Transcript of #180 Major James Capers Jr. - Vietnam Marine Commando Silver Star Recipient

Major James Capers.

Welcome to the show.

Good afternoon. It's good to be here.

It's good to have you. It's an honor to have you here. Thank you. You popped up on our radar, I think about a couple of weeks ago. Man, I just want to say, I think it is a real honor to have you here.

You're the first Vietnam veteran to be on the show, and that's something that I've been really looking forward to getting somebody on the show that's served in that war.

To have you here is just...

I'm over the moon about it.

It's such an honor to have you here. We haven't documented this war at all yet. This is something that I've been real excited about. So thank you for making the trip.

It's good to be here.

I want to get right into it. I want to do a life story on you. From what I understand, there's a really good possibility that your Silva Star might be getting upgraded to a Medal of Honor. I hope this gets to the right people to make that happen.

I just want to put that out right up front, so everybody listening understands how important this interview is, and we want to be a part of making that happen and documenting your life story.

Everybody starts off with a introduction.

Here we go.

Major James Capers, you are a retired United States Marine Corps officer and true American hero. You're a pioneer in reconnaissance training, tactics, and recognized for your legendary career that overcame obstacles and broke barriers on and off the battlefield. You are one of the first African-American Marines to serve in the elite force reconnaissance companies and the first to receive a battlefield commission. You are a recipient of numerous awards, including the Silver Star, Two Bronze Stars with Valor, Three Purple Hearts, and Induction into the US Special Operation Command's Commando Hall of Honor. You are the author of Faith Through the Storm: Memoirs of Major James Capers Jr. You are the subject of the documentary Major Capers: The Legend of Team Broadminded. You are a father figure to Team Broadminded, a specialized group of Force Reconnaissance Marines, and you continue to honor their legacy through annual reunions and your ongoing involvement in Special Operations Community. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

All right.

We got quite a bit to cover here. Okay. But what I'd like to start with is your childhood. So I understand you grew up in South Carolina.

Partly. I lived there early years, and then my father was put on the chain gang. This is back in the old days, '30s.

What is the chain gang?

The chain gang is when they took mostly African-Americans and put them out, and they did hard labor. I don't know. I wasn't born back then, but mostly black individuals was put on this chain Gang, a tough living. They took away from their families. My father was on this chain gang, but somewhere he got away and went to Baltimore, Maryland, and I had gotten sick. Before he left, he gave me to a white family. This was a family that they were all farmers out in this area. They took me in and brought me back to health. And today, they're trying to find descendants of that family.

How old were you when you were given to a white family?

Probably about four.

Four years old. Do you have any recollection of that?

Well, there were days when I thought I could remember a female who obviously would feed me and care for me. In my memory, she looked like a blonde lady. I could remember a female with blonde hair. And so that's all I really remember, except I was cared for. But at some point, I was given back to my family once I'd been cured. Back in those days, we had a lot of childhood diseases. We lost a lot of young Black Americans from those diseases at that time. And I was given back to my family, completely cured or healed. And then my mother, my sister, and two brothers and myself, at some point at night, a vehicle showed up at our shack. That's where we lived back in those days, and we picked cotton, crop tobacco, the Ruel South. And the vehicle showed up, and we ended up in Baltimore. And I was probably five or six or something like that. Nobody really knows. There's no records of my being born. I don't have a birth certificate. Wow. That's the Ruel South back in those days. And I finally got to Baltimore and started in school.

So you were working in the fields as a five to six-year-old child? Sure.

A lot of kids were like that. Had these bags on your shoulder, and you're out there picking cotton. Now, you had adults out there that would go along with you, but everybody worked. Couldn't stay home unless you were sick, something like that. I picked a lot of cotton and learned to crop tobacco and slopped the hogs and all the rule work. Everybody worked. Wow. There was no downtime.

Do you remember the vehicle showing up in the middle of the night at the shack?

Yeah, it was like an old Ford, like a 29 Ford or something like that, one of the old vehicles, thrown into the car and we took off.

What did your parents tell you? Do you remember?

Well, my father wasn't there. He was in Baltimore. It was apparently in a range for another group to take us to to Baltimore. So we got in the vehicle, and next thing I know, we were in Baltimore as a child. Those are my memories. Back in the old days, you couldn't eat at restaurants. You couldn't go into the facilities, bathrooms, things like that. You had black and you had white. And so these were things my mother told me how difficult it was for her as a female There's been a lot of books written on this subject, how African-Americans made that transition, but almost slavery. It was not slavery, of course. We know that that was over, but the remnants were still there. We were treated like slaves, and there were a lot of pieces to that that I saw and I remembered. But when I got to Baltimore, they put me in school as a child. I had no birth certificate, so nobody really knew who I was. And the first, James Capers Jr. Passed away, so they renamed me James Riper's Jr. But there was always some feeling that I was reincarnating my older brother.

But no, I had no birth certificate. Years later, we tried to find something out. But that was a problem that I had. And even today, I got two birthdates, the 25th of August and the 27th of August. Nobody knows how that happened.

Which birthday do you like better.

25.

Right on. So how was it when you got to Baltimore?

Well, it was your four year. I loved it. Buildings and schools and restaurants, of course. It wasn't designed for folks like us coming from the south. We didn't know anything, basically. We had to learn a system there in Baltimore. Went to school, did well, graduated high school there.

Were you welcomed in school?

Yeah.

They didn't have any of those Jim Crow laws?

Well, not in Baltimore, but it was an all-black school. Everybody was teaching with Blacks. Students were Black. So it was hard for me coming from the South. It was certainly different from where I'd been until Baltimore. There's streetlights and and automobiles and all those things that I never saw on the cotton fields in South Carolina.

Interesting. How long did it take you to get used to that? How did that culture change?

It took me a while because I was a country boy. They didn't readily accept me into the city. I didn't know the language. It took me a while to learn there were stores on East corner, and the school was different. The children there spoke differently than I spoke for the South. When I knew that I could do it, and I pressed on.

How did your family integrate? Was there a sense of relief being up there? Was everybody happier?

Well, I was happier. Color by skin, skin took that away. We worked hard. And my father got a job. And us, children, we were happy about that. He got a job in a steel mill. World War II was there. I remember World War II, and he worked in a steel factory. I guess they built ships for the fleet back in those days, the Maryland DryDoc Company. And they were in a pretty good it and was able to sustain us. But when I became a little older, I sold newspapers and sold junk, did anything I could to add to the family Family.

How old were you when that started?

About seven.

Seven years old, you started selling newspapers?

Then they stopped it because they had a law then that you had to be at least twelve years older as a child to work. But no, we did all hustling whatever you could do to do those types of things to add to the income of the family.

Did you have any hobbies as a kid, or was it just work?

Mostly work, but, yeah, you just find some way to do something. Shoot marbles. They don't know about marbles these days, but we did that. We played all the games, basketball, which we didn't have the hoops and things. We had took baskets and put them up on a wall or something, and that was our net. We had to be really be creative because they didn't provide anything for us. So we worked hard and I learned how to take care of myself because in a way it was dangerous. Everybody carried knives and guns and things, and many days they were fired fights. I mean, not a military firefight, but pistols.

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Those types of things were dangerous. And you kept away from that.

You kept away from that? Yeah. Did you carry a weapon as a kid? No. No?

First weapon I had was when I joined Boot camp, 1956.

What got you interested in the military?

Back in those days, everybody, after the World War, I joined in '56. '96. But World War II was over in Korea. We were still digging out of Korea. That happened in '54, and I joined in '56. And I had learned quite a bit. We had television there at Baltimore. I had never seen a television before. So we had television, and we saw these military guys on TV, and they were recruiting back in those days. You had to join or they would draft you. So if you didn't join, someone would come by. Then when you turned 18, you had to join some military. And I saw the Marine uniform on TV, and I saw some of the recruiters. That looks pretty good. I'll go ahead and join the Marines. So we did. My old buddy, we joined in June of 1956.

Did you want to go to war?

Yeah.

You did.

World War II, all the newspapers. We were patriotic. Loved that flag, and we have to go protect it. We were taught that. And I really couldn't wait to protect my country. That was my thought process as a young man.

Were we involved in any conflicts in the year 1956? The US.

In the US? '56?

That was peace time, correct?

Well, I joined the military in '56. Yeah. And I went to war in '56.

You went to war in '56.

I got out of boot camp, and they sent me to Suez Canal. The Egyptians had closed the West Canal. And so Eisenhower was our President. And he said, We're not going to put up with that. He was a wartime President. So he sent the first Battalion, second Marines over there. And we got it done. We didn't land, but just the appearance of that battalion coming in with the American flag, and they opened it back up again. I went back in 1957 when the Syrians started a war. We went back and we didn't have to land to chase the Syrians. We just went back as a show of force. And 1958, I went back and we landed in Beirut. The Egyptians had closed the Suez Canal, and our job was to get it back open. That was 58 when we actually, the Syrians and the Levanties started a big war. And of course, I And he was still President. He was President until Kennedy come in. And so we went there again. We landed and we fought in the mountains and fought the snipers and all of the things that was happening in that time.

Is 58 when you evacuated Americans from Lebanon?

The airport, yeah.

Is that the first time you saw combat? Yeah. First-hand?

Mm-hmm.

How did that feel? Describe that experience.

I was a Marine. It wasn't a problem for me. We landed, we evacuated the airport, we took the civilians out, the embassies that were there. We got them out, but we had a thousand Marines, though. And I was a squad leader. I was in charge of some troops, and I had to get it done. I was an SEO and dying for me wasn't that big of a deal. I'd been trained by guys that fought in Guadalcanal and Iwo Jima. Coming through as a young man, so that's what we were trained to do. You're going to fight. And we went up the mountains with the old M1s, do a lot of handgranades. We learned to make parapets and dig fox holes and eat terrible rations. It was a hard duty for us, but we all got a nice letter from Eisenhow. It thanking us. Then we got one from our Commandant thanking us. Did a good job.

How long was that battle?

A few months.

You were there for a few months?

A few months. Wasn't that long.

Was it fighting every day?

Yeah. We had to go into the mountains, and that's where they were. And some of them had come across from Syria. They have to understand how that stuff was back in those days. No one liked us, the Syrians, and But they took our money and the things that we brought over there. Now, we came in on ships. They didn't fly us in. The other guys that came in from Germany Army Group came in from Germany, and they gave us some relief, but they could fight. They had been in Germany since World War II. So this is 1958. They came in and relieved us. And when we were tired, we've been fighting those mountains day and night. And I had my first experience of killing a human being didn't really bother me. I didn't feel any real problem.

It didn't bother you?

Killing a human being. I had my first experiences with killing a human being.

Well, let's talk about that experience.

Yeah.

How was the first human you killed? How did that experience go?

In the mountains, up on top of the mountains, they had buildings up there, and they had their hideouts and things up there. So my job was to go up there and clear it out with my squad. And I hit a small building, and a couple of the guys tried to run out, and I shot and killed both of them. I didn't feel anything. Nothing. No remorse. And then when we were hit at night in the mountains, we fought them off. So Never lost a battle. In 20 years of my experience in Marine Corps, I was never defeated. No one ever defeated me.

What was it like for you to come home after rescuing Americans in Lebanon during that Civil War? When's the first time you went back home to see your family?

Well, we were there for a six months' cruise. And after we before they in Lebanon, they put us aboard ships and they sent us back. Took us 30 days to get home. It was enlightening. And then when we were told we were going home, we got home. And part of that was my high school sweetheart, so I had I'm still in a madly in love with, Dodi Caprice. We were married 50 years. I still love her today. Never remarried. That's my son back there. But At any rate, I'm sorry.

When is the first time you went home to your mom, your brothers and your sisters?

Oh, yeah, that was good. Came home from Lebanon. I was an NCO. I wanted to see my mom, but I wanted to see my wife. We went with my wife, my girlfriend. I had a man in in love with Dodi Caprice. Never loved a woman other than Dodi Caprice. We weren't married at that time, but I called on her, It was a whirlwind type of thing. This was 1958, just December, so along there. We went into the Caribbean for a while. I had to do some work down there. We had some thugs and whatever, so we had to go do that. Then the Syrian thing popped up all in this area. I don't know if I got the timing right. It was a long time ago. But '59 come around, and my three years was up. I could either stay in the Marine Corps or I could get out now, go home. But going home wasn't much of an attraction, though. I'd been with some of the finest military guys in the world. I'd fought with them, I'd shed blood with them. I want to stay with them. But I saw Dottie, and I decided to stay with the Marine Corps.

I reenlisted.

How did you meet Dottie?

She was my high school sweetheart.

You met her in high school?

I met high school. The first time I saw, I was in love. She was walking by. I was with a group of other guys, and I saw she had on a yellow dress, and I looked at her, I couldn't believe it. I went home and I told my mom, I said, Mom, guess what? I saw this girl today, and she said, Sit down, son. We'll talk. But I loved her so much. Every chance I got to see her in the halls of the school there, it was a Carver High School, and I tried to find a way to sneak around to see her. Sometimes in the hallway, I had the nerve to stop her, and I talked to her and fell in love. When I held her hand, when she was dying, she winked at me. She was dying of cancer. I was holding her hand. We'd been married 50 years. But that was her, a strong woman, military wives, back during that time, they got it done because we were gone a lot. I did 14 years overseas. I fought two wars, include the thing in the Middle East.

When did you guys get married?

June of 1959. I reenlisted, and they paid me a lot of money. Wasn't much. In today's, we look at it and they said that was no money at all. But that was great for me because I was a military guy. I didn't need a whole lot of money. At the time, though, when I joined, I was sending my parents' monies. That's what we all did. We had allotments because I just appreciated what they'd done for me, coming from the south and all that. They were not really educated folks. We were farmers, basically. But I did well, married Donnie. We went to California. I hooked up with First Force Recon Company.

Well, before we get to First Force Recon, you were married for 50 years.

Yeah.

So I want to ask you, in your opinion, what is the secret to a successful marriage?

I will tell you, I loved Dodi Capuissen the first time I saw her. We went through hell. We raised a blind child. Our first child, Gary, was born blind in special needs. And good child. He played the flute, the melodica, the organ, piano, but he had other difficult things. And after we were married, or we were married, then the military didn't have schooling for him, for my son. Wonderful child. I loved him so much. I was holding his hand when he closed his eyes. He died of appendicitis. It didn't seem like the next day, my wife died of cancer, and the demons come home.

How do you stay happily married for 50 years? What's the secret?

I love her so much. She kicked me out once. She kicked you out? Kicked me out once.

What did you do? Did you deserve it?

Yeah, I went out with the guys and stayed overnight. Waiting, and I didn't call her. I came home. I used to wear cowboy hats. Back in the old... That was one of the things I wore for a cowboy boots like that one down and I wore cowboy hats. So she took my cowboy hat and threw it out, then went over and stomped on it. So I knew that I was in trouble. She let me come back But she was such a sweetheart. I remember when we were a snake bidder. She was out feeding the fish at a fish pond. She was out to feed the fish with her hand. A snake come up and bidder on her hand. This takes away from your, what are you talking about there? I was telling you about that time when a snake bit her, and she didn't panic. She scared of snakes. Bid her on the finger. So she come in and said, Sweet, I've been bit by a snake. High panic. But I did the first aid. We had to get down to an emergency room, so we went there, but the snake was not poisonous. One of my troops who lived next door.

He went and killed the snake and brought it down to the hospital, and they looked at it. It was not poisonous, but just the whole idea of her demeanor at that time. I think I would have... I've been struck close by snakes, never got hit by a poisonous snake. But I've been around pythons and all this other stuff in Southeast Asia. But I'm just saying about Dottie, she's so brave, got her taken care of. But we went through a lot of challenges together. I got sent over overseas for 15 months as a Marine pathfinder back in the old days. I had to send her home, put her on a train, and send her back to Baltimore with my child. I was gone for that period of time. Interesting world back then as far as Marines were concerned, and the Army guys, too, which we did work a lot with. And the Seals were just coming on board. So they came on board in 70, 61.

Did you work with the Seals?

Yeah.

How was that?

It was good because they were young guys. They were UDT guys at first, and then they went to move beyond the high water line. We were all scuba. That's what I did for my time in the military. I did dive masters, and I'd combat swams, and I did all of that. But The Seals were new guys. They were on a war or demolition team, but they moved them from swimming. Then they went beyond the high water line, which meant that they could go out and blow shit up. Pardon my language. They were good. They were young, and we had a lot of Marines went over to the Seals. Really? Yeah. Oh, yeah. A lot of the Seals were Marines.

Interesting.

Oh, I knew a lot of them. A lot of the Seals. I worked with them in Vietnam. Of course, I was an old guy. I was 29 years old. I was the dive master, and I did all that because I'd been in for a while, and I was good at it. I did.

Let's go back to 1959, where he became the first African-American to join the Marine Corps's Special Operations Force Recon.

That's what they tell me.

That's what they tell you?

That's what they tell me. I joined up to join Force Recon at that time, you had to be almost a Superman.

So did you know what Force Recon was when you'd signed up for it?

I'd heard about it.

How did you hear about it?

Guys had told me about, and it had a newspaper there. It was the Scout newspaper in California. And they had an article on them, the guy jumping out of airplanes and swimming and diving. I thought this was pretty cool. I'd been in the grunt for three years. So I went down and took the test. They kicked the hell I mean, these guys were nuts. Damn. You think seal training got to be pretty good? We didn't have a whole lot of these guys. And I passed, of Well, actually, I didn't pass. They said I didn't pass. They said, Well, come back on Monday. This was Friday. I took the test. Said, You didn't make it. Come back on Monday and take it again. Okay. Showed up on Monday, took it again. They said, Put him in. They took me in to see the first serge. Then I had to go see the captain. The captain was in his office and he had a hand grenade on his window seal. I saw it. I've seen hand grenades before. He said something dumb like, What would you do with this hand grenade? I said, I'd throw it out the window.

I was sitting, the window was open. And this guy jumped up, grabbed the hand grenade and pulled a pen. It was a Okay. They want to see if I was going to run. No, I went to all this hell to get here now. You're not going to make me run out of this office there. But that's a little induction type stuff. I did three years there, went overseas with the Marine Pathfinders.

What was the training like?

Well, they sent you to jump school and all types of You had a platoon, had a team. Out on the West Coast, it was crazy. Pt every day. During the day, I was married at that time, but now you had to live in the barracks. And for as long as I can remember, we were swimming, running and diving and all kinds of stuff they created. The Seals hadn't come on yet. This was 1961, maybe '60. So I went to jump school in '60. That was separate. Then when I come back, I went through the recon indoctrination. And I was a pretty good kid. I could handle myself. They were tough. We had guys from World War II in there. Not many, but they were new guys. We had some army in there. We had some Seals, not Seals, but UDT guys. And The corpsmen were Seals.

Navy.

Right. Yeah. Navy guys. But First Force was my indoctrination into special operation.

What did it feel like for you to graduate the training?

Well, we didn't graduate from the training. They just put you in a platoon. You go through all the indoctrination, which is the stuff now that jungle warfare and mind clearing and all stuff we went through. We didn't have a battalion. It was one company. And the folks that ran that company, pretty tough guys. And he only took the best guys. They are tough as guys. Had huge guys. I don't know where they got those guys from. I mean, really, when I saw those guys, and they could fight. We had a fight, but a lot of them were overrated, I thought, became hot dogs. And I came there for a serious tour of duty. So I got in a little trouble. Some of the guys thought, Well, I'm a black guy, so let's give this black guy a hard time. It didn't work that way. I didn't back down from them. No.

No. How did they give you a hard time?

Because it was black. How? I was the only black guy there.

What would they do?

Well, one time, after some horrendous program, I was tired. I was in the squad bay, and I laid down this bed, and the guys came by with this cross and put a rebel flag on me. And This stuff. They laughed about it, and I saw it. Then I got up, cleaned myself up, let it go. Indoctrulation. They thought they were going to scare me. No, you don't scare a Capers. I'd worked too hard to get there. And by that time, I had a wife and a child. And of course, they paid you 55, well enlisted 55 bucks for a I'm paying. And I became an officer. It went up to $110. I don't know what they do now, but it was extra pay. So it was an incentive. And I enjoyed the tour. But a lot of racism back in those days. I mean, those things that I saw, and it bothered me, but it didn't deter me.

And in 1966, was that your first tour to Vietnam?

Yeah.

And so what did you think when you got orders to go to Vietnam?

What was going on? I wanted to go.

You wanted to go.

Yeah, I was at the... When I come back from First Force, they sent me back to the East Coast to train troops in something we call ITR. They learned to to do those types of things in the field. So I had that type of work to do. I was a Sergeant E-5 at the time, and I stayed there for a few months. Force Recon was looking for volunteers. I had been in First US. Did that job okay. Now, Vietnam guys were bleeding and the casualty list was high. When I got to Fort Mead, I was on, what I don't know they call it, hardship. I had a blind child at home. So the Commandant Marine Corps said that you don't have to go to combat because you've got a blind son and a young wife. So I went to... I didn't have to go to Vietnam, but I saw the casualty list. I saw the news cycles every night. I watched it. And all those young men were dying. I saw the clips, and I'm at home at night. And then they put me on something called a Fort Mead Guard. It was a ceremonial unit.

Went out to Fort Mead, which is where the Star-Spangled Band was written. So I had a little group. We marched out there every Thursday, marched out there and twirled rifles and carried the flag around. And we had a band with us. The band played and we marched. And at night, when we come home, I had to watch young guys carrying the flag in Vietnam and bringing the dead Marines home, soldiers home, the airmen home. And One day, I asked Dottie. She said, I know what you're thinking. I know what you're thinking. I said, How do you know what I'm thinking? You don't know what I'm thinking. She said, Yes, I do know what you're thinking. I see the news also. I know you're training. I've been there with you. I know it's time for you to go. And if you choose to go to Vietnam, Gary and I will be here when you come back. And my adjudant, another officer, a couple of days later, came to my house, lived on the army base, and they came to my house and said, Sergeant, we know you volunteered to go back to Vietnam or to go to Vietnam.

I hadn't been before. And I just wanted to talk to your wife about it. My wife said, You don't need to talk to me. If you don't need something to eat or drink, your night's over. He's my husband. I'm American, too. I'm a citizen, too. I'll be here when he comes back, and he will come back. And, gentlemen, your night's over. And one of us said, Well, Ms. Capers, we just want to let you know that he doesn't have to go. The Commandant got him on a haul. She said, I'm his wife, I gave birth to his child, and I'll be here. They left. I got orders to go to Vietnam, and I was joining Force Recon, and that was hard. Third Force was made up of First Force and Second Force. Anybody else we can get, they had the qualifications. Now, I'd been in first four, so I'm good to go. So my job was to train the other guys coming in. I'd already been to jump in. I went to scuba school again. Went to Coronado, I think it was. Full week course. It was hard, but I was on a graduate.

You were the honor graduate.

The honor graduate. They worked us hard. We swam a lot. We did a lot of water work. And I enjoyed it because I swam my ass off in first force.

You enjoyed diving? Yeah. You're the only person I know that enjoyed diving in the Coronado Bay.

Well, I did that, and At the end of the course, one of my guys who was going, we had 19 Marines that was in the class, and we were all going to Vietnam. So one of them, my kids did make the distance swim. Before you graduate, you got to make that distance swim, and they don't give you any slack on that. And he was a little bit late. So the chief says, Hey, Sarge, we can't graduate him. I said, Chief, come on now. How long have we known each other? He said, Yeah, I know, but he didn't make the time swim, so he can't graduate. He'd been through everything else. I He said, Chief, you used to be a pretty good man, but now you're not. I said some other words, but he was my friend. I said, Tell you what I'll do. If you let me do this again, I will swim with him. I will take this the last part of the course. And so he said, Yeah, okay. All right, all right, all right. And I said, I thought you were really a candy ass, Chief, but you made I made the right decision.

I got in the water and swam. I don't know how far it was. I'd already made my swim. I'm good. Now I'm doing a second swim with him, and it wore me out. We got about 100 meters from where we needed to be. My leg cramped up. I didn't give up. And at the end, he was tired. I'm trying to hold on to him. I'm trying to deal with the cramp and all that. But we got through there together, crossed the line together.

Damn.

Oh, yeah. I did that. And over the years, he still thanks me for that. No shit. Went to war and he survived. Didn't get a scratch on him. Tom Nicholson. Tom Nicholson.

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So I swam with him. That's documented. But that was Jim Capers. I'm in command. I was a platoon sergeant.

That's a hell of a leader.

Well, did that most of my career. Got shot to hell some of the times. Did you ever get wounded?

No.

Wonderful. That's great. That is really great. After all the hell you've been through, I'm glad you came home safe, and you got a family, and you got a great program. They tell me that you had one of the most... I've heard your program.

Have you heard some of the other Marines?

Mm-hmm.

Have you heard some of the other Marines we've had on here from Force Reconnaissance? In Margar Sock?

I don't know that time as much. When did you come on anyway? What year?

The show? Yeah. This show started on Christmas Eve of December 2019.

I'd gone to California after my wife and my son, I moved to California. I lost touch with a lot of things. But what I've heard about your show and what I was told to listen to it, I figured you were another candy ass seal at first, but I found out that you weren't.

You see that sword right there?

Yeah.

I interviewed a Don Graves. He was a flamethrower in Iwo Jima. And I interviewed him when he was 98 years old.

Oh, great.

And he turns 100 years old in May. He's going to be back here. I don't know if he's coming on the show or not, but I'm hoping to have lunch with him, at least. But he sent me that sword. It took that off a Japanese soldier in Iwo Jima.

That's pretty good, yeah.

Yeah, he's a Marine. And then one of my best friends, nick Keffalidis. He was a Marsak Marine, and he was my third episode. Cody Alfred. He was also a Marsak Marine. Honor Man. Honor Man, I think of his sniper class. First, the youngest Marine to ever reach E-8. Fought in the Battle of Falluja. He's a good friend of mine. We've had a lot of good Marines on here.

Well, you've got a good show.

We've had some candy ass seals, too, though.

I've seen a few of those in my life. Go ahead, let me You're up here. Go ahead.

Yeah, but... Well, let's get back to you. So finish the swim. You passed. Yeah. You guys go to Vietnam.

Well, the other part, I to get one of my other guys to the finish line also so they wouldn't drop them.

Another one?

No, I did that just the one time with my other sergeant. It wasn't two of them, just one. Okay. And then we came back to Camp Lejeune. Then we started trading for Vietnam. Some of the guys had to go to jump school, and I had taken the swim guys there. But we had to go through the mining program. We went to the jungles down in Panama. We went through almost six months of training. Wow. Yeah. And then they put us on a bus at night and sent us to Norfolk.

How did you like the jungle down in Panama? I did training down there to?

I went through three times. I went through with the Force guys, and I went through with our commanding officer with the grunts. Actually, just two times I went through. And it was hard. I was the captain at the time, and trying to motivate the guys. And I took this chicken, grabbed the chicken, I stressed him out and bit his neck, I bit his head off. And I threw him out there and the blood was all over me and all over him, and the guy's going, motivating. We had one of my trainers. We were in a training part of the program in the jungles. And the instructor said, You guys take it easy now. All of us was the Recon guys. We were all in the in the breaches. And the instructor reached down in his boot and pulled out this snake and bit his head off and threw him out in the sand. Now, I bit the chicken off, but that was just show for my guys. Had a lot of new guys, and we're trying to let them know that the old man can get it done. No, you need to fear me because I I will kill you.

They were troops. I couldn't do that, but you're trying to scare them a little bit. Sure, you've been through that. But we went to almost six months of training. Then we finally deployed in April of 6: 00. And they took us to... I forget what they took us with all of our equipment, dive stuff, swim stuff. And we went over to... On ship, we went over. And I think we went straight into Vietnam, into Da Nang, and started setting up camp and started operating, and it was bloody.

What was the mission?

The mission was to go behind enemy lines and kill those son of a bitches. That was the mission? That was my Mission. That's what we did.

Just kill as many of them as you can?

Mm-hmm.

Kill as many as you can? As you could.

If you kill them, KIA, if you wounded them, we didn't really know if you wounded them or not. A lot of them were wounded, and they'd crawling away. You see the blood trails. But if you were KIA, they gave you credit for it, and we killed a lot of them.

Let's talk about your first mission after the camp was built. What did that entail?

Well, actually, the camp was already built. There was guys there when we came in and they had a mess all set up and all that. So we really had to get our stuff together. We went through some phases, and we launched from a place called Fuba by. That was already built. And we took off in area number five because they had all these pieces of Vietnam in different areas. And I got area number 5. And it was loaded with a lot of N-based, whatever those guys were. The Viet Kong, the NVA soldiers. A lot of them were there, and they had been there for a while, and the Vietnamese soldiers couldn't get them out. And a lot of the Vietnamese soldiers were cowards. They didn't want to fight. No kidding. They didn't want to fight, no. They had been there for all these years, and the North Vietnamese come in and wiped them out. So we got to go in and fight the Vietnamese, the North Vietnamese. There was a border, 16th parallel, and the NVA came across the 16th parallel, which is set since the earlier wars in Southeast Asia. They came across and was coming all the way down in South Vietnam, and we were supposed to stop them.

There were a lot of things a part of that. We had to set up ambushes. We went into their camps, and we ambushed them at night. There were a lot of individual stories about that. I ran 50 missions. All of them wasn't from Fubai. I went into Caisson. I went into Fulau. I went into a denang, all my guys, and we lost guys along the way. But I went from Staff Sergeant. We lost our three officers, first three months. Wow. So I went from Staff Sergeant to Second Lieutenant. Never spent the day in OCS or Basischool, officers training.

How would you set up on the camps? Would you do an L-Ambush?

Yeah, we did a lot of those. We set up.

How many guys were you with?

How many guys?

Yeah. When you went on a...

Let's talk about your first. Would you work primarily a daytime or a night?

Both.

Both.

Oh, yeah. You'd go out for five days or so. Mostly four days, though, because if you're working hard as we did and had the combat that we had, we had guys that was injured, maybe not gunshot wounds, but it was hard terrain. Through the jungles and trying to avoid the damn snakes. I had one guy named Miller. He got bit twice by a snake, and I had to send him down to Da Nang for treatment. Went down there and, damn it, the guy got hit again when he brought him back to Caeson. He got hit real bad when we had that last mission at Fowlack. All of us fought for four days, day and night. But go ahead,Go ahead.

Yeah, we'll get to full up. But I just want to talk about your very first mission in Vietnam.

Yeah.

What was the briefing?

The first mission, we made three combat dives. We came on in a ship, and they want to make sure that the ship had not been... They hadn't placed the minds on the bottom of the ship. So I took down the divers, and the ship was almost 3,000 feet. And we went down with scuba gear. We didn't have any trousers on. We just wore the jackets and had the oxygen and all of that. We went there as a regular scuba dive, and we had to check and see that there was no mines on the ship, on the bottom of the ship. Didn't run into any, but we saw that they had something that that... I don't know what the hell it was, but fire was coming out of it, and we had to avoid that. The fire was coming out of the... Had it in the bottom of the ship, and we were trying to get around that because I want to check the whole ship. And one instinct thing had to happen. We got there, had pretty air, no No problem with that. And we got to the end and had these tiger sharks. See, the army was supposed to tell the Navy, Hey, you're here now.

Or the Navy was supposed to tell the Army, We're here now. Don't feed the sharks or the fish because we're going to be in the water. We got divers in the water. Holy shit. Well, that didn't work that way. Somehow, where the tiger shark showed up, I'm finishing up my dive down. And have you ever seen a tiger shark? I'm close. They're voracious. And they were feeding the stuff, the garbage that the army had dropped there at the base there. So I had one man, his buddy line, you all in buddy lines, of course. And I had 10 men or nine men and myself, and his buddy line came loose, and he were drifting out to where the sharks were feeding. Now, as a leader, you have to make a decision. That's what leaders do. They can't sit on it. I made a decision right here, right now. I unhooked my buddy's line and swam out there and got him. You don't let him die. You go out there and you bring him back. Brought him back. He's alive. He passed away a few years ago. But that's what I did. No No honors, no medals, wasn't that?

You save a life because those sharks would have eaten them up. I've seen tiger sharks before. No honors. But the decision you made when you were leading, you make that decision right here, right now. You don't think about it. That's what you do. And I've done that so many times.

How about the first mission on the ground?

Well, we had to do the dive missions. I did. We came in. We had to clear the ship. Then we... Well, when we got in country, That was early on. It wasn't the first mission we went on. But we lost a man, or the Marines had lost a man, and we had to go down and bring his body up. While we were down there, we found there was over a couple of hundred rounds of ammunition down there buried in the mud. So we brought the kids. Wasn't much in the kid's body. They'd eaten them up pretty good. So we brought up what was left, and then we decided to go back down and get those rounds because the NVA would take those rounds and they could use explosives with them. They had them buried there, over 200 rounds. So we went back down and we pulled up every one of them.

When you said that the body was eaten up, eaten up by what? By sharks. By sharks? Oh, yeah.

We had the Songbo River, and they had not just sharks, but they had... The Songbo River was a major river, where they had ships come down, not ships, but boats that come down there. And the Vietnamese, they washed in the river a bit. There were families around there, but that wasn't my concern. We wanted to get that boy's body up, and we did it. And then we found those around, we had to get those up now. Then what to do with it? Eod came in and they took the rounds. They took the rounds. I didn't lose them in on that one. Didn't lose a man. But it was a hell of an experience. We made... Once we got to the Nang, we anchored on the ship and we went down and did some other water work. We did a lot of water work as recon swimmers and divers. Because the grunts were not divers. When they had a problem, they had to call us. I did a lot of that stuff. I was in officer by that time. No, I really wasn't. I was a staff sergeant. I didn't get a commission until later on.

But the first ground missions we went on, we had to go up in the mountains or go in the jungles and hunt down the bad guys. And that's the first time they gave us the dogs, gave us the war dogs, And I had two of them on my first mission. And then Argo and King couldn't get along, so I kept King. King was killed later on in the full-out. Good dog, tough dog would kill you. I had them in big cage because you couldn't let him out of the cage. And I had a dog handling it, assigned to him. And of course, I can handle King. We all trained with him. And he would kill the enemy soldier, grab him by the throat, groan, whatever. He killed two in Fulak. Well, he got killed. First mission on the ground said we had recon zones, and we dropped in by helicopter. We were supposed to parachute in, but the jungles were crazy, and we don't want to get separated, especially if you're going in the night. Some of those were probably done, but I didn't want to take my guys in by parachute. We had all this stuff there, but I didn't...

I decided to take the... The helicopters put us in and we can drop maybe 10 feet on the ground in the jungle, and we stayed out for a while. Then they come and pick us up by helicopter, and we would have the helicopter cop to land maybe two positions because I didn't want the NVA to know where we were. So he would drop in here, drop in there, and we were supposed to be at one place, and they knew where we were coming in. We radioed and said, We're going to be here. But sometime we would drop a flare over here. We did what we could so the enemy wouldn't know that we're going to be picked up here and jump in on us.

Diversions.

Yeah. Yeah. We did that all of our missions and never got caught. But we did a lot of those missions until first part of it, coming in on ground, they put us in with First Force. They were already there, and we became part of First Force, and we fought with them. And then we did work with them, and then they sent us south. Colonel Waller had a battalion there, and he was our first CEO. We were training back in the States. He was CEO of Recon Battalion, and so they put us in with him. They fed us and took care of the things like that. And we stayed with them the whole time. First Force stayed with First Recon Battalion the same time, all the time.

When was your first firefight in Vietnam?

Seemed like they all came together. Damn.

Let's talk about the POW rescue mission ordered by President Johnson.

Yeah, he did it, and the CIA handled it. We had one North Vietnam, Vietnamese, was in the camp, and he was a young guy, and they thought he wasn't treating the Americans hard enough. So they put him in the penalty chamber and he escaped. Cia picked him up and brought him to me or brought him to our headquarters from division. And I took him in. His name was Lapp. He was 18 years old and he was a soldier. He slept in my tent with me. He didn't speak much. I English, didn't speak English. But I talked to him, and he had a rack in my tent with me. Good kid, would have been an American kid, would have done well, but he was a warrior now. He had been trained by the North. He's a kill or to harm Americans or treat them bad, and he didn't. So I got him now, and he wouldn't a bad kid. He would do what I asked him to do. I'd take him to chowel. I'd sit at night with him. I showed him a picture of my wife. She sent me pictures, and he would go, he'd smile.

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And one night, I was asleep. I woke up and knew something was wrong. I looked over and the lamp was gone. Oh, shit. So I grabbed my pistol. I went looking for him. I saw him. Grabbed him, said, What the fuck are you doing out here? I need to go to the bathroom. I said, What? I'm I'm going to shoot you right now. Because I was worried that the guards in the camp, if they saw anybody moving at night that weren't supposed to be moving, they thought they were an enemy soldier because they would try to infiltrate our bases or steal stuff. You couldn't tell the difference. When I grabbed a lap, I brought it back to my tent. And I said, Lap, if you got to go to the bathroom, I don't care what time it is. You wake me up, I'll take you there. Because one of these roving centuries, they'll catch you out there and they won't know the difference. But I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. So She got to be like a son to me. I kept him there for all the training. We had to train for this mission.

Oh, yeah, we had the shooting, the shooting and the language stuff and all that. Finally, we got it done, and they decided the mission was a goal. And then they said, No, we're not going. And so eventually, we went, and we were supposed to jump in, and we worked on jumping in. We still had our parents shoes and all that stuff, which we brought with us. And then the weather got bad. No, we're not going to I was going to be the jump master, of course, because I'm jump master trained and all that. Went in by helicopter, and was a big operation. Seals, They did some recon somewhere. The CIA didn't do any water work, but we did the water work, checked the rivers, and then it was time to go. So we flew in by helicopter and we landed. And the first night, we stayed on our hill watching the area out there. We could see the fishermen, and We could see the guys out in the rice patties, but we stayed quiet. And then the next day, we got off the hill and moved toward the camp, then avoiding anybody that might have been out there.

Third day, we hit the camp, killed the first two guards. My job was to kill the sentry with my knife. I'm the knife guy. So I was good at that. So it had me scheduled to kill the first two guards or the sentries, with my knife. But didn't get that far because everything blew up. All of a sudden, everybody was shooting. God damn it. How am I going to find out? Well, they told us what they thought the POWs was in the tent. The sentries here, the POWs here, and it was something over there. So My job was to kill these guys, get in there and get the POWs out. Five or six of them, POWs. And I got to where I thought they should be, nobody there. So I'm pissed. And one of my guys saw two guys coming toward the camp, and he shot those two. And then I'm pissed now. Everything's happening and no PLWs. So I said, If I could blow it up. We blew the whole base up. Blew those places where they held American soldiers, where they held them. And I'm going, this camp will not hold another American Marine or soldier.

We burned it. Yeah, we burned it. But I didn't get the POWs. And that was hard on us. We trained for so hard and for so long, and now we're going home without the POWs. Damn it. We had a captain in charge. I I was a lieutenant, I believe, but he was in charge of... He's dead now, but he was a coward. He said he didn't belong in Recon for what we did. He failed scuba. He wasn't very good. He could run and all that, but he couldn't do the field stuff. I think he ran maybe two missions and the POW thing. He got the Silver Star for that. He got the Silver Star. He wrote it up himself. Oh, man. Got it through. When I got hit, one time, he never come to see me. He never come to see me. He never asked how I was doing. He was out for himself. He wanted to be the general's aid. He didn't get that. So he ended up in force recon, and He wasn't a bad guy, but he shouldn't have been there.

Yeah. You mentioned you were good at killing people with a knife.

Yeah. I killed a man up in... Well, one of them I killed. We were at Caisson, which is a bloody military base, and we had some troops up there, not many. But I was doing a mission Started off as a recon mission, but now we're thinking that these guys are coming in to Caisson to reinforce whatever they had there, and they had the base surrounded. So I'm looking to see what I can do to get some of these guys out of there. And I run up on some soldiers, and I killed the first three, shot them with my M16. And then I looked over and I saw another NBA looking out that way, and I got him by his mouth and I put a stroke in my head, ripped him, and I stopped my knife down in my cartridges belt. I killed him. Blood was all over the place. He wiggled a little bit, but then he down. I took my There was two others that was moving in between the trees. I saw the first one, I shot him, double tap. He fell, didn't move. I saw the other one look back and I shot him.

I got criticized for shooting them in the back. They're running. I killed both of them. I killed them all. I cut his throat. I killed as many as I could. Killed a lot of enemy soldiers, but it's up close. We have seven or eight men, and you're out in the jungle most of that time. We used to run those trails at night looking for them. We'd catch them cooking. You could smell the food. We'd throw a damn grenade in there. But unfortunately, we stopped. Might have been children in there. I had a heart. Wasn't a very big heart. But yeah, they tried to kill me once. When I was a black Marine, and they had some other stuff for me. They put out a reward for me. This is what I was told by Intel. They said that if you kill me, you would get a cow and you'd get two weeks in Hanoi. Then they'll come close to killing me. They couldn't do it.

Not a lot of Black Force for Connoissance Marines out there, huh?

No, not in those days, no. '50s, '60s. A lot of these guys We all know they come from maybe cities and didn't have swimming pools that these kids could go through. There's a lot of social stuff going on with that. But a lot of the guys didn't try hard enough. I tried hard enough because I want to be there. I knew I could do it.

How did that make you feel knowing that they had a bounty on your head?

It didn't bother me. Folks have been looking after me all of my life. They tried to kill me when I was in Hong Kong. I went there on R&R. I knew it was set up. They brought this girl in my room. She knocked on the door, and I was on the phone talking to my wife. I was waiting on the call because we had another server to get through to the States and all that, and I'm waiting, and she come to my room. She could either capture me or kill me, and nobody would really care another American, especially being black. But no, I don't fall for that. And the time Well, there was a lot of times people tried to kill me. I mean, even in Hong Kong, they tried to kill me, and they tried to kill me in Hawaii, tried to kill my wife and my son.

How did they How did you start to kill your wife and your son?

I have a long history. I had just come back from a year in Europe. And when I was in Hamburg, they tried to kill me. They missed. When they tried to kill my wife and my son, we had gotten a three-year tour in Hawaii. So Dottie 9, Gary, we went to Hawaii. Year goes by, we're doing those. She won first place in the Hula Yes. And we're having a great time. I'm enjoying it and met a lot of Hawaiian friends, and I was out of combat because most people don't know what happened to me in Germany. But at any rate, and one day my general called me and he said, Captain, sit down. I was the captain then. I said, Yes, sir. I Oh, shit. I've done something wrong now. General was calling me in. He said, I'm sending you home. I said, Well, General, I just got here. We're enjoying this tour. He said, I know, but the plan is for... I didn't want to mention the name, to kill your wife and your son. We've confirmed it. And so to keep you out of harm's way I'm sending you and your family home.

Then you go home and you talk to your wife and you tell her that you no longer will be in Hawaii. Went home. Dottie is a trooper now. You got to understand who Dottie is. You would have loved her because she was a real trooper. I said, Sweetheart, something come up. She said, Why is it something always comes up when you want to tell me I don't want to hear? I said, Well, Sweetheart. I just saw the gentleman, and he told me that we're in trouble. And they figured out that you and Gary are going to be shot on the morning at 10: 00, and they were supposed to be there.

Who was they?

You don't even know that. That's a long time ago. Tell me some of your stories, and I'll tell you mine. No, it wasn't a good idea for her to stay in Hawaii. Well, you were a seal, right? That's right. So you're a tough guy. You can handle all this stuff. We'll get around to it. I went back and told the general that my wife don't want to go home. She wants to stay here. This is the first time in a long time we've been together, and the war was hard on me. He said, Yeah, captain, I knew all about that. I know what happened to you in Hong Kong, and I knew about them two people you killed by the way. I said, No, I didn't kill those people, general. He said, Yes, you did. I know that. I'm lying, like a general. But that was something that happened a long time ago. It was supposed to be secret. But he's a general. He's got sources.

Are these the two people that you killed that were running away? Is that who he's referencing? No.

This was in Hong Kong I'm talking about.

You killed two people in Hong Kong.

That was a long time ago. I thought we'd talk about my wife and my son. But he told me that he knew about the people that killed in Hong Kong.

Who did you kill in Hong Kong?

Some bad guys. I killed them both, and I kicked them off and kicked them in the water. Killed them all. They didn't know what they were fucking with. Yeah, I killed them. They tried to kill me.

How did they try to kill you?

They tried to set me up. This is Hong Kong now we're talking about. They come to my room. Well, they sent this girl to my room. Pretty girl. I had a wife at home.

Is this intelligence?

Hmm?

Is it intelligence services?

We had the British there. They owned the base. China owns it now. British was our allies. Sean, there's so many things. They diagnosed me with PTSD, and they also declared me insane. I'm an old guy now, and I have trouble dealing with some of these issues. I know who you are and what you've done, and I appreciate it. And I'm doing the best I can to do this piece with you. But a lot of it was not known through these channels. And when I was in Hong Kong, I was on R&R. But they tried to kill me. If they'd left me alone, I wouldn't have bothered them. But they didn't leave me alone, and they had to realize who they were messing with. So I did kill them. I kill a lot more. Yeah? And that's what you want to talk about. But a lot of this stuff runs together. The timing that was... I'm 87 years old. I'm going to be 88 this year. I spent 14 years overseas. I fought two wars. I have 19 holes that I bled from. Both my legs have been broken. Right now, I got six pieces of metal in my body.

Two in my thighs and down in my lower legs were broken. I got a piece of metal in my left leg. My right leg is shorter than my left leg. I got scars all over me. I can't hardly walk. That's why I didn't stand when you come in. No disrespect.

I didn't take any. Well, let's move into... There was a down B-52, correct? Yeah. That supposedly had a nuclear bomb.

It was a B-57.

B-57, excuse me.

It crashed in the mountains. And I was told... I know it was nuclear-equipped. In other words, you could carry a nuclear bomb on it. And I didn't know if they had a bomb on it or not. But we were supposed to parachute in. Left that alone. Didn't want to drop into an area like that. I've been in jumps where the area was smoked. So we landed on top of the mountain, helicopter. We dropped in about 10 feet. We dropped in. It was a heavy landing. We had our stuff with us. We went down to the crash and wasn't much there. The Vietnamese had already been there. By the time we got there. We got in there at first, might have a chance to see what's on this thing. But we found some goggles, and we knew that somebody had this aircraft. We brought some of the oxygen bottles back. I didn't find any bodies. We did look. But the story Our story is we knew that there's no point looking any further because there's nobody here. The plane crashed and hit the mountain, and the tail was separated from the body. And so I decided, Okay, we need to go home now.

This is enemy territory. And team broadminded. So we went down the mountain and started home. But it started to rain. And I told them that I needed an extraction because we could see tracks on around. I figured that some bad guys are out there. So I call for an extraction, and they call back and says, No, we can't come and get you because it's raining, and the choppers can't fly. I said, Well, I'll give you a day. I'll stay here for a day, roaming around, And then I either got to stay here until you come get me, or I got to come home. And after all of that, I decided we're going home. And I got my team together in a little And Dourosky was a very tall point man. Still around the day. I said, Dourosky? No, I said, Point man, take us home. And for the next five days, we walked through enemy territory, went through two minefields, swam a river, wasn't captured, and we got hit in the last part of it. They opened fire, but that was all right. Not going to bother us because the Marines were coming from the other direction to pick us up.

So we probably killed a bunch of them, but that didn't bother me because they weren't going to really attack us. And they Chuck showed up and picked us up and went home. And the colonel said, Why don't you get something to eat? I wasn't hungry. Couldn't eat. I let my troops go to the mess hall. Then I had to go down to colonel's office to see the CIA guy and the debriefing. Sure, you've been in a lot of those. So But they debriefed me and I told them what I knew. I didn't find any bodies on the aircraft. And then the colonel said, Why don't you go and take a nap? I was tired. I said, I don't know if I can sleep. I've been away for four days. Almost five days, I'm laying down and my eyes had closed. And I couldn't get my eyes open. I had mud and dirt, cake. Everything was in my eyes. I was laying there. I couldn't get my eyes open. I was moving my head. I was trying to get... And I had to do this. My arms were so tired, I couldn't hardly reach my face.

It was a hard, physical trip for us. And finally, I got my eyes open. Then this young kid was standing there. He'd come in, said, Lieutenant, I got your mail for you. No, the Staff Sergeant, said, I got your mail for you. First different voice I've heard, because I knew my guy's voices, and he was different. And he shouldn't have been in my tent because everybody knows you don't do that. But I had to learn to be a human being again. I had been in the jungle for so long. I was almost turning into that person. I could eat anything, I'd fight anything, sleep in the water, those types of things that I had experienced as I was making this from a peacetime Marine until in being totally involved in this jungle thing.

Did you feel more at home in the jungle? I did.

Then you did. Yeah. When my time come to go out, I had about two and a half days in the rear. You get some regular chowel, see the doc and all that. But I had a doc with me. It was uncomfortable. I felt better when I'm out there at watch, when I got my knife, I got my pistol, I got my rifle at the ready, and I knew I can kill anything. I wasn't afraid. I had gotten past that stage. I was only afraid for my men.

Well, Major, let's take a quick break. Then when we come back, we'll just pick up right here. All right. Do you want to water or anything? No. You're okay?

How's it going, dad? No, I'm all right.

All right.

Where have I been? I guess I took me back to Vietnam, huh? He took a little bit of trip there, huh? Yeah, I'm all right.

All good?

Yeah.

Okay.

I'm all right.

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All right, Major, you ready to kick it off again?

For your TV audience, I wear these boots because I've got metal in my legs, and it helps me out with stability.

Yeah. It's pretty sharp-looking kicks.

Thank you. You're welcome.

We're getting ready to get into Fulak.

Okay.

But before we do, we didn't cover the the battlefield Commission from sergeant to second lieutenant. So I wanted to ask you how that went.

Yeah, well, before Vietnam, I'd applied for a commission They had a program that you could apply for, and you'd go to OCS and Basis School, you'd come out an officer. I applied for that, but I passed all of the tests. But they sent me a letter that said, Consider it, but not selected. So I didn't get to go. The next year, my officer said, Try again. So I did again, and I didn't get selected it. It was hard on African-American Marines at during that time. We had very few officers in the Marine Corps, so they had the enlisted commissioning program. So I tried out, but I didn't make it. But then I guess later on, when they considered me for a battlefield commission, they just gave it to me. All the officers were dead. So they gave me the commission. I had never gone to OCS or Basischool. I had high school education. I'd had some college, but I was proud of that. For my family. Nobody in my family had ever graduated high school. And so this was good for them, proved that we could be good citizens My parents insisted on that. And you had to behave yourself.

And I did all those things. Then after I joined the Marines, like I mentioned, I did good. And then they decided to commission me. Took five minutes. Colonel called me in his office, and I signed the documents, raised my right-hand, and come out a second lieutenant.

It sounds like the bureaucrats maybe got in the way of your advancement, but the men that you're actually fighting with on the ground had a tremendous amount of respect for you. Is that fair to say?

Most of them, I can't say all of them did because the commanding officer of my unit, when they were looking at this Melevanta for me, he said he'd rather die and go to hell before I would get the Melevanta.

Why is that?

He was a racist. He's gone. He was within my unit. He was the captain in the unit. But he went to the POW camp with us, didn't fight. He was a coward, failed school by school. I never saw him make a parachute jump. I don't even know whether he even went to jump school or not, because I came in as a sergeant, then I made Staff Sergeant there, then I made Officer there. But Ken Jordan was his name, and his goal was to be the general's aide.

You talked about him earlier. You talked about him earlier. Yeah.

Wasn't a good man, and he didn't like me. I went through that as a NCO and as an officer, but I was okay with it because I was serving the Marine Corps, and I figured, I'm good enough to get through. I'm good enough to do a good job. I didn't make a lot of rank. I made it up to major. I probably could have gone further, but I chose to retire. I got almost 23 years. I was up for Lieutenant Colonel, which I'm sure would have made because of my background, my war background and other stuff I'd done. But when I retired, I bought a home in Jacksonville, and my My son was doing okay. My wife was doing all right. But I think my son had a big part of it, too. I couldn't find a school for him and those types of things. And of course, he's blind, His general needs. And so I had to deal with that. The general told me that he was going to recommend me for a tenant colonel, which has been pretty good for me. I'll come in as a snuffy. And then I come home from work one day, just before I retired, and my wife, Dottie, was crying.

So, man. Said, What's up? What's up, sweet Arch? She said, Gary got assaulted in school. My son was blind, special needs. And the demons came home. So I had weapons in my trunk of my car. I was authorized to do that. So I said, Well, this isn't going to work. I went down to the school. I was driving down to the school. There was a golf course on the left and some housing on the right. I was driving down, I hit a light, and I waited and waited And the more angry I got, I'm going to settle this. You're not going to assault my child. Demons had come home. Should have thought better, but That light never changed. That one didn't change. So I turned around and come back home. God once again protected me. They have no idea what I have had I got there and some kids' parents was there. But anyway, God saved me again. And Gary was okay. I retired. The general came there that day. He tried to talk me out of it, but I think it was time. I was hurting all over, and I was CEO of a Force Recon Company.

Wow.

And had a big retirement from me on the parade field. Everybody come to see me. The Navy come to see me, and everybody was there. And I was a major coming in the cornfield, the cotton fields. Dottie was there. Gary was not there. But there was the idea that all these people come to see me retire. Good friends. I had known since I was a teenager. They gave me a couple of medals. I don't know which one they gave me that time. And had the The band was there and they played the music and the marching band was there, and the general gave me a medal, and everybody applauded that Major Capers is going home now. The legendary Major Caprice, who gave it all. Then I brought up my Exo. Young man, he's gone now. He made Major General, but he's dead now. I introduced him as my relief. Then I waited around. I couldn't leave the battlefield, or not the battlefield, but the parade field, because I I went to see all my guys. I told Dottie, I said, Well, maybe somebody else will come. The general had gone, the admiral had gone, and I was waiting for somebody to come up.

One of my troops that I want to say goodbye to. Nobody showed. So Dottie said, You know, sweetheart, maybe it's time for us to go home. I said, Well, let's wait another minute or two. And nobody else came. I said, Okay. She drove me home and took off my uniform, and I never put it back on again. I have it in a sea bag somewhere in my shed. But those are the memories from beginning as a teenager, from the cotton fields to being awarded on the Tradefield with hundreds, probably thousands, because the divisions had their bands and said goodbye to me.

Let's go back to Fowlack.

Fowlack? Yeah. All right. Not a pleasant thing to do, but let's go back to Fowlack.

You ready for that?

Yeah.

What was going on there? What was the mission?

That confusion, Sean, because nobody really figured it out, except that was my last mission.

That was the last one? Last mission. How much time had you spent in Vietnam until then?

Nine months, 10 months, almost a year. But we did a lot of work with the Navy, doing the ship bottom searches in the diving and the swimming and all that. One night, I made a swim of 1,500 meters in enemy territory to do some recon on the beaches and it swam back 1,500 meters. But Fulak was a different situation. I was asked to go in there, and the Vietnamese had a base on the reverse side of Long Top Hill. Okay. My last mission because my time was up pretty much and I was going to use the last month, I guess it was doing some work for somebody helping the new guys coming in. But I wasn't commanding officer of the unit. I was platoon commander as a lieutenant. But I commanded most of the unit because I'd been around for a while and I was a little older. Some of the young officers, they would come in, wasn't qualified They wanted the experience of being there, but that's not a place you go to get experience in the areas that we were in. But in Fullock, I got to Fullock, and damn. Going into Fullock, we stopped off at a place where we had some guys that lived in the villages with the South Vietnamese, and they would be in the camps with them, and they spoke Vietnamese, and they would help the Vietnamese fight against the North Vietnamese.

I forget what they call those guys, but they were good. So I joined up with them. Well, actually, I didn't get up there first. I went into one place and we got shot out. Just blessed the other place. Chapa got hit, so we pulled out of there. We didn't land. I don't know how the hell they knew we were there coming in that place, landing zone. And the next one we got to We weren't going to quit. We were going in there and they had these pieces of... Had grenades on long holes that was set up with wire around them and they had these grenades. If you land in that area, the chopper would pull little pins on the grenades and they It would blow from each side.

So it was booby trapped, the whole landing zone. Yeah.

So figured that out. We got the hell out of there.

How did you guys see that in a helicopter?

Training, I guess. We spent so much time in the damn jungles, and we saw it. And then the chopper went up. He just kept going up. And all of a sudden, he just dropped down with auto-rotation, they called it, and he just turned it loose, come on down like that, then restarted about 200 feet off the ground, differently from where we were with his boogie traps and we got to where we needed to be, and we started operating. We're angry. This is supposed to be our last mission now. I'm taking whatever I have left, go home. But most of them were gone. It was a hard, hard tour. I was enlisted, man, now I'm in command. Jordan, who was in command at first, he got out of there. So Lieutenant Capers now gets the hard duties of taking the guys with me. I left one man back because he had a hernia, but he didn't want to stay back. He came to my tent and said, Lieutenant, I got to go. You can't leave me behind. I said, No, Ski, Durosky was his name. So you've done a good job. He's been with me all the way.

You fought a good war. Now you go home now and you have a happy life. Well, he was the only survivor that didn't get killed. And I loved him. He's still alive.

You guys keep in touch?

Yeah, still alive. I talked to him the other day. Came to my wife's funeral, my son's funeral. They were both buried together, my son and my son. But Steve was there. He was always there. And I got hospitalized a couple of years ago in Wilmington. And I woke up one morning and guess who was standing there, Durosky. Hey, sir, I'm here. He was my point man. Point man. Loyal. It broke my heart to leave him behind in full-out, but I made the right decision. Because the guy that took over, a guy named You all right?

Yeah.

Okay. Nick D'Greek. I replaced Durosky with nick D'Greek, and I gave him M60 machine gun. It got down to the fact that when we used that M60, he blew up everything. He got lost a leg. Nick the Greek did, the big man had 19-inch arms, and he used that M60 like it was nothing. He was a tough kid. But since Drosky wasn't there, he came to me and he said, Lieutenant, let me be a point, man. I can do it. I said, You know, nick, tough job. I'm going to be up front. He said, Yeah, but I can cover you. Somewhere along the line, I let nick be the Point Man, with the M60s. And Leading into that, a lot of things, of course, happened. Leading into that conversation with nick, a war dog king was killed.

How was your war dog king killed? How was the war dog king killed?

He was killed when explosions went off. It was one of them things that he killed two enemy soldiers. He's a big dog, trained to kill. We had to keep him in a cage. Only I and the dog, Camran, could hold him. And Miller got hit. Everybody was wounded. Drapeau lost a leg.

Is this Fulak?

Fulak.

What happened first? What happened first there? Sounds like there were three really bad firefights where he lost one Marine. Is that correct?

We lost a Marine. Didn't lose a man in Fulak.

No.

No. Everybody survived except the dog. But we had other missions where we lost somebody. Okay. All of us experienced that. All the platoons and teams We killed a bunch of people, and some of ours was wounded. Young Stalin. He was my point man, lost with Durosky. But he got shot and killed at Caisson.

Your team was ambushed in Fulak, correct?

He was with another team, and they went out on the mission and they got hit. And a grenade came in. And what I'm told, grenade came in and he rolled on it and the grenade blew him up. Everybody was wounded on that mission. But he was a KIA, a young guy. I went to see his mother after the war because I wrote the usual letters. Today, your son was killed. I'm sorry, and this and that. That was hard to do. I went to see his mother not apologize to her. She accepted it. It was okay. Then a few years later, his brother called me, but his mother and his brother had divorced, and he was raised by his father. So he wasn't there, but he did call me some years later to thank me, and he never come to see me. But I did go see Scala's mother. He was hit bad. At the time, what I was told, I was not in that area, that he jumped on a grenade, so I put him in for the mellow on. That was the right thing to do. And Jordan refused to send it forward. The kid's dead, and he saved a lot of lives.

Those M-26s that we carried, it would kill at least two or three people. And we knew that his sternum was crushed. So we knew that this grenade was under him. Now, that wasn't that full lock, that was a caisson. You were talking about full lock, right? Yeah. A lot of firefights. Well, that's a long part there. How do I simplify it?

You I have to simplify it.

Thank you. After the POW raid, I went to Hong Kong for four days. They tried to kill my ass in Hong Kong.

Yeah, you had mentioned that.

So I come back.

Do you know who tried to kill you?

In Hong Kong? Thugs. They knew that American Marines and soldiers was coming there for... I forget what the hell it was called now. R&r. R&r, yeah. And they had gang things set up. We'd go to the clubs, and sometimes you found a dead Marine, and the MPs, which is run by the British, would look into it. But we had a water fight. We were still fighting in Vietnam. I come back and I heard Skamla was killed. Yeah. Yeah, we had breakfast one morning. The colonel told me, he asked me, had I heard about the caisson? No, the Sergeant Major asked me, had I heard about the case on? I said, no, Sergeant Major. He said, We had a lot of trouble up there. And he said, Scanlan was killed. And everybody knew I love Scanlan. He was like a son to me. Hard hard, freckled face, red hair, always smiling. After the war, he was coming to live with me for a while. So it was personal when Scandler got killed. Now, they sent me to Caeson. I got there, and I'm going back to Caeson, I guess it is, and ran some long-range missions.

I mean, and walking, and we came home with a Python snake, a 20-foot long, weighed almost 200 pounds. We put him in a big sack, brought him back, and we didn't cross the river with him because it was too heavy. So we left him on the side of the river, and we swam across the river, went up the mountain where our base was. We left the snake there. We got back and I told the pilots about the snake we had caught. He said, You ain't no snake that long. I said, Well, give us a ride The helicopter will go down and get him. So we rode down with the helicopter. One of my swimmers jumped out. He landed on a big rock there. Swimmers jumped out, went in and got the snake. He was loose, and we brought him back to the base And some of this stuff you've already read, I'm sure, but you've done your homework. But we put the snake in an excavation, and he was lying there. And I think Sergeant Yearman said, Well, we got to get him something to eat. So he drove down the town and come back with a damn duck.

And he tied the duck one leg and put the duck in the hole there with the snake. Snakes lying in there, hadn't really moved. Ducks in there quacking. I said, You know, that duck looks tight, looks tough. He's going to kick the ass out of that snake in there. So everybody's laughing. In the morning, that's beating up with feathers in it. And the snake will eat that duck. So everybody's coming by to bet on... Troops bet on any damn thing, who's going to win this fight? The next day, we look in this hole and the snake was dead as a doornail. No shit. Laying out, and the duck is crooking around. Yeah, the duck pect that snake to death, and everybody was laughing. And they believed it for a while that the duck had pect the snake. And it was an unbelievable story, but it was fun. And we took the snake and we gave them to the Montagnards, which is a Montagnard tribe, used to help us with intel in the mountains there, an older tribe called the Montagnards And for them helping us, I gave them some of the meat from the snake, and we gave them the skin, some of them, and we cut the skin off and they made belts Some of the troops made belts out of the skin from the snake.

But they named them Goma Pal, which was a popular TV program during that period of time. So they named the snake Goma Pal. So they had fun with that name and the death of the snake. Okay, time to go back killing people. I will kill them all this time. But we had the 324 B division that had come across the 16th parallel, and they were going south. They're going to chase the Americans out. But, Sean, you don't chase Marines out of anything. It just don't happen that way. Iwo Jima and Okinawa, all those places that we caught in. And we always had Corman with us. There's some wonderful stories we have with the Corman. I got a sealed Corman, Doc Burwell. He's still alive. He was a calling good man, tough guy. He used to hold a deep sea diving record. Have you ever heard of Doc Burwell? But he served with us well. Good man, tough guy. I don't want to get you out of your sequence there, but we're talking about Fulak. It's good.

Yeah, we're talking about Fu-Loc.

Yeah, Fu-Loc. That was my last mission. We were supposed to destroy the base camp. The NVA had set up a base camp on the reverse side of the mountain. So I had to get in there to see how I can blow the hell out of that base camp. I run in some of the guards along the way and kill them. Finally saw, got to the top.

How did you kill him? Was it quiet? Were you in a firefight?

It was a firefight. It was a firefight? All fire fights. So trying to get in there, we didn't go in by helicopter. We walked in, fought our way in because I had to see what's on the other side of that mountain, and I did blow it. I called in the Fantoms, and they came in and blew the hell out of it. And they came out wiggling their wings. They'd come in, again, this blew the hell out of it, dropping all kinds of ammunition. And then the helicopters helped helped us out, tack helicopters. We accomplished the mission. That base didn't operate anymore. Team broad-minded, we had to find our way there. And Fulak? No, that wasn't Fulak. That was another mission But full-out, we all got wounded. We actually walked in. We couldn't get the flight in because, like I said, they had booby traps and all that, so we actually walked in, and we linked up with a group that lived with them, a group of Marines that lived with them. No kidding. And we stayed with them for the evening. Then we left that night and we walked in enemy territory. We're deadly. We went around the rice patties and we went through and got to a graveyard.

And a lot of firing was going on. Everybody was shooting with the... You see the excedent traces, traces going So I didn't want to walk into that. So I put my guys in a graveyard. I had those cement things there. So we stayed there and watched the battle. So no, we're not going to walk into that. So we spent the night there, good bit of the night. And then when I thought I could get in to where I needed to go, I took off about maybe before the born. Team brought them on it, and our dog, we took off. And looking back on it, we linked up with some of the Marines that was already out there, linked up with them, and they'd had a hard time, and they were going to have a hard time. I think it was one, three or something like that, but they had a hard time. We just come in there and we started to... We got into fire fights. I think we had seven damn fire fights in those four days.

Jeez.

Bloody. We run our ammunition the second day. And the chopper came in and brought some ammunition and grenades to us. On the last day, I think I threw 19 grenades. They hit us hard, we hit them hard. My dog killed some. I know how many I kill. You can't count it up, but they used to want to know how many WIAs that you kill. And nobody thought about that. You're on full automatic. You got your M60, you got the M79, everything you got, you're putting it out there. Because if you didn't, you could get overrun. But there was no chance they would run us. We were all wounded. And We had killed most of them. And last decision time, what do I do now? I thought, well, We knew that the choppers or the phantoms that blew up on the other side, they'd taken care of that on the side. I don't know that I really want to do that because they might reinforcements from somewhere. This It was their damn country, and they weren't very loyal. But we're loyal. We'll fight with the army, we'll fight with the Navy, but we're not going to fight with the Vietnamese because we don't trust on number one.

Never did. But the explosion was going off, and I started firing and kept firing. I kept throwing handgranades, and sometimes they would hit a tree or something like that and bounce back on the ground. And you'd have to make sure that if that thing went off, you were covered. So we finally had to make a decision to get out of there. And both my legs were broken. I was bleeding all over the place. We weren't going to quit. We weren't going to give up, not going to be captured. So we finally got down to the helicopter and landed. It was two of them. One was circulating around and the other one landed. I think you know that story, but I'll tell it for your audience. The helicopter landed, and I brought all my men in, and I was being helped by one of the groups, my dog's body. He brought the dog's body in, King. And then I had a problem getting everybody on that 34, H-34, a small helicopter. Got all the bodies on, King's body on. But it was... I had nine men and the dog and the chopper. It was too light of a chopper to get me on board.

So I told the crew chief, Get my men out of here. I'll make it. Find a way. He said, No, come on board. He grabbed me. There was noises going on. He grabbed me by my harness, pulled me on the helicopter, and the helicopter went up by 10 feet and crashed. Bam, I fell off, bleeding all over the place. But I could stand. I had broken a leg. I was standing. But this is a battle. Your personal injuries don't count. He grabbed me again, pulled me on board. Now, I don't know. My corps had given me morphine. So I don't know if he went up another time or if he just went out of there. But he did take off, turned around, and it kept going. And one of the copilot was shot. And the pilot started going home. Then it started to rain, lightning, and the Chapo was wobbling a little bit. But we're talking about God. Up in Caisson, I was on my knees one night after a young child was injured in one of them fire fights at Caisson. So I picked the child up and run toward the aid station. When I got there, the child had died in my arms and I laid the child down when her arm was holding on to my arms.

I couldn't hardly lay her down, but I got laid her down. She was dead. I went back to where I needed it to be, and I saw my coma. I said, Doc, come here. He said, Yes, sir. I said, I'm going to need you now. I figured they'd be coming back in. We had this barbed wire that's got my case on this barbed wire. And we had it because they would come in at night. They'd throw grenades through that barbed wire. And so I told the corpsman, You stay with me. And the corpsman said, Yes, sir. He came around and stood by my right. I was standing And he said, Lieutenant, I'm a little tired. Can I sit for a minute? I said, Yeah, Doc, we got a few minutes. And then we heard those bugles, America and you die, and all that side of foolishness. Doc sat down. I said, Doc, they're coming Now, Doc fell over dead, dying on his post. Damn. That's when I said, damn. He didn't tell me he was wounded. The hole in his chest. I didn't see it, should have. But I said, Doc, I called him over.

I didn't know he had been wounded, but it's my fault. I know for the years I grieved about that. Still grieve about it. The boy sat down there and said, I'm just a little tired, sir. I'll be okay. Damn it. I'll be okay. Brave. Where did you get such men from? Where do we get them from? A young sailor. I never knew his name. At least I don't remember his name. Sat down, and when I said, It's time to fight, he was gone. He would have fought. He had fought. I always thought about Doc, what he might have been, what he might become. He might have cured cancer. He might have done something for all of us. But then for me, the demons come home. Now you got to deal with Jim Capers, the warrior. I looked up in the sky that night, and I pray to God, said, God, I need help tonight. I need help. The little girl I tried to save was gone. The warrior Corman was gone, and I was on my knees. I'm looking up in the sky, I said, God, I need you. Please help me. I'm praying. God didn't say, It's going to be okay, son.

But when I needed it, God saved my life at another part, which I'll tell you later on, which confirms my belief in God. I wouldn't be here today if God hadn't asked it my prayer. He didn't ask it when I was on my knees praying, but God answers prayers when he needs to answer them. He'll talk to you then. He doesn't do things when you want them done. He does things when he wants them done. I've been through the God thing. Trust me, I know what God is, and I'll see him again. I'll see my wife and my son. I believe that. I'll see him again. I do. May not be a day tomorrow. You may jump up and pull a hand grenade.

I'm all out of hand grenades.

It wouldn't go off. God's got me. Kept me alive all this time. This summer, I'll be 88 years old.

Where did God show up? Was it in Fulak? Where did God show up?

God showed up and... Bullock. He always showed up when he went to show up. Maybe not for me, but other men that would have died and artillery came in that I didn't know was coming. But God showed up when I was coming out of Fulak. When the Chopper was flying us back to AMEDD, It was raining, it was a rough night. We'd been out there, and it started to go down. I was sitting in the doorway, and my wounded guys were holding on to me, and the guys in the background were lying down. They were crying and moaning because they had been wounded pretty seriously. Nick lost a leg and the whole bit. And I'm standing in the chopper, was flying in, and they started going down. I don't know if it had been out of fuel. It was going down. It was a nasty night. It was that night, and all of a sudden, the hand of God reached out and snapped it, caught that helicopter and kept it flying. I told it had no fuel, not enough fuel. But when I asked God, God said, Now I'll show you that I am God.

I'll give you my hand. And he kept the helicopter flying. Everybody on that helicopter lived. Those are stories that are real because all the men on board saw the same thing. We were going down. Behind the hill, there's a helicopter going down. All of a sudden, God grabbed it and kept it flying. Then when they took it to the maintenance folks, they said they had no gas. They said it shouldn't have flown. And I'm told they took it to someplace, it never flown again. God can do amazing things. That particular night, we were crashing, and all those lives would have been lost, and I would not have been a 70 A seven-year-old man about to turn 88. 87. I'm 87 now. I'll turn 88 this year. What a blessing. What a blessing. I know about God. I also prayed when my son was dying in a hospital. I was standing by his side, and he closed his eyes. I couldn't save him. I prayed to God. I wanted it a miracle. He died in my arms. But here's But I had to finally see that my son is not blind. God has him now. He's in the bosom of God.

My wife does not have cancer now. God has healed both of them. They're happy. They're sitting at the right-hand of God, and they're waiting on me. I don't know if God will A lot of guy like me who hadn't been a nice guy, but I want to believe that he'll forgive me.

Well, I think you must feel pretty fondly of you if you saved that helicopter.

He didn't just save the helicopter. He saved all of us. There were human beings on that helicopter. I don't know they had prayed like I prayed, but when I was in Caesan, I asked God to show me a miracle. It He hit me with a bolt of lightning, but he didn't. But when that chopper was going down, like I said, God reached out with his mighty hand and kept it flying. In spite of the rain and the light, and everything else that was going on, I know it was going down because I saw the blood all over the place. It was full of blood. Has everybody been wounded?

It doesn't sound like the helicopter should have even been able to take off because the first time, it couldn't.

You're right. They took it out of service, and they said it shouldn't have been flown that night. I don't know. But I can only say that God saved us when we needed to be saved. I've had other cases when I prayed. I prayed for my son. It didn't work, but then God has him now. My wife died of cancer after 50 years of marriage. I'll see her again.

Do you think about dying?

Do I think about dying? No, not really. Because I got friends like you to keep me going. No, I'm all right. I have serious PTSD, so they tell me. I have nightmares. The battlefields come back to me. I live alone in my home, but I have friends that come to see me. The government provides a nurse to see me, and old friends come over and help me because I can't get around very well anymore. I don't drive. No. I've had problems, obviously, sleeping. The demon comes home. I don't know if you know what PTSD is, but I'm not a doctor, but I know that I've had trouble with it. It takes a lot of people to get me a hand these days. I still got a piece of wire in this leg and metal in my lower legs and in my thighs. I had a heart attack. I've had surgery, and the doctor's doing what they can to keep an older guy alive. They give me Purple Heart, and now I understand they're trying to give me the Melvana. Won't bring my men back.

You got a silver star for Bouh-Lop.

Yeah.

Sounds like it's a good possibility it's going to get upgraded to the Model of Honor.

What'd you say?

It sounds like there's a good possibility that's going to upgraded to the Medal of Honor.

Well, that's what they're telling me. There's a list of 47 senators and congressmen who sent a letter to the President and asking him to give me the the Melavana. Now, he's a busy man, President, so I don't know whether he'll get around to that or even if he wants to get around to it. I got nominated in '67 when my general come to see me after full-out and kiss me on the head, forehead. And there were folks who... I was full of morphine. I don't really know what happened there, was what folks told me, but that he had planned to give me the Melavana or recommend me. Congress gives that or the President gives that. He got killed in a helicopter crash. So I left and went home and did the family thing and didn't think about it much until a young general named James Williams, he used to be one of my platoonsargeants, platoonscommanders, rather. He was now a two-star general. And he'd heard all these stories at my reunions, talked to guys that said, Well, Major Capers did this. Major Capers did that. Wasn't simple, but they were there. And Williams, as he come through, a young man, he decided to call me back to duty.

And that's what he did. And he recommended me.

How many of those men that were on that helicopter with you are still alive today?

One man that I know was His name was Henry Stanton. Huge young man, black kid. He was my M-79 man. He run on ammunition. When an explosion hit me and hit him and I would lean up back against a tree or something. And I reached around. I was holding Stanton, and I reached around to take the dog tags off of another Marine that I was holding. Well, Stanton was holding. I was holding Stanton. I reached around to take his dog tags off, and he looked up to me and he said, Lieutenant, I don't think we're going to make it this time. He'd been hit and lost a kidney in his blood all over the place. He's bleeding out of his mouth, some out of his nose. He said, No, we're going to make it. You hold on, son. You hold on. One of the bravest things I ever heard, he said, Hand me a rifle. I can still fight. After all this explosion and whatever, said, Just hand me a rifle, sir. I can still fight. That's a man. That's a patriot. That's a Marine. I can still fight. And He said, I'm going to get you out of here, son.

Everything just went to hell. But he lived. He's still alive.

Do you keep in touch with him?

Hmm?

Do you keep in touch with him?

Hmm. I called him to tell him that it looked like they want to give me the Melavana. He said, Oh, hell, so they should have done that 50 years ago. I said, I understand, but this is what they're telling me now. And I got sent a letter that had all that, if you saw that or not, the signatures, all the signatures of the congressman. I didn't know most of those guys. But Bull and the team, they've been pulling the strings, General Williams and all the ones. I'm proud. I never thought about the Maloana. I thought about my troops. When they gave me a Silver I was all right. I figured, Oh, Jay, that's someone is pulling strings. I never thought I did anything. I did my job like I did when that shark was going to eat the hell out of one of my team members. That's what you do. Sure, you've done it or you're trained to do it. Durosky is still alive, but he wasn't on the Fulak mission. He had a hernia, and I sent him back to the eighth Station. He pissed about. He wanted to go. I put nick in at the Ski's place.

Nick lost a leg. Nick was a big man, 19-inch arms, 50-inch chest. He carried an M60 like nothing. When he got hit, I heard him screaming. Part of my language, You Mfs. He was just firing, which is a large weapon. When you got hit and he kept fighting. Stanton kept fighting. They all kept fighting. There was no quitting team, broad-minded. Just my dog. Miller is gone now. Krepo is gone now. Sergeant Yeeermann is gone now. And a few years ago, they put me in a hospital. Didn't look good for me. But God God knows. I don't worry about it.

After Vietnam, you were involved with the CIA in the Cold War.

Well, there was nothing to that.

No?

No, not really.

What were you doing?

They tried to get me on full-time. I had done this stuff in the Vietnam. I did the CIA thing there in Vietnam, and I'd help them. This is not Vietnam, but when I was CEO of Force Recon, some of the guys that were about to deploy I'd bring them down to Camp Lejeune so they could go to the Jump Master's course or Rappelling, whatever it was. I'd do that for them. And of course, in Vietnam, I did that thing and Europe. But they're a good group. They were a lot of young guys. I did the FBI stuff. Fbi gave me to Thompson Salt Machine when I retired. I got a young man now. He retired, a two-star, and the CIA. I trained a lot of those guys. But as far as operating. My operating operations were not very good. And that's not what I'm just supposed to say. There's a lot of stuff that I was involved in. Yeah. And you've sure you've probably done the same things. Not me. Because of what I look like, number one, and the way they're set up to operate. And the FBI, I tried to help out there.

I put them through a JMP program, a JMP master program, and martial arts. I used to run the martial arts program for a long time, for different folks that want to kill people.

What did it feel like when you got inducted into the US Special Operations Hall of Honor?

I didn't know about it.

You didn't know about it? No.

I had lost my wife, my son. I was living in California, and the general called me, look at his name now, and told me they were coming up with a program, and they were looking for names to submit. And he said, Everybody feel like maybe you would be the first one. And I said, Well, I don't know much about it, but they flew me from California, where I was living, I think I was in... Flew me to Tampa, Might have been Tampa. I don't know. They flew me to Tampa. And Colonel Olson was a seal one time. And he's still a seal. It's still a Marine. He's a nice guy. He picked me to give me the first one. I didn't get the medal at first. They had to make this. Then he sent it to me in the mail. Then the Marines, this is the Vietnam medal right here. And this is the Commando medal, the Rader medal. So that's the stuff all presented to me. Sometimes I forget to wear. I don't wear it all the time, but I thought I'd wear it for your show.

Thank you. Yes.

I wish my wife was here to see this, to see me sitting there with a famous guy like you.

I'm sure she's watching.

Yeah. Yeah, it probably is.

And your son, too.

Yeah. He was a musician. He played the piano, the flute, the melodica, the organ.

Did he really?

Oh, Yeah. All that? Yeah. He played in church. But he had other disabilities. He couldn't do what I'm doing now as far as the whole conversation. Wonderful child. Wonderful child. We used to sit and hug each other before he went to bed. A lovable child. One night, he knocked on my door, our door, He said, Dad, I got a headache. He had said, I had a stomach ache. I said, Okay, son. So Went to the hospital. Doctor says, Well, there's not a whole lot we can do, so I brought him back the first night. And then the second night, it got worse, so I took him back to the hospital, and they said, Well, we don't see much we can do with a stomach ache. So I took him back home Then I took him back the third night. Then for me, now I'm having a problem. They had him laid down on the table, and he died right there. They let my son die. Now, you see, I'm not a bad guy, but I was angry. My son is gone now. They had me in a little chapel there. The pastor come in. My wife was sick and she wasn't there.

So I'm standing there and I don't know what to do. On one way, I'm feeling one way, I'm angry. My child is lying there dead, and they're telling me they're sorry. Demons did come home that night. I told them, Oh, you need to leave me alone now. My wife is coming. I'll be all right. Just leave me alone now. And then everybody tried to tell me this, that. It got to the point where I didn't lose control, but they didn't know who they were dealing with. I got to kill them all. I thought about that, but God stepped in. No, you don't. No, you don't. My wife finally showed up and met her at the car, and she came to see our child. Then we walked down this hall together, and we've been walking down that hall together for a long time. One reason I never remarried. I can appreciate a pretty girl, but Dottie was special. A military wife. But we got through that. Seemed like the next day Dottie dies of cancer. Now I'm thinking, How do I pull this off The human being, I'm sure you had stress, but now I'm in a place where I don't need to be.

I made a plan to kill the doctor. I called one of my friends in Arizona, and he was going to help me blow up the gas station as a decoy. Policeman and farmer would be there. When a doctor come out of the hospital, they're going to kill him with my knife. I'm going to kill him with my knife.

What stopped you?

God stopped me.

How?

I'm not good enough to tell you how God works. I'm not that good, but I know that I pulled off the operation. My men was ready to go. They were volunteers. Team from Arizona were here in Jacksonville. We were going to blow a couple of gas stations. That's the easiest stuff. I'm sure you're not going to do that stuff. I got to divert the police force there, the fire department. Then when the doctor come out of his office, I was going to be parked. I was going to grab him, I was going to cut his throat. That's what I do. But I'll probably mention that stuff too much in your interview, but God stepped in and I came home. I was home and I had to... My pastor came over to the house. It was about three o'clock in the morning. Dottie wasn't crying. I didn't know why, but Dottie wasn't crying. I was crying, but I think Dottie had to be tough for me. She believed in God, too. We always went to church. We built the church one time. My troops and I built the church from the ground up, stole the wood.

I hate to say it that way, but we got to some place, we stole some old wood, got it built. Dottie was the first lady, and I had a chaplain that wasn't too far. He was helping with it. My son played the piano in church. Dottie was the first lady, and we sang every Sunday, and my chaplain prayed. It wasn't a big church, but we enjoyed that so much. And some of the guys who had been in trouble, and back in those days we had some serious issues, and they'd come every Sunday, and they enjoyed it so much. Some a relief, I guess, by the commanding officer sitting with him in church, and his wife is singing, and his son is playing the piano, and my buddy, the chaplain. It was such a wonderful thing to see, nothing to do with anything else but the human spirit. We want the art of God, and we want to build a place. And I'm sure you can relate that in the Bible terms, but Years later, I went back to that area. I went to see if that church was still... It was a little about this size, I guess, there's the room.

I went I got there and I parked my car and I looked around. I said, Well, I think it was over here. I started walking over there and the young Marine came out and just came over and said, Hey, sir, are you all right? I said, Yes, and there used to be a church about this area over here? He said, No, sir. I said, I know of, but I'll help you look. So he's walking along with me. He said, Where you come from, sir? I said, Well, I live in the area, but I used to be stationed here. And there was a church over here that we built, and I just thought I would visit it. He said, No, sir, there's no church here. And I've been here for a while. I've never seen or heard of a church. You wouldn't be lying to me, would you, son? He said, No, sir. Marines never lie. Okay. I got in my car and I drove home. Daddy and Gary still alive at the time. Sometimes it's hard for me to differentiate the timing because we were blessed with good years, and I've been blessed with good years, but my memory is not all that good, which you'll probably see with this interview.

I don't remember everything like I should, but then again, I offer the excuse of being 87 years old now.

You're doing just fine.

Thank you, sir. Appreciate that. Appreciate that. Well, I live by myself, and I don't talk to a lot of people. I have guys come to see me. A matter of fact, on the way up here, a friend of mine, a three-star general, He comes to the house to see me, and he's probably going to be the commoner at a Marine Corps one day. Nice young man. I was his guest speaker at a Marine Corps ball one time. So they called me out when they need me. I put my tuxedo on and try to hold my stomach in. I saw him the other day. But now we're passing the torch. Young people like yourself and the others, they give me a chance to say some things. And I appreciate that. I don't know if I can tell you in sequence because you never ask an 87-year-old man to say something in sequence because I'm going to be all over the place.

You established the Gary and Dottie Capers Foundation. Yeah, I did.

To help kids with special- Both of them are gone now, and I thought I'd honor them by establishing a nonprofit organization. I had some volunteers, nobody's paid, to do certain things, to raise money. Well, Dottie was there. We started for Gary, but Dottie was still alive. And we started get this thing, and we'd bring people in, friends in, raise money for a nonprofit. There were a lot of homeless people in our town, too many homeless people. So Now we got to feed them. We did that. We moved something to my home. We brought the homeless in, and Dottie cook for them, washed their clothes, trying to help, just like I had been helped. But you don't forget those things. When that white family took me in and washed my clothes and gave me clothes and fed me, put me down at night so I could sleep and stood to watch over me as a black man, you don't forget those things. It's a noble example of what America is, what it should be, and what it is, not the way it always is.

Where do people donate to that foundation?

Their time. Sometimes they donated money.

If somebody wanted to donate money, where would they donate?

We have a website, and Kenyata happens to be the president of it. He's the young man that came with me. He happens to be the president of the organization.

Well, I'll tell you what. We'll put the link to the website in the description of this interview. So if anybody wants to donate- Bless your heart.

They could do it. I knew you had a good heart. I knew you just weren't a mean guy. I knew that. It would help us because when the virus hit us, folks lost jobs and McDonald's closed. And I remember when a couple of my guys came to my house and said, Major, we lost a McDonald's here. I said, Well, yeah, that's okay, but I don't eat at McDonald's anyway. But they told me that one of the ladies there who had a couple of children, didn't have a job, and her rent was due. She was going to get evicted. The old man, they brought it to the house Nice young lady. I said, How much do you need? She said, Well, I need about $2,000. I didn't discuss it. Gave her $2,000 on the spot. I have been homeless. Not intentionally. My folks didn't want to give me away, but they thought it would be better with this family, and they took me in. But at any rate, the foundation has done good. We have a young lady named Ashley Casado. She did the documentary for us. I don't know if you've ever seen that, the documentary.

Other folks have jumped in to try to help to raise money for the Home, it's not for me. The government gives me a check every month. They pay me a lot of money for the Purple Heart. I have a lot, but I have five Purple Heart, so I can only get three here. I got so many down times when I got to the hospital, they found holes that they hadn't told me about. Back of my legs. And I said, What the hell that happened? But there's so many fire fights, and you're wounded. But you don't go to the hospital. The corpsman patches you up. You're not going to... You need to be there with your troops. Always with your troops. I did that. I'm an 87-year-old man now, and I'm telling stories that happened years ago. Nobody gives a damn anymore. Only 2% of our country joins the military.

Oh, I think a lot of people are going to give a damn about this one.

You know, been a little tough for the old man. Been a little tough. He told me I was coming on your show. I kept calling you Ryan Shaw. They said, No, no, no. Remember now, he's important. He has so many people listening to him. Don't screw it up.

I'm not important. I'm just a guy doing what I like to do.

Which is happy for you. Thank you. I'm happy to be here.

I'm happy to be here, too. And I'm happier here. And on that note, Major Capers, I just want to say once again, It's an honor. Thank you. To interview you and to get your story out. God bless Dottie and Gary. God bless you.

I really appreciate that. God bless you. I really appreciate that.

I really hope you're still targets upgraded to a medal of honor.

Be nice. Are we done? We're done. You told me you'd be here till 6 o'clock. Thank you.

Thank you.

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