Jocko Podcast 196 w/ Charles Daly: Make Peace or Die. Service, Leadership, and Nightmares.

2019-09-29T13:51:50Z

Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @echocharles 0:00:00 - Opening 0:06:15 - Charles U. Daly 3:37:29 - Final thoughts and take-aways. 4:40:53 - How to stay on THE PATH. JOCKO STORE Apparel: https://www.jockostore.com/collection... All Supplements: https://originmaine.com/nutrition/joc... Origin Jeans and Clothes: https://originmaine.com/durable-goods/ Origin Gis: https://originmaine.com/bjj-mma-fit/ 4:00:19 - Closing Gratitude.

AI summary of episode

not but he named me problem because he'd taken a shower afterwards that's a present of the fucking country and they get the times later he said looking at Packer on his on his years in service when he was in office and if he had just permitted treatment to be so on 350,000 so the Africans would still be alive and nothing new or times in editorial and that is the place for sitting anyway that's what motivated me there this is how you described in the book it was hard to comprehend the magnitude of the suffering there it's hard to imagine a place we're going to the toilet can be fatal a place where there's roughly one flush toilet for every 17,000 people a place that is largely ignored by those with the power to improve those conditions and the absence of government leadership on the AIDS issue rumor and superstition has taken over one rumor said that condoms had worms in them a sitting president of South Africa endorsed the rumor that post-coidal shower could prevent AIDS the minister of health went on to went to the world's aid conference promoting the rumor that garlic and lemon juice were effective treatments and that heart which is highly active anti-retro viral treatment was more dangerous than AIDS but the worst rumor of all the one that once again made me pause to choke back tears at the podium delivering another report was the rumor that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS this had sparked an epidemic of infant rape researching my report has sat down with a member of one family whose baby was essentially brain dead following a gang rape there were instances of four and five year olds who'd already been raped many times and at least one case the rapist of a five year old was let off the ground that his victim was not a virgin see that's an illustration when I get carried away like we just did that you look into that analyzing it and read it is better than my gang I saw it just started I'm almost the incoherent and I'll be like hey what if they never heard a psychological warfare they don't know what that is still sounding cool still don't know what it is soon saying so you gotta find the what he called the shikotomi medium balance thing also don't forget about flip side canvas dot com where you have Dakota Meyer who is making graphic representations that will get inside your brain and keep you honed and on the path of discipline and will flip side canvas dot com nothing else needs to be set on that one those those good uh and true by the way also don't forget about on it on it dot com slash jockel this where you can get your kettlebells your rings your clubs maces battle ropes all kinds of fitness equipment typical stuff and a typical you like that you get a lot of stuff I said it also this immune one shroom tech immune Yeah, I mean that's a Pat Tellman and again, this is the, the, the horrible situation, you know, it's a horrible situation, as dark you're maneuvering through enemy territory, you're expecting to get contacted and, you know, if you're not paying attention, this is why there's such a heavy burden on leadership, because it's a leadership that has to try and track these things and keep and make sense of what's going on in the battlefield and if a, a millisecond goes by and you lose that control, which, which happens, you've got to set yourselves up, so you prevent this sort of situations and it's, it's a nightmare and this is one of the, in my opinion, is one of the worst things in the war is friendly fire, because there's, it's absolutely, you know, trying to explain this is so hard, because people don't understand how confusing and complex these things are as they unfold. I think so I told him after the meeting I contact contacted Margaret J. husband Dr. Michael All Adler he surmised that I had a minor stroke the good kind of stroke if there is such a thing he told me to get to a hospital right away I found all this more than a little upsetting I wanted to get back to Christine and the boys at once so I did what was apparently one of the worst things imaginable for a stroke survivor to do I hopped on a series of flights lasting 24 hours the doctor in the state scolded me for flying and told me I was lucky to be alive he ran tests wrote prescriptions and advised me to stay away from the great pleasures the three great pleasures of my old age tennis red wine and Viagra hearing the doctor's advice I was transported back to 1942 I remembered sitting in a waiting room at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore I could hear my father's voice through the door to the doctor's office after you just been told that the best he could live with to do to live with multiple scrocess was to cut out martinis golf and his pipe I will never forget his response do you expect me to live in a vacuum tube he said I looked at the doctor have a nice day it's it's actually not that hard you can find us on the inner webs we're on twitter we're on instagram and we're on the on the on fashin echo is that echo Charles and i am at jockelwillink and thanks once again to Charles daily to his son Charlie to his wife Christine that was here thanks chalk for your service in the Marine Corps and in so many other marine arenas out there and as a veteran of the forgotten war the so called forgotten war i assure you that you and your comrades are not forgotten and the rest of the troops out there in uniform thanks to you all as well for putting on that uniform and for protecting us from evil around the world and to all the police in the law enforcement and the firefighters and the paramedics and the EMTs and the dispatchers and the correctional officers and the border patrol and secret service and all the first responders out there thank you for protecting us from evil here at home and to everyone else that's listening which got to hear a story of a amazing life the life of Charles and daily a life that still be in lift from a book that is literally still being written just like life and think about that think about think about that life with so many stories and so much life good stuff there's also a bunch of books I wrote a new book it's called the leadership strategy and tactics field manual this is the absolute frontline pragmatic information of how to lead you got a little problem here's how you actually solve that problem by following these actions that's called leadership strategy and tactics field manual it is available for pre order right now and if you want to get that first the dish you better do it quick because you got guys like Andrew Paul who ordered 20 copies get guarantees Sarah Armstrong's order in 20 copies jpg ordered eight copies he's probably going to step it up to 20 though it's so many years this jpg is competitive because of one of them so we also got extreme ownership and that academy leadership the two books that are wrote with my brother-lave batman about leadership and how to take leadership from the battlefield and apply it to your business that you're running right now we got echelon front our leadership consultancy we saw problems to leadership that's we do echelon front dot com for details on that ef online this is online leadership training so that you can so that you can get consistent repetitive and get the reps in like you just talked about getting the reps and get the reps and you have to make leadership decisions during that training by the way I don't know if you know that but AIDS in South Africa was death pointless agony and cruelty like nothing I'd ever seen these people weren't combatants they were simply victims of an unlucky birth even more unlucky than the civilians than the civilian victims of war I found their pain to be overwhelming war may have prepared me to witness such pain without looking away but nothing could have prepared me to understand it I was 72 years old when I started going to South Africa and I turned 80 shortly after my final trip more than once I was asked what were you thinking why did I take up field work and reporting in a dangerous place when I could have been golfing and napping maybe I had one more battle in me maybe I just don't know how to stay out of it when I see suffering on a personal level I knew that it felt better to observe to be somewhere I could work with brave and dedicated whom I admired the way I had admired Gunner Docey and Kenny O'Donnell and finally Dr. Eric Go Merr and these are the Dr. Eric Go Merr's that one that you were describing so so the reason I did that or we the reason we put your did your face like that or whatever is because when you're saying that like you give off a certain feeling you know like even when you say a bunch of stuff you give off a certain feeling so like as a person listening to it it's like what feeling am I getting I see what you're saying and I even see here how you say I dig it man and they said if we did it with enough force and it swamped you and at least we could stay on the end of this thing and so that was unbeknownst to the US but the, but the generals also said they were so afraid of another amygdala landing that they spent a little bit of time to take care of attack up from, sort of, and late May to the end of April and so I knew how they should end of that and the second, the first time we were running around loose but just later on there was intrigued by that and by the forehocity of this and then as usual we did our little circle around ourselves, defend ourselves and the second-hour division disappeared and the public army are okay, division and the other side of the disappearance of their work, they wouldn't sound serious but not impossible but so that was the background thing I think that we've, it's sticked out in the manuscript but laterally multiple levels multiple facets that's good about the thing that's good is would you do to will not just help you with your jiu-jitsu correct you do will help you with all aspects all aspects people on a daily basis start jiu-jitsu and let us know let me know let you know that they started jiu-jitsu 97% of the time they say I started and then you see something close to it you're gonna be more apt to recognize it in the real world then if you just saw it in a movie scenario one time right correct 100% that's totally true um also we got the mustard shikago done it sold out Denver coming up next but guess what it sold out after that December 4th and 5th in Sydney Australia that is the next monster that we're doing extreme ownership dot com for details if you want to come please register now don't wait until it sold out and then send me a twitter that says didn't know you were coming sorry can you still get me in because guess what I can't the fire marshal won't allow it also we have EF Overwatch we're taking proven leaders from spec ops and combat aviation and placing them into companies that need leadership in the civilian sector go to EF Overwatch dot com if you're on either end of that calculus whether you need a leader or whether you are a leader go to efoverwants dot com so we can connect you together and if you want to communicate more with us I'm gonna remember it's been it honor thank you very much and Charles daily has left the building and that just a FYI that we were reading off of a menu script for a book so it's out there not sure what Charlie which is Charles's son Chuck Son and they've got that that man just scripted out there but they have it's it's a well obviously recovered a little part of it the lot bigger lots of stuff in there it's sort of felt like a forest gump scenario you know like just wild things What he said he said what do you want to be at the other five years said I know exactly what I'm going to be five years what I am the day I won't fucking man but anyway, it was a massive, massive accumulation of forces, 700,000 or about a farmer than before and they moved it down and they, this is the whole, I don't, I can tell you what we got them and it assembled that force and they had, later on, quite recently, even in Marine Corps history didn't have it, there's a professor of Korean North America, American, Korean professor in Virginia, with some I got a hold of the post in the war still on, but the post battle thing with quite recently got old and they were the conversations between Mao and his generals and he had decided that the only way to stop this or bring a stalemate about it or whatever, was to have massive, massive attack and so he accumulated these troops so that problem was, and he knew it, they needed some additional training they were taking from China and SON and they were exhausted and they, and it's similar to trained And a bit of an okay leave that alone, but the fact came out that there was shot by his own man, but totally by our, Yeah, it was a, and the fact remains that he wanted to go and do something real country, put the football down, put the other helmet on and it is, his own kill them, but you start telling the people at home, who know them or another who knew of them or others who didn't know it at all, that this heroic remit or I'm given the fucking silver star and let it go. hey you know you got a you know there's this situation when you're going to do you gonna set in and I'm oversimplifying the scenario for sure you're gonna blame someone you're gonna take blame or you're gonna take blame within excuse kind of kind of options but thank you obviously for coming on the podcast and and more important you know thanks thanks for your service to our great country thanks for my citizenship check that's right the Irishman uh and thanks for what you did after the military thanks for your service in government and thank you for what you did not just for this country but for countries around the world like what you did in South Africa to try and help there and to try and do your best in your life to end suffering in the world is been an honor to sit down and talk with you and I thank you for coming on you too anyway I got an origin main dot com that's where you can get this stuff also supplements these are important supplements though they're not the kind that like the guy at the local gym it's trying to pedal to you it's made like 90% of chalk it's not that it's like the furrow one that that not only do they actually work and that's good about the reps too because you know like because a big part of what you kind of can't teach even any like you can't teach this part of it even like I guess in you just you kind of can I mean, I could see, a guy like, like, Lime, the way you described, okay, I'm going to make JFK look, you can't be weak here, you know, trying to get him from that angle. I explained it in the legend was you concur as if you have sex with a virgin and they were widespread practice of raping very young girls in some cases killing them but one was defended by somebody said if they were there wasn't a crime because she wasn't a virgin age five and this is a shit that we're putting up with since we met yesterday afternoon now 600 South African mostly women in children and died of AIDS and we don't do shit about it and I described some of the deaths including one who had described in a previous session brave and smart young and so on and she was raped the previous week by turned out 15 young guys one is 15 years of age and when she screamed out the stop that that shit is a killer and that's the one you have the volunteers type of own and so I made me that advisor and we funded but we could do we changed our editorial boards employees included blacks we had condoms in our workplaces one priest had said in the our pop we'll tell you that a country or evil and he talked as if raincoats cause rain You know, it all feels like that's what the hit, but my World War I, one of the Charlie's said, you know, I played the game yesterday. yeah you could tell a lot of it was was affected from the beginning who good you've also been making little excerpts excerpts some of them are just a straight excerpts occasionally you enhance the excerpts with things like cello music sometimes explosions sometimes fire smoke reflections causes in my facial expressions why would you do that you're just like I'm gonna freeze your facial expression at this time and if you're going to train jiu-jitsu you're going to need a geet yep because we do recommend geet and no geet jiu-jitsu do different things I think is time goes on they become more and more like different from each other which in my opinion is more of reason to do both okay come on back in the day but there's like obvious choice versus like kind of ridiculous choice you know it's like that kind yeah then you can check out the YouTube channel called joccopotcast also we have psychological warfare which is little audio clips that can help you through challenging moments of weakness that threaten your very existence every single day you can go to iTunes Google Play or other MP3 platforms to download these fire support for your ears you know what you know what it's just go off script And now you know, where in the war, you got your dad at this point, he goes to a doctor, goes to the doctor, because he's getting dizzy, and you know, having some spells of dizzyness and whatnot. well it's these the kind of thing that can make you think you're rationally and and here's what you say in here I don't think any anything can prepare someone to understand that kind of suffering I don't think that kind of suffering can be understood some of my family and friend saw straight line between war in my field work in South Africa perhaps I was continuing my search for a sense of purpose and mission seeking once again the company of people who live heroically maybe but this is what it is when you're so came in and you're talking about the one that you're saying um you know what the trump card like you want to go drink you're rather than trained than I don't want you to know maintain you know three percent of the time maybe even less than that I've only had I can only think of two people that actually they're like I just don't like it I read the reader like a boy's car which I got thrown out of fucking boy's car and I said I know this. So you're living that life, you're like I said, you're pretty happy at that point and then going to the book on June 25, 1950, we got our national emergency. but you thought it looked good that's good right you thought it looked good looking at t-shirts that had long sleeves in her hood that's it looked like Thus negating our biggest technological advantage is not something that, you know, if you're going to get to force that has air control and artillery, you get as close to you can't, we call it hugging, hugging the enemy, you know, you, they want to get so close to us that we can't call for fire. and he said I'm alive but he said I'm ashamed that I'm alive and since I'm fucking mess and thought the more you can spell it out and the more you can save these guys they're kind of damn pressure to the country and Becky said he did have sex with the woman as the lead to rape or So when things got worse, he's little guy and I was, he looked like a fucking Lebanese immigrant, whatever they looked like. Oh, yeah, you gotta point that out, because not too many people know what it's like to be at sea these days. we were little bit of us all right subscribe to the podcast to be done already iTunes group of places that you're wherever leave reviews if you want us to read them and get a good laugh out of your awesome review also don't forget about the warrior kid podcast which is also available and good for kids parents teachers adults human beings and there's some more your kids soap you can get from irish oaks ranch dot com which is a young warrior kid making soap that you allows you to stay clean yeah it's actually at the end of the day I mean it's a few origin ones have a jody medic one that I always wear this is pretty much all I'm wearing approved yeah rash guards rash guards on their big time truckers hats you know beanie's dry fit dry fit is there being produced

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jockel Podcast number 196, with echo Charles and me, Jockel Willink. Good evening, echo. Good evening.
[00:00:14] In November, MacArthur ordered a drive all the way up to the Yalu River, which divides North Korean China.
[00:00:21] He made the infamous promise that his victorious troops would be home for Christmas.
[00:00:28] All the daylies were happy to hear this news. At this point, I was still at Quantico, and it looked as though the war would end before my classmates and I deployed.
[00:00:39] Then, on November 26, the Chinese launched an immense surprise attack, routing all UN forces from coast to coast and trapping the US Marines at the chosen reservoir, outnumbering them by upwards of four to one.
[00:00:56] The action that followed became known as the frozen chosen.
[00:01:01] The Marines held their positions with very little support, totally cut off from the unprotected supply lines that MacArthur had stretched thin behind them.
[00:01:11] They fought in near-artic conditions. They're canned rations froze. They're limbs froze, men froze to death.
[00:01:20] The enemy used artillery to soften the Marine positions and then come at them with human wave attacks.
[00:01:27] The strategy was to charge the Americans usually at night when they were without air support.
[00:01:34] In some instances, frozen enemy dead were stacked in front of Marine fighting positions and used his sandbags.
[00:01:44] Needless to say, any Marine who survived chosen became legend.
[00:01:51] It borders on absurd to think that I, a 23-year-old lieutenant with a degree from Yale, would soon be giving orders to men who had fought their way out of that cold hell.
[00:02:04] One such man I would go on to command was Gunther Dose, a German immigrant who is one of just sixteen men in a rifle company of 200-plus to walk out of chosen.
[00:02:18] For his actions, including faking his own death as Chinese soldiers disarmed him and probed the wound in his head, Dose was awarded the silver star and purple heart.
[00:02:31] As summarized in the following excerpt from Silver Star citation, private first-class Dose held his fire to prevent a premature disclosure of his position while the intense small arms grenade automatic weapons and machine gun barrage continued.
[00:02:51] He continued with deadly accuracy killing several and dispersing the others with his weapon in operative as the foe persisted in the onslaught private first-class Dose hurled hand grenades to account for two more hostile soldiers as the bullets from an automatic weapon sprayed his position wounding him and killing a Marine rifleman nearby.
[00:03:11] Fighting unconsciousness as the enemy moved closer, he fained death as they felt the bullet hole in the top of his helmet examined his bloodstained face and hands and removed his weapon and cartridge belt.
[00:03:26] After seven agonizing hours during which he remained perfectly still while the enemy still believing him to be dead occupied as foxhole, he surveyed the situation and made contact with an adjacent Marine unit after friendly counterattack finally forced them to withdraw.
[00:03:47] After training each Marine is assigned an MOS or military occupational specialty the MOS for infantry officer is O301.
[00:03:59] After chosen we had the Marine Corps basic school took to calling it O30 shit by years in 1950 the situation in Korea was so grim that Truman was seriously considering removing all U.S. forces from the peninsula.
[00:04:16] By New Year's 1951 the second wave of the Chinese offensive had pushed the UN coalition south of the 38th parallel forcing them to surrender sole for the second time.
[00:04:30] The first special Marine Corps basic class graduated around the time the division broke out at chosen.
[00:04:37] It was one of the core's finest hours but for us it was a stark reminder that the war was just getting started.
[00:04:46] We had to fill out requests for the next duty assignments.
[00:04:51] Most of us would be given orders to Korea but most made their first choice something other than infantry.
[00:05:00] Only five lieutenants in my training company requested to lead a rifle platoon and I was one of them.
[00:05:16] Only five lieutenants in my training company requested to lead a rifle platoon and I was one of them.
[00:05:21] Think about that for a minute.
[00:05:32] And that right there was an excerpt from a manuscript of a book which is called Make Peace or Die, a life of service leadership and nightmares.
[00:05:48] The book is written by Charles U. Daily and it is a distinct honor to actually be sitting here with Mr. Daily today to discuss his book.
[00:06:05] His incredible life and the amazing lessons he has from it all. Mr. Daily, welcome to the show.
[00:06:14] Thank you for coming on.
[00:06:15] Thank you. I have a very own record.
[00:06:19] And you, how long have you been working on this book for?
[00:06:27] It in my heart a long time.
[00:06:30] I wanted to record.
[00:06:37] I'm actually be sure why other than I thought that I now available and I want to leave something behind for my family, my sons, a raise from 67 to 24.
[00:06:53] And I have an idea of what life is like and truthfully set that down and we can read on it.
[00:07:05] Use it to other people, what do they want to do it?
[00:07:07] What I did not expect to make the commercial venture out of it.
[00:07:11] I felt that would have been trading on the bodies out of behind.
[00:07:17] Well, the truth certainly comes out in this book. It's a super frank and straightforward and it's a great read.
[00:07:27] And I appreciate your son Charlie sending it to me and linking all this up.
[00:07:35] Yeah, it's good.
[00:07:39] And it lays out your life and I'd like to go back to the book right now and go to the beginning of the book and the beginning of your story.
[00:07:49] It starts off like this.
[00:07:50] Mine is not your typical Irish immigrant story.
[00:07:53] For one thing, my dad had use of a private airplane when I was growing up.
[00:07:57] A bulky Ford tri motor with silver skin and loud engines that scared the hell out of me.
[00:08:03] The plane and a private rail car were perks of my father's work as a top US executive for Shell Oil.
[00:08:11] Our family came to America on a boat, but it was an ocean liner and we traveled first class.
[00:08:17] Definitely not your typical immigrant story, yeah.
[00:08:20] No, I screwed it up later on.
[00:08:22] I mean, it's not the sort of person who could be a slunk out of that little island.
[00:08:30] The very interesting story on your heritage and going back to the book again, it says in 1892,
[00:08:39] my father was born in Ningpo, China, the son of Dr. Charles Catherine de Berg daily.
[00:08:46] Did I say that right?
[00:08:47] I'm close.
[00:08:48] Close enough.
[00:08:49] But probably as close as I could do it.
[00:08:51] Who set up a clinic in Ningpo several year following several word voyages to China as a ship's doctor,
[00:08:59] it seems he found the human suffering in that ancient kingdom too hard to ignore.
[00:09:03] And so we stayed and married an Irish nurse with similar ideals.
[00:09:09] Perhaps my grandfather's response to this cry for help explains something about my own life.
[00:09:13] My tendency to spring into action when someone is suffering a wrong,
[00:09:17] even on the other side of the world, even if it's not my fight.
[00:09:21] This habit of leaping into action when the bugle blows has been a mixed blessing for me as it well may have been for him.
[00:09:31] And there was all kinds of turmoil going on in China at the time.
[00:09:36] And so they actually sent your father back to be educated at the turnbridge school,
[00:09:45] and then he went on to Cambridge, where he graduated in 1914,
[00:09:51] and anyone that knows anything about history knows that that's not a good year to be graduated in Britain.
[00:09:57] Yeah, a large number of them, and age 17 or there abouts went off to war.
[00:10:04] And at that time, a little knowledge of war, there's a wonderful book,
[00:10:11] a book, a diary of a fox hunting man followed by an infantry officer.
[00:10:16] And he was a gentleman, and he went to war with his groom for his horse and his horse.
[00:10:28] And before they met machine gun, that's...
[00:10:32] Yeah, that's, we've covered multiple books, first-partent person accounts on this podcast,
[00:10:38] talking about the absolute horror of World War I,
[00:10:43] and the horror of the machine gun versus the tactics that they had at the time.
[00:10:51] And it's actually unbelievable when you read the stories about World War I.
[00:10:58] It's unbelievable that it happened.
[00:11:02] It's unbelievable that it happened for a week, never mind a month, never mind years,
[00:11:07] where you'd say, okay, hey, your battalion just went over the top.
[00:11:12] No one came back, and in 15 minutes, our battalion's going to go.
[00:11:17] And 15 minutes after that, another battalion's going to go.
[00:11:20] It's crazy to think about that kind of human sacrifice and that.
[00:11:26] The geniuses who did that, worked the ones who went over the top,
[00:11:32] and who walked ahead, they fell,
[00:11:36] were hung up on the Bibleire, and they had no concept.
[00:11:41] They had a little bit of experience in the bore war,
[00:11:44] and if you were other souvenir hunts, no concept what they were doing to a generation on both sides of the trenches.
[00:11:55] Going back to the book, I keep a photo of my father taking during the first World War.
[00:11:59] In it, my dad stands in his officer uniform with binoculars and a walking stick.
[00:12:04] Besides him, my mother's 19-year-old brother Charlie, a lieutenant,
[00:12:08] leans on his rifle in a confident pose, half smiling behind his pipe.
[00:12:13] They are flanked by a few others.
[00:12:15] One is wearing a German army helmet with a spike on top, a war trophy.
[00:12:20] What war does to men can be detected in the difference between their expressions?
[00:12:25] My dad has the proverbial fouls in yard stare.
[00:12:29] The corners of his eyes around his spectacles and his brows show resignation
[00:12:34] and an exhausted readiness.
[00:12:36] The men under his command have a similar look.
[00:12:39] Charlie, on the other hand, has the fresh face of a replacement,
[00:12:43] a gentleman for whom war is still a great adventure.
[00:12:47] Charlie has only been on the front for less than a week.
[00:12:52] He would be blown to pieces shortly after this photo was taken.
[00:12:56] My dad handed this photo down to me and scribbled the names of the men under it,
[00:13:00] with Ka-A or W-I-A beside each name, marking them all killed or wounded.
[00:13:09] I thought of cropping the photo to make it a family shot,
[00:13:12] and I'm glad I didn't. Those other guys had already been cropped out.
[00:13:19] Shortly after my own war I asked dad, when do the bad memories fade?
[00:13:25] It will take a long time he said, but finally they will fade.
[00:13:30] They don't.
[00:13:33] No, they don't.
[00:13:36] And we're going to get to your war.
[00:13:40] You know, bit, your dad's war,
[00:13:45] staying with the book,
[00:13:47] dad had gone to the front in the fourth battalion of the Royal Dublin Fusileers,
[00:13:52] having applied for a commission on the day the war broke out.
[00:13:56] He was named a captain following a perfunctory officer's training course,
[00:14:00] while his sons went to war.
[00:14:02] My grandfather managed two hospitals in Ireland that handled the overflow of wounded.
[00:14:07] In 1917 he was awarded an order of the British Empire for this work.
[00:14:11] My uncle, Lieutenant Arthur Charles de Bergdaley, another Charlie,
[00:14:16] was killed in action on the 19th of September, 1916.
[00:14:20] After having seen action and survived in the sun,
[00:14:24] he was 19 years old.
[00:14:27] In his last letter home he wrote,
[00:14:29] we attacked Genchi tomorrow.
[00:14:32] In case of accidents, I played the game two days ago,
[00:14:36] that means he'd already probably seen some combat.
[00:14:39] Probably went out on the East on a patrol or the attack on General attack.
[00:14:44] I didn't like it when I come back,
[00:14:46] but the night patrols were regular.
[00:14:49] And then they went, some geniuses in the back said,
[00:14:52] we're going to probe the enemy line.
[00:14:55] I'll probe the enemy line,
[00:14:57] cutting away through barbed wire.
[00:15:00] They're just waiting.
[00:15:07] That's a tough way to probe.
[00:15:10] Yeah, that's patrols.
[00:15:13] I was very, later on in my life.
[00:15:18] The patrols are different than else,
[00:15:21] without people waiting with certain knowledge that you're coming.
[00:15:26] And as soon as you start messing around with the barbed wire,
[00:15:29] they know exactly where you are.
[00:15:31] And then they don't always hold a lot of ammunition,
[00:15:33] but it doesn't take much of an answer of a machine
[00:15:35] going to clean out some probes.
[00:15:37] So when they didn't come back,
[00:15:39] the geniuses figured it out.
[00:15:41] And both of these are something else,
[00:15:42] trench-able.
[00:15:43] It's not.
[00:15:44] I can't grasp it.
[00:15:46] Or, yeah, mentality went and how pompous
[00:15:50] and that was fucking general's were.
[00:15:57] I'm not from the generals.
[00:16:02] The next morning he said to have led his men over the top
[00:16:05] and was hit in the ear with a bit of shrapnel.
[00:16:08] He took cover and a shell crater to assess the wound
[00:16:11] and regain his composure.
[00:16:13] According to the official report,
[00:16:15] he stood up,
[00:16:16] made it four or five yards toward the enemy wire before being hit
[00:16:20] and the head with machine gun fire.
[00:16:23] Due to a cruel administrative error,
[00:16:25] my family would receive word that he had been wounded.
[00:16:28] Then they were told that the report was an error,
[00:16:31] and that he was fine,
[00:16:32] and finally they learned the truth,
[00:16:35] or at least a polite version of the truth.
[00:16:39] So there's two uncles right there,
[00:16:42] Charlie and Charlie,
[00:16:44] and they both been killed,
[00:16:46] and now we get to your dad.
[00:16:48] Dad was wounded at
[00:16:50] Reischbord Levo.
[00:16:52] I'm not even gonna...
[00:16:54] Your friend says,
[00:16:54] about his good as mine.
[00:16:56] On 9 May,
[00:16:58] 1915,
[00:16:59] in the left thigh in the right hand.
[00:17:01] While convolicing in Dublin,
[00:17:03] he played a role in putting down the 1916 easter rising,
[00:17:07] that I'm glad I don't know too much about.
[00:17:09] Shortly after his return to the front as a major in June,
[00:17:12] 1916, he was sent home again with appendicitis,
[00:17:15] and spent the rest of the war training bombers
[00:17:17] in the art of grenade-friendly.
[00:17:19] For his wounds,
[00:17:21] he was given a lump-son,
[00:17:22] or some, or blood-money,
[00:17:23] as he called it,
[00:17:24] which he spent on a motorcycle.
[00:17:26] He put it around Ireland on the bike for several months,
[00:17:29] visiting the family,
[00:17:30] families of young officers who had been killed,
[00:17:32] while serving under his command in the fuselures.
[00:17:36] He eased painful memories
[00:17:38] by describing deaths,
[00:17:40] courageous and quick,
[00:17:43] given in cases where the truth was pathetic and grotesque.
[00:17:47] Thus he didn't mean to,
[00:17:50] but he promoted the concept,
[00:17:54] war isn't what it is.
[00:17:58] I don't even feel guilty about that.
[00:18:01] He felt more like trying to explain
[00:18:04] how to explain it to the family,
[00:18:11] who made new exacts about the habit of their sons,
[00:18:16] and so he lied.
[00:18:19] I did that once,
[00:18:21] and I just got some later on
[00:18:23] and I carried this with the right letter of condolence.
[00:18:28] And got that letter returned,
[00:18:31] and he said, you were his officer.
[00:18:34] Just curious to know why your life you lived
[00:18:38] and he didn't,
[00:18:40] I think that's sort of feeling,
[00:18:44] and he just can't convey the truth,
[00:18:49] but you want to,
[00:18:51] so you know.
[00:18:54] You're,
[00:18:59] your dad's continuing to travel around
[00:19:03] and he ends up in
[00:19:07] one spot in Bandin,
[00:19:10] where he met the parents and sister of Charles C. Lee King,
[00:19:14] the man beside him in the photo,
[00:19:16] who like his own brother, Charles had been killed,
[00:19:18] while attempting to lead an Irish platoon across Barbed wire
[00:19:21] in the front on German lines.
[00:19:24] Lieutenant King's surviving sister,
[00:19:27] Violet,
[00:19:28] became my mother.
[00:19:31] Violet C. Lee King impressed my father with her independence.
[00:19:34] She reacted to her brother's death
[00:19:36] by leaving County Court for the first time in her life
[00:19:39] to volunteer as a VAD,
[00:19:41] what's a VAD?
[00:19:42] Volunteer aid,
[00:19:44] to God, I don't know her.
[00:19:46] Something, but basically it's nurses going,
[00:19:49] it's not,
[00:19:50] she didn't qualify for the nurse.
[00:19:52] She just,
[00:19:53] in the ten households,
[00:19:56] close your can,
[00:19:58] took care of someone who,
[00:20:00] with a gut wound,
[00:20:01] then you're gone.
[00:20:02] So we're going to,
[00:20:04] bullshit them and clean out the guts,
[00:20:09] and see,
[00:20:10] a mental part of males that she'd come and never in a teenager.
[00:20:15] So when,
[00:20:17] it was a shock,
[00:20:18] I'm sure to her or another hand.
[00:20:21] The death of her brother was,
[00:20:23] was a greater shock.
[00:20:26] Yeah,
[00:20:27] you say in here,
[00:20:28] Violet left behind a life of lunches,
[00:20:30] lawn games,
[00:20:31] pick mixed tennis,
[00:20:32] bridge,
[00:20:32] and ping pong.
[00:20:33] I assume she'd never seen him nude male.
[00:20:35] Let alone one with vital parts missing or
[00:20:38] maimed.
[00:20:39] Mom never spoke about her service,
[00:20:41] but when it came to mind,
[00:20:42] but when it came my turn to go to war,
[00:20:44] she had no illusions about what
[00:20:46] her son would experience.
[00:20:48] Later she told me she had very little hope of seeing me again.
[00:20:52] So,
[00:20:55] and I always have to make this disclaimer,
[00:20:57] when I read through these books,
[00:20:59] I'm obviously skipping giant chunks.
[00:21:01] I'm not just reading the whole book.
[00:21:03] Good.
[00:21:04] And,
[00:21:05] you're like,
[00:21:06] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:07] no,
[00:21:08] no,
[00:21:08] no,
[00:21:09] no,
[00:21:09] no,
[00:21:09] no,
[00:21:09] no,
[00:21:09] no,
[00:21:09] no, not now,
[00:21:12] it was a powerful expression
[00:21:14] and just reading these parts.
[00:21:17] I am just just to read these parts.
[00:21:19] making it happy to know that some people will,
[00:21:23] no,
[00:21:27] it to come with a happy,
[00:21:27] eстрой what I patiently and
[00:21:31] after the war,
[00:21:29] your dad ended up getting a job and
[00:21:31] needed to have your father- probability.
[00:21:36] Was this my mom had something to do,
[00:21:36] and he worked with.
[00:21:38] So she done it with the other mind,
[00:21:38] ended up getting a job and here we go to the book.
[00:21:40] Dad got a job at the offices of the Royal Dutch Shell,
[00:21:42] which is now just shell today, where he found a row
[00:21:45] on row of desks filled with other survivors
[00:21:48] of a decimated generation.
[00:21:50] Discussing this gloomy scene with a board interviewer,
[00:21:54] he learned there was one unwanted job open,
[00:21:57] peddling shell oil products in Royal India.
[00:22:00] He seized it the chance.
[00:22:03] And so he gets this opportunity to go to India
[00:22:06] and working for shell oil,
[00:22:08] he was based in a place called Malibar
[00:22:10] and then there was this event that took place
[00:22:15] called the Mopla.
[00:22:16] Mopla rebellion.
[00:22:17] Mopla rebellion.
[00:22:19] And quick description of it here, Europeans were brutally murdered
[00:22:24] and then the Mopla's Mopla's?
[00:22:26] How do you say?
[00:22:26] Mopla's turned upon their Hindu neighbors.
[00:22:32] They burned villages, sack temples, outrage women,
[00:22:35] massacred and attempted a wholesale, forcible conversion
[00:22:38] of Hindus to Islam.
[00:22:41] Now, your dad at the time,
[00:22:43] although a civilian dad lent assistance
[00:22:45] to that military force,
[00:22:46] drawing upon his wartime experience,
[00:22:48] defended British and Hindu lives and property
[00:22:50] from the Islamic rebels by organizing
[00:22:53] a little convoy of open cars and bicycles to rescue
[00:22:56] and even smaller group under siege in the village.
[00:22:59] The local English language, the paper, the pioneer,
[00:23:02] describes the battle in its September 19,
[00:23:04] the 1921 edition, an ex-officeers' gallantry
[00:23:09] and this is talking about your dad.
[00:23:10] After a fierce assault on the part of some hundreds
[00:23:13] of rebels, the troops withdrew.
[00:23:17] Lieutenant Meganio having been wounded
[00:23:21] to command the next party sent forward,
[00:23:23] Captain Meganiroy called upon Mr. Daily,
[00:23:25] an ex-officeer.
[00:23:26] Mr. Daily went forward with a platoon
[00:23:28] carrying out the task in very gallant fashion.
[00:23:31] The platoon was, I think, four or five.
[00:23:34] Guys, they gave her an on-ded hand,
[00:23:38] and tried to maintain discipline with minimal force.
[00:23:43] Yeah, I mean, that's like,
[00:23:45] you couldn't make that up.
[00:23:46] Here's your dad, former infantry guy,
[00:23:51] and this rebellion happens,
[00:23:53] and he steps up and leads this little team,
[00:23:56] and they basically, they survive the horrible situation.
[00:24:00] He didn't want to die, and they had the automatic weapon.
[00:24:05] Yeah, that makes a big difference.
[00:24:07] You got in here, one of the rebels got close enough
[00:24:09] to swing a handmade sword at my dad.
[00:24:12] He gave me that, he gave that weapon to me,
[00:24:13] and I used it as a fire poker in a garden
[00:24:15] to hold a broke on a stone one day in the 1960s.
[00:24:21] A mid-all this stuff going on,
[00:24:23] he actually wrote and proposed to your mom, Violet,
[00:24:27] and she got on a boat and went down there,
[00:24:32] and they were married on weeks and weeks.
[00:24:36] On their condition, vessel, just,
[00:24:40] sure we read the sea and the phone.
[00:24:41] Oh, yeah, you gotta point that out,
[00:24:42] because not too many people know what it's like
[00:24:43] to be at sea these days.
[00:24:46] Yeah, I've fortunately or unfortunately
[00:24:50] done multiple deployments around the world.
[00:24:52] Oh, shit, shit.
[00:24:53] That air conditioning, even on a modern day ship,
[00:24:56] is noways there.
[00:24:58] Right there.
[00:25:00] I took my space available, took my young family
[00:25:03] on one and right after the election,
[00:25:09] two, and I wanted to get away from the weaving spiders
[00:25:12] and so on, so I found a space, two cabins
[00:25:16] on a on troopship headed Hamburg from Brooklyn.
[00:25:20] So I got it on there, I thought,
[00:25:22] and I just humiliated wife and said,
[00:25:24] this is one hell of a deal, so let's go celebrate.
[00:25:28] We're just going under the,
[00:25:30] I don't know if I'm gonna bridge my daughter Ben there,
[00:25:32] but she said,
[00:25:35] you can't get a drink on a troopship.
[00:25:38] Oh, Jesus Christ, so 14 days later,
[00:25:40] I get to Hamburg, Moe, Moe, Moe was really thirsty.
[00:25:43] It was free, but anyway.
[00:25:47] You're dad, he,
[00:25:50] because he had behaved in performing that manner,
[00:25:55] he kind of got some recognition for that,
[00:25:58] and ended up getting taken care of,
[00:26:01] and then it was going back to the book,
[00:26:03] thanks to Dad's well-known heroics in the uprising
[00:26:06] and an earthquake in Japan that killed a number of shallow executives.
[00:26:09] He soon found himself fast-tracked
[00:26:11] to the highest levels of the company,
[00:26:13] first cleaning up the messenger pan,
[00:26:14] and then onto a senior position in America
[00:26:16] to include it a private plane and rail car.
[00:26:20] That's crazy, a private plane and a rail car.
[00:26:23] That's like, and you remember that?
[00:26:27] I heard a plane, because Jesus was noisy,
[00:26:29] and very, it's a 10-year plane,
[00:26:31] with big three engines,
[00:26:34] and one of the nose and the nose,
[00:26:37] and I don't remember the rail car,
[00:26:40] other than, I guess I assume that's the way people travel.
[00:26:44] That's a good idea, I was.
[00:26:47] So you're now in, you guys are in St. Louis,
[00:26:52] and when you were saying until the war in 1939,
[00:26:59] you got used to go back and forth to Ireland.
[00:27:01] Correct.
[00:27:02] And you were, this is how you describe yourself.
[00:27:05] I was at Brat with a run-of-first class
[00:27:06] at my own private steward.
[00:27:08] That's, I knew I'd do that.
[00:27:11] I knew I'd do it with my dad.
[00:27:13] I can't imagine.
[00:27:15] So how old were you in that was going on?
[00:27:16] I was born in 27, and that was 36.
[00:27:19] So I started to the war, started the war,
[00:27:22] we started to scale, started in 1939.
[00:27:24] Yeah.
[00:27:26] And then I'm more.
[00:27:27] Yeah, that's, I can't imagine, you know,
[00:27:29] I have four kids, three daughters and one son,
[00:27:33] and just how crazy they are.
[00:27:35] I can't imagine putting them in charge of any adult
[00:27:38] when they're seven years old,
[00:27:39] would just be absolutely crazy.
[00:27:40] Yeah.
[00:27:43] And this is interesting.
[00:27:44] For reasons unknown to me, the good times at Shell
[00:27:47] ended in the 1930s.
[00:27:49] So we left St. Louis for a modest life,
[00:27:52] since Golden Perseutes were not known in those days.
[00:27:54] So something happened.
[00:27:55] You didn't even really know what happened.
[00:27:57] You were a little compression happened.
[00:27:59] OK.
[00:27:59] And then the other, well, beyond that though,
[00:28:01] it was, I'm not sure, I don't know.
[00:28:05] But you went from living this kind of first class lifestyle
[00:28:09] to just be in a normal lifestyle.
[00:28:12] Well, St. Louis's constantly became,
[00:28:18] even as an adventurous guy, and he started,
[00:28:22] became a wild cataproil in Michigan.
[00:28:25] There ain't no oil in Michigan.
[00:28:28] But so he started to water himself into company
[00:28:30] and pedulate him so on.
[00:28:32] And when a working body went back to war,
[00:28:36] it was by that time, was too awful.
[00:28:40] That's all the things.
[00:28:41] So he got a job with the British in the US,
[00:28:44] and obviously there in Washington.
[00:28:49] And charge of land lease, which is a con job that
[00:28:54] FDR created because he wanted to get in the war.
[00:28:56] He believed firmly, he had to stop Hitler and so on.
[00:28:59] And he, so the land lease part was some imaginary leases
[00:29:05] on some property and Bahamas or somewhere.
[00:29:08] He gave them, he gave English an 50 rusty old destroyers.
[00:29:14] But they were vital in fighting the U-Bodes
[00:29:17] in the North Atlantic.
[00:29:18] So he felt he was doing something.
[00:29:20] Yeah, because he actually, as soon as the war kicked off
[00:29:24] in Europe, he tried to join the British army.
[00:29:27] And they wouldn't take him.
[00:29:28] It was the same.
[00:29:30] And they were British army, Irish regiments,
[00:29:32] or whatever they had in Dares, unfortunately,
[00:29:35] repair a lot in the war fair thing.
[00:29:39] And you guys were living in Bethesda at this time,
[00:29:41] or had a round the DC marlin derying?
[00:29:43] Yeah, just a narrative of doing it.
[00:29:46] So now you say this, I will never forget one drive
[00:29:48] into Washington on a particularly bombing winter Sunday.
[00:29:52] As we were cruising down Constitution Avenue in our old Ford,
[00:29:54] my father pointed out all the civil servants rushing
[00:29:57] into the Navy department building.
[00:30:00] And he says, look the way the Americans work.
[00:30:02] Even on a Sunday.
[00:30:04] When we got back home, we turned on the radio,
[00:30:06] when we learned what all the commotion was about.
[00:30:09] It was Sunday, December 7, 1941, the Japanese
[00:30:13] had just bombed Pearl Harbor.
[00:30:18] And now you know, where in the war, you got your dad
[00:30:22] at this point, he goes to a doctor,
[00:30:25] goes to the doctor, because he's getting dizzy,
[00:30:28] and you know, having some spells of dizzyness and whatnot.
[00:30:31] So you say, listening outside a half open door.
[00:30:33] Well, I held a deal.
[00:30:35] It was in, you decided to go to a doctor
[00:30:38] and Johns Hopkins is a good hospital in Baltimore.
[00:30:41] And so we asked me if you want to go for a drive.
[00:30:45] And I really worshiped him.
[00:30:47] He said, everything is big and dull,
[00:30:48] that stuff.
[00:30:49] So then we went to the hospital.
[00:30:52] And I listened to this conversation
[00:30:55] and I'd drink the doctor and my dad.
[00:30:59] He could hear through that half open door.
[00:31:04] And I could hear him say something about dad
[00:31:07] about you're going to have any more.
[00:31:12] You got a problem.
[00:31:13] We don't much about it.
[00:31:14] But it's multiple cirrhosis.
[00:31:15] I'm not sure even remember the name or I didn't remember it.
[00:31:18] And he wouldn't be doing any much more golf
[00:31:21] or a, a, a, a, a, a trouble walk.
[00:31:25] The reason trouble walking unless you cut out the alcohol
[00:31:32] and the sense of, he's there
[00:31:37] evening cocktail with my mother.
[00:31:40] And the other other limitations they had to live
[00:31:43] then on.
[00:31:44] And so it remembered as words.
[00:31:47] They would like me live in a vacuum too,
[00:31:50] goodbye doctor.
[00:31:51] And it came out and said, dad, you just said to me,
[00:31:54] that's home.
[00:31:56] Yeah, we, you said here he says, let's good home in time
[00:31:59] for me to have a martini with mom.
[00:32:01] Yeah, that's right.
[00:32:03] So he let the doctor know that his,
[00:32:05] what the doctor was saying, no alcohol, no smoking,
[00:32:08] no more golf and all this stuff.
[00:32:09] He said, okay, guess what?
[00:32:11] We're going to go have a martini with mom.
[00:32:12] Ha ha ha.
[00:32:13] Ha ha.
[00:32:14] Uh.
[00:32:16] Now in the spring of 1945, you join the Navy.
[00:32:22] And, and you said, for my parents,
[00:32:23] this is probably confirmation of our fall
[00:32:26] from gentility.
[00:32:26] They're only son was going to war
[00:32:28] and they're listed guy.
[00:32:30] So uh, the war's still going on when you joined 1945?
[00:32:34] Yes, but the,
[00:32:38] heard the,
[00:32:39] the japs gave up,
[00:32:43] not necessarily because of me.
[00:32:44] And maybe they're giving up on me.
[00:32:46] But.
[00:32:47] Ha ha ha.
[00:32:48] So you go to boot camp.
[00:32:50] You go to fire fighting school.
[00:32:55] Get, you got this part in here,
[00:32:57] which I have to read says to get out of compulsory
[00:32:59] Sunday church services.
[00:33:01] I said I was Jewish.
[00:33:03] For this,
[00:33:03] for this,
[00:33:04] for this,
[00:33:05] for this,
[00:33:07] I was assigned punitive cleaning duties.
[00:33:09] Whether this was because of anti-setting,
[00:33:11] anti-s,
[00:33:11] anti-summetatism in the Navy or because the Navy
[00:33:16] doesn't like, but liars are both,
[00:33:18] I will never know.
[00:33:19] Ha ha ha ha ha ha.
[00:33:21] So I got to sleep in.
[00:33:23] Yeah.
[00:33:25] And then you,
[00:33:26] you had a,
[00:33:27] it also says all recruits were compelled to box.
[00:33:29] My sparring partner was a brute who had fun
[00:33:31] beating the living crap out of me.
[00:33:33] I would say by I recon,
[00:33:35] a genuine Jew who offered to switch sparring
[00:33:37] partners with me and proceeded to salvage
[00:33:39] a beat the guy who'd been doing a job on me.
[00:33:43] And then you get this break,
[00:33:44] which is my big break was the V5 program,
[00:33:47] which had been set up to train naval aviators.
[00:33:50] This included a full ride at University
[00:33:52] and Commission as an officer
[00:33:54] because only gentleman could fly for the Navy.
[00:33:56] So they have this program out there
[00:33:59] to become a pilot and you actually,
[00:34:01] somebody will help help.
[00:34:05] When I have a tie throughout the fleet by order
[00:34:08] and those who got through to sent to get a degree,
[00:34:13] get a degree,
[00:34:16] you had to learn to get a degree before you can fly
[00:34:17] on airplanes to America,
[00:34:20] for America.
[00:34:21] And you, you end up getting selected for the program.
[00:34:25] And this is, this is classics.
[00:34:28] There we go.
[00:34:29] I was college mount,
[00:34:30] but I didn't know which college nor did I care.
[00:34:32] Those of us who had passed the task were assembled
[00:34:34] from our various East Coast stations.
[00:34:36] At Muster, roll was called.
[00:34:39] David, David's loft is in Monroe.
[00:34:42] I can remember very well.
[00:34:43] I remember really.
[00:34:44] Daily, David's loft is in Monroe
[00:34:46] to New Haven, Connecticut,
[00:34:47] go to Yale University.
[00:34:49] We didn't know where to go and go ahead
[00:34:50] even, but then in my.
[00:34:51] And then the others with the last team,
[00:34:54] last name to end through Z,
[00:34:55] were sent to Skenek to New York
[00:34:57] and to Union College.
[00:34:58] Right.
[00:34:59] So by your alphabetical order, you get sent to Yale.
[00:35:03] I'm Bridgetman.
[00:35:04] That's called Plan Perthhood.
[00:35:07] Plan Perthhood, I guess.
[00:35:08] I don't know.
[00:35:10] And then you get to Yale
[00:35:12] and it was pretty challenging.
[00:35:14] And you talk about that.
[00:35:17] We had to wear uniforms at all times
[00:35:19] and guard college gates with empty rifles,
[00:35:22] but just clear that we weren't the normal quality
[00:35:28] of Yale men who were white shoes and ties.
[00:35:31] And so on.
[00:35:34] And I remember the high school girls
[00:35:37] that needed high school,
[00:35:40] used to buy a, and I understand it,
[00:35:43] not an attention, but the best I could.
[00:35:46] While, you know, the war had ended.
[00:35:49] And then you say, after my freshman year at Yale,
[00:35:52] the aviation cadet program was dissolved.
[00:35:54] I could stay on at Yale, but I had to sign a seven year
[00:35:57] enlistment.
[00:35:58] No way.
[00:35:59] I wouldn't sign.
[00:36:00] So I was sent to Norfolk still a Seaman second class
[00:36:03] to guard a gang plague.
[00:36:04] Fortunately, it's a micro rare.
[00:36:06] Unfortunately, the peacetime navy didn't need me for long.
[00:36:11] I received an honorable discharge on August 21st, 1946.
[00:36:15] To my stun delight, I found that I still had some more
[00:36:19] American generosity coming my way.
[00:36:21] Thanks to the GI bill, I was entitled to a year
[00:36:24] for having enlisted and one day of college
[00:36:26] for every day I had served, including my time
[00:36:28] in uniform at Yale.
[00:36:30] This was just enough time to complete my studies
[00:36:33] and earn a college degree.
[00:36:34] So top off this banana of good fortune,
[00:36:37] Yale welcomed me back in September as a regular student
[00:36:39] in regular clothes, free to study, whatever I wanted.
[00:36:42] I chose enactment relations.
[00:36:45] So there you go.
[00:36:48] That's a class, that's classic.
[00:36:49] No airplanes.
[00:36:50] You can't make that up.
[00:36:52] Well, I wouldn't have a plan.
[00:36:54] It was national, it didn't have to.
[00:36:58] In the summer of 1947, I took a road trip.
[00:37:00] My elder sister, my elder sister, Jones suggestion.
[00:37:04] I dropped in on her in laws in Chicago.
[00:37:06] They took me to Lake Geneva, Wisconsin for a weekend.
[00:37:10] At their college, we went to the Bell Fry Summer Playhouse.
[00:37:14] To the Bell Free Summer Playhouse
[00:37:17] to see another part of the forest, name of the play.
[00:37:20] I was stunned by one of the performances and stayed
[00:37:23] by one of the performers and stayed at the lake for three days
[00:37:26] trying without success to bed the star
[00:37:30] by the name Mary Larmouth.
[00:37:32] Larmouth.
[00:37:33] So you see this girl and then you go back to Yale.
[00:37:36] You say I was bored despite good friends and touch football games
[00:37:41] and you couldn't get Mary out of your mind.
[00:37:43] Mary ended up moving to New York and you'd go visit her from New Haven.
[00:37:47] And then here we go.
[00:37:51] At some point, I got to thinking that all this was one hell
[00:37:53] of a deal for an immigrant.
[00:37:55] I couldn't get over the idea that I owed my country everything
[00:37:58] and I was possessed by restless and romantic feeling
[00:38:01] that I ought to pay my country back through further service.
[00:38:03] One go.
[00:38:05] I heard of a Marine Corps program which would make me a commissioned
[00:38:09] officer if I spent the summer between my junior and senior years
[00:38:12] getting paid to train in a puto and leaders class in Quantic Overginia.
[00:38:16] My sister Jones has been John a bit of World War II Marine in the Pacific.
[00:38:21] He was like an older brother to me and I had a lot of respect for the Marines
[00:38:24] in general because of the qualities I saw in John that were almost non-existent
[00:38:28] among my classmates.
[00:38:29] Marines know what I'm talking about.
[00:38:32] That is the few the proud stuff that has led many good men to early deaths
[00:38:36] and others to dish and luge men and boredom in a branch of service
[00:38:39] affectionately nicknamed The Sock, a brotherhood in any case.
[00:38:46] And then after six weeks, I'm a camp, you were Marine officer.
[00:38:49] I was commissioned a second lieutenant in the peacetime Marine Corps.
[00:38:53] Dad didn't have much to say about my commission because he didn't have a crystal ball.
[00:38:59] As a Marine reservist, my standby order is red something like only to be called upon
[00:39:03] in case of national emergency.
[00:39:07] So you become a Marine instead of attending graduation Mary and I got married.
[00:39:12] On a Saturday and both went to work on Monday, Mary worked at a department store and I got
[00:39:16] a job unloading millions of gallons of industrial molasses from deep water tankers
[00:39:21] at a peer-and-ball to more for a British company.
[00:39:25] And I were earning enough to buy a little Ford and rent a little house on the bay with
[00:39:29] a pump well for drinking water and an oil heater.
[00:39:32] Eventually the oil leaked into the well which was okay because it floated as long as the
[00:39:36] water level didn't get too low.
[00:39:39] When it did, we started getting greasy showers.
[00:39:42] We were so unbelievably happy.
[00:39:45] So you kind of scrounge together a nice little life at this point?
[00:39:49] Very good.
[00:39:50] Very good.
[00:39:51] I was just, I felt good.
[00:39:53] I don't know if you could get in there that the job was like but it was a running a one-man,
[00:40:06] two-man terminal and the industrial blasts are collected from around the country and then
[00:40:11] collected there and then pumped on the ship's and we're just two of us.
[00:40:16] And the other guy had retired, had guy and left one, my one-man staff, so one-man staff,
[00:40:27] big fat black guy.
[00:40:29] And we worked a lot.
[00:40:32] He's smarter than I was about this business by far.
[00:40:35] He would have been, except he's got the skin problem.
[00:40:38] So he worked for some years and then he used to, we could long find.
[00:40:45] I don't know if it's after the first week or so I noticed he took a break once or twice a day
[00:40:51] and I didn't even know what he did but he was just an easy job and I learned a real
[00:40:56] old cars and one thing and I never, but he just disappeared.
[00:40:59] So I don't know if it's time I'm just not okay with what you do.
[00:41:05] But I'm just curious.
[00:41:09] He said I have to refer to it and there was a big combination of the industrial pump and
[00:41:17] often the side was of the toilet.
[00:41:20] I surprised you right now when we got a toilet here, that's a white folks.
[00:41:24] I think he'd be shit for me.
[00:41:26] He said no.
[00:41:28] He said that's been that way all the years that you've been here?
[00:41:32] Yeah.
[00:41:33] I think that's just plain bullshit.
[00:41:35] It's forget that.
[00:41:40] He said all right but I noticed when tank trucks came in to load the glasses and saw that
[00:41:48] he was never never near that toilet.
[00:41:52] This is a Baltimore, Maryland, 1945, and he 49.
[00:41:56] It's ridiculous.
[00:41:57] It is ridiculous now what some of the things we do with that really bit.
[00:42:04] So you're living that life, you're like I said, you're pretty happy at that point and
[00:42:13] then going to the book on June 25, 1950, we got our national emergency.
[00:42:22] At dawn that morning the Korean People's Army surged over the 38th Parallel into the
[00:42:29] South.
[00:42:30] This action was immediately condemned by an emergency session of UN Security Council of
[00:42:33] Oak from which the Soviets abstained.
[00:42:37] On June 30, five days after the North's invasion of the South began Truman's
[00:42:41] Center American troops to support the South Koreans.
[00:42:43] On July 7, the UN passed resolution 84 requesting member nations to join a police action
[00:42:50] on the Korean Peninsula.
[00:42:51] 16 nations joined in, including ones with modest armies like Ethiopia and Turkey.
[00:42:56] General MacArthur, who had been serving as the de facto emperor of Japan since the war
[00:43:00] present, was given command of UN forces.
[00:43:03] Unfortunately for South Koreans, MacArthur's army of occupation were not the same men
[00:43:09] who won the Second World War.
[00:43:12] Many were drunk and fat from half a decade of soft-living as occupiers.
[00:43:16] They were beaten back almost off the peninsula by Kim Il-Sung's peasant fighters, making
[00:43:22] their last stand outside the port of Prusen.
[00:43:26] The outcome looked bleak.
[00:43:28] On the 15th of September, MacArthur executed an act of military genius when he ordered
[00:43:33] the Marines under his command to make an amphibious landing at the port of Inchon near Seoul.
[00:43:40] Very nice new little of Korean history, neither of us knew or cared about America's
[00:43:43] Blunder diplomacy and intelligence failures that had left Korea in a national security blind spot.
[00:43:50] But Mary's attention skyrocketed when I reminded her of my standby orders and speculated
[00:43:54] that this skirmish seemed to qualify as a national emergency.
[00:43:58] The call to duty came shortly after Truman decided to commit troops to the UN's response
[00:44:02] to North Korea's assault.
[00:44:03] I went down to our local post office where Navy Corman was giving the Marine physicals.
[00:44:08] I've always had a little blood pressure when the dock double-checked it.
[00:44:12] He wanted to turn me away.
[00:44:14] I had already taken leave from guarding millions of gowns in the last season and gotten
[00:44:18] excited about going to war.
[00:44:19] I told my rewrite back, went ran up and down a few flights of stairs and returned
[00:44:23] to somewhat breathless for a re-exam.
[00:44:26] The Corman said something to the effect of hey pal, if you're dumb enough to go, I'm
[00:44:30] dumb enough to send you.
[00:44:35] Up until that point, my military training consisted of PLC, which is the Patoon Leaders
[00:44:39] Course that summer camp at Quantico in 1948, before deploying to Korea, I would receive
[00:44:44] a statement.
[00:44:45] The PLC, the Patoon Legislative, the rest of the Marine Corps received a little bar
[00:44:51] of silver bar in the state camp camp camp camp and some of the saloon.
[00:44:56] They salute us.
[00:44:57] That really bit.
[00:44:59] They said the Patoon Leaders Class PLC, Pricks Last Chance.
[00:45:04] And that stuck with a Pricks Last Chance graduated.
[00:45:11] Before deploying to Korea, I would receive additional training in the first ever class
[00:45:15] of the special basic school.
[00:45:18] Now today it's called the Basic School, is it special basic school because it was shortened
[00:45:22] for Korea?
[00:45:23] We were the first one.
[00:45:24] It was a creation.
[00:45:26] I think it had a much more extensive process prior to this souvenir and so that they,
[00:45:32] but I don't say it anyway, a meat grinder, but it was fast and it was created as a special
[00:45:38] basic.
[00:45:39] Today, the basic class grows to a, well, a basic class with say six months, another
[00:45:45] year or whatever before you were commissioned, but they needed to do tons, they didn't
[00:45:50] right now.
[00:45:53] Back to the book, we had just 11 weeks at the Basic School.
[00:45:55] Obviously, we came away, willfully underprepared for what lay ahead.
[00:46:00] On chilly autumn nights, when training didn't have to be fumbling around that land navigation
[00:46:03] courses in the dark woods, I would sit by the fire of lion bed with Marion Talk, dreams
[00:46:08] about the arrival of our baby.
[00:46:11] This spoken was the constellation that I was leaving her with child in the event that my
[00:46:15] absence became permanent.
[00:46:18] Those weeks at the Basic School were consumed by season marines, painly trying to teach
[00:46:23] second lieutenant daily to read maps and lead riflemen.
[00:46:26] Not that I was going to need any of the skills I was learning.
[00:46:28] It looked as though the war would be over before we got our platoons.
[00:46:32] Then on Thanksgiving 1950, the Chinese launched their surprise attack at chosen and our
[00:46:38] brother marines found themselves doomed.
[00:46:44] And that's what I started this whole podcast off, but then you get my orders, order report
[00:46:49] to camp Pendleton near San Diego, California, before shipping out across the Pacific.
[00:46:53] I said goodbye to my parents in Bethesda.
[00:46:55] My dad gave me a 45 caliber Smith and Weston revolver, recalling that he had founded a personal
[00:47:00] weapon.
[00:47:01] Recalling that he had found a personal weapon to be of comfort.
[00:47:04] First later my son Charlie was reading, Tim O'Brien's Vietnam stories, the things they
[00:47:09] carried.
[00:47:10] He asked me if there was anything I carried in the war for good luck.
[00:47:13] I told him, yeah, a pistol.
[00:47:16] I still keep that pistol on my desk unloaded.
[00:47:20] Dad kissed me goodbye and hugged me.
[00:47:22] I can't recall him doing that doing either ever before.
[00:47:27] The family's war history must have been on his mind as it was on mine.
[00:47:31] All through my deployment, my mother would garden nervously and dig holes in the yard like
[00:47:38] graves.
[00:47:39] I only got the light graves.
[00:47:41] I don't know what motive was, but she just got digging.
[00:47:45] I had maybe that's what's in her mind.
[00:47:48] I don't know, but she did do a lot of digging.
[00:47:51] I'm sure she was trying to keep her brain occupied.
[00:47:53] It could be.
[00:47:56] Mary and I planned to drive Western on 1949 Ford, but Mary was having trouble riding while
[00:48:01] pregnant, so she followed by train.
[00:48:04] After moving what, it wouldn't have been a dreamhouse in any other circumstance.
[00:48:08] Just off the beach and Carl's bed, Angus and I, it's one of your buddies, Angus and
[00:48:11] I drove north to Camp Pendleton to check in.
[00:48:14] I explained to the weathered sergeant on duty that we just arrived and gave the young
[00:48:18] wives a bit and asked for an added week's leave.
[00:48:23] And then he tells you the boat leaves Diego on Wednesday.
[00:48:28] Angus and I decided to break new separately and gently to our beauties.
[00:48:32] The moment I walked in the door, Mary looked at my face and started to cry.
[00:48:35] Angus's bride heard the news through the bathroom door, seated on the toilet.
[00:48:39] She screamed.
[00:48:41] So you think you're going to get, yeah, cool.
[00:48:43] Can we get an extra week's leave?
[00:48:45] No, the boat leaves on Wednesday.
[00:48:47] You're right.
[00:48:48] Be branded that I was a little holo stool.
[00:48:50] I must run Monday.
[00:48:54] I was given responsible for, Ron's responsibility for 30 or so Marines in the fifth replacement
[00:49:00] draft.
[00:49:01] The draft's mission was to bring the depleted Marine forces on the Korean Peninsula back
[00:49:04] up to strength for a counter offensive.
[00:49:06] As I inspected their weapons and gear, the platoon sergeant advised me that many of these
[00:49:10] boys were virgins and suggested we rectify that before heading out.
[00:49:14] That night we crossed into the U, we crossed the U.S. Mexico border and found a brothel.
[00:49:19] Called El Serape, where I negotiated a group rate using my best college Spanish.
[00:49:26] It's just a call.
[00:49:28] It's some gestures to explain to the ladies.
[00:49:31] It wouldn't take these lads long.
[00:49:36] Not only was I the officer in charge of these guys, but at 23, I was older than most,
[00:49:41] than almost all of them.
[00:49:43] This was not lost on our host who called the Marines Nino's boys on a way out the
[00:49:47] ladies gathered to bid us farewell offering streamers and fainteers.
[00:49:52] Years later I was at a hotel bar in Veracruz, Mexico.
[00:49:55] I kept getting looks from one of the barmen, finally he shouted out El Serape.
[00:49:58] There were a few times the opposite side of Mexico.
[00:50:01] I had a very crazy elegant hotel on the harbor rebuilding a ship in Fort.
[00:50:09] My wife was just being this hotel.
[00:50:13] I still can't remember what a lot of things people looked like and saw it.
[00:50:22] I had been in Mexico and not down there.
[00:50:27] The guy is a Mexican drinker, whatever the bartender is doing, he just shouted and spilled
[00:50:32] a syrup.
[00:50:34] He'd been in the other establishment.
[00:50:37] What's that about?
[00:50:44] I don't want to tell you the story.
[00:50:47] Docside Wednesday morning I bought $10,000 worth of short-term life insurance from an
[00:50:51] enterprise and anetna life salesman, supplementing the government's policy of the same
[00:50:55] amount.
[00:50:56] I would be taking over a platoon where most, if not all of my predecessors had been
[00:51:00] killed or wounded.
[00:51:02] If I thought about it, I was fucked, but I didn't think about it.
[00:51:09] So now you get on a ship.
[00:51:10] We made a stop in Yosuke, Yosuke Suka.
[00:51:13] Yosuke, Japan for two days picking up supplies and ammunition.
[00:51:17] We had a chance to call home.
[00:51:19] There was a long line to use phones.
[00:51:20] It was crowded and I couldn't hear well.
[00:51:22] In a room full of Marines, I shouted into the receiver to marry.
[00:51:25] You bet your sweet ass I love you.
[00:51:27] The Marines off the ship had managed to get drunk and in trouble before the rest of us could
[00:51:31] even get to the ship.
[00:51:32] The first Marines off the ship managed to get drunk and in trouble before the rest of us could
[00:51:50] even get down the gang plank.
[00:51:52] We were ordered to remain on the base.
[00:51:54] Officers included.
[00:51:55] Ego to experience the finer points of Japanese culture, I assembled a squad of like-minded
[00:52:00] Marines, lined them up in formation, and marched them to the main gate sternly bringing
[00:52:06] the ranks to a halt.
[00:52:07] I'd advise the century that we were under orders to move into town and round up our
[00:52:11] misbehaving comrades.
[00:52:14] Outside the gate, I told the men to scatter, have fun, fuck their brains out, drink themselves
[00:52:18] stupid, but don't get arrested and do not miss the ship.
[00:52:22] I was shoured with words of gratitude and promises to return on time.
[00:52:30] Pete McClowski, this is the first introduction of Pete McClowski.
[00:52:35] Am I saying that name right?
[00:52:36] That's right.
[00:52:37] Pete McClowski and I met on the troop ship and had made it to shore earlier.
[00:52:42] I found an amadeeshia house infested with officers based in Japan.
[00:52:46] At one point, an avi officer came from South American.
[00:52:48] Just correct.
[00:52:49] He had made it.
[00:52:50] He had made it.
[00:52:51] He was our mission.
[00:52:52] You showed up.
[00:52:53] Yep.
[00:52:54] At one point, an avi officer came from another room and purposely ordered us to quiet
[00:52:57] down.
[00:52:58] This is the Gisha house.
[00:53:00] When he returned to his party, I threw an empty bottle through the paper screen wall
[00:53:06] apparently striking someone.
[00:53:08] We heard a yell, vidsirens.
[00:53:10] Pete and I clambered through the skylight and spent the night bivalact on the roof.
[00:53:16] To the chamber of an two officers in the night of that submarine.
[00:53:21] The finer points of Japan.
[00:53:23] In the morning, everyone made it back to the ship somehow.
[00:53:25] However, just before departure, six officers were ordered to stay in Japan.
[00:53:29] One was the future evangelist and presidential candidate, Pat Robertson.
[00:53:34] Pat got his daddy then, United States Senator Willie or A. Willie Robertson, to have
[00:53:39] him pulled off the ship because Pat was probably having second thoughts about dying for
[00:53:43] his country.
[00:53:44] The other five litanets were beer.
[00:53:46] It's pulled the cover for Pat's preferential treatment.
[00:53:49] Just kind of thing.
[00:53:51] Yeah.
[00:53:52] And we won't go into it too much, but that comes back to bite him.
[00:53:59] What did they did to come back to bite him later on the book?
[00:54:03] Yeah.
[00:54:04] Just because the verses got out of wonderful preacher, presidential candidate and so on.
[00:54:10] Just how the virtuous guy said, the combat in rain usually wasn't just how he got
[00:54:16] gone around, but it's very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very
[00:54:18] cold and unspecified grip.
[00:54:22] So, something like the immaculate conception did get gone around without any contact.
[00:54:29] I don't know what the first case, but I remember, I remember, Robertson's.
[00:54:34] There was.
[00:54:35] There was truly.
[00:54:39] The main thing I did that had entered his head that he had some duty to those brains
[00:54:49] and so on, was just escaped him.
[00:54:52] As I say in the book, we called him out, but he's actually what he was.
[00:54:59] And what he was running for president.
[00:55:02] And he soon, Klausky, and said, I'll break you and we just have what he called those things
[00:55:12] when he had testimony, whatever, court reports, of course, the suit in every state and
[00:55:19] will break you.
[00:55:20] And so, it gives all of it a book about about that and the depth of the rot, inside that
[00:55:29] guy.
[00:55:30] Well, you guys proceed, you land at Pohang, a port on East Coast to Korea, from Pohang,
[00:55:35] we were driven up into the hills and the back of trucks that rode, was rough.
[00:55:39] The bench is hard and cold, nobody spoke.
[00:55:41] I thought about marrying felt alone.
[00:55:44] It could be that this was the most frightening, one of my most frightening members of the
[00:55:48] war, because the men to my left and my right were still strangers.
[00:55:52] And we had not yet encountered the action that would bond us, then give us the courage
[00:55:56] to get through much darker nights.
[00:55:58] At one pissed stop, we heard that we had already lost some guys from another convoy, not
[00:56:01] sane in some glorious flight, but squashed by their vehicle when it skated off the rudder
[00:56:07] road and rolled down the steep hillside.
[00:56:11] We reached first to vision, first to vision's fifth marine regiment at the front, not a
[00:56:16] lot of trenches, just some high hills, narrow valleys, and a small river with enemy lurking
[00:56:21] in the long night.
[00:56:23] Pete McCloskey and I were assigned to Charlie Company first battalion.
[00:56:26] The motto of first battalion fifth marines is make peace or die.
[00:56:32] For those of us who had just arrived in Korea, the latter seemed much more on light.
[00:56:36] The latter seemed much more likely.
[00:56:38] It was February 16th, 1951.
[00:56:44] Before the cork, it gave me a rifle-potuned command I was designated the battalion
[00:56:47] supply officer.
[00:56:48] A lieutenant would have to be killed, wounded, or at least likely, have all rotated at
[00:56:54] home before I got to a patoon.
[00:57:01] So you're working as a supply officer for a while, and you go through some stories, you're
[00:57:10] a little bit brash, I would say, and a little bit rebellious.
[00:57:13] There's some of the chiggy bearers who are these Koreans that work basically hauling gear,
[00:57:20] and you befriended some of them.
[00:57:22] I was commanding officer because the supply officer had a 50-chiggy bearer, and they
[00:57:34] co-supplies up in the net, and they helped carry wounded down.
[00:57:38] They were, because they're small.
[00:57:46] They were ill-fed, because they were given the rations that were promised.
[00:57:51] They had homemade shoes in many cases.
[00:57:56] They were very brave, and I felt, I must say, responsible for them.
[00:58:03] I suppose I felt that.
[00:58:05] But I felt with rigging as people, you killed for us.
[00:58:09] They just say they pay and they want, you pay by the barrel, because the money was totally
[00:58:16] worthless.
[00:58:17] So you could, I mean, our rations, those days used to include, you know, brought to us,
[00:58:25] or they're carried up or whatever, and you know, our actually get, say, three lucky strikes
[00:58:29] cigarettes, something like that.
[00:58:30] I had to have them to smoke.
[00:58:32] It's easy to start there in heaven.
[00:58:35] But they weren't, and I got the corps and to look at them, and that very pragmatic, the
[00:58:45] market value and to keep in good condition of going to carry the body.
[00:58:49] So my little help my feet.
[00:58:51] And I felt very close to them.
[00:58:53] And I used to, I can do it now, I need them.
[00:58:57] So I'd squat for an hour or two easily, just as they do, and just find out what they're
[00:59:05] going to do.
[00:59:06] But most of them didn't have any trouble.
[00:59:08] But I felt more close.
[00:59:10] And then the fucking colonels, and you can't just squat down, bunch of gooks.
[00:59:15] And even he was not my favorite guy.
[00:59:19] And I just ignored that.
[00:59:21] And it felt that he were part of me.
[00:59:29] It certainly really were part of a Charlie company, first with talent, and stuff and arranged
[00:59:33] what I got there, or the whole battalion.
[00:59:37] So they didn't wear helmet so I didn't wear helmet.
[00:59:40] So another also came from Regiment.
[00:59:43] And they took a major he lists.
[00:59:47] And just things, I think I rub head and there and I said, Mr. Day, we don't stop wearing
[00:59:54] helmet.
[00:59:55] We're trying for you out of the battalion.
[00:59:56] Oh, shit, you're just sending me home.
[00:59:57] I need to fucking terrify me.
[01:00:00] But anyway, it was a bit of a...
[01:00:05] It's a... had job exposed a lot of disgust to performance of the battalion commander who
[01:00:15] did out eat last.
[01:00:19] Like of effort, trying to get decent supplies.
[01:00:23] I got a trailer and a Jeep, and I went and stole something army.
[01:00:27] But it's not stealing.
[01:00:28] So I'm gonna sit in the fat asses.
[01:00:30] These are reserved places, not a belittling army, but anyway.
[01:00:37] So it's okay.
[01:00:38] But anyway, who wouldn't want to want to do?
[01:00:40] And then I had a chance to...
[01:00:44] And a volleyball game, a volleyball game?
[01:00:49] A volleyball game?
[01:00:50] A kernel.
[01:00:51] Well, I recognize the headquartered group with the Tonya's from the class in the
[01:00:59] Tonya, but then he prepared a side of the line-offs.
[01:01:08] And so I thought...
[01:01:10] And this kernel is much worse that I was sitting there.
[01:01:13] Much worse than you can imagine in the cold-anime town fire to protect the headquartered
[01:01:20] rather than worry about who's on the ridge that happened to be arranged.
[01:01:26] So I just replayed volleyball and theory missed the ball and hit me hard to look at.
[01:01:35] But in his face, through the net.
[01:01:40] So then pretty soon I got up at home.
[01:01:47] Like I said, you were brass.
[01:01:49] That was a duty call.
[01:01:56] I really, really wanted to hurt him, but I really felt just an important thing.
[01:02:02] And he had a...
[01:02:04] And well, you say in here my misbehavior and contempt for pointless rules and petty authority
[01:02:11] figures wasn't indicative of an age-old fact-to-war.
[01:02:14] Well, good soldiers who excel at shirt-starching and personal grooming are seldom the guys you
[01:02:19] want in combat.
[01:02:21] Marines have a slur for these scrubbed, disciplined, rear echelon types we call them
[01:02:25] pugs, persons other than grunt.
[01:02:28] Grunts.
[01:02:29] One early morning, I saw this distinction boil over and nearly turned deadly.
[01:02:33] Four of my chiggies, including the widower, were carrying a gut shot North Korean who had
[01:02:38] been hit during a minor skirmish.
[01:02:40] The night before and had been found aimlessly crawling on the hill.
[01:02:44] The bearers set the stretcher down beside the road waiting for someone to collect the prisoner
[01:02:48] for interrogation if he didn't die first.
[01:02:51] A clean, shaving truck driver who just finished hauling supplies up from the rear and noticed
[01:02:55] that the wounded man had used what little strength he had left to struggle onto his side
[01:02:59] to take a piss.
[01:03:01] The truck driver waited for the trickle to start, then put a toe of his boot on the
[01:03:06] guy's shoulder to make him roll back and piss on himself.
[01:03:09] He laughed as the urine went all over the wounded man and seaped into his gut wound.
[01:03:14] Behind me, I heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle being wrapped.
[01:03:19] A Marine, possibly on the edge of reason from his last hill, aimed his weapon at the
[01:03:23] sadistic driver.
[01:03:25] No, I shouted.
[01:03:28] I shared the riflemen's disgust, but I couldn't let him throw his life away by committing
[01:03:33] murder.
[01:03:34] Just one of the cheeky bears touched on there.
[01:03:41] You touched what a the winner were.
[01:03:44] He had come to me and with a certain interpreter.
[01:03:53] You wanted to get a pass to go back to see who definitely is family.
[01:04:01] And I happened to notice him before because he was a little older than the salmon carrying
[01:04:05] off a load.
[01:04:08] I said, poetics and I'm going to group that size.
[01:04:14] I have to be lying crossers who are just watching what we're doing and so on.
[01:04:17] So nobody once they came to us the only way they'd die is if they did.
[01:04:21] I mean, you get out of your dead.
[01:04:23] Just the time either there you don't.
[01:04:25] Nobody goes anywhere else no matter what.
[01:04:28] Wait, these are the cheeky bears.
[01:04:29] No, those are new ones.
[01:04:30] But I can't.
[01:04:31] We've been a sub-ex-number.
[01:04:33] I'm going to say one play none play two.
[01:04:36] We're not.
[01:04:38] We're spying on this really.
[01:04:42] Or so we're told.
[01:04:44] And probably, right?
[01:04:45] So I think I brought the book as a professor at the music.
[01:04:51] I said that he's been good and so on.
[01:04:53] He's going between.
[01:04:54] We'll be right now.
[01:04:56] I'm going to go on Jew and then if he's presented this after, again, week or whatever, after
[01:05:06] such a date or out of direct line between the two killing and I signed it with labor
[01:05:14] also.
[01:05:15] So, Charlie, come on first with time for some Marines and Shenmau is way.
[01:05:21] Yeah, here's the note that you wrote.
[01:05:23] So this guy wants to go and leave and you send him with this note.
[01:05:25] This man is a stretcher bear for Charlie company first battalion fifth Marines.
[01:05:29] He has saved Marine Mives.
[01:05:30] He is returning to Wanda on emergency leave.
[01:05:33] If he has found anywhere off the line between Injin Wanda or if he presents this pass
[01:05:38] after the date on the reserve, reverse side, killing.
[01:05:42] Signed second lieutenant, Charles, you daily, CEO, Korean labor battalion fifth Marines.
[01:05:49] How did you translate this to him so that he knew that he had this, so that he understood
[01:05:56] what that meant?
[01:05:57] I didn't, I just gave him the pass and he wanted me to be worrying about it, but I didn't
[01:06:04] know that I was a small person for doing it.
[01:06:07] I was somewhere in the city of Killed or whatever.
[01:06:11] Fortunately, we didn't change our position on Injin because he had no place to go down,
[01:06:20] but that's what he showed up.
[01:06:22] So I felt good about it.
[01:06:24] And if I hadn't felt good about it, I guess I would have thought it would be good about it
[01:06:28] because I wouldn't kill the prick because he was in fact a line crosser.
[01:06:32] But I don't think he was.
[01:06:35] Going back to the book in mid-March I was up for promotion.
[01:06:38] That meant I had orders to report the rear fur of physical fitness.
[01:06:40] I was excited for my first shower in a month, but mostly I wanted to know how second
[01:06:45] Lieutenant Kerry Coward was doing.
[01:06:48] I was saying that right Coward.
[01:06:49] We have COWRT.
[01:06:51] Yep, about a week earlier trying to do the right thing, leading from the front, he had
[01:06:54] run ahead of his mortar section to observe where their rounds were landing.
[01:06:58] He was spotted by an enemy patrol and was sprayed with bullets from a burp gun.
[01:07:02] A toy size machine gun, so name for spinning out bullets so fast they slur together
[01:07:06] into a burping sound.
[01:07:09] I think how bad the US hit, I couldn't understand why our doctors would keep him in a
[01:07:14] tent hospital instead of sending him rearward to more sophisticated facilities.
[01:07:18] As soon as I reached headquarters I asked about him and orderly checked a list.
[01:07:23] Lieutenant Coward died last night.
[01:07:26] Fuck, Coward was dead and I got to take a shower.
[01:07:32] I felt sick.
[01:07:36] And you know what I got under the hot shower, another naked guy, an older, wise and
[01:07:42] little fellow, entered and began his shower.
[01:07:45] He must have noticed my grimy gear.
[01:07:48] It's quiet up there these days, he said.
[01:07:50] I tensed up, muttering something like, is that right?
[01:07:54] All I could think about was Coward.
[01:07:57] I added that there was so nice to be back here in the rear with all the deep, thinking,
[01:08:01] big picture geniuses.
[01:08:03] Unperturbed he gave me his forecast, gooks will be pouring down any night now.
[01:08:09] About then a man came in, whom I recognized as Colonel Seely, a regiment biggie who
[01:08:14] visited the battalion and whose name I remembered as it was the same as my mother's
[01:08:18] maiden name.
[01:08:19] He nodded to the man I had just mouthed off to and said, hello sir, in honest reverence
[01:08:25] for the man, as much the rank even in a state of undress.
[01:08:31] I realized the runt was none other than General Chestie, was none other than General Lewis
[01:08:36] B. Chestie Polar, Recepine of Moore Real Metals than it does in other generals, a veteran
[01:08:41] of World War I, the banana wars and World War II, Hero of Guadalcanal and the chosen
[01:08:46] Reservoir.
[01:08:47] I left that tent so fast, I still, I was to lathered up with soap while scrambling into
[01:08:52] my new uniform.
[01:08:53] I grabbed my weapons and made myself scarce.
[01:08:56] After passing my physical, I returned to the battalion, a first lieutenant.
[01:09:00] There you go, you have a little conversation with Chestie Polar and Michelle.
[01:09:06] They don't want to be invited to expect the lines, you know, I kind of a general, he made
[01:09:11] some comment about, I should try to ask him, I should recognize me, I just put a good
[01:09:17] line or something like that and I knew he had me by the ball, but it didn't squeeze.
[01:09:22] What he referred to there, I might be, for a minute, to discuss, then he was right about
[01:09:30] that assault, he was wrong about the magnitude of it and the unbeknownst to marine intelligence
[01:09:38] or these useless generals, island and the car from SON because he's gone by the unbeknown
[01:09:45] but anyway, it was a massive, massive accumulation of forces, 700,000 or about a farmer
[01:09:53] than before and they moved it down and they, this is the whole, I don't, I can tell you
[01:10:01] what we got them and it assembled that force and they had, later on, quite recently,
[01:10:09] even in Marine Corps history didn't have it, there's a professor of Korean North America,
[01:10:16] American, Korean professor in Virginia, with some I got a hold of the post in the war
[01:10:23] still on, but the post battle thing with quite recently got old and they were the
[01:10:30] conversations between Mao and his generals and he had decided that the only way to stop
[01:10:38] this or bring a stalemate about it or whatever, was to have massive, massive attack
[01:10:45] and so he accumulated these troops so that problem was, and he knew it, they needed some
[01:10:51] additional training they were taking from China and SON and they were exhausted and
[01:10:56] they, and it's similar to trained but it could be done and they had not, the thing
[01:11:06] that enough could not carry enough, they had to carry it because they were, they had
[01:11:12] a very small amounts of the amygdala, 20 rounds per pound or something like that, but
[01:11:18] a lot of them had limited amount of food so they had the time they launched that to the
[01:11:26] time to be out of amination food with seven days so this is the time you knew that and
[01:11:32] they said if we did it with enough force and it swamped you and at least we could
[01:11:38] stay on the end of this thing and so that was unbeknownst to the US but the, but the
[01:11:48] generals also said they were so afraid of another amygdala landing that they spent
[01:11:57] a little bit of time to take care of attack up from, sort of, and late May to the end of April
[01:12:04] and so I knew how they should end of that and the second, the first time we were
[01:12:12] running around loose but just later on there was intrigued by that and by the forehocity
[01:12:17] of this and then as usual we did our little circle around ourselves, defend ourselves and
[01:12:25] the second-hour division disappeared and the public army are okay, division and the other
[01:12:30] side of the disappearance of their work, they wouldn't sound serious but not impossible but
[01:12:36] so that was the background thing I think that we've, it's sticked out in the manuscript
[01:12:40] but laterally but anyway that's just back for your own information and the casualties were
[01:12:46] far higher than the marine family then they were as a chosen by the time we finished
[01:12:51] waiting through this myth and that's a long episode and we're up there.
[01:12:56] No that's, that's all.
[01:12:58] It's always interesting to hear the, the enemies, the enemies thoughts and you know that
[01:13:05] one of the quotes that you've got in here is their, their strategy was to divide in circle
[01:13:12] and annihilate, they were trying to do.
[01:13:14] That's about to do.
[01:13:15] And you know that's, anyways, obviously very aggressive.
[01:13:19] And I'll get a sit down relax, I should have, I gotta listen to that a tone.
[01:13:23] I would rather you to talk and I'll listen, how's that sound?
[01:13:27] Not good.
[01:13:30] Once the Chinese have routed our allies and surrounded us, they plan to get so close to us
[01:13:35] that we'd be unable to call for air support or artillery without hitting our own men.
[01:13:40] Thus negating our biggest technological advantage is not something that, you know, if you're
[01:13:46] going to get to force that has air control and artillery, you get as close to you can't,
[01:13:50] we call it hugging, hugging the enemy, you know, you, they want to get so close to us that
[01:13:54] we can't call for fire.
[01:13:55] That's what I'm put.
[01:13:57] Sometimes our pilots would drop ordinance by families on families by accident with terrifying
[01:14:02] and horrible results.
[01:14:04] To lessen the chance of this, the Marines would put one of their pilots on the ground with
[01:14:07] each marine infantry battalion.
[01:14:10] We called our guy.
[01:14:11] We always called our guys ACE.
[01:14:13] And I'm very unhappy.
[01:14:14] And the Marine Corps still does that.
[01:14:15] That's good.
[01:14:16] We have, we had Marine Corps pilot with us on the battle of Ramadi, you know, and
[01:14:21] he's running a little team of Marines and that's what they did.
[01:14:24] It's, it's, it's outstanding that they do that.
[01:14:28] If I would have known, I would have called a Mace, but I didn't know that.
[01:14:30] If I had known that you guys always called a Mace, we would have called the Good Deal
[01:14:34] Dave Burke, or what have called a Mace.
[01:14:36] Pilots must have hated it when it was their turn, but we like to know that at least they
[01:14:41] had personal stake and not fire bombing Marines.
[01:14:44] Pilots could strafe the hill with wing mounted machine guns and bless the men they hit
[01:14:48] with a quick death, but their most effective weapon was Napalm.
[01:14:52] The famous jelly gasling designed in a lab at Harvard University in 1942 that sticks to
[01:14:57] human skin and burns up to 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit.
[01:15:01] Napalm kills by burning as well as hypothermia and asphyxiation as it sucks up all the
[01:15:07] breathable air around its flames.
[01:15:09] This makes it particularly effective against caves, foxholes, and bunkers.
[01:15:13] Anyone who isn't barbecued dies from lack of oxygen.
[01:15:18] It flows downhill into trenches and holes, so there's nowhere to take cover.
[01:15:24] I don't have words to describe the screams and the stench, except to say that I've never
[01:15:28] heard or smelled anything so awful.
[01:15:31] Napalm is stuck to my memory and is still burning after all these years.
[01:15:35] My dreams are disfigured by it.
[01:15:40] One day in the last week of April we went through some ground that had been held by the
[01:15:44] North Koreans.
[01:15:45] Due to the prior use of Napalm we encountered no resistance.
[01:15:48] The dead were burned to black.
[01:15:50] One Marine put an unspoken cigarette in a charred mouth with still white teeth of a corpse
[01:15:58] suspended in the agony of emolation.
[01:16:02] This gag was good from morale.
[01:16:03] As the hardened platoon passed by the crack jokes, you want to light buddy be careful with
[01:16:08] those cigarettes they'll make you cough.
[01:16:10] That last puff must have been a ballbuster.
[01:16:12] Is that filter?
[01:16:13] Are you unfiltered?
[01:16:15] I laughed too.
[01:16:17] I'm right as well.
[01:16:21] The war provided no shortage of grim reality checks to one's patriotic pretensions.
[01:16:28] During the retreat, my friend Jim Able's was accidentally shot in the back by one of his
[01:16:32] own men who failed to put his weapon on safe.
[01:16:35] The trigger snagged on something while they climbed into a tank onto a tank for a ride.
[01:16:39] Jim fell off the tank and onto the road.
[01:16:41] I ran over to him just in time to hear him gasped the final word, a cliché of warm
[01:16:46] movies and novels that happens to be something dying men really say.
[01:16:52] Shit.
[01:16:55] Able's had loved his home state of Texas, leading patrols his first three checkpoints
[01:17:00] would be Tango Echo X-Ray followed by Alpha Sierra.
[01:17:06] I would learn that Able's had worked for OC Fisher, a useless congressman from Texas 21st
[01:17:12] district.
[01:17:13] A dozen years later, while I was working in Kennedy's West Wing, I paid a visit to Fisher's
[01:17:18] office.
[01:17:19] No sooner could I mention Able's than this blowhardt sounded off and allowed draw about
[01:17:23] how he knew Able's died gloriously, keeping us safe from the communists.
[01:17:28] He assembled his staff instead of that.
[01:17:30] He assembled his entire staff, it his office and prompted me to regale them about Able's
[01:17:35] patriotic and heroic end.
[01:17:38] By then I had lied to goldstar mothers and wives about the circumstances of their beloved's
[01:17:42] deaths.
[01:17:43] I'd let them think that he'd been great or purposeful or that their boys hadn't suffered
[01:17:48] or gone out screaming.
[01:17:50] But I told this group that's not what happened.
[01:17:54] Jim died because another Marine safety was off and it was fucking tragic and awful and his
[01:17:59] last words were shit.
[01:18:03] Looking back, I know I shouldn't have used those bitter words but I loved Jim and I didn't
[01:18:07] know how to handle the way this slob was talking about him.
[01:18:13] I know how to handle it.
[01:18:14] I didn't do anything.
[01:18:15] I don't know why I did.
[01:18:16] So did I do too much?
[01:18:21] Good.
[01:18:34] Eventually you get transferred out of Charlie Company's supply to become the mortar section
[01:18:38] leader of Charlie Company.
[01:18:41] Supporting the rifle battoons to 60mm rounds lobed with limited accuracy and effectiveness
[01:18:46] from portable mortar tubes.
[01:18:50] In his history of the Korean War, the late David Halberstam, describes the situation that
[01:18:55] spring 1951.
[01:18:57] The war had settled into an unbearable unwindable battle.
[01:19:00] And it reached the point where there were no more victories, only death.
[01:19:05] It may have seemed unbearable but both sides bore it.
[01:19:10] Right.
[01:19:11] War is all about bearing the unbearable, oftentimes discomfort whether from the cold or
[01:19:16] rain or lack of hot food is what breaks a man when heaped upon with the many other stresses
[01:19:22] and fears of combat.
[01:19:23] One reason they stopped executing men who broke down on the line after World War I was
[01:19:28] that psychologists came to understand that given enough time in the shit, the psychiatric
[01:19:34] casualty rate will reach 100% in any unit.
[01:19:39] Do you believe that?
[01:19:40] Yep.
[01:19:41] I do.
[01:19:42] I mean there's a limitation to what people can take.
[01:19:45] I guess no, you know what I would say.
[01:19:48] Wouldn't believe it is because the only way wouldn't believe is there are some people
[01:19:52] who will die before they reach that point.
[01:19:55] But that's the only thing that will keep it from reaching 100%.
[01:19:59] No, I won't do it again.
[01:20:01] I don't know how important not all are statistics of that man.
[01:20:04] That's true.
[01:20:07] Our company commander, Spike Shining, was a very careful man who always insisted on neatly
[01:20:14] pack Napsack's clean dry shaves the burial of every rationed can or cigarette but he never
[01:20:20] shouted but a look from Spike was enough.
[01:20:23] A grimace from him was like a form of corporal punishment.
[01:20:26] His only non-regulation gear was a carved walking stick that underscored his walk in the park
[01:20:30] attitude toward danger.
[01:20:32] Spike was a Mustang Marine who had started as a boot and worked or rather fought his
[01:20:37] way up to become a commissioned officer.
[01:20:41] A veteran of Taroa and Iwo Jima, he was a badass if there ever was one.
[01:20:47] Normally Spike was not reckless but he had one unfortunate habit.
[01:20:51] He would not bend under actual or potential fire.
[01:20:55] There's a combat photographer's photo taken on that beautiful spring morning showing Spike
[01:20:59] standing upright leaning cash to against the remains of a small tree that had been
[01:21:03] stunted by previous exchange of fire.
[01:21:06] He set an unfortunate example for those around to do likewise, breaking two of the most basic
[01:21:12] rules of movement in a war zone.
[01:21:15] Don't stand on a ridge line, don't silhouette yourself.
[01:21:19] My mortar section was dug in nearby.
[01:21:21] I got up from my hold to join the group on the ridge, Spike had just ordered a platoon
[01:21:25] leader who'd been relieved to take over my mortar platoon section and gave me a command
[01:21:32] of the platoon.
[01:21:33] Trying to make the change without hurting a good man, so I didn't cover this part but he
[01:21:37] was basically fire in this platoon commander.
[01:21:39] He's going to put you into that platoon.
[01:21:41] He's trying to make the change without hurting a good man or flattering me.
[01:21:44] Spike said this switch was not a big deal merely an exchange that would give each of us civilians
[01:21:49] a chance to learn yet another Marine job.
[01:21:53] As ordered, I left the group and headed towards Second Platoon's position and in relits
[01:21:56] of safety below the crest of the ridge.
[01:21:59] I had moved no more than 15 or 20 yards when a shell exploded on the ridge line and enemy
[01:22:04] spotter must have found it in irresistible target.
[01:22:07] Everyone on the ridge had been hit.
[01:22:09] Half of my predecessor's clothes had been blown off, he was riddled with strappin' and
[01:22:13] destined to wake up in a hospital to begin a long stay.
[01:22:17] Spike was still on his feet but he had no helmet and had a nasty wound with lots of
[01:22:20] bloods but no brain showing.
[01:22:23] Others later, Spike would get hit hit again this time in Vietnam.
[01:22:26] I asked him what happened.
[01:22:27] The same fucking thing.
[01:22:28] I was standing on a hillout the open and they blew me up.
[01:22:32] I was hoping.
[01:22:34] Others were stunned but less seriously wounded.
[01:22:38] When a Marine in charge goes down, the maps are passed on to the next in line.
[01:22:43] Spike looked at his executive officer and mumbled you know where the maps are.
[01:22:47] Then he went down, dazed and drifting in and out.
[01:22:50] Our company got a new commander and I got a rifle too.
[01:22:56] That's how you're taking over your rifle too.
[01:22:58] That's the scenario right there.
[01:23:01] We were talking a little bit about.
[01:23:04] We have a memory on my desk.
[01:23:07] I have a hammered-a, someone threw at me while I was going.
[01:23:13] And also a railroad spike that was overplated or looked at me so we're plated, full
[01:23:21] side and that's spike shining.
[01:23:25] It's about a spike and a servant man who is serving some of you and someone came up with
[01:23:31] that.
[01:23:32] I like that he called you guys civilians.
[01:23:35] He said he said I didn't know I got it all.
[01:23:38] He said he said so he said such it.
[01:23:42] You're the university boys, you civilians are ruining my profession and he just felt
[01:23:49] somehow you could moulders to be with something.
[01:23:53] Have some sort of value compared with those Marines he had really grown up with.
[01:24:01] He would.
[01:24:02] He didn't get to be over.
[01:24:05] The idea, the idea that he had it up his days is going to disaster parts in the world on behalf
[01:24:12] of the Med Cross.
[01:24:14] That is a good guy.
[01:24:16] Amazing.
[01:24:17] You're talking to...
[01:24:18] When we weren't as bad as he thought we were.
[01:24:22] I'm sure he still thought it.
[01:24:23] Really set in the high standard.
[01:24:26] That's the idea.
[01:24:27] Well, it's not even experienced.
[01:24:29] That's the other thing.
[01:24:30] You were going back to the book night was a tender time.
[01:24:33] The enemy moved on hills around us using bugles to communicate relay messages and drive
[01:24:37] point.
[01:24:38] Drive the point home that we were awful, totally surrounded.
[01:24:42] The enemy were very good at moving silently, sometimes able to enter a fighting hole undetected.
[01:24:46] One night they snatched a guy from pizza-patoon right out of his two-man hole.
[01:24:51] His partner awoke to find him gone.
[01:24:53] Never to be heard from or accounted for.
[01:24:55] I just insert that text just said the pistol I had.
[01:24:59] I wore.
[01:25:00] I got my dad gave me.
[01:25:02] But after that incident, I cut away the letter part, the train that and the trigger.
[01:25:12] So I figured if I could wake him tonight, at least I could fire through the hole surre.
[01:25:18] I didn't really want to be hold off with somebody's gift.
[01:25:23] Yeah.
[01:25:24] And here you talk about something else.
[01:25:27] Other than dark, I had one great fear.
[01:25:30] Landmines.
[01:25:32] More specifically, I feared one in particular, one particular wound they tend to inflict.
[01:25:37] There's an anti-personnel, mind known as a bouncing bedding, which shoots a light charge
[01:25:42] up from the ground around a waist height before detonating.
[01:25:45] It's designed to wound and maim not to kill.
[01:25:47] From a tactical point of view, it's as brilliant as it is evil because a wounded man takes
[01:25:52] a whole fire team out of action while they work to stabilize and move him.
[01:25:56] Walking through my first mind field, I kept one hand deep in my pocket.
[01:26:01] Suddenly clutching my brains.
[01:26:05] Sometimes when a guy loses his hand in combat, it's because it was using it to cover
[01:26:09] something of even more value to him.
[01:26:15] You continue on, sometimes the enemy float around us chasing bits and pieces of retreating
[01:26:19] US and Korean army units.
[01:26:21] When they did attack, our positions directly, they suffered tremendous losses.
[01:26:25] In the morning after an assault, there were piles of bodies in front of our lines, which
[01:26:28] were counted for the sake of those in the rear who equated body counts with winning.
[01:26:33] 152, one morning, 170, something than other.
[01:26:36] Our losses were few during such attacks, but somewhere are numbers.
[01:26:40] I was a photograph of that one morning that nature, taken by a tactical combat photographer,
[01:26:50] ever, is unbelievable numbers.
[01:26:53] I thought people would lie about numbers, so the control or the general would think, well,
[01:26:58] whatever the heroic guys are.
[01:27:00] But when you see several hundred in front of you, really from the advent of the machine
[01:27:08] gun, and our ability to make these interlocking bands a fire and see the result of it,
[01:27:15] really is true, it's a slaughter.
[01:27:18] It didn't bother me one tiny bit, not nearly as much as an individual dead North Korea
[01:27:28] or Chinese.
[01:27:29] It's just such a mass that you can't quite grasp what that's like.
[01:27:36] So what sticks in my head much more than that is an individual who I've gone far away
[01:27:44] as you and Phil.
[01:27:45] And that didn't make a fucking bit of difference to the two or three hundred except it
[01:27:51] does, because you can't mind it and take my mind anyway, not take the grasping.
[01:27:58] That sort of thing you don't even see in a cattle slaughterhouse, we're individually.
[01:28:05] What can you do?
[01:28:08] Well, you know better than that, but the same thing.
[01:28:12] I hope that that's a human trait, at least some of something reaches into you.
[01:28:18] Sticks with you, virtue of dumb.
[01:28:20] I believe it is.
[01:28:25] You continue on here around May 15th.
[01:28:27] We received replacements.
[01:28:28] New cumbers usually didn't last long and their losses were less painful if we didn't
[01:28:32] get to know them.
[01:28:34] Before going out on one patrol, I noticed that one of the greenest replacements was
[01:28:37] nervous with so nervous that he was shaking.
[01:28:39] The instandred operating procedures and the obvious wishes of my Patoon Sergeant and
[01:28:43] squad leaders, I ordered that the kid who looked about 12 stayed behind to guard the packs.
[01:28:49] The patrol went out and was without incident.
[01:28:51] However, when we returned from our walk, the new kid was gone.
[01:28:54] McCloskey came over to tell me what happened after we left the kid had gone down to shoot
[01:28:58] the shit with a fellow replacement from pizza Patoon.
[01:29:01] The kid sat on the landmine.
[01:29:04] We sent the kid, we sent the dead lads back, back to the rear, where sensitive articles
[01:29:09] such as condoms would be removed before whatever personal items they may have contained were sent
[01:29:13] home to his next of kin.
[01:29:15] He was so new that not one of us could recall his name.
[01:29:19] Pete and his Patoon Sergeant profusely thanked me.
[01:29:22] The boy had cleared a mind for us without even nicking anyone else.
[01:29:33] Later that month when a fresh batch of replacements height passed our position on their
[01:29:36] way to the company command post, I turned my back to avoid even looking at them.
[01:29:41] But one in particular noticed myverted eyes.
[01:29:44] It's a fine thing to travel thousands of miles to find someone who won't even say hello.
[01:29:48] Douglas Dacy, is that right, Dacy?
[01:29:51] Douglas Dacy, a buddy from PLC, stepped out of their ranks.
[01:29:55] I recognized his Texas draw.
[01:29:57] Dacy was a veteran of World War II, the son of 11 East immigrant who had sent all his
[01:30:01] boys to war by way of thanking America for its generosity.
[01:30:05] Dacy was also the heir to a small fortune and had used his privilege to get into the fighting
[01:30:12] rather than avoid it.
[01:30:13] His place in the infantry was secured as a favor to his father by none other than Lyndon
[01:30:19] Baines Johnson.
[01:30:21] During his first week in Korea, Dacy was lightly wounded by shrapnel.
[01:30:25] He didn't report the wound because he was afraid he'd get a purple heart and if he got
[01:30:28] another after that he might be sent home.
[01:30:31] While Dacy was still at Kwanico, he looked after Marion D.C. when he got deployed he told
[01:30:35] her, I'm going to look after Chuck.
[01:30:39] Dacy's men came to call on the undertaker because more than once he crawled forward
[01:30:43] under fire to drag a dead marine back to our lines.
[01:30:47] I would name my second son after Douglas.
[01:30:49] He went on to serve our government's secret ways became an economics professor and eventually
[01:30:53] retired to a ranch in Kyle, Texas where he and his twin brother raised cows.
[01:30:59] They can't bring themselves to slaughter them.
[01:31:03] An old age home for cows.
[01:31:06] You can't kill them once you've named them Dacy told me.
[01:31:09] I want to say about him just the, we know very well.
[01:31:15] It's not uncommon I suppose.
[01:31:18] He finished his marine career by signing over to CIA and there's just ways to economic
[01:31:23] professor didn't go to the place where he went.
[01:31:26] So when things got worse, he's little guy and I was, he looked like a fucking Lebanese
[01:31:33] immigrant, whatever they looked like.
[01:31:35] But anyway, he said, Jesus now we know what you're doing.
[01:31:39] But now he got the ultimate way to serve your country.
[01:31:42] Just, you know, you look like a fucking hero.
[01:31:45] We'll dress you in a bed sheet, drop you and you get in no long and really a great job for
[01:31:50] your pals at the CIA.
[01:31:53] What makes you think things like he'd have a droolier to shit to the accent, not really.
[01:31:58] He don't make you think things like that about me.
[01:32:00] I'm a professor.
[01:32:01] Anyway, he was a beauty.
[01:32:04] He's not a nuthouse now and out there.
[01:32:06] He's the last days of what he called it, the Alzheimer's.
[01:32:12] But he's, he doesn't know about it.
[01:32:14] He was, he was a good guy.
[01:32:16] Just good guy right now.
[01:32:18] So that same group of replacements and this happens.
[01:32:22] A runerfall day see in the replacements up a hill with a telegram for me.
[01:32:27] Please pass to Lieutenant Charles U. Daily.
[01:32:30] 05041A.
[01:32:33] Sun Michael Wayne 5 pounds 12 and 3 quarters ounces.
[01:32:37] Born Saturday, 19 May at 2 0 6 PM.
[01:32:42] A black-haired Mick.
[01:32:44] Marion Michael both find.
[01:32:46] Love Mary.
[01:32:49] I folded up the telegram and put it in my wallet and thought it'd be nice to have
[01:32:52] if I make it.
[01:32:54] Now that note belongs to Michael's first daughter.
[01:32:57] My first grandchild, shit it.
[01:33:00] So that's how you get notified that you had your first kid.
[01:33:05] I know you have three dollars.
[01:33:07] I should be careful.
[01:33:08] But I didn't put it in there.
[01:33:10] But the class he said the other bedroom first.
[01:33:13] And I didn't know.
[01:33:16] He said, you know, one of my guys and we had a son.
[01:33:21] He said he's with his daughter and she said that's to.
[01:33:25] Yeah, I have three dollars in the son.
[01:33:27] Yes.
[01:33:28] It's a.
[01:33:29] I knew that when they said that I take my life.
[01:33:31] My hands are and I'm sure it's held.
[01:33:32] I can talk to your wife about it.
[01:33:33] Well, yeah.
[01:33:35] We'll leave it at that.
[01:33:36] Right.
[01:33:37] And this is good.
[01:33:41] Every year on my birthday.
[01:33:43] So now we're going into another section of the book.
[01:33:47] Every year on my birthday, May 29th, Pete gives me a call and tells me, you should have
[01:33:51] died today.
[01:33:53] Sometimes he adds you miserable son of a bitch.
[01:33:56] I dredge up some old comeback and we reminisce about what happened that day in 1951.
[01:34:01] My citation puts it like this.
[01:34:03] The president of the United States of America takes pleasure in presenting the silver
[01:34:06] star to first lieutenant Charles U. daily.
[01:34:09] United States Marine Corps for conspicuous gallantry and in trepidie as a leader of a rifle
[01:34:15] platoon of company C first patying fifth Marines first Marine Division in action against
[01:34:20] enemy aggressor forces in Korea on 29 May 1951.
[01:34:25] Assign the mission of driving a strong enemy force from well-maintained from well-intrenched
[01:34:29] positions on a high knob north of Injay.
[01:34:33] Injay.
[01:34:34] The first lieutenant daily boldly led his men up a narrow spine completely devoid of
[01:34:39] covering concealment and carried out a successful assault against the hostile strong points
[01:34:44] in the face of fierce automatic weapons and small arms fire killing many of the enemy
[01:34:49] enforcing the remainder to retreat in disorder.
[01:34:52] Quickly reorganizing his unit, he pursued fleeting hostile troops and overran an enemy
[01:34:58] regimental command post capturing many valuable documents and prisoners.
[01:35:03] The fire's mark courage, skill leadership and unsurving devotion to duty first lieutenant
[01:35:07] daily served to inspire all who observed him and upheld the highest traditions of the United
[01:35:14] States Naval Service.
[01:35:19] That's your citation.
[01:35:22] But you add those words omit the part of the day that I would go on reliving the guilt
[01:35:28] over what I did and what I didn't do and the feeling that the bravest thing I did that
[01:35:34] all of us did was just keep moving uphill toward gunfire.
[01:35:41] My citation leaves out two war crimes I committed crimes for which I was only punished
[01:35:47] with horrible memories.
[01:35:49] There's no mention of the men on both sides who died or sustained awful wounds for my
[01:35:54] red and white and blue ribbon with a star dangling from it.
[01:36:01] And the words leave out just how hard it is to get young men to fire accurately or at
[01:36:05] all so that they kill other young men.
[01:36:12] May 29th was a beautiful morning after chilly tense night I turned 24 probably my last
[01:36:17] birthday.
[01:36:18] Possibly.
[01:36:21] It was my platoon's turn to lead the company into what had been told was an area held
[01:36:26] by a formidable North Korean regiment.
[01:36:30] Our objective was to take an exceptionally rugged hill.
[01:36:33] There was a cliff just west of the top and a steep exposed slope to the east.
[01:36:39] Our only way up was a narrow spine with all covering concealment long since blasted away.
[01:36:44] General Thomas concluded that enemy resistance in these hills such as this one around
[01:36:49] what was called the Kansas line would be broken not by air power but by the marine riflemen.
[01:36:59] To which you respond in the book Roger that.
[01:37:01] God, that's so corny.
[01:37:03] You can just take that.
[01:37:05] I said no shit or something like that.
[01:37:09] I thought it was one of the Roger that's with that's a sarcastic Roger like Roger that.
[01:37:18] Yeah that's alright maybe that's what the world is doing.
[01:37:21] I read the reader like a boy's car which I got thrown out of fucking boy's car and
[01:37:27] I said I know this.
[01:37:30] At first I can remember thinking that we were facing a great defensive position.
[01:37:34] Several little platoon must have had the same thought and knew it was going to be a long
[01:37:37] day because I had company when I stepped off the trail to take a piss after we dropped
[01:37:42] packs and were getting ready to move up and out.
[01:37:46] The air was tense, even the chattiest Marines were silent.
[01:37:49] The smokers silently smoked up a storm.
[01:37:52] I wondered if the North Koreans could smell lucky strikes alarm men as we could sometimes
[01:37:55] smell garlic on theirs.
[01:37:58] With two words you don't hear very often in modern combat I gave the order fix bayonets.
[01:38:08] I mean that's a serious statement if you're making going up with machine guns and
[01:38:16] you're still fixing bayonets.
[01:38:17] I've been reading the word sure anywhere is up there but it's just in case.
[01:38:23] Well anyway I don't I did it with some anyways but I did it for some of the purpose
[01:38:28] really is because I explained why I'll tell you.
[01:38:34] That didn't help anyone's peace of mind but I liked bayonets for the scare factor.
[01:38:39] I knew that frightening enemy was a good way to keep young men from getting killed
[01:38:43] on both sides fear is tactically useful.
[01:38:47] Warner of the new company commander who was even greener than me offered a call in an
[01:38:50] air strike if we got into trouble.
[01:38:53] I declined pointing out that strikes have been recently been put under army command and
[01:38:58] we were running late and with the habit of and we're running late and with the habit of
[01:39:02] hastily dumping their loads on friends and foe alike.
[01:39:07] Any delay in air or artillery would leave us exposed under fire.
[01:39:11] The only course of action was to get in and among the enemy so they're support, mortars,
[01:39:15] guns and heavy weapons would have to be lifted.
[01:39:18] I just wanted to insert into that text that people may be read was that the lab is caused
[01:39:26] by a general armament.
[01:39:29] I think who commanded the UN forces at that time and he was an army general and he just
[01:39:38] thought that the marine system conducted that I'm raising the Navy of closer support and
[01:39:45] directly on ad hoc basis.
[01:39:48] The ace on the ground could see what's going on or where they're or we could endure
[01:39:53] what's going on and we hadn't been able to order right away.
[01:39:57] No way.
[01:39:58] He should have noted that all of our press for a close air goes through the army headquarters.
[01:40:06] It's built in certain delay.
[01:40:08] That's centralized command and doesn't work.
[01:40:11] Well, I think that's a precise advice to say because it was an immensely effective
[01:40:18] life saving our selfless point of view tactic that he destroyed.
[01:40:24] It didn't delay.
[01:40:25] I did destroy it.
[01:40:26] It just impossible to do this anyway.
[01:40:29] Well, going back.
[01:40:32] So now you go back and you say, my duty was to keep them and moving and firing.
[01:40:36] I talked with my Patoon Sergeant who's advice was essential because we're a major fire
[01:40:41] fight to take place.
[01:40:42] It would be my first.
[01:40:45] We agreed that if we came under fire, the lead squad would charge directly up the spine,
[01:40:48] second squad would fire everything they had at the ridge to the west of the hill and third
[01:40:52] squad would continue the charge led by the first squad.
[01:40:56] The machine gun section attached to the Patoon would follow and set up on the hilltop
[01:40:59] as soon as it was secure to fend off any counter attack.
[01:41:04] We just received reports that elsewhere in North Korean had played dead just like don't
[01:41:09] dose at chosen.
[01:41:10] Don't see you?
[01:41:11] Don't see it chosen.
[01:41:12] And it shot a couple Marines in the back after they walked past.
[01:41:16] I wanted to make sure that if it didn't happen to it, that didn't happen to any of us.
[01:41:19] So I passed the word if they don't stink, stick them.
[01:41:24] At 0800 we began slowly climbing up the ridge, single file on a narrow trail.
[01:41:29] There were small pines and some saplings blown leafless by the earlier showing.
[01:41:34] To delay our advanced limbs were piled on the path, forming poor man's barbed wire.
[01:41:41] No bird saying.
[01:41:43] I was walking close behind the first squad when we came to a small nole at the base of
[01:41:47] a much larger hill that loomed above.
[01:41:50] Billy Bell and experienced riflemen from Arizona got ready to toss a grenade over the crest
[01:41:54] of the nole just in case there was an ambush waiting there.
[01:41:57] Not wanting to alert the enemy to our advance in a freight of seeming trigger happy in a
[01:42:02] situation where there might be no enemy.
[01:42:04] Had knocked by wedding ring against the stock of my car bean to get Bell's attention and
[01:42:08] signaled no hand grenade.
[01:42:13] He put the grenade back in his pocket and resumed leading our first team over the crest
[01:42:19] of the hill in a crouched walk.
[01:42:21] In an instant, Bell and two other Marines went down under a shower of enemy grenades and bullets.
[01:42:27] Resistant the squad rolled off the rise and those of us who weren't shocked into inaction
[01:42:32] began shooting.
[01:42:36] Fire fire shoot got damn it fire.
[01:42:38] Bell is down.
[01:42:39] Grenade shit.
[01:42:40] I'm hit.
[01:42:41] Corman help.
[01:42:42] Keep going fire fire fire.
[01:42:44] Kill those cock suckers.
[01:42:45] They're bailing out.
[01:42:46] I'm out of ammo.
[01:42:47] Use your fucking bayonet.
[01:42:48] Keep going.
[01:42:49] Stick them.
[01:42:50] Fire got damn it.
[01:42:51] Fire.
[01:42:52] I figured the louder we wore.
[01:42:56] I'm more we'd give the impression that we were a huge force ready to kill anyone standing
[01:43:00] between us and the yellow wherever.
[01:43:03] The sound of two dozen or so right from infiring all at once is impressive.
[01:43:08] Dase you would recall.
[01:43:09] It sounded like World War II up there.
[01:43:13] I let loose all the rounds in my car bean a aiming uphill at no particular target.
[01:43:17] I reversed my magazine and loaded a second that I had taped to it for fast reloading
[01:43:21] and resumed firing, adding to the din.
[01:43:24] An unlucky North Korean popped up in front of me from a hole.
[01:43:27] His throat and jaw blew apart with the squeeze of my trigger finger.
[01:43:31] A shout from the my radio man.
[01:43:32] The captain wants you.
[01:43:34] He's telling us to drop back and wait for our artillery.
[01:43:36] Tell him to go fucking self.
[01:43:39] There were so many grenades being tossed down the hill at us that I thought we were under
[01:43:43] mortifier.
[01:43:47] We reached the top of the main hill.
[01:43:48] There were many enemy dead wounded and surrendering.
[01:43:51] I was wild with frustration because my caution on the no, had been costly.
[01:43:56] With a few riflemen I kept running over to the far side of the hill and pursued some
[01:43:59] fleeing enemy.
[01:44:00] We were surrounded.
[01:44:01] We were astounded to find our charge.
[01:44:03] Had been had put us among a bunch of North Korean officers with maps still in their hands
[01:44:09] as though they'd been in a routine review of their position.
[01:44:12] Unbelievable.
[01:44:14] Another unarmed enemy officer crawled out of a command bunker and started braiding
[01:44:18] his comrades apparently upset that they were shredding to this handful of exhausted
[01:44:22] Marines.
[01:44:24] One version of what happened next appears in a chapter about me and Pete's book, The Taking
[01:44:30] of Hill, 610, Daily personally pushed the captured and surly Korean commander off a thousand
[01:44:37] foot cliff.
[01:44:38] That's a crime.
[01:44:39] That's the legend.
[01:44:41] And a prime example of how the truth gets warped by memory and the intense emotions of combat
[01:44:47] into and its aftermath.
[01:44:48] Here's the facts.
[01:44:49] I knew we had to shut this guy up before he got his men to realize that we were overextended
[01:44:54] low on ammo outnumbered and vulnerable.
[01:44:56] My carbine was empty so I couldn't have shot him even if I wanted to, which I did not.
[01:45:02] I figured he'd be less noisy with his clothes off so I threatened the officer with my
[01:45:06] band at and motioned for him and his men to strip, which some of them proceeded to do.
[01:45:11] I have a picture of the three of them hands up raised to clad in undershirts and one
[01:45:15] and longer underwear held together by a string that came undone revealing his limp dick.
[01:45:21] You can see their ribs.
[01:45:22] They look dazed and frightened.
[01:45:24] All prisoners accept the loud officer with tents but silent.
[01:45:27] Without warning, their leader turned, dashed over the cliff's edge and may have been shot
[01:45:32] in the back.
[01:45:33] That's the problem.
[01:45:35] By an alert rifleman who still had some rounds in his weapon.
[01:45:39] In any case, the major could run but he could not fly.
[01:45:42] That's the smart ass or my.
[01:45:44] I don't know if he didn't have a kill.
[01:45:50] He didn't have what?
[01:45:52] He didn't have to get killed.
[01:45:54] It sounds like he killed himself.
[01:45:57] Anyway, that's just mostly the truth but anyway.
[01:46:07] Was he running?
[01:46:17] I mean, we're outnumbered.
[01:46:20] We had these goddamn geniuses on their side there and it's just,
[01:46:25] I don't think my carbon was empty anyway.
[01:46:29] It's just a mess.
[01:46:33] So, I'm still trying to protect me and.
[01:46:43] Got it.
[01:46:44] Yeah.
[01:46:45] I don't know what I got.
[01:46:49] So, I just do guys need to end up being.
[01:46:58] At this point, all other firing and stopped except for picking up the pieces.
[01:47:04] This fight was over.
[01:47:06] The pieces included Billy Bell's right arm blown off of the shoulder.
[01:47:11] He was leaning against the tree holding a compress, calm and pale.
[01:47:16] I hope you're left handed.
[01:47:18] I said not knowing what else to express.
[01:47:20] Not knowing how else to express my concern without upsetting him.
[01:47:24] He responded.
[01:47:26] I am now Lieutenant.
[01:47:28] Else one on the hill we lost Lieutenant Buckman who on numerous occasions on board.
[01:47:33] The troopship had said I'm going to die in Korea.
[01:47:37] The rescreams coming from a badly wounded North Korean lane close by.
[01:47:41] His dying was getting louder and louder.
[01:47:44] If it was that, that's what we see on.
[01:47:47] It seems so.
[01:47:48] And I could see how much that sound was bugging the Paltoon.
[01:47:52] Even when the Corp.Bott brought it up brought up the decent thing to do.
[01:47:56] Lieutenant daily, you want me to do him a favor, do it, a shot, then silence.
[01:48:06] I knew then, and I know now, that shooting a prisoner, or ordering such a killing,
[01:48:10] is a war crime regardless of the victim's condition.
[01:48:14] My only punishment has been the unending knowledge of my guilt.
[01:48:19] I know that I shouldn't have ordered it.
[01:48:21] I know that if it had to be done, I should have done it with my own revolver and protected my fellow marine from that memory.
[01:48:28] I hear that shot right now.
[01:48:31] You continue on after the murder came the next grim task, searching the pockets of enemy
[01:48:55] corpses for papers to send back to intelligence officers. One enemy had to have his head missing.
[01:49:01] Daisy came up to see how I was doing. I pointed to the corpse and said,
[01:49:05] that guy's lucky his head wanted to blow him off completely.
[01:49:09] Yeah, that might have killed him. In one pocket I found a picture of what must have been a man's wife
[01:49:14] and the newborn baby he'd never see.
[01:49:16] Hey Lieutenant, don't feel so bad, said David Ivans. A talented machine gunner who could see I was upset,
[01:49:25] at least he got to see a picture of his baby. I wondered if I would be so lucky.
[01:49:31] I pocketed the three-striped shoulder board of an officer I killed in the first moments of the battle.
[01:49:36] Daisy kept an unexploded hand grenade that must have been thrown by a North Korean two-francic to pull the pin.
[01:49:42] Douglas disarmed it and when we met again back in the state he gave it to me.
[01:49:47] I've used it as a paperweight ever since. The Chiggy bearers arrived with ammunition, water,
[01:49:52] rations and our packs from the bottom of the hill.
[01:49:55] We sat and hydrated among the dead and wounded. Those who could eat, ate, cold, tened rations for lunch.
[01:50:03] Everyone's favorite was the canned fruit cocktail.
[01:50:06] Some men would eat the fruit cocktail first in case they got wounded or otherwise they
[01:50:10] otherwise had their meal interrupted. They would have at least enjoyed the best course.
[01:50:17] I wrote a page or two about the day to my dad. I wanted him to know I had fought well.
[01:50:24] It's just before. It's the same fucking thing that didn't work all one.
[01:50:31] This is a foreign game of play.
[01:50:34] These are obviously going through these situations over there.
[01:50:40] You're 23 years old at this time. Maybe 24?
[01:50:45] No, you turn 24 that day.
[01:50:48] I was probably talking about you.
[01:50:51] Yeah.
[01:50:55] You know, I don't know if I've covered it well enough.
[01:51:03] But it seemed like with a lot of the things that you wrote.
[01:51:09] You didn't really think you were going to make it through this situation.
[01:51:13] I didn't really want to have the hand in a misunderstood situation.
[01:51:18] That you can't stand around on this halfway-up of the hill.
[01:51:24] It's something I was so eager to commit to that.
[01:51:28] It's not easy to have a...
[01:51:34] It sounds like they're firing.
[01:51:37] They're firing. They're firing. They're firing. They're firing.
[01:51:39] They're just qualifying to be a rifleman.
[01:51:42] They're flinting to kill and get through all this stuff.
[01:51:46] The only way to do it is keep going and keep firing.
[01:51:49] And as they say, it's not like World War II.
[01:51:52] I think that wouldn't much choice.
[01:51:59] And that just later on, when I say this guy,
[01:52:03] they make executives come out of their hole.
[01:52:06] They've got me cranked up as far as not stopping.
[01:52:11] I don't know what I thought.
[01:52:15] I mean, even beyond this one day, when you read the whole section again,
[01:52:22] obviously, I'm jumping through huge pieces of this.
[01:52:25] But I don't think I...
[01:52:27] It doesn't seem like you thought you were going to live through this war.
[01:52:32] It seemed like that situation you were doing what you had to do.
[01:52:36] You're not thinking long-term thoughts when you're charging up a hill towards machine gun.
[01:52:43] You just do what you got to do just right.
[01:52:45] But the other parts of it were your...
[01:52:48] Many times you say, look, I didn't think I was going to see my kid.
[01:52:51] I didn't think I was...
[01:52:52] And even when you say, you wrote a page or two to your dad about what you did that day,
[01:52:56] because you wanted your dad to know, hey, you know, I did my duty.
[01:52:59] You know, it all feels like that's what the hit, but my World War I,
[01:53:04] one of the Charlie's said, you know, I played the game yesterday.
[01:53:07] I meant to fucking game, but I never...
[01:53:10] I never...so it was a different expression.
[01:53:13] But somehow you wanted...
[01:53:16] I mean, I don't know about it, and I want to be proud of it.
[01:53:19] And I had no illusions about what's sure shaped the body might come back in.
[01:53:24] It doesn't matter.
[01:53:25] It's just...what...I don't know.
[01:53:29] It's crazy.
[01:53:30] Then I'll respect for him.
[01:53:31] I'm killing some people.
[01:53:33] What would it do to this?
[01:53:35] Going back to the book, there was another hill a couple days later that we occupied with no resistance.
[01:53:41] David, David, Ivan, you say Ivan's IV, yes.
[01:53:44] David, Ivan's was setting up as machine gun a couple feet above,
[01:53:47] where I was sitting safely below the crest of the hill.
[01:53:49] We laughed about how easy the hill had been taken compared to May 29th.
[01:53:53] Easy, except...
[01:53:54] He was cleaning his place.
[01:53:55] Actually, that's...and the book that I thought of.
[01:53:58] He was just cleaning parts of his machine.
[01:54:00] It just messing around.
[01:54:01] Something going on.
[01:54:06] Easy, except a faulty radio left me out of touch.
[01:54:09] McCloskey had sent some of my problem in dispatch.
[01:54:11] His own radio meant Rocky Bruder up the hill to establish comms.
[01:54:15] Rocky paused to catch his breath just short of my position.
[01:54:19] Wounded in sweaty from his radio, laid in climb.
[01:54:22] Get up here, I said.
[01:54:23] I've got a check in with a CP right now.
[01:54:25] Rocky grunted and moved the last few feet and started to hand me the mic.
[01:54:29] Somewhere from behind a burst of machine gun fire smacked into us.
[01:54:34] First, one blast, then the distant gunner adjusted his aim.
[01:54:39] One click over, then one up before firing a second burst.
[01:54:43] The first volley to my right hit Rocky in the back.
[01:54:48] The next high into my left, made Ivan's head explode.
[01:54:52] Ivan's head explode.
[01:54:54] Rocky mumbled, Corman, in his last instant instant.
[01:54:58] Instant of life.
[01:55:00] I could hear the call gunner down, second gunner up, keeping the whole war moving smoothly.
[01:55:06] I believe then and I believe now that that lethal fire had come from our own distant guns.
[01:55:12] I should have known that might happen.
[01:55:14] I'd been so anxious to re-establish radio contact because of how quickly we had taken the hill.
[01:55:20] I didn't want our gunners to be to mistake our movement.
[01:55:23] Near the crest of the hill for enemy defenders not realizing there weren't any defenders.
[01:55:29] Brain matter and blood were splattered all over me.
[01:55:32] In the coming days, every time I encountered water and streams and rain and canteens,
[01:55:38] I would try and wash the stains off.
[01:55:42] I drank the water and it's time to gain so that's enough.
[01:55:45] This is something that when I wrote my first book called Extreme Ownership,
[01:55:52] it opens up the first chapters about a fracture side of blue on blue situation that I was in charge of.
[01:56:00] And there was a friendly Iraqi soldier that was killed.
[01:56:04] One of my guys was wounded.
[01:56:06] There were several other friendly Iraqi soldiers that were wounded.
[01:56:09] It was a total nightmare.
[01:56:11] And when that happened to me, that was very early on in my second deployment to Iraq.
[01:56:17] And the fighting in Ramadi was such that there was mayhem and confusion.
[01:56:24] And when you get in these situations, these fracturesides,
[01:56:31] what we called blue on blue, they can happen.
[01:56:34] And I made it my mission to try and teach the next generation of seals.
[01:56:39] How to prevent these things from happening.
[01:56:41] But when it happened, it was so, you know, we hadn't been in combat for a really long time in America.
[01:56:49] And so we didn't have guys that understood the battlefield and understood how easily these things could happen.
[01:56:56] Now luckily for me, or, I don't know if it's, yeah, luckily for me,
[01:57:00] there was a guy that was in the Seal teams who had been to a platoon commander in Ways City in the Marine Corps in Vietnam.
[01:57:07] And he came and visited us right after this had happened.
[01:57:11] And he said, hey, I think he told me, you know, a third of the casualties in Ways City were friendly fire.
[01:57:18] He said, this is what happens because it's horrible.
[01:57:20] Here's, you know, and I looked at it like, okay, here's the things that we're going to do to prevent it from happening.
[01:57:26] But it's one of those things that it's very hard to think for civilians to understand how easily these things can unfold.
[01:57:34] And this is a classic example. You got supporting fire elements that are looking at this hill that you guys are taking.
[01:57:40] And you guys take it so quickly that by the time you get to the top, these guys that are whatever, 800 meters away or a thousand meters away, they see movement on this hilltop.
[01:57:49] They think they're helping you, but they're actually engaging your men.
[01:57:53] I'm trying, I think that there, and one of those,
[01:57:58] there's a vision battles in the news that there was an NFL football player who was killed and right away they gave him a silver star and everything he got and was wonderful.
[01:58:09] And a bit of an okay leave that alone, but the fact came out that there was shot by his own man, but totally by our,
[01:58:17] Yeah, it was a, and the fact remains that he wanted to go and do something real country, put the football down, put the other helmet on and it is,
[01:58:27] his own kill them, but you start telling the people at home,
[01:58:35] who know them or another who knew of them or others who didn't know it at all,
[01:58:40] that this heroic remit or I'm given the fucking silver star and let it go.
[01:58:46] Yeah, I mean that's a Pat Tellman and again, this is the, the, the horrible situation,
[01:58:54] you know, it's a horrible situation, as dark you're maneuvering through enemy territory, you're expecting to get contacted and, you know,
[01:59:02] if you're not paying attention, this is why there's such a heavy burden on leadership,
[01:59:05] because it's a leadership that has to try and track these things and keep and make sense of what's going on in the battlefield and if a,
[01:59:13] a millisecond goes by and you lose that control, which, which happens, you've got to set yourselves up, so you prevent this sort of situations and it's, it's a nightmare and this is one of the,
[01:59:25] in my opinion, is one of the worst things in the war is friendly fire, because there's, it's absolutely, you know, trying to explain this is so hard,
[01:59:36] because people don't understand how confusing and complex these things are as they unfold.
[01:59:45] Um, as they unfold or flow a part of whatever, yeah, that was the system of the fire, yeah.
[01:59:50] It's not that you'd turn the quantum, when going back to the book when Pete came up,
[01:59:56] the hill and saw me splattered with blood and brains, he tried to call me beautiful day isn't it?
[02:00:01] On the day I got my solar star, L square on the slope, Pete and his platoon approached an enemy position and were peltered with grenades.
[02:00:10] PFC went L more head kicked the grenades off the ridge one by one, attempting to, to, to dispose of one grenade in this way he slipped rather than take cover,
[02:00:21] more than shouder for his buddies to get down and then rolled on the grenade, absorbing the blast with his body and probably saving the lives of Pete and others nearby.
[02:00:31] For his courage and selflessness, well, it was posthurously awarded the Medal of Honor.
[02:00:38] But the recognition of more than action goes beyond the authority of what Congress and the President.
[02:00:45] In John 1513, it is written that greater love, half no man than this, that a man laid down his life for his friends.
[02:00:54] I recall those words because they are etch in a plaque beside a stained glass window in the church of Ireland and banned and honoring those from the town who were lost in the Great War.
[02:01:05] My uncle Charlie for whom I'm named appears on the list of the dead and my mother's name is honored among the list of survivors for her services as a nurse's aid.
[02:01:15] If Pete and I have a hard time talking about the facts of war to anyone but each other, it's not just because we share indelibly graphic memories like the image of what a grenade does to human body, but because we have experienced that kind of love.
[02:01:30] I don't know if the gospel's author had ever been in a combat zone, but I've heard these words put a similar way by people who have.
[02:01:40] You continue on with sort of exposing some of the dark humor that comes out or what it does to people, going back to the book here, war changes the meaning of normal in ways big and small.
[02:02:01] There's a joke about a marine who comes home to his parents and says, pass the fucking cake butter at the dinner table.
[02:02:10] One June day having rotated off the line, we watched an American tank approach a shallow river.
[02:02:15] You can sense the driver trying to decide whether to take the muddy bypass or stay on the road, either could have been mined.
[02:02:21] We speculated and made mock bets.
[02:02:24] The tank took a detour, kaboom.
[02:02:27] A man flew out of the open hatch now legless.
[02:02:31] One of our riflemen yelled with excitement, I win.
[02:02:35] My career as a platoon leader ended early on the morning of June 12th, 1951.
[02:02:55] I spent the night of June 11th, my second wedding anniversary with my platoon manning, a lonely outpost ahead of our lines just north of the town of Injay.
[02:03:04] Why am I saying that wrong?
[02:03:05] Injay.
[02:03:06] Injay.
[02:03:07] That's the way we pronounce it.
[02:03:08] God knows how they pronounce it.
[02:03:10] Sergeant Murphy and I laid up in an abandoned enemy bunker and attack on our position could have
[02:03:17] doomed us but it didn't come.
[02:03:18] I felt good, even though I still had little hope of living to hold my son, a picture of him
[02:03:24] married, sent, had arrived in a letter enclosed with a melted Heath bar.
[02:03:30] That made me feel lucky.
[02:03:32] The happen next was lucky depending on how you look at it.
[02:03:35] It's how I got home to Michael and Mary having seen his face suddenly gave me more to lose.
[02:03:40] Dying was going to be hard.
[02:03:41] At first light I told Sergeant Murphy I was going out of the bunker to check our perimeter.
[02:03:45] He advised me not to go saying he'd already done it a couple hours before but I was restless and anxious about the strain of a 50% watch with no sergeants.
[02:03:53] All but Murphy had been killed wounded or rotated.
[02:03:57] I was going to tell the guys that they could get some rest.
[02:04:00] I was getting up from my hands and knees after crawling out of the bunker when I sensed that I had company.
[02:04:05] I rose up just as a bullet ripped across the front of my jacket and whacked into my left arm.
[02:04:09] Corman, Lieutenant's down.
[02:04:12] I grabbed my arm above the wound wound and waited for the Corman.
[02:04:16] There was no sign of a real attack and unseen sniper had spotted an easy target.
[02:04:21] The Corman caught away my sleeve revealing bones sticking through a red and pink mess.
[02:04:26] The arm was dangling below the elbow.
[02:04:28] I told him just to cut it off.
[02:04:30] Not me he said tightening down the turnic and I got on the radio to tell company HQ what had happened.
[02:04:35] It was then that I learned the whole morning it was a mess.
[02:04:38] Third battoons leader had been hit with strapped from a mortar round.
[02:04:41] The battoons knew executive officer Jack Jones, the real leader who kept the Colonel somewhat in check had a chunk of his right hand blown off by a booby trap hidden in a poor man's barbed wire.
[02:04:51] He had been hit in the leg while helping out one of his wounded. So Charlie Company had no puto leaders and the battalion had an unfettered idiot in command.
[02:05:02] Meaning in your battalion commander.
[02:05:06] By now I was getting sore because the numbing impact of the bullet in the subsequent surge of adrenaline and worn off.
[02:05:12] Because of our isolated position I decided to make my own way back to our lines rather than rob our puto of riflemen carrying me off.
[02:05:19] I couldn't do that if I was stoned on more of you so there would be no pain relief until I made it to our lines.
[02:05:25] I started the height from the outpost to the battalion.
[02:05:28] I started the entire time.
[02:05:29] I had no idea of the mortar and doing a good or not.
[02:05:32] I just knew any of my ass out of there and not take four Marines or even one one with me.
[02:05:41] I started the height down from the outpost to the battalion HQ where I would be flown to a field hospital.
[02:05:48] In Korea hospitals we're just coming into use helicopters we're just coming into use.
[02:05:53] And we're too tiny and fragile to risk ahead of the lines to pick up those who got hit on outpost or patrol.
[02:05:59] In every war since improvements in helicopter capabilities translate to save lives and limbs.
[02:06:04] Now they can land much closer to the action and deliver wounded men to advance medical care within minutes.
[02:06:09] On my way to the little bird had to walk through a shallow creek.
[02:06:13] I wasn't feeling great but I felt worse when two rounds from a distant riflemen struck the water near me.
[02:06:17] I turned toward the ridge where the shots come from and gave the shooter the finger with my good arm.
[02:06:22] I don't know what if anything that means in Korea but the shooting stopped and he let me go.
[02:06:28] At the shelter of the command post I saw a stretcher with mecloski on it.
[02:06:34] He was all set to go farther to the rear and have his fairly minor wound treated get laid and returned to duty.
[02:06:41] He took one look at me rolled off the stretcher stood up, set it quick goodbye and limp back up the valley to take a walk.
[02:06:46] Back up the valley to take over one of the remaining potoons.
[02:06:49] His own wound could wait.
[02:06:51] I sat down and got my first more of a shot of the day.
[02:06:55] A tiny helicopter world in the kind where the bubble canopy you may know from the opening credits of the TV show,
[02:07:01] Mash, the Bell 47.
[02:07:03] As I was being helped in the passenger seat I noticed a bumper sticker on the cockpit to windshield.
[02:07:08] Join the Marines.
[02:07:11] Just funny guy.
[02:07:16] Got to keep that sense of humor.
[02:07:18] He got to guy strapped those baskets and some of them that I've got some light somewhere.
[02:07:25] But guy, I'm shooting along at 1500 feet and you can't hear me out because of the thing that's so noisy.
[02:07:31] But he's dead land and the guy is at this side but it's some job.
[02:07:37] He took off and it clouted up, which must have been tough on the men in the basket.
[02:07:41] We were about 10 or 15 minutes.
[02:07:43] We sat down near one end of a big brown tent.
[02:07:46] This was a battalion aid station, a field hospital staff with Navy doctors, the corps, the corps
[02:07:52] is answered to an army match.
[02:07:54] Unlike Mash, the TV show, which fictionalized this aspect of the Korean war, there was no laughter in this tent.
[02:08:00] No cutenerses, no fun.
[02:08:02] Just young men suffering in silence. Each waiting for his stretcher to be lifted up and placed on a pair of wooden saw horses of the sort used by Carpenter to bring wood up to a convenient height for cutting.
[02:08:13] Each bloody stretcher became its own operating table.
[02:08:17] Between each set of stretchers stood done-gree-clad surgeons working under gas lamps dangling from the ceiling.
[02:08:23] Besides bottles of blood, plasma, and IV fluid.
[02:08:26] General anesthesia was rarely used. Speed was vital. The mission was to stabilize patients who had the best chances for more advanced treatment elsewhere and comfort the ones who weren't going to make it.
[02:08:37] Eight station doctors referred to their duty as meatball surgery.
[02:08:42] Outside the tent, I waited to be seen. I heard one marine next to me die. He didn't groan. Just gasped and stopped breathing.
[02:08:51] The worst sound I heard that day was the clang of shrapnel being dropped onto the stainless steel table beside the unlucky lieutenant stretcher who had been shot in the family jewels.
[02:09:01] The shrapnel had been removed from his groin. Keep that from me, he said. I'll give it to my wife and we'll push it around in a baby carriage.
[02:09:12] I heard his yellow man, he pulled me out of the way. He was a little strapped there and a hole in the hole. He was going to get a lot of movies.
[02:09:23] He was going to get a handle. This is where I was. He can't.
[02:09:27] I have a photograph of the, I don't know, Charlie has it. I think of the military inside of that tent. There were half a dozen of these, the stretcher and then between every two, there was the doctors were operating on the metal table.
[02:09:46] It's an amazing picture because it's just, you don't really comprehend. It went through in the conditions of which they operated.
[02:10:01] And me both served with probably not a bad expression, but they were really, it was in and out and it seemed, to me, just mechanical fast. It was quite nervous at that time, but at that time I didn't mind her home in the life, the Canadian past.
[02:10:16] I've just saw on it, and I wasn't trying to get home the whole time. I'm very, pretty greedy. I was happy to be alive. But so I really kept saying I read, leaving it and so on and I'm anyway.
[02:10:29] So what on? Yeah, the dead marine, this is you back going back to the book. The dead marine was still uncovered when two corpsmen carried my stretcher inside and placed on the saw horses.
[02:10:39] At some of the stations, a corpsmen or nurse would work on a footer leg while a surgeon tended to a chest or head wound on the same man.
[02:10:46] I didn't notice much in the way of surgical gloves or hand washing between jobs. I noticed no stench, perhaps because I stuck.
[02:10:53] How are you doing in a surgeon asked? He loosened the field dressing, resulting in what seemed like a gush or blood.
[02:10:59] Doc, I can't go home on my side. You're not going to cut it off, are you? By now I was hoping to keep the ol' son.
[02:11:04] Okay.
[02:11:05] Not right now, we can wait for it to fall off.
[02:11:08] Then he surprised me by gently touching my face with his bloody finger. That touched me my eyes water.
[02:11:15] So I turned to my head.
[02:11:17] Yeah.
[02:11:24] Tears were turned to my eyes remembering that touching that moment of tenderness.
[02:11:29] It was amazing.
[02:11:30] It was a meatball surgery and so on. He was a human being.
[02:11:33] It was amazing.
[02:11:34] Pretty good.
[02:11:36] It's quite good. I know it's pretty.
[02:11:39] I woke aboard the USS Haven, the late afternoon of what had been a very long day.
[02:11:50] That same night on the ship after being washed, I was wheeled into a cabin where I rested in a bed between white sheets for the first time since February.
[02:11:58] I had been bleeding continuously all day so I felt weak.
[02:12:02] Like a figment of my more-feet injections, Jack Jones appeared in my cabin. The doctors had just finished clipping away, shredded bits of his hand.
[02:12:09] The final wound of five he had received since he had enlisted at age 17 in the last war.
[02:12:15] The next morning, June 13th, we were flown to a former Japanese military hospital in Yoka-Suka for further patching up.
[02:12:25] We took a short walk outside the gate where we found a little bar. Jack was a Mormon and didn't drink, but he watched me put back a few.
[02:12:31] The barmen recognized us as Marines. He spoke English and told us he was on Ewo Jima.
[02:12:36] You were on Ewo. Jack said, how come I didn't kill you?
[02:12:40] Matter of fact without a hint of resentment or prejudice.
[02:12:44] Oh, I remember.
[02:12:46] What's up?
[02:12:47] You were a marker but you must have been on leave or something.
[02:12:49] Yeah, no doubt to survive Ewo.
[02:12:52] Meanwhile, at home, my father had been listed as my next-of-kin because I didn't want a shock-marion event
[02:12:58] I was killed in action or wounded. That turned out to be a terrible idea.
[02:13:01] My mother went to Mary's apartment, waving the telegram,
[02:13:05] Good news, Chuck's been wounded.
[02:13:09] Mom must have been thinking of her dead brother and brother-in-law along with so many others in the meat grinder of flanders in the Psalm.
[02:13:16] In the Great War, survival wounds were good news to families back in Blighty and Ireland.
[02:13:22] But my pacifist wife didn't see it that way. She was horrified, angry and terribly worried.
[02:13:29] Yeah, that's actually the name of this chapter is Good News, Chuck's been wounded.
[02:13:34] And you've got to have a certain mentality to see your, you know, your family.
[02:13:39] Yeah, it's understand.
[02:13:40] Mary never understood that, just, that really didn't.
[02:13:44] From Japan, when I received slightly smaller cast, we were flown from Glamon into Hawaii.
[02:13:50] So you guys get to Hawaii and they had done a, they had done a, they would take your, they would take your pants from you to make sure you don't go out on liberty.
[02:14:00] Yeah, remember on the hospital, I mean on the hospital plane, they have tears of monks and they put, they take your pants and then put a blanket on a double fold it over here.
[02:14:17] Because they had experienced before with Marines fighting, getting as far as Hawaii and so.
[02:14:22] Well, you guys, you guys were made, man, it's just get a hold of some pants.
[02:14:26] Well, we both had a nurse on board because Jack had been through this before and he said, he said, you know, that, we're not going to do any harm.
[02:14:34] Look at us.
[02:14:35] But he said, he just, he just, he just told him and he even knew the gate that he could get through.
[02:14:41] He's been, been through there another war.
[02:14:44] So that's how you get down town.
[02:14:47] So you guys get, get, you do your thing.
[02:14:50] Now you get back on base.
[02:14:54] And now you get this, this, you know, hot headed officer, it will go back to the book.
[02:14:59] A red face, a army officer gave us a lecture and this is him basically yelling at you for, for leaving base.
[02:15:04] This base is no different from the font line.
[02:15:06] You are a wall and there will be consequences.
[02:15:08] I will personally see two of you are kept in this hospital until you rot.
[02:15:12] Is he's actually British?
[02:15:14] The next day in Marine General visited to pin purple hearts to our hospital gowns and deliver a few words about valor.
[02:15:20] All of us admire your courage. You must be looking forward to getting home.
[02:15:23] Oh, no sir, one of the groups spoke up.
[02:15:25] We've been promised to stay here until we rot.
[02:15:28] What?
[02:15:30] He tell that to Marine General.
[02:15:32] Whoa.
[02:15:33] He made sure we were out on the next flight.
[02:15:34] From Hawaii, we were phone to hospital and hospital and treasure island in San Francisco Bay for several days.
[02:15:39] From there to another hospital in San Antonio where we underwent more repairs and celebrated the Fourth of July and hospital.
[02:15:45] This is a distant fireworks retarifying for a blinded Marine New York, back in Korea, but without a sight, his rifle or his buddies.
[02:15:55] Finally, we thumped down at Andrew's Air Force Base a few miles from the Naval Hospital and my parents home and Bethesda loaded in stretchers stacked three high.
[02:16:04] My wound was still seeping and my latest cast stink.
[02:16:08] The plane's big side hatch opened to the bright sunshine as I was helped to my turn at the top of the steep stairs.
[02:16:17] I could see a little crowd standing on the tarmac.
[02:16:20] There was Mary Craydling, a title bundle, a tiny bundle, Michael.
[02:16:25] Clad of my bright shirt like I had been on vacation. I eased my way down the stairs and gave her the best hug I could manage with my cast pressed against Michael in her arms.
[02:16:34] Be careful, Warren, the Navy nurse who walked me down the stairs.
[02:16:37] There's plenty more where he came from, I replied, we laughed, we cried.
[02:16:42] I had orders to report for surgery, maybe even amputation, none of that mattered.
[02:16:47] I only needed one arm to hold my baby boy.
[02:16:52] My joy in that moment was tempered by the sight of my brothers.
[02:17:01] Being unloaded on stretchers without families to hold.
[02:17:07] One of my fellow Marines from the troop ship of my fellow Marines from the troop ship.
[02:17:13] Lieutenant Abels, Baumgart, Buckman, Coward, Finch, Goodlock, McVay, Monday, Musser, O'Hanstein, to get that one right.
[02:17:29] Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday, Monday.
[02:17:32] And then Musser, O'Hanstein and Smith were killed in action.
[02:17:37] Many left wives and babies. Each widow got $10,000 life insurance pay off plus a small pension.
[02:17:44] Not much, but a lot more than it was received by the Chinese North Korean widow's we created.
[02:17:51] Jack Jones and Billy Bell became teachers as did several others. After spending years in hospitals battling near a near fatal wound,
[02:17:59] another of our group, Dick McGue became a priest.
[02:18:04] After his wounding in Vietnam, Spike, Shannon joined the Red Cross, supervising disaster relief efforts in sort of difficult places where he always felt at home.
[02:18:13] Besides the grenade on my desk, I have a silver spiked rail.
[02:18:17] A silver plate of railroads, Spike to remember him by.
[02:18:19] The other amateur, Lieutenant, Sunder his two-de-lich all-havelin.
[02:18:25] Twenty-nine thousand 272 Marines were killed, wounded, and three years of fighting in Korea, all part of the American total of 103,284 casualties.
[02:18:37] Big percentage.
[02:18:39] These numbers are minor when compared with the death wounding in disappearance of three million North and South Korean civilians.
[02:18:45] One point five million North Koreans and Chinese soldiers and 845,000 South Korean military casualties.
[02:18:55] You say this, people talk about the forgotten war as a future generations of students and textbook authors didn't do their job.
[02:19:10] But the fact is, no one was thinking about Korea even when we were in it.
[02:19:15] 1951 is the year I love Lucy premiered and the catcher of the Rye was published.
[02:19:20] There was a new Chevy on the market.
[02:19:22] You go into this story here.
[02:19:24] Mary and I went to stay at the tidewater in in beautiful southern Virginia.
[02:19:28] In the bar at the end, some locals noticed my sling and cast and assumed I was the local gentleman who they'd heard about who had a boating accident recently.
[02:19:38] I had to ask them to repeat the question because I couldn't imagine pleasure boating mishaps any more than they could picture the circumstances of my wound.
[02:19:46] Before dinner the house played Dixie and everybody stood for it.
[02:19:50] I sat in breath hard despite Mary holding my trembling right hand. I felt completely alone.
[02:19:56] I thought about coward and able rocky and I've been along with and long to be with them.
[02:20:04] I'm not joining their ranks in death at least to be back in the dirt cracking sick jokes and feeling like my work mattered.
[02:20:10] I didn't want to die, right?
[02:20:13] Too often that feeling would return for a very long time.
[02:20:17] It's only recently looking back with perspective that comes from a lifetime on dwelling on the personal cost of the game as my uncle called it,
[02:20:25] that I would no longer wish to be back there with them, but wish they could be with me instead.
[02:20:32] I'm beginning to roll up.
[02:20:36] You start doing your therapy on your arm.
[02:20:45] The Navy doctors were able to fuse two bones in my forearms, the radius in the olden to one resulting in an arm that can no longer pronate.
[02:20:52] Progress was slow.
[02:20:54] Finger exercise was frustrating for while I was motivated by relief knowing that I could keep the limb. The bullet damage the owner nerve,
[02:21:02] leaving me with a permanent funny bone feeling and an arm that's sensitive and somewhat painful from the elbow down
[02:21:08] since then I've worn my watch and my right wrist protecting the arm and holding it close in front of me like it's in a sling as twisted my spine over time.
[02:21:15] But today I use a walking stick when I feel like I'm listening too far over.
[02:21:21] One brilliant thing that Navy hospitals do is put you in contact and close quarters with your fellow wounded,
[02:21:26] many of whom are maimed in ways you that make you thankful for your own condition.
[02:21:31] The one thing the doctor's blew and fixing my arm was once it was a very steady touch.
[02:21:39] I blew it, I guess. They explained to me the situation, he's just described it there,
[02:21:45] they said that you'll always have to do the arm will permanently be as if you're shaking hands like this or turn it over so the palm is up.
[02:21:55] Now I could have gotten rich if I just looked up and I'd have gotten a damn thing that way.
[02:21:59] Now I talk to you, you can forgive me.
[02:22:01] But I'm sick and sick from the way you wouldn't give me a nickel.
[02:22:05] I worked my ass off the rest of my life and I had it right there in my hand.
[02:22:09] So they gave you a choice you could either be.
[02:22:11] Either way one of the other you can't do it, you've got to merge the bones, you have one bone and another, you can't go flop it around.
[02:22:17] Huh, that's...
[02:22:19] There's a bone chance.
[02:22:21] Yeah.
[02:22:21] She's now in pain. I'm a 92 and I'm paying tuition to her kid going to law school.
[02:22:27] You've been to busy trying to make money to give it out.
[02:22:31] Well, I would add plenty.
[02:22:33] I would like to stand the gate of Penn State Law like this and say, for my son, somebody put a quarter.
[02:22:43] I'm a maiden for real money.
[02:22:45] I blew it.
[02:22:47] On May 31st, 1952, Lieutenant Charles Euddeily was discharged from the United States.
[02:22:53] Was retired from the United States Marine Corps as confirmed by these actions from the Commonwealth's letter.
[02:22:57] Your disability is permanently related at 40%. I regret the physical condition. Conditions necessitate your separation from the act of list
[02:23:05] and wish you many years of happiness and prosperity.
[02:23:09] And then Pacific Milassus made good on their promise.
[02:23:13] They kept their job for...
[02:23:15] That's right, I wrote about Nelson, Nelson Park.
[02:23:17] Yeah.
[02:23:18] And that was one of the things that made you, well, they took care of him too at the end.
[02:23:22] So they did, because they first all were very decent company.
[02:23:28] And so they went on an end.
[02:23:30] But he told me that when he first got the job, he didn't tell...
[02:23:36] He lied about his age. He was young. He wasn't young.
[02:23:39] But no one's at higher or fat old black man.
[02:23:42] So he said he was much younger than the fact he was.
[02:23:47] So then when the end of the line came, that came because it's so security, no way,
[02:23:54] because he's ten years or fifteen years younger than he said he was.
[02:23:58] And this is after I left.
[02:24:00] But the company went to bat for him and slayed around.
[02:24:04] So it's an element of corporate decency that I haven't forgotten.
[02:24:08] But he had to do that to get a guy to him and job.
[02:24:11] And he still didn't get the rights to use the toilet, but he got the job.
[02:24:15] He's surprised.
[02:24:17] So you get station in California for a while.
[02:24:23] Then you go to Mexico.
[02:24:25] You get station down in Veracruz, Mexico.
[02:24:28] No, I thought I'd put him out down there.
[02:24:30] What's that?
[02:24:31] He'll shut up and return to the floor.
[02:24:34] And then at the end of the day, Pacific Malacis was a corporate job in a started getting boring.
[02:24:39] Mary tried to join me with Xi Jinping like life south of the border, the water made her sick.
[02:24:44] They're Mexico City, she had a mixed miscarriage.
[02:24:47] By the time you were approaching 30, I had gotten, by the time I was approaching 30, I had more or less gotten over the astonishment that I hadn't died at 23 in Korea.
[02:24:57] I sensed it was time to do something with the second chance at life and selling syrup wasn't it.
[02:25:04] When I attended my resignation, my boss is in England.
[02:25:06] We're certain I was going over to the competition.
[02:25:08] I told Ferguson, I would never do that after all.
[02:25:10] He and the company had done for me for Nelson Parker and Parker and for others.
[02:25:14] Not content to take me out my word, the higher-ups at Pacific instructor, Jim DePamia, $1,000 a month for a year to simply stay out of Mexico.
[02:25:21] I told Ferguson that was generous but unnecessary.
[02:25:25] He insisted saying if I didn't take the money, it would confirm London's fear that I would defect to a competitor.
[02:25:32] That's okay, perfect.
[02:25:33] So there you go.
[02:25:34] Now I had two boys, one good arm, a Marine Disability Pension and my stay out of money, say out of Mexico money.
[02:25:41] I had a variety of experience for my age and no financial worries.
[02:25:44] So like many young men in such a position I decided to become a writer.
[02:25:48] You end up going to the Columbia School of Georgia.
[02:25:50] You were a writer, don't be sure.
[02:25:51] Don't be sure.
[02:25:51] Don't be sure.
[02:25:52] Yeah, I guess so.
[02:25:53] That's what they say.
[02:25:55] And then, so you go to Columbia School of Journalism.
[02:25:59] And then you can start this American Political Science or American Political Science Association,
[02:26:05] Congressional Fellowship.
[02:26:06] Is that how you ended up getting kind of involved in politics?
[02:26:09] Well, yeah, what happened was I go there to, I think some of that, put the, I decided to go to journalism school right?
[02:26:20] Back in the day also, it was a big deal.
[02:26:22] So I, I, drove to Columbia Journal of the School was on 116th in Broadway in New York.
[02:26:32] And so I parked and went in and I didn't run the mother place other than the top school.
[02:26:38] And for nine months you get a master's degree as a ticket for me to get to newspaper's album or something.
[02:26:44] So I wanted to get it.
[02:26:45] So then I go to, in and I ask him, and I take a look at the show about how to do it.
[02:26:51] I started class of start in September.
[02:26:55] But, but, but, so you, this is the longest or the latest or the September.
[02:27:01] But you said you could apply for the year, not, not impossible to get an instrument.
[02:27:07] You do it in the next year.
[02:27:09] So let me explain something to you.
[02:27:11] I'm double parked on Broadway in the car.
[02:27:16] My wife and two babies.
[02:27:18] I got to get in in the foreign school.
[02:27:20] So the guy actually, he was laughing at you.
[02:27:23] But he let me in.
[02:27:24] So they all have a deal.
[02:27:25] So then I got enough of a ticket there.
[02:27:26] So he said yes.
[02:27:27] But yes.
[02:27:28] I told him, but, in the face, he got real connoisseurs.
[02:27:31] I didn't have to do that even.
[02:27:33] So, uh, he did a man and, and long as you ought to get out of that after nine months.
[02:27:39] And it then, I worked at nights in newspaper, but, in the white place of New York.
[02:27:44] And he had this fellowship for American Political Science Association, Fellowship.
[02:27:49] And a guy, Eddie Williams, I know, was in previous class, a black pack.
[02:27:53] But he said, I can get something and because he didn't know that.
[02:27:56] If you could deal with the paid on our own, the fellowship is.
[02:28:01] But you, he paid you to, uh, spend a half of the next congressional term with a member of the house and half of it.
[02:28:08] On a member of the Senate.
[02:28:10] And he helped, he's told me to help him and help me too.
[02:28:14] So, if I got it.
[02:28:16] So I got it.
[02:28:18] And, uh, and I, I don't know what Kennedy was.
[02:28:23] His father thought it was going to win the war.
[02:28:27] So, I thought him.
[02:28:29] I thought I'd really, I'm Senator at all.
[02:28:32] But anyway, uh, the first one to choose is on the house side.
[02:28:39] And the young guy, Stu Yuel from Arizona,
[02:28:43] so they were paid trying to own down near themselves.
[02:28:47] So they had to have some free talent, but they didn't know that.
[02:28:49] But newspaper is good.
[02:28:50] So he said that, uh, he gave me a desk in his office and explain everything around.
[02:28:58] I wanted to be sure everything we wanted to do with this.
[02:29:00] So I grabbed it.
[02:29:01] And then he was, he talked about Kennedy.
[02:29:04] He said, I'm going to go over there.
[02:29:06] The young guy, and he's going to be around for president,
[02:29:08] going to run for president.
[02:29:10] And he said, I used to, I told him what I thought.
[02:29:13] A family.
[02:29:14] And he said, I thought too, but this guy is special.
[02:29:17] So you ought to think about that one.
[02:29:19] So yeah, I went over there and worked on that side.
[02:29:22] That's how he got in the public.
[02:29:23] And that's, so that's how it started.
[02:29:25] Yeah.
[02:29:26] And how long were you with Kennedy before the, was that while he was running for president?
[02:29:30] Yeah.
[02:29:31] Okay.
[02:29:32] So you, when you showed up, he was already running for president.
[02:29:35] That's right.
[02:29:36] I had room to have another semi-sound to clear.
[02:29:42] And so then I got involved when that fellowship ran out of,
[02:29:46] I think, called the Democratic Study Group.
[02:29:49] The Democrats are so conservative.
[02:29:52] They were really run by a lot of the Southern Democrats.
[02:29:55] So there's a little separate group.
[02:29:57] You and you and the funder just telling you more than you need to know.
[02:30:00] But he can't be in the politics and knowing those particular members.
[02:30:05] So then did that until the election election day.
[02:30:08] I'd look around and people were trying to put other people's names on them.
[02:30:11] I was so they don't bring it and so on.
[02:30:13] So they held her that.
[02:30:14] So that's when I got off.
[02:30:16] Got on a true ship and went away.
[02:30:19] So after the election, you said, all right, I'm done with this.
[02:30:23] Good bye.
[02:30:24] Yeah.
[02:30:25] You said you were in the book.
[02:30:26] You said you were, I was a Johnny Cumm lately.
[02:30:28] And a Protestant.
[02:30:29] You're right.
[02:30:30] So I'm done by the political top.
[02:30:32] And they, but so anyway, that I go back and I got six months out there.
[02:30:37] I was up writing and then went to California and they're still working on.
[02:30:42] With the University of Sanford University there, I'm writing pretty cold.
[02:30:49] For a grand proposal.
[02:30:51] And the phone rings.
[02:30:52] So, like, who was this is Larry, how was your connection to Larry over?
[02:30:57] He ran, he was the top aide on the political side for running congressional relations.
[02:31:05] So here's the presence in the White House.
[02:31:08] But how did you know him?
[02:31:09] I never only vaguely vaguely because I just, you know where I was around.
[02:31:13] There was an intern.
[02:31:14] Okay.
[02:31:15] But there was well-billed by the thing.
[02:31:16] So anyway.
[02:31:17] But he, he somehow decided that he was, because he's the guy that called you and said,
[02:31:21] Hey, we need you out here.
[02:31:22] Yeah.
[02:31:23] He just remembered you.
[02:31:24] He seemed like a good guy.
[02:31:25] He didn't really remember me, but the, uh,
[02:31:28] I'm trying to be slight, I'll try to type as I found you.
[02:31:32] But so the phone call rings, the phone rings, I'm into shower and, uh,
[02:31:38] and in Stanford and Palo Alto, California.
[02:31:44] And Mary says, the, the, some of the guy says the White House is calling,
[02:31:50] I said that would be in the class.
[02:31:52] And I don't know hang up on the prick with yourself.
[02:31:55] So she got the number and so I went finish my shower and so on and,
[02:32:00] and I took care of that.
[02:32:02] She said, do you hear what this says?
[02:32:04] Would you please call?
[02:32:06] Two, two, four, five, six, one, four, one, four.
[02:32:09] That's a White House number.
[02:32:11] So I don't know if you can see some real con or something's going on.
[02:32:15] So I returned to call all and said, I really worked there.
[02:32:19] So I took a chance and I got a free flight,
[02:32:23] space available from Palo Alto to Tennessee's Memphis.
[02:32:27] Took a bus up and ran it for a room with time to get up behind.
[02:32:33] I think I got to know if Westgate and the White House were all the offices are,
[02:32:37] and I'm not expected if I can put my costume in the kilom.
[02:32:40] But I'm trying to try to know if Westgate, that's a,
[02:32:44] the gate right into the White House.
[02:32:46] You know what I'm expecting? You said the guy.
[02:32:49] So I showed me up to the, I go with the Reptilario Brian.
[02:32:54] I didn't know him at all well.
[02:32:56] He's in a big office with four other guys.
[02:32:59] There is staff. I mean, here, this is his office.
[02:33:02] And he's smoking a cigar where they're always doing.
[02:33:04] And he said, we need someone to work with the liberals and
[02:33:10] house members on the side, south side on the house side of the founders.
[02:33:15] And you know them because of the fellow ship and so on.
[02:33:18] And then you said the main feature.
[02:33:20] So he's, here's what they're doing.
[02:33:23] He's told us to tell us inside guy taking mechanics of the,
[02:33:26] I love Bill is doing.
[02:33:28] And Mike Mattitas, who is, is, is my contact,
[02:33:32] the president's contact with Senate.
[02:33:34] And Henry Hall Wilson, he called him Alaska's now because he's involved
[02:33:38] if he, uh, Southern members.
[02:33:41] And Dick Donney, who worries about the, the bosses daily in the green
[02:33:46] and big city bosses.
[02:33:48] And, and then Dick and Rhapsody says, and that is all as intellectual
[02:33:52] cocksucker, sir, yours.
[02:33:54] So, they, they have fast start.
[02:33:56] But that's what they thought of liberal Democrats.
[02:33:58] So they got the, I know some of them slightly
[02:34:02] to the fellowships, but then I got the norm close.
[02:34:05] And that's, that's how it started.
[02:34:07] That's, um, right.
[02:34:08] I like this one section in here, you're working there.
[02:34:11] And you say this, my young ego would get another challenge
[02:34:13] when I ran into general David M. Schupe,
[02:34:16] 22nd, common out of the Marine Corps on his way to a meeting
[02:34:19] of the Joint Chiefs and staff.
[02:34:21] So I introduce myself as the only Marine on Kennedy staff.
[02:34:24] Good, he said, and what have you done for your country lately?
[02:34:27] Yeah, is it tough, I would, I would, tough, tough guy.
[02:34:30] Good for guy.
[02:34:32] Yeah, that's, uh, that's pretty, that's pretty aggressive
[02:34:36] and he's a great guy there.
[02:34:38] Um, here's, here's one, another kind of interesting section.
[02:34:42] One morning I dropped into Donnie Hughes office when he was finishing up a phone call.
[02:34:46] Here's what I heard on his, on his end.
[02:34:48] I don't care who told you that.
[02:34:50] That's bullshit.
[02:34:51] Hey, do what you want.
[02:34:53] And a conversation.
[02:34:54] Dick created the phone, turned to me,
[02:34:56] and said, just because he's the president doesn't mean everyone
[02:34:59] around him is supposed to kiss his ass.
[02:35:01] Well, he, he burns the volunteer for him,
[02:35:03] he's a small town lawyer and stalked the telephone.
[02:35:06] He'd work around Kennedy for since 1956, never took a dime.
[02:35:11] Look, then he came down to write also.
[02:35:14] Um, speaking of Bay of Pigs and Cuba,
[02:35:20] here we go back to the book.
[02:35:21] Meanwhile, there have been rumors of a Soviet buildup in Cuba,
[02:35:24] but these have been dismissed as GOP scare tactics.
[02:35:27] I'm but known to me in a dark room in the, at the CIA's National Photo
[02:35:31] Center, in interpretation center, located in a non-descript building
[02:35:35] at fifth in Kay and Washington, my brother and law, John Hicks,
[02:35:39] the man who inspired me to join the Marines,
[02:35:41] and it gone from the core to the CIA was analyzing film from an
[02:35:45] American spy plane that clearly showed missiles 90 miles from our coast.
[02:35:49] The photos indicated that at least six canvas covered
[02:35:52] missile trailers, 75 vehicles, eight small tech,
[02:35:55] tents and buildings under construction,
[02:35:57] in other words, a launch site at or near operational stage.
[02:36:01] Another image showed several more missiles.
[02:36:04] John later told me that upon realizing what he was looking at,
[02:36:07] he proceeded to smoke half a dozen cigarettes before the analysis
[02:36:10] was sent to the White House.
[02:36:12] My sister, Joan, never knew any of this.
[02:36:14] She preferred not to ask her husband about his work,
[02:36:16] fearful she'd talk after a couple of martinis.
[02:36:22] So, we got the Cuban missile crisis unfolding
[02:36:25] on the 22nd, I listened to the President's speech on the
[02:36:28] eve of a possible nuclear holocaust.
[02:36:30] Like every parent in America, I thought of my family,
[02:36:33] looking back, it's comforting to know that the man with his finger on the button
[02:36:36] had the same worries as the President's many hours of
[02:36:41] secretly recorded tapes indicate, unlike some of the hawks
[02:36:45] advising him or their piece at any prize counterparts,
[02:36:50] Kennedy had a personal experience of war that put military
[02:36:54] intervention in human terms.
[02:36:56] In a wartime letter, he wrote to his father,
[02:36:58] people get so used to talking about billions of dollars and millions of soldiers
[02:37:02] that thousands of dead sounds like drops in a bucket.
[02:37:06] But if those thousands want to live as much as the ten I saw on
[02:37:10] PT109, they should measure their words with great, great,
[02:37:14] care.
[02:37:16] By contrast, General Curtis Lame,
[02:37:19] who advised the President and his ex-com in those ten
[02:37:22] days in October, had only known war from that great distance
[02:37:26] that the President spoke of.
[02:37:28] As a commander of bombers Lame had been removed by altitude from the
[02:37:32] realities of violence.
[02:37:33] Lame told the President, we don't have any choice but military action.
[02:37:37] And that he wanted to do more than take out missiles,
[02:37:40] saying that the success of an air strike was a guarantee.
[02:37:43] In my war, I was grateful for the air support that protected
[02:37:48] Marines on the ground, but I never forgot that those pilots in general
[02:37:51] would never have to see or smell the bodies they barbequeed on the ground as we did.
[02:37:56] The South Koreans had a nickname for US infantrymen.
[02:38:00] For US Marine infantry, they called us ghost thieves because we were so
[02:38:04] fearsome that we stole the ghosts of the men we killed.
[02:38:07] They couldn't know how true this is.
[02:38:09] Those ghosts are still inside me.
[02:38:12] They will never leave me.
[02:38:14] Boms away Lame as he was known was perverse about his antiseptic brand of killing.
[02:38:20] He bragged about fire bombing civilians in Japan during World War II.
[02:38:24] During the Korean War, he spoke of deleting cities and later complained to all who had
[02:38:28] listened that the war could have been one cleanly and quickly if he had been allowed to
[02:38:31] fire bomb the major cities in China.
[02:38:34] He spoke of war in terms of cost benefit analysis and embraced
[02:38:38] nuke's the next big thing in killing.
[02:38:40] Something like a microwave oven of murder.
[02:38:42] The newest quickest and oh so space age way of getting it done.
[02:38:46] There's no bottom to my content for men for this man and those like him.
[02:38:50] When I draw my last breath, the woman in the child and the photograph belonging to the
[02:38:54] North Korean I killed will be right there with the faces of my own children and the women I married.
[02:38:59] It can't be.
[02:39:00] It can't possibly be the same for a bomb and deer for whom taking life means traveling
[02:39:05] to a set of coordinates while sitting in a cockpit.
[02:39:08] Pushing a button and turning for home.
[02:39:11] Or nowadays from a computer screen and Colorado guiding a drone strike.
[02:39:17] I had a phase and later on in the class of it was in the Congress and the war was
[02:39:23] that particular war we've ended.
[02:39:26] My class gave my urging.
[02:39:28] Putting a bill to forgive the.
[02:39:33] Those persons who for peaceful reasons including going to Canada.
[02:39:38] I was supposed to be at down war.
[02:39:42] So Pete finally he was against that but then we argued back and forth and I was
[02:39:46] friend of he's a congressman.
[02:39:48] So he said I'm going to put in a bill.
[02:39:52] Forgive them.
[02:39:54] Provided they do a.
[02:39:58] A year's public service in penance.
[02:40:01] What do you think of that and he's very proud.
[02:40:04] As long as you put in the bill every B 52 pilot has to also serve a year of
[02:40:11] penance.
[02:40:12] So he said you son of a bitch.
[02:40:15] So he filed a bill without the restriction on the first front.
[02:40:20] So he never faced a second one.
[02:40:22] Oh, and I have a frame.
[02:40:24] Copy the bill and then said to me class said you win.
[02:40:28] You son of a bitch and filed the bill in the past.
[02:40:31] I'm going to say that.
[02:40:36] Well, we're talking about Kennedy and I'm sure everyone knows where this is going
[02:40:40] Friday, November 22nd, 1963 was slow for the president.
[02:40:43] Kennedy's congressional relation staff most members completed their two
[02:40:46] state affairs day work week and when they're we're in their districts chasing
[02:40:50] little white balls or engaged in other vertical and herds on all endeavors.
[02:40:55] My boss, Larry O'Brien, wasn't Texas with president Kennedy.
[02:40:58] I'm likely to call our four-man team for head counsel reports on congressional request
[02:41:02] demands threats and promises.
[02:41:04] He had to me was a weekend with my wife Mary Sun's Michael and Douglas and one
[02:41:08] Spanile, targeting along the chilly shores of the Chesapeake in our seven horse
[02:41:13] power wouldn't now board.
[02:41:15] Once in the White House, Smith was quiet as I took my seat.
[02:41:18] A Filipino steward set down my oblong silver napkin ring,
[02:41:22] grayed with my name two anchors in the words White House mess.
[02:41:25] This was Washington's most exclusive e-dry for privacy and tradition is run by
[02:41:30] the Navy.
[02:41:31] The mess was reserved for select members of the president's senior White House
[02:41:35] staff and there are no guests permitted at the roundtable in the corner
[02:41:39] where I was seated.
[02:41:40] Just after one thirty PM, Jack McNally strode in my first thought was that he
[02:41:44] must be delighted to be carrying some message from the executive office
[02:41:47] building that would gain a entry to the mess and perhaps wreck the weekend with
[02:41:52] the police.
[02:41:55] The president's been shot.
[02:41:58] He was produced.
[02:42:00] What?
[02:42:01] No.
[02:42:02] How bad?
[02:42:03] I don't know.
[02:42:04] I ran up.
[02:42:05] Two flights of stairs to my office.
[02:42:07] Two flights of stairs to my office.
[02:42:09] And turned on the TV.
[02:42:10] One of the millions of sets turned to the news from Dallas.
[02:42:13] I called Mary.
[02:42:15] She just heard the first news built and they've killed him.
[02:42:18] She said, no, they haven't.
[02:42:20] I got shot.
[02:42:21] I'm not dead.
[02:42:22] I hung up the phone and went down to the press office.
[02:42:24] Paul South wicked stepped into the press slot.
[02:42:26] He didn't know any more than the AP's first billet and bullets in Dallas, November 22
[02:42:31] AP.
[02:42:32] President Kenny was shot just as his motorcade left downtown Dallas.
[02:42:36] Spratic updates followed.
[02:42:38] Then the clacking of the news wire delivered the end of our world.
[02:42:42] Bulletin Dallas, November 22nd AP, two pre-step out of Parkland Hospital's emergency
[02:42:48] report today and said that President Kennedy died of his bullet wounds.
[02:42:55] And we're back upstairs and sat until dark calling home ignoring messages, half watching
[02:43:01] the television chronicling the president's final flight to the Capitol, not the new president,
[02:43:06] not LBJ, the president.
[02:43:10] On the Sunday after the assassination, 300,000 people line Pennsylvania Avenue to watch
[02:43:15] six white horses pull a cascad on bearing the president's flag draped casket from the White
[02:43:20] House to the Capitol Rotunda where he would lie in state.
[02:43:23] It was the same casket that had carried FDR and the unknown soldier.
[02:43:30] There's a haunting photograph of the first family following the casket up the Capitol
[02:43:35] steps in the photo.
[02:43:37] The widow Jacqueline is looking directly at the camera.
[02:43:41] Black men Tilla on her head, a whisper of hair between her eyes, she's shouldering the despair
[02:43:46] of the whole country with the same poison that defined her public images first lady.
[02:43:50] Besides, beside her, JFK juniors, bounding up the stairs with his tongue out.
[02:43:55] Too young to fathom, what has happened, you hope.
[02:43:59] Caroline's white glove-tand is holding her mother's in black, a little girl facing the unimaginable
[02:44:04] and unfair duty of publicly mourning her dad.
[02:44:08] In the foreground of this tableau of grief is the back of Kenny O'Donnell's head.
[02:44:14] He's looking off to the side out of the frame at the box containing our president.
[02:44:19] Kenny had been in the car behind Kennedy's and Dallas and blessed himself.
[02:44:24] And when he saw a chunk of the president's brain blown out of his skull, opposite Kenny
[02:44:30] I am standing on a step facing the camera over just over Jackie shoulder with my hand over my heart
[02:44:36] watching the first family climbing the stairs.
[02:44:39] Just a few feet from the family of the straight slain president I observed, a job that started with what I had assumed
[02:44:46] was a prank phone call less than 2000, less than a thousand days earlier.
[02:44:51] A closer look at the man on the step with his hand on his heart will reveal some clues to where I came from.
[02:44:57] In an age of slick side parts, my hair has cropped short, the mark of a marine who didn't know what to do with the freedom to grow it out.
[02:45:04] I wear a tiny lapel pin, the red white and blue vertical stripes of the silver star, which I had received 12 years earlier from my
[02:45:12] Actions as a rifle platoon leader on the other side of the world.
[02:45:16] Behind this ad eyes taking in the first family, I am carrying my persistent anguish over the things I did to earn that medal.
[02:45:26] I remain baffled that I'm even alive in my thirties.
[02:45:30] It seems as unlikely as our president being dead at 46.
[02:45:39] In the coming months, I stayed on with the state on staff with president Johnson.
[02:45:43] I tried to console Mary's and Mary in the boys.
[02:45:45] I pushed papers around my desk in an office that had lost its former feeling of purpose.
[02:45:50] I remembered what it had been like, not wanting my time in the White House to end.
[02:45:57] As I planned, what I was going to do next, I would watch the clock every afternoon, something I had never done while the president was alive.
[02:46:04] My last day couldn't come soon enough.
[02:46:08] In his inaugural address, president Kenny and President Kennedy had challenged my generation to ask,
[02:46:15] ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
[02:46:19] Walking away from the White House, I asked myself the hardest question yet.
[02:46:24] What can I do for my country now?
[02:46:31] Obviously, this is a radical change in the work environment to say the least.
[02:46:38] You make that pretty clear.
[02:46:40] Yeah, I think that Johnson, unlike the situation when FDR died,
[02:46:56] he or FDR fired everybody in the staff right away.
[02:47:00] But that's understandable.
[02:47:02] I mean, Truman did.
[02:47:03] Truman did never been allowed in the White House when his vice president never would not want this.
[02:47:07] So there was, he was treated as a contemporary, a misrepresentative policy,
[02:47:11] so I turned it back out to be quite a good man.
[02:47:13] But he didn't need any more, didn't need that staff anymore, didn't want any of them.
[02:47:17] Johnson, on the other hand, threw his credit.
[02:47:21] I believe he walked into a tragic situation, and some degree of stability was important.
[02:47:29] And what his own personal views were, I don't know, but I think they were genuine,
[02:47:36] that he felt retaining the staff, particularly people like the congressional staff,
[02:47:44] was very important to try to, as we ease into wherever the future lies.
[02:47:52] And I think that was important now, he did it his way, which was embrace us,
[02:48:02] but still, to be the rest of the staff, as it always treated him.
[02:48:06] He would curse him, and they would vote into him.
[02:48:10] He realized he was very, a wonderful, wonderfully effective,
[02:48:14] Senate leader and so on, but they were what they were in his mind.
[02:48:20] And so that he paid extraordinary efforts to, to keep the staff intact.
[02:48:28] And with the Secretary of County O'Donnell, who, who can't handle it,
[02:48:34] but he very soon, he, he, he just was his own man there.
[02:48:38] He stayed there and, you know, the president called, meeting with the whole staff right after he got the job within a week after that.
[02:48:46] And so when we assembled this, as required, or trusted, or whatever,
[02:48:52] someone said, or should I say, who is Kenny? He said, he's another meeting.
[02:48:58] I went to a, he should have had his ass fired, but that's, you know,
[02:49:02] Kenny was Kenny, one tough cookie, so anyway.
[02:49:06] You know, I should ask you this before, because everyone, you know, you hear about, you hear about JFK and,
[02:49:12] and sort of mythical,
[02:49:16] the level of leadership in charisma. I mean, what was it like being around him?
[02:49:22] Someone was a great leader with the right, with charisma.
[02:49:26] I mean, that's, that's a shallow way to put it, but also, I mean, besides instances,
[02:49:30] or he was intensely human, where, as evidence by his handling of the mail,
[02:49:38] the very thing to him and that meeting about keeping this a thing.
[02:49:42] And maybe I was saying, you know, you can't be a coward to kind of,
[02:49:46] either really, it was grossly insulting a thing, and he just managed to manage that.
[02:49:52] Didn't let us, you go get involved at all, wouldn't play with this guy's games,
[02:49:56] Lime.
[02:49:58] I mean, I could see, a guy like, like, Lime, the way you described,
[02:50:02] okay, I'm going to make JFK look, you can't be weak here, you know, trying to get him from that angle.
[02:50:08] I mean, exactly saying you, you can't live with this,
[02:50:14] I mean, the next thing to an open threat, and the records of that now indicated,
[02:50:22] exactly what that amount had amounted to, and he said, what did you say?
[02:50:30] And so, Bumble of the May says somewhat differently.
[02:50:34] Yeah, that's in the book. I didn't like capture that.
[02:50:38] We made it clean that one up a little bit, but yeah, that's, that's.
[02:50:42] And I think that there are instances of a very human things.
[02:50:46] One, he put it to him, a guy, member congressman,
[02:50:50] died in a playing crash in a usual,
[02:50:54] trained at the campaign for you, whether the guy had held a seat in the high
[02:51:00] place, it had been Republicans in 1928.
[02:51:04] It was the one of the golden gate bridge runs up to Oregon,
[02:51:08] and he, he wanted to see the congress because he just devoted to the coastline,
[02:51:12] or protecting the coast, and so we get in.
[02:51:16] So then it's campaigning and bang.
[02:51:18] So then the only way you could hold that seat would be if his wife held it,
[02:51:24] ran and held it.
[02:51:26] So the problem was that it had been turned down.
[02:51:30] It meant that claim always felt very poorly,
[02:51:34] automatically some passion under the widow.
[02:51:38] She was against it and she was very much aware of that.
[02:51:42] She had very young children, so to say,
[02:51:44] so I tried to pedal to the idea, it is the only way we hold that seat if we run.
[02:51:48] So then do course.
[02:51:50] I was talking with Kenny or Larry, I've heard of which Kenny I think,
[02:51:54] but is that the only way is going to work if it all is that the president calls her.
[02:51:58] And he said, once we're in telling him.
[02:52:02] So I decided to the president exactly the situation.
[02:52:06] It would be wonderful man and he got up.
[02:52:10] He was given a house in Rockery Park from Humball, Stonehouse,
[02:52:14] because he loved Rockery Park so much, and it's a huge decent guy.
[02:52:18] But he just doesn't want to do it.
[02:52:20] So I have an unrecited all that to the president.
[02:52:24] And including other peasants made during his, he's the only one.
[02:52:30] And I said, there's a little kids in the zone.
[02:52:34] He said, there goes that seat.
[02:52:38] He would not make a call.
[02:52:40] He just couldn't do it.
[02:52:42] And he wasn't for failure, just he wouldn't do it.
[02:52:46] There's a lot inside him, it's pretty damn good.
[02:52:50] Well, you eventually have had enough of working for L.V.J.
[02:52:56] And again, you don't just jump through huge swaths of us.
[02:53:00] Yeah, because they didn't find a few, I started building notes about Johnson,
[02:53:06] because I thought he was really cool, and that's in the wrong word.
[02:53:10] But he was so upset by never having served in the military.
[02:53:14] And he used to drive me bullshit.
[02:53:18] And I didn't wear that silverstone those days.
[02:53:22] Very often.
[02:53:24] We were just crossing some bill, and he was being bullied by stuff.
[02:53:28] I knew I was a scene that day.
[02:53:30] So I've wore more money.
[02:53:34] And you can tell he knew I knew he was a fake.
[02:53:36] And it was a fake metal, really a fake metal.
[02:53:38] It's in the book we got it.
[02:53:40] But I never made any notes when I worked in the White House before.
[02:53:46] But I had done so I've doing that.
[02:53:50] And then I put that away and I used four basic cards to myself each day.
[02:53:58] Most days, not as day, but individual with it.
[02:54:02] Tenning meetings, it's a very sensitive stuff.
[02:54:04] It's always side to side with it.
[02:54:06] So that's those scribbling of this thing.
[02:54:10] And the one day, it was noisy.
[02:54:12] Christine, from Zase, has got a box.
[02:54:16] She's the right amount of the basement.
[02:54:18] She put those away.
[02:54:20] I thought it's all the way.
[02:54:22] She found them.
[02:54:23] She thought it was reading to tell the end to myself.
[02:54:26] So that's where I'm not project.
[02:54:28] Your next move, so your next move after LBJ,
[02:54:32] is in the midst of figuring out what I'll go next.
[02:54:35] I got an unexpected visit from Edward H. Lee by Provost of the University of Chicago.
[02:54:40] Who is one of those intellectual cox suckers I'd been assigned to as a new hire in the West Wing a lifetime ago.
[02:54:47] He's a general.
[02:54:49] He never used the word shit if he had a mouthful.
[02:54:52] He said he's just a terrific leader.
[02:54:56] And he really during the times of scandal.
[02:55:00] He was so good at balancing and student uprising so on.
[02:55:04] Without him as Chicago police in a vital difference to what all turned out to be.
[02:55:09] And so he offers you a job though at the...
[02:55:12] Yeah, I was vice president.
[02:55:14] Yeah, vice president.
[02:55:15] He just threw that.
[02:55:17] He became a attorney general because he just handled the whole thing so well.
[02:55:23] Yeah, this is what, like 19...
[02:55:26] This is what?
[02:55:27] In the 1960s, 1964, the campuses are starting to get riled up and all that.
[02:55:35] That's what you're dealing with.
[02:55:37] Yeah, but this one was...
[02:55:39] He didn't hire me for that.
[02:55:42] It was a little before that, it was right after the death and so on.
[02:55:46] Or if it didn't seem to get out of there.
[02:55:48] But he handled this in front of police very well.
[02:55:51] He did a lot of stuff with that.
[02:55:54] So, nature and I started up a little signs thing.
[02:55:57] His problem was that the Irish Congress views a bed of commas far out.
[02:56:05] And so on.
[02:56:06] So I started bringing congressmen in like Rost and Calstya.
[02:56:10] These other rough guys who were involved with the university.
[02:56:15] But that changed a lot there and it was interesting, exciting.
[02:56:20] And eventually, you end up working for Bobby Kennedy's campaign.
[02:56:26] Yeah, the deal was with...
[02:56:28] So...
[02:56:29] With Levy, he's pretty mac and belly and guy, and he wanted me.
[02:56:33] Yeah, this is going back to the book on the...
[02:56:35] On the... On the... On the Bobby Kennedy campaign when I flew to Los Angeles early,
[02:56:39] early, 2016, 1968, it was full of hope.
[02:56:41] Bobby made us all hopeful again.
[02:56:44] By June Pierre was working on Bobby's campaign after having already lost his own race.
[02:56:48] He invited us out for what we hope would be a victory party following a California primary.
[02:56:53] We checked it into the Ambassador Hotel.
[02:56:55] We wandered around the sprawl of the hotel,
[02:56:58] Naped a while in the room and watched the early projections, which looked encouraging.
[02:57:01] The polls closed. I called Bobby's room.
[02:57:03] It looks like you're a winner.
[02:57:04] You should give the mayor a call.
[02:57:06] The mayor of England, Daily.
[02:57:07] Yeah.
[02:57:08] It's getting late in Chicago, tell him...
[02:57:10] Tell him...
[02:57:11] Tell him and tell...
[02:57:12] Rotten Calstya.
[02:57:13] Rotten Calstya.
[02:57:14] Right then...
[02:57:16] Kirel Relaxing Calstya?
[02:57:18] Rossten cal nugget that California is...
[02:57:20] Herbert's Hewerh tendencies!
[02:57:23] Kenny's at the Mayflower.
[02:57:25] I'll give him a call.
[02:57:27] It's very close.
[02:57:28] What if I don't win?
[02:57:29] Without call, California, your dead anyways.
[02:57:31] So why not make the call?
[02:57:32] OK, so you were later...
[02:57:37] Mary and I went downstairs to wait outside the crowd of Baldwin
[02:57:40] Maybe he wanted Kenny to first push Rostan Caleski,
[02:57:44] the mayor's main manager, Cago for support.
[02:57:46] Maybe he wanted to call the mayor himself in the morning.
[02:57:49] How many maybes that night?
[02:57:51] Maybe if not through the kitchen.
[02:57:53] He closes speech with a rallying cry.
[02:57:55] So my thanks to all of you and on to Chicago and let's win there.
[02:58:00] The Senator from New York ducked the crowd by exiting through the kitchen.
[02:58:04] The night split open with rapid and unmistakable pop pop pop of the small caliber weapon.
[02:58:10] I ran towards the shots.
[02:58:12] I would learn later that Mary had gone upstairs and sat with the TV switched off.
[02:58:17] She knew.
[02:58:19] Paul Shrade.
[02:58:20] Shrade.
[02:58:21] Shrade Bobby's pal from the United Auto Workers was on the floor,
[02:58:25] bleeding from a head wound, eyes open, looking dead.
[02:58:28] Just beyond Bobby was on his back with a crowd surging around him.
[02:58:33] Some of us tried to make a protective ring to give him air.
[02:58:36] I looked down at Bobby lying on his back.
[02:58:37] He was motionless.
[02:58:40] His mouth slightly open.
[02:58:42] There was almost no blood except on the back of one hand.
[02:58:45] No visible entry or an exit wounds.
[02:58:47] His eyes had that stare that I'd seen before but never from anyone who survived.
[02:58:52] I saw Jim Abel's. I saw Rocky.
[02:58:54] Rocky had mumbled corpsmen. Abel said,
[02:58:57] oh shit.
[02:58:58] Just shit.
[02:59:00] I shouted to Fred Dutton,
[02:59:02] who is inside the barrier.
[02:59:03] Somebody loosened his tie.
[02:59:06] I remember hoping for a miracle.
[02:59:08] But I knew head wounds and miracles don't mix.
[02:59:16] And here you are on the funeral training.
[02:59:20] It was hot on board the funeral train.
[02:59:22] We ran out of ice somewhere in New Jersey on the way to the capital by way of Delaware and
[02:59:26] Maryland.
[02:59:27] So we drank our whisky's meat.
[02:59:29] As you pass through New Jersey, I don't know if it's in there or not.
[02:59:33] We crowd in fact one foot was killed right along both sides of the track and eventually
[02:59:39] stopped other trains and we were in a very slow pace and it looked across the crowd really.
[02:59:47] Now we're crowd not mobbed with all but right along the track.
[02:59:50] And often the distance I saw some people playing golf.
[02:59:53] I saw a force in playing golf. I said to Kenny, we're in New Jersey.
[02:59:59] I said to Kenny, I could know sons of bitches, they'll play in golf.
[03:00:02] Kenny said, go worry about it.
[03:00:04] It's just New Jersey.
[03:00:05] You said, well they know where to not the old voted for Kennedy.
[03:00:07] Oh, a terrible heart there went back to the whiskey.
[03:00:13] You continue on describing this.
[03:00:14] We moved through backyards, dirty embankments, discarded railroad ties,
[03:00:18] bottles and trash and a corridor of humanity beside the tracks on Portch's balconies and roof
[03:00:23] tops. They made signs of prayer they saluted day waived.
[03:00:27] The Economist John Kenneth Gelbreith remembers, if you were bearing Ronald Reagan,
[03:00:32] you would obviously want to do it with an airplane.
[03:00:34] But if you're going to bury Robert Kennedy, his people live along the railway tracks.
[03:00:40] In the last car with the family, friends and coffin, I heard Ethel say to her son,
[03:00:45] Wave back, Gelbreith. On that book I had a piece of Frank Mankerwood press secretary to Bobby.
[03:00:58] He described the funeral train. He said the crowd in the train, he analyzed,
[03:01:06] he said the, I can't prove to verbatim roughly. It says the Protestants,
[03:01:17] Father Gluing, the Jews with Rending Air Cloves apart.
[03:01:24] The Irish drank a lot of whiskey until the Irish ran out and then drank a conding drinking
[03:01:31] about ice and it was a good piece of, and how he above all he was one of the later on
[03:01:37] and Alex Bobby's death into the crowd. He was in a hospital, but for him to write that and analyze
[03:01:44] that crowd, it was terrific and he could have had half of that train. This is another good political
[03:01:51] story that you got in here. In 1967, Pete ran for Congress against former child actors,
[03:01:57] Shirley Temple, and the Republican partner for special election following the death of Arthur
[03:02:02] J. Younger. By then the Vietnam War was on and Pete aimed to be the first Republican congressman
[03:02:07] to oppose the war. Between this unpopular stance and his opponent's celebrity everyone assumed
[03:02:12] his was a lost cause. Things weren't looking good so I was recruited to fly out from Chicago
[03:02:17] to deliver to word to Pete that he was going to lose and should stop wasting his contributors
[03:02:21] donations for a certain loss. Pete's Pete, this is Utah and Pete. They're saying 85% 85% of
[03:02:29] people in this district know who Temple is. Not even 85% of them knew who Jesus Christ is.
[03:02:35] He said Burger and that was his nickname for you for a video. If 85% of the people know anything
[03:02:42] about her, that bitch is dead. Kind of the true thing started to look up when his opponent
[03:02:49] little miss miracle. The star of the depression accused of the him of being soft on communism.
[03:02:54] Not got the attention of a few old Marines. She was talking about the recipient of a navy
[03:02:58] cross. I brought this issue to the attention of David Schupe, the former commoner,
[03:03:03] down to the Marine Corps whom I would knew from the West Wing where he had asked me
[03:03:07] what have you done for your country lately. He was appalled by the child actresses accusation at
[03:03:12] my suggestion. He sent a telegram endorsing Pete saying that when elected, Pete would serve the
[03:03:17] people of the 11th District of California with the same grace and courage that he had served
[03:03:22] his country in Korea. That other appeared in the day before the election. That last minute piece
[03:03:27] was printed in the Palo Alto paper. Pete won his election, a victory that became known as the
[03:03:33] sinking of the Good Ship Lollipop. That was a hard break. And Pete had saved the Marine
[03:03:40] reserved through the 1950s and early 60s. He would make Lieutenant Colonel by the time
[03:03:43] Vietnam was on, but they didn't need any age and reserve lieutenant colonels, much less one who
[03:03:48] is anti-war. So he was out. But Pete wasn't one to stay away from more, especially one he wanted
[03:03:53] to shut down for a change. He put together a privately funded trip. So he's going to go to Vietnam.
[03:03:59] Then I told Pete I had a strong hunch. There'd be an accident over there. A Jeep would roll over
[03:04:03] a chopper would go down. Something taking the piece Nick Republican from California permanently
[03:04:08] out of the debate. So I told him I'm coming with you. Pete went to Vietnam in 1968 between
[03:04:14] Christmas and his swearing in his congressman. I tagged along on a second trip in 1971 by then
[03:04:19] anti-war sentiment had grown following Nick's bombing in the invasion of neutral Cambodia.
[03:04:25] Yet the Republican Party line was still pro-war. And then so you guys go to Vietnam. It was a
[03:04:31] disturbing trip to put it mildly. We were lied to constantly when Pete met the American
[03:04:37] Advanced Ambassador Sullivan. He got a chance to tell him I think you're a liar.
[03:04:43] We went to Me-Li where Lieutenant Kali had carried out his infamous massacre three years prior.
[03:04:48] The survivors were less than welcoming. I was nervous and became acutely so when I noticed that
[03:04:54] dominance was dominance. Is there a life photographer? He'd wandered off. That was a real
[03:04:59] known no because the area was unsafe and it just didn't feel right. I found him behind a hut where
[03:05:05] the man who had covered numerous wars and had privately had privately gone to weep overcome by all
[03:05:11] his eyes had seen. Wondering around one of our bases I went into a big tent, a big tent,
[03:05:18] housing a barn of sorts. The place was full of Marines and had an atmosphere of tension. I knew well.
[03:05:24] I started chatting with a pilot. I told him I was a bustled out platoon leader traveling with a
[03:05:28] fellow Korean war vet and trying to see what was going on over here. He shouted to no one in
[03:05:33] particular. Hey, watch out. This is one of those guys they warned us about. Well,
[03:05:37] fuck you I said. No, hey, relax pal. You want to know what I do? I fly the arvin, which is the army
[03:05:44] of the Republic of Vietnam or allies. Officers home overnight and fly them back in the morning.
[03:05:49] You leave the enlisted guys? I asked him. I tried to imagine a world in which Pete and I got to chop
[03:05:54] off the battlefield every night with other gentleman officers leaving the enlisted swine to
[03:05:59] defend for themselves and hope they're still there when we punch in and again in the morning. What the
[03:06:04] fuck? That's all right. That's right. He said anyone who thinks we can win this war is out of his
[03:06:12] fucking mind. I pilot and the other pilots there were arms and legs, quickly he's
[03:06:20] turning it so that they sat on a piece of armor plate so that if they were shot down lost the limiter
[03:06:30] or limiter or another they could just yank that turn it into a bit of ply. So that was a kind of
[03:06:40] explained their conduct here on that squad 10 and you look at them and you don't you know very well
[03:06:46] that they're turning it's right there for you have to if I have to discuss and discuss they must have
[03:06:53] felt doing their own thing for just that fun but to bail out on say I did that to your crew
[03:07:00] plane on that it's absurd. I mean we we ate that shit for all those years and wasted all those
[03:07:06] bodies man not bodies. That just marines. Yeah just crazy you move forward.
[03:07:20] Since Korea marry the peaceful your wife married the peaceful Canadian had lost whatever enthusiasm
[03:07:26] she had for husbands violent adapt adoptive home. JFK's murder confirmed her low opinion and
[03:07:31] Bobby was the last straw. Chicago wasn't a place to be in the dulled rooms that followed and so we saw
[03:07:37] refuge in Ireland. We found Bantry a year-round market town on the shores of an immense gorgeous bay
[03:07:42] open to the gales and waves of the North Atlantic. So you guys find a house for sale you end up buying
[03:07:49] that house out there and kind of ended up spending a decent amount of time over an island.
[03:07:56] Three months a year. Would during the academic season you had an take any jobs without that
[03:08:02] three months from that point on. And then the the the University of Chicago you kind of wrap up your job
[03:08:13] there five years yeah and then then you get a call then you get another phone call. You get a lot of
[03:08:23] interesting phone calls here this phone call comes in Chuck daily this is Derek Bach. You may have
[03:08:28] heard that I was recently made president Harvard. I'm calling you I'm calling to ask have you ever
[03:08:33] thought of working here. Not in my sickest fucking moment is your response really why not because I don't
[03:08:39] think Harvard cares about anything but Harvard well he was looking to hire you and because of your
[03:08:47] boarden boarden and restlessness you made you an easy mark is what you say so you go and have gone
[03:08:53] to work there. I told him I do it for five years five to the day I quit. What he said he said
[03:09:00] what do you want to be at the other five years said I know exactly what I'm going to be five years
[03:09:03] what I am the day I won't fucking man but I'm five years I'm gone and I was gone today.
[03:09:10] Once a detail gate for Harvard Yale football game I was asked about my allegiance as a Yale
[03:09:14] graduate working for Harvard. I was quoted saying something like this you'd have more fun
[03:09:19] getting a girl into hotel room and watching Ohio State on television. It's a good idea to get
[03:09:24] up or unfortunately I covered the crimson ram that. She said unfortunately they ran it.
[03:09:33] No that's that's awesome. When I left Harvard after my fifth year I was given a rock
[03:09:39] and chair and boss with a Harvard logo my name and title and the years of my service and
[03:09:43] inscription in Irish which translates to he left as he came his own man. In 1977 I've been
[03:09:50] living off living in Key West and Ireland taking some time off. I was invited by Jack Anderson to
[03:09:55] go to Chicago to discuss a job opening as president of the Joyce Foundation of fully funded grant
[03:10:02] making charitable organizations. So this is your next gig. You say this that the Joyce Foundation
[03:10:07] I broke my own rule about not staying in any job longer than five years. I once told a non-profit
[03:10:12] trade publication any foundation president who stays longer than ten years ought to be shot.
[03:10:17] The interviewer called me on this. What about you and you responded I have been shot.
[03:10:24] I saw that a little more off to some time.
[03:10:31] Continuing on through the 1980s I was dividing my time between the Joyce Foundation and the American
[03:10:36] Ireland fund. It was as close to retirement as I was comfortable with and my schedule made it possible
[03:10:42] to spend more time in Bantry. By then Michael and Betsy Claffey bought a home house in
[03:10:50] I'm not even a truck around Kilkaren over a treacherous mountain road from us. We had dinners
[03:10:56] and long sunlit summer nights looking out on the water. Then our world changed. Mary found a lump in
[03:11:03] her breast. Cancer. She had it treated. It came back and spread. By 1987 it was clear that further
[03:11:12] treatment was hopeless. We celebrated my 60th birthday at our Cape House where a local builder
[03:11:19] Scott Sven Sikson who knew the situation of built a deck for her to watch the sunset from working
[03:11:27] quickly ignoring the local building laws. Mary wanted to die in Ireland. We went to Bantry while she
[03:11:34] was still well enough to travel. I did my best with cooking and cleaning but I couldn't carry her
[03:11:38] because of my arm. A local doctor made house calls and confirmed what we already knew.
[03:11:45] No hope. We spent our last moments together in bed. She was thirsty but couldn't swallow.
[03:11:53] I wet her lips to ease the dryness. Can I have a patty? She asked, slaying for whiskey.
[03:12:02] I went to the kitchen, poured the whiskey and brought the glasses to bed. Drank some
[03:12:08] and bent over to let a last few drops dribble from my kiss into her mouth.
[03:12:14] June 16th, 1987, early light clinton off the water. Hungry Hill across the bay was purple
[03:12:24] in the calm, pallet of dawn. Our little inboard cabin cruiser that Titanic too tugged at its
[03:12:31] morning. In the bedroom Mary was asleep and breathing very slowly. I labied beside her. Her breathing
[03:12:41] got slower and slower. Her breathing stopped. I kissed her. I didn't want to leave her.
[03:12:52] The doctor came, the nurse came and then the hers. Then I was alone.
[03:13:01] Toward the evening the tide was out. I went down to the beach. My pistol was an ocean away.
[03:13:11] Fuck it. I begged God to finish the job that I was still here was the only thing cooler
[03:13:18] than her being gone. I nowton the wet sand and prayed as hard as I ever prayed for Mary's life.
[03:13:26] One of the few times I've ever prayed, please God give me cancer.
[03:13:36] I never listen to my God.
[03:13:38] How long have you been together for?
[03:13:57] A few months after the funeral, Dick called me and asked me what my plan was. He told me that he had
[03:14:03] a job opening for me in the event. I was interested in doing something. Besides looking after
[03:14:08] Donkeys, killing rats and feeling sorry for myself. He told me it was a federal government job
[03:14:15] at the John Fitzgerald Kennedy presidential library. A nod from an old pal wouldn't suffice but my
[03:14:20] service and metals and prior federal employment, including my time in Kennedy's own west wing,
[03:14:25] would make me well qualified. I got the job, food a Boston, and at age 60, started a whole new
[03:14:33] career. Seems like a good who's that? That was Dick who. Don't you? Okay. It's like a good friend
[03:14:44] to call you out and get you on a new mission. He came to the funeral. He's got 11 kids. He's
[03:14:55] one of the widest in the White House. He called his wife the caretaker's Protestant. He was
[03:15:03] at his friend. We had an integral of church, but a Protestant church had the funeral. He had a
[03:15:11] congregation and probably 20 or at around him. But he was so poor in a beautiful building down time.
[03:15:18] The roof needed repairs. Dick observed that when he came up with the funeral. The Catholic church
[03:15:28] is up on top of the hill and those days still a huge number of persons go to church. So Dick
[03:15:39] said, that is a pretty separate. I was particularly amazed, but the Catholic church takes
[03:15:45] church gate collections for the cause. He had a special church gate collection for money to
[03:15:53] send down the hill to repair the Protestant church. Dick says, no way. And so, I had not
[03:16:05] left the funeral letter came to the preacher down below. Colomians said, I've got letter. I want to
[03:16:10] show you a letter from Dunno. And I said, here's a check for $1,500 to help fix the
[03:16:20] product, help fix your roof, but not for what goes on under under beneath it. It's vintage,
[03:16:26] don't you? Anyway, once you're back, now you're doing the library thing. And this is,
[03:16:36] you know, you had met Christine before in the past work. So, when he was a friend of mine,
[03:16:41] he worked 12 years for the appointment secretary to, to tip, speak to the house and so on.
[03:16:49] She's in charge of the title of nine as the woman's issues thing. And she's just, she was
[03:16:55] extraordinary. She's very, very difficult person because under the way we were, you couldn't get
[03:17:00] to see her unless, you know, I'm listening to one, so that is usually similar. She probably
[03:17:07] usually sort of fell with her out of it. Wasn't that out of a news story? The Italian ambassador
[03:17:13] or whoever they were was wanted to see. Tip, so let me check. And by the time, if I had
[03:17:21] not, you think I'm going to be part of the two years from much more energy than I thought. Yeah,
[03:17:25] she was impossible. Well, since, since Married died and now you were back, you had Christine.
[03:17:34] And I'm going back to the book around New Year's. I took Christine to dinner at a French restaurant
[03:17:39] on the Cape to say goodbye. I didn't know how to get over losing Mary. She needed to move on for a
[03:17:44] couple of months. We didn't talk. That was devastating to both of us. She loved me for a decade,
[03:17:48] knowing it would never be possible to be together. Now that it was possible, I was too broken.
[03:17:52] Finally, I realized I couldn't live without Christine on the dock of my Cape Cod House. I asked
[03:17:58] you to marry me. We weren't for a seafood lunch to celebrate. We said a date for Columbus Day in
[03:18:02] the fall. There was just one issue. She was a Catholic and, at least in theory, a Protestant.
[03:18:09] The first hurdle was visiting her parents on a presentation, Roden Brighton. 1616,
[03:18:14] presentation, Roden. She told me that I would be the first Protestant to step foot off their
[03:18:19] porch. How is their mother his morning? Not even the mailman I asked. You think a Protestant could
[03:18:26] get a job as a male fan in this neighborhood you responded with her parents very warm blessing.
[03:18:32] We just had the church to worry about. Per Catholic law had to sign some papers saying I'd raise
[03:18:37] our children in the church. That was okay, but on top of that the priest wanted me to go to an
[03:18:42] adult version of Sunday school. That wasn't going to happen. Fortunately, I had an answer.
[03:18:47] I knew Father Richard McEugh in Korea where he had been a Marine Lieutenant. He had been blown up
[03:18:53] by a landmine. We saw each other again as guests of Bethesda, Naval Hospital. When I left the hospital,
[03:18:58] I was used to, he was still undergoing treatment. After the Navy put him back together, McEugh had a
[03:19:03] spiritual awakening and had become a Navy chaplain and went on to serve in Vietnam. I knew he had retired.
[03:19:10] I knew he had retired and was living in North Carolina. I called him to explain my situation.
[03:19:15] He said, I look forward to seeing you on your knees in front of a Catholic altar.
[03:19:21] Father, Slash Lieutenant McEugh married us at our lady of the presentation in Brighton in front of our
[03:19:27] many friends and from the many chapters in our lives. And then a week after my 60s,
[03:19:34] second birthday Christine was due to give birth to her first son. I thought about giving him
[03:19:39] naming him U-Lick. Is that I say U-Lick or U-Lick? U-Lick. U-Lick. U-Lick. U-Lick. After my father,
[03:19:46] something our friends had talked to me about over a drink. We would name him Charlie not just after me,
[03:19:51] but for the two uncles I never met who had been killed leading Paltoons in France.
[03:19:57] One thing I read back then when Christine first came to me, he was after Mary and died.
[03:20:10] There's a wonderful piano player there, played around the world and grew as an all-est of his
[03:20:15] patient. He is part of 11 key west. The day that Christine walked in, he played
[03:20:23] love walking and drove the shadows away. He's a sort of a great song. The trouble is
[03:20:33] she's one of the first never met and the best wife ever had and I don't have any more,
[03:20:39] but she can be really difficult because the guy played that and played up in an hour and
[03:20:47] played that and I love that. She goes over. Next thing here is love is better the second time around.
[03:20:58] I said it at a Precure play that again. He said hey I'm a
[03:21:02] friend of Mr. Daily more than I am of you. It was better. But dinner is going to be difficult.
[03:21:14] You surprised that there was some.
[03:21:21] You continued over some of this. You got involved with other things. I mentioned it really briefly
[03:21:28] but the Ireland fun. Here we go through our work together in the Ireland fun, Tony O'Reilly,
[03:21:33] and I built the lasting and trusting friendship. His rugby interested me just as much as the Marine
[03:21:38] Corps interested him. He was a famous rugby player and in 1999 Tony invited me to join him in
[03:21:45] Cape Town where he was meeting with his South African advisory board. He was the richest guy in Ireland
[03:21:51] at that time when bus later, but he had like 75 newspaper around the world and based in Ireland
[03:22:00] and he got me in that general board. But he got part of a cozy one down to play that
[03:22:07] here. 100,000 people all white at AJ team rugby and South Africa and everybody fell in love with
[03:22:16] the boys. So yes, we can now. The board would have an annual lunch with Nelson Mandela. When I
[03:22:23] met him, he remembered his visit to the Kennedy Library shortly after being given his freedom.
[03:22:28] At my first meeting with him in South Africa, he noticed my PT109 Tyclip, a souvenir from the
[03:22:34] Kennedy White House. He asked if he could have it. Here it is. I said, but what are you going to do with it?
[03:22:40] You don't wear a tie. He clamped the miniature brass boat to his tunic. Mandela's presence can
[03:22:46] best be described as a staggering and powerful gentleness. What's truly remarkable about this man
[03:22:51] is the way he, the way his example inspired others to actualize courage and patience in the face of
[03:22:57] a system that told them they had no dignity and honor to preserve. I think the one thing I hope
[03:23:06] you can consider putting in this thing is why I got interested in South Africa, the idea
[03:23:13] being invited to the most beautiful city in Africa and the richest city in Africa, Cape Town.
[03:23:18] I did that because all right he was sensitive to Bobby to go down there and saw an
[03:23:27] new guy was interested in that and so he asked us to come down on a holiday. He just
[03:23:34] to come see I'd never been to South Africa. So he flew down in first class of course and on his
[03:23:39] nickel and if he flew into the airport, we noticed a big sea of, in fact, I went to the Shacks.
[03:23:45] And so then we landed and drove back into South, and to Cape Town, I looked at the Shacks and
[03:23:52] they were really Shacks and you know windows, they were like that and some tin moved bits and pieces
[03:23:59] they found by the street, whatever. There were hundreds of thousands of people, I believe,
[03:24:05] a little bit there. So we got into the city before I met with a variety of sit-out and a while.
[03:24:12] You know, you said just mess around while and let's have it a little inch and so on. So I went back
[03:24:18] out there and he said it was on the lead of one and they just, it was, it went out with what
[03:24:26] of his drivers and obviously an armed white policeman and so I dropped me a little from,
[03:24:33] it was a little scenic there and it walked in and this area of Gilmaris asked you that he
[03:24:40] guy is and told me this and Eric O'Mear that's the doctor that we are. So he said,
[03:24:47] I said I looked to walk around there and said to have some of the clinic going to have any problem.
[03:24:51] So I went around and looked at it and there was this unbelievable we talked about and then found
[03:24:58] this situation specific to such charming things is the Minister of Health
[03:25:05] believed that if you took lemon juice and I forgot to exact formula and garlet and something else
[03:25:16] you didn't need to worry about AIDS and she's the surgeon general of this. The idea of
[03:25:24] bringing medicine in was illegal, you could lose your license, it was absurd. So this is 1998 when
[03:25:31] this is happening and you know I know you you you you went into that little village obviously you saw
[03:25:37] the suffering that was going on there. It was a little village at 850,000 people. Yeah I should have said
[03:25:42] Johnny. You were in touch with him. And then you start you get put in charge of the AIDS.
[03:25:49] Well I said it's honey that this dream and whether this is beautiful beautiful place
[03:25:54] for getting Robin Island at the prison out in the middle but it's described to him exactly
[03:26:02] how beautiful it I know is all of that but it's also during part I had all the blacks out
[03:26:11] I mean out so it's all white there now but the thing was murderous and we've done nothing about it
[03:26:22] so when I described some detail on the later said you were in trouble places he would never go
[03:26:28] and never did go but nor did anyone else in the South African play. But anyway we
[03:26:37] yeah you know you you you end up giving these reports to this board and here you say in my reports
[03:26:43] I would follow up with statistics about South Africa's AIDS orphans 850,000 in number
[03:26:49] as of 2006 in urge anyone who finds bone or jokes offensive to consider the obscenity is
[03:26:55] of that number. I score a lot during board meetings even by my standards some members of the
[03:27:00] board didn't appreciate my obscene language. I tell them it's obscene fucking world. Real
[03:27:07] obscenity is drinking mineral water and vintage wines in a palatial hotel guarded by armed
[03:27:12] security just 30 minute drive from a city of tin shacks where little girls are afraid to use the toilet.
[03:27:19] I explained it in the legend was you concur as if you have sex with a virgin and they were
[03:27:32] widespread practice of raping very young girls in some cases killing them but one was
[03:27:41] defended by somebody said if they were there wasn't a crime because she wasn't a virgin age five
[03:27:48] and this is a shit that we're putting up with since we met yesterday afternoon now 600
[03:27:55] South African mostly women in children and died of AIDS and we don't do shit about it and
[03:28:02] I described some of the deaths including one who had described in a previous session
[03:28:09] brave and smart young and so on and she was raped the previous week by turned out 15
[03:28:22] young guys one is 15 years of age and when she screamed out the stop that that shit is a killer
[03:28:31] and that's the one you have the volunteers type of own and so
[03:28:37] I made me that advisor and we funded but we could do we changed our editorial boards
[03:28:47] employees included blacks we had condoms in our workplaces one priest had said in the
[03:28:57] our pop we'll tell you that a country or evil and he talked as if raincoats cause rain
[03:29:08] but I mean they're fucking nuts everybody so there's plenty of possibly could as vividly as
[03:29:15] possibly could we didn't help that change and and go mergers was and
[03:29:24] I'm almost the main city to Hannesburg they pull her guys license for that and they threatened
[03:29:33] and three times ordered the medical practice of his clinic in Calacia
[03:29:40] pulled and it wouldn't do it and he said to me you know it just it takes nothing to buy a bullet
[03:29:48] to put him in his head and somehow because the instinct spread worked great thing he was doing
[03:29:55] I mean it had a white supreme court justice of South Africa and extraordinary liberal guy
[03:30:03] he got AIDS probably from homosexual I don't know but I knew him and he so he came out and said
[03:30:10] I have AIDS when he said I'm alive but I have the 400 runs whatever was a month
[03:30:19] to buy AIDS you can get them overseas to delay or not cure maggots more as cure some
[03:30:27] people hard and he said I know die because I have money and they don't and he said I'm alive
[03:30:39] but he said I'm ashamed that I'm alive and since I'm fucking mess and thought the more you can
[03:30:45] spell it out and the more you can save these guys they're kind of damn
[03:30:47] pressure to the country and Becky said he did have sex with the woman as the lead to rape
[03:30:59] or not but he named me problem because he'd taken a shower afterwards that's a present
[03:31:03] of the fucking country and they get the times later he said looking at Packer on his on his
[03:31:10] years in service when he was in office and if he had just permitted treatment to be so on
[03:31:17] 350,000 so the Africans would still be alive and nothing new or times in editorial and that
[03:31:23] is the place for sitting anyway that's what motivated me there this is how you described in the book
[03:31:29] it was hard to comprehend the magnitude of the suffering there it's hard to imagine a place
[03:31:34] we're going to the toilet can be fatal a place where there's roughly one flush toilet for every
[03:31:39] 17,000 people a place that is largely ignored by those with the power to improve those conditions
[03:31:47] and the absence of government leadership on the AIDS issue rumor and superstition has taken over
[03:31:53] one rumor said that condoms had worms in them a sitting president of South Africa endorsed the
[03:31:59] rumor that post-coidal shower could prevent AIDS the minister of health went on to
[03:32:05] went to the world's aid conference promoting the rumor that garlic and lemon juice were effective
[03:32:10] treatments and that heart which is highly active anti-retro viral treatment was more dangerous than
[03:32:18] AIDS but the worst rumor of all the one that once again made me pause to choke back tears at the
[03:32:24] podium delivering another report was the rumor that sex with a virgin could cure AIDS this
[03:32:30] had sparked an epidemic of infant rape researching my report has sat down with a member of one
[03:32:36] family whose baby was essentially brain dead following a gang rape there were instances of four
[03:32:42] and five year olds who'd already been raped many times and at least one case the rapist of a five
[03:32:50] year old was let off the ground that his victim was not a virgin see that's an illustration
[03:33:04] when I get carried away like we just did that you look into that analyzing it and read it is better
[03:33:12] than my gang I saw it just started I'm almost the incoherent so I appreciate very much I'm not
[03:33:19] good no that you've taken the time to read that and I wish I didn't send your questions try to respond
[03:33:26] more passionately well it's these the kind of thing that can make you think you're rationally
[03:33:31] and and here's what you say in here I don't think any anything can prepare someone to understand
[03:33:36] that kind of suffering I don't think that kind of suffering can be understood some of my family
[03:33:40] and friend saw straight line between war in my field work in South Africa perhaps I was continuing
[03:33:45] my search for a sense of purpose and mission seeking once again the company of people who live
[03:33:50] heroically maybe but but AIDS in South Africa was death pointless agony and cruelty like nothing
[03:33:58] I'd ever seen these people weren't combatants they were simply victims of an unlucky birth
[03:34:03] even more unlucky than the civilians than the civilian victims of war I found their pain to be
[03:34:09] overwhelming war may have prepared me to witness such pain without looking away but nothing could
[03:34:14] have prepared me to understand it I was 72 years old when I started going to South Africa and I
[03:34:21] turned 80 shortly after my final trip more than once I was asked what were you thinking why did
[03:34:27] I take up field work and reporting in a dangerous place when I could have been golfing and napping
[03:34:33] maybe I had one more battle in me maybe I just don't know how to stay out of it when I see suffering
[03:34:38] on a personal level I knew that it felt better to observe to be somewhere I could work with
[03:34:44] brave and dedicated whom I admired the way I had admired Gunner Docey and Kenny O'Donnell
[03:34:51] and finally Dr. Eric Go Merr and these are the Dr. Eric Go Merr's that one that you were describing
[03:35:03] and then we get here in the middle of delivering one of my final AIDS reports I started mumbling
[03:35:07] that was nothing new I mumbled all the time and we make it some confirmations of that as my fellow
[03:35:15] board member Lady Margaret J. remembers I'd have liked to have understood more of what he said
[03:35:21] because it all seemed interesting the problem was that day I don't remember mumbling I don't remember
[03:35:27] halting my report mid sentence I don't remember returning to my seat at the board table after
[03:35:33] several minutes I can't account for I asked David Dinkens who was sitting next to me what had happened
[03:35:40] you just stopped he said are you okay I think so I told him after the meeting I contact
[03:35:46] contacted Margaret J. husband Dr. Michael All Adler he surmised that I had a minor stroke
[03:35:53] the good kind of stroke if there is such a thing he told me to get to a hospital right away
[03:35:57] I found all this more than a little upsetting I wanted to get back to Christine and the boys at
[03:36:03] once so I did what was apparently one of the worst things imaginable for a stroke survivor to do
[03:36:09] I hopped on a series of flights lasting 24 hours the doctor in the state scolded me for flying
[03:36:16] and told me I was lucky to be alive he ran tests wrote prescriptions and advised me to stay away from
[03:36:22] the great pleasures the three great pleasures of my old age tennis red wine and Viagra
[03:36:32] hearing the doctor's advice I was transported back to 1942 I remembered sitting in a waiting room at
[03:36:38] Johns Hopkins University Hospital in Baltimore I could hear my father's voice through the door
[03:36:44] to the doctor's office after you just been told that the best he could live with to do
[03:36:49] to live with multiple scrocess was to cut out martinis golf and his pipe I will never forget his response
[03:36:58] do you expect me to live in a vacuum tube he said I looked at the doctor
[03:37:04] have a nice day and I walked out the door and into Christine's arms
[03:37:11] thank you I shut up and let's listen to you but remember
[03:37:15] that's thank you that's how this man you script of the book and obviously that's not what
[03:37:26] the story ends and right now what are you what are you doing day to day right now
[03:37:33] one day is my doing well I mean I hope you're doing I hope you're doing tennis and red wine and
[03:37:45] Viagra tennis is not a little not too great the that is stuff works I think also that it's
[03:37:57] I guess as much as I can do damage to Trump I would do because I think that he would just
[03:38:06] just try much or is about there's a lot of good in this country I mean you look at
[03:38:13] you look at almost every aspect of it and when you see him throwing away the life
[03:38:19] breath of a lot of people in the world and the stuff he believes or says he believes
[03:38:23] I try to do some things there Christine tries I'll sell for what I got
[03:38:35] and do you have any any other closing thoughts that you want to give?
[03:38:41] Thank you that's my thank you well you you don't definitely don't have to thank me
[03:38:47] you said do well one person I want to thank you I want to thank you son Charlie for
[03:38:52] upsetting this up and you know for sending me the man you script and but thank you obviously for
[03:39:00] coming on the podcast and and more important you know thanks thanks for your service to our great
[03:39:07] country thanks for my citizenship check that's right the Irishman
[03:39:13] uh and thanks for what you did after the military thanks for your service in government
[03:39:19] and thank you for what you did not just for this country but for countries around the world
[03:39:24] like what you did in South Africa to try and help there and to try and do your best in your life
[03:39:29] to end suffering in the world is been an honor to sit down and talk with you and I thank you for
[03:39:36] coming on you too I think I've also incidentally I'm very not so incidentally I've very
[03:39:40] great we mentioned Charlie the accuracy which I would have stole for in there
[03:39:48] it means help to a person Charlie on the research and editing and matching the writing and
[03:39:54] then Christine because she reads back to me some that have written and if it brings false
[03:40:05] I can tell you it looks amazing way you look at me so but it was really important to hear it
[03:40:12] this is important but earlier to hear Christine to listen is I listen to you
[03:40:19] really it was very helpful I think I did our same with a podcast what podcast was
[03:40:25] and I understand now I understand the value of it also really I mean how many books are you
[03:40:29] getting but how many people might be hooked on listening some of this thing and care some of the things
[03:40:34] which was put on not just this program but the bulk of those and for me to deep deep set
[03:40:43] as faction took I get your regimental order whatever and read all that stuff he says
[03:40:49] I'm gonna get near it Jimmy makes me nervous but when I found out
[03:40:53] that the installation is my power and apps have a hell of a deal so I do
[03:40:59] awesome well thanks so much for coming on you too so keep it so long I'm gonna remember
[03:41:04] it's been it honor thank you very much
[03:41:09] and Charles daily has left the building and that just a FYI that we were reading off of a
[03:41:19] menu script for a book so it's out there not sure what Charlie which is Charles's son
[03:41:27] Chuck Son and they've got that that man just scripted out there but they have
[03:41:32] it's it's a well obviously recovered a little part of it the lot bigger lots of stuff in there
[03:41:39] it's sort of felt like a forest gump scenario you know like just wild things how yeah and just a
[03:41:48] crazy life but you know Charles daily out there trying to make the world a better place
[03:41:57] and I'm thinking if you want to make the world a better place which I think we do
[03:42:04] as we'll start with yourself yourself in your own backyard yes front porch yes let's see
[03:42:11] the deal your own a.o area of operations make your own a.o better you might have some ideas on how
[03:42:18] to do that I do share all right well we are in well currently we're in Boston
[03:42:27] soon to be in main in yes you just do immersion camp yes for a gen okay so
[03:42:34] do you get to that's one of the ways can keep our a.o intact yes to learn to improve our a.o.
[03:42:43] yeah multiple levels multiple facets that's good about the thing that's good is
[03:42:49] would you do to will not just help you with your jiu-jitsu correct you do will help you with all
[03:42:54] aspects all aspects people on a daily basis start jiu-jitsu and let us know let me know let
[03:43:02] you know that they started jiu-jitsu 97% of the time they say I started and it's awesome
[03:43:09] you know three percent of the time maybe even less than that I've only had I can only think of two
[03:43:13] people that actually they're like I just don't like it it's just not for me two people out of thousands
[03:43:20] think about that two people that said I'm just not going to do it yeah and there's the whole one
[03:43:25] that I said there was one that said I you know what if you just don't want to fight
[03:43:29] right I said if you don't want to fight the best thing you can do is no jiu-jitsu so what we're getting at is
[03:43:33] yes train jiu-jitsu oh yeah and if you're going to train jiu-jitsu you're going to need a geet
[03:43:38] yep because we do recommend geet and no geet jiu-jitsu do different things I think is time goes on
[03:43:44] they become more and more like different from each other which in my opinion is more of
[03:43:51] reason to do both okay come on back in the day no no no I'm so okay bro why I was about to just
[03:43:57] reverse the whole no no no situation yeah people that are wrapping geese behind the neck leg
[03:44:04] whatever yeah some warm guard warm guard Kenie Kranilin yeah
[03:44:10] yeah and that's it and that's a system yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah no geet I don't even know if any of
[03:44:15] that applies to no geet and try thinking oh well how would you do that oh that's how you do it
[03:44:22] you know what I'm saying because remember when you got our mark for the first time
[03:44:25] I get like well I'll just stop him from doing that but then you realize it's you can't really stop it
[03:44:29] right go to the deep yeah and then it's the same thing people say well how would you actually
[03:44:34] get someone's gee over there yeah there's a whole system and yeah and that system is does not
[03:44:40] exist in no geet certain ones so some some do some kind of do some some saying this like a be yeah
[03:44:44] you know it's it's just very fast is what I'm saying so when you get your geet you're going to
[03:44:49] get an origin geet 100% like you even have to ask anymore no everyone knows already get
[03:44:54] origin geet it's on it and you really yeah it's a monopoly on the market because really what
[03:45:00] you're not going to get a different geet is the monopoly and cornering the market the same thing
[03:45:05] I guess I guess you I see your distinction you're implying and I accept it because market is
[03:45:11] cornered is what you're saying yes I'm saying monopoly because not really is like no choice like
[03:45:15] consumers no choice right monopoly I'm kind of saying no choice though oh I don't know man
[03:45:20] you have looked it's like the choice between steak and baloney that's not really a choice well
[03:45:25] there's like obvious choice not to split here but there's like obvious choice versus like
[03:45:32] kind of ridiculous choice you know it's like that kind it's like oh that's a that's an
[03:45:35] obviously good choice versus it obviously the obvious good choice is good yourself an origin
[03:45:40] blade you're yourself an origin rashguard get your geets self some origin t-shirts and you know
[03:45:45] what you can do right now yes you can get yourself some origin jeans which I'm wearing at this time
[03:45:50] you look good by the way they're so legit very fashionable dirt hey back off I look functional very functional
[03:45:56] very functional very functional functional biz biz tack biz is tack isn't that we did you guys
[03:46:03] make that up yes I like it nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice nice this tack to any kind of clothing
[03:46:09] yeah check origin got boots coming by the way yeah boots are coming those look good I mean I already
[03:46:14] haven't I don't think you do yet you're not quiet on that it or circle no I'm not an intermediary circle
[03:46:21] I got jeans though so boom anyway I got an origin main dot com that's where you can get this stuff
[03:46:25] also supplements these are important supplements though they're not the kind that like the guy at the
[03:46:31] local gym it's trying to pedal to you it's made like 90% of chalk it's not that it's like the
[03:46:39] furrow one that that not only do they actually work but you they kind of help your life
[03:46:43] yeah you're saying so you got the joint warfare for your joints cruel oil for your joints and
[03:46:47] and general health um joint warfare for that too also discipline yeah for your mind got the airport
[03:46:57] they're working at the airport straight up asking about it there you go straight up I think
[03:47:01] about discipline start of the blue ask good deal Dave Burke about discipline ask J P about discipline
[03:47:08] and see what do you think about stuff so you all about it you he's addicted I feel bad
[03:47:15] yep so yeah there it is it wasn't considerably just honing their performance in all aspects
[03:47:21] I'd feel bad but I'm not because their performance is honing yeah but yeah P sniper Dave Burke
[03:47:27] fighter pilot on the discipline on the discipline all right cool also don't forget about
[03:47:33] milk because you're gonna need extra protein when you jerk big steel for your training hard or
[03:47:39] whatever you're gonna need some extra protein you might as well drink protein that tastes like a
[03:47:43] dessert like it so there's that gets a milk all different flavors they're all awesome
[03:47:49] and get yourself some jockel white tea in the summertime drink it cold in the winter time you can
[03:47:55] drink it warm if your throat is sore you can have some drink warm jockel white tea if your dead
[03:48:02] lift is weak you can have some jockel white tea yeah that'll help it big time so there you go
[03:48:07] don't worry all that stuff that we just talked about origin main dot com yeah also don't forget
[03:48:12] to where your kid milk because you know when your kids back to school kids are back in school
[03:48:18] they come on from school they're starving yeah and they could eat some sugar filled diabetes
[03:48:25] treat yeah or they could have a malka and get stronger yeah hit all avenues of what he called
[03:48:33] desire yeah that that the work and the last yes very good kid approved which is a good thing of course
[03:48:41] so yeah all at origin main dot com also jockel is a story it's called jockel story and this is where we
[03:48:47] all get our shirts to represent the path dev court disciplining course that we're wearing at
[03:48:54] this time currently yeah it's actually at the end of the day I mean it's a few origin ones
[03:49:01] have a jody medic one that I always wear this is pretty much all I'm wearing
[03:49:06] approved yeah rash guards rash guards on their big time truckers hats you know
[03:49:12] beanie's dry fit dry fit is there being produced we'll talk about that they're filming
[03:49:20] they come be on the stuff for that hoodies lightweight and I wear the lightweight what do you think it
[03:49:25] looked good okay next you didn't care that it looked good but you thought it looked good that's good
[03:49:31] right you thought it looked good looking at t-shirts that had long sleeves in her hood that's
[03:49:35] it looked like yeah you liked anyway yeah a lot of cool stuff on their jockel store dot com good
[03:49:43] way to support yeah and support yourself and represent well you're in the path it's good to represent
[03:49:48] I think we saw the person representing on the UFC oh yeah big time yeah there he was we all
[03:49:55] was in the kind of felt like we were all at the UFC yeah we were little bit of us all right subscribe
[03:49:59] to the podcast to be done already iTunes group of places that you're wherever leave reviews if you
[03:50:03] want us to read them and get a good laugh out of your awesome review also don't forget about the
[03:50:09] warrior kid podcast which is also available and good for kids parents teachers adults human beings
[03:50:18] and there's some more your kids soap you can get from irish oaks ranch dot com which is a young
[03:50:23] warrior kid making soap that you allows you to stay clean yeah two flavors on that one by the way
[03:50:31] flip not flavors sorry two separate kinds of a trooper so jocco so that's what
[03:50:38] it is making up there also used we have a youtube channel official youtube channel jocco podcast
[03:50:43] you can see the video version of this podcast of every podcast I think to a Charles daily looks like
[03:50:48] oh yeah watch his reactions yeah there's some emotional moments during that podcast right
[03:50:53] heavy moments yeah it's it's yeah you could tell man he is like every step of his journey you could
[03:51:00] tell he was caring about stuff yeah you know like he was yeah you could tell a lot of it was
[03:51:05] was affected from the beginning who good you've also been making little excerpts excerpts some of
[03:51:12] them are just a straight excerpts occasionally you enhance the excerpts with things like
[03:51:16] cello music sometimes explosions sometimes fire smoke reflections causes in my facial expressions
[03:51:25] why would you do that you're just like I'm gonna freeze your facial expression at this time
[03:51:30] oh it was the voice is still going on but you're just sitting there it wasn't frozen kind of
[03:51:34] interest now if you look close which I I encourage you to do yeah okay this is what it is
[03:51:39] when you're so came in and you're talking about the one that you're saying um you know what the
[03:51:43] trump card like you want to go drink you're rather than trained than I don't want you to know
[03:51:48] maintain okay so when you were saying that mean Dave Burke good deal Dave we were you just
[03:51:54] this deal Dave to yourself and got a fluke included yeah no we're so we're watching you
[03:52:00] so I'm like okay like this is this different right we're gonna be watching him watch me a little
[03:52:05] now I looked over it him oh yeah so it was the expression like on his face
[03:52:11] did you just look at each other did you guys make eye contact not that I can you guys watching him watch
[03:52:16] me okay we're both kind of captivated in a way so it's so innovative in a way you know okay so
[03:52:21] what I'm not attached enough to take a look and say like is this hitting Dave Burke the way
[03:52:26] it's hitting me yes okay yeah so so the reason I did that or we the reason we put your
[03:52:36] did your face like that or whatever is because when you're saying that like you give off a certain
[03:52:41] feeling you know like even when you say a bunch of stuff you give off a certain feeling so like as a
[03:52:47] person listening to it it's like what feeling am I getting I see what you're saying and I even
[03:52:52] see here how you say I dig it man but it gives you a certain feeling as a result so it took that
[03:52:57] feeling and it was kind of a psychotic feeling so it took the psychotic feeling the best I could
[03:53:02] translate it graphically into the video that's what it came up is all right so if you want to see
[03:53:07] graphic feelings expressed or not expressed subtly or maybe not so subtly yeah then you can
[03:53:15] check out the YouTube channel called joccopotcast also we have psychological warfare which is
[03:53:21] little audio clips that can help you through challenging moments of weakness that threaten
[03:53:26] your very existence every single day you can go to iTunes Google Play or other MP3 platforms to
[03:53:33] download these fire support for your ears you know what you know what it's just go off script
[03:53:43] right that's what it is just go off script sometimes well but sometimes if you go to like you go
[03:53:49] off script and you'll get two us of a character and I'll be like hey what if they never heard a
[03:53:52] psychological warfare they don't know what that is still sounding cool still don't know what it is
[03:53:56] soon saying so you gotta find the what he called the shikotomi medium balance thing also don't
[03:54:01] forget about flip side canvas dot com where you have Dakota Meyer who is making graphic representations
[03:54:09] that will get inside your brain and keep you honed and on the path of discipline and will
[03:54:19] flip side canvas dot com nothing else needs to be set on that one those those good
[03:54:25] uh and true by the way also don't forget about on it on it dot com slash jockel this where you
[03:54:31] can get your kettlebells your rings your clubs maces battle ropes all kinds of fitness equipment
[03:54:37] typical stuff and a typical you like that you get a lot of stuff I said it also this immune
[03:54:46] one shroom tech immune I'm just saying I brought that because you know when you get on the plane
[03:54:51] and stuff and you gotta get the immune system going because you want to get sick on the plane all those
[03:54:55] germs unless on it dot com slash jockel go there good stuff there's also a bunch of books
[03:55:03] I wrote a new book it's called the leadership strategy and tactics field manual this is the
[03:55:09] absolute frontline pragmatic information of how to lead you got a little problem here's how you
[03:55:16] actually solve that problem by following these actions that's called leadership strategy and tactics
[03:55:21] field manual it is available for pre order right now and if you want to get that first the dish
[03:55:27] you better do it quick because you got guys like Andrew Paul who ordered 20 copies
[03:55:32] get guarantees Sarah Armstrong's order in 20 copies jpg ordered eight copies he's probably going
[03:55:37] to step it up to 20 though it's so many years this jpg is competitive because of one of them
[03:55:43] yeah so first of this leadership strategy and tactics field manual pre order now also way
[03:55:49] of the warrior kid three where there's a will that's available also two in one available
[03:55:54] Mikey in the dragons best children's book voted best children's book ever
[03:55:59] yep in the world yep well in my house well well well by my wife actually way the
[03:56:05] word kid gets more reps yeah yeah really gets more reps yes yeah I'm not saying it's better yeah I'm
[03:56:13] surprised because your kids are a little bit younger yeah well they like the mowing the lawn part
[03:56:19] cool so those books are available for kids Mikey in the dragons
[03:56:23] way the warrior kid marks mission in way the warrior kid three where there's a will also got
[03:56:28] discipline equals freedom field manual which by the way Charles daily has read and approved
[03:56:33] he called it something he called it your manual yeah no he said you're something he called it
[03:56:40] something like it sounded pretty official too I liked what he called it I was kind of laughing
[03:56:44] because I knew exactly what he was talking about and he was like you know I don't go near a jam
[03:56:48] or whatever but nonetheless yeah he read it yeah and he talked about the power naps because I
[03:56:54] listened there had to take a power nap and he was like that's what I do I said that's awesome
[03:56:58] so that's available it's also available not on audible but it's available audio
[03:57:06] through iTunes Amazon music google play other MP3 so we also got extreme ownership and that
[03:57:11] academy leadership the two books that are wrote with my brother-lave batman about leadership
[03:57:15] and how to take leadership from the battlefield and apply it to your business that you're running
[03:57:19] right now we got echelon front our leadership consultancy we saw problems to leadership that's
[03:57:24] we do echelon front dot com for details on that ef online this is online leadership training
[03:57:32] so that you can so that you can get consistent repetitive and get the reps in like you just
[03:57:38] talked about getting the reps and get the reps and you have to make leadership decisions during
[03:57:42] that training by the way I don't know if you know that yeah you got to make leadership decisions
[03:57:46] in that training military and business there's scenario set up choose your own adventure
[03:57:51] yeah make a call it could be wrong if it's wrong go back start again yeah and that's good
[03:57:57] about the reps too because you know like because a big part of what you kind of can't teach even
[03:58:04] any like you can't teach this part of it even like I guess in you just you kind of can but
[03:58:09] like you can't teach being in the actual scenario because you're emotional you know so like
[03:58:15] it's like hey you know you got a you know there's this situation when you're going to do you
[03:58:18] gonna set in and I'm oversimplifying the scenario for sure you're gonna blame someone you're
[03:58:22] gonna take blame or you're gonna take blame within excuse kind of kind of options right but
[03:58:28] and it's like okay cool I know it I know that that's a good scenario I didn't send there
[03:58:32] some people blame and other people all the time oh yeah when it comes down to it because when
[03:58:36] you're making when you're in that training whatever you're making the decision you don't feel
[03:58:40] threatened you don't feel defensive you don't feel that you feel like okay I'm gonna get this
[03:58:44] answer right kind of thing so you know the information but now when it's coming at time to execute
[03:58:48] you gotta you gotta contend with your emotions but when you get the reps and those scenarios are kind
[03:58:54] of readily available in your head even though you're kind of feel defensive you're like oh I know
[03:58:58] this scenario and in fact I'm used to this scenario my head you know you know I'm saying so it's
[03:59:02] more involved in the more time you're using a scenario even if you even if you watch the same
[03:59:06] scenario 20 times like let's say you watch a movie scenario unfold 20 times it's and then you
[03:59:14] see something close to it you're gonna be more apt to recognize it in the real world then if you
[03:59:19] just saw it in a movie scenario one time right correct 100% that's totally true um also we got the
[03:59:25] mustard shikago done it sold out Denver coming up next but guess what it sold out after that
[03:59:33] December 4th and 5th in Sydney Australia that is the next monster that we're doing extreme ownership
[03:59:37] dot com for details if you want to come please register now don't wait until it sold out and then
[03:59:43] send me a twitter that says didn't know you were coming sorry can you still get me in because guess
[03:59:48] what I can't the fire marshal won't allow it also we have EF Overwatch we're taking proven
[03:59:55] leaders from spec ops and combat aviation and placing them into companies that need leadership in
[04:00:02] the civilian sector go to EF Overwatch dot com if you're on either end of that calculus whether you
[04:00:08] need a leader or whether you are a leader go to efoverwants dot com so we can connect you together
[04:00:14] and if you want to communicate more with us it's it's actually not that hard you can find us on
[04:00:20] the inner webs we're on twitter we're on instagram and we're on the on the on fashin
[04:00:28] echo is that echo Charles and i am at jockelwillink and thanks once again to
[04:00:32] Charles daily to his son Charlie to his wife Christine that was here thanks chalk for your
[04:00:41] service in the Marine Corps and in so many other marine arenas out there and as a veteran of the
[04:00:48] forgotten war the so called forgotten war i assure you that you and your comrades are not forgotten
[04:00:55] and the rest of the troops out there in uniform thanks to you all as well for putting on that
[04:01:01] uniform and for protecting us from evil around the world and to all the police in the law enforcement
[04:01:09] and the firefighters and the paramedics and the EMTs and the dispatchers and the correctional officers
[04:01:13] and the border patrol and secret service and all the first responders out there thank you for
[04:01:18] protecting us from evil here at home and to everyone else that's listening which got to hear a
[04:01:27] story of a amazing life the life of Charles and daily a life that still be in lift from a book
[04:01:34] that is literally still being written just like life and think about that think about think about
[04:01:42] that life with so many stories and so much life so so don't hesitate don't hold back go and live
[04:01:53] your life go and write that story by going out every single day and getting after it and until next time
[04:02:04] this is echo and jockel out