June 8th, 1967, a date which will also live in infamy with your help.
The USS Liberty was an American surveillance ship suddenly deployed to the Eastern Mediterranean just before the outbreak of the six-day war between Israel and Egypt.
Virtually unarmed and sailing under the stars and stripes in international waters without escort, she was first surveilled by Israeli cargo planes, then strafed and napalmed by Israeli fighter jets, then attacked by Israeli torpedo boats, and then almost stormed by Israeli Marines aboard helicopters.
But they couldn't finish the job.
Of the 294 men on board, 34 were killed in action, 174 injured, and the Liberty would go on to become the most decorated ship in U.S. naval history from a single action.
Officially declared an accident, a case of mistaken identity, the rabbit hole goes way deeper than that.
We are honored and so excited to welcome four survivors of that atrocity to share their firsthand experiences that fateful day in the shameful aftermath and in their virtuous struggle, which continues to this day.
Mr. Producer, to Battle Stations.
Episode 116 of Full House, the world's most straight shooting show for White Fathers, aspiring ones, and the whole biofam.
I...
I am your humbled host, Coach Finstock, back for as long as it takes to make sure you understand the damn truth about what transpired that dark day in June 1967.
Whatever you do after listening to our very special guests this week, please honor them by going to sacrificingliberty.com and buy a copy of the best documentary I've ever seen.
It is equal parts enraging, heartbreaking, and inspiring.
And then go buy more for your family and your friends.
And I am dead serious about that.
I finished the fourth section today.
And yeah, I was ready to rock and roll.
And we're so honored to have these men with us.
Okay, Sam and Smasher, our birth panel regulars, have gone AWOL on one of our best shows out of 116.
So shame on them, but they may hop in later.
And our trusty producer, Rolo, is here.
Rolo, how are we sounding so far?
Good?
All systems go?
As good as they can be.
Okay, very good.
Many, many guests over narrow internet.
All right, to start us off here, Mr. Ron Kuchel said that he would like to open the show with a prayer, please, sir.
Have at it.
We're all ears.
Thank you.
Father in heaven, once more, once more, we're here before you.
As I said here right now, I think about the invocation at the USS Liberty Memorial Library.
You're there with us that day.
You've been with us since day one.
We didn't go to the bottom because of you.
We are here this evening to speak truth, not hate, no hate whatsoever.
We are here because we love this country for what it stood for, because we wanted our own children to be able to experience what we experienced when we grew up.
And by golly, we will stand that.
We will stand no matter what to make sure this country stays strong.
It was born a Christian country.
What it's turned into now is almost beyond belief.
And as I prayed at Liberty Fellowship in Calisville, Montana, we ask that you stand with us, Lord.
We know you have, and we know that you will.
We ask it all in Christ's name.
Amen.
Thank you.
Amen.
Thank you, sir.
And Mr. Kukul, if it's okay, we'll start with you.
Thank you for blessing this show.
It's the first time we've actually had a prayer on the show, and it's more than welcome.
If I could, sir, how old were you when you first boarded the Liberty?
And what were your responsibilities on the ship?
Now see, I was 28, I believe, at the time, and I was a supervisor of communications sections.
I won't go into what I did or how I did it.
I just will tell you, I was a supervisor of a communications section, and I mastered arms most of the time during my tour on the Liberty.
Thank you, sir.
Welcome.
All right.
I'm going to move on then to the total character who helped make this show possible, Mr. Phil Turney.
Welcome to Full House.
We're honored to have you.
And tell us about yourself back in 1967 and your own responsibilities on the ship, please, sir.
Well, thanks.
And, you know, thanks to my dear shipmates for being here.
They're wonderful, spectacular people.
I love them dearly.
And we fought and died together.
We're still fighting and we'll still die together.
Well, I was a 20-year-old ship fitter aboard the ship.
And my duty station in damage control was damage control forward.
And on the ship, I did maintenance and stuff like that, cleaning toilets, stuff like that.
I really enjoy it.
But no, just it was a good ship, too, a fun ship, good people, and we're going to support them to the end.
Amen, sir.
Now, I'm looking at your curriculum vitae here, and it says that you have a vacation home in Tel Aviv.
Tell me that's not true, Phil.
Come on.
You know, they canceled my timeshare.
All right.
I wonder why.
Now I can't get a refund from the airlines either.
Can't even get back over to the good old mothership there.
All right.
Done.
All right.
Phil.
Welcome.
And seriously, thank you so much through our mutual friend for helping to put this together.
All right.
I'm just going to go.
I don't know exactly who has the seniority gentleman on the ship from back then.
So I'm just going to move on to Mr. Bob Scarborough.
Tell us, please, sir, a little bit about yourself back at that time.
I was, when I first went aboard ship, I was right out of CT school and I was an R Brancher, a Diddy Chaser, code taker.
And I got out of school and went straight to the Liberty on October 31st, 1966.
And we went out to sea the next day, right into a storm.
And I've never been so sick in my life.
But I never got seasick again after that time.
And so my first cruise was pretty pleasant learning my job and back to Norfolk after, what, four months, I guess, out at sea and cruising the west coast of Africa, which was really interesting.
And then we pulled out back to Africa and spent a day, I guess, in Abidjan, and then we're called up into the Mediterranean.
So it just got crazy, crazy after that.
Hot and heavy, real quick.
Yeah, I know.
I want to ask about that and right into the fire.
And Bob, it says here in your biography that your favorite American president is Lyndon Baines Johnson.
I found that a little bit surprising.
Actually, that's a shocker to me.
Where that came from.
I warned you guys I was going to do this.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
We'll talk about her.
Number one in my book.
It's just not the one that you think it might be.
On a list of sorts.
All right.
Thank you, sir.
And last but certainly not least, Mr. Mickey LeMay.
Welcome on.
You took a face or a body full of shrapnel on this day.
And so far as I know it, you are not a descendant of Curtis LeMay of Air Force fame.
But welcome, sir.
And let me take you.
No relationship at all to Curtis.
I was 23 years old.
I was electrician mate in charge of the electrical department of the ship.
My duty station would have been the generator right above the engine room.
I had been on the ship since 66.
May of 66, I went on.
Oh, no, 65, I think it was.
Anyhow, I spent four trips.
And that's basically the introduction I have.
All right.
Thank you very much.
Yeah, we've got so much to cover here about that fateful day.
If we have time at the end, I would love to ask you guys about family things.
This is usually the dad family show, but we got to get through the meat first.
And then we can possibly indulge in some more pleasant conversation later this show.
So let's start.
We're going to assume that our audience knows the basics about the USS Liberty, if not from our introduction, from already watching the documentary or doing their own research or reading many of the books that have been published about that day, including from some of you.
But tell us about the ship itself and the mission you were on in June 1967 and how that turned on a dime.
And I'll, Phil, if you want to take this or I'll let you guys choose whoever is the most appropriate for some of these questions.
Well, yeah, thanks.
But if anybody else wants to chime in now, please go ahead.
I'll follow up later.
It's good with me.
Phil, I think it's important that you go first.
You were topside.
You saw it all.
And I've always relinquished that to you every time we did a radio program over the last 54 years.
So, you know, you were there.
You were topside.
You saw it.
Maybe you didn't last long.
But you saw what happened that morning and what happened that afternoon.
I didn't.
I leave.
I relinquish it to you.
I do.
You pretty well started, Ron.
So, yeah, before we jump right to the attack, I mean, you guys were having a relatively low-risk surveillance mission off the coast of Africa.
I don't even want to ask how it was putting into Port and Abidjan and how much fun that was.
But then, almost at the turn of a dime, you said, Oh, you guys are steaming up to the Eastern Med through the Straits of Gibraltar with a brief stop in Spain.
And so far as you knew it, it was, you know, business as usual, just in a hot spot.
Is that a fair scene setter for what was going on?
Yeah, we never expected it.
It is, but we had Abbott John.
We used to have a lot of fun there, but that time we didn't.
Yeah, they've run us right back to the ship as quick as they can get us to go to sea.
And when you think about that, all of us are thinking really different things.
You had a foreboding, but you didn't know what you were in store for her.
No, we didn't.
But as Ron Kugel has pointed out many times about Dixon, Gene Dixon had a prediction we were going to get in a lot of trouble.
I'll be darned if we didn't.
And it came.
She was a soothsayer of the 60s of sorts, right?
She made these predictions and she said that a U.S. Naval ship was going to be in deep trouble imminently, something like that.
I think Ron could handle that better than I did.
Go ahead, Ron.
She did not name the ship.
I can tell you that right now.
She just called it a U.S. Navy ship was going to get in trouble over in the Mideast somewhere.
I kind of poo-pooed it.
I didn't give it much credibility.
And I hadn't given people like that much credibility anyway.
But the fact of the matter is, she was correct.
She might have had some inside knowledge.
I don't know.
But that was about the size of it.
But I told other people about it at the time.
And most everybody just thought, well, this is just, you know, you can take it lightly.
It just doesn't mean that much.
Well, when we look back after the attack, I guess it did mean something.
And that's about the size of that.
There wasn't much more than that came out of her.
And the six-day war had not broken out when you were ordered redeployed essentially to the Eastern Med, right?
The shooting hadn't started.
Not well, a lot of things were put in motion probably six months or a year or two years, who knows, before we even left port to go on our last cruise.
We were set up from the get-go by the United States government.
Their assassins, designers said that Israel was going to take care of it.
And then we got a real problem.
A problem this world didn't want to see as a nuclear war.
And believe me, we were seconds away from a nuclear war if our ship sinks.
Thank God for my shipmates and these men here on this panel right now.
This, oh, God, without what they did was inspirational.
They all wanted to live.
Some died.
30 died.
There should have been 200 died.
When I saw everything, I said, my God, 34 was only killed.
As bad as that is, once too bad.
Only 34 for the damage that ship took.
My God.
A miracle.
Yeah, someone said it was like the hand of God was keeping that ship from going over, given the hole in the hull.
And you mentioned nuclear war there.
That is something.
I had no idea how central this ship was to bigger and more dastardly plans until I watched the documentary.
So we will get to that later, but we got to tease the audience a little bit here, gentlemen.
We can't give them all the good stuff.
I understand that.
Bob knows what I'm talking about.
He knows drama.
Hey, man, he's a movie producer.
He's on Netflix.
Yeah, come on, Phil.
Stay on the script here.
That's right.
One other, and Mickey, I heard you there.
You know, by all means, guys, just cut in as you see fit.
I guess your captain McGonagall requested an escort and was denied.
You're going into Middle East hot zone with the Soviets on the side of the United Arab Republic.
Really, the Six-Day War was mostly Israel and Egypt, and then Jordan and Syria were allied with Egypt, and you were denied an escort.
You guys were sailing alone, essentially, on a very lightly armed and armored ship.
Is that fair to say, too?
Yes, that is correct.
We only had four 50-caliber guns, two on the bow and two on the stern.
That was our defense.
It was designed to repel board is not any more than that.
That's what I was told.
And the denial of an escort, you believe, is consistent or corresponds with the design for the USS Liberty that was set in motion before you men even got there to the eastern med off the coast of the Sinai.
Yeah, I had heard that the general, the admiral told the captain that he could have airstrike help for us within 12 minutes.
So we didn't need the escort.
That's what I had heard.
I don't know, but I did hear that.
Two carriers in the Med at that time, right?
Correct.
Yep, Saratoga and the America.
All right, so you're there.
You're conducting surveillance.
And the ironic part is, if I got this right, you men were not even, or the mission was not, you were not allowed to intercept or collect either British Commonwealth signals or Israeli signals.
I don't know if that's sensitive.
That was not our mission, at least to my knowledge.
Thing about people with top secret clearances is that there are you, everything you learn, it's on a need-to-know basis.
So I'm well here to say that in my department, no.
No.
But in other departments, I can't speak for them.
That just is something I can't talk about because I don't know.
Sure, fair enough.
Okay.
One thing I'd like to say now here, just to help people understand the ship.
Phil and I were part of ship's company.
We were the group of people that got the ship to wherever Ron and Bob's group wanted us to go.
So Phil and I will know nothing about that part of it.
We were just there to keep the ship in shape so we could bring them wherever they wanted to go.
That's correct.
Fair enough.
Yeah.
All right.
So, yeah, a ship, a ship almost divided between the communications guys and the real sailors.
No, I'm joking on that.
So, all right, thank you guys for being good sports.
I don't know if you can see this picture very well, but this is Commander Dave Lewis.
And Commander Lewis, and Ron can attest to this, is really the guy who kind of suggested to the captain as to where we should go for us to pick up the best signals or whatever he was told by NSA to pick up.
So that's kind of why we went where we went was because of where NSA sent us.
And because of the nature of that mission and where you were at that time, I remember in the early days reading about this.
Oh, the first thing you see is that it was an accident.
It was a case of mistaken identity at sea, fog of war, all that stuff.
And then you scratch a little bit further, and then the theory is that the Israelis really didn't want a spy ship off the coast intercepting them.
There's a lot of theories and a lot of books have been written about this.
We're, of course, not going to parse all them.
We're going to hear just straight from you.
But they just didn't want their comms to be intercepted.
But it's even deeper than that.
So let's get to it, men.
June 8th, 1967, bright, brilliant day on the med.
I think it started like any other, but take it from there, Phil.
You were up on the deck.
Yeah, you're correct.
It was a normal day, steaming.
Of course, we knew we were in the war zone.
And you could see the smoke and everything on the horizon.
We knew stuff was going on.
It wasn't really a concern of ours because that flag we had up there was American.
And you don't screw with America.
And that was, to be clear, a big, clear, five by eight foot American flag flying from the mast from the get-go.
Correct, sir?
Absolutely.
And it was a brand new flag initially.
It got shot down several times.
The signalman Joe Meadows and forgive me, I forget Russell David.
They put the flags up.
We always had flags on.
But the point of it is, they know exactly who they were attacking anyway before that.
I mean, it was so flagrant.
Admiral Moore quoted, I'll never, ever, ever, ever believe it was a fake mistaken identity.
And it isn't, never has been.
But our corrupt politicians cover up for it.
From LBJ to every president, even up to Trump, has not lifted a finger to help us.
Not one of them, not Congress, not nobody.
We didn't do anything to anybody.
They attacked us.
We didn't attack them.
We're not the haters.
We're the truth tellers.
We've been labeled Nazis, anti-Semitic, Jew haters, everything else for telling the truth.
We didn't kill anybody.
They did all the killing, and we're the bad guys.
No, that ain't working.
Our mints for it.
You have the courage and the moral strength to not shut up and go quietly into the night, but insist, you crazy rogues, on telling the truth about what happens, what happened that day.
So, God bless you for that.
And we will do all that we can to carry the message forward.
You've been doing this for a long time, but I'm telling you, with my finger on the pulse of people who are smart about this stuff, skeptical about the official scenario, which it just you peel.
I mean, it's like an onion peeler.
The more you peel, the more it stinks, and it just keeps on going.
And part of the reason why the story doesn't hold up is because there were a number of surveillance overflights of your ship that day before a single bullet or cannon was fired or torpedo was launched at your ship.
So it just doesn't fly any of this fog of war business.
How many planes flew over?
I mean, you waved to the pilots at one time they were that close.
I know of two.
I was going to the O4 level and I saw a fighter flying the same way we were that was black, no markings on it.
And that's when I turned to the officer up there and told him that, asked him if he had seen that fighter that I'd seen.
And he said, no, I haven't.
As I was pointing to it, another one strafed us.
So I know of two planes for sure.
There might have been more, but I only know of the two.
And they had no markings on them to give to probably likely the intent was to give plausible deniability.
Or yeah, maybe those were those famous Egyptian fighters checking you guys out off the side.
I thought it was Egypt that was attacking us.
I never thought it to be Israel.
At first, the planes were unmarked.
The plane I saw didn't have a mark on it.
It was painted all black.
I remember that very, very vividly.
And he was not that high up.
I could have waved at him.
He was so low.
Phil, did you see any of the surveillance overflights, too?
I saw surveillance flights earlier.
I didn't see the initial jets.
Getting to sit in their crosshairs.
But Mickey did.
He got knocked out right away.
And there's no telling how many jets attacked us.
Two, eight, sixteen.
Who knows?
The kind of damage they did in two hours?
Think about it.
How many planes would they have to have?
Yeah, and you guys said at that time you thought the Israelis were your buddies.
It was incomprehensible that it would be Israel attacking you.
One, the ship was clearly identified, not resembling anything that the Egyptians might have had parked offshore.
It had the clear GTR 5 lettering on the side of the ship, the stars and stripes flying from the mast.
Most of your ship is antennas and communications equipment.
It's not like you were a destroyer or a battleship.
So it stakes the high heaven.
Yeah, Matt, there was only two ships like this in the world.
No other ship, no other ships looked like the Liberty.
No cargo ship or anything.
With the equipment that Raron and Bob's group had on that ship, it was a very unique looking ship.
The only other one was our sister ship, the Belmont.
That's it.
There's no way in the world anybody could think that this was any other ship than what it was.
And that's one of the excuses that the Israelis gave or went into the reports, right?
That their pilots were tired, they didn't track the ships appropriately, fog of war, foggy pilots.
No chance, right, James?
Go ahead, Bob.
I was, I had the mid the mid-shift or the Night before, and I didn't, I wasn't topside at all that morning.
I got off work at, I think, seven o'clock in the morning, got some chow, and hit the rack and went to sleep until probably about noonish.
And we were all sitting around our birthing space talking.
And it's saying, just, you know, the Arabs don't have the guts to attack us right now.
We got Arabs, we got Israelis all around us.
We were covered.
We got, you know, we had no worries at all about being attacked.
And about 1300, the captain had a drill.
And so we all went to our positions wherever we were supposed to be during an attack, if an attack would happen.
So we were there.
That took about an hour.
So we were just finished with our GQ drill and back in our compartment.
And it was just a little after two o'clock, I guess, in the afternoon.
And it sounded like people were throwing chains on the deck above us.
It was crazy.
But immediately we knew what it was.
And before the general quarters alarm sounded, then we were all hauling to our GQ station.
And so I wasn't topside all morning.
I didn't see the overflights.
I didn't see anything else.
I just went down below decks, two decks below the main deck down in RR1 and manned my position.
And the next thing you know, the captain was saying, brace for torpedo starboard side or standby for torpedo side, starboard side anyway.
After you had already been shot up, and was that after they had dropped napalm bombs on the ship as well?
No, this is when the attack first started.
Okay.
The torpedo boats were there early.
Yeah, the torpedo boats hadn't arrived yet.
And it was just strafing run after strafing run.
And then when the torpedo boats came alongside, then they were started shelling around the ship and particularly on the starboard side.
And they were, I think there were a couple of guys I know that Chief Lynn was killed by shells coming through the side because we were heavily, we were not a heavily armed ship.
We were lightly armed as far as armor is concerned on the side of the ship.
So and so the next thing you know, we were hearing standby for torpedo attack starboard side.
And that went on several times because they shot five torpedoes at us and four of them missed.
I don't know how.
Our top speed was 18 knots, Phil?
Yes, 18 knots.
That's what the governor's off.
Yeah.
That ship would shake.
You guys remember shake it up and down?
Oh, yeah.
You couldn't put a cup on the table.
No.
No, you couldn't.
One out of five torpedoes hit the Liberty, and the one that did hit it, tragically, was it the torpedo that caused the most deaths to the communications officers below deck, but it hit in such a way that it, you know, a foot or a yard one way or another, and that ship would have been split in two.
Correct.
Yeah, it hit an I-beam, it hit an I-beam.
Yeah, it hit an I-beam.
That's why there's only the hole on the starboard side.
It didn't go in and split the ship up.
That's just part of the divine intervention.
I was about 30 feet from where the torpedo hit the ship, and it blew the bulkheads right up over my head.
And it killed and instantly killed 25 American sailors in the comm center and blew me up into the air.
I really don't have a lot of memories of that except hitting the deck.
So I know I was unconscious for a while until the water, I guess the water rushing in finally revived me and I made an effort to find my way out because there was no lights or anything.
It was insane.
And I could see the fires around.
Phil, isn't that the only place on the ship that you could close the water off and prevent it from flooding the whole ship?
If the torpedo had hidden anywhere else, we would have never been able to stop it, correct?
No, we wouldn't have, Mickey.
And again, many blessings that day.
How it all happened is just incredible.
And, you know, it brings me to mind when I was above deck and I saw the horror that was going on, the insanity of it all.
And then when the torpedo hit, I thought of you guys down below and I said, man, I thought I had it bad.
These guys are really going to get it.
And they did.
We were, I made my way out of the secure or the spaces of the radio room that I was in and down the passageway.
And then, and by the time I got down to where the ladder was going topside, which had been locked down, there was maybe, I don't know how many of us there were because there was no lighting, but I was hanging onto a pipe in the overhead with about 18 inches of breathing space left, waiting for the ship to either roll over and go down or the hatch to open to let us out.
And eventually the hatch did open and we got out.
We went up to the next level, to the second level.
Can I intervene right here, Bob?
Of course.
I heard the same thing these guys are talking about.
I heard the captain say prepare for torpedo attack.
We had all the watertight doors closed.
It was Phil and Mickey were talking about here.
Yeah, we did have watertight doors down there and we could seal off from one compartment to another.
I heard the voice of the captain.
Right away, immediately, I felt that my life was over.
And I got up from my atis, my supervisor's desk was down below in RR2, it was called two decks down below the main deck.
And is that correct?
Yeah, two decks bottom below below the main deck.
And what I did is I went directly to my equipment and I stood there and I prayed for my life.
When I got done, I walked back to my desk approximately three to maybe five seconds before the explosion occurred, which was about 60 feet from me.
That's just a guess, but I'm thinking somewhere in that vicinity, maybe 60 foot or so.
A voice came to me and it said, get down and get down now.
Three to five seconds before the torpedo exploded.
I found myself with my nose flat to the steel deck.
And to this day, I don't know how I got there.
It wasn't me.
I was standing straight up.
I ended up with my nose to the steel deck.
How I got there, I know now because I call this all divine intervention.
It wasn't me that moved from standing straight up to laying flat on my nose, or not on my nose, but on my body straight down.
And I could hear the shrapnel as soon as the explosion occurred flying over my head, killing everybody in that compartment, almost everybody.
Incredible.
And then it immediately filled with water up to my shoulders.
And I got up and made my way towards the hatch.
And as Bob described, there was a lot of men trying to get up that ladder to the floor, to the deck up above, where it was quite a little bit drier.
And we were all scrambling.
I just want to put that in there because I do talk a lot about divine intervention and the spiritual side of this.
And I will never stop talking about it because we're only here because of it.
Thank you, sir.
A lot of miracles that day.
Mickey, did you want to get in there on this?
No, I said what I wanted so far.
Thank you, sir.
What really stuck out to me, I had no comprehension of the drawn-out sequence of the attack.
The surveillance, which makes it impossible for them not to have known it was an American ship, the strafing that took out almost the entire ship's ability to communicate back to command.
Then the torpedo ships.
Then the napalm.
And then, not content with that or saying, oh boy, we made a mistake.
Then in came helicopters with Israeli commandos.
And that one really, I was gripping the side of my chair when I saw that.
And Phil, you lived that viscerally.
You want to share that one, your interaction with the guy about to, you thought they were about to board the ship and kill you all.
Yeah, I did.
I mean, it's just not me that lived through it.
It's all of us.
But I, you know, I saw.
You were face to face with one of them.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Hey, what did I have to lose?
I mean, you're going to die then or later.
Who gave a shit?
Yeah, bring it on.
And you weren't armed, right?
The small arms locker was locked.
So it was just you and your fists in a belly full of rage?
Yeah, unfortunately, there was only one key to it.
And we tried, but it wasn't successful to get in there.
And would it make a difference?
It would have to be because I could have fired back but uh, it didn't work out that way.
Well, you did send something his way, didn't you?
Yeah, I give a good greeting the thumbs thumb, thumbs up to the guy and he gave it right back to you.
I think.
Yeah, absolutely yeah right, I don't think it was your thumb, was it not?
Quite it was close to my thumb.
And those, those choppers, were there.
At first, naive sucker that I am, I was like oh, they were sending a rescue crew to help you guys out.
They were there.
They were there to finish you off thinking that the ship was going to go down.
Is that fair?
Yeah, but the gig was up and they knew it.
They left cover up again.
That second, one of the one of the many, many tales of heroism that day, was a man I I didn't catch his last name, but Terry.
Terry ran a coax cable out on the deck under fire to get one antenna still uh, to get one functioning, which was able to get a signal out, despite the fact that you guys were getting jammed by the Israelis even on your international distress call, which is a war crime.
Uh tell, tell us what Terry did and how that may have uh, saved your bacon or saved the ship.
Well uh, one of these other guys go ahead.
Uh, they know the story and the drill and Terry was kind of in their part of the group, in the security groups, the top secret, secret guys.
So yeah uh anyone, you know Bob Ron Mickey, take that out.
I had a uh dinner with him, with Terry Hellbardier, just before um he passed away several years ago.
He said that sat me down.
He said that the story out there uh, about him patching up that cable, is true, but it didn't happen exactly the way the story was put out.
But he did patch up the cable.
It was good enough to get the distress call out and um he um, you know that it remains to this day that uh, he was the man that um helped us get get help when we needed it.
He was shot up pretty bad uh, during that time as well.
Yeah.
Another thing that I might like to bring up, and then Phil told me this because I just didn't believe him when he told me.
But he said after the torpedo exploded and all of us guys were coming out on the main deck, we all were out just, yeah, on the main deck and slabbing each other on the back, shaking hands.
Just happy to get out of that watery grave down below.
Phil told me while we were doing this that they were still machine gunning the ship.
And he said, you guys are down there shaking hands, slapping each other on the back laughing, with all these 50 caliber machine gun bullets flying through the air.
I don't know if he'll verify that today, but that's the Story he told me.
And all I can say is I don't remember that.
I don't remember seeing them or hearing them because we were, you know, like I said, so very happy to get out from that watery grave down below.
I don't remember that.
Yeah, I don't remember that either, Ron.
I know that when I came up out of that hatch that brought us up on the main deck on the starboard side, we were sitting so low in the water that there was water actually splashing on the main deck of the ship because we were sitting low and with a starboard list.
And there was so much shrapnel that it stuck in the bottom of my shoes and I couldn't even walk.
I had a hard time walking without holding on to something to pull myself up because their shrapnel was as thick as glass or gravel in a driveway.
It was unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
And I was then I went unconscious for a while laying on that top side.
I just don't recall a lot of other stuff.
And one of the horrible things about Wikipedia as being the sort of least common denominator for 90% of people's understandings about anything, such as the Liberty incident, as it is disgracefully titled there, is that they, you know, there's all these editors and they put in these little detail points that raise doubts in the reader's mind.
So I was reading the article and it brought up the fact that someone may have gotten a few shots off from one of the machine guns and that that therefore justified the Israeli attack because you guys shot at them.
What's your understanding of any defense that the Liberty put up that day against such a ferocious onslaught?
That never happened.
That never happened.
The machine gun they were talking about was already disabled.
It couldn't fire nothing.
I know.
Sorry.
I was just going to say those men in that machine gun tub were blown to pieces.
Yeah, they were.
The captain told me that it's very possible that maybe a couple of rounds had cooked off.
That's right.
And that was told by the captain personally.
After the fact or during the fact that it doesn't, yeah, it's a first shots I can tell you, they were from the fighter plane that got me.
Nothing happened until that I got hit in the officer next to me.
I believe he might have, he died up there.
I don't know if he's dead when I turned around and ran or whatever it was, but I saw the first shots and they were by that jet fighter that strafed us from port side, starboard side to port side, from bow to stern.
That was the first shots made.
And if any of by the time the guys got to the 50 caliber guns, another plane had already come by and hit us again too.
And they also hit us with rockets up by then, I'm sure, you know, because they knocked out our communications right away.
That's what I've been told.
And I know where the first shots came from.
It was first pass.
That first pass that I got hit on.
And I still have 52 pieces of shrapnel inside me to prove that I got hit.
Amazing.
Yeah.
Unbelievable.
I'm so tempted, gentlemen, to insert a few human questions here, but I still want the audience to get the full story here.
And then I know they'll stick around because it's so compelling.
And we can talk about your response and sticking with this.
And I'm dying to know about the gag orders that were essentially put on you and how you're able to speak so much more candidly about it today.
But you're shot up and eventually the helicopters there to finish you off in the water, so they thought disappeared.
And the sun is still up, and you guys are there listing in the sea with 34 dead, 170 plus injured.
And you're essentially dead in the water, but you're still able to move under your own power.
And you didn't have contact with another U.S. ship, at least visually, until the next morning.
So talk about a long night.
You're just sitting there not wondering, I suppose, whether they're going to come back to finish you off.
Well, I was in sick bay laying on a table with a mattress underneath me.
So I don't know what went on during that time, other than the few times when I woke up and prepared for a torpedo attack.
I don't remember the torpedo hitting.
Prepared to abandon ship.
I can remember telling somebody, just leave me here.
I'm bleeding too much to be thrown into the ocean.
And that's all I know about the aftermath of my first attack when I got hit on the first strafing.
Oh, by the way, I also had a rocket come through the overhead when I was two decks down inside the ship, too.
Well, they were taking me to sick bay.
Sure.
So I got some shrapnel from that, too.
Ron and Bob, yeah, good.
I spent the night in the mess decks.
There was just trying to help whatever I could do.
And I was not in the best of shape myself.
I was still blacking out from time to time.
And there was a body on every table in the mess decks.
And they ran out of room, and there were mattresses on the floor where some of the wounded were lying.
And the doctor and the corpsman and other people were just going from person to person just to try to help out do something.
It was unbelievable.
Unbelievable.
And Phil, we're just talking about the very delayed response that you didn't see another friendly until the next morning after the attack when they sent, I guess they sent choppers and fighters at sunrise to get you guys.
Is that delayed response part of the conspiracy that do you think command wanted you guys to go down that night?
Or was that just logistics?
They couldn't get anybody out there.
I believe that was just logistics.
The USS America came at full speed with USS Little Rock and the USS Davis, two destroyers.
And that was the first thing I saw at daylight.
It must have been about 8, 7.30 or 8 o'clock in the morning.
You could see in the distance the shape of that aircraft carrier coming over the horizon.
And you thought, oh my God, we're saved.
But it took them all night to get to us.
All the aircraft that were launched off the Saratoga in the USS America were all called back by McNamara and Johnson.
That was the interesting part there.
It wasn't 100% clear whether those were the planes that maybe were going to pay a little visit to Cairo or they were literally going to save you guys.
I don't know how fighters helped you in that situation.
I think that was both.
I think once they think they, but Mo Schaefer knows a lot about that.
But from what my understanding is, that there were planes on the way to Cairo and there were also planes that were launched to come to our rescue.
Some of them were nuclear tipped.
Called back to be re-armed with conventional weapons, and then they were in the air again.
And from my understanding, is that was it?
I don't remember which who it was that got in touch with Washington and said that they were sending aircraft to come to the defense of the USS Liberty.
And they immediately, McNamara immediately recalled the aircraft.
But he challenged him, and Johnson came on.
This is what Commander Davis said.
He spoke to the Admiral.
And I don't remember the Admiral's name, but Lewis said that the Admiral said that Johnson said, gee, a lot of sense here.
We will not embarrass our allies.
Now, we think Egypt is attacking us now.
We don't know who's attacking us, but Johnson did.
Johnson knew that Israel was attacking us, and he ordered the planes back.
Because it was set up in advance, right, Mickey?
This was set in motion before the six-day war even broke out.
Could be.
I don't know.
That's believe that to be true, but I don't know.
I'm just going by the way things happened.
Why we didn't see one thing from the United States till the next morning is beyond me.
No planes came over to see if we were doing the evening or anything that I know of.
And a Russian ship came alongside and offered us help during the night from what the guys tell me.
That was our first help, was a Russian ship, not American plane or anything.
They didn't drop anything down on us to help us stay afloat or to save lives.
That's what I heard.
That's a fact.
I'm laying on a bunk, so I can only tell the things that I've heard.
Sure.
And that, you know, and for the audience who this gets even more grandiose.
We'll get to this whole thing.
Stay with us, fam.
But, and I'm a skeptical guy about conspiracies and how complicated it would be and impossible to keep that secret.
But those fighters, some of them nuclear-armed, taking off for Egypt at the same time speaks to the likely truth that this was set up to be a pure false flag, that the Israelis were going to sink you guys.
They were going to blame the Egyptians, and that was going to be justification for U.S. involvement on the side of Israel in the Six-Day War.
Do any of any of you disagree with that hypothesis or theory?
No, Matt.
I wanted to just add that it's not so much speculation, it's the truth.
Thank you.
What happened to us was pre-planned from the get-go.
It had to be.
The Sixth Fleet was caught off guard.
No fault of theirs.
None.
Because the Six-Day War started earlier than it was supposed to, right?
Absolutely.
Frontline 615.
The war was supposed to start on the 15th.
It started on the 8th.
That's why they had us run full speed into the Med, picking up more spies.
Unfortunately, three of them or four of them died.
I think Locke was the only one that survived.
That was very lucky for him.
They had to get their sitting duck into position for the OP to go forward.
Yeah, and then once we sink, it's a turkey shoot anyway.
Come on, man.
They got all these jets, all these helicopters, all these torpedo boats, and they can't seek us.
Come on.
And I'm not going to, like, Joe Biden.
Come on, man.
Hey, guys, I have something interesting here.
I gave a talk in Orlando, Florida a couple years ago with Ernie Gallo.
And it was to a group of about 100 people, maybe a little less.
And after Ernie and I spoke, the organizer called Ernie and I back and wouldn't let us get off the stage.
And he called up the photographer from the America.
All the pictures that were taken of the Liberty from the America, he took.
And he told me and Ernie that before the ship started heading to our aid, they confiscated all the cameras from the crew, canceled the Liberty that they were supposed to have for 90 days.
This was done on the way to help us.
I mean, to show you how quick the cover-up happened.
They confiscated supposedly every camera from the crew.
They would not allow them to do anything.
They weren't allowed to go into a port for 90 days.
So to me, shows the cover-ups was already planned.
And it sounds like they got cold feet to LBJ, McNamara, and whoever else was in on it because you guys didn't go down and you had so much eyewitness evidence that they were like, ooh, all right, that's that false flag isn't going to work anymore.
He should have had a cold body because he got busted.
You know, listen, man, you don't murder Americans on the high seas.
I don't care who you are.
And with the sanction of the U.S. government, that seems a little ironic to me, doesn't it, to you?
A little bit, a little bit.
Although the more I learn, the more I think it's consistent with the way things have been running for a long time.
Rolo, our producer, had his hands up.
I'm sorry, or his hand up.
I didn't see it there, buddy.
Please have at it.
So I was talking to my aunt, who's an older lady, about our relationship with the country Israel.
And I was talking about specifically the USS Liberty incident.
And I don't know the exact numbers.
I said about 30 dead and 180-something injured.
And she didn't believe me.
She just, she didn't believe me.
So she looked it up.
And it was shocking to her that I wasn't lying about that.
And this may sound a little harsh, but you guys really are America's dirty secret.
You are not supposed to walk away from that.
And whenever the Liberty is brought up, it is, it's so quickly swept under the rug.
It was a talking point for a short period of time at Ben Shapiro or Turning Point USA events.
People would bring up the USS Liberty.
Oh, no, no, that was debugged.
That was an accident.
It was proven.
Next question.
There wasn't even a chance for people to dig into it.
And after I brought up the USS Liberty, and I was correct about that, I told my aunt to look up the Levon affair.
I don't know if you guys are familiar with that, but she wouldn't do it because she did not want to find out about more things that Israel has done to America.
She couldn't handle the truth.
Yeah, that's the sad reality is with all the terrible things America has done, the USS Liberty is probably the worst because you guys are still around to tell the story.
And that's the biggest problem is that.
I hate to even say it, Rolo.
It crossed my mind watching the documentary.
Man, these men, one, survived their supposed one-way ticket to the bottom of the Eastern Med.
Two, they carried on and didn't get mysterious car crashes and have heart attacks in the middle of the night and all that to speaking about conspiracy.
And here they are.
Uh, truly, truly remarkable.
You can't say that because speak too soon, knock on wood.
Yeah, no, I'm serious, I swear to God.
And uh, my dear friend Ron and Mickey and Bobby, listen, these guys are great, but I gotta tell you a deal that happened to me and my wife in San Diego.
We were out there uh visiting my son, and uh, we were at a bar, of course, 4v8.
And uh, this guy comes up to me and sits down and says, Uh, you on the USS Liberty?
I say, Yeah, I didn't figure out how he knew that, and then he told me he was a massage agent, and I shouldn't talk about that anymore.
My wife and I got the big argument, and then they had to take us up to our room for God's sake.
Mossad agent telling you to shut up, sir.
Yeah, right.
Yeah, you're massage, aren't you?
He had a big wristwatch sticking to my face.
Yeah, and he says, You shouldn't be talking about this.
You know, it was a mistaken identity.
I said, I was there, and I'm an eyewitness.
He says, Well, I told you I was a massage agent, and my wife went nuts.
These guys, my wife, God, oh man, you're lucky you didn't get charged with uh murder one that night, Phil.
I could when I watching you on the documentary, I was like, Oh man, he still got the fire burning in his heart.
That's not that's 50 years ago, or it's one year ago, it doesn't matter.
It's fresh as yesterday, we all do, Matt.
These, I'll tell you, this fire won't go out.
And the reason is dedication to each other, dedication to our shipmates.
Hey, that could have been any one of us.
Who would give a shit if we didn't, or their families, or good people like you, or radio shows?
In fact, we're going to have a we're going to have a streaming, and we've already discussed that, but uh, that's for the LVA, that's for the Liberty Vetch Association to voice your opinion on their own network and call a bunch of excuse me, old men liars that serve their country with dignity and honor and gave their blood.
Screw them if they can't handle the truth.
I would say give them hell, but you've been giving them hell already, and you're not going to start now.
Yes, absolutely.
So, yeah, Phil, let us know that they're getting into more of the streaming.
Uh, you know, getting the information out there using the new tools that are available.
I guess back in the day, you had to do radio shows where maybe you get more ears, but it sort of disappeared into the ether and your books and everything else.
Let's do let's do the human dimension here.
Take a quick break from the sequence.
I can't wait to ask about Ron.
I can't wait to ask Ron about Malta and the absolutely impossible job that they gave you, survivors.
But the gag orders.
After the attack, both on the Liberty and when you got to safety in Malta into dry dock, you guys were basically read the riot act that you would say nothing to no one ever.
And yet, here you are able to talk about it.
So, have that Mickey, if you want to chime in on this one.
How was it having to keep your mouth shut?
And why are you able to be out and about now?
I don't know if the rules change, statute of limitations, that whole dynamic, please.
Well, for me, I didn't have any admiral talk to me.
I was evacuated the next day to the America, where I spent about three or four weeks to get healthy enough to fly to Naples.
In Naples, they put us at the naval hospital there on the top floor where nobody could visit us unless they wanted them to.
And around September, I think it was, might have been early October, I was transferred to the Army Hospital in Germany.
Now here, I'm still on a stretcher and all that.
I'm losing weight.
I went from 160 pounds to 75, by the way.
That's how seriously I was injured.
And anyhow, they put me in a ward where there's at least 15 beds and 12 of the beds get Vietnam veterans in there.
And I wasn't there two minutes and they came back, put me on a gurney, brought me to a private room.
And then an officer came in and ordered me, your name is Smith.
And if anybody ever asks you about the Liberty, you know nothing about it.
So that was what I got to hush me up.
What Phil and the other guys got was a lot more shocking because in my mind, the only time I couldn't talk about the Liberty is while I was in that hospital.
Once I got out, I was free to talk all I wanted.
He never swore me to secrecy or nothing.
He just said, well, you know, your name is Smith.
You are not allowed to talk about the Liberty.
That was it for me.
So it didn't hit me like it did these guys.
No, it didn't mean neither, Nikki.
It didn't hit me because they never, not once was I told that I couldn't talk about this.
And of course, when Jim Ennis brought his book out, Assault on the Liberty, then it kind of opened up the thing for just about everybody.
And now we're all talking.
Jim had the courage to put that book out there, and I give him credit for that.
And it did help all of us.
But I was never told I couldn't talk about this.
Never.
Well, we still have a lot of shipmates we can't find because the Admiral scared them so much.
I mean, I found Ed Perkins last year, and he still doesn't want to talk about it because of what the Admiral told him.
And then we had that guy come to Vero Beach, who had nothing to do with the Liberty until his wife or somebody finally talked him in to show up with us, remember?
So how many of our shipmates are still in that state of mind that they're scared still?
That's a good question.
Many, Nikki.
I'm sorry?
Many, my friend.
Oh, yeah.
I was shipped to Germany immediately, and I didn't have that experience either, where I was told by an officer to shut up or not say anything.
But I did go to I was sent to Germany to a station up in northern Germany in Bremerhaven, where they where we listened to, you know, whatever we could pick up up there in the far north.
And I'm sure you can figure out who we were listening to.
But when I got there, I had Liberty patches on my ship's patch on the unit, my dress blues.
And I had a ship's patch on my dungery jacket.
And I was told immediately to take those patches off my uniforms immediately.
And I was also, when I received my Purple Heart with seven other Liberty veterans that were sent to Germany, it was in a private ceremony in the captain's office, not in front of the troops.
He just handed me a box in the paper.
I got a picture right here of him shaking my hand and handing me a box and the paperwork for my Purple Heart.
Incredible.
And Phil, did he read you the Riot Act?
Oh, you had the Admiral take his stripes off and do like a good cop, bad cop one-man show with you, right?
I wonder who was the good cop and who was the bad listen I'm a 20 year old wet nosed kid You got a flag admiral right in your face and telling you to shut up.
You know the consequences.
Listen, the guy said Advocate, he took his stars off and all that stuff.
He was a great guy, I thought, until the end.
And then it was disgraceful, disrespectful, and hurtful that my dead shipmates had died just below me and on the decks.
And he tells me to shut up.
Incredible.
That didn't stand then.
It didn't stand out.
But I was, listen, I didn't even tell my wife about this because I took his word.
Jesus, they tried to kill me anyway.
Yeah.
Then I met my wife, and I read an article in the newspaper, Rocky Mountain News, Stan White, got a hold of him.
As Ron said, Jim Nance's book was out, which was inspiring, no doubt.
Other books were written to help us all out.
So, no, it was a defining moment in my life to once I was set free article by Stan White.
I got involved with the USS Liberty Veterans Association and spent a big part of my life.
And I love these guys.
I love our country.
I love our unity.
I love our precious human beings on this earth that care, you know, and they deserve to know the truth.
The truth is, we got screwed, and America got screwed at the same time, and they're still getting screwed.
Yep.
Same, same playbook, and they're going to keep going back to that playbook until people get wise to think.
Think about it, gents.
The USS Maine was fishy as hell.
The Lusitania was fishy as hell.
Hell, three years before the Liberty was attacked, was Gulf of Tonkin.
Now, we don't have to parse every single one of those, but I mean, there was suspicious naval activity used to justify other things with all those ships.
So this one, especially coming so recently after Gulf of Tonkin, which got the United States the involvement in Vietnam that it wanted, certainly is consistent with a pattern of pulling this shit off, contrary to what either the American people want or what is good for national security.
And bless you all for keeping the fire going.
That also struck me.
It's over 50 years later, and you still care.
Bob got choked up in the documentary talking about his experience down in the hold.
And, you know, by all accounts, should have at least drowned, if not died down there.
And Mickey getting lit up in the initial attack.
And Phil flipping the bird to an Israeli commando about to come in and kill all of his shipmates just with his, Phil only had his bare hands.
And then, Ron, after you glorious guys, I was going to say another word, the ship stayed afloat.
You were escorted all the way back to Malta.
There was speculation that Crete would have been closer and wiser, but you get back to Malta.
And what do they tell the survivors who are still healthy enough to walk around under their own strength?
Ron, take us through the aftermath in dry dock and what you were tasked with.
Please.
I was going to tell you that before we started this, I needed to get up and walk around.
I'm not good at sitting still for very long.
Do you gents want to take a quick break and then come back?
Happy to if we're only just a couple of minutes just to walk back and forth in the house just to get loosened up.
And I'll tell you what I heard and how things went about if you want.
Sounds good.
Thank you, Ron.
And so we'll put a little break music in here at the break.
Thank you, gents, for sticking with us.
And so, you know, we always give our special guests a chance to pick some music.
So I, like a nerd, I looked up 1967's like, you know, top 50 hits and I sent them to Phil.
I was like, Phil, come on, pick one from here that you were jamming to out on the deck there.
But he's got something else in mind.
Please, sir, take us into the break here.
What did you choose?
Yes, In the Break is a wonderful song for my shipmates and how proud I am of you.
And you won't back down.
I thought that was going to be Buck Owens.
I thought it was going to be Haba Naguila, but I'm grateful it's not picked up.
It wouldn't be that.
All right, gents, we'll take a quick break.
Audience, stick with us.
Don't you dare leave our USS Liberty survivors hanging here.
They went through the rigor-moral, and you will enjoy the second half, hopefully, even more than you did the first half.
We'll be right back.
No, I won't back down.
You can stand me up at the gates of hell, but I won't back down.
No, I'll stand my ground.
Won't be turned around.
And I'll keep this world from dragging me down.
Gonna stand my ground and I won't back down.
Hey, baby.
There ain't no easy way out.
Hey, I will stand my ground.
And I won't back down.
Well, I know what's right.
I got just one life in a world that keeps on pushing me around.
But I'll stand my ground and I won't back down.
Hey, baby.
There ain't no easy way out.
Hey, I will stand my ground and I won't back down.
Hey, baby.
There ain't no easy way out.
I won't break.
Hey, I won't back down.
Hey, baby.
There ain't no easy way out.
Hey, I Welcome back, everybody, to Full House episode 116.
Truly a delight to be here with four of the brave, honest, and still with us USS Liberty survivors here on January 27th, 2022, over 50 years after that fateful day.
Hope you enjoyed DJ Turney's there, choice, little Tom Petty.
And we're going to pick up right where we left off.
We had a lot of laughs at the break, just talking about the state of the world and all the rest of it.
So we'll keep it a little bit lighter perhaps here in the second half.
I'll try not to be such a taskmaster and I'll shut up more too.
But we got to get through to the rest of this story before we can talk about society and all the rest of it.
So one of the most heart-wrenching, gut-wrenching scenes and segments from the USS Liberty documentary, sacrificingliberty.com, was Mr. Ron Kuchel's duty in Malta after the Liberty miraculously made it out of the Eastern Med under escort to, I supposedly, the best place they could go.
Maybe they picked Malta because it was out of the way and had fewer prying eyes at just how shot up and nearly destroyed that ship was.
But as I understand it, you know, these guys have been through so much, their buddies had been blown to bits or were clinging on to life.
And then there's some admirals there working the side of the dock as the ship pulls up.
And it's not a common occurrence.
So they took a keen interest in that ship, what happened to it, and the men who were still around to possibly talk about it.
And they basically, correct me if I'm, I'll turn it over to Ron here.
But they basically told the survivors to get down there below deck and clean up the bodies, the mess, the equipment, and all of it.
I just fell out of my chair when I heard that.
So, Ron, please take it away, how that was.
And of course, everyone else can contribute to.
Thank you.
Well, it was about, we were about halfway to Malta, I guess, somewhere in that time era.
And an officer whose name I really don't recall stopped me in a passageway and literally said bluntly, you're going to be in charge of the body recovery down below.
Which I got to be truthful with you.
I tried to get out of.
I asked him right then and there, I said, are you ordering me to do that?
He says, yes, I am.
That is an order.
I said, you want me to go down and pick up my own shipmates.
You want me to be in charge of that and try to identify them.
He says, yes, that's exactly right.
So just let me say that I tried to get out of that.
I really did.
But nobody could blame you for that, sir.
The order is an order, and that's what you do.
You follow through.
When we got into Malta, they drained the water out.
We put us in dry dock and drained the water out.
And myself and, I don't know, it must have been another dozen guys went down below.
We do have a Lieutenant Lee who was in charge, but he didn't have a security clearance to go down there.
And so it was pretty much left up to me to do what body recovery we could do and identification.
So it's my job to identify.
Some of the guys that were down there doing all this stuff were bringing pieces of bodies up to me over to me.
And we were, as I remember it, stacking them up in places when we were trying to put them together kind of like a jigsaw puzzle to make some semblance of a body out of him.
Well, we didn't do a very good job of it, but we did the best we could.
So I suppose the people that are listening right now would say, well, we're going to hear some pretty grisly things here coming up out of your mouth.
But you're not because I'll tell you why.
My trauma doctor told me, he said, Ron, you're sitting there trying to remember what you saw.
And the brain will not record that.
It won't.
It's not there.
And I said, well, it has to be because I know I did it.
Ernie Gallo came down below and stood beside me that day.
And he said, Ron, I don't know how you can do this.
It smells terrible.
I talked to Phil about that.
Phil got off the ship for a while because the smell is so really, really bad.
And I told him, I said, Phil, I never smelled a thing.
I never smelled anything the whole time I was down there.
So.
You were on autopilot?
I mean, do you remember it or is it all a blur, a horrible blur?
I can just tell you this: that I know the physical part of it.
I remember picking up the pieces and trying to fit them someplace where they belonged, looking for names on shirts or on trousers or whatever, see if I could place them together with a body, stuff like that.
But as far as describing vividly, there's just no words for it.
After what you had already been through, to then have to deal with the aftermath, the visceral aftermath, too, is almost, I mean, that's almost torture.
Yeah, and to describe it, I can't because there's just no words of seeing that.
I guess if you want to describe it for someone to kind of put in their mind, I guess, if you went to a slaughterhouse after they'd done it a bunch of cattle and seen all the pieces laying around, or that might come close to it.
But my mind went, it drifted to viewing it as sort of something like that.
I couldn't view it as my own shipmates.
I couldn't.
Right.
Two persons.
And so it's kind of a long story short thing because I can't describe anything more than that other than to say that I know I was in charge.
I know I did what I did to get them in the bodies in the bags and try to identify them.
And thanks to you, a lot of those boys made it back home more, you know, for their families and for a great, yeah, without giving myself so much credit.
The guys that had to go down there and dig those pieces out of steam pipes, jammed into steam pipes in places he couldn't believe that a body could be shoved into.
Those guys put up with a lot too.
I think Bob was a part of that.
Yeah, Bob was a part of that.
And he can describe it maybe a little bit better than I can.
All I can say is a blank tape pretty much is what it is with me anymore.
And my doctor did tell me that I would never recall it.
I don't agree with that because I do think that the right circumstances could bring back the recall, but that's just my personal opinion.
That's about the size of it, Matt.
Thank you.
Bob, you were on the recovery duty too?
I was with a group of other guys.
And our job was to pick up classified material and put it into we call burn bags so it could be destroyed and pick up body parts and bodies.
And when we first got into dry dock and the water was drained out, I was in the cruise.
I was with the guys that went down and started immediately to pick up bodies.
And there were some, it was pretty, it was very gruesome and not something I really care to talk about.
Fair enough.
That was something that jumped out of the documentary: how these horrible memories are still with you, men, so vividly over 50 years later to the point of nightmares and legitimate personal trauma.
I think a lot of times, you know, PTSD is mock these days, but there were no lies told in that documentary when you're talking to older men revisiting those horrors.
It was unspeakable.
Can I add one more thing, Matt?
Of course.
There's nothing like coming back home to something like this, having the background, spiritual background that I had, and being ignored by people.
But the worst part of it all, and I want to just put it in here right now, if you don't mind, is to sit in a divorce court, have your family taken away from you with some visitation,
making you a stranger in your own home, sitting there knowing what had happened to all these guys and what they had put us through, and then going through a divorce court where there was absolutely no help whatsoever, none for a veteran, for a combat veteran.
And the reason I know this is because the governor's office called me after they'd taken away my family and my house and everything that just about everything I owned.
That happened to me twice, by the way.
After that was all done, they said, you know, we're going to institute a veterans court where the judge will be a veteran.
So there's some understanding of what you guys were put through.
And right now to this day, my family's gone because I wouldn't back away from the truth.
Because I knew this country needed us to tell the truth to preserve it for their family, for their kids, for their kids as kids.
We have to do it.
Now I'm done.
We spoke a couple days ago and talked about my situation.
And you said that churches have essentially banned you for speaking the truth.
I had no idea that your family turned on you because of your insistence on speaking out on this.
They were turned.
The kids were turned.
They were lied to.
I was back then, I'm not sure that, well, when I first started with this, PTSD wasn't even recognized.
It wasn't even a diagnostic manual.
Well, when you were put up into a courtroom like I was, there was no, you were defenseless.
Kind of like the day the liberty was attacked, we were defenseless.
Well, I got a second chance at it in the courtroom.
And I will say it right here now today.
I do have my three boys that are talking to me.
My daughter has spoken to me in 26 years.
I don't even know what I did wrong.
I was treated like a criminal in that courtroom.
And I have never been in jail or convicted of anything in my whole life.
I just wanted to get that out there if I could.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir, for sharing that.
Yeah, that's a tough act to follow, Ron.
We've spoken about the horrors of divorce in particular on this show and how many times they are completely, unfairly skewed against good husbands and good fathers where the relationship goes wrong and then everything goes to hell after that.
So, one of the many things we have to clean up in this country, among others.
On top of making you, guys, clean up your own ship, it gets even worse, dear listener.
Then they proceeded to patch up the ship, to clean it up and make it look spick and span, if I understand it.
Now, Mickey, of course, was sipping martinis and having pretty nurses wait on him while all this was all these guys.
But hey, Matt, yes, yes.
No, don't leave, don't leave, Mickey.
No, you're not far from the truth.
I was so much weight that in Germany, they had beer, ice cream in the refrigerator for me to try to get me to gain weight.
I mean, people would go up in the refrigerator.
Hey, can I have this beer?
I'm sorry.
That's incredible, Mickey.
I'm so glad you're with us and you made it through.
God knows you deserved it.
You still got the metal in your guts to prove it.
But yeah, they now, okay, maybe they were just repairing the ship to make it more seaworthy for the long trip home through the Med, the Straits of Gibraltar, and back to some obscure dock in, I think it was in Virginia.
But who wants to take on the patching of the ship and your return to America?
I don't know who lived that one was viscerally.
One more thing, Matt, and then I'm done.
Yes, sir.
Please.
I want to thank the women who had to put up with us all these years.
The ex-wives, ex-wife after ex-wife.
I also want to thank the crew for allowing me to have the promotion to honor a chief petty officer.
I tried to get out.
I didn't even really want it, but our president said, you will accept this.
And I just want to thank them all because it's the most precious honorary chief promotion that anyone could ever get because I got it from the most honorable, greatest heroes this country has ever known.
Amen.
Thank you, sir.
Bob Phil, were you there for the big patch up, the cleaning up the ship, removing evidence of the slaughter and the long ride home?
Well, yeah, I was there, but not in the capacity of Bob and Ron.
We weren't allowed to go into the secret spaces, so it was they wanted their own men to clean it up.
And God bullying was a lot of spirit and determination.
They all did it.
A horror I can't believe, but they did it.
And it's just amazing that, well, it's really not amazing.
It's just the gut and the grit of the human spirit, especially the American human spirit, can make you do unbelievable things.
And that's what these brave men did.
God bless them, each and every one of them.
I just wanted to say, I was.
Go ahead, Mickey.
Bill, you were just as good as these guys were, too.
You saw a lot of them, too.
So don't pat it down that you didn't do much.
Okay?
You saw horror.
You saw horror that I can't imagine.
I appreciate that vote of confidence, Mickey.
But we all have our.
I just, you know, I really appreciate that.
We all have our thing here, and that's the truth.
And you brought this shit back, didn't you, Mick?
Didn't you, Phil?
Yeah, I brought her back.
That's what I thought.
Yeah, yeah.
It was like a ghost ship.
Yeah, it was.
And they asked me, hey, do you want to fly home?
Lieutenant Golden said, I said, no, sir.
We brought her here.
We passed her here, and I want to take her home.
True sailors.
Unfortunately, they took her back, patched up, and looked like a brand new ship.
But it was a very interesting experience.
Very interesting.
I cleaned up.
I worked down in the torpedoed spaces for several weeks.
I can't remember exactly how long it was.
And when it was where they felt it was done enough, they sent a lot of the CTs were just shipped out.
I was sent back to Norfolk and literally told to shut up.
And I got orders for Bremerhof in Germany and then went there for the next two and a half years.
They scattered you guys to the winds.
They scattered us all over the world.
Scattered us all over the world and told us to shut up.
All right.
Let's dig into what is unquestionably the cover-up.
You already got an omen of what was brewing if you didn't know the full score of what was at play or the full scope of it by the interaction with the admirals, the weird treatment in Malta, the sort of unglorious return home where there were just family members and no official welcome to the captain McGonagall being, I believe, one of the only Medal of Honor recipients to not be given it by the president.
They did it in a separate ceremony.
So this is all over.
And then the inquiry.
This is key.
For such a momentous attack against a U.S. naval ship unprovoked amidst a Middle East conflict, they gave him, what, a week, two weeks to do the official naval inquiry.
Real rush job.
I think it was, was it 30 days, Phil?
Well, no, it was completed in seven days.
Oh, my God.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, did they ever ask any of the crew?
They interfered, but we were incognito in the report.
Yeah.
Yeah, there's something in there that it said this was the first time where the eyewitness testimonies of enlisted servicemen was not taken into account for the official report.
That's right.
Incredible.
That's a famous quote from Doc Kiefer.
They would take on faith the account of the Israeli government and basically leave us flat out of it because we didn't know anything.
We're too stupid.
That's basically what it was.
I forget who it was, but one of your shipmates or one of the investigators said that Captain McGonagall on his deathbed confessed to either being bribed to change the records or compelled to change the records to reflect different facts than what occurred.
Admiral McCain, John McCain, the presidential candidate senator from Arizona, his father features prominently in this, which goes up the chain to the need to know men who would have been in on what is truly the most dangerous, aside from the outrage of a U.S. naval ship literally being sacrificed to the Israelis for geopolitical purposes.
But let's just go for it here.
I mean, the documentary, especially in the last fourth part, goes there.
It names Lyndon Baines Johnson, Robert McNamara, SecDef, certainly some of the high-ranking Navy leadership, including meetings with the Israeli ambassador, the Israeli military leadership before the Six-Day War to set this thing in motion.
And an extraordinarily pro-Israeli CIA officer named Eagleton, I believe, John Jesus Eagleton.
I have it here somewhere.
There's a whole lot of smoking guns.
Now, of course, we do not have the memorandum from LBJ saying execute plan, destroy liberty, but there's a ton of circumstantial and literal evidence that that was the ultimate plan.
Move these sitting ducks, these sacrificial lambs into position, have the Israelis attack them undercover, sink them so that there were no survivors to say a different story.
Blame it on the Egyptians, all for the purpose of bringing the United States into this Middle East war between Israel, Egypt, and to a lesser extent, Jordan and Syria to give the Israelis the upper hand and possibly nuke Cairo, which was a Soviet ally, thereby risking World War III.
I realize that I'm saying it instead of you guys.
I apologize.
It wasn't a possibility.
It was a reality.
We sink World War III starts.
That's what they planned.
Listen, they're going to destroy the Temple Mount.
That's already been verified by a Russian submarine captain.
I'm back.
I'm back.
They didn't kill me.
Sorry.
Have at it.
Sorry, guys.
I was just apologizing for putting words in your mouth, but I'm so spitting mad about this.
I hope that summary was good enough.
Have at it.
Chew on that stuff.
Lay it on.
It's the nukes, Cairo.
And yes, I'm still here.
Isn't that funny that my Skype went out?
Yeah, it's crazy.
But, you know, hey, listen, crazy things happen to crazy people.
But, you know, here we are talking about 54 years ago in a cover-up that has lasted so long and it's so provable on the other side that it was a mistaken identity.
The heck with the survivors telling their story, what do they know?
They know nothing.
But the official story is it was a mistaken identity.
Our government accepted that.
Case closed.
It's been that way forever.
Case closed.
But we're going to open the door to the vault that Geraldo Rivera couldn't get into.
The truth.
Our younger audience members will have no idea what you're talking about there, Phil, but we know.
There you go.
Look at Rolo.
What a fine young lad.
He knows his history.
Yeah, sacrifice for the special relationship with Israel.
And the nukes thing just blew my mind that they had nuclear, probably tactical nuclear weapons on fighters that were headed toward Cairo.
And apparently they turned back.
They got cold feet or had second thoughts, as they say.
We didn't sink.
Yeah.
They got caught.
What they should have done, the Israelis said, nice, we'd have come after us then.
We were sitting ducks that dipped.
You know what I mean?
They had us.
Nobody was going to come help us.
And we didn't sink.
That's what, you know, the Israeli Navy just world famous for prowess at sea.
And the thought occurs that by you guys surviving, you glorious guys, I keep on.
I'll just say, you glorious bastards.
Who knows?
Maybe you averted World War III, gentlemen.
Maybe by you refusing to go down for the liberty to stay up, that that didn't happen.
It's possible.
It's not beyond the realm of the possible.
Incredible.
It was possible.
We're here talking about it.
So there's a reason for it.
This isn't off topic.
Look at our country today.
How about it?
And it is, I'm so very sad for all the lives that have been affected with people that think they're smarter than us, telling us what to do.
And they do the complete opposite.
Now, the same thing with USS Liberty.
We love our country.
Hey, we went willingly to serve and die if we had to, but not at the hands or the direction of the United States government having their paid assassins kill us all and blame it on somebody else.
Wow.
Blame it on somebody else.
Whoever thought of that one?
How the hell are you still patriotic after all this?
After all you've been through?
It boggles my mind.
You know, and quick commentary, and I'll turn it back to you gentlemen.
We can kick this around for a little bit.
I'm a millennial.
You know, I'm 40 years old, so I'm an old millennial.
But you guys grew up, you're baby boomers.
You grew up largely in the 50s.
You saw a different America that we never saw.
It was 90% white.
The culture was not so coarsened.
Violence was not so bad.
There was more faith in the system.
Even in 1967, Skull Duggery almost sent you to a watery grave, and you didn't get treated particularly well after that.
And yet you re-enlisted.
And yet, Phil still puts American flag emojis in his texts.
And you're not at the rampart saying, you know, this is the new evil empire.
Personally, it boggles the mind.
But go ahead, gentlemen.
This is your chance to defend your worldview after all you've been through.
I'll take a shot at that.
Benz, I'm old enough to remember my uncles coming back to World War II.
I remember the camaraderie, the closeness, the love that Americans had for one another back then.
And believe me, gentlemen, I felt very protected because my uncles, and I know your relation was in that probably World War II, also, that they were there to protect you.
It gave me a feeling of security.
I saw that as I grew up.
I saw it in the American Legion.
I saw it in the VSW clubs.
I saw it in the DAV clubs.
The camaraderie, the closeness that there was with the American people.
That's been shattered, man.
It's been shattered.
You can see the fragments out on the streets, even today.
I got a letter from the commander of the FW Club right here in Sheridan, Wyoming.
This commander is distraught.
They said, we're falling to pieces.
Nobody attends the meetings anymore.
Nobody seems to care.
And she wanted to know if I had an answer.
I don't have an answer, but I do know this.
This country was very close.
They were all close back then.
We should have seen these men when they got together in these clubs and stuff like that.
It was great.
It's been shattered.
It's in peace.
And one of the other things that LBJ did was sign the 1965 Immigration Act, which essentially opened our borders to the world and turned what was once an overwhelmingly cohesive, largely European English-speaking country into a, you know, it goes back to Teddy Roosevelt warning about a multicultural, multilingual flophouse, right?
And we're seeing the evidence of that.
But Phil has spoken about his patriotism, Bob, and I mean, Mickey, you re-enlisted.
You know, what's your thought process and your opinion on still staying true to the American ideals, even if it's not 1967 anymore, yeah?
Yeah, it's pretty simple.
After it happened, after the attack happened, then I learned, started to learn the truth.
It's just, in my simple mind, it's simple.
I care about your family.
I care about my family.
I still care about the families of this country.
So you have to stand.
You have to.
You can't walk away from it.
If you want to preserve this country for your children and their children, for posterity, you just can't.
Of course, I was taught that in the United States Navy going through boot camp.
You know the truth, you don't back down.
It's just the way it is.
And maybe someday, maybe not during our lifetime, but in my lifetime, especially, they can look back and say it was all worth it.
I wish I could be here to see that, but I'm not sure I will.
Abraham never got to see the promised land.
So that could happen with us guys.
Thank you, Rob.
Yeah, I'm not sure I'll ever get to live it either.
But yeah, when I look in the eyes of my kids, that's why we fight.
Phil, Rob, thank you.
I want to just want to add that I was raised in a mixed neighborhood in Cincinnati, and there were no issues, no problems.
We were all kids.
We played together.
We ran around together.
And I'm in the same way when you serve in the military.
You're with all people of different races, different parts of our country, and with different attitudes.
I serve with the disabled American veterans here in Columbus, GA.
And we're all different.
We come from all parts of the country, but we're, you know, people who got out of the army here, which is the majority of the people in our DAV chapter here.
They're from all over the country and some from all over the world.
Their parents were in the military and they lived in Germany or somewhere else.
But they're all like a family.
So we all have our, we all see what's going on in the country right now.
Some don't want to talk about it.
Some won't.
And we don't talk about it with each other very much, but it's too much politics and things going on that we don't want to share with each other.
Nobody wants to start arguments over politics.
You guys got a lot on your plate already trying to get your singular mission out there.
Fair enough.
Plenty, plenty.
So anyway, so I hate to see what's going on in the rest of the country.
Open borders and craziness that's going on.
Looney tens.
Come on, Phil.
Give us the red meat.
Let one rip.
Well, I think Nikki wanted to jump.
Yeah.
Yeah, I'm going to have this red thing.
Go ahead, I know you want to say something.
Go ahead, my friend.
Please.
Oh, go ahead.
Go ahead.
Okay.
The reason I use the symbol of the American flag is many reasons.
And I guess your question, the red meat is this.
I look at our forefathers that founded this country and who gave me the great privilege of becoming an American.
Amen.
That, to me, is sacrificed.
Now, with that being said, down through the years, all that sanctimonious stuff is being trashed and it's almost gone now.
Our Constitution is being traveled on.
I mean, hell, you can get an airplane with an arrest warrant right now and fly all over the country.
And you're a foreign agent or a foreign national or you could be a rapist.
You could be anything.
That's where our country's gone.
The values that we had are deteriorating and nothing person, but the woke community is part of that.
Of course.
Yeah, they're the foot soldiers from making it happen from orders on high.
How about it, Mickey?
Well, I was just going to say, you know, what I believed in when I joined the Navy and almost died for, that's why I'm still patriotic because I want this country to be what I thought it was at that time.
You know, and basically, the Constitution is written in very plain English.
Don't read between the lines, don't do nothing.
Just read the line and follow the line.
That's it.
So, what would you guys want from the audience?
I know you're not issuing demands.
You have a mission to get the truth out.
I suspect you want a more thorough investigation, a true formal report that is not, you know, stuff swept under the rug and whatnot.
And then there might, you know, have a conversation with the audience.
Tell the audience what you want.
You want them to come out?
You want them to buy stuff.
You want them to talk to everybody.
How about it?
A little call to action here for the people who've been enjoying this compelling story for the last hour and a half or so.
I would say this.
What's the reason that people seem to get so upset when they hear this story?
I've thought about it for years and years and years until about two weeks ago on a Sunday, Pastor Chuck Baldwin of Liberty Fellowship put out a sermon that finally opened my eyes up after all these years.
And now I understand why people look at you so strangely when you tell this story.
It's because of what they've been taught in the church.
A lot of it is.
And some of these pastors are taking a backwards look and say, we've been wrong.
Liberty Fellowship is taking the lead in that out of Kalispell, Montana.
They do have a website.
They're there every Sunday at 2:30 Mountain Time.
And the truth comes from that pulpit.
Matter of fact, that pulpit's so hot, I could hardly touch it when I was there.
Yeah, well, Phil knows what I'm talking about.
So's Bob.
Well, so does Nikki.
Everybody knows what it's about.
Liberty Fellowship in Kalispell, Montana.
All right, I'll put that.
I'll look that up.
Yep.
Okay.
Yeah, I hope you do.
And if you like to hear the truth comes from the pulpit, it comes from right there.
Tell you what, guys, I don't know how much longer I'm going to last.
We'll bring this ship into dry dock here very shortly, Ron.
Sorry.
Just into port.
All right.
Yeah.
Into port.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Straight into, yeah, we're going to go.
Yeah, see, that's what you get from a, I'm worse than a greenhorn.
I'm a greenhorn polywog, no-nothing.
There you go.
So you know, if you know what a polywog is, you must know what a shellback is.
I should have.
Go ahead, guys.
All right.
Yeah.
You know, final thoughts, final statements, and then we'll wrap this thing up.
It's been a true honor and a delight.
How about it?
I think if people could talk to other people about the Liberty, get it out to as many people as possible.
To me, that's our goal is so that the American people, no matter what the government says in the end, if the American people realize that it was murder, deliberate, cold-blooded murder, then I think I'd be happy.
I don't think we'll ever get the government.
When you have a corrupt president like Johnson was, that wanted 294 Americans dead, it's never going to come out.
But if the American people can accept it, then I'll be satisfied.
I didn't go to my grave happy, because at least the right people are interested in what really happened that day.
Well said.
You're right.
You're right, Mickey.
Well, our shipmate, Joe Matters, has a program on the USS Liberty blog.
And all he's asking people to do is to write to the representative and ask for a copy of the congressional investigation.
A good troll, as we call it.
Go ahead.
Yeah.
Well, we've never found one yet.
I got a letter back from my own representative, and he said that his people, his staff went through and he said there is no record of one.
So we're hoping that we can come across a congressman or a senator that seems to know where this congressional investigation record is because it just doesn't seem to be there.
And if I could get people to do one thing, it would be write your representative, make a request to see a copy of the congressional investigation.
And if they find one, I'd sure like to see it.
It'd be great.
And so would Joe Meadows.
I'm sure he would.
It's a great program on U.S. Liberty blog.
It's easily found.
Google.
Thank you, sir.
You're right, Ron.
And it's interesting, too, that there have been responses back from representatives that say there's been 10 investigations.
The records show there's been 10 investigations into the attack on the USS Liberty.
Of course, none of them were congressional investigations, and the rest of it is baloney.
That's right.
Absolutely.
I've forgotten about that, Bob.
Yeah, they're always saying that the only investigations are really investigations that went no and said nothing.
Yeah, well, let me say this, gents.
And I love spending time with you.
And I just, you know, it means a lot to me to see great men like you stand up for the right things.
But I'll disagree with about Congress.
You can write them, you can call them, you can kiss their ass, you can do anything you want.
If they haven't answers in 54 years, and to write your congressman now and ask for a paper on an investigation, what do you think's going to happen?
Nothing.
Congress is a waste of time.
We don't have enough cash.
Yeah, no kidding.
No, it's just the very thought of them addressing the USS Liberty shakes them because it shakes their bank account.
It's just the way it is.
So the third rail rail, two dangers.
Yeah.
The only one we're going to shake them is us, the survivors.
We'll shake them and we'll shake them real hard because we can prove it.
And they can't.
So they're a bunch of cowards and liars and cheats.
And I could go on, but I'm not.
But I think you get my drift.
That was some red meat, Phil.
I appreciate it.
Yeah.
I mean, it would really take a sincere and brave and unbought president to appoint a special committee, investigative committee, to get to the bottom of it.
They do things All the time.
And there's no reason.
Certainly justified after everything you've been through, the treachery, the perfidy, the tiptoeing up to World War III, and the fact that they got away with it more or less.
If you know about it, they didn't get away with it.
It's we the people.
We the people.
We'll do it.
The people can do it.
Congress won't.
We'll do it.
That's right.
We always say on this show, gents, that if you know that something's wrong, you smell that there's something rotten in the state of Denmark, the very absolute least you can do is to stand up and speak out about it and not keep your mouth shut,
sit on your hands to save your own bacon, to save your own reputation in a fake polite society and be afraid of offending the wrong, extraordinarily powerful, vicious people driving an agenda that is extraordinarily effective and damaging to what's left of this country.
And it's happening around the world too.
To all of our Full House listeners, I'm all smiles and could not be happier and more honored to have these gentlemen on with us, except for Rolo.
Sorry.
I'm sorry.
I had to do it.
Rolo, my friend, thank you so much.
Rolo is under the weather.
He's there at the control panel.
Without him, the show would not have happened.
Thank you, brother.
Thanks, Rolo.
Thank you.
We're going to see Rolo out at a survivors meeting one of these days soon.
Full House episode 116 started on January 27th.
It's now January 28th.
We're so grateful these men stuck with us for the whole show.
And to all of our audience out there, please check the show notes by Sacrificing Liberty.
Buy the books.
You can join the Survivors Association too and speak up, get angry righteously, and we will try to write this ship.
To take us out this week, I'm going to put myself in the DJ booth.
And I did go through that hits of 1967 when these guys were sailing the med under fire.
And I think I'm going to go with, it's so tough.
I'm going to go with somebody to love by Jefferson Airplane because the opening lyrics are really relevant here.
All right.
Hail the Liberty.
Hail Rolo.
Hail you, audience.
Get involved with USS Liberty.
There's no better cause in the cause of truth.
We'll talk to you next week.
Thank you.
God bless everybody.
Our pleasure, gents.
Good night, everybody.
Thank you very much.
Good night.
All right.
mine, your mind is so furrend.
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Don't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love Your eyes, I say, your eyes may look like tears.
Ever in your head, baby, I'm afraid you're gonna wear it.
Don't you want somebody to love?
Don't you need somebody to love?
Wouldn't you love somebody to love?
You better find somebody to love.
Tears are running running along and undergress.
And your friends think they treat you like a guest.