(inspirational music)
- I grew up in Southern California.
At that time, it was a working class neighborhood.
Graduated from high school, James Wood High School.
I tried going to college.
Well, I was in the North Hollywood Draft Board area
and it was an older area.
In '67, they were really cranking up the draft
and the army's like a business,
it's a corporation compared
to the rest of the service.
I mean, they got everything from carpenters
to electricians, photography, everything.
So, I opted to join the army
'cause I figured,
then it's my choice what I can do and I'm not being told.
I was going through AIT Infantry at Fort Gordon, Georgia.
This was in '67
and this guy come in,
you know, starched fatigues,
spit shined boots, green beret, you know.
He said, you know,
you're going to take a test.
Well, so, I finished the IT Infantry.
And all of a sudden I had orders
for parachute school jump schools, they call it
You're there about four weeks.
And then I,
they loaded about 10 of us on a bus,
says you're going to Fort Bragg.
And we get to Fort Bragg and we get met and
they give us another battery of tests.
And then afterwards they say,
you're going to be a medic.
And I said, okay.
So, I spent the next year or so going
through Special Forces Medical Training.
Went into the 7th Special Forces Group until April '69.
And then I went to the 46th Company in Thailand
and then from Thailand,
I went to Vietnam.
And then I went to MACV-SOG
and our function was two,
we had Hatchet Forces and we had RTs.
And we would go in and attack areas
within Laos or Cambodia,
interdict the Ho Chi Minh Trail
or other areas.
Or they would send us
in there just to see what's going
on in there, or prisoner snatch, or Bright Star,
which was to recover pilots.
When you deploy special forces with allied countries,
our object is to train them how to fight,
how to use weapons and then go into combat with them,
if necessary as advisors.
It gets our people in
with Allied Nations troops,
like Montagnards, in our case.
In September of '70,
there was a CIA operation going
on north of, of Chavane.
It wasn't going very well.
So, they wanted a demonstration Southeast of Chavane
to draw the NVA.
I noticed the guys were taking
more ammunition and reducing their weight load
by not taking very much food.
This is not sounding like it's gonna be fun.
(Gary laughs)
In my unit,
I owned your left breast pocket.
That's where I would grab the supplies.
I went around to all the Americans
and I made them carry extra morphine syrette
The Marines flew down in their CH-53 Skycranes
and we loaded up and they flew.
We moved from Kon Tum to Da Kao,
which was our launch point.
And then we would head for the border.
Well, by air, with those things,
you're about five minutes by the border.
Well, we're still in the air, half an hour later.
We flew for about 45 minutes
or so and I said, "Holy crap".
We're going deep, but we didn't know it at the time.
But, we were basically set down in a core logistics area.
We discovered that, and we started blowing stuff up,
burning rice,
and then we identified it and I know the air force
came in and pounded it really heavy.
So, we really upset the apple cart with the NVA.
And they came at us with a vengeance and we kept moving for
four days.
We were only supposed to be in their a day and a half.
But the reason we were in there
so long is the ground fire was driving the helicopters off,
so, they couldn't get us.
They couldn't get in.
We were so deep into Laos,
they had to have permission from the ambassador
to Laos, all the way up through Saigon
to CINCPAC all the way up
to the White House to do this.
In fact, that's why we used Marine Corps Cobras
because the Army Cobras
at the time did not have the range
that the Marine Corps Cobras had.
We started taking rounds,
ground fire, almost after we crossed the border.
For 45 minutes, we were taking hits.
You could hear it, hitting the ship, around the ship.
Sounds like popcorn.
When we landed,
we were stepping over guys
that had been hit.
As the day continued on,
I started collecting people.
Going from one guy
to the next and then back again to check on 'em.
And we had some pretty severely injured individuals.
I knew I wasn't going to be able to treat them
like I was taught in school.
Like you get a morphine syrette, right?
You're only supposed to use it
on one person.
You're supposed to swab it
with alcohol and all that.
Infection, we'll worry about that later.
So, I would take the morphine syrette and
hit three guys with the same syrette
right through their uniform.
And I only used enough morphine on 'em
so they could stand the discomfort
because I couldn't afford them not to be able to cooperate.
And we moved constantly at night,
we had a Spectre above us and
they fired this gun all around us.
'Cause we had these, what they call mini-pounders.
And so the pilot knew where we were and they
they would run around us like a protective wall.
I started running
out of stuff at the end of the second day.
And the fourth day, I was completely out of everything.
Well, day four,
we were literally being charged by battalion and
NVA infantry.
And the A-1Es came in and just let that CS,
which is riot control gas,
and they dropped that on there.
And that stopped that charge,
which allowed us to get to the extraction point.
The first helicopter came in and we got the wounded,
most of the wounded, up on that.
And I don't know how that thing got off the ground.
It had more people
in it then it was supposed to be able to fly with,
but it did.
That's why I'm saying
that there was a guardian angel with us.
The second helicopter came in.
We got the rest of the wounded
up at that time.
Of the 136 of us
by then we were down to, what, 35 individuals on the ground.
And we had had to go back
to the perimeter to defend the perimeter long enough
to get that helicopter in.
And then we were still getting,
some of those guys got hit.
I went out and pulled somebody who just got hit in the head,
and threw him up on the helicopter.
And by then everybody had moved up
into the helicopter and
there were three of us left on the ground.
Myself, Adair and McCarley.
And McCarley, the great commander, he is
the last one of us to lift off his foot
from that ground, that battlefield.
The third helicopter comes in and coming in,
he loses one engine and part
of his hydraulics.
Pulling out, he loses the other engine
and the rest of his hydraulics.
He's talking to Covey and he goes like,
"Hey, I'm at 4,500 feet, no hydraulics
engines are both dead, uh, we're going down."
He was talking to him like he was ordering a pizza.
So Bernie Bright and I are sitting
in the tail and the engine goes dead.
And I'll tell you when you're
in a helicopter in that engine quits,
you don't know how quiet it gets.
Oh, my God.
And the helicopter kept going this and
you'd see the ground,
and then you'd see, blue sky,
kept doing one of these numbers.
One of us said, "you know,
we're going to crash" and Bernie says, "yeah."
We're arm in arm.
Just watching the scenery.
You know, the trees and the sky.
Beautiful day,
it really was.
I was tapped on the shoulder and
there's a Marine Captain standing there and
this Marine says,
I got a wounded Marine back here.
I go back up there,
he'd gotten hit with a 12.5 through the neck,
just tore everything apart.
And I was out everything.
Somebody tells me,
I was asking for shirtsleeves and kerchiefs.
I got his head stabilized
and I got him on all fours.
And I got him to start bleeding out.
'Cause I was afraid,
one, he was going to drown in his own blood.
And then secondly, he was going into shock.
And I didn't know what to do.
So, I got down
near his ear and I said, "Listen,
if you're going to die,
you'd already be dead."
And he came out of shock. And the next thing I know,
I'm sitting on the ground,
looking at this big gray thing coming at me and
it was a helicopter.
And so, I get up and walk over to McCarley,
who's sitting there.
I told McCarley,
you know that thing's on fire
and we got guys in there.
We gotta go in there.
And he said, "Yeah, we do".
So, we just trooped up into a burning helicopter,
started pulling people out.
So, McCarley tells me later.
He said, I got to think about that later.
He says, you know,
that was one of the dumbest suggestions you ever made
to me, or words to that effect.
Let's get back on that burning helicopter, you know?
(Gary laughs)
Let's go for another ride, you know?
We did get everybody out.
And one Montagnard was killed in that crash and
two were killed the second day.
So, the one thing that bothers me to this day,
is the fact that when I ordered those three men
to be left in Laos.
We couldn't carry the dead.
It just, we just physically couldn't do it.
Not with all the wounded we had.
All of the operations that MACV-SOG went on
were classified and
weren't declassified 'till the late nineties.
On that operation,
we got the largest cache of intelligence
that was ever collected in Vietnam.
We so interrupted their operations,
that they held back almost 55,000 infantry
to guard their rear echelon areas,
which were originally intended to go south
to fight the American units.
And I'm thinking, well, you know,
how many more names would be on that Wall?
The Distinguished Service Cross was presented
to me by General Abrams.
I had the Distinguished Cross and I had that for...
almost 47 years until it was upgraded
to the Medal of Honor in October of 2017.
I mean, it was surreal.
You do the right thing 'cause it's the right thing to do.
Not because you're going to get rewarded,
not because somebody's watching.
And that's what a hero is.
It's a symbol...
that recognized extraordinary service,
not just to the nation and the state or your city
or community,
but extraordinary service
to the people you were with
during a very serious,
in some, many cases, catastrophic event.
I wear it for all the guys that didn't come home.
All the people who did some extraordinary actions
that saved a lot of people's lives
that never have gotten recognized for what they did.
And I keep going back
to the thought and I hear others say
the same thing, that if they had not done what they did,
they would have failed themselves,
the guys they were with, their unit,
the army and the country.
One of the things on that operation,
that means a lot to me:
You know, that Marine that was shot in the neck?
Well, his name is Stevens-
George Stevens.
The man lived another 42 years.
And for what I did
on one afternoon,
there are people walking around today.
He was a father and a grandfather and
it all happened after 1970.
There was one human being
that has a name
that I did something on one afternoon
that allowed him to live another 42 years.
(soothing music)