Flying into the Inferno
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. My name is Sam Alaimo. I'm joined by Bob Graham, former United States Air Force pilot with four tours in the Vietnam War, five hundred plus combat flights, and out with a new book about his time in the service called one of the few.
Sam Alaimo:Bob, welcome.
Bob Graham:Thank you. Thank you.
Sam Alaimo:Let's start where we always do. Where did you grow up?
Bob Graham:So I was raised in Bluefield, New Jersey. And then when I finished high school, I went went off to college, and I had full scholarships. F1 scholarships, so I had a letter in two sports and then an academic scholarship for the other half. So when at the end of my freshman year, my father was in the process of dying and my mother had terminal cancer. And I was an only child and there was no close relatives.
Bob Graham:I didn't have to worry about paying for college because that was paid for. I just need to figure out how to eat. Right. And who's gonna pay the rent? And no answer.
Bob Graham:It just jumped right out at me. So I happened to be an Air Force ROTC in the first year, so I went up to the ROTC commander up there who happened to be, of course, Air Force ground. And I said, what should I do? And he said, enlist in the Air Force. And he probably said that to everybody.
Bob Graham:But anyway, so I did. I quit college and I went off. I enlisted in the air force, went off to basic training, did the things where everybody does off the basic training and got through that. I happened to be on the base boxing team, and my first sergeant was the middleweight champ of the air force.
Sam Alaimo:Nice.
Bob Graham:And so he took a liking to me. And after a couple of months, he said to me, you know, kid, you're wasting your time. Go off to flight school. And the air force at the time had an arrangement called aviation cadets. You had the equivalent of two years of college.
Bob Graham:You could apply for aviation cadets and pit test and go through them. And I didn't know the front end of an airplane from the back end of an airplane. I don't think I'd ever seen one. And but he told me in some fairly direct terms that not to just go sign up and and go there. So I went off to flight school, flew in the back seat of the first all weather fighter interceptors that we had because remember, let's say, nineteen fifty six ish, all the we were still converting from prop driven fighters to jet fighters.
Bob Graham:So so my experience was with the very first jet fighters. And I was in the backseat as a weapon system officer. So as a sideline, I I assumed that once my, you know, my obligations to the air force were over, I'd probably go back to college on the GI bill. So I applied for Penn and got accepted. And so one day, in order to get our fighters renovated, if you will, and updated and stuff like that, We had a major depot out in California, it was just North of LA.
Bob Graham:And so we used to fly the fighters out there and pick up a new one, you know, rebuilt one and fly that back. So I was in the backseat of one of those trips, and we went out there, picked up our renovated fighter and left out of LA, and we're gonna make the first stop in Las Vegas at Nellis Air Force Base. Coincidentally, the engine failed as we're come to was Nellis, and we had a dead stick gear up on into Nellis. And so we're there for like about thirty six hours maybe or something like that while they were repairing the engine. And and a pilot that I had had flown in a Korean war.
Bob Graham:And so he knew some of the guys on the Thunderbirds and also some of the guys teaching at the Top Gun School and stuff like that. So we sat around for a couple of evenings drinking beer with those guys and I decided that when I grew up, what I really wanted to do is not go off to college and become a businessman, but instead I want to go fly fighters. So I'd already been accepted to flight school and went back and I canceled my seat in Penn and waited for a pilot training seat. Then went through pilot training seat or pilot training
Sam Alaimo:What year was this?
Bob Graham:Fifty nine or '60.
Sam Alaimo:So well before anybody knew what was gonna happen in Vietnam.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Right. But one of the things I was sure of is I want to go fly the f 100 because that was the cool thing. First year, a plane never goes supersonic and level flight, and there's the greatest fighter in the whole world. And so that's what all the guys at Knowles told them to do when I got back.
Bob Graham:So anyway, that course course of training was about a year in flight school, and then about just under another year in advanced gunnery training. So I had two years. And then, so I showed up in Japan about, which was my first operational assignment, in sixty one, sixty one ish. And that got me to the beginning of my time in Asia, and yeah, certainly the beginning of my operational fighter career.
Sam Alaimo:So you I had to cherry pick parts of the books because there is so much there that I'm gonna focus and bounce around a little bit. But you were stationed at one point near the DMZ in Korea and had a basically a nuclear mission. And you had one incident where you were talking about hot nosing. And this is an event of the military has a very professional reputation, but one of the ways you get better at your job is by bending the rules a lot of times. Yeah, right.
Sam Alaimo:I never heard of hot nosing, and this is a really good example. You wanna talk about what happened near the DMZ?
Bob Graham:Okay. So while we were sitting nuclear, typically we set it for a week at a time. And during that week at a week, usually got one day off where you could go fly. And when every you went to fly, we had a gunnery range up the West Coast Of Korea just a little bit, and we jump in the jet and go up there. Then maybe a half hour, forty five minutes on the range, and then usually we had a little time left over.
Bob Graham:And the range was only about maybe sixty, seventy five miles south of the DMC. And so the two of us were up there and were running around, you know, doing some acrobatics and stuff like that, killing time. And we saw what we thought was a South Korean f 86 up there kinda wandering around and so we thought we hot hot nosed them. Now, the hot nosed means that you take the the obviously, the target doesn't know you're there, and it's probably not gonna find out until the last moment. And what you do is you take your two aircrafts in close formation, run it up to just under Mach one speed of sound, and come underneath and blow it at 06:00.
Bob Graham:And then just as you pull up immediately in front of his nose, you stroke the burners. And since he didn't know you were there, that comes as a surprise, a complete surprise.
Sam Alaimo:How many feet roughly away are you when you do this?
Bob Graham:Pretty close because there, you know, everybody's traveling about. We were traveling about Mach one and he's traveling probably four or 500 miles an hour. So as you go through, oh, I'll get you're not there very long in front of his nose, I guess, you know, 10 yards maybe something.
Sam Alaimo:At four or 500 miles per hour. Does it
Bob Graham:Well, we were yeah. We were probably closer to 600.
Sam Alaimo:And so what happens to the person in that plane? Do they feel just a massive shutter?
Bob Graham:Yeah. So the so the so the guy in that airplane is in shock because, you know, all of a sudden, he thinks he's just cruising around, you know, nobody's there. He's all by himself. And the next thing knows, two guys with their afterburners on his head, you know, typed to his nose. And that has a fairly dramatic effect as you might expect on on the guy.
Bob Graham:So as we're pulling up, you know, we go up, roll over on our back, and we're looking down at the guy because as we passed, we realized that he wasn't a South Korean at 86. Turns out he was a North Korean mag.
Sam Alaimo:Oops. Yeah.
Bob Graham:It had wandered south of the D M C. So as we went by, you could you could see that air his airplane was almost out of control completely and he's wandering all over and the next thing you know, he turns he starts heading north about as fast as the airplane can go. We, on the other hand, obviously, that's against the rules. We're not supposed to do that to people. So as we're coming back, it was one of those things you land, you're walking in from the ramp, and you say, you know, we probably ought not to mention that.
Bob Graham:But it was it was great fun. Yeah. That was good. That was fun.
Sam Alaimo:The the nuclear mission itself is interesting. You said something when you were trained to drop the bomb, if you had to drop a nuclear bomb, it would be in such a way where you would not have enough fuel to come back. Right. Was that essentially a suicide mission, or was it built into the plan you would have to eject and just make your way back?
Bob Graham:Right. So, yeah. So typically, when we sat alert, we are each of us had a single target. So you have an airplane and a nuc bomb strapped underneath the belt of the airplane. The idea behind it is is that if you're and obviously, we're working Russia and China.
Bob Graham:The idea is is that if you're gonna have a nuclear war, the bomber's gonna take a while to get there. And what we wanted to do is blow a hole in the fence so that the bombers behind us could penetrate deeper and deeper without, you know, any heavy defenses going in until they got much further in. So for us, I mean, you got over there on a Saturday afternoon, you studied up for a target and in my case, it was almost always a target in China. And you only had enough fuel to get there. So essentially, it was a low level, high speed ingress into China, pop up, do like a for lack of a better word, an ammo man.
Bob Graham:The bomb releases, and you had enough gas to get just outside of the large explosion, for lack of a better description. And after that, you fling out and punch out. And of course, as I joke about, you know, the idea is is that you could jump out, land in the middle of the natives and make friends and and spend the rest of the whatever length of time you had for the nuclear war, you could spend with them and your friends and stuff like that. And maybe, you know, find a second career or whatever. But yeah, all the rides were one way rides and that psychologically takes a little getting used to.
Bob Graham:You gotta think your way through that. So
Sam Alaimo:Did pilots talk about what that meant? That they knew it was you basically weren't gonna come back from that. If you just dropped a nuke in China and then you rejected over China, you're not coming home. No. So did everybody just accept that?
Bob Graham:Yeah. You kinda had to, you know, because somebody was gonna have to do it, you were selected. Wow. It was part of what you signed up to do. The idea of living or dying when you're in that kind of a business, you have to accept the fact that your chances of dying are very high.
Bob Graham:And don't forget, in a fighter squadron back then, in the fighter squadron I was in, your fatality rate is about twenty percent a year. So it's not as if dying is not something that you've already accepted. And in fact, a part of that is is the fact that, you know, we we were taught to and pressed to get as far out on a feather edge as you possibly could. The idea of beating the other guy who theoretically is the best that they had. You have to be able to drive yourself out on the edge further and he can drive himself out of And if you think about it from the standpoint of what the basketball coaches teach you, they always talk about you need that extra half a step.
Bob Graham:Well, one way you get that extra half a step is you accept the fact that you are going to die. And most other people won't accept that. Intuitively, they'll push back against that. Right? And when they do, they'll hesitate and you won't.
Bob Graham:And so you got that half step and that's usually a big deal because that oftentimes is what's what gets you to survive and then to lose. So part of that is training yourself to accept the fact that you're not gonna live through this one, so deal with it.
Sam Alaimo:It seems to have served you well in the rest of your career. So right around this time, the Vietnam War didn't kick off, but we started sending Americans there in advisory capacities Yeah. Unofficially for deniability. And there was typically military who were basically decommissioned from the military and sent there as civilians. And you ended up boots on the ground, not even as a pilot in Vietnam in 1962, I believe.
Bob Graham:Yep.
Sam Alaimo:And had some pretty intense combat fighting alongside the Vietnamese. You wanna just take it from there and and how did that come about and talk about your first exposure?
Bob Graham:My first trip into combat, I'd only been there for, a week or ten days.
Sam Alaimo:Within a week you were in a firefight?
Bob Graham:Yeah. Why when I I became a civilian, went through to Tokyo or the embassy Tokyo. Got discharged from the air force, went next door and went to work for and I'm not sure about the name, but the name was something like the American Botanical Survey Corporation, it was something like that. You know, I've been through all the necessary survival schools and, you know, training schools and stuff like that in the air force before that. But I went I left Tokyo, flew down to Philippine Island to Manila.
Bob Graham:Had a maybe a three day introduction in Manila, went across Saigon. Got three or four days in Saigon, and then ran up to to my my first assignment was with twenty fifth Arvin, the Vietnamese Army division.
Sam Alaimo:So to be clarify, you were you were, for all intents and purposes, a civilian right now Right. Working for an NGO, a nongovernmental organization Right. Which is a cover organization. Right. You said you're essentially conducting the military operations in Vietnam.
Bob Graham:Yeah. I was advising.
Sam Alaimo:Advising with complete separations of if you were caught or captured.
Bob Graham:You're a you're a civilian.
Sam Alaimo:You're screwed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.
Bob Graham:Because you have no identification, you have no rank, you have no, you know, anything. You're literally, you know, working as an adviser. Well, the problem with the whole adviser description is is that you're probably gonna end up advising from the front as opposed to the rear. That's right. It's not like, you know, inviting a guy into your office because first of you don't have an office.
Bob Graham:But you did have 10, but, you know, you could but you you're not gonna be able to train the the Vietnamese. So I was assigned to the twenty fifth Army Division. And at that point in time, he'd become a forward air controller, but you're not flying at the time. So you're on the ground. And I happened to be they had, like, a portion of that division battalion or something was a ranger battalion and so they used those for or the rangers for smaller contacts.
Sam Alaimo:These are Vietnamese rangers, not American rangers?
Bob Graham:No. They were Vietnamese rangers. So I was assigned to them, spent probably two days maybe. We got some intel that there was a pretty good size VC group that was in this particular location in the jungle. So there was a American marine helicopter outfit down in Saigon that was supporting almost everybody in the country.
Bob Graham:So they sent up probably the entire squadron of marine helicopters. And we're gonna set up an arrangement where we were gonna have a a three piece driving force to drive via comm into, I think they used to call it hammer and anvil type of operation, where you drive into a range of blocking force. So I was I was gonna go in with the the first wave in the choppers. So it's kind of a funny story afterwards. It wasn't so funny at the time, but anyway, so the night before going in, a marine commander of the of the the chopper app that says, he briefed us on, he says, okay now, we're expecting or we should expect a a 10% loss rate going into the l c.
Bob Graham:And that's the first time that occurred to me that we're gonna lose 10% of the guys before we got to the fight. So so that was sort of an eye opener. And, of course, you know, the adrenaline was flowing, and I'm all excited, and this is gonna be my first show. So then the and I'd obviously never been on a chopper going into LA. So the marine sergeant take me aside because I'm the only American, takes me aside and he said, now listen, the only thing that works is we can't be on the ground very long because, you know, people shooting at you and get out of here.
Bob Graham:I said, so you're gonna be the first one to off the chopper. When I tap you on the back, out you go. Okay. I got it. So I'm going, Ed.
Bob Graham:And, of course, you know, I was I was so nervous and so anxious that if he had sneezed and tapped on each other, I'd have jumped out jumped out at 500 feet. Anyway, so and we go to the elephant grass, and we're gonna land, you know, land on the elephant grass, and then we're gonna go to this, you know, to the jungle, which is just about not very far, maybe 75 yards or so away. And so, chopper lands, guy hits me on the shoulder, I go out and, you know, at John Wayne time, and I'm running through the open grass, and people are, you know, shooting and carrying on and I got about 10 or 15 yards and I thought, geez, I'm the only guy if I don't have to off the chopper. So the next thought was, they're gonna take the chopper and they're gonna leave and I'm gonna be here all by myself and that's not gonna be a very good thing. So anyway, so I turned around, I start running back to the chopper.
Bob Graham:At this time, the marine sergeant, I've got things under control and now all the rangers come off the chopper. So they go by me, I turn around and now I'm the last guy in the the line heading for the, you know, jungle tree line.
Sam Alaimo:It seems like a thought they didn't want to get off because they didn't want to fight, correct?
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:That's a sign of
Bob Graham:things to And also because they were smarter than I was. They'd probably done that before and I never have.
Sam Alaimo:That was your first fire fight. Did you spend the night on that fire fight?
Bob Graham:We were there for a couple days. You know, it was one of those things where we never made hard contact, we had some brush contacts and stuff like that, but there's no hard and I felt that the Vietnamese were doing it in slow motion so that by the time they began to drive the Vietcong force into where the anvil was, the Vietcong had dissipated and gone all through the side and so by the time you get to the anvil, it's not a lot there. So the lesson that I took away from that is that one, when you're working on the ground, you want to make sure that everybody gets off the chopper at the same time. And the other thing was that you don't want to have too much confidence in your in your Vietnamese cohorts because they may not be there, you know, when the loud noises start. But anyway, so that was my first introduction in, you know, how to be a a novice infantry officer.
Sam Alaimo:You had a you had a early taste. Did you, as an advisor in 1962, what did you think about our involvement there? Did you realize it was going to be this full hardcore war in a short period of time? Did you think it was necessary? What did you think as the advisor?
Bob Graham:So before I went down there, I had flown down I flew down to Taiwan. Taiwan was the knock off book capital of Asia at the time. And I got all of the books, all those French books that had been written about Southeast Asia. And I took them back up and I studied them very very carefully and and my going in proposition was that it was a really good idea to go to war, but the important aspect of it was I thought Kennedy was right. That was a special ops war.
Bob Graham:And later on, as I went back over and over again, the problem, I think the basic problem, it never went away was the American military decided to turn it into a variation of World War two. And it never should have happened. It it really was a special ops war. Had we continued to fight it that way, our chances of success would have been, I think, remarkably better. But more importantly, if things weren't going well, if things were starting to go sideways, if you had a special ops war, you can pull everybody out in a heartbeat, turn around and say, not us, we were never there.
Bob Graham:And we didn't do that, instead we took, by the time we were finished, we had 500,000 Americans in here fighting war. I thought that was right next to the border line stupid. I mean, we certainly never should have committed that soon that way to trying to fight some sort of a fixed peace European attritional war. That's what we did, and it worked out very, very poorly.
Sam Alaimo:It almost sounds like the advisers were sent there to get some sort of assessment, And then their recommendations were completely jettisoned in favor of a straight up conventional war.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Later on, I got I got I I ended up flying with a Vietnamese squadron for quite a while. I mean, maybe 75 missions or so. And I got fired and actually I was I was told that I was being thrown out of the country persona, my brother. And and I got and I was kind of temporarily out of work, I was sort of unemployed at the at that time.
Bob Graham:And so I was able to help out and they assigned me to one of our a teams, the special forces a teams from the army.
Sam Alaimo:Was this the incident where you were flying with a well connected Vietnamese officer? Yeah. You want to talk about that real quick?
Bob Graham:Right. So so I we had a we had a problem at the at the time in that particular mission. And and so I had, I think in a very short period of time, like a few seconds, I I had criticized not only him, but him, all of his family, anybody he had a shaking hands with, everybody he knew, and and even his dog. And I don't think I overlooked anybody. Well, it turns out I did not because he was a nephew of the person.
Bob Graham:And so when that happens, why I got fired and they said, you know, we're throw you out of the country. And and so I went down to my boss and the the agency guy and I said, you know, I'm looking for a job and you know, what what do you got coming? So anyway, so to speed things up, moved through that
Sam Alaimo:and So this was your second tour, right?
Bob Graham:This is my first tour. Still on my first tour. So on my first tour I went first with the Vietnamese Rangers, then they they decided that they needed advisors with the Vietnamese Air Force and so I volunteered to fly with those guys for a while.
Sam Alaimo:Got
Bob Graham:it. And I got fired and then they assigned me to an American, an a team for a while.
Sam Alaimo:So when you were flying with the Vietnamese, that's when you were doing the mission where you were lobbing grenades out of the window. Right. Yeah. That was just some savage primitive version of close air support?
Bob Graham:So well, so I was maybe the first or second forward air controller that we had checked out with the Vietnamese air force. So when you go out there, first of the airplane is spotter airplane's canvas. Right.
Sam Alaimo:So propeller canvas.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Propeller canvas airplane and you know, top speed is like a 20 miles an hour. Oh.
Sam Alaimo:It's an easy target.
Bob Graham:The good news is you can't go very fast but you can go very very low and slow. And the bad news is when you're going low and slow, people shoot at you. Because when you're over the top of the target, you know, everybody down there theoretically is a bad guy. And the way you tell the good guys from the bad guys is the bad guys shoot at you, and the good guys don't shoot at you. And so, after maybe the second ride, you you you get to the idea and says, so so wait a minute, I'm low and slow and I'm gonna fire over the top of these guys and they're gonna shoot at me and then, you know, I'm gonna have to mark a target with mop grenade.
Bob Graham:And it didn't seem fair. And so we came up with the idea of, well, what if I shoot back? And every you know, I thought that was a really good idea. And then we thought, well, okay, in addition to smoke grenades, if we can shoot back, maybe we should drop hand grenades. Mhmm.
Bob Graham:And so the next thing you know, over a period of a couple of rides, we were kinda like World War I. Right? So you're flying over the top of these guys and they're shooting at you and you know, and in that airplane, windows open up and connect up. So all you gotta do is kind of fly and guide it with your knees while you're shooting out the window. And then we decided, when I say we, we had five Americans involved in this operation and we had we lived in a tent in Da Nang or back then it was Da Nang.
Bob Graham:And we had an officer's club and the officer's club was a concrete slab, maybe a quarter size of this room and it was a bamboo factory fudge and stuff like that. And we could get booze sent up from Saigon in a shovel transport. And I don't know how they got it, but there was an old ice maker that maybe got left there by the French or something like that. So we had ice and we had, you know, water and mustard bags and and American booze imported from Saigon. So at night, whoever was there that evening of the five of us, on Saturday night, would have sitting around, you know, having a drink because the next day in Vietnam back then, they didn't fight the war on Sundays.
Sam Alaimo:Both good and bad guys took Sunday off.
Bob Graham:Yep. No no no war on Sundays. But the Vietnamese said, well, you guys are Americans, so you know, you're not you know, you don't have to worry about that. But if you want to fly airplanes, well, you can. So which was a good idea.
Bob Graham:So we'd sit around, a few of us would sit around and say, well, okay, what targets did you go on this week that you thought maybe we ought to go back and visit on Sunday? And so we came up with all kinds of things. I think the first thing we tried, we decided that we needed more air power. And so we started out and said, we'll go to the chow hall and get use the peanut butter jars. And we'll open up the peanut butter jar and we'll pull a pin on the hand grids, set the hand grids, screw the top back on.
Bob Graham:And the idea being that now we have a bombing capability, and we can fly over the top of the bad guys, and we can shoot the bad guys, and we can drop hand grenades on the bad guys. And and that led us from there to we thought that we could do the same thing, not the same thing, but kind of like the same thing, a satchel charge. And so we tied a string around the pin or the fuse or whatever it was, and we throw the satchel charge out. And we tried that one Sunday, but the problem was that we did it wrong and the pin never came out. So we had the satchel charge hanging under the airplane, these were flying, and we had to haul the thing back in.
Bob Graham:But but each Saturday night, we come up with different ways to enhance air power and also where we're going to go over the next afternoon after we soak it up to go out and find a target we thought was, you know, interesting from last week.
Sam Alaimo:How did the peanut butter grenade work? So when it landed they would open? Okay. It didn't work out.
Bob Graham:The problem the problem is the ground's soft.
Sam Alaimo:Okay.
Bob Graham:Right? And we're not gonna be dropping them. We're only gonna be dropping it from like 25, 30 feet. And so, we went through the process of saying we we, you know, the peanut butter jars aren't the right jar. Do we need thinner jars?
Bob Graham:And thinner jars were sometimes good, sometimes bad. But the big deal was if we could hit something hard, then it worked out fine. Yeah. But otherwise, you have a life grenade in a peanut butter jar that the yeah, Kong can have. And if and we we made the assumption and said, if you guys really want the hand grenade inside the peanut butter jar, all you got to do is unscrew the top and then very carefully get the hand grenade back up.
Bob Graham:And then but hang on to it. Because, you know, obviously somebody's gotta be hanging on to it. Yeah. So you could kind of pass around. Yeah.
Bob Graham:So anyway, so we would do that. And but the problem was that when we're on duty with the Vietnamese, the Americans could not become the aircraft commander because we were only advisors. So we needed to have a little Vietnamese lieutenant, it wasn't a pilot or anything like that, was just some guy.
Sam Alaimo:Along for the ride.
Bob Graham:And he's in the back seat. And the job of the guy in the back seat was theoretically, I'm in the front and I'm flying the airplane and the guy in the back is gonna drop the smoke grenade. And that's his only job. All he's gotta do is pull the pin out of the smoke grenade, throw it out the window, and everything else takes care. But this particular guy that we're talking about was afraid of heights.
Bob Graham:And in order to do anything, he he needed to be closer to the window. But when he got closer to the window, was really, you know, scared to death. And so he would lean back on the other side of the seat, pull the pan and then throw it out to him. And so one day he missed the window. And that was the day when now we have a smoke grenade rolling around on the seat and we don't have a lot of time for him to pick up, find it, and throw it out to him again.
Bob Graham:So finally he did, but during that interval was when I insulted him and all of his relatives and anybody he had ever met and things like that. And that's when I got fired. So
Sam Alaimo:So you got fired for in in in a really dramatic way. If you're gonna get fired, that's the way to do it. Yeah. And then to basically save your career and cool off
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:You went to probably the most dangerous mission possible, which was to join the Special Forces, who had their A camps dotted throughout Vietnam. Right. And they were super small units involved in guerrilla warfare. Yep. And they partnered with the the Mongards, who I've read a lot about, the tribes under Vietnam.
Bob Graham:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:And that mission, I mean, that's that's the infamous mission. Like, that's the famous the most some of the most famous work done in Vietnam was with these guys. And then yourself, an Air Force pilot, ended up boots on the ground with Special Forces and the Montagnards.
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:Pick it up there at the camp.
Bob Graham:So I really like working with Special Forces guys. I mean, that was really neat. And of course, I'm like a hard carrier's helper. Right? But the one good thing that I learned after I became an officer was that that senior NCOs make it make an assumption that young officers are not very bright and that they have to take care of them.
Bob Graham:And it's almost like a paternal feeling. Right? So I get attached to the this team and, you know, a special forces team, I guess, down even then, at least a small, it's 18 for like 12 guys. Mhmm. We had two officers and a funny aside, so when I reported in to the officer, he was a captain and I thought, I'm gonna meet some guy like Daniel Boone, right, who's really comfortable in the jungle and can, you know, raise in the jungle probably and all that.
Bob Graham:And so when I first met him and introduced myself and he said, you know, what's your date of reckoning on? And we were talking, I said, well, I'm from Bloomfield, New Jersey. And I said, I'm sure you were, you know, like, raising a farm or something like that because this comes natural to you. And he said, no, I come from The Bronx. Wow.
Bob Graham:And I thought to myself, we are seriously screwed. We got some guy from New Jersey and this guy's from The Bronx. And I said, we're never gonna make it. But anyway, so I got a fast constant course from senior NCOs and they taught me, you know, how to survive. Being, you know, being with guys like that, the level of professionalism is so high that it's just a pleasure to be here.
Bob Graham:I thought, you know, they were remarkably affected. And that's part of where I came from, where I said, we fought the wrong war. We exit executed it poorly. You know, in an area which was in a huge area, but but that team was very, very effective in reducing the Viet Cong influence in in general area, to suppressing most of it, to interdicting the Ho Chi Minh Trail as they were moving supplies and putting people down in a very, very short period of time. They organized the Mountain Air Village.
Bob Graham:They had a fairly significant team of Mountain Air strikers. But every place you look, they really had it put together well. So when I was asked periodically to go down to the embassy and brief the, you know, air attache and the military attache down there, of those guys were two star generals, one out of the air force, was a bomber pilot in World War two and one tank guy out of World War two. And no question about the fact that that they were successful in World War two. The problem is is that insurgency warfare is not World War two in Central Europe, and they could not pivot, if you will.
Bob Graham:They they could not get it out of their heads that you can't fight a jungle war anywhere in the world with the same tactics and strategy that you had in World War II or even to a lesser extent Korea. And as a result, it's through your embassy and your attache that most of the information is moving back to to Washington. And and you know, bomber generals don't get along with fighter pilots and tank generals don't get along with special ops guys. As a result of that, the special ops guys are never given credit for what they've achieved because the regular army guys were, at least back then, were, you know, distrustful the special ops guys were doing.
Sam Alaimo:Did they ever kind of tie their hands behind their backs and prevent them from doing their mission as special forces would?
Bob Graham:You know, I I can't tell that because I don't know what was coming in, you know, on the army side of things. The agency at the time had complete operational control over the army teams. And and the problem there was that increased the distrust between the regular army infantry guys or, in this case, know, tanker and and the special ops guys. Because the the the regular army guys and the regular air force guys want to have command and access over their army special ops and the CIA guys were in the way. But I guess, I assume the president and the president and his staff had decided that for the kind of war that they wanted to fight, that the agency would have full operational control over over those guys.
Bob Graham:And and obviously me. So but that that, if you will, internal distrust and the fact that the regular army wanted a piece of the war. Mhmm. They eventually got a huge piece of the war and and in my view screwed it up and So it's an interesting thing. Thought a better way to do it would have been not to scale up and accelerate the American presence in the war until we were a little bit more savvy about how to fight those kinds of wars.
Bob Graham:See, back then, you know, it probably wasn't until '59 or '60 or maybe slightly before, before The United States really got to thinking about insurgency, counterinsurgency warfare. Before that, it was about because all their victories had come from World War II. And so the idea was is that the way you fight a war is the same way we won in World War II. Now, you know, so when you're dealing with the, you know, the agency and the special operations guys and and their teams, covert operation teams, you know, you're dealing with an entirely different strategy and entirely different mindset. It's really hard for regular army guys or regular air force guys to comprehend that.
Bob Graham:You know, it's just, I don't know, counterintuitive or something.
Sam Alaimo:It's an entirely different mission set. Yeah. And like getting getting down, and you know it from boots on the ground. And you wrote about one of the a camps you were at that was being attacked. Mhmm.
Sam Alaimo:And it's it's interesting. I do agree with everything you're saying. We the conventional forces were fighting in a way that the enemy was not, and it was a mismatch. How do we match them, boots on the ground, small units against small units and ferret them out? The studies and observation groups did that extremely well.
Sam Alaimo:Special forces did it
Bob Graham:well when they could. Yeah, they did.
Sam Alaimo:Do you want to talk about
Bob Graham:I mean, Saga was a terrific so was Phoenix, the way.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Yeah.
Bob Graham:And and I don't know who it was, maybe it was Carter. They got all in a s e fit about the Phoenix operation, but they were enormously successful. Yeah. And and to put a stop to it, and then on top of that, fire all the people involved in it, you just took all your best Special Forces people and you had them go hide in the closet.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. With a lot of experience. With a lot of experience. So you saw that night let's let's zoom in the one night when your base was under attack because it sounds like a sort of scene you would see from Apocalypse Now. It was a very different war from the one I'm familiar with.
Sam Alaimo:Okay. So, like, the the jungle warfare is interesting to me, and you were talking about a night when your camp was being attacked, you were fighting beneath the flares, and a couple of guys made it through and were on their way to you. And it sounds like you were in a foxhole. Wanna pick up that story?
Bob Graham:Yeah. So so a typical I shouldn't say typical, but our our 18 camp, we were, if you will, on the not in the center of, but it's sort of attached to the Mattyard Village. And we had a small compound.
Sam Alaimo:How many Americans roughly?
Bob Graham:12 special ops guys and me.
Sam Alaimo:That is remarkably small.
Bob Graham:And they used to work on the basis of 10 to one exchange rate. So so the view was is that if let's suppose we have 12 really effective guys and so you say, well, if you want to take our compound, it'll cost you a 20 guys. Well, that's a big size Vietnam group because gorilla groups in the jungle are usually smaller than that.
Sam Alaimo:Are you saying for every one American you want 10 Montnards?
Bob Graham:10 Viet Viet Cong.
Sam Alaimo:So you're saying one American can handle fight 10 Viet Cong, basically? Yeah. So you so this camp can handle a 20 Viet Cong attack?
Bob Graham:A 20 via Kong. Theoretically, if you exchange rates 10 to one, and if you guys wanna ex ex you know, a 20 guys, come, you know, and oh, by the way, the bad news is is that after you spend a 20 guys, we'll give a phone call to the guys in the Mike Force and will show up in about ten days
Sam Alaimo:Yeah.
Bob Graham:With another 12 guys. Yep. Or maybe 30 guys out in your Mike Force. So so, you know, we can do this a lot longer and you can do that. Right?
Bob Graham:So so when they hit us, and I always had the feeling that they were trying to look when they had maybe a couple of guys out or, you know, whatever. Right. Where they could take advantage of that 10 to one relationship. But the general theory that we operate under was okay, if you're willing to spin the guys, well then okay.
Sam Alaimo:I've read about a few of those. Yeah. About one circumstance, they actually had tanks against one of these a camps and just completely overrode it. Yeah. That was not infrequent.
Sam Alaimo:So you were in a somewhat similar situation where you were in a pretty decent attack.
Bob Graham:So you have this little compound where we had typically bamboo a couple of bamboo huts that we lived in. And then you had in the center, you have what looks like a World War II pillbox, but in the center, it slopes down in the center and you have a grenade pit. And then you have firing pits or firing stations all around it. But for us, we all had a kind of a foxhole assigned to us, you know, with a couple of, I don't know what you call them, firing sticks up on either side. And then around that were, I'm gonna say three layers of concertina.
Bob Graham:And we had some claymores and mines and some flares and stuff like that. And to the best of my knowledge, they always see this at night because they I guess they felt that they had an advantage at night. And on this one particular time, I shouldn't say it that way because it wasn't a frequent thing, but it was kind of a rare thing. But but this one particular night they did it and of course when they're coming through the wire and the flares are going up and, know, light motors are going off and here comes the bad guys. And so they got through the wire and I'm in my little spot here and here comes three guys and and the guy in the middle has a rifle with bayonet on it.
Bob Graham:Mhmm. And the other two guys, I guess they're there so when he gets shot, they get the rifle. And and so they're coming at me and then, you know, it's like there. And but it's okay because I had a Thompson at the time and I carried a 38 and you know, typical machete and stuff like that. And but we'd been at it for a little while and I was out of ammo for the Thompson.
Bob Graham:But I was still
Sam Alaimo:How many magazines did you carry?
Bob Graham:I think I had two or three.
Sam Alaimo:So you fired at 60 or 90 rounds?
Bob Graham:Oh, couldn't have. But I was excited.
Sam Alaimo:Just laying down the fire?
Bob Graham:Yeah. So probably when they were way out there, but as these guys were coming in, I ran out of ammo for the Thompson, and so I grabbed my trusty 38 because I'd gone to the John Wayne movies. I knew I could handle this, right? So I shoot the two guys on either side, so far so good, except that that ran me out of 38 ammo. So that wasn't so good.
Bob Graham:And the guy in the middle, I'd hit a couple of times, but and he keeps coming. It's just a little guy with a with a big rifle and bayonet. So as he's coming towards me, you know, I'm I'm sitting there thinking, Jesus, I'm really in trouble. I just shot this guy twice and he's still coming. And so about the time, you know, I stand up because I think this is gonna be a knife fight.
Bob Graham:And so just as he gets in front of me, he dies in front of me. And I thought, you know, I coulda had a heart attack watching him do that. But anyway.
Sam Alaimo:What was her mind process pulling machete? I've never never been in that situation, thank God.
Bob Graham:Well, so he so these guys were not firing the rifle, so he had a bayonet. Yeah. So I'm assuming
Sam Alaimo:It was a legitimate knife fight.
Bob Graham:Right. So, my 38 doesn't work very well. So one of the things I learned that night, by the way, when I'm excited, trying to reload a 38 revolver is not the thing I do best. So, I immediately left 38 business and got myself a brownie nine millimeter, it looks just fine. And then I can carry a lot of clips.
Bob Graham:So anyway, but the joke I've realized was that, you know, I I'm thinking, cause it's not like I have a ton of experience and here come these guys and they've gone through the wire, they're still coming, and I'm thinking, wow, I'm in big trouble. So it wasn't that I was trying to have a knife fight with my machete, it
Sam Alaimo:should look
Bob Graham:like that, it was what was left.
Sam Alaimo:Worst case scenario. Yeah. You were still technically a civilian at this point in time, were you officially
Bob Graham:in the Yeah,
Sam Alaimo:I was civilian. So this is where it gets interesting. I've read quite a bit about Vietnam and it doesn't typically work out well when you get captured. And you were tasked at one point on a search and rescue mission for an American who'd been captured. Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:And you talk about how you set the ambush, didn't end up getting them on the ambush, or he wasn't there when you ambushed them. Right. You kind of backtracked where they came from, and then you ended up finding where he was, and he had been tortured and killed.
Bob Graham:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:That is as bad as it gets, and I think it probably reframes things for you, not just the fact that you're executed, but that you're tortured. Can you talk about what it was, how you found him, and then how that shaped the rest of your time in the war?
Bob Graham:Okay. So there were very very few American advisors over there at your time. And so typically, what would happen is it it was a it was a big coup. First of we all had boundaries on our head. Right?
Bob Graham:So like, that was quite a compliment actually.
Sam Alaimo:What were you worth? Do you know?
Bob Graham:Yeah. Because our radio Hanoi would say, hey, you know, some you know, there's a, you know, whatever, one year pay reward for
Sam Alaimo:That's pretty good. Bob Grant.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Oh,
Sam Alaimo:they knew your name?
Bob Graham:Yeah. Yeah. They also
Sam Alaimo:So there's obviously a good leak there as well.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Which and very complimentary. Yeah. Right? That's awesome.
Bob Graham:So anyway, but there weren't very many American visors, so what they would try to do is, whenever, like when you're working with a mountian yard, some small percentage of the mountian yard would really be planted in there in order to steal a weapon and kill America. And so that was pretty commonplace. And the fact that you there was always a for them, a lot of money on the table, Then you know, trucking America was a big deal. And so anyway, the way it typically worked was they if they could capture you injured and alive, they would put you in a tiger cage, which is a bamboo type cage. And then they would take you through the villages for a day or two.
Bob Graham:They're really not logistically set up to support a captive, but they were taken through the village in the in the tiger's cage and torture them and allow the villagers to torture them. And then at some point in time, you know, two, three, four days, they would typically have some, I suppose, big ceremony of sorts where they would impale the captive on a stake in the center of the village. So the best thing that would have happened to them is they would have been tortured to death before they got to the stake. But if you were living long enough to get to the stake, it was a tough way to die. So one of the things that was a takeaway for me was that I did not intend to be captured in any of my succeeding tours.
Bob Graham:But I also took it upon myself to think, you know, I'm kinda handy in the in the woods, and I gotta punch out and fend for myself. Well, I'll just fight from the ground instead of from the air.
Sam Alaimo:So this kinda comes into what you wrote about in your book. You wrote about the combat mind, and you said you live at the survival level where everything is a function of living or dying. And a lot of people call that zone, a lot of people call that the flow. And you called your ability to get into that the switch. Can you talk about how you would get into that state and what it felt like to operate in that zone while you're actually in the field?
Bob Graham:Yeah. So and I and I really kinda you know, my first thought was kinda my introduction to the head game problem that we all that we all face. And a and a problem I an advantage because when I got back in the Air Force again, I got back in my own fighter squad under all my buddies there, and that was almost a perfect environment to get your head back screwed on right. But it's a it was a very, very difficult transition for me dealing with a wife and family and other people, you know, as well. And that period of transition coming back was long enough to where, you know, we're talking weeks and months, probably closer to months than weeks.
Bob Graham:And then, you gotta turn around and go back at it again. So so in the business, you're you're gonna have to switch on and switch off. So I spent a lot of time thinking about how to do that effectively. And I decided that I could switch on and off really well during the day. You know, your conscious mind, if you're self disciplined, your conscious mind will allow you to switch back and forth.
Bob Graham:So you can be, for all intents and purposes, the military variation of Jekyll and Hodt. And then so the hard part is always coming back to your family and coming back to a more normalized environment. What I found is I can scale up really quickly to get back into combat.
Sam Alaimo:What does that this is something that happened a lot in the war on terror because you have guys who would do 15 combat deployments. Right. And some people would just get broken. At some point, you just can't take it anymore. How did you Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:How did you cognitively get yourself in that zone?
Bob Graham:This is gonna sound weird. So I I I happen to be really comfortable in that. So I, you know, and I know
Sam Alaimo:I think most people are. The hard part is the transition from that zone to family mode.
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:But it sounds like you were able to just flick that switch and not struggle bouncing back and forth.
Bob Graham:By the time I was back home three weeks or four weeks, I had a day game good. Know, I would look like for all intents and purposes I was normal. I paid for all my sins at night and then Sleeping. Yeah. Well, not sleeping.
Bob Graham:That's the case. But the nights were really tough. But the days, I could, you know, get my arms around that fairly fast. But I I found that I had to get back to my family gradually. I could get back to the squadron quick, but to go back to a family environment with the normal things that you have going on in the family, that was really hard.
Bob Graham:So I kind of took that in small bites until I could get that going. The reverse of that was that when I was going back in, if you gave me a few days or a week and a half or something like that, I was full up and I was comfortable and fit in well and got back in the in the flow, if you will. Very, very quickly.
Sam Alaimo:And it's something I've seen a lot too is you you enjoy that condition, that zone, that survival
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:Mentality. And then you noticed when you got back, you said you were you were changed, you had short-tempered, obviously had trouble at night sleeping.
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:But at the same time, you wanted to get back.
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:A horrible experience. You're out of it in safety. Yeah. You wanna get back to it. Right.
Sam Alaimo:There's there's something paradoxical about that that is universal. So
Bob Graham:so think of it this time. Let's suppose you're you're on a football team and you just got smacked around by the guy opposite you. So the coach pulls you out and he puts you on a bench. And you go, I don't wanna be on a bench, I owe that guy one. Yeah.
Bob Graham:Right? So if you go back through my tours, you find out that they're all about, hey, you know, I didn't sign up to sit on the bench. That's right. I signed up to play. And I happened to be very very good at it.
Bob Graham:And, you know, when you when you see a a group like a squadron or something like that, and later when I commanded a squadron, for example, you got let's suppose you have about 25 guys in a squadron. You got a half a dozen guys who are first class. I mean, they can just go hand to moon for you. Right? You got 15 or so, they're gonna be fine, they're solid guys and all that.
Bob Graham:And you got another half a dozen or so that are, you know, you really got to be careful where you send them because they're, you know, not very good at that and it doesn't look like you're going to get better. So I was always in on the short list of if we were going to throw a war, we'd invite you first. And because some people I think, you know, the gene pool somehow gave them an overdose of, you know, getting in a fight and getting in combat. And so I was surprisingly comfortable in combat and and very very cool and I didn't get excited and
Sam Alaimo:Did you guys have a phrase for those people who you wanted by your side and fight?
Bob Graham:Well, shrinks have a phrase.
Sam Alaimo:When the shrinks go on?
Bob Graham:You know, you have to be careful talking about that because otherwise people think you're a cool of some sort. But the fact of the matter is you just happen to have a knack that you do that well. It's sort of like a gift. So there's guys playing baseball that have a gift that I never had, and they don't know why they got it, and they don't know why they got it. But you know that if you practice for the rest of your life, you'll never be as good as them.
Bob Graham:And that was kind of the position I was in. And so I adapt to that environment better than most, and I'm very comfortable in it.
Sam Alaimo:Did it serve you well when you got out of the military?
Bob Graham:No. Getting out was really hard. But on my last assignment, I was fortunate I had a really good assignment. I was working off and on for DIA and I was on some compartmentalized missions and things like that. So I had a little something going on.
Sam Alaimo:They kind of eased you out of it.
Bob Graham:Yeah. So I I got out and once again, I I worked hard, you know, with my day job of getting back into being a normal human being. And now I'm in a civilian environment where there's no other military guys around. Or at least none none that I knew. The nighttime transition I think took five to eight years.
Sam Alaimo:So they did go away?
Bob Graham:Yeah. Right up until the time I started to write the book. So so what happened is is that, you know, you go through a lot of work to try to forget. And then you say, well, geezer, you know, got some great stories here. And so the more you tell the stories and the more you write the book, you you have to then re remember all the things you worked so hard for then.
Bob Graham:But it's not as hard the years later.
Sam Alaimo:Alright, so we got off, I wanna go back to Yeah. To Viet actually I guess Philippines, we're gonna jump around a little bit
Bob Graham:Okay.
Sam Alaimo:And talk about your ejection experience. Yeah. That was, reading about it was intense, and I still don't think I fully grasp what 27 Gs could feel like, and the circumstances in which you landed. So just to tee it up a little bit, you had to eject in The Philippines. Talk about the 27 Gs, talk about basically I think it was 800 feet straight down, ejecting downwards.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. I don't wanna give the story away, but pick it up from there and let's walk through that story, but that is pretty pretty incredible.
Bob Graham:Alright. So the deal we had going on there is my my squadron was split up in two three ways. So the main part of the squadron was in the Philippine Islands, and they supported our detachment, which was about half of the squadron or more And Da Nang for the strikes up in North Vietnam.
Sam Alaimo:So based in Philippines, but operating in Vietnam.
Bob Graham:Right. And we also had a small detachment, said a nuke alert on Chinese targets out of Taiwan. Just as sort of a, oh, by the way, you know, from a from a Chinese perspective, in case they wanted to become too involved or too aggressive in what was going on in Vietnam, North Vietnam at the time, I guess the American mill not military, but probably the president decided that having a half a dozen nukes would sort of keep them cool and this way didn't get too aggressive. So anyway, so in order for but the Philippine Islands is a was it was a neutral country. And so we couldn't launch strikes into Vietnam out of the Philippine Islands.
Bob Graham:So what what what we could do is we could launch a couple of airplanes in the morning, fly over to Da Nang, which was about a two hour ride or yeah. Two hour ride. And land there, turn the birds, arm them up, and then go north. But at the time, the Philippine Philippine government had had a huge huck problem. The huck being a guerrilla operation, communist guerrilla operation.
Bob Graham:It was sort of centered in in an aisle, but Luzon was a hotspot as well. And so apparently, I say apparently because this is what the investigative guys found out later on. So a huck team came in at night and set up at least one ZSU on the end of the runway. ZSU being, you know, the Russian fifty cal, quad 50 or whatever at the end of our runway. And so I was on the first ride out in the morning to take a bird over to Da Nang to, you know, turn typical takeoff roll afterburner engaged, you know, reaching for the gear and the flaps, and I'm about thirty, forty, 50 feet in the air.
Bob Graham:Right as I cross the end of the runway, I get peppered by the z s u and aircraft exploded. It the design of that particular of the air aircraft, the f 100, was that right behind the pilot's seat is a huge fuel tank that feeds the engine, the main engine. So that's the main fuel tank. So when they did that and hit the airplane, I was told that now hot pieces of metal get thrown into the fuel tank, which then fumes explode. So you're in a cockpit about the size of your chair, and you're enveloped in a canopy and all that, and the explosion just fills the cockpit with fire.
Bob Graham:So you're kinda sitting in the fire wondering, you know, what the hell happened? And so I pulled up to the right to try to climb, get some altitude and sort things out. And as I climbed up to the right, I got the second explosion. Same thing, more fire into the cockpit. So it's really uncomfortable because you're sitting here in your burning and all the skin that's exposed is melting.
Sam Alaimo:What is your mindset in this moment in time? Is it just panicked? Did you just fall back on training? Are you kind of like a passive observer watching yourself in this situation?
Bob Graham:It is a little bit passive, but all of your actions have been rehearsed so often. Like you're kind of going through the motion mechanically while all this is going on. Obviously, the first decision I had is I needed to scratch for some altitude and get myself, you Second decision I had was when I got up to about a 1,200 feet, something like that, I looked down and it turns out I was over the city of Angeles, which, you know, and if I punched out, which would have been a logical thing to do, then the aircraft would have a burning aircraft with munitions would have dropped into the center of the city and the housing area and obviously it'd be killing a lot of innocent people. So, I decided to had an opportunity to get it away from the city and over an area with elephant grass just again, you know, before you got to the jungle. And if I could get it over there, then I could punch out over there.
Bob Graham:So as I was getting over, just as I was getting over to the elephant grass, I got the third explosion and when that happened, the flight control system burned through. And so I had no control of the airplane, and you know, burned through. I rolled over and nose down inverted. And so the ejection seat, if you think about an airplane, the ejection seat is designed to check you up that way. Well, if you take that and roll it inverted and nose down, then instead of being fired up, you're being fired down.
Sam Alaimo:Mhmm.
Bob Graham:So when you fire the ejection seat in that particular airplane, again, one of the early jet fighters, I instantly get 27 g's. And when you get that, anything that's not in exactly the right place breaks. But if you're in a situation where you're being thrown around the cockpit and you're on fire and everything's melting and you're burning, all you're trying to do is get out with what it whatever's left, you know. I'll I'll I'll give it a shot. So what happened was is that I get fired out and you have a butt kicker that kicks you out of the seat.
Bob Graham:That worked fine. And now I'm looking up and the apology came out and deployed. Fine. I'm looking down and here comes the ground. And and I'm thinking and that was when I was thinking to myself, you know, we really need to hurry up with this parachute thing.
Bob Graham:You know, because otherwise
Sam Alaimo:800 feet's not a lot of time for a parachute.
Bob Graham:No. So the accident board said that I got out at 800 feet, but I was going down. Well, I didn't have a parachute, so it's not like I could steer the chute. Yeah. So and as you're watching the ground coming up at you, seems you're coming up a lot faster than the parachute's working.
Bob Graham:So anyway, about the time I thought that I was in a lot of trouble, I I hit, but I hit into this jungle stream and went into the mud up to my chin, literally. And and so now I'm in a stream and I'm I'm kinda punchy because, you know, things this is all taking place in probably a minute, minute and a half. And so about that time, feel thing bumping into my head and and I looked and there were some a couple of large black snakes in the thing. Well, I didn't necessarily know if they were poisonous or not, but I knew that they were there first and that I should leave. And so I climbed up the side of the stream and about that time, coming through the grass is, I don't know, a dozen guys or something like that.
Bob Graham:And it looked like they had AK's. So the typical deal is, what they do is they throw a cordon around you in a circle and then you begin to squeeze the circle in. But having the experience of watching what happened to American advisors in my first tour, I was smart enough to realize that I didn't think that was a very fun thing to do. So I shot a couple of the guys and like all good infantry guys, when somebody shooting at you, you get down. And about that time, an army chopper got in close to the tree line, so I was able to get through the bad guys, hustle on over to the army chopper and get a ride back to the base.
Bob Graham:The problem was that I'd broken my back in three places. And that trip over to the chopper really screwed things up because it screwed up, you know, all of the back and the spinal cord and stuff like that. I was lucky and, you know, obviously I got cut up and stuff like that. But but the funny part of the story was so long, the chopper guys get me in the chopper and we're landing at the hospital and so they get me onto a stretcher and they're rolling me into the hospital. So now I'm all muddy and bloody and dirty and, you know, whatever.
Bob Graham:So as we come through the door to the hospital, there's a lady there with her son. And I as I'm going by, the lady looks at me and she fainted. And I thought, she's like, I gotta do something about my appearance. I mean, this this whole thing. Oh my god.
Bob Graham:So anyway. So anyway, I got to the hospital and then some of the the first guy that comes in that I got to see shortly thereafter was a phy surgeon. The phy surgeon says to me, can I can I get anything for you? And I said, well, said, when I went into the water, I said, you know, my cigarettes got all wet and stuff like that. Said, how about, you know, how about a pack of cigarettes and a lighter?
Bob Graham:He said, no, can't. We don't allow smoking in the hospital. And he said, well, how about some mission whiskey? He said, well, you can't have mission whiskey because we have more tests to take on you. And I thought, why the hell would you ask me if you weren't gonna help, you know, why you why would you bother?
Bob Graham:But anyway, so that whole episode would really over in a really short period of time. But it was just sort of a fast paced then until you get to the chopper and then everything slows down.
Sam Alaimo:Everything that seems like it could have went wrong went wrong, but you still live. Then the irony is that they made you fly again.
Bob Graham:Oh, yeah. Yeah. So To make
Sam Alaimo:sure there is no negative mental programming. Right. But that Roll with that. Roll with that. With a broken pack.
Bob Graham:Alright. The so the deal back then was that if you have a bad incident in an airplane where you eject or something like that or you have a crash or whatever, it is it maybe not a %, but a lot of people get terrifying and they're not gonna get back in the seat. And, you know, and you can see that because you go, one trip around this block is enough for anybody. I'm on the air, I think I'll go to socials or whatever. So the deal was that in order to avoid that, we gotta get you back in the saddle right away.
Bob Graham:My operations officer who is my the boss, the guy in charge of flying for the squattering, he comes into the hospital room to see how I'm doing and and and so he he says, okay, Graham, we gotta get you back in a, you know, in a jet right away. He says, I've already worked on tomorrow's schedule and you're on first thing tomorrow morning. He said, then if we don't do that, you know, you could become afraid to fly. And I said, boss, you're too late. I'm already afraid to fly.
Bob Graham:I said, you know, how about a six pack of scotch and a trip to Manila? And I'll see you in a week. Said, now I gotta get you back in. So anyway, so the the after we banded that thing back and forth a lot, you know, he won and so he got me some new clothes and stuff like that and sent out a couple big musculoskeletal crew chiefs the next day to carry me up the ladder and strap me in the bird.
Sam Alaimo:Did they know your back was broken?
Bob Graham:No, we didn't know that because apparently the hospital didn't catch it. And that became a problem later on. So they didn't realize until they brought me back in big places. And they said, well, you should be fine. You know, cut some stuff like that.
Bob Graham:They'll they'll heal. It should be fine. Anyway, and we were flying into the North right on, you know, bombing missions and stuff like that. And so they brought me back in the lineup. And and the problem was that pulling Gs and stuff like that and combat is really painful.
Bob Graham:And so, but I was able to finish out the tour which took another couple of months. And then by the time I got back to The States, I was beginning to have periods of paralysis from the waist down. That's when the docs finally sent me over to the hospital in San Antonio to see what they could do to fix me up. And there was nothing they could do to fix me up by that time. So that's when I went through that big long rehab period, put her on how to walk again and stuff like that.
Sam Alaimo:So you had to learn how to walk again.
Bob Graham:It's a great story. So about this woman. So I went to the hospital and you know, first she goes to the orthopaedic surgeons, they couldn't do anything. Then you go to neuro guys and you know, they can't do anything. And so you're, you know, you're in a wheelchair and you're paralyzed from the waist down and nobody can help, right?
Bob Graham:And it looked very much like you're gonna be there for the rest of your life, which is not much to look forward to. So after a few days of being tested, this one doc said to me, he said, you know, there's a nurse that is working on a brand new experimental program, you might be a good candidate for her. And she's got this idea that says that she can take people that have lost large portions of their network of nerves that trigger the muscles that she can teach you how to walk using different muscles. And they said, what do you think about that? And I said, There's no downside, right?
Bob Graham:I'm here, I'm not walking at all. So anyway, so they hooked me up with her and she had two other people she was experimenting with, but she liked me the best because I brought to her a combat injury that was really you know, more complicated than what the other guys had, which were mostly upper body stuff. So we started out, it was like a little bitty office with three straight back chairs, a treadmill and that was it. And so, the first thing you gotta do is figure out how to get out of the wheelchair, and eventually you work on getting out of the wheelchair. And then the next thing you know, you get on the treadmill.
Bob Graham:And then next thing you know, you're you're walking. You may not be walking very good, but you're walking. And you keep on walking until you can walk better. Then the next thing you gotta do is you gotta learn how to run. And you can't do that very well, but then the more you do, the better you get at that.
Bob Graham:And then in the meantime, you gotta be able to pass all of the physical requirements to get back on flight status. You know, my upper body was in pretty good shape, right? Because I set up my hospital bed with a chinny bar.
Sam Alaimo:Nice.
Bob Graham:And you know, you run around in a wheelchair, you're doing a lot of pumping. So all I really need to worry about was, you know, some of the core things and the likes. So anyway, after she's in, I'd say five months or something like that, I've gradually getting better and better and better. She arranged and I arranged to go down and meet a flying evaluation board of doctors. And I made the case that says I should I was good enough to get back on flying status.
Bob Graham:I was good enough to move around an airplane and and that we were running short on pilots over in Vietnam. And so they really needed to get me back on flight status so I could go over there. I gave them one of the most patriotic speeches you have ever heard in your life about why they should get me back on flying status and send me back over to Vietnam. But anyway, so I won the case and and then I jumped on the airplane for a moment.
Sam Alaimo:Did they ever question your ability to do another ejection with your back and the condition it was?
Bob Graham:No, that question never came up.
Sam Alaimo:But you knew you could not do another ejection?
Bob Graham:Yeah, because my back was so screwed up at the time and I was still trying to work my way through the pain level, right? And I knew that if I punched out, see the idea behind punching out is your spinal cord is straight. Everything's straight, everything is in the perfect position. Well, mine was already skewed in a couple of different places. So my assumption was that if I punch out, I either break it in new places or I break it in old places and now I'm on the ground in a place where people don't like you.
Bob Graham:And that didn't seem like very much fun. Mhmm. So I decided not to not to reject anymore.
Sam Alaimo:That that part of your story was remarkable to me. Think out of the you did around 500 combat flights. Right. And out of I'd say about 50 of them, you think you got shot up in.
Bob Graham:Mhmm.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Which means you knew you were not going to eject. So you were either going land the plane or you're going to die. Right. And you completely accepted that, and you kept going back.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. Okay. I mean, that's unusual. Were most pilots this aggressive, or was this just your passion for getting into the fight?
Bob Graham:At the end of a lot of it may have been my passion to get back in the fight. I mean, because, come on. You know, mean, God punch you around. You gotta get back in there.
Sam Alaimo:Right.
Bob Graham:Right? You gotta get back up.
Sam Alaimo:Right.
Bob Graham:And I sort of felt like they owed me a couple. So, you know, so I got back in the fight and it worked out just fine. And by the way, they did pay back.
Sam Alaimo:You had to go AWOL at one point to get back to Vietnam to fight. Yeah. How did that work out?
Bob Graham:So I got out of the hospital just before Christmas and went home, talked to my wife and said, you know, gotta get back in the game, you know?
Sam Alaimo:And she
Bob Graham:supported it. She was really great. By the way, I will say, in her defense, I thought when I volunteered for my fourth tour, I she was a little antsy about that. I I don't think she was really fond of that one. But the third tour, I think by that time, she had probably written me off as, you know, some psycho that she but anyway, but she was terrific about it.
Bob Graham:And I hadn't managed. When they discharged her from the hospital, they don't give you any orders. They just send you home. So for all intents and purposes, nobody on the base except my wife and family knew I was there. But the group that was still there at the base was scheduled to go to Aviano Italy for deployment.
Bob Graham:And my squadron had been redeployed back over to Vietnam to fly the first missions into North Vietnam. So if I stayed there, they'd have put me in a group going to Italy. So I decided that the best thing to do is not say anything to anybody. So I I got a airline ticket, I flew up to San Francisco. And I I got a cab over to the air base that was handling all of our Asian deployments.
Bob Graham:And it was Christmas Eve. And so I went over to the officers club and there was me and a bartender. And the bartender's bummed out and, you know, and I'm bummed out. So we're having a couple drinks and in walks this guy. So now we got three guys in the whole officers club.
Bob Graham:And the guy's really upset because he just got divorced. And so he's sitting next to each other and the compensation goes like, so what are you doing here? You know, what are you doing here? And I said, well, you know, I'm here because I need to get a ride to Saigon. And he said, well, why don't you just take your orders and get on the break of it, you know.
Bob Graham:I said, I don't have any orders. And he said, what do you mean you don't have any orders? I said, well, I don't have any orders, you know, I'm I'm hitchhiking a ride. And he said, you know, you're eight ball. And he said, you know, you you can't do that.
Bob Graham:And so we're having this conversation back and forth and, you know, we're at and we're drinking and we're carrying on. And he says, I happen to be the aircraft commander and I'm flying over to Saigon tomorrow. He said, I'll tell you what. He said, if you'll be down on a ramp at like, I don't know, 06:30 or 07:00 tomorrow morning, we're leaving for Saigon. I'll smoke you aboard the airplane and I'll and you'll be flying in the, you know, pilot's area and I'll put you on the on the you know, on the manifest and then but you can't get off the airplane.
Bob Graham:Because if you get off the airplane, now you're going to be dealing with customs and military placement and all that and you're going to go to jail. I said, okay. So I showed up the next morning, I'm on the ramp with my gear and that, you know, and here he comes and he put me on the airplane, we flew to first to Hawaii, and then I think next stop was Guam. And then we hit the Philippine Island in Manila. And finally we ended up in Saigon.
Bob Graham:So now I can get off the airplane. So the guy says, Okay, wait right here at the airplane, I'm going get a pickup truck. So he grabbed a pickup truck, picked me up, took me out to the main gate and by that, while I was in the airplane they put on civilian clothes. He takes me out to the main gate and I hired a Vietnamese taxi driver to drive me to the air base that my squadron was at. And and it was it was like an hour drive or something like that.
Bob Graham:And we often knew and I got up at the gate at the at the base and and I walked into the air police, said, you know, I'm here to rejoin my squadron and you know, I know you guys couldn't win the war without me anyways. So I did. So and you know, so there's a lot of, you know, so the the colonels did not quite understand why I did that. And so there was a lot of outstanding attention saying, yes and no, sir, and I'll never do it again, sir. And then after a couple hours of that, they decided that they since I was already there, they might as well put me to work.
Bob Graham:So they sent me down to my fighter's car, I checked in, got my gear, you know, sorted out, got jumped in the jet.
Sam Alaimo:They had to admire that.
Bob Graham:I think they probably did. I I think I think particularly the the colonel boss that I had, I think he thought I was a little bit goofy. But but
Sam Alaimo:That's what they needed in Vietnam.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Right.
Sam Alaimo:That's what you need in combat.
Bob Graham:And that and he became kind of a mentor for me and I started my father pretty afterwards. We had a good relationship. It all worked out fine.
Sam Alaimo:So you're you're flying, you know you're not gonna be able to eject.
Bob Graham:Sorry.
Sam Alaimo:Can you talk about your Silver Star mission?
Bob Graham:It was a monsoon season, which is at around May. Now at the airbase, we always had two birds on board at the end of the runway. And the idea being because lots of times you get a pop up target, like 18 base under attack or something like that. Things for the kind of things that were unexpected that you can schedule ahead of time. And we kept two birds and and two pilots on alert in a little tiny trailer type thing.
Bob Graham:And on this particular day during this period of time, the the weather was lousy. So by lousy, mean, the ceilings were four or 500 feet. And this was maybe a mile, mile and a half, something like that. Typical monsoon thing where the entire country is covered in cloud. And for some bizarre reason, the Air Force headquarters in Saigon grounded the entire country.
Bob Graham:And so nobody was flying. Everybody's on the ground. So my buddy and I are in a alert and we're thinking, hey, you know, cool it. We'll, you know, white light us home or hang out, grab some sleep, do whatever. And we're there a couple hours and we get a phone call from the headquarters and psychologists said, hey, the main North Vietnamese force was stationed in Cambodia directly across the border from the area Tainan province in in Vietnam.
Bob Graham:We used to call it the Paris Beak. And and so he said that the North Vietnamese army had moved across the border in size, size being thousands, like, you know, eight, ten thousand North Vietnamese soldiers coming across into South Vietnam. And that they had a fire base under attack. The fire base had a couple of hundred Americans here. And and the fire base was about to get overrun.
Bob Graham:And if that's true, then a couple hundred Americans were massacred. And so they said that there's nobody else in in the country literally that can fly. Would you two guys be willing to take off and and, you know, help out? And so we said, well, you know, sure. I mean, you know, what are you going do?
Bob Graham:You're to let hundreds of Americans die and you say, it's raining out, know, I can't fly here. Come on. You know? So anyway, so we said that we'd give it a shot. Apparently, the guy who asked us that question was not high enough rank that he didn't realize that he was asking me, sir, if we wouldn't mind breaking the rules that the four sergeants had put in place.
Bob Graham:And but it didn't matter.
Sam Alaimo:But isn't the mission wasn't approved from the highest levels?
Bob Graham:Right.
Sam Alaimo:He didn't know that? Or did he know that and he did it anyway? I don't know. Okay.
Bob Graham:I'd like to think that he did it anyway, but I never can tell. So it seemed like a reasonable thing for us to do. So we jumped in, took off, flew over, got over to Target, And sure enough, was a really hot Target. Lots of stuff going. And the Ford Air Controller talked us down underneath the cloud, to put that in perspective, so if if you have a ceiling, you're, let's say, at 500 feet, and the trees grow to 200 to 250 feet, you're flying in that 200 foot envelope, right?
Bob Graham:So everything's a flat attack. So anyway, he talked us down, my buddy puts in the first attack and I'm right behind him and he he go and he dropped a couple of bombs. As I'm going in, I had hit really hard and got actually hammered by a couple of CSUs I guess. And so while Jack was putting in the strike and the fire base, you know, once you're hit, I climbed up above the cloud and I was trying to figure out if I'd keep the airplane flying or not. And by finagling that with it with it a little bit, I could keep it flying just above stall speed.
Bob Graham:So that would have been, let's say, 200, two 50 knots, something like that. Stall speed was about one ninety five ish or something like that. So you have a small window that you can work in. And but the problem was both of my fuel boost pump pumps had been shot away. Mhmm.
Bob Graham:And so the only way I could get fuel to the engine was through gravity, which meant that I couldn't go any faster than a couple hundred knots and that I couldn't make any abrupt maneuvers. So no ups and downs and no lefts and rights and no pulling Gs or anything like that. Cause if I did it would interrupt the gravity flow in into the engine and then the engine flames out in the ER. So I realized that I could by, you know, flying very gently and very slow and carefully while I could keep the thing airborne. And so I was up there sort of hanging out, waiting for Jack to take me back to the escort me back to the airbase.
Bob Graham:And in the meantime, he finishes taking care of the bad guys in this particular fire base. And then he comes up and meets me in my mama's way and we're going to head back to Myanmar. And about that time we get a call from the fact and the fact says, we got a huge problem here. And it turns out that there was another larger army fire base a little ways away that was under attack and that they estimated by 4,000 plus bad guys and there's like three or 400 Americans on the base, don't know how many. And he said, and and the bad guys are in the wires coming through the concertina and the fire base is in great jeopardy being overrun.
Bob Graham:Our tour guides had lowered their tubes so that they're flying directly into the wire. So things are not good. And if they break through the wire in one spot, they're inside and now you got hand to hand. And once the Americans and the North Vietnamese get into the mix, can't help them.
Bob Graham:Because,
Sam Alaimo:you know,
Bob Graham:I got to kill a lot of Americans in order to kill some North Vietnamese. The problem we had was that Jack had a good airplane but he's got no munitions left. I got a bad airplane but I have all my munitions left. So it's kind of the awkward thing. So they said the Pat calls me up and says, so what do you think?
Bob Graham:Do you wanna give a shot? And I went, yeah. Yeah. I'll give it a shot. See how close?
Bob Graham:And and so he talked me down then he said, listen, you know, the old guys can't can't lift their fire. If they do, the guys have threw the wire on them and it's all over but the, you know, whistling and shouting. So I said, will I be willing to put the strike in underneath the fire? And that had ever been done before because obviously there's not a lot of space underneath the so all the explosions coming up are gonna take a lot of friendly fire. And so but anyway, but we agreed and all that and so I can I still see in my mind's eye when I broke through the clouds and I looked out and I saw the situation on the ground?
Bob Graham:It was like and the only way I know how to describe it, it was like somebody went in and kicked over an ant hill. You got literally thousands of enemy soldiers masked around this relatively small compound and they're breaking through the wire in a large circumference. And once they get through and they didn't hear very far to go, then it's all over from that point on, and then all the Americans had massacred. So I went down and I started in, put my two bombs in and then I just stayed down there in amongst them. And when I I say that, I imagine it's very very close.
Bob Graham:So it was like almost being part of, Right? Because I'm only I'm flying around at a hundred feet above them. And so you can see wherever they mass, you can and obviously, the the guns are all firing and and and the guns, they use those CSUs and they're all loaded with tracer. So the Vietnamese loaded simple like one out of every six rounds was a tracer round, which is great because that way you knew exactly where they were. All you got is, you know, run back to the yellow stream.
Bob Graham:So I put in so I I put in my two five hundred pounders, and then I went I followed up with I had a CBU cluster bomb units. And probably it wasn't like I made individual passive because I was just down. So I take out a group of them or or guns, and then I kinda rudder the airplane around slowly and find another bunch and then I do the same thing. And I think I did like probably, let's say roughly 15 passes.
Sam Alaimo:So you're you're on you're low on gas. Right. You're beneath cloud cover. Yeah. You're the only plane in the sky.
Sam Alaimo:So every bad guy knows you're there and is probably trying to take aim at you. Yeah. Boots on the ground are about to be overrun. You have a broken back and can't eject. So this is like the most epic situation possible.
Bob Graham:But even if I want to eject, if I eject
Sam Alaimo:You're lighten the
Bob Graham:middle I know all the bad guys. Right?
Sam Alaimo:From from your position up there, worst case scenario, boots on the ground, but up there as a fighter pilot, you being you, was that sort of target rich environment
Bob Graham:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:Dream come true? Like, was your mindset like there?
Bob Graham:Well, first of all, that's really funny. Just before you commit, you realize you're going to die. Right? That's the dead deal. Yeah.
Bob Graham:Right? Even if as I used to say, even if you're a lousy shot, if you have a big airplane and he's like right next door to you, you have trouble missing. Right? So so you know you're gonna take a lot of hits. You know you're not gonna object.
Bob Graham:You know that the airplane is is gonna get shot down. And you go, well, okay. Yeah. So from that point on, you you know, don't have to worry about that.
Sam Alaimo:What's left? Yeah.
Bob Graham:Right. So so now all you have to do is focus on the work at hand. And so you just stay down there and shoot and kill it and do that for as long. And then once I was out of a CBU and once I was out of my two five hundred pounders, I still had my guns left. So that that particular airplane had four twenty millimeter cannon, 800 rounds.
Bob Graham:So I went around and selectively killed all of the gun positions and and because the guys were the bad guys were kinda huddle around the gun positions.
Sam Alaimo:So you traced the tracers back to where the gun positions were?
Bob Graham:Yeah. So what happens is I the guy in the gun position or or would be firing at me and then all I gotta do is go through that. You could just go through the tracers and you and you finally get to where you're close enough there where you can open fire and accurately kill them. But you have to go follow the guys through this tracer thing to get there. And so I did four or five of those passes and magic killed all the guns.
Bob Graham:And the guns were really chopping me up. So the canopy was shot away, the instrument panel was mostly shot away. I mentioned in the book that I I look out to take a look at my left wing because because don't forget it's raining inside now. Right? Mhmm.
Bob Graham:They shot it like, oh, my So I look out at my left wing and I couldn't believe all the holes going up through the wing. And then I look at it and I see Butte Pod and it was on fire burning. And I thought, Jesus, this is really discouraging. So I stopped looking out. So, you know, because if I can't do anything about it, why why why worry about it?
Bob Graham:So then I finally I ran out of ammo and then by some time during that period of time, the thousands of enemy troops broke and they started panicking and running back towards the border in Cambodia. And I thought, well, guys won't know I'm out of ammo. So I I made a couple of three or four passes over the top of me about, you know, 50 feet or something like that. And just to think, you know, keep it going guys, you know. And so if you're that close to people with a jet and a big airplane, you know, it scares a lot of people.
Sam Alaimo:And to show a force.
Bob Graham:And so, anyway, so it turned out to be a good thing. So the army guys gave me credit for a minimum of 1,500 enemy troops killed and eight gun positions destroyed. And the army guys lived happily ever after.
Sam Alaimo:It's a good story.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was a great day.
Sam Alaimo:The army was stingy giving you a silver star for that.
Bob Graham:Well, so, know, obviously, you know, I'm under house arrest and I'm gonna be court martial and, you know, and all that kind of stuff. But the rule was that the highest award that a service can give to a member of another service is the Silver Star.
Sam Alaimo:I didn't know that.
Bob Graham:Yeah. So what happens is so in the Air Force, so you have the Silver Star, Air Force Cross and a middle of honor. Right? And the same in the Army. But the Army can't recommend an Air Force Cross and they can't recommend an Air Force middle of honor.
Bob Graham:But you gotta remember that I broke all those regulations, those five regulations that I disobeyed in one fight, which I think is maybe an Air Force rep. Close. And so the highest award that the Army could give me was the Silver Star. But the Air Force had to punch me because you can't have people disobeying direct orders or you end up with a bunch of, you know Cowboys. Unruly guys.
Bob Graham:Right? And the unruly guys may be good in war, but they're not very good from a military standpoint. So if you're gonna maintain control of all of your troops in an orderly fashion and stuff like that, well, you have to be able to punish guys who break rules. So the army recommended that through Air Force channels that I got the Silver Star. The Air Force accepted that.
Bob Graham:They dropped the court martial charges. And so they were able to punish me, but at the same time, get an army so silver star. And I was really happy because getting out of jail was a good idea.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. God, that's incredible story. I'm gonna zoom out a little bit. We'll we'll kind of wrap up the combat piece. You you talked a little bit in the book about more political concerns and leadership.
Sam Alaimo:And you you told a story about there was a shortage of bombs. Right. And you had a friend who was tasked with destroying a concrete port. And since he ran out of, I guess, GPUs, he had to use napalm at 20 millimeter, which doesn't destroy a concrete.
Bob Graham:And that's all we had.
Sam Alaimo:Yeah. He ended up becoming a POW at the for years. Sure. And that's just the result of sheer incompetence, forcing the mission anyway. And you made it you basically said the president and sec def, the secretary of defense, were making tactical decisions on the ground.
Sam Alaimo:Yes. And just from the high level how did that leadership impact you in the war and then even later in life?
Bob Graham:Well, during the war, the biggest issue was that you got a president who was this time, Johnson was the president. So you got a school teacher out of Texas, you got a politician out of Boston, I think Boston, the sick state, and you got an accountant out of Ford Motor Company, the Secretary of Defense.
Sam Alaimo:McNamara.
Bob Graham:Yeah. So on an earlier press thing, he got questioned about the bomb shortage in Vietnam. And the reason he got questioned on this is because why are having a bomb shortage in Vietnam? And he he answered that by saying we do not have the bomb shortage. And he was right.
Bob Graham:All the bombs were in Europe. The problem was he didn't have the war in the right place. Right? So from a logistical standpoint, the way you're supposed to work that is you're supposed to have the bombs in a war in the same location.
Sam Alaimo:You would think. Yeah.
Bob Graham:The other thing that they were doing, it's that we found out later, was that in order to try to minimize civilian casualties in North Vietnam, the president and secretary of state Secdev would provide all of the flight information and strike information to the North Vietnamese through the Swiss embassy. And so every time we went in on a strike, we got chopped up because they knew where we're coming, what we're coming with, what our route in was, what our exit route was, what altitudes we'd be at, what airspeeds we'd be at, and everything else.
Sam Alaimo:Unreal.
Bob Graham:So when we showed up, the air defense posture in North Vietnam was according to the intel guys, heavier than it was in Berlin during World War II. And and so what was happening was our losses were unreasonably high. And also, your effectiveness gets decayed because when you're under intense fire, you know, it it's harder to remain focused and track the target and stuff like that. But the big thing was that we probably could have reduced our losses by at least a third. Incredible.
Bob Graham:And so what happens is is that now you go, well, you guys were supposed to have my back. Right? I mean, I've built I mean, it felt like I started the war, you know. You guys started the war, then you decide you're gonna go that your main strategy is interdiction in North Vietnam and then because you have some goofball idea that you're that when you tell the North Vietnamese, it's not like they'll move their people out of the way, it's that they'll move the defensive in the way. And you know, you're that we're supposed to be smarter than that.
Bob Graham:And so what happens is is that you begin to understand that the American people don't like it, they're all back home protesting in in, you know, Berkeley. Your bosses, the president and and the secretary of those guys, they obviously don't like it because they don't care whether you live or die. In fact, Mac Merrim once said when he was questioned about it, he said, you know, we got plenty of fighter pilots. And we thought, well, I thought a very nice thing to say. You know?
Bob Graham:So anyway, so the one thing you learn in Vietnam is nobody's got your back. And if you're there fighting, you're there fighting for each other. You're not fighting for, you know, mom and apple pie and all that kind of stuff. You're fighting for each other. And so when people say, well, why would you keep going back?
Bob Graham:And say, well, you know, I'm gonna go back for the secretary defense. I'm gonna back for my buddy. Yeah. Because while you're sitting on a bench in Phoenix, Arizona, your friends are dying. And so I don't know what the president and all the politicians are thinking about, but I know what I'm thinking about.
Bob Graham:I'm thinking about I need to get in there to help my buddy. So whenever you think about the Vietnam War, all of us had a couple of, you know, I would say two choices. We could either be disgusted by the way the war was being conducted and try to get out of it and avoid it and leave it. Or you can say, well, I don't like those guys and I don't like their way of fighting the war and I don't but they don't call me up and ask me. But I do know that I have close friend dying and by God, I'm not gonna sit here while that's happening, let me get over there and help out.
Bob Graham:And so the motivation is a little different than we've had in the past twenty, twenty five years where you had the American people behind you. So
Sam Alaimo:A lot of that was lessons learned from how horrific it was
Bob Graham:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:In Vietnam, the way they treated American soldiers then. I think they more than made up for it now.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You did. But I was far more comfortable fighting in Asia than I was living in The United States.
Bob Graham:When I was in California, know, they, you know, keep my car and vandalized my car. When the American people decide they hate something, they usually don't blame it on the politicians. Right? But one of the things about their military was that the guys were all walking around with uniforms on. So you get to see them at the the airport, you get to see them at the train station, you get to see them when they're home with their families and taking the kids to school.
Bob Graham:So what you learned was is that the business about, you know, you're not fighting for the American people, they don't want you. You're not fighting for the American politician, they don't want you. So who are you fighting for? Well, it leaves you and your buddies hanging out over there. And you fight probably harder for them than you do for anybody else.
Bob Graham:But that's what gets you going back. Right? It's hey, okay, I got a it's just our small team, a relatively small team, but it's our team. And I'm not gonna sit by while, you know, those guys are in trouble.
Sam Alaimo:There seems to be a parallel between what happened when we left Vietnam and abandoning those allies who who we did care about, like the Montagnards, for example, and what we did a few years ago in Afghanistan. Did you see in your mind, was that a very similar process with the same sorts of mistakes from senior leadership?
Bob Graham:Almost identical. And and so this is really interesting. By the way, the French did exactly the same When the French were being thrown out of Vietnam, Two things that really struck me. When the French wounded were placed on chips and taken back to Marseille, you know, for treatment of French hospitals, As they were unloading the wounded on the French dock, they were stoned by French citizens. And when the French pulled out of Vietnam, they had special forces teams around, spotted around the countryside.
Bob Graham:And they literally cut the wire in communication and left them there.
Sam Alaimo:They left their own French special forces orders in the wild.
Bob Graham:Yeah. And so there was a quiet form of maybe not genocide, but there's a horrendous amount of punishment kinds of, you know, murders and all that kind stuff. So when, you know, so like when I went into Da Nang for the first time, the French pulled out of Da Nang, it used to be a French airbase. They they tore down all of the buildings. They pulled up all of the wiring, underground wire, pulled up all of the plumbing, and they took all of the Vietnamese workers and had worked on the base in terms of maintenance and things like that, they killed them.
Sam Alaimo:The French did.
Bob Graham:Yeah. So when we got there, or when I got there, let's say four or five years after the French pulled out, the only thing that we had that wasn't jungle were concrete pads that have been left there. Everything else and everybody else had been eliminated from the process so you couldn't reuse that facility.
Sam Alaimo:Why would the why would the French kill them, the people who supported them, and abandon their own special forces?
Bob Graham:Because they were abandoning them to the North Vietnamese.
Sam Alaimo:Abandoning their own soldiers to the North Vietnamese?
Bob Graham:Yeah.
Sam Alaimo:Why?
Bob Graham:Because they didn't want to go to the border. We did the same thing. When when when we decided to shut down the the the war in Vietnam, we literally just abandoned the Mount Yards. We But
Sam Alaimo:we didn't abandon Americans. I'm wondering why the French abandoned Americans. I'm sorry, the French abandoned French.
Bob Graham:I was told that there were some covert option teams in the North that we had left there.
Sam Alaimo:That that I could believe, in the North, yes. Yeah. Given Yeah. How little the politicians carry. That's just shocking about the French.
Bob Graham:And then you had the evacuation of Saigon. Right? And the evacuation of Saigon was almost a replica for the evacuation in Afghanistan. And one of the reasons for that, by the way, is that most evacuations come under the auspices of the State Department, not the Defense Department. So if you think about like if you're stationed in Korea with a family or something like that, and they decided things aren't going well and they decide to evacuate, that falls under the purview of the State Department.
Bob Graham:So at best in Afghanistan, they would have had to coordinate defense and state and they would have had to figure out who's gonna give the orders about what he should get out of Baghlan, or should go out of some other airport or whatever. And all of a sudden get very confusing and very political.
Sam Alaimo:So if you could look back at your military career, what would be one or two of the the most memorable, the the the best aspects you can think of?
Bob Graham:Well, you know, so I I enlisted in the Air Force when I was 18. So I was raised in the Air Force. Right? So there's a ton of stuff I really liked about. Most of all, I like the people.
Bob Graham:The difference between working in civilian industry and working in the military is like night and day. You know, when when you're when you're in a fighter squadron, you got 25 guys that are joined at the hip. I mean, they're not friends, they're family. Right? And you never have to worry about if you're in trouble, you're gonna come to your rescue, because they will.
Bob Graham:In in the military, guys will actually sacrifice their lives to save the life of one of their bodies. Right? And that's unheard of in in civilian life. The other thing that's unheard of in civilian life is having a a strong ethical compass. And the reason is is because like in the military, people join the military to make a lot of money.
Bob Graham:They join it for a lot of other things that are important to them, but it ain't the money. In American industry, you price people and their work and their positions involved. So as we're a result, they talk about forming teams, they don't form teams. You can't form teams when you're pricing people in dollars and cents. Right?
Bob Graham:You you form teams when you have a greater cause that you join together to accomplish. So the thing that struck me the most when I left the military is the is the idea that the guy sitting next to me would happily steal from me because he would get more money and I'd get over the course of but the IMI fighter squadron would never even dream of that. That would never even occur to him, right? He thought for me. So the difference in the culture is enormous.
Bob Graham:And so, you know, we're lucky here because, you know, what we've done here is we built a team. And that's largely because that's my military heritage, you know. I can't reward people, I I can't go up to somebody and say, boy, you're the best master sergeant I've ever seen, I'm going to give you an extra $50. No, I can't do that. And so what we're trying to do here is we have a, I think a unique business here.
Bob Graham:All of us here really like coming to work, we really like who we're working with, we motivate people largely through appreciation. You know, where Michelle will do something for me and I'll thank her very much and Maria will do something and you know, when we're together and we're talking about a naughty problem and, you know, which way the markets are going or not going or whatever. You know, we got friends sitting there discussing, saying, what about this? What about that? It's very, very open.
Bob Graham:Everybody hangs together. Everybody likes each other. We care about their families. You know, when I when I had my first large group that I commanded was about 1,200 people. When we get an inspection from a higher headquarters, I'd be taken aside as the commander and I was grilled on every one of the people who worked for me and what their lives were, what their health was, that I know that they were in hospital, how about their children, how are they doing at school, things like that.
Bob Graham:And the grilling blast, I think, three, four hours. Wow. And I was supposed to know all that stuff. The reason is, is because, you know, if you if you have somebody working with you and and their kid's having problems and they're in a hospital, well you know, their focus of attention needs to be on that child. That's not what you think about when you're in civilian life.
Bob Graham:And as a result of that, it's not that they don't have teams, the teams are different. And in the military, because the team is all is your family, when you're with them, you're with your family. Right? So any and the other thing about that, when you're in a family, that builds you that ethical compass that I talk about. You never have to worry about what those guys are committed to.
Bob Graham:You know, it's right out there in front of you. But in civilian industry, people are trained to measure everything in terms of dollars. You know, the people measure them themselves, their self worth in terms of dollars. That's a shame because it implies that you're for sale. All you gotta do is come up with the right price.
Bob Graham:And the idea that people are for sale is really objectionable to me.
Sam Alaimo:It's like kind of like Hannah putting a bounty on you. How much is it worth? Yeah. I think that's a good way to wrap that part up. I usually finish with a quick series of questions.
Bob Graham:Sure.
Sam Alaimo:So what are one to two one, two, three things you do to prime yourself for the workday? You're you're 90 years old, you're still getting after it. So what are you doing? I'm wanting to get ready.
Bob Graham:Sure. I go to work every day because it's not like I have tons of hobbies. I mean, what do I do? Right? So and I'm not gonna sit around all day long watching daytime TV.
Bob Graham:So I really enjoy coming to work. But I I don't really have to prime myself in in the morning because I'm anxious to to to come to work. And I'm anxious to as I said earlier, I'm anxious to, you know, be with all my friends. So my day starts very happy. I I I have a rule that says that when I walk in the door that my job is to make everybody else in the room happy.
Bob Graham:Right? And the reason is if I started out and I'm grumpy and I walk up and I bark at people, they're gonna be grumpy all day long. Yeah. If I do it a lot, then they're gonna stop talking to me. And if they stop talking to me, nobody's gonna tell me when the building's on fire.
Bob Graham:And so if I'm the boss, I'm gonna get fired just because I'm grumpy and nobody wants to talk to me. And we've all been through the business about, if you work for a guy that's grouchy and or has a chip on his shoulder, something like that, nobody wants to be the messenger going into the guy's office because he's gonna bark at you all the time. And so people stopped going into the office. And as a result, the guy finds himself more and more isolated in the office, and nobody wants to talk to him. And he don't know what's going on in his own business, and he fails.
Bob Graham:So I have a rule that says every single day, no matter what, no matter how I feel, it doesn't matter how I feel. What matters is how the people that work with me feel. And it's my job to pull that up and be happy and, you know, put on a happy face, and so I do that.
Sam Alaimo:I love it. Physical training program. So like I said, you're 90. For those who wanna be able to still be robust when they're 90 Right. What do you do to maintain?
Bob Graham:I spend I don't know how many hours. I spend a ton of time working out.
Sam Alaimo:It's good.
Bob Graham:I do. So a typical workout I'm lucky. I got the best personal trainer in the world. So, you know, I I assigned Mike. Mike is in charge of my body.
Bob Graham:And if things aren't working right, that's his fault. And he's gotta keep my strength up. And then when I'm alone, my my typical routine is like if if tomorrow's in off deck, my typical routine is fifteen minutes on the bike, five minutes on their own machine, fifteen on the bike, five on their own machine, fifteen on the bike, five on their own machine. So I get forty five minutes to an hour. And then I try to do that three days a week.
Bob Graham:If I'm really lucky and I can learn how to do it, I go play golf on the weekends and stuff like that. So I think that every single day of your life you should be working. So I give you example, the best instructions I ever got, the woman got me walking and running again. When I left her and for the last time she said, okay, she said, you know, you got a lot of problems and stuff like that, do two things. She said, don't get fat and work out every day.
Bob Graham:I'm okay, can do that. When I got ready to retire from the Air Force, the guy said, don't get fat, work out every day and have at least two drinks every night. He said, alright, I can do that. So I do that.
Sam Alaimo:That's right. That's awesome. Books, what are one, two, three books that have changed your life?
Bob Graham:I don't read books to read books. I decided that the reason what I do is I I wanna find out about something. So I'll just use this as an example. So when I was younger, I I really got interested in Formula One. I know anything about it.
Bob Graham:So I went to the base library and I read every book they had on Formula One. And I got something out of everyone knows books. And so when I was working in Asia, I got and still am really fired up on Asian culture and let's say Japanese culture. And I spoke Japanese, can't read kanji but it doesn't matter. I really like haiku.
Bob Graham:If I want to learn more about Japan, I might read Mushashi or somebody like that.
Sam Alaimo:One of my favorite books of all time.
Bob Graham:Yeah. Right? Because that kind of a culture really turns me on. That level of honesty, dedication and courage really turns me on.
Sam Alaimo:Severe commitment.
Bob Graham:And so what happens is is that when I read a book, I'll I'll read for let's say a half hour, an hour or something like that, And then I stop and I think about what I just read. And I say, well, so what did I learn? I just spent an hour and I've been reading about this, that or the other thing, and what did I learn from it? And so I take that and that's what I take away. And what happens is that I may forget the title of the book, but I won't forget what I learned.
Bob Graham:And so I'm a compulsive reader, but if you said, well, what are the three best books? Oh, you say, well, okay. Well, if I want to learn about the army of World War One, maybe I read Once an Eagle by Meyer or you know, something like that. But that's not really what I take away from a book. So for me, I I try to always have three books that I'm reading.
Bob Graham:And I like to have two where I might get smarter if I'm lucky, and one is just pure entertainment. So like cowboy stories and, you know, James Bond stories or whatever it happens to be. But I wanna have one book I'm reading where I don't have to think about it because I know the good guys are gonna win. I can identify the bad guys with the black hats and stuff like that. And the other two, I'd like to be able to get a little bit smaller.
Bob Graham:So that's why I thought your question was so great, is because I can't tell you the names of the books, but I can tell you what I learned from hundreds of books. I did go through a period where I tried to read all the American classics and also I got into things like philosophy and stuff like that, you know. But that's because I wanted to understand the subject, but I can't tell you who wrote the book.
Sam Alaimo:Probably one of the best answers I've got. I would say this was incredible. We probably touched on 3% of what was in your book. I kinda wanna do a whole episode just on leadership because you already gave me some points to think about. Should we focus on the military as opposed to leadership?
Sam Alaimo:Absolutely, genuinely appreciate your time and your story and your service. How can people get your book if they wanna buy it?
Bob Graham:What's the easiest way for people to follow us and get a and get a book? Amazon. Go on to Amazon. You can get it that way. And then you also have a website, colonelrobertjgraham.com.
Sam Alaimo:Colonel robert j graham Com. Alright. It's it's been a pleasure. Anything else you wanna add before we wrap up?
Bob Graham:No. Yeah. I think it's really been fun.
Sam Alaimo:Okay.
Bob Graham:I think the next time we do, we should serve drinks.
Sam Alaimo:Alright. Let's do it. Alright, sir. Genuinely appreciate it.
Bob Graham:I enjoyed it. Every minute of it was fun. Thank you.
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.