Transcript of #317 Johnnie Clark - Surviving One of the Deadliest Jobs During the Vietnam War

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Johnny Clark, welcome to the show.

Uh, thank you, Sean. I'm, I'm really excited about it. I— it's a great honor.

It's my honor. Thank you for being here. You know, I say this to all you guys, but you know, the, the, the, the Vietnam generation is, is what motivated me to join the military and, and do what I did. And I was just infatuated with you guys from a very young age and, uh, really into GI Joes, as we'll get into later.

I got a story about you. I've heard, I've heard.

And, um, but, uh, but yeah, it's truly an honor for you to be here. And I was a machine gunner too for a little while. Yeah, that's cool, man.

What kind— what was your machine gun? What was it?

Well, we started with the M60, and then it went into the— then they converted it to what the— I think they call it the Bravo Mark 48. Yeah, the 240. Twin 240s on top of a Humvee are fucking amazing.

Couldn't get any Humvees where I was.

But yeah, it is. It's an honor to have you sitting here. Thank you.

Thanks. This is really fun for my whole family because my son's a lieutenant with the fire department at Suncoast Indian Rocks, out on Indian Rocks, and the whole fire department are huge fans.

Really?

Oh yeah, yeah. They found out. Sean goes in, he goes, my dad's going to be on this podcast, you know? And he said, have you guys ever heard of Sean Ryan Podcast? And they all went crazy. What? And then they yelled, who the hell is your dad?

We'll have to load him up with some stuff to take back to the department.

Yeah.

Um, well, let me give you an introduction here.

Yeah. Yeah.

Johnny Clark, you joined the Marine Corps at 17 years old, straight out of high school in St. Petersburg, Florida. Arrived in Vietnam at 18, assigned as a machine gunner to the 5th Marine Regiment. In the middle of the Battle of Phu Hu City. You're wounded 3 times in combat— a mortar, a grenade, and a gunshot— and were awarded the Silver Star, 3 Purple Hearts, and the Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with Palm. You have written 9 books, an Off-Broadway play. Guns Up and Gunner's Glory are suggested reading at the Marine Corps School of Infantry, and Guns Up sits on the command on the Commandant's reading list, recommended to every newly commissioned officer at the basic school.

Wow.

You recovered from your wounds in Okinawa, where you began martial arts as physical therapy and spent more than 50 years at it. You are now an 8th Dan Grandmaster of Taekwondo, a member of the USA Martial Arts Hall of Fame, and you have taught hand-to-hand combat seminars at West Point and the Naval Academy in Annapolis. Johnny, welcome home, brother.

Thanks, buddy. Thanks.

Okay, so before we get too crazy and do your life story here, I have a Patreon account. It's a subscription account that's turned into quite the community, and they're the, they're the reason that I get the opportunity to sit down here with you today. And, um, so they get the opportunity to ask every single guest a question, and this is from a woman named Amber. First off, thank you for your service. What prompted you to write the memoir of your military experience, and can you give any advice to a daughter wanting to preserve her father's story and/or encourage him to write it?

I wrote Guns Up out of anger, uh, you know, when I came home from 'Nam. I was— I mean, my, my first, uh I had gotten healthy in Okinawa, rehab there, and been training in martial arts. And I thought I was going back to 'Nam, but anyway, I came home and they threw tomatoes at us. El Toro. El Toro. I got off in El Toro and I was greeted with guys throwing tomatoes and eggs at us. And I was pushing a young guy off the plane who, he probably wasn't gonna live. A lot of these guys were pretty shot up. I'd had time to get healthy, so I was healthy, but Some of these boys were a mess. And they had a red carpet and they were playing the Marine Corps hymn for us. And it was fun until we got down the carpet. It was at El Toro and there was a big chain-link fence. And on the other side of the fence, protesters were throwing tomatoes and eggs and stuff at us. And that was my greeting home. And they had a bunch of MPs there, we thought to protect us, but it was to keep us from getting to these guys.

So they wouldn't let us get to them because I tried. Then I went into town and I was in town. My first, right away I got out, I went to a bar like most Marines, me and a kid from California. And there was a sign on the bar that said no Marines or dogs allowed in the bar.

Are you serious?

I'm dead serious. And I got angrier. And, you know, I'd already been diagnosed with severe combat fatigue. I take that back, that came— they diagnosed me later. But I was, you know, I was a little antsy and, uh, an angry guy because of the way we were being treated. But then we went into— we were— this guy from California says, hey, uh, let's go to my hometown. I, you know, I live down the road here, we'll catch a Greyhound bus, they won't be like LA, you know, we'll get out of here. And so I said, let's go. We go to the Greyhound bus station and I'm standing there with my sea bag and, uh, in our dress greens, you know. I've been on American soil for about 11 hours or something like that. And these two guys come up, they had on fatigues, you know, Army fatigues, and they— rainbow patches. I don't know what they had all over them but peace signs. And they made a couple of comments, and I think one of them spit on my shoes. And anyway, I decked this guy. Well, there were some cops there arresting an old wino at the bus station, and they dropped the wino.

I'm home, I'm just home just a few hours, and I'm on my way to jail. And, uh, Got me cuffed. They drive down the street and I see them look in the rearview mirror and they go, uh, 5th Marines, huh? Well, I knew right away I was safe because only another Marine would know that pogie rope, you know. And, uh, said, yeah. And they said, yeah, we were in 2-5. So I, then I knew I was safe. They brought me to a bus station, got my sea bag out of the trunk, took the cuffs off me, put me on a bus back to El Toro. And I never got, I never got to see anything. That was my, that was my welcome home. So then I did. Yeah. So that was my welcome home. But I— it got worse and worse as I tried to go to college. And, uh, down the line I became a mailman, and I got injured on the job, and I, I lost my job as a mailman, uh, with a back injury that came out of Vietnam. I had to jump out of a chopper. The pilot got killed.

And anyway, uh, so I lost my job as a mailman and my job at teaching martial arts at the University of South Florida. So my wife said said, "Hey, you gotta make a living another way here." And I said, "Oh yeah, I think you're right." So I took this creative writing course at St. Pete College and I kept taking the same course over and over again 'cause they would critique 10 pages a week. So it was non-credit course, you know, at night. I took this course like, you know, 15 times to get the book published. Holy shit. 'Cause they critique my whole book. But that's how I wrote a book. And I'll tell you the rest of that story later. We can talk about other stuff. But I wrote that book out of anger because it came from people saying, you need to tell what the Marines were really doing in 'Nam. You know, they weren't killing women and kids. And, you know, and that's what they were— the American people really believed that. And so I wrote it out of anger. And but God took that. And turned it completely around. But I learned that if you wanted to write something, the most important thing I got out of all those creative writing courses was write like you talk.

Because I barely got out of high school. I had a D-minus average. They only kept me in a couple of classes because I was on a really good football team. And I was no superstar, but they needed me. So they didn't want to flunk me. So I got like a D- in English. And I took the easiest math you could take. I took, what was it, math, business math. It was the easiest you could take. I mean, even the word algebra scared me. So I stayed away from anything like that. And I had an old football coach. He had played for the Chicago Bears and he picked me up and he shook me and he said, "Clark, if we didn't need you on this team, I'd fail you, but I'm giving you a D minus." So I was least likely to ever write anything, truly. But I had a real purpose for writing Guns Up. And I mean, I had an inspiration and I had a story to tell. And I really wanted to honor God. You know, that was a big deal to me. But I wanted to honor the guys I served with because they were just outstanding.

But if you were going to try to write anything, write like you talk. Take some creative writing courses. You're going to learn a lot. But writing today and getting published, everything's different. The whole publishing world's so different. You know, it's— My story is kind of a miracle story, but I don't know, writing today, write it for yourself and write it because you love it. Don't write it trying to be a bestseller or trying to make money off it. If you love writing, write it because you love writing and you want to write it for family. Because that's how I wrote Guns Up, really. I only wrote it for my kids. I thought they would at least know the truth.

I'm starting to hear a lot of lot of people— kids, not kids, they're not kids anymore— a lot of the offspring from the Vietnam generation is, uh, they, they want their parents' stories. And, uh, it's interesting, this Patreon question just came in because I literally just interviewed a woman, uh, here for a job, and she had watched all the Vietnam interviews I had done. And her dad is a Vietnam vet who apparently had a really rough go and, and is trying to find some healing, has overcome cancer. And she's worried. She wants, she wants his memoir before, before he passes.

And write it, write it, not thinking of getting published. Write it for your family. And, and if you write it and rewrite it, and eventually if you want to get it published now, I mean, you can self-publish on Amazon now. Yeah, anybody can.

Yeah. Well, let's get into your story. You ready?

Okay. Yeah, it's actually—

you get a gift too. Oh, here you go.

Almost forgot. Oh, gummies.

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Love them. Hey, I've got, uh, I got a gift for you.

Oh, uh, I love gifts.

I've seen some of the people— the gifts people have get— I watched Jeremiah Johnson. My wife and I watched it, and, uh, when he gave you those gifts, the, the papyrus, you know, she said, Johnny, Don't even go. You got nothing to give him. Oh, man. So I had a Bible. My little Gideon Bible had a shrapnel hole in it that saved my life.

Wow.

And I said, I think maybe if I give Sean that, it'll be impressive enough. And my daughter heard this. Dad, if you give that away, I will slit your throat. Daughter of a Nam vet. But So I brought something a little less than a Bible with shrapnel hole in it. Uh, ah, oh man, sweatshirt.

I love it.

Yeah, guns help.

Thank you.

And yeah, and this one, there's a story behind this one. Uh, years after, uh, I'd been home for many years, and one of the corpsmen that worked on me at one time or another, uh, his name was Doc Turley. He's dead now, died of Agent Orange. But he showed up at my door 30 years after the war. I didn't even know who it was. You know, you don't recognize each other after all that. Shows up at my door and he pulls out this and he goes, "Why waltz when you can rock and roll?" Oh man, that's awesome. So, so Thank you. Holy shit, that's amazing. Some of those made because all machine gunners get it.

I love that, man. That's awesome. I'm going to wear this shit out.

And a couple of books.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you. All right, Johnny, so where did you grow up?

Let's do— what do we want to talk about first?

Where did you grow up?

Oh, I'm sorry. Um, I grew up in South Charleston, West Virginia. I had a— I lived in poverty. My mom was married before she met my dad and her first husband, she had two kids with the first husband and her first husband was hit three times and killed in the Battle of the Bulge. And so then she married my dad. And my dad was destroyed in a car wreck and was blind and crippled for the last 7 years of his life. And he was real young. And so she had, she had 3 kids with my dad, but one baby died. So anyway, my mom couldn't, she couldn't support us. My dad was totally crippled and blind. And, you know, we lived on $70 a month. We lived in a garage for a long time. And actually first, when I was a baby, it was a log cabin out in West Virginia hills, out in Lincoln County. Then we lived in a garage in South Charleston, one-car garage, and we had a bedroom that was just curtains for my dad because he was in a body cast for a whole year after this wreck. And it's a pretty awful, sad story.

But I, as a kid, You know, you deal with this stuff. And so I would bring my little friends in. I was like about 6 years old. So I'd bring my buddies in to see my dad because he looked like the mummy because he's in a body cast the whole way. And so we'd go in and I'd charge them like a nickel to come in and see the mummy. So I'd bring kids in to see my dad. But he finally, you know, finally a year after that, they He got out of the body cast, but he lost his memory for a year. He didn't know me or my sister. He didn't know the other kids. He didn't know my mom. But he finally got his memory back. And how long did that take? He lived for about 7 years. And so he died when I was about 10. But in the meantime, my mom had to give up the kids. I was the only one she kept because I was a baby. So she gave my brother and sister from her first husband, Jimmy and Judy, gave, gave them to grandparents in Wilmore, Kentucky. So they grew up there.

And she gave my sister to grandparents out in Lincoln County, West Virginia, out on McClellan Farm. That was between the Hatfields and McCoys. And her name was Evelyn, Evelyn Jane. Well, Evelyn She grew up between the Hatfields and McCoys. She's actually married to a McCoy now. She married Kirby McCoy. So, so that Hatfields and McCoys thing was its own war, buddy. They, yeah, serious business. So, but yeah, I grew up. Then we moved out of that garage. We moved into a Quonset hut, which is kind of funny, very military. It was an old, it was an old World War II Quonset hut. That this old lady named Alice White, she had bought it and turned it into like a little house and rented it and gave, uh, gave us a place to live. So I lived in that, and then my dad died, then we moved to St. Pete, Florida when I was 10, just me and mom. And, uh, the rest— I had the rest— last 65 years I've lived in St. Pete. Wow.

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Did you keep in touch with any of your brothers and sisters?

Oh yeah, yeah, we're still close. My— well, my sister Judy died, and, uh, we had a baby died, but, um, my sister Evelyn and my brother Jimmy still lives in, uh, he lives in Lexington, and my sister lives in Florence, Alabama. But yeah, we're still close.

How'd you guys reconnect?

Well, they would send me every summer. Mom would send me to, to stay with, uh, Jimmy and Judy in Kentucky, or else she'd send me out to the hills of Lincoln County to stay on the farm with Evelyn. So we stayed close growing up. So, you know, like every summer I'd spend a month or two in Wilmore, a month in out in the hills. They would come to see mom when they could. And when they got old enough to drive, they would come in and come to see mom, and I'd see them then.

Sheesh.

Yeah, it was a tough upbringing. I mean, I literally got my food out of old Army— they were like C-rations cans, you know. We had these big green government cans from World War II that had Spam and, uh, you know, various foods. And that's, uh, Salvation Army would bring us a bunch of that kind of food, and that's kind of kept us going. Wow. Yeah, yeah, we— it was poverty, but you know, I was such a happy kid, it didn't bother me a bit. I, I, I was having fun.

What kind of stuff were you into as a kid?

I wanted to be a Marine since I was 5 years old. So I put together a group of kids and I was the leader and we were the Marines and we would— we had a place I named Marine Hill and we had wars with other kids. Yeah, you know, we BB gun wars. You know, this is back when you got away with that kind of crap. You know, we'd wear coal miner helmets and goggles and we'd have a war with the Blackwell Street gang. And we were the Brown Street Gang and we'd build forts. They'd drive by and I invented a machine gun. We would— it was a— remember when kids used to wear the old little red handkerchiefs, cowboy handkerchief things? So I would— you'd fill it full of rocks and you would hold all four corners, but you'd hold the fourth corner just between there. And you'd let go and it would spray rocks. You could take out 3 or 4 kids with it. So we invented a machine gun. That was my machine gun. But the enemy stole my design and pretty soon they were using it on us. And built giant slingshots.

I built a giant slingshot and they'd ride by on their bikes. They were buzz bombers, you know, and they'd ride by on their bikes. And throw rocks at us or hit us with machine guns, and, uh, we'd knock them off their bikes with this giant slingshot. Yeah, you can't do that today, but, uh, well, maybe not in most places.

Yeah, around here you probably can.

Yeah, you know, Tennessee, you guys.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What, what, so what, uh, what caught your interest since 5 years old in the Marine Corps?

Pardon?

What caught your interest at 5 years old?

Well, my uncle, you know, I, like I said, there wasn't too much beautiful in, uh, in my life. We, I didn't have much. All my toys came from Salvation Army or somebody, you know, or gifts from this group or that group. And, uh, so I had one uncle, I had a few uncles, but I had one who was, stood out, and he was a Marine. He had joined the Marine Corps and kind of got out of the West Virginia poverty, you know, and, you know, one of those no-neck guys, you know, stout, knock people out with headbutts, you know, tough, tough Marine. And I just idolized him. Seeing somebody in that Marine Corps uniform, and he was a tough guy. Well, they all were. All my uncles were pretty tough guys. But The Marines stood out. And, uh, so he'd come home, you know, get liberty and come home and play with me, do push-ups with me and my buddies on his back. And, you know, you just— I just looked up to him. And that was the beginning of it. But you remember when I was a little kid, uh, yeah, the movies were, uh, Sands of Iwo Jima.

You know, the Marines were— they were seen as the best. And, uh, you know, all my life I, I wanted to I wanted to be in the Marines. I wanted to be a Marine. My mom knew it too. When I, you know, when I was, I joined when I was 17. I got an early entry. And boy, when mom found out about that, she, she was gonna let me join anything but the Marines. You know, she said, no, you'll be the first one killed. You're not going. And yeah, my poor mom, six hearts. She had six hearts, you know, three from her first husband. So she, she went through that. The guy's coming up to the door with the telegram, you know, and they don't tell you how the person is. It's wounded in action, condition unknown. And she, it was rough for her.

How long had the Vietnam War been going on when you decided to join?

I joined in '67. Okay. And it had been going on. I mean, you know, we had guys over there in the '50s. So, uh, but, um, '67, '68, you know, that, that was— it got really hot.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. What— I'm just rewinding a little bit. I mean, losing your dad at 10 years old.

Yeah, it was tough, but there's a story, a good story out of that. My dad wasn't a Christian, and, um, when When he was blinded and crippled and he finally got his memory back a year, you know, a year being in the ozone, he was led to Christ by my grandpa and others. And my dad became a strong Christian. So that 7 years that he lived, he lived 7 years as a man of God. And because of that, You know, I came to Christ and, and my whole family. So my dad played a role in saving the whole family. Wow. Wow. So, and that might— I don't think that would have happened if he hadn't been blind because he was a hellraiser. And I don't think that would have happened. So it took that horrible tragedy to bring my dad to the Lord. And you know what Scripture says, be better to pluck out your eyes than to miss out on heaven. And in my dad's case, that was the case.

I'll be damned, man. Thank you for sharing that. Thank you for sharing that. Well, let's move into enlisting.

Yeah. Yeah, I joined at 17 and I had some bad omens right away. I was going in the buddy system, you know, and I had a couple of buddies from the high school football team were going to go in with me., and had 3 of them. I signed up, we're going to show up down at the recruiters, get on the Greyhound bus to Jacksonville, you know, and get inducted and do all that. And, um, I, I, nobody showed up. So you were the only one? My buddies disappeared. So, so I, I went by myself, but It's funny, those 3 guys, well, one went in the Navy and one ended up going in the Army and becoming an Army Ranger. And he went to Nam a year later after. And then the other one went in and he was in 101st. And he stayed in. He went all the way from private to lieutenant colonel.

Wow.

Yeah, so they didn't join with me, but— and they both went— none of them went in the Marine Corps, they went in the Army. So right on, right on.

So how was it?

Well, I was— get to Jacksonville.

Yeah.

And, uh, I've said my goodbyes, you know, got a couple of little cheerleaders waving goodbye to me. You know, it was an important moment in a guy's life. And, uh, so Jacksonville, they tell me, they 4F me. Said, you've got a hernia. And I said, I don't have a hernia. And yeah, you know, this is your out, kid. You don't want to go to Vietnam right now. And these Navy doctors are telling me this. And I said, no, no, I want to go. That's why I'm here. I want to go. And they said, now this is your out. Don't be stupid, kid. And They said, you got a hernia, you can't go. Well, I started, I said, no way. And I started doing, I was young and strong and I started doing one-arm push-ups and I'm doing backflips and I'm saying, I can do anything. I say, I'm perfectly healthy. And one of the guys, one of my buddies from 'Nam was there that day. His name was Pat McCreary. He saw me doing all this. He's a witness to this insanity. He said, we thought you were crazy, man. So he said, He saw all that because he— so he can verify that this actually happened.

But I did everything to make sure they'd let me in. Well, I'm there. We're in this Hotel Floridian or something like that. I think it was what it was called. And first night there, you know, before we're going to go to Parris Island, I go up the stairs and some maniac comes in the lobby and I'm going up the stairs and there's, there's where you sign in. And so this guy starts opening fire and in the lobby of the hotel. He's got a .45 cal and he's blasting away and he's shooting the steps under my feet as I'm going up the stairs. Holy shit. Whoa, I'm not even there yet. They're trying to kill me. And I never did find out what that was about, but that guy took off. And a couple of seconds later, these MPs come running in. And I never heard what that story was about, but it's a true story. You never Never heard, but that was my welcome to the Marine Corps. Damn. Yeah, and then in Parris Island, boy, that was insane. I was begging to get to Nam just to get out of Parris Island. I mean, they got my attention.

Yeah, I saw some crazy stuff there. I was on PT, a guy, he was, he, He was a fat body. You know that, fat body to the end of the line. Anyway, they were going to drive him out of the Marine Corps.

I don't think the Marine Corps likes fat bodies.

Oh boy. You either lose the weight.

It's more of a Navy thing.

They put this guy, they made him do leg lifts until he got a hernia and he's screaming in agony. And I'm thinking, this is serious. This is awful. This guy's in agony. They cussed him out of our barracks, the old World War I barracks, the old wood barracks on Parris Island. We were in the upstairs. We were all at attention as they are watching this, as the DIs cursed him. They took him out on a stretcher. The Navy guys came in and put him on a stretcher. They're taking him out. They cursed him all the way to the ambulance. They, we told you we'd drive you out of our Marine Corps. Damn. A serious, and then I saw another guy. Who lost it, and he went up the water tower at Parris Island. Well, we didn't know, I mean, I never saw this, but all of a sudden we're being marched out to the water tower, and we're not allowed to look around. If you even looked, I looked one time, and I don't cuss anymore, but it was I.F. in the area. And if you were caught I.F. in the area, you got hit.

Nate, this D.I., caught me. Looking like that because there was, we saw girls. And he came up, he kicked my legs out from under me. That was still black and blue when I got to Nam. He kicked me so hard, I thought he broke my leg. Well, you didn't do that. You look straight at the guy's head in front of you. So I didn't know where I was going, but now I know I'm marching on grass. Pretty soon they tell us we can look up. And here's all, the whole battalion is around the water tower. And here's this guy, this poor sap. Is up on the water tower screaming, if, if you don't let me out of the Marine Corps, I'm gonna jump.

Holy shit.

And these DIs down there, you know, they've all got their platoons out there, and they go, all right, we're ready now. I didn't, I didn't bring all these Marines out here to watch nothing. Jump.

Holy shit.

Of course he came down and he said, if you come down from there and don't jump, we're gonna beat the Hell out of here. Well, he, he finally came down. He didn't jump. And they beat the crap out of that guy. I know, they just beat the tar out of that guy.

So that probably wouldn't happen today.

Oh no, no, it wouldn't happen today, man.

They got little chits now. I think they should raise up.

I, I even heard that the obstacle course that was— I heard the obstacle course, uh, you know, that we had to do, uh, it's now for display only. What? That's what I was told by my A-gunner Chan. Now talk about Chan, remarkable guy. He went back to PI and he said, yeah, he said the obstacle course is for display only. Wow. And he was told, gonna make some people mad with this one, but he was told that, you know, a lot of the women Marines, they couldn't do that obstacle course. And They got rid of it. I don't know if it's true.

Wouldn't be far out there, man. So how, so how was the rest of, uh, how was the rest of basic?

Um, I went to, from there went to, uh, machine gun school.

And is that what you wanted to do?

Uh, no, no, they just, they just put me there, you know. And you had to, you had to shoot all the weapons, and I shot really well with the machine gun, so they threw me in machine gun school. Like, I think that's how they figured it out. And, uh, I was too dumb to have an MOS doing anything else. All right, so, so they put me, uh, put me in machine gun school. And, uh, you know, and then I, you know, I start seeing the recon Marines here, you know, and, and I came up with this brilliant idea. But Chan and I— he was this Chinese— Chan was, uh, with me all the way from P.I. From the day we joined, alphabetical, Chan and Clark, you know, we got stuck together all the way through the Marine Corps. And Chan was Chinese American, been smuggled out of Red China as a baby. His dad was a doctor, got him out of China. He was a genius. He, he, and he had a minor in ministry, and I think from the University of Tennessee. And so Chan was going to be an open heart surgeon. Now you hear one guy say that, you think, yeah, me too.

But, you know, this Chinese guy was— he was a giant brain, you know. And, and, uh, and for me to get stuck with him, you know, I, I had that IQ of zero-zero. I'm stuck with this giant brain, and he had this giant vocabulary, and he'd use words I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. I said, what are you saying? But Chan was— he wanted to join the Marine Corps. He wanted to pay America back for taking his family in. I mean, how do you not love a guy like that?

It's cool.

Yeah, it's cool. I mean, if only some of the immigrants felt that way today, man. I mean, you know, really. But Chan wanted to join the Marine Corps. He could have been an officer. He didn't have to be a dumb PFC machine gunner. I mean, he, you know, he had a college degree. He was, he was as smart as heck. So Chen and I were in machine gun. We both fired expert with the machine gun. And I came up with this brilliant idea. I want to go recon. Because I'm telling him, the recon guys get to wear those little gold wings, man. It's a chick magnet. I mean, we'll pick up girls everywhere. So he goes, Clark, do you ever think of anything else? You know, and he gives me some big 10-cent word to describe that I'm not being right. And I said, come on, Chan, go with me, man. You don't want to leave me alone. We've been this far. And he goes, all right. So we put in our request to go to recon. And one night, this is a true story. This is right out of a movie. But we had this old sergeant.

I think he was a Master Sergeant, but he lived in the barracks with us at Camp Lejeune, the machine gun school barracks. Well, got all these racks, you know, regular barracks with all these machine gunners. And he had an office at the end. At about 2 in the morning, he comes out, takes one of those old metal garbage cans that we had. We didn't have the plastic garbage. And he heaves this metal garbage can down the squad bay. And he hits the lights and starts screaming, guns up, guns up, guns up. So everybody out of the racks, standing at attention at the end of your rack. And he's got, he's got a fifth of booze in his hand and he's angry. He's an angry Marine. And he's got a bunch of orders. He's got orders in his left hand. And so, and it was transfer, my transfer to go to recon. And Chance, and I guess maybe a couple of the other guys wanted to go recon. And so he says, Clark, gives me a piece of chalk. He says, draw a line down the center of the barracks. Everybody put your toes on that line, you know.

So we all line up on this line and he says, okay, all you Marines, all you gunners. At first he tells us how bad we need gunners, and we did. You know, we really did. In the 5th Marines, when I got there, they told me every machine gunner in the 5th Marines had been killed or wounded. So we really needed machine gunners. And, and he knew that he had, he, you know, he got all the battlefield casualty list and they knew all that stuff. And so suddenly machine gunners, kind of a critical MOS, but even though you could be as be dumb as a stump and still be one. So he, uh, he says, uh, okay, all you Marines that joined my Marine Corps to kill the enemy, stand still. And all you Marines that joined my Marine Corps to find the enemy and tell us to go kill them, step over that line. And nobody stepped over the line. And I, I mean, it was like I stood there. I mean, he shamed us. It was like being in the Alamo. Step over the line if you want to leave the Alamo. And, but it worked.

Not one guy tried to go to recon. We all just stayed in machine guns. No shit. I saw my little Gold Wings flying out to Paris. I really wanted those wings, man. Wow. But yeah, so we got to Nam and, you know, I thought it was baloney, but because they told us in machine gun school, 7 to 10 seconds after a firefight begins. And we thought that, you know, that's baloney, it can't be true. And then we get there and all the machine gunners have been killed or wounded.

Man, I mean, so you went to the Battle of Hue immediately? That's where you showed up? The Battle of Hue, that's where you went.

Okay, Hue City. Yeah, Hue. Yeah, I know Hue City. That's a little wrong because I mean, I got there for Hue and I got there when Hue was ending, but I just was at the very end of Hue City. All I did in Hue City is step in a punji pit. You know, punji pits with the— I stepped in it and it broke. It didn't go through my boots. You know, God save me. First week of Nam and he's already saving me. So I— but I, I just did patrols, uh, trying to, you know, get the, uh, the NVA that were trying to get out away at the end there. But yeah, I didn't, I didn't really fight in Hue City. I, I mean, you went—

but you went straight from machine gunner school to Vietnam?

Yeah. No, no, I, I— then I went to Camp Pendleton.

Okay.

For jungle warfare school.

Gotcha.

Yeah. And, you know, that little POW thing, that school they give you. And, yeah, jungle warfare, that was eye-opening too. But, you know, I mean, after Parris Island, everything was duck soup. But then there in jungle warfare school, after it was over, they gave us, I think it was 24 or 48 hours liberty. And so I talked Chan in. I had a way of talking Chan into trouble. So I talked Chan into going to Tijuana. I said, we—

What were you doing down there?

I wanted to go to Tijuana. So I talked Chan into, we got to go to Tijuana, man. All this, I hear. So lots of things. Yeah, lots of things. So I talked him into going to Tijuana. So we go to Tijuana and we're in one of those really seedy bars, you know, and there's a bunch of Marines in there, of course, and there's activity going on. It was pretty despicable. But they bring us over a bunch of drinks, you know, I had, we'd order, it was 4 of us, 4 Marines, and we'd order 4 drinks. This big Mexican guy comes over with a tray full of drinks. And I said, we don't, we only want 4. And he expects us to pay for them. And Well, that led to a confrontation. And so I— a big brawl started, a big, huge fight. And I realized this is getting ugly. Let's get out of here. So me and Chan are trying to crawl out because bottles flying everywhere, people fighting all over the place. And we got to the door and the Tijuana police were there. Then everybody said, he started it. I didn't do anything.

But I was almost innocent.

They put you in the clink?

Yeah. Well, they, Tijuana police threw us in the Tijuana brig jail. And then the shore patrol came and got us out of there and threw us in the Navy brig. And then they took me into San Diego, me and Chan. Oh, he was so mad at me because Cheon would never do any of this stuff. So we were in— that was the last time I saw San Diego was Tijuana Brig. But then they— then the Marines came and got us. They threw us in a Red Line Brig at Camp Pendleton. Have you ever heard anything about those?

I haven't.

Oh, they're awful. Yeah, the Red Line Brig, you stand at attention and there was a big wall. Of course, you know, there's a war going on. They take, some guys would get in trouble like this and think it was going to keep them going to Nam. But, you know, I wasn't doing that. I just, I mean, I just, I hit this guy because he was trying to extort money out of us. So anyway, we got our face up against the wall. You'd stand at attention. And if you had to go to the head, you know, you had to, they had MP jailers, they're marching up and down behind you and you got your face up against the wall. And if you move your face away from that wall, they hit the back of your head and it drives your face into the wall. And that's why it's called a red line break. There's bloody red where everybody's faces would be. There's a red line and there's just drips of blood all the way down this wall. Yeah. It's a red line break. So that was, yeah, those guys, They didn't play games. And I, yeah, I wanted out of there, but I had orders from Nam, for Nam, like the next day.

So we didn't spend, we only, I don't know, we might have spent 8 hours in that Red Line Brig and they said, you got orders for Nam, you're out of here. And they took us out of there and put us on the Braniff, old Braniff Airlines and flew us to Nam.

Wow. So what was it like when you landed at Nam? Was it what you expected?

It was, uh, I didn't know what to expect. I mean, I'll be honest with you. You know, I was such a kid. I look back at it. I was such a gung-ho dumb kid, you know. But Chan had been reading about Hue City. He read newspapers and he's telling me, yeah, you know, there's a lot going on in Hue City. I think we're going to be going to Hue City. And I said, oh, okay. So we get off the plane and then we file through this. And as soon as we got off the plane, you know, that heat from Vietnam hits you and you're going, whoa, you know, I'm from Florida, but this was a different kind of heat. And, and we hit and we see the Phantoms jetting down the airstrip and taking off and we could hear artillery. And all of a sudden you're going, crap, it's a real war, man. You know, I'm in a real war here. So they, we filed through, they're giving us our orders. And I always remember the sergeant, he'd go through and hand him yours and he'd stamp it, big red stamp, 5th Marines, next, 5th Marines, next, 5th Marines.

And everybody was getting sent to the 5th Marines. And I said, Chan, why is everybody going to the 5th Marines, man? And he goes, didn't you read in the newspapers I've been giving you? The 5th Marines are taking Hue City. And I said, Oh, they need guys. And he goes, yeah, stupid, they need guys. So 5th Marines it was, but Hue City was really ending. And I, you know, I didn't, I really didn't do anything Hue except patrols around it. And I didn't do anything. So I really wasn't away.

How long were you there?

In Nam?

In Hue City.

Oh, in Hue? Oh, geez, just a couple of days patrols. And then they They brought us back to Phu Bai and then they sent us down to a place called Troy Bridge and yeah, things started getting hot there. Right on. Yeah.

Right on. You didn't have any, did you know anybody that had been to Vietnam before you or?

No.

You were just right, you just plopped right in there.

Yeah. I didn't know anybody.

Shit. Were you nervous?

I, you know, I, I was, you know, like super excited. Uh, I mean, the pretty soon, you know, I mean, you can't tell nerves from fear, but, um, but I, yeah, I, I was kind of still as a— it was a great adventure, and I, I was so young that I just saw it as just You know, right now it's a huge adventure, but you know, once you, once you got out in the bush, yeah, the adventure's over. And this is, uh, it's, it's good. It got, it was hard. It was hard. You know, I, first time I got hit, I, I lost, uh, well, I went over there at £160. Uh, and, uh, first or second time I got hit, I was, uh, they sent me to, uh, hospital in, uh, they sent me to Da Nang, but there were so many wounded Marines that they didn't have any beds. They got guys laying in blood all over the floors. And so they threw a bunch of us on a C-130 and flew us down to an Air Force hospital and Cameron Bay. And, you know, after 6 months in the jungle, getting to Cameron Bay, the Air Force The Air Force, they live a different life.

They air-conditioned hospital, they ate off plates and trays and they had flushing toilets. And I went into the head once I was able to walk. And there's these crazy Marines, stupid Marines in the bathroom. And he's going Clark, Clark, Clark! Come here, man, listen to this. He flushed the toilet. Oh my God, when you're entertained by hearing a flushing toilet. Uh, I mean, I'm sorry, but it's true. Oh man, that in that hospital, when all the guys started coming out of the morphine and stuff, uh where you wake up and you're going, hey, who you with, man? 7th Marines. Hey, who you with? 26th Marines. And I'd say, you know, 5th Marines. And so the whole hospital is filled with wounded Marines. It, you know, it's Tet Offensive. And so this one kid, a couple of beds down where I was, but the other ward, it was the same story. And so this one kid, he wouldn't say anything. Nothing. I think, yeah, you know, he's still in shock or something, you know. And a couple of days later, here's the same thing. Hey, who you with, man? Hey, who you with? 26 Marines? Who's it?

Hey, who's that guy with? And he wouldn't say anything. Finally, the guy started harassing him, said, who you with, man? And he goes, I'm in the Air Force. So all these Marines go, What? There you see these wounded guys sit up and go, what'd you do? What'd you do, step on a nail? It's so—

he's like, no, it was a thumbtack.

He says, he goes, no, it's my mom's fault, man. You know, he was, he was a nice young guy. He goes, no, it's my mom's fault, man. He said, my brother's a Marine and she kept sending me letters and she'd been contacting my CO telling him to make me go check on my brother and see how he's doing. So I finally said okay and I hopped a ride up to Da Nang and then they threw me on a chopper and flew me out to An Hoa combat base. And he said, I got off, I didn't even walk off the tarmac and they got hit and I got wounded and I got a Purple Heart. Holy shit. Damn. So every morning, all the Marines, we'd wake up and we'd sing this kid awake with, "Off we go into the wild blue yonder." Oh shit. We made his life— although he grew to love us, you know. It was all in good fun, but pretty funny.

On that note, before we get into the thick of it, Let's take a quick break.

Okay.

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Check them out for yourself at roka.com and use code SRS for 20% off site-wide at checkout. That's roka.com and use code SRS. All right, Johnny, we're back from the break. We're getting in, getting ready to get into Vietnam. Where do we go from here?

Well, I got to Troy Bridge and Troy Bridge, really the story about Troy Bridge that I wrote in Guns Up is it's about Big Red. I put it in there because Big Red. I, when I first got there, you know, when we got the FUBI right before we went up to do around Hue, there was one guy in this big tent where we came into, and he was coming back from the hospital. He'd been wounded coming back from NAS. And so Chan and I, you know, we wanted to pump this guy because tell us what we're walking into here. And his name was Richard Weaver, but I never knew his real name. I didn't know his real name till 30 years after the war. No shit. Nobody had a name. You know, I, and I was, I've always been awful with names, but it's like everybody had a nickname. You know, I mean, I'm sure a lot of the guys, they knew me as that crazy gunner, but you know, I didn't think, but I didn't think I had a name sometimes. But he was just Big Red. He was just big redheaded guy and he was good looking, you know, looked like the Marlboro Man, you know, in the old Marlboro cigarette commercials, and, uh, and big, big and strong.

He, he had been a bouncer in one of the toughest bars in Cincinnati, Ohio when he was 15.

When he was 15?

That's what— yeah, I found all this out way, way later.

Could you imagine getting bounced out of a bar by a 15-year-old?

Think about— well, listen to the rest of this. He was raised, uh, his bad upbringing. You know, I think his parents basically— I don't know the full story, but he didn't grow up with his parents. They kind of abandoned him.

Gotcha.

And, and I don't want to hurt anybody's feelings that might hear this, but I, you know, that's just the story I got. But he didn't really grow up with his folks that much. And I think there were reasons. Not maybe not their fault at all. Kind of like my mom. My mom had to give up the kids, you know, she didn't have any food to feed them. So Anyway, he grew up with this old guy, an old Marine who had served under Admiral Halsey in World War II. And he raised Big Red like as a Marine from birth. From the time he was a little kid, he was—

holy shit—

brought him up a Marine. And anyway, how did they get connected?

I mean, how did they run into each other? Do you know?

I don't know.

I mean, that's interesting.

I don't know. But he, he, he, he, Fred, he became my big brother and Chan's too, because, you know, we're, we're boots, you know, I mean, you got two new boots walking in, we don't know what we're walking into. And, and first time we met him, you know, he was, he says, trying to get us ready for this. He goes, okay, At first he didn't want to be bothered. Then we'd go, come on, man. You know, and then he found out we were 0331s, machine gunners. And he goes, that perked him up. He goes, oh boy, they're going to be glad to see you, man. And you know, we've been told that 7 to 10 second crap, you know, and we didn't believe it. And he said, you know, there's probably, I didn't see, I don't know of any any gunners left when I got wounded in Hue. I don't think there's any machine gunners left. Said they were giving the M60 to mortarmen and, you know, bringing up guys, whoever, and handing them the gun and saying, you're the gunner today. And nobody liked it because it was like a target on your back.

But, and let me explain that real quick. You know, we're fighting that war at night all the time. And the M60 has a tracer round. Every 5th round's a tracer round. Well, it looks like a laser beam. Of course, I know you know that, but I don't know who's listening to this, but it looks like a laser beam. So you see it in all the movies and you see the lasers. Well, that's a whole bunch of bullets with a tracer round is every 5th round. And, and so we, we had to have that to point out the enemy. Had to have that to know where you're shooting. Uh, we used it for calling in airstrikes, you know, with pointers, you know.

And, uh, forgive me, so for those, those that don't understand what he's saying, a tracer round is, is basically— it, it, it, for America, it's red. Was it red? Yeah, red.

NBA were green.

Yeah, so it's a round that kind of burns red as it's going out of the, out of the barrel, and what people will do is exactly what Johnny's saying. They will mark— so if, if a airplane, helicopter, somebody's gonna drop some ordnance close to your position, you mark enemy territory where you want them to hit with tracer rounds, right? And so they see where the tracer rounds are going, and then they know exactly what they need to hit.

Yeah. And, and we used it, you know, when you're calling them Phantoms. I mean, there were a few times we had a Phantoms had to drop napalm like really close to us, and, uh, if I didn't show them where to drop that, we could be frying like eggs, you know. So, but a lot of guys still carry—

I mean, even, even though we had lasers when I was in, I used to carry an extra mag of all tracers. I mean, oh, in that way, if whatever, if the laser didn't— if the laser went down or whatever, then I could throw in a mag tracer and mark target.

Yeah.

When I wasn't carrying my 60.

Yeah, but well, so I, uh, yeah, so anyway, Big Red— oh, sorry, go ahead.

I was just gonna say, use tracers for a lot of things. I mean, yeah, I remember too, they probably don't do this shit anymore either, but, uh, you know, for a dummy like me, I'd put the last 5 rounds in my magazine as tracer because when you hit that, you know, hey, I'm getting ready to run out of ammo here, start thinking about a mag change.

That's a smart move. Yeah, I know, I know. I never did that. And our rifleman, see, only the gunner had the tracers, only the M16.

Oh, no shit.

Yeah, none of the M16s, you know, they didn't have tracers.

Gotcha.

So it was all up to me. I mean, it was all up to machine gun. So, but anyway, so Big Red's telling us that, you know, every, because of that tracer round, because it points out who, you know, there's the machine gun. You'd only see the M16s and AK-47s going off like muzzle flashes. It looked like a bunch of lightning bugs in a big shootout. And the only steady target you saw was the NVA .30 cals. You know, they'd shoot green tracers. So it was like Christmas time out there, you know, green and red crisscrossing each other. And we were the only targets. And every good army's taught the same thing. Knock out the machine gun first. Back then anyway, I assume it's the same. So anyway, machine gunners didn't last long. If you laid on the trigger very long, that's why it was 7 to 10 seconds. If you laid on that trigger very long, it was 20-round burst. We were told, unless you're being overrun, unless there's no choice, 20-round burst. Don't be laying on 100 rounds. You won't, you'll never finish that 100 rounds because some rifleman's going to pinpoint where your machine gun is and out of the jungle and you're dead.

Well, that's the reason you became such an obvious target in a battle where everybody else is a lightning bug flashing on and off that gunners didn't last long. And, but you got no choice. You got to, you got to use the tracers. It's crucial. And it shows the, uh, shows the infantry where, where to fire, you know, where's the enemy, etc. It shows you where your round's going. You know, shooting without tracer rounds, you don't know— all your rounds could be running into a tree.

I mean, it's really interesting because the M60 machine gun wasn't just a weapon, it was also a communication device. Yeah, you know, because you— it just like all the stuff we were just talking about, you know what I mean? And then you're marking targets for your own guys. I mean, you really got to be switched on.

Well, some gunners— I don't remember doing this, but I know some gunners, and they would talk to each other. You know, you'd be mountains apart.

Like I'm saying.

Yeah, it just, you know, 5-round burst, 5-round burst, you know, and they talk to each other to kind of let each other know where they were out in the You know, the big mountains in North, in like, you know, Thong Duck and places like that. You know, when you get near the Cambodian border and everything, you know, we're talking big fricking mountains. You know, it wasn't, it wasn't flat jungle. It was straight up, straight down. And so you can't see each other. You don't know where the other platoon might be. And, but it, but old Red tried to tell us that, no, that wasn't bullcrap. You know, 7 to 10 seconds is about right. And it goes, if you lay on that trigger more than 20-round burst, yeah, you're going to be dead. And he said, as a matter of fact, as far as he knew, there were no gunners left in the 5th Marines. They had all been killed and wounded. And I mean, what's that like for you to hear that shit?

Well, you're brand new.

That's—

hadn't fired a round yet. And this is, this is your welcome brief.

It's real now, you know, I mean, all of a sudden, you know, where it was a big adventure and I'm not all that scared, I'm just kind of excited, it dawns on you, man, yeah, I might not be alive next week, you know, this, this is gonna, this could end badly. But, uh, yeah, you got no choice, you know, you're there, you got no choice, you got to do it. And, uh, so That woke me and Chan up, but he was great about everything. Big Red was, he was like a big brother. I mean, he was like, you know, bend those pins on your frags. You know, we're right off the plane from Da Nang, you know, and they've given us all this equipment. We got grenades where the pins aren't even bent. And we got, and we had at that moment, we had M16s. And, you know, he's telling us what to do with the M16s, you know.— you know, we had 20 rounds in each clip. Well, you know, you only want 18 in because the old M16s, the— it would, it would weaken. And, uh, I mean, the, the magazine would weaken if you kept it filled with 20-round mags all the time, and it's going to jam because as the spring gets weak, it's not going to feed the bullet.

You know that. I, I hate to talk to you about this stuff because I know you—

so yeah, equipment has changed over the years too, so yeah.

Well, yeah, no kidding. But anyway, yeah, you, you had to, you had to take, knock a couple of rounds. So he took our magazines, took 2 rounds out of every, uh, I mean, out of every magazine, and then, uh, threw it back at us. And then he told us about, uh, taking all your, uh, anything of value that you're going to try to hang on to, uh, that's paper, you know, you know, every, anything, IDs, your MPC, your military payment certificate, your money, anything you got that you want to try to keep dry. And of course I have my little Gideon Bible Bible, and I wanted to keep it dry. And you'd get hold of plastic bags. There were a lot of them around. You'd get them from the corpsman a lot of times. So you'd wrap everything in plastic. And, you know, and then I like my little Bible. It was wrapped in plastic, so it was real thick, but it was in my pocket and it was, I had a flak jacket on, you know, and, but we had the old Korean era flak jackets. So, you know, they're panels. Bullets could go between the panels.

You know, shrapnel could go between the panels. But yeah, we had Korean-era flak jackets. Now the Army got the nice new ones. And of course, it was every Marine's duty to steal anything from the Army. So we were always trying to steal from the Army. If we went into Phu Bai, as soon as the Army heard those Marines are coming in and out of the jungle from that, they'd try to hide all their equipment because we were going to steal. We stole everything. But they had all the good stuff. You know, like our M79 guy, our blooper man. The Army had these blooper rounds that are nothing today. I mean, I know they got everything today, but back then the blooper round was still, it was pretty new. All we had was the HEs, the concussion little grenade.

Golden eggs.

Yeah. And, but the Army had, they had the buckshot blooper rounds and they had blooper rounds that would be like a flare. And I forgot what else they had. But so our blooper man, who was insane, I called him Sam the Blooper Man in Guns Up. And he's a big favorite of all the fans of that book. But Sam was, Sam was, he was a character. He was a total character. But God, he was good with that M79.

Real quick, I'm just curious, would you read your Bible out there? Or was it with you too?

Say that again.

Did you read your Bible out there? Would you unwrap it and read it?

Oh yeah, oh yeah, yeah. I, you know, yeah, I started reading it a lot. And Chan, I had Chan there with me, you know, and Chan started, uh, like I said, he had a minor in ministry, so I had, I had a Bible teacher with me, you know. And you'd ask, and that's, that's why he played such a crucial role, and that's why he's a main character in Guns Up.

That's interesting too, that he came from China as a Christian.

Yeah, I know, it's fascinating. I know. And the fact that he should have been an officer, he should have been a doctor. And his story, you know, at the end, I mean, you know, he got blown up with me, he got shot up pretty good too. And he had to have like 17 surgeries on his arm. And so he couldn't tie surgical knots. So, so at the, you know, and he went through a serious depression for a while. He came home and the girl he thought he was going to marry, that kind of ended. They, that had, that had gone away while he was in Nam, I think. And, and I don't know all the details, but that and now his dream of being an open heart surgeon, that was gone. But But Chan went on to become the leading cardiovascular perfusion expert in the world.

Are you serious?

Yeah, yeah. A dumb machine gunner. Yeah, I know. And I had to go through a war with this guy and his giant vocabulary. He was maddening. Jay would— it was pretty funny, you know what I mean? He would do things because he was so smart. And I was— I barely got out of St. Pete High. And still, I'd be eating C-rations and he'd go, you know, Clark, those C-rations, they were put in that can when you weren't even a glint in your father's eye. And I'd go, what? And I'd look at the date to try to find the date. God, yeah, 1943. Oh man, damn. Yeah, I know. Anyway, he was— he could be a pain in the butt, but, uh, you know, we're still together. Yeah, yeah, we're still together. He came to see me in Florida not long ago. His wife had recently died, and yeah, I came down and took him out on my pontoon boat, drank some wine, and— nice.

You guys are still buddies?

Yeah, yeah.

Where's he at?

He's in, uh, New York, in, um, Oyster Bay, New York.

Right on.

Yeah, right on. And he's got a place on Nantucket that we've been to once. And so nice. Yeah, it's pretty sweet.

So where do you guys go from here? Oh, Vietnam.

Oh, well, In Vietnam, we went— we, uh, let me take a Troy Bridge. It got overrun.

Uh, hold on, what was Troy Bridge? Okay, why was it so important? What were you doing?

You know, later you look at— there's pictures in that book, and there's pictures of Troy Bridge. As a matter of fact, show you real quick. Oh well, it doesn't show the bridge here, but that's me on Troy Bridge.

Look at that.

Yeah.

Great Kurt Engel picture right there.

The Troy Bridge was, it was like an old, I think it had originally been an old train trestle bridge, you know, but it was on Highway 1. And it had, like I said, this part of the story really in Guns, this is about Big Red. Big Red was a hero on Troy Bridge. You know, I didn't do much. I didn't do, you know.

What were we, what was, why were we there? What did we want?

Okay, it was on Highway 1, which is the most important route in Vietnam. All of our supplies went up and down Highway 1. So the NVA, Viet Cong, they're always trying to do something to stop Highway 1. Blow up the bridges along Highway 1 was a big deal. And so bridge duty though was a good deal for Marines because it meant you weren't out in the bush. You got to come in, you know, when you're on bridge duty, there'd usually be a little ville there. You might even be able to eat something besides C-rations, but, and I did that a couple of times, but you know, there was always critters going through your rice. You'd be eating, they'd burrow through your rice and you'd close your eyes and keep eating. But yeah, so anyway, it was, It was an important bridge. It got hit with, they said, over 400 NVA, and they, sappers finally, you know, got onto the bridge and suicide guys. They had all kinds of satchel charges tied to them and TNT tied to them, and they were all doped up. You know, you'd shoot them and they didn't even know they were dead.

They kept coming sometimes and, but they, yeah, they got out to the center of the bridge and, you know, they had to break through the wire on the other side, killed a machine gun team on the other side, but got it, got onto the bridge, hugged onto it. And the bridge blew up and came down on top of another machine gun team that was on the center span, this big cement thing in the river that held up the center of the bridge. And anyway, those guys didn't die right away. And during the battle, during this whole thing, Red didn't stop firing the whole time. I mean, he just fired, I don't know how many rounds, you know, just, and that was, that meant everybody knew where he was and everybody tried to knock out Red in that gun bunker. But Red was, Red was a hero. He should have gotten crap, you know. He could have been put up for the Medal of Honor there, but he didn't get anything. Zip-a-dee-doo-dah. 30 years later, when people read what he did in my book, in Guns Up, a congressman and a good friend, a couple of good friends of his that went to high school with him, caused a stir and they finally gave him the Bronze Star.

You know, he'd been dead for 30 years. He was killed beside me on May 20th, '68. But, uh, but anyway, Red was a hero and he, what he did that night was amazing. And a couple other guys were heroes that night. Uh, we had two guys that Tedesco and Rosalie, both corporals. And Rosalie had been put up, uh, in Hue City. He had been put up for, uh, uh, promotion to lieutenant, got battlefield commission, and he turned it down. He wanted to go home. And so he turned it down and they came out to say goodbye to the platoon. So they, they, they hopped a ride from Phu Bai, which is between Hue City, Phu Bai, and Troy Bridge. They hopped a ride from Phu Bai, which is a great big Army base. And that's where the 5th Marines were too, whenever we went back, but we never went back. But they hopped a ride down Highway 1 to come out to Phu Bai, I mean, come out to Troy Bridge and say bye to everybody. Well, they were there that they picked that time to say bye to everybody and the bridge got overrun, blown up.

Machine gun team was out there screaming. They hadn't died yet and they were in a lot of agony and Tedesco and Rosalie tried to get out to those guys and got killed and they should have been on a they were due for a flight back to the world the next day. They should have been in Da Nang. They came out there to say bye and they died heroes. Yeah, they didn't get anything either, as far as I know. Yeah. But yes, a lot of brave guys.

What did you see there? I mean, this is your first.

I was just an A gunner, just, you know, just feeding the gun. I didn't do anything. I didn't do anything.

Still significant.

I mean, you've never seen combat in your life. I saw more later after the bridge had been blown up. The next day, we started sending out 3-man killer teams. So I volunteered for these 3-man killer teams. And those were pretty fascinating, these 3-man killer teams. They, the, I keep wanting to call them, you know, we called them gooks. All right. We called them gooks.

And I think everybody knows that.

Okay.

Anybody that's watched any Vietnam movie ever.

Well, it came from Korea. You know that term. You probably already know that. But yeah, it was, it was Marines in Korea picked that term up and that's what the Koreans called peasants. And so we, we picked that term up from the Koreans, brought it to Vietnam and they were gooks. But anyway, so that the NVA would send out killer squads. They'd send out a squad of guys to go into a village. And if the village wasn't supplying the communists with rice and supplies, they'd find out who the village chief was and his family. And they would come into that village and they'd get the— like, let's say he had a couple of kids. They'd get one of his kids cut off their head, put it on a bamboo stake in front of the, right in the center of the village, and then leave. And that was their either start supplying the commies or, you know, we'll be back. And they would, they'd come back and they, excuse me, they'd kill a member of his family and finally him or his wife or whoever. And until that village started supplying them with rice and whatever they needed.

Well, our job on these 3-man killer teams was to, because if you went out there with a platoon, you couldn't get them. You know, they would, they, you made too much noise, you know, it's jungle and rice paddies and you had to be quiet. And so I would go out on these 3-man killer teams. And that's before I started carrying the 60. So I didn't carry, I mean, I was just an A gunner. I didn't carry the 60 until Red got killed.

Gotcha.

Uh, once in a while I would, but a lot of times I didn't carry it till Red got killed, uh, unless he'd be gone for this or that, you know, and then I was the 60 guy. But, uh, so these 3-man killer teams, you'd ambush these guys, you'd try to pick them off when they came into a ville. And, uh, one of these, uh, one of these things— I mean, we were successful a couple of times, and, uh, but one of these One of these 3-man killer teams I was on, I was out there with this funny black guy. I called him Jackson in the book, but I didn't remember his real name. But he always smiled. You know, he was just a big white teeth boy. He'd smile. We'd, don't smile out in the bush. You'll get us all killed. So we were laying in wait. And right at the edge of a, it wasn't really a rice paddy, there were rice paddies out there, but this was kind of just, a lot of brush, and then there was real heavy jungle over maybe 75 yards away. And we were behind a big bush and we see some guys come out of the jungle, just 2 or 3 of them, we thought.

The killer team. So we get set up, you know, we're going to blow these guys away. And halfway across this open area, A platoon comes out. These guys are just a point, 2 or 3 guys. They were just point men. And pretty soon they're getting closer and closer and we're going, I don't know if we should open fire on a whole platoon. You know, there are only 3 of us. And so pretty soon it's not a platoon. It was 2, over 200 NVA came out. And they walked so close to us. They walked, I mean, they could have stepped on us because we couldn't do anything. We couldn't run, we couldn't move. We just had to stay still. And we're getting eaten up by ants and mosquitoes. You know, the mosquitoes in Nam were, God, the worst. But we're just getting sucked dry with mosquitoes and getting eaten up. And you can't move. And I tell that story sometimes to other Marines to tell them this is why Parris Island was so horrible. All those stories of a Marine slapping a sand flea on PI, back when I went in, if you did that, you were going to be tortured.

I mean, they tortured guys. They'd make you dig a 6-foot grave with a knee tool. Then they'd make you have an official burial for the sand flea. And then they'd say, what sex was that sand flea you killed? And you'd say, it was a guy. All right, this is a female. Dig another bot, dig another grave. I mean, they torture you, but you were scared to death to move, you know? Like, I was scared to death to even look.

It worked.

They had my attention. And, uh, buddy, it worked. I got to know them, you know? I had discipline, and all of us did. We laid there. It wouldn't matter. I had snakes crawling over me. I wasn't going to move. If you moved, you're going to get everybody killed. So, you know, you just didn't make that mistake. We were well trained. It was torture, torture training, but it worked. And this night, 200 NVA went plodding by our noses. I mean, we could smell the garlic. I saw their little Ho Chi Minh's, that's these sandals they wore, they made them out of tires, American tires, but they'd walk by, their little Ho Chi Minh's flopping right by our nose. And we just going. It was never going to end. 200 guys and they're kind of spread out. It went on forever. I mean, it felt like forever. When they finally got away from us, I had— no, it wasn't me. One of the guys, there was 3 of us. I don't know which one it was, but somebody had pulled a frag. He pulled the pin on the frag thinking that we got to do something to get out of here.

And squeezed it that whole time. The spoon in, squeezed it. And he was so relieved when these guys went into the jungle. He went, "Oh God," and let go of it. He let go of the spoon. And now we got a live frag. And he goes, "Frag!" And we all dive flat down. Boom! A grenade goes off right by us. Nobody got hurt. We didn't catch any shrapnel or anything. And now we're scared to death. You know, you get— and another guy, Then Jackson says, oh, I peed my pants. I peed all over myself. Oh, shit. And I did too. I was peeing. I'm going, oh my God, we're the worst ambush in history. So we got out of there. But that's what 3-man killer teams could be like. You didn't know what you were going to run into. I mean, you think you're coming back for you guys, huh?

They didn't come back for you guys.

Oh, no. Because, uh, Soon we heard artillery going off out of Phu Bai. Now, I don't know if somebody else spotted all these guys, and they may have, but somebody started calling in artillery. It wasn't us. I mean, if I called in artillery, I'd kill the wrong team. I couldn't call in artillery. You wouldn't want me to. I didn't even have a sense of direction. If I'd ever walked point, we'd still be there.

So what were some of the success stories with the 3-man killer teams?

Oh, well, there were, there were times where, you know, they'd only send in a squad and you would. Yeah, we had a couple of times where, you know, we killed 3 or 4 of them and the rest would get away. But what would happen that they'd stop going back to the ville because, you know, they'd leave the ville alone. And now you were heroes to the village and now they're, they're on the Allied side. I mean, they're on the American side again, you know, it's Uh, yeah, it's— yeah.

Do you want to talk about the first time he killed somebody?

Uh, yeah, I, uh, I want to— I'll talk— I want to talk about, uh, uh, yeah, it was an ambush, and, um, uh, I, I, I killed this, uh, NBA officer. And I guess, you know, it stays with me. Yeah, you know, the shooting was at night. I killed him at night. So I, but we stayed in that position all night. And we stayed there longer than we usually would. We would count the bodies, you know, and stuff like that. And so I don't know why we'd stay there. Nobody told me I was a PFC, but we hung around a little longer. And so I had time to go up on the trail where I'd killed this guy and look at him. And it's just always stayed with me. I mean, I remember a smell. It was a hot, sunny day, but it wasn't 110-degree hot, but it was hot and sunny. And it was grass. It was like tall grass. It was blowing because there'd be some breeze. And here's this guy laying on this trail with a breeze going by. And yeah, I think of that a lot. I think of that and I think of this woman, I guess she was an NVA nurse, but I never knew.

But there's a chapter in the book about that. It was called Mercy Killing. And that one really stays with me. And then I was in a little bit of hand-to-hand combat. And I'll tell you, you want me to tell you? I'm going to tell you that one because it's really unusual. Not everybody has this war story. We'd been going for about, I think, if I remember correctly, it had been about 17 straight days. And you'd be out that long often, but you didn't make contact with the enemy all the time, you know. But this time we made contact with the NVA off and on. For 17 days. We kept running into them. You know, I mean, it would short ambushes, big firefights, and it's over. But then the next day, bam, you're running into them again. And we were in a real hot area. It was up near the Cambodian border, if I remember, or Laotian border. But we were in the mountains at that point. Or at one point we start in the flatland, be in the mountains. I never knew what was going on. But I was going around. We were humping all night and we'd been going for 17 days and hadn't had hardly any sleep.

You'd set up an ambush. I mean, you'd march, you'd hump all day, you know, stop maybe for some chow, but you were just humping up and down hills all day. That's how I lost £40 the first time I got hit. But you just hump all day and then at night set up ambushes all night. So We set up this 17th day of contact with the enemy. We're going around the side of a mountain. It wasn't much of a trail, but a tiny somewhat of a trail around the side of this mountain. And it was way up in the mountains. And our lieutenant was as dead as we were. We had a great lieutenant. He didn't make mistakes. He'd call in artillery on a dime, you know. Annapolis grad, smart guy. His name, he went on to, his name was Nelson. Lieutenant Nelson. He went on to become the head of the FBI in all of the Northeast after the war.

Wow.

Yeah, he was a hero at that Ruby Ridge thing. He was one of the FBI guys at Ruby Ridge. I think it was called Ruby Ridge. Anyway, but he was a great lieutenant. We were blessed to have that guy. But he, even he was, you know, we didn't know where you were sleepwalking. You reach a point where you just, you know, you just sleepwalking. I got nothing left. Nobody did. So we sat up on the side of this mountain and he put a couple of guys above this tiny trail. And I should have been ambushing the trail. They should have had the 60 on the trail, aiming down the trail one way or the other. And we always did. This night, I believe everybody was just so exhausted. We didn't know what we're doing. And they set me up. On the bottom half of this trail pointing downhill. Well, I mean, it's possible that maybe he, maybe he had a reason to think they were going to come up the hill at us, but, um, normally I'd be ambushing that trail. So I, me and Chan are, we're trying to stay awake and we're, I got poncho over, the mosquitoes are eating us alive.

And so you couldn't use that poncho, you know, any kind of rain or anything because it makes noise. But it wasn't raining, trying to fight off the mosquitoes, and I'm hanging over the 60, and I got it here. So if I fall forward asleep, it wakes me up. I hit it. And it was Chan's turn to, you know, take an hour's sleep. Sometimes we'd do 2-hour shifts. So, but I think here we were only doing 1 hour because you couldn't stay awake more than an hour, you know. And, but anyway, Chan's It's his turn to sleep. And I'm hanging over this thing and I'm fading out. You know, I'm going out. And believe me, you didn't do that. We were scared to death to fall asleep on lines. We had an Indian named Swift Eagle. It's his real name. He's a funny story too. His real name was Swift Eagle. I had to see it on his paycheck to believe it. I think he had another name too, but Swift Eagle. So Swift Eagle, he'd been in 'Nam, I don't know, a couple of tours, maybe more. And he would sneak around, and if anybody fell asleep on lines, this frickin' Indian would sneak up and he'd take a Ka-Bar and he'd reach around behind you and nick you, just nick you with a Ka-Bar.

Well, in 'Nam, that nick's gonna get infected within a few hours. Everything got infected in Vietnam. So you learned real quick, don't fall asleep. You know, I don't care how tired you are. So I was scared to fall asleep. He had already nicked me once and I almost shot him. I thought it was, I didn't know who it was. But anyway, that guy was a hero. He got hit 7 times. Geez. Yeah. And he kept, he returned down Purple Hearts because he didn't want to go home. The Marines were in Nam. The Marines were his family. Why would I want to go anywhere else? My family's here. He would say stuff like that. I mean, how do you not love these guys? Yeah. So I wasn't going to fall asleep if I could help it, because Swift Eagle would make sure I woke up. But this night I'm dozing and I'm dreaming and I'm dreaming back home. You know, we call them world dreams. You're back in the world and I'm back in the world. I'm cruising Steak 'n Shake.. And I've got my '57 Vette and I'm cruising around Steak and Shake and I'm trying to pick up girls and I'm just, I'm having a great time in my dream.

You know, it's you're out and now, and my favorite band, this true story, favorite band was the Young Rascals. I love the Young Rascals. Well, all of a sudden in the middle of the fricking Cambodian mountains, Laotian mountains, wherever the heck I was, I start hearing the Young Rascals singing "In the Midnight Hour," and I'm thinking, oh my God, this is the best dream I've had since I came to Nam. I'm even hearing the music. And I mean, that's where my mind was, you know, get it? That's where my mind was, man. And, and then bam, bam. And it wasn't M16 rounds, it was M14 rounds. And they're slapping through my poncho and the plastic poncho, the old— we had Korean-era ponchos, okay, they're plastic stuff. They would rip through that and it was cutting my face from the rounds, not the bullets, but the plastic was cutting my face. Bam, bam, it's going through my poncho. Of course I was frozen, but I was awake. And I'm still hearing the music. I'm still hearing the Young Rascals, In the Midnight Hour. And all of a sudden there's, there's a guy on top of me.

And, uh, it was an NVA. And I have too late to get to the machine gun, too late to get to the .45. I got to the K-Bar. I got to my K-Bar and, uh, and we rolled down the hill and, and, uh, Yeah, so later on, I found out that we found the body, of course, and he had a boombox. This guy had a big shiny boombox. And what the North Vietnamese loved American music too. And they would tune in to Armed Forces Radio Network. Well, every night at midnight, Armed Forces Radio Network played in the midnight hour by the Young Rascals. Of course, I knew none of this. I hadn't heard music since I left America. But we sure didn't listen to Armed Forces Radio Network. But they did. He had a boombox. He'd been listening to Armed Forces Radio Network. And evidently it had caught on a twig going through the bush and turned on his boombox.

Holy shit.

Well, above him was this kid named Alabama. Actually, we called him Sugar Bear, but he was from Alabama. Sugar Bear was, Lieutenant made sure one guy in every squad or so had an M14. Because the M16s were crap. They were plastic. We called them Matty Mattels. They would jam in the heat and the rice paddies. And, you know, there were episodes like Liberty Bridge. I had heard the numbers. If I'm wrong, forgive me, but I was told 48 Marines died there. And mostly because all their M16s, their Matty Mattels, jammed. And they ended up using them just as clubs, just, you know, hand-to-hand. But anyway, so we didn't trust that Matty Mattel. It was plastic, you know. We trained through all our training with an M14. At the last minute, they throw us these little plastic guns and say, go to Vietnam with this. So one guy would carry an M14 in case these M16s jammed. Well, you know the sound, you know, you can tell the sound and you know more about guns than I do. And so we could hear that. I knew it was an M14 firing through my poncho. And sure enough, it was Sugar Bear was the only one who woke up quickly as these guys went down through this trail beneath him.

And he had shot the guy, but he wasn't dead. And he rolled down the hill on top of me and And then it was me and him. And so flash forward about 10 years ago, I go to a big party in St. Pete given by a doctor, and he was wealthy. And he would have these big, huge parties once a year, and he would hire old rock and roll bands. He hired the Young Rascals, Felix Cavallari and the Young Rascals, to this party. I ended up meeting Felix Cavallari, and I started, I told him this story. Yeah, I knifed a guy to your song in the Midnight Hour. And he goes, oh God. He goes, I gotta hear this story. So we spent the night, me telling him this whole story. But it was his favorite story about that song from that point on. We became kind of friends. But It's a true story. In the Midnight Hour. So to this day, every time I hear that song, I mean, I, you know, I'm back in Nam, man. My mind is back in Nam. I'm an old man, but it— some things just don't change.

Wow. Can I ask a question?

Yeah.

Why does the officer bother you?

Why does the what bother me?

The officer.

The officer? Oh no, I, I—

Lieutenant, did you say my lieutenant?

Oh, I like that guy.

No, I'm not talking about him. The officer that you killed, that you went to go see in the grass.

Forgive me, I, I've lost— I'm, I'm not sure. Tell, tell me again. Let me—

we had just spoken about it and I had asked if you want to talk about the first time you had to kill somebody. Oh, and you'd brought up an officer.

Yeah, he was, uh, I don't know, I guess I remembered, I remembered it was, it was an officer. You know, we didn't, we didn't, you weren't killing officers every day, you know. Usually it was just peons like me. And, uh, yeah, I think, I think because I stayed around the body so long You know, I think because I had to stay around that body longer than normal. And yeah, it— I think that's why. I don't know. Maybe just because it was the first time I saw— I mean, I had been in firefights, but you know what, you know, you go out, you find some dead bodies, you don't know if you got them. I mean, it— yeah. This one I knew and hit different. Yeah, it's different. It's different. We had some crazy episodes. I shot a girl up that once again, we just had about 20 guys, about 20 Marines. And I don't know, I don't know what we were doing, but we were walking way up in the mountains and, and the word's coming back that we're near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. Well, you know, I'm hoping the rest of the battalion's out there somewhere because 20 guys, you know, there's a lot of, a lot of gooks on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

And, uh, uh, so, but we, uh, we, we came across, we're going up the steep hill and we came across this, um, this guy who'd been left behind, an NVA soldier. Well, The guy, they ran into him up at the front of the line first. First our point man comes across him and, you know, he butt strokes the guy and kicks him back there. Now all the way down the hill, Marines are kicking this guy back down the hill. And, uh, and he comes to me and he's like, so, uh, I didn't hit him. He was already a mess. But, uh, we, um, he had been left behind. He wasn't, you know, he'd been wounded. His foot was all infected. And I don't know if it was from a wound or what, the jungle, you know, and they had left this guy behind, but we knew they were going to come back for him. So we, you know, we set up an ambush and it was, I mean, I remember this honestly, you know, if I was a good painter, I could paint this, but it was all, it was steep hills and then there was a little flat area and a little mountain, a stream going through this little flat grassy area and heavy woods everywhere else.

But there's one little open area in this stream and the trail went through this and right along that side of beside that stream. And we set up on a hill beside it. We got up on this hill, had an open, open fire down on this thing. And I sat the gun up looking down on this, this trail waiting for these guys to come back. To get that guy. And sure enough, these old pith helmets, you know, start diddy-bopping out of the bush, and we get them in the open. I mean, and we just open fire, blew them away. You know, I hit a few of them with the 60, and, you know, 60 does, it'll put a good-sized hole in people, you know. I mean, it made a mess out of people a lot of times, but a lot of times People live through incredible crap. I know one of your guys was showing me a guy over there that was shot 20 times or something and lived. You never know. So I, after this, during this battle, they were like water bugs. I mean, really, they were like roaches. They weren't gonna stay around and fight.

They never did. And they're gone into the woods. But one by one, they keep coming out of the woods back into the open. They're all trying to get to this one guy. It's a true story. They're trying to get to this— we realized it was this one gook laying half in the stream and half out that I had hit. And they're all keep trying to get to this guy. And every time they come out in the open, you know, we'd kill them. And Finally, it's over. And we go down to check the bodies. And we're kicking them over and we kick over this one laying in the stream, half in the stream, half out, and kick the pith helmet off. And it's a girl. It's a beautiful girl. She's a beautiful Asian girl. Beautiful. Long hair falls out. And she's pretty, a pretty girl, you know. And we haven't seen a girl in a long time. So, and she's alive.

She's alive?

She's alive. And her eyes pop open and she starts saying all that. Well, Chan had been sent to, because I told you he was brilliant. They sent Chan to, I think it was called S5 school or something like that, S2 school, some S school to learn the Vietnamese language so he could help interpret when we got prisoners and stuff. So Chan knew a little bit of Vietnamese now. He had learned enough to figure out some stuff. And so she keeps saying the same thing, you know, over and over. And so we— Chan, what's she saying, man? He goes, she's saying Marines, Marines, Marines, you're evil. Marines are devils. Marines are devils or something like that. You know, some, something like that. They'd been told about Marines. And the neat part of the story is after that shootout was done, we're real close to the Ho Chi Minh Trail that everybody said so. And I already, I mean, you don't have to, you know, when you're in Indian country, I mean, nobody has to tell you this is a real dangerous zone here. I mean, you'd see, you'd see where they, they'd worn down a path where they were even pulling, you know, boxcars full of crap, you know, and, you know, bicycles loaded down with ammo.

And, you know, you could tell. And we were in, we were in a place where there are a lot of NVA and we only got 20 Marines, if that many. We called in a chopper to come get this wounded girl. Now there's huge trees, this one little open area, you know, where we got them. But all around it's these giant trees. And here comes, it's Jolly Green that usually would carry 105s, you know, one of those great big choppers. Usually you don't use that for you know, medevacs. But I don't know if that's all they could get. I don't know if it's because of where we were. But Jolly Green shows up and starts lowering the basket to get this girl out. And we rescued this girl, and she's cursing us and doing every, you know, saying stuff about us the whole time. The corpsman did what he could to patch her up. We got her in this basket, and that chopper almost crashed. It's It's hitting the treetops and everything, trying to hover and get this thing out. We could hear artillery. You could hear— I mean, we know we're in a bad zone.

I always think of that. And you come home and Americans are calling you a bunch of baby killers and this and that. And you go, if only they knew. We risked all those Marines to get this wounded girl out of there. We risked everybody's life. And I know it, and the guys with me knew it. But, and that chopper pilot, those guys, crap, they're hitting tree limbs and stuff. I mean, they could have gone down at any time. And they didn't take off. And they got that girl out of there. And I don't know if she ever lived, but we tried. And But I always remember that. And I always, when we talk about girls in infantry units, I'm really against girls in infantry units. I won't change. I know I'm old, maybe that's it. But I'm against that. And I watched, that wasn't the only time. I saw it another time where there was an NVA nurse with, and this girl was probably an NVA nurse. You know, she didn't even have a weapon, I don't think. That we ran into a bunker and it was an NVA. We just saw 3 gooks go in this bunker.

And of course we're open fire. We move up on it, start throwing frags in and frags are coming back out. They're throwing them back out before they go off, you know. But finally, you know, we hold the pin longer, flip it in. And anyway, finally, there's no way they could be alive, you know. And so we sent a guy in to pull out the bodies and he didn't come back out. All the smoke from the grenades, it got him. And so we drag him out and send in another guy and he starts dragging out the bodies. Well, he only dragged out 2 bodies. We saw 3 go in there. Bunker. And they, they, the, eventually, we know there's a third one in there. We don't know if, you know, and we couldn't find it. And finally, I think it was Corporal Houston, Corporal Houston. It was another brave guy. I'll tell you, I could tell you a story about him too. But Houston goes in and there were wood planks inside this bunker and they had taken, it was a girl. And they buried her under the wood planks so she could survive the grenades.

And he found her, he drags her out. Well, she didn't really survive and her skull is cracked open. And we're in combat. We can't get anybody to— it's way too late to try to save her. And so, and you can literally see her brains, you know, from the concussion. Her skull's cracked open. We can see the brains. And I mean, she, no way she was going to live. And that's why I titled it Mercy Killing. But it doesn't matter. You never forget that. You never. So somebody said, hey, you know, come on, put her out of her misery, man. You know, because she's gasping and everything, you know, but she's still gasping. And so a guy shot her with an M16, a a round or two and we were ready to walk away. But we got to search the bodies for papers. So she didn't die. And then somebody hit me. And this is where, like, knifing the guy, some of this, I think my mind tries to protect me.

We don't have to go here.

Yeah, you know. And so, yeah, I don't remember somebody hit me and saying, shoot her with a .45. You know, shoot her with a .45. You know, Matty Mattel's, shoot her with a .45. And of course, machine gunner, I carried a .45. And yeah, so you live with that. You know, I don't forget that one. And 30 years later at the Big Red Memorial thing, when they were giving him the Bronze Star 30 years late and all that stuff, a bunch of the guys showed up. And one of the guys was Sergeant— oh crap. He's in that, he's in Guns Up. There's a picture of him holding the flag from Hue City. It'll come to me. But anyway. The Sarge was there and he pulls out at this reunion, you know, we're having a few beers in a hotel, kind of trying to come down from a pretty emotional time. And I had to give a speech at Red's high school and try to tell what he was, who he was. These kids knew nothing. And anyway, so now we're trying to come down, drink a couple of beers and see if we can chill.

And Stacy Watson, Sergeant Stacy Watson. So Sergeant Stacy Watson goes, he opens, he had a little briefcase or something with him and he goes, do you remember this gunner? And he's got that girl. He had searched, he had to search the bodies that day. He had her full ID. And I mean, it's a full ID. And he made copies of it.— I've still got it. I don't know if that's morbid, but I do. But with her name, where she was born, I mean, all these details, a full ID on this girl that we had to kill. And boy, that one— Wow. —that one sent me reeling after that. And that's real close to that is when they, you know, they found out all my records had been blown up. A 122 Chinese rocket had hit An Hoa Combat Base. And for those who don't know, a 122 is about the size of a telephone pole. I mean, it's a big old frickin' rocket. And it hit the record shack at An Hoa and killed all the guys in the record shack. And blew up all her records. Well, I— there had been a shootout in a graveyard, and, uh—

It's okay, Johnny.

Let's take a break.

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Anyway, it had been a pretty big shootout in this graveyard, and I do want to tell you about that because it's another incredible hero. I mean, I think he was probably the bravest guy I knew through the whole war, and I knew some guys that you could make a movie about. I mean, they were, these guys were, some of them were like, I mean, Swift Eagle, We had a Gunnery Sergeant, Gunnery Sergeant McDermott. He'd been put up for the Medal of Honor. I mean, he— and he didn't get it because he hit— he punched an Army officer and they knocked it down to a Silver Star. Anyway, I mean, God, these guys were warriors, man. And I mean, way— they all did way more than me. But anyway, I— this graveyard incident, They found out I'd been put up for the Silver Star. They told me that night, you know, they'd seen something I did and they wanted to put me up with the Silver Star. And I, you know, 30 years passed, war's way over, but I always wondered about it. You know, I wonder if was I ever, was that true? You know, because all the guys came up and told me.

And so 30 years later, they find out all the records have been blown up. And so, you know, I I looked up the old gunnery sergeant, and I didn't know him. It was Gunnery Sergeant Portner, and he was the— I knew my company gunny was McDermott, so I thought it was him who put me up for it, but it wasn't him. But it was Portner. So I got a hold of Portner. He lived in Virginia, and I said, Gunny, I don't know if you're going to remember this, you know, and I said, but I told him the story. I said, do you remember the graveyard that night, you know, when the Undemstock got killed and Sonny got hit 11 times? I said, do you remember? And he goes, I remember every, every minute of it. And I said, well, look, the guys told me you put me up for Silver Star. And he said, I did. I said, well, okay. Well, I never got it, you know. And I just always wondered, was it true? You know, and I thought it'd end there. But when he found out the records had been blown up, and listen to how they found out.

Pat McDermott, the guy who saw me in Jacksonville doing the one-arm push-ups and the backflips to get in the Marine Corps, he got shot that night in the graveyard. And, uh, so he wanted a Purple Heart. He would, and he was, it still lived in Jacksonville, and he wanted a Purple Heart license tag because they'd just come out with the Purple Heart license tags, and he wanted one.. And they wouldn't give him one. And he goes in, he goes, he shows them the bullet hole. You look, and they go, it's not on your DD-214. Well, nothing was on our DD-214s. Crap, I didn't have anything on my, I had Good Conduct Medal, I think. I had nothing. So, so he says, I got shot, you know, August 3rd, '68. I can tell you. Well, He started the investigation that found out that all the records had been blown up. Oh shit. And because of Pat McDermott wanting that Purple Heart license tag, he's the reason I got the Silver Star, you know, because McDermott, I mean, Gunny Portner found out about it. And one thing led to another. Gunny Portner wrote the whole thing up again.

Other guys doctorally wrote up a thing about it and others did. They're all dead now. But Portner died 2 weeks after rewriting me up for that. And so I got it. But, but that, that particular night, that, that bringing back that, getting the Silver Star, you know, all that stuff comes back on you. And, and then I go to That's when Big Red, they gave him the Bronze Star. He deserved a Silver Star way more than Johnny Clark. He deserved a freaking Medal of Honor. But anyway, they, all that happened and we went to that reunion and that's when he shows me the picture of this girl we had to, had to kill and, and, kind of sent me over the edge. You know, I was—

Why do you think he showed you that?

Oh, we'd all been having, we had a few beers and, you know, and I don't know, some guys handle it better than others. And it was his job to search all the bodies. And that's how he had the flag that the 5th Marines raised over the citadel at Hue City. He still had it. I got a picture of it in Guns Up, him with the flag. But yeah, he didn't mean anything bad by it. I don't, I'm not mad at him about it, but it Yeah, I kind of, you know, I was diagnosed with severe combat fatigue. And that was a rough ride sometimes. You know, all my hair fell out in one night. And up to that point, they had diagnosed it with mild combat fatigue. And then I went to the VA and I said, hey, did I catch something in Nam, man? All my hair fell out one night. And, you know, my wife's screaming and I'm freaking out. And, uh, I said, uh, oh, you've been misdiagnosed. You have severe combat fatigue. So yeah, it was— it's been a bumpy ride at times, you know, it really has.

But, uh, all your hair fell out in one night? Pardon? All of your hair fell out in one night?

Yeah. I've never heard of that. Well, it grew back, you know. It was, it was, it was a shock. I mean, you know, I don't know, I don't know why your body does that. But yeah, I'd gone through, uh, I couldn't get out of 'Nam. You know, it's when I first came home. I was like 20, 21 years old. Yeah, maybe 21. I didn't even know if I was 21, but around there. And here's what made it really devastating to me at the time. I mean, it crushed me. That was when— do you remember the musical Hair? No? Hair, beautiful hair. Anyway, long hair became this incredible rage in America in the early '70s. And there was this giant musical called Hair. And I think they made a movie out of it even. But anyway, Hair became this, everybody had long hair. And I didn't like that. You know, I'm not a long hair guy, but everybody had long hair. And so if you didn't, I already came home looking, you know, here I've got a Marine Corps haircut. So I already looked out of it, and you don't fit in with all your friends because now you're 20 years older than them, even if you're the same age.

And so you don't fit in anyway. But now all your hair falling out one night, and it was shocking. It really threw me over the edge there for a while. But the VA, oh yeah, they diagnosed severe combat fatigue. But anyway, enough of that. I, but all that came about from Pat McCurry wanting a Purple Heart license tag, the Silver Star and all that stuff. It all came out of that. But that night that I, that I got that Silver Star license tag, I got the Silver Star. It was that night in the graveyard. I wrote that story because of a guy, a kid named Undemstock. We had a kid with us that was so terrified, Sean. He, we don't know, nobody could figure out how he got through boot camp. I didn't exaggerate boot camp. It was hell. So we didn't know how he got through boot camp, but somehow he got through. He was a Hollywood Marine. I know that boot camp's easier than Parris Island. So he got through Hollywood Marine, but he got through boot camp. He was so scared that if we go on an ambush, you could hear his teeth chattering and you can't shake— he would shake and he would make noise and he would urinate on himself all the time.

Now, we were— we all smelled horrible anyway. But, you know, that makes it even worse when somebody— you're in a hole with a guy and he's peeing all the time, you know, all over you. But he, he was absolutely terrified. And shouldn't have been there. And it became obvious, you know, you go out on an ambush or an LP with this guy, and, you know, he's just, you know, making noise, shaking. He's going to get everybody killed. So, so we, the lieutenant finally knew and came to him and said, we're going to give you an out. And we called him Cowboy. He was from Oklahoma, and we called him Cowboy. And he had his out from Vietnam. Now look, a lot of the guys at that point, they weren't letting us win the war. We knew that. It was clear they weren't going to let us win the war. They weren't going to let us ever go across that river and invade the North. None of that was ever going to happen. We were just going to play this stalemate game and end up like Korea. And that doesn't do anything for the guys' morale.

So you come to a bunch of guys that have put in a tour, maybe two tours, some of these guys, and you say, okay, here's your ticket home, back to the world. We're gonna let you go back to the world. That a lot of guys would get me out of here. You know, I did my time. I'm ready to go home. And here's a guy who's just most terrified Marine I ever saw, I ever met. And he tells Lieutenant— I ain't going home. Tell all the Marines to go home. Fuck, man. Yeah. Yeah. Well, flash forward. They put him with my gun team. And that's a funny story. They put him with my gun team. I got hit again, and I was coming back to the unit. And they were flying me back from a hospital and they tried to land me with the guys. And the guys were under real intense fire. They were in a big shootout. And so they couldn't get me, the chopper couldn't bring me in. And so they dropped me on an artillery base. And so it was all these, they were Marines. It was a Marine artillery base.

I think they were mostly 105s. They might have had some 155s, but it was this arty base. These guys lived behind barbed wire and bunkers and, you know, and various grunt units down there in the jungle to keep people away from this arty base. But it still is no picnic. They got hit and stuff. I'm not saying these guys, but, but they lived a different life than the grunts out in the bush. And I never saw, you know, if you smoked, if you even smoked a cigarette in the bush with the guys I served with, you might get yourself killed. I mean, there were some mean people. They might kill you for something. You know, you're risking their life and everybody's life. So you just didn't do crap like that, you know? And the idea of smoking pot, you know, I came home and everybody's going, oh, how good was the pot over there? I'm going, you've been watching too much TV, bro. I don't know. You've been watching the Air Force over there or something. I, cause, uh, no, there were no pot where I was. And, uh, so, so I land on this arty base and I'm still 18 years old.

I've never smoked pot. I've, I don't even, I didn't even know what it was. If I saw it, I wouldn't even know what it was. So the chopper drops me off with these arty guys. We'll try to, we'll come back and get you, you know, when the heat goes down on your unit. And I say, oh, okay. So I get off and I'm standing alone. It's like a guy in a desert, you know, because they're all in their bunkers. So I finally, I see one of them come out. I think he had a Hawaiian shirt on. And he comes out. He goes, hey, grunt, come on up. So I go and I plod over to this bunker and they go down in and they've got like beads over their bunker and stuff, you know, like a little door. And I go down in the bunker and they've got music playing, you know, Armed Forces Radio Network's on and they're drinking, they got whiskey and they're smoking pot. They had pot. And And they offered me some, and I, you know, I'd never smoked. And they said, hey, you might go back out in the bush and get killed tomorrow, man.

At least know what pot tastes like. Okay, so I tried it. And then I get stoned, you know, I'm stoned. And now they're giving me whiskey, shots of whiskey. And I'm thinking, now this is a pretty good way to spend the war. I think I'll I think I'm just going to sign up for artillery here. Well, about that time, I hear this scream and, hey, where's that grunt? His ride's here. And I go, oh, God. So I stagger out of this bunker and I go, oh, no, this is going to be bad. And I get over to this chopper and I'm thinking, oh, my God. Get in the chopper, you know, and I'm like hanging out thinking, I hope I don't throw up in the chopper. And they, it's, uh, they, they, they lift off and they bring me back to my unit. And I'm thinking, well, the shootout's over. You know, they'll drop me in. They're in a perimeter. Shootout wasn't over. So they, this chopper comes in and there was all kinds of fire and there's bullets smacking through this chopper and they let me out. And I'm like, I'm half buzzed and I'm standing in the middle of a shootout and the Marines are all firing around the perimeter and I'm standing in the open and the gunnies go, get down, you idiot.

You know, so I, where's my gun team? And he said, your gun's over there, Clark, take over the gun. So I make it back to my gun. Well, it was during that firefight that, you know, I finally have time to square away. 'Cause it went on for a while. And so they, I mean, we had to call in Phantoms and they're dropping napalm. Oh geez, a couple hundred yards outside our perimeter, you know. I mean, it's not a perimeter like a buildup area. We're just in an open area, you know, we're behind trees and dug some holes, foxholes, you know. But we've got a perimeter set up. So, but about 200 yards out in front of me, a lot of the fire's coming from. And so I got to pinpoint, we're calling in napalm, man, over there. And the lieutenant tells me, so I show him where the napalm, and just the second I opened up to show him where it's at, man, these Phantoms rip by. I mean, you could see the pilots, they're so low, you know, and that sound, and you see these canisters. Tumbling real slow, and then suddenly it all goes up in flames.

And of course, you know, Marines were cheering, this is great, you know, and a couple of gooks ran out of it on fire. And so we shot them. But this went on for a while, this big shootout. And well, later on, we're not going anywhere. Clearly, we're not going anywhere. Nobody's coming to save us. So we're We just hunkered down, you know. And so I— and choppers can't get in. You know, that chopper almost got shot down. So nobody's coming. So we've been there. This is going on for hours. And Chan, Chan and I are behind this fall, this tree that's been knocked down. And we're behind this tree and we've got a hold. I got— and he says, so you want some coffee? And I, I said, oh man, I really need coffee. He says, yeah, you smell like you need coffee. And I go, well, it wasn't my fault. It was these already guys, you know. And he goes, yeah, all right, let's just— so we break out a C-ration can and we'd take a C-ration can. You know, we had these old C-ration cans. We punched holes in it and you put a little piece of C4, plastic explosive for those who don't know.

So we put a piece of C4 in the bottom of the can. Light it and heat your food. So we heated up some coffee. So we're sitting back leaning against this tree and there's still lead flying over, but there's nothing we could do. And I don't have any targets. Nobody's saying guns up. So it's like, have some coffee. And Chan says something funny and we were always saying something. I mean, it was, you know how everybody deals with this crap a different way. And you know, I'm not pretending. Usually with sense of humor. We weren't scared or any of that kind of crap. But you deal with fear your own way and, you know, it's like you can't do anything about it. Yeah. So I said, yeah, yeah. So we're having a cup of coffee and, and he said something funny to me and I started laughing because I was already— I was still kind of out there. And the lieutenant and the gunny hear us over there laughing. And then the word gets around the perimeter. Clark and Chan are having coffee. Oh well, pretty soon, pretty soon the Gunny, Gunny McDermott, we called him Gunny Magnet because he drew so much lead.

Gunny Magnet comes sliding in like he's stealing second base and he's going, what the hell are you guys doing? You know, and I said, well, Gunny, we don't have any targets. You know, we're kind of running out of ammo.

You're like, I'm drunk, I'm high, and now I'm fucking caffeinated.

Let's go to war. Just, you know, we want to have a cup of coffee. And he goes, he goes, oh gosh, you know, that he says, you know, Lieutenant's talking about a Section 8 for you, you guys. And they go, oh man, it's not that bad. So flash forward after all this is over. Here's Undemstock, the kid that's so terrified. And the gunny and the lieutenant walk him over to us, you know, the shootout's over and they walk him over to me and Chan and they said, listen, uh, we're going to put him in with your gun team. Yeah, you, uh, you need another guy anyway. And of course a machine gun team is supposed to be 5 guys. A lot of times it was just me. You know, there were, I didn't even have an A gunner sometimes. So now we have 3 guys with this kid, you know, being dropped in. So that was good news. But once we realized it was him, we're going, oh God, you know, he's so terrified. You know, this is going to be rough. But then the lieutenant came and told me, he said, look, I'm putting him with you guys to see if you can make him laugh.

See if you can chill him out a little bit. Otherwise, I've got to send him home. And so, Jane and I took him in and tried to mother him a little bit and started giving him Bible passages. And we started teaching him the Bible a little bit. Well, we gave him a— there's a verse in there, I think it's out of Romans. I think it's Romans 8. I This is where I get mad at myself. I should know these verses, and normally I do. I just a little excited about being on the show and stuff. But anyway, it was out of Romans 8. And what's it about? The one about war and famine and pestilence and all that might rise against you and your parents might, your parents might, you know, dump you. But, but I never will. You know, that verse. And And I, here I got to slow down on the story because I didn't, got to be careful what I say about it. But he had problems when he joined the Marine Corps. That's one of the reasons he joined the Marine Corps because evidently his family didn't, they thought it was a joke, him trying to be a Marine and that he could never hack it.

And anyway, he had some issues, but everybody's got issues with their parents. I'm not, you know, I'm not nailing them, but he felt sort of, I think he felt sort of abandoned or something by his family in the sense that they didn't support him. I don't know. I don't know all the details and I'm not going to pretend to, but I know he needed that verse. And we prayed with him and we We did what we could to try to— you got to lean on the Lord here. All of us are scared. And he'd say, you clowns aren't scared. Look at you. And I'd say, oh no. I said, well, this is just the way we deal with it. He goes, everybody deals with it differently. And I go, everybody's scared. There's guys dying out here, man. Of course we're scared. And we'd tell him, hey, let's just pray about it. Every time you get like that, You know, we tell him how to pray. And he started getting a little better. Well, right before we went into that graveyard, it was a big, big operation. It was a place called Dodge City in the Arizona Territory, outside of Amoah Combat Base.

And it was a, it looked like Arizona. That's why they called it the Arizona Territory. You know, it looked like out in the desert in Arizona, kind of and looking into, but one part of it was called Dodge City. If you went in there, you were going to be in a shootout. You always knew it. Everybody knew it. Well, we knew when we were doing an op in Dodge City, we knew we're going to see some crap today. And we did. But they took him out of our gun team right before that and put him in Corporal Hudson's H-U-T-E-S-O-N, Corporal Hudson's squad. And Corporal Hudson, he was already a hero in Hue City. I mean, the guy, kind of corporal you want, you know. I mean, anyway, he, we started off when we made this op, we started off, we ran into 3 gooks had come out of the brush 50 yards ahead of us, you know, and we saw them. It was open area up to some brush, trees kind of. And Sam the blooper man, boom, with his blooper, he, they take off running and he hits one square in the back and he flips, but he's not dead.

And the other two grab him and they pull him into the trees and I shot one and he starts limping in. To the tree. So we know we've wounded two and they go into this tree line. Well, the whole company, we got a whole company with us this day. And I guess there were even more than that out there, but this spot we had Alpha Company, 5th Marines, 1-5, we're going up to this thing. And we didn't have, usually we were out there with 20 guys. This time we got a whole company. So we knew they're expecting some big crap. And We get up to that tree line and we see them dragging each other into the tree line across. It's about 75 meters across and it's graveyards. And, you know, the Vietnamese graves were these little round mounds that it was significant. They would, they were sending them back into the womb, you know, when they were buried, you're going back into the womb or something like that. And so anyway, there were little round mounds. A, you know, a couple of feet off the ground, usually, you know, maybe a foot and a half.

I don't know, it depended. And, uh, and that was, that was the graveyard. But there wasn't any other cover other than that. It was open. And, uh, so they told me recon by fire. I was ordered out. So I, I go in the graveyard and, uh, I recon by fire. Now at this point Another gunner had been killed and they gave Chan his gun. So now Chan and I aren't together. And Chan's got a gun. I got a gun. So they send Chan out too. So me and Chan go out and we just spray. We spray the other tree line across the graveyard. We just open fire, maybe 100 rounds, and nobody fires back. So They send across Corporal Hewitt's squad. And now his squad, you know, we'd taken some hits and I forgot how many guys were in his squad, you know, maybe 8 or 10. I don't even, maybe. But anyway, they go across and they're spread out going slowly because it's open area, but they suddenly When they're halfway out there, everything opens up. And we found out later it was that we ran into a battalion. Holy shit. And I mean, they had, they had everything.

They had mortars. They had mortar teams back there. They had everything. And 3 .30 caliber machine guns opened up from fixed position. They were in bunkers on the other side, spread out, but 3 of them. And then there's fire coming from our right flank. Across the graveyard, all on these, the squad out there, because we're still behind the tree line, the rest of the guys. And, uh, and these guys hit the dirt, but I saw a kid named Sonny, uh, I saw him get blown back by a .30 cal, and I just assumed he was dead, but then you didn't see anything. Well, this, they kept firing, and we got, we got orders, uh, they're screaming, hold your fire, hold your fire, because if we open fire, we're going to hit our own guys. They're out in the middle of this graveyard. So, and they're on our side of these mounds trying to hide from all the fire. And you really couldn't see them. It's starting to get dark. It's now, now it's getting late and it starts raining and monsoon rain. It was a brutal rainstorm starts coming in, but then it eases up.

And now these guys, they open up again and there's just a ton of fire. I mean, We're talking, I don't know, you know, a battalion's worth of AK-47s. And these guys, they liked opening up full auto. You know, they didn't have any fire discipline. You know, I mean, Marines didn't do that. If you opened up on full auto, somebody's gonna smack you. So, you know, you only did that. So we didn't, you didn't have infinite ammo, you know. But anyway, but these guys, these crazy NVA, they were just everything. Lead, tracers. They even threw a couple of satchel charges out in the middle of this graveyard. So I don't know what their plans were long range, but they were clearly going to blow stuff up. But yeah, and here's 8 or 9 Marines, 10 Marines out there in the middle of all this. So it was horrible. And we want to open fire and we can't. I ran down and I ran out in the graveyard and I got on top of one of the mounds. So I could shoot over them, you know, without hitting our guys. And I, you know, I knocked out a 30.

I killed that gun team. And you knew you killed them because their tracer, green tracers, went straight up in the sky for a while. And then I hit another one. I turned on the next machine gun because you had to knock them out first, which is what— and everybody, they shot my boots out from under me, you know. So I, I was knocked down and my A-gunner at the time, he was from Indiana. He ran out there, grabbed my boots and dragged me behind the grave mound. So, you know, another heroic thing, you know, because it was crazy. There was so much lead flying. And then we started taking M79 rounds, blooper rounds. And we know they're not Marines. They had killed some Marines and took their bloopers, you know, but they were firing at us from the right flank. Well, anyway, they, he pulls me and drags me. We get back, back to the tree line. And, but because everybody tried to shoot me, most of the squad was able to get out. And so this went on though. This kept going on. So it went on all night where this fight's going on all night.

And they, they start calling in their mortars down and we can see the mortar flashes. But the lieutenant moves the whole company around to the left flank and we're behind rice paddy dikes and we see the muzzle flashes of mortar rounds. Just, you know, I, and I, I can see the flashes and I can see the guys. I can see the NVA soldiers dropping in the mortars from the flash. You can see them standing. And, uh, they're back there in the trees, uh, behind this, this, there was an old hooch that back there that we had originally blown up. It's where I killed one machine gun team. Anyway, uh, they, uh, he wouldn't let me open fire on these guys. We were trying to not let them know where we were because they were pinpointing our old position with mortars, just blowing the crap out of it. So the lieutenant was holding our fire until we got got some artillery called in, or I don't know what his plans were. But the rain, the monsoon rain got so heavy that we were literally— you could drown behind these rice paddies, the big dikes. We're down in the mud, but the water was filling up.

That's how much rain came in. And so we had finally, in the middle of this mess, we see a guy running out of the graveyard towards us, not where our old position was, but towards us. And I start to kill it. I mean, I'm going to blow him away. And I see a flash of a mortar going off and I see his helmet. It's an American helmet. We held up, scream, hold your fire, hold your fire. Nobody shoots him. And I, and he stands out. He was, whoa, whoa. And I ran out and tackled him, dragged him back. It was Pat McCreary. Wow. The one, yeah. The one who got the Purple Heart license tag the hard way. Anyway, it was Pat McCreary, and he had stayed out there with Sonny, the one that I thought was for sure dead. So he comes in and he goes, Sonny's still out there, Sonny's still out there. And so Gunny Mac, he comes out because, all right, you got to take us back to him, but we're going to go get him. So I went out with him and we crawled out in the graveyard to try to find Sonny.

And then, then everybody realizes, uh, Undemstock's not here too. So we got two, at least two Marines still out there. So, and, and Corporal Hudson went out with us too. So we're crawling back into this mess and we couldn't find, we couldn't find him. He wasn't where he'd been left. And, uh, cause, uh, Pat knew exactly where he left him. I mean, you know, he knew exactly where pretty much where he was. Wasn't there anymore. Well, we didn't know it at the time, but the Goop machine gunners came out and dragged him back, dragged his body back up in front of their gun so that they were waiting for us to come and get him. And so they, and he said he thought he was, the next morning we sweep through, battle's over, and now we've They've got artillery coming. We sweep through though, fixed bayonets. It's just, you know, and I got no bayonet on that 60. So we sweep across, sweep with bayonets fixed, and they've, they've deed him out. So we, we, uh, but we ended up running into them again later, but, uh, they, uh, we find, we find Sonny and I assume he's dead and we roll him over.

And his eyes are swollen shut, you know, like big, like he looks like a raccoon. And his eyes suddenly just pop open and he goes, oh my God, you guys won't believe what happened to me last night. And he starts telling us a crazy tale. And he had, the gooks had come out and they came down at him with a, like a K-Bar. And he thought they were just going to kill him. They were going to finish him off. And they cut off his web gear, cut off all of his gear and took it. And then they dragged him up in front of the gun and left him. And he said, I almost drowned. He said, I was doing everything not to drown because the water was rising. There was so much rain. And he lived. That guy lived. He went on to become a Virginia state senator. Chan went to see him. He went, actually went to see the guy in Virginia. He still lives here. Not that many, maybe a couple of years back. So Chan went to see him and he's still alive and well. And he lived through that night. But here's a guy with all these bullet holes who lives.

And not very far away was Unum Sok. He didn't have, we couldn't find a wound on him. Now later, years later, they told me they did. They found a little shrapnel hole. But They said that didn't kill him, you know, but he, at the time, the corpsman and Chan, who's way more than a corpsman, he was also handy for that stuff. He was like a doctor. They said that, yeah, they, he died of heart failure. He literally died of heart failure. Damn. Didn't have to be out there. Could have gone home.

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After you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you. What was your favorite Bible verse while you were over there? Did you have one?

Yeah. Well, I'm afraid it's, it's changed over the years. For this reason, my Bible verse now is Psalm 121. I lift up my eyes to the mountains, from where comes my help? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. And I know the whole verse, but that's the part that is a big deal to me. That's a huge deal to me. That I wrote, Took me 14 years to write about it because I didn't know what God wanted me to do with this. But it was, it was a miracle. And the story behind it is, you know, I mean, some people would want to put me in a funny farm and Christians will hear it and go, yeah, that sounds like God, you know. But it was— well, should I tell you? Can I tell you about it? Or should I? Of course. I was writing a book called Gunner's Glory, this one. And it's about machine gunners from World War II, Korea, Vietnam. Incredible machine gunners, some great Marines. And some of the men I ran into were just amazing. And one, it started off, I ran into a guy named Ted Elliston.

And there's a picture of Ted in this thing. Ted died a few years back, but Ted, Ted was, he, there's a picture of him carrying an old water-cooled 30 on horseback. That's what an old salty was. He was in the 5th Marines. He was a Nicaragua era. They knew, they knew the war was going to start. They, He was, he hits Guadalcanal. His whole story's amazing. But through Ted, and Ted ran out of ammo on Guadalcanal, ran out of everything, and had nothing. A Jap came out of the bush and it was him and a Jap soldier. He had nothing but a hunting knife. He didn't even have a Ka-Bar. His dad had given him a hunting knife and he had to kill this Jap with a hunting knife. He still slept with that hunting knife by his bed. And I still sleep with a Ka-Bar. And still to this day, to this day, there's one by my bed. There's one on my desk. Yeah. And I, and a .45. So I still, yeah, I still do. But, you know, when this crap happens in the middle of the night, you just, I don't sleep good without it, you know.

When I take trips like this and you can't bring a weapon on the plane and stuff, I don't like that. I know. Now I'm still— I bet you do. And I mean, I'm old, but I could still surprise some people with hand-to-hand combat. And you know, I'm not dead yet. But yeah, I don't like not being able to go to sleep with something beside me, especially now I don't hear good. Somebody can sneak up on you. And this kind of stuff, you know, I mean, you don't get over it. Yeah. You know, I'll be that way. And neither did Ted. Ted was 84. He slept with his K-Bar. And it was all because of this moment on Guadalcanal where it was no grenades, no pistol ammo, no machine gun ammo, nothing left. Yeah. Amazing men. And I gotta tell you how I met him, but him leading me to another guy. I met him at Haslam's Bookstore, where I have my book signings for all my books. It used to be the oldest bookstore in the Southeast in St. Pete, Florida, and fabulous old bookstore. And the guys who ran it told me one time, they knew I was starting this book, and they said, you know, Johnny, You need to meet Ted.

You need to meet Ted. And I said, who's Ted? He says, Ted, machine gunner, Guadalcanal, 5th Marines. He says, you need to meet Ted. And so I said, I got to meet him. Let's do it. And so they contact, they said, yeah, he'll meet with you. And they gave me his address. And they said, look, when you meet him, you're going to notice his right hand is a real mess. You know, 84-year-old skin, mine's getting like that. But you'll notice his hand is kind of purple and beat up. And he said, ask him to tell you the story behind that. And I'm going, oh, I think I'm liking this guy already. And they said, oh no, he said, we got to tell you. He saw a girl. He thought, he thought— he thought this guy was roughing up a girl on Central Avenue in this kind of seedy part of Central Avenue. And Ted was walking down the street, he's coming to Haslam's Bookstore, and he thought this guy was being ungentlemanly to this lady. And he did, I guess the guy must have slapped her or something. I don't know what he did. But Ted goes up to him and Says something to him.

The guy mouthed off. Ted goes, boom, knocked him out, laid him out in the middle of Central Avenue, out cold. Ted had been a boxer and a fighter, and he was still a big guy, 84, but still a great big guy. You wouldn't want to get hit by him. And this guy found that out. He dropped a dude at 84? Yeah, yeah. He knocked a guy out. Holy shit. No, I'm telling you. These old Marines, these old China hands and some of these crazy guys from Korea. And I got some stories that you wouldn't believe some of these guys. I mean, they're absolute nutcases. I just love them. Gunnery Sergeant Francis Hugh Killeen, as Irish as the day he was born, played the bagpipes in the face of the Chinese, the first Chinese human wave assault at Sudogne. They told him, he was ordered to, and they shot the bagpipes through his throat. When he told me his story, he had throat cancer from that. And he had to write his story story to me. If you read these letters from this old Irishman, you'll cry laughing. It's just so beautiful. It's like, he's one of my books too.

But he's in, uh, No Better Way to Die. I put a lot of stuff about him. But anyway, in this one, uh, Ted tells me about, yeah, you know, Mitchell, Mitch Page was, uh, he was in the 7th Marines, but he, you know, he was, he was at Canal 2. And I'm going, Mitchell Page, Guadalcanal Medal of Honor? And he goes, yeah, I think he did. Yeah, I think he got the Medal of Honor. You know, it was just another guy to him. And he goes, yeah, you know, you need to talk to Mitch. So anyway, I got Ted's story. I get a hold of Mitchell Page. The short version is this. I see you got a GI Joe doll up there. Mitchell Page is the Marine that Hasbro Toys made the G.I. Joe doll in honor of because of what he did on Guadalcanal. And what he did on Guadalcanal is a little crazy. There was one, one big hit where they caught Japanese barges unloading troops and the Japs didn't think that the Marines would leave the ridge, Edson's Ridge on Guadalcanal. They thought they'd stay there and hunker down and try to protect the airfield.

And the Marines, some crazy Marines said, no, let's go get them. Let's go out and find them in the jungle. They went out and they saw them offloading off barges, getting into position, I mean, alignment and marching down the beach where they were going to attack, you know, Edson's Ridge eventually. And Ted, they say he could have had, there could have been 600 Japs killed. In this shootout because they had them totally in the open. And the Marines had dug in on the beach. They were coming down the beach. They dug in on the beach with water-cooled .30s and the Mahoney gun, which had— a lot of these old guys were gunsmiths, Sean. They rigged up a .30 caliber water-cooled to fire. They said— now this is from them— they said somewhere between 900 and 1,200 rounds a minute. Whoa. Different springs. You know, they were gunsmiths. They really, they had these old Marines were, that was their life. They, you know, you know, I, they were, they were real, real tough guys. Well, they, this guy named Mahoney had, had done all this work on these guns before the Japs bombed Pearl Harbor. And they knew it was coming.

And he had them prepared. Well, these were Mahoney guns. So that Mahoney gun place is significant in this whole miracle that I'm leading up to. But so I interviewed Mitchell Page, and I— more than once. But my final interview with him, he was on his deathbed. His wife Marilyn wouldn't— she wouldn't let anybody talk to him because he was going down. He was dying and everybody knew it. And she let me. She 'Cause I was a Marine gunner and she knew I was writing this story about him. And so she let me interview him. Well, on his deathbed, he told me this story. Now he had told it to the Gideons years before, and the Gideons actually put out a little pamphlet about it, but I'd never heard about it. But Edson's Ridge was a ridge that defended the airfield, Henderson Field. If we lost Guadalcanal, they say Australia would have fallen. Guadalcanal was that important at that point in the war. And a lot of people think, you know, America was dominating the war and nothing would be further from the truth at that point. You know, we were in major trouble. Midway, you know, had done a lot, but we never won a ground battle.

Against these guys. And they were building this, this, they built this Henderson Field on Guadalcanal and they were going to be able to bomb Australia and it was for taking Australia. And they were going to, they would have taken Australia. We didn't have enough to stop them at that time. And because they were already in the little islands moving up to Australia. So the Marines had to hold Guadalcanal. It was really life and death. I've read old experts that said they, that they think the Japs could have made it all the way past California, maybe as far as Chicago. I've actually heard, read this stuff. Yeah. Old history accounts. Had we not stopped them at Guadalcanal. So it was critical. And unless you study history, you know, it's just another battle, but it was freaking critical. And so all that was keeping the Japs off Henderson Field was this one this ridge, ridgeline, and on the other side of the ridgeline is the airfield. On this side of the ridgeline is all jungle, deep, thick jungle. The Japs were tremendous jungle fighters, and they were coming out of the jungle and hitting Edson's Ridge. And at one point, in a mass attack, They had almost swamped the ridge.

The Marines had run out of ammo. They were just getting clobbered. And we couldn't get any more. The Jap Navy had sunk a bunch of the US Navy out there. That's something else a lot of people don't study, don't realize. We lost a bunch of naval ships. And our Navy couldn't help us on Guadalcanal because a lot of them got sunk. It's a big, big battle. I think it was Savo Island or something like that. Anyway, some big gun— I mean, naval battles out there where the Navy took some huge losses, a lot of men. Maybe more men died there than on Guadalcanal. I don't even know. But it was— so at that point, we were going to lose Guadalcanal. At one point, a tipping point in this battle for the ridge, the Marines had the Mahoney guns. And even the Japs could tell by the fire, the rate of fire, you could tell by the sound of it. That wasn't a normal water-cooled .30. That thing, you know, it's like— Holy shit. Yeah, it'd be like, well, it was like the first time I heard Puff the Magic Dragon when he'd fire those miniguns.

There wasn't a machine gun sound. It was that rrrr. Well, I'm imagining it must have sounded, you know, somewhat similar because it didn't sound like— So the Japanese knew these guns were bad news and they were on the receiving end of it. And, uh, but at one point every single Marine machine gunner had been, uh, killed or, or wounded and knocked out. All, all the guns, all the machine guns were out of action. There was one machine gun down at one end of the ridge that could cover the whole ridge. If the Japanese got to that gun, before Mitchell Page got to that gun, they could turn that Mahoney gun on the ridge. They would control the ridge. They would have won the Battle of Guadalcanal. This is what he told me. Other guys have told me that. I trust them. So at that point, Mitchell Page is in a race to get to that Mahoney gun. He sees it. A Jap soldier sees it. The Jap has a Nambu. Nambu, 30-round clip, the Nambu machine gun. It's got a 30-round clip, banana clip. The Jap's carrying it, trying to race to that Mahoney machine gun position.

Mitch gets there first, kicks the dead Marines off, out of the way and off the gun, because they were draped all over the gun. Gun's still in action. It hadn't been blown up or anything. He gets behind the gun. He leans forward to chamber a round. And you know, the old 30s, you had to put some weight in that. And he leans, going to lean forward to chamber around and open fire on this Jap before he, it's between him and the Jap. The Japanese soldier drops to the ground, point-blank range. This is what Mitch says, point-blank range, you know, 10, 20 yards. I mean, point-blank range, drops to the ground, opens up with his Nambu. Mitch, this is what he told me on his deathbed. I absolutely believe him. Now I really believe him now that God's done something similar to me. As he goes to lean forward and chamber around, he said, I was frozen in place. He said, I could not move front, back, sideways. He said, I couldn't do anything. And he said, but Johnny, I felt at total peace. I wasn't scared. I knew this guy was going to put 30 rounds through my temple.

I wasn't scared. I couldn't do anything about it. And for some reason, I had absolute peace. It was like a tractor beam, you know, like a Star Wars kind of— he couldn't do anything. And he said, the Jap opens fire. He got burned from here down to here with 30 rounds going under his chin and all down here. Didn't get hit. Had he been able to lean forward and chamber the round, he was dead. But as soon as he fired his last round, he said, I was released, said totally released. Boom, fell forward, chambered around, killed the Jap soldier. The battle's still going on, but not in this sector, another part of the ridge. But this— he turns the Mahoney gun now on the Japs. They're in retreat now. They've beat them back a little bit. Later, he had to then lead a bayonet charge to drive the last ones off. Off into the jungle again. But he goes at— when the shooting has stopped, it's still dark. I mean, your flares are going up. But he goes over and he said, I got behind that nambu, kicked the Jap soldier down the hill. He says, got behind that nambu and looked.

He said, there's no way he could possibly miss me with 30 rounds. And, and he goes, God, how could this possibly happen? I mean, how could this possibly happen? You had to freeze me. You know, he's talking to God. Well, as he's doing this, he's pleading with God. He had his little finger had been almost severed in the bayonet fight. So he's bleeding all over the place. So he notices it. He goes, gets his pack and tries to get his first aid kit out to wrap up this hand. And he said, as soon as I picked it up, my Bible just fell out. He had a, like, I don't know if it was a Gideon, I guess it was a Gideon, but he had a little Bible. He said it fell out and it fell open. And I'd been asking God, how? How could this possibly happen? You know, tell me how. And it falls open to a page. He said there wasn't any wind, but the pages blew open to a certain page. And he said, He said, he said, one passage lights up. He said it was like gold and it would look bigger than all the other letters on the page.

It was big and bright. It showed so bright, he said, it scared the crap out of me because it was giving away my position. So there was, there's still Japs out there and this was like a light. And he reads it. Proverbs 3:5, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. In all your ways acknowledge him and he will lead your path. That was the verse his mother sent him to war with. That was, that was her favorite verse. Later. Yeah, but his favorite verse. Yeah, I know. So he said, I didn't even tell the other guys. He said, if I'd have told them this, they would have thought I was shell— I had shell shock because it wasn't combat fatigue, you know, it was shell shock. He said they would have thought I had shell shock and, you know, they would have thought I was nuts. They wouldn't have believed it. So he said, I didn't even tell the guys this. I didn't tell anybody till years later. And he did tell the Gideons this. And, and so his favorite verse, though, is also Psalm 121.

I lift my eyes to the mountains, from whence cometh my help. My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. That was his favorite verse. And that part of this story, I mean, flash forward, Mitchell Page died soon after my interview with him and soon after he told me this, all about this. And go forward about 3 years. Well, I was working on another book and I, you know, I finish a book, I never look at it again because if I do, I hate it and I want to rewrite it. So I don't even look at them again. And I know that book was put away. And I mean, I admired the heck out of Mitchell Page. Yeah, like I said, every time I see a G.I. Joe doll, you know, that's Mitchell Page. He got some ribbon for that too. G.I. Joe, he's a Marine. But that's Anyway, so he caught some crap over that. But anyway, so years later, I was going through a rough ride. It was soon, somewhere near when all this crap happened at the Big Red thing. And I was, you know, I don't like to call it, I don't like PTSD.

I don't like the term. So I didn't mind when they said I had combat fatigue. I don't know, maybe it's just me, maybe I'm old, but I didn't mind that term. You can say that. This PTSD thing, I don't like this lump, you know, rape cases and car wrecks and everybody, you know, into a PTSD file. I don't think it's the same, and I don't like it. So I didn't mind that, but PTSD. So I guess I was, you know, they said I had 100%. And I guess I did. So I was going through a tough span. We have a Bible study at my house all the time. We'd have a taekwondo at my school and then taekwondo and judo school. And afterwards, on certain days, we'd have a Bible study class. And so we do it at my house. Everybody go to my house and we do it. And I was just having a rough time. I was just, you know, and my pastor came. He came to the Bible study and I talked to him after everybody left. I told him the situation. I said, hey, you know, not sleeping good. You know, a lot of remembering stuff, not forgiving myself for stuff.

He said, I'm doing a study on time alone with the Lord. He goes, Johnny, it's changed Phil, Phil Engelman is his name, Phil and Sue Engelman. He says, Johnny, it's changing Phil, it's changing me and Sue's life. Cutting everything off and just spending time alone with the Lord. He said, you need to go spend time. When was the last time you spent time alone with the Lord is what he asked me. And I said, I said, not since I was a little kid back in the mountains of West Virginia. I'd go up on a hill, you know, but I said, not since I was a little kid. And he goes, that's what you need. So you need to go spend time alone with the Lord.

And I said, well, what does that mean to you?

Well, I didn't really know either. And I said, I turned to Nancy and I said, Nancy, let's go get a mountain cabin or something somewhere.. And he goes, "No, no, no, Johnny, not with Nancy. Just you. Take your Bible, go spend time alone with the Lord. Nobody else. Not your family, not your kids. Go spend time alone." And I said, "Gosh, you know." One of my senior students had moved away. He was a taekwondo master and he'd moved to North Carolina. He's a professor at Montreat College. Brilliant guy, really brilliant, and a strong Christian. And I called Tony up and I said, Tony, here's what Phil told me. I'd like to try it. Can you think you can find me a cabin or something in North Carolina where I just go be alone? Something out in the mountains, something out in the hills. He goes, that's really weird. He tells me these people, he's a doctor from Duke, and they own like a little mountain getaway, and they asked Tony and Jane, his wife, to take care of it while they were gone, and they'd rent it out and stuff once in a while. And he says, you know, they're asking us to take care of this place, and that's unbelievable.

You can go there. And I Well, how much is it? I don't have much money. And he said, no, no, it's free. We're taking care of it. They won't care a bit. So I said, I'm on my way. So I hop a plane, go to Asheville, take a ride out to Black Mountain, North Carolina. He sends me out to Montreat, North Carolina, right outside of Black Mountain. Mountain. And so I rent this little— I don't rent it, I stay in this cabin. I mean, it was pretty rugged. It was a pretty rugged cabin. This was— I mean, there were spider webs, you know, they haven't like been keeping this place up a whole lot. But it was perfect. It's just what I needed. And, but I haven't been out in the woods alone since 'Nam, really. And I, once again, I didn't have my, I didn't have my .45. I didn't have a pistol. I I didn't have a Ka-Bar. And, you know, out in the woods sounds. So I started feeling a little antsy. And I called Nancy and I said, you know, my daughter calls, she's all freaking out, my daughter Bonnie Kay.

She calls and, what are you doing, Dad? I don't know if that's healthy for you. What are you doing out there? She's already come to me and said, Is PTSD catching Dad? Because I'm worried I'm catching it. I said, oh, God, honey, I hope not. So she knows the story of her dad. And but here I am out in the mountains. Called Nancy up and I said, you know, I've been here a night or two now. And I said, I keep hearing noises outside the cabin. And I'm not getting anything done. You know, I'm not, I'm just uncomfortable. I'm kind of always watching my flanks, you know, 6, nobody there. You know, I don't have a perimeter. I don't feel good out here without a perimeter. And so I said, so yeah, I set up some punji pits. So I set up some punji pits around this cabin, just 2x4s with nails, 6-penny nails, you know, sticking up. And so they'll yelp. I'll know somebody's there and, you know, have some kind of defense ready. And it made me feel a little better. What I found out later, it was bears. Bears were banging stuff around that cabin.

And I didn't know. I mean, you know, but I'm still— finally, the third day, I'm out on the porch. Having a cup of coffee, doing my Bible study, going to read my Bible, feeling okay, feeling better. You know, now I can really spend some time alone with the Lord and not be thinking about anything else and da da da. Well, then the guy who owns the house, he shows up. He's going to do repairs on the place. And now I'm going, oh God. So he's got saws. He's got hammers and saws. And I go, oh my God. I call up Nancy and I said, Nancy, I can't believe it. This is a total failure. And she goes, Johnny, just take a walk and cool off. Just take a walk. You need to just take a walk. That's it. I'll take a walk. So I took off walking from down the hill from this cabin through Montreat, up this mountain road. I don't know, it's a few miles. And I just kept walking until I came to a trail. It's a Greybeard Mountain. It's a hiking trail. Now, this was back in 2004, I think. And it wasn't as built up then.

You know, it was really out there a little bit. And so anyway, this mountain trail, nobody's there. A storm's rolling in. There's all these warnings, you know, bring cell phone, bring this, bring water, watch out for bears, et cetera, et cetera. Of course, I'm in shorts and a t-shirt. I just took off walking. And I didn't even bring my cell phone. I'm just going to hike. So I start hiking up this trail and I went and went, I don't know, a couple thousand feet up. I think it's like 4,800 feet to the top. And I'm just hiking. Well, I had knee surgery not long before that. I shouldn't be doing this. But I don't care. At that point, I don't care. I need to walk. I need to hike. I reach a mountain stream. And there's a big rock out in the middle. And I go out and I jump over and get on this big rock. The stream's going by me, you know. I mean, it was beautiful. It's a perfect postcard. There's nobody out there. I mean, because the storms, you know, it's thundering like it's going to rain and it looks terrible.

And so nobody's there but me. Nobody's hiking that trail or anything like that. And I get on the rock and I say a prayer and I ask the Lord, what am I doing here, Father? You know, why would you have me come out to a mountain in frickin' North Carolina I've never been in my life? I mean, what's the point? I don't feel like I'm getting any better. I feel, you know, still kind of antsy. I mean, I don't see any point to this. There's got to be a reason you'd send me out here, you know? And I'm talking to it. I'm talking to the Lord. And then, you know, I start praying and it hits me. What's God's favorite trait? It's humility. That's his favorite trait. He loved Moses. "I know you by name," he told Moses. When Moses wanted to see him, he said, "I know you by name. I will show mercy and compassion on you. And I will let my goodness go before you. You know, because Moses, like a little kid, wanted to see God. He wanted to see him. And it's in Exodus 33. So anyway, but I'm on this rock praying this, and I realize Moses was called the most humble man on earth by God.

About the best compliment any human being can get. And he used Moses, wouldn't you say, in a pretty big way. And so So I said, humility. Here I am, I'm hiking a 4,500-foot mountain. I just had knee surgery a couple of weeks back. This is stupid. This isn't humble. You know, you're being a jerk. And she said, I need to learn humility. That's what this is about. And I said, okay, Lord, I get it. You know? And I felt like, okay, I got it. That's— I— all this, this whole trip to North Carolina, you know, buying airplane tickets I couldn't afford. Oh, it's— here's the reason. And, uh, so I start back down that mountain, and I, uh, I'd gone down 500 feet away from the, the big rock in the middle of the stream, and I don't know, maybe more. And it's— downhill's harder than going uphill, you know, for if your knee's kind of screwed up. And, you know, I I'm having to take these steps and land on the good foot, trying to take pressure off the knee. And I'm going down and, you know, go over a tree branch, gives you a little step on the trail.

You've been on it. And I, at one point, I go to step and I was frozen. I couldn't go anywhere. Now, I've never, I've told this in a church, But I've never even told this in my church. I've never talked about this because I know what it sounds like. And I wouldn't blame anybody for thinking this guy, he does have combat fatigue. He's a total fruitcake. I wouldn't blame anybody for that. Who cares about what the fruitcakes think? I've hesitated to— I've never told anybody. This was 2004 it happened. August 26th. And I've never told anybody except, you know, my personal friends. And of course, I told them right after I went home, told the Bible study and told them what happened. And but I couldn't move. I was just, just like there was no more stepping. I was just, but I was like sitting in a park. I mean, it wasn't uncomfortable. I was just just, you know, just hanging, just kind of hanging mid-step almost. I mean, I wasn't going anywhere, front, back, sideways. And I didn't even have— I don't even know what I thought. People have asked me, what'd you think?

I don't think I was able to think. I just—

I mean, I just— Frozen in time almost.

I didn't know what— I had my mind froze along with the rest of me, I guess. I don't know. Just, that just stood there, just hung there mid-step. Well, then I was released. How long? I don't know how long I was here. I mean, I have no idea. Could have been, could have been 2 seconds, could have been 20 seconds. I don't even know. But I was released. Now, boom, now I've, now running downhill. I mean, I fell downhill a little bit, took those steps and stopped, jumped around thinking First thought, something had to have held me. There's something behind me. There's nothing there. There's nothing anywhere. It's just dead silent. I'm out in the woods alone. Nobody. Black clouds rolling over. There's nobody out there, man. And I realized this is God. This is Jesus Christ here, man. So I fell to my knees. I just fell to my knees. I said, what do you want from me, God? And I don't even know if I said that. I wrote it down so I can show you sometime. But anyway, I just fell to my knees. And I think I was saying, what do you want from me, God?

And in an audible voice, an audible voice, if it was inside my head, It sure didn't sound like it. It sounded like a voice talking to me. And it said, Johnny, get up. Johnny, I want you to walk a little further with me. If you got a Bible, I'll swear to it. I believe you. Yeah. And I got up. I couldn't say anything. I mean, I was so overwhelmed. I think back at that moment and I go, God, I wish I could have asked him. I wish I could have said, tell me how much you love me or something. God, you know something? Yeah, let me hear something good here. You know, I couldn't say. I just did. I said, yes, Lord. And I got up and I started back up that mountain. I would have walked. I would have gone to Canada. I mean, I was just going to go until he stopped me. And I went back up that mountain. I reached that big rock in the middle of the storm and made it over that, jumped to the other side. The trail kept on up. I kept going on up. I've taken my kids there.

I've taken my grandkids to this same spot in about 3 weeks. We're going, we're getting, I'm taking my son and my daughter have never seen it either. My wife, I've We've been back 2 or 3 times and she could tell you what her feelings about this. It was— but anyway, I go, keep going. And I mean, I'm not thinking, I'm just, I'm going to go until God stops me. I would have kept going until I fainted. But I finally, I come to this big boulder on the side of the trail. There's a big old boulder. Oh, you know, as big as the bottom half of that whole bar set there, big. And somebody has put a big round plaque embedded in the boulder. And now I've never been, I've never been there in my life. I've never been in this place in my life, never been to Black Mountain in my life. So If you, you know, somebody's thinking you knew it was there or something. Never been there, never been on this mountain in my life. Never been to Black Mountain, North Carolina in my life. Montreat, never. Here's this plaque and it, the plaque says, I lift my eyes to the mountains.

From where does my help come from? My help comes from the Lord who made heaven and earth. I knew. That's what he was leading me to. I didn't walk any further. I fell down and worshiped. Yeah. Pretty amazing. Then I, when this was over, I went back down off that mountain. You talk about a spring in your step. I went down off that mountain feeling like, okay, there's There's two things going on here. I really have gone over the edge and I am crazy. But I've got to, even if I am, I had to tell Nancy and the kids. So I get back to that cabin, find my phone, call them up, tell them the whole thing. I don't know if she thought, my husband's gone crazy. I don't know what she thought. Then I get in my car and I drive into town and through Black Mountain, through Montreat, through Black Mountain. To where my buddy Tony Horning lives. And he's on his front porch, and I come out and I'm telling him the whole— and I mean, I'm a motor mouth. Tony, my God, you won't believe what happened to me. And I start telling him all this.

Well, there, a friend from our church in St. Petersburg had just happened in on Tony and was on the front porch with him. So now, his name's Gary Ripple, and he was— he's the leader of music in our church, and So now I'm telling these two guys who both went to my old church, I'm telling them what happened. And I don't know what they thought, but Tony told me, "You look like Moses who'd seen the burning bush, man. Your face was red. You were flushed beyond flushed." He says, "Yeah, I could tell something really dramatic happened to you, whether it was that or not, whether I believed it or not." But he believed me. He's a close friend, so he would believe it. A stranger would think you're out of your frickin' mind. And I don't even, like I said, I wouldn't blame him. I don't know if I'd believe a guy telling me this story. But anyway, so I go home. Now I can't wait to get home and tell Nancy and the kids and the Bible study about this. But the more I think about it, I'm going, how am I going to tell them about this?

Am I even supposed to share this? Is this supposed to be something just between me and God? I don't know. You know, I've got all these questions. Did it really happen? Am I really crazy? But, you know, you ask, you don't know. And, uh, so I said, God, how do I know this really happened? And I'm asking God that. I'm talking to him. Soon as I get home, I'm telling Nancy the story all over again. I mean, I'm just, just getting out of the car from the airport, right? And I'm already telling her the whole story again. I've told her twice on the phone, and I'm telling her again. And she's patiently listening to me. My wife is very flatlined, which is probably what I need. But I'm telling the whole thing again. And I'm thinking, God, Nancy, where's the reaction, man? You got to see reaction here. And so she's going, I'm listening, I'm listening. And so she's listening, but she's also going to the mailbox. And I'm thinking, and I yell at her, What are you going to the mailbox for at a time like this? I'm telling you the most important moment of my whole freaking life on planet Earth.

You what? And I'm mad at her now. What do you do? You know, and she pulls mail out of the mailbox and she pulls out to say, and she's looking at the mail and it's, we got this pamphlet. Now I've given to this Missionary Journey, Missionary Ventures, Missionary Ventures. I've given money to this group over the years. You know, they help missionaries and I, I've tried to support them over the years, but they've never ever sent me anything. It's one of the reasons I supported them. They don't send out a bunch of mailings and crap, you know. Never gotten anything from these guys. Today in my mailbox, as I'm telling Nancy for the third time, I just got home, here's a thing from Missionary Ventures. Nancy goes, oh, we've never got anything from them before. She opens it up and on the first page it says My wife Nancy loves to shop, and she goes, "Johnny, this is weird." And there's Psalm 121. No way. All right, it gets weirder. So now we have the Bible study. I tell the guys in the Bible study this whole miracle, you know, trying to, you know, getting ready for anyone who doesn't believe it, think, you know, knowing I'm going to sound crazy and already wondering if I'm supposed to say anything about it.

And so while I'm telling them the whole story, Chris Pegas, one of the taekwondo instructors, another taekwondo master, has been with me for many years. His dad was wounded in the head on Iwo Jima, and one of my books is based on his dad. So he is listening. He's a real studious guy, and he's He's listening to this whole story and he goes, Donnie, have you got a copy of your last book here? You know, the Gunner's Glory book? And I said, yeah, yeah, I think I got one in the bedroom. And he goes and gets it, you know, and I'm still continuing the story with the guys. And he said, he's opening, searching, he goes, I knew it. He says, That Bible verse was in your last book. It's in your last book, Psalm 121. And I go, what? I didn't know. I mean, I'd written the book 3 or 4 years ago. I don't know. And he goes, yeah, it's in your book. It was Mitchell Page's favorite Bible verse. And I said, oh my God. I mean, and I'm thinking, God, is that the connection? Because I'm thinking back, because I hadn't thought about Mitchell Page since he died.

I mean, you don't think about those things. I hadn't thought about the fact that God froze him on Guadalcanal like he did in this turning point of the war. And I hadn't thought about any of that ever since I wrote it. And here I am, here I am going, oh my God, is there a connection? And then The guys start talking. A few seconds later, Chris is going through the book. He goes, Johnny, here it is again. Mitchell Page prayed that verse when they were being shelled by the Japanese ships and he thought they were going to die and they got blown up but not killed. He said he and that other guy prayed Psalm 121. Look, it's on page 66. Gives me the book and I'm going, Oh no. And he says clearly, Mitch says clearly, this was my favorite Bible verse, and I depended on this verse. The next day, now I've been asking God to confirm this, so I'm not, tell me I'm not crazy, God. And the next day I get a book in the mail. And some guy, I don't know where he's, somewhere out west, He'd written a book and he was a huge fan of my books.

And he was asking me to endorse his book, write a little blurb, you know, on there. And, you know, I mean, I was flattered. Why anybody want a blurb from Johnny Clark? You could go find somebody famous or something, you know. But he did. And he'd sent me this book and he wrote a nice letter asking me to do it. And so, you know, I didn't even look at it at first. You know, I was still caught up in this miracle and, what to make of it all. And then Nancy said something like, "Aren't you even going to look at it?" And I said, "Yeah, yeah, I better look at it." And I looked at it and it was based on— it was a World War II. It was about World War II. That's all I remember. And so I opened the first page. The first page, Psalm 121. Nancy can confirm it. But the first page. Then I went to church that Sunday. What's a song we sing? We sing a song based on Psalm 121. I got the hint. You know, I'm not the quickest guy out there, but if you hit me enough times, I can finally get it.

And I finally, I got the hint, man. And God was telling me, You might be crazy, but you're not crazy on this. You, you, this really happened. And this is the first time in my life I've ever told anybody that story. And I'm going to tell you right now, I fasted and prayed about saying this story in front of a million people or whatever. You know, I, I didn't take this lightly. And I know they may want to put me in a loony bin after this, but I've had something very similar happen. I heard some of it. Tell me, I— because I forgot a lot of it and I heard some of it.

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But yeah, there was— this was 2, 3, 2 or 3 years ago, and, um, I can't say I was atheist or anything like that, but I just— I, I paid zero attention to Christ. None. And, um, this is like when all the There's a lot of— well, there's always a lot of shit going on in the world, sure. But the, uh, the, the gender stuff with kids was really fucking with my head really bad. And, um, in a lot of the child predator shit, sex exploitation, and then— and, um, and stuff that had gone on in Afghanistan, it was— there was a lot of shit that was going on that really It was right after the withdrawal, the Afghanistan withdrawal.

I totally get it, Sean.

And, um, so I was in a pretty dark spot. Yeah. And, um, went on a vacation with my wife to Sedona. And, um, I'm pretty emotionless other than anger, you know. I don't, I don't show much happiness. I don't show much sadness. You'll know when I'm really fucking pissed off, but that's about it. And, um, for whatever reason, I had a complete breakdown on the flight there. I was just fucking crying, and I didn't know why I was crying. Yeah, you know, I'm just like, the world is a fucking shit place. I hate this place. I don't even know if I— I wasn't saying I was suicidal, but I don't even want to fucking be in this world. I don't feel like I belong in this world. Like, yeah, I don't like 8-year-olds getting their junk chopped off and changing sexes. Like, I don't like all these pedophiles and—

that's satanic.

It's like everywhere I looked, I'm like, it's just darkness.

Well, especially doing what you do, you're hearing a lot of dark crap and you're hearing a lot of satanic crap. Yeah. And you're under attack because you're honoring God. I guarantee you, you're under satanic attack.

I'm aware now. I wasn't at the time, but I'm aware now. And, um, so we go this whole week. It's a shit vacation. It just fucking sucks. My best friend's there with his wife, supposed to be having a great time. Uh, I had met this other SEAL, and I don't have a lot of friends. I had met this other SEAL here in Franklin who was a very successful businessman, and, and, uh, our relationship was developing quickly, uh, because he didn't need anything from me and I didn't need anything from him, and, and we could just be with each other and just friendship. Yeah. And that doesn't come around often, you know. Seems like the older you get, the harder it is to find. And, and I don't relate with very many people that haven't been to combat or don't run a business or, you know what I mean? I just don't have a lot in common with a lot of people. At least it seemed like that at the time. So he had just died. And, um, so we go through this week and just more shit's happening, more stuff, you know, I'm seeing. And smoking weed.

Tell them the last thing I saw was I saw this country music artist that came out who I respected. I thought was a person of God. And turns out she's like, well, I think that, um Drag queens should be able to shake their dick in little kids' faces. And I'm like, fuck you. Like, I did not want to see that. And, um, totally just threw me off course. And then, which I was already off course, so I tell my wife, I'm like, we got to go on a fucking— we— I have to go on a hike. So I down a joint as fast as I can. We go on this hike. This is embarrassing, but I was out there searching for something. I had heard that Sedona has all this— these energy vortexes. Yeah. And I guess, yeah, whatever, right? Like weird whatever. And I was into crystals. I was looking at all kinds of shit, just trying to find some fucking peace. Yeah. And looking in all the wrong places, right? So we'd hike this fucking stupid crystal.

Most people have.

Yeah, this mountain. And I'm like, we're gonna feel something. We're gonna take this fucking crystal up to this energy vortex and I'm gonna feel something. We get up there, I don't feel shit. Yeah. And, uh, I'm like, fuck this stupid crystal and this dumb vortex. And I'm like, let's just go home. You know, the pot did not help at all. And we're hiking down this fucking mountain and like I'm starting to have like this internal conversation in my head, and, uh, I'm like, what the fuck is wrong with you, Sean? Like, I'm like, all these kids that are getting mutilated, everybody seems to be for this shit except for me. What, what, maybe I'm the fucked up one? Maybe you're the fucked up one, Sean? Maybe 8-year-olds should be able to change sex and, uh, you know, have their parents fucking throw the dress on the kid, all this shit. And I'm like, what are you worried about? All this fucking pedophiles. Maybe like, maybe you're the one that's fucked up, Sean. Maybe, maybe you shouldn't be—

No, I stand it up. Of course, you know, now that's the whole—

I know, but there's— like I said, this is an internal battle. Yeah. Because I could not make sense of anything that I was seeing. Nothing outside of my family unit made any fucking sense to me at all. Yeah. How can— like, how can politicians not be going after pedophiles? How can this be about— like, how is this even fucking real? And I'm— and so I started, like, my mind started— like I said, I'm having this internal battle. Like, maybe, Sean, you're the fucked up one. You shouldn't be standing up for kids. You shouldn't be worried about fucking China. You shouldn't be worried about people dressed in drag, men in bikinis and whatever they're wearing, like, shaking their dick in front of your 2-year-old's face. That's totally normal, Sean. Yeah. Yeah, but what are you worried about? Everybody, every mainstream media outlet, every fucking magazine, every movie, every fucking Hollywood thing. Like, it's just all like, this is the way. Yeah. And I felt like, I felt like I was the only one that was like saying anything about this shit, you know, especially when I saw the fucking country music artist. I was like, whoa, like, well, you're over here spouting Bible quotes and all this other shit.

Say fuck you.

I know. Fuck you. I know. Yeah. And, um, and disappointed in a dude like, what the fuck?

Yeah. Of course, then they got like some huge fucking TV show. Of course, they probably told her to say it and they're like, hey, say this and then we'll reward you. Yeah. And so sure as shit, she's like fucking huge in TV again.

I know. You know, I, I think I even know who you're talking about.

Yeah, who cares? It doesn't matter. It doesn't fucking matter. Doesn't even fucking matter who it is because it's a nobody. Yeah, it's a fucking lying piece of shit. Anyways, um, so I'm coming down this mountain and I'm having this internal battle, and it felt like there, towards the end of the hike when we got back to the resort, I'm like, it, it felt like it was a battle for my soul. I really, I swear to God, that's how it felt.

I hear you.

I walked through this gate, and you know, we have similar backgrounds. You don't go to bed without a Ka-Bar and a .45, and I'm sure you're very aware you probably don't like sitting with your back to the door, you know what I mean? I'm the same way. I pay attention to security and shit like that. And because of the show, a lot of the guys at this, um, at this gate, these armed guards, they all listen to my show. Yeah. And they're all like, you know, and so I'd interact with them. And, and we'd been there all weeks, and like I said, I pay attention. I see these I recognize them all, you know what I mean? When I'm coming through the gate, what's up, Johnny? How you doing? You know, last night we're there walking through the gate. There's this old man, Vietnam vet, Air Force guy. Don't hold it against him. And he starts trying to talk to me and I'm like, man, I've never seen this guy before and I'm not in the mood to talk. I sure as shit don't want to talk about about my fucking podcast or anything like that.

And so I'm nice and polite, but I'm giving body language like, da da, I just don't want to talk right now. So, you know, I refuse to like square up to him and actually have a conversation. I'm just like, oh, nice to meet you. You know, I'm walking away, looking at him over my shoulder. Of course my wife stops, talks to him, and I'm like, fuck. So I turn around and I square up to him and he looks at me and he read my mind from front to back. I had not vocalized any of this shit, nothing. And he goes, he's like, all these kids you're worried about, he's like, that's not your battle, man. That is not your battle. And all the shit you're worried about with China and that, that's not your battle either. And all this stuff, you know, and I, I, After, like, wow, after the first thing, it was after he said, all this stuff that's going on with kids right now is not your battle. Wow. And then my mind went blank. I just caught, like, little glimpses because I was like, how the fuck does this guy know I'm talking to— like, what is happening?

This— he's inside my fucking head right now. And it scared the shit out of me. And Whatever. We wrap up. He's quit talking. This is only maybe, I don't know, 30 seconds. Kind of like you. I don't know how much fucking time has passed. I'm freaking out. I'm like, I wish— why the fuck are you in my head? And how are you in my head? And we're walking. So we're walking away and I look at my wife and I said, holy shit, I think that's fucking God, like, talking to me. And she looked at me and she goes, Yeah, no shit, Sean. She's like, God's always been around you. You just don't make time to let him in. Oh, and I was like, beautiful. What's going on? So keep going. Keeps getting weirder, just like yours.

I know, and, uh, I'm remembering some of it, but I forgot.

So my best friend, uh, in the world, um, was this guy Gabe Bacardi, and, uh, he was a SEAL. We contracted together at CIA. We did a lot of shit down in Colombia off, you know, not working, having a lot of— doing a lot of debaucherous shit down there. Anyways, uh, Gabe, um, succumbed to addiction. He had— he was, um, had some really bad addictions, uh, when he left the agency. And I talked him into leaving, and I, I wanted to help him. I mean, I was all fucked up too. Anyways, whatever, um, I was helping him get over his addiction. He didn't wind up making it, but Gabe was always known as a protector. He's a hockey player, an enforcer on the hockey team, uh, showed up to the SEAL Teams, baddest motherfucker in every one of his platoons. Everybody knew If you're in trouble, Gabe's gonna fucking be there to bail you out one way or another. You know, went to the agency, reputation followed him there. Everybody knew it. And, um, anyways, we get to this resort. All week there's this guy identical, like identical, same jawline, same build. Gabe was jacked.

This guy's jacked, like same brow, everything. Like could have been like not identical but could have been his identical twin. And I'm like, first thing when we did, when we saw, when we roll up to the resort, I'm like, that guy looks like fucking Gabe. He even fucking walks like Gabe. And I'm in a vulnerable spot. Everywhere we go throughout this week, this fucking guy is around. We go out in town, this dude's out in town. We go on a hike, he's coming back from a hike. We're at the pool, he's at the fucking pool. And Katie and I both are like, this shit's weird, you know? And my buddy Dan had just died. So Katie's like, that's Gabe, he's here. You're in a weird spot, you're in a vulnerable spot right now. She's been telling me this shit all week. I'm like, yeah, whatever. Uh, so we go from the gate, it's like maybe a 1-minute walk to the— this bungalow we're staying in, which is like a duplex. And we go in to open our door, unlock the door, and this fucking guy winds up being the— he's staying across the way from us.

And I'm like, What the fuck? That fucking guy's in— he's in the other half of the building. Like, there's only two rooms here. What's the coincidence of that? Yeah, yeah. Plus him being everywhere we're at. Wow. And Katie looks at me again and she's like, I fucking told you. She doesn't cuss. I told you. We get in the room, I'd have another meltdown. I'm like, what? What's happening? What the fuck is going on? You know, I thought like, this— God is like, what is happening? What is fucking— what's going on? You know, and then I'm getting emotional again. And like I said, I don't really show much emotion. And so we talk it out and she's like, how can you keep saying you can't believe it? It's happening right in front of you. I'm like, I can't believe this is happening. She's like, what do you mean you can't believe it? It's right in front of your face, Sean. Yeah. My phone dings in the middle of this. And so we wrap up the conversation. I go look at my phone to see who texted me. And it's Dan Cirillo's daughter, who doesn't— who's my friend that just died, who doesn't have my number.

Must have dug it out of her dad's phone. And I could read it to you, but I'll summarize it. It basically says, hey Sean, I walked into my dad's gun room for the first time since he'd passed, and the whole room came alive. And he, he grabbed me and said that I should reach out to you because you would become his new best friend. And he wants you to know that he loves you just the way that you are. And I was like, man, what is happening? Yeah, 3 things. Then I get home and I'm off. I'm obviously like, okay, holy shit, like, God is real. I've been looking for answers in all the wrong places. So I call this guy up, um, who's, who's been a huge inspiration and, and a bit of a mentor on my spiritual journey. His name's Eddie Penney, and, uh, he came on and gave— he's a, uh, uh, he's a SEAL 2 Development Group guy and, uh, shared his testimony with me on the show. And I was— it was so powerful. I said, this has to this has to be like, we're releasing this on Christmas. Ever since that day, probably for a year, every single person that has come on my show has brought up their faith in Jesus Christ, just like you did.

Like, that— what, I didn't know that was going to happen, that you were going to bring this up. And Eddie, like, full— one of the most powerful podcasts I've ever done, if not the most powerful a wonderful one. It, it, it obviously made a very serious impression on me.

Isn't it fun when God starts working in your life? And yeah, I mean, it's just, it's just fun to go, he's real.

So I call him up and I'm talking to him like at midnight, like I start a campfire at my house and I'm like, Eddie, I gotta talk to you about some shit. And He's like, what is it? You know, start talking to him, telling him what I just told you. And he goes, Sean, he goes, a lot of people have been praying for this to happen. And that freaked me out. I'm like, what? What? What do you mean people are praying that like what? Like this sounds like conversations that are happening behind my back. But you guys have plans for me that I don't know about. And he's like, I just want you to know that. And, um, then he starts talking to me about guardian angels and shit like that. I'm like, all right, and spiritual warfare and all these things. I'm super tuned into it. So then I go to work the next day, and, uh, after the campfire, remember midnight, I have a meeting at noon with my IT guy who's like a super devout Catholic, and I grew up Catholic, but I don't— like I said, I don't— at this, at this point in time, I'm pretty sure if I step foot in church, I'm probably gonna disintegrate.

But, uh, so I think we're gonna talk about IT shit, and he starts telling me— he doesn't even know anything yet— and he starts telling me about guardian angels for whatever reason. Wow. And how, you know, they knew you before you were ever even born, and they're with you, and they're assigned to you, and da da da da. And that meeting happened at noon. So then I take a late lunch, drive back home. I want to have lunch with my wife and kid. And, um, on the way back to work, I tell Katie about all this shit. I'm driving back to work and my odometer, like the mileage left to empty, 444 miles. Look at the clock, it's 4:44 in the afternoon, 4 hours and 44 minutes after my meeting with Guardian, uh, my meeting with Adam, my, my old IT guy, about guardian angels, who I had just talked to Eddie Penny about guardian angels. I call up, uh, one of my guys here and I say, just so I don't forget, I said, hey, Google the meaning of 444. I'm on my way back. Get back to the office, he's standing there, he opens up Google, doesn't have any idea what I'm talking about.

You can Google this shit yourself. 444 means your guardian angels want you to know that they're watching out for Oh, well, I want a high five.

Yeah, no, God, come on. Come on. It's just wonderful. And it's fun to know he's real. You know, he's real. And I mean, he's invested in you and he knows you by name. That one's all— it's all through the Bible. You know, he knows every hair on your head. He knows your name. He knows the day, the second you're going to die. He knew the day and the second you were born. So worrying about, I've had so many close calls. I mean, even in civilian life, I had a Roman candle jumping out of a plane. I had a Roman candle, didn't know it. I thought I was going slow. I was going to die. And it opened by itself. It just suddenly before I hit the ground, it went, and I shot up. Saved again. You remember that character in the old cartoons, Pistol Pete, I don't know, where they shoot bullet holes all around the guy's head? Well, I mean, I should be dead so many times. And guardian angels are real. I'm convinced of it. But I walked into an ambush. And we got They opened up, machine guns opened up on us.

And I went to hit the dirt, but it was pitch black. We're out in the jungle, you know, I don't know where I am. And I hit a bank, an embankment, and I just hit this embankment, knocked my helmet off, and I'm just up against the embankment and everybody's shooting at me. And I got burned from all the phosphorescent tips on the tracer rounds. It burned, it burned me. It burned all the way on my neck. It went down on my shirt. It burned all around my— burned my face, my nose. Wow. Never got a scratch. I never got— I didn't get a scratch. I mean, I've— I just—

I have countless examples of that exact same thing. I mean, that door hinge, that— there's a frame door hinge right there. That's from a guy that was at Delta. His name's Kyle Morgan, and he did— he was in Mali, Africa. Huge terrorist attack at the Radisson Blu. This was supposed to be like a booze cruise for him. Like, he had seen a lot of shit. Delta's like, hey, go do— go do this liaison mission in fucking Mali, and I don't know, have a good time. Yeah, sleep with some State Department bitches or so. I don't know, you know. Like, just take a break. And so he's down there having a good time, whatever, doing his liaison gig. Al-Shabaab hits his hotel. He responds with two other guys. They bitch out. This— he, he— super descriptive account. I mean, he talks about he enters the Radisson Blu, first thing he sees is fucking dead bodies in an elevator shaft. And the elevator doors are open and closing. You know, there's fires all over the fucking place. There's terrorists running around killing fucking people. And he's a one-man— he's one man in a fucking hotel, a massive hotel, like going door to door, saving people from burning to death, saving— like pulling people out of their hotel room all by himself.

I can't remember how long it was, like 12 hours or 16 hours or some shit. He's doing this. Everybody Everybody else is a fucking pussy, to include like the head of state, you know, that's there. He's fucking eating cheese balls out of his belly button because he's a fucking pussy, you know. Yeah, I mean, you know the types. And, um, the feds. And, uh, so at the very end of this shit, he corners these Al-Shabaab guys at the top of a stairwell. He, he clears up a stairwell I guess you can't say cornered them. They're shooting down at him damn near point-blank, and the fucking went all around his body. And then he throws up a concussion grenade, discombobulates him, runs up, you know, finishes him off, rips the door off the wall. And that's the door hinge that was holding the fucking door. Wow. But I mean, it's, you know, it's— and he, same thing. Yeah, he should be Christ.

Yeah. You know, lots of guys.

Eddie Penny, he's got another. He's got the guy I was just telling you about, this kind of a spiritual mentor for me, or he's got a similar situation where it's just like, where I can't remember exactly what happened. Like a voice told him, like, don't fucking move. And then the building gets leveled. I mean, it's just time and time and time again.

You're not going to hear this stuff die until God says So he knows the exact second. He knows. And there's some confidence to take in that. That Bible verse, Proverbs 3:5-6, it's, you know, trust in the Lord with all your heart and do not lean on your own understanding. When I can do that, when I try to figure out, you know, I go through that, China, worrying about China and worrying about, I worry, worry, worry, you know, and what is He says, "Fret not thyself." We're told, "Don't do it to yourself. Be anxious for nothing." He tells us all through scripture, quit doing that 'cause it's a waste of energy. You know, that he's in charge. You know, "Trust in the Lord with all your heart and he will direct your path." I mean, it's always a battle because, I mean, guys like you and me, you know, we believe in doing things and getting it done, you know, go. And we're contingency planners.

Yeah, right. What if this happens? Then we're doing this. What if that goes to shit? Then we're doing that. It goes, you know.

I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I just think as God's kids, we got to be careful where we put too much faith in our own— trust not in our own understanding. And, you know, don't lean on your own understanding. When I have any conflict in my own thinking about Israel, about China, about whatever it is, I can go back to the Word now. And this is something that I think Christians have this huge advantage over the world where we can kind of take the pressure off ourselves. Even in this Iran thing right now, I know that in Ezekiel 38, 30. Now, I know the Bible says clearly, it gives us the play-by-play. Have you ever read that? Do you know what I'm talking about? It gives us the play-by-play of a final big shootout and who the players are. Iran will become allies with Russia, Libya, Turkey, Ukraine, and Arab peoples. It's in Ezekiel 38. They will come against Israel. Israel will stand alone. They're going to have no allies. And so they're going to come against Israel. Israel have no allies. And in this big future shootout— and I'm sure, you know, you have Lee Strobel on here and you got guys who know this 10 times better than I do.

But, but in my own little studies of the Bible, you know, it gives me this. I know we're not going to knock off Iran. I know we're not. Don't get me wrong. I think we're going to decimate them and maybe knock them down a couple of pegs and they're not going to be a problem for a little bit. And I think that's— I'm all for it. But I know we don't get rid of them because Scripture says they're going to be around. They're going to come against Israel with Russia, with Turkey, with Ukraine, with Libya. And anyway, I know that's got to happen. It's prophecy. It's got to happen. Every prophecy, it comes true. All of them. So this is going to happen. And I know it's going to happen. So every time I find myself, you know, getting a little upset about this, you know, why aren't we doing this? Why don't we take Karg Island? You know, why don't we do that? You know, I'm thinking that way. I'm thinking militarily. I'm thinking like a Marine. I know I'm wasting energy because The Lord has this all planned out. This is going to happen.

Everything's going to happen with or without Joni Clark. Although I know I should pray for it. I know I'm commanded to pray about it. But I know that in the end, Israel's going to stand alone. And I mean, you can see it happening. The whole world will basically abandon little Israel. It's Bible prophecy. And when Iran and Russia and all these nations, they're going to be destroyed. They're going to die on the mountains of Israel. They're going to get destroyed. And it even talks about the coastlands of Russia, you know, fire falling on the coast. They're going to get no more Russia, no more Russian army. That's going to be gone. Iran's going to be gone. But we ain't going to do it. God's going to do it. But even in that, two-thirds of the Jews are going to get killed. So God's going to save that third, but they're going to know they were saved by God, not the USA.

That's the way I understand it too. I think a little differently on you than the Iran War. Yeah. But I mean, and but the way that I interpret that is that, I mean, the Jews did kill Jesus and they've always turned their back on God. And the way that I understand this is is that God is going to allow them to be fucking decimated, and they're going— he is going to unveil all of the fucking corruption that is going on inside of Israel. And then when Christ comes back, the remaining Jews will accept Jesus Christ and they will go to heaven. And that's the way I understand it. I don't think Israel is a fucking good guy in this.

I, I— that's it. Oh, I, I— whether— no, I don't, I don't think they're necessarily a good guy. I know I know they're the chosen people. I know that—

Were the chosen people.

I know that God is going to— God's going to take care of these things. Not us, not any human force, that the Lord's going to take care of it. And yeah, they are— the remaining Jews that survive this are going to come to Christ. They're going to realize Jesus Christ was the Messiah. They're going to come to that decision. Uh, but in the meantime, nothing's going to stop this stuff from happening, you know. Nothing. My worrying about it, uh, nothing's going to stop it. It's, it's got to happen. It's Bible prophecy. Yeah. Let me tell you about Guns Up, the miracle with Guns Up. Okay. Okay. It getting published. I told you, like, you know, at first I was an angry mess, and, uh, I was working as a mailman and teaching martial arts at University of South Florida at night. And so I was working two jobs, doing okay. It's like, that's just—

I mean, could you imagine how many people if they knew what the fucking mailman was capable of?

So, well, so I, so I, uh, well, I was really blessed, Sean. I mean, you know, in Okinawa, I, I, by accident, I end up— I trained with, uh, Grandmaster Shimabuku. A really famous old Okinawan. I didn't know he was, he was just another Okinawan to me. But I was ordered out in the ville. We had a lieutenant ahead of his time. He ordered guys with certain wounds to go into the ville and take martial arts from this, this little Okinawan guy. And it ends up being Grandmaster Shimabuku. He was an amazing character. Uh, then I come home there, I can't find a decent Okinawan school, and I switch over to taekwondo and And I mean by accident. My old neighbor was teaching, he was a language expert for the Army in Thailand. He met and trained with Grandmaster Park in Thailand because the King of Thailand asked him to come there and train the Thai people Taekwondo. So this Dong Kun Park that became my Grandmaster that I trained with for the last 50 years, he He ended up being the Olympic coach, the 1992 Olympic coach. He's in the Korean Hall of Fame.

He was just voted by the nation of Korea as the greatest Korean master in Korean history. He had over 280 fights and never lost. He's an amazing little guy. I really, really admire him. And now my wife just showed me a thing of him. He's washing people's feet. As a missionary. Wow. In Guatemala. I think it's Guatemala. Yeah, he's— I just love this guy. And we've been together forever. We've had some adventures. But yeah, so anyway, I lucked out in getting to train with some great men. And I'm just another student. But I lost both those jobs when my back went out on me. And I hurt that back. I was— we were coming in on a hot LZ. The machine gun's the last one off the chopper. You know, when the old CH-46s, you know, with the back ramp goes down, little ramp goes down.

Probably 46s back then, huh?

You run off the back ramp. Well, you know, they hover and guys run off the little back ramp. The front of it hovers because we were under fire. And So all the guys got off, and me and Chan are the last two trying to get to that ramp. And the pilot got killed, and the chopper went out of control, and the co-pilot got control of it, but we're swirling like this, throwing us all over the place inside the chopper. And I got all that gear, you know, 25-pound M60 and on and on. So Chan got off. Now I'm, I don't know how high up in the air, but But he finally gains control of the thing. And I know I've got to get with the guys. And I don't even know how high up I was. I run off that ramp. I landed like an anchor. But I hit mushy, swampy stuff and sank down deep into it and didn't die. Another time, I should have died. And everybody's shooting at me and they can't get me out of the mud. Anyway, I came out of it fine, but that back was never quite the same.

And it finally went. And when it went, now I had to find a way to make a living. And that's when Nancy said, you need to write some of your stories from, you know, Vietnam and fight the liberal media who are lying about what the guys did over there. And you get so angry about it. You can't beat everybody up. You got to I, you know, fight back a smart way and set the record straight. Yeah. And that's what I tried to do. And, but that book was rejected by every publisher from New York to California for 4 years. I told you how I learned, how I wrote it. I kept taking the same writing class over and over and over. Well, my writing professors at St. Pete College thought it was the best war book they ever read. They were sure it's gonna, you know, it's gonna get published here. And they'd give me all these people to send it to. Rejected by everybody. I mean, you couldn't— there was very few publishers that I hadn't sent it to. I don't know if there's any. And so about 4 years into this, Nancy and I started a Bible study class at my pastor's house, and we'd have these memory verses at the end, you know, and you pray for everybody's needs.

You know, there's people fighting cancer, people out of work, and da da da da da. And Nancy, one time she goes, I want prayer for Joni's book to get published. Well, I've got all these four-letter words in this book. I mean, I wrote it to be nonfiction. I didn't know how I could write the dialogue of Marines in combat without all the words we used. And so I did. Well, you know, now I want my kids to know the truth, but I didn't want my kids to hear all that or read that language. I just didn't want them. And I didn't— I started realizing, you know, I don't feel comfortable. And the Holy Spirit was really convicting me. And so anyway, one of the Bible verses that sent me over the edge was, "For those who honor God, God will honor, and those who despise the Lord will be held in little esteem." Well, "For those who honor God, God will honor," that hit me. That really hit me. And you know how you have one verse that just kind of really gets you? That one got me. Convicted me so bad. I finally go to my pastor.

I said, hey, I'm wanting to crawl in a hole every time the prayer group prays for my book to get published yet. If nobody's read it, none of these people have read this thing. And so I gave it to him. I said, read it. And he did. This thing's really vivid and, you know, it's got a lot and da da da. And I said, well, should I Rewrite it, take all the words out. He goes, "Uh-uh, no, that's between you and God. I'm not touching that one." So I go to my writing professors. They go, "Johnny, if you rewrite Guns Up, it's gonna sound like Howdy Doody joins the Marine Corps. You can't, everybody knows Marines don't talk like, you know, they're gonna use the F word all the time. They're gonna do." And so I said, "Well, I can't stand it. It's not getting published anyway." It's gone nowhere in 4, over 4 years. I can't pray about it anymore because I'm so convicted. I'm going to do it. So I sat down, took 6 months. I took all the language out of the book, rewrote the thing. But it's the same war, same stories.

I just took the language out. And what I discovered is it made me maybe a better writer. You know, it's easy to describe anger with a quick 4-letter word.

This probably would have been twice as long. With all those words.

Well, maybe, maybe. So I took all the language out, and the day I finished that rewrite, Nancy and I got a bottle of champagne, popped the champagne and said, Nancy, anchor's off my back. I pray about the book getting published without— I'm done with it. And the next morning, I get a call from Soldier of Fortune magazine and they said, oh, is this Mr. Clark? Da da da da da. We, we've got this, uh, we got this story, uh, you sent us and we want to publish it. I had never had anything published. So I, I said, what story? I never sent you a story. And they go, yeah, you know, you sent us a story, didn't you? You know, about Troy Bridge, da da da da da, out of a book called Guns Up. And I said, well, yeah, that's my— I wrote that. And then he says, he goes— I said, well, wait a minute, when did I send you this? And he goes, let me see. Oh, he sent it to us 4 years ago. And I go, what? Why are you just now finding it? He goes, I don't know. It just turned up in our slush pile.

2 days later, Eagle Magazine calls. It's the exact same story. Whoa. And I say the exact same thing. Why now? Where— why 4 years late? And he goes, oh, I can't answer that. It just turned up in our slush pile. Then American Legion magazine. Holy cow. It's the exact same story. And there was a fourth one. Okay, go ahead and tell me luck. Baloney. I had honored God and now God was honoring me. So I sent the book out again. Again. And now, you know, I started to send it out to publishers again. Within one month, this book that had been rejected by every publisher in New York, North Carolina, California, everywhere I could find a publisher— within one month, 9 publishers now wanted the book. What? And the one that bought it was Random House, biggest publisher in the world. Now they want this book. So I get a phone call from Pam Strickler, the head of She was the senior editor at Random House, at Ballantine Books. And she goes, she starts saying, well, listen, Mr. Clark, we love this book. We want this book. And I said, well, I'm thrilled. But I said, why now?

I mean, why do you want it now? And she says, what do you mean? And I said, well, I had wallpaper. This is something the writing teachers told me to do to keep up your spirits. My whole— my writing office, once we had our second kid, I knocked a hole in our roof of our two-bedroom, one-bath house, and I built a conning tower on top. It was basically a conning tower with little stairs going up to it. Real thrill with Nancy. Did a lot for our living room. But that was my writing room. Well, I wallpapered my writing room with rejection notices. Are you serious? I'm serious. The whole wallpaper. I had rejections from everybody. And I had grown to know, I could tell when somebody actually read it or when it was just a stamp, you know, no thanks. She, I had hers there. And I said, Pam Strickler? And she goes, yes. And I said, I have your rejection letter right here. And I said, you actually read this thing. I can tell. And I read it to her. And she goes, oh. I did read that book. I remember. And I said, well, that was just a year ago.

So why do you want it now? Why do you think it's so great now? I said, is it because I took all the cuss words out? And she said, you mean there's no profanity in this book? And I said, no, none. And she goes, Mr. Clark, that's incredible. All my readers have read this book and loved it. She said, all my junior editors have read this book I've read this book. No one at Random House recognized that there's no profanity in that book. And I said, nope, none. And she goes, that's incredible. She goes, we've never heard of a Vietnam War book without the profanity. And I said, well, yeah. I said, so we have now. And she goes, she said, gosh, well, we want this book. And I said, it's yours. It's free. Great, you're the biggest publisher in the world, please. And she says, she says, but you're going to have to work with us some. And I said, you know, I figured rewrites, I don't know, you know, big. I said, well, sure. And she goes, look, no one's going to believe a Vietnam War book without profanity. She goes, we're going to need you to put some profanity back in this book.

So I said, oh, Satan, you are so good. I don't publish anything for my whole life. Now I got the biggest publisher in the world if I will put the cuss words back in. And I, I, yeah, you know, temptation. I've— yeah, you turned them down. Oh, you bet. No way. Are you kidding? After all, I told her, you get two chances, Pam. Slim and none. It never happened. And she goes, well, okay. And She called me back a little bit later. They bought it anyway. It's now been in print for 42 years. It's been published in Lithuania. It's— I get email from Lithuanian soldiers. One in particular stands out. But this Lithuanian soldier sends me an email saying that all his unit is reading this book. And he goes, Mr. Clark, I just had to tell you that we think this is the greatest war book that God ever wrote. Whoa. Wow. I wish— I mean, come on. I don't even feel like I had anything to do with this book. Honestly, I feel like this is, you know, it's been on autopilot with God from day one. But I don't— the book's a miracle.

It just— it's a miracle. It just keeps going and going. 42 years. And now, you know, I mean, crazy things, the stories that come out of it. I could go on forever, but crazy stories. We had a kid named Frank Burris. He, great kid. He died. We got hit. He died, but he didn't die right away. We stayed with him all night. We didn't even know how bad he was hit. He had some wounds we couldn't see. It's black, and Corman didn't find them, but patched the ones he found. But he carried a picture of his little redheaded daughter. He had a baby he'd never seen. And Frank Burris was from St. Pete. He went to the same high school as my wife. I never knew him. Wow. But he had this baby picture he carried in his helmet because you had to put it in your lining of your helmet to keep it dry. The long story short is this. That picture always stayed up here, you know, and he'd never seen that baby. He wanted to go home so bad. He went to see his baby. Well, he died that night. We couldn't get him medevaced.

Next day, the 101st Cav, or the 1st Cav, or the 101st Airborne, I forgot, but an Army unit. The sky's dark with choppers bringing them a noon meal. We can't get a medevac. And bitter, you know, I mean, this is during Vietnam. We only got hand-me-downs. You know the story behind that. The Marine Corps had to stay. We're going to be defunct. Truman was going to get rid of the Marine Corps. And the only way we stayed a Marine Corps was to prove we could keep a Marine in the field for a third the cost of the Army. And that's how the Marines stayed The Marine Corps. Yeah, he was— great stories about that that these old, these old China hands, old China hand Marines told me. Incredible stories, man. These guys were a hoot. But yeah, so Frank Burris, I wrote that story in there, but I didn't have Frank's real name. I forgot what I called him, but I didn't know anybody. We didn't know each other's names, you know. And so But I knew him. I mean, I knew him like I know you, but I didn't know his name. But anyway, he— 30 years later, maybe more, maybe 35 years later, I hear from this girl.

And she sends me a picture. She gets my email and then she gets my address. And she sent me an email. I contact her back. She said, I think my dad died in Nam with you. And it's Frank Burris. It's Baby Red. That's what we called her, Baby Red, because she had bushy red hair. She had that same picture and she sent me a blowup of it. And it was— she had discovered how her dad died reading that book. But it just, it doesn't stop. I mean, it goes on and on and on. I mean, the stories that that God churns up out of this. And it gave her some peace. Her mom told me, you know, that she needed it so bad. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the book's a flat-out miracle. That's amazing. Yeah, it is. It's a miracle. I don't have much to do with it. I just sit back and marvel. Pretty cool. Wow.

Would that be— that had to just hit like a ton of bricks.

I'm sorry, what?

I mean, just to be connected with her. Oh yeah, I know.

Yeah, yeah. Family members, you know, that Frank Burris's brother has contacted me, and I, you know, he didn't know how he died. And yeah. Yeah, it's, uh, how'd you meet your wife? Uh, a blind date.

A blind date?

Yeah, yeah, blind date. Uh, I was, uh, that Nam vet that they were a little concerned about, and, uh, so they didn't, uh, yeah, it was, it was her best friend and, uh A guy that I went to high school with came over, you know, trying to set me up. You know, I was maybe spending too much time alone, they thought, you know, and da da da da. Well, they come over and her best friend had stolen her license to show me her picture. Well, I took one look at this license and I go, yeah, no thanks. We'll skip this one. And she'd go, No, no, no, she's really beautiful. And I, I think, yeah, thanks anyway. No, no, she's hot. And now Terry, the guy, is telling me, no, no, I wouldn't, I wouldn't lead you wrong. She— and it goes, she lives right around the corner down here, you know, just, just about block and a half away from you. And I said, well, where? I mean, all around the corner. And I said, but she's got black hair, da da da. I said, wait a minute. Does she have a little brown Toyota?

And she goes, yeah. And I said, does she wash her car in a bikini out front sometimes? And they go, well, I guess so. And I go, okay, let's go on that blind date. So we go on a blind date. I win a free pass.

And did you ask her when she's going to wash her car next?

Oh, I was quickly dirtying up her car. We— so we go to the old Beach Theater, which a real old theater out on St. Pete Beach, and, uh, go and get— buy popcorn, you know, our first blind date. And in the popcorn, we won a free pass to a second movie. So we had an immediate second date. And yeah, yeah, the rest is history. We just celebrated our 49th wedding anniversary.

Congratulations.

Yeah, thanks. Yeah. Wow. That's old. 49 years. 49 years.

Man, that's amazing.

Yeah, 5 grandkids. You know, how did that happen?

Beautiful.

Yeah, it is. They make life so much fun. They really keep you young, the grandkids. And now I'm teaching them a little bit of martial arts, you know, some just, you know, simple takedowns and chokeouts. Simple takedowns and chokeouts. I want my— I got one little granddaughter that Yeah, I think I can teach her how to kill people. She's got potential. Now they all do. They're all, they're just great kids. And they, I mean, they already know Bible verses, you know, that just, you know, I wish I had that much scriptural knowledge when I was a little kid. Me too. I really do. I mean, it pays off the rest of your life. You know, they can— these tough questions come up or tough times. God tells— he's got a whole instruction manual if you just read it. Yeah.

Well, Johnny, we're wrapping up the interview.

All right, brother.

But I've got a hot question here for you. Oh boy. You ready? Yeah. You were 18 years old when you got to Vietnam, a Marine M60 machine gunner with 5th Marines. Machine gunners had to— had a 10— excuse me, machine gunners had a 7 to 10 second life expectancy once a firefight started. You were the number one target on the battlefield because every enemy soldier wanted to silence that gun first. Walk me through your combat loadout and be as descriptive as you can for the viewer, and tell me if your loadout ever changed throughout your time in Vietnam.

Wow, that's a good question. I don't know if I can answer it properly. I can tell you this, 20-round burst if you wanted to stay alive. Sometimes you couldn't, sometimes you had to lay on the trigger. And I think If you were so concerned about the other guys, you know, I mean, the machine gun was really critical to a grunt platoon. You had to have the gun. I mean, you could keep the enemy heads down, ducking lead. You could do something to allow your grunts to stay alive. I did fire it a couple of times so much that There were a couple of times where you could see the rounds going through the barrel of the M60. Literally, you could see it. It would go red hot, and then you knew you were in trouble. And see, the Marine Corps, we didn't have any spare barrels. That's another reason. Oh, you guys don't have spare barrels? My whole time, I never had a spare barrel. So, you know, if you had to, you'd pee on that barrel to, you know, just to get the temperature down, make that sucker— you pour your canteens on it, anything to keep it from— because if it melted, Now you got a .45 and a K-Bar, you know, and now you, so, but a couple of times, yeah, fired until it would go red hot.

And then when it went white hot, at white hot, you literally could see the, you know, the round, not every round, but you'd see rounds going through that barrel. You could actually see rounds. And now it's red or white hot. It's like having a light on you. In the middle of a night battle. Lightsaber. Yeah, yeah. Now you've got a big spotlight on you.

Did you ever, did you ever blow a barrel out?

Uh, I, I, oh, I pulled barrels out.

Yeah, I mean like where the round comes out the side. Did you ever have that happen?

No, that never happened to me, but I, I could see where it could happen, but it didn't happen to me. But I did, I did burn out a barrel at one time. And, you know, and then we had to steal a barrel off from a gunner on a chopper. He didn't want to give it up. And Sam the Blooper Man convinced him.

How many rounds would you need?

We need that barrel more than you do. Yeah. No shit. You're firing from way up there. We're eye to eye. Give us the barrel. Anyway, so yeah, I burned out a barrel. I might have burned out a couple.

How many rounds would you carry?

I've carried, uh, 400 myself, uh, and sometimes more, but 400 was usual. But so you're supposed to have ammo humpers. Well, that's why you have a 5-man team, but I didn't have a 5-man team. It was just me and sometimes me and Chan, but sometimes Chan had to take over another gun, and now you're all alone, or they give you a grunt to try to help. But yeah, you're supposed to have a 5-man team and all of them carry 400 rounds each. So the grunts had to carry, you know, I mean, the grunts, they didn't like it. They got enough weight of their own, but now they're having to carry machine gun ammo. So, you know, everybody looks like a Mexican bandit, but everybody's carrying a few hundred rounds and they hated it until We hit the crown. Really need it. Yeah. And then, but they were always happy to run, throw these 100-round belts. Hey, Clark, here. They're throwing those belts at me. Get this weight off me, man. So yeah, but yeah, I think, you know, you couldn't waste ammo. And I don't know the lowdown. I'm not sure if that answers it, but And you had to keep that gun clean.

You know, in the jungle, boy, if you didn't keep that gas cylinder spit-shined, it's going to jam. And if it jammed, you know, you, I mean, you'd catch crap from, you know, your sergeants and so forth. But worse than that, you know, Marines are going to die if that thing jammed. So really had to be careful about cleaning that thing. And that wasn't easy. I mean, the jungle was everything. It rotted everything. I mean, I would come in sometimes with all my clothes would have been ripped apart. Really half naked. We would come in when walk into An Hoa combat base and we'd have Vietnamese laughing at us. Serious, this truly happened. We're walking, humping in, you know, I got the 60 over my shoulder, we're humping in and I had to cut the whole part of my trousers out because I had dysentery. So you don't stop and go to the bathroom, you just drain while you walk. Well, a few weeks out in the jungle or more, your clothes are totally shredded. So we walked into An Wah a couple of times and, you know, half naked some of us. And yeah, toothbrush, couldn't use my toothbrush.

We had to use it to clean the gas cylinder on the 60. Yeah. So when you did brush your teeth, you were brushing with oil, gun oil, and you had to use the right kind of gun oil. You had to be careful there. Sometimes the Marines gave us gun oil that it just wasn't the best. It would get, it'd be no good in the rain and the humidity sometimes, you know, it wasn't. So there was usually the Army had good gun oil.

When's the last time you fired an M60?

Okay, I hadn't fired an M60 since 1968, last night in Nam. And a bunch of Marines from Iraq and Afghanistan, young Marines, all machine gunners, they've read the books, you know, they're in machine gun school, they're told to read them. So they contacted me and they flew me to Pennsylvania wanted me to shoot an M60 machine gun again. And they brought a Marine Corps cameraman. It was a combat cameraman to come out there and get pictures of it. And so it was, you know, like, I don't know, 20 to 30 of these young guys, you know, young Marines, all gunners, you know, they were all, most of them were all gunners. And so I did, you know, I was excited about it, but I haven't fired a 60 since 19— that's 50 years or so, you know, it's so I, you know, I don't know, am I going to embarrass myself or what? And they got it all ready for me, you know, taught me a little bit. It started coming back, some of the ins and outs. And then— Like riding a bike, huh? Yeah, yeah, it came back. It came back. But, you know, I had forgotten, you know, just— And so anyway, I was ready.

And so we start firing. They had— it's probably 150 yards away. I mean, when you look at the little video, you can blow it up and you'll see that's a truck and a car down there and an old washing machine. And I don't, I think that's about it, but it's out on a farm in Pennsylvania and it's down in like a little valley so that the rounds won't, you know, you got sort of something for it to hit if you blow it. And so anyway, I opened fire on this thing and Loved it. But I couldn't see where my rounds were landing because they didn't want to use tracer rounds. They were afraid it might start a forest fire or something. So I finally said, you know, after a little bit, hey guys, I can't see where my rounds are landing. I, you know, I don't know if I'm hitting the target or not. I don't like that. And so, so this one young Marine goes, I got this, sir. And he comes out with a little jar of— is it Tannerite? Is that what it's called? Yeah. Yeah, a little jar of tannery. It had a red label on it.

And, you know, it's just a little jar. I mean, tiny, like a jar of pickles. And he runs out there, you know, and it's pretty good distance. He runs out there with this jar and he puts it on top of this washing machine and then runs back and he goes, you'll know if you hit that, sir, you know. And I go, well, okay, you know. And, you know, I mean, 76-year-old eyes here, and I'm going, God, I think I see a little red dot. And I did. I could see the little red dot that was on that. It was a label. And I say, okay, let's go. And, you know, so I go to shoot, and they're all going, no, sir, sir, you'll never hit that shooting from the hip. You gotta go on the bipod. You need a scope to hit that. You know, the new machine guns have scopes. And I said, Yeah, I know. I don't like that. I don't like scopes. I said, you know, I need to feel it, see it. And they said, well, sir, it's just a waste of ammo. Well, let me try it. So I haven't fired one in 50 years.

And I opened about maybe a 20-round burst. And it blew up. And it blew up. It blew the washing machine, the whole lid up. Blew it up. Boom. And that's That's what you see in the video is me going, "Yeah!" Nice. So after that, all these young gunners, I mean, they were blown away. They were cheering me. They were proud of you.

Anyways, about that scope, ladies.

One of those, you know, one of those old man moments, you know, where you show the young guys you still got it. But, you know, it was fun. It was fun for the moment. So all the young machine gunners, they all, they got to do this now. And they had like 3 M60s out there. So, I mean, these crazy Marines, they had a minigun on the back of a truck. I'm not making that up. Crazy guys. I, you know, I love these guys. That's some gangster shit right there. Oh yeah. Yeah. Anyway, so, so they all tried it with the M60. And, uh, all of them tried it from the hip, and, you know, because they ran out with another jar of Tannerite, and, uh, nobody could do it. And they kept trying. Then they started shooting from the bipod, you know, down on the ground and aiming, aiming at it, and, uh, nobody could hit it. Damn, that's awesome. So finally, some freaking jarhead with a sniper scope, it shot it with a sniper, you know, sniper rifle, and he blew it up. But, uh, Yeah, so it was one of those fun moments where you get slaps on the back from young guys, which felt good.

That's cool, man. Yeah, they enjoyed it too. They got a kick out of it. Still have the same Ka-Bar? Oh yeah, I still got a Ka-Bar.

Oh, cool. Same one?

Oh no, no, not same one. No, they took everything from me. Yeah, I had an SKS that I tagged, you know, if you if you killed an NVA with a single-shot weapon, if you had the chance, if you could tag it, you know, send it back to the rear on the, you know, chopper bringing in food or something. And they were supposed to put it away for you. So when you went back to the States, you could take single-shot weapons home. And yeah, some Pogue in the rear stole my SKS. Go figure. Yeah, but I, I got one. I got an SKS now. That's, it's pretty cool. It just still, it got the big bayonet.

I got one too, an SKS. Yeah. Oh sweet, I'll pull it out here. The bayonet? Yep. Oh, bayonet and a .45.

Oh yeah, Colt .45. Colt .45. Although the truth is, the one time I had to pull that .45 out, ran out of ammo or something, I don't know, who knows why, and, uh, it was, it was rusted so bad it wouldn't work. Well, I took care of the machine gun, but, you know, kind of ignored that .45 on there because I didn't plan on ever using that. Yeah.

What do you think of 9mm?

Oh, I like them. Yeah, I mean, I like— I— yeah. Do you have a 9mm? Uh, I— yeah, I think I do. I got a 9mm, but, uh, uh, what is it? I think I've got an old— I mean, it's not a military, it's, it's a civilian 9mm. Uh, I think I got an old Beretta.

Oh, right on. I think it's a Beretta.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure it's a Beretta.

Well, I got you another present. Oh God, a silencer? That's right. Oh man, I mean, I tried to get you a machine gun, but I just, I couldn't get the paperwork done in time. So, oh gosh, man, I got a buddy over at Sig, his name's Jason. He's got a soft spot for Vietnam vets just like the rest.

Oh, Jason, thanks buddy.

So that is a 9mm Sig Sauer P365 Macro with a Sig flashlight, the brand new optics line. So it's got a red dot on there. The Sig suppressor from Silencer Shop. A silencer? Silencer Shop is awesome. They do— super easy to get the silencers from— suppressors from them. Allowed to have silencers? Well, you're unlucky, live in Florida. So Silencer Shop's going to ship you a brand new can or suppressor down to Florida for you, and you'll be able to put that on that weapon right there. They'll take care of all the paperwork. The other thing I love about Silencer Shop is they They stand up for gun rights for us. Yeah, gun enthusiasts. So they're fucking awesome company. Sig is amazing. God, that's great, that thing. I mean, we're talking some fucking pews. Oh, no spit. 17 rounds in the magazine plus 1 in the pipe. Oh, 17 rounds. 17 rounds.

Oh man. Oh, my son's going to be trying to steal this from me. Don't let him. Okay. Oh yeah. Gosh, this is beautiful, man. Thanks. Well, maybe you can sleep with that thing now. It done? Yeah, I did. Done. Nancy won't even know when I've shot somebody, right? Right on. She could still sleep, and I'll wake her up the next day and tell her, oh, by the way, Oh gosh, thanks, man. What a great— what a great gift. You're welcome. I feel cheap now giving you books and a sweatshirt.

No, you kidding? I'm gonna wear that shirt everywhere. Oh God. But, um, all right, one last question. Yeah. Do you think your buddy Chen would want to come on?

Do I what?

Do you think your buddy Chen would want to come on the show? Oh, I don't know.

He might. I'd love to interview him. He might. I'll talk to him. I'll tell you, I know some great men that probably would do it quicker, but Major Scott Huesing, do you know him? No. He wrote Echo in Ramadi. And he went from, as a lance corporal, he read Guns Up. And now as a retired major, and he came to see me. And Guns Up was huge with him and all the guys. I think it was in, I know he was in Ramadi, of course, but I think he was in Iraq or the first Gulf War before that, I'm not even sure, wherever he read guns up, they handed out guns up and they would tear it in sections for a squad to share it. And so he said, now he's, you know, in his 50s and he shows up at my front door and I didn't know this guy. And he goes, my name is Major Scott Huesing and I've wanted to meet you ever since I was a Lance Corporal. And Got to know him real good. He's with the 4th Marines. And this book, Echo in Ramadi, you'd probably relate to that a lot more than Nam stuff.

But yeah, anyway, yeah, he's one. I will, I'll talk to Chad. Perfect. See what he says. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. God, this is, this has been so, I've been so excited about this. Me too. I've been, and I've been Way too anxious. I had to pray, you know, be anxious for nothing, probably 100 times. Just, I had to chill out a little bit. I was so excited about it. Well, ever since it started when Jaco came on your show and suggested me, and all my friends sent me, Jaco told Sean Ryan to have you on, da da da da, you know? And I mean, from that moment, I've been nervous. Giacomo's an awesome dude, man. I've been excited, but you know, are you? Yeah. God, this is great. I love this thing.

You haven't even shot it yet. I know, but I love it. Ah, you're gonna love it. Oh yeah, it's not raining out there. We can crack a couple rounds off. Oh, let's do. All right, all right. You want to end this with a prayer? I do. How about you? Okay.

Okay, I better put my weapon down. I don't know if God appreciates that. Father God, we come before you, Lord, to give thanks. I want to thank you with all my heart for taking care of me through all this and getting me, just getting me on this podcast. I don't believe in accidents, and I know Sean doesn't either, Lord. We want to give you thanks for a million and one blessings. Thank you, Lord, for the calling you've put on his life. Uh, thank you for using him in such a mighty way and giving him this voice that, that's reaching so many people and giving him the courage to stand up for Christ. That's not easy in this world, Lord. It's really hard sometimes. Father, keep Keep encouraging Sean with that kind of courage, and don't let any of Satan's attacks— and we know there's going to be some, there's always Satan's attacks, especially when a Christian's doing something. If a Christian's on the sideline doing nothing, Satan leaves him alone. But when you got a man like Sean who's stepping up and stepping out front, he's He's walking point, God, and that's, that's hard to do down here, and you know it.

So bless him, bless this show, bless his family, and we just want to give you all the thanks and the praise in Jesus' name. Amen. Amen. Thank you, brother. Yeah, pal.

Johnny. Yeah. It was an honor.

Oh, thanks, man.

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