Thursday September 17th, 1970

…exactly 50 years ago today.

As one of the six guys assigned to guard the Tactical Operations Center (TOC), I started to see that I might miss out on some key training. If I wanted to have a chance of getting selected for one of the Assault Force teams, I had to train when I was not pulling guard duty. Security was so tight that we didn’t know who we would be rescuing or in which part of the world it would be. There was a lot of speculation that it might be an attempt to free prisoners in Cuba based on the three-hour flying time of the mission.

I had been training and pulling guard duty for weeks when I got my chance to speak up. I was checking Colonel Bull Simons for access to the TOC building. While we were waiting for an escort to take the Bull in, he asked how things were going for me. I knew that he was only going to pick some of us for the actual mission, so I said, “Sir I didn’t volunteer to come here and pull guard duty. If I wanted to pull guard duty, I could have stayed at Fort Bragg.” Now the Bull always had a two-inch cigar that he chewed on. He looked me right in the eyes and said, “Young man, hang in there. Things are going to change pretty soon.”

After he went in the building, I thought to myself, “What in the hell did I just do? First I chewed out two Sergeant Majors back at Ft Bragg, trying to get on this mission. Now I just told a Colonel—and not just any Colonel, but Bull Simons—that I was tired of pulling guard duty. I just bitched to the Bull about pulling guard duty!?”

I thought, “Well I’ll probably end up pulling guard duty the rest of my time in the Army.”

Read Sgt Terry Buckler’s full story in Who Will Go.

Click Here:  The book.