Transcript of #276 Nick Brokhausen - The Deadliest Stories From Vietnam with MACV-SOG

Foreign.

Mr. Nick Brockhousen, welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Sean.

It's an honor having you guys.

Well, likewise.

Thank you. Thank you.

So we got connected through Tilt, correct?

Oh, yeah, Tilt. It's so nice to see him in men's clothing again. Oh, my God.

What did he used to wear?

Well, right on.

Well, seriously, I tell all you guys.

This and everybody that I've interviewed from the Vietnam generation, and I just want to say how much, and I don't say this lightly, how much of an honor it is to have you here. And you know, when I was growing up, the Vietnam generation is what inspired me to join service, become a Navy seal, and fight for my country. And it truly is. It was the, it was the movies, it was the guys. It was everything to me about the Vietnam generation that, that, it just fascinated me from, from a young age. And still to this day, I think you guys are just a special breed of human beings. And so it means it stops.

I'm gonna have to buy a new hat.

Right on. But no, I'm being serious, so welcome home.

Well, I appreciate that. And I gotta tell you, the new generation, every once in a while, I get the distinct honor of working with Special Forces, SEALs, whatever, you know, and it, I gotta say, you're all right. Proper rascals. You know, the same spirit, the same drive, the same professionalism is still there. You know, it's, it's, it, it's a pleasure to, to interact with them and it gives me faith that we actually have a chance to recover the Republic. Yeah, yeah.

You know that.

I know every, every new generation gets a lot of, you know, but they weren't as hard and they're not as tough and. But, but the ones that I meet are shithot operators. And lots has changed. I feel like I'm a dinosaur now.

I'm sure, I'm sure you do too. So with the way warfare is conducted now.

But those guys are, are true. Truly innovative and it's really cool to see.

But you know, the, all the SEALs, Special Forces, they've all evolved and some aspects, they become one dimensional and Iraq was a, and Afghanistan was a reason for that. They became door kickers. Our generation was more working with the indej and training them, equipping them and leading them into counterinsurgency. And they're slowly but surely going back to that. And I'm glad to see that because that's really where the individualism and the teamwork really shine, when they start going back to the basic. Because, you know, sf was based on the oss, you know, and you, our lineage was that you were going to get jumped into somebody else's country and you might spend seven years there, you know, fighting a war and that. So, you know, the training for it, the mentality, the, the nexus was based around that concept. And I'm glad to see that they're finally getting back to that in such a way that they can become a really effective tool. Yeah, yeah.

You know, we haven't really talked much about the oss.

Do you want, do you, do you.

Want to go into that a little bit?

Well, what I know about it, I'm not Victor David Hansen, and I'm no great intellectual. I do read, though. Yeah. The OSS was, you know, in the beginning, when they, when they started the oss, Donovan was given the OSS Office of Strategic Service. And it was a battle with J. Edgar Hoover because J. Edgar Hoover wanted it all. He wanted to be, you know, the guy who was putting FBI agents in, where OSS agents actually ended up going. And they, they did a compromise with him that gave him the counter intelligence role in the US and in South America. So the FBI had limited influence in South America and Mexico because there was. The Nazis had a huge, huge station in Mexico. They were operating out of Mexico, northern Colombia, places like that, Argentina. But, you know, the OSS was originally designed to provide war fighters, people that could go in, provide strategic intelligence on the, on the Nazis and on their military and what they were doing in other countries and that. And what he did is he picked businessmen, people that had traveled in Germany, people had traveled that were there, may be natives of Italy, Bulgaria, Armenia, whatever, and drew them in and formed the oss.

And they had different divisions of it. And each of those divisions had a certain amount of latitude how they operated. But the whole thing was based on clandestine. We're not going to make a big show like the commandos and that we're going to drop you out of a Lancaster bomber in a business suit, and you're going to get on the ground and go to meet your contacts in that country and then start providing intel back. And then after the war, they got rid of the OSS and it became the Central Intelligence Agency. And really ruined it when they did that because it took away some of that expertise and Elon Musk of the operators from World War II. But the OSS was a very effective tool. I just read a white paper written by a E8 from 10th group, guy named Kevin O', Connor, O.C. 280 pounds of moving Irish Intellect. Where he suggested as a good suggestion is that do away with Special Ops and turn it back into the OSS and have the same different divisions and that within it, for one thing, centralized purchasing. There's so much redundancy in the purchasing. And second of all, it does away with each service having their special operations division.

Put them all, put them all in, in one unit, make them all warrant officers. So perfect rank to operate in. You know, you got officers, you got warrant officers, but you don't have NCOs anymore. And if you transfer into it, you automatically become a warrant officer.

When did this white paper come out?

He wrote it. I know he wrote it and Al Mullins edited it, thank God, but about six months ago.

Six months ago, yeah.

And he, I, I think he sent it to the Secretary of Defense or he might have sent it to center as, you know, a suggestion. You know, here it is.

I think that's a genius idea.

What do you think?

Got some flaws, but it's much better than what they're operating under now.

What, I'm just curious, why do you.

Think that would be better? I have my own opinions.

But see, how do I put it? They, they've got the ability to act without massive oversight. You know, this, this whole organization in Special Forces stands on the shoulders of 12 men. And they forgot that you've got psyops and you've got civil affairs and you've got, you know, ribbon cutting outfit or some other hoofula. Those are all support units. They're not special operations. I don't consider them a special operation. I'm sure that people in scops argue about, you know, they actually captured this or captured that when they were out in the countryside. But really it's all based on a SEAL team and an A team. Those guys are where the rubber meets the road. And you know, we give you an example when over the years I had people come to me and go, what kind of special school did you go to to get in ccn? Well, a prior felony helped. It's, we were selected because it was just another SF assignment. It was no more than that. You'd go there and you do your thing in Vietnam and then you come back to the States, you might get assigned to the Red empire or the 10th group.

And then you did the missions that they had on the board now. So. But it gave you a vast pool of knowledge and cross pollinization with people that actually know how to operate on the ground.

You know, it's.

That'S, that's interesting. What What, So what, what units.

Would he have? What, what did the white paper say?

What?

Well, he broke it down into how they would structure it, the T, O and E. And the big thing that he was concentrating on was. I'm looking for the right word here. Sometimes I trip the ability to act independently without micromanagement, to give that power and authority and responsibility down to the working level in order to get the job done. Because that when where the rubber meets the road, that's where innovation comes from. And expertise. He, you know, another thing was, you know, the weapons try and do similar weapons so you don't. Again, relaying back to why buy six different systems when two actually will do the job? And standardization makes it easier for ammunition parts supply, you know, and training, simplifying it.

I hope they do it. I mean, I know it would.

I tell you what, I think I might have a copy of it. I'll forward it to you.

I would love to read it. I mean, I think that it would.

Be.

You know, I gotta be honest, I didn't know that's how it used to be.

But. Well, you know, we. Today you go into fifth group, you stay in the fifth group. In my day, you go to the 10th group, you'd be there for three years. You might get transferred to dead A or get transferred to the sixth group or, you know, the first group, whatever. And that allowed for a lot of cross pollinization and that you met guys that were doing different things and you were able to give your input and take theirs and move on with it, you know.

You know, not only that, but the.

First thing that came to my mind when you're talking about, know, you know, consolidating all the special operations under one umbrella. That's not the Navy, Army, Marine Corps.

No, it's own Air Force, actually, its own branch. Make it his own branch.

It's its own branch. I've always thought this was a good idea. I think, I think it'd piss a.

Lot of people off because the history would, you know, that would be the end of the Green berets, the Navy SEALs.

Well, I made the suggestion one time that you had to put the Navy under the Marine Corps. I pulled my pecker out in front of him.

Yeah, but. But I may have. I think it just gets rid of the competition. And when, I mean competition, I don't.

Mean, you know, Green Beret of seal.

I mean, competition is in the.

The salesmanship that goes into who's going to get.

Oh, yeah, what specific operation that I would think that that all goes away.

Because it will be put on some type.

It won't all go away, but it will make it a lot cleaner.

Yeah.

Other thing, a lot more transparent.

Yeah.

And then the other thing is after.

You know, after World War II, we.

Had all these bases all over the world, you know, Germany, everywhere, right? And, and, and those become the commands.

Themselves, you know, eucom, centcom, africom, paycom.

And so, you know, those, those, whoever's in charge of eucom, for example, has.

Two SEAL platoons and two SF units. And you know what I mean? They have that allocated to eucom.

And those leaders never want to, they.

Never want to give up an asset, no matter what's going on in the.

Rest of the world.

So that creates a shortage because you have to send a fucking task unit of seals to Germany when there's two wars going on in the Middle East. And if you had something like that, then it rips everything, it rips all the assets from these people that are hoarding it for no reason. And they all get allocated into the.

You see what I'm into the actual.

War zone, the conflict that is, that is happening right now.

A good example of that waste of, of talent and energy was I was in Detachment A in Berlin for six years and Dead A reported directly to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. And the commanding general of EUCOM didn't like that. He didn't like the fact that we were OPCOM to the Chiefs of Staff and not under his TO and E. And eventually he got his way and got a hatchet man in there and basically made the excuse that the COVID that we were using was too transparent and they should reorganize it. They made it into an MP outfit and gave him the added tendency Dead A had the counterterrorism mission and their primary mission, which was a stay behind mission in case the Russians got drunk and decided to invade. And they would invade and we'd disappear into the population and start blowing up the rail yards and telecommunications and that. And then we picked up the counterterrorism mission because nobody else was ready. Blue light was in the process of forming and Charlie and Delta were in their infancy. So we were the, the, the designee if something happened in Europe or the Middle east for about four years before they got totally spun up.

But you kept that mission and, and kept the primary mission and then added a mission after you got control over it of doing security for all the diplomats overseas, checking their houses, checking the embassies, checking their toilet, you know, whatever, you know, and, and the Guys did a. That unit did a superlative job but it was, it was unnecessary.

Yeah.

You know they misallocation of made a separate unit to do that, you know, because the dip security guys with the state department are mostly SF anyway and you know they've got that job. Yeah. Redundancy. You know it.

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Foreign.

Let'S get into your story real quick.

Well, not real quick. It's going to be.

It's going to be a long interview, but everybody starts off with an introduction. Nick Brockhausen, a green beret with a 17 year career in the U. S. Special forces including multiple combat tours in Vietnam. A veteran of the highly classified Mac V SOG running covert recon missions deep into enemy territory in Laos and Vietnam. Is part of recon team Habu in command and controlled north. The author of we few US Special forces in Vietnam and its sequel, Whispers in the tall grass. You've since had adventures around the world and now run a tech company and an armory.

And this is a quote that I love.

I'm cured for life of ever dating redheaded women or even making eye contact with them.

Never make icon.

It isn't that I'm bonkers over them. They find me as some sort of training aid. I just don't have the deranged state and body fluids for that exercise anymore.

I don't really. I run from them. Oh shit, I love that.

Well, Nick, before we get started, I got a couple of things here. So everybody that comes on the show gets a bag of these.

Those are vigilance leak gummy bears.

Oh, good. For the trip back.

That's right. That's right.

Thank you. You're welcome.

Made here in the usa. And I got. Have you ever heard of uscca?

No.

Well, USCCA as a soft spot in.

Their heart for Vietnam vets, just like I do.

And so they wanted me to give this to you.

Oh, thank you.

This is.

So basically, that is an insurance policy for life. And if you ever have to defend yourself, your family, your friends, whatever happens.

These guys will provide you the legal.

Advice, the legal funding.

Well, I'm old school and help you. I really don't need the insurance policy if you don't leave any witnesses.

Well, if you do leave, a witness.

Will be there to help you, so as long as it's, you know, legitimate self defense, so.

But legitimate self defense, isn't that an oxymoron? I don't know. I don't know. But. Well, thank you. You're welcome. And thank them.

You're welcome.

All right, Nick, so I want to do. I want to do a life story on you.

Starting a childhood. So where did you grow up?

My life started in 1969 when I was accepted into Special Forces selection course.

Roger that. Is that where you want to start?

Well, you know, I grew up poor. Relatively poor. My. My parents were. My. My dad was a former Army Air Corps, my stepdad, and my mom was a waitress, a cook. It's like from Clockwork Orange. What are you? Well, my father was Russian. My mother was a waitress. Yeah, but they raised four kids on a waitress salary and a. And a bartender. And we, we actually, we. We lived in North Dakota and my dad had a farm. We had a.640 acres or something like that. We raised cattle, hogs, chickens, and, and grain. You know, we. We sold all of the above. And two years of drought and another two years of floods put us out of the farming business, so my dad was able to keep the farm and he took the money from the sale of the machinery and everything, and we moved to Minnesota to a little town called Glenwood. And he opened a bar, hotel, and restaurant all in one building. And that's where I spent my formative. From the time I was a preteen until I was, you know, old enough to be drafted or whatever. And it was a great life.

I mean, I, you know, we. I hunted, I fished, I skipped school to go squirrel hunting. You know, hid the. Hid the guns in a hollow tree outside where the. Where they had what they call a shop class. And we'd skid her out over the roof of the building. Go squirrel hunting all afternoon. So I was very adept in the woods. You know, we. My brother and I had ran a trap line for a number of years for make money to buy school clothes.

No kidding.

Yeah. Montgomery Ward and J.C. penney's. You'd order your school clothes and that and your school clothes in the year before became your work and play clothes.

What would you sell? The fish?

Huh?

The trout line.

Oh, trap line.

Yeah.

Outside of Glenwood, it was all woods. Woods and farmland. We trapped mink. There was a big swamp area that. A number of them and that. That muskrat, mink, martins, fisher, cats, you know, all of which brought good money. And porcupines.

No kidding.

Yeah. Now, I got caught. My brother and I, we. We killed these four porcupines. And there was a bounty for porcupines that you had to take the nose, right? And then you pickle it, and you take it down to the game warden, and he'd send it in, you know, and you get. I think it was like 25 bucks for a porcupine. So we're skinning the porcupines and that, and I skin the pads off their paws and dropped it in the pickling. It's a nose. So instead of one nose, we now have five noses per porcupine. So. And dump kids, you know, we turned them all in. And that game warden was drinking. Buddy of my father, he called my father up and he goes, well, either your two boys have cleaned out every porcupine between here and the Canadian border, or they're up to something. So he sent it into the University of Minnesota. Of course, it comes back, these are paws and these are noses and that. They took us down and, you know, scared the shit out of us by locking us in a jail cell. I think I was, like, 12 or 13 at the time.

Yeah, A lot of fun. You know, I. I learned. I learned how to exist in the woods.

Yeah.

Learned how to track, learned how to, you know, learned animals, learned their habits. Then a lot of fun with my brother and my little brother, who was built like a crash dummy because that's the only way he survived childhood. And then eventually, you know, I. I went into the military and eventually evolved into. I. I learned the ground rules for the military and then applied for Special Forces and was accepted in 1968 or 69. And I went to. Went to jump school, went to SF selection course, came out of the selection course and went to Vietnam for my second tour.

What was your first tour?

The Marines. You were a marine?

Did I smumble that.

Why are you mumbling?

I didn't, I didn't. I have a lot of respect for the Marine Corps, you know, Me too. Taught me my craft. Taught me that, you know, I actually could work under pressure. And I was a grant when I first transferred services, you know, that you got to go through the, you know, basic training AIT and that, and then you're in a casual status for a certain amount of time. Before I went to Special Forces selection course, I went to Korea and I was with the second division up there on the DMZ during the Maya or during the Pueblo incident.

I'm not familiar with that.

There was a spy ship that the North Koreans captured and at the same time they sent a 40 man commando outfit down to Seoul to try and assassinate the president of South Korea. And the second division was in the sector. Everybody in the country was hunting for these guys. They got recognized at the front gate of the Blue palace because the guard recognized their accent wasn't from the south. And a run and gun battle started there. And they. I was. My company was assigned as a backup unit to the Koreans, the White Horse Division that eventually went to Vietnam and the Koreans and they tracked down the last 15 survivors. And we were part of the sweep that drove them up on top this mountain and they committed suicide at the last minute. And then I got transferred from there and then back to Fort Benning to go through jump school and then eventually in the Special Forces.

Why did you join the Marine Corps first?

I got drafted.

You got drafted?

Yeah.

How did. Okay, what was that like? It's like the Marines to get drafted. I mean, how did the letter come?

I was going to enlist. You know, just time and events caught up with me before I could enlist. In those days, you couldn't step out of the line and, and move over and enlist and take a three year in the army. Once you were designated, you went, you know, and it was interesting.

What was your first tour like? What, what was your first tour in Vietnam like?

Ah, line company. You never knew where you were going. Just know that you were going to get in a fight and eventually, you know, you'd get mauled or you'd maul them and then come back to it. Same thing was in Korea with the, with the second Division. We were up on the DMZ and that's all we did was we either were in the towers or we were over in the DMZ doing hunter killer patrols. Same exact thing. Just more intense in Vietnam than it was in Korea. No. Yeah.

How was south? How was Korea?

What?

How was Korea?

Cold, Cold, Cold, wet, nasty. Everything smelled like human. Well, the demilitarized zone, there was nobody over there. They basically cleared all the Koreans out of there. In the southern part of the dmz, once you cross the Mjim river, you were in the demilitarized zone and that extended up to the actual border. And then. Well, you had the line of towers and wire which they were just putting in during that time. They didn't have them originally. There was just foxholes. You went out and set up machine gun positions and then the foxholes in a lot like a line outfit does, you know. And then gradually they started replacing that with a fence system and 25 foot wooden towers with machine guns in them. And then they had gates and there was a minefield this side and a death strip that was raked and cleaned so you could see tracks and that. And then on the north side of the border there were some minefields. But there was a lot of old minefields left over from the war. She had to really be. A lot of them were marked and a lot of them weren't. You had to be really careful where you were moving about.

The hunter. I like the hunter killer patrol better than I like the static. Just sitting there all night getting eaten by mosquitoes in the summertime and freezing your balls off in the winter. A lot of interesting. That's where I first discovered kimchi.

Kimchi?

Kimchi. You know what kimchi is?

No.

Pickled cabbages.

Oh, I do know what that is.

There was. They. They make kemp. I make my own now.

Nice.

And you store it in porcelain jars. And in the old days used to put a. Like a straw stopper in the top of it. And it was about that big around in that. I stepped through one of them out in a DMZ and pulled my foot out. What is that? And the Koreans I rose with went nuts. Kimchi. They started dipping out with their canteen cups and that. But a lot of destroyed villages really kind of ghostly, moving around in lot of fog. A lot of activities, some months and a lot of months with no activity. You know, they were always trying to probe the wire and get through and slip infiltrators in. There was a funny story. There was a. Our sister unit was a third battalion of the 38th and they had. There's two bridges across the MGM. One down by Pemonjan and one up north by Nulari. And the one up north was called Freedom Bridge. And they had machine gun posts along the bridge looking down into the MGM river, which at that point is probably a couple hundred meters wide. And if it. During the monsoon season, it's flooded, it's moving fast.

This was kind of in between. And one of the machine gun posts opened up, just blasted away. Said, I got a submarine in the water. And of course that sergeant of the guard, lieutenant ran out there and they looked, they don't see right. So they, the guy was a spec 4. They took him back and they had him down to the Sykes to make sure he didn't crack up in that. And then he's going, I saw a submarine. I saw a submarine. Right. Two weeks later, a mini slab washed up on a sandbar.

Are you serious?

Between that bridge and the next bridge with the crewmen still in it. He had shot the conning tower and the one guy got stuck in the escape hatch and they all drowned. Well, he died. They made him a staff sergeant and sent him back to the States. Wow. There's all kinds of little incidents like that. They tried many subs off the coast, many subs up the mgm. A lot of times trying to come across in raps, you know, either rubber rafts or rafts they made out of vegetation and try and just float across and make their way, strip down and come across. Of course, in those days we had the mighty PRC6 walkie talkie for at squad level. And I think it was the PRC 10, which you had to calibrate all the time to keep it on frequency. You spit. There was too much humidity in the air for it to stay on frequency. A lot of, yeah, the, the weapon was M14S and I, I think when I first got over there, we still had bars for the squad automatic weapon and that rather than the M14E2 because all that shit was going south.

But interesting tour. I remember when it took from the DMZ to Seoul was a grueling, bouncing, jarring ride in the back of a deuce and app that took 3 1/2 hours on the autobahn. Now the freeway takes 15 minutes to get from sold at a DMZ.

So how long were you. How long were you there?

11 months.

And where did you go from there?

I went to jump school.

You went to jump school, Right.

And from jump school into selection.

Where was the Vietnam? Where was the Vietnam before that? Okay.

Yeah.

Do you want to talk about that?

Same as, as Korea, being a grunt, you know, I, I have an undying love for the core. If they just spent all that money on the corps, they would have had a true UW Capability, like I said. I made the suggestion once that the Marines should be in charge of the Navy. And it was. It wasn't well taken in that, but it. I learned discipline and I learned that I could operate under pressure, and I learned that I could take a lot of suffering and still keep going. And that. That helped me a lot when I decided to transfer over. You know, first of all, I went in the army and in Special Forces because you could get promoted. You didn't have to wait for somebody to die up the chain of command for a slot to open. So it was, you know, and, you know, at that time, Special Forces was vogue and go into the Green Berets. You know, it's, you know, be all the man you can be or whatever the slogan was. And I found it interesting. I found it really interesting because I read a lot when I was in high school, like I said, about the OSS and about the commandos and the Rangers and, you know, and, you know, the Raiders, you know, all those specialized outfits.

And it seemed like the thing that I could fit well in.

How did you. Did you see any mav, any SOG guys when you were in the Marine Corps?

No, no, no, no. You know, when I. Even when I was at ccn, we. I. We worked with Tong Du Shan, the SEAL seals over at Tong Desan.

How was that?

It was fun. I mean, they had a warrant officer named Mr. Johnson. Funny guy. Funny guy. Whip Cruel too, if he had. Had to be. And we used to change, you know, equipment, you know, you need this. Well, I got some extra of that. RPD links. Yeah, we got some of those, you know, RPDs. Yeah, we got four of those extra in that. We back and forth and we did a couple of missions where they supported us. With. One time with. With a full seat SEAL team on a amphibious landing to blow up a bridge. And they. A typhoon or some sort of storm came up. They got washed way down the coast and didn't make the rendezvous. And we came in from the land and we found their boats. They washed up down down the coast and that, and they managed to infiltrate in and get picked up by a helicopter and that. But they didn't make the target and we didn't make the target. Consequently, too bad. Storm.

Damn.

They. They had some marines with the seals that were working with the nasty boats. You know what the nasty boats are, don't they? It gets kind of convoluted. The CIA ran some of the projects and the military was gradually taking over from them. The nasty boats were Norwegian pt Boats, okay, real fast, you know, armed to the teeth and that. And what they were doing. They were going up into North Vietnam and taking agents and putting them ashore with those boats and same thing, doing raids and coming back out. And there was. There were Force Recon Marines that were with the. With the seals working on that project and that. I never. It's like now you see all these guys that claim that their unit was maxod. You know, Force Recon was Max od. Well, I don't know if it was ever on the toe. I never saw Force Recon running recon missions for Max sog. They might have. You know, I was in one project. There were two others. Three others. You know, that's possible. But, you know, Max Sog originally was the SEALs and Special Forces. The SEALs were down south, you know, where you guys, you know, with the places flooded, it's your natural habitat.

Keep your skin wet all the time. You know, go into hyperventilation and up anything north into the highlands and up to North Vietnam was, you know, our kind of terrain. So it was those two units that basically made up the core of it. I did a study on my own when I was writing my first two books. The original T O and E for Macsog, Mac Vsog was 1,174Americans assigned to it. That included all the officers, all the, you know, the support units, all the. All the radio relay sites, all the, you know, the people that were at the launch sites, and the two out the two sections of it that actually ran ground combat operations. So you take all that support stuff and shove it over here. You have. All right, we had 18 teams that were recon, and usually each team had two Americans assigned to it. So sometimes three, but two. Normally that's 36 people. In recon company, the Hatchet Force, they had two guys per platoon or whatever. You got three platoons. They had six guys in each company, and they had three companies. So 18 there, 36. This, 148 people that are on the ground running operations on the ground.

And I've met 18,000 of them since I left the war. Because everybody. I was in McVsar. Yeah, sure you were.

Yeah.

It's a very small group. And I think there was during its entire time, if you took those numbers and translated into nine years and that, that's about 4,000 plus people. And only half of us survived the war. Little less than half of us survived the war. So it's. It's a small, small fraternity.

Yeah, yeah. Very elite.

And. And I mean, I go to the SOA every year because there's 30 guys I like to drink with that are like brothers. The rest of that hoopla with the politicians and that. I've never been to a business meeting yet. They've tried a number of times to shut the bar down during the business meeting, and one time we got physical with the sergeant at arms and they've given up on that idea. We don't go there for that, you know.

Yeah.

And these days. Well, when. When we first started the soa, it was for recon. And then we went, well, that's not fair. The guys in the Hatchet Force should be in it, too. So we let the guys from the Hatchet Force in, then we let the guys that were at the launch sites in, and the cubby riders and people like that. And then when we were out doing things, I went to Africa for a while doing that. I was going all the time. The colonels got in charge, and then they started. They needed members, so they said, well, we'll. If you served in a unit that supported max. So that's how we got all the rotor heads in there, all. Well, I didn't disagree with the helicopter crews that flew us in, and they were dumb enough to come back and pick us up, you know, but, you know, I didn't want their basketball control officer and their, you know, their. Their H and R guy, whatever they call them, you know, so you ended up with a lot of people that were ramps that. That got blessed in the end of the organization.

I gotcha.

But there's fewer and fewer of us left every year. You know, the ranks are really, really thinning. Yeah.

Yeah.

So what, did you actually die off early?

Did you. Did you get out of service and then reenlist in the army, or did you.

No, no, no. Straight across the board. Transfer? Well, yeah, and left at 1 and had to join the other.

Okay.

Basically, that's how it worked in those days.

And you joined the army to go macv? Sog? To go.

No, I joined the army to go Special Forces.

Okay.

And I got. I was in casual status, so they, you know, they sent me to Korea while I was waiting to get a slot.

Gotcha.

Yeah, we'll just put you over here. You'll be comfortable.

Gotcha.

You already know what mosquitoes are like.

Let's. Let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll get into selection.

Selection? Well, I don't know if I want to go into that.

You don't.

I'm joking.

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We're getting ready to get into selection.

Ah well, selection well in, in those days it was phase one, phase two and phase three. Phase one was a Camp McCall. I can't remember how long it was, I think it was like a month. You went out and you learned basic patrolling, you learned survival, you learned target recognition, all the things that, you know woodcraft in it and you jumped in and you lived in. In those days we lived in tents, GP mediums and the only structures at Camp McCall were tar paper shacks for the headquarters and the medic cloud shack. And the classrooms were open air or sometimes under canvas and that. Interesting, interesting. Four weeks really intensive training with guys. The guy who, funny story, the guy who taught Survival was a E7 named Rodney, I think was his first name, Nail. And Nail had a black eye patch because he'd gotten shot by an AK through his eye now at one side. And he was a typical crusty old redneck, right? And you know, he taught you how to, you know, they'd kill snakes and you know, they'd rabbits, other animals and teach how to cook things. You know, take a chickens and wrap them in mud and then put them in the coals of a fire and go do patrolling all day.

When you came back you just peel the mud off and it's roast chicken, right, Stuff like that. So we were getting ready to finish up phase one and I was with a guy named Tony Anderson. Tony got a DSC when rt, Kansas got wiped out. And he was a, he was a pool shark when before he come in the army. And that real, real cool guy, his nickname was Fast Eddie. And Nail is sitting or we were getting ready to get go back to Fort Bragg and go into our MOS training and Neil was, was telling us, well you know, we ain't got no booze here, but you can get high if you take the mortar charges from the Four Deuce because they look like little cheese packets. So just bite off a little bit. It was nitroglycerin. So what he didn't tell us was that all your capillaries explode. So Tony and I ate a little bit too large of a chunk. We ended up in Womack Army Hospital and they thought we had meningitis. We're laying in the hospital ward, the doctor comes in and he goes, he had his clipboard. And he goes, let me ask you something.

Do either one of you two gentlemen know Sergeant Nail? And yes, sir. I said, well, he usually gets one or two of the students in every class. Holy don't have meningitis, but you do have some damage to your capillaries and that. Yeah, but it was, you know, it was a good, good training. A lot of good guys and went through, you know, training group with. Then later, you know, went over to, to become part of SOG or at that time they were still filling up the A teams over there. They were still active and the Mike force was active still. Then I went to. From there to weapons training and I was 11 Charlie. Now I think it's an 18 Charlie or I think they're all 18 BBs now. But you went to small arms pistols first, then submachine guns and carbines, and then rifles and machine guns and then you trans. The next phase of that training was heavy weapons training and you trained and it was both foreign and us. So we shot, you know, the Bren gun. We shot, you know, the rpd. We shot, you know, the Madsen, the, the Swedish K.

All of those were in, in the curriculum and that both classes assembly disassembly so you could do it in the dark. And then finally range got to the range and you know, combat course, you know, and regular marksmanship training in that with each weapon. And then you transferred to mortars and. And we trained on the four deuce, the 81, the 60, both the Russian 82 and the Russian equivalent of the 60. And then recoilless rifles, the 57 millimeter, the 106, the Russian equivalent and German equivalents in that. And then the four deuce, we did the four deuce and then the 105 howitzer. So we learned up to the 105. Wow. And you trained both in the gun crew and then the fire direction control and then the forward reservers, live fire on the ranges, calling in fire, while the rest of you know, some of you were manning the gun, some of you were the fdc and some of you were out there as forward observers. And that very intensive course, very, very compacted. So a lot of practical exercise combined with teaching in the classroom. And then when you finish that, meanwhile those others from your phase one who were decided that they were going to be sparkies went to combo training and they did Morse code day after day after day after day after day.

And they learned how to operate both our radios and the Soviet radios and that and the engineers went off and learned how to build things, you know, framing, framing barracks, doing shit like that. And also blowing things up. Very intensive course in demolitions and that. And then the radio engineers. Oh yeah, the medics. You know how medics are, right? You know, sick. If there's a strange, strange, really goofy religion anywhere in the world, you can bet both your medics are practicing highly intelligent with the bedside manner of Dr. Mengele. They go for a real long course and in those days, it was over a year. They'd go to fly. They, they do. They go to the 300 F1 course and then they would come back and do dog lab. And dog lab was. They used to shoot dogs. And then their job was to treat the wound, manage the wound, heal the wound, bring the dog back. Right?

Yeah. Live tissue training.

Yeah, well, all the, you know, the, the cruelty the animal people got got on their case and they changed over to doing on goats. And the only step different is removing the Arab from the back of the goat. Yeah. But very intensive course. To this day, I would rather have a Special Forces medic treat me than any doctor.

No kidding.

Yeah, it's. There's, in fact, there's. There's a guy that teaches the SEAL teams combat medicine, a guy named Ron Broughton who was in Berlin with me. He originally was in Project 404 in Laos. And he went, he came to dead A. And he was a medic there. And he eventually he runs like 20 emergency rooms in Florida and teaches up at, what is it, Little Creek, you know, to combat medicine there.

Yeah.

Muscled up, really dyed, almost white blonde hair and we call him Doc Savage.

Nice.

And he does have the bedside banner of Dr. Mangala. It doesn't hurt that bad. Yeah. But special forces medics, 18, what do they call them, Deltas. Is that the same in the seals? Eighteen Deltas. Yeah, they.

Well, they're going through the Army's Delta course.

Yeah, absolutely wonderful course. You know, Special Forces medics in the old days could get licensed as a practicing physician in over 20 countries.

No, couldn't.

I didn't know training was that good and that, that well respected and that. And to this day, it's one of the best courses that the military offers. Yeah, yeah. Don't leave them alone with your girlfriends or household pets. And then when you finish with your MOS training, you went to phase three and they brought everybody back together and formed up teams. Regular 12 man team. There'd be two officers assigned to it. They had gone through their own course over here, which you Know, taught them not to scratch their nuts with the salad fork or whatever, and they would join the team and then they'd jump you into Gobbler woods exercise and you'd actually operate as an A team in an unconventional warfare scenario in that. And once you. And Phase three also had a real intensive class in the beginning of it, which was called Methods of Instruction, where they taught you how to teach, taught you how to teach the military way, how to compress all that knowledge of four hours of data into one hour and make it stick so the dumbest guy in the class could get it. Then you moved on from there and taught you things like stage presence.

Don't walk around with Air Force gloves on, hands in your pockets, don't be a sword fighter with the stick and, you know, and how to tell jokes to lighten things up and that, you know, some of the jokes I heard were really lame too, but that was a good part of that. And they, they taught you the Special Forces operations as a, A team. But each MOS's responsibility were, you know, how to tie each other together with the team sergeant and with the, with the officers and that. And once you graduated from that in those days, you didn't get a flash on the back of your beret behind a crest until you graduated from the Q course, as they call it now. Then you got a. Before that you had a candy flash. No, you didn't have a flash at all. It was support troops that had the candy flash, a little ribbon, the same colors as a group, patches and that. Okay, yeah. And then once you were three qualified, that was the beginning. You went to a group and you were actively assigned to a team and you started operating in a special forces team, you know, and whatever their missions were.

Where did you go?

I went to the six group. Like I said, it was a holding area for people that. And I was in a six group, I think for like six months, something like that. We did a real interesting. In those days, the Red Empire Bling didn't have South America. It was the eighth group, which was stationed out of Panama. And we did an MTT with the sixth group. We went down with them and we went to Bolivia. And at that time they were tracking down bandits in the mountains and that with the Bolivian Rinche, the Rangers, which are strange, all of them were Indians, big, barrel chested, you know, they all operate above 6,000ft in the flatlands. They can run forever, but they were tracking them down. And we were providing radio operators and some. I went down there as a Mortar instructor and that with the, with the 2 inch or 60 millimeter there, it was easy to pack around in the mountains and get it, get it into battery real quick. They were just starting to use indirect fire when they caught these, these bandit groups, which eventually became the Sendero luminosa were 30, 60, 100 man groups in that and they lived off raiding villages.

They'd move into a village, they'd kill all the men, they'd rape the women until they used them up and throw all the bodies in the well and move on to the next village. And the rangers were right behind trying to close them up. And we, we tracked this one group and the time I was there for about 60 km over the mountains and finally caught him in, in makeshift bait camp and raided them and killed all of them except about maybe 10 or 15 that escaped out of the net.

You were on that?

Yeah.

How many of them were there?

A little over a hundred when they started.

Holy. So you guys killed they, you know, 85, 90 people.

Well, they were no match for the, the Bolivian rangers, you know, they were, you know, they were terrorizing the countryside because nobody, the militias really didn't have the firepower to stand up to them. And they were vicious. Vicious, Absolutely. They killed the children and throw them down the well and then got done raping the women and kill them and throw them down the well, you know, poison the water and move on to the next target.

What was the point of that? Why were they doing that?

They were bandits. They were just, they were just bandits and they. Eventually the communists came in and kind of moved them around, cadre them and, and changed them into a, you know, an insurgent force against the, the, the, the government and that. It was, it was interesting. How do I put this? We, while we were up there, we found an Inca grave and I removed a couple of terracotta figures that were inside that grave and stuck him in my rucksack to bring them back because they were really. One of them was a corn God and the other one was the, like they're Loki, you know. And I had him in my rucksack, right? And when we were in the mountains, they came around, they came around, they pulled that sergeant would pull out a, what looked like a bar of soap, kind of a brown colored bar of soap. Take a pen knife, cut a sliver up, give it to you and said, chew this and it helps you assimilate oxygen in the high altitudes. And that. Well, it was coke. There's cocaine based material in that. So normally they would give One bar to every three or five men and that.

And they ended up. He was giving me one bar by myself. So I wasn't used. And after a while, I didn't need it, and I was just chucking it in my rucksack. So we flew back to Bragg. They'd line us up, and customs comes, they're going to search everybody's bag. And they dumped my bag out, and I was really worried they'd find the two little terracotta thing. They weren't even interested in that when. Because it says on the outside of the cardboard box, you know, product de coca, Right? So as soon as that fell out, they were interested only that. So they. They got me standing there and I had like five or six bars in my rucksack. And he goes, what's this? So. Well, it's the stuff they gave us to assimilate oxygen at high altitudes and that. And they're like, really? So they called for my sergeant major was Sergeant Major Louis Brown. Little short guy. It looked like a fire plug they painted a face on. And he comes out there and, what the fuck have you done now? I don't know. And he's standing there with me, and the two custom guys are standing there, and we're like, acting like, what's the problem here?

And the older guy. The younger guy turns to the older guy, he goes, you know, I don't think they know what we're talking about. And he goes, I'm pretty sure they don't. They ended up confiscated them. And I. I got through with my two little terracotta figures in that, you know. But it was.

Congratulations.

Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.

But we'll have to add drug smuggler to your introduction.

Oh, yeah, thanks. Yeah, yeah. The. It was. I. I thoroughly enjoyed Special Forces training, and I thoroughly enjoyed the process by which I finally. Finally got on an A team and then started. I came back from Bolivia, and about a month later, I got my orders to go to Vietnam, and I was supposed to go to the Mike Force. And when we got to Vietnam, I sent this guy, Bernie o'. Connell. Never have the Irish involved with anything you're doing because they hear loud noises, they think it's awake, right? So when we got to NHA Trang, I sent them with our orders. I said, go over. Make sure we don't get policed up by one of those press gangs, because we were at the regular repo depot in Saigon, Tanzanuta, wherever. And I sent him over with the paperwork for the. We were supposed to go to the Mike Force. And he comes because the press gangs from the regular army divisions were looking for NCOs and they'd pay somebody off in admin and they'd take four or five out of the lift and assign them as platoon sergeants or squad leaders to the division.

He comes back and I had. He brought back some balmy bob beer and a net, and I had stolen a CO2 fire extinguisher. We were busy lowering his body temperature in the room. And he goes, oh, good thing you sent me over there. Because we were on a list to go to the Big Red One. And I'm going, oh, but obviously it's not all bad news because he's back here and he's grinning. He goes, I ran into a guy. Now, Bernie was mid to late 40s, was a buck sergeant. He had been a master sergeant. He got out of the army and got into high tech field of air conditioning, but he didn't have the accounting skills, so he went bankrupt. So he rejoined the Army. Bulbous nose, Irish face, you know, looked like an oversized leprechaun. So he's. I got us a good deal. This guy I know, he was in the Davy Crockett platoon with me in Germany. You know what the Davy Crockett was? It was a weapon that was deployed down to the battalion level. And what it was was a. An oversized mortar that shot a one kiloton atomic shell.

Holy.

And it was. The instructions were, get into battery, get the gun ready, fire the cannon, and try and get a ridge line between you and the target before it goes off. You know, it was T O N E and all the army divisions at that time, I think he. Bernie might have been slapping leather to the guy's wife for a while. Comes back and he goes up, I got us assigned to the Special Forces unit. There's a waiting line to get in. Then Bernie, the only waiting line in this country is at the airport to get out. So, no, no, no, no. It's a special unit. It's all voluntary in that. And that's when my heart fell to my. And he goes, it's ccn. Well, I knew some people that had been in projects, ccc, CC Head, whatsoever, and all of them were nuttier than a. Than a squirrel. So I go, oh, this can't be good. But it is voluntary. So we left NHA Trang, we went up to Danang, and as we were when we were met at the airport, the most decrepit deuce and a half I've ever seen in my life.

Was our transportation from the airport to CCN FOB 4. And driving it was another friend of Bernie's that he'd known in the regimental Combat teams and in Korea who had a plate in his head. He also had instructions from the army he was never to have pharmaceuticals and alcohol in his bloodstream. And he had both when he picked us up. Stevie Comerford got a DSC and he's driving like a madman. When we pulled into the compound, they were launching. One of the launch sites was shut down and reused in Danang as the launch site. When we pulled into the compound, there was a Cobra on fire on the psp. And Bernie had been going, oh, this is probably like one of those show camps, you know, with, you know, crest on everything, everything cemented, colored stones. And then, you know, Bernie, this doesn't look like one of those show camps. This might be a little different than that. And that was my introduction to ccn, basically. Wow. Sorry to travel so fast. No, yeah.

So you get there. Do you know what Mac SOG is yet?

But I knew what Max SOG was because I knew some guys that were there before and it was. I was proud to be there. It was also in the back of my mind once, this is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer unit. This is a volunteer unit. But, you know, peer pressure. You're never going to say, I don't think I could cut it.

How many of you guys went?

I arrived with a. I think there were dying of us, nine of you that. That got assigned there. And a year later, three of us were still running Raycon. Restories are wounded or dead, you know, but we had a real high attrition rate, you know. So anyway, we process in, we pull in the front gate, get off the deuce and a half, and I see these really ragged looking gypsies sitting on this. They had a. You know what a mule is? The vehicle Marines had them. They had a 106 mounted on it. It's a flat, looks like a coffee table on wheels. Open seat with a driver with a steering wheel in that. Anyway, there's five or six of them hanging around on it with cut off jungle fatigues and wearing various parts of uniforms and drinking wine. And when we got out the truck, the cat calls started. Ah, new meat. This is great. Whatsoever. And the guy. They came out and they took us in, they processed us in. And I think two guys went to the Hatchet Force and the rest of us got assigned to recon. So we got our briefing from the sergeant major, you know, this Is a voluntary unit.

This is what we do. We're strategic recon outfit. You're going to be assigned to a recon team. When you get down to recon company, the recon company commander will brief you and assign you to your teams. By dandy, we go down to recon company and my first introduction to Larry T. Manus was a recon company commander. Former E7. Looked like a heavy gravity planet. Inhabited. Thick neck, square face, crew cut, blonde. And we were standing outside the orderly room and the door bursts open and a body comes flying out, lands in the sand. The guy kind of shakes his head, gets up, stumbles out down into the company in that. And the door swings open and there's Manus, the. I'm the recon company commander and this is your briefing, your. Your orientation. And spoiling my drinking time. You can call me sir, you can call me motherfucker sir, or you can just hide when I'm looking for you, first man. And I, you know, first of all, I recognize that this is a retread. You know, I mean, that kind of squat bread is immediately, you know, identifiable. So I said, sir, worst thing I could have done is.

This is a voluntary unit. Yeah, it is, peckerhead. You a barracks lawyer or what? I said, well, what did that guy do? He wanted to quit. And I hate quitters. Since you're so astute in that, I'm going to assign you without even interviewing. And I'm going to assign you to RT Habu. And you can go over there and make that hooch a collective IQ of 3. And that's how I got assigned to Habu.

Right on.

I. I love Larry. He's in a. He's in a hospice at home now. But. Oh, man, just absolutely the best officer I ever served under. And Larry. Larry had been in projects in the very beginning when he's still wearing box hats, you know, yellow name tapes. It should have.

Yeah.

And they protected us from all the bullshit and took the flak for all our shenanigans. And that. Yeah.

Sounds like a good man.

Yeah. Well, when I stole the half track, he confiscated it. Not. Not because he wanted it for any other purpose. And it had two big whip antennas on it with little guidons and no radios just so it would slap back and forth when he slammed on the brakes and that. Yeah, you don't need this here. I'm confiscating it. I think it ended up in security company and somewhere else.

So how did it go when you got to. When you checked into Habu?

When what?

When you checked into Habu, how did it go?

Yeah, well, they had just come back from Quantrium and they were on stand down and they. Do you need to throw up or. Nope. Oh, doing that. Jimmy Johnson and Minnie Mack were in the hooch. Snake was up at headquarters. He was the 1 0. And. And Danzer. Danzer and Mack and Jimmie Johnson. So they're sitting there, they're cleaning weapons. Mac was cleaning a.22 with a silencer. And I walked in, I said. And he goes, before you say anything, you're obviously the new guy, and you've obviously run into Diwi Mainus. Did you question him? Did you make a comment? What did you do to get assigned here? And I go, well, I asked him about it being a volunteer unit. He says, well, he sent you here just to annoy us because you're obviously a Yankee. About that time, Castillo, the Cuban, I think he was on Bolton's team at that time, walks in, oily little shit that he is, and he goes over to the refrigerator, opens it up, takes a beer out of it and starts to hold it up like that. And Mac pings it with the.22 and it starts peeing all over the floor.

Holy shit. And he never misses the beat. He goes just as a. As a cautionary, don't have anything you value around these two or they'll bubify it. And he drank the beer and went out. That was my introduction to Habu.

Right on, man.

And it was. We clicked right from the beginning. And Mac. Mac and I stayed together, I think the longest I stayed on Habu until like two months before I left and I took over as a 10 crusader. And of course, there were some chicanery in there. We had convinced maintenance that I stuttered when I got excited. So it was absolutely no good on the radio. And the 10 in those days normally carried the radio. Radio and that until Boudreau caught us chuckling about it and then threatened us. He said, I'm going to tell Manus what you two have been doing. So. But we ran together solid for 11 months and did some interesting stuff. And we got Cookie. Cookie was a bonus cookie. Robert Cook from Vidalia, Georgia, olive skin, had mannerisms of a Mississippi riverboat gambler. Had a complete solid eyebrow all across here. And it called everybody Stretch. Well, Stretch, First time I saw him, and he was a Ranger, so he had Ranger strings on everything. Ranger string to his compass, Ranger string to his camouflage stick, Ranger string to. There's a peanut radio, you know, all Packed it. I used to tell Mac, we just throw them down in front of the NBA.

They'll get all tangled up in all those strings and we'll be able to escape. But really intense, professional guy on the team. Mack was a 1 0. He was a buck sergeant. He was actually I outranked him. When Manus finally did interview me, he goes, I'm assigning you to RT Habu. And the 10 now is McLaughlin. He's a buck sergeant. You got any grief with that? I said, does he come back with the same number of people he went out with? What does that got to do with it? Well, if he does, I'm only going to change his diapers if that's necessary. So he was a 1 0. Really, really cool, calm, under, under fire. Never got flustered that, that Alabama. Well, I guess we're going to have to move because it's getting kind of hot here. And Danzer actually was the, was the 1 0. But they had just come back from or right after that. I, I, I went to, I think I went to 10 school because you couldn't run Laos unless you went to 10 school down on Long time. And they ran the bright light on Doc Watson and Baby Jesus Lloyd, both of whom had been lost on a mission up in DL or in Asheau.

The bright light went in. Danzer was a 10 because Snake had gone home on emergency leave. And they got on the ground. The azure valley is built in a series of steps. Goes up levels off, goes up, levels off. Got real sheer. And they, they got inserted on the top of the plateau and they started working their way down because what had happened is that they pulled Sammy Hernandez out. They got in a hellacious firefight and they pulled Sammy Hernandez out on strings. And Doc Watson and Baby Jesus were on another set of strings. And the helicopter lost power and they were on the strings underneath it, and that slammed into the cliff face. When they found both of them, they were both dead. They were hanging in the trees. Max said they looked like they were asleep just hanging there in their harness. But they were. They could see them, but they couldn't reach them. They were out about. They were up at the level where they could stand and see out and to them, but they couldn't reach them. They were trying to get long branches and that, try and pull them, pull them back in and recover the bodies.

And they decided it got dark and they decided to spend the night on the top of the plateau. So they went to far. It was like maybe 100 meters to the top. They got back up on the top, set up in a ron and a half horseshoe thing. And five o' clock in the morning thereabouts, they heard trucks pulling up the trail on the top and troops dismounting. And they unloaded about three companies at NVA and started sweeping. They knew the team was in there somewhere. They started sweeping down the plateau and they. They opened, opened up on them with a RP RPG. 2. Two RPGs. Two rounds hit and one of Horton was with them too. 1. One of some of the shrapnel blew his lower leg off and it was partially attached, but it was. It was off in that. And they started dialing everybody in, fighting, throwing. And they were throwing stick grenades at him and that. And eventually there was nowhere to go. So they started going down the cliff. Just stepped off and went. I heard different stories. Mack tried to throw Horton to a tree for him to grab on.

He didn't make it. Went all the way down. And Mack tried to jump out to the same tree and didn't make it. Landed on top of him. Everybody got down to the bottom. Danzer got blown off the top of the cliff.

Damn.

He was behind his rucksack and the radio was in the rucksack and he had the handset and either a grenade or an RPG hit nearby and blew him off. He ended up at the pace of the cliff with nothing but the handset in his hand. And he was shocked. He wasn't functioning totally. Cliff Newman, who was also a 1 0, had been strap hanging with him. He took over command of the team and they had one of the chase medics was also with a wood duck woody and he was patching up Horton's leg and dealing with the other wounded that were there. And. And Mack was covering the ridge. There was a. Like a cut in it. And the NBA were trying to come down hopping from rock to rock and he was like at the carnival picking them off between the rocks. And that Newman just perform outstanding. He got the, you know, the 9 millimeter pistol and I think a silver star for that and eventually went and ran the recon club for us after that. He's. He was basically responsible for getting everybody out that was still living and breathing. And they, they extracted him with a.

With a Ch53 and they worked over the top of that ridgeline, turned it into a killing ground with air support and got a heavy hook in there and pulled him out of there. He was just recently, they're trying to get his silver star changed to a medal of honor, which he really deserves for his actions that day. It went all the way through the Chief of Staff of the army, all the way through the Secretary of Defense. Defense. And then it was approved under the Biden administration. And then when the new administration came in, they just killed it out of politics.

They killed it.

They killed it. Except that now. And we think it's because the, the guys who approved it were all Biden appointees. But Newman earned that medal seven times over that day. You know. You know that this thing with approval, higher awards from a lesser award. When Paris Davis got. Do you know him?

I don't.

Paris Davis read his Silver Star and his Medal of Honor, which he eventually got. He was a colonel. He was a young captain at the time. He did stuff on a mission that they make movies out of, went out from the, you know, saved people that were wounded, dragged them back into the perimeter, went back out, captured prisoners, brought them back and, and basically got everybody out of it and that. And they, I think he got a Silver Star for it. They. The army didn't like him because he was black. In those days, the Armor Corps is what ran the army. And there was a lot of racial prejudice and they thought he was just uppity and they weren't going to give him a medal of honor. He got out, retired as a colonel. He was my commander at Devens for a while, best group commander ever had. And he. Eventually the guys got together and they went back and redid it and got his Medal of Honor here last year. My name was. He was at the convention last year. I love Paris. Yeah, he was special. The I, I had to go to race relations classes in those days.

Race relations. Equal opportunity race relations. They picked two NCOs.

Gotcha.

So they picked me and a guy named Johnny King, who's a full blooded Chakaria Apache, right, To go to the classes. And there's a guy from my battalion, right. And there's two guys from 3rd Battalion, whatever, two guys from headquarters, all that. And we're supposed to be. Learn how to be correct, politically correct, and be able to hold classes to train the rest of the chimpanzees and the techniques of being politically correct. So we're in this classroom and they've got, they got a guy, he's a associate professor or something like that, from Boston College, complete with the revolution knitted black power cap on and the dreadlocks and all that. And he's talking not about yo. Oh yeah, we got to be careful about how we call each other and you know, these things have been done bad to black people in the past. And when I walked into the room, I turned the thermostat up to 94. So King is sitting in the front row. He's unbuttoned his field jacket, was nodding off. Everybody was nodding off except me. I'm watching to see all of them fall asleep. And the instructor came over and kicked King's foot, said, wake up.

And he uncoiled out of that seat and pulled a cruiser Bowie out of somewhere and had it against this guy's throat. He's going, they used to kill my people for sport, and I still like them better than I like you. That's it, out of here. We get sent back to group. I got sent back because I was with him. I hadn't done anything. Well, I turned the thermostat up, but nobody knew it. Yeah, yeah, Paris, you had one job and that was to keep an eye on that blanket ass savage, and you failed.

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What was your first mission with macvsog?

It was, we went to the, was it the ashl? I think it was the ashl, lower end of the ashl. And it was a recon mission, linear recon. We were supposed to follow this trail and see if we could find commonwire so another team could come in and put a wiretap on it. And we, we landed at this target. Particular target was, was in an old caldera and the trail ran up through the center of it and that it was reported there was a, a North Vietnamese regiment in that caldera somewhere. And we were going to go in and do linear recon and partial area recon inside that 6x6 do bambock. And when they, when they put us in, we came under fire immediately. As soon as the choppers lifted off, everybody in the world started shooting at us. And I remember I that one mission anyway, my job on the team was to fight the team as a unit. Mine and Cooks and Mac handled the radio, made sure air, you know, Cubby got air into us when we needed it, did all that stuff, kept in communications with Cubby. So I'm fighting my portion of the team, laying them in down below and that I saw these NBA break out of this ravine like we're down here like this.

Over here is this ravine and there's a ravine that runs up, follows up that way. I saw him break cover and run up in that ravine and I started moving up to tell Mac and I saw a bunch of three or four stick grenades come up out of that ravine and land right where he was. So I run up to. They got the radio and they got the midget at the same time. This is bad. So I get up there and he starts yelling at me, will you please get down. You're drawing fire. And he's got his pants down and I look at what he's checking to see if his junk is still there because he's got the shrapnel wound on the inside of his leg. And I'm thinking to myself, this is the coolest son of a bitch in the world. He's masturbating. He's not. He's got the hook like that down and grab A cubby was on the, on the line. I go, you'll have to wait a minute. The 10 is masturbating. You said that. Oh, yeah. And, and Dave Cheney, big, big Paiute India, was that recovery writer. You go, well, besides that, what else you got?

And then we called in airstrikes and eventually pulled out. I remember we got back and I had my basic load. Normally when I was carrying a car 15 was 1, 2, 3, 4 canteen covers with six magazines, one of which was a 30 round magazine and six 30 round magazines and a AK vest, two canteen covers with mini grenades, two M667 baseball grenades and a WP grenade. And plus extra stuff for, you know, we carried a machine gun, we carried a belt of ammo and thing. And when, when I got back on back to the launch site, I had two magazines left.

Holy.

And my pistol, ammunition. Everything else I'd shot, I would have blown up a nuke and told them it was kids playing with firefight would have helped, you know, but it was just, it was that intense. And I'm telling Mac, I said, God damn, that was intense. He goes, that was a training mission. So. You're kidding me. So now, and the yards like you, by the way, because you've got dialog when you're, when you're hyperventilating. That was my first mission. Sheesh. It just went on from there. I mean, you got into the rhythm. You know, you might, you go back to the launch site, you'd either pull a bright light for a team that was going in or you were done and you went back to Danang and you get three or four days off and then you went back into that process again. Go into isolation, get your target, go to launch site.

How did that, how did that, I mean, how did that compare to your Marine Corps deployment?

The world of difference. World of difference.

What was the major differences?

The intensity of combat, really? And you, you have no idea. Well, you do probably how loud combat is. And the smell and the deuterous, the dust, the explosions, the, you know, the blood. It's. You're many times fighting at very close range with these. You. We were heavy enough that we could give a company a black, black eye. You hit us and we were going to hit you so fucking hard that you'd want to back off. And that's how we survived. We'd pick the point and we would go for that point to break through and break out and get some running room and then find our terrain that we could defend in that. And it Was in that short time period, like I said, you'd use up five, six, seven magazines just doing that breakout.

Wow.

And grenades and anything else you could throw out there. Claymores on coat hangers, Claymores on coatings. Yeah. Cap them and have them everywhere and ready to go. And you put a coat hanger on it, and it's got the clacker in the bag. You pull the claymore out, you throw it up in the tree and then run to the end of the wire and fire it off. Break contact and that. Make sure it's facing the right way.

Yeah.

And then run off and then it just clears a path. Or throw it in front of you and blow it off so you got a clear path. And a lot of mini grenades. A lot of many grenades.

How many guys were you rolling out with?

Normally it was the three of us or sometimes just Mac and I, but three of us. After a while it was. That was three Americans. And from six to eight Martin yards, sometimes we take 10 Martin yards with us up to launch site. In case we got tasked with a bright light, we'd have extra. Extra guns on the team because, remember, they got to have enough helicopters, get you in and get you out, so you can't overload them in that. Yeah. But normally six to eight yards and two or three of us.

How often were you guys going out?

Well, every night, everyone.

How often are you guys going out?

Well, the rotation was you'd go to the launch site. I the only. Only two times they gave us a target after we ran a target while we were up there, and we did the isolation thing in the. In the hooch at the time, and it was an ambush. We were trying to get a prisoner. But most of the time you'd go to the launch site, you'd launch, do your thing, be back in five days, get two or three days off, go back in the system, go back up the launch site three or five days back. Sometimes one day, you know, after a while, I was telling what's his name. I had one target. I can't remember whether it was Hotel 6 or. I think it was DM10. Demilitarized Zone 10. It was that caldera thing again. I ran it four times, and my cumulative time on the ground was little over an hour and four times.

Wow.

That, you know, like I said, it was intense. If you got caught or they thought they could catch you with your pants down, they put everything they could to kill you and capture you, because they knew if you got on the radio and got the air Power, they had to grab you by the belt buckle before that. So it was right at the first full push trying to get on top of you. Now, once you could break contact, kill enough of them, make them back off, then you could start doing an IA drone, getting a path to where you could grab some terrain. When we looked at the target areas, we specifically picked terrain that was in the neighborhood of where the LZ was or along our path. If we got hit, we're going to go here because that's defensible. We can't defend it here or over here, but we can there if we get air power in. Yeah. To bring back a lot of memories.

I bet it does.

Yeah. Sometimes I can smell it.

Are you doing all right? Yeah.

No brains, no headaches. Roger that. Yeah, I don't normally get weepy. I get weepy over the little people. Yeah. We RT Habu was. Was a brew war project, plain and simple. Just like dog soldiers, you know, from the. From the crow. When we hit the ground, the last people in the world you wanted to run into was us. Just the finest, finest troops I ever worked with were the yards.

No kidding.

Yeah.

How long were you there?

Huh?

How long were you there?

How long.

How long were you with that specific unit?

Oh, for 11 months straight with Habu. And when I took over Crusader, they were also a brew team. So, you know, we had sedang, Brew ra Day, all different tribes. The brew looked like bushmen, Real short, you know, very, you know, sometimes almost African features in some of them. The sedang lighter skinned and they filed their teeth so they look. When they grinned at you, they looked like wolves. No, they had tattoos and rade looked like Polynesians. Very good looking people. Beautiful. All of them are beautiful people. But the rade women are stunning. And then we had some Jerry. And some of the teams were Vietnamese, and some of the teams were Vietnamese and Nungs, big Chinese. Rick Hendricks had all nugs and he couldn't remember their names, so he named them after Donald Duck's nephews. Huey, Dewey, Louie, whatever. And it's Huey spoke English like he was from Southern California. We funny story. My team's going to Quantri, the launch site, and Hendricks team is coming back or. No, we're coming back. We're at Quantri. We're getting ready to go back to Danang, and Henrik's team comes up there. He's got seven Nungs, Lou, Huey, Dewey, Louie, and whatever.

And they're on. I don't know who thought this up. They came in on a caribou and there was two donut dollies on board. As we're. We're laying in the shade waiting for the caribou to turn around and not get on it, go back to Da Nang and Hendrickson, his team start filing off, you know, with all their man jewelry and that clink, clank. You know, and they're coming down, preceding them are the two donut dollies. And they're. They're going, well, I can't believe this. I can't believe that those gooks were on the plane with us. You know, I will never. One of them had this face, I swear, looked like a horse. It was long. And one of the other was kind of portly. And they were all outraged, you know, going, whatever. They go over towards flight control over there and that. And Hendricks comes out. Hendricks is going. He's kind of chuckling to himself and that. Here's what happened. They're on the plane and they're in orbit, getting ready to land in that. And horse face starts going, well, what are these goats doing on the plane with us? You know, why are we here with these gooks and everything?

And. And Hendrix is Huey started in by. Well, actually, are you official army prostitutes? Is that what that uniform is? And that blaked her eyes up wide open. I think it's a great idea. But I actually own a whorehouse in the Trang, and I don't think I could get five bucks a trick for. For both of you unless there was a werewolf involved. Yeah, all in perfect English, right? And Hendrix tries to throw water on the fire and he goes, well, you know, I know you have to understand, they're going on a dangerous mission. They, you know, they may be, you know, may not say the best of things and that. And he says, I understand your mission being Red Cross and all that, where you put up the, you know, the. The maps with the name, the state. Some lucky guy gets an extra donut and that, and he says, look here. He sticks his finger out through his fly and he goes, looks like the state of Florida. Everything ended there. And we ended up. The guy from the flight light comes out. You need to get on that caribou and get it on.

Now. They've contacted the provost Marshall and they're on their way here right now. Yeah, Hendricks, him and his Nungs, the star English pupil, bad.

You know, I was talking to our mutual friend John Stryker Meyer before you got here.

Yeah, Tilt. Tilt hides a lot of his sins.

He had. He had a couple questions for. He wanted to know about the Pet monkey at ccn.

Monkey. Mac had a pet monkey. I don't know where he acquired a spider monkey. No, it was actually. I think it might have been a gibbon. And it was a nasty little piece of shit. We had a pole with a perch on it outside our hooch. And of course, sergeant major's like Billy Walls going, get rid of that fucking monkey. I don't want to see that fucking monkey. And Mac kept it just to aggravate the sergeant major. All the dogs in recon company hated this thing because it would sit on his perch, scream at him, roll up its shit, and throw at him. And all of them wanted most of all Ugmo. Ugmo was a mixed breed, two of which weren't from this planet, all right? Kind of looked like a Shar Pei that had cancer. And Cook and I were secretly feeding it screwdrivers with Darbar. So I hated the thing. Cook hated it more because the monkey would break into our hooch and find anything that belonged to him and either chew it, shit on it, or do something else with it. Wouldn't bother my stuff or Max always went after Cook stuff.

So one night we got sick of it, you know, get rid of this goddamn monkey once and for all. Mac was. Mac went downtown, and we were in the hooch. We didn't want to go downtown. We'd been at the club, and we'd been drinking. So we started feeding the monkey Darbonne and screwdrivers at an accelerated pace until finally we started to have storm, right? And we were sitting in the doorway watching the monkey, and he's out there rolling up shit, throwing it at the dogs, and we're down here. And finally it just went and fell over backwards and hit the ground. And they ripped it to fur and bones in about five minutes.

The dogs did.

The dogs did, right? And so we're. Before that, we had thrown the monkey on Lamar when he came back from the club, and he tried to shoot it, and he hit Ugmo instead. So Ugmo was out of the pack at that point. So we decided to cover. It was lightning, right? So we go, well, we can cover up this crime. So we set fire to the. To the pole and the remains on the ground. So when Mac came. Stumbled back in there later on tonight, he found. Found the monkey and woke us up and went, wow, it must have been lightning that hit it. And he goes, next time. We thought we got away with it. And as we were getting ready to go breakfast, he goes, by the way, I think it was Pulley. Pulley told me all about how my aunt monkey died. That's what happened to the monkey. He used to. The monkey would sit on his head and he'd like some kind of weird hat and he'd go, how do I look? It looks like that monkey's got an ugly growth on its ass. Yeah, I hated that thing. We offered to buy him another one.

He goes, nah, you two as pets are enough.

What is with the World War II helmet?

Well, family heirloom. I wanted. I wanted my Luger. I had a Luger. So I told my mom send my Luger over to me. And she sent the helmet too. When the day I got it impacted the helmet was. Was a fruitcake. Even the yards won't eat fruitcake. Really? Whoosh. Number 10. So I get it. I get that she'd put my Luger in a family sized box of Cheerios. The only dry cereal we got at the mess hall was Grape Nuts. You know, little hard, crunchy rocks. So Cheerios was like a special thing. So I run over to the mess hall and I'm sitting there with Mac and Cookie. We all got our little bowls and the milk and everything and we're having Cheerios. And that as I'm pouring it out, the barrel of Luger falls out into my bowl just as Manus walks up to the table and then came to the handle and the receiver and the magazines. And he goes, well, how did he say, how did he put it? And he goes, one of those. That doesn't look like a box of Cracker Jacks, my man. But the helmet was fun. I wore it on bright lights where you're going in, you know, you're going to shoot.

I figured, you know, the NBA go, whose side are the Germans on? You know, and other people borrowed it. Eldon borrowed it one time. Bargewell and who else was it? I wouldn't let Jimmy Johnson wear it because he looked like something really grotesque. Big ears hanging out from underneath it. That. Yeah. But yeah, I brought it back. When I came back I had it in my, my luggage, my bags. And the MPS tried to confiscate it. And everybody that was there ganged up on. No, no, no, no, no. That was sent from. By his mom to him. And they just. Okay. So I managed to get it back to the States. A pissed off girlfriend got rid of it. Oh, I was offered ten grand for that helmet. I'll bet with, with my name and pictures of me with it and that it was worth ten grand, which I bring up to her once In a while. Yeah, and you missed out on that one.

What is with the sawed off rpd?

A lot of guys have. Well, not, not just me. Before I got mine, I had. Well, the Philippine armors up at S4 would saw them off, make sure that it was just the right length. You didn't up the rate of fire too much. We had sawed off M60s too. The sawed off M60 had a tendency for the fucking barrel to fall out in mid stroke. The RPD did not have that problem. And it slightly slowed the cyclic rate of fire. But it sounded like a. Like a 50 caliber. And some of us, like Castro, I did on mine too. I put an oil funnel on the front of it. And when that thing went off, it really sounded like a 50. And it would shoot a gout of blue green plasma out about six feet in front of it at night. It was horrifying. But it lighter, easier to move around in the bush, which you carry a lot more ammo with it because you know it's 52 instead of or 39 instead of 51. So the extra weight there in the shells and that and I got so I can make it sing. And it was real effective.

On bright lights you need a lot of firepower. You need it down. You need something that can chop through brush to get to them. The RPD is your, your weapon, which we're excellent for that. I taught myself how to load that. You lift the COVID just like you do on M60 and that. But it's got a feeder strip that comes out of the drum that you have to put through and pull out and then slam the lid and then you're back in. But if it's in the drum, if it's in a belt that still has a feeder clip but you got to feed it through, hold it, pull it through, get it out. I taught myself how to do that by reaching over and doing that and being able to then slam the lid down. But I wanted something that was. That I could protect myself with. You know, I had. I had a pistol high power that I carried. Or the silence 22 if I was carrying it. We might stumble upon somebody that we could capture. But I had the armorers make me a sawed off 12 gage coach gun that long with the little pistol handle on that two barrels.

And I carried 25 rounds for it in my 10 vest. And wanted to appear either in loops or in the pockets if I had a vest on. Otherwise I kept them in a, in a canteen cup cover. And I added In a slide holster in a small of my back. So when I had to reload the gun, I'd be reloading it with this hand. And I'd pull that 12 gage out so I could cover myself. And I started. I was using double odd buck and slug. And then I came up with a bright idea. That slug just wasn't doing the job that it should. So I started, I took the double ott buck out, I left the bottom four, and then I put. I was putting nickels in there to start with, and I started counting up how much that was going to cost me, and I went. So I started using the five dong piece. It's a brass coin, the same size as a nickel, and it's brass. So I, I could put four of those in on top of the buckshot at the base of it, and then three rounds of a buck, you know, the balls on top of that.

And then close it up, seal it. That at close range, both barrels will blow a man in half. I know that for a fact.

You've seen. You've blown a man in half.

Guy came up on me in the elephant grass, and I let loose at about 8ft. And his legs were there and his top of his body went there. Yeah, because the brass doesn't deform and it comes out like little saw blades in that or flat. And it just, it cut them in half. I, I was surprised myself how, you know, how bad it was. And after that, that was the load for the, for the shotgun.

What were the slugs doing? Why do you say they weren't doing the job?

There wasn't enough of them to really get a pattern. They either. Too many of them went out to the side.

Gotcha.

Rather than hitting center of mass, the flat coins work better because it held together as a mass. And it, it was devastating. It would cut down brush too. Yeah, but you know, you, you learn and you adapt. You. Yeah, you did all kinds of crazy with guns.

How many times were guys sneaking up on you?

I think three times. I actually had to. Had to use the shotgun because I was quick reloading that gun. I could drop the old drum, put a new drum in and get in a matter of seconds. Just when we were. I was always nervous about somebody coming up on me when I'm crouched down or bent over the gun. I didn't want to get shot. And having the shotgun handy was max only complaining. Quit waving that thing around. I'm only going to shoot you on intent. Yeah, that was a good weapon. Good weapon.

Did the killing. Bother you did the killing bother you? Did it get to you?

No, Most of them were jumbled together every, you know, years afterwards. Some of them are. Oh, I had a. It's in the book. I. I had a ghost that haunted me for a long time.

What?

A ghost would come back when I was, you know, I'd have had a malarial relapse and he'd be visited and when I'd get tired or, you know, didn't take care of my, my, you know, my drinking and that, I'd wake up and in nightmares. It was this 16 year old, 15, 16 year old kid, MBA he had. He came up on me real quick. Well, actually I fell on top of him. I got blown. We were trying to dig in on this little incline and that they were pushing us and grenade went off and blew me and one of the other yards down in a little gully that was behind us and that they were coming up it. And I landed in amongst about five or six of them. And the only thing I had was an entrenching tool. And I killed them with the entrenching tool. And I remember them, Like I say, I don't think about him often, but I remember he was the same age as my little brother, man. The others, I remember him screaming, yelling, teeth bared, coming at us, or they came up us on a real quick and I dropped them.

You know, you didn't really get to look in their eyes or see their face. You know, you hear them kicking around and screaming after they were on the ground and that. But most of that's a jumble. Every once in a while one will pop up, you know, because of something that he did, or you see a piece of terrain that looks just like we were in, you know, you'll come back and they'll pop up. Now that they didn't have PTSD before that, they called it battle fatigue. And we never thought we were battle fatigued at that. You know, it was years afterwards we realized that we had drinking and anger problems and why. And the military finally accepted the fact of what it was and started the VA started treating it. But you know, in the early days we just managed to push it aside. A lot of drinking, you know, I know a lot of guys that got into the bottle and then welded the cap on after him.

Yeah. How would the ghost appear to you?

How? The what?

The ghost.

What about him?

How would he appear to you?

Be a nightmare. And he'd, he'd be like I last saw him, would have his head caved open and One eye falling out. And he would wake me up and he'd just be. In the book I described one of his visits. I'm on the lake in Minnesota, and I'm fishing with my little brother. And he's. He's got this old yellow rain jacket on that my mom hated in that. And he's bent over. He's. He's not facing me. He's facing out the back of the boat and he's fishing. He's got a line in the water and that. And he's sobbing. Sorry.

It's okay, nick. It's okay.

Anyway, I reach over to touch his shoulder to find out why he's crying. And he turns around and it's the kid, not him. And he. He grabs my hand and I stand up and he steps off the back of the boat with me. And I'm going down under the water and he's holding on to my hand and I can't get him to let go. And then I wake.

It's okay.

Yeah, well, I don't want to be a one go there, you know.

I have a really good friend of mine, his name's Chris Vettes. He was a sniper for Dev Group.

And I had him on.

And he had to kill two kids on a hostage rescue mission. And he has nightmares similar to that. And he had sons.

Some of them never leave you that are that age.

And his nightmares, his sons look up at him.

I haven't had a visit from him in 10 years. Then five maybe. And it's always when I'm worn down, you know, then, Then. Then it comes back. Or like today. Yeah.

How do you deal with it?

I push him back. Push him back. Don't let him in. I try not to think about things like that. Try not to think about some of the guys that I know that got blown to pieces that, you know, one minute they were there and next minute there's some kind of hamburger meat with bones sticking out of it. You just deal with it. First of all, the psychiatric industry is a bunch of hooey. All those therapists that try and talk you through it and that. I. I did a little bit of that when I. When I was in Germany. And the problem is, is that they put a jacket on you, and then now you're barred from enlistment and all that shit because you're Louie Loopy inside, so nobody goes to him. And two sessions I went to was, yeah, listen, bozo, you don't even know what you're talking about. You're trying to. You're Condescending. And that's. That's an insult. You know, it's. You know, I got problems. I'll deal with them. Thanks. Sign my slip so I can get out of here. My generation, we just dealt with it. I see some of these guys now with the traumatic brain injury from bombs and that and severe ptsd.

First of all, a Navy Seal, God bless his soul, found that psychedelic mushrooms can be used to treat ptsd. Psychedelic mushrooms? There's a friend of mine, Al Mullen, another medic, who understands this completely, how it's done and all that, and the VA Is just now starting to accept it as a treatment protocol. It's psychedelic mushrooms. Some kind of bark from a tree and crystallized secretions from some African frog.

It's a U. S. Toad.

Is it a U. S. Toad?

The son, the Sonoran toad. You're talking about five MEO DMT pen. I began.

Oh, cool.

I've done it. Have you done this?

No. No.

Why not?

I got too much to do right now. They.

Nick.

But the other thing that they found out about. The other thing they found out about. It. It cures drug addiction.

Yep.

You've got your meth, cocaine, heroin, marijuana, whatever. It takes away the total desire to have those substances in your body. That. That is the method they should use for cleaning up the drug addiction and the homelessness in this country. Just grab them off the street, stick them in a re education compound, micro dose their food until they finally realize that they don't want to be on it, and then put them through the treatment. But, no, I haven't done it or haven't even approached it. I.

Did it.

Did it help?

Yeah, it helped. I haven't had a drop of booze in almost four years.

Really?

And it was effortless. Yeah.

That's why all these bottles are still here. Otherwise they'd all be gone. Yeah, but it.

Nick, I'm not gonna bullshit you. It changed. It fucking changed my life.

Well, maybe I'll get around to it someday. I don't drink that much anyway anymore. You know, my. My normal consumption is probably a glass of wine with dinner.

This helps a lot more than just taking the booze away.

What?

This stuff helps a lot more than just taking the booze away.

Yeah, well, I'll talk to Al. I'm sure he'd like to watch while I go through it. Yeah, and I would trust him to watch while I go through it. Yeah. Is it offered through the VA?

No. You have to go to Mexico.

Yeah, well, I go to Mexico all the Time. Well. Well, not all the time.

Maybe I can.

Where's it in Mexico City?

I can't say exactly where it is because. Because what do you want to Just.

Arrived in a laundry bag and they dropped you off.

That's right.

At a clinic. Yeah.

I will tell you off camera where it is.

Yeah. Okay.

And if you want, I will connect you with the people.

Like I say, I might think about it.

I hope you do.

I'm not usually this weepy or loopy.

That's okay. Happens a lot on here.

I get like that when I think about the yards laying on top of me to keep me from getting hit again. No, that's another one that brings the tears. Yeah. Probably because I owed him money more than likely. Or they thought that I owed him money.

Do you want to talk about the prisoner capture attempts? The one the prisoner capture attempts. The prisoner capturing prisoners.

Oh yeah. Well, that didn't turn out all that well. We really habu. Only had. Well when I was there only had one real prisoner snatch and we. We went there to do a prisoner snatch. They the area was high concentrations and it was laced with trails that couriers and etc. If they knew that you were wiretapping or that they had moonbeam overhead trying to listen for radio signals and locate things on the ground, they would use couriers on trails going back and forth between the different units and that we set it up to do the. To do a snatch when it was fairly simple. We we found a trail, high speed trail. Knew that they would use it if they got pressed and that and they. We started using air support to bomb them and make them get up and start moving around and that and they. They knew if we were bombing them they'd have something up there listening for radios at the same time. So they. Anyway we're set up on this trail kind of cool. It was a really large tree by. From over there where the wall is and Mac was behind that and I was over here behind some slightly smaller trees than that.

And. And I had a silence 22. Yeah. And. And Mac had a silence gun in that. And anyway the. The yards are spread out to kill anybody behind the ones we want we're going to let a couple of them go through yards are on the other side of Mac. Couple of them and three or four of them behind me over here down stretch out in that trail. So they start bombing, making them get up and move around and that we hear that pitter patter, little feet coming down the trail and it's three guys actually Four. One guy slightly ahead the guy. And the next guy was an officer. We knew he was an officer because it's the, you know, collar tabs. And he had a map case and the guy behind him and then a third guy or. Yeah, third guy behind him and that. And I waited for him to get by, and Mac stepped out, shot the first one in the leg and pistol whipped him and then shot the second guy. And I. I got the third and fourth guy. I killed them. And the one guy, when I shot him, he said brother and Vietnamese.

And it turned out later that the guy in the front was his brother and he was calling out to him. And the guy that we shot and captured, you know, shoot him in the leg so they can't run off, put a tourniquet on him, grab him, cuff him up, start tearing them, start dating out to get to a LZ to get pulled out. We did all that in a matter of minutes and we're gone. Well, we took the. We stripped the bodies, went through their pockets and everything, threw it into a sack or I think we used an A7, 8. Bag all their equipment except for the guns, and pulled the bodies and took the guns apart, threw it out under the underbrush and hid the bodies and that. Sometimes we take the bodies back with us too, so they could do an autopsy and see what they were eating, see if they had any kind of parasites, that sort of shit, you know. You know how doctors get involved. But we grabbed the guy. We went to the extraction lz. They. They dropped the strings, and we decided to put cumin the 1 001, and I think some pot on there with the prisoner.

And then Mac and I and the other yards got on the second chopper that came in. And we lift out and away we go into the blue yonder. And that. We're the ones. We're watching the one in the front. And suddenly it looked like somebody dropped a rucksack. There was three yards with the prisoner on the first one. And it. We thought somebody dropped a rucksack. It was a prisoner. What had happened. They had him trussed up. And they. They didn't get to snap and link them in tight enough to a. And he started swinging around down underneath the aircraft. And he came back in and he bit Kuman in the face and held onto him like that. And Kuhlman just pulled out a knife and just sayonara. There you go.

Holy shit.

All the way to the ground. We were already counting the bonus money. Let's see, that's how. That's 300 for you and 300 for you. And yards all get a month's pay. We get to go to Natran, get laid. And we watched them go all the way to the ground. We got to the refuel point. It was an old fire base. And they land. Everybody's rolling up the strings and that. We go see, Kuman's bleeding all over his face. And that Mac goes, what happened? And he explained it. Why did you kill him? He bit me in the face, you know, number 10D. BC. I said, well, you know, we're not going to get paid money for. Well, don't need money. Need to kill vc. That was end of the. End of the conversation. That's how Boudreaux threatened us. Because when we got back to the launch site, we were sitting in a little mess hall portion that we drank beer in. And we were joking about what we were going to tell maintenance. Well, how we lost a prisoner. We're going to tell him that I tied him in with some knot I learned in the Sea Scouts, or I had.

I forgot the rope and I'd packed it because I had too many candy bars in my rucksack and that we had used a piece of rope we found out there. And Boudreaux was listening over in the shadows. He goes, you know, you're lucky. I just don't tell Manus what you two are really up to. Yeah, but it's a good mission. Just things went bad at the last minute.

I have here that you were interrogating.

Captives in the field.

No, no, never had time for that. Okay. Oh, you might do impact interrogation. I mean, how many more are with you? You know, where are they? And the yards handle that. But, yeah, you don't have time to do that. You've got. You snatch them and you run until. Because getting them back is everything. And turning them over to people that can really. And like I said, impact stuff. How many guys were with you? That sort of thing. Slap flap, you know, let's go. You know, the. The most valuable POW that I heard of that CCN got was Eldon Bargewell. What. What do you think that POW did for a living? He was the battalion mess surgeon.

No.

So we know who. Who he had to feed, what their names were, what units they were, where they were at, all the rations. He had all this wealth of information because he was a mess surgeon. The guy we grabbed, the only thing. He was a senior lieutenant. And he was asked, and we're acting as some sort of S2 capacity because the map case had you know, just like we used a clear plastic covers and he had units marked on it and all that. And it was, it was a tactical map so it wasn't a line officer. And we pulled a bunch of shit out of his pockets that you know, gave the guys in Saigon said well he was an intelligence officer. Yeah, I remember Eldon told me he said that one time they found a carved into a tree. Born in the north to die in the South. Bam.

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Yeah, I mean, you got to remember These guys are GIs, just like us, just wearing a different uniform. Yeah, hardcore little sons of. I'll give them that.

Sounds like it.

Had a lot of respect for him. I didn't have any respect for the VC because they were ash and trash, you know, militia. But the pavin, that they would come to bombs to get at you and keep coming, you know, take casualties.

Damn. Were you on an operation too that. Did you retrieve down pilots?

Oh, yeah, we did a couple of times on bright lights choppers, you know, you're doing it bright light choppers go in. You're. You're the one, you got to go get them. I remember. I think the chapter is called Blue Eyes. We went in on a chopper that had gone down on an insert and we. The one one and a door gunner had not gone in with the. With the. With the helicopter. They had leaped free from the wreckage or when they hit the water, they got thrown free. Everybody else was dead, you know, the. And burned afterwards, which is bad. I did another one. One of them. I had the guy delivered to me. Another bright light. One of the choppers was going past, got shot to shit, took an rpg right. Right in the transmission and fell out of the sky. And the door gunner got blown up the slope. He landed like that, far away from me. He still had the M60 in his hand, except the barrel was cut in half from shrapnel on that. And the other. The other guys. Well, the chopper rolled down the hill. We were going to go down to it and see if anybody survived.

And no, that was another one. We went in later on the afternoon on the wreckage. And we got there and we got up on. We could see the chopper in the brush below us and we could see movement around it. But according to the cubby, everybody had gotten pulled out. So we thought it was NBA going over the wreckage, that. Pulling shit out and that. So Cook threw a grenade down there and it landed up. The chopper was laying on his side like that grenade landed here, went off to another grenade. It landed on the other side of the chopper and it went off and we heard this voice. Please don't throw another grenade down here. It was American.

Oh, boy.

So we go down. It was one of the door gunners and his leg was pinned under the underside of the aircraft and that he had almost gotten out and the aircraft rolled over on him. So we managed to break. Break him out of the wreckage and that got him Back. And the funny story, they take him to the evac hospital and he's in one bed and the co pilot is in another bed. In the middle of the night, the staff wake, you know, here's a ruckus and he's in there trying to strangle the co pilot. And what had happened was when they unassed the aircraft, they just left him and took his M60 and reported that he was dead. So they took his gun and left the aircraft. And he was trying to kill that warrant officer. Yeah. A number of times we went in. I went in on a. On an F4. The one pilot had either failed to eject or partially ejected. He was still in the aircraft. He was dead. And we. We found him. He's kind of jammed up against the. The. The ejection seat went out about halfway for something, folded in it and stopped it and the rockets and the.

And ejection seat burned him to death. I mean, he was toast from about the waist down. Everything was burned off.

Damn.

Yeah. Not a. Not a nice way to go. No kidding. I don't have nightmares about him because he's Air Force. Yeah, that's. That. That was the worst part. People, when they burn, that's. I can understand getting blown to pieces and shot up, but I don't want to ever see another burned body again.

Yeah. How was it? Leaving?

Leaving was happy, sad. You know, I. I hated to leave you. I. I actually thought about just going off in the bush with the yards. I. I loved him that much. And I really had no ties to the. My family, of course, but I really had no ties to civilized world at that point. I'd been with him so long, I was brew. A lot of guys were like that. Thought about, you know, because they. They closed when they closed off the. When they started moving American troops out, we knew that they were going to close and abandon the yards. The South Vietnamese would for sure. And the American. American command weren't. Weren't all that, you know, reliable to take care of them. We were. They were our family. So we were stealing for them ammunition, mortars, machine guns, rifles, flamethrowers, anything. Because when that. Big American units like americal and. And 10. The mechanized, what was the name of it? 10th mechanized or something like that. When they left Quantri, the PDO yard was full of stuff. Floor fans, big piles of wrenches and sockets, you know, anything you could match. Conex containers with. Mortar ammunition, actual mortars, machine guns and all that.

Just fucking left it for the Vietnamese. So we were going up there raiding It. And every time we went to Mylock, we were taking sling loads. The pilots were in on it. They knew what we were doing. Every time we went up there, we filled up the helicopters, either with ourselves or with equipment and ammunition and then a sling load of stuff underneath it and would fly it up to my lock and it would disappear and at least give them a chance to fight, you know, when the thing happened. But very, very sad to leave them and sad to leave the. The guys. The guy. These are your brothers, you know.

Sounds a lot like Afghanistan, huh? Sounds a lot like how we left Afghanistan. Oh, yeah, well, I'm sure we just abandoned those people.

I'm sure we just, you know, betrayal, you know, not you, but the dip shits in charge. Yeah, I had a lot of anger about that for a long time. You know, when I went back, I. I found two of our. My yards.

You went back?

I went back twice.

How was that?

Enlightening?

No.

Yeah. I had a friend that papered me, so I wasn't traveling on my passport, and Canadian. So I. I actually went back. The first time I. I did a project. I had a. I was working in environmental. And we came up with a. A system where we were treating waste with anaerobic microbes, which. Which increase the anaerobic means. Doesn't need oxygen. And what it does is those microbes eat the. And the pathogens and they produce methane. And we were built these silos in the ground, would line them with clay, and on top of it was a cement plug with a shaft down it with a agitator. And that was run from the top. And it would stir the shit. You make it real liquid. You know, you put some. Some draw organic material in there, but it's mostly shit and water. And then you cook it in the. In the microbes, it makes methane. It comes out to the top, goes over here. You dehumidify it. You can run a reciprocating engine on it. Just like natural gas, because that's what natural gas is, methane. So I had a contact in Canada that got a contract to.

To try and use the system we had in Vietnam with four of these big pig collectives. They brought all the pigs in from the surrounding villages, put them in one big building, and they had a lot of pig shit. Fine. We'd create electricity with it. And when the silo got done, cooking down at the bottom of the silo was this thick, really black material that was kind of. Part of it was a slurry and part of it was kind of grainy pure nitrogen. So they would take that out, you'd empty the silo, you take it out, lay it out on iron sheets, dry it out. You've got 90% nitrogen fertilizer. In fact, they were taking the fertilizer and actually bagging it and selling it to the farmers to replace. Using human shit in the banjo holes, which stops a whole bunch of other diseases by using it was so rich, they had to hit it with potash in order to reestablish a livable PH in it. So I went back for that, and I had a good time for about three months. And I went back one more time that just had a curio I had the first time I heard rumors about the re education camps and how some of the yards had survived.

And I had a. I made a contact there in Danang, and he told me that he knew some monty yards that had gotten out of the education camps that were kind of living like street beggars. And I went back and I found two of the guys from ccn. One of them was on my team.

No.

And I managed to get them enough money to get them out of Da Nang and back up in the highlands. Both of them were missing an arm. The little people had SCU tattooed on their special commando unit, tattooed on their arms, and if the North Vietnamese found it, chopped their arm off. So both of them had their arm chopped off from here down. But, yeah, it was a really great reunion. Yeah. I found out about, you know, how their families had gone back up in the hills, how they actually had fought a running battle back into the mountains and a trail of tears, so to speak.

Damn, man.

I think I got a star on my map for that one. I have a affinity for primitive cultures. You know, the yards were basically a semi Iron Age tribes when we came along with all our man toys and war. And they adapted to it like ducks to water. And they are the finest natural warriors I've ever seen. And I've worked with other groups in other countries. All of them pretty much share the same kind of culture. You're a warrior and you're a member of the tribe. And the first duty is to protect the tribe above everything else. Protect the tribe.

Well, Nick, let's take a quick break, and when we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home.

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Want more from the Sean Ryan Show? Join our Patreon today for more clips and exclusive content. You'll get an exclusive look behind the scenes where you can watch the guests interact with the team and explore the studio before every episode. Plus unlock bonus content like our extra intel segments where we ask our guests additional questions, our new SRS on site specials and access to an entire tactical training library you will not find anywhere else. And the best part? Patreon members can ask our guests questions directly. Your insights can help shape the show. Join us on Patreon now. Support the mission and become part of the Shawn Ryan Show's story. All right, Nick, we're back from the break. We're kind of wrapping up Vietnam.

We have wrapped up Vietnam. What was it like coming home for you?

Total decompression and shock. I mean, the height of the anti war thing and that I was only spit on once and that was in Oakland and they were a bunch of Buddhists or something. I remember punching them really hard and all kinds of robes flying around. But coming back to the states, you have nothing in common with your high school friends. You have very little in common with the outskirts of your family. Your mom, your dad, your brothers and sisters. You know all there for you. I was fortunate. And that, you know, I had a support mechanism there. But once again, after about a, oh, I don't know, two weeks of being home, I really started getting itchy feet. I wanted to go around people that I, I knew, you know, so I, I got in my car and went back to the cries of my mother saying that I abandoned her after she carried me for nine months, nurtured me for, you know, years. But I, I went right to, I stopped on the way from Fort Bragg to visit a friend of mine that I knew from the Mike Force and spent about, I know, you know, visitors and fish have the same three day limit, especially with wives.

So after about the fourth day she started getting the, you know, the skunk eye look when she looked at me, you know, and she knew she was going to have to retrain them after I'd been there for a while. So on the fourth day I told him I was going to take off for Bragg and you know, I have, she made me chocolate chip cookies for the trip and I suspected that they might have had Xlax in them, but they didn't. But I drove to Fort Bragg, I checked into the sixth group again and it was a wild time. I was on the team. We did a lot of stuff. We were always training, we were always going someplace and it helped. Didn't have a lot of personal relationships and just, I just couldn't get into that. I got laid, but I didn't get into personal relationships. And gradually the why not? Just weren't ready, didn't want to let myself go. I didn't want to trust somebody that hadn't gone through what I went through. And I, I saw all my friends that were, you know, having problems with their marriages and their girlfriends. The same thing, you know, we, we drank a lot, A lot, you know, you know, I, I managed to control myself so I didn't get in a lot of trouble.

But like I said, I, Once you've been on that kind of adrenaline high, it's hard to give it up for ice cream cones and cognac, you know.

Yeah.

So it was. Took a long while to totally decompress to the level where I was socially acceptable. And you, you'd be looking at people going, and they'd say something and you know, you go, you stupid people, you know, and then go at it. What I think what really saved me was I got married when I, and I, I'm really sorry for her because it, she, she was 19 and I was 27 and I had Had a baby daughter. And I got orders to go to Berlin, which in those days was like grabbing the brass ring and, and hitting the top. And I was getting ready to go to Berlin. She knows she was going to have to. She was a 19 year old from my. What? It's the name of that town. San Francisco Bay. Monterey, not Monterey. I can't think of the name.

Palo Alto.

No, further north up right. The big electronics center now, Silicon Valley. I'll think of it later, after we get off this thing here. But her parents were from there. Her sister had married a guy from the 5th Special Forces Group, and their marriage was already on the rocks when I met her. I got married. Monterey, full military wedding, of which Spider Parks and two other guys tried to stab me with the sabers. When I walked down to it, we'd been drinking. Yeah. But got married. She got pregnant. We drove to Fort Devin's, my next assignment. And I was at Fort Devens for about two years with her, and things just fell apart. I was working as a bouncer at a place in Leominster for extra money, and we didn't get paid all that much. I told somebody the other day, the E7 asked me, he said, how much did you make as an E7? So my pay was $1,250 a month. And he went, what? And I was. When he told me what they had paid now, I wanted to rob him right there on the spot. But, you know, money was tight. You know, I was gone a lot.

The first year I was at Fort DEVENS, I saw 112 days out of that year. The rest of the time I was either on exercises, flintlock mobile training team, wherever, and it just, it fell apart. And I went to West Point to. You know, every year the, the cadets, the sophomore cadets get patrolling, mountaineering, rubber wraps, all that training and that, and, and, and everything's new. They get everything new. New jeeps, new weapons, new fatigues, new poncho liners, you name it. And when I came back from. From that training, I had a week to clear post before I went to or. No, I had a month's leave and a week to clear post. And when I got back to Fort Devens, I walked into my government housing and there was nothing in it. All my clothes were piled in the middle of the. Of the living room and all the furniture was gone. There was a container of sour milk in the refrigerator and a beer. And I sat there on the floor and had that beer and I, I called up Jay Graves and told him what happened. He said, don't say anything, I'll be there in 30 minutes.

And he came down, picked me up, took, took me up to his place and dropped me off with a well known gangster, a real criminal. And I stayed with him for a week. And I made the mistake of trying to go back to California and patch things up, which didn't work out at all. I got back there, I, I tracked her down to a nightclub and she was sitting on her ex boyfriend's lap when I jumped him and bit a dollar sized hole out of the top of his head. And the fight was on. And I mean the bouncers decided they don't want anything to do with me after I broke one of them's arm. And I escaped and got outside, realized how badly I'd up and still tried to go back and talk to her. And when I got there, her father stormed out the front door and shoved me and I hit him and he had a heart attack. So from there it was a mad flight. Get somewhere. I hired a private plane to fly me to another city and then caught commercial air. When I got back to Boston, I stopped in Cincinnati or someplace and I called Jack.

I said I got in some trouble. And he goes, we know. I said, what do you mean you know? He said, don't go to Boston airport. The state police are waiting for you with a warrant. And I said, well, okay. So I flew into New York City and Chester, God, I loved him. He died here two years ago. Former Marine from the late 50s. Fleet Marine who became a criminal. He was the FBI always suspected he was involved in this or that. He was a one man crime wave, boosting trucks, selling the stuff, you know, great guy, just full of life. He, I had travel orders and a ticket on, you know, the contracted airlines and had to leave from Boston and go to Frankfurt and then on to Berlin. He bought me a first class ticket on British Airways out of Connecticut and into Frankfurt. And that's how I escaped the net and group actually covered my ass. They told them that I was on classified orders and that I had already left and that they no longer were responsible for me. They'd have to talk to my receiving unit, but unfortunately that was classified and I couldn't tell them who with the group commander involved in that loop.

And so I went from there to Berlin and Berlin really was the, the healing process. You know, it was, it was exciting, it was demanding, it kept me occupied. It was, you know, I was in an environment that I absolutely loved. Berlin is still one of my favorite cities there In Munich, you know, those two hit the top of the charts. Then it, you know, I was speaking German almost all the time, either in my job or, you know, I was living out on the economy. I had a really nice flat over in Salendorf. That was. It was just magic. I had two motorcycles and a Volvo. So I had plenty of stuff that, you know, mental health stuff. Get onto Harley and put something exciting between your legs and take a drive, you know, And I. I met a. I met a woman there that was in asa Army. Army Security Agency. She was a oral comprehension specialist. Listening and being able to translate. She couldn't speak Russian, but she could listen to it and understand the dialects and all that. Named Claire. And Claire. Wow. She was. She was something. I lived with her for almost four years before I.

I dumped out of the Army. And she just, you know, recently surfaced and she. Our relationship eventually fell apart because I didn't want to get married. I decided I was never getting married again, and she wanted to get married. I didn't. So she went off and married a real nice guy, a warrant officer, and built a life out of that. But the time in Berlin was really healing because it was just so much going on. It was, and it was. We were doing stuff like, you know, dead a. We did a lot of work with the Sonder 9 Zotz Commando SCK, which was their counterterrorist counterintelligence police. And they. They were great guys. I mean, every. Every one of them were just really talented. They were like Special Forces. Same attitude, same same skills. I mean, just wonderful guys. I. I managed to. About halfway through there, there were six of them going on vacation to the United States. So I lined them up with all my friends and contacts that were in California, Arizona, places like that. Every one of them came back with a saddle that they were going to put in their bar downstairs and use that as their stool to sit on.

And they. A lot of interaction with them. We did a lot of counter surveillance and surveillance of their targets. What better way to learn? You know, we'd follow Soviet agents, East German agents, criminals, whatever they had on the ticket list. Or we'd do counter surveillance, you know, with, you know, with their guys trying to follow us. You know, we played a rabbit, the hair. So you really got good at.

People.

Watching you and being able to sense it and all the little tips of the trade and that. And then, funny story, I had the Volvo, and I wanted to get another car and get it registered as a German vehicle that I wanted to get a Volkswagen But I knew this guy, German guy. He owned a bar up in. In the Turkey sector. Gunther. Gunther was afraid of his girlfriend. Right. And. And Gunther. Gunther was aggravating, but he was fun. Sometimes he had a measure. Schmidt, you know what that is?

No.

Okay. After the war, the actual Measureschmitt factory designed a car that was powered by a motorcycle engine that. Two wheels in the front, one wheel in the back. And it actually looked like the fuselage of a measurement 109. You had to get in it, you had to pull the canopy back, climb in the front seat and had a passenger seat behind you. And that. And that I had. I. I fell in love with it the first time I saw it. I gotta have this, right? So I make a deal with Gunter for $2,500 cash. And I bought that thing from him. And he's, you know, he's fussing about the paperwork. Wow. You know, what if you get in an accident when you're going back to your house and that. I'd prefer if I drove with you and that, you know, so come up and pick up the car. Okay. The date when I went up to, to pick it up. I'm wearing a leather jacket, a leather flying helmet, and a white scarf and goggles. And he goes, oh, no. Said hop in the back. Come on, we'll get down there, don't worry. So you've been drinking?

No, not at all. I had a flask underneath the seat already and I was barely well lit. We took off down the Hovel, which is like in the center of Berlin. There's a freeway before we got a quarter away out of the turkey sector. I already had two police escorts trying to catch me. And I'm weaving in and out of traffic. I've got the canopy pulled back and the scarf's out the window and I'm cackling as I'm going along. Anyway, I got far enough ahead of them and I was using the shoulders everything I could to avoid them in that. We came up on the Grunewald exit, which if you turn left, you go over to Clay Alley where the consulate is and Berlin headquarters. And my BEQ was over there too. But my apartment was further down over in Sallendorf, which is next to the big Banzai, the lake there. So I see the cutoff, and if you turn left, you go over to the American side. If you turn right, you're on the horse trails that go around. The Grunewald is a 12 mile long, 3 mile wide park, all forests and hiking trails, horse trails, all that and that Messerschmitt could scoot in there and the cop cars couldn't.

Nice.

So I'm throwing mud, going around corners, taking. Because I know the whole area. We go out there, do exercises and that. I finally lose all of them except one. And he's right on my tail. I'm thinking, this son of a. He's got to be a dirt track driver in that. So I. I got down towards Salendorf, and I. There's an alley that cuts off to the right off the horse trails and that and gets to the end, and there's just enough space to get that Mederschmitt through. And it goes on a long, gentle slope down to the Hubble river, where it's paved walkways and that. And it's like a block and a half up to where my. My apartment is, which is an old mansion. I got the second floor. So I get down there, and the guy's right behind me. And I get. I can't. I'm looking around. I'm saying, point. He doesn't look familiar. And I see the hedgehog. I said, well, just cut through the hedge. It's a gentle slope. See if the baby can take some damage. Turned to the right, there was a moment of weightlessness, and then we hit the water.

It was the wrong alley. Went through the hedge, out about 20, 30ft, and straight down into the river. When I surfaced, I came to the surface, and I'm looking around for Gunter, and he surfaced. He bubbled up to the top. A couple seconds later, first thing out of his mouth was, I hate you. So I said, well, yeah, we got more problems that we need to get out of the water, for one thing. And then we got to shore, and there was a taxi stand not far from there. That was a lighted telephone pole. You can pick it up and call a taxi. And I called my flat, and Cleric was there, and I said, you need to come pick me up. At such a location. There was a little guest house that was closed, but there's a place we used to go and have a, you know, wine or cheese. Cheese plate, whatever. I said, come down here and pick me up. What was the name of that something? Forest. And she shows up about 10 minutes later with the Volkswagen that I had bought her. And we packed Gunter into the back of it, and we drive all the way back up to Bedding.

And by that time, the whole park's full of fucking police cars going up and down the streets, driving around, you know, looking for us. And then we get back up there and all the way up there until. Look, it's simple. I've already signed the pink slip, right? Just tell them. Don't even show them the pink slip. Tell them it was in the car and that somebody stole the car. Your insurance will pay for the car. No problem. Everything's handled right. But three days later, I go into the detachment and I walk in the team room and one of the guys from the scuba team comes in and throws the license plate from the. From the. From the measure. Schmidt. He says, you might want to keep this. And a little after that, I walked back in, and my team sergeant was a wonderful guy named Krajuk. He was sitting at his desk, and my leather flying helmet was on his desk, all sodden and everything. And he's tapping it with a pencil, said, you might want to put this in with that plate. So evidently, the scuba team had been called out by the German police diving team because they were trying to recover two drunks that had gone into the Hobble river and they were dragging the river for their bodies.

And that holy. It was a healing process.

Sounds like quite the healing process.

They are a great group of guys. Great mission. Saw a lot of really, you know, a lot of guys from project went to dead a. There was probably. When I was there, there was probably 20 of us that had been in projects. You know, it's like all your friends that you don't want as a character show up. But the only sour point about it was I was there when the general that wanted to get. Get control the detachment sent his hatchet man down there and he hated me with a passion, and the feeling was fucking mutual. He made sure he wasn't in front of me on any jumps just in case his static line got disconnected.

Yeah, I've met a couple of those.

Yeah, you know, they're. They're everyone. They're a sour taste, but they are there. There's no denying it. They're little martinets that think they're doesn't stick.

Nick, where's your daughter now?

I tracked her down. One of the guys that I use as an instructor was up the head of the SWAT team in Costa Mesa and a homicide detective. And when he got out, he became a private eye and he tracked her down to San Jose. And she was living in San Jose about a. About two miles from where her grandparents were. And I found her on the Internet and sent her a note. Said, you know, I really hate to break it to you this way, but I might be your natural father. And she took her sight down the next day. And that was the last I heard of her. Except how long ago? But five or six years ago, my phone rang and a young man was on it. Somebody post teenager, but that young. And he goes, are you Nick Brock? I said, yes, I am. He goes, he says, I'm your eldest grandson. And I heard a bunch of yelling in the background, woman's voice. And he never called back. So as far as I know, she's in San Jose, married. My ex wife married a Cajun. So that all wrapped together, it probably wasn't a good idea to go back and try and establish filial ties.

So I still think about her, you know.

What would you say to her?

I'm sorry.

Do you think you'll get that opportunity?

Who knows? Winning the lottery, and that soothes a lot of hard feelings. Maybe, maybe, maybe, maybe. Maybe she'll see what I'm doing now and try and make contact herself. I wouldn't put money on it, but, you know.

Have you done any interviews before?

What?

Have you done many interviews before?

Yeah, a couple of them. You know, I did one with. Who's the guy? The captain from sf. That was a good one. I did. I just did one last night with two LA cops that. It's called War Stories. Never fought. One of them was a former Marine. I kept telling, I know there's some dark in your past. Don't lie to me.

I hope you meet her again. I hope you get to say that to her.

I do too. I do too. You know, we. I don't have any real regrets in my life. I'm not a perfect man. I got a lot of flaws. At least I admit my flaws, you know, and I live with them.

There's no such thing as a perfect man.

Yeah, according to my partner, he's close to it. Yeah.

Yeah.

Wow. We covered a lot of ground.

We did. How are you feeling?

Well, I'm fine. You know, I wrote three books. You know, the first two were about projects and they. Without my trying, they became cult books. You know, I've had many, many people and I didn't write it for the public. I wrote it for the guys I bled with. And I'm happy as hell when one of them walks up to me and goes, way to go, Nick. But the public seemed to taking them well and they, they. I'm still getting paid royalty, so I guess they're doing all right. I wrote this book, Vagabonds, because I had a contract to supply a West African nation with 6, 737, three hundreds on a lease. And I happen to know a wonderful man in London that I'd been in freight business with in Africa that had all these airline, how to get airplanes and run an airline and that. And we set up a lease contract with them for six years. Contract was signed, money was being transferred into escrow. I moved from Palm Desert to Tucson because they were going to paint all the planes and you know, put delivery on them and that and do the sea check and that before they send them to Africa.

I got there and a month later Covid came ashore. Oh, and everything I was, I was set to make 35,000amonth on a six year contract. So I got there and that's when I moved in. I signed a lease for two years with my business partner as a co tenant and everything dropped out. So we, we were locked up for Covid. We're sitting there, we watched everything on Netflix and said, what are we going to do? Well, let's write a book about what we did after we got out of the military. So we wrote the book. 67 days, start to finish.

Nice.

Pushed it through. I had a wonderful editor in, in London, Oxford, a woman named Ruth Shepard. Been really good to me. The owner of the company I would gladly run over with a pickup truck. But she's wonderful and her staff is wonderful. She got it approved, got it published in that. And it doesn't do as well as the other two books, but it's. And it was all about what he and I did after we got out of the military. We rescued kidnapped children in Algeria, Guatemala, rescued people in Mexico from kidnapped real kidnap gangs and one in Chechnya, which I'll never do again.

Why not?

I didn't actually run that thing. That was a friend of mine that had the contract and that I came up with a way of tracking the victim and I used the Russian. Jeff and I had gone to Russia. Oh God back as one of the things we did. We went to Kazakhstan with an asphalt company that was trying to get a contract to build four lane highways connecting Kazakhstan with the rest of Russia and that. And they use cold mix concrete which. Or cold mix asphalt which you can use in arctic conditions. That's what they built a alcan highway out of. No prosthes, all that stuff. So we had met my friend in London, introduced us to the KGB at a very high level. And we went to Moscow and you know, I met the head of Directorate 9 who was a lieutenant general in the KGB. Had a beautiful baritone voice, spoke fluent English and fluent German. And where was I going with that? So anyway, we went to Kazakhstan. It's in the book the Adventures of Going Over There and Doing that. And were we on the airplanes or on the. I lost my track there for a moment.

You were going to Russia?

Yeah, we went to Russia for this deal with the asphalt company. And that was one of the things. And while I was there, I made really good contacts with the kgb. And after communism fell, you understand, the KGB did not belong to the central government, it belonged to the Communist Party. So when the Communist Party fell out, they no longer had a mandate to operate. So they were going through all this rioting about how they were going to build a new Russia and that. And that's how they came up with the fsb, which is what they have currently in that. But the KGB also owned all kinds of things. They owned cities where they had research going on. They had no roads going in or out. Everything came in by air, scientific facilities. They owned gold mines, they owned oil fields, and they were funding themselves, but they were looking for cash. And on the thing in Checha, we actually rented a Spetsnaz outfit that we had come up with a way to. To track them. And actually the Russians came up with it. And it was a friendly isotope. And the victim was an industrialist from the west, tried to make an oil deal with the Chechens.

The Chechens grabbed him, demanded money. Basically how it went. The first group that went in to try and pay the ransom, they just killed them, took the money. The second group went in were SAS guys, and they shot their way out of it. And my friend, who was an SAS guy, actually picked up the third. It came up with this plan that if we could locate them, we also could put enough force to actually grab them. So the Russians came up with two tricks. One was a way to track him, and that was a friendly isotope. There were only two places in the region where you could buy the medicine that he needed to stay alive. So they broke in there and dosed all of the medication with that friendly isotope. If he peed on the ground, they could detect it from the air. So they did the NEST team flying back and forth, doing the grids, and they located him in a mountain, mountain village. And they came up with a substance they could treat the money with. If you touch the money within 24 hours, you were dead. So they dosed the ransom, they picked it up.

They. They had already located the village, and about 2 o' clock in the morning, they went in and rescued him. There was about eight of them that were still kicking. And everybody else was dead. No old people and no children. All young people in the belly. So, you know, it was. The Russians are. They've got finesse sometimes, and sometimes they're bull in the court. Damn. But they're my trip over there, my association with them. You know, I knew who they were and I knew what the communists were, and, you know, they were my sworn enemies at one time, but I watched them rebuild after a total collapse of the system. I asked Vladimir, the general, I said, so what kind of government do you think you're going to have? He goes, well, Nick, it won't be communist because that's gone. And it won't be Western either. But one thing it will be is Russian. Totally Russian. And that's what he came up with. A free market society still with the vestiges of one strong man and one strong party, you know, and I. I admire them for being able to pull through without totally collapsing.

Yeah, they're. It's interesting to watch the events and watch Trump working with him and trying to. He realized, you know, the West. West, the Europeans were raping them. After the communism fell, they went and made deals with all the steel plants and the shipyards in Poland and all that and basically fed the US this thing about how crooked the communists are and they're still in control. While they were buying everything and making joint ventures, Oddly enough, the Kazakhs, you know, the one group of people they would rather do business with, Germans, because the Germans keep meticulous records. So it was really interesting. We did a lot of things with a lot of different people, and eventually we trained SWAT teams, we trained personal bodyguards in Mexico. Ended up supplying my clients with armored cars that were produced in my partner's plant in Mexico City.

Damn.

Tried to stay away from working with the government. That's. You can get on a lot of. A lot of kimchi without, you know, too much effort with that crowd.

Yeah.

Yeah. Well, as you know, you have lived a lot of lives. You get painted, you say you know something and you feel it's in your. Because the person you are, it's your best interest to tell federal law enforcement the minute that you do that, they start building a jacket on you.

Yeah.

If you're hanging out with these people, obviously you're a bad guy. So I did that once and regretted it in the end. And I swore never again. You know, it meant somebody's life. Yeah. But I just don't have a lot of trust in their ethics. Yeah. So anyway, that. To the Present time, we come back to Jeff Miller, my partner, came out here and met a studio, a production company called Show Dog Studio, run by a really great guy, John Attard, who's a former NCO and the Royal Fusiliers back, way back when. And he made an offer to love the book, said we can turn this into a Netflix series. So that was the offer that he gave us at. What they're currently planning is to turn it into a streamer using the book as the basis. You know, basically every chapter can become a episode.

Congratulations.

Well, I, I'm happy about it when the check clears them back. Wow. But, you know, it's the, the thing's going to be called American Ronin. Not my choice, but it'll work.

Sounds pretty badass to me.

You know, they can keep Hollywood out of it, you know, make it, you know, stick to the story.

When do you think it will go?

I hope I'm not speaking out of turn here. I, I, me personally, I think that we'll actually start writing sometime this spring and filming maybe fall and release in late 26. Actually, everything works and.

Well, that will be awesome.

We'll see.

I can't wait.

I'm pleased with it because it's interesting. He's pleased with it because he wants his grandkids to go. That's Grandpa. And I'm doing everything I can to ruin that scene. Yeah. Anyway, that, that, that's what I'm doing now. And I'm, I'm still writing every once in a while. I, I wrote a fiction book years ago that I may get published, and it's about Casca, Gaius Casca Longinus, who was a centurion that stabbed Christ in the side. No, on. On the hill. And as the myth goes, when he stabbed him in the side, a clear liquid be hung on a cross. What happens is your pleural cavity fills up with liquid and you suffocate. You, you, you know that between the bleeding and the, and the trauma, you suffocate in your own juices. When he pushed the lance to his side, that clear liquid splashed out on his hands, his shoulders, and he had a milky eye that was from a slingstone. And his sight returned. His rheumatism, his arthritis, and that was all gone. And as Christ looked at him, the myth is that he says, as you are centurion, so you shall remain until we meet again.

And, and Robin Moore wrote a series of books called Casca the Eternal Soldier. And I met Robin at the soa and I said, you know, I'd really Like to do an update on that. Do you have a. How do I get to use the copyright on the character? And he goes, casca's not copyrighted. Casca was a real person. He was a Spaniard Iberian. And he actually was the. I'm going to call it Pylum Prima, the head spear. The most senior centurion ever. Legion. And that, you know, he was actually the centurion that had the guard mount in the center of the city. And that's. That's how he came to be there.

No kidding.

And you go to South America, that. That myth pops up every once in a while. The Roman, you know, the Romans around. So I. I wrote a fiction book based around the Banana wars in El Salvador, and that brought. Brought it up to date. That, and I just never published it, so.

Well, I hope you do.

I'm fiddling around with it still. Right. Anyway, I don't want to keep you too late.

No, Nick, it's been an honor.

It's been an honor for me, really do. I watch you on TV and I go, there's something about that guy.

Well, seriously, it's been an honor to get your story out, and.

You'Re gonna make me blush. Come on, Ben 1, you have been through.

You've lived a lot of lives.

But I've lived a long and eventful life. And. And I. I've met a lot of good people. I've met some that weren't. Some of them passed. Not by my hand, and. But I think the thing I learned is that I love being human. Every aspect. The agony and the ecstasy. Good. Yeah. And stay away from redheads.

All right.

Yeah, I will. Oh, wait. Oh, thank you. You too.

Cheers.

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