Flying into the Inferno

Episode Transcript
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Sam Alaimo (00:03):
This is the No Bell podcast where we talk about how
to optimize your technology,life, and mind. We're joined by
special operations veterans,entrepreneurs, investors, and
others who have overcomedifficulty to make it to the top
of their craft by staying in thefight. Welcome to the No Bell

(00:24):
podcast. My name is Sam Alaimo.I'm joined by Bob Graham, former
United States Air Force pilotwith four tours in the Vietnam
War, five hundred plus combatflights, and out with a new book
about his time in the servicecalled one of the few.
Bob, welcome.

Bob Graham (00:41):
Thank you. Thank you.

Sam Alaimo (00:42):
Let's start where we always do. Where did you grow
up?

Bob Graham (00:45):
So I was raised in Bluefield, New Jersey. And then
when I finished high school, Iwent went off to college, and I
had full scholarships. F1scholarships, so I had a letter
in two sports and then anacademic scholarship for the
other half. So when at the endof my freshman year, my father

(01:05):
was in the process of dying andmy mother had terminal cancer.
And I was an only child andthere was no close relatives.
I didn't have to worry aboutpaying for college because that
was paid for. I just need tofigure out how to eat. Right.
And who's gonna pay the rent?And no answer.
It just jumped right out at me.So I happened to be an Air Force

(01:26):
ROTC in the first year, so Iwent up to the ROTC commander up
there who happened to be, ofcourse, Air Force ground. And I
said, what should I do? And hesaid, enlist in the Air Force.
And he probably said that toeverybody.
But anyway, so I did. I quitcollege and I went off. I
enlisted in the air force, wentoff to basic training, did the
things where everybody does offthe basic training and got

(01:49):
through that. I happened to beon the base boxing team, and my
first sergeant was themiddleweight champ of the air
force.

Sam Alaimo (01:56):
Nice.

Bob Graham (01:57):
And so he took a liking to me. And after a couple
of months, he said to me, youknow, kid, you're wasting your
time. Go off to flight school.And the air force at the time
had an arrangement calledaviation cadets. You had the
equivalent of two years ofcollege.
You could apply for aviationcadets and pit test and go

(02:18):
through them. And I didn't knowthe front end of an airplane
from the back end of anairplane. I don't think I'd ever
seen one. And but he told me insome fairly direct terms that
not to just go sign up and andgo there. So I went off to
flight school, flew in the backseat of the first all weather
fighter interceptors that we hadbecause remember, let's say,

(02:41):
nineteen fifty six ish, all thewe were still converting from
prop driven fighters to jetfighters.
So so my experience was with thevery first jet fighters. And I
was in the backseat as a weaponsystem officer. So as a
sideline, I I assumed that oncemy, you know, my obligations to

(03:03):
the air force were over, I'dprobably go back to college on
the GI bill. So I applied forPenn and got accepted. And so
one day, in order to get ourfighters renovated, if you will,
and updated and stuff like that,We had a major depot out in
California, it was just North ofLA.

(03:25):
And so we used to fly thefighters out there and pick up a
new one, you know, rebuilt oneand fly that back. So I was in
the backseat of one of thosetrips, and we went out there,
picked up our renovated fighterand left out of LA, and we're
gonna make the first stop in LasVegas at Nellis Air Force Base.

(03:46):
Coincidentally, the enginefailed as we're come to was
Nellis, and we had a dead stickgear up on into Nellis. And so
we're there for like aboutthirty six hours maybe or
something like that while theywere repairing the engine. And
and a pilot that I had had flownin a Korean war.
And so he knew some of the guyson the Thunderbirds and also

(04:10):
some of the guys teaching at theTop Gun School and stuff like
that. So we sat around for acouple of evenings drinking beer
with those guys and I decidedthat when I grew up, what I
really wanted to do is not gooff to college and become a
businessman, but instead I wantto go fly fighters. So I'd
already been accepted to flightschool and went back and I
canceled my seat in Penn andwaited for a pilot training

(04:35):
seat. Then went through pilottraining seat or pilot training

Sam Alaimo (04:38):
What year was this?

Bob Graham (04:39):
Fifty nine or '60.

Sam Alaimo (04:41):
So well before anybody knew what was gonna
happen in Vietnam.

Bob Graham (04:44):
Yeah. Right. But one of the things I was sure of is I
want to go fly the f 100 becausethat was the cool thing. First
year, a plane never goessupersonic and level flight, and
there's the greatest fighter inthe whole world. And so that's
what all the guys at Knowlestold them to do when I got back.
So anyway, that course course oftraining was about a year in

(05:06):
flight school, and then aboutjust under another year in
advanced gunnery training. So Ihad two years. And then, so I
showed up in Japan about, whichwas my first operational
assignment, in sixty one, sixtyone ish. And that got me to the
beginning of my time in Asia,and yeah, certainly the

(05:29):
beginning of my operationalfighter career.

Sam Alaimo (05:33):
So you I had to cherry pick parts of the books
because there is so much therethat I'm gonna focus and bounce
around a little bit. But youwere stationed at one point near
the DMZ in Korea and had abasically a nuclear mission. And
you had one incident where youwere talking about hot nosing.

(05:53):
And this is an event of themilitary has a very professional
reputation, but one of the waysyou get better at your job is by
bending the rules a lot oftimes. Yeah, right.
I never heard of hot nosing, andthis is a really good example.
You wanna talk about whathappened near the DMZ?

Bob Graham (06:09):
Okay. So while we were sitting nuclear, typically
we set it for a week at a time.And during that week at a week,
usually got one day off whereyou could go fly. And when every
you went to fly, we had agunnery range up the West Coast
Of Korea just a little bit, andwe jump in the jet and go up

(06:30):
there. Then maybe a half hour,forty five minutes on the range,
and then usually we had a littletime left over.
And the range was only aboutmaybe sixty, seventy five miles
south of the DMC. And so the twoof us were up there and were
running around, you know, doingsome acrobatics and stuff like

(06:51):
that, killing time. And we sawwhat we thought was a South
Korean f 86 up there kindawandering around and so we
thought we hot hot nosed them.Now, the hot nosed means that
you take the the obviously, thetarget doesn't know you're
there, and it's probably notgonna find out until the last

(07:13):
moment. And what you do is youtake your two aircrafts in close
formation, run it up to justunder Mach one speed of sound,
and come underneath and blow itat 06:00.
And then just as you pull upimmediately in front of his
nose, you stroke the burners.And since he didn't know you
were there, that comes as asurprise, a complete surprise.

Sam Alaimo (07:36):
How many feet roughly away are you when you do
this?

Bob Graham (07:39):
Pretty close because there, you know, everybody's
traveling about. We weretraveling about Mach one and
he's traveling probably four or500 miles an hour. So as you go
through, oh, I'll get you're notthere very long in front of his
nose, I guess, you know, 10yards maybe something.

Sam Alaimo (07:54):
At four or 500 miles per hour. Does it

Bob Graham (07:56):
Well, we were yeah. We were probably closer to 600.

Sam Alaimo (08:00):
And so what happens to the person in that plane? Do
they feel just a massiveshutter?

Bob Graham (08:04):
Yeah. So the so the so the guy in that airplane is
in shock because, you know, allof a sudden, he thinks he's just
cruising around, you know,nobody's there. He's all by
himself. And the next thingknows, two guys with their
afterburners on his head, youknow, typed to his nose. And
that has a fairly dramaticeffect as you might expect on on

(08:24):
the guy.
So as we're pulling up, youknow, we go up, roll over on our
back, and we're looking down atthe guy because as we passed, we
realized that he wasn't a SouthKorean at 86. Turns out he was a
North Korean mag.

Sam Alaimo (08:38):
Oops. Yeah.

Bob Graham (08:40):
It had wandered south of the D M C. So as we
went by, you could you could seethat air his airplane was almost
out of control completely andhe's wandering all over and the
next thing you know, he turns hestarts heading north about as
fast as the airplane can go. We,on the other hand, obviously,
that's against the rules. We'renot supposed to do that to
people. So as we're coming back,it was one of those things you

(09:03):
land, you're walking in from theramp, and you say, you know, we
probably ought not to mentionthat.
But it was it was great fun.Yeah. That was good. That was
fun.

Sam Alaimo (09:11):
The the nuclear mission itself is interesting.
You said something when you weretrained to drop the bomb, if you
had to drop a nuclear bomb, itwould be in such a way where you
would not have enough fuel tocome back. Right. Was that
essentially a suicide mission,or was it built into the plan
you would have to eject and justmake your way back?

Bob Graham (09:29):
Right. So, yeah. So typically, when we sat alert, we
are each of us had a singletarget. So you have an airplane
and a nuc bomb strappedunderneath the belt of the
airplane. The idea behind it isis that if you're and obviously,
we're working Russia and China.

(09:50):
The idea is is that if you'regonna have a nuclear war, the
bomber's gonna take a while toget there. And what we wanted to
do is blow a hole in the fenceso that the bombers behind us
could penetrate deeper anddeeper without, you know, any
heavy defenses going in untilthey got much further in. So for

(10:12):
us, I mean, you got over thereon a Saturday afternoon, you
studied up for a target and inmy case, it was almost always a
target in China. And you onlyhad enough fuel to get there. So
essentially, it was a low level,high speed ingress into China,
pop up, do like a for lack of abetter word, an ammo man.

(10:36):
The bomb releases, and you hadenough gas to get just outside
of the large explosion, for lackof a better description. And
after that, you fling out andpunch out. And of course, as I
joke about, you know, the ideais is that you could jump out,

(10:58):
land in the middle of thenatives and make friends and and
spend the rest of the whateverlength of time you had for the
nuclear war, you could spendwith them and your friends and
stuff like that. And maybe, youknow, find a second career or
whatever. But yeah, all therides were one way rides and
that psychologically takes alittle getting used to.

(11:21):
You gotta think your way throughthat. So

Sam Alaimo (11:23):
Did pilots talk about what that meant? That they
knew it was you basicallyweren't gonna come back from
that. If you just dropped a nukein China and then you rejected
over China, you're not cominghome. No. So did everybody just
accept that?

Bob Graham (11:35):
Yeah. You kinda had to, you know, because somebody
was gonna have to do it, youwere selected. Wow. It was part
of what you signed up to do. Theidea of living or dying when
you're in that kind of abusiness, you have to accept the
fact that your chances of dyingare very high.
And don't forget, in a fightersquadron back then, in the

(11:58):
fighter squadron I was in, yourfatality rate is about twenty
percent a year. So it's not asif dying is not something that
you've already accepted. And infact, a part of that is is the
fact that, you know, we we weretaught to and pressed to get as
far out on a feather edge as youpossibly could. The idea of

(12:20):
beating the other guy whotheoretically is the best that
they had. You have to be able todrive yourself out on the edge
further and he can drive himselfout of And if you think about it
from the standpoint of what thebasketball coaches teach you,
they always talk about you needthat extra half a step.
Well, one way you get that extrahalf a step is you accept the
fact that you are going to die.And most other people won't

(12:42):
accept that. Intuitively,they'll push back against that.
Right? And when they do, they'llhesitate and you won't.
And so you got that half stepand that's usually a big deal
because that oftentimes iswhat's what gets you to survive
and then to lose. So part ofthat is training yourself to
accept the fact that you're notgonna live through this one, so

(13:05):
deal with it.

Sam Alaimo (13:06):
It seems to have served you well in the rest of
your career. So right aroundthis time, the Vietnam War
didn't kick off, but we startedsending Americans there in
advisory capacities Yeah.Unofficially for deniability.
And there was typically militarywho were basically
decommissioned from the militaryand sent there as civilians. And

(13:27):
you ended up boots on theground, not even as a pilot in
Vietnam in 1962, I believe.

Bob Graham (13:34):
Yep.

Sam Alaimo (13:35):
And had some pretty intense combat fighting
alongside the Vietnamese. Youwanna just take it from there
and and how did that come aboutand talk about your first
exposure?

Bob Graham (13:45):
My first trip into combat, I'd only been there for,
a week or ten days.

Sam Alaimo (13:50):
Within a week you were in a firefight?

Bob Graham (13:52):
Yeah. Why when I I became a civilian, went through
to Tokyo or the embassy Tokyo.Got discharged from the air
force, went next door and wentto work for and I'm not sure
about the name, but the name wassomething like the American
Botanical Survey Corporation, itwas something like that. You
know, I've been through all thenecessary survival schools and,

(14:15):
you know, training schools andstuff like that in the air force
before that. But I went I leftTokyo, flew down to Philippine
Island to Manila.
Had a maybe a three dayintroduction in Manila, went
across Saigon. Got three or fourdays in Saigon, and then ran up

(14:35):
to to my my first assignment waswith twenty fifth Arvin, the
Vietnamese Army division.

Sam Alaimo (14:45):
So to be clarify, you were you were, for all
intents and purposes, a civilianright now Right. Working for an
NGO, a nongovernmentalorganization Right. Which is a
cover organization. Right. Yousaid you're essentially
conducting the militaryoperations in Vietnam.

Bob Graham (14:59):
Yeah. I was advising.

Sam Alaimo (15:01):
Advising with complete separations of if you
were caught or captured.

Bob Graham (15:04):
You're a you're a civilian.

Sam Alaimo (15:06):
You're screwed. Yeah. Yeah. Okay.

Bob Graham (15:09):
Because you have no identification, you have no
rank, you have no, you know,anything. You're literally, you
know, working as an adviser.Well, the problem with the whole
adviser description is is thatyou're probably gonna end up
advising from the front asopposed to the rear. That's
right. It's not like, you know,inviting a guy into your office

(15:29):
because first of you don't havean office.
But you did have 10, but, youknow, you could but you you're
not gonna be able to train thethe Vietnamese. So I was
assigned to the twenty fifthArmy Division. And at that point
in time, he'd become a forwardair controller, but you're not
flying at the time. So you're onthe ground. And I happened to be

(15:51):
they had, like, a portion ofthat division battalion or
something was a ranger battalionand so they used those for or
the rangers for smallercontacts.

Sam Alaimo (16:02):
These are Vietnamese rangers, not American rangers?

Bob Graham (16:04):
No. They were Vietnamese rangers. So I was
assigned to them, spent probablytwo days maybe. We got some
intel that there was a prettygood size VC group that was in
this particular location in thejungle. So there was a American
marine helicopter outfit down inSaigon that was supporting

(16:27):
almost everybody in the country.
So they sent up probably theentire squadron of marine
helicopters. And we're gonna setup an arrangement where we were
gonna have a a three piecedriving force to drive via comm
into, I think they used to callit hammer and anvil type of

(16:50):
operation, where you drive intoa range of blocking force. So I
was I was gonna go in with thethe first wave in the choppers.
So it's kind of a funny storyafterwards. It wasn't so funny
at the time, but anyway, so thenight before going in, a marine
commander of the of the thechopper app that says, he

(17:14):
briefed us on, he says, okaynow, we're expecting or we
should expect a a 10% loss rategoing into the l c.
And that's the first time thatoccurred to me that we're gonna
lose 10% of the guys before wegot to the fight. So so that was
sort of an eye opener. And, ofcourse, you know, the adrenaline
was flowing, and I'm allexcited, and this is gonna be my

(17:37):
first show. So then the and I'dobviously never been on a
chopper going into LA. So themarine sergeant take me aside
because I'm the only American,takes me aside and he said, now
listen, the only thing thatworks is we can't be on the
ground very long because, youknow, people shooting at you and
get out of here.
I said, so you're gonna be thefirst one to off the chopper.

(17:58):
When I tap you on the back, outyou go. Okay. I got it. So I'm
going, Ed.
And, of course, you know, I wasI was so nervous and so anxious
that if he had sneezed andtapped on each other, I'd have
jumped out jumped out at 500feet. Anyway, so and we go to
the elephant grass, and we'regonna land, you know, land on

(18:19):
the elephant grass, and thenwe're gonna go to this, you
know, to the jungle, which isjust about not very far, maybe
75 yards or so away. And so,chopper lands, guy hits me on
the shoulder, I go out and, youknow, at John Wayne time, and
I'm running through the opengrass, and people are, you know,

(18:40):
shooting and carrying on and Igot about 10 or 15 yards and I
thought, geez, I'm the only guyif I don't have to off the
chopper. So the next thoughtwas, they're gonna take the
chopper and they're gonna leaveand I'm gonna be here all by
myself and that's not gonna be avery good thing. So anyway, so I
turned around, I start runningback to the chopper.
At this time, the marinesergeant, I've got things under

(19:03):
control and now all the rangerscome off the chopper. So they go
by me, I turn around and now I'mthe last guy in the the line
heading for the, you know,jungle tree line.

Sam Alaimo (19:14):
It seems like a thought they didn't want to get
off because they didn't want tofight, correct?

Bob Graham (19:18):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (19:19):
That's a sign of

Bob Graham (19:20):
things to And also because they were smarter than I
was. They'd probably done thatbefore and I never have.

Sam Alaimo (19:26):
That was your first fire fight. Did you spend the
night on that fire fight?

Bob Graham (19:30):
We were there for a couple days. You know, it was
one of those things where wenever made hard contact, we had
some brush contacts and stufflike that, but there's no hard
and I felt that the Vietnamesewere doing it in slow motion so
that by the time they began todrive the Vietcong force into

(19:52):
where the anvil was, theVietcong had dissipated and gone
all through the side and so bythe time you get to the anvil,
it's not a lot there. So thelesson that I took away from
that is that one, when you'reworking on the ground, you want
to make sure that everybody getsoff the chopper at the same
time. And the other thing wasthat you don't want to have too

(20:12):
much confidence in your in yourVietnamese cohorts because they
may not be there, you know, whenthe loud noises start. But
anyway, so that was my firstintroduction in, you know, how
to be a a novice infantryofficer.

Sam Alaimo (20:27):
You had a you had a early taste. Did you, as an
advisor in 1962, what did youthink about our involvement
there? Did you realize it wasgoing to be this full hardcore
war in a short period of time?Did you think it was necessary?
What did you think as theadvisor?

Bob Graham (20:42):
So before I went down there, I had flown down I
flew down to Taiwan. Taiwan wasthe knock off book capital of
Asia at the time. And I got allof the books, all those French
books that had been writtenabout Southeast Asia. And I took
them back up and I studied themvery very carefully and and my

(21:05):
going in proposition was that itwas a really good idea to go to
war, but the important aspect ofit was I thought Kennedy was
right. That was a special opswar.
And later on, as I went backover and over again, the
problem, I think the basicproblem, it never went away was
the American military decided toturn it into a variation of

(21:28):
World War two. And it nevershould have happened. It it
really was a special ops war.Had we continued to fight it
that way, our chances of successwould have been, I think,
remarkably better. But moreimportantly, if things weren't
going well, if things werestarting to go sideways, if you

(21:49):
had a special ops war, you canpull everybody out in a
heartbeat, turn around and say,not us, we were never there.
And we didn't do that, insteadwe took, by the time we were
finished, we had 500,000Americans in here fighting war.
I thought that was right next tothe border line stupid. I mean,
we certainly never should havecommitted that soon that way to

(22:13):
trying to fight some sort of afixed peace European attritional
war. That's what we did, and itworked out very, very poorly.

Sam Alaimo (22:21):
It almost sounds like the advisers were sent
there to get some sort ofassessment, And then their
recommendations were completelyjettisoned in favor of a
straight up conventional war.

Bob Graham (22:31):
Yeah. Later on, I got I got I I ended up flying
with a Vietnamese squadron forquite a while. I mean, maybe 75
missions or so. And I got firedand actually I was I was told
that I was being thrown out ofthe country persona, my brother.
And and I got and I was kind oftemporarily out of work, I was

(22:54):
sort of unemployed at the atthat time.
And so I was able to help outand they assigned me to one of
our a teams, the special forcesa teams from the army.

Sam Alaimo (23:07):
Was this the incident where you were flying
with a well connected Vietnameseofficer? Yeah. You want to talk
about that real quick?

Bob Graham (23:13):
Right. So so I we had a we had a problem at the at
the time in that particularmission. And and so I had, I
think in a very short period oftime, like a few seconds, I I
had criticized not only him, buthim, all of his family, anybody
he had a shaking hands with,everybody he knew, and and even

(23:36):
his dog. And I don't think Ioverlooked anybody. Well, it
turns out I did not because hewas a nephew of the person.
And so when that happens, why Igot fired and they said, you
know, we're throw you out of thecountry. And and so I went down
to my boss and the the agencyguy and I said, you know, I'm

(23:57):
looking for a job and you know,what what do you got coming? So
anyway, so to speed things up,moved through that

Sam Alaimo (24:04):
and So this was your second tour, right?

Bob Graham (24:07):
This is my first tour. Still on my first tour. So
on my first tour I went firstwith the Vietnamese Rangers,
then they they decided that theyneeded advisors with the
Vietnamese Air Force and so Ivolunteered to fly with those
guys for a while.

Sam Alaimo (24:20):
Got

Bob Graham (24:20):
it. And I got fired and then they assigned me to an
American, an a team for a while.

Sam Alaimo (24:27):
So when you were flying with the Vietnamese,
that's when you were doing themission where you were lobbing
grenades out of the window.Right. Yeah. That was just some
savage primitive version ofclose air support?

Bob Graham (24:36):
So well, so I was maybe the first or second
forward air controller that wehad checked out with the
Vietnamese air force. So whenyou go out there, first of the
airplane is spotter airplane'scanvas. Right.

Sam Alaimo (24:51):
So propeller canvas.

Bob Graham (24:52):
Yeah. Propeller canvas airplane and you know,
top speed is like a 20 miles anhour. Oh.

Sam Alaimo (24:57):
It's an easy target.

Bob Graham (24:58):
The good news is you can't go very fast but you can
go very very low and slow. Andthe bad news is when you're
going low and slow, people shootat you. Because when you're over
the top of the target, you know,everybody down there
theoretically is a bad guy. Andthe way you tell the good guys
from the bad guys is the badguys shoot at you, and the good
guys don't shoot at you. And so,after maybe the second ride, you

(25:22):
you you get to the idea andsays, so so wait a minute, I'm
low and slow and I'm gonna fireover the top of these guys and
they're gonna shoot at me andthen, you know, I'm gonna have
to mark a target with mopgrenade.
And it didn't seem fair. And sowe came up with the idea of,
well, what if I shoot back? Andevery you know, I thought that
was a really good idea. And thenwe thought, well, okay, in

(25:43):
addition to smoke grenades, ifwe can shoot back, maybe we
should drop hand grenades. Mhmm.
And so the next thing you know,over a period of a couple of
rides, we were kinda like WorldWar I. Right? So you're flying
over the top of these guys andthey're shooting at you and you
know, and in that airplane,windows open up and connect up.
So all you gotta do is kind offly and guide it with your knees

(26:06):
while you're shooting out thewindow. And then we decided,
when I say we, we had fiveAmericans involved in this
operation and we had we lived ina tent in Da Nang or back then
it was Da Nang.
And we had an officer's club andthe officer's club was a
concrete slab, maybe a quartersize of this room and it was a

(26:28):
bamboo factory fudge and stufflike that. And we could get
booze sent up from Saigon in ashovel transport. And I don't
know how they got it, but therewas an old ice maker that maybe
got left there by the French orsomething like that. So we had
ice and we had, you know, waterand mustard bags and and
American booze imported fromSaigon. So at night, whoever was

(26:55):
there that evening of the fiveof us, on Saturday night, would
have sitting around, you know,having a drink because the next
day in Vietnam back then, theydidn't fight the war on Sundays.

Sam Alaimo (27:08):
Both good and bad guys took Sunday off.

Bob Graham (27:10):
Yep. No no no war on Sundays. But the Vietnamese
said, well, you guys areAmericans, so you know, you're
not you know, you don't have toworry about that. But if you
want to fly airplanes, well, youcan. So which was a good idea.
So we'd sit around, a few of uswould sit around and say, well,
okay, what targets did you go onthis week that you thought maybe

(27:33):
we ought to go back and visit onSunday? And so we came up with
all kinds of things. I think thefirst thing we tried, we decided
that we needed more air power.And so we started out and said,
we'll go to the chow hall andget use the peanut butter jars.
And we'll open up the peanutbutter jar and we'll pull a pin
on the hand grids, set the handgrids, screw the top back on.

(27:54):
And the idea being that now wehave a bombing capability, and
we can fly over the top of thebad guys, and we can shoot the
bad guys, and we can drop handgrenades on the bad guys. And
and that led us from there to wethought that we could do the
same thing, not the same thing,but kind of like the same thing,
a satchel charge. And so we tieda string around the pin or the

(28:17):
fuse or whatever it was, and wethrow the satchel charge out.
And we tried that one Sunday,but the problem was that we did
it wrong and the pin never cameout. So we had the satchel
charge hanging under theairplane, these were flying, and
we had to haul the thing backin.
But but each Saturday night, wecome up with different ways to

(28:37):
enhance air power and also wherewe're going to go over the next
afternoon after we soak it up togo out and find a target we
thought was, you know,interesting from last week.

Sam Alaimo (28:48):
How did the peanut butter grenade work? So when it
landed they would open? Okay. Itdidn't work out.

Bob Graham (28:53):
The problem the problem is the ground's soft.

Sam Alaimo (28:56):
Okay.

Bob Graham (28:57):
Right? And we're not gonna be dropping them. We're
only gonna be dropping it fromlike 25, 30 feet. And so, we
went through the process ofsaying we we, you know, the
peanut butter jars aren't theright jar. Do we need thinner
jars?
And thinner jars were sometimesgood, sometimes bad. But the big
deal was if we could hitsomething hard, then it worked

(29:18):
out fine. Yeah. But otherwise,you have a life grenade in a
peanut butter jar that the yeah,Kong can have. And if and we we
made the assumption and said, ifyou guys really want the hand
grenade inside the peanut butterjar, all you got to do is
unscrew the top and then verycarefully get the hand grenade
back up.
And then but hang on to it.Because, you know, obviously

(29:42):
somebody's gotta be hanging onto it. Yeah. So you could kind
of pass around. Yeah.
So anyway, so we would do that.And but the problem was that
when we're on duty with theVietnamese, the Americans could
not become the aircraftcommander because we were only
advisors. So we needed to have alittle Vietnamese lieutenant, it

(30:06):
wasn't a pilot or anything likethat, was just some guy.

Sam Alaimo (30:08):
Along for the ride.

Bob Graham (30:09):
And he's in the back seat. And the job of the guy in
the back seat was theoretically,I'm in the front and I'm flying
the airplane and the guy in theback is gonna drop the smoke
grenade. And that's his onlyjob. All he's gotta do is pull
the pin out of the smokegrenade, throw it out the
window, and everything elsetakes care. But this particular

(30:29):
guy that we're talking about wasafraid of heights.
And in order to do anything, hehe needed to be closer to the
window. But when he got closerto the window, was really, you
know, scared to death. And so hewould lean back on the other
side of the seat, pull the panand then throw it out to him.

(30:52):
And so one day he missed thewindow. And that was the day
when now we have a smoke grenaderolling around on the seat and
we don't have a lot of time forhim to pick up, find it, and
throw it out to him again.
So finally he did, but duringthat interval was when I
insulted him and all of hisrelatives and anybody he had
ever met and things like that.And that's when I got fired. So

Sam Alaimo (31:17):
So you got fired for in in in a really dramatic way.
If you're gonna get fired,that's the way to do it. Yeah.
And then to basically save yourcareer and cool off

Bob Graham (31:28):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (31:29):
You went to probably the most dangerous mission
possible, which was to join theSpecial Forces, who had their A
camps dotted throughout Vietnam.Right. And they were super small
units involved in guerrillawarfare. Yep. And they partnered
with the the Mongards, who I'veread a lot about, the tribes
under Vietnam.

Bob Graham (31:47):
Yeah.

Sam Alaimo (31:48):
And that mission, I mean, that's that's the infamous
mission. Like, that's the famousthe most some of the most famous
work done in Vietnam was withthese guys. And then yourself,
an Air Force pilot, ended upboots on the ground with Special
Forces and the Montagnards.

Bob Graham (32:02):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (32:03):
Pick it up there at the camp.

Bob Graham (32:05):
So I really like working with Special Forces
guys. I mean, that was reallyneat. And of course, I'm like a
hard carrier's helper. Right?But the one good thing that I
learned after I became anofficer was that that senior
NCOs make it make an assumptionthat young officers are not very
bright and that they have totake care of them.

(32:26):
And it's almost like a paternalfeeling. Right? So I get
attached to the this team and,you know, a special forces team,
I guess, down even then, atleast a small, it's 18 for like
12 guys. Mhmm. We had twoofficers and a funny aside, so
when I reported in to theofficer, he was a captain and I

(32:49):
thought, I'm gonna meet some guylike Daniel Boone, right, who's
really comfortable in the jungleand can, you know, raise in the
jungle probably and all that.
And so when I first met him andintroduced myself and he said,
you know, what's your date ofreckoning on? And we were
talking, I said, well, I'm fromBloomfield, New Jersey. And I
said, I'm sure you were, youknow, like, raising a farm or
something like that because thiscomes natural to you. And he

(33:11):
said, no, I come from The Bronx.Wow.
And I thought to myself, we areseriously screwed. We got some
guy from New Jersey and thisguy's from The Bronx. And I
said, we're never gonna make it.But anyway, so I got a fast
constant course from senior NCOsand they taught me, you know,
how to survive. Being, you know,being with guys like that, the

(33:35):
level of professionalism is sohigh that it's just a pleasure
to be here.
I thought, you know, they wereremarkably affected. And that's
part of where I came from, whereI said, we fought the wrong war.
We exit executed it poorly. Youknow, in an area which was in a
huge area, but but that team wasvery, very effective in reducing

(34:02):
the Viet Cong influence in ingeneral area, to suppressing
most of it, to interdicting theHo Chi Minh Trail as they were
moving supplies and puttingpeople down in a very, very
short period of time. Theyorganized the Mountain Air
Village.
They had a fairly significantteam of Mountain Air strikers.

(34:23):
But every place you look, theyreally had it put together well.
So when I was asked periodicallyto go down to the embassy and
brief the, you know, air attacheand the military attache down
there, of those guys were twostar generals, one out of the
air force, was a bomber pilot inWorld War two and one tank guy
out of World War two. And noquestion about the fact that

(34:46):
that they were successful inWorld War two. The problem is is
that insurgency warfare is notWorld War two in Central Europe,
and they could not pivot, if youwill.
They they could not get it outof their heads that you can't
fight a jungle war anywhere inthe world with the same tactics

(35:08):
and strategy that you had inWorld War II or even to a lesser
extent Korea. And as a result,it's through your embassy and
your attache that most of theinformation is moving back to to
Washington. And and you know,bomber generals don't get along
with fighter pilots and tankgenerals don't get along with

(35:29):
special ops guys. As a result ofthat, the special ops guys are
never given credit for whatthey've achieved because the
regular army guys were, at leastback then, were, you know,
distrustful the special ops guyswere doing.

Sam Alaimo (35:44):
Did they ever kind of tie their hands behind their
backs and prevent them fromdoing their mission as special
forces would?

Bob Graham (35:51):
You know, I I can't tell that because I don't know
what was coming in, you know, onthe army side of things. The
agency at the time had completeoperational control over the
army teams. And and the problemthere was that increased the
distrust between the regulararmy infantry guys or, in this

(36:11):
case, know, tanker and and thespecial ops guys. Because the
the the regular army guys andthe regular air force guys want
to have command and access overtheir army special ops and the
CIA guys were in the way. But Iguess, I assume the president

(36:34):
and the president and his staffhad decided that for the kind of
war that they wanted to fight,that the agency would have full
operational control over overthose guys.
And and obviously me. So butthat that, if you will, internal
distrust and the fact that theregular army wanted a piece of

(36:58):
the war. Mhmm. They eventuallygot a huge piece of the war and
and in my view screwed it up andSo it's an interesting thing.
Thought a better way to do itwould have been not to scale up
and accelerate the Americanpresence in the war until we
were a little bit more savvyabout how to fight those kinds

(37:21):
of wars.
See, back then, you know, itprobably wasn't until '59 or '60
or maybe slightly before, beforeThe United States really got to
thinking about insurgency,counterinsurgency warfare.
Before that, it was aboutbecause all their victories had
come from World War II. And sothe idea was is that the way you

(37:43):
fight a war is the same way wewon in World War II. Now, you
know, so when you're dealingwith the, you know, the agency
and the special operations guysand and their teams, covert
operation teams, you know,you're dealing with an entirely
different strategy and entirelydifferent mindset. It's really

(38:05):
hard for regular army guys orregular air force guys to
comprehend that.
You know, it's just, I don'tknow, counterintuitive or
something.

Sam Alaimo (38:14):
It's an entirely different mission set. Yeah. And
like getting getting down, andyou know it from boots on the
ground. And you wrote about oneof the a camps you were at that
was being attacked. Mhmm.
And it's it's interesting. I doagree with everything you're
saying. We the conventionalforces were fighting in a way
that the enemy was not, and itwas a mismatch. How do we match

(38:35):
them, boots on the ground, smallunits against small units and
ferret them out? The studies andobservation groups did that
extremely well.
Special forces did it

Bob Graham (38:43):
well when they could. Yeah, they did.

Sam Alaimo (38:44):
Do you want to talk about

Bob Graham (38:46):
I mean, Saga was a terrific so was Phoenix, the
way.

Sam Alaimo (38:49):
Yeah. Yeah.

Bob Graham (38:51):
And and I don't know who it was, maybe it was Carter.
They got all in a s e fit aboutthe Phoenix operation, but they
were enormously successful.Yeah. And and to put a stop to
it, and then on top of that,fire all the people involved in
it, you just took all your bestSpecial Forces people and you

(39:11):
had them go hide in the closet.

Sam Alaimo (39:12):
Yeah. With a lot of experience. With a lot of
experience. So you saw thatnight let's let's zoom in the
one night when your base wasunder attack because it sounds
like a sort of scene you wouldsee from Apocalypse Now. It was
a very different war from theone I'm familiar with.
Okay. So, like, the the junglewarfare is interesting to me,
and you were talking about anight when your camp was being
attacked, you were fightingbeneath the flares, and a couple

(39:35):
of guys made it through and wereon their way to you. And it
sounds like you were in afoxhole. Wanna pick up that
story?

Bob Graham (39:40):
Yeah. So so a typical I shouldn't say typical,
but our our 18 camp, we were, ifyou will, on the not in the
center of, but it's sort ofattached to the Mattyard
Village. And we had a smallcompound.

Sam Alaimo (39:54):
How many Americans roughly?

Bob Graham (39:56):
12 special ops guys and me.

Sam Alaimo (39:58):
That is remarkably small.

Bob Graham (40:01):
And they used to work on the basis of 10 to one
exchange rate. So so the viewwas is that if let's suppose we
have 12 really effective guysand so you say, well, if you
want to take our compound, it'llcost you a 20 guys. Well, that's
a big size Vietnam group becausegorilla groups in the jungle are

(40:27):
usually smaller than that.

Sam Alaimo (40:29):
Are you saying for every one American you want 10
Montnards?

Bob Graham (40:32):
10 Viet Viet Cong.

Sam Alaimo (40:34):
So you're saying one American can handle fight 10
Viet Cong, basically? Yeah. Soyou so this camp can handle a 20
Viet Cong attack?

Bob Graham (40:42):
A 20 via Kong. Theoretically, if you exchange
rates 10 to one, and if you guyswanna ex ex you know, a 20 guys,
come, you know, and oh, by theway, the bad news is is that
after you spend a 20 guys, we'llgive a phone call to the guys in
the Mike Force and will show upin about ten days

Sam Alaimo (41:04):
Yeah.

Bob Graham (41:04):
With another 12 guys. Yep. Or maybe 30 guys out
in your Mike Force. So so, youknow, we can do this a lot
longer and you can do that.Right?
So so when they hit us, and Ialways had the feeling that they
were trying to look when theyhad maybe a couple of guys out
or, you know, whatever. Right.Where they could take advantage

(41:28):
of that 10 to one relationship.But the general theory that we
operate under was okay, ifyou're willing to spin the guys,
well then okay.

Sam Alaimo (41:39):
I've read about a few of those. Yeah. About one
circumstance, they actually hadtanks against one of these a
camps and just completelyoverrode it. Yeah. That was not
infrequent.
So you were in a somewhatsimilar situation where you were
in a pretty decent attack.

Bob Graham (41:52):
So you have this little compound where we had
typically bamboo a couple ofbamboo huts that we lived in.
And then you had in the center,you have what looks like a World
War II pillbox, but in thecenter, it slopes down in the
center and you have a grenadepit. And then you have firing

(42:16):
pits or firing stations allaround it. But for us, we all
had a kind of a foxhole assignedto us, you know, with a couple
of, I don't know what you callthem, firing sticks up on either
side. And then around that were,I'm gonna say three layers of

(42:37):
concertina.
And we had some claymores andmines and some flares and stuff
like that. And to the best of myknowledge, they always see this
at night because they I guessthey felt that they had an
advantage at night. And on thisone particular time, I shouldn't
say it that way because itwasn't a frequent thing, but it

(42:59):
was kind of a rare thing. Butbut this one particular night
they did it and of course whenthey're coming through the wire
and the flares are going up and,know, light motors are going off
and here comes the bad guys. Andso they got through the wire and
I'm in my little spot here andhere comes three guys and and

(43:21):
the guy in the middle has arifle with bayonet on it.
Mhmm. And the other two guys, Iguess they're there so when he
gets shot, they get the rifle.And and so they're coming at me
and then, you know, it's likethere. And but it's okay because
I had a Thompson at the time andI carried a 38 and you know,

(43:43):
typical machete and stuff likethat. And but we'd been at it
for a little while and I was outof ammo for the Thompson.
But I was still

Sam Alaimo (43:53):
How many magazines did you carry?

Bob Graham (43:55):
I think I had two or three.

Sam Alaimo (43:57):
So you fired at 60 or 90 rounds?

Bob Graham (43:59):
Oh, couldn't have. But I was excited.

Sam Alaimo (44:02):
Just laying down the fire?

Bob Graham (44:03):
Yeah. So probably when they were way out there,
but as these guys were comingin, I ran out of ammo for the
Thompson, and so I grabbed mytrusty 38 because I'd gone to
the John Wayne movies. I knew Icould handle this, right? So I
shoot the two guys on eitherside, so far so good, except
that that ran me out of 38 ammo.So that wasn't so good.

(44:29):
And the guy in the middle, I'dhit a couple of times, but and
he keeps coming. It's just alittle guy with a with a big
rifle and bayonet. So as he'scoming towards me, you know, I'm
I'm sitting there thinking,Jesus, I'm really in trouble. I
just shot this guy twice andhe's still coming. And so about
the time, you know, I stand upbecause I think this is gonna be

(44:50):
a knife fight.
And so just as he gets in frontof me, he dies in front of me.
And I thought, you know, Icoulda had a heart attack
watching him do that. Butanyway.

Sam Alaimo (45:00):
What was her mind process pulling machete? I've
never never been in thatsituation, thank God.

Bob Graham (45:08):
Well, so he so these guys were not firing the rifle,
so he had a bayonet. Yeah. SoI'm assuming

Sam Alaimo (45:14):
It was a legitimate knife fight.

Bob Graham (45:16):
Right. So, my 38 doesn't work very well. So one
of the things I learned thatnight, by the way, when I'm
excited, trying to reload a 38revolver is not the thing I do
best. So, I immediately left 38business and got myself a
brownie nine millimeter, itlooks just fine. And then I can

(45:38):
carry a lot of clips.
So anyway, but the joke I'verealized was that, you know, I
I'm thinking, cause it's notlike I have a ton of experience
and here come these guys andthey've gone through the wire,
they're still coming, and I'mthinking, wow, I'm in big
trouble. So it wasn't that I wastrying to have a knife fight
with my machete, it

Sam Alaimo (45:58):
should look

Bob Graham (45:59):
like that, it was what was left.

Sam Alaimo (46:01):
Worst case scenario. Yeah. You were still technically
a civilian at this point intime, were you officially

Bob Graham (46:06):
in the Yeah,

Sam Alaimo (46:06):
I was civilian. So this is where it gets
interesting. I've read quite abit about Vietnam and it doesn't
typically work out well when youget captured. And you were
tasked at one point on a searchand rescue mission for an
American who'd been captured.Yeah.
And you talk about how you setthe ambush, didn't end up

(46:27):
getting them on the ambush, orhe wasn't there when you
ambushed them. Right. You kindof backtracked where they came
from, and then you ended upfinding where he was, and he had
been tortured and killed.

Bob Graham (46:37):
Yeah.

Sam Alaimo (46:38):
That is as bad as it gets, and I think it probably
reframes things for you, notjust the fact that you're
executed, but that you'retortured. Can you talk about
what it was, how you found him,and then how that shaped the
rest of your time in the war?

Bob Graham (46:52):
Okay. So there were very very few American advisors
over there at your time. And sotypically, what would happen is
it it was a it was a big coup.First of we all had boundaries
on our head. Right?
So like, that was quite acompliment actually.

Sam Alaimo (47:07):
What were you worth? Do you know?

Bob Graham (47:09):
Yeah. Because our radio Hanoi would say, hey, you
know, some you know, there's a,you know, whatever, one year pay
reward for

Sam Alaimo (47:20):
That's pretty good. Bob Grant.

Bob Graham (47:22):
Yeah. Oh,

Sam Alaimo (47:23):
they knew your name?

Bob Graham (47:24):
Yeah. Yeah. They also

Sam Alaimo (47:26):
So there's obviously a good leak there as well.

Bob Graham (47:28):
Yeah. Which and very complimentary. Yeah. Right?
That's awesome.
So anyway, but there weren'tvery many American visors, so
what they would try to do is,whenever, like when you're
working with a mountian yard,some small percentage of the
mountian yard would really beplanted in there in order to

(47:50):
steal a weapon and kill America.And so that was pretty
commonplace. And the fact thatyou there was always a for them,
a lot of money on the table,Then you know, trucking America
was a big deal. And so anyway,the way it typically worked was
they if they could capture youinjured and alive, they would

(48:14):
put you in a tiger cage, whichis a bamboo type cage. And then
they would take you through thevillages for a day or two.
They're really not logisticallyset up to support a captive, but
they were taken through thevillage in the in the tiger's
cage and torture them and allowthe villagers to torture them.

(48:35):
And then at some point in time,you know, two, three, four days,
they would typically have some,I suppose, big ceremony of sorts
where they would impale thecaptive on a stake in the center
of the village. So the bestthing that would have happened
to them is they would have beentortured to death before they

(48:58):
got to the stake. But if youwere living long enough to get
to the stake, it was a tough wayto die. So one of the things
that was a takeaway for me wasthat I did not intend to be
captured in any of my succeedingtours.
But I also took it upon myselfto think, you know, I'm kinda
handy in the in the woods, and Igotta punch out and fend for

(49:20):
myself. Well, I'll just fightfrom the ground instead of from
the air.

Sam Alaimo (49:23):
So this kinda comes into what you wrote about in
your book. You wrote about thecombat mind, and you said you
live at the survival level whereeverything is a function of
living or dying. And a lot ofpeople call that zone, a lot of
people call that the flow. Andyou called your ability to get
into that the switch. Can youtalk about how you would get

(49:44):
into that state and what it feltlike to operate in that zone
while you're actually in thefield?

Bob Graham (49:50):
Yeah. So and I and I really kinda you know, my first
thought was kinda myintroduction to the head game
problem that we all that we allface. And a and a problem I an
advantage because when I gotback in the Air Force again, I
got back in my own fighter squadunder all my buddies there, and

(50:10):
that was almost a perfectenvironment to get your head
back screwed on right. But it'sa it was a very, very difficult
transition for me dealing with awife and family and other
people, you know, as well. Andthat period of transition coming
back was long enough to where,you know, we're talking weeks

(50:32):
and months, probably closer tomonths than weeks.
And then, you gotta turn aroundand go back at it again. So so
in the business, you're you'regonna have to switch on and
switch off. So I spent a lot oftime thinking about how to do
that effectively. And I decidedthat I could switch on and off
really well during the day. Youknow, your conscious mind, if

(50:54):
you're self disciplined, yourconscious mind will allow you to
switch back and forth.
So you can be, for all intentsand purposes, the military
variation of Jekyll and Hodt.And then so the hard part is
always coming back to yourfamily and coming back to a more
normalized environment. What Ifound is I can scale up really

(51:19):
quickly to get back into combat.

Sam Alaimo (51:22):
What does that this is something that happened a lot
in the war on terror because youhave guys who would do 15 combat
deployments. Right. And somepeople would just get broken. At
some point, you just can't takeit anymore. How did you Yeah.
How did you cognitively getyourself in that zone?

Bob Graham (51:36):
This is gonna sound weird. So I I I happen to be
really comfortable in that. SoI, you know, and I know

Sam Alaimo (51:42):
I think most people are. The hard part is the
transition from that zone tofamily mode.

Bob Graham (51:49):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (51:49):
But it sounds like you were able to just flick that
switch and not struggle bouncingback and forth.

Bob Graham (51:55):
By the time I was back home three weeks or four
weeks, I had a day game good.Know, I would look like for all
intents and purposes I wasnormal. I paid for all my sins
at night and then Sleeping.Yeah. Well, not sleeping.
That's the case. But the nightswere really tough. But the days,

(52:16):
I could, you know, get my armsaround that fairly fast. But I I
found that I had to get back tomy family gradually. I could get
back to the squadron quick, butto go back to a family
environment with the normalthings that you have going on in
the family, that was reallyhard.
So I kind of took that in smallbites until I could get that

(52:41):
going. The reverse of that wasthat when I was going back in,
if you gave me a few days or aweek and a half or something
like that, I was full up and Iwas comfortable and fit in well
and got back in the in the flow,if you will. Very, very quickly.

Sam Alaimo (53:01):
And it's something I've seen a lot too is you you
enjoy that condition, that zone,that survival

Bob Graham (53:09):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (53:09):
Mentality. And then you noticed when you got back,
you said you were you werechanged, you had short-tempered,
obviously had trouble at nightsleeping.

Bob Graham (53:16):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (53:17):
But at the same time, you wanted to get back.

Bob Graham (53:19):
Right.

Sam Alaimo (53:20):
A horrible experience. You're out of it in
safety. Yeah. You wanna get backto it. Right.
There's there's somethingparadoxical about that that is
universal. So

Bob Graham (53:29):
so think of it this time. Let's suppose you're
you're on a football team andyou just got smacked around by
the guy opposite you. So thecoach pulls you out and he puts
you on a bench. And you go, Idon't wanna be on a bench, I owe
that guy one. Yeah.
Right? So if you go back throughmy tours, you find out that

(53:51):
they're all about, hey, youknow, I didn't sign up to sit on
the bench. That's right. Isigned up to play. And I
happened to be very very good atit.
And, you know, when you when yousee a a group like a squadron or
something like that, and laterwhen I commanded a squadron, for
example, you got let's supposeyou have about 25 guys in a

(54:12):
squadron. You got a half a dozenguys who are first class. I
mean, they can just go hand tomoon for you. Right? You got 15
or so, they're gonna be fine,they're solid guys and all that.
And you got another half a dozenor so that are, you know, you
really got to be careful whereyou send them because they're,
you know, not very good at thatand it doesn't look like you're

(54:33):
going to get better. So I wasalways in on the short list of
if we were going to throw a war,we'd invite you first. And
because some people I think, youknow, the gene pool somehow gave
them an overdose of, you know,getting in a fight and getting
in combat. And so I wassurprisingly comfortable in

(54:56):
combat and and very very cooland I didn't get excited and

Sam Alaimo (55:00):
Did you guys have a phrase for those people who you
wanted by your side and fight?

Bob Graham (55:03):
Well, shrinks have a phrase.

Sam Alaimo (55:04):
When the shrinks go on?

Bob Graham (55:06):
You know, you have to be careful talking about that
because otherwise people thinkyou're a cool of some sort. But
the fact of the matter is youjust happen to have a knack that
you do that well. It's sort oflike a gift. So there's guys
playing baseball that have agift that I never had, and they
don't know why they got it, andthey don't know why they got it.

(55:26):
But you know that if youpractice for the rest of your
life, you'll never be as good asthem.
And that was kind of theposition I was in. And so I
adapt to that environment betterthan most, and I'm very
comfortable in it.

Sam Alaimo (55:41):
Did it serve you well when you got out of the
military?

Bob Graham (55:44):
No. Getting out was really hard. But on my last
assignment, I was fortunate Ihad a really good assignment. I
was working off and on for DIAand I was on some
compartmentalized missions andthings like that. So I had a
little something going on.

Sam Alaimo (56:00):
They kind of eased you out of it.

Bob Graham (56:02):
Yeah. So I I got out and once again, I I worked hard,
you know, with my day job ofgetting back into being a normal
human being. And now I'm in acivilian environment where
there's no other military guysaround. Or at least none none
that I knew. The nighttimetransition I think took five to
eight years.

Sam Alaimo (56:21):
So they did go away?

Bob Graham (56:22):
Yeah. Right up until the time I started to write the
book. So so what happened is isthat, you know, you go through a
lot of work to try to forget.And then you say, well, geezer,
you know, got some great storieshere. And so the more you tell
the stories and the more youwrite the book, you you have to
then re remember all the thingsyou worked so hard for then.
But it's not as hard the yearslater.

Sam Alaimo (56:42):
Alright, so we got off, I wanna go back to Yeah. To
Viet actually I guessPhilippines, we're gonna jump
around a little bit

Bob Graham (56:47):
Okay.

Sam Alaimo (56:48):
And talk about your ejection experience. Yeah. That
was, reading about it wasintense, and I still don't think
I fully grasp what 27 Gs couldfeel like, and the circumstances
in which you landed. So just totee it up a little bit, you had
to eject in The Philippines.Talk about the 27 Gs, talk about
basically I think it was 800feet straight down, ejecting

(57:09):
downwards.
Yeah. I don't wanna give thestory away, but pick it up from
there and let's walk throughthat story, but that is pretty
pretty incredible.

Bob Graham (57:16):
Alright. So the deal we had going on there is my my
squadron was split up in twothree ways. So the main part of
the squadron was in thePhilippine Islands, and they
supported our detachment, whichwas about half of the squadron
or more And Da Nang for thestrikes up in North Vietnam.

Sam Alaimo (57:40):
So based in Philippines, but operating in
Vietnam.

Bob Graham (57:42):
Right. And we also had a small detachment, said a
nuke alert on Chinese targetsout of Taiwan. Just as sort of
a, oh, by the way, you know,from a from a Chinese
perspective, in case they wantedto become too involved or too
aggressive in what was going onin Vietnam, North Vietnam at the

(58:03):
time, I guess the American millnot military, but probably the
president decided that having ahalf a dozen nukes would sort of
keep them cool and this waydidn't get too aggressive. So
anyway, so in order for but thePhilippine Islands is a was it
was a neutral country. And so wecouldn't launch strikes into

(58:26):
Vietnam out of the PhilippineIslands.
So what what what we could do iswe could launch a couple of
airplanes in the morning, flyover to Da Nang, which was about
a two hour ride or yeah. Twohour ride. And land there, turn
the birds, arm them up, and thengo north. But at the time, the

(58:46):
Philippine Philippine governmenthad had a huge huck problem. The
huck being a guerrillaoperation, communist guerrilla
operation.
It was sort of centered in in anaisle, but Luzon was a hotspot
as well. And so apparently, Isay apparently because this is

(59:08):
what the investigative guysfound out later on. So a huck
team came in at night and set upat least one ZSU on the end of
the runway. ZSU being, you know,the Russian fifty cal, quad 50
or whatever at the end of ourrunway. And so I was on the
first ride out in the morning totake a bird over to Da Nang to,

(59:34):
you know, turn typical takeoffroll afterburner engaged, you
know, reaching for the gear andthe flaps, and I'm about thirty,
forty, 50 feet in the air.
Right as I cross the end of therunway, I get peppered by the z
s u and aircraft exploded. Itthe design of that particular of

(59:56):
the air aircraft, the f 100, wasthat right behind the pilot's
seat is a huge fuel tank thatfeeds the engine, the main
engine. So that's the main fueltank. So when they did that and
hit the airplane, I was toldthat now hot pieces of metal get

(01:00:18):
thrown into the fuel tank, whichthen fumes explode. So you're in
a cockpit about the size of yourchair, and you're enveloped in a
canopy and all that, and theexplosion just fills the cockpit
with fire.
So you're kinda sitting in thefire wondering, you know, what

(01:00:41):
the hell happened? And so Ipulled up to the right to try to
climb, get some altitude andsort things out. And as I
climbed up to the right, I gotthe second explosion. Same
thing, more fire into thecockpit. So it's really
uncomfortable because you'resitting here in your burning and

(01:01:03):
all the skin that's exposed ismelting.

Sam Alaimo (01:01:05):
What is your mindset in this moment in time? Is it
just panicked? Did you just fallback on training? Are you kind
of like a passive observerwatching yourself in this
situation?

Bob Graham (01:01:14):
It is a little bit passive, but all of your actions
have been rehearsed so often.Like you're kind of going
through the motion mechanicallywhile all this is going on.
Obviously, the first decision Ihad is I needed to scratch for
some altitude and get myself,you Second decision I had was
when I got up to about a 1,200feet, something like that, I

(01:01:37):
looked down and it turns out Iwas over the city of Angeles,
which, you know, and if Ipunched out, which would have
been a logical thing to do, thenthe aircraft would have a
burning aircraft with munitionswould have dropped into the
center of the city and thehousing area and obviously it'd
be killing a lot of innocentpeople. So, I decided to had an

(01:02:00):
opportunity to get it away fromthe city and over an area with
elephant grass just again, youknow, before you got to the
jungle. And if I could get itover there, then I could punch
out over there.
So as I was getting over, justas I was getting over to the
elephant grass, I got the thirdexplosion and when that

(01:02:21):
happened, the flight controlsystem burned through. And so I
had no control of the airplane,and you know, burned through. I
rolled over and nose downinverted. And so the ejection
seat, if you think about anairplane, the ejection seat is
designed to check you up thatway. Well, if you take that and

(01:02:41):
roll it inverted and nose down,then instead of being fired up,
you're being fired down.

Mhmm.

So when you fire the ejection seat in that particular
airplane, again, one of theearly jet fighters, I instantly
get 27 g's. And when you getthat, anything that's not in
exactly the right place breaks.But if you're in a situation
where you're being thrown aroundthe cockpit and you're on fire

(01:03:10):
and everything's melting andyou're burning, all you're
trying to do is get out withwhat it whatever's left, you
know. I'll I'll I'll give it ashot. So what happened was is
that I get fired out and youhave a butt kicker that kicks
you out of the seat.
That worked fine. And now I'mlooking up and the apology came

(01:03:33):
out and deployed. Fine. I'mlooking down and here comes the
ground. And and I'm thinking andthat was when I was thinking to
myself, you know, we really needto hurry up with this parachute
thing.
You know, because otherwise

800 feet's not a lot of time for a parachute.

No. So the accident board said that I got out at 800
feet, but I was going down.Well, I didn't have a parachute,
so it's not like I could steerthe chute. Yeah. So and as
you're watching the groundcoming up at you, seems you're
coming up a lot faster than theparachute's working.
So anyway, about the time Ithought that I was in a lot of

(01:04:11):
trouble, I I hit, but I hit intothis jungle stream and went into
the mud up to my chin,literally. And and so now I'm in
a stream and I'm I'm kindapunchy because, you know, things
this is all taking place inprobably a minute, minute and a
half. And so about that time,feel thing bumping into my head

(01:04:34):
and and I looked and there weresome a couple of large black
snakes in the thing. Well, Ididn't necessarily know if they
were poisonous or not, but Iknew that they were there first
and that I should leave. And soI climbed up the side of the
stream and about that time,coming through the grass is, I
don't know, a dozen guys orsomething like that.

(01:04:56):
And it looked like they hadAK's. So the typical deal is,
what they do is they throw acordon around you in a circle
and then you begin to squeezethe circle in. But having the
experience of watching whathappened to American advisors in
my first tour, I was smartenough to realize that I didn't
think that was a very fun thingto do. So I shot a couple of the

(01:05:19):
guys and like all good infantryguys, when somebody shooting at
you, you get down. And aboutthat time, an army chopper got
in close to the tree line, so Iwas able to get through the bad
guys, hustle on over to the armychopper and get a ride back to
the base.
The problem was that I'd brokenmy back in three places. And

(01:05:41):
that trip over to the chopperreally screwed things up because
it screwed up, you know, all ofthe back and the spinal cord and
stuff like that. I was luckyand, you know, obviously I got
cut up and stuff like that. Butbut the funny part of the story
was so long, the chopper guysget me in the chopper and we're

(01:06:04):
landing at the hospital and sothey get me onto a stretcher and
they're rolling me into thehospital. So now I'm all muddy
and bloody and dirty and, youknow, whatever.
So as we come through the doorto the hospital, there's a lady
there with her son. And I as I'mgoing by, the lady looks at me
and she fainted. And I thought,she's like, I gotta do something
about my appearance. I mean,this this whole thing. Oh my

(01:06:25):
god.
So anyway. So anyway, I got tothe hospital and then some of
the the first guy that comes inthat I got to see shortly
thereafter was a phy surgeon.The phy surgeon says to me, can
I can I get anything for you?And I said, well, said, when I
went into the water, I said, youknow, my cigarettes got all wet
and stuff like that. Said, howabout, you know, how about a

(01:06:47):
pack of cigarettes and alighter?
He said, no, can't. We don'tallow smoking in the hospital.
And he said, well, how aboutsome mission whiskey? He said,
well, you can't have missionwhiskey because we have more
tests to take on you. And Ithought, why the hell would you
ask me if you weren't gonnahelp, you know, why you why
would you bother?
But anyway, so that wholeepisode would really over in a

(01:07:11):
really short period of time. Butit was just sort of a fast paced
then until you get to thechopper and then everything
slows down.

Everything that seems like it could have went
wrong went wrong, but you stilllive. Then the irony is that
they made you fly again.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. So To make

sure there is no negative mental programming.
Right. But that Roll with that.Roll with that. With a broken
pack.

Alright. The so the deal back then was that if you
have a bad incident in anairplane where you eject or
something like that or you havea crash or whatever, it is it
maybe not a %, but a lot ofpeople get terrifying and
they're not gonna get back inthe seat. And, you know, and you
can see that because you go, onetrip around this block is enough

(01:07:58):
for anybody. I'm on the air, Ithink I'll go to socials or
whatever. So the deal was thatin order to avoid that, we gotta
get you back in the saddle rightaway.
My operations officer who is mythe boss, the guy in charge of
flying for the squattering, hecomes into the hospital room to
see how I'm doing and and and sohe he says, okay, Graham, we

(01:08:21):
gotta get you back in a, youknow, in a jet right away. He
says, I've already worked ontomorrow's schedule and you're
on first thing tomorrow morning.He said, then if we don't do
that, you know, you could becomeafraid to fly. And I said, boss,
you're too late. I'm alreadyafraid to fly.
I said, you know, how about asix pack of scotch and a trip to

(01:08:42):
Manila? And I'll see you in aweek. Said, now I gotta get you
back in. So anyway, so the theafter we banded that thing back
and forth a lot, you know, hewon and so he got me some new
clothes and stuff like that andsent out a couple big
musculoskeletal crew chiefs thenext day to carry me up the

(01:09:04):
ladder and strap me in the bird.

Did they know your back was broken?

No, we didn't know that because apparently the
hospital didn't catch it. Andthat became a problem later on.
So they didn't realize untilthey brought me back in big
places. And they said, well, youshould be fine. You know, cut
some stuff like that.
They'll they'll heal. It shouldbe fine. Anyway, and we were
flying into the North right on,you know, bombing missions and

(01:09:31):
stuff like that. And so theybrought me back in the lineup.
And and the problem was thatpulling Gs and stuff like that
and combat is really painful.
And so, but I was able to finishout the tour which took another
couple of months. And then bythe time I got back to The

(01:09:53):
States, I was beginning to haveperiods of paralysis from the
waist down. That's when the docsfinally sent me over to the
hospital in San Antonio to seewhat they could do to fix me up.
And there was nothing they coulddo to fix me up by that time. So
that's when I went through thatbig long rehab period, put her

(01:10:16):
on how to walk again and stufflike that.

So you had to learn how to walk again.

It's a great story. So about this woman. So I went
to the hospital and you know,first she goes to the
orthopaedic surgeons, theycouldn't do anything. Then you
go to neuro guys and you know,they can't do anything. And so
you're, you know, you're in awheelchair and you're paralyzed
from the waist down and nobodycan help, right?

(01:10:41):
And it looked very much likeyou're gonna be there for the
rest of your life, which is notmuch to look forward to. So
after a few days of beingtested, this one doc said to me,
he said, you know, there's anurse that is working on a brand
new experimental program, youmight be a good candidate for
her. And she's got this ideathat says that she can take

(01:11:05):
people that have lost largeportions of their network of
nerves that trigger the musclesthat she can teach you how to
walk using different muscles.And they said, what do you think
about that? And I said, There'sno downside, right?
I'm here, I'm not walking atall. So anyway, so they hooked

(01:11:29):
me up with her and she had twoother people she was
experimenting with, but sheliked me the best because I
brought to her a combat injurythat was really you know, more
complicated than what the otherguys had, which were mostly

(01:11:50):
upper body stuff. So we startedout, it was like a little bitty
office with three straight backchairs, a treadmill and that was
it. And so, the first thing yougotta do is figure out how to
get out of the wheelchair, andeventually you work on getting
out of the wheelchair. And thenthe next thing you know, you get
on the treadmill.
And then next thing you know,you're you're walking. You may

(01:12:13):
not be walking very good, butyou're walking. And you keep on
walking until you can walkbetter. Then the next thing you
gotta do is you gotta learn howto run. And you can't do that
very well, but then the more youdo, the better you get at that.
And then in the meantime, yougotta be able to pass all of the
physical requirements to getback on flight status. You know,
my upper body was in pretty goodshape, right? Because I set up

(01:12:34):
my hospital bed with a chinnybar.

Nice.

And you know, you run around in a wheelchair,
you're doing a lot of pumping.So all I really need to worry
about was, you know, some of thecore things and the likes. So
anyway, after she's in, I'd sayfive months or something like
that, I've gradually gettingbetter and better and better.
She arranged and I arranged togo down and meet a flying
evaluation board of doctors. AndI made the case that says I

(01:13:00):
should I was good enough to getback on flying status.
I was good enough to move aroundan airplane and and that we were
running short on pilots over inVietnam. And so they really
needed to get me back on flightstatus so I could go over there.
I gave them one of the mostpatriotic speeches you have ever
heard in your life about whythey should get me back on
flying status and send me backover to Vietnam. But anyway, so

(01:13:21):
I won the case and and then Ijumped on the airplane for a
moment.

Did they ever question your ability to do
another ejection with your backand the condition it was?

No, that question never came up.

But you knew you could not do another ejection?

Yeah, because my back was so screwed up at the
time and I was still trying towork my way through the pain
level, right? And I knew that ifI punched out, see the idea
behind punching out is yourspinal cord is straight.
Everything's straight,everything is in the perfect
position. Well, mine was alreadyskewed in a couple of different

(01:13:59):
places. So my assumption wasthat if I punch out, I either
break it in new places or Ibreak it in old places and now
I'm on the ground in a placewhere people don't like you.
And that didn't seem like verymuch fun. Mhmm. So I decided not
to not to reject anymore.

That that part of your story was remarkable to me.
Think out of the you did around500 combat flights. Right. And
out of I'd say about 50 of them,you think you got shot up in.

Mhmm.

Yeah. Which means you knew you were not going to
eject. So you were either goingland the plane or you're going
to die. Right. And youcompletely accepted that, and
you kept going back.
Yeah. Okay. I mean, that'sunusual. Were most pilots this
aggressive, or was this justyour passion for getting into
the fight?

At the end of a lot of it may have been my passion
to get back in the fight. Imean, because, come on. You
know, mean, God punch youaround. You gotta get back in
there.

Right.

Right? You gotta get back up.

Right.

And I sort of felt like they owed me a couple. So,
you know, so I got back in thefight and it worked out just
fine. And by the way, they didpay back.

You had to go AWOL at one point to get back to
Vietnam to fight. Yeah. How didthat work out?

So I got out of the hospital just before Christmas
and went home, talked to my wifeand said, you know, gotta get
back in the game, you know?

And she

supported it. She was really great. By the way, I
will say, in her defense, Ithought when I volunteered for
my fourth tour, I she was alittle antsy about that. I I
don't think she was really fondof that one. But the third tour,
I think by that time, she hadprobably written me off as, you
know, some psycho that she butanyway, but she was terrific

(01:15:45):
about it.
And I hadn't managed. When theydischarged her from the
hospital, they don't give youany orders. They just send you
home. So for all intents andpurposes, nobody on the base
except my wife and family knew Iwas there. But the group that
was still there at the base wasscheduled to go to Aviano Italy
for deployment.

(01:16:06):
And my squadron had beenredeployed back over to Vietnam
to fly the first missions intoNorth Vietnam. So if I stayed
there, they'd have put me in agroup going to Italy. So I
decided that the best thing todo is not say anything to
anybody. So I I got a airlineticket, I flew up to San

(01:16:27):
Francisco. And I I got a cabover to the air base that was
handling all of our Asiandeployments.
And it was Christmas Eve. And soI went over to the officers club
and there was me and abartender. And the bartender's
bummed out and, you know, andI'm bummed out. So we're having

(01:16:50):
a couple drinks and in walksthis guy. So now we got three
guys in the whole officers club.
And the guy's really upsetbecause he just got divorced.
And so he's sitting next to eachother and the compensation goes
like, so what are you doinghere? You know, what are you
doing here? And I said, well,you know, I'm here because I
need to get a ride to Saigon.And he said, well, why don't you

(01:17:12):
just take your orders and get onthe break of it, you know.
I said, I don't have any orders.And he said, what do you mean
you don't have any orders? Isaid, well, I don't have any
orders, you know, I'm I'mhitchhiking a ride. And he said,
you know, you're eight ball. Andhe said, you know, you you can't
do that.
And so we're having thisconversation back and forth and,
you know, we're at and we'redrinking and we're carrying on.

(01:17:33):
And he says, I happen to be theaircraft commander and I'm
flying over to Saigon tomorrow.He said, I'll tell you what. He
said, if you'll be down on aramp at like, I don't know,
06:30 or 07:00 tomorrow morning,we're leaving for Saigon. I'll
smoke you aboard the airplaneand I'll and you'll be flying in

(01:17:55):
the, you know, pilot's area andI'll put you on the on the you
know, on the manifest and thenbut you can't get off the
airplane.
Because if you get off theairplane, now you're going to be
dealing with customs andmilitary placement and all that
and you're going to go to jail.I said, okay. So I showed up the
next morning, I'm on the rampwith my gear and that, you know,

(01:18:16):
and here he comes and he put meon the airplane, we flew to
first to Hawaii, and then Ithink next stop was Guam. And
then we hit the PhilippineIsland in Manila. And finally we
ended up in Saigon.
So now I can get off theairplane. So the guy says, Okay,
wait right here at the airplane,I'm going get a pickup truck. So

(01:18:39):
he grabbed a pickup truck,picked me up, took me out to the
main gate and by that, while Iwas in the airplane they put on
civilian clothes. He takes meout to the main gate and I hired
a Vietnamese taxi driver todrive me to the air base that my

(01:18:59):
squadron was at. And and it wasit was like an hour drive or
something like that.
And we often knew and I got upat the gate at the at the base
and and I walked into the airpolice, said, you know, I'm here
to rejoin my squadron and youknow, I know you guys couldn't
win the war without me anyways.So I did. So and you know, so

(01:19:23):
there's a lot of, you know, sothe the colonels did not quite
understand why I did that. Andso there was a lot of
outstanding attention saying,yes and no, sir, and I'll never
do it again, sir. And then aftera couple hours of that, they
decided that they since I wasalready there, they might as
well put me to work.
So they sent me down to myfighter's car, I checked in, got

(01:19:45):
my gear, you know, sorted out,got jumped in the jet.

They had to admire that.

I think they probably did. I I think I think
particularly the the colonelboss that I had, I think he
thought I was a little bitgoofy. But but

That's what they needed in Vietnam.

Yeah. Right.

That's what you need in combat.

And that and he became kind of a mentor for me
and I started my father prettyafterwards. We had a good
relationship. It all worked outfine.

So you're you're flying, you know you're not
gonna be able to eject.

Sorry.

Can you talk about your Silver Star mission?

It was a monsoon season, which is at around May.
Now at the airbase, we alwayshad two birds on board at the
end of the runway. And the ideabeing because lots of times you
get a pop up target, like 18base under attack or something
like that. Things for the kindof things that were unexpected

(01:20:44):
that you can schedule ahead oftime. And we kept two birds and
and two pilots on alert in alittle tiny trailer type thing.
And on this particular dayduring this period of time, the
the weather was lousy. So bylousy, mean, the ceilings were
four or 500 feet. And this wasmaybe a mile, mile and a half,

(01:21:09):
something like that. Typicalmonsoon thing where the entire
country is covered in cloud. Andfor some bizarre reason, the Air
Force headquarters in Saigongrounded the entire country.
And so nobody was flying.Everybody's on the ground. So my

(01:21:30):
buddy and I are in a alert andwe're thinking, hey, you know,
cool it. We'll, you know, whitelight us home or hang out, grab
some sleep, do whatever. Andwe're there a couple hours and
we get a phone call from theheadquarters and psychologists
said, hey, the main NorthVietnamese force was stationed
in Cambodia directly across theborder from the area Tainan

(01:21:57):
province in in Vietnam.
We used to call it the ParisBeak. And and so he said that
the North Vietnamese army hadmoved across the border in size,
size being thousands, like, youknow, eight, ten thousand North
Vietnamese soldiers comingacross into South Vietnam. And

(01:22:19):
that they had a fire base underattack. The fire base had a
couple of hundred Americanshere. And and the fire base was
about to get overrun.
And if that's true, then acouple hundred Americans were
massacred. And so they said thatthere's nobody else in in the
country literally that can fly.Would you two guys be willing to

(01:22:41):
take off and and, you know, helpout? And so we said, well, you
know, sure. I mean, you know,what are you going do?
You're to let hundreds ofAmericans die and you say, it's
raining out, know, I can't flyhere. Come on. You know? So
anyway, so we said that we'dgive it a shot. Apparently, the
guy who asked us that questionwas not high enough rank that he

(01:23:02):
didn't realize that he wasasking me, sir, if we wouldn't
mind breaking the rules that thefour sergeants had put in place.
And but it didn't matter.

But isn't the mission wasn't approved from the
highest levels?

Right.

He didn't know that? Or did he know that and he did
it anyway? I don't know. Okay.

I'd like to think that he did it anyway, but I
never can tell. So it seemedlike a reasonable thing for us
to do. So we jumped in, tookoff, flew over, got over to
Target, And sure enough, was areally hot Target. Lots of stuff
going. And the Ford AirController talked us down
underneath the cloud, to putthat in perspective, so if if

(01:23:40):
you have a ceiling, you're,let's say, at 500 feet, and the
trees grow to 200 to 250 feet,you're flying in that 200 foot
envelope, right?
So everything's a flat attack.So anyway, he talked us down, my
buddy puts in the first attackand I'm right behind him and he
he go and he dropped a couple ofbombs. As I'm going in, I had

(01:24:05):
hit really hard and got actuallyhammered by a couple of CSUs I
guess. And so while Jack wasputting in the strike and the
fire base, you know, once you'rehit, I climbed up above the
cloud and I was trying to figureout if I'd keep the airplane
flying or not. And by finaglingthat with it with it a little

(01:24:28):
bit, I could keep it flying justabove stall speed.
So that would have been, let'ssay, 200, two 50 knots,
something like that. Stall speedwas about one ninety five ish or
something like that. So you havea small window that you can work
in. And but the problem was bothof my fuel boost pump pumps had
been shot away. Mhmm.

(01:24:49):
And so the only way I could getfuel to the engine was through
gravity, which meant that Icouldn't go any faster than a
couple hundred knots and that Icouldn't make any abrupt
maneuvers. So no ups and downsand no lefts and rights and no
pulling Gs or anything likethat. Cause if I did it would
interrupt the gravity flow ininto the engine and then the

(01:25:12):
engine flames out in the ER. SoI realized that I could by, you
know, flying very gently andvery slow and carefully while I
could keep the thing airborne.And so I was up there sort of
hanging out, waiting for Jack totake me back to the escort me
back to the airbase.

(01:25:32):
And in the meantime, he finishestaking care of the bad guys in
this particular fire base. Andthen he comes up and meets me in
my mama's way and we're going tohead back to Myanmar. And about
that time we get a call from thefact and the fact says, we got a
huge problem here. And it turnsout that there was another

(01:25:54):
larger army fire base a littleways away that was under attack
and that they estimated by 4,000plus bad guys and there's like
three or 400 Americans on thebase, don't know how many. And
he said, and and the bad guysare in the wires coming through

(01:26:14):
the concertina and the fire baseis in great jeopardy being
overrun.
Our tour guides had loweredtheir tubes so that they're
flying directly into the wire.So things are not good. And if
they break through the wire inone spot, they're inside and now

(01:26:35):
you got hand to hand. And oncethe Americans and the North
Vietnamese get into the mix,can't help them.
Because,

you know,

I got to kill a lot of Americans in order to kill
some North Vietnamese. Theproblem we had was that Jack had
a good airplane but he's got nomunitions left. I got a bad
airplane but I have all mymunitions left. So it's kind of
the awkward thing. So they saidthe Pat calls me up and says, so
what do you think?
Do you wanna give a shot? And Iwent, yeah. Yeah. I'll give it a

(01:27:07):
shot. See how close?
And and so he talked me downthen he said, listen, you know,
the old guys can't can't lifttheir fire. If they do, the guys
have threw the wire on them andit's all over but the, you know,
whistling and shouting. So Isaid, will I be willing to put
the strike in underneath thefire? And that had ever been

(01:27:29):
done before because obviouslythere's not a lot of space
underneath the so all theexplosions coming up are gonna
take a lot of friendly fire. Andso but anyway, but we agreed and
all that and so I can I stillsee in my mind's eye when I
broke through the clouds and Ilooked out and I saw the
situation on the ground?

(01:27:50):
It was like and the only way Iknow how to describe it, it was
like somebody went in and kickedover an ant hill. You got
literally thousands of enemysoldiers masked around this
relatively small compound andthey're breaking through the
wire in a large circumference.And once they get through and

(01:28:12):
they didn't hear very far to go,then it's all over from that
point on, and then all theAmericans had massacred. So I
went down and I started in, putmy two bombs in and then I just
stayed down there in amongstthem. And when I I say that, I
imagine it's very very close.
So it was like almost being partof, Right? Because I'm only I'm

(01:28:38):
flying around at a hundred feetabove them. And so you can see
wherever they mass, you can andobviously, the the guns are all
firing and and and the guns,they use those CSUs and they're
all loaded with tracer. So theVietnamese loaded simple like

(01:29:01):
one out of every six rounds wasa tracer round, which is great
because that way you knewexactly where they were. All you
got is, you know, run back tothe yellow stream.
So I put in so I I put in my twofive hundred pounders, and then
I went I followed up with I hada CBU cluster bomb units. And
probably it wasn't like I madeindividual passive because I was

(01:29:24):
just down. So I take out a groupof them or or guns, and then I
kinda rudder the airplane aroundslowly and find another bunch
and then I do the same thing.And I think I did like probably,
let's say roughly 15 passes.

So you're you're on you're low on gas. Right. You're
beneath cloud cover. Yeah.You're the only plane in the
sky.
So every bad guy knows you'rethere and is probably trying to
take aim at you. Yeah. Boots onthe ground are about to be
overrun. You have a broken backand can't eject. So this is like
the most epic situationpossible.

But even if I want to eject, if I eject

You're lighten the

middle I know all the bad guys. Right?

From from your position up there, worst case
scenario, boots on the ground,but up there as a fighter pilot,
you being you, was that sort oftarget rich environment

Yeah.

Dream come true? Like, was your mindset like
there?

Well, first of all, that's really funny. Just before
you commit, you realize you'regoing to die. Right? That's the
dead deal. Yeah.
Right? Even if as I used to say,even if you're a lousy shot, if
you have a big airplane and he'slike right next door to you, you
have trouble missing. Right? Soso you know you're gonna take a

(01:30:39):
lot of hits. You know you're notgonna object.
You know that the airplane is isgonna get shot down. And you go,
well, okay. Yeah. So from thatpoint on, you you know, don't
have to worry about that.

What's left? Yeah.

Right. So so now all you have to do is focus on the
work at hand. And so you juststay down there and shoot and
kill it and do that for as long.And then once I was out of a CBU
and once I was out of my twofive hundred pounders, I still
had my guns left. So that thatparticular airplane had four

(01:31:16):
twenty millimeter cannon, 800rounds.
So I went around and selectivelykilled all of the gun positions
and and because the guys werethe bad guys were kinda huddle
around the gun positions.

So you traced the tracers back to where the gun
positions were?

Yeah. So what happens is I the guy in the gun
position or or would be firingat me and then all I gotta do is
go through that. You could justgo through the tracers and you
and you finally get to whereyou're close enough there where
you can open fire and accuratelykill them. But you have to go

(01:31:52):
follow the guys through thistracer thing to get there. And
so I did four or five of thosepasses and magic killed all the
guns.
And the guns were reallychopping me up. So the canopy
was shot away, the instrumentpanel was mostly shot away. I
mentioned in the book that I Ilook out to take a look at my

(01:32:13):
left wing because because don'tforget it's raining inside now.
Right? Mhmm.
They shot it like, oh, my So Ilook out at my left wing and I
couldn't believe all the holesgoing up through the wing. And
then I look at it and I seeButte Pod and it was on fire
burning. And I thought, Jesus,this is really discouraging. So
I stopped looking out. So, youknow, because if I can't do

(01:32:34):
anything about it, why why whyworry about it?
So then I finally I ran out ofammo and then by some time
during that period of time, thethousands of enemy troops broke
and they started panicking andrunning back towards the border
in Cambodia. And I thought,well, guys won't know I'm out of

(01:32:55):
ammo. So I I made a couple ofthree or four passes over the
top of me about, you know, 50feet or something like that. And
just to think, you know, keep itgoing guys, you know. And so if
you're that close to people witha jet and a big airplane, you
know, it scares a lot of people.

And to show a force.

And so, anyway, so it turned out to be a good
thing. So the army guys gave mecredit for a minimum of 1,500
enemy troops killed and eightgun positions destroyed. And the
army guys lived happily everafter.

It's a good story.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It was it was a great day.

The army was stingy giving you a silver star for
that.

Well, so, know, obviously, you know, I'm under
house arrest and I'm gonna becourt martial and, you know, and
all that kind of stuff. But therule was that the highest award
that a service can give to amember of another service is the
Silver Star.

I didn't know that.

Yeah. So what happens is so in the Air Force,
so you have the Silver Star, AirForce Cross and a middle of
honor. Right? And the same inthe Army. But the Army can't
recommend an Air Force Cross andthey can't recommend an Air
Force middle of honor.
But you gotta remember that Ibroke all those regulations,

(01:34:19):
those five regulations that Idisobeyed in one fight, which I
think is maybe an Air Force rep.Close. And so the highest award
that the Army could give me wasthe Silver Star. But the Air
Force had to punch me becauseyou can't have people disobeying
direct orders or you end up witha bunch of, you know Cowboys.

(01:34:44):
Unruly guys.
Right? And the unruly guys maybe good in war, but they're not
very good from a militarystandpoint. So if you're gonna
maintain control of all of yourtroops in an orderly fashion and
stuff like that, well, you haveto be able to punish guys who
break rules. So the armyrecommended that through Air
Force channels that I got theSilver Star. The Air Force

(01:35:04):
accepted that.
They dropped the court martialcharges. And so they were able
to punish me, but at the sametime, get an army so silver
star. And I was really happybecause getting out of jail was
a good idea.

Yeah. God, that's incredible story. I'm gonna zoom
out a little bit. We'll we'llkind of wrap up the combat
piece. You you talked a littlebit in the book about more
political concerns andleadership.
And you you told a story aboutthere was a shortage of bombs.
Right. And you had a friend whowas tasked with destroying a
concrete port. And since he ranout of, I guess, GPUs, he had to

(01:35:38):
use napalm at 20 millimeter,which doesn't destroy a
concrete.

And that's all we had.

Yeah. He ended up becoming a POW at the for years.
Sure. And that's just the resultof sheer incompetence, forcing
the mission anyway. And you madeit you basically said the
president and sec def, thesecretary of defense, were
making tactical decisions on theground.
Yes. And just from the highlevel how did that leadership

(01:36:03):
impact you in the war and theneven later in life?

Well, during the war, the biggest issue was that
you got a president who was thistime, Johnson was the president.
So you got a school teacher outof Texas, you got a politician
out of Boston, I think Boston,the sick state, and you got an
accountant out of Ford MotorCompany, the Secretary of

(01:36:28):
Defense.

McNamara.

Yeah. So on an earlier press thing, he got
questioned about the bombshortage in Vietnam. And the
reason he got questioned on thisis because why are having a bomb
shortage in Vietnam? And he heanswered that by saying we do
not have the bomb shortage. Andhe was right.
All the bombs were in Europe.The problem was he didn't have

(01:36:51):
the war in the right place.Right? So from a logistical
standpoint, the way you'resupposed to work that is you're
supposed to have the bombs in awar in the same location.

You would think. Yeah.

The other thing that they were doing, it's that we
found out later, was that inorder to try to minimize
civilian casualties in NorthVietnam, the president and
secretary of state Secdev wouldprovide all of the flight
information and strikeinformation to the North
Vietnamese through the Swissembassy. And so every time we

(01:37:22):
went in on a strike, we gotchopped up because they knew
where we're coming, what we'recoming with, what our route in
was, what our exit route was,what altitudes we'd be at, what
airspeeds we'd be at, andeverything else.

Unreal.

So when we showed up, the air defense posture in
North Vietnam was according tothe intel guys, heavier than it
was in Berlin during World WarII. And and so what was
happening was our losses wereunreasonably high. And also,

(01:37:56):
your effectiveness gets decayedbecause when you're under
intense fire, you know, it it'sharder to remain focused and
track the target and stuff likethat. But the big thing was that
we probably could have reducedour losses by at least a third.
Incredible.
And so what happens is is thatnow you go, well, you guys were
supposed to have my back. Right?I mean, I've built I mean, it

(01:38:19):
felt like I started the war, youknow. You guys started the war,
then you decide you're gonna gothat your main strategy is
interdiction in North Vietnamand then because you have some
goofball idea that you're thatwhen you tell the North
Vietnamese, it's not likethey'll move their people out of

(01:38:43):
the way, it's that they'll movethe defensive in the way. And
you know, you're that we'resupposed to be smarter than
that.
And so what happens is is thatyou begin to understand that the
American people don't like it,they're all back home protesting
in in, you know, Berkeley. Yourbosses, the president and and
the secretary of those guys,they obviously don't like it

(01:39:05):
because they don't care whetheryou live or die. In fact, Mac
Merrim once said when he wasquestioned about it, he said,
you know, we got plenty offighter pilots. And we thought,
well, I thought a very nicething to say. You know?
So anyway, so the one thing youlearn in Vietnam is nobody's got
your back. And if you're therefighting, you're there fighting
for each other. You're notfighting for, you know, mom and

(01:39:26):
apple pie and all that kind ofstuff. You're fighting for each
other. And so when people say,well, why would you keep going
back?
And say, well, you know, I'mgonna go back for the secretary
defense. I'm gonna back for mybuddy. Yeah. Because while
you're sitting on a bench inPhoenix, Arizona, your friends
are dying. And so I don't knowwhat the president and all the
politicians are thinking about,but I know what I'm thinking

(01:39:47):
about.
I'm thinking about I need to getin there to help my buddy. So
whenever you think about theVietnam War, all of us had a
couple of, you know, I would saytwo choices. We could either be
disgusted by the way the war wasbeing conducted and try to get
out of it and avoid it and leaveit. Or you can say, well, I
don't like those guys and Idon't like their way of fighting

(01:40:08):
the war and I don't but theydon't call me up and ask me. But
I do know that I have closefriend dying and by God, I'm not
gonna sit here while that'shappening, let me get over there
and help out.
And so the motivation is alittle different than we've had
in the past twenty, twenty fiveyears where you had the American
people behind you. So

A lot of that was lessons learned from how
horrific it was

Yeah.

In Vietnam, the way they treated American soldiers
then. I think they more thanmade up for it now.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You did. But I was far more
comfortable fighting in Asiathan I was living in The United
States.
When I was in California, know,they, you know, keep my car and
vandalized my car. When theAmerican people decide they hate
something, they usually don'tblame it on the politicians.
Right? But one of the thingsabout their military was that

(01:40:57):
the guys were all walking aroundwith uniforms on. So you get to
see them at the the airport, youget to see them at the train
station, you get to see themwhen they're home with their
families and taking the kids toschool.
So what you learned was is thatthe business about, you know,
you're not fighting for theAmerican people, they don't want

(01:41:19):
you. You're not fighting for theAmerican politician, they don't
want you. So who are youfighting for? Well, it leaves
you and your buddies hanging outover there. And you fight
probably harder for them thanyou do for anybody else.
But that's what gets you goingback. Right? It's hey, okay, I
got a it's just our small team,a relatively small team, but

(01:41:40):
it's our team. And I'm not gonnasit by while, you know, those
guys are in trouble.

There seems to be a parallel between what happened
when we left Vietnam andabandoning those allies who who
we did care about, like theMontagnards, for example, and
what we did a few years ago inAfghanistan. Did you see in your
mind, was that a very similarprocess with the same sorts of
mistakes from senior leadership?

Almost identical. And and so this is really
interesting. By the way, theFrench did exactly the same When
the French were being thrown outof Vietnam, Two things that
really struck me. When theFrench wounded were placed on
chips and taken back toMarseille, you know, for
treatment of French hospitals,As they were unloading the

(01:42:28):
wounded on the French dock, theywere stoned by French citizens.
And when the French pulled outof Vietnam, they had special
forces teams around, spottedaround the countryside.
And they literally cut the wirein communication and left them
there.

They left their own French special forces orders in
the wild.

Yeah. And so there was a quiet form of maybe not
genocide, but there's ahorrendous amount of punishment
kinds of, you know, murders andall that kind stuff. So when,
you know, so like when I wentinto Da Nang for the first time,
the French pulled out of DaNang, it used to be a French
airbase. They they tore down allof the buildings. They pulled up

(01:43:12):
all of the wiring, undergroundwire, pulled up all of the
plumbing, and they took all ofthe Vietnamese workers and had
worked on the base in terms ofmaintenance and things like
that, they killed them.

The French did.

Yeah. So when we got there, or when I got there,
let's say four or five yearsafter the French pulled out, the
only thing that we had thatwasn't jungle were concrete pads
that have been left there.Everything else and everybody
else had been eliminated fromthe process so you couldn't
reuse that facility.

Why would the why would the French kill them, the
people who supported them, andabandon their own special
forces?

Because they were abandoning them to the North
Vietnamese.

Abandoning their own soldiers to the North
Vietnamese?

Yeah.

Why?

Because they didn't want to go to the border. We did
the same thing. When when whenwe decided to shut down the the
the war in Vietnam, we literallyjust abandoned the Mount Yards.
We But

we didn't abandon Americans. I'm wondering why the
French abandoned Americans. I'msorry, the French abandoned
French.

I was told that there were some covert option
teams in the North that we hadleft there.

That that I could believe, in the North, yes.
Yeah. Given Yeah. How little thepoliticians carry. That's just
shocking about the French.

And then you had the evacuation of Saigon. Right? And
the evacuation of Saigon wasalmost a replica for the
evacuation in Afghanistan. Andone of the reasons for that, by
the way, is that mostevacuations come under the
auspices of the StateDepartment, not the Defense
Department. So if you thinkabout like if you're stationed

(01:44:49):
in Korea with a family orsomething like that, and they
decided things aren't going welland they decide to evacuate,
that falls under the purview ofthe State Department.
So at best in Afghanistan, theywould have had to coordinate
defense and state and they wouldhave had to figure out who's
gonna give the orders about whathe should get out of Baghlan, or

(01:45:12):
should go out of some otherairport or whatever. And all of
a sudden get very confusing andvery political.

So if you could look back at your military career,
what would be one or two of thethe most memorable, the the the
best aspects you can think of?

Well, you know, so I I enlisted in the Air Force when
I was 18. So I was raised in theAir Force. Right? So there's a
ton of stuff I really likedabout. Most of all, I like the
people.
The difference between workingin civilian industry and working
in the military is like nightand day. You know, when when
you're when you're in a fightersquadron, you got 25 guys that

(01:45:51):
are joined at the hip. I mean,they're not friends, they're
family. Right? And you neverhave to worry about if you're in
trouble, you're gonna come toyour rescue, because they will.
In in the military, guys willactually sacrifice their lives
to save the life of one of theirbodies. Right? And that's
unheard of in in civilian life.The other thing that's unheard

(01:46:12):
of in civilian life is having aa strong ethical compass. And
the reason is is because like inthe military, people join the
military to make a lot of money.
They join it for a lot of otherthings that are important to
them, but it ain't the money. InAmerican industry, you price
people and their work and theirpositions involved. So as we're

(01:46:36):
a result, they talk aboutforming teams, they don't form
teams. You can't form teams whenyou're pricing people in dollars
and cents. Right?
You you form teams when you havea greater cause that you join
together to accomplish. So thething that struck me the most
when I left the military is theis the idea that the guy sitting

(01:46:58):
next to me would happily stealfrom me because he would get
more money and I'd get over thecourse of but the IMI fighter
squadron would never even dreamof that. That would never even
occur to him, right? He thoughtfor me. So the difference in the
culture is enormous.
And so, you know, we're luckyhere because, you know, what
we've done here is we built ateam. And that's largely because

(01:47:20):
that's my military heritage, youknow. I can't reward people, I I
can't go up to somebody and say,boy, you're the best master
sergeant I've ever seen, I'mgoing to give you an extra $50.
No, I can't do that. And so whatwe're trying to do here is we
have a, I think a uniquebusiness here.
All of us here really likecoming to work, we really like

(01:47:41):
who we're working with, wemotivate people largely through
appreciation. You know, whereMichelle will do something for
me and I'll thank her very muchand Maria will do something and
you know, when we're togetherand we're talking about a
naughty problem and, you know,which way the markets are going
or not going or whatever. Youknow, we got friends sitting
there discussing, saying, whatabout this? What about that?

(01:48:04):
It's very, very open.
Everybody hangs together.Everybody likes each other. We
care about their families. Youknow, when I when I had my first
large group that I commanded wasabout 1,200 people. When we get
an inspection from a higherheadquarters, I'd be taken aside
as the commander and I wasgrilled on every one of the

(01:48:25):
people who worked for me andwhat their lives were, what
their health was, that I knowthat they were in hospital, how
about their children, how arethey doing at school, things
like that.
And the grilling blast, I think,three, four hours. Wow. And I
was supposed to know all thatstuff. The reason is, is
because, you know, if you if youhave somebody working with you

(01:48:45):
and and their kid's havingproblems and they're in a
hospital, well you know, theirfocus of attention needs to be
on that child. That's not whatyou think about when you're in
civilian life.
And as a result of that, it'snot that they don't have teams,
the teams are different. And inthe military, because the team
is all is your family, whenyou're with them, you're with

(01:49:09):
your family. Right? So any andthe other thing about that, when
you're in a family, that buildsyou that ethical compass that I
talk about. You never have toworry about what those guys are
committed to.
You know, it's right out therein front of you. But in civilian
industry, people are trained tomeasure everything in terms of

(01:49:29):
dollars. You know, the peoplemeasure them themselves, their
self worth in terms of dollars.That's a shame because it
implies that you're for sale.All you gotta do is come up with
the right price.
And the idea that people are forsale is really objectionable to
me.

It's like kind of like Hannah putting a bounty on
you. How much is it worth? Yeah.I think that's a good way to
wrap that part up. I usuallyfinish with a quick series of
questions.

Sure.

So what are one to two one, two, three things you
do to prime yourself for theworkday? You're you're 90 years
old, you're still getting afterit. So what are you doing? I'm
wanting to get ready.

Sure. I go to work every day because it's not like
I have tons of hobbies. I mean,what do I do? Right? So and I'm
not gonna sit around all daylong watching daytime TV.
So I really enjoy coming towork. But I I don't really have
to prime myself in in themorning because I'm anxious to
to to come to work. And I'manxious to as I said earlier,

(01:50:26):
I'm anxious to, you know, bewith all my friends. So my day
starts very happy. I I I have arule that says that when I walk
in the door that my job is tomake everybody else in the room
happy.
Right? And the reason is if Istarted out and I'm grumpy and I
walk up and I bark at people,they're gonna be grumpy all day
long. Yeah. If I do it a lot,then they're gonna stop talking

(01:50:50):
to me. And if they stop talkingto me, nobody's gonna tell me
when the building's on fire.
And so if I'm the boss, I'mgonna get fired just because I'm
grumpy and nobody wants to talkto me. And we've all been
through the business about, ifyou work for a guy that's
grouchy and or has a chip on hisshoulder, something like that,

(01:51:10):
nobody wants to be the messengergoing into the guy's office
because he's gonna bark at youall the time. And so people
stopped going into the office.And as a result, the guy finds
himself more and more isolatedin the office, and nobody wants
to talk to him. And he don'tknow what's going on in his own
business, and he fails.
So I have a rule that says everysingle day, no matter what, no

(01:51:33):
matter how I feel, it doesn'tmatter how I feel. What matters
is how the people that work withme feel. And it's my job to pull
that up and be happy and, youknow, put on a happy face, and
so I do that.

I love it. Physical training program. So like I
said, you're 90. For those whowanna be able to still be robust
when they're 90 Right. What doyou do to maintain?

I spend I don't know how many hours. I spend a ton of
time working out.

It's good.

I do. So a typical workout I'm lucky. I got the
best personal trainer in theworld. So, you know, I I
assigned Mike. Mike is in chargeof my body.
And if things aren't workingright, that's his fault. And
he's gotta keep my strength up.And then when I'm alone, my my
typical routine is like if iftomorrow's in off deck, my

(01:52:22):
typical routine is fifteenminutes on the bike, five
minutes on their own machine,fifteen on the bike, five on
their own machine, fifteen onthe bike, five on their own
machine. So I get forty fiveminutes to an hour. And then I
try to do that three days aweek.
If I'm really lucky and I canlearn how to do it, I go play
golf on the weekends and stufflike that. So I think that every
single day of your life youshould be working. So I give you

(01:52:46):
example, the best instructions Iever got, the woman got me
walking and running again. WhenI left her and for the last time
she said, okay, she said, youknow, you got a lot of problems
and stuff like that, do twothings. She said, don't get fat
and work out every day.
I'm okay, can do that. When Igot ready to retire from the Air
Force, the guy said, don't getfat, work out every day and have

(01:53:07):
at least two drinks every night.He said, alright, I can do that.
So I do that.

That's right. That's awesome. Books, what are one,
two, three books that havechanged your life?

I don't read books to read books. I decided that
the reason what I do is I Iwanna find out about something.
So I'll just use this as anexample. So when I was younger,
I I really got interested inFormula One. I know anything
about it.
So I went to the base libraryand I read every book they had
on Formula One. And I gotsomething out of everyone knows

(01:53:39):
books. And so when I was workingin Asia, I got and still am
really fired up on Asian cultureand let's say Japanese culture.
And I spoke Japanese, can't readkanji but it doesn't matter. I
really like haiku.
If I want to learn more aboutJapan, I might read Mushashi or

(01:54:01):
somebody like that.

One of my favorite books of all time.

Yeah. Right? Because that kind of a culture really
turns me on. That level ofhonesty, dedication and courage
really turns me on.

Severe commitment.

And so what happens is is that when I read a book,
I'll I'll read for let's say ahalf hour, an hour or something
like that, And then I stop and Ithink about what I just read.
And I say, well, so what did Ilearn? I just spent an hour and
I've been reading about this,that or the other thing, and

(01:54:34):
what did I learn from it? And soI take that and that's what I
take away. And what happens isthat I may forget the title of
the book, but I won't forgetwhat I learned.
And so I'm a compulsive reader,but if you said, well, what are
the three best books? Oh, yousay, well, okay. Well, if I want
to learn about the army of WorldWar One, maybe I read Once an

(01:54:54):
Eagle by Meyer or you know,something like that. But that's
not really what I take away froma book. So for me, I I try to
always have three books that I'mreading.
And I like to have two where Imight get smarter if I'm lucky,
and one is just pureentertainment. So like cowboy
stories and, you know, JamesBond stories or whatever it

(01:55:14):
happens to be. But I wanna haveone book I'm reading where I
don't have to think about itbecause I know the good guys are
gonna win. I can identify thebad guys with the black hats and
stuff like that. And the othertwo, I'd like to be able to get
a little bit smaller.
So that's why I thought yourquestion was so great, is
because I can't tell you thenames of the books, but I can

(01:55:36):
tell you what I learned fromhundreds of books. I did go
through a period where I triedto read all the American
classics and also I got intothings like philosophy and stuff
like that, you know. But that'sbecause I wanted to understand
the subject, but I can't tellyou who wrote the book.

Probably one of the best answers I've got. I would
say this was incredible. Weprobably touched on 3% of what
was in your book. I kinda wannado a whole episode just on
leadership because you alreadygave me some points to think
about. Should we focus on themilitary as opposed to
leadership?
Absolutely, genuinely appreciateyour time and your story and
your service. How can people getyour book if they wanna buy it?

What's the easiest way for people to follow us and
get a and get a book? Amazon. Goon to Amazon. You can get it
that way. And then you also havea website,
colonelrobertjgraham.com.

Colonel robert j graham Com. Alright. It's it's
been a pleasure. Anything elseyou wanna add before we wrap up?

No. Yeah. I think it's really been fun.

Okay.

I think the next time we do, we should serve
drinks.

Alright. Let's do it. Alright, sir. Genuinely
appreciate it.

I enjoyed it. Every minute of it was fun. Thank you.

That's it for this episode. If you wanna check out
more from the podcast, head to0Eyes.com/NoBell, where you can
see show notes, read more aboutour guests, and suggest guests
or topics of your own. Untilnext time, stay in the fight.
Don't ring the bell.

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