Heroes Behind Headlines

Shot down October 1965, Lt. Commander and naval aviator Porter Halyburton, who was part of Fighter Squadron 84, was helped by local villagers and then taken into custody by the North Vietnamese Army.  He was then imprisoned in the infamous Hanoi Hilton and moved to other prisons throughout North Vietnam.

Initially declared dead, Porter describes how he and his fellow POWs forged friendships and developed unique mental exercises to help them cope and survive the deprivation and torture during their years in prison. In 1973, after eight years in captivity, Porter was finally released. The day he left Vietnam he decided to forgive his captors. In his book “Reflections on Captivity” he shares his philosophy of forgiveness and rising above hate. He and wife continue to visit Vietnam.




Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Shot down October 1965, Lt. Commander and naval aviator Porter Halyburton, who was part of Fighter Squadron 84, was helped by local villagers and then taken into custody by the North Vietnamese Army.  He was then imprisoned in the infamous Hanoi Hilton and moved to other prisons throughout North Vietnam.

Initially declared dead, Porter describes how he and his fellow POWs forged friendships and developed unique mental exercises to help them cope and survive the deprivation and torture during their years in prison. In 1973, after eight years in captivity, Porter was finally released. The day he left Vietnam he decided to forgive his captors. In his book “Reflections on Captivity” he shares his philosophy of forgiveness and rising above hate. He and wife continue to visit Vietnam.


Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

While patrolling the waterways in Vietnam’s Mekong Delta as Operations Officer, Bill Retz nearly lost his life. Doctors advised him that his navy career was over yet—defying the odds after a difficult recovery—he ultimately rose to the rank of Rear Admiral. Among his commands were the destroyer USS Stump and the Naval War base at Pearl Harbor. As Destroyer Squadron commander he was closely involved in anti-submarine warfare and in early tests of the Tomahawk cruise missile system.




Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Heroes Behind Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

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 Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music 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 Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

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 Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

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.

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 Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

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 Headlines
Executive Producer Ralph Pezzullo
Produced & Engineered by Mike Dawson
Music provided by ExtremeMusic.com

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify