Firefight in the Laotian Jungle: A Riveting Story from America's "Secret War"

Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Special Forces legend "Tilt" Meyer is back in a special two-part episode, sharing stories from his new book “On The Ground!”If you joined MACV-SOG–-the Studies and Observations Group—in the 1960s for America's "Secret War" in Laos and Cambodia, the first thing you did was sign an oath to never speak about what happened for 20 years. Now able to speak freely, Tilt shares the sheer adventure and reality of jungle combat. Each SOG team was named after a U.S. state, and they were comprised of both American and local Vietnamese soldiers. HBH is thrilled to have him back to describe the friendships, firefights, and fortitude of this remarkable fighting group. Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Retired CIA Operative and government whistleblower Gary Berntsen continues to share insights and details from the results of a four-year investigation into election tampering. His team’s conclusion: Enemies of the United States including Venezuela, Cuba, China and Serbia have been determining the results of elections in the U.S. since 2006 through the use of electronic systems that they have developed. Using these systems, they now manipulate the results of elections in 72 countries around the world.Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Retired CIA Operative and government whistleblower Gary Berntsen reveals the results of a four-year investigation into election tampering. His team’s conclusion: Enemies of the United States including Venezuela, Cuba, China and Serbia have been determining the results of elections in the U.S. since 2006 through the use of electronic systems that they have developed. Using these systems, they now manipulate the results of elections in 72 countries around the world.Gary Berntsen is arguably the most decorated CIA operations officer in modern times. He is the man who recruited and led the combined CIA-Special Forces teams that helped overthrow the Taliban after the attack of 9/11 and had Osama bin Laden and his Al-Qaeda fighters trapped in the Tora Bora mountains of Afghanistan. He also served as a CIA Station Chief in three counties; led the Hezbollah working group; investigated the East Africa embassy bombings in 1998; and stopped various terrorist attacks around the world. Gary and his team are now going public with a criminal investigation that will shock the world. The evidence they have assembled is described in a new book by Ralph Pezzullo titled "Stolen Elections: The Plot to Destroy Global Democracy" published by Skyhorse Publishing.Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

An Inspiring Reprise Episode From Season One:Human trafficking is a $150 billion-a-year business that thrives in war zones and is arguably more lucrative than arms sales. Lurata Lyon joins HBH and bravely tells her unimaginable story of survival during the Balkan Wars across Eastern Europe in the 1990s.Lurata was kidnapped into human trafficking as a teenager when the war engulfed her home country of Serbia. She was destined for a life of sex-trafficking and organ-harvesting. Miraculously, she escaped, only to find further horrors waiting for her in the same war zone.Lurata is a profoundly inspirational person. Beyond her heroism to survive, she continues to speak out for those who were not as fortunate.Cold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Mikael Cook served as a U.S. Army engineer in the reserves. He was sent to Afghanistan in 2019 helping to build out infrastructure for U.S. military camps, working with local translators and other workers. He befriended his Afghan co-workers, especially an interpreter, Muhammad, and his brother Abdul.Following the Trump administration’s decision in 2020 to withdraw from Afghanistan after nearly 20 years, it fell to the Biden administration to execute the withdrawal which they did very abruptly in August 2021, creating administrative and civil chaos and abandoning our allies and billions of dollars of U.S. military equipment. The scene at Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport were horrific with thousands of Afghans, who had worked for the U.S. and feared Taliban reprisals, desperate to escape. With no helping coming from the Biden administration, it fell to an ad hoc coalition of U.S. civilians and military members ­­– later dubbed “Digital Dunkirk’ – to help rescue as many Afghans as they could. On August 26, 2021, in the midst of the chaos at the airport, an ISIS-K terrorist suicide bomber detonated an explosive belt that killed 13 U.S. servicemen and over 169 Afghan civilians.Mikael Cook tells this tragic and dramatic story from various perspectives in his riveting book, “Life and Death at Abbey Gate: The Fall of Afghanistan and the Operation to Save Our Allies.”Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Former Florida police investigator James Byrd-Williams, Sr. recounts the story of his son's murder in 2020. 44-year-old Michael Williams was an African-American man living in the mostly White college town of Grinnell, Iowa, to be near his ex-wife and kids. Occurring just weeks after the George Floyd incident, Michael Williams’ body was found strangled and burned in a ditch outside of town. Three people were later convicted.J.B. expresses his frustration with the thoroughness of the investigation and the fact that officials and the NAACP—eager to avoid any media attention of the type recently seen in Minneapolis—denied it was a hate crime, and avoided the word 'lynching' in describing the homicide. UK newspaper The Guardian asked, “When is a lynching a lynching?”   Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Becky Ellis was one of her father’s eight children by four wives, and the chaos of her childhood, dominated by a haunted and difficult father, marked her and all her siblings. As a child, she suffered through her father’s paranoia about Nazis attacking them; trips to the dentist without anesthesia; and other irrational behaviors.Only at age 89, when Becky was a grown wife and mother, did her father Staff Sgt. Louis K. Boswell finally share his wartime recollections as part of the legendary ‘Timberwolves’ – the nickname for the 104th infantry division. The ‘Timberwolves’ were deployed in northwestern Europe and saw almost 200 straight days of brutal fighting through France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and western Germany, including participating in the Battle of the Bulge. The group saw an extreme level of casualties, and Becky’s father described how he survived and how it felt when he returned stateside, with what was then an undiagnosed case of severe PTSD.This compelling account is a glimpse inside military families who must welcome home a traumatized parent. Personally liberated by finally solving the mystery of her father, Becky shared her story in her book, “Little Avalanches,” and continues to work with military families coping with PTSD.Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Admiral Robert Stiles Harward, Jr. grew up in a Navy family, living overseas, and eventually joined up himself as a means to pay for college. Adm. Harward ultimately went on to an amazing career and leading the U.S. Navy Seals, and the Naval Special Warfare Group Task Force KBAR. He explains his amazingly positive view of the world and philosophy of team collaboration and information sharing, which he calls "The Gouge," with our host and in his book of the same name.Heroes Behind HeadlinesExecutive Producer Ralph PezzulloProduced & Engineered by Mike DawsonMusic provided by ExtremeMusic.comCold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify

Did you miss it? One of the most popular episodes we ever released from Season One is back for an encore listen:Russian and Chinese-backed rebels were making deadly headway in Oman during its Civil War of the early 1970s. In support of the Western-allied Sultan, the British Army secretly deployed nine operators from its most elite unit, the SAS. HBH is honored to have our guest, Pete Winner, with a special appearance by Sekonaia ‘Tak’ Takevisi, two of the nine SAS heroes who took on over 400 Omani rebels at the Battle of Mirbat.At stake on July 19th 1972 was more than just a single battle for a small town on the Gulf of Oman. Due to Mirbat’s geographic significance, had the SAS fallen the communist rebels would have taken hold of the region – and controlled the global shipping routs for Middle Eastern oil. Statues of individual soldiers are rare, but due to his heroism at the Battle of MIrbat, there are not one but two statues of Sergeant Talaiasi Labalaba. One unveiled in 2009 at the SAS headquarters in Herefordshire, and another in 2018 by Harry and Megan, Duke and Duchess of Sussex, in Fiji - which at the time of Labalaba’s enlistment was still a British colony.Pete Winner is the author of his bestselling memoir "SOLDIER, I," which he wrote with Michael Kennedy.Cold Case Western AustraliaThey're the crimes that continue to haunt grieving family members and the wider...Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify