[SPEAKER_01]: Good morning.

[SPEAKER_01]: Welcome to Solidcast, number of fifty-seven.

[SPEAKER_01]: My name is John Striker-Mire.

[SPEAKER_01]: I'll be your host today.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as always, we always thank Jockel-Willing Productions for sponsoring this along with Solid Chronicles.

[SPEAKER_01]: And today we're honored to have a return guest to Solidcast.

[SPEAKER_01]: The last time he was here for Solidcast, number thirty-three and thirty-four.

[SPEAKER_01]: Dale Hanson talked about his first book, which was Born twice.

[SPEAKER_01]: which was if you haven't read it yet by all means get the book and feel free to go back to sawcast, thirty three and thirty four which is available on both Apple Spotify and on YouTube now.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we're here today because when we had the last interview [SPEAKER_01]: I said, Dale, if you write another book, or I hope you do, please come back.

[SPEAKER_01]: But he's back.

[SPEAKER_01]: He's with another book, which is, sag, miss, sag, missions to the well.

[SPEAKER_01]: So Dale, welcome to the show.

[SPEAKER_01]: Thank you, sir.

[SPEAKER_01]: Ordinarily, I would start off with some of your great writing first.

[SPEAKER_01]: But again, your first book was born twice, unique title, amongst our song books.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now we're talking about sawing missions to the well, talking me about the title a little bit.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sir, first and foremost, the title was actually taken from the Bible a little bit indirectly.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of my great heroes would be David in the Bible.

[SPEAKER_00]: David was born in Bethlehem in the Bible.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was his home, Tony was there until actually he was brought into the kingdom.

[SPEAKER_00]: He became a king of Israel.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in the interval of time, as he became the king and he was a great warrior, the Philistine army invaded the land.

[SPEAKER_00]: And their army was between Bethlehem and his army.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they fought for a long time, a very, very difficult battle.

[SPEAKER_00]: And at the end of a day of battle, [SPEAKER_00]: David laid back and in my imagination, he leaned against a, wasn't a soundbag, but it was a, you know, a tree or something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he leaned against the tree and he said to himself, oh, what I would give for a drink of water from the well and Bethlehem.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, that was his hometown and everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he was saying it to himself, but he didn't realize it, but three of his warriors hurt it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And out of their loyalty and love for their leader, the three men fought their way through the entire Philistine army, went to the well and Bethlehem got a flask of water, fought the way entirely back through the Philistine army and presented it to their king.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that was on their love and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of drove me to this title where you do these missions and they're so selfless and so difficult and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And our missions might have just seemed like a drink of water, but they are profound in their importance and what we say.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so in a way, a personifies our song, our mission is as difficult as they were doing it for a country and so forth, was like doing a mission to the well, fighting through the entire army, coming back with a piece of information sometimes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and indeed, for any of our first time viewers with Saag, it was the eight-year secret war conducted during the Vietnam War.

[SPEAKER_01]: From nineteen sixty-four to nineteen seventy-two, and we had misses that were running across the fence in the Layhouse Cambodia and North Vietnam, all top secret.

[SPEAKER_01]: all of the participants signed NDA's non-disclosure agreements with the government saying that we couldn't and wouldn't talk about any of this for at least twenty years.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the missions were amongst the most dangerous and had a very high cash rate because the record keeping was so poor.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it was top secret a lot of records were destroyed at the end of the eight-year secret war.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's never been able to directly get an exact precise number of the even our KIAs or our MIAs missing in action.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so that's why we're here.

[SPEAKER_01]: The sag stories are part of a unique niche and military history.

[SPEAKER_01]: And over the years since we've left now, we're writing books about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: the majority of the people today's veterans.

[SPEAKER_01]: the men that are served in G-Watt for twenty years, and then generations in between, they say all of them have had hard missions, but they all come back and say, but we had nothing like what sag wasn't up against.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's why we're doing this and we're grateful to Joko willing for bank ruling this project on sagcast.

[SPEAKER_01]: And getting back to the whole POWMIA case, [SPEAKER_01]: In the book, you go to a case involving Sebastian Deluca, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And if you could just give us a little bit of background about who he was and then at that moment when it was you or Mike that met him in Thailand where he says, I'm A-wall and why?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it started to look up when we were going through training group, first special forces was our first sergeant.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's a small guy, very wirey and small, but kind of like you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, not as cute though.

[SPEAKER_00]: The look of was what had a knack of the first sergeant first and foremost, but he had a knack of being able to chew you out.

[SPEAKER_00]: I love you at the same time.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's an amazing guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He just absolutely loved his people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And after we became, uh, Levin asks, you know, uh, Levin asks school.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, that's the military intelligence, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because within a green beret team, we had different, uh, [SPEAKER_01]: job descriptions, eleven f's intelligence, and then we have the deltas, medics, recos, recomo, then we have the weapons, and as well as the demolitions.

[SPEAKER_01]: Those are our five different MOSs, military jobs.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we all went to Vietnam and I think this was, I don't know what tour because I did three tours but I don't remember what tour it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was toward the end and our camp had a thing where if you had a really difficult mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: They would say, you know, there's the empty seat on the plane going to Bangkok once you just go take a week off.

[SPEAKER_00]: And a couple of us did.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't remember what mission it was that gave us that privilege.

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyways, we went to the Special Forces Hotel in Bangkok, Thailand, which was the Opera Hotel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was a small hotel, but it seemed to be where we all went.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Mike Buckland was there.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we were having dinner inside the little cafeteria that they had.

[SPEAKER_00]: and then walks Normandy, Deluca Sebastian Deluca, Tony, what he calls himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Tony Deluca comes in there and he goes, whoa, you know, and he just recognizes us, which is fascinating, because he hadn't seen us for a couple years and we were simply trained, trained easier.

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, he comes to our table and he's just so happy and gearless and all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we're visiting with him and he's just excited.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we were talking to him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And finally he says, we said, what are you doing now?

[SPEAKER_00]: And he tells us that these in Saigon in up thirty five.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was these in the headquarters.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he said he has privy to all the MIAs and the POWs.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's telling us [SPEAKER_00]: that far from not knowing where POWs were.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said our government knew exactly who was captured and exactly where they were.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said he knew if they were in Czechoslovakia or Russia or China, North Vietnam in the jungles in Cambodia or in Laos or Cambodia.

[SPEAKER_00]: They knew exactly where they were and I don't know how they'd tracked them whether it was satellite or what it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he knew if they were in bamboo cages or stock haze or pinned to a tree.

[SPEAKER_00]: Tony's demeanor completely changed.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I just can't stand to see our POWs left there when our country knows that they're there and has the ability to go get them if he wants.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so anyway, we're saying, well, what are you doing now, Tony, what are you going to leave or something?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then he looks around the room and he whispers to us.

[SPEAKER_00]: He lowers his voice.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I'm A-wall.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I've actually gone A-wall, which throws out his entire career of twenty-thirty years of being able to walk for our first listeners are away without leave, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway Tony says I'm able and he confies and it looks around make sure there's nobody in the area and he says I can't stand to think of our POWs there and we're not doing anything about he says I'm gonna go get him says I cash in all my money my chains my bots you know the gold chains.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah [SPEAKER_00]: took all of his resources converted into something by which he could get help higher mercenaries by a prisoner or something but he says I'm going to go get him I'm going to go get him tonight and I saw him a few hours later I was alone in the cafeteria and he comes in and Tony and I talk for quite a while [SPEAKER_00]: And he says, this is it.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I believe, and then a cab comes in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Tony gets up, and he wishes to be by, and we hug, and then he goes off.

[SPEAKER_00]: About two days later, we still have our in our leave.

[SPEAKER_00]: And a couple of our guys from Song come into the join us at the table.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, do you know what happened to Tony Deluca?

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was playing kind of coy and quiet because I didn't know if they knew he went awl.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it turned out it was worse than that that he not only had gone awl, but he had been killed.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the first story, the immediate story that came out was the CIA killed him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was pretty shocked, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: the CIA killed him, but it was the immediate story without equivocation, without any doubt in the tellers' mind.

[SPEAKER_00]: The CIA got him, and then I deal, why?

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I had the first thing that occurred to me, but number one, he came from up, thirty-five, which was top-city great.

[SPEAKER_00]: The ones who give us our orders, they couldn't [SPEAKER_00]: risk having someone like that captured and perhaps tortured and expel the beans.

[SPEAKER_00]: The other thing is that we really didn't want our POWs and we've had many opportunities to get our POWs back and America has left them and I've got personal experience talking to people.

[SPEAKER_00]: after World War II, how we left over five thousand in the Gulag and made no attempt whatsoever to get them out.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that was the first intermediate story.

[SPEAKER_00]: After about two or three days and by the time I got back to Vietnam, they sanitized the story.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's my word choice to sanitize the story.

[SPEAKER_00]: The people who retold the story probably think that we've got more information, more [SPEAKER_00]: resources more intelligent and we've come to a better conclusion that he was killed by bandits and that was a sanitized story but you know there's the two aspects and I believe the the initial one is the one that first came out they got him on the road they shot him eighteen times left him in the ditch and they wanted I believe [SPEAKER_00]: that everybody would know and believe that it was the CIA who did it.

[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, any American who goes on on their own, this is what's going to happen to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's the initial story.

[SPEAKER_00]: The sanitized story is simply that he was killed by outlaws because they saw the gold that he had probably saw a portion of the chains that were around his neck.

[SPEAKER_00]: although nor annoying him and of course seeing him in the house ten of the opera hotel in Bangkok.

[SPEAKER_00]: There was no indication of wealth or money.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wasn't displaying anything at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I doubt that he in the jungles around the highways would have done that either.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, he would have been better than that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, it's a sad part of American history.

[SPEAKER_00]: And America has that, you know, for a wonderful and a great country, but we don't really work that hard for our PDABs.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the apostrophe that I would put on the end of that story that lives segment there, when kissing our Secretary of State went to get our PDABs at Operation Homecoming, [SPEAKER_00]: which bears out this idea, we knew how many POWs were out there and who they were and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Kissinger went there with a list of eleven hundred and twenty or something like that, almost twelve hundred, I think, POWs that American POWs by name and so forth that we knew that they had.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Kissinger went over with the list and an operation homecoming when the people were coming out.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were marking the names off the list.

[SPEAKER_00]: but there were about two hundred people and there's more than that with two hundred some who were released that we didn't know that they had, which was unusual, usually we didn't know them all.

[SPEAKER_00]: But there were about four to six hundred that kissing or knew that they had.

[SPEAKER_00]: that he didn't get back and they were mainly pilots and green berets.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he knew that they had them and they didn't really, some didn't put them on the list.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so Kissinger rather than say, hey, where's the rest of our people?

[SPEAKER_00]: Kissinger folded up the list, put it in a shirt pocket.

[SPEAKER_00]: and said to his aid, those are acceptable casualties for peace.

[SPEAKER_00]: In other words, Kissinger, by the fiat of the State Department, said that we want to have this peace accord, and if we have to leave POWs, we'll do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that is the kind of the apostrophe at the end of it all.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have a bad history, and I have a tendency to talk too long when I was in high school.

[SPEAKER_00]: Six great I think it was I met a man named John Noble and he was came out of World War II and John Noble was a German-American his family was came from Germany originally but they had a factory in Germany and the Nazis took over the country and John Noble was [SPEAKER_00]: Went over to check on the factories and when he went over there Hitler grabbed them stuck in in a concentration camp And so he spent the entire war there in a concentration camp So that they could just simply get a rid of them and then they can seize his camera or his factory [SPEAKER_00]: Well, he spent the entire year in the Gulag and a lot of way up in the North Country.

[SPEAKER_00]: And when the Russians over took Germany rather than freeing the POWs that were in the German camps, they simply made the Russians and the Russian POWs and put them in their trains, haul them off into Siberia.

[SPEAKER_00]: And John Noble had a photographic memory.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he wrote down in his mind the list of the names of five thousand Americans with their name and personal data and so forth, who were still in the Gulag and he had that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Noble got out of the country because he was able to smuggle his name and contact information to a Swiss diplomat who happened to come through.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so through the Swiss diplomat, Eisenhower, got his personal release, and then he gave all the information that he had to, the State Department, and to this day, not a single one of those five thousand Americans were ever released.

[SPEAKER_00]: We simply left them there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we did it in other wars, and so forth, Korea, and others we simply leave them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's one of the horrific things that America has done, and I do not know what is wrong with our psyche.

[SPEAKER_00]: That we would leave the people, the King David's who risk all.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it is the phenomena that has persisted over war after war.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's a horrific thing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and just for the record today, and this is being recorded on July the seventeenth, twenty twenty five.

[SPEAKER_01]: And today, from the Vielan War, there are still one thousand five hundred and sixty nine Americans that are still officially listed as missing an action.

[SPEAKER_01]: Body is not recovered.

[SPEAKER_01]: And out of that list, we have, um, fifty eight green berets from [SPEAKER_01]: from the special operations, the missions across the fence and lay out the Cambodian.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then they've also documented, at least, eighty three aviators, from Hillocopter, Phanthons, A.

One Sky Raiders that got shot down supporting our teams on the ground, during the eight year of Secret War.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that always just nalls at me a little bit.

[SPEAKER_01]: and of course just a little future side note the uh...

at the fifth special forces group at today at Fort Campbell they're working with the special forces association chapter thirty eight putting together a special forces memorial from the Vietnam war and we're going to have the name of all the green berets that were killed in action as well as the missing an action and the last headcount was seven hundred ninety eight all together well [SPEAKER_01]: So that includes the fifty-eight sag, MIAs, and there's forty SF men from eight camp battles like Langveye, Mike Forrest, or the Delta Project, where the men were missing and hasn't been still missing today.

[SPEAKER_01]: And, you know, the whole PILWMIA issue with the Department of PILWMIA Accountability Agency [SPEAKER_01]: the primary mission and they give lip service to that as Vietnam.

[SPEAKER_01]: But over the last few years, they're doing more going for the numbers, getting more bodies recovered, and that includes World War II and Korea, where initially the missions were strictly for Vietnam.

[SPEAKER_01]: So spread out and again, it's one more side light of the government's inaction on a topic that's near and dear to our hearts.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's the whole POW issue.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I've never heard that noble story before.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just incredible.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there was a book written several years ago called Kiss the Boys Goodbye.

[SPEAKER_00]: Many years ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, a lot of time ago.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it kind of documents so much of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think Anne's mill, who's Griffith, I think she travels with some of the things in there, but nonetheless, there's so much documentation.

[SPEAKER_00]: The story, of course, is about Howard, you know, a most accurate man, right now.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's, he was then sergeant, Bob Howard at Kantium, at the F would be two before it became CCC and sixty-nine.

[SPEAKER_01]: And three times he's put in for the Medal of Honor, the third time, which was a mission in December of nineteen sixty-eight.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right, and President Johnson awarded him the Medal of Honor and sixty-nine.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a store in Bolivia and two others.

[SPEAKER_00]: One was, I think this name is O'Danville, and I forget the third name.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the three of them were sent to look for POWs across the levels, I think it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's another thing I think the United States has a tendency to send research teams to where they know there are no POWs.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they sent Bob Howard and two other guys, the most decorated man in American history, to look for these POWs, and they worked the way across the jungle and over the hills.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they come across this site, and I think the State Department figured there's nothing there.

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, they're looking across with binoculars and they see, and by count, twenty-six American POWs are blocking in the compound.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he is looking at the force of enemy and how many people they had to get.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was too much, of course, for three people.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he calls back on the radio and he says send in the Delta team.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's too many of them for us to handle.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's twenty-six Americans down there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that supposedly that has gone back to Bob Howard was liquidate the merchandise.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, yes, and Bob Howard says the way and he comes back.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they send helicopters to get the three guys.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they arrest Bob Howard for desertion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and all of a sudden, wait a minute, the most decorate man in history.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're not going to get very far with that dumb charge.

[SPEAKER_00]: Then O'Daniel sees that there's something really awful that he takes off on a run.

[SPEAKER_00]: He wants up getting stabbed in Bangkok.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't remember what happened to the third person.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that's an anecdote that has persisted out after the war.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems to have disappeared.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that story was there for quite a while.

[SPEAKER_00]: Liquidate the merchandise.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my God.

[SPEAKER_01]: So was that mission during the Vietnam War or after?

[SPEAKER_01]: After.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because there's a couple of attempts [SPEAKER_01]: to go back to Leos and there's so many different boggles stories on it.

[SPEAKER_01]: It all kind of we never really get a clear definitive answer to any of those stories.

[SPEAKER_01]: But again, another first I didn't realize Bob Howard.

[SPEAKER_01]: Now we had to go read Bob Howard's book.

[SPEAKER_01]: There's a new book out on Bob by Steve Moore.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I got to read that.

[SPEAKER_01]: All right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Moving, changing talk, anything further on that?

[SPEAKER_01]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: Talking there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's just one that's near and dear to all of our sagman hearts.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it's just, I think, with some point, you just got to say, they're not going to come home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think you're right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the majority of the family members are past the way.

[SPEAKER_01]: And I think the saddest part of that POW issue is a lot of families [SPEAKER_01]: when their siblings or sons or went missing in action, they were told they're missing in action, running missions deep into enemy territory, without ever saying anything about what the secret war was, they're valid because all those guys went down fighting.

[SPEAKER_01]: and there may be a couple cases of we have to cast these from a cubby riders getting killed but still they're in action right missing in action and running those top secret missions so well change gears a little bit here because one of the reasons why we invite you back is because of the writing in the book and there's little things like even we just begin chapter one [SPEAKER_01]: now you have these little descriptions so like this is the way the book begins and it's that morning before the mission before the choppers poked their way through the fog between us and play coup and play coup was your launch site for a contum out of FB two and CCC [SPEAKER_01]: Before our team slogged our way to the air strip, and our sterile uniforms, and waited to be dropped far behind enemy lines, I stood there before a mirror in the latrine, with a camouflage stick in one hand, and prepared to die.

[SPEAKER_01]: The electric charge of adrenaline I felt when we received this mission hadn't worn off.

[SPEAKER_01]: Indeed, resided in me as a tenant.

[SPEAKER_01]: This would be a hard one to survive.

[SPEAKER_01]: We had taken a prisoner a few days before in the same area.

[SPEAKER_01]: We aimed for his thigh so we could not get away so he could not get away.

[SPEAKER_01]: But with him barely walking and blindfolded and the enemy in full chase, we wondered if we would make it out at all.

[SPEAKER_01]: The calmness were aware of the closest LZ, we were in their backyard, and it was a great race for them to kill us during the chase, or ended at the clearing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Casually slowed us, and the North Vietnamese were right behind us.

[SPEAKER_01]: They crashed through the brush, shouting orders.

[SPEAKER_01]: sending their rifle grenades on our directions.

[SPEAKER_01]: Kavi arrived barely in time in a small aircraft, calling gunships and fast moorers, bringing death to the NVA.

[SPEAKER_01]: In the end, as the helicopter's descended, and we were boarding our captive, a bullet struck the prisoner in the center of the left of his chest and killed him.

[SPEAKER_01]: His eyes rolled back to the whites.

[SPEAKER_01]: He slumped for it and rolled from the strut.

[SPEAKER_01]: Later, I was in the men's hall.

[SPEAKER_01]: The mess hall, still in my patchless dirty uniform, I wondered if one of their own made careful aim and killed their comrade, less he'd be taken alive and talked.

[SPEAKER_01]: We were going back to try it again.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's just one POW mission that you went out with that with with our T-flard.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was our T-flard.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't actually remember which one because that happened more than once.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, yeah, you don't think you're going to survive the next mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I remember on that one, I'm particularly, there's a protocol to put on camouflage, of course, and, yeah, I reversed it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that because the communist one time we got that another POW once and he was shot in the thigh too.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was actually visiting him in our dispensary and I was spending a little more time there because I was afraid our montniers would sneak in and kill him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh yeah, big enemy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was talking to him and he understood English.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he looked at us and he says, you know, can die.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, you come from ground.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, you green.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, you already dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: We know can kill.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this terror.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I remember more than once I wanted these missions where I didn't think I was going to live.

[SPEAKER_00]: I put on the camouflage, but on this one time, I reversed everything.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whether recesses were rather than make them lighter, I mean, I'm darker.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I was essentially a skull in green.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I thought, well, if they're going to think that, if I'm going to die in this one, I'm going to take as many of them as I can with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to put that element of fear in them as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that's how I started that book.

[SPEAKER_01]: So you, yeah, and you put more time into your camouflage paint than I ever thought about.

[SPEAKER_01]: So I would just throw it on when we used it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But that's another unique aspect of you thinking about so many little details, such as the mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so this is the NVA POW captured.

[SPEAKER_00]: telling you that you came out of the ground, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: He thought we couldn't die.

[SPEAKER_00]: And, of course, he saw some of our chemical flour.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they thought it was green.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then we came out of nowhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had the impression.

[SPEAKER_00]: We were spirits.

[SPEAKER_00]: We came out of the ground.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they would shoot at us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they didn't seem to kill us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we got them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they thought, we are an entity to deal with it.

[SPEAKER_00]: They weren't prepared to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they always kept coming.

[SPEAKER_01]: They kept coming for sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so with these different missions, was there one particular that sticks in your mind for this?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because there's one, I got to find my notes on it because you describe how you're viewing the enemy and you're crawling up on your stomach.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at some point, you can hear them talking.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as you're crawling to get closer to them, you come across a Viper Snake that if it bit you, you would die instantly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: But it was a sleep.

[SPEAKER_01]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the snake didn't even wake up.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that just happened a couple of times.

[SPEAKER_00]: A couple of times?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously, I don't want to be the one to wake them up.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I remember that snake.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not the huge one you see in Hollywood.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, no, it's the little pit bite.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah, a little slender thing about the thickness of a limb.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was laying on a limb.

[SPEAKER_00]: And just crawling is quietly as they could.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there he is, you know, and just the limb is moving.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there he is, but he's asleep.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's just amazing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because in the, in our case, our point man always spotted those things.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: So our team was V in the Meas, but those guys were very good like your mountain, your mountain.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Once you're in the jungle with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they went over Montenier and Chinese for the first tour.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they were really sharp.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course the Chinese, they started up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, it's a different story completely.

[SPEAKER_00]: But [SPEAKER_00]: At our team, I think we had the last of the Chinese, the known, yeah, with that fall of the Americans.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they started off, you know, way back in World War II and after, you know, communism, Chak Chak, Mountie Dung, the big, big war of basically freedom and communism.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Shankai check has sent a couple armies to surround Mao in the Chinese on the mainland.

[SPEAKER_00]: And in the meantime, Mao started defeating Chang.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Chang retreated to Firmosa, National China.

[SPEAKER_00]: which left a couple armies stranded where they were halfway around.

[SPEAKER_00]: They couldn't get back to national China.

[SPEAKER_00]: They certainly didn't want to go toward not Mao.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they stayed in place like a Burma and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I just made a deal with them.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's a book I think years ago, the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we made a deal with them, is that if you will keep communism out of those areas, we're going to pretend we don't have opium fields.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they had the opium, yeah, the politics of heroin in Southeast Asia.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so we didn't bomb their opium fields and they kept communism out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, in the interval of years, all the way to us and Vietnam, we've got a lot of our Chinese battalions and companies from those people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they volunteered just merciless.

[SPEAKER_00]: Usually, it was the children of that first generation.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they were the ones that became companies and battalions that fought with us against the Chinese.

[SPEAKER_00]: And over the course of years, those units got decimated and there was fewer and fewer.

[SPEAKER_00]: to the point where there were very few Chinese still alive fighting with us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And on Team Florida where I was, I had perhaps the last four Chinese that were still fighting against communism.

[SPEAKER_00]: Very, very brilliant people and fearless.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, fearless.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I had four Vietnamese and four Chinese on my team.

[SPEAKER_01]: cheese.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's just amazing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And those men are just, we, we effectively refer to them as our little people.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But they may have been small, but they had big hearts and just absolutely fearless and amazing people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And what I want to do is just live in peace, not to be under communism.

[SPEAKER_01]: Because when we hear about the Vietnam War, seldom is that side of that story ever heard.

[SPEAKER_01]: And all the documentaries, the stories, all the other things that America was fed for years without talking to the people who said, [SPEAKER_01]: Our governance corrupt, we know that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we prefer to live under a governance corrupt that we can survive and live with as opposed to being under the thumb of Communism.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Absolutely.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so one of the people that you dealt with and served time with on a recon team [SPEAKER_01]: was Norm Dony, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And years later, he was such a highly respected member of SOG because he was involved heavily in the whole P.L.W.M.I.

[SPEAKER_01]: issue.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you met him.

[SPEAKER_01]: When you landed a Florida with Florida, he was the team leader of the ones zero.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so the codenames were ones zero, the team leader, one ones the assistant, one two would be the radio operator.

[SPEAKER_01]: And sometimes the ones zero would carry the radio.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we talked a little bit about Norm, meeting him and what it was like being on that team and then how on one hand, working with one of our song Legends.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, when I got into contume in the first place, I went to S-One and I told him I wanted to go to Recon and I got through a size back like, are you kidding?

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, he says, go see Bob Howard.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, apparently they must let him know in advance, but I went over to talk to Bob.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, he's a legend of his own, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Bob Howard, and I talked, we interviewed, and boy, he says, I'll get the team for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was pretty excited.

[SPEAKER_00]: Whatever it was I said to him, it was exactly what he wanted to hear.

[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, he says, oh, there's Norm now.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he introduced me to Norm.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, Norm, I've got just the guy for you, you know, and so Norm grabbed me.

[SPEAKER_00]: we talked and didn't take long before norms as you know you're going to be on TV or whatever it was I was saying was what both of them wanted to hear and uh...

norms and just instantaneously became a father [SPEAKER_00]: and a mentor and a leader and everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: He treated me as I was a person of respect rather than a new guy, but I felt like I was honored and so forth by him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Norm was just perfect.

[SPEAKER_00]: He taught me every single thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, what do you want from me?

[SPEAKER_00]: And I says, six months, I want your job.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, you'll do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, well, other people would maybe take a weekend off.

[SPEAKER_00]: He and I would go off and we built the Donnie ladders.

[SPEAKER_00]: And all this stuff we worked hard, we drilled, we studied.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the Donnie ladders just for our listeners were, [SPEAKER_00]: There are made on metal rungs connected by it's kind of like a wire.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's coated with something wire with plastic heavy thick plastic coating on it.

[SPEAKER_01]: So basically you have metal rungs with three separate holes in them.

[SPEAKER_01]: So the latter on full will be rolled up in the helicopter when it gets to the LZ it would be on rolled or it's a you could be you could go into a target or more importantly get pulled out from a target right anyone who's watching try to go up or down on a rope ladder [SPEAKER_00]: That was how difficult it is.

[SPEAKER_00]: You put your feet in and they just go and swing it out.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, the don'ty ladder was one of those things that you crawl up and if you're wounded and you couldn't get any farther, you just hooked yourself into whatever rung you were in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the door gunner, if you wanted to, he could just roll up the ladder underneath you and you'd be like in a cot.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so I remember on Saturdays, we built the Firstony letters, then we hooked them up to the water tower, and then we got Colonel App, who's the legend of some sort, absolute.

[SPEAKER_00]: And showed him, along with the...

Here's your camp commander at that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, he was.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, he was.

[SPEAKER_01]: Another World War II vet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And showed him how it worked in everything else, and then he called in all the one zeros, and that Kingby Pilots actually, because they had to know how to work them to.

[SPEAKER_00]: and then we did the first donny ladder.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we had various options then of going in to a target you could go in by helicopter and you could parachute in which I particularly didn't want to do.

[SPEAKER_00]: Or you could go in by rope by repelling or you could go in by a donny ladder.

[SPEAKER_00]: We had a problem for a little while on the Donnie ladder because in fact I came out.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was twice on Donnie ladders after a bad mission and getting out on the thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: The pilot would forget that you have this metal ladder hanging underneath the strut and they would take off under fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: drag in those metal and wire ladders underneath through the trees where they could hang up and pull the chopper down.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they had to remember what they were doing as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Donnie backed a him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Donnie just treated a taught and mentored and everything all the time constantly gave me every single thing that I think basically he took it all the experience of his life and gave it to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing is, he took all the legends of special forces and he would seek to mount.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he'd say, remember in Robin Moore's book, when a guy was coming across the river and after that mission, he's just, this is the guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he would do that for everybody in the camp and the squirrel sprouts all the rest of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: The ledger is the old guys, you know, and he said, I want you to meet squirrel and squirrel.

[SPEAKER_00]: This is Dale Hansen.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the neat thing was to see didn't treat me as if I was an inferior learning mentor or a legend.

[SPEAKER_00]: He taught, treated me as if I were an equal.

[SPEAKER_00]: Which kind of gave me a learning foot as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: It realized that I had something to invest in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was studying hard and really doing everything that this man said.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Tony was a legend.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, I had no idea how many decorations he had.

[SPEAKER_00]: But of course, they had the silver star.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he had more bronze stars than I have letters in the alphabet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay, uh, here's an amazing guy never said a word about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, of course he fought uh, he was in Delta Force two times.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then that's project Delta in the early days, which was like they ran uh missions in Vietnam searching for enemy enemy cave campments and then tried capture peel dubbs for intel purposes and they were doing any kind of those were nasty missions and they now they are in their paychecks.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you bet [SPEAKER_00]: It should say something about casualties through a vessel.

[SPEAKER_00]: Special forces was the most hazardous and dangerous unit of all of Vietnam in all the wars.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the Green Bridge had the highest casualties of anyone in the war.

[SPEAKER_00]: of the casualties that the Greenbury's had.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, I should even back up one step more of the Greenbury's special forces that were in Vietnam.

[SPEAKER_00]: One out of ten were sag.

[SPEAKER_00]: One tenth.

[SPEAKER_00]: But sag got sixty percent of all the wounds.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how dangerous we had we were one tenth of special forces the most dangerous unit yet we had sixty percent of all the wounds which was pretty indicative of how dangerous our missions were plus just the guys in the eight camps yeah that would be when the NVA or to be a common wanted an overtaken a camp they would attack it with great [SPEAKER_01]: for Aussie weapons and they had time to plan it, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And even as early as sixty-four, Roger Donlin was the first Medal of Honor recipient in the Vietnam War from a battle at his camp, Namedong, and that was the several days siege on the A-camp that they finally broke it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Really able to hang on to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that's where he earned the Medal of Honor.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, as part of the whole cast, I think majority men on an eighteen were either killed or definitely wounded in action.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's Roger was.

[SPEAKER_01]: So that's part of that whole never.

[SPEAKER_01]: So, going along to the book, one of your first missions with Norm was for Ben-Hett, the A-camp.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And could you just, that's, again, a some marvelous writing here, descriptions about you and being on the ground, but if you give us a little background, could Ben-Hett was on the border and it was [SPEAKER_01]: Under getting ready to go into their anticipating a strike and then Norm and your team was called to do what?

[SPEAKER_00]: Basically look up for the enemy looking for targets.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but I had two missions at Ben Hat and I'm gonna get a mixed up for sure, but we were looking for for the enemy areas and all that kind of a thing and [SPEAKER_00]: Boy, we went across the fence.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, it's in countries.

[SPEAKER_00]: It doesn't even count as a sognition in a way.

[SPEAKER_00]: But we were looking for the enemy and working, trying to find them.

[SPEAKER_00]: We were just going, every place we could find, trying to find them.

[SPEAKER_00]: But it seemed like we were compromised right off the bat.

[SPEAKER_00]: The enemy knew we were there and that kind of a thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And looking for them, [SPEAKER_00]: I don't remember how many times that they found us and so forth, but that is just break contact and continue mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we would do that and we would go everywhere where we could try to find the enemy and we could hear [SPEAKER_00]: explosions and things like that, but we were looking for targets of opportunity and we would follow the explosions and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we were working through an area and I could smell something that reminded me of mowing lawns at home.

[SPEAKER_00]: Really.

[SPEAKER_00]: It kind of brought me back, but we [SPEAKER_00]: We were working through this area and we started getting really nervous.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's something not right here.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I went forward just a little bit and what it was, it was a brand new trail.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so many communists had walked across the trail that it was like all the grass and vestiges and everything was mowed to the ground.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was just turned into a slush.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was like you mowed your lawn in the summer.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, we put up security on the side and then Donnie ever donnie.

[SPEAKER_00]: We went out on the trail itself to take pictures and all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Donnie had the compass out and he was oriented the trail, you know, and I was taking pictures of the stuff and there were footprints.

[SPEAKER_00]: on that trail in the mud and which the water was just seeping into a brand new made print.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was made minutes before and we could hear walking and farther up the trail and so we were dashing off the trail before they got on there and I took one quick picture and we jumped off the trail and watched them go by and we did that for two or three days and [SPEAKER_00]: Commissed everywhere.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and then we finally they were on a chase and we were being chased by them and so forth and Donnie ever teaching me and training me and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: We could hear it the clicking like in India how the people in the elephants drive the dragon or the clicking Yeah, and we could hear them clicking on various areas [SPEAKER_00]: And they were very clearly, they're trying to drive us to something.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the only would stop is they look at the map.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, okay, we got clicking, clicking here.

[SPEAKER_00]: What are they trying to do?

[SPEAKER_00]: Ever training, you know, sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: And obviously, they were pushing us to an ambush site and it's this opening.

[SPEAKER_00]: We get close to that.

[SPEAKER_00]: What is obviously an ambush site and I'm looking carefully and I can actually see the movement over just hundreds of enemy around that LZ that opening work.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, obviously they have to push us so we keep kept varying around and changing directions and all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it got to where I would take a claymer mine with a ten minute fuse and I say don't eat ten minutes and you know, yeah, I pop that flare and the right that close behind us and boom, you know, and then the enemies start shooting all around because they don't know how what did it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we did that two or three times and then I did a five minute fuse and really honest.

[SPEAKER_00]: Finally, we got to NLC where we could possibly be picked up, and the king bees come and throw down those ladders.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, you know, what it got to them, you know, and actually, since they're monitoring our radios, too, [SPEAKER_00]: I read it back.

[SPEAKER_00]: I just said, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh [SPEAKER_00]: And then, of course, we call in the air strikes as we leave.

[SPEAKER_00]: But again, the pilots not used to it.

[SPEAKER_00]: They start to lift off.

[SPEAKER_00]: And those ladders hung up in the trees.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I can tell they were about to pull us down or cut off the ladder.

[SPEAKER_01]: So were you in triple canopy there?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because triple canopy would be, you know, triple canopy canopy could be anywhere from a hundred to a hundred feet high.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just hard to imagine.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just with one level jungle, there's a layer top at the third layer.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's the only ladder solely went down about a hundred feet because the rest of it has to be inside.

[SPEAKER_00]: It went down the full length of the ground, got into it, and then we're starting to lift off it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know they're going to cut it off.

[SPEAKER_00]: But fortunately, it pulls through.

[SPEAKER_01]: But again, one of the things I like about the book is the writing here.

[SPEAKER_01]: And on this mission where you guys are first on the ground with you, you talk is a little bit what it was like to be there and this is from your chapter two.

[SPEAKER_01]: Said, we were shadows.

[SPEAKER_01]: sliding slowly in total silence.

[SPEAKER_01]: Our feet moved in Braille.

[SPEAKER_01]: We thought the ground before we placed our feet.

[SPEAKER_01]: Feeling to not make a sound.

[SPEAKER_01]: Feeling with a care, one would make to not place a foot on a sleeping Viper.

[SPEAKER_01]: They're those Viper's again.

[SPEAKER_01]: We look for trails, especially leading to the small break in the trees.

[SPEAKER_01]: Across the dry stream bed with his polystones and we move west.

[SPEAKER_01]: Partway up by slope, we made a security stop and it was hot.

[SPEAKER_01]: The air was clammy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Around us the leaves were heavy and drooped.

[SPEAKER_01]: Birds were reluctant to fly.

[SPEAKER_01]: Really moved in the branches.

[SPEAKER_01]: We listened from our small perimeter quiet.

[SPEAKER_01]: I thought I could hear moisture evaporating into the air, but I wondered if I would ever hear movement in the soggy weeds.

[SPEAKER_01]: We listened, I heard by your team member, close beside me when he turned to the top of his canteen, voices.

[SPEAKER_01]: One moment, there was no indication of another human, then voices.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were not crystal clear for they were muted by humidity.

[SPEAKER_01]: Dreamlight voices hung over the ground, like ground fog, weaving amongst the trees.

[SPEAKER_01]: Voices were unafraid of detection.

[SPEAKER_01]: Voices were the tones of the Iran.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're so close.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so many times during those three days.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that was in support of the, uh, uh, better had the camp that was being over one of that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you got to use your.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you don't a ladder?

[SPEAKER_00]: Don't do ladders.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Around two-core because you were an I-core.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Two-core.

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course, content was kind of a hub of some sort, but you had band-hett, duck-pack, duck-seeing, and a couple others.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think there was five or seven A-camps in that area, but they were all hard-pressed at some point.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it seems like the borders of Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam all touched in that area.

[SPEAKER_00]: You had to try border areas.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the communists could use politically internationally, whichever borders are most sympathetic.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that was where they would filter into Vietnam.

[SPEAKER_00]: So as one of the major points where the communists would come into country, and those special forces camps were some of the, I don't know what you would call it.

[SPEAKER_00]: The difficulties that they would bump into, the sword, the thing that just bugged them so much.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I suppose they could move around them and avoid the A-Camps or just knock out the A-Camps and half the time, they decide, well, just get rid of those A-Camps and they would attack them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Ben Hett was an under siege for quite a while.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I just can't imagine.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Being in those camps like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: And again, sometimes you also talked about how on a Florida one point I believe that they, you have some two hoys that came to the team and that [SPEAKER_01]: the descriptions, the way you describe these guys.

[SPEAKER_01]: Again, it's just another story.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so a true boy is an enemy NVA soldier who surrendered to us and said, I'm willing to come to your side to be with you and to fight communism, as opposed to fighting the Americans and our teams.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so when they first came on the team, [SPEAKER_01]: There was a reluctance on certain use to how it was going to work out.

[SPEAKER_01]: But with your team, the two that you talked about [SPEAKER_01]: who were the two-hoi members that came to the team.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was so unique, even for me to read it, the way you described it, how they came on.

[SPEAKER_01]: And at first, it was right, they come on, you have it for a day, for a quick team training with them, and Bing, you've got a mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right away, you have no idea how vetted they really were.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And to say the two-hoi's were, see, [SPEAKER_01]: He said that the one was not the handsome Vietnamese member of Florida, it was on the other side of lamb, next to the second chuhoy.

[SPEAKER_01]: That XNVA soldier was older, nearly donies age.

[SPEAKER_01]: The bony fingers of his hands were wrapped around his rifle like a python.

[SPEAKER_01]: The team would know, but the grip was to mask a nervous tremor.

[SPEAKER_01]: He felt going on this mission to an area from which he had recently escaped.

[SPEAKER_01]: his cheekbones were large and promised his face tapered to a narrow chin, drawing his skin tight, with long wrinkles along both hands.

[SPEAKER_01]: So this, too high, had been fighting for years and it came over to our side with on a team for that mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and we wind up having the target be the very area he came from.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, he has, if he was ever wanting to go back to the other side, he could simply deliver us and be a hero.

[SPEAKER_00]: or be completely concerned about being ever a capture because he would really be tortured.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I remember those two.

[SPEAKER_00]: One was very young, one was very old.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the very young one had chewed, and to our side almost right away he was virtually impressed and could see right away he didn't want to be there.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he was also totally completely ignorant.

[SPEAKER_00]: unaware of how difficult war was, but then the older Chuhui, very, very seasoned to the kind, and they also kind of, in his physical appearance, he fit the North's stereotypes, and Northern Vietnamese had the prominent cheekbones, you know, almost the Chinese, you know, and it kind of, even every time you look at him, you kind of wonder, is he really on our side?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, it's just, you and nature to question that.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And boy did they prove themselves?

[SPEAKER_00]: They did.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh my gosh.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that was a difficult mission, beginning to end.

[SPEAKER_00]: And actually, I think I missed part of that, because I did a mission for the Australians.

[SPEAKER_00]: They got pulled out.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that was a unique thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think Donnie was wounded on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: She and my country and he was wounded on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had a severe head severe.

[SPEAKER_00]: You could see his brain.

[SPEAKER_00]: By the time I got back from my mission and joined them, they had sutured it together and they put the scar at the hairline and of course we tease them.

[SPEAKER_00]: the other Chinese was telling me that a trend was telling me that that's his name chune yeah you tell me that yeah don't he say him him see brain and the other Chinese guy said no he lied he don't have brain [SPEAKER_00]: That's funny.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, that was terrible.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right, guys.

[SPEAKER_00]: Those are the guys that when I went on missions, you know, for some reason, my people really liked me.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I love them.

[SPEAKER_00]: And by Chinese people, every time I went on a mission, they say, we want God, look for you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so with a magic marker on my back, [SPEAKER_00]: I bought my rug sack, but my neck, they would write, Hanson, Cambodia, Chen, which it means Hanson.

[SPEAKER_00]: My name was made into Chinese.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Hanson and Cambodia, Chen, means never die.

[SPEAKER_00]: So God is looking down at the battle and he reads my back.

[SPEAKER_00]: He said, well, that's my guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll take care of him.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's my Chinese.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's amazing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, good people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, absolutely.

[SPEAKER_01]: And just so fearless.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then that mission with North, the one where he got wounded.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Also.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then when I saw him after the mission, it was like he was crying all the time, but they strapped on cut his tear duct.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, because when he was moving, he thought, could he got hit with strappin' or around, that hit him in your mind.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so he thought, oh my gosh, I lost my vision.

[SPEAKER_01]: And it was gonna be bad news.

[SPEAKER_01]: But then he finally gets back to medics look at him and say it was a tear duct.

[SPEAKER_01]: But in order to receive their wound, and he was wounded while carrying a POW.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, they shot in the thigh.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our protocol that we came up with and I assume other teams did too.

[SPEAKER_00]: If the guy was carrying a rifle, we would shoot him in the gun and shoulder so that he could drop the gun and he couldn't use it very well.

[SPEAKER_00]: If they were strapped over his arm and so we would take him in the leg, that way he couldn't get away.

[SPEAKER_00]: So either way there's a plus minus.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the problem, if you shot him in the leg, of course, is that he couldn't go that fast.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you had to help him out, step by step.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it was kind of a toss up.

[SPEAKER_00]: You're going to shoot the guy in the shoulder or the leg.

[SPEAKER_00]: So yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And meantime, they were able to get him out along with everything else.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Only to when they finally get him back to base, he, he passed away.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right there.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: A difficult mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah, done.

[SPEAKER_00]: With our team, our Chinese had fought for so many years.

[SPEAKER_00]: They finally said, OK, we can't do this anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's how they augmented the team, what the North Vietnamese Jew ho is.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they had a Vietnamese that also joined them to join the thing, which he didn't have enough time really to become [SPEAKER_00]: a single unit kind of a team because you have these new people.

[SPEAKER_00]: But on the other hand, you have people who knew what they were doing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they had enough bodies they could actually do a POW stop.

[SPEAKER_00]: So you get right on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

[SPEAKER_00]: And two people on either end is early warning.

[SPEAKER_00]: One guy at Joe Morris, you know, Joe.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was at the radio just behind the site.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then Norm Donnie at Chuhoy and [SPEAKER_00]: one of our other guys of the enemies guy were at the ambush site and they just huge groups of people one after the other kept passing.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they're too big for the team to hit.

[SPEAKER_00]: They finally finally this one by himself and he turned out to be just a carrot, just an anger, angry, fighting, I'm not giving up kind of a thing all the way through.

[SPEAKER_00]: But nonetheless he was by himself and that's the one they took.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and then after it, because Chin was also wounded in one arm, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And there's this, so the second helicopter arrived to pick up the remaining team members.

[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, when they did the extraction there, the U.E.

[SPEAKER_01]: would go in to pick up the men, but the cobra gunship would be on each side.

[SPEAKER_01]: running parallel as they would insert to land on ELZ which is just great tactics and you described all that and then there is this moment where [SPEAKER_01]: Chen only had one arm that he could use because he was wounded near the shoulder and me when he was fighting the enemy with the one good arm would have had to use an AK and just going through all this and then at some point the helicopter lifts off but picking up for the book but Chen was not yet inside [SPEAKER_01]: He had one usable arm and grabbed the strut of the U.E.

[SPEAKER_01]: They lifted into the air with him hanging with one hand.

[SPEAKER_01]: With one arm, he did a pull-up far enough to throw one leg over the strut and strattle it.

[SPEAKER_01]: There were a hundred feet in the air when a Charlie gunship radioed the situation to that helicopter.

[SPEAKER_01]: You have a man hanging outside on a strut.

[SPEAKER_01]: The first consideration was that a courageous enemy had attempted to crawl aboard to take down the craft.

[SPEAKER_01]: Dony, who himself was wounded, could barely see because of his head injuries.

[SPEAKER_01]: He looked around him, chin was missing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Donny was horrified, was his fluid-covered eyes.

[SPEAKER_01]: He thought he himself was the last aboard.

[SPEAKER_01]: Grab my feet, he shout to the closest person as he scrambled to the door on his belly.

[SPEAKER_01]: He reached over the edge and pulled the wounded man inside, where they flew back directly to the contume.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, like.

[SPEAKER_00]: It actually even gets worse in a sense.

[SPEAKER_00]: Worcester.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, her chin was our point man.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he wore a Chinese communist hat and carried an AK, forty-seven and sometimes had a comic shirt because being the first guy on the team, it gave him one second or the other guy is trying to decide who this guy is.

[SPEAKER_00]: So here's this guy, Chan.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's wounded in the head, wounded in the shoulder.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here he is half on the strut.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Charlie Gunship was flying alongside the slick.

[SPEAKER_00]: She's this guy and communist uniform trying to get into the helicopter.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course he, the first impression, I'll shoot him off.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then you hit the chopper.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's like radio it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And don't he realize it's not a communist, it's just my guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He pulls them in.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh because that whole I don't know when you all started doing it but we were doing it by by the end of sixty eight that the point man would always be dressed as an NVA no complete regalia uniform weapon the three the met the magazines that could hold three magazines on the vest right and because if we ever came like you said point to point [SPEAKER_01]: That would hope we would give the NVA a moment of pause to our point, man, because he'd get a chance to take him out, because he wouldn't be sure where our guy had no doubt in his mind.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that was one of the tactics.

[SPEAKER_01]: But again, that tactic could play against you.

[SPEAKER_01]: They can chance case.

[SPEAKER_01]: They don't be the air crews don't know.

[SPEAKER_01]: They just see them in an NBA uniform.

[SPEAKER_01]: They go WTF.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: It would be great.

[SPEAKER_00]: It would be interesting to know how many times our point man was saved by that one second.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, you know, so many times.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, if you're being dressed like the enemy, [SPEAKER_00]: Okay, you're not entitled to Geneva Convention protection, but none of us were anyway, because we were sterile.

[SPEAKER_00]: So what you might as well go to their extra mile and have your guy looking like in the enemy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, during your top secret briefing, they tell you, you go in sterile, but they wouldn't come out and say, well, because you're sterile, you're in enemy territory behind enemy lines, you're officially a spy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you don't fit the rules of Geneva courts, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: They can do whatever to help they want to do to you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I almost wondered if some of the reasons we don't get our saw guys back as POWs is that the NBA doesn't think of them as POWs, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: I think of it as spies, you know, and that could be some of the reasons, you know, although they're valuable people, you know, and you would think they'd trade them or something, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: Of course something.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah or something.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, they did the or something I'm afraid and again that was just a little Part of chapter four in the Layers book sawd missions to the well Today we're not gonna have time to get through the entire book I encourage everyone to purchase it and Soon it will also come out as an audio book [SPEAKER_01]: Right, and so those options will be there and just continue to talk about the stories we go on from there.

[SPEAKER_01]: At some point, we want to talk about Zebron and Zebron.

[SPEAKER_01]: Zebron, thank you.

[SPEAKER_01]: I've been mispronouncing that poor guy's last name ever since I first heard it thirty years ago.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we could talk, I like to talk a little bit about him and that one mission because there's a lot of different things to come into play on it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so this would be in sixty-nine now.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And you're still on your first tour duty.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_01]: I put this all together.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so I like to get into that story because there's so many different angles to it.

[SPEAKER_01]: But this one man's valor along the way and just other men that they came to contact because the mission [SPEAKER_01]: at one point during heavy contact he was with a hatchet forces time and a hatchet force could be it was bigger than a recon team and it could be a, uh, subtitle could be a squad operation or a platoon or sometimes it'd be a whole company, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Like eight company did with operation tailwind in September of nineteen seventy when he went in with a hundred and sixteen in-ditch [SPEAKER_01]: There are a hundred twenty days and sixteen SF, but that's another story that we've covered already.

[SPEAKER_01]: But for you here with Ed, they had a radio relay site that was leghorn.

[SPEAKER_01]: So if you could just set the stage a little bit about that and then how Ed wound up there first, what the misses were, and then how it spread down to these ultimate conflicts.

[SPEAKER_00]: It is just a wonderful guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of my best friends.

[SPEAKER_00]: He and I were the two guys that worked out all the time and the FB and a fast friends and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ed had a recon team.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was some.

[SPEAKER_00]: seven, modern yards, and then himself, something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think what that's what it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he took a tour of duty on Leghorn, which is kind of unusual, because he was actually a part of eight company.

[SPEAKER_00]: But for some reason, he and his people went to Leghorn and supplemented it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if they had additional intelligence or something, but usually I have two Americans and then a pursuit of people on that radio release site, which is on a pinnacle, five thousand feet in the air.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's close to mid-right border area.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's impreditable, but right in the middle of communist territory.

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, Ed is there with his people and every morning he goes out with his sniper rifle and he looks over the edge and he just studies the area below the movement of the communist and all that stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he can actually see communist movement down below.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then I think it maybe it was banned hit or one of the other places was under siege.

[SPEAKER_00]: So there's a lot of movement of the calm is going on that direction.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, he's just decides you know what I'm just sitting here and I'm gonna take my people I'm gonna off this this pinnacle and I'm gonna redo reconnaissance down below.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, for the next, I think it was ten days that he was there.

[SPEAKER_00]: He takes his people, he and his seven montniers, and they memorize the mine fields and all that stuff, and they work the way down with the maps and all that stuff, and it very precise, you have to know.

[SPEAKER_00]: not only asmas, but variation and deviation and magnet, you know, the whole thing, so you don't step on mines.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they go down, they work the way around the communist areas, and they're just a rate in the middle of the communists.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just right up to them.

[SPEAKER_00]: In fact, he was going to go capture one, and he's just halfway in at pounds, with going to knock him out with the back end of his knife.

[SPEAKER_00]: When all of a sudden another enemy just was on the other side of the bush has come in and he got out just in time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the other guy was half awake with the movement and he thinks he's having a nightmare with his guy with the green skin, you know, and all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, it's like a recon mission and he just determines he'll be back at the each day.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he does it seven times in the next ten days.

[SPEAKER_00]: He does these reconditions and it comes up with unbelievable intelligence and what the enemy is and what the units are and everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, he comes back and Homer Hungerford was on the side at that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Rich Ryan was there on the site and Rich Ryan was doing the cubby helicopter a cubby chase [SPEAKER_00]: When I was wounded, and another fast-run, a great guy, I should have had a high medal of honor.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was shot three times in the chest.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was praying for him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I promised I attacked them all.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I promised shot him three times in the chest with an AK-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T-T.

[SPEAKER_00]: We expected to pull his dead body off the telecopter.

[SPEAKER_00]: When he got back to the cartoon, he got back to the cartoon.

[SPEAKER_00]: When he got back to the cartoon, he said, how's off the telecopter?

[SPEAKER_00]: Was that Klein?

[SPEAKER_00]: Klein?

[SPEAKER_00]: I was just said his name.

[SPEAKER_00]: Rich Ryan.

[SPEAKER_00]: Rich Ryan, okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, Rich hops off the plane, helps his people up.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm shocked.

[SPEAKER_00]: I mean, he and his partner, but both been shot three times in that chest, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, I know, day I know your shot.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he, you can see the bull holes in his shirt.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he opens up the shirt and his three welts on his skin.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, the bullets went through my shirt and stopped at the skin.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, you've been praying for me.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I was there on the site and then Homer hunger for you who fought in three wars.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he was on the site and then of course Ed Zebron.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they say, oh, by the way, he's supposed to go in to town.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're going to bring in.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they bring him back to contume at the F.O.B.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's in the mess hall.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm joining him at the mess hall.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're talking.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's still in his dirty fatigues.

[SPEAKER_00]: And two of the people on the platoon that he goes in on find him in the mess hall.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there we are.

[SPEAKER_00]: We've been looking for him.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says our platoon has been tasked with a mission to go over the fence on a mission to POWs, destruction, all the things that they would do.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, we want you to come with us.

[SPEAKER_00]: And here's Andy, he just got out hours before, just in time to go into the mess hall.

[SPEAKER_00]: He has nothing to do with our shower.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I just got in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, we got to have you on this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's these two sergeants, book sergeants.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, they took a captain of the Marines.

[SPEAKER_00]: No, Lieutenant, in the Marines, who had never been in combat, had no idea what special forces was.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had never talked to the indigenous people in Montyred, had no idea what the mission was.

[SPEAKER_00]: and would not confide in any of the people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, and the guys so horribly out of shape, he's at least forty pounds out of, out of shape.

[SPEAKER_00]: He waddles when he walks.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they put him in charge of this puttune.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they got a first sergeant in that puttune.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they say the man has been in so much combat, he shakes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they say, if those two guys go south, [SPEAKER_00]: He says, it's us to private book sergeants.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, we don't have the expertise.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need you.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need you.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so Ed says, OK, I'll do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'll do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he relishes seven people and himself.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they spend the rest of the night getting ready to go in the field.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I do what help I can do to help him.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the next morning, then he joins the team.

[SPEAKER_00]: The captain, I keep saying captain, he's a lieutenant.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he doesn't confine the team.

[SPEAKER_00]: Doesn't tell him what the mission is, the root of March, nothing.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, Ed says, I'm your point element.

[SPEAKER_00]: Shouldn't I be on the first helicopter?

[SPEAKER_00]: And the guy just ignores him, doesn't even answer him.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they go in, and as a field, and finally, and says, look, you don't have anyone in the front.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I can do that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, just say, you know, fifty meters or a hundred meters behind me, and I look for anime.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he does.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then he finds all kinds of anime stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Has a big firefight actually.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's wondering about why he doesn't get help.

[SPEAKER_00]: coming in because the people should be only less than a hundred meters behind him.

[SPEAKER_00]: Turns out the captain is too fat he can't even walk and there are six hundred meters behind him half a mile and he can't get off the stump he can't even get up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And anyway, the people call it says, you got to come back, you got to come back.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, and puts his people in position, he jogs all the way back to the people.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, what's going on?

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, the captain, the lieutenant can't even get up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, you got to get up.

[SPEAKER_00]: We're in contact up in front and all this stuff is so anyway, long short.

[SPEAKER_00]: They have several firefighters the first day.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm making this too fast.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I'm going to forget so many details, but he gets wounded the first day.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was in a leg and something else I don't remember my notes.

[SPEAKER_00]: But pretty significantly wounded.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he realizes that if he gets met-of-act out, the team will be annihilated because they have two book sergeants who have limited experience.

[SPEAKER_00]: One of them is the medic and the other is a fairly new sergeant.

[SPEAKER_00]: But he just went and finally, he runs down back and forth and back and forth and controls the people to finally they come up and join him.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the next three days, he finds bunker complexes and so forth and has extreme fire fights and the people never come up to help them at all.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the second day he finds a base area where the people thought he was a large unit [SPEAKER_00]: And so they basically ran away ahead of them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So ad comes in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's like twenty tons of rice in this bin.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as immediately says, move the rice.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they move the rice.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's heavy mortars.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there's all kinds of horror serves in cannons.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they pack in an effort protection for cases and cases of grenades.

[SPEAKER_00]: RPG rounds, everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, he's got to start getting anything and he blows it up.

[SPEAKER_00]: John Gantic thing, he was explosion, but he has more firefight.

[SPEAKER_00]: He gets wounded the second day.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this captain by that time is to the point where he's a horrible liability, he started out as a liability, but he got so bad that he had to have people set aside to help him walk.

[SPEAKER_00]: The fortune was that he slipped and fell on a broken piece of bamboo in its stuck in his hand.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they used that as the excuse to get him out of act.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they got him out of there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So at least he got him gone.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that left a sergeant.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think it was a sergeant first class.

[SPEAKER_00]: We had so much combat.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was in Shaushak anyway.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they could just tell he was just a bundle of nerves.

[SPEAKER_01]: So basically, that's the one we also started to smith you identify yourself.

[SPEAKER_00]: I changed a few of the changes in the game to protect the guilty.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and the lieutenant I changed his name too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but he's shell shocked as well.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's just he sits down.

[SPEAKER_00]: He mumbles, you know, he doesn't talk to anyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, Ed and the two sergeants said, look, we got to relieve him.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, they come and go off to him and they just say, you're relieved.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm taking over the platoon.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, Ed takes the platoon.

[SPEAKER_00]: So, Ed goes from place to place to place, comes through a communist graveyard and does all this stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: Finding intelligence in the area and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: But for the next four days they have firefight after firefight after firefight and Ed got wounded in day one seriously got shot in the legs and then on day two he gets wounded again and I'm no I'm going to get days and wounds mixed up here.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, but he winds up getting shot in both legs [SPEAKER_00]: He winds up having sharp no all over his body.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had a serious wound in his face.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was embedded in his jaw.

[SPEAKER_00]: And each time they try to get X filled out, another recon team would be in trouble.

[SPEAKER_00]: So the help always goes to the smaller, most vulnerable unit.

[SPEAKER_00]: So instead of helping the thirty people in the retune, they say, we like to come for you, but we have a recond team in trouble.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the first one would be, whatever, Kentucky or something like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: It could talky, Montana, and then Alabama.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they tried to do a resupply.

[SPEAKER_00]: And each one of those was a story in itself.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't remember if Kentucky was the one where they parachuted in.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in another disaster, mainly by the leadership.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I think it was Kentucky.

[SPEAKER_00]: But anyway, he's hard pressed.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been wounded two or three times.

[SPEAKER_00]: And his people are hard pressed.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's got all kinds of wounded.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so anyway, they ask for an expo or at least a resupply or something.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, Kentucky.

[SPEAKER_01]: By then a low on ammo.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, then Kentucky is in trouble.

[SPEAKER_00]: So as I recall it, they perished it into the golf course.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was tasked to go into the golf course one time.

[SPEAKER_00]: But that was the most northern target we had.

[SPEAKER_00]: And any intervening weather would keep you from getting in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So mine was always scrubbed but they were tasked to parachute in to the golf course and then they were supposed to try and get a POW I believe is what it was and anyway the captain without telling the team without telling the FOB without telling the operations center [SPEAKER_00]: without telling a cubby, who does their air support, changed the LZ from about two or three miles away from the entire target.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're actually odd off the bomb lines and everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: They land in the trees.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're all split apart.

[SPEAKER_00]: They land in the storm.

[SPEAKER_00]: and one of them lands in the trees.

[SPEAKER_00]: Three of them land fairly close together and another one lands in another place.

[SPEAKER_00]: Paul Boyd winds up by himself and loses a lot of his gear and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: They have no idea where they're at and they're all split up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the one guy was in the tree.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as it turned out when he landed in the tree, there was a campfire underneath them.

[SPEAKER_00]: The communists had spent the night under that tree.

[SPEAKER_00]: They had a big fire.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they were going to spend the night there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And fortunately, they thought all the crumbling and noise in the tree was a tiger that was going to jump on them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they all took over running.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, let's go, you know, how you let out the reserve and then you crawled on the reserve and then let go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, he did that and then the tree sprung up with all of his gear on it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he's in the ground with only a pistol, I think it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he's by himself with a pistol has no idea where he's at and doesn't know where the team is.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the other guys are split up, too.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they have this prairie fire where they're trying to get put together.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so that's the thing that keeps them away from edge rubber in that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, and they say, well, we can't come for you now.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they try to come again later, and he has to spend the night again.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't remember which is the mission it was, what time it was.

[SPEAKER_00]: But the next day, Ed gets wounded again.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the interval and that one, that he's moving the team along, and also they get attacked from a bunker complex on the left.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's a hidden bunker and also they open up on the team with machine guns and all that kind of a thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: and Ed attacks it and he can't walk anymore because he's shot in both legs and he can't stand anymore so he's on his knees so Ed attacks the bunker complex on his knees wipes out the bunker complex and then it go a little bit farther and it happens again another bunker complex and Ed attacks them on his knees and wipes out that bunker complex [SPEAKER_00]: And again, tries to marshal the team, make some kind of a crutch and move his way and lead the team to where they want them to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Which leads to, okay, we need to get out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's the second time.

[SPEAKER_00]: So then that it's another recon team gets stuck.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think this is the one where I think I don't remember which it was, but it was with Fred Morris, I think, and another.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: A Joe Morris?

[SPEAKER_00]: Fred Morris Fred Morris okay, I think was Fred Morris Morris.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, there you go and it was him and Two others but I forgot the names all of us son too many names and too many missions here But anyway they they they go and I think it's under ladders [SPEAKER_00]: something like that when they didn't parachute in, but they went in at some point.

[SPEAKER_00]: They did the reconnaissance and they were doing a great job finding a lot of stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then they got hit by the communist big time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Morris gets wounded severely in the attack.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, a bullet goes into his head and if I remember it, it's in one side.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it comes out the opposite side of his head.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's cranial cavity.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I'm known to anyone else and it happened.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think three times in my book.

[SPEAKER_00]: The bullet went in one side and I followed the contour of the brainstem, went all the way around the back side of his skull and came out the opposite side.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it looked like he was shot through the head.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then he was shot through the shoulder, and he was shot through the leg, and he had shrapnel and his stomach, is that recall it?

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he was left for dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: He was totally unresponsive and all that stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: I turned up all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so the team is on a survival mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: They're trying to break contact and all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they finally get the radio message out.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have a purifier emergency.

[SPEAKER_00]: We need to get out.

[SPEAKER_00]: So that diverted the mission from Ed Zebron.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so they're going to try to get these guys out.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, Kavi arrives on the scene, directs them to an LZ, and they get to an LZ, and there's a firefight there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're trying to get the team out.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they're kind of sad, of course, because they lost their one zero course.

[SPEAKER_00]: You know, well, in the meantime, Morris wakes up, and he can't see things like that.

[SPEAKER_01]: But when we're more, if he's wounded, [SPEAKER_01]: the team leaves because they were a little as firefight they saw him bleeding from the head and his body they saw the bullhole go through his head and they just assumed he was dead yeah and even the NVA who were chasing the recon team go over look at him and just continue to march out chasing the recon team assuming you know he was dead yeah and and uh...

and uh...

the team has got a firefight on the on the L.s.a and so they of course was unconscious can hear the gunfight [SPEAKER_00]: And so he kind of wakes up, but he thinks I'm blind and stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: I can't see a thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know my eyes are open and I can't see.

[SPEAKER_00]: I know I'm really messed up.

[SPEAKER_00]: But then he realizes for some reason he takes his index, he tries it on this hand, his hand is shot, can't move.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he uses the other hand, he takes his knuckle.

[SPEAKER_00]: and he rubs and takes the blood out of the ice socket and he blinks his eye and obviously I could see but then he knows how bad he is but then he knows he's left alone and the team is in a firefight so he decides the only hope I've got.

[SPEAKER_00]: is to get to an LZ where I can be seen.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he knows he can't go to where they are because they're in a firefight and you got a communist between him and the team.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he starts walking down our trail.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I can't.

[SPEAKER_00]: Don't have the strength.

[SPEAKER_00]: to walk.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's not even stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's shot in a lake in the whole deal.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the other thing is that he never carried penflores.

[SPEAKER_00]: And all of his gear was shot up into the tree.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he doesn't have anything.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's got his rifle and he's got a few things.

[SPEAKER_01]: But he's got one out in that mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, Dell what else?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, I talked to him and because that was just a little interesting sidebar Yeah, we said you I know you nary carry pinflares, but on this mission I've got three here Take these with you and put them in your pocket.

[SPEAKER_01]: He told him where to put them on his body.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yep [SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you never carried him before and what else had a problem where he had to use penflores to get out.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and again, the penflare is a small little flare that you shoot in the air.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like a bullet.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: But when the cubby is overhead, you can use that to get a quick locator is where your team is.

[SPEAKER_01]: If we can get through the triple cannon.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know if you knew it, but the penflare is five, five, six.

[SPEAKER_01]: Is that right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and our mercenary's couldn't sure I do that at some point.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our mercenary's couldn't carry a gun in town.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so they would carry penflores and they would take the bullet out of a pen out of the quarantine.

[SPEAKER_00]: They'd put it in their penflore.

[SPEAKER_00]: So if they got in a barfine.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Morris, here's the shooting, and he starts making it to an opening.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's actually crawling onto the opening.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's really messed up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he gets as far as the opening.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, how do I get their attention?

[SPEAKER_00]: And he remembers the pen flares.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he shoots one pen flare up, and it's John Plaster was ready to cover the way.

[SPEAKER_00]: So John was up there, and he sees it, and the pilot says, are we being shot at?

[SPEAKER_00]: And John's quick thinking, he says, no, our traces are red, there's our green, this was white, white, and he says it has to be a pen flare.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he looks again, and Morris has just enough strength to do one more pin flare.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he shoots it and they calm down and they pull him into the chopper.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he spends the next year in the hospital.

[SPEAKER_01]: And again, plaster was quick on that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: They were able to get to the site and then to get a helicopter and just to pick him up when he was so close to being dead.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And all those wounds.

[SPEAKER_00]: So in the meantime you got Ed Zebron over there and now he's in desperation and he's crawling because he can't walk Yeah, and he's attacked at least how many bunkers by now so far.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's two and he's not done yet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, and so now he's been wounded [SPEAKER_00]: two days in a row and some of those wounds were multiple and so then they spend the night and in the next day he moves the team toward what could possibly be an L.C.

[SPEAKER_00]: where he could defend it and he gets another firefight there's a bunker complex on the left again he attacks it for the third time wipes out everything and a bunker complex joins his team and starts leading the team out and [SPEAKER_00]: And in the interval of time, they decide that they're going to go to the top of this mountain Oya.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now, about this time, the really flaky starter first class.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I don't remember if I made him Smith or Jones or Smith.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he is totally useless, totally gone.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I want to go home, I know that.

[SPEAKER_01]: In the middle of a firefight.

[SPEAKER_00]: They put up for the night, they find an enemy bunker complex with the spider holes in that and they hold up in that area.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Smith just decides, okay, I'm going home and he throws down his rifle and he just walks out of the R-O-N and the team here is bang bang and Smith was killed by the communist around there.

[SPEAKER_00]: So Zebron doesn't want to leave the body if he can help it.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he leaves three of his mountain yards down there to watch the body a little bit away from the team.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he tries to get him into this safer area where there were some enemy bunkers and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they're basically out of ammunition.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been telling the [SPEAKER_00]: The people aim one shot aim one shot.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's a post of firing a full automatic.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's got air support going around.

[SPEAKER_00]: They got puffed the magic dragon and they got a one jets and all that stuff and they're just running [SPEAKER_00]: support round the clock and at night, puff the magic dragon shows up and you know, six thousand rounds a minute going around.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, so he's got that around him and all that stuff, but still the comments keep coming and coming and I had to get some wounded again the fourth day and it's right to get the team out.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they get to an LZ area.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I can't remember what it is.

[SPEAKER_00]: I think they're coming right back up on that hillside.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it says, I still have that body down there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I got three people.

[SPEAKER_00]: They gave them, okay, we're got assets coming in.

[SPEAKER_00]: Twenty minutes were coming in.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he said, I need to get my man.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he crawls down the hill.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he can no longer drag anything anymore.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he tells us three modniards who are superstitious don't want to touch the body.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says you take it and so the three modniards grab Smith's body and they drag them all the way up to Hill and I add runs point because he can't walk anymore and he can't carry anybody.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they work up the hill.

[SPEAKER_00]: In the meantime Ed now has been mooted four days in a row.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been shot in the head.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's been shot all over his body.

[SPEAKER_00]: Both legs.

[SPEAKER_00]: He spent a year.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's spent a year in the hospital too.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the bad thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: was that they gave them a silver star.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it should at the first day, they should have given them a Congressional Medal of Honor.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it was forty years, twenty-five years.

[SPEAKER_00]: It took twenty-five years of people running congressmen to get it upgraded one notch to a DSC.

[SPEAKER_00]: And to this day, he still doesn't have the Medal of Honor.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if anyone deserved it, Ed did.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I didn't even do justice to what he did on that hill.

[SPEAKER_00]: The courage that Ed had, I mean, the entire night when the team, the platoon was in that circle in the enemy bunker complex, Ed spent the entire night crawling around person to person, keeping them away, keeping them into the fight, and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm just an amazing courageous man.

[SPEAKER_01]: No question about it.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they just had those, I mean, individually, all with the accepted of one of the other sergeants on a team who was still learning, right, as he went along, Smith, complete failure that had not lieutenant, that was just, and but the yards respected that.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they listened to him and he cared for them.

[SPEAKER_01]: They knew they had that rapport between them.

[SPEAKER_01]: That was just forged from previous missions.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they all knew who he was, respected them.

[SPEAKER_01]: And that leadership.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my gosh.

[SPEAKER_00]: They would die for, and I don't know what it is, but our Monteniers.

[SPEAKER_00]: But I remember on one of the missions I was on, having a couple of the Vietnamese officers that got attached to me.

[SPEAKER_00]: That didn't know where even they're in the Firefighting stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's aside the point now, but I looked back and I had three of my Monteniers behind my back facing those officers to protect me at all times.

[SPEAKER_00]: They had that amazing respect for our people.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure and then like you were mentioning the different teams that had gone in and they had prairie fire emergencies and then the thirteen right for not that one yeah was a Montana right Mike Shepherd Mike Shepherd actually I wound up having to work but yeah in the companies oh sorry right yeah it was Mike Shepherd and the other guy with them um [SPEAKER_00]: One of the two was killed, and then the other one was a small team.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was only five.

[SPEAKER_00]: He did the dumbest thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: I worked with only three of us in a company.

[SPEAKER_00]: Usually there's about sixteen or nineteen, right, and I had this captain from Germany, and then the first sergeant was the captain from Germany.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And had him, and then me as the staff sergeant, running this company, [SPEAKER_00]: And of course the sergeant, he went to the bar right after the training day.

[SPEAKER_00]: The captain went to the officer's club so basically I had a company all this time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I knew him quite well, but he said he had twelve tours which put him all the way back to the French and he never went home.

[SPEAKER_00]: He just year after year after year.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he thought that he was, he couldn't possibly be killed.

[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't make a mistake and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, he was the guy I had in my company.

[SPEAKER_00]: And this is the guy that was on this recon team.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they actually took him out of that team and put him in a company after that mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: really, which would be unfortunately, but his deal was, he's going through the area in the Communist place, and it's definitely a base area, and there's a water system made out of a bamboo going from this lake source up above in the top of the mountain going down to the base camp with tubes of bamboo.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he just tells the other American, there's only two Americans.

[SPEAKER_00]: He just says, I'm going to blow it up.

[SPEAKER_00]: Hey guys what you're gonna pull this up this bamboo thing that they can fix in an hour and he says yeah I'm gonna blow it up and you know what a dumb thing to do but I guess if when you've been there for twelve years already you're in for a joke I guess [SPEAKER_01]: Well, yeah, and then also, again, getting back to the book.

[SPEAKER_01]: This was the third separate recont team, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And they had jumped in.

[SPEAKER_01]: And so in your book, you talk about how the third group included the team leader, Mike Shepherd.

[SPEAKER_01]: He too had landed in the trees and found a self alone.

[SPEAKER_01]: His first task he decided was to locate his people and so they jumped at night.

[SPEAKER_01]: And as Dawn allowed, reconned down a slight grade, managed to locate his three scattered mountain yards.

[SPEAKER_01]: The four of them huddled near a slight opening in the trees, pursuit of the team was intense and organized.

[SPEAKER_01]: As the sagman crept among the trees using all their senses to avoid death and capture, the NBA broadcasted from loudspeakers hung in the trees and they're saying capture the invaders.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, we never came into speakers in the trees, yelling to the NVA to capture the quote invaders.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my God.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's just by now, Hype III had numbed his senses.

[SPEAKER_01]: their backs were hunched and their teeth were still chiding from the jump.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: People were doing a lot of, you jump at twelve thousand feet, it's so cold.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: You go through all the temperature changes and you're on the ground for a while.

[SPEAKER_01]: Your body still reacting to hypothermia.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: and you captured artists, like one big power griff.

[SPEAKER_01]: I just had to get back to that moment, because that's another aspect of all this meanwhile, has been fighting for his life and his team there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh my goodness.

[SPEAKER_00]: So each time it looks like they can't hold out for another hour, then all the assets get divided again.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then they make one attempt also to send in a hatchet force, not a hatchet force, but a bright light.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

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[SPEAKER_00]: time, I'm going to be alive, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're going to drop him in and it's just a dusk, but to get dark.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're going to send this team in to try to join, at Zebra, and augment his team.

[SPEAKER_00]: But in order to do that, they have to fight the way through the enemy that's surrounding him in the dark, and not be mistaken for an enemy themselves.

[SPEAKER_00]: So at the last minute, they call that one off.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I think it was, actually, it's the cover.

[SPEAKER_00]: That book is, this got's a powerful picture.

[SPEAKER_00]: When I saw that picture out of the thousands I looked at for this book, that was the one that says it all.

[SPEAKER_00]: That's a song.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the guy on the left, right.

[SPEAKER_00]: You got back.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: The guy on the upper right.

[SPEAKER_00]: was that guy who we were talking about that was on that relief saying that was going to go in and fight their way to at Zebra and they got called off.

[SPEAKER_00]: So all these things are happening about the same time and even with Shepherd, I'm getting a mixed up with Mr.

Smith.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, but the no question about Mike because he was then they were able to get extracted finally By you even notice the team was split but they had to pull them out the two split elements right like you said when the recontinues in trouble compose as opposed to a hatchet force was much bigger the little team small units gets taken care of first right and meanwhile all the medics are dealing with people [SPEAKER_01]: Banging them up, keeping them alive, and just moving on, continuing through this ever ongoing firefight.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: I might just can't imagine walking into a butter complex more than once.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: And here's Ed and his hatchet force doing it several times.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: All in like that period of time on the ground.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's like, yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Oh, my Lord, fearless.

[SPEAKER_00]: Just an amazing man.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just a great man.

[SPEAKER_01]: And of course, they did funny get out, but even there is issues through it all.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they had, of course, the first helicopter to come since got pick up all the wounded that they've been carrying with them.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: These little details.

[SPEAKER_01]: that you just captured so vividly in the book and so when we end up if we could talk about just what happened to Ed so then he goes for a year of treatments to get right on his feet again and helps maybe someday to still an effort hopefully [SPEAKER_01]: to bring justice to Ed for his heroics and certainly deserve it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Our guys in SL, we probably got a third of the decorations we should have had.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I do recall at one point, and I don't know the documentation I have for it, but there was a word out that they were supposed to no longer give special forces some decorations until the other units catch up.

[SPEAKER_00]: you know like Air Force and yeah yeah and they wanted them to catch up yes and so they weren't giving our people what we should have had you know and of course yeah it's a awful [SPEAKER_01]: Well, look, the one other chapter that I had to get into a little bit, because this is so unique about the Ford drum mission, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: That was such a small esoteric unit at contume that even many of the SF men that were there didn't know about it, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: And so, again, this is with this chapter of eleven, [SPEAKER_01]: You're a good buddy.

[SPEAKER_01]: Staff Sergeant Mike Buckland, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: With on that mission, but if you just talked to us a little bit, we did talk about that on our other sawcast, but for here, because it's such a unique aspect, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: You know, the total special forces air force.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, for the snake out, or the snake you feed air force, snake you feed air force, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And just a little bit, what, what's that?

[SPEAKER_01]: Those missions were, right?

[SPEAKER_01]: Because it's such a unique moment.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: It was unique to CCCC.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't think all of us are.

[SPEAKER_00]: We didn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, we did it.

[SPEAKER_00]: I never heard of it.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_01]: As far as it feels like only people in it in that little silo.

[SPEAKER_01]: There was a new it.

[SPEAKER_01]: They did it.

[SPEAKER_01]: Right.

[SPEAKER_01]: And we didn't talk about it because you couldn't.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure, so I came out on the contour mat, CCC, and that it was highly successful.

[SPEAKER_00]: We had our own people called Spafs, Niki Peter for us, and they called themselves the headhunters, and they were bird dogs, and oh ones, so they had the bird dogs and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: I had been wounded and I came out of the hospital, came back for my second tour, [SPEAKER_00]: And Mike says, wait a while before you go back to Recon.

[SPEAKER_00]: So I went into and tell him.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just to say, I came back from being wounded where on the first day of your mission, where you were wounded, you lost a digit and a half.

[SPEAKER_00]: I'm shot in the head too.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's where the brains leaked out.

[SPEAKER_01]: But you survived it and you were on the ground for four days to complete the mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just to keep that on the record set.

[SPEAKER_00]: Okay.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, please.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, Mike says stay on the ground for a while.

[SPEAKER_00]: So it's just off the ground for a while.

[SPEAKER_00]: Things were just politically were happening.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's not worth going into the field for a minute.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, I went to intelligence and I was briefing and debriefing teams and that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And out of that program, out of the S-two shop was the sneaky Pete Air Force, this mission we're talking about.

[SPEAKER_00]: And basically what it was is we would go out with two planes, two bird dogs, one high, one low, and we would look for targets behind the lines where we would go as a recon team.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they were actually highly, so highly successful.

[SPEAKER_00]: We sometimes didn't have to do sending a recon team, which saved a lot of our lives.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we would have one plane would be at, say, five thousand feet.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the other one could be at fifty feet.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we would go over there and look for new roads or new truck parks.

[SPEAKER_00]: and we would fly over the communist areas and you know how they would camouflage everything and we would be flying over and all of a sudden you would see a flash and it would be a sun shining off a windshield and you look in that area and you see two or three flashes and obviously you realize there must be vehicles parked there and so you look around and then there must be a road and you find the road and then I report all that information and the next day there would be a bomb run and they take care of that problem [SPEAKER_00]: or where they had new roads cut and it's like, well, where's the bridges?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then what they would have underwater bridges?

[SPEAKER_00]: And you could find where the the lips were either side and find the bridges, you know?

[SPEAKER_00]: So that's part of what we did.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we did bomb damage assessment and things like that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then two, you had two planes, one with low and one higher.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: And my thing was usually the low one.

[SPEAKER_00]: I don't know why we're good at finding.

[SPEAKER_00]: Right.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then I would go now with a pilot ten feet or twenty feet or a hundred feet.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I spent half my time sick because they would tilt the wings to go between the trees.

[SPEAKER_00]: you know that low you know and we would be really low so that upper one would say right down there is a truck part and so you zoom down there right on ground level and with the camera out the window or I would have my car fifteen out the window you take pictures and so we would do that an awful lot yeah [SPEAKER_01]: And your chapter eleven, here is your good buddy, Staff Sergeant Mike Buckland, gets a mission and they come out and talk to him, say we got a top secret mission and then I forget who's talking to him, but somebody from S-III said well sergeant Buckland, I have a significant and sensitive mission that must be flown today.

[SPEAKER_01]: This mission comes from solid headquarters.

[SPEAKER_01]: From much higher up than that, in fact.

[SPEAKER_01]: I am certain as CIA and the State Department are the source of this mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do you understand?

[SPEAKER_01]: Buckle goes yes, sir.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then the major Kirby Smith goes on to explain.

[SPEAKER_01]: So they're right, Buckle.

[SPEAKER_01]: And this is it.

[SPEAKER_01]: This is a non-standard mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: It must be done at any cost.

[SPEAKER_01]: They have this accomplished.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the document is personally signed the document ordering this mission.

[SPEAKER_01]: It was personally signed by the Secretary of State and the President of the United States.

[SPEAKER_01]: I never heard that before if I was on this one.

[SPEAKER_01]: And the mission is of national, if not international importance.

[SPEAKER_01]: your mission button involves the enemy city in the United States, of course.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's really, yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And then you just go on to explain basically there was a a cost of unit, which was a large mobile communist headquarters.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they had locations of there are two different missions here.

[SPEAKER_00]: The one that the president signed off on.

[SPEAKER_00]: had to do with the Nordom Cineau, the king of Cambodian.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the reason we had to go across the fence and all that is that Cineau basically gave the communists the use of the, say, the last twenty percent of the east side of Cambodian and let them do the Ho Chi Minh Trail.

[SPEAKER_00]: And all that basically gave it to the communists to do the war.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, the meeting was going on, going to go on the State Department found out about it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Nordom's, you know, was about to go into secret negotiations with North Vietnam and the Chinese Communist government to give them the half of Cambodia.

[SPEAKER_00]: So all the roads and everything could be farther over.

[SPEAKER_00]: So we couldn't bomb them or too far to send in the recon teams to find out about them.

[SPEAKER_00]: So anyway, they knew exactly the hour and the place where this meeting was going to be.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was in Nordom's Cienux personal dacha.

[SPEAKER_00]: I say that word wrong dacha or dacha.

[SPEAKER_00]: The ACH.

[SPEAKER_00]: I should just spell it each time.

[SPEAKER_00]: Anyway, they knew exactly when and where.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he gets the mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: He takes the japan dry and I'm talking to him at the end because I'm doing these missions too.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I say, Mike, and he, I could tell in his face, something's up, you know.

[SPEAKER_00]: I says, Mike, what's going on, and he says, I can't tell you, you know, and so we go to, or he goes to the large site in Kantoom where the sticky Peter forces, [SPEAKER_00]: And he sees the Frank Dority who's the pilot and basically he Dority consents it to.

[SPEAKER_00]: There's something up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says we have to go.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says I can't tell you where we're going and what we're doing until we get airborne.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they get airborne and then he tells them the whole story.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says that the meeting is in this personal dodger centered in Cambodia and like a resort area that's very private along this river and all that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says that this exact moment the meeting is going to go on.

[SPEAKER_00]: We have to buzz the place and take a picture of the dodger and if the door is open to take a picture inside the door from an airplane that's going by at ground level.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he gets the idea, and so he gets all these papers.

[SPEAKER_00]: He figures out wind speed, distance, and all that stuff.

[SPEAKER_00]: How fast, how far you've got to go to arrive there at the exact time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they do.

[SPEAKER_00]: And inside the book, I've got the two pictures, Mike has time as they buzz the place.

[SPEAKER_00]: Lower than the first level, almost, you know, grounding, landings, height.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he snaps the camera twice, bang, bang.

[SPEAKER_00]: The first one is a perfect shot of the Dodcha.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the second one is the open door of the Dodcha.

[SPEAKER_00]: Now, at a minimum, you can't see the person inside it, because you're looking inside of a building.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: But Nauradam seeing it definitely knows what's going to, that they meet, we know.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he do it.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was so mean that the State Department took that thing and sent it off to see and looked right off the bat.

[SPEAKER_00]: Seeing that goes over to Chinese China, where he's honored as Secretary of State, and all that's the Secretary of a country, what do they say?

[SPEAKER_00]: Not Secretary of State, but ahead of a state.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he's ahead of a state, and honored in all the champagne and everything else.

[SPEAKER_00]: Halfway through the meeting, a need comes over to say on that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he says, you're on or whatever you call a king, you're majesty.

[SPEAKER_00]: You've just been deposed.

[SPEAKER_00]: And long, no.

[SPEAKER_00]: Tric takes over the country.

[SPEAKER_00]: And of course, then he is, without a country, no.

[SPEAKER_02]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he goes to Russia and he goes to China.

[SPEAKER_00]: And now he's on a deal with the communists.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's got full fledged communists in there.

[SPEAKER_00]: And then making these deals and so forth, how to fight the Americans and let's go.

[SPEAKER_00]: The meantime, you got long-null, who you think is an okay counterpart to what the Southern guy is who gives off the country.

[SPEAKER_00]: But long-null winds up being a horrendous guy, the author of the killing fields, in which fifty percent of the entire population are murdered of the country in the killing fields.

[SPEAKER_01]: That was written about many years.

[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Well, you could be walking across the field, knee deep and sludge, which is actually from humans.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, just incredible.

[SPEAKER_00]: If you went, they would say, let me see your hands.

[SPEAKER_00]: And if you didn't have a callous, you were immediately executed.

[SPEAKER_00]: It's just awful.

[SPEAKER_00]: I kind of document some of those things in there.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, also, this getting back to the mission itself, how top secret it was, could normally, when you would meet with your pilot and you, as we get briefed, but on the day of this mission, Mike met, as you said, Captain Dardy who was his pilot.

[SPEAKER_01]: And they said, well, what's happening?

[SPEAKER_01]: And Mike's just had a very dark look about him.

[SPEAKER_01]: And he says, I can't talk to you until we're in the aircraft.

[SPEAKER_01]: I can't even tell you what the mission is until you and I are in the plane flying.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: That's how secure that whole operation.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, that's just [SPEAKER_01]: That's just amazing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, and of course the trust they had they had a course experience working to get a darting new him and working with you and Mike and Then he finally briefed him as to what it was and then it was as you said very distant and far They had to calculate what he got that far when we're done.

[SPEAKER_01]: Do we turn around go back to camp buddy?

[SPEAKER_01]: We just continue on going to Thailand and get refueled.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, I mean [SPEAKER_00]: there's another story in there, I don't know if you're going to it, but anchor what, right?

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Ted Wisswick was another.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's another guy.

[SPEAKER_00]: He actually come to our unions here as a go.

[SPEAKER_00]: Sure.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: He had a similar mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: Same thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: He couldn't tell anyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: and he gets in the plane with his pilot.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the Communist headquarters is kind of a loose of occasionally when we would find out where it was, they were moved the entire headquarters, which is incredible, you know, the resources and what it was there.

[SPEAKER_01]: And now we're talking in nineteen seventy.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Before the incursion.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, exactly.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so, Wizzwick gets this mouse admission.

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's the same thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: He's in the plane.

[SPEAKER_00]: Can't tell anyone.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as he's receiving the mission, they have a suspicion that the commissive moved the entire headquarters for the commiss movement of Southeast Asia into the ruins that anchored what?

[SPEAKER_00]: Which was the old capital of the Comer Rouge of Cambodia, not the Comer Rouge.

[SPEAKER_00]: the commercialization.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so it's the same thing.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he says, well, oh, it's the captain.

[SPEAKER_00]: That actually gets the mission on this.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Ted is the writer.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he's talking to the same Smith.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see why I named him Smith.

[SPEAKER_00]: He talks to the same captain, Smith.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_00]: And he, the Smith tells them the mission.

[SPEAKER_00]: We want you to go to Anchor Wat.

[SPEAKER_00]: We think that's the new headquarters.

[SPEAKER_00]: And so he says, well, that's so far away.

[SPEAKER_00]: If I even have the slightest head when I won't be able to get back to Vietnam or have to go to Thailand or land someplace and the captain's Smith there, Major Smith, whatever it was, Major Smith.

[SPEAKER_00]: He takes the orders and he takes it over to the edge of the table and he cares off the half of the map.

[SPEAKER_00]: that will give them the directions they get to Thailand.

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yes, and he tears it off.

[SPEAKER_00]: He gets them the half sheet of paper.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they're either going to crash in the jungle or make it back.

[SPEAKER_00]: If the winds are bad, tough luck.

[SPEAKER_00]: So he and Ted Ritz were at the end of their fuel.

[SPEAKER_00]: And actually they use more than half.

[SPEAKER_00]: They go over the runes that anchor what.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they don't find this and that.

[SPEAKER_00]: They don't see the people.

[SPEAKER_00]: But they realized there are no monkeys in there anymore and so forth.

[SPEAKER_00]: And there are a few places where there's brand new roses up.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they think the entire headquarters are secreted inside their rooms.

[SPEAKER_00]: So they come back with the information and they get ahead when coming back to Thailand.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I tell when going back to Thailand and they make it land with the last of their fuel in costume.

[SPEAKER_01]: He says, we're on fumes and moisture in the tank with which they made it back to costume.

[SPEAKER_01]: Saigon would make the decision.

[SPEAKER_01]: Was the complex being used as the main headquarters?

[SPEAKER_01]: It thought crossed the sergeant's mind.

[SPEAKER_01]: We didn't see a single person.

[SPEAKER_01]: But we never saw any of the monkeys.

[SPEAKER_01]: They say are everywhere in the place, either.

[SPEAKER_01]: Does that mean there are people living in those temples?

[SPEAKER_01]: Has chased away the Gibbons?

[SPEAKER_01]: Oh, well, Saigon had to figure it out.

[SPEAKER_01]: just the ambiguities and try to track down a whole command center in Cambodia, the North Vietnamese one that's here.

[SPEAKER_00]: All this is from that little tiny project for drum.

[SPEAKER_00]: I came back from one of those for drum missions.

[SPEAKER_00]: And one of our special forces sites was under siege.

[SPEAKER_00]: And that particular one was Depp, but Doc Peck.

[SPEAKER_00]: And Doc Peck was on, I think it was nine hills, you know, little, little wolves and so on.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the comics had captured all but the last one.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as Mike Buckland was in one plane, I was in the other one.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we're heading back from Cambodia or Laos, one of those two.

[SPEAKER_00]: And as we're going back, we go over dot pack.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see the enough fight from the air.

[SPEAKER_00]: And I was maybe a thousand, two thousand feet.

[SPEAKER_00]: Mike was just a little lump above that.

[SPEAKER_00]: And you can see the explosions.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we're on our radio.

[SPEAKER_00]: We hear the buck sergeant who is running, manning the radios in dockpack.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the aircraft are coming by and they say a dockpack, where can you use this ordinance?

[SPEAKER_00]: And it was just as calm as you could imagine.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, I can use it on my west, west wall on my perimeter.

[SPEAKER_00]: In a moment, we watched that entire perimeter just explode in Napalm just a whole thing white with the black cloud and then the pilot comes back as calm as ever.

[SPEAKER_00]: He says, now sorry, oh, in the radio man says, you got about a hundred of them that time.

[SPEAKER_00]: And the pilot comes back and says, okay, where do you want it now?

[SPEAKER_00]: And then the book sergeant says, okay, and can you put it?

[SPEAKER_00]: And it's like absolute calmness.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they're about to have the last bit overrun.

[SPEAKER_00]: and can be in completely calm and self-monitoring the air strikes.

[SPEAKER_00]: And they survived it.

[SPEAKER_00]: The communist never took it.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, you know, it's just amazing.

[SPEAKER_00]: And we got to see that just coming back from one of our missions.

[SPEAKER_00]: They were just watching this like on a movie theater before you.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah, it was amazing.

[SPEAKER_01]: Yeah, what those guys at the eight camps went through?

[SPEAKER_01]: Yes.

[SPEAKER_01]: The ticket of the long season is day after day.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Mortars, rockets.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: And wave after wave attack.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Just for good luck.

[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I think we're close to that time, sir.

[SPEAKER_01]: I know you got a plane at catch, so we don't want you to be late to miss the flight.

[SPEAKER_01]: Any clothing thoughts as we get down to that moment in time here?

[SPEAKER_00]: No.

[SPEAKER_00]: I've enjoyed this.

[SPEAKER_01]: Well, I have two, and again, we encourage everyone to capture the book, sag, missions to the well.

[SPEAKER_01]: It's just well written as always, and a tip of the berate to you for that, sir.

[SPEAKER_01]: And thank you again.

[SPEAKER_01]: So we want to thank all the men and women who are out there today, defending our country, and to the armed services member who have fought and left this country, like our good friend, Dale Hansen.

[SPEAKER_01]: We also remember in salute to men and women who did not return from the battlefields far away.

[SPEAKER_01]: Today, there are one thousand five hundred and sixty-nine Americans still listed as missing an action from the Vietnam War, Southeast Asia.

[SPEAKER_01]: As we said earlier, there's still fifty-eight green berets from the Secret War, as well as at least eighty-three aviators who died supporting stock teams.

[SPEAKER_01]: We also thank the U.S.

[SPEAKER_01]: Border Patrol, all-long enforcement, firefighters, first responders, EMT, and prison personnel.

[SPEAKER_01]: So please take a moment to look at my website, Saad Chronicles.

[SPEAKER_01]: and the previous saw cast as well as again we thank Jockel Willink for sponsoring these interviews and Jockel has his website underground Escelon front.

[SPEAKER_01]: So again, Dale, thank you.

[SPEAKER_01]: God bless America.

[SPEAKER_01]: Amen.