An Honest Look: Col. John Folsom

Ken Harbaugh:

I’m Ken Harbaugh, host of Warriors In Their Own Words. In partnership with the Honor Project, we’ve brought this podcast back at a time when our nation needs these stories more than ever.

Warriors in Their Own Words is our attempt to present an unvarnished, unsanitized truth of what we have asked of those who defend this nation. Thank you for listening, and by doing so, honoring those who have served.

Today, we’ll hear from Colonel John Folsom. Folsom served in the Marine Corps from 1980 to 2010. He was trained as a CH-46 helicopter pilot and a Forward Air Controller, but never flew combat missions. Instead he did staff work at various levels of command. In this interview, Folsom gives an honest look into the lives of non-combat military personnel, and explains what he’s doing to help injured soldiers who have returned home.

Col. John Folsom:
Well, I was retired in 2010, October 1st, 2010, I was a colonel and my primary MOS as a lieutenant and captain, I was a CH-46 helicopter pilot. But as you can imagine, over the years, I've had plenty of assignments, none as a pilot. I was in the reserve component, and the opportunities to fly were very, very minimal. So, I was doing a lot of staff work at various levels of command.

My great uncle, for example, was in the Signal Corps back then. They were the pilots, and he became a pilot during World War I. He did not deploy to France but was a designated aviator, think about it, one of the first ones in our country.

My uncle, my dad's brother started out training at Pensacola just prior to World War II and eyesight failed and ended up not training. So, in a way, there's some DNA there for wanting to be a pilot. So, that's what I wanted to do.

My father was a naval officer. He was sent to Korea on an LST as an intern and his classmates, he was a midshipman at the University of New Mexico. And I'd heard about Marines, I'd heard about Marines from him, and I grew up during the Vietnam and I remember very distinctly that I would read the newspapers, and I would cut out articles about the exploits of Marines in Vietnam. This is like 1966, ‘67, ‘68, ‘69 and there's something about that. I thought it appealed to me. I can't explain at what level that was, but there was something there about the Marine Corps that intrigued me so that's the path I chose.

We were in Hong Kong. I was on the USS Tarawa, a part of Amphibious Ready Group and we were doing a port visit in Hong Kong and in Hong Kong, I saw this poster addressing the problems in Beirut. And I remember there's a woman on the poster, and she was crying, “And what are you going to do about Beirut?” And that struck me as something. And later on, I was back at the ship. I was first lieutenant, this is my first deployment, and I opined as I'm wanting to do, I opined that, I said something to the effect that I wouldn't be surprised if we got chopped to Beirut. And man, I caught all sorts of hell from the captains, and they go, “You don’t know what you're talking about. There's no way that we're going to go to Beirut. We're seventh fleet, we're out here in the Pacific, and that's the mad, you're crazy to talk that way, so knock it off.” I said, “Okay.”

This is in July of 1983. And so, we continued our deployment, ended up in Mombasa, Kenya to do an exercise. The command duty officer, the ship saw me and he said, “Hey, listen, you need to find the CO, the XO or the opposite, you got to find him but don't broadcast this. But we've got 12-hour steaming orders for Beirut.”

And I thought, “Holy shit.” So, we're going to go straight east across Indian Ocean make our way back to Hawaii and we could feel the ship, make a really, really hard turn to the left and everybody instinctively knew we were not heading home.

And the captain came on the one MC, which is the loudspeaker on the ship, and he said, “In case you haven't noticed we're heading north. We're going to the Suez Canal.” And the whole ship erupted in cheers, because you live for this. You go on a deployment; you want some excitement.

I remember very distinctly being at training at New River Marine Fire Station, New River training up at CH-46 as Beirut in 1982 was starting to get hot and the MEUs, in those days, the MAUs, the Marine Amphibious Units were going to support in Beirut. And I kind of envied, I really did envy those lieutenants and captains who were going to go do something like this, because it is exciting, and I envied them. And I guess I caught up with them in a manner of speaking. I caught up with them in September of 1983 and it was exciting. I mean, we were five miles off the beach going back and forth called mod loc, modified location. You go up and down five miles up, turn up five miles back, five miles up, five miles back and seeing the tracer rounds on the beach and Marines trading fire with whomever was pretty exciting, it is exciting.

And so, I really learned something about that. They were there for 30 days. We weren't there for very long. We left just prior to the first battalion, 8th Marine Barracks being bombed but it was something, it really was.

I'd had two of my classmates from the basic school and OCS were there Clyde and Bill Zimmerman. And I saw Bill Zimmerman just before he was killed. He was on our ship in the war room and we just kind of, “Hey, how you doing? What's going on? How are things on shore?” And it was one of these things that I don't tell people goodbye, I say, “See you later.” So, we said, “I'll see you around. I'll see you later. We'll talk about what happened.”

And it was a few days later, after that the truck bomb or car bomb detonated and wiped everybody out. We were saddened. I don't know that I felt anything other than a sense of loss for two of my classmates. I have visited their graves at Arlington, I have visited the memorial at Camp Lejeune that we know we came in peace. And so, yeah, I think that it's a dangerous profession, and it's a dangerous profession even at peace time. I've got friends of mine who were killed in peace time in aviation accidents, so it happens, and I don't know, it just happens.

When I came through as a junior officer, we still had Vietnam vets as battalion commanders and squadron commanders, and I learned from them how to fly and going into a zone, for example, again, I've never dropped Marines off in combat. I've never had that opportunity. So, everything I've done is in a training environment, but you got to train like you're going to fight.

And the one place that I do not want to be with a load of Marines is hovering off the ground 100 feet, 200 feet off the ground, trying to find a place to land and be very, very vulnerable to ground fire. So, we were taught, CO said, “Hey, you don't wait if when you're coming into a zone and your dash two or dash three, when you see somebody start to decel, that's the zone, you're not obligated to wait for him.”

Because if you think about it, it's got this daisy chain effect where, alright, so dash one, the leader, he's going to decelerate, he's getting ready to land, the dash two's behind him, he’s getting ready too, so you end up with this daisy chain of helicopters with the last guy could be 300 or 400 feet in the air waiting for dash one to land, waiting for dash two to land waiting for da … so forth.

And he said, “To hell with that.” He picks his nose up when he decelerates, you land, and though there are instances where I would land the helicopter before the leader landed, because I had my spot. I'm getting down, again, the last place I want to be is hovering 100 feet off the ground and taking ground fire. So, I would pick my spot, and I got the hell down onto the deck so I had a fighting chance to get the Marines off and not get blown out of the sky.

I was kind of a smart ass a little bit as a junior officer, and it was a temporary assignment to second marine aircraft wing at Cherry Point, North Carolina. There are no helicopters to speak of at Cherry Point, it's all attack aviation and C-130. So, I'm up there working for the commanding general of the second marine aircraft wing. I was at the officer's club, there's a major captain, I think it was a captain Eddy and he's a Harrier guy, or he's up there. I have my wings on, I'm a brand new designated marine aviator, and I have my wings on. He said, “What do you fly? I said, “I'll give you a hint.” I said, “I fly the aircraft that has the most lethal delivery system known to man.” “Oh, shit that’s my high-speed guy.” So, he goes through all these different aircraft platforms, and he said, “What? I've guessed this aircraft, I give F-4 Phantom, I've guessed F-18s, so what do you fly?” I fly CH-46s. He said, “Well, there's no lethal delivery system on a CH-46.” And I said, au contraire, we put marines in an LC, and that was it. There was no other discussion after that. I put Marines in an LC. If that's not more lethal than anything else you could name, then I don't know what is.

I volunteered to become a forward air controller. I mean, that whole thing fascinated me being a Ford Air controller. A lot of pilots would resist taking a forward air controller assignment, because that meant being out of the cockpit. And we did workups, a lot of workups. So, I was out of the cockpit several weeks at a time doing workups, getting ready to deploy. Those workups entailed working with F-4s and other attack platforms to get bombs on target.

I went to the school LFTC Pac, Landing Force Training Command Pacific and Coronado to go through this fat course. This is a three-week course, a lot of classroom work, a lot of theory, whatever else but we had the culmination of the course, which to go out to 29 palms and actually control, attack aircraft with live ordinance and have own our skills and making sure we were able to talk a pilot.

This is back in the old days, there was no GPS bombing, these are dumb bombs, what we call dumb bombs, no guidance system. You had to literally get a pilot to see the target and talk them into it. And so, I'm the junior officer, I'm the only lieutenant, everyone else is the captain and we go through this thing, and I get to the end of this exercise, and I have yet to control an aircraft. I have yet to control an aircraft.

And as it turned out I never got to control an aircraft. I graduated from FAC school without ever having talked a pilot onto a target. So, fast forward from that time, a couple months later, I'm on the big island of Hawaii in a place called Pohakuloa Training Area, I'm sure soldiers or marines who've been there, will tell you, it's like being on the moon. High elevation right below, I think it's Mauna Kea. There's two volcanoes, Mauna Kea and Mauna Lao. I think it's Mauna Kea, but your high elevation gets cold, it gets cold in Hawaii, let me tell you. And so, I've never controlled any aircraft. So, my battalion commander is a guy named Chuck Krulak, who later became combat down the Marine Corps. So, Chuck Krulak, battalion commander, and we're going out with a company, the part of the battalion anyway to go for this exercise. And we have F-4 phantoms from Kaneohe who are supporting this exercise. And so, Krulak asked me very directly, “Hey, how close can you get these bombs to my men? How close can you get these?” And we're dropping 500-pound bombs. He said, “How close can you get these bombs to my men?” I go, “Holy shit. I've never controlled an attack aircraft dropping bombs and this battalion commander wants me to drop bombs for him.” And I said, “Well, sir, how close do you want the bombs?” He said, and I quote him directly, “I want them to feel the heat and smell the cordite,” and that's a direct quote from Krulak, and I go, “Holy crap.”

So, I pull out my gouge book. I had a gouge book, and I look up, okay, danger close, danger close 500-pound GPU or a mark, 82, 500-pound bomb, uncovered troops. And I think it was I'm going by memory now, of course, but I think it was like 220 meters, it was close. And I said, “Holy shit, this is crazy.” And I said, “Well, sir, here's the book answer for danger close.” However, and I pulled this out of my butt. I said, I think the range regulations for the Army is a thousand meters, that's a click. A thousand meters, okay, whatever. And so, that was my first time dropping bombs.

But to have the battalion commander say he wants those bombs so close to his Marines, they can feel the heat and smell the cordite, I was a little unnerving. I'll tell you, I think I got pretty good at my craft, I think after a lot of practice and talking guys on and I really, really enjoyed being a FAC. I really did. I had a blast, no pun intended.

I went out to a place called Camp Korean Village, where if you look it up there's a little town called Ar Rutbah.

Ar Rutbah is about equal distance from Syria and Jordan, little place. But there was a lot of things going on out there because the main road, you can see it, I think it's Trebil and another town, a road comes out of Syria, road comes out of Jordan, and it links into the main highway going to Baghdad and most of our fuel came out of Jordan if not all of it. So, it was a very, very important logistics route.

I didn't feel I had to make changes just to make changes. But I knew there were things that could be done differently and part of that quite frankly was my training as a forward air controller, an air officer, I knew that I could coordinate things better, I could tighten things up.

Well, the first thing I did was my predecessor, who's lieutenant colonel was bunking in with the squadron … and we had HMLA debt out there, two Cobras and a Huey so he wanted to kind of hang out with the pilots. And I thought, “Well, I don't want to hang out with the pilots. I don't have that need to, I'm an aviator and you're not sort of an attitude, so I moved my quarters. I need to supervise people, not get friendly with them. So, I don't want to set myself apart from the HMLA.”

So, I started looking around, and I think what's important is that we have to look at our environment, we have to constantly ask ourselves, “What can I do better?” And I will tell you this, and I will tell anybody who ever wants to ask me about this, I lacked two things. I had two things that were working against me, time and distance.

The AO was huge and so the time and distance were my critical factors. I couldn't control the distance, but I could kind of, sort of control the time. What I mean by time, the time to respond, the time to get a helicopter to a firefight, get a helicopter to an IED blast and get somebody home.

And I always do map studies, and I remember it, I was in my little office and I had a map of the AO and I started looking at where we were at Camp Korean Village, and where marines would have to go after treatment at KV Surgical, they'd have to go to Al-Asad, which is like 120 miles to the north and east.

And I started looking around at this map. I said, “Well, how do I minimize the time en route to Al-Asad? And so, I called in the medical people, I called in the HMLA debts CEO, and I called in the army medevac folks.

And I said, “Well, I have an idea.” And I said, “Anything that happens east of us, so if it's east of us to this point, why would we bring a soldier all the way back to Korean Village for treatment and then turn around and fly him to Al-Asad?

Why not if the conditions are right, in other words, the wounds are not that critical and the weather is good, and all the other factors are in our favor, why not just fly directly from the point of injury, bypass Fallujah surgical and fly to other side VFR direct? Because we have to go there anyway. We're going to have to end up going there. Why would I do this?”

And so, that's one change I made. The other change I made was just watching things, observing procedures and we had this old piece of junk fuel truck. And what normally would happen is that after helicopter came back for a mission, it would go park and they'd park, and the fuel truck would rumble out there and gas up the helicopters by pumping JP eight out of this truck at a very, very slow rate.

I said, “Why are we doing this? We have a TAFD system.” TAFD is Tactical Air Fuel Distribution system. And I said, “Why are we driving this piece of junk fuel truck around?” So, I put out an order that said, “When you come back, you come back for mission. When you're mission complete and you're coming back to the airfield, the first thing you're going to do is refuel. You don't park the helicopter, you don't shut down the helicopter, the first thing you do is refuel and then go park.”

And as sure as you know what stinks, a few days after I issued this order, I had a couple cobras getting refueled, getting hot gas at the TAFDs and sure as, yeah, I said, “We got a fire mission. We got a fire mission.” So, they were gassed up, ready to go.

Had it not had that procedure, these guys would've gone to the line, they would've parked out of gas, shut down, out of gas, wait for a fuel truck to gas them up, get the call for fire support, and have either one, a helicopter with no gas, or two, I've got to jump back in this thing and start it and get ready to go. So, my whole thing was what can I do to minimize the time it takes to respond either to a firefight or to an injury?

So, my last flight in the C-46 was probably in April of 1986. I was recalled active duty in July of 2008, and sent to camp Al-Taqaddum, which is just west of Baghdad.

And I got there to be the Camp Commandant, and I was an O-6 colonel, and I got a knock on my door, and it's this major, and I was trying to catch up because the jet lag, I was just still kind of woozy from several hours of flying from here to there, from the west coast, actually left from California so I was still kind of groggy.

And I get this major knocks at my door. He said, “Hey, guess what?” I said, “What? What is this?” He said, “You get a ride into 46.” And I said, “Are you out of your mind?” I said, “You know how many hours I have riding the back of 46? I'm not interested. So, thank you very much, but not interested.”

So, next day, his boss comes up and he said, “Well, we're not offering you to ride the 46, you get to fly it.” I said, “Well, hell sign me up.” So, next day or so, I'm flying with the XO, this is HMM-364, the Purple Foxes, which I'd floated the Purple Foxes as an outhouse pilot in Hawaii.

And we get to the 46 and he taxis, he starts it up, taxis, get out to the flight line. And he said, “Okay, your controls.” I said, “Okay.” And I picked up to a five-foot hover, stabilized, did a pedal turn to the left, stabilized, another pedal turn to the left, stabilized and he basically came around too, set it down and said, “Well, I'm ready to go if you are.” I said, “Are you sure?” I said, “I'm ready to go. Let's go.”

So, there's a section, we had a section to this is a combat mission, this is a “combat mission” but we were gunned up. We had 50 colonels on the board and we'd go out with a sec, fly to two and test fire the guns and there was nothing happening. It was pretty quiet, 2008. So, we broke up the section, and I just got to fly the helicopter.

And I think, I got to tell you, I think the best compliment I've ever had in my life was that flight where the crew chief called up on the ICS, the intercom system and said, “Hey, sir, I got to ask you a question.” “What is it?” He says, “Do you own one of these things? Do you own your own 46?” And the XO said, “If I could legally do it, I'd put you on the flight schedule and say, you fly better than some of my captains.”

And this is, again, remember it'd been 22 years, over 22 years since it tested control to 46. And so, I had a blast. I mean, that was the last time I got to fly it and it was technically a combat mission in Iraq so yeah, it was a fun helicopter to fly and that was my last flight.

Well, I first heard about Jason Dunham in August of 2004 I just reported to be joined up with II Math Forward. And a friend of mine at Bethesda was seeing another colonel who was the marine liaison at the hospital and heard about Jason Dunham. April of 2004 at a checkpoint. He was with, I think 3rd Battalion, something Marines, killer company. And we got into a hand-to-hand combat where with an Iraqi insurgent who later dropped a grenade.

Corporal Dunham smothered the grenade with his body, and it detonated. He did not die, he was not killed instantly, and he was evacuated back to the States and he was at Bethesda. I think he lived for eight days and the story that I heard from my friend was because she was there, the doctors, Deb and Dunham were there, and the doctor said, “I think I've got this right. It's time for Jason to go home.” And they took him off life support.

And that really struck me, here's a young … prime of life, good looking kid and I thought the agony of Deb and I know the Dunham’s now quite well to make that gut wrenching decision to take their son off of life support and that really stayed with me.

As far as Danny Bob. And this is a painful situation to talk about, but I'll tell you what happened, October 17th, 2005, and we had a very small crew to work air support missions. But our little cell was co-located right in the same building, next room to first LAR, first Light Amphibious Reconnaissance battalion. And again, I've been an air officer, battalion air officer, been a regiment air officer, so I've had that experience of air support, do it quite well, quite frankly and walked into my office, it was chaos, it was absolute chaos.

There was what's called a carnivore mission. Carnivore mission it's a snatch. There was a high value target identified. LAR just went out to get this but in the meantime, th ey were ambushed. There's a fire fight, there's an ambush, and there's a young captain who was not the air officer from Battalion. He was one of the Ford Air controllers who's standing in as the air officer and the shit hit the fan, and there's no way to describe it.

And he didn't really know what he was doing, and he was trying to God, I got the fucking helicopter. I've got two cobras. I got a Huey Gunship. I mean, you're trying to request fire support in a way that wasn't appropriate. This is an immediate mission; this is not a pre-planned mission. He was treating this as though it was a pre-planned mission and going up to every level trying to request the use of those helicopters.

Well, shit the helicopters right there, they're 50 yards away and so and then it devolved, it devolved and went to hell. And I got Marines who are now dead. I've got Marines who are shot and dead and now this serves into a recovery mission, so I get things going.

And I thought, “Holy Christ.” And I remember going down to the LC, the LC was right next to my hooch or next-door office, and I walked down there, and these Marines, young Marines, wounded and dead are being taken from the helicopter.

And as I may have mentioned in a TikTok video or something that a Marines, his right arm fell from the stretcher and another Marine came by and put his arm back on his chest. I don't know if that was Danny Bob or the other Marine who was killed.

But later on, when I got back home to Nebraska, I called Lance Corporal Bob's mother, I called her and we talked for a while, and we did some things for her family. Later on, they were from West Virginia, very poor, very poor … family, modest means, I always shouldn't say poor, but modest means. And so, yeah, it's war and part of that story too, was this captain who really did — I had to console him, he was in tears.

I mean, he knew that he made a mistake. He knew that he made a mistake. He didn't do what he's supposed to have done. That comes from an experience and so I grabbed him, I took him. I said, “Come with me.” I took him away from the LC and I sat him down and I said, “You can't bring him back. There's nothing you can do.”

The fog of war, friction, whatever, things happened. I said, “You don't know what would've happened. You don't know what would've happened. And maybe having those Cobras on scene might have made a difference, maybe not. You'll never know. You'll never know. But it is what it is. You're not going to bring him back and you got to learn from the mistake, you got to learn.”

It's a tough way to learn, but it's indelible. And God, I felt for that guy. It may still be with him today. He fucked up. He didn't do what he’s supposed to do, but those things happen in combat.

At was at Bethesda Naval Hospital, back when it was still Bethesda Naval Hospitals, around Christmas, we had a meeting about things. Commandant was there and so, a bunch of us decided, let's go wander around the hospital and wish Marines Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, happy Hanukkah, whatever's appropriate.

And we came to this one room. There was a soldier, he was with, I think second infantry division who had … I think because we had second infantry division soldiers attached to us in Fallujah back in 2005, 2006. And apparently, from what I gathered, he had gone into on a clearing operation in Ramadi, gone into a house. There was an IED in the house, it detonated. Didn't kill him, but there's no other polite way of putting it, it scrambled his brains. He got severe TBI. He's lying in bed, his mother's on his right side, his sister's on his left, they're each holding one of his hands. We came in, he is aware but can't speak. He's aware, knows what's going on, but that's about it. And somebody produced a guitar and started serenading him and I just couldn't help but be focused on his eyes and noticed there was that there was something going on there. He recognized the song; there's something going on.

But the thought that came to me is that, “Okay, so this young soldier in his 20s is going to go home, his mother and his sister, presumably will be his caretaker, taking care of him for the rest of his life, but not for the rest of his life necessarily but as long as his mother can do this in her lifetime.” And I realized we have hundreds, if not thousands of young soldiers, sailor Airmen Marines who have this condition that they're at home now being taken care of by their mothers and fathers and at some point that's going to stop.

So, the question is, okay, so what happens to them? Where are they going to go? Well, the answer right now to that is that they're going to end up going to an assisted living facility, which is fine, but I thought we can do better than that. And so, Dunham House, named after Corporal Jason Dunham who we talked about. So, we have what's called a small house design. You're going to have 30 combat, wounded veterans who live here in a 27,000 square foot facility. And they'll be selected, the application and that's what they'll live. And they'll live there for as long as they want to live there, but they're not going to be warehoused in a typical assisted living facility so that's the concept.

I've never been in combat that I've been shot at. But I haven't ever experienced what a lot of soldiers and marines have experienced and seals and special, air force folks who have been in no kidding firefights, bullets whizzing past my head or anything like that. And I tell folks, I said, “You know what, I've done important things, just they're not exciting things. No one's going to go out and make a movie about my exploits, that's just not going to happen.” And I think that we have to have sense of perspective.

So, I think there's a lot of soldiers out there, Marines too, who feel as though that their service doesn't count for much, because there's no Silver Star, there's no Navy Cross, there's no combat action ribbon. And we kind of lose sight of the fact that not everybody's going to be a trigger polar, not everybody's going to be in the firefight, not everyone's going to be glorified in a movie, like I said, no one's going to produce a movie about my exploits, no one's going to produce a movie about some young Marine who stuck in the supply hut.

But without those marines, the soldiers, sailors and airmen doing that kind of work behind the scenes, you're not going to combat. And we need to recognize, the mechanic, young mechanic or the cook needs to understand that what they did to support the grunts, the trigger pullers, the tip of the spirit guys is just as important and without their service, none of this would've come about.

So, I'll leave it at that. No one should be ashamed of his service as long as it was honorable and everything counts. A lot of moving parts to combat and a lot of the times we forget those young men and women who are behind the scenes, we don't see or hear about, and they need to be appreciated.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Colonel John Folsom.

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