Hostage Rescue in the Philippines: CPT Gene Yu

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 Captain Gene Yu. Yu is a West Point graduate that joined the U.S. Army Special Forces after initially being kicked out of SERE school for ordering pizza during a training exercise. He eventually deployed to Korea, Japan, Iraq, and the Phillipeans in the 2000s. After retiring from the military, Yu led the effort to rescue Evelyn Chang from terrorists holding her for ransom in the Philippines.

CPT Gene Yu:

My name is Gene Yu. I was a captain when I got out and I was an 18A or US Army Special Forces Officer.

I think for me, in terms of joining the Army it was really about wanting to go to West Point. To be honest, I didn't know a lot about the Army when I joined West Point, which sounds very naive, and that's exactly what I was at the time. I was actually inspired by a book that I read about another Asian American who had gone to West Point in the '60s, and he'd written it as a semi fictional account. Growing up in Northern California, it was a very liberal area of the States, and even though I went to a public high school, the principal was so anti-military he didn't allow any military recruiters onto campus. So actually I'd never even heard of West Point. So when I read about it in this book, I actually thought it was like Hogwarts for warriors rather than wizards. I was like, "Oh God, this place is so cool, but it must be made up where they go and turn you into a leader like this and holistically train you across everything from values to military, physical academics." And so when I discovered it was a real school, I was recruited there to play tennis. I played tennis for my first ... Almost finished the first year as NCAA division one athlete. But it really was the impetus of going to West Point rather than joining the Army. It was during my time at West Point that I started learning a lot about the Army, obviously, and began starting to understand the gravity and the responsibility that was going to be bestowed on me as a US Army officer. And when I graduated, it was 2001, so 9/11 happened shortly thereafter, and while I was going through my transformation at school, it certainly had an even more radical turn after graduating because of the incident.

I think it was quite shocking for, of course, everyone in the world at the time, but particularly for us as recent West Point graduates. A lot of us had joined, I think, in the late '90s not thinking that the US Army was really going to go off to war. At the time, if you recall, the Cold War had ended in 1990 and a lot of people were talking about how there was never going to be a conflict again, and there's a time of peace time, et cetera. So when you asked me about how the climate changed, I think it was mostly just absolute utter shock. And it took a while, even for my class, or at least my immediate classmates, to really recognize that we were going off to war. I mean, even in the following, I would say six months or so, I remember at this time I'm a second lieutenant. I started out as US Army armor officer, so I was at Fort Knox at the Armor Officer Basic Course. And you turn on, at the time CNN, you see the Rangers parachuting under the green night vision taking those airfields, it still felt very remote and far away. Probably because I was so untrained that the idea of me being one of the people to go was a little bit distant of a sense of reality. I think the big push for everyone was 2003 when 3rd ID went in to do the thunder run into Baghdad, and that's when at least my class, we were all essentially lieutenants in the initial phases of the Iraq war.

I mean, for me at West Point, I was so turned off by the infantry officers that were at West Point. Later on, I discovered maybe inherently my own personality and what I was more interested in in terms of combat arms infantry definitely fit my personality better, but it was just the actual personalities themselves at West Point that just ... I thought they were just very rigid, very inflexible in their mindset towards things. And I was influenced by a couple of history professors that were armor officers, and I just thought they were amazing and inspired me to go armor. And actually I was a computer science undergrad, which plays into how I ended up founding a cybersecurity company. So when I first joined West Point, I was a computer science undergrad growing up in the Bay Area, Silicon Valley. I thought I was going to go Signal Corps.

That was my plan when I went to West Point. I was like, "Well, I'm not really sure what this Army thing is about, but they have this part of the army where at least you can be kind of in computers and networks and things like that." So really again, it was at West Point that I started changing over and started thinking about what it would mean to be a platoon leader, and particularly in combat arms and ended up changing my mindset towards things. But yeah, no, certainly not a lot of armor officers go to Ranger School, for example, which I was one of the only people that graduated Ranger School from my Armor Officer Basic Course, the actual class that went, I was the only one that actually graduated. There was a couple other folk that came through our pre Ranger course, good friends of mine that went later because they ended up getting assigned at 82nd where they got slots from there so they didn't end up using the ones from Fort Knox.

But yeah, I mean throughout the whole process of going from an armor background, whether it be at Ranger School or the Q Course, I mean, I was so far behind from at least the other light unit guys. So for the six Ranger stakes, which are actually very basic infantry tasks like how to load a 240, et cetera, et cetera, these things I didn't know to do because I came from the armor course. And the pre Ranger course that we had didn't really prepare us necessarily for infantry tasks, but rather just physically. And I failed five out of the six and got a major minus on the second day. I was the only guy that was just repeatedly failing the Ranger stakes. I was so poorly trained. So to your point, yes, it was a big jump from armor coming over to SF. The parts of the Q Course that I had the trouble with were land navigation. The STAR exam. I failed that pretty miserably the first time around and a rare situation as an officer getting a second chance to go back to selection, but it's a story of its own just harassing essentially the selection committee until they let me back in six months later and then ended up passing the STAR exam the second time. And then I also failed SERE School as alluded to earlier when I had my infamous pizza incident and got thrown out along with my team with my never to return. Was able to finagle my way back in to that, so I had the joys of doing two winter SERE courses. I always like to joke around that I had double the survival training of any other Green Beret having gone through the course twice.

My story for the pizza thing, during SERE School, there's a 10 day period of an evasion exercise where there's dog tracking teams. You got to go through an evasion lane with your team about 10 guys and live off the land. And so not only just because it's winter and there's nothing growing out there in central North Carolina, but also these SERE lanes have been picked dry by all the classes that come through. So there's very, very little sustenance or food out there to eat even if you could remember anything from just the fire hose of PowerPoint classes about survival that you could pick out all the different things you could eat out in the woods afterwards.

So it's something like day six or day seven and we build a hide site and get ready to bunker down for the day and hide from the dog teams and it's time to get some firewood, so I grabbed a couple of the guys. I'm like, "Let's go get some wood." And we ended up walking quite a ways away from the area that we had settled down and we started hearing some Latin music. And so I was like, "Oh, there's some people out here. Well, let's go see what's going on. Maybe they have some food. Maybe they just wandered onto the Fort Bragg training area and maybe they're friendly people." You never know.

So we wandered out there and then came across railroad tracks. And I'm actually surprised that I remember because as you recall going through all the training, you just sign a lot of waivers all the time. But I did actually, and I completely own up to this, I completely remember signing something like do not cross the railroad tracks at any point if you run into railroad tracks. And so came out on the railroad tracks ... So I can't pretend like I didn't know and then crossed the railroad tracks is what I'm trying to say. So I completely own that. So came on the railroad tracks and we saw a large group of Hispanic men playing soccer. And so we went up on top of the railroad tracks because we knew we couldn't cross it and tried to talk to them from the railroad tracks. And they're just shocked because they just see these emaciated dudes in fatigues coming out and we haven't eaten in seven days. We look horrible. We reek of ammonia. Our whole body's just eating itself, not having eaten for all those days. And so they're pretty apprehensive of us and just stay away. So at this point, we're like, "Okay, we need to engage." Myself, I spent a summer abroad in Ecuador when I was in high school and had some passable Spanish. I'm never going to claim that I'm a fluent Spanish speaker, but enough to communicate. And one of the other guys that I brought was a fluent Spanish speaker as well, so he was extremely helpful in that situation. But essentially we went forward, explained to them that we were on a US Army training exercise and we hadn't eaten days and is there anything they could do to help us. And we were just trying to be friendly.

I think we even played a little bit of soccer, just trying to build rapport, do the Green Beret thing. And they said, "Hey look, we don't have any food. We're sorry. We had our party and we ate everything. But the local tienda or the store nearby, they've got food. We can take you there." And we're like, "Oh, great." They made it sound like ... I don't know. My Spanish is not great, but I thought it made it sound like it was just around the corner. So we jump into their truck and start cruising on the truck and they go through the woods and pop out onto a hardball and I'm like, "Oh, this is a highway." And they start booking down it at like 50, 60 miles per hour.

And I remember being like, "Whoa. Okay. I knew we crossed the railroad tracks, but now we are way outside of the training area." And it was one of those moments, Ken, that I remember kind of like a little spirit coming and telling me, "This is a watershed moment in your life. Whatever direction you go is going to change your life and right now is a big moment. What are you going to do?" And actually, if you think about my life story, I'm always the guy that kind of zags when everybody else is zigs, just out of curiosity because I'm kind of aware of what's going to happen, just taking the path that everybody else has taken. So we continue on and we literally drive for 45 minutes. And actually the other guys fall asleep. That's how far we leave the training area. And we end up in Aberdeen, which is a very far away ... Okay. You know North Carolina. We're really far away.

And we arrive in the town and I'm still in survival mode, so I'm like, "Hey, take us into that gas station. Let's go to the convenience store and let's get bread and some ham and some cheese and I don't know, make gruel or something like that." And we walk in and the high school age or teenager aged clerk, she's just like, "Oh my God." She just sees these dudes and fatigues. She's like, "Please leave. I'm going to call the cops." And I'm trying to tell her I don't have any money and I'm just trying to convince her to let us just take the food. And so at this point I'm like, "Okay, we're out of luck. I don't know what to do to get food." But then I remembered I did have my credit card memorized at the time because this is mid-2000s and so this is a point in time when you're ordering things online. I have to go get my credit card every time to enter it in manually every single time. And because I ordered so many things online, I just started noticing that I had most of the credit card number memorized. And so I just sat down one day because I was tired of getting up to go get my wallet and just finished memorizing it. And so every time I ordered from Papa John's pizza, they would just ask you for your credit card number in the clear, just right over the phone. These days it's crazy from a security standpoint. But I should just give them the credit card number just verbally over the phone and that's how I placed my orders. So I asked the driver and I was like, "Hey, is there a Papa John's in this town? Because I know that they'll take a credit card number just directly verbally."

And so he said, "Actually there is." And so we cruise on down there. Yes, unusual. Initially the people at the counter were like, "No, we can't just take a credit card number just because standing there telling it to us." I'm like, "Well, what's the difference between that and me telling you over the phone? I want to talk to the manager." Manager comes out, do a little bit of haggling. I was able to convince her that it was the same thing and she said, "You know, you're right." And so at that point I'm like, okay, all gloves are off because now it's like unlimited food in this moment. So we order a lot of pizza. I remember it was close to 300 bucks. It was a lot of pizza. Basically we ordered as much as we could carry back. And soda and buffalo wings and the whole nine yards.

And so we get back to the training area after driving another 45 minutes back in and then walking all the way back into the site. And by this time our team are quite concerned because we've been gone for so long. They thought like a bear had eaten us or something like that and were getting ready to even call an emergency medevac call for us. I remember when we did all the psychological exams for the Q Course, I remember one of the questions they asked you, have you ever physically jumped in the air for joy? I remember scoffing in the moment looking at the exam and just being like, "Who does that? No." And we brought back all these pizzas, these 10 future barrel chested, freedom fighters, Special Forces guys, every single one of them was just leaping in the air for joy like little girls. Just so ecstatic seeing the food and everything. And we literally ate all of it. And I'm not exaggerating. We ate all of it in five minutes. It was just absolutely just inhaling. It was the best food I've ever had in my entire life. Just Papa John's pizza.

So we burned all the boxes and everything like that in the fire, but for some unknown reason even today, I still can't really place it why I did this, but when I got the receipt for the pizzas, I put it in the breast pocket of the BDUs, which nobody ever uses. That's the most bizarre thing. You never use those pockets. They're like this weird fashion statement on the BDU that nobody ever uses. So I forgot about it because it was such an unusual place. Normally you just put stuff in your cargo pockets or your actual hip pockets, whatever you would call those.

So the next day we got captured by the terrorists or whoever it was they were pretending to be at the time. And part of it is you get stripped naked and you get hosed down with the fire hose and the lime thrown on you. And when they went through my things, the pocket litter was there for the receipt for $300 of pizza from the day prior, but in Aberdeen. And so the cadre at SERE School were so confused they actually let me go through the whole resistance training for the simulated resistance POW training for a good close to 48 hours. I'm getting beaten up and all this stuff for a couple days before they're like, "Okay. We're going to pull Captain Yu in here and ask about this."

And they put me in a room and first, they make sure that you know who they are and that it's an actual admin break because people are all just discombobulated and everything. And as soon as I understood what was going on, the SERE commander actually came out, the major, and he just threw the receipt on the table and he was like, "What's this? Explain this." So I'm the type of guy that I have this weird thieves code that I like breaking rules. It's a bit of my, I would say contrarian, insurgent type personality as a Green Beret and as an entrepreneur. But if you catch me doing something coloring outside the lines, I'll always tell the truth. That's like my honor code about it still is that I'll tell the truth in that case. So I just told the whole story just as soon as it came out, and I remember the officers in the room were just getting angrier and angrier as I was telling the story and the NCOs were just laughing just harder and harder as the story going on, high-fiving each other in the background, which is really funny also.

I look back at this story now as civilian, how different the cultures were in terms of the response. And so the commander asked me is, "What would you do if you were me in this situation? You're an officer." All that type of stuff. And this is an era. This is right around the elections with Kerry and George W., his second term. And this is a time period where everybody wants to double Special Forces. They're trying to put as many people through the pipeline as possible. There's a lot of pressure to graduate me because I'm one of the few officers that's made it through the pipeline this far. At that time, SERE School was the very last phase out of the six phases of the Q Course. So I'm literally less than maybe 48 hours from finishing everything and then graduating the whole pipeline. I told him, I was like, "Sir, I have to tell you the truth. I think you have to kick me out never to return. I'm an officer." And I look back now, I don't know if I had to be that honest about my opinion, but he turned around, he's like, "You're right. That's what I'm going to do."

So he kicked me out never to return. And my teammates at the time who were ... I was the hero when I brought back the pizza. Now I was the worst person of all time because they also get kicked out as well. They immediately had a chance to recycle, whereas I went off into presumably a career ending event.

When I was stationed in Korea as an armor officer, it's a whole separate longer story, but I had basically met the rising 1st Group Special Forces commander, Colonel Rick Thomas, in a Seoul bookstore in Korea. And basically picked him up for a coffee, convinced him to let me take my annual leave and come down and basically intern for him during an exercise and built a relationship with him and ended up actually being an intern in Special Forces action in Korea for close to a year.

So I just emailed him, was like, "Hey, sir, I messed up. I'm really sorry to disappoint you." Then five minutes Rick emails me back and he's like, "Give me a phone number. I can reach you. Don't go anywhere." And what he does, he calls SERE School and says, "Hey, I don't care what Gene Yu did. I want that captain in my group." And then I got put back in a couple more, maybe two more SERE courses and had a lovely experience of going through as the pizza guy. More pizza boy at the time, but the pizza guy. And going through a second time with the SERE cadre.

So it's kind of interesting now because after so many years, right after the incident, I would say 50% of the people would come up to me and be like, "Oh, that's amazing," or, "So creative what you did," or survival, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, "Okay. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't really thinking like, okay, this is the ultimate training experience at the time." But the other half would literally, I'd be walking around Fort Bragg, they'd see my name tag, see who I am, and they'd come over and just be like, "You're the worst officer I've ever heard of," or, "You're the worst operator I've ever heard of that has come through this Q Course." It was very polarizing in terms of how people viewed it.

And once I got out to group and I was on probation for a while and had to prove myself before getting onto a team. Normally when you get out to group as a captain, you go straight to an A team. I was put on indefinitely as a spare staff officer, like an extra staff officer in punishment in the Southern Philippines. And I didn't know I was going to get a team at all. But after a period of time, and that's my whole story as well as people realized I wasn't an idiot, it became more of an enhancing story I think, to my reputation. Nobody was walking around giving me medals for it or anything like that. But just in general, it was just kind of an interesting color of otherwise I think I was presenting myself as a relatively neutral character. But then having this kind of more wild story behind me, I think maybe it gave me a little bit more color to my personality.

But yeah, I mean I'm aware at least for many years afterwards, even as far as ... It was long after I had gotten out, and I met some young folk that were coming through the course and they said that that story was still briefed at SERE School about the pizza guy and the pizza incident. So it's interesting. It was a target of opportunity at the time and turned out to be this incredible thing that ended up changing the pathway of my career as well in Special Forces and led to ... Well, I think all life is like that, to be honest.

My first tour was down to the Southern Philippines, an area called Jolo Island, and that's where the first Special Forces Asia Group was generally mostly focused on in the early 2000s. I'd say 1st Group really didn't get into the Middle East fight in earnest until the late 2000s. And so that was actually a big stigma culture wise in 1st Group because we were viewed as though we were cowards for not going to the Middle East, and there was this big chip on our shoulder in the group as well as how other groups looked at us.

So in my first tour in the Southern Philippines, again, I was on penance for being the pizza guy. So I just went down as this extra staff officer in the headquarters of what we called JSOTFP, Joint Special Operations Task Force Philippines. And right when I showed up, maybe about, I want to say two or three weeks in, the conflict down there had evolved to a point where we were pushing with the Filipinos to make the "final move" against the Abu Sayyaf. There was something right before we had showed up on an island called Basilan where there was a mixture of usage of civil military operations or humanitarian aid to win the hearts and minds of the local populace and deny sanctuary and safe haven for the Abu Sayyaf terrorists and kind of cornering them and moving them along.

And while there wasn't a lot of action in Basilan, basically they had fled that island to their main redoubt island of Jolo. And they had been hanging out at this area called Camp Tamahu, which was kind of like their camp, and people used to refer to it kind of derogatory as like they were at summer camp, hanging out in this place kind of chilling out. And it was a big opportunity for us to take out 40 of their high value targets all in one go.

And so a few weeks after I'd shown up, basically the major planning for this started. And even though I was just a spare staff officer, I was one of only three Green Beret officers in this special operations command, and that was one of the aspects of "special operations" command units. Because a lot of the folk from the joint services are not actually from number one, special operations backgrounds, but even if they were, it's not part of land operations or anything like that. There are a whole bunch of SEALs and that command, or there's a platoon or some type of platoon plus detachment there. This is a time period where the SEALs hadn't really spent a lot of time on ground operations. It was fairly early after 9/11. Particularly not in jungle warfare or anything like that. So really it was just the three SF officers that were in this whole command that were putting together the plan. And one was the commander. So it was me and the major, the J3, basically that sat down and started hacking out this large brigade sized amphibious infantry assault on this position. And I mean, it was an interesting exercise. It was just like we were pulling out old US Marine Corps manuals on amphibious operations, and I was reading those as fast as I could to figure out how to plan out this large scale movement. But we basically brought out the plan for roughly about 500 Filipinos that were moving to assault this camp and put, I think it was like three or four infantry battalions in a blocking position behind it. It was a massive operation. I felt like I was a part of history writing this. It was really cool, actually, in terms of getting in and just my first deployment and feeling like I was doing something and being part of something much larger than myself. So it wasn't a lot of direct action, because I was a staff officer behind the scenes.

This is also the Philippines where US forces, due to very, very sensitive political reasons in the Philippines could be nowhere near the front lines. The most forward a SF team could be would be co-located with the infantry battalion commander at the TOC. And so we're a little bit further away, but that aspect still wasn't lost on me about how interesting the operation was.

The long story short behind it is that we ended up failing in killing most of the HVTs. I've read some reports that give credit to about a third out of the hundred folk that were at the camp were supposedly killed. I think this is a difficult battle damage assessment to count on because we always had to rely on Filipino reporting with all of it. It's not like American soldiers could go in the site. And a lot of times these reports come back a little bit convoluted. So long story short is we thought that it was going to be the end all of the entire conflict out there. It was going be this very decisive, very Napoleon Austerlitz. thought it was going to be a very decisive engagement to take out the Abu Sayyaf forever. And we ended up wounding Khadaffy Janjalani, who was the leader of Abu Sayyaf at the time during the artillery strike. I had actually helped make that call as a battle captain to convince the Filipino general to fire that even though the infantry assault element wasn't there on time. And then later on, a Filipino Scout Ranger company killed him maybe about six months later. And I like to think that the wounds that he took during that time slowed him down enough to get him about half a year later. But I had looked at it as a colossal failure at the time. It was called Operation Ultimatum.

I found out years, years, years later that it's actually revered as a series of operations. They call the whole thing Operation Ultimatum over a period of two or three years. And they look at it as a general success. I thought it was a one shot deal at the time, so I thought it was a total failure and carried that ... Not guilt, but was pretty detached from all this, but just feeling like, oh, we had screwed that up. There was a part of the planning that I had put in that I thought I had made a mistake by incorrectly accounting for the amount of time that the infantry assault element needed to get to the target. And I felt like I had blame to share with that.

My second tour, which I ended up going to Iraqi Kurdistan, was attached to 10th Group. I'll never forget this moment where we were at Fort Carson and meeting our new 10th Group commanders, and they had us come in and do our pre-deployment brief, et cetera, and had my whole team sitting, lined up along the meeting room. And I can't remember if it was the colonel or the sergeant major asked, "How many of you have been to combat?" And made this big point to point out that none of us have deployed. My team sergeant at the time had deployed to Gulf One or something like that, and they called that out as, okay, that was just Gulf One, et cetera. But I look back at that and it's just kind of like ... And I just want to share just because there's a lot of military audience for this. This is an interesting time period where 1st Group was looked down upon for a period of time by no choice of our own of not deploying to the Middle East. And I find that very interesting today because the unit I was in in Okinawa, right now of everything where the world is going, if conflict erupts in the Asia theater, as I think a lot of people are thinking, that unit is going to be covered in terms of being on the very, very first in and all sorts of things. So anyway, just interesting about just how that all kind of played out, just culturally dynamics in Special Forces and how that played out.

So after I kind of redeemed myself as the pizza guy and then this Operation Ultimatum thing, even though it failed, people were like, "Gene is not an idiot." They let me pick which ODA I wanted out of Okinawa to join. And the one that I chose was the one that was up for the next rotation for the one A team that went to Iraq out of Okinawa at the time. And that A team or ODA was attached to Korean Special Forces that would deploy to Iraqi Kurdistan up in Erbil, its capital city, to advise them advising the Kurds. And so that was my first Iraq combat deployment, and I went up there and essentially was able to maneuver the mission, which was supposed to be just liaisoning with Korean Special Forces into getting the full-on ODA mission of training up our own strike forces out of the Kurds going across the green line into Mosul just about every week, or the Tigris River Valley to hit targets that we curated through our intelligence operations in Erbil. In pretty much a semi-permissive environment.

We were constantly in just civilian clothes and bongo trucks and AK-47s, running around bazaars, doing chai meetings and stuff like that. Running down informants, and then tracking down targets of folk that were insurgents operating predominantly in Mosul. And so we ran that mission for about eight months or so, and it was very successful and amazing. I think that one of the most creative and under-resourced A team missions in Iraq had to be that one. Mostly because we didn't even have a mandate to a real mission. It was literally a State Department cable that just said liaison with the Koreans, and you figured out how to be useful once you go on the ground.

Flip that with my fourth combat deployment, and this is now I've moved over to the Charlie Company in Okinawa, which was responsible for regional crisis response. This is where I went through all the hostage rescue shooting courses and everything like that, and it's kind of a lateral promotion for me to be in that unit. And that unit was assigned to train the Iraqi counter-terrorist force and the National Mission Force. So I went from basically being probably the least resourced ODA out in the field with the Koreans to now being the most heavily resourced unit down in Baghdad. And we were in Sadr City every night backed by AC-130s. Just a very different culture as well. The guys on my team had been on a similar mission the summer before. They would say things like, "Oh, the AC-130 is not available tonight because of whatever. Cloud cover. I'm not going out there." Whereas the first time I went, if we could even get a Kiowa to support us, we'd be very excited. If they sent a asset to support us on the ground at all. So again, very, very two very different missions as a ground force commander, as a team leader in my times in Iraq.

So that's the second time going in. It was every night we were in Sadr City. Sometimes hitting targets, and on the call right after you come off target to get the call from the headquarters, the new grid just to go hit another target across Sadr City. So it was pretty much every single night, no intel development, which is one of the things I loved about being on an SF team is that we developed our own targets and we hit them ourselves as well. We were just a machine just sitting there, just waiting for the calls to come in, and then just like a hammer every night just kicking doors in. So two very different experiences in Iraq along those lines, while with two different units.

I was an investment banker for a period of time. Didn't suit for me, just to cut the story a little bit shorter. Ended up meeting some people at Palantir, got attracted to that, went over there. Things didn't work out over there. I got basically left out on the street, and I was back at the time back in Hong Kong, trying to figure out next steps. And my mother calls me and is like, "Hey, I'm coming out to Taiwan to visit some family." That's my family background. From Taiwan. "And by the way, did you know that, remember my best friend Angela, her younger sister Evelyn's been kidnapped while she was on holiday in Malaysia and her husband was killed and all this stuff." And I was like, "Oh, that sounds crazy." But mostly because I was fully available at the time and nowhere to go. I was basically couch-surfing at the time amongst friends' places from my banking days. Went over to Taiwan to go meet her up. And when I got into Taiwan, discovered that this was basically national news because nothing like this happens to Taiwanese citizens. It's very rare that something as violent and as brazen as something like this kidnapping could happen. So I agreed to my mother to meet with the family just to see if there's any type of advice or anything I could help with. I already started suspecting that maybe it was Abu Sayyaf. Where the kidnapping occurred was in Eastern Malaysia, which is very close to the Sulu Archipelago, where Jolo and Basilan, where I was just talking about Operation Ultimatum, where that occurred. It's actually only about 20 minutes by speedboat away. That's how close it is. And when I started hearing the story, I started realizing because Taiwan is not an officially recognized government due to the Chinese Communist Party convincing everyone that it's still part of China and all this type of stuff, there's no formal diplomatic relations between Taiwan and the Philippines. And so essentially, just from what I can understand from the Chang family was that there was just a junior anti-kidnapping group sergeant that was assigned to the case. And very quickly I realized because of the political status that Taiwan does not enjoy, there's nobody helping them at all. And understanding how the Abu Sayyaf operate, if you can't even make contact to start negotiations, I mean she's going to get beheaded and become a propaganda video and all this stuff.

So really when you asked how did it even come around, the decision to help, a lot of it was mostly because I was in a place that I was in one of the darker times of just feeling like I was failing in my transition from the military into the real world. A lot of people have a challenge with that transition. Of course, very well documented. So this is my moment. Not really sure who I was supposed to be, what was my task and purpose now. I felt incredibly guilty at the time because I was still in my physical prime while Americans and Green Berets were still fighting in the war. I had left, and now I'm utterly useless and unoccupied and just absolutely feeling like I made a massive decision of leaving and just in where I was in life. So in many ways of the aspect of even the beginning, it wasn't like I picked up the phone and was like, "Okay, I'm going to go over there and I'm going to make this all happen." I'm not that megalomaniac to think that I could go in and just solve everything just by myself in this situation. But rather, “Okay, why don't I pick up a phone and then call some old SF contacts, the old Filipino generals that I worked with during Ultimatum, see whether or not there's anybody there that can make an introduction to somebody. Then I can make an introduction back to the family and then they can work it all out and then I'll feel like I was helpful.” And as things are in Asia, business is done, whether military or financial, it's done through relationships. And not just buddies, but you have to be brothers do business together. And certainly from that aspect, people were willing to help me, but only if I went to Manila so they could at least make the introduction in person. It's not going to happen just over the phone and just get passed off. This is something very, very serious. And even just small business, let alone something this big.

So then it became a decision to just get on the plane and go to Manila to meet people and try to connect up the right people to help the Chang family. So I went through the network and ended up calling several folk that ended up connecting me to first a little bit more of the underworld of the Philippines. Because while the very, very good Lloyds of London kidnap and ransom crisis consultants can calling, one, they were extremely expensive without insurance policy. We're talking like 30 to $50,000 retainers, just sight unseen, deposit just to even get them started. But two, the biggest thing or reason why when I was helping the Chang family screen at least and try to find this help that I couldn't endorse them was because they had never been to the Philippines. Not a single one. I mean maybe they had 50, 100 kidnapping ransom cases under their belts, but dealing with the Abu Sayyaf and in the Philippines, this was a whole separate ball of wax that I had context of because I had deployed there before. And so even though they were very professional, I ended up deciding on behalf of the family that they weren't the right option and we should find somebody on the ground in the Philippines with experience.

So we ended up meeting a guy that I like to just refer to as the Viking, and he's an Icelandic national who'd been in the Philippines at that time, I suspect exile because I think he had some criminal stuff on going back in Iceland. He was just kind of hiding out in the Philippines. He actually claimed that he was a Blackwater private military contractor working in the motor pool in the same classified area of Baghdad International Airport where I served for my second tour that I was just mentioning. The one in Sadr City. So there's this funny connection between us as well, where he said he had recognized me and all this stuff. I got connected to him through basically the SF network. And he was essentially like a "crisis consultant" for hire. He had some kind of interesting connections through the Philippines network that ended up connecting us to some unsavory characters.

Kind of skipping the story, but basically I went down this rabbit hole for about a week and resulted in offending some, basically kidnapped for ransom brokers with Abu Sayyaf because they thought that Evelyn was very wealthy because there was a odd two degrees of separation, maybe even three degrees from Evelyn to the president of Taiwan, the sitting president of Taiwan at the time. So that became huge national news because the Taiwan paparazzi grabbed that and made a connection that this wasn't random, but rather on purpose because they were coming after somebody who was close to the president of Taiwan. Well, not only did I know that this was a fact not to be true, but also because I'm actually the blood nephew of that president of Taiwan. So I'm very well aware there's no connection between them. The naive or the coincidental thing of all this is that there ended up being a connection when I kind of naively wandered into this to help as an unemployed individual and just get involved in this. So it's all very funny how that all comes around.

But anyway, so actually after I had failed through this first group ... And even one of the individuals there threatened to kill me, basically. He called me in the middle of the night and said he's going to slit my throat. He basically thought that I was ripping them off from the Taiwan government paying a $5 million ransom to this group. And when that type of money moves in the Philippines, there's all sorts of hands that come out to try to pick a piece of that for their fees along the ways. They just looked at it as though I was trying to rip them off. But even though the Chang family had no connection really to the Taiwan government who was absolutely not going to pay anything and really could only muster at that time, like $50,000 for the payment. So I always comment is that people say it's dangerous when people know that you have money, but what's more dangerous is when people think you have money and you don't actually have any money. I think that's actually the most dangerous situation.

And so as I was getting prepared to leave and just feeling that I had just kind of screwed everything up or made things even worse after being there for a week, an old Palantir and SF officer contact, Joe Felter, called me back after I reached out to the network and he introduced me to the godfather of his own children, his very close friend named Lieutenant Colonel Dennis Eklert, who was one of the Filipino graduates from West Point, 1993. And he served in the Scout Rangers, which is kind of like their Ranger regiment. And came a little bit out of the woodworks. I was literally getting ready to go to the airport to fly back to Taiwan, tell them that I basically had failed. Sorry, I can't help you. And he met me later on that afternoon and told me to cancel my flight. And turns out that he ... Within the Scout Rangers, there was another Scout Ranger officer who was on loan to NICA. NICA is the National Intelligence Coordination Agency or their version of the CIA. He was on loan and had actually been operating undercover, essentially posing ... At this time. I didn't know this, but found out later that he was posing as a local construction company engineer and making protection payments to that Abu Sayyaf group. So he actually had contacts, very, very low level contacts in the 80 person Abu Sayyaf group that actually had kidnapped Evelyn. And so that ended up being a new lease on life and be able to work through this group.

When the exchange finally went down for a reasonable amount, they had no idea which group was behind all the negotiations. We had come across an Australian intelligence operative at a NICA safe house who had a tracker and logger device and was willing to lend those over, and we inserted them into electronics that they had requested as part of the ransom exchange. And this tracker and logger went with the Abu Sayyaf, and after we made the successful exchange, we had passed off that device to the Scout Rangers and the entire battalion hit them repeatedly over the next few months and basically destroyed this entire 80 person Abu Sayyaf group. And in three separate kill missions basically took out those three main leaders I was just mentioning, that we had failed to take out during Operation Ultimatum. So it was one of the faster recorded recoveries of a kidnap victim from the Abu Sayyaf, and from what I understand is considered one of the most successful missions against Abu Sayyaf afterwards as well.

So kind of an interesting, again, serendipity of how this all kind of plays out. And for me, it ended up giving me a minor bit of notoriety because as soon as I got back to Taiwan and all the media went crazy, nobody had known my existence being a secret nephew, West Pointer, American Special Forces officer of the sitting president of Taiwan. So it became huge national news overnight, and then ended up giving me a lot of profile that immediately allowed me to be much more navigable, I'd say, in business, and was able to just start meeting very powerful individuals that ended up funding Black Panda and now to the tune of $23 million US raised, and now we're one of the leading cybersecurity companies in Asia.

I love the Steve Jobs famous commencement speech in 2005 at Stanford where he talks about connecting the dots backwards and the importance of that as you look forward to your career. It's not about connecting the dots forward, but figuring out how you connect the dots backwards and making it all connect. Is that there's no right decisions ultimately. You just have to make it right afterwards. You make it work for you afterwards.

So it's all, when I look at this in my story is, again, the connecting the dots backwards. I look at it as all these odd events that have occurred not only from my US military background as a crisis responder, as a Special Forces to team leader, ground force commander, et cetera, but then also this private life kidnap and ransom crisis scenario that's led to the incarnation of Black Panda, which specializes in digital crisis response or cyber emergency response in cyber as well. So that's a long, convoluted story of basically how I've realized that my life has come around to being a career crisis response guy basically. Even though initially I just wanted to go to West Point because I thought it was cool.

Ken Harbaugh:

That was Captain Gene Yu. To hear the full story of how he saved Eveyln Chang, check out his book, The Second Shot, releasing on October 1st, 2024.

Thanks for listening to Warriors In Their Own Words. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We’re always looking to improve the show.

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Warriors In Their Own Words is a production of Evergreen Podcasts, in partnership with The Honor Project.

Our producer is Declan Rohrs. Brigid Coyne is our production director, and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our Audio Engineer.

Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.