole camp and anybody looking for any live pows as well as our guys who were wounded just to see what they could do to help your buddy george bacon even though he was wounded he still served and helped some guys yeah yeah he was a medic and uh john when i was doing the research i found some stuff in john's book john plaster's book uh he was out on he was out on patrol with george a couple times was that right yeah yeah i forgot that mm-hmm but george was with us at fob1 and he's brilliant i mean he came into camp he was assigned to a montana team within a week he was talking mountain yard ease with the yards and then in between he would hang out with the vietnamese just to learn the language so within a few weeks he was speaking three different languages he was speaking the brood mountain yard dialect he picked up vietnamese wanted to communicate and he talked to the cambodians god was brilliant i know he had these big shoulders he looked like a walking clothes rack wish holders and he always wore the ugliest hats and can't remember the thing i remember fondly about george is he found ugly hats somewhere but he was a hell of a soldier and a great medic george you know his full name george washington bacon iii and um you know john knew him the a lot of the sad guys knew him of course when he was there but i wrote an article about him years ago and the guy is just he was a super eccentric individual super high iq i think that probably had something to do with it it just like john said he he spoke many languages he read every single book he could find and when he ran out of books he'd go digging through the trash to try to find new books to read all right anything anything that was printed he would read it this guy he wore a rolex watch at home um but instead of the band it was like a pink piece of twine that secured the watch to his wrist uh he did not uh stop at traffic lights he did not obey he did not recognize the lawful authority of traffic lights and i don't need a [ __ ] machine to tell me when there's cars here or not uh he drove a morris miner he he some of his some of his friends think he gave most of his money away he wore finely tailored suits because he came from uh i was told his family had some connection to hickney freeman big uh suit company so he had very nice suits made but he wore them with jungle boots he built a this guy built the harley-davidson motorcycle he bought the parts at auctions and then composed he built it over time in his basement and built the harley and then his friends looking at him like george how the [ __ ] are you gonna get out of your basement and he was like oh yeah i i didn't think of that at all so his friend had to ride it up the steps up the basement steps and went flying out the front door and almost wrecked it um so george after after vietnam after mac visage george went uh he was a cia contractor in laos doing paramilitary ops over there right you can find stuff about george in james parker's book about that another cia officer under his um his call sign kayak because that was his favorite sport was kayaking after laos he bounced between the cia and academia and he was uh he went and served as a mercenary in angola um he was just that kind of guy who'd fight communism wherever it was wherever you could find it and there's a lot of contention to this day whether or not he was working for the cia or not when he was killed and the the honest answer to you is i i don't know well we had heard that they had put up you know the cia has that wall of fame where any of their kids heard that there was one a star for it was for george that one's for him yeah that's what i heard that that would be fascinating to uncover the truth behind that oh yeah george what a character he was a hell of a medic i mean he was so bright i mean you know but the other thing with george was he was a magnet ass whatever team he went on once they were on the ground they got into a world of [ __ ] it wasn't like you'd be on the ground for a couple days and they figured out they get the tracking dog no no no they get on the ground the george got hit hard but he got the team out he was just a great guy i uh when when i got to the end of writing that article john uh i felt like i had known him and uh i was it i was just so sad that i had never actually gotten the chance to meet him that you know he he was killed before i was even born um right the way that happened actually was that he was with uh a canadian mercenary also and a few others and they drove headlong into a uh convoy full of cubans and others it's very complicated the politics but there's united he was with fenwa and it was like fenway's dying days in angola they were towards the end of their run um and they were actually in the process of evacuating into zaire um when they ran into that convoy and their vehicle just got lit up by machine gun fire and george was probably dead by the time he steps out of the vehicle wow never never recovered his remains either oh is that right no well we uh we have some questions but my stream froze up so we're gonna have to ask yeah sure but uh so people got some questions for you john uh gordon says always amazed at the scale of the assets needed to insert the recon team's ie backup helicopters the number of potential enemy in the ao these teams will face and any experience or stories with white advisors for the nva while on sag missions i've seen a few different recon soft units i think we talked about that john but anything you want to add um you just came in broken i i think he's asking about foreign advisors with the uh with the north vietnamese oh well no we we confirmed there's no question about it and even chinese they were there and uh just a quest of how many and we've confirmed that in multiple sources so yeah russians and besides you know north vietnam couldn't have fought that war without the communist bloc behind them that's all and they they gave them all supplies they needed and including the latest anti-aircraft weaponry they trained their pilots and you know we some of our pilots killed sunder migs which was good but they had sophisticated state-of-the-art equipment at that time and uh we lost a lot of good airmen over that in that war up there there's two wars he had the war in hanoi hai pon which is north vietnam and then we had the ho chi minh trail aspect of it and our super war with our missions and uh where the air force paid a high price and up there you had navy and air force that launched from characters so that answers questions jack no i think so i think so um chris yeah this is a good question actually what are the differences between sog and project delta sigma omega gamma etc well we had uh the delta project was set up initially in country and they were they did tremendous work in country and like for example when a camp was getting hit delta force would go out and when i first came in country we were at the safe house and there was a delta force team that was there that had just come back from a mission where they had gone into the ash shaw to help relieve one of our hatchet forces or one of our recon teams i forget what it was so the sigma project was ccs and then uh the project delta guys stayed mostly in country then you had mike force also and the mike force you know you talked to a couple of guys from microsoft guys you went in you did a clandestine mission that's a good mission for you when we were in country we hunted those little [ __ ] we went after him we'd look for them we wanted to engage them and eliminate them and they did they did great work i mean there's some epic stories from the mike force yeah in country absolutely but that's the difference and uh sigma was uh ultimately became ccs down south because in 68 we had six fobs they consolidated so we have ccn and at dinang and then we have ccc contume of ccs there was a bambi to it further south and then to add another layer of complexity to all of this there's the phoenix program uh there's all these other other different projects to confuse people further sure and the phoenix program again here's one that that the agency was involved in we had sf people attached to it and it wasn't one of the most effective countermeasures against the viet vietcong hierarchy they would get into the village learn who the bad guys were and eliminate them they were calmness we were at war but again the corrupt south vietnamese sometimes began eliminating political adversaries as opposed to the communists and of course the washington post or one of our friendly publications got a hold and put that negative twist on it ignoring all the good that was done and they never understood truly what a guerrilla war is uh john mullins talked about that when we had him well john would tell you chapter and verse on that yeah oh he did he did oh yeah yeah uh you know we had him on a while ago amazing and he told me things about macbee saga i didn't even know about you guys running double agents across the fence oh yeah we had a few but again this is this wasn't at my left above my page yeah yeah yeah i hear ya pretty sneaky um john maybe we could like um well hell let's just go for it the war stories man i i think that there'd be some benefit and kind of like walking people through um going out on a patrol going across the fence what that whole experience was like kind of preparing for it going over the border and running recon um i don't know if there's a particular operation that you would be interested in talking about um one that comes to my mind of course is uh that terrifies me when i read about it in your book um when you guys can push you got when you got pushed up into the draw and the and the nva set the elephant grass on fire around you just makes me nervous as hell just reading about it well you know that that was small potatoes compared to the lynn black well in our case we got inserted on christmas day and it was on a little knoll and the knoll was really steep on the west and the south side we couldn't go down it was just too steep so we landed we go east it's elephant grass and we're heading to the jungle we've only been on the ground maybe 20 30 minutes i forget now but we our point man made contact minimal we came back and the north west side was too steep and it was quiet up at the northeastern side so lynn black said you know we could go there but it's too quiet and then we had a radio report that came in said we have an intelligence report now mind you we're on the ground and the intel report says do not go to the northeast there's an ambush waiting for you it turned out that the frenchman was in another target he picked up radio transmission of the nba talking about rt idaho they knew it was us in their ao by name doug heard them talking he told spider and spider tells me and lynn and i had already figured that was the one last option if we're going to try to continue but we had made contact so we're compromised and then that that was the most historic mission for us because that radio contact but so with the firefight going on the we had hand grenades and they sparked flames in the elephant grass and this fire was coming up the mountain at us and at one point lynn black and bubba were putting c4 charges in to literally try to blow the fire back down the mountain to gain some time and we could not leave the peak it was too steep on each side we knew the northeast had an ambush and so we were battling the fire and at one point you could look through the flames and see two nba stand there at port arms looking at us like hey what are you guys doing it's going to be crispy critter time well luckily captain tuang the king bee pilot came down the mountain sideways and the prop wash blew back the flames we jumped on and left and the whole hilltop was over overrun overcome with the flames it's just amazing moment in time and but that is wimpy can appear to lin black now here's the mission where lynn was uh on a team they had a new team leader who came in from 10th group he didn't understand guerrilla warfare but he was a team leader because the senior nco so the day before they did a visual reconnaissance and they're flying at visual reconnaissance in a small air of south vietnamese air force two pilot co-pilot and they're doing a visual reconnaissance a 51 mike mike opened up one round went through the cabin took the pilot's head off with his helmet which landed in lynn black's lap and then needless to say they left the ao went right back but that was the target they were going into the next day they launched and the first helicopter went in with the one zero limb was on the second helicopter they had a total of nine men well lynn saw the nva flag flying lynn had a previous tour of duty with the 173rd he knew that if there's a flag there's at least a battalion three thousand he talks to this team leader and the guy goes no gook's going to run me off my mission so he didn't listen to lynn who knew what was going on then he he did the more he committed immortal sin he told the team to go down a trail so they had argued for this they argued about going down the trail they finally got down the trail they're going downhill and the hill had on a right uh like a about 30 or 40 feet high and there was an l well the nva put 50 soldiers up there and they when they walked down they opened fire they killed the point man who was a good south vietnamese point man they killed the 1-0 who made the mistake and they wounded a third guy who died later that day and they were in the fire fight and uh that fire fight went on for all day now in that 50 people when i interviewed lynn for the book lane goes i remember shooting some people they would spin around i had to shoot him a second a third time well this mission went on for the entire day where they they stacked up so many dead bodies that when they did a wave attack they used the dead nva soldiers to sit behind that when they ran out of ammo they started using nva uh gear and equipment and rounds and uh at one point lynn got knocked out by a hand grenade and the impact was so severe that it knocked him unconscious destroyed his car 15 and they woke him up he got back on his feet and carried on that day we lost two king bees a jolly green giant got shot down and then ultimately at the end of the mission a jolly green came down and hovered and just went lily chopped trees down to hover in the jungle while lynn his team went out and they got to the helicopter and they found the air force pilot of the jolly green that got shot down and his door gunner and they were able to get them all back to the helicopter and they were going up the lift and lynn went back to the teammate who was wounded and the guy said give me your 45. so then gave him a 45 and then as lynn was walking running back to the helicopter the guy killed himself because he knew the nba were coming and when lin's running back to the helicopter two nva come out with their aks and say chu hoy meaning surrender and lynn just kept coming they were young soldiers and linda's charged him grabbed their aks knocked the one guy out with the ak hit the other guy in the face and he burned his hands because the ak-47s were hot for them shooting at the helicopter he gets lifted up just hoisted down 30 years later when they're going back for the body of that 1-0 lin got a phone call from a north vietnamese general who said i am bushed you that day and he said i i was a colonel then i set up the ambush they're talking back and forth and so finally um then goes you know that was a bad day we lost three men that guy goes a bad day for us you know we had 90 casualties lingo's ninety percent he goes yeah between the air you could he has spads fast movers the door gunners you know the helicopter gunships i mean at one point when lynn and his team was behind the dead bodies they had a wave attack come and as a next wave attack the helicopter came down from the muskets and hovered and opened fire on the pending wave attack then pull down to help defend that's the kind of protection they had that day and uh so the general goes yeah you inflicted 90 casualties and the link is well we saw the flag that was a battalion right the guy goes no it was an nba division i had 10 000 men there and you inflicted 90 casualties then the general goes hey who who was the guy standing up in the ambush the lingus that was me he said you shot me three times [Laughter] so that's one of the classic all-time song stories in my opinion i invited you to bring it back for what it's worth mine too john i was i was rereading that story today when i was going through your book and looking at the highlights i made um and what do you like like that that mission where you know that you were describing that you were on where the elephant grass was on fire i mean you were all down to as i recall one magazine a piece that was all you had left you had well at that mission here i wasn't that low the day twice i remember there were times when i went through 600 plus rounds down to the last magazine that was echo 4 on october 7th where we had been in contact for several hours and we had stacked up somebody's air but nothing like what lynn had and that was when we came out on the when we got pulled out he hovered we threw the guys into the helicopter and i was the last guy in and then we let go the last magazine and the last hand grenade and we had been in contact for about four hours and i mean you told me about what how many radio antennas did you have shot off your back during the war no only only two that i could be called only two only just moment time yeah we had the long antenna up and it got they got shot off john when you know you said that uh they knew your team's name they knew your infiltration points how did that feel like when you go back to base and get new missions did everybody just accept that every single operation you guys went on was compromised somehow how early did you guys learn that that's a good question like how would that how did that feel for you and for the team in general well you know we we told the intel guys about it and and whenever we had what we felt was we knew there was compromise i mean for example we had one target where um we were going into the lz and somehow my my little people one of my end dids saw a wire across the lz so not only did they know we were coming but they had a chip wire that was tied to a 500 pound bomb had he not seen that had we hit the wire that 500 pound bomb would have wiped us right out gone so you know it's just like that we all have our mission you go on the mission you're told to do we're talking beside behind lines to ourselves at the club we talk to the officers we talk to us to say hey guys this is stuff's going on we tell s3 they have reports that go down to saigon but then it's out of our hands you know and then we have to go back the next day we get brief i mean sometimes they want teams on the ground so bad they would just give us a target and look at it and you get look out on the way out to the helicopter jump on the chopper and go so you really wouldn't have much time to really review any of the intel but again you know you follow orders and go that's one of those it wasn't fun it was frustrating we just wish that we had more um response let me put it that way from i had read that you guys started bullshitting mac v at a certain point lying about the lz's you were going in because you came to distrust them so much yeah we would and we give them the for the official report that we go to saigon here's our primary secretary to northern lz's we get to the launch site you pull a company pile aside and say hey we told saigon this but you find us in lz and put us in there and it worked i mean we had much more success that way and even nick brockhouse and you know a year later nick was doing the same thing they were finding their lz's or just tell copy go find one because like in the early part of 68 we'd always fly a visual reconnaissance well the congress aren't stupid if they see a bird dog flying around they know that the choppers are coming right and get ready right so were the images that you guys worked with were they were they above suspicion or did you guys not really know where the leaks were coming from was there you know was there strife inside the teams no well uh my team know my team was highly vetted um the assistant we had our counterpart his name was sal so when i got there in 68 sal had been on the team for three years half our interpreter had been on the team for three years at that point and they were good sal could smell the enemy he knew how they thought and um so when our team got wiped out they vetted the vietnamese we heard we hired three fifteen year olds and another a member of the team that came on so i was green they were green and because sound had been such veterans i had to earn their respect i had to show that i could live up to their standards to to justify being on the team and it took a few months you know sal was a hard customer um but uh so on our individual team no and on some of the really good recon teams because the green berets would work with the indigenous people closely enough that it was not a problem however sometimes with hatchet force the bigger force of the cambodian sometimes you had issues there and lynn black later i think it was 1970 he was given a north vietnamese team that converted and they were supposedly wanting to work well lynn took him down to the range one day and they're down there training at some point lynn found that he was standing by himself and all the enemy troops were behind him and they all the enemy troops turned their guns on lyndon said put your gun down we're leaving so lynn goes oh okay he throws his gun down but the nva forgot that lynn had his radio so when they left the range he he could kept track of him he called up covey was able to make radio contact and called in a gunship and wiped him out wow jesus oh yeah yeah lynn black is one slick soldier i'll tell you man i wouldn't want to piss him off even to this day i wouldn't want to piss him off i uh i have to admit i i have not read lynn's book yet it's it's out people want to find it whiskey tango foxtrot right john yes sir and and make sure it's the uh it's the small book version like the uh uh five and a half by eight and a half because he came out when he first did his book it was a bigger format but it had no prologue the smaller version has the prologue which includes his time with the 173rd where his brother got shot up really bad and his brother you got hurt there and one of the reasons why lynn got out after the 173rd he got out for a little bit of time but then he decided i want to go back to special forces i want to take some revenge from my brother you getting wounded right and he talked to his brother you and you goes what the [ __ ] are you doing i'm back i'm alive you don't have to go back for me well then went back and he did take he he killed some communists yeah it sounds like it yes oh it's a phenomenal book i mean i'm sorry i've read it a few times now because uh it's because he get into lynn black's head on some of this stuff it's really but also his leadership skills he just took over that team you know 1-0 was killed the other american on the team at that mission he'd never fired one round he was there praying and crying really yup i remember that oh yeah just a complete coward john can you tell us about your first mission country like what you were expecting what how it went down for you because that must have been a bit of a culture shock right yeah we well we did a couple in-country ambushes at night and so it was just in country training and no big deal our first real mission across the fence was into the astral valley we inserted the air force sensors it had a big central unit with coaxial cables that went out maybe 20 feet so we had to bury everything leave the antennas up well this is my first mission so i'm the low man on total pool me and hep had security at one end and um don wilkin had security at the other end and then spider parks was our 1-0 so prior to going in we figured oh [ __ ] this is it's show time you know we load up with extra bullets and everything and um [Music] true to the forum the nva fight when they want to fight we went in put in the whole device everything slick a snail snot choppers came back we never fired a shot and when we left uh an nva door gunner opened up with i mean a nva gunner with a 51 caliber opened up well we had so much tack air they came down and killed him four or five times just for good luck but you know again we're thinking oh it's going to be a fire fight it's the asheville valley like ken miller those guys have all earned their purple hearts down here and um but not a shot fired and then we did the same thing we put in sensors at caisson right where the right where the whole historic battle had occurred because there was a lot of enemy traffic there we put that sensor in and then um we'd also run a mission on the east side of yasha no contact within four or five days did reports then echo four and that was the one we went in right the day after lynn black was distracted on october 6 we went in he got it it started on the fifth we went on the sixth we made contact on the seventh and that's where we stacked them up and i went right down to the last magazine so that that lived up to expectations and that was like a real eye opener but again sal and hep opened fire in the nva before any of us americans knew it they hit them first and they did the magazine change so we had fire superiority right away you know and one other just one little sidebar you know how you have tunnel vision in a fire fight well i was in the middle of firing one of the main areas they're coming at us out of the jungle and [ __ ] our point man opened fire so i'm shooting here i thought he was shooting over my shoulder and we got back to base the next day we were talking and i said i couldn't hear because he's just like the rounds you know how it is when you're in front of it well in your case an m4a1 blasting away i said [ __ ] what the [ __ ] now i couldn't hear why are you shooting over my shoulder he goes you didn't see down the hill there was some nba coming up i killed them i wasn't shooting over your shoulder yeah so the tunnel vision at the moment had he not done that within seconds i would have been a kia so you know that's just one of those little moments in time yeah you were getting flanked and you were completely unaware because you were you're focused oh yes yeah so green is grass acting stupid there were folks saving my ass you know yeah what was like the composition of your team in terms of like americans in indige well we had um in the beginning was three americans and then we had uh nine vietnamese so the americans would usually would run all the missions and then we would rotate the vietnamese so for the first few months though it would be hep and cell hep's our best interpreter sal was the team leader and then he had trained up [ __ ] to be our point man and then the other team members were trained so by time we got into november and december where we're running multiple missions particularly on the days we would go out in the morning and get shot out of the primary secondary authority come back refuel another targets same thing our little people were getting worn out so we'd rotate them but the americans would stay on and uh so uh in our case we had nine or ten south vietnamese great guys i'm alive today thanks to them and of course they can be the south vietnamese the air force and all the air assets but our guys were wonderful and they trained up it took them a while but but when i came back for my second tour of duty idaho was tight and uh hap had trained a couple of the south vietnamese to speak english so if i got shot or any of the americans got shot the south vietnamese could pick up the radio direct airstrikes and talk to covey and whatever else needs to be done we train them up that way that's part of our cross training you know yeah so our team was we were just blessed we had a great team and there were nuns uh other teams that had his historic uh team members that uh they would literally put their life down like the frenchman he was one night he was calling home he put together a tape for his mom and dad and his appointment came in and said said doug's parents i want to thank you for sending doug here don't you worry i'll protect him if they shoot him i will catch his bullet thank you for sending your son yeah that's awesome so i i i just like to hear one more second on the composition of the team the americans were i believe one one one two one zero and then you had what four or five indigenous personnel right so by by the time i got to a january of 69 my little people were so good i just had another american so bubba sure left the team lynn black came on and lynn was just a phenomenal guy so we ran some missions nothing historic just routine stuff or sometimes getting shot out of the target and then we had a special mission the one that the pitcher is there we were all geared up for we're on the helicopters we're launching and they called us back and we never never got underground on that mission and uh so that was right at the end of my tour of duty and two days later i rotated home and went back to fort davis for a few months then came back in october of 69. lynn was still the one zero the team was tight the frenchman had been with him so it was a frenchman in lynn and then with lynn and i and then about january they said hey you guys have got too much experience here so that lynn went off the team and then i took over we took turns being 1-0 that's pretty incredible yeah it's such a oh yeah you take arrangements for admissions we always had four i'd prefer the six-man team because if the [ __ ] is really in the fan and there's heavy enemy fire one chopper would take the whole team out when you had eight the questions of uh altitude elevation enemy fire just trying to get the second helicopter sometimes was was was fatal it was a fatal mission so um that's why that's why i preferred some other guys like going in heavier yeah and by 1771 like i said uh when jack and i were talking before the show like nick brockhouse and those guys they all carried rpds and carried he carried over a thousand rounds for the rpd and when eldon bargewell earned his uh distinguished service cross he was shot in the face and he continued to lay down suppressing fire when the team was evacuated and uh with his rpd and he went right down to the last couple of rounds and you know elton was a fixture a legend of the special operations community just passed away a few years ago or maybe just just a year ago really it wasn't it wasn't long ago yeah we lost it two years ago two years ago john you guys were really being called upon you know you when you say oh we did these missions nothing historic but you were really being called upon to really sacrifice to hook and jab to to mix it up in ways that i think are beyond most of us how often would guys show up from you know sf and not be a good fit for that not be a good match well there are a few but you know um like that mission i had with echo 4 i had a guy on a team he had been in the 173rd had a tour duty with the 173rd so by october 68 we had lost so many people that sag was bringing in airborne troops then eventually in 69 they even brought in some legs if they had combat experience so you never knew we we had to get bodies to fill the slot so in answer to your question on that mission after we were done jim davidson he was the one two and i missed even though i carried the radio he was the new american on the team don was the one zero our assistant team leader and uh but jim was great on the ground he was tough he hung in there and he was he couldn't ask more of him two days after the mission he came up to me and said hey man um i can't do this he said i had a tour with a herd i i've never seen anything like this and i've never seen anything like that i don't know if i could ever do that again and he says you won't hold that against me i said no why would i do that you're honest i appreciate that because if we went to the field another time we don't know what happened this way you're telling me and i said you and i went to the asheville we survived it and we came back thanks to you sure so i have no grudge i would say you want me to go to sergeant major we'll get a new assignment and that's what i did i went to the sergeant major jim got another assignment and there are other americans that some guys didn't want to be one zeros and we had some guys that would come in look at the guy on lynn black's team complete coward total coward but he um he was it took a while but he got transferred to other duty and even then he created some some issues but that's another story so in answer to your question some sf guys said no and it was a volunteer operation and you know reasonably was if you ran for six months you could take six months off for the end of your duty well we just needed bodies and it would be up to the individuals and i respected anybody who said i can't do this and you know how it is you prefer to have a guy be honest and say i can't do it and that way you don't have to worry about them in the field because the guys and even bob ashore bubba came up to me he'd been we ran a shitload of missions with bubba he was a great guy and he came up to me in january and said look um do you i've been offered a job at the uh at the headquarters company said do you mind i said no i appreciate it because we had been in a target and he had hesitated a little bit one time one one order i gave him which we talked about it on the ground and i was just wondering and when he told me that after we're back at the basis said no bubba i said you're a stud man i love you you're part of the brotherhood and whatever you need to do i'll help you whatever job you want and uh by that time lynn black was ready to rock and roll so i knew i had lynn and uh he plays a good man with an outstanding man yeah and that's that's one of the things is sometimes you never know what's going to shake a person and sure it doesn't take away all of their service up until that point right you know and all the things that they've done just because yeah you never know to the fur to the legs in the ear right right and uh and we've had some historic cases of guys folding up under fire well if somebody says no i can't at least they're honest enough so you got men in the field and in my case again i was lucky i had spider parks had combat experience don wolken they were my two one zeros before i became the one zero and uh they took good care of us you know they they got us in and out more importantly got us out yeah yeah for sure we have some more questions real quick uh thank you uh vulcan um what are your thoughts on russian fsb saboteurs in ukraine killing other soft soldiers was there anything similar to that vietnam well we had a sapper attack at fb4 and um we were told that they were planning an attack at fob1 but we closed it down before the attack came we there was some of that our special forces at the a camps had some issues with indigenous troops that they hired who went sideways on in a firefight or if the a camp would be assaulted some of them would open fire on our guys so that was at the traditional a camps um a couple of our recon teams had issues where the little people ran but they didn't open fire on the americans so in stog to the best of my knowledge and there might be other guys that had different experiences i don't know um we didn't have that but special forces there were some really horrible cases of the friendly fire or our allies uh working being aligned with the vietcong or the nba so it was there maybe not as dramatic fashion as today in afghanistan when they get into the base camp and they kill a bunch of american soldiers as well as and one uh that blue on blue was it jack is that the proper phrase uh yeah blue on blue and then blue on green would be when that well blue and blue would be america in america and blue on green would be in indeed friendly indige no in air quotes on americans yeah sure sure um thank you ian for uh the donation stories about about a kingby pilot named cowboy did you ever meet him any stories direct or indirect about the man no i never met cowboy and there were more than one cowboy who was a vietnamese helicopter both were extraordinary both were fearless and the one cowboy he's mentioning there died early in the vietnam war on a mission where he got shot down and again extreme courage he had he had performed a couple amazing missions where he went in under heavy fire pulled our teams out and uh um but that's the cowboy of legend for the kingby side on on alabama lynn black's team there was a south vietnamese code named cowboy who was a big tall vietnamese and he's still alive he's up in san jose and uh he was just absolutely fearless jonathan was was it your book i maybe get my wires crossed i can't remember which book i read about it where one of the south vietnamese pilots was on the airstrip and a ch-47 came barreling down on them and he starts screaming at the the americans are like you gotta get out of the way of the ch-47 he's like we in vietnam i am vietnamese pilot americans get out of my way oh no no that was me that was you i was me with captain tuan the king beep captain tulong let me fly co-pilot so one day we're flying from fubai up to quan tri the launch site right and so i'm co-piloting and yeah you're right here comes a marine corps chinook a lot bigger a lot of uglier but we're on a collision course and so he could see captain tuwan could see me going man i'm thinking about moving out of the way here he goes no move and i'm going he's bigger than we are he said no move we're vietnamese air force in vietnam the marines will move they did they they turned to the last second and they're all flipping the bird at us and everything and everything you know but hey buku zilloy baby oh yeah captain tulan we just buried him a couple of uh last month sad to say hey you you guys were boys and you like you knew him when he immigrated to america and everything yeah he went back uh after vietnam fell he had to go back for family and the damn kindness got him and his wife told me this time i thought it was five years she told me he was incarcerated in a re-educate quote re-education camp for eight years jesus christ but he escaped came back got a great job and uh he raised his family and of course they've all got their college degrees and uh sadly we we had his funeral back in uh july yeah i i'm glad that he got here though and oh me too yeah you kidding we got the guy called him up every christmas captain tulan you remember where we were christmas 1968 and he goes yeah i remember and he was just as cool the last time i talked to him as he was that day i mean to come down that hill that mountain flying sideways like he did and he's the one that that pulled me out the day i was upside down he's the one who landed when i passed out oh yeah that's why the captain tuang i love you buku baby yeah yeah eddie uh barbara thank you very much for the donation and he just said semper fi brothers well thank you uh general crane thank you uh good evening from ireland john question what was the vetting selection process for the indige on saag teams uh thanks for the great interview and we covered that a little bit yeah well in in my case it was our vietnamese did it they would go out and most of the recon teams the team leader the vietnamese or the chinese nung or the mounting yards they would recruit the monty yards would recruit from their families and their village the noobs would come from they had a sholong which was the part of saigon that was all chinese the nuns came from there so the gnomes would recruit the nuns from their community and then my south vietnamese i'm not sure where where happened sal got him but everyone that we that they recruited their outstanding troops it took a couple a little slower learning but once they got up to speed they were fearless completely fearless and just great men in the field john i want to ask you a little bit about you know the post-war experience and how your book and eventually books came about that you know when you came home from vietnam correct me if i'm wrong like you kind of put the war to bed like i'm done with that that's over getting on with your life and the beginning of across the fence you tell this story that is just so haunting about your daughter playing the piano and you're walking out the window and watching the fog come across your backyard yeah yeah we were at a piano as an invista and uh that was my youngest girl and uh it you you know how these flashbacks you never know when they're going to hit you and so i was in the on the back porch i could hear a plane and uh yeah and those clouds came in there's trees that started with the trees and then there's some clouds or something that came in and all of a sudden i'm in laos i was there and i was talking to bubba i'm talking to the uh the covey because that was a mission where they had put us in we had made we hoped to stay on the ground but by the end of the day we knew they were honest and they were coming at us and then we had had heavy contact and we had to blast our way through an area of where soldiers had attacked us but we were able to get through them after a gun run and we found an area where it come down with the strings and it was right at the end of the day it was foggy and the helicop i remember looking up to the helicopter once the ropes came out it looked like a toy looks so far away and all of that came back and uh we had been in contact for gosh maybe 45 minutes or an hour and it was heavy they kept coming at us but we had moved they couldn't quite tell where we were and so when we finally got pulled out um i had bubba put a uh a claymore and he put a white phosphorus grenade taped it to the front of it and so we had so he i forget how we rigged it now but as we went up we detonated that thing and that helped us give us a few more seconds during the extraction and uh and then all of a sudden was like i'm back in vista but my body was sweaty and uh because i it was i didn't think we were going to get out i really that day that was the one day i really thought we were dead meat either then or it's going to be later that night because they were going to come with us with lanterns and dogs again and we didn't have enough high ground to hide like we did back in november but uh oh yeah it came back jack it really did and how did that impact you that you started you started thinking about the war again how did that coalesce well you know like the best way to handle you compartmentalize it's kind of like holy [ __ ] where'd that come from this is like i forget what year it was now but elena was really young it was her piano lesson so was like five or six minutes three 2004 or something like that oh even later oh yeah and so it came back i mean and uh but you know the moment is i'm there with elena and anna's there for the pianist so it's like daddy did you hear me play whatever the song was yeah you did great kid you know i was like get back to being a dad this is where you are now yeah yeah and uh yeah and and then i had that nightmare with captain tuam the nightmare i had for years that haunted me was on instead of captain tuan coming down the mountain it was a young lieutenant who we had been warned about by the other kingdom said if you get this lieutenant try to avoid him being a lead kingby he could be a backup but not the lead king because he was still learning and they were worried about his courage so that that's kind of report we had with the king bee pilots my nightmare it was him coming down the mountain instead of captain tulan and so instead of him coming all the way down and the prop blown the flames away he pulled away and then i felt the heat of the flames come up and that nightmare stuck with me for quite a while and it came back a couple times even after i married anna i mean we've only been married for 25 years now but i haven't it hasn't come back much the last few years is this kind of what inspired you to write down your experiences so what what was it that got you to write the first book that was my wife really uh we had talked about it and uh because i because of the secret war and because i had done some stuff for soldier of fortune you know and i had a gnome desire with soldier force and bob brown and uh by the time that anna and i got around to talking about the book and stuff it was around 2 000. so we had elena and four teenagers in the house and i'm talking to her i'm going honey i like to i've been thinking about writing the book and she goes no you gotta write it start now i go honey we got four teenagers and a young little girl running around here she goes i'm with you and she has she backed me up every day every way first book second book third the audio books she's always there it's been like my blessing from the lord you know i have my wife amazing without her i still be trying to put together their first book man did did anna understand what you did you ever tell her what you did in vietnam up until that point um you know she had some curiosity so i would talk to her about it and just like with the kids you know if they ever asked the question answer the question up to the extent that they want to hear it and anna was curious i mean she's a sweetheart and as the longer we're together the more she wanted to hear and then when she finally met spider and some of the guys there we go hey you know what this knucklehead did in vietnam yeah he ran recon no no no do you know what this knucklehead really did and uh oh yeah and so over times and plus she's been to a couple of uh of events now where i've been a speaker or something like that and she knows the story she's read the books now uh she's mine she's my uh besides being my sweetheart she's there my biggest fan and uh she's helping out all the time i want to help more so we get we're hearing i'm in tennessee now she's back in oceanside wrapping things up and then uh she's got some more plans for how to push out more books and maybe just a podcast we'll come back and talk about some more podcasts in here for sure do some tilt talk love it actually you never even told us how you came by the nickname of tilt pinball machines see like you guys play pinballs and you lose you walk away and pissed off right when i lose i shake the [ __ ] out of the machine i get to see my nickname and neon at least i get a little satisfaction you know john this will this will absolutely make your day you'll never forgive me for this and man there's a pinball living museum which i took my daughter to to introduce her to pinball machines because these these dang fangled kids and their nintendo switch and all this other stuff oh i took her and i got her introduced they have pinball machines from like the 1960s up until today and uh it's like vegas no no in new york city it's uh it's on like 2nd avenue and we went up there and i took her and it's like hey kid this is the this is what uh grandma's video games were like oh okay yeah here's you know here's my embarrassing story jack it seems how we're embarrassing i had my second daughter meredith we were at a pizza parlor one night she's five years old she could barely reach the flippers she beat me oh my god john how did uh you know it was a secret war you guys signed all these non-disclosure agreements we're told never to talk about it things like that how did how did it all start to come together after the war the the the meetings the the organizations people actually feeling you know getting to the point where they could talk about it find each other things like that well in my case i i had taken down some of the names of our guys and there's a couple like lynn doug letourneau the frenchman rick howard and uh that we stayed in some contact with after the war for a few years and then over time each one would fall off lynn and i uh would talk occasionally the frenchman we not he and i talked until about 79 when i moved to california and then my parents moved we lost contact with doug and a lot of the other guys and then spider parks called me up in 1983 and said hey there's a special operations association it was formed by sag recon and hatchet force and then the leadership brought in all the aviation units the spads all the door gunners and the helicopter pilots the ships and whatnot so they're all they're eligible for membership in the uh soa and so through there was we began going to the reunions i mean the first couple years me and jeffrey junkins uh the reunions were always in vegas and we would um drive out we'd wait for security to leave good they'd go to the bathroom we'd sneak into the reunion right get the free food the free drinks and we find one of our guys and we crash on the floor at night and then go back home but we see the guys and then uh and then we lost jeff and then i took my wife and anna wasn't too impressed with the hotel so she had a few years away from her but pretty much every year we get together and that that helped out and then uh on a very serious note the soa has been uh doing video recordings of their history so now we've got over 125 video recordings of of uh sock recon sonic hatchet forces some of the aviators and i think we include one for jack singh love who was in the oss spec ops for korea he was the officer in charge of sag for two years and then of course he he campaigned vigorously raised money for the contras fighting the uh the comedy bastards down there in nicaragua i have his book right here across from me hazardous duty indeed amazing book and even jack i mean think about it here's jack singh love before world war ii at ucla coming into contact with the communists on campus and how screwed up they were and then the french resistance with jack there's two kinds of resistance the communist side yeah and a side that the americas were aligned with and the economist would only do things that would generate headlines they knew it and they were political even in world war ii the bastards there's a there's a fascinating interview with jack singh lob in the sentinel which is the sfa newsletter out there and uh i heard about that mm-hmm it's really good and and singular talks about that about how in nazi-occupied france the communists uh partisans would do things to like undermine the other partisans and they even would set up like fake drop zones so that they would get the resupply drops from the allies rather than the other guys really really interesting stuff yeah uh i'm right now i'm in franklin tennessee which is where jack lives and hopefully i'll have a cup of coffee with him on sunday morning well give us our regards got a long list of people that i'm giving regards to jack on but for sure i'll add that to the list absolute legend uh uh john i think uh you know there's a lot here there's so much more we could get into but um there's another guy who had a question here and i think this is actually a good one but um just before we get that i want to say to our viewers real quick there's like 230 people just watching this live john um and there'll be many more in the subsequent days i just want to say we really appreciate all you guys showing up giving the uh attention for john and mac b sag and this is really a story we all believe needs to be told um john's books are across the fence on the ground sod chronicles you want to do some more research um we talked about lynn black's book whiskey tango foxtrot we talked about john plaster's book uh which is just called sod uh i just mentioned singh lop's book hazard is duty so those are some good places for you guys to begin your own research um i i think probably the audio now for across the fence i think that's that's on the ground hopefully on the ground will be released across across the fence is the place to start in my opinion um it's one of my favorite memoirs to come out of the vietnam war and i've read a lot of these at this point um no i'm not trying to be a smart ass really it is a really good book um and otherwise i just want to let everyone know um and remind you if you haven't subscribed to the channel please subscribe to it please give us a little thumbs up or thumbs down if you think we suck uh leave a comment below tell us how you think we're doing and uh there's also a link down in the description for our patreon page if you want to support the web or support the channel support the stream if you like what we're doing and keep us running and that will also give you access to the bonus segments that i hope i can twist your arm into doing for for a hot minute here john uh i just got like yeah what do we need what do you do yeah it's got a couple follow-ups for you know 10-15 minutes um some interesting things we'll get into hey remember my wife's in the oceanside so i'm right here i'm i'm ready to roll but i'm yours geographical bachelor i mean you got dave back so i'm really happy to see dave he's like here with such a living legend like dave and you so i'm here buddy too kind john we are so honored and and grateful uh for your time and so sr gross asks oh what is your new book coming out and how can we get your books well the books are on amazon and that's the quick way to get them and uh they're all available in three books and then book four probably won't be starting until a little bit later this year because of moving and all that kind of stuff and uh uh doing some we're dealing with some family issues so i'll get going on that like i said regardless like anna has really encouraged me because of uh podcasts we've had with you jack before and and others that we want to think about it would do more to get exposure to get the shock story the maximum exposure because our guys and sag as well as those who supported us i mean the aviators um you know we had a spad reunion for operation tailwind uh we had it in tennessee at the tennessee aviation museum in sevierville four years ago i think it was four or three years ago and it was amazing because this is the first time that i met and shook hands with a spad pilot right all those times that they came in and delivered ordinance danger close i mean i i told them i remembered from spads and from uh the musket door gunners they were so close that we had their 7.62 cartridges in our neck of our burning our skin but i never complained because that was that close coverage i mean and those fads like on my last mission the spad runner made a gun run they came back and made a second gun run and he turned the plane a little he looked over at me and i could tell you he was so close he was smoking a philly charoot and then i saluted him because you know but these are god we met so we never knew who these aviators were that saved our bacon time after time yeah and so that's one of the things what the soa does and that beginning with the spad piles particularly some who remembered being there for lynn black on october the 5th just amazing i think you should do it john because you know all of these guys and they'd be comfortable talking to you and you could really break some ground that you know that that's never been done before i i think you should definitely go for it yeah well we will talk to you more about that uh when we get off off camera absolutely absolutely thank you anything we can do to support you i mean this is history and people that the world needs you know we need to know about it needs to be recorded it it needs to be there well you guys too being people are doing podcasts now this is the new wave of social media that's amazing because people are tired of what the garbage the crap they see on the boob tube yep and there's just you know and there's so many of the media that lie whereas what you are doing and others that podcasts are coming out that talk about they hear the stories that says i i sleep what you all are doing too man what it is is that people want to hear from you they want to hear from john you are the guy you were there they want to hear it from the horse's mouth and you know that's what this is yeah yeah we have the mutual admiration society yeah very much so uh we asked we talked to veterans like you guys well we appreciate it like i said we feel honored uh we have a couple more questions uh andrew denmark thank you um how prevalent was amphetamine use amongst the team i had heard stories of which unsure of their veracity well we had what they were called green bombers which were amphetamines which uh you could take them if you wanted to stay up all night and i never tried it because very early on you know when i arrived in may of 68 there are still some elements around from the tet offensive there are still enemy units that were in the villages and they would attack our base on occasion they fire in rockets or they murder us no ground attacks by may but anyways we would go out and do ambushes well one night i was on guard duty and the mortar pit started firing mortars and the mortars were landing in support of a team that set up an ambush outside the fulan the village so we hear the rounds impacting but there's no gunfire i mean there's no aka there's no sks's now there's some there's some uh our weapons are being fired american rent so somebody called this guy up and said hey what the hell is going on out there we don't hear any enemy gunfire oh no they're coming through our wire they're coming right at us they're coming through our perimeter and the radio operator said who no the queen elephants they're coming right through our perimeter the guy was high on the amphetamines really and he had an optical illusion that the green elephants were coming through his defensive perimeter and it's like okay i just learned a lesson ain't touching that stuff i'm crazy enough without drugs you know i could be fundamentally dangerous you start pumping that stuff in my body so i'd never touched them but some guys did they used to stay up all night and they could go three or four days yeah now i don't know about others but in my case i was afraid of it so yes some people did have it they were available and but they were used in a uh a mission oriented basis was there abuse probably but again our team we didn't see it and with you either with the americans or the south vietnamese dave do you want to do a quick uh teaser for next week's guest oh uh next week we have on a uh a former military close action uh close action uh uh they're like tech teams cap teams yeah close action i don't know what the piece says platoon no anyway uh close action team uh so they were essentially the end of the guerrilla warfare element of the marine corps uh during vietnam uh rarely rarely that right from did they work with forced recon uh actually the way they worked was sort of the same as sf teams in villages uh working with the indigenous no kidding yes i never heard that because when we at fu buy we had to force recon guys would come by and uh they're always short we would give them extra hand grenades extra bullets and 68 some of the force recon guards were still carrying them four teams it's like hey here take all the bullets you want anything we can give you guys god bless you man yeah but they were going into nashville combined action pacification program oh so it's not close action combined what is it again combined action pacification program yes um and and on top of that like just a massive a very interesting personal story there may be some gun running involved other things i'm not 100 i'm not going to tease it out too much we'll get into all of it next week uh and you know until then you know john you guys led the way thank you so much for joining us this evening well thank you guys for uh the years later picking up the sword and carrying it forward man thanks for your service too it's like the uh i always like talking to different generations of veterans it's an honor it's a lot john it's always instructive um next time gentlemen we'll be talking dave take care continue to heal brother thank you all right stick around john we're going to do the uh bonus segment thanks everybody oh whatever you need let me know okay okay we'll see you guys next week oh

Channel: The Team House

Views: 72,517

Keywords: MACV-SOG, Studies and Observations Group, SOG, John Stryker Meyer, Vietnam, Special Forces, Green Beret

Id: O4lkRzVCNrY

Length: 131min 53sec (7913 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 25 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Catswagger11]

He covers a lot of the same ground as Jocko’s podcast, but if you’re like me, you can’t get enough SOG. The Team House is hosted by former Ranger/SF weapons sergeant Jack Murphy. Lots of good episodes on there.

[u/ascherspottswood]

i loved the 180-183 podcasts. he is awesome