Harry Siegel, a veteran who did four tours of duty in the Vietnam War and rescued hundreds of POWs, joined Good Morning Keys on Keys Talk 96.9/102.5FM this morning on Veterans Day.
In addition to his service to our country, Harry also has a heartwarming story with one of our own, Michael Stapleford of Keys Talk radio.
Stapleford explained, “Harry and his lovely wife Wendy, had been residents of the Keys for a little while, and that’s where our paths did cross, a few years ago. There was a fateful phone call that I just innocently checked in on Harry see how he was doing, and I was then presented with the opportunity to give back to a veteran, which I am forever humbled by and grateful for, because since that time, I have gotten to know Harry better and gotten to hear some of his stories, of his background and what his military service entailed.”
Stapleford donated his kidney to help Siegel.
Siegel said he would like to “tell everyone why I am alive today to celebrate this Veterans Day. Michael, who’s on the other end of the line, who owns this radio station was kind enough and brave enough to donate a kidney to me. Because of my exposure to Agent Orange, I had stage five kidney failure and and my one kidney that I had, had only been working by itself for over 20 years was down to 7% and I was in dire straits. I had an opportunity to go to my Naval Academy football network, which is a brotherhood, and say I needed a kidney. Three people came forward instantly that I did not know, and none of them passed the physical. Then a casual conversation with Michael. He said, well, I could donate a kidney. I was like what blood type are you? And he said, I don’t know. And I said, how can you not know your blood type? But he found out, and anyway, to make a long story short, he did donate a kidney to me, and I’m alive today because of it. So my thanks and gratitude go to him.”
Stapleford said, “I thank you for mentioning that. But again, I’m going to turn the tables on you again, Harry, because really, I’m the one who’s humbled as I’ve gotten to know you better. I am very grateful for being put in the position of helping someone of your caliber. It is amazing what you have done for others over the years and we’re going to talk about that here on Veterans Day, because it is very relevant. I’m going to clarify the record because during that conversation, I distinctly remember you saying directly to me, will you give me a kidney? So when it does come up in conversation, I tell people, look, I was asked, and yes, I accepted. The first thing I heard in my head, admittedly on a personal note, was do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Then I thought, well, how would I feel if I was in Harry’s position? Then at that point, I said, I will try, and it all worked out. As fate would have it, apparently our kidney is doing its job. So that’s a good thing, but I appreciate you saying so. Again, I am humbled to be involved with you and to be a true friend and have this bond. Part of the reason that I am so in awe of you is your bravery and your service towards others, especially during the Vietnam War.”
How did Siegel get involved with the military?
He said, “For those of you out there who are listening that have either served, and if you did, thank you or are thinking about serving, I come from a small town in South Carolina named Anderson, which is not a small town anymore, but it used to be when I was a kid. I come from pretty humble beginnings, and my parents couldn’t afford to pay for college. They had a hard enough time paying for their own mortgage. So the only two ways I was going to get out of Anderson and not wind up working in the cotton mills was going to either be a sports scholarship or to go into the military. I kind of combined the two. I was recruited to play football for Navy, and I had really good grades in high school, and I had not taken the college board exam. The coach, Bill Elias, was the coach at Navy at the time, he came to my home and took my parents and I had to dinner, and he said you need to take the college board exam so we’ll know where to place you academically, so we don’t overload you or under load you. I thought, fine. When you’re young, you make mistakes, and I certainly made mine. I took the College Boards. The night before I took the makeup exam, I went to a party at a friend’s house, and like a young, dumb, 17 year old kid, took a bet about drinking a bunch of beer in less than an hour, and I did it, and I almost died from alcohol poisoning, and was really sick. So my friend called my mom and said, Harry’s not feeling too well. He’s going to hang up my house tonight. She said, fine, but make sure you get him to the school to take this makeup exam he promised. And in Anderson, South Carolina in 1967-68 timeframe, when you promised an adult something, you did it. He woke me up the next morning, and I looked like hell. I was dressed terribly. I had throw up all over my clothes, and I just didn’t know what to do. I cleaned up as best I could. He took me there. I took the exam, to shorten the story a tad, I did not do well on the makeup exam. And 12 days before I graduated high school, and I had turned down other football scholarship offers, and the coach flew down again, took my parents tonight to dinner and said, Harry, I have good news and bad news for you. My parents are eating their steaks. And he said, the bad news is you’re academically rejected from the Naval Academy. I said, why? And he said, well, you have great grades, but we’re not so sure how you got those grades, because in the south there’s three sports. There’s high school football, college football and professional football. I said, well, I earned my grades. He said, well, your college boards say you didn’t. I couldn’t really own up to telling him in front of my parents that I blew that personally. So I said, well, if that’s the bad news, what’s the good news? He said, the good news is, if you enlist in the Navy, go to boot camp, we’ll get you a set of orders to go to the Naval Academy prep school, and you’ll play junior college ball. It’ll be like getting red shirted. You won’t have any of your eligibility used up. Then we’ll teach you how to take a college board exam and and then you can get an appointment to the academy.”
So Siegel went to sign up.
He said, “I went to my local recruiter, and I said, I want to sign up. He was elated to make his quota. He said, what do you want to do? I said, well, I’m gonna go to the Naval Academy. And he said, sure, you are. I go to boot camp. I was the company commander in boot camp, and when I graduated, when I graduated I ended up on a different ship and then eventually I did get orders to the prep school, and I played football there, and I did pretty good. When I took my college board exams sober, I did quite well, and I got an appointment to the academy. So having been an enlisted man for a year, plus almost two years before I went to the Academy, I think made me a better officer. So I went to Annapolis. I played ball for Navy, and we were not a very good team, but we had a bunch of good people, and when I graduated from the academy, when you get ready to graduate from Annapolis, you have an overall class rank standing. It’s based on your academics, your athletics, and your evaluations from your seniors, your juniors and your peers, which I carried on into business when I had my own company. I had people evaluated by their juniors, by their seniors and by their peers, which I always thought was a great thing, because your peers really know who you are, and when you get ready to graduate in November, before you graduate, they they give you a number, and you go down in a line, and there’s detailers, people to give you orders down in a place called smoke hall, and you have blank orders, and you pick what you want that you’re qualified for, and they just paste it on your orders. When I went down, I said, which one of these ships is serving in Vietnam, and they showed me.
Siegel was the anti submarine warfare and gunnery officer on that ship.
He said, “After a year, I asked for a split tour, which up through the chain of command, they kind of laughed at me and said we don’t give split tours to ensigns. Just do your job. When it went to the commanding officer, he said, why do you want to leave my ship? I said, I love the ship. I’m just bored. We went into the shipyard in Philadelphia. We were in Philadelphia, and he said, well, and he wrote a special fitness report, which I was honored about, and had it hand carried to Washington, DC. He said, call your detailer at nine o’clock tomorrow morning, tell him where you want to go. So I called my detailer and said, okay, I understand you’ve got a special fitness report for me and that I’m supposed to tell you where I want to go. And he says, I don’t know if you’re really, really good, and he wants to give you what you want, or you’re really, really bad, and he wants to get you off his ship. I can’t tell. I said, well, I hope it means I’m really, really good. He said, okay, what do you want? I said, I want to command something. He just laughed at me. He said, ensigns don’t command anything. I said, okay, then make me an XO somewhere. He laughed again and said, ensigns aren’t XO’s anywhere. I said, then make me a chief engineer on a gunboat. And he goes, ding, ding, ding, I can do that.”
He became the chief engineer on the USS Grand Rapids patrol gunboat 98.
Siegel said, “I really enjoyed it. After my original first year, a little bit less, I asked to go special forces. And because I was an athlete and pretty big in size. I got picked up, but I got diverted from SEAL training to a program that was that was classified at the time, and it was based on work done by a government contractor. Towards the end of the Vietnam War, they gave them $3 million I understand, to a contractor to give them the requirements for people to do POW retrieval. And as you can imagine, I think I could have done it for 50 cents, but they got $3 million to do the study, and they said they needed to be able to jump, they needed to be able to do warrior work. They needed to be able to handle jungle warfare and a bunch of other things with weapons and whatever. But the key for me is it said they needed to be over six foot tall and weigh over 230 pounds, and I’m six three, and at the time, I was 260. You probably ask yourself, why would you need to be that big? The reason was, when you do POW retrieval, a lot of them are not ambulatory, and you need to carry them. As tough as a 160 pound SEAL is, they have a hard time carrying an 80 pound rucksack, a weapon, and 150 pound person, five miles to a pickup point, because they’ve doubled their weight on top of them. So I got put in this program that was bizarre. It was a program called JAWS. It was Just Add Water Special Forces. At the time, Congress thought we were spending too much money on training a lot of our rangers and our seals and our special operations people in the Air Force and the Marine Corps, and they thought maybe we could do it cheaper, better, faster. Well, I can tell you they did it cheaper and faster, but I certainly don’t think they did it better. I was given six weeks worth of training and sent to Vietnam to run a POW retrieval team and we did not go to major facilities, but we used Marine Corps recon teams and others to find work camps towards the end of the war, and then when they found a work camp where they were using free labor from the POWs, we were sent in to retrieve and I don’t know that I really want to go into detail of what we did, but I think even Jane Fonda would have liked what we did. She probably just wouldn’t have liked how we did it.”
How many missions did Siegel complete?
He said, “We brought back 273 POWs over two years, and in the wind down of the war, we left about three months before everybody left in ‘75 and I would say, we averaged maybe two or three, so probably 80 missions.”
How many men were on the team under his command?
Siegel said, “We had a seven man team, and then we had two guys that were from the agency. We called them Frick and Frack. When I when I went in and checked in to get the service jackets for my team members, I was missing two jackets, and I said to my boss, who was an Air Force colonel, where’s the other two? He said, you’re not cleared to know who they are. I said, why would I take someone on a mission that I don’t know who they are. And he said, trust me, they’re every bit as qualified, if not more qualified than every man on your team. We used to kind of laugh about it when we got to know him, they became really good guys. But in 1975, they were making, like, over $100,000 a year. As a lieutenant JG in the Navy, then a lieutenant with combat pay, I think I was making like $28,000 a year. When we found out how much money they were making, because they were just kind of were bragging about it, we made them buy the drinks every time we went somewhere, because the could, and they were good guys, they did do their job. I was not able to know why they thought they would be on the team, but we used to laugh and say, if we ever got caught, then their job was to take us out because we weren’t supposed to be there. But I don’t think they would have done that because we became brothers.”
This group was walking into hostile territory.
Siegel said, “They were using POWs to put new thatched roofs on facilities and working in rice fields and these guys were really in bad shape. Basically when we got there, we we would see what kind of intel we could gather. We would give first aid to our POWs. I had a corpsman that was really good. And everybody calls their corpsman Doc. And he was pretty amazing. And and then the ones that could walk, walked with us, and the ones that weren’t, we carried. It definitely was a job that I cherished. Once I left Vietnam, I asked the Navy to send me to graduate school. They they said, we don’t spend money on special operators to go to graduate school. And I said, fine. Then I quit. And they were like, well, no, you can’t quit. I was like, yeah, I’ve paid back for my four years at the Naval Academy. I should be free and clear. I should be able to walk away when I want. So they basically said, okay, we’ll let you go to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and we want you to get a master’s degree in mechanical engineering. And I said, I don’t want a degree in mechanical engineering. And they said, well, yeah, you’ll learn how to basically, blow up buildings and bridges. And I said, I already know how to blow up a building and a bridge. And they said, what do you want? And I said, I want a master’s degree in computer science. And I had taken computer classes at the Academy, and it really clicked with me, for whatever reason. So they finally said, okay, and I did get my master’s degree in 1978 from the Naval Postgraduate School in in Monterey, was actually one of the first 32 people, I guess, in the country to get a master’s degree in computer science, because it was such a new field.”
The Navy wanted to send him to the Pentagon to do mission planning for teams in the field.
Siegel pointed out, “I said, you’ve spent all this money for me to get my master’s degree. Let me use it. Eventually, long story short, they said, well, if we send you to DC as a lieutenant, which is what I was, they said, then you’ll get treated like dirt. And I said, fine, send me. So they sent me to the Bureau of Naval Personnel, which changed its name to the Navy Military Personnel Command, and I went there to be, it’s silly. I went there to sit at a computer terminal, and if the Pacific Fleet Commander was looking for a three legged, one eyed bosons mate with a wife that spoke Spanish, I was supposed to query the personnel database and find them. So I checked in with this commander, who ran the data center for the Bureau of Naval Personnel, and he looked at my record and said, my God, you’ve been a chief engineer and all this experience. He said, how would you like to be the maintenance officer for the data center? And I said, that’d be great. I’d love it. And he said, get your family squared away and come back tomorrow, and I’ll let you meet the captain. I said, fine. I went in to see the captain the next day, and he looked at my record, and he said, wow. How would you like to relieve that fat commander and run my data center? I thought, well, this is a setup. I don’t know what he’s trying to do, but I said, okay, if you want me to run the data center, which I’d love to do, I’m sure you’ve got something more important for the commander to do. And he said, yeah, I’ll let him run software. So I relieved the commander, ran the data center for three years, and was able to actually get an award from then President Carter for saving the Navy about $45 million a year in supplies for data centers. I got all of the data centers in Washington, DC together, and we ordered all our supplies together in bulk. That was kind of cool, and that was fun. Then my ex wife, who was my wife at the time, it was time for me to go back in the field, said she didn’t want to be alone anymore and didn’t want me to go so I resigned my commission and went into industry.”
The SDVOSB program can benefit veterans.
Siegel said, “On the 16th of December 2003, then President George W. Bush signed a law, public law 106 the said, if you’re a service connected disabled veteran, injured in the line of duty, and I have eight and a half pounds of titanium steel holding me together with artificial knees and artificial hips. I’m missing a kidney and adrenal gland, a gallbladder, and have a stent in my heart and other stuff. So I’ve kind of been road hard and put away wet. My wife at the time, my wife now, who I’ve been married to for 32 years, who’s a wonderful woman, kept telling me, start your own company. I would say what’s my advantage? If I was just a minority of some sort, it would be like shooting fish in a barrel. So this law came out, and she said, what’s your excuse now, and I said, I don’t have one. So I started HMS Technologies in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and in the SDVOB program, you wind up competing against other service disabled veterans. They have contracts set aside and they decide they wanted to spend 3% of the federal budget with service disabled veteran owned firms. I was blessed to have a great team. We won a lot of awards. We were the first ever service disabled veteran owned small business of the year from the Department of Defense. Then I was able to be the Entrepreneur of the Year and Small Business Person of the Year in West Virginia and then in the region. I had some amazing people. I had 60% of my employees were veterans. We had over 5,000 employees when we were done, and we were living in California because my wife and I have a young son who was a film star in Hollywood, and is still an amazing kid and he’s done three careers already, and he’s only 25 years old. He’s amazing. But I got ready to sell the company, and I said to my wife, we need to get out of California before we sell this company, or the state of California is going to take 13% for doing nothing for the company. So she was raised in Florida, in Cocoa Beach, and loved the ocean and loved Key West, and said, let’s go to Key West. So we flew down, found a beautiful place on four and a half acres on the ocean. We loved it there. It was beautiful. We lived there for about four years, and then we just realized that I kind of missed the changes seasons, and we sold our property in Key West, and we moved to Georgia, which actually I wound up about one hour from my hometown in South Carolina. And we love it here, and I just feel super blessed to be where we are and be retired and have a good life.”
Siegel also mentored up and coming entrepreneurs in terms of discussing how to start a business.
He said, “A lot of the kids coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan had heard about the program, and they would call me and come to my office in Martinsburg, West Virginia, and say, okay, how do I do this? I would sit down with them, and I would say, okay, number one, are you a technical genius? And they would go, well, no, I’m a leader. All military people think they’re leaders. I said, okay, are you a financial genius? They go, well, not really. I said can you sell? They’re like, oh, no, I never sold anything in my life. And I said, well, you’re going to need to hire all those people to run a company, I suggest you go into a company and become efficient in one of those areas, one of those fields. I talked to probably 50 or 60 and 23 of them actually got to be CEOs. One funny thing I’ll mention, this one guy, he came to me, and he goes, well, would you invest in my company? And I said, well, number one, you don’t have a company. Number two, tell me why I would invest in your company. And he said, because you’re a brother, you’re a fellow veteran. I said, well, how much money are you going to put in to the company? And he goes, well, I don’t want to spend my own money. I just want to get other investors to give me their money. I said, if you’re not willing to invest your own money, why would anybody else be willing to invest in you? So a lot of people got the wrong idea of how you start a company. I will say that when I started HMS Technologies, I had a choice to either be an S corp or an LLC or a C Corp, and I chose to be a C Corp. At times it was an advantage. At times it wasn’t. But the advantage was larger companies had the ability or had the desire to work with the C Corp, because you’re a real corporation with a board of directors, and the money doesn’t go through your personal bank account. Everything is separate. And so that stood us in good stead when we actually sold the company.”
Stapleford said, “When you and I first had our discussion on the phone about a year and a half, two years ago, I did not know you well at all, but I have come to know you, and each time we speak and spend time together, I admire you that much more. So thank you so much for visiting with us today.”
Siegel said, “Thank you and God bless you and your family and your people in your radio station and all the veterans out there. Happy Veterans Day.”