this is jocko podcast number 248 with echo charles and me jocko willink good evening echo good evening as the summer of 1970 evolved the dead deadly secret war in laos raged into its sixth year the communist nva and its secret advisors from russia china and cuba continued supplying growing numbers of light and heavy weapons state-of-the-art anti-aircraft artillery missiles and vehicles the communist campaign against sag reconnaissance teams resulted in the green berets exceeding a 100 percent casualty rate meaning of the special forces soldiers who went across the fence into laos and cambodia all were either killed in action wounded more than once in combat with enemy forces or they simply disappeared as of july 4th 2017 there are 50 green berets listed as missing in action in laos alone from the secret war along with 105 aviators who died supporting sog missions sog hatchet force operations of platoon or company-sized missions didn’t fare much better in an effort to bring a temporary halt to shipping supplies flowing down the ho chi minh trail three separate hatchet force slam operations were conducted in laos west of south vietnam between march 1969 and february 1970 the area of operations was code named prairie fire again due to the severe political constraints placed on sog operations the prairie fire area of operations extended west of south vietnam about 30 miles no sag teams went beyond that area of operations the three slam operations were titled night cap spin down and half back each of those operations had a hatchet force company helicoptered to a hilltop on the main segment of the ho chi minh trail the trips would dig in set up ambushes and target nva trucking after the lead trucks were hit there would be a traffic backup along the jungle trail oftentimes large portions of the ho chi minh trail were not visible from air due to clever camouflage efforts by the nva and their constrict conscripted forced labor of local indigenous tribe people thus when the first trucks were hit hatchet force radio operators would call in tactical air support to destroy as many enemy trucks and soldiers as possible eventually after a few days the nva masked hundreds of soldiers to hammer the hatchet force positions inflicting serious casualties upon the entrenched troops forcing their extraction from the area of operations during the last mission operation halfback an h-34 south vietnamese air force helicopter from the 219th special operations squadron was shot down killing all passengers aboard the old war bird including special forces medic sergeant first class bill doyle those operations were viewed as successes due to the amount of enemy trucks supplies and troops destroyed during the intense battles the three slam operations were launched from the top secret sog base in command kantoom control central the last slam operation was run by bee company in hatchet force command by the end of august 1970 greenbrae captain gene mccarley became the commander of b company mccarly was a sog veteran having run missions during the last few months of 1967 and into 1968 when he was assigned to rt florida out of contume in 1968 rt florida ran a series of successful missions including a trail watch wiretaps of nva phone lines and planning air force sensors alongside a trail at the end of august mccarly heard through the grapevine that a major hatchet force operation was coming through the chain of command and he volunteered b company for it assuming it might be another slam operation mccarley researched and the after actions reports from the previous missions he talked to team members in camp about those operations their successes their shortcomings in the first days of september 1970 the operations order came down and was assigned to be company under the command of mccarly it was dubbed operation tailwind and much to mccarly’s surprise operation tailwind was targeted for the deepest insertion into laos ever by a sog team 25 to 30 miles beyond the normal area of operations the operation was dead was designed to take pressure off a cia operation further southwest bordering cambodia because of the unique nature of this mission mccarley drew upon his years of operational experience in laos for a daring new tactic instead of remaining in a static position like the earlier slam missions once the full element b company 15 green berets and 120 highly trained mountain guard tribesmen were on the ground in the deepest penetration of enemy territory during the secret war he would move day and night supported by air assets from the air force army and marine corps it would be an epic mission in hindsight 47 years later although no one said so at the time most agreed it was a suicide mission and that right there is from the prologue of a book called sog chronicles volume 1 written by john striker meyer otherwise known by his nickname and code name and call sign tilt and it is once again an honor to have tilt here with us as he has been here before for podcasts 180 181 182 186 247 and now 248 and if you haven’t listened to those yet go listen to them to understand what sag was and what heroes these men were including this man my hero john striker meyer tilt thanks for coming back on good evening sir good evening welcome thanks for coming back it’s my honor so um this is just a story that you know you and i had talked about some of the different stories that we’ve covered and and you know you’ve kind of i guess you kind of somehow ended up being a little bit of the the sog historian capturing a bunch of these stories from different operations even when you weren’t there but interviewing guys talking to them gathering all this information and then captured and put into these books but it has the i mean since you were in song and you operated in these areas of of operations that these guys were in the way you’re able to tell the story is is is powerful well thank you um but this book here is the first one that doesn’t have my stories and that’s what i like because that’s what my goal is going to be for um sod chronicles is my little humble company and we’re going to write these stories until we die because there’s so many that have never been told and this mission operation tale when it was a classic i’d heard little tidbits about it over the years but until and we’ll get into the details later how in 98 there are some facts that came out twisted on that due to the communist news network but factually this is just an amazing mission and there’s so many levels and it was a classic example of a saga operation with men on the ground doing the mission got it accomplished and they worked with army air force and marine corps air assets everything from fast movers to gun ships and gene mccarley was just an outstanding soldier a soldier soldier and he you know he started as enlisted became an officer so he never lost that grounding but it’s just one hell of a commander and here he just that was his concept and they ran with it and as we get into the story just amazing stuff yeah the the air superiority that we had was really powerful but you have to remember that it wasn’t total air superiority it wasn’t like look we have air superiority in iraq and afghanistan we very rarely will lose an aircraft and usually it’s because there’s some kind of an accident or a crash or something like that but even though we it’s pretty easy to say oh yeah we had full air superiority in in vietnam we had a certain level of confidence but at the same time we didn’t have totally or superiority because there was still there were still aircraft getting shot down by either migs or getting shot down by surface-to-air missiles yeah because you had two separate air wars you had the air war over north vietnam that’s the air force in the navy just pounding away losing hundreds of men and it had the whole pow where many were returned i forget the exact number and they came back in february of 73 through april 73 they came back so that is more of a traditional yeah those migs that were trained by the russians etc and some even said the russians flew i don’t know we were more concerned with down south and the prairie fire ao in cambodia over time as the war progressed particularly after lyndon johnson had the bombing hall in 78 man the anti-aircraft stuff the 12 7 is the 23 millimeter 37 mic mic and heavier stuff and one of the stories later here is one of our medics he remembers flying out and we’ll have some cover that’s a little bit of his story later but on a way out there’s akkack in the air just like world war ii when you see uh you know 12 o’clock high and all those you see all the ackak that shot down all of our airplanes in world war ii there it was courtesy of the russians and they were shooting at our helicopters yeah and so doc padgett was like oh my god this is like watching a world war ii movie but it’s right here and so that’s our war and yes it’s like movie except i think i might get killed yeah and in world war ii they didn’t have any helicopters that we know about and so that is the aspect where like in your introduction we talked about the mias to this day missing in action the americans that were shot down supporting saag that’s everything from fast movers down to the smallest helicopters the loose and of course your vietnamese air force like with the story we talked about on tuesday with lynn black on the visual reconnaissance it’s just a little dinky observation aircraft the co-pilot gets his head blown off literally and his head in the helmet lands in the lens lap so those are the casualties that that went into our war that’s our side of the air war so we dominated the air but that air was full of anti-aircraft weaponry deadly yeah absolutely well i guess we should get into this this story because um this this tailwind is is just kind of crazy just another day another day all right so here we go going to the book sog chronicles volume one and for everyone that’s hopeful out there there’s gonna be volume two three four five the lord willing i know there’s there’s more stories when you got time to write i mean it’s gonna there’s so many stories every one of these operations is its own book oh yeah you know every time i read one of your books and i read one operation i think there’s a whole story a whole book a three or four hundred page book about every single operation if you start going into the granular detail in the back story it’s it’s crazy so get to work tilt keep writing yes sir all right so here we go routinely under protocols established in early sag secret war most laotian sog operators were limited to 20 kilometers west of vietnam’s borders operation tailwind was booked to go approximately 40 kilometers further west beyond that limitation to go that deep into laos required formal approval from the laotian ambassador and from the u s commander of all forces in vietnam general creighton at abrams mccarly the b company commanding officer at the top secret sag com compound in con tomb am i saying that right calm tomb cartoon commanding control central got the word from s3 on september 4th 1970 and he says i remember getting called by s3 and they told me that we had a special mission a mission that was deep into laos a mission deeper into laos than ever before and a mission bigger than any before in the prairie fire ao said mccarley they told me to go heavy on ammo and demo i knew that such a mission would take special clearance up to the ambassador who is no friend of sog and from abrams that’s general abrams who is no big fan of special forces in short order he learned that all of the approvals had been received and signed off so this is a massive mission bigger than any mission deeper into laos than ever before and that means you got to get you got to get approval from the ambassador and generally if you don’t know this ambassadors usually aren’t fond of military actions inside their inside their arenas right that they have that one ambassador just made life so difficult for sog from every day that we’re open there yeah i mean ambassadors if you think about it just from a philosophical level you know they want to solve things through diplomacy and and so generally they have a little bit of a of a friction with the military elements generally not always and then you have abrams who’s not a fan of special forces which i believe we’ve done a good job of moving this in a better direction but there certainly has been tension from time to time between conventional forces and special forces and special operations guys uh generally because special operations guys well they don’t follow the same rules all the time that the conventional guys follow and they might have a little bit of an attitude and that can rub them the wrong way and maybe and a little bit so you know you got a guy like general abrams that doesn’t like special forces except when he needs him except when he needs him well there you go and he needed him here so uh continuing on later that day s3 provided more specific details go heavy create havoc for the nva and keep them busy as long as possible mccarly a former team leader of sog recon team florida where he ran seven seven successful missions transferred to the hatchet force where green berets ran platoon and company-sized operations across the fence in laos and cambodia so just so everyone gets a grip on this these hatchet forces now you have instead of having 12 guys on the ground or six or six guys on the ground like you would with one of your recon teams yeah now you’re talking about a group of special forces guys maybe 10 12 15 special forces american special forces guys and then 120 or 150 indige forces locals yeah and so in this case they’re mountain yards and that means you can conduct these bigger operations and that’s really the the fundamental mission of special forces of the green berets is to work with in-ditch forces train up these guerrilla forces so that they can become a strong fighting unit the seals have a different primary mission the seal’s primary mission was always generally considered to be special uh direct action and special reconnaissance find the enemy kill yep that’s that’s that’s the seals and the the special forces was more hey find the enemy and then train some of the local populists to go kill them that’s the goal and it’s more of a long-term solution you know you’ll hear the green beret say it’s teach him how to fish instead of just giving him a fish seal teams we just kill the fish we just kill the fish generally now we both cross over and we both do each one you know we do their operations when i was in ramadi we that’s what we did we trained a bunch of the indige forces a bunch of iraqi soldiers and you know of course there were special forces units that were doing all kinds of direct action missiles missions there as well so we do cross over but if you look at the kind of bread and butter this is just bread and butter green beret operation a massive in-ditch force going into to to do to harass the enemy oh yeah this is what it this is what it is take the pressure off of the cia which was getting his ass kicked explain that background a little bit about this what’s going on with the cia there well at that time uh premier synoc had been asked it and this is 1970 i forget the exact month but like may or june right around there so he leaves country there’s a political vacuum and so the columnists want to head south in mass to get as many troops in cambodia just to take it because the nva knew there was a khmer rouge element that was on the sideline and growing in strength in cambodia so the cgia put this operation together which was further deeper into the layoffs near the border and the nva came at them hard now they had 5 000 cia troops and they were getting their ass kicked and they said help so they came up with this concept have the team go in and then gene mccarley put his little unique spin to it after talking because by 1970 uh particularly out of contume those hatchet forces were good they really knew how to work with the air assets and uh which includes spectre at night and so gene knew all about that stuff and uh so he put that idea together and it worked in terms of drawing away nva from the cia which in the end mission accomplished not only did they draw them away the cia could hold but they also had some major enemy caches in the command post and that’s why my favorite picture on the front page there’s a picture of our guys from cartoon standing with a picture ho chi minh which was taken from one of the tables in the command center there that was the nva command center when i was going through what they call seal it was called seal tactical training before that was called seal basic indock and then it became seal qualification training it’s like what you do when you get done with the basic training we did a raid on a target and this is up in fort lewis washington and so we do a raid on a target and they’ve they’re flying a flag on this little compound right and they’re flying this flag and sure enough the the the officer in charge of our class which was now the the platoon commander of our platoon going to do this hit he sees that flag walks over to it undoes the figure eight starts pulling it down and sure enough the instructors have booby-trapped that thing and it blows up you’re a casualty so when i see that picture on the cover i always think man i was always scared to touch anything that look good absolutely oh yeah if the first day if it looks good maybe it’s too good yeah uh but you know those um a lot of guys a lot of guy i know a lot of guys from from the war in iraq a lot of guys went home with with paintings of saddam hussein because those things were pretty easy to find they were everywhere yes indeed yeah all right going back to the book with the hatchet force or the hatchet force we were used to going across the fence and getting our ass kicked and then getting saved by tack air on operation half back in laos earlier in the year we lost two south vietnamese air force h-34s which included sf medic bill boyle who died in one of those choppers we got hit hard because we were dug in and the nva pounded our position with operation tailwood tailwind once on the ground we were going to keep moving day and night to keep the nva off balance and keep them from massing a large force against our position it’s it’s fundamental it’s what we’re talking about is maneuver warfare right instead of saying hey we’ll do attrition warfare we’ll sit on this this mountaintop and you attack us hey we’re going to move around and you know won’t know where where we are but that’s tricky too moving 150 guys around in the j in the jungle indeed in the j as they say although no one said so at the time at least not outright the mission that mccarley and the ccc hatchet force were gearing up for to execute could be called a suicide mission as mccarley briefed the b company platoon leaders squad leaders medic gary mike rose and company first sergeant morris adair in the ccc compound operation orders were going out to critical support elements that would play crucial roles in operation tailwind first there was a long distance to the target in laos because it was so far away neither the older piston driven h-34 sikorsky helicopters the south vietnamese armies or south south vietnamese air force 219 special operations squadron nor regular army huey slicks could be used to insert and extract the 136-man attachment so you got just a straight-up fuel limitation absolutely these aircraft they’re not going to be able to fly that deep into laos so what does that mean back to the book thus sag brass turned to the marine corps aviation wing that flew the largest troop carriers in vietnam the powerful ch-53d sikorsky twin-engine helicopters in hmh 463 based at the coors marble mountain air facility using the bigger stronger heavier lift helicopters made sense because three sea stallions with the with the design capacity to hold 55 troops could take the entire hatchet force of 136 men all their equipment and extra supplies such as explosives and ammunition and insert them into the target area so there you go the uh the uh ch-53 helicopter is a massive freaking helicopter oh yeah it holds 50-something troops with all their gear with their gear and all the rounds for their weapons yeah that’s a that’s an awesome aircraft and those were the only two engines in them this v40 came out with a three engine model like you used oh see i got that i got it easy um in previous years marine corps aviators from hmh 463 had performed fearlessly in key sog operations across the fence and marine brass knew that flying combat troops and supplies into laos always resulted in the helicopters getting hit by enemy fire in the first day said mccarley it was funny the marine brass were a little reluctant to go that deep into laos because they knew the sog missions presented extra challenges and dangers to marine air crews but once they heard about the unique aspects of operations t operation tailwind they wanted in marine sergeant larry grow am i saying that right grow was a door gunner instructional mechanic structural mechanic in hmh 463 when the operations order came into the command shed in da nang the most dangerous and he says the most dangerous and most interesting missions we flew were mission 72 and that was sog support we called it going over the fence for me personally this is why i joined the marine corps to run special missions against the enemy i was looking for adventure and wanted to be where the action was the marine aviators were told to prepare for a mission 72 insertion deep into laos grow replaced the 50 caliber machine gun with the m60 because it gave him more maneuverability and if we got shot down he says and and quote if we got shot down i could carry it and take the fight to the enemy the 50 was too heavy to carry is that a great marine or what yeah yeah so just so everyone understands what we’re talking about a 50 caliber machine gun is a big gun and it’s you can’t shoot it you can’t you cannot do it you can’t you can’t carry that thing and shoot it from your shoulder or from your hip it’s it’s meant to be mounted on a vehicle or mounted in an aircraft but an m60 you can shoot by yourself you can carry it and you can you can fire it from the hip or from the shoulder and so this marines thinking well we’re going out these freaking sog guys probably a pretty decent chance we’re gonna get shot down i’ll go ahead and switch it out that way if we get shot down i’ll be able to you know uh unhook that thing and go and fight larry’s a thinker marine boy he’s something he’s one of my all-time heroes from this mission dang yeah um not far away from hmh 463 at marble mountain air facility marine aviators from hml 367 scarface got the op order for operation tailwind in a more dramatic fashion according to cobra gunship pilot joe driscoll who was a first lieutenant at the time and he says the duty driver came by our room at two or three o’clock in the morning and told us to pack our gear as we’d be gone for five to ten days on an operation to be ready at five am my first thought was maybe we’re finally going into north vietnam driscoll and fellow pilots flew the early model ah-1g cobra gun ships with one man sitting in front seat and a pilot sitting behind him a relative of the more familiar huey helicopter the cobra gunship had a more narrow profile designed strictly as a weapons platform driscoll cope driscoll’s cobra had two 19 shot 2 75 rocket launchers two seven shot rocket pods one seven six two mini gun that fired six thousand rounds a minute and a grenade launcher that fired forty millimeter high explosive rounds that’s why they call it a gunship that’s firepower when the early versions of those cobras were fully armed and loaded with aviation fuel the helicopter skids would drag on the runway for a short distance until the pilots gained enough lift to get the bird airborne however once once in the air they brought the fight to the enemy with precise gun runs and rocket runs scarface and several other marine helicopter units had been involved in the secret war in vietnam for several years usually supporting recon teams and hatchet forces from fob-1 at fubai and fob-3 at caisson or fob-4 at da nang in the northern and you’re just this this section of the book is laying out and i’m skipping through it like i always have to skip through some stuff get it get the book so you can get the rest of the details but you know you mentioned that this was a massive joint operation through all these different forces and in this section you’re laying out the various air platforms that are going to be brought to bear to execute this mission you go on here in the northern side of da nang at the joint military civilian airfield air force spad pilots who flew the single win single wing a1 skyraiders received their initial op order for operation tailwind so the a1 the a1 skyraider is this old-school world war ii era right invented and put together at the end of world war ii used throughout korean war and then the air force brass put them all away and then jack singh lob and other commanders said we want those aircraft back in service they had this big battle behind the scenes to get the skyraider because they were just phenomenal support for sog um the nickname spad world war one i looked it up it’s an old world war one airplane and this thing was such an ancient beast yes that they they called it the spad the world war one airplane oh awesome looking bird uh going on here the single the single engine warplane was loved by american ground pounders this is kind of like the a10 oh yeah you know the a10 is the same thing people try and get rid of it and all the ground pounders say we love that thing absolutely we love that the only thing the a10 was missing was napalm yeah that would have been nice oh yeah crispy critter time the single-engine warplane was loved by american ground pounders and feared by communist troops because of the havoc and death they rained down on enemy troops additionally through the unique design by ed heinemann at douglas aircraft company during world war ii the skyraider could stay on station over a target longer than any aircraft and it brought bombs cluster bombs 2 75 rockets 20 millimeter cannons and two mini guns to the battlefield once again that’s a lot of firepower plus bombs and napalm over the years several sog recon and hatchet forest green berets were called getting showered with shell casings from the a1 skyraiders as they flew danger close to the teams they were supporting some later reported receiving burns on the back of their necks from hot shell casings that fell from the warbird and landed on the soldier’s necks burning their skin once they lodged in the collar however no one ever complained about those burns burns that were often life savings life-saving lieutenant colonel melvin swanson was the group commander when operation tailwind op order landed on his desk and here’s what he had to say to tell the truth we didn’t do anything special when the op order came down i had no idea where we were going we operated like any other sog mission that we’d supported over the years we had two a1’s armed and cocked ready to go for sog missions and search and rescue missions we prided ourselves on saving sog teams sog missions were our primary assignment with sar as the other priority when they called we answered always back at ccc and khan tomb mccarly restated the mission to his platoon leaders and squad leaders go heavy on ammo grenades and c4 plastic explosives and light on food and water and he says i had every team member including our in-ditch troops carry at least one pound of c4 because we were going to blow up any enemy caches and structures we found and c4 was always good for clearing lz’s green beret medic gary mike rose went through his mental checklist preparing to carry enough medical supplies and bandages for a company-sized operation he would make sure that each green beret team member carried at least one morphine syrette in a specific pocket he also made sure that he packed that each packed several sizes of bandages and at least one iv he packed about 15 syrettes of morphine five sorrets of atropine he he always carried five for insert and snake bites even in camp as well as extra bandages medical tape rubber tubing and several nato surgical kits rose worked with his modern yard koch is that right [ __ ] koch cut who he described as a loyal brave soldier and medic who carried a similar amount of medical supplies that i carried and like many young soldiers rose never thought for a minute that he would be wounded during combat thus the stage was set for launching operation tailwind on september 11 1970 after several weather delays and rocket attacks to the launch site north of ccc it would be a mission where the 16 green berets would receive a total of 33 purple hearts for wounds received during the heavy combat that was about to unfold in laos oh yeah and the the fun thing here is we this is the first time we were able to interview all the aviators like mel swanson won a character and then joe driscoll and his cohorts from um scarface and then met larry and a couple other it’s on the pilots over time yeah and we’ll get to it because you mentioned in the book and you talk through that but a lot of times you’d never even see these guys never i mean they’re stationed in a different place they’re up in the air you’re on the ground and you never you just never you never meet them never and look i mean you you’ve you’ve heard all the stories mine lynn black the frenchman elton barr as well we all have skyraiders stories that love and saved our bacon i couldn’t tell you one pilot’s name not until we had uh until we had this story and that was even there 40 45 years later dang yes so here we go let’s get to it after seven days of weather delays false starts and enemy rocket attacks um at the top secret military assistance command base in vietnam eugene mccarley that’s the the guy in charge eugene mccarley gave the order to move out 15 berets 15 green berets and 120 modern yards mercenaries on the morning of september 11th four of the powerful marine corps ch-53d sikorsky twin engine helicopters in hmh 463 based at the marine corps marble mountain air facility landed outside the ccc compound and loaded up the 136 man unit sog brass had turned to the marine corps aviation wing that flew the largest troop carriers to reach into laos 25 kilometers beyond the normal sog area of operations escorted by six marine corps cobras the helicopters headed north to refuel at dak ii before heading into the target area after refueling they flew north parallel to the border for a while before taking a left turn heading due west into the target area could the cobras make it all the way in yes that’s pretty impressive yeah they had extra fuel capacity got it and here’s uh speaking of the pilots that you got to interview it was a hot zone from the moment we arrived scarface cobra pilot joe driscoll said we took several hits on the first gun run during the insertion of the team scarface pilot sid baker and i were surprised by the volume of fire in fact we took hits in our rocket pods we had bullet holes in our tail boom and they shot out our radio when the cobras made their final gun run we followed our sop which was to stay in formation and keep an eye out for enemy soldiers firing at us end quote because they had no radio contact driscoll and baker simply flew through flew through the pattern to cover the ship in front of them without firing quote the enemy didn’t know we had no radios i’ll tell you one thing that was a hot target driscoll said we were moving targets the ch-53s were static targets but they went in dropped off the troops and got out of there post haste man yeah on insert okay see ordinarily we’re done we get shot at going in unless you’re lynn black and his 1-0 but ordinarily you’re done you just turn around and go home we’re compromised the idea is to get inserted do a mission without being compromised there by our old standards were compromised operation tailwind we’re going in come hell or high water it gets better oh yeah continuing the ch-53s were big targets mccarley said all of the ch-53s were hit by enemy ground fire while end route to the target i’d never received so much ground fire while flying to a target he said it sounded like a bb gun shooting a tin can but it wasn’t bb’s that the troops heard it was enemy rounds by the time that b company exited the helicopters four mont yards had been wounded from enemy gunfire one died while flying back to base with his three wounded comrade in arms green beret medic sergeant michael rose added it was strange exiting the chopper stepping over wounded in action to get to the ground yeah so they haven’t even started the mission yet they got one killed and three wounded yes we haven’t started the mission yet but we got we got three wounded and one killed continuing under ordinary sog mission sops any recon team or hatchet force that received enemy ground fire and men wounded in action prior to getting to the ground would cancel the mission this was no ordinary mission company b moved off the helicopters and was on the ground in laos shortly after noon time one fundamental truism of the vietnam war as well as the eight years secret surfaced the communist forces fought when they wanted to fight thus when mccarley and the main remaining 131 members of b company settled into the woodline they found complete and utter silence he said it was so strange the aircraft pulled back we were on the ground and there were no enemy soldiers no noise no birds nothing so once again you get that that weird quietness oh yeah what do you think make the make the nva think we’re going to shoot when they’re inserting but once they land we’re not going to do anything what are they thinking what’s the enemy thinking at that point who knows their tactics always varied and i think a little bit was just a complete element of surprise they saw the birds and so the people shooting it would be anti-aircraft crews along the way and probably some ground troops for their aks i don’t know i wasn’t there but once they land let’s see what the boys are up to that’s what the nva could be thinking just to see what and then they knew with those three helicopters coming in there’s a lot of people and they wanted to maybe do their own assessment and see who these what who they are and what they’re up to because um sometimes the nva just didn’t react as quickly particularly that far west they had never had totally surprised at several levels surprised that we were there or sag was there and then surprised at the number of aircraft and that they actually got in and so there’s all these three different elements but they were you know they’re checking it out continuing on mccarly who is serving his second tour of duty and sog wasted no time the company moved out in a northwest direction and then the men of b company had another surprise surprise after moving less than 400 meters from the lz the point element of the company reported seeing huts the first platoon deployed two squads to search the area they found an enemy ammo dump 20 bunkers spread out over 500 meters hidden in the under the jungle canopy with vegetation and dark covers after setting up perimeter security the bee company troops pulled together a quick inventory of what they had found picked up samples while demolitions experts s sergeant first class bernard bright and specialist 5th class craig schmidt photographed identified the weapons and ammo and began setting up explosive charges with 13 and a half minute delay fuses in the two larger structures with white phosphorus grenades attached to each charge to better mark the exact location for covey who would then direct air strikes on that position so here we go already on the ground already found bad guy area but there was no bad guys there for whatever reason but a bunch of ammo and whatnot they found the cash so they’re gonna blow it up and then this happens while while the b company team worked on this cash mccarley had one of the most unique moments in its 28 in his 28 years of military service as he and a few of the sf soldiers were looking at a map a telephone rang quote i couldn’t believe it a phone rang in the middle of laos mccarley said quote so being sf one of our guys picked up the phone and answered it hello fifth special forces group may we help you can you imagine the reaction of the communists on the other end of that phone to this day just thinking about it makes me laugh so there you go yeah as the sf men chuckled at the phone call others were compiling an impressive list of enemy weapons contained in the bunkers massive cache of of of weapons not resting on its laurels b company moved north with the platoon with the first platoon breaking point in a short distance the first platoon found a trail crossed it we’re proceeding north when a dare and second platoon squad leader mike hagen observed several nva soldiers on the trail and opened fire on them an nva 762 round went through hagen’s gas mask which he had on his leg and slammed into his leg so they’re carrying gas masks on this operation bernie bright was slightly wounded the round actually parted his hair said mccarly you can’t get much closer than that the nva fled the area and b company continued to head north after medic gary mike rose patched up hagan’s wound as they marched they heard two large explosions back at the nva bunkers white phosphor white phosphorus grenades that brighton schmidt attached to the demo charges emitted large plumes of white smoke smoke that covey readily picked up and proceeded to direct precise follow-up airstrikes secondary explosions would continue for more than five hours can you imagine that secondary explosions it’s crazy oh yeah yeah it’s yeah it’s crazy amount of well i mean this is their supply this is this is this is how they’re fighting the war right there you go home and say look what we just did yeah they’d be a great mission and that’s the first one hour on the ground uh b company then made contact with the nva with an nva company which lasted for close to an hour mccarley said the hatchet force men used close air strikes from scarface cobras and and spads skillful squad tact and skillful squad tactics against the surprised nva to drive them off as darkness approached mccarly and the point element began looking for a location to remain overnight for the night we we stopped for a combo check when they fired one b-40 rocket into our command post rose added we were fortunate we were fortunate in one small way the rocket flew past all of us before striking a bamboo thicket thus when the shrapnel exploded those of us injured didn’t get the full head-on blunt force of the metal shards as the forward momentum of the rocket exploded into the bamboo 45 years later after that rocket explosion rose had one lasting mental image of it he says quote it’s funny i can’t remember much about it except that all of a sudden i was flying through the air at some point while airborne i looked up and saw blue sky it was beautiful and then i landed and here’s mccarly rose showed us what he was made of that day he immediately started to go to work on the wounded because everyone in the cp at that time had varying degrees of wounds in fact rose had a serious foot injury somehow the shrapnel had sliced open his jungle boot and cut into his foot what did he do he pulled out an ace bandage wrapped it around his foot and used his car 15 as a crutch and began treating are wounded end quote the most serious wounded was a south vietnamese lieutenant shrapnel sliced into his right thigh to the bone in addition to other shrapnel wounds we stopped and licked our wounds as rose past patched up our people mccarley said mccarley’s plan was to continue to move at night and if b company made contact with the enemy the special forces men would determine whether to attack them or maneuver around them or simply pull back and call and fix win gunships that could bring deadly fire from the sky upon the enemy troops on the ground fast forward a little bit finally rose rigged two stretchers from rubber poncho supported by thick bamboo poles and tied them down with six foot sections of rope they would now be able to carry the most seriously wounded indigenous troops when rose gave mccarley the okay bee company took the bold step of moving out at night quote i wasn’t going to let them tie us down in one position and then hammer us by us moving they didn’t know exactly where we were there were little skirmishes and a few times we ran into a few nva after contact we’d move on if there was a larger element we could pull back and call in the gunship strike we had flare ships over us every night end quote b company continued to march west deeper into laos the deeper b company green beret and their mountain yards headed west the more they enhanced their primary goal of being a diversion to the nva forces attacking the cia’s operation catapult this wasn’t going to be easy by dawn nine of the americans nine of the 16 americans had been wounded so these guys have been on the ground for what is it they they got inserted around noon so we’re we’re talking a very short period of time yeah 18 hours or something like that and they already have nine of the 16 americans wounded rose and his indigenous indigenous medic koch worked tirelessly on the wounded all night even as they moved throughout the dark jungle so they got they got nine wounded just americans and they’re still moving and the two seriously wounded uh mounting yards yeah in stretchers and stretchers improvised yeah man carrying stretchers is no joke you need to have like a team to carry if you think if you think oh you just get two guys one on each side of the stretcher that works for a little while but you end up having to either rotate those guys out or you put four guys on the stretcher it’s so much harder than it looks now luckily the yards are smaller though right yeah they’re not like the big map man when we when we were going through training and and i always be a down man the guys would be like hey bro well i love you bud could you go on a diet please here take this grenade and we’ll see you later good luck we’ll mark you with a chem light continuing on captain gene mcardley had the men of b company hatchet force move moving north well before the sun rose on day two of operation tailwind we zigzagged a lot during that mission because we didn’t want the nva to get a good fix on our position as we knew they’d try to pin us down and attack us in force if that happened said mccarley within an hour nva soldiers hit the first platoon with automatic weapons b-40 rockets and mortars two squads maneuvered against the enemy while mccarley directed airstrikes against the enemy positions the tactics work because of thick jungle they weren’t able to get an accurate body count as mccarly continued to march north however sf medic gary mike rose knew the casualties were climbing among both sf and indige troops of b company we had two yards killed and yards is the short the short name for mountain yards we had two yards killed when cap mccarly and i got hit with shrapnel from the b40 after conforming confirming they were dead i wrapped them up and we carried them with us as best we could rose said however after trying to carry them while tending to the two most seriously injured men i quote i had to make a decision to leave the two dead men behind because i could see that carrying them as we moved we were causing too much fatigue for the living so we made a decision that has bothered me for nearly half a century by day two it seemed as though every day every hour i kept getting more and more wounded so the sf medic rose he’s looking at the situation and we were just joking about how hard it is to carry guys and and clearly he he was dealing with that it’s it’s it’s incredibly hard and you think like i said it takes you have to have guys to rotate through it’s taking out a whole lot of your combat power when you’re moving wounded so he they probably have you know probably takes 10 guys to move these two wounded guys maybe even more so that’s 10 guys out of the fight and you’re moving slower and so he has to make this agonizing decision that we’re going to leave these guys nick when i talked to mike for that part of the story his eyes welled up it was just like yesterday it really still hurt him now 50 50 years later yeah rough continues on here at one point during an attack on bee company an nva force of more than 40 enemy soldiers two of the most seriously wounded men that rose was treating had both of their iv fluid bags shattered and destroyed during a hail of enemy gunfire i learned a lesson right then and there said rose we kept the ivs flowing from low positions allowing gravity to work but not high enough for the enemy gunfire to destroy them were you guys using an iv bag were your ivs glass that’s a good question i forget okay that’s for the medics the comma guy yeah we well the weird thing well we all carried ivs right and we ended up getting smaller ivs but i i don’t know if you he said the ivs shattered so that makes me think maybe they were made of glass what the the bags the iv bags yeah just like big jars or what oh no they were we for the for our medics they had plastic oh okay so maybe because they’re i’m not sure what the hatchet for us yeah he took what he had yeah that’d be my assumption so you’re treating your wounded you’re giving them iv in the freaking bags or the jar gets shot at yeah continuing on as the hatchet force moved north it was obvious to mccarley that rose had his hands full as he continually as he had to continually monitor two most seriously wounded men men who were being carried by him and other team members and stretchers made of bamboo sticks and panchos because there were so many wounded mccarly directed b company to find or make an lz for a medevac to land and take out the wounded they found a large bomb crater and began preparing the lz when the enemy initiated two successive contacts with them firing small arms b-40 rockets and throwing chai com grenades as they work to on establishing a clearing bee company dealt with the two separate attacks from the nva using squad tactics and tac air both attacks were neutralized only to have covey report that the weather had turned bad prohibiting any rescue attempts for the day without hesitation b company moved moved out again going west for a while then north keeping its pattern of movement unpredictable what i remember but most about day two of operation tailwind was the disappointment of having the weather turn bad preventing a much needed medevac mccarly said so these guys have the goal like okay we got we got some wounded guys we need to get these guys out of here they fight for to get it to get an lz once they get this lz established under attack they push the attack back and then the weather rolls in and the guys can’t guys can’t fly southeast asia weather is there what’s your what’s your confidence on the weather predictions like the weather predictions in iraq are pretty easy it’s going to be hot every once in a while you would get a a storm and you we we had some sand storms oh i saw those the sandstorms they’re they’re like biblical sandstorms oh yeah they black in the sky it’s pretty cool to see but you can’t run ops in them at all like you can’t make communications because the sand blocks radio waves so basically if there’s that kind of biblical sandstorm coming everyone just kind of stands down now you could go out and try and get into a good position but you can’t see anything you you can see you know maybe maybe 20 yards or something like that i mean your visibility’s just gone oh yeah but we could kind of know that they were coming i never got let me put it this way i never got i never got surprised by the weather in iraq it was it was sunny and hot 99 of the time every once in a while there’d be some kind of cloud maybe a little bit of persis precipitation by because we were by the euphrates what river where it was it was humid people don’t know that by the euphrates river is freaking humid and i’m going to show you pictures sometime of this area to the to the northeast of the city of ramadi it was still in our in our ao right and it was called uh the uh the mc1 or the one mc but what we called it was viet ram because because it looked like vietnam yeah it looked exactly like vietnam palm trees rice paddies dykes my stepson told me about it he was in the green zone yup yup and he’s like i thought i was back in vietnam with you oh was he in the green zone in uh in afghanistan no oh in iraq and by green zone he means areas where there was the we always called the green zone which is the biggest most secure area in iraq okay so you’re talking about the green zone in baghdad in baghdad okay yeah and he was operating southeast in different locations for near some of which they came into iraqi jungle yep in afghanistan they call the green zone like areas where there’s other areas where they’re like heavily fo there’s a lot of foliage right okay so in uh in iraq the green zone is is the green zone it’s the thing right there in baghdad which is big and secure it’s where they had good food and all that stuff yeah we never had any uh sandstorms in the jungle so maybe a typhoon or two so my question was when you would get a weather prediction you’re gonna go like these guys let’s say you were going on a four day mission and and they’re telling you all right looks like the weather’s good how good did you feel about that like did you give it 50 50 you just figured whatever it was figured because it could change so quickly but the positive thing is that if it gets cloudy how long does that how long are you thinking that lasts for oh you know every time was different um because the clouds a lot of time there would be clouds in the morning sometimes they burn off sometimes they wouldn’t and um there’s just so much moisture around and um we’re always juggling with the weather i mean that’s just one of the um factors that there’s just no control we get predictions but um we got socked in a couple times yeah and again they want to get us into a hole and so okay we just go up and try to get into a target get in and then mother nature closes the holes like ah yeah we just had to lie low and wait it out wait it out because if you move and make make contact there’s no support and the nva know that so they’re going to really come at you hard if there’s no air so they love it when there’s bad weather oh sure oh yes bad weather was the nva’s ally all right fighting the nva fighting the weather mother nature to fight mother nature it’s another day at sog back to the book knight two in laos was similar to night one b company kept on the move with continued support from moonbeam linking the team with shadow stinger and spector gunships throughout the night during that night we heard tracked vehicles we heard trucks mcarley said night two sounded like a lot of trucks heading south bringing troops and supplies south and some to deal with us we had skirmishes that night and we directed air assets to assist us directly and to the areas where we heard motor vehicle activity so now you got the spectre gun chips coming at night which is a beautiful thing well they had all three variations because you know you when i first get there in 68 spooky was the first one and then they came out with shadow which was a c-119 whereas spooky was the old c-47 and they could have maybe two miniguns and when they came out with the shadow because we had one of our recon teams said they came back they lived through the night and they went through a couple of shadows and they had more ordinance and they could stay on station longer and then another team a couple months later or maybe a year i forget the time frame then it was the stingers again c119s with the with the weapons the computers the lock-in on the strobe light and then spectre and 50 years later you still dominate the night yeah that thing’s a beautiful piece of machinery the nva also inflicted some more casualties in the company by the time mccarley moved out at 4 00 a m for day three september 13 1970 rose was tending to more than 30 wounded men two with deadly serious wounds that required almost constant attention fluid rejuvenation and pain management by that time rose was also running low on bandages ivs and morphine cyrettes quote we were so low on morphine that i reused morphine threats which is a no-no under normal circumstances but there was nothing normal about this operation so i would give two or three of the wounded morphine from the same suret i only gave them enough to dull the pain but allowed them to be somewhat alert end quote as rose focused on the wounded the first platoon engaged the enemy as they moved toward a potential lz for a much-needed medevac while the third platoon deployed one squad to maintain contact with another squad of nva attacking the company’s rear after several gun runs by scarface and a1 skyraiders from da nang in thailand the rear action force rejoined the company as it pushed into a good lz site and began clearing trees with claymore mines and c4 plastic explosives at noon after scarface and the spads performed gun runs on enemy positions near a small lz the first marine corps 53-d approached the lz as the large helicopter descended into the lz the pilot bill beardoll was concerned that the lz might not be large enough to land in as he maneuvered the chopper slowly downward rose moved toward the rear tailgate of the ch-53 with his most seriously injured soldier the south vietnamese lieutenant with a horrific thigh and hip injury inside the chopper sf medics john staff sergeant john doc paget and sergeant john brown moved on to the back tailgate as it lowered with brown supporting padgett by holding his belt quote i was trying to reach the patient that mike was lifting towards us and just at that moment in time the pilot pulled pitch and lifted to the left end quote rose said quote the tail rotor struck a tree as i was lifting the patient up towards dock the chopper lifted upward suddenly as it was lifting up it took enemy small arms fire and a b40 rocket hit end quote padgett said quote when that b40 hit us it went through the fuel cell but didn’t explode there was aviation fuel everywhere how it didn’t ignite i’ll never know but surely god was riding with us end quote bear doll pilot of the ch-53 radioed may day may day we’re going in as the ch-53 began losing fuel in its hydraulic fuel uh fluids yh14 that’s the number of this particular ch-53 crashed without any injuries to the medics or crew members who immediately exited the wounded bird and set up a defensive perimeter with padgett overseeing the impromptu team on the ground as the ncoic for sog ccc dispensary at khan tomb pageant could have pulled rank and stayed behind and he said quote but that that wasn’t how i did things i usually took my turn riding on the chase medic ship so here you have a guy that’s a senior guy that could have been you know sitting back in the in the in the hooch air-conditioned in the air-conditioned who’s pooch back on base but he’s he’s not that kind of leader no not at all steps up and gets in there and now now these guys are getting shot down maybe he’s questioning that decision right now oh i’m sure he was he may not say that for the record but doc’s a smart guy he could figure all the angles as they set up their perimeter scarface lieutenant h e newton called ch 53 aircraft number yh20 piloted by mark mckenzie met them at a rally point and led them to the crash site where scarface and spads made gun runs in preparation for the chase medic aircraft called sar by by the marines to arrive for the down downed crew and sf medics while enroute to rescue the crew of yh14 said yh door gunner larry grow i was admiring the beautiful countryside and i couldn’t help thinking of all the bad guys down there waiting for us my m60 was locked loaded and ready for action as we got closer to the pickup site i could see that it was surrounded by smoke that was laid down by scar by the scarface cobras along with their rockets and 40 millimeters to protect the crew of the down chopper end quote as yh20 was about to settle into a hover over the downed crew an nva 51 caliber anti-aircraft heavy machine gun opened fire on the aircraft’s left side grows left side window was only about 25 yards away from it and the muzzle flashes from the gun were huge and the rounds seemed to be the size of basketballs grow pulled the trigger on his m-60 and held it until the 51 cal was silenced the ch-53 started to bounce around and i knew quote and i knew we had taken some hits sergeant whitmer was working his gun on the right side as captain coppola and sergeant spalding were at the rear ramp throwing out the 120 foot aluminum extraction ladder end quote meanwhile scarface cobras were making gun runs spads following suit hitting enemy sites quote everything seemed to slow down as the action heated up grow said everything was in slow motion when the ladder landed on the ground padgett told everyone to climb in climb it and hook onto it there was so much confusion and noise that no one moved to the ladder he said finally i said follow me and up i went they followed suit man this is just mayhem gross said the liftoff from the lz wasn’t easy quote we had no idea just how bad the battle damage was but we were bouncing all over the sky and we had a huge beat meaning that the that there was something terribly wrong with our main rotor blades end quote now the crew of yh20 was concerned about the safety of the aircraft and the men below riding on the extraction ladder so you have the helicopter gets shot down and then this other helicopter comes into rescue they get lit up with a with a disc machine gun 12 7 millimeter 51 cal which is a freaking massive machine gun they get shot up with that they throw the the extraction ladder out the back a bunch of the guys don’t know what to do finally someone on the ground starts climbing the ladder they all start climbing the ladder but they don’t get up the ladder so they’re all just hanging onto this ladder and then this thing starts to try and get out of there and it’s like a car with uh you know with like a piston that’s not firing exactly quote in hindsight there was really no way that we or anyone else could know could know how bad the damage was said grow quote only when we finally made it back do we learn just how bad our damage was numerous rounds had cut the hydraulic lines to the tail rotor one round from the 50 cal it almost cut the main rotor tail drive shaft in half that round had hit next to the thomas coupling which connects the tail rotor drive shaft sections together we were extremely lucky to have made it back to base god was with us that day padgett said man those helicopters are beasts to take that kind of damage oh yeah yeah salute salute the 53s amen for the rest of the men on the ground during the night of day three there was no rest yeah by the way while all that’s happening we still got we still got what a hundred and something guys left on the ground the nvn intensified its attacks against the mena b company throwing an estimated 600 plus hand grenades into the defense positions of the hatchet force even as it moved a few times during the night so now we’re taking 600 hand grenades by now the b company med had gained an important tactical advantage over the nva i like this this is a good attitude to have right here we got a freaking down helicopter we got all these wounded guy we received 600 grenades and here you know what here we go by now the b company men had gained an important tactical advantage over the nva they learned the nva combat signals during the close-in fighting the nva would hit two bamboo sticks together or use a whistle for signals the hatchet force men learned that one click or one whistle signaled the nva to move two meant throw hand grenades and three meant withdraw hatchet force men would then radio what signal what the signal was to the other team members so that they could adjust accordingly more than once when the nva signaled to withdraw the hatchet force men would then attack when they were more vulnerable it was one more tactical advantage that they used to their advantage against an enemy force that continued to grow on the battlefield despite losing hundreds of men to air strikes bombing runs and team ground fire meanwhile back in da nang at their air base the marines returned to repair their aircrafts as the warning order came down for day four the weather and nva hordes were closing in on bee company because with those hand grenades one of the things that lynn black discovered was that the nva had hand grenade vest where they would have four or five hand grenades and one vest they could get it and throw it forward and hold it and then all five grenades would launch at one time with the pins pulled so you have four or five hand grenades coming at you at one time so they were all like tied together or something yeah and so when they when they got the vest and then threw it but held it the hand grenades attached would then go forward oh got it and so with this thing that was going on with the 600 plus i’m sure that was one of the tactics the nba report because they had the hand grenade vests that’s a lot of grenades to respond why not that’s a lot of good even if only half go off because they’re chinese the chai comes but still if only half golf that’s still 300 grenades yeah and that that also tells you something else tells you how close the enemy was yeah because that means they’re throwing those grenades so there’s this is close fighting and not to mention you wonder how close it was it’s so close that we can hear their signaling when they’re banging two bamboo sticks together primitive but effective primitive but effective but also so close that we can hear it and we hear it so much that we actually decipher their freaking code yeah god all right going back to the book the morning of operation tail when day four dawned upon b company hatchet forest of mack vsauce moving toward an lz to lift out the more seriously wounded among the remaining 127 men who could still walk all 16 green berets had been wounded at least once and about 40 mountain yard troops were wounded during the first three days of this secret foray deep in the laos so there you go that’s at least 40 probably more because nobody nobody can everybody’s just too busy fighting bee company commanding officer captain gene mccarley had the point element moving toward an apparent clearing with one thought in mind get one marine corps heavy lift ch-53 helicopter in to pick up the wounded and then continue to march to destroy any nva fortifications supplies or troops they encountered by now the entire second platoon was being used to help care for and transport the wounded under the tireless leadership of medic gary mike rose including three wounded who were carried on impromptu stretchers so there you go you have an entire platoon of what 40 guys yeah you have an entire platoon of 40 guys that are just being used to for the wounded help the wounded so that’s how hard it is to deal with wounded and move wounded and his maureen his morphine cervettes are low fast forward a little bit the men on the ground didn’t know about two startling developments the weather was closing in with a storm front that would prevent tac air from supporting bee company and operation tail wind had rocked the nva brass into rallying hordes of north vietnamese and pathet lao troops that were moving toward the highway 165 area near the tiny hamlet of chevain so these guys don’t know it but there’s massive enemy coming and bad weather now when this bad weather hits just to be clear if i didn’t make this clear enough the only thing that really keeps keeps you guys alive on the ground at a certain point is just the fact that we have air superiority and you can drop bombs because they’ve got hundreds if not thousands of troops going against you so if you lose air support it’s a matter of time because the look the the nva they don’t care they’ll keep coming they’ll come in waves until they finally just overwhelm you with the with just attrition so if you lose tac air some point you’re going to be overrun and everyone’s dead our edge is gone yeah indeed here’s mccarley quote when we started day four we hadn’t thought about an extraction except for getting the wounded out we took our mission seriously meaning he’s saying look we’re not even thinking about leaving yet not at all we’re thinking about getting our wounded out but we’re ready to go we’re gonna stay we took our mission seriously relieve the pressure on the cia’s operation thanks to tack air we had hurt the enemy no question and by continuously moving we had kept the nva off balance we were tired but our morale was good we’d been on the move about an hour when we heard dogs these weren’t dogs that sounded like tracker dogs the nva used on us they sounded like pet dogs so we moved toward their sound and the first platoon followed them the dogs led bee company to what would become one of the greatest military intelligence coup of the eight-year sog secret war in laos if you’re dogs they’re not tracking dogs but they’re just like pet dogs and the guys follow him back to this camp that’s me i’m going the other way i don’t like dogs anywhere particularly in the a o sorry yeah no the first time i think it was the first time you were on and we were talking about those tracking dogs about halfway through the conversation after you’re talking about these dogs they’re smelling you and they’re closing on you and i was like till d do you still like do you not like dogs and you said i hate dogs totally understood before long the enemy troops fire fired several b40 rockets at the point element of b company and then fell back it looked like they had gone back to some sort of bunker complex mccarley said after a brief skirmish and a brilliantly executed spad gun runs where they had used cluster bomb units on enemy positions the first platoon led the assault on those bunkers with a well-coordinated attack while second platoon covered our flank and provided rear security so so you guys these guys run up against an enemy position with bunkers and what do they do attack it yeah call in for close air support and then attack it on day four i mean these guys probably haven’t eaten they’re short on water they’re wounded third platoon protected our right flank we caught them napping we hit the outpost when they were cooking breakfast there were open fires fires with cooking pots on them hell they never had anyone mess with them before this deep into laos a few nva a few nva hitting a couple of the bunkers whom the mountain yards quickly eliminated with hand grenades those bunkers were nothing but gory blood and guts after the grenade attacks mccarley said again a1 skyraider skyraiders delivered cbus precisely along two key enemy lines instantly silencing enemy gunfire hand grenades and rocket attacks within a short period of time more than 70 nva were killed as b companies swept through the base as b company drove the remaining nva out of the outpost they discovered a bunker in the base of camp that quote appeared to be like a basement in a regular house said mccarly it was at least 10 feet long and 10 feet wide with maps on the walls and a foot locker loaded with documents i emptied my rucksack of everything except for extra car 15 ammo by that time i had used the extra battery radio battery and c4 that i was carrying and i started packing with enemy documents papers code books transportation logs end quote within 15 minutes the base camp was overrun the area was searched for intelligence and photographs were taken as medic mike rose continued to treat the wounded men of the company so this is a score that’s a coup and a half oh yeah rich by now it was clear to be company intelligence men that they had stumbled into an nv8 battalion base camp that was a major logistical command center and probably the headquarters that controlled the nearby laotian highway 165 remaining true to his original operation order mccarley had all the intelligence documents packed and ordered b company and all of its walking wounded to march out of the battalion base camp while demolitions experts wired 120 millimeter mortar four enemy trucks and more than nine tons of rice for destruction as usual after the special forces charges exploded a1 skyraiders followed up with gun napalm and bombing runs to completely destroy all enemy structures and supplies boom nine tons of rice feed a lot of people oh yeah meanwhile back at con tomb fast forward a little bit meanwhile back at con tomb while all that’s happening all the air assets the a1 skyraiders of the da nang based operating location alpha alpha scarface pilots and ch-53 pilots were getting a detailed briefing on the weather and a sighting by covey of hundreds if not more than a thousand nva and path that loud troops moving east towards b company quote during that final briefing it was very clear today it was do or die end quote from scarface pilot joe driscoll quote the big thing was the stark seriousness of the moment everyone knew they had suffered heavy casualties and now the weather was closing in on them a1 skyraider pilot tom stump added quote the weather was dog [ __ ] when we took off i wasn’t optimistic about getting them out of their end quote on the ground in laos mccarley pressed forward until he received a disturbing radio call from covey sometime in the early afternoon of september 14th day four of operation tailwind quote i believe it was covey writer jimmy war daddy heart radioed down and told us the nva were massing and if that and that if we didn’t get out of there today we weren’t going to get out period that got my attention frankly he mentioned the weather issue too which up to that point in time i wasn’t aware of because we were in the jungle end quote yeah that got your attention huh oh yeah and everybody back at base they know they’re getting hammered and they know it’s bad and they’re getting ready to go they don’t know how bad it is it’s like you’re in the jungle like you’ve heard it before you don’t know what the hell bad the weather is or you’re on the ground and you can’t tell a lot of times the difference between sun and no sun it’s just dark in the jungle and they break loose every once in a while get open if they can see right gene had no idea no idea that’s when cubby told because when i interviewed gene on that he was like stunned when they when cubby total night because he really thought we’re going to kick their ass we just hit the cash you say cash or cashier you’re the english major i’m only an english miner so i had a uh it’s cash cash oh thank you sir it’s cash i’ll be more correct now i got corrected that i got corrected on that when i was a i think i was like an e5 or something an e4 and you know i was briefing something and i said well there’s a cachet over there yeah my officer said actually jocko it’s cash and i said no it’s not i didn’t believe him you had to go to the dictionary and back then you actually had to get a dictionary yeah yeah well i’ll tell you what you’re the man if you want to call it cachet we can change it right now we will follow suit i’ve always preferred cache me i think it’s cooler sound it could be cash or stats but cashier’s got a little bit more a little more pizzazz yeah uh so these guys are in a bad way and and now mccarley kind of realizes we got the enemy coming we got weather moving in back to the book realizing they needed a large lz a large lz large enough to handle a ch-53 because ch-53s are massive birds in the light of and by the way there’s no opportunity you’re not going to get 50 guys out on strings so this thing’s going to have to land yeah and you got wounded on top of that in light of losing one of the 53s heavy lift helicopters on a tight lz the previous day yeah by the way we already lost one of these things mccarley moved down a road towards a clearing that was large enough for nelsie however the open area was seated too deeply in a valley which had hills on two sides of it where the nva gunners would be able to have clear fields of fire on the marine rescue helicopters as well as the supporting tack air assets scarface uh cobra gunships to facilitate the continued movement of b company a1 spads and cobra scarface scarface cobras quote gave us fire protection to the front and to the rear mccarly said the nva kept hitting us with automatic fire and b-40s the air strikes kept them back far enough so they couldn’t do any real damage at some point covey ran dangerously low on fuel returned to base and connected spad pilot tom stump directly with mccarly about future airstrikes shortly before the first ch-53 arrived in the area of operations quote i’ll never forget it when i spoke to gene that’s mcarley when i spoke to gene his voice was as calm as a man at sunday church picnic stump said he had that slow southern draw and calmly said he was getting his ass kicked down there oh and all the while i could hear gunfire gunfire explosions and hand grenades he said he needed some separation between the company and the nva we were on station for two hours doing just that providing close air support with all the sf wounded in the large number of casualties they had i couldn’t see how we’d get them out there you go tom stump man uh mccarley and his men were grateful for the close air support of stump his fellow spad pilots scarface and tak air but stump stood out in his mind mccarley said quote tom stumps flew so close to us during some of those gun runs i could tell if he had shaved or not that’s just how close those a1 skyraiders flew in support of us we were extremely grateful for all the air support believe me but seeing stump was something to that stuck with me i also think it’s safe to say that because this was a sog mission deep into laos none of the air assets got the credit they should have received for the remarkable coverage they provided to us over four days from the fast movers right down to scarface and the cubbies continuing on bee company found a heavily traveled dirt road only wide enough for foot traffic and headed to a second lz one that provided better cover and less exposure to enemy ground fire for the helicopters and for the men of b company as they moved covey rider jimmy ward daddy heart told mccarley he had spotted another quote hoard of nva end quote moving toward b company this time hart told b company to put on their gas masks and directed a1 sorties flown by hobo 20 and firefly 44 based in thailand to deliver cbu 30 tear gas ordinance on the next hoard of nva while bee company found and secured a second lz for the marine ch-53 to land this drastic tactic worked it slowed down another nva horde but many of the men in b company including mccarly rose and others were hit by the gas which had a lot of our guys crying and choking on that cs mccarley said but it also bought them some time so they called they called in some some uh cluster bomb units yes with uh some coughing gas in it some irritant indeed right which is a lot different this is where this is where it gets a little tricky and it comes up later but that is a chemical right and people say well this is a chemical weapon and it is technically a chemical weapon but it’s a freaking non-lethal chemical weapon it doesn’t kill you right just you cry a lot and feel bad continuing on the scarface cobras led the ch-53s into the lz with deadly gun runs as an air force f4 phantom jets pounded two enemy mortar pits that were marching 82 millimeter rounds toward the lz that was large enough for only one ch-53 to land at a time quote we escorted the ch-53s into the lz the first run wasn’t as bad as the previous day when i could see dozens of enemy soldiers out in the open firing at us with ch and the choppers said scarface pilot joe driscoll when mccarley lost radio contact with covey scarface commanding officer lieutenant colonel harry sexton and his co-pilot pat owen quickly picked up coordinating the air assets with mccarley the first heavy lift helicopter landed on the lz picking up a majority of the wounded be company men including the three most seriously wounded who were carried in stretchers since being wounded on night one of the operation since platoon second platoon placed the wounded on the first marine helicopter before it lifted off successfully and headed back to khan tomb scarface again led the second marine corps ch-53 into the lz this time taking an increased volume of enemy gunfire as aviators pointed out to mccarly another large contingent of nva moving toward the lz now it appeared that the nva brass realized that bee company had hit the 559th transportations base camp and taken all of its maps reports records and money and had directed masses of enemy troops towards b company quote they told me they could see hundreds of them coming for us said mccarly the second marine corps ch-53 picked up the remaining wounded men and several other members of b company and lifted off the lz successfully drawing more enemy fire than the first heavy lift helicopter scarface then led the third ch-50 so we got two helicopters have come in we’ve gotten most of the wounded on the first one the a bunch of guys leave on the second one that’s all successful and now we go scarface led the third ch-53 into the lz taking even more enemy fire than the two previous choppers had encountered however for mccarly rose first sergeant morris adair and the remaining men of b company the drama wasn’t over ch 53 sea stallion pilot don first lieutenant don persky and his co-pilot first lieutenant bill batty or beatty were concerned about the amount of rounds hitting the heavy lift chopper i like the way they explained that yeah i’m a little i’m a little concerned i’m concerned about this quote on our final approach we took heavy enemy fire persky said we knew that this was the last element on the ground that we had to get them out sergeant first sergeant or sf sergeant mike hagen said quote i can tell you that big bird was a welcome sight to us we were all beat we were all wounded and we were all ready to go home believe me end quote b company commander captain gene mccarley hagen medic sergeant rose and first sergeant morris adair held a tight defensive perimeter with a few mountain yards as others beat a hasty but orderly path into the large marine warbird as dozens of nva soldiers surged out of the cs gas clouds towards the lz macaulay was on the radio with covey he said you have to get out of there now this is so this is a mccarly saying that covey said you have to get out of there now there’s hundreds and hundreds of them coming after you now now that’s what mccarly’s getting told you have to get out of there now and i don’t know how many are left on the ground but it’s probably what 15 or 20 or something like that yeah because they had the worst wounded yeah in the second bird they got a lot of the indige out as mccarly spoke into the prc25 handset a mountain yard team member standing between mcarley and the radio operator was killed by enemy gunfire as he fired his weapon at them he got shot in the heads mccarley said there was blood all over the place another yard looked at him turned to me with a sad look and simply said he’s dead a1 skyraider pilot tom stump vividly remembers those long moments before the men of b company boarded ch-53 quote it was a wild scene down there as we provided close cover to the team on the ground air force f-4s attacked anti-aircraft guns that the nva had moved into the area they meaning the nva had really had really wanted them they were masked to get them they wanted to get back what the team had taken from the base camp covey riders told us that nva 12 7 millimeter and 37 millimeter anti-aircraft weapons were opening up on us meanwhile the scarface cobra gunships reacted to enemy gunfire on their aircraft while gene directed us to enemy troops moving toward them keep in mind we knew all the sf men were wounded and low on ammo there was a moment in time when i couldn’t see how we’d get them out it was that intense coming out of the gas fumes not everyone was low on ammo as he was severely wounded in the foot hand and arm on day one rose had tightly wrapped a torn jungle boot and bleeding foot with an ace bandage to keep it shut and had used his car 15 more as a cane to support his weight than as a weapon because he was so busy treating and tending to more than 60 wounded men his left hand had suffered a shrapnel wound also which he quickly wrapped before returning to caring for the wounded team now as he a dare hay and hagdon or hagen moved up the ramp the semi mobile medic opened fire on the rapidly approaching nva after they placed their dead mountain yard soldier on the helicopter mccarly was the last man to leave the lz quote as we were backing up the ramp they were coming toward us they were coming at us hard he said i’m guessing the sea ass gas had them confused because they were getting close to us as me mike and morris stood but none of them threw a grenade into the chopper i never understood why they didn’t they were that close and they kept coming even as we lifted off from the lz while mowing down nva soldiers so they go through all that and it looks like we’re gonna be in a pretty good spot possibly but it ain’t over till it’s over indeed as the ch-53 lifted off from the lz pilot persky said he and co-pilot bat batty what do you think that’s bad of your baby patty batty could feel enemy rounds continuing to hit the aircraft adair mccarly and rose had just sat down next to sergeant first class bernie bright when someone tapped rose on the shoulder and pointed to the left door gunner marine sergeant stevens who was bleeding profusely from a gunshot wound in the neck rose said quote he got hit in the neck there was blood everywhere i was coated in blood by then from him another wounded he was very lucky the round had missed the carotid artery and trachea yet he was going into shock i rolled him over got him on all fours and remember telling him listen you lucky son of a if you’re gonna die you’d be dead by now after that he started to bounce back sometimes as a medic you ha sometimes as a medic you have to be harsh with people to break them out of shock then i found something to wrap around his neck to get the bleeding to stop as rose struggled with steven’s bleeding neck injury neither realized that the marine door gunner’s helmet helmet’s open microphone was live so explain this a little bit when you’re on a aircraft the people in the aircraft have what they call interior communications which is basically a you know if you’re the pilot you can talk to the co-pilot and then you can both talk to the air crew and everyone’s got these little helmets on with microphones and the crews in the back and they can’t see each other so they have to have verbal cards right and if you i know it looks like in a movie everyone’s talking in an aircraft in a helicopter you can’t hear anything in a helicopter you have to scream directly into someone’s ear to hear someone especially in a ch-53 those things are freaking loud and so the air crew has these headsets with these microphones that are built a special way so that they don’t pick up the they don’t pick up the external noise they just pick up the voice well when you key that handset you’re transmitting you’re you’re filling up that interior communications network with whatever noise you’re putting into it and so i’ll go back to the book here communications were almost impossible as he was on a hop mic a hot mic is when you’re keying up your microphone when you shouldn’t be and all i could hear was gasping and gurgling said persky who is having a potentially deadly loss of power issue with the severely damaged ch-53c stallion as the heavily laden helicopter lifted off from the lz and went from a hover mode into a transitional lift where the helicopter begins to gain both altitude and speed engine failure emergency lights and warning systems screamed alerts of a pending engine failure within seconds one engine died persky had only one remaining engine to continue lifting away from the hordes of nva gathering on and around the lz shooting at the sea stallion and at least one anti-aircraft weapon that was firing at the struggling sikorsky in addition he and baddie had another challenge on their horizon how to avoid the mountains that they were approaching with only one engine that ridgeline was sheer granite persky said by now in the back of the chopper rose had pulled off steven’s helmet giving persky and batty improved communications between them and other air assets as the granite mountain loomed larger by the second quote we were worried as we had to use extra energy from the last engine to get over that ridgeline persky said after narrowly getting over it a second granite ridgeline came into view it it too had to be flown over now the big war board warbird was struggling quote there were hydraulic fluids and blood everywhere inside the helicopter rose said and the tail was lower than it should be we could tell something was wrong really wrong we just didn’t know how wrong can you imagine no no no it’s uh it’s it’s total mayhem and then you have these pilots that are getting shot at the their their aircraft’s filled up with a bunch of wounded guys they’re taking rounds they can feel the rounds hitting and they still have to fly this thing and now they got to fly it under conditions that they’ve never flown under before which is having one engine and damaged controls and not being able to communicate with each other this is just mayhem back to the book seconds after barely getting over the second ridgeline the second ch-53d turboshaft engine failed at that moment quote i can remember first lieutenant persky’s exact words to this day said mccarly he said mayday may day we’ve lost all hydraulics were going down i looked out of the back and all i saw were the granite cliffs they loomed large to this day i don’t know how we missed them end quote rose echoed the same sentiment quote all i saw were that those were those huge granite cliffs with no engines i fully expected to crash and burn at any moment end quote persky hollered into the radio one more time we’ve lost our second engine we’re going down the fate of the 2 23 628 pound 88 foot long helicopter designed to carry 38 combat troops but now loaded with 40 plus combat troops and weapons including all the intelligence papers maps foot locker and north vietnamese currency sees from the nva’s base camp hinged on persky’s piloting skills and the six 72 foot long rotors that were keeping the 15 foot wide helicopter aloft biting into the air descending at a rapid rate but at a rate better than dropping from the sky like a dead quail after he got out a second mayday alert persky said he was hoping a pilot or covey pilot would say something after a second engine went out there was nowhere to go all we could see was jungle and granite ridgelines quote i really expected someone covey scarface the spads or army cobras to say hey go left go right something but the radio was dead silent for persky and batty the silence was deafening now descending in full auto rotation with both engines dead persky began following jungle covered canyons i followed one gap he said then i followed a second gap it led to a ravine my biggest concern at that moment was being able to find a place just to auto rotate into marine corps door gunner larry grow who was in the first ch 53 that pulled out many of the wounded men from b company earlier said quote at that time no one had ever done a full auto rotation with a fully loaded ch-53 with no power swanson watched the large war bird descend into a canyon quote it was like a depression he headed towards it was trailing smoke it was ugly real ugly i worried that it might explode in mid-air or worse get hit by one of the or worse hit one of those granite mountains or the jungle from my seat up in the old trusty skyraider i couldn’t see any lz or any area that was open or large enough for those marines to land that bird without crashing by now i had heard that they were auto rotating with a chopper full of troops it didn’t look good so auto rotating yeah so basically when a when a helicopter if a helicopter loses power you know if an airplane loses power you can glide somewhat you’re not going to gain altitude i mean i guess you you could technically if you’re getting a if you get an updraft or current or whatever but you’re generally going to come down when a helicopter loses all of its power what the what the pilot has to do is let the blades the rotor blades of the helicopter keep spinning as fast as they can while you’re falling and then basically when you get close to the ground you slam those things into the position it tilts those rotors so they grab as much air as possible in the moment before you hit the ground and you hope that it absorbs enough energy that you don’t all die echo you look puzzled does that make sense not really i think there’s a lot about a helicopter i don’t know about i think because you’re like it seems like a helicopter loses power the the the propellers just stop but there’s momentum so just pictures keeps the blades going all right like descending and the air hits them and keeps them they have their angles that make them spin yeah with the engine so it slows down but it’s better than like he said just falling out of the sky right like those you know remember those windmills he used to buy when you’re a kid and you you you seen him saying you know the wind yeah okay if you went into a room with no wind and you just spun that thing yeah it would it would spin a little bit but yeah as you move it yes so that’s got those things spinning and remember yeah yeah and you know that the blades can tilt you control the tilt of the blades you can make them kind of flat or you can make them like at a bigger angle so they’re grabbing more air so what you do is you kind of make them flat so they’re not getting much resistance but they’re spinning and this is just like i’m never talking about version gotcha yeah this is how i simplify stuff with the rocks up in my head and then when you get close to the ground you slam that thing so it grabs a bunch of air right before you hit and it slows you down a little bit that’s the plan yeah that’s the plan and in history no one had ever done this before with a c with a ch 53 okay filled with troops because as you can imagine you’re adding thousands of pounds to it with all these troops in there so no one’s ever done this before so we’ll just say that the odds were stacked against us at this point it ain’t looking good okay okay gotcha continuing on and then divine intervention persky and batty saw a body of water with a little patch of beach it was just blind luck we didn’t know what was there or we didn’t know what was there or god was with us persky said with the blood hydraulic fluid and aviation fuel leaking and pooling in the passenger compartment persky headed in that direction at first he thought about landing in the water to buffer some of the impact of the landing then i remembered persky said we had wounded in the back i didn’t want to take the chance of anyone drowning so he headed the wounded chopper toward what appeared to be a sandy beach next to the water even though it was slanted to the right all this happened in a matter of seconds we were going down at about six thousand feet a minute at that point we needed high airspeed to use the energy to keep the rotors going so the auto rotation factor would keep the aircraft moving forward instead of dropping from the sky the plan was to flare a procedure where the rotor’s angle pitch is changed to slow down the rate of descent and minimize the severity of impact upon landing on terra firma so i was right yeah the rocks worked the rocks worked dave burke’s got nothing on me good deal quote i started to flare thinking we had enough time to decrease our speed more i pulled the collective hard i had it pulled up to my armpit end quote in a helicopter the collective lever is on the left side of the pilot’s seat and it changes the pitch angle on the helicopter’s main rotors in this case persky was decreasing the sea stallion speed hoping to minimize the final impact of landing in full full auto rotation persky added it didn’t slow our air speed as much as i had hoped it would it was supposed to cushion us it didn’t what’s more that beach had a huge boulder on it that slanted to the right the helicopter violently landed on the angled slope hitting the slope surface and instantly slamming to the right into the ground ejecting several of the green berets and their mountain yard tribesmen team members while six rotors shattered upon impact with the ground bee company commanding officer captain gene mccarley was violently slammed into the roof of the helicopter before being ejected from it i remember hitting the roof of the helicopter i remember hitting so hard i felt my teeth crumble into sand the next thing i knew i was outside on a rock we were all dazed amazed we were still alive rose said quote when you pancake in like we did on a helicopter and when it hits violently upside down everybody had their bell wrong trust me we were all hurting gene was bleeding from the mouth but he could move i remember getting thrown out of the bl throating thrown out and the blades were upside down i was bleary-eyed still not getting all my senses back and for a moment i thought the chopper was coming toward me end quote mccarley said quote mike was standing beside us i was wiping the blood and my crushed teeth from my mouth then mike said we’ve got people in there we have to get them out i could smell the aviation fuel there was blood everywhere there was hydraulic fluids the helicopter was broken by the severity of the crash and it was smoking how it didn’t explode i’ll never know how that young marine pilot landed albeit a hard landing i’ll never know end quote then mccarley had one of those unique inexplic inexplicable moments in wartime in the middle of all the rubble the smoke the dazed confusion at the crash site he looked to his right and observed first sergeant morris adair standing in the water with a smile on his face holding his car 15 in the middle of the jungle that scene was unreal beyond description mccarley said of all the times that i’ve been in laos i’d never seen a scene like this a body of water a nice white sandy beach it looked just like hawaii and there’s a dare standing in the water as though there wasn’t a care in the world adair says to this day i can’t explain explain exactly what happened that day i came out on my own but i’ve been trying to figure out how ever since when i came to my senses i was standing in water gene told me later i was standing there smiling can’t tell you why i was smiling maybe i was just happy to still be alive after getting my bell wrong we were batted around like bbs in that chopper when it crashed at the time i didn’t realize how much damage had been done to my nerves on my left side of my body my head neck shoulder arms and hip the brief reverie ended when rose and mcarley headed back into the smoking helicopter because it ain’t over yet because they got guys in there and it’s get fuel leaking everywhere burning but what do they do they go help rose helped to carry out sf lieutenant pete landon who had only been in country one week when operation tailwind launched welcome to sag mccarly said landon the platoon leader had a bad gash on his head that rose had to tend to as there was a lot of blood flowing from the head wound mccarley gathered the intelligence materials b company had collected that was the first thing i did recover the intel documents maps currency that we had seized from the nva base camp no way we were going back to contour without them after setting up a hasty perimeter at the rear of the broken sikorsky helicopter mccarly returned to help sergeant first class bernie bright get untangled from the wires and debris inside the aircraft then they exited the helicopter to strengthen the perimeter around the back side of it in the pilot’s compartment persky unstrapped baddie who had pulled a bad back compression stemming from the crash i kind of pulled bill from the helicopter he was mobile but still stunned when persky set batty down on the ground in front of the helicopter he didn’t see any sf men on that side of the bird my infantry tactics kicked in we circled the wagon set up a rough perimeter he said persky said in the back of the helicopter rose mccarley and mike hagen helped the stunned troops exit the helicopter quote before i’d let any of the injured get off the helicopter i draped their weapons or any weapon near them around their neck so that when they set up in the perimeter they’d be able to defend themselves said rose by this point in time we were strictly working on adrenaline he added so even those guys these guys have been through all this freaking mayhem yeah and they still go back and rescue their guys and then they’re still thinking tactically about how to get through this yeah mike rose is on top his game for that whole thing just amazing continuing on once again time was working against the men on the ground i forget how long it took from the time we crashed until i received radio contact from either lieutenant colonel sexton or covey said mccarley they told him that the backup helicopters fuel levels were getting low and that when he came into the lz we’d only have five minutes or less to get the hell out or we might not have enough aviation fuel to make it back after dodging russian assisted nva attack aircraft weapons including russian manufactured akkak weapons that exploded in mid-air in the fashion of anti-aircraft weapons in world war ii and hundreds of enemy ground forces firing automatic weapons and rapid rocket-propelled grenades at them pilots in the first scarface cobras that led the rescue helicopter toward the lz were surprised to receive no enemy ground fire the heavy lift marine sea stallion followed closely behind the scarface gunships due to the heavy enemy ground fire throughout operation tailwind to provide extra defensive firepower for the big helicopter captain h capola what do you think coppola captain h coppola was on the rear ramp with an m60 machine gun in addition to right door gunner sergeant t mcbride on the left door gunner sergeant t wennicki and crew chief sergeant smith even though we had our bell rung when that chase ship backup helicopter landed we didn’t waste any time getting aboard it said mike rose i remember hagen gene first sergeant helping me helping people up the ramp marine pilot persky knew that he had bitten through his lip upon the crash impact but he didn’t realize how severely damaged it was until he moved up the ramp of the ch-53 and one of the door gunners pointed out that his lower lip was merely hanging on by a thin piece of skin quote he told me that i better hold on to my lip or i’d lose it i do remember they changed my call sign afterwards to lip as the sea stallion lifted off with the wounded and extremely fatigued men of bee company rose made another surprising discovery maggots had helped to treat the two most seriously wounded team members who had been carried since day since the command post was struck by an rpg round during day one when that rpg hit rose had suffered serious wounds in two places mccarly in several places and two indige team members had been seriously incapacitated the one thing i never thought about or planned for said rose was for the use of maggots which in the end proved to be the most likely lifesaver for the two most critically wounded team members during those four days on the ground rose and the monyard medic trainee koch were kept busy caring for them giving them extra fluid morphine shots and ivs but during those days quote flies laid their eggs in the wounds of the most seriously injured and a few other yards and the eggs hatched according to the doctors at the evacuation hospital the maggots got to the necrotic flesh before infection could set in and in fact did a better job of debriding the wounds than a surgeon could do who would have thought of it we we covered a book where that happened with the prisoner war camps in um in in um world war ii yep they would act that the medics would actually utilize maggots they would get them to plant uh their their their maggots there get the flies to plant their seeds there so to eat away the dying skin crazy oh yeah the ch-53 returned to dak ii to refuel while the a-1 pilots swanson and stump destroyed the crashed ch-53 the rescue sea stallion then returned b company to the lz outside the top secret sog compound in khan tomb an s2 officer approached mccarly and took his rucksack which contained the enemy currency and some of the intelligence documents collected from the nva command post in laos i never saw that rucksack again nor the nva currency again mccarley lamented he continued regardless the mission was dubbed a success by the folks in saigon and at sog headquarters we were told that thanks to our efforts the cia’s operation was able to regain control of the strong point atop the plateau 10 days after we were extracted on the final helicopter we had tied down an estimated regiment of nva and pathet lao forces while destroying one major enemy ammo dump and an enemy base camp after we removed the enemy documents and maps a subsequent dod report confirmed mccarley’s final analysis that operation tailwind was sogg’s deepest penetration into laos during the eight year secret war the final count three mountain yards were killed in action 33 were listed as wounded in action a total of 33 purple hearts were awarded to the 16 green berets who served in operation tailwind for wounds they reserved during the four day wounds they received during the four day mission mccarley required nine months of dental repair and surgery due to crashing crushing his teeth when the ch-53 crashed two days after the green berets returned to ccc completed their reports and got patched up by special forces medics on base a huge party was held in contour base with food soda and alcohol for all the participants in operation tailwind including the aviators from the hmh 5463 unit scarface cobra gunship crews army cobra gunship crews and some air force covey pilots somehow the word did not get delivered to the a1 spad pilots and ground crews from the danang base 47 years later swanson mused quote it’s just as good that we didn’t get the word because we were busy supporting other sog and sar missions you know just another day in the prairie fire area of operations for our skyraiders end quote to this day rose can’t touch the thumb on his left hand with his little finger due to the serious nerve and muscle damage he received when wounded on day one on day one yeah so all that medical treatment he provided with no thumb in action for more than two years his wife pulled pus coated shrapnel and bamboo shards from his body stemming from the many times he was hit with shrapnel while on the ground a dare still suffers from nerve damage to his neck left shoulder and arm from operation tailwind but what’s crazy is no green beret is killed in action that’s that’s amazing to recall oh yeah that’s just a it’s an incredible i mean it’s a beyond incredible operation it is so successful in so many levels and the uh the fact that the hordes were coming by day four they finally reacted when they reacted it was enough to take the pressure off the cia operation so they were missing accomplished with the bonuses of hitting the command center and then the other cache where they blew up with tons of rice weapons trucks etc yeah the the fireworks went on for quite a while and wipe out a base camp in his spare time yeah oh amazing and the i mean just the the the mission focus mccarly just to get you look we get shot at while we’re while we’re on insert yeah yep we’re still going we get contacted we’re still going we get wounded we’re still going we get more wounded we’re still going we find an enemy base camp are we gonna are we gonna back away no we’re gonna attack it yeah we’re gonna keep going he’s relentless totally relentless classic example of a guy learned from the ao applied in the field and do it at such a level no always changing direction so the nba wouldn’t be sure where they’re going and moving at night at night you guys didn’t move much at night normally recon we never did a couple guys may have gotten away with that but not us no when we were night we we hunkered down and they had good enough weather that they could uh click in with you know spectre shadow stinger um and uh it made a difference and we may have downplayed it because gene everybody couldn’t even remember how many gunships they went through at night but every night they went through they used some yeah seals moved at night during vietnam that was that was like one of the things that they did that was like outside the box you know was they that’s what that’s one of the things that they did was they moved at night i don’t know how they did it but they did it yeah um now you kind of you kind of referred to this earlier um these guys do this beyond heroic operation of course no one ever hears about it because it’s sog and you you guys all signed a 20-year uh you know oath of silence on this stuff and all the air crews were told before they went in everybody you know of course they won uh skyraider people they there’s an sop with them but there’s a lot of new troops coming in with the helicopter crews the cobra gunships even though they you know scarface had been doing uh the fence missions for a long time they were all briefs when we’re done here you don’t talk about it yeah and and we kind of breezed through it but also uh you heard mccarly say that i think it was mccarly say that because it was so secretive these a lot of these pilots they didn’t get any recognition at all i mean you’re freaking flying a helicopter into an lz where there’s massive machine gun fire to extract guys i mean that’s just insane bravery right and you know again the beauty of talking to people after you write the book when i talked to tom stump and gene on that one point when they were together we had a a reunion a a tailwind reunion a few years ago in tennessee and there gene mccarley said had you not done that we would have been done right then and because they were really up against the wave attacks by that point and they’re lowering ammo and tom stump he said you literally saved our ass right there and he came through the clouds somehow these a1 piles and tom stump those guys how they get through the clouds to get down to be critical mass danger close and to save their ass i mean and they’re just wonderful we just love them that’s why we feel like the skyraider pilots were saints yeah the the seals had a relationship like like that with the uh with the sea wolves the the navy helicopter pilots and we’ve had a couple of sea wolves on here and and uh freaking badass same thing say they were going like if they got the call they were going that’s all there was to it scramble to see well it’s all right cool what do you got we’re going to get you out and the sea wolf history is they were kind of like treated like steph curry oh for sure they had to go out scrounge stuff for a short time and yet when it came time those guys flew and they were good yeah they’re another legend yeah absolutely man freaking heroic oh yes so these guys do this heroic operation and you mentioned this earlier and i’m going to go to the book 28 years after one of the most successful operations run in the 1970 run in 1970 during the eight-year secret war operation tailwind cnn that’s the cable news network broadcast a disgraceful erroneous story that stained the reputation of the men who participated in that mission portraying them as war criminals instead of reporting the facts of the successful mission cnn accused the green berets and airmen of gassing american pows held captive in laos with deadly sarin gas cnn used that error-laden net work of fiction in an effort to compete with cbs’s popular 60-minute program when it launched a new program on june 7 1998 called newsstand the title of the bogus slanderous story entitled valley of death it alleged that 16 green berets and 120 indige troops from operation tailwind had destroyed a village and killed innocent women and children while directing u s aircraft to drop lethal sarin nerve gas on u s war defectors they said were pows of the communists to compound the egregious attack against america’s finest soldiers and airmen the next day time magazine repeated the hideous allegations in the news story written by cnn staff members headlined did the u s drop nerve gas it was written by cnn producer al april oliver and cnn international correspondent peter arnett who produced the cnn story that aired june 7th the broadcast and time article smeared the men of operation tailwind which was conducted during the eight-year secret war in laos during the vietnam war and run under the ages of military assistance command vietnam studies and obsturation group or simply sag there was an additional political ramification stemming from the cnn time magazine report in 1998 at a july 21 1998 press conference repudiating the cnn time report then secretary of defense william cohen said quote the charge would be used to discredit the united states attempt to curb the proliferation peripheral nation of weapons of mass destruction in fact iraq immediately incorporated cnn’s charges into its anti-use anti-us propaganda effort to try and deflect attention from its own outlawed chemical and biological weapons programs end quote cohen ordered a full-scale across-the-board investigation of the cnn time story from all military branches involved in operation tailwind while requesting at the same time from the cia and the joint chiefs of staffs of course these guys found up you know reported what had really happened and then there’s some retractions and some apologies secretary cohen said i think all americans should know that the 16 men who conducted this mission were heroes but that that they had been have been hurt by this report i can assure you that you and your colleagues and your families you did nothing wrong and he’s obviously he’s addressing the the men quite to the contrary you did everything right 16 americans fought steadily for four days all of them were injured all got out alive the documents that they captured provided intelligence bonanza general abrams the commander of our troops in vietnam said tailwind was a valuable operation executed with great skill and tremendous courage cohen told reporters that after rigorous review of thousands of pages of document statements and after action reports the military ordinance and weapon storage records quote we found no evidence to support cnn time assertions we have found absolutely no evidence to support these charges cnn and time retracted their reports noting that they could not support either charge on july 2nd 1998 in a cnn retraction cnn news group chairman president and ceo tom johnson said an independent investigation concluded that the report cannot be supported there was insufficient evidence that sarin or any other deadly gas was used and cnn could not confirm that american defectors were targeted at the camp as newsstand reported we apologize to our viewers and to our colleagues at time for this mistake cnn owes a special apology to the personnel involved in operation tailwind both the soldiers on the ground and the u s air force pilots and u s marine corps helicopter pilots who were involved in the action on july 13th time magazine printed an apology to its readers headlined tailwind and apology they noted that the allegations reported on june 7 8 1998 could not quote be supported by the evidence end quote in july 14 1998 ted turner wrote a letter to mccarly quote i hope you’ll accept my personal apology for the cnn newsstand’s recent erroneous reporting on operation tailwind this entire episode has been very painful for me as the founder of cnn however my greatest distress comes from knowing that our coverage upset those on the front line of operation tailwind the soldiers on the ground and the u s air force and marine corps pilots engaged in the accident end quote mccarley said in a 2015 interview quote i personally spoke to ted turner and he reiterated that he wrote what he wrote in the letter he also told me he was going to call the other members of our team and write them a letters of apology to my best to the best of my knowledge that did not happen end quote larry grow a marine corps helicopter door gunner who survived operation tailwind added i felt really betrayed by cnn for allowing those reporters to publish all those lies and twisting the statements from those who were interviewed cnn showed me how the news media can twist a story to fit its needs and have never really trusted any of the other media 100 in their reporting since then interviewed in 2016 retired air force lieutenant colonel mel swanson who is the commanding officer of the daring a1 skyraider pilots remained brutally bitter about cnn’s false story quote operation tailwind was the classic example of inter-service cooperation in that area of operations think about it america’s finest the green berets and their loyal troops kicked ass and took numbers on the ground deep in enemy territory the tactical air support from the air force fast movers c-130 gunships our beloved ah a1h spads in combination with marine corps scarface cobra gunships armory army cobras and marine corps dimmers raised hell in the enemy’s backyard we killed hundreds of these commie bastards and thanks to the that green beret medic all were kept alive until the final extraction when one mountain yard soldier was killed until 1998 i occasionally watched the communist news network but after they ruined our reputations i never watched it again it was a crime against our warriors what they did it was a travesty of justice amen yeah i mean obviously right now we’re living in a you know this is 1998 and and the media is even more um uh partisan and they take stories all the time and run with these stories and and a lot of times it’s it happens so much that it’s we forget what it does to the actual people that are victims of the stories these false stories that come out and so you know you get a situation like this these guys and you know you know i was thinking about you know uh uh mike rose who who had to make that decision out in the jungle that he’s gonna leave you know his his his indige troops out there that were dead he’s leaving the bodies and he’s tore up over that for for his whole life since then oh absolutely and then you get a story like this comes out it’s um yeah it’s a travesty and they knew it was coming so i mean they knew there was a story coming but they didn’t know it’s going to have that negative edge to it and the distorted inaccuracies so some of these guys lined up their fountains sit down in front of the tv mike hagen and and mike rose were two others that come to mind right away because they had their families hey we’re going to be on cnn tonight and then halfway through the broadcast when that true tone comes out and the founder looks out like you were criminals and and then mike had to explain to his daughter yeah mike rose and he was just devastated and he had to sit there and try to explain it and these kids see things on tv tv is never wrong and look at dad with a little bit of cross eyed but horrible impact on a personal level nobody ever hears about um you you you alluded to this earlier because the secrecy of sog and what you guys were doing there’s a bunch of reasons because the secrecy of sog because the number of guys that were uh doing turnover so you’ve got guys coming in and leaving and then the number of guys that are wounded the number of guys that are killed the number of guys that are missing there’s a lot of sog operators that as as we mentioned earlier never met the pilots that were supporting them and so you’d get these guys they’d never see them yeah um but then and you again you alluded this to this earlier in 2016 going to the book the first operation tailwind reunion was held at the tennessee museum of aviation bringing together for the first time in more than 45 years some of the men from all of the aviation units and some of the special forces soldiers from that unique mission featuring b company commander gene mccarley the commanding officer of the a1 skyraiders mel swanson and the pilots who flew marine corps cobra gunships from scarface the ch-53 pilots and a few forward air controllers with tears in his eyes swanson said i hope this is the first of more reunions like it to see how grateful the men of saug were for our support during those hairy prairie fire missions touches me through and through as well as the other pilots here today we always wondered who those crazy [ __ ] on the ground were and now thanks to the reunions and this reunion we get to meet them and i can’t tell you how much this means to me on a personal level as a as the commander who sent our a1 pilots into harm’s way every day to learn how much they appreciated us in the ao it’s gratifying beyond words scarface pilot barry pensic am i saying that right panchik pensic pencey scarface pilot barry pencic told the audience that when the marines went across the fence into laos quote they made us change our call sign for some reason they called them mission 72 when we went across the fence whenever we ran a mission 72 for some reason they had us take off our dog tags leave our wallet at home so you couldn’t be identified as if you go down in an american made helicopter and you’re a white round right guy round eye in an asian country and no one’s gonna know you’re american i never understood the logic of that then in a in a closing note pen pencil turned to the audience and apologized to the ladies in advance for contaminating the spoken word with profanities to summarize the time he spent during that operation i can’t think of another way to say this he said apologetically for example if someone is really good he’s a hot [ __ ] if something was good it was [ __ ] hot if you get into a bad situation it was a [ __ ] sandwich don persky mentioned the sandwich we got into earlier if you had your act together you had your [ __ ] together and i would like to say that i was honored to have a week or so to spend with all these people here and a bunch of others and that they were a bunch of hot [ __ ] guys on a [ __ ] hot mission and then we got into a [ __ ] sandwich but we had our [ __ ] together in the end no [ __ ] airborne is that a great line or that is a great line that is a great line um so you know one one thing i want to mention um is that mike rose in on october 23rd 2017 received the the medal of honor oh yeah um at the white house at the white house for president trump and it shows you that you know even though it wasn’t known about at the time the heroism of these guys was just well that’s the highest honor that this person can be can receive so salute to those guys and and man what a mission now i’m going to jump ahead and look we’re we’re not covering all of sod chronicles by the way that was one mission to cover in this volume one assad chronicles um but one of the things that i when i started reading i read a quote that said you know as of june 13 2017 there were still 50 green berets listed as mia in laos alone along with at least 105 aviators who died supporting sog missions they are among the total of approximately 260 av aviators missing missing in laos as of this printing now there’s a uh there’s a story in here and i don’t i don’t want to go through the whole thing um because people should get the book and read through it but on a high level because it ties into the the um you know this the mias that are still out there can you tell us a little bit about rt intruder and and and what happened on that on that operation oh sure um they went into the target and um made enemy contact and uh they had to get pulled out on strings so the first helicopter came in pulled out the first half of the team rt intruder the second helicopter came in again with strings to pull them out and they had two americans three americans are on on the strings and maybe one in the ditch i forget about the endanger and as they’re lifting off one of the ropes got tangled in the trees and sami hernandez fell to the ground was knocked on conscious so he’s unconscious helicopter continues up gets hammered turns around spins out of control and then crashed into a granite wall or to a mountain killing the entire air crew everybody on the ropes so the next day uh the bright light goes in and maybe a day or two days later the bright light goes in they get to the crash site and they’re able to recover all the bodies sammy hernandez during the night woke up played hide-and-go-seek with the nva he found a uh found a cave or some kind of area where he could get out of the way and before he went into the cave he his shoulder was dislocated so he pounded his shoulder back into place on a tree then he hid for the night in the morning at first light covey came by and he had his panel and they were able to extract him out they came in with a bright light got all the bodies put them into body bags moved them to a location i forget they got to the top of the mountain or not but cliff newman was on that mission and they went in put together all the bodies but it was too dark they couldn’t come in and get them out that night the plan was in the morning they’ll come in early well in the morning before any aircraft could get there any air cover the nba hit that team hard and bottom line they couldn’t get the bodies out they literally left them there um 35 40 years later cliff newman goes back in an effort to work with our what’s now dpaa department pow mia accounting agency and it was the predecessor but cliff went in tried to find it the cooperation with the um indigenous people forget with the laotians or the vietnamese they put them in too far away from the mountain they so cliff went back four or five years ago again the second time and again they’re too far away so cliff is waiting for the third call to go back and uh try to help him and this is the dedication of cliff and uh sammy hernandez is still alive and of course cliff newman was and sammy were on the first team that did the first halo jump in the layoffs well that’s one of the other reasons why i don’t want to go too much deep detail right now because hopefully we get them on here to tell the story oh he’ll come back yeah you know when you you think about that you know i just was looking through um some of this information uh americans unaccounted for in southeast asia right now um total of 1580 and post january 1973 they’ve repatriated 1059 from vietnam china laos and cambodia so we still have work to do there to get these guys back home yeah and even on that missionary um the morning that they went in to get to be to pull the recon team out after the recon teams hit we had a cubby that went in and got shot down and they lost all of everybody’s killed and they um they couldn’t get them out right away but eventually i think it now would be maybe 10 years ago they got the pilot out they recovered his body and um so today yeah the 1508 remaining mias in southeast asia which includes vietnam laos cambodia and china and there were a few up there um piles mostly i assume and uh september 18th will be the pod national pow mia recognition day when uh there will be events held across the country and of course you have the iconic plwma flag that that’s now been authorized by president trump to be flown all federal buildings throughout the year now every day trying to keep attention focused at that level anything that we can do to help out on that stuff um well there’s a lot of issues attached to it but the most important thing is to keep keep people writing their congressman and say please keep the efforts going forward on this for the for the americans for southeast asia because what’s working against us in addition mother nature again is the most acidic soil in the world eventually eats up bones and maybe teeth and so um who knows how much longer the remains will be and you know for my case like spider pat watkins lynn black the mias the people we knew who are our teammates that are now part of that and we still hope to someday at least get the remains back someday maybe not i think there’s going to have to be somebody somewhere it’s going to say we have to end it but until they do um the what’s really amazing the young teams that they get out there from dpa they’re dedicated these kids go out their army marine corps they usually take a medic an sf medic with them now and these kids are dedicated they really do a great job we’d like to see a little bit more coming from mid management at dpaa in terms of the commitment it really pushed this thing keep it in the public’s eye and and that president trump’s been supportive of it and um that’s all we can do we’re at the uh we’re at the mercy of uh time here and the efforts yeah i know i know they would send guys i know guys in the seal teams friends of mine that would go to vietnam to support those operations oh yeah it’s it’s like there’s no inter-service ride over here for all americans no matter what service and there’s been teams that have gone in for over 40 years now you know i forget the exact date but if uh i think it’s june you know they they always stop to talk about the aircraft that was a jpeg aircraft loaded with people going for a mission that crashed and we lost several americans as well as indigenous people working with us on that so it’s a deadly mission it’s been a long battle and do you have the a the national pow mia family league of families national league of pow mia families have been fighting this war the effort to bring home identify bring home the remains of many americans we can and did they were the first people in any war we fought that demanded that the enemy treat our prisoners better during the vietnam war and then they had another name i forget what it was but then they initially became eventually became the national league of power m i a families the director ceo is ann mills griffith she and her father started when her brother went down in september of 66 as a navy backseater in f4 and uh that family’s been involved ever since and she had been involved when the league was formally found in 1970 50 years of this effort dedicated to non-profit and they’re down and she fights our government she knows is respected by all the our prior enemies laos cambodia north vietnam they all know her they know the league and they work with dia very closely and who do we look up where do we go to try and give them support uh the national league of pow mia families if um just google and it pops right up and mills griffis is the director ceo just amazing tough strong relentless woman she’s been through three husbands and but the admission never stops she just continues to go seven days a week she works on this stuff it’s just an amazing story well salute to her and obviously um a salute to all these all these all these that lost all these intermission in action and man these stories are unbelievable well i know you and i have some plans of trying to get as many of these things captured as we can um i know you’re traveling and you you might start you know might get some training from uh echo charles and how to press record on one of these things absolutely and get these things you know everyone wants to hear as much of these stories as we can so hopefully we can get that going we’ve we left some space on these last couple podcasts if if if blackjack wants to come on if uh yeah if sammy wants to come on the the it’s always open the door is always open here this is the this is the most friendly ao that sog has ever known right here in this podcast space again the trouble is like with you and your your fellow seals it’s these guys are so damn humble i mean even i had to pull quotes out of them yeah and work at it but i will i promise i’ll go back to cliff and those guys and sammy he’s just an amazing guy he lives down in texas and just goes on to live he came back and did his time in the service a career soldier um just a remarkable man and we got one king bee pilot we were working we got targeted yeah indeed we’re talking to captain on and he hasn’t responded yet okay but when he responds well i hope we can get him in because uh he’s in both the books yep yeah and uh so and his stories are well every king be part any of that is still alive and you know uh sadly in june i attended the funeral for captain tuang who saved my ass on our team bacon so many times i couldn’t even count that many particularly on christmas day of all man yeah those guys um yeah i was i was reading through one of these where these guys were just uh was that captain tuang who would go in but or was it captain ahn who went on by himself by himself hey it’s too dangerous co-pilot get out air crew get out yeah i’m going by myself to go and rescue these guys so we’re getting overnight yeah getting overrun yeah what that’s just freaking awesome and heroic so hopefully it’d be an honor to have him on here and talk to him and uh hear hear about his life story so we will do that and and those king bee polls well even our americans i mean these young kids that were flying these helicopters so fearlessly and amazingly i mean they how did they get ice cubes in their blood would be so calm and cool because that wouldn’t be me if i’m up there i’d be [ __ ] my pants let’s get the [ __ ] out of here and they’re just sitting like okay anytime you want to go guys we’re ready yeah and you know how the cyclic is you just touch those little controls and that helicopter is going to crash and burn yeah like an airplane i was going to mention when i said uh one of the when i said you know first lieutenant so-and-so was found this thing i i was i should have mentioned hey by the way what that means this guy is 23 yeah you know this guy is not an old experienced pilot with thousands of flight hours he’s 23 but like you said he might not have time but he’s got ice in his blood to sit there and hold station with a freaking helicopter while you’re taking diska 12 7 millimeter rounds into the side of your aircraft yeah and like like with the lynn black story the judging executioner all year they came to our rescue time and time again and then with lynn they came in front of the team and mowed down a wave attack by the nva they couldn’t land took off and can’t continue to fight you know you you you talk with such reverence for all the other service branches and it’s the same you know when when we were in the battle ramadi there was just no rivalry whatsoever no i’ve never had and i didn’t really have some big rivalry going into it i never really cared i always thought we were on the same team but some people some people take that stuff pretty seriously but man on the ground in the battle of ramadi it was just brothers and and across the board and sisters as well because there’s females there fighting and females that were killed in action and and but just nothing but reverence for the soldiers the sailors the airmen marines that we work with salute to all of them and and certainly i know you feel the same way absolutely as you talk um but hey once again thanks for coming back we got to get the sog cast going we will do it uh maybe i’ll take the post-graduate record course on how to record i’m telling you all right go echo might be able to take it um thanks for coming on and and more important thanks for everything you did to protect our way of life here and and thanks for what you continue to do to support veterans here talking about the mia’s what you’ve done with your veteran organizations it’s awesome and um it’s just an honor to know you and it’s honored to call you a brother likewise brother thank you appreciate it thanks man like a bad dream we’ll be back and with that tilt has left the building unbelievable opportunity to sit here and talk to these guys and learn these stories so many stories you know after we after we turned off the mics i started getting kind of crazy talking to tilt i was saying hey when you’re talking about 600 hand grenades getting thrown yeah each one of those hand grenades that gets thrown by the enemy into your position is a whole story there’s a whole story behind it yeah hey grenade all right where the ground from i got him over there start putting down fire i’m like that’s a whole story each one oh god jimmy’s wounded each one of these events 600 yeah grenades each one of those events is a is a micro story yeah each one of these hey in in two lines in this book that we just read in two lines it’s like um hey there was enemy bunkers who were cleared by the mountain yards yeah wait wait a second that’s a freaking chapter or two chapters or three chapters or a whole book in itself clearing up enemy bunker filled with the car or with nva fighters what’s happening what are we talking about so to be able to sit here and talk to these guys and and and tilt wasn’t on that particular mission but he has you know he has first hand experience in the ao he lived through it and it’s just awesome so appreciate the opportunity to do this and and one of the reasons we have the opportunity this is because you all give us support support sure as we like to call it echo somebody wants to support this podcast here and while they’re supporting this podcast they actually want to provide themselves with some support yep is it close air support not really but it could be considered on some level it is well let’s just say this it might not be close air support but it is definitely support it is support for sure and for you know for oneself you know to support others you do have to support yourself right like i said i said it before i’ll say it again it’s like you know when you’re in the airplane and the oxygen mask comes down what do they instruct you to do put on yourself then you help your small infant child whatever the case might be so kind of same situation all right so we’re all working out we’re keeping ourselves on the path on the path isn’t just such an esoteric thing by the way it’s keeping your [ __ ] together damn i like it it is 100 in every way you can by the way mental physical uh social social meaning like just your relationships with people in and outside your family anyway you understand you’re gonna know if you’re doing something off the path versus something on the path you’re gonna know pretty clear so anyway so when working out we could benefit from supplementation we could use some air support some air some level of support yes there you go support is way better than no support yes it is 100 so jocko has you covered we have you covered we all have our cells covered as well jackal fuel supplementation for your joints important very important okay so i’m i’m i’m not one of these guys who have these crazy joint problems but from time to time i’ll get jammed up you know the kind when you wake up you walk downstairs if you walk downstairs too quick you’re like you can feel it you see i’m saying you don’t know what i’m talking about you don’t feel that that’s what you’re saying i certainly don’t admit it i thought we were all friends here you know but i will say and the point to this quasi story is that when you think back to those times when you’re like all stiff or whatever just general stiffness and now you don’t have it it’s like it’s it’s a godsend is what it is you don’t miss those days we don’t want to feel it if you don’t have to yeah and it’s it’s not a big deal when you forget it when you don’t realize it you see i’m saying but anyway i realize it a lot so that’s why it is important to keep taking your joint warfare and krill oil those are for your joints discipline discipline go this is the brain body supplement keep you mentally in the game keep you sharp you have a groggy day boom helps you out that’s what that is um also rtd cans it’s like an energy drink in the form of uh you know i got well it’s like an energy drink is something that you drink that makes you feel good for 45 minutes until you crash and burn and you have a freaking insulin level spike yeah and you feel like crap yes because it’s filled with sugar and a bunch of chemicals what’s going on here no sugar no sugar well how does it taste good because it’s sweetened with something else called monk fruit which is actually good for you does it have 700 milligrams of caffeine no it’s got 95 milligrams of caffeine yes good for you yep get that little afternoon hater yes so to sum it up i guess it’s a brain health drink in the form of an energy drink loosely we’ll say it loosely we haven’t figured out what exactly we’ve made it’s a new category potentially yeah okay it’s good nonetheless got some good flavors on there good uh some flavors coming up oh as well so excited about their newfoundland i’m not saying it’s my new flavor i’m not saying it’s not my new flavor i’m just saying we have some various flavors coming up anyway yes that’s discipline and discipline go there’s also the the capsules you know if you’re in a in a rush or what have you yeah there’s that also vitamin d3 and cold war this is for immunity so keeping your immune system is keeping it up keeping it strong that’s important definitely as opposed to unemployment especially right now yes well i i guess i don’t want to get into a whole debate but i think that immune system is important at all times okay that’s what i think i’m going with it all right i’m very curious also what do we got milk jocko milk protein in the form of dessert all different kinds of desserts in the form of protein yeah you know what i’m saying yes i do yeah yeah same deal we’ve got some new flavors coming out and i’ll tell you what bro i’ll tell you what we got some flavors coming out oh for real yes oh okay yes and they are legit okay legit you want to know what one of them is yeah smashing pumpkin all right it’s like uh i didn’t even know what this was yes yeah i didn’t even know what this was i didn’t know it was a thing yeah belittle sends it to me he goes he goes dude you gotta try this and i’m like send it yeah it sends it out and i wasn’t even i didn’t even know i liked this flavor yeah smashing pumpkins yeah but um well smashing pumpkins is a band yeah yeah okay you already knew that your fan you’re smashing absolutely yeah me too actually anyway that’s a ban pumpkin spice the flavor is like a thing like a yeah and i didn’t know that yeah and that makes sense because i mean i knew of it but just in the past like few years or whatever it’s been getting a lot of like teasing and stuff like pumpkin spice i don’t you know okay i don’t know anything about that i know yeah i have to pull this flavor down because it’s weak no i think like since it’s been in the uh what do you call like spotlight or whatever and people will be like oh i don’t know it’s like they’ve been teasing it for some reason like you’re some prep you can tease pumpkin spice but trust me you’re not gonna tease smashing pumpkin well here’s the by the way you also said smashing pumpkins that’s plural that’s a band that’s not the name yes smashing pumpkin we’re going singular yeah yeah i dig it because you know we won’t want to infringe no no no you don’t know you don’t want to infringe um but no the pumpkin spice so that’s the thing where it’s almost like part of the reason or part of the whole teasing culture of it for lack of a better way of putting it um was that everyone likes pumpkin spice but you know like it’s like if you’re like tough you don’t want to like admit it like everybody pumpkin spice is freaking delicious in your cafe latte or whatever like whatever it’s always everyone knows that you know that’s like kind of the thing that’s why i’m going to be honest i’m a little bit excited for pumpkin spice for smashing pumpkin we’re not doing pumpkin spice we’re doing smashing pumpkin because i’m starting to see the connection here that you’re making and i don’t think i like it so we’re doing something called smashing pumpkin yeah and it tastes good but it’s filled with protein that will make you strong turn you into a destroyer there you go yeah we got mold we got it going out there yeah protein forming dessert also what do we got chocolate white tea can you can you are you into dead lifts doesn’t even matter because once you should be you sh that’s true too it’s highly recommended yeah to deadlift and if you’re going to deadlift you might as well deadlift 8 000 pounds and one of the quickest ways to do everyone’s looking for a hack i got a hack for you you don’t want to worry about what your periodization is going to be for your dead lifting well that’s kind of a pain well what you do is you drink chocolate white tea and you’re dead lifting eight thousand pounds by the way guaranteed yeah and if you can’t well that’s kind of on you really and but i mean and that is good i kind of painted myself into a corner i had no way out you saved me i appreciate it hey man well hey look if you’re not into deadlifting and i get it i’m not gonna you can’t judge um well you can’t a little bit you know i overtly can’t overtly judge about that um it is certified organic and it’s very nice all right so you get all this stuff at origen maine com you can also get it at the vitamin shop and pretty soon you’re going to be able to get the rtd drink the jocko discipline go drink at well you’re going to be able to get it at wawa in florida and virginia very soon so be on the lookout for that we’re gonna have a little we’re gonna have a little operation go get some yeah it’s gonna be good also at origin maine com they got some good jiu jitsu stuff american-made jiu-jitsu where do you just throw the word good out there like it’s not good yeah when actually it’s the premier jiu-jitsu stuff in the world yeah yeah i guess it’s like one of those things little understatement yeah don’t worry i’m here i got your back i got your six covered move thank you anyway they got jeans as well good genes i say good as opposed to not good okay like what are they not as good as in the best things you can put on your legs ever yes in the history of america pretty much jeans boots t-shirts hoodies what else i think we covered it anyways a bunch of good stuff and it’s all made in america shorts that’s right shark fin yeah they got some good stuff on how about this go origin main com look at everything they got over there all american made and you might be thinking like well you know that sounds good you know i i could use some stuff for that stuff or the other thing but you know i you know i like to do things that are beneficial to the world you don’t want to just consume right right well guess what go to origin main you get some of that gear you are contributing to the world you are bringing manufacturing back to america we’ve got a bunch of hard working american people up there making it happen and when you support the cause you are doing good for humanity that’s true that might seem like a big step it is it’s true yeah yeah yeah and it’s interesting we talked about this before you don’t care that much about it how well the fit of the jeans are delta 68 and the factory factory jeans yes anyway yes or domain com also jocko has a store it’s called jocko store and this is where you can get your apparel as it were if you want to represent while you’re on the path as we say so you know discipline equals freedom t-shirts hats do you know what bonafides are yes i do you taught me yeah yeah so there’s a good bona fides yeah you’re just out in the wild and maybe you want to you know if you run into someone else that’s kind of on the path maybe a trooper but you don’t want to walk around hey hey how’s it going hey are you in the game it’s like no no no just put the flag on man you know put the flag on put the deathcore flag on yeah and someone and you you know what you’re not going to get bothered but somebody will give you a look your little head nod yep like what’s up yup maybe a little maybe a little yeah what do you call a little heart hitter yeah yeah oh yeah but yes that’s where you can get it jackal storytellerstore com com we got some board shorts on there summer we’re wrapping up summer are we wrapping up well i mean no we are definitely wrapping up summer yeah but you know i know some of us operate more on a hawaiian type schedule so summer might be kind of past but some people may still be wanting some board shorts if they’re actually in hawaii well how about this the board shorts because that we currently have they’re multi-purpose board shorts you can swim with them surf with them do jiu jitsu in them or just wear them wherever they’re going while you’re podcasting like i’m doing right now yeah that’s good that’s your new uniform right there but yes they did make they do make the cut yeah they’re good but yeah a lot of good stuff on there uh yeah if you want if you like something get some don’t forget about that warrior kids soap from iris oaks ranch you can get it on our on on jacquasstore com but it’s a kid a warrior kid with a company who’s making soap because his vision to help humanity is to help people of the world stay clean also for the month of september irish oaks ranch is donating one dollar per bar of soap to cancer research sure so yeah this can uh cancer awareness month so boom that’s what we’re doing uh subscribe to this podcast check out some of the other podcasts that we have jocko unraveling which used to be called the thread but we changed the name so jocko unraveling soon to be on its own feed we have grounded which we really haven’t recorded in a long time we need to get that done and warrior kid also not recorded in a long time but you can listen to those podcasts you can subscribe to those podcasts and this one we also have a youtube channel i i think the main value of the youtube channel and this is me being kind of serious is for those of us who like to watch the podcast two reasons one to watch the podcast as it goes on like if you have a flat screen or you know one of these smart tvs in your office or your gym or whatever you want to play it boom you want some visual uh what do you call it like association you can see what john strucker looks like sure yeah oh yeah there’s that for sure but you know when you have it playing in the background it seems like you’re more in the conversation anyway it’s for that and also the excerpts we have on there so you know like you can get little little as you and theophone would call them little or big hitters were you trying to get me to say hitters no i i wanted you didn’t you understand what i’m saying anyway that in my opinion that’s advice so yeah subscribe to that also psychological warfare is an album with tracks jocko tracks of jocko helping you get past your moments of weakness if they come if they come let’s face it they come they come oh yeah for sure and yes this will help you so yeah you can get on amazon or wherever you get mp3s from all good yep flipsidecanvas com my brother dakota meyer’s company and yeah guess what guess what if you want a little visual representation to kind of keep you on track check out flipsidecanvas com and get something to hang on your wall graphic representation of the path also got some books obviously these books here by john striker meyer across the fence on the ground sog chronicles also don’t forget about whiskey tango foxtrot by black jack lin black we got the code the evaluation the protocols we got leadership strategy and tactics field manual we got way of warrior kid one two and three we got mikey and the dragons we got this one equals freedom field manual and by the way there’s a new version of that coming out extended versions be advised a little bit some additional information for your knowledge and also extreme ownership and the dichotomy of leadership also have a consulting company called echelon front where we teach leadership principles and we solve problems through leadership we also have ef online ef online if you have a question that you want to ask me you sure you could send it into the into the interwebs facebook twitter twitter the gram you could try and ask me questions look sometimes i get to them or you can come onto efonline com and come to a live webinar where i am sitting there in front of my computer answering questions go to efonline com come and hang out basically come and hang out we have something called the muster where you come and physically hang out and learn about leadership we’ve had to cancel a few of them because of the covid virus but we we have one coming in dallas texas december 3rd and 4th go to extremeownership com if you want to come to that we have ef overwatch where we take people from the military that have the understanding of the principles that we talk about and we place those people into the civilian sector into companies in the leadership position go to efoverwatch com if you’re a company that needs leaders we have america’s mightywarriors org mama lee mark lee’s mom her mission since she lost mark since we lost mark has been to help service members around the world in all kinds of different aspects if you want to get on board and you want to help out go to america’s mightywarriors org and you can donate or you can get involved and if you want to hear more from us you can contact us if you have questions if you have answers if you can fill in the blanks of some of the blanks that we get to you can find us on the interwebs for tilt for john striker meyer he’s on twitter at sog john instagram is at j striker meyer and facebook is at john striker meyer on the interwebs he’s got sogchronicles com and if you’re looking for either one of us two knuckleheads echo is that echo charles and i am at jocko willink and thanks to tilt of course for coming back on to share the stories of sog the sog chronicles and more important thanks to tilt and all his brothers in arms for their service and their sacrifice especially those who are still missing in action we will not forget and we thank you and all of our military for keeping us free and to the police and law enforcement and firefighters and paramedics and emts and dispatchers and correctional officers and border patrol secret service all other first responders out there holding the line thank you for your service and sacrifice to keep us safe here at home and to everyone else out there don’t go around thinking that you’re hot [ __ ] and that your [ __ ] doesn’t stink because you’re bullshitting yourself and if you do think that you are the then things will likely [ __ ] the bed and then they’ll go to [ __ ] and you’ll end up in a [ __ ] sandwich and likely [ __ ] a brick when you realize that you’re up shit’s creek without a paddle and that right there is some deep [ __ ] so instead focus on getting your [ __ ] together and then keeping your [ __ ] in line and look we all have a [ __ ] ton of work to do and not just chicken [ __ ] either but the real [ __ ] that can make us tougher than [ __ ] and that is no [ __ ] sherlock so until next time this is echo and jocko out
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