Jocko Podcast 193 w/ Kirby Horrell: The Last Vietnam SEAL to be on Active Duty

2019-09-05T03:44:44Z

Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @echocharles @SavedInAmerica 0:00:00 – Opening 0:03:58 – Master Chief Kirby Horrell 1:42:00 – A new Mission 1:59:56 – Final thoughts. 2:00:46 – How to stay on THE PATH. JOCKO STORE Apparel: https://www.jockostore.com/collections/men All Supplements: https://originmaine.com/nutrition/jocko-fuel/ Origin Jeans and Clothes: https://originmaine.com/durable-goods/ Origin Gis: https://originmaine.com/bjj-mma-fit/ Onnit Stuff: http://www.onnit.com/jocko 2:22:14 - Closing Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

Like, be watch those excerpts because, you know, everyone's in a while, they'll miss, you know, this, you know, two hour podcast about, you know, something, maybe they didn't have the time of whatever. You know, in the personality, I think my personality kept me going, because it was a good thing in the instructors, even though I was pissing them off, they enjoyed having me there, because when it came to being, you know, making sand cookies and volcanoes and stuff, well, if they got too close, they became part of the sugar cookie in the volcano. So it was probably about, I don't know, 100 yards, you know, on each side of it, on the river banks until the tides, you know, went, when the tides changed over there because there were 14 foot tide change, then you'd have mud banks and stuff like that. And then all the new personalities at, you know, at, at team three, like Sharazee, you know, like, you know, We saw him, because the shit we got into man, I mean, one night, when we got ambushed on the damn guy, and Mike probably told you this, but we were going in and I, who had, I was going in on a sandpan. And these kids these days, like what you're talking about, is exactly what the, I don't know what the trend, I guess, called the trend of, you know, with social media, oh, I'm going to be rich. You know, so some of the other, some of the other tidbits about going through training, Mike, Mike Thorton, because the dirty name is built for big guys, tall guys, because I'm short, I got a big chest, the top log on the dirty name. Gosh, you know, I can't answer that question because we were working so hard, you know, and everybody goes, okay, we're going to stop operating two weeks, right? So, you know, in the beginning of it, it worked fantastic because we got a lot of bad guys, you know, basically out of the jungle. So we lost, I think, two guys that day and Wawkesland got his eye put out and then a lot of other people got trapped metal wounds and stuff like that, off of the mighty moat. Because you know, a lot of, like today, a lot of guys have a lot of mental problems adjusting from the war and stuff like that. And so we can put together, not very, very quickly, you know, and, you know, just in, in Germany when I was working in Germany, you know, in plus two, that's what it meant, man. And when we got back to sea float, you know, the, the boat that I was in was almost right as sink, right? I don't know what it was, but as a program, they had where they're trying to bring, you know, vets back on that had skills and stuff like that. I mean, when we got home there was kind of a demonstration outside of North Island, you know, about that kind of thing. So it was, uh, it was, it was a welcome, you know, thing for me to come back into because being in the business world, you don't have that kind of camaraderie that you do with the guys, right? But, you know, third phase to me was, you know, that was like a vacation because his land warfare, because it reached him, great shot. I mean, we saw it when we got home, you know, because of the, because of the anti war stuff and all that kind of stuff. So, you know, as, as we were going through this and going back on active duty in the 90s, she had never been involved in the Navy at all, right? Because I was just getting warmed up every, you know, when we start talking, I mean, the stuff about Vietnam and you know, the fact that you did a hundred missions, you probably debriefed three of them. The workout, but you know, you do like dips and in some push-up situations or whatever, you know, the various things. You know, but they were all, you know, I think, I think probably the biggest guy, the gunshot, I won was the chief. But yeah, we all got home safe, which was a blessing, you know, except for our five guys we lost their lives. I was out for like 90 days, did this trip around the country and then came back and got back on active duty, you know. I got like 20 guys from Vietnam to all right a story called the book was called the men behind the trident by Dennis Cummings. So I mean, when we get something, we could put together an op in a couple hours and ready to go because, you know, just as, as every seal knows, you know, once the, you get there and you get the routine down, everybody knows what their job is. So that was a role of the dice sometimes depending on what the moon coverage was at, you know, and tides, you know, what was going. Well, you know when Sierra Leone is your safe haven, you know you're going into a rough neighborhood. I think once I got my fins, I felt like, you know, I was a water baby then, because I could fly with the fins. I know that when I got home off of Op, I got my gear and put it on a heel and flew off. You know, I remember I go to a meeting, they'd be talking about what kind of boat engine are we going to have in 2028, right? But we always got the shoot and we got the blow up things, keep our calls up, we got the jump, which was better in the reserves than it was on active duty because you always had assets. I mean, when you're flying in, you're flying in low, a rocket team tried to, to take us out going in and, and the door gunner with the minigun, got pointed in the right direction and that rocket team disappeared. We all got back, we all got back to sea float and all of us had like 20 bird marks on our back where the hot brass had fallen out of that minigun I went. And you know, they would go to market, you know, which was up in Wung Tal and not Fung Tal, but been to Y and sell their fish and all that kind of stuff. And we'd say probably 3,000 people, you know, in that particular thing and got them back. But that if I were to react it that way, you know, people would say, hey, jockel, you know, you're being too aggressive. And that's when we moved off of, we moved off of Seafloat and moved into Solid Anchor because they had built the base over on, you know, stabilized the situation enough where the she-bees could come in and build the base, you know, over on the shore. That's what these old team guys did for me and also obviously thanks to Kirby for what him and his team is doing right now with saved in America.org they are out there rescuing children and I don't know if there is a more noble cause than that. So you know, you kind of say, what does a 14 year old know? And, and I said, well, you know, it's the only thing I know

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 193 with echo Charles and me,
[00:00:04] Jockel Willink. Good evening, echo. Good evening.
[00:00:09] I often say that I was raised in the sealed teams.
[00:00:17] And I was actually, I mean, I didn't join the Navy until I was 18 years old,
[00:00:23] but once I was in, the team was the only thing I knew.
[00:00:28] And when I got in, what happened when you got to a team was you got in line?
[00:00:37] You got on board with the program. You got taught how to act.
[00:00:44] Not just how to fire maneuver, not just how to shoot, move and communicate.
[00:00:48] You got taught how to act, how to carry yourself.
[00:00:54] The attitude you're supposed to have, you got turned into a frogman.
[00:01:02] Now there was no explicit course of instructions.
[00:01:08] No one's given classes on mental toughness or anything like that,
[00:01:12] but you were indoctrinated in other ways.
[00:01:18] You were taught the old ways.
[00:01:21] The old ways.
[00:01:23] Then you heard stories and you'd read stories about the NCDUs,
[00:01:28] the Naval Combat Demolition Units and the underwater demolition teams you hear about their incredibly brave work in World War II.
[00:01:37] You hear about the massive casualties that they would suffer,
[00:01:42] making the beaches safe for amphibious landings.
[00:01:46] And that frogman heritage certainly ran deep.
[00:01:55] But at its core, the lineage that we followed that we emulated and that we worshipped as young seals was the Vietnam seals.
[00:02:13] They were the standard without question.
[00:02:21] And I was lucky because when I got to the teams, there were still some Vietnam seals around.
[00:02:28] Some of them were on active duty.
[00:02:30] They were at the teams.
[00:02:32] They were in training departments or master chiefs or war officers or some of them were senior officers.
[00:02:37] Matter of fact, the Admiral and charge of the community when I got him was a Vietnam guy.
[00:02:40] But there weren't that many.
[00:02:43] And when they spoke, we listened and when they taught us something, we took notes.
[00:02:49] And they taught us the things that we needed to know, the tactics, the techniques, the immediate action drills, the standard operating procedures.
[00:02:58] And they also kept us honest because this is the 80s and this is the 90s and there's no war going on.
[00:03:04] And there was some flare ups around the globe and seals got some flashes of combat action, but there was no sustained operations.
[00:03:16] And we could have slapped off.
[00:03:20] But the old breed knew.
[00:03:23] They knew that it was only a matter of time before war would come again.
[00:03:28] And they wanted us to be ready.
[00:03:33] And when the time came, they were ready and we were ready because of them.
[00:03:38] Because of those Vietnam era seals that had continued to serve and continue to pass on the lessons and the knowledge to the younger generations.
[00:03:48] And because of them, we were ready to take the fight to the enemy.
[00:03:53] And we did.
[00:03:54] Like our forefathers, that's what we did.
[00:04:01] And it is an absolute honor today to have one of the longest serving seals.
[00:04:08] Clocking in at 47 years.
[00:04:12] The last Vietnam seal to be on active duty.
[00:04:16] And he's here with us tonight. Master Chief.
[00:04:19] Kirby Hurrell.
[00:04:21] Master Chief.
[00:04:22] This is your one thanks for coming on man.
[00:04:24] Hello guys. How you doing?
[00:04:26] I'm honored to be here and honored to to talk to all of your supporting people out there.
[00:04:33] And let them know what my story is and what a great story it is and what a wonderful life I've had.
[00:04:41] As I told the vice president the other day, I said, you know, I'd still be doing this job.
[00:04:47] If I wouldn't have got old.
[00:04:48] So that's the only drawback man. We all get old. It's the John Wayne theory. And if you know what that is.
[00:04:55] What's the John Wayne theory?
[00:04:56] None of us get out of here alive.
[00:04:59] That's the deal.
[00:05:01] But where do I start? Let me let me go.
[00:05:03] Let me go do you start. Let's start with wherever you grew up.
[00:05:06] I grew up in Missouri farm boy.
[00:05:08] Move to the big city.
[00:05:10] Start a building hot rods.
[00:05:12] Which big city?
[00:05:13] Say, Los.
[00:05:14] That's the only one in Missouri.
[00:05:15] They think other ones are but so much.
[00:05:19] So what year what year was this that you were moving to?
[00:05:23] Say Louis.
[00:05:25] Probably around 62 63.
[00:05:28] You know, and I, that's why I went to high school.
[00:05:31] Okay, so I was going to say, sir, you're in high school.
[00:05:33] Yeah, in high school at the time. And a COE was a big thing in those days where you go to high school in the morning.
[00:05:39] Get your math, arithmetic, English.
[00:05:41] And then you go work at noon time at a job site.
[00:05:45] And get a trade kind of something they're coming back to now because kids need trades.
[00:05:50] So I had a trade, but I worked at County Speedchap.
[00:05:53] So it fit perfect with my county.
[00:05:56] County Speedchap.
[00:05:58] It was a speedchap.
[00:06:00] The bill drag cars, build to track cars, everything else.
[00:06:04] And I had a 55 Chevy that I had built up had run.
[00:06:09] And the next one was a licker from dry counties to wet counties when I was living in Arkansas.
[00:06:15] It paid the bills. So that was good.
[00:06:18] And so when I got back to Missouri, I sort of built in bigger and faster motors.
[00:06:22] And I would take the car down and race for money down on the river flats, right.
[00:06:27] Well, I got caught one too many times.
[00:06:30] And the judge said, young man, I have some options for you.
[00:06:34] Well, I just finished reading the book Frog Man and I said,
[00:06:38] you know what, you're on her. I think that going to the Navy thing is going to be a good deal.
[00:06:42] So he said, here's my number. If your recruiter doesn't call me tomorrow,
[00:06:47] I'm putting a bench warrant out for you. So I went to sign up for the Navy the next morning.
[00:06:54] Was on an airplane that evening headed for San Diego and the change of my life, right?
[00:06:59] This is what kids think it's going to be like nowadays and it's not like that anymore.
[00:07:03] No, it's not like that. Matter of fact, if you get in trouble, you're not getting in the Navy.
[00:07:06] You damn shouldn't get in the sealed teams. If you have any kind of record, they don't want you.
[00:07:09] Absolutely. The other thing that happens is guys think, oh, I'm just going to join and then I'll be going the next day.
[00:07:13] It's like, no, you're going to have six months, eight months of waiting around before you go.
[00:07:17] Completely different world. And you got to remember the Vietnam War was.
[00:07:20] So it's way, really? I was 18 when that happened.
[00:07:24] And how close attention were you paying to Vietnam at the time?
[00:07:28] Not really a lot. I was paying more attention to hot rods and building fast cars.
[00:07:34] You know? And then when this thing came up and I had to kind of shift gears,
[00:07:40] realized that I was in the Navy now.
[00:07:42] This is 1967.
[00:07:44] 67. So Vietnam's full. I mean, Vietnam's on right now.
[00:07:48] It's on. It's going. So the, I got out here and went to boot camp at NTC here in San Diego.
[00:07:54] And in those days, you had to go do a ship tour or a Westpack tour before you could come to the teams.
[00:08:00] Oh. It wasn't coming right out of boot camp and going to butts, right? So I had to do a Westpack.
[00:08:07] And, you know, my job on the Westpack was a farmman because I happened to be the shortest guy
[00:08:12] and could crawl inside the boilers. And I went, wow, what a good deal.
[00:08:16] What's your way back then?
[00:08:18] Oh, probably about 130. Yeah, 130. I strong as bull, right? I could do 30 pull ups and not even
[00:08:26] bad and I and I'll tell you how that worked out for me when I was a training.
[00:08:30] So then the, so I was on the ship and the, the cool part about it is I didn't stay in the fire room
[00:08:38] a long time because the people that were taking care of the captain's gig did know how to set the
[00:08:43] rack on a slant six Detroit diesel. Check. I knew I was set that. So they got me out of the fire room
[00:08:51] to come up and be the captain's gig. So, uh, engineer. So that was a good deal. So you need one,
[00:08:57] E2, E2 at the time. Yeah, yeah, big man. Big, big, big, great, big, great. So it's very cool. I got the job.
[00:09:05] The boat was running great. The first day, uh, the job, right? And I was on the USS Peedmont.
[00:09:11] You had to run out on the big booms that that swing out from the ship. So they tie up all the
[00:09:16] captain's gigs and the mall of the officers motor boats and stuff like that. Well, the first day,
[00:09:21] I just had taken my white tennis shoes out of the washer. They were still pretty slippery. I'm running
[00:09:27] out on the boom, slip to a back flip from about 30 feet in the air into the water. Swim over,
[00:09:35] jump on the captain's gig and stand in where the engineer stands all the time and and captain
[00:09:41] Davies, who was the, was also a shard captain. He starts a plot and the quarter deck. He goes,
[00:09:46] geez, that was the best man. So needless to say, homin' I became great friends, great friends.
[00:09:54] And, uh, and that lasted for six months. And then when I got back, I did my, um, my bud's
[00:10:01] training, um, qualifications over in the PI. Did those over the PI when I got back to San Diego.
[00:10:08] I was expecting to go right to class, right? Not the case. Because my lieutenant had hidden the
[00:10:14] shit that I pushed through. And I, fortunately, I knew the captain. So captain Davies kind of made
[00:10:20] that all right. But I still ran from 30 seconds straight over to bud's training many times trying to
[00:10:26] get all that started out. It was just good training. But, um, then I got over to the training.
[00:10:32] And a captain, Adi, who's over there, goes, man, you just made it just in time to start class 40
[00:10:38] and I. Right. Well, all the pre-training that we have nowadays that kind of prepare you for all that
[00:10:43] stuff. And wasn't there. So like three days in the training, my legs are like ready to fall off.
[00:10:49] And so was everybody else's, right? Class 49 started. So how many, so what you checked in on
[00:10:54] what day, like how, how was it, how long was before you actually classed up and went? Like I
[00:10:59] started on, I, I, I got there on a Thursday. But we started training on a Monday. Okay. So that,
[00:11:06] that was the pre-training I got. Get your head. Get your head. Get your head. Yeah, yeah, that was the
[00:11:12] whole thing, man. So it was very cool, a very cool, all of it. And all this stem from the fact that you had
[00:11:17] read the book, the frogman. Oh, absolutely. And you said, that's what I wanted to do. Yeah, yeah, that's the
[00:11:21] exact. Were you a water guy? Did you? And not really the lakes or anything? Not really. First time I was
[00:11:26] in the ocean was here in San Diego. And I had a couple of surfers guys that were in the class,
[00:11:31] because I was trying to jump over the waves, because the only swim and I had to have been down as
[00:11:34] rivers and lakes, right? And was okay with that. But I hadn't dealt with surf before. And the surfers
[00:11:41] in the classical, no curvy, you got to dive underneath the waves. And I'm like, oh, shit, okay,
[00:11:47] got it. So underneath the waves I went, and it was great, man. I think once I got my fins,
[00:11:53] I felt like, you know, I was a water baby then, because I could fly with the fins. I never
[00:11:58] go near the ocean without my fins anymore, anyway. So it was very cool. So we got a
[00:12:04] so we got started. I mean, there was 220, 25 of us at starting class 49. And my
[00:12:11] nimicis was was Oliver and this came out of my retirement, right? Oliver was this big hook
[00:12:17] nose Indian guy that ran like a hundred miles and he was strong as an ox and ugly as an ace.
[00:12:22] Was an instructor? Was he a, another student? Total instructor. Got it. Total instructor,
[00:12:26] him and mother Moe. Mother Moe was also an instructor. Our class 49 was mother Moe's first class,
[00:12:32] right? So we're all standing out in front, you know, of the of the building over on the old
[00:12:37] amphibies. And we're all lined up there. Well, Oliver comes out and starts looking up and down
[00:12:43] the line and he goes, say, you're too sharp to be here. And I went, I'll be here when you're gone.
[00:12:52] Dave. Oh, that hurt. I ate half the mud in the bottom of San Diego, Dave, man. It was wild.
[00:12:59] But Oliver and I, we had, we grew a relationship while I was going through training. So being the
[00:13:05] shortest guy that everyone went through butch training, right? I felt all the five four. All the
[00:13:13] some days. Other days, I'm five three. Now that I'm getting older, I'm probably going to push
[00:13:18] five two pretty soon. But he had some more stories about that. But so the, so Oliver walks in the
[00:13:27] back of the, of the main office and tells Mother Moe, hey, Mother Moe, I think you got a troll in this class.
[00:13:35] And Mother Moe goes, tell her, shit me goes, we'll go out there and look. And there I was, man,
[00:13:41] it was wild. That, that started the whole cascade of of situations, right? So you talked shit to an
[00:13:49] instructor. That's, oh, yeah. I just want to advise people that could go, okay, it could also go
[00:13:54] terribly wrong. Oh, because if you piss off an instructor, they will, they will, they can crush you
[00:13:59] and destroy you. So that's, obviously saw something in you that he liked. Right. But if you want to
[00:14:04] see that, you know, they'll eat you alive. Well, I, I can only tell you that every day of training,
[00:14:09] every day of training, I was in the Goonsquad. So, so that may have been part of that, what you're
[00:14:16] saying, he didn't like me kind of thing, because no matter where I was at, if I was running in the
[00:14:20] middle of the pack, everybody from me back was in the Goonsquad. I was, I was the cut off. I could,
[00:14:27] one day, we just said, okay, I'm going to run in front of the pack, right? And everybody in the
[00:14:32] class goes, okay, that's great, because we'd wittled the class now a lot. So I was in the front of the
[00:14:36] pack, no shit. The whole class was in the Goonsquad. Oliver, he was great. He was a hard hard man,
[00:14:45] but, and I'll tell you, the, and it goes back to what I was saying earlier about pull-ups. We do
[00:14:50] PT and I could, I could run hard, do a lot of PT. And I, what it came to pull-ups, I could knock
[00:14:56] out 30 pull-ups with nothing flat. Well, Mother Moe and Oliver, I used to make me hang on the pull-up
[00:15:02] bar, and that hit me in the stomach and see how high they could make the swing. And I could,
[00:15:08] man, everybody in the class will tell you that my tharn, my tharn was in my class, you'll tell
[00:15:13] you that. You know, so some of the other, some of the other tidbits about going through training,
[00:15:17] Mike, Mike Thorton, because the dirty name is built for big guys, tall guys, because I'm short,
[00:15:22] I got a big chest, the top log on the dirty name. I couldn't get over sometimes. I just would
[00:15:28] couldn't do it. Well, Mike Thorton would come up there and throw me over the top log. And the
[00:15:33] instructors would get pissed off and go, sorry, and you stopped doing that. Where would he stand?
[00:15:37] What do you do that? What do you stand? Stand on the log, you know? He stands on the Lord log
[00:15:41] and throw me over the top log. It was great. And the day I couldn't do it, the instructors
[00:15:47] made me go through the weaver twice. But all the rest, no problem with any of the rest of the obstacles,
[00:15:54] but that was part of it. You know, in the personality, I think my personality kept me going,
[00:15:58] because it was a good thing in the instructors, even though I was pissing them off, they enjoyed having
[00:16:03] me there, because when it came to being, you know, making sand cookies and volcanoes and stuff,
[00:16:09] well, if they got too close, they became part of the sugar cookie in the volcano. And they're
[00:16:14] gone to hell, we hate you. So it was very cool. All of our bottom-y mistake after after graduation,
[00:16:22] so that must have meant something. Right? And, and mother-in-law, today, one of my best friends,
[00:16:29] you know, he comes to every event. He was at the, at my retirement, you know, when I retired,
[00:16:35] from the Navy, I had, I had like five speakers that all came up and shared their, their comments
[00:16:44] about Kirby as he went through training. And mother-in-law was one of them. So it was classic
[00:16:48] 1500 people, or my retirement. Yeah, yeah, huge, huge. But anyway, after after we got through
[00:16:54] buds, you know, then we went through, mom, we went to SBA. How many guys made it through?
[00:17:00] Yeah, in our class, there were 22. So you started with 220 and you ended with 20. Yeah, probably 10%.
[00:17:06] But I got roll back into class 50, same kind of thing. That's where I was. You get rolled for.
[00:17:12] Because there was a chief, chief rose, who was one of our instructors. Good guy,
[00:17:18] but he had come up with this little thing called the little Olympics where you had to do the,
[00:17:23] all these different exercises. Like swim, you had to swim 500 yards in your clothes, you had to
[00:17:28] push up setups, pull ups, and run a half mile a half in your clothes. And you had to do that all
[00:17:34] in a thousand seconds, right? So I missed it by like 12 seconds. And he goes, sorry, we're going to
[00:17:43] have to roll you back. And I went, oh, crap. Well, I wasn't only when there were like five guys in
[00:17:49] the class. I got rolled back. How far along were you in training? Well, we went through second phase.
[00:17:52] We had to go through second phase, die phase again, and then go into the third phase. But, you know,
[00:17:57] third phase to me was, you know, that was like a vacation because his land warfare, because it
[00:18:01] reached him, great shot. I'm good on the land. Because I was a hunter. And, you know, ours is a
[00:18:06] country boy. So I knew about all that stuff. And Mike Martin was in your Buds class as well.
[00:18:11] Yeah, class 50 rolled back in. You rolled into his class. Yeah, yeah. And then Mike Thornton,
[00:18:15] Mike Martin. Yeah, yeah. Oh, yeah, that's good. I know what I thought about that before from one
[00:18:19] Mike to the other. And Mike, Mike and I were swim buddies. I mean, we did all the dives together,
[00:18:24] everything else. He was a hood when it came to doing ocean dives because he'd always get above me.
[00:18:30] And I couldn't, you know, when you're diving, you're looking for your swim buddy to the sides,
[00:18:34] right? Not above you. And Mike would screw with me all the time and hide up there in the
[00:18:39] kelp. And I go, I just lost my swim buddy. Where the hell is he? Right? But that was when we're out in
[00:18:44] the point Loma. Well, you guys diving the Emerson rig? Oh, absolutely. You mean,
[00:18:49] yeah, the one that that bubbled the way everything. Yes. Yeah, I don't know. I've only heard
[00:18:54] they call the green death. Yes. Yes. That's good. It's not a good rig. Well, because all of the
[00:18:59] bags, either bags that they had on it were built to keep, you know, the air, but because of your
[00:19:07] rubbing on things and operating and everything else, that always get a wear pattern at them.
[00:19:12] So you're always off-gassing in those bags. So you always had the charge. And if you didn't
[00:19:17] make sure your bags were charged, that's why they called it the green death. So yeah, we, we,
[00:19:24] we, we dove those a lot a lot. But, but we made it. We made it through. And then we all went to
[00:19:31] San Clemente Island, which was another hoot and had a great great time out of San Clemente Island,
[00:19:36] blown up stuff, shoot and stuff. I mean, you know, it's a dream. It's a dream. It's a dream.
[00:19:40] Yeah, total dream. Coming across the beach at night, you know, it was, uh, it was definitely
[00:19:45] definitely a good thing. And then, and once we graduated, but our graduations in those days were
[00:19:51] certainly not what the graduations are today. We were out behind building 401 and they came
[00:19:58] behind and gave us our certificates and goes, congratulations, you guys. You know, we all fell
[00:20:03] 10 foot tall because we graduated buds. But at the same time, there was no crowds. There had no
[00:20:08] nothing. It was just us. So different. And you, how did you not go to a UDT team?
[00:20:16] I was great at Land Warfare and I was a great shot. So they kind of, that's the way it worked
[00:20:21] in those days. If you were a good swimmer, if you were a real good swimmer, and you were kind of
[00:20:28] trinited towards that, then you would go to UDT. If you were good at Land Warfare, good at blowing
[00:20:34] up things and shooting, then you would go to Seal Team. And that's how I got picked to go to Seal Team
[00:20:39] 1 because I was much better on land than I was in the water. So that was the, um, that's what
[00:20:45] brought us over there. Mike and I went there. We went through SPI together. And now when you get to SPI,
[00:20:51] now there's just one Seal Team on the coast. So obviously Seal Team 1's running the SPI,
[00:20:55] which is the training to get you, the actual, the actual skills to be a seal because in buds,
[00:21:02] you don't learn a lot of things. And who's running that? The cadre. The cadre. I mean,
[00:21:09] we had, um, Moky Martin, you know, uh, and he was there and we had a number of other
[00:21:16] excellent guys that were had been to Vietnam several times. They were our instructors. The, um,
[00:21:22] and they took us out to our famous location as Nyland. You know, when there was nothing there,
[00:21:28] we lived in, uh, we had trailers that all the streams, uh, silver stream trailers, stream trailers.
[00:21:36] That's what we lived in. When no, no windows, it was 120 degrees. You know, we get up every morning
[00:21:42] and have our protein breakfast, which was fruit cocktail out of a can because there was nobody
[00:21:47] cooking anything. And then we, and then we'd go work in the desert all day and come back in that
[00:21:53] heat and then we'd have, uh, we'd have dinner, which was fruit cocktail in the can and kipersnack,
[00:21:59] which was another good deal. And then they had the, um, then they had the irrigation ditches up
[00:22:07] in the desert where they'd irrigate all the fields. Well, that was our shower. Because we didn't
[00:22:12] have any running water. So we would fill our, we would fill our canteens up to go train and in the desert
[00:22:19] at the filling station in town and off we'd go. That was the, uh, but we had a lot of bullets and that's
[00:22:25] all that mattered. Bullets, but the heat was unbearable. I mean, it's unbearable. 120 degrees. So I got
[00:22:30] it already, basically, for Vietnam. Because when we got the Vietnam, it was kind of like,
[00:22:35] yeah, this place is cold. But so SBI, how long was SBI? SBI was like six weeks. Okay. Six weeks.
[00:22:45] And, and that got us up the speed and then they got us into our batones and then now. And so what
[00:22:50] year was this now? This was 1969. 1969. Yeah. And what opportunity did you go into at Seal Team 1?
[00:22:57] At, uh, Fox Trapperton. Fox, I was a point man of Fox Trapperton. Squad one and Mikey was
[00:23:04] a point man of squad two. Mikey Thornton or Mike Martin. Mike Martin. Mike Martin. You're right.
[00:23:08] Mike Martin. I mean, Mike Thornton had already been over with another. He's using class 49.
[00:23:13] Class 49. Yeah. And because then we were kind of six weeks behind those guys, that's why we rolled.
[00:23:19] But there was no, we didn't have the time lag they have today about going to war. When you
[00:23:24] finish SBI, you were going right now. So I remember the day when they go, okay, you guys are
[00:23:29] deploying and we went over to North Island Air Station. Did you do any kind of work up as
[00:23:34] you're put as a pertune? A couple weeks, you know, couple. So you finished SBI. Yeah. And then it's
[00:23:41] into a pertune. You spend a few weeks into a, in the pertune and then off off your wall. I guess there
[00:23:46] wasn't really because there's so many less seals. It wasn't only what on the west coast there
[00:23:51] was about 100 seals. 80 seals. Okay. So everybody's kind of uniformed anyways because you're all
[00:23:56] learning from the exact same cadre. That's right. And that's why when when I came back from Vietnam,
[00:24:02] that's why they put me right into training. So because we had new guys that had to be trained up.
[00:24:07] And there was no time to get that going. Right. So that's what they, that's what they were doing.
[00:24:12] The guys that were really good in the, in the field, they would take them and put them right in the
[00:24:16] to training department and get the guys that are ready to go into it and off they go. So
[00:24:21] long was it. So how long were you in your pertune? Do you in Foxhopton for like a couple
[00:24:27] months? Then you did this at all? You're going on the planet? Probably nine. We were, we were in
[00:24:31] there three months prior to deployment. And then we deploy would be over there six months and
[00:24:36] come back and then they'd break the pertune apart and off it goes. Was there any, I mean, was there any
[00:24:42] like this anti war stuff that we didn't even think about it? We were all way too busy to even think
[00:24:48] about that. I mean, we saw it when we got home, you know, because of the, because of the anti war stuff
[00:24:54] and all that kind of stuff. And you know, and we were too hardened to even carry it right,
[00:25:00] we didn't carry it. And so that we just kind of blew right past that we never got into anyone.
[00:25:06] I mean, when we got home there was kind of a demonstration outside of North Island, you know,
[00:25:12] about that kind of thing. We drove right by it. But so it was no, no big deal.
[00:25:16] So what was in your, so how old are you now right now? Are you like 19, 20 years old? Yes.
[00:25:21] So you're 20 years old. You're going on your first deployment to Vietnam. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:25:24] How turned 21 over? What was your, what was your thoughts flying over to Vietnam?
[00:25:29] Well, we had like a C 17, which was like a World War II plane that we were flying in.
[00:25:36] And it seemed like we flew forever. And you know, and then the cool thing about it is when you're
[00:25:41] left North Island, they give you a box lunch. Then when you landed in Hawaii, they gave you a box
[00:25:47] lunch. Well, the, you know, the box lunch was like an egg, an orange. You had a peanut butter
[00:25:53] and jelly sandwich and an amitan cheese sandwich and some milk. So that was your box lunch.
[00:26:00] And, and off you went, man, we went in high style, you know, and we landed at Thompson
[00:26:05] New Airport. We landed there and they, we hung out there for a while and then the, even before
[00:26:13] we had to fly from Thompson, Newt, down to Ben Tui because our, the special operations office or
[00:26:18] Seal team office was at Ben Tui. So we flew into there. I flew into there because I was like the
[00:26:25] part of the pre-party to go to Seafloon and start setting up for the new Patoon and run the first
[00:26:30] ops stuff with the, with the old Patoon and stuff like that. So that was, we flew from there.
[00:26:36] There was a guy's stayed in the Victoria Hotel, you know, in in Saigon at the time and we
[00:26:42] took off and flew down to Ben Tui. Got ready to catch a bird and go on down to Seafloon.
[00:26:48] And were you pretty much just completely amped to go and get some?
[00:26:50] Oh, absolutely. We all are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a, that's who we are, right?
[00:26:56] Yeah. We wanted to get with it. We wanted to get with the program and get there as soon as possible.
[00:27:01] We did our break and up. You know, we, what about older guys that were on their, who, who and
[00:27:05] your Patoon had been on like three, four, five deployments already? Well, the chief that we had,
[00:27:11] chief Jones had been on it. He'd been on a couple of deployments. My radioman, Lee Pippman,
[00:27:17] who had been there. We had another guy, Al Jatsu, as our Rishikiradi guy, you know, and they're
[00:27:23] all good guys. All good guys. And what was their attitude like going back?
[00:27:27] Hey, let's rock. Let's rock. Yeah. Let's rock. So legit. Lee Pippman was my, was, was the best. He was
[00:27:35] the best radioman you could ever want, right? He was in their collinum and just, hey, get over here.
[00:27:40] You know, but they were all, you know, I think, I think probably the biggest guy, the gunshot,
[00:27:45] I won was the chief. He, he just had seen a lot of war. And I don't think that he really,
[00:27:53] he knew he had to be there because he was the chief, right? But some of the shit that we got into,
[00:27:58] you know, he just, it was time for him to go home. Right? And so we did. We saw him,
[00:28:03] because the shit we got into man, I mean, one night, when we got ambushed on the damn
[00:28:09] guy, and Mike probably told you this, but we were going in and I, who had, I was going in on a sandpan.
[00:28:15] We had like four sandpads on the bow of the, of the seal light support craft. And I was asleep in the,
[00:28:22] in the sandpan, right? We hit this canal called the damn guy, something woke me up. I think it's
[00:28:28] a guy upstairs, you know, the Lord was going Kirby. It's time for you to wake up. So I woke up and I
[00:28:34] go holy shit. And I jump, I start to jump in the boat and a B-40 rocket blows the bow of the boat off.
[00:28:41] I roll and come up right behind right, I'm holding on to the 50 caliber machine gun. We're right
[00:28:48] in the middle of the kilzone of an ambush. Everything we learned, right? If you're in a kilzone
[00:28:54] blast your way out of it. So that 50 swung around and it just started blast it. And I had a
[00:29:00] couple of guys on the floor, which the chief was one of them. And they were link in that 50 cal,
[00:29:05] ammo and that 50 cal was going for everything it was worth man. People on the, on the banks,
[00:29:12] guys are shooting flares and every time I saw a guy that 50 cal were took amount. So it was like
[00:29:17] we were doing damage. But by then the first boat that Mike was on, Miss Mike Martin, they had
[00:29:24] called in the sea walls. So the sea walls were scrambling. Here are these guys come flying over
[00:29:30] miniguns, blaring the door gunners. So I've got their white BVDs on and black jackets. I never
[00:29:37] even took time to get dressed and they're blowing the shit out of this place over there, right? So
[00:29:42] by the time we got all that settled, the, the, the, I had had bullet holes through my clothes that had
[00:29:49] burned my skin, but no through and through. Everybody, the boat was, we had to scrap the boat because
[00:29:56] it had so many bullet holes and it was unbelievable. Mike's boat, the medium support had to
[00:30:02] tow a saline. Then we had to make a circle and come back out of the dam, do I hell of a firefight,
[00:30:07] hell of a firefight? One on for a long, long time. And when we got back to sea float, you know,
[00:30:14] the, the boat that I was in was almost right as sink, right? So it was, it was very well destroyed,
[00:30:20] but nobody got shot, nobody got killed. I got burn marks that was the biggest, that was the biggest
[00:30:25] deal. But the, that was a wild time and the, and the coxon whose name was Willy Willow Williams,
[00:30:33] that guy was, he was an older guy, right? And every time he had gone with this, he needed to
[00:30:38] take a shot of whiskey, just, just to keep himself safe. Take the edge off. And he was like a little,
[00:30:47] yeah, he was, that was one crazy night for Willy, but we all made it home safe, you know,
[00:30:53] I'm ready for the next day. So when you got there, what was the, what was the primary,
[00:30:57] what was the mission that you guys were tasked with doing, what were you guys doing? Well,
[00:31:00] we were, you know, when we got there, Admiral Zumwall had towed a bunch of barges up, right?
[00:31:06] 13 barges, we call it sea flow, you can go online and look at it. So a bunch of barges that supported
[00:31:13] all of the river reenboats and all of the air squadrons in South Vietnam. So it's set,
[00:31:20] they anchored it right in the middle of the San Kulan River with these giant anchors, right? So
[00:31:25] it was probably about, I don't know, 100 yards, you know, on each side of it, on the river banks
[00:31:31] until the tides, you know, went, when the tides changed over there because there were 14 foot
[00:31:36] tide change, then you'd have mud banks and stuff like that. So it worked out perfectly. The problem with it,
[00:31:43] and that's where we were all stationed. The problem with it was that the zappers would use the current
[00:31:48] and tie explosives on a line, let the explosives float down with the current and hook around your
[00:31:55] anchor chain. And then these explosives would come into the side of sea float and try to blow you up.
[00:32:00] So all of the guards that were posted 24, 7 at the thing would have to watch out for that and shoot it out.
[00:32:07] So in a million night when you're trying to get sleep and all of a sudden this big charge blows
[00:32:11] up and you go, oh, cool. Well, that one didn't get us. And so that was the, that was life on sea flow.
[00:32:18] I mean, every, every night where you're burning was and everything, everything, everything.
[00:32:23] Yeah, burning showers, food, everything. That's where our offices were at and all that kind of stuff.
[00:32:28] So it was, it was an experiment to do that. Very successful deployment on that thing.
[00:32:34] Yes. Well, except when I was working Phoenix program, if I was working Phoenix program,
[00:32:39] then I would go to different locations, right? But we usually would launch off of there.
[00:32:44] And some of the Phoenix stuff we would do were two man sandpan ops, where myself, Leon Roush,
[00:32:50] rest his soul. Him and I would get in a sandpan and take a KCS scout with us.
[00:32:56] And we had paddle 10 clicks into bad guy country and snatched the sky out of his hooch and
[00:33:01] bring him back because he's was a bad guy.
[00:33:04] Big high level VC. Yeah. High level VC. Where were that intel come from?
[00:33:08] From the kid Carson scouts from Navy intelligence, you know, from from a lot of different
[00:33:14] areas and we would bring it all in because we sent a lot. We did a lot of owner, our own intelligence
[00:33:19] gathering in the southern region down there. Explain the Phoenix program for people that don't know what it is.
[00:33:25] Well, the Phoenix program was designed by the agency and probably several other people.
[00:33:31] And what it was was to root out the bad guys in villages that were working kind of like double
[00:33:40] agents that were working for the South Vietnamese government, also working for the Viet Kong.
[00:33:45] So what we relied on, what this Phoenix program relied on was intel from the locals
[00:33:51] that this guy was a double agent and then when we got that, then we would send teams in to
[00:33:57] snatch the guy and bring him out and do further interrogation on. By not only us, but by other
[00:34:04] groups, you know, and that worked. It worked well until the bad guys started fingering good guys
[00:34:12] and now the intelligence was all mixed up. So, you know, in the beginning of it, it worked
[00:34:17] fantastic because we got a lot of bad guys, you know, basically out of the jungle. But then the bad guys.
[00:34:24] It's like psychological operations too, because these guys who thought that they were safe and thought
[00:34:28] they could get away with it all of a sudden they disappeared in the middle of the night. Absolutely.
[00:34:32] Absolutely. And put the fear of God into it. That's right. That's what the minute a green face
[00:34:36] is did was make them disappear. And you were running two man operations. Oh yeah.
[00:34:41] Getting a sandpan and you were paneled how far would you guys paddle? I think the
[00:34:47] feathers, the deepest we ever want was probably ten clicks from a safe zone. Would you care for
[00:34:55] radio? Where would you carry your radio? We carry regular radio, pre 25. Yeah, yeah. And I carried
[00:35:02] I carried a... But you're dressed like a Vietnamese guy. Absolutely. Black pajamas, you know,
[00:35:07] the hood is nighttime so they can't see that you're a white boy from Missouri. That's
[00:35:11] that's exactly right. That's exactly right. Probably the scariest opt is I tell everybody about
[00:35:16] this opt because Leon and I went on this opt and we captured this high level VC and we're patlin
[00:35:21] back on. So let's lift it. It's a good one. Let's talk about it. So this is Phoenix Program
[00:35:26] operation. Phoenix Program operation. And you get in tell on a bad guy. Right. They tell you,
[00:35:32] okay. Now, how detailed was the intelligence that's what you would get? Would they tell you, okay,
[00:35:36] here's the village? Would you get overhead imagery of that village? No, not in those days. So
[00:35:42] you just would look at a map. We would look at a map. We would talk with our KCS and the KCS
[00:35:47] were more kind of guys that we paid on our side to that new the local area because we had captured
[00:35:54] them but we had switched them over to our side. We were paying them. We also had a village with
[00:35:59] their family that we supported. Okay. And so we made sure that they weren't going to go to
[00:36:05] the other side because their family was visiting us. Right. So that was the whole thing. So they
[00:36:11] would help us decide exactly where this were at. And they were good guys and for the most part,
[00:36:17] they were wonderful. So operative. So you'd be looking at, you, okay, there's a village at this
[00:36:23] grid coordinate or whatever. You'd look at it. You'd do a map study looking at the river. And you think,
[00:36:28] okay, when this river turns to whatever, 280 degrees, then we have to go another 200 meters
[00:36:34] and the village will be on the left side of the lake. Absolutely. And then work the tides because
[00:36:38] remember the tides are 14 feet. So you've got to move with the tides. There's nothing moving against
[00:36:44] the tide. You can move it, herb. But you've got to move with the flow. Would you try and time it?
[00:36:49] So you were going in with the tide and coming out with the tide? Oh yeah. That was key.
[00:36:54] And if you didn't do that, you're kind of screwed. Yes. Well, you were very slow one way or the other.
[00:36:59] And then you're going into a little like this is just your stereotypical Vietnamese village.
[00:37:04] Oh, absolutely. So much a little huch is set up. And you would know, hey, third huch from the water
[00:37:10] on the right hand side. It's got to whatever, a freaking. That's exactly right. That's exactly right.
[00:37:15] That's how we would target it. And then, okay, so you go up, you paddle, you're tracking,
[00:37:22] are you using any night vision at all? No. Are you trying to do it with moon with half moon
[00:37:28] with starlight? Did you want to completely dark? What did you all always ideal? All the half moon
[00:37:32] would have been ideal. And that's what we would. But y'all, you don't always get that. So that was the
[00:37:38] whole thing. So that was a role of the dice sometimes depending on what the moon coverage was at,
[00:37:44] you know, and tides, you know, what was going. So you always had to work those two, especially
[00:37:48] with a two-man team, two-man team. You don't have a whole lot there. I mean, you got everybody
[00:37:52] on standby. What are you caring for a weapon? Stoner, man. Coming on. I didn't go anywhere without Betsy.
[00:37:59] She was she was with me all the time. She was a great equalizer. How many rounds would you carry?
[00:38:06] Thousand. And what, and what, like two canteens of water in a K bar in your good. Maybe some grenades.
[00:38:13] Maybe one canteen of water, a K bar, a medical kit, and four grenades. And I was good.
[00:38:21] That was my black pajama outfit. Yeah. And so a body armor, body armor was a t-shirt with a
[00:38:29] boot, bulls-eyed painted on it. And you're in black pajamas. And so you get, so you pat it up.
[00:38:37] And then you, do you just beat the boat? Yeah, coast right in. coast right in. It's quiet.
[00:38:43] Is there any other activity on the water at night? And if there is, is there another VC activity?
[00:38:48] Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. I'll tell you a story about coming out of one of the villages where
[00:38:53] there were, you know, that mean they're moving the same way you're moving. They're moving with tides
[00:38:58] and everything else. If they're moving at night, are they VC? Yes. Okay. Yep. Only a people
[00:39:02] not there that were friendly were us. And the, and the, the philosophy goes. Everything on this
[00:39:10] hop, everything, everybody that's on this ops coming home safe, everything else is not. Right?
[00:39:16] So that's what it was. So we slid into a village one night. So we slide in, we take the people we
[00:39:21] want, knock them out, thome in the bottom. Would you do knock them out? Hit them with the hammer, hit them
[00:39:26] with the, whatever. Just standard operating procedure. Carry the slapper, you know? The slapper
[00:39:32] always works. Slapper on the jaw, you'll knock it, guys. You can't even suppress weapons?
[00:39:38] I did 22. That's all we had in those days. We didn't have any good.
[00:39:42] The last puppies. Yeah. And we did those mostly far dogs that were in geese that were, you know,
[00:39:48] that were put out there to act as shooting headshot on a geese. That's impressive. Well, yeah,
[00:39:54] it had this. But you usually shot him in the fat body. With the 22 with the 22 long, they go
[00:40:02] what was that? But the, but the stoner one night were coming out. We met some VC going in. We were
[00:40:13] just kind of laying out, waiting for the tide to change. And we were laying in the weeds, right?
[00:40:19] And a VC, Sampan came by and I put my stoner up. I had my stoner pointed it in, follow her on
[00:40:27] the sandpan. And he reaches out to knock all the weeds away and touches the coal steel. Well,
[00:40:35] his eyes were very big at that moment. But they weren't big for very long. So we eliminated
[00:40:42] those boys and kept on moving. Yeah. It's a once you get in a contact like that. Now,
[00:40:48] everybody knows you're there. Everybody's scrambled. Everything. Everything gets scrambled.
[00:40:52] Everything. Okay. So now you're scrambling the sea wolfs. Absolutely. And they come out at night
[00:40:57] to try and help you. Oh, yeah. We had a guy from, we had Dennis Rally on here from the US,
[00:41:02] a C wolf pilot. And he just was just awesome. Oh, awesome talking to him. They didn't care about anything.
[00:41:08] Oh, they were going. They were going. If you guys called them, they were going 100% they were
[00:41:12] going. They were full on. And if you haven't seen their new video, they got to see it. We put
[00:41:18] out the word scrambles. He was. Yes, scrambles. He was, you got to do it. It's a great, great film.
[00:41:23] Man talks about those guys and you can't say enough about those guys. They're coming out to our
[00:41:28] our Vietnam, you know, parties get together. That we have because they were so vital to our survival.
[00:41:35] You know, they saved our ass. Way more than we can even count. Yeah. Crazy. He told the story.
[00:41:43] They were, they stayed on station so long. He goes, look, we're going to run a fuel. Oh, well,
[00:41:49] they run out of fuel. They land in the middle of a pet rice paddy. Yep. And they're using ammo cans to
[00:41:55] transport fuel for one. No, they were all garage mechanics. Those guys were unbelievable. I mean,
[00:42:04] I was a hotrod mechanic. So I understood the mechanism. But what they did to get those birds
[00:42:11] airborne in the beginning was phenomenal. I mean, they took pieces and parts and pieces and parts
[00:42:16] and did it. And to see them do that and then, you know, as the war carried on, people at the army
[00:42:23] actually started copying what they were doing. They're going, how come those guys do that? We can't
[00:42:28] do that. Right? So now there's many guns on way more aircraft than they ever had before. And that was
[00:42:34] because the sea wolves were the ones that started it. And they put their rocket pods on there. I mean,
[00:42:39] hey, man, you know, it was all good. It was all good. So you you whack this VC that touches the barrel
[00:42:47] of your weapon in the genre. Yeah, yeah. You kill him now it's on. It's on because it's been completely
[00:42:55] silent the whole night. Hold the whole night. And all of a sudden, there's a burst of 5, 5, 6 rounds
[00:43:02] and now everyone's awake. So now you get on the radio? Okay. And you gotta go, hey, we just
[00:43:06] were in contact. The VC that our our KCS is paddling like a wild man. Leon is on the radio.
[00:43:14] And I got the stoner out of the front of the of the sandpan. We're going. How far, how far away are
[00:43:21] you from? We were picked up. We were probably like three, four clicks inside VC country. So that's
[00:43:28] how we had to go 4,000 yards to get off. I mean, everybody knew where we were at. So the launch was good.
[00:43:35] It was hairy to say this. The good thing is they don't have night vision. That was a good thing.
[00:43:39] How we didn't have night vision. Yeah, but I mean at that point, I'd take that trade because
[00:43:44] I don't want them to have night vision on a river. It's a night. It's scary. Oh, yeah. Absolutely.
[00:43:48] I've been on the river. It's like, you know, combat zone. You feel real naked at all. If the
[00:43:53] enemy possibly has night vision, even they don't have night vision. Well, you're running on the
[00:43:56] moon. Your whole and your whole and instinctive reaction is heightened. Right. The hair on the back
[00:44:02] of your neck, everything's going. Right. Because you know, they are feeling exactly the same thing.
[00:44:07] You're feeling like they're going holy shit, man. Where's this person at? Because they don't
[00:44:11] know exactly where you're at. All they heard was a burst. So they're coming in their carousness
[00:44:16] and you're moving as fast as you can. Right. So that was the whole thing. We knock on wood. The
[00:44:22] Lord was with this that night and we got home safe. Right. And so what's your, what's your extra
[00:44:27] point? Do you get, do you meet it? Uh, in a main canal, the main canal. The main canal. And there's,
[00:44:32] there's a boat of some kind. Yeah. Yeah. What kind of boats were you guys using? The MSC. We had
[00:44:36] Light Seal Support Craft, which was the one that we got ambushed in. We had medium seal support
[00:44:40] craft, which were aluminum boats that had a step on the back of them had two twin, four 27
[00:44:48] Chevy motors and them with holly carburetors. We, I put the holly carburetors on them. So, and these
[00:44:54] things, I mean, they were fast and they would do 50 miles an hour plus on those river. So,
[00:44:59] if once you got on step, get out the way, there wasn't anything stopping. And then we had swift
[00:45:04] boats and we had PBRs. Then we had the big junks that were down at sea, floating everything out.
[00:45:08] So, there was, there was more than enough coverage to pick us up once we were on the big river.
[00:45:15] So, your paddle and out, do you stay close to the edge of the river? Oh, yeah. So, you're in the
[00:45:19] dark? Oh, sure. Shadow is. So, you're trying to stay in the shadows? Don't get, yeah, don't get in
[00:45:24] hurry when and rush something, right? Take your time. I mean, you just, you had a burst.
[00:45:30] Nobody knows what that was, but they know there's something, right? There's there's not.
[00:45:36] And if you had a one burst, it's hard for them to even triangulate by sound where it was.
[00:45:41] Yes, totally. Is that true in the jungle too? Like in the city,
[00:45:44] you, you, you, you's hard to really hard to tell where a, one burst, it'd be hard to tell where it came from.
[00:45:49] Same. Same. Because you, you have the same situation. That sound is bouncing off of everything.
[00:45:54] So, you know, that's why they have, they've invented the, when we're over in Bosnia,
[00:46:00] you know, the Brits had the triangulation thing. When a mortar would go off, they would
[00:46:05] contrangulate right where the noise was at. Yeah. And then we could drop stuff right on that.
[00:46:09] That was an excellent thing. We didn't have that in Vietnam. We're kind of going. I think it's over there.
[00:46:13] Yeah, yeah. Mel, maybe over there. Right? And as soon as you, I mean, you scramble out of the
[00:46:18] immediate area, but you get 200 meters away and then it's like, okay, let's get quiet.
[00:46:23] Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Same thing. Same thing as you do as an insertion. Right?
[00:46:27] You move off that noisy spot. You move in. You set your weight. Is anything moving? Is anything
[00:46:34] coming at us? No, it's not. Okay. Let's move. Right. Get going. That's where the word black came from.
[00:46:40] When you go black. Go black. I came from guess who? That was a Vietnam thing. Go black.
[00:46:47] Nobody knows what that word means only you. Right? So when you're all the shit going,
[00:46:53] everything else is going, go black. Boom. Now what is everybody? Nobody knows where it's all coming
[00:46:59] from. They get suspected, but they don't know. And are they brave enough to stick their face
[00:47:04] out there to find out? Not really. So that was that was that was one of many. I mean, yeah.
[00:47:11] So is that the op? I cut you off and then we kind of ran off in another source. That the one you said,
[00:47:16] this is a story I always tell. It was Phoenix program. It was in a village. Oh, one of many. Okay.
[00:47:22] Yeah, one of them. So that's the one where you had that guy. You got that contact. Well, we went
[00:47:26] range. And then I'll go to another one that was down south when we insert it because we had some
[00:47:33] VC. We had intelligence. The VC was coming up south. We had done all the sensor planning to
[00:47:40] in the jungles to make sure we could pick up movement in the jungles and stuff like that. And
[00:47:44] we got movement way down deep. But we had to go in and set to so how awful the tune of Fox
[00:47:51] Trot. We went down to set up on a river that we thought they were going to become an across. So
[00:47:58] we moved in late in the evening. So you're setting up an ambush or setting up an ambush on a river
[00:48:03] on a river. And this is straight up the same thing that you guys taught us. Yeah, it's a
[00:48:09] same thing. Play more. It's a same thing. It's an ex-absolutely the same thing. Play more is on each
[00:48:17] flank. Play more in the rear. Let's watch. See what happens. So I'm on the left flank. Right. I
[00:48:23] run my clay more out. Come back in. I'm setting. Right. And all of a sudden I hear movement. Right.
[00:48:28] So I'm watching the tides. The tides are going down. And I see this bridge start bubbling up from
[00:48:39] the water. So they have a hidden bridge in it. So I see that the only saving graces were on high ground.
[00:48:46] They're on low ground. I see all these guys. There's like 80 guys down there that are trying to come
[00:48:52] across that bridge to do a ambush on sea float on the Sun Kulin River. So I let the first guy.
[00:48:59] Right. I tell the oh get the black ponies and the sea wolves in there. So he scrambles those guys.
[00:49:08] Right. So this guy comes walking across and it's a point out when it comes right. What's the range from
[00:49:14] you? Probably when I initiate probably five feet. So so he's got to walk up like this up the bridge.
[00:49:25] Right. Well I'm right here. So the hillstone or it comes over and I go,
[00:49:29] and we light them up. Right. Turn eight. Boom. Boom. Light them up and overhead. OV10s. Right.
[00:49:40] And one of the pilots, let's slide here and tell. Come with me. We call them. We throw the
[00:49:46] we had a tear out, which was kind of the early stages of Kim Light Juice that we could throw
[00:49:53] in the water that marked our line. So we threw that in the water and marked our line and the OV10s
[00:50:00] come flying out of the sky. And they're coming from like 3,000 feet directly at the ground.
[00:50:06] Letting loose the zoomy rockets going. And they're getting kind of close. And I'm going
[00:50:13] blow the clay mors and get the hell out of here. So we're blowing the clay mors and we're getting
[00:50:19] the hell out of there. Right. And these guys are just tearing it up across the river. And so we're
[00:50:24] taking off and all of a sudden we hear this. He and I go, shit. What is that? Run. So so we're taking
[00:50:33] off. Well, what was was our Lieutenant had just pulled his lifejack just enough in the frenzy.
[00:50:40] Oh, where the CO2 cart was just. Was weeping? I'm going to get away from me. It's going
[00:50:45] to be a big blow. So we're all in the ass. We're all in the ass back up to Canal. It was what a
[00:50:51] night that was. Holy shit man. And then we sent down a group of arvins the next morning to check
[00:50:57] it out. And they there was like 80 dead bodies down there. So it was a while. So I'm off like that.
[00:51:03] What, what, how did you guys insert? We insert a boat up the river where the river started.
[00:51:08] I'll be able to remember how far we, how far away would you guys throw? Probably. Probably click.
[00:51:12] Okay, so pretty close. Yeah. And you're controlling. What do you wear it? You wear it? Are you wearing
[00:51:17] blue jeans? I didn't wear blue jeans at night. I did wear blue jeans. But that night I didn't
[00:51:22] wear blue jeans. How about how about barefoot? Oh, no. Oh, no. Jim Bird is the only one that does barefoot.
[00:51:32] Yeah, no, I wore my boots and I'm glad I wore my boots. Yeah, that that only seemed crazy to me. But I know
[00:51:38] there's guys that did it. Oh, man, I know. And I don't, guys, I did it too. But I, hey, when I'm moving,
[00:51:44] I'm moving way too fast. I worry about stepping on something. Right? Yeah, because it was, uh,
[00:51:49] that was a busy night. And so for a night like that, since you're not wearing the black
[00:51:53] pajamas, you're wearing web gear. You got your stoner. You're still carrying a thousand rounds.
[00:51:59] Thousands of rounds. Offensive operation. You're bringing more grenades?
[00:52:02] Oh, we would have probably, you know, in smoke. I mean, since I was a point man, I would have
[00:52:07] a carried whatever the red or the green smoke and the radio and usually carry the red smoke.
[00:52:12] If we need to mark something, if we need to mark an LCE, they would have it. Somebody else would
[00:52:15] have yellow and purple. You know, out through the, out through the squad. And then in the squad,
[00:52:20] how many sixties would you have in the squad? Uh, two. Two sixties. And then with the rear
[00:52:24] security be carrying a stoner, too. You bet. And nothing like far superior. Yeah. So anyway, what about
[00:52:32] would it be, so there would be two stoners in two sixties? Two stoners, two sixties. And sometimes
[00:52:37] three stoners and two sixties. The Lieutenant would carry M 16, right? A.O. I.C. would probably carry,
[00:52:45] and they would probably have, you know, M 79. M 79s are have a 203 underneath of it. Uh huh.
[00:52:52] You know, that's probably what would, would have went on. And were you guys in seven or eight
[00:52:57] men's mods? We were in eight. Yeah. Yeah. Eight eight eight men's mods. Right. So it was, yeah. That was,
[00:53:08] how long would you guys plan for these missions for? Oh, that's, you know, I mean, we had our own
[00:53:12] intel. So I mean, when we get something, we could put together an op in a couple hours and ready to go
[00:53:18] because, you know, just as, as every seal knows, you know, once the, you get there and you get the
[00:53:24] routine down, everybody knows what their job is. That's what makes us what we are. And so we can put
[00:53:29] together, not very, very quickly, you know, and, you know, just in, in Germany when I was working in
[00:53:35] Germany, you know, in plus two, that's what it meant, man. In plus two. When you get the call,
[00:53:41] you got two hours to get the airport, get on that airplane and get going. And that happened more
[00:53:45] than I want to. We can shift gears, but the, uh, that was, that was a Vietnam war. And then I came back
[00:53:52] and, uh, so we, what, just hold on the Vietnam war. How, what was your optempo like? Like how often
[00:53:57] were you guys working? We ran probably in that six month period of time, well over 100 opts.
[00:54:04] So, I mean, there were days when there would be three opts a day, you know, other days where there's
[00:54:11] two opts, one up. Did you do any of those parakeet opts flying in the daytime, like,
[00:54:15] just pouncing on a village or something? Sure. Sure. We did that, and I'll tell you a good story about
[00:54:21] that. We, we did one of those when, because I was appointment, I was a guy that hung out the door
[00:54:26] and located the village, right? Because we didn't have GPS in those days. So I was hanging out
[00:54:30] the door and I'd find the village where the bad guys were at and I'd tell the birds set down. So we're
[00:54:35] flying down this canal. I mean, we're doing every maneuver or following each bend in, in that canal.
[00:54:42] I'm hanging out the door and I go, that's the village right there. So we flares, we jump on, hit it.
[00:54:48] We're in a skirmish line. We start taking fire from the village, not long. Our close behind us
[00:54:55] are the sea walls. So we get in a skirmish line. We start moving on this village, right? And
[00:55:00] taking, taking all the bad guys down this village and we call in the sea walls. So the sea walls
[00:55:06] come in, probably 10 feet overhead with the minigods and chest start breaking the village, right?
[00:55:12] Needless to say, we looked like a wildman running at the village and that was because all the
[00:55:20] hot brass coming out of the minigods were going down the back of our necks and we were going,
[00:55:25] help us. So I was going to kill anybody that was in front of me. I didn't care who
[00:55:31] I was. We all got back, we all got back to sea float and all of us had like 20 bird marks on
[00:55:37] our back where the hot brass had fallen out of that minigun I went. That's probably the last time I'm
[00:55:42] going to do that. But it wasn't, but it worked out that worked out fantastic and that was like
[00:55:48] the same what you're calling periquita. Absolutely. Any kind of ops, stay behind ambushes all
[00:55:54] that kind of stuff. We did all that. We incorporated all that in our tactics. How often would you
[00:55:59] guys get contact with the enemy on an ops? If you did 100 operations, how often would you guys
[00:56:04] get contact with the enemy? You don't, I want to say 70% of the time because we did most of our
[00:56:11] own intelligence. So we were always involved in contact. There were a few times where we walked and
[00:56:20] walked and dry whole. Dry whole. It wasn't where it was supposed to be. But the majority of the
[00:56:27] time we had contact, which was, which kept us all jazzed and ready to go pumped. That was the whole
[00:56:36] thing. But a capet reel because we were all, we knew when we'd go out, we were going to have contact.
[00:56:41] So you better have your shit in one bag. How did you guys do for taking casualties?
[00:56:48] Well, you know, everybody in Foxhopatoon except for one of our officers who,
[00:56:56] I have to laugh because Mike Martin pointed out a booby trap to him and he turned around to tell somebody
[00:57:02] about the booby trap and walked into the booby trap and it put some babies in his butt. So he was a
[00:57:09] casualty. So we had to fly him back to a sea float and get the holes in his ass patched up. But
[00:57:17] other than that, everybody, I think, I mean, we all got hit. But nobody got hit so badly that they had to
[00:57:25] they had to be met a vact off. Now our group when we were there is when we had the biggest loss
[00:57:31] of life in Vietnam when the Hilo went down that we lost five guys. We got off of that bird and that
[00:57:38] bird, that operation was an operation that we had just come off of because we had we went after a
[00:57:45] Russian advisor to the, to the Vietcong. We had him in a village. He was able to run out of that
[00:57:54] village and run into the forest. That was at the end of a rice paddy. So we decided to go after that.
[00:58:03] But going after that, we got met with like 500 VC because they had a whole company size element
[00:58:11] down there. So we kind of got it handed to us in a bit. But nobody, nobody lost their lives. We were able
[00:58:17] to get back to get back, break contact, get on our birds and get home. But the bird took some
[00:58:23] hits. Right. So when landed at C-flow, we told them shut it down. Let's take a look at it. The army
[00:58:30] pilots said, no, no, all my gauges are good. It's good and everything else. Why are five guys
[00:58:36] jacked on Lee and Toby Thomas and sparks and Ritter and Gore got on the bird to go up to Ben
[00:58:44] Tui and unlike a thousand yards out from Ben Tui, the bird spun its rotors and inverted. And
[00:58:51] the guys, all of them were skydivers. So they all left the bird, you know, and tracking across the sky.
[00:58:59] But what happened is they, from what I know, is they hit the hit the rice paddies and stuck in the
[00:59:05] mud and drowned in the in the rice paddy. They couldn't get themselves loose from the from the mud.
[00:59:11] So that was that was a crime. We all cried about that. It was their all-greet great team guys.
[00:59:17] That was a bad day in our lives. What did you do with that platoon? Just backfilled it backfilled it,
[00:59:25] you know, and then we all kept working. Because when we got to C-flow, there was one butoon,
[00:59:32] Fox start was there. When we left, because there was so much action, we had four
[00:59:36] battoons at there trying to cover down on on everything. It was going on. Right. So it was a,
[00:59:43] it was a very active, active place. Another good up. I'll tell you about that was a square bay,
[00:59:50] square bay up, which was a location right up from the entrance of the Saun Kulan river. Can I
[00:59:57] was at night? The VC would run supply trains down across square bay in sand pans and deliver it
[01:00:06] to the VC, which were down south of us, that we were always hitting. So we found the south
[01:00:13] so we decided to set up an up on on square bay. So I built a twin 60-mount for the Boston
[01:00:21] Wailer, which we had, so I let run in, you know, 25s on. And we took that up the square bay and we
[01:00:27] parked it in a little cove up there and just waited that night. We had night vision,
[01:00:32] our great big night vision glass. And we're watching these sand pans as they're coming across
[01:00:38] a square bay and there was like 25 of them. And we said, wow, this is the wow, wow west. So we got on
[01:00:47] the boats, the boat driver was there, got on the 60s and we hit it and we hit it because the
[01:00:51] square bay very shallow, probably 10 foot of water. And we come across there blazing them 60s and
[01:00:59] all those guys in that, in that whole sand pan, sticking out like dogs balls. So we just let them
[01:01:07] have it, let them have it. With one Boston Wailer, one Boston Wailer, with 60s, 20s, 20s, 60s,
[01:01:12] all on it. Well, yeah. And there's how many sand pans? There's, I think there was like 40.
[01:01:17] So, and we had other team guys in the boats with the stoners and stuff, right? So we hit these
[01:01:23] guys, devastated. Devastate them, and now we got, now we got 40 sand pans full of fish, rice,
[01:01:30] guns, everything that the bad guys need down south. We waited for daylight with
[01:01:36] which was probably about 45 minutes, so we just let them set there, right? Waiting for any guys that
[01:01:42] kind of pool blood that want to get up and shoot again. So we just set. Then we approached once it
[01:01:48] started breaking daylight, right? So the only person that was alive was this old woman that was
[01:01:54] chewing beach nut, had like three teeth gone. So we, so we made her drive. So she drove all the
[01:02:05] sand pans back to sea float. It was wild. I know, I know there's hellows because there's hellows
[01:02:11] over the top of us. Somebody was taking a picture of that, but it was, it was a magnificent thing, right?
[01:02:16] And bringing all these sand pans back to sea float. And then we gave them two, we distributed
[01:02:22] them to the village that we had started, which was upriver. We had captured so many people at sea
[01:02:28] float that we started a village upriver, probably about a half a mile from sea float. And we just,
[01:02:38] that was our village, right? So we anything we would recover or anything else from the
[01:02:43] vehicle, we would give to the village. It was a fish and village, right? Started with like five people
[01:02:48] by the time we left country. It was like 1,500 people. Who are these people? They were just innocent
[01:02:53] fishermen and you know, an innocent citizens that had gotten caught up in the water, right? And
[01:02:58] they were trying to get out of the water zone. So we moved them up there. Great fishing, where it was at.
[01:03:04] And you know, they would go to market, you know, which was up in Wung Tal and not Fung Tal,
[01:03:09] but been to Y and sell their fish and all that kind of stuff. So they were just trying to make a living.
[01:03:15] So we would take everything to those guys. So that day they got Hawkeye's a fish and brand new
[01:03:20] sand pans and everything else they loved us. I loved those Americans. It's always very,
[01:03:25] that was very cool. Very, very cool. The old lady we took the old lady up there too. It's sitting.
[01:03:30] You have a new home now. She just kept going. She went to her beach nut.
[01:03:36] She was crazy. Crazy man. But that was one, that was one crazy op that made the history books.
[01:03:41] So it was, it was good. But yeah, we all got home safe, which was a blessing, you know,
[01:03:47] except for our five guys we lost their lives. And you know, and then we had the mighty moat,
[01:03:53] got ambushed on it went down south. We lost Mikey got hit then. She had got a purple heart didn't.
[01:04:01] Wawkesland got hit in the eye with the piece of
[01:04:05] scrap metal. What happened with that? What was the, well, the mighty moat was a big Mike boat,
[01:04:10] you know, had all kinds of armor on it and everything else. And what they were doing,
[01:04:14] which they shouldn't have done. We were trying to plunge away through a canal down to VC country.
[01:04:20] Well, the VC had grenades and had mines and everything else on it. So when the boat would go down there,
[01:04:26] it would catch on cables, right? And then snagged their props so they became in mobile. So they were
[01:04:31] setting ducks when all these mines started going off and they got hit from all sides by the VC.
[01:04:39] So the VC really shot the boat up again, sea wolves got us out of there, came in black ponies.
[01:04:46] Got us out there. We had to go pull the boat out. But the guys that were on the boat, you know,
[01:04:52] were inside and the rockets were going inside and the hot core was bouncing all over the place. So
[01:04:58] we lost, I think, two guys that day and Wawkesland got his eye put out and then a lot of other
[01:05:06] people got trapped metal wounds and stuff like that, off of the mighty moat. But that was not
[01:05:12] a good day and it probably shouldn't have happened, but it did. Right? So a lot going on when you're
[01:05:20] out there pushing. How did you decide when your last stop was going to be?
[01:05:27] Gosh, you know, I can't answer that question because we were working so hard, you know,
[01:05:31] and everybody goes, okay, we're going to stop operating two weeks, right? Before we take off,
[01:05:38] well, that didn't happen. We just operated up. I know that when I got home off of Op,
[01:05:46] I got my gear and put it on a heel and flew off. That's when my last two was. So
[01:05:53] and I know the rest of the guys were probably very close to the same. You know, because I was
[01:05:58] one of the last guys to take off. We did the turnover off with the new Patoon coming in, you know?
[01:06:03] And that's when we moved off of, we moved off of Seafloat and moved into Solid Anchor because
[01:06:11] they had built the base over on, you know, stabilized the situation enough where the she-bees
[01:06:17] could come in and build the base, you know, over on the shore. I always felt like it was a jinx
[01:06:23] to say, okay, this is our last stop. Oh, yeah. I never said that. No, I just, we just kept going.
[01:06:29] And then one day it was like, guess what, we're going to go home. So we can't do anymore. So that's right.
[01:06:33] That last stop that we just did. That was our last stop. That's exactly the same way. I thought it
[01:06:38] jinx it and go again, you know. No, and you know, because our world, it's push-push push. I mean,
[01:06:44] we're all jacked up to do everything we can and you want to do that. I mean, the time to sleep
[01:06:49] is on your way home. I know I came off of one of the Africa ops that we did down in Sierra Leone,
[01:06:56] right? And we'd say probably 3,000 people, you know, in that particular thing and got them back.
[01:07:03] Safe and stuff. And when I jumped on that C14 fund to come home, I looked at all the guys that
[01:07:10] were there with us. I go, man, this hero shit is really hard. And I went to sleep, man. I went,
[01:07:17] see you later. I was gone. Tell me, landed in Stukar, Germany. Yeah, it was wild. That was wild.
[01:07:24] But Vietnam was a great, and it's just what you said earlier. Vietnam was a huge learning
[01:07:28] ground, a huge proving ground for seal team. If we would not have had a head Vietnam, we would not
[01:07:37] be where we're at today. It's that simple. It's that simple. And you know, the guys, the personalities,
[01:07:44] they came from all walks of life, all walks of life. And we have that same thing today
[01:07:50] at Naval Special Warfare. I mean, I see it in every young man that I see it. Every one of them has
[01:07:55] got a different personality, but the fire and their gut and the fire and their eyes is there.
[01:08:02] And they want to do the job and they want to do it the best they possibly can. Right?
[01:08:07] With all the other crap that's going on, I mean, you got to give it to them in the men. And we're
[01:08:12] so fortunate to have the quality of men, both officers and enlisted that we have a Naval Special
[01:08:18] Warfare. Because they're professionally, they get the job done. Every nun then they drop the ball,
[01:08:23] but for the most part they get it done. Yeah. So, sir, you come home from Vietnam.
[01:08:28] I come home from Vietnam. I get on my Harley. And I sounds like a plan right there.
[01:08:36] It was a plan. It was a plan. I, well, I had a chopper shop. So I came home. I had a chopper shop
[01:08:42] before I left the two go to Vietnam. And I had so I had the chopper shop. Somewhere next to the
[01:08:47] I go. Yeah, in Imperial Beach. Okay. I be. So I built a bike. I built my first bike.
[01:08:54] Mike took off. I went back to Ohio. I said, you know what? I'm going to build a bike. And I'm
[01:08:57] going to go for a ride. So I built a bike tour to around the United States. Met Americans again,
[01:09:04] which was a real eye opener. Because you know, a lot of, like today, a lot of guys have a lot of
[01:09:09] mental problems adjusting from the war and stuff like that. I used to travel around the country to
[01:09:14] adjust myself, right? I didn't have a lot of money. I had a great Harley. And I would stop at work,
[01:09:20] get a job for a day or two, get some gas money, get some food money, put it in the tank, and I'd
[01:09:26] hit it again. And I, I made around the country and enjoyed the hell out. Are you on leave at this
[01:09:32] point? No, no, no, not a lot of the Navy. Oh, so this is, so you came home. Yeah. What do you do just
[01:09:36] when you got home? When I, well, when I just got home from Vietnam. I went back to the training
[01:09:41] so I was on active duty for another two years after I got home. When you planning to get out,
[01:09:47] when you got home, we were like, okay, what would Vietnam end it? You know, I don't, I didn't know.
[01:09:52] I was there for, you know, and the whole thing was I got out. I was out for like 90 days,
[01:09:57] did this trip around the country and then came back and got back on active duty, you know.
[01:10:02] And, and I said, well, you know, it's the only thing I know and it's the only thing I love. So I'll do
[01:10:07] that and then I got off of active duty cleanly and went into the reserves in 75. And in 75,
[01:10:15] that's when we started the seal reserve unit in in San Diego and also on the West East Coast.
[01:10:21] And so I was in the reserve unit, you know, as a second, third class, second class pediocer,
[01:10:28] made first class and the reserves. And then it was your civilian job at this point. I had a couple
[01:10:33] civilian jobs. I had a, I had a boiler shop that worked and did Navy repair ships over at that 30
[01:10:40] second street, Long Beach and then I go up the Swamana Island and do stuff up there because I repaired
[01:10:45] boilers because it was easy mechanical stuff, machinery stuff. And so I did that, had a company
[01:10:52] of probably about 15 guys. We did that for a while. Then I had got another company that did it and
[01:10:59] that grew to about 90 people, you know. And then I got rid of both those. I sold those and
[01:11:05] then up front of mine came to me and wanted to start another company with the, it's called the
[01:11:13] takeoff and estimating system. Company was called Texanics and we came out with and devised a
[01:11:19] system where if you put a set of building plans on the top of a digitizing board, we had a
[01:11:28] guy that wrote the algorithm that would could tell you. If you touched that stylus and two different
[01:11:33] points, it would give you the dimension of that eight foot wall, tell you all the pieces that you
[01:11:38] needed to build that, tell you what your labor cost would be and everything else. So we sold about
[01:11:42] 5,000 of those systems across the world and we sold that company to a group of Canadian guys.
[01:11:50] And that's when I went to reserves in 1990 and they said, hey, we need some volunteers to come back
[01:11:57] for Desert Storm Desert Shield and I went, I think that's me. So, so that's when I re-engage. That's
[01:12:05] when I re-engage with the level of active duty at that point. Did you expect that whole time in the
[01:12:10] reserves? At the 15 years I'd spent in the reserves. Which is one weekend a month, two weeks in
[01:12:15] summer, some months. Weekend in a month, yeah. Weekend a month and two weeks during the reserves. And we,
[01:12:20] we were very creative about that. We, you know, we would do cold water training in the Colorado
[01:12:26] River and a big raft, yeah, that was good. And then we do cold weather training and, and
[01:12:33] mammoth of the. Yes, yes, trying to get down the hillless passes you possibly could. It was
[01:12:40] hell, but somebody had to do it. But we always got the shoot and we got the blow up things,
[01:12:44] keep our calls up, we got the jump, which was better in the reserves than it was on active duty
[01:12:50] because you always had assets. So that was very cool. So for those 15 years, that's pretty much what I
[01:12:55] did. And then 1990, when I got callback to active duty, I went to Seal Team 3, started working
[01:13:03] at training cell with Mike Martin and K bar and a couple other guys that were there and
[01:13:08] were you a master chief at this point? No, no, as a first class. Oh yeah, oh yeah, because in the
[01:13:14] old days, rank never meant anything. I mean, some of the ups I was telling about in Vietnam,
[01:13:19] we ran on the second class pedigles. You know, I mean, so the rank was never a big deal.
[01:13:27] And so not till I got back on at 1990, I did our realize that rank was a big deal. And I went,
[01:13:34] Jesus, I guess I better study. So in the chiefs to us come around, I took the chiefs to us. We were
[01:13:41] in German then not, you know, and it's so interesting to think I didn't know about in German.
[01:13:46] So how far up was Mike Martin? I have you checking back into Seal Team 3. Oh, he's great. Well,
[01:13:52] Mike when when Mike originally came back, he lived with me. You know, he moved in the house. We
[01:13:56] saw a bit of him. Mike got out. Yeah. And then what did he do? Because it's a good story. Oh,
[01:14:02] he absolutely like Mike got on the, Mike got on the bike. I built him and rode back to Ohio. That's
[01:14:08] where he met Gail, his wife, right? So Mike went to work at the steel mills back in Ohio,
[01:14:15] working the steel mills with his, with his new triumphant motorcycle. Right. So he'd ride it there.
[01:14:20] And he was working there. That's where he'd learn to tattoo. You know, he'd run into a guy back there
[01:14:26] that was also a biker and learned how to tattoo from the sky. And that became his new career.
[01:14:33] Well, the steel mills after 13 years, the steel mills were going to close down. So Mike went to a
[01:14:41] reunion in Florida and saw Steve Frisk, who was one of our, who Mike worked with in Vietnam.
[01:14:48] He was one of the two man ops, right? Him and Steve would do the two man ops together. And myself and
[01:14:53] Leon would do the two man ops together. We went down there, saw Steve and Frisk was a commander.
[01:14:59] I think in the teams at the time. And Steve goes, hey, if you want to come back in,
[01:15:04] oh, help you. So that's how it happened, right? Got back in. Um, because of a, something that like
[01:15:13] I am bad or something like that. I don't know what it was, but as a program, they had where they're
[01:15:17] trying to bring, you know, vets back on that had skills and stuff like that. And Mike got it and fell
[01:15:22] into that category. Well, then he calls me, you know, and I'm still in the corporate world doing
[01:15:28] business and stuff like that. And goes, hey, hey, it's me, Mike Martin. I go, I know a lot of Mike's
[01:15:33] who, you know, me, you. And so he starts going off on me and I go, all right, Mike, I got it. I got it.
[01:15:38] So he came out hung around. I gave one of my bedrooms and, uh, and he lived with his
[01:15:43] belly. Got back on his feet and got his family moved out here. Everything else, but what a wonderful
[01:15:48] deal for him, right? Because of steel models, we're down. There was no job for him back there. And
[01:15:54] he was able to get back on active duty and come back on active duty. And everybody knows what
[01:15:59] his stud, he was. So that was just the cool besides wonderful personality, wonderful man, wonderful
[01:16:05] wonderful man, great brother, great great brother. So we had, we had tons of fun, you know, rehash
[01:16:11] and the thing. And then all the new personalities at, you know, at, at team three, like Sharazee,
[01:16:18] you know, like, you know, and then we're like on and on, like the Chang, right? So it was, uh,
[01:16:26] it was, it was a welcome, you know, thing for me to come back into because being in the business
[01:16:32] world, you don't have that kind of camaraderie that you do with the guys, right? So the guys are
[01:16:39] there and that's what it's all about anyway. It's about the brotherhood. It's about the camaraderie.
[01:16:44] You have with one another coming back. And I know Mike and I miss both of that and when we came
[01:16:47] back together at Seal Team three, it was just happening. So we let it go from there, you know,
[01:16:53] and that, uh, and it proved to be fantastic. So I was in Seal Team three from, uh, from the 90s
[01:17:01] until 95, 95. I got, uh, orders, which I was a chief now, uh, over to Stukar Germany to move
[01:17:11] unit two from McRainey, Scotland down to Stukar, right? I get over there and I'm going Holy
[01:17:17] crap, uh, Germany, right? And my wife is going, wow, Germany, because she's, if starting to travel
[01:17:24] and she loves it, right? So we got over there and then we got into the, uh, into the world of,
[01:17:30] of moving from McRainey, Scotland. We had to go get all the stuff from the base at McRainey,
[01:17:37] Scotland, which is a story all its own and drive it down to Stukar, and they gave us the worst
[01:17:44] base in Stukar to fix up, right? That Panzer Cancer, which was wrong, all tanker. Yeah, yeah,
[01:17:55] you know, and that's all, that goes a whole new thing, but we, uh, they still have the cranes
[01:18:01] in the base there to pull the engines out of the Panzers. Yep. They're in there, they're in the
[01:18:06] base. It's like part of the building. I know, I know, all those, all those cages that you see in
[01:18:10] there, guess who put those up? I'm going to get them back in a new day. Yeah, yeah, so it was wild,
[01:18:15] but I had the ordinance department training department at the time when we were moving then.
[01:18:19] So that was, that was a good thing. And then we got onto the E-sat team and the RST teams,
[01:18:26] where we had to start. One second, you threw your wife into the scenario there. Yes, yes.
[01:18:30] When did that all start? Oh, yeah. Wow. I probably should discuss that. My wife was my biggest
[01:18:37] supporter, right? So, you know, as, as we were going through this and going back on active duty in the
[01:18:43] 90s, she had never been involved in the Navy at all, right? So, Mikey and I are going out to
[01:18:49] Nyland to train the guys at Nyland. And I'm going, hey, honey, I'm going to be gone for a couple of weeks.
[01:18:55] Well, she was a professional woman, had her own career and stuff like that. And our son was
[01:18:59] John was old enough to kind of take care of himself. She'll, she'd say, okay, well, just call me,
[01:19:04] let me know what it is. So it wasn't that big of an unfair. So we were going and then she worked
[01:19:09] for San Diego Gas Electric. So when I got orders to Germany, she retired from San Diego Gas Electric.
[01:19:16] And this was a new adventure for her. So she was all excited about going the Germany and everything
[01:19:21] else. And so it was great for her. I mean, she absolutely loved going there. Did you, was your son
[01:19:27] old enough to, that he went to Germany or not? No, he was, he turned into a college boy. Okay.
[01:19:33] College boy in my house paid for it. Yes. All my neighbors were calling me a Germany.
[01:19:40] Go on. They're wrecking the house. They're wrecking the house. I'm going only corrupt. So,
[01:19:44] oh, you left him here? Go on. Yeah. College in your house? Yes. Yeah. Big mistake. But, you know,
[01:19:52] what we lived through it, that's a whole part we lived through it. So she was very excited about it.
[01:19:56] So it was, it was a fun, it was a fun move because it was her first one. As we go on through the
[01:20:02] career, she's going, this is not getting to be as much fun as I thought. Right. So she got there and
[01:20:08] we got moved on to Kelly Barracks, right? Well, because I was a chief, I got the top floor, right?
[01:20:15] And the Barracks, well, there's four floors. 90 steps every time you go up, no elevators. So every
[01:20:22] time she would buy groceries, the groceries would be waiting at the bottom of the steps for
[01:20:26] guests who would carry up when I got home. Right. Laundry, she would bring the Laundry down. I'd take
[01:20:32] the Laundry back up. And it was like, oh my God. So now I know why the Germans have such strong legs
[01:20:38] because they were up and down those things. It was crazy. So that was, it was a good move. We got into a
[01:20:46] real rhythm over there where we really justified general Lambert was the general there and he loved,
[01:20:53] you know, naval special warfare. So we justified by being on the ESAT teams and being on these
[01:21:00] RST teams. We justified our existence there and everybody wanted us to be there because anytime
[01:21:06] we would go on an operation, the operation would work perfect. That's where the kneels came into
[01:21:12] how we started doing the kneels in Africa. That's a non-combatant evacuation operation,
[01:21:18] where there's something going wrong in a country, whether it's civil unrest, it could even be disease,
[01:21:23] it could be disastrous, it could be anything, but there's a problem and somebody's got to get
[01:21:28] basically the Americans out of there. And so you've seen them happen all over the world and you did
[01:21:34] you did one where, Liberia or Sierra Leone, Liberia? We did one in Liberia, we did one in Brasaville,
[01:21:41] we did one in Sierra Leone and we used, I mean, you used all methods and the reason, this is
[01:21:48] the reason why they wanted us on because we were the Marine peace to it. So if there was any
[01:21:52] landings that had to come, I had to survey the beaches before the guys got there,
[01:21:57] had to make sure they had access on and off of the beach, all that kind of stuff. I was secure.
[01:22:02] That was my job, plus going to the embassies, find out what kind of supplies they have,
[01:22:07] what kind of food, what kind of medicine, all those kind of things. So when they called us to go
[01:22:12] down and do this, you kind of took control. You worked at the ambassadors, has pretty much
[01:22:19] but the military guy could take over at any time. Yeah, because this is those, these operations
[01:22:25] are so vast in the responsibilities, could you got security? Yeah. Obviously, but you got logistics,
[01:22:32] you got medical, you got food supplies, there's all these things that have to do with the place.
[01:22:37] I mean, it's a, it's a massive undertaking to get 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 people rounded up,
[01:22:46] marshaled into an area and then extracted from that area. I mean, that and keep them comfortable
[01:22:52] the whole time. At least as someone comfortable, otherwise you're going to hear about that too.
[01:22:55] Yes, you will. I'm going to call my representative, but that's, but that's a whole thing. That's
[01:23:00] I mean, we had to go out in town. I'll break it down just like the first one, the first one we
[01:23:05] went on was in to Liberia. Liberia was, we landed in Sierra Leone, I use Sierra Leone as a safe haven.
[01:23:13] And that was the best place to do that because we just surveyed the airport and stuff like that.
[01:23:18] Well, you know when Sierra Leone is your safe haven, you know you're going into a rough neighborhood.
[01:23:23] You can see your Leone is that safe. That's safe. That's right. It's not the safest neighborhood anyway.
[01:23:29] So we flew in the Liberia and the, and the embassy was basically under siege. So we had to shut the
[01:23:35] siege down, close the gates up, take care of the bad guys. That were there and start, you know,
[01:23:41] vetting people coming into the compound, the embassy because the ambassador wanted to save as many
[01:23:47] people as possible. He said, that's great, but they're not bringing everything they got, especially
[01:23:51] people with American passports to come in. So we were, we probably flew 90 chalks out of there
[01:23:59] of people with the, with the thing. I mean, when you're flying in, you're flying in low,
[01:24:04] a rocket team tried to, to take us out going in and, and the door gunner with the minigun,
[01:24:10] got pointed in the right direction and that rocket team disappeared. So that was very cool.
[01:24:15] And so we flew in, we had a chop trees down, we had to move light poles, we had to do all this
[01:24:21] for this evacuation plus. We had to tell catalog everybody coming in, take care of medical stuff,
[01:24:27] coming in and everything else. So our job was was big, was big and the ambassador loved this,
[01:24:33] but, but it was a big job. So we were on that siege probably for about two and a half weeks,
[01:24:38] right? So the, we evacuated, I think, close, well, 90 chalks, so probably,
[01:24:46] probably close to 1,500 people on that thing and getting them out there. And they were all people
[01:24:52] with American passports, our tied to an American passport, one of the other. So we,
[01:24:57] we turned that whole thing over to the Marines when the Margot there, that's their job.
[01:25:04] And everything, everything was pretty well done. We had to go back in the, in the, the country,
[01:25:09] fly in, we'd run security, we'd pick up people and, and bring them back, we had to recover the
[01:25:14] ambassadors, Egyptian daughter, the Egyptian bassers, daughter that got taken away by bad guys.
[01:25:20] So we had to go convince them that they didn't need to keep her. So we helped them with that decision.
[01:25:26] And then we, and then we got her back. So he was quite grateful and everything else. And then,
[01:25:32] and then the news media started showing up and they wanted it to go on. But, but in Liberia,
[01:25:37] they have a, a cannibal community. So we used to call them the street sweepers because
[01:25:43] in, during the day when the battles were raging and stuff like that, all the dead people would
[01:25:48] be removed at night because the cannibal should come and go, who'd be?
[01:25:54] Roadkill. Roadkill for dinner. It's exactly.
[01:25:57] To be human.
[01:25:58] Happened to be here. That was classic. That was, that, that's a first time ever seen anything like that.
[01:26:03] But it was something I think every human being should see and realize that it's out there.
[01:26:08] But it was wild. So we were able to successfully close that down and move on. A lot of first
[01:26:16] came out of that. That was the first time that a P3 had a camera mounted in it and was flying
[01:26:23] overhead and we could get the images from the city. So that was very, very cool. That was a 96.
[01:26:28] So, and you know how that's grown today with all the drones and everything else today.
[01:26:34] So yeah, it was, it was quite an operation for shielding to be there.
[01:26:40] And then you stayed in Germany. And you did the other thing you mentioned, I mean, in order to prepare
[01:26:46] sort of logistically and just for planning purposes, you guys would travel around and go into
[01:26:51] countries and say, okay, if we have to do this in this country, here's some contacts,
[01:26:54] or some people here, some places, or some recon's, check these things out.
[01:26:58] And then also at this time Bosnia was going on.
[01:27:00] But it hadn't kicked off yet. It was still kind of kind of bubbling up. You know, in the 90s,
[01:27:06] it was still going. We would fly around. We did probably like 11 different embassies
[01:27:11] where we put together packages on that and knew exactly what needed to be done.
[01:27:16] If for some reason, the Americans and those particular countries had to be evacuated. So
[01:27:21] that's something that's a standard type of operation. They just got us involved in it
[01:27:26] because we did a good job with it. And we had a team of Army guys, Air Force guys, and everything else.
[01:27:32] You know, and then I left them and then I left Germany in probably 98. And I'm trying to think,
[01:27:42] I probably had my first, we were in Bosnia because we were going to Bonstheel all the time.
[01:27:49] And I probably did, I don't know, like four months over there before I took off and had it back.
[01:27:57] But once I came back, then I was the, I went to group one and then was the weapons officer there.
[01:28:03] And that's when we put the mark 46 and the mark 48 into a contracting play and got those two weapons.
[01:28:13] So unless you, oh yeah, those are heavy weapons. They're the best. As we call them, they're firebrothers.
[01:28:20] Yeah, they are firebrothers. So we got that done and as soon as I got that off and running and they
[01:28:26] started the manufacturing, those, then I got sent the Spain. And that's when the, I took
[01:28:32] or the training department in Spain at Unit 10. And we knew, was that? That was 2000.
[01:28:38] 2000, 2003. I went over there. And that's when we started running Bosnia. We did a couple
[01:28:47] of African gigs then. But, of course, of all was there. Of course, of all was still in Germany, too,
[01:28:52] because we were running at 10. And that was, let me back up a little bit. But the
[01:28:57] course of what war, as well as Bosnia, they were filthy ones. Yeah, the guys that were there,
[01:29:06] they were just the serves, were fucking, you know, they were horrible people. Harrible, horrible people.
[01:29:14] I don't know what possessed them to be the way that they are, but they were horrible people.
[01:29:19] They had no qualms about shooting innocence, none at all. And we had no qualms about shooting
[01:29:26] people with guns. So it was good. You always heard the story about the building, where the
[01:29:33] 130 blew the corner of the building out, because we couldn't find a sniper that was in it.
[01:29:39] Okay, I was there when that happened. And I also was there when we, we went that we re-elicit
[01:29:45] in the paper on the paper building steps. There was like 10 of us and we were flipping off to the
[01:29:51] snipers when we were doing our re-enlistment. It was great. It was great. And so, because we had our
[01:29:57] countersniper's up, all we wanted to see was a barrel. Please, let me see a barrel. And so that was
[01:30:02] that is actually when sniper Alley just lost all its support. After we blew that building down,
[01:30:11] Kill and try to kill that one guy. There wasn't any other sniper's that really were on sniper
[01:30:16] Alley after that. So it kind of lost its weight because they knew that we weren't going to hesitate
[01:30:22] to take the buildings down if we couldn't get the guys. So they would ask us in, in Ramadini,
[01:30:28] you know, for good counter, counter sniper technology. And we'd say you guys have the counters
[01:30:34] sniper technology. It's called an M1 Abrams tank. That's right. That's the best counter sniper
[01:30:38] that I've seen. Oh, you want to shoot a snap from that building or at least one of those buildings
[01:30:42] over there. Cool. Watch this. That's right. Those are the ones, man. Those things. Those are the
[01:30:48] snipers. They, yeah, they do the trick. It's called Orphalode and there's a reason for it. Right. That is
[01:30:55] so cool. So cool. But that was a good thing. And we would fly back and forth the Bosnia all the time.
[01:31:00] And then of course, of all was exactly the same thing. We'd be in the woods with Jason,
[01:31:04] those guys down in the woods. And it was, you know, that was our business. And we did a good job
[01:31:10] of it. Everybody loved having us there. It's all in the United Nations people. So you were in Spain
[01:31:14] when September 11th happened? I was. I was in Spain when September 11th happened. And I had just
[01:31:20] come back from the range walked into the training department and was watching this on the TV.
[01:31:28] And I go, what movie is that? It was no movie. It really, really sent us home. And we had to move back
[01:31:38] on base after September, though. We had to move back on base and everybody started starting going.
[01:31:44] How are we going to prep for it? Where are we going? We had a couple of people come by and talk to us that we
[01:31:50] were going to be doing different things. And we did those different things, right? But none of us,
[01:31:57] I don't think any of us at that time left to go to Iraq. I think it was more of a supportive kind of
[01:32:03] thing that we had at 10 because I was still doing Africa, gigs going on to Africa at the time.
[01:32:09] I think most of the Iraqi, Afghanistan kind of thing at the time was still happening from east
[01:32:19] and west coast. That's what they broke it off. And Admiral Wilson came by and told us that it's
[01:32:24] going to be a slow crawl. We're not going to get it for the long term. We're going to take our time.
[01:32:29] We've got to plan. We're going to make sure we don't burn out our guys. All right. So that was
[01:32:34] good information. Good information. Then I left a thing. Thank you as thinking 20 years at that time.
[01:32:38] I think that he's a smart enough guy where he was going, yes, I think so. Yeah. He's very smart guy
[01:32:45] in a little bit of AdMolson. Yeah. Great. Great guy. All the senior officers, especially the officer
[01:32:50] detailer, who I called and said hey, get me to a sealed team, please right now. He was like,
[01:32:55] this thing is going to last a long, long time. Yeah. And yeah, he's right. So then where did you go
[01:33:01] when you got done with Spain? Then I came back to because that was like 2003. I came back
[01:33:08] to trade it. That's when Ronnie Cooper, Joe Burn, all the boys we put together trade at one.
[01:33:18] Got it. And I was the ops chief for trade at one. So Mike Turcott was, if you know, Mike,
[01:33:25] he was the boss in the ops shop. So we started putting together that, which was fascinating. And I
[01:33:32] did that from the inception of trade at two like 2005. And then I got a call from a good buddy of mine,
[01:33:43] Doug MacNutt. I don't know whether you know him or not, but he was a detailer. And he goes,
[01:33:48] hey, because George Young had gotten hit over when he was over in Iraq. And he needed a place to kind of
[01:33:55] settle because he was getting retired. I said, well, you take my shot, my spot here. And I'll find some
[01:34:01] place else to go. And so that's when Doug MacNutt, I thought I was going to stay west coast, right?
[01:34:08] He goes, I got a hard and to feel billet. I go, hey, where's it at, man? He goes, why?
[01:34:14] I go, why? I feel billet in Hawaii. He goes, yeah, I need an ops chief over in Hawaii. I said, well,
[01:34:23] you know, I'll go, not knowing I have to go to SDV school. Oh, to go to this billet, right? So now,
[01:34:33] I'm a senior citizen almost. And Doug's going, yeah, you got to go to SDV. Are you a master chief yet?
[01:34:40] I made master chief at SDV school. Okay. So it was so interesting. The interest in me, George was my
[01:34:46] third platoon chief. Right. And then when I took over trade at was when he was the master chief of trade at.
[01:34:52] Oh, okay, okay. So George, yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah. So that's probably his, what he did have when he
[01:35:00] went to the odd took my job. And then he became, because I think Ron Cooper was the master chief
[01:35:06] of a trade at and he probably relieved Ron Cooper probably. Probably. So anyway, off to 2005,
[01:35:13] he was the SDV school and Panama City. How far did you? I was like 56 at the time. Yeah. So yeah.
[01:35:22] For those of you that don't know what an SDV is echo. It's sealed delivery vehicle. It's a
[01:35:28] miniature submarine, but it's not a submarine that keeps you dry. It's called a wet submarine. So
[01:35:35] it's got a motor on it. And it's, it's enclosed, but water comes in and out of it. So you wear a
[01:35:40] scuba rig inside of this thing. And because otherwise, you know, you'd have to worry about pressurizing
[01:35:45] this thing and you have to be his home. You have to get in and out of it. And so that all that would
[01:35:49] make it too complicated. So they just take a basically a shell, put a motor in it, and then you get
[01:35:55] inside the shell, and you drive this small underwater submarine. Is that that like real claustrophobic one?
[01:36:01] Do you know, yeah, you'd be lucky if you're, yeah, okay. It's very claustrophobic. Especially if you're a big guy.
[01:36:07] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's, it takes a lot of skill to drive them. And then, and when you have a
[01:36:14] driver, you want to keep that driver that's real good at it. I was not real good at driving the boat
[01:36:20] because I need him my glasses. That's what they give for him in a 57 year old. You're a good
[01:36:28] thing, right? So anyway, how long is that school? The school is three months. At least it's in
[01:36:36] Florida. Oh, yeah. But still you're doing what eight hour dives. Oh, yeah, all the time. All the time.
[01:36:42] Take on the boat apart, put in the boat back together, doing it. I mean, you're just, you're doing what you
[01:36:46] have to do. I mean, you got to know the head, your motor head. Oh, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I can take the
[01:36:52] boats apart and put them back together. Drive and almost see in all the other thing, right? And
[01:36:56] state, keep it on, keep it on level and all that kind of stuff. Hey, one chance. When you can't read the
[01:37:01] numbers on the beef, that's how it gets challenged. Give me words, my glasses. That's why I always
[01:37:06] let somebody else drive. And I would ride them back. Go on. But it was, but it was interesting. It was
[01:37:12] an interesting time. It's something I kind of enjoyed. I wish I was better at it. But, but I wasn't,
[01:37:18] but I still went to SDV team in Hawaii. So I went to the team in Hawaii. I became the combat
[01:37:25] systems officer over there because Jim Merrell at the time was retiring. And so I took over
[01:37:31] his job. And that is where we started working and doing a whole lot of very, very cool things that
[01:37:37] they're doing today. And so it was a fun gig. I mean, it was a fun tour over there. And then when I
[01:37:45] left that, I actually went to work on our dry submarine that was over there. And it kind of burned
[01:37:52] up so I kind of lost my job over there, which really pissed me off because I was really getting
[01:37:58] good at paddle boarding. And so the, so I had to come back to work on. And that's where I took the
[01:38:06] program over in N.8. And that's kind of where I wrapped up my career. It was running that program
[01:38:14] and running the palms and the funding lines and everything else to keep the new SDVs because
[01:38:19] now we have a new one. And keeping that and keeping the boys trained and getting them the gear
[01:38:25] that they need and it's evolved a lot since I had that particular job. So it's, so it's been
[01:38:33] very, very interesting. It's been a very interesting career. I mean, so 1967, you joined the Navy
[01:38:40] and now it's 2014. Yeah, the end of 2014. Is it when you finally retire? Yeah, after 47 years.
[01:38:47] Oh, yeah. Wild. That's what I held. And, and just for the note to all of your clients, I was retired
[01:38:58] for six months and then they sucked me back in. So I still work over there. Yes, every day I go into
[01:39:07] do things. And now I'm working analyst stuff that's for Naval Special Warfare and it's very exciting.
[01:39:14] I mean, I think and and Jockel tell you the same thing. I mean, once you work for the boys
[01:39:19] and you're working for the boys and for their health and they're benefit, you want to keep doing
[01:39:24] that because they're out there on the front lines. They and they require people just like us
[01:39:30] to keep pushing and keep doing the best we can do because we're we're speaking for them. They've
[01:39:35] got more than enough to do when you're out there in the war zone. Yeah. Yeah, so when I was the
[01:39:40] Admiral's aide for 13 months and one of the things that my boss would say in these big meetings,
[01:39:46] he'd say, what does that, what does that do for our seal platoons? Right. And that's the always
[01:39:50] the reminder for all the guys. It was at Warcomks, Warcomks really elevated. They're looking at things.
[01:39:55] You know, I remember I go to a meeting, they'd be talking about what kind of boat engine are we going
[01:40:00] to have in 2028, right? Yeah. And I'd be thinking of myself, how does this matter? And that's what he would
[01:40:06] say. He'd say, how does this affect the seal platoon? How is this going to, because you know what,
[01:40:10] the seal team's argument to be here in 2028? Oh, and you know what they're going to need? A boat engine.
[01:40:14] That's right. So if we don't plan for it, don't figure out what the best one is right now.
[01:40:18] Smart guys looking at it that have operational experience and that care. Yes. Then they'll
[01:40:23] end up with a piece of shit. But if you could do it right, that's how we got the the Mark 48, the
[01:40:28] Mark 46, right? Exactly. Because someone like you was saying, okay, this is what we need.
[01:40:32] Yep. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's very true. And if you don't have people doing that and push
[01:40:37] in the future envelope, then you'll always be behind the parker. All of our peer-to-peer competitors
[01:40:43] are doing exactly that. And some of them are doing a better job than we're doing at it. So
[01:40:48] you we have to push harder. That's that's our job. And so there's your retirement. There's like
[01:40:55] 1500 people show up for your retirement. Right. There was more, but they couldn't get in.
[01:40:58] And it was at the at the lows hotel. Yeah. There was, I mean, people are piling in from everywhere.
[01:41:07] I mean, and I didn't know I knew that many people, but evidently I did it. So it was wild.
[01:41:13] It was wild. It was wild. You had five people speak? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. And they were all great. I mean,
[01:41:18] they were all, all people that had a very important part of my career as I went through
[01:41:25] the Naval Special Warfare. You know, I mean, the guys that were e-fives with me that were now
[01:41:32] two star admins, they spoke. Right. I mean, I think I'm one of the only guys that's had an instructor
[01:41:40] from their training class, come and speak at their retirement. You know, I had, who was that?
[01:41:47] Mother-moi. Oh no. Mother-moi. I mean, the best CEO I had, John McTai was there. He spoke,
[01:41:53] added, you know, it was, it was fantastic. You know, so it was, it was very cool. It was very,
[01:42:00] very cool. Retirement couldn't have asked for it to be any better. Yeah. 47 years. You, you wrap up with
[01:42:08] that career. Yes. No, that was with waivers. Okay. Yeah. I know kid and a lot of waivers. It's not a
[01:42:16] waiver. It's a lot of waivers. And then you, you're still our working for Naval Special Warfare. But at some
[01:42:22] point, you realized that there was another mission that you wanted to get out. You wanted to attack.
[01:42:28] Absolutely. How, how did you, how did you get involved with, with your next mission that you got involved
[01:42:34] with? I will, um, yeah, let me go and, let me go into that. I had an old team guy. It seems like
[01:42:39] it always happens with an old team guy. Jeff Bramsted, who is, who is a sky god? Jeff Bramsted. Jeff came
[01:42:48] to me when I, right after retired and says, hey, I need your help with this particular project that
[01:42:57] I've, I've taken on. And I went, well, what's the project? And he told me it was child trafficking.
[01:43:03] And I said, well, you know, I mean, I've dealt with that all over the world. Then we've saved
[01:43:08] thousands and thousands of kids all over the world because of, you know, assholes that that want to
[01:43:13] abuse them and use them. And I said, you know, we've done that. He said, but, but this is American
[01:43:19] kids on American soil. That kind of peaked my interest. He had a, um, uh, one of the PhDs at, um,
[01:43:28] USD had written a white paper. Amy Carver, Carverner, she had written a white paper. I read the
[01:43:35] white paper and I just went, wow, I had no idea that 3000 children a year. And Southern California
[01:43:42] were being either kidnapped or put into human trafficking in one form or another. And I said,
[01:43:50] you know, I have to get involved in this some way. So I met Joseph Travers, who is the, um,
[01:43:58] is the co-founder of Save Than America. Save Than America is a nonprofit organization. We don't
[01:44:07] charge the parents any money at all to go locate their children. The children half are the parents
[01:44:13] half that come to us. They give us the power of attorney of the child. And then the child becomes
[01:44:19] ours to locate to find locate and identify which they do. Many of them have. We recovered over 200
[01:44:26] kids so far. We will take that power of attorney. We will find the child, we'll locate the child,
[01:44:33] identify the child. And then we work with local law enforcement and have local law enforcement,
[01:44:38] come in and recover the children. Give the children to us so we can take the children to medical
[01:44:44] care, get any DA evidence off of them. And then we will take them into a counseling type thing
[01:44:52] or a safe haven so that they can come down off the drugs. A majority of them have heroin in them.
[01:45:00] They have some type of drugs that keep them, you know, in a very lethargic state so that these
[01:45:09] pimps and predators can do whatever they want with them. The very, very sad state and a heinous
[01:45:16] crime. When you're dealing with these situations where are these children coming from? How does it happen?
[01:45:24] They come from many different areas. The Southern California is one. We've come from all over the
[01:45:32] country. They come from poorer families. They come from rich families. There's not any
[01:45:38] demographics on exactly how they get there that we've been to determine yet. So we're only into
[01:45:45] it a little bit over 200 kids so far. We've been working in Southern California that's where
[01:45:50] our main location is at. We get a lot of support, philanthropic support from the community,
[01:45:57] philanthropic support from the government. So it's the local government. I mean,
[01:46:02] and that's the, that's kind of where we've been focused at. Now we've gone all the way to Florida to
[01:46:08] recover kids. We've gone to Utah to recover kids. We've gone to Phoenix Arizona to recover kids.
[01:46:16] And so that's what we're doing now is we're expanding, save the America from San Diego.
[01:46:24] We're over in Las Vegas at the end of the month. They had recovering kids. We probably got four
[01:46:29] kids over there that we've got information and in tell-on that we will go seek and find, call in
[01:46:36] local law enforcement and have them recover the children just as I mentioned. Local law enforcement
[01:46:42] loves us because we're a huge asset to them and helping them find, you know, these kids.
[01:46:49] Because they, they don't have the time. They're so overworked, so over-bearant by, you know,
[01:46:55] runaway kids or kids that gets, you know, into trafficking. They don't have the resources
[01:47:01] to do as much as they would like to do. So it's very frustrating to law enforcement.
[01:47:06] So when law enforcement hears about us, they are totally in tune to say, hey, come in and help us. All of
[01:47:13] us are private investigators. We're all insured in licensed. We all are CCW carriers. We have a
[01:47:20] whole network of private investigators throughout the United States that we can call on the
[01:47:25] Neem Mac people. So if we know that a child's been taken to another state, we will call a PI and that
[01:47:32] particular state. He will volunteer his time to go see if he can locate that child at a particular
[01:47:37] address or where we kind of direct them. If he finds the child, then we will fly a team from San Diego
[01:47:44] here to go set up, do the surveillance, do the watching, and everything that's required to identify
[01:47:49] that child to call in local law enforcement. That's how we've been working to date to recover
[01:47:55] these over 200 kids. Now this is a heinous crime. It's a crime that I have to ask everybody in your
[01:48:04] audience. I have to ask every grandparent, every parent that's out there to please be on the watch
[01:48:11] and be able to identify what's happening with this child trafficking things. These pimps,
[01:48:18] these perverts are taking these kids. A half the take them in public every non-than just to keep
[01:48:23] on. They keep them locked up most of the time and houses. And if you see them on in the street,
[01:48:29] don't be afraid to go seek law enforcement and ask law enforcement. That's something is not right
[01:48:35] with this particular situation because you may be saving that child's life. And that's what we
[01:48:41] want to do. That's why we're here. This all our whole organization is about the children. That's why
[01:48:47] we are bound not the charge the parents for doing this. People have charged parents in the
[01:48:53] past thousands of dollars and never found their child farm and how heart-wrenching is that. To be
[01:48:59] a parent you've already lost your child and now you're paying thousands of dollars to some unscrupulous
[01:49:05] person. And they're not locating your child. We'll locate your child. Usually the day it takes
[01:49:12] three to four days to locate a child no matter where they're at in the United States. We've got
[01:49:17] I've got great computer people. I've got great people that work behind the scenes to assist
[01:49:22] and help us even in Mexico sometimes. But we hardly ever go outside the United States. And because
[01:49:29] we work so well with law enforcement and supporting them. So this is the word I want to get out. We need
[01:49:35] your help. We need your support. Please go to our website which is saved in America.org.
[01:49:43] And the whole story is there. It's all about the teams. We're made up of retired special
[01:49:50] operations, guys, and retired police officers, some FBI guys, some old agency guys that I've
[01:49:56] worked with in the past. And I have a whole slew of IT guys that support us with chasing the internet.
[01:50:04] Because that's where it all starts from. So that's where I was going to ask you. When you see
[01:50:09] what are some warning signs for parents to look out for? Grandparents to look out for. Obviously
[01:50:14] the internet has got to be a huge one right now. Oh, totally. The internet is the media that gets
[01:50:23] them started, right? And a lot of them, we call it the Don Juan guys. So you have an older guy
[01:50:30] that is pursuing a younger girl, promising her all these kind of things. That's one thing you
[01:50:36] got to watch out for. When you're, if your daughter or your son shows up with expensive
[01:50:41] purses or different gifts and things like that, where are they getting it? They're getting it
[01:50:46] from these pimps because these guys are trying to lure them in to what a good life that they can
[01:50:52] show them. As long as they can possess them. And the Don Juan's will keep them for two or three
[01:50:59] months, you know, as a girlfriend or something like that, then one day they will sell her and she'll
[01:51:05] be gone. Then if she's gone, they will sell her on the weekends only the weekends because they'll
[01:51:11] bring them home so you can feed them all week long. And then on the weekends, you won't see them
[01:51:17] because the pimple have them out selling these girls. And I have to remind you that, you know,
[01:51:23] a one person that gives that these pimps do that is worth and they sell them throughout that
[01:51:34] weekend and a year's particular time, $150 to $200,000 a year. So that's just an idea. It's better
[01:51:43] than any drug that pimple or that drug dealer could push because they use them, they bring them back,
[01:51:50] they let them go back to either a community home during the week because they don't have the
[01:51:55] feed them, they don't have to keep them. They are your house and then on the weekends, they just
[01:52:01] call them up and off they go, get you know and the kids are 14 years old. So you know, you kind
[01:52:08] of say, what does a 14 year old know? A 14 year old doesn't know a whole lot, right? And they don't
[01:52:14] listen to their parents as well as they should. So it's kind of up to the parents to be able
[01:52:20] to be ready for the warning signs, be ready to do something. And if you have any questions at
[01:52:26] all, go to our website, save them America.org and ask the question and we can get you a
[01:52:32] steered to a counselor, get you steered to something that's going on in the cities. Like I say,
[01:52:38] if we're in one of the cities that we're involved in, we have counselors, we have people
[01:52:43] that you could talk to in those cities. Man, if you said 3000 in Southern California? Yes,
[01:52:52] shocking. That's why I got involved. That's what I so imagine. If that's what you have in Southern
[01:52:59] California, imagine what you have nationwide. That is, it's a crime and it's a heinous crime
[01:53:06] that nobody wants to talk about. You, I mean, they're talking about child trafficking, they're
[01:53:12] talking about the immigration problem and everything else. But nobody's talking about the child
[01:53:17] trafficking inside the United States of American kids, right? And it's done by all kinds of unscrupulous
[01:53:25] people. I mean, the first ring we busted here in San Diego was run by Russians on Pacific Coast
[01:53:31] Highway. And I was blown away when I went there. So these guys are, they got multiple girls,
[01:53:39] underage girls, and they've somehow gotten them off wherever they pulled them out of their house,
[01:53:45] and they've they've lured them in somehow. Yes. They've gotten them on drugs. Yes. So they've
[01:53:50] got them in a flacid, say to mind where they're not thinking straight. And then they're just,
[01:53:56] they're just selling them. Yep, they're cool. And let me go back a little bit, but in every
[01:54:02] middle school that we have here in San Diego, which is going to be shocking to many of the people
[01:54:08] that are listening is that they are recruiters. The gangs have recruiters inside the middle
[01:54:13] schools that are trying to recruit these girls, far the Don Wands, so that the drug cartels and the
[01:54:21] gangs have these as income sources. So if you go, the only, I mean, the schools have been real
[01:54:28] slow to recognize that this is happening. And they are still real slow to get programs in place
[01:54:35] to teach these kids about these recruiters that are in the middle schools. I'm middle
[01:54:41] schools. It's 14 years old, 13, 14 year old, that these recruiters are trying to recruit
[01:54:46] these girls and boys into this gang style life, or style of life, so that they can sell them
[01:54:55] on the weekends, bring them home to mom and let them be school girls during the week, and then
[01:55:00] traffic come on the weekends. So that is, that's something that's going on today. So
[01:55:08] everybody has to be aware of that. And that's why I asked parents and grandparents to please keep your
[01:55:13] eyes open and be aware of these kind of things because there is that evil out there and it is
[01:55:18] happening every day in our world. And these kids these days, like what you're talking about,
[01:55:24] is exactly what the, I don't know what the trend, I guess, called the trend of, you know,
[01:55:32] with social media, oh, I'm going to be rich. I'm going to be mature. I'm going to have a cool
[01:55:36] car. Oh, there's drugs. Cool. I'm going to be mature. I'm going to be mature. Girl, even though
[01:55:41] I'm only 14 years old. And so they see that and they get offered that. And that's, you know,
[01:55:47] I could imagine that's how a girl gets lowered into these horrible situations.
[01:55:51] It's exactly exactly right. I want to be older than I am. And I want more stuff. My family can't
[01:55:57] provide this for me. But my, my honey over here can provide it for me. It gets me new dresses,
[01:56:03] new purses, all that kind of stuff. Those are the kind of things. And those are kind of the red flags
[01:56:08] that every parent needs to be aware of. Man, all right. So saved in America.org is the website.
[01:56:20] You got your team on there. A bunch of old team guys, too. A bunch of guys I know. And all
[01:56:25] and all guys that now have their private PI license. So you guys are actually out doing the
[01:56:31] recon work if needed. Oh, absolutely. We're doing all the, where the rubber meets the road. We're
[01:56:36] there. We, and that's, that's how we find these kids. I mean, you know, the, the police department,
[01:56:42] if they had the resources to do it, I know they would be doing it. But they don't have the
[01:56:46] resources. And that's why that's why we're holding a fundraiser in November on November 7th
[01:56:53] at the Estonia Hotel in La Jolla. Please go to our website. Everything is on there. If you can
[01:57:00] afford to come to the event, it's going to be fantastic. We have, we probably have about
[01:57:09] 500. Okay. So what was the date on that? November the 7th. It'll be at 6pm. Our website has all the
[01:57:19] information on it. And you can buy tickets off our website. If you got any questions about it,
[01:57:25] please just go to the website. Send us a question. We'll answer that. It's for corporate people.
[01:57:31] They can buy tables of 10 for all of the other people that they have or all their employees.
[01:57:37] They can donate. They can do so many things that they can do to help sponsors and help support us.
[01:57:44] Awesome. Awesome. Well, I'll tell you what. We've been going almost two hours right now.
[01:57:50] I think this may be a good time to wrap up. I'll tell you right now. I'm going to listen to this
[01:57:56] and I'm going to have about a thousand more questions for you. Okay. That's good. Because I was just
[01:57:59] getting warmed up every, you know, when we start talking, I mean, the stuff about Vietnam and
[01:58:04] you know, the fact that you did a hundred missions, you probably debriefed three of them.
[01:58:08] Four of them. Maybe here briefly. I'm going to start thinking about those. And I'm going to start.
[01:58:13] I'm going to come up with all kinds of new questions. And it'd be awesome if you could come back on
[01:58:18] because I guarantee everybody that's listening. This is going to want to hear more.
[01:58:22] How I'm sure. And there's, you know, we a long time ago of friend of mine put together a
[01:58:28] book. I got like 20 guys from Vietnam to all right a story called the book was called the
[01:58:33] men behind the trident by Dennis Cummings. And there's like 20 different stories of, you know,
[01:58:39] the people is the first contact action that they had in Vietnam. One of my stories is in there.
[01:58:45] But it's a great read and it's out on Amazon. So if you guys get a chance, go spend through that.
[01:58:53] That's interesting. I actually have that book. Oh, good. I was looking at it today.
[01:58:58] What I'll do is we'll do it. Next time you come on, we'll go through your story.
[01:59:02] We'll talk about some more stories. And in that way, I seldom give out books that I'm going to
[01:59:07] cover on the podcast prior to covering them. I don't think, and it, sometimes people get mad.
[01:59:12] They go, please tell us what books you're going to cover. And I, and I don't do it because
[01:59:17] I don't even know what books I'm going to cover. Sure. There's so many books that I'll be,
[01:59:21] I'm reading five, six books at a time. And I'll go, okay, this one, I like this part now.
[01:59:25] And I'll cover that book because I cover a lot of books on the podcast. Sure. But yeah. So now
[01:59:28] everyone has a heads up. It's, it's men behind the trident. Men behind the trident.
[01:59:32] It's my Cummings. Yeah. Coming in. And we'll cover that next time you come on. All right.
[01:59:37] Beautiful. That would be awesome. You got anything else? And then you want to add?
[01:59:41] Just I want to, before I jump off, I want to thank all of you for your support to save
[01:59:46] the America. We definitely need it and make yourselves more aware of the human trafficking that's
[01:59:53] going on in the United States of America of US children. They're not foreign kids. They're US kids.
[02:00:02] Yeah. Well, once again, Master Chief Kirby, Sir. Yeah. Thanks for coming on.
[02:00:13] Thanks for what you did for the country. Thanks for what you did to the Navy. Thanks for what you did
[02:00:17] for the teams. As I already said, it was your generation of seals that built the foundation
[02:00:24] of the tactics of the operational excellence and of the standard of will and of perseverance.
[02:00:31] That's never going to be forgotten. It's what gave me my life. Right on.
[02:00:37] It's what gave me my life as you guys. So thanks for doing that. Thanks for coming on.
[02:00:42] And it's an honor to be part of a brotherhood that you're a member of. And thanks for having me.
[02:00:48] And we love the brotherhood. Long live the brotherhood. Indeed, sir. All right.
[02:00:53] And Master Chief Kirby, her out, has left the building real quick. He didn't mention this
[02:01:03] for social media for saved in America is at saved in America on Twitter, at saved in America on the
[02:01:11] Instagram and at saved in America on Facebook. So there you go. Check that out. Follow that support that
[02:01:19] situation. And you know, we started off to I started off talking about learning how to act,
[02:01:28] learning how to get better. Echo. Yes. Are you looking to get better? Yes. Or are you trying to
[02:01:39] learn how to act better? Trying to. Yeah. I even worked out today. I feel like that. The feel
[02:01:44] good about that. I hope you did. I did. Any other things that we can do to get better? Yes. We can
[02:01:50] live. Oh yeah. Big time. We can't imagine camp coming up. I know sold out. But a point is
[02:01:59] you do jujitsu. That's what you do. Highly recommend. But we were, yeah, just the other day when we're
[02:02:05] waiting before we record it. We're sitting there. Jujitsu is going on. Your boys there. Oh,
[02:02:10] yes. Jujitsu. Other friends doing Jujitsu. And I'm sitting standing there looking at it,
[02:02:16] listening to you. Of course. And just watching people do Jujitsu. Yeah. Even watching
[02:02:22] Jujitsu people do Jujitsu. When you understand Jujitsu is like, filling my heart and just filling it to
[02:02:29] the brim. And I'm like talking to you. And then I even said, I was like,
[02:02:32] you just is so good man. I'm just watching people. You know, beginners, whatever,
[02:02:37] high level guys, whatever. It's so good. Unless when you do it, it's even better than watching it.
[02:02:43] You'll know. Ask the people who do it. You'll know. They'll tell you when you do it,
[02:02:48] you're going to need a key. Of course. And what you're going to get, none other than the best
[02:02:52] key. Unless you want the worst key, I don't know. But if you want the best one, you get the origin
[02:02:56] key. Get the best key from originmain.com. Made in America from the dirt to the shirt. Yes.
[02:03:05] From the seed to the ghee. So we got we got a bunch of awesome craftsmen up in Maine,
[02:03:15] craftsmen up in Maine, making these geese. They're also making geese. They're making rashcards for
[02:03:21] no ghee. I meant to say they're making shirts, t-shirts, sweatshirts. They're also making jeans right now.
[02:03:30] Jeans. Is there, I mean jeans are as American as Apple Pie, right? Blue jeans. So get yourself some
[02:03:40] blue jeans. You want American jeans. You know, right? Are there even any American, I mean,
[02:03:46] there has to be odd over there. There are some. And you know what they do? They make these
[02:03:52] hipster American jeans. And they sell them for $280. That's what they do. Okay. So you don't want
[02:04:00] those jeans. Unless you do, I don't know, but no, you don't. These are not that. So originmain.com
[02:04:06] get yourself some clothing of all kinds, including clothing for training, including clothing for
[02:04:14] working and for cruising. Yeah. All good. Of course. Also, you want to keep your body intact as
[02:04:22] well while training, while just cruising, whatever. But recovering. How about that? Yes, you do. Yes.
[02:04:31] Joint warfare? Yes. The, the, just go read the reviews on joint warfare. And then get some.
[02:04:37] Because I consider and tell you that I take joint warfare three in the morning, three at night,
[02:04:42] you take, you take three in the morning for your night. Three. I, what I was doing that when I,
[02:04:46] when I had like when you were injured, each now you backed off. I'm back on the, yeah, I just do three.
[02:04:51] Okay. Read the reviews. See what other people say. Because there's people that are like, oh, my
[02:04:57] mom had bad art for whatever, arthritis problems. Yeah. And they go on joint warfare, which has
[02:05:04] active proven things in it. Curcumin, right, tumor, two, two, two, Marick. Yeah. All those things.
[02:05:15] So yeah, joint warfare, get the grill oil. Get that's the combo. That's the combo. That's the,
[02:05:20] that's the dual hitter. Get that dual hitter. Oh, yeah. Big time. The, and here and I'm not
[02:05:26] recommending to do this, but for sake of this kind of experiment for lack of a term. If you're already
[02:05:33] on joint warfare and crew, try go off it. See what happens. I don't recommend that. Yeah, yeah,
[02:05:37] I don't really do it. I mean, that's just, it's more of a dare than anything, but Brett,
[02:05:40] try go off it. I've done it. I've done it. I've had a lot of complacency. Whatever. Okay. When you do
[02:05:44] legs, when you squat, guess what you're going to need, additional protein. The steaking and a cut it.
[02:05:52] So when you squat, when you do, you ever do heavy cleans, and like the next day, your whole
[02:05:57] posterior chain is like sore. Yeah. It needs. You know what it's saying to you? It's going
[02:06:04] mook. It doesn't go. So listen to your body. You don't people say that. You call it
[02:06:11] into your body. You know your body saying your body saying you're body saying you're so boy.
[02:06:14] I love it. You could. So get yourself some of those mook. Get yourself a, you know what I do when
[02:06:19] I do when I do legs. When I get done, I don't normally do this because it's pretty early in the
[02:06:24] morning. I'm usually not hungry anymore. When I do legs a lot of times I'll get done. I'll have a little
[02:06:28] handful of nuts. You know, we're talking seven o'clock in the morning. A little handful of mixed nuts,
[02:06:33] which people got to kick out of the way I say that. And then I'll do a little one scoop hitter. Okay.
[02:06:38] And this is right. This is like an hour. Yes. Yeah. Maybe like two hours after. Yes. For me, that's kind of
[02:06:43] so you don't believe in the anabolic window. You know what that is? Yeah. I know what it is. I
[02:06:48] wouldn't say I'm not a believer, but it's just not something that I, I even am hungry. I listen to my body.
[02:06:55] My body wants more. Well, here's the thing though. I, I have, I thought it was to me and my
[02:06:59] mind it was proven to anabolic window. Right when you're done working out, probably is into recovery mode.
[02:07:05] Then I read like all this stuff. Oh, there's no true. You're going to do this. And growth
[02:07:08] home alone. And all this like good stuff as far as you go. It's weird. So check this out. The things that I've
[02:07:13] been saying. Okay. Like I used to say, I got to eat steak all the time, right? Hey, I eat steak,
[02:07:18] steak, people. And then people all of a sudden, that's a, that's an actual thing now. The carnivore
[02:07:24] diet. Oh, I mean, like it's a real thing now. Yeah. That's the same thing with me. I'd be like,
[02:07:28] I don't eat breakfast. I don't like to eat until, you know, 10 to 11, I've all of a sudden it's called
[02:07:32] something. It's called intermittent fasting. Right? This is just stuff. I just kind of lived that way.
[02:07:37] Right. So now the sudden the same thing with people saying, oh, uh, uh, uh, your, your discipline
[02:07:44] depletes throughout the day. Wrong. It's actually wrong. It's now it's proven wrong. I was right.
[02:07:50] Well, so anyways, what I'm saying is listen to your body, the people say this. Listen to your body.
[02:07:55] I'm saying it. Say it that too. Well, I'm staying at right now. Listen to your body. No,
[02:07:58] your body says your body's saying milk. Yeah. And my wife, my wife mixed up a strawberry
[02:08:05] milk with the, do you have one of those nice blunders? Like the power blenders that has like a
[02:08:10] 40 horsepower engine in it. Yes, right. My wife mixed up a mole in there and she, I come home and she's like,
[02:08:16] I mixed a mole in those things and she was talking like almost an essential voice. Right? And I go,
[02:08:22] okay. And she goes, she said something she never said she goes, it was next level. Which he never says that.
[02:08:29] And then she goes, she goes, it's the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. That's what she said.
[02:08:34] She said those words fired up. It's the best thing I've ever tasted in my life. This is a protein
[02:08:40] shake. Right? That's, let's face. That's interesting. That's something. Right? Nothing. That's not
[02:08:45] true. Yeah. So yeah. And don't feel like a warrior kid milk because sometimes your body, your kids,
[02:08:51] you know what their body, their brain, their brain is saying, give me sugar. Yes. Right. Their brains.
[02:08:56] I give me a, give me a chocolate chip. Right. To answer that call, answer that call instead of giving
[02:09:02] the poison, give them something that answers the call, but makes them stronger faster, smarter,
[02:09:08] better. Yeah. Give them some warrior kid milk. Although I would not recommend that you tell
[02:09:14] you kids to listen to their body because their kids would be like, hey, my body's telling me I want some
[02:09:19] fucking candy. Well, if my kids don't need to say to that, yes, you listen, you, you feed them the
[02:09:26] right things. So milk. Yeah, because kids listen to their taste buds. They don't listen to their body.
[02:09:30] That's what I'm saying. Yes. You're right. So when your kids taste buds call out for that, that little
[02:09:36] sweetness hit me. Yeah. Give them what you keep the good slides right in. It's right in.
[02:09:41] Yeah. Easy money. Good. So there you go. Right on. And don't forget about white tea. Yeah.
[02:09:46] Jocco white tea. Taste good. Did you notice when Sean Parnell was on the podcast? He's like,
[02:09:53] this, I've had so much caffeine in it. And I was like, no, actually doesn't. There's only 60 grams.
[02:09:58] Yeah. What you feeling is the antioxidant kicker.
[02:10:01] Yeah. Well, I did drink four of them. Yeah. That's the same. And here's the thing. I drink four of
[02:10:07] them too before and the caffeine sneaks up on you. Because you keep, you're just, it's like a steady
[02:10:13] dose of caffeine. You're like, oh, yeah. So, and he's, you know, when you're in conversation and
[02:10:18] talking about stuff or whatever. So yeah, he got hit with a double triple whammy situation.
[02:10:22] Check. Also, Jocco as a store, it's called Jocco store. And this is where we, we collectively,
[02:10:31] we can get rash cards there. Oh, yeah. Let's say get out of there. When you do ring workouts,
[02:10:36] using your rings, you need to, you kind of need to wear rash cards. Yeah. Could you get, you'll get like,
[02:10:42] what is it? Rope Burr. Yeah. Basic rap, birr. Chafing, or your arms. Yeah. I got the, I don't do
[02:10:49] mine's not as intense as yours. The workout, but you know, you do like dips and in some push-up
[02:10:54] situations or whatever, you know, the various things. And I felt the chafing. My workout wasn't long enough
[02:10:59] on the rings. It wasn't long enough to actually get chafing. But I was in a chafing indication.
[02:11:07] So you get rash, guys. You can also get t-shirts. The t-shirts that I wear,
[02:11:11] JP to Nelson, I picture these clean and out. It's closet. Get rid of shirts.
[02:11:16] And I was like, that's why I'm not sure. So they say, it's all my shirts are the same.
[02:11:21] Yeah. If you like the shirts that I wear, or you like the shirts that echo, you can just get the shirts there
[02:11:25] in jocquist or dot com. Just leave any cool freedom. Represent. Def course course.
[02:11:29] Represent. Some of us representing Def course the other day. And I had a little bit of sort of
[02:11:35] of a little connect, right? Because you're kind of stepping up. Oh, yeah. But, and JP speaking,
[02:11:41] JP he posted a picture of one of the troopers representing big time in the wild at the UFC.
[02:11:48] Oh, yeah. That's right. There was a guy at the UFC. I saw it too. I tried to take a picture.
[02:11:52] Didn't get there quick enough. And my little daughter who was watching UFC with me,
[02:11:56] check. She was like, oh, you didn't get a picture. I go, someone's going to post it.
[02:12:01] Watch. You know, and someone posted even before JP. My little brother text me before JP
[02:12:07] texted me with it. Text me. He says, hey, someone was out to UFC wearing you guys shirt. He's
[02:12:12] with someone's at the UFC wearing the shirt that you designed echo troughs. And I didn't see that.
[02:12:17] But unless he did indicate, so the point there is, yeah, when you see, when you see another
[02:12:23] person in the wild representing hard on the UFC, oh, on the UFC or otherwise true, but you will,
[02:12:30] you'll feel that connect. And jocquist, I feel it too, man. In the boat of the
[02:12:34] ladies, yeah, yeah, connected. So that's that. Also, you can also get a trucker hat or flex or flex
[02:12:41] that or you can get a beanie winter is coming. Hoodies heavy medium light heavy and like medium
[02:12:49] heavy like I think they're heavy. They're heavy. They're normal. Hoodies is what I'm saying. And like,
[02:12:55] yeah, a lot of cool stuff. I got a new design coming out didn't even tell you. Boom. Oh, that's a big surprise.
[02:12:59] But it's, you know, probably lame. No, it's not lame. I, I pretty, if you will like you. There's no 50 50
[02:13:05] chance. Well, there's no 50% of the time when you show me something like dang, that's dope.
[02:13:11] 50% of the time I go, I don't like that at all.
[02:13:13] I'm proud. All right. Well, there you go. We're going to see about that one. And I predict that you like it.
[02:13:20] But, but whichever, you know, it's, it's, it's out. It's out. Big, yeah, it's out. Big time. Right on.
[02:13:25] Anyway, yeah, jocco store.com. There it is. Boom. Also, subscribe to the podcast if you haven't already.
[02:13:31] Google Play iTunes Stitching. You know, wherever you get your podcast. And then forget about the
[02:13:35] Warrior Kid podcast. We got that as well. If you're, if you got kids or if you're an adult,
[02:13:40] that just wants to get after it more, yeah, go the Warrior Kid podcast. And you can also support
[02:13:46] A Warrior Kid by going to IrishOx Ranch.com and getting some. Getting some jocquoise soap
[02:13:52] made by Eden from goat milk on his farm. America. Yeah. Big to stay clean. Stay clean.
[02:14:00] Big time. Also, while you're staying clean, if you want to watch some YouTube videos, don't watch
[02:14:04] that junk girl-fail videos. We have a YouTube channel. We have excerpts on there from the podcast.
[02:14:11] Like, be watch those excerpts because, you know, everyone's in a while, they'll miss, you know,
[02:14:15] this, you know, two hour podcast about, you know, something, maybe they didn't have the time
[02:14:20] of whatever. Maybe it's happened before. I'm saying that. But don't get the excerpts. So they can
[02:14:26] really get many of the lessons. You know, you need to make BTF Tony compilation. That's three minutes
[02:14:32] long of him just saying awesome stuff. It'd be longer than three minutes. Please. Yeah, well,
[02:14:37] I mean, I'm saying, just take the top highlights of, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah,
[02:14:40] it's still might be more than three minutes. It might be my B88, in a video. Yeah, that is a good idea.
[02:14:46] But the last point is yes, we do have a YouTube channel and articles. If you want to
[02:14:50] encourage Kirby, her L looks like, yeah, then you can, you can watch the whole podcast. This whole podcast
[02:14:56] will be on YouTube. You can see what he looks like. He is expressions. Yeah, so psychological warfare,
[02:15:02] which is a little sonic boost for your brain that will make you think the right thoughts that
[02:15:08] you know you're supposed to be thinking. It's called psychological warfare, and it will get you
[02:15:12] over the edge of weakness and into the realm of strength. No, the winner circle. Yes,
[02:15:21] yeah, that's a good way to play. That's a good explanation. A little bit assoteric. A little bit
[02:15:26] but this on the left. Yeah, folks on canvas.com. If you want, visual representation of the path
[02:15:32] that you can stare at every day when you wake up in the morning, hang on your wall. My brother Dakota
[02:15:36] Meyer is making, no, he's making graphic representations of the path that you can get. Flippeside
[02:15:46] canvas dot com. So get some of that. Also on it on it dot com. Go to on it dot com slash jockel. This is
[02:15:55] where you can get workout here various other things. Some some good electrolyte, magnesium. I don't know
[02:16:03] all the little minerals or whatever, but that's it to me. That's like a go to as far as recovery
[02:16:09] performance. I don't know. It's good for a lot of stuff, but that's a daily one as well. Anyway,
[02:16:14] but the kettlebells that I get 100% on it, 100% artistic ones go there. There's a lot of cool stuff
[02:16:19] on there is what I'm saying. I got it on. I got a bunch of books. Right now, I have a new book.
[02:16:24] It's available for preorder. If you want to let my publisher know that they should print a lot of
[02:16:30] these books, then go and preorder leadership strategy and tactics field manual. Not to mention,
[02:16:37] you know you, you don't want to get the second edition. How many chances do you get to get
[02:16:45] to get a first edition? You get one shot. Don't blow it. Don't blow it. As soon as
[02:16:52] as soon as humanly possible, I'm going to have a make a slight change to the cover. Second
[02:16:55] edition, I'm going to make it different. Just so I can tell PID positive identification from a distance.
[02:17:03] Oh, that's cool. I see you got the book. I'll sign it for you. But I realize where you were at,
[02:17:08] when the chips were on the table. You weren't there. You're in the blue. That's fine. Wait.
[02:17:13] Order that first edition. Leadership strategy and tactics field manual.
[02:17:17] Way that were your kid three. That just came out where there's a will. It is live.
[02:17:23] So Boston. And then of course we have way the warrior kid one and two.
[02:17:30] And you know me bad reviews. I've gotten on those books. Oh, man. Zero.
[02:17:35] Yes, man. Well, you did get a bad review from someone who didn't not only didn't read it,
[02:17:40] but didn't even know what it was about. Oh, yeah. One guy called that one that called said it
[02:17:44] looked like a bunch of toxic masculinity for children or something crazy like that. Yes.
[02:17:49] I could just repost it out about 10 million people ordered the book as soon as they saw that guy.
[02:17:54] Whatever that idiot's name was. Well, you know, and his defense. I mean, he did speak to soon.
[02:18:00] That's all. That was his mistake. He spoke to soon. Like without looking into it. He seems to say like that.
[02:18:05] And actually what I did as I of course just said, hey, if you want all sungear ones,
[02:18:10] you can actually read it. Yeah. Make your judgment. See, that's what he did.
[02:18:13] What really happened then, there's a lot of people jump on and said, hey,
[02:18:16] I'm a woman. My my daughter loves this book. And then someone else said, hey,
[02:18:20] this book teaches people how to be respectful. Hey, this person teaches everyone. And he finally
[02:18:25] relinquished his he recanted. Yeah. Apologize. I do. But his own fans. Like his own fans were like,
[02:18:33] I love your stuff. You're wrong. Yeah. You got them into it. People just came off the top.
[02:18:38] That's what's funny. Even my comical sort of overreaction of that guy being an idiot. I didn't do that.
[02:18:43] Of course, because I'm, you know, not going to do that. But that if I were to react it that way,
[02:18:51] you know, people would say, hey, jockel, you know, you're being too aggressive. He, you know what I mean?
[02:18:54] Like I would have been the bad guy. So it's not the same man. I'll send your copy. If you want it.
[02:18:58] And then you can read it. But then everyone else wasn't me that convinced him. It was everyone else.
[02:19:02] Yes. It was the the the the the the the the the the the the the troopers from the coming up. It was troopers coming at him hard kind. Yeah.
[02:19:09] You mean, well, not even hard. They were all the everyone just everyone. I mean, there was a couple people.
[02:19:13] It was a little stab. I don't agree. Yeah. So a lot of people were just like, hey, you should you should actually check it out because it's going to help you.
[02:19:20] Yeah. Actually, he's a human being be better. So he essentially got that corrected by people who actually read the book.
[02:19:26] And I'll give him a little bit of credit. He wreak he wreakanted and said, okay. Okay. I'm wrong. I should jump to conclusion.
[02:19:32] So technically is that a bad review technically. No, because they didn't read the book. Good point. You can't review something in experience. That is true.
[02:19:42] So there's that there's there's Mikey in the dragons.
[02:19:46] This should be with every child. The book should be with every child.
[02:19:52] Mikey in the dragons get this book for every kid that you know get it for the library get it.
[02:19:56] The field manual discipline goes freedom field manual get that book for anyone that you know that
[02:20:05] you actually care about as a human so that you can keep them on the path. And then of course,
[02:20:10] there's extreme ownership. There's that academy of leadership. The first books that I wrote with my brother,
[02:20:14] life, Babin about leadership and how you can take leadership that we use on the battlefield and apply it to your life.
[02:20:20] We got echelon front, which is my leadership consultancy, where we come into organizations and solve whatever the problems
[02:20:28] that they have through the one thing that matters. And that's leadership.
[02:20:35] Go to echelonfront.com for details on that. EF online.
[02:20:39] That is since leadership training is not an evacuation. You need repetitive training to get the skills down.
[02:20:48] So we made EF online EF online.com interactive training in leadership through the interwebs.
[02:20:57] We also have the master. Chicago's done Denver sold out. Sorry. Sydney, Australia is next to
[02:21:05] December 4th and 5th. So if you want to come to that register now so you're not emailing Jamie
[02:21:12] and saying hey we didn't get to put our things in time. Is there any more seats? Because there's not.
[02:21:17] Sold out means we sold it out. We're not like well you know we'll we'll sell it out but we have
[02:21:23] 100 more seats. No it's literally sold out. So if you want to go then go to
[02:21:30] extremownership.com and register and then of course we have EF Overwatch where we are
[02:21:36] taking leaders from special operations and combat aviation and putting them into the civilian sector.
[02:21:43] So go to EF Overwatch.com. If you're a company that needs leadership which you are or if you're a
[02:21:50] spec ops guy combat aviation guy that is looking to move on to their next mission in the civilian
[02:21:58] sector. Go to EF Overwatch.com and if you feel like you need more than the 500 hours
[02:22:06] that we have spent talking on the podcast then you can find us on the interwebs on Twitter,
[02:22:16] on Instagram and on DuFazBock. Echo is at Echo Charles and I am at Jock O'Winnock and like I said
[02:22:27] if you want to help out save the America you can follow them. They are on the same platforms
[02:22:33] at Save the America and thanks once again to Master Chief Kirby O'Rell for his
[02:22:40] service and the teams and it's literally like I told him it's given me everything that I am right now.
[02:22:49] That's what these old team guys did for me and also obviously thanks to Kirby for what
[02:22:55] him and his team is doing right now with saved in America.org they are out there rescuing
[02:23:02] children and I don't know if there is a more noble cause than that. So thank you Master Chief Kirby
[02:23:10] O'Rell, the rest of our military out there that also gives us everything that we have.
[02:23:16] Thank you for doing what you do so that we can freely do what we do
[02:23:23] and to our police and to law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and EMTs and
[02:23:28] dispatchers and correctional officers and board patrol and secret service and to every other first
[02:23:33] responder. Thanks for what you do as well for being on call each and every day to protect us
[02:23:43] and to everyone else out there when I think about someone like Master Chief
[02:23:50] who has given so much but you know what just keeps on giving. And I ask myself what
[02:24:02] what else can I give to the world? Ask yourself that same question what else can you give to the world?
[02:24:08] Whose life can you make better? How much more can you give? Let's find out.
[02:24:16] Get up, move forward and get after it. And until next time this is echo and jocco out.