All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And now, your host for today's program, Dale Throneberry.
Hey, welcome to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry, CW-2 helicopter pilot in Vietnam, 1969.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
We are truly all over the world on today's program.
I'm really excited to have you listen to the people that we have.
We've got a group from out in California called Elder Warriors, for all of you that look like me.
And we are going to be talking to them about their program and what they've got going out there.
And they have a number of special events that are geared toward the Elder Warrior and also to the civilians
to figure out what is going on in these Vietnam Veterans heads that are out there.
Also joining me a little bit later on from Australia is Tom Williams.
And Tom has written a number of books, actually started off with a series of books called Heart of a Marine.
And we're going to be talking with Tom about how he started writing.
He's a Lieutenant Colonel, retired.
His first book is Door Steps of Hell, book number one.
And so we are going to be talking with him.
If you want to get in on the action and feel like talking with any of our guests, please feel free to do so.
The number here locally in Michigan is 734-822-1600.
734-822-1600.
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Thank you in advance. Now let's get into the program.
All right.
So join me on a line from an organization, as I mentioned before, called Elder Warriors out in California.
We've got Father Michael Chieftanato.
He is the president of the organization. I knew I'd do that.
And I'm also the director of the organization, Michael Sternberg, who is one of the directors and Michael Brewer, who is a Marine Corps squad leader in Vietnam.
He is also one of their directors. So I wanted to welcome all you gentlemen to our program.
And thank you.
So let me start off with Michael. You're the one that made the initial contact. So tell me a little bit about Elder Warriors.
It's hard to share a life recording in progress.
Oh, I had an audio interruption there.
Hard to share a 77 year long lifeline of involvement with veterans activity, but I'll do it.
Being a little Irish, I'll do it as fast as I can.
In 1969, my guy, the Marine Corps, I had a pretty rotten experience in Chicago.
And upon returning to the University of Arizona, I checked in the Student Health Center as 1970.
And about three or four of us got the diagnosis of Vietnam syndrome.
They gave us volume. They didn't know what else to do.
Didn't make for real exciting Friday night dates.
And five of us started our own group at the Student Health Center and ended up being guinea pigs for the training of psychiatric interns.
And they've done as Erickson.
That was 1971. That year I was on a program called GI update in Tucson and ABC affiliate.
And the station manager wanted to talk about Vietnam and we didn't get very far.
They didn't grasp the fact that we were just trying to tell stories. We weren't anti anything.
We weren't anti war. We just wanted to share our experiences.
We were opposite national football. They didn't get very far.
Lasted about six weeks.
Fast forward. I used my GI ability to go to nursing school.
Was hoping to work with veterans at that time in the 70s.
But myself and the medical community having no difference of opinion with them.
Just personal feeling like rear ships passing in the night.
I worked at Night Shift at St. Mary's Hospital in Tucson.
A lot of suicide prevention work. A lot of great in service training. Distalt therapy and all that.
Well the docs, when a vet would come into the ER having flashbacks, they'd tag him as schizophrenic and give him Mellorail.
Well that was the final straw for me. I realized that was not going to be my vocation.
If that's the kind of hierarchy and authority I had to deal with.
I went on in time to join some retreat circuits in Arizona. One called Vets for Vets.
I was there token non-vet. It was formed by a former Marine captain Jim Driscoll to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan veterans.
And I was literally the only Vietnam veteran there. I think it was designed on purpose.
Great retreats. Great experience.
Moved on to a retreat program called the Merit Center Retreat Program in Payson.
A lot of Native American involvement. Hoping Indians and all.
And then comes a move to California.
And I attended an Edward Tick retreat in Joshua Tree. Williams probably knows.
The listeners know that Joshua Tree is right at the front door of 29 Bombs Marine Corps Base.
So it's a great place to hold the retreat. And that's where I met Peter and Mike.
And they actually authored the first script, I think, of this retreat program right there during the Joshua Tree retreat.
And I attended their first one. And having been through a whole panoply of treatment modalities and believe me, I've done it all.
EMDR, biofeedback, all that. I'm both PTSD, TBI. I was in a coma in Vietnam.
I thought that I had, I thought I'd expired every treatment program known to man until I met these guys.
And they authored a script that just was an absolute breakthrough for storytelling.
And the aspect that made for the breakthrough was the addition of civilians at all the retreats.
Where no longer were our stories truncated, cut off prematurely. As Colonel Williams would probably know, we used the phrase, oh, honey, pass the salt.
You know, you could never get your story finished. And at that first retreat, I left saying to my wife, I think I can fly.
You know, something just happened to here. And it has to be related to the scripted nature of this civilian addition and the listening level.
Because telling our stories to each other, as you saw in the beginning of this recording, we could go on to the sun goes down telling our war stories.
But adding the civilian population just makes all the difference. And that's all I got for now.
Well, thank you. Thank you, Mike. I want to go to Michael.
Did it again.
Michael got it. Finally.
Anyway, you are the president of Elder Warder of Elder Warriors.org. And I'm reading from your biography here. It's that you've been heavily involved with veterans helping veterans and veterans treatment center and so forth in these San Luis Obisco.
Yes.
Portion of the in California. How did this idea come come about for you?
Well, when I retired at the age of 71, I asked my community, my parish, I'd been there for 28 years, which is unusual. I was vested. But anyway, I asked them to pray that I would be guided by God to what ministry I should have in my retirement that I could do.
And I figured in retirement, I could do ministry at my pace. And when it became clear that I was being called to deal with veterans with PTSD, I was saying, God, you got to be kidding.
I was, you know, I was an anti war person. Okay, not anti veteran, but anti war actually helped work with some of our events before.
At any rate, I had a lot of learning and thank God my bishop gave me a year to work on this, in which I made two different trips to Vietnam with Ed Tech and in his healing program.
And then I also got to go to New Zealand to visit the Maori people because they have very specific healing process.
And what I've learned is there's been a healing process throughout the centuries, a lot with the indigenous people, with the Greeks even had it.
But it involved storytelling where it could be heard without judgment, without critique, without analysis or diagnosis.
You know, there's a place for those things, but in this there wasn't. You just listened with respect for the storyteller and the story and then ritual.
And I learned that the storytelling, the ability to do that in safety and to tell your true story to both veterans and civilians who wouldn't be commenting, they'd be listening with respect.
That that then allowed the ritual processes and the other pieces to work for healing, forgiveness, grief, loss, all of that.
But additionally, as I began working with Peter, Peter and I met at 29 Palms there. And as I began to work with with him, we also realize the civilians, the civilian piece that Ed Tech recognized was needed, was needed.
But the civilians needed to understand how to listen.
The other part was the civilians had a moral duty to accept responsibility for what we ask of our veterans and our and our warriors when they go.
It's a moral responsibility, not only for what we asked them to do, but for them as they come back with what that effect has had on them.
We see PTSD as post traumatic soul distress. So we see it as a soul wound. And yes, it affects physically, mentally, the whole, the whole being, the whole person, but it's primarily a soul.
And it comes from what we call a shredding of the soul where in order to do the work of war, you have to separate yourself from your humanity.
Okay, and that is brilliantly taught. But all the preparations we have for our warriors, all the training is just expert at doing that.
The thing is, is we don't do anything to reconnect them to their family, their humanity or anything else when they come back.
And that's what we seek to do in this, in this journey.
So it's seeking to make the reconnection that provides healing for our vets, but also owning the moral responsibility for those of us who are civilians.
You know, in New Zealand, for example, when they listen to the story, they tell the veterans coming back, look, we asked you to go.
And it was the war and everything that you did and everything that happened in the war is on us is our responsibility. We own it with you.
We own it as a community. And then it's our job to bring you back. Okay, and to bring you back and they basically, the Maura guys told me, you bring them back to God, to nature, and to, and to human people.
So that's pretty much how we began. Peter and I began to design the ritual process. That ritual was an area that I was trained in.
Richard Gower is one of our Catholic priests, the Franciscan priests, many know, was my mentor in that and dealing with men's work and men's wounds.
So that gave me that component.
So anyway, that's where we started. And then I guess it should probably lead on to Peter to fill out.
Yeah, I'm going to go over to Peter.
Peter Sternberg and Peter is one of the directors of Elbert Warder warriors.org. He's also a psychotherapist in Chicago. See, this is a worldwide program nationwide today, for sure.
So Peter, how did you get involved in this whole thing? I know Michael just mentioned that that you met together out at 29 Palms.
I attended the the conference that Ed Tick was running in Joshua Tree.
And it was a powerful conference for me personally, as well as professionally.
I learned for the first time about moral wounding.
That moral wounding is a component of most post traumatic stress disorder, certainly military post traumatic stress disorder.
And this comes out of the work of Jonathan Shea, who spent his career working with veterans, a psychiatrist working with Vietnam veterans.
And he developed this understanding of the wound that comes to our moral sense through two ways.
One is when we are asked to do something that goes against the mores, the values, the moral system that we were raised in.
And learning how to be an effective warrior is that exactly.
And the other is when a person feels betrayed by authority.
This is the other way in which our moral sense is wounded.
And Ed Tick spoke about this, I had a personal understanding of it in terms of, man, I was going over experiences of my own life and realize that even though I was not in, I had not served in the military.
I did go to military school as an adolescent, but never served in our armed forces.
I thought about my own experiences and realized that I had experienced moral wounding and had some signs and symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder myself.
And this led me to a deepening contact and friendship with Father Mike.
And out of our conversations, he told me that he was working on a retreat for veterans and based on what I was talking about about myself, he was very interested in seeing if I would collaborate with him.
And I said, yes, I would. And almost immediately, we landed on the idea of healing the split between the military community and the civilian community.
That there is a split that is promulgated by the civilians. We ask people to be our warriors. And then we don't want to know about their experience.
We don't want to know what they did. We don't want to know the effect that it had on them.
We thank them for their service. But mostly we don't want to know. And there's the split. And there is the moral wound to the warrior who feels that they don't have a way back into the society that sent them into the military.
And so we knew from the beginning that whatever we put together as a healing journey had to include civilians being present and listening to veterans without analysis, without diagnosis, without critique, just acceptance, receiving the veteran stories.
And that when the civilians do that from a place of heart and compassion and responsibility taking magic seems to happen.
Yeah, I was thinking, as you mentioned, Jonathan Shay, and I'm just tooting my horn or our horn here on veterans radios we interviewed him quite a while ago, because he had written a couple of books Odysseus and Achilles in Vietnam.
Which I guess it sounds like you folks have read and probably utilize he was in, I think it was a Boston VA.
Yes, exactly. We studied his work Achilles in Vietnam and Odysseus in America and, and it's a brilliant understanding of the story of the Iliad as telling the story of moral wounding.
Well, I, you know, so I understand that you have an event coming up here, or not right away but in 2025. So, Michael, I'm going to ask you, which where where and when it's in San Juan, Batista, near Salinas, California, to the beautiful retreat center.
Again, as Michael said earlier, Padre said earlier, it's a Catholic retreat center, but the retreats are not Catholic. They just happened to own the best damn real estate in California, probably inherited it all from the Spaniards.
But they're wonderful places. This one is really cool.
March 23 to March 27. Four days private room, three meals a day.
It's a Franciscan center. I guess I said that we're filling up faster than we ever have. I've been with these guys for 10 years now.
And we got a lot of help from where I live in the mountains. I'm by Lake Arrowhead, California.
We've got help from the from the Legion. We have W just got $2,500 from the rotary couple days ago. So far, you guys correct me if I'm wrong so far. 10 years I've been with them. No veteran that can't afford it has ever had to pay.
We've covered every one of them. Isn't that correct?
If someone truly cannot pay the fee that they can attend, they could still attend.
You never turn anyone down. We never turn anyone down. And one of the critical, I wouldn't call the sales shop just out recruiting is that none of our staff, none of the far board are paid top and sated.
Some of you who have been in this I can tell Dale has and Tom William Chast. PTSD has turned into a cottage industry.
And we're not in that lane. Not a single soul has paid a thing here. 7 8 of that money goes to room and board printing costs. We have to have pliers and stuff.
And some collateral material. I think we just ordered caps for the first time in 10 years.
I just think it sounds like what you guys are doing. It's terrific. Those are the can't see the video of it. We just saw the hat. I want to thank all three of you for being on veterans radio.
The organization is elder warriors.org. You can find out more about their retreat that's coming up in March of 2020. How can it be 2025 already?
But and if there is a fee, what is the fee if you can afford to pay it? It's $800 is what it costs us. We charge what it costs us.
So $800. We would gladly accept more because that and this is open to this is open to that.
Four days. Four and a half days. Actually, it's four and a half. It's four and a half days. We you hear that we provide scholarship money for people who cannot afford and we run on on people's giving on philanthropy that comes our ways.
Anybody feels so inclined. Please do elder warriors.org. This is open to all veterans and civilians. Yes.
That's awesome. That's awesome. Congratulations to you for what you're doing.
I'm anxious to talk to you again as we get closer to March to find out what's going on with the whole thing and maybe we can carry this discussion on because it's it's valuable information that we all need to have, you know, not just the veterans of the community, but as you mentioned the civilians.
This is what we've been trying to do in one of our mission statements is, you know, not just to tell the story of, you know, America's, you know, warriors and so forth, but to invite the civilian world in to see what these men and women have gone through.
So on behalf of all of us here at the tragedy, I want to thank all three of you for stopping by today from all over California and Chicago.
And look forward to seeing you again and talking again.
Thank you.
Thank you all very much. All right, so that's elder warriors.org. Make sure you check them out. I think this sounds like a great program.
It's probably something that is spreading out across the country, I am sure we need to take a break. Right now we're going to when we come back, we're going to be talking with Lieutenant Colonel Tom Williams retired US Marine Marines on today.
And we'll be talking about his book series of books called Heart of a Marine. So you're listening to Veterans Radio. We will be right back after this.
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The Marine platoon had been trapped in a minefield outside of Dunn-Airing. One Marine was already dead and 11 wounded.
It was Clausen's helicopter that had inserted the Marines and the crew felt responsible for getting them out.
He leaned out the side door to determine where mines had already exploded to help the chopper's land.
Then he jumped out and moved toward one of the wounded. As enemy fire bracketed him, he picked up the man, carried him to the helicopter and returned for a second Marine.
Clausen made six trips into the minefield, saving 18 Marines. Only when he was sure that all were safely aboard did he signal the pilot to lift off and leave the combat zone.
President Nixon presented him the Medal of Honor on June 15, 1971, shaking his hand and saying, well done, Marine.
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And we're back here on Veterans Radio and joining me from Australia of all places is Lieutenant Colonel Tom, or yeah, Tom Williams, retired United States Marine Corps.
And he has started writing a series of books called The Heart of a Marine. And the first book is called Door Steps of Hell.
Let me give you a quick background on Tom. He's been everywhere. It seemed like I was going to try and do this, but, you know, he's brought up in Georgia, went to college in Georgia.
And then when he joined the Marines, he had two tours in Vietnam, went from there everywhere. He's just been all over the world.
He's a trainer, was with the Marines, as I said, and ended up in the Middle East and every place else. So the idea here is I got to bring Tom on because this is, I think you're going to really enjoy this portion of the program.
So Tom, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Well, thank you, Dale.
It's a pleasure to have you on. And as I said earlier, you know, in reading your book, it's just, it's the story of so many veterans that we've had the privilege of talking to here on Veterans Radio is, you know, you weren't the greatest student in the world.
Initially, but you had language, you had linguistic skills, and that, you know, that were developed when you were, you know, when your father took you all over the world.
Well, I think just the other day, I had an encounter with somebody and they were about to have a child. He and his wife and I said, you know, the best gift you can give that child is to put him in a playgroup of youngsters that speak a different language other than English,
because learning another language leads to additional languages.
I learned Arabic and French as a youngster between the ages of six and nine, and that opened the door.
I wouldn't say it opened the door.
It caused the Marine Corps to say your language skill is such that you're too smart to go to Ranger school. So we're going to send you to language school.
Well, I was heartbroken in a way because I wanted that Ranger quota. All my close friends were Army Ranger or airborne Rangers from North Georgia College.
But over time, I realized that was a gift that just kept on giving.
You know, in Vietnam, I learned to, I was able to interrogate prisoners. I was able to influence Vietnamese and win friends.
Well, I know just the idea of being able to speak another language is amazing to me and I don't have the skills of doing that, but I admire you.
So let's go back. So tell me why you decided at this point in your life to start writing stories about Marines.
Well, you know, I'll be 80 in December and I said to myself, self, what are you going to leave behind?
And there's a void out there. Avoid in that there are not enough of us who have been in the military that pass on the lessons we have learned, not just about combat.
Combat. Yes, it's very important. Once the politicians have failed to achieve by political means what they want to achieve, we are then thrown into the breach and we do what they are not able to do.
So I said I would start a series based on my my career.
And because I'm a diarist, I have over 100 diaries in my library right over there that I've written.
I can recall any day of the year since 1968. So that's a resource that enables me to write the book that I've written.
This this first book, the second book is about my second tour.
I'm an aerial observer and as an aerial observer embedded with the Vietnamese and I have finished that book but we're polishing it.
The third book will be about my experiences as the NATO and TBS operations officer in Naples, Italy.
A lot of that book will be about antiquity. And then the third book will be about desert storm.
Okay, well, I know in in in reading your book that you do have an incredible memory, obviously, and I'm sure that Diaries help because I don't remember what happened yesterday.
But, you know, that's what happens with multi was I want to I want to kind of go back and and and take this chronologically I'd like to go back and talk about your upbringing because you had a did not have the best upbringing until a certain gentlemen, you know, came into your life.
And so can you talk about growing up in Georgia.
Well, I didn't grow up in Georgia so much as I. Okay, let me go all the way back.
I was abandoned as an infant.
My mother handed me from pillar to post to family members all over the Savannah, South Georgia area.
I was married Carl Filton Williams at the time a major in the US Air Force, one of the founding fathers of the US Air Force Jag in 1947.
I then found myself on a ship, a military transport ship going to Morocco.
All of a sudden, all my playmates are Arabs and French kids.
Well, if you don't speak, you don't play.
My dad rented a French citrus orchard outside of robot.
We lived there for three years.
We went to suits.
My dad, being a history buff, took me to my first Roman ruin, the Lubanus in Morocco.
That that that gave me a passion which continues for Roman history or antiquity, if you will, then came back to the states.
And he was the staff judge advocate at Travis Air Force Base.
Then the staff judge advocate at Shaw Air Force Base in South Carolina.
And the next thing you know, I'm in Japan as a high school student.
And I'm learning a little bit of Japanese.
After that, dad decided to retire.
And that's when we went back to the farm.
I was a junior and senior in high school.
No audio here.
Can you hear me now? I can.
I lost your audio after your dad retired.
Yeah, dad retired.
We went back to Georgia and dad and his brother and his mother owned a farm that had been established in 1832.
Georgia was not a state.
So it was called the Indian territory at that time.
Well, we just kept building on the farm and I learned to manage field hands.
I drove a tractor, I raised peanuts, cotton, corn and soybeans.
We had cattle.
We had pigs, goats and a few sheep.
Well, then I went off to North Georgia College.
And that's where I really found the true value of Tom Williams at the military school at North Georgia College.
Yeah, I wanted to spend some time at North Georgia because evidently this was a pretty well known.
And I guess it still is a well known kind of a military school sort of like the Citadel type of thing.
But their ROTC program.
That's correct.
There are five essential military schools at that time.
The Citadel being one VMI, North Georgia College, Norwich and Texas A&M.
Of course, we at North Georgia, we took pride in the fact that we were at the foot of the Appalachian Mountains.
So and we were co located to La Niga, Georgia with the mountain phase of the Ranger program.
And so I became in time the executive officer of the mountaineering club platoon.
Because I was a stepchild, I was expected to run the farm in the summer and then during school year at college, I earned my spending money by serving meals in the mess hall, the school mess hall.
And then the dietitian got me another job running the movies on Friday and Saturday night.
So, they don't do this anymore. I don't think kids are working their way through school. We don't hear about them running. Well, they don't need projectors anymore.
But the idea of working the mess hall, whatever it took to get you in through school.
That's correct. Well, I had to first learn how to study.
I mean, I was on probation initially, because I had very little supervision as a student in high school.
I was kind of an action junkie on steroids.
Or you might say I was Huckleberry Finn on steroids in my youth.
It sounds like it in reading the book. The first book, The Doorsteps of Hell, is kind of gives us a background of how Tom kind of developed.
What is it that you took away from North Georgia when you graduated from there? You were ready to go.
What is it that you learn in your in your in your message?
It's probably three or four things. The first in college. Yes, you're there to get a degree.
But the most important degree that you receive is a lifelong group of friends.
Those fellow students, both male and female, are some of the closest friends I ever had.
Second, I learned who Tom Williams was.
Okay, I found him embedded in this body.
And I became known because I became known as action.
I was constantly on the move, either academically doing patrols, climbing, or writing.
And then I reckon the last thing I fell in love with the military mindset.
I went back last year and I was offered the opportunity to address the cadet leadership.
And the first question I asked the student, the cadet leadership was, how many of you are hunters?
There were no hands raised. I said, you understand that you're here in preparation for a career in the military.
You're joining a hunting club.
And you'd better be a better hunter than your adversary because he has a rifle and he is hunting you.
And I emphasize something else too, that your mission as a company grade officer,
a second lieutenant, first lieutenant and captain will always be to close with and capture the enemy.
But don't ever forget, once you have captured your enemy, it is as much your obligation to protect him as it was your original intent to kill him.
Unfortunately, that was not emphasized enough, I think, during my time in the service.
That's how we ended up with somebody like Cali. And I think you know, the story of Cali.
Yes, I do.
All right, so from North Georgia College, you decided to go into the Marines for some unknown reason.
Why did you decide to go the Marine route instead of the Air Force?
Well, I had a little conflict with the military department at North Georgia College.
There were some damn good instructors, but I found that amongst the cadet corps, there were a handful of cadets that stood out.
And those cadets were all Marine contract students.
So I decided I want to be one of them. I don't want to be in this large, huge thing called the Army.
Nothing against the Army. I learned an awful lot at North Georgia College about tactics, techniques and procedures.
I have a great admiration for the Airborne, the Rangers, the Special Forces, but think about it.
They're all specialists in the Army.
I wanted to be a Marine because of what I saw the Marines cadets at North Georgia displayed as the best, if you will.
Well, the Marines are Marines. They're always Marines.
Well, if you're going to be a Marine, I always say, be a badass Marine.
I agree.
So you decided to join the Marine and he went through all of the different schools for the Marines, the OCS and the new school.
Where did that go? I wrote it down somewhere here.
Oh, the basic school. You had OCS and then you had the basic school.
We're going to run out of time. I can already tell this, but can you tell me that it's OCS, just the normal officer candidate school?
And then the basic school is more intense?
The first thing you need to know about Marine Corps, about Marine Corps ROTC is that it's a deslection process.
They're doing everything they can to break you.
They want to know what kind of metal METTLE you are made of.
And second, they then will build you up to be the Marine that will go to the basic school.
Okay.
The proudest I am of my OCS officer candidate school is I set the Marine Corps record 100 yard 14 obstacle O-course. I ran that in 52 seconds.
And then TBS, you then learn what it is to be an officer, what it is to lead, what it is with every weapon, squad tactics, platoon tactics, company tactics.
You fire every weapon. And then you go to any specialty courses after the basic school and become an artilleryman or an aviator, or in my case, I went to language school before going to Vietnam.
Okay. Well, I mean, that's the training you received just sounds remarkable to me and is so intense.
I guess I'd never really thought about it. You know, being a war officer, our only job was to fly.
That was it. We didn't have any command responsibility at all.
Oh, you know, in fact, we could tell a colonel if he got on our aircraft and he wanted to do something, we could say, no, get off.
And you couldn't do anything to us. That's why we stayed in our seats so often after a flight.
But the responsibilities that you had as a, especially I think as a Marine, you know, platoon leader, squad leader, company leader, whatever it is.
I mean, you have that responsibility for those men under you to keep them alive.
And I know that that's that was your main goal when you got to Vietnam.
Well, keeping them alive. Yes. But you also had to trick the enemy.
You had it because this was a hide and seek. It was a platoon commander, company commander war for those of us who participated in it as infantry commanders at whatever level.
I became known for moving at night in the rain.
And that really didn't make my Marines very happy.
But I learned early on and I learned through my dad.
And we were getting feedback from other North Georgia cadets who had already been commissioned in.
We're in Vietnam.
Lessons learned. That's kind of some of this.
This idea of why I'm writing.
So we, we at North Georgia took very seriously.
We're going to war.
There ain't no if it's when and what do you want to know?
Well, you better be good at it.
Map and compass patrolling and bushing.
So I know that you did all that.
And I was thinking of one of your one of the stories in the book that I read was about.
And this is a little out of context, but you were talking about an M 79 blooper.
Yes, that trigger memory for you trying to get across the rice fatty.
My company commander ordered me around a huge rice patty and I was supposed to tie in on the river.
And then he was supposed to take a platoon and we were going to, we were going to squeeze the enemy on the, on the river and trap him.
I, I warned my company commander.
Before I left him to make the trek around the patty, huge patty, I'm talking 1000 meters.
Don't leave without a platoon.
Your headquarters groups not big enough.
Well, he didn't.
He thought he could.
This was his third tour.
And he got himself pinned down in a bomb crater.
I had to do a 90 to three current to come relieve him.
Across the patty, the enemy were coming out.
He was, he was driving him off.
He was defending himself, but he's in a bomb crater.
He's driving the enemy back, but they're keeping him pinned down.
And they started coming out into the rice patty in my direction, not knowing that I was there.
Well, hello.
Surprise, surprise.
My first kill was one of my bloopers.
M79 men raised his weapon.
Kentucky windage at max range, 305 meters.
He hit him in the chest and he disappeared.
And we continued the attack killing enemy as they came out in our direction.
As and just to just to deviate a little bit, the OV 10 pilot.
And that was the first experience with an aerial observer I had.
That kind of said to me, if I live through this, I want to be one of those guys.
Because his eyes in the sky, like you will know, is able to see the big picture and not just what's in front of you.
And I later worked for him, that pilot.
Really?
All right.
Well, we're running as I said, we know we're running up against the end.
So, you know, we've got about two minutes left before we have to get out of here.
And so can you tell me one lesson that you would like to leave our audience with today?
We're going to have you back on, I promise.
But today, let's say a one lesson.
The one lesson that I would tell you is that on the battlefield, there is a secret weapon.
And that secret weapon is the individual Marine or soldier.
You take care of your soldier, you take care of your Marine.
They will take care of business and they will take care of you.
I remember reading that in the book, you're talking about what your responsibilities as a commander are.
And also to get to know your men.
Yes, sir.
And I often regret that I didn't get to know every Marine personally.
I knew the ones I could count on.
And in particular, I had a corporal who was my platoon sergeant.
Tommy Bird, T-Bird.
I have the highest regard for him.
And it's tough.
Kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier on with our elder warriors is it's so important for us to tell these stories,
to get them out so that we can get rid of the cobwebs in our minds about what was really going on.
We've been talking here with Tom Williams.
As I said, we need to talk more about it. He's coming out with a series of books entitled Heart of a Marine.
And the first book is titled Door Steps of Hell.
And you can get this on your website.
What is your website, Tom?
My website is www.heartofamarienseries.com.
And the first book is this one right here.
And that's me on the cover as a 24-year-old.
Yeah, I love those old pictures.
They were great.
So, and you can get them on Amazon because I got a Kindle version of the book on Amazon.
It's a great story.
Tom, thank you so much for your time.
Don't go away.
We can continue this conversation when we go off the air.
We are going to go out as usual with a God Bless America.
You know, I love this song.
I think it's so important.
This version happens to be Leanne Reims, Our Rhymes.
And so this is the version that we're going to have today.
I think I'm coming up toward the end of the program, aren't I?
I'm really at the end.
Okay, so until next week, this is Dale Thoreau-Marie for all of us here at Veterans Radio.
You are dismissed.
Thank you.