All across America and around the world, this is Veterans Radio.
And now, your host for today's program, Dale Throneberry.
Welcome to Veterans Radio.
My name is Dale Throneberry, a CW-2 helicopter pilot in Vietnam.
Welcome to our program this couple of days just before Christmas 2024.
Oh, in Malia.
I'm not sure how that got here so quickly.
But I'm really excited to have you here.
We've got two great guests today.
The first one is going to be Richard Sherman.
And he's written a book about, actually, it's a book of photographs of all of the cemeteries
overseas where all of the military people who were killed overseas are.
And it's a great story.
I'm anxious to talk with them about it.
It's entitled, Never Home is part of it.
It's honoring heroes who never returned.
Excuse me, I've got to get this right.
And so I'm really excited to talk with him.
In the second half of the program, we've got another gentleman.
His name is Bob, well, Robert Colella.
And he is an Army veteran.
And he's going to be talking about his two tours in Iraq and what he's been doing, trying
to help this generation of veterans record their stories.
So stick around.
I think I'm going to find this rather interesting today.
All right.
So, you know, we always have to start the program, I think, in our sponsors because
we can't do this program without their support.
And we really do appreciate them.
So number one, of course, is legal help for veterans.
Legal help for veterans specializes in veterans disability claims.
So call Legal Help for Veterans at 800-693-4800 or go to their website.
That's legalhelpforveterans.com.
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leading third party authority for the certification of veteran-owned businesses.
For more information, you can go to their website, NVBDC.org, or give them a call at
888-237-8433.
Remember out there, all of you veteran-owned business owners, if you want to do business
with the federal government, you've got to be certified as a real live veteran-owned
business.
And there's kind of a process that you have to go through.
And this is what the National Veterans Business Development Council does.
They'll help you through that process.
Again, that number is 888-237-8433.
Pure Clean, known as the paramedics of property damage, Pure Clean provides water damage
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biohazard cleanup to commercial and residential customers.
The reason we're talking Pure Clean around here is that they're also one of the nation's
leading restoration franchise networks, and it's made up of Ventrum Newers, just like
you, and veterans get 25% off their franchise fee.
So for more information, go to pureclean.com.
The Charles S. Kettles VA Medical Center here in Ann Arbor.
For more information, go to va.gov.
Slash Ann Arbor Healthcare.
And the National Vietnam Veterans of America.
Never again will one generation of veterans abandon another.
For more information, go to their website, vva.org.
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Make it a good year.
We're really excited.
Okay, and into the program now.
All right, so number one is I want to bring him right on, and then we'll talk about how
what he did to preserve, you know, the American military history, I think.
So I want to bring on Navy veteran Richard Sherman.
So Richard, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Bill, thank you very much.
It's great to be with you.
Well, all right, so this idea of your book, and maybe you can describe the book to our
audience first, and we'll get into that.
So why don't you tell me what is in your story?
The book is Never Home, Remembering the Military Heroes Who Never Returned, and it honors the
men and women who died in World War I and World War II, and who are interred overseas,
thus the title Never Home.
So there's some 207,000 or more individuals that are memorialized in the 23 American overseas
military cemeteries, and those cemeteries are maintained by a magnificent organization
known as the American Battle Monuments Commission.
As we were talking about beforehand, Dale, before the show started, these are immaculately
maintained cemeteries and final resting places for over 200,000 of our brethren.
Of course, most folks know Normandy, but there are 22 others, and they're located on three
continents.
In the book, I travel to all these cemeteries.
I'm a professional photographer, and I wanted to go on this journey of gratitude and go
and thank the individuals that I've never met for the freedoms and the privileges that
I enjoy in my life today.
And I decided to bring my camera gear along with me so that I could bring others and share
the images with all of you.
So the book has about, it has 240 pages.
It has over 225 photographs.
The overwhelming majority are the ones that I've photographed, but there are also 54 distinct
biographies in chapter two that tell the brief stories, the brief histories of the individuals
who never made it home.
Some of them, unfortunately, are, the biographies include brothers, and in one case, the Sullivan
brothers that are memorialized over in Manila.
There are five of them.
But anyway, it has 54 biographies, and I tell a little bit about the individuals who never
made it home.
The faces, the pictures of those individuals, of course, those are not my pictures.
They've gotten through public sources, many of them from families, some of them from newspapers
and other sources.
So the book has 225 plus photographs.
It has 54 biographies, and it honors a World War I and World War II individuals who have
never made it home.
Well, you can tell when you look at the pictures in this book that they are done by a professional.
So you've really got a great eye, I must say, of the ones that I saw.
How did this whole thing start?
How did you decide that you were going to do this?
What motivated you?
Well, you know, like you and your listeners, I'm a veteran, and so the stories of those
who have gone before us are served as a part of our culture, a part of our motivation in
our service is to honor those who have gone before us and who've served before us and
to keep up the great traditions of the Army, of the Marine Corps, the Coast Guard, the
Navy, the Air Force.
So after leaving active duty, I was worked at the Pentagon for a couple of years as a
reservist, and that culture really never really leaves us as veterans, I think.
And so I came from a lot of relatives in my family, including my father, was a Navy veteran,
but it really kind of cemented, this idea cemented itself in 2007 when I was working
at that time in the financial services career, and I met a, I traveled to Vancouver, Canada
for a conference and I got into a cab and I liked to chat.
So I was speaking to the cab driver, I jumped in and, you know, in 2007 was a time when
we were in Gulf War II and the Canadians had a different perspective on the war than we
did.
And so the cabbie said, hey, you know, where are you coming in from?
I said, New York, I said, but you know, I don't think we're so popular up here in Canada
right now.
And he said, oh no, you know, I'm a World War II veteran from Ukraine.
And we had this most fascinating conversation and he proceeded to tell me these incredible
stories from his experience serving in World War II, two of which, two pieces which stood
out and, you know, really became the background for the book.
One was, you know, here he was a young man in World War II starving, freezing, you know,
facing the Nazi war machine in front of him, his, his brethren, the Russian Red Army beating
them and shooting them and, you know, abusing them.
And you know, he was overwhelmed in telling the story.
I just remember this because he would look back in the rearview mirror and he had these
blue eyes.
He's probably in his 80s at the time, but blue eyes like the color of a glacier.
And we had this amazing conversation.
He said, you know, even in his 80s, you couldn't understand why the American forces, these
young men would leave their home.
They didn't need to come to the Ukraine.
Why would they come?
And he could, even in his 80s, couldn't understand, but was extremely grateful that the American
GI came and fought alongside them.
And so, you know, the conversation proceeded and, you know, in this backdrop of war and
death and misery and cold and, you know, these attempts to survive, he shared this very warm
experience, you know, when, when he was a young man in the fighting with the Red Army,
he would only eat every four or five days.
In his own country, there was no food, it's winter, where the fields are destroyed.
And you know, it was a desperate time for them.
And here, you know, thousands of miles from home, the American forces with the logistics,
which is often overlooked by the media, the critical role of logistics in warfighting,
but the American troops had their rations to eat.
And against this, there was this human connection where the American GIs would share their food.
And, you know, even now, as I tell that story, I get a little emotional about it, you know,
that human connection, that, that intimacy, that brotherhood, right?
And so that got me thinking about, oh my, you know, how I got to do something to thank
these guys.
And that's where the background of the book started.
I, I, as I was listening to you to tell that, I'm kind of flashing back here on my own,
you know, to Vietnam.
And then the American servicemen and women are just amazing people.
And even when I was in Vietnam, we would always share our rations with the kids that would
come running around.
Sometimes you'd go into a village and the people were starving and, you know, we'd
end up giving them our C rations, especially the ones that we didn't want.
What?
Food is food.
Yeah.
And I was thinking about that.
And there's a, there's a book out there that's called, it's called A Thousand Tears Falling
by a Vietnamese woman named Young Crawl, K-R-A-L-L.
And she was, ended up being kind of a spy for the North and the South Vietnamese and
all this other stuff.
But the gist of the book was telling her story.
And at the end of our interview that we did, probably 15 years ago now, she said, I still
want to thank the Americans.
And we said, you know, I said, what?
What did we do?
And she says, you gave us 10 years of freedom that we had never had in a thousand years.
And I thought, you know, at the time, and just as you mentioned, I'm thinking all over
again, it made it worth it.
Yeah.
And all the bad images, all the bad stories, all the bad welcome homes and all that other
stuff.
Here is this Vietnamese woman that says it was worth it.
And so grateful for that.
So how did you get through all of these cemeteries?
Well, you know, let's see.
I guess 2007, I told the story about the Ukrainian cab driver, right?
And then fast forward, changed your career, started studying photography, did a few mentorships
with some professional photographers.
And now it's 2017.
And I believe my skill level has gotten to the stage where I can do something.
And so I engage a woman who's very well known named Mary Virginia Swanson.
She is the consultant on creating photography books for some very famous photographers as
well as, you know, less famous photographers like myself.
And we started working together in 2017 on how we would come together and put this together.
He started contacting the American Battle Monuments Commission, which I said, you know,
earlier does a great job maintaining the cemeteries.
He couldn't have been more hospitable to me.
And then in 2018, started getting on book and flights and car rentals and hotels and
started to travel in Memorial Day of 2018.
You know, COVID meant a couple extra years.
So it took me six years to go to these three continents.
It took eight trips to do it.
But you know, COVID also was a blessing in the sense that we now have 54 biographies,
whereas maybe I would have only had half of that if I didn't have that extra time to do
the research.
Yeah, so, you know, just started working with the American Battle Monuments Commission.
I had this idea that the biographies obviously is a number of Medal of Honor recipients.
There are generals or artillerymen.
There's infantrymen.
But it also includes other groups because they wanted it to be relatable to not just
the veterans that have served, but also to the civilians who could understand or relate
a little bit better to some of the other fields that we have in our army and Navy and services.
Also there's a number of doctors.
There are a number of nurses, ambulance drivers.
There's some OSS, which was a predecessor of the CIA, spies that were involved, women
who worked for the Red Cross Canteen Service, for example.
You know, so they're not just the trigger puller and the warfighter, but those are in
support and logistics, merchant mariners as well that are in there that go into this
whole machine, this whole organization that allows us to be effective in combat.
I know, I did.
What was so, you know, many of us, I'm sure many people listening to this have been to
a national cemetery of some kind, you know, whether it's Arlington or any of the other
ones that are across the country.
And you know, somehow they're beautiful in their own way.
Of course, they're a little depressing sometimes when you, you know, these perfect rows just
roll upon roll and you think about the sacrifice.
And I think this is one of the things that we talked about earlier on is that I think
you and I are afraid that the newest generation of Americans coming up don't know these stories.
You know, they don't get an opportunity to learn about it in school as much because
everything seems to be more toward the STEM projects and, you know, history has been kind
of laid around with in various educational ways in various states.
And you know, you don't get to all of these things sometimes during the year.
And I was just, I just think that this book is so important.
I mean, you know, some people are oral learners and some people are visual learners.
Because sometimes they just don't get it when a teacher talks about Normandy and what was
occurring there.
But if they can see the pictures of the results of Normandy and I can, you know, you said
there over 207,000, you know, veterans in these cemeteries across the world.
It kind of gives you an idea of the sacrifices that were paid and how many of those 207,000
had families and how many of those 207,000 had wives and had children who never, you
know, got to see them again.
Those are the things that I keep thinking about.
Yeah.
I would say there's so much unpacked there and I know we are time is limited, but I would
agree with you across the board and everything you really said there about your lack of really,
you know, really teaching the individual histories.
We may know a little bit about Normandy or D-Day or Relay or a little bit of high school.
But this book, like what you do is really, you know, about connecting to individuals
and people and they had, as you mentioned, loved ones and people that they loved and
they never made it home.
And that's, you know, we can talk all about in the media or in TV or whatever and talk
all about, you know, war fighting.
But it's a very, as you know, being a Vietnam veteran and I'm a Gulf War veteran, it's a
very intimate experience.
It's not about, you know, global perspectives and communism.
It's about getting through day to day and getting your job done and taking care of the
people around you and hopefully coming back at night.
So yeah, I think this is a humanist story.
This book is a humanist endeavor.
It's not really a history book.
There are incredible history books.
We were talking about some of them before.
There's many that your listeners have read and can recommend.
This is really about connecting to their lives.
And so the histories, the personal histories, I wanted to try to tell a little bit about
something about them.
You know, they, about their families, Charlie, Charles Summers, the first killed in action
in Europe of the American troops.
He was in six days, he was six days from coming home and getting married when he was killed.
He was an aviator.
Part of an aviation team was shot down searching for submarines in the North Sea.
You know, try to share just an individual about an individual piece about their lives
and not just they were part of this unit and this unit took that hill or they won this
battle.
And so there's nothing about this person because, you know, we owe it to them and we do have
a responsibility of our age is to help these younger folks understand the costs and sacrifice
of war.
Citizenship comes with great responsibilities.
We talk a lot about our rights today.
You know, we hear about, we have a right, we have a right and that's important.
We have to guard and protect our rights 100%.
I'm 100% behind it.
But we also have to remember the responsibilities that come with citizenship.
We had the draft three times the last century.
Yes, I know well about that.
You know well, right?
And we're 25 years into this century.
Well we go the next 75 without having a draft.
I hope so, but something tells me we won't.
And so we have to do our best to share our experiences.
And you know, the younger generation, they're very much visual learners as well.
And so photography lends itself very well for them to understand and to learn about
this experience.
What would you say was the most, I don't know, the overseas cemetery that just struck you
the most, you know, with its beauty or its meaning?
I know that's kind of, that's out of left field, but I just was thinking about that.
Yes, I'm going to say yes.
Good, we got it.
You know, I had the privilege of going to Normandy twice, including having a press pass
for the 75th anniversary, the American Battle Monument, working with the American, I was
lucky to get a press pass.
So there I am going in with BBC and you know, NBC News, and then there's me with my camera
gear going in.
And that was kind of a cool experience.
But to be there and in front of the, I think there's a two page spread in the book of a
number of the veterans in their wheelchairs or the seats that they provided for them.
Many of them could still walk, some of them could not.
But it was, it's a very organic photo.
It's not a posed photo.
They're at the ceremony.
But to be, you know, that was an, I mean, that's a life changing experience to be in
their presence at the 75th.
So it's, you know, and so that would be the one I would have to identify is that that
stays with me.
And I think about it all the time.
And I was just thinking, you know, when we talked earlier, we had a gentleman over here
locally who wrote a book about there were 76 Vietnam killed or Vietnam deaths from our
local county here, Washtenaw County in Michigan.
And a friend of mine, John Kensinger wrote a book about each one of those gentlemen trying
to, you know, who are these, you know, and, you know, somebody were 18 years old, 19 years
old and so forth.
And they went to local high schools and everything.
And in the story, though, he had put down where they were buried.
And my wife and I kind of decided we're going to have a little project.
And so we went out and we attempted to find all of those tombstones.
And most of them were government provided and they're in the ground, which is, you know,
tough to find sometimes in some of these places because they didn't obviously get the care
that they do at the national cemeteries.
And so when we were talking about this, I said, I got to figure out how to get these
pictures that we took together with the stories that John wrote about these people.
And I just got an email this morning, actually, from a gentleman in Toledo, Ohio, who goes
around cleaning veterans gravestones.
And I know that this is something that started to happen around the world, I mean, around
the country over the last couple of years.
But I'm saying this is like cosmic something's going on here.
All these things that are happening.
So we were talking with Richard Sherman here.
He's the author of the book, Never Home, Remembering the Military Heroes Who Never Returned.
And it's a beautiful, beautiful book.
And I really encourage people to go and get it.
Where can we get this?
So the website with all the pictures and the background in my travels is neverhomeheroes.com.
And I will say, thank you, Dale, for that opportunity to talk about the selling of the
book.
But there's two things that I really want to emphasize here that I'm extremely proud of.
One is that we printed it in the United States of America.
It's much cheaper to print it in Korea or China, but this had to be done.
It was printed in Wisconsin, and Warzala is a printer.
They did a magnificent job.
W-O-R-Z-A-L-L-A.
They were extremely supportive of this project.
And so I'm grateful for them.
And we got it printed in the United States.
It costs more, but this is an American project.
And the other thing that's really proud of is that it's hard to buy a photography book
for less than $50 or $60 today.
And we've kept this price under $30.
It's $29.50 because we wanted this to be accessible to everyone.
It wasn't just folks of significant means or it's not just a corporate project, but
it has to be accessible to everyone because it's the stories that I want to get out.
It's not the money that I want to get.
It's the stories that I want.
If the money comes, the money comes.
It's cost a lot of money out of my own pocket to go do this, but it's a journey of gratitude.
And I was honored to do that.
So we've kept this price as low as possible.
We print it in the United States because it's the stories.
That's the goal of the project is to get the stories out.
The goal of the project is not a commercial goal.
It's to get these stories out.
And so we're very proud to have it printed in the United States by Warzalla and to have
it at a price point that's accessible to people.
Where do I buy the book?
You can go to www.neverhomeheroes.com and there's a, you just click on it and it says buy the
book and it takes you to buy the book page and it'll take you through that process.
Okay.
All right.
I want to make sure that we can get ahold of the copy of this book.
That's the whole point here today is to make sure that people do this because I'm so grateful
to, you know, to, you know, that you reached out to us here at Veterans Radio and, you
know, to tell your story.
And then, you know, there's a whole lot more of this background to this story.
And unfortunately, I don't have time to go into in your background as far as the Navy
and your family and so on and so forth.
But it's just great.
You know, you mentioned, we've got about three or four minutes here left, I'm not done with
you yet.
You mentioned that you did approximately 50, 54 biographies in there.
Can you tell us about one of them that really stood out for you?
Well, I mean, there's a number of them that are really important.
I don't think that there's 54 that are important.
They're all important, right?
I never thought I could do more.
And then, you know, my wife eventually had to corral me and said, look, you got to get
the book published, stop doing research on biographies, get the book out because they
all deserve to remember.
You know, I love to talk about the tester brothers just for a second.
They're three brothers that are interred, buried side by side in Henri Chappelle.
Like a number of our cemeteries have brothers, a sad, I don't know the total number, but
have a large number of brothers laying side by side next to each other.
Unfortunately for the tester brothers, three of them, the only three brothers that are
side by side in any of the cemeteries.
And it's in Henri Chappelle in Belgium.
And so the tester family was living in Tennessee.
And unfortunately in 1942, Mr. Tester passed away as well as one of the sons.
One had cancer, one had a heart condition.
And lo and behold, over the next three years, the Eliza tester, the mother, saw three of
her remaining four sons leave for war.
In 1943, in 1944, in 1945, on that homestead, on that farm, she received a telegram from
the United States Army indicating that her three of her sons had passed away in each
of the three years.
Which is an extraordinary story.
Glenn Tester was the youngest of the three brothers, but he was the only one of the three
that was married.
So Glenn Tester had a son.
And when Glenn Tester passed away, his son was a year and a half old.
And so Glenn Tester's son is named Frank Tester.
Frank Tester lives in Modesto, California.
And it has been an extraordinary privilege in my life to have spoken and exchanged emails
and chat it with Frank Tester.
He shared some of the photos of his father from their archives, which is in the book.
And I'll try not to get emotional here, but in my experience with him, here he is, he's
in his 80s now.
And he's shared that he's just wanted to meet his father.
And he has, he's a man of faith, and he has his belief that soon he will get a chance
to meet his father.
Because I mean, over the course of eight decades, the toll of war, we have, unfortunately for
the Vietnam veterans, your experience coming home wasn't like it was for us in the Gulf
War, the First Gulf War.
People said, thank you.
Thank you for your service.
And they say that today, which is we're lucky.
But the toll of war also includes families.
I think we have to start thanking families for their service to the nation as well, of
husband or wives who are back home raising their children and the sacrifices that family
make implicitly.
So the Testar brothers lay side by side at Henri Chappelle, and it's an extraordinary
story and it's added immeasurably to my life to know Frank Tester.
I can only imagine, you know, I thought of this very belatedly in that my mother, my
mother, my dad was in World War II.
He was in the Coast Guard of all things.
And he figured that he was older.
He was 40, 39 when he joined up, and because I think they were drafting to 40.
And he says, I cannot be in the infantry and tools for this stuff.
And he figured, you know, I'll guard the coast.
Well, he ended up guarding the coast of Imajima in Okinawa and ship was hit by a kamikaze
and all these different things, which I never knew until actually I started doing this radio
program.
But I was thinking about what my mother must have gone through with him being gone for
two years.
And then not 20 years later, I go off for a year.
My father had unfortunately died in the meantime.
So here she is going through it one time and now she's going through it again.
And I never thought about that.
And I think that, you know, maybe for all those veterans that are out there, at least
for my generation, you know, if your mom is still alive, you better go thank her.
Yeah.
And I'll first, you know, believing in you and hoping that you're alive every day, that
you're gone because, you know, mail took forever to get from one place to another.
So I just think that, you know, in this book, I think people, when they look at it and they
look at the pictures and they read those biographies that you put in there, they're all going
to be able to relate to it somehow.
Well, I certainly hope so.
And by the way, I love the Coast Guard, did some service with the Coast Guard.
Those guys are extraordinary.
And you know, during the wars, we have a number of Coast Guardsmen in the book.
And you know, in World War I, in fact, the USS Tampa, which was a Coast Guard cutter
renamed and be provisioned for the Navy, they went down off of the coast of England.
And by that one sinking of loan in 1918, the Coast Guard had the greatest number as a percentage
of total forces.
The greatest percentage loss of forces of any of our services in World War I was the Coast
Guard with just the single sinking of that ship.
In addition to the other casualties that they suffered.
But the Coast Guard is incredible even to this day, the multitude of their mission.
As a Navy guy, I'm just to have so much respect for their op tempo.
They're always operational.
And the experience they have from their junior enlisted to their junior officers, to their
senior admirals is extraordinary.
So yeah, but the families are important.
And hopefully, that's, you know, thank you for your service.
In 50 years time, people are saying that also to those who are at home as well.
Right.
To them and everybody else that's concerned.
I'm going to keep you on if you don't mind for a little bit, because my other guest has
not signed in yet.
And you know, you mentioned the Tesla brothers, you mentioned the Sullivan brothers too.
I mean, that's another whole family that was, you know, wiped out in a Navy.
You know, just, I don't know what kind of ship it was that was sunk.
But yeah, the the solvents were went down on a destroyer.
They couple of the brothers, the five Sullivan brothers were killed in the battle of Guadalcanal.
And they all went down.
They were all in the same ship.
So a couple of the brothers had served in the late 30s, early 40s, and had been gotten
off of active duty before we had gone to war.
And then Pearl Harbor happened.
And one of their friends was killed on the USS Arizona at Pearl Harbor.
And so the five brothers decided to enlist together and to do their duty.
The one thing that they asked of the Navy, unfortunately, was that they all serve aboard
the same ship.
So in January of 1942, they enlisted, they would not make it through the end of the year.
They ended up their hit their ship was hit by a Japanese torpedo.
And then in retreating to a safe area where it's hit again, and the ship sunk in 42 seconds,
killing most aboard.
Some of them survived for a couple of days.
The oldest of the Sullivan brothers apparently survived on a rafts, their stories, but either
died, you know, from being at sea for a long time or lost his mind or what have you, but
it's not clear.
They all die.
And so, you know, they it's an extraordinary story that the media and the Department of
Defense made a big deal out of it because they were family was doing their duty, right?
That was an extraordinary commitment to nationalism and patriotism, excuse me, not national, but
patriotism by the family.
And even after their the boys were lost, their family continued to travel and tour the country,
helping to raise war bonds.
And their sister served as a wave, even after the five brothers had had passed away, an
extraordinary, extraordinarily patriotic family, true and true.
And even after losing their sons, they continued to help with the war efforts.
They are memorialized at Manila American Cemetery.
We have one cemetery in Asia, Manila American Cemetery, of course, this is in the Philippines.
It is our largest by total number memorial allies.
There are some 17,000 headstones at Manila over, well over twice as many as they are
at Normandy.
Well, hang on a second.
There are 17,000.
There are about twice as many.
Yeah, it would be 18,600 if you doubled it.
So just under twice as many, I should correct myself at Manila, but it's enormous cemetery
and they have those the walls of the missing go on and on the Indianapolis, you know,
who brought the the material for the they're listed there.
As well as the Sullivan brothers are on the walls of the missing and that image appears
in the in the book as well.
Well, again, I want to thank you.
We've been talking here with Richard Sherman.
The book is Never Home.
Remembering Heroes Who Never Returned.
You can get the book by going to his website, which is again, NeverHomeHeroes.com.
NeverHomeHeroes.com.
And I want to thank you very much for being on our program, Richard, to have a great
holiday season.
It was been a real pleasure.
Thank you very much.
And thanks to your sponsors and to your listeners for joining today.
Okay, thank you.
All right, we're going to take a real quick break here and do our Medal of Honor segment.
And when we come back, we're going to be talking to Bobby Coella and his book is entitled
Batterford Bakuba in Iraq.
So stick around.
We'll be right back.
The Medal of Honor is the highest award for valor and combat given a member of the
Armed Forces of the United States.
There have been over 3,400 recipients of the nation's highest award.
This is one of them.
Such at first last, Paul Smith gave his life to protect his troops.
Details after this.
If you have a VA claim denied by the Board of Veterans Appeals, contact Legal Help for
Veterans at 1-800-693-4800.
They're experts in handling cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims.
Their number again, 1-800-693-4800.
On April 4, 2003, a call went out for a place to put some Iraqi prisoners.
Sergeant First Class Paul Smith volunteered to create a holding pen inside a walled courtyard.
Soon, Iraqi soldiers, numbering perhaps 100, opened fire on Smith's position.
Smith was accompanied by 16 men.
Smith called for a Bradley, a tank-like vehicle with a rapid-fire cannon.
It arrived and opened up on the Iraqis.
The enemy could not advance so long as the Bradley was in position.
But then, in a move that baffled in angered Smith's men, the Bradley left.
Smith's men, some of whom were wounded, were suddenly vulnerable.
Smith could have justifiably ordered his men to withdraw.
Smith rejected that option, thinking that abandoning the courtyard would jeopardize
about 100 GIs outside, including medics at an aid station.
He manned a.50 caliber machine gun atop an abandoned armored personnel carrier and fought
off the Iraqis, going through several boxes of ammunition.
As the battle wound down, Smith was hit in the head.
He died before he could be evacuated from the scene.
The Medal of Honor series is a production of Veterans Radio.
Military veterans touch everyone's life.
I'm guessing right now you're thinking of a veteran, a close friend, relative.
Maybe it's you.
Even the toughest of us sometimes need help, but don't know where to turn for support.
You don't need special training to help a veteran in your life.
We can all help someone going through a difficult time.
Learn how you can be there for veterans.
Visit veteranscrisisline.net.
Veteranscrisisline.net.
A message from the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
All right, we're back here on Veterans Radio, and joining me on the line right now is a
new friend of Veterans Radio, and I'm anxious to talk with him.
His name is, well, the book is, first Sergeant Robert Colela.
The book is entitled Battle for Bakuwa, and I'm probably pronouncing that wrong, but I'm
going to call him by what he tells me to call him.
That's Bobby.
So, Bobby, welcome to Veterans Radio.
Thank you, Dale.
Thanks.
First, you got my last name right, and you also got the total book right, so you're about
a thousand, man.
Appreciate you having me on, Dale.
Wait, I was, I've been practicing my linguistics here, so to make sure I get it right.
So Bobby, the story is, you know, the Battle of Bakuwa, I don't think many of us even
are familiar with that, and I guess we should back up a little bit and say, okay, so when
were you in the service, and how did you get to Bakuwa?
I joined the United States Army in October of 1989, and I just worked my way through
the ranks, and, you know, as fate would have it, I did my first tour in Romadi in 2004,
2005 as a infantry platoon sergeant, also had the opportunity to fight in Operation
Phantom Fury in November of 2004.
That was the second battle of Fallujah with the Second Infantry Division, and then from
my first tour, I redeployed and went up to Fort Hood, Texas, and became a company first
sergeant, and we had about a one-year spin-up from the time I landed at Fort Hood, about
a year to work and train up the unit and deploy, and when we went, actually, let me back up,
I wasn't a company first sergeant during the train up, I was actually a brigade master
gunner, and during the train up phase, and all the way up to deployment into Kuwait,
and that's why I became a company first sergeant, but we didn't even know we were going to
Bakuwa.
We were being held in Kuwait as a brigade-ready reserve, or theater-ready reserve, and within
a couple weeks of us being on the ground in Kuwait, they gave us the word that we were
going to go ahead and push north up into Bakuwa, which is about 40 miles north of Baghdad.
I had never heard of Bakuwa before, but next thing you know, we're there.
That was right around October of 2006.
The thing I found really interesting in reading your book, Bobby, was the whole idea of the
logistics.
I don't think many people think about moving a battalion or a brigade or whatever size unit
is from Fort Hood to Kuwait and then into Iraq, and you cover quite a bit of that in
your book.
That was...
Yeah, that's a huge logistical undertaking.
We have Bradley's tanks, heavy equipment, recovery vehicles, armored personnel carriers.
All of that has to go on railheads right there at Fort Hood, which is now Fort Kavafos, onto
ships, and then next thing you know, they wind up in Kuwait, and then you're offloading
them in Kuwait and onto trucks and trying to get them to camp Buren, and then eventually
to push north.
More often than not, they go on trucks up into Iraq as well.
You don't drive them.
They get loaded up on habits or hats, and they truck them up.
Yeah, but absolutely hats off to all the logistics folks out there.
Definitely some unsung heroes there.
Absolutely.
I was thinking about that.
When I was reading the book, I was going, okay, I flew helicopters.
Well, how did the helicopters get there?
And where did all the spare parts come from and all of those types of things?
It's...
We really have to thank all the people in the background.
I think the story is something like...
It takes nine people that are not on the front to support the one that's on the front.
Anyway, I just wanted to...
People want to read this story about what it takes to get this whole unit up north.
I thought that was really interesting.
And you talk about once you got to Bakuba that you were taking over for another company
that was there, correct?
Yeah, it was...
Actually there was a brigade previously in our sector, and we wound up as a battalion
taking over that area.
And of course, one-on-one company with the Colvery Rips or Relief in Place.
And we wound up doing...
It's about a two-week process to do a relief in place with the units.
And with all things said, it seemed like it was a pretty quiet...
There is some engagements and some insurgent attacks and what have you, but it originally
didn't seem like it was going to be that big of a fight up in Bakuba, but that quickly
changed within about a month of us taking over.
Well, I wanted to talk a little bit about before we get into the actual fighting that
you got involved with, was trying to transfer some of these equipment.
You have some stories in there about the typical army.
I can't use all of the acronyms that are listed in the book, and we'll get thrown off
the air if I use the true words.
But that some of the equipment that you inherited wasn't in the best condition.
No, it wasn't.
A lot of the equipment...
It's just unit after unit, they have some equipment that just stays over there.
And it just gets passed from unit to unit to unit, and it just gets worn down over time.
So you're hoping for the best, but also prepared for the worst.
And to complicate things really, we were an infantry company, and the landholders that
were out there that we actually did a relief in place with was an engineer company.
So we were actually getting equipment.
I was signing for excavators and various engineering equipment that I had no idea how to use it
or what have you, or did I have anybody trained on it.
So that was kind of an interesting curveball thrown at us.
But we're infantry guys, and we adapt and overcome for sure.
Can you kind of tell our audience, I'm talking here with Robert Koala, he's a retired first
sergeant, the book is Battle for Vakuba, it's called Killing Our Way Out.
Can you tell me what kind of the job of a first sergeant?
Because I was an E3, and then I was a warrant officer.
I didn't know all about the people in between.
Yeah, well, you know, the first sergeant, the big thing is that they say beans and bullets,
right?
And really, the most experienced noncommissioned officer in the company, I am the company commander,
sounding board.
We had a great relationship, I had two company commanders while I was over there.
But really, it's taken the brunt of all the administrative stuff, all the, you know, working
with XO with the logistics side and the maintenance and the ammo and the food and the security
out the combat outposts.
And, you know, just making sure that all of that is taken care of is one thing that the
company commander should not have to worry about.
And they can focus on the fight.
They can focus on what the battalion commander wants them to do.
They can focus on what the enemy is doing out in the sector.
You know, so it's really just taking care of the troops and minimalizing the distractors
for the company commander so he can focus on the fight and command those platoons and
have them execute what needs to be executed out in the sector.
In your book, you also talk about not only what occurred in Bakuba, but you also talk
about some of the things that a leader has to be.
And one of the things that you did mention was a leader has to get out in the field and
see what's actually going on.
And that's one of the issues that many people have with sometimes with leaders, especially
in the military, who don't necessarily go out in the field with you.
But you wanted to get out there with your men, correct?
A hundred percent.
You can't make those decisions.
You can't be the sound of board for the company commander without having a good operational
picture.
And you can't get that operational picture by reading situation reports and debriefs
and stuff like that.
You have to go out there and you have to see the soldiers.
You have to see, you know, to be able to look into their eyes and see the fatigue, to look
into their eyes or have that long conversation with them while they're on guard and listen
to what the troops are telling you, what the patoon sergeants are telling you, what the
patoon leaders are telling you.
But you know, it's also a balance.
You don't want to be smothering them and micromanaging.
But at the same time, you have to find that ability to get out there, keep your finger
on the poles, understand the area of operation, see if you can make good decisions.
And you know, at the same time, be hands-off enough to where you're not stifling the patoon
leaders and the patoon sergeants, let them go out and get after it like they need to.
Right.
Yeah, because, you know, the leaders don't always, don't have to be out in the field
all the time, but it's not a bad, a bad idea if they're out there at all.
And I know that you ran into a number of different firefights and lost a few friends over there.
I certainly did.
You know, our company for the fight, so we wound up on the bonus program over there.
So, you know, the troop surge was announced in, I think, like, February, January, February
timeframe, and the extension.
So, we actually wound up doing a 15-month deployment, and within those 15 months, starting
in December, we took our first killed in action.
We were manning a combat outpost in a small town called Barrett, and the insurgents, you
know, it used to be an Iraqi police station, and the insurgents ran, overran the police
station, killed, chased off the occupants of it.
One of our units, not my company, but our engineering company, Echo Company, went down,
retook that ground, but our engineers were also starting to spin up and do route clearance
missions to keep the main supply routes and what have you open.
So, the call was made to send Bravo Company 112 down there to do a relief in place with
War Dog, and within a couple days, December 23rd, actually, tomorrow, being the anniversary,
is they launched an all-out attack.
It was overcast.
The helicopters weren't flying.
We usually had attack aviation units that would be our angels on our shoulders, but
the insurgents knew what they were doing.
We were there, and they just started dropping water rounds, indirect fire, rockets, machine
gun fire, precision fire, and they also tried to coordinate assault, to the point where
one of our platoons were called in to do an ammo resupply, and as the tank was backing
up to the outpost.
So, to minimize exposure, minimize exposure to the dismount, so they didn't have to come
out and get the ammunition, as they were backing up mortar rounds, landed on top of
the tank and killed the gunner, Corporal Barda.
That was our first kill done action that day, and it also disabled the tank.
It was a pretty tough fight.
That was kind of like the moment in time where we knew a lot of things had shifted when insurgents
were doing a coordinate attack.
They were able to drop, in our company logs, we lost count at, I believe, 77 indirect rounds
and do a coordinated attack.
It was like, hey, these insurgents are well-equipped, well-trained.
They knew what they were doing.
They knew business, man.
They knew business.
Well, we're running out of time, unfortunately, Bob.
And I got to get you in to talk about it.
I only have a minute left for you to talk about it.
But that is your debrief project.
Can you tell me what you're doing with that?
Yeah, so the debrief project.
So, our company, we lost 14 people out of our company.
I think 28 or 29 people out of our battalion.
It was a pretty kinetic fight.
We never really had a chance to talk about it.
And writing my book, I found healing and storytelling.
And just to encapsulate, I want to give everyone an opportunity to share their stories.
So I'm focused on going around debriefing with soldiers from my company, my battalion,
sniper teams, special forces, 520 infantry that came up and supported us during the troop
surge, and the aviators.
So I'm going to travel around the country, giving people an opportunity, long-form opportunity,
sit down hours, two, three hours to tell their story and their view of their military
career and, of course, the fight in Baku because it was such a pivotal battle.
That was a place where the insurgency's backbone was broken during the troop surge.
And it was really the insurgents' alamo.
And we crossed them, man.
We did.
And it's a story that needs to be told.
And we just released a press release.
We're hoping to get a documentary going.
We would like to get some support with the documentary.
As I'm doing these interviews, they're amazing.
You could go to our website.
We're on YouTube, the debriefproject.org.
We're on Facebook, YouTube, all the normal places.
But you could get a better understanding of what our mission is and what our purpose is.
But really, it's a huge undertaking, but it's certainly a worthy cause because there was
an awful lot of sacrifice and there was an awful lot of heroics that it would be great
to give these people a voice and share their story, not just their story, but their unit
story and, of course, the barters and the other soldiers that lost their lives that
never had a chance to come home.
Right.
Well, Bobby, we got to go.
Yeah, man.
We got to go.
So look up the debriefproject.com.
So we got to get out of here.
We want to wish Merry Christmas to everybody who's listening.
We're going to go out on a partial song that I wanted to hear play the whole thing, but
it's called All I Want For Christmas by the U.S. Army Band.
You Are Dismissed.
I don't want a lot for Christmas.
There is just one thing I need.
I don't care about the present underneath the Christmas tree.
I just want to form my own more than you could ever know.
Make my wish come true.
All I want for Christmas is you.
I don't want a lot for Christmas.
There is just one thing I need.
I don't care about the present underneath the Christmas tree.
I don't need to hang my stocking there upon the fireplace.
Santa Claus won't make me happy with a toy on Christmas day.
Cause I just want you for my own more than you could ever know.
Make my wish come true.
All I want for Christmas is you.
You baby.
I won't ask for much these Christmas.
I won't even wish for snow.
Just gonna keep on waiting underneath the mistletoe.
I won't make a list and send it to the North Pole for saving.
I won't even stay away to hear those magic reindeer kicks.
Cause I just want you here tonight.
Warming on to me so tight.
What more can I do?
All I want for Christmas is you.
You baby.
All the lights are shining for right here everywhere.
And the children's time to fill the air.
And everyone is singing.
I hear those fables ringing.
Santa won't drain me the one I really need.
Won't you please bring my baby to me?
I don't want a lot for Christmas.
This is all I'm asking for.
I just want to see my baby standing right outside my door.
Cause I just want him for my whole more than you could ever know.
Make my wish come true.
All I want for Christmas is you.
Baby.