#260 Dale Hanson - Why MACV-SOG Had an 85% Casualty Rate and 1-in-4000 Odds

Mr. Dale Hanson, sir, welcome to the show. Thank you. It's an honor to have you here.

So I started interviewing your generation of veterans this year and have had, I think, three Vietnam vets on this year. And I just want you to know that, you know, I was in the military, went to Iraq, Afghanistan, did some contract work for the agency all over the Middle East. And I just want to say that your generation is the Vietnam era is what was really the motivating factor for me to enlist in the SEAL teams. And I watched all the movies, read a lot of the books.

I mean, I just was infatuated with the Vietnam War and what you guys were doing over there. So it really is a true honor for me to be able to interview you guys. Thank you. And you came very highly recommended from John Strykermeyer, our mutual friend.

And here you are. How long have you guys known each other? We didn't know each other in Vietnam, but we knew each other after. We didn't see North, I was seen Central, so we were only a couple hundred miles apart, but our missions were parallel rather than at the same time.

So I knew him at the first Army reunions, the Special Forces ones. You know, got to be friends right away. Who can not be friends with TILT? Right.

Such an awesome guy. All you guys are awesome people, man. But, well, everybody, everybody starts with an introduction here. So, Dale Hansen, welcome home.

Thank you. A born Korean Christian since the age of five. A Special Forces operator and Vietnam War veteran who served three tours in the secretive MACV SOG, a command and control central. Innovator behind the adoption of the 30-round magazine for the Car 15 in SOG, solving a critical battlefield issue through personal initiative.

Author of numerous books, including Born Twice and SOG, Missions to the Well, which you detail your missions and those of your comrades. Pursued martial arts, black belts, pilot training, police work in Alaska, and a successful career as a sculptor. Currently, you're a pastor of a small Baptist church. You're a husband, father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and servant of Jesus Christ.

Amen. Welcome again to the show. Thank you. Thank you.

So, I'd like to do a life story on you, where you grew up, what childhood was like, getting into the Vietnam War, how you got into MACV SOG, and then, you know, I think an important thing for all generations of veterans who went to war is the transition home and how you got over some of the traumatic events and how you got back into the civilian life. And, yeah, but I'm just curious, are you from Alaska? No, northern Minnesota. Northern Minnesota.

The most town in Connell, the United States, the cold spot in the United States. And I mentioned to one of the guys that 30% of Canada is south of northern Minnesota. And Maine and Washington State, that's 300 miles south. If you go to longitude and latitude, and it seems to come down right there in my hometown.

It's pretty cold. Wow. Real cold. So, how did you wind up in Alaska?

Is that getting the hell away from everybody? It was after the war, after a whole bunch of stuff. I think my wife wanted to go more than anything else. That's probably it.

And she went to college in Alaska. And the president and his wife just made her into a daughter. And she was a Miss Alaska, kind of a thing, too. Beautiful woman.

Very, very smart, smarter than me, by a long ways. And it was difficult in California after the war, and I don't know exactly why. But anyway, she says, let's go to Alaska. And she called the president, and we had a job right away.

And we went up there, and we've been there ever since. And it's a beautiful place. It's small, conservative. We've just been there forever.

A lot started in Minnesota, where we grew up. A small farmhouse, a clapboard. My dad came out of World War II. He was at Iwo Jima, Guadalcanal, Tinian, and another one, the big one, but he was Army.

Because Marines get all the credit for it, but they would attach this one regiment of Army on all the attacks. And so he wound up at all the big battles. And he came back. And basically, he wanted to be a farmer, get away from things, be quiet.

And so we were on this single-story, clapboard house, no electricity, no running water. I remember, as a young boy, we had a well. And my dad took me out to the well. I was pretty small, a couple years old.

And he took me over to the well. And he said, this is where we have our butter and our cheese and stuff. And we put it in the well. He said, never go there.

Never go there. Because you'll drown, we'll never find you. But then, after a certain amount of time, my dad and mom moved to International Falls. You couldn't make a living on the farm and so forth.

So we got a job in the mill. And that's where he stayed until he died. Wow. Well, before we get too in the weeds, sir, we've got a couple of things to knock out.

So everybody gets a gift here. So those are Vigilance League gummy bears. Made in the USA. Perfect.

Legal in all 50 states. Good to go. Perfect. And then just one more thing.

We have a Patreon account. It's like an online community. And they have been with us since the beginning when I was doing this in my attic. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question because they're literally the reason that I get to sit here with you today.

And so this is from Moose. How is our country? How is our country different before you left for Vietnam versus when you came back? It seems the country has changed in many ways as it was during Vietnam.

What do you think of the state of our country now? And are you hopeful for our country's future? Extremely good question. You know, I think we seem to notice things when they happen quickly and violently and in great degree.

We're losing our country incrementally, piece by piece. And most of it is the moorings that we have. When we were founded in your own recollection, we were founded on the Judeo-Christian ethic. We were a Christian nation.

Specifically, we didn't believe in enforcing someone. So therefore, you have the privilege of not believing as well. But all of our documents that we hold these truths to be self-evident. We were done by our creator with certain inalienable rights that among these are like liberty, pursuit of happiness and stuff.

Everything about our country was on those moorings. And if you look at the media and so forth, those moorings have disappeared. And sometimes I think the only thing that holds it together, the glue and so forth, is well-being. People figure, as long as I'm happy and well-being and my bills are paid and all that stuff, I'm happy with the country.

And we watch and let it dissolve. And some of the old preachers from years and years and years ago would say that apart from revival, our country will be lost. I mean, what will it take to save America? In every state in the United States, the major city is left-wing to the point of almost being socialist.

So I have a lot of concern for America. And like the old time, it's going to take revival. People are going to have to turn back to the moorings, which made us great in the first place. I don't think I could have said that any better myself.

Thank you. Thank you for saying that. Man, it's just, I don't know, it just makes it more real when somebody like you says it. It really does.

But, all right, let's move into the interview. So, where did you grow up? Where did you grow up? When did I grow up?

Where? Mainly, International Post, Minnesota. I guess some of the foundational things about life and what made me what I am. I think it's kind of instructive to see the end result of who you are, what made you into that, what was the ingredients in that recipe.

And there were a couple of them for me that were foundational that made the character of Dale Hansen, who I am. And the first one was when I was five years old. I became a Christian, which sounds kind of strange maybe to some people. But I apparently had a good mind, and I could converse with adults.

I'm pretty much at a straight level. And I was hearing the preacher, and I remember so clearly, he was so intense on the sermon, and his head was sweating and thin hair, and his head was down. And it was almost like he was preaching at the pulpit instead of us. And in his heart, it was just exploding in his heart.

And he says, at the invitation, he says, you need to stand at the bridge of decision, and look into the churning waters, and dive to yourself, and dive to yourself, and come up a new creature. And I wanted to be a Christian at five years old. And I understood it from my Sunday school teacher. But when he spoke that, it was a foundational thing to me.

And so, all week long, I had nightmares about it. Because as a child, I can understand straight literal language, but I didn't understand metaphor, and simile, and comparisons, and allegories. I didn't realize that he's making word pictures to make it clearer to people to understand. Well, as a boy, I remember the one place that there was a bridge was between International Falls, Minnesota, and Canada, and that place.

And all the gigantic lakes of northern Minnesota, Rainy Lake, and all the rest of them would pour through that gully, and the lake of the woods in the western half of the state. And down below that bridge, it just churned, and it beat against the rocks. It was like, almost like a yellow is at board of rocks. And in my mind, I kept thinking, this must be where it happens.

And so, I wrestled with it all this week. If I want to be a Christian, I have to be willing to do that, not understanding. So, next week, my parents weren't there, but I sat on the edge of the pew. And when the pastor gave the invitation, I went forward, and I was only five years old, and the pastor thought I must have gotten away from my parents or something.

And he said, what can I do for you, son? And I said, I'm ready to have you throw me off the bridge. And I thought that morning, when the church was dismissed, we would go over there to the Canadian border, and that's what would happen. And all of a sudden, he realized his metaphor was way over the head of a young boy.

And so, he looks to his wife, and he says, maybe this young boy would like to know how to become a Christian. And so, we went back into the back room, and I sat in a little red chair, and I just vividly remember it. She sat in a chair next to me, and she told me the plan of salvation, which I already knew, that we are born sinners, that man is a sinner by choice and by character, and that we are separated from a holy God. And there's nothing of our own merit that we can do to earn that, but Jesus Christ came, and he was God, and he was born of a virgin, and represented me in the human race.

And so, he died on the cross with Dale Hansen's sins. And so, I get saved by believing that and accepting the Bible. It talks about the gift of eternal life, and I accept Christ's gift that he did on the cross, and I became a Christian. Oh, that at the age of five?

Yeah, at five. It must have been one of the first things of definitive courage that I did, because beyond just the spiritual thing, I physically thought that I was going to be tossed off that bridge or jump off myself. But, you know, obviously, it was wrong, because I was understanding the metaphor. But that's been who I am the rest of my life.

The Bible says you're born again, which is how I got the title for my first songbook, you know, is that the experiences in Vietnam, and what we went through was horrendous. Our odds of living was 1 in 4,000, and it was so unique that when you come out on the other end, you're not the same person again. And so, anyway, that was kind of the first. That's a vivid memory for a five-year-old.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Remember, I don't know what happened to my brains, you know, but I remember being across the breakfast table from my grandma Hanson and one of my uncles, and I would be talking to them, talking to them, and they would just be smiling and listening to me talk, you know, and it never occurred to me until much later, you know, what that was like, you know. But there were a couple other cornerstones in my life that made me who I was. Perhaps the third one, I didn't say a second one, but as a young Christian, you want to be as Christ-like as you can, you know.

You want to, I mean, you're a new person, you want to emulate or emulate. I want to burn one of his coffee. I don't remember which. Me neither.

Yeah, but you want to emulate Jesus Christ and be as much like him as you can. And I was reading the Bible, and I think I was about 12, 13 years old, and I came across a verse in Luke 2, 52, in the Gospel of Luke, chapter 2, 52, and it talks about Jesus. He was 100% God and 100% man. He had to be God or he'd be a sinner just like us, and he had to be man to represent me.

So, yeah, I'm forgetting where I'm at. Age 13, read the Bible. It goes like this, and Jesus grew and waxed in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men. And of course, the word wax means increased and increased.

And I was really captivated by that verse. It said, Jesus was perfect in four different areas. If I'm going to emulate him, I should be also in those four areas. It's so often in Christianity and spiritual things, we think of just the spiritual.

But it says, and Jesus grew and waxed in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men. And so I was looking at that as a teenager. He was perfect physically, intellectually, socially, spiritually. And so I tried my best to be as close to perfect as I can in all those areas.

So physically, I worked out hard. I don't know if anyone in high school ever did, but I worked out hard. I might pull up three sets of 35, and the dips was three sets of 50. And so I worked out really hard, a jog, and all that kind of thing.

And then intellectually, I tried to read good literature. I read the classics and all that, and books on logic and thinking and so forth. So you could actually reason clearly. And of course, socially and spiritually, I'm a little bit clumsy socially, a little bit shy.

But nonetheless, dry. And so that is one of the things that you may be as well-rounded as I am today, if I am at all. Well-rounded. Because I tried to encapsulate all four of those areas in my heart.

And of course, the third thing is getting shot. I was 13 years old, and the first one kind of gave me a certain amount of courage. A lot of people ask me, what is the number one ingredient to be a green-gray? And I always think, well, people expect me to say, and they're true, like physical strength, intelligence is in there, there are several bunch of them.

But after three years of combat, I think the number one thing of a leader, especially in that kind of a war, is being able to make a decision under pressure. Probably more than anything, when it is so violent and wild. and turmoil that you can't even think you've got to come up with the right thing to do and um i was hunting with my uncles i was there my brother was a year and a half younger and my cousin was two years younger and two of my uncles and my uncles uh we were young guys were going to do a drive and they were on the other side of a pretty large forest area and so they went around and they left the cars or they're in the field and so they said give us at least a half hour so they were walking around to the other side and um i looked at my cousin i uh says let's go spin in the car and uh my uncle all cars back then we go 100 all of them did uh before i know what they do nowadays but they don't uh and my uncle waltz get to 120 like nothing he's just fast but anyway i'm over there my brother was having none of that my uncle but i had a 30 30 winchester never action and so i opened the lever of the 30 30 and slid across the seat you know barrels toward me but it's inoperable well i didn't notice but my cousin who's a couple years younger than me so that doesn't look right he shut it and that left it not only loaded brine but cocked you know so it's cold minnesota i'm driving across the highway and um all the bumps where the furrows were where the farmers were the year before and it just bumps and bump bump and then railroad tracks coming on the highway bump bump you know it was just as i hit the highway that went off and it went through my hip the cheek part and out my tailbone a quarter inch out and um uh my leg shot out just stiff as a board just totally stiffly it was like it was made out of wood you know on the accelerator and i'm heading down the highway and this car's going right next to me going faster and faster and i got both hands trying to pull my leg off the accelerator i couldn't it just would not come i was pulling i'm pulling now i'm instead of steering with my elbow i've already got a hand on the steering wheel as i'm steering trying to keep it on the highway and i'm grabbing the cloth on my pet like i'm pulling trying to get my foot off the accelerator and we're going 120 and we're going down the highway and my cousin jumped out right away uh knew something was dreadful but then i um uh the shock came out and i was able to pull it off my uh the accelerator and so we pulled off to the edge down there and um got it out of gear and i just sat there and i i knew this this was significant and before i knew it my two uncles ran over they they found out what happened they ran over i slid over to the other side my uncle went behind the steering wheel and the other one in the back and we headed for a little hospital 12 miles down the road world minnesota and uh he was driving full speed 120 all the way down there and uh we got to the hospital and the road uh separated from the hospital doors by 150 feet maybe maybe a little bit more with a long sidewalk and the uncles ran out to carry me to the hospital and it's like i definitively i i i needed to praise the situation even at 13 years old i said no i gotta walk because by trying to walk i could assess how bad it was i just knew that that's the thing you know more than what a doctor can tell me it'll tell me if i'm broken broken bones and all that stuff and i walked all the way to the door and at the door i i all strike was on the weakness was there and they grabbed me put me in there and uh i remember that at night uh you probably haven't had occasion to think of it but when you have a lot of bleeding they put a rubber sheet on top of the mattress so it doesn't get ruined and uh the nurse came in and um i asked the nurse i said am i supposed to slosh and she said what am i supposed to slosh and i turned my body sideways and you could hear the bloody slosh out and she just dropped her stuff up to a ring and it seemed like an instant and uh the doctor was there and i was definitely bleeding out you know and i spent probably a week there my parents brought me home to international falls it's 100 miles from world and i had all the blankets and pillows in the car i remember the first week after i got home i said i gotta go to church i don't know i didn't want to make a spectacle on myself and i just thought i should be in church and so um my dad dropped me off he says are you sure because he wasn't a church going guy and he said you sure and i said yeah i didn't realize until he left but there were steps going up oh man i gotta walk up those steps you know i walked up those steps and i had a bible in my left hand and a pillow on my right and i went to the back uh pew so when you know disturb anything and put that pillow down and sat on the pew but it was only in retrospect from years later that i i kind of thought and realized that you know you know even at that young age i was making decisions under extreme pressure is a 13 year old can't handle much more pressure than that you know yeah and um so anyway uh uh those were three events just growing up that i thought were formative in my life and going getting older in college and all that and the military you know you realize that i can handle stuff maybe other people can but i know i can you know it gave me a cover and even the simple thing about being a christian going going to combat knowing that you're going to kill people and all that i think that was resolved in the mind too uh and that is permissible to take a life for self-defense capital punishment and more you know and it's not a problem with me and i looked at all of the characters uh moses was adopted by pharaoh's daughter to be perhaps the next pharaoh and he would have been a general in the indian army and then uh david you know king david the shepherd boy who killed goliath uh they used to sing saul had killed his thousands but david is ten thousands and all the way down the line there were heroes and in the new testament when it talks about the christian life uh ephesians 6 talks about putting on the armor of god and all this kind of thing so the metaphors of war are there and um that's interesting so you you actually you did all the research before you went you know most of the time i was actually in college i'm a ministerial student and um i think it was my third third year a year to go and um i believed in the war i'm very anti-communist and uh anyway i think i read the newspaper so many gis have been killed and all that stuff i'm thinking i'm ready to die you know if i have to you know i'm not eager but i'm ready and you know the least i can do is do my part what a shame it would be at the end of this war being healthy and intelligent that i didn't do my part so i quit and enlisted with the previous so that i'd be able to try for special forces wow so you you you wanted special forces right that's the only thing if i'm going to do this i'm going to be the best there is that's all there is to it i'm not going to be anything else you know how old were you when you made that decision um probably 21 21 i think so third year of college what were you in what were you in school for major yeah theology theology yeah yeah of course you take all the other stuff what was the one thing that you saw that made you decide to go the military route um that's that's a good question because it makes me think um it was probably atrocities i saw from the other side a horrific communist i know philosophically how bad communism is and how they enslave and murder people but um to see it firsthand and of course you had the one american who did this atrocity for the whole war um cali but it was routine fare for the enemy how they would wipe out entire villages and so forth or leave one alive so that he could tell people who did it general and that might have been a good part of it we live in an environment our biology was never designed for emfs artificial light seed oils microplastics endocrine disruptors modern stressors the list goes on 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ministerial students got four s they couldn't touch you you know because no i'm going to go in this thing so i drove down to minneapolis and took all the tests and enlisted and i wanted to see in writing i have the right to try for special forces i can't give it to you but i can try for it you know and you know i did well as a i was an undergraduate on a basic and got promoted and i was an undergraduate on a-i-t and got promoted and then uh and a-i-t is interesting to um camp crockett and i don't know if you've ever heard of that but um it was a secret military installation in the united states to train people to fight and it was outside fort gordon 10 miles in the woods and it was paid for by excess funds is what the euphemism was and there were 600 of us there and um uh it was all uh people were going to go commando airborne um and things like that and we took the special forces test there and there were 600 of us and only three of us passed it are you serious and i was one and mike buckland was another and there's another guy his name was 600 people and three yeah only three individuals passed it it was it was an interesting test i don't know if it's a routine one but yeah three tests done at exactly the same time one was oral and they read it uh on microphones but the minute the scenario was read they went immediately to the next one you had to immediately put down the answer and then one was literal uh where you were reading the words and then there was another one that was uh visual where you saw a picture but three of them were at the same time so you had to divide your attention at three different tests at the same time and then um in most cases you had no time to really deliberate the answer you had to intuitively put down the right one you know so um it was an interesting challenge i've not seen that they've done that sense interesting interesting okay a lot of people went through that this is the first time i don't know if we would i can't imagine we were the only class um because it seemed like everything was set up it was like quonset huts and so forth it was wild it was um very very basic you know um i used to do nunchucks and throw my eyes and at the end of the training day i go up behind the quonset hut and i throw my knives you know i had a little spot i would go in and uh i looked on the ground all over the place were stockings with kiwi and shoe polish in them and these people were taking shoe polish and taking the lid off and putting them in a sock and they were getting high on shoe polish what yeah so they were all over the place i guess it was the only high they had you know so um it wasn't too long until i realized that we were all top tier of recruits up there damn so you pass that yeah then what happens um we gotta leave then went to training in uh fort bragg uh for special courses finish phase one which phase one is designed to make you quit or read you out that's it uh phase two i forget what that was but anyway um and the third one was um for 11f uh and that was never done to uh someone who's not a high rank uh nco e7 or above um we had a lecture by a major i think he came in and he i remember him saying uh uh other people say no they said highly classified unit i remember song and um but anyway he says we have this program uh in vietnam in his special operations group and um um you need to be 11 enough to go with your mos and um that was hard you had to be a senior but we were gonna let this small group of us do it 37 of us and uh but then the proviso at the end of it is at the end of this all of you people all graduates are gonna be sent directly to vietnam to song and uh 85 of you will be dead in three months so the first thing i did is i went back and said well how many do you have to start with if every three months 85 percent die and it's over 4 000 so the odds of living a year in song back that was one in uh 4 000 assuming you know he wasn't just trying to scare us but holy it seems you know fairly accurate in the sense that of my class you know most of them were killed wow one in 4 000 just to live for one year yeah yeah so it was a super good classes intelligence and spies and all this kind of thing it even had safe cracking and i mean all that part that you could be the james bond coming out of this thing as well as a commando you know and so at the end of it all we got our leave from full off to vietnam and uh landed up in the train the headquarters of special forces and uh uh cc north command and control it went by several names um command and control it went by sog special ops it went by studies and observation group and it seems to me there was a couple others too euphemism they kept changing the names you know but uh the first day uh north and south flew out in the next day uh my group that was that contum wow let's just rewind real quick i mean what is going through your head when they tell you 85 of you will be wiped out you do the math it's more than 4 000 i mean what's going through your head for some reason it might be a characteristic of youth but you're kind of indefatigable you think that well if there's one that's gonna be me and um i don't know how to say it um um you want to be in the most worthwhile program of all um accepting the idea that there's gonna be tremendous risk involved in it and uh uh you're willing to take the risk when you're like nothing's going to get me you know but as it was like it popped more than once in my tours so did they tell you what mackley saw would encompass what the job description was what you'll be doing pretty much um we know mainly it was going to be intelligence gathering a lot of that now we had the mic forces too you know the strike forces as a part of us perhaps to exploit uh things that we found and so forth um but but that was a part of it too um so so you get there yeah and uh the person who i met first was bob howard and we hit it off really well and um he was first starting to recon because they wouldn't go on the field anymore because for the third time they're going to put him in he's supposed to get his medal of honor you know it's funny because um in college i knew greek because that new testament was written in greek i learned greek you know and i'm walking by the the team house and there's an outline of horseshoe up there which in greek is omega and i and i and i said omega up here i said was there a project here called omega and he says i need to paint that building that's all he said but bob was his wife taught sunday school in a in alabama in a little tiny behind his church and he's just a great man you know and we talked you know and he says well i think i've got the guy for you and um and we left out in the headquarters and uh there he is norm doney It was my 1-0. And Norm had a silver star and seven bronze.

And it was his third or fourth tour. And Bob Howard says, Donnie, he says, I think I got the man for you. And talk with Norm Donnie. And some of those guys can take your measure pretty quickly.

They know what you're going to be like, whether you're going to falter in the field and all this stuff. And he took the measure. And it was great. It was interesting because he had come from the mailbox, and his wife had sent him a magazine.

And the cover of the magazine was men's magazine. And the cover was Sergeant Donnie, Sixth Man, Mission Impossible Team, Drive Out and Kill 200 VC. And that was my team leader. Holy shit.

What's the back story behind that? Yeah. He was doing his recon. He caught them doing PT on a riverbank.

And he just called in the air strikes and just nailed them. Wow. Wow. What would that feel like to be?

Have that guy as your leader? Yeah. But Donnie was a team leader, but he was going to teach me everything he knew. I was going to be a sponge.

And he wound up being my team leader, my father figure, my mentor, and my friend. And after the war, I've been seeing him in Oregon. Just a wonderful man. A great man.

And he retired after, I don't know, 25 years or so in the military. How big was your team? How big was your team? There were three Americans.

And I think we had, I think it was five or six inage. And my team was a little bit unique because most of mine were Chinese. So Chinese and Vietnamese. And we started to lose some wounds.

So we were down to like six and three. Yeah. How much training did you guys do before you went out on operations? Oh, constantly.

Only, of course, you'd be prepared well enough that they could grab and say, we need you going right now. And they would be confident. But when you get a mission, the first thing is, the talk, the headquarters would find Donnie or me if I was leading it. And they say, this is your warning order.

And you've got a mission. And the briefing will be tomorrow at two o'clock. And so now you know something's going on. So you make sure your people don't go to town on leave or something like that.

And then you get your warning order. I mean, the mission briefing. They'll say, this is where you're going. This is what you got.

This is what your mission is. All that kind of a thing. And you kind of appraise it. It's just like when we're, I'm going to need more defensive things or, you know, get to the mission and so forth.

And then if it requires special training, then you take your people and you go to the range or whatever and then do that specialized training that they don't normally do. And then you give a brief back in which it's in a briefing area. And all the people are there, the commanding officer is there, the S2, the S3, S4 is there. Everybody's there.

And anybody can ask you any questions they want about the mission, you know, the captain and the colonel and all the rest, you know. And when they're totally satisfied that you're ready and you've got a degree of success looking ahead, then they get okay. And then you'd have a time when the choppers are out there and you meet them out there and get inserted into the target area. A lot of people talk about, you know, I did 40, 50 missions.

I don't know how you can do that if you go through the warning order and all that kind of thing. I mean, an average intelligence mission is seven to 10 days, you know, of my missions overseas aren't that many, it's less than 10. But I had a lot of them in country too, which we didn't count. You know, the old timers wouldn't count it, only counted SOG.

Because SOG missions were deep in enemy-denied and controlled territory, Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam. Those were our missions. Anything else that we did, we can regard as just training missions. Interesting.

And I remember, Tony, I used to talk about, it was just a training mission. Tony said, don't forget, 58,000 people have been killed in those training missions, you know. You had to remember that because it's in Vietnam. It's still dangerous.

What would some of the missions be in CONUS? Over the fence? Yeah. Intelligence was probably number one, you know, and sometimes it's direct action.

My team in particular was specialized to be a prisoner of war snatch. That's what we did. And usually, you'd want to have a couple extra people because you'd have to snatch, you know, the attack element. Then you've got somebody behind you with a radio in case something goes south.

Then you've got the two wings, you know, the security. So the wing can say the comment or something like that. So you're talking about two on each wing in an attack element and then somebody behind. So ideally, you'd have about 10 people.

But it's hard to hide 10 people too, you know. But we would have the attack element. And I'm not sure if I'm getting carried away here. But a lot of times we would have a couple of claymores.

And we have a claymore here, a claymore here. And in between, we have a dead space, but an empty space. And that's where we would time it so the prisoner was right there. And we'd blow the claymores.

Everything down there was done. Then we'd run out there and grab the prisoner while he's still in shock. And time off, search him the whole deal and get off the road quick. And then get your people to come in.

But that's one of the big ones. Our specialized in POWs. And a lot of them did go for POWs. How many POWs did you guys saw?

We got two. But they both died. One died in the bed. He just died.

And there was one that I believe an NBA sniper shot him at the helicopter. He could have been shooting us. But I think they popped him because we were ready to just lift him on. And he took the shot.

And he went down just like that. And I think they picked their own guy so that he wouldn't talk. You guys were getting our POWs? No, you were taking our POWs.

Yeah, I'm sorry. Usually when we are trying to get our own POWs, that's a pretty big unit. What would you do when we're taking prisoners of war? What would we do?

What would you guys do? Well, you want to interrogate. If you can, we don't torture. I've never heard of torture.

But interrogate, all that kind of thing. Let the S2 people figure out how to do it. I remember, I can't remember what mission it was, but I took out this guy. And he was alive and all that stuff.

And he looked at me and he said, we think you'd be dead already, green. You know, all that stuff. Coming from the ground didn't come up. And we think you'd be already dead.

And we don't can kill. And so I remember I mentioned in one of the books, but I was going to go on a mission. I didn't think I was going to survive it. So I took the camouflage and I reversed the protocol.

Because usually, you know, the shadowed areas, you kind of lighten them up a little bit. I reversed it. I took the shadowed areas and made them dark with that dark green. And then the highlights of cheeks.

I did them with the lightest. And then I took a bunch of horizontal, that beige kind of color, and I put horizontal ones out here. So I looked like a death mask in green. And I didn't think I was going to live.

But boy, if they came after me, they were going to think there was someone to deal with, you know. Oh, shit. Yeah. Why didn't you think you were going to make it?

I don't remember. I don't remember which one that was. That's probably one of those things you try to forget. Yeah.

I think it was simply the intelligence we had, the people who had been there before, things like that. And I remember. Did you paint your face like that often? Did I think like that often?

I did. You talk to the SOG guys. They're a little bit reticent to tell you their anxiety. I don't think many of the guys talk.

I'll admit it. There were many times I didn't think I was going to live. But it's not cowardice at all. What it is is that when you're going to go anyway, it shows the opposite.

I remember my friend Doni, Novi, he fought in World War II against the Germans. He was in the Czech resistance. And then he fought in another war in Korea. And then he came to our war.

And by then he was old. And I got to know him in a training group. And he ran the mortar pool. Because he's too old to go to the field.

No. You were doing martial arts. You guys? You were serving with World War II, guys?

Yes. Oh. Yeah. That's incredible.

Novi fought the Germans from the Czechoslovakia deal. He's a big Czech guy. He told me once that he couldn't remember how many times he swam the Rhine. Amazing.

But Novi was just amazing. I'll get sidetracked. But Novi, Novi says I was always stealing his employees because I was really into martial arts and doing that. And then Chaco, you know, well, we had this teak from Vietnam that was really hard.

And I would always get his guys to mill it on their milling machine. You keep taking my guys. I remember I was getting ready to go on one of these really rough ones. I think I was talking to Novi.

And he gave me a book of poetry. And I was reading it. It was poetry of the wars, you know. And this one was, I remember I said, I was really nervous about going out the next day.

And that poem was, All night long, thrown against a buddy, slain, with his gnashing teeth, bared to the full moon. I was writing letters full of love. Never had a hug life so dear. Wow.

Yeah. And things like that. Novi would give me something like that. He never, never suggests for a moment that you're nervous, you know.

But he would do something to encourage you. Novi was interesting, too, because Novi was a friend, you know. And he had the mortar pool. And then there was one who ran the missile.

And there was another one who ran the club. And they were going from Khantum to Pleiku six miles away to buy stuff for their knees. And Novi was in the jeep, too. Well, on the way, the NBA or the VC, I packed the jeep and blew it up.

I mean, it flew up in the air upside down. And Novi landed sitting up like I am this morning with his back against a tree. And the bullet creased his forehead and just blood was coming down. And the one who was driving the jeep couldn't get out from the steering wheel.

They shot him. And then the other one, when the jeep flipped over, he was under the jeep. And he could see the NBA and he tried to move his foot so that they wouldn't see it. And they saw the movement and they shot him in the head.

Well, they went to Novi and all the blood there. And Novi's eyes were wide open, just like that, and just frozen. And, you know, anyway, the one vehicle said, him die, him die. So they went over and they saw his ring.

They tried to pull off his ring. And they couldn't get the ring off. So one of them grabbed a knife and they shot it on his finger. And they saw his finger off and they held up the ring to the light, you know.

And Novi, who is totally cognizant of what's going on, wouldn't move if he could. You know, but he kept, I cannot move because these guys will finish me off, you know. But he watched them do it, you know. And I went and I saw him in the hospital in Pleiku.

Just a good man, you know, old. He gave us a couple classes in 11F school in Fort Bragg, you know. What's it like to be able to serve with the World War II generation? What's it like to be able to serve with the World War II generation?

I would imagine that. Good. There were a couple of them. I don't, I think they thought of it more in terms of service.

And it was only the unique aspects of it that were related to what we did, that they wouldn't mention at all, world warfare and all that kind of a thing. And they would mention it. But it was never in a context or it never seemed like they were trying to show that they had an experience that was better than us. It was bigger and all that kind of a thing because of the world war as opposed to, you know, Indochina, but there was so much I got from them.

Inovi was one, but they never bragged about it, talked about it, really. This was a thing that they knew and they did, the experience and went through. And there were lessons to be learned if you as a young guy would talk to them about it and they'd say, you know, I went through something like that. But there were people, it's like my own father, you know, he did the entire war against the Japanese, you know, and never talked about it.

Wow. Yeah. Wow. Yeah.

There were some good ones there. Very interesting. Let's talk about your first mission. Your first mission.

First mission, oh boy. What was it? It would have been recon. It would have been with Donnie and Jim Morris.

How long were you in country before your first mission? Oh, not long at all. A month and a half, maybe. A month and a half?

Almost right away because I got on a team right away. Some of the other guys took a while to get a team. I don't remember which is the first ones. Do you remember waiting for your first mission?

Yeah. And it wasn't fear. It wasn't nervousness or anything like that. I was anxious.

Were you excited? Ready to go. Yeah. I want to go and get this done.

Knowing full well, of course, that the danger was there. But Donnie, my team leader, had such a confidence in his demeanor and stuff. You know, he knew what he was doing and I was confident. He knew what he was doing and we're going to do this.

I did maybe three with Donnie. I think the one that kind of stands out, but I don't know if it was the first one, was Ben Hat was under siege. The communists, of course, would siege major places like the French, Dien Ben Phu. That broke the back.

You know, it was like they had no more will to fight and so forth. They tried to do the same thing to the Americans. And, of course, Ted Offensive was a disaster unless you looked at the news. You know, they made it like, oh, they attacked 200 places in Vietnam.

What they don't say is they lost to every one. But I was with Donnie and we were doing a reconnaissance thing on the Ben Hat. We were way behind the lines. And our thing was to gather intelligence.

And our motto that people don't mention here is that break contact and continue mission. A lot of times people get in contact and then they want to get out. And the real motto in SOG is you break contact and you continue mission. You break contact, you avoid the enemy and all this stuff.

You get some distance between you and continue the mission. You know, with Donnie and there were enemies everywhere. It just totally, I just saturated. And they were all going toward Ben Hat and the big siege was going on.

And I seemed like I had been watching the siege for quite a while. And anyway, we come across the trail system. And Donnie and I went onto the trail. The other guys were security.

And it looked really well-traveled. And I looked down here and there were footprints in the mud. That was so new that the water was just starting to seep into the footprint. So it had to be like a minute or two minutes ahead.

Wow. Yeah. And so anyway, we know we're hearing movements down the line. And they're coming again from the other end.

And I had the camera. And I took a picture of that footprint with the water just starting to seep in there. And I just barely got off that trail before the first people started going by. But we don't fire them up because the job is intelligence.

So you let them go by, the job is intelligence. So we're continuing on. We're looking for enemy and finding this intelligence. We are in for the night.

Remain overnight. You used the same term. We are in for the night. And as I'm in there, I can hear.

the communist walking all over the place i even could hear um the trucks down the highway farther away and even tailgates going and sometimes that's not a good sign because it means they're unloading troops to come after you you know but uh as we're kind of waking up and all this stuff you know i had this smell that brought me back to when i was a boy mowing lawns it was a grass green grass has been mowed and it was like it just was so familiar to me so i got up and well we maneuvered to this trail area and it was probably for me to you probably six feet wide eight five feet wider where the people on the nba were going by battalions toward them they had trying to take them out and mowed it down and walked through it so much it was it was all the grass was broken and you know that smell from grass you know down it's just strong really strong as i'm looking at it's like they are saturated in this area you know we're going to be in trouble but anyway um donnie and i in the team we're maneuvering uh along this road we're about to come off the road and also i looked down and i saw commonware it was hidden quite well but i found common wire and so as soon as we got safely off the trail i mentioned the donnie you know whispering as a common wire you know and we went over and sure enough there was commonware so i said there has to be a headquarters up here somewhere because i'm just whispering you know and so donnie and i leave the team and donnie and i start following where the common wire is uh trying to get the whole team we're not going to get there quietly so donnie and i start working away along uh where the common wire is and it goes for quite a while then all of a sudden i get you on like a low area where there's a like old river or something like that and then on the other side i i hear the artillery that they're using to bombard them yeah it was um uh i don't know 50 artillery pieces 105 155 that kind of thing and they go boom boom boom into the camouflage but i can see the leaves blowing every time that the shell comes out you know and uh we get closer and i start getting close and i can see where scores of artillery pieces are left along this is what was bombarding ben hat and it is the the place where all the artillery was so anyway um we start looking for landmarks to get it really zeroed down to exactly where that would be on the map and i saw like where the old river was where there was kind of a cliff face and i said that's it on the map and so on and we isolate we got into exactly where it was you know so we make our way join the team and do a sit rep back to the fob and so we found the artillery and basically what we're saying that is bombarding ben hat and they said uh immediately go and i forget what it was nearest lz they said as fast as you can go and so we get to this lz where chopper's gonna pick us up well at the same time we were there our mike force um uh our strike force from from fob that's out there with the company but they're a few miles away from us and they're talking to a couple of guys after the war um uh because what they wanted to do they're gonna bomb it and they want us out of there you know because it's a little saturation bomb well anyway uh they told them because they could take a recon team out quite quickly but they couldn't likewise do that to a company you know so the order that came to them was a maneuver and i think they said seven clicks fast it's out south as fast as you can go and um anyway uh the guys afterward they were going so fast they could hardly breathe and about the time they got seven clicks away and we were off in the choppers 100 b-52s hit the place i didn't know there were that many in existence but the word came down 100 b-52s hit the place holy yeah and uh i didn't know we had that many you know and um uh maybe it's hyperbole huh yeah so anyway um uh we get out i get back to base and that is the day the siege of ben had ended that that intelligence line that we found you know and they dropped in all the b-52s that ended the siege of ben had wow interesting you know wow look back and say we did something yeah and that was that was the first one i think it was holy shit we may have had some locals you probably you know close by you know that we call locals and of course donia had to constantly tell me 58 000 in killed in locals you know you know in country you know don't get overconfident you know wow what can you um could you would you mind what was the mic force the mic force well we had companies people that would attack targets of opportunity they went by different names depending on mic force uh strike force i forget what they all were um hatchet force i think is what we called ours and i was on a hatchet force for a while um uh it just went by different names depending on who you were attached to yeah so were they you were attached to them or they were attached they were part of the fob so um were these maps were these uh sob guys as well guys yeah they're all um usually there were 15 americans and about 120 usually montanars you know in the old days and these days were about done just before we got there we had battalions of chinese and uh over the years the chinese have about been wiped out and i had four chinese on my team and they might have been the last fighters as far as i know um you know um who knows if they retired to pensacola who knows wow wow that's a hell of a first mission yeah yeah it was yeah did you did you develop any patterns or rituals or um anything in particular that you or you and your team would do before operations i don't think so um not spiritual or anything like that um i think i would always try to encourage our people i i had a closeness to our mercenaries that i don't think anyone else really have i'm one of the guys that i put my arms on them and i can i can hug them or i can tease them and all this stuff you know it never interfered with my command because they knew when the time came okay but i said what was it but i i think prior to all these missions and all this stuff i always make sure my people were emotionally and um ready for the missions you know they weren't christians per se i did uh most of them were buddhist i think you know how would you prepare yourself um well day by day i always prayed i tried to read the scriptures every day um but with me i always do the prayer but it was like it wasn't like a lot of praying it was almost and i want to diminish what i did as you would perhaps say grace to yourself when you eat a meal you know um you've prayed uh and it's not a long prayer a lot of times going on a mission unless there's something unique about it um i would pray god you know be with me help me be wise help me be courageous and things like that protect me things like that um but i didn't pray a long time i think i think my time there was in a readiness platform emotionally and spiritually gotcha did you carry any sentimental stuff pictures of family yeah yeah anything yeah i usually um never told him what we were doing um once in a while i might say if somebody died i i would probably be more prone to tell my dad or my brother definitely not my mom you know someone like that now what i meant what i meant was did you carry did you carry any sentimental type things on your person during operations maybe maybe a small bible or pictures of your family or anything that you thought would keep you totally sterile totally sterile totally sterile i mean absolutely but the only thing that about me that would violate the sterility of it all is when my chinese would write my name in kabaguchiin on my back i don't think we mentioned it but my name is hanson which renders well if you're chinese it's han son you know and they said we have to go to the witch doctor see how best the most suspicious way to write your name and so the first half was easy the han dynasty was the warrior dynasty of china and i forget now after these years about what the sun was but then they would write come by your chin which means never die so i go out in the field and my chinese we forgot and on my back and usually above my collar where god could see it or their god could see it they would put the chinese characters deal yeah the hands on come by your chin never die you know in their mind god is going to be looking for me on this mission wow yeah i didn't discourage so you got pretty close with those guys oh yeah no kidding yeah go to go to lunch in town with them or something like that you know yeah yeah good people yeah and and and they never they never took it took advantage of it never you know just just good people let's take a quick break okay this time of year everyone's putting together their holiday shopping lists but your personal information is also being gathered and circulated online in ways most people never think about while you're searching for gifts try searching for yourself what shows up might surprise you your name home 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from the break my shooting by the way that was a damn good time but um we just wrapped up your first mission uh with sock and so wanted to move into some some some of the other missions that really stick out in your mind i mean i needed you did three different tours over there i think you said 50 missions 20 of which if i remember correct are in in combat and are in uh southeast asia right and um and so i'd like to talk about the mission that you did for australians okay um of course uh was divided up into sectors of koreans had some australians had some in americans of course and there might have been someone else in there too uh in that mix um the australians somehow had been very much infiltrated uh in their headquarters or whatever it was so anyway uh we were tasked with a mission for the australians and it was an all green green greenberry team all five of us and um when it came time to get the mission um uh i don't remember how we got there if we went by chopper or by a truck or something it was definitely far away from anything it was in a toolie somewhere and uh we went across fields and stuff from when the french were there and uh when we went across several of these fields and so forth there was a huge tent like they had in world war ii and so forth squad tender bigger than that even and um that was a makeshift headquarters for uh the head of the operations for the australians so um the five of us went in there and um uh the australian uh commander came out he's a major and he's built he's looked exactly like hollywood uh he had the shorts and all that stuff and the knee high socks and all that and um and uh he came out to see us and he had the hat and he had that really trim mustache and all and it was quite formal as as asian i mean european people are but anyway as it turned out there was so highly infiltrated that this major didn't think he could get any mission started from his own people of his own headquarters and so forth because someplace along the line there were uh people who were uh double agents and so forth so um anyway um uh he gives us this message uh this mission uh he said that um coston the headquarters for the communists in south vietnam they were quite certain had their headquarters centered inside of a rubber plantation from the french and um people were bought off the french didn't want anyone to know about the presence of the nba and the vietcong because they didn't want the rubber plantations bombed and uh of course the constant the communists certainly didn't want it uh known by anyone and um so we were tasked with this mission and the other thing was a south vietnam and some of the other people were being bought off so there's this triple thing here someone is paying the money to look the other way they have the headquarters in the rubber plantations the french know it and so forth so we were given a mission to find that headquarters and report only to that major and so we were in that tent and he was giving us all the parameters of the mission and of course it's intelligence gathering it's not about getting a spy or anything like that so uh we start on this mission and we're making our way toward what we think is the rubber plantation and uh there's a lot of enemy around although a lot of it is ex-farmland and things like so hard to find places to hide and so forth but we um start making our way toward what i think is the headquarters and i was on the team leader and i took points were you commingled with the australians were you were you was this a joint operation no not just that major and once we got the information we give it to him and he take over from there but the closest we would get would be a helicopter one of theirs and he would give us only one um and some of the parameters were um about what you could shoot and not shoot at things like that so anyway we're going through the bushes and all that kind of a thing and um uh i've never seen so much bombs and booby traps and it's all over the place i couldn't believe it and uh it was really moving slow it was on my knees and stuff like that and i got to a place i could just sense the enemy was there i just knew it and um uh the ancillary sounds or hum or something there's something big close by so i'm on my belly i'm crawling through my belly through the really thick tangle that's there and uh i'm really going slow because i know somebody's in front of me and i get to a certain spot uh in this tangle and i smell something and i freeze i don't move or anything like that and as it turns out it was the breath of the century that was there on the edge of the line and i am so close i can smell his breath and uh um so so anyway it's like now it's taken me hour hour and a half to crawl this far without being heard now is enough information to know that that which i thought was really the headquarters for costum so now i need to back out of there and i could barely go forward quietly and now here i got a guy whose breath distance away and i gotta go backwards and um uh how do i do that and uh you know i kind of gave a signal to the guys behind i could get my hand back and i could see his shadow once i located him i smell i didn't move until i could kind of see him and then i could see his head moving shadows slightly on the other side so anyway i prayed and i did that quick prayer and i said god there's no way i can back out of here quietly can you cover the sound and about the time i said amen a jet took off from someplace um 50 miles away and went directly over the top of us are you serious yeah just absolutely certain and so i backed up as quickly as we could um we got to try to make our way back to an lz and uh lessons learned too because now i'm going to give the major his information he's going to drop the big bombs you know that assuming his headquarters let him but as i'm going back uh just a lesson learned uh as i'm going back and trying to lead my people to a place where we can pick up i find an lz it's actually a little bit too big it's too enticing but uh they said that they would not pick us up in any lz unless we had recon all the way around it these are big lz's i said this is crazy by the time i worked my way all the way around was to say somebody didn't go where we started from you it was crazy it was an hourglass shape lz so it was a white on the two ends and narrow in the middle and i thought the best i can do is to set up right in the middle of it i can watch both hemispheres then call in for my extraction and um as i'm there um uh uh all of a sudden i see movement across the hourglass from me and it's nba big big time movement a company or battalion big time uh coming across and i could beat the mind almost they didn't want to cross an opening either and so they would go across the narrowest place right over the top of me and so now it's one of those things of a brain that don't go by and um uh be ready to take out and they had a front element a patrol element in the front and i think there's about seven or eight of them and i thought i was pretty certain i could take that element out but then the rest of them you know we would put them under fire but once they collected themselves they'd overrun us no problem yeah so anyway uh long and short is i'll be called for the extraction uh same kind of a thing um uh god help us to get through this thing and same thing uh an aircraft came by and uh the point element took off running as fast as they could went right past me and i'm shorter than here to you and uh went right past me without looking and took off and then the rest of the element followed suit so we're in the mud and we got as low as we could go and then we sunk into the mud and then um the uh the chopper came in and uh they wouldn't go if we were under fire etc very strict rules of engagement but they got us out and i gave the debrief and gave it to the major and had no idea what happened you know you hope that they took out the place you know so you never got confirmation never got confirmation that they did anything oh shit i suppose entered different countries or something what did he say when he got me intel um very prussian if that's a good word um strict and all that's not formal you know um british or you know that kind of thing uh they took our information so forth and thank you yankee and that was it we're gone no shit yeah did you do any joint operations with any foreign guys no no not that i remember anyone yeah that wasn't was that a thing back then or everybody was pretty segmented in there yeah they had their own areas of operation and all that gotcha gotcha let's let's move into lima 50 mission in cambodia the lima 50 which we call the biggest intelligent find of any small unit of the green vietnam war um that takes a backstory to bring you to it um the communists had infiltrated headquarters in saigon significantly to the point where a lot of people were being informed what we're going to do and so forth we had a special forces had a project called gamma and one of the greek letters alpha beta gamma of bc in our one um uh it was called project gamma and actually a couple names you would probably know that the finnish uh number one commando uh uh was on that and actually was killed coming out on one of the missions uh anyway um uh we we were um at the place with this intelligence line that so many people and teams were being compromised that they actually scrubbed the team project gamma and uh which was really bad at that time gamma supplied 75 percent of all intelligence from vietnam war those special forces guys that were up to the fence and some of them over the fence in the other countries but 75 percent of all intelligence came from them so it was a real gut-wrenching thing to cancel the program so um anyway uh project gamma gets canceled and then i wind up on a mission that is lima 50 um if a number ends in two digits is cambodian if it's a single digit like 80 of six is laos so this was in cambodian that tribe border area where things were really hectic so this is lima 50 and uh we were on this mission and um uh it was just dense with enemy all over the place just you couldn't believe how many there were uh my roommate was um from minnesota as well and he uh because it was a it was his team to start with he as he came back from leave he took over the team and i was there in bon barcia i was there and then we had our indigenous people and we were sent on this mission to gather intelligence and so forth so we're on the mission two or three days really really hectic stuff and uh buffed into uh some communists and um one of them was when i lost my fingers on my hand um a whole bunch of them and we got into a firefight uh there was a lot of them and uh i was throwing grenades and we had the m79 grenade all i was just really going like crazy and um shooting as fast as i could well anyway um three of them jumped up in front of me and um uh and m16 had the 20-round magazine and the 30-round wasn't invented yet so i got three nba soldiers each of whom have 30 rounds in the magazine and i managed to get two of the three but the third one still had 10 rounds in his magazine he's extended 20 of his runs so he fires at me and um i was reaching for another magazine so as i'm reaching for the magazine his bullets went about there they took off the little uh the middle finger it was just hanging by his skin and then blew the different bullets of course and then one blew the knuckle out of the forefinger and then a series of bullets took the ends of all the fingers off and all the fingernails wound up in the back of my hand so i took a long time to get the magazine and i'm changing the magazine trying to put it in a magazine well of the m16 and the figure keeps flopping into the well and i can't get it changed fast enough finally you know i swing it into the palm of my hand and slam the magazine in there and be a uh another guy who rides at the scene and i'm there we took out the third guy and uh there were lots and lots of energy all over the place you know and um as um i'm thinking the next day we took out the agent i'm trying to remember this get it categorized right in my mind but anyway long short uh uh we uh ron in the night and uh set up a small perimeter and in the night and we stayed out of the ground and in the night um i could hear the shouting i could hear the trucks coming i could hear the tailgates coming down so i knew they were lining up in the pushing trail below us and um her dogs so i knew they had tracker dogs coming at us and so um we're sitting there uh waiting to be overrun and i've got four claymore mines in front of me and i didn't think i could push the plunger well so i found something solid on the ground and i had four claymore mine plungers right in front of me and as they were coming up the hill i had the heels of my hand on the four plungers ready to take them out and the dogs are coming up and again on that mission i prayed god plug up the noses on those dogs i could hear them coming and uh bah was my tail gunner and one of my other guys was on the other side of me and they come up and they're just you can tell in the dark these come these come they're really really nervous and uh i know bah put his buddha in his mouth he thought if he was killed he had died with buddha in his mouth he'd go to heaven so i could tell the way he was whispering that he had buddha in his mouth and um so anyway they came on he went right up the hill i could hear the grass and the twigs breaking right in front of me and then it was kind of quiet i'm ready to pull these plungers next thing i know i can hear them passing on the back side of me and never heard us never saw us and the dogs never smelled us you know it's just incredible you know so anyway so um next day um we get up we start uh early and all that and we find a pretty extensive trail system and uh coming down that trail system are several nba and we decide to take them out um two of them were chinese and they were couriers and they were on their way to south vietnam and uh they were the highest ranking people ever killed behind enemy lines in the war and we got into both colonels how'd you tell them huh how did you kill firearms and actually i was shooting along with uh uh ken wordley and we put them all down and then i could hear more of them i was actually i was throwing grenades with my hand and it was really messed up because i had ace bandages wrapped around it but it dried like a cast and so i only had the tip of my little finger my thumb sticking out but i was trying my best throwing grenades with that and it seemed to manage and then i killed them and then it was pretty evident right after that they were high-ranking chinese nba type people and they had a huge satchel and uh so we ran over there and we started addressing them totally um uh taking every bit of intelligence we could um langley could look at the paths and say well the cotton was growing over here and on down the line they could do a thorough thing to take samples of hair you know everything take his health you know everything and then we looked in the satchel in the satchel and i i missed some things too that you really need to know um uh in the satchel uh what was um i think they said 200 pages of top secret orders and so forth wow the siege of ben hat had just finished and he had the names of 52 nba soldiers who shot themselves so they wouldn't have to find out that he wounded themselves and he was administering discipline and then there was a location of two underground factories in the kushi tunnel system and accordance of how this guy could find him to give them their awards and then there was one underground field hospital in the kushi tunnel system and how to find them so we had all of that and there was a couple um american ids and uh i don't know exactly what'll happen but to back you up just a slight bit um we found the double agent basically we thought he was turning in all the people and caused project gamma to fold and uh uh the problem then was how to get him uh because he went up project folded he kind of just disappeared so what's cia you know sog is basically under the cia and uh they came up with a bogus brand new program and they were looking for people to work in it and this guy uh chuan was his last name um volunteered oh i'll work for you americans ready to do the same thing he did before so once they got him and he's not in the wraps they grabbed him they arrested him and uh they gave him sodium pentothal they interrogated him they did what is sodium pentothal yeah what is sodium pentothal truth serum does that work does that work apparently it does yeah sodium pentothal yeah truth serum um yeah and anyway uh he was i'm not going to tell you americans anything you know he knew he was compromised all help is done you know so the thing then is america the cia had two projects the same project just the names change pru and phoenix and once it was called phoenix the phoenix program and then when press started to find out about it they changed it to a pru provisional reconnaissance unit and it sounds innocuous you know so anyway their job their specific job was to eliminate the fifth column in south vietnam the people who don't wear a uniform but are fighting their job was to put them out they could kill you know so our people bring chuan over there and say we've got him we're going to deliver him to you and you can do your thing and they said he's your baby you take care of him and so they just dumped him back in her lap so um colonel roe was the new commander of special forces and only been a country a month and then several of his chief of staff they said it's up to us so they took chuan gave him sodium pentothal so he was asleep put him inside of a gunny sack then they took him over to end of trying harbor and started going out to sea and when he got significantly out to sea and the sharks were thick um they lifted him up so that his head was shown in a high standard with a silencer they put two rounds in his head stuck him back into the sack and dumped him overboard into the ocean ended the problem but somehow the press got word and i don't know how and they the united states government and arrested colonel roe the commander of all special forces in vietnam they put him in stockade prison in longan outside saigon along with seven of his people and they were there in longan jail for a long time no shit um anyway they were uh and even to back up further um abram's hated special forces and uh he did not like them at all for one thing the people in special forces would have been his officer court because they were a top special on intelligence and character and all that stuff you know if you don't wear green berets he'd have an officer courier but anyway he put him in stockade and uh kept him there well the mission that we were on when we killed the chinese couriers and we brought that back and uh actually the mission isn't done yet because the communists when we took out those uh chinese they knew they had something really big we had something big because there's their two dead bodies and one of them they stripped skin and the whole thing they knew and the satchel charge is gone so it's like every communist in that part of the country was just charging trying to get us and um we were trying our best to get out and and uh uh and the next afternoon uh we had more firefights and then this one i got shot in the back of the head and the bullet went across my head you got shot in the back of the head yeah but i didn't pass out i i remember just as if it was yesterday the sound i made was nah you know i just i just i don't know why you remember some things but anyway i reached back with my good hand and with my fingernails i raked it across and the shrapnel came out you know and um so there i was again so then um we get to an lz and the communists got us around there's several hundred of them they figure 600 to a thousand of them and we're holding them off big time as long as we can and uh so we're fighting we're trying to get airstrikes and all that to get us out and uh uh it's getting pretty wild um i went off on one edge to hold up a flight that they would come up one flight the rest of guys were on the other end and i was shooting as fast as i could you know and aiming and all that kind of thing and uh uh one of the guys on the other end his m16 it wasn't working right car 15 and so they thought well hansen is so slow um uh we need to get on this and when i shouldn't we got that i got the carbine and so forth so i had a carbine and my own rifle and so forth so they come by we need to get your rifle for a while we're being overrun so like a fool i give him my rifle i'm holding him off with this uh m1 carbine which is interesting and i mentioned it in the book um three smells where it's just like smelling the guy's breath in the in the thicket um i could smell his sweat like the extreme uh i don't know how you explain it that dress of the sweat i could smell the sweat and i could smell the fear i could smell his fear uh i just right there when i had his gun to my face and then i could smell his thoughts it was all on the smell if you've ever heard anyone talk like that but i could the minute i started shooting with his weapon i knew exactly what he was thinking and feeling it's incredible but it's true and i'm not a psychic or anything like what was it yeah so i'm holding i'm holding off with an M1 carbine and they're charging from this side and they're charging from my front left and all of a sudden the bullets come from my front left as I'm aiming because I only got so much ammo and as I'm aiming the bullet goes between two fingers on this hand and goes right through the comb with the rifle and essentially breaks the rifle in two although it's just holding together by a couple pieces and so you know it's not my day you know you know so anyway in the middle of this firefight one of my people bah my Vietnamese guy he comes running halfway to me and he stands up straight in the firefight it's just the anguish of his voice and he says hands on hands on worthily him die worthily him die which was acting was zero and you think about thoughts and you've done it yourself and comment you think oh what made me think about the first thing that went through my mind is that bah wanted me to bring him back to life and I yelled at what do you want me to do about it you're like I can't make him come back alive then I realized okay I understand and ran over there a chopper was coming in and I said take the rope wrap it around Ken Wordley you know Swiss seat and wrap it around him and take the satchel and put it down his shirt and you and he get out of here because I want that out of here so um uh he did he did and then one of the other Vietnamese from the other end ran to the helicopter to him and on and so then I went back to my place and um oh and I get my rifle back um I think it was from him I got my rifle back now so I'm fighting with a one-piece rifle and a wounded rifle you know what I'm fighting and um uh things are getting pretty wild but then all of a sudden um Ken Wordley uh Bob Garcia runs over and he says where's Ken where's Ken and I said he's dead I just sent him out and uh then Bob and I are from here to your wall apart and he gets on the radio and he looks at me for confirmation he says I want um I think it's hard for the big bombs whatever it is 500 whatever I want it right on me and I'm like right now and he says it's too close he says you'll be killed he says I want it right now that's it or he looks at me that's okay with you yes because we're about to be dead anyway and so he runs to his end and then the bombs start coming like crazy all over the place you know and uh enemy is still around you can't kill them all and so then the chopper comes another chopper comes and I hear yelling for me and I I run over there and it was that far away maybe uh 50 feet 75 feet and Bob Garcia and the other Vietnamese are already hooked up and they say Hanson come on come on and I thought in that interval of time I was the only one left on the ground I thought they were dead because I was hearing nothing at all so um and this is before the second chopper come and so I got on on the RT10 radio on the survival radio which you probably have yourself or whatever the radio is now but it was used to be a two-piece and then it was a one-piece and I got on the radio and I think I'm the only one left alive and so um again I don't know who to call I don't know any call signs and all that stuff you know and um all I know is that when I push that button every aircraft and so I push that button and I say is anybody out there and it was so cool and the copywriter um it was um uh a dear friend of mine uh one when I prayed for and he lived and uh and he says I got you Dale I got you know the call is a waste of the world that's what I wanted to hear more than anything else they've got me we're going to be okay we're going to get out of this thing even if I'm the only one left you know then they start hearing them calling and uh there's two of them left they're already hooked up ready to go and then um I get in uh go over there and then with my wounded hand I can't tie the knot you know you know that not just bring it through yourself it's like I don't have a hand to do it with and so I thought the only thing I can do is I make the biggest overhand knot knot and pull it through the loop snap it in and hope I did it you know it worked and uh the chopper lifted off and it hooked you know it's tightened on itself and that was good but then it never ends this mission then um the chopper is taking heavy hits and so instead of going straight up until we left clear the worst he went horizontal and dragged us through the foliage and I hooked up in the branches of the trees I was about to be pulled off and I my first assumption I'm sure it's what would happen is that the crew chief would have seen the dilemma and he would cut the rope no use with the chopper and thus you know so um he uh about the time uh he was probably picking out in his head I got the last branches done and we sprung 100 feet in the air it was like it was a bone arrow just shot into the air and then uh we headed toward a base um duck pecker and had one of those and um I remember a couple things one is that I was spinning and spinning and spinning and spinning because the other guys were hooked together on two ropes oh another thing too is that when that chopper came in there were four ropes and as I'm looking up looking for one for me to hook on the fire was so intense that one of the ropes got shot in two and I watched it fall to the ground like a snake you know and so I got the one made the biggest overhand knot stuck in then I'm stuck in the trees and the tree is just bending and it's just a second or two before he cuts it but then when I get the last branch done you know I got the rifle over the shoulder and cutting with my and that boy when I gave we just shot into the air like a bone arrow and um on the way back they were low on fuel so they couldn't make any detours so they drew us right through a hailstorm and I remember we were about beat to death by that hail it was awful did one thing after another and then when we landed I think it was Ben Hat but um Norm Doney my old team leader and father figure and Mike Buckland who went through all the training with me 37 hours and he's about the only one left alive besides me you know and uh they're there waiting for me and hugging and all that kind of a thing so glad to see us and I remember too because the guys were so glad to see me and hug they remember I got some Vietnamese there too and I yeah I'm like I'm half drunk you know we'd be twisting in the air spinning and spinning as far as it'll spin and then we go the other way and also sick and everything else but I went over and hugged my Vietnamese they're important too you know and I went and I hugged them and I said you okay and made sure they were good you know and that was the mission and we were I was at a Pleiku hospital field hospital and Norm Doney and Mike Buckland came to see me they drove six miles from Khantum to Pleiku and to see me and all that stuff and we went outside and found a table outside under the sun and he gave me a heads up this is what you guys found you know and they're not the highest intelligence line of any small unit in Vietnam tailwind it was gigantic but there was about 140 people getting it and it was a whole complex but um what we got the significant and after that they had no choice but to release Curl uh Curl and his people out of London jail but they still um insisted on trying them and all that kind of just a mockery thing a control thing because they wanted to control special forces and it bothered Ro uh uh Abrams because um um he didn't have control over special forces we're in a complete different auspices yeah holy shit this episode is sponsored by BetterHelp the holidays are here and you know what that means traditions some of us have decades of family rituals and some of us are just starting to build our own maybe perfecting a new hot chocolate recipe with the kids or finally mastering a great aunt's classic sweet potato pie I love reflecting on the traditions that matter the most for me I'm planning to start a new one this year setting aside a specific time just for myself the holidays can be a joyful but also hectic and lonely time of year that's why I think making therapy a new tradition is such a powerful idea a guaranteed way to ensure you take that time for yourself it's a space where you can get the clarity you need amid the holiday chaos and think about what traditions you want to keep or maybe even rewrite to make them more 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say you could sell his thoughts before you killed him what was he thinking when you said you could smell his thoughts before you killed him with his own weapon i could do that um i don't know what we transmit uh perspiration and all that kind of thing i definitely smelled his perspiration for sure and in that i could smell adrenaline the fear adrenaline i could smell it just as clear as can be and uh um the thinking auspices of course you can't um write down the sentence that he said but you can sure factor out the concept what he's going through his mind is amazing yeah um is that the first operation he lost anybody um i think so i think so we had several when we lost people you know how did you get through that um it was difficult uh with uh ken wordley from he grew up in place just 150 miles from me and all the stuff i did that is when i was in the hospital and i met his parents and you know that it was so difficult and uh um uh really difficult and there were times i know i was coming back from either the hospital or one of the missions i remember mike buckland met me and he says so-and-so died and i was on the middle of the compound and i started to weep and i just started to cry you know um and that happened more than once yeah damn yeah what what advice do you have for today's generation who's lost people and more who are trying to go families families friends people have lost teammates yeah um if the christian they believe in an afterlife okay you're going to see him again we're in sorrow now you know but if they don't have those kinds of feelings but all you can share with them is well he didn't suffer long or um it was for a good cause and although you love your son grandson you know um what he did sacrificially is uh incredible actually my uh the second song book is a song missions to the well and uh um in the old testament king david was a shepherd and he was raised in the town of bethlehem and uh he wound up to the note of the king when uh he went to visit his brothers and goliath was out there and david killed him with a sling you know but ultimately he winds up being the king of israel and the people praised him they said uh saul has killed his thousands but david his tens of thousands but david uh came from bethlehem and the philistian army had invaded the land and got between bethlehem and david's army and he's sitting down at a day of fighting and he says to himself not realizing anyone heard it he says to himself oh what i would give for a drink of water for my hometown of bethlehem and three of his people heard it and out of their love and loyalty to david they fought their way through the entire philistian army went to the well in bethlehem and got a flask of water and fought their way all the way back to david and presented it to him and that's how i came up with uh the title of the book uh missions to the well it's um when we do things so selflessly at great cost and sacrifice and perhaps permanently maimed in some way or give our lives you know um that's what david did his missions to the well were sacrificially you at cost yourself do something for someone else and that's probably the kind of thing i would share to a family um i'm not sure how many of them would take it perhaps not at the beginning but down the line they might yeah thank you for sharing that yeah do you remember the first time you killed another human being an enemy um i don't you don't i don't i don't um and i think and i think because of my ethic on taking a life it's okay to kill for self-defense capital punishment and war and so i don't have that guilt matrix to really make me you know cry sorrow whatever it is um perhaps sometimes when you take out the first one or two that you got you figure you got them because the fighting is diminished but they're on the other side of the branches and stuff and you know you got them um but you didn't see the dying you know um yeah sometimes you go back and think you know he came from a family too and he probably didn't want to go to south vietnam and fight for ho chi minh you know it's really hard to give comfort in that time did it ever bother you no it doesn't um only philosophically when you realize that that person probably didn't want to be or may not have wanted to be there but as far as far as my part in it i didn't um it didn't bother me uh it needed to be done it had to be done and so um yeah there were times uh i don't know how many i took out but there were lots you know um i just don't think about it you know yeah got plenty of things to worry about on the upcoming mission And then, you know, same thing with you. Did you ever, did you stay in Vietnam the whole time, or did you come back home at all? Yeah, I came back for a couple months. Five months to leave, so it was in three hospitals, and one up in the Fifth Sevens Hospital in Denver, and one in Japan, and one in Saigon, I think it was, but three different hospitals, and then convalescent leave at home.

And what I did when it was time to go back, I could pick one place to go to en route, and so I put my finger on International Falls, Minnesota, and I put the other finger on the other side of the globe, and I said Cape Town, South Africa, and I said, I want to go there. And then every time the plane stopped, whether it was Greece, Rome, Africa, or whatever it was, I traveled in there. Did you have anybody to come home to? Did you have anybody to come home to?

A brother to come home to? Did you have anyone to come home to? No, I wasn't married. My family was there.

My brother was there. He had a year and a half in the 173rd Airborne. Yeah, that's interesting. On the break, you told me that your brother was also in Vietnam.

It's interesting. I called my mom from Japan and said I had been shot in Vietnam, and my brother was in the room, and she said, Mom, I know where. And she said it was in the hand in the hand. And she said, how did you know that?

He said, I felt it. Yeah, he said, I felt it. We were pretty close, but he said, I felt it. Wow, is he still alive?

Oh, yeah, yeah, he's a couple years younger. But he was close? Yeah, yeah, we were close. Very good, man.

Do you guys talk about the war often? Do you relate with each other? Some, but quite limited. I don't think some of his missions were quite as hairy as mine were, although he had some.

But sometimes, usually it's in connection with me writing something or trying to find something out, you know, writing the other two books, you know, the immense amount of time it takes to find the witnesses and the documents and all that. And I remember I was trying to find a witness, the seizure of Manhattan, actually, and I called the day he went into hospice. That's the kind of thing that was more difficult every year, I'm sure. Man, man.

So we talked about the CAR-15 30-round magazine. CAR-15. And, of course, what I mentioned before was, you know, changing magazines is that they had, after the Tet Offensive, the Viet Cong was essentially wiped out, 35,000 Viet Cong. So it had to be, and their primary weapon was the SKS or the captured American, the Caribbean.

So the NBA came with theirs, the RPD and AK-47 and all the rest, you know. But the AK-47 had a 30-round magazine, so that was one help. So we had, well, they had 16, but we couldn't carry it overseas for a while because we had to go sterile. No tattoos, no laundry marks, no nothing, completely sterile.

And because if we were captured, granted, the United States would disavow any knowledge of us, you know, the old adage. So in that one firefight I was at, you know, the three of them stood up. There was a whole bunch, but there were three right in front of me. And we were trading bullets, and the one guy emptied his rifle on me.

The other one was just about done. But I got the other two, and I don't know if they were finished with their magazines or not, but I got two of them. And then the third one still had 10 magazines. I'm reaching for the magazine.

And that is a, we already started trying to find a producer to make them because we saw the need when the AK-47s came in. And so we all put in $50 for it. John Plaster headed it up, and he started finding manufacturers all over the world who can do this for us quickly. And by the time I got back from the hospital and all that, we had, each of us had at least one 30-round magazine.

And it wasn't very long after that the United States followed suit and we started having 30-round magazines. But it was crucial for us, you know, just like the RPD with a drum held 50 rounds. You know, and if you're in the initial firefight, and you've got 50 rounds to lay down that first assault, that's significant. That's significant.

Damn. Wow. I still can't believe you're the reason we have 30-round magazines. Yeah.

I did not be able to carry it in the first place. Yeah. The magazine's a weapon. Yeah.

Yeah, finally, we really complained. We went to our CL, whoever we love, Colonel Apt, ABT, a great man. He should have gotten a star, except he had a heart attack after the war. But we said, look, sir, this is our situation.

We're out of ammunition and they're still shooting. And he said, I'll look into that. And I don't know if he orchestrated the wordish of it all. But basically, they said that the communists had captured enough M-16s that the M-16s are no longer sterile.

And so it doesn't readily identify you as an American. So that's how we got the okay to use it, you know. I mean, it is kind of interesting, right? I mean, if they had 30-round magazines, why would they be picking up weapons that only have 20-round magazines, you know?

But did you have any downtime in Vietnam? We had R&R. What would you guys do on R&R? I went to Bangkok every time.

I love Bangkok. Nice people, friendly, courteous people. I totally enjoyed it. We could go to the beach and all that kind of a thing.

And it was nice. I totally enjoyed it. We got totally away from the war and everything else. And anywhere with the other guys, CCN, CCC, CCS, the other three units that would come in and how are things in the north?

What do you do differently? Stuff like that. I mean, was it welcoming in Thailand? Yes.

Yeah. Not the Khmer Rouge, but the Cambodians and the Thais are the smiling people. Very beautiful, friendly people. Would the enemy send in spies?

I would imagine that was a hot spot for R&R from Americans. Yeah. To catch a drunk guy and be his friend and find out what he has to say. I'm sure that would happen.

It's not one of the things that happened to us. No reports of it, no warnings, nothing like that. I think our people are a little bit smarter than that. Have you ever gone back over there since I've been there?

No, I haven't. Not anywhere near it? No. Would you?

Would I? Would you? I think I would. I think I would.

But I don't think I would go to Vietnam, though. A lot of the guys that I go to Vietnam afterward, they say, well, they're basically, communism needs capitalism to survive. And so they're in the business and all that kind of thing and welcoming foreigners and all that. So I don't think they're anti-American in their sentiment, at least when they talk to us.

A lot of our guys go over there, especially ones that are looking for MIAs and stuff like that. Let's talk about the post-hospital work in S2 Intelligence, Fort Drum. Fort Drum. When I got back the second time, we had been, in a way, and I'm going to insult people, but we had, in a way, had lost so many of our special portions of people.

We were somewhat decimated. And our ranks were filled with rangers and so forth like that. They didn't have quite our training. And when we would go on a mission, if it was intelligence, we broke contact, continued mission.

And I remember one of our guys, Mike, he said, don't go back to recon yet, because there's a new batch of people out there, and they don't seem to have the same ethic that we do. And so... Same ethic? Yeah, well, ethic in the sense of your job, your job.

You have to go out and collect the information. A lot of our guys would go out. They see the enemy. They get in a firefight.

Usually, they initiated it. And then they would ask for an exfiltration. So the missions were being cut off simply because they didn't break contact and continue the mission. And so they were saying that our old guys are kind of disappearing.

You need to sit back and watch for a while. So I did. And what was happening was for drum, it was a secret program that only about six of us, special forces and six or eight pilots, Uber dogs and all that. And our job was going behind the lines, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, North Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and look for intelligence.

And if it was fruitful, you wouldn't have to send a recon team in there, expose them to being killed. Or if you did send one in there, it was to confirm or deny or find a vulnerability. So we were, one of us would fly about 4 or 5,000 feet and the other one about 10, 20 feet. And so the top one up there would say there's a villa and a highway out there that looks like trucks.

And so we would come down in the low level, sometimes below the trees and actually tilt wings to get between trees. And we would be out the window taking the pictures and stopping pictures and finding enemy intelligence. It would be new segments of road, truck parks, things like that, really important things. And that's what we did.

And then we're, I think there were four or five of us, special forces. And I was doing intelligence because I didn't want to go on the ground right away until we factored this out. So I was on the ground briefing, debriefing teams so they could go out. And having been on the ground, I certainly knew what they needed to know and so forth.

So that was good as far as intelligence. But that's what we shared in the same office. So that morning, one of the pilots, the backseat observer was killed. He was taking pictures out of the window.

And boy, that looks lucrative. He tells the pilot to go back. I want to take another picture. The pilot says, no, no, you don't go back twice.

That's lethal. But he says, no, I insist. This is really good. And then he goes back a second time and he gets shot in the head and dies.

So then the major, who was in charge of intelligence, was a little bit concerned. He says, well, I wonder what I'm doing now to replace him. So I told him, I said, I'll do it. So I started doing the bird dog stuff.

Mike Buckland and some of the other ones would teach me what to do. And we had the Laika cameras and all of that. And so it was quite hairy. We were definitely way behind enemy lines for sure.

And of course, yeah, in Nordam, the emperor of Gambonia, and I forget who was in North, basically leased or gave North Vietnam and China, the Western, 30% of his country, to do their thing, which is where SOG missions were. We knew where they were. So that's what we were monitoring. And so it was densely populated with enemy, the Ho Chi Minh Trail, the figures, and we could put it on a map really, really clearly.

And we could find the truck parts and so forth. And underground, underwater bridges in the rivers. They make a bridge underwater. And you could see on the shore, you could see where our truck was.

And then on the other side, there's an exit. In between, there's a bridge. But we did that for quite a while. It was extremely lucrative intelligence-wise.

It was a very good one. And I did that, I suppose, only a couple months. My other roommate I was with in a training group, he stayed with it. And I said, I've got to get back on the ground.

I feel like I'm not doing anything, which is probably silly at that point. So rather than go back to recon, I went to a company. And that's a story in itself. I went to a company.

There were only two Americans instead of 15. And it was a captain and a first sergeant. And now there was me. So the three of us each took a platoon.

And we were it. And just before my first mission out with them, we got one more American. And we put him in charge of mortars. So we had mortars with us now.

But it was kind of an interesting deal. The captain was German from Germany. Was in German special forces. They just weighed in the United States and joined special forces in the United States.

I was, we'll test your World War II memory year. I used to go get the mail and go to the post office. I said, you know, the other guy's got somebody dropping off. Well, anyway, I was picking up a letter for the captain.

His name was Jaime Roth. And anyway, as I'm picking him up, you know, because you look at the back to see who it's for. And I said, that looks like my grandma's handwriting. You know, she's Germany from the old country, turn of the last century.

And so I look at the writing, and it's Otto Scorzini. I don't know if you know him. He is the most decorated commando of World War II. He's the number one guy of Germany.

He's the one who parachuted at Normandy, turned all the roadsides backward. He's the one when Tito was in an impregnable fortress prison on the top of a mountain. He's the one that got him sprung, went up there, flew up there with a small plane, busted him from jail, and got out with him. I can't remember all this stuff.

It's in the book for sure, but a dozen things that he did. Unbelievable. And after the war, he was a personal bodyguard for Ava Peron of South America there. And one time he was in Egypt, and two Israelis came up to him.

And of course, he's on the guard because he figures, you know, German Nazi and all that stuff, you know. And he says, are you here to kill me? He said, oh, no, no, we're not here to kill you. We want to hire you.

And he says, what do you want me to hire me to do? He says, they have six Egyptian scientists that are about to make a nuclear bomb to drop on Israel. We want you to get rid of those scientists. And apparently it was very close to being finished.

He says, okay, what do I get out of this? He says, what do you want? And remember the Nazi hunter, the Jewish guy who got so many. Well, anyway, he says, I want you to get my name off of his hit list, and I'll take out these scientists.

He said, okay. And within a week, six dead scientists. And Otto Scorgini's name was off the list. And there were so many more, I wish I could remember them.

But we're in this company, usually 15 or 16 Americans in the company. And he's a captain, and he's Prussian in his attitude. You don't talk to him and listen to him and all that. He's very Prussian, like old-time Germany, you know.