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This episode is sponsored by 511, a company that I've used for well over a decade and continue to use to this day.

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And 511 is offering you guys, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a discount on every purchase you make with them.

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Before we get to that code, I want to highlight a couple of products that again, I personally use today.

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One of the most impressive products they just released is their Rush Backpack 2.0.

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Now for many of you, whether you're going to the fire station, the police station, whether you're traveling with your family,

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whether you're taking training courses, we have to fly, we have to drive, we have to take trains.

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And I have to say, I own multiple backpacks, many of 511's different ones, but as far as a daypack, this one was the most impressive.

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There are so many different compartments. The way it sits on your back is incredibly comfortable.

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If you are a concealed carry person, there's also a spot for a weapon.

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So they've thought of multiple, multiple things that a man or woman would have to do on a daily basis.

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That is in addition to all of the products that I talk about a lot.

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Their uniforms fit for men or fit for women in the first responder professions.

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The footwear that they offer, whether it's the Norris sneaker or the Atlas system that is designed for foot health

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and therefore knees and back and hips and shoulders and neck.

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As a civilian, I live in a lot of their clothes as well.

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Their jeans stretch, you can actually squat down in them.

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We live in Florida here, so I wear a lot of their shorts, which again, very, very lightweight material.

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You can get it wet and it will dry almost immediately.

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And then moving to the fitness and tactical space, I used to have just a regular weight vest.

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Recently, I switched to a 511 vest and actually bought ballistic plates as well.

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My thinking was simply, if I'm going to have a vest, why not have one that protects me as well?

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And that tack vest is trusted by law enforcement all around the country.

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So I mentioned they were going to offer you a discount code.

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So if you go to 511tactical.com and enter the code SHIELD15, S-H-I-E-L-D-1-5,

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you'll get 15% off not just that one purchase, but every time you visit their store.

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And if you want to learn more about 511, their mission, their products,

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then listen to episode 338 of the Behind the Shield podcast with the CEO and founder, Francisco Morales.

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Welcome to episode 469 of Behind the Shield podcast.

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As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Richard Rice.

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Now, Rich entered the military during the Vietnam era, found himself in Airborne and ultimately in Delta.

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And his Vietnam career in itself is incredibly powerful.

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But he served for decades more, including being present in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu.

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Now, equally as important is Rich's transition out, where he then entered the world of education

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and spearheaded initiatives to take veterans training and turn them into credits

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to enable them to work towards degrees and therefore a career after the military.

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On top of that, he now works with the Gorak family.

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So I can't explain to you the level of humility that this man has

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and how many lessons there are in this conversation that we can all learn from.

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Before we get to that conversation, as I say every single week, please just take a moment, go to whichever app you listen to this on.

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Subscribe to the show, leave feedback, but most importantly, leave a rating.

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Every five star rating elevates this podcast, making it easier and easier for others to find.

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And this is a free library of some of the greatest minds on planet Earth.

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So all I ask in return is that you help pay it forward and share these incredible men and women's stories

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so I can get them to everyone else who I know needs to hear them.

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So with that being said, I introduce to you Richard Rice.

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Enjoy.

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Well, Rich, I want to start by saying thank you for inviting me back to Gorak here.

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I got to talk to Emily before this conversation, but last time I was in this room you were asking me questions.

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So it's payback time.

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It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

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Beautiful. Well, people listening probably know where we are now in Jacksonville Beach.

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So I would love to start at the very beginning of your personal story chronologically.

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So tell me where you were born and then tell me about your family dynamic, what your parents did and how many siblings.

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I'd be happy to, because I think that's what's brought me to where I am today. I really do.

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My name is Richard Rice and I was born in San Bernardino, California, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.

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It's also known as the home of the Hells Angels, but I was not associated with them in any way, shape or form.

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I grew up there. My grandparents lived in San Diego.

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And for years and years, until we moved to Oregon,

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my life kind of centered around just my mother, my father and me, and then our local friends in that particular area,

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spent a lot of time in the Mojave Desert. So deserts to me are beautiful places. I love deserts.

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And I learned so much from my parents and my grandparents.

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And I think that's what stood me in good stead throughout my life.

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These are people who had, they'd grown up, if you will, during the Great Depression in America, the early days of that.

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And those were some pretty tough times and it made them some pretty resilient people.

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They also understood how important it was to work as a team.

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Each individual brought something, but to work as a team allowed them to go farther and to live better

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and to be more secure in their life than any other way.

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And so I learned so much from them. My mother's parents were from Texas.

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My grandfather, there had been a, he'd taken the call to the ministry.

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And he spent two years at a theological seminary and then decided that wasn't for him.

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He was going to go be a cowboy. And he was a cowboy on several of the big ranches in Texas.

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And that's where he met my grandmother. She was a cook on one of those ranches.

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So they married and they moved to Juarez or El Paso vicinity.

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And he and his brother opened a cantina in Juarez and sold whiskey to Pancho Villa and his fellows.

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Then they went on south to Chihuahua and they had a hotel down there for a while and then moved back to Texas.

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Texas to them was their touchstone. It was where they emerged from, if you will.

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And so this occurred throughout their lives.

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My mother was born in Texas, a little town called Swinson, just north of Abilene.

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And she used to tell me stories and they would tell me stories.

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So I fit into this aspect of oral history. And history has always been very important to me.

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My father was a student of history, if you will, on his own.

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He didn't have any formal education in that, but he loved to read. He loved to follow history.

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And he read everything that he possibly could from the mountain men of the early west of America,

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Trap and Beaver in the Mountains, to World War II, to any period of time.

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And so this oral history became really important.

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And as an only child, I was often relegated to an adult world.

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And so I listened more than I talked, because at that time, good children listened and adults talked.

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Seen, not heard. Exactly right.

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But they were such interesting stories about being a cowboy and being raised in Texas and what that was like for them.

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And then my grandmother on my father's side, she and her husband lived in San Diego.

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Then they divorced and then she married another fellow that had been in Columbus, New Mexico.

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But he moved to San Diego. And so they had their own set of history.

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So I listened to all of this, the early formulations, if you will, of America and how people work during the depression

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together to help others and to reach out and provide service.

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It was not unheard of for a total stranger to walk up to their door, knock on the door and say,

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Hey, you got any food? And they would invite them in and feed them dinner.

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And that person would then leave and go on about their business wherever.

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And that's today. That wouldn't happen.

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Now you get murdered. Yeah. Everyone thinks everyone's a murderer.

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Yeah, exactly. Every hitchhiker, every homeless person.

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But there every person they saw was a chance for service, some way to help.

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And so I just I didn't realize that at the time.

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But what I was hearing was an establishment in my mind of providing service,

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service to individuals, service to community, ultimately service to nation.

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And that it got embedded in me without me really knowing it was happening.

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So from California, we moved to Portland, Oregon.

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And my dad was a refrigeration service engineer that oversaw the the installation of commercial refrigeration equipment in supermarkets.

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He had teams that did that. And he'd go around and visit and make sure they were doing it right.

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And the company that he worked for understood family and working together.

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Again, it kind of reinforced this whole thing.

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And they told him as he traveled around during the summers to be sure and take his family with him.

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And they paid for it.

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Block, stock and barrel, which is that's kind of unheard of also these days.

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But because he was such a fan of history everywhere we'd go, he'd read about it.

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He'd read about the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest America.

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He'd read about the mountain men and talk as we went by a beaver pond.

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He'd say, OK, there's a beaver pond.

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And they could have trapped beaver there and the beaver then transported to St. Louis.

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And he'd go through this whole history.

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Again, it was all oral to me at that point, although I read a lot.

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I didn't read the same stuff.

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So he was reading the history and that was that was kind of our family action at that time.

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We moved from Portland, Oregon to Texas.

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He got a new job.

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And, of course, Texas was back home for my mom.

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And again, I was regaled with stories again of Texas and what it was like for her growing up as a small child in Texas.

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And then they moved when she was small from Texas to California and then back to Texas and then back to California.

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They're kind of chasing jobs at that time.

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This was in the late 30s and early 40s for them.

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So I heard all of these stories.

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We travel today between states on interstate highways and think nothing of it.

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When they traveled, they traveled on sometimes roads, sometimes across the prairie until they came to a fence.

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And then they go up and down the fence till they found a gate, let themselves through and then get back on the direction again.

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They didn't have roads every time they went somewhere.

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Her job in the evenings was to go around and gather up cow chips, dried cow dung, which they would cook dinner over.

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And my grandmother would cook dinner over those.

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They'd get them on fire.

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She'd cook dinner over those.

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They'd eat dinner.

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Everybody sleep on the ground.

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Get back up, get back in an old Model T Ford and take off for California again.

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So these are some of the kinds of stories that I was listening to.

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It was resilience.

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It was people just being resilient about how they lived their lives.

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There wasn't a Holiday Inn every time you turned around.

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There wasn't a gas station everywhere.

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So you had to allow for things like that.

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Sometimes she said they'd stop at ranches and buy two gallons of gasoline so they could get to the next town.

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Just people working together and people helping people, providing service.

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So that was a great, again, it was a great education for me.

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I didn't realize it was education at the time.

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It was educating me to what my future life was going to be.

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Then we moved from Texas back to Seattle.

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We lived there for a few years and then back to Portland.

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Then Portland is where I graduated from high school.

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I went to work for Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone as a lineman.

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A lineman was pretty hard work.

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You're out there being very physical.

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So I'd watch another set of people within the phone company called splicers, cable splicers, that seem to have a pretty good life.

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They could put a little tent up over the cables.

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I'm out working in whatever weather might be as a lineman.

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These guys are in a little tent and they're splicing lines together.

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I thought, wow, that's pretty good.

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And they made more money.

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So I was like, hmm, maybe I need to do that.

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So I applied for it and was accepted.

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Went through the school that they had and became a cable splicer.

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It was about that time that it dawned on me that I was getting really close to Uncle Sam calling on me for my national service.

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How long has Vietnam been going on by this point when you were looking at the drop?

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This was 1966.

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So Vietnam had been going on, I guess the early days of Vietnam, you could say somewhere around 54, but that was a very minimal amount.

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Then in the 60s, they started, 63, 64, they started pumping folks up and increasing the numbers of troops in Vietnam.

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So I was very much aware of it.

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It was on the news every night, but it still hadn't hit its full stride.

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It was just starting to come into the national awareness.

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So I decided that I was probably going to get drafted.

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What I needed to do was pick what I wanted to do instead of let somebody else pick it for me.

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If I was drafted, it would be for a two-year period, but I'd do whatever they told me to do.

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If I enlisted, it would be for a three-year period, but I got to pick what I wanted to do.

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So that kind of made sense to me.

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So three years isn't that bad, and I pick what I want to do.

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And in the back of my mind, I think that's about the time I started thinking I needed to challenge myself.

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I needed to know what I was capable of.

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And so I started thinking about Vietnam in that positive sense.

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I didn't think that I thought Vietnam was great or that I wanted to get killed or anything.

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It's just I wanted to challenge myself.

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The ultimate challenge was to go to Vietnam.

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Just to interject, because obviously we're going to talk about when you transitioned out, when you came home.

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Sure.

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Not transitioned out, when you came home.

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At that point, through your own personal eyes, through your family dynamic,

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what was your perception of the wars, I guess, through a political lens?

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Was it something that, through the media that you were being given at that time, that made sense?

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Because obviously, in a way, it was out of your hands.

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You were going to get drafted probably anyway.

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But at that point, what was the kind of feeling in the country in the mid-60s?

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In my group, now, there were two groups of people.

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There were, if you will, the hippies, those that were pretty much against the war.

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They didn't believe what the government was telling them.

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Now, I'd grown up in kind of a different era.

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All of my relatives, my father, close friends of the family had all served in World War II and had served honorably.

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And I thought that was a very important thing.

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I looked up to them as heroes, if you will, as people that had truly done their duty.

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And I think I believed then, as I do today to a great deal,

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I believed what we were doing in Vietnam was the right thing to do.

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Now, I was listening to the government.

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I was listening to the news.

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And the news at that time was a bit more, I call it direct reporting.

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It was Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, the newscasters of the day, reported the news.

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They didn't spin the news.

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And have an opinion.

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Right. There were no opinions.

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It was, this is what happened today.

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That's how the BBC used to be when I grew up.

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Exactly. And they would lay out the facts.

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And that kind of dovetailed with what I knew of World War II, the BBC,

217
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the American journalists that were broadcasting at that time,

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that they brought the facts to the American people as best they could.

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They didn't know all the classified things and the secrets and all that.

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But they brought what was happening within the war, the trends that were going on, without the opinion.

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And so I took them at, if you will, face value.

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I was probably a bit naive, but that's welcome to the world.

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Welcome to growing up.

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Welcome to be part of the world.

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And so I saw it as a need within the world that there were people that were being forced.

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In this sense, the North Vietnamese were forcing people to their will as opposed to allowing them to choose.

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And I thought liberty and freedom have always been two big words to me.

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And I thought everybody should have the chance to be able to do that.

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And not to jump forward, but in 2017, when I went back to Vietnam for the first time in 45 years,

230
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I had a really interesting thing happen to me.

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And we'll talk about that then.

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But back to then, I felt it was a very positive thing that America was doing in Vietnam at that point.

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Now, what I didn't realize was the politics involved and the businesses that were involved.

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And there was a lot of influence there, too.

235
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So it wasn't just pure white and sweetness and all that.

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There were some behind the things going on that I didn't know about.

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I don't think it would have changed my mind about how I felt about the North Vietnamese versus the South Vietnamese,

238
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particularly after I got to Vietnam and got to know the people and what they wanted to do

239
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and to see what they've done with themselves today, even under communist rule.

240
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It's not the same as I had anticipated it would be.

241
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So it's an interesting dichotomy.

242
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But I decided that I would pick what I wanted to do.

243
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So I went to the Air Force and they were full.

244
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And I went to the Navy and they were full.

245
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So I heard you talk about that with Jason in your podcast.

246
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So were they full because they were the more desired branches?

247
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Oh, absolutely.

248
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Because they represented a military, a source of the military that probably wasn't going to get involved in ground combat operations,

249
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although the Air Force came a little bit closer depending on your job.

250
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And they were all Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines were all involved.

251
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But the people that were actually on the ground was the Army and the Marines.

252
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So I kind of gravitated to the Air Force because I thought they were really cool.

253
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I wasn't too excited about the Navy, although my dad had been in the Navy during World War II.

254
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A couple of uncles had been there.

255
00:21:06,000 --> 00:21:13,000
The Navy was OK, too, but they were both full because everybody saw them as a way to do their service

256
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and yet not become involved specifically on the ground.

257
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So I was walking away from the Navy and I happened to walk by the Army recruiting office.

258
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I thought, well, what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound.

259
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I might as well see what they've got.

260
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And they saw me coming.

261
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There's no question about it.

262
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So I walked in, recruiter, welcome, heartily welcomed me because, again, I didn't realize it,

263
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but here's another tick on his quota mark.

264
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They all had quotas.

265
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And he knew you were coming because he knew the other two were full.

266
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So they probably were just channeling in.

267
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Exactly.

268
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And so he was getting the spoils.

269
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So he sat down and he talked to me very, very, very gentlemanly and asked me about what I like to do,

270
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which I told him I said, you know, I love the outdoors.

271
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I love to be doing things.

272
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And he said, well, you know, we've got all kinds of possible jobs that you can have.

273
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So let's go over some of them.

274
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He said, what have you been doing recently?

275
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And I don't know why, but it popped in my head to say, well, I just finished a couple of books by a guy named Ian Fleming,

276
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the James Bond books.

277
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And I said, you know, they were pretty cool.

278
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And I just kind of said it without thinking.

279
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And he said, interesting.

280
00:22:34,000 --> 00:22:40,000
You should say that he said, because we have an organization called the ASA, the Army Security Agency.

281
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Now, it doesn't exist anymore.

282
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It's been morphed into something else.

283
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But he says the Army Security Agency and they have, among other things, agents and agent handlers and people that do things like that.

284
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I was like, really?

285
00:22:55,000 --> 00:23:14,000
So immediately, I started getting this picture of me in Berlin in a foggy standing on a foggy street corner with a fedora and a trench coat and smoking a cigarette and doing all this stuff that James Bond did.

286
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And I said, well, gee, that sounds pretty good.

287
00:23:16,000 --> 00:23:18,000
He said, well, now here's the deal.

288
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He said, if you sign up for the ASA, you have to sign up for four years instead of three.

289
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It's a four year commitment because you're going to go through a lot more training.

290
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I was like, hmm, OK.

291
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That kind of makes sense.

292
00:23:32,000 --> 00:23:36,000
So I went home and I thought about it overnight and I decided, OK, this is the thing to do.

293
00:23:36,000 --> 00:23:39,000
So I went back, saw him the next day, and he said, absolutely.

294
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Sign on the dotted line.

295
00:23:41,000 --> 00:23:43,000
And I did.

296
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So friends and neighbors came together, said goodbye to me.

297
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I boarded a bus and went to California to basic training.

298
00:23:53,000 --> 00:24:03,000
And I got to basic training and I'd been there probably a week and the ASA representatives showed up.

299
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And they said, OK, all you guys that are in the ASA, and I think there were six of us that had signed up for the ASA in my basic training company.

300
00:24:12,000 --> 00:24:16,000
So here's your options.

301
00:24:16,000 --> 00:24:21,000
Radio teletype repair or high speed radio intercept.

302
00:24:21,000 --> 00:24:24,000
Excuse me.

303
00:24:24,000 --> 00:24:28,000
I still thought, you know, where's the bong girls?

304
00:24:28,000 --> 00:24:29,000
I'm sorry.

305
00:24:29,000 --> 00:24:36,000
I signed up to be an agent and they kind of looked at each other and chuckled and said, well, maybe someday.

306
00:24:36,000 --> 00:24:42,000
But your choice right now is high speed radio intercept or radio teletype repair.

307
00:24:42,000 --> 00:24:45,000
And I knew what a radio teletype machine was.

308
00:24:45,000 --> 00:24:48,000
I had no desire to work on those things for four years.

309
00:24:48,000 --> 00:24:53,000
I really I asked him, I said, what's high speed radio intercept?

310
00:24:53,000 --> 00:25:00,000
And they said, well, you know, you set around with earphones on and you copy code 12 hours a day.

311
00:25:00,000 --> 00:25:04,000
And I'm like, no, I really didn't sign up for this.

312
00:25:04,000 --> 00:25:06,000
We'll be back tomorrow.

313
00:25:06,000 --> 00:25:10,000
By then, please make your choice because you get one or the other.

314
00:25:10,000 --> 00:25:13,000
Now, what am I going to do?

315
00:25:13,000 --> 00:25:16,000
It was obvious that I had been hoodwinked at this point.

316
00:25:16,000 --> 00:25:21,000
And was it in the small print? Did you ever get to look at what I went back and looked at it?

317
00:25:21,000 --> 00:25:22,000
It wasn't addressed at all.

318
00:25:22,000 --> 00:25:24,000
All it said was I signed up for the ASA.

319
00:25:24,000 --> 00:25:31,000
They had never put agent or agent handler or any specific M.O.S. military occupational specialty.

320
00:25:31,000 --> 00:25:33,000
They had they had not addressed that.

321
00:25:33,000 --> 00:25:38,000
It was a new under an umbrella where they could assign you all these tasks.

322
00:25:38,000 --> 00:25:41,000
Yeah. So I was like, hmm, damn.

323
00:25:41,000 --> 00:25:49,000
So the very first formation the next morning, there was there was a sergeant to sergeant first classes,

324
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one who became a friend of mine later on in life, Jack Davis, who was the Green Beret recruiter at Fort Ord at that time.

325
00:25:58,000 --> 00:26:02,000
And there was another I don't remember his name.

326
00:26:02,000 --> 00:26:06,000
I think his name was Nathan, Sergeant First Class Nathan.

327
00:26:06,000 --> 00:26:14,000
He was from the 82nd Airborne Division, both of them with with highly polished jump boots, starch fatigues.

328
00:26:14,000 --> 00:26:20,000
I mean, they were the epitome of an elite soldier, both of them.

329
00:26:20,000 --> 00:26:29,000
And they said, you know, we really don't want to be here to talk to you because none of you are good enough to do what we do.

330
00:26:29,000 --> 00:26:31,000
Well, there's the first hook set.

331
00:26:31,000 --> 00:26:36,000
I was like, oh, wait a minute, who who are these guys?

332
00:26:36,000 --> 00:26:41,000
Because I heard the ballad of the Green Beret and all that stuff, but I didn't really know anything about them.

333
00:26:41,000 --> 00:26:44,000
I didn't know anything about the Airborne to speak of.

334
00:26:44,000 --> 00:26:47,000
And so I went in to see him.

335
00:26:47,000 --> 00:26:49,000
Davis was busy, the Green Beret.

336
00:26:49,000 --> 00:26:51,000
So I went to see Sergeant First Class Nathan.

337
00:26:51,000 --> 00:26:53,000
I'm pretty sure that was his name.

338
00:26:53,000 --> 00:26:58,000
And he said, he said, you know, he said, I represent the 82nd Airborne Division.

339
00:26:58,000 --> 00:27:05,000
And he said, we're looking for for good soldiers, elite soldiers, soldiers that are a cut above the rest.

340
00:27:05,000 --> 00:27:09,000
And I always I always like to consider myself a cut above the rest, whether I was or not.

341
00:27:09,000 --> 00:27:14,000
And he said, I explained to him my predicament.

342
00:27:14,000 --> 00:27:18,000
And he said, look, he said, I can get you out of the A.S.A. commitment.

343
00:27:18,000 --> 00:27:25,000
He said, if you volunteer for Airborne, we have priority over everyone and we can get you out of that.

344
00:27:25,000 --> 00:27:28,000
You're still going to have to keep your four year commitment.

345
00:27:28,000 --> 00:27:34,000
But he said, I can get you out of that and I can get you into the 82nd Airborne Division.

346
00:27:34,000 --> 00:27:39,000
And he said, we can send you to signal school and you become a radio operator.

347
00:27:39,000 --> 00:27:41,000
That sounds like a pretty good deal.

348
00:27:41,000 --> 00:27:44,000
That sounds OK.

349
00:27:44,000 --> 00:27:47,000
And so I said, what about this Green Beret thing?

350
00:27:47,000 --> 00:27:52,000
And he said, well, he said, you know, he said, you don't want to go right into that.

351
00:27:52,000 --> 00:27:59,000
He said, you really want to get in the airborne first, get comfortable with that, become a soldier.

352
00:27:59,000 --> 00:28:01,000
And then you can look at doing that.

353
00:28:01,000 --> 00:28:06,000
I said, he said, because they're both at Fort Bragg 82nd and Special Forces are right there at Fort Bragg.

354
00:28:06,000 --> 00:28:08,000
That made sense to me.

355
00:28:08,000 --> 00:28:10,000
So I said, OK, give me the papers.

356
00:28:10,000 --> 00:28:12,000
So I signed on the dotted line.

357
00:28:12,000 --> 00:28:14,000
Did you read those papers a little more carefully?

358
00:28:14,000 --> 00:28:16,000
I did. I was pretty careful.

359
00:28:16,000 --> 00:28:24,000
And it said and he even put down because there was an at the time radio operator was considered an O5 Bravo MOS.

360
00:28:24,000 --> 00:28:26,000
And so it was right.

361
00:28:26,000 --> 00:28:28,000
The school was right there at Fort Ord.

362
00:28:28,000 --> 00:28:37,000
So I could finish basic training, go to my advanced training, which was the O5 Bravo, then go to jump school and then go to the 82nd.

363
00:28:37,000 --> 00:28:40,000
And that was all it was lined out very clearly.

364
00:28:40,000 --> 00:28:43,000
So it's like, OK, now I feel comfortable with that.

365
00:28:43,000 --> 00:28:46,000
So I signed off on that.

366
00:28:46,000 --> 00:28:49,000
The ASA came back that afternoon said, OK, which one did you pick?

367
00:28:49,000 --> 00:28:50,000
And I said, neither one.

368
00:28:50,000 --> 00:28:52,000
I'm going to the 82nd Airborne Division.

369
00:28:52,000 --> 00:29:00,000
And they just they about had a heart attack because what I didn't realize at the time was the ASA, since I'd signed their contract,

370
00:29:00,000 --> 00:29:06,000
had already begun processing a security clearance for me because everybody in the ASA had to have at least a secret clearance.

371
00:29:06,000 --> 00:29:09,000
That was like ten thousand dollars out of their budget.

372
00:29:09,000 --> 00:29:11,000
And there was no way to stop it.

373
00:29:11,000 --> 00:29:15,000
So the 82nd was actually getting something that they hadn't bargained on.

374
00:29:15,000 --> 00:29:19,000
And the ASA was going to have to pay for it and get nothing to show for it.

375
00:29:19,000 --> 00:29:20,000
You read what you saw.

376
00:29:20,000 --> 00:29:23,000
So they got they got very accommodating at that point.

377
00:29:23,000 --> 00:29:26,000
And they said, look, we'll send you to any school you want to.

378
00:29:26,000 --> 00:29:28,000
I said, no, you lied to me once.

379
00:29:28,000 --> 00:29:30,000
I don't want to hear any more of this.

380
00:29:30,000 --> 00:29:32,000
Oh, well, we'll make an officer.

381
00:29:32,000 --> 00:29:33,000
We'll do that.

382
00:29:33,000 --> 00:29:34,000
No, don't.

383
00:29:34,000 --> 00:29:36,000
I'm not even listening.

384
00:29:36,000 --> 00:29:38,000
I've turned off my receive set.

385
00:29:38,000 --> 00:29:40,000
I'm on transmit only.

386
00:29:40,000 --> 00:29:43,000
I'm going to the Airborne. Goodbye.

387
00:29:43,000 --> 00:29:44,000
And that's what I did.

388
00:29:44,000 --> 00:29:56,000
And interestingly enough, one of my instructors in the in the O5 Bravo school at Fort Ord was an ex green beret that had become medically disqualified to continue on jump status.

389
00:29:56,000 --> 00:30:00,000
So he was an instructor at my radio operator course.

390
00:30:00,000 --> 00:30:05,000
And he regaled us with stories about his time in special forces.

391
00:30:05,000 --> 00:30:06,000
And it was just it was great.

392
00:30:06,000 --> 00:30:10,000
And I was like, oh, this sounds like this sounds like the place to be.

393
00:30:10,000 --> 00:30:14,000
So through the 82nd and then we'll see what happens from there.

394
00:30:14,000 --> 00:30:25,000
So I went through that training, went to to Fort Benning, Georgia to go through jump school, completed jump school and then went on to Fort Bragg and was assigned to the 82nd.

395
00:30:25,000 --> 00:30:33,000
And I stayed there probably six months and I was assigned to the brigade that had just returned from Vietnam.

396
00:30:33,000 --> 00:30:37,000
And so we were in a training cycle.

397
00:30:37,000 --> 00:30:42,000
So we went into this training cycle, preparing to go back to Vietnam.

398
00:30:42,000 --> 00:30:45,000
And I think it was nine months, something like that.

399
00:30:45,000 --> 00:30:48,000
So I went through that training.

400
00:30:48,000 --> 00:30:49,000
I prepared myself.

401
00:30:49,000 --> 00:30:52,000
I got pretty comfortable with being a soldier.

402
00:30:52,000 --> 00:30:57,000
And I even got as far as as being made a squad leader.

403
00:30:57,000 --> 00:31:02,000
And another fellow and I had had made friends with each other.

404
00:31:02,000 --> 00:31:05,000
And we're talking and said, you know, we both want to go to Vietnam.

405
00:31:05,000 --> 00:31:06,000
We want to see what it's like.

406
00:31:06,000 --> 00:31:08,000
We want to challenge ourselves.

407
00:31:08,000 --> 00:31:12,000
Maybe not in those words exactly, but that's what it came down to.

408
00:31:12,000 --> 00:31:15,000
But we could always use a little more training.

409
00:31:15,000 --> 00:31:20,000
So let's go down and talk to these guys down Ardennes Street.

410
00:31:20,000 --> 00:31:25,000
82nd and Special Forces both were on Ardennes Street, just opposite ends, so to speak.

411
00:31:25,000 --> 00:31:28,000
So we went down and we talked to the special forces recruiter there.

412
00:31:28,000 --> 00:31:31,000
And he said, oh, yeah, he said, we'd be happy to have you guys.

413
00:31:31,000 --> 00:31:37,000
If you qualify, we'll run you through a battery of tests to see if you if you pass, if you make it.

414
00:31:37,000 --> 00:31:42,000
And if so, then we'll schedule you for training and take you from there.

415
00:31:42,000 --> 00:31:47,000
So we went through the tests, took the battery of tests that they had at that time passed.

416
00:31:47,000 --> 00:31:50,000
And both of us got into special forces training.

417
00:31:50,000 --> 00:31:54,000
82nd wasn't particularly happy about that, but it happens.

418
00:31:54,000 --> 00:31:56,000
Now, they're a big organization.

419
00:31:56,000 --> 00:31:57,000
Yeah, there's a lot of people. Exactly.

420
00:31:57,000 --> 00:32:03,000
But with with that group you were assigned to, you had a lot of veterans that already seen combat in Vietnam.

421
00:32:03,000 --> 00:32:06,000
What were some of the impressions you got from from those men?

422
00:32:06,000 --> 00:32:10,000
The the guys in the 82nd were were professional.

423
00:32:10,000 --> 00:32:14,000
They were they were soldiers. They.

424
00:32:14,000 --> 00:32:22,000
They represented to me the the people that I had known before from World War Two,

425
00:32:22,000 --> 00:32:28,000
that that mentality, that mindset, the focus that they had.

426
00:32:28,000 --> 00:32:33,000
And started hearing, of course, a lot of stories from them about what they had been through in Vietnam,

427
00:32:33,000 --> 00:32:35,000
the guys that had been to Vietnam.

428
00:32:35,000 --> 00:32:40,000
And it again, it strikes me now.

429
00:32:40,000 --> 00:32:47,000
It didn't strike me at the time, I don't think, but it strikes me now is that was that oral history of the tribe being passed on.

430
00:32:47,000 --> 00:33:00,000
And I was a little more attuned to it because I was used to this adult world where I would find those above me that had had done things like in my life.

431
00:33:00,000 --> 00:33:04,000
You know, my father, my grandfather and uncles and people.

432
00:33:04,000 --> 00:33:07,000
And I had learned from them. They had become my mentors.

433
00:33:07,000 --> 00:33:13,000
And so I reached out to those people that that I could within 82nd in my unit at that time.

434
00:33:13,000 --> 00:33:23,000
And they became my next set of mentors, preparing me for what it might be like or what I thought it would be like when I went to war myself.

435
00:33:23,000 --> 00:33:27,000
And so that was a that was a very positive thing for me.

436
00:33:27,000 --> 00:33:34,000
And I was nothing but ears at that point. I wanted to hear everything they could possibly tell me.

437
00:33:34,000 --> 00:33:49,000
And that continued as I went to special forces, because virtually everyone that was a special forces cadre at that time was a combat veteran, many of them several times over, some of them from World War Two and Korea and Vietnam.

438
00:33:49,000 --> 00:33:51,000
So I was getting at all of this stuff.

439
00:33:51,000 --> 00:34:00,000
And that that was just that was a plethora of people out there with just these these terrific educational stories.

440
00:34:00,000 --> 00:34:08,000
I mean, there were stories, but they were truly educational to me, having never been there and to hear them explain.

441
00:34:08,000 --> 00:34:22,000
And in essence, again, I didn't realize at the time, prepare me for what I was going to for what I was going to walk into when I went to Vietnam and began my actual combat experience.

442
00:34:22,000 --> 00:34:33,000
And it was the thing that struck me about the special forces cadre that I ran into and those that were in those senior special forces people.

443
00:34:33,000 --> 00:34:39,000
They told me the why. They didn't just tell me the story.

444
00:34:39,000 --> 00:34:44,000
They told me the story, but they told me the why of the story.

445
00:34:44,000 --> 00:34:50,000
And they told me why we trained in certain ways, why we did things the way we did them.

446
00:34:50,000 --> 00:34:55,000
And they wouldn't just tell us to do something.

447
00:34:55,000 --> 00:34:58,000
They would do it with us.

448
00:34:58,000 --> 00:35:05,000
You know, if we were doing push ups, they were doing push ups, whatever it might be, something as simple as that.

449
00:35:05,000 --> 00:35:08,000
But they they showed us the way to do things.

450
00:35:08,000 --> 00:35:14,000
Then they did it with us and they explained why we were doing it and why we were learning to do the things we did.

451
00:35:14,000 --> 00:35:22,000
And I was really lucky because when I had gone through the radio operator's course, I learned to send and receive Morse code.

452
00:35:22,000 --> 00:35:31,000
And in special forces at that time, you had to you had to send and receive, I think it was 20 or 22 words a minute.

453
00:35:31,000 --> 00:35:40,000
And I sent and received about 24, I think, because I'd really tried hard and had been influenced by that instructor that I had.

454
00:35:40,000 --> 00:35:50,000
So they tested me and said, well, you know, you you already meet the standards of Morse code because a lot of the guys going through had never seen Morse code.

455
00:35:50,000 --> 00:35:52,000
So that was new to them.

456
00:35:52,000 --> 00:36:04,000
And so they said, since you already send and receive at the an acceptable level, we'll put you through a truncated course of just the radios themselves that we use, which was, I think, two weeks long.

457
00:36:04,000 --> 00:36:06,000
And then we'll send you to another.

458
00:36:06,000 --> 00:36:12,000
And in this case, it was what they called 11 Foxtrot at that time's operations and intelligence.

459
00:36:12,000 --> 00:36:18,000
So they sent me through the operations and intelligence course as soon as I went through that short course on the on the radios themselves.

460
00:36:18,000 --> 00:36:33,000
So I actually picked up two MOS at that point because special forces has always prided itself on all the people on the team being cross trained in at least two, if not more, MOS or military occupational specialties.

461
00:36:33,000 --> 00:36:40,000
Weapons, engineers, communications, operations and intelligence.

462
00:36:40,000 --> 00:36:57,000
Only the medics reach the actual level of 18 Delta or special forces medic at that time, but they would teach us a lot of their skills that they had, you know, proper placement of tourniquets, proper placement of wounds, wound bandages and things like that.

463
00:36:57,000 --> 00:37:03,000
And how to how to care for people that have been wounded and to prepare them for transport and so on.

464
00:37:03,000 --> 00:37:06,000
So everybody's teaching everybody on the team.

465
00:37:06,000 --> 00:37:17,000
And so I picked up both of those MOS and completed that training in April, early April of 69.

466
00:37:17,000 --> 00:37:20,000
And then I was on my way to Vietnam.

467
00:37:20,000 --> 00:37:23,000
I'd already volunteered for the Army.

468
00:37:23,000 --> 00:37:28,000
I volunteered for airborne and I volunteered for special forces.

469
00:37:28,000 --> 00:37:41,000
So when I arrived in Vietnam, we arrived at Cam Ranh Bay and then we were trans shipped to Nha Trang, Vietnam, which was the headquarters of the fifth Special Forces Group.

470
00:37:41,000 --> 00:37:51,000
And when we got there, they said, OK, we've got a requirement for some people at some of the classified assignments.

471
00:37:51,000 --> 00:37:55,000
And if you'd like to volunteer for that, we'd be happy to accept your set you.

472
00:37:55,000 --> 00:37:58,000
Otherwise, you're going out to.

473
00:37:58,000 --> 00:38:02,000
I can't remember the name of the island. I think it was on tray.

474
00:38:02,000 --> 00:38:07,000
Doesn't matter. There's an island offshore where they ran a training course for people new to Vietnam.

475
00:38:07,000 --> 00:38:13,000
And they said, for those of you that that don't volunteer for this special assignment, we're going to send you out there.

476
00:38:13,000 --> 00:38:19,000
The rest of you will get on a different airplane tomorrow, fly out to your assignments and then they will send you to a training course,

477
00:38:19,000 --> 00:38:22,000
which is what I decided to do. Heck it.

478
00:38:22,000 --> 00:38:25,000
That was lying. No information on what you were signing up for.

479
00:38:25,000 --> 00:38:31,000
It was. I think they said it was perhaps a reconnaissance operation, but that was all they said.

480
00:38:31,000 --> 00:38:35,000
They said nothing more than that. They use no acronyms or anything else.

481
00:38:35,000 --> 00:38:40,000
They just said this is a classified assignment concerning reconnaissance operations.

482
00:38:40,000 --> 00:38:44,000
And so I said, what the heck? I'll give it a shot.

483
00:38:44,000 --> 00:38:46,000
I've done well so far apart from the first time.

484
00:38:46,000 --> 00:38:50,000
In for a penny, in for a pound. So I went ahead and did that.

485
00:38:50,000 --> 00:38:53,000
And that's what got me to ban me to it.

486
00:38:53,000 --> 00:39:01,000
And command and control to set detachment south or B-50, as it was known, which was a part of MACV SOG.

487
00:39:01,000 --> 00:39:08,000
Now, for people listening, myself included, that aren't in a military background, explain that unit to us.

488
00:39:08,000 --> 00:39:17,000
MACV SOG was Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which was the overarching military organization in Vietnam at the time.

489
00:39:17,000 --> 00:39:21,000
And SOG was Studies and Observations Group.

490
00:39:21,000 --> 00:39:37,000
It was that consisted of multiple organizations that that provided intelligence activities for Military Assistance Command Vietnam and for other units within Vietnam.

491
00:39:37,000 --> 00:39:47,000
Our operations consisted of cross border operations into Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam for the three CNCs.

492
00:39:47,000 --> 00:39:53,000
There was three CNC command and control detachments in Vietnam at that time.

493
00:39:53,000 --> 00:40:00,000
Mine was at Bami Tuot. There was another at Khon Thum, CCC Central, and then CCN or North was at Da Nang.

494
00:40:00,000 --> 00:40:09,000
And they did firstly all of the operations up north, although I went up and did a couple of operations, assisted them in the north.

495
00:40:09,000 --> 00:40:14,000
And I actually got as far south as Kanto and the Delta.

496
00:40:14,000 --> 00:40:29,000
So we were to provide intelligence of what was going on in the sanctuary areas and or the Ho Chi Minh Trail of that ran through Laos and Cambodia.

497
00:40:29,000 --> 00:40:38,000
The North Vietnamese were using to move men and equipment down and then they would turn and bring them into South Vietnam to confront American forces.

498
00:40:38,000 --> 00:40:52,000
So our job was to identify whatever we could or directed targets to look at to see where the supplies were, where the equipment was and where the people were.

499
00:40:52,000 --> 00:40:56,000
And if we could, who the people were that were comprising those organizations.

500
00:40:56,000 --> 00:41:01,000
That would indicate what their mission was when they got to South Vietnam.

501
00:41:01,000 --> 00:41:15,000
Right. So I think if I'm understanding right, listening to you and Jason, what made your unit unique was rather than being in the area that the conflict was, you were entering outside that.

502
00:41:15,000 --> 00:41:26,000
So not only were you politically in a dangerous position, but also you didn't have the huge support of the main military to back you up if the shit hit the fan for lack of a better word.

503
00:41:26,000 --> 00:41:42,000
That's correct. There was another organization called Project Delta, B-52, which was an in-country, in-Vietnam activity that provided reconnaissance operations within Vietnam, within the contiguous borders of Vietnam.

504
00:41:42,000 --> 00:41:52,000
But we were outside and you're right, there was, we had minimal support, a couple of gunships and a couple of slick helicopters and that's about it.

505
00:41:52,000 --> 00:42:01,000
We couldn't call in fires for the most part, although occasionally I think it happened by accident because nobody was sure where the border was.

506
00:42:01,000 --> 00:42:04,000
Which tree is it?

507
00:42:04,000 --> 00:42:19,000
But you're absolutely right. Our operations were covert at best and very, we were supported, but we weren't supported with the full might of the American military.

508
00:42:19,000 --> 00:42:28,000
Right. Now, going back for a second, so you, well firstly, funny story, as a fellow Delta guy, Pat McNamara, who I had on the show quite a while ago now,

509
00:42:28,000 --> 00:42:35,000
who has by far the best recruitment story from a positive way because his dad actually sent him down there with a lawyer.

510
00:42:35,000 --> 00:42:37,000
Smart move.

511
00:42:37,000 --> 00:42:44,000
So he actually got exactly what he was looking. So everyone listening to date, you know, four and a half years later in this podcast is still the best thing I've heard.

512
00:42:44,000 --> 00:42:47,000
So I highly recommend that even though I was never in the military.

513
00:42:47,000 --> 00:42:51,000
That's a great idea. I love that. I wish I'd have thought of it.

514
00:42:51,000 --> 00:42:54,000
Yeah, well I mean, everyone does now because I hear all these horror stories.

515
00:42:54,000 --> 00:42:59,000
But the other thing is, you know, you volunteered and leveled up over and over again.

516
00:42:59,000 --> 00:43:10,000
And I get that philosophy myself because as someone who did a profession where we might die, our brother and sister might die, or the person we're trying to rescue might die,

517
00:43:10,000 --> 00:43:16,000
the more training you get, the more effective you are at saving someone and going home to your family.

518
00:43:16,000 --> 00:43:17,000
Exactly.

519
00:43:17,000 --> 00:43:28,000
So that makes perfect sense as well. But there's a path, there's a crucible to go to be, you know, the most elite, one of the most elite units in the Army.

520
00:43:28,000 --> 00:43:40,000
So when you look back at this, you know, you're in the mountains, you're in the desert, you're helping with the family members and the job site stuff.

521
00:43:40,000 --> 00:43:49,000
Which elements do you think physically and mentally allowed you to continuously succeed in these selection programs when so many others didn't?

522
00:43:49,000 --> 00:44:06,000
I think what, I think from the mental aspect, that's what came from my parents and grandparents talking about their lives and the trials that they had been through,

523
00:44:06,000 --> 00:44:23,000
that life put in front of them, and the perseverance that they had, and the resilience that they had, knowing that they only had themselves and their close friends and or family to rely on.

524
00:44:23,000 --> 00:44:36,000
And so that's what brought me to the comfortable aspect of understanding teams, small teams that rely on each other to get through.

525
00:44:36,000 --> 00:44:42,000
Yeah, you know, to be a great team member, you have to first be a good individual.

526
00:44:42,000 --> 00:45:02,000
And that just came home to me time after time after time, because there was a lot of people as I went through training, the very stages of my training, people had a real problem understanding that there's times when, yeah, you need to do it yourself,

527
00:45:02,000 --> 00:45:15,000
and there's times when you need to rely on someone else to do their job to allow you to do yours. And they had problems with that. They couldn't get to that team aspect, or it took them a long time to get to that team aspect.

528
00:45:15,000 --> 00:45:22,000
It came very comfortably to me because I had been listening to it for so long.

529
00:45:22,000 --> 00:45:41,000
From the physical aspect, probably the lineman work that I did in the telephone company, I played football, I spent a lot of times in the mountains, outdoors, camping and hunting.

530
00:45:41,000 --> 00:45:57,000
That aspect never bothered me. I wasn't a city guy. So those aspects of being involved in outdoors activities and strenuous outdoors activities came pretty naturally to me also.

531
00:45:57,000 --> 00:46:16,000
And so when you combine those two together, I think that's what gave me the ability to move forward and to pass the various selections that I went to.

532
00:46:16,000 --> 00:46:27,000
Again, and I said this before, I think it's a physical aspect, but it's more a mental aspect than it is physical. Yeah, you've got to be physically fit, certainly.

533
00:46:27,000 --> 00:46:41,000
But you can do more with your body if your mind tells it to. And so I think the mental aspect was probably the most important part that got me through all of those selections.

534
00:46:41,000 --> 00:46:53,000
And the mentorship of those around me that had been before and understood and explained.

535
00:46:53,000 --> 00:47:05,000
Too often it's great to hear a story, but then I'm always looking for the why. Why did you do it that way? What made that way the best way to do it?

536
00:47:05,000 --> 00:47:15,000
And if it was a satisfactory explanation, fine. If it wasn't, then I'm going to look for a better way to do it. Absolutely not. Not because I told you so. Exactly.

537
00:47:15,000 --> 00:47:24,000
But I was certainly willing to listen to anything anybody would be willing to tell me. And I think that stood me in good stead too.

538
00:47:24,000 --> 00:47:35,000
And so it was that resilient mental attitude that allowed me to get through and be successful.

539
00:47:35,000 --> 00:47:45,000
Now with you also spending a lot of that time outside of being involved in working for a living, or working assisting, when you were younger,

540
00:47:45,000 --> 00:47:53,000
is there also an element of that baseline of discomfort being a lot higher than possibly someone who grew up in a city?

541
00:47:53,000 --> 00:48:06,000
Yeah, I think probably so. I know one of the things when I went to work for the telephone company, it was interesting to me the interactions I had with all the old guys.

542
00:48:06,000 --> 00:48:16,000
Because of course they always looked at me as the funny new guy. Oh boy, here comes another one. Now we've got to train him.

543
00:48:16,000 --> 00:48:27,000
And we've got to bring him up to speed so that he doesn't fail. And I think it surprised them that I was willing to listen to them and willing to take their advice.

544
00:48:27,000 --> 00:48:32,000
And then at times I was able to come up with something maybe a little better than they had done it.

545
00:48:32,000 --> 00:48:38,000
Find maybe a different way, a slightly different way to do something. But always try theirs. And I was willing to do that.

546
00:48:38,000 --> 00:48:52,000
And I think that kind of surprised them a bit. So it was me learning to interact with other people. And that helped me later on in special operations when I started working with indigenous personnel.

547
00:48:52,000 --> 00:49:00,000
That I understood that I was the old guy from the outside and now I'm dealing with totally new people.

548
00:49:00,000 --> 00:49:10,000
And yet they had within their culture ways of doing things that I probably ought to check out myself because they've been doing it for a long time.

549
00:49:10,000 --> 00:49:15,000
They've been pretty successful because they're still alive and I need to listen to them.

550
00:49:15,000 --> 00:49:20,000
It's like when I got to Vietnam and I started working with a mountain yard team.

551
00:49:20,000 --> 00:49:26,000
The people that I worked with were mountain yards, which were the mountain people of Vietnam from the central highlands.

552
00:49:26,000 --> 00:49:32,000
They taught me how to live in the jungle better than anybody I've ever met.

553
00:49:32,000 --> 00:49:41,000
That was their home. And so they understood it better than anybody that ran.

554
00:49:41,000 --> 00:49:46,000
And I went through some of the jungle training back at Fort Bragg, some very basic stuff.

555
00:49:46,000 --> 00:50:00,000
And yet these guys lived it every day. And I've always been able to identify who knew the best way to do things and follow their organization.

556
00:50:00,000 --> 00:50:03,000
So that helped tremendously too.

557
00:50:03,000 --> 00:50:06,000
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's so good to hear for a couple of reasons.

558
00:50:06,000 --> 00:50:15,000
Firstly, like you said, I think mentorship is something that's so important, something I think that's missing a lot in the fire service in some departments.

559
00:50:15,000 --> 00:50:23,000
Instead of sitting in a lazy boy, rolling your eyes, talking about these new guys and how useless they are and back in my day,

560
00:50:23,000 --> 00:50:27,000
instead of actually getting off your ass and filling in the void.

561
00:50:27,000 --> 00:50:28,000
Working with them.

562
00:50:28,000 --> 00:50:30,000
Yeah, working with them. But I think the other side is humility.

563
00:50:30,000 --> 00:50:37,000
And I remember, I hated seeing this, but there was a rule list in one of the stations and you see this on its own as well.

564
00:50:37,000 --> 00:50:42,000
Like no one cares what you did in your last apartment. Bullshit. I care.

565
00:50:42,000 --> 00:50:43,000
Absolutely.

566
00:50:43,000 --> 00:50:49,000
And you did what you did that were better. Now, maybe the first day you don't start pointing it out, get through, you know, probation a little bit.

567
00:50:49,000 --> 00:50:54,000
But if you're so arrogant that you don't want to learn from anywhere else, and this is not just the fire service.

568
00:50:54,000 --> 00:51:01,000
I mean, I talk about this a lot on here, what Portugal did with drug prohibition, what the UK has done with the national health when it's fully funded,

569
00:51:01,000 --> 00:51:07,000
what Finland's done with their education. There are some places around the world that do things so much better than us.

570
00:51:07,000 --> 00:51:09,000
And there's some things that we do so much better than anywhere else.

571
00:51:09,000 --> 00:51:13,000
If we all have the humility, we can all share information and all rise up.

572
00:51:13,000 --> 00:51:18,000
Exactly. That's teamwork. That's what it boils down to.

573
00:51:18,000 --> 00:51:27,000
And I encourage everybody, not just here, but everybody that I come in contact with, to be a mentor.

574
00:51:27,000 --> 00:51:35,000
You don't have to be an old sage like Socrates or Plato to be a mentor.

575
00:51:35,000 --> 00:51:45,000
If you have experience or knowledge or skills in a specific area, and you find somebody that doesn't have those that you think should,

576
00:51:45,000 --> 00:51:56,000
then become their mentor. And at the same time that you're mentoring them, you need to become a mentee, because they may have some ideas.

577
00:51:56,000 --> 00:52:02,000
They may point out some of yours, or they may bring some entirely different and something you can learn from.

578
00:52:02,000 --> 00:52:07,000
Because every day that you don't learn something is a lost day.

579
00:52:07,000 --> 00:52:16,000
And so that's why to me mentorship is so important, to pass down the knowledge and skills that you have as an individual,

580
00:52:16,000 --> 00:52:22,000
whatever your station in life, whatever your job is, there's somebody that you need to mentor.

581
00:52:22,000 --> 00:52:35,000
It struck me, and I don't remember who said it, the most important job of any leader is to train new leaders.

582
00:52:35,000 --> 00:52:40,000
Because you're not going to be around forever, particularly in the military.

583
00:52:40,000 --> 00:52:42,000
Oh yeah. But the fire service is the same.

584
00:52:42,000 --> 00:52:46,000
True also in the fire service, true in law enforcement, true in life.

585
00:52:46,000 --> 00:52:54,000
So find someone, mentor them, and help them become a better leader.

586
00:52:54,000 --> 00:52:59,000
And you will have fulfilled the requirements that you have on yourself.

587
00:52:59,000 --> 00:53:00,000
Absolutely.

588
00:53:00,000 --> 00:53:02,000
And it just makes sense.

589
00:53:02,000 --> 00:53:08,000
It does. And you hear coaches talking about that, that their goal is to make the athlete better than they ever were.

590
00:53:08,000 --> 00:53:09,000
Exactly.

591
00:53:09,000 --> 00:53:10,000
The coach whoever was.

592
00:53:10,000 --> 00:53:11,000
Exactly.

593
00:53:11,000 --> 00:53:15,000
If your ego can't take the fact that someone might be better than you, then maybe you're not the right mentor figure for that person.

594
00:53:15,000 --> 00:53:17,000
You're right. You're absolutely right.

595
00:53:17,000 --> 00:53:24,000
And so that's why I think mentorship is so important, because I've been lucky to have had some of the best mentors in the world.

596
00:53:24,000 --> 00:53:30,000
Some of the non-commissioned officers and the officers that I've served under have mentored me

597
00:53:30,000 --> 00:53:39,000
and ensured that I was professionally developed to be a better person, to be a better soldier,

598
00:53:39,000 --> 00:53:43,000
and ultimately to be a better individual.

599
00:53:43,000 --> 00:53:47,000
And that's important for all of us to do.

600
00:53:47,000 --> 00:53:49,000
I don't care where you work.

601
00:53:49,000 --> 00:53:54,000
You don't have to work in fire service or law enforcement or the military.

602
00:53:54,000 --> 00:53:57,000
You can work at McDonald's. It doesn't matter.

603
00:53:57,000 --> 00:54:04,000
But you need to be the best you can be, and you need to be able to mentor and be a mentee also.

604
00:54:04,000 --> 00:54:08,000
Be aware of people around you, situational awareness.

605
00:54:08,000 --> 00:54:12,000
Be aware of what's going on around you and plug into it.

606
00:54:12,000 --> 00:54:15,000
To the positive, not the negative.

607
00:54:15,000 --> 00:54:18,000
Absolutely. Well, you mentioned the why as well.

608
00:54:18,000 --> 00:54:20,000
I think that's an important thing where humility comes in again.

609
00:54:20,000 --> 00:54:26,000
Just because it's what your profession has done for X amount of years doesn't mean it's the best way now.

610
00:54:26,000 --> 00:54:30,000
And one thing I talk about quite often, and it's not a crusade of mine.

611
00:54:30,000 --> 00:54:35,000
I'm out the fire service now. It just is a common sense to me, is the helmets that we wear.

612
00:54:35,000 --> 00:54:38,000
I mean, those are 100-year-old designs.

613
00:54:38,000 --> 00:54:39,000
Right.

614
00:54:39,000 --> 00:54:43,000
But people hang on to them, and they're just not functional compared to, you know,

615
00:54:43,000 --> 00:54:46,000
and then some groups will even ridicule what the Europeans wear.

616
00:54:46,000 --> 00:54:51,000
Well, that's a much superior technology-wise helmet.

617
00:54:51,000 --> 00:54:56,000
And I've had a recent Irish firefighter I'm talking about, they just made the change a few years ago,

618
00:54:56,000 --> 00:54:58,000
and he was just raving about it.

619
00:54:58,000 --> 00:55:03,000
And to me, and people hate hearing this, but that's vanity. That's not tradition.

620
00:55:03,000 --> 00:55:07,000
Tradition is brotherhood and, you know, the courage and all those kind of things.

621
00:55:07,000 --> 00:55:11,000
And some of the skills that we take on the fire ground, the thing that sits on your head

622
00:55:11,000 --> 00:55:17,000
that is far inferior to technology now, that's ego getting in the way.

623
00:55:17,000 --> 00:55:20,000
If you're worried about how you look, then maybe you should just retire,

624
00:55:20,000 --> 00:55:24,000
because you need the best equipment to facilitate the rescues that you need to,

625
00:55:24,000 --> 00:55:29,000
and, you know, protect yourself so that you don't go down and become a liability on a fire ground.

626
00:55:29,000 --> 00:55:34,000
Sure. And you can look at the helmets in the military and see, from World War I,

627
00:55:34,000 --> 00:55:43,000
the old flat steel pots, to the World War II helmets, to the Vietnam, and then the newer helmets.

628
00:55:43,000 --> 00:55:47,000
And at one point, we were using skateboard helmets.

629
00:55:47,000 --> 00:55:50,000
I remember that. I've seen some of the pictures.

630
00:55:50,000 --> 00:55:56,000
So they've evolved, you know, and now the helmets that they have now are truly functional.

631
00:55:56,000 --> 00:55:58,000
But I think they're probably going to morph, too.

632
00:55:58,000 --> 00:56:02,000
I mean, people are always looking at new ways to do things.

633
00:56:02,000 --> 00:56:06,000
And those are the tools, the tools of the trade. And the tools of the trade can change.

634
00:56:06,000 --> 00:56:09,000
You don't need tradition there. You're absolutely correct.

635
00:56:09,000 --> 00:56:16,000
Your tradition is your history and your lineage and where you came from and what you did, not what you wore.

636
00:56:16,000 --> 00:56:20,000
That's kind of a, that's a no-brainer.

637
00:56:20,000 --> 00:56:23,000
Yeah. That's interesting perspective, so thank you.

638
00:56:23,000 --> 00:56:29,000
So one thing that I ask every single person that has been, you know, sent to combat,

639
00:56:29,000 --> 00:56:35,000
as myself, even though I'm a responder, I'm a civilian, I've never, never worked in the military.

640
00:56:35,000 --> 00:56:38,000
And I always preface by saying the same thing.

641
00:56:38,000 --> 00:56:45,000
We get given a polarized view of war, either the very pro-war, kill them all, let God sort them out,

642
00:56:45,000 --> 00:56:48,000
or the very anti, they're all baby killers.

643
00:56:48,000 --> 00:56:51,000
And it's politicized a lot of times as well.

644
00:56:51,000 --> 00:56:56,000
You obviously have now new stations that literally are wearing red or blue.

645
00:56:56,000 --> 00:57:01,000
So what gets lost is what we're asking our children to do in foreign countries.

646
00:57:01,000 --> 00:57:08,000
So you had, you know, this, this American upbringing, and then you had a lot of training within the military.

647
00:57:08,000 --> 00:57:14,000
When you arrived in Vietnam, regardless of the politics that sent you there,

648
00:57:14,000 --> 00:57:20,000
were there any moments where you saw some things that were happening to the Vietnamese people

649
00:57:20,000 --> 00:57:24,000
that kind of made you realize, all right, regardless of why we were initially sent,

650
00:57:24,000 --> 00:57:29,000
there are some horrible people that we need to take care of over here?

651
00:57:29,000 --> 00:57:34,000
Yeah, I think so.

652
00:57:34,000 --> 00:57:43,000
When I got to ban me to it, I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to run into.

653
00:57:43,000 --> 00:57:52,000
But it was a very interesting camp because command and control detachment south had Vietnamese,

654
00:57:52,000 --> 00:58:00,000
South Vietnamese, LLDB, the Look Long Doc Biet, which are the Vietnamese Special Forces.

655
00:58:00,000 --> 00:58:10,000
Within that group, there were some mountain yards, which was not too, that didn't happen very often.

656
00:58:10,000 --> 00:58:17,000
Because the, the South Vietnamese tended to look down on the mountain yards,

657
00:58:17,000 --> 00:58:22,000
kind of like America used to look down on the Native Americans.

658
00:58:22,000 --> 00:58:27,000
General equation, it's not exact, but that's close enough.

659
00:58:27,000 --> 00:58:33,000
And so there were, of course, mountain yards in my camp, because that's who I worked with.

660
00:58:33,000 --> 00:58:39,000
There were Chinese nuns, Chinese mercenaries, if you will.

661
00:58:39,000 --> 00:58:48,000
There were Chu Hois, which were North Vietnamese that were, that had left the North Vietnamese Army

662
00:58:48,000 --> 00:58:50,000
and had flipped to the south.

663
00:58:50,000 --> 00:58:58,000
And those guys I found really interesting to be able to talk to some of them as to why they had originally

664
00:58:58,000 --> 00:59:02,000
chose to support the North Vietnamese and fight in the North Vietnamese Army.

665
00:59:02,000 --> 00:59:06,000
A couple of them because they were forced to and the rest of them because they thought it was a good idea

666
00:59:06,000 --> 00:59:12,000
until they found out what they were being asked to do and that was kill more of their own countrymen.

667
00:59:12,000 --> 00:59:16,000
Because they didn't have a real problem killing Americans.

668
00:59:16,000 --> 00:59:25,000
They seemed to be the enemy, but just as important, stressed on them by their political officers was to kill the South Vietnamese.

669
00:59:25,000 --> 00:59:32,000
And that really upset them, that bothered them.

670
00:59:32,000 --> 00:59:35,000
And then there was a Cambodian company.

671
00:59:35,000 --> 00:59:40,000
So we had kind of an ethnically diverse camp, if you will.

672
00:59:40,000 --> 00:59:45,000
And so I was able to set down somewhat and talk to each one of those groups.

673
00:59:45,000 --> 00:59:49,000
I didn't talk too much to the Cambodians because they kind of, they stuck to themselves.

674
00:59:49,000 --> 00:59:54,000
They were in one of the exploitation companies and they kind of did their own thing.

675
00:59:54,000 --> 00:59:57,000
But I did talk to a couple of them.

676
00:59:57,000 --> 01:00:04,000
But more importantly, I really wanted to get to know the people because I had been raised to accept people.

677
01:00:04,000 --> 01:00:12,000
At face value, based on their values as to whether I thought they were good people or not.

678
01:00:12,000 --> 01:00:21,000
And I'd been taught there's good and bad people of every ethnicity, of every strata of life.

679
01:00:21,000 --> 01:00:23,000
There's good and bad.

680
01:00:23,000 --> 01:00:32,000
So the key is to get to know them and find out who's good, who's bad, and then figure out where you need to be.

681
01:00:32,000 --> 01:00:35,000
So that kind of made sense to me.

682
01:00:35,000 --> 01:00:38,000
It's kind of a black and white thing, but it just truly makes sense.

683
01:00:38,000 --> 01:00:42,000
And I still probably do it to this day.

684
01:00:42,000 --> 01:00:47,000
Ethnicity, race doesn't mean anything to me.

685
01:00:47,000 --> 01:00:49,000
It's what kind of person are you?

686
01:00:49,000 --> 01:00:51,000
That's what makes the difference.

687
01:00:51,000 --> 01:00:53,000
And there's good and bad everywhere.

688
01:00:53,000 --> 01:01:01,000
But I started listening to some of these guys and the things that had happened to their families personally in years previous.

689
01:01:01,000 --> 01:01:05,000
Because I was there for 12 months.

690
01:01:05,000 --> 01:01:09,000
A tour at that time in Vietnam was 12 months.

691
01:01:09,000 --> 01:01:14,000
These guys have been fighting war for 10 to 15 years, some of them.

692
01:01:14,000 --> 01:01:17,000
And that really kind of got my attention.

693
01:01:17,000 --> 01:01:19,000
That made me stop and think.

694
01:01:19,000 --> 01:01:24,000
Because here's people that are living a war.

695
01:01:24,000 --> 01:01:34,000
From the French, when the French were in Indochina, through all the iterations that had occurred since.

696
01:01:34,000 --> 01:01:44,000
And so in listening to them, I kind of plugged that into what I already had in my mind from what I had heard in America.

697
01:01:44,000 --> 01:01:49,000
What I had heard from news services, what I had heard from veterans, other veterans.

698
01:01:49,000 --> 01:01:57,000
And it struck me that we were really there for the right thing.

699
01:01:57,000 --> 01:02:02,000
That, again, I fall back on two words, freedom and liberty.

700
01:02:02,000 --> 01:02:09,000
The choice of any individual to choose their own life and what they want to do in life.

701
01:02:09,000 --> 01:02:12,000
Not forced on them in any way, shape or form.

702
01:02:12,000 --> 01:02:17,000
And I think that's something, to me, worth fighting for.

703
01:02:17,000 --> 01:02:18,000
That's important.

704
01:02:18,000 --> 01:02:26,000
And so as I talk to these people, the stories of some of the horrendous things that had happened to them,

705
01:02:26,000 --> 01:02:31,000
their family members, their extended families, the people in the neighboring village to them,

706
01:02:31,000 --> 01:02:41,000
under the hand of the North Vietnamese and the Viet Cong at that time, it just, I'm in the right place at the right time.

707
01:02:41,000 --> 01:02:44,000
This is right for me to be here.

708
01:02:44,000 --> 01:02:46,000
It wasn't so much that I was questioning myself.

709
01:02:46,000 --> 01:02:54,000
I was just trying to gather more information, but it was reinforcing my original beliefs.

710
01:02:54,000 --> 01:03:00,000
And I really felt it was important and has been important ever since throughout my life.

711
01:03:00,000 --> 01:03:07,000
Everything I've done, I've used those two things, liberty and freedom, to make a determination.

712
01:03:07,000 --> 01:03:09,000
Is this the right thing to do?

713
01:03:09,000 --> 01:03:17,000
And if I can do something to help somebody to gain either one or both of those, it's the right place to be.

714
01:03:17,000 --> 01:03:18,000
Absolutely.

715
01:03:18,000 --> 01:03:25,000
Well, one thing, I was speaking to Major Capers yesterday and he had some pretty horrendous things that he saw.

716
01:03:25,000 --> 01:03:29,000
One was talking about the, I can't remember if it was the NVA, I think it was the Viet Cong.

717
01:03:29,000 --> 01:03:38,000
We'll go into a village and take the military-age men and rape the women and take the food and then gut the chief and just hang him there.

718
01:03:38,000 --> 01:03:53,000
And what strikes me as some of these images and these stories that we hear from that particular conflict was just how brutal and just evil some of these men were, men and women, I don't know.

719
01:03:53,000 --> 01:04:13,000
So what I always wonder is, and I'm not saying that there weren't Americans doing some terrible things at one point too, but when your time over there and retrospectively when you think about it now, where did that level of violence and hate come from?

720
01:04:13,000 --> 01:04:20,000
It wasn't just like, okay, we're going to take over this village, we're going to eat some of your food, but to do what they did to some of these villages.

721
01:04:20,000 --> 01:04:44,000
Well, it wasn't true in every case, but in a couple of instances, some of the Viet Cong or a lot of the Viet Cong that I was aware of that were working in the areas that, well, they were peripheral to where we were.

722
01:04:44,000 --> 01:05:01,000
They were deposed from previous governmental jobs. And so when they would go into a village, they might have been one of the semi-chiefs or whatever of that village or the village next door.

723
01:05:01,000 --> 01:05:20,000
And they really had a personal vendetta against the hierarchy that had taken over and been supported by Americans or by the South Vietnamese government and ultimately supported by America.

724
01:05:20,000 --> 01:05:37,000
And so they chose that way, that brutality, to show their anger and to vent their frustration and anger against the organization, if you will.

725
01:05:37,000 --> 01:05:56,000
Yeah, they'd take the young men, they'd take their food, they'd take their animals, they'd rape the women, and they would oftentimes kill the hierarchy, if you will, of the village, which is, I think, what they wanted to be but were frustrated for whatever reason,

726
01:05:56,000 --> 01:06:09,000
be it the caste they were or the...there were some that were just bad people. There's bad people in every society.

727
01:06:09,000 --> 01:06:27,000
And to foster that upon the civilians in the way that they did, to me, was just unacceptable. And anything we could do, although we didn't have direct action against them, we were operating in a different area.

728
01:06:27,000 --> 01:06:36,000
And yet at the same time, the mountain yards that we worked with, we would support them in any way that we could.

729
01:06:36,000 --> 01:06:45,000
And it was interesting that most of the mountain yard villages didn't have those kinds of problems. The Vietnamese villages did.

730
01:06:45,000 --> 01:06:54,000
The mountain yard villages, there was an organization called Full Row. And Full Row was, in essence, a mountain yard army.

731
01:06:54,000 --> 01:07:14,000
It was a shadow army that was run by mountain yards, nobody in it but mountain yards, and we used to support them with ammunition, weapons, claymore mines, grenades, etc., for their village defenses.

732
01:07:14,000 --> 01:07:30,000
And they didn't have the problems that the South Vietnamese villages did because they protected themselves, their tribe, if you will, and didn't have to run into that particular situation of being targeted.

733
01:07:30,000 --> 01:07:37,000
Now, they were targeted in certain instances, certainly, but they had the ability to fight back, and they did.

734
01:07:37,000 --> 01:07:39,000
So they weren't an easy target.

735
01:07:39,000 --> 01:07:52,000
It was funny, in one of the exploitation companies at CCS, just a standard company, there was an old mountain yard first sergeant.

736
01:07:52,000 --> 01:08:00,000
He was a character, and he'd just quietly walk around, and he'd check on the troops and see how training was going and so on.

737
01:08:00,000 --> 01:08:12,000
And one day I happened to see a, I was walking with my interpreter, and I happened to see another young mountain yard pass by that first sergeant and salute him.

738
01:08:12,000 --> 01:08:18,000
And I was like, what? Because we didn't salute, we didn't teach him to salute.

739
01:08:18,000 --> 01:08:30,000
I asked my interpreter, I said, took, he took me, I said, took, I said, why did that young man just salute, and the first sergeant chewed him out?

740
01:08:30,000 --> 01:08:33,000
I mean, stood him at attention and just chewed him out.

741
01:08:33,000 --> 01:08:38,000
And we walked off a ways and took, just kind of put his finger over his mouth and said, come with me.

742
01:08:38,000 --> 01:08:47,000
So we walked a little ways away, and he said, first sergeant is a general in the full row army.

743
01:08:47,000 --> 01:08:52,000
And that kid knew it. So he'd saluted the general, but he didn't want him to.

744
01:08:52,000 --> 01:08:55,000
And so that's why he got himself chewed out.

745
01:08:55,000 --> 01:08:59,000
Ah, gotcha.

746
01:08:59,000 --> 01:09:07,000
But it was, some of the things that went on were absolutely terrible, no question about it.

747
01:09:07,000 --> 01:09:12,000
And whenever possible, we would support anybody that we could.

748
01:09:12,000 --> 01:09:20,000
But in our particular case, we supported our mountain yards because the people that worked with us, the soldiers, had families in these villages.

749
01:09:20,000 --> 01:09:25,000
And that was as much a concern of ours as it was to take care of ourselves.

750
01:09:25,000 --> 01:09:36,000
Now, with this conflict, as you said, being 15 years old now, another thing that I try and do is kind of reverse engineer any of the issues that we see now.

751
01:09:36,000 --> 01:09:40,000
So you have this country divided. You have these conflicts going on.

752
01:09:40,000 --> 01:09:45,000
You have basically genocide going on.

753
01:09:45,000 --> 01:09:57,000
When you reverse engineer that, what was at the root of this was because it seems like so many times, whether it's slavery, whether it's prohibition of drugs,

754
01:09:57,000 --> 01:10:06,000
any of these things that have this horrendous ripple effect that we're still dealing with today is greed and power is the root of it.

755
01:10:06,000 --> 01:10:17,000
So these farmers killing each other over yards in their native country, what was the root of that conflict?

756
01:10:17,000 --> 01:10:19,000
We have to kind of go back several thousand years.

757
01:10:19,000 --> 01:10:21,000
Let's do it.

758
01:10:21,000 --> 01:10:28,000
Vietnam, if you look at Southeast Asia, Vietnam is kind of the hub.

759
01:10:28,000 --> 01:10:32,000
To the southeast, you have the Philippines.

760
01:10:32,000 --> 01:10:39,000
To the south, you have Borneo, you have Australia, all of that.

761
01:10:39,000 --> 01:10:51,000
To the southwest, you've got Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, which used to be Burma.

762
01:10:51,000 --> 01:11:01,000
And then you've got to the north, you've got China and then Japan to the northeast.

763
01:11:01,000 --> 01:11:06,000
Vietnam has always been a hub of trade in Southeast Asia.

764
01:11:06,000 --> 01:11:17,000
A lot of trade passes through there because to go from one country to another is often a circuitous route.

765
01:11:17,000 --> 01:11:21,000
And so it's easier to transship through Vietnam.

766
01:11:21,000 --> 01:11:28,000
So they've always been an entrepreneurial people, a group of tradesmen, and it's a very rich country.

767
01:11:28,000 --> 01:11:39,000
And it's flourished as such to this day because it's interesting when I went back, I was sitting next to an older lady.

768
01:11:39,000 --> 01:11:43,000
And she said, is this your first time flying into Vietnam?

769
01:11:43,000 --> 01:11:47,000
This was in 2017 when I went back for the first time.

770
01:11:47,000 --> 01:11:48,000
And I said, no, ma'am.

771
01:11:48,000 --> 01:11:50,000
She said, you were here during the war.

772
01:11:50,000 --> 01:11:52,000
And I said, yes, I was.

773
01:11:52,000 --> 01:11:56,000
And I said, I guess I'm going to have to get used to calling this Ho Chi Minh City.

774
01:11:56,000 --> 01:12:00,000
And she said, oh, no, it's still Saigon.

775
01:12:00,000 --> 01:12:01,000
She said, I live there.

776
01:12:01,000 --> 01:12:03,000
And I said, OK, thank you.

777
01:12:03,000 --> 01:12:06,000
So that made things easier for me.

778
01:12:06,000 --> 01:12:19,000
So it was just it was mind expanding to me to see what Saigon had become because I'd been to Saigon a couple of times while I was in country for debriefings and so on.

779
01:12:19,000 --> 01:12:24,000
So I kind of had a general sense of what I thought Saigon was totally changed.

780
01:12:24,000 --> 01:12:32,000
I mean, it's one of the most bustling, awake all night cities that things are just always going on.

781
01:12:32,000 --> 01:12:35,000
But it's always been that way.

782
01:12:35,000 --> 01:12:44,000
So any time you have a country that's that that's that that's rich, that's that's big in trade, everybody wants it.

783
01:12:44,000 --> 01:12:47,000
Everybody wants a piece of that action.

784
01:12:47,000 --> 01:13:01,000
And the North Vietnamese in this particular instance and their surrogates, the Chinese, decided that they wanted to control the south because Saigon was the hub, not Hanoi.

785
01:13:01,000 --> 01:13:07,000
Hanoi was the the governmental hub, but Saigon was the economic hub.

786
01:13:07,000 --> 01:13:09,000
And that's what they wanted a piece of.

787
01:13:09,000 --> 01:13:12,000
That's what they they wanted, that richness.

788
01:13:12,000 --> 01:13:21,000
They wanted the land, which in South Vietnam at the time was covered in in rubber plantations.

789
01:13:21,000 --> 01:13:25,000
Michelin and others own these giant rubber plantations.

790
01:13:25,000 --> 01:13:29,000
Big money at that particular time in the 40s and the 50s.

791
01:13:29,000 --> 01:13:36,000
And so it was an economic hub that the whole south of Vietnam.

792
01:13:36,000 --> 01:13:44,000
It was a breadbasket of rice and and all of the other truck farming and everything that went on with that.

793
01:13:44,000 --> 01:13:47,000
So the north is a very pretty area.

794
01:13:47,000 --> 01:13:49,000
It's beautiful. Hanoi is a gorgeous city.

795
01:13:49,000 --> 01:13:52,000
Ended up going back there in 2018.

796
01:13:52,000 --> 01:13:56,000
I think it was very interesting to see.

797
01:13:56,000 --> 01:14:03,000
But the money, the economics were centered around Hanoi.

798
01:14:03,000 --> 01:14:06,000
I'm sorry, centered around Saigon.

799
01:14:06,000 --> 01:14:09,000
And that's what the people wanted. That's what they wanted out of this whole thing.

800
01:14:09,000 --> 01:14:16,000
They wanted that access to the trade routes and to the direct trade with all of the countries in Southeast Asia.

801
01:14:16,000 --> 01:14:20,000
So that that to me is what drove it.

802
01:14:20,000 --> 01:14:23,000
Certainly, there was some ideology that came to it.

803
01:14:23,000 --> 01:14:27,000
You know, nothing is just one simple thing by itself.

804
01:14:27,000 --> 01:14:41,000
The ideology of the communists at that time and the the drawing into the communist participation of China and the Soviet Union through North Vietnam.

805
01:14:41,000 --> 01:14:44,000
Pull them into that sphere of influence.

806
01:14:44,000 --> 01:14:51,000
And then that was turned around to pick up the economies because the Soviets have no ports on the west.

807
01:14:51,000 --> 01:14:57,000
And they really wanted Cameroon Bay and they really wanted the Saigon.

808
01:14:57,000 --> 01:15:02,000
And so that that made absolute sense economically to do just what they were doing.

809
01:15:02,000 --> 01:15:07,000
Yeah, just not ethically. Exactly.

810
01:15:07,000 --> 01:15:10,000
I mean, thank you again. Like I'm not well versed.

811
01:15:10,000 --> 01:15:12,000
I watched the Ken Burns documentary. I heard you talking about it in the interview.

812
01:15:12,000 --> 01:15:16,000
It was amazing. But even so, you know, it's still so much information to take in.

813
01:15:16,000 --> 01:15:19,000
And again, sometimes you have to go further back.

814
01:15:19,000 --> 01:15:22,000
So I appreciate you lending your perspective.

815
01:15:22,000 --> 01:15:28,000
Conversely to the atrocities, the other side of the coin, I like to ask is moments of humanity.

816
01:15:28,000 --> 01:15:34,000
Were there any kindness and compassion moments that really stuck out in the midst of that combat?

817
01:15:34,000 --> 01:15:48,000
From our side, one of the things that our medics did, we ran what we called MedCaps, medical capabilities, exercises in country.

818
01:15:48,000 --> 01:16:03,000
And what it basically what it was was the medics from our camp would would pack up in trucks and go out to to outlying villages, Vietnamese, mountain yard, whatever, and and treat the people.

819
01:16:03,000 --> 01:16:13,000
Not so much to bring them into our way or our sphere, if you will, although it did that, I think, to a certain degree.

820
01:16:13,000 --> 01:16:21,000
And there was probably some thought given to that also. But more importantly, just to take care of other human beings.

821
01:16:21,000 --> 01:16:27,000
And it was so, so interesting. I went out on a couple of those just out of pure curiosity.

822
01:16:27,000 --> 01:16:38,000
But it it made me feel so good to be able to do that because the people with all kinds of ailments would would show up for those.

823
01:16:38,000 --> 01:16:59,000
And we'd stay there for for quite some time, allowing people time to move to us because we'd set up in a village somewhere and then they would come to us to to be treated for for everything from boils to broken legs to deformities to just all kinds of things.

824
01:16:59,000 --> 01:17:08,000
And and to see the gratitude that those people gave for some of the simplest things.

825
01:17:08,000 --> 01:17:16,000
Nothing more than just cleaning a wound, because these are people that live out in the jungle and they run into water buffalo.

826
01:17:16,000 --> 01:17:23,000
I remember there was a young young child that had been gored in the thigh by water buffalo, really quite torn up.

827
01:17:23,000 --> 01:17:28,000
It wasn't life threatening, but it was a real mess. And it could have been a real mess if it hadn't been treated.

828
01:17:28,000 --> 01:17:31,000
And the medics worked on him, patched him all up.

829
01:17:31,000 --> 01:17:38,000
And his father was just effusive in his thanks.

830
01:17:38,000 --> 01:17:42,000
Couldn't understand a word he said, but we had interpreters with us.

831
01:17:42,000 --> 01:17:44,000
I take a my interpreter with me.

832
01:17:44,000 --> 01:18:04,000
I mean, I mean, it was just it was heartwarming to see that that that here in the midst of fighting, if you will, we're able to do something on a humanitarian scale that that that really made a difference, at least for that one boy at that one point in time.

833
01:18:04,000 --> 01:18:08,000
And some of the old people would show up and their teeth would be bad.

834
01:18:08,000 --> 01:18:21,000
And we had a dentist there that that worked with us occasionally, just all of the aspects, the stuff that we as Americans come to just accept as the norm as our do.

835
01:18:21,000 --> 01:18:24,000
There aren't any dues. There aren't any dues there.

836
01:18:24,000 --> 01:18:26,000
There's just life.

837
01:18:26,000 --> 01:18:48,000
And so to be able to work with them and to talk to them about the what they eat and and and how they take care of themselves and how they conduct their sanitary operations in their own village, you know, where to build their their outhouses and the people

838
01:18:48,000 --> 01:18:57,000
appreciate anything you do for them. And when you when you just take that little simple step of helping people, it's just it's amazing.

839
01:18:57,000 --> 01:19:04,000
And it it kind of reaffirms your your feeling about doing the right thing and being in the right place.

840
01:19:04,000 --> 01:19:17,000
Absolutely. Well, speaking of that, so Major Capers was talking about, again, trying to protect these villages, trying to find these people that have done these things to these, you know,

841
01:19:17,000 --> 01:19:21,000
these village leaders and they would track them down.

842
01:19:21,000 --> 01:19:25,000
They would hunt these human beings and make sure they couldn't do it to anyone else.

843
01:19:25,000 --> 01:19:33,000
What's interesting about your story is you've talked before about Vietnamese groups hunting your group down.

844
01:19:33,000 --> 01:19:40,000
So tell me about that and then tell me about just being on the receiving end of being hunted.

845
01:19:40,000 --> 01:19:43,000
Not many people, not many humans know what it's like to be hunted.

846
01:19:43,000 --> 01:19:47,000
It's not a lot of fun.

847
01:19:47,000 --> 01:19:59,000
The our organizations were known as SCU special commando units, SCU's and the North Vietnamese.

848
01:19:59,000 --> 01:20:08,000
I want to say late 69 or maybe early 70 gets a little hazy in my in my memory at times.

849
01:20:08,000 --> 01:20:15,000
They they fielded a issues anti SCU units.

850
01:20:15,000 --> 01:20:29,000
These were trackers and and teams that were established just to find us as we did our cross border operations because they they understood that we were operating in small teams,

851
01:20:29,000 --> 01:20:33,000
normally about six people, two Americans and four mountain yards.

852
01:20:33,000 --> 01:20:44,000
They they knew that we didn't have a whole lot of support and they wanted to what they really wanted to do was was capture the Americans.

853
01:20:44,000 --> 01:20:57,000
And so they they had set up these various sized units platoon or or squad sized units that were there to to chase us and to find us whenever possible.

854
01:20:57,000 --> 01:21:03,000
Some of them used dogs and they all used trackers and they they had a pretty good idea.

855
01:21:03,000 --> 01:21:16,000
The general vicinity that we would be operating in somewhere along the Ho Chi Minh Trail so that we could observe around some of their their base areas where they had storage of supplies and equipment.

856
01:21:16,000 --> 01:21:19,000
And so they would turn these guys loose around those areas.

857
01:21:19,000 --> 01:21:25,000
And particularly they would watch the inserts that occurred because we were inserted normally by helicopter.

858
01:21:25,000 --> 01:21:31,000
And when we were inserted, it's kind of easy to tell where the helicopter is generally.

859
01:21:31,000 --> 01:21:35,000
You can't pick it up specifically, but you can tell generally where that where it was.

860
01:21:35,000 --> 01:21:38,000
And so they turn these guys loose to chase us.

861
01:21:38,000 --> 01:21:43,000
And it's it's a feeling like no other.

862
01:21:43,000 --> 01:21:54,000
I mean, it is not a good feeling when you start hearing the dogs bark and and the guys are yelling to each other because they're they're they're trying to figure out where you are exactly.

863
01:21:54,000 --> 01:22:00,000
And if they're close enough, you can hear them talking or yelling back and forth because they're really quiet up to that point.

864
01:22:00,000 --> 01:22:07,000
But when they think they've they've come to the position where they've got you kind of where they want you, then they they start talking.

865
01:22:07,000 --> 01:22:15,000
And one of the first times it happened to me was I heard them talking, a couple of them talking to each other.

866
01:22:15,000 --> 01:22:18,000
And I asked my interpreter, what are they saying?

867
01:22:18,000 --> 01:22:24,000
Because I could pick up a few words of Vietnamese, but I certainly couldn't follow their conversations.

868
01:22:24,000 --> 01:22:28,000
And he said, they're saying kill the mountain yards and capture the Americans.

869
01:22:28,000 --> 01:22:32,000
And that's a that's a really bad feeling, especially if you're a mountain yard.

870
01:22:32,000 --> 01:22:37,000
Yeah. Yeah. And and so I want to protect my mountain yards.

871
01:22:37,000 --> 01:22:47,000
I want my mountain yards to protect me. And I want us all to stay safe and get the heck out of there because we're now in a in a denied area that that we've been identified.

872
01:22:47,000 --> 01:22:50,000
Or at least they're close enough that they think they have us identified.

873
01:22:50,000 --> 01:22:58,000
And then on top of that, you throw in the dogs. And I love dogs.

874
01:22:58,000 --> 01:23:04,000
You've met my dog. And I mean, I just I think dogs are great until they're chasing you.

875
01:23:04,000 --> 01:23:08,000
And then it's it's they're on your scent. What breed did they use?

876
01:23:08,000 --> 01:23:16,000
I think mostly shepherds or like Alsatians. Yeah, they had they had they were working dogs.

877
01:23:16,000 --> 01:23:24,000
What we would think of as working dogs like I don't know that they had any malinoise, but but they certainly had shepherd looking dogs.

878
01:23:24,000 --> 01:23:30,000
Put it that way. Yeah. So you're not being chased by a shih tzu. No, no, not at all.

879
01:23:30,000 --> 01:23:44,000
And so one of the things that we used to do was we take a small push bottle and I think like Deet insect repellent came in.

880
01:23:44,000 --> 01:23:58,000
And we we dumped the deed out of it or the insect repellent, cut off the end of it, clean it out really good, dry it out completely, fill it full of CS powder, and then put a cap on on the end of it again.

881
01:23:58,000 --> 01:24:06,000
And then when when the dogs would start chasing you, look for the thickest brush you could possibly find, kind of leave a trail.

882
01:24:06,000 --> 01:24:13,000
Everybody single file through and the last guy through just reaches behind and pumps out a little CS powder.

883
01:24:13,000 --> 01:24:18,000
And you can tell when the dogs hit that because they'll be making normal dog noises until they hit that.

884
01:24:18,000 --> 01:24:28,000
And then it's like, oh, my God, because their their noses, their olfactory senses are so acute that when they sniff CS, I mean, it's bad enough when we do.

885
01:24:28,000 --> 01:24:32,000
But but when they sniff CS, it just it really affects them.

886
01:24:32,000 --> 01:24:36,000
Lights them up. Oh, they they they just howl and howl and howl.

887
01:24:36,000 --> 01:24:45,000
And I'm sure the guy, the handlers are then that much more mad at us. But it gave us a few seconds or a few minutes or perhaps a bit more to get away.

888
01:24:45,000 --> 01:24:49,000
But that's that's a very bad feeling when somebody starts chasing you.

889
01:24:49,000 --> 01:24:55,000
It's there's not a whole lot you can do, but but try to get away from it very quickly.

890
01:24:55,000 --> 01:25:05,000
Now, with that, I mean, being chased by a group, you know, you can you've had all this training, you as you mentioned, you know, you got the physical fitness, you got the mindset.

891
01:25:05,000 --> 01:25:20,000
Were there any tools, any dark places you went to be able to either, you know, fight with the enemy or that time, you know, evade the enemy?

892
01:25:20,000 --> 01:25:30,000
The way you can realize, OK, that all this training we did, all these these these limits that they made us surpass finally came in in this one event.

893
01:25:30,000 --> 01:25:40,000
Well, as you mentioned, one of the things that what we tried to do was evade because we're my team was always a six man team

894
01:25:40,000 --> 01:25:51,000
and we didn't want to get in a prolonged contact with anybody because we're only going to be able to do that for a short amount of time because we didn't carry all that much ammunition.

895
01:25:51,000 --> 01:25:56,000
We certainly had some, but we weren't there to get in a fight with anybody.

896
01:25:56,000 --> 01:26:01,000
So we try to evade as much as possible and we try to slide to the side.

897
01:26:01,000 --> 01:26:04,000
So we try to identify where they were as best we could.

898
01:26:04,000 --> 01:26:12,000
Again, you can't tell exactly because you're certainly not looking at them, but you're hearing and you're noticing things.

899
01:26:12,000 --> 01:26:21,000
And so you try to slide to the end of where they are because they'll normally come online and kind of move through the jungle towards you as best they can.

900
01:26:21,000 --> 01:26:31,000
And if you can slide to the side and get on their wing, if you will, then either you can move behind them and find a way out.

901
01:26:31,000 --> 01:26:40,000
Or if you come in contact with them and you have to get into a fight of any kind, you're fighting one or two as opposed to a whole group.

902
01:26:40,000 --> 01:26:45,000
And then the other thing was at the same time, you're looking for a place to get out.

903
01:26:45,000 --> 01:26:54,000
So you're trying to get a hold of the FAC or the forward air controller, the Covey who was flying above you that could identify,

904
01:26:54,000 --> 01:27:00,000
move in, identify a location that they could drop helicopters into to pick you up and get you out.

905
01:27:00,000 --> 01:27:07,000
And so that was the thing to do because at that point in time, you're compromised and you need to get out.

906
01:27:07,000 --> 01:27:10,000
And that's the primary exfil.

907
01:27:10,000 --> 01:27:29,000
But it's again, all of these things are going through your mind. And as I look back, I'm thankful that I had been trained in the way that I had been having been through special forces training and then through the one zero school or the team leader school at Long Ton just outside Saigon.

908
01:27:29,000 --> 01:27:51,000
The techniques, the skills that they had taught us at that time to evade and to acknowledge and identify and how to move our unit in such a way or our team in such a way as to avoid contact and or if we made contact was how to peel from that away from the enemy,

909
01:27:51,000 --> 01:28:02,000
laying down a base of fire so that they think you're maybe a bit more than you really are. And so they're reluctant to come at you and it gives you a chance to slide away and leave.

910
01:28:02,000 --> 01:28:10,000
Very interesting. Very interesting. Well, one more area because I want to get to transitioning out and then make sure we get to Somalia as well in this conversation.

911
01:28:10,000 --> 01:28:24,000
But again, Major Capers is tracking down the enemy. They're engaging a lot. And he talks about witnessing the thousand yard stare.

912
01:28:24,000 --> 01:28:37,000
And then also just some members, some Marines getting past that point where there's complete compassion fatigue, where they're starting to be almost dangerous now because they've killed so much.

913
01:28:37,000 --> 01:28:47,000
You're doing more of a tracking element, but I seem to remember you talking about some kids in a water buffalo witnessing in the field. Have I got that?

914
01:28:47,000 --> 01:28:55,000
So were there anymore? Because what I want to get to is we're asking these children, these high schoolers to go to another country, learn how to kill and kill.

915
01:28:55,000 --> 01:29:03,000
And then we just bring them back to the US. So I'm going to ask you were there. But I mean, it seems like this would be a good example.

916
01:29:03,000 --> 01:29:23,000
This elements of of just that get being in combat so much fear and fear of life, having the kill to the point where that line is crossed, where where you know you you kind of the ethics get blurred a little bit.

917
01:29:23,000 --> 01:29:25,000
Yeah.

918
01:29:25,000 --> 01:29:38,000
I was probably lucky in that sense, because the people that I was involved with our contacts were I don't want to say sporadic, but they were they were spread out.

919
01:29:38,000 --> 01:29:55,000
We didn't have day after day after day of contact and killing and things like that with with our operations. Normally, once we go on the ground anticipated missions would be five to 10 days.

920
01:29:55,000 --> 01:30:05,000
And there's times when you got like 50 minutes and then you had to be pulled because it was a hot area and there was just too many people.

921
01:30:05,000 --> 01:30:13,000
So we had people that were in contact. I've been in contact multiple times.

922
01:30:13,000 --> 01:30:29,000
But but it never pushed us to the point of of that psychological point, if you will, to that you're talking about.

923
01:30:29,000 --> 01:30:40,000
So we are trying to think back and I don't think we had some people that had been.

924
01:30:40,000 --> 01:30:45,000
They probably been there two to three years, which is a bit long.

925
01:30:45,000 --> 01:30:47,000
That's that's a long time.

926
01:30:47,000 --> 01:30:49,000
It's a bit long is the wrong choice.

927
01:30:49,000 --> 01:30:53,000
Yeah, really bloody long.

928
01:30:53,000 --> 01:31:02,000
And they probably needed to rotate. We had a couple of guys that decided they want to change their names to mountain yard names and and some things like that.

929
01:31:02,000 --> 01:31:11,000
But I don't think we ever we never had anybody that that really got to the point.

930
01:31:11,000 --> 01:31:14,000
I'm trying to think.

931
01:31:14,000 --> 01:31:23,000
Well, I just don't think that we haven't had anybody that really got to that point that was pushed to their psychological limit.

932
01:31:23,000 --> 01:31:28,000
Yeah. So so the common denominator is probably the amount of action that some Americans action.

933
01:31:28,000 --> 01:31:41,000
The other thing was that I attributed the steadiness of our group to was the training that we had received in special forces before coming to Vietnam.

934
01:31:41,000 --> 01:31:54,000
The training we received after we got there and the mentorship of those that had been before us that that helped us through and prepared us for what we were going to see and what we were going to be involved in.

935
01:31:54,000 --> 01:32:01,000
Because so many and you mentioned it so many young Americans came to Vietnam.

936
01:32:01,000 --> 01:32:03,000
They went to basic training.

937
01:32:03,000 --> 01:32:07,000
They went to infantry training and then they immediately went to Vietnam.

938
01:32:07,000 --> 01:32:12,000
There was no preparation period for them. There was no learning curve.

939
01:32:12,000 --> 01:32:15,000
Their learning curve occurred in country.

940
01:32:15,000 --> 01:32:27,000
And that was extremely unfortunate in my opinion because they were not prepared for what they saw or what they had to deal with.

941
01:32:27,000 --> 01:32:42,000
Whereas we on the other hand had been prepared by by those mentors and the trainers that we had been through. They they truly prepared us for what we were going to see when we came online or when we got involved in a conflict.

942
01:32:42,000 --> 01:32:45,000
A specific shooting if you will.

943
01:32:45,000 --> 01:32:47,000
That helped us tremendously.

944
01:32:47,000 --> 01:32:59,000
And so it gave us a more mature mindset as opposed to those those young guys that were just thrown into battle. And that really made a difference.

945
01:32:59,000 --> 01:33:10,000
It didn't make a big difference when we came back because everything that we had been through had prepared us for going and participating in combat operations.

946
01:33:10,000 --> 01:33:19,000
We were volunteers. In essence we wanted to be there for whatever reasons that might be coming home was an entirely different story.

947
01:33:19,000 --> 01:33:27,000
Absolutely different because we were all in the same boat then we had been through the crucible if you will of combat.

948
01:33:27,000 --> 01:33:33,000
And now we're returning home to the land of the big PX.

949
01:33:33,000 --> 01:33:40,000
And all of us had this this this mental image of what it was going to be.

950
01:33:40,000 --> 01:33:46,000
You know Xanadu. This was this was the ultimate place to be. It's the great place to be.

951
01:33:46,000 --> 01:33:51,000
And we got back and it wasn't exactly that.

952
01:33:51,000 --> 01:33:55,000
Certainly our families and friends were happy to see us home.

953
01:33:55,000 --> 01:34:04,000
But there were there was a vocal minority in America then that was very much against the war.

954
01:34:04,000 --> 01:34:11,000
And I understand that. And that's part of what we fought for was their right to do just that.

955
01:34:11,000 --> 01:34:18,000
But they brought it to us in a way that I kind of found unacceptable.

956
01:34:18,000 --> 01:34:21,000
I didn't appreciate it.

957
01:34:21,000 --> 01:34:26,000
You're welcome to your thoughts. I will respect your thoughts. I don't agree with you.

958
01:34:26,000 --> 01:34:33,000
But I will respect your ability to have those thoughts and to voice those thoughts.

959
01:34:33,000 --> 01:34:37,000
Just don't put them in my face. That's my face. Yeah.

960
01:34:37,000 --> 01:34:41,000
And I had a guy try to spit on me when I came back.

961
01:34:41,000 --> 01:34:50,000
It was it was really kind of funny because I came back to Fort Lewis Washington Seattle Tacoma Airport.

962
01:34:50,000 --> 01:34:57,000
Came back on a contract aircraft. I think it was a DC-8. Flew into Seattle Tacoma.

963
01:34:57,000 --> 01:35:03,000
They put us on buses, took us to Fort Lewis and we're still in fatigues from from in country.

964
01:35:03,000 --> 01:35:07,000
And my fatigues had this red dirt just ground into them because around Bambi to it.

965
01:35:07,000 --> 01:35:15,000
It was red clay. And so this this red clay was just embedded in the in the in the fabric, if you will, and in my boots.

966
01:35:15,000 --> 01:35:20,000
And got back to Fort Lewis and they had brand new uniforms for us.

967
01:35:20,000 --> 01:35:25,000
Green uniforms so that we could dress up and ties and shirts and all that stuff.

968
01:35:25,000 --> 01:35:31,000
And they said, just throw your fatigues over there and that bin and we'll we'll dispose of them later.

969
01:35:31,000 --> 01:35:34,000
No, you won't. They're going home with me.

970
01:35:34,000 --> 01:35:37,000
You know, we've been through too much together.

971
01:35:37,000 --> 01:35:44,000
The the guys that were that were running that station just well, you can do whatever you want, but we just don't understand that.

972
01:35:44,000 --> 01:35:48,000
Well, you don't have to understand that it's mine.

973
01:35:48,000 --> 01:35:59,000
So it's going with me. So I packed up all the stuff and then I went out and my parents had had driven up to Seattle from Portland and picked to pick me up.

974
01:35:59,000 --> 01:36:03,000
And as I went through the gate, there's a whole group of protesters there.

975
01:36:03,000 --> 01:36:09,000
They're they're shouting all kinds of things, baby killers or who knows who knows what.

976
01:36:09,000 --> 01:36:15,000
And one of the guys tried to spit on me and I saw him getting ready to.

977
01:36:15,000 --> 01:36:18,000
So I just moved. I and he missed.

978
01:36:18,000 --> 01:36:24,000
And I think he got one of his own protesters or that's their problem.

979
01:36:24,000 --> 01:36:31,000
And if I think of that point, if somebody would have actually accosted me, I might have reacted a little different.

980
01:36:31,000 --> 01:36:34,000
But it was just, you know, I don't have time for you guys.

981
01:36:34,000 --> 01:36:39,000
You know, say whatever you want. I'm just going about my business.

982
01:36:39,000 --> 01:36:43,000
And I did got in the car, drove off. I was good.

983
01:36:43,000 --> 01:36:54,000
Although it was interesting over the next two weeks, I alienated just about everybody I knew because to include my parents to a certain degree,

984
01:36:54,000 --> 01:37:05,000
because I wasn't ready to to to re-assimilate back into this this normal culture. It just it wasn't what I'd lived for the last year.

985
01:37:05,000 --> 01:37:14,000
And for the last year, I'd been on, in essence, high alert, you know, aware of what everything going on around me, how everything could turn bad in a minute.

986
01:37:14,000 --> 01:37:23,000
And I'm still that way mentally. I'm not ready for this. There was no decompression.

987
01:37:23,000 --> 01:37:28,000
It was just from one extreme to the other.

988
01:37:28,000 --> 01:37:33,000
And I went back and made friends with everybody all over again a little later in life.

989
01:37:33,000 --> 01:37:38,000
But it's just at that point in time, I didn't care about anything.

990
01:37:38,000 --> 01:37:44,000
And I was very confused about I felt comfortable in the military environment.

991
01:37:44,000 --> 01:37:48,000
I did not feel comfortable in in society at that point.

992
01:37:48,000 --> 01:37:54,000
And I think if I'd probably gotten out at that point in time, I probably could have been a real problem child.

993
01:37:54,000 --> 01:38:03,000
I would have had far more mental problems than I ever did because I left there, Portland.

994
01:38:03,000 --> 01:38:13,000
I drove back to to about a Jaguar, brand new Jaguar XKE Roadster, drove it back to Fort Bragg and went back to work at the Army.

995
01:38:13,000 --> 01:38:16,000
And so that was probably the best thing that could happen to me.

996
01:38:16,000 --> 01:38:22,000
That was my decompression at that point. That was when it was just like, OK, now I'm back in comfort.

997
01:38:22,000 --> 01:38:29,000
I'm back in people that know me. And I was able to to re-assimilate myself into society.

998
01:38:29,000 --> 01:38:33,000
And then I think that Christmas, I went back and made friends with everybody.

999
01:38:33,000 --> 01:38:41,000
Well, Sebastian Junger talks about the contrast between the ticker tapes of the Vietnam excuse me, of the World War Two vets coming home.

1000
01:38:41,000 --> 01:38:47,000
And then the Vietnam era and so many levels.

1001
01:38:47,000 --> 01:38:52,000
I mean, you have, like you said, not punctuating whether and it's the same for us.

1002
01:38:52,000 --> 01:39:02,000
We need to be better at punctuating between the fire station and dad, husband, you know, and taking that time to separate the two.

1003
01:39:02,000 --> 01:39:05,000
So you don't have that kind of demob a couple of weeks.

1004
01:39:05,000 --> 01:39:09,000
But then also you don't have that storytelling element.

1005
01:39:09,000 --> 01:39:18,000
You don't have that. Here's what we did for you that you see in so many of these tribal cultures, you know, sitting around the fire and the hunters come back or the warriors come back and they tell their stories.

1006
01:39:18,000 --> 01:39:23,000
And that's healing for them. Instead, you had shame and guilt and all these things.

1007
01:39:23,000 --> 01:39:27,000
Many of these were children, as we said, that were also drafted.

1008
01:39:27,000 --> 01:39:30,000
Didn't even put their hand up to go over and do that.

1009
01:39:30,000 --> 01:39:46,000
So what damage do you think that contrasting experience for the Vietnam vets do you think had on on a those members of the military, but also homelessness, addiction and things that couple into that?

1010
01:39:46,000 --> 01:39:49,000
I think it led to a lot of it. And you brought up a good point.

1011
01:39:49,000 --> 01:40:10,000
When I when I came back to Fort Bragg after that tour, I was back amongst my tribe. We would sit down and talk to each other and we would share experiences, not necessarily stories, but a lot of them were turned into stories, too.

1012
01:40:10,000 --> 01:40:13,000
But we would share those experiences with each other.

1013
01:40:13,000 --> 01:40:26,000
So we were we didn't realize at the time, but we were decompressing. We were talking through what had happened to us, what had what had occurred in the area that we were because each one of us is a little bit different.

1014
01:40:26,000 --> 01:40:34,000
And even if you in generally the same thing, if you and I go through an experience together, I'm going to see through it through my set of eyes.

1015
01:40:34,000 --> 01:40:38,000
You're going to see it through your set of eyes. And it's going to be somewhat different.

1016
01:40:38,000 --> 01:40:42,000
It'll be generally the same thing, but there will be differences on both sides.

1017
01:40:42,000 --> 01:40:53,000
So we were able to sit down as as members of the same tribe and talk about what we had seen, what we had been through, what we had done.

1018
01:40:53,000 --> 01:40:59,000
And that allowed us that decompression time.

1019
01:40:59,000 --> 01:41:11,000
The those that didn't those that just walked back and because there was a lot of them that came back from their first tour and were released from service.

1020
01:41:11,000 --> 01:41:16,000
They were back in in society and they really didn't have anybody to talk to.

1021
01:41:16,000 --> 01:41:20,000
They didn't have anything in common with the World War Two vets.

1022
01:41:20,000 --> 01:41:30,000
Very few of the young people today, unfortunately, are participating in some of the activities that are available to them.

1023
01:41:30,000 --> 01:41:34,000
And and so they had no they had no tribe.

1024
01:41:34,000 --> 01:41:44,000
It was it was as if they were tribalist people because they didn't belong to American civil society.

1025
01:41:44,000 --> 01:41:47,000
And they no longer belong to the military society.

1026
01:41:47,000 --> 01:41:52,000
They're caught in kind of a no man's land and.

1027
01:41:52,000 --> 01:42:04,000
Ergo homelessness, ergo bikers, whatever, whatever path they chose to follow was out of the norms of society.

1028
01:42:04,000 --> 01:42:12,000
So society continued to look down or askance at them as as when they had been in the military.

1029
01:42:12,000 --> 01:42:16,000
And so that that created a.

1030
01:42:16,000 --> 01:42:21,000
A set of circumstances that was extremely unfortunate.

1031
01:42:21,000 --> 01:42:34,000
And I thought some of the senior military leadership and senior civilian leadership at that time for not recognizing that they needed to do something for those people to to allow them.

1032
01:42:34,000 --> 01:42:37,000
We call it decompression now. Don't know what they would call it then.

1033
01:42:37,000 --> 01:42:45,000
But a time for them to re assimilate into society with.

1034
01:42:45,000 --> 01:42:49,000
Positive skills as opposed to negative skills.

1035
01:42:49,000 --> 01:42:55,000
Because they came back and certainly they had handled weapons and they had done all this stuff that you do during war.

1036
01:42:55,000 --> 01:43:01,000
And and now they were back weaponless and and lost.

1037
01:43:01,000 --> 01:43:07,000
And we needed to give them something to fight their way back into society skills.

1038
01:43:07,000 --> 01:43:18,000
You know, purpose, education, training, whatever it might be to make them a positive member of society because they've now contributed greatly to that society.

1039
01:43:18,000 --> 01:43:21,000
And that wasn't done.

1040
01:43:21,000 --> 01:43:23,000
And that was very unfortunate.

1041
01:43:23,000 --> 01:43:30,000
I was just absolutely lucky that I'd signed up for four years and therefore I had to stay.

1042
01:43:30,000 --> 01:43:34,000
Yeah, because I don't know what would have happened to me if I would have gotten out at that point.

1043
01:43:34,000 --> 01:43:36,000
But I had I still had time to do so.

1044
01:43:36,000 --> 01:43:42,000
I came back to Fort Bragg and I was back in my tribe and I got very comfortable in that tribe.

1045
01:43:42,000 --> 01:43:48,000
And I found that that's that's where I wanted to be for the rest of my military career.

1046
01:43:48,000 --> 01:43:58,000
I forget who it was, but someone told me recently that the figure that we have a 22 suicides and a lot of those are actually the Vietnam generation.

1047
01:43:58,000 --> 01:44:01,000
So those men are asked and younger.

1048
01:44:01,000 --> 01:44:08,000
I remember I listened to a Ted talk that he gave and I my wife is in mental health has been for for quite some time.

1049
01:44:08,000 --> 01:44:16,000
She was embedded in Iraq with with the 10th Mountain and the First Cavalry divisions as a civilian contractor.

1050
01:44:16,000 --> 01:44:20,000
She's a cultural anthropologist.

1051
01:44:20,000 --> 01:44:25,000
And so we were talking about it and I listened to Sebastian Younger's Ted talk.

1052
01:44:25,000 --> 01:44:36,000
And that's where he first said or he said again that of the 22 a day, 80 percent of them are Vietnam age veterans.

1053
01:44:36,000 --> 01:44:39,000
And that just that really hit me.

1054
01:44:39,000 --> 01:44:45,000
But then I started thinking about it and it absolutely made sense to me.

1055
01:44:45,000 --> 01:44:51,000
When you think of 22 a day, you think of all these young people coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan.

1056
01:44:51,000 --> 01:44:56,000
And certainly there are some and I hope that number decreases.

1057
01:44:56,000 --> 01:45:03,000
But for the for the older guys, the 80 percent of those, it doesn't surprise me in this sense.

1058
01:45:03,000 --> 01:45:07,000
They're reaching the age where I am now.

1059
01:45:07,000 --> 01:45:10,000
Many of them are ill health.

1060
01:45:10,000 --> 01:45:13,000
And that's a drain on one psyche.

1061
01:45:13,000 --> 01:45:23,000
Many of them have been through terrible divorce or they've lost their spouse to illness.

1062
01:45:23,000 --> 01:45:29,000
And so you reach that point in life that you kind of start asking.

1063
01:45:29,000 --> 01:45:31,000
What's the sense in going on?

1064
01:45:31,000 --> 01:45:34,000
You know, I don't have my health, my health's declining.

1065
01:45:34,000 --> 01:45:36,000
I'm not going to get any better.

1066
01:45:36,000 --> 01:45:38,000
You know, they can't fix me.

1067
01:45:38,000 --> 01:45:40,000
They can just medicate me.

1068
01:45:40,000 --> 01:45:42,000
Well, that sucks.

1069
01:45:42,000 --> 01:45:48,000
I lost my spouse either through divorce or through through death.

1070
01:45:48,000 --> 01:45:53,000
That was that was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I never will.

1071
01:45:53,000 --> 01:45:59,000
And there are also many of them in hard economic times.

1072
01:45:59,000 --> 01:46:08,000
And so with all this against them, it to be honest, it really doesn't surprise me that they are comprising that large number.

1073
01:46:08,000 --> 01:46:10,000
Absolutely sad.

1074
01:46:10,000 --> 01:46:12,000
Everything I can do to help them, I will.

1075
01:46:12,000 --> 01:46:15,000
And I continue to do so hopefully.

1076
01:46:15,000 --> 01:46:18,000
But it doesn't surprise me.

1077
01:46:18,000 --> 01:46:21,000
And but it does make sense.

1078
01:46:21,000 --> 01:46:26,000
Well, I think what was interesting to add to that list was also you.

1079
01:46:26,000 --> 01:46:35,000
I've noticed now one of the many kind of coping mechanisms, technically negative in a way, is that you busy.

1080
01:46:35,000 --> 01:46:41,000
You throw yourself into a thousand things so that you don't have to think about the thing that bothers you.

1081
01:46:41,000 --> 01:46:42,000
And then police and fire.

1082
01:46:42,000 --> 01:46:49,000
That's the guys and girls that sign up for the extra shifts and do side gigs and all this stuff and family hardly ever sees them.

1083
01:46:49,000 --> 01:46:53,000
And so I forget again, whoever it was that was talking about it.

1084
01:46:53,000 --> 01:46:59,000
And I'm sure Sebastian was probably the source, but was that now that age is also retiring.

1085
01:46:59,000 --> 01:47:02,000
Right. So that thing that they did, they filled the space.

1086
01:47:02,000 --> 01:47:03,000
Yeah.

1087
01:47:03,000 --> 01:47:04,000
They've got no purpose left.

1088
01:47:04,000 --> 01:47:06,000
So you add all those together.

1089
01:47:06,000 --> 01:47:10,000
That's why I'm so lucky to be here at GoRuck, because it gives me some purpose.

1090
01:47:10,000 --> 01:47:13,000
It gives me a reason to get up every day and do things.

1091
01:47:13,000 --> 01:47:22,000
You know, when you lose your health, your spouse or your purpose, and particularly when you lose all three, then you've got a real problem on your hands.

1092
01:47:22,000 --> 01:47:25,000
And that purpose is probably the most important.

1093
01:47:25,000 --> 01:47:33,000
For a short period of time, I retired, moved to the outer banks or the lower outer banks of North Carolina and lived on the coast.

1094
01:47:33,000 --> 01:47:36,000
Gorgeous place. Absolutely gorgeous place.

1095
01:47:36,000 --> 01:47:38,000
But I didn't have any purpose.

1096
01:47:38,000 --> 01:47:41,000
And I really I needed purpose.

1097
01:47:41,000 --> 01:47:44,000
And Jason and I just happened to connect at that particular time.

1098
01:47:44,000 --> 01:47:46,000
And it worked out great for both of us.

1099
01:47:46,000 --> 01:47:57,000
He called me on one of my my pet ideas, and that is we continually reinvent ourselves in life.

1100
01:47:57,000 --> 01:48:03,000
When we graduate from school and we begin working, that's a reinvention.

1101
01:48:03,000 --> 01:48:06,000
When we change jobs, that's another reinvention.

1102
01:48:06,000 --> 01:48:08,000
When we move across country, another reinvention.

1103
01:48:08,000 --> 01:48:11,000
We're continually reinventing ourselves.

1104
01:48:11,000 --> 01:48:13,000
And that can be a positive thing.

1105
01:48:13,000 --> 01:48:16,000
It should be a positive thing.

1106
01:48:16,000 --> 01:48:22,000
But he caught me at the right time and said, Hey, look, you keep talking about reinvention.

1107
01:48:22,000 --> 01:48:26,000
Reinvent yourself and move to Jacksonville Beach, Florida.

1108
01:48:26,000 --> 01:48:27,000
He called you on it.

1109
01:48:27,000 --> 01:48:29,000
He called me on it and it worked.

1110
01:48:29,000 --> 01:48:32,000
Beautiful. Well, you've got an interesting transition story.

1111
01:48:32,000 --> 01:48:41,000
But just before we go to that, purely because it's a fascinating story, but be I had Matt Eversman on and Mike Durant on as well.

1112
01:48:41,000 --> 01:48:45,000
So you were present at Somalia. Correct.

1113
01:48:45,000 --> 01:48:54,000
So, you know, just kind of walk me through the end of your Vietnam presence and then kind of into into that particular event.

1114
01:48:54,000 --> 01:49:03,000
OK, when I did another second tour in Vietnam and then I moved to Okinawa to the first Special Forces Group,

1115
01:49:03,000 --> 01:49:08,000
spent some time there, went through scuba school and then returned to the States.

1116
01:49:08,000 --> 01:49:13,000
Started working at the Army Scuba School in Key West, Florida for a short period of time

1117
01:49:13,000 --> 01:49:20,000
and then was called back by a friend of mine at Fort Bragg that said, Look, you need to come back up here and you need to be interviewed.

1118
01:49:20,000 --> 01:49:22,000
The colonel wants to interview you.

1119
01:49:22,000 --> 01:49:24,000
I didn't know who the colonel was.

1120
01:49:24,000 --> 01:49:25,000
All right.

1121
01:49:25,000 --> 01:49:27,000
Being asked to volunteer again.

1122
01:49:27,000 --> 01:49:30,000
Yeah. So my this friend knew me very well.

1123
01:49:30,000 --> 01:49:36,000
He and I were in special forces for of the 25 years I spent in special forces.

1124
01:49:36,000 --> 01:49:40,000
He and I were probably on and off together 24.

1125
01:49:40,000 --> 01:49:43,000
So we're good friends. He knows me. I know him.

1126
01:49:43,000 --> 01:49:49,000
So he called me up. I went to Fort Bragg and the colonel was a guy named Charlie Beckwith.

1127
01:49:49,000 --> 01:49:55,000
And Beckwith sat down and talked to me and identified himself.

1128
01:49:55,000 --> 01:49:58,000
And he said, Look, we're going to build a new unit.

1129
01:49:58,000 --> 01:50:02,000
And he said, I need some people around me that have specific skills.

1130
01:50:02,000 --> 01:50:06,000
And he said, Foreman says you're the right guy for this.

1131
01:50:06,000 --> 01:50:15,000
And so after the interview, he personally selected me, said, Yep, OK, you're in and sent me to a couple of schools.

1132
01:50:15,000 --> 01:50:18,000
I went through that.

1133
01:50:18,000 --> 01:50:23,000
And then we formed the organization that's first special forces operational detachment Delta.

1134
01:50:23,000 --> 01:50:27,000
Most people know what is Delta Force, a.k.a Chuck Norris.

1135
01:50:27,000 --> 01:50:30,000
Yeah.

1136
01:50:30,000 --> 01:50:34,000
I wouldn't tell Charlie Beckwith. Yeah.

1137
01:50:34,000 --> 01:50:42,000
And so my career went on and I flipped between the unit and my old special forces several times.

1138
01:50:42,000 --> 01:50:48,000
And I ended up in an organization called ISA, the intelligence support activity.

1139
01:50:48,000 --> 01:51:06,000
And it was there that I ended up after Urgent Fury, which was Grenada, the military operations in Grenada, Just Cause in Panama and the first Gulf War.

1140
01:51:06,000 --> 01:51:09,000
I was in ended up in in ISA.

1141
01:51:09,000 --> 01:51:18,000
And that's when I was posted to Somalia in a small detachment that was supporting the activity down there at that time.

1142
01:51:18,000 --> 01:51:28,000
And about that time, C Squadron showed up from from Delta and third of the 75th B Company, third of the 75th in particular.

1143
01:51:28,000 --> 01:51:36,000
But the third of 75th, along with the 10th Mountain Division, who was there to support the UN aspect.

1144
01:51:36,000 --> 01:51:44,000
But the third of the 75th and C Squadron formed or supported Operation Gothic Serpent,

1145
01:51:44,000 --> 01:51:54,000
which was the activities in Somalia at that time to to follow the presidential declaration of what we were supposed to do,

1146
01:51:54,000 --> 01:51:57,000
because he decided that that something needed to be done there.

1147
01:51:57,000 --> 01:52:04,000
And so that that led up to what everybody knows as the day of the ranger and or Black Hawk down.

1148
01:52:04,000 --> 01:52:11,000
And they they were conducting their operations and I was conducting operations to support them.

1149
01:52:11,000 --> 01:52:16,000
And then about that time, everything turned to shit.

1150
01:52:16,000 --> 01:52:19,000
Excuse my language, but there's no other way to put it.

1151
01:52:19,000 --> 01:52:26,000
And there were some there was loss of some awfully good men.

1152
01:52:26,000 --> 01:52:31,000
There were truly some heroic actions that were conducted during that operation.

1153
01:52:31,000 --> 01:52:37,000
Some of the guys I knew very well, others I didn't know because they were newer to the organization.

1154
01:52:37,000 --> 01:52:49,000
But there was there was a unified effort to to conduct the mission and to support each other.

1155
01:52:49,000 --> 01:52:55,000
And that's really what combat comes down to is supporting the guy to your right and your left.

1156
01:52:55,000 --> 01:52:59,000
That's that's what it's all about. I think it's same same true in the fire service.

1157
01:52:59,000 --> 01:53:05,000
Absolutely. And in and in law enforcement activities and in many other occupations.

1158
01:53:05,000 --> 01:53:10,000
Yeah, you're there to do what is supposed to be done in that particular instance.

1159
01:53:10,000 --> 01:53:15,000
But more importantly, you're there to take care of the guy or girl to your right or left.

1160
01:53:15,000 --> 01:53:19,000
And that's that's what that one really boiled down to.

1161
01:53:19,000 --> 01:53:27,000
It was a tragic loss of personnel on both sides. To be honest, it was it was a terrible thing.

1162
01:53:27,000 --> 01:53:33,000
There was there was a lot of smallies killed, some of whom were simply caught up in the moment

1163
01:53:33,000 --> 01:53:40,000
and truly weren't combatants. But to differentiate in those particular circumstances,

1164
01:53:40,000 --> 01:53:44,000
what's happening in a mob, there's no way to do that.

1165
01:53:44,000 --> 01:53:50,000
And then, of course, the guys on our side, kudos to them.

1166
01:53:50,000 --> 01:53:54,000
Some of the some of the bravest men I've ever met in my life.

1167
01:53:54,000 --> 01:54:01,000
It's amazing to hear. And obviously, your Delta brothers, the reason that Mike's still around today, their heroism.

1168
01:54:01,000 --> 01:54:07,000
Absolutely. Absolutely. You can't say enough about those people.

1169
01:54:07,000 --> 01:54:11,000
Well, thank you for sharing your, you know, your your whole journey so far.

1170
01:54:11,000 --> 01:54:19,000
So as you mentioned, so many, you know, combat deployments, so many years spent serving.

1171
01:54:19,000 --> 01:54:27,000
What made you finally decide to transition out and then tell me the role that you you filled after that?

1172
01:54:27,000 --> 01:54:29,000
Well, I'd gone about as far as I could in the army.

1173
01:54:29,000 --> 01:54:33,000
I kept volunteering for stuff until there was nothing left to volunteer for everything.

1174
01:54:33,000 --> 01:54:36,000
By that point, and should have become a recruiter.

1175
01:54:36,000 --> 01:54:40,000
And I looked around and I again, I had been counseled by some of my mentors.

1176
01:54:40,000 --> 01:54:48,000
They said, you know, the other thing about being a soldier, about being a warrior is knowing when it's time to go.

1177
01:54:48,000 --> 01:54:52,000
When you when you've done all you can and you need to make room for those coming up.

1178
01:54:52,000 --> 01:55:02,000
And certainly, you know, I was lucky I was in on the organization and establishment of two organizations that had never existed before.

1179
01:55:02,000 --> 01:55:09,000
Delta and NISA. And that was just that that was heady times.

1180
01:55:09,000 --> 01:55:19,000
But the the young men and women in those organizations that have taken it from where it was at that point in time to where it is today.

1181
01:55:19,000 --> 01:55:31,000
My hat's off to them. They they have done yeoman's work to to hone the skills and to come up with new ideas and new ways to do things.

1182
01:55:31,000 --> 01:55:38,000
It's mind boggling. And I am truly in awe of them and what they've done with that.

1183
01:55:38,000 --> 01:55:44,000
So I decided that it was time for me to get out of the way and let some of these these younger folks come up.

1184
01:55:44,000 --> 01:55:48,000
And I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.

1185
01:55:48,000 --> 01:55:53,000
And I had a small sailboat at the time, about 23 foot.

1186
01:55:53,000 --> 01:55:59,000
And I went down and I pulled it out of the water and at the little place, I kept it down on the coast of North Carolina.

1187
01:55:59,000 --> 01:56:05,000
And and I ground the bottom down, epoxied it, did all the things that boaters do to their boats.

1188
01:56:05,000 --> 01:56:09,000
And I got done with that and I really didn't know what else I was going to do.

1189
01:56:09,000 --> 01:56:15,000
So I drove back to Fort Bragg and I was just I was at the PX one day.

1190
01:56:15,000 --> 01:56:20,000
I stopped in to pick something up and I ran into an old colonel that I had known in the army.

1191
01:56:20,000 --> 01:56:27,000
And he, you know, hey, hail well fellow met and he said, what are you doing now?

1192
01:56:27,000 --> 01:56:30,000
And I said nothing. And he said, what are you going to do?

1193
01:56:30,000 --> 01:56:39,000
And I said, I really don't know at this point. And he said, well, I'm running the contract operations on Fort Bragg for Fayetteville Technical Community College.

1194
01:56:39,000 --> 01:56:44,000
He was the director of continuing education at that time on Bragg.

1195
01:56:44,000 --> 01:56:53,000
And he said, I need a recruiter. I kind of looked askance at him because recruiters have not always been my favorite people, as you can well imagine.

1196
01:56:53,000 --> 01:56:58,000
And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, well, he said, here's what I want you to do.

1197
01:56:58,000 --> 01:57:12,000
Just go around, drink coffee with all your old sergeant major friends and tell them about what we're doing, because we were running courses at that time at the school in frequency management,

1198
01:57:12,000 --> 01:57:18,000
logistics operations, combat lifesaver.

1199
01:57:18,000 --> 01:57:26,000
And then we ran some classes on computers, effective writing, which soldiers should know how to do because they have to write reports and so on.

1200
01:57:26,000 --> 01:57:33,000
And he said, and convince them that they need to send their soldiers because the Army's paying for it, regardless of whether they come or not.

1201
01:57:33,000 --> 01:57:38,000
So it isn't going to cost the soldier or the unit anything.

1202
01:57:38,000 --> 01:57:42,000
They're just going to get a better guy trained when they get him back, a guy or gal.

1203
01:57:42,000 --> 01:57:49,000
And all it costs is the time for them to set in class and gain the knowledge.

1204
01:57:49,000 --> 01:57:55,000
That sounds pretty good. And he said, it's just part time. He said, three and a half days a week.

1205
01:57:55,000 --> 01:58:00,000
Well, that worked out pretty well because I could do three and a half days and then have a three day weekend every week.

1206
01:58:00,000 --> 01:58:04,000
That sounds pretty good to me. So I did that.

1207
01:58:04,000 --> 01:58:13,000
And at the same time, I was starting to finish up. I'd done some work on a college degree, but I hadn't completed.

1208
01:58:13,000 --> 01:58:19,000
So I had the V.A. transition money to use that for. So I started going back to school in the evenings.

1209
01:58:19,000 --> 01:58:23,000
And then I was working during the day. I did that for a while.

1210
01:58:23,000 --> 01:58:26,000
And then he said, hey, look, this is this is going so well.

1211
01:58:26,000 --> 01:58:35,000
He said, now I need a program coordinator, somebody that that oversees these programs because he was picking up some additional requirements.

1212
01:58:35,000 --> 01:58:43,000
He said, so I want to hire you full time. Probably the biggest mistake I ever made because now I didn't get that three and a half day weekend.

1213
01:58:43,000 --> 01:58:47,000
I'm working five days a week. But it was good because I was back.

1214
01:58:47,000 --> 01:58:52,000
I was working with soldiers and I love to work with soldiers and we're working with their family members.

1215
01:58:52,000 --> 01:58:58,000
Some of the family members were coming to these classes for the computer classes, the effective writing, stuff like that.

1216
01:58:58,000 --> 01:59:05,000
And so I was like, OK, what the heck? And so I completed my degree, my four year degree.

1217
01:59:05,000 --> 01:59:09,000
And I went to work full time for the college as a program coordinator.

1218
01:59:09,000 --> 01:59:13,000
And a couple of years later, he left. He retired completely.

1219
01:59:13,000 --> 01:59:19,000
And I got the job as director and then kind of started working up the food and shade from there.

1220
01:59:19,000 --> 01:59:25,000
I still had some VA money left, so I continued going to school at night and got a master's in business administration.

1221
01:59:25,000 --> 01:59:33,000
And shortly after that, I was promoted to the vice president of military programs on Fort Bragg,

1222
01:59:33,000 --> 01:59:40,000
which combined both the continuing education, the skill courses and the college level courses that we taught.

1223
01:59:40,000 --> 01:59:52,000
And I began working with, along with some others at the school, to take military training courses and convert them where possible to college credit.

1224
01:59:52,000 --> 01:59:58,000
And we did it in particular with the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg.

1225
01:59:58,000 --> 02:00:04,000
We took the Special Forces course, the Psychological Operations course and the Civil Affairs course.

1226
02:00:04,000 --> 02:00:07,000
And we looked at their programs of instruction.

1227
02:00:07,000 --> 02:00:10,000
I passed them out to the various sections of the college.

1228
02:00:10,000 --> 02:00:17,000
They evaluated them. And on a two year degree, which is what the school offered as a community college,

1229
02:00:17,000 --> 02:00:25,000
on a two year degree of 64 hours, we would award those students 48 hours of credit for their military training,

1230
02:00:25,000 --> 02:00:27,000
which meant they had to do 16 hours with us.

1231
02:00:27,000 --> 02:00:36,000
And then we had programs to link them to 55 other four year institutions around the United States so that they could get a four year degree.

1232
02:00:36,000 --> 02:00:40,000
Which, education always stands you in good stead.

1233
02:00:40,000 --> 02:00:46,000
And we were doing it for soldiers. We were helping family members do the same thing, kids and spouses,

1234
02:00:46,000 --> 02:00:54,000
or if they wanted a particular skill course, because a lot of the spouses came to attend the hair courses.

1235
02:00:54,000 --> 02:01:00,000
And there was a couple of nursing courses and dental hygienist courses.

1236
02:01:00,000 --> 02:01:07,000
And so they were transportable degrees that a spouse could take virtually anywhere and use as a secondary.

1237
02:01:07,000 --> 02:01:15,000
So it's about that time that it dawned on me that really what my life is all about is service.

1238
02:01:15,000 --> 02:01:20,000
It had been national service while I was in the military.

1239
02:01:20,000 --> 02:01:25,000
And then it was community service. And yet still with a national flair to it,

1240
02:01:25,000 --> 02:01:31,000
helping soldiers, their spouses, their dependents get education.

1241
02:01:31,000 --> 02:01:36,000
And that's when it really hit me that it's all about service. And that's what I like.

1242
02:01:36,000 --> 02:01:40,000
I like working with people, helping them help themselves.

1243
02:01:40,000 --> 02:01:43,000
And so I felt very comfortable at that point.

1244
02:01:43,000 --> 02:01:49,000
And so I did a 20 year hitch, if you will, with the community college system in North Carolina.

1245
02:01:49,000 --> 02:01:53,000
And then retired from that in 2015.

1246
02:01:53,000 --> 02:01:59,000
Amazing. So what I'm anticipating, and please correct me if I'm wrong,

1247
02:01:59,000 --> 02:02:06,000
so many of the important elements that make for a healthy transition you had in yours.

1248
02:02:06,000 --> 02:02:09,000
First, you had the decision to step away.

1249
02:02:09,000 --> 02:02:12,000
Then you were still surrounded by your tribe with the military.

1250
02:02:12,000 --> 02:02:17,000
But also you retained the same purpose, just it was in a different uniform.

1251
02:02:17,000 --> 02:02:25,000
Right. Absolutely correct. And I think the thing that was helpful to me,

1252
02:02:25,000 --> 02:02:30,000
none of those were a negative. They were all positive moves.

1253
02:02:30,000 --> 02:02:37,000
They were, I got to choose. And I did it with a general purpose in mind.

1254
02:02:37,000 --> 02:02:41,000
Yeah, I retired and I didn't know exactly what I was going to do.

1255
02:02:41,000 --> 02:02:46,000
But I figured I was going to be successful. I just hadn't decided what.

1256
02:02:46,000 --> 02:02:50,000
And it was a good move for me to move away from the military at that point,

1257
02:02:50,000 --> 02:02:56,000
because it was just time to go. I spent 30 years in the Army, so it's time to, that's enough.

1258
02:02:56,000 --> 02:03:05,000
And then as I moved to various jobs, they were all purposeful jobs.

1259
02:03:05,000 --> 02:03:10,000
I don't think I thought of them as purpose at that time, but they really were.

1260
02:03:10,000 --> 02:03:14,000
And so I had some very positive things going for me.

1261
02:03:14,000 --> 02:03:19,000
And again, it came down to the mentorship aspect too, because I had people,

1262
02:03:19,000 --> 02:03:24,000
that old colonel that I ran into. To a degree, he'd been a bit of a mentor of mine,

1263
02:03:24,000 --> 02:03:28,000
because we worked together on the same staff for a two-star general.

1264
02:03:28,000 --> 02:03:30,000
I was a sergeant major and he was the chief of staff.

1265
02:03:30,000 --> 02:03:36,000
So we knew each other in that aspect and we positively supported each other

1266
02:03:36,000 --> 02:03:40,000
while supporting the general. That was our primary function.

1267
02:03:40,000 --> 02:03:45,000
It all goes back again to mentorship.

1268
02:03:45,000 --> 02:03:51,000
People working together and the tribe working together to continually support

1269
02:03:51,000 --> 02:03:57,000
in different aspects at times, but still in the tribe and making it happen.

1270
02:03:57,000 --> 02:03:59,000
And that's what made it so positive for me.

1271
02:03:59,000 --> 02:04:03,000
Beautiful. Well, just one more area then I want to transition to some closing questions.

1272
02:04:03,000 --> 02:04:09,000
But one thing that I saw myself struggle with a little bit when I transitioned to doing this full-time,

1273
02:04:09,000 --> 02:04:16,000
and again, for me, taking a phrase that I hear, your group of men and women use a lot,

1274
02:04:16,000 --> 02:04:21,000
which is the force multiplier, I realized at that point that this project

1275
02:04:21,000 --> 02:04:26,000
was going to affect more lives than me sitting in a fire engine or a rescue

1276
02:04:26,000 --> 02:04:30,000
and running one call at a time, even though I miss it and I loved it.

1277
02:04:30,000 --> 02:04:36,000
But my ego struggled a little bit at first because I wasn't wearing the uniform.

1278
02:04:36,000 --> 02:04:44,000
With you being such a high-level operator and then finding yourself in a community college,

1279
02:04:44,000 --> 02:04:48,000
even though that purpose was the same, we're talking about egos the same way as egos with the fire helmet

1280
02:04:48,000 --> 02:04:52,000
we were talking about earlier, was there any struggle with that?

1281
02:04:52,000 --> 02:04:57,000
Like one minute you were in uniform, next minute you're holding a dry erase board.

1282
02:04:57,000 --> 02:05:04,000
Yeah, I tell everybody that when you get up in the morning in the army, it's pretty easy.

1283
02:05:04,000 --> 02:05:08,000
You put on all camouflage and you're good to go.

1284
02:05:08,000 --> 02:05:13,000
When you get up and you're working for the community college, it's like, okay, do my shoes,

1285
02:05:13,000 --> 02:05:19,000
match my socks, match my pants, match my shirt, match my jacket, match my tie.

1286
02:05:19,000 --> 02:05:22,000
You've got all these things that you've got to bring together.

1287
02:05:22,000 --> 02:05:30,000
That's a funny way of saying it, but you lose that comfort zone that you're now in a new...

1288
02:05:30,000 --> 02:05:35,000
You've got to reestablish yourself in your own mind, not with the people around you,

1289
02:05:35,000 --> 02:05:38,000
to a degree, but mostly in your own mind.

1290
02:05:38,000 --> 02:05:48,000
Again, I had really good mentorship because people told me, the people that I valued that had done this before me,

1291
02:05:48,000 --> 02:05:54,000
said, look, when you get out, you're not Sergeant Major anymore.

1292
02:05:54,000 --> 02:06:03,000
Yeah, you need to understand that these people around you don't feel the same drive that you do internally

1293
02:06:03,000 --> 02:06:05,000
because you're used to a higher level of drive.

1294
02:06:05,000 --> 02:06:07,000
It doesn't mean you're better or anything.

1295
02:06:07,000 --> 02:06:11,000
You're just used to a higher level of drive because of all the missions, the operations,

1296
02:06:11,000 --> 02:06:15,000
the things that are going on that you have to concern yourself with in the military.

1297
02:06:15,000 --> 02:06:20,000
These people are very focused in their area, particularly academics.

1298
02:06:20,000 --> 02:06:22,000
They're great people.

1299
02:06:22,000 --> 02:06:30,000
I take my hat off to them and I listen to every one of them, but they operate at a different level than I do.

1300
02:06:30,000 --> 02:06:39,000
I had to learn to truly calm myself down and operate at a level that was acceptable to them and acceptable to me.

1301
02:06:39,000 --> 02:06:43,000
I found new things to do with myself and new areas.

1302
02:06:43,000 --> 02:06:51,000
I would sit down and think of new areas to get involved in that were still within the bounds of academia.

1303
02:06:51,000 --> 02:06:54,000
And yet, they weren't academic things.

1304
02:06:54,000 --> 02:06:56,000
They were programs.

1305
02:06:56,000 --> 02:06:58,000
How can we expand our programs?

1306
02:06:58,000 --> 02:07:00,000
How can we reach more people?

1307
02:07:00,000 --> 02:07:09,000
How can we do better in bringing people into the college, assisting them with what they need and their educational needs,

1308
02:07:09,000 --> 02:07:11,000
and then moving them to the next level?

1309
02:07:11,000 --> 02:07:13,000
How better can we do that?

1310
02:07:13,000 --> 02:07:15,000
And that's where we came up with the 55 schools initially.

1311
02:07:15,000 --> 02:07:22,000
I'm sure it's more than that now that would accept our two-year program as a four-year program at their institution.

1312
02:07:22,000 --> 02:07:28,000
I got involved in that a lot and a lot of talking going on and a lot of traveling.

1313
02:07:28,000 --> 02:07:36,000
But it made me feel good because I was doing it with a true purpose in mind to help these people that I so believed in.

1314
02:07:36,000 --> 02:07:40,000
And everybody was concerned when we set up this program.

1315
02:07:40,000 --> 02:07:46,000
They said, well, gee, how are these soldiers going to do when they do 16 hours with us,

1316
02:07:46,000 --> 02:07:51,000
they complete that two-year degree, and then they go to a four-year institution?

1317
02:07:51,000 --> 02:07:54,000
How are they going to handle that?

1318
02:07:54,000 --> 02:07:56,000
And it was really great.

1319
02:07:56,000 --> 02:08:02,000
One of the schools we worked with was Norwich University, which is the home of ROTC, among other things.

1320
02:08:02,000 --> 02:08:08,000
And I was in constant contact with their vice president, who was my counterpart.

1321
02:08:08,000 --> 02:08:17,000
And when we got probably 200 of these soldiers through our program and into his school, maybe 150, something like that,

1322
02:08:17,000 --> 02:08:22,000
and I called him up one day and I said, say, Bill, I said, I need to ask you, how are our guys doing up there?

1323
02:08:22,000 --> 02:08:28,000
How are these guys that have been through our program, how are they matching up to your school?

1324
02:08:28,000 --> 02:08:30,000
He says, I said, I hate to tell you.

1325
02:08:30,000 --> 02:08:32,000
Oh, I don't want to hear this.

1326
02:08:32,000 --> 02:08:36,000
And he said, they're doing better than our resident students.

1327
02:08:36,000 --> 02:08:42,000
And that just made me feel so good that these soldiers that we believed in,

1328
02:08:42,000 --> 02:08:48,000
that we helped get into this program and convinced them that they needed to buckle down,

1329
02:08:48,000 --> 02:08:53,000
even with that tremendous workload that they had as soldiers in the special operations community,

1330
02:08:53,000 --> 02:08:58,000
and complete this program and move on to something else, were doing so great.

1331
02:08:58,000 --> 02:09:04,000
So that helped my transition, that I was able to do that.

1332
02:09:04,000 --> 02:09:11,000
And I was able to find new venues to move into so that I wasn't just absolutely stifled.

1333
02:09:11,000 --> 02:09:13,000
But it was a bit tough.

1334
02:09:13,000 --> 02:09:20,000
I was used to getting up in the morning and doing certain things and routines, and that routine just totally changed.

1335
02:09:20,000 --> 02:09:27,000
But I had, again, some great mentors that said, hey, look, you're off active duty, so remember,

1336
02:09:27,000 --> 02:09:31,000
be proud of what you were, but accept that you are no more.

1337
02:09:31,000 --> 02:09:33,000
That's kind of hard to do sometimes.

1338
02:09:33,000 --> 02:09:34,000
It really is.

1339
02:09:34,000 --> 02:09:40,000
And there's multiple times I had to sit down and tell myself that exact same thing.

1340
02:09:40,000 --> 02:09:42,000
But it worked.

1341
02:09:42,000 --> 02:09:43,000
Beautiful.

1342
02:09:43,000 --> 02:09:47,000
One thing, just before we move on, that I remember hearing this story,

1343
02:09:47,000 --> 02:09:50,000
it was probably one of the interviews you did with Jason.

1344
02:09:50,000 --> 02:09:53,000
It really resonated with me because in the fire service,

1345
02:09:53,000 --> 02:09:58,000
we have all these special operations classes that you can take whether you're on the special operations team or not.

1346
02:09:58,000 --> 02:10:01,000
And I got a whole bunch of myself, the rope rescue and extrication,

1347
02:10:01,000 --> 02:10:08,000
and all these advanced level courses, but none of them counted for anything in the academic world.

1348
02:10:08,000 --> 02:10:14,000
So you want to go and get your degree, you have to do a bunch of administrative classes that aren't going to make you a better firefighter whatsoever.

1349
02:10:14,000 --> 02:10:20,000
So I loved when I heard you talking about that and how elements of military training factored into the degree,

1350
02:10:20,000 --> 02:10:24,000
because I think the fire service could learn a lot of lessons from that.

1351
02:10:24,000 --> 02:10:30,000
You get someone who's got the classes that I talked about, maybe some advanced EMS classes,

1352
02:10:30,000 --> 02:10:36,000
you factor it in, you should have enough credit to do some additional classes and get a bachelor's,

1353
02:10:36,000 --> 02:10:43,000
versus some godawful emergency management administration degree that on scene isn't going to mean a damn thing.

1354
02:10:43,000 --> 02:10:44,000
Yeah, exactly.

1355
02:10:44,000 --> 02:10:53,000
Well, we were really lucky because at the time, General Sokolik was the commander of the Special Warfare Center in school

1356
02:10:53,000 --> 02:10:57,000
and had a couple of friends that were actually working within the school.

1357
02:10:57,000 --> 02:11:04,000
One was a civilian that had been hired for educational purposes and one was a military guy.

1358
02:11:04,000 --> 02:11:09,000
I knew several others, but these were guys that were kind of high up in the hierarchy.

1359
02:11:09,000 --> 02:11:14,000
And so I explained to them what I wanted to do, and that's when I went to them and I said,

1360
02:11:14,000 --> 02:11:22,000
I need you to give me your POI, your unclassified POI, because there's some classified portions, didn't want that.

1361
02:11:22,000 --> 02:11:28,000
The unclassified POI, and they did, 79 three-inch binders.

1362
02:11:28,000 --> 02:11:29,000
Oh my God.

1363
02:11:29,000 --> 02:11:34,000
That's the entire program of instruction for a special forces soldier.

1364
02:11:34,000 --> 02:11:35,000
Wow.

1365
02:11:35,000 --> 02:11:41,000
And then the equivalent for civil affairs and for psychological operations, but we took special forces first.

1366
02:11:41,000 --> 02:11:48,000
And so I took those books and I thought, you know, if I take this down and just give this to the academic departments,

1367
02:11:48,000 --> 02:11:50,000
they aren't going to get it.

1368
02:11:50,000 --> 02:11:59,000
So we had a great president at the time of the college, Dr. Larry Keene.

1369
02:11:59,000 --> 02:12:03,000
And I went to him and I said, sir, I said, here's what I want to do.

1370
02:12:03,000 --> 02:12:11,000
I want to set up a program for our department chairs to come to.

1371
02:12:11,000 --> 02:12:13,000
And I want to take them out to Fort Bragg.

1372
02:12:13,000 --> 02:12:21,000
And I want to get a briefing from General Sokolic and or his people on what special forces is all about

1373
02:12:21,000 --> 02:12:25,000
and what they do to train special forces and where they're going and so on.

1374
02:12:25,000 --> 02:12:26,000
And he said, OK.

1375
02:12:26,000 --> 02:12:27,000
He said, that's great.

1376
02:12:27,000 --> 02:12:31,000
He said, I will make that a requirement for every department chair to come to.

1377
02:12:31,000 --> 02:12:34,000
You just set it up and I'll make sure they're there.

1378
02:12:34,000 --> 02:12:35,000
OK.

1379
02:12:35,000 --> 02:12:41,000
So I went back to my guys and they went to General Sokolic and I ended up going to General Sokolic too.

1380
02:12:41,000 --> 02:12:43,000
And I told them what I wanted to do.

1381
02:12:43,000 --> 02:12:45,000
And they said, absolutely, we'll do it.

1382
02:12:45,000 --> 02:12:53,000
So we took all these department chairs from mathematics and just all the department chairs,

1383
02:12:53,000 --> 02:12:56,000
took them out to Fort Bragg, even the nursing department chair.

1384
02:12:56,000 --> 02:12:58,000
We took her out there too.

1385
02:12:58,000 --> 02:12:59,000
Great lady.

1386
02:12:59,000 --> 02:13:05,000
And General Sokolic sat down with them in the auditorium at the Special Warfare Center.

1387
02:13:05,000 --> 02:13:12,000
And he told them about special forces, about the imperatives of special operations

1388
02:13:12,000 --> 02:13:16,000
and special operations training and all.

1389
02:13:16,000 --> 02:13:22,000
He covered the entire spectrum at his level, at a two stars level.

1390
02:13:22,000 --> 02:13:29,000
And then we took them out and we took them to the, at that time, the military free fall school was at Fort Bragg.

1391
02:13:29,000 --> 02:13:33,000
And they had a wind tunnel that they did their initial training in.

1392
02:13:33,000 --> 02:13:39,000
And we timed it so that we could take all of these people in there and we actually flew them

1393
02:13:39,000 --> 02:13:45,000
with instructors from the Special Warfare Center in the wind tunnel, vertical wind tunnel.

1394
02:13:45,000 --> 02:13:50,000
Then we took them out to the range and they shot weapons.

1395
02:13:50,000 --> 02:13:57,000
And while they were shooting weapons, the guys were talking to them in various languages,

1396
02:13:57,000 --> 02:14:07,000
Korean and Serbo-Croatian, just showing them the multitude of things that a special forces soldier represents.

1397
02:14:07,000 --> 02:14:09,000
Then we fed them all MREs.

1398
02:14:09,000 --> 02:14:15,000
We weren't excited about, but they just thought we're wonderful because it was something new for them.

1399
02:14:15,000 --> 02:14:19,000
We took them back out to the sniper range and they shot sniper rifles.

1400
02:14:19,000 --> 02:14:21,000
They did a little bit of everything.

1401
02:14:21,000 --> 02:14:33,000
And then we took them out to a mount site, a terrain, urban terrain site, and evacuated from there in helicopters.

1402
02:14:33,000 --> 02:14:40,000
So they got a ride in a helicopter in the back of a CH-47 doing nap of the earth over the trees and flying low.

1403
02:14:40,000 --> 02:14:49,000
And we got done and they were just, they were astounded at the skills and abilities that these young men were capable of.

1404
02:14:49,000 --> 02:14:53,000
And the mathematics and physics and chemistry and all these things that you need at an operational level.

1405
02:14:53,000 --> 02:14:56,000
And they were just like, this is incredible.

1406
02:14:56,000 --> 02:14:59,000
And then I dropped the 79 books on them.

1407
02:14:59,000 --> 02:15:04,000
I gave, depending on what it was, I gave it out to all the departments.

1408
02:15:04,000 --> 02:15:09,000
And then I kept my fingers crossed because I didn't know how it was going to turn out.

1409
02:15:09,000 --> 02:15:12,000
And it turned out great because that's when they came back.

1410
02:15:12,000 --> 02:15:26,000
And ultimately we determined that we could legally and properly, because we're, as a school, we're bound by certain educational requirements,

1411
02:15:26,000 --> 02:15:35,000
that we could legally and properly award 48 hours of credit on a 64-hour degree, which was unheard of at that point.

1412
02:15:35,000 --> 02:15:39,000
And I was just, I was ready to do backflips.

1413
02:15:39,000 --> 02:15:42,000
I was too old to do them, but I was ready to do them.

1414
02:15:42,000 --> 02:15:46,000
And we took that back to the Special Warfare Center in school.

1415
02:15:46,000 --> 02:15:57,000
At that point, they gave me space at the schoolhouse, offices and classrooms to actually put instructors at the Special Forces School

1416
02:15:57,000 --> 02:16:06,000
so soldiers could take classes during the day and in the evenings from instructors that were actually assigned their jobs,

1417
02:16:06,000 --> 02:16:12,000
were to be at that schoolhouse and Special Warfare Center to teach soldiers their classes.

1418
02:16:12,000 --> 02:16:16,000
Public speaking, English, mathematics, whatever it might be.

1419
02:16:16,000 --> 02:16:18,000
It was great.

1420
02:16:18,000 --> 02:16:23,000
So it was, it was a, it wasn't just me by any means.

1421
02:16:23,000 --> 02:16:27,000
It was a multitude of people that came together to make that happen.

1422
02:16:27,000 --> 02:16:32,000
But the whole idea was we were supporting America's warriors.

1423
02:16:32,000 --> 02:16:37,000
I'm sorry, I'm going back to the beginning of this conversation,

1424
02:16:37,000 --> 02:16:43,000
looking at something that's been done a certain way for a long time and saying, I think we can do this better.

1425
02:16:43,000 --> 02:16:50,000
Exactly. Exactly. Always, always thinking outside the box, outside the envelope.

1426
02:16:50,000 --> 02:16:53,000
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for sharing that.

1427
02:16:53,000 --> 02:16:55,000
So one last thing before we transition.

1428
02:16:55,000 --> 02:17:03,000
You, with that skill set, with the Special Forces experience, then with the college experience, academia,

1429
02:17:03,000 --> 02:17:10,000
you could have reinvented yourself in any company in this country or another country.

1430
02:17:10,000 --> 02:17:17,000
So tell me about GORUCK and what it was that drew you to Jason and Emily and then this particular company.

1431
02:17:17,000 --> 02:17:30,000
I retired from the school in 2015 and in 2016, I was asked to come to an event in Atlanta

1432
02:17:30,000 --> 02:17:35,000
that was sponsored by Team Red, White and Blue, Team RWB.

1433
02:17:35,000 --> 02:17:44,000
They were having a meeting of all of their captains of various communities coming together for a training session.

1434
02:17:44,000 --> 02:17:49,000
My wife was invited to come and she said, oh, gee, I've got this boyfriend because we weren't married at the time.

1435
02:17:49,000 --> 02:17:53,000
She said, I've got this boyfriend and he gives leadership and management talks.

1436
02:17:53,000 --> 02:17:55,000
Do you want me to bring him?

1437
02:17:55,000 --> 02:17:57,000
And they said, oh, yeah, sure, you can bring him.

1438
02:17:57,000 --> 02:18:02,000
So I went and she gave her talk and I gave my talk.

1439
02:18:02,000 --> 02:18:10,000
And the guy that was running it was a guy named Garrett Cathcart, who now is involved with Mission Roll Call.

1440
02:18:10,000 --> 02:18:14,000
And Garrett and I became pretty good acquaintances.

1441
02:18:14,000 --> 02:18:18,000
I won't say we were friends at that time, but we've ultimately become friends.

1442
02:18:18,000 --> 02:18:26,000
And because of that particular incident, later on in the year, that was in like August of 2016.

1443
02:18:26,000 --> 02:18:37,000
In October of 2016, she and I both again were invited to come here where we're sitting right now to GORUCK headquarters

1444
02:18:37,000 --> 02:18:43,000
because Team RWB and GORUCK were coming together to form what they called a rucking university.

1445
02:18:43,000 --> 02:18:55,000
It was bringing together club captains, team captains, all kinds of various people that would come here and talk GORUCK.

1446
02:18:55,000 --> 02:19:01,000
And so I gave a presentation to them and then we did an event here on the beach, Jason Lettitt.

1447
02:19:01,000 --> 02:19:08,000
And Jason and I talked a little bit, although at that point we were kind of like a couple of new dogs that just meet each other.

1448
02:19:08,000 --> 02:19:11,000
We're kind of sniffing each other out, but we're not sure yet.

1449
02:19:11,000 --> 02:19:13,000
We don't know each other that well.

1450
02:19:13,000 --> 02:19:22,000
But at the end of that event, he said, you know, we've got an event coming up at Fort Bragg in February of 2017.

1451
02:19:22,000 --> 02:19:29,000
He said, I'd like for you to come out if you can, because you're still living in the Bragg area, aren't you?

1452
02:19:29,000 --> 02:19:33,000
And I said, yeah, I still live there. And he said, I'd like you to come out.

1453
02:19:33,000 --> 02:19:41,000
So he gave me all the particulars. And in 2017, they ran the Bragg Heavy, which was a big event for GORUCK.

1454
02:19:41,000 --> 02:19:44,000
So I went out to that. It was held out in Southern Pines.

1455
02:19:44,000 --> 02:19:51,000
And I met a bunch of the cadre, hung out with them, again hung out with Jason, got to know him a little better.

1456
02:19:51,000 --> 02:19:57,000
And at the end of that, he said, you know, he said, how would you like to do something for GORUCK?

1457
02:19:57,000 --> 02:20:01,000
And I said, do what? And he says, well, I don't know.

1458
02:20:01,000 --> 02:20:04,000
He said, maybe we could make you an ambassador.

1459
02:20:04,000 --> 02:20:06,000
I said, what does that mean?

1460
02:20:06,000 --> 02:20:08,000
He said, well, I don't know that either.

1461
02:20:08,000 --> 02:20:11,000
But he said, I'd like you to be involved in GORUCK.

1462
02:20:11,000 --> 02:20:15,000
He said, I think you could bring something to this to this community.

1463
02:20:15,000 --> 02:20:19,000
And I said, yeah, sure. It sounds good to me.

1464
02:20:19,000 --> 02:20:22,000
No big commitment either way. You know, I'm not going to get paid for it or anything.

1465
02:20:22,000 --> 02:20:25,000
It's just that's the way it is.

1466
02:20:25,000 --> 02:20:29,000
So I talked to him several times after that.

1467
02:20:29,000 --> 02:20:31,000
We communicated, stayed in touch.

1468
02:20:31,000 --> 02:20:41,000
And then in, I think, late March, he said, hey, how would you feel about going back to Vietnam?

1469
02:20:41,000 --> 02:20:43,000
You know, the war's over, right?

1470
02:20:43,000 --> 02:20:46,000
Yeah. I said, well, I don't know.

1471
02:20:46,000 --> 02:20:51,000
You know, I said, I've talked to a lot of people, friends of mine that have been back.

1472
02:20:51,000 --> 02:20:55,000
And they rather enjoyed it for the most part.

1473
02:20:55,000 --> 02:20:59,000
I said, I've never had a big desire to do it.

1474
02:20:59,000 --> 02:21:01,000
So let me think about it.

1475
02:21:01,000 --> 02:21:03,000
I said, why?

1476
02:21:03,000 --> 02:21:08,000
And he said, well, we're going to start working with a company there to build a boot.

1477
02:21:08,000 --> 02:21:13,000
Because one of the things I'd ask him in February at the Bragg Heavy of that year was,

1478
02:21:13,000 --> 02:21:16,000
you know, you build all these great rucksacks.

1479
02:21:16,000 --> 02:21:20,000
You build pants and shirts and jackets.

1480
02:21:20,000 --> 02:21:22,000
You've got all this stuff going on.

1481
02:21:22,000 --> 02:21:27,000
But I said, and you push rucking events because that's what you do as a company.

1482
02:21:27,000 --> 02:21:31,000
You're the rucking company.

1483
02:21:31,000 --> 02:21:33,000
But what about boots?

1484
02:21:33,000 --> 02:21:35,000
You don't have any boots.

1485
02:21:35,000 --> 02:21:37,000
And he said, well, we're working on that.

1486
02:21:37,000 --> 02:21:41,000
He said, we try to build everything we can in America.

1487
02:21:41,000 --> 02:21:46,000
But he said, unfortunately, all the producers of boots in America are full right now.

1488
02:21:46,000 --> 02:21:49,000
And they're making their own boots.

1489
02:21:49,000 --> 02:21:54,000
And he said, so we're going to go to a company in Vietnam and work with them that we've been

1490
02:21:54,000 --> 02:21:57,000
recommended to go check out.

1491
02:21:57,000 --> 02:22:03,000
And he said, we've got this guy named Paul Litchfield who developed the Reebok pump shoe.

1492
02:22:03,000 --> 02:22:05,000
He's going to be the designer.

1493
02:22:05,000 --> 02:22:10,000
He said, but we want to kind of design it off the old jungle boot from Vietnam.

1494
02:22:10,000 --> 02:22:12,000
And he said, that's where you come in kind of.

1495
02:22:12,000 --> 02:22:15,000
And he said, so there's four of us going to go if you go.

1496
02:22:15,000 --> 02:22:17,000
And we're going to go together to the factory.

1497
02:22:17,000 --> 02:22:21,000
And then he said, you pick out where we go next.

1498
02:22:21,000 --> 02:22:24,000
And he said, we'll be there for three or four days.

1499
02:22:24,000 --> 02:22:25,000
All right.

1500
02:22:25,000 --> 02:22:29,000
So I thought about it overnight, came back to him, and I said, yeah, I'll go.

1501
02:22:29,000 --> 02:22:35,000
So in April, I think it was, of 2017, we went to Vietnam.

1502
02:22:35,000 --> 02:22:38,000
I still didn't know exactly what to expect.

1503
02:22:38,000 --> 02:22:42,000
And I know when I walked off the airplane at Tan Son Nhut, because we flew into Tan Son Nhut,

1504
02:22:42,000 --> 02:22:46,000
and I'd been to Tan Son Nhut before, didn't look exactly the same.

1505
02:22:46,000 --> 02:22:51,000
Now it's a much nicer place than it was during the Vietnam War.

1506
02:22:51,000 --> 02:22:54,000
First thing I saw was the customs guys.

1507
02:22:54,000 --> 02:22:59,000
And they're all wearing basically what I remember as a North Vietnamese uniform.

1508
02:22:59,000 --> 02:23:03,000
And that was a little, that kind of made me stutter just a little bit.

1509
02:23:03,000 --> 02:23:04,000
I'm sure.

1510
02:23:04,000 --> 02:23:06,000
It was like, OK.

1511
02:23:06,000 --> 02:23:11,000
So but there was a guy there from the company that we were going to go see.

1512
02:23:11,000 --> 02:23:14,000
And he took all of our passports, got us through customs.

1513
02:23:14,000 --> 02:23:18,000
And then we went through, never had a bit of trouble.

1514
02:23:18,000 --> 02:23:26,000
And so we spent two days at the factory working with them, amazing factory and amazing people.

1515
02:23:26,000 --> 02:23:31,000
Again, the entrepreneurial spirit of Vietnam just astounded me.

1516
02:23:31,000 --> 02:23:39,000
It was just incredible to see what had become of this city that I knew as a rather quaint, small city.

1517
02:23:39,000 --> 02:23:42,000
It wasn't small, but it was small by comparison.

1518
02:23:42,000 --> 02:23:45,000
Now it's just huge and bustling.

1519
02:23:45,000 --> 02:23:48,000
I mean, there's Lamborghinis racing down the street and stuff.

1520
02:23:48,000 --> 02:23:52,000
And I'm like, holy cow, this is just incredible.

1521
02:23:52,000 --> 02:24:00,000
First night we got there, we just hang out and drunk, we hung out and drank beer.

1522
02:24:00,000 --> 02:24:03,000
And listened to the rooster crow the next morning.

1523
02:24:03,000 --> 02:24:06,000
And none of us were sleepy. It was just amazing.

1524
02:24:06,000 --> 02:24:12,000
So we went downtown and this is, I mentioned this earlier in this interview.

1525
02:24:12,000 --> 02:24:20,000
We went downtown to the American War Museum, which has been established by the Vietnamese government.

1526
02:24:20,000 --> 02:24:25,000
And the victor always gets to write the history.

1527
02:24:25,000 --> 02:24:27,000
So they had written their history.

1528
02:24:27,000 --> 02:24:34,000
So they had, it was an interesting museum to see because it was from a different perspective than I was used to.

1529
02:24:34,000 --> 02:24:37,000
But it started warming up and I was just, I was kind of tired.

1530
02:24:37,000 --> 02:24:39,000
I was kind of getting let down at that point.

1531
02:24:39,000 --> 02:24:46,000
So I sat down in a courtyard and this gentleman came up and he's Asian.

1532
02:24:46,000 --> 02:24:49,000
He wasn't Vietnamese, but he's Asian.

1533
02:24:49,000 --> 02:24:53,000
And he said, excuse me, he said, are you American?

1534
02:24:53,000 --> 02:24:55,000
And I said, yeah, I am.

1535
02:24:55,000 --> 02:25:03,000
And he introduced himself, BJ, can't remember his last name, but I remember BJ.

1536
02:25:03,000 --> 02:25:06,000
And he said, do you mind if I sit and talk with you a minute?

1537
02:25:06,000 --> 02:25:07,000
I said, no, not at all.

1538
02:25:07,000 --> 02:25:10,000
And he said, I'm from Singapore.

1539
02:25:10,000 --> 02:25:14,000
And he said, were you here during the Vietnam War?

1540
02:25:14,000 --> 02:25:16,000
And I said, yeah, I did two tours here.

1541
02:25:16,000 --> 02:25:23,000
And he said, I would like to thank you on behalf of me and my friends.

1542
02:25:23,000 --> 02:25:26,000
And that just took me by surprise.

1543
02:25:26,000 --> 02:25:27,000
I didn't know what to thank.

1544
02:25:27,000 --> 02:25:29,000
And I said, thank me for what?

1545
02:25:29,000 --> 02:25:44,000
And he said, because of what you did here, it slowed down and stopped the movement of communism moving through all of Southeast Asia.

1546
02:25:44,000 --> 02:25:49,000
And I'd never thought of it in that particular context before.

1547
02:25:49,000 --> 02:25:52,000
And it just, it really hit me.

1548
02:25:52,000 --> 02:25:57,000
And that kind of, that made it all worthwhile.

1549
02:25:57,000 --> 02:26:08,000
And then the rest of that trip, again, we worked at the factory for a couple of days, and then we took a three day trip from Saigon to Banh Mi Thuot,

1550
02:26:08,000 --> 02:26:13,000
which is where my old camp had been up to Da Lat and then back to Banh Mi Thuot.

1551
02:26:13,000 --> 02:26:18,000
And we had a driver because you can't rent a car and drive it yourself in Vietnam.

1552
02:26:18,000 --> 02:26:20,000
You have to rent a car and a driver.

1553
02:26:20,000 --> 02:26:24,000
So it actually worked out really good because he drove and we drank beer.

1554
02:26:24,000 --> 02:26:26,000
I wish they did that in Orlando.

1555
02:26:26,000 --> 02:26:28,000
Oh, wouldn't it though?

1556
02:26:28,000 --> 02:26:37,000
So we had this great time together, the four of us, Jason and Paul and Andy Nilsson and myself.

1557
02:26:37,000 --> 02:26:43,000
And Andy was the videographer for that trip and Paul was the shoe developer.

1558
02:26:43,000 --> 02:26:47,000
And I was just kind of hanging out and having a wonderful time.

1559
02:26:47,000 --> 02:26:54,000
And so it was, the way I explained it, it closed a circle that I didn't know was open.

1560
02:26:54,000 --> 02:26:59,000
It was kind of a cathartic thing, I guess, to speak of.

1561
02:26:59,000 --> 02:27:03,000
But it was, it's a favorite event of mine now.

1562
02:27:03,000 --> 02:27:06,000
I was glad to go back and see it.

1563
02:27:06,000 --> 02:27:12,000
Some things I remember, some things I didn't, but it was just, it was good to go back and see the people

1564
02:27:12,000 --> 02:27:20,000
and see the positive things that have occurred to Vietnam, regardless of who won and who lost.

1565
02:27:20,000 --> 02:27:24,000
The people is what really matter.

1566
02:27:24,000 --> 02:27:28,000
They're the ones that mean something to me.

1567
02:27:28,000 --> 02:27:31,000
What government is in session, I could care less.

1568
02:27:31,000 --> 02:27:33,000
It doesn't mean anything.

1569
02:27:33,000 --> 02:27:37,000
But what means something to me is the people and how well they've been able to do.

1570
02:27:37,000 --> 02:27:41,000
And it appeared, for the most part, that they've done really, really well.

1571
02:27:41,000 --> 02:27:44,000
And I was glad to see that.

1572
02:27:44,000 --> 02:27:48,000
Amazing. Amazing place to kind of transition then.

1573
02:27:48,000 --> 02:27:53,000
So I would love just to ask some quick questions for you and then we'll wrap up.

1574
02:27:53,000 --> 02:27:59,000
The first one that I'd love to ask, is there a book or books that you love to recommend

1575
02:27:59,000 --> 02:28:05,000
that can be related to what we've discussed today or something completely unrelated?

1576
02:28:05,000 --> 02:28:17,000
If somebody's interested in Vietnam, probably Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a great book.

1577
02:28:17,000 --> 02:28:23,000
Sebastian Junger's The Tribe, another great book.

1578
02:28:23,000 --> 02:28:25,000
Doesn't really address Vietnam.

1579
02:28:25,000 --> 02:28:27,000
It addresses the world.

1580
02:28:27,000 --> 02:28:29,000
It addresses everything.

1581
02:28:29,000 --> 02:28:32,000
And tribe to me is what it's all about.

1582
02:28:32,000 --> 02:28:36,000
My roots in special forces, tribe.

1583
02:28:36,000 --> 02:28:39,000
My roots with my family, tribe.

1584
02:28:39,000 --> 02:28:43,000
And now, Go Ruck, tribe.

1585
02:28:43,000 --> 02:28:47,000
We even call it tribe.

1586
02:28:47,000 --> 02:28:50,000
But it's really what it's all about.

1587
02:28:50,000 --> 02:28:57,000
It's that combination of living life and the oral history that goes along with it

1588
02:28:57,000 --> 02:29:03,000
and being a better person individually and group-wise.

1589
02:29:03,000 --> 02:29:06,000
Those are the big ones, I think.

1590
02:29:06,000 --> 02:29:12,000
There's a tremendous amount of books out there that have influenced me.

1591
02:29:12,000 --> 02:29:16,000
It's interesting that I've always loved to read.

1592
02:29:16,000 --> 02:29:22,000
And my mother said that it was probably because when I was still in the womb,

1593
02:29:22,000 --> 02:29:26,000
she used to read out loud the Reader's Digest to me.

1594
02:29:26,000 --> 02:29:30,000
Just for something for her to do because she couldn't get around a whole bunch.

1595
02:29:30,000 --> 02:29:33,000
She was pregnant with me.

1596
02:29:33,000 --> 02:29:35,000
And she thought maybe it would be helpful to me.

1597
02:29:35,000 --> 02:29:37,000
Well, I think it probably did.

1598
02:29:37,000 --> 02:29:42,000
It made me a voracious reader of everything I can get my hands on.

1599
02:29:42,000 --> 02:29:44,000
Beautiful. Beautiful.

1600
02:29:44,000 --> 02:29:50,000
So the same question. What about a film and or documentary?

1601
02:29:50,000 --> 02:29:59,000
Of course, as a kid, I watched all the standard movies of The Longest Day and all.

1602
02:29:59,000 --> 02:30:09,000
I think something that really talks to me has been the TV miniseries Band of Brothers.

1603
02:30:09,000 --> 02:30:17,000
It really represents what being in combat is all about.

1604
02:30:17,000 --> 02:30:24,000
It takes it from civilian life, so to speak, in the early days of training the soldiers,

1605
02:30:24,000 --> 02:30:28,000
preparing them to go to war, and then taking them to war.

1606
02:30:28,000 --> 02:30:36,000
And then a short period of the aftermath of war because war isn't the end.

1607
02:30:36,000 --> 02:30:39,000
War is a beginning.

1608
02:30:39,000 --> 02:30:44,000
And so that one probably speaks to me most of all.

1609
02:30:44,000 --> 02:30:47,000
Well, firstly, that's mentioned so many times.

1610
02:30:47,000 --> 02:30:52,000
I actually worked with Captain Dale Dye when I did some stunts in Japan.

1611
02:30:52,000 --> 02:30:53,000
Quite a guy.

1612
02:30:53,000 --> 02:30:55,000
Amazing. And then he actually came on the podcast.

1613
02:30:55,000 --> 02:30:58,000
And so did Julia, his wife, who I worked with in Japan.

1614
02:30:58,000 --> 02:31:01,000
But I refer to Band of Brothers all the time.

1615
02:31:01,000 --> 02:31:08,000
When you talk about Chuck Norris, Delta Force, John Rambo, John Wayne,

1616
02:31:08,000 --> 02:31:15,000
that's what a lot of young men and women, especially men, were raised to believe was a man.

1617
02:31:15,000 --> 02:31:16,000
That's Hollywood.

1618
02:31:16,000 --> 02:31:19,000
Yes, exactly. But that's the facade.

1619
02:31:19,000 --> 02:31:23,000
And then there's such a dangerous place to go mentally

1620
02:31:23,000 --> 02:31:25,000
if you think that's what a man's supposed to do.

1621
02:31:25,000 --> 02:31:26,000
Exactly.

1622
02:31:26,000 --> 02:31:31,000
And so I always point to Band of Brothers because the real men of Easy Company

1623
02:31:31,000 --> 02:31:38,000
that talk at the beginning and the end, you can see 60 years later are still so moved

1624
02:31:38,000 --> 02:31:45,000
and so hurt by some of the things they did, some of the things they saw, the men they lost.

1625
02:31:45,000 --> 02:31:47,000
That is a man.

1626
02:31:47,000 --> 02:31:54,000
An incredible warrior whose heart is broken by some of the things that they've endured.

1627
02:31:54,000 --> 02:31:55,000
That's truth.

1628
02:31:55,000 --> 02:31:56,000
Yeah.

1629
02:31:56,000 --> 02:31:58,000
That's what that boils down to.

1630
02:31:58,000 --> 02:32:01,000
There's Hollywood. And I grew up on Hollywood.

1631
02:32:01,000 --> 02:32:05,000
I was a kid during those periods of time.

1632
02:32:05,000 --> 02:32:13,000
But I think I was tempered by my parents and those around me that had been through World War II

1633
02:32:13,000 --> 02:32:15,000
and had seen action.

1634
02:32:15,000 --> 02:32:20,000
They didn't talk to me specifically about stuff, particularly the really bad stuff.

1635
02:32:20,000 --> 02:32:27,000
And yet at the same time, they let me know that war wasn't what you saw produced in Hollywood.

1636
02:32:27,000 --> 02:32:29,000
That there was far more to it.

1637
02:32:29,000 --> 02:32:32,000
And it was a far more stressful situation.

1638
02:32:32,000 --> 02:32:37,000
And Band of Brothers probably comes as close to any of explaining that

1639
02:32:37,000 --> 02:32:41,000
because you're seeing some vignettes about what happened.

1640
02:32:41,000 --> 02:32:45,000
But then you're hearing the guys that were there really talk about it.

1641
02:32:45,000 --> 02:32:51,000
And you can see, as you said, how it affected them and how it still affects them to this day.

1642
02:32:51,000 --> 02:32:54,000
Yeah. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.

1643
02:32:54,000 --> 02:32:57,000
Well, like I said, I had Dale on the show as a guest.

1644
02:32:57,000 --> 02:33:02,000
The next question, is there someone you would recommend to come on this podcast as a guest

1645
02:33:02,000 --> 02:33:07,000
to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world?

1646
02:33:07,000 --> 02:33:11,000
I think a really great guy, if you could get him.

1647
02:33:11,000 --> 02:33:16,000
And I'd be happy to contact him and see if he'd be willing.

1648
02:33:16,000 --> 02:33:18,000
There's a guy named Tom Satterly.

1649
02:33:18,000 --> 02:33:21,000
Tom is a CSM at Delta.

1650
02:33:21,000 --> 02:33:31,000
And he started a new organization that addresses the problems that soldiers and their family members have

1651
02:33:31,000 --> 02:33:35,000
after they have left their service.

1652
02:33:35,000 --> 02:33:39,000
And even during while they're there, but specifically after,

1653
02:33:39,000 --> 02:33:44,000
to help them cope with the life circumstances that they find.

1654
02:33:44,000 --> 02:33:50,000
And Tom went through some tough times, but has come out very strongly.

1655
02:33:50,000 --> 02:33:55,000
And he's a great guy. And I think he'd be a great guy to interview.

1656
02:33:55,000 --> 02:33:57,000
Beautiful. Well, I'd love to.

1657
02:33:57,000 --> 02:34:06,000
And I think one of the things that's so important is that we hear these stories of vulnerability

1658
02:34:06,000 --> 02:34:12,000
and honesty from the professions that people have put on a pedestal,

1659
02:34:12,000 --> 02:34:16,000
whether it's SWAT, whether it's firefighter, whether it's Delta or PJs or whoever,

1660
02:34:16,000 --> 02:34:22,000
because then the rest of us have no excuse to buy into this facade of masculinity.

1661
02:34:22,000 --> 02:34:35,000
And we're like, well, OK, well, if you, a career SF guy, can talk about the reality of war,

1662
02:34:35,000 --> 02:34:41,000
then how can Joe the Plumber, who loves his Chuck Norris movies,

1663
02:34:41,000 --> 02:34:46,000
look himself in the eyes and say, oh, but no, I'm a real man. No, we're shattering that illusion.

1664
02:34:46,000 --> 02:34:50,000
So the more people from those communities and obviously, you know,

1665
02:34:50,000 --> 02:34:54,000
other associated professions that are just courageous enough to be honest about those things

1666
02:34:54,000 --> 02:34:56,000
and tell their story, you know, if they've got a powerful story.

1667
02:34:56,000 --> 02:35:01,000
Tom would be a good one for that. Yeah. Really. And the other one would be Roger Sparks.

1668
02:35:01,000 --> 02:35:04,000
Yeah, Roger. I just interviewed him. Oh, did you? I haven't put it out yet.

1669
02:35:04,000 --> 02:35:06,000
OK. Yeah. So I interviewed him.

1670
02:35:06,000 --> 02:35:10,000
Yeah, he's a three weeks ago. He's an amazing guy. Yeah. Amazing.

1671
02:35:10,000 --> 02:35:15,000
Yeah. So, no, we had a good conversation and I felt like I'd scraped the surface.

1672
02:35:15,000 --> 02:35:18,000
I feel like there's another 10 episodes to come. Absolutely.

1673
02:35:18,000 --> 02:35:22,000
But he and I have been been scraping further here, so it's great to talk to him.

1674
02:35:22,000 --> 02:35:26,000
Yeah. Well, I got to witness one of the conversations a minute ago. It's fascinating.

1675
02:35:26,000 --> 02:35:32,000
All right. Well, then the last question before we make sure people know how to find you online.

1676
02:35:32,000 --> 02:35:34,000
What do you do to decompress these days?

1677
02:35:34,000 --> 02:35:54,000
A lot of the let me back up. When I was going through training, I think most of my decompression was purely physical.

1678
02:35:54,000 --> 02:35:59,000
And it needed to be more than that. It needed to be mental as well as physical.

1679
02:35:59,000 --> 02:36:03,000
Now, there's nothing wrong with the physical. I still use the physical.

1680
02:36:03,000 --> 02:36:14,000
Milo and I, my dog, we're out every morning with weight rucking, enjoying the weather, as long as it's not too awfully bad out.

1681
02:36:14,000 --> 02:36:21,000
And even on some bad days that she questions my choice of activities.

1682
02:36:21,000 --> 02:36:29,000
But the other is to learn more about yourself in the mental aspect, not in the physical aspect,

1683
02:36:29,000 --> 02:36:36,000
because I've got a pretty good idea what I can do. My mind keeps telling me I can do the things I could at 25.

1684
02:36:36,000 --> 02:36:42,000
But my body tells me, no, you can't quite do that still. So you need to modify it just a touch.

1685
02:36:42,000 --> 02:36:48,000
But one of the things I got into was yoga. And I really love yoga.

1686
02:36:48,000 --> 02:36:55,000
I always thought of yoga as more the feminine side of things, but it's not.

1687
02:36:55,000 --> 02:37:03,000
I've come, I had a yoga instructor in Fayetteville, and he'd been practicing it his whole life.

1688
02:37:03,000 --> 02:37:10,000
And he really turned me around. And it made me better physically.

1689
02:37:10,000 --> 02:37:20,000
And it also, the interesting aspect was that it changed me to a degree mentally also.

1690
02:37:20,000 --> 02:37:27,000
You get into a different zone. And so mindfulness, I've studied some mindfulness.

1691
02:37:27,000 --> 02:37:34,000
I'd like to study it more, because I think it's so important to understand your own mind, not just your physical aspect.

1692
02:37:34,000 --> 02:37:38,000
Physical is fine. That needs to be part of it to be a well-rounded person.

1693
02:37:38,000 --> 02:37:46,000
But you really need to understand your mind. And there's some great books out there on that, that have helped me and that would help others.

1694
02:37:46,000 --> 02:37:55,000
And so I think that's a big thing to do. So for decompression, my favorite activity is to walk the beach.

1695
02:37:55,000 --> 02:38:05,000
It's a reminder to me that life is infinite, that life goes on. I'm enjoying a great part of it right now.

1696
02:38:05,000 --> 02:38:14,000
Life's good for me. There's other going on. And it will continue to go on. And that's a positive aspect.

1697
02:38:14,000 --> 02:38:21,000
That's a positive thing for me. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, Shiloh and I just go walk the beach.

1698
02:38:21,000 --> 02:38:25,000
It's hard to be depressed when you're out on the beach with the waves crashing.

1699
02:38:25,000 --> 02:38:29,000
Especially when the sun's coming up. Love it.

1700
02:38:29,000 --> 02:38:37,000
Absolutely. All right. Well, this has been an incredible conversation. I'm sure people are going to want to learn more about you or reach out.

1701
02:38:37,000 --> 02:38:41,000
Do you have any avenues online at all for people to connect?

1702
02:38:41,000 --> 02:38:49,000
If anybody wants to get a hold of me, they can get a hold of me at Blackhawk at goruk.com.

1703
02:38:49,000 --> 02:38:58,000
Beautiful. Well, Richard, I just want to say thank you. I mean, to be this perpetual student,

1704
02:38:58,000 --> 02:39:02,000
to be so fortunate to sit in front of people like yourself and ask questions.

1705
02:39:02,000 --> 02:39:07,000
And I know that I get to share it with everyone that wants to listen.

1706
02:39:07,000 --> 02:39:14,000
But I'm the one that has the honor of sitting here and to hear the background of your journey into the military

1707
02:39:14,000 --> 02:39:21,000
and some of the history of Vietnam and what we see through or what you saw through the soldiers' eyes versus the civilians back home

1708
02:39:21,000 --> 02:39:25,000
and all the other things we've discussed. It's been an absolute honor.

1709
02:39:25,000 --> 02:39:28,000
So I just want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time today.

1710
02:39:28,000 --> 02:39:33,000
Well, it's been my absolute pleasure, James. I really enjoyed talking to you.

1711
02:39:33,000 --> 02:39:40,000
I know I enjoyed when we interviewed you at our podcast, and it's great to be around and just talk to you.

1712
02:39:40,000 --> 02:39:44,000
You get it. And I hope your listeners do, too. I think they will.

1713
02:39:44,000 --> 02:40:03,000
People that are willing to sit down and listen to you, maybe they'll listen to me.