That. So its a long essay. Its pretty funny, actually. A lot of what happened is just hilarious and unplanned. Your whole life youre not just an author. You have some other things as well. Yes, i am a tv host and i host a show that airs every sunday morning. Parents of Young Children may know you from a different genre. Strangely enough i have had the joy of working for veggie tales as a writer. I wrote half of the hamlet all my parity and im the voice on the video. Also i wrote some books for veggie tales. I have written 30 Children Books over the years and other genre that i was expecting to skip that god had other plans. I love writing for children. Its one of the most fun things you can do. Some of my heroes have been childrens books writers. C. S. Lewis wrote childrens books and i really do enjoy it. My childrens books are usually also for adults. I hope theres a sophistication and a wit that some of the best childrens writing and mind aspires to have that so ive done a lot of childrens bookwriting and ive written something in manhattan called socrates in the city. Its a Speaker Series and i interviewed Malcolm Gladwell dick cavett chuck colson a lot of people you might have heard of or might not have heard of. Socrates in the city. Com. Thats a lot of fun. Anyone can, or anyone can see it on line. We have been talking with eric metaxas. His most recent book seven men and the secret of their greatness. Youre watching booktv on cspan2s. Next on booktv encore booknotes. Norman schwarzkopf appeared on booknotes in 1992 to talk about his auto leather free it doesnt take a hero. In the book general schwarzkopf discussed his military career and explained how the motto duty honor and country helped to mold him into an american leader. This is about an hour. Cspan general norman schwarzkopf, author of it doesnt take a hero, buried in your book is the following sentence almost every general in Desert Shield had fought in vietnam, and we all remembered feeling abandoned by our countrymen. You had two tours in vietnam. How much did that experience impact the rest of your career . Guest oh, it had probably more impact than any other experience i had in my entire military career. Many of the decisions that i made in desert storm and Desert Shield, many of the decisions that were made by subordinates, were a direct result of things that we had learned from our vietnam experience. Maybe not things that had gone well you know, you learn just as much by seeing things done wrong and sometimes more. You say, ill never do it that way, and then you do it differently. But it had an unbelievable impact. I came back from vietnam the second time and agonized over whether to stay in the military or not, and the only way i came to an answer to myself was, yes, i will stay but only under these circumstances and doing it this way. All that was directly as a result of vietnam, so it had a profound influence. Cspan you were there twice; once as an adviser to the south vietnamese in 1965 . Guest right, 196465. Cspan back then again in. . Guest in 1969 and 70. Cspan as a Battalion Commander. Guest yes. I spent five miserable months at the long binh headquarters and then from there seven months as a Battalion Commander. Cspan go back to your first trip there, 196465. How did you get there . Guest i was at west point. I was an instructor. I had been at the university of Southern California for two years, gotten a masters degree and obliged to come back to west point to teach for three years as payback for that masters degree. Id been there one year, saw some friends die over there, knew the war was going on and the war was building up. It was an infantrymans war, and i was an infantryman. I had a very guilty conscience about having the soft life at west point while other members of the military were going off to war, and so i volunteered to go. It just happened to be at a time when the department i was in was reorganizing and they could afford to let me go, so they said, you can go for a year and come back and serve your two more years after that. Thats how i got over there. I got there, went in as an adviser to the south vietnamese airborne, probably the finest military unit in the south vietnamese military many, many of whom had been members of the First Battalion of colonial parachutistes under the french back at dien bien phu, so people had been fighting that war for 20 years. An incredible experience. Cspan what was your rank . Guest i was a captain when i got there. I got promoted to major about a month and a half after id been there. Cspan the first time you got into battle . Guest i didnt know what was going on. Nothing youve ever had before or had been taught before really totally prepares you for it, and yet youre very well prepared for it. What happens is, all of a sudden theres somebody shooting at you and rounds are going over your head and your training takes over and you just continue doing your job, but it is chaotic. It has been described as long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and thats sort of what it was like the first time. I wasnt quite sure of what really was happening, but i had a job to do and i just kept on doing the job. Cspan how Many Americans were there when you first went in 65 . Guest im trying to remember. I want to say there was like 20, 25 or 30,000 or Something Like that. It was a very, very small number that were there when i first got there, but in that year there was a dramatic buildup. When i got there the only American Unit that was there was one brigade the 173rd Airborne Brigade was there. When i left there were four, five or six divisions that had come over the first cav, the big red one, the 25th infantry division, the 101st airborne was coming in so i was there during a year of tremendous buildup from 65 to 66, and by the time i left, there were hundreds of thousands of americans. The whole complexion of vietnam had changed; the whole complexion of saigon had changed at the time. When i got there saigon was still the pearl of the orient you know, sidewalk cafes, sleepy verandas, very laid back, sort of colonial, sort of humphrey bogartish, if you know what im talking about. Gee, by the time i left a year later, there were american troops in their uniforms staggering around in the streets and that sort of thing. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge at the time even wrote a memorandum complaining about the dodge city atmosphere that had taken over in saigon, which i think pretty well summed it up. Cspan you write in your book about the most heroic act ive ever seen, and youll have to help me with the pronunciations it was lt. Earl s. Van eiwegian why did he perform the most heroic act youve ever seen . Guest i dont know, and i have never ever talked to van eiwegian about that after it happened. Cspan what did he do . Guest well, we were surrounded at du cho. We had gone into du cho to supposedly relieve a special forces camp, right on the cambodian border, from a couple of local vc battalions. It turns out there were two regiments of North Vietnamese regulars that were coming across the cambodian border right at that point. We ran smack dab into them, and the next thing we knew we were surrounded. We spent many, many days surrounded there, but we had a whole bunch of men that had been wounded in, frankly, our retreat into the special forces camp, who were going to die if they didnt get out of there. Yet the environment was such that any helicopter or any airplane that flew out there got such heavy fire from the ground that they just refused to come out. I mean, they just wouldnt. There was a high ridge between us and pleiku. There was an air base there, and as the story was told to me, van eiwegian was sitting in a bar, and people were talking about how rough it was out there at du cho, and the pilots were saying, oh, i wouldnt fly out there, and everything else, and van eiwegian said, i will. I didnt come out here to sit in this bar. I came out here to help. He went out there, got his aircraft a c130 aircraft and came flying in. I can remember, we knew he was coming in, and so we had the wounded out there and we were ready to run them out onto the airstrip when the plane came in he had to fly over a ridge out there in the distance, and as he flew over the ridge these green tracers just came up from the ground from every direction. Everything in the world was shooting at this guy. He just flew right through it, came in and landed on the runway. When he landed on the runway, they started mortaring the runway. Mortar shells were going off all around us. More people were getting wounded. He just sat there, cool as a cucumber, at the controls of the airplane. It was dripping hydraulic fluid i can still see the red hydraulic fluid just running out of the airplane on all sides, and this fellow sat there, lowered the ramp on his aircraft c130. We ran the wounded in, the other people were getting wounded at the time, and he just sat there at the controls waiting until we gave him the high sign. Once we had all the people loaded, he lifted up the ramp and took off. He had to fly across the same ridge on the way out, and the same thing happened the sky filled with tracers, he flew right through it. Then he could have taken the shortest possible route and gone to pleiku, but our base was in saigon and there were much better hospitals in saigon, so he takes this plane thats dripping hydraulic fluid and everything else, and turns around and flies south to saigon and lands. I never met the man, but ive always admired him and this is my chance to hopefully immortalize him a little bit. Cspan was he moving south vietnamese out . Guest yes, these were south vietnamese airborne. There was not a single u. S. Wounded on that airplane. This was south vietnamese troops that were wounded that he came in there to save. Cspan i know you went there twice, and this may have been on your second visit, but you talk about how you heard people refer to the south vietnamese as gooks and it irritated you. Guest sure it did. Cspan why . Guest well, thats a pejorative term. Its a term of prejudice. Its a term that tends to paint everybody with the same negative brush. Ive got to tell you that the south vietnamese that i served with on that first tour were not corrupt; they were not cowards. They were very brave, very heroic patriots. Many of them were citizens of North Vietnam who had been run south because they were catholic i mean, literally run out of their homes because they were catholic and they were fighting for their country, they were fighting for their freedom, they were fighting for freedom of their homeland all those things that supposedly we americans believe in. Thats what they were fighting for. It wasnt to support a corrupt regime in saigon that they were fighting. Thats not what these people were there for. They were genuine patriots and i had Great Respect and admiration for them, so i didnt like it when other americans who didnt even know what they were talking about for the most part, who didnt know many south vietnamese or knew one or two, all of a sudden talked in those terms about them because, frankly, i was one of them at the time. I was as much a part of the vietnamese Airborne Unit as any other south vietnamese was in that organization. Cspan col. Trung . Guest yes. Amazing man. Absolutely one of the best combat leaders i have ever seen anywhere and certainly the most intuitive ive ever seen. He was almost idolized by the people in the vietnamese airborne. He was the chief of staff, a colonel at that time, but he was a guy that every time there was a tough nut to crack they would pull him out of his staff job and send him off as a Task Force Commander with a number of troops aggregated under him, and trung always took me along as his task force adviser. Ill never know why he did that, but it was a relationship that worked, and i learned a great deal at col. Trungs side. Cspan have you ever seen him since then . Guest no, i have not. He went on to be a fourstar general. As a matter of fact, he commanded the fourth corps, which was the mekong delta area of vietnam, when vietnam fell, and the american Senior Adviser who was there at that time brought trung out with him and trung is living in the United States someplace today. Cspan you were wounded that first trip . Guest wounded the first trip on valentines day. We called it jokingly after the fact its sort of a sick joke but we called it the st. Valentines day massacre because schwarzkopf got hit three different places. It was funny. The night before trung had said, boy, youve got it easy tomorrow, tieta, which is a term for major. Weve got it easy tomorrow. Were always used to walking, but tomorrow were going to have these armored personnel carriers, and were going to ride around in these armored personnel carriers and its going to be a piece of cake, he said laughingly. They drove up the armored personnel carriers, and they opened from the top. Theyre designed for american troops to stand in them with their heads sticking out about like this. Well, of course, you did that and all the south vietnamese heads couldnt see anything. So they piled ammo boxes all over the floor so the south vietnamese heads were all sticking out like this. That meant i was sticking out all the way up to here. I dont think ive ever felt more vulnerable in my entire life. There was a stronghold that had been identified. We went in and attacked it in force, and it was a stronghold and a tremendous fight broke out. I can remember there was a tree line. The stronghold village was up here, and then there was a long line of trees that came out this way. We were coming around through the rice paddies and turned and heading towards the village, and i looked at the time and i thought to myself, gee, i sure hope somebodys cleared that tree line. I said, has someone cleared that tree line over there . Yes, somebody has cleared that tree line. Well, we got up here, looking at that village, and all of a sudden somebody opened up on me right out of the tree line with an automatic weapon. It climbed right up the side of the armored personnel carrier, and i got hit with all the splatter. I got a huge fragment that hit me in the arm, i got hit in the face, i got hit around the cheek and everything like that. After the fact, we looked at this thing, and if that fellow had had one more click of elevation on his sight, he would have cut me right in half. Its things like that that cause you to become so fatalistic when youre in combat the recognition that here i was literally one click on his elevating device away from being dead, and yet because he didnt have that on, all i got was a lot of painful fragments in me but no deaththreatening wounds. Cspan another vietnam story i remember was the one when you had to throw yourself on top of a soldier. What was that . Guest that was my second tour over there when i was a Battalion Commander. We were in a terrible area called the batangan peninsula, just north of quang ngai up in icor, the first corps area. The batangan was an area that had been fought over the japanese had been in there, the french had been in there, the koreans that were over there with us had been in the batangan and it was just loaded with mines and booby traps from one end to the other; a very, very tough area. My lai 4 was in the middle of the batangan peninsula. The battalion had gone in there i had a commandandcontrol helicopter at my disposal at all times. We were a halfanhour away from the hospitals in chu lai. Any time we would take a casualty, wed call for medivac it took a half an hour for the medivac to fly down, load the person in; another half an hour to get them back, which meant it was an hour before they got medically treated. If i could do it, any time we had a casualty id get my helicopter in there right away, and that saved you half an hours flying time for him to get down there. On this one given day a company walked into a mine field. I had flown in with my helicopter to medivac the casualties out. My helicopter had flown off with the casualties, and then another kid stepped on a mine over to my right, right over there, and seriously broke his leg. He started flailing around and screaming, and i was worried about two things. Number one, he was going to panic the rest of the company and the rest of the company was going to run and, of course, thats the worst possible thing they could have done at that time because they would have been running on a mine field. Secondly, i was worried about the way he was flailing around. It was obviously a compound fracture, and i was afraid that he was going to cut an artery and kill himself. I told someone this once, and it really is true. One of the things i thought about was the sign on Harry Trumans desk that said the buck stops here. I really didnt have any choice in the matter. Somebody had to go over there and calm that kid down and i was the senior ranking man there and it was my responsibility. Besides that i wanted the company commander, who was standing next to me, to make sure he got the company under control get his leadership working, talk to them and get the company calmed down. So i went over to help this kid was that a heroic act . Hell, no i was scared to death. I honestly remember walking. Each step i would take id be checking the ground first, and id put my foot down and my knees you know, you hear about your knees shaking when youre frightened. Thats the only time in my life my knees have ever shaken, but man, they were shaking i had to grab my knee with both hands, it would shake so badly. Then id put the other foot down and i would grab like this and i got over to the kid. I was a pretty big guy then, as i am now, and i laid down on top of him. I literally pinned him and was talking to him, saying, come on, youve got to calm down now youre going to cut an artery. Youre going to kill yourself. Youre scaring the hell out of all the rest of the troops, and this sort of thing, and i got the kid calmed down. Then i saw id have to splint his leg, no matter what, some way, and i turned around and looked back and right back where wed come from, where the landing zone was that the helicopter had come in, there was a bush right there. I turned around to my artillery Liaison Officer who had come in with me, tom bratton, and i said, bratton, cut a limb. Theres a limb on that bush. Cut that limb off and throw