November 27, 2025 • 58 mins
#193 - Some stories ask for courage. This one demands it. Marine veteran Rand Timmerman returns to share a raw, graphic, and deeply human account of Vietnam—what he saw, what he did to survive, and what it took to live with those memories when the shooting stopped. We open with a trigger warning for good reason: a suicide on his first night in-country, chaotic airlifts into hot zones, and an accidental death that still haunts him. Rand walks us through helicopter gunner missions where landing meant risking a minefield, and a midair struggle over a pilot’s unsecured revolver that ended with a prisoner out one door and Rand hanging from a skid at altitude.
The ground war was no less brutal. In a reaction platoon ambush, his unit ran out of ammo; he fixed bayonet, fought, and fled to a river where he hid for days while grenades exploded nearby. Rescue pulled him into another horror—collecting bodies after a C-130 crash that obliterated a village—then onto a hospital ship where he realized he was “okay” only by comparison to a Marine who’d lost his jaw. That moment shifted his mindset from terror to cold acceptance: do the job, and let go of what you can’t control.
Coming home brought a different kind of wound. Rand was shoved and called “baby killer” at LAX, learned to hide his uniform, and followed his father’s order to bury the war deep. He built a life—law school, family, work—until the nightmares flooded back, dragging him into years of alcohol-fueled numbness. The turning point arrived at the VA and through a 12-step path that replaced isolation with service. Today, Rand mentors veterans and chronic relapsers, writes to heal, and speaks with a clarity that cuts through myth: PTSD recovery is possible, purpose is medicine, and telling the truth can save lives.
If stories of resilience, veteran mental health, and trauma recovery matter to you, press play. Then share this with someone who needs hope, subscribe for more powerful journeys, and leave a review to help others find the show.
To learn more about Rand and get a copy of his book, "A Spiritual Passage" check out his website www.randtimmerman.com.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
My guest today is someone you might remember, Ran
(00:02):
Timmerman from episode 174.
This time, Ran opens up abouthis life as a soldier in Vietnam
and he doesn't hold back.
What you'll hear is graphic,honest, and unforgettable.
This is a story of survival,pain, and ultimately the human
spirit.
Welcome to Journey with Jake.
This is a podcast aboutadventure and how through our
(00:23):
adventures we can overcome thechallenges of life that come our
way.
While I expect you will learnsome things about different
adventures, this show willentertain you.
Each episode will featuredifferent guests or guests as
they share experiences andstories of the different
adventures they have been on.
Not only will you beentertained, but you'll also
hear the failures and trialseach guest faces what they have
(00:45):
done or are doing to overcomethe hardships that come their
way.
My goal is to take each of us ona journey through the
experiences of my guests withthe hope that you'll be
entertained and inspired toovercome your day-to-day
challenges.
After all, it's all about thedestination.
That's it.
(01:20):
Today's episode is a bonusconversation, a powerful and
emotional follow-up with myfriend Rand Timmerman.
If you missed our firstconversation together, that was
episode 174, where Rand sharedhis journey on the Appalachian
Trail alongside his brother.
It was an incredible story ofperseverance and brotherhood.
In this bonus episode, we gomuch deeper.
(01:41):
Rand opens up about his time asa soldier in Vietnam, and I want
to give a clear trigger warningbefore we dive in.
Rand shares in graphic detailsome of what he saw and
experienced during the war.
Moments that still haunt him tothis day.
In fact, after our conversation,Rand told me he was going to
have a hard time sleeping thatnight because of the memories
that surfaced.
(02:03):
This episode is raw, emotional,and incredibly brave.
It's a look into the cost of warand the resilience of the human
heart.
I'm so grateful to Ran for hishonesty and willingness to share
his story.
Well, this is awesome for me.
I'm sitting here looking at RanTimmerman, who is my guest from
episode 174.
It's awesome to have you back,Rand.
(02:24):
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Jake.
Really appreciate it.
The main reason I'm having youback is because you had so many
experiences, so many stories.
Really about the war.
We touched on the war a littlebit.
It was kind of who your journeyand who you are, but then we
really focused on your trip withyour brother through the
Appalachian Mountains.
That trip was a huge part ofwhat we talked about.
(02:46):
But you had all kinds ofexperiences in Vietnam and you
kind of touched on a few ofthem, but not a whole lot.
So I kind of wanted to dive intothat and talk about that
experience you had there.
So when you first found out I'mgonna be going to Vietnam, what
was going through your mind?
SPEAKER_01 (03:02):
You know, it was a funny thing.
I wanted to go to Vietnam.
I came from a very rural family,very poor.
I went to college.
Only person my family ever wentto college, and I'm I'm uh in my
fourth semester.
I changed my uh major threetimes.
The third time I changed it touh psychology because I knew it
was a nut job.
(03:23):
Because I didn't know what Iwanted to do, you know.
I knew I was a latent alcoholic.
I had figured that out at 13,and um I could never make big
decisions without getting drunkfor some reason.
So I ended up in a bar inOswego, New York.
I was going to OswegoUniversity.
I had saved up my money, I'mworking three jobs, I'm a
janitor from midnight to eighto'clock, cleaning toilets in my
(03:45):
old high school, pin setter in abowling alley.
I got no money, I don't knowwhat I want to do.
And I get drunk in this bar, andMonday morning the owner comes
in.
I hear I come to or whateverwhen he puts a key in the door
and he comes in, never says aword to me, goes over, turns the
radio on.
I'm laying there, hung over, andthey're talking about the 1st
(04:07):
Marine Division in Vietnam.
And to me, it was my gatewayout.
My French Foreign Legion.
So, yeah, and a month later, I'mdown in Syracuse at Memorial,
well, whatever it was, and I'mraising my hand, just you know,
just taking the oath to defendmy country against all enemies,
(04:27):
foreign and domestic.
And um shortly after that, I'mon a bus with 40 guys going to
Paris Island, South Carolina,and for about 20 of them are
drafted.
So they're not happy.
And the two guys that are on thebus are drill instructors from
Paris Island with theirclipboards, and these these guys
are going, I'm on the wrong bus.
(04:48):
I'm supposed to go to Fort Sill.
Well, no, you're not.
You're you're gonna be in theMarine Corps, and you know what,
Jake, to their credit, aboutthree weeks later, they were
okay.
They were okay, they they allsucked it up, you know.
And that first week was toughthere because we got down there,
(05:08):
they weren't ready for us.
The Marine the Vietnam War hadjust started to really crank.
The Marine Corps was about200,000 standard, you know,
manpower.
And that year, and uh the nexttwo years it went up to a
million.
So all the recruit depots werereally cranking.
They reduced 12 weeks' trainingdown into eight.
So I got caught into all that,and then went to uh Camp Geiger
(05:33):
and Camp Lejeune.
I went to uh typing course, andthen we went out to Camp
Pendleton to do the finaladvanced combat training.
We got out there, two thingshappened, one funny and one not.
So we're all done, we're gonnago to Vietnam within a couple of
days, and then the Marine Corps,they never told you what they
were gonna do.
(05:54):
The whole idea was that you hadto be prepared for anything.
We marched to this big hangar oncement that seems to go on for
miles, hotter than heck.
They reversed the platoon.
So for the first time, insteadof being the last guy to go in,
whatever we're doing, I'm thefirst.
So I walk in this hangar, take acouple of turns, I'm in the main
(06:17):
bay, and there's two, there's arow, two guys, two, a column of
corpsmen with inoculation guns.
So what we're doing at thatpoint, we're getting our shots.
So I walked down this gauntlet,I think it was eight corpsmen,
two, four on each side, withthese great big guns, and
they're hammering my shoulders,right?
(06:39):
My arms giving me the shots.
Well, I flinched a couple times,and then I walked towards the
daylight where the battalion wasstanding outside, and the blood
is running down my legs or downmy arms and off my fingertips.
I mean, like a river, right?
And I walk outside.
No, they don't know what's goingon, right?
They're just all standing therein formation.
(07:00):
Marines started fainting.
I mean, by the dozens.
There's like 1,200 of us in thatbattalion, right?
It was insane.
SPEAKER_00 (07:10):
So they see you coming out of there bleeding,
and they're like, what's goingon?
SPEAKER_01 (07:12):
I don't know what's going on, right?
Yeah.
Insane.
Funny as hell, really.
Well, not so funny the next day.
We had another formation.
I think it was our last one, andsome sergeant comes from
somewhere with a clipboard andcalls my name.
And so I had to walk from theback of the battalion all the
way to the front.
I come to attention in front ofhim, and he says, You're going
on mess duty for 30 days.
(07:34):
I said, What?
You're going on mess duty for 30days.
The next 30 days, Jake, I wasgetting up at 4 a.m., going down
to the mess hall, going into thekitchen, sitting on a stool,
peeling potatoes, 10 foot highpile of potatoes when I began in
the morning, and I peeled themall day long till whatever it
took.
Usually it was six or seveno'clock at night.
(07:56):
Thirty days straight.
I was so angry.
Were you punished?
SPEAKER_00 (08:03):
Like what was the deal?
SPEAKER_01 (08:04):
No, I don't know.
I to this day I don't know.
The problem with it was is Inever, you know, they talk about
the the band of brothers.
My band was gone.
My brothers were gone.
They're gone, they're gone.
And it had a major a majorimpact on one episode that I
will tell you about.
It's very painful, but anyway,so I at the end of that 30 days,
(08:25):
I ended up going to Okinawa.
And then I flew over to Dananginto the first Marine Air Wing,
which ironically, a couple yearslater, I would be a member of
the air wing.
I had no idea that.
So I get there, it's almostnighttime, it's pouring buckets,
the monsoon season has started,and I'm by myself, basically,
(08:46):
and I have to go to my unit,which is the first Marine
Division, ironically.
And then, you know, what we hadto do, you had to find your own
way there.
I had to hit a right uh ride ona six by a big truck, and I
think I ended up in a Jeep, andfinally I get to the
headquarters battalion.
It's I don't know, 10 o'clock atnight.
There's a guy there assigned tome, takes me to the armory
(09:06):
because it's open 24 hours aday.
Marines are coming and out allthe time, and gets me, you know,
my rifle grenades, you know,flag jacket, all my 782 gear,
everything, takes my duffel bag,and then this guy's taking me in
the rain to the transition tentwhere I'm gonna stay overnight.
Now it's a tent, but it's allsandbagged.
And we're walking up to it, andyou kind of see the glow because
(09:28):
there's guys in there withlights and stuff, you know.
And just as uh my guide startedto open the tent, there was a
bang.
unknown (09:35):
What the hell?
SPEAKER_01 (09:37):
That was a shot.
And the tent explodes, there'speople running yelling, medic,
medic, medic, and all thisstuff, and some marine comes out
and says, Don't go in there.
My guide leaves, so I'm standingthere in the pouring rain.
Eventually, uh, really quick,some Marines come, I think it
was a medic for sure, and thenthey bring the body of the
(09:58):
Marine out.
And then I go in the tenteventually.
There's one cot empty, whichwould have been his, right?
And I go sit on it, and now I'mshaking.
I don't even know what thehell's going on.
Well, I just kind of listen tothese guys because they're
talking up a storm, and they hadjust come out of the field.
They're gonna go home the nextday, right?
(10:18):
Turns out they all got theirmail, and then Vietnam, you only
got your mail about once amonth.
So you get in a big bundle withrubber bands around it, and it
turned out that when he got hisbundle, he was looking for some
special letters, and he foundthe most recent one, and he
opened it up and it said, DearJohn, I hate to have to tell you
this, but I met somebody else,and it's been a real whirlwind,
(10:40):
and we got married.
And he picked up his pistol andshot himself in the head.
And I thought, oh my god, whathave I gotten myself into?
It's just uh unbelievable.
Because I was kind of a one-off,I ended up, I mean, I would be
typing sometimes because I hadbeen I had multiple what they
call multiple militaryoccupational specialties, MOSs.
(11:04):
I had an O311, that's a grunt,you know, an infantryman.
I had a machine gun, I think itwas 0841, something like that.
But anyway, so I was kind of autilitarian, right?
I could do a whole bunch ofdifferent things.
I ended up being a machine gunon a helicopter, courier, I
would go out on trucks as arifleman in the passenger seat
to provide security.
(11:24):
I was a leader of a squad, ofinfantry squad, all kinds of
jobs, right?
Depending on what where I wasneeded, I guess, or somebody had
to fill a slot.
Uh I went out in the field and Iget told to go down to a
platoon.
I'm at the I'm at the companyheadquarters.
Go down to that platoon.
There's they're gettingprisoners, you're going to bring
(11:45):
one of them back.
So I said, okay.
Just follow that trail, go downthere, they'll meet you down
there.
They're down there.
I said, I know, I can hear themshooting.
They're in a firefight, right?
They're having a battle.
So I walk down this trail, andyep, there's a prisoner.
He's he's properly secured.
So I take him, I walk back out.
(12:07):
They told me to go to the to apoint, it was a supply point,
and rendezvous point, whateveryou want to call it.
And so when I get there, so I'maway from this battle on a trail
with the prisoner by myself,pulling him along.
Get to that point, there'snobody there.
So I sit him down on the ground,I wrap the rope around a tree.
He's blindfolded, his hands aretied behind him, the rope goes
(12:29):
around his waist.
It's he's tied up the properway.
I got involved with anotherprisoner that wasn't, and that
makes a big difference.
But he was properly secured, andthen I tied him to the tree.
And then the six buys, thetrucks start coming, it was
supplies, right?
The second one that pulled intothis landing, he jumps out and
he yells my name, and it's oneof the guys I trained with,
(12:50):
right?
So, like, we're like, you know,boisterously, hey man, start
talking to each other, andtrucks are coming in and out,
and I'm not paying anyattention, and all of a sudden I
hear this, we hear this scream,just blood curdling scream.
And the the driver I'm talkingto said, Ran or Timor, what's
(13:10):
what's that?
I said, Oh shit.
And I raced down, and sureenough, that uh one of the
trucks had backed into the treethat my prisoner was tied on.
He immediately pulled away, andI ran around behind the truck,
and I just he was his chest wascrushed.
He's dying.
There's there's there's nopossibility.
There's no medic anyway, there'snothing they could have done.
(13:32):
But he's conscious, so he'sscreaming, the blood is coming
out of his eyes, his ears, hisnose, his mouth.
I mean, I untied him, kind oflaid him down, and then took his
blindfold off, and he's justlooking at me, and I was holding
his hands, and I watched himdie.
Yeah.
And I thought, oh my God.
Oh my God.
And the worst part was how manyMarines' lives could have been
(13:56):
saved based on what he mighthave told us?
You know what I mean?
The Marine Corps never I was notcastigated by anyone for it.
I don't know.
I think they kind of knew I wasreally upset about it myself
because it was a really baddereliction of duty on my part.
Uh I also got bored a lot.
Walking around the jungle andsweating your balls off and and
(14:18):
sometimes fighting.
A lot of it was skirmishing.
Somebody shoot at you, you shootat them.
It's kind of like civil war.
You really don't know what thehell's going on, right?
You don't know if you've runinto a battalion or is it
another squad and they're just,you know.
So there would be a lot ofshooting at times and not a
whole hell of what going on.
And so I got a little bit boredafter a while and volunteered to
be a gunner on a machine gunneron a helicopter.
SPEAKER_00 (14:42):
So I gotta tell you, when I think of Vietnam, you
always see those pictures orthose films of those helicopters
and those gunners on thosehelicopters.
So that's kind of what comes tomind for me when I think about
that.
So yeah, I want to hear kind ofabout some of those.
That's gotta be a pretty wildexperience.
SPEAKER_01 (15:30):
Oh my God.
It was scary as hell.
It was it was like being on thebest rolly coaster in the world
with surrounded by an enemy witha machine gun.
I mean, it was just heartpounding.
Those pilots were fantastic.
They could do things with thoseheavy you wouldn't believe was
possible.
(15:50):
You either down on the right onthe top of the trees or the rice
patties, or you were 3,000 feetup.
There wasn't, you know, youweren't cruising around, joy
riding.
It was it would be one heck of aride, but uh it was dangerous as
hell.
Two things happened.
One was we got we went into uhwhere some marines were
fighting, and uh it was so itwas a hot zone.
(16:12):
We went in and that pilot didn'tland.
So the other gunner, he'sengaged, he's on the side where
the enemy are shooting at us, sohe's shooting away.
And I'm I'm I jumped down,grabbed ammo and water, took it
in.
I brought out a wounded marine.
I did that a couple times, andit's hard.
The helicopter's not on theground, so it's bouncing around,
that everything's flying.
(16:33):
When we so when we get back,well, on the way back, I'm on
the radio.
Uh, once I got back in mystation, my machine gun and
everything, and then uh and Igo, uh, Captain, you know, it'd
be a lot easier if you couldland this thing.
He said, I'll talk to you aboutthat later.
So we're we get back to thebase, you know.
I'm taking the machine gun up,we're doing everything we do.
He gets he gets out of the uhhelicopter after he turns all
(16:56):
the switches off and everythingand starts to walk away.
I go, uh sir, uh, I don'tunderstand.
Why you why didn't you land?
We it would have been a lotbetter for all of us.
The machine gunner could haveshot more accurately, you know,
whatever.
And he says, You don'tunderstand anything, doofus,
basically.
And he's got the chart.
Now it's a map, but in theaviation end of it, they call it
a chart, right?
(17:16):
So he opens up the chart, whichhas a map where we are, and he
puts his finger on it.
He says, You see that?
I said, Yeah, and he says, Doyou see what it says?
I said, Oh.
It says, probable minefield.
And my brain was like, you know,I'd really rather not know that.
SPEAKER_00 (17:37):
So that's why he kept you up in the air.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (17:40):
Yeah.
And then there were two otherthings that happened that
actually changed my life uhdramatically in a bad way later
on.
So I'm gonna relate these alittle bit.
On another helicopter mission.
See, I was a I was a sub.
So every day when I went to thewe would go to the the command
center, the operations center,which is a big tent, basically.
(18:02):
Well, I sometimes it was aquantit hunt, but and then you'd
just get your or you know,they'd have charts and
everything up there, and thenokay, you're gonna be assigned
this helicopter, you're gonna bethe gunner on the left side,
whatever.
So I wasn't, I wasn't flyingwith a crew, right?
Like some of them, or I was justfilling in for the guy that got
killed the day before or was insick bay or whatever.
(18:23):
One time I got on the plane, andand these helicopter pilots are
kind of like cowboys, right?
Their hair is a lot longer thanmine.
They kind of they're living thegood life in a sense.
They're fighting, I mean,they're doing a really hard job,
right?
Dangerous job.
But nighttime, they got the warmshowers, they got the great
child, they got the the booze,whatever.
(18:43):
I get on this helicopter, andthe pilot has got a western,
he's got like a 38 revolver in acowboy holster with the bandana,
you know, the belt with the forthe shells and everything
hanging from the back of hisseat.
And I said, sir, uh that's notreally a good place for that.
(19:05):
And then he told me to go havesex with my mother.
So, well, guess what?
Later that day, uh, we picked upsome prisoners, three of them.
And I loaded them on thehelicopter.
This is another deal that wenever shut down the helicopter,
we never landed, whatever.
It's a scrambling, it's a mess,right?
I put them on there.
Now, these guys are not, theyhaven't been secured properly.
(19:28):
They got blindfolds on, buttheir hands are tied in front of
them, not behind them, and theydon't have a rope around their
waist, so they can't so they canso guess what?
One of them shoves his blindfoldup, sees the pistol.
I hear the the uh captainyelling in my headset, he's got
my pistol, do something.
(19:49):
And now I'm outside thehelicopter on my station, right?
I turn and look and I see theprisoner going for the pistol.
So I unhook and jump in, and thenext thing I know, I'm fighting
with this prisoner for thepistol, right?
Well, guess what the pilot'sdoing?
He's doing this with theairplane.
He's trying he's trying to dumpus out.
(20:09):
Now I didn't realize that itimmediately, but that's what he
was doing.
So what happened was I got thepistol, the prisoner went out
one side of the helicopter,right out the bay door, and I
went out the other side with thepistol in my hand.
The helicopter was tipped likethat when the prisoner went out,
and then it went like this, andit threw me the other way,
(20:31):
right?
If you can picture that.
And I would have sailed rightoff completely, but the other
gunner was kind of watching,looking to one.
He saw what was happening, hesaw me come flying towards him
and by him, and he tried to grabme, but he couldn't.
He's but he hit me.
And all I knew was I hip feltthis wicked pain, and then I'm
realized I'm hanging on this,I'm underneath the helicopter.
(20:53):
I can see the call sign on thebottom of the helicopter.
And I and then I realizedinstantly it's not getting
smaller.
This is good.
Because I was I had my legswrapped around the skid.
SPEAKER_00 (21:06):
Oh wow.
How high were you at this point?
SPEAKER_01 (21:09):
I don't know.
I wondered about that.
It could have been a thousand,two thousand feet.
We were up.
I mean, it was holy cow.
No, we were well up at thatpoint.
And anyway, on the way back, theuh captain said, I don't want
anybody telling anybody anythingabout this.
I will do all the tack talking.
Understood, and yes, sir.
(21:29):
I I was thankful, right?
So we get back to base, did ournormal stuff.
Next morning I show up theoperations tent at 4 a.m.
There's two MPs there.
Then the next day I'm 200 milesfurther north.
Back pounding the ground again.
SPEAKER_00 (21:46):
Really?
SPEAKER_01 (21:48):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (21:49):
Yeah.
So you got in trouble for that?
SPEAKER_01 (21:52):
Well, no, but they got rid of me.
SPEAKER_00 (21:54):
Okay, but they got you out of there.
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (21:56):
Yeah, no, I didn't get in trouble for, but you made
sure I was going my temporaryduty was over.
SPEAKER_00 (22:03):
Gotcha.
Wow, okay.
So then they sent you north backto just infantry type work.
SPEAKER_01 (22:09):
Yeah.
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (22:11):
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (22:11):
So, and then eventually they made me a
Mustang lieutenant.
I did my so I was a lieutenantthe last couple of months.
One other thing happened, Ijoined a re a reaction platoon.
It was a special combat unitthat could be sent out in
emergencies to kind of try tochange the direction of the
battle, if you will.
And I volunteered for it becauseit was stationed at the
(22:32):
headquarters battalion.
Yippee! Showers, you know, hotchow, beer, cold beer.
So, you know, like one night aweek or maybe two, you could go
drink, right?
You would be like off duty.
The other nights you'd be uhwe'd do patrols or uh ambushes
or perimeter.
A lot of times we just didperimeter around the base and uh
(22:55):
stuff like that.
So it was kind of you know, itwas decent.
But then uh we went out on amission and uh it was really
bad.
We knew it was gonna be bad.
It uh it was monsoon, it'sraining.
It didn't start out well.
We ended up walking all night toget to where we had to be.
(23:16):
At daybreak, we got hit.
Now we're nobody knows for surewhere we are, right?
And anyway, long story short, weran out of ammo.
And I had to use my bayonet.
And I ran.
I got the hell out of there.
I used my last two bullets to uhkill the two VC that were almost
(23:37):
got me.
And then I spent uh a coupledays in or around a river.
And finally, the second or Ithink it was the second day, I
heard a tank.
During the day I was in thisriver.
I mean, I could see VC.
They wanted to get me really,really bad.
And it did in the nighttime Icould get out of it for a little
bit.
But I mean, uh the heels of myboots fell off.
(24:00):
I'm waterlogged.
All I had was my rifle, mybayonet, my clothes ended up
pretty much being off of me.
I mean, just ripped to shreds.
And then one one morning I hearduh a tank, and I go, I don't
think they got a tank.
It's gotta be our forces.
I was going downstream.
I knew if I went downstream longenough, I would come back to
(24:21):
something, you know, a villageor whatever.
And anyway, long story short, itwas a marine unit.
When I came out of the jungle, Ithink if the initial reaction
was that I was a VC, right?
SPEAKER_00 (24:32):
I mean, I'd just be draggled.
Yeah, tattered clothes if youhad any clothes.
I mean, you were just a mess.
SPEAKER_01 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm I'm leaving a blood trail.
I got 14 guys pointing their uhM14s at me, like, no, I'm one of
you.
Don't you you know?
And then a few hours later, Iended up in this.
I'm back, I'm at theheadquarters battalion, 1st
Marine Division, in a bunkerthat I had no idea existed.
Way down in the ground, I'm inthe cement bunker.
(25:01):
It is colder than hell because Igot air conditioning and I'm
practically naked, and it's fullof generals, and it's like it
was like out of a movie, youknow, where they have the
geographic big thing in themiddle of the table that shows
all the terrain, and then youmissed the little things.
That's what it was, that's whatit was, right?
And they had all these things onthe walls, and and there's a
(25:21):
couple of generals in there, andthis general is showing me a
map, and he's going, show mewhere you were, and I said,
Well, sir, you know, and we werehere, and we went this way, and
I but I don't know where we wereexactly, and and then he then
he's going, you know, Marines,you're not you're not supposed
to run, you're not supposed toleave the battlefield.
(25:43):
Uh-huh.
Uh I I was speechless.
I was speechless.
Anyway, after a few hours ofquestioning me and all that, I
ended up in a sick bay.
And then I I passed out, went tosleep, whatever.
And but it felt like 10 minutes,Jake.
Somebody was waking me up.
Shake, get up, get up.
What I just got here.
No, get up.
I said, Why are you getting me,why are you waking me up,
(26:04):
Sergeant?
And he says, you're going back.
I'm not going back.
He says, You're going back,because you gotta sh you gotta
help us find the bodies.
So I ended up going back.
And when I got back there, wellwhat it was was the a C-130 had
crashed.
Uh would have been southwest ofDenang.
(26:24):
And when it did, it wiped outhalf of a village.
And it was j I had never seenanything like it.
Some of the Marines hadsurvived, actually.
And the ones that had gottenkilled were and the wounded were
so there was no Marines leftthere when I got there anymore,
but there was a lot of bodies.
(26:46):
So we're walking around puttingpeople in body bags, and I I saw
this shoe of a child.
It was um, you know, like aflip-flop, but it's made out of
a they made them out of tires.
Right?
And then they just put stringsthrough them to to wear them.
And I saw one bottom side up andI pulled it out of the ground.
(27:07):
And it had a kid's foot in thelower part of the leg, and I
started puking.
I just started and the sun, itstopped raining, the sun had
come out, it's like 100 degrees,100 degrees, 100% humidity.
And I walk over in the what'sleft of the village, and then
the next thing I know, I'msurrounded by these little kids,
(27:29):
three, four, five years old.
And they're all going, Mr.
Marine, Mr.
Marine, they would do this allthe time, even when it was
nothing going on, right?
They come up to you because theywant you to give them something.
I gave them all my water, I gavethem all the candy I had, all
the food I had, I gave themeverything.
And I was thinking, I wonder howmany of their fathers we killed.
You know?
(27:49):
And all of a sudden I was drunk,Jake.
I'm staggering, I'll neverforget this.
I'm staggering around, like,what's wrong with you?
You know, I was sweaty oneminute, and then I was dry the
next, and and anyway, and then afew days later, I am surrounded
by a white light.
I go, what the hell?
(28:10):
And then I'm moving my handsaround, and I I'm I'm in a bed
with sheets.
At first I thought, you're dead.
You know?
Yeah, and then so I'm right, andI hear this gurgling right next
to me.
And then finally, I can't openmy eyes.
It's it's it's it's verypainful.
The light is so bright, I can'teven open my eyes.
(28:30):
So I had, you know, flooding myeyes and stuff, a few minutes go
by.
I can hear people down at theend of the I I realize I'm in a
sick bay.
I'm on a ship because it's I canfeel it moving, right?
It was a USS Repose.
It was one of the Navy vethospital ships.
And uh I keep hearing thisgurgling.
Eventually I got my eyes openand I look and I can see there's
(28:52):
and I've got tubes in my armsand stuff.
And oh, I did a personalinventory.
So I realized kind of what wasgoing on.
I said, Oh, you better figureout what's why are you here?
And then I so I started my toes,worked up to my head, and I
realized there's nothing wrongwith you.
You just got dehydrated orsomething, you know.
Because I didn't know how I gotthere, but I said there's
(29:14):
there's nothing then I realizedyou don't have a million-dollar
wound.
We always talked about amillion-dollar wound where if
you, you know, I also if I getshot in the elbow, I still
could, I could still have myarm.
And they're gonna have to sendme home because I won't be able
to fight anymore.
That's for me.
I was gonna be my million-dollarwound.
So finally, I roll over to seewhat this gurgling is next to
(29:37):
me, and there's a marine therein the bed, and he's got his
head looks like a basketball,only it's all cotton.
And he's and all he's got islike uh right they left his eyes
open.
He's got the blackest eyes I'veever seen.
He's got tubes in his mouth, andthe bottom of it's all blood and
everything, and he's gurglinglike crazy.
And his eyes are and we'relooking at each other, and I go,
(29:59):
Wow, you got a million-dollarwound.
And now he goes really crazy.
Like he's yelling at me, or hecan't yellow, and I roll back
out of my back, and I'm like,what the hell?
And then all of a sudden I lookat him again, I go, he has no
lower jaw.
His jaw is gone.
How the hell?
(30:20):
It was a transformationalexperience for me because two or
three days later, I'm back inthe jungle, right?
And I realize.
You know what, Rand, you'reokay.
You're okay.
I just I got some peace.
I came to a place where I wasokay with my situation.
I realized I didn't have anycontrol over it anyway, and I
(30:42):
wasn't gonna be as afraidanymore.
I'm just gonna do what I gottado, and whatever happens,
happens.
Right?
It changed my mindset a littlebit.
And then you became fatalistic.
I figured I'm probably not gonnamake it out of here alive, but
I'm gonna do the best I can.
That was it.
And that was my mindset for therest of the time there.
But the reason I'm telling you,and there was other stuff that
(31:04):
happened, but telling you thesebecause it had a huge impact
afterwards, but I didn't knowwhat how that was gonna work out
for me.
SPEAKER_00 (31:11):
Well, I do just go back to that moment, you know,
where you're I mean, gown you'rein you're in the water, hiding,
seeing the enemy.
What kind of fear is that?
Like, cause that I mean, I'mfearful of that, and I mean
you're just telling me thestory.
When you're in that situation,are you just too focused?
Like, how how do you it justseems like it would be
(31:32):
paralyzing the fear?
SPEAKER_01 (31:33):
Yeah, well, what happened was I knew I had two
bullets left.
The rest of my squad is dead.
The machine gun is damaged.
The other Marines around me areall dead or dying.
I have two bullets left.
Uh the enemy is coming at me.
I can see like five of themcoming right at me, and my brain
(31:56):
is thinking two options shootmyself or run.
Because I knew I was a coward,Jake.
I knew I could never stand beinga prisoner and being tortured.
That was my fear.
So I um stabbed the one closestto me and ran.
And I ran right at him.
(32:17):
I knew I couldn't turn my back,right?
Mean call, you're ch you'retrained to just chart, you
always attack.
So I attacked, but I I ran rightthrough him.
I'm I'm getting the hell out ofthere, right?
And so I hoofed right throughthem.
I think everything froze.
It felt like everything stoppedfor like five seconds.
They're they were shocked.
(32:37):
Here's just I'm covered withblood from what I did with the
knife with the bayonet.
So I ran right through them asfast as I can go.
Well, two of them peeled off tocome after me, and I jumped in
the river and I got upunderneath the bank, and I'm
standing there with my M14 likethis, and my receiver is in the
(32:58):
water.
And I'm thinking, I wonder ifthis will shoot underwater.
I didn't think it would.
Well, guess what?
Those two heads popped up rightabove me, and I went bang, bang.
And now I got no more ammo.
Um now I'm really screwed.
So I just I went I wentunderwater and started going
south.
(33:18):
And they started throwinggrenades in the water.
Of course, you don't they don'thave to hit you right they don't
have to be right on you.
Cushing of the even in the watercan kill you.
So anyway, at one point, onewent off on my left and one went
off on my right.
And I'm like, I'm bracketed.
This is not good.
And I'm kind of I'm on thebottom just trying to get away
(33:40):
from you know, keep moving.
And uh, but they didn't throwthe third one, thank God.
And I just stayed in that room.
I come up, get some air, go backdown.
And a couple times I saw, youknow, I saw them, they were
trying to find me for sure.
And I was grateful when it gotdark, but then the next day we
did the same thing pretty muchall day long.
(34:01):
And then another night, and thenthe third day was in the
morning.
I don't know if they had givenup or not.
I hadn't seen any in a while,thank God.
But I wasn't making muchprogress either.
It's a slow way to it was just anightmare.
I don't even know how todescribe it, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (34:15):
At that point, you're just fighting to stay
alive.
SPEAKER_01 (34:18):
Yeah, I did not want to die.
I did not want to die, and Ididn't.
SPEAKER_00 (34:22):
And then you had that other moment that was
transformational for you.
You said something too that youI don't I mean, and you this is
the way you felt at the time.
You know, you said you were acoward, and you know, I'm
sitting here looking at you asthis amazing man.
So to me, you mean you'redefinitely not a coward to me,
but you were feeling that at thetime.
(34:42):
You felt like you ran away.
You felt you felt like you werea coward.
SPEAKER_01 (34:45):
You know, a lot of guys that get medal, I didn't
get any medals.
And I didn't really deserve anymedals either.
The guys that you read aboutthat get the medals, what
happens to them, I think, isthat because when you when
people try to kill you, Jake, Idon't, everybody's a little bit
different, but it really pissedme off.
(35:08):
The idea that somebody wastrying to kill me really made me
very I had no idea how much rageI had.
I mean, I would fight like amaniac to stay alive.
And then but it's verystressful, and sometimes the
guys that get the medals are theones who just say, you know
what, screw it.
I'm just gonna do what I gottado.
I'm just gonna do it, right?
(35:28):
They don't they put theirsurvival out of their mind, and
they just do what they gotta do.
And that's real courage, right?
That's real heroism.
The bravest men, in myexperience, were guys who would
just get, you know, we'd begetting shot up, and then they
would just I remember one inparticular, or one of our
(35:48):
machines.
We were in elephant grass, whichis the worst because we'd walked
out of the jungle, we had to gothrough this elephant grass, and
and we all detested that becauseyou're a sitting duck.
The elephant grass is like uh, Idon't know, it's uh reeds, but
it has very serrated edges.
It will cut you to shreds.
And so there's trails goingthrough it because, you know,
(36:10):
people uh Vietnamese people runaround and it's usually close to
uh rice patties and stuff likethat.
Anyway, we got in this bigbattle in the middle of one of
these things.
We were all, I'm on, I'm down.
A guy next to me has been shotthrough the you can't stick your
head up.
You didn't you do, becausethey're shooting at you from the
jungle.
You can't see that, right?
There's very hard.
(36:30):
And they're they're blastingaway at us.
So and the bullets are goingthrough the grass.
They can't even see us andthey're shooting the shit out of
us.
Excuse my friends.
And then if you stick a head up,you're a dead man, you know?
So you're kind of well, one ofthe guys, this is what happens
to heroes, in my opinion.
They just say, I'm going to, andthey just get up, and that's
what happened in this situation.
One of the machine gunners gotup and just started doing uh
(36:53):
Rambo style, just stood up,started shooting, and started
going forward.
And as soon as he did, in thissituation, the enemy stopped
firing.
They start they started leaving,you know, they're running away.
It changed the whole thing justlike that.
It was amazing.
And he started shooting, andthen a couple other guys got up,
and then we all got up and youknow, the battle ended.
(37:14):
I don't know.
I think he probably got thesilver star at least.
But I did eventually leaveVietnam.
Went to Okinawa.
We got they gave us all new uhclothes pretty much.
They put us in winter greensbecause it was October.
No, it was end of November.
When we when we get back to theStates, that's the uniform of
(37:36):
the day, right?
In those days you couldn't wearutilities off base.
You had to be in your dressuniform if you were not on a
military base.
In winter greens in Okinawa in ahundred degree heat and 100%
humidity, sitting on our doublebags on the uh out on the
outside where the airport werein the airport, right?
And waiting to get on.
And the planes are coming in andout.
(37:56):
Every plane was going to be ourplane, and then at one point a
rock band came out and got on itand and and left.
So we were out, we were on thetarmac, I think for two nights
and three days.
They were bringing sandwichesand water, stuff like that.
So you can imagine we are notcomfortable at all.
Yeah, eventually I complained.
(38:18):
One of the guys said to me, Joe,he says, Rand, or Timmer, he
called me Timmer, or actually hecalled me Lieutenant.
He said, I'm not a I said, I'mnot a lieutenant, I'm a corporal
now.
He said, Well, you gotta dosomething.
So I went over to the dispatcherfor the tenth time, and so they
brought out uh like a bigumbrella that we could so we
were in the shade finallyanyway.
But anyway, so I get into LA andwe all went and got tickets.
(38:41):
I had to get a standby because Ididn't have any money, you're
right.
You know, I made less than athousand dollars for a whole
year in Vietnam.
Yes, in 1967.
My W-2 was$93, something likethat.
I go and get my ticket and I goto the so we all had different
gates because we're all going todifferent places, right?
(39:02):
So all of a sudden I'm alone.
I've been surrounded by Marinesfor 13 months, right?
And now I'm all by myself.
And I go to the gate, and I'venever, you know, I haven't
flown, I've flown a couple timescommercially, but not a lot.
And I get to my gate, andthere's a long line, and they're
starting, they're gonna boardthe plane pretty soon.
And I walk to the front of theline.
(39:23):
I hand the lady my ticket,nobody's saying a word, and then
all of a sudden, this guy comesbarging up, probably 250 pounds,
big guy, 6'3 or whatever, notfat.
And he starts yelling at me, getto the back of the line, baby
killer.
I'm five foot eight.
(39:44):
At that point, I weighed 145pounds when I went to Vietnam.
I was a lean, mean fightingmachine.
That's what my DI told me.
But I'm not anymore.
I'm only I'm I'm just a wreck,pretty much, right?
And then he shoves me hard and Istagger backwards, and there's
this row of stanchions with arope through it, like they do to
(40:06):
guide people, right?
I end up standing by the lastone.
I yank the rope up.
I'm not thinking anymore, Jake.
I'm not thinking at all.
I'm reacting.
And I grab that stanchion by thetop, I'm gonna kill this guy.
I mean, I'm on attack mode.
And then all of a sudden, I'msurrounded by four stewardesses,
(40:26):
and one of them says, Let metake that, you know.
And he's surrounded by, I don'tknow, police.
I don't know, three or four,right?
And he was giving them a hardtime.
They put they could puthandcuffs on him, they take him
away.
He's still screaming at me.
They put me on the plane, nobodyelse got on the plane yet.
They put me on the plane infirst class.
(40:47):
Yeah.
The cap the pilot, the captain,comes and sits down and starts
talking to me.
Turns out he's a Marine Corpsaviator from the Korean War.
SPEAKER_00 (40:59):
Wow.
SPEAKER_01 (41:00):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (41:01):
Good for you.
You know, because I've heardstories about you know the
veterans getting home fromVietnam and just not being
treated good at all.
Just, you know.
And so I won't I wondered aboutthat.
SPEAKER_01 (41:12):
Well, yeah, actually we weren't.
When I so I went home on 30days' leave, and then when I
went down, I went to the uh airwing.
Once I got done with all mywell, actually, I went to OCS, I
went to basic school, you know,I became a second real second
lieutenant after my 30 daysleave.
And then I decided I don't wantto be a grunt anymore.
(41:33):
I didn't want to be in theinfantry.
So I went to the first MarineAir Wing.
I wanted to have some of thosehot showers and good chow,
right?
But we learned, we never wentoff.
We always had to be in our dressuniform when we went on base or
off of base.
But we always, if we were goingoff base, first gas station,
we'd pull in, we'd all go in thebathroom, take our uniforms off,
(41:54):
put our civvies on, come back tobase.
We'd always have a gas station,the closest one to the front
gate, go do the reverse.
I mean, we knew, you know, uh,we had to do that.
When I came back from Vietnam, Iwent out to my I went with my
dad out to the field.
I was on my 30 days leave.
I drank my brains out on my30-day leave.
(42:14):
I also met a girl and we wereengaged when I left.
She became the mother of mythree children.
So I'm going out to the fieldwith my dad, and because he had
a little airport.
We'd made a hangar when I was ayoung boy.
He always he bought usedairplanes.
He was paralyzed with polio fromthe waist down.
But he had been a Mustang pilotduring World War II.
(42:37):
And then he had me and mybrother.
He met my mom, married her, hadme and my brother, got polio
really, really bad.
He had two cousins that gotpolio and died the same day.
Something in our genes.
So he spent eight months in theiron lung.
Eight months.
Can you imagine?
A year in the hospital.
But some of his Air Force Armybuddies, because it was Army Air
(43:00):
Force in World War II, right?
Wasn't just Air Force.
Uh, came when he was out of theiron lung and took him out to an
airport and they got him in aplane, and he realized he could
he might be able to flyairplanes.
He was the best pilot I everknew.
He could do amazing things withairplanes.
But anyway, we're going out thefield.
I probably want me to help himwith something.
And on the way out there, Istarted telling him a little bit
(43:22):
about one of my deals that youand I have been talking about,
right?
And he stops me, wraggling hishands in front of me.
Don't you ever talk about it.
You just forget about it.
You put it, you, you put it backin your brain there somewhere
and close the door on it.
It's over and done with.
Nobody wants to hear about it.
Your Uncle John and your UncleDean, they both fought probably
worse than you did in World WarII, which is not true, but And I
(43:45):
said, Dad, you don't understand.
I'm gonna I'm a combat veteran,enlisted man, it's going to OCS.
I'm gonna be a second lieutenantwith combat experience.
Where the hell do you think I'mgonna go?
And I'll probably be a forwardobserver because I'm going in
the air wing, you know.
And he starts beating me overthe head with a newspaper.
(44:06):
You just listen to me, you dowhat I tell you to, you know,
like I'm 12 years old again.
It was kind of funny in a way.
But you know what?
I took him serious.
I took him serious, and I neverand and veterans don't talk
about combat veterans almostnever we may hang out in hell,
but we don't talk about, we justdon't.
And now a couple years ago, Irealized I got sober.
(44:28):
I had a problem with mydrinking, you remember that
part.
And I got sober, and a coupleyears ago I realized I was still
isolating.
So I started writing all thisstuff down, and then I joined a
veterans writing group, and sonow I meet with guys once a
month and we talk about stuff,and usually not, you know, this
kind of stuff.
When I get to Cherry Point,after all my training and
everything, because we'retalking about transitional
(44:51):
things.
When I got to Cherry Point, itwas a Sunday, and the officer of
the day is a captain, temporarycaptain.
His name was Dale Moan.
He was my drill instructor inParis Island.
He had been a staff sergeant,they promoted him to gunnery
sergeant.
He became a Mustang secondlieutenant, then a first
lieutenant, then a captain.
And when I left Cherry Point acouple years later, I'm a first
(45:14):
lieutenant and he's a gunnerysergeant again.
I mean, talk about crazy, right?
So I get there and we do the,you know, back the hugs and
whatever, really happy to seeeach other and still alive and
all that kind of stuff.
And then he said, Where do youwant to go?
And I said, What do you mean?
And he says, Well, I got a bunchof schools, and he starts
rallying them off.
I go, Rhode Island?
You got something in RhodeIsland?
(45:34):
He said, Yeah.
Jag school, judge advocategeneral school.
I said, What?
Well, I've never been to RhodeIsland.
You know, I had a great career,but uh it's funny.
I was in law school.
I had went back, I came back toSyracuse, New York, and got my
BA, and then went to law school.
And somewhere in there, now I'mmarried, I got two kids, I'm
working three jobs becausethere's no the GI Bill didn't
(45:56):
even pay the tuition atSyracuse.
So I'm struggling financiallyquite a bit, which is probably a
good thing because I don't haveany money to spend on booze, but
and then one night, and I would,you know, Jake, I would think at
times, man, you are so becausethe guys that I had contact with
and some of my old buddies uhdid not do well.
(46:17):
They did not do well, and I justI just got myself dove right
into living life, right?
Education, working, having afamily.
I'm I'm all in.
And I kept thinking, it's kindof weird, you don't seem to have
any issues from it.
And then one night I went tobed, I'm in bed, and all of a
(46:38):
sudden I'm not, I'm in Vietnam.
It's the same old stuff.
It's it's a battle, and I cansmell the gunpowder, I can smell
the blood, I can sm I can smellmanure, I can smell it all, and
I'm like, and then all of asudden I'm wounded and I'm
sliced open.
My innards are in my hands, andI'm trying to put them back in
me, and I'm covered with blood,and I'm screaming, and I realize
(47:01):
I'm dying.
I ran this, there's no out.
There's no way out on this one.
You're done.
And I'm screaming, and then allof a sudden I'm surrounded by a
white light again.
And I look, and my wife is onthe floor over by the bathroom
door, and she pushed the uhlight on, right?
(47:21):
And she's looking at me, and I'mlooking at her, I'm screaming.
And then I realize I'm notcovered with blood, I'm covered
with sweat.
And I am smelling the manure andthe urine.
I avoided myself.
Our bed is destroyed.
And she's looking at me, and I'mlooking at her, and we both knew
(47:43):
that this was bad, that ourlives were not without problems.
SPEAKER_00 (47:49):
Especially, well, especially after the fact that
you were you said you feltpretty normal.
You know, you recognized someother guys were having problems,
but you're like, I'm doing okay,what you know, and then it just
happened to you, you know, outof your control.
SPEAKER_01 (48:00):
So I already knew I had an affiliation for alcohol,
and I and I, you know, I keptmyself under control most of the
time.
And I had a lot of fun drinkingon weekends and stuff like that.
Um life would look normal fromthe outside.
But what I did start doing wasat nighttime, I'd put the kids
to bed, my wife would go to bed,and I would just pound it for
(48:22):
half an hour, an hour.
I never needed more than four orfive hours of sleep, so I would
just basically pass out, Iguess, and the alcohol would
take away, you know, make menumb, and it didn't seem to have
any real bad.
And I would wake up at you know,five o'clock in the morning, I
was self-employed, I'd get up,go to work, you know.
SPEAKER_00 (48:42):
It's interesting because we and we talked about
this before when you're whenyou're on the episode before,
episode 174 or two, for anybodywho wants to go back and listen.
But you know, you talked allabout having to go to the I
think you went to the VA becauseyou were, you know, escorted
there and you know, justdepressed and you know, that
whole that whole bit.
I was in handcuffs, Jake.
(49:04):
And handcuffs, yeah, exactly.
And you were older.
I mean, you were older when thishappened.
You were in what in your 60swhen you finally Yeah, I was 67.
SPEAKER_01 (49:11):
My my drinking didn't get out of hand
completely until my early 60s,and then I struggled.
I, you know, I mean I I would gomonths without drinking because
I knew that I had a problem onceI put it in me that I would lose
control.
And I, you know, I had a greatcareer as an attorney.
I'd done a lot of good things.
(49:32):
Um on the outside, I lookedpretty damn good, you know.
But I knew inside, I knew insideit was I was not right, that it
was getting really bad.
SPEAKER_00 (49:41):
Well, and the thing too, uh, that I think that I
love is the fact that you didovercome this and now you help
others, others who arestruggling with this, which I
think is is is so amazing.
I mean, you talked about how youfelt, you know, you felt like a
coward.
I look at you now, and that isjust that's amazing to me.
And and that's that's a hero tome, someone like you who's who's
(50:03):
helping others who struggle,because you know what it's like.
You know what it's like to nothave that control and to wake up
with that white light around,not knowing where you're
thinking you were in Vietnam,smelling it, feeling it,
destroying your bed and yourwife's in the corner like what
is you know, knowing things areare gonna change.
I mean, how do when you lookback at all that, here you are
(50:27):
in your 80s, sober, rand,helping others.
How does that feel?
Is that I mean, you feel I meanyou gotta at least have some
sort of pride about that, thatyou're now at least being able
to help others.
SPEAKER_01 (50:38):
You know, I try to stay humble because I had to get
a relationship with a higherpower and uh in order to
overcome my alcohol.
I did a really tough, not tough,I did a great, somewhat
difficult recovery program with12 steps in it.
As soon as I had done that, andI stayed sober for over a year,
and then I started working withother guys, and my life has been
(50:58):
full of joy since then.
You know, I told you about thehelicopter thing because I had
various nightmares.
It wasn't just that one.
That one was over and over againfor a long time, and then I
would have this one where I'd befalling, you know.
It was terrible.
There's nothing more terrifyingthan falling out of an airplane.
Um without a parachute.
Uh, you'll never see meparachuting, trust me.
(51:20):
Yeah, and a few months, well, acouple years ago, I was working
with a guy, and he was a vet, Iget veterans, I get relapsers
because I was a pretty badrelapser for a while.
We're kind of the hardest kindbecause we do have that
determination and that pride andego and all that.
And you have to you have torealize that you are powerless
(51:41):
over alcohol.
This is the one thing.
And you so you've got to have apower outside of yourself,
right?
And so I was talking to one ofthe guys, we had just finished
what we call his fifth step,where he basically admits to his
the things that he shouldn'thave done, you know, that kind
of thing, in order to get rid ofit, turn it over to God.
And uh he looks at me and hegoes, Would you, if you could go
(52:01):
back, I think I was 75 then.
If you could go back and say andget sober when you were 50,
would you do it?
And I said, No way.
Uh-uh.
I wouldn't because I wouldn'tknow what I know right now.
And I can use it.
I use it every day.
I work with guys every singleday.
And I see them transformed intopowerless people that alcohol is
killing them, and many cases hasdestroyed their families, their
(52:24):
whole lives, and they don'tunderstand it, and they can't do
anything, and then theytransform and they do the deal,
and then they're helping otherguys, you know, and it just goes
on and on.
It's great.
I'm I'm I'm the luckiest man onthe planet, Jake.
SPEAKER_00 (52:37):
And I know it.
And I'm happy for you.
Uh and I I appreciate Iappreciate you taking some time
again to visit with me.
I kind of wanted to leave on alast thought kind of about
Vietnam.
Because when you think aboutVietnam now, like what what
emotion comes to mind?
Like, what's kind of the firstemotion that comes to mind when
you think about Vietnam?
SPEAKER_01 (52:54):
Yeah, somebody asked me a while back if I would go
back there.
I said, no, I don't want to goback there.
I I'm kind of amazed by howVietnam is apparently it's a
republic in some fashion, andthey've done very well, and
there's a lot of Vietnamesepeople that emigrated here.
I was horrified after, I don'tknow, 1975, 76.
(53:18):
I realized we we lost.
We lost.
59,000 veterans died.
59,000.
A third of them by accidents.
Accidental discharges, you know,falling out of a helicopter, you
name it.
All kinds of crashes.
And I was on a C-130, Jake, thatlanded, that crashed with only
(53:42):
one engine working.
I didn't tell you that story.
And I walked away with thewhole, we all walked away.
We were absolutely astoundedthat we actually survived that
son of a gun.
But anyway, I diverged.
So I don't know, I have reallymixed feelings about it.
After Tet in August of 68, wehad won.
We destroyed every North Vietnamregiment that came down from the
(54:06):
north.
We're destroyed.
We destroyed all the Viet Congfighting apparatus.
We had won the war in August of1968.
And what happened?
We lost.
And that really bothered me fora long, long time.
All those men, some women, youknow, what a waste.
(54:29):
What a waste.
I still don't understand it.
I don't need to.
SPEAKER_00 (54:35):
Well, it's and I love that.
I love the fact that you don'tyeah, you can let that go too.
You don't need to to understandit.
I wanna per I want to thank youfor sharing because you know, uh
most of the World War II vetsare gone.
You know?
Yeah.
You're kind of that nextgeneration where there's Korean,
some Korean left Vietnam.
And you know, I look at my sons,I don't they don't, I don't they
(54:57):
have no clue, you know, and andit was after my, you know, I was
born in 77, so it was after myyou know, I was born afterwards,
but that was the war closest tome growing up.
So that was the one, you know, Isaw movies about, heard stories
about.
And so I appreciate you sharingthis because it it you know it's
touched me too.
I've grown so much, not onlyfrom doing this podcast, but
when I get to talk to peoplelike you, Rand, who who build me
(55:19):
up and you turn your life overto that there is a higher power
and that you need that help.
I'm so thankful for that.
So I just want to tell you thankyou, thank you for your service,
thank you for who you are, andthank you for your continued
service with helping others.
Thank you, Jay.
Appreciate it.
I want to take a moment tosincerely thank Rand Timmerman
for his courage andvulnerability and sharing his
story.
(55:40):
It's not easy to revisit thetrauma of war or to open up
about personal battles like hisstruggle with alcohol, but Rand
did so with honesty and strengththat truly moved me.
If you'd like to learn moreabout Rand and his journey, I
encourage you to check out hisbook, A Spiritual Passage, and
visit his website,rantimmerman.com.
His story is one of resilience,healing, and rediscovering peace
(56:01):
after years of pain.
Thank you, Rand.
And to all of you listening,thank you for being here and for
supporting Journey with Jake.
Your time and attention mean theworld to me.
Be sure to join me next week asI sit down with Rick Glaze.
We'll dive into a conversationabout adventure, treasure
hunting, and a whole lot more.
It's gonna be fun and afascinating ride that you won't
(56:21):
want to miss.
As always, I'm your host, JakeBushman, and this is Journey
with Jake.
Remember, it's not always aboutthe destination, as it is about
the journey.
Take care, everybody.
My guest today is someone you might remember, Ran
(00:02):
Timmerman from episode 174.
This time, Ran opens up abouthis life as a soldier in Vietnam
and he doesn't hold back.
What you'll hear is graphic,honest, and unforgettable.
This is a story of survival,pain, and ultimately the human
spirit.
Welcome to Journey with Jake.
This is a podcast aboutadventure and how through our
(00:23):
adventures we can overcome thechallenges of life that come our
way.
While I expect you will learnsome things about different
adventures, this show willentertain you.
Each episode will featuredifferent guests or guests as
they share experiences andstories of the different
adventures they have been on.
Not only will you beentertained, but you'll also
hear the failures and trialseach guest faces what they have
(00:45):
done or are doing to overcomethe hardships that come their
way.
My goal is to take each of us ona journey through the
experiences of my guests withthe hope that you'll be
entertained and inspired toovercome your day-to-day
challenges.
After all, it's all about thedestination.
That's it.
(01:20):
Today's episode is a bonusconversation, a powerful and
emotional follow-up with myfriend Rand Timmerman.
If you missed our firstconversation together, that was
episode 174, where Rand sharedhis journey on the Appalachian
Trail alongside his brother.
It was an incredible story ofperseverance and brotherhood.
In this bonus episode, we gomuch deeper.
(01:41):
Rand opens up about his time asa soldier in Vietnam, and I want
to give a clear trigger warningbefore we dive in.
Rand shares in graphic detailsome of what he saw and
experienced during the war.
Moments that still haunt him tothis day.
In fact, after our conversation,Rand told me he was going to
have a hard time sleeping thatnight because of the memories
that surfaced.
(02:03):
This episode is raw, emotional,and incredibly brave.
It's a look into the cost of warand the resilience of the human
heart.
I'm so grateful to Ran for hishonesty and willingness to share
his story.
Well, this is awesome for me.
I'm sitting here looking at RanTimmerman, who is my guest from
episode 174.
It's awesome to have you back,Rand.
(02:24):
Welcome back to the show.
Thank you, Jake.
Really appreciate it.
The main reason I'm having youback is because you had so many
experiences, so many stories.
Really about the war.
We touched on the war a littlebit.
It was kind of who your journeyand who you are, but then we
really focused on your trip withyour brother through the
Appalachian Mountains.
That trip was a huge part ofwhat we talked about.
(02:46):
But you had all kinds ofexperiences in Vietnam and you
kind of touched on a few ofthem, but not a whole lot.
So I kind of wanted to dive intothat and talk about that
experience you had there.
So when you first found out I'mgonna be going to Vietnam, what
was going through your mind?
SPEAKER_01 (03:02):
You know, it was a funny thing.
I wanted to go to Vietnam.
I came from a very rural family,very poor.
I went to college.
Only person my family ever wentto college, and I'm I'm uh in my
fourth semester.
I changed my uh major threetimes.
The third time I changed it touh psychology because I knew it
was a nut job.
(03:23):
Because I didn't know what Iwanted to do, you know.
I knew I was a latent alcoholic.
I had figured that out at 13,and um I could never make big
decisions without getting drunkfor some reason.
So I ended up in a bar inOswego, New York.
I was going to OswegoUniversity.
I had saved up my money, I'mworking three jobs, I'm a
janitor from midnight to eighto'clock, cleaning toilets in my
(03:45):
old high school, pin setter in abowling alley.
I got no money, I don't knowwhat I want to do.
And I get drunk in this bar, andMonday morning the owner comes
in.
I hear I come to or whateverwhen he puts a key in the door
and he comes in, never says aword to me, goes over, turns the
radio on.
I'm laying there, hung over, andthey're talking about the 1st
(04:07):
Marine Division in Vietnam.
And to me, it was my gatewayout.
My French Foreign Legion.
So, yeah, and a month later, I'mdown in Syracuse at Memorial,
well, whatever it was, and I'mraising my hand, just you know,
just taking the oath to defendmy country against all enemies,
(04:27):
foreign and domestic.
And um shortly after that, I'mon a bus with 40 guys going to
Paris Island, South Carolina,and for about 20 of them are
drafted.
So they're not happy.
And the two guys that are on thebus are drill instructors from
Paris Island with theirclipboards, and these these guys
are going, I'm on the wrong bus.
(04:48):
I'm supposed to go to Fort Sill.
Well, no, you're not.
You're you're gonna be in theMarine Corps, and you know what,
Jake, to their credit, aboutthree weeks later, they were
okay.
They were okay, they they allsucked it up, you know.
And that first week was toughthere because we got down there,
(05:08):
they weren't ready for us.
The Marine the Vietnam War hadjust started to really crank.
The Marine Corps was about200,000 standard, you know,
manpower.
And that year, and uh the nexttwo years it went up to a
million.
So all the recruit depots werereally cranking.
They reduced 12 weeks' trainingdown into eight.
So I got caught into all that,and then went to uh Camp Geiger
(05:33):
and Camp Lejeune.
I went to uh typing course, andthen we went out to Camp
Pendleton to do the finaladvanced combat training.
We got out there, two thingshappened, one funny and one not.
So we're all done, we're gonnago to Vietnam within a couple of
days, and then the Marine Corps,they never told you what they
were gonna do.
(05:54):
The whole idea was that you hadto be prepared for anything.
We marched to this big hangar oncement that seems to go on for
miles, hotter than heck.
They reversed the platoon.
So for the first time, insteadof being the last guy to go in,
whatever we're doing, I'm thefirst.
So I walk in this hangar, take acouple of turns, I'm in the main
(06:17):
bay, and there's two, there's arow, two guys, two, a column of
corpsmen with inoculation guns.
So what we're doing at thatpoint, we're getting our shots.
So I walked down this gauntlet,I think it was eight corpsmen,
two, four on each side, withthese great big guns, and
they're hammering my shoulders,right?
(06:39):
My arms giving me the shots.
Well, I flinched a couple times,and then I walked towards the
daylight where the battalion wasstanding outside, and the blood
is running down my legs or downmy arms and off my fingertips.
I mean, like a river, right?
And I walk outside.
No, they don't know what's goingon, right?
They're just all standing therein formation.
(07:00):
Marines started fainting.
I mean, by the dozens.
There's like 1,200 of us in thatbattalion, right?
It was insane.
SPEAKER_00 (07:10):
So they see you coming out of there bleeding,
and they're like, what's goingon?
SPEAKER_01 (07:12):
I don't know what's going on, right?
Yeah.
Insane.
Funny as hell, really.
Well, not so funny the next day.
We had another formation.
I think it was our last one, andsome sergeant comes from
somewhere with a clipboard andcalls my name.
And so I had to walk from theback of the battalion all the
way to the front.
I come to attention in front ofhim, and he says, You're going
on mess duty for 30 days.
(07:34):
I said, What?
You're going on mess duty for 30days.
The next 30 days, Jake, I wasgetting up at 4 a.m., going down
to the mess hall, going into thekitchen, sitting on a stool,
peeling potatoes, 10 foot highpile of potatoes when I began in
the morning, and I peeled themall day long till whatever it
took.
Usually it was six or seveno'clock at night.
(07:56):
Thirty days straight.
I was so angry.
Were you punished?
SPEAKER_00 (08:03):
Like what was the deal?
SPEAKER_01 (08:04):
No, I don't know.
I to this day I don't know.
The problem with it was is Inever, you know, they talk about
the the band of brothers.
My band was gone.
My brothers were gone.
They're gone, they're gone.
And it had a major a majorimpact on one episode that I
will tell you about.
It's very painful, but anyway,so I at the end of that 30 days,
(08:25):
I ended up going to Okinawa.
And then I flew over to Dananginto the first Marine Air Wing,
which ironically, a couple yearslater, I would be a member of
the air wing.
I had no idea that.
So I get there, it's almostnighttime, it's pouring buckets,
the monsoon season has started,and I'm by myself, basically,
(08:46):
and I have to go to my unit,which is the first Marine
Division, ironically.
And then, you know, what we hadto do, you had to find your own
way there.
I had to hit a right uh ride ona six by a big truck, and I
think I ended up in a Jeep, andfinally I get to the
headquarters battalion.
It's I don't know, 10 o'clock atnight.
There's a guy there assigned tome, takes me to the armory
(09:06):
because it's open 24 hours aday.
Marines are coming and out allthe time, and gets me, you know,
my rifle grenades, you know,flag jacket, all my 782 gear,
everything, takes my duffel bag,and then this guy's taking me in
the rain to the transition tentwhere I'm gonna stay overnight.
Now it's a tent, but it's allsandbagged.
And we're walking up to it, andyou kind of see the glow because
(09:28):
there's guys in there withlights and stuff, you know.
And just as uh my guide startedto open the tent, there was a
bang.
unknown (09:35):
What the hell?
SPEAKER_01 (09:37):
That was a shot.
And the tent explodes, there'speople running yelling, medic,
medic, medic, and all thisstuff, and some marine comes out
and says, Don't go in there.
My guide leaves, so I'm standingthere in the pouring rain.
Eventually, uh, really quick,some Marines come, I think it
was a medic for sure, and thenthey bring the body of the
(09:58):
Marine out.
And then I go in the tenteventually.
There's one cot empty, whichwould have been his, right?
And I go sit on it, and now I'mshaking.
I don't even know what thehell's going on.
Well, I just kind of listen tothese guys because they're
talking up a storm, and they hadjust come out of the field.
They're gonna go home the nextday, right?
(10:18):
Turns out they all got theirmail, and then Vietnam, you only
got your mail about once amonth.
So you get in a big bundle withrubber bands around it, and it
turned out that when he got hisbundle, he was looking for some
special letters, and he foundthe most recent one, and he
opened it up and it said, DearJohn, I hate to have to tell you
this, but I met somebody else,and it's been a real whirlwind,
(10:40):
and we got married.
And he picked up his pistol andshot himself in the head.
And I thought, oh my god, whathave I gotten myself into?
It's just uh unbelievable.
Because I was kind of a one-off,I ended up, I mean, I would be
typing sometimes because I hadbeen I had multiple what they
call multiple militaryoccupational specialties, MOSs.
(11:04):
I had an O311, that's a grunt,you know, an infantryman.
I had a machine gun, I think itwas 0841, something like that.
But anyway, so I was kind of autilitarian, right?
I could do a whole bunch ofdifferent things.
I ended up being a machine gunon a helicopter, courier, I
would go out on trucks as arifleman in the passenger seat
to provide security.
(11:24):
I was a leader of a squad, ofinfantry squad, all kinds of
jobs, right?
Depending on what where I wasneeded, I guess, or somebody had
to fill a slot.
Uh I went out in the field and Iget told to go down to a
platoon.
I'm at the I'm at the companyheadquarters.
Go down to that platoon.
There's they're gettingprisoners, you're going to bring
(11:45):
one of them back.
So I said, okay.
Just follow that trail, go downthere, they'll meet you down
there.
They're down there.
I said, I know, I can hear themshooting.
They're in a firefight, right?
They're having a battle.
So I walk down this trail, andyep, there's a prisoner.
He's he's properly secured.
So I take him, I walk back out.
(12:07):
They told me to go to the to apoint, it was a supply point,
and rendezvous point, whateveryou want to call it.
And so when I get there, so I'maway from this battle on a trail
with the prisoner by myself,pulling him along.
Get to that point, there'snobody there.
So I sit him down on the ground,I wrap the rope around a tree.
He's blindfolded, his hands aretied behind him, the rope goes
(12:29):
around his waist.
It's he's tied up the properway.
I got involved with anotherprisoner that wasn't, and that
makes a big difference.
But he was properly secured, andthen I tied him to the tree.
And then the six buys, thetrucks start coming, it was
supplies, right?
The second one that pulled intothis landing, he jumps out and
he yells my name, and it's oneof the guys I trained with,
(12:50):
right?
So, like, we're like, you know,boisterously, hey man, start
talking to each other, andtrucks are coming in and out,
and I'm not paying anyattention, and all of a sudden I
hear this, we hear this scream,just blood curdling scream.
And the the driver I'm talkingto said, Ran or Timor, what's
(13:10):
what's that?
I said, Oh shit.
And I raced down, and sureenough, that uh one of the
trucks had backed into the treethat my prisoner was tied on.
He immediately pulled away, andI ran around behind the truck,
and I just he was his chest wascrushed.
He's dying.
There's there's there's nopossibility.
There's no medic anyway, there'snothing they could have done.
(13:32):
But he's conscious, so he'sscreaming, the blood is coming
out of his eyes, his ears, hisnose, his mouth.
I mean, I untied him, kind oflaid him down, and then took his
blindfold off, and he's justlooking at me, and I was holding
his hands, and I watched himdie.
Yeah.
And I thought, oh my God.
Oh my God.
And the worst part was how manyMarines' lives could have been
(13:56):
saved based on what he mighthave told us?
You know what I mean?
The Marine Corps never I was notcastigated by anyone for it.
I don't know.
I think they kind of knew I wasreally upset about it myself
because it was a really baddereliction of duty on my part.
Uh I also got bored a lot.
Walking around the jungle andsweating your balls off and and
(14:18):
sometimes fighting.
A lot of it was skirmishing.
Somebody shoot at you, you shootat them.
It's kind of like civil war.
You really don't know what thehell's going on, right?
You don't know if you've runinto a battalion or is it
another squad and they're just,you know.
So there would be a lot ofshooting at times and not a
whole hell of what going on.
And so I got a little bit boredafter a while and volunteered to
be a gunner on a machine gunneron a helicopter.
SPEAKER_00 (14:42):
So I gotta tell you, when I think of Vietnam, you
always see those pictures orthose films of those helicopters
and those gunners on thosehelicopters.
So that's kind of what comes tomind for me when I think about
that.
So yeah, I want to hear kind ofabout some of those.
That's gotta be a pretty wildexperience.
SPEAKER_01 (15:30):
Oh my God.
It was scary as hell.
It was it was like being on thebest rolly coaster in the world
with surrounded by an enemy witha machine gun.
I mean, it was just heartpounding.
Those pilots were fantastic.
They could do things with thoseheavy you wouldn't believe was
possible.
(15:50):
You either down on the right onthe top of the trees or the rice
patties, or you were 3,000 feetup.
There wasn't, you know, youweren't cruising around, joy
riding.
It was it would be one heck of aride, but uh it was dangerous as
hell.
Two things happened.
One was we got we went into uhwhere some marines were
fighting, and uh it was so itwas a hot zone.
(16:12):
We went in and that pilot didn'tland.
So the other gunner, he'sengaged, he's on the side where
the enemy are shooting at us, sohe's shooting away.
And I'm I'm I jumped down,grabbed ammo and water, took it
in.
I brought out a wounded marine.
I did that a couple times, andit's hard.
The helicopter's not on theground, so it's bouncing around,
that everything's flying.
(16:33):
When we so when we get back,well, on the way back, I'm on
the radio.
Uh, once I got back in mystation, my machine gun and
everything, and then uh and Igo, uh, Captain, you know, it'd
be a lot easier if you couldland this thing.
He said, I'll talk to you aboutthat later.
So we're we get back to thebase, you know.
I'm taking the machine gun up,we're doing everything we do.
He gets he gets out of the uhhelicopter after he turns all
(16:56):
the switches off and everythingand starts to walk away.
I go, uh sir, uh, I don'tunderstand.
Why you why didn't you land?
We it would have been a lotbetter for all of us.
The machine gunner could haveshot more accurately, you know,
whatever.
And he says, You don'tunderstand anything, doofus,
basically.
And he's got the chart.
Now it's a map, but in theaviation end of it, they call it
a chart, right?
(17:16):
So he opens up the chart, whichhas a map where we are, and he
puts his finger on it.
He says, You see that?
I said, Yeah, and he says, Doyou see what it says?
I said, Oh.
It says, probable minefield.
And my brain was like, you know,I'd really rather not know that.
SPEAKER_00 (17:37):
So that's why he kept you up in the air.
Yeah.
SPEAKER_01 (17:40):
Yeah.
And then there were two otherthings that happened that
actually changed my life uhdramatically in a bad way later
on.
So I'm gonna relate these alittle bit.
On another helicopter mission.
See, I was a I was a sub.
So every day when I went to thewe would go to the the command
center, the operations center,which is a big tent, basically.
(18:02):
Well, I sometimes it was aquantit hunt, but and then you'd
just get your or you know,they'd have charts and
everything up there, and thenokay, you're gonna be assigned
this helicopter, you're gonna bethe gunner on the left side,
whatever.
So I wasn't, I wasn't flyingwith a crew, right?
Like some of them, or I was justfilling in for the guy that got
killed the day before or was insick bay or whatever.
(18:23):
One time I got on the plane, andand these helicopter pilots are
kind of like cowboys, right?
Their hair is a lot longer thanmine.
They kind of they're living thegood life in a sense.
They're fighting, I mean,they're doing a really hard job,
right?
Dangerous job.
But nighttime, they got the warmshowers, they got the great
child, they got the the booze,whatever.
(18:43):
I get on this helicopter, andthe pilot has got a western,
he's got like a 38 revolver in acowboy holster with the bandana,
you know, the belt with the forthe shells and everything
hanging from the back of hisseat.
And I said, sir, uh that's notreally a good place for that.
(19:05):
And then he told me to go havesex with my mother.
So, well, guess what?
Later that day, uh, we picked upsome prisoners, three of them.
And I loaded them on thehelicopter.
This is another deal that wenever shut down the helicopter,
we never landed, whatever.
It's a scrambling, it's a mess,right?
I put them on there.
Now, these guys are not, theyhaven't been secured properly.
(19:28):
They got blindfolds on, buttheir hands are tied in front of
them, not behind them, and theydon't have a rope around their
waist, so they can't so they canso guess what?
One of them shoves his blindfoldup, sees the pistol.
I hear the the uh captainyelling in my headset, he's got
my pistol, do something.
(19:49):
And now I'm outside thehelicopter on my station, right?
I turn and look and I see theprisoner going for the pistol.
So I unhook and jump in, and thenext thing I know, I'm fighting
with this prisoner for thepistol, right?
Well, guess what the pilot'sdoing?
He's doing this with theairplane.
He's trying he's trying to dumpus out.
(20:09):
Now I didn't realize that itimmediately, but that's what he
was doing.
So what happened was I got thepistol, the prisoner went out
one side of the helicopter,right out the bay door, and I
went out the other side with thepistol in my hand.
The helicopter was tipped likethat when the prisoner went out,
and then it went like this, andit threw me the other way,
(20:31):
right?
If you can picture that.
And I would have sailed rightoff completely, but the other
gunner was kind of watching,looking to one.
He saw what was happening, hesaw me come flying towards him
and by him, and he tried to grabme, but he couldn't.
He's but he hit me.
And all I knew was I hip feltthis wicked pain, and then I'm
realized I'm hanging on this,I'm underneath the helicopter.
(20:53):
I can see the call sign on thebottom of the helicopter.
And I and then I realizedinstantly it's not getting
smaller.
This is good.
Because I was I had my legswrapped around the skid.
SPEAKER_00 (21:06):
Oh wow.
How high were you at this point?
SPEAKER_01 (21:09):
I don't know.
I wondered about that.
It could have been a thousand,two thousand feet.
We were up.
I mean, it was holy cow.
No, we were well up at thatpoint.
And anyway, on the way back, theuh captain said, I don't want
anybody telling anybody anythingabout this.
I will do all the tack talking.
Understood, and yes, sir.
(21:29):
I I was thankful, right?
So we get back to base, did ournormal stuff.
Next morning I show up theoperations tent at 4 a.m.
There's two MPs there.
Then the next day I'm 200 milesfurther north.
Back pounding the ground again.
SPEAKER_00 (21:46):
Really?
SPEAKER_01 (21:48):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (21:49):
Yeah.
So you got in trouble for that?
SPEAKER_01 (21:52):
Well, no, but they got rid of me.
SPEAKER_00 (21:54):
Okay, but they got you out of there.
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (21:56):
Yeah, no, I didn't get in trouble for, but you made
sure I was going my temporaryduty was over.
SPEAKER_00 (22:03):
Gotcha.
Wow, okay.
So then they sent you north backto just infantry type work.
SPEAKER_01 (22:09):
Yeah.
Wow.
SPEAKER_00 (22:11):
Okay.
SPEAKER_01 (22:11):
So, and then eventually they made me a
Mustang lieutenant.
I did my so I was a lieutenantthe last couple of months.
One other thing happened, Ijoined a re a reaction platoon.
It was a special combat unitthat could be sent out in
emergencies to kind of try tochange the direction of the
battle, if you will.
And I volunteered for it becauseit was stationed at the
(22:32):
headquarters battalion.
Yippee! Showers, you know, hotchow, beer, cold beer.
So, you know, like one night aweek or maybe two, you could go
drink, right?
You would be like off duty.
The other nights you'd be uhwe'd do patrols or uh ambushes
or perimeter.
A lot of times we just didperimeter around the base and uh
(22:55):
stuff like that.
So it was kind of you know, itwas decent.
But then uh we went out on amission and uh it was really
bad.
We knew it was gonna be bad.
It uh it was monsoon, it'sraining.
It didn't start out well.
We ended up walking all night toget to where we had to be.
(23:16):
At daybreak, we got hit.
Now we're nobody knows for surewhere we are, right?
And anyway, long story short, weran out of ammo.
And I had to use my bayonet.
And I ran.
I got the hell out of there.
I used my last two bullets to uhkill the two VC that were almost
(23:37):
got me.
And then I spent uh a coupledays in or around a river.
And finally, the second or Ithink it was the second day, I
heard a tank.
During the day I was in thisriver.
I mean, I could see VC.
They wanted to get me really,really bad.
And it did in the nighttime Icould get out of it for a little
bit.
But I mean, uh the heels of myboots fell off.
(24:00):
I'm waterlogged.
All I had was my rifle, mybayonet, my clothes ended up
pretty much being off of me.
I mean, just ripped to shreds.
And then one one morning I hearduh a tank, and I go, I don't
think they got a tank.
It's gotta be our forces.
I was going downstream.
I knew if I went downstream longenough, I would come back to
(24:21):
something, you know, a villageor whatever.
And anyway, long story short, itwas a marine unit.
When I came out of the jungle, Ithink if the initial reaction
was that I was a VC, right?
SPEAKER_00 (24:32):
I mean, I'd just be draggled.
Yeah, tattered clothes if youhad any clothes.
I mean, you were just a mess.
SPEAKER_01 (24:39):
Yeah, I'm I'm leaving a blood trail.
I got 14 guys pointing their uhM14s at me, like, no, I'm one of
you.
Don't you you know?
And then a few hours later, Iended up in this.
I'm back, I'm at theheadquarters battalion, 1st
Marine Division, in a bunkerthat I had no idea existed.
Way down in the ground, I'm inthe cement bunker.
(25:01):
It is colder than hell because Igot air conditioning and I'm
practically naked, and it's fullof generals, and it's like it
was like out of a movie, youknow, where they have the
geographic big thing in themiddle of the table that shows
all the terrain, and then youmissed the little things.
That's what it was, that's whatit was, right?
And they had all these things onthe walls, and and there's a
(25:21):
couple of generals in there, andthis general is showing me a
map, and he's going, show mewhere you were, and I said,
Well, sir, you know, and we werehere, and we went this way, and
I but I don't know where we wereexactly, and and then he then
he's going, you know, Marines,you're not you're not supposed
to run, you're not supposed toleave the battlefield.
(25:43):
Uh-huh.
Uh I I was speechless.
I was speechless.
Anyway, after a few hours ofquestioning me and all that, I
ended up in a sick bay.
And then I I passed out, went tosleep, whatever.
And but it felt like 10 minutes,Jake.
Somebody was waking me up.
Shake, get up, get up.
What I just got here.
No, get up.
I said, Why are you getting me,why are you waking me up,
(26:04):
Sergeant?
And he says, you're going back.
I'm not going back.
He says, You're going back,because you gotta sh you gotta
help us find the bodies.
So I ended up going back.
And when I got back there, wellwhat it was was the a C-130 had
crashed.
Uh would have been southwest ofDenang.
(26:24):
And when it did, it wiped outhalf of a village.
And it was j I had never seenanything like it.
Some of the Marines hadsurvived, actually.
And the ones that had gottenkilled were and the wounded were
so there was no Marines leftthere when I got there anymore,
but there was a lot of bodies.
(26:46):
So we're walking around puttingpeople in body bags, and I I saw
this shoe of a child.
It was um, you know, like aflip-flop, but it's made out of
a they made them out of tires.
Right?
And then they just put stringsthrough them to to wear them.
And I saw one bottom side up andI pulled it out of the ground.
(27:07):
And it had a kid's foot in thelower part of the leg, and I
started puking.
I just started and the sun, itstopped raining, the sun had
come out, it's like 100 degrees,100 degrees, 100% humidity.
And I walk over in the what'sleft of the village, and then
the next thing I know, I'msurrounded by these little kids,
(27:29):
three, four, five years old.
And they're all going, Mr.
Marine, Mr.
Marine, they would do this allthe time, even when it was
nothing going on, right?
They come up to you because theywant you to give them something.
I gave them all my water, I gavethem all the candy I had, all
the food I had, I gave themeverything.
And I was thinking, I wonder howmany of their fathers we killed.
You know?
(27:49):
And all of a sudden I was drunk,Jake.
I'm staggering, I'll neverforget this.
I'm staggering around, like,what's wrong with you?
You know, I was sweaty oneminute, and then I was dry the
next, and and anyway, and then afew days later, I am surrounded
by a white light.
I go, what the hell?
(28:10):
And then I'm moving my handsaround, and I I'm I'm in a bed
with sheets.
At first I thought, you're dead.
You know?
Yeah, and then so I'm right, andI hear this gurgling right next
to me.
And then finally, I can't openmy eyes.
It's it's it's it's verypainful.
The light is so bright, I can'teven open my eyes.
(28:30):
So I had, you know, flooding myeyes and stuff, a few minutes go
by.
I can hear people down at theend of the I I realize I'm in a
sick bay.
I'm on a ship because it's I canfeel it moving, right?
It was a USS Repose.
It was one of the Navy vethospital ships.
And uh I keep hearing thisgurgling.
Eventually I got my eyes openand I look and I can see there's
(28:52):
and I've got tubes in my armsand stuff.
And oh, I did a personalinventory.
So I realized kind of what wasgoing on.
I said, Oh, you better figureout what's why are you here?
And then I so I started my toes,worked up to my head, and I
realized there's nothing wrongwith you.
You just got dehydrated orsomething, you know.
Because I didn't know how I gotthere, but I said there's
(29:14):
there's nothing then I realizedyou don't have a million-dollar
wound.
We always talked about amillion-dollar wound where if
you, you know, I also if I getshot in the elbow, I still
could, I could still have myarm.
And they're gonna have to sendme home because I won't be able
to fight anymore.
That's for me.
I was gonna be my million-dollarwound.
So finally, I roll over to seewhat this gurgling is next to
(29:37):
me, and there's a marine therein the bed, and he's got his
head looks like a basketball,only it's all cotton.
And he's and all he's got islike uh right they left his eyes
open.
He's got the blackest eyes I'veever seen.
He's got tubes in his mouth, andthe bottom of it's all blood and
everything, and he's gurglinglike crazy.
And his eyes are and we'relooking at each other, and I go,
(29:59):
Wow, you got a million-dollarwound.
And now he goes really crazy.
Like he's yelling at me, or hecan't yellow, and I roll back
out of my back, and I'm like,what the hell?
And then all of a sudden I lookat him again, I go, he has no
lower jaw.
His jaw is gone.
How the hell?
(30:20):
It was a transformationalexperience for me because two or
three days later, I'm back inthe jungle, right?
And I realize.
You know what, Rand, you'reokay.
You're okay.
I just I got some peace.
I came to a place where I wasokay with my situation.
I realized I didn't have anycontrol over it anyway, and I
(30:42):
wasn't gonna be as afraidanymore.
I'm just gonna do what I gottado, and whatever happens,
happens.
Right?
It changed my mindset a littlebit.
And then you became fatalistic.
I figured I'm probably not gonnamake it out of here alive, but
I'm gonna do the best I can.
That was it.
And that was my mindset for therest of the time there.
But the reason I'm telling you,and there was other stuff that
(31:04):
happened, but telling you thesebecause it had a huge impact
afterwards, but I didn't knowwhat how that was gonna work out
for me.
SPEAKER_00 (31:11):
Well, I do just go back to that moment, you know,
where you're I mean, gown you'rein you're in the water, hiding,
seeing the enemy.
What kind of fear is that?
Like, cause that I mean, I'mfearful of that, and I mean
you're just telling me thestory.
When you're in that situation,are you just too focused?
Like, how how do you it justseems like it would be
(31:32):
paralyzing the fear?
SPEAKER_01 (31:33):
Yeah, well, what happened was I knew I had two
bullets left.
The rest of my squad is dead.
The machine gun is damaged.
The other Marines around me areall dead or dying.
I have two bullets left.
Uh the enemy is coming at me.
I can see like five of themcoming right at me, and my brain
(31:56):
is thinking two options shootmyself or run.
Because I knew I was a coward,Jake.
I knew I could never stand beinga prisoner and being tortured.
That was my fear.
So I um stabbed the one closestto me and ran.
And I ran right at him.
(32:17):
I knew I couldn't turn my back,right?
Mean call, you're ch you'retrained to just chart, you
always attack.
So I attacked, but I I ran rightthrough him.
I'm I'm getting the hell out ofthere, right?
And so I hoofed right throughthem.
I think everything froze.
It felt like everything stoppedfor like five seconds.
They're they were shocked.
(32:37):
Here's just I'm covered withblood from what I did with the
knife with the bayonet.
So I ran right through them asfast as I can go.
Well, two of them peeled off tocome after me, and I jumped in
the river and I got upunderneath the bank, and I'm
standing there with my M14 likethis, and my receiver is in the
(32:58):
water.
And I'm thinking, I wonder ifthis will shoot underwater.
I didn't think it would.
Well, guess what?
Those two heads popped up rightabove me, and I went bang, bang.
And now I got no more ammo.
Um now I'm really screwed.
So I just I went I wentunderwater and started going
south.
(33:18):
And they started throwinggrenades in the water.
Of course, you don't they don'thave to hit you right they don't
have to be right on you.
Cushing of the even in the watercan kill you.
So anyway, at one point, onewent off on my left and one went
off on my right.
And I'm like, I'm bracketed.
This is not good.
And I'm kind of I'm on thebottom just trying to get away
(33:40):
from you know, keep moving.
And uh, but they didn't throwthe third one, thank God.
And I just stayed in that room.
I come up, get some air, go backdown.
And a couple times I saw, youknow, I saw them, they were
trying to find me for sure.
And I was grateful when it gotdark, but then the next day we
did the same thing pretty muchall day long.
(34:01):
And then another night, and thenthe third day was in the
morning.
I don't know if they had givenup or not.
I hadn't seen any in a while,thank God.
But I wasn't making muchprogress either.
It's a slow way to it was just anightmare.
I don't even know how todescribe it, but yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (34:15):
At that point, you're just fighting to stay
alive.
SPEAKER_01 (34:18):
Yeah, I did not want to die.
I did not want to die, and Ididn't.
SPEAKER_00 (34:22):
And then you had that other moment that was
transformational for you.
You said something too that youI don't I mean, and you this is
the way you felt at the time.
You know, you said you were acoward, and you know, I'm
sitting here looking at you asthis amazing man.
So to me, you mean you'redefinitely not a coward to me,
but you were feeling that at thetime.
(34:42):
You felt like you ran away.
You felt you felt like you werea coward.
SPEAKER_01 (34:45):
You know, a lot of guys that get medal, I didn't
get any medals.
And I didn't really deserve anymedals either.
The guys that you read aboutthat get the medals, what
happens to them, I think, isthat because when you when
people try to kill you, Jake, Idon't, everybody's a little bit
different, but it really pissedme off.
(35:08):
The idea that somebody wastrying to kill me really made me
very I had no idea how much rageI had.
I mean, I would fight like amaniac to stay alive.
And then but it's verystressful, and sometimes the
guys that get the medals are theones who just say, you know
what, screw it.
I'm just gonna do what I gottado.
I'm just gonna do it, right?
(35:28):
They don't they put theirsurvival out of their mind, and
they just do what they gotta do.
And that's real courage, right?
That's real heroism.
The bravest men, in myexperience, were guys who would
just get, you know, we'd begetting shot up, and then they
would just I remember one inparticular, or one of our
(35:48):
machines.
We were in elephant grass, whichis the worst because we'd walked
out of the jungle, we had to gothrough this elephant grass, and
and we all detested that becauseyou're a sitting duck.
The elephant grass is like uh, Idon't know, it's uh reeds, but
it has very serrated edges.
It will cut you to shreds.
And so there's trails goingthrough it because, you know,
(36:10):
people uh Vietnamese people runaround and it's usually close to
uh rice patties and stuff likethat.
Anyway, we got in this bigbattle in the middle of one of
these things.
We were all, I'm on, I'm down.
A guy next to me has been shotthrough the you can't stick your
head up.
You didn't you do, becausethey're shooting at you from the
jungle.
You can't see that, right?
There's very hard.
(36:30):
And they're they're blastingaway at us.
So and the bullets are goingthrough the grass.
They can't even see us andthey're shooting the shit out of
us.
Excuse my friends.
And then if you stick a head up,you're a dead man, you know?
So you're kind of well, one ofthe guys, this is what happens
to heroes, in my opinion.
They just say, I'm going to, andthey just get up, and that's
what happened in this situation.
One of the machine gunners gotup and just started doing uh
(36:53):
Rambo style, just stood up,started shooting, and started
going forward.
And as soon as he did, in thissituation, the enemy stopped
firing.
They start they started leaving,you know, they're running away.
It changed the whole thing justlike that.
It was amazing.
And he started shooting, andthen a couple other guys got up,
and then we all got up and youknow, the battle ended.
(37:14):
I don't know.
I think he probably got thesilver star at least.
But I did eventually leaveVietnam.
Went to Okinawa.
We got they gave us all new uhclothes pretty much.
They put us in winter greensbecause it was October.
No, it was end of November.
When we when we get back to theStates, that's the uniform of
(37:36):
the day, right?
In those days you couldn't wearutilities off base.
You had to be in your dressuniform if you were not on a
military base.
In winter greens in Okinawa in ahundred degree heat and 100%
humidity, sitting on our doublebags on the uh out on the
outside where the airport werein the airport, right?
And waiting to get on.
And the planes are coming in andout.
(37:56):
Every plane was going to be ourplane, and then at one point a
rock band came out and got on itand and and left.
So we were out, we were on thetarmac, I think for two nights
and three days.
They were bringing sandwichesand water, stuff like that.
So you can imagine we are notcomfortable at all.
Yeah, eventually I complained.
(38:18):
One of the guys said to me, Joe,he says, Rand, or Timmer, he
called me Timmer, or actually hecalled me Lieutenant.
He said, I'm not a I said, I'mnot a lieutenant, I'm a corporal
now.
He said, Well, you gotta dosomething.
So I went over to the dispatcherfor the tenth time, and so they
brought out uh like a bigumbrella that we could so we
were in the shade finallyanyway.
But anyway, so I get into LA andwe all went and got tickets.
(38:41):
I had to get a standby because Ididn't have any money, you're
right.
You know, I made less than athousand dollars for a whole
year in Vietnam.
Yes, in 1967.
My W-2 was$93, something likethat.
I go and get my ticket and I goto the so we all had different
gates because we're all going todifferent places, right?
(39:02):
So all of a sudden I'm alone.
I've been surrounded by Marinesfor 13 months, right?
And now I'm all by myself.
And I go to the gate, and I'venever, you know, I haven't
flown, I've flown a couple timescommercially, but not a lot.
And I get to my gate, andthere's a long line, and they're
starting, they're gonna boardthe plane pretty soon.
And I walk to the front of theline.
(39:23):
I hand the lady my ticket,nobody's saying a word, and then
all of a sudden, this guy comesbarging up, probably 250 pounds,
big guy, 6'3 or whatever, notfat.
And he starts yelling at me, getto the back of the line, baby
killer.
I'm five foot eight.
(39:44):
At that point, I weighed 145pounds when I went to Vietnam.
I was a lean, mean fightingmachine.
That's what my DI told me.
But I'm not anymore.
I'm only I'm I'm just a wreck,pretty much, right?
And then he shoves me hard and Istagger backwards, and there's
this row of stanchions with arope through it, like they do to
(40:06):
guide people, right?
I end up standing by the lastone.
I yank the rope up.
I'm not thinking anymore, Jake.
I'm not thinking at all.
I'm reacting.
And I grab that stanchion by thetop, I'm gonna kill this guy.
I mean, I'm on attack mode.
And then all of a sudden, I'msurrounded by four stewardesses,
(40:26):
and one of them says, Let metake that, you know.
And he's surrounded by, I don'tknow, police.
I don't know, three or four,right?
And he was giving them a hardtime.
They put they could puthandcuffs on him, they take him
away.
He's still screaming at me.
They put me on the plane, nobodyelse got on the plane yet.
They put me on the plane infirst class.
(40:47):
Yeah.
The cap the pilot, the captain,comes and sits down and starts
talking to me.
Turns out he's a Marine Corpsaviator from the Korean War.
SPEAKER_00 (40:59):
Wow.
SPEAKER_01 (41:00):
Yeah.
SPEAKER_00 (41:01):
Good for you.
You know, because I've heardstories about you know the
veterans getting home fromVietnam and just not being
treated good at all.
Just, you know.
And so I won't I wondered aboutthat.
SPEAKER_01 (41:12):
Well, yeah, actually we weren't.
When I so I went home on 30days' leave, and then when I
went down, I went to the uh airwing.
Once I got done with all mywell, actually, I went to OCS, I
went to basic school, you know,I became a second real second
lieutenant after my 30 daysleave.
And then I decided I don't wantto be a grunt anymore.
(41:33):
I didn't want to be in theinfantry.
So I went to the first MarineAir Wing.
I wanted to have some of thosehot showers and good chow,
right?
But we learned, we never wentoff.
We always had to be in our dressuniform when we went on base or
off of base.
But we always, if we were goingoff base, first gas station,
we'd pull in, we'd all go in thebathroom, take our uniforms off,
(41:54):
put our civvies on, come back tobase.
We'd always have a gas station,the closest one to the front
gate, go do the reverse.
I mean, we knew, you know, uh,we had to do that.
When I came back from Vietnam, Iwent out to my I went with my
dad out to the field.
I was on my 30 days leave.
I drank my brains out on my30-day leave.
(42:14):
I also met a girl and we wereengaged when I left.
She became the mother of mythree children.
So I'm going out to the fieldwith my dad, and because he had
a little airport.
We'd made a hangar when I was ayoung boy.
He always he bought usedairplanes.
He was paralyzed with polio fromthe waist down.
But he had been a Mustang pilotduring World War II.
(42:37):
And then he had me and mybrother.
He met my mom, married her, hadme and my brother, got polio
really, really bad.
He had two cousins that gotpolio and died the same day.
Something in our genes.
So he spent eight months in theiron lung.
Eight months.
Can you imagine?
A year in the hospital.
But some of his Air Force Armybuddies, because it was Army Air
(43:00):
Force in World War II, right?
Wasn't just Air Force.
Uh, came when he was out of theiron lung and took him out to an
airport and they got him in aplane, and he realized he could
he might be able to flyairplanes.
He was the best pilot I everknew.
He could do amazing things withairplanes.
But anyway, we're going out thefield.
I probably want me to help himwith something.
And on the way out there, Istarted telling him a little bit
(43:22):
about one of my deals that youand I have been talking about,
right?
And he stops me, wraggling hishands in front of me.
Don't you ever talk about it.
You just forget about it.
You put it, you, you put it backin your brain there somewhere
and close the door on it.
It's over and done with.
Nobody wants to hear about it.
Your Uncle John and your UncleDean, they both fought probably
worse than you did in World WarII, which is not true, but And I
(43:45):
said, Dad, you don't understand.
I'm gonna I'm a combat veteran,enlisted man, it's going to OCS.
I'm gonna be a second lieutenantwith combat experience.
Where the hell do you think I'mgonna go?
And I'll probably be a forwardobserver because I'm going in
the air wing, you know.
And he starts beating me overthe head with a newspaper.
(44:06):
You just listen to me, you dowhat I tell you to, you know,
like I'm 12 years old again.
It was kind of funny in a way.
But you know what?
I took him serious.
I took him serious, and I neverand and veterans don't talk
about combat veterans almostnever we may hang out in hell,
but we don't talk about, we justdon't.
And now a couple years ago, Irealized I got sober.
(44:28):
I had a problem with mydrinking, you remember that
part.
And I got sober, and a coupleyears ago I realized I was still
isolating.
So I started writing all thisstuff down, and then I joined a
veterans writing group, and sonow I meet with guys once a
month and we talk about stuff,and usually not, you know, this
kind of stuff.
When I get to Cherry Point,after all my training and
everything, because we'retalking about transitional
(44:51):
things.
When I got to Cherry Point, itwas a Sunday, and the officer of
the day is a captain, temporarycaptain.
His name was Dale Moan.
He was my drill instructor inParis Island.
He had been a staff sergeant,they promoted him to gunnery
sergeant.
He became a Mustang secondlieutenant, then a first
lieutenant, then a captain.
And when I left Cherry Point acouple years later, I'm a first
(45:14):
lieutenant and he's a gunnerysergeant again.
I mean, talk about crazy, right?
So I get there and we do the,you know, back the hugs and
whatever, really happy to seeeach other and still alive and
all that kind of stuff.
And then he said, Where do youwant to go?
And I said, What do you mean?
And he says, Well, I got a bunchof schools, and he starts
rallying them off.
I go, Rhode Island?
You got something in RhodeIsland?
(45:34):
He said, Yeah.
Jag school, judge advocategeneral school.
I said, What?
Well, I've never been to RhodeIsland.
You know, I had a great career,but uh it's funny.
I was in law school.
I had went back, I came back toSyracuse, New York, and got my
BA, and then went to law school.
And somewhere in there, now I'mmarried, I got two kids, I'm
working three jobs becausethere's no the GI Bill didn't
(45:56):
even pay the tuition atSyracuse.
So I'm struggling financiallyquite a bit, which is probably a
good thing because I don't haveany money to spend on booze, but
and then one night, and I would,you know, Jake, I would think at
times, man, you are so becausethe guys that I had contact with
and some of my old buddies uhdid not do well.
(46:17):
They did not do well, and I justI just got myself dove right
into living life, right?
Education, working, having afamily.
I'm I'm all in.
And I kept thinking, it's kindof weird, you don't seem to have
any issues from it.
And then one night I went tobed, I'm in bed, and all of a
(46:38):
sudden I'm not, I'm in Vietnam.
It's the same old stuff.
It's it's a battle, and I cansmell the gunpowder, I can smell
the blood, I can sm I can smellmanure, I can smell it all, and
I'm like, and then all of asudden I'm wounded and I'm
sliced open.
My innards are in my hands, andI'm trying to put them back in
me, and I'm covered with blood,and I'm screaming, and I realize
(47:01):
I'm dying.
I ran this, there's no out.
There's no way out on this one.
You're done.
And I'm screaming, and then allof a sudden I'm surrounded by a
white light again.
And I look, and my wife is onthe floor over by the bathroom
door, and she pushed the uhlight on, right?
(47:21):
And she's looking at me, and I'mlooking at her, I'm screaming.
And then I realize I'm notcovered with blood, I'm covered
with sweat.
And I am smelling the manure andthe urine.
I avoided myself.
Our bed is destroyed.
And she's looking at me, and I'mlooking at her, and we both knew
(47:43):
that this was bad, that ourlives were not without problems.
SPEAKER_00 (47:49):
Especially, well, especially after the fact that
you were you said you feltpretty normal.
You know, you recognized someother guys were having problems,
but you're like, I'm doing okay,what you know, and then it just
happened to you, you know, outof your control.
SPEAKER_01 (48:00):
So I already knew I had an affiliation for alcohol,
and I and I, you know, I keptmyself under control most of the
time.
And I had a lot of fun drinkingon weekends and stuff like that.
Um life would look normal fromthe outside.
But what I did start doing wasat nighttime, I'd put the kids
to bed, my wife would go to bed,and I would just pound it for
(48:22):
half an hour, an hour.
I never needed more than four orfive hours of sleep, so I would
just basically pass out, Iguess, and the alcohol would
take away, you know, make menumb, and it didn't seem to have
any real bad.
And I would wake up at you know,five o'clock in the morning, I
was self-employed, I'd get up,go to work, you know.
SPEAKER_00 (48:42):
It's interesting because we and we talked about
this before when you're whenyou're on the episode before,
episode 174 or two, for anybodywho wants to go back and listen.
But you know, you talked allabout having to go to the I
think you went to the VA becauseyou were, you know, escorted
there and you know, justdepressed and you know, that
whole that whole bit.
I was in handcuffs, Jake.
(49:04):
And handcuffs, yeah, exactly.
And you were older.
I mean, you were older when thishappened.
You were in what in your 60swhen you finally Yeah, I was 67.
SPEAKER_01 (49:11):
My my drinking didn't get out of hand
completely until my early 60s,and then I struggled.
I, you know, I mean I I would gomonths without drinking because
I knew that I had a problem onceI put it in me that I would lose
control.
And I, you know, I had a greatcareer as an attorney.
I'd done a lot of good things.
(49:32):
Um on the outside, I lookedpretty damn good, you know.
But I knew inside, I knew insideit was I was not right, that it
was getting really bad.
SPEAKER_00 (49:41):
Well, and the thing too, uh, that I think that I
love is the fact that you didovercome this and now you help
others, others who arestruggling with this, which I
think is is is so amazing.
I mean, you talked about how youfelt, you know, you felt like a
coward.
I look at you now, and that isjust that's amazing to me.
And and that's that's a hero tome, someone like you who's who's
(50:03):
helping others who struggle,because you know what it's like.
You know what it's like to nothave that control and to wake up
with that white light around,not knowing where you're
thinking you were in Vietnam,smelling it, feeling it,
destroying your bed and yourwife's in the corner like what
is you know, knowing things areare gonna change.
I mean, how do when you lookback at all that, here you are
(50:27):
in your 80s, sober, rand,helping others.
How does that feel?
Is that I mean, you feel I meanyou gotta at least have some
sort of pride about that, thatyou're now at least being able
to help others.
SPEAKER_01 (50:38):
You know, I try to stay humble because I had to get
a relationship with a higherpower and uh in order to
overcome my alcohol.
I did a really tough, not tough,I did a great, somewhat
difficult recovery program with12 steps in it.
As soon as I had done that, andI stayed sober for over a year,
and then I started working withother guys, and my life has been
(50:58):
full of joy since then.
You know, I told you about thehelicopter thing because I had
various nightmares.
It wasn't just that one.
That one was over and over againfor a long time, and then I
would have this one where I'd befalling, you know.
It was terrible.
There's nothing more terrifyingthan falling out of an airplane.
Um without a parachute.
Uh, you'll never see meparachuting, trust me.
(51:20):
Yeah, and a few months, well, acouple years ago, I was working
with a guy, and he was a vet, Iget veterans, I get relapsers
because I was a pretty badrelapser for a while.
We're kind of the hardest kindbecause we do have that
determination and that pride andego and all that.
And you have to you have torealize that you are powerless
(51:41):
over alcohol.
This is the one thing.
And you so you've got to have apower outside of yourself,
right?
And so I was talking to one ofthe guys, we had just finished
what we call his fifth step,where he basically admits to his
the things that he shouldn'thave done, you know, that kind
of thing, in order to get rid ofit, turn it over to God.
And uh he looks at me and hegoes, Would you, if you could go
(52:01):
back, I think I was 75 then.
If you could go back and say andget sober when you were 50,
would you do it?
And I said, No way.
Uh-uh.
I wouldn't because I wouldn'tknow what I know right now.
And I can use it.
I use it every day.
I work with guys every singleday.
And I see them transformed intopowerless people that alcohol is
killing them, and many cases hasdestroyed their families, their
(52:24):
whole lives, and they don'tunderstand it, and they can't do
anything, and then theytransform and they do the deal,
and then they're helping otherguys, you know, and it just goes
on and on.
It's great.
I'm I'm I'm the luckiest man onthe planet, Jake.
SPEAKER_00 (52:37):
And I know it.
And I'm happy for you.
Uh and I I appreciate Iappreciate you taking some time
again to visit with me.
I kind of wanted to leave on alast thought kind of about
Vietnam.
Because when you think aboutVietnam now, like what what
emotion comes to mind?
Like, what's kind of the firstemotion that comes to mind when
you think about Vietnam?
SPEAKER_01 (52:54):
Yeah, somebody asked me a while back if I would go
back there.
I said, no, I don't want to goback there.
I I'm kind of amazed by howVietnam is apparently it's a
republic in some fashion, andthey've done very well, and
there's a lot of Vietnamesepeople that emigrated here.
I was horrified after, I don'tknow, 1975, 76.
(53:18):
I realized we we lost.
We lost.
59,000 veterans died.
59,000.
A third of them by accidents.
Accidental discharges, you know,falling out of a helicopter, you
name it.
All kinds of crashes.
And I was on a C-130, Jake, thatlanded, that crashed with only
(53:42):
one engine working.
I didn't tell you that story.
And I walked away with thewhole, we all walked away.
We were absolutely astoundedthat we actually survived that
son of a gun.
But anyway, I diverged.
So I don't know, I have reallymixed feelings about it.
After Tet in August of 68, wehad won.
We destroyed every North Vietnamregiment that came down from the
(54:06):
north.
We're destroyed.
We destroyed all the Viet Congfighting apparatus.
We had won the war in August of1968.
And what happened?
We lost.
And that really bothered me fora long, long time.
All those men, some women, youknow, what a waste.
(54:29):
What a waste.
I still don't understand it.
I don't need to.
SPEAKER_00 (54:35):
Well, it's and I love that.
I love the fact that you don'tyeah, you can let that go too.
You don't need to to understandit.
I wanna per I want to thank youfor sharing because you know, uh
most of the World War II vetsare gone.
You know?
Yeah.
You're kind of that nextgeneration where there's Korean,
some Korean left Vietnam.
And you know, I look at my sons,I don't they don't, I don't they
(54:57):
have no clue, you know, and andit was after my, you know, I was
born in 77, so it was after myyou know, I was born afterwards,
but that was the war closest tome growing up.
So that was the one, you know, Isaw movies about, heard stories
about.
And so I appreciate you sharingthis because it it you know it's
touched me too.
I've grown so much, not onlyfrom doing this podcast, but
when I get to talk to peoplelike you, Rand, who who build me
(55:19):
up and you turn your life overto that there is a higher power
and that you need that help.
I'm so thankful for that.
So I just want to tell you thankyou, thank you for your service,
thank you for who you are, andthank you for your continued
service with helping others.
Thank you, Jay.
Appreciate it.
I want to take a moment tosincerely thank Rand Timmerman
for his courage andvulnerability and sharing his
story.
(55:40):
It's not easy to revisit thetrauma of war or to open up
about personal battles like hisstruggle with alcohol, but Rand
did so with honesty and strengththat truly moved me.
If you'd like to learn moreabout Rand and his journey, I
encourage you to check out hisbook, A Spiritual Passage, and
visit his website,rantimmerman.com.
His story is one of resilience,healing, and rediscovering peace
(56:01):
after years of pain.
Thank you, Rand.
And to all of you listening,thank you for being here and for
supporting Journey with Jake.
Your time and attention mean theworld to me.
Be sure to join me next week asI sit down with Rick Glaze.
We'll dive into a conversationabout adventure, treasure
hunting, and a whole lot more.
It's gonna be fun and afascinating ride that you won't
(56:21):
want to miss.
As always, I'm your host, JakeBushman, and this is Journey
with Jake.
Remember, it's not always aboutthe destination, as it is about
the journey.
Take care, everybody.
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