Air assault

[laughs]

'Cause y- y- if you've been to Air Assault school or Pathfinder school, you know you can't land a helicopter on any grade over 14%.

Mm-hmm.

So that, and that's a Black Hawk, you know, because they have wheels.

I heard one of the...

When we did the Air Assault, uh, the last thing I had to do was the, the 50-mile ruck march that they do-

Mm

...

target, interdicting courses, Special Forces advanced urban combat, not easy.

3rd SFG advanced sniper, Special Forces qualifications courses, and airborne and air assault.

He's got every single thing in the book.

John's awards and badges include Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart, Combat Infantry Badge, Airborne, Air Assault, and Air Special Forces tab.

John participated in numerous battles during his deployment.

Most famous of all was the Battle of Shok Valley, which was a tough one, a really tough one.

I was, like, you know, dressed in my butter bar, VDUs, and stuff like that.

I had, like, some Air Assault wings.

I was still, like, kind of a skinny dork.

And I, like, walk into this place, and it was just, like...

You're just, like, a second lieutenant young college kid

... second lieutenant young college kid.

You know, I had, like, Air Assault, but, like, that didn't matter to them.

Like, they didn't care.

And, and what's funny is that 30 years later am I going, I'm probably less attention to detail today than I was then, which is a weird thing to say.

You're like, "All right, what do you mean?" Back then I went through a school called, you know, Air Assault, right? And the Air Assault School, uh, is I think from an em- emotional or intelligence standpoint the toughest 11 days in the Army.

Because everything is, is about attention to detail, the way your uniform-

Mm

We should have deployed every US military unit that could be quickly deployed to surround that area, that cave complex.

Sur- we should, you know, we should have the 82nd, uh, Airborne, we should have 101st Air Assault, 10th Mountain, all the Ranger battalions, every SF unit that you could get out there.

Get the s- you know, g- just get them all, you know, the, the mer- the Marine special operations surrounded it and nothing should have walked out alive unless it surrendered.

And we didn't.

And I'm not taking anything away from the bravery of those guys or anything.

But, you know, you think of the 101st Airborne, you think of Air Assault, which they are.

I mean, that's their designation.

But they had a lot more of a fluid tactical orientation.

But he became a huge critic of operational doctrine in Vietnam, and he had a notion that counterinsurgency should have been abandoned altogether.

It should have been placed within the operational purview of Army Republic of Vietnam forces and adjacent police and paramilitary elements.

And America's only role should have been to defend critical military objectives, you know, like Saigon, Hue, positions along the Cambodian frontier, and maintaining an ability to bring forces to bear at the 17th parallel but otherwise this uh movement to contact whereby guerrillas are drawn out and then once identified massive firepower through combined arms and particularly air assault is brought to bear on them was was asinine i've got my own thoughts on that as I think people have gleaned in part from this discussion just now.

But this Neil Sheehan, who's somewhat of an interesting guy because he's basically this big liberal.

The only thing that seemed to interest me was going infantry.

So I did that and did a whole bunch of Army schools, Ranger and Airborne and Air Assault and all the rest of that stuff.

northern warfare and jungle i felt like i was division in hawaii great anybody who's been stationed in hawaii um including my my marine brothers and sisters knows that it's a it's a fantastic place to be to be uh to be serving um i i was one of three platoons oddly enough they got deployed to operation desert storm the department the army sent out a message and saying send platoons the commander of my unit, which was really weird.

But long story short, I ended up supporting as really the security detail for Army Central Command Jump Talk as they followed the Marines into Kuwait.