Any time in life that you do something, you tend to forget the bad and remember the good. I remembered the good. I wasn’t sure I wanted to remember the bad. For a long time, I talked to a bunch of my peers in the Special Forces community that had made the trip back to …
Sapa Valley, Northern Vietnam The final stop in Rich’s journey through Vietnam. Sapa is a frontier township along the Chinese border, home to the northern highlanders and hundreds of miles of trails. It’s the perfect place to field test MACV-1 prototypes. Sapa is considered the trekking capitol of Vietnam and we all know trekking is …
PART 1 – HOW TO GET STARTED & THE FUNDAMENTALS Let’s just say this and start here: rucking is simple to start. You can do it in your neighborhood with things you already have on hand, and it’s free. The military teaches the KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) approach and Leonardo da Vinci said simplicity …
Da Lat, Vietnam April, 2017 My “one night in Da Lat” was a pleasant reprieve from the war and normal combat operations that we had been conducting. I’d heard of the city, but never believed all of the stories I’d heard. Stories about the beautiful architecture, the green and lush gardens, cool weather, and about …
Dak Lak Montagnard Museum, Buon Ma Thuot April, 2017 When I attended Special Forces training at Fort Bragg, NC I learned that one of the primary tenants was something called Foreign Internal Defense (FID). What this was based on was learning how to work with people indigenous to the area we were operating in, helping …
As we made our way from Saigon to Buon Ma Thuot (or as I knew it, Ban Me Thuot) the low lying farm lands turned into gently rolling foothills covered with coffee fields being tended by local farmers living along the edges, just as the rubber plantations had been during my time before. Night …