Interview with Dillard Johnson

I got an email from Dillard Johnson today requesting that I call him so I did. We talked for a half hour or so about him and his book. So what we settled was that he probably didn’t kill 2700 people or whatever that number was. He says the number came from his little green notebook and tick marks that he made for weapons and bodies that he recovered between sand storms on the way to Iraq. He says the casualties probably came from work his platoon and his sister platoon did in the opening days of the Iraq War.

I told him that if I counted weapons that I found in the Gulf War as “kills” mine count probably would have been higher than his, because we found weapons from Kuwait all the way to the Euphrates. And he agreed that it probably wasn’t the best way to consider dead enemy.

Johnson blamed the publicist for putting the number on the cover of the book, he claims that the number isn’t in the book (I just bought the Kindle edition today, so I haven’t read it yet), but that it’s on the jacket and in the liner notes and was added after he read the review copy.

He went on to say that when he did the Fox & Friends interview, Brian Kilmeade was supposed to ask him about the numbers so he could explain that the numbers were a total for the whole troops not just him and his vehicle, but Kilmeade never asked the question.

I also asked him about the incident where he was tossed out of ANCOC for wearing an unauthorized CIB. He says that he spent some time as a infantryman and that he did earn a CIB. Johnson was supposed to send me a DD214 from which I could verify that, but I haven’t seen it yet. So, this is me waiting. I guess I’ll read the book while I’m waiting.

We also talked about the 7000 rounds of DU, and he admitted that maybe that wasn’t real accurate either. As a former Bradley commander, I know that would be almost impossible. That’s a lot of loading. If I remember correctly, the M2 Bradley only carried 900 rounds – 300 in the ready box and six hundred stowed in lower compartment. So, that’s a lot of resupply. Johnson told me that it was the number that he told technicians from Redstone Arsenal when they asked him about his cancer while he was at Walter Reed.

I advised him to stay away from numbers, because it catches people every time. Math isn’t a war story teller’s friend.

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