In one of those books, there's a picture of me sitting there wearing a jacket, uh you know, uniform, and with about two or three , a couple of , and . 'Cause that's what I used to carry. I just took a picture of it one time for the hell of it. And uh, we used it for, we used to rig up mechanical ambushes at night, too. Did you ever run into those? Well the weren't the only ones who rigged up . What we could, we got pretty good at uh rigging up mechanical ambushes with claymores. And the way it would work is you'd take an old battery and rig a lead up to a blasting cap. One lead goes to the blasting cap and the other lead would come to, how'd we do this exactly? Blasting cap and ... oh yeah. The trick is you'd have to break the . So you'd have the two leads and the wires, and you take a spoon or something, you know an insulator, and you put it in between them. Somehow secure them together and then put a string on that. This stuff would all be rigged up to the claymore and the battery. So the idea was that if you had a string on the spoon and you could string it across a place where somebody might come. If they hit it the spoon pops out, completes the thing and it blows it up.
, if you think he looks scary now, imagine him 15-20 years younger and about age 37 or 38. When he got off the helicopter and took over our unit, I looked at this guy and said, "Oh my god, we got a lifer here. We're in it now."
And he was a pretty good guy actually. But he was pretty aggressive, too. He was. The guy that replaced him later on told me that he was one of these from that's, you know destined to be stars. And he was on track. And he was getting his command. You know the command experience. So he got a little aggressive and he moved us around, and he had 'em, had some guys doing night river crossings and things like that, that weren't so good. But, I did not dislike Gen. Schwarzkopf. I thought he was a great guy, just a little more aggressive. No different than a lot of career officers, just trying to do their job.
I wonder sometimes, you know, what's going on. My hope; I felt kind of strongly that we all owe a debt to those that didn't make it to live our lives better. To try to do something to help people and not, not just go off on your own and be a money hog like some of these cats that we've been watching on Wall Street. But I mean I feel very strongly that if I ever have to face one of those guys at , I would like to be able to feel I lived up to it.
