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Speaker 1: straight talk with the guys in the community.
Speaker 2: Welcome to another wonderful episode of soft Rep Radio and
Speaker 2: I am your host, rad But first, before I introduce
Speaker 2: my next guest, I got to point out that we
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Speaker 2: And we might just have our next guests book in
Speaker 2: our cycle of over a thousand books that we have
Speaker 2: already rotating. And my next guest is Robin Bartlett, and
Speaker 2: he wrote the book Vietnam Combat, Firefights and Writing History,
Speaker 2: and I want to welcome him to the show. Thank you, Raed.
Speaker 3: It's wonderful to be here.
Speaker 2: Thank you.
Speaker 3: So much for having me today.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for reaching out and wanting to be
Speaker 2: on the show and wanted to tell your story and
Speaker 2: talk about your book that you've got coming up. I
Speaker 2: know you have a lot going on, and you've taken
Speaker 2: the time out to give us some of your insight
Speaker 2: into Vietnam and really just what's been going on in
Speaker 2: the sixties, seventies, eighties into today. So with that, I
Speaker 2: want to introduce you again. What was the rank that
Speaker 2: you got out as second lieutenant?
Speaker 3: Well, I went over to Vietnam as a second lieutenant,
Speaker 3: that's right, and then after one year, just one year,
Speaker 3: I was promoted to first lieutenant. Huh. And that was
Speaker 3: the day that I joined my battalion in Vietnam. There
Speaker 3: were four officers, all the same roughly the same data rank.
Speaker 3: We marched into the battalion commander's office bunker, i should say,
Speaker 3: and in alphabetical order. So I went in first, and
Speaker 3: this lieutenant colonel who was the battalion commander, was just
Speaker 3: totally beat. He was totally exhausted. He gave us the
Speaker 3: two minute speech and then asked the s one, the
Speaker 3: personnel officer, where do we need officers? And he said
Speaker 3: the s one said we need one in A, two
Speaker 3: and B and one in C. So I was assigned
Speaker 3: to a company. The three other officers did not complete
Speaker 3: their tours. They were either killed or wounded. So my
Speaker 3: first story is the luck of being in alphabetical order
Speaker 3: and assigned to a company. So I was the only
Speaker 3: officer to survive. The other two were The other three
Speaker 3: were either wounded or killed.
Speaker 2: So let me just ask you this. You know, as
Speaker 2: a young man, how old were you?
Speaker 3: Twenty two years old?
Speaker 2: And here you are, okay, realizing that you're being pulled
Speaker 2: in because the other gentlemen that we're in your position
Speaker 2: are no longer doing that position because of war. What's
Speaker 2: going through your head right now? Just like I'm the guy?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, part of the reason why I wrote
Speaker 3: this book is because I had some experiences that were
Speaker 3: kind of unusual, and I've talked to a lot of
Speaker 3: it about and found that I had had some things
Speaker 3: happen to me that didn't happen to them, and each
Speaker 3: one of these stories ultimately became a chapter in my book.
Speaker 3: They're rather unusual stories, some are horrific, and some are
Speaker 3: really just unbelievable. They're funny, and unbelievable.
Speaker 2: It's like life happens and then horrific situation. All of
Speaker 2: a sudden, You're just like walking along and telling a
Speaker 2: joke and talking about your girlfriend, and the next thing
Speaker 2: you know, it's combat.
Speaker 3: That's pretty much it.
Speaker 2: Yep, and you probably dealt with a lot of ambush
Speaker 2: tactics coming at you being on the ground. Tell me,
Speaker 2: tell us about your unit, tell us who you got,
Speaker 2: who's siverer with Let's just dive right into it.
Speaker 3: So I went through the ROTC program because you know,
Speaker 3: as a military brat, I went to thirteen different elementary
Speaker 3: and middle schools and at four different high schools and said,
Speaker 3: I have had enough of the military. I want no
Speaker 3: part of it. But in college it was the height,
Speaker 3: you know, the war was building and my classmates were
Speaker 3: being reclassified one A during the summer months, and I said, well,
Speaker 3: I'm going to serve my It looks like I'm going
Speaker 3: to serve my obligation. I want to serve it as
Speaker 3: an officer. A lot of family tradition in my family.
Speaker 3: My grandfather went to West Point, father went to West Point,
Speaker 3: brother went to West Point. All served military careers. But
Speaker 3: I went through the ROTC program. I turned down an
Speaker 3: appointment to West Point Wow, and after graduation, I was
Speaker 3: a distinguished Military graduate and just fell naturally into the routine.
Speaker 3: Volunteered for Airborne Ranger and was assigned to the eighty
Speaker 3: second Airborne Division. Was there for about nine months, and
Speaker 3: then transferred to the one hundred and first Airborne Division
Speaker 3: in Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Oh Wow.
Speaker 3: When I arrived in Vietnam, it was just after the
Speaker 3: Tet Offensive of nineteen sixty eight, and they said all
Speaker 3: orders are for officer. Orders are canceled. There have been
Speaker 3: so many casualties. I was reassigned to the first Cab Division,
Speaker 3: and that turned out to be a wonderful assignment in
Speaker 3: many ways because the whole air mobile concept was to
Speaker 3: bring fresh troops to the battle by helicopter. You didn't
Speaker 3: have to walk, didn't have to hump through the boonies
Speaker 3: to get to the battle. You went in on helicopters.
Speaker 3: You carried more water, you carried more ammunition, and you
Speaker 3: flew to the battle. My other colleagues officers, they carried
Speaker 3: seventy pound packs. My pack was forty five. But the
Speaker 3: other side of that coin was that sometimes we went
Speaker 3: into hot alz's I.
Speaker 2: Say, you're going into the bush, you are like getting
Speaker 2: dropped into hells and ferno. And to put that extinguish that.
Speaker 3: I made more than fifty helicopter combat assaults, and when
Speaker 3: it was my platoon's turn to lead the assault, I
Speaker 3: will always rode in the first helicopter. And this was
Speaker 3: pretty harry.
Speaker 2: Follow me, boys, here we go.
Speaker 3: That was pretty harry. Even though they would prep the
Speaker 3: LZ with artillery and we had Cobra helicopters overhead gun runs,
Speaker 3: the enemy somehow, somehow was able to survive. Now, they
Speaker 3: liked to let the first helicopter land, but then they'll
Speaker 3: take out the second one and then that would divert
Speaker 3: the rest of the helicopters from coming into that LZ.
Speaker 3: They would divert to another LZ landing zone, and the
Speaker 3: men on the ground had to fight it out on
Speaker 3: their own.
Speaker 2: And those down copters and trying to figure like take
Speaker 2: care of their casualties, take care of themselves. Fight this
Speaker 2: overwhelming number coming from the trees in every direction. I
Speaker 2: can only from the ground too.
Speaker 3: It could be overwhelming, or it could be just a
Speaker 3: sniper with an LPG shot.
Speaker 2: I got you. That's So did you ever encounter the
Speaker 2: So I've heard stories of smoke getting popped and like
Speaker 2: they say, Roger that we're coming in for a landing,
Speaker 2: golehea and pop your smoke. And they're like, okay, we're
Speaker 2: popping yellow. And then yellow smoke would pop all over
Speaker 2: the place, and you guys are like, let's fix this,
Speaker 2: let's say, well identify it. Is that a thing? Am
Speaker 2: I tripping?
Speaker 3: It was the reverse of that. I mean I never
Speaker 3: actually had that happen to me. But when the helicopter
Speaker 3: pilots were coming in to bring supplies or to they
Speaker 3: would ask you to pop smoke and then you would
Speaker 3: tell them that you had pop smoke and they would
Speaker 3: verify the color. So the enemy was be listening to
Speaker 3: our radio, so once you said pop smoke, sometimes you know,
Speaker 3: they would pop a different color smoke. They had access
Speaker 3: from somehow, they had access to our.
Speaker 2: Cancers su grenades, right from policing up those that left
Speaker 2: them behind, you know.
Speaker 3: A market wherever. I mean, yeah, supplies were left all
Speaker 3: over the place exactly.
Speaker 2: It was just kind of just such, that's a crazy war,
Speaker 2: you know, and I don't want it to let it
Speaker 2: be forgotten. And you don't either, And that's why you've
Speaker 2: written your book. You know, at Vietnam combat and you
Speaker 2: were there. This is what I want my listener to know.
Speaker 3: I wanted to tell it from a boots on the
Speaker 3: ground point of view. I mean, I didn't have a
Speaker 3: fifty thousand foot view. I had boots on the ground
Speaker 3: point of view. I wanted to tell it what it
Speaker 3: was like to lead twenty eight men through the jungle.
Speaker 3: These were draft e's, almost all of them were draft Ese,
Speaker 3: and I was the second oldest man in the platoon,
Speaker 3: yet responsible for their welfare and in many cases, you know,
Speaker 3: giving them orders and direction on what to do and
Speaker 3: how to do it.
Speaker 2: Did you ever come into contact and all of a
Speaker 2: sudden you have to go for some other weapon because
Speaker 2: youre's jammed. There's out ammo, and you're just like, maybe
Speaker 2: there's an AK and you grab that. If you were
Speaker 2: swapped out weaponry to just do your mission.
Speaker 3: Actually no, not quite that way. We always had superior firepower,
Speaker 3: but the enemy was incredibly competent. That was one of
Speaker 3: the misconceptions that we had. We always thought that the
Speaker 3: VC were, you know, they were citizen soldiers and walking
Speaker 3: around with a little ball of rice on their hip
Speaker 3: and ak with one or two magazines.
Speaker 2: Not true.
Speaker 3: They were tough soldiers, especially at night. They were the
Speaker 3: best night fighters around, far superior to what we did.
Speaker 3: And they had this unique ability. We would hole up
Speaker 3: for the night and night defensive position, dig fox holes,
Speaker 3: put out Claim our Minds and trip flyers. But they
Speaker 3: had this uncanny capability of penetrating our wire and penetrating
Speaker 3: our defensive positions, getting in, throwing hand grenades or satchel charges,
Speaker 3: and they just had an amazing ability to fight at night.
Speaker 3: The only times we were successful at night would be
Speaker 3: when we set up an ambush and they would walk
Speaker 3: down the trail and we'd blow Claim our Minds, which
Speaker 3: was just an awesome, awesome weapon. But no, I never
Speaker 3: really had occasion to be that. I only had one
Speaker 3: occasion to it. It was close in far close end fighting.
Speaker 3: Everything else was that fifty fifty meters maybe or or less.
Speaker 2: That's amazing that we stand to hand and when you're
Speaker 2: firing these claym wars there are attached to like a
Speaker 2: device like a remote control that's called what a clacker?
Speaker 2: Is that right?
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's like almost looks like a handheld vice gript.
Speaker 3: It's like a stapler. Yeah, and there's about a seventy
Speaker 3: five foot wire that goes out to the claymore mine
Speaker 3: three hundred steel balls in a semi circle, and we'd
Speaker 3: plant two or three of them in front of us.
Speaker 3: You fire those suckers, and we'd go out in a
Speaker 3: cone six inches or foot off the ground, six feet
Speaker 3: in the air, and in a code cone three hundred
Speaker 3: meters wide. Nothing survived.
Speaker 2: The nothing survived, just flying out boom, and it says
Speaker 2: front towards enemy on those for my listener or my viewer.
Speaker 2: If you're not sure, that's the one. Very stick it in,
Speaker 2: point it away from yourself and make sure it's still
Speaker 2: pointed away from you. Geez, seventy five feet you are close.
Speaker 2: That is danger close.
Speaker 3: The backblast wasn't much. It was all going out toward
Speaker 3: the front.
Speaker 2: Interesting ingenuity that we have to check.
Speaker 3: It was an amazing resource that we had available that artillery.
Speaker 3: I shot a lot of artillery. I got good at
Speaker 3: shooting artillery.
Speaker 2: Man. Let me tell you, well, you want to know
Speaker 2: what's going on nineteen sixty eight. There's two things that
Speaker 2: I learned about nineteen sixty eight. One, the big Mac
Speaker 2: was invented in nineteen sixty eight. Okay, I just want
Speaker 2: to say to my listener, to the Big Mac. Okay,
Speaker 2: so while the Big Mac tonight's coming out on the market,
Speaker 2: he's in Noam. And then also Jumping Jack Flash from
Speaker 2: the Rolling Stones was the album number one album. And
Speaker 2: that's where you start getting like painted black. You get
Speaker 2: all these songs that are so synonymous with Vietnam in
Speaker 2: movies that they use from the Stones. So I thought
Speaker 2: it was relevant to say what was going on in
Speaker 2: sixty eight. You were there in sixty eight, you know,
Speaker 2: it's just the things going on in the US. Everybody's
Speaker 2: still trying to live and you're in there plant and
Speaker 2: Claymores and the Big Mac is coming out of the market.
Speaker 2: That's right. Do you remember your first Big Mac?
Speaker 3: It was a long time after that before I saw
Speaker 3: the first Big Mac.
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, right right. Did you have any like USO
Speaker 2: shows where any like you know and Margaret or anybody
Speaker 2: showed up and did a dance or anything like that.
Speaker 3: Where I was with the first cab division was up
Speaker 3: in iCore, that's right along the demilitarized zone in the
Speaker 3: northern part of South Vietnam. And we operated from the
Speaker 3: Gulf of Tonkin on the east, so you had sandy soil, tumbleweed,
Speaker 3: no overhead cover all the way to the Laoshan border,
Speaker 3: which was three canopy jungle, and we were in a
Speaker 3: free fire zone. There were no friendlies, especially toward the
Speaker 3: Laoshan border. We were trying to prevent infiltration from the
Speaker 3: Hochi Min trail anything. I only encountered friendlies on one occasion,
Speaker 3: and that was when we were in a blocking force
Speaker 3: around a village and that was being searched by Arvin troops.
Speaker 3: Otherwise we were in a free fire zone and if
Speaker 3: we encountered anything or anyone, we killed it.
Speaker 2: What will you say what Arvin stands for for Mike,
Speaker 2: do you do you remember? That's?
Speaker 3: Oh yeah, Army of the Republic of Vietnam. Those were
Speaker 3: South Vietnamese soldiers.
Speaker 2: An icor man, that's a that's a word that radar
Speaker 2: O'Reilly used on mass Let me get icor on the phone,
Speaker 2: Let me get icor on the phone, let me get
Speaker 2: icre on the phone. So you're just saying.
Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, And depending upon where we were, it was
Speaker 3: for it was like three different wars. You could have
Speaker 3: sandy soil, incredible heat one hundred and five hundred and
Speaker 3: ten degrees. We had to be very careful about men
Speaker 3: staying hydrated, and it was not uncommon, even with experienced
Speaker 3: soldiers for men just to be walking with us and
Speaker 3: keel over from heat exhaustion.
Speaker 2: Right, And to me once just total heat casualty.
Speaker 3: Heat casualties and ha percent and then you had a metavac.
Speaker 3: You had casualty and you had to get them out
Speaker 3: of there.
Speaker 2: And it's real, you know, fevers and over. It's just
Speaker 2: you know, what can you do to the body when
Speaker 2: it's burned out like that? Right? And you are a
Speaker 2: casualty of the war? Dang hod.
Speaker 3: It happened to me on one occasion. I started having
Speaker 3: leg cramps and I had drunk all the water I had,
Speaker 3: and I carried two gallons of water, but I was
Speaker 3: so hot and so humid, I drank all the water.
Speaker 3: I took my salt pills. Those are the days they
Speaker 3: thought salt pills would help. You just got incredible leg
Speaker 3: cramps and I had to be medovac.
Speaker 2: Did you ever as an officer, did you ever have
Speaker 2: to sign some paperwork to like give somebody an accommodation
Speaker 2: that they had done some active valor and combat, and
Speaker 2: do you remember what that might have been.
Speaker 3: I was a comparative literature major in college, and so
Speaker 3: they found out very quickly that I was a good writer.
Speaker 3: So the answer is, every time we needed to have
Speaker 3: a citation written, I got the job.
Speaker 2: Okay, because you could type? Could you type? Oh? You
Speaker 2: can write? And really it's really yeah.
Speaker 3: I rarely got close to a typewriter, but I wrote.
Speaker 3: I wrote them out on paper.
Speaker 2: And as you're writing these out with your eloquent style
Speaker 2: as an English you know, savant, I'm going to call
Speaker 2: you that what was going through mind? Where you reading
Speaker 2: like young Joe Private Joe here had stormed them hill
Speaker 2: and deserves this and he lost his life. I mean,
Speaker 2: what's going on? You know?
Speaker 3: Well, you know, the people I was writing up were
Speaker 3: the men in my own platoon who had been involved
Speaker 3: in actions that I had been involved with. So I
Speaker 3: could reconstruct the actions in the territory and the and
Speaker 3: the discussion of what that soldier had done, as well
Speaker 3: as the posthumous write ups that I had to write
Speaker 3: on occasion as well.
Speaker 2: And I just want to touch on that because you know,
Speaker 2: it is it is a part of the whole situation.
Speaker 2: You know, these young men and young women who gave
Speaker 2: their lives deserve to have that noted in our halls
Speaker 2: of history, if you will, Okay, so love that you
Speaker 2: wrote that. They probably eloquently as well.
Speaker 3: To this day, I try to It was not an
Speaker 3: easy task, especially if you had a KIA killed in action.
Speaker 3: It was the officer's job to the soldiers. They would
Speaker 3: bring the body back, but they didn't want to be
Speaker 3: involved in the preparation of the body to go back home.
Speaker 3: That was the officer's job, and my medic would give
Speaker 3: me a death card. It was basically three by five
Speaker 3: card with a hole punched in it a piece of string.
Speaker 3: You fill out that card and for the first time
Speaker 3: we actually recorded the coordinates as best as we could
Speaker 3: as to where that soldier had been killed. So we
Speaker 3: kept I don't know where that data ended up, but
Speaker 3: they tried to record exactly where that soldier had had died.
Speaker 3: And you attached the card to the boot along with
Speaker 3: one dog tag. The other dog tag remained around his neck,
Speaker 3: and it was my job to go through the pockets
Speaker 3: make sure there was nothing that shouldn't be there, remove
Speaker 3: any personal effects. Then we didn't have body bags, but
Speaker 3: we had ponchos. I would wrap the man in the poncho.
Speaker 3: But you know these choppers when they came in a
Speaker 3: lot of rotor wash. So I had a ball of
Speaker 3: twine and I would tie off the poncho around the head, waist,
Speaker 3: and feet so that the poncho wouldn't flop around, and
Speaker 3: then we'd call in a helicopter to come in and
Speaker 3: begin the journey back home.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you for that, and on behalf of them, right,
Speaker 2: thank you, and for that that person you're thinking about
Speaker 2: right now. I mean, you can say the name if
Speaker 2: you want to, but thank you.
Speaker 3: You know, tried to do it with respect every time
Speaker 3: that had happened, and it did happen to me a
Speaker 3: number of times. Was not easy. I guess my men
Speaker 3: were a little superstitious about doing it because they thought, well,
Speaker 3: maybe it would be me the next time.
Speaker 2: So I see. But if you keep doing it, then
Speaker 2: you have a job to do to keep doing it,
Speaker 2: and they're like, they're going to fight for you, but
Speaker 2: you keep doing Okay, Oh what a job here you
Speaker 2: are going through out TC and now you're you know,
Speaker 2: doing that detail and where in the manual. Does it
Speaker 2: teach you to do all of that right? No, where
Speaker 2: does the teacher to get the twine? Where's it teach
Speaker 2: you about the rotor washing? So here you are trying
Speaker 2: to be so ceremonial, ceremony, you know, respectful to these,
Speaker 2: to these fallen, and you got rotor washing, and you
Speaker 2: got you know, back to action, back to the jungle.
Speaker 3: Yeah, some of that I learned in ranger school. Ranger
Speaker 3: School was the best training that the army had to offer.
Speaker 3: It was the best insurance policy, wow, for a new lieutenant.
Speaker 3: And Ranger school took us to the point of physical
Speaker 3: and mental exhaustion and hunger because if you didn't make
Speaker 3: your objective, they didn't feed you. And then at that point,
Speaker 3: when you reached that point, that's when they made you
Speaker 3: the leader and put you to the test to lead
Speaker 3: the patrol. So there was really never once in Vietnam
Speaker 3: that I did not feel in control of a situation.
Speaker 2: Now.
Speaker 3: I was scared to death, no doubt about that. When
Speaker 3: the bullets fly, you are scared. But I always that
Speaker 3: training instilled in me a sense of tremendous confidence that
Speaker 3: lives with me to this day. My wife tells me
Speaker 3: your greatest strength is that you are fearless, and your
Speaker 3: greatest weakness is that you are fearless. Right, But that
Speaker 3: comes from Ranger School. It was the best training the
Speaker 3: Army had to offer, now, Seal training, I admit, I
Speaker 3: will go on record to say that that was tougher.
Speaker 3: I didn't go through it, but I know it was
Speaker 3: tougher physically. But Ranger School demanded a lot from us,
Speaker 3: both physically and mentally, planning the operations, writing an operation
Speaker 3: plan and executing it.
Speaker 2: Kind of groomed in a green beret fashion as a
Speaker 2: ranger to see if you could be pulled into the
Speaker 2: next echelon upwards.
Speaker 3: At the time, if I had stayed in the Army,
Speaker 3: that that would be the direction that I probably would
Speaker 3: have pursued.
Speaker 2: Because your glasses that you're wearing right now are totally
Speaker 2: green beret style, you know, officer glasses, sir.
Speaker 3: That's true, that's true. And I have sunglasses just like yours.
Speaker 2: I love it. I thought i'd give you the flare
Speaker 2: of the sixties and seventies, baby, you know what I'm saying. Yeah,
Speaker 2: So here we are sixty eight sixty nine. Rolling Stones
Speaker 2: are in the background playing some music. You're moving, there's
Speaker 2: smoke popped. Ever, it's just tell me something. What are
Speaker 2: you feeling? You know, like you got a unit with
Speaker 2: you're you're on the trail. What are you looking for?
Speaker 3: Well, when I came into my unit, I did something
Speaker 3: that I think was allowed me to survive my tour
Speaker 3: because the life expectancy of a lieutenant ap platoon later
Speaker 3: was ninety days.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: I got wounded twice, but I did survive. Why. One
Speaker 3: thing was I tried really hard not to do anything stupid.
Speaker 3: It was easy to do stupid stuff over there, but
Speaker 3: I worked hard at not at trying not to do
Speaker 3: stupid things. Secondly, I sat down with my platoon sergeant
Speaker 3: and my squad leaders and I said, listen, you know
Speaker 3: more about what's going on here than I do. You've
Speaker 3: had more experience, more in field, So I want your advice.
Speaker 3: I want you to tell me if you think I'm
Speaker 3: doing something that's wrong, and I want your advice. Now,
Speaker 3: I didn't always take it, but I established that rapport.
Speaker 3: And the other thing that happened after a period of
Speaker 3: time is that you know, officers in Vietnam were measured
Speaker 3: by BodyCount. That was the metric by which junior officers
Speaker 3: and senior officers were measured. But I suspect I never
Speaker 3: would have been a really great commander because after a
Speaker 3: period of time, the welfare of my men became more
Speaker 3: important to me than BodyCount. For example, if my point
Speaker 3: man alerted, I would he would call me forward and
Speaker 3: I'd talk to him and he says, sir, or they
Speaker 3: didn't call me sir. My name was one six. That's
Speaker 3: you didn't call anybody sir. You never saluted, there was
Speaker 3: no insignia. The only way you knew I was an
Speaker 3: officer is that said Lt. Bartlett on my camouflage band cover.
Speaker 2: That was it.
Speaker 3: So he would say, I got a bad feeling about
Speaker 3: what's in front of us. I don't hear any monkeys,
Speaker 3: I don't hear any birds. And I respected that, and
Speaker 3: I trusted my point man. I also got really good
Speaker 3: at firing artillery. I was great. In fact, I shot
Speaker 3: so much artillery that the battery that supported us got
Speaker 3: to know my call sign, and I would do what
Speaker 3: was called reconnaissance by fire, meaning I would shoot artillery
Speaker 3: in front of where we were going to be walking through.
Speaker 3: And they actually ended up putting a budget on me
Speaker 3: of twenty five us. That's the most I could shoot. Yeah,
Speaker 3: but when we walked through that area, my men felt protected.
Speaker 3: You know, at least we had put a lot of
Speaker 3: artillery out in front of us before we walk through.
Speaker 2: You're giving them the best opportunity in the situation to
Speaker 2: move through that to live. They're looking at you like,
Speaker 2: all right, because you have a job to do, and
Speaker 2: we don't want you to do that to any of us.
Speaker 2: That's the job they want you to have to do.
Speaker 2: They don't want it to be done so blast that.
Speaker 3: Yeah, they wanted to know that their welfare was foremost
Speaker 3: in my mind over bodycoumt.
Speaker 2: Yes, And obviously, I mean for the situation. I'm not
Speaker 2: trying to make light of war, okay, but when you're
Speaker 2: in it and you're doing your job as told, you're
Speaker 2: just clearing a path for your men to move through
Speaker 2: the fight. And so so you know, as we just
Speaker 2: talked about previously, you know, in your book it talks
Speaker 2: about war and you know, being trained to lead and
Speaker 2: like born to kill. You know, it's just this this thing.
Speaker 2: Then you get out and do you ever look back
Speaker 2: and feel like there's an atrocity situation that happened to Vietnam.
Speaker 2: Can I ask you that, do you feel like, you know,
Speaker 2: what's your thoughts looking back today to then? I know
Speaker 2: you went, my dad went, you know, the whole nine yards.
Speaker 3: I was there at the height of the war sixty
Speaker 3: eight to sixty nine, and that was well before the
Speaker 3: Cali atrocities and some of the other things that happened.
Speaker 3: And the whole character of the war changed as you
Speaker 3: hit seventy and seventy one seventy two, because the American
Speaker 3: soldiers figured out that this was not a war we
Speaker 3: were going to be able to win. But when I
Speaker 3: was there, it was still on the cusp of transition
Speaker 3: from we can win this. We're going to prevent Communism
Speaker 3: from taking over the South, and that's right. We're defenders
Speaker 3: of the face, defenders of democracy. But once seventies came
Speaker 3: in to effect, that whole attitude changed in American soldiers.
Speaker 3: Nobody wanted to die for a if you know what
Speaker 3: I mean.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's like, hey, you know, so, you know, there's
Speaker 2: got to be another cause, right, could have maybe let
Speaker 2: the French fight it out, or could have let the
Speaker 2: Japanese and the Vietnamese fight it out. When they're originally
Speaker 2: ticking off each other in the beginning, and then the
Speaker 2: French were there, and then they called us up to
Speaker 2: come and you know, in the fifties, late fifties, to
Speaker 2: come and try to help, even early fifties, right like
Speaker 2: we're there, like fifty one fifty five, you know, and
Speaker 2: then all of a sudden you get jfk saying we
Speaker 2: need a special warfare, we need to have That was
Speaker 2: like in fifty two fifty three he's like green berets. Ye,
Speaker 2: the British like, take our green beret. We're like, okay, no,
Speaker 2: I love it. I love the whole story. I know,
Speaker 2: when I think about how sneaky the enemy could be,
Speaker 2: it reminds me of the movie with John Wayne in
Speaker 2: the movie The Green Beret, and he's sitting there talking
Speaker 2: to him. He's like, you never know where the enemy's at,
Speaker 2: and then all of a sudden, it's got a little
Speaker 2: dude with an RPG if crawl through his wire while
Speaker 2: they're sitting there talking to him. In the daylight. Yep,
Speaker 2: in the daylight.
Speaker 3: It was a pretty amazing time.
Speaker 2: You know.
Speaker 3: I had ninety percent of my platoon was were draftees.
Speaker 3: My platoon sergeant was supposed to be the most experienced
Speaker 3: man in the unit. They usually have, you know, ten
Speaker 3: years of experience, but mine went through the instant NCO
Speaker 3: program and he had his nineteenth birthday.
Speaker 2: Oh my goodness.
Speaker 3: So here was supposed to be the most experienced man
Speaker 3: in the in the unit, and he and I had
Speaker 3: about the same level of experience in terms of leading
Speaker 3: leadership and being able to handle these soldiers.
Speaker 2: You guys are rock paper scissoring it together, okay, street right, right,
Speaker 2: So that's like an FNG type of thing. And you
Speaker 2: talk about in your book, you know, fucking new guy,
Speaker 2: freaking new guy, new guy in the field. You know,
Speaker 2: here you are, lieutenant, you're being coiled up to go
Speaker 2: over there. You're meeting a bunch of draftees. Who are
Speaker 2: you know, happen to go? How'd you do it? Like?
Speaker 2: How'd you guys all? Did they look at you like,
Speaker 2: smell you a little bit? Or were they like, what's up? Doc?
Speaker 3: We smelled pretty good because we would be out in
Speaker 3: the field for four to six weeks at a time
Speaker 3: and no showers. You had enough water to drink and
Speaker 3: occasionally brush your teeth. That was it. So unless you
Speaker 3: got it monsoon rain and then you showered off real quick.
Speaker 3: You know, you could wash a little bit, sure, but
Speaker 3: your clothes would stand up on their own after about
Speaker 3: four weeks. But these men were draftees. But we were
Speaker 3: all in it together. We were all I mean, I
Speaker 3: ate the same food, I wore the same clothes. I
Speaker 3: got just as dirty.
Speaker 2: Right.
Speaker 3: But when the bullets started to fly, if you were
Speaker 3: in a firefight, everybody immediately hit the ground. But you
Speaker 3: could as the leader, You could actually feel the eyes
Speaker 3: of twenty eight men on you, saying, Okay, give us
Speaker 3: some direction, give us an order. What do you want
Speaker 3: us to do? Stop hugging the ground and praying take
Speaker 3: action right or wrong? And sometimes it wasn't right. But
Speaker 3: it was better to give orders and take the steps
Speaker 3: necessary to combat the situation.
Speaker 2: Decisive decision has to be made and then deal with
Speaker 2: it and make it.
Speaker 3: It came from ranger school. That was the training we
Speaker 3: got in ranger school.
Speaker 2: You got to make a decision.
Speaker 3: You know, you mentioned John Wayne, but John Wayne's and
Speaker 3: John Wayne never served in the military. Oh he did,
Speaker 3: but his comment, you know, courage is being scared to death,
Speaker 3: but saddling up anyway, Yeah, that was the true grit
Speaker 3: of an officer, of a leader of a small unit
Speaker 3: in Vietnam. That's what you had to do.
Speaker 2: You know about John Wayne real quick, he was filming
Speaker 2: The Green Beret and he got to go overseas and
Speaker 2: work with a unit for like three weeks, an SF unit,
Speaker 2: and they just kept him inside the fob the Ford
Speaker 2: Operating Base and didn't want to let him go outside
Speaker 2: the wire. And they're like, one day it was like,
Speaker 2: let's go on a mission. And he's like, can I
Speaker 2: go with you and let me just do it? I'm good, guys,
Speaker 2: And they're like, you don't tell us how to do
Speaker 2: our job, and we won't tell you how to act.
Speaker 2: And that's that right, I mean, all the way to
Speaker 2: that point, he thought he could go out with them
Speaker 2: and set Claymores. Yeah he was.
Speaker 3: He was an amazing actor, amazing person, right, And the
Speaker 3: soldiers just loved the guy, absolutely loved him. I mean
Speaker 3: I can remember being a Travis Air Force Base waiting
Speaker 3: for the flight to go over.
Speaker 2: I've been there.
Speaker 3: Everybody was singing that song. I mean they kept playing
Speaker 3: it on the juke box again and again all the time.
Speaker 2: Oh my dad would played around the house, and I'd
Speaker 2: listened to it in the armory in the eighties. It's like,
Speaker 2: you know, growing up in a green Beray culture, in
Speaker 2: the Rangers style of life. You know, it's just what
Speaker 2: it is. Man. But you were one of those that
Speaker 2: went on to get the Ranger and a mission and
Speaker 2: have that confidence instilled in you from the confidence course,
Speaker 2: and let me go, let me, let me paint a
Speaker 2: scenario for you. Okay. So I do wargames in Utah.
Speaker 2: I do large scale wargames, and we set up ambushes
Speaker 2: and all this stuff, do night operations, and so here
Speaker 2: we are in the mountains and I've got probably forty
Speaker 2: sixty people out in the field and we're playing till
Speaker 2: about two in the morning. But I'm stalking somebody and
Speaker 2: we're good at it. We're doing it, and we're stocked.
Speaker 2: We hear the movement, we hear them brushing in through it,
Speaker 2: and out of nowhere, before we thought we were gonna
Speaker 2: engage them, a deer just bolts right out in front
Speaker 2: of us, a deer. So we use airsoft guns, which
Speaker 2: are non lethal. And I'm sitting here with this BB
Speaker 2: gun and this deer and I'm like this deer could like,
Speaker 2: you know, dear boy, me to death. And I'm just
Speaker 2: out here. What am I doing? I have a bb gun,
Speaker 2: So funny, store, that's funny. It's fun and it's funny.
Speaker 2: Have you ever had a situation and now I'm where
Speaker 2: it was like you're in an ambush and the jungles
Speaker 2: all around you and tigers, lions or bears.
Speaker 3: Well, I had too interesting a case like that. One
Speaker 3: was again, your point man's out in front of you
Speaker 3: about fifty meters and they passed the word back to
Speaker 3: have me come to the front. And as I got
Speaker 3: up close to the point man and the cover man,
Speaker 3: I noticed they're lying on the ground and behind cover.
Speaker 3: And here I'm walking down the trail and I immediately
Speaker 3: sort of went down to a duck walk. And here
Speaker 3: in front of me walking up the trail was an
Speaker 3: enemy soldier about fifty feet away, maybe seventy five feet away,
Speaker 3: and he's got his rifle on his shoulder and he's
Speaker 3: looking at me, and I'm looking at him. So I
Speaker 3: have my weapon in my hand. I had an AR
Speaker 3: fifteen out of sixteen, and I flip it to full automatic.
Speaker 3: And we carried twenty magazines with eighteen rounds in a magazine,
Speaker 3: and that weapon would fire eighteen rounds in two and
Speaker 3: a half seconds. Two and a half. You didn't even
Speaker 3: have to aim. You just pointed it and it rode
Speaker 3: from the lower left to the upper right. And that's
Speaker 3: exactly The weapon performed exactly as it's supposed to. And
Speaker 3: the bullets just traced a path from the lower left
Speaker 3: to the upper right. And this soldier fell dead.
Speaker 2: Oh wow, it's different kind of animal.
Speaker 3: But the point man had alerted heard this man coming
Speaker 3: up the trail and they called me up to the front.
Speaker 3: But I'm looking at them and they're on the ground
Speaker 3: behind cover and I'm just.
Speaker 2: Staring at the sky. So they didn't even know exactly
Speaker 2: where he was. But you're just eyes to eyes with
Speaker 2: him and got the drop, that's right.
Speaker 3: And he had his weapon on his shoulder and I
Speaker 3: had mine in my hands ready to go.
Speaker 2: Yeah, he wasn't ready, was it. He had slung up
Speaker 2: and you were just carrying it. Yeah, you're like, what's up.
Speaker 2: That's the way we can't.
Speaker 3: We never put our weapons on our shoulder. We've never
Speaker 3: slung our weapons. We always carried them. Now we kept
Speaker 3: it unsafe. The only man who was allowed to have
Speaker 3: it on fullto was the point man. Everybody else had
Speaker 3: to have their weapon on safe, loaded with rounds in
Speaker 3: the chamber, but on safe. Occasionally the point man would
Speaker 3: trip and fall and pull the trigger and everybody would
Speaker 3: hit the ground, which is scary, and the word got
Speaker 3: passed back, it's okay, it's okay, just he tripped. He tripped,
Speaker 3: It's all right, no problem.
Speaker 2: So is that something through like special training that they
Speaker 2: talk about that, because my dad also talked about like
Speaker 2: never having a sling and always carrying it around the ring,
Speaker 2: you know, just like always on a march or whatever.
Speaker 2: He's never slinging it and you know, never he says,
Speaker 2: if it's not in your hand, it's not ready. That's
Speaker 2: what he said. Yeah, that's right, that's right. Huh.
Speaker 3: The other interesting occasion, going back to your question, was
Speaker 3: I came up with this very creative idea with our
Speaker 3: mortar platoon to set out trip players in a saddle
Speaker 3: between two hilltops that were about about a kilometer away.
Speaker 3: We have happened to have a night defensive position and
Speaker 3: DP and we could over these two hilltops with the
Speaker 3: saddle in between. We had a direct line of sight
Speaker 3: was unusual, and I came up with this wonderful idea
Speaker 3: to sighte in the mortar on the on the saddle,
Speaker 3: and we walked out and put trip flares right along
Speaker 3: the saddle because it was a natural point for the
Speaker 3: enemy to come through. So we had a man stay up,
Speaker 3: you know. We had guards awake and alert all night long,
Speaker 3: and all of a sudden, about two o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 3: one of the trip flayers goes off and we started
Speaker 3: pumping mortar rounds down the tube everything we had. So
Speaker 3: the next morning we went out to look at the
Speaker 3: area where all the mortar rounds landed. We ended up
Speaker 3: killing about three gazelles.
Speaker 2: Three gazelles tripped your flare. Oh wow, bad day for
Speaker 2: the gazelles. Yep, good thing. They only give you twenty
Speaker 2: five rounds. I know, it's a mortar. It's totally different,
Speaker 2: not artillery.
Speaker 3: This was a order.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you have any of those.
Speaker 3: Six or eight rounds. That's all we could shoot, that's
Speaker 3: all we could carry. I mean they brought they would
Speaker 3: bring in supplies to us every night by helicopter and
Speaker 3: then come in the morning and put it back on
Speaker 3: the chopper.
Speaker 2: And just reload you that way.
Speaker 3: That was Yeah, couldn't carry that much weight.
Speaker 2: Wow. So that's the cowboy hat. Guys with the rope
Speaker 2: around their hat right first calf, I have.
Speaker 3: A hat like that sitting right over here next to me.
Speaker 2: That's legit. No, that's yeah. You're what movies are made of.
Speaker 2: I have to say that, you know. And do you
Speaker 2: find any movies out there that you've seen? Did you
Speaker 2: can suck? Can you muster it? Or do you just
Speaker 2: move on from those?
Speaker 3: I can kind of move on from them, Yeah, I can't.
Speaker 3: Many of them had parts that were very well performed,
Speaker 3: were well done, yeah, but you always look at things
Speaker 3: like the uniform and how clean it was, and whether
Speaker 3: there were any patches on it, and whether they were
Speaker 3: wearing their helmets and whether the helmet had camouflage on them.
Speaker 3: And there were a number of things that mediate giveaways,
Speaker 3: you know, mostly how clean the uniforms were, right, Yeah,
Speaker 3: we did not. We were not clean. We were dirty.
Speaker 2: It's the little things Like in Rambo, my dad would
Speaker 2: always say at the end of it, they would all die.
Speaker 2: I'm like why, He's like, well, the RPG in the
Speaker 2: helicopter when he shoots the helicopter down. It would blow
Speaker 2: all the POW's way in the back because he holds
Speaker 2: up this RPG in Rambo, you know. And it's like
Speaker 2: my dad would always just say, as he'd look over
Speaker 2: at the TV, oh yeah, they'd all die, a little
Speaker 2: twelve year old me learning, you know, the little things.
Speaker 2: It's the little things. It's the little things it is.
Speaker 2: But today you have TV shows that are using airsoft
Speaker 2: guns like what I work with to use in these
Speaker 2: movies and use them to you know, society the real
Speaker 2: gun aspect, and they're a lot more cost effective, less
Speaker 2: lethal first and foremost, and they look the same. So Hollywood,
Speaker 2: hit me up and hit up my man Robin too. Please,
Speaker 2: do you have a movie coming out or anything? What's
Speaker 2: going on?
Speaker 3: No, I'm just working to try and promote my book
Speaker 3: and get people to read it and buy it so
Speaker 3: that you know. My publisher is actually in the UK
Speaker 3: Case Made Publishers, and they did a beautiful job on
Speaker 3: the cover. I'm very very happy with the cover and
Speaker 3: the design. They included a lot of photographs in the
Speaker 3: book and I was very very pleased with the production.
Speaker 3: But their marketing department here in the US is a
Speaker 3: small operation so and I come from a publishing background,
Speaker 3: so right here, I know.
Speaker 2: I'm not the fanciest, you know, it's me and you
Speaker 2: and we're doing the show. And I got my phone up.
Speaker 2: But you can see on the cover right here at
Speaker 2: the back of the first half patch on the helmet
Speaker 2: and then out the door, probably the gunner's door. There,
Speaker 2: you've got a line a column of all of these.
Speaker 2: Huey's probably just going and he's got the book right there. Yeah,
Speaker 2: show that. Oh yeah, Vietnam Combat.
Speaker 3: Now you do know that that first camp patch was
Speaker 3: was added to the back of the helmet. All all
Speaker 3: the chopper pilots did have various different stickers and things
Speaker 3: on the backs of their helmets, but mostly it was
Speaker 3: ID I had that added.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, right, because you just wanted to make that
Speaker 2: a point. Yeah sure, yeah, no, I mean you got
Speaker 2: to be why not. And they probably love it, I'm
Speaker 2: sure you know, oh yeah, one hundred percent. This is
Speaker 2: gonna be huge with the first first.
Speaker 3: Instantaneous they know.
Speaker 2: Yeah, we're showing it off right here software dot Com,
Speaker 2: Rad and Robin talking about first Cave baby all day.
Speaker 2: Look at that column of Hughey's in that picture. You
Speaker 2: guys got to go check out this book, Vietnam Combat,
Speaker 2: Firefights and Writing History, Robin Bartlett. You know, there's so
Speaker 2: many reviews. Everybody's talking good about it. Can you get
Speaker 2: it locally? Is it online? What are we going to
Speaker 2: do with it? How were we going to get it?
Speaker 3: You can get it at Amazon and Barnes and Noble.
Speaker 3: It's in a lot of bookstores. You can also buy
Speaker 3: it off my website, which is www dot Robin Bartlett
Speaker 3: dot Robin Bartlett a third dot com.
Speaker 2: Robin Robin Bartlett, author dot dot com. And we'll have
Speaker 2: that put on the website down below our you know,
Speaker 2: our conversation here so when folks that might be reading it,
Speaker 2: they can just tap on that. So we'll make sure
Speaker 2: that that goes right to your link so that it
Speaker 2: gets that.
Speaker 3: And they'll get an autograph copy with free shipping and
Speaker 3: save thirteen dollars off the cover price. How about that?
Speaker 2: Yes? And you're supporting you know, local if you will,
Speaker 2: that's right, local American And also it's out of England.
Speaker 2: You know your publisher. Give them a shout out again
Speaker 2: and thanks for believing in you to write your story.
Speaker 2: And whoever took the I mean really a lot of
Speaker 2: folks are like, how do I write a book? How
Speaker 2: can I get published? How can I how can I
Speaker 2: you know you've done it? Is there is there something
Speaker 2: that you can maybe give my listener who might be
Speaker 2: let's say they've written something. Let's say they've gone and
Speaker 2: they've written something and they don't know what to do
Speaker 2: with it. What's your advice for somebody.
Speaker 3: The one thing that helped me the most was that
Speaker 3: I had a college actually a college classmate who was
Speaker 3: with me in Vietnam, but his wife, also a college classmate,
Speaker 3: was just an incredible proofreader. She went through that manuscript,
Speaker 3: caught every misplaced comma, every misspelled word, and ask a
Speaker 3: whole ton of WTF questions. And I figured if she
Speaker 3: didn't understand what I was talking about, I needed to rewrite.
Speaker 3: So that was probably the most important thing that I did.
Speaker 3: And I also demilitarized it to find every acronym, every term.
Speaker 2: I love that.
Speaker 3: And I had some people read it, a couple of women,
Speaker 3: and she said and they told me that, I guess
Speaker 3: you just want to sell this to the military, right,
Speaker 3: And I said, no, I want this to appeal to
Speaker 3: general readers too. I want people to understand about the war.
Speaker 3: And they said, well, you need to add more of yourself,
Speaker 3: more of your emotions into the book. And I remember
Speaker 3: that my mother had saved every letter that I wrote home,
Speaker 3: over one hundred letters, and she kept them in the
Speaker 3: envelope so they were all date stamped, and I put
Speaker 3: them in chronological order and re read every letter that
Speaker 3: I wrote home, and I reached in and I grabbed
Speaker 3: snippets of the letters and I put them into appropriate
Speaker 3: chapters so.
Speaker 2: You could read.
Speaker 3: You could read what I wrote about what happened, and
Speaker 3: then you could read what I wrote home about and
Speaker 3: they weren't always quite the same story.
Speaker 2: I'm okay, everything's good. I love you, don't worry.
Speaker 3: I know I haven't written for a while. But by
Speaker 3: the way, I was wounded, but I never told.
Speaker 2: Him I know you got or what no.
Speaker 3: I never told him. And the way they found out
Speaker 3: is I sent a box of stuff home and it
Speaker 3: had my purple heart in it, and that's how they
Speaker 3: found out that I had been wounded.
Speaker 2: The enemy's marksmanship badge, or as my father called it.
Speaker 2: It's like, I don't want that.
Speaker 3: The only award that's awarded by the enemy, that's.
Speaker 2: Right, He's like, I don't need it. I don't want it.
Speaker 2: You don't want it, That's what he would tell me,
Speaker 2: don't ever want that. Nope, it's like, how can we
Speaker 2: don't have a purple heart? Little me, little me and
Speaker 2: all the little questions, you know. But now I'm forty
Speaker 2: five year old me and he's up above with my mom. So,
Speaker 2: like I said, I love to immortal lives my dad
Speaker 2: and my mom in here because you know, we want
Speaker 2: to keep their names going. So John and VICKI radel
Speaker 2: out there forever right now. So you like to just
Speaker 2: like that. You're a good dude, Robin, and a good dude, sir.
Speaker 2: I give you that salute, sir. And you know what's
Speaker 2: your hobbies today? How are you just? Are you just
Speaker 2: writing another book? Are you just gonna go surf out?
Speaker 3: I'm still I still work full time, Okay. I actually
Speaker 3: work for my college and I call senior alumni and
Speaker 3: I try and get them to pony up dollars for
Speaker 3: the college. So that's what I do on a part
Speaker 3: time basis, and I'm very active. I'm actually thinking about
Speaker 3: writing another book, but I want to write it as
Speaker 3: a fiction account. One of the best books so I've
Speaker 3: ever read is by Carl Malantes Matterhorn. It is the finest,
Speaker 3: probably the now he was a marine, so I have
Speaker 3: to give him a little bit of a hard time there.
Speaker 3: But it's one of the finest books I've read. And
Speaker 3: he's written two non fiction books which did pretty well,
Speaker 3: but his matter Horn went to the Moon. Sure. I
Speaker 3: think it's because it was a fictionalized account, and that's
Speaker 3: what I have in mind. Once I finished the promotion
Speaker 3: of this book, I've got a lot more stories in
Speaker 3: me and I'd like to go back. But I believe
Speaker 3: in embellishment a little bit. Maybe here there.
Speaker 2: Right, Sure you can have a big beer to be
Speaker 2: a second lieutenant in Vietnam and look like me. You
Speaker 2: could be me and Vietnam right now, go ahead, cast me.
Speaker 2: It's okay, I'll be here. I'll play you. I'll do that.
Speaker 2: Just give me those glasses. Where's mine?
Speaker 3: Not?
Speaker 2: I wanted to give you my eyes right here so
Speaker 2: you can see them. They're there. I just wanted you
Speaker 2: to know. Let me put these back on, though. See
Speaker 2: that's how you should look in noam right here there?
Speaker 3: You go right well, And if you look at one
Speaker 3: of the pictures in my book. I'm wearing those glasses.
Speaker 2: I love it.
Speaker 3: I call it my badass photograph.
Speaker 2: All right, that's Elvis, baby. I got to give it
Speaker 2: to the King and hail to him. These are the
Speaker 2: Elvis shades. You know. I met my wife wearing these
Speaker 2: twenty three years ago. This is not just a thing
Speaker 2: I got sucked into. I thought, who's cool? Elvis absolutely
Speaker 2: a glasses brother, like what you're wearing. He's the king.
Speaker 2: He is. If only his colonel would have let him
Speaker 2: go travel to England. I never until I saw Elvis,
Speaker 2: I never knew that he was confined to Vegas like that. Huh.
Speaker 3: I didn't know that either.
Speaker 2: You didn't know. No, he was. He was trapped like
Speaker 2: a lion in the zoo. His colonel was like, oh,
Speaker 2: it's too dangerous for you to travel. Elvis, He's like,
Speaker 2: but they want me over there. He's like, but it's
Speaker 2: too dangerous because he didn't want to go because, oh,
Speaker 2: you gotta watch that movie. Have you not seen the
Speaker 2: Elvis movie?
Speaker 3: No, I haven't seen that. I'll have to watch it.
Speaker 2: Please do that, Okay. I had no idea Elvis was trapped.
Speaker 2: The Beatles like come over, and he's like, why can't
Speaker 2: I go over and they're like it's too dangerous. They
Speaker 2: offered him f like four million dollars. He didn't know that.
Speaker 2: His managers like denied it, just kept him at the
Speaker 2: Vegas casino. Man. Yeah, you know Elvis wanted to come
Speaker 2: visit another veteran right there, Elvis Presley, Oh yeah, baby.
Speaker 2: When you write your book, I'd love to have you
Speaker 2: on again. If you're going to write something out or
Speaker 2: you do come up with something that's fiction nonfiction. I
Speaker 2: think my point what I was going to say is
Speaker 2: when it comes to nonfiction, and when I've interviewed folks
Speaker 2: who have written nonfiction, there's a little bit of a
Speaker 2: scare thing when they have to write something that's real. Yep, right,
Speaker 2: how am I going to write this? You know who
Speaker 2: wants to read data?
Speaker 3: Well, I was raising a family. It took me ten
Speaker 3: years to write this book, sure, because I was raising
Speaker 3: a family and I had a job that took me
Speaker 3: on long airplane plights. So that's when I wrote. I
Speaker 3: would whip out my laptop as long as it wasn't
Speaker 3: too bumpy, and I'd work on a chapter. And my
Speaker 3: favorite author is Stephen King, and he talks about In
Speaker 3: a book called on Writing, he talks about falling into
Speaker 3: the typewriter, and by that he means you become so
Speaker 3: engrossed in the story you're writing that you block out
Speaker 3: everything that's going on around you.
Speaker 2: M you see it.
Speaker 3: And that's what happened to me. I would be so
Speaker 3: involved in writing this chapter and recalling what happened that
Speaker 3: it was just amazing how much detail my mind could
Speaker 3: bring back. I would come away from some of these
Speaker 3: writing events just sweating with perspiration on my face and
Speaker 3: recalling the events. I could see the colors, I could
Speaker 3: smell the smells. It was pretty amazing.
Speaker 2: That's awesome. Yeah, you were just it was vivid. You
Speaker 2: were just there. It was almost like out of body
Speaker 2: experience with Yeah, really one hundred percent. You're really passionate,
Speaker 2: emotional about it. And I think you're going to put
Speaker 2: that right into your writings. And I don't think you
Speaker 2: should have a problem writing a fiction book. It should
Speaker 2: be probably pretty fun. I think you want to do it.
Speaker 3: I got to work on some technique, but yeah, that's
Speaker 3: the next goal that I have for my writing.
Speaker 2: I love that. And so, since you are a Stephen
Speaker 2: King fan, you.
Speaker 3: Said that, right, Oh, yeah, I've read every one of
Speaker 3: his books. Now, I just saw Boogeyman, So.
Speaker 2: I just I just want to let you know about
Speaker 2: trying to boast or brag. But I have a little
Speaker 2: Stephen King something for you. So he's born in September
Speaker 2: twenty first. I was also born on September twenty first.
Speaker 2: Cool okay. But I also play Andy McGee in Firestarter
Speaker 2: to the fire Starter for Stephen King. Oh that's cool, okay.
Speaker 2: So in the series for Sci Fi Channel, I have telepathy.
Speaker 2: She starts fires. Her mom and I met in the
Speaker 2: Lot six experiment, you know, and then we become one
Speaker 2: and then we're the only two survivors out of the experiment,
Speaker 2: and then we marry each other, have her and Charlie
Speaker 2: goes off and starts fires with her mind. And then
Speaker 2: the series I was picked up as the reoccurring Andy
Speaker 2: McGee through all of her flashbacks and all these demons
Speaker 2: that she dealt with with her fire starting, so she
Speaker 2: gets hot and bothered later in life. It's kind of interesting,
Speaker 2: so very cool. Yeah. That was with Dennis Hopper, Malcolm McDowell,
Speaker 2: Danny Nucci from Titanic. I have to say that, you know,
Speaker 2: he was like Leonardo's buddy that was stuck down below.
Speaker 3: Oh so yeah, well I have an interesting set of
Speaker 3: dates as well. You know, the tour in Vietnam was
Speaker 3: three hundred and sixty five days, and I went over
Speaker 3: on May the ninth, nineteen sixty eight, and you couldn't
Speaker 3: determine exactly when you came back. But I actually came
Speaker 3: back on May the ninth, nineteen sixty nine, one year
Speaker 3: to the day day. It just happened that way. My
Speaker 3: wife was born on May the ninth, My youngest son
Speaker 3: was born on May the ninth, and I have played
Speaker 3: those numbers in every possible combination to try to win something.
Speaker 2: Never wont to Nickel's see what's going on in August
Speaker 2: at your house? Is it your birthday? May? No? I
Speaker 2: know May's the birthday when we were on vacation. Yeah, yes, yes,
Speaker 2: I'm like, wait there here, so you're trying to figure
Speaker 2: out the numbers. I'm like, let's go back nine months.
Speaker 2: All my kids are born in October, so you know
Speaker 2: it's cold here in Utah in January. Okay at my
Speaker 2: house because nine months later my kids, all of them
Speaker 2: are October.
Speaker 3: Yeah, my oldest was born in May, and my second
Speaker 3: son was born in April, but he came early. So yeah,
Speaker 3: May is my month.
Speaker 2: Yeah May is your month, nine months before that's your month, homie. Now,
Speaker 2: I've taken about an hour of our time to talk
Speaker 2: and and I loved it, and I've had a great time,
Speaker 2: and I hope you had a great time being here
Speaker 2: and talking with me just about everything life in general
Speaker 2: and a great candid conversation. I just want to drop
Speaker 2: your book again as Vietnam Combat, Firefights and Writing History
Speaker 2: by my wonderful friend and guest here, Robin Bartlett, the author,
Speaker 2: veteran and father. And yeah I add.
Speaker 3: One final note. You know, it's very common these days
Speaker 3: to say to a veteran thank you for your service,
Speaker 3: and there's absolutely nothing wrong with saying that. But Vietnam
Speaker 3: veterans now are starting to walk in the boots of
Speaker 3: Korean War and World War Two veterans. They're all up
Speaker 3: there in their high nineties and hundreds. So if you
Speaker 3: want to acknowledge the service of a Vietnam veteran, the
Speaker 3: code words are welcome home. And if you say welcome
Speaker 3: home to a Vietnam veteran, it's a game changer. You
Speaker 3: will see them stop in their tracks, tears to their eyes,
Speaker 3: lumps and throat. It makes a big difference. Nothing wrong
Speaker 3: with thank you for your service, No, but I the
Speaker 3: home is the code word.
Speaker 2: I could not agree with you more. And honestly I
Speaker 2: say the same exact thing. And I was going to
Speaker 2: tell you, welcome home. You have you are for sure.
Speaker 2: I know it was tough and it wasn't a wanted
Speaker 2: thing and it was a very different time then. We
Speaker 2: live in Iraq and Afghanistan. Everybody coming home after nine
Speaker 2: to eleven and everybody's like these big, huge greetings. So
Speaker 2: from me for my father and my welcome home to yourself,
Speaker 2: and thank you know, and to my listener, welcome home
Speaker 2: to you as well. And we do welcome you home.
Speaker 2: And you know, you can hit me up on Instagram
Speaker 2: if you want to say hi. I'm cool like that.
Speaker 2: Whoever's out there, all right, So that's cool. With that said,
Speaker 2: I'm going to close out one more time with Robin's
Speaker 2: book Okay, which is Vietnam Combat Firefights in Writing History,
Speaker 2: and you can check it out, Google it, find it online.
Speaker 2: You can check soft rep dot com. We could try
Speaker 2: to get it in the merch not our merch, but
Speaker 2: our book club if be happy to Okay, we'll work
Speaker 2: something out'll get a guy to get involved, and we'll
Speaker 2: try to get you in the book club.
Speaker 3: I'd be glad to.
Speaker 2: And you know, we'll have you back on and we
Speaker 2: could talk more Vietnam more. That's it, that's it. I
Speaker 2: got no problem with that, and we'll dive right into it.
Speaker 2: I'm not trying to be those podcasts that take fifty
Speaker 2: minutes to get in ten minutes at the end of
Speaker 2: the juice. That's why we went write at it. So
Speaker 2: thank you for your stories. Thank you all right, and
Speaker 2: it's been a pleasure. Okay on behalf of Robin Marlott
Speaker 2: and my name is Rad sayin peace.
Speaker 1: You've been listening to your self Red Radio.
Speaker 2: H