It's time to get away in a new Hyundai vehicle during the Hyundai Getaway Sales Event at Woodhouse Hyundai. The Hyundai Line-Up Sedanza SUVs has the capability you need and technology and features you want, like the all-new 2023 Hyundai Palsate and Hyundai Tucson. This holiday season, get into a vehicle that will give you confidence with Hyundai Owner Assurance America's Best 10-Year 100,000 Mile Werency. Visit us online at woodhousehandeofomaha.com The cross-road window is because we've worked a lot later on in two of these countries where we had to work underneath the Chief of Station.
It was really funny because you and I, after talking last night, we were in the same country. On the same project. On the same hunting down the same person. Yeah.
There was this fight promoter named Santo. He was a Japanese guy and he took underneath obviously he wanted to make money out of it and he said, would you want to fight? You know, at Japanese dojo's and matches, he was talking about the underground matches. And the technology was used against the enemy and how we would find fix and locate and kill him.
He got killed was that 2006. I tracked down a tiger. Get this. Are you shitting me?
Yeah. A tiger? I tracked down a wild tiger. Welcome back to the Sean Ryan Show.
This is episode 009 and we've brought you our most requested guest today. I want to kick things off by saying thank you to all the patrons on Patreon. Because of you guys, we're getting an entire new studio which will be done by the end of next month. I want to say thank you to everybody who's left us a review on iTunes.
If you haven't done that yet, please go to iTunes. Leave us a review even if it's just one word. That's all we ask. Just one word on iTunes.
And lastly, please go to vigilance elite.com. Subscribe to the newsletter for all of the other content that we release on all the other platforms. There are hundreds of other videos to include behind the scenes footage of the Sean Ryan Show. Let's get on with it.
Number 009. He was smuggled out of Vietnam at an extremely young age and later found himself in the United States where he would serve a 23 year military career, 20 of which as a green beret and special operations. After retirement, he went on to become Call of Duty's character Ronan. He co-hosted history channels, forged and fired, knife or death.
He founded Ronan tactics. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome 009, Mr. Toulam. Two.
Welcome to Tennessee, man. Thank you. It's great being here. It's great having you.
Thank you. You are the number one most requested guest for the Sean Ryan Show. And so I'm just ecstatic to have you here. We ever since episode one, it's been, can you get two lamb on the show?
Can you get two lamb on the show? And now you're here. And, you know, we had some talks before today on the phone and then media dinner last night. We got a lot to dive into.
Absolutely. So forward to this. Me too, man. But just, I mean, so many accomplishments, 23 years military service, 20 years special operations.
If I'm not mistaken, you have beat the game Call of Duty more than anyone I know, because you're a character in it, forged and fired. You had an extremely successful transition out of the military and overcoming the dreaded transition. And, you know, something that I think a lot of people leave out that is extremely commendable is you've been with your wife for 20 years. And it sounds like she was with you the whole time through all those deployments.
And, and that is no easy task for for any spouse. And, you know, coming from a occupation that has one of the highest divorce rates in the world, that's pretty amazing. Thank you. So yeah, and meeting our, what an amazing moment you've got there.
So appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah, you're welcome. But all right.
So every show, I always start out with a gift. So because your name's two, we got you two gifts. Yeah, I like that. Yeah.
So here we go. Ready? One. And here's the other one.
Wow. I mean, some elite candy. This is awesome. Thank you so much.
You're welcome. Wow. Those more bikes have been compared to crack. They're so good.
Yeah. Yeah. So I can't wait to try to crack. Be careful with those.
Awesome. I appreciate this. It looks so great. Right.
Thank you. So that hoodie we had modified, you know, so you're pretty fit guy. So it's it's a large torso with double X arms. So, but yeah, man, I appreciate thank you.
You're welcome. But just dive into it. Your story starts at birth and you were born in to war. And so I kind of want to cover some of that.
But in 1973, Nixon signed a peace agreement with North Vietnam, South Vietnam, and the US, which unfortunately nobody followed. And then the US started pulling troops out in 1973. You were born in 1974 and Saigon, the hospital was getting mortared. Yeah.
And so I'd like to start right there. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, let's let's put us back in that timeframe, you know, huge, unpopular American war, you know, it was a war of a body count, you know, the Americans that came in and fought against the the communist regime, the North Vietnamese. Well, during that time when Americans drew with drew, you know, I'm South Vietnamese, I was born on the losing side of war.
On the morning of my birth, you know, my mother, I was born on the basement floor of the Saigon hospital. My mother's shield, my body from incoming artillery fire in the morning of my birth at three months old. I lost my freedoms to the communist regime. You know, like any occupying force, you know, you're they're going to take the leadership out of that government.
So Saigon was a capital of Vietnam, you know, South Vietnam, you know, the country was divided in North South, the North Vietnamese surrounded the country, the city of Saigon, mortared us artillery fire, eventually the troops came in. And that's when the post-war genocide started happening, you know, our family, we, the North Vietnamese will go through the homes, they'll look for valuables, good belongings, they'll push out the the civilians out in the streets. And, you know, you serve with the South Vietnamese army, then you're immediately executed. All right, it might, my uncle who served with the the South Vietnamese along with the Americans, they were immediately executed.
My other uncle was wearing prison in what they call re-education camps. Let me explain to Sean, you know, when these re-education camps are torture camps, you know, by the time I received my uncle after 15 years imprisonment, he had no skin on the bottom of his foot. All right, so they tortured him, beat him, broke him as a human being. So at three months old, you know, we endured that, my mother held on to me as a killer family.
We were facing genocide that we lived underneath Communist occupation to us three years old. During that time, it was a flux of refugees leaving Vietnam. Was the violence happening the entire three years leading up to? No, that initial violence, and this is history, me studying history, that initial violence of occupying, taking out the current regime, the power in that government system, imprisoning people, once that was established, then the oppression started, you know, social ideology, you know, you're going to pay the government system this, the oppression we started starving, you know.
So we were facing, you know, them oppressing us as a human race, and then additionally, we started facing genocide. You can read the history on it, you know. They looked at our lives as in, we're not even worth a bullet. They would take us out and write spatties and they would murder people by putting a plastic bag with their heads, damn suffocating them to death, you know.
So at three years old, my parents, my biological father and my mother and my brother, we escaped on a wooden fishing boat with hundreds, hundreds of other, hundreds of thousands of other fleeing refugees. You know, I want to put you in a scenario, imagine like escaping in this country, right? Hundreds of thousands of refugees escaping on wooden boats. Well, that brought in the pie tree that was going on around other countries, neighboring countries like Thailand, Philippines, the bandits that came in, and basically they would stop our boats when we were escaping, border boats, they'll murder the men, rape the women, and torture the children.
Were you just backing up for just a second, on these boats, who was orchestrating this kind of migration out of South India? People, they're just trying to leave, so think about like Syria or any country that's war-torn, they're just trying to escape that area, right? So after the fall of South Vietnam, you know, we were facing the Communist regime. So a lot of people were just here walking out of the country, they were getting on these wooden boats, smoking on themselves.
It was not like the Communist regime let us leave. We had to escape, you know, and the people that own these boats, we were like fishermen and they're just trying to make a living too. So these are like, can you describe the boat? A normal wooden fishing boat.
Just a motor, no motor. A motor boat. Now this normally fits about maybe 20 people. My mother said on our boat, it was 100 plus people.
Holy shit. We couldn't sleep. We had to basically, we were in the basement area of the boat, the bottom deck of the boat, and we had to sleep sitting up, right, because they were jam-packed in there. So think about the smell, think about the desperate, you know, how desperate these people were.
They're rich, we're in the same boat as the poor. Wow. You know, so we were truly trying to survive, truly, you know, trying to escape. So the poetry was going on.
My mother told me the captain of the boat. He used to then ex-navy for the South Vietnamese military. So he employed the tactics that you needed to navigate past these poetry. And basically all he did was we escaped at night, he shut off the lights, and we just kind of sailed past the poetry by cutting off the motors, right?
And then once we got out at sea, then he cut on the motors, and then we went. Our first destination was Malaysia, right? So you think about it, man, like we were escaping and all these neighboring countries, they don't want to deal with you. They don't want your issues.
They don't want escaping refugees in their country. Now they have to house and feed you their third-world countries themselves. So we went into Malaysia and the Malaysian Coast Guard stopped us at Gunford. They shot at us, and then they told us that we will not enter their country.
They anchored us in, and then they pulled us back out into the ocean. They shot our motor, cut the lines, and left us drifting out of the oceans to die. So my mother said we drifted. We were out there for nearly a month at sea.
A month? Nearly a month at sea. And she said people started dying due to the lack of food and water. People were dying.
They were stealing or fighting from each other, they threw the dead bodies over the sea. So my mother said we were in a very desperate survival situation. She actually told me she lost hope. Do you remember any of this?
No. Nothing? There's flashes of like the refugee camps growing up. There was a flash of like in my dreams where I see a light going through like the crevice of a boat.
And I'll explain that light. But those like little flashes, I wouldn't say I remembered the whole big picture. I was so young. How about your brother?
My brother remembers. How old was he? He's four years older than me. Okay.
He was seven at the time. Wow. So you know people started dying. My mother said they were throwing people off the boat or lack of food, water.
And then um, you know my mother carried poison in her belongings. You know it was a calming practice for fleeing refugees to poison their children when the journey ends. That means they know they're going to die or if the pirates entered a boat and they'll give the poison to their children so they won't die being tortured. That they have the peaceful, you know, death.
So my mother contemplating on this poison because she knew that we're not going to make it, you know. So she said a huge storm hit us. You know, imagine a fishing boat man out in the middle of the South China Sea, right? And she said it's huge storms.
She thought the boat was going to tip over with no motor, no more. And we drifted and drifted but the rain, she said, saved us because it allowed us, you know, the water source we needed and we were surviving few more days, you know. She said that we drifted out that the storm took us further out into the ocean. They didn't know where the captain didn't know where we're at.
You know, we were just out at sea. Had no motor. We're just drifting. And um, America happens man, you know.
There was a Russian supply boat that was exiting out of China. I mean out of Vietnam. They were leaving Vietnam and they saw refugees. Now I want to paint the story.
These are Russians. The government, the system, the ideology that took me out of my country that took away my freedoms, you know, to murder my family, you know. And these Russians were coming out of Vietnam and they saw fleeing refugees and they, they sent us. They brought us on board and, well, they brought us on board one at a time.
That's what my mother said. And they basically they provided medical aid to us, you know. We were drifting out of sea from early on month. And they anchored us on and they told the captain and my mother said it to the tee.
They told the captain that you're lucky because if we were going into Vietnam, we would have drug you back into Vietnam. Oh man. But because we're going out of Vietnam, we have no other choice but to take you with us. Right.
So they were a destination in the Singapore. Right. So they basically tugged us along, you know, on their line and they dropped us off at a refugee camp in Indonesia. You know, I want to explain this, you know, the situation to you is that these refugee camps are very dangerous, man.
They're a plot of land in the middle of the jungle. You know, and there's maybe a control post in the middle, right? Where people go there and check their meals and that's their communications, you know, sponsorships to get into other countries, you know. So we lived on this plot of land in the middle of the jungle in a grass hut in a tropical island, you know, no food, no water is given to you.
So you have to survive off the land. How long are you there for? A year and a half. So up into four and a half or five and a half.
Yeah, four and a half, four and a half years old. So we were living off the land and, you know, my brother growing up, he would tell me, you know, I used to gather firewood around camp, you know, and I would see dead bodies all around the camp because people were getting murdered for supplies. You know, women were drug into the woods and getting raped. Is this just an Indonesian?
Indonesia. Is this Indonesian? This is refugees. This is south Vietnamese on south Vietnamese, not taking care of each other.
It's about survival. Yeah. You know, at that point, you know, you know, then you have, you know, bandits in these in these jungles as well. You know, I asked my mother, I said, okay, so how do we survive?
Well, my mother is, she's hard. She's bad ass. And what she told me was, you know, there were rich refugees and they had these, you know, jewelry and stuff that they would take to them. And she will go and basically bid because they need to sell her jewelry to eat, right?
So my mother would take this jewelry from him be the middle person and make the trek through the jungle where people are murdered and raped and killed daily, go to the northern portion of the island and deal with these bandits. Wow. And sell them these valuables for money and she'll track back and take her earnings. And that's what kept us alive.
Did you have to hide that from? Oh, yeah. From pretty much everybody, right? Yeah.
Yeah. I mean, I just think like, you know, a young Asian lady tracking through the jungles. Yeah. You know, I mean, so her children can survive.
Yeah. Who? So who was watching you guys? You know, I don't, I don't hear too much stories on my biological father.
You know, it's just, they did it worse when I was very young. But I'm sure he, he had a, you know, helping him on, you know, how we survived them in the refugee camps as well. So, um, so we lived off this in this plot of land. Now what's really unique was my aunt married a American Special Forces Green Beret.
And he was an officer. His G-base got overran during the one of the battles, right? And he got stabbed by SK as a bayonet in the back of his rib cage area. He ended up killing the Bitcoin, you know, he'll make sure he'll let you know I killed him too, you know, but he was evacuated out of Vietnam, you know, and my aunt went him after the fall of South Vietnam and she moved over to the United States to favor North Carolina, right?
So him being an officer in United States military, he was able to sponsor us to come over to America. Now what I want to explain to you is my mother waited a year and a half for the sponsorship. We got accepted to New Zealand. We got accepted to Canada.
We could have been, you know, I mean, we could have been in all these different Australia. We could have been in all these different countries that accepted us as refugees. America, at that time, it took a little longer, you know, unpophered it, not more. But because of the sponsorship, we were able to get to America.
And I asked my mother, you know, later on in life, I said, why, you know, why in America? She said, before I left, you know, your grandfather, who funded the escape, who funded the escape made me promise that if I can, if I survive this journey, then you must do what you can to become American because you need to reunite with your sister in America. And that's the land of the free. So my mother waited, you know, literally for a year and a half.
And then eventually we got accepted to come to America. And we made our way to Bay of the Hill, North Carolina, where that was the, if you know Bay of the Hill, North Carolina, anybody's ever been there, it's a town right outside of the biggest military base, the biggest army base in America, you know, for special operations, a home with special operations, which was for Bragg, North Carolina. And that was where I was raised. Before we go into Vietnam, how many of your family members made it to the US?
Was it your mom, your brother and you? Was there more? Yeah, yeah, eventually, because my mother made it, you know, my mother has a giving heart. So she she never forgot where she came from.
So we were able to free my uncle from the prison camp. So she brought him and her family over. We brought my grandmother over, you know, so our uncle, you know, that survived the camps eventually came over. How many family members did not make it over?
She told me like, morning five. Damn. On the boat, you spoke about bodies being thrown overboard and people dying of starvation thirst. I'm sure probably sickness was in there too, being out there for over a month.
How many, how many, and you said there was maybe over 100 people on that boat? Do you have any idea? I don't, man. You know, I did ask my mother one time.
I said out of, you know, the people that came on the boat, can you tell me like roughly how many people die? She goes a lot. Yeah. Obviously, she doesn't, you know, keep track of that.
But she told me like when they slept, she had to sleep where all her valuables, clothes pinned to her clothes, right? So we had layers of clothes. We were escaping. We didn't have luggages or anything, you know, we had to travel very light.
So she would layer us with, you know, two outfits. And then she would take our valuables as our birth certificate's photos that she had reminding her her childhood. It's amazing. So some of these photos that she showed me later on life, like you could tell that's, that's been through escape, you know?
So she would stuff it into a Ziploc bag and she'll tape it and then she'll clothes pin it to her body. Any jewelry that she has, any, any money that she has, she'll put it into a Ziploc bag and basically clothes pinned to her body. And when she slept, you know, she had the sleep sitting up so she would sleep it with this stuff underneath her. So no way can steal because everybody was stealing from each other.
Yeah, so obviously situation. Do you talk with your mom a lot about kind of what led up to whether any early signs before the war actually kicked off of, you know, certain freedoms being taken away? I don't know, maybe like we have the Second Amendment here. Were there any freedoms that just started disappearing slowly?
You know, you read the history on the Vietnam War, Ho Chi Minh, you know, he, he first came to America that asked for help because the French were trying to colonize, he was fighting against that regime and you know, Americans didn't want to get involved. So then he switched over to the Russians and the Russian started helping Ho Chi Minh. So that's why he took on more of that socialist ideology. Ho Chi Minh's goal was to unify all of Vietnam under one rule, which was because he took on the socialist ideology, the communist ideology, he wanted to press that into the South, which was more democracy.
You know, I think what's really unique was there was a North and South divided, you know, the South Vietnamese, which the country I was born on, was sided with Americans. They fought for democracy and freedom. The North Vietnamese fought for more of a common ideology, you know, obviously the communist one in that country. And I think what's unique was like, you know, this, the crimes that happened after that, like there was no humanity, there was no compassion, you know, they were trying to wipe out a whole race of people because we thought differently.
Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's, you don't hear a whole hell of a lot of stories where the Russians are showing anybody compassion. If there's one thing they're kind of known for, it's being pretty ruthless. And so the fact that, you know, they showed you that fishing boat, you know, at least a little bit of compassion and fed you and gave you water and actually brought you, you know, to a refugee camp where you eventually, you know, get out. That's, that's, I've never heard of the Russians doing anything like that.
No, no, but you know, I think what's unique is, you know, now that I'm older in life and you know, you kind of study how the human being develops and, you know, the mind develops. And, you know, from two to four, that's where you develop a lot of your, your code, your values, your ethics, whatever you live by, right? So a lot of kids at that age, they get abused, they're going to have a really hard time in life, you know, I mean, two to four, man, that was, yeah, you know, you know, I was trying to, you and I were trying to survive. So I think with that energy, you know, kind of, that's what I grew up with, you know, I just couldn't pinpoint what that energy was.
I was off growing up. It's just, you know, how you feel like you're meant for something, you don't know what it is or there's emptiness inside, you just don't know what it is. There was a rage, definitely, you know, but I didn't know why, you know, and it wasn't until later on is when you mature, you realize that, man, you're escaping for your life during that age, when when a normal human being is developing his code, his way, you know, of who he is in this world, you know, two to four. Yeah, I mean, that's, uh, about as traumatic as it gets.
And I'm kind of curious, you know, you say you have flashes here and there, but what, what is, if you can remember what is your first childhood memory? Yeah, it was America. I mean, dramatically, you know, we came in America and, you know, it wasn't a popular war Vietnam was not a popular war. And I want to bring us back in history.
And the reason why Vietnam was not a popular war was because up until then, right, you think about like, World War I, war II, you know, Korean War, everything was censored through the military. Reporters will come in and you have your military reporters and it was censored through and then that's what the public saw, you know, Vietnam was the first time that they allowed unprecedented covering of story. So all these reporters were coming in and obviously they want to capture a war, right? The infantry war, war is not beautiful.
So when, um, when they reported that American soldiers were killing, you know, innocent people, you know, and they had this on video and they're seeing it back. Well, that's why it became a non-pop war, you know. So the Americans didn't have the support, you know, and that reciprocated into the South Vietnamese and we didn't have the support once the Americans left, you know. So when we came up to America, I am the image of a hateful war to them, you know, and it was so fresh when we came over because it was right after the Vietnam War.
So when we came over, man, my first memory, it was, um, my mother took me to a grocery store, you know, and I remember what I saw was, uh, endless food, you know, that doesn't mean anything to anybody when you start, right? When you had nothing, you know, when you come from nothing, you see endless rolls of food, you know, and I'm like, wow, you know, this is amazing. And I saw the joy in my mother's eyes because we're not starving, you know, she grabbed a groceries and we came out and this older gentleman came up to us and he spent on my face and he flicked his fingers at my mother and he called us all sorts of racist names. So that was my first memory, you know.
So, um, growing up in the stage, you know, obviously after the war, it was, uh, it was very difficult time, it was very racist, very racist times in America. I mean, that has not only coming, you know, back to or coming, not back to for you, but coming to the US, uh, you know, from Vietnam, but you move to Fayetteville, North Carolina, which is probably the biggest special operations base out of all branches in the US and special operations in a lot of times are, you know, the backbone of the war, they generally see the most action and to have you move there, uh, you know, in what they were doing, you know, as, you know, as well as I do can create a lot of hate. And, uh, so I'm sure that was extremely tough to deal with. And, uh, but before we get into that, let's just take a quick break and, uh, when we come back, we'll pick up with, uh, your journey in Vietnam.
Absolutely. New Trans survivor. Feed your freedom. All right, too.
We're back from the break and you're in Fayetteville, North Carolina. You have just, uh, immigrated into the United States and, uh, your, you, your mother and your brother are in a town that holds more special operations, commandos, uh, than, than any other town in the United States who are all, you know, fresh out of the Vietnam War. And, um, so, what was that, what was that like growing up, uh, with that hatred and, and, you know, when we first moved to the States, um, we lived with my uncle and my aunt, you know, their, my uncle's officer. So, you know, that was the best life I ever seen, like, you know, coming from the oppressed, you know, escaping Vietnam.
I never lived in such a huge house, you know. Uh, so it was a huge eye opener. So we lived with my uncle for a few months until we got on our feed. It was my, my biological father, my mother, my brother and myself, you know, and, um, you know, just during that time frame, was trying to get climatized to this environment, you know, it was, it was so much going on there.
And like you say, it was home, special operations. My uncle was special forces, green and bright. So when I walked down, it's all his words, you know, all his war stuff. I thought it was really cool, really unique.
Um, eventually my, my biological father and my mother, we moved out and we went to, um, it was a very low income part of town. We had nothing, you know, when we left it not, we have absolutely nothing. We have no country has no freedom. We have nothing, you know, um, so my father and mother, they would work on jobs because my mother always felt education was the answer to freedom.
And she said, if you have an education, you can never be oppressed. So it means a lot to me, if you constray on school, you know, so we lived in a, um, gosh, man, really small apartment in a really part, uh, poor part of town. The only furniture that we had in this apartment was one full size mattress, one used full size mattress that we all were sleep on. We had no other furniture, you know, we were very poor.
And how old are you at this time? Um, six, six, six year old, a 10 year old, and then two adults, mom and dad, right on a full size, which is just a little bit bigger than a twin size bed. So my mother, you know, she would, uh, we have other refugees. So they would donate clothes to us.
And so we had like really like four hand me downs of clothes, you know, holes, all already, you know, holes in our shoes. Uh, but my mother appreciated them, thank them for, you know, their donations and she would stay up at night and sew up the holes on my clothes. She would fix the shoes so we can attend school. Do you remember your parents demeanor?
Did you, did they have a positive demeanor? I mean, it's my mother was born a year to tiger. So she has that aggressive, aggressive attitude, you know, step out, you step out, I'll show you what your attitude, you know, my father, my step father was very, he's a quiet professional. Did you know how poor you were at the time or did you just think?
No, I just thought this was it. This was just life. I mean, we did go, I would tell you what days without eating a few times, my mother would obviously give us the food before she would eat herself, you know. So they went more days starving than we did, but we did go, you know, days starving, growing up, along with that, you know, we started attending school, you know, and that's when you really see the, the hate in our culture, you know, the hate to the Vietnamese people.
The, you know, one of my first teachers openly discussed that she does not support the flux of refugees coming into her hometown, you know, and she expressed it numerous times and obviously the kids, they would pick on us because we're poor and we look different. How many Vietnamese kids went to the school? We were the only one that was in, besides my brother that I knew, you know, he wasn't like that much Vietnamese refugees coming in and getting to America was very difficult. And a lot of the refugees, they settled in more of California area.
We settled in North Carolina because my uncle, yeah, right. So you think about like the biggest military base, right? You have all these veterans that are fresh out of war, okay, then you have date, some of them are married foreign women, you know, so you have all these people right within the small town, different cultures and everything. But it was a very racist time.
When I said that is, you know, I don't throw out that word lightly, you know, but it was because of the post Vietnam War hatred. You know, I was told I was called by many names grown up. Yeah, I can see that being, you know, extreme racism, you know, and I'm really curious, you know, that's a hot topic for today. Even, you know, there are Asian racism that's going on and all the other communities and but somehow you've gotten through it and and I kind of, you know, I want to talk about how you how you did get through that.
And I think a lot of times, you know, people that either feel they're being oppressed or are being oppressed, they tend to go down that victim road. And you know, unfortunately, it is going to take effort on your part to to turn yourself other, turn yourself into something other than a victim. And there's not a whole lot of people doing that these days. So I really want to pick your brain on how you kind of got over that and how you became, you know, the success story, the success story that you've become today with with Ronin tactics and an impeccable military career and and everything that goes with that.
You know, there's there's evils on the world. You know, that, you know, traveling around is an AVC. There's evils everywhere, man. So it's it's we can dwell on what we can't change or we can work on what we can.
And that lesson was taught to me at a very young age by my mother. You know, let me let me explain this. You know, my mother would we were very poor, but she would cook and she would deliver food to the other refugees that were in town. You know, there's not that much, but she would go to these communities and she would give.
And I remember, I asked her, I said, you know, why, why are you doing this? They don't really appreciate it. You know, it's been kind of defined that that age and she pulled the car over. And she grabbed my hand and she said, look at me.
I looked over her and she goes, no matter how bad off we are in life, if we can, we must help others. Somehow those words kind of resonated. Obviously, I can talk about that day even to today. So that day had a lot of impact.
I want to talk about this day. You know, I want to explain to see you. So substitute teacher days, man, they were to worse for me. Let me explain to see you.
My Vietnamese name is pronounced, oh, un-lum. Imagine trying to pronounce that. Right? I pronounced my name to lamb.
So you guys don't butcher my Vietnamese name, you know? So I'm substitute teacher's day to try to pronounce my names. All right. And don't butcher my name.
And then that allow for all the other students to mock me and make fun of me and throw paper at me or whatever. Because my name sounds weird and I'm different. Well, on this specific substitute teacher day, I had this bully, you know, in third grade, it really hated me. He hated who I was, the way I looked.
He hated that was poor. And he wouldn't make it a daily routine to pick on me, you know? But on this substitute teacher day, he started on me pretty early, you know? It was really loud and a substitute teacher day wanted to do it.
So he told me and the bully to go down to the principal's office. I don't even know how to control that victim, right? So we walked down to the principal's office, you know, it was very racist times, you know? So the principal said, sit here and do your parents come?
Well, my mother don't have a car. So I knew I was going to be sitting here for a while, you know? So the principal was sitting right here and the bully was, you know, across the room in the chair and I was sitting here in the chair and I was really, I don't know, man, I was just really defeated, you know? And the mother comes in and she demanded to know what happened, right?
And the principal stood up. He goes, that boy right there, he looked at me, he called him a chink. He sat back down, he continued on his day like it didn't even affect him. She went over and grabbed her son and she walked up to me and she stood there.
So he forced me to kind of look up at her and she had this look of a hate, you know? And she told me that my kind don't belong here. I need to go back home to my country. You know, I swear to man, like that point, I was probably at the lowest part of my life.
You know, third grade. Third grade I was telling you that. Yeah, I was really defeated that day. I was having a bad day.
And I came home and I made a promise to myself that day that I'm stronger than hate, you know? And what's that mean? Was that you look like I got tired of being this weak child, the mindset, being defeated, you know? I hated that.
So what was really unique about this was that, you know, eventually my biological mother and father were divorced and my mother remarried to American Special Forces Green Beret. He was an ex-drill sergeant Green Beret, very strict military discipline. So imagine going from no discipline to a life of getting up at 4.30 in the morning, saluting the flag, raising the flag, hands over your heart, saying the national anthem, making your bed, or he can bounce the quarter off. It is not going to know he'll rip everything back out.
Going from zero discipline to that and then working in. So he had a company, a family company, and we were working in the family company in between going to school. And we didn't have days off. It was seven days a week, 4.30 in the morning, up in the morning.
Ballad to Green Beret. I could still sing it to this day. National Anthem, hand over your heart. We had a dress code to go to school.
I couldn't wear jeans. I had to wear slacks. But down shirt, it was that discipline. Going from zero to 100.
So it was a very difficult time. Even though I love my stuff father and he gave me the discipline I needed in life. But man, it was a hard pill to swallow at eight years old. So I knew he was a Green Beret.
I knew he was Special Forces and stuff like this. And people always ask me now that I'm ruining. They say, you follow a papa buschito the way you say it. What's that mean?
And why you're going to meet? So why are you following a Japanese code of honor, samurai? So I want to bring this story to you. So when my stepfather left us, I didn't have any communications with him.
It was a very difficult time for me because I do love my father. I love my stepfather, but I did love my father as well. We had history, he escaped us from Vietnam, gave us our freedoms. So I didn't hear from him and my mother brought in a box one day.
My mother said, this is from your father. I tell you, I didn't know how to take it, man. So I put that box across the room and I remember sitting in my room and I had the doors closed up, sitting in my room looking at this cardboard box. I thought about my father.
So finally, I had the courage to go up to the box and I opened up the box and I was, there was four VHS tapes. I remember the VHS. So it was four VHS tapes and it was obviously dub tapes and I had Vietnamese writing on these tapes. So I remember just randomly picking one of the tapes out and I popped it in the VHS player and the first tape was the Art of Budo.
Don't know what Budo is, it's a combat skill that the samurai's used, the martial arts they use in worst-dating periods of Japan, right? And they break down to different martial arts. It was the combat side of being samurai. It was the martial arts, right?
And it's the way to path. And I was, that's where I was the first tape that I saw, eight years old, and intrigued me. To live a life like that. Well, you know, you got to understand I was defeated.
Yeah. At that point, I wanted strength. How old are you at this point? Eight.
Yeah, I wanted strength. I wanted to change my life. And I didn't know how to get there. You know, even though my father was a great man, but he wasn't the wearer, right?
So the other three tapes were like Fiswafiri, you know, in a very Bruce Lee stuff. So that's why I'm a big fan of Bruce Lee, you know. But throughout my childhood years, I grew up to revisiting the Art of Budo over and over and over and I romanticized about being this path, this way. What is it?
Right? So, you know, during the 80s, special forces were deployed by Ronald Reagan to go fight in the drug wars, remember those days, or the drug war days that would go down my stuff, I would go down to Central America and South America and you would train fit-offs and deal with due to counter drug missions. You know, and you know, he had his teammates over and he'll talk over their team room talks and that's house and I'll be in the next room like, trying to listen in. Like, what do you mean you free no press?
What's that mean? Right? And you know, eventually I put it all together. The way, the path, you know, what is the way of the way is to better humanity, to better yourself in a warrior's path is extremely hard, right?
So I was able to take that tape that I was viewing and tied in into a higher purpose, which was, you know, because I was indoctrinated more into a green braid lifestyle, growing up, I chose the green braid, I knew their mission and their mission was the free to oppress. It was to fight for the people that were like my mother and myself and my brother and my father. It was to fight for their freedoms. Man, if I could be a force to go around the world, free, no press and enslave in modern day world, that's the way for me.
That's what I want to do. So I'm this weak little frail eight year old with this concept of the way. Right. So, you know, we, you know, we, my father was a enlisted man, you know, he worked in his job.
We're not rich. You know, we're not poor like I used to be. We ate every day. He made sure that we were taking care of, but we did work.
We worked very hard. You know, myself, I'd love this like his own. He raised us very strictly, you know, but that's just the way it was. When I was researching you, and I don't know if I've read this or heard it, but you had talked about, so it sounds like the Bishudo tapes were a major turning point for the childhood and and overcome some of the racism and everything else that you had been through as well.
We also were talking about, and I forgive me, I can't remember if it was your uncle or your father, but you were driving and they were saying, you know, to sometimes you're gonna feel down. Commando. Yep. Michael with a video.
Do you want to be a fucking commando? And that resonated with me, you know, and I thought about that and the impact that could have on anybody, let alone to believe you said you're 11 at the time. Did that have a major impact? You know, I love my uncle, man.
What a great American, you know, to this day. He would pick us up. He would pick me up on it Sunday and he would drive me to Dairy Queen, you know. It was just Uncle Nguyen a few times, you know.
And my uncle, he's very blunt. You don't hold the punches back. Yeah. He's driving his little Volkswagen, Dune Buggy, that he reconstructs for hobbies, you know, and he goes to, I'm going to tell you something.
You know, the days that you're feeling bad, the days that you want to quit, you need to ask yourself. He just out of blue. He just told me. You need to ask yourself, you want to be a fucking commando tonight.
You know, when the bones hurt and you're, you're aching from your injuries, do you want to be a fucking commando? When it's raining, it's wet outside and it's five o'clock in the morning, you know you have to go for a run because that's the thing to do and you're feeling sorry for yourself. Do you want to be a commando today? At 11 years old, can you imagine that impact?
Can you imagine the discipline of being a commando? You know, it takes so much discipline, right? To be there commitment, discipline day in, day out. It's not just the way of a weapon or it's, it's the whole encompassed of life, right?
To look at life differently as a warrior, you know. So he truly taught me to never quit, to never give up, no matter what. You know, he drives home with my mother did, you know, no matter what, no matter the circumstances, doesn't matter. You know, so I was taught at a young age that conditions and circumstances, it doesn't define us as a human being.
We define ourselves by the actions we take daily. Do you want to be a commando today? You know, so I love and I realized that, you know, and I'll tell you Sean, you know, getting back to the racism, I didn't get over it. You don't get over hate like that.
You know, I was bullied through my junior high years, my high school years, I was called by racist names during training, during my military career, all the way to the end. You know, I'm not saying everybody. I'm saying there's bad apples everywhere you go. And there's racism I hate wherever you go.
And racism is a mean to control a human being, right? You think about like some of the countries that went into the people that were present slaved, that's a mean of controlling a human being to degrade a human being to spin on him, right? You're a person to person. So that's why it was so strong for me to live this life, you know, as a green braid, because the model is the freedom of breast, you know, and I knew that that was my ticket.
That was my ticket. Maybe you didn't get over it, but you definitely got through it. And so after watching the VHS tapes and the words of encouragement from your uncle, what was kind of the next encounter like and how did you, I know you carry a lot of that, but you did get through it. And so I guess kind of what I'm asking is, well, what was the next encounter like?
How did you how did you roll with the punches? You know, at 11 years old, I knew I wanted to be a green braid. At 16, it was a great program in my training, my timeline, right? That I need to start training at 16 to start developing the cardiovascular strength I needed in order to pass through this reckless training that I needed to go to.
You know, at 16, I started reading. I read since I was 13, so I read a lot of the warrior philosophies, a lot of the book. I read a book of five rings when I was 13 years old. Wow.
You know, I read the art of war and I did a thesis on art of war in high school. So these were the subjects of interest throughout my life. I knew I wanted to live a warrior's life, you know, and at 16, I started the training. It just intensified closer to I got to the timeline, which at 18 was when I enlisted in the military.
Now I want to I want to tell you the story, right? My mother wanted me to be a doctor, wanted me to be a lawyer, engine, anything but a soldier because, gosh, man, right? She escaped it. No, I'm she lost her freedom.
She knows what war smells, looks, and feels like. And she don't want her son to do that. Yeah. But because I was indoctrinated into the special forces life, and you know, my uncle never pressured me, man.
He never said, Hey, when you're going to be a green braid, you should be a green braid. My stepfather has never other those words. You should be a green braid window. Never.
I felt no pressure from them. But I felt a draw to that world. Right. So at 17, I went down to the map center and I enlisted into the military.
There was no special forces contracts coming in. You can't just enlist out the street. You have to be E5 in the army, right? Or you have to have this amount of time in the army.
So either rank or certain time in the army is in one of them is waveable. You know, I can't go green braid, but I can be infantryman. I can learn all these basic skills. Right.
So I enlisted in an army and I went through infantry based training, and I chose to be 82nd, uh, perager. And the reason why is because now put me back to Fort Bragg, North Carolina, where I can be around my parents. Right. So when I came there to the 82nd, it was a real funny story.
We they line all the new recruits up the privates, right? So I came there. I'm spit shine boots, you know, starts with gigs. I was so proud of being a soldier.
And the first sergeant lined us all up. And there was at least eight of us privates in this, in this office, right? And you had the first sergeant out there and first sergeant, you know, Gianna's and Conner's piece of shit and whatever. Right.
And the commander then comes in with slap two attention and he asks one question. He asks one question. He goes, who wants to go to Ranger school? We're all privates, you know, with less than, I think I had, gosh, less than a year in army.
Right. So I raised my hand and I said, I want to be Ranger qualified. You know, he looked at the first sergeant and then he looked at me and he walked back in his office close the door. First sergeant kicked everybody else out of the room.
And he goes, private lambs stay here. So I stayed there, slept to, you know, I was at pretty rest. And he said, so you want to be Ranger qualified. So there was, you know, the tile floors, you know, the square tile floors.
So he, he smoked me. So smoking me means physical training. So it starts uniform, spit, shine boots, you know, I'm doing burpees. I'm, you know, pushups into that tile floor.
When it goes tile floor is full of my sweat. He tried to make me quit. I was dehydrated. I went on for hours to hazing the yelling.
And finally, you know, he got me back up. He said, how do you feel now? I still want to go. So within, you know, I swear, within four days, I was at the Recon d'Ole training side in outskirts of North Carolina where they run the pre-Ranger Corps.
I graduated with honors, you know, because I didn't have any bad habits. I listened to what this is for understand. I did it to the T. You know, all these other senior guys, they were here with this structure saying, you know, try to work game and they'll do it their own way.
I didn't know anything else. I listened to what they had to say. I did it to the T, you know, and I graduated that and went to Ranger training and the Ranger Ranger school. And I was now I found I was this E4, right?
That's Ranger qualifying in Iftrian. And, you know, it's great, but I want to do more. So I tried out for the long range of constants team. Now, it's really hard to leave the 82nd when you get in, right?
Because they lock you in, they invest money into you and they need you there, you know, want to grow you into a leadership position. But I wanted something else, you know. So I tried off with a long range of constants team, which is the descendant of the LIRP teams and long range patrol teams. So their mission is to forward deploy.
I was on amphibious team. So we were forward deployed on amphibious team, we're inserted in by Helikaz and Zodiac and I will lay on and report what I see, and we learned the advanced communication at the time, which VHF, jungle and town. So I learned all that at a very young age. And my time came up.
I made E5. Year and a half in an army, I was E5. And I'm like, that's a criteria. That's a course.
Yeah, that's definitely fast track. Yeah, because nobody wanted to Ranger training, right? They didn't want to go through all this hard school. And for me, it was just, I had something in front of myself.
I didn't want to beat this week even being anymore. Nutrient survival loaded with 40 essential nutrients. So you were chasing it from the get go since 11 years old, you were chasing that lifestyle. Was there what conflicts were going on that early in your career?
If any? You know, my first phase of my career, it was just me selling man. It was education, military education at the military education. I was young, I was fit.
I trained since I was 16. So I was able to pass through to really physically demanding schools at a very young age. You know, so when I made E5, I realized that that's waveable. Now I can apply for the special forces.
So I submitted my packet, I applied for a special forces selection and training out of Fort Bragg, 21 day select. And then I went through the pipeline for weapons training for the Q course. So then I went through the weapons training phase, of course, then we went into unconventional warfare phase, you know, and I got orders to go to semik group, which is at the time located in North Carolina. What I found out was my stepfather was talking to the guy who worked at Brian Hall, who runs orders and said, yeah, he needs to be here.
And I found this out because after unconventional warfare phase, I was in the mess hall and I saw Mr. Joe Lupiac, which he's a legend and special forces. He was part of the saunte raid, you know, and now he's this retired Savannah who runs orders, but we're going to put these new candidates students, you know, when to graduate. And he always talks like this, hey, my man, come over here.
So I came out and was like, Mr. Lupiac, you know, I knew him since I was a child, you know, and I'm coming out unconventional warfare phase. And I was like, Mr. Lupiac, how's it going?
He goes, he goes, he set me down. He goes, eh, I got you in seven group, you know, I know that you want to stay here with your parents. And you know, I love my parents. I still do to this day, but I had a journey, you know, I wanted to go to Asia.
I wanted to go back to affect the country that you know, I was born in, if I can possibly do, you know, it was a long shot. So I said, Mr. Lupiac, I really want to go out to first group. He goes, you're Danny, go like that.
But he changed my orders. And he rerouted me to first special forces group out of Okinawa, Japan. Okinawa, Japan, that's where all the seniors are at. You know, like the guys that did their team time, Okinawa, Japan is a forward deployed, battalion that affects Asia, you know, you're in that continent.
So it was very hard to get out there as the first assignment, but that was my first assignment. Okinawa, Japan. So here I am, 21 years old, went out to Okinawa, Japan, and I was assigned to a combat search and rescue team, CSAR team. So during that time, it was really heavy reconnaissance of North Korea.
You know, they had to know Gama missiles that could strike, you know, U.S. soil. So that was a really concern for us. And then, you know, the unstable country, you know, the dictator.
So we were doing a lot of reconnaissance around South Korea, working with the commando force. I was a CSAR team. So when the pilots are flying over there, they were to get shut down. Then we were teams that come in with a two man PJ packet, heavy guns, and we'll come in and do offsets to try rescues.
These pilots, so that was my first assignment. It was cool. You know, I went through a lot of training, but not my thing. Yeah.
You know, you just know that's not what you're destined to do. Going back to training, you know, people are always not know kind of what got you through it. And, you know, I guess every once in a while, you made the guys that say that, you know, they just breeze right through it. But I would say for 99% of us, that is definitely not the case.
So did you have any hiccups? Did you have any, is there any particular point in training where you were ready to call it? You know, it was, you know, I'm done. During selection and training, during the Special Forces assessment selection process, I was a, so we stayed in these barracks, right?
So everybody stayed in these like, combined barracks. And I went in February. It was very coding our line during that time. And if one person gets six in a bay, everybody else gets sick in a bay.
It's just, that's the way it is. Well, we had one guy get sick and I caught a flu. And we were doing land navigation that night. So we were doing the map and compass or teaching us how to dead reckon or teaching us train, orientation.
So advanced land navigation training, it's not like a basic land navigation train, because we had to pass through what's called a star exam, which is one of the hardest land navigation courses in, you know, see, sorry. So during that time, and I was coming down with the flu, right? I had gosh, man, I might, I had a high temperature over 100. And you know, I was, I was cold, I was breaking out sweat.
And I really wanted to quit. I really wanted to quit that night. Well, I told you my uncle was a Special Forces, you know, and he was the commander of the SWIC assessment selection during that timeframe that went through. It was his last class before he took over Jess Magtai.
So this was his last class before he takes over a different command. He was in charge of the whole thing. Before I went through, I said, Hey, look, I don't want any, you know, I know there were family members and you know, I don't want any hand me else, you know, don't look after me. He goes, Oh, you don't have to worry.
He goes, you don't have it. You don't have it. Yeah. So I wanted to quit.