[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Mount Lebanon lost, uh, 50% of its population up there. It was one of the worst hit parts of the entire country. And so those are two of the guys. And the third one, uh, member of the triumvirate is Enver Pasha. And Pasha is just a term of respect in the Ottoman Empire. It's a very high ranking, like, official, basically. Uhm, it's not there. They're not brothers or anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so Enver decides, um, you know, Napoleon tried to invade Russia in the winter. Hitler's going to try and do it in a few decades. Not going to go well for either of those guys, but screw it. Let's go for it. And so he gets his force and he tries to go up into the caucuses and face the Russian army up there, maybe feeling like he's going to catch them off guard. He doesn't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The battle of Sarikamish happens and the Russians wipe him out and push him way back. And so now the Ottoman Empire is really starting to panic, right? If you look at like when the Holocaust really kicked into gear, it wasn't 1939, it wasn't 1940, it wasn't even really in early 1941.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was after the Germans got within seven miles of Moscow and then those Siberian troops showed up and pushed the Germans back and they realized this might not work out the way we thought it was going to. And they said, well, what else can we accomplish then? What else can we accomplish? And, um.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, right across the border is more Armenians. Like that's modern Armenia right across the border today. And so, and these people didn't, you know, they, they, they were separate. Don't get me wrong. They even spoke really different dialects, you know, to a large degree and stuff, but they still knew that those were their Armenian cousins over the border. And they knew it back and forth, kind of like the Kurds in Southern Turkey and Northern Syria today. And so when the Russian army pushes past, uh, past that border into Eastern Turkey,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Ottoman Empire is thinking with, with some justice, I mean with some reason that these people who they had just massacred a few hundred thousand of a few decades back and have been allowing to be abused by the Kurds and everybody else who wants a peace in the decades since,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, that the Russians are going to mobilize these people and put them to work against the Ottoman Empire. And so as the Turks are retreating,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They are just slaughtering and burning and destroying everything they can. Just terrorizing Armenians, murdering the people they see, especially military-age men. You know, most of the military-age men by this point have either been conscripted into the military and then disarmed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Put into a slave labor battalion and by the time you get up to 1915 around the Battle of Gallipoli, uh, they'll be worked to death or simply murdered. The, uh, generally speaking, they would get these men who, the Armenians who showed up for the draft and, uh, tell them you're going to go into the interior. We're going to build trenches, defensive fortifications.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All go and they'd spend all day digging a trench and they'd be like, great job, can you stand on the edge of it please? And then they would murder them all and then fill the trench in. It was a mass grave they'd been digging for themselves the entire time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, as this is going on, you have the other Armenian young men, military age men, uhm, who are like, well,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They either saw that coming or maybe they didn't want to leave their home villages because they were already getting attacked by Kurdish tribes every other day and they said, I can't leave my wife and kids here and my parents here. And so they just refused to go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that meant you had to go into hiding. You had to go somewhere because if the Turks found you, it was a wrap. And so all of these villages that the retreating Ottoman army is coming back through and just murdering and terrorizing, these are pretty much all women, children, and old people. And that's going to be a theme throughout the entire story is the men are already gone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The men have already been killed a long time ago, or they've had to run away across the Russian, uh, you know, across the Russian battle lines.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of them did go join the Russian forces once the, uh, once the genocide kicked in. And so a lot of the stuff that we're going to be, that we're going to be hearing about going forward, this is all stuff that's being done pretty much entirely to groups of women, children, and old people by, by, by military age, you know, fighters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so that's that first step, disarming and then killing the Armenian men who had joined the military happens. And the second thing that the Ottoman Empire needs to do, this is before the real genocide, the mass deportations and killing really start in a systematic way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, they have to lay the groundwork for it, and after disarming the Armenian military people,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They decided they needed to get rid of these two, these two towns that they expected would put up resistance because they had done so before. They did so during the Hamidian massacres in the 1890s. In fact, one of them, Zeytun, which was a, you know, these were,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are mountain men, you know, these are tough people that even other Armenians kind of looked at them like they were a little bit crude and uncivilized. They were like, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Appalachian Scotch Irish kind of like the way we in America look at like those Appalachian folks like, man, they're wild and they're kind of crazy and whatever, but boy like, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You start problems with them, then you're going to have some problems yourself. Like they're not going to, you're very independent minded, uhm, and, and not used to or down with being told what to do by people. And, uh, Zaytoon was up in the, up in the hills.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, they knew that they were not going to just accept this and they had the capacity to actually push back a little bit so that if they started


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They wipe those places out. They go to Van. Von is the second one besides Zytoon. And uhm, you know, they go in and, uh, give them an ultimatum. Tell all your men to come out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, they do this under the, under the guise of like, we're looking for draft dodgers and deserters and so forth. And so they show up and they just round up anybody who's there who's important.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right. Any of the older men who are leaders, if there's any writers or singers or poets, if there's any, anybody who's prominent who could serve in a leadership capacity, you know, as sort of a collecting point for people, a rallying point, they take all them, they torture them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they kill a bunch of them and then they give the rest of the people an opportunity to turn in any of the men who are still around or anything. And instead the people in van barricade themselves into the town.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And say, we're not coming out, give us back our notables, give us back our men, our leaders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so, uh, instead they roll in artillery and they just start shelling the town. And, uhm, intermittently they'll send in Muslim mobs to go in and massacre the people who were in there. And eventually, uh, they, they kill enough people that they're able to get all the women and children out and they send them marching south into the desert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They do something very similar in Zytoon as well. Surround it with artillery, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actually, so yeaah, actually I left out one other thing. This is another thing that they, that they did to compel people is when the people in Van, uh, were holed up and refusing to come out, they said, okay, roger that. And they just started going to all the villages around the town and just massacring all the people there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, once they had pacified the area, they got all the women, children, uh, and old people who were left and they put them into caravans under guard and they sent them marching south into the desert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know, this is northern, northern Syria, southern Turkey. That's what we're talking about here. So like you have like Aleppo and Mosul over in Iraq, that whole area, they just send a marching sound.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then step three came, and this was really the thing that kicked off.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The program now that all of the men with guns are have been neutralized guys in the military. Now that these two potential trouble sites, vans, they tune are taken care of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, they wanted to make sure that all of the Armenian national level leaders were neutralized. And so all of these men who were in Constantinople and Smyrna and some of the other big cities, including Grigoris Balakian, the priest whose book we're reading today, were all arrested and deported down south as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And uhm, they could tell from the beginning that this was something probably a little bit different than what they had seen before.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are the prominent priests, the writers in the big cities. These are the people who everybody in our, everybody, every Armenian in Turkey knew who these people were. They knew them by name for the most part. And so they wanted to take them out immediately and just get them out of circulation at first.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they did it secretly, they did it quietly on April 24th, 1915, which is Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day, cause this is where it really kicks off. Once they did that, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All, most of the pieces were in place to begin the campaign of mass killing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The only things that remained were, uhm, there was this organization called the Special Organization that had actually been set up for a previous war with the Russians.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they used it for a different purpose and augmented it with different people here, uhm.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They freed about some 10-15,000 violent convicts from prisons, including thousands of murderers and rapists, and they freed them and promised them a pardon if they would


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Right with this group called the special organization, which was put under the command of the most fanatical anti-Armenian young Turks and, uh, their job was to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Terrorize the Armenian population in an unrestrained manner. Uhm, you know, we, we...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Think about genocides, you know, again, we're very influenced by the Holocaust and the way we think about these things. Methodical. Exactly. Disciplined. Systematic, you know, it's like, okay, what's your number? You can check that one off and, you know, and, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's not how this was carried out and this, this special organization is, is a good illustration of how that is. I mean, you know, most genocides, when you look at millions of people dying in the civil war in the Congo or in Sudan, you say, well, how's that happening? They don't have gas chambers there. They're not even going around and individually.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shooting every person that's there. You don't have to do that. All you have to do is go to one village.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not just kill them, but do it in the most horrific ways you can possibly imagine and make sure that a few people get away to go war in the next village over. And then those people who are mostly women, children, and old people because the men are all fighting or


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you can't be there when the army shows up, when the militia shows up. They say, we gotta get out of here. So they take their kids and their grandparents and they run off into the bush.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And defenseless women, children and old people die very quickly in the bush. Well, they die very quickly in the desert too. And so this was part of the goal, is to go out there and terrorize brutally.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And make sure that word of that spreads to the other groups so that these people get moving.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Because if we can do that, they'll finish themselves off. We won't have to go around doing, you know, most of the, most of the Ottoman soldiers, they're off at the front. You know, this is being carried out by older gendarme, uh, you know, police, police soldiers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Ordinary men type people, right? Like guys like that. As well as by, uh, local villagers and Kurdish tribes that they couldn't have conscripted if they wanted to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Once everything else was in place, uh, and this kind of happened systematically, I guess over the, over the period of time that the genocide was taking place, but the central government worked to identify


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Governors and mayors of local areas that might be reluctant to do what they needed to do. And when they were identified, they were taken out. Some of them were thrown in jail and some of them were even killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that was an example, actually. That was one where the guy who, the valley, the governor of that province,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was, uh, trying to almost be a Oscar Schindler type. He got together a bunch of prominent Turks in the area, had them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so that guy was just fired and sent off to some random spot in the empire. And, uh, his, his.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Successor came in and immediately went to work, searched all the Armenian homes for weapons, took them all away right down to all their kitchen knives. The local jails there were emptied. All the convicts were turned into paramilitaries. And uhm, once everything was in place, they got to work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And total license and in fact encourage them to be as brutal as possible because that's part of the plan, you know, to drive these people out into the desert through, through brutality.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you ever watch a movie about one or read a decent book written about a genocide, they'll usually find some dramatic persona to focus on so that they have some kind of drama with it, some story line or art to follow because when you get down to it,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What it comes down to is we went to this village, we killed all the men, we raped all the women, we robbed all their stuff, took their children as slaves and then we left. And then we went to the next village and we raped all the women, we killed all the men, we took the children as slaves, robbed all their stuff and we left. And it's that a hundred times, a thousand times.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you can't tell a holocaust story or write a holocaust book that's just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They marched 10,000 people to the edge of the mass graves, they shot them naked and they threw them in. And they took these, it's just, it gets repetitive in the most grotesque way imaginable, and that's what a genocide is. The depravity of it is easy to focus on, but in many ways the, especially after it's been going on for months or years,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and the people themselves, the killers themselves have been almost brutalized psychologically and spiritually by what they're doing and it becomes routine for them. So that things that...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some individuals may have hesitated to do it first or not. Things that elicit any kind of hesitation anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A thing that is, I guess you could maybe only compare it to what happened in Rwanda.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In, in so far as the extent to which the general population was mobilized to participate. You know, uhm, something like, again, like with the Germans, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, this was something, Ernst Younger during the Second World War was stationed in Paris. He was sort of a cultural figure at that point, so he was kind of there as like a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Technically he was some kind of a minister of this or that, but I can't remember, but really he was there as like a cultural figure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he's writing letters to people trying to figure out, like, I keep hearing about all these things that are going on out in Poland and out in the East. Like, what's going on out in the East? Like, I hear about bad things going on out in the East. This is Ernst Younger. I mean, this is a guy that even the Nazis, like, thought this guy was great.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there was, there was possibility that he was, uh, in on one of the, uh, failed assassination attempts. Maybe he knew about it at least, but Hitler himself even said nobody touches Ernst Younger, right? This is the guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, and so even him, a guy in that position, serving as a minister in Paris at the time, he's like, trying to find out what's going on in the East.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The way that that was conducted, and you know, it gets overplayed a little bit, how secret it was and everything. It did take a large number of people, including the Wehrmacht, to pull off some of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But relatively speaking, this was something that was able to be kept from the German people and to be localized to the SS and like, you know, the people who were actually handling it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A great book. I know I've brought it up a few times in other podcasts that, um, by Philip Gorevich about the Rwandan genocide. We wish to inform you that tomorrow will be killed with our families. And he has a quote in there when he's talking about what genocide is in a stick to the society that's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That stuck with me as I was reading all the material about the Armenian genocide and the way that it's specific way that it was handled. One of the things that happened was these people who would be deported down south. When I say that, what I'm talking about is, you know, all the men would be killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the women, children, and old people who were left would be put into a caravan. They'd be sent down to march in the Syrian desert on a march that would take about two months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when they got to the end, it was just, there was a death camp there where they would, anybody who survived two months with, you know, no food because it would all be taken from them right away. Um, you know, if they couldn't scrounge bugs out of the desert or eat dead bodies or whatever they had to do, they'd die of starvation. If they couldn't, um, if you weren't a woman who could, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, use your body or whatever to get a Turkish soldier to give you a drink of water or do whatever you had to do, then you died on the way and the roads were littered with bodies and sometimes they would just massacre all of you along the way, but the ones who got to the end.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Would get to these death camps in the Syrian desert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And these, uh, these routes, you know, it doesn't take two months to walk directly in a straight line from one place to their end state, end place in the Syrian desert. They would go on these winding routes sometimes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it wasn't just to drag it out so that people would die of exposure and starvation. They would actually bring them through different Muslim villages, different territories of Kurdish and Circassian tribes. And when they would come through a given area,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just like we saw here, people would be waiting for them with weapons.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they would attack and they would rape and they would take the women that they liked away as sex slaves. They would take the children away as slaves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And very often the Turkish soldiers, this is actually what would happen much of the time, is they would sort of organize it a little bit. Be like, well, here's a really, really pretty Armenian. All of you want her as a sex slave. Well, let's hold an auction. And then the Turkish soldiers get paid. Oh, well, you know, we're going to get a lot of the most valuable things that they have. And so the Turkish soldiers were getting paid.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was a way of sort of, it was a very crude and brutal form of wealth redistribution in a way. Everything that these Armenians had, they were being walked around to these different villages and territories so that each of the people in those places got their cut.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there would be almost, you read accounts where it's almost like there's a sense of expectancy, almost like a party atmosphere when people know another caravan is coming through. What are we going to get this time? And, um, all of these, these Kurdish tribes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of these Islamic villages, uhm, there were Armenian women and children, uh, tons of them in a lot of these places. A lot of them would just be taken sometimes as slaves and when the novelty wore off after a few weeks or a few months, they would just be murdered or turned away out in the desert to go, to go wander and die.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then the other thing that's happening when they're doing that is that the state is


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Take, well they're taking the opposite approach that the Nazis took, right? Which is that they are making all of these people complicit in this atrocity that the state is carrying out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It really does bind them together in the same kind of way that, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, you know, like in a mafia movie where you do a hit and all three of us who did it have to fire a shot to the body because we're all in this together now. And it's a...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, this shared knowledge that we have all participated in this tremendous crime, that even going forward that can bind people together in a certain way, especially when we've all benefited from it, we've taken slaves from it, we've robbed, and maybe the things in our house right now, the furniture in our house right now,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Maybe, uh, were things that we, that we took from these people when we killed them. And uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's how it went. Over and over and over and over again. You know, and the thing that always, the thing that is just the most unbearable to me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is imagining, like just, I've mentioned it a few times already, but it's always the thing I can't get out of my head about this, is that these were all women, children and old people. Men were gone already.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And just imagining like your mother, or your wife, or your sisters, or your kids.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being marched along out into the desert by these people. Set upon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, not blown up by a predator drone, as bad as that is. They are being hacked down with machetes and axes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In, in massacres that would take hours and hours and hours.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It takes a long time. Some of these, they're killing six, seven, eight thousand people at a time in a ravine by hand. And that takes time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so it's just screaming and the smell of feces and blood and people, you know, you have just body parts hacked up over here and over there, there's just a big rape orgy. And it's all right next to each other while over here they're searching your mother's pockets for any gold coins she might have. And it's, and it's that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For as far as you can see, there are times where they did, you know, one instance where they did 6,400 people was, uh, was the, uh, consensus estimate on it. And it was the entire ravine. I mean, you come over this ridge and it's just this entire ravine, hundreds of yards, and it is just bodies. And they're not dead of, you know, this, this place was, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are just one big mass of gashes and mutilation and hacked off limbs and women with their heads cut off who are laying there with their dresses thrown up over their head and their legs spread with their heads cut off. I mean, this is the, these are the scenes that you see over and over and over and over and over to the point where


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, you read a book like the 30 year genocide about it where he really does take the time to get into each of the massacres and it becomes almost sickeningly, nauseatingly boring in a way. And uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just, it's hard to imagine when you make it personal like that. You know, trying to imagine the helplessness that you would feel, uh, knowing that this had happened to people that you cared about or being one of those people. It would just, it's, it's, it's hard to imagine.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the things that would happen on the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lot of the American consulate people and other diplomats and missionaries who were there, including by the way, this is really worth mentioning that I haven't brought up yet, a lot of the people, diplomats who have reported


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] These are German diplomats, Austrian diplomats, these are people who are allied to the Ottoman Empire in this war who are writing back about a lot of these things.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's one memoir that was written about it by a guy named Rafael de Nogales who was a Venezuelan mercenary who was actually serving as a Turk, eh, as a, as a mercenary officer as a major in the Turkish military. And he wrote a lot about it as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and one of the things that you hear over and over again is how by the time you're a week out of the city, all these people are naked. All their clothes have been taken. So they're walking in July or August maybe in the Syrian desert.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] 12 hours a day, uhm, or more, you know, and they're just blistered up from the sun. They don't have any food. They don't have any water. Anything they can scrounge from the landscape or bag off some, or prostitute from some Turkish soldier or something. That's all they got.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As ever, they didn't have tents most of the time. Those would have all been taken from them. They didn't have any kind of shelter. So they're just sitting out in the weather. And if there was a village nearby or a tribe nearby.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or sometimes just the soldiers themselves. This was their time to blow off a little bit of steam. And so they would show up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they would just be walking through the encampments of all of these women and children and elderly people who, who stopped and they would just take their pick for rape. They would take slaves. Sometimes they would just torture, um, people for, for entertainment. There are stories of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Pretty Armenian women being stripped naked and forced to dance for Turkish soldiers and when they weren't pleased with their performance.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They just doused them in kerosene and watched them burn to death for their entertainment.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There's story after story after story after story like this. And not a bunch of people from one caravan we're talking from.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All over the country. Throughout the entire period of this going on. There's something...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there's, maybe you can get people to go put a bullet in somebody's head for their country. You can maybe play, uh, play up that angle of it to get them to do something like that. You've got to really engender a level of extraordinary hatred. Uhm, I think too, too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get people to do some of the things that were being done here. Um, especially the regular people that doesn't go so much for the special organization. You know, I think, uh, I think maybe in, in one of the unraveling episodes we did, I, I asked a question, like if you had a bar in town in any city in America,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Where everybody knew that's the bar, where in there there's this room and there's a person in there. And you can just do whatever you want to them. That's the gimmick at the bar.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like I might not go there, you guys might not go there, but I don't think it would be empty. I think it would rarely be empty.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And when you're talking about, okay, what if you had that in a prison?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That would be a lively joint. I mean, that's what you had going on here. You had these caravans of women, children and old people being marched down into the desert very often.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By guards who were from this special organization, guys who were...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Convicted murderers and rapists who had been given complete and total license from their government to do whatever they want. And now you stop at nighttime and you're bored. You've been on the road for a week riding in the hot sun on your horse, guarding these people. And what are you, how are you going to spend your evening?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the way a lot of them spent it was just, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Again, you just, it's one of those things that like, reading a book about it or anything, it just, you really can't do justice until you really tr- just close your eyes and try to put yourself in the position of these people. In the position of a mother who's already watched two of her children die of exposure.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, and then has her baby grabbed by a leg and thrown in a river and then she's gang raped. And she's going to be gang raped again and again and again for the next two months as she walks, you know, this road.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Or until she can't take it anymore and commit suicide, basically. Uhm, that was...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The situation of hundreds of thousands of people being marched down into the desert like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A very strange demographic dynamic that happened in Turkey in the years afterwards. There was actually a book that came out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I remember it was in the 2000s or the 90s when it actually came out. It must have been the 2000s. It was written by a Turkish woman living in Istanbul now. Her grandmother pulled her aside when she was very old and told her her life story.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it turned out her grandmother was an Armenian and she had been taken as a small girl away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, Armenian, uh, one of the Turkish women who were heading back to Constantinople with like a, with a stable of six, seven, eight little Armenian girls. And they were taking them back to be their house servants. And that's how her grandmother was taken. She was taken back into a house that was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, she ended up in a place that was pretty civilized. They pretty much just raised her. You know, she was kind of a servant, but they didn't abuse her or anything, and so she was raised in this house and became Turkish. She remembered who she was, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, everybody thought she was a Turk. Her granddaughter thought she was a Turk. And so, after she told her granddaughter her life story, she wrote the, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She wrote the, she wrote the book and it was kind of a sensation in Turkey because to this day, uh, you know, Turkey still denies the genocide. And so, I mean, it's something that they.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, we'll talk about that in a little bit, but that aspect of it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The taking of children and women, the mass enslavement of these people was a huge section. It's almost, gosh man, you would almost think that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The people who have killed your husband, your parents, your kids, your entire community, your entire people. And now they're going to take you as a slave. Most of, most often when you're talking about the women, they're being taken away as sex slaves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And very often they're being taken away not by, not that this would make it I guess any better, but they're not being taken away by some Turkish notable to go be in his harem in Constantinople. They're being taken away by some


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh gosh, I mean it's hard to really say, but you're talking tens of thousands at least of Armenian women and children taken away this way. Maybe a hundred, maybe over a hundred thousand. The total number of deaths between one and 1.5 million.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but the number of people who were taken away as slaves and just kind of melted into the population or were murdered later, that's what happened to a lot of these people. It was, it was in the tens, at least the tens of thousands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, sex slavery in the Ottoman Empire, this isn't something that just sort of came out of nowhere because of the chaos that was going on. There was actually, just last night as I was brushing up on some of this, I came across a New York Times article written in 1886 by a journalist who managed to, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had a, uh, he had a guide there in Constantinople that was helping him and they dressed him up in a beard and said he looked like, uh, you know, he was from the area and he had some money and they got him into some of these places where they were selling women and this was in 1886. None of this was going on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they would, uh, they were mostly, so there's always Christian women usually. You're not, you can't enslave Muslims. Sometimes, you know, people do what they do. But generally speaking, that's what would happen. And so it would be Circassians and Slavs and Armenians. And, uh, and sometimes Assyrians and Greeks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so this was something that, uh, you know, the, the, the Sultan himself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The way the Sultan reproduced was he had a harem of hundreds and hundreds of women and all of them were slaves taken from Christian lands and they would be kept in a cell in like a very specific part of the palace and they would be guarded by black, uh, like black African eunuchs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so let me just again give you some idea of like the society we're talking about here. The king has hundreds of slave women.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, this is a, it's a different, we're not talking about, you know, the, uh, Bundestag or the English parliament or something. It's just a different, different time and a different place. I mean, we do have to remember that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, uhm, I just mentioned that New York Times article in 1886 that only 21 years before was when we got rid of, you know, chattel slavery in the United States. So it was a different time and there were a lot of things going on back then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But there's a, there's a little bit of exotic strangeness to something like that that I think kind of shocks us a little bit. And this idea that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, you could take, especially non-Islamic women as spoils of war into sex slavery. We saw that reignite when ISIS, you know, rampaged through everywhere. They were taking the Yazidis and everybody else that they found who wasn't Muslim as sex slaves.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Especially when you get out into the countryside where things don't change much very rapidly. Uhm, this was something that was not a huge diversion from what was normal for people. And so once there was the opportunity, it just happened at scale.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, Derzor was one of the main... Gosh, what do you even call a place like that?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You want to call it a death camp, but that sort of makes you think of the Nazi example where this is like a factory of death and it wasn't, it wasn't that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You had these, these caravans that were being wound through the desert to be robbed and raped and killed and enslaved as they went and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just eyewitness report after eyewitness report describes the road on the way down is just littered with corpses and body parts everywhere you go. Anytime there's a hill, you look over the other side of it off the road and it's just filled with bodies back there. The rivers are choked with bodies and body parts, but some of the people survived.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some of the people just figured it out. You just said people who were alive started to eat the flesh of the dead. People who haven't had anything to eat for a month will, uh, will do, you lose your mind when you start to, when you start to starve and die of thirst and exposure. And some people made it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hell was waiting for them. You know, the place that they got to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's basically big, open-air cages that they just pen people up in.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And there was no food, and there was no water, and there was no medicine. And they just stayed in there and they died.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And now, you know, this wasn't Auschwitz with, you know, double razor wire fences, you know, multiple layers deep. People could kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Get there and you know, if you had an ability to do, if you knew somebody who maybe came down there to give you a blanket or some food, you might live a little bit longer than everybody else, but people were dying by the 500, the thousands, the 2000s a day, just dying of disease and exposure and hunger and thirst and periodically massacre.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, sometimes when another caravan would get there and there just simply wasn't any room for anyone else, they would either take that caravan or most often they would take people who were already


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Degraded near the point of death and they would be like, well, we're moving you to the next location. You're going south again, everybody back on the road and there was nothing south. They just marched them out there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] People who were already right on the point of death, they would march them further into the Syrian desert and they would just wander out there and die or be massacred.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, the scenes in Darezor that are described are really something beyond. I mean, it's a Hieronymus Bosch painting, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is, is, is that pretty close? There are Armenians in other countries, obviously. So the people survived, but there are no Armenians in Turkey today.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And in fact, Christians in general, and again, I don't mean to dilute the Armenian experience here, but it is worth mentioning that this was something the Turks were attacking Christians across the empire at this period. They killed 300,000 Assyrian Christians.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They killed countless Lebanese Christians, and after the war when Ataturk came back and they were fighting in the West against the Greeks, he killed, and then he killed 300,000 Greeks, Greek Christians, and then expelled another million to a million and a half.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, there were three or four million Armenians in Turkey proper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Before the war started and when, when it was all over by 1917, really when, when the genocide kind of died down, maybe tens of thousands crawled out of their hiding places. Went from three or four million to maybe a few tens of thousands.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you have to call it, in a way, successful because...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From one standpoint, Turkey got what it wanted. There are no more Christians or Armenians in our country. And from another angle, they didn't really pay for it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Some individuals did and we'll get, we'll get to that, but uhm, you know, after the, one of the, probably the great tragedy of the 20th century, here's another one of its consequences was the Russian revolution in 1917.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Bolshevik, the communists take over Russia in 1917 and pull them out of the war. And so the Armenians who have been hiding behind Russian lines.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's where a lot of the Armenians in eastern Anatolia retreated, just get behind the Russian army here. The Russian army packed up and left. They're out of the war. And so you have all of these Armenians now right up into the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The, the, what we consider today Armenia proper, the Republic of Armenia is wide open.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It is wide open over there and there is still a Turkish army in the field that is, uh, fully prepared to finish the job.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they are driving up into Armenia. They're driving toward the capital of Armenia, Yerevan. Talking about a Turkish army.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tens of thousands strong, a fully equipped military force, World War I era military force, and you've got about 1200 Armenian soldiers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you've got a bunch of refugees and older men and everything else who are given guns, clubs, anything that they could find, which is not much. And they're told, uh, do we flee up into Georgia, up further into the Soviet Union, depending on how bad this gets or, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are we gonna, are we gonna make a stand here? And that's what they did. Uhm, there were people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In Yerevan, lots and lots of refugees, so it was an overcrowded place. They had a lot of people, but they only again had about 1200 trained soldiers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Serving as like signal operators with flags and things up on, you know, up on towers. Everybody was participating here and the Turkish army pushed up.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Within, you know, just about within visual range, just over the horizon of the capital of Armenia. And they got to a place, there were three


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Areas where they fought, but the main one that, you know, people remember today, there's a great big monument there and a great Armenian history museum called Sardarabad. And uhm, thankfully this French guy,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's not a, it's not a very well-known battle if you look in general histories. Uh, they'll talk, they'll all talk about it, but they won't get much into the details. Thankfully there was this French guy back in the 70s, this historian who went back.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, he really gets down to like the order of battle on both sides and everything else. And I mean, you're really talking about a fully equipped Turkish army against a ragtag group of refugees led by a few.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I'm a colonel in the Soviet army now, I guess. Do I go back to Moscow or wherever they're calling us or am I going to stay here and fight? And so some of them stayed and helped lead the effort as well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this ragtag group put a halt at Sardar Abat to the Turkish advance. And really, I mean, there was a historian, American historian, not, not Armenian, but just a historian of the Ottoman empire who said that if they had lost that battle, then the word Armenia today would just be a curious historical footnote.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, we'd probably still have Armenians, obviously, just like we had Jews for a long period of time when there was no such thing as Israel, but that's what we would be talking about.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, it didn't preserve Armenian independence at the time. They tried, you know, one of the things that happened was in that brief period after they did put a stop to them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, which were all right there clumped together. None of them wanted to be part of the Soviet Union at the time, and they didn't want to be part of the Ottoman Empire either. So they formed a little alliance to try to defend themselves, but as soon as things got, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Little bit tricky. Georgia was pretty quick to be like, you know what, we're gonna go with the Soviet Union. And Azerbaijan was very quick to be like, you know what, we're Muslims too, and they kind of stabbed the Armenians in the back and attacked them from behind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so the Armenians then at that point had to cut a deal with the Soviet Union. And so Armenia became a Soviet Socialist Republic as well. And so out of the, out of the frying pan and into the fire there, you know.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Although, I mean, you know, the thing is, one of the things that did happen in Armenia, obviously, you know, they were under the same Soviet tyranny as everybody else to some degree, but they did understand the Soviets even. As fanatical as they were, they understood to a certain degree that these people


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, we're not going to give up their national or religious identity.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No matter what, we'd have to finish the job that the Turks started if we were going to accomplish that. And so they really didn't push that as hard as they did in some other places, which is why, you know, to this, the Armenian church was able to survive. And then to this day, once they achieved their independence finally in, uh, you know, when the Soviet Union fell, everything was in place there. And, uh, you know, say what you want, uh, um, about,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The downsides of, I don't know what you would call it, of nationalism or just sort of that, you know, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Armenians, one of the things that you find about them, and it's something I love about Armenians, really like any Mediterranean peoples, is Armenians love being Armenian.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it makes them, it makes them so much fun, you know, it just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To me, like Armenians in America, they're almost a perfect immigrant group in a sense, where they...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Are, they're, they're American, 100%. You know, you can't look at the Kardashians and be like, those aren't Americans. Those are Americans as much as George Washington's an American. You know, it's just, they, they fully adopt and like they're down, they join the military, they do everything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And fully assimilate and integrate and yet they love Armenia and they love the Armenian church and they love their people and their history and there's no tension there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, they, they're, they can be fully patriotic Americans or in France. There's a lot of Armenians in France, for example, and they never have lost that connection.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] with, uh, with their own history and, um, in their own traditions. And I think they, they really walked that line really well.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is you have all of the, you know, by the time, by the end of the war, everybody knows what was going on in Turkey. So you had the British and the Americans and everybody else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who are looking at the Ottoman Empire, or now it's just the Republic of Turkey, right? The war in Turkey went on until 1924.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Brit- the British defeated the Ottoman Empire, they occupied Constantinople, but there was still a large military force.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, commanded by, uh, a great man. I mean, there's no other way to put it. He, you know, he was a, he was a hard man. He did a lot of bad things in the field and did what he had to do for his country, I suppose is one way to look at it. But Kemal Ataturk, the father of the Turks.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Father of the modern Turkish Republic, he was in command. He was in, he was, he was a hero at Gallipoli. The man knew how to fight, knew how to command, very smart, very tough, and he was still out there. And so he moved the capital from Constantinople, where the British had established themselves, out to Ankara, where it is now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he kept fighting, you know, he, uhm, at first was pushing up into the caucuses to, you know, the idea that if you get past Armenia and Georgia, and you keep going northeast there,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's just Turkic peoples, like all the way over to Western China at that point. And so there was this like pan-Turkish idea that maybe, okay, we lost all of North Africa and whatever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But maybe, you know, the Arabs were always kind of trouble anyway, why were we doing that? Maybe this is the empire, this pan-Turkish empire. The Armenians at Sardarabad put a stop to that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then the Soviet Union established itself, so that wasn't going to work out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so they retreated back and eventually they went back and pushed everybody else out of their country and, uhm, established the modern republic of Turkey.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kemal Ataturk was, he was a young Turk, he was a member of the Young Turks. Uhm, he had broken with the Triumvirate a little bit, uh, over, over, you know, military reasons over the years, but he was still part of these people and a lot of the Young Turks and even the Committee of Union and Progress, the, the core group that was really carrying all this out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were still there, they were still in the government, you know? There was no real...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We had denazification after the second world war and there was really not a whole lot of that going on. Some of the very, very main people, you know, they fled the, they, uh, fled the country and so this wasn't carried out, but they were tried and absentious. Some of them were sentenced to death. Some of the main architects, um,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But after a little while, everybody realized that Turkey is gonna be kind of strategically important now that we have this huge threat of the Soviet Union looming up here. And so, like it or not, we're gonna have to kind of...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Find a way to like bring Turkey back into the fold. I mean, Turkey was in NATO by the 1950s and it was considered a strategic necessity to just kind of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Forget about all this. You get all the way up to the 1980s. And there was a uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] An American scholar named Susan Blair who found a bunch of the American Consulate documents.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That people hadn't, people didn't even know about these yet. You know, because nobody was studying this. It was not something that people really wanted to look into. Because Turkey, we have nuclear weapons in Turkey. It's a supremely important ally in the Cold War. Nobody wants to look at this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And so in the 1980s, Susan Blair finds all these documents by people like Leslie Davis describing everything that they've seen out there. And she says, well, this is incredible. Writes it up as a book, tries to get it published. She can't get it published anywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] She's told by major publishers that this is too controversial. We can't touch this. And the thing is, those people were right. Because she finally found a publisher.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that publisher started getting bomb threats. They started getting death threats. She and her family had to go into hiding for a while because, uh, the Turkish government, they don't play around. Like, uhm, have you seen that movie The Promise?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No. It's a great movie. It's about the Armenian genocide and it's a really, really good movie. But you wouldn't know that. Maybe this has changed a little bit now. You wouldn't know that by going on like Rotten Tomatoes.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The first night, er, first day that that thing was released, there were like 5,000, like, one star, terrible, horrible, worst movie ever reviews.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And like all of them had kind of broken English and like whatever else. I mean, you see that and then immediately afterwards, literally like the next year, there was another Armenian genocide movie that was put out that was sponsored by the Turkish government. And it was just, it's almost worth watching for just the.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Nazis and the Holocaust where all of the SS officers and Heinrich Himmler and everybody else are just portrayed as like, they're just really trying to help all these Jews, but like the Jews, they just, they ran off out there into Poland and something happened to them. And I don't, I mean, it's that bad. You know, it's really that bad. And it is like a state effort ever since then.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, it was happening at the time they were, they, a lot of this was carried out with burn after reading telegrams and things like that. Some of them were preserved, but uhm, throughout,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The 20th century, all the way up to the present day, there's Turks still going through all the archives and going through, be like, yeah, shred that, shred that. They've been doing it for centuries. And it's because they, I mean, look, um, this is, this is maybe one of the darker things to point out about it is they know, they know that that can work.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, people forget things. People forget everything. It doesn't matter what you did or how bad it was or how many people were affected. They have this idea that if you just keep denying it,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Keep calling everybody a liar. Keep, just do whatever you gotta do. Give it a century. All we have to do is survive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, if you, if you look like this was something that was really prominent at the time, right? You re- you re- all the re- the writings of Lenin, for example.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And Trotsky and Stalin, you know, all the Bolsheviks and you see the same strain in Hitler where they all understood that we're about to do something that is horrific and barbaric and that is going to be condemned by everyone.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It passed very quickly. Like I said, Hitler was partly inspired by, you know, the, the Armenian example specifically because even by then, just 30 years later, 25 years later at that point, when I got started, even by then he could say, and make a good point with it, who today remembers the Armenians.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is 25 years after, uh, his own country was allied.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] To the Ottoman Empire as it executed one of the most thorough and complete genocides in history.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's exactly what it was, and it was done by a bunch of Armenians without any state support. You know, if you think about...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Everybody looks, looks at like what the Mossad did, the Israelis did after the second world war. They hunted down a thousand, fifteen hundred Nazi officers, SS officers around the world. Uhm, and that's, you know, that's, that's good for them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Armenians, you had a group of people who were doing this completely independently without any state support, this group of hardcore militants who hunted these people down all around the world and essentially took out the entire Ottoman government that was running this during, during the period, all the high ranking people. There is one other thing I want to close with. I kind of forgot about earlier.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Cause there is, on the whole question of turkish denialism.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is a quote from a letter written by the leader of the special organization, a guy named Bahidin Shakir.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This was a letter that was found fairly, uh, fairly recently, last few decades.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The committee, which cannot forget the country's bitter and unhappy history and whose cup runneth over with unrelenting desire for revenge, has decided to annihilate all Armenians living within Turkey, not to allow a single one to remain, and has given the government broad authority in this regard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On the question of how this killing and massacring will be carried out, the central government will give the necessary instructions to the provincial governors and army commanders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] All of the Unionist regional representatives would concern themselves with following up on the matter in all of the places where they were found and would ensure that not a single Armenian would receive protection or assistance. Not a lot of room for doubt there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, the best thing about the go energy drinks is I was one of those douchebags. I was pounding like 300 milligrams of caffeine. I came in here one time with one of those things and Chuck was like, what are you drinking?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What are you doing to yourself? And so I switched over a while back and here's where I was worried. Like I always thought that I needed a huge amount of caffeine. I'd drink one of those 300 milligram things and after like an hour I was just dead again. I was like, I guess I need 600 milligrams.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Could you imagine Jaco doing some basic ass read for like a mattress company? Oh my god. It would be in my nightmares.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] If you start wanting to differentiate it between a novella and a novel, it gets very hairy sometimes. Maybe let's say a hundred pages. I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty suggestive.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Howly as we say in Hawaii. Which, which, you know, little digression here. People say howly is a derogatory word, but it all depends on how you use it. It can go, it can go either way. And it can be, it can be referred to as an attitude. Like I don't care what your skin color is. It can be used in a derogatory way.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Food, food is, food is the ultimate, you know, bridge builder and I knew once you were like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I saw the last girl jump and miss it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was born a poor black child. I actually, uh, uh, believe it or not, I was born and reared in the panhandle of Texas between Memphis and Turkey, Texas in Hall County. There was a little spot of dirt and that's where I was born.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was the first Nelson male to graduate from high school. So I went to college, I thought I was a flippin' genius. I mean, a kid must know everything, right? So uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They were children of sharecroppers and sharecroppers themselves. We didn't own anything, but uhm,


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[Assistant] At five, six, seven and eight, nine years old, every fall. Our school started early, like in August, let out for a month in September, October, whenever the cotton was ready to harvest. And of course, we needed all the family to pick the cotton because there just wasn't enough labor. And, uh, so dragging a cotton sack was, uh, and of course the rate going wages those days.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was, when you paid somebody, and that wasn't often, was a, what, a dollar or a hundred, a penny, a pound, for picking cotton, and, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My dad picked a thousand pounds one day, a long day. Most I ever got was like 200, but I was a little guy. So that's my roots. And, uh, we moved to Oregon when I was in grade school and, and, uh, it was a great relief getting away from that damn cotton.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, sounds like a lot of Horatio Alger stories and my kids yawn and roll their eyes. They've heard them. But, uh, I'm really proud of my roots and it's interesting. My goal was to be a high school football coach. First of all, I thought I was going to be a professional athlete. I was sure I was going to be in the NFL as a middle linebacker.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I thought, you know, I had a younger brother in the army, in Vietnam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this is 1966, when I graduated. And, uh, you were after John. I'm surprised by the way you're here. I was very surprised to hear that Tom Richards finished high school, and, and John Farr. That's breaking news on the same program. You did it, Jocko. But, uh, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I got a dream job. I thought if I don't, if I don't, I'll do the tryout in San Diego. I would do the tryout if, if,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't get a real job that I really, first class job. I wanted a first assistant job in a high school and a large high school in Oregon. And I got that job, so I didn't go to camp.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But then I had the guilt setting in all year long and my brother's still serving and he's going for another tour in Vietnam so I resigned my, I was to be the head football coach of Springfield High School the following fall and it was like April, May and I just, I couldn't do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Resigned that job, I went to my department head, I taught boys P.E. and chemistry in high school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My chemistry department head was a guy named John Vogt and John was a naval aviator.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He says, what are you going to do? And I says, I think I'll probably join the Marine Corps, I don't know. He says, no, don't do that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go fly. So Sandpoint Naval Air Station was open in those days up in Seattle, Washington. He says come with me to reserve weekend and, and I went flying with him.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we hung out in the Oak Club and I was on the stage dancing with some Polynesian ladies and I thought, I could do this. I could do this job.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So, I, I took the test and did the interview and, and I, I was in class 32-68, in the fall of 68, in Pensacola office, at an AOC class, and John, you were 38. I was 38-68. He was six weeks later.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, we met in Vietnam. Oh, okay, you didn't meet until Vietnam. He was always far enough behind me that I didn't really get to know him. Only three months. But, you know, as you go through, it's pretty intensive training. Right.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not a big socializer, nor was John, I don't think, and we worked pretty hard, and so I really got to know John in Vietnam, uh, in a fract.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I think we looked in the logbook today, my logbook's somewhere in the bottom of storage in Sanger, California, but I think we flew together probably a couple dozen times. Oh yeaah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he was my, as we called it today, we called it a Clarence Pumpkin. I'll quote about it. He was my Clarence Pumpkin. So, and a damn good man by the way. I don't want to make him feel too good about himself today, but he, you know, it's critical. Every job in a cockpit is a critical thing, combat or not. But, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Getting where you're going and all systems being switches in the right position. And when you roll in and put me hot, that means we know what we're going to do with the intervalometer, whether we're going to fire a pair or two pair.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Keeping an eye on things as a co-pilot besides operating the miniguns or whatever else he does. So John was excellent and then, and having a co-pilot that knows what he's doing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More than once you have to fly with guys, and you probably have too, John. You look over and say, don't touch a dang thing. Just don't touch anything. I'll let you know when I want you to do something. But John wasn't that kind of guy. He was, uh, he was, uh, he was in the mode. He was a good guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I was in flight school and my, I had my flight instructor, my primary flight instructor was a guy named, I'll say his name, Johnny Hankel. Johnny's retired in Florida. I just called him the other day to thank him. I haven't talked to him since 1969. And so I, on the Seawolf mail list that you get comes in with addresses, numbers.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A lady answers the phone, uh, who may have said I was calling? I said tell him, Carl Nelson's calling, like he knows, like he remembers 42 years ago, and so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] More than that, 52 years ago, I'm sorry. So he comes on the phone, cautiously, like, I'm not buying anything, type of a voice. Hello?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Johnny Hancock says, who's calling? He didn't admit to anything. Well, like I said, hey.


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[Assistant] I'm a flight student of yours from February of 1969. Softly Field, T-34. And he says, Jesus Christ. Really? And I said, I'm sure you remember me. And he said, actually I don't. I said, I know you don't. But here's what he did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I, I was getting ready to solo and I thought I was going to fly just because I joined, I left my teaching and coaching job. I went into the military because I wanted to serve in Vietnam where my brother was serving. And he was serving, actually,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back up the clock. I, when I got into Officer Candidate School, he was serving.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anyway, I was in a hurry to get there. I wasn't trying to get even. That wasn't my goal. I just wanted to serve, and I wanted to get to Vietnam, and I thought just was the only way to get there. I knew I couldn't do it in the transport. I didn't want to fly mail to Saigon. Oh, God bless the mail guys, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought, oh my god, and then Nixon's trying to stop the war. Good lord, that guy's trying to ruin my plan. So I got, I was pretty depressed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, in flight training, they try to keep it moving through quickly. They're on a schedule to get students through the syllabus every flight from primary to advanced. And after advanced,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, after primary, you go to, you go to Meridian, Mississippi to advance jet training, or you go to, to, uh, the... Ellison. Yeah, the T-28 flying where they're preparing you for fixed wing or helicopter, or for, for multi-engine helicopter, and so,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's where the decision was made after you finished primary, in Softly Field, VT1 they called it, the T-34 Mentor. So...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought, good lord, I will never get out of here. Because after Meridian, you gotta go to Kingsville and Beeville, and then you get your wings, and then you go to a rag, and it, you know, it's a long time. I didn't have much time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, from the time I started flight school until I got my wings, uh, it was 11 months and 9 days. I was in a hurry. It was an 18 month program. John went through pretty quickly too.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I was in a bit of a hurry. Well, that day, Hankel says,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What's wrong? You seem a little down. So I'm way down. Here's the deal. They got a pool and meridian. I'll never get out of this damn place and the president's gonna stop the war. What am I gonna do? This is awful. And I gave up my great coaching job. And he says, what are you doing tonight? I said, I'm studying sir. I wasn't studying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He says, come to my house, give me the address, I go to his house.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My wife and I, and this is, you know, he's a JG, pretty important guy when you're an instant. And he's got his wings and everything. And I said, wow, you know, I'm going to an officer's house and he's a senior officer. I got there and we have,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't know what we had for dinner. I don't remember. I was just nervous, you know, and what do I do? How do I act? Trying to remember all the charm school stuff they told us. Well, he brings out 8mm movies. Howl 3 movies. And I went.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] God, where, what is that? And he told me and I went,


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[Assistant] Man, I flew out of his house, and I flew all the way through to get my wings to Ellison. And then I sweated Ellison, because at my week to get my wings, they only had two slots for howl three. Can you believe that? Two slots.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Buzzy Buzzel and I, Buzzy Pass, great guy, great friend, but Dick Buzzel and I got the orders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] First time I heard of Hal Revers from Hankel at VT1 when he showed me the home movies. And, uh, and I didn't tell anybody about it, like my secret. I wanted, I wanted to make sure I got the job. I'm not giving any leads to anybody. So it was a blessing and I'll tell ya.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, I'm talking too much and I'm going to give this book for John here, but.


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[Assistant] The greatest thing that, probably not, outside of the birth of my two daughters, the greatest thing that happened to me because the mission was incredible. Incredible guys to fly with.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And working with SEAL teams and with the boats, really, we were needed and there's not a better mission on Earth than that, I thought. It was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I just had the pleasure, by the way, I go back to Louisiana.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Annually because, and I'll say it here, I'm not named to be unnamed, but one of my door gunners, uh, unfortunately is in prison in Angola, not a good place to be, Louisiana.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Life. And, uh, while I'm on this trip, uhm, I got to meet a guy, 92-year-old Robert Spencer.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That, you'll hear about VCA. What was that date, John? That was, uh, September?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The HAL-3 had nine detachments throughout the Mekong Delta, strategically placed, all the way from the Cambodian border down to where I was, down in the lower Kamao Peninsula.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And if you were, if you got in trouble at night, you needed a medevac at night, or an advanced tactical support base, an ATSB, kind of a triangle shape, and they got Constantine all around it, and they got hit all the time at night.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They scramble the seawolves, and we would fly, we were all weather pilots, uh, in those days, most of the army guys were not all weather pilots, they were VFR daylight pilots, not all of them, most of them.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Nighttime and rain. There was monsoon season you could barely see in front of your face. We're flying instruments in an old UH-1B. But we were all instrument trained.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And we were heavily instrument trained. After we got our, through our primary training in T28, we had instrument training there. We went through another squadron, VT6, nothing but instrument training.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We got all, we got transition to the aircraft, precision and acrobatics.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then we got over to do instruments, and then instruments again, and then went to do FCLPs, field landing carrier practice, a lot of them, before you go hit the boat. In those days, every naval aviator had wings on, was carrier qualified. Not anymore. We're saving money now. So, not anymore.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was always interesting to me when an aircraft package would come down to where I was, Solid Anchor Seafloat, but Solid Anchor wouldn't have the runway. They would come and get there by nine and they usually leave by five. Gotta get back. And when it gets dark, okay.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, but to be fair, when you mentioned Songadoc, I had a memory as I was a co-pilot in those days. And uhm, I was co-pilot for, to go unnamed, an ONC.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he had to be 1200 feet that night. I said, sir, we're getting nosebleeds up here. We, our rockets are burning out before they hit the ground. But anyway, that's what song and doc reminds me of.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Set it up on all the systems, fly the airplane, and you're a copilot. When you have enough time, and you qualify, you become aircraft commander. And with HAL-3,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, once you show the capability to manage and control two aircraft and tactically be unknowledgeable, you become a Fire Team Leader, FTL, another acronym. So, John was an FTL.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he did and I never heard of a seal. I had no idea what a seal was. And I forgot what it was and I had to ask him the next day, what did you say they were?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he said, well, they're like, like frogmen. I said, yeah, I know what movies in World War II, I knew what frogmen were.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he said, well, they've evolved from that, from UDT. There's still a UDT, but there, and, and that was 1968. The Seals hadn't been around a long time as Seals. And, uh, yeaah, and I, uh, remember


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Going to, first of all, Seafloat was a bunch of barges tied together in the, in the, in the, uh, the Baudet River, I think it was, in the Sacramento Peninsula. And, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It was great because they had two sail platoons there. We lived on these barges.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Johns were, the river was rushing down below this way at morning and this way in the afternoon. And all night long, you couldn't sleep at first when you're a new guy because they're setting off concussion grenades all night. And the next morning, many mornings, there'd be a sapper.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, the perseverance of some of those characters.


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[Assistant] We're gonna go in at night, we're gonna go by boat, you know, they've got a Kit Carson scout that's gonna lead them in, intelligence says XYZ is here, and they would let us know where they're gonna be, and the coordinates of where they're gonna be, and, and, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'll tell a story here about John Sandoz. I'll use your name, John. And outstanding officer. And the good news on him is he operated often and heavy and nightly it seemed like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've done all the checks, we've cranked it once it's ready to go and you literally hop in there and you're airborne and like, you know, I've heard the term three minutes, we've got an awful lot of work in three minutes lots of times.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We got airborne and it was black, literally black. Well, we'd pre-briefed John. We gave John, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What, the strobe, what was the strobe called that we had, John, that we carried? The little strobes that, it had a guard around it and it was- Oh, a directional strobe? Yeah, it was a directional, and he had one, and he had a Prick 90 radio of mine that I gave him, because it was small, and it was easy to operate, and so John himself,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Tough Seal, he's out there, and the enemy's over here, and Freedom's over here, and John is between both of them, and he's gonna defend. And he's out there, uh, see Wolf 1-3, uh.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was hilarious because he goes, okay, a little closer, uh, uh, a little closer, uh, and his voice starts raising, uh, a little bit closer, less closer, no!


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I could hear, I could hear rockets going off in the background, and I was, here I am safe and sound at 800 feet or whatever I was, 600 feet, and it was hilarious. And I never let him forget that, ever.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You have to have a co-pilot who knows what he's doing, who can navigate, cause you're busy as hell keeping that thing on altitude, on heading, and realize you've got a wingman.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Who's got to have discipline too. He's got to know the heading you're on and out. You've got anti-collision light, top and bottom. So you can keep track of each other. But it's, uh, it can get hairy out there at night.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, some guys, you look over one time, I mentioned Earl Schott's name, Earl was a copilot of mine many times, good guy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But he was over there like this, he got the leans pretty bad because the semicircular canal is kind of getting messed up and you think you're level but you're not when you start, when you start getting vertical. He's over there like this, I said, okay, we weren't in combat or anything, we were just flying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's over there leaning sideways. I said, okay, Earl, you got it. He said, oh, that's okay, that's all right. No, Earl, you got it. And I'm over there laughing, the crew's laughing, but.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, oh, excellent pilot, but once in a while you can get them like that, but uh, no, it is dark and it's like,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was going to say, and you ought to know, Jaco, is that a fireteam in most attachments would come on


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For 24 on, 24 off. For 24 on, you're on for scrambles, you get your meals and you get your rest when you can, but you're on duty from noon to noon. Usually we did it, but wherever, but, and when you're, and anything that happened during that time, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your crew's at the ready, you're all briefed, and by briefed, you go down to what we call TOC with the Army.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Operation Center, we know where there are, where there are artilleries at. We know where the units, all the units are. We know what the radio frequencies are. We know what the planned operations are. We have a general idea where the bad guys are, but most of the time,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When we weren't actually involved in a combat operation, we'd be patrolling and basically looking for trouble. That's what we always did. And we'd usually find it. And uh, sometimes people get, it never,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I can't, I have a hard time thinking about a flight that I was on that we didn't get shot at. I'm sure there were some, but it was rare that we didn't get shot at.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Shooting randomly and we didn't shoot her down, but we didn't do that. Honestly. Ever. I mean, you do that on some of his crew and you're gonna get your butt kicked off and back to home guard in a heartbeat. We were professional, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Eligible Asian male could be that we just, we might just take his sand pound up under him, you know, cause he's in the wrong area. We don't kill the guy, but he's swimming. And, uh, if it's, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A guy who gets stupid and starts shooting back, well then we erase that guy. But again, we were pre-briefed, we knew where everything was, what was going on, and more often than not,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We could brief TOC as well as they could brief, we could get the frequencies from them, but the Intel, we could feed to them. We knew what was going on everywhere.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I honestly, uh, I flew a lot because I was of the opinion the more airborne I was, the better pilot I was, the better my crew was, because everybody was doing their job, they loved it, I loved it, and the better we knew our area of operations.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I have, uh, many times flown, if you say, every other day is 15 days, uhm,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I've flown many months from 100 to 130 hours a month, and during the day, maybe 8 to 10 hours, it wasn't unusual. We, you're looking at your logbook today, and we flew together that first month, uh, at Death 6. All day long.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you're day off, what are you doing? You're doing your job, whether it's ops, or admin, or maintenance, or whatever your job is, or sleeping, because you know the next day you may not get any sleep. So you, you sleep. And, uh, no, it was,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But I barely know what the fitness report wasn't. And he was stroking me and I didn't know it, but he, he says,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now Carl, I know you really like this mission. You're really enjoying it. Oh yea sir, I mean that was just, he says, but the real Navy's not like this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're not gonna go to a squadron and have this much authority and responsibility. I mean, we're out there deciding who lives and who dies every day. And we're trying to make the right decision every day. I think we did.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, it's like your family, you know, these guys know all your crap and they still like you.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you, they know you on bad days and good days, and I'm gonna tell the story. It's, it's one of those, this, this ain't no, no, but it's true. He talked about being, when you're in charge of a fire team, you're in charge, and rank matters.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But rank on the cockpit goes away. You may say, sir, but you're in charge of the airplane. Your co-pilot's the captain, okay, captain, sit there, don't touch anything. That you're in charge. And, and it's Navy regs that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Your aircraft cannot be commandeered by some guy on the ground saying, fly over here and do this. No.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The only person that can command your aircraft and your aircraft commander is a flag officer, a line officer, in your


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back, sitting in a seat, is the only guy that can override an aircraft commander. Flag-offs. So, that in mind, one night at Debt One, Captain Martin Twight, great guy, he's passed on now, he was our SEAL, he came to fly at Debt One.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you know, you start flying and you don't mean it in a bad way, but you get your chin out and your chest out and you're aggressive and no BS. You can laugh and have fun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The mission's serious. It's no screwing around. So Captain Tripe wanted to go on a combat flight so he came down and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And he was my co-pilot. Of course I sat in the left seat and respectfully let him have the right, which aircraft commander in a helicopter. My wingman was two other guys, I won't use their names, but lieutenant commander and a lieutenant. And I'm a JG. Very, very green JG. But not green.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, kissing up and I just said stop. Stop.


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[Assistant] Brief me. This is not the Army. This is the Navy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The Navy, it has nothing to do with rank. It's who's the smartest guy here. And on this mission, I'm the smartest guy here. Brief me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was so nice to me. He should have slapped me, but he didn't do that. And that army guy was mad. But he had nothing he could do about it. But that's kinda how it is. The aircraft commander is the ultimate. It's like the captain of a ship. What you say goes and your job is to do the right thing.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] John was new in country and you were flying an admin flight, right? Yes. You were flying a slick, flying a slick.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Let me ask you John, we're on the fly here. Two guys from debt one, we were down to one bird because every hundred hours we had to get a new aircraft from maintenance. The major maintenance was done in Bentui. So we would do the oil changes and filter changes and so forth, but they did all the heavy stuff.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, the bad guys I think had a 51 caliber.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, that's, you post-flight really heavily when you get back, and you can, you know, when you're, when you're a new guy, you can hear certain things, but when you're, got experience, you can hear gunfire, you can hear


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] From 800 feet, you can hear it. You can dang sure hear it when you're breaking off target at 200 feet, but, uh, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back on, but anyway, the bottom line is, is that, uh, uh, we would get back on post flight and, uh, more often than not,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The SEALs would bring in intel stuff and it would be a drawing of a helicopter and then Vietnamese telling the bad guys where to aim so they could hit the aircraft. Cause most of the time they'd shoot at us and hit the tail section. Most, all of my hits, not all of them, but most of them were aft of the cabin.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There were some in the cabin, and they were uncomfortable. And sometimes, I know John got a Purple Heart, and he can tell that story, and I got one, Earl got one, and I mean, it's no big deal. I mean, you get it because you got shot, and it's not, nothing necessarily heroic. People think a big, a Purple Heart's a big deal, it's not a big deal.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Me. He forgot to add there was a heavy fireteam and I was a fireteam leader. Those two guys were doing everything I asked them to do. Most of the time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, Earl and I were together and we just, we just, uh, it was minor. It was minor stuff, but I bled a lot. I just, uh, we took a round through the cockpit.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, actually we were just on a patrol. We weren't actually even put in a strike. You could take a round randomly. And it happened one time when we were taking a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We just took a random run as I recall and, uh, and Earl and I took, both took flack in the face where it bounced off of the center divider and the windscreen so we got glass in our face and metal in our face and it looked pretty bad until we shaved the beard and it actually wasn't bad at all. It was minor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So I didn't limp anywhere. I didn't have to be carried down to third, to third, third, third. Nobody bought me booze at all. Nobody cared, you know, and I didn't care. But when they treat you and you're wounded and they treat you and they stitch you or whatever, you get a purple heart.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's what the Honorable John Kerry figured out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We gave him tons of grief over that, and we love John. He's a great guy, one of the best guys I know, and a gentleman. I don't have many guys I can call a gentleman that I know, at least not Seawolf. Anyway.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well I, I was a very experienced fire team leader, and what they do...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Is a, when you first get to HAL-3 in those days, you had a month or two in the home guard and you kinda transitioned, you already transitioned to the H-1 because you flew the H-1 in flight school.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But you transition to the mission and build your time, get to know the area of operations, you fly to every debt, taking mail and parts and people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, in that month or two you do that. And then your detachment, you make aircraft commander, and then you make fire team leader.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And after a period of time, before you go home, they bring you back in, you fly at home guard again for a couple of months, as the aircraft commander like Bill Belst did for you, when you went to V.C. Lake. And so,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The executive officer was one to bring me back to do that. And I said, it was March, and I said, hey, I got two months.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] March and April. I don't want to go back. I'm just getting good at this. Leave me alone. And so I whined and whined and whined and finally he demoted me. He took me to death sex.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Aircraft commanders and you, you were a co-pilot when I first got there I think and you became a, maybe you were an aircraft commander. I was an aircraft commander. Oh yea, okay. Well there were, there were three or four or five good guys and I'll name them, John Farr, John Barnes, uh, Matt Kinman, Paul Waters. Who did I miss? That's it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, Mack Henwin, did I miss you Mack? No, you said Mack. And, uh, super guys. And the exos said go get those, those guys are all just, they need a little leadership, they need a little experience. And, uh, go do it. If you got any, you know, go and see.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He had a bad case of Lieutenant Commander, which is do nothing. I tried to figure it out when I went to the Navy. I tried to avoid Lieutenant Commander. If I could go from Lieutenant to Commander, I'd have been very happy. Uh, but anyway, so I sort of had to be me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A little, put my chin out and chest out and had these, these great guys that, uh, took about, uh, 30 minutes to fire up and get going and all of a sudden we were flying all day every day, like we're supposed to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Not sitting back at the boat waiting for meals. And then what's on at the movie. We don't give a damn what's in the movie. We're going to fly it, period. That's what you do. That's how you know you're AO. That's how you support the people out there in the boats. And that's how it happens. If somebody gets shot down, you're right there on the spot. That's what we do.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, I was in a training squadron with Earl and BT3 after our helicopter. We went back, fixed wing for a while. And I remember guys fighting over a