This episode is sponsored by 511, a company that I've used for well over a decade and continue to use to this day.
And 511 is offering you guys, the audience of the Behind the Shield podcast, a discount on every purchase you make with them.
Before we get to that code, I want to highlight a couple of products that again, I personally use today.
One of the most impressive products they just released is their Rush Backpack 2.0.
Now for many of you, whether you're going to the fire station, the police station, whether you're traveling with your family,
whether you're taking training courses, we have to fly, we have to drive, we have to take trains.
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.
There are so many different compartments. The way it sits on your back is incredibly comfortable.
If you are a concealed carry person, there's also a spot for a weapon.
So they've thought of multiple, multiple things that a man or woman would have to do on a daily basis.
That is in addition to all of the products that I talk about a lot.
Their uniforms fit for men or fit for women in the first responder professions.
The footwear that they offer, whether it's the Norris sneaker or the Atlas system that is designed for foot health
and therefore knees and back and hips and shoulders and neck.
As a civilian, I live in a lot of their clothes as well.
Their jeans stretch, you can actually squat down in them.
We live in Florida here, so I wear a lot of their shorts, which again, very, very lightweight material.
You can get it wet and it will dry almost immediately.
And then moving to the fitness and tactical space, I used to have just a regular weight vest.
Recently, I switched to a 511 vest and actually bought ballistic plates as well.
My thinking was simply, if I'm going to have a vest, why not have one that protects me as well?
And that tack vest is trusted by law enforcement all around the country.
So I mentioned they were going to offer you a discount code.
So if you go to 511tactical.com and enter the code SHIELD15, S-H-I-E-L-D-1-5,
you'll get 15% off not just that one purchase, but every time you visit their store.
And if you want to learn more about 511, their mission, their products,
then listen to episode 338 of the Behind the Shield podcast with the CEO and founder, Francisco Morales.
Welcome to episode 469 of Behind the Shield podcast.
As always, my name is James Gearing and this week it is my absolute honor to welcome on the show Richard Rice.
Now, Rich entered the military during the Vietnam era, found himself in Airborne and ultimately in Delta.
And his Vietnam career in itself is incredibly powerful.
But he served for decades more, including being present in the Black Hawk Down incident in Mogadishu.
Now, equally as important is Rich's transition out, where he then entered the world of education
and spearheaded initiatives to take veterans training and turn them into credits
to enable them to work towards degrees and therefore a career after the military.
On top of that, he now works with the Gorak family.
So I can't explain to you the level of humility that this man has
and how many lessons there are in this conversation that we can all learn from.
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.
Subscribe to the show, leave feedback, but most importantly, leave a rating.
Every five star rating elevates this podcast, making it easier and easier for others to find.
And this is a free library of some of the greatest minds on planet Earth.
So all I ask in return is that you help pay it forward and share these incredible men and women's stories
so I can get them to everyone else who I know needs to hear them.
So with that being said, I introduce to you Richard Rice.
Enjoy.
Well, Rich, I want to start by saying thank you for inviting me back to Gorak here.
I got to talk to Emily before this conversation, but last time I was in this room you were asking me questions.
So it's payback time.
It's my pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.
Beautiful. Well, people listening probably know where we are now in Jacksonville Beach.
So I would love to start at the very beginning of your personal story chronologically.
So tell me where you were born and then tell me about your family dynamic, what your parents did and how many siblings.
I'd be happy to, because I think that's what's brought me to where I am today. I really do.
My name is Richard Rice and I was born in San Bernardino, California, about 60 miles east of Los Angeles.
It's also known as the home of the Hells Angels, but I was not associated with them in any way, shape or form.
I grew up there. My grandparents lived in San Diego.
And for years and years, until we moved to Oregon,
my life kind of centered around just my mother, my father and me, and then our local friends in that particular area,
spent a lot of time in the Mojave Desert. So deserts to me are beautiful places. I love deserts.
And I learned so much from my parents and my grandparents.
And I think that's what stood me in good stead throughout my life.
These are people who had, they'd grown up, if you will, during the Great Depression in America, the early days of that.
And those were some pretty tough times and it made them some pretty resilient people.
They also understood how important it was to work as a team.
Each individual brought something, but to work as a team allowed them to go farther and to live better
and to be more secure in their life than any other way.
And so I learned so much from them. My mother's parents were from Texas.
My grandfather, there had been a, he'd taken the call to the ministry.
And he spent two years at a theological seminary and then decided that wasn't for him.
He was going to go be a cowboy. And he was a cowboy on several of the big ranches in Texas.
And that's where he met my grandmother. She was a cook on one of those ranches.
So they married and they moved to Juarez or El Paso vicinity.
And he and his brother opened a cantina in Juarez and sold whiskey to Pancho Villa and his fellows.
Then they went on south to Chihuahua and they had a hotel down there for a while and then moved back to Texas.
Texas to them was their touchstone. It was where they emerged from, if you will.
And so this occurred throughout their lives.
My mother was born in Texas, a little town called Swinson, just north of Abilene.
And she used to tell me stories and they would tell me stories.
So I fit into this aspect of oral history. And history has always been very important to me.
My father was a student of history, if you will, on his own.
He didn't have any formal education in that, but he loved to read. He loved to follow history.
And he read everything that he possibly could from the mountain men of the early west of America,
Trap and Beaver in the Mountains, to World War II, to any period of time.
And so this oral history became really important.
And as an only child, I was often relegated to an adult world.
And so I listened more than I talked, because at that time, good children listened and adults talked.
Seen, not heard. Exactly right.
But they were such interesting stories about being a cowboy and being raised in Texas and what that was like for them.
And then my grandmother on my father's side, she and her husband lived in San Diego.
Then they divorced and then she married another fellow that had been in Columbus, New Mexico.
But he moved to San Diego. And so they had their own set of history.
So I listened to all of this, the early formulations, if you will, of America and how people work during the depression
together to help others and to reach out and provide service.
It was not unheard of for a total stranger to walk up to their door, knock on the door and say,
Hey, you got any food? And they would invite them in and feed them dinner.
And that person would then leave and go on about their business wherever.
And that's today. That wouldn't happen.
Now you get murdered. Yeah. Everyone thinks everyone's a murderer.
Yeah, exactly. Every hitchhiker, every homeless person.
But there every person they saw was a chance for service, some way to help.
And so I just I didn't realize that at the time.
But what I was hearing was an establishment in my mind of providing service,
service to individuals, service to community, ultimately service to nation.
And that it got embedded in me without me really knowing it was happening.
So from California, we moved to Portland, Oregon.
And my dad was a refrigeration service engineer that oversaw the the installation of commercial refrigeration equipment in supermarkets.
He had teams that did that. And he'd go around and visit and make sure they were doing it right.
And the company that he worked for understood family and working together.
Again, it kind of reinforced this whole thing.
And they told him as he traveled around during the summers to be sure and take his family with him.
And they paid for it.
Block, stock and barrel, which is that's kind of unheard of also these days.
But because he was such a fan of history everywhere we'd go, he'd read about it.
He'd read about the Nez Perce Indians in the Northwest America.
He'd read about the mountain men and talk as we went by a beaver pond.
He'd say, OK, there's a beaver pond.
And they could have trapped beaver there and the beaver then transported to St. Louis.
And he'd go through this whole history.
Again, it was all oral to me at that point, although I read a lot.
I didn't read the same stuff.
So he was reading the history and that was that was kind of our family action at that time.
We moved from Portland, Oregon to Texas.
He got a new job.
And, of course, Texas was back home for my mom.
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.
And then they moved when she was small from Texas to California and then back to Texas and then back to California.
They're kind of chasing jobs at that time.
This was in the late 30s and early 40s for them.
So I heard all of these stories.
We travel today between states on interstate highways and think nothing of it.
When they traveled, they traveled on sometimes roads, sometimes across the prairie until they came to a fence.
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.
They didn't have roads every time they went somewhere.
Her job in the evenings was to go around and gather up cow chips, dried cow dung, which they would cook dinner over.
And my grandmother would cook dinner over those.
They'd get them on fire.
She'd cook dinner over those.
They'd eat dinner.
Everybody sleep on the ground.
Get back up, get back in an old Model T Ford and take off for California again.
So these are some of the kinds of stories that I was listening to.
It was resilience.
It was people just being resilient about how they lived their lives.
There wasn't a Holiday Inn every time you turned around.
There wasn't a gas station everywhere.
So you had to allow for things like that.
Sometimes she said they'd stop at ranches and buy two gallons of gasoline so they could get to the next town.
Just people working together and people helping people, providing service.
So that was a great, again, it was a great education for me.
I didn't realize it was education at the time.
It was educating me to what my future life was going to be.
Then we moved from Texas back to Seattle.
We lived there for a few years and then back to Portland.
Then Portland is where I graduated from high school.
I went to work for Pacific Northwest Bell Telephone as a lineman.
A lineman was pretty hard work.
You're out there being very physical.
So I'd watch another set of people within the phone company called splicers, cable splicers, that seem to have a pretty good life.
They could put a little tent up over the cables.
I'm out working in whatever weather might be as a lineman.
These guys are in a little tent and they're splicing lines together.
I thought, wow, that's pretty good.
And they made more money.
So I was like, hmm, maybe I need to do that.
So I applied for it and was accepted.
Went through the school that they had and became a cable splicer.
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.
How long has Vietnam been going on by this point when you were looking at the drop?
This was 1966.
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.
Then in the 60s, they started, 63, 64, they started pumping folks up and increasing the numbers of troops in Vietnam.
So I was very much aware of it.
It was on the news every night, but it still hadn't hit its full stride.
It was just starting to come into the national awareness.
So I decided that I was probably going to get drafted.
What I needed to do was pick what I wanted to do instead of let somebody else pick it for me.
If I was drafted, it would be for a two-year period, but I'd do whatever they told me to do.
If I enlisted, it would be for a three-year period, but I got to pick what I wanted to do.
So that kind of made sense to me.
So three years isn't that bad, and I pick what I want to do.
And in the back of my mind, I think that's about the time I started thinking I needed to challenge myself.
I needed to know what I was capable of.
And so I started thinking about Vietnam in that positive sense.
I didn't think that I thought Vietnam was great or that I wanted to get killed or anything.
It's just I wanted to challenge myself.
The ultimate challenge was to go to Vietnam.
Just to interject, because obviously we're going to talk about when you transitioned out, when you came home.
Sure.
Not transitioned out, when you came home.
At that point, through your own personal eyes, through your family dynamic,
what was your perception of the wars, I guess, through a political lens?
Was it something that, through the media that you were being given at that time, that made sense?
Because obviously, in a way, it was out of your hands.
You were going to get drafted probably anyway.
But at that point, what was the kind of feeling in the country in the mid-60s?
In my group, now, there were two groups of people.
There were, if you will, the hippies, those that were pretty much against the war.
They didn't believe what the government was telling them.
Now, I'd grown up in kind of a different era.
All of my relatives, my father, close friends of the family had all served in World War II and had served honorably.
And I thought that was a very important thing.
I looked up to them as heroes, if you will, as people that had truly done their duty.
And I think I believed then, as I do today to a great deal,
I believed what we were doing in Vietnam was the right thing to do.
Now, I was listening to the government.
I was listening to the news.
And the news at that time was a bit more, I call it direct reporting.
It was Walter Cronkite and David Brinkley and Chet Huntley, the newscasters of the day, reported the news.
They didn't spin the news.
And have an opinion.
Right. There were no opinions.
It was, this is what happened today.
That's how the BBC used to be when I grew up.
Exactly. And they would lay out the facts.
And that kind of dovetailed with what I knew of World War II, the BBC,
the American journalists that were broadcasting at that time,
that they brought the facts to the American people as best they could.
They didn't know all the classified things and the secrets and all that.
But they brought what was happening within the war, the trends that were going on, without the opinion.
And so I took them at, if you will, face value.
I was probably a bit naive, but that's welcome to the world.
Welcome to growing up.
Welcome to be part of the world.
And so I saw it as a need within the world that there were people that were being forced.
In this sense, the North Vietnamese were forcing people to their will as opposed to allowing them to choose.
And I thought liberty and freedom have always been two big words to me.
And I thought everybody should have the chance to be able to do that.
And not to jump forward, but in 2017, when I went back to Vietnam for the first time in 45 years,
I had a really interesting thing happen to me.
And we'll talk about that then.
But back to then, I felt it was a very positive thing that America was doing in Vietnam at that point.
Now, what I didn't realize was the politics involved and the businesses that were involved.
And there was a lot of influence there, too.
So it wasn't just pure white and sweetness and all that.
There were some behind the things going on that I didn't know about.
I don't think it would have changed my mind about how I felt about the North Vietnamese versus the South Vietnamese,
particularly after I got to Vietnam and got to know the people and what they wanted to do
and to see what they've done with themselves today, even under communist rule.
It's not the same as I had anticipated it would be.
So it's an interesting dichotomy.
But I decided that I would pick what I wanted to do.
So I went to the Air Force and they were full.
And I went to the Navy and they were full.
So I heard you talk about that with Jason in your podcast.
So were they full because they were the more desired branches?
Oh, absolutely.
Because they represented a military, a source of the military that probably wasn't going to get involved in ground combat operations,
although the Air Force came a little bit closer depending on your job.
And they were all Navy, Air Force, Army and Marines were all involved.
But the people that were actually on the ground was the Army and the Marines.
So I kind of gravitated to the Air Force because I thought they were really cool.
I wasn't too excited about the Navy, although my dad had been in the Navy during World War II.
A couple of uncles had been there.
The Navy was OK, too, but they were both full because everybody saw them as a way to do their service
and yet not become involved specifically on the ground.
So I was walking away from the Navy and I happened to walk by the Army recruiting office.
I thought, well, what the heck, in for a penny, in for a pound.
I might as well see what they've got.
And they saw me coming.
There's no question about it.
So I walked in, recruiter, welcome, heartily welcomed me because, again, I didn't realize it,
but here's another tick on his quota mark.
They all had quotas.
And he knew you were coming because he knew the other two were full.
So they probably were just channeling in.
Exactly.
And so he was getting the spoils.
So he sat down and he talked to me very, very, very gentlemanly and asked me about what I like to do,
which I told him I said, you know, I love the outdoors.
I love to be doing things.
And he said, well, you know, we've got all kinds of possible jobs that you can have.
So let's go over some of them.
He said, what have you been doing recently?
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,
the James Bond books.
And I said, you know, they were pretty cool.
And I just kind of said it without thinking.
And he said, interesting.
You should say that he said, because we have an organization called the ASA, the Army Security Agency.
Now, it doesn't exist anymore.
It's been morphed into something else.
But he says the Army Security Agency and they have, among other things, agents and agent handlers and people that do things like that.
I was like, really?
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.
And I said, well, gee, that sounds pretty good.
He said, well, now here's the deal.
He said, if you sign up for the ASA, you have to sign up for four years instead of three.
It's a four year commitment because you're going to go through a lot more training.
I was like, hmm, OK.
That kind of makes sense.
So I went home and I thought about it overnight and I decided, OK, this is the thing to do.
So I went back, saw him the next day, and he said, absolutely.
Sign on the dotted line.
And I did.
So friends and neighbors came together, said goodbye to me.
I boarded a bus and went to California to basic training.
And I got to basic training and I'd been there probably a week and the ASA representatives showed up.
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.
So here's your options.
Radio teletype repair or high speed radio intercept.
Excuse me.
I still thought, you know, where's the bong girls?
I'm sorry.
I signed up to be an agent and they kind of looked at each other and chuckled and said, well, maybe someday.
But your choice right now is high speed radio intercept or radio teletype repair.
And I knew what a radio teletype machine was.
I had no desire to work on those things for four years.
I really I asked him, I said, what's high speed radio intercept?
And they said, well, you know, you set around with earphones on and you copy code 12 hours a day.
And I'm like, no, I really didn't sign up for this.
We'll be back tomorrow.
By then, please make your choice because you get one or the other.
Now, what am I going to do?
It was obvious that I had been hoodwinked at this point.
And was it in the small print? Did you ever get to look at what I went back and looked at it?
It wasn't addressed at all.
All it said was I signed up for the ASA.
They had never put agent or agent handler or any specific M.O.S. military occupational specialty.
They had they had not addressed that.
It was a new under an umbrella where they could assign you all these tasks.
Yeah. So I was like, hmm, damn.
So the very first formation the next morning, there was there was a sergeant to sergeant first classes,
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.
And there was another I don't remember his name.
I think his name was Nathan, Sergeant First Class Nathan.
He was from the 82nd Airborne Division, both of them with with highly polished jump boots, starch fatigues.
I mean, they were the epitome of an elite soldier, both of them.
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.
Well, there's the first hook set.
I was like, oh, wait a minute, who who are these guys?
Because I heard the ballad of the Green Beret and all that stuff, but I didn't really know anything about them.
I didn't know anything about the Airborne to speak of.
And so I went in to see him.
Davis was busy, the Green Beret.
So I went to see Sergeant First Class Nathan.
I'm pretty sure that was his name.
And he said, he said, you know, he said, I represent the 82nd Airborne Division.
And he said, we're looking for for good soldiers, elite soldiers, soldiers that are a cut above the rest.
And I always I always like to consider myself a cut above the rest, whether I was or not.
And he said, I explained to him my predicament.
And he said, look, he said, I can get you out of the A.S.A. commitment.
He said, if you volunteer for Airborne, we have priority over everyone and we can get you out of that.
You're still going to have to keep your four year commitment.
But he said, I can get you out of that and I can get you into the 82nd Airborne Division.
And he said, we can send you to signal school and you become a radio operator.
That sounds like a pretty good deal.
That sounds OK.
And so I said, what about this Green Beret thing?
And he said, well, he said, you know, he said, you don't want to go right into that.
He said, you really want to get in the airborne first, get comfortable with that, become a soldier.
And then you can look at doing that.
I said, he said, because they're both at Fort Bragg 82nd and Special Forces are right there at Fort Bragg.
That made sense to me.
So I said, OK, give me the papers.
So I signed on the dotted line.
Did you read those papers a little more carefully?
I did. I was pretty careful.
And it said and he even put down because there was an at the time radio operator was considered an O5 Bravo MOS.
And so it was right.
The school was right there at Fort Ord.
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.
And that was all it was lined out very clearly.
So it's like, OK, now I feel comfortable with that.
So I signed off on that.
The ASA came back that afternoon said, OK, which one did you pick?
And I said, neither one.
I'm going to the 82nd Airborne Division.
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,
had already begun processing a security clearance for me because everybody in the ASA had to have at least a secret clearance.
That was like ten thousand dollars out of their budget.
And there was no way to stop it.
So the 82nd was actually getting something that they hadn't bargained on.
And the ASA was going to have to pay for it and get nothing to show for it.
You read what you saw.
So they got they got very accommodating at that point.
And they said, look, we'll send you to any school you want to.
I said, no, you lied to me once.
I don't want to hear any more of this.
Oh, well, we'll make an officer.
We'll do that.
No, don't.
I'm not even listening.
I've turned off my receive set.
I'm on transmit only.
I'm going to the Airborne. Goodbye.
And that's what I did.
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.
So he was an instructor at my radio operator course.
And he regaled us with stories about his time in special forces.
And it was just it was great.
And I was like, oh, this sounds like this sounds like the place to be.
So through the 82nd and then we'll see what happens from there.
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.
And I stayed there probably six months and I was assigned to the brigade that had just returned from Vietnam.
And so we were in a training cycle.
So we went into this training cycle, preparing to go back to Vietnam.
And I think it was nine months, something like that.
So I went through that training.
I prepared myself.
I got pretty comfortable with being a soldier.
And I even got as far as as being made a squad leader.
And another fellow and I had had made friends with each other.
And we're talking and said, you know, we both want to go to Vietnam.
We want to see what it's like.
We want to challenge ourselves.
Maybe not in those words exactly, but that's what it came down to.
But we could always use a little more training.
So let's go down and talk to these guys down Ardennes Street.
82nd and Special Forces both were on Ardennes Street, just opposite ends, so to speak.
So we went down and we talked to the special forces recruiter there.
And he said, oh, yeah, he said, we'd be happy to have you guys.
If you qualify, we'll run you through a battery of tests to see if you if you pass, if you make it.
And if so, then we'll schedule you for training and take you from there.
So we went through the tests, took the battery of tests that they had at that time passed.
And both of us got into special forces training.
82nd wasn't particularly happy about that, but it happens.
Now, they're a big organization.
Yeah, there's a lot of people. Exactly.
But with with that group you were assigned to, you had a lot of veterans that already seen combat in Vietnam.
What were some of the impressions you got from from those men?
The the guys in the 82nd were were professional.
They were they were soldiers. They.
They represented to me the the people that I had known before from World War Two,
that that mentality, that mindset, the focus that they had.
And started hearing, of course, a lot of stories from them about what they had been through in Vietnam,
the guys that had been to Vietnam.
And it again, it strikes me now.
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.
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.
You know, my father, my grandfather and uncles and people.
And I had learned from them. They had become my mentors.
And so I reached out to those people that that I could within 82nd in my unit at that time.
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.
And so that was a that was a very positive thing for me.
And I was nothing but ears at that point. I wanted to hear everything they could possibly tell me.
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.
So I was getting at all of this stuff.
And that that was just that was a plethora of people out there with just these these terrific educational stories.
I mean, there were stories, but they were truly educational to me, having never been there and to hear them explain.
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.
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.
They told me the why. They didn't just tell me the story.
They told me the story, but they told me the why of the story.
And they told me why we trained in certain ways, why we did things the way we did them.
And they wouldn't just tell us to do something.
They would do it with us.
You know, if we were doing push ups, they were doing push ups, whatever it might be, something as simple as that.
But they they showed us the way to do things.
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.
And I was really lucky because when I had gone through the radio operator's course, I learned to send and receive Morse code.
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.
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.
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.
So that was new to them.
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.
And then we'll send you to another.
And in this case, it was what they called 11 Foxtrot at that time's operations and intelligence.
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.
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.
Weapons, engineers, communications, operations and intelligence.
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.
And how to how to care for people that have been wounded and to prepare them for transport and so on.
So everybody's teaching everybody on the team.
And so I picked up both of those MOS and completed that training in April, early April of 69.
And then I was on my way to Vietnam.
I'd already volunteered for the Army.
I volunteered for airborne and I volunteered for special forces.
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.
And when we got there, they said, OK, we've got a requirement for some people at some of the classified assignments.
And if you'd like to volunteer for that, we'd be happy to accept your set you.
Otherwise, you're going out to.
I can't remember the name of the island. I think it was on tray.
Doesn't matter. There's an island offshore where they ran a training course for people new to Vietnam.
And they said, for those of you that that don't volunteer for this special assignment, we're going to send you out there.
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,
which is what I decided to do. Heck it.
That was lying. No information on what you were signing up for.
It was. I think they said it was perhaps a reconnaissance operation, but that was all they said.
They said nothing more than that. They use no acronyms or anything else.
They just said this is a classified assignment concerning reconnaissance operations.
And so I said, what the heck? I'll give it a shot.
I've done well so far apart from the first time.
In for a penny, in for a pound. So I went ahead and did that.
And that's what got me to ban me to it.
And command and control to set detachment south or B-50, as it was known, which was a part of MACV SOG.
Now, for people listening, myself included, that aren't in a military background, explain that unit to us.
MACV SOG was Military Assistance Command Vietnam, which was the overarching military organization in Vietnam at the time.
And SOG was Studies and Observations Group.
It was that consisted of multiple organizations that that provided intelligence activities for Military Assistance Command Vietnam and for other units within Vietnam.
Our operations consisted of cross border operations into Cambodia, Laos and North Vietnam for the three CNCs.
There was three CNC command and control detachments in Vietnam at that time.
Mine was at Bami Tuot. There was another at Khon Thum, CCC Central, and then CCN or North was at Da Nang.
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.
And I actually got as far south as Kanto and the Delta.
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.
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.
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.
And if we could, who the people were that were comprising those organizations.
That would indicate what their mission was when they got to South Vietnam.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Which tree is it?
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.
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,
who has by far the best recruitment story from a positive way because his dad actually sent him down there with a lawyer.
Smart move.
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.
So I highly recommend that even though I was never in the military.
That's a great idea. I love that. I wish I'd have thought of it.
Yeah, well I mean, everyone does now because I hear all these horror stories.
But the other thing is, you know, you volunteered and leveled up over and over again.
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,
the more training you get, the more effective you are at saving someone and going home to your family.
Exactly.
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.
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.
Which elements do you think physically and mentally allowed you to continuously succeed in these selection programs when so many others didn't?
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,
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.
And so that's what brought me to the comfortable aspect of understanding teams, small teams that rely on each other to get through.
Yeah, you know, to be a great team member, you have to first be a good individual.
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,
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.
It came very comfortably to me because I had been listening to it for so long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And the mentorship of those around me that had been before and understood and explained.
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?
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.
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.
And so it was that resilient mental attitude that allowed me to get through and be successful.
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,
is there also an element of that baseline of discomfort being a lot higher than possibly someone who grew up in a city?
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.
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.
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.
And then at times I was able to come up with something maybe a little better than they had done it.
Find maybe a different way, a slightly different way to do something. But always try theirs. And I was willing to do that.
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.
That I understood that I was the old guy from the outside and now I'm dealing with totally new people.
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.
They've been pretty successful because they're still alive and I need to listen to them.
It's like when I got to Vietnam and I started working with a mountain yard team.
The people that I worked with were mountain yards, which were the mountain people of Vietnam from the central highlands.
They taught me how to live in the jungle better than anybody I've ever met.
That was their home. And so they understood it better than anybody that ran.
And I went through some of the jungle training back at Fort Bragg, some very basic stuff.
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.
So that helped tremendously too.
Yeah. Well, I mean, it's so good to hear for a couple of reasons.
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.
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,
instead of actually getting off your ass and filling in the void.
Working with them.
Yeah, working with them. But I think the other side is humility.
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.
Like no one cares what you did in your last apartment. Bullshit. I care.
Absolutely.
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.
But if you're so arrogant that you don't want to learn from anywhere else, and this is not just the fire service.
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,
what Finland's done with their education. There are some places around the world that do things so much better than us.
And there's some things that we do so much better than anywhere else.
If we all have the humility, we can all share information and all rise up.
Exactly. That's teamwork. That's what it boils down to.
And I encourage everybody, not just here, but everybody that I come in contact with, to be a mentor.
You don't have to be an old sage like Socrates or Plato to be a mentor.
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,
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.
They may point out some of yours, or they may bring some entirely different and something you can learn from.
Because every day that you don't learn something is a lost day.
And so that's why to me mentorship is so important, to pass down the knowledge and skills that you have as an individual,
whatever your station in life, whatever your job is, there's somebody that you need to mentor.
It struck me, and I don't remember who said it, the most important job of any leader is to train new leaders.
Because you're not going to be around forever, particularly in the military.
Oh yeah. But the fire service is the same.
True also in the fire service, true in law enforcement, true in life.
So find someone, mentor them, and help them become a better leader.
And you will have fulfilled the requirements that you have on yourself.
Absolutely.
And it just makes sense.
It does. And you hear coaches talking about that, that their goal is to make the athlete better than they ever were.
Exactly.
The coach whoever was.
Exactly.
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.
You're right. You're absolutely right.
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.
Some of the non-commissioned officers and the officers that I've served under have mentored me
and ensured that I was professionally developed to be a better person, to be a better soldier,
and ultimately to be a better individual.
And that's important for all of us to do.
I don't care where you work.
You don't have to work in fire service or law enforcement or the military.
You can work at McDonald's. It doesn't matter.
But you need to be the best you can be, and you need to be able to mentor and be a mentee also.
Be aware of people around you, situational awareness.
Be aware of what's going on around you and plug into it.
To the positive, not the negative.
Absolutely. Well, you mentioned the why as well.
I think that's an important thing where humility comes in again.
Just because it's what your profession has done for X amount of years doesn't mean it's the best way now.
And one thing I talk about quite often, and it's not a crusade of mine.
I'm out the fire service now. It just is a common sense to me, is the helmets that we wear.
I mean, those are 100-year-old designs.
Right.
But people hang on to them, and they're just not functional compared to, you know,
and then some groups will even ridicule what the Europeans wear.
Well, that's a much superior technology-wise helmet.
And I've had a recent Irish firefighter I'm talking about, they just made the change a few years ago,
and he was just raving about it.
And to me, and people hate hearing this, but that's vanity. That's not tradition.
Tradition is brotherhood and, you know, the courage and all those kind of things.
And some of the skills that we take on the fire ground, the thing that sits on your head
that is far inferior to technology now, that's ego getting in the way.
If you're worried about how you look, then maybe you should just retire,
because you need the best equipment to facilitate the rescues that you need to,
and, you know, protect yourself so that you don't go down and become a liability on a fire ground.
Sure. And you can look at the helmets in the military and see, from World War I,
the old flat steel pots, to the World War II helmets, to the Vietnam, and then the newer helmets.
And at one point, we were using skateboard helmets.
I remember that. I've seen some of the pictures.
So they've evolved, you know, and now the helmets that they have now are truly functional.
But I think they're probably going to morph, too.
I mean, people are always looking at new ways to do things.
And those are the tools, the tools of the trade. And the tools of the trade can change.
You don't need tradition there. You're absolutely correct.
Your tradition is your history and your lineage and where you came from and what you did, not what you wore.
That's kind of a, that's a no-brainer.
Yeah. That's interesting perspective, so thank you.
So one thing that I ask every single person that has been, you know, sent to combat,
as myself, even though I'm a responder, I'm a civilian, I've never, never worked in the military.
And I always preface by saying the same thing.
We get given a polarized view of war, either the very pro-war, kill them all, let God sort them out,
or the very anti, they're all baby killers.
And it's politicized a lot of times as well.
You obviously have now new stations that literally are wearing red or blue.
So what gets lost is what we're asking our children to do in foreign countries.
So you had, you know, this, this American upbringing, and then you had a lot of training within the military.
When you arrived in Vietnam, regardless of the politics that sent you there,
were there any moments where you saw some things that were happening to the Vietnamese people
that kind of made you realize, all right, regardless of why we were initially sent,
there are some horrible people that we need to take care of over here?
Yeah, I think so.
When I got to ban me to it, I wasn't sure exactly what I was going to run into.
But it was a very interesting camp because command and control detachment south had Vietnamese,
South Vietnamese, LLDB, the Look Long Doc Biet, which are the Vietnamese Special Forces.
Within that group, there were some mountain yards, which was not too, that didn't happen very often.
Because the, the South Vietnamese tended to look down on the mountain yards,
kind of like America used to look down on the Native Americans.
General equation, it's not exact, but that's close enough.
And so there were, of course, mountain yards in my camp, because that's who I worked with.
There were Chinese nuns, Chinese mercenaries, if you will.
There were Chu Hois, which were North Vietnamese that were, that had left the North Vietnamese Army
and had flipped to the south.
And those guys I found really interesting to be able to talk to some of them as to why they had originally
chose to support the North Vietnamese and fight in the North Vietnamese Army.
A couple of them because they were forced to and the rest of them because they thought it was a good idea
until they found out what they were being asked to do and that was kill more of their own countrymen.
Because they didn't have a real problem killing Americans.
They seemed to be the enemy, but just as important, stressed on them by their political officers was to kill the South Vietnamese.
And that really upset them, that bothered them.
And then there was a Cambodian company.
So we had kind of an ethnically diverse camp, if you will.
And so I was able to set down somewhat and talk to each one of those groups.
I didn't talk too much to the Cambodians because they kind of, they stuck to themselves.
They were in one of the exploitation companies and they kind of did their own thing.
But I did talk to a couple of them.
But more importantly, I really wanted to get to know the people because I had been raised to accept people.
At face value, based on their values as to whether I thought they were good people or not.
And I'd been taught there's good and bad people of every ethnicity, of every strata of life.
There's good and bad.
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.
So that kind of made sense to me.
It's kind of a black and white thing, but it just truly makes sense.
And I still probably do it to this day.
Ethnicity, race doesn't mean anything to me.
It's what kind of person are you?
That's what makes the difference.
And there's good and bad everywhere.
But I started listening to some of these guys and the things that had happened to their families personally in years previous.
Because I was there for 12 months.
A tour at that time in Vietnam was 12 months.
These guys have been fighting war for 10 to 15 years, some of them.
And that really kind of got my attention.
That made me stop and think.
Because here's people that are living a war.
From the French, when the French were in Indochina, through all the iterations that had occurred since.
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.
What I had heard from news services, what I had heard from veterans, other veterans.
And it struck me that we were really there for the right thing.
That, again, I fall back on two words, freedom and liberty.
The choice of any individual to choose their own life and what they want to do in life.
Not forced on them in any way, shape or form.
And I think that's something, to me, worth fighting for.
That's important.
And so as I talk to these people, the stories of some of the horrendous things that had happened to them,
their family members, their extended families, the people in the neighboring village to them,
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.
This is right for me to be here.
It wasn't so much that I was questioning myself.
I was just trying to gather more information, but it was reinforcing my original beliefs.
And I really felt it was important and has been important ever since throughout my life.
Everything I've done, I've used those two things, liberty and freedom, to make a determination.
Is this the right thing to do?
And if I can do something to help somebody to gain either one or both of those, it's the right place to be.
Absolutely.
Well, one thing, I was speaking to Major Capers yesterday and he had some pretty horrendous things that he saw.
One was talking about the, I can't remember if it was the NVA, I think it was the Viet Cong.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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,
be it the caste they were or the...there were some that were just bad people. There's bad people in every society.
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.
And yet at the same time, the mountain yards that we worked with, we would support them in any way that we could.
And it was interesting that most of the mountain yard villages didn't have those kinds of problems. The Vietnamese villages did.
The mountain yard villages, there was an organization called Full Row. And Full Row was, in essence, a mountain yard army.
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.
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.
Now, they were targeted in certain instances, certainly, but they had the ability to fight back, and they did.
So they weren't an easy target.
It was funny, in one of the exploitation companies at CCS, just a standard company, there was an old mountain yard first sergeant.
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.
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.
And I was like, what? Because we didn't salute, we didn't teach him to salute.
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?
I mean, stood him at attention and just chewed him out.
And we walked off a ways and took, just kind of put his finger over his mouth and said, come with me.
So we walked a little ways away, and he said, first sergeant is a general in the full row army.
And that kid knew it. So he'd saluted the general, but he didn't want him to.
And so that's why he got himself chewed out.
Ah, gotcha.
But it was, some of the things that went on were absolutely terrible, no question about it.
And whenever possible, we would support anybody that we could.
But in our particular case, we supported our mountain yards because the people that worked with us, the soldiers, had families in these villages.
And that was as much a concern of ours as it was to take care of ourselves.
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.
So you have this country divided. You have these conflicts going on.
You have basically genocide going on.
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,
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.
So these farmers killing each other over yards in their native country, what was the root of that conflict?
We have to kind of go back several thousand years.
Let's do it.
Vietnam, if you look at Southeast Asia, Vietnam is kind of the hub.
To the southeast, you have the Philippines.
To the south, you have Borneo, you have Australia, all of that.
To the southwest, you've got Thailand, Malaysia, Brunei, Myanmar, which used to be Burma.
And then you've got to the north, you've got China and then Japan to the northeast.
Vietnam has always been a hub of trade in Southeast Asia.
A lot of trade passes through there because to go from one country to another is often a circuitous route.
And so it's easier to transship through Vietnam.
So they've always been an entrepreneurial people, a group of tradesmen, and it's a very rich country.
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.
And she said, is this your first time flying into Vietnam?
This was in 2017 when I went back for the first time.
And I said, no, ma'am.
She said, you were here during the war.
And I said, yes, I was.
And I said, I guess I'm going to have to get used to calling this Ho Chi Minh City.
And she said, oh, no, it's still Saigon.
She said, I live there.
And I said, OK, thank you.
So that made things easier for me.
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.
So I kind of had a general sense of what I thought Saigon was totally changed.
I mean, it's one of the most bustling, awake all night cities that things are just always going on.
But it's always been that way.
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.
Everybody wants a piece of that action.
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.
Hanoi was the the governmental hub, but Saigon was the economic hub.
And that's what they wanted a piece of.
That's what they they wanted, that richness.
They wanted the land, which in South Vietnam at the time was covered in in rubber plantations.
Michelin and others own these giant rubber plantations.
Big money at that particular time in the 40s and the 50s.
And so it was an economic hub that the whole south of Vietnam.
It was a breadbasket of rice and and all of the other truck farming and everything that went on with that.
So the north is a very pretty area.
It's beautiful. Hanoi is a gorgeous city.
Ended up going back there in 2018.
I think it was very interesting to see.
But the money, the economics were centered around Hanoi.
I'm sorry, centered around Saigon.
And that's what the people wanted. That's what they wanted out of this whole thing.
They wanted that access to the trade routes and to the direct trade with all of the countries in Southeast Asia.
So that that to me is what drove it.
Certainly, there was some ideology that came to it.
You know, nothing is just one simple thing by itself.
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.
Pull them into that sphere of influence.
And then that was turned around to pick up the economies because the Soviets have no ports on the west.
And they really wanted Cameroon Bay and they really wanted the Saigon.
And so that that made absolute sense economically to do just what they were doing.
Yeah, just not ethically. Exactly.
I mean, thank you again. Like I'm not well versed.
I watched the Ken Burns documentary. I heard you talking about it in the interview.
It was amazing. But even so, you know, it's still so much information to take in.
And again, sometimes you have to go further back.
So I appreciate you lending your perspective.
Conversely to the atrocities, the other side of the coin, I like to ask is moments of humanity.
Were there any kindness and compassion moments that really stuck out in the midst of that combat?
From our side, one of the things that our medics did, we ran what we called MedCaps, medical capabilities, exercises in country.
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.
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.
And there was probably some thought given to that also. But more importantly, just to take care of other human beings.
And it was so, so interesting. I went out on a couple of those just out of pure curiosity.
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.
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.
And and to see the gratitude that those people gave for some of the simplest things.
Nothing more than just cleaning a wound, because these are people that live out in the jungle and they run into water buffalo.
I remember there was a young young child that had been gored in the thigh by water buffalo, really quite torn up.
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.
And the medics worked on him, patched him all up.
And his father was just effusive in his thanks.
Couldn't understand a word he said, but we had interpreters with us.
I take a my interpreter with me.
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.
And some of the old people would show up and their teeth would be bad.
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.
There aren't any dues. There aren't any dues there.
There's just life.
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
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.
And it it kind of reaffirms your your feeling about doing the right thing and being in the right place.
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,
these village leaders and they would track them down.
They would hunt these human beings and make sure they couldn't do it to anyone else.
What's interesting about your story is you've talked before about Vietnamese groups hunting your group down.
So tell me about that and then tell me about just being on the receiving end of being hunted.
Not many people, not many humans know what it's like to be hunted.
It's not a lot of fun.
The our organizations were known as SCU special commando units, SCU's and the North Vietnamese.
I want to say late 69 or maybe early 70 gets a little hazy in my in my memory at times.
They they fielded a issues anti SCU units.
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,
normally about six people, two Americans and four mountain yards.
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.
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.
Some of them used dogs and they all used trackers and they they had a pretty good idea.
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.
And so they would turn these guys loose around those areas.
And particularly they would watch the inserts that occurred because we were inserted normally by helicopter.
And when we were inserted, it's kind of easy to tell where the helicopter is generally.
You can't pick it up specifically, but you can tell generally where that where it was.
And so they turn these guys loose to chase us.
And it's it's a feeling like no other.
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.
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.
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.
And one of the first times it happened to me was I heard them talking, a couple of them talking to each other.
And I asked my interpreter, what are they saying?
Because I could pick up a few words of Vietnamese, but I certainly couldn't follow their conversations.
And he said, they're saying kill the mountain yards and capture the Americans.
And that's a that's a really bad feeling, especially if you're a mountain yard.
Yeah. Yeah. And and so I want to protect my mountain yards.
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.
Or at least they're close enough that they think they have us identified.
And then on top of that, you throw in the dogs. And I love dogs.
You've met my dog. And I mean, I just I think dogs are great until they're chasing you.
And then it's it's they're on your scent. What breed did they use?
I think mostly shepherds or like Alsatians. Yeah, they had they had they were working dogs.
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.
Put it that way. Yeah. So you're not being chased by a shih tzu. No, no, not at all.
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.
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.
And then when when the dogs would start chasing you, look for the thickest brush you could possibly find, kind of leave a trail.
Everybody single file through and the last guy through just reaches behind and pumps out a little CS powder.
And you can tell when the dogs hit that because they'll be making normal dog noises until they hit that.
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.
But but when they sniff CS, it just it really affects them.
Lights them up. Oh, they they they just howl and howl and howl.
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.
But that's that's a very bad feeling when somebody starts chasing you.
It's there's not a whole lot you can do, but but try to get away from it very quickly.
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.
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?
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.
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
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.
We certainly had some, but we weren't there to get in a fight with anybody.
So we try to evade as much as possible and we try to slide to the side.
So we try to identify where they were as best we could.
Again, you can't tell exactly because you're certainly not looking at them, but you're hearing and you're noticing things.
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.
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.
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.
And then the other thing was at the same time, you're looking for a place to get out.
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,
move in, identify a location that they could drop helicopters into to pick you up and get you out.
And so that was the thing to do because at that point in time, you're compromised and you need to get out.
And that's the primary exfil.
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.
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,
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.
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.
But again, Major Capers is tracking down the enemy. They're engaging a lot. And he talks about witnessing the thousand yard stare.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
Yeah.
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.
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.
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.
So we had people that were in contact. I've been in contact multiple times.
But but it never pushed us to the point of of that psychological point, if you will, to that you're talking about.
So we are trying to think back and I don't think we had some people that had been.
They probably been there two to three years, which is a bit long.
That's that's a long time.
It's a bit long is the wrong choice.
Yeah, really bloody long.
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.
But I don't think we ever we never had anybody that that really got to the point.
I'm trying to think.
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.
Yeah. So so the common denominator is probably the amount of action that some Americans action.
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.
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.
Because so many and you mentioned it so many young Americans came to Vietnam.
They went to basic training.
They went to infantry training and then they immediately went to Vietnam.
There was no preparation period for them. There was no learning curve.
Their learning curve occurred in country.
And that was extremely unfortunate in my opinion because they were not prepared for what they saw or what they had to deal with.
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.
A specific shooting if you will.
That helped us tremendously.
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.
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.
We were volunteers. In essence we wanted to be there for whatever reasons that might be coming home was an entirely different story.
Absolutely different because we were all in the same boat then we had been through the crucible if you will of combat.
And now we're returning home to the land of the big PX.
And all of us had this this this mental image of what it was going to be.
You know Xanadu. This was this was the ultimate place to be. It's the great place to be.
And we got back and it wasn't exactly that.
Certainly our families and friends were happy to see us home.
But there were there was a vocal minority in America then that was very much against the war.
And I understand that. And that's part of what we fought for was their right to do just that.
But they brought it to us in a way that I kind of found unacceptable.
I didn't appreciate it.
You're welcome to your thoughts. I will respect your thoughts. I don't agree with you.
But I will respect your ability to have those thoughts and to voice those thoughts.
Just don't put them in my face. That's my face. Yeah.
And I had a guy try to spit on me when I came back.
It was it was really kind of funny because I came back to Fort Lewis Washington Seattle Tacoma Airport.
Came back on a contract aircraft. I think it was a DC-8. Flew into Seattle Tacoma.
They put us on buses, took us to Fort Lewis and we're still in fatigues from from in country.
And my fatigues had this red dirt just ground into them because around Bambi to it.
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.
And got back to Fort Lewis and they had brand new uniforms for us.
Green uniforms so that we could dress up and ties and shirts and all that stuff.
And they said, just throw your fatigues over there and that bin and we'll we'll dispose of them later.
No, you won't. They're going home with me.
You know, we've been through too much together.
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.
Well, you don't have to understand that it's mine.
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.
And as I went through the gate, there's a whole group of protesters there.
They're they're shouting all kinds of things, baby killers or who knows who knows what.
And one of the guys tried to spit on me and I saw him getting ready to.
So I just moved. I and he missed.
And I think he got one of his own protesters or that's their problem.
And if I think of that point, if somebody would have actually accosted me, I might have reacted a little different.
But it was just, you know, I don't have time for you guys.
You know, say whatever you want. I'm just going about my business.
And I did got in the car, drove off. I was good.
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,
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.
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.
And I'm still that way mentally. I'm not ready for this. There was no decompression.
It was just from one extreme to the other.
And I went back and made friends with everybody all over again a little later in life.
But it's just at that point in time, I didn't care about anything.
And I was very confused about I felt comfortable in the military environment.
I did not feel comfortable in in society at that point.
And I think if I'd probably gotten out at that point in time, I probably could have been a real problem child.
I would have had far more mental problems than I ever did because I left there, Portland.
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.
And so that was probably the best thing that could happen to me.
That was my decompression at that point. That was when it was just like, OK, now I'm back in comfort.
I'm back in people that know me. And I was able to to re-assimilate myself into society.
And then I think that Christmas, I went back and made friends with everybody.
Well, Sebastian Junger talks about the contrast between the ticker tapes of the Vietnam excuse me, of the World War Two vets coming home.
And then the Vietnam era and so many levels.
I mean, you have, like you said, not punctuating whether and it's the same for us.
We need to be better at punctuating between the fire station and dad, husband, you know, and taking that time to separate the two.
So you don't have that kind of demob a couple of weeks.
But then also you don't have that storytelling element.
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.
And that's healing for them. Instead, you had shame and guilt and all these things.
Many of these were children, as we said, that were also drafted.
Didn't even put their hand up to go over and do that.
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?
I think it led to a lot of it. And you brought up a good point.
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.
But we would share those experiences with each other.
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.
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.
You're going to see it through your set of eyes. And it's going to be somewhat different.
It'll be generally the same thing, but there will be differences on both sides.
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.
And that allowed us that decompression time.
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.
They were back in in society and they really didn't have anybody to talk to.
They didn't have anything in common with the World War Two vets.
Very few of the young people today, unfortunately, are participating in some of the activities that are available to them.
And and so they had no they had no tribe.
It was it was as if they were tribalist people because they didn't belong to American civil society.
And they no longer belong to the military society.
They're caught in kind of a no man's land and.
Ergo homelessness, ergo bikers, whatever, whatever path they chose to follow was out of the norms of society.
So society continued to look down or askance at them as as when they had been in the military.
And so that that created a.
A set of circumstances that was extremely unfortunate.
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.
We call it decompression now. Don't know what they would call it then.
But a time for them to re assimilate into society with.
Positive skills as opposed to negative skills.
Because they came back and certainly they had handled weapons and they had done all this stuff that you do during war.
And and now they were back weaponless and and lost.
And we needed to give them something to fight their way back into society skills.
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.
And that wasn't done.
And that was very unfortunate.
I was just absolutely lucky that I'd signed up for four years and therefore I had to stay.
Yeah, because I don't know what would have happened to me if I would have gotten out at that point.
But I had I still had time to do so.
I came back to Fort Bragg and I was back in my tribe and I got very comfortable in that tribe.
And I found that that's that's where I wanted to be for the rest of my military career.
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.
So those men are asked and younger.
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.
She was embedded in Iraq with with the 10th Mountain and the First Cavalry divisions as a civilian contractor.
She's a cultural anthropologist.
And so we were talking about it and I listened to Sebastian Younger's Ted talk.
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.
And that just that really hit me.
But then I started thinking about it and it absolutely made sense to me.
When you think of 22 a day, you think of all these young people coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan.
And certainly there are some and I hope that number decreases.
But for the for the older guys, the 80 percent of those, it doesn't surprise me in this sense.
They're reaching the age where I am now.
Many of them are ill health.
And that's a drain on one psyche.
Many of them have been through terrible divorce or they've lost their spouse to illness.
And so you reach that point in life that you kind of start asking.
What's the sense in going on?
You know, I don't have my health, my health's declining.
I'm not going to get any better.
You know, they can't fix me.
They can just medicate me.
Well, that sucks.
I lost my spouse either through divorce or through through death.
That was that was the person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with and I never will.
And there are also many of them in hard economic times.
And so with all this against them, it to be honest, it really doesn't surprise me that they are comprising that large number.
Absolutely sad.
Everything I can do to help them, I will.
And I continue to do so hopefully.
But it doesn't surprise me.
And but it does make sense.
Well, I think what was interesting to add to that list was also you.
I've noticed now one of the many kind of coping mechanisms, technically negative in a way, is that you busy.
You throw yourself into a thousand things so that you don't have to think about the thing that bothers you.
And then police and fire.
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.
And so I forget again, whoever it was that was talking about it.
And I'm sure Sebastian was probably the source, but was that now that age is also retiring.
Right. So that thing that they did, they filled the space.
Yeah.
They've got no purpose left.
So you add all those together.
That's why I'm so lucky to be here at GoRuck, because it gives me some purpose.
It gives me a reason to get up every day and do things.
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.
And that purpose is probably the most important.
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.
Gorgeous place. Absolutely gorgeous place.
But I didn't have any purpose.
And I really I needed purpose.
And Jason and I just happened to connect at that particular time.
And it worked out great for both of us.
He called me on one of my my pet ideas, and that is we continually reinvent ourselves in life.
When we graduate from school and we begin working, that's a reinvention.
When we change jobs, that's another reinvention.
When we move across country, another reinvention.
We're continually reinventing ourselves.
And that can be a positive thing.
It should be a positive thing.
But he caught me at the right time and said, Hey, look, you keep talking about reinvention.
Reinvent yourself and move to Jacksonville Beach, Florida.
He called you on it.
He called me on it and it worked.
Beautiful. Well, you've got an interesting transition story.
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.
So you were present at Somalia. Correct.
So, you know, just kind of walk me through the end of your Vietnam presence and then kind of into into that particular event.
OK, when I did another second tour in Vietnam and then I moved to Okinawa to the first Special Forces Group,
spent some time there, went through scuba school and then returned to the States.
Started working at the Army Scuba School in Key West, Florida for a short period of time
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.
The colonel wants to interview you.
I didn't know who the colonel was.
All right.
Being asked to volunteer again.
Yeah. So my this friend knew me very well.
He and I were in special forces for of the 25 years I spent in special forces.
He and I were probably on and off together 24.
So we're good friends. He knows me. I know him.
So he called me up. I went to Fort Bragg and the colonel was a guy named Charlie Beckwith.
And Beckwith sat down and talked to me and identified himself.
And he said, Look, we're going to build a new unit.
And he said, I need some people around me that have specific skills.
And he said, Foreman says you're the right guy for this.
And so after the interview, he personally selected me, said, Yep, OK, you're in and sent me to a couple of schools.
I went through that.
And then we formed the organization that's first special forces operational detachment Delta.
Most people know what is Delta Force, a.k.a Chuck Norris.
Yeah.
I wouldn't tell Charlie Beckwith. Yeah.
And so my career went on and I flipped between the unit and my old special forces several times.
And I ended up in an organization called ISA, the intelligence support activity.
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.
I was in ended up in in ISA.
And that's when I was posted to Somalia in a small detachment that was supporting the activity down there at that time.
And about that time, C Squadron showed up from from Delta and third of the 75th B Company, third of the 75th in particular.
But the third of 75th, along with the 10th Mountain Division, who was there to support the UN aspect.
But the third of the 75th and C Squadron formed or supported Operation Gothic Serpent,
which was the activities in Somalia at that time to to follow the presidential declaration of what we were supposed to do,
because he decided that that something needed to be done there.
And so that that led up to what everybody knows as the day of the ranger and or Black Hawk down.
And they they were conducting their operations and I was conducting operations to support them.
And then about that time, everything turned to shit.
Excuse my language, but there's no other way to put it.
And there were some there was loss of some awfully good men.
There were truly some heroic actions that were conducted during that operation.
Some of the guys I knew very well, others I didn't know because they were newer to the organization.
But there was there was a unified effort to to conduct the mission and to support each other.
And that's really what combat comes down to is supporting the guy to your right and your left.
That's that's what it's all about. I think it's same same true in the fire service.
Absolutely. And in and in law enforcement activities and in many other occupations.
Yeah, you're there to do what is supposed to be done in that particular instance.
But more importantly, you're there to take care of the guy or girl to your right or left.
And that's that's what that one really boiled down to.
It was a tragic loss of personnel on both sides. To be honest, it was it was a terrible thing.
There was there was a lot of smallies killed, some of whom were simply caught up in the moment
and truly weren't combatants. But to differentiate in those particular circumstances,
what's happening in a mob, there's no way to do that.
And then, of course, the guys on our side, kudos to them.
Some of the some of the bravest men I've ever met in my life.
It's amazing to hear. And obviously, your Delta brothers, the reason that Mike's still around today, their heroism.
Absolutely. Absolutely. You can't say enough about those people.
Well, thank you for sharing your, you know, your your whole journey so far.
So as you mentioned, so many, you know, combat deployments, so many years spent serving.
What made you finally decide to transition out and then tell me the role that you you filled after that?
Well, I'd gone about as far as I could in the army.
I kept volunteering for stuff until there was nothing left to volunteer for everything.
By that point, and should have become a recruiter.
And I looked around and I again, I had been counseled by some of my mentors.
They said, you know, the other thing about being a soldier, about being a warrior is knowing when it's time to go.
When you when you've done all you can and you need to make room for those coming up.
And certainly, you know, I was lucky I was in on the organization and establishment of two organizations that had never existed before.
Delta and NISA. And that was just that that was heady times.
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.
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.
It's mind boggling. And I am truly in awe of them and what they've done with that.
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.
And I had no idea what I was going to do with myself.
And I had a small sailboat at the time, about 23 foot.
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.
And and I ground the bottom down, epoxied it, did all the things that boaters do to their boats.
And I got done with that and I really didn't know what else I was going to do.
So I drove back to Fort Bragg and I was just I was at the PX one day.
I stopped in to pick something up and I ran into an old colonel that I had known in the army.
And he, you know, hey, hail well fellow met and he said, what are you doing now?
And I said nothing. And he said, what are you going to do?
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.
He was the director of continuing education at that time on Bragg.
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.
And I said, well, what does that mean? And he said, well, he said, here's what I want you to do.
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,
logistics operations, combat lifesaver.
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.
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.
So it isn't going to cost the soldier or the unit anything.
They're just going to get a better guy trained when they get him back, a guy or gal.
And all it costs is the time for them to set in class and gain the knowledge.
That sounds pretty good. And he said, it's just part time. He said, three and a half days a week.
Well, that worked out pretty well because I could do three and a half days and then have a three day weekend every week.
That sounds pretty good to me. So I did that.
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.
So I had the V.A. transition money to use that for. So I started going back to school in the evenings.
And then I was working during the day. I did that for a while.
And then he said, hey, look, this is this is going so well.
He said, now I need a program coordinator, somebody that that oversees these programs because he was picking up some additional requirements.
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.
I'm working five days a week. But it was good because I was back.
I was working with soldiers and I love to work with soldiers and we're working with their family members.
Some of the family members were coming to these classes for the computer classes, the effective writing, stuff like that.
And so I was like, OK, what the heck? And so I completed my degree, my four year degree.
And I went to work full time for the college as a program coordinator.
And a couple of years later, he left. He retired completely.
And I got the job as director and then kind of started working up the food and shade from there.
I still had some VA money left, so I continued going to school at night and got a master's in business administration.
And shortly after that, I was promoted to the vice president of military programs on Fort Bragg,
which combined both the continuing education, the skill courses and the college level courses that we taught.
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.
And we did it in particular with the Special Forces School at Fort Bragg.
We took the Special Forces course, the Psychological Operations course and the Civil Affairs course.
And we looked at their programs of instruction.
I passed them out to the various sections of the college.
They evaluated them. And on a two year degree, which is what the school offered as a community college,
on a two year degree of 64 hours, we would award those students 48 hours of credit for their military training,
which meant they had to do 16 hours with us.
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.
Which, education always stands you in good stead.
And we were doing it for soldiers. We were helping family members do the same thing, kids and spouses,
or if they wanted a particular skill course, because a lot of the spouses came to attend the hair courses.
And there was a couple of nursing courses and dental hygienist courses.
And so they were transportable degrees that a spouse could take virtually anywhere and use as a secondary.
So it's about that time that it dawned on me that really what my life is all about is service.
It had been national service while I was in the military.
And then it was community service. And yet still with a national flair to it,
helping soldiers, their spouses, their dependents get education.
And that's when it really hit me that it's all about service. And that's what I like.
I like working with people, helping them help themselves.
And so I felt very comfortable at that point.
And so I did a 20 year hitch, if you will, with the community college system in North Carolina.
And then retired from that in 2015.
Amazing. So what I'm anticipating, and please correct me if I'm wrong,
so many of the important elements that make for a healthy transition you had in yours.
First, you had the decision to step away.
Then you were still surrounded by your tribe with the military.
But also you retained the same purpose, just it was in a different uniform.
Right. Absolutely correct. And I think the thing that was helpful to me,
none of those were a negative. They were all positive moves.
They were, I got to choose. And I did it with a general purpose in mind.
Yeah, I retired and I didn't know exactly what I was going to do.
But I figured I was going to be successful. I just hadn't decided what.
And it was a good move for me to move away from the military at that point,
because it was just time to go. I spent 30 years in the Army, so it's time to, that's enough.
And then as I moved to various jobs, they were all purposeful jobs.
I don't think I thought of them as purpose at that time, but they really were.
And so I had some very positive things going for me.
And again, it came down to the mentorship aspect too, because I had people,
that old colonel that I ran into. To a degree, he'd been a bit of a mentor of mine,
because we worked together on the same staff for a two-star general.
I was a sergeant major and he was the chief of staff.
So we knew each other in that aspect and we positively supported each other
while supporting the general. That was our primary function.
It all goes back again to mentorship.
People working together and the tribe working together to continually support
in different aspects at times, but still in the tribe and making it happen.
And that's what made it so positive for me.
Beautiful. Well, just one more area then I want to transition to some closing questions.
But one thing that I saw myself struggle with a little bit when I transitioned to doing this full-time,
and again, for me, taking a phrase that I hear, your group of men and women use a lot,
which is the force multiplier, I realized at that point that this project
was going to affect more lives than me sitting in a fire engine or a rescue
and running one call at a time, even though I miss it and I loved it.
But my ego struggled a little bit at first because I wasn't wearing the uniform.
With you being such a high-level operator and then finding yourself in a community college,
even though that purpose was the same, we're talking about egos the same way as egos with the fire helmet
we were talking about earlier, was there any struggle with that?
Like one minute you were in uniform, next minute you're holding a dry erase board.
Yeah, I tell everybody that when you get up in the morning in the army, it's pretty easy.
You put on all camouflage and you're good to go.
When you get up and you're working for the community college, it's like, okay, do my shoes,
match my socks, match my pants, match my shirt, match my jacket, match my tie.
You've got all these things that you've got to bring together.
That's a funny way of saying it, but you lose that comfort zone that you're now in a new...
You've got to reestablish yourself in your own mind, not with the people around you,
to a degree, but mostly in your own mind.
Again, I had really good mentorship because people told me, the people that I valued that had done this before me,
said, look, when you get out, you're not Sergeant Major anymore.
Yeah, you need to understand that these people around you don't feel the same drive that you do internally
because you're used to a higher level of drive.
It doesn't mean you're better or anything.
You're just used to a higher level of drive because of all the missions, the operations,
the things that are going on that you have to concern yourself with in the military.
These people are very focused in their area, particularly academics.
They're great people.
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.
I had to learn to truly calm myself down and operate at a level that was acceptable to them and acceptable to me.
I found new things to do with myself and new areas.
I would sit down and think of new areas to get involved in that were still within the bounds of academia.
And yet, they weren't academic things.
They were programs.
How can we expand our programs?
How can we reach more people?
How can we do better in bringing people into the college, assisting them with what they need and their educational needs,
and then moving them to the next level?
How better can we do that?
And that's where we came up with the 55 schools initially.
I'm sure it's more than that now that would accept our two-year program as a four-year program at their institution.
I got involved in that a lot and a lot of talking going on and a lot of traveling.
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.
And everybody was concerned when we set up this program.
They said, well, gee, how are these soldiers going to do when they do 16 hours with us,
they complete that two-year degree, and then they go to a four-year institution?
How are they going to handle that?
And it was really great.
One of the schools we worked with was Norwich University, which is the home of ROTC, among other things.
And I was in constant contact with their vice president, who was my counterpart.
And when we got probably 200 of these soldiers through our program and into his school, maybe 150, something like that,
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?
How are these guys that have been through our program, how are they matching up to your school?
He says, I said, I hate to tell you.
Oh, I don't want to hear this.
And he said, they're doing better than our resident students.
And that just made me feel so good that these soldiers that we believed in,
that we helped get into this program and convinced them that they needed to buckle down,
even with that tremendous workload that they had as soldiers in the special operations community,
and complete this program and move on to something else, were doing so great.
So that helped my transition, that I was able to do that.
And I was able to find new venues to move into so that I wasn't just absolutely stifled.
But it was a bit tough.
I was used to getting up in the morning and doing certain things and routines, and that routine just totally changed.
But I had, again, some great mentors that said, hey, look, you're off active duty, so remember,
be proud of what you were, but accept that you are no more.
That's kind of hard to do sometimes.
It really is.
And there's multiple times I had to sit down and tell myself that exact same thing.
But it worked.
Beautiful.
One thing, just before we move on, that I remember hearing this story,
it was probably one of the interviews you did with Jason.
It really resonated with me because in the fire service,
we have all these special operations classes that you can take whether you're on the special operations team or not.
And I got a whole bunch of myself, the rope rescue and extrication,
and all these advanced level courses, but none of them counted for anything in the academic world.
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.
So I loved when I heard you talking about that and how elements of military training factored into the degree,
because I think the fire service could learn a lot of lessons from that.
You get someone who's got the classes that I talked about, maybe some advanced EMS classes,
you factor it in, you should have enough credit to do some additional classes and get a bachelor's,
versus some godawful emergency management administration degree that on scene isn't going to mean a damn thing.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, we were really lucky because at the time, General Sokolik was the commander of the Special Warfare Center in school
and had a couple of friends that were actually working within the school.
One was a civilian that had been hired for educational purposes and one was a military guy.
I knew several others, but these were guys that were kind of high up in the hierarchy.
And so I explained to them what I wanted to do, and that's when I went to them and I said,
I need you to give me your POI, your unclassified POI, because there's some classified portions, didn't want that.
The unclassified POI, and they did, 79 three-inch binders.
Oh my God.
That's the entire program of instruction for a special forces soldier.
Wow.
And then the equivalent for civil affairs and for psychological operations, but we took special forces first.
And so I took those books and I thought, you know, if I take this down and just give this to the academic departments,
they aren't going to get it.
So we had a great president at the time of the college, Dr. Larry Keene.
And I went to him and I said, sir, I said, here's what I want to do.
I want to set up a program for our department chairs to come to.
And I want to take them out to Fort Bragg.
And I want to get a briefing from General Sokolic and or his people on what special forces is all about
and what they do to train special forces and where they're going and so on.
And he said, OK.
He said, that's great.
He said, I will make that a requirement for every department chair to come to.
You just set it up and I'll make sure they're there.
OK.
So I went back to my guys and they went to General Sokolic and I ended up going to General Sokolic too.
And I told them what I wanted to do.
And they said, absolutely, we'll do it.
So we took all these department chairs from mathematics and just all the department chairs,
took them out to Fort Bragg, even the nursing department chair.
We took her out there too.
Great lady.
And General Sokolic sat down with them in the auditorium at the Special Warfare Center.
And he told them about special forces, about the imperatives of special operations
and special operations training and all.
He covered the entire spectrum at his level, at a two stars level.
And then we took them out and we took them to the, at that time, the military free fall school was at Fort Bragg.
And they had a wind tunnel that they did their initial training in.
And we timed it so that we could take all of these people in there and we actually flew them
with instructors from the Special Warfare Center in the wind tunnel, vertical wind tunnel.
Then we took them out to the range and they shot weapons.
And while they were shooting weapons, the guys were talking to them in various languages,
Korean and Serbo-Croatian, just showing them the multitude of things that a special forces soldier represents.
Then we fed them all MREs.
We weren't excited about, but they just thought we're wonderful because it was something new for them.
We took them back out to the sniper range and they shot sniper rifles.
They did a little bit of everything.
And then we took them out to a mount site, a terrain, urban terrain site, and evacuated from there in helicopters.
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.
And we got done and they were just, they were astounded at the skills and abilities that these young men were capable of.
And the mathematics and physics and chemistry and all these things that you need at an operational level.
And they were just like, this is incredible.
And then I dropped the 79 books on them.
I gave, depending on what it was, I gave it out to all the departments.
And then I kept my fingers crossed because I didn't know how it was going to turn out.
And it turned out great because that's when they came back.
And ultimately we determined that we could legally and properly, because we're, as a school, we're bound by certain educational requirements,
that we could legally and properly award 48 hours of credit on a 64-hour degree, which was unheard of at that point.
And I was just, I was ready to do backflips.
I was too old to do them, but I was ready to do them.
And we took that back to the Special Warfare Center in school.
At that point, they gave me space at the schoolhouse, offices and classrooms to actually put instructors at the Special Forces School
so soldiers could take classes during the day and in the evenings from instructors that were actually assigned their jobs,
were to be at that schoolhouse and Special Warfare Center to teach soldiers their classes.
Public speaking, English, mathematics, whatever it might be.
It was great.
So it was, it was a, it wasn't just me by any means.
It was a multitude of people that came together to make that happen.
But the whole idea was we were supporting America's warriors.
I'm sorry, I'm going back to the beginning of this conversation,
looking at something that's been done a certain way for a long time and saying, I think we can do this better.
Exactly. Exactly. Always, always thinking outside the box, outside the envelope.
Beautiful. Well, thank you so much for sharing that.
So one last thing before we transition.
You, with that skill set, with the Special Forces experience, then with the college experience, academia,
you could have reinvented yourself in any company in this country or another country.
So tell me about GORUCK and what it was that drew you to Jason and Emily and then this particular company.
I retired from the school in 2015 and in 2016, I was asked to come to an event in Atlanta
that was sponsored by Team Red, White and Blue, Team RWB.
They were having a meeting of all of their captains of various communities coming together for a training session.
My wife was invited to come and she said, oh, gee, I've got this boyfriend because we weren't married at the time.
She said, I've got this boyfriend and he gives leadership and management talks.
Do you want me to bring him?
And they said, oh, yeah, sure, you can bring him.
So I went and she gave her talk and I gave my talk.
And the guy that was running it was a guy named Garrett Cathcart, who now is involved with Mission Roll Call.
And Garrett and I became pretty good acquaintances.
I won't say we were friends at that time, but we've ultimately become friends.
And because of that particular incident, later on in the year, that was in like August of 2016.
In October of 2016, she and I both again were invited to come here where we're sitting right now to GORUCK headquarters
because Team RWB and GORUCK were coming together to form what they called a rucking university.
It was bringing together club captains, team captains, all kinds of various people that would come here and talk GORUCK.
And so I gave a presentation to them and then we did an event here on the beach, Jason Lettitt.
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.
We're kind of sniffing each other out, but we're not sure yet.
We don't know each other that well.
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.
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?
And I said, yeah, I still live there. And he said, I'd like you to come out.
So he gave me all the particulars. And in 2017, they ran the Bragg Heavy, which was a big event for GORUCK.
So I went out to that. It was held out in Southern Pines.
And I met a bunch of the cadre, hung out with them, again hung out with Jason, got to know him a little better.
And at the end of that, he said, you know, he said, how would you like to do something for GORUCK?
And I said, do what? And he says, well, I don't know.
He said, maybe we could make you an ambassador.
I said, what does that mean?
He said, well, I don't know that either.
But he said, I'd like you to be involved in GORUCK.
He said, I think you could bring something to this to this community.
And I said, yeah, sure. It sounds good to me.
No big commitment either way. You know, I'm not going to get paid for it or anything.
It's just that's the way it is.
So I talked to him several times after that.
We communicated, stayed in touch.
And then in, I think, late March, he said, hey, how would you feel about going back to Vietnam?
You know, the war's over, right?
Yeah. I said, well, I don't know.
You know, I said, I've talked to a lot of people, friends of mine that have been back.
And they rather enjoyed it for the most part.
I said, I've never had a big desire to do it.
So let me think about it.
I said, why?
And he said, well, we're going to start working with a company there to build a boot.
Because one of the things I'd ask him in February at the Bragg Heavy of that year was,
you know, you build all these great rucksacks.
You build pants and shirts and jackets.
You've got all this stuff going on.
But I said, and you push rucking events because that's what you do as a company.
You're the rucking company.
But what about boots?
You don't have any boots.
And he said, well, we're working on that.
He said, we try to build everything we can in America.
But he said, unfortunately, all the producers of boots in America are full right now.
And they're making their own boots.
And he said, so we're going to go to a company in Vietnam and work with them that we've been
recommended to go check out.
And he said, we've got this guy named Paul Litchfield who developed the Reebok pump shoe.
He's going to be the designer.
He said, but we want to kind of design it off the old jungle boot from Vietnam.
And he said, that's where you come in kind of.
And he said, so there's four of us going to go if you go.
And we're going to go together to the factory.
And then he said, you pick out where we go next.
And he said, we'll be there for three or four days.
All right.
So I thought about it overnight, came back to him, and I said, yeah, I'll go.
So in April, I think it was, of 2017, we went to Vietnam.
I still didn't know exactly what to expect.
And I know when I walked off the airplane at Tan Son Nhut, because we flew into Tan Son Nhut,
and I'd been to Tan Son Nhut before, didn't look exactly the same.
Now it's a much nicer place than it was during the Vietnam War.
First thing I saw was the customs guys.
And they're all wearing basically what I remember as a North Vietnamese uniform.
And that was a little, that kind of made me stutter just a little bit.
I'm sure.
It was like, OK.
So but there was a guy there from the company that we were going to go see.
And he took all of our passports, got us through customs.
And then we went through, never had a bit of trouble.
And so we spent two days at the factory working with them, amazing factory and amazing people.
Again, the entrepreneurial spirit of Vietnam just astounded me.
It was just incredible to see what had become of this city that I knew as a rather quaint, small city.
It wasn't small, but it was small by comparison.
Now it's just huge and bustling.
I mean, there's Lamborghinis racing down the street and stuff.
And I'm like, holy cow, this is just incredible.
First night we got there, we just hang out and drunk, we hung out and drank beer.
And listened to the rooster crow the next morning.
And none of us were sleepy. It was just amazing.
So we went downtown and this is, I mentioned this earlier in this interview.
We went downtown to the American War Museum, which has been established by the Vietnamese government.
And the victor always gets to write the history.
So they had written their history.
So they had, it was an interesting museum to see because it was from a different perspective than I was used to.
But it started warming up and I was just, I was kind of tired.
I was kind of getting let down at that point.
So I sat down in a courtyard and this gentleman came up and he's Asian.
He wasn't Vietnamese, but he's Asian.
And he said, excuse me, he said, are you American?
And I said, yeah, I am.
And he introduced himself, BJ, can't remember his last name, but I remember BJ.
And he said, do you mind if I sit and talk with you a minute?
I said, no, not at all.
And he said, I'm from Singapore.
And he said, were you here during the Vietnam War?
And I said, yeah, I did two tours here.
And he said, I would like to thank you on behalf of me and my friends.
And that just took me by surprise.
I didn't know what to thank.
And I said, thank me for what?
And he said, because of what you did here, it slowed down and stopped the movement of communism moving through all of Southeast Asia.
And I'd never thought of it in that particular context before.
And it just, it really hit me.
And that kind of, that made it all worthwhile.
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,
which is where my old camp had been up to Da Lat and then back to Banh Mi Thuot.
And we had a driver because you can't rent a car and drive it yourself in Vietnam.
You have to rent a car and a driver.
So it actually worked out really good because he drove and we drank beer.
I wish they did that in Orlando.
Oh, wouldn't it though?
So we had this great time together, the four of us, Jason and Paul and Andy Nilsson and myself.
And Andy was the videographer for that trip and Paul was the shoe developer.
And I was just kind of hanging out and having a wonderful time.
And so it was, the way I explained it, it closed a circle that I didn't know was open.
It was kind of a cathartic thing, I guess, to speak of.
But it was, it's a favorite event of mine now.
I was glad to go back and see it.
Some things I remember, some things I didn't, but it was just, it was good to go back and see the people
and see the positive things that have occurred to Vietnam, regardless of who won and who lost.
The people is what really matter.
They're the ones that mean something to me.
What government is in session, I could care less.
It doesn't mean anything.
But what means something to me is the people and how well they've been able to do.
And it appeared, for the most part, that they've done really, really well.
And I was glad to see that.
Amazing. Amazing place to kind of transition then.
So I would love just to ask some quick questions for you and then we'll wrap up.
The first one that I'd love to ask, is there a book or books that you love to recommend
that can be related to what we've discussed today or something completely unrelated?
If somebody's interested in Vietnam, probably Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a great book.
Sebastian Junger's The Tribe, another great book.
Doesn't really address Vietnam.
It addresses the world.
It addresses everything.
And tribe to me is what it's all about.
My roots in special forces, tribe.
My roots with my family, tribe.
And now, Go Ruck, tribe.
We even call it tribe.
But it's really what it's all about.
It's that combination of living life and the oral history that goes along with it
and being a better person individually and group-wise.
Those are the big ones, I think.
There's a tremendous amount of books out there that have influenced me.
It's interesting that I've always loved to read.
And my mother said that it was probably because when I was still in the womb,
she used to read out loud the Reader's Digest to me.
Just for something for her to do because she couldn't get around a whole bunch.
She was pregnant with me.
And she thought maybe it would be helpful to me.
Well, I think it probably did.
It made me a voracious reader of everything I can get my hands on.
Beautiful. Beautiful.
So the same question. What about a film and or documentary?
Of course, as a kid, I watched all the standard movies of The Longest Day and all.
I think something that really talks to me has been the TV miniseries Band of Brothers.
It really represents what being in combat is all about.
It takes it from civilian life, so to speak, in the early days of training the soldiers,
preparing them to go to war, and then taking them to war.
And then a short period of the aftermath of war because war isn't the end.
War is a beginning.
And so that one probably speaks to me most of all.
Well, firstly, that's mentioned so many times.
I actually worked with Captain Dale Dye when I did some stunts in Japan.
Quite a guy.
Amazing. And then he actually came on the podcast.
And so did Julia, his wife, who I worked with in Japan.
But I refer to Band of Brothers all the time.
When you talk about Chuck Norris, Delta Force, John Rambo, John Wayne,
that's what a lot of young men and women, especially men, were raised to believe was a man.
That's Hollywood.
Yes, exactly. But that's the facade.
And then there's such a dangerous place to go mentally
if you think that's what a man's supposed to do.
Exactly.
And so I always point to Band of Brothers because the real men of Easy Company
that talk at the beginning and the end, you can see 60 years later are still so moved
and so hurt by some of the things they did, some of the things they saw, the men they lost.
That is a man.
An incredible warrior whose heart is broken by some of the things that they've endured.
That's truth.
Yeah.
That's what that boils down to.
There's Hollywood. And I grew up on Hollywood.
I was a kid during those periods of time.
But I think I was tempered by my parents and those around me that had been through World War II
and had seen action.
They didn't talk to me specifically about stuff, particularly the really bad stuff.
And yet at the same time, they let me know that war wasn't what you saw produced in Hollywood.
That there was far more to it.
And it was a far more stressful situation.
And Band of Brothers probably comes as close to any of explaining that
because you're seeing some vignettes about what happened.
But then you're hearing the guys that were there really talk about it.
And you can see, as you said, how it affected them and how it still affects them to this day.
Yeah. Amazing. Absolutely amazing.
Well, like I said, I had Dale on the show as a guest.
The next question, is there someone you would recommend to come on this podcast as a guest
to speak to the first responders, military and associated professions of the world?
I think a really great guy, if you could get him.
And I'd be happy to contact him and see if he'd be willing.
There's a guy named Tom Satterly.
Tom is a CSM at Delta.
And he started a new organization that addresses the problems that soldiers and their family members have
after they have left their service.
And even during while they're there, but specifically after,
to help them cope with the life circumstances that they find.
And Tom went through some tough times, but has come out very strongly.
And he's a great guy. And I think he'd be a great guy to interview.
Beautiful. Well, I'd love to.
And I think one of the things that's so important is that we hear these stories of vulnerability
and honesty from the professions that people have put on a pedestal,
whether it's SWAT, whether it's firefighter, whether it's Delta or PJs or whoever,
because then the rest of us have no excuse to buy into this facade of masculinity.
And we're like, well, OK, well, if you, a career SF guy, can talk about the reality of war,
then how can Joe the Plumber, who loves his Chuck Norris movies,
look himself in the eyes and say, oh, but no, I'm a real man. No, we're shattering that illusion.
So the more people from those communities and obviously, you know,
other associated professions that are just courageous enough to be honest about those things
and tell their story, you know, if they've got a powerful story.
Tom would be a good one for that. Yeah. Really. And the other one would be Roger Sparks.
Yeah, Roger. I just interviewed him. Oh, did you? I haven't put it out yet.
OK. Yeah. So I interviewed him.
Yeah, he's a three weeks ago. He's an amazing guy. Yeah. Amazing.
Yeah. So, no, we had a good conversation and I felt like I'd scraped the surface.
I feel like there's another 10 episodes to come. Absolutely.
But he and I have been been scraping further here, so it's great to talk to him.
Yeah. Well, I got to witness one of the conversations a minute ago. It's fascinating.
All right. Well, then the last question before we make sure people know how to find you online.
What do you do to decompress these days?
A lot of the let me back up. When I was going through training, I think most of my decompression was purely physical.
And it needed to be more than that. It needed to be mental as well as physical.
Now, there's nothing wrong with the physical. I still use the physical.
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.
And even on some bad days that she questions my choice of activities.
But the other is to learn more about yourself in the mental aspect, not in the physical aspect,
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.
But my body tells me, no, you can't quite do that still. So you need to modify it just a touch.
But one of the things I got into was yoga. And I really love yoga.
I always thought of yoga as more the feminine side of things, but it's not.
I've come, I had a yoga instructor in Fayetteville, and he'd been practicing it his whole life.
And he really turned me around. And it made me better physically.
And it also, the interesting aspect was that it changed me to a degree mentally also.
You get into a different zone. And so mindfulness, I've studied some mindfulness.
I'd like to study it more, because I think it's so important to understand your own mind, not just your physical aspect.
Physical is fine. That needs to be part of it to be a well-rounded person.
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.
And so I think that's a big thing to do. So for decompression, my favorite activity is to walk the beach.
It's a reminder to me that life is infinite, that life goes on. I'm enjoying a great part of it right now.
Life's good for me. There's other going on. And it will continue to go on. And that's a positive aspect.
That's a positive thing for me. Instead of sitting around feeling sorry for myself, Shiloh and I just go walk the beach.
It's hard to be depressed when you're out on the beach with the waves crashing.
Especially when the sun's coming up. Love it.
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.
Do you have any avenues online at all for people to connect?
If anybody wants to get a hold of me, they can get a hold of me at Blackhawk at goruk.com.
Beautiful. Well, Richard, I just want to say thank you. I mean, to be this perpetual student,
to be so fortunate to sit in front of people like yourself and ask questions.
And I know that I get to share it with everyone that wants to listen.
But I'm the one that has the honor of sitting here and to hear the background of your journey into the military
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
and all the other things we've discussed. It's been an absolute honor.
So I just want to thank you so much for being so generous with your time today.
Well, it's been my absolute pleasure, James. I really enjoyed talking to you.
I know I enjoyed when we interviewed you at our podcast, and it's great to be around and just talk to you.
You get it. And I hope your listeners do, too. I think they will.
People that are willing to sit down and listen to you, maybe they'll listen to me.