Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
In a world where storytelling has been our link to the past since the days of cave drawings, there exists a timeless tradition. It's the art of passing down knowledge, and for Military Veterans, it's a crucial piece of their legacy. Join us on the Veterans Archives Podcast, where we dive deep into the heartwarming and awe-inspiring stories of those who served, no matter when or where.
Here, Veterans get the chance to be the authors of their own narratives. Through guided interviews in a relaxed and safe environment, they paint their experiences with their own words and unique voices. The result? A memory card in a presentation box, a precious gift they can share however they please.
But that's not all. These stories find a secure home in our archive, a treasure chest of experiences for future generations to explore. The best part? It's all a gift to the Veteran – our way of saying thank you for their service.
Tune in to the Veterans Archives Podcast, where history, heroism, and heartwarming tales come to life.
Veterans Archives is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Please visit our website for more information. www.veteransarchives.org
Veterans Archives: Preserving the Stories of our Nations Heroes
Life's Trials and Triumphs The Inspirational Tale of Dave Dunkel
From carefree childhood adventures in a bustling Catholic neighborhood to the rigorous halls of Navy submarine training, Dave Dunkel's life is a captivating symphony of resilience and legacy. In our latest episode, we sit down with Dave, a Lansing native, who takes us on a nostalgic journey through time. With vivid tales of kickball games and neighborhood camaraderie contrasted by the stern but loving discipline of a working-class upbringing, Dave paints an evocative picture of a time gone by. We explore the delightful chaos of large families, and the contrasting worlds of pop culture influences and conservative parental views that shaped his youth.
Dave's story unfolds further as he shares the rich tapestry of his family's military history, stretching back to the Dunkels' roots in 1500s France. Through tales of bravery and perseverance, Dave honors the legacy of his father, a World War II veteran, and recounts his own transformative experiences as a submariner. With candor and heartfelt honesty, he opens up about the emotional challenges faced during military service, including the impact of personal loss and the psychological trials endured by veterans. Through powerful narratives, Dave invites us to reflect on the resilience needed to navigate life's hardships and the enduring bonds formed through shared service.
In the poignant final arc, we delve into the intricate dynamics of family, love, and legacy. From a touching tale of wartime romance to navigating the complexities of post-combat trauma, Dave offers insights into the challenges and triumphs that have shaped his journey. With a focus on growth and community, he urges us to consider the impact we leave behind, not just for our families but for future generations. Join us for this deeply moving episode as we celebrate the spirit of perseverance, the strength of familial bonds, and the quest for personal growth amidst life's trials.
Good morning. Today is Monday, october 21st 2024, and we're here talking with Dave Dunkel, who served in the United States Navy and the Michigan Army National Guard. So welcome, Dave. Oh, thank you, Good to be here and, for full disclosure, Dave and I served together for a while in the National Guards. We've known each other for a few years. But here's some things I don't know about you, like when and where were you born. But here's some things I don't know about you, Like when and where were you born?
Speaker 2:So I'm a Lansing boy. I was born in. August of 1957 on the east side of town, a big Catholic neighborhood nearby Resurrection School and Church.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about. Actually Born at Sparrow Hospital.
Speaker 2:I certainly. Well, it was. St Lawrence is where I was born. Oh, okay, my mother worked there. All right, good Catholic neighborhood, good Catholic my middle name is Lawrence, and my mother named each one of her boys after a saint, and their middle name was also after a saint, and she looked out the window at St Lawrence Hospital when I was born. That's how I ended up Lawrence was named after the hospital.
Speaker 1:That's pretty cool. It's still standing. Ended up, Lawrence was named after the hospital. That's pretty cool. It's still standing today too, so it's a testament, right? Well, so let's talk about your childhood a little bit. What was it like growing up?
Speaker 2:Dave Dunkel on the east side of Lansing. As I mentioned earlier, it was a predominantly Catholic neighborhood so there were lots of kids. I mean the, the family that lived right across the street from me had nine children, and the kitty corner from that was another family that had six children and then four children and and five children in our family, so there was somebody from every age group to hang around a lot of kickball on the street playing football. Uh, most of us boys we spent our summer days playing army. You were either german or uh american. Since I had a last name of dunkel.
Speaker 2:I usually ended up as the german soldaten and, uh, we'd run up and down you know, back then it was the uh, backyards. We just run from backyard to backyard hopping people's fences. I mean, you get shot nowadays if you do that. That's true, we're a little marauding band of children, but you know it was a safe place. Classic lower middle class upbringing. Didn't realize that we were kind of poor because we had everything we wanted.
Speaker 1:Right, right. Well, and it sounds like if you didn't have it, you just sort of improvised right. You played with your friends, you did stuff Exactly, you didn't need stuff.
Speaker 2:It sounds cliche, but it was literally from the time the sun come up in the morning till the streetlights come on at night, we were outside running around somewhere and that was because our parents told us to, and every single house was our home. So you might eat lunch with the Mapes one day and have dinner with the Ellsworths the next day, and, depending on where you ended up in your daily, playtime is where you'd end up being disciplined, where you ended up eating, because it would be nothing for another parent to grab you by the scruff of your neck and shake you up if you needed it. It was a different world back then, yeah, it was, it was.
Speaker 1:Now this has nothing to do with the story, but you just said you had lunch with the maips. Yep, okay, true story. My sister and I used to hang out with the maips was probably the younger maips kids when I was in high school and we would sit at their house and I hope nobody gets upset we'd sit at their house and my sister friends would smoke as much pot as they could and then we listened to Richard Pryor records. So I didn't want to get us off track, man. But you said the mapes is and I'm like, oh, this whole memory thing came back for me sitting down.
Speaker 2:The basement listens albums yep, cheech and Chong Richard Pryor yeah yeah, I hid that album from my parents. My, you know, my father was a bit old-fashioned especially and uh, I can remember we had a victrola in the living room. You know that had a record, uh cabinet on each side and and my sister's coming home and playing uh chubby checker music or the beatles music and my dad lecturing him that that would ruin the needle on that on that uh uh, record player that you can't play that kind of music, Cause that needle was not that kind of needle.
Speaker 2:We need to get a different needle for those.
Speaker 2:He probably believed it too, it wasn't like he was lying, he really probably believed that, and I had a red Fox 45 single from one of his bits in a and that that first album that uh uh richard pryor put out and that was a? Uh contraband in our house because he said the f word and the n word and everything else he could think of um and red fox, who is blue but not quite as bad, uh, by today's standards, I mean to my father, that was like that was the limit right there right now was that the richard pryor album that had the thing about the polar bear with the little tiny feets it could be, oh my gosh that was some funny funny
Speaker 1:stuff, but I digress so. So you're growing up in this neighborhood. Now I'm like I know exactly where you're talking about and, um, tell me a little bit about your mom. You mentioned that you know she looked out the window and your middle name became lawrence, but what do you really remember about your mom and what are some of your best memories about her?
Speaker 2:yeah, my mother was a nurse and a lot different from my father. She was educated where my father wasn't. I think my father went to high school but but never graduated. Uh, came from a farming community, basically, uh, until the depression, and they ended up living in the city. But my mother was an east coast kid and so she was, uh, her, her values and her morals were formed by the depression.
Speaker 2:Uh, her father was an iron worker, my grandfather grace. He was born in 1890, so he was older when he had his children. He was a world war one veteran and, uh, he was an iron worker out in philadelphia and worked primarily in new york city. Building like the Verrazano Narrows Bridge it's still there now and he was a high, uh, high altitude iron worker. And, uh, uh, they went from having a house in Chester, pennsylvania, to running a duplex during the Depression, to renting a quadplex to where they ended up in New Jersey, in Jersey City, in a tenement, and my mother told stories about how kids would walk down the railroad tracks during the daytime, find pieces of coal to help heat the tenement.
Speaker 2:There was 16 different families in this building. They used one bathroom and she had one sibling, my Uncle Joe and she lost him in World War II. He was a prisoner of war of the Japanese and did not survive and that's a whole other story there. That's very interesting. But my mother was grateful for everything she had. She was very nonviolent. She graduated from nursing school and back then in the early forties it was a resident school. So she went off for two years and then was immediately wasn't really drafted.
Speaker 2:They were asked to become Army nurse cadets, which is what she did. As soon as she graduated she put an Army uniform on as a cadet, but by that time it was 44, so she never got deployed anywhere. She just worked at Philadelphia Naval Hospital for a while and the thing I remember most about her is her nonviolence, is her tolerance. She was a lifelong Democrat, a delegate to the Hubert Humphrey Convention back in the 60s, and always wanted, always taught me some valuable lessons about looking through someone to try to understand who they really are. Don't look at what. It doesn't matter what they look like or what color they are, it's you got to be able to look in somebody's eyes and that'll tell you everything about who that person is. And uh, I still use that lesson to this day.
Speaker 2:But yeah, it was great mother, she the most violent I ever seen. My mom was. She threw a deck of cards at me once when I swore and it was she took a deck of unbound cards and threw them at me, so it was 52 pickup after that. That was the most violent. I might've been hit by one of the cards. I don't remember.
Speaker 1:You probably deserved it too. I certainly did deserve it, so so what about your father then? It's interesting that, as we go through this very short period of time, there's a military history that runs pretty deep in your family.
Speaker 2:Yeah, as far back as any male can remember male can remember, uh, and we are our. The dunkel family actually emigrated from, uh, the alsace lorraine region of france. They were displaced germans, they were huguenots, and they were displaced back in the 1500s, uh, and they emigrated to the mohawk valley in new york in the 1600s, mid 1600s, and then the first dunkels ended up in michigan, especially in New York, in the 1600s, mid-1600s, and then the first Dunkels ended up in Michigan, especially in this area, in the Lansing area, back in the 1820s.
Speaker 2:One of my grandfathers was a prisoner of war of the British. That's how they ended up in Michigan. He was captured in New York by the British. He was a patriot and was sent to a prisoner of war camp that was in Canada, in British-controlled territory, and when he was released from that prisoner of war camp he emigrated to Michigan with two of his sons and that was the first dunkle that showed up out in that area back in the 1820s, but long before we were a state this in that area back in the 1820s, but long before we were a state right, um, my father, uh, he passed away in in 2019 at 87. Uh, he was a rough guy.
Speaker 2:He was a world war ii veteran probably one of the only people you'd ever meet that fought the japanese, the germans and the italians during the war. He was a world war ii veteran, probably one of the only people you'd ever meet that fought the japanese, the germans and the italians during the war. He was a gunner on a merchant marine different merchant marine ships and the navy had a program they called the naval armed guard where they would supply gunners, mates, to these merchant marine ships so they could do those terribly dangerous northern runs uh mermansk runs up to russia, go through the canal and and take fuel and and uh ammunition and supplies out into the pacific. And he did it all, uh and uh. Uh was just a hard worker. You know, my mother was a nurse and she worked the afternoon shift at St Lawrence, so she worked from 3.30 in the afternoon to 11.30 at night.
Speaker 2:My father would go to work at about 4.30 in the morning and he was a laundry delivery guy. That's what he did for 35 years. He had a route sales and he worked for a company called Model Coverall that supplied technician uniforms to gas station attendants, you know with the name on the yeah, back when they used to actually service you.
Speaker 1:right, exactly.
Speaker 2:And throw rugs, shop towels, that kind of thing. So he would pick up the dirties and go have them cleaned and then bring them back and he had a regular route where he would drop these uniforms off. He did it for 35 years but, like I say, my mother worked from 3 30 in the afternoon to 11 30 at night. Every day my dad would get up to work 4 30 in the morning, get home just in time to take my mother to work because she didn't drive, so he would drive my mother to work because she didn't drive, so he would drive my mother to St Lawrence hospital, come back home, supervise my sisters while they helped cook dinner Uh, all of us would cook dinner, all of us did the housework.
Speaker 2:He would stay up till 1130. When mom got out of work he'd go pick her up and then, two or three nights a week, they would stop at Amos on the East side to have a beer and a slice of pizza, which was the only alone time that they probably ever had. Get home 12, 1230, go right to sleep and get up 430. He did that for 35 years and I can never remember him calling in sick. He had a work ethic that was also formulated, I think, during the depression, when his father went from. His father was literally a city garbage man by the time he lost what he had during the depression.
Speaker 2:He ended up going to work for the city of Lansing emptying garbage cans and did that till he retired. And my dad and my twin brother to help support support the family got parted out to different farms in the area and they were just from the time he was 12 or 13 years old. That's how they spent their time was as quasi-indentured servants for different farmers to help the family make ends meet. When I say he was a rough guy, he would smack the shit out of us boys and nine times out of ten we deserved it. Uh, nowadays that kind of behavior is frowned upon, and for good reason. Uh, it didn't teach me a lot about how to discipline my own children.
Speaker 2:Uh, so he, he had a bit of a quick temper, but was not abusive by any stretch of the imagination. I mean, he busted his ass for his kids. That's why he worked as hard as he did and he could like say we didn't know, we were poor. We had a camper, we had a pop-up camper and every single weekend that the weather permitted we were going somewhere. Uh, every year dad got two or three weeks of vacation and we would pile in the car. We, in 1966, we drove all the way to california to go to disneyland. We went to florida two or three times.
Speaker 2:We went to maine uh so great memories growing up of being able to see the country, uh, usually from the back seat of a station wagon with no seat belt on exactly, uh, standing up in the back seat, me and my little brother and my sisters, um and uh, at christmas the presents would be, you know, from the tree out into the middle of the living room for the five kids that were in the house. Uh, and we, like I said, we had no idea we were poor. But when, when my father passed away, he probably had three thousand dollars in the bank, you know, to show for his whole life work. But that was fine, you know, that was, that was all he ever needed right.
Speaker 1:Well, and I mean there's it's. It's interesting because you say you don't know that you were poor poor by the standards of money, but rich by the standards of you know you're in a family that loves you, you have brothers and sisters. You guys are doing all kinds of cool stuff as kids you know. So I can see where you would say we didn't. We didn't know, we didn't have money because we were doing stuff. We were together and I get the feeling, as you're talking with your mother and your father both regardless of whether your mom threw a deck of cards at you or whether your dad beat your ass once in a while you knew that they cared about you.
Speaker 2:Oh, yeah, definitely about you?
Speaker 2:oh, yeah, definitely. Uh, you know, it came to fruition where I really, my mother, lost one of her sons right before I was born and, uh, his name is tommy and he had died of crib death at about six months old and it really took a toll on my mother. And then I was the replacement model. I came like nine months after he passed away and my father would remind me of that once in a while that if Tommy had lived, I probably wouldn't be here. So I need to check myself. And Thomas had blonde hair and I didn't and I don't think he did that to be intentionally mean, but that was just a fact of the matter that I was that replacement child. So I was always judged by Tommy would have never done that. I know for a fact. Even though he only lived six months, I had big shoes to fill by the time I was born. But I ended up having to tell my mother that her, her youngest son, had passed when he was 39. My little brother passed away at 39 and they were living. They were retired and living in Texas and I had to break that news to her on the telephone for them to come up to Michigan and I watched that destroy her. Uh, for all intents and purposes, she was never the same again. And uh, uh, and, and, and, for all intents and purposes, she was never the same again. And to watch my.
Speaker 2:My mother ended up with a relatively early onset Alzheimer's, just like both of her parents did. They all lived to be in their late 80s, but the last 10 years of their lives was not pleasant. By the time my mother passed she could barely recognize any of us. We'd continually tell the same three stories over and over. One was about her cat being missing. One was about the Campbell's Soup Company heir that helped out her family during the Depression because the Campbell's Soup Company heir lives somewhere in that Jersey neighborhood and my father getting wounded in World War II. Those were the three stories that she always told, and one after another, and uh, uh, and I watched my father just stand by her side.
Speaker 2:They were married 64 years when, when she passed away and she was she got like a lot of people that have that Alzheimer's.
Speaker 2:She got angry and she got violent and she got physical with my father and he would just nod his head and say it's okay, catherine, it's okay.
Speaker 2:And he was a primary caregiver, went to a nursing home with her, uh, until she passed, and then, as soon as she passed, he moved back out of that nursing home and got his own apartment. And I learned a lot in my later years about what dedication and love to another person really means just by watching how my father stood by her side we were both in the hospital with her when she did pass and, uh, him struggling to tell her to it's okay, honey, let go, let go, because she was suffering, and then telling her to hang on, hang on in the same breath, cause he didn't want to lose her. It uh showed me a level of dedication that you just don't see much nowadays. Right, we're all divorced, we're all you know. Half the kids I know have a couple sets of parents and you know I was blessed I count my blessings now to this day about having that stable household and dedicated parents that were dedicated to each other.
Speaker 1:Well, I want to back way, way up, because it's been on the in the back of my mind. Your parents have an amazing story all unto themselves. How'd they meet, like what? How did they come together? Because she's in jersey and he's in michigan? What?
Speaker 2:I gotta know. My father and his twin brother joined the navy in 1943 and he was 17 years old, just turned him and his twin brother uh, that's how my father ended up being named ronald. My father didn't have a birth certificate, he was born at home, so there were plenty of people that didn't have birth certificates back then. Right, he was born in the kitchen and uh uh. So when he joined the navy he joined with his twin brother.
Speaker 2:My father's name was Roland and his twin brother was named Donald. Well, that didn't rhyme right for the Navy, so they just named him Ronald. So on all his enlistment paperwork his name was changed by the Navy from Roland to Ronald because it rhymed with Donald, his twin brother, because it rhymed with Donald, his twin brother. And he ended up going out to Philadelphia as a gunner's mate and he was picking up a Liberty ship and he saw my mother and her girlfriend hanging outside a movie theater. My mother was engaged to some other sailor who was deployed somewhere and I don't know much about him, but apparently it was a whirlwind romance back in the 40s, like so many people had back then, and my father pursued her pretty relentlessly by letter.
Speaker 2:Okay, because he met her that night and asked her if she wanted to go see a Frank Sinatra concert, because Frank Sinatra was playing right across the river in Jersey. And so they went to a Frank Sinatra concert. My dad and his buddy and my mother and her girlfriend and my dad actually my dad's buddy actually wanted to hook up with my mom, but my mother was chased and spoken for, so neither one of them got very lucky. But my dad started this relentless letter campaign while he was deployed, telling her you are going to end up marrying me and you might as well kind of get used to it.
Speaker 2:I have all those letters now and I read them and it's hard to picture my dad as a young teenager in love, so much so that that's how he spent, you could tell, the vast majority of his free time, because there's letters almost every day. There's a stack of maybe 400 letters that I have at home that he wrote her. Wow, uh, and then he was wounded and ended up doing some time in, uh, philadelphia naval hospital and my mother recognized him and, uh, he told her. He says I told you were gonna end up dating me and they they did and had been together ever since then.
Speaker 1:So their dedication started way before they ever got married, and I'm here to tell you that sounds like there's no such thing as a coincidence, right? He's writing these letters and he ends up in the same hospital.
Speaker 2:And you know, I think it's one of those World War II stories that if you start turning over those rocks, there's so many of them out there because the times dictated that people, first of all, there wasn't social media, there wasn't anything like that. There was telephone calls, face-to-face meetings or letters. So the written word was extremely important. But that means people really thought about what they wanted to say and I think they kind of built up that commitment to each other in tough times. You know, my father was deployed in combat zones. My mother had a brother who was missing in action. The war dictated every aspect of their lives. And war is hard, especially a war like that, like World War II. And they talk about the greatest generation and I think they were probably one of the most tested generations. That's what made and they pass the test. I mean that's what made them so great.
Speaker 2:But I think that level of commitment was reflected not only towards each other, but in everything they did, you know, to their parents, to their families, to their country. Commitment was commonplace back then.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Well, and then to jump forward a little bit now. Where were you at in the pecking order of kids? We know that you had a brother named Tommy that you had to live up to that you never met.
Speaker 2:Right, I was the next to the last I had a little baby brother. I was the next to the last I had a little baby brother. There's an old saying that as a middle kid you'll either see all of your siblings die or none of your siblings die. And there's, just out of the six original children there's just me and my sister left my older sister she's five years older than me I lost a big sister, lost my little brother, jimmy, relatively young, when he was 39. And my big brother just passed away in January. And so I was next to the last child and I kind of broke a mold. I was not a good kid. I was recalcitrant and I talked back quite a bit to my parents. I was a good student, really listened to the nuns at school but didn't really listen much to my parents, really listened to the nuns at school but didn't really listen much to my parents and my younger brother. Now they would call him special needs. Back then Everybody called Jimmy slow.
Speaker 1:You know Jimmy was just slow Right, and that's what we used to say.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and it was just the way it was. You know, he didn't read as well as we did, he didn't do as well in school, but they kind of gave him a pass and uh, uh, and I think a lot was expected of me. Uh, the one because my older brother was 10 years older than me, so he was gone by the time I was 10 years old. He was in Vietnam, Vietnam, Uh, and I pictured myself as the man of the of the house. Uh, much to the chagrin of my father, Part of that was the neighborhood I grew up in and there was a distinct pecking order there and it was all about corner, you know, street corner fights and they weren't they weren't serious fights or somebody had a bloody nose.
Speaker 1:The fight was over and you were the winner Right, and you weren't shooting each other, you were just fighting right. Exactly, I got you and uh uh.
Speaker 2:So I had being a smaller kid, I had really gone out of my way to fight just about everybody I could to find my pecking order on that street and and uh I think some of that uh became apparent in the house too and how I would listen to them or not listen to my parents. It wasn't rough, it was. I brought it all on myself.
Speaker 1:It sounds a little bit like prison A little bit you had to be out there proving yourself to whoever I got out at 15.
Speaker 2:I left at 15 years old and my dad I don't remember exactly what it was. It had started with cleaning the garage and me sweeping out the garage, and I'll remember and this probably happened a few days before I ended up leaving. But I didn't do a very good job and I back talked my father and he went for his belt, because that's what he did with us boys especially.
Speaker 2:He knew you were in trouble and he reached for his belt and whipped it off and just started wailing on you with the belt uh and he went for his belt and at this time I was 15 and I stopped him and I told him I said if you hit me, hit me like a man. And I woke up like five minutes later I'd never really been unconscious in my life you like a man didn't he? That's exactly what he did, and then he kind of went downhill between him and I at that point, and you know my father, like I say, he worked on farms, he was 12 years old and he packed my stuff and threw it out in the front yard and said get the hell out of my house.
Speaker 2:If you're going to act like that, get the hell out of my house. And I had $76. And I remember I had $76 because I went downtown to the Greyhound bus station and I laid $75 on the counter and said I would like to see an ocean. Which ocean could I go see? And the guy behind the counter looked at me and said are you running away? And I said nope, I'm not. I earned this money myself, which I did. And he looked on the map and he said well, I can't get you to the Pacific, that's $90. He said these are one-way tickets.
Speaker 2:He says I can get you to the Gulf of Mexico down in Alabama, or I can get you to Providence Sound, massachusetts, which is the farthest eastern point, and I went, I'll take that one. I'll go to Providence South Massachusetts. He got a one-way ticket and headed out to Providence South Massachusetts. At 15 years old had no idea that it was the gay capital of the United States back then this is in the early 70s and it was. It was a huge gay community like san francisco nowadays. But uh, and it was readily apparent, and when I got off the bus in providence town that something was different, because there were, men weren't in kansas anymore exactly where men walking down the street holding hands I remember seeing that and going, and I wasn't repulsed or anything by it, it's just I.
Speaker 2:I was smart enough to know these guys are. Well, they were queer back then.
Speaker 2:They didn't call them gay guys who were queer, I don't think they called them gay and I was like, oh my gosh, everybody here's queer, and uh, all the shop owners and and uh and uh, uh. And so I got a little scared because I was a 15 year old runaway boy showing up in a gay stronghold. I had like $8 to my name and I saw a boarding house that said $5 a night. And I went into the boarding house and it was, of course, this older gay gentleman working in there and he took one look at me and says what are you doing here?
Speaker 1:he knew you weren't one of them he knew I had run away.
Speaker 2:You know, I and I made up some story about how I'm emancipated and I'm off on my own, which is true, but I, I was basically a runaway yeah uh.
Speaker 2:And he said, well, I can get you a room and a meal for five dollars for tonight. And then he went upstairs and it was get you a room and a meal for $5 for tonight. And then he went upstairs and it was a bunkhouse style and there was probably 10, 15 men up there and he told them this is David. If any of you lay a finger on him, you're going to have to deal with me. He's okay, he's going to stay here for a day or two.
Speaker 2:And just took me under his wing and I stayed there for a couple days and then volunteered to work at the local fire department because I saw the guys all sitting out in front of the fire station washing their trucks and I was like I could do that, make a couple bucks. So I approached the fire station. I said I can wash that truck for a couple bucks because I needed food. And that ended up into a month long gig doing their laundry, helping them cook chili, washing their trucks, helping them with their fire gear, cleaning it up after they rolled out and they let that.
Speaker 2:For that I got a bunk in the firehouse and I stayed there most that summer Met a girl, a rich girl from Boston whose parents summered up there on the Cape and fell in love for the first time. Janet Luciano was her name. She was the granddaughter of Lucky Luciano, the gangster.
Speaker 1:Oh boy.
Speaker 2:Yep, that family history was there.
Speaker 1:Yeah, you got to make sure you handle that one right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, well, it didn't matter to me, I was in love.
Speaker 1:Oh, that's true, you're 15. She's beautiful. Who cares?
Speaker 2:You know, I came back home after that summer because I didn't want to drop out of school. I finished my sophomore year Now were you at Catholic Central?
Speaker 1:Nope, now were you at Catholic Central?
Speaker 2:Nope, I went to Eastern oh okay, we all went to Catholic school for grade school. My sisters went to Gabriel's back then, before it was Lansing Catholic. My brother was a graduate of Gabriel's too, but Catholic school had become so expensive by the time us last two boys were going that I ended up going to Pattengill Public School. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I tell you it was a whole different world. You know I had gone to fourth grade in a public school because I was really sick during the third grade, when I was a third grader. It's a long, convoluted story. I ended up getting encephalitis. Okay, and.
Speaker 2:I was hospitalized for probably six months between a home hospital bed and being in the hospital, missed my whole third grade and so they were going to set me back at the Catholic school and the public school down around the corner, allen Street, said, oh, we'll take them in fourth grade. And so I went to that one year of public school and that was a wide awakening. You know, I had gone to an all-white Catholic school and then right around the corner was a really integrated public school and I thought I was a tough kid and I ended up on an ass-kicking conveyor belt, you know, to determine where my ranking was. My dad had told me find the toughest kid. I told him I was scared. He said find the toughest kid in school, go up and punch him in the face, because that's how my dad would have handled it yeah, why?
Speaker 2:not. I asked who the toughest kid in school is. His name was Jesse Espinosa, and I don't know if Jesse Espinosa, if you're still around. This is why I picked that fight with him. So I found Jesse Espinoza because everybody told me he's the toughest kid in school and I went up to him and I I said I'm going to meet you after school on a playground. He said, yeah, you probably don't want to do that. He did everything he could to dissuade me from starting a fight with he was a nice tough guy he was a nice tough guy.
Speaker 2:He was like he couldn't quite figure me out, and so that fight lasted about 10 seconds and I was actually dipping into the girl students before I found out one that I could whip wow, you really.
Speaker 1:You were pretty far down the picking, I was way down on the picking order um, and isn't allen park where the isn't that there's a pool there?
Speaker 2:Allen Street. No, that's.
Speaker 1:Hunter Park. Hunter Park, that's right, hunter Park.
Speaker 2:Basically next door to the school Gotcha which is Allen Street School. One block, one block to the west of that.
Speaker 1:So you make your way through the ass, kicking conveyor belt. I did, you survived. Fourth grade I did.
Speaker 2:I got called an MF-er by a kid and it upset me so bad that I cried on the way home from school. And my father was working on the porch putting up some screen windows and he saw me coming home from school crying. He said what's the matter? I said a kid called me a name. He says what'd he call you? And I said I can't say it. But he said what'd he call you? You can say it. But he said what'd he call you? You can say it. And I said I can't. I can't say this word. He says what did he call you? You can say it. I said he called me a motherfucker and whack. He smacked me in the face.
Speaker 2:I told you I couldn't say that's exactly I was like I said I couldn't say it. I told you not to say it so you don't say that word.
Speaker 2:And uh, that's what he told me. Just go back and find the toughest kid and punch him. And that didn't work out very well, but that was public school for a year, went back to Catholic school for a couple more years and went to public school at Eastern, or I mean in Pat Gill at Eastern After I went out to Massachusetts for that summer when I was 15, I came back just turned 16, enrolled in my junior year but was staying at home occasionally, but most of the time couch surfing with a couple of my buddies. I had a couple of friends that were seniors, that had their own places, all on the east side of town, because I'd never really patch patch things up with uh, my dad and uh.
Speaker 2:I dropped out of school to work and then uh joined the navy. As soon as I turned 17, got parental permission, which was tough, but right, so you made it.
Speaker 1:What to your year then?
Speaker 2:I made it to my junior year. Okay, I am now currently the last official graduate of Lansing Eastern High School.
Speaker 1:Congratulations.
Speaker 2:I am Because two years, three years ago, there's a law in Michigan I can't remember the statute there's a law in Michigan that says if you quit school to join the military during time of war that you can be granted a high school diploma, not a GED which I ended up getting previously, but an actual high school diploma. So Lansing Eastern High School was closing. I put in my application for the Lansing Eastern High School diploma. They invited me down to the school board the Lansing school board meeting. I was in my uniform. They presented me with a high school diploma with the class 75 on it. About 30 of my high school friends showed up for that graduation ceremony.
Speaker 2:That's amazing and the class valedictorian from 1975 gave me her tassel and her hat, and I was the last graduate of lansing eastern high school before they closed yeah and I still have that diploma at home.
Speaker 1:It's one of my prize possessions yeah, that should go on the wall, yeah, you know, I always felt a little.
Speaker 2:You know, I maintained good contact with my high school friends and had attended a couple reunions, but you know I wasn't a graduate so I never really felt like I was part of that class, uh. But yep, still to this day, uh, plenty of them are my friends well, next year you'll have your 50th I will yep you're going to that right oh, we'll do it. On on that, we go to old town to have our reunions. Yeah, plenty of them are my friends. Well, next year you'll have your 50th. I will yep.
Speaker 1:You're going to that, right? Oh, we'll do it on that. We go to Old Town to have our reunion, so we'll do it again. Yep, that'll be awesome. So you dropped out to work.
Speaker 2:I dropped out of school to work. I had an opportunity to get it. I had a job working downtown. I was telephone soliciting actually, but I was making good money Selling fraternal order police, tickets to circuses and things like that. It was all a big scam, I'm pretty sure, and it was all 15, 16-year-old kids that were doing it.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:And I was experimenting with marijuana. I was experimenting with the street drugs that were available back then and they all had different names. You know, they call it mescaline, or they call it thc, or they they call it micro dot. It was all the same stuff I think, strict nine and and uh, uh, they were making the stuff out to mU, oh yeah. Most of it. Yeah, the students were making it.
Speaker 1:I remember Microdot.
Speaker 2:Yup, yup and uh. So I was experimenting with that kind of stuff and and uh, just didn't care, you know, didn't care about school. I considered myself a hippie. Uh, I kind of grew up in that generation where all the older teenagers that they were all hippies back in the 60s.
Speaker 2:Oh yeah, and just knew I was going to. I always knew that I was going to end up joining the Navy, because my brother joined the Navy, my father was in the Navy, my uncles, and it was just something that us boys were expected to do. And so I showed up at home and told my dad I'm going to join the Navy and he said well, your mom's not going to sign. And I begged her to sign. I had to get out of there and she said promise me you won't get a tattoo and I'll sign. And I said I promise you I won't get a tattoo. And that lasted. I don't know.
Speaker 1:Oh yeah yeah, lasted about six months before I got it. Months he's got some tattoos on his arms let's just say that broke her heart.
Speaker 2:So much for that, yeah, I was. I had just turned 17 by a matter of days. I got on the, got on the bus. Back then, when you joined, you went, had your physical and the next day they bust you off to basic training there's no delayed entry program at that point.
Speaker 1:No there wasn't.
Speaker 2:There wasn't that I knew of. Right. And so this is 1974. There were a couple of guys with me that had deferred their draft for a couple of years to finish school, and they were actually draftees that were finally getting enlisted in 74. And off I went to basic training in in great lakes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, great lakes, illinois, north of Chicago, yeah, so what was that like? I kind of judging from your childhood, I don't think basic training was a big shock to you, was it?
Speaker 2:You know, not really I. I really wanted to excel, I wanted to do well. It was a challenge more mentally than physically because I was, you know, I'd been away from home for a while. But you know it was a little rougher back then. It was, you know, stereotypical. They yelled at you when you got off the bus, you know, put your feet on the yellow marks on the grinder.
Speaker 1:Talk bad about your mom, exactly.
Speaker 2:We'd get a smoke break once a day and everybody would run to this one room that they had in the barracks that was made for sitting and smoking. So we all got one cigarette a day back then, totally cut off from the outside world no newspaper, no radio, no cell phones, no, anything like that. And I remember being frightened because I didn't care much for water and I ended up in the Navy just because my father had been there. And when I went to the recruiting office in Lansing it was downtown, torn down now, at a place called Leonard Plaza, and all four services were there the Army, navy, marine Corps.
Speaker 2:And I was going to join the Marines. I was going to show my dad and I walked in the Marine Corps recruiting office. I weighed probably 111 pounds, I think, and there was a marine. Gunny sergeant was feet up on the desk reading a newspaper and I said I want to be a marine. I walked in there and he looked up past his newspaper. He goes no, you don't, he goes. He goes gonna talk to the army guys. He said they're right there on the corner. He took one look at me. I was like yeah, this kid's not marine material. And I was. So I was gonna go to the army, so I'll join the army. And I walked by the navy recruiting poster and the guy wasn't wearing a tie in the navy recruiting poster, he was wearing cracker jacks yeah and I looked at that and said, well shit, they don't wear a tie in the navy, I'll join the navy.
Speaker 2:so that was the extent of the thought that I put in, that I they don't wear a tie in the Navy, I'll join the Navy. So that was the extent of the thought that I put in, that I didn't want to wear a tie, so I'll pick this branch of service.
Speaker 1:Everybody has their reasons, I guess.
Speaker 2:High school dropout, I scored really well on the MET test. They called it back then the military entrance test. That was when APHES was the Armed Forces Induction, was the Armed Forces Induction or the Armed Forces Induction or Education Induction Center or something like that down in Detroit. But yeah, I did well on the test, but they couldn't guarantee me a school, so they just sent me down to Great Lakes as undesignated seaman, they called it.
Speaker 1:Did you stay at the Mariner Hotel when you went to Detroit?
Speaker 2:No, we stayed at the Book Cadillac back then.
Speaker 1:Oh well, lucky you, I stayed at the Mariner Well, it was a dive back then.
Speaker 2:You know it was rough. The bottom floor was the military entrance processing station. The old maps, or at least that's where you did your physicals. I don't know if I can't remember, if I I actually did enlist there, uh, but it was in the old book cadillac motel now, which is a top dollar motel. I was just there this year with my wife yeah, yeah, no cockroaches or prostitutes, right not anymore. Back then it was a little rough yeah, yeah, yeah, I remember.
Speaker 1:So you get to Great Lakes and you're wanting to do great things, basically.
Speaker 2:I was willing to do anything. I really wanted to be a gunner's mate, because my father was a gunner's mate and I volunteered for the submarine service without realizing that I'd volunteered for the submarine service. How'd?
Speaker 1:that happen.
Speaker 2:Week six.
Speaker 2:I think it was week six or week seven of the nine week basic training program. He went to classification and that's where the guys who had a schools would get their orders to go to their a school. Uh, they would find out. You know, you're going to go to san diego, you're going to go to basic electronics first. You're going to go here. This is where you're going to go for your follow-on training after you go home for two weeks. And uh, so I was on designated semen and I went up to a window in the processing center that was just like a bank teller window it had a glass front.
Speaker 2:There was a guy sitting behind the teller window and he had a little uh place that he could slide papers to you underneath the window for you to sign. And he shoved a stack of papers through that window that had about 35 pages on it and he'd flip up the bottom of each page. He goes sign here, sign here. And I was just signing because I was in the navy and if they tell you to do something, you do it that's right and I, so I was getting classified.
Speaker 2:Then I knew I was going to get classified but I had volunteered for every program that the Navy had the Naval Speed Testing Center down in New Orleans, where they strap you to a speed sled.
Speaker 2:I volunteered for that. I volunteered for everything. And I found out I was going to submarines just before I graduated from basic training and they read our orders out to us. It was just like something out of Full Metal Jacket, where they kind of gathered around and said someone's going here, so-and-so's going here, and they went Dunkel, you're going to basic electronics school and then you're going to go to submarine school out in Connecticut.
Speaker 1:Out of Groton, right Out of Groton, Connecticut.
Speaker 2:I've got to ask. Gotta ask, though, that guy that made you sign the papers, did he have a tie on? No, I didn't, you know, it's kind of blacked out. I can't even remember him.
Speaker 2:I remember I recruiter, yeah, I remember my company commander who was the equivalent navy equivalent of a drill sergeant. Uh, he was a e6, uh, petty officer gill, uh, and you know it was those guys that made me a man. It really was. I was 17. I was a boy, I thought I knew everything, but I didn't know shit. And I went out to submarine school with the full intention of failing because I knew it was a tough school. Everybody told me, academically it's really difficult and you know, you're studying nuclear physics and things like that. I was a high school dropout, terrible at math and, uh, physically and mentally it was a pretty demanding school as far as navy standards went. And the day I showed up I I had fully intended, like you say, to fail and then I couldn't. I just couldn't fail. You know, once I saw the classrooms and saw how serious they were and how professional they were because the submarine service is very professional, you know like 1200 sub sailors in the whole navy back then it
Speaker 2:wasn't a whole lot of us and it was a uh, they weeded a lot of people out in those preliminary training classes, things like that. So I just dug my heels in and said I'm going to learn this, and I think it was a six-week course, and then we got to pick the submarine or we got a wish list. They kind of posted on a bulletin board which submarines needed people, which submarines needed people, and uh, and I saw on there the uss tulibi was ssn 597 and then in parentheses it said experimental.
Speaker 2:So it was an experimental submarine and I thought well, that sounds cool as shit, and I volunteered for that instantly and I didn't realize that it was experimental in 1957, when they had built it Now it's 1974. And that the experiment did not work very well so they didn't build any more like her.
Speaker 1:Oh boy, she was a one-of-a-kind submarine.
Speaker 2:It was the smallest naval warship submarine that they'd ever built 270 feet long, about half the size of a normal submarine, had a crew of 55, when most submarines had a crew of about 100 110 um. And it had the smallest nuclear reactor that they'd ever put online anywhere. It was a. They built it under a program called the small nuclear reactor program, uh, and it was an ugly boat. It was a small, short, stubby, ugly submarine and, like I say, I volunteered for this because it was experimental. After graduation they sent me to Torpeneman School, which was a four-week course back then. It was a slam-bam, sent me down to Florida to go to that school and then sent me to the fleet sent me to the submarine and I reported aboard in Naples, Italy.
Speaker 2:The boat was already in the Mediterranean doing a six-month Mediterranean run and they put me and two other youngsters on this airplane and flew us to Naples, Italy, to meet the boat. Guys that are still friends Well, one of them since passed away but one of my best buddies was one of those guys on a plane with me, Bill Keel, and uh uh. So we got there and we'd missed the boat. The boat had pulled out like the day before we got there, so it wasn't pulling in again for another 20 days, 15 days, something like that oh gee, that's terrible it was terrible.
Speaker 2:So we got to hang around naples, italy, in a hotel for like the next 15 days, I think it was. We reported every morning to a young lieutenant who was also waiting for his boat to show up, and they ended up flying us in an Italian Air Force plane out to his little secret submarine base out in the middle of the Mediterranean, off Coast, sardinia. It's not secret anymore.
Speaker 1:Well, not now. It's a resort now?
Speaker 2:Oh, on an island called La Maddalena. It's the height of the Cold War, it's 74. So it was somewhat secret. It had uh, it was very small had a submarine tender there and two or three boats at a time would pull up. Uh, it wasn't secret from the russians, but it was secret from the italians and everybody else that didn't know what we were doing back there and I remember reporting aboard.
Speaker 2:I walked towards the pier and that big submarine tender was there, the SS Gilmore. Their job was to take care of submarines that pulled into port. And on the other side of the Gilmore was the boat called the Greenling and the Greenling was one of the newer, it was before Los Angeles class. I can't remember Gato class submarines, I think they called them and it was sleek and black and beautiful. And then my boat was tied to the starboard side of that boat and it was not black and sleek and beautiful, it was beat up and ugly and short and stubby. And I looked at that and I was like, oh my God what happened to that submarine.
Speaker 2:But, there began my adventure. 17 years old Tough way to grow up.
Speaker 1:Well, and that sub was born right around the same time. You were right, yeah.
Speaker 2:His keel was laid. The same year my keel was laid. It actually launched in 1963 when I was six years old. Wow and uh was.
Speaker 2:It was a very unusual submarine. It was experimental because it didn't have reduction gears. It was so to the layman. It had a straight drive electric shaft that went right from the nuclear reactor to steam turbines, to electric motor generator, to a straight shaft that spun the propellers. So because it didn't have uh gears, that uh, it didn't have reduction gears to reduce that, that power coming off the the motor generators. Uh, it was very quiet because it it was a straight drive electric shaft and uh. But it was also very slow and it's not classified anymore. But you know our top speed was 15 knots, where the average russian submarine could tool around 30, 35 and we were a hunter killer boat. We were very small, very quiet and our job was to track russian ballistic missile submarines uh, and, if needed, kill them. That was uh venator nekator was the boat's motto, which is hunter killer, and uh didn't have missiles on it, just had torpedoes, had one torpedo room where a lot of submarines hit, two torpedo, front and rear. We just had mid-shift torpedo tubes or mid-ships torpedo tubes.
Speaker 2:But I reported aboard and the education began. I was 17. I was pretty much scared shitless. A salty crew, real salty crew and a couple guys just took me under their wing because I was, you know, my section chief, who was an E6 guy named Jim Ash since passed away. An E4 at the time who was my direct supervisor, named Thomas Grove, rookie Grove, and Rookie ended up retiring as the command master chief of the Naval Submarine School. He was a senior ranking enlisted guy that ran the school years later. But those guys took me under their wing and literally beat the shit out of me every day to get me to be better than what I ever thought I could be.
Speaker 2:Submarine life is tough. The first thing you've got to do is get qualified. So you have to. To earn your dolphins, you have to learn every single aspect of that ship, because you could touch something and sink everybody. If you touch the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, report to the wrong place, and so you learn all about the propulsion systems the primary propulsion, which was nuclear, the backup propulsion, which was battery and diesel. Uh, you learn about the ventilation, learn about the weapon systems, sonar systems, radio systems, and so for your first year you're doing nothing but studying and having men sign your call cards. They'd sit down with you and drill you. Your first 90 days you spend in the kitchen, so you don't touch anything that will hurt everybody. You spend it doing dishes and they call it mess cooking, helping the cooks. That's what everybody does, e4 and below. The rest of the time, because you're E4 and below, you're either doing your job, which my job was torpedoes, so maintaining torpedoes or torpedo tubes.
Speaker 2:Then driving with helms and planes, either steering the ship or diving the ship, and we'd sit for hours and hours at a time at those controls or standing lookout watch. Our boat was one that had to surface just about every evening to replenish the air. The scrubbers were bad, everything was bad and beat up on the boat. So when it was dark outside we would surface to replenish air. It's always safer on the surface than submerged, especially in a whole boat like that. But as an E4 and below we stand lookout watch. So I was either driving, standing in the sail, doing lookout, or working in torpedoes. There is no day and night on a submarine. It's dark and light. You know it's dark out when the control room's red. You know it's light out when the control room's white. I mean by lighting Right.
Speaker 2:You know, it's light out when the control room is white, I mean by lighting, but there's no 24-hour day. Everything's 24 hours. It's a 24-hour clock, but you'd work for four hours, rest for six hours, work for six hours, rest for four hours, and so you do that for most jobs. You do that for six months and you lose all track of what is nighttime, what is daytime regular sleep cycle.
Speaker 2:Uh, the most he can sleep still to this day, the most I can sleep is four or five hours at a time. Can't sleep much more than that. Uh, yeah, it was demanding life, but uh, and I did not enjoy it. I was scared pretty much all the time.
Speaker 1:I didn't show it well and I think too that a lot of times people um come out of boot camp, they go to their schooling and everything and they, they think they're educated. But you, you know I think you said it best that you're the real education starts when you get to the fleet or when you get to your unit that the real education starts when you get to the fleet or when you get to your unit. That's where you really start to learn. You can learn all the book stuff, but it's the military way of life. The only way to learn it is to live it.
Speaker 2:And especially on an austere environment like that. It was a beat-up boat and it was an older boat and it didn't have many creature comforts and and so it was an uncomfortable place to live, especially in close quarters with it was it was built for a complement of 55 men, but I usually had about 70 guys on it, yeah.
Speaker 2:So we all hot racked. We always shared the bunks. You'd wake somebody up, they'd crawl out of the bunk. You'd crawl in the bunk. Uh, somebody'd wake you up four hours later and crawl in that same bunk. So somebody was always sleeping in your bunk. You're allowed 30 pounds of of gear, including your uniforms, to take with you, so that, basically, was my uniforms and a case of coke. That's what I would bring with me you had your priorities because my case of coke would fit in my uh rack.
Speaker 2:Uh, that had a little locker on it yeah, did you got you.
Speaker 1:So you guys had like those coffin lockers that's what we called them.
Speaker 2:It was yeah, yeah so it was basically a bed yeah but I, mine, was strapped onto a torpedo. Oh so we utilize the torpedoes as bunk space, where, literally, you would strap this bunk on top of the torpedo and so I would reach my hands down it when I was sleeping, because, the old Mark 14 torpedoes had brass warheads with 640 pounds of TNT in them but they were cool to the touch and so it was so hot down there.
Speaker 2:I would reach down there and try to put my arms on that warhead because it would help cool me down a little. And so 640 pounds of TNT was literally three inches below my head and the whole ocean's trying to get in that boat with you. Every single second the ocean wants in there. Really bad, and it was us against mother ocean, right it wasn't the, it wasn't the.
Speaker 1:Uh, it wasn't the russians that were the problem oh no, it was uh nature yeah well, I mean, we sprung a leak once.
Speaker 2:We sprung leaks quite a few times. Um, we sprung leaks bad enough once, in the engine room where I was operating a submersible pump. We dropped into the bilges to help just move the water from one end of the submarine to the other. It was all you were doing. You couldn't really get it out. We were submerged. Right.
Speaker 2:And we were having a hard time surfacing and I had found the Lord, like four months prior to that, uh, just by living in a submarine, and I'd carry around this little bible in my pocket, those little green uh service member bibles that they give out I still have one, yeah, I have a couple yeah, it says new testament on the front it was just the new testament didn't have time to carry over the old testament, so it's just the new testament.
Speaker 2:And I was manning that submersible pump and I had that bible in my hand and my e6, jim ash, the guy who's passed away now was tough as they come. He walked by me, he stopped me, look. He said hey, what are you doing? I said I'm praying. He said you know, god's only good to 150 feet. I Roger that and he was right God was good to about 150 feet. And after that it was Mother Ocean took charge. Yeah.
Speaker 2:And he would remind me constantly that every bit of that ocean wants in here with you, every single bit of it.
Speaker 2:And you're a matchstick in a bathtub To show us exactly what we were dealing with.
Speaker 2:One of my first dives on that submarine, jim Ash took a piece of string and tied it from one bulkhead to the other bulkhead.
Speaker 2:So it went across the breadth of the torpedo room and in the middle of that string he tied a crescent wrench. So you had a crescent wrench suspended on a string four foot above the deck and as we dove the submarine got squeezed from all sides top, bottom, side to side and it got squeezed and squeezed, and squeezed, and as we dove deeper the crescent wrench would go closer to the floor because the string was getting shorter and losing its tauntness. It was getting slack in it until by the time we got down to 700 foot, the crescent wrench was touching the deck and it gave me an idea. Now you could see that it had. The boat was a foot and a half narrower when we were submerged than when we were on the surface and made horrible noises as we were diving from all the patches that they put in that pressure hole over the years. It was definitely a challenge. That's how I ended up an airborne paratrooper.
Speaker 1:I'd rather jump out of a perfectly good plane exactly than to be inside a submarine. So how long were you on the sub than a year and a half?
Speaker 2:yeah, almost two years on the sub okay and uh.
Speaker 1:So what happens next?
Speaker 2:well, I enlisted for two years. It was time for me to get out and I really wasn't sure if I wanted to stay or not.
Speaker 1:And the Navy made up my mind for me they told me hey, thanks for your service, dave. They were pretty sure they didn't want you.
Speaker 2:I had been in a few brushes. I was an E3, but I considered myself an E9 because I was an E3 three times I went E1, E2, E3, E2, E3, E2, E3. And it was all drinking and running around and stealing shit and just getting in trouble. I was in trouble.
Speaker 1:Well, if it makes you feel any better. Some of the best NCOs I've ever served with have taken a few dips in rank before they got where they were at.
Speaker 2:I think back about my commanding officer now, a guy named Folta. He ended up.
Speaker 2:I won't say that he ended up leaving the submarine service. But he was so exasperated with me because I was a good sailor, I really knew my stuff, I was a good torpedo man and I wasn't afraid. And the end for me came from a sense of failure. I had gone to Navy dive school. From a sense of failure, I had gone to Navy dive school and with my buddy Rookie, the guy who ended up becoming the Command Master, chief of the Submarine School, command Master Chief, petty Officer of the Submarine School we had two divers on our boat so it was an additional duty.
Speaker 2:Being a diver, you would do hull checks when we were in port. The divers would go into the water and check, make sure there was no explosive strapped to our submarine, uh any, any outside repairs that needed to be done. The divers, you know, don their uniform, but they all had regular rates. One was an electrician, I think. One was a machinist mate and that was an additional duty. But it was a veryinist mate and that was an additional duty. But it was a very, very demanding school Right, and I wanted to be and I looked up to both these guys. One of them is still my Facebook friend. He retired as a commissioned officer. He ended up retiring as an 06. But he was an enlisted guy. When I served with him and I went to dive school in New Londonondon, connecticut. When they had to dive school there, they had two of them, one in connecticut, one in florida and they have a hell week, just like bud's training had a hell week.
Speaker 2:and uh, where you're in a pool all day long and they're, they're uh ripping your tanks off and tearing your regulators out of your mouth literally for eight hours. They're harassing you while you're diving in your gear. They're trying to make you drown and you go through drown-proofing courses or classes where they literally do hold you under to your sucking water in your mouth. And Rookie had had enough.
Speaker 2:I think it was like we were in this it was a four-week course and we were two and a half weeks into it and Rookie was sick. I was sick and he said I'm done and he left and I was there by myself and I lasted one more day and I was really sick and the corpsman was wanting me to drop out. But I didn't want to drop out and he was taking my temperature about every three hours and my temperature was like 102, 103 degrees. A lot of people get sick in that school because you're exposed to water.
Speaker 2:It's cold. It was in April, so being sick was nothing, that was the norm. But they want you to drop if you get too sick. They want to deal with putting you in the hospital and I did. I after about I just hit my third week of a four-week course and I dropped. I just felt horrible about myself, about everything, because I wanted so bad and they were telling me said, dude, you can come back next week. They said just go take, dude, you can come back next week. They said just go take a week off, you can come back next week. You're going to have to start over, but you can come back next week. We'll hold the slot for you.
Speaker 2:And I went back to the boat, just embarrassed, just embarrassed. I never failed in anything. I'd been their sailor of the quarter before and Rookie was like he didn't care, it didn't bother him. And uh, and rookie was like he didn't care, it didn't bother him. You know he was like, yeah, we tried, we didn't make it. But I was crushed and uh, and I never really I had a bad attitude about everything in in the Navy after that.
Speaker 1:And it was my own fault, but I just.
Speaker 2:That's the way I looked at it.
Speaker 1:Uh it uh was I had not failed at anything.
Speaker 2:I don't think really in my life not like that. Well, do you think it's important to fail? You know I probably, if it would not been for that failure, I wouldn't have survived combat. Yeah, I learned lessons, I think there.
Speaker 2:Uh, that I didn't know were lessons that I learned there, but between the leadership that I got in the guard and my experiences in the navy in that austere, tough environment, uh, when it when, when I found myself years and years later in a place where, hey, we're not fucking around here, this is the real deal and I'm responsible for these guys, and either we're coming home at the end of this mission or we're not, uh, it was those lessons that always made me realize I'm tougher than I think I am. I'm tougher than I think I am and I can do this, especially when people are looking up to you. I hate to say it was an act, but a lot of it is. You know, I knew what a tough sergeant looked like. I was a first sergeant when I deployed in my dangerous deployment, and I knew what a first sergeant looked like and acted like, especially under fire. And that's what I did, did I acted my ass off I, you know, I, I.
Speaker 1:I think very few people are born with that in them like you. Yeah, a lot of what you're doing is you know that people's lives depend on how you react and how you do things and how you do things, and so you have to act a certain way, you have to be a certain way, whether it's part of who you are or not, because you are responsible for them yeah and they are looking to you for leadership and you can't, in the heat of it, go.
Speaker 2:I don't know yeah, and to and to fast forward. I left the Navy, banged around for eight, nine years and ended up joining the National Guard and became a forward observer. And I liked the idea of being a forward observer because they paint their faces, sneak off into the woods and come back a couple weeks later. That's what you did at annual training.
Speaker 1:This sounds like it might be cool.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I saw that. That's kind of neat and and you have the power of God in a handheld radio calling for artillery fire, naval gunfire or close air support. And the group of guys that I served with in the guard our leadership was almost 100% Vietnam veterans. This is back in the late 80s, real early 90s. So the E7s and above they were just about all of them were Vietnam veterans, combat-hardened Vietnam veterans. I was blessed in that I had two or three key personnel who may not have been combat veterans, like my E6, a guy named Dave Buck who ended up retiring after 20-some years, still a friend of mine. I was a 32-year-old private and when you see a 32-year-old private, the first thing you think is what did he do wrong?
Speaker 1:How messed up is this guy going to be? Yeah, what did he do?
Speaker 2:wrong. Dave Buck saw something in me. He took advantage of my maturity. Instead of making me feel bad for it, took advantage of my maturity, put me in leadership positions as soon as I was able to be in a leadership position, and then rode my ass mercilessly, just rode me mercilessly, and this was back in the day. This was back in the day when you could get butt-stroked, or you could get slapped up a little bit in the middle of the night, or wrestle in matches oh yeah, We'd pair us off to wrestle in matches, and that's how we settled our differences.
Speaker 2:And and like say, as sport observers, we were either out in the ginky weeds or we were up in our op somewhere by ourselves, uh, but those lessons that I learned from those guys when the shit hit the fan, for real it it just clicked.
Speaker 2:So many of the little lessons that they taught me just clicked. And a lot of it, like you mentioned, it's the attitude. A lot of it is just how you're going to contemplate this particular situation, not necessarily what you're thinking, but how you think about it. And those are National Guard guys, those are National Guard, the weekend warriors that people talk about, some of the finest warriors I've ever had the honor to serve with and was tested myself and saw where, especially in the combat zone, where these guys really did know what they were talking about.
Speaker 1:Well, I think the thing, too that a lot of people disregard is that if you look at any major war or conflict, the national guard was there on the front line fighting in those wars, everything from all the way back to world war two and probably a little bit earlier than that, all the way up through the wars that that we've had in, you know, recent memory those were fought by National Guardsmen. Oh yeah.
Speaker 1:And you put a National Guard unit next to a traditional Army unit and I would defy you one to tell the difference. And when you did tell the difference, you might realize that that National Guard unit did a little bit better, because we tend to think outside the box.
Speaker 2:Exactly did a little bit better because we tend to think outside the box, exactly, you know, I, when I joined I, I joined the first of the one time, the 119th field artillery were you, were you out on? Marshall street. I was on marshall street. I was part of that unit, yeah, years ago.
Speaker 1:I remember when you were enlisted guy, that yeah oh, actually I, I had just got my commission, did you?
Speaker 2:yeah, with butch seacord and those guys. Was it during that time?
Speaker 1:I don't remember the battalion commander, uh gosh.
Speaker 2:I can't remember his name either wasn't dolman, it was dolman, sammy dolman, it was dolman. See, I wasn't, he was my captain.
Speaker 1:Okay, so he was the battalion commander when I was out there. I wasn't supposed to, so I was supposed to be military police and I got hoodwinked and ended up in the, and in every drill weekend I would harangue sam dolman. And finally, after about six months, he just signed the paperwork and said get the hell out of my office he was a.
Speaker 2:He was a great man too, I tell you he was, he was and a great soldier.
Speaker 2:Uh yeah, so I I joined the 119th and you mentioned about a National Guard role. I was really interested in the history of that unit and it kind of came about by accident. They had a bar downstairs, like a lot of the armories, had little secret bars and a little listed man's club, and back behind the bar they had boxes of stuff that belonged to the unit. That was historical pictures, banners, guidons, written reports from World War II. And these guys, the 119th, got activated in World War II. It's the very beginning of the war. Sent to St Louis, missouri, they became the 973rd Field Artillery Brigade. They landed on D-Day plus six, you know. So they were one of the first artillery units to land in Europe six days after D-Day, fought through the hedgerows, fought in the Battle of the Hurtigan Forest.
Speaker 2:Fought through the hedgerows, fought in the Battle of the Hurtigin Forest. The 119th held the record. I think it was Bravo Battery held the record for the most artillery rounds fired from one specific howitzer during the war, 3,200 and some odd rounds they fired continuously. They were the first unit to fire rounds across the Rhine into Germany. They were the vanguard of the artillery forces that was over there. And yet active component guys, they're calling us weekend warriors and, like you say, just about every conflict, especially modern day, still to this day, over 50% of the available combat forces to the active component are reserve component forces uh-huh we're cheaper to train.
Speaker 2:Uh, we bring that wide and varied skill set. Quick story I was in a place called bob prosperity, outside of baghdad, iraq, and, uh, I was on a small nine-man team. We were quartered in a tent that was in the shadow of a demolished Saddam Hussein palace with a roof blown off of it, and we stayed in this little tent city. They gave us one tent and it was five or six tents that were part of this, and three of the tents belonged to a national guard unit that was there augmenting the first cavalry division. They were a guard unit that was out of, I think, georgia or Tennessee, and then, right next to that, was three tents that belonged to the first calf guys from the helicopter squadrons and and the ground pounders that were in the uh, first cab. And, uh, uh, the guys in the guard tent had internet, they had wooden doors built on their tents, they had a refrigerator.
Speaker 2:They had cold pop. They had their own latrines that they had carried to be right outside their tent. The guys and girls that were staying in the cabs' tents were miserable. All the time it was hot in their tent. And the difference was those guard guys they had a carpenter, they had an electrician, they had three or four it guys. They had that wide range. I was on a helicopter with a united states or actually with a canadian uh men's sticky multinational force commander that was riding with us.
Speaker 2:And he talked about when he saw that there were guard pilots. Because he asked him you guys guard or you're active army flying our Blackhawks? And they said, oh, we're in the guard, and you could tell because they were 48 years old or the other pilots in the regular were 22. He goes. I love guard pilots. He says give me a 48-year-old pilot any time. You know they did. They'd been flying for 15 years. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's. You know my own story when I volunteered to go to Iraq. So you know, got out of the Navy, banged around as a civilian, didn't do well, joined the Guard, loved it, did everything I could to excel and within the first few years I was selected to become active Guard Reserve and work full time in the Guard. So that's what I did. My first assignment was as a counter drug and back in those days we were legal pirates we flew around the state in helicopters, looking for weed fields and and serving warrants on people.
Speaker 2:It was a we'd work with different task forces, you know the western michigan enforcement team or uh the grand, I mean uh, the eastern enforcementforcement Team. So there were DEA, state police, county or local police and guard guys and you know we were up in the UP looking on Indian reservations for illicit marijuana grows, and then everywhere down in the southern peninsula we'd fly them, find them with helicopters going on the ground and cut them down or do surveillance on them to catch the guys. If it was a, if it was a high-tech field where somebody was watering it, somebody was taking care of it, we'd just sit on the field for a couple days so we could actually bust the people that were, that were maintaining the field were, Was Colonel Francisco.
Speaker 2:In part of that he was actually he was a little after my time.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And it changed a lot. I think they called us Wolverine teams back then and they had armed certain guard guys. We'd go out there and we'd be armed with shotguns. And guard guys would go out there and we'd be armed with shotguns. We would do surveillance on different groves partnered with. We were equal partners to the law enforcement entities. That kind of changed. It wasn't because of posse comitatus, it was just, I think the guard really started weighing the risk factors and and the liability factors or you know, you're because we were in people's houses sometimes and they would serve a warrant or we would land.
Speaker 2:I remember laying in somebody's property that had quite a few marijuana plants and the police raid the house. You know that's what they're going to do. They're going, they've got probable cause and so we're sitting in the guy's kitchen looking through his shit. Now who knows whether that was technically legal or not, but that's the way they did it and they changed a lot of that, as I was in kind of toning us back. But yeah, francisco came along a little bit after us. There was a lot of leadership changes in the counter-drug teams and in the duties.
Speaker 2:But so I ended up going into recruiting and I loved recruiting because the guard had saved my life. You know, I thought taking a guy who wasn't accomplishing much in his life and give me every opportunity in the world, as long as I just worked harder than the guy next to me.
Speaker 2:And that was really as simple as it was. If I worked harder than the guy standing next to me, I was going to get rewarded. It was so simple to me. I was like I'm going to get rank, I'm going to get extra duties, I'm going to get, you know, recognition, uh.
Speaker 1:And so I just always worked harder than the guy standing next to me well, here's the thing I like about the guard because I've worked in the civilian world for a long time as well is exactly what you just said. Right, it's not about I've been here for 20 years and I deserve this. It's about whether or not I'm working harder, whether or not I'm getting the job done, because that really does get recognized. It does job done because that really does get recognized. It does you know, maybe there's some places where it doesn't.
Speaker 1:But my experience was, if you work hard and you get the job done and you're good at what you do, that gets recognized and rewarded it does.
Speaker 2:You know I end up. I was a street recruiter and then I went to operations and training, which was training recruiters, and then I went down to the schoolhouse on a title 10 tour uh, working for the Army National Guard of the United States, and I went down there and taught recruiting school and then I became a liaison to the regular Army Active Component Recruiting Battalion. I was stationed at Fort Knox at USAREC they call it the United States Army Recruiting Command as a guard liaison, the United States Army Recruiting Command as a guard liaison. And so I rose up the ranks through recruiting, just by working hard and being good at what I was doing. And my first drill weekend going to Grayling six years prior to that, I was in the back of a quarter-ton truck, basically as a paperweight to hold down rucksacks so they wouldn't get blown out of the back of the Jeep, and I laid on top of these rucksacks with a rifle as a private. That was my job Don't let any of the rucksacks fall out the back of this quarter-ton. And so that's what I did and that was my first real job in the guard.
Speaker 2:Six years later I remember sitting by myself in a top dollar restaurant in St Louis with a government car out in the parking lot and a pager on my belt, and I was there training Missouri National Guardmen on the recruiting, doing some extra training for them out there as an instructor from the schoolhouse and ordering a $100 dinner and thinking to myself there's no other organization in the world that would take a high school dropout which is what I was a 32-year-old washed-up dude and go from being a paperweight to a bunch of rucksacks to having a position of authority six years later where they trusted me like they're trusting me right now.
Speaker 2:No other organization in the world can you do that just by working hard, and I found that time and time again in the guard. It wasn't perfect, no, uh, I had my shared difficulties in the guard too, but uh, uh, I'd hold it up against any organization in the world when it comes to professionalism, when it comes to accomplishing mission, getting things done, uh, facing adversary, adversity, coming up with novel ideas to fix things, regenerative thought. You know somebody's going to take your job in two years, whether you like it or not, and probably do a better job than you are, and you're expected to do a better job than the guy you're taking right now. That's why, when I watch this current political scene, I've heard so many people say well, kamala Harris has been in the job for three, three years. What is she going to do? That's any better, and I don't care if it's comel, harris or trump or anybody else. Uh, the next president always thinks they're going to do better than the last president that's their job.
Speaker 2:That's why they run exactly that's what they should be thinking. Yeah, you know, when I became sergeant major, I Sergeant Major I wasn't besmirching the Sergeant Major whose place I took, but I fully intended to leave it better than I found it when I walked into there, even though I respected highly the person who had the job immediately before me. I expected to do a better job and it was expected of me to do that, and that's one thing. That the military rank structure is perfect at that they move us around enough to realize that you're going to have to not necessarily reinvent the wheel, but your new thoughts are going to make an impact.
Speaker 1:That's why they move you around. That's why they do those things. Sometimes it doesn't feel like they want your better idea.
Speaker 2:Sometimes they don't.
Speaker 2:Sometimes you've got to prove yourself, but still I mean you're absolutely right, especially in the enlisted ranks, in the NCO ranks especially, officers, can tend to be a little more stagnant or have less control of their careers. Is the way I always looked at it. More stagnant or have less control of their careers is the way I always looked at it. Officer kind of gets pointed to their next duty location at every, at every juncture. To make captain, you're going to have to go here to make major, you're going to have to go here where, as an NCO, to make Sergeant, you might want to go here, but you could also go over here or go over there. Maybe try a little something different.
Speaker 1:Work, work in a field outside your area of expertise, uh, and I was a classic example of that. You know, yeah, yeah, they can. I mean, if there's something you want to try, yep, um, they're going to let you try it. So you, uh, you were in recruiting command for quite a while. At what point did you actually deploy then? So we were talking about you deployed, uh, and you were the first sergeant, right?
Speaker 2:yeah, I deployed as a first sergeant. I was actually the first agr individual.
Speaker 2:Uh, augmentee that deployed so tell me about that uh, I got a son who's recently retired from the military and he did his 20 years and at this point he was an E-5 and I was an E-8, and I was working for recruiting retention in a couple different jobs. I was the state retention NCO, which was a new position. I had 16 retention NCOs that reported to me. I was also the first sergeant of headquarters, headquarters, detachment of joint forces headquarters. So I had those 250 soldiers that I was the first sergeant of and I was the operations and training NCO for the recruiting and retention command.
Speaker 2:So you weren't really busy, no, so I developed all the training, supervised MAPS, the Military Entrance Processing Station, supervised everybody that wasn't a direct recruiter and developed all the training programs for them. And so extremely busy. The war was about two and a half years old and we were taking a lot of casualties. My son was getting ready to go over for his second tour and he'd had a rough first tour up in Samara, and not only the guard but the army-wide. We were taking quite a few casualties. The war's on the news every single day. I always felt like God, what am I doing back here running three desks, let alone one desk. And Maria Pruitt, chief warrant officer, called me up one afternoon and said I need you to do something for me. And I said what? And she goes I need you to do a notification. And.
Speaker 2:I was like wait, I'm not a chaplain. And she goes we don't have any chaplains. And it was so bad this was in 2006 that they'd run out of chaplains to go give notifications to family members of active component folks and guard folks. We were taking so many casualties that they'd plain run out of chaplains. She says but I know you and I trust you and I'm asking you to do this, and I said well, I don't know how she goes here's what's going to happen.
Speaker 2:In four hours you're going to get a call from Fort Knox. They're going to walk you through the process. There's a script that you're going to read. You need to knock on a people's door. When they answer the door, you read your script and you tell them. And it's you know, the secretary of the army regrets to inform you that your son blah blah blah has been, and so she said could you do it? I said if I have to. She says find a second. You gotta have somebody with you. Just pick somebody.
Speaker 2:I called a friend of mine, reggie ed Adkins, who was an E7 NCO, but I also knew he was a Baptist preacher in his spare time. I thought I'm not a religious man but I could use the Lord with me on this. She hung up the phone. An hour and a half later, Fort Knox calls me and walks me through the process. They tell you certain things like you can only notify the next of kin if the next kin's not there. Wait, get a hold of the next kid. Wait at the house has to be done within 12 hours. You have to make this notification because word's going to get out from the unit that this kid got cooked and he got shot in the chest.
Speaker 2:And samara young 19 year old boy, yeah, from Michigan, and, uh, uh, they faxed me all the all the paperwork that I had to fill out the casualty report, and we jumped in our car, me and Reggie, and off we went to Eagle, Michigan to knock on these people's door, and I did. I walked up there and I knocked on the door and the young man's name was Niall Yates III. And a woman answered the door and she looked at us both standing there in our dress uniforms and a government car with government plates sitting in the driveway, and she said oh my God, it's Niall. And I says ma'am, are you Miss Yates? Mrs Yates she goes no, that's my sister. She said I'm Niles' aunt, what's going on?
Speaker 2:And I can't tell her. I said I'm not at liberty to discuss what happened, but I need to talk to Niles' parents as soon as I can. Do you know? Where they're at.
Speaker 2:She says, well, they're on the way to Ann Arbor to the hospital to visit the father's sister, Got taken to the hospital for an emergency and so they were headed down there for a medical emergency. They were on the road. I said do you have their cell phone number? She said yeah, so she calls the mother and then hands me the phone. So I'm in this living room and I says Ma'am, I'm First Sergeant Dunkel, I'm here on behalf of the Department of the Army. You need to. If you're not pulled over, please pull over. You guys need to come home. And she just started freaking, wailing on the phone and the husband picked up the phone and I said Sir, please make haste, but drive carefully. You need to come home as soon as you can. And he said, okay, and uh. And then I waited in their living room for about 40 minutes while the aunt was just inconsolable. I asked the aunt if they knew a preacher. Did they go to church? Did this family have a chaplain?
Speaker 2:And they said, yeah, they go to church. Did this family have a chaplain? And they said, yeah, they go to church. I said you could do me a favor and maybe call the church and let somebody from the church know that I'm here and that they're on their way here.
Speaker 2:And the car pulled in the driveway short time later and I remember the father carrying the mother out of the car because she didn't want to walk into the house and I was standing in the living room and he ushered her to a chair and she sat down and I got on my knee in front of her while she sat in the easy chair and I read that script and told her that her 19-year-old son had been killed in action the day before in.
Speaker 1:Taji.
Speaker 2:Iraq or Samar. Iraq had been shot by small arms, fire in the chest and the father got right in my face and told me I knew you, son of a bitches, wouldn't be happy until you killed him. I knew you, son of a bitches, were going to kill him, couldn't? Find out later. The boy had been stop-lost. He had supposed to have been out six months earlier.
Speaker 2:They stop-lost him and I sat with them, filled out the paperwork that you have to fill out for Serviceman's Group Life Insurance, stayed there while they notified their daughter, the young man's sister, over the telephone, so she was on her way. Another family member had shown up by that time and then it was my job to turn them over to a casualty assistance officer who was giving the contact information. So after about two hours of spending that worst night of my life and definitely the worst night of their lives, I went back to the office the next day and immediately called a contact. I had a national guard bureau. I said I'm not gonna sit this war out anymore, said I gotta go now. Send me some, I'll do anything. Uh, because I had to my son was going again.
Speaker 2:I just notified parents about a 19-year-old kid. And here I am sitting in Michigan running three desks and I was like I'm going. And the guy I called a guy named Dennis Chapman, I don't know if you remember he was at MSU's. I worked with him when he was Michigan State University's professor of military science for their ROTC. He was now out at mobilization branch at national guard bureau, so he was the one that ran the national guard mobilizations and I knew I had that connection. So I called him directly. He said I got just the job for you.
Speaker 2:He says there's a nine-man team that we're putting together. It's called a mit team, military transition team. You'll be embedded with uh, the foreign nationals, with the iraqi army, and you'll train them up and it's a 15 month deployment. And he says it's a active component, uh duty position right now. He said but you'll be one, you'll be one of the first guardsmen that we put on these teams, because they were all active, they were marines, uh, army and the Navy had a couple. And he said when can you leave? And that was like June 1st. And I says whenever. And he called me back the next day with orders for June 6th and the contact that I had out at National Guard Bureau, a guy named Dennis Chapman.
Speaker 2:He was a lieutenant colonel at the time and he was a chief of the mobilization branch and MIT teams were being fielded throughout the Department of Defense into Iraq and Afghanistan because they run out of special forces soldiers and it was a traditional special forces role where they would embed a special forces team with a host nation armed services and that's what the special forces did from the days of Vietnam.
Speaker 2:But they'd run out of special forces and special forces had also taken a more dynamic role to where they were actually doing more combat-oriented missions than they had in the past. So they started putting together these MIT teams to do that job, that liaison job, that training job. And they they did it by building small nine-man teams that were either marines or regular army and and sending them down range and attaching them to specific Iraqi army units or Afghanistan National Police or army units. And Colonel Chapman, my contact out at National Guard Bureau, says we're putting together a MIT team that's a little different from the active component and that it's going to have National Guard leadership but active component soldiers. And that wasn't the first time that that was tried. There were instances of National Guard units in country, in Iraq, that actually had active component units aligned underneath them. New York National Guard, for instance, had the 3 ID, had some units from the third ID reporting to them for a while and uh, and he said uh, good thing you called because he says I'm volunteering. When I say I, he was volunteering to be the commander of that unit, of that nine man unit. And I knew Dennis Chapman and he, he knew me and thought pretty highly of me and he says that you'd be great on this team, but uh, you're going to have to leave in like three days. And uh, uh, I says great, and uh, I'll take it. And so he says, all right, we'll start working on your orders. Here was the sticker. The sticker was I was an AGR soldier. An AGR soldier is a full-time National Guard. You belong to the Michigan National Guard. The Michigan National Guard wasn't sending me on this mission. I was volunteering for a mission that was being filled at National Guard Bureau. That was where the billet, or where the vacancy rested, was with National Guard Bureau.
Speaker 2:So I went to my immediate supervisor, who was Sam Dahlman, and I says I got an opportunity to deploy and I have to go. He knew that I had just done that notification. I told him look, my son's heading down right for his second tour. I can't sit here anymore. And he said, no, he he said you're not going. And I says I says first of all, sir, please sit. Don't put me in a position where I'm going to ask somebody higher than you, because I'll go to the tag if I have to, I'll go to the adjutant general. And uh, he says, if that's what you got to do. You got to do. He said, but I need. He said but I need you. You're holding three jobs and I was. I was doing three jobs.
Speaker 2:He says I can't lose you, not now, and I was a little selfish, but I had. It was a whole lot of dynamics involved in my thinking. I just couldn't do it anymore. I wasn't going to be effective at my job. That notification had just put me over the edge Watching my son go again. I just couldn't sit back and plus, this opportunity at National Guard Bureau sounded like a really interesting and challenging job. So I did. I went to the adjunct general and I requested an audience like the next day and he saw me.
Speaker 2:He said sure, you can go. Uh, so I went back and I told sammy I says, tag says I can go. He said well, I still say no, but tag says you can go, you can go. And then the adjutant general got back and touched me so well, colonel dalman doesn't want you to go, so you can't go. He didn't realize that colonel dalman didn't want me to go right.
Speaker 2:And so my choice was I could resign my agr position to deploy or just stay where I was. And uh, sammy told me that he said you got 15 years if you resign, you're not coming back. And which was my full-time employment, which was my pension, which was everything for a 15 month stint in the army. I was going to give up 15 years of service, but I didn't have a choice and I wrote my resignation, a letter, that day and I resigned from the agr force on. I think it was the 5th of june and I had orders in my hand the next day for 15 months. So at least I had 15 months of security, right, but that was it. I had to tell my wife you know I I'm risking my pension, but I have to go to this war. Uh, and everybody was mad at me, everybody in the michigan national guard.
Speaker 2:Now fast forward, years later. All sorts of people were doing it because it became an acceptable thing to do. But I was the first one to break the mold and say all right, I'll quit my job, I'll go. And I reported to Fort Riley, to this nine-man team, and there was two lieutenant colonels, two majors, two E-8s. The other E-8 was an active component guy from the 82nd Airborne, an E-7 commo guy and an E-6 medic and that consisted of this training team that we were going to go to Fort Riley for 90 days and they called it Green Beret in 90 days. We were going to learn that SF mission in 90 days and then deploy and get embedded with the Iraqi forces.
Speaker 2:So we all reported out to Fort Riley and it was very demanding training. It was 90 days of training, learning everything about convoy operations, how to be a liaison in a foreign country, language courses we took Arabic language courses every day Lots of role-playing where they would have fake cities built, you know, out of connexes that we would do cordon and searches and go in there and meet with the elders and close combat training. Marksmanship training that was unlike any other marksmanship training I'd ever received in the Army because this was close with the enemy. This is how you shoot when you're running backwards. This is how to shoot from behind a car. This is how to shoot from the window of a car. This is how to shoot from a turret Actual, real, good marksmanship stuff that's really going to happen exactly this is how you clear a house.
Speaker 2:This is, uh, not standing at a firing line, going ready on the left, ready on the right. Uh. So we went through that 90 days training. It was very demanding, kind of tough for me, and that colonel chapman had to make the decision who was going to be the non-commissioned officer in charge, and he chose me to be the non-commissioned officer in charge, which rankled the regular army folks and I don't blame them.
Speaker 2:A guard guy comes in and, uh, they didn't know what agr was. They didn't know. I'd really been full-time for the last 10, 15 years, right, but uh, you don't tell an 82nd airborne jump master e8 that he's got a new boss from the national guard. So it was challenging, but we all got along grandly, especially when we went overseas. And then the other odd part was we were headed to baghdad and was going to go to the iraqi army and all of a sudden, at the last minute, they go we want to send you up north. In northern Iraq there's a Peshmerga unit, which is a Kurdish guerrilla that we're integrating into the Iraqi army. So these are guys, these are 800 soldiers that have been fighting against the Iraqi army for the past 20 years. We're going to take their uniforms and give them Iraqi army uniforms. We're going to see how this goes this is going to go really well this is really going to going to happen.
Speaker 1:What, what city were they in?
Speaker 2:they they were. We were in Sulaymaniyah, which is where there's a. There's a post called the Firmandi, which was between Kirkuk and Sulaymaniyah. The Framundi was a big Peshmerga compound, so that's where they placed, they built this brigade. It was the 3rd Brigade of the 4th Iraqi Army Division and it was literally taking a Peshmerga unit and giving them Iraqi Army uniforms, so it still had all the Peshmerga leadership. We still were staying at a Peshmerga location, the Peshmerga leadership. We still were staying at a Peshmerga location and they were learning to be Iraqi army.
Speaker 2:All the Arabic language that we'd learned went out to drain because they don't speak Arabic. Most of them weren't Muslim. Most of them were either Kakeh or there were some Muslims, but most of them were, uh, either kake or there were some muslims, but uh, then none of them were arabs. There was one or two that were actual what they called arabs. These were kurdish, autonomous kurdish, uh people and, uh, some of the best soldiers I'd ever seen, some of the laziest, sometimes uh they get it done, though the the Pest Burger got it done.
Speaker 2:When it comes to the fight, they were great fighters. They weren't afraid of anything. But when it comes to military discipline or order, record-keeping, bribery, things like that, they were the worst of the worst. They had a hierarchy system. We had a general named General Anwar uh, they had a hierarchy sister, and we had a general named general anwar, and general arnoir had gone from living in a cave literally to having a probably a two million dollar mansion. As soon as the americans moved in and started handing money out, yeah, uh, we would get shipments of fuel, 90,000 liters of fuel the first thing they would do would be sell 70,000 liters of it on the black market and then complain to us that they don't have enough fuel to run their operations. Every soldier in the unit kicked up pay to their supervisor. Every supervisor kicked up pay to where it was going, all the way to the general. So the officers were tremendously rich.
Speaker 2:The enlisted guys were all driving taxis and stuff whenever they could, using our fuel. They told us right off the bat look, we do not have time to worry about bribery and what's the word. I'm looking for the graft and corruption. The Army didn't have time for that.
Speaker 1:Well, and I think people should understand too that by Western standards, that all looks really bad. But that's the culture, right. It doesn't mean they're bad people. That's just how the culture worked, it is. It's their way of life, yeah, and that's something that you uh I think rightly so they said. You just have to accept this. You can't measure. You can't measure iraqi or or peshmerga success by a western yardstick. No, because they're two different cultures, right and we sure tried.
Speaker 2:You know, we sure tried. We had charts and briefings. I was essential in that I was the first guy to come in and tell Iraqi NCOs that NCOs have a job and NCOs have authority. They didn't realize that because the officers had always run the show and that's just the way it was. It was a british army model. Uh, very uh.
Speaker 2:There weren't strong nco corps, even though somebody would make sergeant in order, because that's all there was. There was the jundi, which was the enlisted guy, all one rank. They were privates. And then there was e5 sergeants, or our equivalent to e5 sergeants, and then there were a sergeant major or two in every unit and there wasn't anything in between. But the sergeants had no authority. It was just a matter of hey, my uncle's the colonel or I've been here longer so I get paid more. They all got paid in cash. Once a month We'd bring literal truckloads of cash up to pay these cats and uh, and I was able to instill some pride in that nco corps, making them where they're at rank insignia.
Speaker 2:Uh started as a non-commissioned officers academy so they'd learn the role of an nco when it comes to battlefield preparation and battlefield operations and the officers actually liked it. They stood back and they looked and they went. Jesus, I didn't know I wouldn't have to do all this myself, that I got these guys that are willing to take the heat for giving orders that the Juneteenth don't like, because the Juneteenth didn't like the orders and we were in a unique position in the Peshmerga really didn't give a shit what happened to iraq. Iraq was not their country. Iraq was a figment of the british imagination.
Speaker 2:Kurdistan was their country right and it was a country without borders, but it was a country that went across turkey, iran, iraq. It was their autonomous, indigenous homeland. That's what they really cared about. But they were so loyal to the Americans because we had helped them out, especially during that last 20 years, with Special Forces support to fight Saddam and, at the beginning of the war, by supporting them in ousting Saddam and beating their army up north. Especially the Peshmerga were a critical part of that, but they were extremely loyal. Hey, if you fight side by side with these guys, they will die for you. Today I could show up at a house in the middle of the night in Sulaymaniyah, knock on the door and say I need help and I would be welcomed like a brother. Even 20 years later, I'm still with these, with a lot of these guys that, uh, I'm part of their family as far as I get invited to their weddings and, uh, they've come, stayed at my house, uh, but so we get over there. We're in northern iraq. Uh, we're dealing with the graft and corruption, we're trying to train up the troops as best we can, and then the surge happens. Yeah, where? In June of 2006, or was it 2007? It was June of 2007.
Speaker 2:Yeah, when they started throwing troops down to Baghdad and they wanted us to go, we, we had on the books we had 2,500 soldiers, but we didn't have 2,500 soldiers. We had 675 to 800 on a good day. The rest of them were ghost soldiers that they were collecting pay for, but they weren't actual bodies. And and we told them that, we told the, we told the multinational commanders that if we deploy down to Baghdad, that's what they want to do. They wanted us to take our Peshmerga guys down to Baghdad and I said, well, we can give you 600 guys, maybe because not all of them are going to go and we don't have 2,500 like you think we got, and we've been telling you this the whole time, but nobody listened to me. Now they're going to listen to us and the Peshmerga were like that's not our fight, we're not going. That's what General Anwar basically said he goes look no, we're not going to Baghdad.
Speaker 2:That's Sunni and Shia. That's an Arab fight. It has nothing to do with us. Let them duke it out. We don't care. And Kirkuk is what we're worried about. Mosul is what we're worried about. We want the Arabs out of there and we want to take our ancestral homeland back. So we'll do that. We'll go to Mosul, we'll take over Kirkuk tomorrow, but we're not going to, we're not going to baghdad. We took us weeks of haranguing, uh, begging, bribing, forcing at gunpoint, literally. You guys are going and I'll be god dang if one morning they all, we all, showed up getting ready to roll an 18 hour road march from, from uh, outside of Sulaymaniyah, to Baghdad. A hundred vehicles, largest crown convoy in that war's history, 18 hour drive in front of us. Uh, and general Anwar don't show up. I got like 600 of his shoulders. He's at a wedding, his nephew's getting married.
Speaker 1:So we're gonna have to leave the next day yeah, yeah, you have to postpone this by one day yeah, so we're postponed it by one day.
Speaker 2:National public radio was there with us a guy named ivan watson, a national public radio reporter, had embedded with us and nbc had some reporters embedded with us and they were fired up because we're getting ready to roll out the gate largest convoy in the iraq war history. And yeah, the generals at a wedding there's a time out on the sideline, folks we're gonna have to.
Speaker 1:You know, I think something else too. When they were moving all these troops down for the surge, um, you know, the surge was successful. They did some great things. Um, what I don't think anyone ever talks about is how it really pushed all that garbage up into the northern area, which had been, to that point, not quiet but not super busy. And I remember, man oh man, did we get super busy in Mosul, iraq, when they pushed them up.
Speaker 2:And Kirkuk was the same way.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah, our sister units took a lot of casualties down there.
Speaker 2:Yes, sulamania was where we could literally walk around in sulamania with a soft cap on our head. You know we had weapons, things like that. But oh, you could take your helmet off, you could go shopping. We, you know, we shopped on our first two months. We were up there in sulamania, uh and and we were buying stuff for our Iraqi troops off the market and they would give us stacks of money Foo money, they called it where once a month we'd go to Kirkuk and they would give me, I think it was $7,000 or $8,000 worth of 50s at a time whenever we asked for it.
Speaker 2:We used it for bribes, we used it to buy stuff, use them to get the iraqis to do their job, use that money, but anyway. So we get surged down to baghdad and we do roll, we all roll down there, and they put us in the northwest corner of baghdad, mansoor shula area. There hadn't been an american presence there in a couple years. Uh, it was no man's land. It was right on the fault line of the Sunni-Shia divide. Sadr City was there and it was like kicking a hornet's nest. We went down there and set up 23 checkpoints with our Kurdish soldiers. So our job was to interdeck weapons and to do cordon searches, was start knocking on people's doors and finding bad guys.
Speaker 2:And our Kurdish guys are smart. They're not going to pick a fight, they can't win first of all, and they're not going to get involved in a Sunni Shia thing. They're going to let them fight it out. And it was literally like that. On one side of our checkpoint would be sunni death squads that were shown that were kidnapping people in the middle of the night and, uh, executing people a lot of kidnappings for money. And on literally on the other side of the road, other side of the checkpoint, was the shia militias with uh the jay shalmati, with uh muktad al sadr and more organized. But you know these firefight loving dudes, the guys that would shoot you from the windows, uh, and then disappear, uh, relatively disciplined uh, and we were right in the middle of both of them. It depended literally on which way you turned on, what, what the threat was at that moment, and the Kurdish were right in the middle of that going this is not our fight. This is not our fight. So they didn't go out looking for a fight.
Speaker 2:We went out on patrols, things like that, but I hate to say it now but, I, know that they were meeting, probably with both sides, in the middle of the night yeah saying hey, you know you don't fuck with us, we won't fuck with you, but hey, that's the way things have been happening for 800 years in that country.
Speaker 1:You're not going to change it Exactly, not, not, not anytime soon. And I think the other thing too is um, you know, if, if you've done some reading and and um, there's, you always read never, never, never. Underestimate your enemy, right? And I think a lot of times when american truth I know we were this way when you first get over there, you're like these are a bunch of cavemen. How hard can this be? Um, but you very quickly learn that you really have to respect, uh, your enemy, because they're not a bunch of cavemen, they're people and they're smart and they've been doing this for a long time.
Speaker 2:You know, especially 06, 07, during the surge, we killed all the shitty soldiers, the low-hanging fruit right, yeah, all the bad talk, fury had been shot. And now we were dealing with combat-hardened professional. These guys knew what they were doing and they were watching us. Oh, they knew what our ttps were oh yeah, I mean our.
Speaker 2:They used to call us the peace train, my three unit convoy, because they didn't want to fuck with us. Right, you know, they knew that the bad guys knew I mean they would mess with my guys as soon as I pulled away from a checkpoint. That checkpoint would get hit. They didn't want to mess with us because we had more firepower in those three vehicles than probably a company of infantry during World War II. I mean we had 50s, 240s grenades. We were high risk of capture. So when we went in country, they gave, gave us a choice anything we wanted when it came to equipment.
Speaker 2:We they our initial issue was all special forces same thing. Uh, we had at4s in the truck, you know, in the truck. I didn't know how to shoot one, but we had them. I had in my turret, I had my M4, a Glock pistol. A Glock pistol on my side, my Beretta pistol that the Army gave me up in the turret, an AK-47 or two up there also, that we'd taken off the bad guys. We were armed to the teeth and the bad guys knew that. So they weren't going to pick a fight with us unless they had to, unless we cornered them or popped on them when they weren't expecting it.
Speaker 2:And my Peshmerga guys, like I say, were extremely loyal, especially loyal to us. For me to go out there and risk my life to them was the greatest thing in the world. I had proven my, I had gone out there and stood side by side with them and risked my life and to them that was like a lifelong pledge of loyalty and they'll do anything for me after that. So they they kind of played the political game when they needed to did a real good job on maintaining those. I think we had 27 checkpoints in that northwest corner of baghdad and we interdicted a lot of weapons and not only that, but we disrupted, uh, what the bad guys were doing.
Speaker 2:They couldn't walk around down the streets with their guns in their hands like they'd done two weeks before. Uh, all the bad crooked police officers, we knew who they were. We got them off the street, uh, and I had the heartbeat. So the guys would talk to me and those, those enlisted peshmerga guys, they're very observant, they're like, say, good fighters, and they would talk to me and they'd be honest, like they had no loyalty to the iraqi army.
Speaker 2:They had no problem telling me that they wouldn't tell the Iraqi army that but they tell me that, and as a result of our special relationship with these Peshmerga, there were three letter agencies over there, state department guys that that were very interested in what the Peshmerga's role was going to be in the future and what's going to happen in Kirkuk with this referendum coming up and look, are we going to end up fighting another war up there all by ourselves? So these three letter agency guys would embed with us and ride with us for a while and then they'd rely on me to actually get the truth from the troops, because the troops would talk to me and I'm in all sorts of reports.
Speaker 2:there's a couple classified reports where I've seen my name mentioned you know, that I had a rapport with the troops so they believed what I told them and they were all State Department guys that came to work with us. But we went down there for six months, down to Baghdad, and my guys took their share. Casualties, yeah, uh, uh, we, we went relatively miraculously unscathed until, uh, the month of april I mean, because we went down there in january and uh had been shot at a couple times, but nothing really. And then in April shit really started hitting the fan. So where it was dangerous to roll, and my commander man, he loved doing route deviations and loved being outside of the wire, and him and I would bump heads in the middle of the night out of your shot, of everybody else, because I was the ncic and he was the commander. I tell you what, and it was a his rule, this was his rule, not mine when it comes to strategy, when it comes to mission planning, when it comes to the liaison work with the iris, that was his job.
Speaker 2:When it come to what happened in our convoy, when we rolled outside of the wire, that was my job because I was in the lead turret. I will always I made it a point I always led. I was always in the turret of the lead vehicle, not inside the vehicle. I was always a gunner because I could see more and uh, and he trusted my judgment. If I said stop, we stopped. If I said turn left here, we turn left there. Uh, he was extremely uh, uh understanding of that point that outside in the tactical world, the guy out front needs to make those calls and but when it come to the strategy, him and I would sit out in the middle of the night yelling at each other outside because he was too risky and it wasn't, he was a glory hog, he just he had a hard time. He had a hard time with risk assessment, was really doing a like. He was just ah, like, here's just.
Speaker 1:That's not going to happen to us and I was how bad, how bad could it be.
Speaker 2:Yeah, how bad exactly yeah and I was 50. I turned 50 in iraq and I think that had a lot to do with it.
Speaker 2:I understood our that we weren't invincible right uh, I understood that it's only a matter of time, you know, because we that year we did 325 combat missions in 365 days and it was 15 months. But we did 325 combat missions and movements. That's a lot, that's a lot of being outside the wire and it was only a matter of time before we did get hit. We hit a easter weekend where we're going down route irish, outside a buyout outside of the international airport, and a couple of bad guys had got a hold of a 90 millimeter uh old british anti-tank weapon and had it set up at the side of the road and took a shot at my face as we were driving by.
Speaker 1:that'll wake you up it did.
Speaker 2:it's literally sucked the air out of my lungs over pressurized everything. I felt it coming before, yeah, I heard anything or or saw the whiz, but I felt my ears popping and my my air getting sucked out of my lungs. It was a real odd little whoop. And then it went past us and across the road and then later, that little, the very next day, they'd strung piano wire over one of the roads that we were on and I was in a lead vehicle and it hit my turret. That we were on and I was in a lead vehicle and it hit my turret Just luckily caught the barrel of my .50 cal before it hit me, so it knocked my .50 cal up and that was piano wire that they spread across the road.
Speaker 2:And then, a couple days after that, we got hit by a catastrophic IED and I was up in a turret and that destroyed the vehicle I was in. We were able to fix it but, uh, that put us out of commission for a few days off for that one.
Speaker 1:I can imagine and I and so, in these instances though, I mean, is this where your training kicks in, Like, like when that IED goes off?
Speaker 2:I, I mean there's things that you just do there is, and, and the hardest part of that whole war was not that.
Speaker 2:The hardest part of that whole war was going out there and rolling all the time yeah was rolling and knowing, knowing that around the next corner there's going to be bad guys around, or not knowing you know, uh, just, you're in places that are, you're in the most dangerous place in the planet, and so constantly, day after day after day after day, you're on edge. You're up in that turret, you're waiting for something to happen. When something does happen, you're like fucking good, that's when the train does kick in you're just, you're just doing shit.
Speaker 2:Then it's the waiting for the stuff. That happened. That really it it. I didn't realize what it took. I mean till years later I think, uh, where I I hate to say I'm not right in the head, but I'll never recover from that. I'll never recover from that hypersensitivity that was just pounded in me every waking minute of every day for 15 freaking months. You become a different person right and and and.
Speaker 2:The hardest part for me, the very next hardest part, was, or the absolute hardest part, was falling asleep when it was time to rest, because I knew I'd have to wake up again. I knew I was going to have to do it again. You're going to do it again and tomorrow might be the day, and it's scary, it's terrifying. Like I say, I was acting. I was acting like a first sergeant. I had nine men that I was responsible for that really kept me going. They couldn't see me fearful. That was impossible.
Speaker 2:I mean that one IED we had an individual leave the team and never come back, uh, because he couldn't, and and uh, and we had to get out there and roll again right down those same exact streets where we knew. We just lucked out by the grace of God or whoever you want to call it. That day we got hit with a catastrophic. I had just said we were in bad guy land and we are right in their neighborhood in the Shula district, and I had said to Colonel Chapman, who was in the passenger seat and I was up in the turret and I was kind of looking at him and I says what's the report on this road? Because they were either red or they were black.
Speaker 2:Certain routes were black and route senators up through that area was always black. Just don't go down that road because you're going to make contact.
Speaker 1:Something's going to blow up.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something's going to blow up A lot of IEDs and I says what's the security assessment on this, this neighborhood? He goes out, this is their neighborhood man, they're not going to do anything in their neighborhood, which does make a little bit of sense. But it didn't make sense that day and we had come around this corner onto a route uh was route pilgrim, I, no Route Ranger which was a divided highway Two lanes on one side, small, narrow, median, two lanes on the other, and we would always cross over into oncoming traffic whenever we moved and the people would just have to get out of our way we had sirens and we had lights and we had a big presence so they could see these giant vehicles coming.
Speaker 2:So people would get out of the way. And as we crossed the median and pulled out into the oncoming traffic, I saw a vehicle about 30 meters ahead of us with his hood up and with a gas can sitting next to it. And I said to my driver, a guy named omel, I said watch that, watch that vehicle, because it's a classic v-bid setup, you know to have a stalled car on the side of the road with a bomb in it. So he veered way to the left to avoid that vehicle and they had an EFP IED Explosively Formed Protectile IED on the other side of the road. It's because they knew that. That's exactly. They knew our tactics like you mentioned earlier.
Speaker 2:They knew what we did yep, and they had that buried into a wall or they had it flush with the wall. They dug a hole in the wall, put the efp in there and, uh uh, covered it up with plaster. Well, lucky for us, the efp went off when we were very close to it, so it didn't have time to fully form like those electronic.
Speaker 1:Right, right.
Speaker 2:So the EFP is a copper disk right, Excuse me, yep, and the copper disk melts and becomes molten Right and it burns its way through anything it reaches, what they call spall.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and these were actually built by Iran.
Speaker 2:Yeah, most of them were Iranian.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, we were so close to it that it didn't really have time to fully form and the back of the wall blew out. So it lost some of its forward pressure because it blew a hole in the wall, its forward pressure because it blew a hole in the wall, but it still burned a hole directly through our uh front passenger, uh, through our front driver's fender wheel tire engine. Burned a hole in the engine like it was cutting through butter out the other side, through a house that was 40 meters away, and then the entire side of our vehicle was small and then they shot at us with small arms. After that, um, but when it happened, I was up in the turret and everybody was convinced I was dead because, I guess and I didn't see the explosion because it knocked me out I remember everything turning, turning white, that's all I remember Like a TV.
Speaker 2:When I woke up, it was like static. I could hear static in my ears and I was only out for a few seconds, but everybody behind me thought I was dead because we just got engulfed in flame. I don't remember any heat either. Engulfed in flame, I don't remember any heat either. But, uh, when I came to, I could hear ping, ping ting.
Speaker 2:So we were getting shot at and I went to grab my joystick, because I had a joystick operated 50 caliber and an electronic turret, and my joystick was gone. It had got blown out of the turret and I so I went to grab my AK or my M4. I didn't care, I was grabbing a rifle. They were both gone. They'd both been blown out of the turret. So I had a grenade that didn't get blown out. It was rolling around there. It got blown out from where it was, in a little bag that I kept them in, I had a grenade and my pistol. My pistol was still sitting there, but the turret was filled with the dirt from the wall and concrete chunks and I'd had a canopy over my turret that had a camouflage net on it and that had been all blown off. My glasses had been blown off on my eye pro and uh and it's not so much training kicked in as I was fucking furious it was like all this.
Speaker 2:We've gone through all this and waiting, and waiting and waiting and these fuckers got me and all that's what I was saying. They fucking got me and they destroyed my and our vehicle's still rolling, but it doesn't have a front anymore. So oil spraying like a geyser out of a whale, it's just spraying up over on everything and my driver. I can hear him swearing and I can hear Colonel Chapman instantly calling it in We've been hit and telling the other vehicles I can't remember what it was, we were red or we were black. That's what he was telling them we're black. We're black, which means we've got casualties and we're no longer operable Right. Black, we're black, which means we got casualties and we're no longer operable right.
Speaker 2:And we come to a roll rolling. Stop into these concrete barriers. And I was fucking mad because my weapons were gone. They'd blown my weapons away and now it was just unfair. You know this is not freaking fair. So I'm screaming expletives and Colonel Chapman and he was like I need you, I need you, cool it. I said okay, that's all he had to tell me is I need you? Because I was ready, I was leaving, I was getting out, I was going to go find some people with that stupid little pistol. He said I need you Stay right here Because I was leaving. But I did, I stayed, and then the 82nd Airborne came and rescued us. Yeah, yeah, we called it in and, yeah, that was the worst.
Speaker 1:Did you take casualties in that one?
Speaker 2:Nope, I got hurt a little bit, but not enough to be a matter of record. My shirt was leaking out of my ears and I couldn't hear for a couple days and, uh, probably for longer than that anybody's hit with an efp would tell you you're probably the luckiest person on the planet we are. We're lucky, we're so close yeah and then you know the 82nd.
Speaker 2:They come and did an after. They did a blast analysis and all that. They said I wasn't an efp. And I was like, look, dude, there's copper all over the side of our vehicle because in every little divot there was a little piece of the copper where it burned halfway through and then stopped. Uh, it was obviously an efp. It put a perfectly round hole that big around in the wheel that it hit and a perfectly round hole through the crankcase of the engine. It could look to and see sunlight. That was that round. Well, shrapnel don't do that?
Speaker 1:no, that's not. That's the ordinary. Uh, ied it was melting, yeah and uh, but they didn't.
Speaker 2:They were. Efps were a relatively new thing. And uh and like say, if they were gonna, they've been. They've been wanting us for a while. They've been wanting our specific unit because we had gone into their neighborhood and they didn't and they were that's an expensive proposition. They don't. Those efps weren't easy to get right and so they were going to be very judicious about deploying it.
Speaker 1:I'm sure they put a lot of thought into how they hit it, setting us up knowing we were going to be there well, this is something else, too dave, that maybe people don't know is that when you're there, um, good guys and bad guys all take stock of like what markings are on your vehicle, what combat patch you're wearing, what unit you're. They have, they know. And so when you say they were trying to get you, that's not paranoia, like they knew who you were and they knew that you were the one that they wanted to get and it was a perfect setup yep, and we had.
Speaker 2:They knew who we were, because we wanted people to know who we were we had.
Speaker 2:We were team hurricane and on every one of our turrets was a, the, the national weather service hurricane symbol. We had that it was hurricane one, hurricane two, hurricane three, uh plus we were in their shit all the time, right and uh. So you know, I can imagine being a bad guy and they're like oh jesus, because when we rolled into their neighborhood we were going to everybody's house. You know, if it was a mile worth of houses, we were walking a mile. We're knocking on everybody's door, we're going in everybody's house and depending on which side of the road we were on, it was different because, like on the shia side of the road it's really unusual, that was the shia and the sunnis were fighting each other, let alone us. So on that side of the road, in the shula district, the mans district, was all of Saddam Hussein's former bureaucrats, his school teachers, his police chiefs, his government workers, his mid-level, relatively well-off, nice houses. But you know the middle class. They were middle-class people, they weren't peasants, but they were all beholden to the Ba'ath Party and to Saddam Hussein.
Speaker 2:Because they were middle class people, they weren't peasants, but they were all beholden to the bath party and to saddam hussein that because they were the professionals, uh, power plant operators, you know those kind of guys that were, uh managers, and the shia had taken over their neighborhoods. But the shia were very religious. You know these followers of muktad al-sadr, who was a cleric. They were religious, they believed in what they were doing. They believed Muhammad was on their side, allah was on their side. So they would do stuff like kick a Sunni out of his house, take his house over, not steal anything from him, take all the Sunni's belongings and, like, pack them to the corners of the rooms because they weren't thieves, and then cut the dude's head off. They had no problem cutting the dude's head off or his son's head off in front of him, yeah, but which happened?
Speaker 2:I mean, I remember talking to women who found their son's head on the sidewalk, uh, but they wouldn't steal anything, right? We're on the other side of the road, literally on the other side of the road, literally on the other side of the road, the sunni dust squads were kidnapping people and asking for ransom. They were the guys that were working people over with craftsman drills and, you know, torturing the shit out of people in the middle of the night, like kidnapping everybody, uh, and then pot shooting at us when they got a chance to. Every they were all shooting at us when they got a chance to. They were all shooting at us when they got a chance to. But yeah, it's a whole different world than what I expected. You know, growing up as a kid and having relatives and family members who went to combat.
Speaker 1:It wasn't what I expected. Expected it was asymmetric warfare you didn't have a front line. You didn't know who, didn't know who your, your friends were and I don't. You know you were talking about how they would cut somebody's head off in the in the front room. I don't know about you, but I spent 12 good months, seven days a week, 21st hours a day, not wanting to end up on the internet getting my head cut off. That was in the back of my mind the whole time.
Speaker 2:I don't know if you experienced that. Yeah, our unit was considered high risk of capture because we were embedded with the Iraqis. So it doesn't matter.
Speaker 2:Are you really going to trust these guys? Will they sell you down the river? My interpreter had been kidnapped, previously Guy's living in the States, now US citizen. He was able to overpower his captors and killed a shitload of them and got away, and we wore personal locator beacons which was about the size of a large walkie-talkie, had two buttons on it. If she'd hit the fan, you hold those two buttons down for three seconds. And then the entire army has a new job. At that point they're going to come find you.
Speaker 2:So we all had personal locator beacons. We all had escape and evasion kits with us all the time and I felt the same way uh, that they're not. I'm not gonna end up on the internet getting my head cut off yeah when I rolled, I had two pistols, two rifles, my crew serve weapon.
Speaker 2:I had seven knives on me and, and I didn't have seven knives to fight dudes. I had seven knives to where. No, and I didn't have seven knives to fight dudes. I had seven knives to where. No matter what happens, they're not going to find one of them, and if I have to use it to cut my own throat, that's exactly what I'll do. I'm not going to let them cut my throat right, uh, and I did. I had knives secreted in every place you could imagine, carrying a knife so where the bad guys weren't going to find them all, I was going to end up with a weapon, and it was a constant, uh, fear of ours and we were very susceptible to it. I'm really surprised it did not happen more than it that it did uh say we were heavily armed.
Speaker 2:People didn't like to mess with us.
Speaker 1:But uh I'm surprised it didn't happen more than it did well, and you quit your job and volunteered to go do this I did yeah and I was that ever roll? Around. They ever roll around in your head when you're out there.
Speaker 2:Like I quit my job to do this turning 50 years old over there was a revelation yeah and my son being over there at the same time.
Speaker 2:Uh, his second tour and my first tour, he was an infantryman with a third id and we were able to communicate with each other through Iraqi cell phones that we bought on the street. And, uh, he had a very high profile. He was a squad leader, even though he's an e5. He was running a squad, uh, and he was going out on three and four day small kill team missions. That's what his job was was to go out and find guys, lay an ambush and kill him. And, uh, it was my baby boy. You know, that was the kid I talked into going in the army because I thought it would do good things for him. When he was 20 years old and had a punk rock haircut, I was like you need to. He wanted to move in with me. When I would, I went down to uh arkansas to teach at the schoolhouse down there and he wanted to move with me. I says, yeah, you can move with me, but you're 19 years old, you're going to join the guard yeah and he did.
Speaker 2:He joined the national guard down there in arkansas. Uh, it was in the national guard for eight months when the war started. And he did he joined the national guard down there in arkansas. Uh, it was in the national guard for eight months when the war started. And he was like, if I'm going, I'm going, I'm better trained.
Speaker 2:And so he joined the regular army and was was deployed very soon after switching from the guard to the regular army, but being there in country with my son at the same time. You know, my dad told me war stories and I remember looking at him with a sense of awe and hearing these things. And my uncle told me war stories. My big brother had been to Vietnam and told me war stories and it's completely different being on the phone telling war stories to each other in the same theater of war with your son. I felt like I needed to protect him but I couldn't, and that I felt like he's 10 times as tough as I am. Anyway, I was a good judge of character and a good judge of soldiering skills and he was a fine fricking soldier, one of the best Uh he.
Speaker 2:He ended up in 900 fights without getting wounded because he was that good Uh and and three tours later, but uh, uh, I can't remember what caused me to think of him in the first place.
Speaker 1:So it's because you guys were in the same, basically same theater of war at the same time. Yeah.
Speaker 1:So not to sidetrack us, but I'm just curious, because my son served as well and we weren't there at the same time, but he deployed right after I got back, and you know we don't come from a military family, and so he and I get each other, and so sometimes we will laugh at things that other people don't think are funny, or, uh, you know, thanksgiving dinner can be a little interesting because he and I share some of the same background in history that that people who have never served will never understand, um and? And so they just look at you look at you sideways sometimes, because they don't get it, but your son gets it Like you have that bond that no one else could have with their son unless they both served.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and it's you know it's not so much unspoken, it's you know when I think of my dad as being a veteran. My dad was a truck driver delivered laundry stuff, who happened to go into world war ii and was a veteran, like like 70 of the every able-bodied man did back then, because they either got drafted or they joined right and the war was a huge part of his life. But he would never let you know that. My mother would never let you know that, losing her own older brother, her only sibling, you know what impact that war must have had on them. But they moved on and their focus became hard work raising a family, getting a house.
Speaker 2:The american, my son and I, are forever branded as warriors by our family. That's how they look at us. The war walks with us every day, even when we don't want it to, and I think part of it is the social media mystique that's grown up about what being a warrior means nowadays, because there are so few of us really Less than 1% of people out there serve in the military anymore, where my dad's, like I say it, was 30% minimum that joined 70% of the men joined uh, 70 of the men and and.
Speaker 2:Uh. There's an allure that people are a more afraid of and be taught by rote to respect through mantras like thank you for your service and this and a certain expectations that civilians are supposed to hold veterans in steam for where it was different, because when I grew up, mr mapes cross street he was a veteran fought in the battle of bulge. I knew that nobody else gave a shit. My dad fought in three different conflicts. During the war, my mom's uncle got killed. My dad's twin brother was one of my brothers in vietnam. Uh, nobody really gave a shit much because everybody did it right, but but those guys were heroes, and they were.
Speaker 1:They were heroes.
Speaker 2:Mr Mapes. He limped his entire life. Yeah. You know and we knew he'd been wounded. But yeah, so half the guys, Mr Seifert down the street didn't have both of his legs Because he was on a Navy aircraft carrier that a kamikaze ship or a plane had flown into cost him both his legs. I don't know, it's almost a manufactured persona now of what a veteran is, but because we are that small part of our family nowadays that have done it, that's who we are to everybody in our family right where if I looked around the christmas table when I was 10 years old, the minority were not veterans.
Speaker 2:I mean the majority, yeah were all my uncles, all my, most of my cousins, my parents, my grandparents, just different now.
Speaker 1:So this might be a good time. I don't want to skip over anything, so if we're skipping over something, tell me. But this might be a good time to talk about what it's like to come home, because the people who go off to war are not the same people who come home. I know I wasn't. I certainly wasn't the same person when I got home. And you, you live with these people for a year, a year and a half, and you, you go through some stuff that no one else understands with them, and then you come home, and part of it, too, is that you're in the national guard. You're in the national guard, so, um, you're not coming home to a base where there's a bunch of other people who have been there. You basically come home and that's it. So, um, can we talk a little bit? What was that like for you?
Speaker 2:yeah it. For me it was especially unique in that not only was I a deployed guard member, I didn't deploy with a unit, so I didn't have I, I, I went from. It was this place we used to go to, called twos it was a small city and it was a Peshmerga outpost there, uh, it was bad bad area.
Speaker 2:Uh, and we were towards the end of our tour there. They were going to send us back to baghdad again and decided not to, and so they took us and and kind of pulled us away from the peshmerga and stuck us with this strategic infrastructure brigade which was engineers, army engineers, build bridges and everyone and they were the bad guys. They were the bad guys. So now we're embedded in a bad guy unit. We knew they were all bad guys. They were literally planting ieds down the roads they were repairing in the daytime, because it was, it was job security so at night time, uh, they were our enemy.
Speaker 2:At daytime, we were going through these charades and we'd stay at this place called two's hormado, at castle grayskull, and castle grayskull was a house that was built by saddam hussein's wife's bodyguard. So um majid I think her name was her bodyguard built this palatial home. Uh, we were staying in chemical ali's house before we moved down there and took this house. So we didn't have any floors, didn't have a second floor, had the second floor but no floor. On the second floor was a straight ceiling all the way up, dirt floors on the inside, uh, but it was a call. We called it castle grayskull because it was a solid concrete structure, right and, uh, it was a bad area, one of the few places where my Iraqi guys, my Peshmerga guys, would just get behind their dushka a couple, three times a day and shoot into the village, just harassing and interdiction fire, like what they did in Vietnam. Uh-huh.
Speaker 2:Because you know there's bad guys running around there, might as well, let them know we're here. And so it was a strange, really weird place, because it was new to us and it was out and barren and dangerous.
Speaker 2:And then I got on a helicopter and went home in 40 hours and was sitting in my fricking living room. I went through Fort. They sent me back to Fort Riley. I was when I went to Atlanta. Fort Riley was at Fort Riley for a day. They put me on an airplane, sat me home and I was sitting in my chair with a bourbon next to the fireplace going. What the fuck was that? You know.
Speaker 1:Almost like you'd woken up from something it was I did.
Speaker 2:I literally woke up. We had visited a hospital where 20 of our guys were hit real bad got shit tore out of them, friendly fire incident. Our SF guys lit them all up. So I was visiting wounded and in the depths of this war zone and then bam.
Speaker 2:I was home and I tried to explain it. So for the next couple of months, uh, I didn't. I lost my AGR job, right, right. So when I got back, I had to fight to get my agr job back again, and it come right down to me making an appointment with the governor and I said here's what's going to happen. And they let me speak to the lieutenant governor, because the michigan national guard hate to say it.
Speaker 1:We're like no, sorry, you quit your agr job, you're done this is one, this is one thing I'll say bad about the guard.
Speaker 2:They don't forget shit no, and, and I did not have a job I had. Now, I had almost 17 years of service and did not have a pension. All of it was why? Because I went to war right and I got a hold.
Speaker 2:They got me an appointment with the lieutenant governor on the telephone and I says lieutenant governor. I said here's what's going to happen. I said five o'clock, every local news agency is going to be in my living room and I'm going to be sitting there with a tear running down my eye and my grandchild in my lap and my bronze star permanently or prominently displayed. You're going to tell me that you'll guarantee a job from the Donald worker who gets deployed or a guy who works at the local lumber yard has protections if they get deployed, they're going to make sure they get their job back when they come back to uniformed soldiers employment, re-employment rights act and you're going to tell me that as a soldier I don't get those. I can't get my full-time job back.
Speaker 2:And the inspector general of the Michigan National Guard had sat with General Cutler and he went. This is wrong. What you're doing is wrong. This guy's sacrificed and now, by this time, 15 months later, they were asking AGR guys to go because they were looking to build these more of these mid teams were begging them they were begging them yeah and nobody wanted to and I was risking unemployment and I had a job offer.
Speaker 2:I did. I had the university of iowa, rotc. I'd met uh, one of their professor of military science, over there as a when he was deployed. He wanted me to come out there. They offered me the job going out there, wear the uniform every day. It was rotc, pay you the same pay scale yeah but I wanted to serve the michigan national guard.
Speaker 2:I wanted to finish my time and, uh, the ig got with general cutler and general cutler said will you take a bus to e7? Because we don't have any e8 slots? I says I'll take a bus to E7? Because we don't have any E8 slots? I says I'll take a bus to E7. And that was fair, because I was the one that left my E8 job and I wasn't going to hold up a control grade just so somebody else couldn't get promoted. So I took a bus to E7 and I went back right where I started as a street recruiter and I was successful. I went on a kick ass for a year as a street recruiter and then the very IG that fought to get my job back hired me as the Inspector General NCO and I made E-8 again by going to work for the Inspector General's office, did that three years and then got selected for Sergeant Major and doing a job that I wasn't used to I I was selected as the 63rd brigade operation.
Speaker 2:Sergeant major was my dream job. All the artillery, all the infantry, all the cab in the state reported the 63rd. I was going to be their operation sergeant major. I was going to develop their training. I was going to set the op tempo. I was going to set the op tempo.
Speaker 2:I was going to help them deploy, bring them back home. It was a job that was made for me. I'd just come back off a combat tour, plus Inspector General experience and Bert Francisco. I was reporting Monday this is Thursday I'd already got up. They gave me all the. I had all my transition materials from the, the brigade. I've been studying up on all their manpower and m toes and he said I need you to do something for me. I said what's that? He said I need you to be the g1 sergeant major and I says he's. I says say again, sir. He says you have to be the g1 Sergeant Major. He says we're having problems. He says they need a leader, they don't need a clerk. And it's a clerk job, it's the top clerk job. But you're an administrative specialist. That's what the G1 is personnel records. I didn't know anything about personnel, nothing.
Speaker 2:I knew about enlistment packets because I'd been a recruiter but, I didn't know anything about pay and and medical and everything the g1's responsible for. But he was right, they, they were fractious and it was a big staff of 42 enlisted and the officers that cycled through there they didn't know shit either. Those poor people. You know those poor officers. They come in as a major, never done any of it in their life before, and all of a sudden you're now the OIC of the officer branch. They didn't know anything.
Speaker 1:And I think too, dave, the other thing, because I've got an enlisted background and then people will say I had half my brain removed so I could be an officer. But we can talk about that later on. Here's the thing that I know for a fact, and that is that when you go to almost any unit, the enlisted soldiers, they've been there, like they're there, that first sergeant, those squad leaders, those platoon sergeants, they've been there. Officers come and go, right, officers come and go, and officers come and go and you get good officers, you get bad officers, you get officers that will listen and officers that won't. But the thing is everyone in that unit knows that officer he's going to be gone in 18 months or a year or six months or whatever it is, but they know they can count on you because you're the enlisted guy I remember getting an officer who's a young captain.
Speaker 2:You know him well probably. He reported to recruiting, which is a terrible place for an officer to go, but they've got to do their time somebody's got to do that operations officer job.
Speaker 2:So they're dealing with seasoned recruiters that have been doing the job for 10 years. They come in, they don't know anything about the business and sammy dolman was a battalion commander and Sammy Dahlman was smart enough recruiting battalion commander to go. I don't know shit about what you guys are doing, but as long as it's working, don't call me. And so he stayed in his office, built his house, focused on the 119th and things that he wanted to focus on Was a buffer when he needed to be Exactly.
Speaker 2:When you need a lieutenant colonel. You got him. He resourced the shit out of us. He was a great resource provider but Sergeant Majors ran the show and the production and we had a young captain come in as operations officer and I remember Sammy had given me signature authority on anything come out of MEPS. If they need policy directives, things like that, he goes. You know how to sign. I'm like. I didn't name that, that was him. You got the stamp, that's who he called. You got the stamp and so I did. I had the Sammy Dolman stamp for day-to-day communications with the MEPS.
Speaker 2:If something had to come from on high to tell the MEPS to do something, it was way. He just had sammy's signature on it. And that captain was like, well, I should be the one signing this stuff. And I said, yeah, probably not. So he probably said that. I said he probably said because he probably don't understand it. He goes look, he's got all the bats and all the balls and I just want to play the game and I said sir, you don't even know what sport we're in Because there's no bats and balls here.
Speaker 2:I said sit. I said you're going to be out of here in 10, 12 months and you'll get an ARCOM and you'll not make any waves. And I feel for you, Because it's a terrible thing to do to an officer. It's terrible, but that's all they can do. What are they going to do?
Speaker 1:You know what? It's not a terrible thing to do, officer. It's not. And here's why I'm going to tell you why. Because as an officer, that shit you need to know. You need to know what your place is Like. You know, I think people get rubbed the wrong way when they hear the that's NCO business kind of thing, because sometimes it's not right, sometimes it's an excuse. 99.9 of the time a good officer will go yep, you guys handle it. And that's actually a good place for them to learn it. Either they learn it or they don't. And if they're not learning it, it's a terrible thing to do in an officer. Yeah, but if they're smart, that's a great place for them to be yep and it comes a formulation of policy.
Speaker 2:That's what officers are for. Implementation of policy. That's policy. That's what the NCO does.
Speaker 1:Right. Sit down, shut up and learn.
Speaker 2:I've had some great officers that really understood that. I watched Brigadier General Terrell at MSU last week dedicating a— they just uncovered an older veteran memorial that had been banging around since like the 20s. They just rediscovered this and rededicated it last week. So it was in. I'm an alumni member and it was in that magazine. It showed a picture of General Terrell and he was my ROTC cadet for the worst AT of his life where he had to follow me every. You know I was an E6.
Speaker 1:That poor guy.
Speaker 2:He was. He was, he was an MSU ROTC cadet and I said you got one of those little green books I know you do. He goes yeah, yes, sergeant. I said here's what you want to do. He says we're here for two fucking weeks. I says you follow me around for two weeks, write down everything I say and everything I do, don't say nothing. He said all right, sergeant. I said I hit the end of two weeks, you'll be the smartest cadet here. And now he's a brigadier general, you know. But he's a guy who took those kind of lessons to heart. You know, he was in the artillery community and cab community for a while but the artillery community for a lot of years.
Speaker 2:And he did. He trusted his freaking ncos right and and deployed and became a great officer never saw him with the pump puffed up.
Speaker 1:You know I am the officer kind of guy because I've I've interacted with him since I retired. You're absolutely right.
Speaker 2:Like he's, he got it and he's good at terrible, terrible, you know, from from the days when he was a young captain, young, and I watched all of it, you know, watched him as a lieutenant. Watch him as a captain, watch him become major, watch him get so professional.
Speaker 2:That thing, when those guys make lieutenant colonel how you watch and they, either they got it or they don't by the time they make lieutenant colonel, they're either going to be just somebody that everybody avoids, they're going to be really good and uh, army's really good at that. The guard sometimes isn't. Sometimes there's guys that just hang on to do their time or girls that get protected, and it's not so much the case in the NCO ranks, because you get plenty of guys that try to stay as an E5 for 25 years and they never get under any pressure or under magnifying glass. But it's kind of hard to make E8 or E9 without having a spotlight on you for an extended period of time by the time they do so. Anyway, I make G1, sergeant Major, and they were exactly right. I mean, I was there for two days and I don't know if you remember the old G1, but every outside wall of the third floor of that whole area of Joint Force Headquarters had file cabinets, big three-drawer file cabinets.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I remember that.
Speaker 2:And it was because of the mentality. Here we're in the digital age, here we're. Iperms had been launched a few years earlier. Because of misunderstandings or security, that unit had kept every piece of paper it had generated from like the 70s, and I went up there as a sergeant major a new set of eyes and I went well, what's in this half? I can't remember what's this literally literally 30 tons of paper I had removed and shredded. They had to hire a shredding company to come do it.
Speaker 2:There were certain NCOs there. I won't mention names, but some of the old-timers that had been in the G1 for 20 years.
Speaker 1:Probably gave him a heart attack.
Speaker 2:Were freaking literally to where I had to tell them you're being insubordinate.
Speaker 2:You can't get in my face and tell me I'm fucked up. I'm the sergeant major, so you're getting insubordinate. I don't want to have to slam you, but that's what's going to happen Because guess what? This shit's getting hauled off and burned and we digitized everything. We digitized everything with the tools that we had available to begin with and literally got rid of all that paper and went electronic and really streamlined operations. And I was able to build different teams that had free time because they weren't shuffling papers around, and I was there for two years and it was very rewarding. I'm glad I did it, but it sure was out of my value.
Speaker 2:It wasn't my area of expertise.
Speaker 1:Which is probably good, because you might've been that, you might've been that guy that showed up and goes oh my God, we got to keep all this paperwork Right. You're like that's a, that's a fresh set of eyes when you don't necessarily know how it works, but you know what wrong looks like for some reason.
Speaker 2:And it was a mess.
Speaker 1:I mean it was a mess I mean it was a mess.
Speaker 2:We did conditional promotions that had happened five years earlier, that the army didn't put a lot of thought into what's going to happen afterwards. Uh, when these conditional promotions, what if these people don't go to the nco school they need to go to, or they've been carrying around e6 for three years, four years, five years, but don't have their prerequisites to make E7 because they don't have to make E6. So there were people getting reduced and policies that were just ignored, that had to be reinforced, and it was tough. It was a tough couple of years, but I'm glad I did it.
Speaker 1:There was no popularity contest, was there?
Speaker 2:Then I became the first recruiting and retention command sergeant, major the first one that they had and that was a job that was made for me because I had been a street recruiter twice so nobody could tell me about street recruiting. I'd been operations and training NCO. I'd been the state retention NCO. I'd been the operations and training NCOIC. I'd worked at the MEPS. I'd been an NCOIC of a 10-man recruiting team. I taught at the schoolhouse and I was the liaison to the active component recruiting at Fort Knox, kentucky. So nobody knew more about recruiting than me and I competed it was a competitive award process to get that job and when I got it I was like, yes, this is for me, finally, I was right at home.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so how long did you do that for?
Speaker 2:I did that for just two years and it was great because we hadn't made mission and I did exactly what I wanted to do with that that as a battalion had not made mission in years, and my first year there we made a hundred percent and then some of our mission. My second year there we were on track and it was another somewhat traumatic event. Uh, that had a impact in me leaving and uh, so I'm two years, just about two years in. I graduated from the Sergeant Major's Academy. I did that while I was a G1 Sergeant Major. I'd gone to the academy, I was doing a good job in recruiting, loved my boss, the battalion commander, and I got a call at 6 o'clock in the morning, 5 o'clock in the morning, from one of my NCYCs.
Speaker 2:I got a call from one of my NCCOICs real early in the morning. He was an E-8, and one of his soldiers was missing. He was concerned because his wife had called and this was a soldier. His nickname was Rado and Rado had somewhat of a troubled past, had some dependency issues with alcohol but had whipped it and anyway he was missing. He didn't come home that night at 2 o'clock in the morning. So his E8, his master sergeant, who was also his friend, was trying to find him.
Speaker 2:By this time it was 5 o'clock in the morning. He hadn't shown up since 10 o'clock the night before at his house. He had talked to his wife on the phone, said I was on his way home. So we called the police early in the morning and as police the police in Lansing they pinged his phone. And they pinged his phone and it was a patch of woods up by Michigan State University and I knew that area. That's where I grew up, I mean I played in them woods. And then we come to find out through friends of friends that he had called this former girlfriend out in California the night before. They'd had some kind of tearful soul-bearing over the telephone the night before and then we found evidence of alcohol in his office. When we went there to his office there was empty bottles of.
Speaker 2:Jack Daniels and he had been on the wagon for almost a year and so, anyway, we're looking for him and we follow his track out into these woods and there's a homeless encampment nearby. And they said, yeah, we saw. And I stumbled on this homeless encampment and I'm by myself at this time, we'd split up back in these woods and the police are out looking. Lansing Township Police and Lansing Police had a helicopter because they're searching these woods, because his phone had ping there right. And uh, they said we saw a guy in a uniform last night and he was like in a dress uniform.
Speaker 2:And I was like, yeah, anyway, I just kind of I don't know what it was, but I followed my nose and and I found him in the river and he had, uh, put his full dress uniform on and walked in the river, killed himself in the middle of the night. And when I found him he was jacked up in some, uh, in a log jam and I had I had found him by talking to the people to. So the homeless encampment was near a bridge and they said they saw him near the water. So I just followed it downstream, because shit floats downstream and that's when I found him.
Speaker 2:I remember sitting there and next I called the detective who had been dealing with all night, this Lansing police guy, and he's the guy that got us the helicopter. He's the guy like, this is a soldier's missing, we're gonna do what we need to do. And I said I found him and, uh, you can call off the search, but I need help because we got to pull him out of the fucking river and, uh, I was so fucking mad. I sat there on the bank of that river. I pulled leaves out of his mouth because he had leaves and shit in his mouth and I didn't know who was going to show up.
Speaker 2:But I didn't want to see him looking like that because he looked like shit and a body had been in the water for 10-12 hours and I was so fucking mad at him. He had two kids. Man had a little girl that was like five and a little boy that was like three. And I'd met his kids and a wife and I'd lost enough of my friends to suicide by this time. Kids whose fucking initials I got tattooed on my chest, and I was just so fucking mad at them and, at the same time, so fucking used to it. It was just again and the fire department came. And the fire department came and his NCYC and a couple of his teammates were with him and they said these guys can pull him out, we'll help them, but they get to pull him out. And so they did. They tied ropes on us in the whole nine yards and they let us pull him out Because he was not easy to get out guy, it was a steep bank, uh and we pulled him out. And it was another one of those things where I went back to the office and I went you know what I'm fucking done? Yeah, I'm done. Uh, I'd suffered a lot of suicide deaths, me and my son, both and my son. He's got a picture of him and his squad. The last tour that he went to, everybody in his squad is dead except for him everybody. So this is something we dealt with mutually. He was an escort on the way home with one of the bodies and then I went to the funeral of that. It was just so much fucking death and it was something I was not going to deal with. Sitting back home as a command sergeant major in a desk in Lansing I was like that's it, that's the last one I'm going to have to deal with wearing this uniform. And I did.
Speaker 2:I went into the AGR office the next day and I told sergeant major a female I can't remember her name, squared away. I says how soon can I get out? She says it takes about a month. I says I want out now. I'm retiring and I had my.
Speaker 2:I had 20, almost 25 years, yeah, and my mother had died the week before I found this kid. I lost my mother, so my dad was like distraught and I just was like, yeah, this is uh time for me to go.
Speaker 1:I think, the most frustrating in all of that. I mean, I buried someone every year since I got back right. I mean, I get it. The most frustrating thing is there's literally nothing you could do. I know who you're talking about because right before that happened, I was in line at Sears to return something and he was there and we had a long conversation. There wasn't a fucking thing wrong with that guy. I'm going to tell you right now nothing.
Speaker 2:And then that happened I'd had a really good counseling session with him. Yeah, because he was uh behind in his mission. Yeah, and you know I was. I'm firm believer and I could train a guy to recruit. You know I can teach you to recruit or I can help you out because of what I hated seeing was, squared away ncos going to recruiting and fail because it doesn't matter how good an nco is.
Speaker 2:Either you're a good recruiter or you're not right you might be the best infantryman in the world, but you suck at recruiting, yeah. But their careers get ruined because they get that bad ncoer or two bad NCOERs because they're not good at recruiting. And Radel was kind of like that, that he was a good soldier but this might not have been the right job for him. And so I made it a point that when I had guys that were struggling, I was going to personally counsel them because I was going to make that determination where, before you get your career ruined, let's find a job for you, let's find a readiness job for you somewhere.
Speaker 1:Find something you can do.
Speaker 2:Exactly, and I'm not going to give you a ban on COER. We'll just go do the things you're good at, because, yeah, these guys got their careers just fucking trashed, just ruined. Yeah, let's use language, but yeah, I had a real good counseling session with him that week and the alcohol must, must have something to do with it. This tie that he had with this other person that he called on the phone uh, triggered some kind of behavior yeah and, uh, I don't know.
Speaker 2:You know I've questioned so many of them. I've had command. I had a command sergeant major you probably remember that to walk into the woods outside his house, shoot himself.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I went to that funeral. He was a mentor to me.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I busted my ass to help him through the academy because he was not a book smart guy. The academy was very demanding. It was all online. Well, if you're not good at that online learning like he wasn't. He was an old school, so I busted my ass helping him write papers and and uh, uh, because I knew he'd be a good csm. I just knew he'd be a good transportation guy.
Speaker 2:You know that's what it'd be. He's good at that, uh, and then others, countless, others not countless, but there was a dozen of them that, that I could think up off the top of my head. And I was just done with it.
Speaker 1:They're all head scratchers. They're all head scratchers. I mean I can't like I don't know about you, I can't like pick out one guy and go oh yeah, we all knew that was going to happen. Not one of them were like that, and you know? No, none of them. Yeah, and I would imagine and we haven't really touched on this, but I imagine you yourself have probably been in that spot before- too Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I tell you when I first got home and we talked about that how I went and lost track of the subject. In about 40 hours I went from a combat zone visiting wounded soldiers in a hospital to being at home and I couldn't get away, even though physically I was back. Remember the old overhead projectors that they used in high school where they had the Mylar sheets and they would draw on it with a black marker and it would overhead project onto the wall.
Speaker 2:You know that's what the teachers used, and it was like everywhere I walked, there was this sheet of mylar between me and reality of what I had seen or what I had done, or what I had saw or what I had felt, and I couldn't get away from it. It was like it was there all the time, every time I drove, every time I turned to look at somebody there.
Speaker 2:All the time, every time I drove, every time I turned to look at somebody I was speaking through this filter that, uh, I couldn't get rid of it unless I got drunk. And I remember driving down saint joe highway the street I live on out in the street, I live on out in the country, I live in the country in the middle of the night, with a fifth of Jack Daniel between my legs and driving as fast as I could till the road, ran out into a cornfield, almost wrecked, almost totaled my truck on purpose, doing it on purpose. Not even it was passed on purpose doing it on purpose, or not even it was. It was passed on purpose. It was like like uh, uh, destined, I was destined to do it and I would fucked myself. You know, I did this to myself.
Speaker 2:I was 50 for crying out loud, I, I knew better, I knew better and uh, uh, and I hated fucking george bush and I hated dick cheney and I hated all these. I'd seen kids get blown up, you know. I'd seen kids lose their lives and parents that had to deal with that stuff for the rest of their existence their whole family for the rest of their existence.
Speaker 2:Why, why? And I kept doing that and kept drinking and kept getting worse and worse and worse till I called I I ended up getting a civilian job and I excelled at my civilian job. I walked into this civilian employer who had saw me guest speaking somewhere and said we really like you and we want you to. It was a Fortune 100 company. They wanted me to run their recruiting program, their veteran recruiting program, and they heard me guest speak talking about military recruiting. And I walked in there all cocky like I want $120,000 a year and they were like okay.
Speaker 2:And I was like oh shit, shit, that was easy and gave me the keys to the kingdom. I mean, this is it's roush enterprises, uh, which is the owning company of roush racing and roush industries, and they do a lot for veterans. They do a lot for veterans but, they didn't.
Speaker 2:I was the one who started that yeah and they really wanted to right and gave me every available resource that I needed. I mean, I walked in there and said all right, let's. First of all, we had to change our corporate culture so they understand the value of a veteran. Start with something as basic as that, and then active outreach programs. We had to spend money to reach these veterans. They were like sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, sure, what do you need? Plane tickets, car money, staff spare, no expense For the mere fact that they realized that the more veterans they hired, the more competitive edge they had over the guy who didn't hire veterans.
Speaker 1:It's money well spent. It's a return on investment. They knew it.
Speaker 2:They'd watched it happen. They were watching it happen with me. I was sitting at executive level meetings two weeks after working there making a shitload of money Uh, it was making I we. The first year I was there, we were recognized by the disabled American veterans as the number one employer of disabled veterans in the country. So went from hiring a goal we set a goal of hiring 15 veterans to hiring 200 our first year and the number one hirer of disabled veterans in the entire country and being recognized by Gary Sinise in Denver, colorado, on a stage later that year and the Secretary of Veterans Affairs Department was there coined me and everything because that was my program and I was haunted and they had no idea.
Speaker 2:I got my own place down in Detroit and had started treating my wife of 21 years like shit. We had never had a fight, hardly ever did we disagree on anything, and I found myself not trusting her. I found myself calling her. I remember the distinct day there was she joked about something, joked about something about me deploying, and I turned to her and I said you fucking liar, don't you say that? You fucking liar? And I was seriously hating her guts for fucking absolutely no reason other than I was screwed up and I moved out, wasn't seeing anybody else or nothing like that. I was just.
Speaker 2:I had this small little uh condo that I rented in detroit. I focused on that work, focused on that work and left everything behind because I just didn't want to face it. And it got to the point where my mother died. She had died the year before my father died. Uh, uh, my sister died, uh, everybody was fucking dying and I was like you know what fucking I'm dying? I just it's easier for me. This is easy. I'm not the army, first of all. I think you may or may not agree. The army did an amazing job at institutionalizing the act of suicide when I first joined the military back in the early 70s and there were people that slit their wrists back then. That's how they did it. There were guys that jumped out of the barracks window occasionally and they were pussies. That's what we all thought about them. You know how dare that frickin' coward slit his? He's scared. That's why he did it, because he's scared of being in the navy, not that he has ptsd or he's fucked up. He's scared.
Speaker 1:And so they were pussies well, go back to world war ii, when patton slapped that kid right he had ptsd but we didn't know. No, and that was.
Speaker 2:It wasn't a non-purpose, yeah so the army in their wisdom, the department of defense in their wisdom, when suicide started to become a problem, what do they do? They take a. They take an age-old problem that has harangued mankind since there's been mankind and they put 14 no offense, 14 staff officers in a room and say you better, you better figure this out guys right now, come up with something. Here's a couple doctors too. How?
Speaker 1:do we fix this really quick? How do we?
Speaker 2:fix this. And what they did was they institutionalized slavery. My son, who was an active component and was gone through like his 36th suicide briefing in three years, was going. Dad, you know I never thought about committing suicide, but if I have to sit through one more of these freaking briefings I might just do it. But if I have to sit through one more of these freaking briefings, I might just do it. So we understood as people who lived it.
Speaker 2:As a combat veteran who lived through losing so many friends, we understood that it was a problem. But the way they tried to handle it with the ace, it just didn't work.
Speaker 1:I think their intentions were good. I think the execution was awful.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. Their intentions were good but, like I say, they institutionalized it, where I think it became an off-the-shelf option. Right. All right. As a young NCO who's having problems, what are my options? My options are I get better, seek treatment? Well, there's a suicide one. Talk to my wife. There's this, the suicide one's a suicide one. Talk to my wife.
Speaker 2:There's this or that I'll just the suicide one's a fucking easiest. Yeah, you know it was the easiest, especially to somebody who's seen enough deaths to go, you know, fucking death. I remember distinctly thinking and it was an instance about bodies in a trash bag over in Iraq and and coming to the realization we ain't nothing but fucking walking trash bags. Anyway, that's the way I thought of it we're just a bag holding guts inside, right, you know, we can be snuffed out like that. The guy's face would look so cool a second ago. Look at his fucking face now. Right, you know, all it takes is a high-velocity piece of metal in the wrong place at the wrong time. Guess what? All your humanity, all your good memories, everything that you talk about, nice guy, bad guy, asshole, cool dude, fucking don't matter, cause that chunk just tore your fucking head off, yeah, and, and guys who know that and girls who know that are much more willing, I think, to go. You know what Fucking. I know that, and girls who know that are much more willing I think, to go.
Speaker 1:You know what fucking I'll take that little.
Speaker 2:How bad can it be? Yeah, how bad can it fucking be? It'll be quick anyway, right, or I can get up again tomorrow and try to deal with this shit time after time after and I did I got to the point where I called the hotline because I was sitting in my apartment down in detroit and I was seriously contemplating it. But I was also a retired command sergeant, major, and I knew that I better call somebody, because if you do it, dude, I've already buried one CSM. If I do it, everything's out the window and nobody will be able to say I understand what the fuck's going on.
Speaker 1:Right, well, nothing you ever did mattered.
Speaker 2:if you do mattered, yeah, do that exactly, uh, and how many other people are just going to look at me like, just like you say, he's so full of shit I don't have to listen to anything he ever told me or taught me.
Speaker 2:So I knew I didn't want to call, but I did and I tell you it was a nightmare. Because they asked me do you have firearms in your home? I said, yes, I got firearms in your home. I'm talking to a guy on the phone and within 10 minutes of me telling them there was a swat team showed up in my front door with their lights and sirens going yeah uh, with a loud speaker telling me to step out of the apartment, and I remember, right before I hung up, I went.
Speaker 2:You guys, you gotta work on this part of it, because this isn't the last thing you want to do to a guy who's feeling suicidal. It's also make him feel like a worthless piece of shit. Right, who has to give up his guns? And I did Gave him all my weapons. The police were very understanding once they got inside, but that's what they did. They called the because they asked me my address and I told my address. They. They called because they asked me my address and I told my address. They asked me if I had guns inside. So I started going to therapy. I went to therapy through the Warrior Center. It's part of the VA, but it's only for combat veterans. What's it called? I think it was called the Warrior Center. I think it is.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I went through cognitive behavioral therapy for about a year and I was very systematic and contemplative about it because I knew that I'd been damaged through repetition. That it's not about me being weak. I'd been damaged through repetition, that I, that it's not about me being weak Do that enough to the not fucking people. Some guys like it and those are the guys that that like it, and they're fucked up in their own little way. Right.
Speaker 2:And then some guys are fine. But if you do it to 200, I remember the premise of of of cognitive behavioral therapy is they find a, they find a instance in your life that's traumatic and you pick it apart. Basically you go back, you relive it. How, what would I do different to react differently than how I did the last time? So you got to pick that thing. What's the traumatic event? And I'm reeling them off to my-.
Speaker 1:You have a catalog right. They're cross-referenced and indexed.
Speaker 2:But my therapist is getting to the point where my therapist is looking at me like did that really happen to you? And I'm like you're not supposed to do that. You're not supposed to look at me like incredulous, like oh my god, dude, how did you live through that?
Speaker 1:you're not supposed to be shocked yeah, exactly, I was shocking him.
Speaker 2:So I was like the hardest part is gonna be to figure out which one of these I want to pick. But I did. I took it serious and the mere fact of speaking to somebody and going through the process, I think, helped me, and I still, to this day, have issues. The smartest thing I did was quit drinking alcohol, because alcohol made it 10 times worse. I would get depressed. I would play with guns. I would play with guns because I was drunk and and uh, uh, I wonder how many of my friends were drunk, playing with guns and killed themselves and probably wouldn't have had they not been drunk and playing with it. Uh, a couple I can think of off the top of my head. But, uh, quit and drink, and my wife and I did at the same time. We knew it was doing us no good. I was drinking too much. I was always quick to anger. Usually when I was drunk I acted different and I didn't have troubles with the law. I never had a DUI. But my son was a raging alcoholic. I was a raging alcoholic.
Speaker 2:I drank whiskey every day and once I retired, retired retired because I did I ended up going to work for the state and then quitting during COVID because I didn't want to relearn how to work all over again. And I was drinking at 10 o'clock in the morning because I could and we both decided that we were just going to stop and we stopped. I called the va, got their help with that too and uh, picked up a good therapist and a stop date and called them both on the same time did I quit and called my therapist that day, said well, this is it, let's see what happens. And and to me it's about alcohol management I would just get returned from Italy and guess what? I was in Italy, I was in Venice, I was having pasta and I had a glass of wine, and I don't mind having a glass of wine, but what I will not do is have whiskey in my house.
Speaker 2:What I will not do is ever have a touch of alcohol if I'm going to operate any kind of machinery. I don't drink at home. I don't drink in the United States. I've had a couple glasses of wine. I just went to a memorial in Bosnia for a fallen acquaintance, went to there 30 years. We dedicated a playground in Mostar, bosnia, in this woman's name name and everybody had a shot at that, and I had a shot too. Uh, so I'm not afraid alcohol. I'm not going to be an everyday drinker, I'm not going to do it, and that helped me tremendously when it come to psychologically handling who I am and what's molded me to this point, because it was alcohol doing all the molding and determining back then when you're drunk.
Speaker 1:Do you feel like your drinking was a way to not have to deal with all that other stuff?
Speaker 2:right, it was self-medication. Yeah, you know, I'm an active participant, active volunteer in the 54B District Court, the Veterans Treatment Court. I'm a mentor. I was one of their very first mentors 15 years ago. So November, on Veterans Day, out at the Hanna Center in East Lansing there's a celebration. General McDaniels is going to be there. We're celebrating 15 years of the court uh being successful.
Speaker 2:And it's a sobriety court and uh. So I know what sobriety looks like because I forced it down after the guys I was mentoring, even though I was drinking on my. But they knew I drank and I tell drank. But hey, I'm not the one in trouble with the law, you're the one that's got to quit drinking. So I knew what sobriety looked like.
Speaker 2:But I also knew what over-medication looked like, because I watched plenty of my veteran buddies that have run afoul of the law that it got into the VA health care system and they were fucking just drugged and they were fucking just drugged. I mean everything you could think. This helps me sleep, this helps me stay awake, this helps me think, this helps me not drink and I wasn't going to do that. I take blood pressure medication and stomach medication. I sure don't want to take anything that's going to affect how I think or how I sleep. But drinking was doing that. That's what I was doing, just to in a worse way. Uh, cause it was bad for my health and I started having stomach issues and couldn't figure out why.
Speaker 2:And my doctors at the VA told me they're like, dude, you're going to have to quit drinking. You know you can't keep doing this because I was regular, relatively physically fit fit. You know, I go to the gym and I remember Dr Najee, this old Iranian doctor that I got at the PA. He was like it's like you're like a car with no oil. He says you can drive it as fast as you want, but it's going to blow up and that's what you're doing is you're driving your body without feeding it the right stuff. So my wife and I decided to quit. We didn't have a drop of alcohol for the first 12 months. That was the deal. As I said. I said someday I'm gonna have a shot of bourbon again, uh, and I'm certainly not there. But uh, I did have a glass of wine in venice and uh.
Speaker 1:But I smoked cigarettes when I'm in europe too, and I don't smoke cigarettes here, right, I think, the only time I smoked was when I was in Europe too, and I don't smoke cigarettes here, right, I think the only time I smoked was when I was in the military, to be honest, yeah.
Speaker 2:When I'm in Europe, there's something about European cigarettes. I just got to smoke weed, so we buy a pack. My wife and I both smoke, but we never smoke over here at all.
Speaker 1:Well, the food's better. It is Everything I don't know.
Speaker 2:You're spending money and money, yeah, yeah, left and right. So how? How long has it been since you stopped? We quit on september 15th two years ago, so a little over two years. Yeah, uh, and I did. I went from. We both went from drinking diesel pizza. I was drinking at least a pint of whiskey every day, which isn't a lot by hardcore drunk standards, but there's plenty I.
Speaker 1:That's a lot to me.
Speaker 2:I was never, a guy who got drunk at work, or never a guy who snuck something on the. I was always that guy that got home five o'clock, started drinking, and my parents weren't drinkers, but both my sisters, my brother, all of us kids were, and so much life is so much better now that, at this pace uh, you know, I drive anywhere I want without ever worrying about because it was 90 of the time I would operate a motor vehicle. I was under the influence of something, right? Uh, how many times I, at seven o'clock at night, I would have to make the decision Okay, I'm going to keep drinking cause I'm not driving after this. Uh, you know but.
Speaker 2:If somebody calls an emergency, I can't drive. I'm stuck here at the house now, where now I'd never have to worry about driving under the influence. I'm waiting for a cop to pull me over so I can say I don't drink. Cause I haven't been able to say that yet.
Speaker 1:Right. Well, I have a bigger question then. So your wife and you both stopped drinking. There's a point in time where you're being a total asshole to her right, and so neither one of you are drinking now and you have a certain amount of clarity. What's that done for your relationship with your wife and your family?
Speaker 2:My wife that I treated like shit for 21 years. We got divorced and I initiated it. I told her I was done. She's still dear and close to me, and then I've been married for five years now to a neighbor and and uh uh, that was my neighbor before she was my wife.
Speaker 1:You got to share a house. Now, right, she's not your neighbor anymore.
Speaker 2:No, I moved two doors down.
Speaker 1:I sold my house and moved two doors down.
Speaker 2:Okay, uh, and it's done so much for both of us as far as she went on a fitness jag and lost 40 pounds and is physically fit and goes. We got a gym at home and she goes to the gym every day and uh, uh, we don't fight, we don't argue about stupid stuff, we're better with the kids around, uh. And you know we've done everything we've, we've passed all the milestones, because when we first both decided to quit in September, we were like boy, thanksgiving is going to be hard. You know, christmas is going to be hard because we have a drinking family. So going out there and drinking with everybody or not drinking I was the guy who brought the liquor, I was the hardcore bourbon drinker that never got shit-faced. They could drink, but we made it through that first death in the family, the funerals, the holidays.
Speaker 2:Once we did that first year and started realizing the benefits of it, waking up with clarity in the morning, just feeling so much better, feeling so much more healthy all the way around not being dependent on, uh, getting home, not stealing.
Speaker 2:We would buy a lot of one-shotters to drink in the car, you know, when we're heading up north or whatever. Have a little single shot of jack, not doing that stupid stuff anymore, um, and we're just so much healthier. Yeah, we eat better, act better, sleep better. My dreams, uh, it's been rough this last four or five months. They've come back because I have real nightmare issues and uh, they were. They got a lot better when I quit drinking for some reason they've been acting up again lately.
Speaker 2:I don't know why, but I know I sure ain't going to turn to drinking again. Right, that was bad, because you're risking everybody else's life when you do that too, Not just your own, it's so much better now.
Speaker 1:Well, we have talked about a lot of stuff over the last couple of hours, don't tell anybody. Oh, it's safe between you and I, Dave. No one will hear this. Is there anything we haven't covered that you want to talk about?
Speaker 2:Retirement's good, you know there's a happy ending. Yeah, I'm like anybody else. It hurts when I lose a member of the family, hurts when I lose a friend. The war is sometimes in in instances made that much worse and harder being a combat veteran, but in some ways it's made it better. You know, I remember before I became an airborne soldier, reading a book by Tom Clancy about the airborne and how General Dwight Eisenhower said I don't give a shit if they ever jump out of an airplane again. If I can get this guy to jump out of the airplane the first time, I know he's 10 times better soldier than the guy standing right next to him.
Speaker 2:If I can convince him to trust me enough to trust army equipment and has the balls to do it and I remember reading that and going. I want to try that, I want to test myself that way. And I was quite old. I went to jump school. I was still the oldest distinguished honor grad from the army or assault school down at Stabaluski at Fort Campbell. Wow, I was like 43 years old when I was a distinguished honor grad.
Speaker 1:That's pretty old for that school. That's a tough school. That's a tough school, yeah.
Speaker 2:And it says 14 toughest days in the Army, right as you walk through the gates. There's been times when I've cradled the head of a widow trying to console them that their husband just shot themselves in the bedroom. That's fucking happened to me, killed me. And there's been times when I've looked out the door of a helicopter and thought this is the coolest fucking thing I've ever done in my life and I don't believe that I'm here, that I'm getting paid, that I'm doing this. You know I'm freaking.
Speaker 2:This is legendary shit and the army has presented me with legendary opportunities time and time again right so, as hard as it is, the thing I want people to realize is there's the upside is just as powerful as the downside.
Speaker 2:If you remember it, you know you got to remember it and take advantage of it. I, I talked, I sold the army to young kids for years and years, and that's a tough sell. I mean, if you're honest with them, you sit down with a high schooler and say here's what we're going to do. It's a good deal. We're going to take all your independence. We're going to take that right away from you. We're going to put you with 100 other kids, most of them you don't know. You're going to use the shit out of you. So I'll tell you what you want to throw up Shave your head, pay a sub-minimum wage, feed you shitty food, send you to war, where there's a good chance to argue, not only be killed, but the better chance that you'll be horrifically maimed and in a wheelchair for the rest of your life. You resign right here.
Speaker 1:Oh, by the way, you're going to enjoy every minute of it, yeah.
Speaker 2:And you know, that's what we were selling to kids.
Speaker 2:But, in reality, what I would sell to them is there's times you're going to hate what you're doing, without a doubt. There's times of basic training. There's times in your first two days there that you're going to shake your head and wonder what you did and why you did it. But there's also going to be times I promise you, probably within the same week, that you'll look back and say this is the coolest thing in the world and nowhere else could I do this other than here. And it concerns me.
Speaker 2:Nowadays, the tenor of our nation's politics is very concerning to me as a veteran, because I still feel that obligation to defend the Constitution. I think our Constitution is definitely threatened right now, and it's not any particular. Well, it is particular individuals on both sides of the aisle, but it's us as, as citizens, we're the ones failing here. We can't blame any one individual on either side. We're the ones failing. We're the ones paying too much attention to this and not enough attention to this, and, uh, the time it takes to listen to somebody, to actually listen to somebody, and it's jeopardizing our constitutional rights. It really is, and, as somebody who's sworn to defend that Constitution, that's really scaring me. So get up in the morning, decide whether or not the Constitution's worth defending, and then do it Go down to the recruiting office.
Speaker 2:Raise your hand If, if you're too old, talk to somebody who is old enough. I talked to my grandkids all the time. That's what my son joined, that's what my granddaughter tried, and there's tough times that go along with it, but it's uh, it has to be done. Yeah, you know it has to be done that's.
Speaker 1:that's the truth, and I you know, having been a recruiter myself. It's funny cause I you never stop really being a recruiter, because if you're good at it it's because you believe in it. You know that it's going to help people. Well, with with all of that said, there's so much in here that people can can take away from from your life and your story and the people around you. I just want to ask one more question before we wrap it up, and I know you've said a couple of things already, but for someone who's listening to this 100 years from now, what lesson do you want them to take away from this conversation? Or, really, what lesson do you want them to take away from the way you've lived your life? What lesson do you want them to take?
Speaker 2:away from the way you've lived your life. You know, as I get older and I'm 67, so I'm in the twilight of my years, whether I like it or not. My dad lived a long life. He lived until he was 89. My mother lived until she was 89. But I have grandparents that died in their 70s. As I get older, I realize the fleeting nature of the impact that we have on this planet as an individual, and there are great men and great women who we speak about today. I'm not a Christian. I'm not a Christian, but I read the Bible every day.
Speaker 2:Jesus, 3,000 years ago, left such an impact on people as a dude that had no media representation, no public affairs guy, nothing but his willingness to speak to somebody and to care about other people. And 3,000 years later, half the planet is listening to every word he said because it's written down. He didn't choose that. I don't think. Not really not consciously. Albert Einstein didn't choose, when he was 9, 10, 12, 14, 20 years old, the impact he was going to make on the planet. David Dunkel did not choose what kind of impact he's going to make on this planet when he leaves.
Speaker 2:So I'm not concerned about my legacy. I'm proud of my legacy. I know that when I do pass that, my children are going to think a certain way about me. My neighbors are going to think a certain way about me. My acquaintances, my subordinates, my peers are all going to, are going to think a certain thing about me. And I did have control over that. How I presented myself, how I acted.
Speaker 2:Uh, and everybody out there has that opportunity and it's so easy to piss it away and it's so easy to be selfish and not care about your legacy. Your legacy is your gift to everybody when you're gone. So if you're focused too much on yourself and and what you can get you'll, you'll let your legacy slide to the side and it won't matter in 20 years what you did. You know people. My family is going to be talking about me, just like I talk about my uncle, joe, who died in world war ii. Right, you know, never met the man. He died when he was 19 years old or 21 years old. Captured when he was 19, died when he was 21. It's a huge part of my life, even to this day. That's because of the legacy he left behind, the kind of person he was. He was remembered fondly by everybody that knew him. So just if you heard this, remember me fondly.
Speaker 1:I think we will. Well, thanks for being here today.
Speaker 2:It was my pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.
