May 14, 2025 • 40 mins
Doug Greenlaw sees his life as a series of "lightning strikes." He was literally struck by lightning when he was 13 years old, thankfully making an immediate recovery. He later left Indiana University to join the Army, become an officer, and serve in in the Vietnam War - first as a platoon commander and then as a company commander. He arrived in Vietnam in 1967.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Greenlaw takes us through his training, including a terrifying story from jungle training, and through his most harrowing moments in Vietnam. Greenlaw details the events of Thanksgiving Day 1967, when his platoon was dropped off in the wrong spot and quickly found itself facing a North Vietnamese battalion of 400-500 fighters. He explains the actions he took to keep his men alive until air and ground support could arrive - and he describes hand-to-hand fighting with an enemy officer in a North Vietnamese tunnel.
Greenlaw also tells us his responsibilities and priorities as a platoon and company commander and how he and his men painstakingly looked out for enemy booby traps and explosives. He also reveals the extensive injuries he suffered after a soldier in his company tripped one of those wires.
We'll also hear how Greenlaw's military service impacted his impressive rise as a sales and marketing executive, all the way to the top of MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH-1.
Finally, we'll learn about Greenlaw's leadership with the Military Order of the Purple Heart, from leading his local chapter to serving as national commander for two years.
In this edition of Veterans Chronicles, Greenlaw takes us through his training, including a terrifying story from jungle training, and through his most harrowing moments in Vietnam. Greenlaw details the events of Thanksgiving Day 1967, when his platoon was dropped off in the wrong spot and quickly found itself facing a North Vietnamese battalion of 400-500 fighters. He explains the actions he took to keep his men alive until air and ground support could arrive - and he describes hand-to-hand fighting with an enemy officer in a North Vietnamese tunnel.
Greenlaw also tells us his responsibilities and priorities as a platoon and company commander and how he and his men painstakingly looked out for enemy booby traps and explosives. He also reveals the extensive injuries he suffered after a soldier in his company tripped one of those wires.
We'll also hear how Greenlaw's military service impacted his impressive rise as a sales and marketing executive, all the way to the top of MTV, Nickelodeon, and VH-1.
Finally, we'll learn about Greenlaw's leadership with the Military Order of the Purple Heart, from leading his local chapter to serving as national commander for two years.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:12):
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Lieutenant Doug Greenlaw. He's a US Army veteran,
a Vietnam veteran, and the recipient of the Silver Star,
two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. He later became
a top executive at MTV, VH one and Nickelodeon, and
(00:33):
also served as National Commander of the Military Order of
the Purple Heart in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen. He's
the author of the memoir Forged by Lightning. From Boyhood
to the Battlefield to the Boardroom. Doug Greenlaw was born
in Minnesota in nineteen forty four. A few years later,
the family moved to Michigan City, Indiana, on the shores
(00:55):
of Lake Michigan, where Greenlaw's father got a job working
in a local mis Greenlaw loved growing up near the
Great Lakes, but his most notable moment from those years
is when he was struck by lightning shortly after returning
home from the beach.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I was thirteen years old. We lived in a little cottage,
a beautiful little cottage, but it was tiny. All five
people in a little two bedroom cottage off the beaches
of Lake Michigan. So I was down on the beach
swimming with my friends, and there's a family reunion at home.
So I hurried home to be at the reunion, and
(01:33):
my favorite cousin showed up and he just got a
new buzz cut. So I reached up to rub his
head his new buzz cut, and boom, lightning struck me
right in the chest. And I don't know if you've
ever seen it, but you get these red lines through
your chest, my neck and chest and both arms from
(01:54):
the electricity going through your body. Later turns black and blue,
not just all out myself, my cousin, and my uncle.
And it hit a tree route nearby and followed a
route to the tree and blew the tree in half,
split it right in half. So yeah, that was my experience.
(02:16):
One of my many experiences in my crazy life was
sort of starting with that one.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
As he moved into high school, green Law joined his
dad in the mill during the summers of his high
school years, and.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I did my time in the mill too. I worked
there every summer during high school sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.
You had to be eighteen to work there, but they
didn't have an HR department in those days. If I
said I was eighteen on the paper and I was
strong enough to do the work, they hired me. So
I enjoyed that, made really good money, and saved it
(02:53):
for college.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
After high school, green Law went to Indiana University to
play baseball, but college life did not suit him at
that time, so he dropped out and joined the Army.
And he knew right away from his athleticism and his
leadership skills that the military was a perfect fit.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I played freshman baseball for Indiana, and I played all
the sports except basketball. I played all the sports in
high school, so I was in really good shape when
I got to the Army. You know, I could run
a ten second one hundred yard dash. I ran in
the Army for the testing of the candidates in the Army,
(03:35):
I ran a mile and under six minutes with my
boots and uniform on. So I was in really good shape.
That helped a lot. And I had leadership skills sort
of embedded into me by sports. I was usually picked
as the captain of the baseball team and all that
as I grew up, so it fit me like a glove.
(03:57):
It really did and so they would have us run
the obstacle course, not ask him if I could do
it again. That was fun. They said, no, shut up
and get in line, you know. So that's the way
the army was for me. They made me a platoon
leader for a student platoon leader of both basic training
and advanced training. So it just came to me naturally.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Green Law thrived and eventually went through Officer Candidate School,
finishing seventh in his class of two hundred and fifty.
Before deploying to Vietnam, he also completed jungles survival training
in Panama. Green Law says it prepared him well for
the triple canopy jungles of Vietnam. But he says the
most memorable moment was when one guy on his four
(04:42):
man team got attacked from one of the residents of
the jungle.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So my point man was up maybe fifteen twenty feet
in front of me, and he screamed as loud as
he could, and I'm thinking, oh, great, they're going to
discover us out here by the river, you know, where
we're not supposed to be. Maybe they'll they won't let
us get our certification. So I went up to him
and I had a little pen light. I was the
only one that had a light, A little, tiny, little
(05:07):
tiny pen light with work with your helm. I turned
a pen light on him. I said, what the hell
are you screaming about? He said something bit me and
I said, well where, And he said, my hand. He
had bites on the palm of his hand and bites
under his elbow from one bite. That's how big the
mouth was on this snake. And I said, holy crap.
(05:29):
I took my light and I shined it down in
to look, you know, see maybe he was still there.
And I saw the back of this snake slide into
the river, and his back was the size of a basketball.
Since then I researched it and I found out would
be a green anaconda. And they they're fairly docile, but
they strike when they're molting skins coming off. They're sort
(05:53):
of pain. It gets over their eyes. They can't see
very well. They'll strike. Then they strike when they're hungry
to get food. They'll they'll grab a live jungle pig
and drag it into the water, drown it and then
swallow it. And the rare human being they will do
that too, very rare. I couldn't believe the size of
the mouth. It had to be a fourteen inch right.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Fortunately that team member turned out to be just fine.
Green Law then got a week at home before deploying
to Vietnam. From everything he had learned as an incoming
platoon commander who hadn't seen combat yet, green Law knew
that he should rely heavily on the experience of his
platoon sergeant, and that's what he planned to do. But
(06:37):
once he arrived at his new platoon, that plan abruptly changed.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
So I got there and I met the company commander
out in the jungle, and I said, sir, I'm Lieutenant
green Law, or your new platoon leaders, just replacing a
guy that was killed a couple of days before. And
he said, okay, your platoon has You're out here at
nine o'clock, from nine o'clock to noon in a circle
nine to new like a clock. That's where your men
(07:01):
are go take it over. So I'm going over there,
and I'm expecting Clint Eastwood, you know, or Rambo. So
I said the first guy I saw, I said, I'm
Lieutenant Greenlaw, the new platoon leader. I want to see
the platoon sergeant. Bring him to me, said yes, sir,
takes off. Excuse my language. I mean, I'm not supposed
to talk about people overweight, but this guy was. I'll
(07:22):
just put it nicely, he says. Obese individual sloshed over
to me. Before I could say anything, he says, are
you the new platoon leader? And I said yes, I
am Lieutenant green Law. And he said, man, I'm glad
you're here. I know nothing about running a platoon. It's
all yours. And I'm thinking, oh, oh no. My whole
life flashed in front of me. I think I got
(07:43):
struck by lightning again. My training was good, so I
knew what to do. I had to replace him, but
I didn't have any As a first lieutenant, I had
no authority to fire my platoon sergeant. It's a military
you know. He asked to be done officially. I fired
his ass right there on the spot, and I said,
the helicopter is still out there. That dropped me off.
(08:03):
He's unloading food and gear. Get on that helicopter and
get out of here. And he did. He took. He
didn't even get his stuff. He just grabbed his rifle
and ran to that helicopter. And the company commander comes
over to me. He said, what the hell did you
just do? I said, well, I fired my platoon sergeant
and I hired one of my best squad leaders. I
(08:24):
found a guy that had been there nine months. He
knew what he was doing. He's a sergeant. I promoted
him the staff sergeant, which I had no authority to do.
So he's now my platoon sergeant. And he said what
and the hell you don't have any authority to do that,
And I said, well I did it, and so I
had my first really good stare down. I looked him
right in the eye. I did this once more in
my career or two, and it works. I stared at him.
(08:47):
I didn't blame, I said, sir, I told him exactly
what that guy said to me. I said, this is war.
I don't have time to sit around and wait for
a bureaucracy to take care of this. I took care
of it. And he stared at me and he said
finally he blamed, turned and walked it with Okay, but
don't do anything like that again until you talk to me.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Green Law also described his new duties and responsibilities as
a platoon commander.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Make sure we survived. My first job this and also
as company commander later on. I didn't want anybody to die,
so I try to be smart. I try to stay
ahead of the enemy, and my job was to save lives,
not take lives. We took a lot of lives of
the enemy, don't get me wrong. But I had a
(09:30):
really good ratio on my side with my men, so
I'm very careful to take care of them. I make
sure they we had and every company, infantry company and
every infantry platoon. You have not experts, but you have.
Lets say that you know medicine a little bit. Blood
doesn't bother you all of a sudden. You're the medic.
(09:51):
We make you the medic. Somebody else is good with
C four high explosives, they're good with They're good with
explosives and tech skills with their hands. He becomes the expert.
I had experts for every area. My last name is
green Law, so my nickname my whole life from childhood,
so today it's law Law. I said, don't call me sir,
(10:14):
don't salute me, don't salute me. Out here, the snipers
are looking for the guy getting saluted. The snipers will
shoot three people. They'll shoot the guy next to me
and the other guy next to me, usually the radio man.
They shoot him and then they shoot me. So the
platoon loses its communications. It's leadership, and so that's what
they're smart. People are smart, you know. These these Vietcong
(10:37):
were local peasants, but they weren't stupid. They had IQs
just like everybody else, and they figured this stuff out.
So I tried to motivate everybody to and work together
as a team, team building, and not to be afraid.
The more bold you are, the more likely you are
to survive. If you're a coward, you're gonna get shot,
(11:00):
probably right in the back. So we we had we
had a great relationship. It was it was a wonderful
learning experience for me. I was twenty twenty two, almost
twenty three when I took over that platoon. I was
twenty three when I took over the company a company
later on in another area. So it's survival, survival and
kill everything, you see.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He got even more specific about the challenge of finding
and avoiding enemy booby traps.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
It's very very difficult. You have you have to work slow,
and you don't look for the wire. You'll never see it.
Because it's about shin hai, and it's it's like a
piece of thread, metal thread. You know, you can't even
see it. Uh, So you have to look for abnormalties,
look for some leaves that have been crushed in there.
(11:50):
Back in they're putting, putting all this together, the trip wire,
and they were all they weren't all that careful, and
so you could tell something was going on somewhere. So
we would stop and take a really close look, go
inch by inch until you saw the wire. Once you
had the wire, you can't touch it. You have to
step over it. And it's usually about shinhai, so it's
(12:11):
fairly easy to step over. But uh, there's no easy
solution to it. And once in a while, including me
later on, that's that's what got me. It was a
trip wire. It's a little luck and a lot of
a lot of hard work to an intense pressure. One
(12:32):
way you can avoid it is to stay off the paths.
Don't take a path. You see a worn path, like
to a village. Don't take that path because the villagers
all know where the booby traps are and we don't.
And so we get off the main drag to it.
You know, the main the main path to a village
might be oh, you know, eight feet wide. Still it's
(12:55):
not a road or anything. It's just crushed jungle path.
So we avoided those. We use the paths out in
the middle of the jungle where they were small and
you could it was. It wasn't a lot of use,
if any use. But so avoid the path and be
real careful and be a superman. You know, in combat,
(13:15):
you become a super person of yourself, a super green Law.
Your eyes are wider, your prefer vision is better, you
can see, you know, during during combat, you can see better.
You can smell things you couldn't smell before. You know,
you were stronger with all the adrenaline pumping on your heart.
(13:36):
So you become a super being of yourself in combat.
And I always thought that was interesting. Probably it's the
same in sports. You know, you get out there playing
some kind of a sport. I don't care what it is.
It's not like you're laying on the couch. You're pretty
fired up. Well, was picture that in extreme and that's
what combat is like.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
That's a US Army veteran and Vietnam veteran Doug green Law.
In a moment, they'll share the details of the harrowing
day that earned him the Silver Star. I'm Greg Corumbus
and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Sixty seconds of Service.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
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(14:31):
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Speaker 1 (15:07):
This is Veterans Chronicles I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is US Army and Vietnam veteran Doug Greenlaw.
Green Law now shares the story of Thanksgiving Day nineteen
sixty seven when his platoon was overwhelmingly outnumbered by enemy forces,
and he tells us about the actions that led to
him receiving the Silver Star.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I was with a one ninety six infantry. It's light infantry,
so they put us in helicopters and flew us to
hot areas during the Tet offensive. So we fought almost
every day. They would fly us to where something's happening.
They flew us to this one area. I was a
lead platoon for my company, and what our job was
(15:50):
to fly with the helicopter land pop green smoke, which
means okay, and then they rest can come in in
an area that we've secured. Well, the pilots got mixed
up with the map. They landed us one thousand meters
farther than where we're supposed to be left off, and
that happened to be right in front the battalion of
(16:13):
North Vietnamese, which was about probably four hundred between four
hundred and five hundred men at that time. I had
forty two men in my platoon, so it was us
against them, and it was hell. Everything you can possibly imagine,
including hand to hand combat, happened that day. When it
(16:33):
got to be hand to hand, I had to call
in a phantom jet to bring air support, and I
asked this guy, this pilot, to drop bombs on my
own position because we were so close they were overrunning us,
and he did that and some of my guys. I
lost some of my guys, but I saved most of them,
(16:55):
and it worked. It pushed them back away from us,
and it was hell fire. We fought for five hours
before they could catch up to us from where they
were supposed to be a thousand meters behind us. So
it took them five hours to get to us through
the jungle and everything. And when they got to us,
a lot went on. You know, hand to hand combat
(17:16):
is hard to describe. You kill somebody with your bare
hands or your knife or your weapon. I'll give you
one example that I put in the book. Because we
were bringing jet bombs on our own people, everybody had
to get down, obviously, and I saw a little trench,
a handmade trench, about twenty feet from me, so I
(17:38):
ran and jumped into that trench. I got in there
and there were four North Vietnamese soldiers inside that in
that trench, locked and loaded, and I just snapped a
new load of bullets into my AR fifteen, locked it in,
and just then I jumped in and there they were.
So I killed all four of them with my weapon.
(18:00):
The sixteen fire so many shots in a second or
a minute. You only have like eighteen rounds in your magazine.
And I told my men, don't ever leave it on automatic.
You'll be out of ammunition in one second. So I
just popped them all. What we used to call in
those days. I stitched them from their genitals to their brain.
(18:22):
They all fell dead, and one of them dove into
a tunnel at the end of the trench, had a
little canvas flap on it. And I was out of
ammunition and I saw him. I took my helmet off
and I threw it at him, trying to stall him
so I could get a hold of him. I missed
him and he dived in. To my stupidity, I dived
(18:43):
into that tunnel after this guy. I got in there
about ten feet in its dark, and I could hear
the muffles of the war going on out front of
the artillery and everything coming in, the bombs being dropped
by the jet, and I didn't see the guy. And
I started getting my night vision opening up a little bit,
coming in from that bright sunlight. I saw a form
(19:04):
in front of me, ten feet in front of me
or so, and I saw that the tunnel took a
hard right turn. And these tunnels had been there a
long time. They're hard as a rock, it's almost like
cement smooth on the inside, and they've been there. There
are hospitals in them. There are sleeping quarters. One time
we stumbled on a tunnel that had a young woman
(19:27):
and her baby hiding from us in there, so they
lived in these tunnels. I knew my men were up
there wondering where the hell their leader went. So they're
all up there not knowing what to do. I said,
I better get up there because they don't know how
to handle this calling in the jet. So I turned
to leave, and I heard this rustling behind me, and
(19:49):
this guy was coming at me. He had ammunition. He
fired one shot. I turned around, he fired one shot,
and I hit right over my head into the top
of the tunnel. You could feel it falling on my
neck and sweat. And uh, he obviously missed. The next
shot whiz right by my ear. I could hear it.
(20:10):
The third shot, it nicked my my right shoulder, just
just barely a nick, more of a burn than an
actual shot. So I said, I got to charge this guy.
And I charged him, and I was out of ammunition.
I took my, uh my Gerber commando knife from my side.
It's a dagger, long dagger, and it was it was
(20:33):
as sharp as a needle at one end and and
it was like a razor blade sharp down down the sides.
So I charged him and I heard a click. He
was out of ammunition too. So when I he turned
and ran to go around the turn I told you about,
and I grabbed him by the heel. I pulled him
around and I stabbed him in the calf of his leg,
(20:57):
into his into the bone, pulled out, brought him up
to me, and finished him off. And it turns out
they think, and the reason I got the silver Star,
I think versus the bronze. They think that he might
have been the battalion commander. That was a formal tunnel.
It wasn't recently Doug, it had been there a long time,
(21:18):
and that trench is probably the entrance to that battalion
level leaders ship's rule. He probably slept in there. I
got back out to my men and we held him
off till my support came five hours later. By that time,
three and a half hours later, most of us survived.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Much more from Doug Greenlaw's story of service. In just
a moment on Veterans Chronicles, this is Veterans Chronicles. I'm
Greg Corumbus. Our guest is US Army veteran and Vietnam
War veteran Doug green Law. A moment ago, we heard
green Law's intense account of protecting his platoon while badly
outnumbered and fighting hand to hand in a North Vietnamese tunnel.
(22:03):
What goes through your mind in a moment like that.
Is it reverting to how you've been trained, realizing that
it's either him or me that's going to emerge from
this fight alive. Or is it simply instinct.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
You hit all the points. It's all that mixed up
into one person. It turns out we were bigger, we
were stronger. They had on their side, they had a
strong loyalty to their country. You know this is their country,
not ours. They lived there, their families are there, so
they fight equally as strong as we do. But we
(22:37):
were always physically stronger. It's either him or me. The
tunnel is a good example. It was either him or
me was that. Am I going to die in this tunnel?
Or is he going to die? It's not going to
be me. And that's the way young people think. I
just turned twenty three at this time, and I thought
to myself, I'm not going to use the language, but
I thought to myself, I'm going to kill this guy
(23:00):
going to kill me. I'm not going to die here.
Now that was just my youth. With one of those
bullets would have hit me, it had been all over,
I'd say it's a combination of everything that you said,
all in one person, also filled by a quart and
a half of adrenaline pouring onto your heart all the time.
So you have a superhuman thing going for yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And there's more to the story. Green Law also elaborated
on how he positioned his men to fend off hundreds
of enemy fighters while he called an air support and
waited hours for ground reinforcements to arrive.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Well, I put everybody into a tight circle, and real tight.
I'm shoulder to shoulder. So if you're going to have
to get all of us, you're not going to get
warn you're not going to pick us off. I was
calling in a lot of overhead bombing. I was on
direct call with the pilot, and he and I got
to be friends, short and fast friends there because he
(23:56):
would he's coming in fast, you know, even slow, as
slow as a jet comes. If a jet is flying fast,
he's flying almost either down or lateral. But when you're
coming in low, you got to go as slow as
you possibly can. And this thing comes in like this,
you know, with this being the engine down here, and
(24:18):
he's going as slow as he can go to drop
those bombs. So he could be accurate. Still, you can't
be that accurate. So we got into an argument. Not
an argument, but I'd say you got to bring it back.
I'd give my zone. I'd say bring it back three
hundred yards. He dropped it again. I say bring it
back three hundred yards. He said, I just did. I said, no,
you didn't. I'm down here watching you weren't three hundred yards.
(24:39):
So we're back and forth. It becomes a talk through
none of this formal broadcasting thing, you know. Back and forth.
We ended up being friends. But he even came in
lower and slower. I can't believe it. So he got
pretty accurate, and he kept him away until to support.
(25:01):
Seemed like it took forever, But it's not as complicated
as you might think. He's like one of my men
up there, and he happened to be an ima.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yet, in addition to the other losses that day, Greenlaw
says two other things ended that day as well, his
sense of fear and his faith. He says he's never
been afraid since then, which can be both good and bad.
As for his faith, Greenlaw says the horrors he witnessed
and was part of on the battlefield led him to
(25:31):
becoming a doubter. He says he's not an atheist, but
an agnostic who is going to need a lot of
evidence to believe again. After the fighting on Thanksgiving nineteen
sixty seven, green Law was soon promoted and named a
company commander. He went on fewer patrols at that point,
but the difficult work of his men continued, including finding
(25:52):
and avoiding enemy booby traps. But on some occasions Greenlaw
still joined his men on patrol, and that's how he
was severely injured.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
They're getting my during my silver star ceremony they had
back at the hospital because my leg was healing. I
had a minor wound in my leg and it was
healing up in country and that's when they're going to
send me back out. And the battalion commander was putting
the silver star on me, and he said, we're real
proud of you, and blah blah blah, and he said,
you're getting a brigade level promotion to a company commander.
(26:27):
You're going to command second of the first company. And uh,
it's and I didn't know what a brigade level though
it was versus anything else. Turns out that's a big
deal for the brigade. The colonel to do that or
might have been might have been a one star general.
So they made me a company commander. I got back
(26:47):
from Bangkok on R and R. My leg was finally healed.
I was ready to go. They sent me out to
be a company commander. I told my battalion commander, they
don't teach you how to be a company commander. I've
never been a company commander. I don't know what to do.
And he said, hey, he had a good platoon. Just
have five good platoons. I'll get out of my face.
(27:08):
So I did, so I just took over the company.
Fortunately I had Rambo as my first sergeant. This guy
was fantastic. He and I ran that company. So what
happened was that we're doing fine. We were mean, you know.
(27:28):
I wrote home for Ace of Spades, and everybody said
what I said, I don't want the cards the deck,
just send me the Ace of Spades, and we use
the Ace of Spades to put the fear of God
into these North Vietnamese enemy. I had stack of them
in my pocket and i'd pull one out and stick
it in their mouth. And because they're very superstitious, and
(27:49):
that's called the death card in Vietnamese. We were out
on as a company commander. Occasionally I would go out
with my men on a patrol at night to secure
the area, make sure it stays secure so everybody else
could sleep. We'd come back in the morning, maybe get
one hours sleep if we're lucky, on the floor of
(28:09):
the jungle. And I did this as an active leadership
to show my men that I wouldn't ask them to
do something that I wouldn't do or haven't done, And
so I would go out on these patrols with them
once in a while. And we were out on a
patrol and we entered into a big something I'd never
seen before, a very big bamboo forest. I didn't realize it,
(28:33):
but bamboos, the ancient bamboos are six feet around like
big oak trees. What the enemy would do would set
a bomb. They would find an artillery round, a dun
one that didn't work on the jungle floor, and they
would take it up. Now this is very sensitive, so
(28:55):
these guys are brave that did this. You can screw
the end of the artillery round off. There's a screw
drop it slip in very easily, a hand grenade blasting
shell inside of it, and it's a little aluminum about
the size of a pencil. Stick it inside and all
it does is explode and set the big explosion off.
(29:17):
So they put that in with a trip wire. They
bring it out from the tree about head head level
is a bomb, bring it down across the trail about
shin Hai. And we were out there that one night
and my point man tripped the trip wire, killed three
(29:38):
in front of me, and one behind me and wounded.
Everybody else on the patrol is that one whether they
think is a one to five artillery round, which just
for your sake of understanding, is about two feet long.
One five. You know, this big round pack full of
thirty three pounds of TNT, so when it goes off,
(30:00):
it makes a big blast. There was a helicopter coming
in at that time for resupply, and that helicopter came
out and got me. I don't think it's real cloudy here.
They picked me up, got me on a helicopter, and
the other wounded got on a helicopter. The dead people
we left there with being guarded by our people, in
(30:22):
due respect, but you never put dead people on a
helicopter with live people. It's just it's an unwritten rule.
So they flew us back to a mash unit in
the jungle, a little clearing, and these helicopter pilots broke
all the rules. They flew full speed ahead right tree top.
They're not supposed to do that, but they did to
(30:43):
get because I was bleeding so bad. My throat was
slit from my left ear to my atom's apple. I
had a hole the size of a tennis ball. Here
I cut my left carotid artery, not in half, but
sliced it half and squirting out two feet from my neck.
(31:03):
Compound fracture on my right leg, lost my left knee,
cap had a piece of bamboo that nailed my arm
to my chest, missing my heart by a quarter of
an inch. And I survived. I was twenty three, iron man.
I shaved off my stitches before they could pull them out.
(31:25):
Back in the hospital when in denaying, we were all tough,
tough as nails. You had to be if you weren't tough.
And I've met people that weren't tough. They're hard on
the whole organization because they can't you can't depend on them.
So everybody became tough, whether they were or not. I
never saw super weak people. I saw stronger than others.
But so that was it. Somehow I survived and I
(31:50):
got back to the mash unit. The doctors started working
on me. They stopped the bleeding. Here they clipped off
my carotid artery. He eclipped it shut, and Catholic priest
was there. He gave me the last rites and I died.
I was dead for no breathing, no respiration, no heartbeat
(32:14):
for fifteen minutes. That's what they told me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Anyway, After much care and enough time, green Law recovered
remarkably well from his many injuries. He returned to Indiana University,
got his degree, and met and married his wife. His
newfound fearlessness proved very helpful in his new career in sales.
He was a great success selling advertising in radio. He
(32:37):
was later a sales executive for Pat Robertson at the
Christian Broadcasting Network before moving on to work at the
highest levels of Viacom, including MTV, VH one, and Nickelodeon.
Greenlaw says his fearlessness also served him well in a
showdown with Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, I'm not afraid.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
I'm not afraid if I were working for you and
something was going wrong. My job is to protect you
by doing a good job. My job is to make
me real successful so you're successful. So if you're not fair,
I'm going to tell you right to your face. It
doesn't bother me a bit. If I'm right, you got
(33:18):
to be in order to do this, you got to
be right. And if you don't know if you're right,
keep your mouth shut. If you know you're right. Say
it to anybody anytime. I stared down Sumner Redstone, the
chairman of Viacom, just like I did that company commander
in Vietnam, same technique. I did the same thing. He
(33:38):
gave me a direct order to hire his daughter, Sherry Redstone.
And she came in fingernails bitten down to the quick,
with blood sweaty, looked like she just got off a
hard walk through Central Park, casual arrogant, you know, Sumner's daughter,
for God's sake. And I'm thinking to myself, I can't
(34:02):
hire this woman. She's not ready. So I'm thinking to myself,
I'll give her a job. He gave me an order
to hire her. I'm going to offer her a job
as a second level assistant down at the bottom of
the And like I started out, start at the bottom.
By the time you work your way up, you're going
to know the game you're gonna and you do well.
(34:22):
I said to her, Sherry, I'll hire you, but you
know it's going to be a low level job. In
a year, and I'm in the back of my mind,
I'm thinking I'm going to put her with Sandy Sheffer
and Karen Zolman two of my top executive salespeople. They
were fantastic. They were on Armani outfits. They looked stunning,
and they were nice looking ladies. And they could They
(34:45):
could talk to her differently than I could. They can
talk woman to woman to her, get to get her
fingernails fixed, put on some decent clothes. She wouldn't do that.
She wanted a top level marketing job. And I said,
it's not going to happen, So my phone ran. The
next morning, some of the Redstone wanted to see me
in his office. I walked up and I had my
best I knew he was going to do this. I
(35:06):
had my best harmony. Soon on tie looking good. Strode
into his office, standing tall, and before he could say anything,
I said, Summer, I didn't hire her because she's not ready.
And he looked at me and he said, what do
you mean. I told him exactly how she showed up.
She was arrogant. I described her fingernails. I did. She
was sweaty. I don't know why she was sweating. She
(35:29):
didn't seem nervous. She seemed arrogant. I told him like
it was, and he stared at me, sitting in his
big chair in his office and I stared at him.
He finally blinked. He blinked and turned around and said, ah, hell,
I wouldn't have hired her either. You know where she
is today, Cherry. She's had of CBS, She's head of
(35:49):
the holding company for CBS Inc. So she had the
smarts she just needed. I don't know how she got it,
but she found out somebody, some good woman got a
hold of her. I think straighten her up.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
After retiring, Greenlaw found himself serving military personnel again, not
on the battlefield this time, but through the Military Order
of the Purple Heart, where he eventually served as National
Commander for two years and met countless Americans who still
bear the scars of battle.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
The Military Order of the Purple Heart is a leading
organization of Purple Heart recipients in America. There are about
five hundred thousand wounded individuals in our country right now
from all wars, and the Purple Heart is the oldest
medal in American history. George Washington created it in the
(36:41):
Revolutionary War, and so it's been around a long time,
and then in World War One they got serious with it.
I think Roosevelt redesigned it. In World War two to
be as beautiful as it is today. The purple Heart
is the most beautiful medal. I think the medal of
honors is number one. Distincuish served cross his number two,
(37:02):
silver stars number three, purple Heart is number four, and
ranking when you put it on your uniform, it's how
they rank up. So it was an honor to be
the National Commander. I started off by founding a chapter
and then I was a commander of that chapter for
nine years. I ran for State Commander of South Carolina
and I won that, and then I ran for National
(37:24):
and I won that. So it's not like it was
new to me. I grew up through it and I
experienced the order, and the President of the United States
is the honorary chairman. I thought I had it rough.
I got to meet Purple Heart recipients across the country.
Met a guy in Atlanta that woke up in a
(37:44):
zipped up body bag in the cooler. You know, I
thought I had it rough. He felt something in there
with him, pulled it over. It was his arm. Like me,
they had no respiration, no heartbeat. Threw him in a bag,
threw his arm in with him, zipped him up. The
guy woke up. Now, here's what happened. He says, God,
not an image of God, not the thought of God.
(38:09):
God himself entered that bag with him, and he said,
don't worry, you're going to live. You have to scream,
kick your feet, yell. They're going to hear you and
they'll pull you out of here, and you're going to live.
You're going to die an old man. Unfortunately without an
arm you're going to die. You're going to die an
old man, happy old man.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Doug Greenlaw has a lot to be proud of from
his service to our nation and our wounded veterans. But
it didn't take him long to pinpoint what makes him
most proud of his service.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Saving the lives of a lot of people in combat,
the circle life formed in it with my platoon when
we were being overrun. I think I saved lives doing that.
I can't save everybody, but I think being a good
leader with my men in a platoon and also in
a company, and it was extremely rewarding and it changed
(39:02):
my life at a young age twenty three, and it's
been an interesting ride ever since.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Doug Greenlaw is a US Army veteran, a Vietnam Veteran
and the recipient of the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars,
and two Purple Hearts. He later became a top executive
at MTV, VH one and Nickelodeon, and also served as
National Commander of the Military Order of the Purple Heart.
(39:28):
His memoir is entitled Forged by Lightning, From Boyhood to
the Battlefield to the Boardroom. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus and thanks
(39:50):
for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American
Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veterans Center.
You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook
and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the
American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and
(40:12):
special features, and of course, please subscribe to the Veterans
Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening,
and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles
Welcome to Veterans Chronicles. I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is Lieutenant Doug Greenlaw. He's a US Army veteran,
a Vietnam veteran, and the recipient of the Silver Star,
two Bronze Stars, and two Purple Hearts. He later became
a top executive at MTV, VH one and Nickelodeon, and
(00:33):
also served as National Commander of the Military Order of
the Purple Heart in twenty eighteen and twenty nineteen. He's
the author of the memoir Forged by Lightning. From Boyhood
to the Battlefield to the Boardroom. Doug Greenlaw was born
in Minnesota in nineteen forty four. A few years later,
the family moved to Michigan City, Indiana, on the shores
(00:55):
of Lake Michigan, where Greenlaw's father got a job working
in a local mis Greenlaw loved growing up near the
Great Lakes, but his most notable moment from those years
is when he was struck by lightning shortly after returning
home from the beach.
Speaker 2 (01:10):
I was thirteen years old. We lived in a little cottage,
a beautiful little cottage, but it was tiny. All five
people in a little two bedroom cottage off the beaches
of Lake Michigan. So I was down on the beach
swimming with my friends, and there's a family reunion at home.
So I hurried home to be at the reunion, and
(01:33):
my favorite cousin showed up and he just got a
new buzz cut. So I reached up to rub his
head his new buzz cut, and boom, lightning struck me
right in the chest. And I don't know if you've
ever seen it, but you get these red lines through
your chest, my neck and chest and both arms from
(01:54):
the electricity going through your body. Later turns black and blue,
not just all out myself, my cousin, and my uncle.
And it hit a tree route nearby and followed a
route to the tree and blew the tree in half,
split it right in half. So yeah, that was my experience.
(02:16):
One of my many experiences in my crazy life was
sort of starting with that one.
Speaker 1 (02:23):
As he moved into high school, green Law joined his
dad in the mill during the summers of his high
school years, and.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
I did my time in the mill too. I worked
there every summer during high school sixteen, seventeen, and eighteen.
You had to be eighteen to work there, but they
didn't have an HR department in those days. If I
said I was eighteen on the paper and I was
strong enough to do the work, they hired me. So
I enjoyed that, made really good money, and saved it
(02:53):
for college.
Speaker 1 (02:54):
After high school, green Law went to Indiana University to
play baseball, but college life did not suit him at
that time, so he dropped out and joined the Army.
And he knew right away from his athleticism and his
leadership skills that the military was a perfect fit.
Speaker 2 (03:11):
I played freshman baseball for Indiana, and I played all
the sports except basketball. I played all the sports in
high school, so I was in really good shape when
I got to the Army. You know, I could run
a ten second one hundred yard dash. I ran in
the Army for the testing of the candidates in the Army,
(03:35):
I ran a mile and under six minutes with my
boots and uniform on. So I was in really good shape.
That helped a lot. And I had leadership skills sort
of embedded into me by sports. I was usually picked
as the captain of the baseball team and all that
as I grew up, so it fit me like a glove.
(03:57):
It really did and so they would have us run
the obstacle course, not ask him if I could do
it again. That was fun. They said, no, shut up
and get in line, you know. So that's the way
the army was for me. They made me a platoon
leader for a student platoon leader of both basic training
and advanced training. So it just came to me naturally.
Speaker 1 (04:21):
Green Law thrived and eventually went through Officer Candidate School,
finishing seventh in his class of two hundred and fifty.
Before deploying to Vietnam, he also completed jungles survival training
in Panama. Green Law says it prepared him well for
the triple canopy jungles of Vietnam. But he says the
most memorable moment was when one guy on his four
(04:42):
man team got attacked from one of the residents of
the jungle.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
So my point man was up maybe fifteen twenty feet
in front of me, and he screamed as loud as
he could, and I'm thinking, oh, great, they're going to
discover us out here by the river, you know, where
we're not supposed to be. Maybe they'll they won't let
us get our certification. So I went up to him
and I had a little pen light. I was the
only one that had a light, A little, tiny, little
(05:07):
tiny pen light with work with your helm. I turned
a pen light on him. I said, what the hell
are you screaming about? He said something bit me and
I said, well where, And he said, my hand. He
had bites on the palm of his hand and bites
under his elbow from one bite. That's how big the
mouth was on this snake. And I said, holy crap.
(05:29):
I took my light and I shined it down in
to look, you know, see maybe he was still there.
And I saw the back of this snake slide into
the river, and his back was the size of a basketball.
Since then I researched it and I found out would
be a green anaconda. And they they're fairly docile, but
they strike when they're molting skins coming off. They're sort
(05:53):
of pain. It gets over their eyes. They can't see
very well. They'll strike. Then they strike when they're hungry
to get food. They'll they'll grab a live jungle pig
and drag it into the water, drown it and then
swallow it. And the rare human being they will do
that too, very rare. I couldn't believe the size of
the mouth. It had to be a fourteen inch right.
Speaker 1 (06:16):
Fortunately that team member turned out to be just fine.
Green Law then got a week at home before deploying
to Vietnam. From everything he had learned as an incoming
platoon commander who hadn't seen combat yet, green Law knew
that he should rely heavily on the experience of his
platoon sergeant, and that's what he planned to do. But
(06:37):
once he arrived at his new platoon, that plan abruptly changed.
Speaker 2 (06:41):
So I got there and I met the company commander
out in the jungle, and I said, sir, I'm Lieutenant
green Law, or your new platoon leaders, just replacing a
guy that was killed a couple of days before. And
he said, okay, your platoon has You're out here at
nine o'clock, from nine o'clock to noon in a circle
nine to new like a clock. That's where your men
(07:01):
are go take it over. So I'm going over there,
and I'm expecting Clint Eastwood, you know, or Rambo. So
I said the first guy I saw, I said, I'm
Lieutenant Greenlaw, the new platoon leader. I want to see
the platoon sergeant. Bring him to me, said yes, sir,
takes off. Excuse my language. I mean, I'm not supposed
to talk about people overweight, but this guy was. I'll
(07:22):
just put it nicely, he says. Obese individual sloshed over
to me. Before I could say anything, he says, are
you the new platoon leader? And I said yes, I
am Lieutenant green Law. And he said, man, I'm glad
you're here. I know nothing about running a platoon. It's
all yours. And I'm thinking, oh, oh no. My whole
life flashed in front of me. I think I got
(07:43):
struck by lightning again. My training was good, so I
knew what to do. I had to replace him, but
I didn't have any As a first lieutenant, I had
no authority to fire my platoon sergeant. It's a military
you know. He asked to be done officially. I fired
his ass right there on the spot, and I said,
the helicopter is still out there. That dropped me off.
(08:03):
He's unloading food and gear. Get on that helicopter and
get out of here. And he did. He took. He
didn't even get his stuff. He just grabbed his rifle
and ran to that helicopter. And the company commander comes
over to me. He said, what the hell did you
just do? I said, well, I fired my platoon sergeant
and I hired one of my best squad leaders. I
(08:24):
found a guy that had been there nine months. He
knew what he was doing. He's a sergeant. I promoted
him the staff sergeant, which I had no authority to do.
So he's now my platoon sergeant. And he said what
and the hell you don't have any authority to do that,
And I said, well I did it, and so I
had my first really good stare down. I looked him
right in the eye. I did this once more in
my career or two, and it works. I stared at him.
(08:47):
I didn't blame, I said, sir, I told him exactly
what that guy said to me. I said, this is war.
I don't have time to sit around and wait for
a bureaucracy to take care of this. I took care
of it. And he stared at me and he said
finally he blamed, turned and walked it with Okay, but
don't do anything like that again until you talk to me.
Speaker 1 (09:04):
Green Law also described his new duties and responsibilities as
a platoon commander.
Speaker 2 (09:09):
Make sure we survived. My first job this and also
as company commander later on. I didn't want anybody to die,
so I try to be smart. I try to stay
ahead of the enemy, and my job was to save lives,
not take lives. We took a lot of lives of
the enemy, don't get me wrong. But I had a
(09:30):
really good ratio on my side with my men, so
I'm very careful to take care of them. I make
sure they we had and every company, infantry company and
every infantry platoon. You have not experts, but you have.
Lets say that you know medicine a little bit. Blood
doesn't bother you all of a sudden. You're the medic.
(09:51):
We make you the medic. Somebody else is good with
C four high explosives, they're good with They're good with
explosives and tech skills with their hands. He becomes the expert.
I had experts for every area. My last name is
green Law, so my nickname my whole life from childhood,
so today it's law Law. I said, don't call me sir,
(10:14):
don't salute me, don't salute me. Out here, the snipers
are looking for the guy getting saluted. The snipers will
shoot three people. They'll shoot the guy next to me
and the other guy next to me, usually the radio man.
They shoot him and then they shoot me. So the
platoon loses its communications. It's leadership, and so that's what
they're smart. People are smart, you know. These these Vietcong
(10:37):
were local peasants, but they weren't stupid. They had IQs
just like everybody else, and they figured this stuff out.
So I tried to motivate everybody to and work together
as a team, team building, and not to be afraid.
The more bold you are, the more likely you are
to survive. If you're a coward, you're gonna get shot,
(11:00):
probably right in the back. So we we had we
had a great relationship. It was it was a wonderful
learning experience for me. I was twenty twenty two, almost
twenty three when I took over that platoon. I was
twenty three when I took over the company a company
later on in another area. So it's survival, survival and
kill everything, you see.
Speaker 1 (11:21):
He got even more specific about the challenge of finding
and avoiding enemy booby traps.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
It's very very difficult. You have you have to work slow,
and you don't look for the wire. You'll never see it.
Because it's about shin hai, and it's it's like a
piece of thread, metal thread. You know, you can't even
see it. Uh, So you have to look for abnormalties,
look for some leaves that have been crushed in there.
(11:50):
Back in they're putting, putting all this together, the trip wire,
and they were all they weren't all that careful, and
so you could tell something was going on somewhere. So
we would stop and take a really close look, go
inch by inch until you saw the wire. Once you
had the wire, you can't touch it. You have to
step over it. And it's usually about shinhai, so it's
(12:11):
fairly easy to step over. But uh, there's no easy
solution to it. And once in a while, including me
later on, that's that's what got me. It was a
trip wire. It's a little luck and a lot of
a lot of hard work to an intense pressure. One
(12:32):
way you can avoid it is to stay off the paths.
Don't take a path. You see a worn path, like
to a village. Don't take that path because the villagers
all know where the booby traps are and we don't.
And so we get off the main drag to it.
You know, the main the main path to a village
might be oh, you know, eight feet wide. Still it's
(12:55):
not a road or anything. It's just crushed jungle path.
So we avoided those. We use the paths out in
the middle of the jungle where they were small and
you could it was. It wasn't a lot of use,
if any use. But so avoid the path and be
real careful and be a superman. You know, in combat,
(13:15):
you become a super person of yourself, a super green Law.
Your eyes are wider, your prefer vision is better, you
can see, you know, during during combat, you can see better.
You can smell things you couldn't smell before. You know,
you were stronger with all the adrenaline pumping on your heart.
(13:36):
So you become a super being of yourself in combat.
And I always thought that was interesting. Probably it's the
same in sports. You know, you get out there playing
some kind of a sport. I don't care what it is.
It's not like you're laying on the couch. You're pretty
fired up. Well, was picture that in extreme and that's
what combat is like.
Speaker 1 (13:55):
That's a US Army veteran and Vietnam veteran Doug green Law.
In a moment, they'll share the details of the harrowing
day that earned him the Silver Star. I'm Greg Corumbus
and this is Veterans Chronicles.
Speaker 2 (14:08):
Sixty seconds of Service.
Speaker 3 (14:10):
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(14:31):
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(14:52):
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Speaker 1 (15:07):
This is Veterans Chronicles I'm Greg Corumbus. Our guest in
this edition is US Army and Vietnam veteran Doug Greenlaw.
Green Law now shares the story of Thanksgiving Day nineteen
sixty seven when his platoon was overwhelmingly outnumbered by enemy forces,
and he tells us about the actions that led to
him receiving the Silver Star.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I was with a one ninety six infantry. It's light infantry,
so they put us in helicopters and flew us to
hot areas during the Tet offensive. So we fought almost
every day. They would fly us to where something's happening.
They flew us to this one area. I was a
lead platoon for my company, and what our job was
(15:50):
to fly with the helicopter land pop green smoke, which
means okay, and then they rest can come in in
an area that we've secured. Well, the pilots got mixed
up with the map. They landed us one thousand meters
farther than where we're supposed to be left off, and
that happened to be right in front the battalion of
(16:13):
North Vietnamese, which was about probably four hundred between four
hundred and five hundred men at that time. I had
forty two men in my platoon, so it was us
against them, and it was hell. Everything you can possibly imagine,
including hand to hand combat, happened that day. When it
(16:33):
got to be hand to hand, I had to call
in a phantom jet to bring air support, and I
asked this guy, this pilot, to drop bombs on my
own position because we were so close they were overrunning us,
and he did that and some of my guys. I
lost some of my guys, but I saved most of them,
(16:55):
and it worked. It pushed them back away from us,
and it was hell fire. We fought for five hours
before they could catch up to us from where they
were supposed to be a thousand meters behind us. So
it took them five hours to get to us through
the jungle and everything. And when they got to us,
a lot went on. You know, hand to hand combat
(17:16):
is hard to describe. You kill somebody with your bare
hands or your knife or your weapon. I'll give you
one example that I put in the book. Because we
were bringing jet bombs on our own people, everybody had
to get down, obviously, and I saw a little trench,
a handmade trench, about twenty feet from me, so I
(17:38):
ran and jumped into that trench. I got in there
and there were four North Vietnamese soldiers inside that in
that trench, locked and loaded, and I just snapped a
new load of bullets into my AR fifteen, locked it in,
and just then I jumped in and there they were.
So I killed all four of them with my weapon.
(18:00):
The sixteen fire so many shots in a second or
a minute. You only have like eighteen rounds in your magazine.
And I told my men, don't ever leave it on automatic.
You'll be out of ammunition in one second. So I
just popped them all. What we used to call in
those days. I stitched them from their genitals to their brain.
(18:22):
They all fell dead, and one of them dove into
a tunnel at the end of the trench, had a
little canvas flap on it. And I was out of
ammunition and I saw him. I took my helmet off
and I threw it at him, trying to stall him
so I could get a hold of him. I missed
him and he dived in. To my stupidity, I dived
(18:43):
into that tunnel after this guy. I got in there
about ten feet in its dark, and I could hear
the muffles of the war going on out front of
the artillery and everything coming in, the bombs being dropped
by the jet, and I didn't see the guy. And
I started getting my night vision opening up a little bit,
coming in from that bright sunlight. I saw a form
(19:04):
in front of me, ten feet in front of me
or so, and I saw that the tunnel took a
hard right turn. And these tunnels had been there a
long time. They're hard as a rock, it's almost like
cement smooth on the inside, and they've been there. There
are hospitals in them. There are sleeping quarters. One time
we stumbled on a tunnel that had a young woman
(19:27):
and her baby hiding from us in there, so they
lived in these tunnels. I knew my men were up
there wondering where the hell their leader went. So they're
all up there not knowing what to do. I said,
I better get up there because they don't know how
to handle this calling in the jet. So I turned
to leave, and I heard this rustling behind me, and
(19:49):
this guy was coming at me. He had ammunition. He
fired one shot. I turned around, he fired one shot,
and I hit right over my head into the top
of the tunnel. You could feel it falling on my
neck and sweat. And uh, he obviously missed. The next
shot whiz right by my ear. I could hear it.
(20:10):
The third shot, it nicked my my right shoulder, just
just barely a nick, more of a burn than an
actual shot. So I said, I got to charge this guy.
And I charged him, and I was out of ammunition.
I took my, uh my Gerber commando knife from my side.
It's a dagger, long dagger, and it was it was
(20:33):
as sharp as a needle at one end and and
it was like a razor blade sharp down down the sides.
So I charged him and I heard a click. He
was out of ammunition too. So when I he turned
and ran to go around the turn I told you about,
and I grabbed him by the heel. I pulled him
around and I stabbed him in the calf of his leg,
(20:57):
into his into the bone, pulled out, brought him up
to me, and finished him off. And it turns out
they think, and the reason I got the silver Star,
I think versus the bronze. They think that he might
have been the battalion commander. That was a formal tunnel.
It wasn't recently Doug, it had been there a long time,
(21:18):
and that trench is probably the entrance to that battalion
level leaders ship's rule. He probably slept in there. I
got back out to my men and we held him
off till my support came five hours later. By that time,
three and a half hours later, most of us survived.
Speaker 1 (21:39):
Much more from Doug Greenlaw's story of service. In just
a moment on Veterans Chronicles, this is Veterans Chronicles. I'm
Greg Corumbus. Our guest is US Army veteran and Vietnam
War veteran Doug green Law. A moment ago, we heard
green Law's intense account of protecting his platoon while badly
outnumbered and fighting hand to hand in a North Vietnamese tunnel.
(22:03):
What goes through your mind in a moment like that.
Is it reverting to how you've been trained, realizing that
it's either him or me that's going to emerge from
this fight alive. Or is it simply instinct.
Speaker 2 (22:15):
You hit all the points. It's all that mixed up
into one person. It turns out we were bigger, we
were stronger. They had on their side, they had a
strong loyalty to their country. You know this is their country,
not ours. They lived there, their families are there, so
they fight equally as strong as we do. But we
(22:37):
were always physically stronger. It's either him or me. The
tunnel is a good example. It was either him or
me was that. Am I going to die in this tunnel?
Or is he going to die? It's not going to
be me. And that's the way young people think. I
just turned twenty three at this time, and I thought
to myself, I'm not going to use the language, but
I thought to myself, I'm going to kill this guy
(23:00):
going to kill me. I'm not going to die here.
Now that was just my youth. With one of those
bullets would have hit me, it had been all over,
I'd say it's a combination of everything that you said,
all in one person, also filled by a quart and
a half of adrenaline pouring onto your heart all the time.
So you have a superhuman thing going for yourself.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
And there's more to the story. Green Law also elaborated
on how he positioned his men to fend off hundreds
of enemy fighters while he called an air support and
waited hours for ground reinforcements to arrive.
Speaker 2 (23:36):
Well, I put everybody into a tight circle, and real tight.
I'm shoulder to shoulder. So if you're going to have
to get all of us, you're not going to get
warn you're not going to pick us off. I was
calling in a lot of overhead bombing. I was on
direct call with the pilot, and he and I got
to be friends, short and fast friends there because he
(23:56):
would he's coming in fast, you know, even slow, as
slow as a jet comes. If a jet is flying fast,
he's flying almost either down or lateral. But when you're
coming in low, you got to go as slow as
you possibly can. And this thing comes in like this,
you know, with this being the engine down here, and
(24:18):
he's going as slow as he can go to drop
those bombs. So he could be accurate. Still, you can't
be that accurate. So we got into an argument. Not
an argument, but I'd say you got to bring it back.
I'd give my zone. I'd say bring it back three
hundred yards. He dropped it again. I say bring it
back three hundred yards. He said, I just did. I said, no,
you didn't. I'm down here watching you weren't three hundred yards.
(24:39):
So we're back and forth. It becomes a talk through
none of this formal broadcasting thing, you know. Back and forth.
We ended up being friends. But he even came in
lower and slower. I can't believe it. So he got
pretty accurate, and he kept him away until to support.
(25:01):
Seemed like it took forever, But it's not as complicated
as you might think. He's like one of my men
up there, and he happened to be an ima.
Speaker 1 (25:09):
Yet, in addition to the other losses that day, Greenlaw
says two other things ended that day as well, his
sense of fear and his faith. He says he's never
been afraid since then, which can be both good and bad.
As for his faith, Greenlaw says the horrors he witnessed
and was part of on the battlefield led him to
(25:31):
becoming a doubter. He says he's not an atheist, but
an agnostic who is going to need a lot of
evidence to believe again. After the fighting on Thanksgiving nineteen
sixty seven, green Law was soon promoted and named a
company commander. He went on fewer patrols at that point,
but the difficult work of his men continued, including finding
(25:52):
and avoiding enemy booby traps. But on some occasions Greenlaw
still joined his men on patrol, and that's how he
was severely injured.
Speaker 2 (26:02):
They're getting my during my silver star ceremony they had
back at the hospital because my leg was healing. I
had a minor wound in my leg and it was
healing up in country and that's when they're going to
send me back out. And the battalion commander was putting
the silver star on me, and he said, we're real
proud of you, and blah blah blah, and he said,
you're getting a brigade level promotion to a company commander.
(26:27):
You're going to command second of the first company. And uh,
it's and I didn't know what a brigade level though
it was versus anything else. Turns out that's a big
deal for the brigade. The colonel to do that or
might have been might have been a one star general.
So they made me a company commander. I got back
(26:47):
from Bangkok on R and R. My leg was finally healed.
I was ready to go. They sent me out to
be a company commander. I told my battalion commander, they
don't teach you how to be a company commander. I've
never been a company commander. I don't know what to do.
And he said, hey, he had a good platoon. Just
have five good platoons. I'll get out of my face.
(27:08):
So I did, so I just took over the company.
Fortunately I had Rambo as my first sergeant. This guy
was fantastic. He and I ran that company. So what
happened was that we're doing fine. We were mean, you know.
(27:28):
I wrote home for Ace of Spades, and everybody said
what I said, I don't want the cards the deck,
just send me the Ace of Spades, and we use
the Ace of Spades to put the fear of God
into these North Vietnamese enemy. I had stack of them
in my pocket and i'd pull one out and stick
it in their mouth. And because they're very superstitious, and
(27:49):
that's called the death card in Vietnamese. We were out
on as a company commander. Occasionally I would go out
with my men on a patrol at night to secure
the area, make sure it stays secure so everybody else
could sleep. We'd come back in the morning, maybe get
one hours sleep if we're lucky, on the floor of
(28:09):
the jungle. And I did this as an active leadership
to show my men that I wouldn't ask them to
do something that I wouldn't do or haven't done, And
so I would go out on these patrols with them
once in a while. And we were out on a
patrol and we entered into a big something I'd never
seen before, a very big bamboo forest. I didn't realize it,
(28:33):
but bamboos, the ancient bamboos are six feet around like
big oak trees. What the enemy would do would set
a bomb. They would find an artillery round, a dun
one that didn't work on the jungle floor, and they
would take it up. Now this is very sensitive, so
(28:55):
these guys are brave that did this. You can screw
the end of the artillery round off. There's a screw
drop it slip in very easily, a hand grenade blasting
shell inside of it, and it's a little aluminum about
the size of a pencil. Stick it inside and all
it does is explode and set the big explosion off.
(29:17):
So they put that in with a trip wire. They
bring it out from the tree about head head level
is a bomb, bring it down across the trail about
shin Hai. And we were out there that one night
and my point man tripped the trip wire, killed three
(29:38):
in front of me, and one behind me and wounded.
Everybody else on the patrol is that one whether they
think is a one to five artillery round, which just
for your sake of understanding, is about two feet long.
One five. You know, this big round pack full of
thirty three pounds of TNT, so when it goes off,
(30:00):
it makes a big blast. There was a helicopter coming
in at that time for resupply, and that helicopter came
out and got me. I don't think it's real cloudy here.
They picked me up, got me on a helicopter, and
the other wounded got on a helicopter. The dead people
we left there with being guarded by our people, in
(30:22):
due respect, but you never put dead people on a
helicopter with live people. It's just it's an unwritten rule.
So they flew us back to a mash unit in
the jungle, a little clearing, and these helicopter pilots broke
all the rules. They flew full speed ahead right tree top.
They're not supposed to do that, but they did to
(30:43):
get because I was bleeding so bad. My throat was
slit from my left ear to my atom's apple. I
had a hole the size of a tennis ball. Here
I cut my left carotid artery, not in half, but
sliced it half and squirting out two feet from my neck.
(31:03):
Compound fracture on my right leg, lost my left knee,
cap had a piece of bamboo that nailed my arm
to my chest, missing my heart by a quarter of
an inch. And I survived. I was twenty three, iron man.
I shaved off my stitches before they could pull them out.
(31:25):
Back in the hospital when in denaying, we were all tough,
tough as nails. You had to be if you weren't tough.
And I've met people that weren't tough. They're hard on
the whole organization because they can't you can't depend on them.
So everybody became tough, whether they were or not. I
never saw super weak people. I saw stronger than others.
But so that was it. Somehow I survived and I
(31:50):
got back to the mash unit. The doctors started working
on me. They stopped the bleeding. Here they clipped off
my carotid artery. He eclipped it shut, and Catholic priest
was there. He gave me the last rites and I died.
I was dead for no breathing, no respiration, no heartbeat
(32:14):
for fifteen minutes. That's what they told me.
Speaker 1 (32:16):
Anyway, After much care and enough time, green Law recovered
remarkably well from his many injuries. He returned to Indiana University,
got his degree, and met and married his wife. His
newfound fearlessness proved very helpful in his new career in sales.
He was a great success selling advertising in radio. He
(32:37):
was later a sales executive for Pat Robertson at the
Christian Broadcasting Network before moving on to work at the
highest levels of Viacom, including MTV, VH one, and Nickelodeon.
Greenlaw says his fearlessness also served him well in a
showdown with Viacom chairman Sumner Redstone, I'm not afraid.
Speaker 2 (32:58):
I'm not afraid if I were working for you and
something was going wrong. My job is to protect you
by doing a good job. My job is to make
me real successful so you're successful. So if you're not fair,
I'm going to tell you right to your face. It
doesn't bother me a bit. If I'm right, you got
(33:18):
to be in order to do this, you got to
be right. And if you don't know if you're right,
keep your mouth shut. If you know you're right. Say
it to anybody anytime. I stared down Sumner Redstone, the
chairman of Viacom, just like I did that company commander
in Vietnam, same technique. I did the same thing. He
(33:38):
gave me a direct order to hire his daughter, Sherry Redstone.
And she came in fingernails bitten down to the quick,
with blood sweaty, looked like she just got off a
hard walk through Central Park, casual arrogant, you know, Sumner's daughter,
for God's sake. And I'm thinking to myself, I can't
(34:02):
hire this woman. She's not ready. So I'm thinking to myself,
I'll give her a job. He gave me an order
to hire her. I'm going to offer her a job
as a second level assistant down at the bottom of
the And like I started out, start at the bottom.
By the time you work your way up, you're going
to know the game you're gonna and you do well.
(34:22):
I said to her, Sherry, I'll hire you, but you
know it's going to be a low level job. In
a year, and I'm in the back of my mind,
I'm thinking I'm going to put her with Sandy Sheffer
and Karen Zolman two of my top executive salespeople. They
were fantastic. They were on Armani outfits. They looked stunning,
and they were nice looking ladies. And they could They
(34:45):
could talk to her differently than I could. They can
talk woman to woman to her, get to get her
fingernails fixed, put on some decent clothes. She wouldn't do that.
She wanted a top level marketing job. And I said,
it's not going to happen, So my phone ran. The
next morning, some of the Redstone wanted to see me
in his office. I walked up and I had my
best I knew he was going to do this. I
(35:06):
had my best harmony. Soon on tie looking good. Strode
into his office, standing tall, and before he could say anything,
I said, Summer, I didn't hire her because she's not ready.
And he looked at me and he said, what do
you mean. I told him exactly how she showed up.
She was arrogant. I described her fingernails. I did. She
was sweaty. I don't know why she was sweating. She
(35:29):
didn't seem nervous. She seemed arrogant. I told him like
it was, and he stared at me, sitting in his
big chair in his office and I stared at him.
He finally blinked. He blinked and turned around and said, ah, hell,
I wouldn't have hired her either. You know where she
is today, Cherry. She's had of CBS, She's head of
(35:49):
the holding company for CBS Inc. So she had the
smarts she just needed. I don't know how she got it,
but she found out somebody, some good woman got a
hold of her. I think straighten her up.
Speaker 1 (36:01):
After retiring, Greenlaw found himself serving military personnel again, not
on the battlefield this time, but through the Military Order
of the Purple Heart, where he eventually served as National
Commander for two years and met countless Americans who still
bear the scars of battle.
Speaker 2 (36:19):
The Military Order of the Purple Heart is a leading
organization of Purple Heart recipients in America. There are about
five hundred thousand wounded individuals in our country right now
from all wars, and the Purple Heart is the oldest
medal in American history. George Washington created it in the
(36:41):
Revolutionary War, and so it's been around a long time,
and then in World War One they got serious with it.
I think Roosevelt redesigned it. In World War two to
be as beautiful as it is today. The purple Heart
is the most beautiful medal. I think the medal of
honors is number one. Distincuish served cross his number two,
(37:02):
silver stars number three, purple Heart is number four, and
ranking when you put it on your uniform, it's how
they rank up. So it was an honor to be
the National Commander. I started off by founding a chapter
and then I was a commander of that chapter for
nine years. I ran for State Commander of South Carolina
and I won that, and then I ran for National
(37:24):
and I won that. So it's not like it was
new to me. I grew up through it and I
experienced the order, and the President of the United States
is the honorary chairman. I thought I had it rough.
I got to meet Purple Heart recipients across the country.
Met a guy in Atlanta that woke up in a
(37:44):
zipped up body bag in the cooler. You know, I
thought I had it rough. He felt something in there
with him, pulled it over. It was his arm. Like me,
they had no respiration, no heartbeat. Threw him in a bag,
threw his arm in with him, zipped him up. The
guy woke up. Now, here's what happened. He says, God,
not an image of God, not the thought of God.
(38:09):
God himself entered that bag with him, and he said,
don't worry, you're going to live. You have to scream,
kick your feet, yell. They're going to hear you and
they'll pull you out of here, and you're going to live.
You're going to die an old man. Unfortunately without an
arm you're going to die. You're going to die an
old man, happy old man.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Doug Greenlaw has a lot to be proud of from
his service to our nation and our wounded veterans. But
it didn't take him long to pinpoint what makes him
most proud of his service.
Speaker 2 (38:37):
Saving the lives of a lot of people in combat,
the circle life formed in it with my platoon when
we were being overrun. I think I saved lives doing that.
I can't save everybody, but I think being a good
leader with my men in a platoon and also in
a company, and it was extremely rewarding and it changed
(39:02):
my life at a young age twenty three, and it's
been an interesting ride ever since.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Doug Greenlaw is a US Army veteran, a Vietnam Veteran
and the recipient of the Silver Star, two Bronze Stars,
and two Purple Hearts. He later became a top executive
at MTV, VH one and Nickelodeon, and also served as
National Commander of the Military Order of the Purple Heart.
(39:28):
His memoir is entitled Forged by Lightning, From Boyhood to
the Battlefield to the Boardroom. I'm Greg Corumbus and this
is Veterans Chronicles. Hi, this is Greg Corumbus and thanks
(39:50):
for listening to Veterans Chronicles, a presentation of the American
Veterans Center. For more information, please visit American Veterans Center.
You can also follow the American Veterans Center on Facebook
and on Twitter. We're at AVC update. Subscribe to the
American Veterans Center YouTube channel for full oral histories and
(40:12):
special features, and of course, please subscribe to the Veterans
Chronicles podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Thanks again for listening,
and please join us next time for Veterans Chronicles
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