#227 Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show - Episode #227: Henry Dick Thompson - MACV-SOG Operator, Codename "Dynamite"

Podcast Information:

• Title: Shawn Ryan Show
• Host: Shawn Ryan
• Guest: Henry Dick Thompson (Codename "Dynamite")
• Release Date: August 14, 2025
• Description: Hosted by Shawn Ryan, former Navy SEAL, CIA Contractor, and Founder of Vigilance Elite, the show delves into the real-life stories of individuals from diverse backgrounds, exploring their triumphs, struggles, and experiences with candor and respect.

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Introduction

[00:00 – 03:07]
The episode opens with a warm welcome to Henry Dick Thompson, known as "Dynamite," a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, Green Beret, Ranger, and veteran of the MACV-SOG (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam – Studies and Observations Group). Shawn Ryan and co-host John Stryker Meyer highlight Thompson's extensive military background and personal accolades, setting the stage for an in-depth discussion about his experiences in Vietnam and beyond.

Notable Quote:

• John Stryker Meyer [00:51]: "This is the last interview in the studio and I wanted the perfect guest."

Early Life and Military Background

[35:09 – 66:52]
Thompson recounts his upbringing in Walhalla, South Carolina, where military service was a family legacy, with multiple relatives having served in World War II and Korea. From a young age, he was fascinated by the military, forming his own "69th Ranger Company" with cousins, which mirrored his aspirations to join the elite Ranger units.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [35:13]: "When I was about seven years old, I decided, I'm going to have an army."

His passion for military service led him to pursue a career in the Army, enrolling in Officer Candidate School (OCS) and advancing through Airborne and Special Forces training. Thompson emphasizes his desire to serve his country, inspired by a sense of duty and the influence of his family's military history.

Joining MACV-SOG and Early Missions

[72:13 – 114:43]
Upon joining MACV-SOG, Thompson describes the clandestine nature of the unit's operations, which often bypassed the Geneva Conventions by operating without official identification. This allowed for greater operational flexibility but also increased the risk of being classified as spies if captured.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [91:45]: "We were considered spies if we were caught, and it also gave the US Government plausible deniability."

Thompson details his first mission, including the harrowing experience of sensing an impending attack and executing rapid defensive measures. He shares a poignant moment where a premonition of mission failure comes true, highlighting the intense psychological stress soldiers faced.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [161:37]: "I had a couple of minutes to make a decision. Get down, get all the team members down because it's coming."

Combat Experiences and Tactical Innovations

[114:43 – 199:23]
As a team leader, Thompson implemented several tactical innovations to enhance his team's effectiveness and survivability. He discusses the strategic use of claymores, ammunition management, and behavioral insights into enemy tactics. His approach emphasized quick decision-making, adaptability, and leveraging psychological warfare to outmaneuver the enemy.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [127:51]: "You need to be able to load faster and shoot longer."

Thompson also delves into his studies in psychology, which equipped him with a framework to understand combat stress, sleep deprivation, and the mental toll of warfare. He emphasizes the importance of recognizing and addressing these issues to prevent long-term psychological harm among veterans.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [170:02]: "There are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready."

Post-Military Life and Helping Veterans

[225:20 – 199:23]
Transitioning to civilian life, Thompson faced significant challenges, including societal indifference and hostility towards returning veterans. He highlights the lack of support systems for veterans during the Vietnam era and shares his commitment to creating programs that help veterans reintegrate into society by leveraging their military-acquired skills.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [194:43]: "I hate that it happened. I think we screwed up Vietnam royally."

Through his company, Thompson advocates for initiatives that honor veterans, provide psychological support, and utilize their unique skill sets in the civilian workforce. He underscores the importance of continuous support and recognition to prevent veterans from falling into despair or addiction.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [204:52]: "Moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically."

Personal Life and Reflections

[257:56 – 267:15]
Thompson shares personal anecdotes, including meeting his wife under unconventional circumstances and maintaining a long-lasting marriage despite the traumas of war. He reflects on the psychological scars left by combat, the loss of comrades, and the enduring impact of his military experiences on his personal relationships and mental health.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [260:56]: "She's always right. And I would do well to remember that, whether I think so at the time or not, she's going to end up being right."

Advice to Veterans and Moving Forward

[267:07 – 199:23]
Drawing from his extensive experience, Thompson offers practical advice to veterans struggling with PTSD, addiction, and reintegration challenges. He emphasizes the importance of continuous movement, both physically and mentally, to prevent stagnation and psychological decline. Thompson advocates for strong support networks, personal accountability, and leveraging one's skills to build a fulfilling post-military life.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [251:51]: "You have to keep moving forward and keep remembering."

Conclusion

[267:06 – End]
As the episode wraps up, Thompson expresses gratitude for sharing his story and reiterates his commitment to supporting fellow veterans. The hosts commend his resilience and the invaluable insights he provides, bridging the gap between military experiences and civilian understanding.

Notable Quote:

• Thompson [265:21]: "I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this."

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Key Takeaways:

1. Military Service and Sacrifice: Thompson's extensive military background showcases the dedication and sacrifices made by elite soldiers in complex combat scenarios.

2. Psychological Resilience: His experiences highlight the profound psychological impacts of warfare, emphasizing the need for robust support systems for veterans.

3. Tactical Innovations: Thompson's contributions to military tactics demonstrate the importance of adaptability and strategic thinking in high-stress environments.

4. Veteran Support Advocacy: Post-military, Thompson's efforts to aid veterans reflect a commitment to addressing the often-overlooked challenges faced by those who served.

5. Personal Resilience: His ability to maintain personal relationships and build a life after combat underscores the human capacity for resilience and healing.

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Notable Quotes with Timestamps:

• John Stryker Meyer [00:51]: "This is the last interview in the studio and I wanted the perfect guest."

• Thompson [35:13]: "When I was about seven years old, I decided, I'm going to have an army."

• Thompson [91:45]: "We were considered spies if we were caught, and it also gave the US Government plausible deniability."

• Thompson [127:51]: "You need to be able to load faster and shoot longer."

• Thompson [170:02]: "There are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready."

• Thompson [194:43]: "I hate that it happened. I think we screwed up Vietnam royally."

• Thompson [204:52]: "Moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically."

• Thompson [251:51]: "You have to keep moving forward and keep remembering."

• Thompson [260:56]: "She's always right. And I would do well to remember that, whether I think so at the time or not, she's going to end up being right."

• Thompson [265:21]: "I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this."

---

Conclusion: Henry Dick Thompson's narrative on the Shawn Ryan Show offers a profound glimpse into the life of a decorated MACV-SOG operator. His stories not only underscore the valor and tactical acumen required in covert operations but also shed light on the enduring psychological challenges faced by veterans. Thompson's dedication to supporting fellow soldiers post-service exemplifies the vital need for comprehensive veteran assistance programs. This episode serves as both a tribute to Thompson's service and a call to action for better support systems for those who serve.

Transcript

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Foreign.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Dynamite Dick Thompson, welcome to the show.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Thank you. Honored to be here. And really appreciate the opportunity to sit in this chair and in this room, particularly as you're getting ready to transition to the new one. So honored to be here. Honored to be a SOG guy on your show.

[Unknown Host]

So honored to sit across from you. And I, I truly mean that Came highly recommended from our mutual friend John.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Stryker Meyer and he's told us a lot about you. And you know, I just. This is the last interview in the studio and I wanted the perfect guest.

[Unknown Host]

To shut the lights off with. And it is a real honor to be sitting here with you. So thank you for making the time to be here and, and, and I'm really honored to document your story and your history and it's going to be good. It's going to be a powerful interview.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

You ready? Ready. Looking forward to it.

[Unknown Host]

Me too. Me too.

[John Stryker Meyer]

So every guest starts out with an introduction here. Dynamite Dick Thompson, last interview in the studio, 21 year, retired army lieutenant colonel, Green Beret, Ranger and MACV SOG operator who ran over 20 cross border recon direct impact missions into Laos, Cambodia and North Vietnam. Awards include four bronze Star medals, two with V for valor, two air medals for aerial combat, one with V for valor. Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry with gold star for valor. Natural born tracker, raised on your grandparents farm. You could smell the NVA in the jungle. Distinguished member of the Airborne Ranger Training Brigade. Served as a professor of military science at the University of Georgia. Author of SOG codenamed Dynamite, a two book series about top secret missions that were Once classified. For 20 years. A PhD in psychology, founder of High Performing systems and author of the Stress Teaching leaders how to make decisions under pressure. Among your hobbies, you are a master scuba diver. You've made over 1200 free fall Halo parachute jumps, earned a black belt in karate. And you're an Ironman. You're a husband, a father, a grandfather.

[Unknown Host]

And most importantly a Christian.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Thank you.

[Unknown Host]

I'm sure I'm missing some but.

[John Stryker Meyer]

But yeah, like I said, it is an honor to be here with you.

[Unknown Host]

And so I just want to do.

[John Stryker Meyer]

A life story with you, document everything.

[Unknown Host]

You'Ve been through and hopefully bring a lot of hope to veterans that are coming home for more and that are trying to find their new way in life. So once again, it's an honor.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Thank you. And one of the things that we started doing in our company back in the 90s was we traveled all the time, always going through an airport. So I implemented a policy that said if you See someone in uniform, or you can tell they're a veteran, standing in the Starbucks line, pay for their coffee, thank them for their service. And then so everybody had a special credit card from a company card, you know, to pay for that with. And then a little bit later, we bumped it up some more. And what we started doing is also giving them challenge corn. Oh, man. Thank you. That basically says, thank you for your service. We care about you. Welcome home. And, you know, we give that out. I've been doing that now for a long time. It's not the big fancy one like, you know, the corn John gave you, but it's one that we could share with a lot of veterans who had never, never been welcomed home. So, you know, I'm a little biased along that line because, you know, when I came home, people literally spit at me coming through the airport. And, you know, I also talk later on that my biggest challenge in the beginning coming home from Vietnam was restraint. Coming through the airport and listening to somebody yell baby killer, murderer, or whatever. But noticing that they were not close like you and I are now, they were back at what they considered a safe distance. And I used to think they have no clue. I can close the distance between us in less than a second because I'm not carrying 90 pounds of gear, you know, and I could be real ugly to you when I got there. So I have to restrain myself, know that I could do that, but I don't have to do that. And just a lot of things just based on coming from the Wild west back to a country that has some laws and is civilized, you know, I've got to come back to this world. And one of the things that I try to work with veterans on is understanding the skill set you have and how do you use it. Because most veterans think, well, you've taught me all this war stuff and tactics, and I don't, you know, I can't use that stuff back in the civilian world. Yes, you can. You know, how to plan, make decisions, organize. I mean, you have a whole skill set that can help you be successful. And you got to apply some of the SOG techniques that we'll probably talk about in a little bit to keep moving forward, and you can be successful. So, anyway, so I love that.

[Unknown Host]

I love that. Thank you. Thank you. Everybody starts off with a gift.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Thank you.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Vigilance League. Gummy bears may hear made right here in the USA. Just candy.

[Unknown Host]

There's no marijuana in it. No CBD, just candy. So they're legal in all 50 states.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

John Meyer Said there might be something in here. He said he noticed some kind of of charge after he ate. So, yeah, yeah, I'll put it right there. And if I start to run down after a while, I'll consume a couple of what? Thank you. I really appreciate that.

[Unknown Host]

Hey, my pleasure, My pleasure. And then one more thing before we get going.

[John Stryker Meyer]

So I have a Patreon account and that's a subscription account, and we've turned that into quite a community. I think we're at 85,000 patrons now and.

[Unknown Host]

And they're the reason that I get to be here and that I have.

[John Stryker Meyer]

This amazing team that I'm surrounded by. And so one of the things that we do is we offer the Patreon.

[Unknown Host]

Community the opportunity to ask each and.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Every guest a question. So this is a question from somebody you might know. John Stryker Meyer, please explain how you carried seven claymores. Buku car, 15 rounds, hand grenades and M79 rounds. I believe you carried it on most missions. Oh, and I forgot your pistol.

[Unknown Host]

How did you carry all that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

After the first mission that I went on where I carried the normal loadout, I used up so much ammunition in the ambush that we went into this. This is not going to work. So once I became the team leader, then instead of carrying five frag grenades per person, per team member, I upped it to 10. So what that did was and I usually went out with six or seven people. So if I had seven men on the team carrying 10 frag grenades a piece, that's 70. With 70 frag grenades, you can do some serious damage. So I also up the claymore to three per person. Some people, like the M79 man, usually didn't carry a claymore because he was carrying so much many grenades with him. So but Everybody went to three seven man team, 21 claymores. Wow. And then I also started at night on the most likely avenue of approach. Coming into our remain overnight position, I would put out seven claymores, Daisy chained. One click. Seven claymores go off. Ten and a half pounds of C4, 4900 steel balls traveling at 4,000ft a second. The blast, the steel balls would just shred whatever was out there. And if you were far enough back or happened to be behind a tree and survived, you would say, this guy's crazy. Nobody sets off all of their claymores at one time. So now the survivors, we can go down and get them. And they start to come. That's when they run into three more. Daisy chained. And that goes off. So you Catch them by surprise with that. Wow. And then they start running into Claymore's own time fuses that are randomly going off as they're trying to come and. Yeah. So in their dossier that they put together on me, it was, this guy's a nut. Don't go charging after his team because he's going to run into all those claymores. And at night you want those area type weapons like the claymores and those frag grenades. You could start chucking frag grenades at them. They don't know where they come from. Yeah. And they're just going off everywhere, man. And then I like, well, let me say if you shoot at me, I'm going to shoot back. I really don't like people shooting at me, so I will shoot back. So I found I needed to carry more ammunition and most guys were carrying, you know, 800 rounds or so, or maybe 700, some 600. I went to a thousand. I carried 50, 20 round magazines. 50, 20 round magazines. And in my 20 round magazines I put 20 rounds because I used brand new magazines. Every mission I would draw new magazines. So everybody had new magazines. So they'd only been loaded for three or four days. So the springs were fine, they were working good. So I never in a firefight had my car 15 jam, not from the number of rounds in the magazine, but, you know, so my people had a lot of them. I didn't force them to put 20 if the 18 rule had been ingrained in them, but I encouraged them to put in 20 because when you run against up against the NVA, you've got your setting there with a 20 round magazine for initial contact. The NVA's got a 30 round magazine. They already got 10 more rounds than you do. You run out first and then the firepower shifts totally over them now. So until we finally got the 30 round magazines, we were at disadvantage every time as soon as we started. So you needed to be able to load faster and shoot longer.

[Unknown Host]

Man, I never thought about that 20 round magazine. The versus 30 round magazine.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

It's a big difference.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, yeah. How long did it take them to get you guys 30 round magazines?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

We didn't get, I got there in 68. We didn't get the 30 rounds until 69 and when we first got them, they couldn't get many. So I could go draw one 30 round magazine per car. 15.

[Unknown Host]

Oh man.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So we all have one in our weapon to start with. That was after they made a tweak. I discovered early on, as did a lot of other people that if you have that 30 round magazine and your car 15 and you, you jump off the skid of the helicopter when you hit the ground, your gun got lighter all of a sudden because the magazines are laying down in the mud because the spring on the magazine retainer wasn't strong enough to hold that extra weight. Wow. So the shock of hitting the ground, the magazines fall out. So we had to take the weapons back in, have the spring changed to a stronger one. So the magazine was staying here.

[Unknown Host]

Geez.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

But at least you had a 30 round magazine to start with. But you know, I guess, I guess my teams just had problems. Discipline problems maybe. It seemed that we lost our 30 round magazines almost every time we were in contact. And I'd have to go back to, you know, S4 and draw some more 30 round magazines to replace the ones we lost. Wow. And what, you know, but then that somebody noticed one day, how are you guys getting so many 30 round magazines? You're only supposed to have one per gun. Your guys are all carrying more. Well, I guess they found some of the ones they lost.

[Unknown Host]

What kind of pistol were you carrying?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I tried different ones. I carried 1911,45 caliber pistol. It was heavy, only held seven rounds. But man, if you hit somebody with that, it would put them down. I mean it hits hard. But then I, I changed to a Browning high power 9 millimeter because now I, you know, double the amount of ammunition number of shots in there. So I, I played with those a little bit and then I started carrying a high standard.22 caliber long rifle with an integrated silencer because that thing was so quiet.

[Unknown Host]

Little hush puppy, huh?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yes. You know, you got to be careful where you shoot them, you know. 22, it's a vest or something. It's, it's not going to penetrate. So I tried to go for softer spots like the temple. I did a lot of practice and trying to get a guy in, particularly a tracker. If you were tracking me, then I would tell those teams, you guys keep going, I'm going to drop back, somebody's behind us. I'm going to drop back here and have a little chat. So I could go back and take out a tracker, I could take out a dog, I could do things without a big disturbance. And particularly at night. There were times when we had people walk inside our little perimeter. I mean we were all within arm's reach of each other in a little circle. And sometimes you'd have somebody walk right through the middle of it. You couldn't open up with a car 15 because it just light the whole area up. But with that 22, I could tap you, particularly if I set off a claymore, made a little noise, shot you at the same time. Nobody'd ever know I took you out. Wow.

[Unknown Host]

You had people inside the perimeter when you guys were at arm's length distance and you're only six to nine people. How many times did that happen?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Several. And we can talk maybe in a little bit about where I had a longer experience of someone inside that. Pretty cool.

[Unknown Host]

Let's talk about it now.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

We were. I had 22 man team. We had put two of our recon teams together because we were going after a group of NVA that had a group of American prisoners that they were trying to take through Malaos into North Vietnam. And we're trying to stop them. And we had stopped for an RO in. We had 22 people. So it was a circle almost as big as this room in here. And they were about arm's lengths apart. I was in the center with my assistant to team leader. And it was about 2130. It was dark. You couldn't see your hand in front of your face. And I was really tired. My eyes were starting to roll back in my head. I was leaning against a tree and I heard a twig break. And I opened my eyes and I was thinking to myself, that sounded like a twig break inside the perimeter. And then I heard another one. And I realized someone was inside our perimeter and was coming directly toward me. I'm laying back. I have car 15 laying across my lap, and I can hear this person moving. And I knew all of our people knew the rule. Once you go down, you don't get back up. At night, anybody moving is a bad guy. And this guy's coming right toward me, and I think he's going to step on me. I slid my selector switch over the full auto, and I'm laying there and he's coming. And the air so thick at this point, I can mentally see a silhouette coming at me. Although I can really see the silhouette, I know where it is based on the sound. And now I'm starting to hear him breathe. I'm starting to hear his heartbeat because he realizes he's inside the perimeter and he's probably about to get killed. So his heart is thumping. He's coming right at me. I can't open up because that'll light the whole perimeter up and we'll be in trouble. So I couldn't get to my knife. So I decided just as he gets to me, I'M just going to shoot my left hand up. I'm going to grab a hold of his chest, whatever he's got there, and I'm going to pull him at the same time, raise my leg up and trip him. I'm going to pull him down to the ground, and I want to hit him in the side of the head with the muzzle on my car 15. As I'm bringing him down, if he yells, if he fires his weapon, I'm going to pull the trigger. So he's coming. He got into position. I grabbed him. I jammed the muzzle into the side of his head. Just cut a big gash in his head. I bring him down face first into the mud. And he didn't say a word, didn't make a sound. It scared him so bad, he didn't even grasp when I grabbed him. And then I started thinking, now what? I'm sitting here holding this guy face down in the mud. What am I going to do with him? And then I heard a whisper. And the whisper was, trung Hui Trui. Lieutenant in Vietnamese. Lights. Lights. What? And he said, lights, lights. And I looked up the ridge towards the top of the mountain, and you could see lights, lanterns coming down the mountain. About 400 people, if you counted one or two people in between each lantern. Probably 400 people coming down the ridgeline toward where we were. That's not good. We're on a ridgeline like that. We picked it so people couldn't get around us. They're coming straight at us. But then I turned and I looked down the ridge. They were that same number coming up the ridge, and they were going to come right to us. We were going to be right in the middle when they got there, about, you know, estimated 800. Whoa. So then I realized the guy that I've got face down in the mud is the Vietnamese captain that we took on this mission with us. He didn't, you know, he didn't have the experience. He didn't realize it when he got up to come tell me there were lights coming, that I might shoot him or somebody might shoot him or knife him. But anyway, you know, he did call that to our attention. And so these guys are all coming at us. They're going to intersect right on us. So my RTO crawled over and said, sir, you wanted on the radio. And I got the radio, and this is. This was a KY38 with the KY28 manual code loader in it and all that stuff. You had to have that daily code set in this coder. You had to be on the right frequency. All this was the highest security radio that you could manually carry around. Anyway, so I was talking, you know, answered it, and it was Saigon. And they were, they said, you are now a prairie fire emergency, meaning everything in that part of Southeast Asia now belongs to you. Everything, Every asset that's within range of you, every asset that still has armament left is being diverted to you to try to get you out. And I'm looking up and down, I can see how we are praying for our emergency. So I copied that. I got my assistant team leader over and said, here's what's going on. And then the RTO says, sir, you got to hear this. And I said, WTF, Schaefer. What? I've got 800 people coming. What else you going to tell me? I picked up the radio, the handset, and there's a Vietnamese woman on the radio. Classic. There's no way that she can talk to this radio, but she's talking to this tactical radio, Secure One, and she's reading our obituary.

[Unknown Host]

What?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

She's reading our obituary that we were all killed in action that night. She's reading name by name of everybody who's laying in that perimeter. And she reads my name, she reads off Dick Thompson and keeps going. Saigon's monitoring. And they heard her read my name off as Dick Thompson. And they said, okay, she made a mistake. She doesn't even know his name. Who is Dick Thompson? His name's Henry. No one at that point on that side of the world knew me by Dick Thompson, except for Eldon Bargewell, later Major General Barswell. And we'd been on the same team before, but somehow she knew my name that no one else knew. And as I'm listening to it, there's music in the background. Not just music, but I realized this is the same music that as a little kid at 12 o' clock every day at my grandmother's house, she would say things like, boys, boys, quieting down. I need to hear the obituaries in the county. And there's a Southern kind of music that they played in the south when they would read obituaries, read about somebody that had died. And they're playing this in the background as they're reading our names off as being killed in action that day on a super encrypted radio that they couldn't possibly be talking on. So kind of got our attention, I would imagine. So I got a team leader together and we put our plan together. And when we were, we were armed, we had four machine M60 machine guns with us, you know, four Grenadiers with us. We had all those claymores. We. We were loaded for bear. But that kind of, kind of got all of our attention. And that started at 9 o' clock at night, is almost 1700 the next day when we got out and we just banged it out with them right and left and had one catastrophe after another. But. But we got out and we got everybody out with us.

[Unknown Host]

We got everybody out. Wow.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

There are a lot of bad guys that were left. But.

[Unknown Host]

Holy. What was the radio? Did you ever figure that out?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Somehow they'd gotten a hold of one. They'd gotten a hold of one of those. They got the radio. They had to have gotten the codes and the frequencies from the compound. We think part of what happened was eight days before. We were at the launch site, getting ready to launch on this mission, and a team was overrun. And, you know, the launch site commander came in and said, look, your mission's just changed. You're now bright light. Your team's going to go in to try to recover the team that just got overrun. So they changed our mission and we went out there and fought it out for a couple days. When we came back, we had to have some recovery. We had to replace some people that were when we did during the firefight. So it was eight days before we could go back and run our original mission. So they had eight days to get more intel on us and figure out what was going on. And we had some spies there at CCN in the camp that we didn't know about. So. Man.

[Unknown Host]

Well, I got another gift for you.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And the KY38 radio. And that's 54 pounds of radio plus all the batteries, the big batteries that it goes through. Nobody wanted to carry those things. You had to have a PRC 77 to hook to this KI and KY 38. So you. Half of it was on your front chest, half of it was on your back. Oh, man, it was unreal. I'm sorry I interrupted you. Go ahead.

[Unknown Host]

No, no, no. Well, not much has changed today. Nobody wants to carry the radio, but it's not 50 pounds. But hey, since we're talking about everything you've carried, I got you a little present here.

[John Stryker Meyer]

So I got a friend over at.

[Unknown Host]

SIG Sauer, his name's Jason, and I told him you were coming on, and he is just fascinated with MAGV SOG guys. So he wanted me to present this to you.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Oh, wow.

[Unknown Host]

Go ahead. Hold it up.

[John Stryker Meyer]

So that is the SIG Sauer P365 Macro Legion and holds 17 rounds plus.

[Unknown Host]

One in the pipe. It has that red dot. We were talking about red dots at breakfast.

[John Stryker Meyer]

It has the slide cuts in the.

[Unknown Host]

Front to help you with the muzzle flip and recoil.

[John Stryker Meyer]

It's made out of all metal.

[Unknown Host]

And that is the latest and greatest everyday carry handgun from Sig Sauer. So we wanted you to have that.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

That is awesome. Thank you.

[Unknown Host]

You're welcome.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Thank you. Fortunately I'm driving home so I don't, I don't have to try to carry this on a plane.

[Unknown Host]

But. Yeah, so we wanted you to have that.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So when, when you get your new studio completed, including your firing range, hopefully I can get invited back up to see if the thing works on your range.

[John Stryker Meyer]

We'll invite you back.

[Unknown Host]

You and John. Maybe we'll have a little shooting competition.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Oh yeah, he'd love that.

[Unknown Host]

I'm sure you'd whip John's ass in the shooting competition.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Oh yeah. I'll tell it. I'll tell him he better start practicing. That's great. Thank you. You're welcome.

[John Stryker Meyer]

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[Unknown Host]

So we always start with where did you grow up?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Grew up in a little town called Walhalla, South Carolina, up in the northwestern tip of South Carolina, right up above Clemson University, and spent a lot of time outside. And, you know, my mother's family had four sons. When World War II came along, all four of them were deployed in World War II. My father was deployed along with them. So there were five men from the family there. And three of the brothers. Four brothers came back, and my father came back. And then when Korea came along, you know, my father was called back in, so served in Korea. And they talked about some army stuff, mostly at my prodding and saying, what does this mean? What is a potoon? What do you mean? Have a reserve? What's a reserve? What? Excuse me. All kinds of questions. You know, I was just full of questions about army stuff. And then when I was about seven years old, I decided, I'm going to have an army. So I got with my cousin Carl and I said, you're the first member of my army. And I had heard about Rangers. I'd heard them talk about what the Rangers did. So I decided it was going to be, you know, Ranger company. So I formed the 69th Ranger Company, and it was commanded by General Thompson, of course. And so. But we needed more than one other member. I needed to command more than one person. So I started recruiting my other cousins that are about the same age. We got all the close ones in, the ones I liked, got those guys in, brought in one female cousin, Pat, which was actually cousin Carl's sister. We brought her in. So we had a WAC in the army. Then we started letting people outside the family in. So it grew bigger. And I. I still got the. The logbook for Thompson's Rangers at home. The actual log. Are you serious? You can open it up and you can. It's getting pretty faded now, but you can see notes. You can see people's names. You can see the note. You can see information about the only court martial that we had. So there was one of the Members of the company that gave me some lip. And he ended up getting court martialed and booted out of the ranger group. But anyway, I still have that book. Yeah, that's cool. You know, I, I cut two pieces of cardboard for the covers and taped it together and put the paper inside and it's pretty cool. But I still have it after all these years, so. Really got into rangers and the family did a lot of hunting. My father liked to hunt, so I was brought up with weapons and shooting and hunting and tracking. And every time I. My parents both worked as I was getting older, so every opportunity I got, I was in the woods by myself. Hunting, tracking, tracking deer. Tracking whatever animals I could find and studying them. You know, what do they do? How did they move? And then I got this idea. I need to be invisible. How can I be invisible? Excuse me. So to be invisible, it's, it's not just that you are not visually seen. If I'm invisible, you can't hear me, you can't smell me. You know, I just don't exist. I'm just, I'm here, but I'm not here. And how do you do that? So I practice slipping up on deer or rabbits or whatever I could find out there. And then my cousin Carl started coming over and we'd take. We had a little army pup tent. We'd carry that thing a couple hundred meters up on the hill in the woods and put it up. It would go out and once I got a BB gun, we'd go out and shoot some birds and, you know, little birds and build us a fire and we would roast them and we would, we would say, well, what else do rangers eat? You know, let's, let's get us some ranger food. Let's go kill something else and let's come eat it. And, you know, we'd camp out there and pretend we were rangers and we'd go on missions and different things like that. And, you know, and we, we got older and. And then when I was 13, my parents sabotaged me because I knew I was going to be a ranger and Santa Claus came and brought me a chemistry set. You know, I used to watch shock theater at midnight on Saturday night. You know, they build Frankenstein and werewolves and change people's brains out. And I was, they can do that. Why can't I do it? So I started, you know, catching rats. I catch rats and bring them into my lab and I'd knock them out. At that time, if you went into a pharmacy, we call them drugstores at that time, if you went in there, I mean, if. If you could get permission from your parents to buy a syringe, a real syringe, which was a big deal at that time because only drug users and medical people had access to syringes, but talked the pharmacist into letting me buy one. So I had a syringe and then I could shoot the rats or the birds or whatever up, knock them out, and I could go in, take their brains out and see if I could swap them and bring them back, swap their hearts, things like that, and try to, you know, from Shock Theater with Frankenstein, you know, the electricity from lightning went in him. I would plug them into the outlet, tended to fry their little hearts and stuff. I never could get one to start back. I could put them in there. I just couldn't get them to work again.

[Unknown Host]

The psych test must have been a lot different to get into the Green Berets back then.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. So I really got into chemistry. And then at some point, I got into let's build some rockets. You know, Thompson Rangers need some rockets to launch it to the bad guys. So I studied rockets and rocket fuel and the chemistry around it. And again, back to the pharmacy. I need some potassium nitrate, I need some charcoal, and I need some sulfur. What are you going to do with that? I said, oh, I'm building some bottle rockets. Okay. I had so much of those chemicals and a Foot locker in the house. If my mother had realized what that was and what it could have done to our house. But anyway, you could build rocket fuel out of that and then discovered later you could build bombs out of that, too. So I built a launch pad. I built a lab in the barn and built an actual launch pad out behind it. I had a window so I could look out there and see it so I didn't get hit with shrapnel stuff. If that exploded on the launch pad. And I'd launch them off of there. One day, I built a big one. It was almost three feet high. Exploded on the launch pad. Actually broke windows in my neighbor's house. So I decided I needed to go back down to smaller ones so they didn't do so much damage as they didn't work. But, you know, so I played with explosives. I did all kind of chemistry stuff. I mean, when I was in. In high school, I took, you know, the advanced chemistry course. I didn't even have a book. I just basically showed up for class, took the exams, and maxed out the course because I was going down to Clemson University. To the library, reading all the articles, reading chemistry books. Wow. Getting. And I found that if you got the older chemistry books around the turn of the century, around 1900, they were like recipe books. They didn't just talk about theory and how if you mix these two components, then you get this. It was a recipe. This is how many grams of whatever it was that you were going to use and mix together. And this is how you mix it together. They told you how to do all this stuff. So I was learning that and really, really into chemistry. I got a scholarship to University of South Carolina on chemistry.

[Unknown Host]

You had a pet, too.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I'm sorry?

[Unknown Host]

You had a pet?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I had. I had several pets. But I had one when I was, you know, really young that was of particular interest. I was in third grade and my parents came, got me out of school and took me home and said, we've got a surprise for you. What is it? Well, you have to wait till we get home. So we got home, we got out, and. And there was a spider monkey. So it's a monkey, you know, he's on a. He's on a little chain, a leaf. So he's running around doing things. And I thought, that's cool. I snatched that little joker up. I found out about monkey teeth really quickly. I mean, he about bit my finger off. So anyway, I didn't. I kind of liked him, but I was careful with him because I knew he would bite. We ended up building a small house that was outside, close to the barn, and he would sleep in that at night. And we put a light bulb in there for heat because it was wintertime. And I went out one morning and looked in the air, and, you know, I could see his tail sticking out the little door. And I grabbed his tail and I thought, wow, this is strange. He's not moving. And I pulled him out, and he was literally just straight out. He looked like a monkey on a stick. And he was frozen.

[John Stryker Meyer]

A monkey on a stick, huh?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

He was frozen and his little mouth was open. All little teeth are showing, you know, And I was not happy, you know, I mean, I forgave him for all the biting. But, you know, I ran back in house. In the house, and I gave him my mother and said, you know, he did. He's dead. And she said, I don't know if he is or not. Let's try this. She wrapped him up in a little blanket and put him on top of a little oil heater that we had. So the heat was coming up to try to warm him up. Thaw him out a little bit. And then she heated up some milk and took an eyedropper and squirted that warm milk down his little mouth. And I mean, she kept working with him and after a while, you know, his little mouth started moving and she thought that joker out. She thought him out. And all of a sudden he came back to life. Oh, I thought, this is really cool if you can freeze somebody to death and then just throw them back out. I mean, how cool is that? But anyway, they had the monkey and he caused so much trouble that we ended up swapping him for a dog. So he had to go away.

[Unknown Host]

You didn't take that and ask for volunteers from your army to freeze, did you?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

No, I'm not saying I didn't think about it, but maybe the guy that.

[Unknown Host]

Got court martialed could have had a ultimatum.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I did take college students. Oh, I have to be careful how much I tell you about, but I did take college students and I was interested in what happens if I put you into sleep deprivation. If I don't let you sleep for a while, what will happen? So I got permission to do some research. University of Georgia, using college students. And so I got a group of volunteers from the ROTC department. These guys were all in the rotc, you know, ranger company there to University of Georgia. You know, of course they, they can do anything and, you know, so they volunteered to do it. So they had their full gear on. We took them out in the national forest, full gear, carrying a 40 pound rucksack and continuous movement. We'd stop for a 10 minute break every once in a while, but continued movement, no sleep. Every four hours they had to take a test. One of the tests they had to take was a cognitive test. You know, it's basically addition and subtraction, just a couple sheets of addition and subtraction. Um, and then they would rate after they finished it. I would say, compared to when we first started and you were fresh before you'd lost any sleep, compared to that, how well you think you did this time? And they would say, it's pretty easy. I did just as well. Well, this time just as accurate as I did on the first one. I'm looking at the scores and thinking that didn't happen. One of the things that I discovered was that after 24 hours with no sleep that you lose about 25% of your cognitive ability, particularly to be able to do things like math. The scary thing is you don't know it. You think you're still just as good as you were when you started out and. And you know, it doesn't stop at 24 hours. It keeps on going down. And you don't see things. Things happen in front of you. You don't see it. Things. Things you see sometimes didn't happen. You know, you hallucinate. You do all kinds of things. And, you know, as a ranger instructor for a number of years, you know, with the ranger students, we didn't feed them much. We didn't let them sleep. We kept them running up and down mountains all the time. And, you know, they would hallucinate. You know, you'd lose them. You're going through the woods, and all of a sudden you say, send up the count. They start sending the count up, and you realize you're missing about 10 or 12 people. You stop, you go back. You know, it's night. You go back, and here's a guy standing behind a tree, just standing there, thinking, that tree in front of him is his buddy. He's supposed to be following. His buddy's not moving, so he's just standing there, and nobody behind him is moving. They're all waiting. Are they? And when I went through, my ranger buddy and I, you know, we were already SF qualified and everything, so we thought, we're going to have some fun, you know, so if you're, if you're walking along, you had your little patrol cap on. You had. Had the little ranger eyes in the back, the little fluorescent tabs in the back of the hat so the guy behind you could see you in the dark. You take your hat off and kind of put it over to the side. And as you're walking along, you just, you just, you just start. You know, you're getting yourself lower and lower, and you're lowering the hat around, and the guy behind you, he's following you now, he's feeling around, trying to. Where's the drop off? Where's he going? And, you know, we. We found that. We found if we did stuff like that, it was hilarious to us, and it kept us motivated. And, you know, we could do all kinds of things, and we had fun in Ranger school.

[John Stryker Meyer]

But anyway, humor keeps it going.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. It keeps you moving right along, especially.

[Unknown Host]

In the darkest hour.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. So anyway, with the sleep research that was a major study that the military used because one of the, One of the things when I was put on the air Land Battle 2000 team to figure out, how are we going to go 100 hours straight with the ground war when we move into 21st century, how can we go 100 hours straight leaders be able to lead, soldiers be able to function, aviators be able to fly, you know, without 100, you know, 100 hours of that sleep. So I did a lot of research around that. And then I started going to NATO nations and briefing the army staffs. Here's what we found, here's what you need to do to be able to function. And I remember very clearly when I briefed the commander of the UK forces, I gave the presentation and this is what special ops are going to have to do and then what the soldiers and aviators to do. And I finished that presentation and the general got up and he said, thompson, that was a good briefing. But I can tell you now, we're not doing any of that crap. These guys are just going to have to drive on. We're not doing that. Okay, There's a price to pay. And then shortly after that, focal and Islands came along and all of a sudden they ran into problems because they didn't have enough pilots down there to meet the safety requirement, asleep and rest requirement between missions. They tried different chemicals to help them be able to do that. Because when a pilot comes back from a mission, his eyes are like that. He's wired from all the stress and everything. He can't go to sleep to start with. When he finally does go to sleep, he can't wake up. And if you give him a chemical that knocks him out right away, then you can't get it out of his system six hours later or four hours later when you wake him up and say, you gotta go, you gotta fly another mission. He's still trying to figure out who he is, but there are ways to do some of that that we worked on getting ready. Because when the Gulf War, you know, the ground war started, the ground war went 100 hours. Now, my, my brother was an Apache pilot and, you know, he was telling me all the time about, you know, I go fly a mission, I turn around, I come back, I'll land. While I'm rearm and refueling, I'm sitting there in the cockpit eating a sandwich, drinking a coffee, because soon as they, they get me rearmed, I'm going back out. I got to go fly another mission. And so, you know, that stuff was going on all the time and you just not as effective. And somewhere, somewhere around five hours or five days without any sleep, zero sleep, people start to die. And the university said, you know, we can't keep supporting your research if you have your students dying, so you got to stop keeping them up that long. They didn't actually Die. But, you know, they were getting close enough that they were concerned about it. Wow. So I hear people all, how long.

[Unknown Host]

Are you keeping these people up?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Holy. We ended up, we ended up stopping them after, I think it was 72 hours as far as we, we would go. But I hear people tell me all the time, man, I can, I can go five days without a problem. Young guys tell you that you think you are. I remember in ranger school, sitting in the blisters and, and instructor standing in front, in front of us, there's a creek there. He's standing in front of us and he's talking. And it seems like mid sentence, mid sentence, he says, thompson in the creek. And I think, what did I do? You were asleep. And I think, no, I wasn't asleep in the creek. Do push ups until I get tired. Make sure your face goes under every time, you know, as I went there in the creek, trying to drown myself, you know, doing push ups. And I was. And my ranger buddy said, yeah, you were sitting here, but you were asleep. You were setting up, your eyes were open, but you were asleep. And I, I began to realize, yeah, you go to sleep and you don't realize it. In fact, some of the research shows that there are more people killed in traffic accidents with drivers falling asleep than there is with drunk drivers.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Almost everyone that drives or been driving for a while can tell you you've had an experience late at night and you're sleepy and your head's bouncing around, and all of a sudden, just before you hit the bridge abutment, you feel the car run off your shoulder and you jerk it back into the road because you were asleep. You didn't know it. And you know, if you're driving a drone, you drive whatever and you go to sleep. The drone's on its own now. There's no telling where you're going to put that thing. If you're watching a radar screen, you don't see the aircraft coming, you don't see the blips. You're looking at it, your eyes are open, but you don't see it. There's a whole series of things like that that I did a lot of research on, and particularly using it with Special Ops. And still now I go out, I do a lot of presentations with different groups, particularly high stress groups, special ops groups on sleep deprivation, things to help you get around it, to be able to function better, longer, and what's going to happen if you don't. So that's a long answer to whatever you ask me about a Monkey or something like that.

[Unknown Host]

Well, I want to get into that, what you're doing nowadays towards the end. But, you know, you went to school, you dropped out of school, correct?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah, I, I was in school. And at that time, every night on the five o' clock national news, you know, there'd always be a segment about what was happening in Vietnam. And interestingly enough, very different from what we have today. You know, the reporters would be saying, man, we're crushing those guys. I mean, we're just crushing the NBA and we're doing this and we're doing that. And I started thinking, well, I wanted to go to Vietnam so I could do my patriotic duty like my uncles and father and everybody had done. It's going to be over. If I wait until I finish school, it's going to be over. So I decided to take a break from school, go enlist for three years, go do my thing, come back, pick back up where I was in school and, you know, continue on. No, no intent, no desire to really be a career person. I wanted three years and then I wanted to get back to chemistry and do my thing. And so I stopped. My mother was not happy. My father supported it. My mother kind of freaked out over it. I told her, I'll go back to school. She said, no, you won't. I said, yeah, I'll go back to school. I'll get a doctorate. But I, I need to go to do this first. And then, you know, I get to the recruiting station and, and went down to Fort Jackson, South Carolina, and, you know, we, they put us in, in the barracks, went to sleep. About 3 o' clock in the morning, all the lights come on and there's some guy yelling and screaming the top of his lungs to get up and get the attention in front of the, your bunk. And then I hear bunks being pushed over, you know, double bunks pushed over, people falling out on the floor and this guy yelling and hollering. I got my buns up and got the attention in front of my, you know, bunk there. And I look and I said, he's my size. He's got a big smoky bear hat on. He's my size. And he sounds like a giant coming through here. And what is that on his shoulder? A Ranger tab. So I thought, that's it. You got to do that. And then he took us, took us on a run and we were singing all this stuff about I want to be an airborne Ranger, I want to live a life of danger, all this kind of stuff. And I thought, this is cool. If I'm going to be in three years, I might as well. This is what I want. I get a chance to, you know, feel real Ranger now, not, not just, you know, what I used to play at. So all of a sudden, you know, I still didn't have, I still didn't intend to stay in beyond the three years, but I wanted to be a Ranger while I was in and you know, go to Vietnam as a Ranger, you know, why not?

[Unknown Host]

What was the sentiment of Vietnam at the beginning of the war?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Terrible.

[Unknown Host]

It was terrible.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

You know, the, the country, my country's divided now.

[Unknown Host]

You know, we're in America.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

But yeah, in, in America it was divided. So they, they had, you and I, for example. As soon as people looked at our heads, they could say, well, he doesn't have hair down to his shoulders. His hair is not parted in the middle. He's in this group over here. You and I are in this other group and we're much more likely to be patriotic, support the war and go do it. These other guys, these long haired hippie guys over on the other side, they're against it. They're all smoking marijuana and they're doing whatever. And I'm kind of exaggerating, but it was divided. Those people anti war, going to protest, do all this kind of stuff. So there were some people who were for it, most people were against it and they were out protesting. So. And you know, I had some good friends that had moved on the other side. They were total anti war. But some of the stuff you were hearing was, you know, we're killing babies, we're killing old women, we're doing all kinds of things like that. Which wasn't necessarily true. But, you know, I got really excited about the army and what we were doing and kept thinking, they're, they're paying me to do this. Can you imagine what it would cost if you just wanted to go jump out of an airplane and have a thrill like that? They paying me to go do that and all these other things. And the more I got into it, the more I enjoyed it. When I finished ait, they said, you're going to ocs.

[Unknown Host]

You went to OCS right away?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah, so you need to go to ocs. And I said, they talked me into it, said, you know, you can still get out. The end of your three years, you'll be your, your two year requirement that you'll get from OCS will be over and you can still get out of the army, you'll still get to go to Vietnam and you can probably do some of these other neat things like airborne Ranger stuff like that. So I started volunteering in OCS to go to airborne school and to go to Special Forces. So when I finished ocs, then I just went from there to airborne school. I was already at Benning. I went to airborne school and then they sent me to Bragg and went through the officers Q course up there and became SF and then sf. I went to Rangers and then went to filth group in Vietnam and did what my buddy said or didn't really do what he said. I did the opposite. He said, whatever you do, do not volunteer for saab.

[Unknown Host]

Why is that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And when I asked that question, he said, if you do, you're going to die. And if you don't die, you're going to come home with the crap shot out of you in a nutcase. That's if they find you do not volunteer for Sock. What do they do? I said, nobody knows. You have to get there and volunteer and get there, and then you'll find out what you're going to do, but you're going to die or come back as a nutcase. I was 21 years old at that time in history, we thought that your prefrontal cortex up here in the front of your brain, we thought that the only thing it really did was hold up your cranium so that your front end of your head didn't kind of cave in. And we thought it was fully developed. By the time you're 20 years old, you had all your prefrontal cortex abilities. Really, you got to be about 30 before it's fully developed. So before it's developed, you tell somebody you're going to volunteer to go anywhere, do anything, anytime, and never say a word about it for 20 years. I can do that. I mean, that's a recruiting poster to a 21 year old. And if you. If you look at the SOG pictures of the Americans on those teams, almost all of them are little baby face guys. You look at tilt at John Shocker Meyer, you look at his old baby face. You look at my little baby face. You look at, you know, Eldon Barswell's little baby face. I mean, all three of us within two or three months of the same age, and we all look like little baby faces because we'll go charge that hill, we'll go to another country and do things. By the time you're 30, you're saying, let's let the younger guys do that. I don't need to have that kind of action anymore. If you Stay. If you're still there at 30, you're still doing missions like that. You know, as you. You saw with some of the SEAL work you were doing, you know, it's starting to have a bad effect on you. I mean, there's a limit to how much stress you can take and recover from it, you know, easily. So we don't take good care. Our special operators in particular, we keep throwing them back out there in the middle of all the stress with no break, with no opportunity to heal some. And then we put all these restrictions out there. Don't mention the word mental health. Don't say you're getting a little stressed, because we'll take you off the team. Yeah, Tier one guys, you know, like, you like the SOG guys. I mean, I had to pass, you know, the flight physical. I mean, just blow it out of the water every year or I couldn't be on a team like that. You can't be Tier one, You can't be Halo. You know, you got to have perfect ears, perfect eyes, perfect everything, or they'll take you off the team. And what do you do? Same thing in Sock. I mean, I used to come back and take forceps and pull pieces and I've got scars all over. Pull pieces of shrapnel out and not say anything about it because I didn't want to get taken off the team. And civil guys do it all the time. Rangers guys still do it. You're not going to report anything. Yeah, but you don't have to. So.

[Unknown Host]

So did you go right into SOG from the Green Berets?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

When? When I. When I got there, When I got to Vietnam, I met a buddy of mine in the bar that first evening when I got there, and he's the one that told me, whatever you do, don't volunteer for sog. Because he'd been there a month before me, so he knew all kind of stuff. Right? So the next day went the all in process. And at the end, end of the day then I ended up Colonel Bazatz's room. And he said, I'm looking through your folder here. You volunteered for the Army. You volunteered for ocs, you volunteered for Airborne. You volunteered for Ranger. You volunteered for. For Special Forces. You volunteered for Vietnam. I got the most important job that you will ever have an opportunity to do, but you have to volunteer for it. And I said, you're trying to get me to volunteer for sog? He said, yes. I said, what do I do? What does SOG digging? So I can't tell you he couldn't tell you. You have. I can't tell you what they do. I just tell you you're going to have to volunteer and sign the volunteer paper to go to sog. You're going to have to sign a non disclosure agreement, 20 year agreement that you won't say the word SOG, you won't say anything about what you guys did for 20 years, or you're going to receive the full punishment of the law. But if you'll do that, you can get in the SOG and you can do things that nobody else can do. So the next day I was supposed to be at the airfield. They sent me down to the classified end of the airfield where the Blackbirds, the black C130s and C133s were all parked. You know, nobody could go down there. So I went down there, got on an aircraft to go up to in the train, and there were no seats in the plane when it got there to seat belts on the floor. So the crew chief came by and he said, sit on the floor and buckle in. And there were three or four of us. Sit on the floor and buckle in. Because when we take off, we're going to climb as fast as this thing will climb so that we don't get hit on the way out. And then when we go to land up in the train, we're going to dive toward the ground like we're crashing so we don't get hit on the way down. And you guys just hold on, you're going to have a great ride. Got there, got off the plane and they told us where to move to. And they said, you know, there's a SOG bus there that's going to pick you up and drive you on up to Da Dang. So we went over where the bus was supposed to be and there's a black school bus sitting there. All the windows are shot out of it. There must have been 200 bullet holes in the bus. The seats are all ripped apart where bullets had been hitting. And there's a driver there, went up to him and said, is this the bus up to Da Nang? He said, yeah, what happened? And he said, well, there is this one pass that we have to go through and the NVA like to ambush us up there, you know, on a fairly regular basis. So, you know, kind of shoot the bus up and the people are in it. We're going to pick up a SOG team in a few minutes. As soon as they get here, then we'll, we'll leave all you have to do is just do what they tell you. Whatever they tell you to do, you do, and you'll live. If you don't, you probably die before you get there. And all of a sudden, just out of nowhere, here's a line of about seven or eight guys headed toward the bus. I mean, they just appeared. And I'm looking at them and saying, I never seen anybody like this before. I mean, I've been Special Forces, I've been through Grangers. I don't recognize the equipment they have. I don't recognize the uniforms they have on. And they're scary. I mean, if they had this little short, like a little short M16, some of them have, you know, grenade launchers that had been cut down to that long. They camouflaged, they had on bandanas around their heads, hand grenades all over them. Scary looking dudes. They got on the bus and said. And they immediately took up defensive positions on the bus. The team just arrayed itself around the bus and they were all at the windows ready to shoot in whichever direction the fire came from. And the guy who was the team leader, he said, if we run into trouble, you get face down on the floor of the bus and don't move until we tell you. Copy that. We didn't get ambushed. But wow, you know, you start thinking, what did I get into? Geez, yeah, I was talking. I'm Talking to Ellen Bar 12 several years ago, before he passed, he said, oh, yeah, I still can see that bus in my mind all shot up like that and wondered, what have I gotten into?

[Unknown Host]

Is that what you were wondering?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

You said, this is, this is different than what I thought. But, you know, it's going to be exhilarating because I'll be on a team like that in a few days. I'll start becoming one of those guys. I mean, those guys made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. And when they get around other people, you can see, everybody just kind of backs away. Gives them room. They don't get close to them, they don't make eye contact with them. If you look them in the eye, for the most part, you see death. I mean, they're just. They've seen things nobody else is saying, and you can't not see it once you've seen it. So. So I thought, you know, that part's probably pretty cool. So, yeah, it went and went on up. Got to Danang, and the little guy that picked us up there said, I'm going to take you to your quarters where you'll stay tonight. Tomorrow you'll get your assignment. You'll get briefed, and you might want to. We have a movie theater set up out here. You know, we put a couple pieces of plywood together. We got a movie projector, and we show John Wayne and other kind of movies out there. And we have some bleachers up. You might want to go out there and watch the movie. This will be the last chance you get to take a break and relax a little bit. Been in the bleachers about. It's dark bleachers about 15 minutes. Marble Mountains behind us. And all of a sudden, it looked like the Fourth of July. Red tracers, green tracers, flares, stuff going everywhere. Now I'm face down in the sand, and the guy sitting in the bleachers said, oh, I'm sorry, sir. I should have warned you. This happens every night. Just watch the movies. They won't shoot down here. You know, in a few minutes, all those green tracers will be gone because they're dead. The team's up there on top of the mountain, will take them out. Everything will be fine. Just enjoy the movie. Yeah. My heart's pounding.

[Unknown Host]

Holy.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So, you know, there we go. And I, you know, you pick a code name. So I picked the dynamite code name. Then I went to. Up to fubai, where, you know, John Myers already. Up there. I went to fubai. We got off. There's about five or six of us. Went up the air, and the sergeant major came out and he had a hell of a little list. He got us all together and he said, all right. He read the names off and he said, all of you guys are going to leave tomorrow to go back down toward NHA Trang to one zero School to learn how to be a SOG team leader. I said, you didn't read my name off, Thompson? Oh, no, you're not going down there. You're SF qualified, your Ranger qualified. I'm putting you on a team this afternoon. You don't need to go down there. What you don't know, that's going to be taught down there. The team's going to teach you over the next few days before you go on your first mission. Wow. And then he said, you know, tomorrow morning, I need you to report into the S4. Sergeant Jones has a mission. He'd like for you to help him with that. I need an officer for if you would help him for that. And then we'll link you up with your team and you can get started. Okay? They put me in quarters. Went to S4 the next morning. And the sergeant said we've had some casualties. And we have their personal effects here. They've all been packed up in duffel bags. Before we can ship them back to their families, their personal effects back to their families. The effects need to be sign. You know, reviewed and signed off by an officer. So I need you to just go through each of these seven duffel bags, make sure there's nothing in there that would be classified. No pictures, no, you know, anything that could be classified, and pack them back up, sign the sheet, and we can get them out of here. First duffel bag I picked up friend of mine home for a break. He. He went. Sorry.

[Unknown Host]

It's okay.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

He met. He went about 30 days, you know, before me, and, you know, just disappeared. Nobody knew where he went, what assignment he got. When he got there. He just went into a black hole and, you know, so he's been there 30 days. Now I'm inventory in his personal effects to send back to his family. And Saab got real. So did that. Went and linked up with the team and, you know, went to work, started training with the team because we had a mission coming up in a few days and trying to learn everything I could before we went out. But anyway, that was a long story of how I got to what was in the bag. He had, you know, some civilian clothes letters, you know, to his parents. I mean, you know, people's personal kinds of things like that. They were letters that, you know, that. That had come from their families. They were letters they had written that they hadn't mailed yet, things they'd had in their hoot, the personal kinds of things that they would put in there. So, I mean, probably half to two thirds of it, you know, I took out, but I had to read the letters, you know, to their families. And, you know, that was brutal, just brutal.

[Unknown Host]

And you were close with him?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah, I just.

[Unknown Host]

Anyway, what was his name?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Stacks. Lieutenant Stack. Stan Stacks. And, yeah, you know, we went through the officer court SF course up there and, you know, hung out some after that. But it was just a shock to my system. All of the first bag, you know, the duffel bag with your name stenciled on the side of it. And I picked that up and it just. Holy cow, man. Now I know where he went. He went to sog. Like my friend had told me, you know, a couple of days before, don't volunteer for sog. You're a dead man walking if you do. And then, you know, here's your stacks. All of a sudden, I'm Sorry. So, I mean, I got put right to work, which, you know, I'd rather get to work. Let's go do it. I learn fast. If you show me, I'll learn it. And wasn't expecting to get ambushed first time out.

[Unknown Host]

Let's take a quick break.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Sure.

[Unknown Host]

When we come back, we'll get into your first mission.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Okay?

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[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

All.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Right, Dick, we're back from the break.

[Unknown Host]

And we're getting ready to get into your first mission with sog.

[John Stryker Meyer]

But you know something that I found.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting that, that, that you didn't mention is SOG did not fall under the protection of the Geneva Convention. Correct?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Right.

[Unknown Host]

Why is that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Well, we were not supposed to be in the countries we were going into. We didn't have permission to go into those countries. So we all missions were conducted without ID cards, which you can't do and be covered with the Geneva Convention. No dog tags, nothing in the beginning, Nothing that said us on it. Now later on M16s and car 15s and those types of weapons became so ubiquitous in in that area that anybody could be carrying something a Weapon that said US on it. So they took the restriction of that. In the beginning, you carried a, you know, Sten gun or Swedish K or something like that, rather than American guns. So they took that off. But because we had no identification of any type on us, and then we were considered spies if we were caught, is that what. And it was also gave the US Government plausible deniability that they didn't have anything to do with us.

[Unknown Host]

That's. That's what prompted the different uniforms and different gear and everything.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Wow. Now, you know, like I said later when we went to the regular jungle fatigues or tiger stripe for whatever.

[Unknown Host]

Very interesting. Let's get into your first mission.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Okay. We had kind of started it before where they assigned me right off the bat. So even the SOG rule was, even if you come in as an officer, like I, I did when you went to a team, you cannot go as the team leader. You had to go out as an assistant team leader or a certain number of missions until the team leader that was vetting. You said, you know, this guy's ready to lead a team. So I went out with Team rt, Alabama to start with, to, to get, to learn really what it was like and get vetted because it's, it's just a river. But there was something about when you cross that river into that other country, everything was different. I mean, you didn't make contact with. With 20 or 30 guys and have a gun battle. You made contact with 500. You know, it was like kicking the top off of an anthill. I mean, they would just swarm once they figured out where you were, they were coming from everywhere to try to get you. And the other, the other thing, it was kind of reminds me of jiu jitsu in that with jiu jitsu, you and your opponent kind of lay down in the floor and you get your best hold on each other, and then they say, go, and you try to fight your way out of it with us. They would take us into Laos or wherever, set us down, put the NVA all around, Just hundreds and hundreds of them all around us, with us in the middle. And then they'd say, go, go accomplish your mission and then see if you can get out. So you started off surrounded with every mission, and just there are just so many of them when you did. And then I worked mostly up north with Laos, you know, North Vietnam. The terrain up there is very mountainous and double triple canopy jungle, thick vegetation. I mean, most of the time when I made contact, you would, you know, this close to me 10 meters, maybe 15 meters. That's when we made contact. And I probably couldn't see the other 20 people who were with you because they were standing a couple meters farther back in the vegetation. I could, I could hear the gunshots. I could see the bushes moving as, you know, the blast came and things like that. So a lot of times I was shooting just movement, shooting at sound, shooting at the one or two that I could see. And bullets were just coming from everywhere. You were never shooting at one. You might think you're shooting at one person, but there's 30 or 40 shooting back at you. And it was when you made contact in Vietnam, which we'd go do a lot just for practice, so you can have a live shoot back target. You know, you run up on five, 10 guys and have a gunfight. But when five or 10 turns into 100, 200 and there are more coming, it becomes difficult. So the, the, the hardest or the easiest thing is to get inserted. And sometimes that's a real problem. But still getting inserted seems to be the easiest part. Accomplishing the mission becomes really difficult. Getting out becomes almost impossible. And, you know, it's like that almost every mission. And you get in, trying to accomplish the mission with everything going on. But then how do you get out? I mean, it can go on for hours and hours and hours trying to get out because you can't get the fire suppressed enough to get a helicopter in. And I mentioned prairie fire emergency earlier if we were about to be overrun. If I call on the radio and declare prairie fire emergency, everything within range that has ordinance is getting diverted to me to try to help get me out. So all of a sudden, I mean, there were times when I'd have 14 gunships in orbit waiting their turn to come in. You know, five or six f4 phantoms in orbit ready to come in, some, you know, other types of aircraft all in orbit, just waiting their turn to come in and expend their ordinance on the bad guy so I could try to get out. So anyway, what was it like when.

[Unknown Host]

You, I mean, you show up as an officer to the most elite unit at the time, and they want you to lead one. How are you received by those guys? Young guy, 21 years old, only been to the schools, you know, qualified sf, qualified Ranger. But, you know, even in today, that doesn't mean much when you show up to the team. I can't imagine what the reception's like for a junior officer to show up at a team like that of those type of men to be led.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

John Meyer might have told you what the perception was.

[Unknown Host]

He did.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. He told me one time that he said you, you were one of the few officers that actually wanted to go out and was not afraid to go out and could perform when you were out there. And he said, you know, that made you different than most of the officers. And most officers, they went out a few times and they didn't go back out again. You know, they, they found another job. But, you know, enlisted NCOs did that too. I'm telling you, when you go over there and experience what it's like, you have to think long and hard before you say, I'm, I'm ready to go back. Because it was just so different when you went out there. And, you know, I was, I thought I was given a, a fair chance. Sergeant Gentry Deck, he didn't seem to have any qualms. He just, you know, see what you can do. It's my team and, you know, I'll tell you what I want you to do, and you do it. And, you know, I was okay with that. And, you know, the, the guys in, when you, when you went into the lounge, the club, you know, you could sit with more senior guys there, people with more experience, and, you know, they would chat with you. And I think first or second day I was there, this E7 was talking to me, came over, met me, and we, we started talking. And, and at one point he said, let me, let me tell you something, Lieutenant. Never ever shoot an NVA less than three or four times. Every time you shoot one, you shoot them three or four times. If they twitch, you shoot them three or four more times. Don't ever assume that you've shot somebody and they're dead. Because we've had a lot of SOG people kill shot in the back because they walked past the NVA that they had shot and thought was dead.

[Unknown Host]

Damn.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

He said, you make sure you do the job the first time. And, you know, that was, that was a rule I adopted. There's no single shots, there's no double tap. If I shoot you, I'm going to shoot you. I'm gonna, you're gonna get held a lot of times. And most of the time I shot short bursts on automatic. I'd shoot, you know, three or four round burst because I want to make sure I hit you. I want to make sure you're going down. And you know, if you don't go down fast enough, I'm going to hit you with three or four more rounds. And, you know, that was one of the reasons, I carried a lot of ammunition. So deck was very open to having me on there, particularly after, you know, we had the first mission, we'd go out, we're doing a last light insertion, and we were going to go do a wiretap once we got on the ground. So we go out, it's starting to get dark, we circle around and we come in. On our run toward the lz, Deck gave a thumbs up. That means get out on the skids. 30 seconds out. I climbed out on the skids. The other American climbed out on my side with me and the door gunners right next to me. We were on a Huey and we're coming in really low and we're just going across the trees. I mean, the skids are almost dragging into the top of the canopy and we're going slow. And I was thinking an NVA could knock me off of this skid with a rock. I mean, we're just barely moving. I'm exposed to the world standing out here and wow, there's a little village over there. Looks like six or seven hooches in a little village. That wasn't in our briefing. There was nothing said about a village being that close to where we were going in. So we come on up and. And they had blown a hole in the canopy and it was just barely big enough for the chopper to just set straight down in. So we're settling down in there and I'm, I'm scanning, you know, the tree line and still thinking. I'm just, you know, a setting duck out here. And we get down, it looks like as far as we're going to be able to go, we're still about six feet from the bottom of the bomb crater. And I'm thinking we, I've got to jump off the skid down in this thing with 80 pounds of gear on. I'm gonna break both legs, you know, when I hit down there. And while I'm, I'm having that thought, you know, it's time to suck it up and just jump. So, you know, I bent my knees so I could, you know, kind of hop off. And as I bend down, this guy NVA pops up right there, 10ft away from me, you know, in the bomb crater. AK47. Holy cow. So instead of jumping in, I straighten my legs up and hop back up on the edge of the floor of the aircraft. As I do that, he pulls the trigger on the ak. My legs move just in time. They went right across in front of me and hit the American that was on the other side of me. They hit his legs and took him out from under him. He started to fall. I grabbed the back of his harness with my left hand. I put a half a magazine into that guy and drug him back up into the aircraft. You know, he's yelling and hollering, you know, about his legs. Blood's going everywhere. There's two indig behind me, both open fire going out of the helicopter, one on each side of me. And I'm getting powder burns from their muzzle flashes going death. As that's happening, the door gunners opened up, and it's just unbelievable, the number of bullets that all of a sudden are coming crisscrossing inside the aircraft, hitting the aircraft. You can hear the metal clangs as they hit. I see another one now. I finish off my magazine on him. Now I've got to reload. And that's when I discovered what stress does to you find motor coordination. So I reached to try to get a magazine out of my pouch. My hand is just soaked with the blood that's squirting out of his leg. I'm trying to get the magazine out. I couldn't get it, and it was stuck in there. My hand was slick. I finally got it out, but when I went to put it in, my hand was shaking so much I couldn't get it in the magazine. Well, at first I finally got it in there so I could start returning fire. The next one came right out of the pouch. It wasn't that big of a deal, but it went in a lot easier. But I had never experienced that level of fear before. I mean, I just. And I. It's hard to believe today that that many bullets could come at you that fast and none of them hit you. So start returning fire. Knocked some guys that. Who were in the trees knocked them out. The same thing that's happening, you know, we had two Cobra gunships that were coming in, you know, right beside us. They opened up with their miniguns. And so you have, you know, 4,000 rounds a minute coming down from. From the Cobras hitting right next to us. Ricochets going everywhere. You know, there's tracers all over the place. They're firing. The next two cobras right behind them were firing 40 millimeter. You know, that's exploding all around us. Everybody in the aircraft on both sides are shooting. You can see the tracers crisscrossing on the inside. And, you know, the pilot, I think. I think that's the first time he's been ambushed like that with people that close and it seemed like he just froze or stopped or something because we're just sitting there. I always think we need to be going up, getting out of this hole. And finally we started moving the aircraft, shaking, trembling all over, going up, the bad guys are all shifting their fire up. The Cobras are coming in. They're just circling around and coming in. And then we had some Sky Raiders, A1 Sky Raiders coming in, flying across in, in front of us and dropping 250 pound bombs, not right there, but off to the side. I found out later those hooches in the village over there were not hooches, they were tanks with thatch put around them to make them look like, you know, they were thatched houses over there. They were actually tanks. And they started moving when all this started happening. So the A1s went after them and started putting the bombs. So with all the other stuff that's going on, when those things start, the bombs start going off. Now you're getting these blast waves coming across that's trying to knock the helicopter into the trees, you know, and we're getting hit with the blast. But finally we got up and we're able to start moving and flying away from it and we're still getting 51 calibers and things coming up at us. And I looked over, you know, at Sergeant Deck and he looked around at me and he's grinning like a horse, eating saw briars and giving me a thumbs up and I'm saying, I want to count. He thinks that's the coolest thing he's done lately. He enjoyed that. And he did. And I thought, wow, he'd done this quite a few times, so it's not his first radio, but he enjoyed that. Scared the crap out of me. Then we get back and we have the conversation of, lieutenant, if you don't want to change magazines faster, you're going to die. But every time, except for the last time, every time we went out on a mission, as we would be extracted, when I'd look over at him, I'd see that big grin and thumb up. He was so excited about that. So, yeah, that got my attention.

[Unknown Host]

I'll bet it did.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Unfortunately, before, before the mission, the camp commander up there had call me over, wanted to talk and he said, I just, I know this is your first mission. I want you to understand we're not going to put you out there where we can't get you back. If we put you in there, we're going to bring you back. Okay? So when I got back from that mission, and got to the hooch and spent some time with Jack Daniels. I decided to go talk to the camp commander. Learning experience, you know, to go to the camp commander and tell him his baby is ugly. There's some problems with the process. But, you know, he didn't fire me. That was good. He, he recognized, you know, had had a, you know, significant experience there and then compounded it with a little Jack Daniels. And I didn't do that again. I learned, definitely learned from that.

[Unknown Host]

But what did you think the problems were?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I thought part of it was it fubai. We, we had a range, we had a big open area, huge open area that we would go to to do immediate action drills to, you know, test fire our different weapons and things. And there were nothing you could shoot in any direction out there. And I mean, he could practice, but it's not the jungle. The jungle is very different. You know, when I'm out where I can, I can see a thousand meters out in front of me, that's different. When we are, you know, 10 meters and 15 meters out, it's about the range of my vision. And, and then, and after that mission, you know, the next one we got on the ground and just moving through the jungle and particularly moving once contact is made, it's very different. So when we got down to Da Nang, we had a jungle. We could go practice in Monkey Mountain. We could go over there and you were in a rural jungle so you could practice movement, falling over logs, stepping in holes and all that kind of stuff. But, but I learned a lot from that. One of, you know, one of the things was I want more ammunition and I've got to be able to get the magazines out. So had had the magazine stuffed in the canteen pouch. So what I, I did was I took a piece of parachute cord and some duct tape and I made a loop, taped it on the side of the magazine so there was a loop sticking up on that center magazine. I could just stick my finger in and I could jerk that magazine out. And once it was out, the rest of them were loose. It was, they were easy to get out.

[Unknown Host]

You came up with that yourself.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I had heard somebody talk about, you know, putting a loop on it or string. And I thought that makes sense. So I, I tried that. And yeah, you know, when I was practicing, that first one would come right out. So I started, you know, doing them all like that. But just, you know, that was part of, was learning that, making sure I had them in the right place. Making sure, since I was right handed, the grenade for in the pouch on the right hand side, magazines on the left hand side, you know, so you could go with them. Water was in the back. And then after a couple of times on the ground, I started to flatten out what was on my waist. To me it seemed like the closer you could get to the ground, the better your chance of surviving because I'd be laying on the ground and my rucksacks getting hit. So I thought if I could get a little bit closer, that gets me a little ways farther. I mean, I'd come back from a rucksack shot up on just about every mission I'm laying down. But the bullets had come in that close.

[Unknown Host]

Better sight picture too.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. And so, you know, I started making little changes like that. And then once I became team leader, then I, you know, implemented those changes to the, to the whole team. But some of them along the way, you know, I would make suggestions to, to deck and say what if, what if as soon as we get in, excuse me, we get into our remain overnight position. Quick meeting before everybody goes down. This is the direction we're going to go. If we get hit, this is our avenue of escape. Here's where we think they're coming. The claymores are out there, you know, so we, we started having that little quick debrief, you know, like that. And then started the after action reviews where we, we did kind of a formal after action review with the team running. I implemented our talk deck into implementing a running password. If we got scattered and you're running and you coming up on somebody, we would have a running password example, bug fuzz. You think that makes sense? Well, not only does it not necessarily make sense, it was hard for them to say. So if I don't speak the language and I hear you say something, bug fuzz, I can't understand what you're saying. I don't know what it means. So it's hard for me as the NVA to use that same word to come running into you. So every time we were compromised and had to use a running password, the next time we went out we had a different one. So I kept changing those and so just putting things in like that. And DEC was pretty good about going along with that. And then Christmas, Christmas we went out and it was going to be the last mission that this team ran out of food by they were going to close it, close FUBA down. And we got in really heavy contact and when we got, finally got on the helicopter and they were just really pummeling the helicopter and we got on it, and we started lifting off. I looked over at deck expecting, you know, the big grin and the thumb up. And he just looked up at me, and then he looked back down. I was, oh, crap. You know, he. He must have gotten hit. I mean, he's never done that before. Must have got hit. So I kind of crawled over there to him and grabbed him by the shoulder and said, are you okay? And, you know, he said, no, I'll talk to you when we land. So when we got on the ground, I grabbed him up and I what's going on? And he said, I'm done. I'm done. When we get. When we get to Dang, I'm going to have a different job. Don't tell the team. I'll tell the team, but I don't want to tell them right now. But I won't be on the team after this, after we get to da name. And, you know, I thought that was good. He had recognized it was time to do something different. And sometimes I found some. Some people couldn't or wouldn't recognize that. You've got to know when you. You've gotten up to the edge where you're now dangerous. Dangerous to yourself, dangerous to the rest of the team, and you need to take yourself out. Because even though you. You had to sign up for six missions or six months after the first mission, if you went to the one, your team leader and said, I'm done. I don't want this anymore. I can't do this anymore. I want out. That was fine. You know, you would be taken out and either put somewhere else in Da Nang or where you were, or back to Special Forces, go to, you know, regular Special Forces unit or something, because you didn't need to be going out there if, you know, once you had decided that you couldn't do that because the volume of fire was so heavy, so intense when you were out there, all decisions had to be made quickly, and you had to continue to doubt because those suckers were coming at you. And just, you know, with. With me, it was, now I'm going to be the leader. I need to be learning more. And I started watching the nva. What is. What did they do when we make contacts? Is there a pattern to how they behave when we make contact? And I started to see a pattern. And just a simple example, if you're an NVA and we make contact and you go down behind a tree, 95% of the time, when you decide to return fire back at me, you will come around the right side of the tree from your perspective, the right side of the tree, your muzzle of the AK will come around. Your forehead will be right behind it. If I know that. So I'm out here. From my perspective, I watch the left side of the tree and I'll see you start to come around it and I've already zeroed in on it. And I'm ready when I see that muzzle come around and maybe foreheads right behind it and I'm ready to, you know, launch three or four rounds at you. And I told my, my team, I implemented it with the next team and I said, they'll do that every time. I said watch, just watch. They'll do that and you can take them out. And we came back and we debriefed it and they said, wow, they do, they shoot around that side of the tree or rock or whatever it is. Said, okay, here's, here's the big thing. You got to realize we do that too. We're humans, we're going to shoot around that right side of the tree every time. Unless we train it out of ourselves or you're left handed, or you're left handed. So we've got to practice doing that. But we know where they are when they go down. Almost without fail, they will shoot from where they went down. When we go down, we've got to roll one way or the other. Don't shoot from where you went down because they're going to shoot right where they saw you go down last time. You got to move before they start shooting and they get you. And there's a whole series of things like that that I call the human reaction to combat that humans do instinctively and they don't even realize they're doing it most of the time. But if you know how they're going to react, you know which way they're going to run and what they're going to do. That gives you the advantage. It gives you the advantage with close quarters and combat. You know, when I, I watch people, you know, from the catwalk, I watch people go through the rooms clearing them and everything. And I think, holy cow, you know, if that joker was in the air with live ammo shooting at you, he's going to take you out. And you know, they're just in, in the U.S. for example, if, if you come into this building and I, I know you're coming in as a SWAT team, for example, or as a stack with military, you're coming in, I can take you out. But just by shooting a row across the wall there. I'll get half your team because you're all leaning up against that, you know, drywall, and that bullet's going to go right through it. So I can take out a bunch of you right there. There's a whole series of things. Don't stand close to the wall. If I shoot at the wall and I hit the wall, even drywall, a lot of times you can get a ricochet that's going to come off that wall just a little ways. And if you're standing a couple feet from it, it's going to hit you how you hold your weapon when you go in there. I won't go into all that right now. But you really started working with them on what I was, what was called quick kill when I went through the training, how to shoot from the waist and hit your target every time you don't have to aim. We went through a whole course at brag on that with BB guns and then graduated the M16s. And I and some of the work I do and, you know, active shooters and stuff like that. And showing the police, you and I both turn and turn into the hall at the same time. I'll hit you three times before you can get your weapon ready to fire, because I'm already ready to fire. I just need to see a target and I can hit you without moving my weapon at all. And you've still got yours at a down port, and you've got to try to bring it up. And what will happen in that situation is, as you're bringing it up, you'll be able to spend the rest of your life thinking about why you did it that way. Of course, the rest of your life is going to be about a half a second. But I know they're lawyers. I know there are safety things, but you got to think about your opponent and about how to take them out. But anyway. But we did all kind of practice on the Ranger pictures in the. In the books, out on the range of us shooting from there, putting the silhouettes out and practicing hitting those things. If you're 20 meters or closer, I hit you every time without aiming. I used to put five silhouettes out there and, you know, let one of the team members say, go. And as I was falling to the ground, I'd hit all five targets before I hit the ground. And you can do that, but you got to practice. And they loved it when you. You gave them techniques they could use that would work. They loved it.

[Unknown Host]

How did it feel to take over the team?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I was excited I really was a little nervous because I didn't know this team. I took over the team when we moved to Danang. They actually split up Alabama and kind of sent them to different places because DEC was going to a different job. And I took over RT Michigan. The 10 had been wounded, he was gone. There was a guy, Spec 4 on the team, Eldon Bargewell. Hard dude, Good dude. You know, SOG legend, Delta Force commander forever. I mean, just, you name it. Special ops wise, he did it. But at that time, he was my assistant team leader. So working him, working with him was, was good. We got another American in for a while, and it was a mountain yard team, good team. And Eldon and I worked together, you know, really well.

[Unknown Host]

So what was your first mission as team leader.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

The first one? Oh, it was one where we were going to try a new insertion technique. There was a company of the 101st that had moved up right up next to the border, Laotian border. So the plan was they were going to insert us into the 101st company. So on one of their resupply missions and where they were bringing in some additional new recruits in there. We were going to put the team on those helicopters, dressed like the 101st steel pot, all that kind of stuff. We were going to fly in, get off just like we were. New people coming in. And then we would spend the night there in their perimeter. And at first light, we would go down to the stream, big stream that was down there with the water supply. So we would go down with some 101st guys dressed like them to get water. Except when we got down there, we would change into our Superman suit stuff, the 101st stuff, and bagged. Those guys would get the water and go back, you know, to the perimeter, and we would move out across the river into, into the jungle. So we, we would make, you know, that clandestine insertion. First time. And really the only time that I ever had a chance to have to be within range of artillery. Southern first had set up a fire base out there to support them. So once we got inserted and had a conversation with the company first sergeant coming over and saying, all right, I want you guys to dig in around here. And my interpreter looked at me and said, we no dig. I said, tonight we do. We know, Dick. I said, look, they're probably going to get hit really hard tonight. Bullets are going to be coming from everywhere, and you guys look like the guys who are shooting at them. You need to be down in a hole or you're going to get shot from Inside the perimeter, we dig. So, okay, so they dug in. Sure enough, we got pounded that night. And, you know, the hole saved us, but that was cool. But I, you know, that evening I had met with the company commander and a fire support officer and a couple of lieutenants, and I kind of laid out for him, this, this is what we're going to do. And here's, here's what I need. I want artillery targets plotted on these areas right here, these coordinates. And I want them named Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I want to be able to just call up and say, From Monday right, 200 down, 100, fire for effect. And it was funny, you know, he was company commander and he looked at me like, wow, that sounds. I never heard of that before. That sounds cool. I said, when I need it, I need it. So we went in, crossed over, and we were doing. There was a hatchet force that was across the road on the other side. And we were, were supposed to make sure no one approached them from the side of the road we were on. So we had the targets plotted out the air and we heard some mortars that first night firing at the hatchet force. I could tell they were close to one of our targets, so I just called it in and they dropped, you know, some 105 rounds over there. And that shut the mortars up from that position. So we started doing that. But after about three days, the launch commander decided we needed to be resupplied ammunition and water. And Kobe said they were coming. And I said, no, we don't want to respond. I don't. Well, he needs your grid coordinates so they can just, they can hover and drop the supplies down through the camp. No, I'm not going to tell him where I am. So a few minutes, Covey came back and he said, if you're not going to tell him where you are, he's going to drop them at the last set of coordinates we had on you guys. No, when you do that, they're going to know right where we are. It was too late. I can see them coming. So sure enough, they dropped all that stuff down. So we ran down and grabbed most of it and hit it, took the water with us and moved out quickly. But they were, they were on us shortly after that. And, you know, things didn't go well. Artillery worked pretty good, but there were just too many of them. And now they knew where we were and we. Where I got that big insight about if you stop moving, they're going to surround you. We got into those rocks and I stopped us. I thought we could defend from there. Big mistake. They just circled us just like a big amoeba. When we were there. Supper. The only way we could get out was go up. So eventually got the fire suppressed enough they could drop mcguire riggs down for us and pull us out. So I sent bargewell and the other American and a couple of indig out on the first aircraft. I stayed there with the other two indig and just kind of battled it out. So we could fight in place and die. We could try to run and escape someplace and get away, or we could go up those ropes. I decided we'll go up the ropes. But we had nobody to give us fire support from the ground. So, man, they're just shooting away at us. As we were going up, I got a couple rounds in the radio. Kill killed my radio. Big chunk of shrapnel went into my survival radio that I was wearing right over my heart, buried itself in there. Killed the. Killed that radio. And, you know, both of them did. Got wounded as we were. We were going up and we're flying along 7,000ft, 100 miles an hour, oscillating back and forth. I could see my rope fraying on the edge of the floor of the helicopter. No radio, no way to call and say I'm developing a little problem up there. I couldn't tell him that the other guys were wanted. But we made it to a fire support base. And in the book, there's a picture in there of a helicopter coming in to a fire support base. And you can see three guys hanging on the end of ropes down below him. The guy that's the lowest on the rope is me, and the other two are hanging right above me. So what had happened is Bargewell and the. His little group came in first. These guys on the fire support. But they never seen anybody coming from that side of the border or hanging under a helicopter like that. So there was a guy there who had bought a brand new mini polaroid camera before he came over to Vietnam. He brought it with him. So he saw bargewell and his group, you know, come. He ran and got his camera, came back out in time to see me and my two guys coming in and took a picture of it. So they set us down, they got us in the helicopter and they started. Just as they started lifting off the ground, this guy comes running over holding his arm up in the air with something in it. I reached down and took it as we. As we lifted off. And it was a picture that he took as we were coming in, have no clue who he was, but he took an actual picture of us live coming in, hanging on those ropes. So that's pretty cool.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So still have it? Put it in the book.

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[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

But anyway, we got back. Good, good debriefing. One of the things that I had figured out by then was doing an after action review is not just to figure out what went well, what didn't go so well, what you might want to change. But it's psychologically, it gives me an opportunity. If I'm upset about something you did. I think you left me hanging out. You didn't have my six or whatever. It gives me a chance to bring that up and let's get it settled right here, get it off the chest. It gave me a chance to, you know, I could facilitate what was going on so you guys didn't go duke it out after a while. But we could get that resolved and get your stress level back down and, you know, we could move forward. And then we also did. These are the post training things we're going to do based on what we did out there. One of them in this case was why did we not have those stupid harnesses on to start with? I mean, you could wear Swiss. You could have it on, you could have it, you know, just wear it a little loose if you wanted to. And all you have to do is tighten the knot up and you could snap on that joker and go. But to try to put on a Swiss seat when you got bullets coming at you from every direction, then you're trying, you know, flat down on your back trying to get that thing on and you're trying to, you know, return fire. I mean, that's not easy. Why not put it on beforehand? I mean, you know, just little things like that that you can think of now. Let's go practice that. Let's implement that as a SOP. So we started doing things like that and it was pretty good until Dick Meadows came in and said, can Bargewell take over the team? Said, sure, no problem. He knows exactly what he's doing. So anyway.

[Unknown Host]

Where did you go from there?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

That's when I did the run on the beach with Dick Meadows the next morning and did the let's review all the people. And then he put me on this other super top secret mission to go into the Mygea Pass. And actually John Meyer had also been given that mission and they canceled it at the last minute. They gave it to me. I told the people in Saigon, when I went down for a briefing, I said, this is not going to work. I said, I know you think there's no one up on that ridge that's going to be protecting those convoys Going through there. I guarantee you there are people up there. Why do you think they're not up there? Well, we fly over there all the time and nobody shoots at us. I said, of course they're not going to shoot at you. They don't want you to know they're up there. But when you put a team up there, they're going to walk right into them. Here's my recommendation. Plan a target, thousand meters away on that ridgeline. Let's hit that target about, you know, the L4 is about 2 o' clock in the morning. While that's being hit, let's fly a huey at about 300ft. Lights out, full blast, coming across this little clearing that's on that ridge. I'll slide out of the helicopter, no reserve, because won't need it, too low. I'll just ease out. I'll be on the ground within a minute or so, pack it up, hide it. I'll move up there to the ridge. They'll never know I'm there. I'm one person. They're not going to find me. And worst case is, they do find me. And what do you lose? You lose one crazy SF guy. Not a whole team, not some helicopters trying to get him out. You know, I can go do that. It'll be a lot more secure and easier to do if you just let me go do it myself. Holy cow. I mean, they just went bananas. I was crazy. There's no way they were going to let me go out by myself, so. But that mission ended up getting canceled anyway.

[Unknown Host]

You volunteered for a singleton mission in Vietnam?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. I mean, it just looked to me like there were a lot of SOG missions where the mission was to go set on a ridgeline or go find the location of a battalion. Just go do something, nothing kinetic about it. Just sneak and peek and find out, get the information, get it back in, get out. That I could just go do. I mean, drop me out there in the middle of the night. Nobody's going to be expecting it. Helicopter comes across that low, nobody's gonna think you're gonna parachute in. It just screams across through there. They don't see it. It's dark. They hear it. They just don't know what happened. They know it didn't stop. And, you know, I just carried a survival radio. Not even carry the PRC 25, all that garbage. I don't need all that weight. I just need to get in there. I need to send you a signal when I is, I'm ready to come out. And, you know, if Things are too hot or too bad around that area. I'll start walking. You can pick me up somewhere else. And if you can't find me, you know, I'm walking toward the border. Might take me a while, but eventually I'll get there and met us. Meta said, no, you're crazy. I'm not putting you out there by yourself. He said, no. Camp Commander said, no. SOG Chief said, no, you can't do that. And then fate said, I'm going to activate RT dynamite. Everybody else has said no, but fate is about to say, yes, you are about to be activated, dude. So that's when I did the R and R mission.

[Unknown Host]

Holy shit. Let's go into it.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So, yeah, I mean, I felt I was. I was convinced I could just. I could move quieter, farther, more effectively. And with some missions, you know, it was just me. I didn't need a team with me because I wasn't going out there to make contact or to fight anybody. I was to be silent, hidden, collect the information I needed, and get out. So when I did go out, it wasn't all that silent, but still worked.

[Unknown Host]

How many times did you do that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Only got to do it the one time, but, you know, it ended up. I had to go. There were a bunch of people in trouble, and somebody needed to go get them and lead them out. So I did that.

[Unknown Host]

Can you be a little more descriptive?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I. I just come back from a mission, rough mission, and they were going to give me two days. Let your team have two days, take a break before we give you your next mission. So I decided I was going to leave camp, go downtown for a couple of days, because if I stayed in camp, somebody was going to find me and give me something to do. I was heading for the gate, heard a helicopter coming. Helicopter landed on our pad. A lot of activity going on around it. And one of the. One of the people there fumbling around with the helicopter, saw me walking toward the gate. He started yelling. I couldn't understand him, but. So I moved closer to him, and he ran over to me and he said, do you know how to rig? McGuire rigs to the floor of a helicopter so that we can use them. We've got an emergency going on. I said, sure, done that lots of times. I can rig that up. So I. I ran over. I had a. Had my car, 15, had a bandolier with me, set that against the condense container, jumped in the helicopter, started, you know, making all the appropriate ties and fastening it down, getting them rigged and ready to go. And then the helicopter started to move. Told a crew chief I'd say I'm still on here. And he said, sorry about that. We gotta go. We're in trouble. So he said, you just have to go with us. So, okay. I mean, I don't know what you're going to do or anything, but, yeah, I guess I'll go with you. I sat back and I just kind of started thinking about what was going on. And I had this one vision just started playing over and over in my mind, and it was that the helicopter in front of us got shot down. When we got there, the only way to get to the helicopter was to go down the McGuire Rig, drop the McGuire Rig and go down the rope. But it was like I was looking into a black hole. I couldn't see what was really going on. Anyway, I pulled a crew chief over and said, you know, it just crazy vision. You know, helicopter in front of us is shot down, and now we're there, and I think I might have to go down and do something. He said, you're crazy. I said, Yep. And about 10 minutes later, he pulled me over and he said, you're not going to believe this. They just shot down the middle of that helicopter in front of us. Okay, that's interesting. In my mind, I started thinking, I think RT dynamite might have just been activated. Somebody's going to have to go down there. So when we got there, the first helicopter that they shot down, it crashed and burned three. Three survivors. The pilot, the co pilot and NCO that was on there with him. The medevac got there, dropped a Maguire or a jungle penetrator down. They put the. The co pilot and the sergeant on the jungle penetrator. Medevac started pulling it up. It got hit, lost power, it went forward. And the jungle penetrator is just like a big grappling hook that you're setting on. So they were about 100ft in the air, and it got caught on a big limb. The cable snapped, and it was just like the medevac had been shot out of a slingshot or something. It just fired it right through the canopy and into a ravine. So when we got there, we circled around. I could see the helicopter was face down into a ravine, and the crew was still in it. You could see the fuel spilling out over them. I could see, you know, 40, 50 NVA coming up the ridge toward that. It was going to take them out, plus any, you know, a tracer, anything ignite that fuel, they were all going to burn, and they were so banged up and everything, they couldn't get out of the ship. So I told the pilot, circle around, hover, you know, close to that hole. And I was going to drop a Maguire rig and go down there. So I borrowed the crew chief's M16 and stepped out on the skid. We're about 400ft high in receiving fire. And McGuire went. Rig went down. It was 150ft long, but it was still up above the canopy. That was 150ft high. But I told a crew chief, get him to lower some, because I've got a. I'm going to go down. No, I didn't have any gloves or anything. Turned out to be a brand new nylon rope. And I thought, you know, if I squeeze really hard and I wrap my feet around it, I can slow it down enough. It's not going to burn that much. About 30ft down now, I realized the flaw in my plan. I couldn't squeeze it that hard. The rope had already turned red. It was just taking everything off both ends. I was bleeding, blood, running off my elbows, people shooting, shooting at me right on down. When I got to the McGuire rig, I was able to, you know, because it was pretty big, I was able to stop, but, you know, I was 20 or more feet up above the canopy at that point. And he was taking enough fire, he was going to leave. So I knew I needed to go ahead and just drop into the canopy before he carried me off. And I'd be too high to do that. So, you know, I dropped, went into the canopy, and I discovered it's really hard even in a jungle canopy to be able to grab a hold of something and hold onto it when you're falling through. So took me about 100ft or so, bouncing off limbs and things before I finally managed to hit with my stomach and kind of wrapped around a big limb. Got my breath and broke a couple ribs and things as I was falling through. No meat on my hands. Climbed down as soon as I got to the ground. Two NVAs standing there, so terminated them.

[Unknown Host]

How'd you do that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

That technique I was talking to you before, where I'd put five silhouettes at, and I just go full auto as I went down to the ground because I still had the M16 that I took from the crew chief. I'd lost one of the magazines, but I put another one in it. He'd given me a bandolier with five magazines. So I took those two out and then started moving toward the crew that was still trapped in the Helicopter. The pilot started shooting at me because he didn't know anybody else was down there, you know, where I was coming from. I could hear that little.38 popping as he was shooting at me. So I'm yelling at him and telling him, hey, I'm the rescue team. And finally he had to reload. And when he reload, I charged him. And, you know, he. Once he saw me, he was kind of in shock because he's looking at me and thinking, you're the one that needs to be rescued. You know, you're all bloody from head to toe and torn up and everything. But anyway, I managed to get all of them out of the aircraft and move them to a safe space. So if it exploded, you know, it wasn't going to get them. So then I had to go. There was a SOG team that the initial helicopter went out to try to pick some of the members up. So I went to where they were and I heard. I heard an American voice speaking kind of loud. So at that point I thought, well, they must not be captured. I mean, there's an American talking. I got a little closer and I could see the. The one zero, the team leader. So I yelled at him and, you know, told him I was. I was coming in, not to shoot. Tell these people not to shoot. He said, come on in. I kept with the. If I back up a minute, I kept telling the pilot of the other crew, I said, I'm going to get you out. You just need to do what I tell you. I will come back and get you. Don't move from where you are right now. I go up to the team. So I go in, and there's an Air Force lieutenant colonel standing there talking to the team leader, telling the team leader that he's in charge of the operation now. He's the senior man on the ground, and he's in charge. So I got there and heard him saying that. I said, you're not in charge. You're on the ground now. I'm the senior ground commander and I'm in charge. He said, you're a lieutenant and you are not in charge. And I said, you need to look around. Because all of a sudden, all the indig had turned their weapons toward him. They had figured out what was going on. I said, they are about to make you disappear and your body's never going to be found. You need to be quiet and do what I tell you. So he quietened down. I went down and got the. The two guys off the jungle penetrator, brought them up Use the radio, call for, for help. And told them I needed explosives. So a Marine CH46 came out, dropped 50 pound blocks of C4 and some fuses and fuse lighters, blasting caps. So I blew a big several trees down to create a hole in the canopy, got some gunships out, started working the gunships and eventually I got everybody up the jungle penetrator into the CH46. I got up, went up last and we flew away. So.

[Unknown Host]

Holy.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So that was.

[Unknown Host]

You had a premonition?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. And that was, that was a long day. I get back to camp and the camp commander is in there with some aviation colonel and they're upset about something. And I said, I'm back. And he's an aviation guy. Said, you didn't get everybody? I said, I got everybody that was there. You didn't get the crew Chief from the CH34, white crew chief? I got everybody that, you know, the pilot said was his, said, you didn't get the crew chief, you got to go back out and get him. The pilot didn't tell me that the crew chief on his helicopter was missing. The Air Force guys didn't tell me, you know, I'm still, I'm bleeding like a stuck pig. And I said, you need to go back out and get him. I need to get my hands treated first and then, you know, I'll go back out there. But we decided to wait and let me take some of my new team and go out there the next morning and get him. But came a storm that night. It was two days before I could go back out there, but I took my new team and went back out, went to the helicopter where the body was supposed to be. And sure enough, with all the rain, you could see his femur sticking up the wreckage on the ground, plus all the flies and the smell and everything. We got him. I was also supposed to blow up the Huey Medevac. So I got the rest of the C4 that I had left out there inside the aircraft packing the C4 and it. And here come the NVA again. So now I'm inside, bullets are starting to come in because I realized I was in the helicopter doing something and you know, they're hitting, it's hitting the C4, but you know, it's not going to bother the C4. I'm safe until I put the blasting cap in, you know. So got everything ready and decided, okay, this is it. Stick the blasting caps in, set the two fuse igniters on, jumped out and managed to climb up the ridge. I had put the team up on the bridge up above the helicopter, and as I was going up the bank, the NVA assaulted the helicopter. They thought I was still in there. And I got up on top and. And looking down, and they're standing next to the helicopter with the time fuse burning. Told my guys to get down 40 pounds of C4. Fortunately, it was down in that ridge. So most of the blast went linearly, you know, down the ravine, and then the rest of it went straight up, but it still hurt, you know, the blast. And then the rest of the NVA attacked. We had a big firefight for an hour or so, and finally we managed to withdraw using the gunships and stuff. Then it started pouring rain. We stayed out there another two days, and we came back in, and then the aviation guy flipped out because I blew the helicopter up. I said, you told me to do it. I told you to start. I didn't tell you to blow it up. I said, well, isn't a million little pieces along with body parts right now? So anyway, wow. I know that was a long story. But I did get to go out that one time initially by myself and do some things.

[Unknown Host]

Holy.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

When I told. When I first told the. The medevac pilot, I said, I. He said, where's the rescue man? And I said, it's me. I'm your rescue team. Yeah, but where are your rescue. I said, it's just me, you know, just. Just do what I tell you. I'll get you out of here. We can do this. And they would just really disappointed. There's one guy came in here to get us.

[Unknown Host]

Geez.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So anyway, I could have done, you know, some other missions where I didn't have to fight out there, you know, if I'd gone in alone.

[Unknown Host]

Did you like the fighting?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I. I mean, it was exciting, but I didn't have a problem with going in and not fighting if I could accomplish the mission. I thought we had missions on a fairly regular basis that came up. Just didn't need a team. You just needed somebody that could sneak around out there, gather the information we needed, and come out.

[Unknown Host]

Shit. Did the killing bother you?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

No. And I think what happened was on the very first mission, you know, I kept saying to myself, it's okay. I mean, this is war. They're bad guys. They're going to kill me if I don't kill them. And it's okay to kill them. It's okay to shoot at them. You know, I got to remember that. And I kept saying that over and over. I have to do this it's okay. And when that first one jumped up and shot at me, then, you know, I didn't think about that anymore. I just started, you know, defending and shooting back.

[Unknown Host]

Did the killing ever affect you as time went on?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

How so?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I, you know, just the fact that you had to do it. And if you're over there at the wall and you're shooting at me, that doesn't bother me. I can, you know, shooting back at you doesn't bother me if you're standing there and you're not shooting at me. To just take you out without you realizing it, like some of the trackers that I did with the.22, you know, that I had to think more about, you know, particularly afterwards, that I would just do that. There are also some times where I had to take people out really up close. That K bar that you have over there, I found. I started carrying that and I found really close quarters stuff, you know, that was quick and easy. You know, it's. It's about as up close and personal as you can get.

[Unknown Host]

How would you do that.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Into the. In through the side of the neck? If you go in straight in right there and go out, you'll get the jugular, you'll get the carotid, and it's over. It's over in a minute. I mean, it's. It's unreal how fast you bleed out like that. And you can do that quietly. And I think I mentioned to you before that those are some of the things that I talk to special ops guys about. Not talk to, you know, law enforcement about that. But with the special ops guys, if you have to do things quietly, you don't have night vision. You. You don't have all your electronics. There are ways to get right up next to someone if you need to do it quietly.

[Unknown Host]

How many times do you think you had to do that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Four or five. And just. Yeah. And, you know, sometimes it's quiet, sometimes it's not. First time I did it, you know, I was just, you know, fighting for my life. And, you know, I was about to lose, but I needed.

[Unknown Host]

How were you about to lose?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Because a friend, mafia showed up. I mean, I'm on the ground with this guy, and his friend showed up and saw us down there and realized that, you know, what was going on, that I was a bad guy and had his friend. So I had to deal with his friend and then, you know, take care of him. I had to shoot him, but just there are a few times where I just got caught up in a I'm going to take a prisoner. I'm going to get this guy and take him back in. And for whatever reason, wasn't able to do it. So, yeah, I changed to the K bar. I don't know about midways, I guess I tried a SOG knife. I did. For me, it was. It just felt too small. If I. Because I. I wanted something that if I wanted to cut down a, you know, a limb for a pole or to do something with, I wanted to have enough weight that I could hack through it or a piece of cane. But I also wanted something big and strong enough that if I pushed it hard, it was going to go. Particularly, you know, when you get around the soft tissue in the neck and it goes fast. And a K bar is a big enough blade that when it goes in, it's hard to miss one of the arteries in there. You could get in quickly. But I am a nice guy, but sometimes you have to do things.

[Unknown Host]

Does that stick with you?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yes. Yeah, there are some things that you just. You can't unsee, you can't undo, you can't get rid of. You can. You can start to deal with it. But it's so far, it's always been there and it's not where I like to spend a lot of time.

[Unknown Host]

When we were talking to John about you before the interview, he had mentioned that your only regret was not closing your mouth when you killed people, people up close.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Well, I think. I think what happens or happened was I became so focused on what I was doing. I mean, it's life or death. It's a fraction of a second here. You got to do something. And I was so focused on doing the termination thing that for some reason my mouth would be open. I don't know if I was talking about their ancestors or what, but if you're using a cable arm, you, you're. And you're up that close, you're going to get hit with a rush of blood. And if you got your mouth open, you're going to get a mouth full of blood. There are at least two or three occasions where I put a five or six round burst into somebody's face right up close to them when I'm right there with them, and their head just explode. Brain matter, tissue, bone, everything's gonna hit you, you're gonna be covered with it. And the blood, if you got your mouth open, it's going into your mouth too. And I've had, you know, that happen on a few occasions because I didn't have my mouth closed. But.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, there are not a lot of people out there that have that experience.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Most people are probably smarter than me. They didn't get themselves into that situation.

[Unknown Host]

You know when you're looking at taking somebody out that close and you're thinking about it, I mean, how the hell do you get that fucking close to.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Him.

[Unknown Host]

And think about it, exactly what you're going to do?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah, well, the opportunity, you know, presents itself. It's. It's not in most cases, it's not that that's what I start out to do. Unless. Unless it's dark and I'm sneaking up on you because I need to take you out without making any noise. Then I'm. I'm thinking mostly about how do I get from where I am to where you are without you knowing I'm coming and knowing that I'm there. And, you know, what I'm trying to do is get from here over there. And now I'm next to you. You don't know I'm next to you. And you're going to feel a lot, a sting on the side of your neck. You're going to feel warm blood go out and everything's going to fade to black. And your knees are going to start to crumple and I'll catch you as you're going down so you don't make noise. But it's over very quickly. But I'm spending most of my energy and thought process about how do I get to you? I've got to get over there without you knowing that I'm there. If I'm going to do something like that and be quiet and not discovered. So there are things that I want to do. Depending on the terrain, I may do a distraction. I may toss something over another direction for you to hear, just to redirect your attention for some second. While I can get closer to you. Depends on how much I know about what the terrain's like. Is it raining? Has it been raining? I mean, if it's raining, I'm going to be all over you. I don't have to work hard to get close to you. If it's not raining and everything's really quiet, I have to be very careful because I can't see the ground. And I'm going to step on something. Twig's going to break or something, and you're going to hear it. And one thing is if I've got a pebble, if I've got something that if I do break or twig here, I can launch that little pebble off to the other side of you over there. So you hear that louder than you heard this. And now you will, you will turn that way and that gives me a chance to get closer.

[Unknown Host]

Did you come up with that? You are a master in that case, right?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

That's what my friends.

[Unknown Host]

I can argue that.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

But, you know, it just. This is still really going on topic, but, but how you walk. Typically we put our heels down first and then the rest of the foot comes down. But what I had read about decades ago was that American Indians slipping up on their prey, whether it was another Indian tribe or animal, whatever, is that they went toe first. If I go this way and I step on a trig, a twig, it's like there's a little amplifier there and it's throwing the sound out in that direction. If I step on it and break it with my toe, the sound's coming back this way so you don't hear it as much. So I used to have my, my little guys toe down, toe first. Toe first. Let's practice that toe first and you'll be quieter. I, I had a thing that I call invisibility. I used that hand signal. If I did that, go invisible, be invisible right now, be invisible. Nobody can hear you, nobody can smell you, nobody can, you know, know anything about where you are, change how you walk. And we started changing how we move through the woods. I don't know if you hunt deer or not, but if, if you watch a deer, he's the hardest to see when he's coming directly at you until he stops. And when he stops, what he, he screws up with is he starts looking right and left. And when he starts moving his head, you'll see it because the different color in the skin and any movement like that, you'll see horizontal movement is much easier to see than vertical movement. So instead of the point man walking through the jungle, you know, moving his weapon and twisting his body back and forth so he thinks he's going to be ready to fire. You know, if he encounters somebody that's just giving him away. Don't move the weapon. Scan your eye. Your eyes are not. You won't see him. The eyes move. Keep your weapon here because you don't know if he's going to be over there or over here. So if you do like this now he's. But he's actually over there. By the time you can get back around to him, you, death split the distance. So, so teaching, teaching them how not only for the fort man to do that move the whole Team straight. You start zigzagging, you're easy to see as you're coming. So I started teaching them all kinds of invisibility. No soap, nothing that you can smell for the last three days before we go out. I don't want them to smell us when we're out. They'll smell the soap because they're not used to soap. And soap just stands out when you go out there. In fact, they even got to the point where I started making them eat North Vietnamese type food. Because I told them if, if we're out there and we're out there four or five days, eventually you're going to have to poop. And when you poop, I want it to smell like NVA poop. And if they find it, I want them to say, oh, that's, that's one of us sweat. My. My father told me when I was a little kid one time, there's a, a dog, strange dog, and the dog was growling at me. And, you know, my father went over and petted him and I said, now it's just okay. Why is he growling at me? And he's not growling at you? My father said, he knows you're afraid of him. How does he know that? He just does. He knows you're afraid of him and he's intimidating you. He knows I'm not afraid of him. It took me, you know, a couple of decades to figure out what was going on. When you all sweat is not the same. You go out and do some exercise or it's hot in here and you sweat. Yeah, sweat smells. If you sweat because of fear, fear sweat smells very different. It's much stronger and it smells different. So if you're laying in an ambush site waiting to ambush me, and you know when you ambush a SOG team, those jokers are coming after you. You're laying there sweating with fear sweat. I'll smell you more than one occasion. I've just stopped the team stop. You know, they're there. I can smell them laying up there in the woods. I can smell the sweat. Dogs can smell the difference between fear sweat and normal sweat. So it's easy for them to tell that you're afraid of them. So they want you to relax. I want you to your poop to smell like NVA poop. I don't want any soap or anything like that on you that people can, that the NVA can smell. So that's all part of being invisible. Jump up and down. Nothing should make a sound on you when you jump up and down. You should have nothing on you that's bright. All the buckles and metal things on your harness need to be painted black or wrapped in black friction tape so they don't shine. You need to. To be camouflaged. All the stuff counts. Take pictures of them and say, look, what does this look like? That looks like Ben laying on the ground because you can see all the buckles on it, or you can see he's got two yellow smokes on him. The bottom of the yellow smoke is white. Color is yellow. It's got kind of a light white band around the thing. You can't have that. It makes you show up. And how you walk, how you approach people is all part of being invisible, human in the daylight and ways to do that, maybe giving you more than you want to know. But.

[Unknown Host]

You know, something I didn't say at the beginning is the Vietnam generation is what inspired me to go into the SEAL teams. And hearing you talk, I'm just realizing so many of our TTPS and SOPs and all that kind of stuff came came from. From you guys. Pretty surreal for me.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I think on a lot of it did. Came, you know, from SOG guys because of the intensity of the missions and where we were going. If you're going to survive, there are things you had to do. And we learned things. You know, I. I felt stupid when I realized that some of the people who came after me in 70 started using the earplugs that we use on the range when they'd get on a helicopter. Because you ride on the helicopter, unprotected ears, it'll be two hours plus when you get off of that thing before you get your full hearing back. So you do a security stop, and you're out there trying to listen and see if you hear anybody moving. You can't hear yet. And I discovered that for me, when I saw a headset hanging in the helicopter. We were on the way out, I saw a headset, and I asked a crew chap, can I use that? And he said, sure. So I got the headset, I put it on, and then discovered I used to watch the door gunners. They're sitting there and we're going out and their heads bouncing up and down. And I. I thought, wow, it's rough riding on the outside where the door gunners are. I put that headset on, and I thought, he's listening to Credence Clearwater Revival. You know, their head's moving with the beat of stupid. The pilots have got to the radio station on. I mean, I didn't Know that. And then, then I realized that when I got off the helicopter I could still hear. But later on, some guys realized, just pop the earplugs in before you get on the aircraft. When you get off, pop them out, put them in your pocket, you can hear. So there are a lot of things like that that people discover, you know, kind of irritated me that I didn't think of something that simple, that obvious. But there are a lot of things you can do.

[Unknown Host]

Did you have any personal pre mission rituals or anything that you would do before you go out on an op? Some guys pray, some guys write a letter, some guys listen to music. Some guys. I used to watch this video of terrorists stripping gear out of the guys from Red Wings. They would video it. They would video stripping our Kia of their rifles, their helmet, their night vision, their IDs, their magazines, everything. I used to watch that before every op. Did you do anything?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Some of mine was mental. I. And I'll just start with once I got on the aircraft, while we were waiting to take off, you know, I'd always say a prayer. I. Let me preface this with I can't carry a tune in a bucket. You know, singing, you would not. You'd think it was a dying calf in a hailstorm or something if I tried to sing. But mentally, you know, I can't, you know, so I would always do Amazing Grace and, and then, you know, I may mix some other little things in with it as then I transition over to the mission focus. What do I have to do when the countdown starts? What do I have to do? What am I looking for? What's the plan? Who's going first? Which way are you going? What do I need to do with the team? I'm reviewing the plan. Then I may throw a little more Amazing Grace in there just before we get there. And then, then it's back to the box breathing. So by the time I'm, by the time I get out on the skid, I've already been doing it for a while. But doing the box breathing, because that will relax your arteries, it has an impact on you vagus nerve, it calms you down. Because I know that when we get there, if we engage right away, all of that stuff's coming at me and I'm standing out on a skid because I'm getting ready to jump off and I've got to think about the other things that we're going to do. Not those bullets coming at me, bullets, at least to me, bullets can be a real distractor. You hear Those things cracking by you, it can distract you from what you're supposed to do. And you. I had to find a way to turn loose of the bullets and see what's going on, see the battle space, know what I needed to change, make sure. I was going to tell you guys what the difference was. I was going to give you the signals and same, you know, on the ground once you make contact. Disadvantage we had was then you couldn't hear car 15 so loud. AK47s are so loud and you're so close to each other and I'm. You're there and I'm trying to tell you, go left, you can't hear what I'm saying. Not that even this close with all the car 15s and everything, firing grenades, going off, rockets coming at you, you know, and I'm pointing, you know, I'm having to do, you know, hand signals and stuff to get people to move. And then once you drop down out of sight, then, you know, I'm trying to remember, you went there, he went there, he went over there. And telling all of my people this, if you get hit, and I'd make them practice, if you get hit, start yelling, hit. I need to know someone's hit. I need to know a general direction of where they are. If you're hit, I will come get you, but I need to know the vicinity to look for when I come over there. So start yelling hit. I know you're alive and I can eventually find where you are and I will get you. But if you don't yell, I don't know where you went down. I don't know that you've even been hit. So there are things like that just making them yell, hit, hit, hit. Because they could say that close enough that I could understand it. And loud and just practicing those things, it made them more confident that if something happened to them that I would get them. And they saw it on different occasions where I snatched somebody up and I made sure we got him on the helicopter. And, you know, the word spreads. You know, Thompson might be a nutcase, but he'll put you on an Alicante anyway.

[Unknown Host]

How many friends did you lose over there?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I have list 34.

[Unknown Host]

34.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And I didn't lose, you know, Bargewell over there, but I put him on the list when he passed away a few years ago. Seven years ago.

[Unknown Host]

You know, the reason I'm asking is there's a lot of people that struggle with lost friends in combat.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And that that's not how many people were killed. That was Just the guys I knew, and we were either on the same team together or we knew, like, till, you know, Tilt would have been on my list, you know, because I. I knew him well. Lynn Black would have been on my list. So it's not a list you want to be on, obviously, but it was. There were a lot of other people who were killed. I just didn't know them.

[Unknown Host]

How did you compartmentalize that in the middle of it?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Difficult, you know, trying to. Trying to realize that I couldn't do anything about it. They were gone. I could remember them, could make sure, you know, they wasn't forgotten. I couldn't bring them back. In some cases, I could, you know, contact their family, you know, later. It's just very difficult. And I think. I think at times, in some cases, it probably influenced my thinking of just let me go by myself. That way I don't have to worry about losing you.

[Unknown Host]

Makes sense.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

In fact, you know, if you read the book, when you get in there, you'll see that, you know, I would keep having that discussion with Meadows where I wanted to go alone. You know, I would use. When he would just deny that I'd finally come back and say, well, at least I'll just be the only American on the team. I'll take the little guys. I'll be the only American. Don't put another American on a team with me. You know, so he. He would do that most of the time. And I think some of that was influenced by, you know, I don't. I don't want to lose you.

[Unknown Host]

Yes.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So there's just so many. And John and I've had this conversation recently is. It's almost like now, today. It's almost like being back in soc.

[Unknown Host]

How so?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Every day, there's. Every. Every day, there's a list that comes out on the phone. So we. We have a lady, Bonnie Cooper, who's worked for the Special Ops association in various ways, particularly the website, but she monitors SF and particularly SOG people obituaries. And I told her before, honey, take a break. You know, try not to let so many people go away like that. I mean, it's like every few days, you're seeing somebody's name, you know, because we're in that age group now.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, I can relate. With us, it's suicide.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. And, you know, then, you know, it's. I can. I think I can understand why they do it, what they. What's going on. But you. I mean, I got people I talk to every day, and you know what I'M trying to do is prevent that.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, you have a PhD in psychology. Everybody's trying to get to the bottom of this. And I've had so many friends that have killed themselves, I just, I can't even count them all. I quit counting. You know, I think. And you know about the struggles with addictions and booze and opiates and everything, you know, and I think it just takes one second.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

It does, you know, and there's there, you know, there's. There's some decisions that you can't take back. I, I think about it sometimes and share sometimes. You know, when I was standing on the hill, the skill of the helicopter holding onto that. That rope. Once I stepped off, that decision was made and there's no change in it. I was on the rope and on my way down, you know, that there was no opportunity to say, I don't think I want to do this. And that decision to pull the trigger, do whatever it is that you're going to do once you make it, and you can make it very fast. I mean, I, you know, I, I talked to a guy who had decided, this is it. I'm going to hang myself. And he went into his bedroom and tied a rope up, climbed up on a stool and was getting ready to put the noose around his neck. And his little daughter walked in. What are you doing, dad? And you know, he came back down if she had been a few seconds later. And it. And it's hard to tell sometimes where people are. They can, they can change into that mode and make that decision so quickly.

[Unknown Host]

How do you honor your friends that have been killed or taken their own lives?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Well, for 50 years or so, I run in their memory. Well, when I was active doing Ironman, I would, you know, today's swim is for these people. The runs for this, the bikes for that, and still do that on the. What I call the angel versa. Versary of their death. So on, on that day, you know, we do the. The names of all the people and. And then I let that person, person, whoever's angel versa is. I let them lead the run. And you know, so. And I post it and put it out on social media so that, you know, people remember. Been doing that. And you'll see in the back of the book and in the book you'll see every month there's a section in there. Here the guys are those 34. Here are the ones that died this month. You know, my friends. And even though there are a lot of other people that died, I've Got them in there at the end. Well, every day when. When I post, I've got the list of the 34. So I post all of them, post the pictures, and then highlight the one that died that day. And suddenly would sog people. Sometimes it's three or four that died that day. Maybe the whole team got wiped out. And, you know, their parents are gonna. Your parents would be over 100 years old, you know, so they're not there, but, you know, they still have, you know, brothers, sisters, wives, whatever. Some of them. I get a message every once in a while. But I also have a group of, you know, Afghan and. And you know, that. That whole group of people, I've got about 35 of those. So I. I interact with their families, but, you know, I post them on the days that they died.

[Unknown Host]

So, I mean, it's a. There's a saga operator who's been through this a long time ago and, and have navigated your way through it up to this point. What advice do you have for my generation who's dealing with this? How do you move past it?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Some of it is. I tried to put some principles, solid principles in. In the book, the moving forward. I mean, in the book, it's related initially to combat, but there's still combat. When you're not in combat, things happen. You got to keep moving forward. You got to do it. And once you stop, all kind of things happen. And. And moving forward is moving forward mentally as well as physically. And like. Like old guys, like John, you know, he's an old guy. We have to kind of watch each other and take care of each other and contact. And I was talking to a teammate of mine earlier this week, and he was telling me he's afraid to call people now. You know, our sagas. He said, I'm afraid to call them. I'm afraid they won't answer. I'm afraid I'm going to get a family member or something and they're going to tell me, you know, he's gone. But you got to keep. You got to keep checking. You keep moving forward and keep remembering. In the book, it talks about people die. People die twice. The first time they die is when their heart stops. The second time they die is when people stop saying their name. So that's why I use the list. I go down that list and say it. Their families. And then particularly, you know, the. Your group, their families are still alive. Their parents are still around. And, you know, I get emails from them all the time saying, thank you. You know, so it's not easy. But applying some of those principles like that and just you got them, you can't bring them back. You got to keep moving forward. And sometimes you think about, like Bargewell, for example, remembering that all of God's angels don't sing in the choir. Some of them are warriors. Figure. I figure Barge, well, worked himself up pretty high into the warrior group. Some, you know, so some of us are going to end up there, I think. And, you know, that's good. And, you know, at some point, you know, most of us will see each other again, hopefully in the right place. So I'm with you.

[Unknown Host]

If we haven't talked about it yet, what mission in SOG sticks out more.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Than all the rest of them for me. Mission I went on, a real contender for that would be the one where had the woman on the radio. The gunfight went on so long, almost 24 hours, and just one thing after another. I mean, in that mission, after, you know, all the lights coming, the weather had socked us in. I couldn't get air support in, so we had to use something called combat sky spots. You know, the F4 is coming by. He's gonna. He's gonna drop a bomb just based on the radar saying you're in the right place. And, you know, so working with that, you know, the first one he dropped was like 3,000 thousand meters off. And then. But, you know, we worked. So we had to work through all of that. And then, you know, we were in contact. Daylight and we're in contact. And I. I saw in the book, I just call it the Grim Reaper coming in. You know, I think the devil showed up and said, now I'm coming for you. So some discussion back and forth like that and got to the point where we were being overrun. And, you know, I called a com CBU in right on top of our position. I just said, if you guys are going to overrun us, I'm going to take as many of you with us as I can. So I had Covey find a plane that had cbu. And so we're in this little circle, this size. You know, A canister of CBU has like 250, you know, grenades in it with explosives in it that come raining down. So out of the 250, 15 of them landed either inside this perimeter or just outside 15 of them and, you know, explosions everywhere, people screaming, all this kind of stuff. And I saw some of them hit, and I thought it hit, but I didn't hear it explode. I must be dead. I'm still seeing itself, but I must be dead. And then I realized, yeah, I'm not dead. They didn't go off.

[Unknown Host]

Wow.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

So I obviously got some help from above. You can't have 15 duds all been in the same place at the same time.

[Unknown Host]

Holy.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And not go off. You just can't do that. That's not going to happen without some divine intervention. So the old, the whole image came back again and he's just shaking his head and walking off into the vegetation. It was like, I thought I would get you, but I didn't. We go, we're trying to fight our way down. We get ambushed trying to go toward the lz. We managed to survive that and get through it. We got down to the extraction LZ and my point man, you know, stopped us. I went up to see why he stopped us and he looked at me and he said, bomb. What bomb? And I looked out at the LZ over on the left side of it. Sticking up out of the mud was a 500 pound bomb, unexploded. That's the one that we didn't hear explode last night. When we were trying to adjust them, it went into our landing zone. Now there's a 500 pound bomb sitting there. That's the only place we can get out. The NVA don't know it's there and we're going to be in a firefight with them and if somebody hits it, it's going to take all of us out and whatever aircraft were coming in to get us. So we got a real problem here to deal with that. So I got my old covey and had him put the word out, don't put any ordinance on that side of the LZ when you're trying to help us. And so finally we're bringing the aircraft in, I'm out, I'm having to stand up with a VS17 panel, bringing the aircraft in, trying to get them to where I wanted. Got down to the last aircraft and I'm trying to throw the last people up there and that's where I hear the loud drop. Everything went silent and there's booming voice that says drop. I just got to my knees and when I did a stream of machine gun bullets, RPG bullets came across and cut a hole that big side of the helicopter, you know where I was.

[Unknown Host]

So another permanent issue.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I said, yeah, I'm getting a lot of help to try to get me out of this. And so finally got the last. Through the last guy up on the helicopter and off we went. Thought, man, that was a long mission.

[Unknown Host]

As a team leader, when you're calling air power in on yourself to take you and as many of them as you possibly can, is that a team decision or is that a personal decision?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

In my case, you know, I, I told Bruce, who was acting as my assistant, I told him, the other American, this is what I'm doing because I mean, they're coming across us. I mean, we got a few seconds to make a decision. Get down, get all the team members down because it's coming. And I told Cubby, you make, have them make one pass, put the CBU on top of us. If I don't come right back up on, on the radio, then have him make the second pass, but listen for me, because if I come back up saying I'm still here, he's going, don't let him put another one on us. We didn't have to use the second.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Did you support.

[Unknown Host]

Hamburger Hill?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

No, no. Oh, oh, I, no, I'm, I'm thinking support in another way. Yes, there was, there was NBA division that was being moved around that they were going to bring up there and just crush the 101st. And I was assigned a mission to go find them and stop them. So I figure with six people, how hard can it be to find 10,000 people in a group so surely I can find them. But they didn't cooperate. Well, that's when they shot the helicopter down. I was in, broke my back, some ribs and one of my guys got in my helicopter, shot through the thigh. I got them and finally got them into bomb crater and spent most of the day there fighting and putting in airstrikes and eventually got out. And they said, you got to go back tomorrow morning. We don't have, we don't have the division. What's left of the division, which we figured was down to about 7,000. We don't have them pinpointed enough for the B52 strike. We need you to go back in and get some more data. Don't want they, they put pistol belts around me with a piece of wood behind it and a little pad. I didn't carry my rucksack because I couldn't, I couldn't lift any weight like that and went back out there, but I got the coordinates, gave it to the B52s. That evening they came in and wiped the rest of them out. And they dropped 660500 pound bombs in that little rectangle I gave them. Oh, and we mentioned my grandson, grandson in law at lunch, his father's. No, his mother's father flew B52s in Vietnam. Interesting guy to talk to. And at one point, we thought we had pinpointed the date that he might have actually flown that mission that came in and took these guys out. But he was flying a different mission, but that would have been cool.

[Unknown Host]

Wow. What was the final op?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

The final one? There it came right after. Shortly after that. That one we were talking about. There was a little one. We went and knocked out a underwater bridge. We couldn't figure out how they kept getting the trucks on down the trail. They were going off the trail under the canopy, and they had built a bridge that was just below the water so you couldn't see it. They were driving across it and coming back on the road. And they still work on this bridge that you could see, but we keep bombing that, but somehow they were still getting across. So we went out, we took that out, dropped a bridge. On a different mission right in there, I. You know, the one where we were going to drop the big bridge, I had. I had to crawl on my hands and knees across an open field to get to where I could really see the supports and things on the bridge. There was a bush out in the center of the field, about that high, so if I peek my head up a little bit in the grass, I. I could see the bush. So I used that to navigate. Crawled under it, went about 10 meters, and then caught on fire. That bush was covered with big fire ants, and they got all over. I had to strip out there in the middle of the field, you know, thinking, how many NVA are on that bridge, are going to go across that bridge? When I look, and out here almost naked, you know, and my team, they don't know what's going on. They're back there in the edge of the wood line thinking, what is he doing? He's taking his clothes off out there in the middle of the field. Oh, I mean, I almost died from that.

[Unknown Host]

Okay.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I mean, because we didn't. You know, we didn't care. Antihistamine with us. I was so loaded with all their venom. Yeah, there were. There's two or three short ones like that toward the end. And then, you know, the commander plucked me out.

[Unknown Host]

They plucked you out?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Pull me. Pull me off the team and say, I'm gonna move you into operations here for a while.

[Unknown Host]

Did you want to do that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

No. And I didn't want to work for him either, so. So I. Because I had. My plan was to extend for six months, but after working for him for a while, I decided no. I'M not going to do that. I'll go ahead, rotate back to the States, you know, give him six months or so to go away and. And then I'll come back and have a new commander polish my skills up for six or eight months and then come back and be better. So. But then I didn't get a chance to come back either. So.

[Unknown Host]

Did you get addicted to the adrenaline, the killing?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Oh, yeah.

[Unknown Host]

The combat, yes. How did you.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

And that's it. I mean, that's a real issue because that happens to special ops guys. You get so addicted to their adrenaline. Finding something else that'll give you the adrenaline rush. That's not. Maybe not quite as dangerous in my case. One of the things was, you know, free fall. Halo, particularly if you can burn it on down a little closer than what you're supposed to do. And I was. I was in a situation where, you know, I put the HALO team together. I was the leader of the HALO team, and, you know, I could do just about anything I wanted to. So I could. I could look at the terrain and see this little tiny opening on a ridgeline there in the mountains and say, I wonder if I could hit that at 2 o' clock in the morning and land right in that little opening, put Ranger students out there on their back holding the flashlight up with a red filter on it in the shape of a T or whatever letter I wanted and see if I can get in there. So I was doing, you know, a lot of different things like that that would give you a rush. And I was also very fortunate that, you know, when I. When I came back from sog, I went to the Rangers and everybody had to have combat experience to be there as one of the instructors. So, you know, I had 40 guys there that were all talking with each other and helping each other, and everybody kind of understood about combat. They didn't know I'd been in with sog, but still, people were shooting at them, too. So we had. We had a support group there, and we were doing things that could give you adrenaline or adrenaline rush, so that helped.

[Unknown Host]

Well, let's take a quick break. When we come back, we'll talk about what it was like coming home.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Okay.

[John Stryker Meyer]

All right, Dick, we're back from the break, and, you know, I'd like to.

[Unknown Host]

Document what it was like for you not in the military, but what was. What was it like for you coming home from Vietnam, seeing how Americans were acting towards veterans? And I want to cover this.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I was not happy. You know, it started as I was coming through the airport and seeing that, you know, people in general were not reacting favorably toward, you know, the soldiers coming home. I think in my case, just coming through the airport, you know, I had my beret on, so that was kind of like a force factor that was just. People were getting out of the way. They just let me through. They didn't want to get close to me. And the ones that yell something were always, you know, at a distance, but it was there. And like I mentioned earlier, I think I had friends that had been friends at one point, but kind of went away because of war. And some of them never came back. In terms of coming back and being a friend, I mean, they just, once they separated from me, they just stayed that way, you know, because I stayed in the military. So I was disappointed with that. I think staying in the military helped me. It did because I was around, obviously, people who believed in being in the military. Military went through a lot of changes, you know, going forward, because once you stopped the draft, then getting people in, it really changed the people who were coming in. But the general attitude, I mean, it still out there. When I got out of the military and started the consulting company, I didn't tell people I'd been in the military. Clients. I never mentioned the military. Really?

[Unknown Host]

What the hell do you think you've been doing for the last 20 years?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Being a consultant, going to school, doing whatever. But, you know, the military just had a bad name. And if I mentioned I'd been in the military, it's interesting. One of a client that I had for years started out with. They flew me out to meet with the executive team before they hired me. So I'm talking to them, and the CEO looked up at me and he said, what are you going to tell me about how to be a CEO and run this? What do you know? And he knew that I had been in the army because he had hired somebody that knew me that had been in the army. And he said, all you know how to do is tell people what to do, to yell at them. I don't know how you're going to help me out at all. And I said, well, you have people in the organization, and when you have people in the organization, there are certain difficulties and problems that will come up. Just because you have people, doesn't matter who the people are or what they are. And I know how to help with those types of problems. And it's not yelling at people. It's not doing anything like that. Not being a dictator, that's not my philosophy. I don't believe that that's the way to be a leader. And you know, I'm going to be working with you to see what's going on, help you find solutions that will work with your people. So we talked like that a little bit and he met with his team for about 20 minutes and called me back in and said, okay, let's get started. And worked for him for years until somebody else bought the company. So. But I just didn't tell people. But once 911 happened. Yeah, tell people you're in the military, that's a good thing. Oh yeah. Appreciate your service. I mean, just.

[Unknown Host]

You didn't get that until after 9 11. I'm sorry you didn't experience that until.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I mean, there, there were people who I knew or had known or grown up around older people who would say, you know, thank you for the service and things like that, but people who hadn't known me before find out I was in the military. It wasn't necessarily, you know, congratulations or thank you or anything for a long time. Just we had a, we had a bad reputation because, you know, because of Vietnam. But then, you know, because of going to the all volunteer army, you know, that was a disaster. Do you want to go to jail or you want to join the army? Oh, I'll join the Army. You know, I can put you in jail with drugs use, or you can join the army, I'll go in the Army. And you know, it was just different. But 9 11, all of a sudden.

[Unknown Host]

It became a punishment instead of an act of service.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah. And everybody wasn't like that. But a lot of the people I ran into were. And I would, you may have already asked John about that, but I, I would just see what most vets say, the Vietnam vets say, when did it change? And there, there are Vietnam vets out there right now that are still angry, very angry. And if you try to tell them, you know, thank you for your service, I mean, it'll bite your head off. Because they're so angry about, you know, why didn't you tell me that 50 years ago? Yeah, it's, it's worked out, you know, for me. I think I've been very fortunate.

[Unknown Host]

So do you carry any animosity from that?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I hate that it happened. I think we screwed up Vietnam royally. I think there are a lot of things we could have done to make it better. I don't think we as soldiers, I don't think we went over and did the kinds of things that most people thought we were doing. I don't think we were running around killing women and babies and doing things like, I'm sure some got, you know, killed. It's war and, you know, shrapnel and bombs and things, bullets. They don't care if somebody gets in the way of it is going to hit them. And it's. It's hard to have a war and not have someone, you know, killed or wounded.

[Unknown Host]

That's innocent.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

What prompted you to get your Ph.D. in psychology?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Psychology came about because as I. As I watched what was happening on the battlefield and trying to understand, like, with my indigenous team leaders, they'd been going out on SOG missions, you know, for two years or so, and now they're going out with me for a year, and when I leave, they're going to go out with the next team leader for why would they do that? I mean, some of These guys were 50% scar tissue. Why would they keep going out and getting shot up or killed on a regular? We paid them, but it wasn't enough money to make it, you know, worth getting killed for or. Or mangled like a lot of them did. And then why would the Americans go out, the operators, why would they go out and do this? Why not go to a regular unit or why not come to SOG and. And go to a staff job and not go across the fence? The addiction, and it was dangerous to do that. Yeah, once. Once you got out there and survived it a time or two, yeah, you could start to get addicted to it. And, you know, there are cases that I talk about in the book where I could see they were addicted to it.

[Unknown Host]

How could you tell?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Well, my. My roommates, you know, we were, for the most part, put in. In rooms with, you know, two people to a room in the recon company. And my roommate came back from a mission, and he. He told me that, wow, they thought they were going to get me this time. They thought they were. I outsmarted those guys and, you know, so they. They're not as good as they think they are. I said, dennis, they are good, you know, and if they almost got you, you need to be careful. You need to think about it. And then he came back to me a couple of missions. Well, before he came back, a couple missions later, I woke up, you know, in the middle of the night, because I just. I could feel somebody looking at me. And I woke up, and Dennis is standing right there, lights out, looking down at me, my car, 15 hanging on the wall right next to me. I grabbed that, you know, and I was ready to Shoot him. And I realized it was him. Dennis, what are you doing? Said, nothing. I was just thinking. And he wouldn't talk about it. He got back to bed, went to bed. And then he wanted to talk because he was getting ready to go out on another mission. And he said, I don't have a good feeling about this one. I said, I thought you felt like you were doing pretty well. He said, there's something about this one. I don't know what it is. I can't shake it. I just feel like I'm not coming back from this one. And we chatted about that feeling. And I told him, just my thought, talking to you, it's not over to. It's over. And I don't know where that's coming from. I'm just telling you, if I were you, first of all, I wouldn't go on the mission. I would go turn it down. I know you're not going to do that, but that's what you should do. But if you go, just keep in mind, it's not over until it's over. You know, be very careful, you know, very careful. Not realizing that his assistant team leader was talking, you know, to my buddy, the same thing. He said, you know, I think the captain is. Is really good. He's a really good operator and team leader, but I'm scared. There's something about this mission. I'm scared. And so we were having these two separate conversations, and Bruce didn't know that I was talking to Dennis. I didn't know he was talking to the other guy. And they went out and got to. They came back to finish the mission, supposedly got back to the extraction LZ undetected. They were waiting on the helicopter to come get them. And all of a sudden, you know, you heard that call on the radio, Prairie fire emergency prayer. Fire emergency. You know, we're overrun. And then it goes off. Cubby can't make contact with them. You just radio silence on their part. So we realized we're going to have to send a bright light team out there. And this is one where I was already at the launch site. So they changed my mission to bright light to go out there. But about 30 minutes after the message that we heard, that was where they were overrun. Then on the emergency radio on the guard frequency, there was a voice that came on and saying, God, help me, please, somebody help me. On the American voice on the guard frequency, the cubby that was out there didn't know. Didn't know these two guys personally. So he did. He couldn't tell if that was one of their voices or somebody else. He couldn't tell which one of them. It might have been on the radio, but sent a team out. They. They recovered two survivors of the indigenous. They got them back in. And I was on standby to go back out there to try to find Dennis and the one one. And listening to these two guys tell what happened and what they did after it happened. Bruce was there with me and we were talking. Something's not right. Something just doesn't sound right the way they're telling it. So when we did go in, it didn't. Didn't take long to tell Bruce. I mean, we were in contact, continuous kind of fight our way in continuous contact. Oh, you know, the time we were there, didn't get. Get back out until the next day with continuous contact. And I told Bruce, I said nothing where we are looks like what they described. I mean, this is just not the place where it happened. I think they were wounded, they were scared. And how far they ran, which way they ran was just not correct. Not that they were intentionally, you know, doing it, but I think they were so stressed out, they. They didn't know where they had started from and how far they went. I said, I think we're, you know, 2,000 meters probably away from where it actually happened. But we were in such heavy contact. We were in the middle of a bunker complex. We couldn't really stop and do anything about it, you know, then never found them. They were eventually declared presumed dead and, you know, so the families could get some closure.

[Unknown Host]

Have you ever gone back to Vietnam?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

No, I've been invited a few times by people. I. I probably barge. Well went back. I probably should have went. When he went, you know, he actually went back and he found the interpreter that we had on the team that we were on together, actually found. Tracked him down and found him. Terrible story. I mean, the guys just living in poverty, his family's in poverty. You know, the NVA put him in, you know, re education camp. All those guys, they killed them, put them in re education camps for years, took everything they had. You know, like a lot of the stuff in Afghanistan sounds almost identical if you, if you're supporting Americans and Americans pull out and leave you, you know, it's. It's not going to be a good thing for you. I mean, yeah, Afghanistan was just a repeat of what we've already done. We did the same thing, you know, Vietnam.

[Unknown Host]

What did you learn in your studies for psychology when it comes to war?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Well, I think it helped Me to have a framework for looking at how people respond in combat, how they can get addicted to different things, get addicted to the, you know, adrenaline rush, you know, those kinds of things that help me to understand, I think, you know, the impact of fatigue, sleep loss, getting wounded, stress, the different changes. It just, it's interesting. We, we take soldiers and we train them and we train them and train them on the range. Here's what the sight pictures got to look like. Here's, here's how you do all this stuff. Front sight, focus on and on and on. And then we put you out there and have those targets start shooting back at you. Stress level skyrockets. And now you discover you can't see the sights. Your vision changes. You don't have up close vision anymore. Everything is blurry, you know, within the range of your weapon sights, everything's blurry. You can't get that sight picture when you stress skyrockets. So now you're trying to hit something and don't realize that you can't focus like you've been trained. So there are a lot of things like that that I had to framework to go back and look at, think about and then go test out, see what works and what doesn't. And so that's one side of it. The other side is how do you help people move forward, start moving forward again. What is it that you can do for them? And everybody's a little different. You have to understand that they're starting at different places, they're a little different. Your approach needs to be different. And I found that when I'm talking to vets who are struggling in particular, if it's combat related, that one thing that they seem to be looking for is I want someone that I can talk to who understands what I'm saying. I don't care how much book knowledge you have, I don't care how many books you've read or stories you've heard. You just don't know what it's like. And you can't understand me. And I tell you and you say, yeah, that's the way war is. And you're not hearing me. And John and I were having a discussion a number of years back and I said, one of the things, one of the things that's different about you and I and the rest of most of the other world out there is when you and I read one of these SOG books and we're reading about the gunfight that's going on, it's not nice and quiet like it is here. And we're just reading the words and. And hearing it, you know, seeing what's going on. We hear it, you know that we see that F4 coming. It's silent. It's not making a sound until it passes us. And once it goes past us and that sonic boom hits us and that bomb comes in or the napalm comes in, and the heat and the smell and everything is. I mean, and it's so loud right now, we. We can't read that book and not hear it. You know, other people can read it. They don't hear that stuff. They don't smell the napalm. You know, people who have been there do. And when they're talking to somebody who hasn't been there, they realize it. And I always. I always tell. I. I did a podcast with Mike Glover, and a few minutes into it, you know, I realized he knows what I'm saying. He's been there, he's done it, and we're communicating. We're on the same wavelength here as we talk about what's going on. You know, it's like you and I, you. You've done it, you've seen it, and. And we can talk about it, and. And we're connecting while we're doing it. But if you're some doctor in a VA hospital somewhere or therapist and you haven't experienced it, it's hard to connect, you know, because that realizes it right away. It doesn't. It doesn't take him or her but a few minutes to realize you got some book knowledge, but you don't know what I'm talking about. You can't. You can't really empathize with me. You can sympathize, but you can't empathize anyway.

[Unknown Host]

Did you feel a lot of resentment towards regular, everyday Americans that had not served, who were calling you baby killer, woman killer, whatever.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I didn't. I don't resent that they haven't served. You know, I'm okay with that. I mean, it's serving. I don't think it necessarily good for everyone. I don't resent that. If they haven't served and they want to call me a baby killer, then, you know, I'm not happy with that. If he wasn't there, don't tell me what I did.

[Unknown Host]

I think a lot of vets in different generations feel that type of resentment. What advice do you have for them?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

There are different generations, and. Except that we're not going to send everybody. Everyone is not going off to serve. That's not the way we're set up. And even if we were, I think because of the different generations that we have and the outlook and philosophy of the different generations, it would be difficult. You know, when we were doing the all volunteer army and we were just dragging people in right and left and putting them in the army whether they wanted to be there or not. It created so many problems, you know, to go in the service and do what needs to be done. And I'm not talking about war, just to serve, to be a good, you know, soldier or SEAL or whatever it takes, the right attitude. You've got to want to do it. You, you have to believe in it, at least to some degree. And I think it's good that we have a program where you can get out. You know, you go sign up. I mean, you don't have to stay 20 years. You can get out before then. And I think that's good. A lot of people. I had a basic training company one time and I had a guy that just at first he said he really wanted to be in the army. And then he got, he just kept getting into trouble. And he'd go talk to the chaplains. The chaplains would call me up and say, you know, George. Not his name, but George, George is a good soldier. You gotta, you gotta give him a chance. I mean, he's a good soldier. And he kept. We had several conversations about George and I was just misunderstanding him. He was a good guy. And then I got a call from the, on the chaplain saying, is George there? You know where George is? I said, I'm sure he's here in the company area somewhere. Why, it's that low life stole my boombox while he was up here talking to me yesterday. And he, oh man, he flipped. And so anyway, went to the barracks and sure enough, there was a chaplain boom box and took it back to him. And then finally we, I decided to go ahead and process the paperwork to, to let him go, get him out of the army. So the day of the company graduating, he was still in, but he wasn't going to be able to graduate. And he came to me and he said, I, I know you're going to have a graduation ceremony this morning. Now, I'm not going to be there, but I stayed up most of the night last night and I wrote a poem and you know, I, I'd be honored if you would read this poem at graduation today. Said, let me see it. And I said, this is the poem you wrote last night? Yes, sir. Okay, so the title is I am the Infantry. I said, yes, sir. He's standing here, I'm looking on the wall right behind him. And I'm not reading what he wrote, I'm just reading off the picture that's hanging on the wall back there with this poem on it. I am the infantry. Yes sir, I wrote that. I'm the queen of battle. Follow me word for word. Off of that he copied on this piece of paper and he gave it to me, told me he wrote it and he wanted me to read it. Some people don't need to be in the service even if they want to. Some of them don't need to be. I don't know. I've looked at Korean army mandatory two years. When you hit a certain age, you've got to go into the army for two years. When I was in Korea, I had 32 Katusas, 32 Koreans who for whatever reason they were able to get to serve their two year obligation in the US Army. As long as they, they did well, they could do their two years with the U.S. army and then to move on because the Rock army is hard and they're hard on the young guys. So I had 32 of them and all I had to do was mention, I think you're going to have to go back over to the Rock Army. What do you want me to do? I'd do anything. In fact, I actually sent one back. They came, got him yelling, screaming, drug him into the jeep and he was yelling out the back, I'll do anything, I'll do anything, just don't send me back. So they do it two years. The North Korean Army, I think is seven years. So it might be that we have some kind of service program, whether it be military or something else that people do. I don't know. Everybody's just not cut out for it, I think.

[Unknown Host]

But how did you meet your wife?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I was stationed at Dahlonega, Georgia and the Ranger camp up there. Now the call the 5th Ranger Battalion as an instructor. And a friend of mine had set up a date with her, my wife's roommate, but she's told my friend that she wouldn't date him unless it was a double date. So he needed to get someone, get someone to, you know, go out with her. So would been a blind date. So he got one of our other friends that was said he would go. But something came up and he, the last minute he wasn't going to be able to go. So my friend came to me and said, would, would you fill in for him? I really want to, you know, Take this girl out, and she won't go unless I have somebody for a roommate. So I volunteered to. To go, and we got it approved that, you know, it was going to be a different person. It was going to be me showing up. But when I got out of the car to go in with my friend to pick him up, somebody on her hall looked at the window, saw me coming across to the parking lot, and I was on crutches. I had. I had a really bad landing and I screwed my knee up. Parachute jump. And somebody on the hall yelled that he's got a wooden leg. And word spread fast that, you know, I had a wooden leg. And she wasn't going to go, but convinced her that I didn't have a wooden leg. I had a real leg. So we went out. We had a, you know, we really had a really good time, except for she did have to sit on parachutes that we had in the back of my friend's car that, you know, the trunk was full. We had a bunch of other parachutes there. You know, if you got a bunch of parachutes and you got a helicopter that you can use for, you know, short period of time, you don't want to have to stop and repack. You have several parachutes, you go jump, you hit the ground, you put on a new one, you go jump. But anyway, so we kind of. We kind of hit it off from there once. I didn't go back to Vietnam. Then we decided to get married. And 51 years, we're still here.

[Unknown Host]

Congratulations. What's the secret to a successful marriage?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

She's always right. And I would do well to remember that, whether I think so at the time or not, she's going to end up being right. I mean, because she really is right. So I need to listen more. And. Yeah, and, you know, she went to. Graduated from college at North Georgia Military College. So she understood about the military. And the ranger camp was right there. She knew about rangers. And just one quick thing. Her family, for the most part, they had. There was one section of road and land around it that her grandparents, I guess, had owned at one time and started giving it to her kids. So most of the family lived in that one spot. And I told her when I went over there to pick her up, I said, one hand grenade, take out most of your family. They're all right here together. But anyway, they would have this big Christmas party. You know, family would all come in and get together every, you know, few days before Christmas. And so this year, I got invited. We're not married yet, but I got invited to it. And, I mean, the house is full, but, you know, like that time, most of the men are gathered in one room and, you know, so I went in to kind of meet him, and one of her uncles said, grenade says, you're a Ranger. No, but four. He asked me. He asked me a question about invasive species. He said, you know, the pine needles are just killing the pine trees out here. What do you think about that? I said, that's not good having, you know, an invasive species like that. And a little bit later, he asked me another question about trees. And I. I said, when did you keep asking me questions about trees? He said, well, you know, Grenad said you were a Ranger. I said, I am a Ranger. I'm an Army Ranger. You could have heard a pin drop in the whole room. You're in the Army. You're an Army Ranger. They did not have a good reputation in that area, but. And it was like, holy cow, she's dating an Army Ranger. And then somebody in there just. I didn't get to see exactly which one it was, how many people you kill. And it was just silence. But then they decided, you know, they would let me in the family. But, yeah, I thought, why am I getting all these questions about trees? I don't.

[Unknown Host]

Oh, man. What are you doing to keep busy today?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Today? I'm. I'm really enjoying spending time with you. This has been great from start to finish. Very impressed with what. What you've done, what you're doing with your new facility that you've got set up. Having the opportunity to come up and spend some time to get to know you better. I mean, this has been awesome, so.

[Unknown Host]

Well, Dick, it's been a real. A real honor to interview you, and I would love to get you and John out there here pretty soon, and we'll have a range day, break that new cig in, tell some stories, hey, have a fire.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I'm all for it.

[Unknown Host]

Me, too. Me, too. But, man, I'll tell you, I couldn't think of a better person to close this studio down with than having you here. And it just means the world to me. And thank you for being here.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I appreciate it. It's a great honor to be able to come in and do this and be the last person. But even if I wasn't the last person, just to get to come in and spend the day with you and chat about all these different things and meet you and be able to put you on a friend list and say, I know this guy. So I really appreciate that. And there was some discussion this morning when we ate breakfast, so. John, I tell you, I got your back. I'm here. You need me, you call me. And I appreciate it. Appreciate everything you've done.

[Unknown Host]

I'd stay in that. Same to you. Thank you so much. Seriously, thank you. It's been an honor.

[John Stryker Meyer]

I am Michael Rosenbaum.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I am Tom Welling. Welcome to Talk Bill. Where it's fun to talk about Smallville. We're going to be talking to sometimes guest stars.

[John Stryker Meyer]

Are you liking the direction Lois is going in?

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Yeah, because I'm getting more screen time. It's good. But mostly it's just me and Tom remembering. I think we all feel like there was a scene missing year. You got me, Tom. Let's revisit it. Let's look at it. See what we remember.

[John Stryker Meyer]

See what we remember.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

I had never been around anything like that before.

[John Stryker Meyer]

I mean, it was so fun.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Talk Ville. Talk Bill.

[John Stryker Meyer]

I just had a flashback follow and listen on your favorite platform.

[Dynamite Dick Thompson]

Let's get into it.