Ask A Vet Podcast

A lieutenant was yelling in his face about his jungle boots, and Alex Pelensky just laughed: what are you going to do, send me to Vietnam? He'd just gotten back. That was Myrtle Beach Air Force Base, 1970.Alex joined the Air Force in 1968 to stay ahead of the draft, trained in electronics at Chanute AFB and spent a year at Tuy Hoa Air Base on the coast of the South China Sea, keeping the autop...

It was about 10:30 in the morning on July 29, 1967. Joe Duarte was underneath an F-4 Phantom on the flight deck of USS Forrestal, hooking up the air start for the second launch of the day, when the first explosion went off. A volunteer firefighter back home, he jumped into the catwalk and started handing out fire hoses. Then two more bombs exploded, and he knew he couldn't stay. Joe grew up in...

Seven grenades with the pins pulled. A Marine he'd never met shaking beside him in the hole. Forty minutes of fire, a lull, then forty more. Then the word came down the line: "Fix bayonets." Amadeo Robert "Stef" Stefanelli grew up in South Brooklyn in a family of Marines. He enlisted at 17, started boot camp at Parris Island in April 1966, and survived a plane that nearly w...

Thanksgiving Day, 1967. Lieutenant Douglas Greenlaw's platoon was supposed to land, pop green smoke, and mark a safe zone for the rest of the company. Instead, the helicopters set them down a thousand yards too far, at the edge of a North Vietnamese battalion. Forty-five Americans against roughly four hundred. They fought for five hours. Doug grew up in a steel-mill family on Lake Michigan, su...

On October 23, 1983, at 6:22 in the morning, a truck bomb destroyed the Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Marine Scout Sniper Frank Roberts was 400 yards away, sleeping in the dirt near Charlie Company. The blast threw him into a wall. When he came to, the four-story building was gone. Frank was 20 years old. He had come up through amphibious recon school and Scout Sniper School, where he learne...

This episode is a little different. Amy Rodman Little isn't a veteran, but the daughter of one who never came home. Army Captain David "Dave" Rodman was an artillery officer, former Big 33 football star, and devoted husband and father. He was killed in Vietnam on May 8, 1968, while helping pull wounded soldiers onto a rescue helicopter. Amy was four years old. For most of her life, D...

When Saigon fell in 1975, retired Air Force Senior Master Sergeant Scotty Acton was stationed on Guam — and watched over 50,000 Vietnamese refugees pour onto an island 8 miles wide. In this episode, Scotty takes us through 22 years in Air Force logistics: keeping fighter jets flying with "mission capable" parts, riding out a Category 5 typhoon with no water for 13 days, midnight runs acr...

Larry grew up in and out of foster homes across the West and landed in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury during the Summer of Love — homeless, drifting, and certain he was headed nowhere good. He enlisted in the Army looking for structure. He got Vietnam instead. Assigned as a radio operator (RTO) with the 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry, S2 Intelligence, Larry humped a 20-pound PRC-25 through the ju...

Morgan Lerette joined the Air National Guard in 1999 for one reason: his grandfather told him the Air Force had the best food. Two years later, September 11th changed everything. Morgan deployed to Oman, Jordan, Kuwait, and Iraq during the ground offensive — then walked away from active duty and into one of the most controversial jobs in modern warfare: private military contractor for Blackwater....

He served on Cold War fast-attack submarines, surfaced through Arctic ice, and spent up to 85 days underwater breathing recycled air — all without his family knowing if he was alive. Retired Navy Commander Henry Rausch joins the show to talk about his time as a submarine officer, the true story behind his bestselling memoir Submerged, and why the submarine force may be America's most important — a...

Herman "Butch" Peace enlisted in the Army at 19 and became a Huey pilot in Vietnam — flying troop insertions, taking fire, and watching men he served with die, all before he could legally rent a car back home. At 77, he finally put that year into words in his memoir, One Year: Or the Rest of Your Life. In this episode, Butch walks us through flight school, his first solo flight, arriving in-countr...

Roderick "Roger" Pugh grew up hunting and fishing in rural Alabama — and ended up living through 9/11 in basic training, the initial invasion of Iraq, an IED explosion that nearly killed him, and a front-row seat to the execution of Saddam Hussein. Along the way, he became — by his own research — the first African American sniper in the Iraq campaign and U.S. Army history. In this episod...

From civil engineer to Cold War nuclear weapons officer to Vietnam advisor — Bob Echols' journey through the Army is anything but a straight line. In this episode of Ask A Vet, Bob shares what it was like growing up as the son of a WWII transport pilot who rarely spoke about the war, getting turned away from West Point over his eyesight, standing guard over atomic demolition munitions in Cold...

For three years, Michael Reeder treated the wounded of the Vietnam War without ever setting foot in Vietnam. Drafted in 1966 and trained as a combat medic, Michael expected to deploy in-country. Instead, because his younger brother was already serving in Vietnam, the Army sent him to the 106th General Hospital at Kishine Barracks in Japan — one of the primary evacuation hospitals for the most seve...

From a small farm town in Georgia to the cockpit of a C-7 Caribou over Vietnam, to eleven years flying B-52 Stratofortresses at the height of the Cold War — Buddy Herrington's story is one of the most remarkable we've covered on Ask A Vet. In this episode, Buddy walks us through four years at the Air Force Academy, two tours in Vietnam, a career that touched Guam, the Pentagon, and Space C...

Joe Priester never planned on the Army. He joined the Air Force at 18, spent six years flying on AWACS radar planes, and watched 9/11 unfold from a locked-down base — and walked out of that day determined to become a pilot. Twenty-four days after leaving the Air Force, he was back in basic training, this time headed for Army flight school. In this episode, Joe walks us through flying the OH-58D Ki...

He gave up two businesses and a comfortable life at 32 years old to become a Green Beret — then spent six months in the Congo hunting one of the world's most wanted warlords, Joseph Kony. In this episode, Josh Nacey takes us from a small painting company in Rock Springs, Wyoming, through Special Forces selection, the Q Course, and multiple deployments — including a split-team operation in the...

Robert Williams grew up in Colville, Utah, and followed three generations of his family into the military: commissioning through Army ROTC at the University of Utah before serving as an artillery officer in Vietnam. In this episode of Ask A Vet, Robert takes us from basic training at Fort Lewis through his time as a battery commander on a remote firebase in the Vietnamese highlands — the boredom,...

Larry Winters served as a Marine helicopter mechanic and door gunner in Vietnam, stationed at Phu Bai and Marble Mountain outside Da Nang in 1969. He grew up in a house with no electricity or running water in upstate New York, ran away from an abusive father at 16, and joined the Marines at 19 trying to "become a man." What he found in boot camp and Vietnam set him on a 56-year journey t...

Stephen Davy was drafted out of a Toys R Us toy gun department in 1967, joined the Air Force to avoid the Army, and ended up loading napalm, two-thousand-pound bombs, and 2.75 rockets at the Pleiku Air Base bomb dump in the Central Highlands of Vietnam. But the part of his story you've never heard is what happened on the weekends: Stephen and his buddy Tom Glenn formed a rock band that played Camp...

Gary Howard grew up in Atlanta and joined the Navy in 1968 to stay one step ahead of the draft. A few months later he landed at Tan Son Nhut on the night of Tet '69 – the whole countryside on fire, Intel telling everyone this year would be worse than last. It wasn't. What followed was a year as a Naval advisor with the Vietnamese Marines in the Mekong Delta: helicopter landings, MEDCAPs in remote...

In 1963, a kid from Las Vegas with no money and a father enlisted in the Air Force earned appointments to all three service academies. A retired Army colonel teaching high school math gave him one piece of advice: "if you want choices, go to Annapolis" and it set Tim Martin on a path into the most secretive community in the U.S. military: the Silent Service. In Episode 46 of Ask A Vet, T...

In Episode 45 of Ask A Vet, we sit down with Aaron Hinds, a Georgia kid who turned down a Navy SEAL contract and a nuclear program to do the one thing he'd wanted since he was fourteen: be an infantryman. Aaron takes us from Sand Hill at Fort Benning to the 10th Mountain Division at Fort Drum, through brutal pre-deployment "tryouts" where only two dozen men made the cut, and into Afg...

Stephan Wolfert enlisted as a medic in 1986, became an infantry officer, trained for elite special operations, and was on a fast track to a full military career…until two devastating losses in the same year broke something in him. A chance encounter with Shakespeare's Richard III in a small Montana theater changed the course of his life forever. Today, Stephan is a licensed psychotherapist, Sh...

In EP 43 of Ask a Vet, Ron Holdaway shares a remarkable journey from growing up in Wyoming to serving as a senior Army lawyer involved in historic cases during Vietnam and beyond. Discover his perspectives on military justice, the Vietnam War, and the lessons learned from a lifetime of service. CHAPTERS: 01:00 - Growing up in Wyoming & becoming a lawyer 02:37 - ROTC, JAG Corps & early mili...