Adam Torres and Adam Torres and Jerry Glazer discuss Jerry’s book.
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Show Notes:
New book alert! In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Jerry Glazer, Author of Vietnam Uncensored: 365 Days in a Nightmare, explore Jerry’s book, Vietnam Uncensored: 365 Days in a Nightmare.
About Jerry Glazer
As the leader of a Special Ops team, Jerry learned the hard way that the Vietnam War was built on lies and deceit. He had as much to fear from the hardened American units, as he did from the enemy.
He was one of the more fortunate ones who returned alive, but every soldier has been wounded. Jerry was awarded 3 medals for bravery, and meritorious service awards, but PTSD, regret and guilt followed him home.
About Vietnam Uncensored: 365 Days in a Nightmare
This story unmasks the profound truth of what it was like for an average American, caught in the draft in 1966 and sent to Vietnam.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest on the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on be our guest to apply. All right. So today I have Jerry Glazer on the line. He’s an author, he’s an entrepreneur, and he’s also author of Vietnam Uncensored, 365 Days in a Nightmare.
Jerry, welcome to the show. Thank you so much, Adam. I appreciate to be here. My pleasure. All right, Jerry. So we got a lot to talk about today. I, of course, want to get into Vietnam Uncensored. I understand, you know, you had a feature on NPR Snap Judgment. so curious about that. I want to get into that, of course.
I want to get into the book, what inspired you to write it, and a bunch more. But before we do that, I’d like to start with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute. So. Jerry, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories. We bring stories of entrepreneurs, of executives, of thought leaders to our audience so that they can benefit from those stories.
Jerry, what mission matters to you? What matters to me is for people for newer generations and even older generations to know what happened in that Vietnam, what caused it, why it happened, and what happened to those who returned from it. To exemplify what veterans, Vietnam veterans or any veterans have to offer to the civilian population when they return.
So, that’s important to me. I write about Vietnam and what happened to us every day and try to bring it into the current context of what’s happening in our world. I don’t discuss politics, religion, or anything like that. I’m just bringing in that we, Vietnam War was very special. It was a very dirty type of award.
It was no reason for it was purposeless. It had no use and it came out to zero. And 50 more than 58, 000 American boys died there. Another 150, 000 returned wounded and another 22, 000 committed suicide after return. So it was really something different. Nobody ever heard of it. And then it was a war where they drafted two and a half million boys right out of school.
And so there was a lot that went on there, that the history is a lot is forgotten, and I write about it, and I have newer generations, and I have even Vietnam veterans that say, you know, I didn’t even know that. I said, no, neither did I, until I researched it. I tried to help.
Yeah, amazing. and one of the things that and I don’t know, I mean,, I’m over 6, 000 episodes in, and I don’t know if this has ever come up on the show, but , my father was a Vietnam veteran, and I know I’ve heard some of his opinions over the years, and he definitely didn’t agree with it, and he didn’t understand, and he was, he was one of those people that were drafted Did he was in New York and he said in New York and his neighborhood, how you knew you were drafted.
They didn’t even have to open the letter. I forgot what he called it. He used to have a special term for it, but basically, , oh, your token. That’s what he’d say. He’d say and it was basically , your subway fair. And he’d say that, you know, you just, how you knew is you would basically crumple the envelope and when you felt that token, your heart would just drop and you just, the data is still alive.
Entire neighborhood. Were, were gone. Mm-hmm . Your dad is still living. Yeah, you know, in his presence, you are standing in front of a hero and a Patriot. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You know. Oh, yeah. And speaking of that, there’s a lot of different before we go further into the book.
You obviously have given to put together a book. It’s very difficult. It takes time. It takes resources. It takes thought. It takes concentration. And there’s a lot of different ways, not downing any other way of thinking. somebody, you know, creating content or creating things. But why did you feel as important specifically to create a book?
Like what was special about that for you? Well, first of all the Vietnam experience to most people who, most men who went there that served in combat, not everyone served in combat, you served in combat, you awoke in trauma. You spent your day in trauma, and you went to sleep in trauma. So from the moment you stepped foot in that country to the moment you left, you lived in trauma, if you were a combat veteran.
and while you were there, and you’re in that trauma, and all these things are happening, you survive. You do what you need to do to survive. To get out. Yeah, but you don’t realize the effect that it has on you There’s no way that you knew that I would have known or my buddies would have known That we were slip sliding down a rabbit hole of insanity Now vietnam the vietnam war in vietnam cambodian laos was the largest insane asylum Between doing 11 years of that war.
There wasn’t a person Not a private not a sergeant not a warrant officer. Not a lieutenant. Not a colonel. Not a general that wasn’t nuts You They were all nuts. And they were all nuts because they would be driven crazy by the civilians that were running the government, orchestrating that war from 8, 000 miles away, and they didn’t know what was going on.
So the things that happened there are beyond anything that you could comprehend. and. We all suffered because of it. When we came back, we tried to, of course, we want to transition. we came back, we dreamt of America. This was Oz, right? You’re in the mud and in the slime and and you’re going through that.
What was the dream? The dream was America. My dream was Norman Rockwell a beautiful house and sitting on a lawn with a porch, with a couple of kids, with a swing set in the backyard and a front lawn, and my wife serving dinner. That was a dream, but the fantasy was greater than the reality because we weren’t welcome.
There were demonstrations at the airports attacking U. S. men that were coming home. Men were changing in the washrooms before they got, went into the airport in Al, California. So they weren’t spit on by demonstrators in the airport. The civilian population, because of the press, blamed the soldier for the war, but we were drafted.
This was an obligation. This was a duty. And when you were there, you had to perform that duty. And that’s what we did. And you didn’t fight, I mean, the concept of war was on a false premise. What was the premise? Stopping communism in Southeast Asia. Do you think that all these people that were drafted cared about communism in Southeast Asia?
What did we know? What we cared about was the brother standing beside us. Because that guy who stood beside you on the battlefield, He was your life and , he was the person who would sack and this is the truth. Every one of those boys in that squad and any squad would sacrifice his life for yours.
Yeah. and even if he didn’t know you, he would sacrifice his life to save you. That was just the nature of combat. The brotherhood became the family. It was the family . in the United States, 8000 miles away, faded. It went up in smoke. You forgot about it. you were just living to survive. , you were running through a jungle waiting for artillery or waiting for air support and you were being attacked night and day by these people, by the enemy.
And so when I came back, I felt I needed to get out those stories. I just needed to get them out of my system because they were driving me insane. Impossible to live, almost impossible to live. What I didn’t know is that my training I was in charge of a special operations team that leadership.
Educated me and made me very capable to become, and I wasn’t this before I went, made me capable to operate and conduct my own business in the United States. It made me a very strong leader and trainer. Wow. Mm and I call it military mindset. Mm hmm. That’s my mindset.
It’s a military mindset. And there’s a certain way of thinking of things, the way of doing things, because when you’re in a situation of a life and death situation, and you have to make a decision within ten seconds to go left, right, or forward, right? Mm hmm. And the chances are not one of the decisions you make will be right.
There’s no right decision in combat, because the enemy doesn’t cooperate. Yeah. Thank you for sharing that. And, one of my things when I thought about a book and when I thought, thought about what you’re doing, and , I’m a big fan of, and this isn’t just , for the Vietnam War, this is for different things.
It’s like, essentially, once upon a time. The historians during that age and the access to creating content was , it was held in the hands of a few, right? The publishers, , this, , that, , or whatever it was, the media outlet, but nowadays what I was found so inspiring about what you’re doing is.
You know, you went through the effort, you’re on these podcast interviews, you’re doing these interviews, so that’s documenting it so that people can listen. And in time, when both you and I are no longer around and many, many years in the future, this will exist and they’ll be able to look back.
And when somebody says something didn’t happen or a piece of history didn’t happen or something else, it’s like, That guy was, all these people can’t be lying. Like, what are you talking about? Like, like Ed, I heard his interview. He’s talking about what happened, how it happened and these things match up so that, you know, things in history can’t just be smudged out as they’ve done in the past or in, to a certain extent.
And so I found that super inspiring for what you did for not just. This particular situation, but I think it’s also to show other people that, hey, if you have a story that needs to be told or that you feel they need to be told in your case, the outlet was a book and obviously being interviewed and doing other things, but whatever somebody needs to do to express themselves or to that story.
I think they should do it. And I guess that’s a good transition because I’ve been, holding onto this question since we met a while ago what happened with NPR, the NPR feature , speaking of being featured, which is an amazing accomplishment, big fan of NPR.
, what happened? Well what happened was, is they had a program called Snap Judgment, and they asked for stories about a ghost story. Right? Now, I will say this to you when we start this conversation, that Vietnam was nothing , what you thought, what I thought, planned or expected. it was a world within a world, within a wheel within a wheel, nothing ever went right there. No matter what happened, and the strangest events possible happened. Now, when I landed, so I sent them this particular story, which is a ghost story. I think it’s a ghost story. And I wrote it out and I sent it to them.
And I didn’t expect an answer because I didn’t even normally I edit what I write. Normally I check and I read it over. I just like typed it up and sent it in to their website and they called me. What is that story? And I was very surprised and they interviewed me for.
Three days. Wow. They couldn’t get it. They couldn’t get enough. Wow. The director of the radio station called me. He wanted to know. , he says, he never heard anything like that. I said, well, he says, what do you think? Is it the truth? I said, listen to me. Everything in Vietnam that happens is, if you, Adam, want to write a book, You say to me, Terry, I want to write a book about Vietnam, what should I write about?
So you know, write a horror story, put in Frankenstein, put in Dracula, put in Godzilla, put in King Kong, put in everybody’s killed, every, they eat the bodies, they hang them and they torture them, whatever you want to put in. And write that book and give it to me and I’ll tell you what, did that happen in Vietnam?
And if you say yes, I’ll believe Because you cannot understand. What we saw. What I saw. Mm-hmm . I saw things that defy the imagination. Mm-hmm . I saw men sink as low as any human being can sink below the animal kingdom. Mm-hmm. I saw people lose their minds. Lose their minds. They weren’t even saying anymore.
Wow. Running, running divisions. I saw a whole division. My lie. How did you think my lie happened? you know my, what my lie is, right? Mm hmm. Mm hmm. The story of my lie, well, they, they just killed. How did that happen? How did that guy go? They killed women, they killed children. How did they get to that?
That was Vietnam. It was not a place, it was an insane assignment. There was no one there that was normal. And Kelly and I knew those people. I was there. I knew those people. I had been there about a month before I knew them. The point is, is they drove him crazy. They gave him orders that didn’t exist. They gave him information that didn’t exist.
The was army intelligence didn’t exist. the intelligence or the coordinates or whatever went on there changed, not by the day, by the minute. By the minute. because the North Vietnamese and the Viet Con, they fought, they didn’t fight for fight a normal war. They didn’t fight the way the Americans knew how to fight.
they ran a health war. They were here, they were there, they were everywhere. and you would get into a firefight with them. You would kill maybe 20 of them and then you go try to find the bodies. They weren’t there. They took their data away, and then , you would win the battle, S. very rarely lost the battle, the next day they’d be back. So it was something that, to get your mind around this kind of warfare, you were never safe. You can never be safe. Nobody was safe. The Marines faced the enemy at Da Nang, at the DMZ, and they were attacked daily. Daily. And they couldn’t stop it.
Per capita, the Marines lost more men than anyone else. In, in Vietnam. So let me go back to this. So I sent this in and they called me back. So what is the story? Now, I was part of a, I’m not going to go into the story, but , I was an Airborne. I was an Airborne Ranger and I got to be an Airborne Ranger by a fluke.
So I raised my hand for the wrong thing and then. That’s how I became an Airborne Ranger, and I went through this training. You’re not supposed to volunteer in the Army. I’ve, I’ve never been on that route when I did want to when I grew up. My dad was always like, you’re not allowed to, and I understand why now that I was older, but when I was younger, I did think that’s where I was going.
He said, that ain’t happening. But I did remember that in the Army, you don’t volunteer for anything. Well, if you want, after I tell you this story, And you want to hear that story. That story in itself is a big story. So I’ll tell it to you, but I’ll tell you how this happened. So , I was sent as punishment because when I became an Airborne Ranger, I was drafted.
In order to become Airborne, you have to have signed up for four years. But since they were putting together a special unit of 200 and some odd men, they needed extra men. They went to the training companies and I mistakenly raised my hand because I thought I was going to donuts and coffee, but I wasn’t.
As soon as I raised my hand, I was airborne, and that was it, and I was over. I was the worst soldier that was sent into that army. I’m gonna tell you, I was a skinny kid from the Bronx, just out of school, with pimples on my face, no muscles to speak of, and they put me into basic training. if we were running somewhere, I was the last in line.
If we were doing push ups, after five pushes, my behind was going to the elite of the elite. Go ahead, this is interesting. Yeah, I know, I know. I know, I know. And, and they put me at the airport. I know, I, you can’t believe it either. Yeah, yeah, that’s right, that’s right. I wanted to cut off the handed, the raised.
But the point is, is that in basic training, they’ll have one side, they’ll have maybe one or two. Two or three sergeants for 200 men in airborne. They had 10 sergeants for 200 so Everybody and they took the training in the airborne very seriously these guys that I was with and the point is is that if you couldn’t do it, they take you out They didn’t know we yelling no screaming.
No belittling. No putting you down take you out train you special Take you at night, do push ups, do sit ups, do this. At the weekends, on Sundays, there wasn’t training on Sundays, but on Sundays, they would take the guys that weren’t up to par, take them to the gym, take them for runs, take them for extra training so that they caught up.
Now, that, that extra training that they gave me, gave me the confidence to continue, gave me the strength to continue, because I didn’t have the strength. First, you need strength. Skill I had, intelligence I had, probably more than anybody there, but that’s not the issue, issue is you have, somehow, I had something that you needed, and that strength did not cover it all.
You needed endurance. You needed endurance. In order to pass that, you had to go 48 hours without sleep and do a whole bunch of stuff. Yeah. Now, I could run, I mean, I had the stamina, I had the breath. Once I had it, I was fabulous at it. I couldn’t get over it myself. Yeah. When I earned those, when I got to , stuck to the podium and the colonel pressed the wings on my uniform and he said, no, congratulations.
It was the greatest, one of the greatest, to this day, I consider one of the greatest achievements of my life that I actually was part of that. Those people, Ranger training was something that I qualified for. They didn’t want to give it to me. Why? Because I needed to sign up for four years. I refused, but they couldn’t refuse to give me the training.
So they gave me the training soon as I was through, they sent me to Vietnam. But they didn’t send me to Vietnam with the unit, they sent me to Vietnam as an independent. So I I went by plane, unit , went later on, but they went by boat. I was on a plane by myself, I got to Cam Ranh Bay, which was the in processing center.
And at Cam Ranh Bay, when I was there, that’s how I got it, that’s how I got assigned to a unit. That’s another story. So here I am in Cam Ranh Bay. I arrived. Whatever night, it’s two night, it’s about night, and you’re, the in processing is you go and you stand in a building, and they call out your names, and then they assign you.
Right? Which they have. so the first day, my name wasn’t called. I got there at night. The next day, I went to the building, tried to stand in line, put in my name. They didn’t call me. That night, I was out of cigarettes. I didn’t have cigarettes. I didn’t have any snacks or nothing. So there was a PX across an open field.
Now, we weren’t supposed to go, right? I wasn’t supposed to go. What the heck am I going to do? And I wanted a cigarette, so I snuck in between the gate and I went walking across the field. And the only light I could see was the PX at the other end of that field. The other end and I’m walking and I hear footsteps beside me.
I hear footsteps beside me and I look over and you know the moonlight I see a Stocky boy with a field cap and he’s walking beside me and he introduces himself as coming I introduce myself where you from I tell him where I’m from and we walk towards the PX now as we get to the PX Right. I walk inside you coming in tonight.
I’m gonna wait outside I’ll wait for you. I said, okay, so I go inside, I buy a whole bunch of Clark bars, I buy, you know, chewing gum, I buy some toothpaste, I buy, I buy a couple items, right? And I walk out and he’s waiting there. So I have this bag of stuff and as we’re walking I open up of the pack Take out a pack of cigarettes from the carton and I open the pack and I don’t have a match I don’t have my lighter.
I didn’t take my lighter and as we’re walking there are rockets flashing across the sky, right? Wow, what’s that? So I said, what’s that? He says? Oh, they’re walking in the rockets What do you mean? He says, well, you know, they come, they stand in the rice pad and they have three guys.
One guy carries the rocket, one guy stoops down, the guy with the rocket, one guy stands on the guy’s shoulders. He looks out to see where the the target is, and then he aims the other guy on the ground, aims the rocket launcher, and he fires. And then if it goes short, he adjusts. It goes long. They fire in three rockets, and then they’re gone because then the helicopters and all the search people come out for them.
Right? So I said, Oh, really? and in the back, this thunder, right? Like you hear artillery firing in the distance, you hear artillery. So that’s my welcome to Vietnam. Welcome. that’s my first night, practically, that I was there. So. I’m walking back across the field, and I’m halfway, let’s say, back to the base, and I say to him, do you have a light?
He says, yeah. And he flips me, I thought he flipped me his lighter, and it passes my hand, it goes over my hand, and goes into the darkness. I said, oh my goodness, and look at that. So , I bend over, like to go and get, I drop my bag of stuff, and I bend over to get, to find the light. I’m feeling around for the lighter, you know?
He doesn’t say anything. all of a sudden he kicks me in the backside kicks me, I go flying like Superman. I’m telling you, I scraped my hands, my chin, my knees, I just jumped up, turned around to confront him. He wasn’t there. What was there was the smell of cordite. You know what that cord smells like.
It’s like gunpowder been here and I’m looking around, he’s like, so I go back to the PI get my back of my pack of stuff and I go back to the px. I say, maybe he went back to the px. He’s not there. Where the hell is he? So it’s total darkness. I go back to my barracks. I lay down and I go to sleep.
I have my cigarette. I lay down. I go to sleep. In the morning, the barrack sergeant is kicking my foot. He said, Hey, man, get up. Time to get up. I go to raise myself. I can’t lift myself out of my bed. can’t lift myself out of my bed. And he says, What’s the matter? I said, Can you grab my hand, sergeant?
Just help me up. He helps me up. The pain. The pain. And he says, Take off your shirts. I took off my shirt. He says to me, Were you in a fight? I said, No. He says, Why? You’re black and blue from the buttocks, from the thighs to the neck. And you’re back. I said, what are you talking about? So I look, I go down to the showers to take a shower.
And I look in the mirror, I’m black and blue. He says, you you want to go to the hospital? I said, no, I don’t want to go anywhere. I just, I’m going to get dressed. I’m going to go down, take a shower. And then I’m going to go to the processing center. When I was through with that, our processing center, I went to find him in the out processing center. I said, do you have a guy by the name of Cummings here? Right? Maybe I could find him. No, he doesn’t. He’s not on the roster. He’s not on the roster. Who the hell is he? Where is he? Maybe he was cadre. Maybe he came from there. So I figured I’ll go through the barracks.
Right. And see if I can find them in the holding barracks where we were. And the first day I didn’t find him. The second day I go again, there were like 10 or 15 bags. I went, when I was at the last barracks at the second, the end of the second day, I found a bed with a duffel bag on it and it said cuttings, but the bed was filled with Garbage.
Dirty. And the bag was full of dust. Hmm. I go back to the oil processing center on the third day, and there are two MPs waiting for me. You met this guy Cummings? They wanted to know. I said, yeah. He says to me, how did you know? I said, where’d you meet him? I said, well, I was on the field going to the PX. He said, you know, PX is illegal.
I said, listen, I don’t know anything like that. He says to me, how could you have met him? Are you sure? So what? He says, he’s been AWOL for two years.
Wow. So, that night, that afternoon, I went, stuck back in, I went back to the field where he was and I went looking for where maybe he happened. What I found, what should have been where he was, was a crater. Whoa. At the bottom of the crater, it was like, what’s the word for it? It was soft.
It was like oil. You know, it was like, it was smooth, like ceramic, like it was burned. Yeah. I don’t know. A rocket landed on his head? Whoa. How come I, wasn’t injured? You know, I should have been injured too. I wasn’t injured. The only injury was that I was thrown. Maybe 10 or 15 feet and landed and I had the scrapes on my hands and my chin and my face for weeks Still so that happened there and it didn’t occur to me though.
Whatever happened to this guy Where was he was my imagination now that’s the coming story. Now, I would say it’s months later. I’m in my permanent duty station and They walked in the Rockets where I was too, right? And we would lay on the sand, but we would lay on sandbags, naked whatever, , drinking You know, Jack Daniels or whatever we had, passing it around and smoking weed and watching the Rockets.
Every night there was fireworks. Hmm. The Rockets coming in overhead. and One rocket, the rockets were coming in and it hit a latrine, right? So I decided to go into one of the bunkers. And there are bunkers, where the tents were. Each, like, tent location had a bunker. Underground bunker with sandbags built up around it and you walk down them.
an incline and then you decline and you walked into the bunker, you made a left turn, you were in the bunker. So I go into the bunker and these guys are playing cards. There’s a bunch of guys sitting around playing cards around that little table there. This is where some of the card games happen. And I’m standing there and I’m in my towel, have nothing on, I just have a, , like a soap dish and a toothbrush.
And I say to this guy, I said, can I have a cigarette? gives me a pack of cigarettes. I take one, I give it back to him and I go by near the opening, you know, and I’m sitting But where there’s a, the opening I came in. I said, you have a lighter. He says, sure, here’s a lighter and he throws the lighter at me and it rose over my head and out into the decline, like going back out to the unit, right?
I look up and who’s standing there, who’s standing there coming, not coming. Whoa, coming. I understand here. Now, if you think it’s a surprise, you should think how I go. What the, and I didn’t even finish that sentence. When a rocket landed straight on that bunker collapsed. The bunker, three men died. Whoa.
And I was standing outside. Whoa. I was standing outside. That was the second time I met him. Now, that was the story I told, I gave NPR. Man. And, yeah. And, and I want to tell you something. And I wasn’t in combat yet. Yeah, you just got there. And that is, I just got there. And that is the tip of the iceberg of what happened to me.
Oh, man. the iceberg of what happened to me. So you can imagine if that was the easy part, imagine what the hard part might have been. Oh my gosh. Jerry, I have to say, this has been a an amazing episode. appreciate you coming on. I appreciate you. I know there’s much more to this and I definitely want to make sure that our audience picks up a copy of your book.
How do people connect? how do they follow your journey? How do they follow you on social and how do they pick up a copy of your book as well? Thank you. Well, the book is on Amazon, Vietnam Uncensored, 365 Days in a Nightmare. You can contact, you can also go to my website, VietnamJerry.
com, and there’s also a link on there to get to the book, and you have my bio there, you have information that’s, you know, that comes from the book, but things about myself, and I post a newsletter every week. I post every day on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Substack, and Instagram, every day I post on those platforms, you can find that on also Jerry Glazer, and I try to get the story out, I try to give the history of Vietnam, and then when I post, I don’t post the history, the history is in the book.
the book is in two parts, actually. the story of what happened to me and my unit, and the history of the war. That, so you have a chapter that’s what happened to my unit, and right behind that chapter is a small essay about what happened to bring us there. So, I tell about the dirty politics and how we were betrayed and what went on in the war.
And then I go to the next chapter and what you’re doing is you’re following what’s happening, why the war is happening, what’s going on, and then what’s happening to us in the field, which has nothing to do with the history. So when you come back from reading the book, you have all my stories, all the strange and different stories that you won’t read about.
it’s not a Hollywood thing. It’s just very different. I don’t leave anything out. I mean, I don’t leave Officer Bordello’s out. I don’t leave love affairs out. I don’t leave anything out , that, and the book is not about. Combat. And although there’s combat in the book, it’s not about like you see in Hollywood where we’re a combat unit.
And while we were extraction, we weren’t hunt and destroy. There were units that were hunt and destroy. Marines were hunt and destroy. Go hunt down the enemy and kill them. We weren’t. We were to hunt down somebody or something and bring it back. That’s what we did. Dangerous work. And we did confront the enemy, but , we never went looking for the enemy.
As a matter of fact, we ran from the enemy more times than we confronted But our job to find and kill the enemy. Our job was to find a target and bring home the target or bring home what we were supposed to bring home and then get the hell out of there. It didn’t matter whether those people lived or the enemy lived or died.
It didn’t matter to us. But to some units, because all they cared about was the kill. We came from a mission we met an infantry unit on a landing zone and we took shelter there one night and he said to me, how many blood trails did you have?
He said, did you run into the enemy? I said, yeah, how many blood trails? I said, I don’t know. You don’t count the blood trails? He was upset. He was supposed to kill those people. wanted to tell him, we were running from them. We weren’t supposed to find them. We were running. I didn’t tell him my age, it was just gung ho nutcase.
I got it. I got it. Not that he was any better than us. He was. Of course. But the point , is that that was , his mantra. He was , his macho. I had no natural whatsoever. I just wanted to get the job done and get the hell out of it. Because , every day, every foot, every step you took there was a step towards eternity.
And I’ll tell you this, and I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you something just while we’re on this subject. You know, I’ve had people say to me, you know, Did you find God there? Was there God there? Christians say to me, say, I want to tell you something. There were priests that came and gave the sacrament.
There were priests that came and did mass. There were, Jewish chaplains that came around that held Jewish services. There were Protestant preachers that came around that held services. I said, and I want to tell you something, the one God, there was one God that everybody didn’t have to pray to, but he would welcome you into his paradise.
He said, what are you talking about? I said, well, I’m talking about that my opinion is that, Everybody that went there, I never saw one prayer answered. I never saw one person prayed to live and he lived. I saw not one person that was seriously injured that didn’t want to die, that he wanted to pray to God to save him, didn’t, wasn’t saved.
But I do know one God, One God that welcomed everybody. He says, what’s that? To the angel of death. There, everyone was welcome into that kingdom. There wasn’t a person that wasn’t welcome. You could go there anytime you want, and voluntarily or not, there you were welcome. There was no sin. He didn’t judge.
That angel didn’t judge. He took you no matter what. And that I do, did believe then. I did believe it. and, if you believe in religion, and if religion gives you comfort, fine. But I didn’t see it giving anyone comfort there. Not there. Not there. There the angel of death, this is in the book, but I saw someone commit suicide there, a combat veteran, you can’t imagine, I mean, how the heck, I mean, things you see day to day, when the abnormal becomes normal, that’s nuts.
That’s crazy. The abnormal was normal. This is, yeah, well, he died. What do you mean he died?
And I think, and in, and in the book, I know that you’re gonna, that you go through a whole lot more. You also mentioned your social media handle. So what we’re going to do, , I want to make sure to continue to get this message out there. And I want people to, to hear, because I mentioned before, when we opened this interview, one of the reasons that I’m.
Super excited to have you on with us. I don’t want the history, you know, people will judge things. People, you know, have their opinions. People could say lots of different things, but, you know, you documenting, in my opinion, your story, what took place, your book, by writing, by creating content those are even you talking about the, you know, some of the people, even the person that you’re mentioning that, you know, unfortunately took his life like that, like you’re.
You’re remembering their memory. You’re keeping that alive so that other generations can learn. So hopefully, I mean, hopefully, obviously, as a civilization, we get better and we make less of the same mistakes over and over. I mean, yet to be seen, right? Lots of things but You’ve done your part. And on our part, we’ll make sure that we have this and for everybody listening, by the way, in the audience we’ll definitely put links to Jerry’s book and the show notes so that you can just click on the link, head right on over, check it out.
And if this is your first time, by the way, with Mission Matters, and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or follow button. This is a daily show. Each and every day, we’re bringing you new content, new experiences, and hopefully new inspiration. It’s great. And there is a lot of inspiration to help you along the way in your journey as well.
So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Jerry man, I really appreciate you making some time for us and wishing you much more continued success and your mission of getting this message out there and getting the book out so thanks again for coming on the show. Okay. Thank you so much.