Inside Military Intel in WW2 | Tim Scherrer | Ep. 395

It's super cool. If I mean, if you're interested in World War two era military intelligence, you're definitely gonna want to have this book on your shelf. Tim, thank you for joining us tonight.

So I was always interested in the military, and my mom would take us to the library and they had these CB Colby books like Equipment of the Cold War, Weapons of World War Two, things like that, you know. And I remember opening that book and seeing that Davy Crockett on the back of that jeep, thinking that was the coolest thing ever. So, and I was always definitely

interested in World War Two. And there was one point when I was super young, I was maybe five or six, like the movie The Battle of the Bulge was on, and the parents were trying to get me to go to bed, and I didn't want to go to bed because I want to know how the war was going to turn out. I mean, the Germans had patent tanks, I mean, how could they not lose? But so my dad said go to bed, you'll be fighting World War two for the rest of your life. And that's kind

of kind of how it's been. I think. So my dad served in the military. I had some uncles that served Moms and Paton's Army. I have one that's a little bit of a mystery. He was a aviator who received a Silver Star during the Japanese attack at Clark

Field on the eighth of December forty one, and he survived the Baton Death March and died afterwards. And also, I mean that my brother served in the Air Force. My niece just got back from a deployment as the chief of staff for the Air Force Base and the UAE. She just got back like a week ago.

might as well study history. And then RTC presented itself so yeah, I started participating in RTC as a freshman, and then I ended up getting to three and a half year scholarship, which because I got it at the end of that semester, that gave me the money to buy my seventy three Volkswagen Beetle, which was my college car. So drove that all the way through school. You know, I'm a first gen college and so my dad basically said, this is a waste of money. Why are you doing this?

When I moved into the doors, my parents learn just said, hey, just go put your stuff up there and drive back the next day and then we'll drop you off. Like there was no big moving day, Like we didn't know how to do any of this. So and I was again, I was a band kid to the nth degree. I mean, Quincy Public Schools had bought a child sized tuba and I was the guinea pig for the child size tuba,

and so I started playing it in fourth grade. And I remember having to march in like, you know, three mile parades with like a full sized fiberglass susophone that's almost like dragging on the ground and stuff like that. Although I was a pretty good, pretty good tuba player in that I think I only set second cheer one time in my life. Ended up being All state actually my senior year, and then I really walked away from it.

I just decided, you know, there's not going to be any big resurgence in polka music, and I think so far i've called that one right. I could have bought a tuba with my scholarship money, but I thought the car would do me a little more good. So and again I was a skinny kid. I was one hundred and sixty pounds and I really worked hard during my freshman year my sophomore year to build up and get strong.

I've got these ridiculously skinny arms, so like push ups are just like the mechanics for push ups for me are just not pretty. And so the second semester of my sophomore year in college, I got mono and I went from like one sixty to one thirty and I lost everything and I had to completely start over. So, you know, went through my junior year, became went through

RTC Advance Camp Fort Riley. I would have been summer of eighty six, and then I was a pretty mediocre cadet. Again, I just wasn't that physical. I mean, I was just a skinny kid that was you know, just had monol like a year before. And but I did the best I could. And you know, I never I never struggled with anything, but it was just always a bit of a bit of a challenge for me. So they they do like an internship for cadets and I got it's

called Cadet Troop Leader Training. So I got a CTL the assignment and it was like the worst CTLT assignment in the world. I got assigned to the jail commander at Fort Gordon, Georgia. So I'm like, I show up in like day one, Hey we're feeding them. Hey we're they're getting showers. Hey they're doing this. And then like day two, hey we're feeding them. Hey we're doing so actually I we went and kind of farmed out and rode along with the MPs, busting up fights at the

Enlistic Club. I stood gate one time, caught a drunk driver, you know, all these sort of fun things that I got to do. So when it came time to commission again, you submit your dream sheet, and mine didn't come back the way I'd hoped. I mean, I ranked as a Distinguished Military Graduate but then I got put in the reserve component and I got the branch I wanted, But no one could seem to quite understand how that happened. And everyone's like, well, you're a DMG and you got

in the reserve. So I'm like, yeah, I have no idea how that happened. So I didn't really have a plan B, so I had to had to move pretty quick and figure things out. So I had to. And when you're in the Army Reserve as an officer, there's no career manager for you, like you are your own career manager. There's no one you call and say, hey, what jobs are open. You have to figure it out yourself. So I figured out there were two am I detachments

in Saint Louis. One was the four eighty fifth am I Detachment, which was a infantry brigade support unit, and the other one was the two to eighty third in my debt, which was a UKM theater level CI counter intelligence unit. And so to me, the the forty fifth seemed like the place to go, so I went ahead and signed on there. I was really kind of an extra officer until I went to my basic course, which was not until October. But so I show up from

my first drill. I have no idea, never been to a drill in my life, and I'm just kind of sitting there and it's a warm June day and all these guys are taking off their blouses because it's warm, and they all got guns. I'm like, do I get a gun? Like? I don't? Is this normal? They were all Saint Louis City cops, so they were they were packing guns with them all the time because you never know, they might walk out of the Reserve center and see

somebody that they knew. But so we ended up doing our very first annual training that summer and we were going to Gagetown, Canadian Forces Base. Now the forty fifth mission was US Army Forces Republic of Iceland. So there's the Icelandic Defense Force and then they're the different service components NAVICE which was active duty, at ICE which was

active duty, and then the reserve component had had the Army Headquarters was a reserve unit out of a oh gosh An Air Force Base out of Massachusetts, and the one eighty seventh sib Army Reserve. This was before the off Side Agreement and the Army Reserve lost all the combat units they were out of Massachusetts, and so because I didn't have a job, didn't have really anything to do,

I got put on advanced party. So we went up there and we had all kinds of problems that Sato screwed up our tickets, like our connecting flights were booked for the second day. Ended up sleeping in the Bangor main airport with my RTC colleague, and then it came time for us to pick up our vehicles. So we had this blue Bonneville station wagon with like wood grain on the site, so they rented at the airport to kind of run around until we got all of our equipment.

So our equipment had been railroaded out of Saint Louis and shipped up to like New Hampshire and then put on flatbeds to haul up to gain each town Canadian Forces base, which is New Brunswick. And so we go up to pick up our vehicles and we quickly discover that we only have one of our vehicles. We only have our two and a half ton truck, and fortunately that's got all of our tents and everything else in it.

I mean, we only had like five vehicles to begin with, so our our other vehicles were involved with the fatal traffic accident, I'm sure, and the state police impounded them. So like, we didn't know when we're going to get our stuff, and so we decided to keep the Bottomville wagon for a while. And so we you know, fortunately we had our tents. We got our tents and everything set up, and the Brigade commanding General showed up and there's you know, this kind of like strach e five.

He sees I've got a different patch. He goes, hey, where are you from? I seven forty fifth of miles Saints? Where you and my guys? And he says, okay, so what's going on. How's it going. I'm like, well, not well, we don't have any of our vehicles because of this thing happened. And he said, oh okay, well thanks for letting me know. And so he told the general and next thing, you know, like that, the Brigade S four came looking for us. He's like, hey, you guys, don't

you got your vehicles? Are gone? Like okay, we can loan you get two in one five one jeeps. We're like, hey, that's awesome, thank you. And so we got the two M one five one jeeps and then so in the motor pool, you know, it was like Humby Humby kuk v kuk V Bonneville with wood grain Humby Humby humby uh. And they they wanted the jeeps back after like two days. So we started hiding the jeeps. So we found a place where we could park them where no one could

see them. And so then the you know, the S four would come back, Hey, I need my jeeps back, and we're like, oh, you know, they were just here five minutes ago here, why don't you come back in about two hours? And we think they'll be here. So we finally got our vehicles like well into the second week.

But I remember we did a jump talk for the brigade and so it was an artep exercise. So the aviation unit Kyro Warriors is flying overhead. I can see the CAVS squadron screening us on the flanks and then on one threes and and I'm in the Bonnaville in the middle of this convoy. So that that was an interesting experience. So from there I went to IOBC Class eighty eight dash too. It's about a half active half reserve start in October and it was a really good experience.

I did pretty well there, and there was a guy in there which I've never quite figured out who he was to this point. I think his name was his last name was Mackenzie, and I want to say Bob Mackenzie, but that may be like a that may be like a Great White North mix up in my brain. But Bob had a really curious intel background and he had

some stories about how he had been in Granada. He had been in the evasion of Lebanon in an Israeli uniform, and he had just come from Infantry Officer Basic course and then he was going through am I Officer Basic course. I'm like, who does that? So we've and he was going to brag, So we're kind of curious. So if anyone knows Bob, let me know kind of who he was. But so he actually ended up getting hurt in Ranger school, which he went to right after then I think he

got out processed. But so then I had another opportunity to go for active duty that had what was called the Commandants program, and so I ranked sixth out of my forty five members in my class. But my buddy, good friend of mine he ranked fourth out of forty five. So I h he ended up getting it and he was clearly the better man. But so then I'm like, Okay, I got to go back and find a job, and that's what I did.

you recover. Every ghost Bed mattress is made with premium materials, proven cooling technology, and their exclusive pro Core layer, a targeted support system that reinforces the center of the mattress where your body is the heaviest. It helps to keep your spine aligned and your back supported so you wake up ready to take on what's next. In ghost beds, cooling materials don't just keep you from overheating, they help

regulate your temperature year round. Each mattress comes with one hundred and one night sleep trial and a twenty to twenty five year warranty plus fast free shipping. Most orders arrive in two to five days, so better rest is just around the corner. Right now. During ghost beds Holiday Sale, you can get twenty five percent off site wide for a limited time. Just go to ghostbed dot com slash house and use the promo code house at checkout. That's

ghostbed dot com slash house promo code house. Upgrade your sleep with ghost bed, the makers of the coolest beds in the world. Some exclusions apply. See site for details. And thank you ghost bed for sponsoring the show. Please check out the link down the description and support our sponsor. Is that how it works in the reserves, They're not just assigning you somewhere.

I've got these orders. I can get them canceled if need be. I kind of like to go came into work Monday, and he fired me. So it all actually kind of worked out in that the next day I actually got a much better job offer for where I worked for twelve years, so it turned out to be pretty well. So my job was I worked at Northeast Missouri State and I maintained fourteen hundred and ninety two apartments and dorm rooms. I had twenty six staff and just basically kept all those kids warmed ry and did

that for twelve years. And that was never a dull moment for sure.

was me. I had a warrant officer who was a school teacher librarian, but he spent all summer going to army schools and teaching in army schools, so he you know, he was an interrogator. He was a a CI agent. He had taught at the school house, all that kind of stuff. And then I had a deputy sheriff from Madison County, Illinois, so he was a full time cop. And then I had a guy who was a Saint Louis City cop, former prior service sergeant, York crewman, if that says anything. And then I had a guy who

was a private investigator. So I had a pretty stacked little team of guys who did stuff on their outside work from the unit. The interrogator section had a bunch of Saint Loss City cops, a postal inspector, our photo interpreter. Warrant worked at defense mapping, the order of battle warrant worked at defense mapping. I mean, there's a lot of very good crossover inside of that unit, despite the Army not giving this a whole lot of anything.

super cool. If you've ever read Red Storm Rising, that's that's the scenario right there. That's that's what was going to go down in Iceland. And we, like I remember, we were next to the flight line and like an F fifteen would go screaming off the runway and you could follow it because the sky was so clear. You know, it's going up to intercept a bear bomber in the sky. There were anti submarine aircraft lying all the time, things

like that, so it was it was pretty fascinating. It was also during summer, so it really didn't get dark the whole time we were there. So when we came back, we're like eating dinner in Connecticut and we're like, it's dark. You see that it's dark outside, Yeah, it's dark. So that was a that was an interesting experience.

biggest problem we had off post, which are our soldiers. Didn't go off post a whole lot for that exercise, but these are intersitdery Boston kids, and that's like the flavor flav era. So I remember one guy walking around with the big clock and all this kind of stuff,

and so that was a bit of a challenge. And also we were just doing standard tactical ci making sure that they had good operational security practices, make sure they weren't throwing op orders and dumpsters and you know, listening to radio nets and visiting sites for camouflage and all those sorts of things. We actually the year before we did, we were with the separate Infantry Brigade out of Oklahoma, and we decided that we were talking to the battalion commander.

He's like, oh, yeah, you guys can collect on my boys. They're good. I'm like, okay, that sounds like fun. So we snuck some guys in and they used a lighter and burned burned off the insulation on their WD one wires, and we tapped them and ran a line off of

that flew around and got aerial imagery of it. We took We had a interrogator female, so she put on a pair of shorts and a tank top and went for a ride on the roach coach and started asking questions to see what kind of information she could get. So it was all over. We gave this guy like a I actually sat and listened to the radio nets into traffic analysis on it and stuff like that. So we presented, you know, okay, here's your battalion, this is what we know about him. So that that was good.

That was that was actually good training.

So in the summer of nineteen ninety, we didn't have a name training, like people were just going to schools. So I actually got sent to kind of a crap job I got to. I got sent to Fort Leonard Wood to the Special Security Office. Although it turned out to be interesting because that was July of nineteen ninety and I was producing the Black Books for the Engineer School and that was the entire build up of Saddam on the Kuwait border. So I'm reading all of this

intel before. Of course, you know, it ended and I went home, But little did I know a few months later I would get roped into it.

called up and they went to they went to Germany, and by the time they got spun up and trained, like, the whole thing was over and they came back like a couple of months later. So they actually pulled two officers out of the unit, myself and another guy who worked at McDonald Douglass which is now Bowing in Saint Louis, and they sent us to US Transcom j the J two of Transcomb, which is at Scott Air Force Base,

Joint Force Headquarters, four Star Headquarters. And at that point Transcomb was really only two years old, as Goldwater Nichols had just happened, and the J two was really just the Military Airlift Command I in shop and then they had like a little space with about a dozen people

in it. A Navy guy there was like an Army imagery guy and a few others, and I was either the second or third Army guy assigned to the J two there at Transcom, And so then I got thrown over to be the briefer on the Crisis Action Team. And so I was brief in the four star general like within two days of again there, and I was like, I was not a good briefer. I had to figure it out quick, and it actually worked out okay. But so I did that for like forty five days, and

then the other lieutenant swapped with me. He came over to the Crisis Action Team and we were working four days on, two days off, and then we have flipped the nights, and then we do four days on and then two days off and then flip back to days. So every six days we were flipping days and nights. They just have enough people to do days and nights.

So I was working in the Crisis Action Team among all the operations folks, the logistics team, the airteam, Navy team, all those guys that are making all of this high level logistics working, and so we would give them our J two update. So I got swapped out and I actually went over to write a trucking study on the Saudi Arabian Peninsula. So that was my job for like forty five days. You got to write this trucking study on Saudi Arabia. I like, okay, so I'm researching. I'm

trying to find everything. I asked for a couple of days of like a permi of TD why. I went back to my college library, spent two days, and all I found was a reference in Smithsonian magazine that said, no self respecting Bedouin truck driver would drive anything less than a Mercedes. I'm like, I went to my box. I'm like, I am floundering on this. So another guy came in and he's like, why don't we call a

why don't we call like a auto company. They called the Ford Motor Company, and like you know, four days later we had a print out like this thick of every vehicle that has ever been sold to Saudi Arabia. So so I've got a citation for that, but I also didn't do much on it. So the other guy

decided he wanted to go back to Boeing or McDonald douglas. So I was left there and then I got joined by an army guy who transferred end by the name of Brock ears A. Brock actually had grown up in that area. He's a captain as a lieutenant, and I was a brand new first lieutenant at that point, and he had just come out of the White House situation room.

In fact, he was the Southcomb briefer for just cause, so and he had some really good stories about, you know, how all that went down, but so how he briefed on the Oval office and now he went and briefed Quail separately and things like that. So he was a really great mentor for me. And we were working together these kind of day and night shifts, so there were a few moments when we didn't actually know what to

make of anything. So Brock's like, hey, let me call my buddies, you know, and you get on the stew three and call and pop up White House. Hey, Bob, tell me what's going on, that kind of thing. So it was it was really interesting to be there. But so the J two desk was actually right next to

the snack bar and the J three. General Cross wall Cross was kind of a junk food junkie, and so he would always come over and looking for something to eat, and he would just strike up conversations, and we had complete access to all the geos there there was there were no there were no people we had to go through. We need to talk to anybody, we could just go talk to them. And I remember one day I was reading Bodyguard of Lies and he's like, Lieutenant, I'm so

proud of you for that. So it was, it was, it was pretty pretty, pretty busy. I actually did make an attempt to try and to play went over to the Helicopter Unit, Army Reserve Helicopter Unit, which is part of our command. I said, hey, I mean, am I a guy, I'm trained up, I'm already working the problem. I like to go with you guys. And they're like, no, I think I probably worked it wrong. But they were

actually the unit. They were a super cool unit. They were a lot of the guys worked at Aviation Systems Command, which is at that point was in Saint Louis, Missouri, and all the warrants were Vietnam guys, and they actually ended up being like the Distinguished Visitor Helo Unit or Sentcom, so they flew shortz cough to the peace talks with the Iraqis things like that. So that was a kind

of a missed opportunity for me. But so, yeah, there was there's a lot going on, and when Israel started receiving scuds from Iraq, we got like a warning and execution order like that, like we got to do this right now. We had to get patriots down to Israel. So my colleagues worked that that evening. I didn't really have much of a play in it other than, you know, making sure that the apods and spods were okay in Germany.

And then the next night they were set up in Israel and we watched them like knock missiles out of the sky and saved lives. That was super cool.

the scuds coming into Israel and hitting residential areas and I'm I mean, it looks so terrifying.

And so I was in the watch center and I heard the beep, beep beep, and and then listened ANSD like, we got a critic, we got a critic, Like, okay, we got a critic. Okay, let's see what happens, and beppepeep, Okay, we got a scud. It's coming out of a rack. It's going to Turkey, It's going into Turkey. I'm like, Turkey. Turkey is a NATO country, So if they shoot a missile at Turkey, that means that's an attack on a NATO country, which means NATO is probably going to join

the GOUF. I was like, oh shit, this is this is a pretty big deal. And then peep peep, another one comes in. We got the asthmuth wrong. It's going to Israel, like geez Louise. So you know, the war kind of drew down, and so there's a little bit of an insurgency that popped up there and I ended up I was briefing the general, and the General really kind of took a shining to me, a hands for T. Johnson Air Force four star guy, and like all the geos kind of took a shining to me because I was,

you know, a younger version of them. And so there was one moment in a briefing where the four star at that point they were called sins like, I'm briefing something about Iraqi a surgency, and he's like, well, why don't they just fade into the woodwork and like Vietnam. I'm like, well, sir, there and I just shot right back and I'm sure there is no woodwork in Iraq. And there was this like pregnant moment. I'm like, I am so screwed, like I'm about to get fired, and

then he started laughing. And so from then on I became Lieutenant Woodwork. So as things spun down, we worked on like Northern Watch. I remember I had to hand draw a map for the four star to brief him. I literally hand drew a map and laid it on the table for him and kind of explained it to him and he's like, LT, what's this, I go, sir, that's an Infantry Company, you know, things like that. That

was a little crazy. One of the weirder things we did was as Desert Storm was the desert desert sorte was starting to pick up, which is the return, we

got like a warning order that there'd been some sort of Yanna humanitarian disaster in Iran and and there were there. They wanted us to start looking at the possibilities of taking humanitarian supplies into Iran. We're like, oh, jeez, that's a weird one. So I got with the Middle East Analyst and we started looking at road networks and train network and roads and all that kind of stuff. We got like a day into it, and then the Iran put out a message that they didn't want any AIDS

infected blankets from the US. So that pretty much shut that whole thing down immediately. So I kind of like, I guess smallpox blankets, I don't know.

joint joint document, everything else. But when they stood up the Army Element in October of ninety one, they made us a drilling im a detachment, which basically just means you're not going to get paid. I figured that out. So I actually went eight or nine months without getting any of my droll pay, which was not cool. And I ended up having to work through a my congressman like every single month so I could actually get my drolly.

It was so screwed up. So then when we went into Somalia restore Hope, I believe is that name an exercise?

I remember I was chatting with an amphib and hey, I need some pictures of the doc, and you get me pictures of the dock and you know, some guy and he's like, ah, sure, sure, I'll tee, I get it right for you. You know, two hours later these JPEGs show up. I'm like, this is so cool, Like this thing, this internet thing's pretty interesting. But when I

actually reported. The day I report, I remember I was checking into the scot d and I saw the seals coming over the beach on CNN and the lobby of the I'm like, okay, well this is going to be different. And then that that pay issue continued. I was going

towards my second month of active duty and still had not been paid, which was ridiculous. So I would work a night shift and Army Reserve Personnel Centers ninety seven hundred Page in Saint Lewis, So I would come off a full night shift and I drove over there. I'm like, I'm not going to leave until this is resolved. I ended up having to go back three times to get it resolved. And yeah, yeah, and like, well, in the first month wasn't so bad because I was still getting

my civilian salary. But and when I was in there, I just completely understood how the Army can get screwed up. There'd be like a pallette of two OHO one files sitting in the hallway, and like one of them would fall off the top and get on the floor and people would start walking on it, and next thing, you know, the whole files all over the place, all over the place, and somebody kind of scoops it back up, but it's

probably missing a few pages and stuff like that. So I demobed around March, I think, And that was well before black Hawk Down happened. I did brief the weekend of black Hawk Down, but we had no idea what was going on over there, you know, typical operations in Somalia at this point. We heard about it later later on.

on a friday if you're going to brief. And I walked into the conference and there's a VTC going on and it's the uh, the briefing the air drop plan for the Brigade of eighty second to go into Haiti. Yeah. Yeah, and so the air at that point, I think it might have been Air Mobility Command versus MAC and so we got that whole plan and I got a phone call before I had left. They said, hey, you know, we may send you down to Homestead to be an

l ando down there. I'm like, okay, you know, I'll just I'll pack up some extra clothes and you know, I'll show up and just tell me, tell me where to go. And then on Saturday they're like, no, we think we got all this covered, so we don't need us to just go home. So I worked this plan for like two days. I'm like, go home and watch it on CNN. My roommate was like, hey, let's watch something else. I'm like, no, we're going to watch CNN tonight. Why because we're going to watch see itn in tonight.

So but yeah, I ended up going on to becoming a company commander. And again there's by that point them I debts had completely folded in Saint Louis. They were gone. There were no slots there. So there's the only way

I was going to get a company command and was get like a zero one alpha branch and material. So there was the second the three three fourth Infantry Regiment, which is an Army reserve basic training company and they and they were located in my hometown. They had they had a debt up in my hometown of Quincy, and the main unit was in Granite City, which is right across from Saint Louis. So I talked to the Battalian community.

He goes, you know, I need someone to be an S one and we got to merged three giants into one and then when you finish that, I'll give you a company command. I'm like, okay, that's good. So did that. We didn't do like a two week annual training. We busted it all up into two weekends. So generally we were working two weekends a month, which was getting kind of old by the end of it. But so yeah, I took this basic Training Company command D Company three

three fourth Infantry Regiment. So and I had a little bit of street cred, like I'm the mi G coming out of nowhere, like like who is this guy? But I was all so from Quincy, so I got a little bit of street cred there, and so I did that for three years. We did multiple you know, annual training cycles. I uh, we did two at Knox and we did one at Benning. The Benning one was kind of just kind of weird because the Basic Combat Training Brigade was standing up at that point, and it only

been the ITB at that point. So they stood up this other brigade to do basic training, and some of the drill sergeants came from Ibing and a bunch of them were brand new, and they kind of dumped us on us on top of them to help them out, because I mean, we had drill sergeants that have been on the trail for twenty years doing that. So but they were just doing really just dumb stuff. I'm just

looking at this like what are you people doing. So one of the things when we were at Fort Knox, we were always we were always to be in the exact same uniform as the private like the privates are wearing helmets, were wearing helmets, were in LB. They were

an LB. And these these drill starts didn't want to do that, and so they were trying to figure out ways to carry water and they're doing like gatorade bottles and camelbacks and all this kind of stuff, and I'm like, dude, the Army has a thing that has canteens on it that carries water if you just want to wear it. So that was also gosh. So the unit that relieved me was out of Chicago, and we tried to do a good handover to them, and I remember the company

commander came in. I'm like, where are your guys. They're supposed to write seat ride left seat ride, and she's like, well, my NCOs had a meeting today and they decided they didn't want to come in this early. I was like, excuse me, your NCOs had a meeting and decided they didn't want to come in this morning. Okay, So that was that was curious. But so then I finished out of I finished my company command, and then there was an opportunity to go back to Transcom and it was

a major slot, which is good because I needed that. Again, you got to manage your own career. So I actually went to the Advanced Airlift Tactics Training Center, which is a super cool course that the Air Force runs out of Rosecrans Air Base in Saint Joe, Missouri. So it's really to teach airlifters how to do defensive tactics besides just to curl up the ball and die, so protect themselves from triple A missiles, aircraft things like that. So

its a two weeks school. We went to Rosecrans for like four or five days and then we flew to Wachuka and which you know, I'm familiar with Wachuka. And then we did the flying phase and like they would literally teach them to fly over a mountain, drop a wing and fly down the other side like in a C one thirty. Also we had a C seventeen and we had a G triple three there as well, and one of the guys, one of the pilots, overbanked a C one thirty doing this training, so they had to

ground that. I did win the Biggest Puker Award, although in my own defense, like they had to give it to the Army guy. They just had to. But in my own defense, I was the third person to puke on that aircraft. The Hope air crew had been out drinking all night and they were definitely not eight hours throttle the bottle, so they were hungover. So we're taking off and I look over and the nave is on oxygen.

I'm like, this is not a good sign. And we take off and that was the word they were doing, the terrain train flying and falling down the other side of a mountain. Yeah, in big trash haulers and so the so he started puking, the light engineers start puking, and then I start puking, and then so apparently I was like the biggest puker, even though I was the third one to puke on the aircraft. But we had

to see seventeen. They brought in a third pilot to clear the wings to make sure they didn't hit anything with the wings of the aircraft. So that was that was pretty interesting to do all that. So from there I left my job at Truman in n MSU, which became Truman State and Army RTC was doing contractor jobs to teach RTC and they were hiring Guard, reserve and active duty officers and at that point they didn't want anyone to know our status. They didn't want to want

anyone to know our contractors. So we were we were our BDUs just like everyone else. So I had BDUs with the cadet command patch and I had you know, stuff for my unit, and I just kind of swapped the blouses depending upon where I was at and I had opportunities. I was a captain straight up company command, and I had an opportunity to go to Missou Illinois

State and soon ELOI University at Edwardsville. But I also had a class three MP forty Schmeiser and I couldn't take that to Illinois, So that kind of made my decision to go to Missou. So I went to Missoo and I started some history classes I taught the freshman. I was a platoon TAC officer that summer. Greg Hammer, Panama Ranger, was my pack and CEO. Great guy. We had a blast. We had so much fun together and when I was at Missoo, we had some interesting hits

go through there. Some of the some are just people in general. Andrew Bailey, who's now the Deputy Director of the FBI, he was a cadet there at that time. Will Eatens, who it was a KIA in about two thousand and four, he was there, and then Sar Major Kevin Griffith was my my, uh my, he was the senior NCO there for a couple of years and he actually, uh he was one of the four that got killed in that suicide attack that flowed Goberg shoved the guy

away and received the Medal of Honor. So it was kind of wild to see those people pop up here and there. Yeah, take a drink. Sure. So then nine to eleven happens and I'm at Missoo. I'm teaching Miszoo, I was doing PT. I was leading like incentive PT that morning, and I come back and like, the first plane hits the tower. I'm kind of like, you know, B twenty five hit the Empire State Building World War two.

The second the second plane hit the tier, I'm like, damn it, this is al Kaeda and I just lost next year. So by ten o'clock I had an email said, hey, we need people to come in at the at Transcom, which is my reserve and assignment at that point. And so I actually went down there on the Friday after nine to eleven and checked in and got on my jaywix terminal, watched Bush on the mound for my Jaywix terminal, and my shift changeover was a guy who was you know,

had been working on nine to eleven. He's like, Okay, we have fighters on strip alert at Lambert Field in Saint Louis, so if you see any threats, let us know. We can, you know, send some fighters after him. And I'm like, damn, I am like one hundred miles from where I grew up and this is insane. So went back to Miszoo and like, they kept telling us, we're going to get called up, We're going to get called up, We're going to get called up. Finally they called us

up on the first of October. My boss was the PMS was starting to be kind of a jerk about it. And so when I finally did get called out, like two days in, he shoots me an email, Hey, since you were mobilized, you can't come back to work here. And I had I had just had an excellent performance evaluation. There were no issues up to that point. I'm like really, So I printed it, sent it to US Department of Labor,

filed a case one that got my job back. So in the beginning, we augmented the night team and so we would do this terrorism VTC in the middle of the night, and there were so all the different agency CIA, DA, Joined Terrorism Task Force and there was a Special Ops Task Force. I think this was around the Rhino era when we were in Rhino and so like Joined Task Force whatever twenty or whatever they were would pop on

and they were clearly in a tent. So we were sitting there one night and we're doing the roll call to make sure everyone's on and Task Force whatever it was, twenty pops in and there's gunfire or like, damn, what's going on there? Are they getting overrun or whatever? And it gets muted and we hear it. Sorry, we were watching a movie, so that was a little nutty. But another funny thing that kind of happened is we are getting ready to put all those C seventeens into Rhino.

I think they were moving in the hundred and first and maybe some Marines in there. And in the middle of the briefing, you know, the C seventeen can land on a dirt strip, like it has that capability. But the middle of the briefing that J three is like, have we done any studies about the long term effects of landing C seventeens on dirt runways? The room went quiet. Everyone's just looking at each other, and he's like, well,

I guess we're about to find out. So so my job eventually became the asymmetric threat she So we produced the disomid. The briefing team had a group of briefers that would then do the J two and the J three briefs in the morning. So they would come in at like midnight. I would come in at like three or four, kind of read the intel, read their products. We'd brief it to the deputy or the current intelllogience chief, and then we'd brief it in the J two and then we go and we brief it in the J

three later in the morning. So one of the weirder days is we walked in on a Monday and anaconda had just happened, and like the J three is like hair on fire, Like okay, we're air refueling direct apaches from or Campbell and we're rounding up all this ac one thirty AMO from all the world air refuel direct getting it over there. I know the briefing that the J three is like, two, how come you didn't tell

us about this? And we're like that's because we're the two Like we don't know what the J three is doing, what the two is going is doing, So they actually had to assign an officer to keep track of that and keep them up to data what the three was doing because we've really had no idea. We were just reading intel traffic. So I did get to go to the OH. I did get a information war briefing that was super fascinating. I had a guy who kind of

worked information war. So we had this arm come in and it was a contractor contracting company and they were running the information war campaign for that war, and they gave us, you know, how they do things, how they do information bracketing, like they would put stories out there in advance to get picked up by the media and to drive their briefings. And it really changed my view

on everything. These were just a political company that was hired and they were doing that and they were on like a joint VTC every morning to get the messaging right. Just things that you don't really get to see a whole lot of. But I went to the Dynamics of International Terrorism course which was at Joint Special Ops you, which was pretty amazing. Course, our speakers were General Doser,

who had gotten kidnapped by the Red Brigades. We had the real guy who was kidnapped by the farc and proof of life we had the force protection guy from Cobar Towers. So it was a legit course. It was really really good. So yeah, I got released after a year. And in the middle of that, I got another issue with my job in that the contract went from one company from MPRI to Contact and I got an email from and They're like, you've never worked for us, so

you don't have any reemployment rights with us. So I went to my Department of Labor rep and I'm like, dude, what's going on here? Like, I don't know what to make of this? Think goes, no problem, got it, It's a continuation of interest. So they ended up having to hire like a dozen people back that they tried to screw over. So so then I went back to Missoo that reserve unit and oh yeah, another thing is I did do is I did brief at the ten oh three Tipfit Briefing or Iraqi Freedom And that was in

February of two. So I went into the bulk, got right into the plan and then presented my briefing before the assembled crew and the tipfit meeting is like a big food fight for everyone wants to get their folks in early, Like do you take the loggies in early? Do you take the infantry in early? Do you do those kinds of things, like what's the right flo for all this where everything works the best? So that was pretty interesting. So I went back to Missou and then

I was back at RTC. Everything's going great, and then I get another email, Hey from my company. Hey, we are overstaffed at your position and you're the junior employee, so you have to go. I'm like, are you kidding me? I'm the original guy, Like I'm the first guy, Like none of this happened without me getting called up a year ago or a year and a half ago. So again I called him Dennis McElroy a US Department of Labor. He's like like, what are these people thinking? So again

I got reinstated again. Third time I had to get my job back. Now I felt awful though, because the guy who had taken my position, buddy of mine named Terry Heisler, he Signal Corps guy, so he was losing

his job. But I actually called trans Comm and got him hooked up with the j six because he was a Signal Corps dude, and so he got orders to go to go to Transcom J six for like a year, and it actually worked out for him because the daughter got really sick with cancer and needed that medical attention that would be paid for, so so that actually worked out for him. He now owns a beer garden in Washington, Missouri, so John G's if you ever go there. So so really,

I mean from there, just continued to teach RTC. Summer of seven, I walked, I walked stick Slanes, and I was doing pretty well. I felt pretty good about all that. So I was at the Van's camp up in Lewis walk in I don't know, five seven miles a day with gear. I got back and I was at a World War two division reunion to connect with some vetsite in New and I had this massive chest pain. I was like, oh shit, what is this? And I went white and then I recovered. I went and saw the

doctor and they didn't know what it was. So then I went to cup Weeks later, I was at Kansas City for drill and I had another one of those in the heart in a hotel room. I was by myself, so I called nine one one ended up in the hospital, and really that started like a year long ordeal for me. My spleen was destroying my red blood cells and my hemo globan count was like four point eight where it's supposed to be like fifteen to eighteen. So it was

really my spleen that was causing that. So I went through that for a period of time, and then it was really kind of time for me to get out of Missoo. Like Missoo, I was just kind of done with it, and so I went ahead and got a job at Missouri Military Academy. Although the last year we were there, we got the MacArthur Award for best RTC program Western Mississippi, and we had failed an inspection like

four years before horribly. I mean I thought my boss was going to jump over a table at our personnel person. But so I also changed reserve units. I got out of the JTAU. I just felt like I had done everything I could there, and again it's your free agent, you got to go find another job. So I actually found the Command in General Staff College, which I had a background in education, that seemed to be like a

good fit. So they put me in as the S three and then I could become a student after that, which was perfect because I do wasn't have to do like two weekends. So my first job as the S three was to give a PT test to eighty lieutenant colonels and that was a good time. And so I ended up finishing the course and became a instructor, and then I eventually became a lead instructor and then I

became a head of school for that unit. On the civilian side, I went to Missouri Military Academy as a director of College Placement Counseling, So it was again another uniform job I did testing college placement toss history military history. One of the kids that was there some people may know Ian Ives. He was a combat cameraman that got blown up in Afghanistan in twenty nineteen. So he was one of my kids there and he's doing okay. I think he lost an eye and jacked up his arm

pretty good. But so I was there for six years. It was pretty toxic. So then I ended up looking for another job. And my final job in the Army Reserve was that I had to set up a schoolhouse at Camp Parks, California, which is where the MythBusters blow everything up. So it's right across the mountains from Oakland, California, and so as a new side I had to go out there, had to figure out however was going to

get there, messing classrooms, all that kind of stuff. And then when we did our first iteration out there, it was March of twenty fifteen, and I had four classrooms, maybe eight instructors, and at one point I had like twelve inspectors there on the ground. And these are all people that got orders to come out to California in the winter, and then they would check in with us for like an hour or two hours and say everything's going great, and then we wouldn't see him for four days.

So but yeah, I ended up retiring from there, and then I ended up at the Catholic school that I'm at right now because I was friends with the principal and she wanted the program placement program that I built

at the Military Academy. I kind of turned around that program, and so I ended up getting hired in twenty fourteen and jumped in there and basically start doing a lot of the same things I was doing at the Military Academy, except this time I got to work with girls, so working with you know, working well with boys before and now there are boys and girls. Although our kids are so sweet, they're great kids. So yeah, I'm in my twelfth year there. Fourth principal went through COVID school. We

stayed open where the public schools closed. So I do the master Schedule Career Center, which is like our votech center. Coordinate with that. I'm like the I'll know for that. Mobley Area Community College were the largest earner of dual credits for Mobley Area Community College, although we were one of the smaller schools testing. Just drop a few names

of some kids we've had through the school. This guy in Brooklyn, you might know a boy the name of Michael Porter Junior plays for the Mets, and I.

And then there's another kid who was just kind of floating around by the name of Sophie Cunningham, who you might know of her as a player on the Indiana Beaver. She's a she's like the enforcer for Kaitlin Clark. So she didn't go to my school, but she she was the same age and went through eighth grade with the kids at my school, and so she was always around and I actually knew her grandma. So those are kind of all my brushes with Christmas. Yeah. Yeah, So it's

it's been interesting. We've had a lot of a lot of kind of known people that I brushed up against here and there. So it's been it's been a good run.

this is an amazing expression of American culture. So I actually wrote my master's thesis as a cultural history of CB Radios, which is actually my first book. In fact, I argue that it's that it's really America's first social media platform. So there's that. The second book was a just a paper I turned into about a doctor who gets some self arrested down in southern Moon County and

gets some stuff for released by the president. And then third book was a series of articles I said together about army chaplain's like what they what were their qualifications, what equipment did they have, and what were like the basic soldier religious items. And then the third book, a fourth book involves this guy right here, Yeah, I wrote.

I wrote the book War Pigeons, which is about the pigeon corep and how the Signal Pigeon Corps operated and how a signal pigeon company operated in the army and all the different equipment and things like that. So that was a lot of fun to write, and I get to speak about that one in Missouri. And then my fifth book was about a small town in Missouri that burned in ninety minutes in October twenty second, twenty twenty two, combine spin a wall of flame at them at the town.

Eight minutes later, the first home caught on fire, and ninety minutes later, half of this town of twenty eight people's gone. Is cool?

there's a wall of flame coming at their house. So it was a little crazy. And the first responder. I have all the audio recordings for it. I have the nine one one call and I have the uh the like the first responder. And so there's like a twenty two year old firefighter. He lives in the fire station Volunteer Fire Department, you know, five acre brush Fire, Woldridge, Missouri. He rolls down there, he shows up in the whole town's catching on fire, and he's by himself. Wow, And

you can hear it in his voice. He's like he's stressed, but he's like immediately called for second tone and then third tones to get backups. He started evacuating the town. He got on the speaker on his brush truck and told people to get out of there and called for backup. And he's really a he's a little bit of a hero. Well he did everything right, let's just say that. Yeah, but the people in that town, only one family had insurance.

Everyone else lost everything. They didn't get anything from FEMA. It's just kind of a really really sad story about what happened there. But It was the largest mutual eight fire response in the history of the state of Missouri. One hundred and sixty three firefighters from sixty six departments showed up to that. So that was And I only got into that story because we were I'd heard about it. I was out of town when it happened, and I

heard about it. We had some families that lived in that area from the school, and I just I called the family contact. I'm like, you guys need help. We've got like a day off coming up here. We can get some kids to come down and help them. Like made some calls. Yeah, sure. We had forty four kids show up in parents and we didn't have to tell them to do a damn thing. Like they saw what

they had to do. And the only thing that was left was like doorknobs and appliances, and you know, some kids were digging around and found some rings and a few other personal artifacts, but it was it was not good.

And then they called us and wanted us to come back, and so we went back over Christmas and New Year's and a couple of weeks later had this brilliant idea to write a book about it, and I thought, oh, Hunter page book, you know, firefighters being helpful and safety and all that kind of stuff, And then I got into it and got pretty dark different points. But it came out on the anniversary of the fire. Wow.

to carry heavy weapons. And so before half tracks existed, the plan for mechanized infantry was to use ten and a half trucks. And this is in the mid nineteen thirties. So the and a half trucks would go up to a couple of miles short or maybe like a mile short of the front lines as the tanks rolled forward, and then these guys would dismount and they would take their weapons on these carts, and so the army perfected

that design. But then by World War Two starting, they had half tracks, they had jeeps, they had things that they can mount weapons. So they ended up they ended up giving them to airborne units and assault units that may not have their equipment. So a lot of people refer to them as airborne carts, but they really predate airborne by like five years. So that was my sixth and now my seventh Spy Catchers, interrogators, and analysts, and that's why we're here today. Yeah.

that different than what I learned in the eighties. Late eighties intelligence for the commander. They have a decision support template. That's part of that. It's a little slightly different. They have essential elements of information, which is really like their pirs at that point. But so I documented that and then I went through the pipelines of where these soldiers came from. Now, the US didn't have really any serious capability before World War Two. They had like sixteen counter

intelligence police. There were some sick Ginners and that was about it. But so they went to the Britz. They said, how do you guys do this? And they gave him a template and that's what they ended up using. So they stood up a schoolhouse at Camp Ritchie, Maryland, and the schoolhouse trained the photo interpreters and order battle teams, and then they also trained the ETO based linguists and a lot of those were expat German Jews. Again, they're called the Richie Boys because.

a training exercise. I mean, he's like an infantry private yelling at them in German to try and make the training seem better, and the division commanders there, he's like, who's that guy? Who's that guy there? So they actually actually moved him into the G two shop and he became friends with Kissinger, and our Kissinger was a high IQ guy. He was going to Brooklyn College maybe or somewhere like City College of New York to become an accountant. And he gets drafted and he gets he's a high

AQ guy. So he gets put in this army specialized training program which took high AQ guys, and they sent him to college to try and have them get degrees and operate the more high tech equipment. In nineteen forty five, nineteen forty six, nineteen forty seven, as the war goes on, so you know, Kissinger goes to a college in Pennsylvania and you know, doing well, and the Army in the spring of nineteen forty four discovers they have a personnel shortage.

They have an infantrymen shortage, and where can we get more infantrymen. There's three hundred thousand college boys. So they knocked the as from three hundred thousand to thirty thousand and sent all those guys on orders to the infantry divisions. So Kissinger shows up to g Company of the three three fifth Infantry, just a normal infantry company, and he madily gets poison ivy and is in the hospital for

forty five days. And then they did some sort of a psychological test with him and they found that he wasn't really suited to be an infantryman, so they made him like a driver. And then eventually his connections with Kramer, who talks to the division commander, gets him assigned to the counter Intelligence Corps and he ends up working in the counter intelligence Corps. And Kramer gets a German garrison to surrender of like fifty guys by himself in like

November December of forty four. He literally just walks into this town and talks to him and gets them to surrender. So he gets a field promotion, and then Kissinger is given this assignment to stand up like civil affairs operations in this one German village and he gets everything going in a period of like two weeks, and he gets

promoted to sergeant. They tried to get him constructive credit to be a CIC agent, and the Army said no, and he did actually get his He actually did become a certified agent, but that was not until like in nineteen forty seven. So Kramer and Kissinger actually became long term friends. And the book actually has a picture of Kramer and Kissinger in the office with Nixon. Yeah, it's pretty cool.

the promotion for it out there. That's why we're talking today. Sure, but but it's it's just a completely different angle and really a lot of this information is already out there, you know, like the NISSI interpreters, interrogators, that whole school that they set up in Minnesota, the singing operations at vent Hill Farms. The CIIC got itself into a little bit of trouble early on. They tried to make them

into They tried to make them into like gmen. So their schoolhouse was in Chicago at the Tower Town Club on Michigan Avenue. So they would go out and they'd do their practice surveillance exercises and stuff on Michigan Avenue, and they would they would go to Underwriters Laboratory to get some like scientific training. In the Chicago Police Lab. In nineteen forty three, they got themselves in a little

bit of hot water. So they were they were following a guy who was involved with the youth Labor movement who they thought was a communist. I feel pretty sure he was a communist in fact, and he was friends with Eleanor Roosevelt. In fact, Eleanor Roosevelt introduced him to his future spouse, and so the CIIC recorded a meeting between him and Eleanor Roosevelt, and then later on they recorded an encounter between him and his future wife in the same hotel room. That's one version of the story.

The other story is a little bit different, just some of the details are a little different. If you read the guy who is involves account. But word gets back to the White House that the CIC may have intercepted an encounter with the first lady and that did not play well. So they ended up shit rolled down hill to the CIC and they got and from Washington. The

school house got shut down for like a year. Eventually it was re established at Richie and they focused on tactical counterintelligence, but it was kind of a not a good situation for them to be in.

We didn't know where he went. We're trying to find him. He was with this like post high school basketball team thing that turned out to be a little sketchy. So but we couldn't find this kid, and we called the cops. We did everything we could do, and we were getting into a situation where we were in the I twenty fraud. And so I saw him on Valentine's Day in the

grocery store, but I lost track of him. And then like about a week later, my phone rang and it was a sports agent from somewhere in Virginia, and he calls me and he's the guy that put the kid into this particular school. And so it turns out what had happened is the sports program had the prior year. There's going to be a connection, hearing, just let me

get to it. This particular sports program the year before had lived in some student housing and not paid the entire year, and they got fined seventy four thousand dollars. So this was the second year. So he actually the guy who ran it rented a dorm from a local university and then he didn't pay them either, so they kicked him out because there was vandalism and drug use

and things like that. And then they bounced from hotel to hotel to hotel with as soon as you know, like a week no payment, they would move, another week, no payment they would move. And this is like twenty people. This is not a small group. And so this this coach calls me says, you know, this kid, I put him here. I feel bad. He's in a bad situation. We got to go get him, like like, so we got to do something here. This is not a good

situation that particular team had ended. So this kid was living in an apartment with a mattress and nothing else. The dudes he was living with were like charging him to go to the grocery store. Not not a cool situation. So we're like, okay, we'll have him get to school. So he gets to school and we figure out what's going on all these different threads about you know, what's really going on with this situation. We called a guy

from an organization called City of Refuge. He found like an older couple who's gonna who are willing to take him? We're like, oh, thank god, And so they called her doctor to get advice. And the doctor was a school mom from my high school, and she's like, well, hey, we'll take him. So so okay, we got a good place for this guy, but we got to go get this kid. And so the City of Refuge guy thought that this might be a little bit shady, like this may this may break bad for us, so, you know,

rather than a pickup, it could become an distraction. So he called a lady named Nannette who's with the Stop Human Trafficking Coalition, and she agreed and she gave us a security guy. So we met at the fire station and this security dude rolls up, and this dude is fricking John Wick. He's driving a five series BMW. He looks like he just stepped out of a out of a structure store. And we kind of developed a plan

and then we went knocked on the door. It turned out to be a non event and that John Wick dude disappeared, So I finally figured out who John Wick was. That was a guy by the name of Ryan Burke. Is it ring? A bell. No, Andrew Milbourne would know who he is. He's the guy that sued Andrew Milbourne, oh, for definite defamation.

The allegation that came out from Andrew. I think Andrew was coming from an honorable place. I think that he you know, again, he won the lawsuit, the defamation suit, although that may not necessarily that may just speak to his motivations and sourcing, but not necessarily what occurred in the end. Only two people in the world know what happened in that situation. And I know people who went to who grew up with him here in Columbia. I knew people who knew him when he was at Missoo.

I was at Missoo at the same time. This was the dude that showed up from the human trafficking coalition to go get that kid on a Sunday morning that he didn't know. And I don't know what happened in Ukraine, but I can say. What I will say is it's completely out of character with who he is, absolutely out of character with who he is. And I'm actually very nice. There are many of my friends who are like, this is absolute bullshit. So but again, I'm not accusing Andrew

of anything. I think he was probably coming He's an officer and a gentleman. I'm assuming he's coming from a good place. But you know, stuff can happen with alcohol. I get that, but in the end, this is completely out of character with the rest of this man's life. And I'm just trying to set the record straight because I met him, I looked him in the eye, and he helped me.

really really solid this guy's reputation. So I would encourage anyone to just go look at his Facebook profile and see who he was. It's very curated, it's very millennial, but like there's like one of the last videos he posted was him playing his guitar for a bunch of school children in Uganda, and that was a couple weeks ago.

which I run with Sean Naylor. The newsletter is going to be once a week. It's going to come into your inbox and you're going to get the most current podcasts on eyes On and the teamhouse and whatever's topical or current on the high side. So it's another way for us to get the information out to you as social media algorithms are pretty iffy and you never really know what you're gonna get. So this is a once

a week email. It'll slide into your inbox and it will have you know the greatest hits of that week. It's really good man checking it out. The website for it is Teamhouse Podcast, dot kit dot com, slash Join, Teamhouse Podcast dot kit dot com slash join.