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Robinson, Michael
Grand Valley State University
Veterans History Project Interview
Name of War: Vietnam War
Interviewee’s Name: Michael Robinson
Length of Interview: (1:55:33)
Interviewed by: James Smither
Transcribed by: Chelsea Chandler
Interviewer: “Okay, Mike, begin with some background on yourself, and to start with,
where and when were you born?”
I was born in Grand Haven, Michigan on September 17th, 1947 at North Ottawa Community
Hospital.
Interviewer: “Okay, and was your family living in Grand Haven or somewhere else?”
They just moved to Grand Haven. They were—lived in Chicago until just before I moved, and
then when they moved, it probably helped things along. And I was born.
Interviewer: “All right. Now did you grow up in Grand Haven, or did you move around?”
Until I was—about the sixth grade, and then we moved to Saginaw because my father got a
better job.
Interviewer: “Okay, and what kind of work was your father doing?”
He was a salesman for Construction Aggregates, which is a stone and gravel company, and he
ended up doing it over on the other side of the state. And I don’t remember the name of that.
(1:02)
Interviewer: “All right, and then did you finish high school?”
Yes, I did.
Interviewer: “And what year did you graduate?”
‘66.
Interviewer: “Okay, and what did you do after you got out of high school?”
Dodged the draft and went to Delta College for a year in Saginaw.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. At this point how much do you know about Vietnam?”
�Robinson, Michael
What’s sitting in front of you. I was on a boat, and they told me, “Hey. We’re going in the
Army.” And I—
Interviewer: “Well, no, but the point when you’re—Before—We’re still at the point in your
story where you haven’t gone in the military yet, but you said you were dodging the draft
and going to Delta College for a year. So, I mean—”
Yes, I understand what you’re saying now. I had an older brother, Steve, that was in Vietnam in
1965, and he had gone through ROTC in the—for the Air Force. And he got orders to go over
there, so when I was still in high school, he was over there. And he used to let us know what was
going on a little bit. And he was so close to the fighting and all that. (2:05)
Interviewer: “Okay, so your impression was that would be good to stay out of?”
Yeah, it sure was. It was a very good impression to stay the heck—That’s why I tried to go to
the—I was not a very good student, so I went to Delta College for a year. And it wasn’t good for
me.
Interviewer: “Okay, so basically you leave school, and once you leave school, you don’t
have a draft deferment.”
Correct.
Interviewer: “All right, and then did you get a draft notice?”
Yes, I did.
Interviewer: “Okay, and what did you do once you got that notice?”
I thought about it, and I said, “Jeez. Two years in the Army on the ground in Vietnam, or I could
be four years Navy on a ship five miles off shore. I think I’m going in the Navy.” And, of course,
that’s not what happened.
Interviewer: “All right. Do you remember what time of year it was that you went in?”
It was after—It was probably mid-summer or late summer or early fall or something like that.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right, so it’s sort of after the spring term or whatever at the
college, and you’re out, and…”
And now they found out about it. They says, “Ah.”
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Now when you went to sign up for the Navy, what kinds—
What did the recruiter tell you you could expect, or…?”
�Robinson, Michael
Yeah, he says, “Make out a list of ten things you want to do in the Navy since you’re going in for
four years.” And so—“You have to give at least ten.” So I started listing—And I love
photography, so I said, “I want to be a Photographer’s Mate.” And so I listed that up front, and
he said, “No, you’ve got to keep going until you get all ten of them filled out.” Well, the last
thing I could come up with was a Gunner’s Mate. You know, what he did—Went, “Ah, you’re
going to be a Gunner’s Mate.” So that’s how I became into weapons.
Interviewer: “All right. Now did you go through a physical, or had you done that already
before the draft, or…?”
No, I—When I went in the Navy, they sent me to a physical. I did my boot camp in Great Lakes,
Illinois.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now what did the boot camp consist of?” (4:09)
Just normal drill, and first they knock you down to nothing and make you feel like dirt. And then
they build you back up to be a military person. You know, that type of thing.
Interviewer: “All right. Well, what kinds of things do they do to knock you down?”
Made us—An awful lot of marching and physical—Lot of physical stuff and lot of training,
schooling, and, of course, drills and that kind of stuff.
Interviewer: “Okay. Was there stuff on just how to keep your uniform and your—”
Yes, we had to learn—Well, I—Yes, that was solely part of it that I had already learned how to
take care of myself and keep, you know, my clothes clean and all that. I had a very good mother,
and she taught us how to—You do your own dishes, you do your own clothes, and all that stuff,
so that helped me because I wasn’t starting from scratch like a lot of these people were doing.
And it was easy for me to take care of myself.
Interviewer: “All right. What kind of people were you training alongside? Do you have any
sense of what their backgrounds were?”
Yeah, there was two different styles. One was a—I want to say he was a New Yorker—city of
New Yorker—and he’s a, you know, gang, cool, badass. You know, he knows toughness, and
another one—The other one was a guy from Tennessee Hills. Real hillbilly. Literally a hillbilly,
and he—He wasn’t going to know how to keep himself clean and stuff like that, and then the city
guy—He was very hard on him, and he was going to teach the little Tennessee—Little guy. He’s
a tiny guy. (6:02) He’s going to teach him a lesson. He’s going to take him into the—what we
call the drying room where you wash your own clothes, and you hang them up and dry them in
this drying out room. And he’s going to take him and going to kick his ass and make him clean
up because we get demerited more. And he went in there, smacking his hand in his fist. He’s
going to kick this little, Tennessee boy’s ass. Well, about less than three or four minutes later, the
little, teeny, Tennessee guy came over and was hitting him in his face, and we all kind of
�Robinson, Michael
watched him walk away. And he—Nothing. Absolutely nothing. About ten minutes later, he, you
know—The old, New York, tough, badass guy comes in all bloodied and beat up, and—But—
Interviewer: “Well, did the guy from Tennessee learn to clean up?”
No, he ended up getting out because they—They put him in a—what they called a mouse house.
Was trying to get him to do that. He never learned, and he ended up getting out, you know.
Interviewer: “All right. Now—And how long was the boot camp part do you think?”
I really don’t know. I want to say at least three months or more. Something like that.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. I guess the Army was eight weeks fairly consistently by then,
but the Navy could do things their own way.”
Oh, no, maybe it was less because I don’t really remember for sure.
Interviewer: “Well, it could have been twelve weeks.”
It seemed like forever for me.
Interviewer: “Yeah. All right. Now did you understand what they were doing at the time—
this idea of breaking you down and building you up—or did you just figure that out later?”
Oh, I kind of knew about that because I could say I had an older brother that was in the Air
Force, and he went through ROTC in college. And he went through some of this, and then we
kind of, you know—We would watch [?] and everything, so I kind of knew what they were
doing. And I was always going to be the best I could be, so I didn’t get picked on. The more
you—The more you didn’t abide by the rules, the more they made you. And so I kind of just
said, “Hey. I think I’ll just do the right thing from the very beginning and kind of stay the hell
out of everybody’s way.” (8:12)
Interviewer: “Okay. Yeah, that seems to be a good approach. All right, so once you finish
that, now what do they do with you?”
I went to weapons school. It was a big—Big weapons like five-inch .54s and all that kind of—
gyros, how to operate the—Do maintenance on the big ships. When they roll, the guns stay
stable, and our job was to fix and repair all that kind of stuff.
Interviewer: “Okay, and where were you doing the gunnery school?”
In Great Lakes.
Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re staying at Great Lakes. Now are you actually going out onto
ships now, or is this still on shore?”
�Robinson, Michael
Just on shore. Yeah, we didn’t go on any ships until after we’re all done.
Interviewer: “All right. Now are you really firing any of the guns, or were you just working
with the gyros and the stabilization?”
Yeah, that kind of stuff. We didn’t do any firing while we’re on there. They just teach us how to
fix things.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now while you’re there, do you get to go off the base at all?”
Yes, we did. We did a little bit of partying. Yeah, and we tried to, you know, do the best we
could to stay in one piece. Terrorizing the world.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Well, did you go into Chicago or just stay at near the base?”
I had some relatives that lived in Chicago, so on weekends I got to go to their house. And so that
was kind of a really big thing to have home cooking and sleep in a real bed and that kind of stuff.
But most of it was on base, but every once in a while I’d get a weekend where I got to—And I’d
even come home some weekends. I was still doing—Back to—I was back to Saginaw.
Interviewer: “Okay, and now do you have a recollection of when it was that you finished
the gunnery school? Was it still ‘67 at this point? Before Christmas, or…?”
I really don’t know. No, I do not know exactly when it happened, but—
Interviewer: “Do you remember where you spent Christmas in ‘67?” (10:13)
I may have been able to go home.
Interviewer: “It’s possible. Okay. All right, so after gunnery school, what’s the next step
for you?”
Well, they sent us out into the fleet, and I was on a ship that wasn’t even—It was in dry dock,
and so I didn’t really get out in the sea when I was stationed to it. And then they quickly sent me
on a different ship. It was an ocean-going minesweeper, and I was told once you get on those,
you don’t get to get off. And I’m thinking, “Damn. That’s great because I don’t want to go to
Vietnam.” Because, like I say, it was going on pretty good then, and so when I got orders for
there, I was very, very happy.
Interviewer: “All right. Where was that ship based?”
I think it was Charleston, South Carolina. I’m not sure, but I think so.
Interviewer: “Okay, and did you actually get to serve on that ship for a while?”
�Robinson, Michael
Yes, yes, and I was very happy. And I ended up being the ship’s diver because they pull
probably almost a quarter mile to a—Maybe it is a mile. I don’t know. A very long line of cable.
What they do is they—The minesweeper is made out of wood, so they send down the signals and
find the mines. And then the cable comes along, and they’ve got cutters on them. They cut them
loose, and then they pop up to the surface. We had twenty millimeter cannons on there and one
single, and when they expose these tops—pop up to the surface—we would shoot them and blow
them up. But they—This was all mock back then, and they would float a fifty-five gallon drum
half full of diesel fuel. And you have to try and hit this with this cannon, which was almost
impossible, but we…
Interviewer: “So what does the diver do?” (12:04)
Well, this is why—how I became—Divers are new commanding officer on board. Stopped.
Well, the cable doesn’t. It’s still coming forward, and it wrapped around our screws. So we were
out there for about three days. Dead water. We couldn’t even go—Getting them into the wake.
We had—We got sideways, and we—Because we couldn’t turn on the screws or anything, so we
had to have divers come out and cut the cables off the screws so we could get back in. And they
says, “Oh, we’ve got to have somebody on board.” And I was a very good swimmer from Grand
Haven. “Yeah, I’ll be—” You know. That was another—Don’t volunteer, okay? So that’s—I
went to school for that and did some training basically. We never ran into that problem again, so
I didn’t really—I went to a lot of training in the rivers.
Interviewer: “And was this still near Charleston where you were doing that?”
Yeah, I think so. Yeah, because we were in the river so filthy, dirty you couldn’t see your hand
in front of your face, and so I was—Well, we went down—We were supposed to go down and
feel around the screws and see if there was anything around them. Well, it was kind of a weird
feeling being pitch-black. And so I did it, but thank god we never came across that.
Interviewer: “At least if you were out in open ocean, you might be able to see through
water.”
I was hoping that. Yeah.
Interviewer: “All right. About how long did you wind up staying on the minesweeper?”
Supposed to have been forever, and it wasn’t. But I think it was more like—I want to say maybe
six months or so. I don’t really know, but I know my officer coming out there so happy. He said,
“You’ve got new orders for Vietnam.” And I said, “Kiss my ass.”
Interviewer: “All right, so I think we’re getting into 1968 now at this point if you’re there
that amount of time.” (14:01)
Yeah, latter part of—Yeah, yeah, ‘68. Early part of ‘68.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay, because you get to Vietnam at the end of ‘68, so okay. Now a lot of
stuff was going on in ‘68. I mean, you had—I mean, the Tet Offensive went on early in the
year, and then Johnson decides not to run. And then Martin Luther King gets assassinated,
and eventually Bobby Kennedy gets assassinated. Did any of that stuff get noticed where
you were?”
I can’t remember right now, but I’m sure it did have some effect on our orders and stuff. But I
can’t really remember a whole lot.
Interviewer: “Okay. Yeah, but it’s just not something that stands out in your memory
because you’re focusing on what you’re doing on the ship at that point.”
Yeah, well, I was on the minesweeper. Something must have happened to ramp up the war. We
didn’t know about this. I was a very low rank person that—I think things had gotten a little more
heated, so when they had to ramp up more—
Interviewer: “Okay. Well, I mean, I think some of it kind of is indicated by the nature of
your story and what comes next. So you get orders. You’re going to go to Vietnam, but you
don’t go straight to Vietnam.”
No.
Interviewer: “Where do you go next?”
Coronado, California is where the West Coast Swift Boats was doing all their training. Well, we
went there. There was ten crews of five apiece or six apiece—six people on each boat—and
they’ve got ten of us groups like that. And then we all trained together, and we learned—The
boat—Because it’s so small—Only fifty foot long. And you can go like this, and two guys can
touch at the sides. It’s pretty narrow. That we had to learn everybody else’s job. (16:02) That’s
why it took us so long because you had to learn the radars, the radios, the engines, the weapons
system, helmsman, how to take care of stuff. And that’s why it took so long.
Interviewer: “Okay, so how many months was that?”
I want to say it was—Months. I want to say—Seems like it was like three months to me. I don’t
remember.
Interviewer: “Yeah, that’s quite likely. I mean, the right chronology. ”
Yeah, because it was a long time, and then I was so happy. Because we had to also go through
survival training where we had to learn how to survive if we got separated from the boat.
Interviewer: “Okay, and what did that consist of?”
That was pretty hell. We went up to would be [?] up in state of Washington, and the first part of
the week—you’re there for a whole week—they don’t feed you. You only—Whatever you’ve
�Robinson, Michael
got to eat is what you forage, and they teach you how to dig—In low tide how to dig snails or
clams or whatever the hell you dig, and I didn’t—And you always had to be doing—Like in a
scenario where you’re—You’ve got to be careful, so you only got to go out there at night in low
tide. And we would dig—If we got our bucket full—And it was probably about eight inches tall
and about six inches in diameter. If we got that full for our group, which is like twelve, fourteen
of us, then we could keep digging because they gave us a time period. And you can eat whatever
you can get from then on, and, of course, I don’t like seafood, so—But I tried it because you get
pretty hungry, and I couldn’t do it. You know, I—And they—That’s what they did, and then,
after a while, they’d teach you how to do snares. How to catch rabbits and stuff like that, and so
basically—And then, of course, they did how to—If you’re walking down a trail, how to get—
You know, if you come up across a VC, how to shoot because you—Right there, all of a sudden,
this big thing pops up. It’s supposed to be a VC jumped up in front of you, and you’re supposed
to know what to do. (18:14) And you shoot the first one low, so you can see where it hit. And
then you bring it up to the height of the target. So that you do boom, boom! Two quick shots, and
you only get two shots. So you’ve got to hit it supposedly, and we did that. That was quite an
experience, and then after that they—We learned how to do all that, and then they decided that,
“Okay. You’ve got to go through a capture stage.” And they gave us a compass and a map and
says, “You’ve got to go to Point A to Point B, and you’ve got so much time to do that. And
there’s so many of you.” I don’t know how many it was—like maybe four or something like
that—and you’re supposed to make that point. If you make it to that point and don’t get captured,
then you went to the next point. And you keep—One thing, learn how to use a compass
obviously, and that we did very well. In fact, I’m kind of a country boy living up in Grand Haven
and stuff, and we lived on an old farm. And so we—I knew how to play in the woods, so to
speak, and so I could spot movement. So I knew when to get the hell down and stop and freeze
and all that, and so we made it all the way through. And most people didn’t. Most groups didn’t,
and after you get all done, we say, “Well, we made it.” And they say, “Yeah. Come on. You’re
camping.” They put us in concentration camps anyways just to give us—For the experience of
being in a—In that scenario of being captured, and then they start doing a lot of things to you,
trying to break you mentally. And, of course, they beat you up and propaganda, and one of the
things that I—I have two things I have problems with: small spaces and drowning. (20:06) And
that’s—Of course, that’s the thing they work on, of course. “Oh, you’re in the Navy. In Vietnam,
there’s water, so…” And they would take you and put you in this box about maybe this wide and
just wide enough for your shoulders but just long enough to where you had to—You know, on
your hands and knees type thing, and then they’d push the top down until you’re down and right
against your—Your face against the floor almost, and then they lock it. And they leave you
there, and it really works on your mind. And I played golf in my head to keep me busy, and
when I got out, I was a little bit—Probably a little bit screwed up, but I didn’t—They, of
course—They’d say, “Who’s your commanding officer?” And they’d keep slapping you around
a lot and trying to get you to give your—The name of your commanding officer, and I was so
freaking scared I couldn’t remember his name anyway. And then they kept—They did that for a
while and then put us in classes again—the propaganda classes—and if you didn’t pay attention,
they grabbed a—Of course, I’m trying to always resist type of thing, and I was not being
cooperative. He grabbed me by my hair and pulled me out of the room and put a gun to my head
and pulled the trigger a couple of times. And I knew that they—God, they’re not going to kill us,
so I kind of half-ass believed that they weren’t going to kill me. But you kind of get weird, and
then they—That didn’t do it for them, so they put me in a—You know what a fifty-five gallon
�Robinson, Michael
drum is. You know how tall they are. (22:09) What they did is they welded them—A whole
bunch of—Like four of them together so that you’ve got a big, long tube you’re in, and they set
the end of the tube—One on the ground and one on a board, and then they shove you down there
headfirst. And it’s full of water, and it’s just going over the edge. That way it’s staying flat or
almost flat, and you’re standing up. And you can’t get up and high enough to get out of the
water, and they wait until you—your last burst of air. And they bring you back down, haul you
out, and, of course, you—
Interviewer: “Okay. Now it seems like an awful lot of production for somebody who’s
going to be an enlisted man on a Swift Boat in terms of—Why are they doing all of this
stuff to you?”
Because we’re going to be in the area where we’re going to get—Maybe get captured.
Interviewer: “That’s possible.”
Yeah, very possible. Yeah, and so that was one of their reasons for this was to see what we could
take, and I think that was a separation point. Because when we got back from there, they said,
“Well, a lot of people got—didn’t—I mean, we’ve got too many crews over there, so we’re
going to send you all back to the fleet.” And I think that was when they were—The ones that
didn’t make—Because they made us go into a concentration camp where they made you pick up
boulders and move them to this pile, and then, “No. Move them back over here.” You know, and
they broke you. They did everything they could to break you. They got a lot of people that did
break, and they were up there on the walls acting like a chicken and everything. I mean, there
were some people that really broke bad, and it was—I think that’s what they were doing. They’re
weeding out the ones that couldn’t make it, and so when we got back down to…(24:06)
Interviewer: “Coronado?”
Yeah, Coronado. Thank you. Going crazy. And that’s when they told us we’re going to go back
to the fleet, and I was so happy. And a lot of them did, and there was one more group left that
was my group. Five or six guys. And I says, “Hey. Where’s our orders? You gave everybody
else orders. Where the hell’s ours?” And he looked down in his office—I was about to go to the
office to get my new orders, and he pulled out my papers and handed them to me. It’s the same
ones, and he said, “You’ve got a week. Get your—Get everything in order.” And so I called my
mom, and I says, “Hey. I’m going after all.” You know, and, boy, she was so goddamn mad at
the Navy that—But then went out and got shit-faced drunk, and I was just not—Just about ready
to turn twenty-one, so that was in September, and we went off base and got drunker than a
skunk. And I ended up in jail somewhere.
Interviewer: “All right. Now this is—Coronado’s by San Diego, right?”
Yes.
Interviewer: “Yeah. Okay, and in general how do the locals seem to view the sailors?”
�Robinson, Michael
Not very well, not very well. They didn’t like them, and probably—Because we were probably
kind of rowdy, and I don’t blame them because we were stupid. But anyways, I got thrown in jail
for I don’t know exactly what, but I know we were drinking because I—Yeah, and they couldn’t
get out of me who I got my alcohol from, and I kept saying, “Just a minute.” And I’d throw up,
and then they did it. Asked me again. I says, “Just a minute.” And they were probably thinking,
“Okay. He ain’t going to talk,” and so they—That’s when they kept me overnight and sent me
back the next day, and...
Interviewer: “All right. So now how do they get you to Vietnam?” (26:01)
They flew us after they gave us ten billion shots. You know, they filled our arms full of shots, so
they walk you down a line with these guns that shoot into you. They’re not needles. They
actually shoot a stream of medicine into you, and after I don’t know how many shots, then they
put us on an airplane. And we got to California—Not California. To Hawaii, and they knocked
us off the planes to get more shots. And that’s all I thought of Hawaii was get off the airport, go
through a line, and get back on, and they shipped us off to Vietnam.
Interviewer: “Okay, and where did you land in Vietnam?”
I think Cam Ranh Bay.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. What was your first impression of Vietnam when you got
there?”
That was a stable part of the country with that being the Air Force base there and all that, so I’m
just kind of like, “Wow.” You know. Not until the day—Flew us down to Cat Lo Coastal
Division 13, and then it was getting a little tighter. And, like I say, I came on base, and I had my
duffel bag and all this stuff. I handed it, and he’s, “Oh, come on, come on, come on.” They took
me down to the pier, and that boat—The picture of the boat with a big rock in it. He says,
“That’s your boat.” And, “Holy shit.” And, of course, I didn’t have to go on that one because it
was pretty bad up.
Interviewer: “So the boat that you were supposed to go on had just been shot up.”
Yeah, he got knocked out the night before.
Interviewer: “All right. Now are you joining an existing crew as the new guy, or what’s
happening?”
Yes, so one person—You know, we went over there as a crew, but they only allow one new guy
on a boat at a time because they don’t know how you’re going to react to—Especially as the
gunner’s mate, I couldn’t be on the main guns because they didn’t know if I would freeze on
them, and so—And that was every—Everybody did the same thing. They did it to all of us. We
all went on a different boat, and…
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “All right. Just describe a little bit what a Swift Boat is like. You said it’s fifty
feet long, it’s pretty narrow at the beam, and what’s it for?” (28:14)
It’s a river patrol boat. Further up north as you go—Because I was always down in the delta area,
but up north—the DMZ—they actually patrolled the ocean a little bit, too. And that’s when the
North Vietnamese didn’t have aircraft, and they could come over the ocean and knock out them.
So they were in pretty bad shape, too, but we just ran the rivers. We didn’t go out in the ocean.
The only time we ever went out on the ocean is when we did a one-day patrol, and I was
supposed to guard the bases. It was a day off basically. You just tuck around the base, and we
would go out to the ocean. And right there—That was, you know, in country in our place it was a
pretty safe patrol to have. I can’t remember. I think it was Vũng Tàu.
Interviewer: “Vũng Tàu, and, well, that would fit the description. Yeah.”
Yeah, I think it was Vũng Tàu, and so we went out—You know, we went out on the beaches
partying all the time, so it wasn’t really a patrol, even though we had to go back in behind them.
But, I mean, that was all friendly.
Interviewer: “Okay, but did you go into the ocean to get from the estuary or one river to
another? Kind of in and out of the rivers and the delta?”
Yes, every one of them. We would leave the Saigon Basin or whatever it was, and we would
travel along the ocean just to get to our patrol river.
Interviewer: “Right. Okay, and as a gunner’s mate, what’s your job?”
I was fore gunner in the main defense and destruction. Both. We—I sat up high—real high—so I
could really see what was going on, and I was the main defense and the main destruction.
(30:06)
Interviewer: “Okay, and what kind of weapon did you have?”
I had—Beginning I just had two twelve—No two twelve. Two .50 caliber machine guns, and as I
realized when we would do search and rescue missions—not rescue, but search—that my .50s
could not—Were useless because I couldn’t get the guns down too far, so I ended up carrying an
M16 behind me and M79 grenade launcher. And so when we pulled up alongside a sampan, I
would take my M16 down, and they would—A lot of times they would pull me out of there
completely and go down and do the search because I was useless up there with the big, big guns
anyway. So they said, “Well, you do the search, and thanks a lot, buddy.” And so I did a lot of
the climbing through the sampans and checking for stuff.
Interviewer: “All right. What was your main base?”
Cat Lo.
Interviewer: “All right, and describe what that facility looked like.”
�Robinson, Michael
The big flotation of piers, and they had barracks there, commissaries, hospital type places, and a
big, big warehouse for food because we would have to—When you go on patrol, if you went on
a—like a—two and three-day patrols, we would get allotment to have food because we cooked
our own foods on board while we were out. And so we had places like that and mess halls and
places to drink.
Interviewer: “Okay, and how much time would you actually spend at the base?”
We would go on a one-day patrol. Then they have a day off. Then we’d go on a two-day patrol
and have a day off. Then a three-day patrol and have a day off, and so…
Interviewer: “All right, and what do you do during the day off?”
A little bit of drinking. Sleeping. Oh, lord, a little bit of drinking. Quite a bit of drinking,
sleeping, and have our own bed and all that kind of stuff, so it was kind of nice. You had your
own locker, and you had, you know, barracks. It was kind of nice. It was very well—nice—I
mean, showers, and that was nice because we didn’t use the showers on more of the boats. We
had to just jump in the river, and so…(32:20)
Interviewer: “All right. Let’s see. Now did you have to stay on the base?”
No, it’s supposedly all friendly around the base, so a lot of people went out. And I know I—One
of my favorite foods was—They made french fries using pure butter, and that tasted so good.
And so—Of course, it’s like five bucks for a little packet of french fries, but they’d have little—
Vietnamese would have a bunch of little stores and stuff to buy and get in trouble in. You know,
women and things to buy and places to eat and—But at night we were all supposed to be back
inside.
Interviewer: “And were there ever problems with Viet Cong in the village?”
Yeah, we—Normally, not individually, but one time we were all on base and I was sleeping on
my rack, which the house—Or what do you call that? Barracks. Our barracks was long, and mine
happened to be way up front by the showers—my bunk—and we heard a mortar leave a—Mortar
round. You hear that boop that goes off, and, “Boom!” It hit pretty damn close. I said, “Jesus
Christ, you idiots. You’re almost hitting us.” Well, it wasn’t us shooting. It was them shooting at
us, and they hit our barrack for that—Our back end, and all the people back there were on
patrols. (34:03) So nobody got hurt. The building got damaged, but nobody got hit. And the
officer in charge of our base security—Yeah, I seen him in the bunkers and stuff like that and the
sandbag area, and he says they— “We know where they’re coming from, and they’re right there.
Can we shoot them?” And he says, “Oh, that’s all friendly over there.” And, “No. No, it’s not.”
You know. “It’s not all friendly over there.” And we never—They never shot back. They weren’t
allowed to, and we went out on—Got on the boats. The duty boat. We’d get on this boat and go
behind that area, so—To try and cut them off, and we never did find the people that did it. And—
But they never did that again, so, you know…
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay. Did they just fire a couple of rounds and leave, or…?”
About six. Yeah, six mortars and left, I guess. I mean, because, I mean, we never found anything.
Interviewer: “All right, but there weren’t cases of people going into the village and having
trouble with the VC or things like that?”
No, no, it—We—Supposedly all friendlies, but yeah.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Now do you remember your first mission on a Swift Boat?”
Yes, it was the very first Sea Lord Raid. Yeah, I was still fresh in country, and then they—We
went up one of these rivers, and then we went off on this canal. And we went in. It’s pitch-black
as night, and we chugged up there real slow. We have a radar that we can see where their nets
were spaced across the river, so we could maneuver around them. And so—And I can’t see
nothing because it’s pitch-black, but the guy in the helm could. And we went all the way up to
where—I was going to show you that. Where the VC supposedly had some of our guys captured,
and—So we’re supposed to go up, and there’s a T in the canal. (36:05) And we were supposed to
go up there and go to that T, and then if nothing happened, we were supposed to turn around and
come back out there. But we would get up there and nothing, of course, and the minute we
started to turn around they hit us from everywhere. And I was on the—Because I was not out on
the .50s, they put me on the bow with an M60 machine gun, and there’s so much light from them
because you couldn’t see because there is no street lights or anything like that. So we—The
only—Anything you could see was basically from the flash of the guns, and you’re shot at.
Flashes of guns, and there was some big stuff that came in, but it went over our heads. And I just
shot at everything I—It was—Whatever. And we turned around, and we ran our asses back out
of there, I think. And I sat back, thinking, “Oh my god, we made it. Nobody got hit.” And officer
says, “Reload. We’re going back in.” I said, “You’re out of your freaking mind.” You know, and
an M60 machine gun—You take the handle, and you flip it this way. You can dump the barrel
right off, block a new one on, and a nice, new barrel, and that’s—So that’s what I did. I put a
new barrel on and reloaded, and we turned around and went back in at full water because they—
When you’re out in the ocean—You know, if you get out to Lake Michigan, you can be twenty
miles inland and still hear the power boats going, so they didn’t know exactly where we were.
But they heard us, but they didn’t know where we were. They didn’t realize we were coming
straight at them with exhaust going behind us, and they didn’t hear us coming. So they were out
on their—Had campfires going and cooking fires going. They’re outside the bunkers, and
they’re—Everybody’s sitting around, and we came in there and started just blasting away.
(38:02) We got up to that T again, and we slammed on the brakes. Basically stopped, and, well,
here they all was. About twenty feet in front of me was a VC in a sampan. Caught him dead right
in the middle of the river, and, you know, it’s like, you know, “What am I going to—” Well,
I’m—I leveled my, you know, M60 at him, and I killed him. And we—I don’t know what else
we did. I mean, I know we—I did a lot more shooting because we got—We’re still getting shot
at from all over, and I know a lot of the times—I don’t know if you see this in some of the
movies of Afghanistan where they’re shooting like this, you know, and not aiming. They’re
just—And I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of that because we had an awful lot of firepower, so they
didn’t want to stand up and be brave because we could—Thing is, we could rip bunkers apart,
�Robinson, Michael
buildings apart, knock trees down with my—With the .50s, not with my M60, but—So they
didn’t—They weren’t too accurate in their shooting, but they were shooting with—You could
see the muzzle flashes, and you could hear some of the bullets go whizzing by. But I didn’t—We
would just turn around and shot our way out and, “Ah, man. We made it. Second time.” You
know, and so it was—
Interviewer: “Now was your boat by itself on this mission?”
No, we never go on raids—Sea Lord Raids—It’s at least two to three or four sometimes, and I
don’t remember how—In our patrol areas themselves, we always have two, and then if we go on
the raids, it’s probably three.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now you’re using the term ‘Sea Lord’. What does that refer to?”
That’s the type of raid that they gave a name to, and it was in the—Out—Go out, and we were
going to go do some damage. We know where the VC are. We’re going to go in there and rip the
place apart.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now as far as you know, did you always encounter Viet Cong as
opposed to North Vietnamese troops?” (40:03)
No. Never. I have no idea. I just saw muzzle flashes, and that one poor guy in the sampan—I
don’t think he was a North Vietnamese regular. I think he was just a regular guy. Was told to—
“You shoot at the Americans, or you die. Or your daughter dies.” So...
Interviewer: “Okay. Now what proportion of your missions were conducted at night?”
I want to say that the heavy-duty ones—the Sea Lord Raids—were about fifty percent because a
couple of times—There was a lot of times we did day raids, too.
Interviewer: “All right. Now, I guess, you’ve got—You have a—You’ve written a memoir,
which we can include actually in the file we’ve made for your interview here, and you talk
about a variety of incidents. And another one—a different kind of incident—We talked
about—You talked a little bit about going out in the ocean, and if you’re going out in the
ocean in a small boat like this, could that be dangerous or at least unpleasant?”
Not when you’re out there. Is this when you try to come into—during a monsoon season, coming
into that—In the Saigon Basin? Because the waves start coming up the land, and then it gets all
huge. They’re bigger than us, and we’re going in—We would back in because the waves were
pushing us in, and so you get up to the top of the wave. And you had to power up it, so you
didn’t get pushed all the way down to the ground in— back in the boat and get just buried into
the ground. So we’d power up it, and as it went by us, we come this way. And then you would
try to back up to go up the thing, so you don’t want to hit so hard at the—on the front of the
wave. So we had to keep maneuvering forward and backwards and get—We kind of—You
know, we had to—Of course, we could thank god we can lock it all up and close it all off, but—
�Robinson, Michael
So you wouldn’t get buried nose first or ass first into the ground, and we had some people that
did. And it’s—That was very dangerous. (42:16)
Interviewer: “And when you’re bringing the—Now is the base itself—Does it have a
breakwater or something to protect you against the waves?”
Yeah, you go around the—Where are base was—Because going up the river basin—That was
one thing, but we—Our base is over to the side, and so there was no waves there at all. It’s just a
river coming down.
Interviewer: “Okay, but you had to get through the area that had the waves first.”
Yeah, we had to get through that, and then when we got through that, we were home free
basically.
Interviewer: “All right. Now what different kinds of missions did you have over the course
of your time there?”
We had gun support missions, we had troop insertions, and Sea Lord Raids. Types—Things like
that. The—We would—Troop insertions we would back them up. When we’d get like—They’d
get them like six or eight big, huge sampans or whatever. You called the troops on us, and then
load us with a bunch of troops. And we’d go in as shallow as we can, and they—Those boats
would go on shallow water, so they would go in. And we would stay out there with our support.
My 81 and my .50s and—
Interviewer: “Okay. The 81. Explain what that is.”
That’s the 81 mm mortar—single-shot—that—You can do couple things with that. One: You
could drop the mortar down just like you see on the TV when they drop the mortar, and it goes,
“Boop.” Then we also had a tracker system on ours, so if we wanted to kind of lower the angle to
where we want to shoot it at something with a different type of rounds, that we could stand it up
straight, cock the firing pin back, then drop it down in there. And it would seat, but it wouldn’t
go off. So then we could aim it like a great, big shotgun, and we could do…(44:09)
Interviewer: “Okay, so you could use direct fire with a mortar—”
Oh, yeah. Oh my god, it was a—Definitely a—We only had to use that twice. I only remember
using it twice, and it was so devastating that—We were in a bad firefight, and this one bank was
just tearing us apart. And he only had an M—.50—One single .50 on his—Top of his mortar, but
he had that mortar, too. 81. And I cannot shoot straight behind me, and we were getting hit pretty
good. And he couldn’t—He wasn’t—His .50 calibers couldn’t hit everything all at once, so he
just leveled that 81 and let that thing go. And the whole bank went, “Whoosh,” and there’s
nothing. There was not a single sound after that.
Interviewer: “Okay. This was an anti-personnel round or something?”
�Robinson, Michael
Yeah, it has a—Thousands of tiny, little darts in them. I have them in my hat there, and it shows
you what they are. They’re little, black darts that—They’re packed in there, and it’s a 81 mm
long round. And probably about that long since there’s thousands of rounds in there, and, of
course, as soon as it leaves the mortar barrel, it spreads out like this. And—
Interviewer: “Okay. Now is this called a flechette round or a beehive—”
Yes, a flechette, I think. It might be called beehive round, too. I think the—
Interviewer: “Yeah, but that same idea. A whole bunch of little flying things.”
Yeah, it—
Interviewer: “So—But a giant shotgun effect.”
Yeah, basically.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Now the troops that you were bringing in. Do you have—Did
you form much of an impression of them or get to know any of them, or would you just see
them once and that was it?”
I didn’t get—The South Vietnamese I did not get a good impression with because they didn’t
have the—They were not there for—They thought that they were fighting our war. (46:06) They
really believed that, and, I mean, we were starting to turn our boats over to the South
Vietnamese. We were going to—They knew we were going to go—The people that were
supposed to go on our boats with us and be training with us. When they found out where we
were going, they wouldn’t show up, and so we knew—“Oh, this is going to be something
because they won’t even show up.” So it usually was a little bit more of a gunfight than a—That
they—They knew. It’s probably their brothers or something, I’m thinking. I don’t know.
Interviewer: “Okay, so you take South Vietnamese troops in.”
Yeah.
Interviewer: “Would you take American troops in as well?”
We—Couple of times we took in some of our Marines and stuff like that. I want to say the—
Interviewer: “The Navy Seals?”
Seals. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, Navy Seals. We were going to go up this one canal that went
back to—We know it was a very strong—Big stronghold of the VC, and we were supposed to go
up there and tear them a new one. Whatever. And we got part way up there, and we knew this
was there. That they had a—They put a barricade underwater about a foot and a half below the
waterline, so we take—At slow speed, we take three feet of water. I mean, we have all our
stuff—props and everything—hanging underneath, so we couldn’t go up there. And we had like
�Robinson, Michael
eight tubes almost the length of our boat of C4, and they packed it around that huge, monstrous
barricade they had. And then we back off. I don’t know how far. We have a very, very long way,
and they detonate it. And the water and everything flew about thirty, forty feet in the air. It was
unbelievable, and after they cleared our way, we went in and did our thing. (48:01) And we also
had a—We know where the VC were, and we know where the campsites were. And they’re way
inland, and we sent some Marines—or Marines or Seals or whatever—inland to capture, I guess,
some general. And so we ended up doing a—Running our bow up on the beach real tight, so we
were really stable. Got these quick—Read coordinates to where we know we were going to be,
and they knew where they were going to be. And we set up our mortars. You have to—It
changed the distance that the mortar flies. You have a little—powder bags on the side of them
that when you drop them down the mortar, they’d get so much push, and, of course, then the
angle and all that stuff they figure out. And—So we were ready to support them, and they were
going to go on and do this. Get this army’s general or whatever. And we were waiting I don’t
know how many—it seems like forever—before they got on the radio and says, “We got him.
We’re on our way out.” And you could hear that they were running, and they were on the radio.
And so it’s, you know. Okay. And a little bit—Not too long later, he says, “We need support.
Drop some rounds in on our positions right here.” And they told us where it was, and, of course,
they were on the run. So once we dropped the rounds, they’re away, and they did that. And we
could hear the gunfire. You know, they’re in a firefight, and you could be—Kept telling us that.
They did that a couple of times, and then finally he says—He came on the radio very, very
excited, and they said that—“We’re pinned down. They got us surrounded. Drop some mortars
right on top of us.” “Right on top of you?” So we did, and nothing. (50:07) “Jesus Christ, we just
killed them?” And it was like in between the other transmissions there were only like five
minutes or so, and this was ten or fifteen minutes. And nothing, so we thought we killed them.
And he came back on the radio. “Oh, yeah. We got them. We’re coming on out.” And, I mean, as
calm as can be, and they came out. And we were saying, “Jesus Christ.” You know, and you’re
smiling and laughing, and one of the guys reaches into his pockets. And he says, “Here,” and
dropped it in one of our guys’s hands. It was part of our mortar. “Thanks,” he said.
Interviewer: “Did they come out carrying—with a Vietnamese prisoner?”
Yeah, I think so. I don’t remember. I just remember them coming up. They’re as happy as hell,
and I’m assuming they had because they said, I mean, the whole time—They said they had him,
they had him, you know, and they’re coming out with him. And then that last bit when they
finally came out and said thanks. That’s all they said, you know, and it’s kind of bizarre.
Interviewer: “All right. Now when you’re going up these—You get into the canals and the
very narrow waterways. How hard was it to maneuver? What kinds of things did you have
to do in there?”
Yeah, they were always—When we got into the canals, they—We couldn’t turn around. We had
to—If we were going to turn around, we had to ram the bow up on the beach and back off, ram
the bow up on the beach and back off, ram the bow up on the beach—Did that until we got
turned around because you—It was too—Obviously, the rivers are too narrow to even—
Interviewer: “Okay. Would you do that under fire?”
�Robinson, Michael
Yes. The last one I was on we went up—It was supposed to be—It was going to be four of us,
and we’re going to run up this one canal that we knew would belong to the VC. (52:12) And we
were supposed to come in with four boats in a row—come in like a lickety-split—and the canal
went in at an angle and then did a hard right about—I don’t know. Not very far in but less than a
quarter of a mile. And go up there, and it was very, very narrow. And as we were going to go up
there, the command boat was the last boat in line, and he was—He wanted to be the lead boat,
and we were lead boat. So we had to stop. You take four great, big boats with two twelvecylinder diesel engines apiece and slam on the brakes and throttle back, and the noise it makes is
unbelievable. And so we all stopped. The other three boats had to stop, and he went around us.
And, of course, then we had to get back going again, and—Because I couldn’t—Canal went up
and did a hard right. I could see in front of me, but I couldn’t shoot because of the boats. And I
was watching the front boat, and it got to that corner. And the front boat just went, “Bam,” and
laid right over on its side. I mean, hit it with something huge, and it laid right on its side. It
popped back up and went around the corner, and I said, “Holy shit.” I couldn’t shoot. I could not
shoot, I could not shoot, I could not shoot. And then the second one went around, and it’s getting
all this smoke. And the fire is so much that I couldn’t see anything, and then the next boat. And
when we got there, I just opened up. Didn’t even know where the hell I was shooting because it’s
so smoky, and, all of a sudden, our boat goes, “Boom.” We got hit in the—in our port engine. It
knocked us down out of the water, and, you know, you’re up at full board. You’re up on the
plane, but it knocked us right down to where we just stalled. (54:06) And we went over on our
side, and we’re shooting. They knocked out our engine, and so we’re trying to get it started. And
we’re screaming on the radio, “Come back for us! We’re down! Come back for us! We’re
down!” Well, at the same time, the lead boat was saying, “Turn around and get the hell out of
here any way you can. I mean, we’re sinking.” And we thought they were coming back for us,
and so we were kind of shooting all the time. And he’s cranking the engine, trying to get it
started. Well, it started. Somehow it started. It had a bullet hole that big right through the
goddamn thing, and it still started. So we said, “Hey. We’ll take the point,” because we thought
we saw them coming back. So, “We got it. We’re okay.” And we didn’t get the transmission that
says, “Get out of here any way you can,” so they left. So we went up there all by ourselves,
and—“Jesus Christ. An awful lot of fire.” We didn’t know that until we got to a little
straightaway and looked back. There’s nobody there. We’re all by ourselves, so I kind of reached
down and grabbed the hull and what I only was saying and screaming—I says,“Get the—out of
here because we—We’re all alone.” And so he just rammed the hell into it and went, “Bam,”
right up on the beach. Then we had to do this to turn around because it was so narrow. Well,
I’m—While he’s doing that, I look down, and I’ve got five rounds hanging from my guns. That’s
all I had. I only had five rounds, and that’s five out of a thousand or so. So I had another belt
down in the deck, but the way a clip loads, you know, you’ve got to have a male and a female
type fitting. Then you put a bullet through there, and that’s what locks them together. Before I
could hook into the newest set of belts, I had to get everything up, and I’m shaking so hard. And
you hear all this gunfire, and, you know, it’s just—You know, I—You just hear it. I mean, I just
kept hauling them up, and I’m shaking so hard. And I can’t lay them straight enough. (56:09) If
you’re trying to lay them down—And I was trying to lay them down in there. I finally get it to—
The blast went up there. Then I can hook into it. Then I had to do the other side, and all this time
we’re doing this, trying to turn around. And about the time we got turned around, I got them both
loaded. I got in those last five rounds. I look down, and there’s a bunker right there. I never saw
�Robinson, Michael
it going in, and, of course, I filled the slot. And I—As we went by—And I swung around, and,
“Jesus Christ, there’s another one.” And that’s the way it was all the way out, and I shot two—I
didn’t—You’re supposed to shoot your short rounds, so you don’t cook your barrels and get
them all—And I didn’t. I was shooting at anything, and pretty soon near the end—Of the end of
the—Where we got back—Going to go get back out—My rounds were coming out, and my
gun’s going about ten, fifteen feet and hitting the water. And the cherry—The redness of the
barrels were so cherry-red and totally worn out that I was just making noise, but I don’t know. I
still—If you hear a .50 caliber machine gun coming at your direction, you—They probably kept
their heads down a little bit, and we got back out. And we got around that corner, and our engine
died. And all the shooting stopped, too, so I put my guns up like this. And the barrels were so hot
they’re still going off. The gun’s still going, “Bam, bam. Bam, bam, bam,” because as soon as
the round chambered, it cooked. We called it cooked off, and it kept going off. And I’m laying
back. I say, “Holy—We made it.” And I look down. There’s holes in my gun tub. Where the
fuck was I? Excuse me. And, you know, where could I have been? I must have been down
getting ammo when they went through, and we got out. And then—Oh, we had—I forgot to say
that we had a big TV crew from like NBC or ABC or CNN or whatever that came onboard, and
they were going to film this thing. And we knew it was going to be bad because they were going
to film it, and he got sick before we even left the dock. (58:24) And he was laying on the port
engine cover, and because we got hit in that engine, we thought he got killed because he was just
laying there. And then we had a choice to kick him off or throw him onto the starboard engine
cover, and we ended up—thank god—We threw him on the starboard engine cover because he
was still alive, and he said, “Is everybody all right?” And—
Interviewer: “Okay. Now was he—Did he have like a TV camera or just a—”
Yeah. Great, big—
Interviewer: “Oh my goodness. Yeah, so what happened to that?”
He never even got it out. We—He put it inside the boat itself in the inside, and before we even
left the pier, he was so seasick he never got it out.
Interviewer: “All right. Now do you suppose the unit commander decided to be the lead
boat because he was going to be on television?”
I’m not going to answer that. I would think it may have something to do with it.
Interviewer: “All right. You were talking about encountering bunkers and so forth. Aside
from a machine gun, what else could you use against a bunker?”
Well, that was my main one when I—we get into that type of situation, but I know that we—
When we did other raids, I carried an M79 grenade launcher, but we didn’t—I didn’t use that
against bunkers because it’s—They’re not more safe. In other words, mostly rounds like that—
They have to be about so many feet out the barrel before they’re armed, and so if you shoot at
something too close, you can—The shrapnel can get you. Yeah. (1:00:01)
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay, so what would you shoot at with the M79?”
I would knock out hutches and stuff. I could—A football field away at full bore I could drop a
round from the M79 right in the doorway.
Interviewer: “Okay. You’ve got a story in the memoir about using white phosphorus
grenades.”
Oh my god. Yeah, this was at—We had this new guy onboard. He was 6’2”, 3”. Big guy. And he
had this blue beret on, and he was a real badass-looking dude. And we went in to destroy the—
this village. It was all VC. That was the one where the—We moved up the barricade for us. We
got to the village, and they were all gone. I don’t know why, and so we’re just going to burn it to
the ground. And this white phosphorus grenade is very big and heavy, and he looked like a big,
strong guy. And the kill radius of the white phosphorus is like thirty feet, so you had to be—You
had to throw it—It had a long fuse—thank god—so you got time to throw it way out there and
back off. Well, this guy—He pulled the grenade because he was just going to—We were going
to burn up some hooches over there, and he pulled the pin on the grenade. And he wound back
like he was going to throw it to the length of a football field, and he ended up getting—throwing
it just like a girl. And it landed right beside our bow. I mean, that’s not past our bow but right
beside our bow, and, of course, we backed out of there so damn fast. And, you know, two
twelve-cylinder diesels going in full. We burst the whole boat. Just shaking, trying to jump to get
out of there. We get out of there just in time when it went off.
Interviewer: “What happened with him?”
He said it was an accident, and he’s going to do another one. (1:02:01) And he went over to the
other side. Did the same thing. Five feet. We had to back away, and he said, “Good. That was an
accident.” Because—But he’s, you know, real tough guy, and he was going to go throw another
one. I said, “No. No, you’re done. You’re not going to throw—ever throw another grenade. You
aren’t going to throw it.” And he—Of course, he’s a lot bigger than I was, and he says he’s going
to throw another grenade. I says, “No, you’re not.” And he stepped outside the—on the—by the
door there to get—And that’s where—Right below my .50s, and there’s a guard, so I don’t shoot
my own man. But that barrel was only about six inches above his head, and the tip was right over
the top. So that was going to be pretty loud, and he stepped out there. And I shot a six round
burst, and it knocked him right down. Knocked him right down, and he—Of course, he called me
a bunch of names, and he went out to go to the other side. I just swung my .50s right over his
head again, lowered as far as I could go, and opened the .50 calibers again. And he went down
and didn’t come back up, and he didn’t throw a—Never threw another grenade, but I know when
we got back, they took him off the boat. And we never saw him again. Now I don’t know if
they—He went into a hospital because they—I’m sure it blew his eardrums out, and I didn’t
know if he went home. All I know is he was gone, and nobody died. And that’s all I could think
of is, “You’re going to kill us, and you ain’t going to.”
Interviewer: “All right. You’ve got a couple other stories in your memoir about different
kinds of characters, and one of them was a new officer who came to the boat.”
�Robinson, Michael
Yes. Yeah, he—We—Like I say, you don’t have a new person—Only one new person at a time
because that way you don’t have any—Nobody freezing, and if they do freeze, you only have
one person freeze. You don’t have the whole boat, and he was cockier than hell because he was
an officer, you know. We were just enlisted people, and he was being very “I’m in charge” type
of attitude. (1:04:08) And he tried to—He wasn’t going to stand any night duty, you know. He
was going to sleep, but for our boat to function at night—Was—We usually had one guy on the
helm and watching the radar, watching the—Anything around us, and then we had like a bank of
three or four radios that we monitored all the bases close by. And so we had two people—You
had to have two people all the time, and the rest were just—Slept on the boat somewhere, and
mine was the starboard engine cover because it was nice and warm. And—But he would—And
we really had a long discussion about him not standing watch, and plus, he wanted to paint our
boat nice and pretty. And the whole thing is is when you have a boat that’s all shiny and new,
that’s like throwing on a red flag. You know, everyone wants a piece of that new crew, so you
don’t paint your boat. And he—We had a discussion about that, and he kept saying, “Well, you
made us get the paint. We brought it onboard, and we aren’t going to use it.” And we pulled up
alongside—You usually patrol a minimum of two boats in the same river at the same time, so
you could back up, you know, and kind of support each other. And during—Sometime during the
day, you would pull up alongside and have dinner together or some dang thing, and we pulled up
alongside our sister boat. And we were talking. I says, “This character wants to paint our boat,
and we’re not going to do it.” And he kind of like—“Yeah, probably not a good idea.” And he
says, “Yes, you are,” and, well, we got into a big discussion about that. (1:06:02) And he—I’m
getting my stories mixed up here, but anyways, we didn’t paint the boat. And we ended up
getting into a position where we were boarding sampans to the—You know, check out for
contraband and all that stuff, and we usually locked the boat up against their boat. And that’s
when the—I no longer am any good because I can’t lower my .50s there, so they usually have me
crawl out on the boats. And we were getting ready to do that, and the helmsman—He, you know,
walked the boat right up to it, and then we tied them to us. And then he has a twelve gauge
shotgun right by the helm where he pulls off, and he stands there and helps guard while we’re
down there. And we pulled up alongside, and we didn’t even tie it up. And something happened.
I don’t know what it was, but he was standing out at a very—Almost by the bow there, and the
rest of us was just starting to get down. And then—And he hit the throttle, and two twelvecylinder diesels—That boat just leaps right out of the water, and you can’t be—I mean, you can’t
stand up. You have to grab onto something. Well, the guy who was standing by the helmsman
did this kind of thing trying to grab a hold of something. Well, he—The only thing that was
hooked right there was a twelve gauge shotgun, and it was still loaded. And it went off, and the
officer up front—He hit the deck, and he got hit. And we find out later—I’ve got to say it. This
was a [?], and he got hit with one BB. He didn’t get hit with a whole shot, and—But we had
medevac. I mean, he was screaming and hollering and all that stuff, and we went down to the
mouth of the river and met a medevac ship. (1:08:01) And we were offloading him, and they
kept yelling down at us, “You really did it! You really did it!” “Jesus Christ. Shut the hell up. We
did nothing now.” “It’s you that shot him. You did it.” “Oh, Christ.” And, “We don’t know
where that round came from.” We said, “It didn’t come from us, man. And, well, somewhere. It
came from somewhere. We don’t know.” But he was only gone for three days or maybe less. I
don’t know. I can’t remember, but he came back on the boat. “Damn it. He’s a good officer.” But
we didn’t have to paint our boat, and he’s—He helped night watches. I mean, he ended up being
the best officer we had.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay. How many officers did you have?”
One officer onboard.
Interviewer: “Yeah, but I mean over the course of your tour.”
Oh, I had—I probably had three or four. I know I had at least three because I was on three
different boats. But may have had another replacement—Well, he came onboard when I was on
one, so at least four then that I had. And he was—Yeah.
Interviewer: “Okay. How did you wind up switching from boat to boat? Did boats get
damaged, or you just rotate, or...?”
Rotate, rotate. They had a new gunner coming onboard, and they says, “Hey. We need you to
cover this boat, so we can put him on all by himself.” Because you never want more than one
guy at a time, and so we rotated. I was on at least three boats. I don’t remember too much about
that. But I know I was on the 28 boat, the 37 boat, and I don’t know what the other one was. But
I was on three different boats, and we would—When a new person would rotate in or
somebody—Because we came in country at all different times, they would get shipped out, so
then we’d get a new guy onboard.
Interviewer: “All right. Okay. Now was there—Would the men who were in crews on
different boats—If you’re all in the same barracks together, do you know each other,
and…?”
Yeah, because when we—Like I say, we always—When we were patrolling the same river, we
pulled up and made dinner together and all that stuff, and so we knew each other pretty well.
(1:10:07)
Interviewer: “Okay, so you know more than just the crew of your own immediate boat.
You know some of the other guys.”
Absolutely, absolutely. We—Like you say, because we would patrol a river with boat 29 or
something like that, and then later on we’d end up being on a different boat. We always shift off
because we don’t have always the same boat we’re patrolling with, and we—So we had all
different boats that we—But our barracks was always the same place, and when we did go back,
we partied pretty hard together.
Interviewer: “Okay. You’ve got a story in the memoir about, I guess, a new guy coming in
at night and not being very happy.”
Yeah, this—He was a radarman. I mean, I knew what he was, but he had gone out on base. We
just came back, and I was—got to sleep in my own bunk for the first time in quite a while. And
he was coming in off of partying at night off base, and he was a big, big guy. And I hear some
guy cussing and swearing, and I hear pounding and screaming. And I get up, kind of look up
�Robinson, Michael
over my bunk, and here’s this great, big, monster guy with a guy hanging off each arm, trying to
settle them down. And he’s punching lockers. He hits them so hard they go flying, and I’m
thinking, “I’m not going to stop him. Those two big guys are hanging off his arms. I’m not going
to stop him.” So I guess I look at my locker and think, “Ah, shit. I’m going to have to clean all
this up.” And he was walking down and cussing because somebody—He got drunk and got his
wallet stolen, and so he was kind of mad. But by the time he got to where my bunk was, I’m
thinking, “Yeah, well, this is it.” His bunk was right across from mine, and he got him in bed.
(1:12:00) And then, “Cool. My locker made it.” And the next day we got our new radarman. It
was him, and holy shit, he ended up being the nicest, gentlest, loving, hardworking, doing—You
know. I mean, he was awesome to have onboard, and we actually became—He was the only one
I actually became friends with. We—I went to—He lived in Detroit. I went to his family’s when
we got out. He came to my family’s when we got out, and...
Interviewer: “All right. You have another story in here about working with a Coast Guard
ship.”
Yeah. Yeah, okay, that’s a good one. We were down in this one river. I don’t remember names,
but right in the center of the big river was a great, big, huge island. And down one side of the
island there’s a canal, and he wanted to—They wanted to get their Combat Action Ribbons. Is
what they wanted to do. They want to go up there and get shot at. Well, they couldn’t even think
about turning around, so they would have to back out. Because they thought they could go
straight through, but it got too narrow. And I guess they got in—They got what they were
looking for. They got into a firefight with the people on the island, and all they had was one .50
on the left side—or on port—and one was on the right side, you know. And then maybe an M60
here and there, but they had less firepower than we did. And they’re so high off the ground that
they couldn’t shoot anything, you know. And so they just screamed at us, “Come back and help
me! Help us! We need help!” And so we went on in there, of course, and we did take care of
business and got them stopped. But we had to escort them out because they had to back out, and
it took them forever because they, you know—In the great, big ship they’re in.
Interviewer: “Okay, so what was that boat supposed to be doing?” (1:14:01)
Out on the coast. He wasn’t supposed to be on the rivers.
Interviewer: “Okay, so you’re looking for sampans, not looking for firefights.”
He was looking for—
Interviewer: “Well, he was looking for a fight that day.”
Yeah, but we do—Our normal thing is patrol the area and looking for sampans and looking for
trouble. You know, that type of thing, but he bit off more than he could chew.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now are there a lot of islands in the rivers?”
�Robinson, Michael
Yes, quite a few islands in the rivers. We—One of the rivers that we—It’s probably the very last
one in the chain that we normally patrolled, so we spent a lot of fuel getting down there. And so
when we—First chance we got to cut in, we cut in just by that island, and we had to go the Army
base, which is around the tip of the island. And we hadn’t even uncovered the guns. They said,
“Well, we better get refueled to do our patrols then.” Because I think it was a three-day patrol, so
we had to refuel before we could even start patrolling. So we were going around that tip, and
we—A little bit too close, and we had them open up on us. And our guns are still even covered,
and I said, “Holy shit.” You know, so we went straight away, and while we were going straight
away, I uncovered my .50s and got them ready to go. And we spun the boat around and come
back. I just chewed up the beach, you know, and we didn’t even get hit. And I don’t know what
we did, but we never got shot at again. And we went and refueled, and we did that. That was
quite an experience.
Interviewer: “All right. Now aside from supporting ground troops, what else could you—
are the mortars for? Or, at least, you have another story in there about using them, I guess,
when you were just using up extra ammunition. ”
Yeah, at the—Usually, when we have a long, open sea run, that, you know, salt in the air and all
that stuff—You’ve got to—If you haven’t used your mortars in a while, then you don’t want to
get salt in there and saltwater in the mortar box, so we sometimes empty it. (1:16:16) And then
we say, “Hey. Where’s a good spot to shoot these rounds?” You know, and we—They gave us
the coordinates to give us, and so we just sat there and emptied our mortar rounds in this one
area. And, I guess—Because they say, “There’s a bunch of VC there. There’s a whole bunch of
them.” We said, “Yeah. Okay. We’ll drop them in there.” We did, and about two days later, I
guess, a VC Chi Hoi—Is that right? Turned himself in, and he says we hit them pretty bad. And
so we did some damage there, and that was just getting rid of the old rounds.
Interviewer: “All right. Okay. Do you have encounters with wildlife or livestock?”
Yeah, well, livestock was only one thing, but wildlife—We went up in this one river where we—
It was a pretty long ways. Where we were patrolling it was long, and at night you can hear our
engines. And so we’d go out, and we’d turn around and come back. And we’d go out, turn
around, and come back. And they’d listen to us, and we got far enough away. They’d quick go
across the river and get—Before we could turn around and come after them, they were already
on the other side by the time we got there, so we’re going to be real smart and dropped off two of
our guys on this tiny, little island. And that was right where they were crossing, and so we told
them, you know, “Let us know when they—” This was when we could first see them getting
ready to go and all that stuff, so we went down. And they called back kind of excited—very
excited—and so we ran back up there. And they didn’t catch anybody, but there’s, I guess, wild
pigs on that island. (1:18:10) And they move around at night, and here these poor two guys with
M16s and couple of grenades on them. And, you know, they didn’t—I mean, that’s all they had
on them, and they called us up, like I say, on the radio. And, “Come and get us, come and get us,
come and get us. We don’t know—” And they couldn’t—They didn’t know what the heck’s
going on. They couldn’t see. It was pitch-black, so we get there. And here’s a poor—Guys were
backed out of the river up to their waist, aiming their guns at the beach, and then they—And it’s
just pigs who scared the hell out of them, and so we didn’t do that again. We didn’t—You’d
�Robinson, Michael
think we could learn, but pretty cocky Americans. And we were going to get them, but we didn’t
really get them. And then we—Couple of times we almost caught—Just at dusk we would come
down the river, and we’d come around a corner of an island. And we’d come around the other
side, and there’s somebody crossing. And I remember you were going to try and stop him going
full bore at them. They kept going. We had great, big speakers telling them, “Don’t lie. Stop.”
And stop and all that stuff, and I ended up shooting some rounds in front of their bow, thinking
that will stop them. All I know is there’s something coming, and it kept going. And I’d bring him
in a little closer, and then he just kept right on going. And so there’s somebody onboard that they
didn’t want us to catch, but we—I didn’t shoot him. I didn’t kill him. They made it all the way to
the other side, and about the time we got there—the same time—And here’s the boat just
jammed up into the brush, and nobody’s onboard. And so I just kind of did damage on the boat a
little bit, but we never caught anybody. But...(1:20:03)
Interviewer: “All right. There are some kind of standard sort of Vietnam stereotypes and
things that come up, and I’ll kind of just ask your perspective on them. One of them has to
do with race relations. I mean, was everybody on your boat white, or was there a mix of
people in boats?”
There was never any trouble there. I don’t know if there were—I don’t even remember. I know a
lot of them are white. Most of them are white, but we were—You know, we were crew, and we
were brothers. And I don’t remember a whole lot about that, so...
Interviewer: “And it wasn’t—The base—I mean, there weren’t a lot of just base personnel
or other people that you saw much of.”
No. I heard—We heard an awful lot about—In the Army. The Army bases had a lot of problems,
but, you know, it’s only six of us on the boat. So you’ve got to be—And, you know, you rely on
those six people, and so we never—We had one person that—He came onboard our boat, and,
you know, you hear about all this drugs all the time. Well, we didn’t have any of that, and we
had this one gunner’s mate who came on our sister boat. And he smoked marijuana and stuff,
and we got out into a pretty good firefight. And he didn’t do a very good job. He was higher than
a kite, and when we got back, he never came back on the boat. And so we didn’t—I mean, we
drank, but usually afterwards. But nothing to jeopardize our people.
Interviewer: “Okay. Now you were in Vietnam for a full year. Did you get an R&R at some
point?”
I was supposed to. Yeah, and I told them, “You know, if I leave this place, I’m never coming
back.” So I stayed right in my barracks. (1:22:00) There’s an in country R&R place right by us. I
think it’s Vũng Tàu. Is that…? Yeah, and I didn’t even go there. I didn’t even go there. I mean
that’s—We—You can—The people that—I mean, they did water skiing and swimming and all
kinds of stuff on that base, but I said, “If I leave here, I am never coming back.” So I didn’t go
anywhere. I mean, we got to go Australia, Japan, and all kinds of—I mean, people would come
back saying, “Oh, man.” And I’m saying, “I wouldn’t come back.” You know, so no, I didn’t go.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “All right. Okay. Now I just want to see—Okay. You mention at a certain
point you actually got up as far as Cambodia.”
Yeah, that river where that big island is—They had a new PBR for—to go up to Cambodia, and
they were stationed where we went and got, you know, fueled. And so we went up there and—
To refuel, and we have big gas tanks. And the PBR that we’re going to escort up there had
obviously smaller gas tanks, and so they were going to ride in our wake and save fuel. And I
don’t know how this ever happened, but we got drinking quite a bit. And they were in our wake
trying to, you know, save fuel and their bow slid off our wake and caught in the river and threw
everybody overboard. It did an 180 degree—It threw—The only person that wasn’t—didn’t get
thrown overboard by the PBR was the guy hanging onto the helm, and the rest of them did. We
went back for them, and they went back. And we loaded them back up, and we all got sobered up
pretty quick.
Interviewer: “Was that an American crew, or was that Vietnamese?”
No, American. No, we never did—They weren’t turning over the boats just then. It’s all
American, and by the time we got to the Cambodian border where we escorted them to,
everybody was sober and dry. And that’s the only—
Interviewer: “Now were you on a branch of the Mekong River at that point do you think,
or…?” (1:24:16)
Oh, we were on one of the rivers. Yeah, I don’t remember which one. I can’t remember which—
what the name of it is, but it went all the way up into Cambodia.
Interviewer: “Okay. Was it a big river or fairly wide?”
It started that way, and it kept getting, you know, smaller and smaller and smaller. And it got
faster and deeper, and that was an unusual situation because a lot of times we’d get caught into a
whirlpool. And the boat would just sit there, and you’d—You got—We were trying to go
forward, and it wasn’t going forward. And so—But usually we could work our way out of it.
You know, kind of overpower it.
Interviewer: “Okay, but you were—If you’re drinking on that mission, was the expectation
that that particular mission was not dangerous, and nobody was going to bother you?”
I don’t know the answer to that. I think that’s what we figured it—They’re going up there with
no guns on them, so we were escorting them. And it was just going right up the center of the
river. We weren’t looking for—
Interviewer: “Okay, and then did you bring that crew back with you?”
No, no, they went up there, and that’s where their station was.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay, and, of course, you’re there basically in 1969, and the official
Cambodian incursion doesn’t happen until 1970. But we’re operating there in ‘69.”
Yeah, they were doing it long before I—we went in there. That’s for sure. We were there—Many
years before us, and then I went up there.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Now you mention at a certain point also working with
Marines. Did you actually—I mean, Marines are known mostly for being up in the far
northern part of south Vietnam.” (1:26:01)
Well, I want to say the Marines. I never met the people, but I was—They were—We went out—
Again, we didn’t have a Sea Lord Raid, so we were just going to—For the night we were going
to anchor, and we usually go out in the deepest part and the widest part of the river and anchor.
And I think we were too close to one bank, and we were anchored there. And I was sleeping on
my favorite starboard engine. You don’t sleep inside because if you got hit with a rock or—A
concussion would kill you or pretty mangle you. And so we were just anchored there, and we
had one guy in the boat. I mean, one on the radar and one on the helm, and we’re basically
anchored. And I’m laying there, and, all of a sudden, I hear gunfire. I hear AK-47s and M16s,
and, of course, they’re so close together that I couldn’t tell—All I saw was muzzle flashes like
this. I thought at first they’re coming at us, so I jumped up to my gun tub, lowered my .50, and
was just going to open up on it. And the guy down on the helm banged my foot. He says, “Hold
fire. Hold fire.” I said, “What the—What do you mean hold fire? You—” And in that second or
two that I held fire I realized that the bullets were going this way—not coming out at us—and so
I just—We just stood there. I just stood there and just ready to go any minute because we didn’t
know what’s going on. And, obviously, we found out later that—I say the Marines because that’s
what I said. I don’t really know for sure, but I—They—A patrol—let’s put it this way—
ambushed a VC patrol. They’re going to ambush—They were out on the beach getting ready to
set up and ambush us, and they ambushed them. And after the firefight was over with, you know,
you’re sitting there. “Who won? What do we do?” And, finally, the—I keep saying Marines.
They called us on the radio and says, “We got them.” And he says, “Okay. All right. I think
we’re going now.” So we pulled away and got the hell out of there. (1:28:13)
Interviewer: “Right. Odds are they were Army just because of where you were, but—”
Probably, but I said Marines because—one thing—my—I have a Marine buddy that—We did a
lot. He got blown up pretty bad over there, and we—And then we did do a lot of Special Forces
people, and so I don’t know. Like I say, I was Navy. I didn’t know. Yeah, they all look alike to
me.
Interviewer: “All right, but yeah. All right. Now let’s see. The—At a certain point, you got
a Navy commendation, and what particular action was that for?”
First three months—That’s not for it. It’s for the middle three months. For six months, I mean, in
the middle that—And that’s why—I don’t know what officer it was, but he was very—Kept a lot
of good records and stuff, and I can’t—I mean, because I never knew—I mean, I’m just
shooting, man, and he wrote me up for the number of sampans that I knocked down because I—
�Robinson, Michael
We’d go in through a place, and I just blow everything up. And bunkers, and we’d just blow
them all up and everything.
Interviewer: “So basically it was something for just kind of doing your job.”
Yeah, exactly what that was, and it was a six-month period he must have been on my boat. And
it was—I read it, and it scared me, you know. And the very first firefight I was in, you know, is
not in there because it was the middle six months, so those firefights—They’re not in that book,
and the last three months are not in. It’s the ones in-between, and those are the two ones that
affected me the most. Is the first and the last. (1:30:14) And so that blew my mind when I read
that because they put us up in a nice, big parade and—Trying to make it sound glorious. It was—
It wasn’t too glorious to me.
Interviewer: “All right. Now to think back at the time that you spent in Vietnam, are there
other particular memories you want to bring into the story that you haven’t talked about
yet?”
I know we went to go on a raid that we were coming up the river, and we’re supposed to cut into
this one canal. It was daytime, and it was going to be all VC camp back there. And we knew it
was there, and they knew too that we were there. And coming up the river we’re coming up fast
at full force, so they sound like we would go right on by. And what we did was make a hard left
and then go into that canal. Well, soon as we made the hard left, I looked up, and here’s this
cable hanging across about this high on me. And, of course, I was screaming down there to—
“Stop, stop, stop!” And we came to a stop, and that thing was right up against the gun tub. And
we didn’t—If we didn’t—If I wouldn’t have saw it, it would have chopped me right in half, and
we didn’t know if it was booby-trapped. Were there claymore mines on both sides of us, so it
wiped us all out or what? So once we got stopped, we cut the cable, and then we went up there.
And it was all—I mean, people were just standing there with their—They didn’t have time to go
anywhere, and so they’re just standing there with nothing in their hands or whatever. And we had
a couple of—I don’t know if there were Vietnamese policeman or army regulars, but they
lined—They were already lined up. (1:32:01) They made them line up a little straighter, I guess,
and they were asking them—We knew it was VC, and they yelled, “No, no, no!” And then—And
they killed them, and that’s when they showed us where all the guns were. And we hauled them
off, and that was wow, you know. I don’t even know where we took them. I mean, it must have
been an army base close by that we took them to or whatever because we picked the army guys
or the policemen or whatever they were up close by within, you know, like five, six miles. And
we went in there looking for trouble, and...
Interviewer: “Okay. In the pictures that you’ve got, you’ve got a shot of what seems to be a
kind of—What’s along the shore, but some kind of store or shop or something like that.
Was that a Vietnamese operation, or was that on a base, or…?”
Yeah. Well, it was a general—Yeah, it was a general civilian grocery store or boat rental or
whatever it was. Just a little town, and that was supposed to be always friendly. And we ran into
a couple of places that weren’t. I—Something to that effect—I don’t know if that was the picture
�Robinson, Michael
of whatever, but I’m always up on my gun tub. And somebody opened up on us, and we’re in
town. So all I did was just lay a line of fire right over top of the town, and it stopped. And so…
Interviewer: “And would you stop at any of these towns and get off, or would…?”
The only time we got off is when we blew the heck out of that one company or whatever—I
don’t know—and they told us that we wiped them right out. And, for some reason, we said, “Oh,
let’s go take a look.” And we got off the—Couple of us got off the boat, and we walked into
where they—Where we supposedly wiped everything out, and that was the stupidest thing you
could possibly think of. But we did it. (1:34:11) Normally, you don’t get off. Some of the South
Vietnamese that we stopped—I mean, we fuel, and we pick up people and do stuff like that. But
we don’t normally—We would help them fish. We would—The poor, little Vietnamese boys
down with these little throw nets. You throw it in a big circle, and it comes down. And you pull
it up, and you get a little minnow or some damn thing inside there. We told them, “Back out of
the way. Get out of the water. Get back on the shore.” And we would drop a concussion grenade
over the side, and all the fish would float up. And, “Ah!” They’d come over there and grab all
the fish because if the big ones—They couldn’t find them. This—That way they’d pull them
right up to the top, so we did that a couple of times.
Interviewer: “All right. Now did your duties change at all at the end of your tour?”
I’m not sure what you mean by that.
Interviewer: “Or did you stay off the—I mean, you talked about your last mission, and in
the memoir it suggests that for a while they just kept you on shore or at the base.”
Well, yeah, after the last mission where I—we got shot up really bad and my gun tub was full of
holes—There’s a couple of times I’ve been—Where we were in some pretty bad firefights that
I’d go into shock and just—I’d come off of—We came out of a patrol that—“Hey. We did all
right.” I’d look around, and from where—my vantage point, I could see everybody’s fine. I’d
say, “Hey. We’re all right.” And I climb down, and the guy in the other aft .50 come up and
started shaking me. He started screaming at me, “You all right? You all right?” And I say,
“Yeah. What the hell’s up, man?” And he says, “You should have seen the tracers going by your
head.” So I crashed a little bit during that time, and—But—I mean, now you’ve got me going on
this. (1:36:03) Another time we came out of a patrol, and we thought we come out smelling like
a rose because we couldn’t—“Nothing’s hit? Nobody’s hit? Cool.” So we’re sweeping the old—
The brass off the back, you know, into the river, and the guy who was—The aft gun guy who
was cleaning up—And he looks over, and he looks at the back of our mortar box. And there’s
five holes in it, and there’s no holes in the front. So—“I wonder where they went.” And so we
very carefully unloaded the rounds and kept looking at them, and we found a—See, they’re in
cardboard boxes, and the thing is there’s open bags of gunpowder for the projectile part of it.
And so if you hit one of those, or—I mean, one 81 mm mortar would blow our boat to hell, and
the whole mortar box full—We wouldn’t have been—They wouldn’t even find anything, and so
we very gently found them. Very carefully and very gently lowered them over the side and thank
god.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay. Now that time when your boat was—It was a recoilless rifle that went
through the engine?”
Yeah.
Interviewer: “And then did that shell not explode? Did it just push right through the
engine and out the other side?”
I think it blew up inside the engine because we had a hole that big going in, and there was
nothing coming out the back sides. I don’t know what—Because the engine covers were opened
up this way, so we got out. And, I mean, they’re so tight together that I couldn’t—We—It didn’t
hit the other boat—Other engine, so it had to get stopped inside there somehow.
Interviewer: “Okay, but if it blew up, it would’ve—You probably couldn’t have started the
engine.”
I can’t answer that, buddy, because I tell you, Jim, I—There’s so many times that I don’t know
how I’m still alive and here. I really don’t. I have no clue because as many times as I should not
be here.
Interviewer: “Okay. All right. Now you get now to the end of your tour. How do they get
you back to the States?” (1:38:00)
I flew back. I was off the boats for the last probably week or two because I was worth a shit
because that was the time that they hit that mortar, and my gun tub was all blown to hell. I was
useless, and you get—When you first come into country, you’re scared after your death, and you
ain’t worth a damn. And then about halfway through, you say, “All right. I’m going to take as
many of these bastards with me as I can.” So you—You’re getting a little bit cocky, and then
after you get started near the end, you think, “Maybe I’ll make it after all.” And so you start
getting a little bit nervous, and it gets worse and worse as you get closer. And so when it was
time for me to go, they just— “Robinson, why don’t you take the last week or two off?” I don’t
know, and I was just on base. I didn’t do anything, and then they flew me out.
Interviewer: “All right. Okay, and where do you land in the States?”
California. I want to say—I don’t know the—what—
Interviewer: “Would it be San Francisco, or…?”
Yeah, something—Must be something like that, but I don’t remember exactly. But all I
remember—Coming off the plane, and there’s no barbed wire fences. And it was so cool, and we
had such a tailwind that I got back—The next day I had a flight to go to Saginaw, Michigan, and
we got back so early that I had enough time to get checked in and got on the plane a whole day
early.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Okay. Now when you get back to the States, did you encounter any
protesters in the airports or anything like that?”
I was blessed in that way because I heard—We heard a lot about that, but on the—In San Diego
where we flew in at I think that was a big enough place that they didn’t—And I wasn’t there very
long. That I didn’t see anything. And then I flew into my hometown, and there was all kinds of
people there. But they were for me, and my little brother—He was supposed to be—go to
Vietnam, and I told you he got orders. And I was there, and he didn’t have to go. So he came
home on leave the same day from the Army, and I flew in. (1:40:07) And I—The last—From
Chicago to Saginaw I flew standby, and, of course, military standby is one thing, but then the
veteran—The Vietnam veteran standby gets a little more, and so I bumped somebody. And this
is my story in its own. I’m going to tell it the way I have it, and Richard says they don’t know for
sure. But I bumped one person obviously, and I think he was supposed to be on that flight
coming up from the army base down south somewhere. And he got bumped, and that was fine by
me. By the time I got home, we have all the people waiting for me. I got drunker than a skunk
again. We—Of course, I—My dad says after about an hour and a half—He says, “We’ve got to
go back to the airport.” I—“What do you mean?” He says, “Rich is coming home.” So he’s a
bigmouth, and he’s always smart-mouthing on shit. When he got off the plane and saw me—
Because he was supposed to do that for me the next day. I wasn’t due back. He didn’t say a
word. He couldn’t talk. It was so cool. “Hey, Rich. That’s the first time you ever shut up.” And
we got kind of drunk out that night, but we were home for—I had thirty days leave. Plus, they
gave me a little more time because whatever, and so we were home for thirty days together. And
he went to Germany, and I went down to—I don’t know if it was Charleston, South Carolina and
got on these same boats. On base only, so I didn’t have to go back out at all.
Interviewer: “All right, and so how long did you spend down there in Charleston or
whatever the last part of your—”
It wasn’t a whole year I don’t think. I don’t know how long it was, but I remember that they
wanted to do a bunch of maneuvers with, you know—“See, we’ve got to give them some
practice.” And they’re supposed to go on these—When I went up to what would be island that
the training we did in the woods and all that stuff, they wanted me to go in there and help them.
(1:42:16) I says, “I’m not going—” You know, we’re going to—We’ve been shooting all
blanks, and I said, “I’m not—I mean, you can’t shoot a .50 caliber machine gun or [?] at me.”
You know, I was pretty bad, and I probably still am there. And I said, “I’m not doing that.
You’re shure out of luck. I’ll take care of the boats.” And that’s what I did. Is I stayed home
basically.
Interviewer: “All right. Did they make any effort to encourage you to stay in the Navy?”
Yes. Malta, south of Italy. The Maltese police were having a lot of problems with drug runners,
and they wanted us to go over there and teach them on our—On my Swift boats how to, you
know, search and—Search boats and all that stuff. And I was supposed to get a three months
early out, and then they says, “No, we’re going to actually extend you.” And it didn’t go over too
good with me, and I got kind of a little bit upset about it and told them where to go. And they
says, “Well, if you can find somebody that can take your position on the boat, we’ll let you go.”
�Robinson, Michael
Well, I found a PBR guy, and I trained him on my boat. And then he took my place, and I got to
come home. That was…
Interviewer: “All right, so once you’ve gotten out of the Navy, now what do you do?”
I guess I went into civilian life. I started—The guy I came home was just home on leave, and
then somebody was installing carpet and linoleum in my parents’ house. And I was kind of
laying on the floor watching him, and so he says, “Do something.” (1:44:07) And so I ended up
doing—I went into floor covering for a while and countertops, and then I did all kinds of things
like custom cabinet building. I did electric mower repair, and then I ended up writing manuals
for machinery for—When the Ford and Chrysler and GM all have these great, big machines in
the plants that assemble the engines, I wrote the step-by-step instructions how to operate them,
maintenance, and the training on them, so I did that—
Interviewer: “How did you wind up with that job?”
Yeah, my little brother—the one I went in the Army with—He’s very good at writing this stuff,
so he got into that. Well, I like photography, and I wanted to go in the service. That’s what I
wanted to be, so I had taken that up after I got out just for playing. And he says, “Hey. I’ve got to
go down to this one plant down in Indiana, and I’ve got to have pictures taken. Can you go with
me?” And I wasn’t doing anything. I said, “Yeah, I’ll go with you.” And after I was there taking
pictures for him and all this time, and he was so swamped at his regular job—This was another
plant that—down there. He says, “You’ve got to write the manuals.” “The hell I am.” Because I
don’t know how to write manuals, and he got me started. And I kept getting better at it because I
always want to do the best I can possibly do. And I got pretty good at it, and the fact is he says,
“You know, these manuals are pretty nice. Now you’ve got to teach it.” “I can’t talk in front of
people.” And he says, “No, you’ve got to. You’ve got to teach.” So they ended up—And my
sweet, little brother—He says, “Yeah, he’ll do it.” I says, “You what?” And I’m shaking like hell
in front of everybody, but the only thing I figured out which helped me is I wrote the manuals.
(1:46:01) I know every inch of those machines, and so when I got in front of all these people
standing there looking at me, I’m like, “Yeah, what do you know?” And I started to tell them that
if you have any problems with these manuals, and you have—“If there’s anything you find
wrong, and it doesn’t explain it right, you let me know. I’ll kick the guy’s ass.” And then I—And
they all—“Yeah, right, you will.” And I said, “Well, yeah, because I wrote them.” And then it
came easier because they did have questions, and I could answer them. Well, I did that until
cancer got me.
Interviewer: “All right, and you have health issues that relate to Vietnam service as far as
you know?”
Yeah, I started out with mantle cell lymphoma, which is a blood cancer, and lymph nodes—Your
lymph nodes try to clean your blood. Well, they swelled up huge, and I tried to get the Army—
Not the Army. The military to do something about it, and they says, well, I have to get on a list
to get on a list so I can get on the list to get in. And I couldn’t—You know, I’m watching this
thing swell up almost—The side of my leg. And I finally went to a private doctor, and he did a
biopsy. And he says, “Yep. You’ve got stage four mantle cell lymphoma cancer. You’ve got to
�Robinson, Michael
start chemo right now.” And I was paying for this for myself, and I says, “I can’t—I’ve got to
make the military pay for this because I can’t afford that.” And so I got the paperwork from
them, and I went to the VA. And they still—I couldn’t get in, and I slammed that down on their
desk and told them what the hell I—What the story was, and they took me in the back room. And
I got talking to a doctor, and he says, “Just a minute. I’ll be right back.” (1:48:01) And two, three
days later, I was in the ER getting chemo, but I had to—It’s been years. They wouldn’t pay off
my initial thing because they says, “Well, you could’ve come to us.” And I said, “You son of a
bitches. I tried to come to you, and you wouldn’t—You know, you wouldn’t take me, and I
didn’t—I don’t have time to play around.” And so I ended up having to pay for my own original,
but they—From then on, they were absolutely fantastic for me, and then I did—I had—I ended
up getting prostate cancer after that, and then I ended up having to have a bone marrow
transplant. I did all kinds of things.
Interviewer: “Now do you think you were exposed to Agent Orange?”
Absolutely. I was sprayed with it at [?]. Yeah, we were on a support mission. We dropped off a
bunch of troops, and we just run our bow up on the beach. And then we sit there with our 81
ready to go, and we wait and see if they need any help. They—We give them some help, and
we’re sitting there. And it started to rain. I kind of look up. I says, “There isn’t a cloud in a
billion miles.” You know, and it was the Agent Orange. We got sprayed with Agent Orange, so
that was how I got zapped with that.
Interviewer: “All right, and did you have some version of PTSD or something along those
lines?”
Yeah, yeah, quite a bit. I still do. Yeah, I don’t know if that will ever go away or not, but I still
jump. And it was worse the first ten years. The first year I had to sleep with a gun, and then the
next ten years I would—I’d cry myself to sleep because I was thinking of all the things I did. I
killed a lot of people. I killed a lot of people, and I was so ashamed of what I did. (1:50:12) And
it was—So I married a woman in ‘71 or ‘72—something like that—and she was a godsend to
me. I mean, she helped me the best way she could, but she could stick around so long. And it just
never went away, and so after twenty-four years, she had enough. And I put her through enough,
so I let her go. And that was in ‘95, and—But pretty much not—It was pretty much nothing like
it was at the beginning when she had to go through—I still have nightmares. If it wasn’t for these
memoirs that I wrote, it still would have a hold on me. For the first time, I could feel it let go of
me. I know what I did, and I know what really helped was the fact that my people—all my
people on my boat—came home alive. My people came home, and that’s the only thing that
saved my ass because I never looked at it that way because I just looked at what I did and the
families I destroyed and the people I destroyed. And for the first time I understood that my
people came home, and that was war. That was war, and people die in war. And it took a long
time for people to get that through my thick skull, and my little brother was one of them. And
Amy here that’s—She’s helped me talk through some of this stuff. It really—I understood that
that was war, and I did my job. (1:52:08) And it—And nothing to be ashamed of, and so my
people came home. You know, I was kind of proud of that, and that’s when I finally started to
get out of this murder realm of cancer and stuff.
�Robinson, Michael
Interviewer: “Yeah. Now to look back at the time that you spent in the service, do you
think you took anything positive out of it?”
Oh god, that’s a good one. I know—I don’t know if I can answer that. I was very bitter for so
many years, but…
Interviewer: “Do you think you learned anything, or gained any kind of perspective,
or…?”
Yeah, well, that war is stupid. War is stupid, and the only people who get hurt are the little
peons. The generals and the presidents and all that and not just our side. I’m talking both sides.
They don’t fight the wars. They don’t get all thrown in the nitty-gritty. They don’t die. They just
point their finger and say, “You go.” And that’s—I’m a little bitter in that sense. Is the fact that
you don’t have a clue what you just told me to do. You don’t have a clue what it means to go
over there and shoot these people and kill them. You know, they—Well, they’re—These poor
guys that I was fighting were people just like me except on the other side. They were told, “You
shoot those Americans, or I’ll kill your daughter.” You know. “Here’s a gun. You fight the
Americans, and if you don’t, I’ll just kill your daughter.” And so what choice did they have? And
so I have nothing against the Vietnamese people. I do have to do with the generals and those
people. I will never be very happy with them because I—You’re not—They don’t have a clue,
and what you’re doing right here—I hope to god that this helps people understand that it isn’t
pretty. (1:54:16) It isn’t pretty. There’s no honor. You know, they tried to tell me I’m doing this
for God and county. I wasn’t doing it for God. That’s for sure. I’m not killing these people, our
people, my people for God, and I certainly didn’t think I was doing this for country. Big
business. The weapons people, the Agent Orange people. Always making all this money off the
wars. I wasn’t doing it for my country. I wasn’t doing it for—And my [?] fight. The six people.
That’s what I was fighting for. To keep them alive. That’s—And get them—So they can come
home. And for their families. Because that big radarman—Remember that? He was my buddy.
He had a family with three kids then or four kids or something like that. They’re Italian, you
know, so they have a lot of—And I was so glad that he got to come home to his kids. I was so
proud of that, and, of course, we did it together. You know, all of us.
Interviewer: “All right. Well, it makes for a pretty powerful story, and I appreciate your
willingness to come and share it today. So thank you very much.”
Thank you very much. (1:55:33)
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Veterans History Project
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Grand Valley State University. History Department
Description
An account of the resource
The Library of Congress established the Veterans History Project in 2001 to collect memories, accounts, and documents of U.S. war veterans from World War II and the Korean War, Vietnam War, and conflicts in the Middle East and elsewhere, and to preserve these stories for future generations. The GVSU History Department interviews are part of this work-in-progress, and may contain videos and audio recordings, transcripts and interview outlines, and related documents and photographs.
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
1914-
Rights
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<a href="http://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Subject
The topic of the resource
Afghan War, 2001--Personal narratives, American
Iran Hostage Crisis, 1979-1981--Personal narratives, American
Korean War, 1950-1953--Personal narratives, American
Michigan--History, Military
Oral history
Persian Gulf War, 1991--Personal narratives, American
United States--History, Military
United States. Air Force
United States. Army
United States. Navy
Veterans
Video recordings
Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American
World War, 1939-1945--Personal narratives, American
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Grand Valley State University. University Libraries. Special Collections & University Archives
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Smither, James
Boring, Frank
Relation
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Veterans History Project (U.S.)
Identifier
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RHC-27
Language
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eng
Source
A related resource from which the described resource is derived
<a href="https://gvsu.lyrasistechnology.org/repositories/2/resources/455">Veterans History Project interviews (RHC-27)</a>
Oral History
A resource containing historical information obtained in interviews with persons having firsthand knowledge.
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
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RHC-27_RobinsonM2286V
Title
A name given to the resource
Robinson, Michael (Interview transcript and video), 2018
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018-11-12
Description
An account of the resource
Michael Robinson was born in Grand Haven, Michigan, in 1947. He graduated high school in 1966 and only attended college for a year before recieving his draft notice. So, Robinson decided to enlist into the Navy in which he trained as a gunner's mate and was assigned to a minesweeper based at Charleston, South Carolina, becoming the crew's designated diver repairman. He was then transferred to San Diego for training in Swift Boats before being deployed to Vietnam. In Vietnam, Robinson was assigned to a Swift Boat unit based at Cat Lo, conducting patrols, searches, raids, escorts, and fire support missions in the Saigon and Mekong River deltas during which he served primarily as a machine gunner. After his tour was over, he returned to Charleston to complete his enlistment.
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Robinson, Michael W.
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
Smither, James (Interviewer)
Subject
The topic of the resource
Vietnam War, 1961-1975--Personal narratives, American
United States. Army
Oral history
Veterans History Project (U.S.)
United States--History, Military
Veterans
Video recordings
Format
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video/mp4
application/pdf
Type
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Moving Image
Text
Source
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Veterans History Project collection, RHC-27
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<a href="https://rightsstatements.org/page/InC/1.0/?language=en">In Copyright</a>
Publisher
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Grand Valley State University Libraries, Special Collections & University Archives, 1 Campus Drive, Allendale, MI, 49401.
Relation
A related resource
Veterans History Project (U.S.)
Language
A language of the resource
eng