>>So David, the Charlottesville
community knows you
as a feature writer
for the Daily Progress
but I'd like to start
out talking a little bit
about your past.
Tell us about joining the Army.
>>No, I can't tell
you about that.
>>(laughs) You'd
have to shoot me.
(laughs)
That's sort of true.
>>I was somewhat of a disaster.
Well, I was a disaster
in high school.
I decided to join the
Army when I was 17
and my parents were happy
to sign off on that.
And I went in
and my first tour was in Korea.
And then I came back,
and I wasn't back
but a couple months
and I was assigned to
First Calvary Division
and they'd come
down with the orders
and this is 1965 for Vietnam.
So I went over.
Started there, really.
>>So you stayed in the Army
for a couple of years, left
and then came back
to join the Jump School?
>>Yeah, I was in for three years
and then I had a break
of about nine months
and that wasn't
really working out.
There was a lot of
residue left from Vietnam.
I'd been in some major battles
and coming back
from that I remember
when I first got
home the first night,
I kept opening up
the refrigerator and
shutting the door
because it was so foreign to me
that I could just reach in
and grab a cold whatever
and just the lights and all that
because I had basically been
in the field for a year.
>>Right.
>>So, I just didn't adjust.
And after nine months
I decided to go back in
and there'd been a lot of
paratroopers in the First Cav
and I really liked those guys.
And so I said, if
I'm going back in,
I wanna, you know, at least
try to be a paratrooper.
So when I was in Jump School,
the instructor came up and said,
if any of you guys think
you wanna be snake eaters
which we call
special forces guys.
>>Okay.
>>That guy'll, you
know, talk to you.
So everybody 200 guys go over.
Out of those 200
guys took the test,
six of us came down for
orders for special forces.
And out of those six guys,
two of us graduated
>>Oh.
>>about a year later.
>>Why do you think you made it?
>>It was a miracle.
This is a completely...
You can watch as many
programs on television
about special forces training
but until you actually
go through it,
you have absolutely no idea.
And every day, you're being
tested in one way or another.
And the perfect example
of this is I was there
for about a month in training
and I was changing a light bulb.
A light bulb had burned out in
our hallway in the barracks.
And one of the Glow
in the Dark Guys,
these are the guys
that teach us.
These are the guys who have
to accept you into the family.
And he said, "Give me that."
And so handed him
the light bulb.
He smashed it on the floor.
He picked up this
big shard of glass.
He handed to me
and says, "Eat it."
And I took this shard of glass
and I put it in my mouth
and I bit down on it fully
expecting it to cut me up.
But it turned into
little granules of sand,
completely harmless,
which he obviously knew.
But this was a test,
and he just kind of
nods and walks away.
>>Try to explain to
me the difference
between a soldier
and the Green Beret.
>>In our creed, it says,
"We will never surrender
though we'd be the last."
Which means we die in place.
We don't surrender.
We die in place.
It doesn't matter
if we're the last.
And I think a country has to
have those kinds of people
with that kind of mentality is
that we don't surrender.
And if you're gonna take us on,
you're gonna pay
and you're gonna pay dearly.
>>So now I didn't
hear this from you,
but I saw a photograph of
you wearing a Purple Heart.
You wanna tell us about that?
>>That's just obviously a
medal that you don't wanna get.
But we were on a mission
into North Vietnam
and on the fifth
day we're supposed
to be getting
pulled out that day.
And it was around noon.
And we'd been
surrounded by these guys
for that whole
time that we're in,
but I heard some noise
up to the side of our position.
And I went down there to...
Crawled down there basically
to see what was going on.
And I heard some rustling.
I knew it was some
NVA coming up there.
We were on a ridge.
And so I pulled out a grenade
and pulled the pin
out of the grenade.
And about that time I heard
a thump up in front of me
and the NVA down below
me had thrown a grenade
up towards me
and about then it goes off.
And I feel a searing
pain in my neck.
And so my first thought was
to get rid of this grenade
with the pin out of it.
And I knew where that guy was
and then put it down there
and got him
and then everything erupts,
and we get into a big gunfight.
So at one point I was
up against the tree
and these bullets
started to hit right
above my head in the tree.
And I rolled over on my side
to get lowered to the ground.
And the blood that had
pooled in my lap just poured
onto the ground like a bucket
because I bled that much
in a short period of time.
And then I just started
to go into shock
and my vision started
to close down.
And fortunately, Hanger
and Trepier, got up to me,
put a pressure bandage on there
and got the bleeding to stop.
But when the helicopters
came in finally,
and I can tell a
story without saying
how courageous those guys were
because this was bad
news all the way around
but they did,
and we got back to Da Nang.
And I consider it my
best day of my life
because everybody was
there was hugging us
and, you know, that whole, it
was just a magnificent moment.
>>Your best day.
>>Yeah, definitely my best day.
>>All right, so
after nine years,
you left.
Tell us a little bit about that
and how you ended
up as a writer.
>>I had told myself
when my dear friend
Bill Brown was killed,
and I'd just come back
and they told me
that the whole
team had been lost.
And I took it
stoically at the time.
I just nodded
because, you know, I'd heard
that kind of news before.
And, but that
night I was walking
by his hooch
and it was his
parents had sent him
a little artificial
Christmas tree.
And before they went
out on the mission,
we had trimmed this
Christmas tree.
And that night I'm
walking past the hooch
and the wind blew the door open,
and I looked in the hooch
and there was a
Christmas tree lit up.
And I just fell to my knees.
It was the only time I
ever cried in Vietnam
almost three years
I spent there.
And I just fell to my
knees and I sobbed.
And,
when I got up,
I said that someday somebody
was gonna have to know
about these people.
And I decided then I was
gonna write a book about this.
And when I got out,
I went to college thinking
that they could
teach me how to write
and quickly found
out that they can't.
And...
(Terri laughs)
But I also found out that
I had the gift of writing.
And I would sign that
first sentence of that book
for five years.
And I was doing
this nowhere jobs,
just keeping myself alive.
Every night coming home
and trying to start this book.
When the first sentence came:
"At 25 yards,
the front side of the machine
gun nearly covered the back
of the resting
soldier's head..."
That's it.
It started
and I wrote a whole
book in nine months.
>>And had you not
had that experience,
you might not have even had the
calling to write, who knows?
>>Well, that's exactly it.
So, I consider the three
major blessings in my life
to have been,
one being accepted in
the special forces family
which is
extraordinarily special.
The second blessing a lot of
people don't understand this
but is Vietnam.
Because,
Vietnam provided the
atmosphere for me
to have the best friendships
I will ever have in this life
and the deepest friendships.
And the third blessing is
here at Daily Progress.
I love the daily progress
and it has given
me the opportunity
to do the most amazing things
for all these years.
To be standing right
next door or next
to a surgeon harvesting a liver
in a hospital in
Beckley, West Virginia
and flying back with him
and standing next to him
as he puts the good liver
in a person here at UVA.
And, you know, it's just
endless all these opportunities
that you get as a journalist
that you wouldn't get
in any other jobs.
So, it's just a great blessing.
And, you know, you get
people read your stuff.
(both laughing)
So, well what's better
for a writer than
to have people doing that?
>>What's one of the most
risky projects you've ever,
you know, attacked?
>>Well, I'll tell you
the one that jumps
to mind immediately is I did
this guy who's coming here
to the area to have these
people walk on coals, right?
>>Oh, oh okay.
>>The 1200 degrees coals
and it was who do
their thing, you know,
so, everybody else
is like taking a run
and going tippy tippy
there off of 'em, right?
But I said to myself, you
know, I can't do that.
You know, I'm a
special forces guy,
if I'm gonna walk on the coals,
I'm gonna walk on
the coals, right?
>>Okay.
>>So, I step off onto
these 1200 degree coals
and surprisingly enough,
it felt exactly
on my bare feet like burning
hot coals would feel.
(Terri laughs)
And I'm going, I'm
in trouble here.
(laughs)
But what was really
interesting is
that it didn't
really burn the soles
of my feet like you would think.
>>And you did write the article?
>>I did indeed.
>>Be interesting to
see what you wrote.
(Terri laughs)
>>Yeah. yeah. I'll have
to revisit that one.
>>Yeah, we'll definitely
have to do that.
David, thank you.
>>You're welcome.
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