Jocko Podcast 358: Out of Airspeed, And Ideas. With Fighter Pilot and Hanoi POW, Col. Lee Ellis.

2022-11-03T07:00:09Z

Underground Premium Content: https://www.jockounderground.com/subscribe Join the conversation on Twitter/Instagram: @jockowillink @echocharles Leon F. "Lee" Ellis (born October 9, 1943) is a retired United States Air Force colonel, award-winning author, speaker, and consultant.[1] Ellis gained notoriety when, as a fighter pilot in the Vietnam War, he was shot down, captured, and spent 5+1⁄2 years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi and surrounding areas with former presidential candidate and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) and others.[2] His capture occurred on November 7, 1967, and he was released on March 14, 1973.[3] He was one of the youngest, junior members in the camps.[2] Ellis is an international speaker and consultant on the subjects of leadership and human performance.

AI summary of episode

but you're not going to just instantly detonate in cartwheel you're going to you're probably going to pull out of it and go dang something's wrong some indicators will pop up the jet might start to deteriorate over time maybe seconds or minutes but the scenario of being in a dive being shot at by bullets and then just like literally up until sitting here listening to explain it I never fully piece that together in my head in fact the pilot was like I don't understand and I wasn't going to ask him like can you explain this better because I couldn't follow it when he explained the fuse the FMU he called it which I think is like fuse mechanical unit literally just the thing that detonates the bomb as soon as he said that it all made sense like a bomb literally blew up underneath his jet he probably had a string of bombs probably picture two or three in a row like the old videos of bombs coming out the bottom bomb blows up blows up the next bomb blows up the next bomb probably a hundred feet away from his jet or less literally blows up his airplane from the bombs detonating and he's talking about tumbling that makes so much more sense so if you want to come to that you better sign up now the one that we're Atlanta sold out everything we do so as I sells out so if you want to come to any of our events go to that's on that's on front dot com if you have a company you want us to work with your company helping you with leadership as long front dot com we also have online training academy you can get better you don't have to create courses from memory in a prison camp to get better you can go to extreme ownership dot com can learn about leadership from us we don't have to hit a tap code thankfully we can just sit there and answer your questions in a live session or you can go through the courses that we have on there learn about life and if you want to help service members active and retired you want to help their families gold star families check out marclise mom mom only she's got an incredible charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved go to america's mighty warriors dot org and don't forget about my kfink who's up there in the wilderness reintroducing veterans to their soul heroes and horses dot org once again if you want to follow leah ellis or you want to connect with leah ellis leading with honor dot com he's got an instagram at leading with honor he's got a twitter leon leah ellis facebook at leon in parentheses leah ellis and his linkedin is leah ellis the books leading with honor engaging with honor and of course captured by love is new one i don't know what's coming out but it's coming out soon to be on the lookout for that one they he wrote it with a love expert named greg goddack somehow i didn't get tapped as the love expert holly mckay she wrote an awesome book rest her life to write that book pick that one up especially with everything that's going on the world right now it's good stuff to understand you know all the books I've written you might want to check those out especially the kids books come on come on maybe you're like too late to save maybe like discipline equals freedom it's not gonna help me because I'm just too I'm already just a disaster but don't let your kids go off the path break the cycle break the cycle get your kids on the path at a minimum look should you get on the path yes you should get discipline equals freedom field manual should get that for your your your your cousin and your dad and your mom right do that at but at a minimum get your nephew and your kid Totally you feel it like I guess as I'm talking to the story I think I remember I feel it in my chest more than anything like a tightening or some some you know I guess it's almost like an exhilaration or something anxious but dude like I said man I almost don't even want to tell a story after listening to what he's talking about not to mention to I didn't fully in reading the book I wasn't able to piece together what what happened until he explained it. So if I, you know, Dave's got a project that's due and it's going to look the client wants it by by Wednesday and I know it's going to impact the way Dave's, you know, his weekend is going to ruin his weekend. oh I'm at I'm at 6,000 feet closing with the earth I'm going 500 knots I'm gonna get out of here just gonna get out of the airplane not like you know which is what it really is well whatever that's the same thing with putting rounds down range and same thing with putting hands on someone you know it's like this is a ready to drink they're out there they're in while while we're making them as many as we can right now which is not easy because the demand signal you know we had these at camp at jujitsu camp we got enough for like six days or whatever they were gone in two days people were just drinking them back to back to back to back to back to back they're awesome get some if you want to get some go to jacquafuel.com go to Wawa go to vitamin shop and get yourself some we're gonna make as many as we can and we're upping the production all that stuff because people want things that are healthy and you will supply one thing that we're supplying better is discipline go the drink oh you know you got to be like you know you might have to get out of the airplane whatever right you guys always say that kind of stuff too though but like what give him rounds down range And to be honest with you like my pilot brain like this this doesn't fully make sense to me not that I've known was like to get shot down I'm talking about why do the like why the airplane did that really didn't make sense because I know a lot about triple and it seems like even that get out of the airplane it kind of seems like hey let's not make it it's a huge deal we all know that already but let's not make it a huge deal kind of a thing and think about it that so we can navigate through the scenario same saying it's almost like it's on purpose and it happened to a bunch of people and he's telling that I had I had never I had never heard those I did not know that was the face in my nope did not know that from you know early fandom days mid to late 60s big cover up that fuses predates anything I ever flew with you know our fuses were super reliable we knew how to program they worked I don't think I ever once heard a story of a fuse prematurely detonating a weapon that we lost an airplane we had you know different mechanical failures here and there but nothing like that certainly not an endemic thing where multiple airplanes were lost as a result it's awful sucks you know I noticed remember the thing was on the ground podcast we were talking about somebody is using the terms putting hands on yeah are you gonna get one of those I've probably outgrown the vet that was a you know my kid childhood dream and like young you know early 20s but don't they just real people back in my going back to one on that that new ones legit looks awesome and if you're if you got hit by triple a in your jets what we call it kind of like kind of falling apart underneath you you're like hey man buckle up dude we got about 30 seconds you're gonna be fine so the fact that it was catastrophic and had no choice that was the difference it would have been better had he been shot down by triple a because he probably could have just pulled the thing out waffled up motor shuts down catches on fire You know, it's like, you know, they were upset that they had to fly with somebody else in the airplane with had a stick, you know, because they had been single-seaters so long. So, you know, if you get a guy like McCain, who's the last in his class at the Naval Academy and, you know, has a reputation for kind of causing problems, that's exactly the kind of guy you want in these cases. and well you know the people you know the kids you know get away the warrior kids series get a mic in the drag just do that do them a favor a lifelong favor as on front we have leadership consultancy we solve problems through leadership we have the next muster is in Orlando April 3rd through the 5th yeah that's like I'm probably just like so guilty of like 47 different little statements like that but didn't even until you brought it up I was recounting when did I say that that's how you say it It was, we needed all different kinds of people there, but we were all similar in a lot of ways because you can't go through flight school, you know, physically, mentally, go through all the, you know, go through all the requirements of flight school, go through the training and then become a fighter pilot without having something similar to the other people. I'm doing I think I'm doing like just some what I would consider like basic dumb bomb dropping bombs at 45 degree dive you're probably going on 350 knots something like that. And you know, in fact, one guy was in solitary confinement and he wanted to know about, he wanted, he wanted to know about Shakespeare. This digital flight control thing I'm like whoa I pulled back and like the jet didn't respond for probably a very short period of time and in that moment you have these thoughts of like OK this isn't good and you're in a dive. That, I think, helps you get through these things and it seems like that helps so many people in the camp, both when it's happening, right after it happens, and then, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it, the way that you all came back. but so you need a different guy now same saying you gotta be I don't know somebody's training you get to yes somebody that's working out getting up early somebody that's getting up early getting after it there you go yeah chocolate field calm origin USA calm get stuff made in America get shirts get belts get boots get jeans get stuff made in America get stuff made in America that's what I'm talking about those new So you got these guys, you got, you know, it's like a good attack dog, right? You might be a little bit, have a tendency, you know, I talk about the SEAL teams, like there's a, there's like a criminal element to your brain for a lot of guys. and i am at jockel willink watch out for the algorithm because it'll grab you and thanks once again to colonel leah ellis for his service and sacrifice into all those p o w's who faced such horror but maintained their honor and therefore the honor of our great nation and thanks to all the military personnel out there you signed the dotted line and swear to uphold the constitution regardless of what you face so thank you for protecting us and our way of life and the same goes to the rest of our police force law enforcement firefighters paramedics emt's dispatch dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders you all swear an oath to protect us and we thank you for your service as well and everyone else that's out there when you're facing something tough like life because life is tough remember the stockdale paradox that is that you can never confuse faith that you're gonna prevail in the end so you gotta believe that you're gonna prevail in the end Was it, you know, for like guys going into ground combat, you kind of remember the first time you rolled outside the wire? They're going to know that I trust them that are going to know I appreciate them because I'm giving them more autonomy. Speaking of leadership and you know, as I as we've gone through this book, this is a book about leadership and and a book about, you know, what the human being can come up against. you know I might have I know kind of a little bit of terminology of FMU and like you know I just like the look then I bought the wire wheels you know good deal Dave Burke had a Corvette And we'd see a lot of Army helicopters would come through and pass refuel and there in Moody and going, you know, this was when the Army, Airborne, an Army, whatever the helicopter groups were called, really got going. And they're going to be better performers at work they're going to be better people at home they're going to be better parents and that sort of thing. And, you know, I often talk about, you know, if you want to get through some trauma that you've been through, you got to own it and say, hey, this is what I did. And I mean I mean how much I'm going through the book like what part of my going to actually read right. Sam's are totally different story too this is a big giant missile going to you know mock a couple and they blow up like they literally are designed to explode triple A doesn't do that they're just bullets That sense, I mean, I don't know what it's like to be a fighter pilot, your description of going back seat at fours as part of the standard continuum to cycle up front.

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Episode transcript

[00:00:00] This is Jocko podcast number 358 with Dave Burke and me,
[00:00:03] Jocko Willink.
[00:00:04] Good evening, Dave.
[00:00:05] Good evening.
[00:00:08] It is with deep personal concern that I officially inform
[00:00:12] you that your son, first Lieutenant Leon F. Ellis, Jr.
[00:00:18] is reported missing in North Vietnam on 7 November 1967.
[00:00:24] He was a pilot on an F-4C aircraft on an operational mission.
[00:00:32] His aircraft was last seen to roll in on target.
[00:00:36] Shortly thereafter, a large fireball was seen,
[00:00:40] where his aircraft previously was located.
[00:00:44] The fireball descended to the ground and impacted.
[00:00:48] The crew was not seen to bail out, but however,
[00:00:52] voice contact was established with your son on ground.
[00:00:58] Rescue operations are in progress.
[00:01:01] Lieutenant Ellis may have been captured.
[00:01:06] For his welfare, it is recommended that in reply to questions from other
[00:01:11] than your immediate family, you give only his name, grade, serial number, and date of birth.
[00:01:19] If this is the information he must provide if captured, please be assured when new
[00:01:25] information is received, it will be furnished to you immediately.
[00:01:29] A representative from Dobbins Air Force Base will contact you within 48 hours to assist
[00:01:36] in any way possible.
[00:01:39] If you have any questions you may call my personal representative,
[00:01:44] please accept my sympathy during this period of anxiety.
[00:01:56] Brigadier General George E. McCord, Military Personnel Center, Headquarters, United States Air Force.
[00:02:03] And that was the telegram received by Leon and Moline Ellis, parents of First Lieutenant Leon Ellis Jr.
[00:02:18] Probably one of the most terrifying things a parent could ever hear about their child.
[00:02:24] But the good news is Leon Ellis Jr. or Lee Ellis did survive being shot down.
[00:02:35] The bad news is he was captured.
[00:02:38] He was captured by the North Vietnamese and ended up spending five and a half years as a prisoner of war.
[00:02:49] But the good news is he did survive that.
[00:02:53] He went on to become a colonel in the Air Force and after that a speaker, a leadership consultant,
[00:02:59] and an author.
[00:03:01] He's written three books, Leading with Honor, another book called Engage with Honor, and a fourth coming book called Captured by Love.
[00:03:11] And it is a distinct privilege and an honor to have Lee Ellis with us here tonight to discuss his experiences and his lessons learned.
[00:03:24] Sir, thank you for joining us.
[00:03:27] Thank you, Jaco.
[00:03:28] It's great to be with you.
[00:03:29] I really enjoyed your book, your in life, Babin's book, leadership book, certificate.
[00:03:37] I can tell you the name of it.
[00:03:38] I've written a bunch of them, but it's all good.
[00:03:40] But it was so good and I quoted it in several places in my book.
[00:03:44] So thank you for what you've done and are doing and it's a pleasure to be with you.
[00:03:49] I'm excited.
[00:03:50] Yeah, I appreciate it for sure.
[00:03:51] And I mean, reading your books and having had a couple other POWs from Vietnam on this podcast.
[00:04:02] We had William Reeder, who was a helicopter pilot, was shot down.
[00:04:06] He was shot down in South Vietnam, so he made the treacherous journey, months long journey through the jungle, staying in the jungle camps, which were, you know, by his account, the absolute horror.
[00:04:20] And then, of course, we've had Charlie Plum on as well.
[00:04:22] And I know you know him.
[00:04:24] So honor to have you here share your experiences.
[00:04:28] The perspective that you all bring to leadership and to life is just unbelievable.
[00:04:35] And it's something very powerful.
[00:04:37] I know as I read through what you all experienced, it's impossible not to try and take some lessons from that and improve the way I live as a human being.
[00:04:49] But with that, let's, before we jump into your time in Vietnam, let's start off in the beginning and how you grew up.
[00:04:59] So you were born in Georgia, right?
[00:05:01] Yes.
[00:05:03] I was born down in South Georgia, but when I was about two years old, my parents moved back to North Georgia because my grandmother had cancer.
[00:05:11] And we wanted to live near my mother's parents on the farm.
[00:05:15] And we lived in a four-bedroom house there on the farm, not a four-bedroom.
[00:05:23] Two bedrooms, a living room, and a kitchen.
[00:05:25] That was it.
[00:05:27] Back in, that was back in the 40s, my grandmother died, and then we moved in with my grandfather on that farm.
[00:05:33] So I grew up in the real days of farming.
[00:05:39] We went, by the way, we went barefooted from May until October.
[00:05:43] That was a thing we were proud of.
[00:05:45] We wanted to get those shoes off and go barefooted.
[00:05:47] Didn't wear a shirt much in the summertime and worked on the farm.
[00:05:53] Looking back, it was good that we had that responsibility.
[00:05:57] My dad was not a farmer, but he learned to do some and work some.
[00:06:03] But my brother and I worked a lot there on the farm.
[00:06:05] My mother was a wonderful cook, and we had this huge garden, and we would grow an acre of garden stuff.
[00:06:13] So my mother would can a hundred quarts of beans every summer.
[00:06:19] And corn and peas and butter beans and all this stuff.
[00:06:23] Well, my brother and I did a lot of that work, and we would sit on the front porch in the swing,
[00:06:29] shelling butter beans or string and beans at night, listen to the Atlanta crackers,
[00:06:35] which was like a double-A baseball team before it became the Atlanta Braves.
[00:06:39] And that was life, you know.
[00:06:41] It was a good life and hard work.
[00:06:43] My brother milked a cow because my dad went to work in town.
[00:06:48] My brother would milk the cow in the morning and evening.
[00:06:50] That was good because I didn't have the same grip he did.
[00:06:53] He was bigger than me and older.
[00:06:55] But I fed the hogs, fed the chickens, chopped the wood and brought in the coals every day.
[00:07:00] So, you know, this was the good thing was we learned about responsibility.
[00:07:04] We learned about being in the cold.
[00:07:06] We drove cars that sometimes the batteries were dead and you had to push them off.
[00:07:10] They were all straight shifts.
[00:07:12] So it was an era when we just, as young kids on the farm, we had a lot of responsibility.
[00:07:17] But out there on that farm, during the Korean War, so which was 1951 to 53 or 54 timeframe,
[00:07:25] I was born in 43, so I was like eight, nine, ten years old.
[00:07:31] And I'd be out there on the farm working and I'd keep looking up because overhead with these huge formations of airplanes
[00:07:40] going off to war or going off to prepare people or drop, you know, paratroopers or whatever.
[00:07:45] And I'd look up at those airplanes.
[00:07:47] Oh, wow.
[00:07:48] And all of that because when I was five, my parents took me to Athens, Georgia, which is 10 miles away,
[00:07:54] what the University of Georgia Bulldogs are, by the way.
[00:07:57] And in the park, the Veterans Park in Athens, Georgia, there was a World War II fighter plane.
[00:08:04] And I climbed up on that wing and it was like at age five or six, I said, this is me.
[00:08:10] This is what I'm going to do.
[00:08:13] Well, now, I was also big into sports.
[00:08:17] My brother, my mother's brother had played football at the University of Georgia in 1928, 29.
[00:08:22] He became a doctor and his two sons played on scholarship at the University of Georgia in 50, 51, 52.
[00:08:30] So we would go down and watch the University of Georgia football practice over on Ag Hill there.
[00:08:35] So I got this in my mind and I wanted to be a quarterback at the University of Georgia.
[00:08:41] So I was a quarterback in high school and I was above average, but I wasn't the fastest guy on the team.
[00:08:49] In my senior year in high school, I only weighed 155 and they did not recruit me, which I didn't expect them to.
[00:08:55] So I went on to the University of Georgia when I finished high school and got in Air Force ROTC.
[00:09:01] And then I knew that was what I wanted to do.
[00:09:04] So what year is that that you go to college?
[00:09:06] I graduated high school in 1961.
[00:09:09] I went to college then and graduated in four years in 1965.
[00:09:15] Now, I was probably the worst student ever to graduate in four years because I had never really learned to study.
[00:09:24] I was kind of ADD and focused on whatever and I had to work to pay my college tuition and all that.
[00:09:30] I didn't have any money, so I worked and lived at home after my first semester there.
[00:09:36] I lived on campus just because I saved up money and wanted to do it.
[00:09:40] But in ROTC, I graduated as a distinguished graduate and went to flight school with the Academy Class A class of flight school.
[00:09:52] Was it was it hard to get into flight school?
[00:09:54] Not for me.
[00:09:57] I passed the exam and the written exams and I got my pilot's license my senior year in college.
[00:10:04] The Air Force had a flight indoctrination program where they kind of screened you out and I sailed through that and went right to flight school.
[00:10:12] I had always been driving. I started driving cars when I was 11, tractors when I was 12, and I could drive them by myself.
[00:10:22] I mean, they would let me go with responsibility to go drive them.
[00:10:26] I chauffeured for my grandfather when I was 12 and 13.
[00:10:31] I'd always been very confident about operating machinery and taking risks and being able to go right to the edge but not go over it.
[00:10:40] And so it just was a natural place to be.
[00:10:45] And when they told me that I passed the physical to be a pilot after my sophomore year, I was just thrilled.
[00:10:53] And I went over and changed my major.
[00:10:55] I was in pre-med and because my uncle had been a doctor and I wasn't going to get into medical school with my grades because I didn't study.
[00:11:03] I went over and changed my major to history and sailed right on through in four years and off to flight school.
[00:11:09] And flight school for me, I had a check every month.
[00:11:15] I bought myself a new car.
[00:11:17] What kind of car was it?
[00:11:19] Well, I was going to get either a school to get a GTO.
[00:11:23] They'd only come out with GTOs in 64 and this was summer of 1965.
[00:11:29] The problem was the GTO was bucket seats and I wanted a bent seat because back then I wanted my honey to be sitting like real close.
[00:11:38] And I said, I'm going to buy one of those stupid GTOs.
[00:11:41] I love GTO.
[00:11:42] So I bought the Cutlass Supreme which is exactly like the GTO except a little bit smaller engine and had a bent seat.
[00:11:51] And I bought wire wheels on it to be cool.
[00:11:54] And my roommate bought a, his dad was a Ford dealer and he got a Mustang.
[00:12:01] So my roommate in flight school.
[00:12:04] So we were cool and the Beldost State College was right down there in Beldost, 11 miles away.
[00:12:10] We could just roll in there.
[00:12:13] We'd go to the freshman dorm and say, well, who's in there?
[00:12:18] And they had to sign out. We'd say, well, Janie and so and so will bring them down here and let us meet them.
[00:12:24] And they would.
[00:12:25] We liked them.
[00:12:26] We'd take them to the, let's go to the clubs.
[00:12:28] So I did not study very hard in UPT.
[00:12:33] And to me, UPT, I had a check.
[00:12:35] I had a car.
[00:12:36] There's girls nearby and I was living the life that I wanted to live in college but also doing flight school.
[00:12:43] Wait, what's UPT?
[00:12:44] Undergraduate pilot training.
[00:12:45] Okay.
[00:12:46] So is that before you go to, before you go, before you graduate from college?
[00:12:51] No, this is right after I graduated.
[00:12:53] Okay. So you graduate, you get commissioned.
[00:12:55] Three days later, I was in flight school in Beldost, Georgia at Moody Air Force.
[00:13:00] And this is 1965, right?
[00:13:02] Yes.
[00:13:03] What are you hearing about Vietnam?
[00:13:04] How much is that on the radar right now?
[00:13:05] It's starting to jump, jump up and you, there's some debates.
[00:13:08] You see them.
[00:13:09] If you watch TV, there'll be some debates on there and Secretary Russ could be on there.
[00:13:14] They'll be talking about it.
[00:13:16] And we'd see a lot of Army helicopters would come through and pass refuel and there in Moody and going, you know, this was when the Army, Airborne, an Army, whatever the helicopter groups were called, really got going.
[00:13:30] Air cab.
[00:13:31] Air cab got going.
[00:13:32] That's right.
[00:13:33] And they would come through.
[00:13:34] But in flight school, we didn't have any instructor pilots that had already been on a tour.
[00:13:40] And then as I was in a T-38, which was the second stage, the advanced flights, part of flight school, there was a major came in, a single guy who was a major.
[00:13:50] And he'd just come back from a tour in Vietnam as a, as a, the, what's the Navy prop airplane that's there for us had one too.
[00:14:02] A1.
[00:14:03] A1 Sky Raider.
[00:14:04] He'd been an A1 Sky Raider pilot.
[00:14:05] He's a fighter pilot, but he'd been an A1 pilot for a tour over there and he told us about it.
[00:14:11] And he went cross country with us and he was, he was a fun, a really great leader and a great guy.
[00:14:16] So he was the first combat veteran we'd ever met.
[00:14:20] And he was single.
[00:14:21] So that was fun.
[00:14:25] What's the, what's the training aircraft, the T-38?
[00:14:28] The T-38.
[00:14:29] Is that the same one you use now, Dave?
[00:14:31] It's the Air Force still using it.
[00:14:32] Yeah.
[00:14:33] They've been using it 60 years or so.
[00:14:35] It had just come out into the Air Force in 63, 64.
[00:14:39] And so it's a supersonic 20-inch and afterburner two-seater.
[00:14:45] The fighter version of it was the F-5.
[00:14:48] Got it.
[00:14:49] But, you know, it would go supersonic.
[00:14:51] It would, it would climb great.
[00:14:54] It was a great airplane for us to fly.
[00:14:56] It flew, it flew faster on final than most of the airplanes do now, you know.
[00:15:01] Now, are you competing for that fighter pilot slot?
[00:15:05] Yes, but they were going to be plentiful.
[00:15:09] I was in, I was in the top 10% of my class until on my contact evaluation of the T-38.
[00:15:19] My instructor had told me, well, on the single-engine landing, don't worry too much about your airspeed.
[00:15:25] Well, on my check ride, my airspeed was about 10 or 12 knots high and I got downgraded.
[00:15:30] And that took me from like third or fourth in my class down to about the 50%ile in my class.
[00:15:39] And it just couldn't get back up.
[00:15:41] There wasn't enough more check rides to get much higher back up.
[00:15:44] So I was probably in the top 40%.
[00:15:47] But technically in my mind, I knew where I was.
[00:15:50] I should have been up there in the 10%.
[00:15:52] But the, in my class, which was 67A, it was in 1966.
[00:15:59] But the physical year, we graduated in August 1966.
[00:16:03] Across eight training bases, there were 500, I'm sorry, there were over 800 pilots being trained that whole year.
[00:16:16] And over 500 of us got F-4 backseat.
[00:16:20] They were putting pilots in the backseat.
[00:16:22] Now, the Navy didn't put pilots in the backseat.
[00:16:24] They put reels.
[00:16:26] But the Air Force was trying to get, use money to get more pilots training.
[00:16:33] Okay.
[00:16:34] So they said to Congress or somebody, hey, we need more pilots because they put in pilots in the backseat.
[00:16:40] And so we had to go over there first tour in the backseat.
[00:16:43] So, and as I was going through my combat training, there were some of the front seaters that I knew I was a lot better pilot than they were.
[00:16:51] But I helped them look good.
[00:16:53] Most of them were good, but not all of them.
[00:16:56] So you get done with that, you get done with the T-38 and then it's into, then you get assigned the Phantom.
[00:17:02] Yes.
[00:17:03] And how, but were you assigned the backseat for the Phantom?
[00:17:07] Yes.
[00:17:08] And then were you mad about that?
[00:17:11] Well, I was, but there were only three other single seat fighters in my class.
[00:17:16] Okay.
[00:17:17] There were one guy got a 105 and one guy got a 102 and everybody else got backseat F4.
[00:17:26] So, but there was no choice.
[00:17:29] All of us, all my buddies and I went there and, you know, we were going to go do it and pay our dues and get out and go to the front seat or go to another airplane.
[00:17:38] So that was kind of a normal pattern.
[00:17:40] You'd go to the backseat for a tour and then you get, get into the front seat.
[00:17:43] I was actually, I didn't know this, but my buddy Lance Sideson, who went down two days after I did, metal of honor guy, we were, and I was starting, they were starting to fly us a little bit with some instructor pilots who were check pilots.
[00:17:57] And they didn't tell us this, but they were going to upgrade us to the front seat in combat.
[00:18:01] I found that after I came home.
[00:18:03] And I thought, that's not very wise to upgrade somebody to the front seat where you didn't even in the backseat, you didn't have a pickle button.
[00:18:10] You couldn't pickle the bombs and fire the gun in the backseat.
[00:18:14] You could fly the airplane to everything, but you couldn't pickle the.
[00:18:17] So you would need further training on that before you moved up there.
[00:18:21] The, the F4 Phantom is my favorite American bird.
[00:18:27] That thing was just like a modern masterpiece at the time, right?
[00:18:32] Yes, it was.
[00:18:34] It was a lot of power and it wasn't the sharpest turning one, but it would turn pretty, pretty, pretty dog on good.
[00:18:44] It would pull Gs well and it had a lot of power and it could carry a lot of stuff.
[00:18:48] The problem was it was built as a Navy long range interceptor.
[00:18:53] Okay.
[00:18:54] So they didn't have a gun built into it.
[00:18:56] Just had it with missiles.
[00:18:58] Well, the Air Force wanted it for more air to ground and air to air.
[00:19:01] So we actually started carrying a pod gun, a 20 millimeter pod gun underneath in the center station while I was there.
[00:19:11] And we did quite a bit of that.
[00:19:13] It was the same gun that they later built into the airplane in the F4E.
[00:19:18] And the, now the ATN now has a 40 millimeter gun.
[00:19:21] They built an airplane around the gun, but yeah.
[00:19:25] So then when, when you get done with that training, how, how long is it before you go to Vietnam?
[00:19:30] Normally the, the replacement training unit, which would be like the RAG and the Navy, the RTU and the Air Force, we went to, I went to George Air Force Base.
[00:19:40] There were three different bases that were doing it in the high desert right near where Top Gun works out and was filmed there in the high desert.
[00:19:48] And we go there and we do air to ground, air to air refueling and that sort of thing.
[00:19:53] And then we deployed straight to war.
[00:19:55] The order said, F4, F4 Phantom pipeline Southeast Asia pipeline meant as quick as he gets combat trained, he's going to go to Southeast Asia.
[00:20:06] And so now it's 1967.
[00:20:09] Yes.
[00:20:10] And so now Vietnam is pretty much in full swing.
[00:20:13] Yes.
[00:20:14] And how's that sit with you, with your teammates, you guys just all like that's your goal is to get to Vietnam and fly in.
[00:20:23] And I think most of us were, that's where we're going to go.
[00:20:25] And they changed our assignment two, three times because the weather over there and different things.
[00:20:30] So one time they told us we were going to go to Japan to Masawa and stay there and we go TDY to the war.
[00:20:37] Well, the wives and kids were getting shots and everything getting ready to go overseas to Japan.
[00:20:43] And I thought, well, it'll be okay.
[00:20:45] We're going to take F4Es over to Japan.
[00:20:47] And then all of a sudden about two weeks later they said, that's been canceled.
[00:20:50] We're back to the original.
[00:20:52] And so you're going to go straight to the war.
[00:20:54] So the main thing we did though was we got, we'd already had survival training before I went to George to get the combat training.
[00:21:02] And so now we go to water survival because we had a little bit of time.
[00:21:05] They said, you're not going to go to July.
[00:21:07] So I went to water survival and then departed the states on about 30 or 30 June or so.
[00:21:13] Headed, went to the Philippines through jungle survival school about a week there in the world.
[00:21:19] What year is this?
[00:21:20] 1967.
[00:21:21] Okay.
[00:21:22] And then straight from there to Da Nang, which was in the northern part of South Vietnam, about 70 miles south of the DMC that separated North Vietnam from South Vietnam.
[00:21:36] And so there's, that's where you end up flying out of.
[00:21:39] That's where your, your base is.
[00:21:40] Yes.
[00:21:41] You end up flying out of Da Nang.
[00:21:42] Yes.
[00:21:43] And we flew a lot of combat stories over the north.
[00:21:46] Those were our counters.
[00:21:47] If you got a hundred stories over the north, you could go home.
[00:21:50] If you only flew over South Vietnam, you had to fly for a year before you go back home.
[00:21:55] So whenever we could convert a mission in Laos or South Vietnam, get something done and then have a little bit of ammo left, we'd go over to north Vietnam and work with the Ford air controller there, the Missy Facts, and get that counter in.
[00:22:13] What was the, what was the main mission that you were getting tasked with doing?
[00:22:18] It was, there were two missions.
[00:22:20] One was close air support for combat troops in I Corps, which was the northern part of South Vietnam in support of the Marines and the army.
[00:22:29] So we would do those.
[00:22:30] We would sit alert sometimes for that and we'd get scrambled and go out when they got, are about to get overrun or something, getting attacked and go out and do close air support.
[00:22:39] And that was a lot of fun.
[00:22:40] But most of our missions, I had about 15 or 18 of those kind of missions, but most of the missions were road recce and bombing of trucks on the road, bombing out bridges, keep the roads bombed out.
[00:22:58] So they could not, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, to keep them from bringing truckloads of troops and war materials into South Vietnam.
[00:23:06] They would come down south, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, which ran parallel to the coastline.
[00:23:11] And then as they got to the DMZ, they would cut over into Laos and then go down through Laos and then cut back into South Vietnam.
[00:23:21] Because that was the safest way for them to travel.
[00:23:23] So that's why we flew into Laos was to blow up those bridges and roads.
[00:23:28] And if we could get a convoy of trucks, you know, we could wipe those out pretty quickly.
[00:23:33] And that's where that, so that was the main mission that you did?
[00:23:36] Yes, it was.
[00:23:37] We were flying mixed combat air patrol supporting the bombers, fighter bombers, up around Hanoi when I got there at Da Nang.
[00:23:48] Most of those, they were Da Nang and U-Bahn, F-4s were supporting the air support for the 105s, F-4s, F-4s that were flying combat attacks in the Hanoi area up in North Vietnam industrial complex.
[00:24:04] But about four or five weeks after I got to Da Nang, the whole policy changed.
[00:24:12] 12th Air Force was in Saigon and we were part of 12th Air Force, I'm sorry, 7th Air Force, and 12th Air Force controlled Laos and I'm sorry, controlled Thailand.
[00:24:25] And that's where we had four main bases in Thailand who were flying missions out of.
[00:24:31] And a lot of them were going over North Vietnam into the Hanoi area.
[00:24:36] So we lost the bombing and the combat air patrol support, MiG-CAP, I guess you call it, MiG-CAP.
[00:24:44] We lost that about a month after I got there, so I did not get to go on the MiG patrol up around Hanoi.
[00:24:52] And I was very disappointed because that's what I'd always wanted to do.
[00:24:55] Was just dogfight.
[00:24:56] Yeah, dogfight.
[00:24:58] Just pull plane against plane.
[00:25:00] Did you ever see any MiGs?
[00:25:02] Not from the air.
[00:25:04] I've seen them on the ground.
[00:25:06] When I was in prison up there, I saw them a few times.
[00:25:10] Do you remember your very first mission that you flew?
[00:25:14] Was it, you know, for like guys going into ground combat, you kind of remember the first time you rolled outside the wire?
[00:25:20] Was your first mission, was it monumental in your brain or was it just like, oh, another day?
[00:25:25] It was just like going out to the range and bombing, really.
[00:25:29] It was kind of more like that.
[00:25:31] It seems like these...
[00:25:33] I got shot at.
[00:25:34] I'd say most of all the missions we got shot at.
[00:25:37] And we'd come home and have some bullet holes from ground fire, mostly.
[00:25:43] I never got hit by any real AAA, I don't think, up there.
[00:25:47] I didn't have any big holes blowing up my airplane, but it was common to have, you know, ground fire rifles.
[00:25:54] Did you feel like the threat when you were flying up there?
[00:25:58] What was the threat level that you felt?
[00:26:01] I know in the book you end up mentioning you had, I think, three of your friends had been shot down.
[00:26:08] Like, how often is that happening where guys are getting shot down and you're rolling up there?
[00:26:14] What's your impression, or did you have the typical young man's impression, which, hey, it's too bad it happened to someone else,
[00:26:21] but it sure is not going to happen to me. I'm too good.
[00:26:23] Well, it was kind of that.
[00:26:25] But it was sad, too.
[00:26:27] I'd lost two roommates before I was shot down and another one after I was shot down.
[00:26:35] But there were a lot of people shot down.
[00:26:40] The summer and going into the fall of 1967, it was a huge number of people shot down
[00:26:46] because our combat missions increased significantly
[00:26:50] and there, and aircraft artillery, surface air missiles increased significantly during that time.
[00:26:57] So it was pretty common for airplanes to be going down.
[00:27:01] Did you feel like the skill level that it takes to drop bombs back in your day?
[00:27:10] I mean, nowadays it's a computer that's doing it. The computer's doing all the work.
[00:27:14] And you're just inputting the numbers and it's going to put that bomb wherever you tell that bomb to go.
[00:27:19] Did you feel like you're getting better?
[00:27:22] Were some guys better than other guys?
[00:27:25] In the SEAL teams, which I was in, you got this guy over here, he's really good, long range shot with his rifle.
[00:27:31] He's going to be super accurate. This other guy maybe is not so great.
[00:27:34] Did you guys have that kind of pecking order in terms of, hey, Lee's getting sent out to get this bridge
[00:27:40] because we know he's good or hey, don't send Lee out to get that bridge.
[00:27:43] Maybe he's not the best of our guys. Did you guys have that kind of pecking order?
[00:27:47] Yes and no. The flight commanders were generally established fighter pilots at that time.
[00:27:56] And so they were usually the best in the squadron. So they were set an example.
[00:28:01] But at this time, because of the war in 1967, by the summer of 1967, all the fighter pilots have gone over and done their year
[00:28:12] and come home, not all, but many, the first big chunk of them. And they don't want to send them right back.
[00:28:19] So they brought in guys from B-52s, from C-130s to become F-4 front-seaters in fighter pilots.
[00:28:28] Well, us back-seaters who had just been flying the T-38, we knew that one of our jobs was to keep them safe
[00:28:36] and help them be fighter pilots.
[00:28:38] Seriously, I mean, they were good pilots, but they just hadn't been flying fighter airplanes.
[00:28:43] And they were a little bit more cautious and slower thinking, I think, sometimes.
[00:28:48] And so we were almost coaching. There were times I was coaching the guy in the front seat.
[00:28:53] Now, don't roll in yet. We're not close enough to roll in yet.
[00:28:57] So, you know, it's hard to say, but most of the time when I flew with the more senior guys and who experienced fighter pilots, they were really good.
[00:29:11] And what about like, so you deploy in 1967, you're over there, the political thing in America of, you know, the war protests, they weren't really strong in 1967.
[00:29:24] No, it wasn't going strong yet. It was just starting to roll in certain parts of the country.
[00:29:29] I think the thing for me, I realized very quickly, and most of the pilots realized very quickly, that we were not fighting this war in the right way.
[00:29:43] And you saw that even from your time, you're a first lieutenant. You've been in the Navy for, or sorry, you've been in the Air Force for a short period of time.
[00:29:53] And you're already seeing, as a first lieutenant on your first deployment, this maybe doesn't make the most sense.
[00:30:01] Yes, I did see that. I said, why don't you let me figure out how to pick the targets?
[00:30:07] I mean, I did. I wanted to say.
[00:30:09] The targets are getting picked by like Washington D.C. and stuff, right?
[00:30:12] Yes, yes, exactly. And I'd say, well, here's how we need to do this.
[00:30:15] We need to go up there and bomb out the roads, you know, just bomb them out in certain specific places intentionally, about an hour before dark.
[00:30:25] And then as quick as it gets dark, the trucks will back up and we'll go in and strafe them all and wipe them out.
[00:30:31] Well, that would took me about a month to figure that out.
[00:30:36] And sometimes we did that, and sometimes we didn't, but it wasn't part of the plan.
[00:30:41] There was no plan to do that. You had to fly authorities to some degree to when Saigon said fly them.
[00:30:47] And to a large degree up around Hanoi, you could only fly them when they told you to.
[00:30:53] And of course, the enemy knew exactly when we were coming.
[00:30:56] So it was just ridiculous that so many decisions about what to bomb and when to bomb it was made in Washington D.C. by civilians who knew nothing about warfare.
[00:31:06] And even you as a first lieutenant, you're what, 23 years old, 24 years old?
[00:31:10] I was 23 when I got there.
[00:31:13] 23 years old, you're just driving around a muscle car in America as a knuckle draggler.
[00:31:18] And even you figured out, hey, you can't micromanage this thing from Washington D.C.
[00:31:23] Yes. And I was, it was kind of down. It was kind of a downer for me.
[00:31:29] It's like, why can't somebody stand up and fix this, you know?
[00:31:34] At this point, are you seeing the POWs, any of that propaganda stuff that would come out over the years?
[00:31:43] Are you already seeing that some of that stuff?
[00:31:46] You mean in our culture?
[00:31:48] Yeah. So, so in other words, you're there, you're flying.
[00:31:51] At this point, obviously pilots had been shot down, pilots had been captured, soldiers, sailors had been captured.
[00:31:58] And that propaganda, you know, as POWs, is it not really out in 1967 yet?
[00:32:04] No.
[00:32:05] They weren't really pushing that hard, the Vietnamese to get that propaganda out.
[00:32:09] No, we had not, I had not heard any propaganda from POW camps.
[00:32:13] I didn't know anything about the POW camps of what was happening.
[00:32:16] I'm sure some folks did, but I knew some of my buddies had been captured,
[00:32:21] but I did not know what was happening there other than it was a, they were probably prisoners.
[00:32:27] So how many, how long had you been there before you ended up getting shot down?
[00:32:34] Well, I got there around the 3rd of July and I was shot down to 7th of November.
[00:32:41] And at that point, I had 53 missions over North Vietnam and another, I don't know, 15 or 16 or so over South Vietnam and Laos.
[00:32:51] All right, well, probably a good time for me to pick up this book.
[00:32:57] The book is called Leading with Honor Leadership Lessons from the Hulley Hilton.
[00:33:02] This is just out of the gate.
[00:33:04] We're starting it off from the book.
[00:33:07] It says this November 7th, 1967, four o'clock p.m. Captain Ken Fisher and I rolled into a dive bomb pass in our F4C Phantom jet.
[00:33:17] As we swoop downward, our bird with turned up wing tips, elevated tail and deafening roar must have resembled a high-tech version of a prehistoric pterodactyl.
[00:33:28] Tracers from the North Vietnamese anti-aircraft artillery flashed by our canopy like giant Roman candles,
[00:33:34] their explosions encircling us with ominous puffs of gray and black smoke,
[00:33:39] each representing hundreds of shards of shrapnel designed to mortally wound our beautiful beast.
[00:33:45] As our jet plunged toward the artillery positions at 500 miles an hour,
[00:33:49] the earth enlarged in our windscreen as if we were adjusting the zoom on a telephoto lens.
[00:33:55] It was eyeball to eyeball stare down with the enemy, with each side expecting the other to die.
[00:34:01] When you face enemy fire, you are at the point of the sword.
[00:34:05] Ken and I had been around long enough to know that the sword of combat cuts both ways.
[00:34:09] We had lost three close friends in similar situations in the prior two months.
[00:34:14] We released our heavy payload of bombs and our lightened plane lurched upward.
[00:34:20] Suddenly an explosion rocked our aircraft.
[00:34:23] A terrifying sound like marbles in a blender alerted me that the metal of our expensive flying machine was ripping apart.
[00:34:31] The cockpit was still intact but it was rapidly filling with smoke.
[00:34:35] The control stick was frozen at full aft right and we were tumbling end over end through the sky.
[00:34:41] Just before bomb release we had been at 6000 feet descending rapidly in a steep dive.
[00:34:47] Now on fire and out of control there was only one option, eject.
[00:34:53] But that was impossible.
[00:34:55] I was upside down, floating out of my seat with my head pushed against the top of the canopy.
[00:35:00] If I ejected while we were in negative Gs, I would suffer severe injury, even death.
[00:35:06] But time was running out, at our rate of descent we would soon be out of the envelope for safe ejection.
[00:35:13] Suddenly the cockpit flipped again and I felt pressure in my seat.
[00:35:17] Positive Gs, it was now or never.
[00:35:19] I sat upright and pulled the ejection handle.
[00:35:23] An explosive charge fired blowing away the canopy, still strapped in my seat I was blasted free of the aircraft.
[00:35:29] Like a carnival stunt artist shot from a cannon at an acceleration force 18 times the force of gravity.
[00:35:37] Now if this expensive one time use Martin Baker ejection system was going to save my life,
[00:35:42] it would have to falllessly execute a remarkably complex series of events.
[00:35:46] A half a second later the man seat separator worked as advertised firing a blast of compressed air
[00:35:52] to the open lap belt connecting pin freeing me from the heavy seat and triggering the appropriately named butt snapper.
[00:36:01] A folded nylon belt under my seat that mechanically snapped tight thrusting me into space.
[00:36:06] As the ejection seat moved away the attached lanyard pulled out the D-ring deploying my parachute.
[00:36:12] The F-4 Phantoms marvelously engineered James Bond like a escape system had snatched me from the jaws of death in less than two seconds.
[00:36:21] But much like Bond's adventures escape from one danger only brought another.
[00:36:30] So when you're in negative G's you can't eject. That's the rule?
[00:36:41] Well if you do you might just smash your head on the canopy.
[00:36:47] And then it'll just break your neck and kill you?
[00:36:50] Yeah, it could. Yeah.
[00:36:52] So you're going 500 miles an hour and you're 5,000 feet. How many seconds is that? How far are we from impact?
[00:37:01] Two or three at the most I guess. It would have come very quickly.
[00:37:06] Now once the airplane blew up and was tumbling it wasn't going 500 miles an hour.
[00:37:11] We were probably between 450 and 500 miles an hour when the bombs came off and we blew up.
[00:37:18] And then within another second we're tumbling and so it's slowing down.
[00:37:25] You know that part, it all happened so quickly. This is within less than a second.
[00:37:33] It happened so quickly. I don't remember exactly except I knew I had negative G's and I needed positive G's.
[00:37:41] And it did a little longer and it flipped and there it was and I pulled that handle and Ken did too.
[00:37:48] And it was just unreal that we got out to be honest.
[00:37:52] Let me tell you one thing. We were the first, I didn't know this till several years later,
[00:38:00] we were the first probably to be blown out of the sky by the FMU-35 fuse.
[00:38:06] Because when it came off in less than two seconds, when there were bad fuses, there was a new fuse with a new type chemical reaction or whatever.
[00:38:18] But some of them were bad.
[00:38:21] So what is this FMU-35 fuse?
[00:38:23] It goes into the head of the bomb. It's crazy and it was a timed fuser so you could drop it and it would lay on the ground
[00:38:32] and wait for 10 seconds to blow up or wait for an hour to blow up.
[00:38:36] Okay. Well, we didn't even know, we were the first ones to ever fly with that and we were not supposed to be flying with it.
[00:38:44] We had not been told. We had been told they were coming but we had not been told that we had one.
[00:38:50] So I wouldn't know when I did the bomb inspection, the armament inspection, I wouldn't know an FMU-35 fuse different from another one.
[00:38:57] It was just a fuse. But hours blew up. They blew up in 1.8 seconds after they came off and boom.
[00:39:06] And most of the people that had that happen died.
[00:39:12] My roommate died two weeks later from that.
[00:39:15] And this is because he's shooting the missile and it's detonating 1.8 seconds later and it's not far enough away? Is that?
[00:39:23] No. It was dropping a bomb.
[00:39:25] Okay.
[00:39:26] And when it comes off, it detonates in 1.8 seconds after it's released, which is maybe 100 feet from where you are.
[00:39:33] It's going to parallel you to some degree.
[00:39:36] Right.
[00:39:37] Okay. And it blew up maybe 200, 300 feet under us and all that shrapnel out of one blew up all the rest of them.
[00:39:46] And so all these bombs blew up and it blew our air.
[00:39:50] Normally when you get hit by aircraft artillery, it doesn't blow your airplane up.
[00:39:55] It might blow off part of the wing or it might blow up part of your tail or shoot a hole through your fuel tank or your engine and blow out your engine.
[00:40:03] But it doesn't blow your airplane apart.
[00:40:06] So that in itself is very unusual for an airplane to be blown up by an aircraft artillery.
[00:40:13] Well, we found out several years later a POW, I was putting another cell with a POW and he was telling me about how he was blown out of the sky.
[00:40:24] By his wingman, his flight leads bombs going off and he said at the name we had lost like 12, 10 or 12 airplanes over a period of about six weeks and almost all of them died.
[00:40:37] Very few of them were recovered.
[00:40:38] So is that what happened to your bird?
[00:40:40] Yes.
[00:40:41] And we didn't know that.
[00:40:43] You thought you got hit?
[00:40:45] Yeah.
[00:40:46] Because there was a lot of AAA, you know, tracers right going right by the cockpit.
[00:40:50] So what else would you think? Nothing else.
[00:40:54] It had to be that until we found out that what it was like to be blown out of the sky by the FMU 35 views.
[00:41:02] And it happened, let's say John, my buddy, two days later, Doug Condit, my roommate, two weeks later.
[00:41:10] And neither one of them came home.
[00:41:12] So and they were great guys, great pilots, incredible men.
[00:41:17] Wow.
[00:41:19] That's horrible.
[00:41:21] Man, talk about a lack of communication.
[00:41:25] That's just that's crazy to think about.
[00:41:27] Well, they never really solved the problem and, you know, between the industrial and military.
[00:41:38] No one takes ownership of the problems and no one solves the problems.
[00:41:43] Okay.
[00:41:45] And finally, the Wing Commander, General Colonel Boussé, was a pretty famous guy being an ace of the Korean War.
[00:41:53] But he went down to Saigon and said, you can court martial me, but we're not going to fly those anymore.
[00:42:01] Wow.
[00:42:05] Going back to the book here.
[00:42:07] He had ejected from the womb of the F4 into a very unfunny world hanging in the parachute without my shallow protection.
[00:42:15] I felt exposed and vulnerable.
[00:42:17] Gunfire cracked below and bullets whizzed by me.
[00:42:19] Instinctively, I followed the procedures ingrained by regular refresher training since entering flight school.
[00:42:25] Check for a fully open shoot.
[00:42:27] Activate the emergency beeper.
[00:42:29] Decide on deploying a life raft.
[00:42:31] Pick a spot to land and steer your parachute.
[00:42:33] And then go to the parachute landing fall PLF.
[00:42:37] So you're going through the motions.
[00:42:39] You're thinking through your training.
[00:42:43] I had one goal and that was to make capture.
[00:42:45] And I was going, my training, it was unreal.
[00:42:48] I couldn't believe that I was so focused on my training and what I was doing here.
[00:42:52] The enemy is still shooting at the wingman and bullets are going by and I'm just focusing on what I'm supposed to do.
[00:42:58] Could you see Ken Fisher?
[00:43:00] No.
[00:43:02] He was about half mile away.
[00:43:04] When you eject, do both of you get ejected?
[00:43:07] No.
[00:43:08] So one person, so you each have to pull your ejection handle?
[00:43:11] Some airplanes are that way but ours wasn't.
[00:43:14] You know, the F-4 wasn't that way.
[00:43:15] So you don't know if he made it out at this point?
[00:43:17] No.
[00:43:18] You don't know if he ejected or not?
[00:43:19] No.
[00:43:20] I'm looking down and I can see the ocean just a few miles, three or four miles away.
[00:43:27] And we were attacking the gun protection for the Quine Key Ferry.
[00:43:32] That's what the four-air controller put us on to bomb those gun areas.
[00:43:39] And so I know where I am.
[00:43:41] I've flown to this area a lot and so I made a radio call.
[00:43:45] As soon as I got on the ground, I did my parachute landing fall and I hit all the points, jumped into an old bomb crater,
[00:43:51] pulled out my radio and on guard said, hey, I'm on the ground, 200 meters north of the river,
[00:43:58] start strafing at 300, I'm headed south.
[00:44:00] Because I thought if I could get in that river, I could evade and get picked up out by the Navy.
[00:44:06] Well, I saw the flight lead after I came home at a fighter pilot reunion.
[00:44:12] He said, hey man, I heard you a radio call but I decided I couldn't shoot that good.
[00:44:17] I didn't want to hit you and I said very wise because they surrounded me and captured me within 90 seconds.
[00:44:25] Yeah, you're saying the book.
[00:44:27] In less than 60 seconds, the militia troops formed a semi-circle about 30 yards away and began moving toward me.
[00:44:33] Survival instructors had taught us the best chance to escape as immediately after capture because frontline soldiers are typically the least trained in handling prisoners.
[00:44:40] Deciding to try to bluff, I drew my 38 caliber six-shot revolver, Smith and Wesson,
[00:44:46] combat masterpiece which was loaded with two rounds of tracer and three of regular ball ammo.
[00:44:51] Could these rookies be scared off? I would challenge them and find out.
[00:44:56] The first three stepped out from chest high bushes and pointed their rifles at me.
[00:45:01] I raised my revolver, motion for them to get back and fired a tracer round over their heads.
[00:45:07] Without flinching, they shouldered their rifles and pointed them at me.
[00:45:11] Why they didn't cut me down right then, I'll never know.
[00:45:15] I can only assume God had other plans for my life.
[00:45:19] So you took a crack at these guys with your 38?
[00:45:24] I'll tell you what. How you survived that, I have no idea.
[00:45:28] I just wanted to scare them. I fired it over their head. Tracer, you know.
[00:45:33] In the heat of the battle, that's just all I was thinking.
[00:45:37] Yeah, I mean please, anyone out there, if you point a weapon at me and you pull the trigger,
[00:45:42] actually if you point a weapon at me, you're going to die.
[00:45:45] So the fact that you just shot a tracer at these guys to try and scare them off,
[00:45:50] but they must have been there clearly, the value of a prisoner must have been so high to them
[00:45:57] and they knew that and that's why they said, oh no buddy, you're not getting out that easy.
[00:46:04] Continuing on, you say, one of the militiamen pulled, and by the way, I'm reading this book,
[00:46:08] I'm reading some excerpts. You got to get the book, I'm skipping a bunch of stuff.
[00:46:12] There's all kinds of awesome details in here of what's going through your mind.
[00:46:15] Like you got to get the book, I'm just trying to give some of the highlights.
[00:46:20] They're not even all the highlights, there's some of the highlights.
[00:46:22] One of the militiamen pulled out a pamphlet.
[00:46:25] I recognized it as a pointy, talky, a tool of the Vietnamese military
[00:46:30] that showed drawings of American pilots being captured along with Vietnamese phonetics
[00:46:34] for English commands, referring to his booklet, he began to shout, handshop, handshop,
[00:46:39] shirendo, no die, shirendo, no die.
[00:46:42] Aviators have a number of expressions for being in deep trouble.
[00:46:46] One of the nicer ones is out of airspeed and ideas.
[00:46:51] That precisely described my situation.
[00:46:55] I figured you'd like that one, Dave, out of airspeed and ideas.
[00:46:59] Not a good place to be.
[00:47:01] I tossed aside my pistol, raised my hands, not knowing what to expect.
[00:47:04] Immediately my captors grabbed me and began tugging at my survival vest, anti-G suit,
[00:47:08] and flight suit, my last vestiges of protection.
[00:47:14] And here's the psychological view of what's going through your mind.
[00:47:19] Up until the time of surrender, I had operated like a computer,
[00:47:22] calculating and processing at nanosecond speed.
[00:47:25] My training programs had translated into almost flawless execution,
[00:47:30] from the credit to the military way, and those who did the training.
[00:47:34] Now, out of control and with no power, this cool, somewhat cocky fighter pilot
[00:47:39] felt all alone and very scared.
[00:47:42] Captured and in enemy hands, what lay in store?
[00:47:46] Would I be tortured, killed?
[00:47:48] The shock of my predicament made the whole affair seem like a dream.
[00:47:52] I knew this was happening to me, but I also felt like an observer,
[00:47:55] as if participating in an out-of-body experience.
[00:47:59] Only this nightmare was real, and I would need to adopt a new mindset,
[00:48:03] a new game face to fight a different kind of battle, a battle of minds and wills.
[00:48:10] You were in enemy hands in 90 seconds from hitting the ground.
[00:48:18] Yes.
[00:48:20] Is that just bad luck? How does that even happen?
[00:48:24] That happened quite a bit, because usually we're in more populated areas,
[00:48:31] and there are going to be militia or farmers.
[00:48:34] Farmers came with axes or shovels or whatever to capture you.
[00:48:40] So it was good to be captured, but if you're going to be captured better by the militia than the farmers.
[00:48:47] Is there a massive relief of just survival?
[00:48:52] The fact that you made it out of the aircraft that blew up underneath you,
[00:48:57] and now you're on the ground, you got to at least feel good that you're alive.
[00:49:01] Or was that not there?
[00:49:03] I guess I was just focused on the moment.
[00:49:07] I didn't, at that point, if this is just part of my day that I'm dealing with,
[00:49:16] I wasn't thinking that I guess, I don't know, maybe I was thinking I'm glad I'm alive,
[00:49:22] but that only lasted for a second.
[00:49:25] Now I'm dealing with the realities of what's going to happen next.
[00:49:29] And I suppose that just overshadowed any sort of, like, for lack of a better word, celebration that you left.
[00:49:38] Although you did mention in the book, as you were under canopy, you were kind of looking around like,
[00:49:42] oh, it's kind of nice up here, you saw the ocean, hey, if I can get to the ocean.
[00:49:46] And then you heard them yelling and shooting.
[00:49:50] It didn't take but a second.
[00:49:51] I looked back over and I knew up the river there was disappearing cave, because I knew about that.
[00:49:57] The river went into the cave and they would hide their sampans and ships, boats up there during the daytime
[00:50:04] and bring them out at night to ferry boats to ferry these guys across the river, the trucks across the river.
[00:50:11] So I was looking over that way and then I looked over here and there's the ocean.
[00:50:15] Don Hoey, the city was over there.
[00:50:17] So it was beautiful, but that took about a split second.
[00:50:23] Dave, did you ever grab your ejection handle?
[00:50:26] No, I never reached for the handle.
[00:50:30] I thought about it once.
[00:50:31] What was going on?
[00:50:32] It was just a mechanical problem that I had with an airplane.
[00:50:36] Very similar, it was actually in a dive and back up, I don't want to even draw a comparison between what you just described
[00:50:45] and what happened to you in mind, but the feeling of going really fast downhill.
[00:50:49] I really like the way you described the way the earth comes up.
[00:50:52] It's like a telephoto zoom lens as you're rotating that lens, how quickly it comes up.
[00:50:57] When things don't work going downhill, you're much more inclined to leave the airplane when things aren't working going uphill.
[00:51:03] It's hard to listen to because in my brain when you say you see the ocean and that airplane, I just wish you just want the airplane to climb up.
[00:51:12] Even if it's out of power, you just want it to get up into the air and it's such a better place to be.
[00:51:16] The fact that you're going downhill is such a heartbreaking thing to hear because you have such few options.
[00:51:20] So I guess my answer is yes and no, nothing like that, but that feeling of I got a problem going downhill, you're much more inclined to leave.
[00:51:27] I remember thinking about it for a split second, no, no, I can actually solve this problem unlike your problem is not solvable.
[00:51:33] But going downhill is not cool when you got a problem.
[00:51:36] You ever heard the term ground rush?
[00:51:38] I have heard that term.
[00:51:40] Absolutely.
[00:51:41] Okay, so we only know it from freefall perish.
[00:51:44] So it's a thing for pilots as well.
[00:51:46] Ground rush?
[00:51:47] Yeah, it's like the ground is coming, but then all of a sudden it starts coming really fast.
[00:51:54] The lower you get, the faster it starts going.
[00:51:57] I have one parachute cutaway, meaning my main parachute failed and I had to get rid of that parachute and pull my reserve parachute.
[00:52:07] That only happened to me one time.
[00:52:09] And for me, it was very mechanical mind.
[00:52:12] My mind was just, oh, you know, I'm looking at my perimeter trying to clear the problem.
[00:52:16] Look at my timeter trying to clear the problem.
[00:52:18] Parachutes not good.
[00:52:19] Okay, I'm at the cutaway altitude supposed to be 2000 feet.
[00:52:22] I got to 1900 feet. I was like, yep, you need to cut this thing away.
[00:52:24] And I just did it.
[00:52:25] My reserve parachute came out and I was fine.
[00:52:27] Very mechanical, you know, very, yeah, that's just robotic.
[00:52:32] You know, that's how we were trained.
[00:52:34] That's what I got trained to do.
[00:52:35] That's what I did.
[00:52:36] And do I have this right?
[00:52:37] You were in the back seat for this.
[00:52:39] Mm-hmm.
[00:52:43] How frustrating was that, that you were not flying the airplane?
[00:52:47] That sense, I mean, I don't know what it's like to be a fighter pilot, your description of going back seat at fours as part of the standard continuum to cycle up front.
[00:52:55] And I'm sure the guy you're with was a great guy, but that pilot in command sense of who's got the controls.
[00:53:01] How much of that were you thinking about in real time, that frustration of, or was there any of you not being the one flying it?
[00:53:08] Or you just recognizing it was going on?
[00:53:09] No, it didn't occur to me at all because he was a really good pilot.
[00:53:12] Yeah.
[00:53:13] And I trusted him and no problem there.
[00:53:16] And it all happened so fast.
[00:53:17] Yeah.
[00:53:18] I mean, we're talking about second, two seconds at the most.
[00:53:23] Yeah.
[00:53:24] Dave's the single seat fighter for his whole career.
[00:53:27] Yeah.
[00:53:28] Just that sense of wanting to be the one making the airplane do what it's supposed to do.
[00:53:32] I just think for me, and I'm sure it was for you, that it sounded like it was much more standard.
[00:53:37] We never had that pipeline, but going in the back seat of an airplane, the one or two times in my career I did it, there was a small sense of, I'd really rather be up front.
[00:53:45] Dave Burke has this feeling, if you go over to go fly on a civilian flight with him, he's frustrated that he's not flying the civilian bird.
[00:53:51] Well, I can understand that, but you had to live with what it was.
[00:53:57] Yeah.
[00:53:58] And it's kind of like, in a way, some of the things you said in your previous podcast talking about when you become the boss of your peers, you sorted that out quite well.
[00:54:12] Well, I had to sort out not being the boss in this case.
[00:54:16] Now, and some of the guys I flew with, though, I had to help them fly, I think, a little bit.
[00:54:22] Not that they were bad pilots, they just weren't fighter pilots yet, that much.
[00:54:27] But some of the fighter pilots I flew with were like you, and they didn't want to give up the stick.
[00:54:33] And I had to almost fight them to say, give me that stick.
[00:54:37] You know, it's like, you know, they were upset that they had to fly with somebody else in the airplane with had a stick, you know, because they had been single-seaters so long.
[00:54:50] So we were friends, but, you know, one thing about me is I was always pretty able to be straightforward with people in a respectful way most of the time.
[00:55:02] But I scored 34 on the fast-paced, impatient side, so being able to confront people has never been a problem.
[00:55:12] I confronted a four-star general one time.
[00:55:15] I knew him, and he was a really good guy, and he said, I think we should pull this guy's wings.
[00:55:20] And I said, General, I don't think so. I'd be a mistake.
[00:55:23] I said, here's A, B, and C.
[00:55:25] And sure enough, the guy went back and flew 141s. In fact, he was the aircraft commander of the 141 that flew my War College class up to Carlisle Barracks to meet with the other War College classes, Navy, Industrial Army, and Air Force, all together.
[00:55:39] What the guy do that had his wings at stake?
[00:55:43] That's what I'm saying. He became the aircraft commander.
[00:55:46] But why was he in trouble?
[00:55:48] Oh, he was not instructor pilot. They sent him from a 141 co-pilot to be a T-38 instructor pilot.
[00:55:57] And he was a good pilot, but he just couldn't fly and talk at the same time, catch it all.
[00:56:03] And I said, he's already a trained pilot. I don't think we should take his wings and send him back.
[00:56:08] And he did.
[00:56:10] But I didn't mind confronting the front-seater if he was doing something. I was in no way. My life was at stake.
[00:56:18] I would tell some of those guys, roll in now. Don't roll in now.
[00:56:23] And one of them told me, just shut up, boy.
[00:56:26] I said, okay.
[00:56:28] He was one of the more experienced ones.
[00:56:30] You have to take ownership for things, and sometimes you can be wrong, but most of the times you know you're probably right.
[00:56:43] All right. I'm going to go back to the book here.
[00:56:46] Fast forward a little bit. Again, you got to get the book for the rest of these details, but I'm going to fast forward a little bit.
[00:56:52] The journey from the Southern Panhandle of North Vietnam to Hanoi was a long grueling ordeal. For the first few days, they moved me from Hamlet to Hamlet during the daylight.
[00:57:01] At night, they tied me down to boards and bomb shelters. As I contemplated what suffering might lie ahead, I found encouragement in the words of the apostle Paul.
[00:57:11] Quote, we also rejoice in our sufferings because we know that suffering produces perseverance, perseverance, character, and character, hope.
[00:57:23] On three occasions, American fighter jets flew in low and attacked trucks parked in the trees alongside the road.
[00:57:29] We took shelter in foxholes and bomb shelters and watched the fireworks, a front-row seat to the terrors of war.
[00:57:36] Foot-long chunks of red-hot shrapnel sometimes landed not more than six feet from me.
[00:57:41] The sights, sounds, and smells of the bombs and anti-aircraft artillery explosions are indelibly etched in my memory.
[00:57:48] War attacks the emotions in a way that's impossible to describe and difficult to erase.
[00:57:53] More threatening than the bombs were the attacks from angry peasants, a mob of old women and teens, furious over the destruction American pilots had wrought,
[00:58:03] rushed toward me wielding rocks, sticks, and rice-cutting sickles.
[00:58:08] My young North Vietnamese escort and the guards under his authority formed a cordon and ushered me to safety, even absorbing some of the blows.
[00:58:17] Several times during the week-long journey north, this soldier saved my life.
[00:58:22] In following his orders to transport me safely, he displayed a remarkable balance of toughness and kindness not only to me,
[00:58:29] but also to his men and the two civilians we met along the way.
[00:58:33] Strong character is remarkably apparent, even in your enemy.
[00:58:37] Again, they must have placed a huge level of value on you pilots, on capturing Americans, for this guy to do such a good job protecting you from the civilians.
[00:58:52] Yes, they did, but this guy was special.
[00:58:55] I found out because a guy who lives near where I was captured, went to the village.
[00:59:04] He's gotten to know a lot of the forward air controllers who flew over there, Vietnamese guy.
[00:59:10] He went to the village, found the person, the wife of that person that we're talking about, and he investigated a little bit about this guy.
[00:59:21] He stayed with the militia. He wasn't a gung-ho on the communists, and he was known for being tough and a really good man.
[00:59:32] And this woman, because the bombing out of the road, and the- we had a hurricane, what do they call them over there, come through?
[00:59:42] Typhoon.
[00:59:43] Typhoon came through, and we had to stay at his place for two nights, and he had moved out of his house with his wife.
[00:59:50] And his father, and he had dug into the sand dune right away, just up some of the beach, and they were living in a cave.
[01:00:00] And they took me in that cave, and I slept between his father and his two-year-old daughter, tied up, slept between them in the back of that cave.
[01:00:08] And at night, when it was time to eat, they saw I couldn't eat with chopsticks, and they brought me a spoon, and I had a bowl of rice.
[01:00:17] And they started talking to me, and they were treating me like I was a really nice fellow and just a visitor to their house.
[01:00:25] Even though most of the time I'm tied up in the guards or right out the front door there.
[01:00:30] And this guy went back and interviewed that lady, and she told him about me.
[01:00:35] She said she's speaking Vietnamese, but he has a video of it, and says, oh yes, I remember him.
[01:00:41] He was nice. He smiled, and he had eyebrows that went all the way across.
[01:00:46] And they did, by then, my eyebrows were solid all the way across.
[01:00:50] And this woman, I think she's 82 or 81 or 82, and her daughter, the one that was two years old, that slept on one side of me and his father, of course, is dead.
[01:01:01] But they were wonderful people, and they treated me like I was a guest.
[01:01:05] And then the next day, he loaded me up and took me off to the bin to the camp up there.
[01:01:10] But still he protected me a couple of times on the way up to bin because the Communist Party would get a party leader in the local village would get a bullhorn out, and he'd get them all fired up.
[01:01:23] You know, work harder, suffer more for the Fatherland kind of thing. Look what we've done. You know, ah, ah, ah, ah.
[01:01:29] And he'd get them all fired up, and then they'd come after me.
[01:01:33] And they would get hit sometimes trying to protect me.
[01:01:39] And one time he had the driver of the truck who we were traveling in.
[01:01:43] Normally you'd travel in the back, but he had the driver drive up to the door, open the door, push me in, told the driver to drive on off through the crowd.
[01:01:53] And the driver's just pushing the crowd back.
[01:01:56] And one guy jumped up on the hood of the truck and started beating on the windshield, cussing at me, pointing at me, cussing at me.
[01:02:03] Cussing at me. Yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah, yah. And the driver told him to. He was in Vietnamese.
[01:02:09] Get off. He had his hand. Get off. Get off. Get off. The guy didn't do it.
[01:02:13] The driver just looked over at me and said, oh, well, you know, he started speeding up.
[01:02:17] And finally the guy looked over and he saw how fast he was going.
[01:02:22] The driver was going and he jumped off and went rolling down the hill.
[01:02:25] And the driver kind of looked over at me and grinned.
[01:02:28] It was just bizarre. My trip to Hanoi was bizarre. It's unreal that, you know, nobody, none of the POWs I know had that good, protected experience I did.
[01:02:43] Now, I joined up with some, with Biller and Fisher and Warner at Ben and from then on we were tied up and bouncing along in the back of the truck.
[01:02:52] But that was special. That was unique.
[01:02:58] You end up here in the book. You say, my escort deposited me at the collection prison near Vin, which was nothing more than a bamboo pole barn divided into individual cages, each with a pile of straw on the floor for sleeping.
[01:03:10] Ken had already arrived. So that's the first time you see Ken?
[01:03:14] Actually, right after I was captured, they took, yeah, the first time I saw him, we were both blindfolded. They took me to a bomb shelter right after I was captured.
[01:03:23] And I heard this guy breathing heavily. Now Ken had been a wrestler. He was New York state wrestling champion and wrestled in college.
[01:03:32] And so his nose had been smashed. So when he breathed hard, you could hear him.
[01:03:36] And so I said, is that you can? And the guards went out, had gone outside of that bomb shelter. He said, yeah, you okay?
[01:03:44] I said, yeah, you okay? He said, yeah, they came right back in, dragged me out and I didn't see him again till we got to Vin.
[01:03:52] Lieutenant Colonel Ted Minter and first Lieutenant Jim Warner, whose Marine F-4 Phantom jet had been shot down a few weeks earlier. We're also there. We were kept isolated from each other and fed a small bowl of rice topped by a few greens twice a day.
[01:04:06] A day or so after my arrival, the camp commander, whom I derogatorily nicknamed Madman, summoned me for my first interrogation.
[01:04:13] According to the Geneva Convention, captured soldiers are required to provide name, rank, service, number, and date of birth.
[01:04:18] Our code of conduct says that we should resist answering other questions. When I tried to stick with these big four, Madman went berserk.
[01:04:25] He called me a criminal and threatened to kill me on the spot. After I still refused to answer, he shouted at command in Vietnamese.
[01:04:32] A nearby guard jammed his AK-47 barrel against my head and chambered around. Still in shock of capture and unsure of how POWs had actually been treated, I decided to talk a bit more.
[01:04:44] Spying my F-4 aircrew checklist on the table, I admitted that I had been flying the F-4 Phantom out of Da Nang.
[01:04:50] Madman asked me several more questions about my unit and command structure. I stalled then gave bogus answers to a couple and did not know to the rest.
[01:04:59] That was sufficient to end the interrogation without giving up any meaningful or accurate information other than the big four.
[01:05:05] The next evening, under the cover of darkness, the V, and this is your shorthand throughout the book for the Vietnamese captors you call the V, shoved the four of us into the back of a truck.
[01:05:17] Accompanied by several armed guards, we headed for Hanoi on a bomb crater pocked Route 1A, the primary coastal route from north to south.
[01:05:27] With blindfold on and hands and feet tied, we crashed up and down on the hard steel truck bed like helpless pigs going to market.
[01:05:36] Mark it, words cannot adequately describe the agony of that journey which was heightened by the mental anguish of knowing that every bounce brought us closer to an uncertain fate in the infamous prisons of Hanoi.
[01:05:49] You end up there. Our section of the Hanoi Hilton was known to POWs as Little Vegas because most Air Force fighter pilots had done some training at Nellis Air Force Base just outside Las Vegas, Nevada.
[01:06:11] The various wings of Little Vegas were appropriately named after some of the popular casino hotels of that era.
[01:06:20] The Desert Inn, Stardust, Golden Nugget, Riviera, The Mint, and Thunderbird, our cell block.
[01:06:25] Four men's cells were typical except for the Mint which had three and a half foot by seven foot rooms used for solitary confinement.
[01:06:34] Our cell in Thunderbird was six and a half feet wide and seven feet deep, about the size of a small walking closet and had masonry walls 16 inches thick.
[01:06:44] One wall faced the central courtyard of Little Vegas and its opposite wall fronted the main hallway.
[01:06:50] The side walls of our cell were separated from the walls of the neighboring cells by narrow hallways so we could not tap messages through them to other POWs.
[01:07:00] Camp rules tacked to the inside of our cell made it clear that anyone communicating with another cell would be severely punished.
[01:07:07] Armed guards constantly patrolled the halls to ensure compliance.
[01:07:12] The heavy door of our cell had an eight inch by ten inch peephole with a hinged cover which guards occasionally would flip open to threaten us and make sure we were behaving ourselves.
[01:07:22] There were four beds about 30 inches wide made from two by six boards that were bracketed too high to the walls on either side of the doorway.
[01:07:33] The walking space between the bunk beds measured about 18 inches.
[01:07:36] From the high ceiling hung a single dim light bulb that burned night and day.
[01:07:41] Iron leg stocks at the foot of the beds gave this dark and depressing cell the ominous feel of a medieval dragon, a medieval dungeon.
[01:07:49] At least three times a day, seven days a week, the V piped in propaganda through a soapbox speaker also called camp radio attached high on one wall.
[01:08:00] That's a rough, that's just sounds off, sounds horrible.
[01:08:13] What are you thinking when you get into this place?
[01:08:16] You know, I think you're just wondering what's going to happen next.
[01:08:23] And the fact that I'm with three other guys, I'm an extrovert outgoing guy.
[01:08:32] So that was pretty exciting to me to be with three other guys.
[01:08:36] And I was the youngest guy in the junior ranking guy.
[01:08:39] So I'm thinking I'm just going to hang on, you know.
[01:08:42] You go on to say just before bedtime, Hanoi Hanna, the North Vietnamese version of the infamous Tokyo Rose of World War Two shared communist half truths and outright lies.
[01:08:54] She typically closed her broadcast each night in a sympathetic and sisterly tone by saying, G eyes, why should you die 10,000 miles from home?
[01:09:03] Lay down your arms now and crossover to the people side.
[01:09:06] The afternoon broadcast were especially disheartening because they featured Americans spouting words that could have been written for them in Hanoi or Moscow.
[01:09:15] Tom Hayden, founder of the socialist front organization Students for a Democratic Society was a regular speaker.
[01:09:23] Later in the war, the V welcomed the aid of Hayden's antiwar activist wife, film star Jane Fonda.
[01:09:29] Isolated in that tiny cell, the four of us had plenty of time to get to know each other. Captain Fisher told us how he had endured brutal torture during his initial interrogation back at Vin to avoid answering any questions beyond the big four.
[01:09:42] At Madman's command, guards had tied his arms behind his back, tossed a rope over a high beam and pulled Ken's arms up behind, lifting him until he was suspended with the weight of his body pulling and tearing at the muscles, ligaments and nerves in his shoulders.
[01:09:58] A star collegiate wrestler at New York State High School and New York State High School champion, Ken was mentally and physically one of the toughest men I'd ever known, but eventually the pain transformed him into a screaming idiot.
[01:10:12] As we all learned to do so, he had to fall back to the second line of resistance.
[01:10:18] At times some POWs prayed for death as a relief, but the V, who were experts at torture, rarely obliged.
[01:10:28] Upon hearing Ken's story, I felt embarrassed and immature. He had suffered so much trying to follow the strict letter of the code while I had given in after threats and a rifle jab to the head.
[01:10:40] When I shared my interrogation encounter with him, he said with sincere kindness, you did the best you could under the circumstances. We ended up at the same place giving them something that was nothing.
[01:10:52] That experience gave me a glimpse of the character of this man who would be a cellmate and inspirational leader for the next five years.
[01:11:03] That little piece of leadership right there, here's this guy that withstood the description, horrible torture.
[01:11:14] You tell him, hey, they put a gun in my head and I told him some information. He said, yeah, you did the best you could.
[01:11:24] That had to have left an impact on you with him as an individual and him as a leader.
[01:11:31] It did. And then the next time we got tortured, it was the same thing. He went a lot longer than I did. I went a lot longer than somebody else did.
[01:11:53] Because Ken didn't have any experience with any of the other POWs who had been there, he was a very level headed guy and just a great leader.
[01:12:04] He was a really good thinker and even some of the things that he did after we came home, like one time he had two squadron commanders when women first started flying in the Air Force.
[01:12:16] One of them was in charge of the flying squadron, the other one in charge of the student squadron, and they weren't handling the flying squadron very appropriately with the women there.
[01:12:28] And so Ken realized that he needed to do something and he didn't fire them. He switched them.
[01:12:37] He put the guy in the student squadron in charge of the flying squadron and the guy in charge of the flying squadron in charge of the student squadron and they both did great and they both got promoted to colonel.
[01:12:48] And it was just a brilliant move of how he saw what the situation was and what would be the best solution.
[01:12:57] And I think in the POW situation, he was a great example and I didn't have the choice of being put in the ropes or being hung by the ropes like he was in that case.
[01:13:10] My situation was death in my case and I think he saw that. I didn't know that they wouldn't kill me, why wouldn't they?
[01:13:21] So I think he took all that into account in a really good way but he realized probably at that point that I probably needed to be more confident.
[01:13:33] And when leaders are able to help their people believe that they let them know they believe in them, they become more effective and more confident and next time they're going to come through stronger.
[01:13:46] So that's a really important leadership point and I've been very fortunate in my life growing up in high school, college days and in the military.
[01:13:58] I've had leaders that believed in me. I wouldn't be where I am today if I hadn't had leaders that believed in me and helped me become the person I am today.
[01:14:09] So I just think he showed me that and a great example there. And of course later he relieved Lieutenant Colonel Lecomand in that cell.
[01:14:19] So he was just very wise, not perfect. I remember after a few months and I finally decided, well, he's not perfect. I can forgive him for that.
[01:14:30] But for a while I thought he was just perfect.
[01:14:34] Another question we get asked a lot is how can I get this individual to step up into a leadership and start becoming a leader?
[01:14:41] Put them in a leadership position. When you put someone in a leadership position, you're telling them, hey, I believe you should be in this leadership position.
[01:14:47] I believe that you can lead. And guess what they start doing? They start acting like a leader. Most of the time occasionally you'll get someone that's not ready for you.
[01:14:55] They don't have the right attitude yet. But oftentimes you just take someone, a junior individual and say, hey, I want you to run this operation. I want you to run this project.
[01:15:04] And they see that you believe in them and that makes them believe in themselves. It's a good move.
[01:15:09] You know, speaking of this relief, we'll get into this because I think it's an important and bold move that happens here.
[01:15:20] So there's a guy named Lieutenant Colonel Minter. It's actually not his real name. It's a made up name to be gentle, I guess, with the situation.
[01:15:29] Well, he had five sons. And I thought that when I wrote that book, I wrote that for his sons. I didn't want to put his name there.
[01:15:37] Right. So Lieutenant Colonel Minter was summoned to more interrogations than the rest of us. That seemed natural at first.
[01:15:44] As the senior ranking officer, SRO in our room, he was potentially the highest value target for exploitation.
[01:15:51] But over time, we realized that Minter's views were not aligned with ours or the policy of our government.
[01:15:57] A soldier has the obligation to do his best to uphold the code of conduct, which includes resisting exploitation by the enemy.
[01:16:04] What might be acceptable for a civilian back home in our free society is totally out of line for a military person, especially a POW.
[01:16:10] One day, Minter came back from an interrogation with pencil and paper and began writing an extensive description of the organization responsibilities of a Marine Air Wing.
[01:16:19] We cautioned him that his cooperation was a violation of the code of conduct, but he said he didn't see any problem.
[01:16:26] Later, when he was called out of the room for an interrogation, we looked at the paper and saw that it contained information that appeared accurate and of value to the enemy, a clear breach of the code.
[01:16:37] Captain Fisher, as the next senior officer in the cell, told Lieutenant Warner and me that he felt compelled to remove Lieutenant Colonel Minter from command.
[01:16:47] He asked if we agreed. Is a very serious and risky step for a captain to relieve a Lieutenant Colonel of command?
[01:16:55] If competent authority did not support Ken's action, he would likely face a court martial for insubordination.
[01:17:01] We also risked court martial for our involvement, but we knew Ken was right, so we gave him our wholehearted support.
[01:17:08] When Minter returned to the room, Ken said, you're willing cooperation with the enemy in writing this paper as a violation of the code of conduct.
[01:17:15] I am removing you from command and ordering you to destroy that document and cease cooperating with the enemy.
[01:17:21] If you disobey these orders, I will personally seek a court martial against you after the war.
[01:17:26] That's friggin' awesome.
[01:17:30] Minter said he did not believe the code of conduct applied in this case because we were not in a declared war.
[01:17:35] In his opinion, everyone was free to do as he saw fit.
[01:17:38] That was a shockingly irresponsible attitude for a military officer.
[01:17:42] Only a few months previous, he had told friends that he hoped to make general.
[01:17:46] Now his comments made him look like a selfish survivor who would forsake his beloved core, his friends, his roommates, and even his country to save his hide.
[01:17:54] That evening, Lieutenant Colonel Minter ripped up the document and threw it in the waste bucket, but his behavior over the subsequent years indicated that he never had a change of heart.
[01:18:03] So that's a bold move to make.
[01:18:08] You're more junior than the senior officer and you say, hey, you're not in charge anymore.
[01:18:13] I am.
[01:18:14] And by the way, I'm in a court martial after the war if you resist this.
[01:18:19] Yeah, it takes courage and believing, you know, it was obvious what was right.
[01:18:28] And there was evidence, enough evidence for him to make that decision.
[01:18:32] And so he courageously stood up and did it.
[01:18:35] And that's the kind of guy Ken was.
[01:18:37] So I had this courageous role model living with 24 hours a day, actually for five years.
[01:18:44] In fact, we've been home a couple of years and he'd only been married for two and a half years when he was captured.
[01:18:51] And his wife, we were his wife and him and my wife and I were at a social event and she came up and says, Lee Ellis, I want you to know I've lived him with Ken Fisher longer than you have.
[01:19:07] But he was a great cellmate and a real, he helped me mature.
[01:19:13] You know, I needed maturity in lots of different ways and watching him, learning from him helped me to grow into be the person that I needed to be.
[01:19:25] And so I got tougher.
[01:19:28] I got wiser.
[01:19:32] And I would say I don't know to what degree, you know, I would say this, but my own courage grew.
[01:19:44] I thought I was pretty courageous, but I think it, I gained courage because I knew what I wanted to do.
[01:19:54] I wanted to live up to the code of conduct and be a good American and be faithful to my teammates, do my job.
[01:20:01] And so I was willing to take risks.
[01:20:04] I was a pretty good risk taker.
[01:20:05] I'm in the camp.
[01:20:07] I was found it easy to take risks in communicating and things like that because I know I'm good at it.
[01:20:15] So I figured I can do it and get away with it.
[01:20:18] So they brought this three-page biography questionnaire for us to fill out and we filled it out and put name, rank, service number, date of birth, except for a mentor who filled it in.
[01:20:30] And then they hauled the other three of us out to interrogate and threaten us.
[01:20:35] It was funny because they had a new interrogator there and he came in and he would say, I don't want to hurt you.
[01:20:45] I don't want to bother you, but you're a good person.
[01:20:47] You should do this and it'll be all right.
[01:20:49] You know, he was a nice guy.
[01:20:52] Okay.
[01:20:53] And then we say no.
[01:20:55] And then the bad guy comes in.
[01:20:57] We're going to torture you.
[01:20:59] We'll go back and forth for an hour or two and then we didn't fill it in.
[01:21:03] So then they put us in handcuffs and tied our feet and put us on our knees up against the wall with our hands over our head, which, you know, no big problem.
[01:21:17] But after six or eight hours, you start falling over and then they start coming in and start kicking you and beating you.
[01:21:24] And you get back up and after six or eight more hours, you've been up and down and been kicked and beaten and all this.
[01:21:31] So finally, after, I don't know, the next day, probably 36 hours, I decided, well, I'm going to give in.
[01:21:41] I'm going to give them something.
[01:21:43] Ain't going to be nothing, but I'm going to.
[01:21:45] And so I told them I would do it.
[01:21:47] I filled in the three pages and everything on it was a lie except for my dad's first and last name.
[01:21:54] And everything else was just made up, you know, education, money, what everything was just totally made up.
[01:22:02] Well, I get back to the room and I wasn't the first one back, but after a while.
[01:22:09] But when I did that, when I did that, when I agreed to do it, I laid there and cried.
[01:22:16] I was so sad because I was not tough enough to beat him.
[01:22:20] I felt so ashamed.
[01:22:21] I felt like the most worthless piece of crap that I ever wanted to uniform because I wasn't able to beat him.
[01:22:29] My duty was to beat him and I couldn't beat him.
[01:22:33] Now, I didn't give him anything, but the fact that I'd filled it in, that was the first time I'd ever really come to grips with the reality that at some point,
[01:22:43] you know, you got to fall back to a second round.
[01:22:48] Now, when they put the gun to my head earlier, I had, but that was a little different than just being tortured and being painful, uncomfortable,
[01:22:56] and being beaten and kicked and all that.
[01:22:59] And then when you got back to it, how did Ken Fisher do?
[01:23:02] Well, he came back to and he said he had done the same thing, but he was 54 hours longer than me.
[01:23:09] He survived, so he was tougher than me.
[01:23:12] I'm laughing because that's like, you know, in the SEAL teams, you know, everyone's always competing with everybody else.
[01:23:18] And here you guys are competing to see who could take horrible torture longer.
[01:23:22] Exactly.
[01:23:23] And so as quick as we got communication, though, we found out that everybody had been through it and done the same thing.
[01:23:34] Everybody had filled out that biography.
[01:23:36] So then I thought, well, I guess I'm not quite as worthless as I thought.
[01:23:40] But Ken was good about it, too.
[01:23:42] Again, he helped me understand that he didn't go much longer than I did and he had done it, too.
[01:23:49] But we didn't give him any information.
[01:23:51] Yeah.
[01:23:55] Given a little bit more about your life there, for the first two years, the feeling of hunger never left us.
[01:24:03] Food was the most popular topic of conversation, especially when it was cold and our bodies needed more calories just to stay warm.
[01:24:09] Upon awakening in the winter months, I would realize I'd been dreaming about walking down a cafeteria line, selecting a breakfast of eggs,
[01:24:16] bacon, sausage, toast, orange juice, and coffee.
[01:24:19] But in reality, our typical meal was a bowl of thin, greasy vegetable soup accompanied by either a cup of rice or an 8-inch baguette of bread.
[01:24:26] We joked that the menu had lots of variety.
[01:24:28] It changed three times a year.
[01:24:30] Since the V cooked outside in big pots, small bugs and white worms would regularly drop into the soup from overhanging trees.
[01:24:38] Every August, weevils would hatch in the flour so the bread would be peppered with black buggers.
[01:24:44] Having nothing better to do one afternoon, I counted 44 and one cubic inch of bread.
[01:24:50] There were too many to pick out, so we just ate them, figuring they were a good source of protein.
[01:24:56] Winters in Hanoi were surprisingly cold, with temperatures off into the low 40s.
[01:25:00] Fahrenheit sometimes lower.
[01:25:02] The chilly air blowing in through our barred open window, covered only with a raton mat, made our unheated cell feel like an ice box.
[01:25:09] It was also cold because our meagre rations provided insufficient energy to stay warm through the long nights.
[01:25:15] We survived by putting every bit of clothing we owned, two pairs of thin pajamas and a cotton sweater, and wrapping ourselves in our blanket.
[01:25:22] For the first two years, we had no socks, so our feet never got warm in the winter.
[01:25:32] The POW experience produced severe mental and emotional stress.
[01:25:36] Hour after hour, we found ourselves battling an army of oppressive feelings.
[01:25:41] From fear about what might happen to us, to anger at our captors for the way they treated us to disappointment for being shot down, to guilt for leaving our families in the lurch and in the dark.
[01:25:51] Maintaining a positive mental outlook was crucial to survival.
[01:25:55] Military leaders expect life to be difficult, yet they tend to be optimistic about their ability to succeed.
[01:26:02] They are trained to make the best of the situation by solving problems instead of stewing about them, and they place a high value on cohesive teamwork.
[01:26:11] Fortunately, that's the kind of leadership we had in Hanoi.
[01:26:14] A few of our buddies who had more pessimistic temperaments occasionally needed extra measures of encouragement from the rest of us.
[01:26:22] In return, they frequently contributed a healthy dose of realism that balanced our optimism with objectivity and discipline.
[01:26:30] Vice Admiral James Bond Stockdale insightfully captured the importance of this dynamic tension in what Jim Collins called the Stockdale Paradox.
[01:26:41] You must never confuse faith that you will prevail in the end, which you can never afford to lose with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.
[01:26:59] Yeah, that's just a critical way of thinking, right? Having the positive mindset that we can overcome whatever this challenge is, but not being Pollyanna and saying, oh yeah, we'll be fine.
[01:27:15] No, there's going to be struggles and we have to face our reality for what it is.
[01:27:20] Yeah, I think so. It was very, very important.
[01:27:23] You know, I remember, I was shot down November 67. In early 68, I said, you know, there's going to be an Olympics in Mexico City this summer.
[01:27:35] We'll be home because I knew that President Johnson really would have to do something with the war to get reelected.
[01:27:42] That was my thinking. I didn't know it, but that was my thinking.
[01:27:45] I said they will end this war and we'll be home by the summer. I'm going to go to Mexico City and go to the Olympics.
[01:27:51] Well, July comes and I moved to Sante and I'm still there.
[01:27:57] And they said, well, I've made it seven months. I can make it for another year.
[01:28:03] Well, that was one more year. The summer of 69. I said, I can make it two more years, but it was really three, three and a half.
[01:28:13] So, you know, the POWs, it became our way of life.
[01:28:21] And the fact that we had great leadership, the fact that we did get communication, we communicated covertly,
[01:28:30] but we were able to fight as a team, was a common enemy, and to care about each other and look after each other,
[01:28:37] we would risk our lives to get to somebody and say, man, we're proud of you. Hang in there. We're leaving without you.
[01:28:44] So it was just the leadership, the teamwork and the commitment of our leaders that they got tortured all the time.
[01:28:56] And they would do things much worse than we were doing, actually, but they would bounce right back and come back because they did the best they could.
[01:29:04] And they bounced back and they put out good policies and they lived by them.
[01:29:10] It was an amazing experience. That's why I wrote that book, because I think it's just the principles that we learned and lived by there are good everywhere, you know?
[01:29:22] Yeah. No doubt about it.
[01:29:24] And here's the thing about it. You couldn't hide, you couldn't pretend because somebody was going to be watching you 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.
[01:29:37] There was no way you could hide anything, so you just confessed it all up front.
[01:29:43] And I think there's a pride piece in confessing, coming back to the cell and saying, I did feel like that three-page biography, but I didn't tell them anything honest, nothing real, no true facts except for my dad's name.
[01:30:03] But it was still painful at times. But I think we realized that that was a way of life.
[01:30:11] Yeah, there's you capture some of that in here.
[01:30:15] You say, when you are at the mercy of an enemy who has the power to force you to do things against your will, the psychological impact can be unimaginably depressing and debilitating.
[01:30:24] His goal is to break you and you must constantly fight to maintain your self-respect and optimism.
[01:30:29] Most of us did this in two primary ways.
[01:30:31] First, we fought to maintain our belief in ourselves and our competency by resisting the enemy and exercising our autonomy at every opportunity.
[01:30:38] In order to demonstrate that our lives still had worth and we were not just helpless, we had to find ways to get our licks in, often using tricks and subtle acts of rebellions as weapons.
[01:30:47] Subtle acts of rebellions as weapons.
[01:30:49] Every time a POW outsmarted the V, no matter how trivial the incident, the other POWs were encouraged and emboldened.
[01:30:59] And I really like that idea, you know, in the modern era of working out, of lifting weights and doing workouts.
[01:31:09] They have something they call scalable workouts, meaning, oh, we're going to do a weightlifting exercise.
[01:31:16] If we're going to deadlift and I can deadlift 300 and you can deadlift 500, we both do the workout, but I'm just lifting less weight than you.
[01:31:24] But we're still both going to go and do our best.
[01:31:27] And I wrote down here a note that said scaled victories because anything that you could do to just get a shot at the V was like a victory that you all could celebrate.
[01:31:38] And that's so good for morale.
[01:31:40] And the fact that you've got all kinds of jokes in here, you guys would fill out information and it would be the Lieutenant Clark Kent was the person you talk about.
[01:31:52] Just all these like jokes that you that you would play or every time someone would sneeze or there's a guy that would sneeze that would sneeze.
[01:32:00] You know, every one of his sneeze would be her shit.
[01:32:03] Yeah, you know, everyone would hear it.
[01:32:05] All you guys would hear it.
[01:32:06] There's a guy that had to talk about the talk when they talk about Ho Chi Minh, they call him horseshit.
[01:32:12] You know, so Lieutenant Paul Galante.
[01:32:16] You know, he's he's in this he's getting forced to take a picture a propaganda picture.
[01:32:22] And in the picture, you can see he's he's got his middle fingers up on both hands.
[01:32:27] And I've got this at some point in my life, I'm going to get all these well, certain black and white photos that mean a lot to me hung up.
[01:32:37] And that's one of those photos I'm going to put up there is just you can see him.
[01:32:41] It says neat and clean.
[01:32:43] I don't know why they have that word up there, but they have neat and clean above him on the wall.
[01:32:48] And he's sitting there and he's having his photograph taken and you look at his hands and he's flipping off the camera.
[01:32:55] Both fingers and those little victories, little scaled victories that you guys had to to keep the positive attitude, even when things are horrible.
[01:33:09] Yeah, you have to you have to find a way to fight back and keep doing fighting back in that way gave us some victories and made us feel like well, you know, they may be in control, but we're still controlled some things.
[01:33:24] And that they've made everybody feel good.
[01:33:28] It made the individual feel good and it just became a way of life.
[01:33:32] We're going to look for ways to make them look bad and us look good.
[01:33:36] You know, they're the enemy.
[01:33:38] You were able to do it a lot.
[01:33:41] You know, in the book, after you talk about that, that torture that you went through for the document, you go in there and you talk about John McCain.
[01:33:53] And, you know, just powerful story about John McCain.
[01:33:58] And at one point, you know, they're trying to get him, you know, his dad's an admiral, they're trying to use him as a propaganda piece.
[01:34:04] They're torturing him, but not only they're torturing him, what even might be more effective is they're saying, hey, you can go home early.
[01:34:11] They're saying, hey, you should go home.
[01:34:13] They tell him that the president's telling him to go home.
[01:34:16] They're just trying to get him to break ranks.
[01:34:19] Right.
[01:34:20] And at one point he he's like answering as loud as he can so that everyone can hear.
[01:34:29] He's saying, I'm not going home.
[01:34:31] I'm not going home.
[01:34:32] It's tilting to my turn.
[01:34:34] How impactful was that for you guys to hear?
[01:34:36] Well, it was huge because, you know, when to think about going home when you're a POW, I mean, that's a hard place to be put in.
[01:34:45] You know, he's wife and kids back home.
[01:34:48] His father was an admiral.
[01:34:50] He had been had broke arm.
[01:34:52] Both arms were broken when he was captured when he jumped out of the airplane.
[01:34:55] The injury from the ejection was so bad.
[01:34:58] He couldn't even feed himself, so he had been through a lot of suffering.
[01:35:02] But for him to yell out, you know, it was a it was a double whammy because in one way he's saying to the guys, I'm with you guys.
[01:35:13] And the other way he was saying to the enemy, I ain't going to do what you want me to do.
[01:35:19] So it was a double whammy and it was very powerful, very powerful.
[01:35:23] And, you know, he was always kind of a quick thinker to make trouble.
[01:35:28] That was part of his reputation.
[01:35:30] Doesn't he like last at the Naval Academy in his class or something like this?
[01:35:33] And I was reading his story.
[01:35:35] It's being written right now, his first marriage about that story and all.
[01:35:39] And he was always kind of a wild and woolly guy, you know.
[01:35:43] So he played that role there.
[01:35:45] He was courageous but also willing to take some risk.
[01:35:50] Yeah, there's something about the guys that are going to go fight in war.
[01:35:56] And there's a decent chance that if you want to dedicate your life to going and fighting wars, there's a decent chance you might not be the best follower of rules.
[01:36:08] You know, that's just the way it is.
[01:36:10] You might be a little bit, have a tendency, you know, I talk about the SEAL teams, like there's a, there's like a criminal element to your brain for a lot of guys.
[01:36:19] And the SEAL teams just say, hey, what do you want to do?
[01:36:22] What do you want to do when you grow up?
[01:36:23] I want to go and shoot machine guns at people.
[01:36:26] That's not a normal thing to be thinking.
[01:36:28] So you got these guys, you got, you know, it's like a good attack dog, right?
[01:36:32] A good attack dog you don't want as a family dog, right?
[01:36:35] You don't want to attack dog in your house.
[01:36:38] You want them on the battlefield, but you don't want them in your house.
[01:36:41] So you don't want them in your neighborhood.
[01:36:43] You can have them really, really well trained.
[01:36:46] Then you can have one in your house, maybe, but you're still going to watch it.
[01:36:49] So, you know, if you get a guy like McCain, who's the last in his class at the Naval Academy and, you know, has a reputation for kind of causing problems, that's exactly the kind of guy you want in these cases.
[01:37:03] Yeah.
[01:37:04] It was, we needed all different kinds of people there, but we were all similar in a lot of ways because you can't go through flight school, you know, physically, mentally, go through all the, you know,
[01:37:15] go through all the requirements of flight school, go through the training and then become a fighter pilot without having something similar to the other people.
[01:37:25] In fact, there's a book I have, I brought with me today.
[01:37:30] I wish I showed you that, but there are five categories of similarities between fighter pilots.
[01:37:37] And one of them is that they are, they're very aggressive and risk takers, but they're also affiliative.
[01:37:43] They like to be around people so they can tell their war stories to, you know.
[01:37:48] And so it made a good team, the fact that we were team players, but we were also capable of operating on our own and being confident about going and executing a mission.
[01:38:01] I think that was consistent.
[01:38:04] Our guys were willing to take risk and yet they wanted to be together and take care of each other.
[01:38:10] It didn't, it wasn't okay to be not concerned about your teammates.
[01:38:15] Yeah, I know it's, when people ask me what makes a good seal, it's a very easy answer to give.
[01:38:21] It's the one that's going to take care of his team and put the team ahead of himself.
[01:38:25] That's a good seal.
[01:38:28] You give a really crazy and horrific description of, who is it?
[01:38:37] Reisner, Lieutenant Colonel Robbie Reisner.
[01:38:41] And he had like a picture, a picture of his family or something and they, the V wanted it to use it for propaganda.
[01:38:50] He ripped it up and threw it in the bottom of the, of the, of the shit can that you had in the cell.
[01:38:57] And so they are, they want to get this picture.
[01:39:01] So they torture him.
[01:39:02] Here you go.
[01:39:03] They offered to force him to produce the photos that guards severely beat Robbie and put him through rope torture.
[01:39:08] The ropes or pretzels, as it was sometimes called, was a terrifying and brutal method for breaking POWs.
[01:39:14] After the prisoners legs were tied together, his arms were laced tightly behind his back until the elbows touched and the shoulders were virtually pulled out of joint.
[01:39:22] Then the torture would push the bound arms up and over the head while applying pressure with a knee to the victim's back.
[01:39:29] During torture, the circulation is cut off and the limbs go to sleep, but the joint pain continues to increase as the ligaments and muscles tear.
[01:39:37] When the ropes are finally removed, circulation surges back into the dead limbs causing excruciating pain.
[01:39:43] When the V eventually learned what Reisner had done with the photos, they furiously inflicted more torture upon Robbie until he agreed to sign a confession and an apology for committing, quote, grave crimes.
[01:39:57] Under such severe torture, no POW could resist signing these four statements.
[01:40:02] We took some comfort in the fact that they invariably sounded phony because they were dictated by the V using awkward sentence structure and expressions that no American would use.
[01:40:12] Sometimes they were so ridiculous that they made the V look foolish.
[01:40:15] After torture, the guards boarded up the window in Reisner's cell, making it so dark that he couldn't see the walls.
[01:40:22] Robbie had never been afraid of the dark, but he immediately began to have panic attacks.
[01:40:26] In later describing this episode, he said,
[01:40:45] Reisner's only relief was to keep moving and praying.
[01:40:48] He would walk around his cell, often covering as many as 20 miles a day, and do push-ups and sit-ups until he was exhausted enough to fall asleep.
[01:40:55] If he awakened during the night, he had to resume exercising until he was again exhausted enough to sleep.
[01:41:01] It was a maddening existence.
[01:41:03] At times he wanted to scream, but since that would bring more torture, he would hide under his mosquito net, stuff something in his mouth, wrap his blanket around his head, and just holler until the anxiety eased.
[01:41:17] Often he had to talk himself into making it through one more minute and then one more minute.
[01:41:22] As he put it, quote, I literally lived one minute at a time.
[01:41:27] After ten months of darkness, the night finally passed.
[01:41:32] In June 1968, the V removed Robbie into the Golden Nugget section of Little Vegas.
[01:41:39] From our cell about 40 feet away, we heard him moaning and screaming in nightmares throughout the first night.
[01:41:45] The next day when Robbie's shutters were opened, I saw his tired but smiling face for the first time.
[01:41:52] During siesta, while the guards were generally less alert, Reisner and I made contact.
[01:41:57] Over the next few days, he shared his story in basic guidance by writing with his index finger on his open palm one letter of the alphabet at a time.
[01:42:05] It was clear that he had a lot of fight left in him.
[01:42:09] His courage served as an inspiration for the rest of us in the months and years ahead.
[01:42:19] I mean, solitary confinement is one thing, but solitary confinement in complete darkness for ten months.
[01:42:27] Three hundred days.
[01:42:30] And the first time you see him, he's got a smile on his face.
[01:42:34] He looked like an old, old man. He was forty-four or so by that time, but he looked in his sixties.
[01:42:42] He was so wrinkled and pitiful looking, but he smiled and I could tell he was exercising.
[01:42:50] And it was just amazing, you know. He was positive.
[01:42:56] You know, I use, when I'm speaking, I use three of our senior leaders, Reisner, Stockdale and Denton as an example.
[01:43:05] And they were all different personalities. Stockdale was a very introverted, results mission focused guy, stoic.
[01:43:13] Denton was a very outgoing politician kind of guy.
[01:43:17] And Reisner had some of both.
[01:43:20] He was, you know, kind of a mixture of that 20% of the population had some of both.
[01:43:26] But Reisner was just an incredible guy.
[01:43:29] He was so honest and he was the senior ranking officer there, except for when we had some three colonels captured in late 1967,
[01:43:39] but they kept them isolated from us.
[01:43:42] So Reisner was the acting commander of all.
[01:43:45] Denton was, I mean, Stockdale was a senior naval officer.
[01:43:49] But these three guys, they supported each other and they just provided a great example.
[01:43:56] Reisner had incredible ability to bounce back and be positive and do the shameful things he did,
[01:44:05] like take all that torture and then write that confession or whatever it was and then bounce back again.
[01:44:13] And part of it, you know, when you talked about this, taking ownership when you do something
[01:44:22] and the fact that you say, hey, look, this is what I went through and this is what I did.
[01:44:26] And the fact that everyone just kind of was honest with each other.
[01:44:29] You know, I've always told people when you take ownership of something, it's like overcoming an obstacle.
[01:44:35] But once you get on the other side, you feel so much better.
[01:44:37] You know, you get caught in a lie.
[01:44:39] You're making something up.
[01:44:40] You're not telling your parents the truth.
[01:44:42] You're not telling your team the truth about what's going on.
[01:44:44] You feel that heavy burden.
[01:44:47] And the minute you say, hey, listen, everybody, I got to talk to you.
[01:44:49] The plan that I came up with, it's not working and we need to change it.
[01:44:52] Like, it's so liberating to do that.
[01:44:55] And, you know, I often talk about, you know, if you want to get through some trauma that you've been through,
[01:45:02] you got to own it and say, hey, this is what I did.
[01:45:05] Here's what I think I should have done, you know, when you're in combat, things happen in combat.
[01:45:09] You know, a lot of veterans suffer from this.
[01:45:12] You're in combat, things don't go the way you want them to go.
[01:45:15] And you look at it and say, hey, this is what I think I could have done better.
[01:45:19] I should have made this move.
[01:45:21] I should have moved left instead of right or right instead of left or whatever the case may be.
[01:45:24] That, I think, helps you get through these things and it seems like that helps so many people in the camp,
[01:45:32] both when it's happening, right after it happens, and then, you know, I'm sure we'll talk about it,
[01:45:37] the way that you all came back.
[01:45:39] I talked about it with Charlie Plum and William Reader as well.
[01:45:43] Psychologically, for the absolute hell you all had lived through, psychologically, you were actually,
[01:45:51] you actually were, did great in comparison.
[01:45:56] And I think a lot of that, in my assessment as I look at it now, had to do with the fact that you all took ownership of what you did.
[01:46:03] You took ownership of your limitations, right?
[01:46:06] Hey, I can only take so much of this and I signed that paper.
[01:46:09] You know, I think it really did help us to be okay with ourselves.
[01:46:17] It gave us actually more confidence in the long run of dealing with things.
[01:46:22] And the other thing that happened was the fact that we lived together, you couldn't hide things, you know.
[01:46:28] People are going to see you.
[01:46:31] You can, it's going to come out.
[01:46:34] And so we knew that and so therefore it just, we lived totally transparently, completely transparently with each other.
[01:46:43] And so it was just, that made us really so much stronger and healthier.
[01:46:49] It increased our teamwork and our trust for each other because if something went bad, we knew we'd find out right away.
[01:46:56] And of course then being locked up like that, and we could talk about this later, but I want to make sure to mention it now,
[01:47:05] is that because of what the wives and families did back home, they got our torture stopped in late 69 and early 70.
[01:47:14] It changed the policy of the U.S. government, changed the policy of the communist government.
[01:47:18] And so everybody in the world was putting pressure on them about our treatment.
[01:47:22] And so when Ho Chi Minh died in September 69, as soon as they quit celebrating his funeral and the new leaders came in,
[01:47:31] they started rearranging the treatment.
[01:47:35] And so the last three years we were there, it was more live and let live.
[01:47:41] And we had time to decompress and get over our trauma with people who had been through worse than we had.
[01:47:49] So I'm feeling bad about what I went through, but you've been here two years longer and you were tortured with the ropes three times,
[01:47:56] and I didn't go through the ropes.
[01:47:59] And now I can't feel bad about what has happened to me.
[01:48:02] I've got to feel bad about what happened to you.
[01:48:04] And we got so much healthier that POW PTSD is like 4%.
[01:48:12] POW PTSD is much lower than combat veterans because we had people to talk through who had been through worse than we had for years,
[01:48:24] locked up with them 24 hours a day.
[01:48:27] Say we didn't just get on the airplane and come home and your buddies died over here today and tomorrow you fly back home and you're having dinner with your family.
[01:48:35] And you're thinking about the trauma that we had a totally different situation.
[01:48:41] So we came home very, very healthy and because of that and because of many other things we did while we were there.
[01:48:50] You talk about Reisner here.
[01:48:53] You say Reisner's first camp, first in his camp SRO did not last long.
[01:48:58] The V found a written note that contained his guidance and connected it back to him, determined to squelch his leadership in the camps.
[01:49:03] They pulled Reisner out of the zoo camp in Hanoi and returned him to Heartbreak Hotel in the Hanoi Hilton and began extensive torture to break him.
[01:49:11] Because the process for selecting SRO leaders was clearly established,
[01:49:15] Commander Jerry Denton, the next ranking officer at the zoo immediately stepped into the line of fire.
[01:49:20] As part of the dramatic change in treatment in the fall of 1965, the V were now torturing men to extract propaganda statements.
[01:49:28] Denton reaffirmed Reisner's policy and added no writing, no taping.
[01:49:33] Take torture until you're in danger of losing mental faculties and then give a phony story.
[01:49:39] Die before giving classified information.
[01:49:42] If broken, don't despair.
[01:49:44] Bounce back as soon as you can to the hard line.
[01:49:47] Remember, unity above self.
[01:49:50] Denton's simple motto of unity above self provided a strong cultural bond for all of us.
[01:49:56] Even when we were isolated or shuffled from one camp to another.
[01:49:59] When Denton's strong leadership became evident to the V, they ushered him off to the torture chamber, followed by solitary confinement.
[01:50:06] Fortunately, James Bond came to the rescue.
[01:50:09] James Bond's Stockdale, that is.
[01:50:12] Bouncing back from one of his extended periods of abuse and solitary confinement,
[01:50:16] he took command from his cell in Little Vegas, Thunderbird cell block in the spring of 1967.
[01:50:22] One of his first tasks was to update the policies previously disseminated by Reisner and Denton using the clever acronym, back us.
[01:50:33] And so here you go through the acronym, back us.
[01:50:37] B, bowing.
[01:50:38] Resist bowing in public in front of outsiders.
[01:50:41] Make the V use force.
[01:50:43] And this is because the Vietnamese, that was a show of respect.
[01:50:46] So we're not doing it.
[01:50:47] Air.
[01:50:48] A, air.
[01:50:49] Stay off the air.
[01:50:50] Make no recordings for radio and no tapes.
[01:50:54] C, crimes.
[01:50:55] Don't admit to any crimes.
[01:50:57] K, kiss.
[01:50:58] Don't kiss the enemy goodbye.
[01:51:01] If POWs were released, Stockdale did not want them to be overly generous in their comments on the way out.
[01:51:06] And the last is, is us.
[01:51:09] Unity over self.
[01:51:11] Stay united.
[01:51:12] Take care of each other.
[01:51:14] The big three, Reisner, Stockdale and Denton established the code of conduct as the goal while recognizing that not even the toughest men had been able to live up to a purely literal interpretation.
[01:51:26] Over time, a somewhat loose, tight culture evolved.
[01:51:29] It provided strong, clear guidelines yet allowed each cell SRO and even each individual to exercise some judgment in dealing with various situations.
[01:51:41] These goals and expectations empowered a common cultural mindset that allowed us to operate with unity across half a dozen camps over a period of several years, whether we were in solitary confinement or locked in large cells.
[01:51:57] When there was disagreement about local interpretation, we had discussions that sometimes turned into passionate arguments before decisions were made.
[01:52:04] When necessary, SROs changed or adapted policies as a result of lessons learned.
[01:52:11] So this is just a, you know, I, one of the laws of combat that Dave and I talk about a lot.
[01:52:17] It's an extreme owners.
[01:52:18] It's all we talk about all the time is decentralized command and this, this decentralized command where this solid guidance came out and it allowed everybody in prison camps in 12 different camps.
[01:52:31] The frontline person may not communicate with anybody for extended periods of time, but they understand what the goal is and they can all move in the right direction towards that strategic goal.
[01:52:41] And they even know there's flexibility in that, in the way that they get there.
[01:52:44] This is a very powerful lesson here.
[01:52:46] Yeah, it is.
[01:52:48] You know, the new chief of staff of the Air Force is pushing that right now is to set the boundaries, the big picture boundaries and let people at the lower levels operate.
[01:52:58] And I think he sees that, but yes, it was powerful for us because communication was hard.
[01:53:05] We were separated.
[01:53:06] We were moved different places, different camps.
[01:53:08] They were always, they'd pull out some people in one camp and move them to another camp and for various, you know, anytime you have a bureaucracy, they make decisions up there.
[01:53:17] The communists were the same.
[01:53:19] We can never could figure out some of their moves.
[01:53:22] But the reality was that we understood what our mission was, what our goals were, and what the, the, the few boundaries and rules that we needed.
[01:53:34] And within that, we're going to go for it.
[01:53:37] Yeah, good example that is you talking here about receiving care packages, which you were occasionally allowed to receive these care packages.
[01:53:45] Was that from your families are sending in care?
[01:53:47] Yeah, they weren't care.
[01:53:48] They were like packages from family.
[01:53:50] So your first one that you get, you know, you had to apply this, these principles, because in it, you had to make you in order to get the package.
[01:54:01] And this package is like, I mean, heaven sent for all practical purposes.
[01:54:07] It could have food, it could have clothes, it could have, I mean, just not to mention communication from your loved ones.
[01:54:12] And yet they wanted you to sign something, some kind of confession.
[01:54:17] It was basically a paper, a little one pager that said in accordance with their lenient humane policy.
[01:54:26] And that was too much for you too much.
[01:54:28] And so you decided don't don't want the package.
[01:54:31] And the next time another package came and they actually removed that statement.
[01:54:36] No more statements.
[01:54:37] Never had one again.
[01:54:39] And you got you took your package.
[01:54:41] Yep.
[01:54:42] What was in the package?
[01:54:44] Let's see, there was some coffee and there was some candy and there was some socks.
[01:54:51] Nice.
[01:54:52] That's what I wanted.
[01:54:53] Some socks, maybe a piece of fruit cake.
[01:54:56] Just little things like that.
[01:54:58] I was on deployment and, you know, my wife, my wife's at home with three kids.
[01:55:05] They're all under the age of like six.
[01:55:07] So it's like six, four and two.
[01:55:09] I mean, she's just overwhelmed.
[01:55:11] And so she's not worried about me.
[01:55:13] Like she got bigger.
[01:55:14] They got bigger problems to solve on a daily basis.
[01:55:16] And, you know, guys in the platoons are getting their packages from their wives and from their
[01:55:21] parents and stuff, you know, big, nice, beautiful packages.
[01:55:24] Finally, like three months into deployment, I get a package from my wife.
[01:55:30] It's got, I like honey roasted peanuts.
[01:55:33] And so there's a little can of honey roasted peanuts, but they'd already been opened.
[01:55:40] They had half eaten and they were taped back shut.
[01:55:43] And I was like, God bless her.
[01:55:44] She's doing the best she can.
[01:55:46] You know, she's one of the kids got into it or whatever.
[01:55:49] So she said, I'll throw some tape on it.
[01:55:51] We'll be all right.
[01:55:53] Yeah.
[01:55:54] You got to give them credit.
[01:55:56] Oh, a hundred percent.
[01:55:57] Yeah.
[01:55:58] Like I said, I, she was dealing with three little kids and not, not worried about, definitely
[01:56:04] not worried about me.
[01:56:07] We talked a little bit about communication and the importance of communication and the
[01:56:14] communication.
[01:56:15] I mean, we're, we're, we're sitting here talking about it, you know, about you, they're putting
[01:56:19] out word and, and how the information you knew this person and respected this person and
[01:56:24] you got guidance and all these things are happening.
[01:56:26] This is all happening in the most restrictive imaginable communication environment.
[01:56:33] And so I'm going to go to the book here.
[01:56:35] It would be safe to say that in the early, early years and small cells, 50% of our waking
[01:56:41] hours were spent in covert communications.
[01:56:44] Later in larger cells, fewer people were needed.
[01:56:47] And with our newer technologies and a less threatening environment, communications were
[01:56:51] much more efficient.
[01:56:52] Over the years, we use tap code, hand code, flash code, Morris code, cough, hack, spit
[01:56:59] code, sweeping code, voices through the walls, notes over the walls, notes under the door,
[01:57:04] notes under the doors and more because they knew it was our primary tool for resistance,
[01:57:09] the V tried hard to stop us, but they never could because of our poor treatment.
[01:57:17] Now I'm going to fast forward a little bit.
[01:57:19] So you had all these different methodologies for communicating.
[01:57:23] And the fact that you, you, you, you mentioned this in here.
[01:57:27] You got this tap code, the, the matrix, the five, five, five by five matrix, which is a
[01:57:33] way of communicating.
[01:57:35] And when I was a young seal, I was a radio man and we had to learn Morris code.
[01:57:41] And I was probably pretty close to the point where I could kind of do it without thinking
[01:57:48] about it, but I never quite got there.
[01:57:51] But you know, you're talking in the book at, at some point you could just do it.
[01:57:55] I mean, it was like, without thinking the letter A was just, you could immediately just get
[01:57:59] it done.
[01:58:00] And there's a whole group of you that could, that could communicate on this high level
[01:58:04] with these tap codes.
[01:58:05] And that's how all this information was passed.
[01:58:08] It's just an incredible story.
[01:58:10] And that tap code tapping through to somebody on the other side of the wall, especially in
[01:58:16] the early years where there were a couple of guys in solitary confinement and had gone
[01:58:20] through torsional, it was like, it was the most incredible thing to keep them motivated,
[01:58:28] inspired, connected, emotionally, mentally going.
[01:58:34] And you know, in fact, one guy was in solitary confinement and he wanted to know about, he
[01:58:43] wanted, he wanted to know about Shakespeare.
[01:58:46] So some guys next to him knew of some Shakespeare stuff.
[01:58:49] And, and they got them all the through, gave them all they could remember.
[01:58:54] And then they just made it up because they didn't want to tell him.
[01:58:57] We don't know anymore.
[01:58:58] So whatever it was, we were going to share it and make it interesting.
[01:59:04] Guys would share all sorts of information.
[01:59:09] I remember I, at times, you know, you, you're in a cell with four or five guys, like I was
[01:59:15] out at Sante.
[01:59:16] And so you know them, you've been locked up with them for a while.
[01:59:19] And so you get off on your own project.
[01:59:22] So one time I farmed for two months and there was a farmer from Kansas living next door,
[01:59:30] Leroy Stutz.
[01:59:32] And so I got, whenever I needed a question answered about farming, I wasn't quite sure
[01:59:37] about it.
[01:59:38] I'd ask, through the wall, I would ask Leroy and he would tell me what a, how many feet
[01:59:43] of barb wire went a roll of barb wire.
[01:59:46] Okay.
[01:59:47] And how much a roll of barb wire normally costs.
[01:59:50] And I'd go back and calculate.
[01:59:52] So I was fencing in 120 acres of farm there that day.
[01:59:56] So you go through doing all these kind of things.
[02:00:00] And one time, another time I was going to be a lawyer when I went home.
[02:00:03] I was just decided, okay, what if I wanted to do something different?
[02:00:07] I'd be a lawyer.
[02:00:08] And it took me a month.
[02:00:09] And I mean, I would think for this for hours every day.
[02:00:12] So I had to find out more about different kinds of laws.
[02:00:15] So I'd ask the guy's question.
[02:00:17] I decided I'd be a tax lawyer and I go to the University of Virginia.
[02:00:23] And all this was done through tap.
[02:00:25] But some of this was going back, you know, I was finding a lot, so much with tap code.
[02:00:28] And then we wrote up the blankets and we could talk to it because a blanket would be a muffler,
[02:00:33] like a little donut or like a horse collar.
[02:00:36] Put your face in it real tight and you could talk real loud and they couldn't hear you out there.
[02:00:40] And the guy on the other side could hear you, everything you said.
[02:00:44] And I would ask questions that way so I could get information to, you know, work on my project.
[02:00:53] Speaking of the tap code, you say, because of poor treatment, Smitty Harris and Fred Flam,
[02:00:59] first lieutenant USAF, were fighting losing battles with the bilitating gastrointestinal disease.
[02:01:05] Through a crack in our door, we watched Smitty and Fred stagger across the courtyard to the bath house.
[02:01:10] Their emaciated bodies reminiscent of survivors of Auschwitz and Baton.
[02:01:15] Smitty's POW weight had dwindled from 130 pounds to about 90.
[02:01:19] Fred had dropped from 140 down to about 110.
[02:01:24] Sante SRO Lieutenant Commander Render Creighton realized it would take drastic action to save the lives of these men.
[02:01:31] Using the tap code, he sent an urgent message that was transmitted across the entire compound.
[02:01:36] Tell every English-speaking Vietnamese you meet, that the camp commander must do something for Harris and Flam,
[02:01:42] or his superiors in Hanoi are going to be very upset with him about what is going to happen in this camp.
[02:01:51] By threatening to make trouble, we were virtually inviting reprisal.
[02:01:55] This ploy was especially risky because it revealed that we had a cohesive team with good communications.
[02:02:01] Once the enemy realized we were organized as a military unit with a functioning operational leader, they just might try to break us.
[02:02:09] Nevertheless, the seriousness of the situation justified the risk.
[02:02:13] The next day, POWs across the camp delivered the bold, agreed-upon message in rapid fire succession.
[02:02:18] If only one or two guards had received the message, the V would have downplayed it.
[02:02:22] But our overcommunication resounded across the camp like a string of firecrackers that couldn't be ignored.
[02:02:28] Evidently, the V Camp Commander, a fearful footer's job, was convinced we had the will and capability to carry out our threat.
[02:02:35] Three days after the message hit, Smitty and Fred were taken to a field hospital a few miles away and given fluoroscope.
[02:02:42] This was followed by two shots twice daily that were apparently vitamins and antibiotics.
[02:02:46] Their improvement was slow, but steady.
[02:02:48] A year later, they were back to their normal POW weight.
[02:02:51] It's superbly fitting that the code that was instrumental in saving Smitty and Harris's life, because Smitty was the man who saved all of us by bringing the TAP code to the POW camps.
[02:03:04] In fact, he was known to us as the Code Bearer.
[02:03:07] When Smitty was in survival school, he alone stayed after class one day to learn about the code used by POWs in World War II.
[02:03:15] Then as one of the first POWs in the war, he passed this precious gift onto his fellow prisoners.
[02:03:21] Now, four years later, the code had come full circle and saved his life.
[02:03:28] Amazing.
[02:03:29] And the first time you got like the little bit of the code someone's telling you through your window, but you didn't get the missing letter.
[02:03:37] The missing letter, that C and K, there's no K.
[02:03:39] It's just five by five, 25 letters in the alphabet you remove K.
[02:03:43] Yeah.
[02:03:45] You know, Smitty's 93.
[02:03:47] He'll be 94 next April.
[02:03:49] He was a POW for almost eight years.
[02:03:51] I think he was number five or six.
[02:03:54] And his wife had two little girls, five and three, I think, and she was six months pregnant with their son.
[02:04:01] But incredible guy.
[02:04:03] I lived with Smitty for a couple of years and in the same camp with him for probably close to five years.
[02:04:10] But we stayed real close friends and he has a book out, Tap Code, that came out three years ago.
[02:04:15] And I wrote the foreword to it to talk about Smitty and what a great guy he was and what a great example he was for me.
[02:04:25] You mentioned the being at Sante for a while and that's how we originally got connected because I had Terry Butler on who is a Sante raider.
[02:04:36] And he's the one that connected with me with you.
[02:04:41] How, when the Sante raid happened, how did you guys hear about it?
[02:04:48] What did it do to you guys?
[02:04:49] What did you think about it?
[02:04:51] Well, we were, we had moved to this new show place camp because they wanted to show the world how well we're being treated.
[02:04:59] And we heard the bombs going off.
[02:05:00] There was a bomb attack to kind of distract attention.
[02:05:04] And some, we knew something was happening that night.
[02:05:07] And then the next day we could tell about the guards, the way they were acting and the turn keys and guards were like, uh, and then the next morning we moved back to Hanoi.
[02:05:17] They load this all up and they built this camp and put 205, four quadrants of about 50 each in one camp.
[02:05:26] We're in separate quadrants, but we're all in one location.
[02:05:30] So there's 205 of us there and they 48 hours, then 48 hours, they moved all of us back to Hanoi and put us into the cell, the large rooms cells where the Vietnamese had been back for the early years.
[02:05:44] We had never been in there.
[02:05:46] And so we went into these big cells and one of this 1800 square foot cell with 52 guys in there.
[02:05:54] No walls in there.
[02:05:55] Just 1800 open Bay barracks type thing.
[02:05:59] Concrete slab to sleep on, but back to Santé.
[02:06:02] Uh, and hearing it, hearing it, uh, that night we heard it from a show place camp.
[02:06:08] We didn't know what was happening.
[02:06:10] And then because they got scared and moved us back, we started listening and one of the guys, uh, heard on their propaganda, something about that Barry Goldwater had said that we could drop a.
[02:06:26] Men in downtown Hanoi or something like that, and they couldn't stop us or something.
[02:06:32] And that sounded strange.
[02:06:34] And then the next time we really found out was when some of the guys, uh, you shoot down told us.
[02:06:41] And that was a while later, maybe about a year later that we really found out for sure what had happened.
[02:06:47] How exalting was it to be in a room with 50 other people and have all these other people to interact with?
[02:06:54] Well, it was, uh, it was a celebration because we had, I mean, there were some hard parts to it, but they, the good things over overwhelmed the difficult parts because within a couple of weeks, the senior ranking officer looked around and found the one guy who had been a college instructor in the client in the group.
[02:07:15] He'd been recalled on active duty in 1962 and stayed in the Air Force and captain Tom story.
[02:07:22] He said, Tom, I'm putting you in charge of the education program. I want to make it happen.
[02:07:28] Tom found a piece of broken brick tile out in the yard, brought it in and went over on the concrete slab floor over in the corner and started writing down subjects that study math, German, French, Spanish, Russian art and had us go by and put a mark under the ones we want to study.
[02:07:47] So he took a survey and then he recruited teachers. And so within three or four weeks, we had Monday, Wednesday, Friday classes, Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday classes, three hours in the morning, two hours in the afternoon.
[02:08:01] We had toastmasters informal on Tuesday nights on one end of the room, formal on Thursday nights. And we had every kind of class you can think of.
[02:08:14] I was studying Spanish, French and German, teaching beginning French. I took differential calculus from a Naval Academy guy and we were writing problems over in the corner with that piece of broken brick tile and he was teaching me.
[02:08:31] So I mean, we got busy, man. We were so busy. You talk about Paul Galani. Paul Galani and I were in there together and we would speak Spanish, French and German for 10 minutes each.
[02:08:43] For four days a week. We got to the point where we were dreaming in foreign languages. I'd be speaking Spanish to somebody in a foreign language. I didn't have a conversation with them in my dream.
[02:09:00] So that's what our life became.
[02:09:04] Yeah, the amount of effort that you guys made in the section here, you say a number of officers developed a rigorous curriculum and volunteered to teach you the various components of the course.
[02:09:14] This was that you wanted to teach an officer candidate school for the three Air Force enlisted guys. So you guys put together a course of instruction for these enlisted Air Force guys.
[02:09:26] And you say this when the three men returned home, the US Congress approved the program and offered the candidates commissions as second lieutenants in the US Air Force.
[02:09:34] One was so close to retirement, he declined. The other two men accepted their commissions and enjoyed successful careers.
[02:09:41] Unbelievable. You go on to say the lack of books or outside resources did not limit our continuous learning in the POW camps.
[02:09:47] We relied on recall past education and there was a lack of clarity. When there was a lack of clarity on the subject, we tried to get a consensus of the best minds.
[02:09:56] Eventually, many areas were quantified into what we called Hanoi fact, meaning it was accepted as true until we were released and could verify the information.
[02:10:05] The in-house joke was that some men whose education had been slighted before capture and now proudly posed as experts had been totally educated by Hanoi fact.
[02:10:13] Fortunately, it turned out our facts were amazingly accurate. Our investment in developing and development has paid big dividends in a year since.
[02:10:21] I can't believe they took guys just so. Yep. Yeah, you guys learned. We're going to give you guys your commission. Incredible.
[02:10:27] Yep. And you know, similar in the same group, I think it was a group like them. If not the same group, there were four of them, four or five of them were married and about seven or eight of them were bachelors.
[02:10:41] And so the married guys did marriage counseling two days a week. They would teach a marriage course to the single guys.
[02:10:48] And one of the single guys said, well, some of what they said was true, but some of it was probably not the best in the world.
[02:10:55] But you know, they were listening. They were trying to learn about what it's like to be married when we go home.
[02:11:02] I want to go back to the code of conduct here again or to back to the book here. Talk about the code of conduct.
[02:11:08] You say, we found that the code of conduct had to be interpreted in light of specific circumstances.
[02:11:13] How long a person should resist under torture before completing a biography or agreeing to read the propaganda news into a tape recorder to be played over camp radio?
[02:11:22] Under what conditions should we try and escape? How much torture should someone take to avoid meeting with a peace delegation?
[02:11:29] These were not hypothetical issues that a detached executive made in a remote top floor corner office would address for implementation by the rank and file.
[02:11:39] In the POW camps, the decision makers knew they were likely to be the first to follow their own guidance.
[02:11:46] Reisner, Stockdale and Denton made it clear that we were to refuse to participate in propaganda broadcasts.
[02:11:53] But under extreme torture, it was impossible to totally resist. As we learn from the experience of several men who did not come home,
[02:12:00] at some point, mind, body and spirit break, causing loss of rational, coherent thought and the ability to effectively function.
[02:12:08] Therefore, Reisner further clarified this policy by adding that we should quote, take torture indefinitely,
[02:12:16] but stop short of losing life or limb or mental faculties by falling back to a second line of defense.
[02:12:24] Having been pushed beyond his endurance several times, he knew that sometimes temporary submission was the only way to preserve the ability to fight.
[02:12:33] Because some POWs were simply tougher mentally and physically than others, local RSOs had the freedom to interpret resistance policies to suit the circumstances.
[02:12:44] Major Larry Guarino, am I saying that right?
[02:12:47] Guarino.
[02:12:48] Guarino, who heroically stood up to some of the worst treatment during the darkest days of the zoo camp,
[02:12:53] demonstrated wise discernment about how to effectively balance accomplishment of mission and care for the men.
[02:13:00] He said there are wide differences in people.
[02:13:03] A very few men, like Jim Kassler, a major U.S. Air Force, have the stamina and courage to stick to a hard line during severe punishment and continue to hold out.
[02:13:13] Most men, although they want to do a good job, will gamely resist the cruelties, but not for very long.
[02:13:20] Although our leaders were often tortured first and most, they did not pretend to be macho John Wayne heroes.
[02:13:29] On the contrary, they openly shared the pain and despair of their brokenness,
[02:13:34] helping us understand the enemy's tactics and the realities of what was and what was not possible.
[02:13:41] It would have been disastrous for the mission and for their credibility had they been less than totally honest with us about their experiences in the torture chambers.
[02:13:50] Mutual accountability and transparency in the face of a cruel enemy bonded us together tightly.
[02:14:00] An analysis conducted after the war by headquarters U.S. Air Force reflects the sacrifices and commitment made to achieve the mission.
[02:14:07] Nine faithful warriors died before they could return with honor.
[02:14:12] We lost eight brave men due to extreme torture and deprivation in the earlier years and one died of typhoid fever.
[02:14:20] More than 95% of the POWs were tortured.
[02:14:24] Approximately 40% of POWs were in solitary confinement more than six months.
[02:14:29] 20% were in solitary for more than a year.
[02:14:32] 10% were in solitary for more than two years and several were in solitary more than four years.
[02:14:41] Considering the length of stay in the crowded conditions, our survival record was remarkable.
[02:14:47] Most of us made it back and our mental and emotional state exceeded the predictions of most of the mental health professionals advising the DOD.
[02:14:55] The overall determination and devotion of this group to our mission was impressive.
[02:15:03] Of the nearly 500 POWs in our network, fewer than 10 only 2% willingly cooperated with the enemy.
[02:15:13] And it's again from a leadership perspective, all this leadership was done tapping on walls and setting examples.
[02:15:22] It's just like it's from a leadership perspective is incredible story.
[02:15:27] Well, when you don't have a lot of news and no radio and no TV, you don't get a lot of news.
[02:15:33] And what you get is usually focused on what's happening, how we're resisting.
[02:15:40] And that becomes the headlines.
[02:15:44] And you know where you are.
[02:15:47] You know what's going to happen.
[02:15:49] And you've just got to be able to face up to it and walk that line one step at a time.
[02:15:56] I think that was, every day was an unknown and yet somehow we had to step out every day and be ready for whatever came our way and respond to it in a way that was honorable, that was courageous,
[02:16:14] that we would be willing to stand up to our boss and say, here's what I did and here's why I did it.
[02:16:21] And the amazing thing about this situation, I think one that made it so strong was that the bosses got tortured the most and they had to stand up and say, here's what I did and here's why and here's what happened.
[02:16:36] So the fact that our bosses were so vulnerable, they're very courageous and very tough, but they were vulnerable about sharing what they had been through and what they had done.
[02:16:48] It set an example and it created a culture that was very special.
[02:16:56] Speaking of leadership and you know, as I as we've gone through this book, this is a book about leadership and and a book about, you know, what the human being can come up against.
[02:17:10] But it's absolutely a leadership book.
[02:17:12] I've been, we'll get to some of the leadership a little bit later, but I did want to jump into this point on leadership right now.
[02:17:18] You say this leaders who balance the competing demands of results and relationships are able to push for the achievement of goals while eliciting the best from their people.
[02:17:28] It's as if they have two bank accounts, they make their deposit they make deposits in their results account by consistently accomplishing their goals and they build up capital in their relationship account by caring for their people as individuals of worth.
[02:17:43] In the first instance, they earn credibility with their superiors and in the second they earn loyalty from their followers.
[02:17:51] Occasionally leaders will need to make withdrawals from these bank accounts.
[02:17:55] For example, a leader who is being pressured by unrealistic expectations from above may need to draw on the credibility she's accumulated with her results bank account and say to her superiors, we need to adjust this timetable or burn out our people.
[02:18:10] At other times, she may have to make a withdrawal from the relationship bank account and say to her team, we'll have to work over the weekend to get this job done.
[02:18:18] With regard to balancing mission and people, Admiral Stockdale wisely said, a leader must remember that he is responsible for his charges.
[02:18:27] He must tend to his flock, not only cracking the whip, but washing their feet when they are in need of help.
[02:18:35] Balancing results and relationships is a major leadership challenge. Some leaders are naturally gifted with the head logic and not very good with the heart feelings. Others are the opposite.
[02:18:47] Only about 20% of the population has a natural ability with both.
[02:18:52] Even those with this tightrope walking capability often end up tilting toward a results oriented style because results are typically what get noticed and rewarded.
[02:19:02] If your leadership style is unbalanced, the good news is that you don't have to reinvent yourself.
[02:19:08] To gain better balance, you simply have to develop some of the skills you lack. Simply put, you may either need to toughen up or soften up.
[02:19:16] This may sound artificial, but with practice, your adapted behaviors will feel more comfortable.
[02:19:21] They will never become totally natural, however, so you'll have to consistently and intentionally work at keeping your balance.
[02:19:30] I make a living on that right there.
[02:19:34] I've coached CEOs. I coached a CEO who was a West Point graduate, Army Ranger, had a Harvard MBA, and when I told him, when I confronted him, so to speak, I said, you don't give any positive feedback to your team.
[02:19:49] He had a really good executive team. He said, well, that's just not me. I said, wait a minute, you know better than that.
[02:20:01] I said, your people, they're all different kinds and some of them need a lot more affirmation and feedback than others, but they all need to know that you believe in them, that you care about them, that you see how well they're doing.
[02:20:15] Well, we actually wrote him out a three-centus affirmation for one of the VPs on his team, and I had him stand in front of the mirror and practice smiling to the point that he felt, I said, I want you to go to the point you feel almost ridiculous smiling and energetic and enthusiastic when you say this.
[02:20:37] And he practiced and he did it, and his team performance really went up, but I've coached him for two months, and when I finished his, he said, the last day I was with him, he said, hey, can you stay five minutes after we finish today?
[02:20:53] I said, sure. He said, I got somebody who wants you to meet, so we finished. He jumps up, runs out in the hall, brings in a lady and introduces her as his wife, and she said, well, I just wanted to meet you and say thank you because we have one son, we have one child, one son who's 13 years old, and in the last two or three months, his relationship with our son has totally changed.
[02:21:19] He sits down and asks him questions and listens to him and smiles and encourages him. He said, it's just wonderful. Thank you.
[02:21:28] And I said, well, he did it. He courageously learned how to do things. Well, ten years later, I saw that CEO in a meeting in Atlanta, and I said, how are you doing?
[02:21:39] He said, fine, how's your son doing? Oh, he graduated from college, and he's working at the bank now and says he and I are going to run a half marathon together on Saturday. It just totally changed him.
[02:21:50] Here's a guy who was so results-oriented, he could not even think anything about feelings or relationships or what people's needs were, but once he started letting people know that he cared about them and believed in them, it totally changed his leadership.
[02:22:08] And now he's the CEO of another company, and they think he's the best CEO they ever had.
[02:22:14] Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome.
[02:22:18] And then Leif and I wrote another book, which is called the dichotomy of leadership and what the dichotomy of leadership is about is this. And there's all kinds of different dichotomies we talk about. The first chapter is about, hey, you've got these guys that you love more than anything else in the world, and you're going to send them out on missions that may get them killed.
[02:22:39] And how do you balance that? You got to balance that. And you got to have, you got to care about the men, but you've got to also accomplish the mission. Ultimately, if you don't take care of your men, you're not going to have anyone to execute the mission.
[02:22:51] So you have to prioritize taking care of your team, but you've got the same exact theory here. It was just awesome for me to read it in a different vocabulary, but the exact same message and holds true in any situation.
[02:23:06] And, you know, that chapter or that title, dichotomy of leadership was the last chapter in the book, Extreme Ownership. Because, you know, we said, hey, listen, you're going to be pulled in multiple different directions.
[02:23:18] You got to stay balanced as a leader. That's the thing you got to do. And there's a bunch of categories. You know, you could be a micromanager if you go too far in management.
[02:23:25] You could be too hands off. No one knows what's going on. So communicating. You communicate too much. You communicate too little. So you want to be balanced.
[02:23:33] But we wrote that as one chapter. But as we went out and continue to work with companies, the biggest problem companies have, the biggest problem leaders have would be finding that balance.
[02:23:43] And then like you say in here, you know, people have what they tend towards, right? Some people tend towards, I just need to take care of everyone and they take care of everyone to the point that they don't get anything done.
[02:23:54] Exactly.
[02:23:55] And you have people that tend towards, I'm just going to get the mission done and I don't care what happens. I don't care who's back, I step on to get there. So, uh...
[02:24:04] Yeah, I quoted your book Extreme Ownership a couple of times in my books too, by the way, because I saw your mindset said what I wanted to say and I said, let Jaco say it.
[02:24:16] Yeah, well, in the dichotomy of leadership, we pose all kinds of these opposing forces that you have as a leader. And the opposing force that you phrase very succinctly is results versus relationship.
[02:24:29] Those are two things that are pulling you in opposite directions.
[02:24:32] Mission and people.
[02:24:33] And you got to stay balanced.
[02:24:34] You know, I've been working in assessments of human behavior for 32 years and the one thing I know is that 40% of the population is wired toward results, mission, focus.
[02:24:47] And 40% are wired more towards people, patients, relationship, social focus. And 20% have some of both. But to be a great leader, you have to do both.
[02:25:00] So you're going to have to learn to adapt in certain situations to be either tougher or more affirming and kind.
[02:25:10] The thing that everybody needs to understand, and this goes to the POW, it goes to the fight a pilot world, it goes to everywhere, is that every human being wants to feel valued and important, worthy.
[02:25:24] And when you as a leader are able to let them know that you value them, that you appreciate them, that you believe they have a future, you believe in their future, and that you're going to help them develop, it totally changes their loyalty, their commitment.
[02:25:44] They're going to work harder. They don't want to let you down.
[02:25:48] But that's not easy for results, mission, focus, leaders. It's just not part of their natural mindset.
[02:25:55] You know, Richard Boyatsis, Dr. Richard Boyatsis, who was one of the co-authors of the big emotional intelligence book that came out in 2002 or three, I have a video, a two and a half minute video of him talking about the brain, the networks in the brain.
[02:26:13] And he said there's the task focus network and the social network, which is very similar to what we're talking about here, mission, people, results, relationship.
[02:26:23] And he said they can actually see with the MRIs of the brain that when a person is working a problem that the social network goes quiet and shuts down.
[02:26:34] And it's all focused on results, results, results, solving a problem.
[02:26:39] And he says, but the problem is you have to do both and you have to learn to switch.
[02:26:46] And he said in our schools, our business schools, our MBA programs, so much of the time it's spent on results, results, results, results.
[02:26:56] And they don't teach them much about learning to deal with people and let people know you care about them, that you appreciate them and that they're valuable, they're important.
[02:27:06] And you know there's another thing I've watched as a guy out in California who's a PhD psychologist and he talks about the monitoring of the child's brain, a baby 69 months old, an MRI of a baby 69 months old.
[02:27:25] When somebody smiles at them and cuddles them, their prefrontal cortex develops in a healthy way.
[02:27:33] And so the whole concept is that for a small child, unconditional love is the most positive thing and people that have had a lot, their prefrontal cortex develops in a more healthy way.
[02:27:46] They have less problems working with people and doing their job too.
[02:27:52] But every human being wants to be cared about.
[02:27:57] And I have a model now, it's called insecure-secure. And on the left side is insecure.
[02:28:06] And this model on the left side is insecure and the right side of this continuum is secure. Secure is confident and humble.
[02:28:15] Insecure has doubts, fears, shame, guilt, all these things that cause us to be insecure.
[02:28:22] And we all can be insecure in some places. So we slide back and forth on this model.
[02:28:28] But healthy people spend most of their time over on the secure side.
[02:28:33] And as a leader, my goal and your goal should be how can we help our people become more secure?
[02:28:40] Because the more secure they are, the more confident they're going to be and they're able to do things, but also they're going to be more humble and admit when they do it, don't do it.
[02:28:49] Okay? So how can you do that? You have to help them believe in themselves.
[02:28:55] What can you do to help? So I came up with a simple, the four As, acknowledge their existence, accept them for who they are, show some appreciation and affirmation.
[02:29:10] And find those have to be legitimate affirmations for something they've done, but make an effort to do that.
[02:29:19] One CEO coach, I had him put all the people's names across the top in a spreadsheet and all the things he needed to get to know about them down the side.
[02:29:30] Because he said, I don't do that. I don't go down to their office. I don't talk to them because I thought my job.
[02:29:35] And I said, well, I think it. So he had, he was so results oriented. I had him check them off.
[02:29:43] Every time you go to that person's office and do that, you check it off. And that was how he learned how to do it.
[02:29:51] Yeah, that's awesome stuff. Number one for me, a lot of times, you know, when you talk about how to build people's confidence and the four As great.
[02:30:03] Well, one of my favorite tools in leadership is leadership. My favorite tools in leadership is leadership.
[02:30:09] So I went through my whole career to this day when I want someone when I want to show someone I appreciate them, when I want to show them, I trust them.
[02:30:16] I'm going to put in charge of stuff. I'm going to put them in leadership positions and that's going to elevate the way they feel about themselves.
[02:30:22] They're going to know that I trust them that are going to know I appreciate them because I'm giving them more autonomy.
[02:30:26] So that's just totally in line. Another thing that we talk about at our company is something we call the leadership loop.
[02:30:34] And it's just things to think about as you're leading people. And the heaviest weight when I'm making a leadership decision is what is it going to do to my leadership capital?
[02:30:45] So if I, you know, Dave's got a project that's due and it's going to look the client wants it by by Wednesday and I know it's going to impact the way Dave's, you know, his weekend is going to ruin his weekend.
[02:30:55] I'm actually going to weigh out. Hey, is this worth the impact it's going to have to my leadership capital that I have with Dave?
[02:31:03] And maybe I say, you know what, I'm going to call the client and say, hey, listen, we're going to have to push this back a few days.
[02:31:07] Or I call Dave, you know, if it's if it's going to ruin the relationship with the client. Hey, Dave, this is, you know, I got to cash in some of these chips, man, we got to get this thing done.
[02:31:15] Where do you want to meet to get this thing worked on this weekend because we got to get this thing done.
[02:31:19] So, so that's again, just in line different verbiage. And then the other thing is when it comes to results oriented.
[02:31:29] And I'm saying to myself, you know, man, for me to put some for me to give Dave this project and goons some more autonomy.
[02:31:36] He can't do this as good as me. And so a lot of times, you know, people say, I just want to get it done. I want to get it done right.
[02:31:44] The problem with that is it's a short term win because over time I haven't developed Dave into a into a better leader that understands how to get these projects done.
[02:31:52] So I need to think of things in a strategic manner. So my goal becomes not the result immediate results for this particular project.
[02:32:04] The goal becomes winning in a long term strategic way where I've trained up not just Dave, but three or four other of his peers that can all step up and get this stuff done.
[02:32:16] Now we can win on a much broader scale and we're going to get much more profound strategic results than if I just get stuff done myself because that's what the result oriented leader often wants to do.
[02:32:28] So you believed in him 100% when you did that you believed in him and he don't want to let you down. That's the way it works.
[02:32:37] I had to read this part. You said over at camp over at Plantation Camp Charlie Plum Lieutenant J.G. United States Navy was the resident inventor and engineer with a strong background in electronics.
[02:32:49] He developed more than a dozen devices to measure time temperature and weight. He was well on his way to making a radio when the V discovered his stash of razor blades nails, wire spools and tinfoil.
[02:33:00] Plum also scratched a keyboard on his bed boards and went over the notes until he could hear them in his head.
[02:33:06] So we had Charlie Plum on this on this podcast number 76 and number 95.
[02:33:13] So when you're in camp you're memorizing each other's names right? We're memorizing all the names of every. Do you remember Charlie Plum's name? When you were in camp?
[02:33:22] Yeah.
[02:33:23] And then you met him afterwards?
[02:33:25] Yeah.
[02:33:26] Crazy, crazy.
[02:33:30] When you're in there and people do you sort of get to know people even though you've never even seen them?
[02:33:37] Yes and no because sometimes you might be with someone who does know them and they tell you about them.
[02:33:45] That's another thing Charlie Plum mentioned to me. He said you know you're in a cell with four guys.
[02:33:52] He said it was around the three month mark. You knew absolutely every detail of their life, every movie they'd seen, every TV show they watched, who all their teachers were, what their, you know, every girlfriend that they ever had,
[02:34:06] their family, their brothers, girlfriends, he just knew everything and he said when a new person would come into the cell.
[02:34:13] It was like all ears.
[02:34:14] Not stop.
[02:34:15] Just like tell us your entire life story.
[02:34:18] Yeah.
[02:34:19] That's crazy.
[02:34:22] I'm gonna fast forward here again. I'm gonna fast forward through a bunch of stuff but we're getting towards the end here.
[02:34:32] Early on our final day of captivity, the V issued each of us a pair of dark blue cotton slacks, a long sleeve blue shirt, a gray windbreaker and a small gym bag and a pair of shoes.
[02:34:43] We didn't waste any time getting dressed for the first time in more than five years.
[02:34:48] We would be wearing something other than black or maroon striped pajamas.
[02:34:53] My feet had become so accustomed to rubber tread tires held on by straps across the toe that I wondered if I would have trouble putting on real shoes.
[02:35:01] It was not a problem.
[02:35:02] Yes, this was the day, the long awaited day and we were functioning as if it was just another day at work.
[02:35:07] To be honest, I was more curious than excited.
[02:35:10] I had grown to be so cautious that my emotions were flat as a table.
[02:35:14] After five years, four months and two weeks, 1,955 days of captivity, I was going to walk through this exercise and see what happened.
[02:35:26] As our names were called, we stepped forward and saluted the senior U.S. Air Force officer who was receiving us.
[02:35:32] We were then escorted to three waiting C141s, a bird ever after to be known as the Hanoi taxi.
[02:35:41] When we were all loaded, the walk on tailgates were closed and the windowless aircraft, which felt inside somewhat like a cave, began taxing out.
[02:35:49] The lack of visibility brought to mind a trip I had taken less than a year earlier when we were transported under a tarp in the back of a truck from the Hanoi north to dog patch.
[02:36:00] On today's journey, though, there would be no blindfolds, handcuffs, guards, or bone jarring bounces.
[02:36:06] The revving of the C141s four big engines caused my heart to race.
[02:36:12] Pilots loved the feeling of power during the run-up and take-off.
[02:36:16] This time it was almost surreal as the brakes released and our Hanoi taxi accelerated smoothly down the runway.
[02:36:23] We held our breath waiting, waiting, waiting.
[02:36:26] Finally, the wheels broke ground.
[02:36:28] We were airborne.
[02:36:29] A bedlam of cheers, yells, whistles, and footstamps erupted in the cabin.
[02:36:34] Our destination was the big hospital at Clark Air Force Base in the Philippines.
[02:36:38] As the primary air force staging base in both the Korean and Vietnam wars, it was a familiar place to most of us.
[02:36:44] A few minutes after takeoff, the aircraft commander came on the intercom.
[02:36:48] Gentlemen, we are feet wet and over international waters.
[02:36:52] A roar went up.
[02:36:54] The captives, indeed, were free.
[02:36:59] On the flight to Clark Air Force Base, we smoked cigars, circulated, shook hands, looked at the latest magazines, visited the cockpit where I was taken aback to see that the aircraft commander was a captain about my age, still under 30.
[02:37:13] We also took turns hugging the three nurses on board.
[02:37:16] Other than a couple Vietnamese kitchen coolies, we had not seen a female in all those years.
[02:37:23] As the Hanoi taxi rolled into VIP parking space at Clark, we were surprised to see a large crowd waiting with welcome signs and banners.
[02:37:33] As we de-planed, the cheers and tears of the crowd warmed our hearts and calmed our anxieties about our re-entry into a radically altered world.
[02:37:42] It was a shock to be treated like returning heroes.
[02:37:45] We did not see ourselves as heroic.
[02:37:48] We had simply done our duty.
[02:37:56] So, that's a...
[02:38:01] Can't even imagine what that was like.
[02:38:03] You know, we were, as I said, emotionally, we were so flat, it was like, okay, what's next?
[02:38:12] But we were thrilled with the crowd and it was exciting.
[02:38:17] But it was always thinking, okay, this is good, what's next?
[02:38:23] That was mine, and I'm sure most people, because I didn't know what to expect.
[02:38:29] What was the biggest... and look, you talk a lot in the book about what you're actually doing.
[02:38:36] You talk about one guy that he must have made three or four rotations through the chow hall line, getting sausages and eggs and steak and ice cream and everything.
[02:38:46] You talk about some of that stuff.
[02:38:48] I mean, you got captured in 1967, as we mentioned, this was before the hippie movement had really come out.
[02:38:59] What was your view as you came back to this radically changed world?
[02:39:03] That's the term that uses radically changed, and it was a radical change.
[02:39:09] I was protected in that going back to Georgia and small towns, it wasn't as extreme as it would have been maybe in San Diego or San Francisco or somewhere around San Diego, but San Francisco, L.A.
[02:39:25] So it's somewhat protected.
[02:39:27] But I think there were several folks that threw parties for me, high school, college friends and that sort of thing.
[02:39:37] And family.
[02:39:39] And there was a young lady who was my age, college, went to college with her, but she was an anti-war person.
[02:39:47] She'd become a college university professor, I think, was anti-war.
[02:39:53] But she was my friend, and I did not show any disrespect for her, and she didn't show any for me.
[02:40:01] We were friendly and treated each other respectfully.
[02:40:04] I think it was some of the extremists, though, that spit on soldiers in uniform and insulted them.
[02:40:14] I didn't encounter too many of those, but a lot of people did.
[02:40:19] And POWs, we didn't, because the war it ended, it was over, and there was something to celebrate, and we kind of became something to celebrate that the war was over.
[02:40:30] So I think both sides, at least anti-war people, tolerated us, at least when we first came home.
[02:40:39] And so we didn't get any of that negative stuff.
[02:40:43] And I think that made it a lot better for us and a lot easier for us to make that transition.
[02:40:48] Again, we kind of touched it on and already, but just the unity that you had as POWs, the time you had spent together, the fact that you had bore your soul to each other and to yourselves,
[02:41:07] this sort of absolute ownership, this extreme ownership of who you were as people, that you all came out of this shockingly, shockingly well.
[02:41:24] Shockingly well.
[02:41:26] Yeah, it is.
[02:41:27] When you look at what we did and where we've been and all as a group, it is shockingly well as the way we came home.
[02:41:36] And I think, you know, here's one example in looking at my own self, is I realized after I retired, I never worried about getting promoted.
[02:41:48] I did my job as best I possibly could.
[02:41:52] I just wanted to do a good job, and I came back and went to work.
[02:41:56] And I didn't want any special treatment.
[02:41:59] I just wanted to prove I could do my job and to be successful with it.
[02:42:03] But I didn't worry about getting promoted to be, I didn't worry about getting this job or that job.
[02:42:09] You know, I just, it's coming, it's coming nice and whatever happens is going to happen, you know.
[02:42:15] So it, because I didn't have insecurity, going back to the insecure, secure.
[02:42:21] How can I be insecure when I've got a good job, flying airplanes?
[02:42:27] I'm a flight commander.
[02:42:29] I'm a section commander.
[02:42:30] I'm a chief of standardization.
[02:42:33] I'm a chief check pilot on the base.
[02:42:35] I'm a squadron commander.
[02:42:36] I mean, I have had it so good.
[02:42:39] And I don't think they gave me those jobs because I'd been a POW.
[02:42:43] You know, I had to prove that I could do it.
[02:42:46] My, my units got high ratings.
[02:42:50] They didn't give them high ratings because of me.
[02:42:53] They, the IG or the inspectors would come in and the standardization evaluation, they'd come in and because I had good guys doing good jobs.
[02:43:03] Okay.
[02:43:04] My team was doing their job really well.
[02:43:06] Well, okay.
[02:43:07] I think I helped them in retrospect.
[02:43:10] I didn't think about that at any of that at the time, but now I say, okay, I guess I was doing okay.
[02:43:17] Yeah. And the other thing is, you know, if you're going to be the, let's say the senior check pilot on base and you are looking at your skill set and you say, oh, you know, I could, I could get a little bit better at this.
[02:43:29] You're the type of person that goes, well, I'll go work on it and I'll improve on it.
[02:43:33] So I can be better at this.
[02:43:35] And those are the kind of people that ultimately get to a higher level because they're being honest with themselves, taking ownership of their shortfalls and then making corrections.
[02:43:45] Yeah. I, you know, that's, that leads to debrief.
[02:43:50] One of the most important things a person, a leader can do is debrief.
[02:43:55] And when I make a presentation, I debrief afterwards and say, what did, what did I do well to myself and what did I could have done better in this situation?
[02:44:05] And when I go to a meeting, okay, and I walk out of that meeting, I say, what did I do well?
[02:44:11] What could I've done better?
[02:44:13] And I coached myself, okay, next time you need to do this or this or a little bit better.
[02:44:19] And I do the same thing when I am at home with my wife.
[02:44:24] There are times when I mess up, guys.
[02:44:27] And I debrief myself after that and say, oh, what could I've done better?
[02:44:31] Let's see, what can I take ownership for?
[02:44:33] Sometimes my wife even debriefs me formally, you know, which is a bonus.
[02:44:39] I mentioned this earlier. So in the book, this is a leadership book and it's a leadership book filled with stories with a bunch of stories and examples of leadership.
[02:44:49] And at the end of each one of these sections, you go through what you call footstompers and it's a very common term.
[02:44:57] I don't have to, I don't know civilians use the term footstompers, but in the military, we certainly all branches use this term footstompers,
[02:45:04] which is when you're learning something from an instructor and they hit a point that's going to be on the test.
[02:45:11] They'll they'll stop their foot on the ground like, hey, listen up, you better pay attention.
[02:45:15] So you have these these sort of leadership footstompers at the end of the book and they're throughout the book, but you you summarize them here.
[02:45:24] So I just wanted to go through these to close out this.
[02:45:29] Number one, know yourself. Authentic leadership flows from inside out.
[02:45:35] You will be most successful and fulfilled when you clarify who you uniquely are in terms of purpose, passion, personality, and then lead authentically from that core.
[02:45:47] And by the way, everybody can tell. And if you're pretend trying to pretend to be someone, you're not people can tell it.
[02:45:55] I always say intent has a smell. So if you're like you just said, you never tried to get promoted. I never tried to get promoted either.
[02:46:02] It's like, oh, I'm going to work hard. And I kind of I had an advantage that I was a prior enlisted officer.
[02:46:08] So if I didn't get promoted, oh, well, I was still in the Navy for 20 years. They couldn't do anything to me.
[02:46:16] But that intent has a smell. So like you say here, be authentic.
[02:46:23] Number two, guard your character authentic leaders intentionally guard their character clarify your values of specificity and total honesty, then structure a support team to help you live them with courage and transparency.
[02:46:35] Number three, stay positive. A positive attitude is one of leaders greatest assets and it's one of the best ways you can influence and lead others keep your chin up because when it goes down you do too.
[02:46:45] And many others will follow right behind. And I don't know if there's any examples throughout history stronger than you all have from being this POW camp for positive attitude.
[02:46:56] So everyone can learn from that.
[02:47:00] Confront your doubts and fears authentic leaders develop courage as an act of will choose today to do what you know to be right even when it feels unnatural or unsafe.
[02:47:12] Trust yourself, honor your values, lean into your pain and intentionally engage issues with strength and humility, despite your fears.
[02:47:23] Number five, fight to win. Successful leaders believe in their mission and fight to carry it out successfully. They don't quit.
[02:47:29] They expect to win. They take others with them and they give the others the credit.
[02:47:34] Number six, bounce back. Authentic leaders know that life is difficult. They expect to get knocked down and they have the proper attitude and outlook to enable them to persevere.
[02:47:44] You have a choice about how you respond to difficulties. Confront the brutal realities of your situation but never give up hope.
[02:47:51] Develop your plan. Connect with your support team and bounce back.
[02:47:56] And then you get into a section leading others. Clarify and build your culture. Authentic leaders intentionally define and build cultures that further the mission, vision and values of their organization.
[02:48:07] Assess the culture of your organization and take the appropriate steps to make sure it is well defined, soundly structured and effectively communicated.
[02:48:16] Number eight, over-communicate the message. Effective communication requires intentional effort to overcome noise, distractions and misinterpretations in the workplace.
[02:48:26] You must develop a clear message and comprehensive communication plan. Then you must over-communicate your message multiple times through multiple channels.
[02:48:33] And I don't care what environment you're in, whatever communication methodology you have is not as hard as tapping on walls with the threat of being tortured or killed.
[02:48:43] So you can improve the communication inside your organization.
[02:48:47] Number nine, develop your people. Authentic leaders engage in continual development. Knowledge alone is not enough. The only way to grow as a leader is to do things differently.
[02:48:55] That requires change. Go first and then take your people with you. And again, I don't think there's anybody that has to work harder to develop their people than creating college courses inside of a prison camp.
[02:49:06] No books.
[02:49:08] No books. Do it all from memory.
[02:49:11] Number 10, balance mission in people. Outstanding leaders balance accomplishment of the mission, results and care for the people, relationships.
[02:49:19] However, the styles of most leaders are naturally biased towards one end of the spectrum or another.
[02:49:24] To enhance your leadership effectiveness, find out which type of skills you need to develop. Then leaning into the pain of your doubts and fears, adapt your behaviors to do what you know a good leader should do.
[02:49:36] It's another thing that's weird about these tendencies that we have is when we go against them, we think we're wrong.
[02:49:41] You know, we think like we're going to get in trouble. We think that, I better not do that. I need to focus on results so that ego will start chiming in.
[02:49:52] Number 11, build cohesive teams. Build trust by helping teammates gain understanding, acceptance and respect for each other.
[02:50:01] The resulting unity and cohesion will enable them to engage in creative conflict, which in turn will build the commitment and loyalty necessary to overcome the most difficult challenges.
[02:50:13] Underrated way of building a cohesive team, listening to what the team has to say.
[02:50:19] There's a lot. I didn't, a lot of examples you give in the book about this is how much discussion and input the SROs would take when coming up with a decision.
[02:50:29] It wasn't like the SROs just created the ideas in a vacuum and then imposed them on the team.
[02:50:35] You all would have discussions and you describe it in the book as often passionate discussions about what the course of action was.
[02:50:45] Number 12, exploit creativity. Think futuristically and innovate to stay competitive.
[02:50:51] Everyone has the capacity for innovative ideas. The leaders job is to draw them out, harness the ideas of creative folks and allow them to pull you ahead of the competition.
[02:50:58] And yeah, I read that one little section of Charlie Plum, but that's, there's a whole section that you're talking about all these different individuals and all the things that they did to improve life in the camp.
[02:51:10] You know, most of the creativity comes from the bottom up and leaders need to be aware of that.
[02:51:17] They're not saying you have to adapt every idea that comes up, but quite often the people doing the work have the most creative ideas of how to do it better and fix it.
[02:51:27] Yeah, no doubt about that. You have to be paying attention to what the people on the front lines are saying.
[02:51:36] Number 13, treasure your trials and celebrate your successes. Effective leadership is forged in the crucible of struggles and fueled by the celebration of accomplishment to promote teamwork and achieve success.
[02:51:46] Treasure your trials and celebrate your victories. And the last one, free the captives. Authentic leaders proactively identify the shackles that hold them back and lean into the pain to break free and grow as you gain your own freedom begin helping others to do the same.
[02:52:04] Start by avoiding bitterness, connecting with your emotions and doing the right thing, even when it's difficult.
[02:52:13] So those are the the footstompers and and to get like more of the details around those and great examples. Everyone that's listening, get the book.
[02:52:33] Now, you have this next book. The book is called Engage with Honor, and we're not going to do it today, but at some point, hopefully you can come back and we can cover that book and the ideas that are in that book and the stories that are in that book.
[02:52:49] But I wanted to just quickly just to kind of introduce people to what I thought was a really outstanding part of the book and also kind of the crux or one of the cruxes of the book, because the book is called the book is called Engage with Honor.
[02:53:06] So I'm skipping to this section here. It's called Learn to Engage. It says, collaboration requires engagement. Unfortunately, many leaders respond out of unhealthy emotions. Instead of engaging to collaborate, they let negative emotions drive them to either dominate or withdraw.
[02:53:26] And again, going back to the dichotomy of leadership, these are two extremes that are bad dominating a conversation dominating ideas or withdrawing from conversation or withdrawing from ideas.
[02:53:37] And this is presented in the leadership engagement model, which is something that you created. All of us have made this mistake at home or at work and usually in both arenas.
[02:53:47] It's the easy way out, but it's not honorable, and it never works in the long run.
[02:53:52] In uncomfortable situations, most people have a natural default to either dominate or withdraw based on their natural DNA.
[02:54:02] Negative emotions, so that's like, you know, you get confronted. There's a plan that needs to be made. There's a scenario that's unfolding and what most people tend to do is either dominate or withdraw.
[02:54:15] So something's getting uncomfortable to either dominate or withdraw depending on your DNA.
[02:54:19] Negative emotions come from the limbic system of the brain that can be quick and strong, making it easy to go left or right side responses.
[02:54:27] And you've got a chart here that I'm going to explain. Moving to the engage column.
[02:54:32] So this is instead of trying to dominate or instead of withdrawing, what you want to do is you want to engage.
[02:54:37] This is the engage column of this chart, which again, I'll describe in a second.
[02:54:41] It requires you to slow down and use the prefrontal cortex of the brain to rationally consider the issues and what's at stake.
[02:54:49] Engagement takes a willingness to respect, listen, share logic, discuss mindsets and stay engaged to work through a healthy solution.
[02:54:59] Most of all, engagement requires setting aside or walking through your fears.
[02:55:04] And that takes a great deal of courage.
[02:55:08] And then you get into this chart that you've got here, the leadership engagement model.
[02:55:14] So on the one side, you've got withdraw.
[02:55:17] So this is an uncomfortable situation. This is how people respond.
[02:55:20] One response that people have is to withdraw, which means they retreat, they hide, they avoid, they abandon, they quit, or they go passive aggressive.
[02:55:30] The other side, the other extreme on this spectrum is to dominate, which is they control, they dictate, they force, they bully, they manipulate.
[02:55:40] You've got a list of the emotions that kind of trigger these two responses and they're both the same.
[02:55:46] Right. Right. Fear, anger, distrust, pride, ego, hubris, pessimism, shame, guilt, both those.
[02:55:53] You got both those and both all those description, both those columns.
[02:55:56] And you know, when some people are afraid, some people just hide, some people attack, right?
[02:56:02] When people, when people's ego gets in the way, of course, some people, some people shy away or they turn people off, they don't say anything, or some people jump in and try and dominate.
[02:56:16] The correct response here that you've got in the middle, which is engage, a balanced response, is believe, initiate, dialogue, clarify, connect, collaborate, celebrate.
[02:56:29] And this is driven by the emotions of courage, of respect, love, trust, humility, optimism, self-respect, confidence.
[02:56:37] So this is an important thing for us to think about, an important model for us to think about from this book.
[02:56:46] Engage with honor is think about what you're doing when it's time to respond.
[02:56:50] Are you responding out of fear? Are you responding out of anger? Are you retreating? Are you hiding? Are you avoiding?
[02:56:58] Man, that avoid when people like that one, don't they?
[02:57:01] I'm just going to avoid this problem. Pretend it doesn't exist. Hopefully it'll go away.
[02:57:05] Or are you going to try and get in there and impose your plan, impose your will, and force things down people's throats? None of those are good.
[02:57:14] And said, go on, talk to people, collaborate with them. So powerful stuff inside that book and a ton of other information.
[02:57:24] I think you may have one of those. That's the courage card on one side, the courage challenge. And on the backside, it has the engage model that you were just talking about.
[02:57:34] So that we give these out to our clients so that they can actually learn to coach themselves. Okay.
[02:57:43] Yes, I was withdrawing there. I should have engaged. You know, we had one client, it was a large hospital.
[02:57:52] And I at the workshop, we were offsite retreat and I said, okay, I want somebody to tell a story of how the hospital has done one or the other of these.
[02:58:05] And so they thought about it for a minute and somebody says, well, you know, we're working with the doctors from that clinic over there.
[02:58:12] We tried to dominate because we're the hospital and they're the doctors. And they withdrew.
[02:58:18] And then a year later, they came back with something and they tried to dominate and we withdrew.
[02:58:25] And what we needed to do was sit down and work through all that with them because they need us and we need them engage and work through it.
[02:58:34] Again, maybe next time we'll go through that book and some of the leadership in that inside that book. But for now, that gets us up to date somewhat.
[02:58:48] Where can people find you? Let's talk about that. I know you've got leadingwithhonor.com.
[02:58:54] Yes.
[02:58:55] So that's the main page for your consulting for your speaking. All that stuff can be found there.
[02:59:00] Right.
[02:59:01] You have an Instagram.
[02:59:04] Yes.
[02:59:05] Your Instagram is leadingwithhonor. You have a Twitter. So you're on social media. Leon Lee Ellis.
[02:59:14] Facebook page. Leon in parentheses. Lee Ellis.
[02:59:20] And then you LinkedIn. Lee Ellis came up pretty quick.
[02:59:24] The books we talked about today, leadingwithhonor, both these books are available. We'll put them on our website so people can easily find them and link through.
[02:59:35] I just gave Echo Charles who's sitting in the corner right now the look of confirmation.
[02:59:40] There are times where I as a leader fail to correctly impose the idea that when we say something should be on the website, it should be on the website.
[02:59:51] Oh, good.
[02:59:52] So I think by the big affirmation, not I just got from Echo Charles, I think we should be good.
[03:00:00] But that's where we can find you.
[03:00:03] Yes. Thank you. And there are a lot of free tools on our website.
[03:00:08] A lot of things, the things we're talked about here, the engage model and everything, those are all free on the website.
[03:00:15] We even have one on voting and it's totally nonpolitical, but it's on how to think about who you're going to vote for and it emphasizes character.
[03:00:25] But there's a few questions you can check off, but there's just a lot of free tools on there.
[03:00:30] What kind of scores are our politicians getting on the character right now?
[03:00:34] Are we talking about the point, the guy that scored a point zero one beats the guy that scored a point zero zero one?
[03:00:41] You know, I think politicians get very insecure when they're afraid that somebody's going to publicize something negative about them and then they fight.
[03:00:51] And when, you know, talking about character earlier, once you step over the line and do something that you're not proud of, then you have to cover it up, especially if you're a politician.
[03:01:02] And so you start covering up and then you do something that covering up causes more and it just cascades really.
[03:01:10] That's why when you mess something up, you say, Hey, this is what I just messed up.
[03:01:15] Exactly.
[03:01:16] This is my mistake.
[03:01:17] Here's what I was thinking.
[03:01:18] Here's why I did it.
[03:01:19] It wasn't right.
[03:01:20] Dave, what do you got for questions?
[03:01:24] You've been you've been quiet over there.
[03:01:26] At least I know.
[03:01:28] Let's get an F4 phantom question.
[03:01:30] Come on.
[03:01:31] I don't have any questions.
[03:01:33] It's it's actually very easy to be quiet when I'm listening to you tell your story.
[03:01:37] So please don't take my lack of verbal engagement as anything other than just being really captivated.
[03:01:45] And this is by the second time in a couple months, I've had a chance to sit here and talk to a fighter pilot.
[03:01:53] Tell his story.
[03:01:54] We listened to bud, buddy Anderson a couple months back.
[03:01:57] And then of course now you and what I've been thinking about more than anything is it's just it's so remarkable to me that you're you're talking about these names.
[03:02:06] And as as a naval aviator, you know, McCain, those names like that, you know, Stockdale, they're just they're just in the vernacular.
[03:02:19] There's just the names that naval aviation knows.
[03:02:21] I have a picture from my T2 Buckeye intermediate jet training class sitting on the wing of the exact same T2 Buckeye that John McCain sat on as an ensign.
[03:02:29] But when you talk about Lance Seidgen, Robbie Reisner, and if you have any connection to the Air Force, which I was very fortunate growing up to have a connection and didn't exchange with the Air Force, those names are the same names for the Air Force as the ones I talked about on the Navy.
[03:02:46] But those were the I only knew them from books.
[03:02:50] I only knew them from war and from stories and to hear you talk about them in a way that really humanizes them because you didn't read about them.
[03:03:00] You didn't hear about them that you actually knew them has been just incredibly, incredibly powerful for me because those guys shaped what I did in my life.
[03:03:11] But I was removed from them because they were just they weren't even people.
[03:03:14] They were just put up on a pedestal like they were they were elevated above there.
[03:03:18] But to hear you talk about that, I hope you take a little bit of I hope you take some pride in knowing that there's an opportunity now for a whole other generation of people and the thousands upon thousands of people are going to listen to this podcast and hear those names are going to Google them.
[03:03:33] They're going to look them up.
[03:03:34] They're going to read those books, thoughts of a philosophical fighter pilot, those type of books and then hear about what Lance Seidgen did to earn the Medal of Honor.
[03:03:43] They get to they get to do to another group of people that they did to me.
[03:03:48] And I think the reason that happened is because I got to sit here and listen to you tell that story and tell those stories of them.
[03:03:54] So thanks for letting me be part of this.
[03:03:56] Thank you.
[03:03:57] Incredible.
[03:03:58] Thank you Dave.
[03:03:59] I those guys inspired me to they were they were exceptional people because going back to things some of the things that joccos been talking about was they believed in themselves.
[03:04:12] And they weren't afraid to they weren't afraid of failing.
[03:04:17] They knew they were committed to what they were doing.
[03:04:21] They stayed with it and did the best they could and they did not worry about what somebody else would think or anything like that.
[03:04:28] They just did their best.
[03:04:30] And that's what made them so special to us and everybody else and their rewards and you know that they rise.
[03:04:39] I said would have won a Medal of Honor also but they'd already given two or three out to POWs and they didn't want to give any more.
[03:04:46] But he should have probably have had one to the Silver Star.
[03:04:49] But those they were amazing inspirational Lance was an inspiring teammate.
[03:04:56] We play golf together and dating girls together.
[03:04:58] But I always kind of looked up to him.
[03:05:01] You know when we you brought up Lance and you talked about Lance but we weren't on the podcast.
[03:05:07] Can you can you go through again you know your your experiences with Lance and and what happened with him.
[03:05:14] Well we connected in survival school right after we got our wings.
[03:05:20] We were signed F4 pipeline Southeast Asia both of us were and our first next assignment was to Fairchild Air Force Base to survival school up in Washington and we went there and went through that.
[03:05:33] And I watched him in class and out in the field as we were going through and Lance was paying so much attention carefully and asking questions in class and he sat on the front row and he was so focused on that survival training because he knew we're going to war and should be important.
[03:05:53] Well I was too but not as much as he was.
[03:05:55] And then we got to know each other and start playing golf together and dating girls together and partying together and that sort of thing.
[03:06:03] We went to war together on a chartered flight from San Francisco over to the Philippines and as quick as we got leveled off and they fed us and all that.
[03:06:14] Lance and I went back to the back and met the two flight met two of the flight attendants and got dates with them.
[03:06:20] Okay. And if you read the book about him the mile into the mouth of the cat that girl in there is the one that we met and I still keep in touch with her.
[03:06:30] But in the period in the situation when his airplane went down and lost he evaded capture for 4043 days or so and was dying.
[03:06:45] No food just eating bugs and leaves and that sort of thing and his back was broken so he couldn't stand up.
[03:06:53] He was crawling backwards and he had a skull that was bashed open.
[03:06:57] So incredible courage and then tried to escape and he was just an amazing guy that did everything he could to be the soldier he was committed to be.
[03:07:09] And so that was and a really good guy came from a really good home.
[03:07:15] You know I think the one thing I want to say on this podcast because it's so important Lance grew up in a family where his father he and his father had a great relationship.
[03:07:26] His mother and father he had a great relationship with both of them.
[03:07:30] He had a lot of unconditional love Lance was an artist.
[03:07:35] And a fighter hand to hand combat type fighter and an artist and a football player and a fighter pilot.
[03:07:43] But he was incredibly gifted artist and he was an actor he played in high school he played in the the great king of Siam or whatever in one of those plays.
[03:07:56] He was so incredibly adaptable and so talented in so many areas but he had incredible amount of unconditional love from his father and his mother.
[03:08:07] He had very little insecurity from shame or guilt from growing up and as a parent the more that you can provide that to your child the healthier they're going to be the tougher they're going to be in battle.
[03:08:22] And the more forgiving and accepting of others they will be it's just a healthier person.
[03:08:28] So to me that's one of the most important lessons I've learned in all of my POW experience my leadership is that help people be more healthy believing themselves so they'll be more healthy.
[03:08:42] And they're going to be better performers at work they're going to be better people at home they're going to be better parents and that sort of thing.
[03:08:49] And you two ended up in prison camp together but you didn't know it.
[03:08:55] I didn't know it was him.
[03:08:56] So what was that experience.
[03:08:58] Well we were both in the Hanoi Hilton there in the same cell block and I didn't know he had been shot down he went down two days after me.
[03:09:07] And he was about 30 or 40 feet away in another cell with two other guys.
[03:09:13] And he was delirious he started screaming and it was obvious he was delirious because you weren't supposed to make any noise.
[03:09:20] They'd come in and beat you up but they knew he was delirious and badly wounded and injured.
[03:09:26] So they didn't come in and beat him up but they tried to quieten him down but the English speaker came by checking on all the other cells in there to see what everything going OK.
[03:09:35] And he opened our cell and I said why don't you help that man who has a problem sounds like he needs some help.
[03:09:43] And the English speaker said to me had been in jungle long time have one foot in grave.
[03:09:50] And I did not know it was Lance for two years that they was talking about he died two days later.
[03:09:59] Any other closing thoughts Lee.
[03:10:06] There are some great lessons that we learned in the POW camp that apply to love and marriage and so I've just finished a new book called Captured by Love inspiring true romance stories from Vietnam POWs.
[03:10:21] And we have a website POW romance dot com and it'll be out there where you could sign up to learn about it.
[03:10:29] But we have 20 stories of guys who are POWs more than five years two of them more than eight years several of them six or seven years who have had incredible love stories.
[03:10:41] And the romance is in there but the love is there and at the end of each chapter the chapter is about nine or 10 pages long end of each story.
[03:10:50] And we have some love lessons and but those love lessons of commitment of caring were some of the same lessons that helped us survive five six seven eight years as POWs.
[03:11:06] It's amazing how similar those lessons are.
[03:11:11] When you know the broad the when you know the way broadly you see it in all things.
[03:11:15] So these lessons apply everywhere.
[03:11:18] Well thank you so much.
[03:11:21] Thank you for coming on.
[03:11:23] Thanks for your service.
[03:11:25] Thanks for your sacrifice.
[03:11:27] Just unbelievable what what you all went through.
[03:11:31] Thanks for continuing to pass these lessons on these leadership lessons on.
[03:11:36] I want to close with a section of your book that so so to set the stage.
[03:11:43] You get back home your your getting your life and your career back on track and that meant flying again meant flying again.
[03:11:54] And so you wrote about what that was like.
[03:11:58] I'm going to take it to the book to close this thing out.
[03:12:00] You say like most of the POWs I had decided to continue my career in the service.
[03:12:05] The Air Force had instituted a plan called Operation Homecoming to re qualify returning pilots.
[03:12:13] So on August 7th 1973 under the watchful eye of my instructor pilot I launched a T 38 out of Randolph Air Force Base in San Antonio.
[03:12:24] As we cleared the end of the runway I rotated the white rocket into a max climb pressed the mic button and made the call to the tower.
[03:12:34] Freedom 34 airborne.
[03:12:38] This captive was really free.
[03:12:41] I had slipped the surly bonds of earth once more.
[03:12:46] That's freedom sir.
[03:12:51] Thank you Chaco.
[03:12:52] Thank you for having me on.
[03:12:53] It's been wonderful to be with you and Dave and to meet that go here.
[03:12:57] And I appreciate what you're doing to help all of us think about leadership about service and about just being good humans.
[03:13:06] So thank you guys for what you're doing.
[03:13:09] It's an honor sir.
[03:13:10] Thank you.
[03:13:12] And with that.
[03:13:14] Lee Ellis has left the building.
[03:13:18] And once again we can look at our lives and see how ridiculously lucky and blessed we are to be doing whatever it is we're doing.
[03:13:33] Yes.
[03:13:35] And I mean I mean how much I'm going through the book like what part of my going to actually read right.
[03:13:42] There's so much in there to read.
[03:13:44] And it's all just overcoming the worst possible challenges on a day.
[03:13:54] You know we barely even talked about.
[03:13:56] I mean I put I read a little bit.
[03:13:59] You know you're you're on a trip and you didn't bring any food.
[03:14:07] And so it's been like nine hours since you ate and you're all bummed out.
[03:14:13] Yeah.
[03:14:14] You know what I'm saying.
[03:14:15] Yeah.
[03:14:16] Or or you go like hey we were on a road trip and we're driving and we pull over.
[03:14:23] There's no food anywhere.
[03:14:24] So we finally pull over like a rest stop and they got a bunch of junk and you're mad.
[03:14:28] Right.
[03:14:29] Yeah.
[03:14:31] Dude we're talking five and a half years of like a little piece of bread with with bugs in it.
[03:14:42] Yeah.
[03:14:43] That's every day.
[03:14:44] That's what you're getting.
[03:14:45] That's what you're getting.
[03:14:47] Yeah.
[03:14:48] We barely even talked about that.
[03:14:50] Yeah.
[03:14:51] It's insane.
[03:14:54] Yeah.
[03:14:55] Not to mention just all the little details we take for granted where you know how he's
[03:14:58] like oh I really wanted those socks.
[03:15:00] Yeah.
[03:15:01] Yeah.
[03:15:02] But you ever tried a pair of socks.
[03:15:03] I mean one pair of socks coming from is different than coming from you.
[03:15:07] But I was going to ask you ever try sleep when your feet are cold.
[03:15:10] And you can't get.
[03:15:13] I know wrong crowd but I'm just saying most of us.
[03:15:18] She is hard.
[03:15:19] Can be.
[03:15:20] I'm just saying in our daily lives today.
[03:15:23] But yeah he you know he barely mentioned that or whatever but consider all that put together.
[03:15:27] You know and not to mention the stuff he didn't mention.
[03:15:29] Yeah.
[03:15:30] By the way.
[03:15:31] But it's like okay your feet are cold.
[03:15:32] You can't sleep.
[03:15:33] You don't have any food.
[03:15:34] The food that you do have is bugs in it.
[03:15:37] That's your baseline.
[03:15:39] Yeah.
[03:15:40] On top of that you're getting tortured.
[03:15:41] You may get killed.
[03:15:42] You may get disintery.
[03:15:43] All these things are going on.
[03:15:44] You may have a bomb dropped on you.
[03:15:46] Yeah.
[03:15:47] An American bomb.
[03:15:48] Yeah.
[03:15:49] Right.
[03:15:50] And for you're going at this for five and a half years.
[03:15:53] The keeping the pot.
[03:15:55] This is what this is where I started like assessing myself in this as I was reading this is I'm
[03:16:01] just thinking I just am slacking in like nine different categories.
[03:16:06] Unappreciated.
[03:16:07] You know what I mean.
[03:16:08] Yeah.
[03:16:09] These guys are putting through such effort to improve themselves in a prison camp.
[03:16:15] They're trying to learn a new language in a prison camp.
[03:16:19] They don't have food.
[03:16:20] Like I'm mad because you know I didn't my my my my steak isn't ready yet.
[03:16:26] I'm kind of mad about that.
[03:16:29] My rib eye steak is not you know the when I got home my rib eye wasn't fully defrosted.
[03:16:37] So I'm going to have to like eat something else besides a rib eye steak tonight and I'm
[03:16:41] mad about it.
[03:16:43] Meanwhile these guys are in a prison camp and they're making courses to learn and improve
[03:16:51] themselves as they're resisting and fighting.
[03:16:56] I like that little thing I talked about like scaling the victories.
[03:16:59] That's a good thing to do with life.
[03:17:00] Yeah.
[03:17:01] You know you got to scale your victories.
[03:17:04] So we're lucky.
[03:17:07] We're lucky.
[03:17:09] Hey what is what is so I keep out of get these mixed up which what's negative G's versus
[03:17:16] G's in the plane.
[03:17:19] Negative G's is floating.
[03:17:20] Oh OK.
[03:17:21] So like if you're OK so you know when they film movies some movies and they want to do
[03:17:30] like a gra- you know think it's straight up your feet cold.
[03:17:35] I'm going to do some turmoil over it.
[03:17:37] But you know they want to do a zero gravity scenario.
[03:17:40] So they go on a big plane and they make that kind of the recording place and then they
[03:17:43] do a parabola is what they call it right.
[03:17:46] So that's a negative G's scenario.
[03:17:48] Yeah you got it.
[03:17:50] Gotcha.
[03:17:51] And then G's is obviously the pre- 18 G's in the injection sheet Dave.
[03:17:54] 18 G's something like that something crazy.
[03:17:56] You know it's obviously a relatively short period of time but yeah it's like a massive
[03:18:00] amount of initial onset G. If you eject once I heard you're grounded for life.
[03:18:04] Is that true or not.
[03:18:05] No not true.
[03:18:06] What about two ejections.
[03:18:08] I don't actually know the to my knowledge I don't think there's anything that says you're
[03:18:11] automatically grounded.
[03:18:13] I imagine a second ejection you're going to get a pretty thorough physical but I knew
[03:18:19] a decent number of guys that ejected and went back to airplanes.
[03:18:21] When you thought about grabbing your ejection handle what was the scenario.
[03:18:24] Yeah I mean that's a pretty fleeting thought.
[03:18:27] I'm in a dive.
[03:18:30] I'm doing I think I'm doing like just some what I would consider like basic dumb bomb
[03:18:34] dropping bombs at 45 degree dive you're probably going on 350 knots something like that.
[03:18:38] Where were you Iraq.
[03:18:39] No no no this is in training.
[03:18:41] This is in training here like in Southern California.
[03:18:45] And Iraq I'm guessing.
[03:18:47] Come on dude.
[03:18:50] I get what's called a flight control problem.
[03:18:52] So I get like a D. D. D. like the jet starts making these weird noises and I get this thing
[03:18:56] that lights up and I get this little code that says F. C. S. caution which means my flight
[03:19:00] controls as I pull back in the stick like for a second nothing happens.
[03:19:04] This digital flight control thing I'm like whoa I pulled back and like the jet didn't
[03:19:08] respond for probably a very short period of time and in that moment you have these thoughts
[03:19:13] of like OK this isn't good and you're in a dive.
[03:19:16] I'm in a dive was altitude.
[03:19:18] I would say probably 6000 feet and I can't do the I can't exactly remember the math but
[03:19:25] I bet you you're you're your rate of descent you know is is not long 10s of thousands feet
[03:19:32] per minute.
[03:19:33] So you've got you know probably a handful of seconds maybe 20 seconds or something before
[03:19:35] you literally were to get hit the ground.
[03:19:37] And in that moment of hey I pull back nothing happens.
[03:19:40] I need to think about what are my options are you run through a few one of them is I need
[03:19:44] to I might need to get out of the airplane.
[03:19:47] And then I think a very short period of time you know a button you hit and then the plane
[03:19:51] is fine you and it ends up being totally uneventful.
[03:19:55] But when you make a consideration of doing that it's a it's a significant event in your
[03:20:00] mind of having to think should I do this.
[03:20:02] Did you get a little adrenaline rush down your arms like when you almost crash a car.
[03:20:06] Totally you feel it like I guess as I'm talking to the story I think I remember I feel it
[03:20:10] in my chest more than anything like a tightening or some some you know I guess it's almost
[03:20:15] like an exhilaration or something anxious but dude like I said man I almost don't even
[03:20:21] want to tell a story after listening to what he's talking about not to mention to I didn't
[03:20:26] fully in reading the book I wasn't able to piece together what what happened until he
[03:20:31] explained it.
[03:20:32] No I wasn't either.
[03:20:33] And to be honest with you like my pilot brain like this this doesn't fully make sense to
[03:20:40] me not that I've known was like to get shot down I'm talking about why do the like why
[03:20:45] the airplane did that really didn't make sense because I know a lot about triple A I've seen
[03:20:48] a bunch of videos we study that stuff and how the airplanes react to that is like didn't
[03:20:54] make sense.
[03:20:55] The other thing is what didn't make sense to me was like Charlie Plum talking about you
[03:21:00] can see the surface to air missiles coming at you.
[03:21:02] Yeah said it looked like a telephone pole.
[03:21:04] Yes and you're like looking at it going oh no it's going to hit us because I was going
[03:21:08] to ask him you know in boxing they say it's the punch that you don't see that knocks you
[03:21:12] out and I was like did you not see this thing and then he explained what happened it's like
[03:21:16] oh dang.
[03:21:17] Sam's are totally different story too this is a big giant missile going to you know mock
[03:21:22] a couple and they blow up like they literally are designed to explode triple A doesn't do
[03:21:28] that they're just bullets I mean they don't have really so when he explained it he did
[03:21:32] it well like bullet goes through your wing maybe it hits a hydraulic line or goes through
[03:21:35] your engine but you're not going to just instantly detonate in cartwheel you're going to you're
[03:21:40] probably going to pull out of it and go dang something's wrong some indicators will pop
[03:21:43] up the jet might start to deteriorate over time maybe seconds or minutes but the scenario
[03:21:49] of being in a dive being shot at by bullets and then just like literally up until sitting
[03:21:55] here listening to explain it I never fully piece that together in my head in fact the
[03:22:00] pilot was like I don't understand and I wasn't going to ask him like can you explain this
[03:22:03] better because I couldn't follow it when he explained the fuse the FMU he called it which
[03:22:08] I think is like fuse mechanical unit literally just the thing that detonates the bomb as
[03:22:12] soon as he said that it all made sense like a bomb literally blew up underneath his jet
[03:22:17] he probably had a string of bombs probably picture two or three in a row like the old
[03:22:20] videos of bombs coming out the bottom bomb blows up blows up the next bomb blows up the
[03:22:24] next bomb probably a hundred feet away from his jet or less literally blows up his airplane
[03:22:30] from the bombs detonating and he's talking about tumbling that makes so much more sense
[03:22:36] and it's heartbreaking to think that in the end he actually didn't get shot down that
[03:22:41] clarified why it was such a catastrophic event requiring him to get out of the airplane
[03:22:46] so quickly with such this catastrophic series of failures hearing him explain it made it
[03:22:53] all make sense in my mind and it sucks because you know obviously you can't predict the future
[03:22:57] but yeah were you tracking how long it took me to understand I was like wait a second
[03:23:02] we were there together you know I might have I know kind of a little bit of terminology
[03:23:06] of FMU and like oh yeah I got that and I you know probably studied some of the I was like
[03:23:10] wait wait what's FMU yeah he's like and yeah of course I understand that stuff maybe a
[03:23:15] little bit better but in the end like I'm there with you and go and once it registered
[03:23:19] I go oh dang and why it's so heartbreaking is that you know this pilot or not the water
[03:23:25] is home get me to the water and as he is he's seeing the ocean like in your brain as a pilot
[03:23:30] or anything especially in our service yeah get me to the water I'll be okay I'll just
[03:23:34] hang out there until somebody picks me up and oh we're cool especially you're down in
[03:23:38] this in in southeast Asia the water's gonna be warm you know like I got this and if you
[03:23:43] tell me the the water and I think he said a couple miles away a couple miles bro that's
[03:23:47] literally seconds seconds it's not a couple miles of walking it's in an airplane it's
[03:23:52] like thousand one thousand two yes eject now I'm good yeah it and if you're if you got
[03:23:58] hit by triple a in your jets what we call it kind of like kind of falling apart underneath
[03:24:03] you you're like hey man buckle up dude we got about 30 seconds you're gonna be fine
[03:24:09] so the fact that it was catastrophic and had no choice that was the difference it would
[03:24:14] have been better had he been shot down by triple a because he probably could have just
[03:24:17] pulled the thing out waffled up motor shuts down catches on fire he's talking to the guy
[03:24:22] you get 30 seconds you're fine obviously that didn't happen but I did not follow that series
[03:24:28] events from the book until he explained it and then and then it's just awful and it happened
[03:24:32] to a bunch of people and he's telling that I had I had never I had never heard those
[03:24:38] I did not know that was the face in my nope did not know that from you know early fandom
[03:24:43] days mid to late 60s big cover up that fuses predates anything I ever flew with you know
[03:24:49] our fuses were super reliable we knew how to program they worked awesome I don't think
[03:24:54] I ever once heard a story of a fuse prematurely detonating a weapon that we lost an airplane
[03:25:02] we had you know different mechanical failures here and there but nothing like that certainly
[03:25:06] not an endemic thing where multiple airplanes were lost as a result it's awful sucks you
[03:25:12] know I noticed remember the thing was on the ground podcast we were talking about somebody
[03:25:18] is using the terms putting hands on yeah yeah like I'm gonna put hands on them yeah and it's
[03:25:23] sort of a it's does that remind you of when Dave says get out of the airplane yes like
[03:25:31] it's like the lingo that kind of down plays it like but it's still kind of like badass
[03:25:37] at the same time you're like wait a second like I might have to get out of the airplane
[03:25:41] yeah yeah I think it yeah very similar you know put hands on yeah so there what's what's
[03:25:48] put hands on putting hands on someone is like dude I was you know this guy was getting my
[03:25:52] face I had to put hands on the way of saying it instead of just saying like I had to knock
[03:25:56] this dude out or whatever instead of you just saying like oh you know you got to be like
[03:26:00] you know you might have to get out of the airplane whatever right you guys always say that kind
[03:26:04] of stuff too though but like what give him rounds down range yeah that's like I'm probably
[03:26:09] just like so guilty of like 47 different little statements like that but didn't even until
[03:26:14] you brought it up I was recounting when did I say that that's how you say it so it didn't
[03:26:19] even cross my mind that that was a thing but yeah put it around down range yep that's
[03:26:24] what we're doing or even even even contact when you say we can't or the enemy contacted
[03:26:29] us or whatever yeah probably totally attacked you guys with like guns yeah that's more big
[03:26:38] deal yeah well then it turns into what Dave's talking about cuz like you are so that's your
[03:26:43] vote your your fur there's not there's no translation you're just like oh enemy contact
[03:26:47] yeah that's what it's called it's yeah and it seems like even that get out of the airplane
[03:26:51] it kind of seems like hey let's not make it it's a huge deal we all know that already
[03:26:54] but let's not make it a huge deal kind of a thing and think about it that so we can navigate
[03:27:00] through the scenario same saying it's almost like it's on purpose yeah just he just gets
[03:27:03] out just so everyone else getting out of the airplane is what you should do when you land
[03:27:07] it hey I'm good now I'm gonna get out of the airplane all right it's like the most nonchalant
[03:27:12] pilot thing to be like oh I'm at I'm at 6,000 feet closing with the earth I'm going 500
[03:27:17] knots I'm gonna get out of here just gonna get out of the airplane not like you know
[03:27:24] which is what it really is well whatever that's the same thing with putting rounds down range
[03:27:28] and same thing with putting hands on someone you know it's like oh you're getting that
[03:27:31] means you're gonna you're about to get in a fight with someone yeah blood's gonna be drawn
[03:27:35] people are getting stabbed whatever put hands on yeah I don't put hands on this dude so he
[03:27:40] had a good one too that I've heard a billion times but he in the phrase he used the phrase
[03:27:45] out of airspeed out of ideas yeah classic aviator you know lingo of yeah screws yeah we're done
[03:27:55] right on so you know speaking of food well I did notice he mentioned he had a cutlass
[03:28:00] supreme with wire wheels on I had one of those too by the way 1985 cutlass supreme did you
[03:28:06] use the same logic as to purchasing that car that he did because the reason he bought that
[03:28:10] was like the coolest story ever yeah the bucket seats versus I don't want the bench I don't
[03:28:14] need a bucket seats I need a bench seat and get that girl right next to me what year was
[03:28:18] your cutlass supreme 85 so that's the same as the impala not the same as the gto little
[03:28:23] different I mean it's the same concept though the impala is like legit and the cutlass supreme
[03:28:30] is like a legit version but it doesn't have quite the power yeah and I didn't at especially
[03:28:37] at the time I didn't not only did I not have the option I bought it for my friend but I
[03:28:41] didn't know that much about it you know I just like the look then I bought the wire wheels
[03:28:45] you know good deal Dave Burke had a Corvette right yes sir it is straight up just like
[03:28:49] a hundred percent just top gun city I may have to post a throwback Thursday Instagram
[03:28:55] with me and that vet here was that your dream car a 100 percent color was yours the first
[03:29:01] one I got in flight school was a multiple he's a multiple ones yeah what was it what
[03:29:06] color was the first one black on black what was the second one it was like a light like
[03:29:10] a pewter you kind of like a metallic color yeah the first one was like a 95 black six
[03:29:17] speed that he was just when they fast dude they were awesome really yeah cuz aren't
[03:29:23] there some vets that are a little bit yeah the mid 80s to like the early 90s I think
[03:29:27] I had what's called I know a an official I was gonna I'm gonna get it wrong I think
[03:29:32] it was it was the C5 like that generation was the first real they had come back to like
[03:29:38] it was a legit yeah and the second one I got which was an 02 that was totally legit cruising
[03:29:45] the top gun in that thing have you seen the new ones with the yeah are you gonna get one
[03:29:49] of those I've probably outgrown the vet that was a you know my kid childhood dream and like
[03:29:56] young you know early 20s but don't they just real people back in my going back to one
[03:30:02] on that that new ones legit looks awesome it's like legit across the board yes like it
[03:30:06] competes yes I'm not gonna get one I don't know man I think you should okay all right
[03:30:16] get into the Corvette as they say awesome all right speaking of food speaking of food
[03:30:23] so what time is it right now in the world I don't know it's been all many many hours
[03:30:29] since I've eaten yeah and when I when I took Lee Ellis downstairs to see him off I grabbed
[03:30:35] a mulk a ready to drink mulk because I haven't eaten today this is the first thing I'm eating
[03:30:42] it's delicious this is a ready to drink they're out there they're in while while we're making
[03:30:47] them as many as we can right now which is not easy because the demand signal you know
[03:30:52] we had these at camp at jujitsu camp we got enough for like six days or whatever they were
[03:30:57] gone in two days people were just drinking them back to back to back to back to back to
[03:31:01] back they're awesome get some if you want to get some go to jacquafuel.com go to Wawa
[03:31:10] go to vitamin shop and get yourself some we're gonna make as many as we can and we're upping
[03:31:15] the production all that stuff because people want things that are healthy and you will
[03:31:22] supply one thing that we're supplying better is discipline go the drink yeah do we call
[03:31:31] it an energy drink yes we kind of have to the new year is it comparable to a normal energy
[03:31:38] drink no because a normal energy drink is giving you type 2 diabetes and some other crap issues
[03:31:43] yeah issues so jacquo discipline go an energy drink that's truly good for you your kids can
[03:31:49] drink it I mean maybe not your nine-year-old but your teenage kids look your teenage kids
[03:31:55] gonna go out and grab one of the other energy drinks which is literally horrible for them
[03:31:59] it's poison so we're not doing that let them drink something healthy so there you go discipline
[03:32:05] go jacquafuel jacquafuel.com who's the the what do you call it's like the a caricature
[03:32:10] of the the teenager kid with the flat brim hat they call him Kyle you ever heard of this
[03:32:15] guy no it's not a real guy it's like just a caricature okay and he has the energy drink
[03:32:21] wait is it Chad no oh Kyle yeah Kyle is different yeah so who's Chad Chad is like a woman not
[03:32:28] a womanizer but a guy he kind of a stud a stud yeah exactly right got it all going for him
[03:32:33] in that way all Kyle's just a bro kind of like the bro you know flat brim hat may or
[03:32:40] may not have sparkles on his oversized white shirt may or may not be a gamer has an energy
[03:32:45] drink okay usually a bad one it's kind of a negative stigma like they kind of tease
[03:32:50] him kind of not totally no he's not drinking a discipline go no he's not he's drinking
[03:32:56] a junk energy drink but so you need a different guy now same saying you gotta be I don't know
[03:33:01] somebody's training you get to yes somebody that's working out getting up early somebody
[03:33:06] that's getting up early getting after it there you go yeah chocolate field calm origin USA
[03:33:12] calm get stuff made in America get shirts get belts get boots get jeans get stuff made
[03:33:21] in America get stuff made in America that's what I'm talking about those new okay so Delta
[03:33:28] 68 jeans there's the two new colors oh what do you guys call them the wash or whatever
[03:33:32] yeah and then yeah much but nonetheless so I so I use the light ones we went out to dinner
[03:33:37] the other day and my son really liked the light ones he's six but for him to point it
[03:33:42] out and say that those jeans are dope it's one of the litmus tests yeah he likes Moke
[03:33:48] too he likes Moke too he's just across the board legit kid approval I like this kid
[03:33:53] approving approving and he's kind of hard to please to he's one of those kind guys cuz
[03:33:57] I got one of these RTD's not the not the Moke like the other brand that was kind of supplied
[03:34:02] at one point given the place we were at and he didn't like him straight up to say junk
[03:34:07] that was junk yeah and now he's down for the cause always totally don't really cause check
[03:34:11] origin USA calm get yourself some American made stuff that's my that's look we're supporting
[03:34:17] America I think that's just as self-evident right that's what we're doing and you know
[03:34:22] even if let's say we're like oh well not necessarily I'm sure I support America okay
[03:34:26] well do you at least not want to support slave labor do you at least not want to support
[03:34:32] a 13 year old girl working in a sweatshop in somewhere in some foreign country for $3
[03:34:39] a month that could crumble by the way at any moment yeah it has before yeah so hey look
[03:34:45] you don't want to support America fair enough okay but do you want to support the virtual
[03:34:52] a form of slavery that's taking place right now you probably don't support origin USA
[03:34:59] dot com there you go it's true also jockel store jockel store jockel store dot com is
[03:35:05] reading your discipline you just messed it up you kind of messed it up no I was reinforcing
[03:35:08] it soon saying so I say jockel store that's what I'm about to talk about URL what it called
[03:35:14] website jockel store dot com okay discipline equals freedom shirts and hats and hoodies
[03:35:20] we do have the shirt locker gone are the days of not being able to find a t-shirt in the
[03:35:26] event that you are a t-shirt wearer which a lot of us are but those days are gone you
[03:35:32] always have a new one every month boom all designs are good real positive feedback look
[03:35:38] out for that one jockel store dot com I'm here to tell you bruh your feet must be cold
[03:35:46] something right you're all over the mat no I wasn't not that was very cohesive you seem
[03:35:50] saying subscribe to the podcast go to jockel underground calm subscribe to that to go to
[03:35:55] YouTube channel subscribe to that get psychological warfare get flip flip flip side canvas dot com
[03:36:00] Dakota Meyer books we got leading with honor by liellis we got engaged with honor by liellis
[03:36:06] check out those books tons of lessons learned incredible books to read only cry for the
[03:36:12] living speaking a war holly mckay she wrote an awesome book rest her life to write that
[03:36:17] book pick that one up especially with everything that's going on the world right now it's good
[03:36:21] stuff to understand you know all the books I've written you might want to check those
[03:36:25] out especially the kids books come on come on maybe you're like too late to save maybe
[03:36:33] like discipline equals freedom it's not gonna help me because I'm just too I'm already just
[03:36:37] a disaster but don't let your kids go off the path break the cycle break the cycle get
[03:36:44] your kids on the path at a minimum look should you get on the path yes you should get discipline
[03:36:49] equals freedom field manual should get that for your your your your cousin and your dad
[03:36:57] and your mom right do that at but at a minimum get your nephew and your kid and well you
[03:37:06] know the people you know the kids you know get away the warrior kids series get a mic
[03:37:09] in the drag just do that do them a favor a lifelong favor as on front we have leadership
[03:37:15] consultancy we solve problems through leadership we have the next muster is in Orlando April
[03:37:22] 3rd through the 5th so if you want to come to that you better sign up now the one that
[03:37:26] we're Atlanta sold out everything we do so as I sells out so if you want to come to
[03:37:30] any of our events go to that's on that's on front dot com if you have a company you want
[03:37:33] us to work with your company helping you with leadership as long front dot com we also have
[03:37:38] online training academy you can get better you don't have to create courses from memory
[03:37:43] in a prison camp to get better you can go to extreme ownership dot com can learn about
[03:37:48] leadership from us we don't have to hit a tap code thankfully we can just sit there and
[03:37:54] answer your questions in a live session or you can go through the courses that we have
[03:37:58] on there learn about life and if you want to help service members active and retired
[03:38:04] you want to help their families gold star families check out marclise mom mom only she's
[03:38:07] got an incredible charity organization if you want to donate or you want to get involved
[03:38:12] go to america's mighty warriors dot org and don't forget about my kfink who's up there
[03:38:18] in the wilderness reintroducing veterans to their soul heroes and horses dot org once
[03:38:27] again if you want to follow leah ellis or you want to connect with leah ellis leading
[03:38:31] with honor dot com he's got an instagram at leading with honor he's got a twitter leon
[03:38:38] leah ellis facebook at leon in parentheses leah ellis and his linkedin is leah ellis
[03:38:45] the books leading with honor engaging with honor and of course captured by love is new
[03:38:50] one i don't know what's coming out but it's coming out soon to be on the lookout for
[03:38:54] that one they he wrote it with a love expert named greg goddack somehow i didn't get tapped
[03:39:01] as the love expert but uh that's the way it is if you want to follow us on twitter on
[03:39:10] the ground on facebook echo is that echo charles david is that david r burk and i am at jockel
[03:39:16] willink watch out for the algorithm because it'll grab you and thanks once again to colonel
[03:39:22] leah ellis for his service and sacrifice into all those p o w's who faced such horror but
[03:39:33] maintained their honor and therefore the honor of our great nation and thanks to all the
[03:39:38] military personnel out there you signed the dotted line and swear to uphold the constitution
[03:39:44] regardless of what you face so thank you for protecting us and our way of life and the
[03:39:49] same goes to the rest of our police force law enforcement firefighters paramedics emt's
[03:39:56] dispatch dispatchers correctional officers border patrol secret service all first responders
[03:40:01] you all swear an oath to protect us and we thank you for your service as well and everyone
[03:40:10] else that's out there when you're facing something tough like life because life is tough
[03:40:19] remember the stockdale paradox that is that you can never confuse faith that you're gonna
[03:40:29] prevail in the end so you gotta believe that you're gonna prevail in the end and you can't
[03:40:34] afford to lose that but at the same time you gotta have the discipline to confront the
[03:40:39] most brutal facts of your current reality whatever they might be so that you can overcome them
[03:40:48] so face the facts and know you can win and then go out and get after it and until next
[03:40:55] time this is Dave and echo and jocco out.