May 27, 2023 - Bannon's War Room
47:57
Participants
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| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies, because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
| MAGA Media. I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
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War Room, here's your host, Stephen K. Bamm. | |
| Okay, welcome. War Room, 27 May, Year of the Lord 2023. | ||
| Patrick K. O'Donnell. Now, Patrick K. O'Donnell, the finest combat historian of his generation, is going to be with us on Monday. | ||
| We do our, I don't think, ninth or tenth year of doing the Memorial Day special with Patrick with me. | ||
| And the reason I have Patrick is that he has... | ||
| Either experienced himself as a combat historian assigned to the Marine Corps in Fallujah, or done 4,000 hours of oral histories with the veterans of World War II before they passed away, or gone back and done really the most incredible primary archival research. | ||
| I'm talking about years. When he writes a book on the Revolution, Or some of these wars that you can't really do direct interviews, years of research and archives to tell the story. | ||
| So we're not going to have enough time on Monday because we're going to really be packed with going through Arlington National Cemetery and going through the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and how the whole process started in France with the great battles. | ||
| An hour here, some time here today. | ||
| First off, because our audience has grown exponentially over time, so you join us, I want to make sure for people I've known from the previous years, give me your background. | ||
| How did you arrive at a guy, and here's the reason that Patrick's so unique, and you can go to his, we'll put his website up and check his books, but he's got essentially first-person accounts of two of the most fascinating groups Of really special forces in the revolution. | ||
| And in these books in the revolution, you get the whole kind of sweep of the revolution all the way to a book in Fallujah, which up until Bakhmut, the biggest battle of the 21st century was the Battle of Fallujah. | ||
| And you see it with a Marine rifle squad you're in in a first-person count, and he's actually, as a combat historian, not a journalist, not a war correspondent, but a combat historian is assigned to the rifle squad, and he's going room by room, house by house in Fallujah itself, and the whole arc between them. | ||
| And you've just spent, I'm not going to give away the book, but you've just spent years, as you do, doing something on the Civil War. | ||
| So you have done every major conflict Of American history and really have a first person count. | ||
| How did you get in? How did Patrick K. O'Donnell, where did you come from? | ||
| How did you get to be the leading combat historian of your generation? | ||
| I came from a blue collar family in Ohio and my interest in history began when I was about four. | ||
| Four? I was obsessed. Yeah, I had a library of hundreds of books, of, you know, hardcore books. | ||
| I was getting, when everybody else was getting the dinosaur book, I was getting this hardcore World War I book of photos. | ||
| You know, I mean, I was obsessed. | ||
| Even at that young age? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. My father would take, you know, I'd say, hey, can we go to the battlefield? | ||
| He'd be like, oh, you've seen one, you've seen them all. | ||
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I'm like, nope. So this did not come from your father? | |
| No. Your father was not obsessed? He was not obsessed, but he loved history. | ||
| Right. But what was it that... | ||
| I can't put it... | ||
| I can't put it... I can't say. | ||
| Just something that was... I was passionate about... | ||
| I've always been this way since the beginning that I can remember pretty much. | ||
| And... That followed you through high school? | ||
| Absolutely. I was... | ||
| I was building my... | ||
| I mean, I was a... | ||
| We were national champion wrestlers. | ||
| I was wrestling all the time, but I was building scale dioramas. | ||
| I was, you know, I had even more books. | ||
| When I went to American, the first place we went to was the Aberdeen Proving Ground. | ||
| I told my parents on our way down to D.C., we gotta go, because at the time it had the largest collection of German armor in the world, and it was sitting out in a field. | ||
| They brought it back from Germany. | ||
| Yeah, but in World War II, they had Tiger II tanks and Tiger I's, I mean, Broom Bars, they had Anzio Annie. | ||
| I was like, oh my God, it was in heaven to see that in American armor. | ||
| You know, I was... Interviewing World War II vets shortly after, right after college. | ||
| I mean, when nobody else was doing it. | ||
| At college were you also? | ||
| I was obsessed and also finance. | ||
| So I had a business background as well as history. | ||
| And I've always been into it. | ||
| But my thing has always been that first-person account. | ||
| My books are all small stories that tell the larger story. | ||
| A small story of a small group of individuals that make a difference, that change the course of history in one way or another. | ||
| And the thing about them, they're all ordinary men and women in this country that do extraordinary. | ||
| They become extraordinary. Their units become elite units. | ||
| They become extraordinary. | ||
| One, they're training. Two, there's something inside these people that comes out. | ||
| And what they do is unbelievable. | ||
| And it happens time and time and time again. | ||
| I think that's what we honor. | ||
| And the weekend, and I realize for most people it's become the kickoff of summer and all that, but the war room posse is different. | ||
| We have to understand we anchor ourselves in these traditions. | ||
| This goes back to Ancient Athens with Pericles' funeral oration to the dead of Athens during the Peloponnesian War. | ||
| It goes like an unbroken chain throughout the West. | ||
| That's one of the things that you show particularly in the book that we'll go through on Monday on Memorial Day when you talk about the unknown soldier and the tomb of the unknown and how that had antecedents or precedents. | ||
| In France, in other places. | ||
| So even in college, you were obsessed. | ||
| Did you know then this was going to be your life's work? | ||
| No, I didn't. | ||
| I just kind of let things kind of fall into place. | ||
| And I've been lucky in many ways. | ||
| And I just followed my passion. | ||
| First thing I did is I started interviewing World War II vets. | ||
| Well, how did you do that? You got a writing gig to do that? | ||
| No, I just started doing it. | ||
| I volunteered to be purely... | ||
| Who did you volunteer with? | ||
| Myself. No, no, no. | ||
| I mean, was there an organization? | ||
| No, no. You just said, I'm going to just go interview. | ||
| You put the microphone on. | ||
| Yeah, I just did that, and I would go to the reunions, and then I created a website called The Drop Zone, which is the first virtual museum in oral history project. | ||
| This is at the infancy of the Internet. | ||
| And I was gathering the stories when pretty much nobody else was. | ||
| Was anybody else actually out there? | ||
| I know Studs Terkel did it for the Good War, but was anybody else doing it systematically, going and talking to you? | ||
| No. And my thing was the elite units. | ||
| And it was the 101st Airborne, the 82nd. | ||
| You know, I mean, my friends were the heroes of D-Day. | ||
| And, you know, it's just, this is powerful. | ||
| Powerful. To be able to talk to a guy that fought his way off of Omaha Beach, that laid the Bangalore torpedo that blew up the wire, that allowed them to escape from the beachhead, that changed the course of history. | ||
| Only two types of people on this beach, the dead and those are going to die. | ||
| The general said when they were backs against the wall, that Bangalore torpedo. | ||
| And how many men died? | ||
| And rangers lead the way. | ||
| I mean, I interviewed the guy that heard that. | ||
| I mean, I know these, I knew these guys. | ||
| Still, this is 101 years old John Ron, still a good friend of mine, who's the oldest surviving ranger officer and probably the oldest surviving officer from Dog White and Dog Green Beach living to this day. | ||
| I mean... This generation, the interesting thing about your oral history is the greatest generation It was very stoic. | ||
| They were raised...they never talked about...I mean, you went 20 or 30 years, even when the longest day came out in 1961, I think. | ||
| Nobody really...I remember going with my parents and going to all the reunions. | ||
| None of the veterans really talked about World War II. It was only much later. | ||
| When Brokaw did The Greatest Generation or things, it was only really in the 80s that anybody, when Reagan went and gave the famous speech, the boys appoint the Hock. | ||
| But that generation was very stoic, right? | ||
| They didn't talk about it a lot. | ||
| Was it because the memories were too brutal or just that they were raised that they just didn't talk about things like this? | ||
| I think it's a lot of things. I think it was definitely the memories were very brutal. | ||
| Many of these, the men that I interviewed were at the tip of the spear. | ||
| They were either the airborne parachuting in behind the lines of the Rangers. | ||
| So they saw pretty much all of it. | ||
| They were very stoic. And they also believed in kind of moving forward, especially when they came home. | ||
| I'll never forget I interviewed. Many of the guys are like, yeah, I'm not going to sit around and loaf. | ||
| I'm going to get back to work. | ||
| And they hung up there. | ||
| They didn't want to just, like, get hung in high school and they just talk about high school all the time. | ||
| Yeah, these guys were just, like, not looking in the rearview mirror. | ||
| They were moving forward with their lives. | ||
| When they came back from the war. Yeah, many of them. | ||
| But what you also saw, and I brought it out in my book Beyond Valor and many other books that I've written, there was a hidden war, and they suffered from PTSD just like any other character. | ||
| But they didn't talk about that? | ||
| No. For the most part, they didn't. | ||
| But it resonated, and many of the men also silently suffered, or they dealt with it in their own way. | ||
| Many of them were alcoholics. | ||
| Was that part of, do you think that that was part of the response, that it had been so intense? | ||
| And it wasn't a generation that could talk things out? | ||
| Yeah, no doubt about it. That they just went into themselves? | ||
| Everybody has their own way of dealing with combat. | ||
| And, you know, some people dealt with it in one way and others in another. | ||
| But I would say, by and large, many of these men were moved on and just got back into life in one way or another. | ||
| And then it would be, in many cases, my interview would trigger a lot of the memories. | ||
| And they had never- They had not gone back in detail when you were talking to them? | ||
| No, I would always ask them the questions, the hard questions. | ||
| What's your most vivid memory? | ||
| What do you remember the most? | ||
| And it would be stuff that nobody ever talked about. | ||
| It would be killing a prisoner, for instance, which is kind of unheard of, right? | ||
| What we think of an American combat soldier. | ||
| In popular myth. Yeah, right. | ||
| But probably much more prevalent. | ||
| And it was in terms of, you know, sometimes when you're dealing with an airborne unit, there is no enemy lines, basically. | ||
| But it is what it is, and, you know, those are some of the stories that came out, and they were powerful. | ||
| How much was the, how much was the, um, that they had to prove themselves? | ||
| So they were afraid of their of being a coward. | ||
| How much was it that? Peer pressure was a big thing. | ||
| Peer pressure, but even maybe even to themselves. | ||
| How much was that? How much was that fear that I've got? | ||
| I don't know what I'm getting into, but I've got to be able to stand and deliver. | ||
| I can't. I can't waiver. | ||
| Was that a big deal? | ||
| It was a big deal because everybody was a volunteer in these units and the washout rate was high. | ||
| And if you were there, you were special. | ||
| They were often told that they could beat five guys, you know, obviously a myth. | ||
| But they believed in themselves that they could do extraordinary things. | ||
| And the legacy of these units, the American Airborne, for instance, in World War II, 101st Airborne, 82nd, these are exceptional units that have an incredible legacy. | ||
| Of many presidential unit citations where they change the course of battles, their actions alone. | ||
| The story, stuff of story and legend, it's incredible. | ||
| But it all comes down to, in all your books, the small units where you said you tell the bigger story, the small unit cohesion, small units, it's all individuals. | ||
| It's individuals in the defining moment. | ||
| Actually use their agency, make a decision, take action, and that action drives not just the story, but drives the event to a different place. | ||
| That's absolutely true. | ||
| In each of these cases, it's that human element of their training of whatever it is that made them tougher. | ||
| And I think that's what's so important even today is that human agency. | ||
| But I fear that technology As we've seen over time, will hinder that. | ||
| You sound like Patton. | ||
| Yeah. You sound like Patton at the end. | ||
| Yeah. I thought that all valor and courage and nobility of combat would be taken away by modern technology. | ||
| I tell you what, let's hold that. We'll get into that. | ||
| I want to thank Patrick O'Donnell. | ||
| Kind of a preamble. | ||
| For what we're going to do on Monday. | ||
| One of the things we're trying to do here at the War Room is it's the opening weekend of summer, but it's so much more. | ||
| It's Memorial Day weekend. This is not Veterans Day. | ||
| It's not thank you for your service. | ||
| This is about this weekend, which will culminate with the commemoration on Monday. | ||
| At Arlington and at many military cemeteries, hopefully all the military cemeteries throughout the country and many other places, is about the commemoration of our honored dead, the war dead of the United States of America. | ||
| short commercial break. Be back with Patrick K. O'Donnell in just a moment. | ||
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War Room. Here's your host Stephen K. Bamm. | |
| Okay, welcome back. | ||
| It's Memorial Day week. I'm here with Patrick K. O'Donnell. | ||
| Had anything prepared these men in any way about the ferocity of combat? | ||
| I think, you know, when the Spielberg A D-Day movie came out. | ||
| That, I think, kind of shocked people the way it was shot on actually hitting... | ||
| The beach at Normandy, Omaha Beach. | ||
| The longest day in these other movies had never really brought the intensity of combat. | ||
| And since that time, we've had, of course, All Quiet on the Western Front that came out this year. | ||
| They're shot very differently. | ||
| But does even that expose the frosty intensity of combat? | ||
| That's one of the things I want to get across the audience. | ||
| These men and women in your books, the men and women that we honor this weekend on Monday, The level of violence is so incredible that it's hard to comprehend in these conflicts. | ||
| And you go to these cemeteries and you see the beautiful, peaceful nature. | ||
| The thing that's most juxtaposed is Normandy. | ||
| Because you go to this magnificent cemetery, the American cemetery, and they brought essentially all the war dead there We're buried. | ||
| And it's so calm. | ||
| It's so beautiful. And its simplicity and the monuments are so powerful. | ||
| Almost like you're back in ancient Rome or Greece. | ||
| And of course the crosses or the stars of David. | ||
| But you're right looking on a beach and you have people there in the summer and there's kids running around and it's a beach and they're playing. | ||
| And you think about it and you go, my God, there was a time that this was literally hell on earth. | ||
| That you couldn't have gotten more intense than a D-Day coming ashore. | ||
| In those first couple hours, and those men and women or those guys knew that they were going to be killed. | ||
| There's just no probability of surviving that would have been so low. | ||
| Is anything preparing them, or do you think Americans even today understand the intensity of the actual combat that people go through? | ||
| Well, for the World War II generation, I think that there was some preparation in the sense that they were very hardened by the Great Depression. | ||
| And that made people very tough because they had nothing. | ||
| In some cases, they were starving. | ||
| So the Great Depression always... | ||
| That came out in your interviews? | ||
| Yeah, it did. Some of these guys would be part of the Civilian Conservation Corps. | ||
| Even at a young age, as teenagers, they would leave their homes to make a little bit of extra money for their family. | ||
| And they would go through a very hardening process of not having any money or food. | ||
| So that, for the WWII generation, was absolutely a factor. | ||
| For the elite units that I interviewed, it was also the training. | ||
| The training was incredibly intense. | ||
| You got some of the great individuals from that generation in these units. | ||
| The smartest, but also physically the toughest because of what they went through. | ||
| Just back-breaking in so many ways. | ||
| It would build mental toughness. | ||
| We would have to do that from a standing start in World War II. Remember the first campaign in North Africa at Kazarin, we had sent troops over and they went over I think in the Pearl Harbor was December of 41. | ||
| The North African campaign I believe, Torch, started in September of 42. | ||
| So he had almost a year. | ||
| But people were not trained at all. | ||
| I mean, they kind of were throwing people into combat. | ||
| The Germans were essentially laughing at us. | ||
| And even the British said, this is such a disaster. | ||
| It wasn't about the heroism. | ||
| I mean, people got chopped up. | ||
| And one of the criticisms was that... | ||
| You didn't have enough junior officers that knew what they were doing, but you particularly didn't have field officers that had a clue of how to manage men. | ||
| It was just a slaughterhouse. | ||
| So from that, we got better at training people? | ||
| My book, Beyond Valor, begins with 50 American Rangers at the D-up raid. | ||
| And that was in August 1942. | ||
| And that was a real training point for many of these men because they were mixed in with British commandos. | ||
| And it was a disaster in many ways. | ||
| And these 50 men were then... | ||
| It was a raid into France to find out. | ||
| It was a raid into Dieppe, France. | ||
| And they wanted to test the German defenses of the Atlantic wall. | ||
| And what it did is it showed just how unprepared the Allies were for a naval assault. | ||
| Because there was huge pressure by the Russians to open a second front. | ||
| That was what it was all about. | ||
| To open a second front, you had to... | ||
| You had to take on the Atlantic Wall. | ||
| And what the British couldn't do politically, you couldn't take any more slaughter. | ||
| You couldn't have another day, the first day of the Somme. | ||
| You couldn't have another. The British politically church on these guys have been. | ||
| So they were always hesitant to do it. | ||
| They wanted to try some. We were certainly not prepared. | ||
| And it took two years, two more years, basically, in order for us to be, almost two years, for us to be prepared for D-Day in 1944. | ||
| Could you imagine that army in North Africa, N-42, torch at Kazarin Pass? | ||
| The amazing thing is that is, I don't know, September, October of 42, that that would be ready less than two years later to hit the landed D-Day? | ||
| I interviewed the men that were the tip of the spear of Operation Torch, and this was the Darby's Rangers. | ||
| The guys, the 50 Rangers that were in that raid on Dieppe were part of Darby's Rangers, and they were part of the first ranger battalion that went in in Oran. | ||
| I wear this every day. | ||
| St. Christopher's medal that was worn by a member of the five of them. | ||
| In a scapula. In a scapula. | ||
| You got double percentage. | ||
| I wore this in Fallujah. | ||
| I got it about... Two weeks before I went, and both veterans said to me, you're going to need this where you're going more than I do. | ||
| And the St. Christopher's Medal, I've always worn it. | ||
| It was a member of the 509 Parachute Battalion. | ||
| And the 509 were the first parachute assault into North Africa. | ||
| They took some airfields from the French. | ||
| And they're a storied unit. | ||
| I mean, it's just an amazing unit. | ||
| The individual that I wore this with, he was... | ||
| Of 850 men in the Battle of the Bulge, only 55 men were standing. | ||
| They were all either wounded or killed. | ||
| They fought against an SS Panzer Division. | ||
| Regiment, I should say. | ||
| And they fought all through North Africa. | ||
| They were at ANZIO. I mean, it's a storied unit. | ||
| These are some of the people that are in my books. | ||
| They're just extraordinary Americans. | ||
| How did they, given these elite units, because you've done both Darby's Rangers and you've done Merrill's Marauders. | ||
| I have. Merrill's Marauders would be in the Burma. | ||
| I interviewed every Ranger. | ||
| There were six Ranger battalions in World War II, and then there was also Merrill's Marauders. | ||
| And then something after that called Task Force Mars, and I interviewed veterans from every one of those units. | ||
| You've interviewed all six? | ||
| From all six of the battalions, plus Merrill's Marauders, Task Force Mars. | ||
| And I would just go to these reunions, and I'd spend three days just sitting there with a microphone and interviewing these guys. | ||
| And that was just some of the most extraordinary experiences of my life. | ||
| And those reunions are essentially gone. | ||
| They are. Do the children and grandchildren still hold them? | ||
| Some of them carry them on. | ||
| Yeah, they do. | ||
| But for the most part, they're gone. | ||
| And it's, you know, it's a very sad thing because I spent a large portion of my life, you know, being with these veterans. | ||
| And now they've, for the most part, my friends are largely gone. | ||
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Tell me about the reunions. They're powerful. | |
| You would just go to these things and usually no frills. | ||
| It was a modest hotel and these men would gather. | ||
| They were from all walks of life. | ||
| All walks of life. From all parts of the United States too. | ||
| And they would gather and They would remember. | ||
| In some cases, it would be the first time they would remember. | ||
| I would trigger a lot of the memories that they had never talked about in 50 years or more. | ||
| I was the first person to talk about the war. | ||
| A lot of these guys would just think about the happy memories and stuff. | ||
| I asked a whole assortment of things. | ||
| And all the interviews I had were exceptional in the sense that I was recommended by somebody else. | ||
| So I always knew who would be the guy that would not embellish the stories or anything else. | ||
| It was always the truth for the most part as they remembered it. | ||
| And then I had the unit reports and everything else in my mind or with me and I could Take some of that stuff and provide that in the questions I ask them. | ||
| 4,000 World War II veterans. | ||
| You've interviewed 4,000. | ||
| Either orally through on tape or through email. | ||
| I created a system called eHistories. | ||
| This is in the early to mid-90s when email and the internet was sort of at the beginning and I was using that to interview them too. | ||
| Are you the first really to do this? | ||
| There were others, but the E thing, yeah, for sure. | ||
| I created this thing called the Drop Zone Virtual Museum, which still is out there. | ||
| It's a museum that focuses on the history of the men and their photos and their scrapbooks and all that stuff. | ||
| If we lose that, we've lost something very elemental to this country. | ||
| Do you agree? Absolutely. | ||
| I think that our history is... | ||
| In many ways, just as we look around, is disappearing. | ||
| It's very important. | ||
| Our history is who we are as Americans. | ||
| We're going to deal with that when we get back. | ||
| We're going to take a short commercial break. | ||
| Honored to have... | ||
| the preeminent combat historian of his generation, Patrick K. O'Donnell, in the war room on this Memorial Day weekend, the commemoration of our honored dead, the war dead of the United States of America, our Republic. | ||
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♪ | |
| War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Babb. | ||
| ♪ Welcome back. It's Saturday, 27 May, in the Year of the Lord 2023. | ||
| It is the kickoff for our Memorial Day commemoration coverage. | ||
| I'm with Patrick O'Donnell. | ||
| Patrick is going to join me for our Monday, as we've done now for, I don't know, eight, nine, ten years. | ||
| Patrick, you just said something before the last break. | ||
| Tell me about, do you think we're in jeopardy of losing, number one, the memory of our history, and two, the connection to that memory? | ||
| I think absolutely that's the case. | ||
| There's danger of that pretty much all around us in different flanks in different ways. | ||
| Either it be renaming military bases or just the interpretation of our founding, which is fundamentally, in some cases, it's It's anti-American. | ||
| I'm all about, you know, looking at things from different angles, and that's certainly important in all cases, but I think there's a lot of, there's a great issue of, our history is in danger of being lost in many cases. | ||
| All my work has really been about It's always been like the story is the story. | ||
| It's always been to try to preserve those stories and those legacies. | ||
| And I think the other danger that we have is there's a lot of people that put a bias, their personal bias, on history. | ||
| I try to just, in most cases, all cases actually, is just let the story tell itself. | ||
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Let the actors, let the actors in the play. | |
| Yeah, exactly. And it's their own words that tell their story. | ||
| It's those primary sources that my books are made up of. | ||
| Are they in literature or in literary theory, are they reliable narrators? | ||
| Well, I think they have their own bias as well, of course. | ||
| And you have to sort of, you have to suss that out. | ||
| You have to look at all of the components and pieces as a historian when you're putting together a book from different sources to tell something. | ||
| But yeah, sure, there's always a bias from a certain perspective. | ||
| When you talked about, you just said about changing the names of the base of the fort, Fort Hood and Fort Bragg. | ||
| Come to mind immediately. | ||
| And Fort Bragg, obviously, the honored 82nd Airborne. | ||
| And then you've got Fort Hood out west, right? | ||
| Was it Third Armor at Fort Hood? | ||
| Yeah, there's this changing of names. | ||
| I mean, that was an important phase in our history was a reconciliation. | ||
| The coming together of the north and south begins at Appomattox. | ||
| It's there that... | ||
| That Lee and Grand set this amazing example of, in many ways, forgiveness. | ||
| And the basis, in many ways, were a part of that reconciliation, to give a tip of the hat to the vanquished, in this case. | ||
| So I think that certainly is a great danger in many cases, constantly renaming things and looking upon our history in a different manner. | ||
| Do you think today that the combat history is harder for younger generations to connect to? | ||
| Or is there still a section of men and women? | ||
| I know, for instance, Mo, I dragged her every Civil War battlefield. | ||
| And she liked it, but I think she could have opted out of a few of them and went to Chancellorsville a couple times in Virginia. | ||
| The wilderness in Spotsylvania where it's 104 degrees in Virginia summer, she might have thought of some other things to do. | ||
| Obviously, it resonated with her. | ||
| It's one of the reasons she went to West Point and then went to the 101st afterwards. | ||
| Do you think it's tougher to reach a younger generation that's on social media and TikTok? | ||
| I think it certainly is. | ||
| I think the key, though, is how you connect with them. | ||
| If you connect with them through story, And really, the stories of these Americans, in many cases, are just exceptional, extraordinary. | ||
| They revere their grandparents and their grandparents and great-grandparents. | ||
| Are they connecting to these World War II stories right now, or the Korean War stories? | ||
| I say it all depends. | ||
| You know, I mean, it depends on who you're dealing with, because there is a certain segment of the population that does connect, and then there are those that don't. | ||
| It's about how history is taught. | ||
| That's another important thing out there. | ||
| What have you learned about that? I think through story and connecting people with the past. | ||
| And if you have an assignment in a class where you ask somebody to investigate a pension file of a Revolutionary War soldier, then that person might make a connection to just an average individual. | ||
| It's a lot different than memorizing a date and a place. | ||
| You really get sort of a personal connection with history. | ||
| Is the hardest war for us still to comprehend or to see about the valor? | ||
| Is it still Vietnam? | ||
| Is Vietnam the hardest? | ||
| Of all the ones you've done, what's the hardest to actually not bring to life, but to tell the stories of? | ||
| Is Vietnam still the hardest? | ||
| I think that might be one of the wars, but also I think our current wars, Afghanistan and Iraq, I know from the guys that I was with, they don't talk about it at all, ever, unless it's among themselves. | ||
| But even then, they don't. | ||
| Explain that. What do you mean by that? | ||
| I think that there's a fear of misunderstanding with People that weren't there in many cases. | ||
| These were all volunteer forces. | ||
| Yeah. There were no drafts. | ||
| So this is two wars there for 20 years. | ||
| That group is a silent group as well. | ||
| They don't talk about it ever. | ||
| And even within our groups, it's not talked about either. | ||
| They have the highest PTSD. Maybe not the highest, but now the PTSD is a defined thing. | ||
| It's very high. 40 suicides a day or two? | ||
| Very sadly, we've exceeded suicides in the unit that I was in than we had in combat deaths in Fallujah. | ||
| Oh, stop. In the unit, there are more suicides. | ||
| You lost four in combat, KIAs? | ||
| Yeah, we had about over 50 that were killed in Fallujah, and there's now more suicides than there were. | ||
| Hold it, the unit overall, your squad had four? | ||
| Yeah, I'm talking about... | ||
| Give me the unit. What was the unit? | ||
| 3-1. 3-1? | ||
| Yeah. Had 50 KIAs? | ||
| And then there's now more. | ||
| It's a very sad thing. | ||
| I mean, is that an extraordinary number? | ||
| 50 killed in action in Fallujah? | ||
| It was even higher than that, I believe, but yeah. | ||
| And you've had more... So you've... | ||
| Not that unit of Marines. | ||
| I mean, this is kind of the elite of the elite. | ||
| You're telling me of combat Marines. | ||
| There are now more suicides than there were... | ||
| That's what I've been told. Is this back to a lack of belief in the country? | ||
| Is this the drop in religious belief and outward participation in religion? | ||
| It's hard to say. I think it's a situation that's all based on the individual and how they process the events. | ||
| But I think the other thing is you've had economic downturns. | ||
| And, you know, people have looked back at different things. | ||
| We never talk about those suicides as part of the honored dead. | ||
| We don't talk about them as the casualties of these wars. | ||
| They're not added as the casualties. | ||
| Should they be? I think so. | ||
| You know, they've been touched by war. | ||
| This is true sacrifice. | ||
| I mean, there's so much, a tremendous amount of sacrifice goes on for those that have served and also the families of those that have served. | ||
| When you go to Section 60, and Section 60 is the section they open up for the Iraq and the Afghanistan We're dead. | ||
| You see that in the younger families. | ||
| I mean, Andrew Breitbart, the reason one of the things of Andrew Breitbart's change is he bought a house that overlooked the National Military Cemetery that's right there in Westwood. | ||
| It's right in the middle of Los Angeles. | ||
| In fact, the U.S. Open that will be played is just right down, is really right down within a quarter of a mile of the cemetery. | ||
| It's beautiful. And overlooking it, one of the things that got Andrew, who didn't come from a military background and family, had not been in the military, really had no involvement, Was to see the young families come back for the section they opened up for the burial of the honored dead in Afghanistan and Iraq were right there in back of where his backyard on the cliff would look down over and see these young families. | ||
| And it started to have an impact on him. | ||
| The sacrifice of the war was more than just the warrior itself. | ||
| It was the entire family. | ||
| It was. And that's what I've seen. | ||
| It's a cradle to grave kind of experience. | ||
| That, you know, you see these just extraordinary sacrifice on the part of Gold Star families, everybody else that have evolved in that, in that, those warriors that have given their entire, you know, last full measure of devotion for our country. | ||
| What, um... | ||
| This weekend, you know, it's gotten to be the kickoff of, and we'll talk a little bit about this more on Monday. | ||
| It's the kickoff of summer. | ||
| Obviously, it's gotten to be a big, you know, with the car sales and all the sales and people going to the beach. | ||
| Do you believe we've lost the memory of what Memorial Day is really supposed to be about, particularly when they shifted it from the 31st of May to the last Monday in the month, so you've got a three-day weekend and now people make it a four-day weekend? | ||
| It depends on who you asked. | ||
| The groups that I follow, the people that I'm still in touch with from Iraq, they're very much in touch with the meaning of Memorial Day and how powerful it is. | ||
| And they remember the sacrifices of those young men. | ||
| You did the book you were embedded with, but you haven't done today, maybe I'm wrong, you haven't done another book about either Iraq or Afghanistan. | ||
| No, I wrote, the book that I wrote was We Were One, Shoulder to Shoulder with the Marines that were in Fallujah, and that was my book. | ||
| But it was not a book of, it was not a personal memoir in any way. | ||
| It was about eight best friends that go to Fallujah in 1st Platoon 3-1, and it's what they experience. | ||
| And then I intersected that experience in the battle, in some of their toughest battles, in an area of Fallujah called Queens, where it was house to house against a Star Wars bar of international jihadists, including Chechens, people from multiple net 16 or 17 different countries. | ||
| People don't realize Fallujah, and the Marine Corps would tell you one of the toughest battles the Marine Corps has ever had. | ||
| A city of 250,000 people, a lot of the people left, every bad element. | ||
| They tried to draw the American military strategy to draw the Star Wars bar in there. | ||
| Yeah, and they were highly trained, but they were also on... | ||
| We saw liquid adrenaline in most cases or methadone. | ||
| They were jacked up on drugs. | ||
| They were on many of them. | ||
| We saw the syringes all over the place. | ||
| So you had super fighters in many ways. | ||
| Guys that saw the entire building collapse on people and they're still firing their AKs underneath the rubble. | ||
| They would take enormous amounts of bodily damage and still keep fighting. | ||
| They were just an incredibly bunkered enemy that was determined and very Very determined. | ||
| For one of the great battles of the Marine Corps, the largest battle or the most intense battle, set-piece battle, only probably topped by Bakhmut, the Siege of Bakhmut, which is now coming up in one year, it doesn't get the type of coverage you think it was. | ||
| Your book is, I think, probably the most prominent book about Fallujah. | ||
| My book is a very unique book in the sense that it's a relic of the battle. | ||
| And what I mean by that is all the oral histories and most of them were done at night when we finished an engagement or a couple weeks afterwards. | ||
| In the moment. Yeah. In the moment. | ||
| So it's raw. | ||
| Emotions and Salty. | ||
| It's it's an incredible it's an incredible oral history in many cases in their own words of what happened and it's and then a couple weeks later we did uh you know group interviews and we diagrammed every every ambush everything okay short break so it's incredibly detailed back with uh the combat historian patrick Getter has arrived. | ||
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| Okay, so I'm going to break an exclusive here, and that is you've been researching for the last five years. | ||
| Five years. Yeah. | ||
| Five years. Look, this guy is a national treasure. | ||
| As people know, I'm a voracious reader. | ||
| I read it all. His books are read-like novels. | ||
| For five years, you've been researching, for the first time, the Civil War. | ||
| I don't want to tell the story at all. | ||
| It's actually, since my childhood, I've been in the Civil War. | ||
| As a professional, I've dedicated yourself to a project. | ||
| If now seeing, in studying the combat of the Civil War, Patrick K. O'Donnell, where do you rank in ferocity of battle? | ||
| World War II, World War I, Revolutionary War, Civil War, Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam. | ||
| Give me your rankings. | ||
| Number one, the Civil War. | ||
| Number one, the Civil War. | ||
| Yeah, because it was so close, combat. | ||
| The level of intensity was amazing. | ||
| Just ferocious, hand-to-hand. | ||
| Had the technology overtaken the tactics? | ||
| That was the thing. They didn't quite get it. | ||
| I mean, the rifle musket changes everything. | ||
| They're using Napoleonic tactics. | ||
| But I think everything, in many ways, much of what we've seen in textbooks, There's a lot of myth to it. | ||
| In other words, what I mean by that is one of the things that you'll come away with when you read the book. | ||
| It's quite a different look at the Civil War. | ||
| It's a very different perspective. | ||
| I can't get into the details. | ||
| What I say, what it wasn't was just a situation where the North had an overwhelming number of men and supplies and equipment and overwhelm the South. | ||
| It wasn't the case at all. | ||
| In fact, it's really quite a miracle. | ||
| That the war ended up the way it did. | ||
| A total miracle. The political complexity of this. | ||
| This book, I can tell you, ladies and gentlemen, will be a blockbuster. | ||
| His other twos have been bestsellers. | ||
| I mean, big bestsellers, but this is going to be a blockbuster. | ||
| The technology, both Lee and Patton both said It is good that war is so horrible or we would get to love it too much. | ||
| Is that seen at the general level but not seen? | ||
| But that fails to resonate at the private or the person in the trenches level where it's hell all the time? | ||
| It certainly resonated in the Civil War. | ||
| In fact, many Americans looked at it as a forever war that would never end and they wanted it to end. | ||
| This book that I've written will bring that to the reader's attention. | ||
| Okay, I don't give any more away. | ||
| Just say it's not on pre-sale. | ||
| We got about a year to go, but we'll make sure we do this right. | ||
| How do people...first of all, I want to thank you. | ||
| I want to thank you for Monday. | ||
| Patrick will be here on Monday as we do our, I don't know, ninth or tenth annual session with Patrick on the War Room Memorial Day special. | ||
| And we'll really be spending time about Arlington National Cemetery, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, all of it. | ||
| So I want to thank you in advance for that. | ||
| It's an honor to be here, Steve. | ||
| I really always appreciate it. | ||
| You're a national treasure. | ||
| You've done amazing stuff. Stop, stop. | ||
| I got the easiest job in the world. | ||
| I provide a platform for the best people in the country, which are guys like you, men and women like you. | ||
| I want to make sure everybody can get to your writings. | ||
| I want to make sure everybody can get to your books. | ||
| I want everybody to get to your website, the Drop Zone, everything you've done, the 4,000 interviews you've done. | ||
| You're a treasure because you went when nobody was doing it, and we have that now in posterity. | ||
| If you had not done that, it would not. | ||
| This is what I say about human agency. | ||
| If Patrick K. O'Donnell is a young person not gone and done it, it'd been lost. | ||
| And those oral histories are everything. | ||
| That's what we have really to, that's the, like Homer, that's the ancient storytelling that connects one generation to the next, and it was because of you it happened. | ||
| So where do people go to get all your content? | ||
| My website is PatrickKO'Donnell.com. | ||
| And then my Twitter account is at CombatHistorian. | ||
| And that is also my Getter account as well. | ||
| At CombatHistorian. | ||
| At CombatHistorian. I follow you on Getter. | ||
| I'm not on the Twitter. | ||
| Well, thank you for doing this. | ||
| And five years of research. | ||
| The book will come out in the spring of 2024, so it couldn't be more timely, right, of the presidential election and everything. | ||
| The country will be on the line then, so it couldn't be better. | ||
| And you'll do your natural book tours. | ||
| You do that. Are you doing any speaking engagements? | ||
| I'm always doing speaking engagements. | ||
| And people can see that on the website? | ||
| Yeah. I'm a professional speaker, and I've been... | ||
| I'm constantly engaged in different speaking engagements. | ||
| Patrick, you don't want to miss him if he speaks. | ||
| Okay, we're going to leave you with some images and music that is appropriate for this weekend. | ||
| We'll be back here on Monday. | ||
| Patrick O'Donnell and myself will be talking about Memorial Day itself. | ||
| The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, Arlington National Cemetery. | ||
| Captain Bannon will actually join us for part of that. | ||
| So until Monday, this has been The Word. | ||
| I want to thank Real America's Voice, the folks in Denver, my crack team here, everybody for putting this together. | ||
| Until Monday, I will be up on Getter for the entire weekend. | ||
| I may actually do a couple of Getter Lives. | ||
| Please check it out. Thank you very much. | ||
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We'll see you Monday.. |
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