The Secret War's Invisible Heroes
This is the No Bell podcast where we talk about how to optimize your technology, life, and mind. We're joined by special operations veterans, entrepreneurs, investors, and others who have overcome difficulty to make it to the top of their craft by staying in the fight. Welcome to the No Bell podcast. I'm Sam Alaimo, and I'm joined with, John Stryker Meyer, SOG legend, author, and host of the SOG cast podcast. John, welcome.
John Stryker Meyer:Thank you, Sam. Good to be here.
Sam Alaimo:Let's start where we always do. Where did you grow up?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, Trenton, New Jersey, just a few miles north of your AO there in Philadelphia. And, my dad was a milkman. Mom was a piano teacher and a choir director and a church organist. And so I had music and, grew up in a milk truck with dad. And then, graduated from high school at 64.
John Stryker Meyer:That was the same year that Roger Donilon earned the 1st Medal of Honor in the Vietnam War. And, in history classes, we had read about Southeast Asia and Vietnam was beginning to get more headlines. This is back with David Haberstom and some of his cohorts were doing some excellent reporting from Vietnam. So in 'sixty 4, I graduated. Roger Donnell earned the Medal of Honor the following month.
John Stryker Meyer:Took me 2 years to flunk out of college at Trenton State College. When I flunked out, I was working in Yosemite National Park. And I've read the book, The Green Berets. And, my dad told me, he says, The draft board's coming. I read the book.
John Stryker Meyer:I said, well, you know what? These guys, they sound crazy. If I could qualify for them, I'd rather go to Vietnam with these guys. Went down, talked to the recruiter. And back then, used us to list it for airborne unassigned.
John Stryker Meyer:And so after basic training, which was 8 weeks at Fort Dix, we were down at Fort Gordon, Georgia. And about the 3rd or 4th week through, they have one of these career days. Like, it's always a rainy day. You go to a big gym or an auditorium. Everybody's sitting on the floor, like, 5, 600 guys.
John Stryker Meyer:And it had a stage up front with staircases on it on each side, and the cooks would come up, the commo guys, the military police, and the cooks, this is the best job. You'll never be hungry. And they're all fat slobs. Right? And so the very last guy to come in was a Greenbrae and it was raining because we were inside because it was raining.
John Stryker Meyer:And this Greenbrae came in. It's a little bandy rooster of a guy, no rain jacket. His fatigues were wet because he obviously walked in the rain. He walked up to the stage, did a vertical jump up on the stage, turned around and said, I'm the Special Forces recruiter if you're interested. How many are interested?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, I read the book. I jumped up off the floor, me about 5 or 6 under guy other guys, And everybody else is just sitting there going like, you guys are crazy. After AIT, you're going to Vietnam. I'm a city slicker. I need a lot more training.
John Stryker Meyer:So then we went through the test, and, at the end of it, the recruiter told me, Meyer, you're lucky. We've lowered the standards. So then from that jump school, training group for 7 months, And then we had TDY for the radio teletype training, which was early 68, landed at the end of April 68, had the in country training. And they told us some of our, you know, once we were in these classes with the special forces, we had guys have been to Nam 2 or 3 times already. And all of them said, when you go to Vietnam, go to an aid camp, learn how the country works.
John Stryker Meyer:And at the end of your in country training, some guy's gonna come out and say, we need volunteers. Don't do it. They all die. So sure it up. We're in country.
John Stryker Meyer:We did the 3 weeks of in country training. At the end, here comes this little guy out. We're looking for volunteers. And so my buddy, Johnny McIntyre goes, for what? He goes, can't say.
John Stryker Meyer:Either you're in or you're not. Well, we all volunteered. And next day we were in Da Nang, we got the top secret briefing in the room with the curtains on the windows and the curtain over this map. And we've been students for over a year. And so we're pulling our pads and pens out and the Sergeant Major goes, put that shit away.
John Stryker Meyer:This is a top secret briefing. And it says, in front of you is an NDA. You can sign it or leave. So we all signed it, then we got the briefing. There's the map.
John Stryker Meyer:Vietnam, I Corps, II Corps, III Corps, IV Corps. On the left was Laos and Cambodia, all in 6 by 6 target boxes. And welcome to the SEC award, Dean went on to explain it. And then, Johnny Mac and I, after the briefing, we went up, we flew up on South Vietnamese Air Force H34 King Bee's. The code name was King Bee's, and that was like culture shock because we had all these American helicopters.
John Stryker Meyer:We didn't even know what a CH 34 was, let alone have it flown by some South Vietnamese guy. Well, it turned out those guys were really outstanding. But we flew up, get off the helicopter and a recon team gets on and disappears It was Spike Team Idaho and that's why as our introduction to the secret war. And so it was an instant opening on recon and we're just very fortunate. Spider Parks had been on the team, he'd gotten promoted to his own team and HEP, the interpreter, didn't go.
John Stryker Meyer:He was sick, and the team leader, the Vietnamese team leader hadn't it was not his rotation. They rotated on missions. So HEP and Sal were stayed back at the base. After the team got wiped out, Spire to became the team leader, and we rebuild it around Hep and Sal. Hired 3 new 15 year olds, and I have myself, green as grass, and then Don Wolkan.
John Stryker Meyer:And that was the beginning of the entrance to the secret war.
Sam Alaimo:I wanna back up and then come back to this point. Were you Sure. Don't you enlist in the military anyway? Or did the draft make the military an option for you?
John Stryker Meyer:Oh, well, I knew they were coming. And with the draft, you know, I wasn't sure how it's gonna pan out, but I wanted to enlist because the, recruiter said that, you enlist for airborne unassigned, and when you're in AIT, you'll get the option to volunteer there. You'll have a a moment in time. And, I was surprised. They came through, we did it, and that's when we, volunteered there, went through all the tests and this and everything else.
John Stryker Meyer:Britain, physical, swimming, whatnot.
Sam Alaimo:It's interesting. So you knew what was happening in the Vietnam War at the time. Was it unpopular then when you enlisted?
John Stryker Meyer:There was growing dissent in the country, and this is I enlisted in December of 66. So on the college campus where I'd been, there was, like, some of the what I would call, I guess, the left or some are a little bit more flaky people, the marijuana smokers, they were beginning to be anti anti war, which I didn't really understand that much other than we had the communist up north that wanted to subvert people down south. That was all I knew about it. By 66 and then the 67, we're we're learning about the we had the Idrang Valley in 65. There were a couple egg camps that were historic.
John Stryker Meyer:And then, of course, in 68, when we were going through our, special training for radio teletype, they had the Tet Offensive. And, Johnny Mac and I were up in a bar in Washington DC like January or February 1, 68. Here on TV, like CBS, they had film of an NVA tank in Lang Ve, the uppermost a camp in Vietnam, a 101, and the tank was right on top of the command bunker. Somehow they got video of that, and I was like, woah. WTF.
John Stryker Meyer:We went home, took our money out of the bank, because we don't wanna leave any of our money left for our relatives to fight over, and we spent every penny before we went to Vietnam. And so, yeah, we knew in the tentative, they launched a lot. Of course, it was interesting because some of the media, particularly after Walter Cronkite came out and said there's no light at the end of the tunnel, and he was, like, portrayed it in a negative way where every unit that had contact with the enemy, the Viet Cong were viscerated. They were never as effective as they were again for the rest of the war, but that part never got reported. But that was what's going on, and then by the time we got there, by time I got the FOB 1, there was still some activity.
John Stryker Meyer:They rocketed our base, we got more than once in a while, but nothing like Lang Veith, when he would come in and attack the base head on.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah, stories from Lang Veith are incredible. Oh, my gosh. Yes. When you first got on the ground, you talked about you were making your way around the country. You heard from a few SF guys, special forces guys, that an entire recon team at FOB 4 vanished in Laos, and that a spike team Alabama from FOB 1 lost all Americans but 1, sergeant John Allen.
Sam Alaimo:I think your book, you it it made it sound like this made it very real to you, but can you can you get into what what that did to you as you're just getting into Vietnam, green as grass?
John Stryker Meyer:Yeah. I mean, on top of Allen and the recon team, there were, like, 2 recon teams in late March of 68 that we knew about. One was before and another was I forget the name of the team, but John Gallagher had been the, I think it was the 10 and he died on the LZ. He let all the team members get out and then he stayed on the ground because he took care of the team first. There was a couple other teams that we'd heard about.
John Stryker Meyer:In addition to that, when we had gone through training group, we went through his comma guys and we had to do Morse code. And there was a sergeant first class named Villa Rosa. And he was our trainer and me, McIntyre, a few other guys, we got recycled for Como. And he brought us in on the weekends, at night we would go back just to get us up to the mandatory word group per minute that you needed in order to graduate. And, he did it.
John Stryker Meyer:He got us through it. When we went through our top secret briefing, at the end of it, they said that we've had some bad cases, and then they asked, does anybody know Paul Villarosa? Well, me and Mac, we're like, oh, yeah. Of course, we know. He was one of our heroes back before Bragg.
John Stryker Meyer:He said, well, he went out of FOB 4, the first new mission out of FOB 4 in Da Nang in early January 68, and he was KIA. And what they didn't tell us was not only was he KIA, but they tortured him and they burned him with a flamethrower, and they kept 1 American alive who was wounded, kept him alive, and they knew we'd come to get him. And they kept him alive, so he'd go back and tell everybody what happened. So that's one of our heroes that we heard about in addition to all the teams that had been hit. And we knew by that time, like we had our first mission briefing in July for a training mission, and then we had another one in August.
John Stryker Meyer:And each time they said, we've heard that the NVA are training sappers or teams that are just designed to find SOG teams in Laos and Cambodia and to kill the Americas, but leave the indigenous troops alive. And then on August 23, 68, there was a sapper attack of FB 4, and they killed 16 Green Berets in 1 night. It was a night, no moon, and they hit after midnight. They were in the camp, and, it was the most, severe loss of Green Berets in SF history. And nobody fortunately, nobody's come close to that since then.
John Stryker Meyer:So that was our introduction. Now it's all going on, and we knew we were up against a determined foe.
Sam Alaimo:It's interesting to me that you you knew how hardcore it was, you and everybody else there. And I wonder if there's some sort of commonality among yourself and all the other guys who fought in SOG. I know there's radically different backgrounds, different motivations, but do you see some sort of threat of similarity in the way that they approached the world and why they were still willing to lean into that unit and that combat.
John Stryker Meyer:Absolutely. I mean, to this day, anybody I meet, I judge the men I serve with, including Hep and Sao. I mean, they were just outstanding and we knew what the mission was. And my team was all South Vietnamese. There are 3 guys that were on the team.
John Stryker Meyer:Their families came South in 1954, 1955 after Dien Bien Phu fell. They came South because they didn't want anything to do with communism, and they're all in recon, our team, Spike Team Idaho. They said we would rather live in South Vietnam. We know the government's corrupt. We can live with it.
John Stryker Meyer:And when we have issues with this government, we work around it. And they were willing to die for it as opposed to living under the Communist thumb. And that's like, okay, man. We're in this thing together. And in the jungle, man, we always well, anybody that I served with on our team, we always deferred to if they ran Point, they ran tail security.
John Stryker Meyer:And, we just went with their innate skill set in the jungle, and try to keep up with them.
Sam Alaimo:The King Bee pilots. So they're piloted, you said by the South Vietnamese guys. Can you talk about what lies at the the root of that relationship? Because it doesn't seem like it would be patriotic. It doesn't seem like it would have that sort of value.
Sam Alaimo:There's some, I think, deeper deeper brotherhood there that's maybe forged in the combat, in the hardship, but what do you think about that relationship?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, I'm alive today, because thanks to the King Bee Piles and other aviators. But in my first 7 months running missions with, Spy Team Idaho, there are so many times that our team was in under contact. We were extracted under enemy fire each time. On, October 7th, we had been in contact for 4 hours, and Captain Tin came in with the king bee and hovered there in the elephant grass for 10 minutes until we got to it. And the bottom line, we were down to our last magazines over 600 rounds out of hand grenades, out of them 79 rounds.
John Stryker Meyer:He pulled us out. That King Bee had 48 bullet holes in it, and somehow none of our
Sam Alaimo:guys were wounded. So did the entire recon team Idaho vanish and that's how you ended up joining? Nobody knows what happened?
John Stryker Meyer:No, it was the 2 Americans, Glenn Lane, who was the team leader, and Robert Duval Owen was the assistant team member. Even his story, like a little quick sidebar, he had been to Vietnam previously. So in early May, he he could have flown to Washington State from South Carolina, but he had to leave, he hiss tike to Washington, send his money home to his wife, goes to Vietnam because he had been in country before. He gets assigned to SOG, gets on our, Spy Team Idaho, and within 20 days from May 1st to May 20th or May 22nd, he, they get inserted, he disappears. He promised his daughter he'd be home for her birthday, but he never made it.
John Stryker Meyer:And I'm still in contact with his daughter, but that's just one of those little sidebars. And so it was the 2 Americans that 4 or 5 in did that were we we lost. So we hired right away 3 South Vietnamese that were 15 years old, and Spider brought us together with Sal and Hep, and we trained up really hard. During June July, we ran a couple of night ambushes, a couple of practice missions, and then we started doing a real thing.
Sam Alaimo:Who on your team had combat experience since you were new? Spider Parks
John Stryker Meyer:and Hep and Sal. I mean, both of them had been this is 68. They had both been running solid recon missions for over 2 years now. Oh, rock.
Sam Alaimo:And do you say they were 15 years old?
John Stryker Meyer:Yeah. We hired 3 15 year old kids. And by the end of the year, 2 of the 3 were really sharp. In fact, one song was so good, he began running point. That's remarkable.
John Stryker Meyer:Oh, yeah. Yeah, they're serious. And we had one other team member, Fuchs. So we had Hep, Sal and Fuchs who all had combat experience. And so Fuchs was the point man for our first few missions that we had Fuchs, Sal, HEP, myself, and Don Wilkin.
John Stryker Meyer:And so we had those those missions. And, again, we just learned, grew together. They were the experts in the jungle. I always did the tac air and all the camo Do the prick 25, FM radio or an emergency, we had the, ultrahigh, year arc 10 for, talk to the air crews and things like that. But they were great.
John Stryker Meyer:I mean, our staff, we had the means, were and they were just, they were absolutely fearless. I mean, Sal and or Hepp or Fook, they always initiated contact when the enemy was approaching us. We never got ambushed. We knew when they were coming for us and we were we were very fortunate. They we we always somehow had high ground or had a tactical situation where we were able to work with TAC Air or things like that to to hold them back.
Sam Alaimo:You're you're with these guys, like combat hard in South Vietnamese, 15 year old Vietnamese, and it would just be you, maybe another 1 or 2 Americans, and a handful of these South Vietnamese in Cambodia or Laos, knowing full well that if you get caught because Geneva Convention doesn't apply, you would never make a home.
John Stryker Meyer:When you're in, you can't talk about this to anybody. And they were serious, like after my first book came out, dad read the book, he goes, you know, I always wonder why the guy came by and picked up our trash. And we used to have trash collection 3 days a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Fridays. And dad saw this guy pick up the trash. He got my dad got a job at the post office a couple years later.
John Stryker Meyer:He saw the guy, and he worked with the FBI, and they're picking up our trash to make sure we didn't violate that NDA. That's how serious they were about it.
Sam Alaimo:So you're out there, Cambodia with with the South of Indian of his partner forces. And I I can't wrap my head around that that tight knit partnership you had because I didn't see anything to that extent in our in our wars in the Middle East. Was it just the fact that you were surrounded out there completely on your own with hopefully some aircraft that you got into a troops in contact? Is that what enabled you to bond with these South Vietnamese partner force and basically become brothers with them?
John Stryker Meyer:We were all into the mission, and they knew that they were in a special mission with us going across the fence. They got paid more than any others, South Vietnamese military unit to a good pay. Like our first few missions, everything was with Sal, Phuc, and Hep because they were hardcore. And then as time went on, we ran missions bringing out some of the younger guys to see how they were. As time went on, we had a bunch of missions, so we always had plenty of opportunities, but we always had hep and Sal or hep and Fook because hep was our interpreter.
John Stryker Meyer:I'm alive again today. Thanks to to them and, of course, to King Bees and our aviators that were American. When I first came on to the team, when Spider Parks introduced me to the team, Sal looked at Hepp, and he said quietly, he says, he's too tall, his feet are too big, and he looks stupid. This is, like, May, right, of 68. After that mission, when we're on a helicopter, after after captain Tim pulled us out, I looked over at Sal.
John Stryker Meyer:He went like he gave me a little nod. As the first time, he gave me a nod like that. So that was part of us building our bonding. And from that day on, we were tight. And Sal was a farmer.
John Stryker Meyer:All he wanted to do was go back with his wife, get a little patch of land somewhere, plow up some rice. And he was just a cool guy, but man, he could smell the NVA before we did. He knew what they were doing. And, he kept us alive on the ground.
Sam Alaimo:I think this is probably your your first major firefight, if I remember correctly. Correct. You had a prairie fire emergency, which means you're at risk of being overrun. And, the the comms guy's worst nightmare, you couldn't get anybody up on the radio. Your teammate said to you at one point, look, they're stacking up dead bodies against us, to get to us.
Sam Alaimo:Can you pick up the mission from that point there?
John Stryker Meyer:Earlier in the day, we had been we had moved all in the morning. In the afternoon, we went out of the jungle because we wanted to get we're trying to get to the secondary mission was we had heard there was American POW camp in Laos, and we wanted to try and move in that direction. So at one point, we left the jungle to get to a a a trail that's right at the end of the jungle. It was a steep drop off, and we went up this trail for maybe an hour or so. And at one point, around 1:30 or so, I heard Sal because I was back Sal was a tail gunner.
John Stryker Meyer:Fook was running point, Don Wilkin, Hepp, Davidson, who was the other American with us, myself, and Sal. And I hear Sal hissing. I turned around and back way down this trail, we could see 2 NVA in full not in uniform, but I think they had, like, black shirts and hats. And their AKs were at Port Arms. I was stunned.
John Stryker Meyer:And Sal was like, number 10. I want to throw an m 79 round at him. He said, no. No. No.
John Stryker Meyer:Let's keep moving. So we told Don, and we left the trail, went straight up a little knoll and got on top of a knoll. And when we were in our perimeter up there, I was trying to make communication, no luck, hep and hep and Sal opened fire, and they kept coming up. So luckily, the knoll was small enough that they can only send so many people up at a time. So they come out, we blow them back in the jungle.
John Stryker Meyer:A lot of times, I wouldn't even see who we're shooting at. You see the weapon, the weapons first, and, this went off for a while and at some point, we had no comma yet. Don came by and we had this little break sometimes, you know, and, that's when he said, look what they're doing. And I couldn't really see it, and he says, look. They're stacking up the bodies because Hepps showed him, and they were stacking up the bodies because they're gonna climb on top of the dead bodies to shoot down, to get an angle to shoot down at us instead of us shooting down at them all the time.
John Stryker Meyer:And that, I'll tell you, that got my undivided attention, and that's also indicator of how serious they were.
Sam Alaimo:I think at some point during that mission, you had a couple of napalm runs, right?
John Stryker Meyer:Oh, yeah. We we used everything they had. Some of the first gun runs we had were, I think, A1 Sky Raiders. So that's a single engine aircraft developed at the end of World War 2 used in Korean War, and it was an aircraft single engine that carried tons of orders. They could carry the same amount of orders that a B 17 bomber could carry, and they carried bombs, CBU, napalm, weapons.
John Stryker Meyer:They had, everything from a minigun to 20 mic mic. It would depend on what the configuration for each plane was. And so my first napalm run, Covey had left. Covey was our Ford Air Controller and the code name for that was Covey and Covey would be an Air Force pilot with a Green Beret Covey rider. And so when I talked to Covey, it would be to the rider, and the rider would always be a veteran SOG soldier, the Green Beret, because that way they'd be familiar with what it was like to be on the ground.
John Stryker Meyer:And, in this case, it was Spider Park's, but Spider had to leave to go refuel. I'm talking directly to the SPAD pilot directing him in for a napalm run, and I'll never forget it. He goes, now y'all put your heads down. It's crispy critter time. And he was right.
John Stryker Meyer:It was the first time I ever smelled burnt human flesh. He brought it in that close and just took the oxygen to right out of our lungs tight, but right. Then he came back with CBU, gun runs. Then we had Scarface, which was the Marine Corps gunships that supported SOG throughout the entire 8 year of SICU War, and then we had the, the judge and the executioner who were flying with the muskets out of oh, they were down south at 2 corps, And the Muscles were with the, 176, the Merical division, but they were good. The judge and the executioner came in, and then they all refueled and came back.
John Stryker Meyer:So by the time captain 10 came in, we had the muskets doing gun runs around us to suppress enemy fire because we were in elephant grass. It took us almost 10 minutes just to go maybe 10, 15 yards, but it was elephant grass. It's just hard going. Like I fell down, woke and ran over me. He fell down, I ran over him, but we pushed the grass down getting to the King Bee that was sitting there waiting for us.
Sam Alaimo:You wrote at one point that once the NVA heard the propellers of the a one e's, they started getting even closer trying to negate the fire superiority of the bombs.
John Stryker Meyer:Besides the mission mission briefings, the clubhouse was where we learned a lot. And there were several senior NCOs, all of them experienced Green Berets, couple had been in the Korean war. They knew about it, and they called it. The NVA will get close to the bell. If they hear your helicopter gunships coming, or even a helicopter, they'll try to come and shoot the helicopters down, or an a one Skyraider.
John Stryker Meyer:They knew the difference, and they hated the Skyraiders. As much as they hated them, we loved them because they could bring it in really close, and they could stay on station for an hour or 2 hours sometimes, coming back, making repeated gun runs. And their tactical strength was they were always close to the treetops, and, they were just amazing.
Sam Alaimo:So that mission was wrapping up. He said captain Tin came in cool as a Rocky Mountain breeze. On the ride back, he said you just you were happy to be able to drink water because you were still alive to drink it. The king bee had 48 holes in it, which you said earlier. And I I'm just marveling at the captain Tim being that cool, just hovering under fire, knowing what you were in the middle of, actively in the middle of.
Sam Alaimo:How does someone become that calm and that cool under what might be the worst case situation?
John Stryker Meyer:That's a $64,000 question. I mean, not only with the South Vietnamese aviators like captain Tin, captain Tuong. I mean, these are all guys that came in at different time and pulled us out under fire. As part of that aviator ice in the blood thing, they're just amazing. I mean, even the Americans, they're the same way.
John Stryker Meyer:All of our aviators, they're just fearless, and I I never understood it because you ever touched the controls of a helicopter to send it a copilot seat and try to do it sometime because, you know, the the controls are so sensitive. Like, what you see the movies, we have airplanes, we have pilots, they get the they get the stick and they're moving it and they're fighting it and all this, not with the helicopter. You just barely touched that main stick in the front, and it moves because the captain too long to let me fly in the copilot seat, so I knew how sensitive they were. I could almost take off in a King Bee, almost, but, it was really delicate flying. But an answer to your your question, I don't know.
John Stryker Meyer:There's just something about them being able to focus on keeping that bird flying, that somehow they were able to do it time after time.
Sam Alaimo:So after that mission, you became 10, which means you you took command of RT Idaho, and you you had a part in the book that it made me stop and think. You said one team member decided to leave SOG at that point in time, and he spoke to him 32 years later. And he said that he'd never been the same since that mission. Why do you think that some people have such radically different experiences from the the same the same mission, the same contact? What what are your thoughts on that?
John Stryker Meyer:It just comes down to the individual's, individual strengths. I mean, Jim, Davidson, when he came on the team, he had a tour of duty with the 173rd first. So he was familiar with contact and, you know, fighting the communist with the 173rd, which was a unit, a really highly respected unit in Vietnam. And he came to the team, and during and during that time we were on the ground, Jim was rock solid. He never he never quenched.
John Stryker Meyer:He never yielded. He stayed right there, held his position time after time with right with between hep and Sal. We never word, so I always credit him, and he just knew it's an individual thing. He said, I've never seen anything like that. I said, Well, welcome to SOG.
John Stryker Meyer:I didn't say it that way, but this is where our missions are. And he said, well, I I can't do it. I said, well, thanks for telling that. I'd rather have you tell me now than to be on a mission and have you break. Because 2 days before that mission, when we had our fire, Lynn Black had his, where a 9 man team went in and came up against an NVA division at 10,000.
John Stryker Meyer:1 of the Americans, the SF guy, never fired a round in anger. He prayed and did a bunch of crazy stuff, but never fought, and somehow Lynn was able to survive all that. So we never had that problem with Idaho, and thanks to Jim, he did he got us through. He fought through the the battle. He just knew he couldn't do it, so it was a volunteer organization.
John Stryker Meyer:So anybody who wanted out, they could leave anytime they want it.
Sam Alaimo:Let's roll that example of 9 versus 10,000. I wasn't gonna go to the path of of Lynn Black, but would you mind talking about that?
John Stryker Meyer:Are you kidding? This is one of the, during the 8 year secret war, Lynn has got to be one of the top 3 to 5 SOG missions, which is just incredible. It started out, they had a a mission, I think it was just an area recon, and they went in with 2 helicopters. And we have a brand new team leader who's inexperienced. He had been in Europe with the 10th crew, but he hadn't been on the ground.
John Stryker Meyer:But because he had more rank, the people in s 3 or whoever made him the team leader, they pulled off the experienced team leader, sent him to another team, and on this day, October 5, 1968, when the team got inserted, the second helicopter had contact with the enemy, and they saw an NVA flag. Well, Lynn Black goes Lynn had a tour with the 173rd. Beforehand, he and his brother had been with the 173rd, And so he knew that if you see an enemy flag, there's at least a battalion which would be 3,000. He told the team leader, Look, this is not gonna be good. We have 9, there's a could be 3,000 NBA here.
John Stryker Meyer:And the team leader refused. And then he walked them down a trail. Well, the golden rule with us, we never walked on trails. Some teams did, but our team never walked on a trail. We would cross a trail, photograph a trail, set up ambushes on a trail, but not walk down it.
John Stryker Meyer:It's just an invitation for real trouble. Anyways, he walked him into an l shaped ambush. As they're going down the hill, there's like an embankment up in the front and on the right, and he walked him into an ambush where he was killed instantly. The point man was killed instantly. A third was wounded, And they were in that firefight for for a long time, then they finally backed out, and then the NVA began doing wave attacks with them.
John Stryker Meyer:And then these people began building a wall of cundivers, dead NBA soldiers. At some point, they all ran Alabama with the CAR 15s, and they began taking AK 40 sevens. Well, at one point, when Lynn had moved the team, he literally got hit with a with a concussion grenade that destroyed his car 15, knocked him unconscious, and with Burns and some other Taurus pants, and, Cowboy and the team members were literally kicking him kicking him and pouring water on his face to wake him up because he was doing all the radio comms at the time. And, they woke him up, got him back on his feet, and, they continued on for the rest of the day. And they finally, at the end, after an all day engagement, numerous air strikes, fast movers, spads, They lost 2 king bees.
John Stryker Meyer:They were shot down there. They had 1 jolly green giant that was shot down next to the l z, and then ultimately, a jolly green giant came in and hovered for he came into a wooden section, chopped the trees down, just literally hovered there when Minh took the remaining 6 back to the helicopter, and they lifted off. As lifting off, they had these RPG rounds hitting the bob just lifting it up, and it flew over 1 of the 2 mountains, and it had to do an emergency landing because it couldn't fly anymore. They set out some air assets to pick up the remainder of the team, but they didn't have enough for Lynn and the and the one one. And so a Cobra came in, and you know with a Cobra gunships, they have those doors on the left side that fold down to the gun racks and everything.
John Stryker Meyer:Well, there's an area there with seat belts or safety belts and you strap yourself in. Well, Lin and the one one flew back to Da Nang, Phung Leos strapped to those things, froze their balls off. But they're going up at 5,000 feet after being on the ground sweating all day. 20 some years later, America went back to try to find the 10, the team leader. And Linda helped them.
John Stryker Meyer:He got a phone call from an NVA officer who is now an NVA general, high ranking, and he introduced himself as, I was the colonel that ambushed your team. And he said, that was and they talked, you know, and Lynn was just couldn't believe he's talking to the guy that they ambushed him on October 5th. They're back and forth, and then at one point, Lynn goes, that was a bad day. We lost 3 men. And then the general go, well, it was a bad day for us because, you know, between you and Tac Air, we you inflict a 90% casualties on us.
John Stryker Meyer:Lingo's, well, we saw the flag. That's the battalion. He was, no. No. That was an NVA division.
John Stryker Meyer:We had 10,000 men there. He inflicted 90% casualties on us. They talked a little bit further, and then the general goes, hey. Who was the radio operator? And Lynn goes, well, that was me.
John Stryker Meyer:He goes, yeah. You're the only guy that didn't go to the ground when we opened fire on your team. He goes, Yeah, that was me. I was just stood there shooting. I changed magazines, and when I interviewed Lyn, I remember him saying, Sometimes I shoot a guy.
John Stryker Meyer:I'd spin him around. I'd just shoot him a second time before he go down. So the general is talking to Lynn. He says, so you're the radio operator? I said, yeah.
John Stryker Meyer:You shot me 3 times. He said the worst thing about it, I was lying on the ground watching you kill my men, and I could do nothing about it. So you shot me three times. That's one of my favorite lines. But that was Lynn Black, October 5, 1968.
John Stryker Meyer:And, that was one of our historic missions. He got out 5 other team members. They lost 3.
Sam Alaimo:That's incredible.
John Stryker Meyer:Yeah. Yeah. And they get a hat off to I mean, there was a time and again where they were right up against, the enemy, several wave attack. One time, an a one Skyraider came in flown by a captain Don Denene or lieutenant Don Denene. It was so close that Lynn and them, they had all kinds of debris, tree branches, stuff like this from the gun runs.
John Stryker Meyer:And then at one point or another time, one of the judge came in with his helicopter and hovered in front of the team as there was a wave attack coming at him and mowed down that wave attack and then left. He couldn't land, but that was just some of the heroes and the jolly green. And that's where we heard for the first time what the jolly green giant motto is, that others may live. And that day, they lost one helicopter, 2 KIA's there, as well as other, I think there's a total of 19 casualties that day. If you include the King Bee pilots and the other aircraft that was shot down or people wounded during that battle.
Sam Alaimo:You said at one point they used concussion grenades. Why did they not use shrapnel grenades?
John Stryker Meyer:Good question. The chaikon grenades that they had were not as good as our American grenades. And the concussion ones, I mean, thankfully, it was a concussion. If it had been a shrapnel, I think Lynn may have been KIA, because there were times when the grenades didn't work. I mean, we had a time where Lynn and I got inserted, and we were moving in the jungle, and we had like a little rise above us and we were going to go around this rise.
John Stryker Meyer:Fook was running point. I was behind fook number 2 in line and Lynn was back. He He's number 4 or 5. I forget where in the back. But as Fook was walking, he's a little bit more ahead of me.
John Stryker Meyer:The vegetation was not as thick as it usually was, and I could see one of those grenades come down from top of that little rise. It came down. I yelled grenade, and I tried to pull get the fuck to pull him back, and the grenade went off. And but it wasn't if that had been the American grenade, Fook would have been dead. As it turned out, he he was stunned, but no wounds.
John Stryker Meyer:So that's getting back to your question, I think there there are hand grenades just weren't as good as ours were in 1968.
Sam Alaimo:You wrote about another mission in, Target Echo 8 Operation. Actually, this was in John L Plaster's book. It was about you in Plaster's book. You you had NVA on your trail and they had tracker dogs with them. And at one point of the mission, you heard a tow popper, which was kind of a stay behind bomb explode behind you.
Sam Alaimo:You heard diesel trucks with the backs coming down and then dogs, which is almost like the worst case scenario. Can you Oh, yeah. And then how you ended up getting out of that pickle?
John Stryker Meyer:We had a couple days where in the morning, we would go out with a team, get shot out of the primary, secondary, and the alternate LZs. Go back, have lunch, give you a new target fold and say, Here. Because they wanted to get a team on the ground. So we go out, same thing. And so this had happened on and off.
John Stryker Meyer:And, one morning we go out, get shot off, come back, have lunch. I rotated some of the team members around because just the idea of flying out, having that brief contact, and then the flight back, just, you know, just the it wears on you after a while. And so in this case, we got inserted, and we got inserted into a part of the jungle where the Laossians had formally done some slash and burn of agriculture, so it wasn't thick jungle. And we got the team and we said moved up the hill. Normally when we were on the ground and thick vegetation, we would move 10 minutes and wait 10.
John Stryker Meyer:Well, here, because we got inserted and we had this open area, I pushed the teen, we went up that hill and never took a break. Maybe have one break along the way where I would talk with my assistant team leader, John Bubba Shore. We came to a major road, we crossed the road, they had telephone wires, we had set up a a wire tap, and then we set up an ambush on the road. And we had developed an ambush where you had plastic explosive in the center of the ambush, would be 6 feet from the trail, and there'd be enough c 4 that it would knock out that person, and then on the other side of each would be claymores that would kill everybody else. And we practiced that time and time again, inserting it, and so you put in the plastic explosive, have the claymores, have claymores on flank security and 1 or 2 in the back, and our back was up against the hill.
John Stryker Meyer:So Sal was monitoring the, the wire tap and Spider finally came out for a commo check. And so me and Bub are like I mean he envier walking up and down this trail. They got their AKs on their shoulders. One guy was an officer with his pistol, but they didn't know we were there. And we had gone so far so fast, they just didn't realize that we were there.
John Stryker Meyer:So Spider comes in, I gave him the code, says, hey. Get in 1 hour, I'll be back to the primary l z. I'll have a POW. I gave him the code for POW, and then Spider just told us, hey. I'm at 10,000 feet.
John Stryker Meyer:I can't see the mountain you're on. Well, the fucker factor tightened up real fast. And right about then, up the mountain from us, we could hear some tanks starting up. And then on the road, now all of a sudden the NVA are on the road. They're running past, they got their weapons, and they're going different directions.
John Stryker Meyer:And so we pulled the wiretap down, pulled in the ambush, we moved out and moved away from where we had been, and, we moved until dark. And when dark came, we came to a little stream bed because now Sal climbed a tree and we could hear the dogs and there was, I don't know how many were too many, and he said, Buku dogs, maybe over a 100 people with lanterns. So we got into the stream and it wasn't really deep, and we went up it for an hour or so in the dark, and we finally came in at one point, had the guys going out. So if the dogs came, they'd follow the false trails, then we put down pepper, and we had the pattern mace and put that out, and then at some point, we finally broke and we went up the bank, It was like in the bank, maybe 10, 12, 14 feet up, and we set up the RON for the night, rest overnight. So at that time, we had 8 men on the team.
John Stryker Meyer:I was facing the creek or this little little stream, whatever it was there. About midnight, 1 o'clock, 2 NVA walked past with a lantern, and they went past us, and the lantern ran out of fuel. They turned around and came back. We're going down the stream, and they passed me, hep coughed. And, so that guy, the NBA came up the hill towards me.
John Stryker Meyer:And I'm sitting there and my feet spread in my car 15. I'm I'm assuming he could hear my heart. But he came up, but only when the wind moved. He came up, and when the wind moved, I hear him move. He finally got close enough, we touched my boot, and I heard him catch his breath, but he's cool.
John Stryker Meyer:He waited. When the wind blew, he backed up, finally got down to the stream. He and his buddy went that way. At first light, we were out of there, and we went up to the top of the mountain. It took us all day.
John Stryker Meyer:We got up to the mountain top, set up that night, and that night we had a, a Russian resupply in Laos. It was just a weirdest damn thing because here we are on a mountain top, it's dark, and 2 or 3 mountains over, the whole side of the mountain lit up with lights, And we could hear the Russians on the radio. We got them, but I couldn't get any tack air or anything. They came in, they did their resupply and left. So we knew that we knew the Ivan and the boys were there.
John Stryker Meyer:So that was that mission. And we we stayed there for, like, 2 or 3 more days. Sal and Asone had run into some woodcutters, but the woodcutters were just civilians. They saw Sal and and they didn't say anything. They went their way.
John Stryker Meyer:The Sal came back to our r o n and then we got pulled out. We got pulled out under heavy enemy fire. It was the first time we had an American come pick us up. Could we have been this was November and every all of our transportation had been King Bee. So this time when they there was a 101st airborne and when the ship came in, I told Bubba, you go out and tell them we got Vietnamese.
John Stryker Meyer:So Bubba was the first one out. We took half the team. The second helicopter came in and then, Henry King was the other team member for that mission. Henry went out first, then the Vietnamese salad have went with him. And then I was the last one on the last bird.
John Stryker Meyer:You know, we're always the first one out, last one off for a team leader. Left under heavy enemy fire, and Scarface got shot up really bad. And the, they they had 2 gunships. One was flown by a lieutenant colonel, and, his plexiglass got shot out. And that night, we get back to the bar, and he's, like, cussing up a storm.
John Stryker Meyer:I said, I'm sorry about your helicopter. He said, you guys, every time I go in, my helicopter just gets shot up. It's hard to get them fixed. He says, bitch in the middle. I bought them several rounds, and, still kept groaning and said, look, colonel.
John Stryker Meyer:I'm sorry. That mean it was Colonel ro Lieutenant Colonel Robinson. So I'm sorry, sir. Does that mean the next time you're not gonna come? He said, no, we didn't say that.
John Stryker Meyer:Scarface always came for us. We needed him.
Sam Alaimo:Why did the NVA tracker get so close to you that he could touch your boot? I get why you didn't kill him, but why didn't he try to kill you or raise the alarm?
John Stryker Meyer:You know, I'm not sure. That's the $64,000 question. I think they knew they were by themselves, and maybe he didn't wanna die right away. Yeah. Because I know the I'm not I'm not sure if he was the one that was carrying a lantern.
John Stryker Meyer:Because those teams sometimes when they have maybe, again, I'm not speaking from experience because tonight you just can't see them. But we had Lantus before it get close to us, and that was really close. And I could see them, but I just forget because, like, after what happened afterwards, I forgot everything that happened before. We could see them when they walked past. You know?
John Stryker Meyer:And I thought the other team members saw, but nobody else saw but me.
Sam Alaimo:You wrote at one point, I'm gonna quote you, I had heard tiny droplets of morning dew landing on the leaves above us. 6 months ago, I wouldn't have heard a freight train roll past me. Now dew drops were my wake up call, end quote. And that that you perfectly encapsulated the sensory experience of being in a combat environment. I I wondered with how intense your tours were, did you ever try to replicate that sort of extra sensory awareness?
Sam Alaimo:Did you ever Were you able to replicate it? Did you want to?
John Stryker Meyer:No, never per se. I was just amazed because that was that we had a couple other missions, but that one mission on October 6th, that was the one. We we were up all night, and we took turns, and at one point during the night, it was my turn, and I heard something moving, because when we set up our RON that night on October 6th, there had been a tracker that got really close to us. He fired 1 round from his his, SKS, and so we were hypersensitive. And around 2 o'clock, I I could hear some movement.
John Stryker Meyer:And at one point, I heard movement right in front of the claymore that we had out. So I whispered in Don's ear. I said, hey. We got something in front of the claymore. Can I blow it?
John Stryker Meyer:And, he said no. I thought he said go. So it was 2 o'clock in the morning, I blow off this claymore. Hep and Sal were pissed, Don was pissed, but whatever was in front of that claymore, it went away and that was part of that, that mission. So I was asleep when first light came, and that was when I had that for I will never forget it.
John Stryker Meyer:I could I wonder what that noise is. It sounded like a noise, but that sensory amplification, in my mind, it was the dew drops, and that's what I could hear, and that's what woke me up. And that happened time at the time when we'd be on the ground for nights when there'd be moisture coming down through the jungle.
Sam Alaimo:One thing that strikes me when I listen to your your SOG cast podcast or read the books about SOG is the willingness to accept casualties on the American side. If if in Afghanistan or Iraq, a tune disappeared, there would be a complete overhaul of tactics. What happened? What went wrong? But the Vietnam in the Vietnam War, it seemed like a like a grinder.
Sam Alaimo:It was just full speed ahead. No matter what, we're not letting up. I don't even know how to phrase it as a question, but what what what did that experience feel like? Like, how did it hit you to know that recon teams would vanish and never be seen again, and just still have to go out there on missions voluntarily because you were a volunteer the entire time? What was that experience like?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, we grew up watching World War II and Korean War movies. So we had a sense of people like Audie Murphy, Sergeant York and wartime stories where Americans would stand tall for the right cause. We knew we were the tip of the spear at that point for our government and for those missions. The top secret missions having gone through all the background, everything checks. So it was a big deal.
John Stryker Meyer:We knew that we were special, although we didn't talk about that much. So regardless of what they threw at us, we had to continue on with the mission one way or the other, try to figure out ways to improve the time on the ground, to improve our odds, what could we do? I mean, some guys like Dick Thompson, they got to the point where, they would not eat American food 3 days before mission, and they would not shower or shave. They wanted regular body odors. And so that the regular body odors would smell like anything else.
John Stryker Meyer:Whereas me, I wasn't bright enough like Dick. I was still eating blurps and things like that on the mission. And, there was a couple of times where we've been training hard. I would take a shower and then the next day in the jungle, now on afterthought, I think, well, that's pretty stupid. But back then, we just didn't know any better.
John Stryker Meyer:But that was part of that. We're here. This is what the odds are against us. How can we further the mission unless let's keep going? God and country, first and foremost, you know?
Sam Alaimo:So you were 1 0, that is the cream of the crop. That's the God mode in SOG. That means you were the leader of a team out there with complete autonomy. Did you have, or do you have now like principles of leadership that you exercised while you were boots on the ground that you tried to live up to and tried to embody?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, I learned from Spider Parks and Pat Watkins, our senior NCOs first and foremost, and wants them not to be a rigid military guy, particularly with special forces, because we work with our, we call them the little people, but it's a term of affection of affection. We would work with them, but also we get to know them on a personal basis. Like when Lynn was with the America with with the 173rd and a couple of other guys with traditional American units, they wouldn't get to know guys because they would lose them maybe. They didn't wanna have a friendship to go through that that terrible experience. Whereas with us on a team, we got to know each other and then any Americans that we lost, that was part of the, unfortunate part of the game.
John Stryker Meyer:I mean, Sam, today we're talking in Southeast Asia from the Vietnam War is 1573 Americans who are still listed as missing in action. Out of that, you've got 98 Green Berets that are still listed as missing in action. So we have out of 9858 are from SOG. Those are recon guide that includes Lane and Owen from Idaho. These are Green Berets that we'll never gonna see again or hear from.
John Stryker Meyer:Their families will never hear anything. The 5th Special Forces Group is putting together a 5th Special Forces Group War Memorial at 5th Special Forces at the at the Fort Campbell. There's almost 800 Green Berets that are gonna be on that list. So, yeah, it's it's a big never, and it hurt, but we had to go on. We knew that if those guys were there with us, they would urge us to go on, try to improve the battle, try to get a leg up on the NVA anytime we could.
Sam Alaimo:Who is your greatest mentor and how do they help you grow?
John Stryker Meyer:In spite of progress, first and foremost. I mean, those 1st couple of weeks, I did so many things so wrong. And, he was like a big brother, more than a team leader. Haley raised his voice at me maybe once or twice. And it was only when I did something really stupid as opposed to just being regularly stupid.
John Stryker Meyer:He, and then later on when I became the 10, and talking with Sal through HAP about the mission, mission prep, after action, about the the men, try to take care of them any way we could. Everything from not necessarily Sal, but some of our younger guys, it could be anything from, getting their v d taken care of, to give them weekend passes, whatever. But you come together as a team. And over time, you had that bond there.
Sam Alaimo:If you had to boil it down, what are 1 or 2 attributes of your SOG teammates that you most admired?
John Stryker Meyer:Just the absolute sense of resolve to do the mission, even though we were up against, and we knew we were up against harsh odds, but we had Tac Air, we had our King Beast, and we really thought we could make a difference. We tried our own way. The leadership thing was we never have a team member do something you wouldn't do. Say the whole thing about leading from the front, in my case, I wouldn't lead from the front because I was too big to be the point man. So, and my V and the means were better.
John Stryker Meyer:So, but to listen to them and just to watch the way they would interact with their people, you take care of them once in a while, you got to crack the whip a little bit as a team leader, but when you did it, you would explain why. Now on missions, once we were on the ground, you know, the job was the mission. I mean, sometimes you wouldn't talk for 2 or 3 days. And it would be strictly hand signals, set up the RON, who's gonna take watch, and then Sal would take care of that because he would tell everybody when. And, if Sal wasn't there, it'd be FUC or hep, and all of that stuff was just, prioritized.
John Stryker Meyer:And all that training just just panned out and spent went through thousands of rounds on the range. So whenever you made contact, now you weren't worried about your weapon or a bit other than keeping it clean and, you had muscle training. So if you're in the middle of a firefight, you're doing things as quick as you can to change the magazine or whatever it took. Use the m 79 round, grenades, and of course, tack air. Use it to its best advantage.
John Stryker Meyer:Try to leave from the front. Never ask people to do things you you wouldn't do. And again, I was very impressed with SPIRE because when we were on the ground, the team was so smooth because we had worked so hard on the range at night, did the 90 ambushes and all that kind of stuff.
Sam Alaimo:We talked about Lynn Black. Do you have another mission that's kind of famous in the SOG world you you think is worth, talking about?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, there's one that's more fun than anything with, Lynn and the Frenchman, Doug Letourneau. They had been in a target area, and they're up there. And after the 2nd day, they could hear activity in the jungle, and they thought it was a path that allowed because the path that allowed were not as good as the NVA. So path that Lao was the Laotian equivalent of the Viet Cong, but they weren't trained as well as the Viet Cong, and certainly not as well as the NVA. So the second or third day, they moved, they could hear this activity.
John Stryker Meyer:So finally, like on the 4th day, Lynn said he had enough. He put the team online and they could hear the movement coming towards him. And they figured they had the hand grenade pins are pulled, car 15's on full automatic, and it was orangutans. A flock or group of orangutans have been following the team. If they get done breathing a sigh of relief, meaning orangutans had never seen white guys before, let alone Laotian orangutans ever seen in South Vietnamese.
John Stryker Meyer:So at one point, Lin was there and he he scratched his armpit, and the orangutans scratched his armpit. And so wherever Lin did, the orangutan did. So at one point, Lynn flipped in the bird, and the orangutan flipped in the bird back. But that's one of my favorite, that's another Lynn Black story. And then on on another occasion, the team had been He and Doug were on a mission in Laos, and they were near Invisalign, and Doug had somebody come up on a radio with a with a Spanish accent, and said, RT Idaho, we know where you are, and we're going to come and get you.
John Stryker Meyer:And Doug was going, who is this? Because it wasn't a combo check, he thought maybe at first was Covey coming for a combo check, but the guy had a Spanish accent. Well, Lynn turns to Doug and goes, WTF. And Doug goes, oh, this guy's talking to me. He says he knows where we are.
John Stryker Meyer:So Lingo's on the phone with a guy. He was a Cuban. And the guy says, we know where you are. We're gonna come get you. And Lingo, he goes, I got your coordinates.
John Stryker Meyer:So he read off the 6 digits and Lingo, no. Let me give you the 8 digit coordinates. Come and get us motherfucker. Oh, he said, by the way, your mother was a piss poor prostitute because if she was any good, you would have had a better job instead of landing a layoff. The guy never came for him.
John Stryker Meyer:Unbelievable. Oh, yeah. Lynn was amazing.
Sam Alaimo:Come up to the SOG cast. Do you have a podcast where you interview people who are in SOG or who are tangential to SOG, air crew pilots? What has that meant to you, I I guess, personally? Like, how has that deepened your tie with the community? What have you learned new from it?
John Stryker Meyer:Well, learned a lot. Again, Sogcast happened and is funded completely by my favorite Navy Seal, Jocko Willink. As you know, I've had the honor of being interviewed by Jocko 8 times. And during the 7th 8 interviews, he kept talking about, let's do a thing called SOGcast where we'll do more SOG interviews. So the very last interview that I did with Jocko was with a king bee pilot, captain Ahn, who was one of his amazing King Bee pilots.
John Stryker Meyer:At one point, he lost both hands after a helicopter crashed, but he had saved other teams. He saved Lynn Black, and, he may have saved us once or twice because sometimes we get pulled out, dropped off at the launch site. We wouldn't even have a chance to to interact with the air crews. At the end of it, On leaves and Jocko goes, okay, let's get this podcast going. I said, great.
John Stryker Meyer:I said, I'll get you some green berets. We'll get some fat pilots in here. He goes, no. No. No.
John Stryker Meyer:You're gonna interview. I go, me? I said, Jocko, with your skill, your talent, and your money, we could do this. He goes, okay. I just realized that I just bit off a little bit more than I could chew.
John Stryker Meyer:So he and Echo and I, we we worked it out. And every saw a cast, all the expenses, flying people to, my house in Tennessee for the interviews, aircraft, hotel reservations, meals, or if they drive out, he'll pay for it. He's covered all of those costs, and we've got 52 posted. Now they go up first on Spotify and Apple as audios, and then later they'll post it as, YouTube. So we've got 52 now up on on, Spotify and Apple, and number 29 just went up on, YouTube.
John Stryker Meyer:27 and 28 were with Lynn Black. We went into that mission further there. So an answer to your question is for me, it's really been fascinating. We've interviewed John Mullins who spent time with the, Operation Phoenix, the Phoenix project, and he was one of the the only guy we've interviewed who could talk about it, and Phoenix was the great program. We really hurt the Vietcong infrastructure, and John had several tours of duty there.
John Stryker Meyer:And we talked to the king, 1 king b pilot 2 king b pilots now, and, Covey Riders, and, of course, fellow Saw Guys, Dick Thompson, Pat Watkins, Spider Parks. He's just so damn humble. You know? He just I couldn't get him to go far, but we talked about the basics, and we had an hour plus interview with Spider. That, of course is one of my favorite because if he's just my big brother, also my one zero.
John Stryker Meyer:If I stepped out of line, man, the sergeant major hat would go on and I hear about it right away in clear on certain, very certain terms.
Sam Alaimo:I've listened to probably 45 of them, and I'm about to finish up the rest. So I I couldn't Enjoy. As well as your book, Across the Fence. We'll do the last few questions here. You've been through a lot.
Sam Alaimo:You're still getting after it. What do you do to kinda prime yourself for the day, for for podcasting, for writing, for everything you do?
John Stryker Meyer:We live in Tennessee now, we have 5 acres. We love it here, we love the people, and, so there's a lot of work with the land. We got some families nearby, and, those are our top priorities. And then the podcast, we try to pull them together whenever we can. And I get them over to Echo.
John Stryker Meyer:Echo puts it up online, and it's just been a wonderful relationship. When I'm long gone, pushing up daisies in the wilderness somewhere, that people will turn to those with a sense of appreciation for hearing, honest people talk about the missions on the ground.
Sam Alaimo:What about 1 or 2 or maybe 3 books that have changed your life?
John Stryker Meyer:The Green Beret by Robin Moore. I mean, holy smoke. Reading that book, it just changed my whole attitude, and I figured I would like to think I could fit in with them. And even when I graduated, it was like I just stood there going, holy shit. I'm a real Green Beret now.
John Stryker Meyer:I can't believe it. You know? I kept waiting for somebody to say wake up from the, your dream, knucklehead. A book called Bodyguard of Lies, which was the first major book about the, World War 2 encryption with the, encryption devices that were top secret. And there was, like, scenes that he portrayed, including Winston Churchill, realizing that the Germans were gonna bomb the town of Coventry.
John Stryker Meyer:And so there are people, who were it was the Enigma project. So the Enigma staff had broken the code, and they came and said, look. We gotta tell people of Coventry, and Winston Churchill said no. Because if we tell the people of Coventry, there's German agents there, and they'll all wanna know what led to us warning the people about the raid. And the bodyguard, Elijah, had phenomenal details on the enigma, the early days, how they broke the code, and, what its impact was helping find the German submarines and etcetera.
John Stryker Meyer:Amazing book.
Sam Alaimo:Alright. How can people follow you? How can they get your book? How can they follow the Sawcast?
John Stryker Meyer:All the books are up on, Amazon. Just punch in the John Stryker Meyer or Cross the Fence, it should pop. And I have a website, a Sog, s o g, chronicles.com. All the books are there. We have a listings for all of our MiAs, and most of the podcasts are there.
Sam Alaimo:Alright. I I can't tell you how much I appreciate your time. I really do. I appreciate everything you've done for your service and, and everything else.
John Stryker Meyer:Well, thank you, Sam. Keep up the good work there and, your other projects that we talked about before we turned on the microphone. Keep up the good work. God bless you, sir.
Sam Alaimo:Likewise. Thank you.
John Stryker Meyer:You're born.
Sam Alaimo:That's it for this episode. If you wanna check out more from the podcast, head to 0eyes.com/nobell, where you can see show notes, read more about our guests, and suggest guests or topics of your own. Until next time, stay in the fight. Don't ring the bell.