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[Assistant] But I remember, uh, this wonderful old neighbor lady that lived down the road from us gave me this box of, a big cardboard box full of old Louis Lamour and Zane Grey novels.


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[Assistant] Which, for anyone who's not familiar with those, they're, they're westerns. They're all westerns.


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[Assistant] And that was, you know the way you talk about being a kid and sort of.


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[Assistant] You are focused on that and that's all you are gonna do. That was me, but with horses.


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[Assistant] That was the only thing I cared about. And so I just gobbled up all of these old westerns.


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[Assistant] And lived in that world of imagining myself being like a cowboy riding across the plains with my bedroll and...


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[Assistant] But I didn't have a horse, so uhm, you know, I lived in the woods as much as I could. I, I, we, we foraged, we found uhm, we hunted for wild mushrooms all the time, which is still one of my very favorite things to do. Uhm, and I used to read


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[Assistant] Mushroom and plant field guides like other kids might read, you know, fantasy novels or something.


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[Assistant] It was a very idyllic childhood. I would say that.


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[Assistant] I have a lot of darkness in that same time, but...


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[Assistant] I wouldn't trade the way that I grew up for anything.


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[Assistant] So I think it started happening with me when I was so young that I just, I didn't understand it.


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[Assistant] I did not understand what was even going on. No one had ever told me that something like that might happen and I was told not to say anything by an adult and so I didn't.


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[Assistant] And I think I definitely had a feeling that I knew something was wrong and that this was not what should be happening.


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[Assistant] But I was, a lot of it was probably just my personality type. I was a shy, quiet kid and.


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[Assistant] Express my emotions that much anyways, uhm, and I, you know, I think people who do this sort of thing, they look for a specific type of kid.


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[Assistant] They're not stupid. They know how to single out just the right kid.


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[Assistant] And that was me in, in that time.


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[Assistant] I just had, I had a lack of understanding of what was even going on.


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[Assistant] It was definitely something that I should tell other adults.


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[Assistant] Yeah, not really. And definitely not in. I think that it's hard for people to believe that their best friend or close family members would ever harm their children. And so I don't


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[Assistant] I suspect that my parents felt like they kept a pretty good eye on me and that I was fine because they didn't look where they needed to look.


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[Assistant] And you'd probably think that your kid would let you know if there was a problem.


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[Assistant] Right? You would be like, well, I would be able to tell if something was wrong because my kid would let me know somehow. And that's not necessarily the case.


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[Assistant] Yeah, pretty much. I think because it started when I was so young, it just was part of my life.


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[Assistant] And it was so consistent. It wasn't like something that happened and then didn't happen for, it was just like a daily part of my life. And so.


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[Assistant] I don't think I really ever tried to signal. I remember one time.


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[Assistant] There was a couple girls, some friends of my parents came and visited and


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[Assistant] They had a couple girls a little bit older than me that came.


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[Assistant] And I remember the one girl who was probably 12 at the time telling me they spent the night, they slept outside, and she told me that, uhm, when she woke up in the morning, this, my abuser had


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[Assistant] Like, crawled up onto her bed and started touching her leg. And she like jumped up and told him no and ran away. And she also didn't go tell a grownup. She came and told me that this had happened. And I remember telling her what happened to me.


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[Assistant] And that's the only time as a child that I ever told anyone. And I remember us


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[Assistant] Sitting there kind of discussing this. I was probably eight maybe at the time.


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[Assistant] And we're like, wow, that's, yeah, I don't know why he does this. That's, that's weird. I don't know. You know, and we just kind of discussed it and then never told anyone, even though she was even older and hadn't grown up with it. And I don't know if.


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[Assistant] Later on she told someone, but at the time she definitely didn't go tell her parents or my parents or anyone, which reaffirms...


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[Assistant] The fact that your kids aren't necessarily going to tell you.


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[Assistant] Hopefully, hopefully before something happens, uhm.


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[Assistant] Make them aware of the fact that this does happen.


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[Assistant] People think that they're protecting their kids by not telling them that horrible stuff happens. They feel like they're protecting them by


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[Assistant] Shielding them from this. And meanwhile, their kids are being molested.


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[Assistant] And don't know how to tell anyone because no one's talked to them about it.


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[Assistant] Can start talking to them when they're really young use simple terms and express that sometimes people do bad things and there's something


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[Assistant] I tell my kids that there's something broken in some people's brains that makes them do something that normal people don't do, but that they're out there.


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[Assistant] When you, I think when you question a kid about this, you have to ask it once and then give the kid time to think about it.


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[Assistant] Hey, you remember that thing we talked about the other day? I was thinking about it some more. Uhm, do you have...


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[Assistant] You know, is there anything else you wanna talk to me about with that? And do that a few times, especially if you have any


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[Assistant] If you suspect anything, for sure, but even if you don't, bring it up once.


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[Assistant] Bring it up again a couple days later. Bring it up again a couple days later.


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[Assistant] Give their little brains time to process what my, and then make sure to tell them that


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[Assistant] If anything happened, even if they're not telling me anything did, they are not gonna be in trouble.


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[Assistant] If they feel like they want to tell me something. Now some kids are just vocal and will talk fine, but other kids won't. And that's the kind of kid that you have to eek it out of.


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[Assistant] I always tell my kids that they'll get in more trouble for telling me a lie than for whatever they did in the first place.


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[Assistant] Another thing that I do with my kids is I got, there's some great books out there about talking to your kids about abuse and stuff. And, um, there's one that I read to them sometimes and it's not,


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[Assistant] Those books aren't meant to just read once and never pick up again.


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[Assistant] They're a perfect opportunity to bring it up casually in conversation. There's a book, uh, it's called I Said No and it's written by Zach and Kimberly King.


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[Assistant] And Zach is a little boy and his mom, Kimberly King, and they wrote this book together.


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[Assistant] It's really great, it talks about people as being like red flag people and those people can be the sort of people who just give you


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[Assistant] A strange feeling. They, they unsettle you. They make you feel a little bit.


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[Assistant] Odd and it doesn't necessarily mean that they've done anything wrong to you, but you should be able to.


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[Assistant] Pick out those red flag people and then talk to an adult about what is making them uncomfortable.


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[Assistant] It's more about your, your gut intuition if there's something that just.


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[Assistant] Makes you feel a little bit weird if they say something, you know, it's, it's about listening to that internal voice that might be telling you something's a little weird, but he's a really nice guy. You know, he's.


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[Assistant] And, and learning how to identify that and listen to it.


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[Assistant] Because yeaah, that's like I said, pedophiles, sexual predators, they're not stupid people. Most of them aren't stupid people. They're very calculating.


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[Assistant] And they look for the right opportunities. So you've, yeaah, you've gotta teach your kid specifically that.


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[Assistant] And it's on the parent to initiate these conversations. It's not on the little kids to come to you and tell you something big has happened. It's on you as a parent to initiate these conversations.


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[Assistant] My daughter is, uhm, she's shy and she doesn't express her emotions very well. She's not the kind of kid who comes and just tells you stuff.


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[Assistant] And I don't, I don't want this to sound like I'm beating this stuff into my kids' heads every day and terrorizing them with the thought of scary things that might happen to them because I'm not, you know.


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[Assistant] Talk about it casually enough I think that it gets through to them. But she had, she's in kindergarten and she had a little issue and she told me


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[Assistant] That a boy has been coming up to her on the playground and she, I always use correct terminology because that's another thing I want. I feel like kids should be comfortable talking about their bodies.


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[Assistant] And she told me, and it was hard for her to tell me. She didn't want to tell me and I could.


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[Assistant] Totally see it because of her personality. She came up and she told me that a little boy was coming up every day on the playground and


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[Assistant] Like poking her in the vagina and then asking her to do the same to him.


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[Assistant] She's, I think she's five. She told me that and I was like, okay, what I'm doing is working because knowing her personality, she didn't want to tell me that.


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[Assistant] But she did, and so, and that was also the perfect experience to sort of teach. Like, okay, cool, not a big deal, he's five years old.


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[Assistant] You know, they- little kids do that and they don't know what they're doing, but let's go talk to your teacher and-


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[Assistant] Yeah, and that gave me a lot of confidence that if something, because I, because she dealt with that in a great way, if something bigger were to happen, I now feel like she would be much more inclined to come to me.


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[Assistant] But what you're saying about not wanting to make a scene, I think as I got older and


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[Assistant] And understood what was happening to me a lot more than I did when I was little.


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[Assistant] This is somebody who was my parents' best friend, was deeply involved in our life, had been with us forever. And imagine what telling would look like.


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[Assistant] And that wasn't something that I was prepared to handle.


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[Assistant] Even when I was a teenager and I knew exactly what was going on and I knew exactly how wrong it was, the scene that would ensue if I said something was not something that I was willing to deal with.


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[Assistant] It just becomes easier to just not say anything. You don't know if they're gonna believe you. You don't know if he's gonna go to jail. You just don't know.


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[Assistant] What the consequences are going to be. And it's much easier to just be like, all right, I've dealt with this. I can keep dealing with this. I'm not gonna cause any ripples.


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[Assistant] The best thing that ever happened to me up until that point, at least, maybe ever, there was a neighbor lady that lived close to us who had this horse that she didn't have time for and she let me bring it home and start riding it.


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[Assistant] And I didn't, my family never had horses. We knew nothing about horses other than my just insane desire to have one.


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[Assistant] And so I just started riding it and this horse was half broke at best. And I would fall off constantly. I just would smack my head on the ice and get back on and fall off again. And I remember my dad one time standing there and just telling me, you gotta stop.


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[Assistant] You can't, you can't, I'm not going to let you sit here and kill yourself trying to ride this horse. And you know, of course.


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[Assistant] I did, I just kept after it and finally wore the poor horse down and he gave up and he ended up being, you know, by my side for many years.


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[Assistant] So that, that gave me this whole different level of freedom. I wasn't, you know, constrained to my feet anymore. I could go out and get just miles and miles away from it all. And you know, home wasn't,


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[Assistant] It wasn't a comforting spot for me to be so I was much more comfortable being out in the mountains by myself with my horse. And some people might


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[Assistant] I have an issue with this, but by the time I was 12, I was carrying a


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[Assistant] 30-30 rifle on, in a scabbard on my saddle.


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[Assistant] And I had a little Ruger 22 that I carried with me, you know, one or the other, usually when I was out riding because my parents felt like I was safer with a gun than without a gun. Even though I was 12 years old, I'd grown up around guns and was comfortable with them. And.


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[Assistant] Since I would head out in the mountains and I think that the only rule I had was that I had to be back by dark.


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[Assistant] And you know, when you're on a horse and you leave first thing in the morning, you can cover a lot of ground.


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[Assistant] And if something had ever happened to me, I don't know how anyone would have even found me. So I was...


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[Assistant] I had to be responsible and self-reliant to make sure that I was as safe as I could be out there and I give my parents a ton of credit for allowing me that freedom. They had a daughter who had this passion to


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[Assistant] Be doing what I was doing. And it was dangerous.


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[Assistant] And they let me do it. And that is a large part of what built me into who I am today. And so...


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[Assistant] That, you know, that's something that I also try to do for my own kids as much as I can, you know.


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[Assistant] You know, I'm, I'm pretty cautious with them, but I still try to always allow them a lot of freedom. I remember one time I was, I think I was 15, I was riding, uh, away from home a little ways and I was down in this creek bottom and I heard this commotion down there, this like barking and


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[Assistant] Noise and I thought there were neighborhood dogs who would chase deer.


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[Assistant] And I thought that the dogs had a deer down, down in the creek bottom. And that was what I, you know, went through my head. And I ran my horse down through the brush into this creek bottom thinking I was going to scare the dogs off this deer. And I came out of the brush.


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[Assistant] Literally from me to you, like five feet away from this mountain lion that was just in full snarling crouched attack mode and it was squared off with, I didn't


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[Assistant] I didn't know this when I was writing, but one of my dogs had followed me and I hadn't seen it.


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[Assistant] And it was down in this creek bottom with this mountain lion and they were face to face just snarling and crouched down at each other. And I, I came out of the bushes right on top of them. And.


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[Assistant] You know, I didn't feel any fear at all. I just reacted and I just knew I had to get a little space between myself and the lion and I spun my horse around and got up the hill just a little ways and then stopped to watch the situation. And the dog was this big wolf.


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[Assistant] Chao cross. It was a big dog, but she, she got scared and she cut and ran. She decided.


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[Assistant] Bit her throat and she just went limp. And then the cat just picked her up and carried her away.


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[Assistant] That is because the cat was distracted.


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[Assistant] I wasn't the threat to the cat. I was the side thing. The threat was this dog.


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[Assistant] And thank goodness my horse was just a rock and didn't dump me right in front of this cat because had that happened, there's no doubt in my mind that I would have been attacked.


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[Assistant] But you know, things like that, that was, that was my life. Things like that happened and I was young and I had to be able to deal with those situations. How old were you at that point? 15.


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[Assistant] Uhm, met someone that lived a few miles away from us who was, uh, I think he was in his thirties. He was an Indian guy and he rode around the mountains on his horse as well and it was, uhm,


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[Assistant] I developed a relationship with him and, you know, it was, he was not the kind of person that you would want your 15 year old to be dating, but to me, he was, it was just this romantic thing and it was this escape. It was, it was something different and it was someone that


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[Assistant] Uhm, my home life and, and who I was. I think the


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[Assistant] The molestation abuse stuff got harder for me as a teenager as I.


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[Assistant] Even though it wasn't actively happening anymore, really? Physically?


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[Assistant] It was messing with my mind a lot more because I understood it better.


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[Assistant] And so I started dating this guy who, um,


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[Assistant] A distraction to me from that and you know, in the way 15 year olds will, I just became madly in love with him.


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[Assistant] You know, you can make your own conclusions about a 30 something year old man dating a 15 year old. Uhm, I certainly feel a lot different about it now than I did then.


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[Assistant] He told me that he wanted to marry me, like it was, it was very serious in my mind. And then one morning I was riding away from home down the Sturt Road and I remember


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[Assistant] Neighbor rancher pulled up alongside me and asked me if I'd heard what happened.


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[Assistant] And he told me that this man that I was in love with had been shot and killed.


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[Assistant] Well, I'll just say it. He would steal people's marijuana plants from them and sell them. And.


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[Assistant] That got him into trouble. Um, and I look back now on


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[Assistant] The road that that relationship could have taken me down and while it was this...


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[Assistant] Horribly tragic event for me at the time that sent me into an even deeper tailspin.


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[Assistant] Now as an adult the way I am, I'm almost thankful that it happened because I think that had that not happened, who knows where my life would have gone.


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[Assistant] Yeah, that was a, that was a hard thing for my 15 year old brain to process. And shortly thereafter, my parents separated.


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[Assistant] Not in an amiable fashion. My sister went off to college so I was especially on my own because she was, you know, my rock.


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[Assistant] You know, I have very different feelings now on what a 32 year old cop is doing dating a 16 year old. But.


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[Assistant] He was this safety zone for me in a big way.


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[Assistant] You know, strong, brave person who wasn't going to let anything bad happen to me. And I really latched onto that.


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[Assistant] When I was just trying to find something in life to hold onto.


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[Assistant] And that ended up being a long on and off again relationship, which definitely was not healthy for me.


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[Assistant] And at that point in time, I started self-mutilating. I started cutting and burning myself.


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[Assistant] Uhm, I was definitely very depressed.


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[Assistant] And it was not something that I knew how to communicate to anyone. I just was sucked into misery and self-pity, really.


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[Assistant] I would say it's definitely both. It's definitely.


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[Assistant] It's a funny thing and it's hard to understand. It's sort of an addictive behavior.


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[Assistant] And you know, I've read about it some and they say there's chemicals released in your brain and stuff when you feel physical pain that makes the emotional, that doles emotional pain and things like that. But it also for me, I will absolutely say that yeah, I think it was, it was a cry for help. It was like,


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[Assistant] As all teenagers do, you think that you're some rare exotic creature that's, no one else has ever experienced anything you've gone through and nothing anyone says to you.


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[Assistant] Matters because they don't know what they're talking about. But.


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[Assistant] For me, a lot of it was a cry for attention to have someone, and I got it. The thing is, is I got the attention. Uhm, the cop that I was dating


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[Assistant] I told my parents that I was doing this and people kinda freaked out and everybody thought that there was really something


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[Assistant] The matter with me and I was really depressed and I wouldn't


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[Assistant] Even though I was getting the attention and people were actually asking me, like, what's going on? What's, why are you doing this? I wouldn't say, I would not tell anybody. I just was.


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[Assistant] Shut off. And it's like I wanted the attention, but then I still wouldn't say what.


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[Assistant] And maybe part of it is that I didn't even know, but I think what we talked about before.


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[Assistant] Of the not wanting to make a scene. I was not going to make a scene. This, at this point, my abuser was pretty old.


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[Assistant] But he was still alive and he was still in our lives, he's still, you know, all the time. And...


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[Assistant] People were asking me, what are you doing? Why are you doing this? And I was not going to say.


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[Assistant] So, as soon as I graduated high school, I left to start working on ranches. I went to Montana, and I remember clearly I was


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[Assistant] I guess, and I was working on a ranch in Montana.


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[Assistant] And someone had left laying around this dusty old copy of D.H. Lawrence's book of poetry.


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[Assistant] And I read this little poem and it just stuck with me and I'll read it here. It's, I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bow without ever having felt sorry for itself.


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[Assistant] And I read those words and they just, they just hit me in the right place. And I'm not saying that that in particular is what really started to make a change, but uhm,


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[Assistant] I read some more things and, you know, I was growing older and I was thinking about things differently and my abuser had died and that was probably


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[Assistant] The biggest weight that I've ever felt lifted off of me.


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[Assistant] Because now what I realized is even if I did choose to tell someone, it wasn't gonna cause the kind of scene that it would have before. Now I still didn't really choose to tell anyone, but


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[Assistant] That in itself, not having him actually be present was a big thing for me. And I realized that I had just been damaging myself and I'd really been hurting people in my life.


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[Assistant] My, my parents, my sister, they were just confused. They didn't understand why I was where, why I was doing what I was doing to myself.


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[Assistant] And I realized that I was just in this, I was being selfish and self-centered and just feeling sorry for myself.


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[Assistant] I just gained a little bit of perspective and made myself stop.


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[Assistant] Definitely. It was, it was a long, slow process for me though. It didn't just happen overnight. I mean, I...


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[Assistant] I think I've been made a very conscious decision not to hurt myself anymore, but you have to


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[Assistant] Teach yourself how to think and feel and that takes time to teach yourself to have the right kind of thoughts and feelings about things and


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[Assistant] One thing that I wanted to say while I'm here talking about this is that


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[Assistant] Just because I'm sitting here saying that I did this, that I s- I s- woke up and stopped doesn't mean that


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[Assistant] Everyone who's experienced something like this should just get over it. Uhm, if you have


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[Assistant] Listeners, if you have a girlfriend or a wife or a sister or someone who


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[Assistant] Has been through something like this or maybe after listening to this show, we'll confess to you that they've been through something like this. Maybe they've never told you before.


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[Assistant] And maybe they'll tell you something that doesn't even seem like that big of a deal. Maybe it's not.


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[Assistant] Violence. Maybe it is something that, you know, happened to them when they were young and it's...


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[Assistant] A sucky situation, but it's not, it's not horrible, it's not horrific.


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[Assistant] Has gone through something like this, doesn't give them the right to drag everyone else down with them.


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[Assistant] Into the, into their pit of depression and misery.


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[Assistant] The bad behavior because that's really what it is. It's bad behavior. There's people who've gone through.


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[Assistant] Much more horrific things than anything I have ever been through that have come out fine.


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[Assistant] And it's just getting your mind in the right place and taking control of your, your thoughts.


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[Assistant] And there always has to be accountability for your own actions, no matter what you've been through. You can't just say, I've been through something horrible so I can act like this.


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[Assistant] So it really wasn't until my kids were born.


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[Assistant] That, I mean, this was, this was in my mind all the time. I probably.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is how prevalent it was. I probably thought about the abuse at least once every single day. It was always in my mind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And eventually I learned that I didn't need to waste my thoughts on that and learn to spend less time thinking about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it really wasn't until my kids were born, I think, and my daughter was five years old. She was just this little girl, just this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Little girl. And she was the same age that I was when I was already dealing with abuse.


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[Assistant] I felt that I had an obligation to speak about this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That it happens to so many kids. It's so prevalent in not, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Girls, but also boys. It's not just girls. This is hap- it happens in higher number to girls, but it happens to both.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What I've been through and what I had, you know, I think I've...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Come around and I'm a pretty well adjusted person now.


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[Assistant] And that I had an obligation to talk about this because it's something that doesn't get talked about. It gets swept under the rug and even people who have happened to get treated like there's something wrong with them and they're


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they're embarrassed and they don't want to talk about it. And it's time for that to stop. It's time for us to start talking about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I'm, I feel like I'm resilient.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I grew up with this really close proximity to nature.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But they've got fire in their hearts and they don't feel sorry for themselves. And they survive.


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[Assistant] And I credit a lot of my resiliency to my upbringing in nature and observation of nature and how it's cruel and it's beautiful.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In the most difficult and challenging situations, and they flourish. And if they can do that, so can I.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I, I, definitely not from a military family.


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[Assistant] Fairly well suited to the lifestyle because I'm pretty independent and I'm


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I don't tend to be someone who frets a lot over what might happen.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I know that he loves his job and he's as well trained as he can possibly be to do the job that he does. And so, you know, that's.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Really, that's really all there is for me. And, you know, of course there's moments where you feel a little bit sorry for yourself and think,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Gosh, what if something happens? What if he comes home without his legs or with half his face shrapneled or something? But, you know, I don't.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Anymore, that stuff doesn't get into my head much, and so I don't, I just don't really worry about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] My husband's pretty good actually about staying in touch with me and communication on deployments, but it's not because of emotionally


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being dependent on each other. That's just the way he is.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Values my opinion on things a lot, and we talk about things, and uhm,


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[Assistant] You know, so, so we do communicate quite a bit, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I completely know what you mean about the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And as, as being a wife sitting at home with your husband gone, like you can't just sit there and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Carry on while they're gone. And that's the best way you can support them I think if you're, you know,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Making them feel bad for not calling you every opportunity you get and then laying a guilt trip on them about, you know, the fact that they're not giving you enough attention and stuff when they've got, yeah, you can't do that. You've gotta, you've gotta just take charge of your own life and, and do that while they're away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The very first night he was home from that deployment.


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[Assistant] I woke up in the middle of the night and he was standing over the bed holding a gun.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that sort of shocked me a little bit and made me realize that I was dealing with something a little bit different. I talked to him on deployment and over the course of the deployment, I could hear his voice changing. I could tell that he was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He was changing. It was, it was strenuous and there was a lot of, uhm, engagement. And when he came back, he just, you know, when he woke up in the middle of the night,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His immediate response, he just heard a noise, a dog barked or something and he just jumped for a weapon. He just...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Startled easily, and that was his reaction.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Um, he had, uh, definitely a shorter temper. Little things that he shouldn't have been getting mad about were setting him off. You know, just, just dumb stuff. Somebody would say something or do something and he would get so mad about it. And it was like.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, take it down a notch. He started, um, you know, I don't want to make it sound like he was doing this in a terrible way, but he definitely started some self-medicating with alcohol. Uh, he was like relying on sleeping pills to get to sleep. He has never.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Drinking more than he normally would every single night.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uh, you know, that immediately was a red flag to me. And then the sleeping pills.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, he definitely wasn't sleeping, um, normally. And so, you know, I started to, to see this stuff and I was like, this isn't, this isn't a road that we want to go down. And so I told him that I thought he really needed to go see a psych.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And luckily in the SEAL teams there's good access to that and also fortunately my husband


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He went and saw the psych and I think, um, Doc Parsley, I think you've talked about him before helped, helped him to get onto, um, just a healthier sleep cycle, cut out all the, the medication. He doesn't take any medication at all anymore. Never, never any sleep pills or anything.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started taking like some herbal supplements and stuff and uhm, he takes some alpha brain now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, and it didn't take long. He, he, you know, he made a few appointments with the psych. That definitely helped him to realize that, yeah, he was, wasn't acting normally because I don't think when these, when you guys come back, you don't,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You've already been used to operating on an elevated level for a while and you don't realize that you're not, you're now home with your wife and your kids and you're still trying to operate on that level.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's where it's really important for the family spouses and stuff to, you know, keep an eye on these guys and hopefully channel them in a good direction when they get home as opposed to, you know, had I not stepped in and I mean, my husband's


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He's been a sale for a long time, he's- he's been through a lot of stuff, but-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, you know, he definitely could have gone down a road that wouldn't have been healthy for him or his career.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I mean, I, that was a condition to.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Him having me was that I was not gonna put my horses in a stable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And go see them once in a while, like they were gonna come with me and we needed land for them to-


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Be horses, wild horses like they were used to being and so.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] He made that happen. He made it, he did, he made it happen and we got a great 18 acre piece of property and we've got five fat horses now out in the field every time I look out.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I never farmed before. I'd always been a horse wrangler and.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I started just growing a little garden and I was like, oh I love this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I heard about a CSA program, which is basically where you grow a


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Like, you grow a bunch of stuff and you sell a box of whatever your farm is producing every week to people who pay, you know, they'll pay to get their box of fruits and vegetables. And I was like, oh, I could do that. I could get a few people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Start to do that. And so I did. I started out with like 10 families that I do boxes for and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I realized that I really liked it and it gave me a lot of focus when he was deployed. It gave me a lot of something to really throw myself into and focus on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then, you know, we, we had kids kind of right, right around that same time and so that was, that was a little challenging in itself to be trying to like get this farm up and going and being, you know, in the beginning you talked about me being like nine months pregnant out there working and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But it was awesome, you know, I loved it and I've, I've managed to build up a pretty decent little business and, um, there's nothing that I find more rewarding.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In life than growing good food. There's something about it that's, and, and for my husband too, like, I do most of the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's very therapeutic for him. I think when he comes back from deployments and stuff and he will, he can just kind of let all that go by being.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In this natural surrounding with physical labor to do every day. You don't need, I think you've talked about this before, you don't need sleeping pills when you work yourself hard.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I want the subjects to be normalized a lot more than it is. Uhm, you know, yeaah, it's a horrible thing to talk about and it's hard to talk to your kids about it, but...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We have to make it more normal not only for kids, but for the


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Millions of adults that are out there who've been through it and still don't talk about it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When I first posted uhm, what you read, I posted on Facebook, and I had a ton of people send me private messages telling me


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Their own horrible stories. People that I knew, people that were friends of friends, people that I didn't know at all.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I was shocked by a few of the people that I knew who had horrible stories.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Uhm, kids that I went to high school with, that I knew during the time that their abuse was also going on. Told me some things. And...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, let's have a honest conversation about this. We'll help someone else, even if one or two other people.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kids and the interaction that their neighbor or their friend or their


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Grandpa, uncle, somebody has with their kids and realizes that there's something not quite right.


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[Assistant] Then everything that I've been through is worth it because I will have used my experiences to help someone else.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Well, it's been a, it's been a incredible honor to be here and, and thank you guys for.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Stepping out of box a little bit with me and getting this out there and talking about some of this stuff. And I love, you know, what you wrote to your daughter and your wife is still stunningly beautiful and very kind.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, yeah, not like a, not like a ten pound brick or whatever it is, but yeah, smaller bars.


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[Assistant] But we're there, we had some reserve, we got some backup.


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[Assistant] This is Jocko Podcast number 76 with Echo Charles and me, Jocko Willink. Good evening, Echo.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] For your freedom, and I even say things like, you don't appreciate your freedom until it's gone.


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[Assistant] And not in some way trapped by a situation in our life that we don't have the courage to get out of, but I am talking about an actual loss of freedom.


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[Assistant] Retired Navy captain, Charles Charlie Plum.


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[Assistant] Naval Academy graduate, F4 Phantom fighter pilot.


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[Assistant] It is an absolute honor to have you on and thank you so much for being here.


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[Assistant] Let's just start from the beginning. Okay. Of Captain Charlie Plum. You were, I know you were born wearing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, uh, at some point, I think it was that you had a basketball coach, or a coach of your school that was a pilot in World War II.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then at some point at the, at the Navy, did you, did you know about naval aviation? I guess you did from, uh, from Bob Johnson. Yeah. He told you about naval aviation. Did you have that thought in your mind of naval aviation at that point?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it must have been, I mean, that's always been ultra competitive at the academy. And I know we had another pilot on Dave Burke and he was talking about how each step of the way he kind of looked around and said, I think I can actually do this. You know, it's kind of the same thing. You look around and say, I think I can get the best grades. I think I can get in this position. At some point you must have said, I think I can, I think I can do this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] While you're at the academy also, you, is this when you got involved with Anne for the first time? Is that at the, at the Naval Academy?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did you, so when did you find out you were getting picked up for flight training?


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[Assistant] Did you guys, were you guys thinking Vietnam already? No. Or was it just too early and there was limited operations so it wasn't really something that you guys were thinking about in front of mind?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Just thinking, hey, we're gonna fly around, we're gonna go do regular deployments which you'd heard about, but you weren't thinking about Vietnam.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So at what point, was that in flight school when you first started thinking of yourself? Yes. Hey we got guys over here dropping bombs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did your, did your attitudes shift at all? So for, for my generation, when all of a sudden September 11th happened, it was like, it was like a paradigm shift in everyone's mentality. That, that day, it was such a clear,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Clear demonstration and we all knew that we were going to war and that was an immediate attitude shift. Did you guys start to have a shift in attitude or was it so, because the way Vietnam escalated more slowly, was it more of a slow escalation in your minds as well?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you were talking about in your book you'd done a mid shipment tour where a phantom went down. Both pilots killed. And then you got assigned the phantom. Did that give you any reservations at all?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So you get that and you come out and you're stationed in San Diego or is that was outside San Diego, right? For when you, when you deployed for the first time.


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[Assistant] Without training to fight, how are you gonna know how to fight? That's right. And you gotta, you gotta be, that's outstanding for the, for the commanding officer of that squadron to say, you know what, instead of being, instead of being mad that you were doing it, instead he's humble and says, you know what, we need to get better at this. Let's, let's, let's keep training.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That's awesome. And you eventually do get your time in the F4 Phantom. You learn how to fly that. And now it's time to go on deployment. You're going on deployment now. November 5th, 1966. You kiss and goodbye.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You go on deployment on the, on the Kitty Hawk. It was her birthday.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Oh, that's a great birthday present, sir. Alright, alright. Very nice of you. That's like my first daughter. My first daughter was born.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Actual birthday? Like actual birthday? Yea, I went on deployment the next day. Everyone was really happy with me on that one.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You, but you get overseas and you're, you're flying, you start flying missions. You're doing, you're doing mostly strike missions. Is that primarily what you're doing, taking out targets in, in North Vietnam?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Almost done with deployment. We're, we're talking, you, you spend, you did what, 74 missions at this point. You've been there for five or coming up on six months. And on the 19th of May, 1967, you get a phone call and you guys get like a strike mission comes in that you are supposed to execute.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] One of the things that we were talking about just before we hit record was the...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Kind of the, the sense of humor that you have in the military and, and what that's like and, uh, one of the,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] By the way, I haven't even mentioned that I'm referring to a book that you wrote called I'm No Hero by Charlie Plumb and that'll be that's available on Amazon get it through it'll be a link on the website, but awesome book


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Okay, well there you go, even better.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Going to the book here, you guys are getting, before you launch, you're getting ready to launch, kind of getting ready for the briefing, and here we go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The pilots of the fighter planes gathered in their own briefing room and read from a television screen and teletype the weather information and the position of the ship. We reviewed once again the switches we would have to throw, and I coordinated with the maintenance officer, the weapons we would need, the volume of the fuel, etc. Serious thoughts were in the back of all our minds, but outwardly, our mood was light.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We laughed and joked, drank coffee and smoked.


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[Assistant] My regular Rio, which is the radar intercept officer, he's the backseater because the F4 Phantom has two people, was up to his old habit of manipulating his slide rule.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Being a self-styled math wizard, he again pinpointed his likelihood of getting bagged or shot down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you replied to him, then save me a room at the Hanoi Hilton.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, back to the book here, we left our ready room and entered the central briefing room where all the pilots, Rios, and standby crews scrutinized their master plan, which included maps and photographs of the targets and intelligence reports of enemies' fire capability. After our central briefing, we returned to our ready room, meditated last-minute instructions, and put on our flight gear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Altogether these briefings took as long and sometimes longer than the mission itself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I looked up at the screen, pilots, man your aircraft. We gave each other


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We slapped each other in the back, exchanged a customary give-em-hell dialogue, and patted the posterior of our good luck girl hanging on the door. It was time to go topside.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You guys are now getting ready to take off. And again, just some of this, this humor. Back to the book. Engine run up is good. Take off checklist is complete. I'm ready to go. Gary, you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. Okay. I'm mocked.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This is your captain speaking. Welcome to flight 403 to Hanoi, North Vietnam. We'll be flying at an altitude of 11 grand, and we have a high ceiling. Make sure your seatbelt is fastened. No smoking, please. So that's the attitude going out, and...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Legitimately, this is your 75th mission. You've flown 74. You're feeling pretty comfortable. I mean even though of course you've got thoughts in the back of your mind, but you're feeling pretty comfortable about how you do your job and what you get done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Back to the book, all this coordination, so it's what you just talked about, this massive effort going forward, dozens and dozens of aircraft. All of this coordination of men and machinery during the refueling was done in complete silence. We called it ZipLip. Although enemy radar would have already detected us, we were careful not to give radio spooks any additional information. It was gratifying to experience


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Such close rapport with my air wing. I knew and they knew what each was doing in this intricate maneuver, yet not a word had to be spoken.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And that's, I've actually talked about that on here. When we would train, and when I was running training for the SEALs, I would tell them, hey, you're not allowed to talk during this training mission. You can't say one word to each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was amazing, after you do that a couple times, how much better people get, cause they're reading, they're reacting, they're anticipating what other people are gonna do, and you guys are just so far ahead at this point, five and a half months into deployment, it's, you guys are doing this whole thing without saying a word to each other.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Yeah, I think that's one of the, one of the incredible things about the military is even though you're just a little piece of that big machine, this big powerful machine, it's, it's pretty awesome to experience when you, when that stuff's going on.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you kinda talked about what, what you were doing. You were positioned on the flanks. Anticipating migs. How often are you guys seeing migs over there?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And on this one, you get a call though, you hear, they don't, they, they gave you a call for, there's Migs, what is it, Migs 20, 20 West, and you start to get a little aggressive, start leading out that way a little bit, right? Yep, yep. And the, and the, uh, flight commander tightened you up and said, hey, Plum, get back over in formation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they, and they tighten you back up. So you fall back into formation and now.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sam surfs their missiles up there, and here we go back to the book. Gary, that's your Rio, sitting behind you in the plane. You say, Gary, do you see it? And he says, I don't see a thing, Charlie. We had both seen Sam's before. They resembled


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Flying white telephone poles with huge 4th of July sparklers spraying silvery orange glows from their tails.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I felt a thump in the empanage, the aft section of the airplane.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Red instrument lights jumped across the panel indicating that I had two engines on fire.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That wasn't good. This plane only had two engines. I yanked the throttles back to idle and the bird seemed to come to an immediate halt in midair. Charlie, we're hit. How bad is it? She's still flying.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then the aircraft started to roll, and while I madly scanned the instruments, I looked up and found that the F-4 had suddenly overturned. Ground was where there, was where there should have been sky. And the nose was heading downward, ripping air at 500 knots.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The altimeter needle collapsed to four thousand, then thirty five hundred, then three thousand.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We had to get out, but being inverted, we would be rocketed by the ejection seat right into the rice paddies.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had to roll the plane upright. I tried the stick, it was frozen. The only manual control was the rudder pedal, not normally used to roll an aircraft. I stepped on it as hard as I could, adrenaline surging through my veins. The plane shuttered once, and again, slowly, it began to right itself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Rearview mirrors reflected a screaming fireball, 12,000 pounds of flaming gasoline and 30,000 pounds of fissionable aircraft.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You want to eject? No, wait a minute. I shouted back. The plane struggled. Then the sky was where it should be. Gary, let's go.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I jerked my face curtain to eject. The rocket slammed me out of the aircraft. I tumbled a couple times and the chute caught just as advertised. All kinds of debris filled the air around me as wadding from the shells whistled by.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Son of a gun, they've bagged my airplane, now they're after me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I went to the concussions from the exploding shells, sonic booms battering my eardrums, rockets of heavy smoke clouded the sky. Gary and I had ejected so near the ground, however, that enemy guns could train on us for only a short time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I checked my parachute canopy. It looked good, torn in only a couple of places.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I thought of escape, but where? Looking away, I saw my buddies and their aircraft blending into the horizon.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Below, my landing zone was nothing but barren rice patties. Down to my left, a huge cloud of black smoke billowed at the outskirts of a peasant hamlet, punctuating a row of four or five huts, my plane. Had it wiped out a family? If so, the villagers would certainly be unhappy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I wasn't happy either. I hadn't intended that to happen. I later learned that the plane had impacted just beyond the last shack on the road.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] There was precious little time before I could touch down, before I would touch down, and I had much to be done.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I grabbed my two-way radio and tried to contact Gary, but I received no answer. Then I called my skipper. Linfield lead, Linfield lead. This is Linfield 2.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We've got two good shoots. We're gonna be alright. Request no SAR effort.


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[Assistant] And SAR is search and rescue. For those of you that don't know. And I, when I read that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Part right there. I stopped in my tracks because here you are. You're shot down.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You're in a parachute, you're gonna obviously be landing in these rice paddies surrounded by enemy, and you had the wherewithal to understand that if you requested for search and rescue to come and get you, it was just gonna get more people killed.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you're gonna, you're gonna talk about this, you talk about it in the book, but, you know, just to kind of point out the fact that whatever, two minutes earlier,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You were part of this giant powerful force with a multi-million dollar


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, aircraft under your command as a 24 year old as part of this group that of many, many multi-million dollar with this huge destructive power launching off of these ships and airfields and to go from having all that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So now you're under a parachute and you're about to have all of that just absolutely taken away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was surprised at how calm I was when I should have been panic stricken.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It would all be different now. I tried to envision myself in this new world and prepare for it. I had a lot going for me.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I was in good physical condition and I could probably withstand torture.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I plunged backward into the mud and water. Trying to get my bearings, I took off my helmet and mask and crawled out, crawled without direction in the quagmire. With slimy hands, I tried to wipe mud from my eyes. I saw that I was about 10 or 15 yards from an embankment.


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[Assistant] I looked over to see that Gary, touching down an adjacent patty about 100 yards away, had disappeared behind the 8 foot embankment.


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[Assistant] A barefoot peasant wearing khaki shirts, shorts and t-shirt ran at top speed down the path toward me grimacing with excitement and anger.


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[Assistant] Above his head, he waved a double edged axe with blades about 8 inches long.


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[Assistant] My instructors never documented that type of weapon. I heard him scream, hand up, hand up.


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[Assistant] I didn't understand what he meant and I kept working with my gear and shoot.


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[Assistant] I had a 38 revolver strapped to my chest, and it, and as long as he stayed in the embankment, I would not touch it.


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[Assistant] It wasn't long, however, before ten or twelve more peasants came rushing toward me, yelling and waving their shovels and hoes.


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[Assistant] Now there was power in numbers and they charged out in the water after me. I raised my hands away from my body, they started ripping my G-suit, found my survival knife and proceeded to cut away at the suit and the torso harness. I tried to tell them to use the zippers and even attempted to show them how to do it, but they knocked my hands away.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The more certain they were that I was harmless, the meaner they became. The shovel and hoe blades flailed at my body to prove to me that I was their loathe captain.


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[Assistant] A moment later he returned and screamed for special attention. He fixed the barrel to my head. I could see that at least two of the chambers were empty.


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[Assistant] I had always kept five of the six chambers loaded, so I knew that he must have removed at least one of the cartridges.


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[Assistant] There was little I could do as I felt the muddy barrel against my temple. The peasant pulled the trigger. Click.


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[Assistant] He guffawed and sneaked away wiping off his unexpected prize.


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[Assistant] Did you accept him? Did you, were you just thinking he's not gonna do it? What's your attitude at that point?


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[Assistant] Now you guys are blindfolded. They, they captured Gary as well. And they're, you're, you're blindfolded, but at this point they put this kind of,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Marginal blindfold on you, that's not working really well, so you can actually see, and again, I'm gonna go to your, uh,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Go ahead and highlight your twisted sense of humor here. So here we go. Uh, you're in the back of an old Russian Jeep. Back to the book. Gary was held captive in the Jeep ahead of mine. At the instant I recognized Gary, I started calling hysterically for a doctor to attend to his burned arms.


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[Assistant] Guards restrained me violently, screaming foreign but distinct warnings to attempt no more communication.


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[Assistant] And it says later the POWs who were in nearby cells heard, heard you screaming that and still laughed about it. So, uh, I'm glad you kept your sense of humor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They bring you in, they kind of parade you guys around and you hear cameras clicking and eventually you get put into New Guy Village and you get put into


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[Assistant] You know, a torture, basically a torture room. So here we go back to the book. Several torture cells in the prison. The green knobby room.


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[Assistant] So called because the walls and ceiling were covered with gobs of plaster the size of golf balls, which looked somewhat like mud dauber nests.


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[Assistant] The globs had a particular function, acoustics, to muffle human sound.


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[Assistant] Now you get through this day sunset, I had difficulty in seeing what was beyond myself. So I began reminiscing about the world of active life I had loved so much. Outside, my every minute had been filled.


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[Assistant] Outside, I had been king of the skies. Outside, I had been continually learning, doing, accomplishing.


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[Assistant] And now I was tired. So tired. So perplexed. So confined. So very lonely.


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[Assistant] The trauma of overwhelming change caused my mind to reel with this orientation.


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[Assistant] I was afraid. I stared at the emptiness. Shadows crept up the walls gradually becoming more pronounced.


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[Assistant] Curiously, a vague ghost-like impression materialized.


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[Assistant] The image took the appearance of the master with arms outstretched, a symbol.


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[Assistant] It was strange, yet something I felt I should expect.


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[Assistant] I began to utter the first lines of the 23rd Psalm. The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.


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[Assistant] He maketh me to lie down in green pastures. He leadeth me beside the still waters.


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[Assistant] He restoreth my soul. He leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake.


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[Assistant] I repeated it aloud several times, not because of any deep religious drive, but because it simply seemed the thing to do.


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[Assistant] And then I prayed. I considered making a deal with God, but rejected the idea.


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[Assistant] I made no big promises and asked for no miracles, just strength.


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[Assistant] Strength to endure the hardship and strength for my wife Anne. It would be difficult for her too.


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[Assistant] Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death. That was certainly where I was.


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[Assistant] Well I say there's no atheists in foxholes, and I guess there aren't any in the prison camp. Although you do talk about some atheists in the prison camp.


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[Assistant] Yeah, and you know that you also talk about faith and one of the things that I will get to this but


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[Assistant] When you talk about faith, you're, you talk about faith not just in God, but faith in your country and the one that I think that regardless of what someone's religious beliefs are, faith in yourself. Absolutely. And I think all three of those are, whichever one of those faiths where you find strength in a time like this, lean on it.


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[Assistant] How quickly did you realize that there was, that you were part of, I guess we'll get to it, but I mean,


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[Assistant] So the interrogation begins. The torture begins. We're going back to the book.


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[Assistant] I did not respond. First regulation, you answer all questions.


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[Assistant] The way that the North Vietnamese justified torture was peculiar.


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[Assistant] When they asked me questions and wanted military answers, I was not tortured to answer questions, but punished for disobeying camp regulations. What, what airplane you fly? I'm sorry, I can't tell you.


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[Assistant] To answer this question was of course, not in my rules. I'm sorry, I can't answer that.


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[Assistant] The officer again reminded me about the punishment for disobeying camp rules. Okay, you talk me, or you talk steel. To which you responded, bring it on.


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[Assistant] The two higher ranking officials left. The remaining officer with one word ordered the guards forward. They brought it on.


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[Assistant] The steel mentioned by the interrogator consisted of iron manacles, shackles, and a leg bar.


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[Assistant] The shackles were cylindrical iron bars shaped like horseshoes but rounded at the end so that the five foot leg bar could be slipped into them and locked.


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[Assistant] The prisoner's ankles could then be forced through the openings and secured by the bar. The junior officer walked out.


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[Assistant] These had obviously been intended for the more modest Vietnamese arms. They were so small that they had to be forced together just so the screw could be seated in the bottom of the threads.


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[Assistant] With what looked like a rollerskate key, a guard began to turn the screw.


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[Assistant] My skin was pinched between the metal and quickly succumbed to the vice. I screamed in agony. Surely the guards wouldn't get these things much tighter.


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[Assistant] Blood oozed down my hands, and still the guard kept turning the key.


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[Assistant] Like powerful magnets, the iron was finally set flush.


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[Assistant] Circulation stopped. My hands burned. Greyish blue. Tingled. And became numb.


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[Assistant] A guard then wrapped a rope first around my left elbow and then around my right and drew my elbows together behind my back. My shoulder muscles writhed and I feared that my sternum would separate. I gasped for air.


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[Assistant] Then I was thrown abruptly to the floor, shackles were jammed around my ankles, and the leg bar was fastened and padlocked.


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[Assistant] Electric wire similar to the kind that I had hidden underneath the table was brought forward.


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[Assistant] I thought that the guards were going to use this to shock me, but typical of the Vietnamese, they didn't have anything else to use for rope. And it torn the wire down from some light fixtures. This became the apparatus to wrap me up.


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[Assistant] It was first tied to the manacles, then thrown over my shoulder, and at last secured to the shackles around my ankles.


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[Assistant] Guards forced a bamboo pole under the wire and started rotating it so that the wire contracted, bringing my wrists up high on my back and drawing my face completely to my ankles.


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[Assistant] I was a human pretzel, a teacup with arms for a handle, and the rest of my distorted body for the bowl.


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[Assistant] Circulation was impaired throughout my limbs making them extremely painful to the touch.


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[Assistant] The guards, apparently drugged, exhibited wide and glassy eyes.


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[Assistant] They maliciously kicked me in the sides, the limbs, the back and the head, giggling and having a great time.


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[Assistant] Since I was on my side most of the time, they especially enjoyed standing on my head. Symbolically victorious.


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[Assistant] The rubber tire's sandals tore at my ear. My face, a ready target for abuse, was repeatedly subjected to fisticuffs and kicks.


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[Assistant] Well, they know the airplane I'm flying, and it's so ridiculous to undergo such torture for information they already have. The F4B.


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[Assistant] That part right there, I mean, will you hesitate for a moment? And then you say to yourself, okay.


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[Assistant] These guys shot me down in an F4 which crashed into this paddy and they know exactly what I was flying.


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[Assistant] This does not make sense for me to get this kind of abuse and torture for something that they already know.


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[Assistant] And when you came to that conclusion, how did you, did you, was it pretty, were you feeling comfortable with it in your mind when you came to the conclusion, look, this is stupid.


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[Assistant] Again, you might have felt like you broke at this point, but there's still some...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm going back to the book. Around the courtyard in a nearby room, my copilot, copilot Gary Anderson was undergoing about the same treatment.


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[Assistant] As soon as I heard him exploding obscenities, I knew he was near. Hey Gary! You alright? I called. The guards were immediately on top. Kicking and striking. Gary heard me and yelled back.


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[Assistant] It was four years later that I came across a POW who had been in a cell close to ours at the time.


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[Assistant] He said, boy, that was one of the craziest things I ever heard. You yelling, hey Gary, are you alright? Bang! Crunch! Fud! Fine! How about you? Smack! Crash! Crack! Yeah.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Going back to the book, the officer briefed me once more. I was to walk with my head down until he gave me the command, let people see face.


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[Assistant] The guards removed the cuffs and I pumped my hands and twitched my shoulders to restore circulation. The guards carefully directed me to the door, removing the blindfold and warned me not to look around. They then prodded me down the hallway lined with photographers and journalists, a group composed of Orientals and a few Caucasians.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] With the officer at my side, I walked out of the building onto the patio where a battery of motion cameras started whirring.


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[Assistant] The officer shouted to me, let people see face.


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[Assistant] Slowly and deliberately I looked up, staring blankly into space, bowed deeply to the cameras and lowered my head. I was uneasy about this entire charade.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Feeling a combination of resentment and embarrassment at being featured as a sideshow attraction.


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[Assistant] So that was the first indication that people knew that you were actually okay. Right. Or you were alive. Maybe not okay. That's a strong word. Didn't mean to say okay. You were alive.


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[Assistant] They're gonna give you, they give you the rules for the first time that you're supposed to follow.


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[Assistant] And, the, the guy reads them to you, and I'm just gonna, I gotta read these rules, cause uh, I think they give a good,


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[Assistant] Number two, criminals must make no noise in room. Number three, criminals must keep room clean and neat and must not mark rooms so graciously given by Vietnamese people. Number four, criminals must get up and go to bed at sound of gong.


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[Assistant] Number five. Criminals must get under bed when imperialist aggressor bomb and strafe our sovereign country.


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[Assistant] Number six, criminals must say, bow cow, when they want. Ask anything.


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[Assistant] Number seven, criminals must go only in area that guard orders when they go outside of room. Number eight, criminals must bow to every Vietnamese, guards, officers, and people.


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[Assistant] Number nine, criminals must not bring anything into room from outside. Number ten, criminals must not communicate with or look at other criminals in any other room or outside.


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[Assistant] With minor variations, these were the rules for the next six years.


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[Assistant] Now you spent some time in solitary confinement and


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[Assistant] A definite schedule for personal reflection and appraisal. This included a two hour worship service in the morning and a similar one in the evening.


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[Assistant] I spent much time praying, talking informally with God.


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[Assistant] And recalling as many scriptures, verses, and bible stories as I could.


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[Assistant] I also revived the words and tunes to songs from a Tennessee Ernie Ford album that I'd enjoyed on the Kitty Hawk.


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[Assistant] Once in a while I would start humming too loudly and a guard would bang his rifle against the door. I spent more and more time thinking about intangibles. The purpose for living.


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[Assistant] Because the tangibles which I had identified with were no longer present. My aircraft, my ship, my personal possessions.


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[Assistant] This was the onset of a thorough re-examination of my life.


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[Assistant] People might have a tendency just to let their mind wander and maybe it wanders into places they don't want it to wander into.


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[Assistant] Did you somehow catalog the days in your mind?


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[Assistant] You finally get some pair of pants, couple pairs of pants, couple shirts, some underwear, undershirt, toothbrush and some soap, and you


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[Assistant] Are gonna use it for the first time. I stripped and with my little drinking cup doused myself with water, lathered with my new bar of soap, and rinsed, shedding a two-week layer of grime and sweat. Then I shaved using a double-edged razor, which had no handle. At last I was clean.


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[Assistant] No itchy beard, no reeking body. I put on my new clothes and wondered what impressions I would now make on the newly captured POWs.


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[Assistant] Dressed in fresh hablement, I experienced a sublime physical and mental catharsis.


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[Assistant] Even the pain of my wounds seemed to wash away with the filth. 15 minutes later, I was back in my cell, re-inspired to outlast any Vietnamese endeavor to debase me. The door opened.


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[Assistant] I waited for something to happen, and then, in the doorway sauntered in a tall man, back hunched and forehead deeply lined. He studied me with uncertain eyes.


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[Assistant] I established a routine once you got in there and you know, there's a whole chapter in the book called routine and you're waking up at six thirty in the morning. You're doing prayer at that time. You're at seven o'clock. You're, you're practicing piano.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which I like. Right? You're practicing piano. And that was just from memory. You, you, had you ever played piano before?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then at 8 o'clock you're doing push-ups. Yep. And sit-ups and leg lifts and whatever else so you're doing some, some physical training and then you have school, the school bell rings at 9.30am and you guys are, you guys are learning and teaching each other whatever you can possibly teach each other. Whatever subject you were good at, you were gonna teach.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I had to bring this one up too, because you talked about how you didn't have PowerPoint or whatever, you didn't have pens and chalkboards, and here you go.


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[Assistant] And bringing it back to my cell, or I would dream of entering shops containing nothing but rows and rows of pencils. I've never since taken a pencil for granite.


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[Assistant] And to, and to think about that right there. And what, what power a pencil gives you, the power to take notes, the power to create, the power to draw, the power to write. This incredible power comes from this little thing that we just gaff off like it's meaningless. That's right. And for you to have that much appreciation for it that you would dream about it at night. True. Yea, it's incredible. Uh, 10 o'clock you'd eat. And what was the food, what was the food?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Was the hunger, did the hunger go away? Did you, or were you just grinding hunger, or did you just get used to it?


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[Assistant] And, uh, you mentioned in here that in the beginning of confinement, the movies that would get described or created, because people were creating movies too, right, in their heads.


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[Assistant] To triple x over time. So, did anybody come out and, and execute on some of these ideas that they had? Is there anybody that came out and said, yeah, I thought of this movie, I thought of this book.


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[Assistant] Guards. Some of the guards were pretty sadistic.


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[Assistant] And here we go back to the probably the most sadistic practice of all was a game involving mice or puppies. Guards would douse them with gasoline, set them on fire, and turn them loose to squeal and scurry in search of relief from the heat. Then the soldiers would chase them with sticks, playing polo with their live fireballs until the little animals blackened and died.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Book, magazine, newspaper, lyrics to song, written speech, any billboard or anything while you were there that wasn't just 100% propaganda.


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[Assistant] At one point, you got this propaganda newspaper, and it's the front page headline.


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[Assistant] We've discovered a revolutionary method of planting rice. Through extensive research, we have found that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Instead of grasping the rice sprouts and planting them with the palm of the hand facing downward, it is much more efficient to plant the rice sprouts with the palm of the hand facing upward.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] So there's, there's the propaganda coming at you. And there's the advancement of the, you know, them trying to tell the people how we're moving forward in the world. And that was another thing that


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Surprised me, or it didn't surprise me, but how, what their, their understanding, you know, their, their brainwashed, and their understanding of what American culture was like, and when you'd say, well yeaah, I have a car, and I have an air conditioner, to them that was just unbelievable. Because the only people that could afford that in Vietnam were, was the state itself.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And they also thought that a third of Americans were starving to death.


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[Assistant] So that's, you know, something to think about always when you deal with these countries where people are being indoctrinated and they're being fed information from the state. It's going to be, it's going to be lies. And you, you, you, you can't be surprised when they believe something like that. You just have to say, yeah, that's what they believe. How do we re-educate them?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] On that culture or that, that system of government. Back to the book, the Vietnamese rarely exerted themselves. Why should they? If they were gonna get a meal at all, they'd eat regardless of whether they worked for it or not.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it was more important- You were kinda worried about that too in the beginning, right? Like you thought it was something you needed to be concerned about, and then you saw how ridiculous all this was.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A little bit earlier you talked about the communication and what that was all about and you had this, the first time you were in your cell, you hear a little scraping and eventually you go over and it's


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] A little wire and eventually a note comes through it and here we go back to the book. It had a piece of toilet paper tied to it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I unfolded it and found these words. Memorize code, eat note.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The code was easier to memorize than the note was to eat, but I did both. I rechecked the door, sat back down on the honey bucket and tugged on the wire. The code was a series of tugs which represented letters of the alphabet,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And it's, it's basically a 5x5 code. A, B, C, D, G, E, F, G. And that is how you guys communicated. And...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] That had to be. How long does it take to have a conversation with that code? Cause you give, you know, one, two tugs to go down and then one, two, three tugs to go across. How long does it take? These conversations must have taken a long time.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the sneezing, you know, he said so that just was it Morse code the sneezing and wheezing work offing


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Did the guards ever catch on to that 5x5 code?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I mean, that's the same thing. I mean, when we capture prisoners overseas, we don't want to talk to each other. We'd separate them and you don't want them to talk to each other. And at some point you started getting


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Letters. And receiving letters. And how did that change the environment?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And yet those bastards, and I use that term very specifically for this situation, the Dear John letters, they leave those completely good to go and turn those over.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The chain of command that you guys...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, here you are in this prison camp and you guys all, you know, you figured out, you realize we need to have a chain of command and you put that structure into place and


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] When you did that, did that, I mean, it seems like it would've, it seems like that gave you guys so much strength as a group to get in the chain of command, to organize yourselves. It seemed like that gave you guys so much strength and fortitude as you were there.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And on top of that, and this is what I've really


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[Assistant] One of the big points I wanted to talk about today was what you're just hitting on is that people have this idea that the military chain of command is this rigid structure and that's why it survives and that's what, but you guys were put into a position


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And this really became clear. One section of the book here, I'm gonna read that.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What you were dealing with and how challenging this leadership position was for the people that were leading. So here we're going back to the book.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Making sure that everyone was on our team was the first of many objectives. Understanding the rules of the game was the second. It was assumed that all of us had a basic knowledge of the military discipline and the code of conduct.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] This code, a very general document, was open to many interpretations. How we construed the code often depended on the severity of the situation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] No longer could we pick up a telephone and call the Pentagon for advice.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The broad spectrum of the code divided the men into at least two groups. Those who were disciplinarians by nature and interpreted the code strictly and those who were liberal and rendered the code loosely. We called these two groups the Tough Guys and the Softies. But this is the key part right here. Softie was not derogatory.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The name simply indicated a different approach to the code. Tough guys, who referred to the line, I will never surrender of my own free will, sometimes flaunted their incorrigibility and taunted the guards.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Regardless of our attitudes, we were all in the same boat. Each of us had acquiesced to the Vietnamese control to some extent, whether accepting cigarettes or bowing to guards. The line which separated the tough guys from the softies was often unclear.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The important thing was to display unity, regardless of our individual philosophies. We clearly understood that the Vietnamese would capitalize on any chinks they found in our armor.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Unity didn't evolve automatically, learning its value required from us such introspection and sacrifice. How could a camp SRO appease the softies if he interpreted the code too strictly? Or if he was too lax for the tough guys?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] His only association being a tap on the wall or a scribbled message. To meet this impractical setting, the SRO wielded gentle sticks of diplomacy.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] They knew we were not boots, meaning boot camp guys fresh out of boot camp, who, who, who asked how high at the command to jump. We were all trained leaders who acted independently.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] We were very alone in answering these questions. Once I received an order, Plum, request you communicate with Captain Abbott at all costs.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] What did the SRO mean by at all costs? Did it include being caught and put in leg irons for months at a time?


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] The way that that is laid out, it reflects...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And I think that the way that this comes out, and that probably is one of the reasons why, you know, I didn't know about the, the, uh, facts that you just told me about the only 4% having PTSD. I mean, and obviously you rattled off all the successful POWs that came out of this horrible situation.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] As subordinates to say, look, I'm getting this.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Advice, right? This is so called advice from the boss. I respect it. I'm gonna act on it. Not because I have to, but because I understand the mission. I understand why we're doing this. And therefore it's not something that's being imposed on me. It's something that I am accepting and pushing forward of my own accord.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And then you guys started taking the broad code of conduct and specifying it.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] You know, not aiding the Vietnamese in whitewashing the truths, uhm, the resistance, how, what level of resistance you were going to give when you were, when you were


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] In, uh, interrogated how much resistance you were gonna give with, and, and, Rezcon 6 was just, you know, military bearing, and then Rezcon 1 was straight up hunger strike.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the other thing was that how you stayed unified was by not accepting favors. And then you had just the dichotomy of leadership, right? You got a balance between, hey, if I can accept a favor, and it's gonna help us, and it's gonna make me healthier, it's gonna, then I should probably do it. But then they put this


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Then the commander, the SRO would put a restriction or a reasonable time frame. So this was a classic example because I already talked about how, how, how in love you were with pencils at this point and at some point you got a pencil. Somehow you got a, they gave you a pencil.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And, you know the word spread that you guys had a pencil.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And the, the, the report or the, the direction came back was, okay, you have 30 days to get more pencils, so we're all equal, or you gotta give the pencil back. Right. And you didn't get any more pencils, and you had to give that pencil back. Yep. That's...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] But that you can see how when you, uh, how unified you are and how, just like you said, that shows the, the, the guards and the camp leaders.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Hey, we are unified. You can't break us. You can't give somebody some special help and not give it to everyone. Yep. Unbelievable.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Now you started talking about this a little earlier and I had to dig a little bit deeper on it because I think it hits a pertinent message, right? So when you talk about living with somebody


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Sometimes I feel like this with Echo and we're, you know, we don't even live with this guy, but sitting in this podcast thing for, and you start saying, okay, that's good. What, what things start to grind on you and irritate you. So whether they were exercise, you get a guy that's going to exercise while you're trying to sleep or you get a guy that snores.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Which, if you've ever dealt with somebody that snores, they can't help but they don't even know that they sound like a chainsaw in your room. And you deal with, you might get roomed up with somebody that snores every single night. And the worst thing about somebody that snores is when you start thinking that it bothers you,


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] I'm gonna take those idiosyncrasies that bothers me about you, and I'm gonna take the blame on myself. I shouldn't be bothered by this, and I'm the one that can't let it bother me. And that is a huge...


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] And you're all's attitude was, no, you know what? My attitude is, you don't need to change. I need to change. I need to become more.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] Accepting of the way you are. That's a big deal. If you can make that transition in your life, you'll be a much happier person.


[User] Please transcribe this text

[Assistant] It's, it's one of those things where it really is a game changer because now