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Coberts, Spiona, The Team House with your Hopes, Jack Murphy and David Bark.
Hey, everyone, welcome to episode two hundred and ninety six of The Teamhouse. I'm Jack Murphy here with our guest tonight, Joe Muccia.
Joe is the.
Author of Cry Havoc, The Untold Story of Rangers at War with his co author Tom Greer. We're really excited to have him on the show. This is, as far as I know, the first time many of these stories have been told publicly. This really is from the Ranger perspective of first and Second Ranger Battalion guys who jumped into Grenada in nineteen eighty three, an operation that has kind of like slipped through the cracks of history in some ways. I feel like, but you accomplished, you know,
telling these guys' stories through this book, cry Havoc. So thank you, Joe. I really appreciate you taking the time to write this book.
Now it's a pleasure. I'm glad to come on and talk about it. These guys are in many cases they're my friends, so it's really easy to talk about them.
That's great. So, Joe, I guess the first question I'd like to ask a little bit about you. Uh, tell us a little bit about your background, your military background, and and sort of what led that towards you becoming, you know, something of a historian at this point.
Yeah, I'm a retired marine, uh, and then I worked, uh work for the government. I started out as an intel analyst, and by nature intel analyst, if you're a smart one, you you pay quose attention to history. I did that quite a bit. And I remember as we were getting ready to go into Iraq and O three. UH, I ended up sitting down with a lot of guys who were in Desert Storm.
UH. A lot of those guys were my mentors.
When I first got in the Marine Corps UH and UH they kind of taught me and and so I kind of took it to heart in terms of, if you're going to understand a problem set, the best thing to do is get with the people who have experienced it before.
UH.
And that's kind of how it drove me when it came to research for the for the book. And when I got back from Iraq and O three, I left active duty in O four and I continued working on my degree and I focused on history. Every time I get asked, you know, why did you take history? You want to be a professor or something, I'm like, no, not really. I just picked it because that was the subject that I really liked. And one of the first
projects I had started. I had taken some junior college classes while I was on active duty, and one of them was an American history one and there was a Latin America South America chapter to it, and one of my first squad leaders when I was in the Marine Corps was a Grenada marine. So I reached out to him and he provided me some good, good stuff for it. And I really wanted to make sure because at that
time we knew it was a joint operation. Everybody, everybody who had seen the footage from from the operation that had leaked out saw the Rangers jumping at Points Salinas. So to me, the next best thing to do was to reach out to a ranger and get his his inputs to it. This led me to a gentleman by the name of Kip ryan Hart. Kip's a great friend. He was a B Company Ranger, first Battalion. He was one of the first sticks to drop at Points Alina's,
his platoon, first platoon to B Company. He was one of the first Rangers on the ground actually, and he was a young PFC promotable. He had just gotten back from Ranger school. He had, in his own words, he was beat to shit from ranger school, but he still made mission and the insights I learned. But from Kip, I was like, my god, why isn't anybody talked about
this stuff? I mean, it's so amazing what these guys accomplished, And especially when he started to dig in and I talked to his platoon sergeant Brian Stags and Stags he told me, yeah, we were on the ground I think for twenty five or thirty minutes before the next you know, chalk jumped. And I went, wait, wait, wait, there's just one platoon of rangers and he goes, oh yeah, and the battalion headquarters on the ground for twenty five thirty
minutes before any other rangers jumped. Was Yeah, the Triple A was too too dense. We had to bring inspector to clear the hills off so we could start the rest of the air the air drop back up. And to me, that just opened up this this can of worms in a good way. And and digging into the
into what happened there. And again, like you said in your in your preamble, there's a I think everybody kind of knows the story in broad terms about what happened, but it's the real nitty gritty details that that I don't think a lot of people are aware of. And yeah, that's what we tried to accomplish with cry Havoc.
So as uh, that's how you got your start into researching this topic. Talk to us a little bit about coming together with Tom Greer and how this book starts to come together, because that's I have to imagine, that's an interesting story in of itself. And of course we have to mention the the late Tom Greer himself, a former Ranger, former Delta Force officer, who passed away a number of years ago. You carried the torch for him too with this book.
Yeah.
Luckily I got to bless off from Tom's family to continue to write the book and get it out there. I had been researching Grenada in general more to do a full length operation, a book about the operation. And it wasn't going to be just a peel off Ranger book. It was going to be the in totality, the entire operation. And Tom reached out to me about I want to
say two thousand and eight or so. He had basically started interviewing some of the same rangers I had already interviewed, and they were like, listen, I don't want to do this all over again. Just contact Joe and get with him and tell him. I said, to share my interview with him, And so this is how the relationship began. And first I didn't know Tom. I didn't know at all. I didn't know any of his reputation, where he had been, the Tora Bora thing, none of it. Knew none of it.
And then I had a friend say, oh, yeah, he's an operator.
He was one of us. Was a ranger.
For those who don't know, Tom was with Charlie Company, Hard Rock, Charlie First Battalion, and he was one of the rangers who got left behind it Hunter.
There's supposed to be this mythical second wave that.
Was supposed to come in and Tom was going to be part of it, but he ended up being stuck at Hunter the whole time during Grenada. So these guys they raised him as a young ranger. When they came back. You know, everything that the rangers had been doing at that point had been validated, So it was easy to learn from these guys that you already knew, who had already seen the elephant and then had come back and teaching you the lessons and reinforcing lessons that you already knew.
But Tom, to his credit, kept at it like he kept reaching out and kept like finally did the digging in and I found out who he was and I said, okay, I'll talk to him, and he said listen, you don't have to share anything with me, but I'm going to share stuff with you because you're writing the broader campaign. I'm just writing a ranger book for rangers and ranger families.
And I said, well, that's pretty dynamite. And I started sharing some of the stuff, putting guys in touch with him and him vice versa, and we started talking to a lot of the same people, and sometimes people wouldn't. It took a long time for me to be able to access that community. You know, I'm a marine, I'm an outsider, not a ranger, never went to ranger school.
So I think the only thing that got me the inroads early on was I was a combat veteran, and I think that that was the only thing that these guys could associate with me, because you know, I'm a.
Jar ahead, you know.
And it took a long time to get those inroads, and to Kip's credit and to doctor Hero from Second Battalion, those guys really paved the wave to me for me to get to talk to more more rangers that were there. And Tom didn't need that, like he was already one of them, Like he was already one of you guys. He was a ranger, he had been an operator. He knew a lot of these guys who had went on to serve in the unit afterwards, Like, he knew a lot of so it was easier for him to make
those inroads. But we had a lot of cross pollination and our research.
And so.
The years went by and he kept focusing in on the range of book, but he was also writing his other books, his his fiction books about Colton Rayner and you know, the Delta Forest books that he wrote. And but he really had a passion for this story because it wasn't fiction, and it was people he knew and respected greatly. And and if those of you had the book and read the opening to it, you know that he reached out to me and he basically I was one of the few people outside of his close friends
and his family that knew that he was terminal. And he basically said, look, I've done as much as I can do with this thing, and I can't get it any further because you know, as his brother Steve told me, you know, he was trying to write books. He's trying to write his books, he's trying to finish manuscripts and stuff. Well, while on morphine for the pain for threshold work, and you know, it was very tough on him, and he was really really hurting. And I knew that I I
told him I would I would do it. I would do something with it, and I didn't. And and to my my failing, I didn't do anything with it right away. It really took another Grenada Raider to give me a kick in the ass and get me going on, a guy named Todd Beard and whose dad, Milton, is a well known personality CIA personality. Todd Todd was like, dude, you got to get this thing going. You know, you can't let it just die on the vine.
That's amazing. Yeah, we've had Milt on the show a couple of times.
Yeah, yeah, Well, Tod Todd really was the one who got this thing that we energized, and between him and the and the Greer family, I put it put a lot of pressure on myself to get it done and get it done in advance for the fortieth anniversary last year, which thankfully I was able to. I literally got it out the door, I think within I don't know, three weeks of the anniversary. Four weeks of the anniversary, I
had sold him out so fast. I had one box of books with me at the reunion down in Savannah, and the guys were pissed off. I didn't bring enough with me, but Tommy was. He sent me everything. He sent me all of his research. He sent me the shell of the manuscript he had written. I want to say about maybe fifty sixty percent of it, but it was rough and it needed a lot of work. There was some sequentially sequential issues with it in terms of
where things were. I wrote in the note section. Bruce McGraw was another first Platoon B Company guy who was that first plane load over the on the airfield. Bruce had found the MC one thirty chalk listings and their time on target for the drops. Wow, and this was able to really solidify. I knew the planes were all out of order from my interviews, but I didn't know exactly where who was who in the zoo in terms
of the stack. After that, the first stick jumped, which was actually Aircraft three, and then the other ones stacked. But with that in hand, I was really able to put a pin in it and finish that that portion up,
and that's when everything started to really coalesce. Getting getting the manuscript finished, but there was a lot of a lot of the tough sequences were still there that needed to be done, the Grand Dan's rescue, the firefight with Juliette six, the jeep team Calvini, and then then then wrapping it all up and putting a bow on it was was There was still a lot of work that needed to be done. But Tom did such great work,
and he also had written it in a way. I'm actually working on a companion book called Old Scrolls right now. I'm interviewing a lot of old score rangers.
It that book.
The genesis of it was the stuff that went to the cutting room floor from cry Havoc. He had written this thing that we probably would have ended up being about five six hundred pages long if we would have just published it in total. But it needed some streamlining and it needed some stuff to get cut, and thankfully we'll be able to put that stuff in another book. But this way, I think it's much more economical, and it reads. The flow of the read is a lot
better this way. But he did all the heavy legwork early on.
So yeah, this was really a labor of love for both of you guys. You know, it shows So to start to get into the content of the book, could you start by giving us a sort of a little bit of a background about what was going on in Grenada in eighty three that leads up to first and second range of Battalion getting this Warnoh.
Yeah, the.
Actually, as far back as I want to say, nineteen seventy nine, Grenada had been on the State Department watch lists in terms of, hey, we have Americans on the ground there, the medical school there. They've got some political consternation going on. They have a socialist government that is leaning heavily towards becoming full blown Marxists.
They originally.
The Maurice Bishop government had reached out to the United States and they were sort of rebuffed. I don't know the ins and outs of it, and I won't get into it in the book. I say it right right right away. I don't really I'm not a State Department guy. It's not my job to sit there and talk about all the political machinations behind the scene. Although he was rebuffed and that led him to lean towards Cuba and later Russia, and this obviously worries that when the Reagan
administration comes into power after the in eighty one. It's in eighty one. Yeah, it was eighty one. Sorry, I'm old. I'm not that old. When Reagan, the Reagan administration comes on the power, they really start to put a focal, focal lens on on on Grenada, especially when the airfield
starts to get built. You have the g Canadian saying it's for tourism, but the thing is long enough to with to handle any any of the larger Russian and Cuban bomber fleet airframes, and this worries the Reagan administration, although if they had any imagery analysis done worth its salt would have told them, hey, there's only the small parking apron. There's no way they can pivot multiple aircraft around at one time. And this has an effect on
the actual operation Urgent Fury later on as well. But they become they become a focal point for the Reagan administration.
And then into eighty two and eighty.
Three there is political unrest there. The new Jewel Movement is formed. It is more extreme Marxist. They think that it's led by Bernard Cord. They don't think that Maurice Bishop is Marxist enough, and they decide to overthrow them. But there's a public outcry when Bishops has loved among the people of Grenada, and he's arrested but later freed, but then they seize him again, and then he's later assassinated. And this this at that point in time, the US
government decides we've had enough. They originally the original plan, they had done a number of exercises at the Aegas that that simulated a Grenada operation where they were going to put a marine battalion landing team on the ground and a ranger battalion and they would basically be able to subdue the island and rescue, rescue political prisoners, and and that was it. And they do this a couple
of times. But finally, after after Bishop's assassination, the wheels are set in motion for for the US intervention.
There on on the fears that this could become some sort of communist stage and ground right, even though that maybe wasn't quite plausible at that moment.
I think there was a there was a multi view opinion that one they didn't like the possibility that airfield becoming militarized. They didn't like that they had a Marxist communist government in their backyard. They already had one in Cuba, and on top of it, you had US medical students there, and you have the Iran hostage crisis fresh in everyone's memory.
So I think all three of those pieces are upfront in the in the in how they're doing their calculus in terms of when I say they, I mean the Reagan administration, how they're their calculus is forming about how to deal with the situation. But once once bishop is assassinated and a curfew is put in place, a shoot on site curfew, that really is what starts everything in motion.
So I mean it's your book is really the ranger perspective. So if you don't want to get into the top level, but I mean, can we at least talk a little bit about like how the Reagan administration arrived at that decision and then how that order makes its way down to the rangers who have to start preparing for them the operation.
Yeah, I think they looked at it as like a coupe de main operation where they would just parachute, you know, a battalion at points alnas and they would roll north and and and you know, or or roll out to the east and secure the the the students and then they would backload them and be done. But there were a whole slow emissions laid on, especially for the special mission units, a number of them like the electrical power stations.
The oil pumping.
Station, radio transmitted mission, state station on the island. These the whole slow emissions that are there that are at least conceptually looked at the Rangers. First range of it had just come off ready Ranger ready Force one. They had just handed it off to second Battalion who had just assumed it.
For the Rangers. You know.
They Yeah, Jaysack had just you know been formed in you know again in the ashes of of the Iran rescue. General Schoulties, Dick Schulties was running the show there. He was a conventional guy, but he had had a very experienced special operations staff around him. Uh, And they were they were pushing early on to make it a Ranger
battalion show. Later on the Marines get added. And there's a lot of the thing I I've learned about Urgent Fury and is that there is more urban legend and myth involved in this operation and I think any other military action in US military history. There are so much bullshit and stories that people think they know the truth about what happened or who is alerted or who did this or who did that. And the odd thing about it is typical D classification for papers dealing with stuff
is about twenty five years. Well it's going forty and a lot of the stuff still hasn't been D classed.
Wow.
Thankfully the stuff that was relevant to the book was D classed so we could write about it.
But for the.
Rangers, it starts. It starts at Jaysock, right. It's Ken Bower and John Ritzell who are the j three alphas at Jaysock, and they are the ones who start the ball in motion. And the first thing they do is, according to John Ritzill, he informed first Bat first. And I talk about this in the book in the notes section,
and I encourage everyone to read it. And I think the world of Colonel John, and I think he's a great guy and his my moory might be a little flawed because I ran down the timelines of all of it, and second Bat got alerted first, which was proper. They were our or ranger ready for us one. But the thing with them is they had to stage out of the ISB, which was gonna end up being hunter, they had to fly across country, so they immediately start recalling.
They've got rangers up at a a Halo jump Master MTT at a Yakama, and for first bat they've got rangers that are flying all over the place because it's deer season and they're worried that guys will not be you know, back then had pagers. You know, you don't have cell phones and communications, global communications not there. So they were worried guys are flying to the four Winds to go hunting or whatever because they just came off and you figure they're going to be back in the barracks party
and hard. So there was yeah, no, imagine that young rangers and the barracks party and hard.
Not.
That never happens, right, So the recall goes out and they start bringing guys back in, and for both battalions, both battalion commanders had done multi alert on consecutive weekends leading up to that. So the guys who were really sore about having to come back in, we're just gonna come in, accountability, draw weapons, rock march, come back, and then we're gonna lose half a day and we're gonna be pissed off and then they come in and the medics are pulling morphine. The war as they called them,
the war guns are coming out. And I don't know if they did this in your time. There was a separate set of weapons.
Back then.
They had their take them to the field and beat the crap out of them weapons. And then they had their war guns which were specially sequestered and weren't taken out as often.
Oh no, we didn't have that.
Yeah.
I thought it was interesting in your book how you talk about, you know, how the guys get recalled for training purposes over and over again. So when the live thing happens, a lot of these guys think it's bullshit. There are actually, I think, as I recall a couple people in your book who are like sitting on the plane thirty minutes away from jumping into Grenada still like, ah, this is just an exercise. They're gonna call it. They're gonna call it all off.
Yeah.
And the funny thing was it Jerry Perky said it best. He opened up his Ammo pouch and there's you know, there's full there's real real rounds in those magazines, and he goes, yeah, but it was an alert.
We wouldn't have these, you know.
He points, yeah, points to his jump master buddy, right, He's like yeah, but yeah, for a lot of these guys, they were they they rolled into an eighteen hour sequence just like normal, like it was normal.
But this wasn't normal. Obviously.
As soon as the live AMMO came out and the guy's described it as this mortgage board, he just walked along the tables and picked what you want, Like I have friends who jumped into into Panama with the Ranger Regiment and they were like, no, we got cards that told us how much AMMO to take back.
Then no.
And there's a story about Bill Mayville, General Mayville, and he ends up jumping with a Claymore and a belt of seven six to two m sixty AMMO in his shirt because they were thinking how long are they going to be down there before I get resupplied. And so these guys told me these are the heaviest rucks they ever jumped, and all they had was water, food AMMO, no snivel gear, really a couple pairs of socks if they were lucky, maybe a poncho liner.
So the sequences, first battalion gets alerted, then second battalion.
The second battalion goes first.
Okay, okay, because they're they're on RF one yep, okay, So second battalion gets it first. They have to fly across the country to Hunter to co locate with first Battalion, who also gets alerted. What are that sort of the actions on at Hunter and like at what point do these guys get kind of like briefed on an actual upward like does that? Does that happen?
Yeah?
The so, first off, the mission changes a little bit. Originally, Colonel Hagler flies out to Brag and they meet to Jaysock headquarters and they go into a planning session, initial planning session where they kind of do a divisional labor who's going to do what First Battalion's going to take Salina's Second Battalion's going to jump at Pearls Airport up on the eastern side of Grenada. So basically coup de
main operations on both of the islands airports. Later on, the Marines get added and Pearls is taken away from second bat and they are given the mission to follow first in and then conduct a road march to Calvini, which is the main Cuban and Grenadian training facility on the island, and they're going to take that out. And in between there there are also both battalions are going to help to rescue all the medical students and evacuate
them or secure them for evacuation. So at that point they start discussing like, Okay, here's specter is going to be in support.
What's the jump altitude going to be?
They get with the special operator, the special airman special operations airmen to discuss jump altitudes. Originally those guys wanted to go up like twelve hundred and sixteen hundred feet. The Rangers really wanted to jump at like three hundred to start. That was the first suggestion, no reserves. Then the two of them together. Now the funny thing is I interviewed both battalion commanders, and both battalion commanders told me they made the decision to go at five hundred.
So I came to the conclusion that they got together and they said five hundred. I called that one because neither one of them seemed to want to back off of they were the ones who made the call, but the five hundred was the only one that they could get the space Special Operations aviators to guarantee them to be able to put them on the DZ without getting every plane blown out of the sky. So that's how
they settled in the five hundred. And you also had your Air Liaison officers US Air Force a LOS that were to the battalions were there to help with the planning. Again, the specter guys, you had your night stalkers, you had your smooths. They were all in there doing their their going into their separate little rooms and doing their own their own coordination. And here's where a lot of the
confusion for the operation starts to take place. They had very few maps, so they got copies of the maps, and then each one of those cells made their own grid lines, so none of them had corresponding grid lines. So it made it very difficult to coordinate things once they got on the ground.
Later on, the.
Defense Mapping Agency starts churning out maps left and right, but it's four or five days after the operations kicked off, so that's a real limitter for them right then and there, and it makes it very difficult unless it's an inter unit fire, like let's just say B company mortars are going to fire and support a B company and they're
all shooting off the same map. Okay, it makes sense, but when you're trying to coordinate fires across the battalion, man and you got two battalions and two separate sets of grid system you know, two different grid systems. You got that's a recipe for disaster.
So what is this the final scheme of maneuver that they come up with for the infiltration phase? And how does that start to uh go and you know when h hour comes.
Yeah, So the way they work it out is it's going to be a company. The first battalion is going to be your jump clearing team. They're going to jump to two aircraft loads of rangers are going to go down clear the airfield, and then it's going to be air land and Tebbie style where the rest of the first and then second following will pour out of the aircraft and go about securing their portions of the of
the airfield. And the airfield originally is divided up with a company having the eastern portion of it the hills north of the airfield, and then the eastern portion of the airfield along with the True Blue Medical School campus. B company is to the left flank of the left flank of A Company First Battalion, so B Company First
Battalions right next to them. And then you have if memory serves, A and B Company of second bat on the western side of the airfield's northern hills with I think their C Company.
I'd have to pull my maps out.
It's been a minute on the south side of the airfield, kind of acting as a quick reaction force. And then hard Rock Charlieer the first Battalion is attached to Delta for the Richmond Hill prison rescue mission. So that's the basic force laydown. And again the initial the initial entry method is going to be the jump clearing team in
first and then AirLand the remainder of the force. But because Murphy gets a vote no pun intended, the parachute option is always on the table and all the parachutes are brought ends up working out.
Joe. I got to do a quick ad read from one of our sponsors before we get back into it.
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And then I'd just like to tell our viewers real quick about we Defy Special Forces History book I have coming out in December, the Lost Chapters of Special Forces History, with chapters about Blue Light, America's first counter terrorism team, green Light, the guys that trained to jump with backpack nukes, Detachment A in Berlin, Detachment Kay and Korea, and this commander's in extremist Force, the SITH. So I mean, I interviewed dozens and dozens of people for this book. I'm
really happy with how it's coming out. It's up for pre order now on Amazon. Paperbacks will be available December ninth when the book is released. And of course we also want to tell people about Cry Havoc, Joe Muccia's book written with Tom Greer, the Untold Story of Rangers at War and the subject of this podcast. Obviously, Joe you're also doing a podcast. Do you want to tell people a little bit about what that's about and where they can find it?
Sure, if you're interested in World War two history, I do a World War two podcast called the We're Not Lost Private Podcast. If you're a fan of Band of Brothers, you're I recognize the the title. In some capacity, we talked mostly Western Europe, but actually I just finished one with a fellow Long Islander about the Battle for Wake Island.
So it's pretty broad ranging. If again, if you like World War Two especially, we have a focus for paratroopers, one hundred first Airborne, eighty second Airborne.
A lot of that.
We cover a lot of broad range of topics. But it's it's pretty good. I think it's pretty good.
Will We will have links down the description for both Cry Havoc, the book as well as the podcast Joe's podcasts. So please take a look.
Guys.
The book is Cry Havoc is available right now, and give people your website so they can go and get the book directly from you. Get autographed copies.
I got to read this off this stupid business card. Okay, go for It's https backslash backslash SSgt moot dot Wicksite dot com, forward Slash, Joe Dash Mucia, I'll have this. I'll send this to you Jack, so you could throw it on there. If you follow the drop down menu, you can find the menu for Cry Havoc. You can order it directly from me and then I'll sign it and I'll inscribe it if you like. And also, like I spoke about earlier in the pod, I'll have a companion book to Cry Have It coming out.
Called Old Scrolls.
It's basically stories of the Ranger battalions from their formation in seventy four to seventy five up through the early part of eighty four. It's gonna be pretty I am really enjoying writing this one. It really covers a lot of ground. There's a lot of legend in the Elden, Bargewell, Bob Howard, all these these legends and Ranger and Special Forces history. I think a lot of especially the Ranger community,
will really get a kick out of it. It was originally gonna be like a forbidden tale of the Rangers, but there's there's a lot more to it than just telling,
you know, telling some stories out of school. And I think everybody will get it, get a feel for you know how difficult it was for those for the First and second Range Battalions to reform after Vietnam and then change themselves from a light one of the premier light infantry battalions, battalions in the world, into almost a special mission force, you know, changing from light infantry to more of a Vietnam reconnaissance patrolling organization, and then into a
special unit where they conduct airfield seizures and raids and things of that nature. So it goes through a lot of those growing pains to get to what we now have as the modern Ranger Force.
I will definitely be reading the book when it comes out. Joe, hit us up. We'll have you back another time to talk about that one.
Yeah, that'd be great.
Let's uh, let's get into the interesting part here, the jumping self. Reading your book gonna be completely honest. I hope I don't offend some of the Rangers out there. The jump sounds like it was a bit of a mess man, that it was just chaos and confusion in those aircraft.
Yeah, you're not, you're not. You're not downplaying it at all.
I think I think the thing that most people don't really understand is one, the force inbound goes through several order changes that really throws things off. And then two again too, as we spoke about before, they don't get to pull off the jump clearing team and then the Entebbe style land and offload.
They end up having to jump.
And in some cases the word goes out throughout the force rig d D rig rig again, so guys are and not only that, sometimes during that d those parachutes are just getting thrown haphazardly into the somewhere some open space in the aircraft, and then when they get handed back out, you don't necessarily get to shoot back that you originally rigged.
So in some.
Cases we had guys who were five foot eight getting a rigged for somebody who was six foot two, or
vice versa. So there was a lot of things that went on, and I think while we laugh about it and we talk about it being a bit of a mess, I think this is where we look at the professionalism of the ranger force at that time, that they're able to overcome that, get their rangers rigged, get their rucks rigged, and get themselves out of the aircraft and on the ground in fighting order so they can immediately go into and conduct operations.
So I have to also acknowledge with that comment Joe, that it's not necessarily fair for me to reach back into the past and criticize too much because the things that I had the fortunate experience of having the TTPs, the SOPs, those are lessons learned from the past from these guys who developed that stuff for us. So I don't mean to be overly critical of of of the guys. I know they and they got the job done at the end of the day, regardless of all those problems.
Yeah, I don't I don't think. I don't think any of them can take offense.
We all understand is friction in combat, and it happens, and and and you know what, did Mike Tyson say, everybody's got a plan to get punched in the face. I mean, you know, they get punched in the face early on, and not in a way where thankfully no nobody in the Ranger Force or the Air Force Special Air Crew are injured during the run ins. But what happens is the first two aircraft that have the jump clearing team on it have to wave off because of
the intense anti aircraft fire that's coming up. But the third aircraft in line, which had the first Battalion headquarters on it and first first platoona B Company, First Battalion board in on the on the on the drop zone, and thankfully the Cubans and Grenadians had elevated the anti aircraft guns in the hills. They had sandbagged underneath them and they couldn't depress below five hundred feet. So literally his aircraft are coming in and there's this fire that's
screaming right over them. This is not to say they didn't take any hits. There were plenty of twelve point seven positions and then small arms positions that were firing. But you could tell that they were undertrained because most of the hits are happening in the tail sections of the aircraft. They're not leading the aircraft enough. But what
happens is the third aircraft bores in. After specter softens up everything again, third aircraft comes in and then the rest of the force waves off, and then for twenty five to thirty minutes, that lone ranger pull tune and that battalion headquarters that ATOK, that talk one is on the ground. Thankfully they have their a lo their senior al on the ground, Jim Roper.
He begins to work.
Calling in specter on his own and then meets up with the FIST, the Battalion Fist Ike Eisenbart, and two of them get together and they start working the hills based on Colonel Taylor's guidance.
But all that is happening while.
The rangers of first Platoon, Bee Company are assaulting up into the hills and clearing the runway. And this is a reduced force. It's not a full first platoon because they had crossloaded on the aircraft, so it's not even the entire first platoon a BEE Company, And so this force is down there clearing heavy light towers, rebar they're getting all this oil drums off the airfield so that the remainder of the force can come in. And it's pretty amazing that they were able to do this and
not one of them get killed during that time. And a lot of them told me, you know, the biggest issue with what the Cubans and the Grenadians did wrong was they didn't come down from the hills and just sweep us off the airfield. They let us build up combat power, right and that's exactly what happens. So after they restaff, can I apologize, you're gonna have to read the book if you want to figure out where who was who in the zoo in terms of the airflow.
But they don't go in number order. I will say that. But what's really interesting is when you get into the nitty gritty and you read about what's going on in each one of the aircraft, and I do that, I go Tom and I specifically wanted to make sure that ranger there was ranger representation for each aircraft in the Cereal coming in for one through seven, which was the first Battalion Cereal, and then eight through twelve, which was
the second Battalion Serial. And if you go in there, you'll read and there's again as we talked about, there's a lot of well known ranger names in those And to me, yeah, it was a mess, but these guys just got the job done. They just didn't screw around. They re rigged guys, they got them ready to go. There's one instance where Gary Carpenter, the first Battalion Sergeant Major Gary Carpenter is a legend, made the made the jump in the Vietnam with the one hundred and seventy
three Airborne. M blessed to have met him and spoken with him several times. And Gary Carpenterom's got sucked right out of the aircraft because one of the retaining straps on his ruck came off and the ruck was dangling when he went to do his door check and they had Bruce McGraw had had to.
Haul him in. So there's some pretty amazing stories in there.
Again, I mean, were there were a couple toad jumpers on this, wasn't there?
Yeah?
Bill, Bill Feedack was one of them, and Marlon Maynard?
Was it Marlon Maynard?
Yeah?
I think it was Marlon Maynard because Marlon is later killed on on Jeap five Juliet five. Bill actually got credit for the jump even though he never exited. He exited the aircraft, but he they hauled him back in and he ended up air landing later on, But he got credit for the jump because he exited the aircraft under fire.
True story. Yeah, he can't argue with that.
Yeah, Yeah, Bill a good guy too.
Again, I've been blessed to know a lot of these guys, and a lot of them I met on my own, but a lot of them I met through Tom, and without Tom's efforts, some of these stories would have never.
Saw the light of day.
So, how we have the one platoon that's on the ground for a prolonged period of time. How long is it until the next pass?
Oh, you're gonna make me open the book?
Now, I mean thereabouts. I mean, if you don't know, it's.
About twenty five, it's about twenty five to thirty minutes before that next open chalk comes in. So these guys are on the ground there watching specter duel it out with these anti aircraft positions in the hills above above the airfield, and they really were worried that that they the enemy was gonna come out of the hills and just sweep them off into the sea. But once that starts happening, and those initial sticks, and I will say this, we all we always say, oh, it was a five
hundred five hundred foot jump. So the first couple of sticks that went out were about four hundred if I remember correct, the aircrew wrote was four hundred and ninety two feet AGL. By the time the later second battalion sticks start coming, it's around seven hundred. Because the aircraft anti aircraft fire is completely is almost completely abated. At that point, Specter has really cleared the gun crews out. The rangers have assaulted up the hills. They've cleared those hills.
They are holding them, and they're looking down on what was called Little Havana, which was the Cuban construction workers compound in a bowl on the northern side of north of the airfield. So the rangers are all in these positions now, and there's all these little fights, these little tactical level fights that I think a lot.
Of your onesies and twosies, Yeah.
Yeah, I think the people you know that enjoy this kind of material and like this kind of of combat memoirs will will enjoy those real tactical level views of some very well known rangers doing ranger things.
And I have to point out you write in the book about a few of them who brought their personally owned weapons with them. So there's like some guys pulling out three fifty seven magnums and shoo.
Yeah. Yeah.
I mean there's one guy who I think he had. It was Dale Killinger from Second bat. He was a company guy. I think he went with three personal handguns and he ended up giving out like two of them to two of his ranger buddies. He didn't have, you know, like there wasn't much restriction on that stuff back then. It was in the barracks, but he you know, like
stuff was kind of you know, unlike nowadays. Like when I was in the Marines, if you had a personally owned weapon, you could check it into your unit armory and check it out when you wanted to. But back then, I think, you know, they the hollowed out ceilings in the in the cutouts in the wall lockers that you could hide stuff in. And I think I think the guys took took full advantage of that.
And so how long is it before we get all the rangers on the ground.
I believe the last the first air landing sea when thirty comes in at zero seven thirty six, so the jump kicks off. That was it five these six if I remember ish.
So some of them are jumping during daylight, right, Yeah, it's it's pretty light out by the time, you know.
A couple of the guys told me it was very light out, and a couple of guys told me it
was getting light out when they approached. But pretty much it was daylight and that was a lot of the Rangers were pissed off about that, and they blamed the Marines because the rumor was that the Marines couldn't land in the dark and they had to hold up the Ranger operation to accommodate the Marines going in simultaneously, which was a bunch of bullshit, because I've interviewed a lot of the Marines, especially the Marine pilots from two six to one who flew those missions. All the lead pilots
were MVG qualified before they left the States. In fact, when they took off their first seials to make their assault into Pearl's Airport, they took off at zero three thirty in the dark in a rain squall. It Actually, the reason why the Ranger jump got pushed back was because they had pushed forward, was because they had to accommodate some of the smooth units that needed a stage
in Barbados. They were late leaving, and then there was some load out and loading issues, specifically with some TF one sixty aircraft once they got to Barbados, and.
They would have gotten on the ground a little bit sooner if some of those air initial aircraft didn't have to peel off because of the anti aircraft fire.
Yeah, yeah, that's exactly right.
And they put in AC one thirty went in and did a re mission rekis flight before the jump. The main body arrived and they were picked up right away. In fact, there was a spotlight that was running that picked up not only the AC one thirty, but it ended up picking up Jim Hobson's aircraft. He's the one who jumped first Platoon, B Company in the battalion quarters for first Battalion. So they knew early on that there was something coming, and I don't you know, and there
was other actions that took part. You know, there's some Navy Seal action to reconnoiter points alinas that didn't didn't end up coming going off because of a number of different issues. So there were a lot of things going on at one time, a lot of elements going in at one time. You know, I think lant Com at the time, it was lant Com. It's not lant Com anymore. They don't exist. But lant Com at the time wanted to synchronize all of the actions at once, which was ridiculous.
They didn't need to do that. Once the first unit goes on the gig is up. I mean, everybody knows what's going on, right, So trying to synchronize the Marines, the Rangers, and the special mission units all at one time was to me just a stupid thing to do. Not to mention, they weren't using Greenwich meantime, they were using local time versus I mean, there was a whole
host of issues that plagued the operation. But again, I hate to sound like a cheerleader, but the guy has got the job done, Yeah, regardless of all the obstacles, the shitty intelligence about where the positions were, all of that stuff, where the students were. That was another one that comes into play later on with the Grand As Mission, the rescue mission, because I like to call it the twenty six minute Rescue.
One of the things I really enjoyed about the book was that it really does take you inside the perspective of like the tabspec for ranger on the ground, and
like you're experiencing the chaos as he experiences it. You know, it's one thing for like you and I years later to pick apart the operation and we understand all of these things, but those soldiers in that moment don't have that information, and so there's like some great moments where like a dev grew guy shows up out of nowhere with long hair, like oh hey, guys, and the Rangers
are like what who are you? Or another time where a Jasock officer like order some of the Rangers to go do some crazy mission and the guys like who are you? Not unless my battalion commander says, so.
Yeah, I don't work for you, buddy. Yeah, yeah it does. There's the the tab spec for you know, you're talking about that guy, that guy. It's up front and and and prevalent throughout the story. But I also want to point out that the key leadership moments occur, like there's a lot of those, like especially in the aircraft before the jump, like guys Dale Kennedy making some really great decisions there alongside Doc Donovan. If your first first ranger battalion alum, then you know who Doc Donovan.
He's a legend. Yeah, lots of people, no Doc.
Yeah.
So I mean these guys get together at this critical point in time in the Jump and they're like, no, don't d rig just keep your rigs on. I mean those are sprinkled in there too, But you're right, I mean we wrote it that way. We wrote it to be sort of a love letter to this that tab spec spec for who's you know, it has to be the point that this strategic corporal at times, right, he's got to he's got to lead an assault because I don't know where my sergeant is or I've got to securities.
I've got to secure these students because that's our mission. And yeah, I'd love to go shoot out the armored vehicle that just showed up, but my job is to protect these students. You know, Like this, there's all these little vignettes baked into it that I think that rangers especially will get a lot out of.
Tell us a little bit about the actual rescue of the True Blue medical students because it's like a little bit of almost a comical scene that takes place amongst all of this mayhem.
Yeah, I mean, you can.
You know, the True Blue is on the eastern side of the campus, and I think a lot of the Rangers that were part of the platoon that had to secure them, they knew where the campus was, but they they the approach was through enemy territory essentially, so as they clear up that eastern side of the runway, it rises up a little bit into true Blue and then drops down and I think a lot of the Rangers as they got to that hill and they kind of lay it up to get a lay of the land,
and you're kind of doing that little bit of leader's rereki before you go charging into the objective right, and they're looking and they see all these little faces sticking out from between curtains, like what the hell is going on?
Because these students know what's going on. They've been watching aircraft fly over the airfield for for hours now, or a couple of hours at least, and all of a sudden, you know, they kind of they bounce in there and they start pulling all these these students together and they secure them in the library, which ends up turning into an operating room, especially when the Jamus shows up.
But it's funny.
Because they're like, Okay, we've got you. Don't worry, we're gonna get you out of here. And they're like, what about the.
Rest of us?
And the Rangers are like, what do you mean the rest of us? They're like, there's a whole nother campus above the airfield at Grand Ends, and the Rangers are like, what are you kidding me. No, We'll get on the phone, hold on, and they call up the other campus and they're, yeah, we're over here.
We got one hundred and.
Thirty something people and if you give us some time, we'll call the rest in so we can get everybody here.
And so the Rangers are.
Like okay, and it gets passed up the chain and it gets handed off the second Ranger battalion and this happens on the twenty sixth. It's the second day the operation where they go into too Grand Ants. And the funny thing was it was originally going to be a Marine Corps mission, but all the Marine Corps rifle companies had been tasked out to different missions north of the boundary line for the two tfs, so there were no Marine rifle units to assist in the recovery of the
students from Grand Ants. But they had the aircraft and that's what the Rangers needed. And so there was a bit of a we'll call it a discussion on the bridge of the Guam about who was going to go on the aircraft and rescue the students. The marine The mal commander wanted to be Marines, and he's like, I need you know, twelve hours to get my marines together, and Schwartzkov looks at him and goes, no, that's not
gonna happen. We're gonna put rangers on those aircraft. They're going to go in and they're going to rescue those students, and that's going to be it. And Schwartzkov was a two star at the time, the commander was a full bird colonel. It was a little bit of posturing and a little bit of words thrown around, and then all of a sudden it was you have your orders, I'll be there, I'll fire you, and I'll find somebody who will execute what I want storm and Norman was not
going to be dissuaded. So thankfully Granny Amos, who is the commander officer of six one one, had gone to VMI with Colonel Hagler, the second Italian commander. They got together over at Selinas and they whipped together a plan, fragoed it out to the companies, and basically, in twenty six minutes, they put multiple flights of Helo on the ground. The rangers went in first on ch forty six's up along this beach strand now interestingly the beach when they
first looked at it. The tide had not started coming back in, but by the time they started flying in, the tide was in. So they had a very thin strip of land to put the hels in and Co Marine don't care. We'll land our hels and water.
And I mean, you're they're very exposed too out there on the beach.
Yeah, they started taking fire the moment they started coming in. They brought in a seven's, they brought an AC one thirty, they had the eighty second was on the island by then, including batteries of their artillery. They were firing one oh five's at the what they thought with Cuban positions. So all the supporting fire goes in, but they're still taking fire, and a number of the aircraft take hits going in, but the most damage gets done to the aircraft by
palm trees. And there's a couple of there's famous pictures of a H forty six sitting on a beach. Everybody thinks that that's their aircraft that got hit and didn't take off, and it wasn't. Sea Company and my buddy Kurt Star went in on air aircraft and air aircraft basically what happened was the palm tree got hit by the roderwash, forcing it to go back, and then when it came forward, it hit the aircraft. And to say it, they thought it was going to disable it. But the
crew chief under fire the aircraft. The crew comes off the aircraft, the crew chief climbs up there, it checks it out. He goes, I think we can make it back out to the flotilla. They get back on the aircraft and they fly it out. Once the rangers secure all of the students. And the interesting part was again
they had phone communication between the campuses. So what they did was they told the students, hey, tie white strips of cloth on both arms, so we know your students, mattresses up against the windows, and one small bag per and that's it. And even then, some of those aircraft went out pretty heavy. Now, the rangers went in in forty six is, but they brought fifty threes in to pull the students out. And some of these were coming out with sixty packs on board, including the flight crew.
I mean, they were way overloaded. Some of them were doing this dip build up, air speed rise, dip rise, dip out to the flotilla.
That's how heavy they were coming out.
The forty sixes came back in and then one of them did the same thing the other one did. It hit a palm tree, but it destroyed the aft rotor system and that one was totaled as a result. A ranger squad gets left on the beach after everybody's eve act. Now they call back.
Thankfully they had a radio. They called back.
At first they were going to e and e them back through the lines, but the eighty second was up there and they didn't have running passwords to work with the eighty second, and they were worried about getting lit up. So basically, the guys in that squad decide to go check out the ch forty six and they pull out all of the life rafts out of it, and one of them shot the pieces and they get two of them. They put it together and then they they make their
way out. Well, one of them starts to sink, so they basically put all the non swimmers in the in the uh in the life raft with all the equipment and weapons, and the rest of the guys just hold on the side and paddle and they finally get out and they get a small patrol boat from the USS. Karen finds them and then brings them on board. They get their clothes, they get their uniforms laundered, the grenades get thrown overboard because they're worried about salt water contamination.
They get fresh AMMO and that's when that jaysock officer talks to the to the platoon leader at the time, and he tells them that I don't think so, I gotta wait to talk to my Theatian commander. But the next day they come back, they get flown back out and they're in pipe this brand clean, spanking new uniforms that looks like everybody else is dirty.
Has got like two three days worth the.
Grime and crap on their uniforms, and these guys are all, you know, looking spiffy, and you know, it was it was pretty pretty. I don't think it was funny for them, obviously, you know, there's a lot of unknown there. But again, they make it work. They make it out, They figure it out, they work the problem out, they find a way out, and they make they make it out without getting themselves killed, which.
Is there's all one more big mission that happens uh during this battle, during this operation. But there's a couple of interesting vignettes that I'd like to ask you about. The first one being the jeep that unfortunately runs into an ambush on the side of the airfield, and the second I had no idea that this had happened. You write about the Rangers engaging basically an armored column like armored vehicles with recoil ass rifles.
I was like, yho, yeah, So on the first day, they really understanding of the battle space was very very thin, and they had worked out scheme of maneuver back at at Hunter before they had taken off. So Alpha Company First Bat had its jeeps. They were gonna use their jeeps like pickets, right, they were gonna they were gonna form a picket line around the airfield along the major major avenues of approach, and basically, you know, they were the jeeps back then were.
Equipped with recoill it.
They well, they did never recall this rifle on that on that one in particular, but they did have flash launcher. The old I think they're M two oh two's basically like four laws in a block that you could fire. I think if you remember the old Schwarzenegger movie, Commander uses one of them in that they had flash launchers they had. They had a man pad on the back of the and then they crew mout. They had an M sixty mounted on top. And you know, they had
five rangers assigned to the jeep. They had the gunner, the jeep commander, the assistant jeep commander, and then they had two other rangers assigned to it. And so it's a Randy Klein and Mark Rademacher, two sergeants, two well respected sergeants Marlon Maynard, Russell Robinson, and Tim Bromick on the gun. They roll out to where they think they're blocking position is and they're actually being trailed by a ranger named Frank Moore in another jeep behind them, although
Frank doesn't have any other rangers on his jeep. But they move to an intersection and they stop and Mark and Randy break out the map and they're taking a look at the map and they're doing a little terrain appreciation. They're trying to figure out if there where their blocking position is. And Frank runs out of his jeep and he says, hey, Sergeant, I think we've gone too far. Frank's is speed four. He's like, I think we've gone too.
Far far.
And Mark's like, hey, look, we got it. You can head back. If we go out too far, we'll turn around and we'll come back. And so the guys they Frank turns around heads back to the airfield because they need the jeeps back at the airfield as well. The spars and Mark and Randy and crew take off towards what they believe is their blocking position. The intersection where they stopped at was actually where their blocking position was supposed to be, but they keep going out because they
think it's further out. Again, the maps aren't very good, and they're trying to do terrain appreciation. They drive past a drive in movie theater, which up until the last major hurricane to hit the island was still there, but
it's not anymore. They drove past that, and then they realized they had gone too far, And when they had done that, a squad of Grenadians had saw them drive by and basically took up line almost like an L shape shaped ambush along the roadway, including an RPG, And when they drove back, they fired fired at the jeep and they hit it with an RPG, immobilizing it. A couple of the rangers are killed outright Russell and Marlin are killed outright. Tim is hit by a burst of fire.
Hits him in the helmet and the leg, and he's also hit one other place. He gets knocked off the gun mount, but he's alive. Randy is killed outright as well. Mark is able to get out of the jeep with his two oh three. They take up position behind the jeep and Mark knows they're in dire streets. Tim has his forty five, but he doesn't the M sixty didn't fire. It was I'd have to talk to my buddy jose Gordon again because he described to me what he thinks was wrong with the gun at the time. I think
I have it in the book. I describe what happened to it from what he told me. But anyway, Mark basically tells Tim go back and get help. Go run right back to the airfield and get help. And Tim didn't want to leave him. He's like, Sergeant, I'm not leaving you, and he basically makes it an order. And when you're a ranger I think he was a specialist at a time, No, he's a PFC. When you're a ranger, PFC and a ranger sergeant gives you an order you're
going to execute it. And he just as he goes to take off, Mark far as his forty millimeter and he kills one of the Grenadians. And then he charged across the road and he's he's shot down as he assaults the other side of the road. Tim makes it all the way back down, but he's bleeding heavily. They secure him and he basically starts raging, they're killing my team. You got to go back. They pull him in the hole,
they start treating him. Doc Donovan shows up. They pack him out to the to the aid station, but they end up mounting a patrol led by Sid ferrar, Jose Gordon, Max Dello. A lot of these guys are in in the book. You can read about it, Tony Nunneley. It's a lot of well known rangers names that are part of this patrol. They try and make it out to the out to where the jeep is, but they can't. They get ambushed. Sid Ferrara is shot. They packed Kelly Vendon packs him out. He's a Word of the Bronze
Star for evaking him out. Him and Johnny Welton get finally gets Sid who's a big guy up the hill and then a jeep comes up in his and is able to evac him. But as they're up there maintaining overwatch,
they see this is before Sid gets shot. They see these BTR sixties coming down the roadway, and they basically set up a law ambush and they miss, and and the BTR sixties keep going and they hit this top of this slight rise at the end of the airfield and all hell breaks loose, like every ranger within range starts engaging these things. And the weird thing about it is, if they would have kept charging down into the airfield with their main guns going, they could have wiped out the better part of.
Two battalions and rangers. But they don't.
They hesitate, and that allows the rangers to get laws and M sixty seven ninety mills rifles in action, and guys legends like Jimmy Pickering, Right, these guys end up blasting the crap out of these these BTRs. The first one backs up into the second one and it stops, and that gives them all the time they need to blast these these things. And the third BTR backs out and then they start calling inspector and specter knocks it out.
But guy guys were telling me, I'm sitting behind the side to my weapon, like I'm on a range, and these guys are trying to pour out of these BTR sixties and he's like, we're just knocking them up. They're they're they're racking up and knocking them down. They're just buying bang bang. These guys are coming out of the out of the out of the BTRs and then they
and they take them out pretty quickly. And then sid Farar gets hit and they that that squad has to pull him back, and they're they're under fire for for a pretty good amount and they actually have to call in some air strikes and the only thing available are a six IS and they're firing rock eyes. They're dropping rock eyes cluster bomb munitions, which are not really the optimal type of munition to be dropping here. But really
what they need to do is break contact. So it allows them to break contact and maintain their overwatch position. So but that that's that's emblematic of all these small little fights up in the hills above the airfield that that take place. But it's all interconnected, all those actions. The cheap the BTR sixties, the small hill fight there. They're all interconnected that that action.
And so there's one more one more big mission, that Calvigny mission. But in the meantime, I also have to mention eighty second is coming in. Marines are coming in Jaysck, the prima donnas that they are. We're going home. It's been forty eight hours. If that time for us to go, that's enough for us.
Well, once they were once the once they were shot off of of of Richmond Hill Prison, and then the seal teams were pulled out of the radio transmission where they they eeed out to see uh. After the radio transmission station mission, there really wasn't much left for them to do. But this is again, this is in the embryonic stages of Jaysck. They're really their command and control of the ranger battalions is a little tenuous. They belong
to Jaysck. But Jaysak was like, Okay, the eighty second Airborne commanders kind of wishy wash and he might need some more forces. We'll get them back loaded. But maybe if they're there is like a quick action, quick reaction force on the airfield. But with all of the battalions that are flowing in from the eighty second. They're used to expand the airhead, but they're not moving out as fast as, oh, say, a lot of people in the government and the military hierarchy would want.
So.
General Trobaugh, who's the commanding generally eighty second, basically asks for ranger support for the Calvini mission. He basically tells him, look, I'll give you all the artillery you can handle. I'll give you the some aviation assets. Well, you know, we'll take care of all that stuff. And even then Colonel Hagler is like, he's not the idea of flying into a place where they don't have a lot of intelligence about.
I mean, the rumors were flying around. It was anywhere from five hundred to twelve hundred Cuban and Grenadians on site and air.
It was a weird, unexpected mission to write. I think you write about how the Rangers were like turning in their ammunition and like getting ready to roll out.
Yeah, And this is where Doctor ho really explained it to me. He goes, this is where the real I we're not restricted on language usage. Doc said, this is the big mind fuck right here. We're on the airfield, we're turning in our AMMO, we're expecting to be bored. And you know, we've done our missions right, We've jumped in, we've secured the airfield, we've rescued the students, we've we've done all of our missions that we're supposed to do. You know, it's it's time for us to go home.
And then all of a sudden, this these these these squad leaders and platoon sergeants that show up and after getting the initial frago and they're going, we got another mission. And these guys are like, you know, Doc's a real cerebral guy.
He wrote his own book.
He really explains it better than I do in the book. But he talks about how your your mentality shifts. You feel like you're you know, you're running against the law of averages. At that point, you've rolled the dice a bunch of times, you've managed to work make it out of it, and and you feel like if there's one more roll of the dice, snake eyes coming up and you're done. And you know, he he felt like he had death premonitions while he was on the island a
couple of times. So I mean, again, very cerebral guy. The way he explained it, but you know, he he's he's like he said, I just was. I resigned myself to the mission. I went back to this eighty second Airborne guy and got my grenades back, and he was looking at me like you're a medic, and he goes, I'm a ranger. And the guy just said he didn't get it. The eighty second guy just didn't get it, like, you know, he's CSMLG and I know a lot of people know Lean Guerrero.
He he used to say.
Killers and healers. I think Doc used to say. He quoted him. He said, where's my heelers and where's my killers? And then I think he said to Doc, well, you're a heeler and a killer, Doc, you know, And I don't think the under eighty second kind of understood that mentality, because a medic's a medic right in an eighty second, whereas a ranger every gun counts. Yeah, you're a combat medic, right. So Doc's like collecting up his grenades. Guys are reloading mags.
They're getting clay more minds back from these guys. They're you know, getting you know, links of seven to sixty two for the sixties. They've got resigned themselves to the mission because they're going in in flights of eight, two flights of it's a it's two flights of four, and you can only fit what fifteen sixteen rangers. Maybe if you squeeze everybody in fifteen rangers on a black Hawk, and that's really tight with everybody scrunched in there and
holding on to each other. I think I think that's what he told me was about fifteen per flight for per aircraft.
It doesn't take a genius to do the math.
Sixty in the first four and sixty in the second four against what, at the minimum five hundred was the estimate. I mean, that's death man's dead man's odds, right. And these guys they lift off, and a couple of the guys told me they had never traveled in a black Hawk as fast as they did that morning. And they were flying just at sea level until they hit the coast. They hit where the cliff line was for Calvini, and when they did, they crested. They basically popped up and
popped down to hit the l Z quick. But what happened was they were coming in too hard and too fast, and a lot of those guys that didn't have a lot of hours in the black Hawk, and one of the pilots who went on there to be a one sixty sore pilot who flew in Somalia, told me, he goes, yeah, there was a there's an automatic setting with the stabilizer in the black Hawk. Then if you didn't know it was coming, it could really throw you off, and it would self adjust in those early models, at least I
think I'm describing it properly. Anyway, when they popped up, they had too much air speed and they tried to dump it really hard and they came up on their tails basically when they hit the LZ and that first aircraft in I know you tagged General Thomas on one of your Twitter posts about this thing.
Yeah.
Actually I worked in the Pentagon when he was at the J three for Special Operations, talked with him a few times and exchanged a few notes with him back and forth over the years. But General Thomas straight up a couple of years ago said, I don't remember seeing any fire, but the guys in that first aircraft did, and one of them was w I A and the other one took a round in the flash suppressure of them sixteen, and somebody said the pilot was hit.
I've never seen the pilot.
The pilots of that initial craft listed on any w i A listings, so I can't say if they were they weren't. But that aircraft was the only one out of that first four to get out of the zone because the rest of them was demolition Derby. They came in too hard and too fast. They broke one of them broke their back, pirouetted on its nose. It hit Bill Sears, who was the fist guy n c O I C for a company second bat, and it basically danced on Bill's chest like three times.
And those of you know Bill Sears. I was lucky enough to know Bill for a number of years and talk with him.
He was a paraplegic as a result of his injuries. A lot of guys got really screwed up, and we lost three damn good Rangers too, Doc Lannon and Steve Slater and Phil Grenere. And some of those aircraft hit the other aircraft, and then some of them hit There was a fence line that was adjacent to the l Z that one of them struck its rotors on and
then bashed its tail. In landing, there was a ditch that had actually landed in the ditch which lowered the silhouette of the aircraft, which drove the rotors into the fence line. So all this stuff happens is this shower of rotors and you know that's squealing. If you've been in an aircraft that's had an emergency, you know what that sound is. And there's probably a bunch of people watching this of air on the back of their next stand and up when you think about that sound, that's
what you could hear. And then it was clouds of dust because of the rotor strikes. And piecing that whole sequence together was really difficult because a lot of the guys only have fragments of memory from that, whether whether they're purged it from their memory consciously or subconsciously picking up they could pick up bits and pieces of it, you know, things that would flash across their field of vision. Once things settled and the dust settled, and they they
did what rangers do. They assaulted through the objective and in the book you'll read about all the subsequent flights and it really the one of the hardest descriptions was Dave Cummings who's another ranger legend from second Bat who would was a ranger in one of the letter companies in Vietnam as well, and he was in the second flight of four in the lead aircraft and watched it all go down. And Dave's description of it is really heartbreaking.
And as far as like the expectations of the enemy for us on that target, like it sounded if I recall correctly that the target was actually like relatively empty.
Yeah, it was.
It was pretty much a dry hole after those initial rounds. It was a dry hole. I mean, a couple of the guys said that there were corpses in the ground around there, but I don't think that they were there from the initial bombardment or or the ranger actions after landing at Calvini. So I don't know what the sourcing
is for those those those bodies there. But once those a few initial rounds, I think it was a stay behind force, maybe fired off a bunch of rounds at the aircraft they were coming in, and then beat feet because they knew they were gonna be in a hurt locker quick if they stuck around. So to me, there was I think there was a minimal force there a handful of guys. At most they've peppered the lead aircraft and took off running, because that was the mo for a lot of the Grenadians.
The UH.
As far as the ranger perspective in your book, I mean, that's sort of the last combat operation that they participated in before heading home. I would like to kind of ask you like concluding thoughts. I mean, you interviewed a ton of these guys, got a lot of different perspectives. I think there's maybe a couple different ways to think about Grenada. One of it was special operations, you know,
kind of getting the wind under their wings. One of it was, you know, the so called Vietnam syndrome that America was afraid to engage in military action after the Vietnam conflict and Grenada acting as sort of a test bed. No, actually, we can do operations shown again in eighty nine and Panama. I'd like to throw it to you and here you know your conclusions, your observations from all the research that you did for this book.
Yeah.
Well, first off, I'll start at the tactical level, and let's say ranger training works. Right, It's been proven over and over and over and again, and no matter how bad the situation is, whether pre mission or during mission or post mission, the Ranger methodology, the Ranger training model works and this validated again and they were the Ranger
Force took this. And when I say the Ranger Force because later on, obviously you know in eighty four there's a third battalion and then a regimental headquarters and they really start to That was the thing with the with the battalions at the time, they were kind of their own little entities. They didn't answer to a regimental headquarters. They were basically.
So calm didn't come around until what eighty seven, Yeah, So.
These guys were kind of operating in their own little bubble. And while there was a lot of cross pollination in terms of TTPs at the time, I think that they still operated a little bit in their own world. But the model, the overarching model was there for both battalions and it worked. Like the training, the individual training of a Ranger, the Ranger squad, the Ranger sections, the Ranger platoons, company, battalion level, etc.
It worked. It needed refinement, it.
Wasn't perfect, but when push comes to shove and the bullets started flying, the Ranger model worked again and it has ever since, and I think they were able to build on that. And like you said, without Desert One, without Grenada, we don't have the success in eighty nine and Panama that integrated command structure and the battalions a ranger regiment proved it again in Panama, and they proved it again ever since that that that ranger model works.
But I think again we had to go through the stand up of the battalions and then go through to Grenada to show the evolution of the force, right, and the force continues to evolve at this point, but I think that for Grenada was a vital component to showing, Hey, we moved away from light infantry, we moved away from the Vietnam recon, we moved into the special operations world. We now do raids, we now do airfield seizures, we do you know, And then you have Somalia where they're
doing direct support for smooth this. Without Grenada, we don't get there, or at least we don't get there as fast, and we also don't get Jaysacken later on SOCOM exercising better command and control of their organization and not leaving a ranger battalion at the hands of a conventional commander who doesn't know how to use them properly. But I would I would I would point to at the back of the book there is a lessons learned portion of it. A guy who started out as a ranger, Private Mike
Frank was in second Battalion. He was a B company, and then rose through the ranks and then made the jump as an officer in eighty nine. So he saw the evolution and he brought out a lot of those points and he's like, he's like, are you going to
do it after act? You know, like a lessons learned thing, And I was like, I kind of thought the book itself was a lessons learned when you think about it, and he goes, yeah, but we could pull those out and really make them precise and really make them succinct. So I would say Mike's did a really good job of pulling those things together, and I'm indebted to him
for putting those in there. And he later went onto Special Forces as well, so he brought a lot of institutional knowledge all the way from private to when he retired as a full wird colonel. So I would recommend folks going back and looking at that. But we again, without Grenada, we don't get to where we are as fast, and who knows what kind of mistakes we make in the run up and the execution of just causing eighty
nine without the Grenada mission. But yes, it also proves to the world we're not gun shy about putting our folks in the field and and rescuing student rescuing Americans, and fighting communism in our own hemisphere, although they tried to downplay that a bit at the time.
So to me, it's all those things.
But to me, it's, uh, you know, basically, it's a tribute to to the guys who executed the mission, and and to Tom and his family, and uh, you know, I feel really good that it got out and it's been been well received by the Rangers, so that I'm happy if other people like it. But to me, they're the they're the litmus test when it comes to the audience I'm shooting for.
Yeah, yeah, that's the hardest audience to convince, right. You can't get anything by them.
Yeah, if they would have come up to me and told me I was shit, I would have been upset. But you know, you do the best you can with it. A couple of them told me, not bad for a marine.
So the book is Cry Havoc, The Untold Story of Rangers that were by Tom Greer and Joe Muccia. You guys can find it now Joe's website. There'll be a link down the description. You can go and get an autographed copy directly from him. It's a preferred method. You said that the next book is called Old Scrolls.
Old Scrolls, that's the working title, but I think I like it a lot. It's going to be called Old Scrolls, A Decade of Change.
I like it.
It goes from basically the formation of the Ranger Battalion's seventy four to seventy five time frame up until early eighty four, but before the formation of the Regiment and the third Battalion, So it's going to cover a lot of those missions that the lessons learned from those those training exercises in those years of growth that lead up to Cry Havoc essentially.
Joe, thank you so much for writing this book, for finishing Tom's work as well, and telling the Rangers story. So many things I didn't know that I learned from reading this book. I really hope that other people will go and.
Pick it up. Thanks, I appreciate it.
We got one question for you from m Corbin.
What do you think General Crighton Abrams would have to say about the regiment's evolution of capabilities during the gwatt have they become the finest direct action force in the world.
I think Abrams probably would have been pleased to see where they evolved into. Obviously, he came from a place in Vietnam where he was not trust full of special forces, and the reason he wanted the Ranger battalions formed was because in his mind, if he lived long enough, he was going to disband special Forces and the Rangers would be the piece would be that special operations force that would would take the missions. I mean, so to me, I think he'd be pleased to see where they've evolved to.
He wanted them to be the finest light infantry force in the world, and I think they've got a few peers out there.
Joe, before we take off, any final thoughts or anything else that you want to plug before we get going here tonight.
No, No, I appreciate everybody coming on and watching. I'm hoping there's a few of the guys that were in this book listening and watching. So if you are, hey guys, good to glad to promote you guys. I know you don't like it. You're a very insular community. Don't like people speak in your names. But it's okay. There's a lot of love for you guys these days. Absolutely, but thanks for having me on. I appreciate you guys.
Yeah, man, stay in touch. Let me know when the next book comes out. We'll have you back on again to talk about that. And we will be back on Monday with FBI retired FBI agent who served in a counterintelligence role, so it should be fun to talk to him Joe again. Thank you, and we will see all of you guys on Monday.
Thanks. Yes,